Tags
12-step programs, Aristotle, Augustine, Brook Ziporyn, Chan/Zen 禪, Reinhold Niebuhr, Śāntideva, Tiantai 天台
The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I had had good reason to be frustrated earlier with such traditions – for their rhetoric sometimes implies that that present-moment acceptance is easy, which it is not. It was a long and painful lesson for me learning how hard it is to be good. That made me a longtime advocate of what East Asian Buddhists would call the gradual path, but I increasingly also see the wisdom in its converse, the sudden. Can the two be reconciled?
Tiantai and Headspace provide a hugely important insight on how to deal with one’s bad emotional tendencies, one’s kleśas: contra Śāntideva, you shouldn’t fight the kleśas, but rather let go of them. I think they are right about that. The frustrating paradox is that letting go can actually be harder than fighting. If it were about fighting kleśas and being at war with them, as Śāntideva says, then it would simply be a matter of trying harder, putting in more effort. But when the effort needed is non-effort, trying not to try – well, how do you even do that? That was the issue I faced with my struggles with insomnia: it was indeed the case that what I needed to do was let go, but at that point I wasn’t capable of doing that, and I knew it.
So I suspect that letting-go doesn’t make any sense at the beginning of the path; the sudden path must come as the endpoint of the gradual, or at least as an endpoint. When you’re at conscious incompetence (let alone unconscious incompetence), you can’t just jump straight to conscious competence. You need something to do, to practise – in order to get yourself up to not-doing. Sometimes people do famously have moments of sudden liberation (what in Zen is called satori 悟) early in the process – but those moments drop away, and they are lost without an effortful process of getting back to them.
What is still needed for letting-go is a vigilance. Satori can put one in the present moment in one moment, but being in the present moment is a habit one needs to keep building so that one has it at every moment. Augustine and Śāntideva are right to be alarmed at how deep and persistent our bad habits go. Our natural tendencies and habits are to return to anger and fear and shame and self-pity, to not let them go. These self-destructive and other-destructive tendencies are observable at birth, if not before. If we just leave ourselves to those natural tendencies and habits, then we are in deep trouble.
That is the truth that gives rise to Śāntideva’s military metaphors: things inside us get really bad, and if we hope to live well, we can’t afford to accept them in the sense of leaving everything about ourselves untouched. We must instead watch ourselves carefully to observe the bad states arising – but then when we see them arising, what we need to do is let them go. This is a particular problem with angers and fears that are deeply rooted, when we have a hurt that goes so deeply down that we get angry or afraid any time it comes up: there we likely need to discover those roots and not simply be in the moment. There, the tools of modern talk therapy are our friends.
Yet the vigilance too can go too far, if it leads us to beat ourselves up for imperfection. Contra Augustine, it’s okay if anger or other bad emotions arise, as long as you notice them and let go. Sure that makes you forever imperfect – but that’s no problem in a cosmology where we are the accidental products of evolutionary chance rather than the design of an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. And the refusal to accept our imperfections leads us to its own deep problems – sometimes it can tempt us to act as if they’re not there. The one who wants to be an angel is a beast.
Here as elsewhere, the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer is essential. But the key in this context is that the prayer needs to be applied, not just to the world, but to oneself. I imagine this is one reason for the prayer’s enduring popularity in 12-step programs, full of people whose own flaws have brought them low: when you’ve dug yourself deep into a hole of addiction, even if you stop using the substance today, you’re not going to get out of the hole right away. And more generally – as much as I might like to immediately be as strong as Thich Quang Duc, to have the strength to be calm if I were set on fire tomorrow, that’s just not going to happen. After a lifetime of practice maybe, but not now. Self-improvement has its limits and we need to recognize them.
Being virtuous is always a challenge, one that requires what Aristotle calls phronēsis: the discernment of what each particular situation calls for. What’s at issue in this context is a sort of meta-phronēsis, a discernment of when to accept oneself and when to improve oneself. That comes with experience and practice, a practice that must still be gradual, even as its results are experienced in the moment.
What I will offer here may have little to do with eastern thought on what you are discussing. However, as I watch people, in a culture too preoccupied with itself, who can’t take their eyes off their phones long enough to walk the dog or notice much of anything else, it occurs to me we have a problem. They have some idea of what is happening around them, but reaction time would be impaired if their life were suddenly in danger. In my view, they lack responsive consciousness. Moreover, they don’t even know it. Even lesser beasts are alert to dangers in their environment—they have to be, else their lives be pityously short. So, people fall to their deaths while backing up to take ‘selfies’, or are hit by oncoming traffic while crossing the street. I am appalled that their lives are worth so little, or, they believe others have an obligation to watch out for them because they are so busy. Is it ignorance, arrogance or narcissism? I find it hard to accept as sheer stupidity. But maybe it is as simple as that?
Multi-tasking does make it harder to be present in the moment. It is nevertheless ubiquitous because it is a way of saving time, which is one of the most precious things we have – and our society continues to encroach on it. In living memory, one typical parent would have a 40-hour-a-week job and the other would raise the kids full time (and before that arrangement, raising the kids was up to the grandparents); now they’re both working overtime and expected to somehow raise the kids on top of that.
I think this may be the most satisfying (for me) post in this series. You tied together the various threads of the discussion well.
I’m wondering what a further explication or analysis of meta-phronēsis would look like. I’ve been thinking of self-regulation in terms of regulatory systems, and what comes to mind is Conant & Ashby’s (1970) “good regulator” theorem, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system” or, in other words, must contain a model of that system. Meta-phronēsis perhaps would require having a meta-model, or repertoire of meta-models, of the ongoing development (adaptive change) of one’s regulatory models. (For example, the four stages of competence could be such a meta-model, allowing one to contextualize where one is in the process of developing an unconscious regulatory model that permits an appropriate response to a given situation.) This may be rephrasing Aristotle in terms of control systems theory. As you said in the post above, this is a process that happens over time (the gradual aspect) but involves moment-to-moment feedback/experiencing (the sudden aspect). It’s also a complex process with aspects that happen over various timescales, so I wonder if it would be helpful to have a model like Stewart Brand’s pace layers (e.g., Brand’s “Pace layering: how complex systems learn and keep learning”, 1999/2018) but for personal change instead of civilizational change.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think the big thing about phronēsis, meta or otherwise, is that models can help it but you don’t want to adhere too closely to them: the complexities of the situation will often go beyond what your model is prepared for. That is one of the biggest differences between Aristotle’s ethics and Kant or utilitarianism: there’s no one rule, principle, or model that you can deduce everything from.
Right: all models are wrong, but some are useful, as someone famously said. Models are problem-solving tools, not universal truth, and using them will always involve some degree of risk. A great article title that summarizes this is: Paul Teller, “Twilight of the perfect model model”, Erkenntnis, 55(3), 2001: “By the end of the 20th century we have learned that even photographs require interpretation. The only PERFECT model of the world, perfect in every little detail, is, of course, the world itself. While one may intelligibly seek to characterize ideals of perfection in model building which fall short of getting every speck of dust in the right place, I am moved by acute awareness of our cognitive limitations to conclude that such programs are on the wrong track.” (Teller’s phrase “even photographs require interpretation” reminds us that even the visual field that we see with our eyes is a model.)
I am such a pragmatist about models (and Aristotle’s ethics could be called proto-pragmatist) that I sometimes forget that there are people who still espouse a “perfect model model” contra Teller’s epitaph.