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Aristotle, Bruce Cockburn, drugs, Kieran Setiya, Kyoto School, mathematics, mystical experience, Nishitani Keiji, Pali suttas, pragmatism, puruṣārthas, Rachael Petersen, religion, Richard Rorty, Seth Zuihō Segall
While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.
The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.
Many explicitly reject Seth’s interpretation on that point – and not just conservative monotheists. Consider Rachael Petersen, a Harvard divinity student who had undergone one of Roland Griffiths’s psilocybin trials, and had a full-fledged mystical experience as a result of it. In a panel about the experience, Petersen critiqued the language of integration that is often used in discussing psychedelic experiences: “I was told, you need to integrate this experience into your life. And I was like, wait, I just encountered an ultimate reality. Wouldn’t that imply that I need to integrate myself into it?”
That powerful quote has stuck with me ever since that panel. For Petersen, there was a problem with viewing this encounter’s significance merely in terms of “maintaining and enhancing” her own life, or even those of others. She believed that she had encountered something bigger and more important than those; the real question of significance wasn’t the significance of that ultimate reality for her life, but her life’s significance for that ultimate reality.
The modern Japanese Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji in the opening of Religion and Nothingness elaborates a similar critique:
to say that we need religion for example, for the sake of social order, or human welfare, or public morals is a mistake, or at least a confusion of priorities. Religion must not be considered from the viewpoint of its utility, any more than life should…. Of everything else we can ask its purpose for us, but not of religion. With regard to everything else we can make a telos of ourselves as individuals, as man, or as mankind, and evaluate those things in relation to our life and existence. We put ourselves as individuals/man/mankind at the center and weigh the significance of everything as the contents of our lives as individuals/man/mankind. But religion upsets the posture from which we think of ourselves as telos and center for all things. Instead, religion poses as a starting point the question: “For what purpose do I exist?” (2-3)
Seth can certainly say that Nishitani and Petersen shouldn’t be asking the question in those terms, that they should be asking about the significance of religion or mystical experience for maintaining and enhancing their own life. (Assuming, of course, that he’s willing to take up the task of arguing to convince someone!) What he can’t legitimately say is that they are “really” asking about religion’s or the experience’s significance for their own lives – when they explicitly say that they are not, that rather they are asking about their lives’ significance for an ultimate or “religious” reality. Here again, Seth is not living up to his own advice to “listen to your beliefs and explain why I believe mine”. When people explicitly say that “what’s the meaning of ‘X’?” does not merely mean its significance for enhancing and maintaining their lives, he doesn’t listen.
Seth does recognize some role for religion as a source of meaning (111-13), in that limited sense of enhancing and maintaining our lives. And indeed, our lives are typically enhanced and maintained by a transcendence of self. But the meaning from this self-transcendence is paradoxical: we need to go beyond ourselves in order to actualize ourselves. When we speak of that going-beyond only in terms of meaning-for-us – of “maintaining and enhancing” our lives – we deprive it of its power. I think here of Bruce Cockburn’s lyric: “without the could-be and the might-have-been, all you’ve got left is your fragile skin, and that ain’t worth much down where the death squad lives”. A therapist may not need to address that paradox himself: it’s the therapist’s job to be concerned with maintaining and enhancing a client’s life. But if the client is deriving meaning from self-transcendence in the way that Petersen and Nishitani do, then from the client’s perspective it must necessarily be about something more.
Seth, though, takes his unjustified pragmatic claim about meaning to an extreme even further than this. He extends this approach to “meaning” not just to the existential meaning discussed so far (“what is the meaning of life?”) but to cognitive meaning, the meaning of words. Now even truth is reduced to a matter of mere usefulness – the striking view expressed in his earlier blog comment that “I think it’s best to give up claims to anything being ‘ultimate reality’ — when have such claims ever gotten us anywhere useful in the past?” He makes the eye-opening claim that even the truth of mathematical concepts has to do with nothing more than their utility:
… the meaning of the object for me is its potential utility in furthering my process of living. It’s the same when we inquire into the meaning of abstract terms such as the meaning of love or the mathematical symbol “π”… The meaning of “π” is also all the things it means for your life and our common social understanding of things—”the thing I need to remember when figuring out the area of a circle from its radius,” or “the thing I need to understand if I’m going to pass math.” (108)
Aristotle would never agree with such a relentless utilitarianism! (I’m in general agreement with Richard Rorty’s claim that pragmatism is just utilitarianism applied to knowledge.) When he wrote a whole book that gave its name to what we now called metaphysics, he began it with the sentence “All men by nature desire to know.” For Aristotle, to know the true natures of things, and our quest to do so, had an intrinsic role in our eudaimonia, our flourishing – not its utility for passing exams or constructing buildings, but as a constitutive part of eudaimonia in itself. (And, of course, as Kieran Setiya notes, Aristotle judges philosophies by their truth: “Aristotle believed that his philosophy was true—one size fits all—not a good look for some that others need not sport.”)
Seth outlines a set of multiple domains of flourishing – what classical Indian texts would call puruṣārthas. I agree that there are multiple such domains and it’s worth trying to catalogue them. But I notice that in both his list of domains – relationship, accomplishment, aesthetics, meaning, whole-heartedness, integration, and acceptance – and his other related list of “higher goals” – “freedom, equality, justice, wealth, power, respect, beauty, intimacy, security, excellence, serenity, sanctity, and ecstasy” – truth is conspicuous by its absence.
The problem with such a list is that, as Aristotle notes, seeing or knowing truth is certainly something human beings seek, not merely because honesty is the best pragmatic policy (as Seth discusses on pp 58-9), but just as often for its own sake. To ask “when have claims of ultimate reality ever gotten us anywhere useful?” is much like asking “when has beauty ever gotten us anywhere useful?” There are answers about utility that can be made – Śāntideva, in chapter IX of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, claims that knowing the ultimately empty nature of reality is what liberates us from suffering – but there is also an extent to which, as with beauty, to ask about the purpose of truth is to miss the point. Truth and beauty are the point.
Indeed, if there is one puruṣārtha the Pali Buddhist sutta texts do clearly acknowledge as valuable aside from the removal of suffering, it is yathābhūtadassana, seeing things as they are – that very seeking of true knowledge which Seth implicitly excludes from his list. A list of domains of human flourishing that does not include truth – or something closely related to it, like correct seeing or knowledge of reality – is incomplete. And once it’s added in there, we get a very different view about which questions are significant.
Amod, you are astute in identifying our most fundamental disagreement—what you perceive as my “excessive pragmatism,” is from my perspective just the right amount—one can never be too pragmatic! My intent was to investigate Aristotle’s, Confucius’s, and the Buddha’s teachings to discover resources for a pragmatic approach to virtue ethics, and that is what I have done. I appreciate you would have preferred a less pragmatic approach, but I make no apologies for it.
So where do we fundamentally differ? I don’t believe there are “special experiences” that reveal true knowledge about anything ultimate, transcendent, or absolute. I am not dismissive of such experiences—I have had them myself. They are powerful and have made a significant impact on my life—but I would not bet money on any “truths” revealed therein. I discuss yathābhūtadassana in depth in my chapter in Rick Repetti’s Routledge Handbook of The Philosophy of Meditation, and I refer readers to that chapter for a more full discussion of why I dismiss its literal meaning. When Rachel Peterson says, “I just encountered an ultimate reality,” that is her conviction at the moment. Mystical experiences possess a certain apodicticity—that is, they appear to be self-evidently true— truer than ordinary truth—the reality behind appearances. This is like Plato’s belief that we are just seeing shadows in a cave, but we can emerge from the cave into daylight and see absolute truth. I think this way of thinking is a mistake, and that the only path to what we aspire to as “truth” is not through revelation, but careful investigation, experiment, and logical thinking. I agree with you that the search for truth is one of our highest aspirations, but only because truth is what allows us to pragmatically address the dilemmas we are confronted with in each and every moment of life.
I unapologetically subscribe to a pragmatic theory of truth— including mathematical truths — that they are useful tools for pragmatic purposes but reveal no ultimate secrets about the universe. “Truth” is always tentative and partial. If there is any God’s-eye view beyond our limited perspectives, we have no way of accessing it.
Finally, I concur with Dewey that religious experiencing, like aesthetic experiencing, enriches and deepens our lives—not because it reveals absolute truths, but because it intensifies experiencing.
My aim in writing this is not to convince you (or any reader) that my beliefs are true, but to agree with you that these are indeed the points on which we differ. When you suggest that I listen to people who think differently to see what I might learn from them, let me just say there was a time when I might have sounded just like Rachel Peterson and agreed with her. My own experience over time — both with psychedelics and nearly 30 years of meditation — has led me to think otherwise. But that is just the outcome of my personal fallible, limited human journey. I do talk with religious people—Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, Buddhist roshis and senseis—all of the time. Many are dear friends and mentors I deeply respect. I am always looking for ways in which we can talk with each other and find commonalties in our experiences that can act as bridges to mutual appreciation and understanding. My debate with Winton Higgins on “Why I Am Not a Secular Buddhist” (https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/seth-zuiho-segall-and-winton-higgins-debate-the-meaning-and-value-of-secular-buddhism/) is a case in point— I don’t want to insist on a secular as opposed to religious view of the world.
Amod, I want to thank you for devoting so much time and thought to responding to my book. Given our disagreements, you have been more than generous. What I find interesting is that despite our profound metaphysical disagreements, we still agree on much of what virtue and eudaimonia entails—although perhaps for somewhat different reasons. This is — I think —a useful overlapping consensus.
Thanks, Seth. I agree that we have reached our most fundamental disagreement! (And yes, there are many areas in which we do agree, while disagreeing on the reasons.) As you can tell, I disagree with the latter half of the claim that “the search for truth is one of our highest aspirations, but only because truth is what allows us to pragmatically address the dilemmas we are confronted with in each and every moment of life.” There are two different ways that that “only” clause could be read, and I disagree with both of them.
The claim could be interpreted in descriptive terms, that the only reason we do in fact take truth as a high aspiration is that it’s pragmatically useful. For reasons described above in the post, I think the claim is evidently false on such a descriptive level: many people do in fact aspire to truth for non-pragmatic reasons, and even on pragmatic grounds one does poorly to deny that point, for one is misunderstanding those people. I think it takes some gigantic contortions of thought to look at people who claim to be searching for truth on non-pragmatic grounds and tell them that they are in fact searching for them on pragmatic grounds: it’s denial of evidence to fit a theory, in exactly the way that pragmatic people will often accuse “religious” people of!
But the other way to read that claim – the one I suspect you actually are making – is more sophisticated and interesting. That is the normative version of the claim: that we shouldn’t be aspiring to truth on anything more than pragmatic considerations, that any aspiration to truth-for-its-own-sake is misguided. As I might say that an aspiration to revenge-for-its-own-sake is misguided: we do in fact often aspire to revenge for the sake of revenge, and we’re wrong to do so. So claims of that form can be legitimate. You would be saying that while people do in fact take truth to be an independent domain of flourshing, they should not do so.
I am still not convinced of such a claim, though. I note especially that I don’t think it’s possible to defend such a claim on purely pragmatic grounds. To do so would be begging the question. The question I always want to ask pragmatists is what they are being pragmatic for – pragmatism is about things being a means to an end, so which ends are we selecting? Given that (as argued above) people do in fact value truth for its own sake, it seems natural to take truth as an independent domain of flourishing, like aesthetics or relationship. You don’t perform a further reduction and say that those are valuable for something else, but rather they are valuable for their own sake, ends to which other things can be pragmatically directed. So on what grounds can we reduce truth to being merely instrumental in a way that those are not – without dogmatically assuming a pragmatic conclusion in our premises?
Amod asked: “The question I always want to ask pragmatists is what they are being pragmatic for – pragmatism is about things being a means to an end, so which ends are we selecting?” and “So on what grounds can we reduce truth to being merely instrumental…?”
Yesterday I wrote a long comment that hasn’t appeared yet but pertains to these questions. In it I discussed pragmatist philosopher Nicholas Rescher, who attributes pragmatic usefulness to the methods by which we establish the truth (or approximate truth) of our candidate items of knowledge (theses, theories, beliefs, etc.). Rescher’s answer to the question “What are we being pragmatic for?” would be something like: to select and use the best methods to achieve cognitive success and avoid failure. This theory does not “reduce truth to being merely instrumental”: what is instrumental is the methods by which we establish the truth.
As I tried to explain in my previous comment, Rescher’s pragmatism is not what Seth expressed in a couple of the quotations in Amod’s post. But it’s important to acknowledge the variety of pragmatist theories of truth, so as not to equate pragmatism with relativistic antirealism. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of John Capps’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “The Pragmatist Theory of Truth” (although I recommend Rescher’s writings over this article, which does not even mention Rescher—a major oversight):
Hello Nathan,
While it is true that pragmatism should not be taken as equivalent to a “relativistic antirealism”, I’m somewhat skeptical that this is a useful distinction in common discussions of pragmatism. To be sure, the pragmatism of Rorty and Seth Zuihō Segall are distinct from the pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce or Nicholas Rescher. However, as Cheryl Misak notes in her history of American pragmatism, the differences between pragmatists amount to what is an essentially inter-family dispute: “Despite the debates outlined in this book, it is well worth remembering that the pragmatists have much more in common with each other than not.”
Additionally, Rescher’s own pragmatism differs in many important respects from Peirce, James, and Dewey – all of whom took “truth” as being instrumental in some form or another. Even Peirce, whose views are closest to Rescher on this account, held such: “When we say that we aim at the truth, what we mean is that, were a belief really to satisfy all of our local aims in inquiry, then that belief would be true. There is nothing over and above the fulfillment of those aims, nothing metaphysical, to which we aspire. Truth is not some transcendental, mystical thing and we do not aim at it for its own sake.” (quoting Misak’s The American Pragmatists)
Rescher offers a pragmatist methodology, but not a pragmatist theory of truth – instead defending something closer to the coherentism of the British idealists. To my knowledge, he has never claimed to be offering one, either. Given the size of his bibliography, though, I could simply have not yet read where he does!
Since I referred to Peirce above, I’d like to add nuance to his account – and thereby the pragmatist account – in light of Lele’s criticisms. When Peirce, or most accurately a Peircean, says that we do not aim at truth “for its own sake”, what they are expressing is that ‘truth’ cannot be decoupled from the process of inquiry generally. Though there are problems with the particular phrasing that lead to misunderstanding, Peirce held the view noted by Nathan’s quote that ‘truth’ is that which would be agreed upon at the end of inquiry. However, as Misak notes: “[Peirce] was very careful not to make this a reductive definition of truth. He did not want to define truth as that which satisfies our aims in inquiry. A dispute about definition, he says, is usually a ‘profitless discussion’ (CP 8. 100; 1910).”
The example of Peterson is less notable from this perspective because she does not undercut any pragmatic theory of truth unless we take it as an assertion of how we as individuals approach truth. Peirce does not do this; he claims that ‘truth’ cannot be an individual matter, and that we cannot do anything but hope that our beliefs will be vindicated by future inquiry. Since Nishitani was quoted in the article, and to partially steal a line of thought from a book I read recently by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, I’ve been thinking that it may be helpful to think of Peirce as expressing his theory of truth in terms of Other-Power rather than Self-Power.
Hello Em, thanks so much for your comment; it’s great to have another voice in the discussion. You said: “Rescher offers a pragmatist methodology, but not a pragmatist theory of truth – instead defending something closer to the coherentism of the British idealists.” Yes, coherentism is a key aspect of it (and also a key aspect of my own understanding of epistemology), but the pragmatic aspect is there too. Here’s a quote from Michele Marsonet’s Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Rescher (a different part of which I also quoted in a previous comment that hasn’t yet appeared above, perhaps due to mistaken spam filtering):