Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The inexplicable appeal of spicy food”. Pallies, from his bio, indicates that one of his key interests is the question: “What makes a feeling pleasant, or unpleasant?” And so he is puzzled by a phenomenon that he and I share: we enjoy eating food high in capsaicin, even though the sensation of eating these foods is painful. He adds: “And like most people, I think that pain makes your life worse. All else being equal, your life goes worse for you to the extent that it is painful. So why do I, and lots of other people, eat spicy food?”
Last month I had the good fortune to attend a weeklong conference of Buddhism scholars in Leipzig, Germany – a wonderful opportunity in many ways, not least that one gets to be in a world far removed from the current craziness of American politics. So not long afterwards, I set myself the goal of not saying the T-word to anyone during my week there.
I succeeded at that goal, barely. But it was really hard.
Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, several people have reminded me of this point, and they’ve been right – in a way that I know a little too well, because of other experiences with grieving over the past decade.
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.
It recently hit me, though, that there’s actually a huge point of metaphysical agreement among all the Buddhist schools: huge enough to mean that this disagreement about the ultimate isn’t what matters most to them. And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate. Rather, it’s breaking down the conventional!
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.
Plaster cast bust of Thucydides. Photo by shakko, CC-BY-SA licence.
A few years ago I wrote about my old friend Nic Thorne’s book on Thucydides and Plato: how they both address the failure of an old social order and the people who show its inadequacies. In Plato’s work, the nihilistic Sophists Callicles and Thrasymachus are worse people than their more genteel predecessors, but they understand the old order’s failings much better than those predecessors do. That claim strongly suggests parallels to our own chaotic age, but the book leaves those parallels unstated.
Now, I’m happy to report, Thorne has a new “limited-edition” Substack, entitled This Has Happened Before, devoted to making those parallels to our age explicit. What do Thucydides and Plato have to teach us about the 21st century? Check out the Substack. Political views expressed there are his and not mine – we have plenty of areas of disagreement – but I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in lessons that history might give us about our crazy era.
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our own individuality and are not the same as others’. Yet there is also a grave danger in this ideal.
This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my father, Jayant Lele, had peacefully passed away.
His health had been failing for a while. It got so bad in January that we expected to be saying goodbye to him then; miraculously he survived that, but he never made anything close to a full recovery. So we knew this was coming, but we didn’t know when, which put a lot of stress on all of us.
These last months have been the hardest. I got several chances to visit this year, which I’m very grateful for. (My parents have continued living in Kingston, Ontario, where I grew up, while I live in metro Boston now.) Those visits felt to me like I imagine raising a child must feel: difficult and frustrating, but rewarding.
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore what goes wrong with standpoint theory on its own terms – noting a key tension internal to standpoint theory which I do not think it resolves.
Namely: the main justification for standpoint theory – the reasoning that gave it plausibility – was materialist, in a sense drawing on Karl Marx. But as it grew, standpoint theory lost that materialist justification, leaving it with little grounding. We can see the loss of standpoint theory’s materialist underpinnings just within the work of Nancy Hartsock, one of its key founders.
Hartsock’s original 1983 chapter, “The feminist standpoint” states what I think was standpoint theory’ in general’s core underlying claim: “If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” (285) The key word in this claim is material: for Hartsock as for her predecessors Marx and Georg Lukács, one’s viewpoint is deeply structured by the material conditions of one’s life. What Hartsock’s feminist analysis adds to Lukács and Marx is the materiality of household work and childrearing. She cites Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room to illustrate how this materiality works:
Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed; they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. (quoted on Hartsock 292)
