31 Sunday Aug 2025
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Alison Vipond, autobiography, Canada, Claude Vipond, Dave Harkness, Facebook, Jayant Lele, mystical experience
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.
Continue reading27 Sunday Jul 2025
Posted in Death, Emotion, Family, Gratitude, Grief, Health, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Psychology
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.
Continue reading03 Sunday Nov 2024
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Abhidhamma, Aśvaghoṣa, John Dunne, Pema Chödrön, Śāntideva, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Theragāthā, Tibet, Wangchuk Dorje
Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart is a beautiful and valuable work on dealing with difficult circumstances. What strikes me in it is how Chödrön – despite being a monk herself – takes a position so deeply at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism.
Chödrön refers to the traditional Buddhist “three marks” (tilakkhaṇa or trilakṣaṇa) of existence: everything is impermanent, suffering, and non-self. This idea goes back to very early texts. But Chödrön does with it is something quite different from the earlier idea:
Even though they accurately describe the rock-bottom qualities of our existence, these words sound threatening. It’s easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there’s nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful. (59)
Here’s the problem with this passage: the classical Indian Buddhist texts are quite clear that in fact there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. She is disagreeing with them, whether or not she acknowledges it.
Continue reading25 Sunday Aug 2024
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Charles Hallisey, Epicurus, George Grant, Hebrew Bible, Martin Hägglund, Pali suttas, Peter Berger, Simone Weil, Steven Collins, William Christian
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.
I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.
This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)
How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.
Continue reading18 Sunday Aug 2024
Posted in Biology, Christianity, Death, Deity, Despair, Foundations of Ethics, Hope, Metaphysics, Physics and Astronomy, Politics, Protestantism
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atheism, Martin Luther King Jr., natural environment, New Testament, Richard Swinburne, Simone Weil, theodicy
There will, eventually, be an end to the human race. We don’t think enough about the significance of this fact.
I am not even talking about avoidable apocalypses, as real as the threat of those is. I am assuming for the sake of argument that we will manage to avoid being stupid enough to kill ourselves off in the next few centuries, through global nuclear war or climate change or AI robots or nanotechnology or a newly emerging plague. Many if not all of those are real threats and we should do whatever we can to prevent them from destroying us. But for my purposes here I’m assuming we’re smart enough to fend them off. The point is that humanity will end even so. It may take a very, very long time. But it will happen.
Continue reading04 Sunday Aug 2024
Posted in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics
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Anishinaabe, autobiography, Ben Koan, Benedict Anderson, Canada, Fred Kelly, J.D. Vance, Jeff Jacoby, John Ganz, Joseph Miller, natural environment, Northeastern University, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, United States, Viola Cordova
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.
Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.
I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.
I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:
Continue reading02 Sunday Jul 2023
Since reading Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness, I have found myself continually more attracted to her concept of transition-anger. That is: the main, and perhaps only, place where anger is a helpful emotion is on its first arising, where it signals to us that something is wrong or unjust; after that, one should transition “off the terrain of anger toward more productive forward-looking thoughts”. (Nussbaum capitalizes “Transition-Anger”, but that seems an awkward usage to me.)
I’ve found the concept of transition-anger very helpful for the argument of my upcoming book (which is more focused than my original concept was, so anger now plays a larger role in it). More even than that, though, I think the basic idea of transition-anger can and should be expanded to other emotions: it is not only anger which is most valuable on first arising. Nussbaum doesn’t consider that approach in Anger and Forgiveness, and there wasn’t a need for her to do so since the book wasn’t about other emotions, but only about anger. But it’s worth talking about here.
Observing my own emotional life, I have noted there is a set of four emotions that I feel very often – most of them daily – and they all cause me trouble and suffering. Yet I see how each can potentially be valuable on first arising. Anger is one of them; the other three are fear, shame, and self-pity. Let’s go through them in turn.
Continue reading26 Sunday Mar 2023
Posted in Aesthetics, Death, Deity, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism
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Aztec, Cantares Mexicanos, Desiderata, Hebrew Bible, James Doull, justice, Leonard Cohen, music, slavery, Stonehill College
I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.
Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.
Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.
Continue reading07 Sunday Feb 2021
Posted in Death, Family, Flourishing, Food, Pleasure
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I now conclude my series of comments on Martin Hägglund’s stimulating and fascinating This Life. My final point of disagreement with Hägglund has to do with a theoretical possibility: eternal life. Against traditional Christians, neither Hägglund nor I believe that eternal life is possible. But I think Hägglund is right to highlight the question of whether it is desirable.
On his answer, however, I think Hägglund is quite wrong; this is the point where his argument is at its worst. When he rejects the aspiration to eternal life, the rejection appears to rest on surprisingly bad argument. I would agree with rejecting such an aspiration on Stoic or Epicurean grounds – that it is futile to aspire to what we know we can never have. It is wisdom to know that we cannot change the finitude of our life, and so we should seek the serenity to accept that sad fact, as no amount of courage will change it. (There is a hugely significant difference between a 25-year life and a 100-year life, but both remain entirely finite.)
Hägglund, however, rejects the aspiration to eternal life on entirely different grounds:
An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life…. there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care…. Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal…. (4-5)
I do not think any of this is true.
Continue reading25 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Buddhism, Death, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Self
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Augustine, conventional/ultimate, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Kyoto School, Nishida Kitarō, nondualism, Quentin Meillassoux, Śaṅkara, Speculative Realism, Wilfrid Sellars
I first read Quentin Meillassoux in a local reading group in summer 2016, and thought at first that I was largely in agreement with him. That changed in 2019 when the same group read the Kyoto School‘s Nishida Kitarō.
Nishida reminded me of the importance of subjectivity in our thought about the world – something which Meillassoux is at pains to deny. It was particularly striking to hear this from Nishida since he was a self-proclaimed Buddhist – a tradition so often thought to deny subjectivity. Nishida says:
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