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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Friends

Doing what you love when the money won’t follow

05 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Family, Flourishing, Friends, Play, Work

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

"Weird Al" Yankovic, Freddie deBoer, generations, LARP, Martin Hägglund, Maya Tokomitsu, music, Ted Gioia

I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it, I think the word has gotten out how terrible that advice is, with books coming out with titles like Do What You Love and Other Lies. We are now at the point that Freddie deBoer can describe the critique of that advice as “endless”, and critique the critique:

There’s also the endless genre of “don’t do what you love” essays, which critique the omnipresent cultural assumption that you should do what you love. And yeah, that can be exploitative, as employers will often use that love as a means to be selfish with your pay and benefits. But what’s the alternative? Don’t try to get paid doing something you like? Do what you hate? I read Maya Tokomitsu’s book on this question, and like so much of what the socialist left publishes these days it was far more compelling as a critique of what exists than as an argument for a better alternative.

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What we learn from the negative moments in Plato and Thucydides

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Politics, Sophists

≈ 12 Comments

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21st century, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Karl Marx, Nicholas Thorne, Plato, Socrates, Thrasymachus, Thucydides

My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.

Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.

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How the Grinch found eudaimonism

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, Friends, Human Nature, Judaism, Pleasure, Rites, Virtue, Zest

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Confucius, Dr. Seuss, law, Mohandas K. Gandhi, television

Last week my wife and I re-watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – the original Chuck Jones cartoon, not the later remakes. As we talked about it, I realized that that Christmas special, and the original book, are a great depiction of eudaimonism – perhaps even in a Confucian form.

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Our need for other people

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Flourishing, Friends, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, architecture, ascent/descent, Ayn Rand, COVID-19, expressive individualism, intimacy/integrity, Tattvārtha Sūtra, vinaya, Yoga Sūtras

As I write this post, I, probably along with most of my readers, face severe restrictions on normal human social activity, in order to limit the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Electronic communications have made it possible to continue a social life despite these restrictions – but much of this conversation tends to focus on the virus and the limitations of life under it. I find myself yearning for more conversations about other things, and you may be as well. I also do not think I have anything particularly profound to say about the virus so far. For these reasons, I am not going to write here about the virus, at least for now. Instead, for the next little while I’m going to write about other topics that I’d been planning to write about anyway, but on an increased frequency to suit my and others’ changed schedules: every Sunday rather than every alternate Sunday. This is the first such post. I was not thinking about the virus when I originally wrote it, but perhaps it takes on a different resonance now.

A good human life, in general, requires living with other human beings. Some would take this claim as a truism, but I think it’s important to establish it. The ideal of the autonomous, independent individual is not merely a modern Western conceit, as is usually thought; this ideal is held up as a high ideal by monastic traditions in ancient India, perhaps most prominently in the Yoga Sūtras and Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra which describe their highest ideal as kaivalya, aloneness.

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The rejection of righteous anger

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Friends, Karmic Redirection, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Patient Endurance, Politics

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, autobiography, David Chapman, Dean Esmay, Dhammapāda, Disengaged Buddhism, George W. Bush, Jack Layton, justice, Śāntideva, Thich Nhat Hanh

Last time I began to propose an answer to David Chapman’s questions about what might be distinctively Buddhist about a modern Buddhist ethics. I mentioned the classical Buddhist critique of politics and activism, and noted that I agree with some of that critique. Let me now say more about what I mean by that.

What first excited me about Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra was not the widely read eighth chapter (with its meditations on self and other and the deconstruction of the body that repulses many). Rather, it was the sixth chapter, on anger and patient endurance – when I responded to a student’s question about the text by saying “in this text, there’s no such thing as righteous anger.”

I do not think this is a message a typical secular North American liberal is likely to accept. Continue reading →

The bodhisattva complex

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

chastened intellectualism, Ken Wilber, passive aggression, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra

There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?

When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading →

A journey to Buddhism with Hegel

14 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Friends, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Social Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Four Noble Truths, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Karl Marx, Nicholas Thorne, Pali suttas, Thailand, utilitarianism

A few years ago I told what I thought of at the time as the story of my philosophy: how I left a utilitarian worldview and came to discover Buddhism in Thailand at age 21. I realize now that there’s something important missing from that story, and you can see it in the final paragraph of the second piece:

And yet, all the Western philosophy that I’d learned before didn’t just go away. I’d learned important, powerful, beautiful things that seemed true – and often seemed opposite to the Buddhism I’d found myself in. Is there a way to reconcile the two? One way or another, that question has been central to my life ever since.

That was the right ending: since then I have indeed been preoccupied with reconciling Buddhism and the Western philosophy I’d already learned. But if you only read those two pieces, you would come away with the impression that the Western philosophy I had learned, and would try to reconcile, consisted primarily of utilitarianism. And that would be completely wrong. Continue reading →

Digital philosophy

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Friends, Metaphilosophy, Social Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

academia, Aristotle, Elisa Freschi, lokatakki (commenter), Matt Wilkens, Mencius, Pune, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger), technology

The term digital humanities has quickly become trendy over the past couple years. The term has often excited me, since digital technology in the humanities is both a part of what I do for a living, and what makes my humanistic scholarship on this blog possible. So I’ve followed discussions of digital humanities, such as the HUMANIST mailing list, with interest.

I remain deeply interested in the field, but I’ve also begun to acquire some skepticism toward it. Continue reading →

Two concepts of sensitivity

06 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Emotion, Family, Friends, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

André Comte-Sponville, gender, niceness, Śāntideva

Perhaps the most common term for a man who is not traditionally masculine is “sensitive.” The term is sometimes spelled out further so that such men are called SNAGs, “sensitive new age guys.” But what is it to be “sensitive”? And is it a good or a bad thing?

It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad. Continue reading →

On celebrating the death of an enemy

08 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Compassion, Death, Friends, Gentleness, Happiness, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

≈ 62 Comments

Tags

George W. Bush, Harvard University, Jim Wilton, Linton Weeks, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nazism, Osama bin Laden, Pamela Gerloff, S.N. Goenka, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, United States, war

The momentous yet mixed results of this week’s Canadian election were overshadowed on the global scene by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Though the first event riveted me more, the second has more philosophical significance – or rather, not the event itself, but the reaction to it.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy? Continue reading →

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