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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Sex

On traditional wisdom and qualitative individualism

12 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Politics, Self, Sex

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, David Meskill, gender, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Hebrew Bible, identity, John Duns Scotus, Mencius, modernity, natural environment, Pure Land, qualitative individualism, Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras, vinaya

David Meskill asked an important question in response to my coming out as gender-fluid. He asks:

I’m curious about how your personal transformation might relate to your interest in traditional wisdom. Has it affected your views of tradition? Have those views informed your transformation in any way?

I said a bit in response to his comment (and in the previous post itself), but I’d like to expand on it here. (David is correct in thinking I have addressed the question somewhat in earlier posts; I will link to many of those here in this post.) As I noted in the previous post, my conviction that gender identity does not have to correspond to biological sex is deeply informed by qualitative individualism, which is a largely modern movement, though (like nearly every modern movement) it is one with premodern roots. But I do think it’s important to understand our philosophies historically and even understand ourselves as belonging rationally to a tradition, and I think there is a great deal to be found in premodern traditions that is lacking in more modern ones (such as Marxism). I am willing to characterize my relationship to Buddhism, especially, as one of faith. So how does all of this fit together?

Continue reading →

God’s natural law?

22 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Foundations of Ethics, God, Islam, Metaphysics, Mu'tazila, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism, Sex

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Charles Darwin, fundamentalism, George Hourani, ibn Hazm, ibn Ṭufayl, intelligent design, Lady Gaga, law, Thomas Aquinas

A few years ago I discussed why the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist conceptions of God (is God an intellect or a will?) was so important in the medieval Western world. (The West here includes medieval Muslims, who not only started the debate, but were often further west than the Christians – in what is now Spain and Morocco rather than France and Italy.) I followed up by speaking of the modern practical implications of this debate: how it shows up in modern conceptions of law, and democracy. I think there are also some interesting things to say about the ethical implications of the debate in its own context.

Above all, if God is taken as a supremely good being, then our conception of him is inextricable from our conceptions of goodness and morality as such – and for that matter, of how we can tell what is good. This was the context for the debates that raged in early Muslim ethics, perhaps best chronicled by George Hourani. Muslims of the time agreed that the good life should be thought of in terms of law (shari’a): the prohibitions and obligations set out by God. But how do we know what God’s law is, exactly? It depends on what God is.

Continue reading →

The case for individual teleology

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Politics, Self, Sex, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt, identity, nonhuman animals, qualitative individualism, RSS

The big problem with the relative lack of philosophical attention given to qualitative individualism is that the ideal has had relatively powerful defences. Its most explicit defenders have been existentialists like Sartre, but Sartre’s best-known defence, at least, seems to fall flat. Charles Taylor has done the most to articulate the idea and how and it makes internal sense, but for the most part he is very cautious about ever actually endorsing it. Sometimes his defence of it seems to be simply on historicist grounds, as I quoted him in my first post on the subject. That is: qualitative individualism happens to be what we believe in the educated 21st-century West, and it is just for that reason important to us. Western governments therefore need to respect it just as the governments of Turkey or Indonesia need to respect Islam. Beyond politics, it is among our assumed starting points for inquiry, such that philosophically it is important to think with it (even if in the end we come to find it untenable). This point does matter.

But the point also doesn’t go far enough. Continue reading →

An invisible ideal that we cherish

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex, South Asia, Western Thought

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Charles Taylor, Gretchen Rubin, identity, law, music, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Supreme Court of India

When we study non-Western cultures it is difficult to separate out the study of “philosophy” from the study of “religion”. Those of us who study the brilliant arguments of élite men are often told we should pay more attention to the lived culture, to what people there actually say and do. There are advantages and disadvantages to studying other cultures this way. But one of the things we often don’t do is turn that same gaze on our own.

What if, as philosophers in the West, we paid more attention to the ideas that actually underlie our everyday lives and cultures and arguments rather than to prestigious theories? As “religious studies” scholars do, in ways that do not and should not depend on the concept of “religion”? I think that if we approached contemporary Western philosophical culture in this way, we would discover how much of our ethical life is animated by an important ethical ideal that has not had a defender as philosophically rigorous and articulate as a Kant or a Rawls. Continue reading →

Is it morally wrong to eat your dead dog?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Confucius, J. David Velleman, Jonathan Haidt, nonhuman animals, Peter Singer, virtue ethics

Jonathan Haidt opens his The Righteous Mind with two hypothetical examples, “thought experiments” as analytic philosophers would say:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

And

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Haidt asks us: Did the people in either of these cases do something morally wrong? My reaction was, and is, to say yes in the first case but not the second. Continue reading →

Reading the deconstruction of the body

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Disgust, Family, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Sex

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Elisa Freschi, gender, Śāntideva, Stephen Harris

I was honoured to see Elisa Freschi’s post reviewing my recent article on Śāntideva’s metaphysics and ethics. I have a lot to say about both the post itself and the comment threads that followed it. I’ve said some of it in those threads already, but I’d like to pull them together and express a way they relate to more general ideas. Continue reading →

In which I am interviewed

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Canada, conservatism, Damon Linker, Disengaged Buddhism, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, Heinrich Zimmer, interview, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger)

The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my philosophy, in both oral and written form. He is posting the interview on his blog in two parts; the first of these is up now. I think the dialogue form is helpful for philosophical thought, and if you’re interested in my ideas I would highly encourage you to read it.

Trans* inclusiveness as an innovation to Buddhism

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Politics, Sex

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conventional/ultimate, Engaged Buddhism, gender, justice, Justin Whitaker, Pali suttas, Peter Harvey, transbuddhists.org, vinaya

On his American Buddhist Perspective blog, my friend Justin Whitaker recently posted an interesting interview on the experience of trans* people in American Buddhism. Justin uses “trans*” as a shorthand for “transgender”, “transsexual”, “transvestite” and similar terms – to denote people who have become or attempted to become, in some respect, a gender different from the one associated with their biology at birth. It is clear to me that trans* people in the US face various forms of unjust discrimination. Where the tricky questions get raised is when the struggle against that injustice intersects with Buddhism – as, for that matter, when the struggle against any injustice intersects with Buddhism. Justin and I began a conversation about this in the comments to that post, and I’d like to continue that conversation in more detail here. Continue reading →

New pope, new hope?

17 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Generosity, Hope, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Argentina, Benedict XVI, Engaged Buddhism, Francis of Assisi, Jesus, John Paul II, Mohandas K. Gandhi, New Testament, Pope Francis

Last week I discussed the first reason you can read my dissertation on this site, and said that this week I would talk about the second reason. But I’m going to put that off until next week, to speak this week of a current event.

Pope FrancisI refer, of course, to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. The selection of a pope is a philosophically significant event, for a pope is in some respects among the modern age’s closest equivalents to a philosopher-king: a man trusted by millions or even billions of people to decide the truth about ultimate reality and what is good. And the selection of this pope in particular seems to me an excellent one, a man much better suited for this role than I expected him to be. Continue reading →

The Christianity that changes is the one that dies

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, M.T.S.R., Sex, Social Science, Supernatural

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

conservatism, Glenmary Research Center, John Shelby Spong, Ken Wilber, modernity, mystical experience, Paul J. Griffiths, Unitarian Universalism, United States

As I discussed last week, Ken Wilber’s recent work argues that spirituality must be taken to a new and higher level, one associated with the “orange” and “green” worldviews of modernity and postmodernity. What does such a higher spirituality entail? Wilber points to examples of liberal Christianity like Hans Küng and John Shelby Spong. This is well and good; I’ve drawn a lot from liberal Christianity and I think it offers crucial methodological lessons for the study of Asian traditions. But his enthusiasm for them goes much too far. He claims that “any premodern spirituality that does not come to terms with both modernity and postmodernity has no chance of survival in tomorrow’s world”. (IS p225)

I would have little problem with this claim if by “come to terms” Wilber meant only that they must acknowledge and react to the existence of post/modernity – as fundamentalism does, by mostly reacting against it. But in his explanations it becomes clear he means significantly more: they must embrace and adopt it. In this claim Wilber echoes the title of one of Spong’s works, a work he names approvingly: Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. Continue reading →

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