Seth Zuihō Segall, longtime friend of Love of All Wisdom and author of The House We Live In, will be offering an eight-week online course, called The Seven Universal Virtues, offered through Tricycle magazine. On each virtue, Seth will be in conversation with another thinker; I’m doing the one on temperance. (Others include Sharon Salzberg, Stephen Batchelor, Jack Petranker.) The course takes inspiration from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius and their shared point that good lives are those that cultivate virtue and wisdom through practice and study.
You can enroll for access to approximately six hours of material, plus contemplative exercises and two live Q&A sessions with Segall on October 22 and November 10. The course starts begins on September 30, so sign up today if you’re interested. You can learn more by watching a preview lesson.
Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)
Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.
News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”
To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?
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.)
NASA image of a dying star from the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be the eventual fate of the sun.
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.
When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.
A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.
I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.
For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.
The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discusseda recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher” – not because there are so few such jobs out there and you’re taking them from people who want them more, but because the time you spend on such a career is supposedly abdicating a larger political responsibility.
I’ll close my discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In by noting how its radical pragmatism undermines itself in practice – which, for pragmatists, is the place that matters. Seth wants to listen to political foes and reach political understanding, but his prgamatism reaches so deep that it doesn’t allow him to do that – given how many such foes would be conservative Christians and Muslims.
At the heart of most monotheistic thought is the idea that God is the true source of all value, the proper end and meaning of our lives. That view is directly antithetical to the one Seth advocates, in which “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) When faced with 2500 years’ worth of monotheistic thought that asserts the contrary, he doubles down by tossing it all aside in this surprisingly flippant quip:
Things do not have meanings in themselves but are only meaningful in terms of their relevance to living beings. Since, so far as we know, there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to, the question is largely meaningless. If one believes in God, one can ask God what life means for him but until one gets to ask Him directly one would only be guessing. (108)
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.
In thinking further about Seth Segall’s The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism, I want to turn from reviewing the book itself, whose broad approach I generally agree with, to exploring my major points of philosophical difference with it. I think this is a particularly important approach here because the book’s biggest weakness is its refusal to go down to deep philosophical differences, differences in questions of ultimate value, meaning, truth, reality. Such an approach leaves Seth in no position to understand his political opponents, many of whom are going to be conservative Christians (in the US) or conservative Muslims (worldwide). I don’t think you can reach a full mutual understanding with them unless you understand their differences from you at this very deep, foundational level.
For when we look at Seth’s engagement with monotheistic thought – the thought that underlies those conservative Christian or Muslim views – it turns out to be unfortunately superficial. They get their most extensive treatment on pp 133-7, in which the wide range of thinkers quoted includes Francis of Assisi, Rabbi Hillel and Albert Schweitzer. But notice how the section characterizes the work done by its quotations:
