Category Archives: Asian Thought

Of mental health and medical models

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Skepticism, Stoicism, Therapy

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The concept of mental health – and even more so its converse of mental illness – has become ubiquitous in the modern West, and it deserves serious examination by philosophers. Many, probably most, cultures would not recognize the claim that a mind that sees demons or refuses to speak or commits suicide is in a condition analogous to a body with a fever or a broken limb.

The idea of mental health and illness is the central idea in the psychological approach that we typically refer to as the medical model. The term “medical model”, in its most basic sense, means that one approaches a given field of human endeavour in the manner associated with medicine: that field may then be considered a part of medicine, or simply analogous to it. I believe the term was coined by R.D. Laing, the prominent critic of psychiatry, and so it often takes on a negative cast, for the application of specific aspects of modern medicine in areas where it is inappropriate to do so.

It does not have to, though. Unless we reject modern medicine in its entirety (which would be a stupid idea), we are going to accept some aspects of the medical model for at least the practice of medicine itself. Modern medicine has accomplished a great deal, even in its application to phenomena of the mind: antipsychotics and antidepressants are not cure-alls by any means, but for a great many people, their mental lives are much improved as a result of these medicines.

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Of perpetually vulnerable subjects

10 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What is that supposed to mean? Modern meditation is frequently described as “neoliberal” in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which Purser coedited, and especially the closing essay by Glenn Wallis (which responds to a thoughtful defence of mindfulness by Rick Repetti in the same volume). Wallis’s piece is a good illustration of how a concept with some legitimate and meaningful uses can get bandied around so casually that it becomes completely specious. Here is Wallis:

You don’t have to look too closely to see that Mindfulness’s most recent progenitors are, of course, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I mentioned earlier, Mindfulness has the same DNA and was raised on the same values that undergirds today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure (acceptance, resilience, self-help, etc.). So, of course Jon Kabat-Zinn [the creator of secularized and medicalized mindfulness meditation] cozies up to corporate CEOs and American military generals. (Wallis 499)

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The scattershot application of “neoliberalism”

27 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Economics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Virtue, Work

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In my previous post I agreed with Wendy Brown and other critics of “neoliberalism” that something was genuinely new, and disturbing, about the attempt to treat education as producing “human capital”, a narrow economic value. I do think, however, that such critics greatly overplay their hand. That is, they extend the critique of “neoliberalism” to phenomena that are not even liberal, let alone neo – to longstanding, deeply human concerns that predate capitalism and its ideology.

In Brown’s case, the problem comes across most clearly in a footnote attacking David Brooks. Some years ago in the New York Times, Brooks had written a moving defence of traditional humanistic education:

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The goods of lay life

13 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure

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I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

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The West is neither white nor European

16 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in African Thought, Asian Thought, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Place, Pre-Socratics, Western Thought

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In the discourse of the United States today, everything is supposed to be about race. That particular American view infects any American discussion of the West. Overt racists like Lothrop Stoddard associated Western civilization with racial whiteness. Today, the American left often seems to agree with Stoddard, viewing “the West” as code for racial whiteness – as when Natalie Wynn says “the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface”. But the Greek, Semitic and Latin historical roots that make the West go back much earlier than the 17th-century concept of the “white race”; Westerners thought of themselves as “Christendom” long before they thought of themselves as “white”. Anti-black and anti-native racism are the US’s original sin, but we mislead ourselves in a deeply parochial way if we think of the whole world in those American terms.

Rather, it seems to me that the important thing is to reclaim the West from that recent (and harmful) concept of whiteness. “Whiteness” never was constitutive of the West as a historical complex, and the last thing we should do is treat it that way now. For as it turns out, the history of the West is in key respects not even European.

To see why, let’s take a look at the history of the West. Philosophy forms a key part of that history, and this is a philosophy blog, so the history of Western philosophy is as good a case study as any other.

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Why the West is a real thing

02 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Asian Thought, Greek and Roman Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Place, Western Thought

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When one studies Indian philosophy, or Asian philosophy in general, one is always faced with its other: a philosophical tradition with origins to the west of India, which, after the history of colonialism and modernity, is in the background of everyone now. What should we call this tradition?

The term in by far the most widespread use is Western. It’s not a very good term, but it is the one we have, and I think there is good reason to keep it. I’ll be arguing that point in a series of three posts. I’ve seen two camps of people who discourage the use of “Western”. One (found within philosophy) merely discourages the term, in favour of the term “Euro-American”, which I find far worse; I will deal with that in the final post. The other thinks that “the West” doesn’t even name a meaningful referent at all, such that there should not even be a term to replace it. As I think that that’s a deeper criticism, I will start with it, in both this post and the next.

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Are we taking up the suttas’ view of household life?

19 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Family, Flourishing, Monasticism, Play, Pleasure, Self-Discipline

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Justin Whitaker has made a second defence of the Sigālovāda Sutta, and it’s time for another response on my end. As a recap, we are debating the value of the Sigālovāda as a guide to lay Buddhist ethics: I do not find it a good guide, he does, and we’ve had a round of back-and-forth over this

I think Justin’s latest comment on the topic is very perceptive, and it pushes the points at which my own take on Buddhism is a reinterpretation, a departure from the classical Pali suttas – for the advice offered by the Sigālovāda is in keeping with the tenor of advice offered in many other such suttas. I’d like to follow up in a couple of ways, among them to ask about how much Justin’s own view might be such as well.

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There are bad Buddhists and false Buddhist claims

07 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

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Paul Fuller’s thoughtful and well researched new introduction to Engaged Buddhism cites my Disengaged Buddhism article together with an article I hadn’t heard of before, Victor Temprano’s 2013 “Defining engaged Buddhism” (Buddhist Studies Review 30.2). (Fuller has very kind words for both Temprano and myself.) I proceeded to read Temprano’s article and was quite struck by it – and by the fact that Fuller had listed our two articles together, as making complementary critiques. Fuller’s putting our two articles together is striking to me because, while Temprano and I do both make a critique of Western engaged Buddhist scholars like Sallie King and David Loy, we do so for entirely different reasons – reasons that are actually opposed to one another. And indeed, I think my differences from Temprano are larger than my differences from King and Loy.

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Integrators and operators at the APA

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Asian Thought, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its 2021 annual meeting last winter. It could not meet in person, of course. I forget where it was originally scheduled to meet, but that hardly matters now. Rather: since attending philosophy conferences is usually not related to my day job, I need to use my own money and precious vacation time to travel there, so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have attended. This year, though, since it was virtual (and spread over two weekends), I had a chance to participate and see several of the sessions.

What immediately struck me on perusing the meeting program was how drastically different the meeting’s content was from previous years. It seemed barely recognizable as the same organization. On the kinds of abstract analytical topics that are the APA’s traditional bread and butter – epistemology, philosophy of language, meta-ethics – there were surprisingly slim pickings. The sessions I’d found most valuable in past years were on interpreting and applying philosophers of the Western canon – Aristotle, Hume, Hegel – and this year, those too were in short supply. Neither kind of session was gone, their numbers were just notably smaller, at least in proportion.

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Reinterpreting the Sigālovāda’s prohibition on theatre

10 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Play, Pleasure, Zest

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I was delighted to see Justin Whitaker responding to my post on the Sigālovāda Sutta – both in a comment and in a separate post of his own. Justin and I first found each other long ago over our shared interest in Pali Buddhist ethics, and he was one of my more frequent interlocutors in the early days of Love of All Wisdom, so it’s great to see him back around. I recall Justin citing the Sigālovāda favourably several times in earlier conversations, so perhaps it’s not surprising that my broadside against it is what brought him out of the woodwork!

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