Category Archives: Practical Philosophy

Being yourself in the medieval era

07 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Politics, Self, Western Thought

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Along with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve also lately been rethinking the history of the phenomenon. The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t think about it because we assume it. (Some of the deeper thought on the matter comes from Christian conservatives, because they need to think about expressive individualism in order to oppose it.) Very few expressive individualists do the work that they should to defend the ideal philosophically. More attention has been paid to the idea’s history – but this, too, is something that I think we often get wrong.

The big question I want to revisit today is: when does expressive individualism begin? When do people first start thinking that every person has her own unique purpose in her individuality, and that following that purpose is a proper ethical ideal? I’ve argued there are metaphysical precedents for the idea in John Duns Scotus‘s distinction between whatness and thatness, but I don’t think there’s any inkling of individualist ethics in the pious thirteenth-century monk Scotus. Expressive individualism comes later – but how much later?

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From “qualitative individualism” to “expressive individualism”

23 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in Flourishing, Philosophy of Language, Self, Social Science

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The contemporary world (and not just the Western world) continues to feel the power of the ethical ideal that proclaims “be yourself”, which I wrote about in detail) five years ago. I stand by most of what I said about this ideal: it remains philosophically under-studied, it remains pervasive, and I continue to find it persuasive.

What I have come to question over those five years, though, is the name I gave to that ideal.

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Are mountains beautiful?

09 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, God, Metaphysics, Place, Pleasure, Protestantism

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Western aesthetics has made a lot of a supposed distinction between “the beautiful” and “the sublime”: “sublime” referring to things like high mountains and the starry night that make us feel awe, make us feel small in a good way. Indian rasa theory would likely refer to this feeling as adbhūta rasa, the taste of wonder. I love awe-inspiring natural phenomena – Bryce Canyon, Todra Gorge – and I find the term “sublime” helpful to describe them. But I’ve long found myself mildly puzzled by the distinction. It seems obvious to me that mountains and gorges are beautiful – their sublimity is one variety, one kind, one species, of beauty. Yet writers on “the sublime” tend to treat it as something different from beauty. Why?

I’ve found a good answer to this question in a marvelous old book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, entitled Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. I turned to this book out of curiosity about a related but slightly different phenomenon: the many generations of people who thought mountains were not beautiful. In premodern England at least, it turns out that it was commonplace to view mountains as ugly, as “warts” or “tumours”, deformities of nature. In a world where the goodness of God’s creation was assumed, writers often did not view mountains’ majesty as evidence of God’s own majesty, but rather felt the need to justify why a good and loving God would deign to create such excrescences. Why was that?

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A hymn to Ecclesiastes

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, God, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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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.

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Thoughts on MonkTok

12 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Play, Politics, Self-Discipline

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In my view the most interesting thing about TikTok is the proliferation of subcultural communities that flourish on it – WitchTok, BimboTok, KinkTok, NunTok. The most unfortunate thing about TikTok, conversely – well, aside from the alarming power it gives the Chinese government – is that there is no real way to find these cultures on the platform, you just hear about them on the news. This week, I happened to hear in that way about one such subculture of particular interest to me – and that is MonkTok.

In Cambodia, that is, younger Buddhist monks are now making videos on TikTok and getting famous for them, drawing up to half a million followers. From what little I know about this phenomenon – basically drawn from one article this week – I have mixed feelings about this.

Hak Sienghai, a Buddhist monk with more than 500 000 TikTok followers, according to the Rest of World article that is this image’s source.
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Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in External Goods, Gentleness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

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The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.

Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.

Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.

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Confucius in middle age

29 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by in Confucianism, Flourishing, Practice, Virtue

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There is a famous passage from Confucius that goes like this:

The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

This is section 2.4 of the Analects, Confucius’s selected sayings. The translation is an old one from James Legge, which is freely available online. I’m not claiming that Legge is a particularly good translation, but it’s adequate for my purposes today, because the details of the translation aren’t what I’m interested in.

Instead the point I want to make today is just this: this passage can be a real inspiration in middle age.

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Honing in on a disagreement

01 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Morality, Self, Virtue

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I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

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The Nativity is my Ramakien

18 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by in Aesthetics, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Epics, Modernized Buddhism, Rites

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For most of my life, when people asked me “what’s your religion?”, I usually felt the need to respond with a paragraph. That changed about eight years ago, dealing with my wife’s cancer treatment, where I realized it was important to me to be able to say simply: I am a Buddhist.

It felt strange, and yet reassuring, to be able to answer “what’s your religion?” with a simple answer. Yet complexity remains – the sort of complexity that has led me to proclaim, “I am a fine distinction“. I note nowadays how there is almost no area in which my identity is single, and I say: I am gender-fluid, biracial, binational… and a Buddhist who celebrates Christmas.

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Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Supernatural

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This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

Lele handoutDownload
Goodman handoutDownload