26 Sunday May 2013
On Stephen Walker’s recommendation, I’ve been turning to the articles of Chris Fraser in order to understand the difficult Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. (Happily, Fraser makes most of his articles available free online.) The Zhuangzi is an intimidating text to attempt to understand for a number of reasons, and it’s helpful to have the guidance of someone like Fraser who has spent a lot more time with it than I have. Continue reading
17 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Generosity, Hope, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Sex
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.
I 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
03 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in Aesthetics, Family, Food, Modern Hinduism, Place, Pleasure, Rites
This post will be a little less philosophical, strictly speaking at least, than is usual here. Readers have found my autobiographical explorations interesting in the past, and I hope this will be similarly so.
I recently returned from India, to have a traditional Indian wedding ceremony. (I’ve been married for two and a half years, but my Indian friends and relatives could not attend that ceremony, nor did it have Indian gods presiding over it.) It’s an unfortunate irony that I have been able to get to India much less frequently ever since I started studying it. My previous trip was at the beginning of 2005; it had been eight years between that trip and the one I just returned from, whereas in my childhood the years between trips were no more than three. And I’m very glad to have had this trip, for it made quite a different impression on me from the previous ones. Continue reading
26 Sunday Aug 2012
Posted in Analytic Tradition, East Asia, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Virtue
I have noted that those modern Westerners who learn from South Asian philosophy are usually looking for Ascent while those who learn from East Asian are usually looking for intimacy. Given that my own doctorate was specialized in South Asia, with little East Asian component despite my eventual focus on Buddhism, you might easily guess what my own orientation has been on this score – and you’d be right. I’ve often insisted on correcting those who portray Buddhism as an intimacy-oriented tradition – not just to set the historical record straight, but because I think it’s important to emphasize the value of integrity. When I was thinking in terms of three ways of life, the integrity-oriented “ascetic” and “libertine” approaches, for all their contrasts with each other, both appealed to me far more than the intimacy-oriented “traditionalism”.
But then in recent months and years I’ve been reading significantly more East Asian thought myself – and I’ve also been a bit startled to find myself leaning more toward an intimacy orientation. Continue reading
19 Sunday Aug 2012
Posted in Food, Happiness, Place, Politics, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā
Tags
conservatism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York City, Rod Dreher, Ruthie Leming, Stonehill College, Wilhelm Halbfass
I’ve written a fair bit lately about conservatism, of both literal and innovative (reactionary) varieties. There is much I find admirable and valuable in conservative views; but I would be quite hard-pressed to say I agree with them. Certainly I do not live a life compatible with them, as I am frequently reminded when I read them. One of the reasons I have been drawn to these worldviews is precisely because they are so alien to me. I can see the consistency and power in these views, but my own temperament is typically far away from them. And that’s part of why I see them as such an important counterbalance.
The point really struck me when I was reading a piece by Rod Dreher about his late sister Ruthie Leming, in reference to Asian supermarkets: Continue reading
05 Sunday Aug 2012
Posted in African Thought, Confucianism, Happiness, Human Nature, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Social Science
Tags
Aaron Stalnaker, Augustine, autobiography, chastened intellectualism, conservatism, democracy, John Locke, Leo Strauss, Mencius, pedagogy, Republican Party, Stonehill College, Thomas Hobbes, Winston Churchill, Xunzi
For the sorts of reasons I discussed last week, I have been strongly leaning for the past couple years toward Xunzi‘s negative dark view of human nature – or so I have thought. I observe my own tendencies and see just how hard it is to be good even when I really want to. Augustine, whose similarities to Xunzi run deep (as Aaron Stalnaker has noted), points to the behaviour he observes in babies: creatures not only of desire and greed, but even of jealousy and anger. It’s as we grow up that we learn to be good. And then, of course, there’s the history of human violence and bloodshed. I often find myself a little bewildered by the 20th-century philosophies that say philosophy must be entirely different after the Holocaust; the Holocaust would not have surprised Augustine. He knew what evil lurks in our minds.
One of the more common objections to such a dark view of human nature is that it leads to tyranny: if people can’t be trusted, they need an iron ruler to rule them. Such a view is most famously associated with Thomas Hobbes, and it seems that Xunzi held something like it, but I’ve tended to find it a bit puzzling. If we can’t trust people to rule themselves, how on earth could we trust an arbitrary sovereign to rule them? A dim view of human nature seems perfectly compatible with Winston Churchill’s endorsement of democracy: that it’s the worst form of government except for all the others. We need a strong system of checks and balances to hold down the dark tendencies of our leaders.
And yet. With reflection I have realized that I cannot endorse a view like Xunzi’s and Augustine’s, even modified in the latter way. Continue reading
22 Sunday Apr 2012
Tags
intimacy/integrity, Jātakas, Louis Dumont, Maria Heim, modernity, Stanley Tambiah, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Yoga Sūtras
It’s often said that “individualism” is an invention of the modern West – meaning the approach that defines human beings as independent and autonomous from their social context. The French sociologist Louis Dumont made this claim directly in contrast to India, seeing India as a highly communitarian place where an individual’s community and social status much more. Dumont applied this communitarian view not only to Indian society at large but to its theoretical thought.
Many students of other cultures soon come to see individualism as a Western conceit – a bizarre peculiarity of an eccentric society that went wrong with Descartes. If indeed the modern West is a complete solitary exception to the rule, then there would seem to be something to this view.
I wrestled with it for a while myself. I used to believe Dumont’s classification of India was correct. It certainly resonated with my personal experiences, seeing how much more my Indian family cared about family and community ties. But those experiences, combined with the communitarian stereotype of India found in the likes of Dumont and Max Weber, blinded me to things I read every day in graduate school for years without actually noticing. Continue reading
15 Sunday Apr 2012
I admire Maria Heim‘s research on gift-giving in classical India. There’s one point that I think her work misses, however – a topic I had intended to cover in my dissertation on Śāntideva but never had room for. It’s not a constructive philosophical point – I’m not taking any ideas of my own from the ideas I discuss here – but it’s helpful to think about in order to understand philosophies like Śāntideva’s that I do draw significantly from. (And it will be relevant to next week’s post.) Continue reading
26 Sunday Feb 2012
My former grad-school colleague Justin McDaniel recently ran into an interesting bout of media attention and controversy over a course he teaches at Penn, and an Associated Press article written about it. It is a comparative course on monasticism, entitled “Living Deliberately”. Nothing unusual so far; but what makes this course innovative is it contains a practicum. A practicum is relatively standard fare these days for many university courses on meditation, in which students are encouraged to meditate and thereby get a firsthand grasp on the course content. But McDaniel’s course is the first one I’ve heard of in which students attempt to get firsthand experience of being a monk.
What does that mean? As part of the class, students are required to live for various periods of time according to various restrictions, each one followed by an actual monastic order of some tradition or other. No technology beyond electric lights; no reading news from the outside world; no eating after dark; no caffeine or alcohol; no vegetables that grow underground (a nod to Jainism). Breaking the rules requires confession. Continue reading
06 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Anger, Emotion, Family, Friends, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance
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