03 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Psychology, Serenity, Virtue
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Charles Taylor, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, expressive individualism, Patrick Lee Miller, relativism
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our own individuality and are not the same as others’. Yet there is also a grave danger in this ideal.
Continue reading06 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science
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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States
Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.
It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.
Continue reading21 Sunday Jul 2024
Posted in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity
≈ Comments Off on George Grant, Daoist
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Canada, Chris Fraser, George Grant, Laozi, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther, modernity, natural environment, Robert Meynell, Robert Sibley, Zhuangzi
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.
Continue reading05 Sunday May 2024
Richard Chappell recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, “The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects.” I argued instead for
a relatively strong partialist account, in which one is obligated to promote the welfare of those one is directly engaged with – co-workers, family, friends, fellow organization members, maybe neighbours – but going beyond that is supererogatory. (Beyond that circle there are harms that one is obligated not to cause, but harm and benefit are not symmetrical.)
I liked Chappell’s main response, which seemed to deemphasize obligation, and I didn’t find much to object to:
we would do well, morally speaking, to dedicate at least 10% of our efforts or resources to doing as much good as possible (via permissible means). Whether this is obligatory or supererogatory doesn’t much interest me. The more important normative claim is just that this is clearly a very worthwhile thing to do, very much better than largely ignoring utilitarian considerations.
But he also linked to a backgrounder on obligation, and there I found much more to disagree with. I agree with Chappell’s most basic point in the backgrounder: that it is “unfortunate” that “Delineating the boundary between ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’ actions… has traditionally been seen as the central question of ethics”. But I disagree entirely with his reasoning for this view.
Continue reading22 Monday Apr 2024
Posted in Buddhism, Emotion, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy
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autobiography, Céline Leboeuf, Friedrich Nietzsche, interview, Martha C. Nussbaum, Plato, Śāntideva
Céline Leboeuf just interviewed me for her “Why Philosophy?” newsletter, where I talk about philosophy and its role in my life. Have a look!
24 Sunday Mar 2024
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Aristotle, Bruce Cockburn, drugs, Kieran Setiya, Kyoto School, mathematics, mystical experience, Nishitani Keiji, Pali suttas, pragmatism, puruṣārthas, Rachael Petersen, religion, Richard Rorty, Seth Zuihō Segall
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.
Continue reading25 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted in Christianity, Flourishing, Politics, Psychology, Virtue
It has taken me longer than expected to get to reviewing Seth Zuihō Segall’s thoughtful and engaging The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism. Most of the reasons for that are personal, but some have to do with the book itself: the book is short (less than 200 pages) and in admirably simple prose, but I spent a long time reading it because of the number of times it made me stop and provoked my thinking. It’s provoked me enough that my review and response to it will stretch over four different posts; the other thing that took a long time was organizing all the many things I had to say about the book. (I had even more to say than those four posts, but decided to restrain myself to the most important.)
The book is an ambitious attempt to set out Seth’s own constructive philosophy. (I went back and forth on first vs. last name – although when reviewing a book it’s conventional to use a last name, since Segall is an active contributor to Love of All Wisdom’s comments on a first-name basis, I prefer that friendlier usage.) I’m broadly sympathetic with this attempt, since like my own philosophy it is broadly eudaimonistic (and naturalistic). We agree on an ethical account that focuses on human virtue and flourishing.
Specifically, the book is Seth’s philosophical account of two things: the good modern human life, in an ethical and psychological sense, and a political direction for modern societies, especially the USA. (It does not attempt to probe other philosophical areas, such as metaphysics – possibly to its detriment, as we’ll see later.) The ethical account of the good life is relatively strong; the political account, somewhat less so. At its best it provides an admirable political vision to aspire to. The biggest problem with the book is its papering over of the major differences among traditions. I am going to spend more time on the criticism of that latter point than the praise of the former, just because I think there’s typically more to be learned in disagreement than in agreement. (And indeed, the importance of difference and disagreement will be at the heart of my critique.) I want to be clear that I think the book is well worth the read, at least its middle ethical chapters, and that’s a big reason I am engaging with it at length. For a long time, virtue ethics of any kind was so underrepresented in philosophy that we virtue ethicists all had to stick together against our Kantian and utilitarian foes. I think it’s a sign of major progress that books like Seth’s are now out there – in a way that allows us to turn our attention to our differences.
Continue reading19 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity
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Andy Puddicombe, autobiography, Brook Ziporyn, drugs, Four Noble Truths, Headspace, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Dunne, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Śāntideva, Tiantai 天台, Zhiyi
One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.
That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.
Continue reading05 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Flourishing, Humility, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Self-Discipline, Serenity, Virtue
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Augustine, autobiography, Chan/Zen 禪, Disengaged Buddhism, John Dunne, Nancy Houfek, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, skholiast (blogger), Wangchuk Dorje
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.
I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.
Continue reading07 Sunday May 2023
Posted in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Politics, Self, Western Thought
Tags
Charles Taylor, Epicurus, expressive individualism, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, John Duns Scotus, Michael Allen Gillespie, modernity, Petrarch
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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