Category Archives: Hermeneutics

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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On traditional wisdom and qualitative individualism

12 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Politics, Self, Sex

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David Meskill asked an important question in response to my coming out as gender-fluid. He asks:

I’m curious about how your personal transformation might relate to your interest in traditional wisdom. Has it affected your views of tradition? Have those views informed your transformation in any way?

I said a bit in response to his comment (and in the previous post itself), but I’d like to expand on it here. (David is correct in thinking I have addressed the question somewhat in earlier posts; I will link to many of those here in this post.) As I noted in the previous post, my conviction that gender identity does not have to correspond to biological sex is deeply informed by qualitative individualism, which is a largely modern movement, though (like nearly every modern movement) it is one with premodern roots. But I do think it’s important to understand our philosophies historically and even understand ourselves as belonging rationally to a tradition, and I think there is a great deal to be found in premodern traditions that is lacking in more modern ones (such as Marxism). I am willing to characterize my relationship to Buddhism, especially, as one of faith. So how does all of this fit together?

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The Sigālovāda’s vicious mean

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Monasticism, Play, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Work, Zest

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The Sigālovāda Sutta might be my least favourite sutta in the Pali Canon.

There is relatively little that the Pali texts say on “ethics” in a modern Western sense of interpersonal action-guiding; much of the specific instructions on action are found in vinaya, legal texts for the conduct of monks. The Sigālovāda is relatively unusual in providing guidance for action to lay householders. For that reason, a number of secondary writers on Buddhist ethics regard it as as a valuable guide for Buddhist ethical conduct.

I do not.

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Why philosophy needs history

04 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

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After writing my previous post about history and the love of literature, I realized there’s a lot more one could say about the way history can deepen our appreciation of a work of literature – and perhaps even more so of philosophy, where I’ve thought about the question a lot more. I noted Herder’s recognition of the differences between eras, but there’s a lot more to say beyond that. It’s a particularly important point to make within philosophy, since it’s at the heart of the analytic-continental divide: analytic philosophers typically appreciate the truth of philosophical texts but without reference to their historical context, and continental philosophers typically learn about the historical context of texts without reference to their truth.

I am not satisfied with either of these approaches, because I think learning the historical context of a text is directly relevant to assessing its truth. And I think it’s time to unpack what I mean by that a bit more.

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History and the love of literature

14 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation

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Many years ago, as a master’s student in development sociology, I took a course on nationalism with the late Benedict Anderson, renowned for his idea that the nation is an imagined community. The topic and the professor attracted a cross-disciplinary audience; about half of us students were in programs of sociology and political science, the other half in programs of literature. The distinction between the two, as I recall, became apparent when, from theorists and philosophers of nationalism, our reading turned to a work of literature, the sentimental anti-slavery novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. We wrote brief papers articulating our reactions to and thoughts about the work. The social scientists were moved by it; one fellow sociologist said she cried while reading it. But the literary theorists, as I remember, all thought it was (in Anderson’s words) a “dreadful” novel, worthy of study merely as something symptomatic of its historical period, at best. I had taken other classes with several of them, and become friends with some, and it occurred to me that I had never heard one of these literature students express love for any work of literature, with the sole exception of Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Literature as representation and rasa

21 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Aesthetics, Emotion, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Reading and Recitation, South Asia

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Sumana Roy, a professor of literature at Ashoka University near Delhi, wrote a wonderful recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education identifying significant problems with the way Indian literature is taught, in both American and Indian universities. In American universities Indian literature is expected to represent India, to provide a moral or political message about the country and its political life – and, Roy thinks, this American understanding has then been imported into India itself. When Indian universities teach English-language Indian literature, they are asked questions like “Analyze Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as a critique of the nation-state” and “Write a note on Velutha as a Dalit character in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”. Yet in the same departments John Donne is studied as “a metaphysical poet”, Virginia Woolf as “a stream-of-consciousness novelist” and so on. European and American writers, Roy thinks, can be appreciated and enjoyed for their aesthetic qualities; Indian writers are supposed to send a message.

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Bultmann for Buddhists

15 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Faith, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Karma, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Protestantism, Psychology, Supernatural

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The world picture of the Buddhist Pali Canon is a mythical world picture. The world is made up of 31 planes of existence, divided into a formless realm, a fine material realm and a sensory realm. In the formless realm dwell purely mental beings; in the fine material realm dwell most of the devas (gods, angels). Some devas also inhabit the higher planes of the sensory realm; we humans live in the middle planes; and in the lower planes we find the hungry ghosts (pretas) and hell dwellers. Life is a cosmic cycle of death and rebirth between these planes, with movement upward and downward determined by the good or bad nature of one’s actions within each plane. The results of these actions affect not only the circumstances of our new birth, but also our actions and mental states in the new life, which reflect the previous ones. All of this takes place on a cyclical time scale of endless recurrence, of decline followed by renewal and more decline: once upon a time human beings lived for 80 000 years, and their lack of virtue slowly reduced this, so that now their lifespan is merely a hundred, and it will eventually decline to ten.

All of this is mythological talk, and the individual motifs may be traced to the contemporary mythology of Jainism and the Upaniṣads. Insofar as it is mythological talk it is incredible to men and women today because for them the mythical world picture is a thing of the past. Therefore, contemporary Buddhist proclamation is faced with the question of whether, when it invites faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture of the past. If this is impossible, it then has to face the question whether the Pali Canon’s proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of Buddhist theology to demythologize the Buddhist proclamation.

The words above are not mine. I have pulled these two paragraphs directly from the beginning of New Testament and Mythology, by the 20th-century German Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann, and simply replaced what is specifically Christian with Buddhist concepts. But I think Bultmann’s argument stands just as well when it is transposed into a Buddhist key.

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Resolving cliffhangers in a book

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Buddhism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy

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For some time now I have realized: it is time for me to write a book. It’s time to take ideas that I have circulated in blog-post form and develop them into a more systematic, coherent constructive argument. It has now been about seventeen years since Robert Gimello told me that the project that I had wanted to do for my dissertation was a twenty-year project, and as it turns out, I have spent much of those ensuing years working toward exactly that.

The questions that drove my dissertation – the ethics of emotion around attachment, anger and external goods – have continued to drive my thoughts over the thirteen years since I finished it, through twists and turns like declaring myself Buddhist. The dissertation could not resolve them; it ended on a cliffhanger. Śāntideva had good reasons for his views; Martha Nussbaum had good reasons for hers; where do we go from here? By 2013 I’d been thinking here about ways to resolve that cliffhanger, but I now think the approach I took at that time was exactly the wrong one: I had tried to generalize Śāntideva’s and Nussbaum’s views, viewing them as exemplars of integrity ascent and intimacy descent worldviews respectively. As I said at the time, that approach helped me spell out my problématique – but it still didn’t bring me any closer to resolving it.

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Theodicy is not the core of karma

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Karma, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

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I will close out this latest round of replies to Evan Thompson with a recap: It is simply not the case that karma “is fundamentally about” why bad things happen to good people (or vice versa). To try to portray karma in that way, it seems to me, requires more cherry-picking and selective quoting of sources than does portraying it as a form of eudaimonism. Obeyesekere’s study of the concept’s origins, which Thompson originally cited as his source, shows that its formation is in something quite different. The passages that Thompson quotes from Śāntideva do nothing to establish that karma for him is about why bad things happen to good people. The sociological studies that he now cites do not even claim to establish any such thing, and their evidence does not imply it either – so they would not establish this claim even if they had been studies of Buddhists, which they are not. Going by Thompson’s own sources – historical, philosophical and sociological – we see absolutely no reason to believe that the question of theodicy is or ever was at “the beating heart” of the karma concept, for Buddhists or anybody else. Actual anthropological studies of karma beliefs in context establish its core as something very different, just as Obeyesekere’s study itself does.

Why then does Thompson continue to insist that bad things happening to good people and vice versa – the core problem of Christian theodicy – is also the core problem of traditional Buddhist karma, when it has turned out multiple times that even his own sources provide no reason to believe this claim? Thompson himself is clearly deeply bothered by the fact that bad things happen to good people, which he calls “shocking and disturbing”, a “cosmic affront to our human sense of fairness”. It is hardly unreasonable to be bothered by this fact in this way, and Thompson is entitled to be so. What is not acceptable is to then reread this preoccupation back onto traditional Buddhist sources.

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