Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

A disrespectful performance

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Social Science, South Asia, Truth

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What does it mean to respect another culture, or the people and ideas within that culture? In the prevailing climate of contemporary academic religious studies, it seems taken as a given that one should refrain from criticizing other cultures and their beliefs and ideas. Older Buddhologists like Edward Conze are viewed as an embarrassment, with their strong opinions, positive and negative, about Buddhism and India. We are told not to judge other cultures the way Conze did. Sometimes the refusal of judgement derives from a positivistic desire to ape natural science, with an “objectivity” that denies reference to value; but more often, making judgements about other cultures seems imperialist and disrespectful, a form of Orientalism or even racism.

This refusal to make judgements seems to me to underlie the currently fashionable “performance theory” in studies of ritual, and religious studies more generally. The approach here (usually drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin) is to remove attention from ideas and truth claims and direct it instead toward social functions: don’t look at what people’s claims say, look at what the claims do in their social context. (As a former sociologist it’s curious to me that the hot and trendy methodology in religious studies – look at functions rather than ideas – looks very similar to the sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons, an approach that sociologists now discuss only to explain how discredited it is.) One former colleague of mine, describing his studies of Vedic texts, explained his approach as follows: “What do these texts mean when they say ‘gold causes jaundice’? They can’t really believe that gold causes jaundice! There must be something else going on here, something that it does to say such a thing.” As far as I understand it, much of this performance theory is motivated by a desire to respect other cultures. Surely people can’t be so stupid as to mean these bizarrely unscientific things they say; they must be saying it for another reason.

It seems to me, though, that this view gets it exactly backwards. Continue reading →

Is pleasure the only intrinsic good?

14 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Monasticism, Morality, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Truth

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I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting paper by Neil Sinhababu, a friend I met while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. Neil’s paper, thoughtfully posted online, is entitled The Epistemic Argument for Univesal Hedonism. In it, Neil makes an argument for a strong and controversial position that I’ve flirted with before myself: that pleasure and displeasure are the only things intrinsically good or bad in any ethical sense.

Neil’s argument proceeds roughly as follows (and this summary, qua summary, must necessarily leave out some of the detail and precision of his argument): Ethical judgement all derive from one of two sources: emotional perception and phenomenal introspection. The source of most of our commonsense judgements about morality is emotional perception: a process by which we react emotionally to states of affairs in the world, form moral judgements in connection with these emotional reactions, and thereby perceive the states of the world as having objective moral qualities. Neil draws on Jonathan Haidt’s empirical research to support this point.

Neil goes further, however, in arguing that we are wrong to make moral judgements on the basis of emotional perception, thus rejecting Mencius’s metaethics as well as those of the moral sense theorists. Emotional perception, he claims, is inherently unreliable. Continue reading →

Neither supernatural nor political

07 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Epicureanism, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Supernatural

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I’m sometimes curious about the resolutely political nature of modern secular thought – self-proclaimed humanists tend to see political activism as an intrinsic part of their belief system, along with a refusal to believe in the supernatural. So too, in Yavanayāna Buddhism, a skepticism toward the supernatural tends to go hand in hand with political engagement.

The same is true at most Unitarian Universalist churches. I attended a UU church for two years, but this is among the major reasons I stopped going. The UU church appealed to me because it seemed open to seekers with a wide range of values; nevertheless, there are some values that typical UUs do share, among them a commitment to political activism for social justice as a central part of a good life. That’s something I’m skeptical of, at the least. And so while I found a great community there and made some lasting friendships, I ultimately found myself far out of sync spiritually with the church’s ethos.

To me, perhaps the most curious example of the close connection between politics and non-supernaturalism is Robert Hanrott‘s now-defunct Epicurus Blog. Hanrott claimed to devote the blog to the Epicurean philosophy of “moderation, enjoyment of life, tranquillity, friendship, lack of fear,” along with Epicurus’s rejection of gods and other supernatural forms of causation. Hanrott explicitly acknowledged that “those who try to follow Epicurus and his teachings are not supposed to involve themselves in politics.” And yet the majority of the posts on his Epicurus Blog wound up being about… politics. Continue reading →

Of noble lies and skill in means

04 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Honesty, Humility, Morality, Truth

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Justin Whitaker makes an important point about my Noble Truths post: “I have to laugh, thinking of the Buddha as a ‘mostly-suffering-free’ spiritual ideal instead of the traditional ‘fully awakened one.'”

Justin’s quite right that what I present in that post looks like a rather washed-out version of Buddhist tradition, “a bit dour.” I think the title “One and a half noble truths” effectively acknowledges that I don’t claim the view to be traditional Buddhism. I agree that it doesn’t provide the kind of excitement available in the Third Noble Truth’s promise of a life without suffering.

But I don’t make the claim that one and a half of the truths are right on the grounds that it will motivate people to practice; I make the claim on the grounds that it’s true. Amicus Buddha, sed magis amica veritas. If it’s not Buddhist, well, that’s a big reason I don’t call myself a Buddhist.

And if people don’t get motivated? If they don’t do the hard work the path requires, because the diminution (as opposed to elimination) of suffering is not enough of a motivator? Well, then the questions get tougher. Continue reading →

Certain knowledge

27 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Reading and Recitation, Self, Sufism

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I recently had an extraordinarily stimulating conversation with two friends who wish to remain anonymous (but they know who they are). The topic: can we ever have certain knowledge about anything? My initial response, not intended to be flippant, was: I’m not certain.

The MatrixThe friends claimed certainty about things that I don’t think we can reasonably be certain about. One claimed to have achieved certain knowledge through the Sufi practice of dhikr; I argued that this could be a feeling of certainty about falsehood rather than about truth, so that one needs standards of truth external to the mystical experience. The other claimed that we could know with certainty that we are awake and not sleeping; I wasn’t ready to grant that. I’m ready to grant the basic point of Descartes’s skepticism: although we can be relatively confident that the things of the world are as they seem, it’s possible they could all be a dream, or the creation of an evil demon – or even the Matrix. (What a gift that movie is to teachers of introductory philosophy!)

Now Descartes himself thinks he can have certain knowledge in spite of all this doubt, or in a certain sense even because of it: he believes that the one thing he can’t doubt is the fact that he is doubting. His doubt would be logically self-contradictory, for its very existence would require the presence of a doubter, namely himself. Thus, “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).

My Buddhist readers will probably be unsympathetic to Descartes’s argument, and rightly so. Descartes tries here to prove the very thing that the Buddha of the Pali suttas – and the vast majority of later Buddhists – would be at pains to deny, namely the existence of the self. I would argue that a Buddhist critique knocks Descartes down quite effectively. Descartes may have established the existence of doubt, but not of an agent of doubt, of a doubter. That’s an error, a reification. As a popular book on Buddhism has it, there are thoughts without a thinker. Even if one disagrees with Buddhist deconstructions of the self – and I am often skeptical of them – one must surely still acknowledge that they at least cast doubt on the self, the thing Descartes thought could not be doubted.

Nevertheless, there’s a route to certain knowledge that one can still follow from here. Continue reading →

On Examined Life

23 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Blog Admin, French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Truth

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I just saw a screening of Examined Life, Astra Taylor‘s movie about philosophy. It’s a little surprising in the first place to see a movie about philosophy (as opposed to a movie that expresses philosophical ideas, of which there are many). But there’s something about the film that’s in its way even more surprising: although all of the eight philosophers in the film is a professor, only one (Kwame Anthony Appiah) is actually a professor of philosophy. Two of them (Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer) have minor appointments in philosophy, where they might teach a few philosophy classes on the side but most of their work is done elsewhere. The majority, however, have no current official association with academic philosophy whatsoever. They’re in departments of French and Italian, rhetoric, sociology – anything but philosophy. This despite the fact that every large university and nearly every small college has a philosophy department, full of people who consider themselves philosophers. The film makes no comment on the fact.
Continue reading →

Karma: answering a question not worth asking?

20 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Deity, Karma, Psychology, South Asia, Supernatural

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I often feel a little puzzled about the origins of karma theory; it seems like an answer to a question that didn’t need to be asked. Karma functions very well as an answer to a common question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” People who are good now receive bad fates because of bad things they did in former lives, and vice versa.

The thing is, Buddhists – and their predecessors in Indian culture – don’t need an answer to this question. The suffering of good people, it seems to me, is a major problem for those who believe in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god. If God is really all-powerful and all good, it would stand to reason that he would stop bad things from happening to good people (and maybe bad people too) – so why doesn’t he? It’s a logical problem – theodicy – that monotheists continue to wrestle with answering.

But for someone who’s not a monotheist, the question seems like a non-starter. The question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” seems to me like the question “Why do yellow things fall when they’re dropped?” The very phrasing of the question suggests a certain lack of understanding. Why would we ever think that bad things wouldn’t happen to good people? What, other than the belief in an omnipotent being, would lead us to make such a connection?

I wonder if there’s something in the human condition that compels us to expect that the good will be rewarded and the bad punished – basically, that the world is fair. I’ve heard of studies of chimps that show signs of distress when others get more than they do – more distress than they feel when they have less themselves. Is there, perhaps, a justice instinct – even a theodicy instinct?

Śāntideva helps Lucretius

13 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, Fear, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Self

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In my post on marriage I wrote about Lucretius as offering something of an alternative to Buddhist views on death. There is a contrast in emphases: where Buddhists warn us of the terrible losses that come with death, Lucretius tells us death isn’t so bad and we should stop fearing it. But I think there is a way in which the two can go together.

The biggest problem with Lucretius’s advice is that it’s so hard to follow. Often those who don’t fear death simply don’t treat it as a real possibility. (The young, I think, are especially prone to this.) Once you really contemplate the possibility of your own death, the fear becomes much more real. You think you don’t fear death, but you really do.

The thing is, as long as your worldview focuses on yourself, your death is inevitably going to be a problem for you. You can live to improve the remaining moments of your life, but eventually those get fewer and fewer. Egoistic consequentialism, at least, seems to end in futility. This would seem a logical reason to fear death, against Lucretius – maybe not death itself, but the last moments that precede it, where everything you do means nothing.

Here, I think, a Buddhist view can help – especially Śāntideva’s. He takes the basic Buddhist doctrine of non-self and runs with it: claims that because the concept of a self makes no sense, we need to live for everyone and not just ourselves. I’m not sure I buy the metaphysical arguments, but there’s a lot to be said for their practical consequences. One of Śāntideva’s verses that has really stuck with me is BCA VIII.129: “All who are suffering in the world are suffering because of their desire for their own happiness. All who are happy in the world are happy because of their desire for others’ happiness.” Śāntideva doesn’t explain what he means by this, but I think this may be a part of it: getting over ourselves helps us to be happy, partially because it lets us live for things that extend beyond our deaths. (I’m reminded of this passage when I read of Jesus saying “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”) On this score, it seems to me, Śāntideva helps us to be better Lucretians.

Inconsistency in the incest taboo

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Disgust, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Sex

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I’m often surprised by people who see gay rights as an entirely one-sided, good and evil issue – and then turn around and condemn incest, even consensual adult brother-sister incest, as sick, disgusting and therefore wrong. (The “therefore” is the most intriguing part.) I’ve always enjoyed Dan Savage‘s sex columns, but after his continued attacks on those who condemn gay sex as disgusting (such as ensuring that this (NSFW) is the first Google hit for Senator Rick Santorum‘s name), I lost a lot of respect for him when he repeatedly proclaimed incest to be wrong.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Continue reading →

Repressing and reducing anger

25 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Anger, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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What first drew me to Śāntideva was his critique of anger. I had students read him for a tutorial course on comparative ethics, and one student was shocked by his almost total criticism of anger as an emotion. “What about righteous anger?” she asked. I replied: “according to this text, I don’t think there’s any such thing as righteous anger.” The more I thought about this teaching afterward, the more profound it seemed: the number of times in my life I’d been glad I got angry, I could count on the fingers of one hand.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?
Continue reading →