Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

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 →

An evil God?

18 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Deity, Karma, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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I’ve lately been finding myself increasingly horrified by the concept of hell, and its implications for a certain kind of Christian belief in God. I’m familiar with several theological ways in which Christians handle this concept; there’s the pre-New Testament view in which the unsaved simply disappear after death, or the view in which hell is simply an allegory for what we do to ourselves psychologically in life. (I think Dante, who did a great deal to create our conception of hell, is often interpreted this latter way.) I don’t have serious problems with hell interpreted in either of these ways, or with a God who created it.

My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.

I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?

Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. Śāntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.

Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.

Against “moral intuitions”

16 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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One of the biggest problems with analytical ethics, as it’s usually practised, is the reliance on “moral intuitions” as data for ethical judgements. “Intuitions” themselves are not the problem, as long as we think of them as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, as “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” the relatively commonsense understandings that make up our starting point, like Gadamer’s Vorurteilen (prejudices). We have to start our enquiry where we are, making sense of the beliefs we already have, rejecting some in the light of others.

But contemporary ethicists often go further than this, giving our unreflective “intuitions” a high status they do not deserve. Continue reading →

Chastened intellectualism and practice

06 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Practice, Unconscious Mind

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My previous post discusses the problem that academic philosophy doesn’t do a whole lot to make us better people; its main defence is that it isn’t supposed to. But then what is?

Aaron Stalnaker addresses this point in his book Overcoming Our Evil. It compares Augustine and Xunzi, two thinkers from faraway contexts who share a commonly pessimistic assessment of human nature. I had some serious methodological concerns about Stalnaker’s work in the sixth chapter of my dissertation – basically that the work isn’t as relevant to constructive ethical reflection as it claims to be – but I’ve softened a bit on those concerns since writing the dissertation. While I still don’t think that Stalnaker’s work itself makes the constructive contributions it claims to make, I do think that its categories are helpful for others who do want to make such contributions.

Specifically: what Augustine and Xunzi have in common, according to Stalnaker, is “chastened intellectualism.” While they agree that we can know a great deal of the truth about how we should live, they also agree that knowing the truth is not enough to make us act accordingly – contradicting at least some readings of Plato. Some sort of further practice is required. Pierre Hadot points out that in Roman times such practices were viewed as integral to philosophy. (Jonathan Schofer, on my dissertation committee, kept insisting that I pay greater attention to Śāntideva’s accounts of practices, and now I’m seeing why.)

I’m very sympathetic to such an account, from my personal experience. It was one thing to realize that my own attitudes and behaviours were the big problem in my life. It has been quite another to actually change those attitudes and behaviours.

But then seekers like me face a problem. Augustine and Xunzi recommend practices that are embedded within a particular tradition – Christianity and Confucianism respectively – each of which I find highly problematic. There’s a lot I disagree with in Buddhism as well; I don’t think any tradition has managed to fully grasp truth (though I also certainly don’t claim to have done so myself!) Some traditions of practice (like Goenka’s) claim to be non-sectarian techniques, but nevertheless incorporate a great deal of their tradition’s own teachings. (At the same time, Goenka’s technique didn’t do a lot for me, with one major exception.)

What then are we seekers to do? Should we swallow the practices of an existing tradition whole even while disagreeing with it, as a part of developing a necessary humility? Or should we pick and choose to make our own practice, retaining intellectual integrity but giving ourselves less chance to learn from what’s out there?

Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is

14 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

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Academic scholars of Buddhism (often referred to by the ugly term “Buddhologists”) today spend a great deal of time and energy pointing out ways that particular features of contemporary Western-influenced Buddhism are not present in earlier or classical tradition. At least four features appear strikingly new: Engaged Buddhism and its concern with politics; the relative absence of monks; the strong emphasis on meditation; and the rationalistic denial (or minimizing) of supernatural forces.

It’s pretty clear that most of these features were not there in most premodern Buddhist traditions. So, for example, Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught, while taken from the Pali suttas’ record of what the Buddha supposedly taught, turns out to be an extremely selective reading. Even if we take the suttas as an accurate record of what the Buddha taught (which they probably aren’t), if you read the whole collection you would get a very, very different picture of Buddhism than the one Rahula gives you: a world inhabited by gods and spirits, focused on monks, with limited emphasis on meditation and almost none on politics. What people like Rahula did is a genuine innovation.

This innovation departs enough from earlier tradition that one could call it a fourth y?na, a new Buddhist “vehicle” or tradition. Traditionally there are held to be three y?nas: the Theravāda of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia which adheres to early, pre-Mahāyāna teachings; the Mahāyāna prevalent in East Asia; and Vajray?na, the tantra-influenced variant of Mahāyāna prevalent in Tibet. I like to call the new Buddhism Yavanayāna – after yavana, the Sanskrit and Pali term for Hellenistic Greeks, and by extension for Europeans. A four-y?na distinction makes for an easy mnemonic – to Theravāda in the south, Mahāyāna in the east and Vajray?na in the north, one adds Yavanayāna in the west.

Christopher Queen has recently been arguing that Engaged Buddhism itself constitutes a fourth y?na; but modernized Buddhist traditions share other characteristics as well, such as meditation and non-supernaturalism. Goenka vipassanā is not very political, but it is very different from the Theravāda of eighteenth-century Burma, and seems like it must be considered a part of fourth-y?na Buddhism. Queen has noted in conversation that Engaged Buddhism (and other forms of modernized Buddhism) are not just a Western invention; many of its most noted practitioners, including Rahula and Goenka and other luminaries like Thich Nhat Hanh, are Asians. This is certainly true, but it would also be hard to deny that their Buddhism owes a great deal to the influence of Western reformers (Christian, Theosophist and secular). Some take this point as a criticism: this so-called y?na is just a bastardization, a pandering to Western tastes. I strongly disagree with this criticism, but that’s a topic for my next post.