Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

Who cares about phenomenological similarities?

20 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.

Continue reading →

Mystical experience across cultures

06 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Consciousness, Epistemology, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are likely a number of religious-studies scholars who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical experience. I haven’t gone into their literature in a while, but I think it would be easy for them to say Griffiths is setting the study of mysticism back many decades. Because Griffiths’s stated conception of mystical experience is one that many religionists would already have considered very dated – even when I was studying them twenty years ago.

I say this because Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical experience using a questionnaire based on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960. And when I was in grad school twenty years ago, Stace’s work was often considered impossibly backward.

Continue reading →

Two South Asian approaches to gender ethics

23 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in Biology, Confucianism, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Human Nature, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Sex, Vedānta

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I was recently invited to a recent Buddhist-ethics conference featuring a workshop discussion on gender. I decided to attend the workshop en femme – as Sandhya – because I thought it might be relevant, though I wasn’t sure how. It turned out it was.

The workshop, hosted by Amy Langenberg and Antoinette DeNapoli, showcased the pair’s work on the welcome South Asian phenomenon of female renouncers. DeNapoli studied Mataji, a guru in Uttar Pradesh who declared herself a Shankaracharya (a monastic leader in Śaṅkara’s lineage). Langenberg studied the Peace Grove Institute, a community of female Theravāda Buddhist renouncers in Nepal. Having introduced Mataji and the Peace Grove, the two asked some discussion questions relating to the two, and broke us into small groups to discuss them. I forget the exact wording of the question that proved most fruitful, but it was something along the lines of “What do these female renouncers teach us about gender ethics?” And one of my group’s participants asked a most insightful question: “What do we mean by gender ethics?”

Female renouncers at the Peace Grove Institute
Continue reading →

A speculation on Ken Wilber’s experiences

09 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in Consciousness, Epistemology, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Practice, Psychology

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

As I reflected back on the works of Ken Wilber recently, a thought occurred to me: man, that guy must have done a lot of drugs.

I don’t recall Wilber ever saying anything about drugs in his work one way or the other. Given that he wrote most of his work under the restrictive régime of the late-20th-century US, that shouldn’t be a surprise; caution is valuable. Yet he is an American baby boomer deeply interested in spirituality and mysticism; that is the sort of profile that leads one to expect significant experimentation with psychoactive substances.

But more importantly than his demographic: Wilber’s philosophy is very much the sort of philosophy one would expect from someone who had had profound drug-induced mystical experiences. A theme throughout Wilber’s work is the importance of experience to knowledge, a view that Wilber’s late work comes to call “radical empiricism”. He claims throughout his work that the essentials of premodern wisdom traditions – Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity – are to be found in mystical experiences, and in replicable practices that lead up to those. Some years ago I wrote an article debunking this claim: I don’t think that a reasonable historian can look at the evidence we have of Confucius or Moses or Jesus or Zhiyi (Chih-i) and still say that the essentials of their teachings come from replicable experiences. (We could reasonably say that Moses at the burning bush was having a mystical experience, but it was not in any way replicable.)

Continue reading →

On chemically induced mystical experience

25 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Biology, Certainty and Doubt, Emotion, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Psychology, Roman Catholicism

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

One of the more exciting scholarly developments of the century to date has been the growth of studies – previously hindered for too long by legal barriers – into mystical experiences induced by psychedelic drugs. In a landmark 2006 experiment, rigorously controlled and double-blind, Roland Griffiths’s research team at Johns Hopkins University found that people given high doses of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – typically had experiences they described as “having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance”, and bore several other characteristics in common with a certain kind of non-drug-induced mystical experience: a sense of merging with ultimate reality, a nondual sense of the unity of reality, a sense of awe or sacredness. This sort of mystical experience, it seems, can be chemically induced.

Continue reading →

Tenets of a new movement

19 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, , ,

In the mid-2010s in the English-speaking world there arose a left-wing social and political movement that has become enormously influential, one you are likely familiar with in one form or another. The movement has gone by many names: woke(ness), social-justice warriors (SJW), Progressive Activist, The Elect, Successor Ideology, Tumblr liberalism. What is notable about these names is that all of them have been applied to the movement primarily by people outside it. The only one coined from within the movement is “woke”, and recently many members of the movement have become suspicious even of that.

The movement, in other words, has shown a remarkable reluctance to name itself. What is clear to me is that the movement is a movement, with its own new and radically revisionary paradigm of inquiry, and therefore needs a name to identify it, even though its members seem reluctant to give it one. Perhaps this could be because they believe it is not a movement, it is just common sense. If so, I think a simple reflection on what was considered common sense ten years ago, within the same societies, is sufficient to show that belief false.

But this post is not about the name or lack thereof. Rather, the purpose of this post is to talk and think about the movement’s ideas, whatever it might be called. There are significant aspects of this movement that I agree with, and at least one that I have greatly benefitted from. I sympathize with its aims considered at the broadest level. Moreover I believe that there is truth in everything; I looked for the truth in the rise of Trump, and it is at least as important to do that here.

Continue reading →

Eliminating and interpreting as Buddhists

22 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Play, Pleasure

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I want to turn now to what I think are the really interesting questions raised by Justin Whitaker’s latest post on the Sigālovāda Sutta. These are questions of hermeneutics, of method in interpretation. As noted, the previous post was exegetical: I think everything I say there could have been endorsed by a historically oriented religion scholar with no stake in Buddhist tradition. But Justin and I are not that: we are Buddhist theologians, who consider ourselves Buddhists and seek to apply the tradition to our lives. So I now want to take the previous post’s ideas into that wider theological context.

Continue reading →

Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Play

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

,

I return now to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker about the Sigālovāda Sutta, the Pali text so often viewed as a guide to the household life. Justin helpfully begins his latest post with a list of the previous correspondence we have exchanged on the topic so far, so I won’t repeat the list here. (The opening list unfortunately doesn’t include hyperlinks to the earlier posts, but those links can be found at the bottom of the latest post.)

From my previous post on the more general philosophical issues, I think we can now return to the sutta itself. Justin is correct that I read the Sigālovāda Sutta as “an overly strict and dour text that sucks the joy out of householder life”. He claims that this is a misreading. Is it? Let us take a look at the feature of the Sigālovāda that most leads me to such a reading: what I characterize as its prohibition on attending theatrical shows. I will examine that prohibition in detail this time, and next time talk about we do with it as Buddhist theologians – a topic that I find more interesting. (Since Justin and I have been pursuing this debate at a slow pace, I will post the next one on my usual schedule in two weeks, and I recommend he wait for it before posting a reply.)

Continue reading →

Of mental health and medical models

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Skepticism, Stoicism, Therapy

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

The concept of mental health – and even more so its converse of mental illness – has become ubiquitous in the modern West, and it deserves serious examination by philosophers. Many, probably most, cultures would not recognize the claim that a mind that sees demons or refuses to speak or commits suicide is in a condition analogous to a body with a fever or a broken limb.

The idea of mental health and illness is the central idea in the psychological approach that we typically refer to as the medical model. The term “medical model”, in its most basic sense, means that one approaches a given field of human endeavour in the manner associated with medicine: that field may then be considered a part of medicine, or simply analogous to it. I believe the term was coined by R.D. Laing, the prominent critic of psychiatry, and so it often takes on a negative cast, for the application of specific aspects of modern medicine in areas where it is inappropriate to do so.

It does not have to, though. Unless we reject modern medicine in its entirety (which would be a stupid idea), we are going to accept some aspects of the medical model for at least the practice of medicine itself. Modern medicine has accomplished a great deal, even in its application to phenomena of the mind: antipsychotics and antidepressants are not cure-alls by any means, but for a great many people, their mental lives are much improved as a result of these medicines.

Continue reading →

The people need their opium

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Play, Pleasure

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John Sullivan, is a director of lowbrow comedies who aspires to instead make serious art about the suffering of the poor. He tries to do experiential research about their suffering, and winds up being falsely imprisoned at hard labour. The prisoners’ one reprieve is to watch a Disney Goofy cartoon, at which Sullivan finds himself laughing uproariously. His lesson, from actually experiencing the suffering of the poor, is to go back to making silly comedies. The film closes with his lines: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Sullivan in prison laughing at Goofy

The story of Sullivan’s Travels serves as an eloquent defence of lowbrow or shallow art, of kitsch and even smarm. And I think it helps us see what is wrong with the philosophical critique of kitsch.

Continue reading →