In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.
How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.
That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.
Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.
There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.
I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.
This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)
NASA image of a dying star from the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be the eventual fate of the sun.
How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.
There will, eventually, be an end to the human race. We don’t think enough about the significance of this fact.
I am not even talking about avoidable apocalypses, as real as the threat of those is. I am assuming for the sake of argument that we will manage to avoid being stupid enough to kill ourselves off in the next few centuries, through global nuclear war or climate change or AI robots or nanotechnology or a newly emerging plague. Many if not all of those are real threats and we should do whatever we can to prevent them from destroying us. But for my purposes here I’m assuming we’re smart enough to fend them off. The point is that humanity will end even so. It may take a very, very long time. But it will happen.
Glenn Loury – who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a “sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness”, on these reasonable grounds:
I don’t just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one’s children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].
So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It’s something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?
My response, not far from Foster’s, is: you don’t have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people’s race, but rather their culture.
While lecturing at Stonehill I made a comment about some traditional practice, I don’t remember which, that it was “less mystical and more magical.” Or maybe it was the reverse. What I remember clearly is that, as I was about to move on, one brave and perceptive student raised her hand to ask “Could you maybe explain the difference between magical and mystical?”
I paused for a moment, a little stunned by the reminder that I hadn’t explained that distinction. I was very grateful for the question: of course I should have explained the distinction, how could I have expected them to know it? The question reminded me that the distinction between magic and mysticism is something I tend to take for granted – even though it is not at all obvious to a layperson. It’s also quite important – for the key reason that the claims of mysticism are more likely to be true than those of magic. Or at the least, they are less unscientific – likely to conflict with the evidence of natural science. So it’s a key distinction I keep in mind when I read works like Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip, which argue for viewing the world in ways that go beyond the natural-sceintific.
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?”
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.
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?
