Category Archives: Western Thought

The supernatural without Ascent

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Social Science, Supernatural, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

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I’ve repeatedly returned on this blog to the concepts of Ascent and Descent, derived above all from Ken Wilber’s work and to a lesser extent from Martha Nussbaum’s. I have found that these concepts do a lot to help us understand the differences between philosophical traditions. I have not yet been precise about defining them, however, and I would like to think them through in some more detail.

The concept of Ascent has above all to do with transcendence; “transcendence” and “immanence” are close cousins to Ascent and Descent as I understand them. However, Ascent is not transcendence as such. Continue reading →

On Christianity’s moderate importance

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Social Science

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When it comes to writing about Christianity, C.S. Lewis had an impressive talent for making claims that were witty, sincere, clever, pithy, and completely wrong. I discussed one of these – the “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” argument – before. Recently, I’ve been seeing another one popping up in church ads on the Boston subway, where I do a lot of my writing. Lewis said:

One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

The church slightly modified this quote to fit in its ads: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” The modified version removes a little bit of the untruth: surely there is more to the two-thousand-year history of Christian tradition, from St. Teresa’s visions to church architecture, than a mere statement. But the “statement” bit isn’t the point of Lewis’s quote, and it’s not what I want to focus on here either. Continue reading →

On the economic value of the humanities

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Economics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics, Work

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[This entry will be cross-posted at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.]

I’ve been asked to expand on some brief comments I made a little while ago in a Facebook thread. They pertain to the institutional context of the humanities – including philosophy and especially religious studies – in academia. Since my new job involves supporting an entire university and not only the humanities, I no longer have a professional stake in these debates. But they remain important for me as someone who cares deeply about the subject matter of philosophy and of much religious studies, for the academy remains central to the work done in these fields, for now at least. It may be that in my lifetime “philosopher” and “religionist” do not primarily mean “professor of philosophy” and “professor of religious studies” respectively. I would welcome such a day, but it is not here yet.
The comments I made stem from a newsletter recently published by the AAR on the topic of teaching and learning. The newsletter highlights Martha Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa. In explaining Reineke’s views, it identifies some questions important to her with the introduction: “At a time when liberal education in public universities is being challenged as governing boards, state legislatures, parents, and students press for majors with narrow vocational application, questions that keep Reineke awake at night include:”. Of the questions listed there after the colon, I’m particularly interested in this one: “When others increasingly ascribe to public higher education as a narrow economic value, how can we demonstrate that knowledge of world religions builds intercultural competence that undergirds successful economic development and supports strong communities?”

My response to this question was as follows:

The rhetorical move of “When others increasingly believe that higher education should be X, how can we convince them that we are a form of X?” is an interesting one to take. When others increasingly believe that higher education should be an ice cream sandwich, how can we demonstrate that we are an ice cream sandwich?

Continue reading →

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Vedānta

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I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

The trouble with phenomenological similarities

23 Sunday Sep 2012

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

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This week’s post is a slightly abridged version of a paper I wrote eleven years ago for Robert Gimello’s class on Buddhist meditation traditions. I’m posting it now for a couple of reasons: because I still enjoy its punchy rhetoric, because it’s a useful corrective to Wilberian and similar perspectives that assume “religion” is fundamentally about mystical experience, and because I think it’s likely to be relevant to posts I want to make in the months ahead. I also still agree with it to at least some extent, but I am not entirely sure what that extent is, and that is something I hope to be sorting through.

In his chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of the Cloud of Unknowing?”1, Ninian Smart argues that “there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the anonymous 14th-century Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing.” Although Smart never defines “phenomenological”, I believe from the context of the article that he uses the term to refer to similarities of experience, and specifically mystical experience.

To what extent does Smart’s chapter succeed in its project? Continue reading →

An outsider who sees the whole

16 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Family, German Tradition, Gratitude, Modern Hinduism, Social Science

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Continuing to honour my parents, I would like to turn this week to my father, Jayant Lele, who has been central to my intellectual development throughout my lifetime. No doubt he has influencrd me in many ways I’m not even aware of; here I will discuss what I do know about.

My father bequeathed to me two intellectual drives: to understand wider context, and to stand outside consensus as an intellectual outsider. Continue reading →

Intimacy and the eschaton

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Death, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Politics

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Last week’s post explored how my views have begun moving from integrity toward intimacy. To me the key appeal of the intimacy approach, as I discussed there, is the way it can lead to satisficing over maximizing. Last week I focused on the implications of this distinction for happiness.

But there’s an additional appeal to intimacy’s satisficing, one which I have also begun to explore only recently. I have often been curious about the tendency for philosophies to be either supernatural or political (or both) in orientation, and as an explanation I have repeatedly returned to Simone Weil’s quote: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” The question then is: why do we need to orient ourselves to an absolute good, in the future or up there? Why not just set our eyes lower? Continue reading →

Slouching towards intimacy

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, East Asia, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Virtue

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I have noted that those modern Westerners who learn from South Asian philosophy are usually looking for Ascent while those who learn from East Asian are usually looking for intimacy. Given that my own doctorate was specialized in South Asia, with little East Asian component despite my eventual focus on Buddhism, you might easily guess what my own orientation has been on this score – and you’d be right. I’ve often insisted on correcting those who portray Buddhism as an intimacy-oriented tradition – not just to set the historical record straight, but because I think it’s important to emphasize the value of integrity. When I was thinking in terms of three ways of life, the integrity-oriented “ascetic” and “libertine” approaches, for all their contrasts with each other, both appealed to me far more than the intimacy-oriented “traditionalism”.

But then in recent months and years I’ve been reading significantly more East Asian thought myself – and I’ve also been a bit startled to find myself leaning more toward an intimacy orientation. Continue reading →

In praise of questions which tend not to edification

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Social Science

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The Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta, in the early Pali Buddhist sutta texts, opens with the Buddhist monk Māluṅkyaputta meditating and thinking as follows:

These positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One [the Buddha] — ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul and the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathagata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathagata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist’ — I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not declared them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. [Majjhima Nikāya i.426, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]

The absence of answers to these questions frustrates Māluṅkyaputta enough that he is ready to leave the monkhood and become a layman if the Buddha doesn’t answer him. Continue reading →

Augustine and Xunzi at Stonehill

05 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in African Thought, Confucianism, Happiness, Human Nature, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Social Science

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For the sorts of reasons I discussed last week, I have been strongly leaning for the past couple years toward Xunzi‘s negative dark view of human nature – or so I have thought. I observe my own tendencies and see just how hard it is to be good even when I really want to. Augustine, whose similarities to Xunzi run deep (as Aaron Stalnaker has noted), points to the behaviour he observes in babies: creatures not only of desire and greed, but even of jealousy and anger. It’s as we grow up that we learn to be good. And then, of course, there’s the history of human violence and bloodshed. I often find myself a little bewildered by the 20th-century philosophies that say philosophy must be entirely different after the Holocaust; the Holocaust would not have surprised Augustine. He knew what evil lurks in our minds.

One of the more common objections to such a dark view of human nature is that it leads to tyranny: if people can’t be trusted, they need an iron ruler to rule them. Such a view is most famously associated with Thomas Hobbes, and it seems that Xunzi held something like it, but I’ve tended to find it a bit puzzling. If we can’t trust people to rule themselves, how on earth could we trust an arbitrary sovereign to rule them? A dim view of human nature seems perfectly compatible with Winston Churchill’s endorsement of democracy: that it’s the worst form of government except for all the others. We need a strong system of checks and balances to hold down the dark tendencies of our leaders.

And yet. With reflection I have realized that I cannot endorse a view like Xunzi’s and Augustine’s, even modified in the latter way. Continue reading →