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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: generations

A speculation on Ken Wilber’s experiences

09 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Consciousness, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Practice, Psychology

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

drugs, generations, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, Moses, mystical experience, nondualism, perennialism

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 →

Doing what you love when the money won’t follow

05 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Family, Flourishing, Friends, Play, Work

≈ 9 Comments

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"Weird Al" Yankovic, Freddie deBoer, generations, LARP, Martin Hägglund, Maya Tokomitsu, music, Ted Gioia

I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it, I think the word has gotten out how terrible that advice is, with books coming out with titles like Do What You Love and Other Lies. We are now at the point that Freddie deBoer can describe the critique of that advice as “endless”, and critique the critique:

There’s also the endless genre of “don’t do what you love” essays, which critique the omnipresent cultural assumption that you should do what you love. And yeah, that can be exploitative, as employers will often use that love as a means to be selfish with your pay and benefits. But what’s the alternative? Don’t try to get paid doing something you like? Do what you hate? I read Maya Tokomitsu’s book on this question, and like so much of what the socialist left publishes these days it was far more compelling as a critique of what exists than as an argument for a better alternative.

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Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work

≈ Comments Off on Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

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20th century, academia, Catharine MacKinnon, expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, generations, Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, identity, Immanuel Kant, interview, John Locke, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Monty Python, music, race, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Stefani Ruper, United States, virtue ethics

Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.

I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:

iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen

Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/listenspotify

Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch

Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/podcast

 

 

The material conditions of qualitative individualism

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Flourishing, Politics, Self, Work

≈ 1 Comment

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20th century, Anthony Woodiwiss, autobiography, Charles Taylor, Existential Comics, expressive individualism, generations, Jayant Lele, Jim Wilton, Karl Marx, modernity, Students for a Democratic Society, United States

When I first started reading Charles Taylor on qualitative individualism in my 20s, my Marxist father complained that Taylor paid too little attention to material conditions. I didn’t really get the criticism at the time, but I do now, for reasons that go well beyond reading and writing.

Taylor’s discussion of qualitative individualism (or “expressivism” or the “ethics of authenticity”) takes place largely in the realm of ideas, as mine also has so far. I have tried to trace the history of the ideas of qualitative individualism. But such a history is incomplete. Continue reading →

In memoriam: Claude Vipond

23 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, Protestantism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, atheism, autobiography, Canada, Christmas, Claude Vipond, generations, modernity, obituary, Stephen Leacock

My maternal grandfather, Claude Vipond, died peacefully last Tuesday. His life was long – he reached 95 years. Claude was a doctor and a World War II veteran, but I knew him entirely as a grandfather – an often larger-than-life figure at family gatherings, delivering corny jokes with an enthusiasm that made them hilarious. At large Christmas gatherings he would read to the grandchildren, not some sentimental Victorian Christmas story but Stephen Leacock‘s marvelously tongue-in-cheek Caroline’s Christmas.

The irreverence of Leacock’s self-subverting story left a strong impression on me as a boy – much like the movie The Princess Bride, which came out when I was the age of its child narratee. In a different way from my father, “Caroline’s Christmas” helped teach me the pleasures of being an outsider, with an ironic detachment expressed in humour – in ways perhaps more profound than I realized at the time. In many ways I think that story really sums up my grandfather’s spirit. Continue reading →

On making America great again

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, academia, autobiography, Canada, conservatism, Donald Trump, Eric Hobsbawm, gender, generations, identity, Jayant Lele, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., race, United States

In the early 1960s, my father finished his PhD in political science from Cornell. Under the restrictive and racialized American immigration rules of the day, he needed to work in a neighbouring country for two years before he could come to the US. So he applied for six tenure-track faculty jobs in Canada. He was offered five of them. The sixth, at the relatively low-prestige Memorial University of Newfoundland, turned him down with a curt letter that said “In our competition, you failed to qualify.” He found it amusing that such a lower-tier school would say such a dismissive thing when he had offers from so many places higher in the hierarchy.

This story ceased to amuse me when I received my PhD from Harvard in the late 2000s and began applying for faculty teaching jobs myself. I sent out nearly two hundred job applications, most of them for tenure-track jobs, across Canada and the United States, and a few off the continent. I received not one tenure-track offer anywhere. If Memorial University of Newfoundland had offered me a position, I would have taken it without hesitation and been grateful to have the opportunity. The same applies to most of my generation in academia. To those coming of age in the 21st-century university, my father’s story sounds as implausible as if he had wandered into the White House, said “I’d like a job as President of the United States”, and been offered it on the spot. But it was and is true. His experience was in Canada, but as far as I know, those faculty of his generation with a similarly prestigious degree who could apply for jobs in the United States had a comparably wide range of opportunities.

This intergenerational experience should highlight how the story in the academic humanities and social sciences from the 1960s to the 2010s has been above all a story of decline. Many North American leftists look at the real accomplishments made in areas of race, gender and sexuality and see this period as a time of unalloyed progress. I cannot. Continue reading →

A synthesis beyond Orientalism

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedānta

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

A.E. Gough, Andrew Nicholson, Edward Said, generations, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernity, perennialism

[Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.]

I am increasingly getting the impression that the debates over Orientalism in Asian traditions have taken a new turn, and one very much for the better.

Few books of the twentieth century have made as much impact as Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. It is particularly striking that even though Said’s book was entirely about the Middle East, it has been a major scholarly landmark in the study of South and East Asia. Until Said, Western scholarship on Asia was rarely viewed as having a hidden colonial agenda. The perennialism of élitist mystical schools like Theosophy was taken seriously by scholars. And the views of Asian traditions’ popular advocates – such as D.T. Suzuki, Walpola Rahula, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – were widely accepted as accurate portrayals of those traditions.

After Said, all that changed. Continue reading →

Academia’s details

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Economics, French Tradition, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Work

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

academia, Confucius, David D. Hall, generations, Harvard University, Jacques Derrida, Ken Wilber, postmodernism, technology, Thomas Aquinas

A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular historical details in individual places rather than larger issues that characterized or crossed traditions. I responded that the competitive job market and publish-or-perish tenure system require that people take an ever narrower focus, in order to carve out a niche for themselves. Hall replied, “Er, well, yes, that’s the cynical explanation.”

And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas? Continue reading →

Where Marx was right, and wrong

23 Sunday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Family, German Tradition, Hope, Social Science, Work

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Bart D. Ehrman, Friedrich Engels, gender, generations, Jayant Lele, Jesus, Karl Marx

I grew up exposed to a great deal of Marxist thought, and thought I had mostly left it behind. But in the past year or so I’ve been at something of a crossroads, reconsidering my work life as I teeter between academic and non-academic work, and I have repeatedly returned to one insight of Marx’s that now strikes me as completely true: the theory of alienation. The work we do for pay is not our own. It is never our own, by definition; it is the work we do for someone else (whether employer or customer) and it is done on that someone else’s terms.

It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. Continue reading →

Technology is not a category

10 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Work

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

academia, conferences, Elaine Garofoli, generations, Jorge Luis Borges, NERCOMP, technology

Teaching and learning in the humanities, including philosophy, are changing rapidly as technology advances; that’s pretty much a truism when every faculty member has an email address. Now, general discussions of technology often begin with the point that pretty much every object in our lives is a technology: the pencil, the staircase, the chair. (And similarly, books are information technology.) But this is usually just said to get the point out of the way before they get to Web 2.0 and cloud computing and all the fancy new stuff people are excited about. But the most important thing I realized at this week’s NERCOMP conference is that the point has really significant implications for the way we think about technology in the humanities and academia, and about generational differences more generally.

At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?

Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. Continue reading →

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