Tag Archives: Jesus

Certainty requires omniscience

08 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Human Nature, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Truth

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Under what circumstances can one be absolutely certain of anything? I had intended my previous post to be on that question, but the preliminary inquiries to it were significant enough that I thought they deserved their own post. I end that post, like the earlier “Certain knowledge” post, on a note of uncertainty; I don’t discuss any circumstances under which certainty is possible. So is it possible at all?

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. Continue reading →

The universalism of multiple Buddhas

17 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Islam, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism, Truth

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Alasdair MacIntyre, especially in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, has frequently tried to make the case that adequate moral inquiry needs to be embedded within a tradition. In the book he makes the case by arguing that Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris shows a fuller and more adequate understanding of the attempts to get beyond tradition (Nietzsche’s genealogy and the Ninth Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica) than they show of themselves or each other. I’m not going to address the details of his case here. But I want to note one point that MacIntyre frequently seems to shy away from: for Leo XIII and the Catholic tradition that precedes him, it is not the case that adequate moral inquiry must take place within a tradition. Rather, it must take place within this tradition, the universal and apostolic Catholic Church. The inquiries of the Confucians or Muslims are not significantly better, in this respect, than those of deracinated cosmopolitans like the Encyclopedists or Nietzsche.

In this, MacIntyre skirts around on an idea that endures through the history of the Abrahamic traditions: that the ultimate truth is tied to one single historical event, time, place and/or people. It begins with the idea recorded in the Book of Exodus that the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews are God’s chosen people, and continues with the idea that the single human person Jesus of Nazareth was the only begotten human son of God. The Qur’an, too, is a single set of revelations made in a small geographic area to one human person, not adequately translatable (so the claim goes) into a language other than the original, which is better than any other revelation that has been or will be made.

It is in this context that I am intrigued by the Buddhist claim that there are multiple buddhas. Continue reading →

Monotheists’ humility

04 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Early Factions, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Jainism, Judaism, Mu'tazila, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Sufism, Truth, Vedānta

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I’ve been thinking some more about the idea of encounter, which I blogged about in these posts and which I take to be central to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas: the idea that we can never encompass the wholeness of truth, it must remain irreducibly other to us. I’m wondering whether the basic idea animating encounter philosophies is the virtue of humility – a virtue, I think, in both epistemological and ethical contexts. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw pride as a virtue, modesty as its lack – and while I do think humility is a virtue myself, I would remain an Aristotelian in seeing humility, like justice, as a mean. It is far too easy to be too humble in action, to be servile and self-abnegating – an excess which, I’ve suggested before, hurts women’s struggle for equality. And with respect to knowledge, too little humility can lead us to an inappropriate feeling of certainty; but realizing that lack of certainty can spur us to too much humility, leading us into a self-contradictory denial of truth and knowledge.

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Continue reading →

Wilber’s ātmanism vs. the saints’ encounter

02 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Christianity, French Tradition, Humility, Metaphysics, South Asia, Sufism, Vedānta

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Skholiast recently referred in his blog to a recent review he wrote of Ken Wilber‘s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. To review this book is in a sense to review Wilber’s work as a whole, for it remains (by Wilber’s own account) the most comprehensive exposition of Wilber’s ideas – although Wilber has written considerably more since this book, some of it in response to critics. Skholiast rightfully applauds one of Wilber’s most important ideas, the pre-trans fallacy – the point that moving beyond something in conventional experience (such as rationality and the ego) is very different from not properly entering it in the first place.

Skholiast makes two criticisms of Wilber, which are closely related to each other, and which reflect his interest in 20th-century “continental” thinkers, especially Emmanuel Lévinas. The second criticism is probably the more fundamental: Wilber, according to Skholiast, is too much of an “ātmanist,” too beholden to nondualist philosophies (of which Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta is the prime example). He doesn’t leave room for the priority of Lévinas’s philosophy, namely encounter with the other.

But while the immediate ancestors of Skholiast’s view may be in the likes of Lévinas, he is right to claim an older pedigree for it. For Vedāntic monism indeed makes an uncomfortable fit with Western monotheisms, in which to say “I am God” is a heresy.

Skholiast reminds me a little here of the Indian debate over Sufi mystical experiences. Continue reading →

Where Marx was right, and wrong

23 Sunday May 2010

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

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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 →

Newly authentic scriptures

09 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in Aesthetics, Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Food, German Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Social Science, Truth

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In my introductory religion class at Stonehill I was teaching about the Marcionite Christians, followers of the second-century Christian Marcion of Sinope, who wished to see a Christianity without any Jewish influence. This posed rather a tricky problem for Marcion, seeing as Jesus was born Jewish and seemed to claim the lineage of the Jewish prophets. That Jesus viewed himself as Jewish is not only the conclusion of modern biblical scholarship; it seems to have been the view present in the scriptures that Marcion himself encountered. Marcion, it seems, took the Gospel of Luke as known to him and edited out everything that looked Jewish.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” Continue reading →

Paradoxes of hedonism

11 Sunday Apr 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Despair, External Goods, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Pleasure, Psychology, Self, Truth

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By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) Continue reading →

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.

Gandhi as lord, liar or lunatic

10 Wednesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism

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Cross-cultural philosophers often wish to treat Jesus of Nazareth as a great philosopher, whose life and thought we can learn from – but one who is fully human, no more divine than the rest of us.

C.S. Lewis hated this move, thought it was intellectually sloppy. Continue reading →