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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jim Wilton

The material conditions of qualitative individualism

27 Sunday Jan 2019

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

20th century, Anthony Woodiwiss, autobiography, Charles Taylor, Existential Comics, generations, Jayant Lele, Jim Wilton, Karl Marx, modernity, qualitative individualism, 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 →

Naturalizing Śāntideva’s eudaimonism

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Stoicism, Supernatural

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Barbra Clayton, Charles Goodman, hell, Jan Westerhoff, Jim Wilton, Martha Nussbaum, rebirth, Śāntideva, suicide, Thich Quang Duc

My disagreements with Charles Goodman continue with his contribution to Jake Davis’s thought-provoking volume A Mirror Is For Reflection. (I’ve previously written about Jan Westerhoff’s chapter in the same book.) Just like Westerhoff, Charles is exploring the important question of naturalizing karma. He does so with particular reference to Śāntideva. He opens with a beautiful reading of Śikṣā Samuccaya chapter 4’s graphic descriptions of the punishments a wrongdoer will face in the hells, reading them in terms of the actions’ psychological effects on the wrongdoer.

The problem with this reading is that it doesn’t go far enough. Continue reading →

Farewell to “Yavanayāna”

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anagarika Dharmapala, authenticity, B.R. Ambedkar, David McMahan, Engaged Buddhism, identity, Jim Wilton, modernism, modernity, race, Richard K. Payne, Sulak Sivaraksa, Tibet

Late last year I was delighted to see a post from Richard Payne retracting his earlier post on “White Buddhism”, motivated at least in part by my critique. It is all too rare to see a human being change his or her mind, especially on politically charged issues where passions run high and it is all too easy to develop attachment to views. I commend and thank Payne for his thoughtful retraction. On my end, he has provoked me to make a retraction of my own. Continue reading →

Buddhist human nature from India to China

22 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, East Asia, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, South Asia

≈ 14 Comments

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Augustine, Bryan Van Norden, Elisa Freschi, Gretchen Rubin, Jason Clower, Jim Wilton, Mencius, Mou Zongsan, Shunryū Suzuki, Zhao Qi, Zhu Xi

The translation of a small passage can turn out to tell us a great deal. Consider section 4B12 of the Mencius. Mencius says in this section that the great man is one who retains, or does not lose, chizi zhi xin 赤子之心. This Chinese phrase translates literally as something like “heart/mind of baby.” Most translators have followed the interpretation of the great Neo-Confucian synthesizer Zhu Xi, which dovetails smoothly with the optimistic view of human nature generally attributed to Mencius: in D.C. Lau’s translation, “A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.” We are born naturally good as babies, and become bad only if something intervenes to impede our natural development. (Contrast Augustine in the first chapter of the Confessions, who observes babies as creatures of desire and envy.)

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.'” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. Continue reading →

On celebrating the death of an enemy

08 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Compassion, Death, Friends, Gentleness, Happiness, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

≈ 62 Comments

Tags

George W. Bush, Harvard University, Jim Wilton, Linton Weeks, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nazism, Osama bin Laden, Pamela Gerloff, S.N. Goenka, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, United States, war

The momentous yet mixed results of this week’s Canadian election were overshadowed on the global scene by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Though the first event riveted me more, the second has more philosophical significance – or rather, not the event itself, but the reaction to it.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy? Continue reading →

Sudden liberation in pessimism

01 Sunday May 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, East Asia, Epicureanism, External Goods, Free Will, Happiness, Hope, Humility, Politics, Psychology, South Asia, Stoicism, Supernatural, Virtue

≈ 73 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Canada, Chan/Zen 禪, James Maas, Jim Wilton, John Rawls, Karl Marx, Phineas Gage

Judging by the comments, many readers found my diagnosis-prognosis post to be dark and pessimistic. Going back to the post, it’s not hard to see why. I endorse there the dark view of our existing human problems shared by Augustine, Marx and the Pali suttas; and yet I don’t think any of their solutions work. The essay effectively ends with a rejection of hope. The logical conclusion to draw from the essay might seem to be “life sucks.”

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Continue reading →

Can collectivities be virtuous?

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, Virtue

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Benjamin C. Kinney, Carl Sagan, Jabali108 (commenter), Jim Wilton, justice, law, Margaret Thatcher, religion, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath

There’s been a great discussion going on in the comments to last week’s post on humility and science. This week I’m going to focus on only one of the themes mentioned, which takes us in a different direction from that post but is interesting in its own right.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble? Continue reading →

Is there certainty beyond logic?

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Logic, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Reading and Recitation, Truth

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

intimacy/integrity, Jim Wilton, mystical experience, Plato, Thomas P. Kasulis

Responding to my post on doubt, Jim Wilton agreed that “truth established through thought and logic is always subject to doubt.” But he suggested that not all knowledge or truth is a product of logic – and, he claimed, perhaps this non-logical knowledge can be certain, indubitable.

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Continue reading →

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