• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In praise of the present moment

19 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Andy Puddicombe, autobiography, Brook Ziporyn, drugs, Four Noble Truths, Headspace, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Dunne, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Śāntideva, Tiantai 天台, Zhiyi

One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.

That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.

Continue reading →

The birth of qualitative individualism

11 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Politics, Self

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Charles Taylor, expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, modernity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Wilhelm von Humboldt

What is remarkable about the ideal of qualitative individualism is that it is so pervasive yet so rarely thought about in depth. To get a bit more of that depth, I would like to examine next the question of where it comes from.

The idea is modern, I think, though like so many modern ideas it has premodern antecedents. A while ago I breezed a little too easily over the differences between qualitative individualism and Aristotle. I said:

Aristotle – not exactly a great friend of modern liberal freedom – thinks of the best politics in terms of allowing each person to fulfill a highest end or telos, all being the best they can be. Some thinkers would consider this teleology a higher and truer kind of freedom than choice alone. But it seems to me that the freedom of choice is a vital part of the freedom to be what you are. Who would know what you’re meant to be better than you yourself?

I missed something there. If it’s so clear that you’re the person who knows best what you’re meant to be, then why would Aristotle have been “not exactly a great friend” of the political freedom of choice lionized by qualitative individualists today? Continue reading →

The good life, present and future

03 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Chan/Zen 禪, consequentialism, Epicurus, Four Noble Truths, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, natural environment, Pali suttas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), T.R. (Thill) Raghunath

Every human life ends in death. A long time ago I noted that we often forget this fact; and we shouldn’t. But granted that we acknowledge that we are all going to die, just how significant is the fact of our deaths? A little while ago I treated it as a significant problem, whether for an egoist or for one seeking the good in politics: whatever we achieve comes tumbling down in the end.

There’s a strong philosophical allure to consequentialism, the view that the best actions are those that produced the best consequences (of whatever sort). But a problem with consequentialism is that consequences, by definition, happen in the future – and eventually there will be no future. Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Where race and gender overrode everything
  • Polemarchus on Where race and gender overrode everything
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on Where race and gender overrode everything

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity music mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (14)
  • Applied Phil (342)
    • Death (42)
    • Family (50)
    • Food (19)
    • Friends (18)
    • Health (28)
    • Place (31)
    • Play (16)
    • Politics (209)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (44)
  • Asian Thought (438)
    • Buddhism (315)
      • Early and Theravāda (133)
      • Mahāyāna (129)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (95)
      • Confucianism (59)
      • Daoism (19)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (140)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (42)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (15)
      • Vedānta (39)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (7)
  • Method (262)
    • M.T.S.R. (148)
    • Metaphilosophy (170)
  • Practical Philosophy (405)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (50)
    • Emotion (178)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (30)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (12)
      • Grief (7)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (96)
    • Foundations of Ethics (119)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (75)
    • Virtue (170)
      • Courage (6)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (11)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (24)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (35)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (135)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (41)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (374)
    • Consciousness (19)
    • Deity (73)
    • Epistemology (131)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (29)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (32)
    • Metaphysics (107)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (71)
    • Supernatural (52)
    • Truth (60)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (480)
    • Analytic Tradition (97)
    • Christianity (155)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Eastern Orthodoxy (2)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (56)
    • French Tradition (49)
    • German Tradition (90)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (119)
      • Epicureanism (25)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (22)
    • Islam (41)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (10)
    • Judaism (35)
    • Natural Science (97)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (172)
      • Economics (42)
      • Psychology (70)

Recent Posts

  • Where race and gender overrode everything
  • What should we call the movement?
  • Yes, there is a movement
  • Why we sometimes need to deadname
  • Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2009-2024 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2009-2024 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.