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

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Max Weber

Power in anarchism and project management

17 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Leadership, Politics, Social Science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Graeber, David Wengrow, Gary Gemmill, Hans Thamhain, Max Weber, Project Management Institute

In everyday communities and institutions – families, universities, businesses, clubs – we cannot help but engage in politics, in the sense of influencing or making collective decisions. I think political philosophy does better when it turns its attention to those communities and institutions smaller than the state, where most of our political actions take place: political philosophy should be a philosophy not just of the state but of office politics, of academic politics.

In that regard, I’ve noticed an interesting commonality between two works whose authors likely wouldn’t see themselves as having anything in common: Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist anthropology The Dawn of Everything, and the standards set out by the Project Management Institute. Graeber and Wengrow look at a wide range of anthropological and archaeological sources on how humans organize their societies; the Project Management Institute examines how an individual (a project manager) can get a group of people to succeed at a collective institutional goal.

To the former (one of whom is the author of Bullshit Jobs), the latter probably looks like a deadening or sinister tool of The Man. To the latter, the former likely looks like a juvenile whining that refuses to sully its hands with getting anything done. Yet both concern themselves with the questions of how non-state institutions can be run: the latter in the day-to-day practice of making those institutions’ projects succeed, the former in imagining the functioning of a world without a state. And so both wind up exploring one core and inescapable concept: power.

Continue reading →

Interview, part 2

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Interview, part 2

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Anagarika Dharmapala, Donald S. Lopez Jr., G.W.F. Hegel, Henry Steel Olcott, interview, intimacy/integrity, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Rammohun Roy, skholiast (blogger), Swami Vivekānanda, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis

The second half of Skholiast‘s interview with me is now available, for anyone interested.

Searching for ascent and descent (1)

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Flourishing, Metaphilosophy, South Asia

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Max Weber, Thomas P. Kasulis

A couple years ago on this blog, after exploring a number of ways of classifying world philosophical traditions cross-culturally, I found the most robust and satisfying to be a 2×2 grid: we may classify philosophies as intimacy or integrity, and we may classify them as ascent or descent. (Methodologically, I find it best to treat each of these four as an ideal type.)

What I didn’t do was spell out with much care what each of these terms really meant. Last fall I tried to articulate more precisely what I meant by intimacy and integrity, and am currently in the process of writing an article on the topic. But what about ascent and descent? Continue reading →

Ideal types in philosophy

27 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Social Science

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, Max Weber

When I use concepts like intimacy and integrity and ascent and descent on this blog, I very often refer to them as ideal types. So far I have explained what that means mostly in passing, and it’s time to provide a bit more detail.

Credit for the concept of an ideal type must go to Max Weber, the early twentieth-century German historian who is now retroactively regarded as one of the founders of sociology. Weber identifies the concept in his long and thoughtful piece “‘Objectivity’ in social science and social policy”; its English translation (by Edward Shils and Henry Finch) is easily found in the short collection The Methodology of the Social Sciences, available free online. Weber’s point is to argue for theoretical constructs that – much like Platonic forms – allow us to understand empirical reality even if they are never instantiated in that reality. He takes as an example the abstract mathematical constructs that characterize twentieth-century economic theory: Continue reading →

Indian intimacy

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Family, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Rites, Social Science

≈ Comments Off on Indian intimacy

Tags

ascent/descent, autobiography, Chad Hansen, intimacy/integrity, Joel Kotkin, Max Weber, Mozi, puruṣārthas, Thomas P. Kasulis

I’m back from a trip to see my family in India, and have an Indian wedding ceremony. It was wonderful to see everyone there, and it also got me thinking.

When I wrote recently about my Indian background, I put some emphasis on how having an Indian background could be misleading in trying to understand Indian philosophy. It had taken me longer to see that Indian philosophy has an integrity orientation because after living in modern India, I’d spent a long time thinking of India as having an intimacy orientation.

But in my excitement over that realization, I think I’d forgotten that I’d held an intimacy view of India for a reason. Continue reading →

Chinese intimacy and Indian ascent

11 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in East Asia, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Social Science, South Asia

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Max Weber, modernity, Parimal Patil, skholiast (blogger), Thomas P. Kasulis

I have repeatedly returned to the categories of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity, to classify philosophies; and I have found that the two intersect in important ways. When I discussed that intersection the first time, skholiast asked the important question: “What is the itch in us to make such schematisms?” What is the purpose of trying to classify philosophies in this way?

My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them. Continue reading →

Logic and truth as normative

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Social Science, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Max Weber, Stanley Rosen, theodicy

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seventh chapter in a splendid book called The Ancients and the Moderns, by a fascinating Boston University professor named Stanley Rosen. I read the book over two years ago, but the ideas of this chapter have since continued to percolate in my brain.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. Continue reading →

Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together

26 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Confucianism, Epics, Family, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Pleasure, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Social Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Augustine, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Max Weber, Moses Maimonides, Mozi, Plato, Prabhupada, puruṣārthas, Stephen Walker, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

I’ve been thinking further about what kind of categories one may best use to classify philosophies and their associated ways of life. I do think my earlier classification of three basic ways of life hits on something quite important; but I also think Stephen Walker’s criticisms of that scheme (addressed here) are on point. Among those who reject traditional ways of life and knowing on non-ascetic grounds, there is more going on than the pleasure-seeking I identify with the concept of “libertinism.” That’s why I toyed in the same post with expanding the conception based on the Sanskrit puruṣārthas, the “four aims” of worldly success, pleasure, traditional duty and liberation. But as I mused at the bottom of that post, the puruṣārtha scheme loses the far-reaching nature of the three-ways-of-life comparison. The differences between asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism are not only differences in ways of living; they reach down to epistemology and ontology, theoretical ways of understanding the world. When the “libertine” mode of living and thinking is formally subdivided into artha and kāma, these two supposedly separate modes no longer look all that distinct from one another.

Instead, I now turn back to a different categorization I didn’t have time to mention in the puruṣārtha post: the intersecting axes of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity. These two ways of classifying philosophies seem to me to do more justice to East Asian thought, while still going “all the way down”: extending from theoretical foundations all the way up to life as lived. Continue reading →

The four puruṣārthas across cultures

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Consciousness, Daoism, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Pleasure, Social Science

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Augustine, Confucius, Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, Mahābhārata, Max Weber, Mozi, Plato, puruṣārthas, Stephen Walker, utilitarianism

In private messages, Stephen Walker recently came back to points he’d made before about the three basic ways of life I had identified before (asceticism, traditionalism and libertinism). He noted, correctly I think, that that scheme as it stands is Indo-Eurocentric; many Chinese thinkers (especially pre-Buddhist ones) do not fit it comfortably.

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. Continue reading →

Why I am not a right-winger

18 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Patient Endurance, Politics, Self-Discipline, Social Science, Virtue, Work

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Bertrand Russell, conservatism, George W. Bush, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Rod Dreher, United States, William Vallicella

In grad school it often struck me that most of my intellectual partnerships were with self-professed conservative grad students, despite my own left-wing politics. Similarly, some of the most interesting blogs I’ve found have been conservative or right-wing.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but I came to see it quite clearly: for most left-wingers, the good is fundamentally political. The place to focus our efforts, in changing the way that things and people are, is on the inequalities, oppressions and pollutions of the state and the corporations and wealth it regulates. Conservatives, at least social conservatives, often do not think this way. Our big problems are with ourselves. It matters that people become better, more virtuous; even when they do obsess about politics, it is as an attempt to make people better in some sense. An interesting example is Rod Dreher, one of the conservative bloggers I linked to in the earlier post: while his blog was originally called “Crunchy Con” (as in “conservative”), it later just took on his name, and now is called Macroculture – the emphasis has been steadily less on politics and more on culture, and the blog has gotten steadily more interesting (though less popular) as it went. This is an attitude I tend to be largely in agreement with. My deepest debt to Buddhism is that it saved me from politics, made me focus on problems with myself and not with the world.

The question I’ve then come to ask myself is: why haven’t I become conservative myself? Continue reading →

← Older posts

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

  • Paul D. Van Pelt on You can’t just wish detransition away
  • Amod Lele on You can’t just wish detransition away
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on You can’t just wish detransition away
  • Nathan on Why philosophy must cross boundaries
  • Marc Terrettaz on On “just asking questions” as a trans philosopher

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada 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 mystical experience nondualism Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (15)
  • Applied Phil (346)
    • Death (42)
    • Family (50)
    • Food (19)
    • Friends (18)
    • Health (29)
    • Place (32)
    • Play (16)
    • Politics (212)
    • Sex (21)
    • Work (45)
  • Asian Thought (441)
    • Buddhism (317)
      • Early and Theravāda (133)
      • Mahāyāna (131)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (97)
      • Confucianism (60)
      • Daoism (21)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (142)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (42)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (15)
      • Vedānta (41)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (7)
  • Method (268)
    • M.T.S.R. (150)
    • Metaphilosophy (175)
  • Practical Philosophy (409)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (50)
    • Emotion (179)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (30)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (13)
      • Grief (7)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (96)
    • Foundations of Ethics (120)
    • Karma (44)
    • Morality (76)
    • Virtue (172)
      • Courage (6)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (11)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (25)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (36)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (137)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (43)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (378)
    • Consciousness (19)
    • Deity (73)
    • Epistemology (134)
      • Certainty and Doubt (17)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (30)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (32)
    • Metaphysics (109)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (72)
    • Supernatural (52)
    • Truth (60)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (488)
    • Analytic Tradition (100)
    • Christianity (158)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Eastern Orthodoxy (3)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (59)
    • French Tradition (50)
    • German Tradition (92)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (121)
      • 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 (98)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (175)
      • Economics (42)
      • Psychology (72)

Recent Posts

  • You can’t just wish detransition away
  • On “just asking questions” as a trans philosopher
  • Why philosophy must cross boundaries
  • Philosophy as psychedelic practice
  • After mystical experiences

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.