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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Mozi

Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Supernatural

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Charles Goodman, consequentialism, Evan Thompson, Mozi, Peter Singer, Princeton University, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

Lele handoutDownload
Goodman handoutDownload

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

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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 →

The classical opposition

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Confucianism, East Asia, Metaphilosophy, Sophists, South Asia

≈ 15 Comments

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ascent/descent, Chad Hansen, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, Jayarāśi, Mencius, Mozi, Plato

In each of the three great classical traditions of philosophy – the West, South Asia and East Asia (or Greece, India and China) – there appears early on a school of thought that is taken as that tradition’s target of attack. This school dies out after a few hundred years or so, so that in modern times we know them above all as the object of the mainstream tradition’s attacks. And yet, to the extent that we can date the philosophy in this period, the philosophical reflection arising before this school tends to be far less sophisticated than that coming after.

The three schools in question are the Sophists in Greece, the Cārvāka or Lokāyata in India, and the Mohists in China. They are of crucial importance to any cross-cultural philosopher, because by running against the grain of the later tradition they break most of our stereotypes about that culture’s philosophy as a whole. In most general attempts to characterize the nature of Indian philosophy, for example, the words “except the Cārvākas” come up a lot. Continue reading →

Perennial questions?

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in East Asia, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth, Vedānta

≈ 12 Comments

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Aristotle, ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Mozi, perennialism, Plato, Śaṅkara, skholiast (blogger), Thomas P. Kasulis

On my recent post about the ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity classifications in philosophy, skholiast asks an important question: “what is the itch in us to make such schematisms?” What is the point of trying to classify philosophies this way? Clearly many philosophers do attempt to so classify them – but is that anything more than the kind of obsessive interest that characterizes Asperger’s syndrome?

I thought of one important answer to this question because of some friends who are interested in Frithjof Schuon and his fellows in the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. The members of this school believed, and continue to believe, in a philosophia perennis, a kind of philosophical wisdom that persists across cultures throughout the ages. Central to this perennial philosophy is the idea of an ultimate Reality distinguishable from the everyday world we perceive with our senses – an ultimate One which Plato, Śaṅkara, and Zhu Xi might all arguably be said to have found, more or less entirely independently of one another. The perennialists tend to believe that the reason so many came to this conclusion in so many places is because it was the truth – it was really there, to be observed or deduced by any human being anywhere if they cared to take a serious look.

As for me, one reason I find classification of philosophies so important is that I’m only willing to meet the perennialists halfway. 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

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ascent/descent, Augustine, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Maimonides, Martha Nussbaum, Max Weber, 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 →

The three basic ways of death

30 Sunday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Death, East Asia, Family, German Tradition, Judaism, Psychology, Self, Social Science, Supernatural, Vedānta

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Advaita Vedānta, Hebrew Bible, Lucretius, Max Weber, Mozi, nondualism, Plato, rebirth, Śaṅkara, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Walker

Few phenomena lead people to philosophy (as the love of or search for wisdom, not necessarily as an academic discipline) like the fact of our own deaths. Most of the things we might seek in life – especially happiness – we will cease to have when we die, or so it seems. This fact is sobering; our choice is to be aware of it (and therefore be in some sense philosophical) or to be caught unawares, die unprepared and miserable. For that reason Plato said that philosophy is the practice of death; today, we don’t have enough of a culture of death, enough to prepare us for this fact.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Continue reading →

The three basic ways of life

20 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

academia, Aristippus, Augustine, autobiography, Bhagavad Gītā, Confucius, David Hume, dharmaśāstra, Epicurus, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, intimacy/integrity, Jeremy Bentham, Mozi, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, utilitarianism, Yoga Sūtras

One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading →

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