Tag Archives: nondualism

Schopenhauer and the tat tvam asi ethic

01 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Self, Vedānta

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In studying Indian philosophy today one is often confronted with a question that can be surprisingly tricky: what counts as Indian philosophy, anyway? Sometimes what we think of as ancient Indian thought might be something quite different.

Perhaps the boldest statement of this point was the 1962 article “Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” by the late German Indologist Paul Hacker (now translated in a collection of Hacker’s writings by Hacker’s student Wilhelm Halbfass). Hacker is reacting against what was until that point a commonplace in the presentation of Indian philosophy – an interpretation presented as uncomplicated fact, for example, in Hajime Nakamura’s A Comparative History of Ideas – which turns out to have a far more modern provenance.

The commonplace in question is what Hacker calls the tat tvam asi ethic, an idea found above all in the works of Swami Vivekānanda. This ethic is Vivekānanda’s influential attempt to use Advaita Vedānta to support an altruistically engaged politics, closely parallel to what would come to be called Engaged Buddhism; it would later be picked up enthusiastically by other modern Hindu thinkers like Radhakrishnan. 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 →

Nishida’s encounter

20 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in East Asia, French Tradition, Humility, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Self, Sufism

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I’m currently at the 2010 SACP conference in Asilomar. I had the good fortune to be on a panel about emptiness with Bret Davis, who was presenting on the Kyoto School philosophy, especially Nishida Kitarō. Davis’s discussion of Nishida and Ueda pushed me to think further about the idea of irreducible encounter, which I’d recently examined in posting about Skholiast and Ken Wilber.

I’ll admit often feeling a certain impatience with philosophers of encounter like Lévinas (which probably makes me what Skholiast called an “ātmanist”). It has never been clear to me why, exactly, we’re supposed to be so limitlessly bound by “the Other” (usually with the capital letters). Lévinas’s philosophy strikes me as ruthlessly Abrahamic: at its core is a bowing and scraping before God, drastically opposed to any embrace of the divine with ourselves, parallel to Sirhindī‘s insistence on God’s distance from his creation. As I noted in the comments to that post, Sirhindī advocated not merely intolerance to, but subjugation of, indigenous Indian traditions. Likewise Davis, in our conversation after his talk, noted that Lévinas uses the term “pagan” in an extraordinarily negative sense; his Abrahamism reminds me of Tertullian asking rhetorically “What has Athens do to with Jerusalem?” And while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of humility expressed in a humanist view, I’m even more uncomfortable with trusting an Abrahamic god.

Davis’s talk, however, helped me put many of these ideas in perspective. Nishida’s thought, it turns out, is close to Lévinas’s in a number of ways, though far removed from Abrahamic traditions. (Intriguingly, Nishida even wrote a book entitled I and Thou, while apparently entirely unaware of Buber‘s work of the same title.) Nishida tells us that “there is no universal that would subsume I and thou,” for that would deny the individuality and otherness of the two terms. The other must remain other. Nishida has a Zen take on the matter rather than an Abrahamic one: there must be something shared between the self and the other or no encounter can take place; but one must speak of this shared universal as emptying itself out, a “None” rather than a “One.”

But why should we think this way? A particularly evocative quote in Davis’s talk helped give me a clue in explanation: “I am truly myself by way of not being myself; I live by dying.” Now it seems like we are dealing with the paradoxes of hedonism: when all we seek is our own happiness, we don’t get it. We are most fulfilled when we live for something bigger than ourselves; a life centred entirely on the self will fail even on its own terms. Perhaps I’m getting more sympathetic to this sort of view as I approach marriage – realizing the fulfillment in a life choice that requires a certain self-overcoming, requires you to live for someone else as they live for you.

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 →

The three basic ways of death

30 Sunday May 2010

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

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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 →

Advaita theodicy and the goodness of existence

06 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta

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An anonymous friend recently suggested an intriguing equivalence to me: the problem of ignorance in Advaita Vedānta is effectively an Indian form of theodicy.

Let’s back up a bit for those who aren’t familiar with Advaita Vedānta (or theodicy). Vedānta is philosophy based on the “end of the Vedas,” the Upaniṣads – sacred Indian texts often considered “Hindu” (although there are a lot of problems with that term). The Sanskrit advaita means “non-dual”; Advaita Vedānta, associated above all with the philosophical teacher Śaṅkara, is the kind of Vedānta that says everything is really one, and not two (or more). Especially, there is no duality between subject and object. The universe is all one, and each of us ultimately is that one. We seem to perceive multiplicity in the world, but only because of our ignorance. Multiplicity is an illusion; really, all is one. This one is expressed with the word sat, meaning existence, truth, even goodness.

But the difficult question for an Advaitin to answer is: where does that ignorance come from? Continue reading →