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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: passive aggression

Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, French Tradition, Humility, Indigenous American Thought, Mahāyāna, Neoplatonism, Patient Endurance

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Blaise Pascal, Inuit, Jean Briggs, Martha Nussbaum, narcissism, passive aggression, Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, Śāntideva

In his excellent little book on Plotinus, Pierre Hadot quotes a lovely maxim of Blaise Pascal‘s, of which I was not previously aware: qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Roughly: whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast. The full quote from Pascal’s Pensées is: L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and the problem is that whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast.

The maxim is a good word of caution for everyone, but particularly when considering those traditions I have described as ascent: the ones that aim to transcend our particular human condition for a higher and better state of being. Continue reading →

The bodhisattva complex

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

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chastened intellectualism, Ken Wilber, passive aggression, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra

There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?

When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading →

The trouble with nice

24 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Courage, Fear, French Tradition, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Social Science

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

André Comte-Sponville, Ayse (commenter), Canada, Dr. Phil, gender, Harvey Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, niceness, Norman Lear, passive aggression, Śāntideva

When asked what makes Canadians different from Americans, many Canadians will respond that Canadians are nicer. I think that this characterization is (as generalizations go) entirely accurate. I’m just not so sure whether it’s a good thing.

Niceness, in my books, is not necessarily a virtue like kindness or gentleness, though it’s also not necessarily a flaw like timidity. Like extraversion, it is a personality trait with its benefits and flaws; the latter tend to receive less attention. I’m not just referring to the view that “nice guys finish last”; one might argue that that’s part of the point of niceness, to be self-sacrificing or altruistic so that others may do better. But even if one would argue that that’s a good thing, there are ways that niceness can hurt others as well as the nice themselves.

Consider the distinction between niceness and gentleness – or more concretely, between the nice guy and the gentleman. Continue reading →

Reconsidering traditional masculinity

27 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Emotion, Greek and Roman Tradition, Patient Endurance, Stoicism

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

gender, Harvey Mansfield, Nicholas Thorne, passive aggression, Slash

I’d like to push a bit further on the theme of the previous post, because I think it points to some important objections people have to Buddhism – and related philosophies.

A long time ago, I was talking to my friend Nic Thorne, a classicist, about Buddhism and virtue. I was explaining the characteristically Buddhist virtue of k??nti or patient endurance – taking unpleasant events with peace and equanimity. He said: “stoicism.”

The word just floored me. At that point I’d never studied the Stoics, and never imagined that there could be a connection between Buddhism and stoicism – whether with a small or big S. I associated the term “stoicism” with icons of old-fashioned masculinity, which seemed at the time almost comical: the British stiff upper lip, John Wayne. Men who refused to display emotion. I assumed such a posture was repression, leading to passive aggression – or perhaps to self-destruction. (Slash‘s autobiography is an interesting case study of a man who, unwilling to talk about or express his worries, instead turns to heroin for a release.)

But through my appreciation for Buddhism, I came to a new appreciation of that traditional masculinity as well. There’s something to the idea that one should control one’s emotions – though, again, this is very different from repressing them. It’s good to be the kind of person who doesn’t get angry – even though it’s terrible to be the kind of person who gets angry inside and represses it outside.

I do think, though, that the association of small-s stoicism with masculinity is misguided. Harvey Mansfield tried to defend it in his book on manliness, and in a talk he gave on the subject at Harvard; but I couldn’t discern a single reason in his talk why this manliness should be a virtue limited to biological males. I asked him why it wouldn’t be a virtue for women too, and he said “well, that’s the gender-neutral society I’m attacking,” but nothing in his reply seemed at all persuasive in claiming there was anything wrong with such a society. I appreciated his attempt to revive the virtues associated with masculinity, but his attempt to maintain a gender link did those virtues no favours.

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite of Mansfield’s position is true. Men should be the ones trying to express their repressed emotions, since they’re so conditioned to repress them – that’s how we avoid ending up in Slash’s position. It’s women, conditioned to be emotional, who most need a healthy dose of Buddhist patient endurance.

Repressing and reducing anger

25 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Friedrich Nietzsche, passive aggression, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud

What first drew me to Śāntideva was his critique of anger. I had students read him for a tutorial course on comparative ethics, and one student was shocked by his almost total criticism of anger as an emotion. “What about righteous anger?” she asked. I replied: “according to this text, I don’t think there’s any such thing as righteous anger.” The more I thought about this teaching afterward, the more profound it seemed: the number of times in my life I’d been glad I got angry, I could count on the fingers of one hand.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?
Continue reading →

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