14 Thursday May 2015
Posted in Buddhism, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Politics
≈ Comments Off on Interview, part 2
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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.
23 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in Deity, Jainism, Monasticism
≈ Comments Off on Intermediate ascents
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Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, atheism, chastened intellectualism, Gnosticism, ibn Sīnā, intimacy/integrity, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras
It seems to me that the concepts of ascent and descent allow relatively easily for intermediate positions between them, compromises that attempt at a synthesis. I suspect that in this respect they are different from the related binary of intimacy and integrity. Thomas Kasulis tries to argue that intimacy and integrity are incommensurable – one may experience elements of each at once, but it is difficult to take a moderate position between them, let alone to establish a synthesis. I am not convinced that Kasulis is right about this, but I do think that at least middle grounds on intimacy and integrity are harder to establish than on ascent and descent.
For relatively few seek the pure transcendence of the Yoga Sūtras, abiding in a pure universality outside the changing world. It is an uncompromising and drastic ascent that demands we act and be with a higher universal, leaving the particulars of the world behind us. Jain monks, following a similar path, deliberately renounce dependence to all particulars up to and including food – they often end their lives through sallekhanā or santhara, intentional slow starvation. Continue reading
11 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in Christianity, Deity, Flourishing, Politics
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ascent/descent, Augustine, conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Front Porch Republic, Gnosticism, Karl Marx, Mark T. Mitchell, Martha C. Nussbaum, modernism, Simone Weil, Thomas Aquinas
Last time I discussed the relationship between the concepts of Ascent and of transcendence. I think there’s more to say about the latter. Last time I had noted two forms of transcendence: an Ascent beyond the physical world, and the “transcendence by descent” endorsed by Martha Nussbaum in which one transcends one’s own limits. But I think there’s also a third type found between them, one which I’ve spoken of before in other terms.
A key feature of any kind of transcendence, it seems to me, is dissatisfaction: something appears wrong with that which one is trying to transcend. In Nussbaum’s transcendence-by-descent, one is dissatisfied with one’s own weaknesses and flaws. In an Ascent, one is in some sense dissatisfied with the whole world. But what if one is dissatisfied with the whole world in a way that motivates one not to step outside the world, but to change it? Continue reading
12 Sunday Feb 2012
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self
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Alan Gewirth, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Piaget, John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, Ken Wilber, Lawrence Kohlberg, modernism, modernity, Thomas Aquinas, Zhu Xi
While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.
This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading
04 Sunday Dec 2011
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academia, Confucius, David D. Hall, generations, Harvard University, Jacques Derrida, Ken Wilber, postmodernism, technology, Thomas Aquinas
A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular historical details in individual places rather than larger issues that characterized or crossed traditions. I responded that the competitive job market and publish-or-perish tenure system require that people take an ever narrower focus, in order to carve out a niche for themselves. Hall replied, “Er, well, yes, that’s the cynical explanation.”
And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas? Continue reading
27 Sunday Feb 2011
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Harvard University, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, Philippa Foot, Thomas Aquinas, trolley problem, virtue ethics
Suppose a trolley is hurtling down a track, on which are placed five innocent people with no chance to escape in time. You are standing beside a switch that will redirect the trolley onto a track where stands one innocent person, who also has no chance to escape. Should you flip the switch, and thereby kill one to save five?
Now suppose there is no track onto which the trolley can be redirected; the five innocents will be in its path no matter what happens. Instead of being beside a switch, you are standing on a bridge over the tracks, beside a very fat man looking down over the action. You can push the man over the bridge, knowing his enormous girth will stop the trolley’s movement before it hits the innocents. Should you push the man, and thereby kill one to save five?
Michael Sandel begins his famous course on Justice with this action scene, and it’s a great way to start such a course. This trolley problem, ingeniously introduced by Judith Jarvis Thomson and the late Philippa Foot, is a wonderful way to shock beginning students out of their ethical complacency. For nearly all people faced with this problem agree they would kill one to save five in the first situation but not the second. After hearing one case they think there’s an easy principle by which to decide the right action; after hearing the second, they are forced to admit that there isn’t. Continue reading
12 Sunday Sep 2010
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Aristotle, ascent/descent, Asperger's syndrome, Augustine, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, nonhuman animals, Oliver Sacks, Plato, Rāmānuja, Raphael, Śaṅkara, Temple Grandin, Thomas Aquinas
I’ve just been reading the popular neurologist Oliver Sacks‘s piece “An Anthropologist on Mars,” from the book of the same name. It’s a short biography of Temple Grandin, a woman whose life was recently made into a movie. Grandin, an animal researcher, has Asperger’s syndrome or “high-functioning autism”; she understands science, and animals, much better than she understands the social interactions of her fellow human beings.
People describing Grandin often reach first for words like “extraordinary,” “fascinating,” “remarkable.” These are not the words that come to my mind. I say this not because I find her accomplishments limited – they are major – but because I find her story very familiar. I don’t know if I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s myself; but I do know that Asperger’s is part of a spectrum, with full-blown autism on one end. At the other end, I think, one finds the behaviour of typical science-fiction geeks and absent-minded professors, in whose company I unquestionably fall.
The central features of Asperger’s syndrome are a difficulty with social cues and a narrowness of interest; one falls far outside the normal realms of human interest and interaction. (My interests are almost opposite Grandin’s, yet this makes me sympathize with her more. Where Grandin has been obsessed with animals since her youth, my mother recalls that I was the only child to be completely uninterested when a bunny rabbit was brought into our classroom.) The subtle interplay and social niceties that come so naturally to most people, must be learned deliberately and consciously, as one learns mathematics – and learning these is often far more difficult than learning math.
There are a number of philosophical implications that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome might have. In today’s post, I want to focus on its implications for the history of philosophy. Continue reading
01 Wednesday Sep 2010
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Advaita Vedānta, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Christine Korsgaard, law, obligation, Plato, Śaṅkara, theodicy, Thomas Aquinas
In my previous discussion of Christine Korsgaard’s prologue to The Sources of Normativity, I left out one significant feature of the story she tells of Western philosophy. This is the reason – related to the basic account of excellence of obligation – why Christianity proved philosophically more powerful than Greek thought.
On Korsgaard’s account of Greek metaphysics (à la Plato and Aristotle), goodness is a feature of reality, one more fundamental in a sense than the particular physical objects that appear before us. Perfect form is more real than imperfect matter. This is true whether, with Plato, those forms exist in a world apart from matter, or, with Aristotle, they exist within matter as its potential and telos.
But if that’s the case, Korsgaard notes, then the logical question is: why aren’t things perfect already? We normally think of theodicy – the problem of suffering and responses to it – as primarily a problem for Abrahamic traditions. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, it’s hard to see how there can be suffering in the world (though it’s less hard to see how there can be evil). But broaden the question a bit – make it “the problem of bad” – and it appears elsewhere too. For Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, in which reality is pure knowledge, it’s a conundrum to think how there can be so much ignorance.
And Korsgaard seems to provocatively suggest that the Christians were better equipped to handle the problem than the Greeks – connecting to her account of how an ethics of excellence was superseded by an ethics of obligation. Continue reading
28 Sunday Mar 2010
Posted in Deity, Faith, Grief, Karma, Mahāyāna, Prayer, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural
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12-step programs, AAR, atheism, Augustine, autobiography, David Hume, drugs, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Lucas Johnston, Mañjuśrī, nonhuman animals, religion, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Aquinas
My fiancée, who believes in God, once told me that God seems much too distant to pray to. Despite not having any Catholic background, when she feels like praying, she prays to saints. When I was in the running for a good tenure-track job in our area, she prayed to St. Thomas Aquinas, as the patron saint of academics and philosophers, that I would get it. Until that point I don’t think I’d even made the connection between the saints people pray to and actual historical people – I’d only thought of Thomas as a natural law theorist and systematic theologian.
Fast forward: a little while ago, things were a little rough in my home. My fiancée and I tried to adopt a big beautiful black dog, which turned out not to be the right pet for our situation. The dog found a very good home and we’ll be able to get another dog soon enough, but losing the dog was pretty rough on us, especially my fiancée. It didn’t help that it was late winter, when everything was dark and cold, without the novelty of snow’s first arrival or the joys of Christmas. The stress of wedding planning didn’t help either. I was intending to ease some of my fiancée’s distress by planning a surprise party for her approaching milestone birthday. Of course, while the planning was happening, I couldn’t tell her about the party to comfort her; and hiding the event from her was its own source of stress.
It was a hard thing to take. Even though I knew I was doing something that would make her happy in the end, the combination of the secrecy and the present suffering was hard for me to handle emotionally. And so I found myself offering a prayer to Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom Śāntideva offers his devotion. I prayed, tearfully, for him to give me the strength I needed to help me through my loved one’s suffering. At one point while doing this I wound up calling him Maitreya, because (I admit sheepishly) I sometimes have difficulty remembering the difference between the two.
All this is no small deal for me, because I don’t actually believe in Mañjuśrī or Maitreya, at least not in any standard sense of the term. Continue reading
20 Sunday Dec 2009
Posted 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
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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