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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Wilhelm Halbfass

Perennial nondualism

30 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in East Asia, God, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Neoplatonism, Self, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 11 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Dara Shukoh, Muhyiddin ibn 'Arabī, mystical experience, Nishida Kitarō, nondualism, perennialism, Plotinus, Rāmānuja, Ron Purser, Śaṅkara, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, Upaniṣads, Wilhelm Halbfass, Yogācāra

I have spent a good deal of time criticizing the idea of a “perennial philosophy”, the idea (expressed by Ken Wilber and others before him) that the great sages of the world have always basically agreed on the really important things. In the past I had said there were perennial questions but with different answers; now I’m not even sure whether that is the case.

And yet I am struck by a particular phenomenon from which the perennialists draw a great deal of inspiration – and that is the pervasive influence of nondualism. “Nondual” is a literal English translation of the Sanskrit a-dvaita, the name of Śaṅkara’s school of Vedānta philosophy. But the core idea of nondualism has been asserted by a very wide range of philosophers around the world – from people who could never have heard of Śaṅkara, to Śaṅkara’s enemies.

Continue reading →

A Buddhist argument against rebirth

04 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Biology, Death, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Hope, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Self, Supernatural

≈ 67 Comments

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Epicurus, Jan Westerhoff, Lucretius, Pali suttas, rebirth, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Halbfass

I am not entirely sure that I agree with the argument I am about to make. However, I do find it at least plausible and I have not seen it made before. I think this argument is worth somebody making, and I think it is worth doing here.

That is: I would like to make a Buddhist argument against rebirth. An argument against rebirth on Buddhist grounds. Continue reading →

Mere convention vs. seeing correctly

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Truth

≈ Comments Off on Mere convention vs. seeing correctly

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Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, Maria Heim, phenomenology, Wilhelm Halbfass

Continuing my response to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, I want to turn back now to the original point of contention with which our exchange first began: the role of conventional (sammuti/vohāra) and ultimate (paramattha) in Buddhaghosa’s thought. First and foremost, I am deeply puzzled by Ram-Prasad’s claim in his comment on my previous post that “Buddhaghosa does not use the locution ‘merely’ (matta) in reference to conventional language”, when one can find this passage on page 1094 of his and Heim’s own article:

At XVIII.28, [Buddhaghosa] says that “there comes to be the mere common usage of ‘chariot’” (ratho ti vohāramattaṃ hoti) from its parts but that an ‘examination’ (upaparikkhā) shows that ultimately there is no chariot.” Likewise, when there are the five aggregates of clinging, then there comes to be the mere common usage of ‘a being’, ‘person’”… Continue reading →

The blurry boundary between premodern and modern

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ Comments Off on The blurry boundary between premodern and modern

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Andrew Nicholson, Brian Tierney, David McMahan, Donald S. Lopez Jr., G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Michel Villey, modernity, Rammohun Roy, rights, Wilhelm Halbfass, William of Ockham

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two excellent books on very different topics, both of which I’ve written about at Love of All Wisdom before: Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, and Brian Tierney’s The Idea of Natural Rights.

The idea of human or natural rights has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Michel Villey, shows us it is not that. Villey takes the work of William of Ockham as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of rights, which brings in a very different metaphysics where rights now play an important role. The brilliance of Tierney’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Ockham to the world after him. It preserves Villey’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined.

The idea of Hinduism has often been taken as something nearly eternal, dating back into antiquity. More careful scholarship, most notably that of Wilhelm Halbfass and Heinrich von Stietencron, shows us it is not that. Halbfass takes the work of Rammohun Roy as a breaking point, a sharp rupture from the previous world that had no concept of Hinduism, which brings in a very different metaphysics where Hinduism now plays an important role. The brilliance of Nicholson’s work is to qualify this point, showing a gradual transition from the world before Roy to the world after him. It preserves Halbfass’s basic point that rights do not go back to antiquity, but shows that the boundary between premodern and modern is much blurrier than previous scholarship had imagined. Continue reading →

A way forward for Wilber?

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

≈ 2 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Dustin DiPerna, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, modernism, modernity, mystical experience, Robert Sharf, Romanticism, Wilhelm Halbfass

I have not yet had a chance to hear a response from Dustin DiPerna on my post replying to his. However, his friend Mark Schmanko emailed me a response which I found utterly fascinating – one which takes up the arguments of my article as well. (I am posting these remarks with Mark’s permission.)

I had argued, following current work in religious studies like that of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass, that replicable mystical experience is more of a modern construction than we make it out to be, certainly not something at the core of premodern traditions. The conclusion in my article argued that, if my claims were true, a Wilberian could take two legitimate options: either rethink Wilber’s model heavily so as to incorporate the non-mystical elements of traditions, or “bite the bullet” and admit that it is accepting only the mystical elements and not other elements that would be closer to the tradition’s cores. Continue reading →

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Vedānta

≈ 15 Comments

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Candrakīrti, Jesus, Ken Wilber, mystical experience, New Testament, perennialism, religion, Robert Sharf, Wilhelm Halbfass

I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

Alien conservatism

19 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Food, Happiness, Place, Politics, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

≈ 6 Comments

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conservatism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York City, Rod Dreher, Ruthie Leming, Stonehill College, Wilhelm Halbfass

I’ve written a fair bit lately about conservatism, of both literal and innovative (reactionary) varieties. There is much I find admirable and valuable in conservative views; but I would be quite hard-pressed to say I agree with them. Certainly I do not live a life compatible with them, as I am frequently reminded when I read them. One of the reasons I have been drawn to these worldviews is precisely because they are so alien to me. I can see the consistency and power in these views, but my own temperament is typically far away from them. And that’s part of why I see them as such an important counterbalance.

The point really struck me when I was reading a piece by Rod Dreher about his late sister Ruthie Leming, in reference to Asian supermarkets: Continue reading →

Overthrowing Indo-European tradition

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Daoism, East Asia, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Self

≈ 8 Comments

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20th century, Bryan Van Norden, Chad Hansen, Chan/Zen 禪, D.T. Suzuki, G.W.F. Hegel, Japan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Speculative Realism, Taylor Carman, Wilhelm Halbfass

I have often found myself somewhat bewildered by the philosophy of the early- to mid-20th century, associated above all with the names of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These two thinkers cast their shadow widely over the traditions of philosophy that followed – Heidegger over “continental” philosophy, Wittgenstein over analytic. (The split between the two traditions was not nearly as pronounced in their day; in many respects they helped create it.) They are far apart in many respects, but they do share at least two tendencies I have strongly disliked – an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life, on one hand, and a rejection of the bulk of philosophy that came before them on the other. I have tended to view these two tendencies as going hand in hand – but do they?

I’ve been thinking anew about Heidegger and Wittgenstein from perhaps an unusual angle: Chad Hansen’s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. I don’t yet know early Chinese thought well enough to assess whether Hansen’s account of it is accurate. But I can at least say that Hansen, like Nietzsche, is more interesting and thought-provoking even when he’s wrong than most people are when they’re right. Continue reading →

The Catholic Pauls against nondualism

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Bhakti Poets, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Self, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 62 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, al-Hallāj, Eknath, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hugh van Skyhawk, nondualism, Paul Hacker, Paul J. Griffiths, Paul Williams, Ramprasad Sen, Śāntideva, Swami Vivekānanda, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, Upaniṣads, Wilhelm Halbfass

A curious phenomenon in the study of South Asian and especially Buddhist traditions is the number of Catholic scholars named Paul who have approached these traditions – and especially what Skholiast has called their ātmanism – with a critical eye. The two thinkers I have primarily in mind are the late Paul Hacker (whom I discussed last time, and the living Paul Williams. (The thought of Paul J. Griffiths, who moved in his writings from Buddhology to Catholic theology, bears a strong resemblances to these other Pauls, though I have less to say about him today.) That these men are all named Paul can only be a coincidence. That they are all Catholic is less so; for there are striking affinities in the ways that they (in many respects independently of one another) approach South Asian and Buddhist tradition, affinities that are far less coincidental.
Continue reading →

Without rebirth, suicide?

10 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Death, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Karma, Serenity, South Asia, Supernatural

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Dale S. Wright, Four Noble Truths, Nāgārjuna, Omar Moad, Pali suttas, rebirth, Saṃsāramocaka, suicide, Wilhelm Halbfass

I’ve often heard it said, rightly I think, that Buddhism cannot do without a concept of karma; it is too central to Buddhist thought. I don’t see this as a big problem in itself, even for those (like myself) who would wish to do without the supernatural elements in Buddhism. For karma, as Dale Wright has proposed, can be naturalized on Aristotelian grounds: virtue makes our lives better, because it makes us happier on the inside. In that sense, our good and bad actions come back to us as good and bad results, without any supernatural causation being involved. Buddhism may require karma, but we can have karma without rebirth.

The question troubling me now is: can we have Buddhism without rebirth? There’s a basic problem posed here by the First Noble Truth, the classic Buddhist idea that all is dukkha: all is suffering, painful, unsatisfactory, sorrowful, bad. If this is so, why not commit suicide? For a classical Buddhist, rebirth is the answer to this question, and the obvious answer. Suicide makes your dukkha even worse; as a bad, un-dharmic activity, it will trap you in a far worse rebirth, leave you far more sorrowful and suffering than you are.

But if there is no rebirth? Then death starts to look disturbingly like nirvana. Continue reading →

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