Every post on Love of All Wisdom has a comments section which extends a welcome to all who wish to reply. I hope you will feel free to post and speak your mind; dialogue is an essential part of philosophy. There are just a few simple rules I ask you follow, in the interest of keeping the comments welcoming to everyone.
1. No personal attacks – aka no flaming, no trolling. As in many other moderated Internet fora, it is not acceptable to insult those with whom you are having a discussion. This includes insulting people by logical implication (such as telling a self-proclaimed atheist “Every atheist is an idiot”), and describing someone’s position in a way that implies an insult about the person holding it (such as calling the position “wicked” or “stupid”.) Criticize only the position, not the person, and do so in a way that does not imply criticism of the person. Repeat violators of this rule may be banned, though there will always be warning offered before it comes to that. I understand that conversations can get heated from time to time, and prefer just to remind participants to cool down.
2. Please post under a single user name, whether it’s your real name or an alias. (You’re welcome to start posting under a new name if you decide you didn’t like the old one; just announce that you are doing so.) Posting under multiple names creates the impression of ganging up.
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Happy commenting!
Mat said:
A doctor of philosophy once said to me in an email: “ad hominem is the most underated form of argument”. Isn’t there some merit in this?
Amod Lele said:
Not on the Internet.
Bernat said:
Dear Amod, thank you for this fascinating blog I just discovered. For some weird reason I can’t comment on the post about “Aristotelian vs Buddhist eudaimonia”, so feel free to move this comment there.
i’m a first year PhD student researching vedanā in early Buddhism. As, for now, it seems I may be focusing on the role vedanā plays in the pursuit of awakening, pleasant spiritual feelings (nirāmisā sukhā vedanā) come to the fore. But also a general dialectic of ‘sukha’ which seems to unite the kammatic and nibbanic perspectives on living the dharma.
Alongside many negative/apophatic descriptions of nirvana, there are also affirmative ones as “the highest sukha” (Dhp 203), and similar qualities are applied to what that nirvana consists in, as in: the highest sukha is abandoning the conceit ‘I am’ (Mucalinda Sutta, Ud 2.1). There are also those expositions of gradual happiness which proceed from morality to restraint to abandoning hindrances to the jhānas, etc. Each one deemed a superior form of well-being, turning kammatic-nibbanic into a spectrum hinging on the notion that “wholesomeness entails sukha”. So even if the practices and the goals of those two may in some respects be at odds with each other, they are unified by sukha at least as a dialectic. I find this interesting.
Congrats for your blog!
Amod Lele said:
Thank you, Bernat, and welcome! Comments close on posts after three months, to avoid spam coming in (and that one is from January). I don’t know of a way to move a comment, so I’ll just reply to you here.
Your point about sukha is a good one; I hadn’t thought of those passages. They do need to be tempered by the claim also found in the suttas that sukha itself is dukkha. It would be exciting if your dissertation was able to explore the role of sukha in the Pali canon!
Bernat said:
That is a big part of what I intend to do! The interesting thing is that the problem with describing nirvana as sukha is acknowledged in the suttas, and the explanation given is that the mere absence of dukkha is sukha, which is rather Epicurean!