Love of All Wisdom

Well, the move to a new server is clearly not proceeding as smoothly as I’d hoped. A lot of things are broken on the site right now. I am working on fixing them as fast as I can, and I beg your patience in the meantime.

As a religious studies grad student, I used to joke that if you wanted to say someone was a bastard, you called him a Protestant. If you wanted to say he was a filthy bastard, you called him a liberal Protestant. And if you wanted to say he was a dirty rotten filthy stinking bastard, you called him a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant.

I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan‘s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.

I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.

Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.

Over the next couple days I’m going to be trying to move loveofallwisdom.com to a new, and less shady, server. I’m hoping the site should be up uninterrupted during this time, but given how I’ve been treated by JustHost so far, there may be some hiccups in the process.

There’s been a fair bit of blogosphere buzz about Sam Harris‘s recent TED talk, entitled “Science can answer moral questions.” I didn’t expect to agree much with Harris, given my usual objections to empiricist scientism and related attempts to exalt “science” against “religion.” And I think there are indeed a number of problems with Harris’s view. And yet there’s quite a lot that Harris gets right – at least as much, I think, as most of his critics.

The most widely read response to Harris (and the one that Harris himself responded to at length) is one by Sean Carroll. I find the Harris-Carroll debate instructive because both seem to miss the most important point; and that, in turn, would seem to be because both fall prey to an unfortunate empiricism.

At the heart of the debate is the supposed dichotomy between “facts” and “values,” or “is” and “ought.” (I would rather say “should” than “ought,” because “ought” sounds increasingly rare and archaic in contemporary North American English, but that’s a quibble.) Harris insists that values are a kind of fact, even objective fact, so that “should” or “ought” statements have a meaning grounded in reality, not entirely relative to or dependent upon the subjects making the claim. “Should” statements, on this view, are a kind of “is” statement. In this, I think, Harris is entirely right.

Where Harris slips up is in missing the elision of “fact” with “empirical fact.” (continue reading…)

There’s an unfortunate tendency in contemporary religious studies to widen the word “ethics” so much it loses its meaning. I once was the teaching assistant for a very enjoyable course taught by Anne Monius on Indian stories: the R?m?yana and Mah?bh?rata, of course, but lesser-known works as well. The course introduced the great variety of ways people read and perform these texts throughout South and Southeast Asia. I learned a lot from it: about Southeast Asia, about Indian aesthetics, about theatrical performance, about regional identity, about the anthropology of contemporary India, about lesser-known Indian stories.

What I didn’t learn from that course, though, was ethics. (continue reading…)

In recent posts about lying to oneself, I’ve emphasized the importance of truth. Truth seems to have an intrinsic value separate from all beneficial consequences, something sometimes worth following even if its results are bad. But what exactly does this mean? What does it imply for how we choose to live our lives?

While I think I’ve established the importance of truth as an end in itself, I don’t think I’ve at all established that truth as an end overrides other ends, especially beneficial consequences. I am not convinced of Kant’s or Augustine’s view that lies are always unconditionally wrong – that one should tell the truth even to a murderer whose victim you’re sheltering. In Rawls’s terms, I don’t think that there is a “lexical order” of priority between truth and good consequences, such that the latter matters only when the former isn’t an issue. Far from it.

Indeed I’m concerned about an overemphasis on truth per se. In an earlier post I thought about this question in the context of children and happiness: suppose that one’s children make one less happy, as some psychological research suggests is often the case. If one keeps this truth firmly in mind at all times, one is likely going to become a significantly worse parent. Even supposing that one should recognize this truth, one is likely better off ignoring it.

Here the relevant distinction may be between truth and importance, significance. It is true (in this supposed case) that one’s children make one less happy; but it is also true that one should love one’s children as wholeheartedly as possible. And the second truth is more important than the latter, it matters more. (Even if beneficial consequences are not the issue; Kant himself would have to say that it is a duty to love one’s children.) And so perhaps in other cases I have recently considered: the truth that Mañju?r? doesn’t exist matters less than the truth that praying to Mañju?r? helps one in dark times; the truths seen by pessimists matter less than the truth that optimism makes one happier.

I begin to wonder whether the concept of importance needs to get more philosophical investigation than it so far has. The biggest divide in contemporary Western thought, between analytic and “continental” philosophy, has seemed to me to rest at least in part on exactly this distinction: analytic philosophy typically looks for truth without importance, continental philosophy for importance without truth.

While I was thinking through my dissertation, Robert Gimello suggested I read an intriguing article in the conservative journal First Things by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, entitled The Virtue of Hate – I think because Soloveichik’s views are in some respects the polar opposite of Śāntideva’s. Soloveichik makes the provocative suggestion that a key difference between Jewish and Christian traditions is their attitude toward hatred: contrary to the Christian advocacy of forgiveness, some people – those, like the Nazis, who have committed truly heinous crimes – genuinely deserve our hate. For Soloveichik, even the sincerest of repentance cannot wash away a serious crime.

I don’t know enough about Judaism to say how pervasive Soloveichik’s approach is in the tradition, or enough about the Tanakh to know how much it pervades there. But I find his view intriguing for a number of reasons, even if it is little more than Soloveichik’s own idiosyncrasy. First among these is the afterlife; for when I read Soloveichik’s article on this subject, I found it made me consider myself significantly more Buddhist. (continue reading…)

By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) (continue reading…)

Many years ago when I began grad school, I recall overhearing fellow grad students (in comparative literature, I think) discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the now classic Beat Generation story of travel through the USA. One of the students mentioned the main character’s deeply questionable behaviour – especially, as I recall, his tendency to form sexual relationships with local women and then nonchalantly abandon them – and the other agreed, responding “Yeah, On the Road is really offensive.”

I didn’t say anything – I wasn’t part of that conversation – but something about that offhand remark has bothered me ever since. “Offensive“? Is that the best word you have for a criticism, I thought? In the politically correct Nineties, had moral criticism been erased and replaced with mere “offensiveness”? Then something must have gone terribly wrong. For to my mind, offensiveness had always been something good. We political radicals – as I and the other students identified – were supposed to be offensive against the values of the conservative mainstream… weren’t we? Even now, when I’m far less political, I still love deliberately offensive humour – the bad taste of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up comedy or of South Park. To be inoffensive, by contrast, seems a lot like being nice, in the wrong way. If all that was wrong with On the Road was that it was “really offensive,” it seemed to me, then nothing is wrong with it.

What does it mean, indeed, to be “offensive”? The word has achieved a particular currency in the era of identity politics – a cultural product is “offensive” to particular groups of people. But what is that? What makes it “offensive”? Is offensiveness purely a creation of a postmodern era of heightened sensitivity? Typically, I think, something is called “offensive” because it is presumed to be insulting; more specifically, because someone feels insulted. I suspect there isn’t much of an objective dimension to offensiveness; something is only offensive if someone is offended.

And here Śāntideva’s magnificent words in chapter six of the Bodhicary?vat?ra come back to me. (continue reading…)

I have just started trying to make my way through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and so far it has had a surprising effect: it has made me more of a Platonist. Which is exactly the opposite, I think, of what Wittgenstein intended.

Wittgenstein begins the book with a critique of a passage in Augustine’s Confessions, on a subject whose Christian significance is not discussed. Speaking of his childhood, Augustine – a Platonist – explains how he came to understand concepts:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out….. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified… (Confessions I.8)

On such an account, Wittgenstein thinks, words have a meaning correlated with them, and their meaning is an object they stand for. Wittgenstein replies that such an account is true, at best, only of nouns. It is not true of other parts of speech. To argue his point he gives the following example, often cited in others’ expositions of Wittgenstein’s thought:

Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked “five red apples.” He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers – I assume that he knows them by heart – up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. — It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words. — “But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” — Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanatons come to an end somewhere. – But what is the meaning of the word “five?” – No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used. (Philosophical Investigations I.1)

I hope that Wittgenstein’s arguments get better as the book goes on, or that this excerpt turns out to be only a piece of a larger and better argument. For it strikes me as rather a poor piece of reasoning. Indeed the meaning of the word “five” was not in question in the transaction – but neither was the meaning of the word “apples,” for both participants already knew what the word meant. (continue reading…)