It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad.

Sensitivity in the good sense, it seems to me, involves being aware of emotion, being able to sense it. One can witness that slight tremble in a lower lip and know that it means unhappiness, see that those slightly narrowed eyes indicate disapproval, recognize that that particular turn of phrase indicates annoyance. This sort of sensitivity strikes me as a valuable skill. It allows one to be attentive to others, know the needs that they often fear expressing. One can be similarly sensitive to one’s own emotions – be attuned to them, aware of them as they arise. I think that something like this sort of sensitivity to oneself is expressed in the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness (smṛti), awareness of the currents of one’s thoughts and feelings. Such awareness can mean the difference between repressing and reducing anger, or other negative emotions – between leaving anger untouched in a way that leads to passive aggression, and dealing with it actively and openly in a way that actively minimizes it.

But the term “sensitivity” also typically implies something else. A “sensitive guy” is often easily affected by another’s emotion, takes it personally. This is, I would admit, a flaw of mine; I don’t react particularly well to others’ disapproval. And “sensitivity” in this second sense can be exacerbated by sensitivity in the first sense – for it’s much easier to react negatively to disapproval when you’re acutely aware that that disapproval is happening. This is why I find it very easy to get annoyed by subtle changes in tone of voice when they come from my wife or a close friend – when those same changes from a stranger would not affect me. It’s a source for the kinds of arguments within married couples that seem so bewildering to those outside the relationship (“Don’t give me that look! You always do this!”)

A traditionally masculine man is likely sensitive in neither of these ways. The second makes him easier to get along with because less easily offended; the first is a source of frustration to those who try to send him subtle signals. A nice person, on the other hand, is likely sensitive in both ways – considerate of emotion but solicitous of approval.

A significant part of classical Buddhism’s appeal to me is that it seems to get this distinction. Mindfulness toward emotion, at least one’s own, is a key Buddhist virtue; but saukumārya, “softness” or “fragility,” is disdained. Śāntideva insists that being soft in the face of suffering only allows that suffering to increase.

The larger passage in which Śāntideva’s claim appairs, within the Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter on patient endurance, is rhetorically striking: “A wise one should not disturb purity of mind even in suffering, for [the wise one is in] combat with the mental afflictions, and pain is easily obtained in war.” One might not expect military metaphors from an advocate of non-harming. But for Śāntideva our mental afflictions (kleśas) are so destructive that we must stamp them out, fight a battle against them in a way we would never do against a sentient being.

The metaphor takes me back to my earlier discussion of niceness (the SNAG looks almost identical to the nice guy). André Comte-Sponville addresses the importance of gentleness as a virtue, beginning his discussion thus: “Gentleness is a feminine virtue. That is why it is particularly pleasing in men.” And he urges us to “think of trains packed with soldiers” as an example of the ugly, and traditionally masculine, world that follows from a lack of gentleness. Now Śāntideva does not wish us to be gentle toward the mental afflictions, rather to root them out and fight them, be tough against them. We must not act like sensitive guys toward our craving and ignorance and even anger. But to fight them we must nevertheless be sensitive to their existence.

There is a fine line between gentleness and niceness; the latter too easily becomes a vice. Similarly, there is a fine line between the two concepts of sensitivity: In subtly discerning others’ emotions, one runs a risk of being too easily affected by those subtleties. It is in being affected by them that we most easily notice them. But to notice others’ subtle emotional shifts while remaining undisturbed by them – this is an ideal worth striving for.

Deneen’s speech is a “defence of culture.” Following one Romano Guardini, Deneen understands culture in a specific sense that ties it essentially to nature, history and society. Culture thus defined is a tradition of interacting with nature and other humans, suspicious of change, deferring to the past and ready to pass it on to future generations. When defined this way, Deneen says, the enemy of culture is liberalism, the contemporary politics of individual choice and freedom at a great remove from nature, history and society. (In this sense, most of the libertarian American Tea Partiers are consummate liberals; liberalism is generally the ideology of both the modern left and the modern right.) Liberalism, Deneen says, endorses an “anti-culture,” or at least monoculture, in which the priority of individual over collective goods is everywhere enshrined. The particular kind of collective goods Deneen has in mind, I think, have above all to do with raising a family – for example, the ability to raise one’s children in an environment that is not thoroughly sexualized by scantily-clad magazine covers, Lady Gaga, Internet pornography and Bratz dolls. (The example is mine, but it’s true to Deneen’s position as I understand it.) Perhaps the most telling line in the piece, and the one that inspired me to write this entry, is this quote from Bertrand de Jouvenel: the political philosophers of liberalism are “childless men who have forgotten their childhood.”

I find Deneen’s definition of culture strange, but I won’t dwell on that point. I’m more interested in the essay because of the way it cogently expresses the critique of liberalism, as made by a literal conservatism rooted in nature and family. And I think there’s something missing from this analysis, something put in acute focus by a knowledge of South Asian traditions.

For liberalism, I submit, is not the only tradition that opposes “culture” in Deneen’s sense, wishes to free human beings against the bonds of nature and family. Rather, Indian “renouncer” traditions have been engaged in this project for hundreds of years. The Buddhist First Noble Truth, that all the conditioned things around us in the world are suffering, is relatively well known. But plenty of his non-Buddhist contemporaries said something very much like it. Classical Jain tradition, as expressed in the Tattvārtha Sūtra, aims to free the human subject from the material world and its bonds, into a liberated state called kaivalya (aloneness) – as do the Yoga Sūtras, often considered “Hindu.” One might hesitate to refer to early Buddhism as individualist, since it so readily deconstructs the self, but the same cannot be said about these other traditions – which, in some form in another, also survive to this day in India and its diaspora.

And these different Indian traditions find their social expression in monkhood – a deliberate rejection of family. Their thinkers and theorists are childless men by choice; it is not that they have forgotten their childhood, so much as they wish to transcend it. The fact of our past childhood should not be denied, but it should also not weigh down on our transcendent futures.

Now such traditions are of course far removed from the modern liberalism Deneen criticizes. Monks, more or less by definition, don’t have sex. To Jains and Buddhists and yogins, sex and related worldly pleasures are among the worst of the fetters that bind us to the world of suffering – to society and history and nature. Deneen’s conservative traditionalism has important commonalities with the Indian renouncers, most obviously a suspicion of open, or permissive, sexuality. And yet the renouncers share a great deal with liberal modernity that they do not share with the family-oriented culture embraced by Deneen. I tried to get at this point when I identified asceticism, libertinism and traditionalism as three distinct ways of life, but since then I’ve come back to thinking that the point is best expressed in Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews: modern liberalism’s integrity orientation is shared by the classical Indian renouncers.

More germane to Deneen’s points about culture, these renouncers also share modernity’s universalism. For the Jains or early Buddhists there would be no problem if everyone around the world adopted a common Jain or Buddhist culture, aimed at the renunciation of suffering. While Christians and Muslims would often believe a similar thing, their universalism is still self-consciously and essentially tied to particular historical events in a way that Buddhism, like modern liberalism, is not. Thus to the extent that Buddhists care about the “authenticity” of Buddhist teachings, it is only because the historical Buddha happened to be the only awakened one in our era.

Yet nevertheless Buddhists do look back to the Buddha’s teachings. The past great thinker is still treated as worthy of reverence. And this much, Buddhists do share with Deneen’s traditionalists, against modernity. For Deneen, if we look to the future as a place to be liberated from the past – as our increasingly science- and technology-focused education systems effectively do – we will lose something of the greatest human importance, our best guides to living well.

And on this score, if little else, I agree with Deneen. I have learned far more about living well from the Buddha and Lucretius and Aristotle than I have from contemporary philosophy or even psychology. At the same time, I do have one foot firmly planted in the universalist and individualist world of modern liberalism, to the point of not intending to have children. I suppose this all makes for a key reason Buddhism continues to hold such appeal for me: it allows us to return to the past for guidance, and yet in an individualistic way that does not bind us too closely to nature and society. (Stoicism and Epicureanism do the same things, in a way, but they have lost Buddhism’s continuity to the present day.)

No doubt Deneen and his colleagues would criticize such a view as shallow, an attempt to have one’s historical cake and eat it too. There’s a lot to such a view, and developing a critique of it would take far more than this one post. But I will start by saying that attempts at synthesis do not have to be shallow. Traditions change, develop and grow as they encounter each other – and such encounters are happening today to an unprecedented degree.

Instead, I now turn back to a different categorization I didn’t have time to mention in the puruṣārtha post: the intersecting axes of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity. These two ways of classifying philosophies seem to me to do more justice to East Asian thought, while still going “all the way down”: extending from theoretical foundations all the way up to life as lived.

The distinction between intimacy and integrity modes of thinking and being, as developed by Thomas P. Kasulis, is identified specifically with East Asian philosophy in mind, as a tradition deeply rooted in the intimacy approach; and it is also intended to cover all realms of philosophical endeavour, whether theoretical or practical. The ascent-descent distinction, developed most by Ken Wilber, brings South Asian concerns of transcendence more explicitly to the fore; and I think it also expresses the combination of theoretical and practical philosophy.

I’ve explored each of those distinctions in the earlier posts. Here I want to say more about their intersection, as a potential fourfold classification of philosophies and lives, which I only began to touch on in the ascent-descent post. Can we fruitfully classify philosophies into ascending integrity, ascending intimacy, descending integrity and descending intimacy? Assuming, again, that the categories are Weberian ideal types between which historical examples are expected to be a middle ground?

The category of ascending integrity is relatively continuous with, if a bit more narrow than, the ascetic way of life as I described it before (and then attributed to the mokṣa puruṣārtha). Epitomized by the Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra, one seeks to transcend the everyday world for a higher truth that lies in some respect separate from it, away from the suffering it contains. One seeks to stand alone, metaphysically separate from entanglement in the everyday; epistemologically, breaking things down into component parts is an important step on this path. Plato’s identification of higher truth with a realm of rational and other-worldly Ideas would seem to fit this category as well.

In the opposite corner, the category of descending intimacy comes close to what I have called traditionalism (or the dharma puruṣārtha), with Confucius as the characteristic example. Human beings and human knowledge, on the traditional view, are properly situated within chains of ancestors and descendants who were there long before we arrived and will be there long after we are gone. (The idea of deliberately not having children is highly suspect for a traditionalist.) Epistemology properly comes from two sources: custom or common sense (the knowledge passed on to us indirectly by the ancestors) or the knowledge our ancestors had that recent generations lost (Torah, dharmaśāstra, the Confucian classics). Either way, the right place for us is in this world, immersed amid intimate networks of our fellow human beings. Maimonides, with his worldly Aristotelian view of the Torah, may be a comfortable fit here.

“Descending integrity” may be a better category than either “libertinism” or “artha-kāma” to describe the default position of the modern West, according to which individuals are treated as atomized bearers of rights, reason and experience. Its metaphysics is empiricist – bound to sense experience away from speculation – and atomist, reducing things to their component parts. And the goals of life are similarly worldly: if they go beyond pleasure, it is to flourishing defined in terms of an individual’s capabilities and achievements in this world (something like Nussbaum’s capabilities approach). Mozi then lies somewhere between the two kinds of descent, less intimacy-oriented than Confucius but not going all the way to the integrity orientation of the modern West. Placing him in this middle ground seems to make much more sense than placing him between traditionalism and libertinism, as the old scheme might have had to do, since pleasure per se is of little importance to him.

Each of the three categories above matches roughly but not exactly with the previous schemes (ascetic/traditional/libertine, mokṣa/dharma/artha-kāma). But this scheme adds a fourth: ascending intimacy. I mentioned this possibility briefly before, associating it with Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON (the Hare Krishnas). But I think ascending intimacy goes well beyond Prabhupada and his Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava tradition. The idea of bhakti – loving devotion to a divine being – became very widespread in medieval India, and pervades much of what is now called “Hinduism”; and it is also, in many ways, a characteristically Christian attitude. In ascending intimacy as in descending, relationships are central to a good life; but the relationships with our familial and local intimates on earth are less important than our relationships with a transcendent, eternal deity. Epistemologically, the deity is the source and arbiter of truth, and we are not ourselves the deity. For Kasulis, in intimacy approaches true knowledge is more like knowing a person than knowing a fact (in French, connaître is better than savoir); but where for descending intimacy this true knowledge is of concrete phenomena in the perceptible world (including other people), in ascending intimacy it is of a divine and higher being. Augustine had been a Christian paradigm of my older ascetic category; while he would likely fit in this category with his continued poetic declarations of love for God, he does not exemplify it the way he did asceticism, because his Platonist tendencies pull him closer to the integrity side. Rather, Christian exemplars of ascending intimacy would likely be the female medieval mystics like Teresa of Ávila, overwhelmed by their experience of God.

I’m leery of attempts at schematizing everything into diagrams the way Wilber does, but this classification seems to call out for a summary table, with characteristic examples of each of the four categories:

I’m feeling relatively satisfied with this classification scheme; I think it’s the most robust one I’ve come up with so far. I’m particularly pleased that it seems to do more justice to Christianity as well as East Asian thought. But I wouldn’t be surprised if gaping holes remain. What do you think?

Friends and loved ones, it has been three years since Amod and Caitlin met at the home of Joanna, whose music has accompanied us into this chapel. Now we are gathered here in love and support for Amod and Caitlin as they promise to face the future together, accepting whatever may lie ahead. What we are celebrating, they have summed up in a Sanskrit word inscribed on both of their wedding rings. This word is parasparaprīti, a word that can mean many things. It is a compound word, made of two parts, paraspara and prīti. Prīti can mean love, joy, delight, pleasure, friendship, kindness, affection, zest, exuberance. Paraspara means mutual, shared, of or by or for each other.

And so when these two words are put together into the compound parasparaprīti, it can mean any number of things — including mutual love, shared joy, delight in each other, kindness toward each other, exuberance for each other — all of which Caitlin and Amod have already felt for each other, and all of which they pledge to continue feeling for each other from this day forward.

The marriage, which they begin today, is not only about joy and delight. It is also about the sorrow, frustration, and grief that are inevitable parts of life — about committing to share these as well, and knowing they can be made a little lighter by facing them together. It is this commitment to share and stand by each other, in joy and in sorrow, that we are here to declare and affirm today.

EDIT (29 July): For some reason, comments were turned off when I first made this post. That was not my intention; I don’t know why it happened. It should be fixed now.

The problem I quickly realized is that romantic marriage is a recent invention, a construct of our own time. It was obvious to me from the beginning that I’d get little help from Indian Buddhism, where sex and marriage are emphasized as fetters that bind us in suffering. I knew that to choose marriage was to side against Śāntideva. Sure, Śāntideva praises the monk Jyotis for breaking his monastic vows and marrying a woman who fell in love with him – but Jyotis, like a good bodhisattva, did this entirely out of compassion. “I’m marrying you out of sympathy” is not exactly the note on which I want to start married life.

Classical Buddhism is an ascetic tradition through and through, as uncomfortable as such asceticism might make us today. But then much the same can be said about classical Christianity, at least as expressed in Paul’s New Testament writings. “Better to marry than to burn”: marriage is a third-best option, not as good as converting to celibacy as Paul did, let alone lifelong celibacy. It is good only because it prevents the worse option, of being led around by sexual lust. For this reason I tend to chafe a bit when I hear the standard wedding reading of 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. Paul is not even talking about familial love, let alone romantic love; that’s the last thing on his mind. He’s talking about agape, compassion, close to Buddhist karuṇā. The King James Bible makes the point well when it renders the passage with “charity” rather than “love.”

But what about the non-ascetic traditions? Clearly some premoderns gave an unqualified endorsement to married life, even if the classical Buddhists and Christians did not. Indeed they did – but marriage so viewed was a very different thing. I touched on the point in my previous post about weddings, but it’s worth coming back to. Traditionally, marriage was not about the couple, it was about the community and its continuity, arranged by parents for the sake of producing and raising new children. And it was often the wife’s job to raise the children and the husband’s to provide materially – or sometimes the job of the extended family, if both were working. This is the married relationship that Confucius praises; but it is not our marriage. We fell in love without our families’ involvement, and we do not intend to have children. All of my family members are hundreds of miles away; hers do not live with us. To top it off, for the moment, she is our breadwinner while I am unemployed and taking care of the household. When classical Jewish or Confucian texts endorse marriage, it is for reasons far removed from ours. While I’ve said that weddings always imply a certain amount of traditionalism, to most traditional audiences our marriage looks a lot more like libertinism.

So the best premodern texts for a modern marriage are likely those which are not about marriage. The last time I got married, we read Pausanias’s speech from Plato’s Symposium, arguing that the best kind of love is pursued for the cultivation of virtue. A great and noble sentiment, and here we are talking about a love closer to modern romantic love – sexually charged eros, not compassionate agape. A good reading, but worth remembering that the eros that’s at issue here is the love Plato knew, between an older man and a younger boy. The dialogue never even entertains the idea that a married couple would feel eros for each other.

So likewise the Song of Songs, that Hebrew text that has made so many wonder “why is this in the Bible?” Not being constrained in our interpretations by tradition, we don’t need to take the strained reading of the text as an allegory for God’s love for the church. We can read it literally for what it is, the erotic passion of two heterosexual lovers, in a text that is nevertheless ancient and passed down by tradition. The text never says these lovers are married; in their time, they probably wouldn’t have been. But their love is much more like ours than is Paul’s agape, Śāntideva’s karuṇā, or the community- and family-oriented Confucian marriage. And so we are having a selection from this text sung at our wedding.

The other premodern reading we’ll have at the wedding is the short closing lines of the Rig Veda (X.191.4): “May your aim be one and single / May your hands be joined in one / The mind at rest in unison / At peace with all, so may you be.” It is also not about marriage in its original context, but about unity among Agni worshippers; and the translation is quite loose. In these respects I suppose it’s really no better than the Corinthians. But my father has regularly sent it as a wedding blessing to most of the couples we know who have married in my lifetime. So it’s become part of our own family tradition, in a way, as well as being an appropriate wish expressed in beautiful English. And all of that matters.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks – because of the wedding, of course! The next week and a half will be frenetic with wedding planning, and after that we are having a week’s honeymoon in New Orleans. (We had intended to go further afield, but immigration issues intervened; we expect to take a longer honeymoon this winter.) Blogging will take a back seat during this period. If I am seized by the urge to write about something topical, it’s possible that there may be a post in the interim; but I expect the blog’s writing to resume on the first of August.

Naturally, comments will remain open during this period; I’m happy that some lively discussions have got going here recently and I would be delighted if they continue. Before I pause, I would like to say a word of thanks to all my commenters and regular readers. You have made writing this blog a tremendously rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to resuming it in August.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” This part of the book explores a strikingly wide range of Western perspectives on partial love (as opposed to universal compassion), and especially erotic or romantic love – from Spinoza’s Ethics to the Kindertotenlieder songs of Gustav Mahler. They are all “ladders” of love in a certain sense, in that they attempt to reform the way we see love. And they are arranged in a dialectical or phenomenological manner, with each one identified as (in Nussbaum’s eyes) responding to the inadequacies of the view before it, and in that respect providing a more adequate view. Such an attempt at dialectical progress is close to the way Wilber understands his project as well, and to the Chinese Buddhist idea of pan jiao 判教 (classification of the teachings) as I understand it. ^*

So far Nussbaum’s text sounds itself like a ladder of sorts. However, the order in which Nussbaum ranks these views is unusual for a philosophical ladder. She begins with Plato and Spinoza as the most inadequate positions, going through Augustine, finding herself after a while in Walt Whitman and ultimately in James Joyce. Why? Because Plato tries too hard to ascend above love’s imperfections; his love is too far removed from the world. Joyce’s Ulysses, on the other hand, takes us down the ladder, lovingly embracing the world with all its imperfections. Likewise in her previous work Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum had described her vision of an ideal transcendence as a “transcending by descent” (379, italics hers). [EDIT, June 17: part of this paragraph was missing when I first made this post yesterday.]

It would be too simple to describe Wilber as an ascent thinker and Nussbaum as descent; both see value in the two different sides and want to incorporate both. (For a pure ascent tradition we might do better with the Yoga Sūtras or the Jains’ Tattvārtha Sūtra; for a pure descent we might look to pragmatism or to Paul and Patricia Churchland.) But I think it’s useful to juxtapose the two because they both use the language of ascent and descent while taking quite different positions on it.

The ascent-descent distinction particularly interests me because of the way it can interact with other distinctions I have used to classify philosophies, especially Thomas Kasulis’s aforementioned distinction between intimacy and integrity. What’s always struck me about the integrity-intimacy distinction is that the integrity side captures something in common between two very different kinds of philosophies: ancient Indian views like the Yoga Sūtras in which the human subject aims to abide in a pure transcendental aloneness, and modern individualist philosophies of which Ayn Rand‘s is perhaps the epitome, in which the rational individual aims for mastery of the material world. There’s even a certain rough correspondence here with the three ways of life classification I’ve employed before: “asceticism” is integrity ascent, “libertinism” is integrity descent, and “traditionalism” is intimacy.

But could the distinction be pushed further, so that intimacy too is divided between ascent and descent? I suspect that it can. As luck would have it, on my way to India where I was to have these thoughts, I was accosted in LAX by a group of airport Hare Krishnas. When I told them (perhaps inadvisably) that I knew Sanskrit, they pushed very hard for me to take a copy of their teacher Prabhupada‘s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. I read some of the introduction on the plane, and it stayed with me. As I thought through these categories, I realized: Prabhupada’s thought is the perfect example of intimacy ascent.

Prabhupada follows in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition of Caitanya, according to which the purpose of human life is to abide in the love of the god Krishna. Prabhupada makes it clear that this love is far superior to any merely human love, which is impermanent and will fade – the ideas of an ascent tradition – while at the same time arguing for a radically dependent view of human beings, according to which human beings can never be viewed as solitary or independent (in the way that Rand and the Yoga Sūtras both do). But rather than depending on each other, as we do in Nussbaum’s thought, we depend on a higher, eternal being. Here intimacy is an ascent. (I suppose Augustine’s view, which Nussbaum also sees as inadequate, is of a very similar kind.) Nussbaum’s thought, on the other hand, takes us to an intimacy by descent – as does Alasdair MacIntyre’s world of “dependent rational animals,” and the relationship-centred world of Confucius.

Two axes, then, to classify philosophies (both theoretical and practical): a vertical axis of ascent and descent, and we might also say a horizontal axis of intimacy and integrity. How robust is it, how well does it work? I’m not sure yet. But it seems like a good start.

* I’m trying to begin learning Chinese characters, and how to produce them online. Please, any readers who know Chinese, correct me when I do this wrongly in this post or any other – as I’m sure will happen along the way.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

It would be nice to think that the academy was some sort of exception to this rule; but it’s anything but. People go into academic work because they love to think and read and write and teach. But in a research-oriented job where one is paid to think and read and write, one must do it according to established disciplinary boundaries that do not necessarily make sense for one’s work: in my field one writes either for “philosophers” who value only precision and logical rigour, and care little or not at all for the great ideas of the past; or for “religionists” who care only about an accurate representation of the past and not about what that past has to teach us. If one tries to cross the boundaries, one is hurt far more than helped. And even if one is comfortable with those boundaries, one cannot simply take the time to learn, understand, absorb; one must write and be published, even if one would rather take the time to read and learn more before doing so. As for that vaunted “academic freedom”: for the majority of people employed in academic positions, there is no such thing. I started this blog only once it seemed likely I would not have an academic career in the long term; for I try here to speak my mind openly, explore my passions and intellectual curiosity, in a way that all the world can see. As long as I sought an academic career, I was deathly afraid that search committee members would discover that my views were not what they wanted to hear, and promptly exercise their wide-ranging arbitrary powers to deny me a livelihood.

And then there’s teaching: often in subjects that have little to do with one’s own passion, and equally often to students who do not care. That’s not even to mention the oft-required bureaucratic committee work, work that most academics relish far less than either research or teaching. Between these three alienated commitments, an aspiring philosophy or religion professor often has less time to think about philosophy than one who is outside the academy. And to do all this, in the vast majority of cases, one must effectively abandon friends and family, move to a place to which one has no ties and may well despise – and all of this is what one does if one is lucky, if one does not join the majority of PhD graduates who teach courses for less than a living wage.

To enter the academy, to try and write or play music for a living, to sell homemade crafts – these are often failed and futile attempt to avoid alienation, one which only leads one deeper into oppression and false consciousness. As an adjunct professor, one is exploited far more ruthlessly than any unionized factory worker – and the work that one does is scarcely any more one’s own than is the product of a modern factory. Marx would not be surprised to see that colleges and universities – even now that they’re run by the Sixties generation of former radicals – are alienated capitalist shop floors like any other. We want to think that the university is a place for the free exchange of ideas, outside of alienated market labour; it is anything but. It is one more site of capitalist exploitation.

The more I experience the capitalist workplace, the more I see that Marx’s diagnosis was right. Where Marx was wrong was in his prognosis of a better system. Bart Ehrman portrays Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet – one who thought that the Day of Judgement was coming in his own lifetime. Marx thought the same: the last would be first and the first would be last, a new order would come in where justice would prevail and humans’ true ends would be fulfilled.

Jesus and Marx were wrong. There was no new order. Once they were gone, their hopes were dashed. In the 150 years since Marx wrote they have not been fulfilled; nor have they been fulfilled in the 2000 years since Jesus’s lifetime. It’s been long enough in both cases to think that if the prophecies have not yet been fulfilled, they may well never be. And to me, this is where Buddhism comes in, another reason why I find the Buddha’s thought profounder than Marx’s. What Christianity and Marxism share above all is a sense of hope – a hope that history has so far falsified. Buddhism, on the other hand, offers us a critique of hope. The world is never going to get better. What we can do is work on our own suffering, and that of those around us, in the midst of our alienation and oppression. As the bumper sticker used to say, I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

Or, if you can’t handle that kind of pessimism, at least consider this. Marx was always cagey about his vision of a future society, what a non-alienated world would look like – it was supposed to arise out of the reflection of alienated or exploited groups. And yet he did offer glimpses, especially in the early work that focuses most on alienation. In the German Ideology, Marx speaks of a better world where one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,” as opposed to the specialized, mechanized world of alienated capitalist labour. My father, explaining this passage, once mentioned a time he had been flying first class and discussed Marx with a wealthy heiress sitting beside him on a plane. He had mentioned this passage to her, and she replied: “I can do that right now!” The difference was just that Marx hoped to see everyone, not just the aristocracy, have such an opportunity for self-definition.

And yet here’s the thing. Thanks primarily to the work of twentieth-century labour unions – often allied with Marxists, especially in places where their gains were strongest, outside the United States – many of us now have some of our lives to ourselves, where we can define ourselves in this way, independent of our alienated careers. If we can manage to find the 40-hour work week that our grandparents fought so hard for, we can certainly hunt in the morning, fish in the evening, and be a critical critic in the evening – on the weekend. Even the rest of the week, we might have several nights on which we can do at least one of these things. Alas, these days the work week seems to be getting longer; any fights in this regard are to maintain the status quo, not to make things better or bring them any closer to a non-alienated utopia.

Still, the benefits are there if we accept them – and, I suppose, if we don’t have children. Marx didn’t seem to think much about that part: even if we all had the resources to hunt in the morning and criticize in the evening, who would raise the kids? Friedrich Engels took up that question some, but Marx himself didn’t. Still, to have children is a choice which many people undertake, and undertake for their own reasons, not as part of a bargain with an employer; whether or not children actually make them happy, people have them because they believe they do. If we don’t take that choice, and we fight to keep the rights our grandparents fought for (as so many people today do not), then we may well be able to do the things we love in life without getting paid for them, do work that is a genuine labour of love. The work I did in academia was not my own. It was alienated labour. But this blog, I am happy to say, is not. I am lucky to have the chance to do some work that is all mine.

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.

The point seems to come up again and again, for there are many reasons why trying to believe false things might prove valuable. In cases where one’s children make one less happy, one is still a better parent if one falsely believes that children make one happy. Some psychologists suggest the possibility of depressive realism: the idea that depressed people actually view the world more accurately than others. In a comment I noted the happiness often radiated by evangelical Christians: should one perhaps try to become such a person even if their God doesn’t exist? Last time the point came up in speaking of prayer: there seem to be real benefits from prayer, but it might require belief in an entity that isn’t real.

Now in every one of these cases, the good thing about lying to oneself has something in common: it is a good result. If one believes false things, one will treat one’s children better, be happier, be more successful, be stronger, as a consequence of that false belief. And so the goodness of lying to oneself in these cases seems to rest primarily on the truth or falsity of consequentialism: the idea that whether actions are good or bad (and a belief is a kind of action in this case) depends entirely on their consequences.

Consequentialism has a real intuitive appeal. To do something for a reason other than its consequences – well, that seems literally pointless. And yet, in cases like these, it seems to land one in outright contradiction. It’s one thing to tell other people false things for the sake of their happiness or success. But oneself? It doesn’t even seem possible to believe something one believes to be false. For to believe something is just to believe it to be true.

What is possible, and indeed frequent, is to believe contradictions. People hold beliefs that contradict each other all the time. And yet, it is difficult for those beliefs to survive reflection. In speaking of contradiction previously, I noted Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance: something feels wrong about contradiction, makes us uncomfortable. (And we would seem to feel this cognitive dissonance for good reason, since even contradiction’s most sophisticated defenders, like Graham Priest, admit that “[i]f we have views that are inconsistent we are probably incorrect.”) Also, practically, contradiction can lead us to acting at cross-purposes with ourselves, foiling our own goals (spiritual or otherwise).

It would seem that a pure consequentialism requires us to believe false things. Peter Railton’s defence of consequentialism relies at least in part on a distinction between truth and justification, so that on consequentialist grounds one could be justified in believing things that are false. But if we believe false things, the false things we believe are very likely to contradict other true beliefs. And such contradictions get us in various kinds of trouble.

It seems to me, as a result, that a pure consequentialism may well be wrong. Certain kinds of action, especially believing, will have to be good even though they bring worse results than their absence. I guess this takes me back to an earlier post on the idea that pleasure is the only good: truth must be a good in itself. For that reason, as far as I can tell, we should try never to lie to ourselves.