So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.)

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

The three schools in question are the Sophists in Greece, the Cārvāka or Lokāyata in India, and the Mohists in China. They are of crucial importance to any cross-cultural philosopher, because by running against the grain of the later tradition they break most of our stereotypes about that culture’s philosophy as a whole. In most general attempts to characterize the nature of Indian philosophy, for example, the words “except the Cārvākas” come up a lot.

For when one tries to characterize Indian philosophy in general, the words “religious” and “spiritual” usually come up a lot. As unhelpful as those words can sometimes be, they do point to something real that is generally shared across most Indian philosophy: an ascent orientation. The majority of Indian thinkers see everyday life in the world as a site of suffering, something to be transcended and moved beyond; and there is usually an element of the supernatural closely connected with this attempt to transcendence.

The Cārvākas, on the other hand, are said to deny all this. I say “said to” because the works of the Cārvākas are almost entirely lost to us, more than those of the Sophists or Mohists; the only surviving text that even could be considered Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, whose status as a Cārvāka text is quite disputed. (The comments to that post are a great introduction to the question of whether Jayarāśi was really a Cārvāka.) Because Indian tradition was largely preserved orally, we have few fragments of oppositional traditions; people didn’t usually bother memorizing the texts of their opponents, except for brief refutations. But from the refutations that do survive, it seems that the Cārvākas denied the existence of anything that could not be perceived – thus denying karma and rebirth along with any attempt to transcend bodily existence, and advocating some form of hedonistic ethics. This is a strong example of a descent orientation, quite far removed from the Buddhist and brahmanical views that survive in Indian philosophy.

So too, the history of East Asian philosophy has been characterized above all by an intimacy orientation, characteristic especially of Confucianism. East Asian thought has typically rested on a valuing of close family connections above any sort of universal humanity, and relied heavily on nonverbal knowing; thus there is often a lack of explicit polemical argument.

But in Mozi, for whom the Mohist school is named, we find little of this. (Since his name is usually transliterated with “Mo” rather than “Moh”, it would be more strictly accurate to call the school the “Moist” school, but the resulting jokes would be too distracting.) Mozi is an interesting figure here because there are some respects in which he remains an intimacy thinker – for example, not positing a dualism between subject and object, and continuing to emphasize social cues as well as explicit argument. But he rejects several of the most typical intimacy views, views which have later been taken to be characteristically Chinese. Most notably, he rejects partiality to family and friends in favour of a quasi-utilitarian universal concern. And he makes rational arguments in an explicit, polemical, and uncompromising manner.

As for the West, its philosophy – at least until the time of Nietzsche – is widely characterized as a search for truth, with that truth typically seen as correspondence with a reality external to the self. Medieval Christianity and Islam identified this truth with God; the ancient Greeks and the modern Europeans had varying beliefs about God or gods and their relations to truth, but truth remained at the heart of their concerns. And the ideal was to reach this truth through rational argument, conceived of as distinct from rhetorical appeals to emotion.

This ideal of philosophy comes largely out of the works of Plato – and he developed it in contrast to the Sophists. The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric, the equivalent of spin doctors and advertisers, who aimed for their words to be practically effective, make a political difference. Effectiveness rather than truth was the standard by which they judged. If one were to compare East Asian and Western thought by taking Mozi and Gorgias the Sophist as their representative figures, one would gain a very unusual view of the differences between the traditions!

Now Mozi is almost never taken as a paradigmatic thinker of East Asian thought, nor Gorgias of Western (or the Cārvākas of South Asia). And this is for good reason. Western, South Asian and East Asian thought would all have turned out very differently had Sophism, Cārvāka or Mohism emerged as the dominant philosophical tendency in the medieval era. But the fact is they did not so emerge, and so the vast majority of thought in each of these places did indeed take the direction we now associate with it: ascending South Asia, intimacy East Asia, rational truth-seeking West.

So what then is the significance of these oppositional traditions? Well, especially, they forced the mainstream tradition to react – and to become philosophical. I’ve been thinking about these issues in reading Chad Hansen‘s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, which often seems to me more Mohist than Daoist. Hansen points out that there is little explicit argument in Confucius, only a collection of “wise sayings” hearkening back to earlier tradition. It is Confucius’s successor Mencius who first argues for Confucianism; his arguments are not as polemical or analytical as Mozi’s (and Hansen doesn’t think they work very well), but arguments they nevertheless are. Hansen claims, plausibly, that Mencius was spurred to make these defences of the tradition primarily because of Mozi’s challenges.

The Sophists seem to have had a very similar role in the West: until their time, ethical reflection had been left to the poets and tragedians. The Sophists challenged existing pieties, in a way that led to the explicit philosophical reflection of Plato and Aristotle. Confucianism and later Greek thought could not have been nearly as robut without the challenges of the Mohists and Sophists.

And the Cārvākas? Because of the aforementioned lack of sources, we need to be more conjectural here. But we may note that they flourished in the era of the wandering sages, which gave birth to both the Buddha and the founders of Jainism – an era, like ancient Athens or the Warring States era of Confucius and Mozi, where many different philosophies thrived. It could well have been their challenge that led the other schools to define themselves in response.

Christmas appears to have a dual message in our culture. ‘Rampant consumerism’ is one half, and ‘The True Meaning Of Christmas ™’ is the second. While there are exceptions that focus more on family and loved ones and generosity, references to TTMOC largely also include references to the birth of Jesus.

I think Ben is on to something important: an unreflective understanding of Christmas can turn into a simple consumerism. So, many who do reflect on Christmas either refuse to celebrate it at all or try to make it entirely about Jesus. I think both reactions, but especially the latter, are examples of single-mindedness as a problem: an attempt to pick out one single meaning that’s most important and ignore the details. But for those of us who genuinely enjoy Christmas, the details can be the most important part.

In my reply to Ben’s first comment I pointed to trees, wreaths, “Deck the Halls” – trappings of North American and at least some European Christmas that have no clear connection to Jesus but also don’t require any consumerism. Ben replied that those elements of Christmas scarcely have any meaning left if one takes out the two alternatives of consumerism and the Christian “true meaning”: people do them only because their family did when they were young and it leaves them with happy associations.

In my reply at the time, I focused on the performative implications of the rituals, on what they do: nobody really agrees on what Diwali “means,” but it never really seems to matter. They bring us together as families and as a larger cultural community – which is why some non-Christian Indians celebrate Christmas when they come to North America, and why my immediate family (who do not identify as Hindu) celebrated Diwali in India. Along with weddings and funerals, Christmas seems to me the closest North American analogue to the traditional familial rituals that Confucius viewed as crucial to a good life. In this light I also pointed a while ago to Frits Staal‘s conception of ritual as “rules without meaning.” While I had previously disparaged performance theory – the idea that the important thing about a traditional action is not what it means but what it does – I did come to realize that sometimes that can indeed be true, and thought about the point especially with regard to Christmas.

So far this has been a summing up of things I’ve said before, in one manner or another. But more recently I’ve been thinking in a different direction about Christmas rituals. I’ve come to think their meaning does matter, even for us non-Christians – but in a way that doesn’t have to do with Jesus. Christmas, as a traditional ritual passed down through history, has multiple meanings of which the significance of Jesus of Nazareth is only one.

On another post about Christmas, my wife Caitlin referred to the origins of Christmas in pre-Christian ritual. And I’ve lately been thinking about Christmas differently because of her, as well. She loves Christmas, but dislikes the rest of the winter season, because she loves being out in sunlight.

And only after being with her did it occur to me that Christmas is in many respects a ritual about darkness. Like (the Western) New Year’s Day, its timing is linked to the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere, 25 December is far from the coldest time of year, but give or take a week, it is the darkest. And a great deal of its rituals focus on lights shining against that darkness – often lighting candles, but nowadays especially the small coloured lights on strings that, in North America, are known as “Christmas lights” whatever time of year they appear. So too, the English-language Christmas carols about Jesus’s birth repeatedly return to the theme of darkness and night, whether in their titles (“Silent Night,” “O Holy Night”) or in their content (when “O Little Town of Bethlehem” proclaims “But in thy dark street shineth the everlasting light”).

The emphasis on darkness and night doesn’t come from the Bible. As far as I can tell, the biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth mention only once that it took place at night, and that in passing: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” (Luke 2:8) Moreover, the biblical authors did not deem it important to fix a date for Jesus’s birth; it is generally agreed that the date of Christmas was chosen to coincide with a preexisting festival occurring near the winter solstice, though there is some debate as to which one.

I don’t know enough about the history of Christmas to say when and how the various night- and darkness-related aspects of its mythology emerged. But it seems likely to me that these have less to do with the birth of Jesus itself than with the timing of the festival at the winter solstice. The idea of light in the darkness makes some sense as a Christian metaphor for the presence of Jesus in a non-Christian world, but that doesn’t seem enough to explain the ubiquity of light and darkness language in the tradition, especially given the seasonal timing. (In this respect the celebration of Christmas by non-Christians feels less odd to me than its celebration by Australians.)

Here the meaning of Christmas seems to be: our year is now at its very darkest, but the light is coming, and even at the darkness we will hold back that darkness with lights of our own. One can read this as an allegory for Jesus, but one doesn’t have to. No wonder the Puritans, zealous exemplars of Protestant single-mindedness, sought to ban Christmas as a form of “popery” – there is so much in it that is not primarily about Jesus or his role in saving human beings. And those are the things I love about it.

No posts for the next two weeks, as I’ll be taking a break for Christmas – and for the New Year.

My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them.

For one thing, they reach very deep. The other perennial questions I named in the later post – free will and human nature – do have ramifications both theoretical and practical, but I’m not sure that they colour the overall tenor of a philosophy the way ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity do. A philosopher’s position on free will or human nature seems to me less likely to affect her views on the basic nature of reality and knowledge, say, than these two do. I’m not entirely sure that this point holds up well, but it’s probably worth mentioning.

The more powerful reason to work with these two classification schemes, I think, is that they name perhaps the most abiding differences between philosophical traditions. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that the modern West generally takes an orientation of integrity descent, in its secularism and its atomistic individualism. Thomas Kasulis’s book, from which I draw the intimacy-integrity distinction, takes the modern West as the paradigm of an integrity approach; Ken Wilber, in theorizing ascent and descent, identifies the recent history of the West with the “dominance of the descenders.”

What I find particularly interesting about these classifications, though, is that they don’t merely name distinctions between the West and the non-West, or modern and non-modern. Those kinds of distinctions have been done and done to death, especially in the early- and mid-20th century sociological work that asked why the rest of the world hadn’t “modernized” the way the West had. (Max Weber’s work is probably the most famous in this genre, but far more of them were written.)

Rather, these classifications also catch distinctions between the major non-Western philosophical traditions, those of East Asia (especially China and Japan) and South Asia (especially India). I noted previously that Kasulis’s intimacy-integrity distinction at first struck me as just another forgettable example of the attempts to characterize the modern West against the rest of the world, until Parimal Patil pointed out the fact – right under my nose – that in nearly every aspect of Kasulis’s classification, classical Indian thought had an integrity orientation at least as strong as the West’s. Ever since then, I’ve found the classification indispensable. One might similarly note that the ascent orientation in classical Chinese thought is not significantly stronger than it is in the modern West – not, at least, until Buddhism begins to arrive there from India.

In other words, Kasulis could not have written a book characterizing ancient India as an intimacy culture in the way that he did with modern Japan. Wilber, meanwhile, notes that contemporary Westerners (especially of his baby boom generation) are much more likely to recognize a lack of intimacy in their own culture than a lack of ascent; he reserves significant criticism for the widespread ecological views that exalt our interdependence with nature but do not recognize a spiritual dimension in which we strive for something beyond it. And it can be no coincidence that, with such a project, Wilber refers far more often to Indian tradition than to Chinese. Nor, conversely, is it a coincidence that Alasdair MacIntyre – whose philosophical writings have long been aimed at moving contemporary Western thought to a more intimacy-oriented worldview derived from ancient Greece – has written significantly on Confucian thought, but said absolutely nothing (that I’m aware of) about anything Indian or Buddhist.

It seems to me, then, that when modern Westerners turn to other traditions to seek something missing in their own, they look to China if they think the “something missing” has to do with intimacy, and India if it has to do with ascent. A notable exception to this tendency (of looking to India for ascent and China for intimacy) is Yavanayāna Buddhism, which looks to the Buddha’s Indian Buddhism for an intimacy philosophy that celebrates the interdependence of all things – something it is not. But I suspect the chief reason it can do this is the presence of East Asian Buddhism, which does celebrate interdependence in a way that would be quite alien to the Buddha himself. In this respect, I think Yavanayāna is the exception that proves the rule.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. And one might well trace much of this single-mindedness in the West back to Plato, with his focus on the good as one and single. Most notably, the single-minded Plato banished the poets from his ideal city. He did this for a variety of reasons, but all of these had to do with the poets’ leading us away from the single true good: their works portrayed the false idea that external goods matter to a good life as much as virtue; they imitate the bad as well as the good; and their very practice of imitation leads one to mistake falsity for truth.

Marxism – about as modern a political philosophy as one can get – has paralleled Plato (and the Salafis) in a political single-mindedness. Plato’s ideal state seems totalitarian in theory; implementing Marx’s vision turned totalitarian in practice, even if that was not his intent. Self-proclaimed Marxists pursued the vision of a classless society with a zeal that overrode any and every other possible goal. Pol Pot justified some of his atrocities – the evacuation of the cities, the mass murder of intellectuals – with the chilling words: “If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?”

Now in saying this I am not agreeing with the distorted account of Karl Popper. While I would dispute Popper’s interpretation of Plato and Marx to some extent, more important in this context is his unfortunate lumping of G.W.F. Hegel in with these two; for Hegel’s vision strives directly to encompass the particulars of everyday life without sacrificing them to a higher ideal. Yes, the state is necessary to human fulfillment, and Hegel’s state is less liberal than those we are accustomed to, but it does not dictate the details of life in the pursuit of a single ideal, in the way of the Platonic state or of existing Communist states.

Indeed, I find the unabashedly Hegelian thought of James Doull perhaps the most helpful way to theorize and think about philosophical single-mindedness. For Doull, the most abiding philosophical issue is a conflict between the universal and the particular – between the one singular truth or good that Plato picks out, and the manifold reality that surrounds us. Single-mindedness is then a dogged focus on the universal that disparages the particular.

And if we understand single-mindedness in this way, with Doull, then we can start to note its appearance in South Asian traditions as well — most clearly in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta. For Śaṅkara as for Plato and Mao, everything of significance reduces ultimately to one driving universal thing that’s most important, and nothing else compares. One may contrast particularist thinkers like the Sophists or postmodernists for whom there is no universal, and the details are all that matter. The project of Aristotle, and his followers Hegel and Doull in turn, is to harmonize these viewpoints and acknowledge both the one and the many, the universal and the particular, as having great significance – a significance found perhaps especially in the relationship of the one and the many to each other.

Personally, I find Doull’s reflections particularly helpful because I am very much a big-picture thinker. It’s probably one of the big reasons I was so impatient with the philological questions that preoccupy so many scholars of religion; I was always asking “but what’s the point?” On the Myers-Briggs personality test I scored near the middle on three of the four dimensions, but off the charts for “iNtuiting” over “Sensing” – which is to say that I gravitate toward abstract concepts, theories, larger significance, and away from details and particulars. In many respects philosophy appeals to me precisely because it deals with the biggest questions of all — the most important things, the universals. But the problems of modernism — to say nothing of Salafism and Communism — are a good cautionary reminder of why the details really do matter. One may well find a universal ultimate that is most important; but that does not make everything else unimportant.

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. You go to New York because you want the best of everything – for indeed, in New York you get the best of everything, at least if you can afford it. I like to talk about the great Thai food at a couple of restaurants back home in Boston, being as good as it is in Thailand, but these were blown away by a truly stunning Northeastern Thai restaurant that recently opened up in the East Village neighbourhood – the sauce on their laap was pure perfection. The Boston places are very good, but they can’t keep up. Nor is the Boston subway nearly as fast or as extensive; nor does a brand-new store selling cheap, quality, high-tech Japanese clothing open up all around the city. Nor are there browseable bookstores four storeys tall – one of which was the place where I purchased Annas’s book. And these are just examples I experienced on a four-day trip, with relatively limited funds – no attempt to, say, see Jon Stewart live.

But as I noted before, all this is just the problem. You go to New York because you want to have the best of everything – and that means you will always be wanting more. I remember, on one of my first trips to New York years ago, speaking to the New Yorker closest to me, who was already making an income likely higher than anything I’ll ever make – but spoke of his frustration that this was less than his MBA classmates. You don’t go to the place that has the best of everything if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be satisfied with the life you have. In the terms of Herbert Simon and Barry Schwartz, New Yorkers are maximizers rather than satisficers. And this, in turn, is probably why the people in this wonderland are the unhappiest in the United States.

Which brings me back to Julia Annas’s quote. Like Simon and Schwartz, she uses the language of “maximizing” – in her case, to describe what it is that “ancient philosophy” does not advocate. You can maximize your variety of food choices, but you can’t maximize courage. John Rawls popularized the highly unfortunate term perfectionism to describe virtue-focused ethical theories; it is an awful term, since virtue theories are in this respect the opposite of perfectionism in the usual sense of that word. Perfectionists, as we normally understand the term, are the consummate maximizers, never satisfied because they strive to make everything perfect, including themselves. But Annas is pointing out that the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle onwards are very different from this: their philosophy cannot be put in terms of maximizing, not even the maximizing of virtue. Rather, try to live a flourishing life – a life with which you can be satisfied.

I think it’s important to stress and illustrate Annas’s point because it helps illustrate an alternative to consequentialism, the widespread view according to which the best actions can be defined in terms of bringing about the best total consequences. Consequentialism is the philosophy of maximizing, the worldview that built New York. (Philosophical utilitarianism, the most common variant of consequentialism, is a direct ancestor of modern economics.) The “ancient” view offers us something quite different, in a way that Rawls’s “perfectionism” concept obscures.

It’s important to have this alternative because consequentialism is so filled with problems. I think Schwartz and Simon point us to a paradox at the heart of consequentialism – at least of hedonistic forms of consequentialism, which is most of them. I’ve attempted to note this before: trying to maximize our own happiness is like trying to get to sleep; thinking about it gets in the way. But the same is true about maximizing others’ happiness. Happiness is there in the moment. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have now, and even with what others have now. Eventually, you are going to die; and if you keep trying to maximize, you are going to die unsatisfied. This was the point behind my rejection of utilitarianism: there’s a fundamental problem behind a life devoted to making others happy as possible, when doing so makes you unhappy yourself. If everybody lived the way you did, they would all fail at their goal.

It is true, as commenter Ethan C-F pointed out before, that we can realize a good for others that will come about after we’re gone, even if it too will eventually perish in the cosmos. But it seems to me that if we’re going to strive to benefit others, we need to see a good in the striving itself, in the doing of good works for others, and not in their consequences – successful or not. It is that attitude that allows us to be happy satisficers rather than miserable maximizers. I think that this point is what underlies the enduring popularity of the Bhagavad Gītā, the reason the pacifist Gandhi drew his inspiration from a text that advocates war: if you tie your happiness to the consequences of your actions, you will not be happy, and neither will anyone else who does so. I suspect that Jack Layton had figured out this lesson, which is why he was as inspiring as he was.

The Gītā’s worldview, to be sure, is quite different from Aristotle’s – all about adherence to an externally defined duty rather than the cultivation of flourishing. But they share the rejection of consequentialist maximizing; they are willing to let virtue be its own reward.

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna.

McMahan, more than most observers of Yavanayāna, rightly notes the extent to which Buddhist modernists affirm the very phenomena that the early Buddhists were most suspicious of. I’ve noted before how Yavanayāna Buddhists often treat “interdependence” as something to be celebrated and rejoiced in – the very opposite of the Buddha of the Pali suttas, for whom it was something to be escaped. But McMahan extends the point to two other phenomena I’d thought less about: nature and everyday life. The old texts see the forest as a fearful place, full of dangerous animals, far from contemporary ideas of celebrating nature and our harmony with it.

And in what seems to me the most original and insightful of McMahan’s contributions, he points to the way that Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to treat “mindfulness” as an appreciation of the beauties and even sacrality of everyday life in the world of mundane work and family. Drawing on Charles Taylor‘s work, McMahan notes that modernity in the West has characteristically involved just this kind of orientation. Using the term found in Ken Wilber and Martha Nussbaum, I have characterized it as Descent. Indeed for McMahan, the affirmation of everyday life is found most characteristically in modern novels, especially those of James Joyce, which highlight the subtle and particular details of everyday experience and consciousness; and it is Joyce whom Nussbaum takes, in Upheavals of Thought, as the ultimate paradigm of the descent she advocates.

It strikes me that the affirmations of interdependence and nature are themselves forms of Descent – embracing the connections of the material world with all its flaws and imperfections, avoiding attempts to transcend it. The advocates of affirming nature and interdependence tend to see themselves as opposing scientistic and technological views of the world that attack nature; but I think they’re also in their way opposed to the early Buddhist texts’ quest for an other-worldly (lokottara) nibbāna/nirvana. Buddhist modernism, then, seems to be characterized by a move from Ascent to Descent orientation – as, it would seem, is modernity in general. (I might argue that in many respects Buddhist modernism is also a move from an integrity orientation to an intimacy orientation – and in this respect it is against the grain of modernity in general. But that could be a post of its own.)

But there’s more to the story of Buddhist Ascent and Descent than this. McMahan is rightly ready in his book to note that none of the features of Buddhist modernism have been entirely novel; they all had some precedents in premodern tradition. But those precedents were found far more often in Mahāyāna than in Theravāda – and above all in East Asian Mahāyāna. Yavanayāna has a stronger Descent orientation than does Ch’an or Tiantai; but those in turn have a stronger Descent orientation than the older Indian Mahāyāna, which in turn is more of a Descent than the oldest Buddhism recorded in Pali (or Gandhari or other ancient Indian languages).

So perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that it is in some sense linear. Depending on one’s own orientation, one could view it either as progress or as decline; but it is a continuous progress or decline, moving toward one point and away from the other. The Buddhism of the Pali suttas is not all that far removed from its contemporary rival Jainism, about as thoroughgoing an Ascent tradition as one could name – a tradition whose monks practised self-mortification in order to achieve a superhuman state of transcendental solitude. Perhaps one could even identify early Jainism as the very first step, before early Buddhism, in an Ascent-Descent movement whose latest stage is Yavanayāna.

With the rise of Mahāyāna, Indian Buddhism takes a Descending step, especially under the influence of Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna claims that saṃsāra and nirvana are not different from one another; nirvana is merely this world viewed properly. This statement sounds like an affirmation of everyday life, a descent, and it will be used that way later; but it only goes so far. For Indian Mahāyānists like Śāntideva, the important thing is that we normally view this world improperly, and that wrong view mires us in the terrible suffering that constitutes everyday life. Transcending that everyday world is still paramount, and one is best suited to do it as a monk, leaving work and family behind. Nature, too, remains suspect – the Indian Pure Land sūtras describe a world of beautiful buildings and carefully manicured gardens, and view it as a marked improvement on the chaotic and dangerous nature that normally surrounds us.

East Asian Buddhism, as I understand it, takes a step past Indian Mahāyāna toward Descent and immanence. For pre-Buddhist East Asian thought was already far less anthropocentric than Indian thought, more oriented to what we in the West would call nature; and Buddhism in East Asia absorbed such an orientation to the physical world. McMahan notes that classical Ch’an/Zen literature is full of stories of monks liberated at the sight of mundane natural images, like a frog jumping into a pond; this is not an idea one would find in India. Relatedly, the Huayan tradition begins to talk about interdependence in something like the positive light it takes on in Yavanayāna. For the Huayan thinker Fazang, we do not need to transcend the world, not even through knowledge of its illusory nature as in Nāgārjuna or Śāntideva: interdependence or dependent origination is the “marvelous manifestation of the cosmic Buddha,” so properly seeing the world means only “seeing it as the wonder as it is.” And East Asia also introduces the idea of sudden liberation: taking Nāgārjuna a step further, liberation is now something we can achieve not only in this life but in this moment, right here and now. (It increasingly seems to me that the Chinese and Japanese changed Buddhism at least as much as the modern West ever did.)

Despite all of this, East Asian Buddhism still retains an emphasis on monkhood. Buddhists soften their criticisms of family life when they defend the tradition in China, to win acceptance in a society whose ways of ethical thinking are heavily Confucian; but they continue to emphasize the detached, ritualized life of the monk. Ch’an and Zen affirm the everyday world, but McMahan notes that it is the monk‘s everyday world. He notes that the Zen master Dōgen had said “There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.” But, says McMahan, “In contrast to contemporary interpretations of Zen spontaneity however, this meant an intensive formalization of every activity, from meditation to using the bathroom.” (234-5) The “practice” spoken of was not merely being mindful of events in the everyday household life, but in the ritualized life of a monk. “True spontaneity, on this model, was not doing whatever one wanted; it could only come about when the extremely formal gestures and acts that made up the monastic life became ‘natural’ and effortless. Then they could be understood as expressions of buddha-nature.” (235)

Here Yavanayāna takes one more Descending step. Even though some of its most influential figures (like Anagarika Dharmapala and Thich Nhat Hanh) were and are monks, Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to downplay the importance of monasticism. Indeed, S.N. Goenka‘s organizations effectively prohibit it. One is allowed to live at a Goenka vipassanā meditation centre (and help run its activities) for a period of a few months; but one may not do it for the long term. Even if one wishes to, one cannot leave worldly society for a Goenka Buddhist society, in the way that the most devout would have been expected to follow in traditional Buddhist societies. That path of Ascent is forbidden. From the original disparagement of everyday life, Buddhists – even Theravādins like Goenka – have now moved to requiring it.

EDIT: Due to a technical glitch, the podcast was not yet available when this post first appeared. It is now available: http://newbooksinbuddhiststudies.com/2011/09/02/david-mcmahan-the-making-of-buddhist-modernism-oxford-up-2008/

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. God in the Hebrew Bible is the arbiter of truth as well as ethics; the Sophists reduce not merely justice and goodness, but truth, to the subject that knows them. (In a similar way, for Doull, Plato’s Sophist dialogue makes essentially the same point as the Statesman, even though it would appear that one is entirely about metaphysics and the other about politics; both are asking how ideals can relate to physical reality.)

In ethics, as I noted in the earlier post, analytic philosophers tend to use the terms internalism and externalism to describe the opposing positions on this question. In ethics, internalists say that genuine reasons for action must come from our own motivations or desires; externalists say there can be reasons that come from outside us. To use Doull’s examples, the Sophists are the ultimate ethical internalists, the Hebrew Bible the ultimate ethical externalist text. (Consider Ecclesiastes, which repeatedly advises us to fear God and follow his commandments even though it repeatedly denies the possibility of our attaining any benefit for doing so, in this life or the next.)

Now, as well as in ethics, analytic philosophers also use the terms “internalism” and “externalism” to describe positions in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Ethan Mills discussed this other form of the distinction in comments on a recent post, and I’ve been trying to learn some more about it. What follows is some preliminary attempts of mine to think through the distinction between internalism and externalism in epistemology, and relate it to the distinction in ethics. Apologies if the results are somewhat unclear, as I’m still thinking it through.

Before reading this analytical literature, I had already saw an important internal/external distinction of sorts in epistemology, parallel to the one in ethics. (Doull influenced my thinking here too.) In ethics, we may ask whether we acting subjects are the measure of goodness; just so, in epistemology, we may ask whether we knowing subjects are the measure of knowledge. Ethical internalists say our reasons for action must all come from within us, from our motivations; ethical externalists say we can have reasons to act independent of our motivations. There seems to be a parallel set of questions in epistemology: can the reasons for our beliefs be independent of the ways we come to know them? For example, can we logically speak of a truth that no subject is capable of knowing? Or as the Sophists would put it: is man the measure of truth?

It is not quite clear to me, though, that these questions are what analytic philosophers mean when they speak of “internalist” and “externalist” epistemologies. In Ethan’s comment, the key question dividing internalism and externalism is: Can we really be said to know something if we don’t or can’t know why we know it? Externalists say we can, internalists say we can’t. In online introductory works on internalism and externalism, the problem is phrased in terms of justification rather than knowledge: can our beliefs be justified even in cases where we don’t or can’t know why we hold them?

Now, when the distinction was put in this way, it was not immediately clear to me why these positions were even called “internalism” and “externalism.” In ethics the terminology seems clear enough to me: internalists say that any reasons for action must come from our motivations, which are inside us. But what is “inside us” about knowing how we know or knowing why we hold our beliefs, the hallmark of epistemological “internalism” in the analytic sense? Another article, by Joe Cruz and John Pollock, helped clarify. Internalism on Cruz and Pollock’s view “is the view that all the factors relevant to the justification of a belief are importantly internal to the believer”; our knowing how we know or why we hold our beliefs is itself internal to us. An example of the contrasting, externalist view would be “reliabilism”: the view that a belief is justified if it comes from a source that is in its nature likely to be correct, even if we don’t know that it comes from that source. (So in recent debates “common sense” was defended on the grounds that it is
“reliable.”) The distinction might be illustrated with an example from Laurence BonJour:

Norman, under certain conditions that usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power, or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against his belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.

A reliabilist would need to say that Norman’s belief that the President is in New York City is justified, because his clairvoyant power is reliable – even though Norman doesn’t know it’s reliable. (Perhaps it’s one of the first few times the power has manifested.) By contrast, an internalist, like BonJour, says that in such a case Norman’s belief is not justified – even though it’s true. Which is to say, I think, that Norman has no reason to believe the President is in New York.

It’s on this matter of “reasons to believe” that I suspect the two analytical internalism/externalism distinctions dovetail the most. The internalism/externalism question in epistemological justification asks: what counts as a good reason to believe something? In ethics, it asks: what counts as a good reason to do something? In both cases, the internalist says that the good reason must be within us.

Ethan notes in his comments that the South Asian Nyāya school is similar to the reliabilists: what matters is that knowledge is formed by the right kind of process, not anything within us. We can know without knowing how we know. So they are effectively externalists in the analytical sense at issue here. Yet at the same time, the Nyāya have a slogan that “whatever exists is nameable and knowable” – for something to exist objectively, it must be available to subjective knowledge. To speak of something which exists but we couldn’t know – that is meaningless. Here, man (or other subjective knowers) is in some sense the measure of truth, as the Sophists would have wanted to have it. On this score, the Nyāya view seems more comparable to ethical internalism, the view that good reasons must come from within us – truth is in some sense within us knowers as well. Perhaps one could describe the Nyāya as externalists epistemologically, but internalists metaphysically or ontologically?

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.

For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.

Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?

Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)

The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.

The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)

What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.

In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.

Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:

What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)

What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.

The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.

By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.

Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.