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.

The question, or some form of it, came up a number of times in recent discussions of “common sense”: if common sense isn’t reliable, I was asked, what is? I’m going to try to avoid the word “reliable” as I think its different uses became confusing in the previous debate; I have little stake in its use as a term. But the basic question of determining truth from falsehood is a crucial one and worth asking.

That’s not to say, however, that it admits easy answers, for I don’t think we should expect easy answers on the most basic philosophical questions. If the answers were easy, it would be a stunning and bizarre fact that so many intelligent people have spent so long trying to answer them and explain them without coming to a resolution (as indeed has, so far, been the case in the recent debates, though these have lasted only weeks and not centuries). This is one reason why I don’t identify knowledge of the truth as deriving from a single source like “common sense” – though my posts and comments should make clear I have many more specific problems with that concept, especially as defined by Thill and other commenters on this blog.

How should we identify truth instead? The question of how we should discern truth is closely linked to the question of how, in practice, we do discern it. I like to say that we start where we are: we assess new information learned by reasoning out its coherence with the information we have already accepted. The new information comes in through sense perception one way or another, though the perception might be of someone else’s testimony: I observe you tell me something.

So I think the Vedānta schools are probably right when they describe the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) as perception, inference and authority – that is, the testimony of sources we trust. But that’s not to say any of these sources are always right. Rather, they’re right often enough to be worthy of our belief unless there is some reason to mistrust them in a particular case: for example, I would normally believe my eyes telling me that there is a large yellow stick floating in front of me, but I can’t touch the stick and I have heard that this perception is a symptom of eye diseases, so I don’t.

When a particular belief is in question, though, it’s not enough to refute it merely by saying we learned its contrary through any of these means of knowledge; for they can be, and often are, wrong. Moreover, this is not a matter of one means taking precedence over another. Yes, my senses tell me that the sun revolves around the earth; but because I trust the authority of trained astronomers, I know that this is not the case. Or alternately: a scientist friend (in this case our esteemed commenter Ben) tells me there’s a new article in a refereed psychology journal telling us that caffeine doesn’t actually increase alertness; but I don’t accept this claim because it is so completely contrary to my felt and observed experience of caffeine’s effects on myself. The conclusions must have been misreported, or something wrong with the methodology, or the sample unrepresentative, or the definitions of “alertness” something very different from what I understand by it.

But how do I, or should I, make the decision in those cases where means of knowledge conflict with each other or with themselves? I don’t think a hard-and-fast rule can be provided. Providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I tell true from false?” is like providing an easy and definitive answer to the question “How can I become a better fiddle player?” Discernment of true and false is a virtue, a skill learned with time and practice; there is a wealth of tips and advice one can offer about how to do it better, but one can’t provide a formula for it that will settle disputes in advance. (Or rather, one can; it’s just that one will be wrong.) In saying this, I’m expressing agreement with a contemporary school of analytic philosophy known as virtue epistemology.

Thill disputes such claims:

If you have easy answers to determine what is unreliable, indeed, if you can go to the absurd length of deeming common sense (on which you rely for your very survival) unreliable, you can surely specify what you consider reliable and what you depend on to function in the world…. your claim that it is not easy to ascertain what is reliable implies that it is not easy to ascertain what is unreliable. This is at odds with your easy dismissal of the appeal to common sense on the grounds that it is unreliable.

But I’ve made no such easy dismissal. The easy answer Thill asked for, as far as I can tell, is a statement of “that which is X is reliable and that which is not-X is not,” an exaltation of one single source of knowledge in the way that Thill exalts common sense, which is what I’ve refused to provide here and elsewhere. My refutation of “common sense” as a reliable source of knowledge didn’t rely on a single-sentence knockdown; more importantly, it didn’t say simply “all X is true and all Y is not,” but tried to show us the complexity of the world and of knowledge. I have never said that the items of knowledge included in “common sense” are always wrong; indeed, I suspect most of them are right. The point was that we do not have any special reason to believe a claim based on the fact that it is said to belong to “common sense” (in the sense of knowledge learned without training).

If my alternative view can be described in a sentence, it is probably this: we need to engage in the complex process of knowing as best we can. And if that sounds vague, that’s because it is, intentionally. You should be suspicious of anyone who claims to give you a single easy tip that sums up the whole of how to play the fiddle, do successful biology experiments, or pick up romantic partners. You should be similarly suspicious of anyone who claims to easily sum up how to tell truth from falsehood in the general case.

There is, of course, plenty to be learned in each of these practices; that’s one of the reasons they’re not easy. There are various tips and tricks that can aid in each: play emphasized notes with a down stroke of the bow; control as many variables as you can; groom your hair carefully; trust the conclusions of scientists with expertise in their fields. All of these tips are generally wise, but still admit exceptions: there are two emphasized notes of the same pitch in a row; controlling an additional variable would cost so much that you’d need to hire fewer staff and make careless mistakes; you’re courting someone who likes the dishevelled look; the scientist misspoke because she’s having a bad day. And in each field there is also advice offered that is well meaning but inappropriate, advice we should not take: play as fast as you can; fudge your data a bit and nobody will notice; pretend to be wealthier than you are; treat a claim as true because one can learn it without specialized training. The acceptance or refutation of one of these tips may be a relatively simple matter by itself; but that doesn’t make the whole practice an easy one.

Is this a definitive account of how we can discern truth? No, it’s just a start. But that’s the point.

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Mou thinks the Buddhists provide conceptual tools to discuss this relationship which the Confucians didn’t have.

The key metaphysical distinction Mou takes from the Buddhists is between “perfect theories” (yuanjiao 圓教), monist theories according to which existing things are ultimately identical to the one good, and “separation theories” (biejiao 別教) in which they are fundamentally distinct. Mou identifies Tiantai Buddhism as the key example of perfect theory, and Yogācāra as separation theory; both believe in “buddha nature” as an ultimate value in the universe, but for Tiantai we are identical with it in a way we are not for Yogācāra (or so Mou claims). He is a strong advocate of “perfect theory,” and with that monism he sets his Confucianism apart from many others’. Especially, he rejects the thought of Zhu Xi, probably the most influential Confucian thinker since ancient days, because Zhu insists that Heaven (tian 天, the ultimate source of goodness in Confucianism) is separate from the human mind.

The debate Mou examines between perfect and separation theories may seem like the kind of abstract technical debate that is relevant only to Buddhist-influenced neo-Confucians. But I don’t think it is. I’m coming to think the distinction is quite a powerful one for cross-cultural philosophy – because it applies even to traditions Mou doesn’t really think about or care about. It seems to me that in key respects it is the same debate that I – following Skholiast – have previously characterized as a debate between ātmanism and encounter.

Perfect theories are “ātmanist”: they claim that created things, trees and jars and human beings, reveal themselves in the end as equivalent to the ultimate truth or good. The idea of ultimate “encounter,” by contrast, requires that the ultimate source of value (Heaven, Buddha-nature, God) remain ultimately distinct from flawed, fallen worldly beings. Here’s the thing: I spoke of this debate primarily in the terms of Indian Sufism. Sufis typically aim at an experience of mystical oneness with God; the Indian Sufis debated whether this meant that human beings really were one with God, or whether God must ultimately be irreducibly distinct from us. That is exactly what’s at issue between perfect theory and separation theory as Mou describes them – even though Indian Sufism is a tradition which, to my knowledge, Mou had absolutely nothing to do with.

It goes further. Skholiast, in setting out the terms of ātmanism and encounter, was drawing on still other traditions. He used the term “ātmanist” to refer to Ken Wilber, who draws perhaps most heavily from Aurobindo, and clearly draws the term from Advaita Vedānta, the tradition whose central teaching is that everything is all one ātman (self). And “encounter,” with which Skholiast contrasts Wilber and Advaita, draws heavily on the thought of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Yet neither Judaism and Vedānta registered much on Mou’s radar either – when he looked outside of China philosophically it was mainly to Kant, with occasional references to Christianity and Indian Buddhism.

It seems to me, then, that in exploring perfect and separation theories, Mou is asking a perennial question. Across very different philosophical contexts, people have struggled at length with perfect and separation theories, the question of the relationship between ultimate value and everyday things. It’s a question well worth thinking about.

Mou’s answer also bears some thought, because it leads in a fairly distinctive direction. The perennial questions I’ve most commonly examined have been the questions of ascent vs. descent and intimacy vs. integrity. How do perfect and separation theories (ātmanism and encounter) relate to these questions? At first, perfect theories seem to map relatively well onto theories of integrity ascent, like Advaita, which aim to transcend this world for a solitary unity, and theories of intimacy descent, like those of Lévinas or Martha Nussbaum, which embrace the physical world and its relationships. Integrity-ascent views, like perfect theories, point us at a metaphysical unity we can identify with if we cast off our mistaken identifications with the physical world. Intimacy-descent views, like separation theories, warn us of the arrogance of a quest for perfection and ask us to embrace a flawed world that will never fit a perfect good.

Mou, however, flips this all around. His metaphysical “perfect theory” is combined with an ethics of intimacy descent. In practical terms, Mou is resolutely Confucian. Not for him any monastic rejection of worldly goods; the human life is best lived in the everyday world of work and family. We live best when we recognize that ultimate metaphysical value is found right in all of these everyday things. Mou is unusual in thinking that perfect theory makes a good fit with an intimacy-descent life. His approach resembles that of the Bhagavad Gītā: act in the finite with your eye on the infinite. Moreover, I think it gets around the objection that Nussbaum makes to the Gītā’s kind of view: she claims that one isn’t really living in the material world if one doesn’t identify with it, if one goes through the motions like a “play-actor.” Here Mou’s view of perfect theory is distinct: unlike Advaita, the material world for him is no illusion. Heaven or buddha-nature, the source of ultimate value and goodness, are all there in the material world, and that’s exactly why it’s so important to live in it and play by its rules.

Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” The history of violence across traditions is of course long and bloody. So, in an effort to prevent such violence, one smooths the differences over to the point that they no longer really seem to matter. The traditions, effectively, no longer say anything.

I was reminded of this point when I attended the National Seminar on Comparative Religion at the University of Allahabad in 2005, celebrating the founding of a department of comparative religion. In a country racked by conflict between Islam and “Hinduism,” the presenters had the laudable goal of trying to celebrate commonalities – but often in ways that presented more harm than good. One non-Muslim presenter even said she stressed her respect for Islam by placing an idol of Muhammad beside the other statues she prayed to – apparently not realizing that Muslims have traditionally considered idolatry of any kind to be a cardinal sin, even forbidding depictions of Muhammad. She was perhaps the clearest example of something the advocates of “interreligious dialogue” so often do: she missed the point of the tradition she was dealing with.

It is of course difficult to speak of “the” point of any given tradition. And some forms of some traditions are quite compatible with this approach to interreligious dialogue. The best example I know of is Reconstructionist Judaism. As I understand it, Reconstructionists see different traditions, such as Judaism, as “civilizations,” cultures laden with history and ritual, more than beliefs or paths to enlightenment or codes of ethics. This Judaism is more of an ethnicity than a soteriology.

Such a view might similarly suit much of what is today called “Hinduism.” Vasudha Narayanan, former president of the AAR, once in its journal juxtaposed “liberation and lentils.” Raised Hindu, Narayanan associated her tradition more with cultural rituals, such as her relatives’ choosing the auspicious kind of lentil for particular festivals, rather than the philosophical and mythological accounts of liberation that were spoken of in her graduate coursework. This “lentil Hinduism” sounds a lot like the Reconstructionist account of a religious civilization. And that account does indeed seem to fit many members of such traditions, so closely associated with a particular ethnic or national group.

But, one might ask, what about the thinkers classified as “Hindu” who do stress “liberation”? They might be a minority, but they’re there. Nobody reading the works of Śaṅkara or Rāmānuja could imagine that their traditions are all about finding the auspicious lentils for the right occasion. Śaṅkara is not trying to give us a culture, a set of traditional practices that give a group its ethnic identity. Like a Buddhist, he is trying to free us from the suffering inherent in worldly life. And his path is not necessarily compatible with others.

Śaṅkara himself provides an important challenge to the advocates of Dabru Emet-style reduction of differences among traditions. For he’s often taken to be saying all paths are equally valid – but he isn’t. True, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita tradition, it doesn’t matter which god you worship; any deity can be a viable path to the ultimate. You can worship Gaṇeśa, or Krishna, or Jesus – it’s up to you. But that’s because in some respect the gods you see ultimately reveal themselves to be illusions, compared to the one ultimate truth. More importantly, the Buddhists, who don’t worship gods, are just plain wrong, and he spends a large portion of his work attacking them and explaining why.

There are real differences between – and within – traditions, and those differences matter. The life of the ideal Confucian, deeply immersed in family life and politics, is worlds away from the
life of the ideal Jain, seeking monastic liberation from all the fetters of this world. It matters a great deal which one is right – or if both or neither are right. It makes all the difference in the world. That is why I’ve defended the practice of apologetics, of attempting to convert others, even when performed by relatively ignorant people like FOX’s Brit Hume – it is ignorant attempts to convert, not attempts to convert as such, that are the problem. It may be the case, especially in places like India, that one should publicly diminish the differences between traditions for pragmatic political reasons – pretending to agree when one doesn’t, in order to reduce violence. Here finding the truth of the matter is less important than keeping people alive. But as Levenson points out, such an approach has no place in a document whose Hebrew name means “to speak the truth.”

Now if common sense is defined as primary theory, what then is its philosophical significance? Far less, I would argue, than is often claimed for “common sense.” The problems with primary theory are twofold: first, it is relatively limited in scope; and second, it is often wrong. Both of these problems can already be seen from the demarcation I laid out in the previous post – the point that common sense (thus defined) does not include the hard-won conclusions of natural science. Common sense can tell us that people who eat raspberries will be healthy and those who eat mistletoe berries will sicken; it doesn’t tell us why this is the case. That requires an accumulation of specialized knowledge gained through more systematic investigation. Similarly, common sense tells us that the sun goes up and goes down, as does a baseball – moving in the sky around a fixed earth – when in fact this is not the case at all, we are the ones who are moving.

Likewise, contra Thill’s comment, common sense does nothing to prevent racism, and historically has done much to support it. Thill claims “Common sense tells us that all humans have the same biology, i.e., a Jew is subject to the same biological processes an ‘Aryan’ or an Arab is subject to.” But to the extent that primary theory tells us this, it tells us the same about other primates, which are killed and nourished by more or less the same things that humans are. Humans outside our in-group, by contrast, can look just as alien as chimpanzees do, with their unintelligible languages and their strange tools or dress. And so indeed many tribes call themselves by a name that translates as “the people” – the common sense of everyday experience has told them that others were something not quite human. A more advanced secondary theory, a departure from common sense, was required to teach people the truth that we share a common humanity.

And so it is no strike against a philosophy that it denies common sense, in either sense of the term. I explained before why our understanding should be able to depart from prevalent ordinary beliefs. But if we aim at truth, we should also be ready to depart from primary theory. It is far removed from common sense to say that the earth revolves around the sun, or that apparently solid pieces of matter are mere collections of atoms; yet these claims are nevertheless true. And, to take us back to earlier discussions, the same can be said of Madhyamaka philosophies like Nāgārjuna’s that claim the world as we experience it is ultimately unreal. If one’s secondary theory did not at times and on some level contradict the primary theory, one could probably just stick with the primary theory and call it a day. But if one seeks genuine truth, one needs to do better than that.

Now it is reasonable to demand, as Aristotle does, that philosophy “save the appearances” to some extent: if one says that common sense – in either sense – is wrong, one must then go on to explain why it’s so common. One needs a theory of error. Some counterintuitive philosophies have a hard time providing this. Śaṅkara tries to tell us that truth is really one, indivisible; he grants that we perceive plurality, and argues that this perception is ignorance and error. But if everything is one and indivisible, how can there be ignorance? In order to be ignorance, wouldn’t it have to be a second thing, divisible from truth? One might argue Śaṅkara has ways of answering such an objection, but there’s no denying that it’s a thorny problem for him, comparable to the Abrahamic problem of suffering. If a philosophical system cannot adequately explain the existence and prevalence commonsense views (again, either in the sense of prevalent ordinary beliefs or the sense of primary theory), then that is a genuine strike against it. But the bare fact that it diverges from common sense is not in itself a problem.

This is a broadly Hegelian account of the history of philosophy. Judging by his use of the term Aufhebung, Skholiast has intended it to be such. My own sympathies with G.W.F. Hegel are no secret, given my influence by James Doull and his school. But while expressing my admiration for Hegel before, I also expressed my biggest concern about his system: that it fails to do justice to Asian thought.

Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy argue that philosophy proper begins with the Greeks and only develops in the world that they influenced. Much of this comes out of an idiosyncratic definition of philosophy, one that ties it closely to the individual political freedom that the Greek citizens had. I’ll admit I don’t understand Hegel well enough to understand why he defines philosophy this way, but it seems highly suspect to me – especially given that he is perfectly content to consider feudal Christian thought philosophy, at a time where there was little political freedom to express wide individual differences in thought, and when Greek democracy had disappeared.

Probably more important than mere definition is the question of timing. Hegel places Asian thought at the start of philosophy, in a way that presumes Asian systems of thought to be static. In Hegel’s defence, the project of translation was only beginning; Hegel had little access to Asian thought beyond the classics. If one hadn’t read any Western philosophical texts dating from the common era, it might look static too. With only the Asian classics available, it might be easy to characterize Asian systems as lost in one side of the truth: the Chinese lost in the particular and pragmatic details of statecraft and etiquette, the Indians lost in the abstract universals of metaphysics and logic. And so in neither one do you get something that Hegel (more plausibly) takes as central to philosophy: a universal principle that is nevertheless expressed in the particulars of reality. I’ll admit some of my own generalizations might sound like they support Hegel’s claims here – but that is because they are generalizations, and therefore by their nature must leave out some significant details.

For once one explores the later development of both Indian and Chinese thought, one can find major thinkers who take the particulars of the world as real expressions of universal principles, in the Aristotelian way that Hegel takes as so crucial – and what’s more, they do so in a way that could not have happened if not for the centuries of philosophical development that preceded them. I think here of Rāmānuja in India and Zhu Xi in China. Rāmānuja articulated an understanding of the world’s particulars as the real expression of a divine unity, refuting Śaṅkara’s view of those particulars as an illusion. But Rāmānuja was also building on Śaṅkara’s exposition of the nature of that unitary universal (braḥman); and both of them developed their views with the tools of logical argument first developed by Buddhists. All of this happened well after the classical era that Hegel’s books refer to. So too, Zhu Xi saw the particulars of the world as expressing a universal principle or pattern, li 理 – but he got that term from Chinese Buddhists who had equated this li principle with the emptiness of all things (a rather un-Hegelian view). It was his Confucian commitments, his desire to synthesize Buddhism and Confucianism, that led him to develop the idea of li as expressing a pattern in real, concrete things. And the idea of li among Buddhists had itself been a new Chinese development beyond the Indian schools it had derived from. In both places there is an active working out of philosophical positions in history – and one which leads, at one major medieval point, to a synthesizing view that puts together universal and particular in a way that Hegel should be able to respect.

If all of this is the case, it implies that there is a recognizably Hegelian development taking place in three different and parallel philosophical traditions, not merely in one. But this fact complicates any Hegelian story of philosophy’s history, because Hegel characterizes the history of philosophy as a single story with a single telos, a single development. The Marxist geographer David Harvey said perceptively about Marx’s thought that it is “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space.” This insight, I think, was the foundation of Harvey’s project to turn Marx’s historical materialism into a historical-geographical materialism. I wonder whether one could take what Harvey did with Marx in social theory, and do it with Marx’s mentor in philosophy.

I thought of one important answer to this question because of some friends who are interested in Frithjof Schuon and his fellows in the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. The members of this school believed, and continue to believe, in a philosophia perennis, a kind of philosophical wisdom that persists across cultures throughout the ages. Central to this perennial philosophy is the idea of an ultimate Reality distinguishable from the everyday world we perceive with our senses – an ultimate One which Plato, Śaṅkara, and Zhu Xi might all arguably be said to have found, more or less entirely independently of one another. The perennialists tend to believe that the reason so many came to this conclusion in so many places is because it was the truth – it was really there, to be observed or deduced by any human being anywhere if they cared to take a serious look.

As for me, one reason I find classification of philosophies so important is that I’m only willing to meet the perennialists halfway. I am struck by the recurrence of different ideas across philosophical traditions, and I suspect at least some of that is indeed because it is true. What I don’t buy is that the thinkers cited by the perennialists were the ones who found the correct answer. For those thinkers who seek an ultimate Oneness beyond the world of the senses, like Śaṅkara and Plotinus, are basically Ascent thinkers, almost by definition. And yet Descent thinkers, who embrace the material world and its flaws, are just about as common in the history of philosophy – probably more so, since they’re so much closer to that elusive beast called “common sense.” Indeed, as I noted in my post on Asperger’s, many of the greatest ascent philosophers (Plato, Augustine, Śaṅkara) were followed soon enough by a more descent-oriented thinker (Aristotle, Aquinas, Rāmānuja) who tried to harmonize those ascending views with a more everyday understanding of the world – to “save the appearances,” as Aristotle put it. That’s not to mention the thinkers who didn’t bother harmonizing with the ascent tradition and preached a pure descent of sorts – while ubiquitous today, they also have significant historical precedent in thinkers like Mozi.

What I’m getting at is this: the question of ascent and descent – of whether we should ascetically seek a perfect world beyond, or embrace the world of the senses with all its flaws – strikes me as a perennial one, widespread throughout the history of philosophy. But it is the question that is perennial, rather than the answer – or at least, the perennial answers are multiple. Human beings, when they have started to think about questions beyond their immediate survival, have tended to think about the kind of questions that I refer to as ascent and descent – and they have answered these questions both ways. I strongly suspect that whatever truth is out there to be found is going to be somewhere in the middle; and it is by identifying these ideal-typical answers that we can more successfully locate where that middle will be. As many difficulties as I have with Ken Wilber’s thought, this is a reason I keep coming back to him: I think he gets this point, and really tries to harmonize ascent and descent. (The big danger in doing so, one I’m not sure Wilber avoids, is reaching merely a compromise and not a synthesis.)

I’m not quite sure whether the same discussion (mutatis mutandis) would apply to Kasulis’s distinction of intimacy and integrity, but it might. East Asian thought often seems to have embraced the intimacy orientation wholeheartedly; one finds some elements of the integrity orientation in Mozi, but even he doesn’t seem to go all the way. I suspect glimmers of it do keep showing up there, as Daoists and Buddhist monks retreat out of the wider society. But suppose that isn’t so – suppose East Asian thought is basically all intimacy. Then intimacy-integrity is not quite a perennial question in the way that ascent-descent is – it is not a question that is asked everywhere. Even so, it seems like the distinction remains essential for those seeking philosophical truth, because so many great thinkers come out on either side. If one is to do justice to the concerns of humanity’s great thinkers, if one is to really find truth, it seems to me that one must find some sort of synthesis (and not merely compromise) between intimacy and integrity, as between ascent and descent.

But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.

I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? (Epicurus is perhaps the clearest example of a figure who avoided both supernaturalism and politics – but Epicureanism as a system did not last, and even those who sought to resurrect Epicurus’s philosophy have sometimes ditched his anti-politics.)

Last time I mused on the subject, I turned to an explanation from Simone Weil: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” Humans, Weil seems to imply, will always seek some sort of absolute perfection: the choice is to seek it in an otherworldly realm, or in the future of this one. Eric Voegelin appeared to see the same choice as Weil, and view the latter choice as disastrous: there will always be an “eschaton,” a Final End that human life aspires to, and if we immanentize it – that is, set it in this world instead of a transcendent world beyond – then we will end up with totalitarian states that goosestep over the messy imperfections inevitable in human life. Whether or not there were any other world in which to transcend, according to Voegelin, the absence of belief in such an other world leads us to terror in this one.

But I asked before: do we really have to seek an absolute good? What about just seeking modest improvements, trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it? As non-supernaturalists, shouldn’t we just try and make sure that people set their eyes lower than Weil and Voegelin do?

Well, one answer that comes to mind for that question is: death. The existence of a final death seems to pose a major problem for any sort of egoistic consequentialism, any idea that one should seek out the best consequences for oneself – including the virtue and tranquility that Epicurus himself seeks. For eventually, there will be no further consequences no matter what one does. At the last moment of one’s life, there is no future, nothing to maximize and no reason to do anything. And at the previous moment, all the egoist can act for is something better in that last moment. In the earlier moments of life, the moments that one can improve will run out before one knows it. As important as this one life looks while we’re in it, it begins to look pretty small when one faces impending death, whether it is impending in seconds or in decades.

By contrast, an absolute good – an “eschaton” – outlasts the individual self, it is something bigger to strive for. Even striving for the good of one’s immediate circle of friends and relatives seems hollow when their death will follow in a few decades as well. But the state – that offers the promise of something more lasting. The Jacobins are long dead, but the capitalist world unleashed by the French Revolution is still with us. The possibility of a classless communist society offers the same intoxicating thought of a world in which one’s contributions live on long after death, a world where one’s life is more important than its mere length.

Politics, then, offers a way to transcend death through what Freud called cathexis – as might one’s children and one’s work. We break down the boundaries of our selves and identify them with something that outlasts ourselves, such as a state or new classless society.

But there remains a basic problem with transcending death through cathexis in this way: the object of cathexis has no guarantee of immortality either. Lenin’s classless society lies in ruins today. What guarantee have we that the perfect society we think we’re building will not do the same? Let alone the more minor improvements we might make to politics as it is. This seems to me the greatest problem with descent philosophies of whatever variety: however much one might accomplish, in the end it comes to naught. Lucretius is right that when we die we won’t care about that nothingness. But that doesn’t stop it from casting a shadow over all we do in life, raising questions about the point of it all, whether it’s really worth bothering or we’re just fooling ourselves.

And so I start to turn to ascent philosophies, views that turn us in some respect away from the world we see. But then we are back to the original problem: most ascent philosophies, especially the ascending intimacy philosophies, are supernaturalist. They depend on an afterlife, turn us away from this world toward the one that is supposed to come after death – but to one who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, it would seem like there is no such thing.

However, those philosophies of the afterlife have one thing in common with the descent philosophies. They both put the absolute good, the eschaton, in the future, whether a transcendent or immanent future. A great appeal to me of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy is that it gives us an eschaton which is beyond time itself, and therefore essentially not in the future. We have an absolute good that is already there at all times; it’s just a matter of realizing it. Does Śaṅkara get us entirely beyond the supernaturalism-or-politics quandary? Probably not – he believed in rebirth himself, after all, and the main point of bothering to realize the absolute good would be that one would do so in the future and avoid the suffering attached to future ignorant births. It makes for an interesting alternative way of viewing the problem, but not necessarily a solution to it.

People describing Grandin often reach first for words like “extraordinary,” “fascinating,” “remarkable.” These are not the words that come to my mind. I say this not because I find her accomplishments limited – they are major – but because I find her story very familiar. I don’t know if I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s myself; but I do know that Asperger’s is part of a spectrum, with full-blown autism on one end. At the other end, I think, one finds the behaviour of typical science-fiction geeks and absent-minded professors, in whose company I unquestionably fall.

The central features of Asperger’s syndrome are a difficulty with social cues and a narrowness of interest; one falls far outside the normal realms of human interest and interaction. (My interests are almost opposite Grandin’s, yet this makes me sympathize with her more. Where Grandin has been obsessed with animals since her youth, my mother recalls that I was the only child to be completely uninterested when a bunny rabbit was brought into our classroom.) The subtle interplay and social niceties that come so naturally to most people, must be learned deliberately and consciously, as one learns mathematics – and learning these is often far more difficult than learning math.

There are a number of philosophical implications that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome might have. In today’s post, I want to focus on its implications for the history of philosophy.

I’ve recently been noticing a repeated pattern in Indo-European philosophy: one great philosopher posits a realm of pure reason, absolute abstraction, an abstract Good set above and beyond the particulars of the everyday world; and then that abstract philosopher gains a disciple (whether known personally or hundreds of years later) who takes the first philosopher’s abstract ideas and embeds a modified version of them in the concrete everyday world. The first philosopher is to some extent an Ascent thinker, trying to transcend the material and social world, and the second is more of a Descender, trying to embrace it.

The classic version of this pattern is in Plato and Aristotle. Raphael’s The School of Athens immortalizes their differences – Plato pointing up vertically to a transcendent world of Ideas and Aristotle emphasizing the horizontal world of matter – but Aristotle nevertheless embraces much of Plato’s worldview, agreeing the Ideas exist but situating them in matter instead of in their own outer realm.

I see at least three places the pattern repeats itself. In Christianity, Augustine points to a transcendent God, sublime in infinite majesty compared to a world of darkly fallen, sinful humans, hoping that through God’s grace we can ascend to something better than our worldly fallen state. Much later, Thomas Aquinas works God much more deeply into the world of human interaction, seeing it as the working out of God-given natural laws. Here the repeated pattern is explicit, with Augustine drawing deeply from Plato and Aquinas from Aristotle.

No such influence is present in Vedāntic India. Yet I think the same pattern appears. Śaṅkara, clearly influenced by Buddhists, sees the world as full of suffering and produced by ignorance, and advises us to transcend it to realize our nature as a single entity of pure knowledge and consciousness. Then Rāmānuja draws on Śaṅkara’s account of cosmic oneness, but sees it as manifested in the physical world.

Finally, one can see a similar pattern among the great thinkers of modern Germany. Consciously attempting to move away from the supernatural transcendent worlds proposed by Plato and Augustine, Kant nevertheless identifies a realm of pure reason that would exist even in the absence of anything concrete; and tells us our moral goodness lies in following this reason, as opposed to the natural inclinations of the physical and social world. Soon enough, Hegel tries to take Kant’s pure reason and show how it underlies the physical and social world of desire and inclination. (An acquaintance once proposed to me the analogy “Kant is to Hegel as Plato is to Aristotle”; I would now add “as Augustine is to Aquinas as Śaṅkara is to Rāmānuja.”)

So to return to the earlier concerns of the post, I can’t help but wonder whether the first philosopher in each pairing had Asperger’s syndrome, while the second did not (or had it more mildly). I imagine that the same sense of being outside the normal world, which drove Temple Grandin’s animal research, also drove Plato and Augustine and Śaṅkara and Kant – but then in each case someone more normal and well-adjusted then sat down and tried to adapt their theories so they could fit into the everyday world. This seems to be confirmed in the case of Kant and Hegel, where we have the most reliable information about their personal lives. Kant never married, and was said to have been so obsessive about punctuality that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by his daily walk; Hegel, meanwhile, had a wife and children and seemed to live a relatively normal personal life by the standards of nineteenth-century Prussia.

I seem to recall Graham Harman noting a while back (I can’t find the reference) that most great philosophers today begin by making an extreme and exaggerated claim that draws attention, and then gradually pull back to a more moderate position. I wonder if the same thing may occur interpersonally: a weird outsider with an autism-spectrum disorder is needed to get the philosophical world to pay attention and shake things up, and then someone more socially well adjusted is required to give those theories wider acceptance. Grandin suggests that Asperger’s may be one of the world’s great wellsprings of creativity: “if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses…. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.” (quoted in Sacks 292) Perhaps one needs a maladjusted, socially inept genius to create a great idea and then an “accountant” to make it stick. (Sacks’s piece mentions Wittgenstein as someone who might have had Asperger’s, and there is a certain transcendent aspiration in some of his work; it may have been the whole 20th-century school of analytic philosophy that brought his work down to earth.)

At least, that seems like it may be the Indo-European pattern. I don’t see anything parallel in East Asia, perhaps because East Asian thought has so much stronger of an intimacy orientation. (At the SACP two years ago, I said to an East Asianist colleague that I thought explicit argument and disagreement were essential to the progress of philosophy. He said he thought that I was being Eurocentric; when I noted how much explicit argument there is in India, he modified it to “Indo-Eurocentric.”) For better or for worse, people with Asperger’s tendencies seem to have found much less of a home in East Asian thought. Perhaps that should be no surprise: after all, Aspergians make terrible Confucians. A philosophical climate that stresses etiquette and social relationships is about as uncongenial an environment as can be imagined for someone like Temple Grandin. The thought of such a person might have had a much harder time getting a foothold there.

On Korsgaard’s account of Greek metaphysics (à la Plato and Aristotle), goodness is a feature of reality, one more fundamental in a sense than the particular physical objects that appear before us. Perfect form is more real than imperfect matter. This is true whether, with Plato, those forms exist in a world apart from matter, or, with Aristotle, they exist within matter as its potential and telos.

But if that’s the case, Korsgaard notes, then the logical question is: why aren’t things perfect already? We normally think of theodicy – the problem of suffering and responses to it – as primarily a problem for Abrahamic traditions. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, it’s hard to see how there can be suffering in the world (though it’s less hard to see how there can be evil). But broaden the question a bit – make it “the problem of bad” – and it appears elsewhere too. For Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, in which reality is pure knowledge, it’s a conundrum to think how there can be so much ignorance.

And Korsgaard seems to provocatively suggest that the Christians were better equipped to handle the problem than the Greeks – connecting to her account of how an ethics of excellence was superseded by an ethics of obligation. The ethics of excellence, in Plato and Aristotle, remains teleological: things naturally tend toward perfection. But if this is so, how do we account for people’s all too evident imperfection? Aristotle tells us that a person who is well brought up will tend toward excellence; but what of those of us who aren’t? Korsgaard claims that Aristotle doesn’t say very much about them, but notes that he does say they require law – thus possibly laying the seeds for the fusion of Greek thought with Jewish law in Christianity. Alasdair MacIntyre, I think, would suggest that Aristotle’s teleology as it stood was rooted in the Greek polis, where standards of excellence were largely agreed on and socially embedded; in such a situation, most people would be well brought up. But as the polis fragmented into empire, the well-brought-up began to seem like exceptions rather than rules. And so with Greek and Roman empire we enter a world where law and obligation, rather than excellence, are the fundamental moral concepts – to the point where even a committed Aristotelian like Thomas Aquinas will express ethics above all in terms of natural law. (This story of the transition from Greece to Christianity, I think, parallels the one I have attributed to James Doull.)

Korsgaard, as I noted last time, comes out of this story noting that the modern world is more like the Christian than the Greek in a most fundamental respect. Since we see matter and not form as the most fundamental reality, we no longer see goodness and value at the heart of things. And so we can no longer accept an Aristotelian account on which things (including people) tend naturally toward their perfection; people, on a modern scientific metaphysics as well as a Christian one, are fundamentally fallen, flawed, imperfect.

Still, the Christian world, like the Greek, remains laden with value, with God’s goodness at its very heart. And so the problem of badness and imperfection – already a problem in Plato and Aristotle, at least on Korsgaard’s account – becomes even bigger in Christianity than it did with the Greeks. I really don’t think monotheists ever successfully resolved the problem of suffering, to the point that if an omnipotent God or creator God existed I still wouldn’t think we should put our faith in him.

A world without value at its core is the world generally suggested by modern natural science, with the hypothesis of God the creator refuted by the evidence. But as I noted before, it is also the world suggested by Buddhism, at least before the doctrine of Buddha-nature complicates the picture. The world just is; it is indifferent to our suffering, and it’s up to us to do something about that suffering. Still, the Buddhist view does raise questions about how value comes to exist in the first place. Why is suffering bad, or why is it experienced as bad? How can that badness, that fact that something is wrong with suffering and we should do something about it, come to be, if goodness and badness are not somehow fundamental to the nature of reality? One might go so far as to say that Buddhists and scientists face a problem of good.