Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. There is always much more to the reasons a philosopher says anything than the arguments that she makes for it. Certainly the arguments matter. They always do. But they are not the only thing that matters. Michael is right that depth of interpretation requires a serious attention to detail – but arguments are not the only details.

So what else could we be speaking of here, other than arguments? I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine what that could be. An argument consists of premises leading to a conclusion. But where do those premises come from? Sometimes from other arguments – but not always. We can follow a chain of reasoning back from one argument to another argument to another, but eventually it’s going to stop somewhere. There will be a premise that is simply asserted – or at least as often, and this is particularly important, a premise that is not even stated but merely assumed. And if one merely understands the structure of a thinker’s arguments but not the assumptions that underlie them, one will not have understood that thinker.

I should note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with an assumed premise, or one asserted without argument. Indeed, one has to do it at some point; one cannot say everything, or one would run out of space. It’s just that if one is going to assume or assert a premise successfully, it must be an assumption that is shared by one’s intended audience. That’s the point that is typically missed by overeager campus missionaries: you are not going to get anywhere by telling me that Jesus is God’s only son because the Bible says so, since I don’t accept your assumption that the Bible as an authority on that matter. If I did, your argument would be sound; but I don’t, so it isn’t.

Within analytic philosophy, when these shared assumptions are highlighted it is usually with the term intuition. I find that term highly inappropriate, because it suggests that these “intuitions” are something more than mere shared assumptions. But it’s not wrong to ground one’s arguments in those shared assumptions that get called “intuitions” – simply because, again, one has to start somewhere. On the “continental” side this point was one of Gadamer‘s key insights: new knowledge is always measured against the “prejudices” (Vorurteilen) we already have. (I find Gadamer’s “prejudices”, or Martha Nussbaum’s “prevalent ordinary beliefs” – a term derived with reference to Aristotle’s phainomena – all much more appropriate terms than “intuitions”. For the purposes of this discussion, I think it’s fine to call them “assumptions”.)

Now where all of this gets us into trouble is when we start dealing with thinkers who don’t share our assumptions (and we don’t share theirs). Such thinkers exist even within our own time and place (as with the overeager campus missionaries). But the greater the distance in time and space, the greater the disconnect of assumptions is likely to be – and the more crucial it is to consider not merely the explicit arguments but also the assumptions of the thinkers we hope to learn from.

Figuring all this out was crucial to my own dissertation work. Śāntideva, I noted there, believes that material goods are harmful and still urges one to give them to others for their benefit. If I’d merely considered his explicit arguments and nothing more, I would have had to have stopped there: Śāntideva is a fool who contradicts himself, and there’s an end on’t – and in that case, why bother studying him any further?

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I followed the method of looking for coherent authorship, as stated by Thomas Kuhn: I tried to ask myself how an intelligent person could have written such an apparent absurdity. And that required looking deeper into Śāntideva’s assumptions: the things he believes but doesn’t say. Key among these was the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I argue in the dissertation that if you look at the things Śāntideva does say, you can infer that Śāntideva believes this, and it makes sense out of his explicit arguments in a way that you can’t get from looking at the arguments alone. Such an approach, I think, is crucial to making sense of any philosopher outside of one’s own immediate cultural milieu. If all you’re going to consider is the arguments, you might as well not bother. And indeed, most analytic philosophers don’t bother much with thinkers from distant times and places, which, considering their method, is just as well.

But that is not to say analytic philosophy is worthless. Not at all! It just doesn’t prepare you very well for studying the history of philosophy (which is why that history tends to be relegated to the sidelines of analytic departments). What it does very well is attempt to get to truth within a given context, namely ours – to take the incoherent mess of “intuitions” or prejudices, with which we must always begin our philosophical reflection, and start to hammer them into something that actually makes sense. For that reason I often refer to analytic philosophy as the scholasticism of the liberal tradition. Like medieval Christian scholasticism, analytic thought provides an extraordinary level of detailed reflection within one given context, which is necessary if those within that context are going to seriously strive to reach a truth about their lives. But it also makes that thought look parochial from a foreign context; I strongly suspect that the majority of analytical reflection will look as bizarre to people 500 years from now as Christian scholasticism looks to us today. Those people of the future may well be able to benefit from the argumentative details of 20th-century analytic philosophy; but it will require someone with the interpretive approach of a continental philosopher to figure out just what it was the analytic philosophers were going on about.

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.

And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas?

I suppose it might not have been so hard for Hall to think that way as a member of the Luckiest Generation: the pre-baby-boom scholars who taught at a time, unthinkable now, of vast expanding opportunities in academia. But for a member of today’s academic proletariat, it’s hard not to think in materialist terms – to follow the money, as one tries to think and write in socially approved ways in order to make it possible to earn a living.

It’s not that contemporary academic thought in the humanities is monolithic; there are at least three major methodological approaches that are very much at odds with one another. But there is something these approaches all share in common, and I think that that something can be attributed directly to the material conditions of academic life.

The first and oldest of these approaches is philology. Philology is devoted to the collecting, editing and translating of old texts – figuring out exactly what it is the text says, more than what it means. There aren’t that many philologists left teaching at smaller or regional colleges, but they often receive the juiciest teaching positions at the big prestigious universities, the Harvards and Pennsylvanias.

The second major approach is analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers devote their attention to analyzing arguments in ever more precise detail, leaving aside as many extraneous issues as possible in order to get one tiny conclusion exactly right. Analytic philosophy tends to be the object of scorn and derision outside of philosophy departments, but it rules those philosophy departments with an iron fist. The philosophy job market is cruel enough to those who are trained solidly within the analytic tradition; if you do anything else, your odds of getting a teaching position in a philosophy department these days are very close to nil.

The third, and surely most widespread, of the three is postmodernism, or the many variants on it. Postmodernists believe, among other things, that there is no definitive interpretation of any given text; a text is certainly not limited to what its author intended. So one can, for example, perform a “queer reading” of a classical text, examining homoerotic dimensions that are more apparent to a contemporary reader than to someone in the text’s own time. Leading postmodernist Jacques Derrida emphasized reading at “the margins,” those parts of a text which the author wished to wave aside. In philosophy, the majority of postmodernists are often quite cagey about advancing philosophical theories that they claim as their own (in the way that analytic philosophers do); rather, their works typically involve the exegesis of someone else’s existing work.

All three approaches are found in religion departments today, and they are typically quite hostile to each other. Postmodernists, especially, are philosophically opposed to the philologists’ attempt to pin down a single fixed text and the analytics’ attempt to find a single truth; analytic philosophers and philologists both disdain postmodernists’ apparently fast and loose readings of texts and of the world.

Beneath this hostility, however, there is one thing that all three schools of thought have in common. And that is the tendency to think small. The philologist focuses on tiny details of a single text, the analytic on tiny details of a single argument. The postmodernist may look at a whole text or even corpus of texts, but with the attempt to establish one single new interpretation among many, no attempt at anything grand or definitive; and talking only about what’s within the text and its historical context, not examining whether the text’s content is true or correct about the world outside the text. (Thus much postmodern work in so-called ethics tends to actually be in ethics studies.)

And that smallness, in turn, brings us back to the material conditions with which I opened. There is endless room to publish new work coming from all three of these methodological approaches. There are always ever more obscure texts for philologists to study, lying forgotten in dusty rooms until someone publishes about them in a journal. There are always smaller and smaller corners of an argument for analytic philosophers to poke at, finding some new detail or twist that has not yet been explored. And there are nearly infinite ways to reinterpret a text in the postmodern manner, taking the many permutations and combinations of applying interpretive lens X to text Y. If you want to publish in an academic journal, any variant of these three strategies gives you a good start for finding something new to say.

What you can’t do is be a scholar in the manner of Confucius, who tried to faithfully pass the received great ideas of the past down to new generations. Such scholars were the norm in the old days; now they are nearly an extinct breed. Sadder yet, the dominance of these three schools leaves no room for the wide-ranging, broad-minded work that pulls together many fields of knowledge into a single synthesis. If a young scholar today were to try to write the contemporary equivalent of Plato’s Republic or the Mencius, she would find herself eating out of garbage cans.

It is for these reasons that I have embraced blogging with such excitement. In academia, I could never have gotten away with asking the big questions I ask here. I would have earned great scorn for saying as much as I do on Greek and Chinese philosophers without knowing Greek or Chinese. Never mind that Thomas Aquinas managed to be one of the world’s greatest Aristotle commentators without knowing any Greek; if written today, his painstaking works would be snubbed as the scribblings of a dilettante. But if one wishes to try and learn, as I do, from all the major philosophical traditions – to learn all the languages involved would itself require a lifetime of training before one could begin to do any actual thinking. Outside of academia, one can start the thinking process as one wishes, and allow oneself to be corrected by people who do know the relevant languages if one gets something egregiously wrong.

I make no secret of being a big-picture thinker. (At least, not anymore.) But I also keep in mind the admonitions of the previous weeks: the details do matter. Ken Wilber is another philosopher who was able to get to the big picture by sidestepping academia; but I found that in his early work at least, he erred in the opposite direction, often writing the same book many times and rarely letting himself be corrected about the things he gets wrong. He could have used some of the detail-mindedness that academia provides. (Though I am currently reading some more recent works of his and finding that he may have started to get better at this.)

For this reason I have some sympathy for all of the approaches I discuss: we need the philologists to collect the texts we learn from, the analytic philosophers to sharpen our arguments’ precision, the postmodernists to remind us there might always be another way of looking at it. All of these approaches risk getting lost in their details, not seeing the forest for the trees; but Wilber (like myself) tends to gloss over the trees that make the forest up. The ideal approach, far easier said than done, is to combine the two. For that reason I’m grateful to have had a detail-oriented PhD training before trying to write about the big stuff on my own. That certainly doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to get it right. But it feels like I’ve got a good shot.

Salomon argues that the manuscripts disprove an earlier model of Buddhist history – according to which there was an original council of Buddhists which established the first Buddhist canon, transmitted to disciples more or less verbatim. Instead, they show us that very different Buddhist texts were transmitted in very different places from very early on; the evidence doesn’t give us a first text that we can come back to.

The question is: what does that point imply? Heuman quotes Salomon to the effect that “none of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures—not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, nor even the Gandhari—’can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha.’” (The first part of the quote, with the italics, is Heuman’s.) Heuman uses this claim to argue against Buddhist sectarian disputes: “Sectarian authority claims assume solid essentialist ground. That type of ground is just not there.” Let us assume for the purposes of this post that Salomon’s historical conclusions are correct. Does Heuman’s critique of sectarianism really follow?

Heuman claims: “Every school of Buddhism stakes its authority, and indeed its very identity, on its historical connection to this original first canon,” the canon established by the First Buddhist Council. But do they really? It is not the Council that was taken to have the perfect knowledge that liberates us, but rather the Buddha himself. Every tradition of Buddhism claims that its core teachings were taught by him.

And we have long known that the Mahāyāna claim to this effect is hogwash. I briefly discussed the evidence for this point before, and I am aware of no scholar with any training in historical methods who seriously contests it. Heuman quotes Paul Harrison to the effect that the Mahāyāna is much older than we had previously thought – but even he doesn’t buy the claim that the Mahāyāna was actually an esoteric teaching preached by the Buddha himself.

Rather, Salomon’s claims question further the ability of the Pali canon – the Theravāda sacred texts – to accurately represent the words of the Buddha. We have long known that the Pali texts were compiled several hundreds of years after his death by the Sri Lankan philosopher-monk Buddhaghosa (whose name, perhaps aptly, means “Voice of the Buddha”); the Kharoṣṭhī fragments cast further doubt on the accuracy of the texts he compiled. So the Pali texts are probably further from the claims of the historical Buddha than we might have thought.

But what does any of this do to undermine sectarian differences? Well, perhaps this evidence provides a way for Mahāyānists to proclaim to Theravādins: “Nyah-nyah!” They can turn the historical evidence that favoured the Theravādins on its head: maybe our texts weren’t really spoken by the Buddha, but neither are yours.

But what follows from such a point? Definitely not the “anti-essentialist” view that Heuman tries to argue, according to which “all Buddhists are 100 percent Buddhist.” That claim begs the big question: who counts as really Buddhist in the first place? As I’ve said before, if all people who call themselves Buddhists are Buddhists, then Dick Cheney can be a Buddhist simply by calling himself a Buddhist, even as he continues to promote mass murder and environmental pillage for the sake of oil profiteering. What that comes out to meaning, in the end, is that it matters not a whit whether you’re a Buddhist or not. Buddhism, on such a view, means nothing at all. And yet somehow the people who say these sorts of things still seem to call themselves “Buddhist practitioners,” as if the Buddha and his words actually mattered and were important somehow. The Heumans of the world want to have it both ways: following the Buddha matters, except that it doesn’t.

In discussing Heuman’s article, Justin Whitaker quotes Richard Gombrich to this effect: “The exegesis of the Pali canon has not yet advanced much beyond where the exegesis of the Bible stood in the middle of the 19th century…” This quote, I think, is correct. And what follows from it is that anyone who cares about the teachings of the historical Buddha should support textual studies like Salomon’s that will help us piece together the difficult task of reconstructing his ideas as best we can, just as biblical criticism has helped us to show how far the New Testament diverges from the words of the historical Jesus. What doesn’t follow is our saying: “Well, hey, we can’t actually know what the Buddha really said anyway, so we might as well just accept everything called Buddhism as genuine Buddhism.” As soon as we say this, we are saying that Buddhism doesn’t matter and there is no reason for anyone to bother calling themselves a Buddhist or engaging in any sorts of Buddhist practice.

The whole point of being a Buddhist or doing Buddhist practice is that that practice is better than other things one could be doing, or that those ideas are truer than others one could believe. (If one didn’t believe that, one would have no reason to be a Buddhist.) If one can accept that Buddhism is better than not-Buddhism, why is it so hard to accept that one kind of Buddhism could be better than another?

Now there are plenty of grounds other than connection to the historical Buddha on which one could argue for one tradition over another. It can sometimes be puzzling why the founder’s words are privileged so much – although I think there are some valid reasons to do so. By all means, say that Mahāyāna or Yavanayāna are an improvement over the teachings of the historical Buddha. Perhaps even try to argue that the Mahāyāna is closer to the Buddha’s words than we might have thought. Or make the theological claim that the different traditions are different skillful means, as long as you understand that that is a theological claim which goes against the self-understanding of most practitioners. Just don’t pretend that crucial questions which divide Buddhist practitioners from one another – should we seek our own liberation or everyone’s? Were there other buddhas after Gotama Buddha? – don’t matter.

I am not here to write about dreadful editorial decisions, however, but rather the content of the book. Lopez undertakes what has become one of the most standard methodologies in the contemporary academic humanities: following Foucault and ultimately Nietzsche, it is typically known as genealogy. One starts with a widely used contemporary concept and goes on to show the history of its usage, in order to create doubts among those who might otherwise use it. This has already been done plenty of times both for the concepts of “Buddhism” and of “science”; Lopez’s project here is instead a genealogy of the joint concept of “Buddhism and science,” the frequent form of inquiry that tries to link the two conceptually or analytically. As is typical for contemporary genealogies ever since Edward Said (though not for Foucault’s own and certainly not Nietzsche’s), Lopez finds the origins of “Buddhism and science” in the colonial nineteenth century. He shows us that claims about Buddhism’s compatibility with science remain remarkably consistent from the late 19th century to the early 21st, even though the science itself has changed drastically.

Now what is the purpose of showing us this point? From Nietzsche onward, the genealogical method has never been neutral. The point has always been to undermine. Lopez doesn’t like “Buddhism and science” any more than Nietzsche liked morality. But Lopez is shier than Nietzsche in proclaiming his distaste for the topic of his genealogy. In a followup article published in the “religion and science” journal Zygon last December, Lopez brings out an “argumentative thesis” which, he claims, was only “implied” in his book:

that claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science have been made in surprisingly consistent rhetorical forms over the course of more than a century and a half, years in which huge advances have occurred in the natural sciences. What is understood by “Buddhism” also has changed considerably over the period. That the claim has remained the same while the meaning of the two nouns — Buddhism, science — has changed so greatly raises a simple question that should give us pause: If Buddhism (however this abstract noun is understood) was compatible with the science of the nineteenth century, how can it also be compatible with the science of the twenty-first? Perhaps it never was, and perhaps it is not now. The more interesting question is why the claim continues to be made.

Now of all the seemingly innocuous words that merit a genealogy of their own, perhaps the most important is this “interesting,” so often claimed without argument. What interests tenured scholars of ancient languages is, to put it mildly, often not what interests most people who now live or ever have lived. So when such a scholar uses the word “interesting” as an adjective to denote a property intrinsic to his subject matter itself, as opposed to merely claiming his own personal interest in the subject, we should at least be alert to what makes it so supposedly interesting. In this particular case, the question of “why the claim [of Buddhism's compatibility with science] continues to be made” is only more interesting if the claim happens to be false. If it is true that Buddhism (however understood) is compatible in important respects with the science of whatever century, the question at issue — why the claim of compatibility is made — ceases to be an interesting one for anyone without an obsessive interest in minutiae. For if this claim is true, then the odds are that that’s the reason it’s being made.

But to actually declare the claim false? That is where Lopez, like most Buddhologists of the present age, refuses to go. In the Zygon article he casually tosses off this bombshell in the middle of a sentence: “no scholar of Buddhism can say what Buddhism should be.” (Lest I be accused of quoting Lopez out of context, I’ll give the whole sentence: “For, although no scholar of Buddhism can say what Buddhism should be, a scholar can say, or at least speculate on the basis of historical evidence, what Buddhism has been for Buddhists across Asia, extending back over more than two millennia.” (891)) The claim is of course false. Buddhism should be a tradition that teaches us important, provocative and potentially true ideas about the nature of reality, how we should live in it, and the practices that will best enable us to do so. I have a PhD in South Asian Buddhism from Harvard University; I am therefore a scholar of Buddhism. And I have just said what Buddhism should be. Obviously, a scholar of Buddhism can say this.

What Lopez presumably means to say is that scholars should not say what Buddhism should be. But the “implied argumentative thesis” above, and indeed the whole book, are important precisely because of their implications for what Buddhism should be. Lopez’s timid rhetorical questions and “perhaps” are a still-timid way of phrasing the motivation behind the book: Lopez likely wants to claim that Buddhism and science are not compatible, not without doing violence to one or the other. If his genealogy were as forceful as Nietzsche’s, he would be able to come right out and say this. But just as Robert Gimello’s class contained a Catholic apologetic disguised as neutral Buddhist studies, so Lopez keeps up the engaged and partisan genealogical method under the guise of neutrality.

Lopez and Gimello share a familiar critique of modernist Buddhism, the Buddhism I have called Yavanayāna. Lopez claims he is trying to call attention to what is lost when it is claimed that Buddhism and science are compatible. I would say that that’s fair enough – except that this mournful scholarly expression of loss always seems to be directed against the Yavanayāna target. You don’t hear such scholars worry about what is lost in Chinese schools of Buddhism that proclaim that material things have an enduring or even eternal existence and we are all already buddhas – directly contradicting some of the most fundamental teachings of the early Buddhist schools. If you’re going to try and worry us about what is lost in “Buddhism and science,” when are you going to try and worry us about what is lost in Tiantai?

The first, normative meaning is the one with the most philosophical significance. This is the one with normative weight; it is in this sense that, if we call something unscientific, we are saying something bad about it. I haven’t pinned down the details of this normative sense as much as I’d like yet, but I think it involves testing falsifiable hypotheses, making controlled experiments, controlling for variables, and above all rejecting hypotheses that turn out to be falsified. I expect to say more about this normative sense of science in the near future.

Overall I think it is that first (normative) sense of science that’s most relevant to philosophical inquiry, inquiry about the nature of reality and how we should live in it. But the second sense also matters, if only because we need to isolate it as a way of understanding the first. In this descriptive sense, science is what scientists do, and scientists are people who have been trained in academic science departments. This is the realm where scientists fudge data to fit their own political agenda or that of their corporate funders. It is also what Thomas Kuhn famously catalogued in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where the consensus among scientists moves much more randomly and haphazardly than the normative ideal should indicate. There is something about science in the first sense that is (I would argue) inherently good; this is not the case about science in the second sense. A man who has a PhD in biology but regularly falsifies data to fit his preconceptions is a scientist in only the second (descriptive) sense, not the first (normative) sense.

What strikes me about this distinction, though, is that much the same distinction could be made about any given “religion.” Not about “religion” as such, for this pernicious category is almost never itself taken as an ideal, but about the various traditions it is taken to encompass: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism. When one Christian tells another “that’s not the Christian thing to do,” she is speaking in the normative sense. She is not saying “you are not acting in the manner of historical Christians, such as the Borgia popes and the Inquisition.” She is saying “you are not living up to Christian ideals”: ideals of charity, hope, forgiveness.

And so likewise in Buddhism. I have a longstanding beef with scholars of Buddhism like Gregory Schopen, who wishes that Buddhist “texts would have been judged significant only if they could be shown to be related to what religious people actually did.” For Schopen, scholars of Buddhism should study Buddhism in the descriptive sense, and the descriptive sense alone. And Schopen’s view predominates in the field; this is why Glenn Wallis could write his Buddhist Manifesto only after he had left the mainstream academy. (Thus the highly problematic, but still predominant, view that anyone who calls herself a Buddhist is a Buddhist.)

The same applies to the study of most other traditions, as when scholars of “Hindu” traditions follow Vasudha Narayanan’s populist injunction to study “lentils” rather than “liberation.” It is sad that such a view prevails in religious studies, though fortunately it does not prevail in the study of science. As I noted before, if the study of science were to take its methodological cue from Schopen and Narayanan, the sociology of creationism would be held more valuable than evolutionary biology. (On this prevailing approach, even ethics starts to get used to mean the study of what other people do, irrespective of what actually is good or bad.)

The one tradition that gets an exemption from all this is Christianity. Since its early days as the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the American Academy of Religion – the main North American academic institution for the study of “religious” traditions, the organization which one must join if one wishes a scholarly job in the field – has embraced a large number of Christian theologians. They get to talk about Christianity in the normative sense, about what it is to be a good Christian. There are plenty of anti-theological scholars who would like to see the Christian theologians expunged from the AAR, but the theologians are much too powerful and entrenched; the anti-theologians mainly exert their weight in the studies of other traditions. The result is a division of labour that is Orientalist in Said’s pejorative sense: Christianity, and no other tradition, can be examined as a normative ideal, a way that people should be and not merely a way that they are. In that respect, in the North American academy, it is Christianity and Christianity alone that can be studied as science is, with a normative eye to its values and truth claims as well as a descriptive eye to its history and sociology.

I once battled to gain this kind of respect for non-Christian traditions; no longer striving to be a professor, I no longer care so much about the dysfunction of the profession. I go over the point because I think it’s instructive in thinking both about what science is and what “religious” traditions are: the grubby history of scientists as a profession does not in itself tarnish the ideal of science for which most of them have strived, just as Schopen’s research showing Buddhist monks owned property does not in itself tarnish the ideal of the propertyless monk free from worldly attachments. Human beings are flawed, and regularly fail to live up to their ideals. That fact does not make the ideals unworthy.

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.”

The different backgrounds of the two writers are evident from their pieces – but that itself makes the dialogue between them more interesting and fruitful. Loy is writing as a Buddhist. In a sense Loy’s arguments come in two pieces: first a dialectical argument to a certain conception of Buddhist first principles, especially based on the idea of non-self, and then a demonstrative argument from those principles to a sense of environmental concern. The first section makes the article more than a piece of “Buddhist theology”; unlike Glenn Wallis’s manifesto, Loy’s article is written as if it is intended to persuade non-Buddhists to a Buddhist point of view.

The substance of Loy’s demonstrative argument is similar to one that I have criticized in the past: that Buddhism is environment-friendly because it tells us to acknowledge our interdependence with other life on the planet. Loy’s argument is a bit more sophisticated than the view I criticized, and might arguably stand up to some of those criticisms. But I’m not going to focus on that point here. Rather, I’m more interested in the dialogue between Loy and Kao, and its implications.

Kao is not a Buddhist nor a Buddhologist, but a scholar of cultural diversity and the issues it poses for global politics. Partially for that reason, Kao’s article does relatively little to engage Loy’s Buddhist claims directly. Instead, she raises interesting and important questions about the proper connection between cross-cultural philosophy and global politics.

While Kao doesn’t say whether she has been convinced by Loy’s dialectical arguments for non-self, it seems unlikely that she has; if she were, it would have serious implications for the opening section of her article, where she continues to identify as a Christian and not a Buddhist. As I understand her article, this raises the question, for Kao, of what to do with the demonstrative (“practical and political”) arguments when she is not persuaded by the dialectical (“conceptual and metaphysical”) arguments.

One might think that the answer should be nothing: if you don’t agree with the principles and premises of an argument, why would you care about its conclusion? But, Kao is right to point out, this is not how things work in global politics. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was crafted specifically as an attempt to find common ground at a more pragmatic level, among people who did not share metaphysical first principles. Jacques Maritain, a Catholic thinker involved in the early stages of planning that document, was convinced that even people of “violently opposed ideologies” could agree on a list of basic human rights — “only on condition that no one asks us why.” This point is telling. Maritain was convinced that his Catholic path of justifying human rights was the only one “with a firm foundation in truth.” But as it turns out, other people happened to believe in the same rights, though their belief was based on what Maritain would likely consider falsehoods. One “agrees to disagree” on the foundations, and works together on pressing practical issues.

Kao rightly interprets Loy’s perspective as being far from Maritain’s. Loy’s article implies that an understanding of self more like the Buddhist one “points the way to” solving the ecological crisis. Kao responds with what I think is a correct (and Maritainian) pragmatic assessment of the situation:

any environmentalism that is conditional upon human civilization becoming “awakened” from its illusory worldviews is going have to wait a dreadfully long time before becoming actualized, if ever. For however ultimately false the socially-constructed distinctions between selves and others, egoism and altruism, and nature and culture are or may be, these ways of thinking are firmly entrenched and dominant today. On this side of (spiritual or secular) nirvāṇa, then, I submit that environmental campaigns will stand a greater chance of success if they strategically work within those paradigms, even if by appealing directly to people’s selfish desires and “illusory” assumptions, than if they insist upon first trying to liberate us all from them.

I suspect that Loy would in fact agree with this claim. For his article is not a practical piece about the most efficacious methods of convincing others to solve environmental problems; it is a philosophical argument for why we should be trying to solve those problems in the first place. In Maritain’s terms, Loy is trying to find an environmental worldview that has a “firm foundation in truth.” And, while I tend to disagree with the particulars of Loy’s approach, I do think it is in many respects the right approach to take.

For when one attempts to find common ground – whether on human rights, environmental issues or any others – without finding common ground in metaphysics or first principles, that common ground is and must invariably be superficial. In the battlefields that constitute politics, superficiality may well be perfectly appropriate. The point here is similar to my recent discussion of doubt and certainty: one cannot wait to establish the truth, individually or collectively, before one acts. There is not enough time for that. In the short term, one must simply act as best one can, and pragmatic acts of superficial compromise may well be the best acts available.

Such compromises are nevertheless a second-best approach. For they are mere shifting alliances, an attempt to exercise power without getting to the truth of the matter. Kao closes her article with an approving quote of feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether to this effect: ““an ecological crisis of global proportions can mean nothing less than a true dialogue and mutual enrichment of all spiritual traditions.” But such dialogue and enrichment is exactly what is denied by a focus on political compromise. One doesn’t learn anything of substance from the other tradition, for (given the urgency of the impending crisis) one doesn’t bother taking its arguments seriously and sorting through them. True dialogue and mutual enrichment are all about an understanding that is deep rather than superficial, one that “asks why” in a way that goes against the Maritainian compromise.

Moreover, the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the American Academy of Religion and this blog are not intended as fora for pragmatic political compromises. Their influence on global politics is slight enough that they make extremely poor places for such compromises. Rather, they are fora for scholarly discussion and thought. As such, what they do best is go deeper, attempt to establish what is genuinely true and what is false.

My critique of Wallis’s older work is hardly limited to Wallis; one could make it about a great number of works produced in contemporary religious studies. Anne Monius encouraged her students to ask of the texts and rituals they study: “Why bother?” and “So what?” Why do people bother doing this, and what is its significance for their culture? What she never asked students was to turn those same questions on ourselves: ask of our own work, “Why bother?” and “So what?” But it seems to me like these are the most pressing questions to ask of a work like Mediating the Power of Buddhas.

No such problem exists in the Buddhist Manifesto! Here, we find a call to arms, a clear vision for Buddhist life and thought, intended to transform Buddhists’ own understanding of themselves and their tradition. And no surprise, Wallis published this after he left Georgia and took a position at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies – a new postsecondary institution focused on applied Buddhist teaching, the integration of Buddhist thought and practice. A document like this would have been laughed out of court in any of the major academic journals pertaining to Buddhism. From what I observed of Wallis’s old department at Georgia, if he had published this before receiving tenure there, I’m betting he never would have attained it.

I am delighted that Wallis has found an environment where he can speak up and say the things that really matter, and I am very encouraged that he has published the Buddhist Manifesto. In a spirit of sympathetic cooperation, I’d like to investigate some of its claims further.

The upshot of the document is to draw a distinction between “Gotama,” the original or ultimate Buddha, and “Buddha,” an imagined figure created by later tradition. It proceeds in what I think is the spirit of Walpola Rahula, attributing to Gotama a view that looks very much like what I have called Yavanayāna Buddhism: a heavy emphasis on meditation, and a criticism of “religion.” “Religion” here refers to the colourful rituals, stories, temples, paintings which everywhere form a component of Buddhism as it is practised, but which Wallis, like Rahula, takes to be inessential. (Wallis, with refreshing frankness, acknowledges the beauty of these “religious” phenomena but is concerned about them as a distraction from the more important projects of meditation and awakening: “I love it all! Don’t you? But can we ask: at what cost, our love?”)

But what makes this figure of Gotama; how is he different from the Buddha known to “religion”? What makes Wallis’s manifesto different, and what I think distinguishes him from the likes of Rahula, is that Wallis does not try to claim that his Gotama is the person we will find historically at the beginning of Buddhist tradition if we use academic historical methods to separate out the original from the later accretions. (He is moving away, then, from the kind of approach taken by the Jesus Seminar.) He recognizes that, given the data, such a project is likely not even possible:

I will begin by saying that I am not interested in the old philologists’ project of separating out the original (good) teachings of Gotama from later (bad) accretions. Given what we now know of the textual history of the Buddhist canons (e.g., that they are heavily edited translations of older oral compositions), that project is no longer viable. (p2)

But if not on the basis of historical accuracy, then on what ground do we separate “Gotama” from “Buddha” – and follow the former rather than the latter? As far as I can tell, Wallis identifies his fundamental premise, his first principle, as this: “Gotama was an unsurpassed scientist of the real.” Gotama, here, seems almost to be defined as that figure who had the most important things figured out. Most of what Wallis says takes off as demonstrative argument from this first principle. But why should we accept it? What is the dialectical argument that would lead us to this first principle?

Wallis says his premises – the one about Gotama above and those which follow from it, such as a distinction between Gotama and the traditional Buddha – are “obvious, fair, and accurate.” All of these terms are debatable; as my recent posts on “common sense” should indicate, I’m rather skeptical of appeals to the “obvious.” More important overall seems to be Wallis’s following claim for these premises: “They constitute our starting point as Buddhist practitioners.” (p3) And later he adds “It is so basic to Buddhism that it hardly requires comment.” (p5) Here Wallis’s strategy reminds me of Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who starts with the assumption that his readers are all Christians and doesn’t bother addressing any others, so that the fact of that Christianity can be the opening point for debate. Wallis, speaking to Buddhists, asks: what constitutes your Buddhism? What is the purpose and the point of it – and how much of your practice actually has to do with that purpose?

I daresay that most Buddhists throughout history, and even most Buddhists alive today, would identify their Buddhism very differently. One thinks perhaps of the Burmese Buddhists found in Melford Spiro’s anthropological study Buddhism and Society, for whom interactions of the Buddha were first about magic spells for mundane purposes and secondarily about acquiring good karma; awakening was a distant goal. Such Buddhists, I think, are in some sense the proper target for Wallis’s arguments. It would be fascinating to see their responses to claims like his – defending a more aesthetic or more ritualized Buddhism. So far, too much of that defence has been left to outsider scholars, people who do little more than point out the fact that far more Buddhists in history have been concerned with ritual and stories than with meditation. Wallis raises a fair point, which those scholarly works do little to answer: maybe those Buddhists are wrong.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well.

Only in such a context can one make sense of what I have found perhaps the most annoying behaviour of Massachusetts natives: the habit of responding to the phrase “Hi, how are you doing?” with another “Hi, how are you doing?” Such a response would never be uttered by an Ontarian in response to another Ontarian, any more than they would say “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” in response to “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” (In my experience, this has also been true of most of the rest of the English-speaking world.) I have always believed that “How are you doing?” is an actual question, and therefore merits an actual response. So, in recent years when I have been convinced of the vital importance of truth-telling, if I am not feeling well I have tried to respond to this question with a shrug and a “meh” – or a similar response that implies that, while I am not feeling particularly well at the moment, it’s not a particularly big deal and the questioner should feel no obligation to distract herself with concern about it.

Feser’s approach, while intended to explain away a pleasantry that is in some sense false, also helps explain pleasantries like the Massachusetts greeting that are literally nonsensical. In Massachusetts, the phrase “how are you?” does not mean anything more than “hello,” and people are occasionally startled when the question receives an answer. The words themselves have no semantic meaning at all.

I’m reminded here of Frits Staal‘s study of Vedic sacrifices and recitation. It has long been noted that many Indians in history (including some still alive) have been able to recite all the words of the Vedas without knowing a single word of the Sanskrit language in which they were composed. Staal used his study of Vedic practitioners to argue against those who searched for an intellectual meaning to every ritual, especially to ritual words like mantras, magic spells. He would claim that many rituals are “rules without meaning” – comparing them and the words spoken in them, instructively, to birdsong. (Insert a joke about Twitter here if you wish.)

If we think of pleasantries as analogous to birdsong, I think we learn something important about them – and we do not necessarily diminish these activities for doing so. Since Aristotle it has been a commonplace that human beings are rational animals – and the “animal” is often just as important as the “rational.” We have a need for wordless reassurance, just like our pets.

One might even apply the term more generally to all the kinds of human behaviours that Confucians call “rites” (li 禮) – patterns of interpersonal behaviour sanctioned by tradition, from solemn ceremonies like weddings and funerals to polite gestures like pleasantries. If we think of pleasantries and other speech rites like birdsong in this way, we return to something like the performance theory of ritual that I had criticized in this post: analyzing spoken words in terms of what they do rather than what they mean. But as I later noted, my earlier criticism was too harsh: many rites should be thought of in terms of what they do rather than what they mean, but we should be clear to include our own rites among these. And here it’s worth noting that this applies to rites that consist solely of words, such as “How are you doing?”. Sometimes, we mean what we say. Sometimes, we just chirp it.

Speaking of rites, I don’t expect to post on Sunday, because I’ll likely be busy with festivities for American Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!