I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership.

I’ve never been much of a leader. I’d much rather let people do their own thing, and stay out of their way. But there are plenty of circumstances when such an attitude is not appropriate. Sometimes, we need to make decisions for other people, and it’s not easy to figure out how to do that well. “Leadership” does not figure prominently in premodern lists of virtues (like Aristotle’s), but I wonder if that’s because of different social circumstances. The idea of leadership as a virtue seems to me to come to the fore in organizations that are supposed (in theory) to be meritocratic, and where the input of subordinates is supposed (again in theory) to be valuable. This is the regular situation of a modern business, but seems to me to have been less common in earlier days. Confucius’s “rectification of names” tells us that “a king kings” (that is, a king should act in the manner proper to a king and “a father fathers”; it doesn’t tell us that “a leader leads,” and I wonder if this wasn’t because most hierarchies were specific enough that the more general idea of leadership was unnecessary.

I’m not enough of a social historian to say any of that with confidence. The point is: however that history may be, today we – at least we in the white-collar middle classes – are frequently thrown into situations where we are expected to lead people who are in other respects considered our equals. And this is a situation that requires decisiveness, requires that those decisions be made even when there are others who actively disagree. And Steve Jobs was the best model of this kind of leadership that I knew.

I remember how back in 2001, not long after I’d first obtained my beautiful Ruby iMac, Apple announced one of its famously secretive press conferences for a mysterious new product. Online Apple forums lit up with underwhelmed disappointment after the conference, saying “you mean it’s just an MP3 player?” But that disappointing MP3 player, of course, turned out to be the iPod – a product that wound up being more successful for Apple than any of the computers it had previously sold, and one which probably eventually wound up in the hands of nearly all the people who had previously posted their disappointment. Similarly, the new computer designs that Apple released under Jobs were often notable for what they lacked. It was unthinkable in 1998 for a computer to be sold without a floppy disk drive – but that’s exactly what the iMac was, and it was the computer that saved Apple. If Jobs had listened too attentively to those around him, he could not have made the bold decisions that he did.

In this respect, leadership is in many respects the inverse of humility, a virtue I’ve spoken of quite frequently on this blog. One must listen to others enough to be aware when one might be wrong – but one must nevertheless still make the decision even though it might be wrong.

Indeed, while Jobs’s decisiveness made him a good leader, it may well be the occasional dose of humility that helped make him a great leader. Just before the iPod, Jobs had gushed about a computer called the G4 Cube, saying in interviews “Isn’t it beautiful?” The G4 Cube, as it turned out, was a very expensive computer that was only as powerful as a laptop but had none of the portability. Few people wanted one; I can’t recall meeting anybody who owned one. It was a flop. But soon enough, Jobs admitted “we goofed.” The humility to admit a mistake is essential to a good leader – one must have the courage to make mistakes, but then be willing to accept their consequences. Jobs did, and he didn’t look back – he continued to make the bizarre but prescient decisions that would build his company from a struggling niche player to the most valuable company on earth.

Now as part of an integrated human life, leadership extends beyond just your own organization; it’s one thing to be a good leader for your company’s bottom line, and another to be a leader who benefits humanity as a whole. On this score, Jobs’s later monopolistic tendencies leave me unable to give him the unequivocal praise I would have liked to give; excluding competitors arbitrarily from the iPhone’s store has probably been great leadership for the bottom line, but it diminishes the broader human good in a way that Jobs’s earlier innovations never did. But then power corrupts, and Jobs is no exception to that. I doubt I could have been as effusive about Jack Layton had he actually become prime minister for a significant length of time. For many years, at least, Jobs gave us a model of what it’s like to be a great leader. That model is worth celebrating – and emulating.

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Well, the first part is easy. Rejecting Marx’s form of hope, political hope, is something I found essential to living a happy life. Right now I’m quite excited about tomorrow’s Canadian election – where the socialist NDP, which I’ve long supported, seems poised for an unprecedented breakthrough. But it is as a spectator sport, the excitement of a Boston fan seeing the Red Sox on the cusp of winning the World Series, where one shrugs and gets on with life if one’s favoured team turns out to lose as it has so many times in the past. If my happiness were tied to a real hope that politics in Canada or the US were going to get significantly better – as it was in my teens – I would be setting myself up for crushing disappointment. No, I continue to endorse at least some form of the anti-politics that I learned from Buddhism: we cannot let our well-being be tied too closely to the external goods of politics, things we cannot control. It is best to free ourselves from political hopes and focus on our own virtues, which we can control. I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

But there’s a problem here. This move from the external to the internal, from what we can’t control to what we can, is characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans. But Augustine’s perceptive critique is directed squarely at these Hellenistics: we cannot actually be as good as we think we can. The Stoics move us from hope about politics to hope about virtue. But in Augustine’s diagnosis, that hope too is bound to disappoint. Our bad habits persist; we enlist reason in the name of self-improvement, but too often it turns into rationalization. More than that, even virtue can be a matter more of luck than of effort. This is the main theme of John Rawls’s early Christian writings, which I have been finding more interesting and thought-provoking than the later political theory that made Rawls famous. Our patient endurance or our honesty themselves arise as a result of the biological and social circumstances that made them possible. The clearest example may be the case of Phineas Gage, whose former virtues of self-discipline and respectfulness nearly disappeared after he suffered brain damage. (Such a line of reasoning does suggest a denial of free will which sits uncomfortably with Rawls’s and Augustine’s other Christian convictions, but never mind: I am not concerned with whether the claim is Christian but with whether it is true.) We cannot put our hopes in our virtue, but only in God.

Now this kind of hope seems to propose a greater problem, require a greater pessimism, than does Marx’s. If politics is a problem with no solution, then fine, withdraw from politics and focus on ourselves. But what if our own virtue is a problem with no solution? If we can’t really be all that good, as Augustine says, but his God does not exist and would not deserve worship even if he did? How can such a conclusion lead us to anything but darkness and misery?

Looking back on it, I think that Buddhists provide a helpful answer, and that – as Jim Wilton argued – I may have counted the Buddhist critique of hope out too quickly. And the reason has to do with an important debate within Buddhist tradition, one that I don’t think I’ve explored enough yet: the debate between sudden and gradual liberation.

In traditional Indian Buddhism, my graduate area of study, liberation from suffering is a long, slow, painstaking, gradual process. It doesn’t just take years; it takes millennia, as you work to improve yourself across multiple rebirths to become a perfected person, an arhat or bodhisattva. But in East Asia, and above all in the Ch’an/Zen tradition – to which Jim’s comments about kōans refer – liberation comes suddenly, is experienced in a single moment. I had long been skeptical of the sudden-awakening school. It sounds too much like the worst hippie clichés of Yavanayāna Buddhism, where you don’t actually have to do anything, you can just be yourself as you are and you’ll be perfectly enlightened. It seemed to get you out of all the hard work of making yourself a better person.

And yet in contexts like the present one, I come to see the wisdom in the sudden-liberation approach. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to take the unscientific concept of rebirth out of the picture. But more importantly, it reflects a psychological truth about the achievement of happiness: that as long as one’s attention is focused primarily on happiness, one will not have it. The same is true of several virtues: if one strives to be an exemplar of perfect humility, one will not be very humble. The sleep study noted by James Maas, demonstrating that it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re trying to do so, seems to me like it can be analogically extended to a lot of noble human goals. At some point along the path, you have to stop trying and just be.

All this, I think, is why Jim effectively defended my earlier characterization of Buddhism as a critique of hope, and rejected my later presentation of the Third Noble Truth as a form of hope, the hope of nirvana. At some point along the path, a good Buddhist stops hoping; as long as there’s hope, there’s attachment and not liberation.

And I think that Jim – with the East Asian Buddhist traditions – thereby puts his finger on the reason I felt so happy after that pessimistic post, better than I had myself. The last sentence of the post struck me as upbeat then and still does: “All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.” What I was trying to get at is a transition from the future to the present – an ability to enjoy life and be good just as things are, even in the face of one’s own insurmountable imperfections.

To say that is to risk the very pitfall that made me so suspicious of sudden liberation in the first place: thinking that one is already great just as one is and doesn’t need any improving, leaving one’s weaknesses and problems to fester. But then it seems to me that finding this balance is its own kind of virtue – and like any other virtue, it is a mean between two vices. I don’t know what to call it, but it seems like a sort of meta-virtue: the ability to maintain the effort at cultivating one’s own virtue, while still remaining immersed in the moment of the virtues one already has.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble?

The answer will necessarily be “no” if we define “virtue” (or any of its species) strictly, so that virtue is by definition individual. But I see no clear reason why we should do this. Going back to earliest accounts of the concept, Aristotle does not limit virtue to individuals; in explaining aretē, the word we translate as “virtue,” he speaks of the aretē of a knife: a virtuous (or excellent) knife is one that cuts well. Even thinking of common English usage, we can speak of an honest car dealership, one where all the sales staff are genuinely expected to be upfront with their customers and act accordingly. We can speak of a courageous action taken by a political party, when it adopts a platform that is politically unpopular but is nevertheless the principled thing to do.

Now common usage can and should be criticized; everyday speech is often inaccurate. Are these examples of category mistakes? Virtue is realized and expressed in action; if human collectivities can take action, that fact suggests that they can also be virtuous. But is it inaccurate to speak of an action taken by a collectivity? When we speak of an honest car dealership, a generous government or a humble tradition, is this merely an inexact way to say that these collectivities are generally made up of honest, generous or humble individuals?

I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. The idea that the virtues or actions of collectivities are merely those of their constituent individuals – this puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” But in this very quote Thatcher shows that she’s not ready to carry a reductionist individualism all the way: there are families, which she grants an existence distinct from the individuals who make them up. If families are not merely the individuals that make them up, then surely other institutions – including society itself – can also be more than their constituent individuals.

Collectivities can take on a life of their own. (I say “collectivities” rather than “groups” because the latter term tends to connote a mere aggregation of individuals, prejudicing the discussion in that direction.) We understand this point when we make the important distinction between the rule of law and the rule of men (or women). A government (or a corporation) works best when its members act not according to their arbitrary individual preferences, but according to the interest of the whole organization and the precedents that have been collectively established. When an organization successfully acts according to the rule of law, it is that organization as a unit and a whole, and not merely the individual members who make it up, that is acting justly. It is a just organization, not merely a bunch of individuals who happen to be just by themselves. To describe the organization as just is no category mistake; it is correct.

It is in terms similar to these that I think one may accurately speak of the humility of a tradition – and as something quite separate from the humility of individuals. As Jabali108 noted, defining the terms matters here. I set out a basic sketch of the idea of a tradition two weeks ago, as consisting of both a normative ideal and a set of institutions which often does not live up to that ideal. Thill, rightly I think, pointed out a third separable element of a tradition: its body of accumulated knowledge.

As for humility, I take it to mean the awareness of one’s limits and weaknesses, not only in an intellectual sense but also in a practical one – acting on the recognition that one is fallible and dependent on others. In a more specifically intellectual or epistemological sense, it means listening carefully, recognizing that one has never thought of everything, that others very often have something valuable to contribute – even when one maintains the courage to defend one’s own sincerely held convictions. Above all, perhaps, the readiness to admit when one has been wrong. A mean between the vices of arrogance on one hand and meekness or timidity on the other, as I said to Thill. (If this definition seems imprecise, that’s intentional: spelling out the nature of a virtue too precisely implies that one already knows exactly what to strive for, which in my books itself demonstrates a lack of humility.)

On these terms I defend my previous claim, developed with Ben: natural science maintains an institutional humility as a tradition, because it does not take its claims as infallible, is ready to see them overturned when better evidence comes to light. The ideals of scientific tradition encourage its institutions to act in a humble way. This institutional humility is a very different thing from encouraging the humility of individuals; and indeed the two are in distinct tension with one another. When a tradition emphasizes its own unchanging rightness, as Buddhism or Christianity does, it is much more likely to foster a sense of individual humility – a recognition that one as an individual doesn’t have all the answers, that one has been wrong before. I think this is typically a good thing for the individual within the tradition; but it’s not so good for the health of the tradition itself. Science is a whole made humble by its arrogant members; the “religions” are wholes made arrogant by their humble members.

After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. For the answer is right there in that very sentence. Talk of humility – humility as an ideal – is directly comparable to Druyan’s quote, which is, of course, itself talk. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Ideals are good things to live up to. It’s just that in practice we fail to do so.

The chastened intellectualists named by Aaron Stalnaker – the Christian Augustine and the Confucian Xunzi – tell us exactly the idea spoken in Druyan’s “whisper.” In the few decades we humans have on earth, we remain very new at this whole living thing. We may well be mistaken about a great deal; we have been wrong before. Even our reason can mislead us, a point on which they agree with Freud: too often it serves only to come up with rationalizations for the troublesome desires that are in fact bad for us. I have argued before that humility is, if anything, even more important for Judaism and Islam – for there the gulf between imperfect humans and perfect God is far greater than it is in Augustine’s Christianity, where a human being could be God.

Sagan’s reference to “talk” suggests a gap between ideals and practice. We are all too familiar with the arrogance of zealots, the Bible-thumping preacher and the unpersuadable New Age Buddhist who refuse to admit any doubts in their views. Such people fail to live up to their traditions’ own “talk of humility,” the ideal that Sagan himself identifies: they fail to acknowledge that they are mere humans and not an omniscient God or Buddha. But once we acknowledge that humility here is a gap between ideals and practice, then science does not seem so very different. It is not clear how often science changes because those who held falsified ideas recant them, and how often it changes because those whose beliefs didn’t fit the evidence simply die off. Here we are dealing with my point from last week: in scientific tradition as in “religious” traditions, there is a gap between theory and practice, the normative ideal the tradition advocates and the historical institutions charged with bringing that ideal to life.

This gap can be bridged, of course. Sagan does about as good a job as anyone can at the difficult (because paradoxical) task of demonstrating his own humility, when on pages 256-7 he comes out to list several cases where he has been proven wrong. But in this he is not so far from Augustine, whose Confessions is a book-length account of the various ways he has been wrong in his life to this point – and a painful acknowledgement of the ways he still falls short of the ideal.

There, Sagan (like Augustine) personally lives up to the ideal of humility he espouses. What he doesn’t show us is humility in the scientific tradition he advocates for. In arguing that science is humble in practice as well as theory, he proudly claims that “We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.” He proceeds to cite several examples of cases where young and up-and-coming scientists have managed to overturn ideas previously cherished. But this is no example of humility. It is no humility at all to show how someone else is wrong. Typically, that is the very opposite of humility, which requires acknowledging where you have been wrong. To reward those who generate new ideas and disprove the old can encourage an arrogance that goes against the scientific ideal. For if your data only serve to confirm your null hypothesis – the existing established views – you may well be tempted to fudge that data to get the new and exciting view you wanted, the one that is rewarded. The academic humanities and social sciences often proceed similarly on the model of rewarding those who demonstrate new things, and I can vouch those who have been so rewarded tend to have outsized egos.

Humility is hard work, harder than many other virtues. André Comte-Sponville calls it a contradictory virtue, because he who claims to have it does not. One of the more reliable ways to get it is to submit to the ideals of an established tradition, rather than exalting your independent ideals as the highest good. In this respect, scientific tradition is quite comparable to the traditions we call “religious.”

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Jim’s first example of such knowledge is the “eureka” moments of natural science: points where a discovery is made in a flash, a leap. I agree that such moments, though likely impossible without a long and disciplined prior process of rigorous logical reasoning, themselves include something more than logic; this example is an important argument for an intimacy worldview. The question is: are such moments free from doubt? I think the answer must be no. I don’t think one would have to probe the history of science very long to find a “eureka” moment whose resulting insight turned out to be largely false. I remember that writing my dissertation involved moments of insight which later reflection revealed to be untrue.

Jim refers to the knowledge faculty that produces such moments as “intuition.” He attempts to define “intuition” as a knowledge based on direct perception. But it seems to me that direct perception is among the most unreliable of all sources of knowledge – mirages, ropes misperceived as snakes, eye diseases or whatever example of illusion one might wish to cite.

I suspect that the underlying question in this discussion might be the kind of knowledge derived from mystical experience, the kind of wordless realization obtained in meditation. That possibility came up in the discussion that led to my old post on certainty, where a friend claimed that he reached absolute certainty in his Sufi chanting. But I said then and say now: such experiences lead to a feeling of certainty, but it could be a felt certainty of falsehood rather than truth. I suspect any of us could find a militant fanatic, of whatever stripe we disagree with, who derived his fanaticism from a cultivated vision.

Direct perception, intuition, mystical experience, aha experiences: I don’t intend to denigrate any of these as potential sources of knowledge. But are they sources of certain knowledge, indubitable knowledge? The answer must be no. Indeed, I would argue that they are less reliable sources than is boring old logic; for logic can proceed with the kind of inexorable rigour that rules out impossibilities. As I’ve said before, if there is certain knowledge to be found, it is likely to be there, in the kind of logical certainty sought by Plato.

Still, I want to note an important point of agreement between Jim and myself. In a comment on another post he claimed: “From my point of view (and I think Amod’s as well), doubt is more an openness to what exists than a negative statement or a disagreement.” I like this claim and I think it expresses something true and important. I see doubt as essential given our status as imperfect, non-omniscient beings – there is always more to be learned. Doubt is an intellectual manifestation of the key virtue of humility – a key virtue for monotheists and other encounter traditions, taken a step further by doubting even God. And so too with mystical experience and its directly perceived or intuited cousins: this, too, must be doubted. It is as capable of generating improper pride and arrogance as any of the works of logic and reason. We should not and will not find true certainty there.

To recap a little first: This question was Descartes‘s biggest passion. He wanted one and only one Archimedean point, one firm foundation that could not be doubted, on which he could build the rest of his philosophy. And to doubt that he was doubting would be self-contradictory, so the existence of his doubt and therefore of his own existence became certain. “I think, therefore I am.”

But Descartes was wrong: the existence of the thinking self can be, and is, doubted all the time. Almost all Buddhist tradition rests on just such a doubt: the self is not real. If there is an indubitable Cartesian foundation, one must take it back to “There is thinking, therefore there is being.” But is there even this? Descartes argues that to doubt one’s own doubt (or doubt one’s own thinking) is self-contradictory. To establish this point for certain, however, does require that one accept the logic law of non-contradiction – and accept it as an absolute law, brooking no exceptions ever. Graham Priest’s dialetheist epistemology denies this very point: only by allowing that certain contradictions can be true, he says, can we successfully resolve the liar paradox or Zeno’s paradoxes. As I noted to Thill in the Wittgenstein post, the rules of logic are much harder to doubt than the self – but that sure doesn’t mean they can’t be doubted.

Wittgenstein, as I understand him, tries to dismiss much such doubt by claiming that it is meaningless – but such views, again, seem unhelpful to me. I tend to be deeply suspicious of claims to the effect that one’s opponents’ philosophical positions are linguistically meaningless. This is the classic move made by the very worst philosophers in recent memory: the logical positivists led by A.J. Ayer, who tried to claim that the only sentences that bore meaning were either insignificant tautological definitions or empirically verifiable. And of course, since that claim is itself not empirically verifiable, it is at best insignificant and at worst meaningless, on its own terms. Under the influence of Ayer and Wittgenstein, generations of English-language philosophers tried to wave away “metaphysics,” “religion,” even ethics as meaningless drivel – a phrase probably better applied to their own philosophies. Now I don’t want to engage in guilt by association here, and damn Wittgenstein for his being taken up by hacks like Ayer – for after all, far worse use has been made of philosophers I admire (Marx, Nietzsche, Augustine). That cannot on its own be sufficient reason to believe him wrong. But when a sentence has been made by someone who has thought about the matter greatly, and significantly changed the thinking of others who have heard it, it strikes me as strange to dismiss it as “meaningless.” False perhaps, but not meaningless. It had a meaning to its speaker and to its recipient. Certainly I think there are some concepts – “religion” chief among them – which we would be better off without, because their use tends to confuse us and make us think incorrectly. But that’s not to say they are meaningless, merely that their meaning is unclear in a way that muddles our thinking.

Now when I make all these claims about doubt, their point is not to immerse us in a paralyzing skepticism where we cannot act at all. I don’t agree with the pure skepticism of a Candrakīrti or a Sextus Empiricus, according to which it is spiritually beneficial to hold no beliefs at all. (I strongly suspect that this is impossible.) I do think, however, that there is a spiritual benefit to holding a weaker position in which everything can be doubted: it leads us to a virtuous epistemological humility, leads us to listen, to entertain even seemingly absurd claims that might, on reflection, turn out to have something to them. I have turned out in the past to be profoundly wrong about my most rock-solid of convictions – for example, that the good life is about maximizing overall happiness. In my youth I thought it ludicrous to believe that being good might have little to do with political activism – and yet eventually I found that belief not only true, but essential to my well-being.

Granted, while entertaining these doubts we must still live, we must still act, and this requires acting on what we believe to be true even if we doubt it. Doubt can have a spiritually harmful consequence as well as a benefit. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has likely chronicled this problem as well as any philosopher: one can be ruled by doubts, be so consumed by one’s lack of certain knowledge that one refuses any decisive action. And yet this isn’t an argument against doubt per se. It’s often said that courage is not the absence of fear; that would be simple imprudence. Rather, as John Wayne said, “courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.” One doesn’t eliminate fear, one acts in spite of it. Similarly, decisiveness or leadership – just as much a virtue – is not the absence of doubt, it is doing what one believes is right under the circumstances while knowing full well that one might be wrong. Might be – but, one believes, probably isn’t.

The most famous use of this analogy between individual and state is likely in Plato’s Republic. In Book II, Socrates reminds Glaucon that one can typically see bigger things more clearly than smaller things. Similarly it is easier to observe justice in a state than in an individual, so we should first ask what justice is in a state, and then we will be more able to see what it is in an individual. The city or state is larger than the individual; “perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is.” (368)

Plato’s approach, of using the state to illuminate the individual, is not obvious or natural; it was not taken by the Confucians, as far as I can tell. Confucius in Analects I.2 says that those who behave well toward their parents don’t start revolutions; Mencius argues for benevolence over profit by arguing that a state of benevolent people will flourish. Here – not so surprising given the early Confucians’ social context – the point seems to be to figure out how to run a state, and individual conduct is addressed for its relevance to that goal, rather than the other way ’round.

But one can find a similar approach to Plato’s in a more surprising place, where it plays a different role: the work of the Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti (whom I also discussed last time). In his commentary on Āryadeva‘s Four Hundred – now translated into English as Four Illusions – Candrakīrti also spends a chapter inquiring about how a king might best run a state. His rationale for doing so, however, is telling when compared to Plato’s: “Since the king certainly has egotism and selfishness in abundance, primarily the king is advised about their removal.”

At a theoretical or epistemological level, or in terms of their literary style and method, there is not so great a difference between Plato and Candrakīrti here. Both decide to study the state or the king because this object of study is in some respect bigger than the ordinary individual, and therefore clearer, easier to see. But where Plato sees more justice in the city than in the individual – a good thing, overall – Candrakīrti sees more egotism. The egotistical king is cited as an example of what is worst in us. Plato gives us an abstracted (and idealized) city-state to show us what is good; Candrakīrti gives us an abstracted king to show us what is bad.

With this difference, I think, we see Buddhist anti-politics once again. Candrakīrti is far less hostile to politics than Śāntideva; he doesn’t ever say that the king should give his kingdom away. Still, his advice to the king is chiding, cautionary: do not punish harshly, do not sacrifice your life in battle, and above all, never feel proud or self-satisfied about your status as a king. (Compare how Mencius always returns to the ancient emperors Yao and Shun and how great they were; for him, their pride would have been appropriate.) And so, while the literary function of politics for Candrakīrti and Plato is the same, the value they attach to it is opposed. For Plato, an idealized city-state shows us the heights of good to which we can inspire; for Candrakīrti, a king shows us the depths to which we can sink.

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Like the question of internalism and externalism, it hits deep issues both theoretical and practical, though from a different angle. And I suspect this is why the question is so pervasive throughout the Western monotheisms.

An earlier post on the subject noted the debate within Indian Sufism, between ibn Arabi’s wahdat al-wujūd and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī’s wahdat ash-shuhūd. But what was new in India with Sirhindī was only that the debate happened within Sufism – Sirhindī was the first Sufi to articulate the idea of irreducible encounter, the opposition to pantheism. Opponents of the Sufis had been putting forth that idea for a long time before that. Perhaps most famously there was the case of al-Hallāj, the tenth-century Persian Sufi, who in in his state of mystical experience proclaimed anā’l ḥaqq, “I am the truth!” Al-ḥaqq, “the truth,” was one of the traditional 99 Muslim names of God; for saying that he was God, al-Hallāj was swiftly put to death.

Non-Sufi Islam, it seems to me, stresses the gulf between God and man as a way of maintaining human humility. Stephen Prothero’s popular new book on religious difference identifies pride as the central problem in Islam, comparable to sin in Christianity or suffering in Buddhism. I suspect this is why Muslims lay so much stress on tawhīd, God’s inviolable unity, and treat shirk – idolatry or “associating partners with God” – as a cardinal sin. To raise anything in the physical world to God’s level is to assume an arrogant knowledge of God. In the early days of Islam, the Mu’tazila school, relying on this idea of tawhīd, had argued that the Qur’an was a created object like anything else perceptible, and so one should read it with a rationalistic and allegorical eye. To read it as literal and inerrant would be arrogant, idolatrously taking the Qur’an as a partner with God. But one of the reasons the Mu’tazila became a minority position was that their view was used to license human arrogance: the caliph, the human ruler, had no limits on his power if he could take the Qur’an as meaning something different from what it literally said.

It has been my sense that, while there has been some suspicion of Christian mysticism through the ages, it was not persecuted within Christianity as strongly as the Sufis were within Islam. I think this is because official Christianity has drawn the line between God and man far less sharply than has official Islam (and I suspect official Judaism). What defined the Christianity accepted as orthodox in the Nicene Creed was that God had in fact become man. This idea of God-become-man is, as I understand it, what James Doull finds most significant about Christianity: in it, objective truth (God) and subjective humanity can be united. The idea of God as man has been accepted by all the major strains of Christianity since then – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – but in its time it had seemed absurd to many if not most. The Arians took a more traditionally Jewish view, that Jesus was merely a prophet, a teacher, an exemplary human being. To say that he was more than that would be impossible, for it would identify perfect God with imperfect humanity. Their foes the Docetists took the exact opposite view: that Jesus was purely God all the time and was never actually human. Despite being at opposite ends of the spectrum, the Arians and Docetists shared the view that no man could ever be perfect enough to be God.

Go to India, on the other hand, and the view is vastly different. There, to identify human and God is commonplace. It’s not just that God takes a physical form, in a way scandalous to Muslims. Many traditions – especially Jainism and Yoga – are all about becoming godlike, taking on superhuman powers and transcending the universe. And most prominently, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, we all already are God, we just don’t know it. For this reason, Nicholas Gier takes these mainstream Indian traditions as examples of what he calls spiritual Titanism: worrying attempts to make man into God. Gier clearly thinks that Titanism is a bad thing. He doesn’t explicitly argue the case against it, but he returns repeatedly to environmental crises: human beings have tried to become godlike in their attempts to master nature, and now we are paying the price. Here, the problem of human arrogance appears again with an ecological cast.

My own position on all this goes back to this post. I agree with the orthodox monotheists that humans are fallen creatures, not worthy of deification. In Buddhist terms, this is why I denied the Third Noble Truth: I have not met anyone I would consider awakened (“enlightened”) in this lifetime, and could not imagine becoming awakened in this life myself; and I also don’t believe in rebirth, so I don’t see our perfection as possible after this life. We are deeply flawed creatures and must always remain aware of those deep flaws; that’s why humility is important.

But. Unlike the monotheists, I don’t see any reason to prefer God to man. For in my view any capital-G God, any god that has created the world or is omnipotent, cannot be taken as a model of moral perfection. God’s track record as revealed in the world is no better than ours; his track record in scripture and tradition is often worse.

And all this, in the end, takes me back to the Aristotelian mean. We must be humble enough to recognize our deep flaws; but not so humble that we submit ourselves wholly to another entity with flaws as thoroughgoing as ours (or close to it). We cannot fully trust ourselves; but we have no choice but to trust ourselves to some extent. The line is difficult to walk, but no genuine virtue is ever easy.

EDIT (11 Jul 2010): The original version of this post claimed that James Doull was an Anglican preacher. A former student of his informed me that he wasn’t, although he was always a believing Christian and belonged to an Anglican community in his later life. A number of his students and grand-students became Anglican priests, however, and that’s probably where my confusion arose.

I’ll admit often feeling a certain impatience with philosophers of encounter like Lévinas (which probably makes me what Skholiast called an “ātmanist”). It has never been clear to me why, exactly, we’re supposed to be so limitlessly bound by “the Other” (usually with the capital letters). Lévinas’s philosophy strikes me as ruthlessly Abrahamic: at its core is a bowing and scraping before God, drastically opposed to any embrace of the divine with ourselves, parallel to Sirhindī‘s insistence on God’s distance from his creation. As I noted in the comments to that post, Sirhindī advocated not merely intolerance to, but subjugation of, indigenous Indian traditions. Likewise Davis, in our conversation after his talk, noted that Lévinas uses the term “pagan” in an extraordinarily negative sense; his Abrahamism reminds me of Tertullian asking rhetorically “What has Athens do to with Jerusalem?” And while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of humility expressed in a humanist view, I’m even more uncomfortable with trusting an Abrahamic god.

Davis’s talk, however, helped me put many of these ideas in perspective. Nishida’s thought, it turns out, is close to Lévinas’s in a number of ways, though far removed from Abrahamic traditions. (Intriguingly, Nishida even wrote a book entitled I and Thou, while apparently entirely unaware of Buber‘s work of the same title.) Nishida tells us that “there is no universal that would subsume I and thou,” for that would deny the individuality and otherness of the two terms. The other must remain other. Nishida has a Zen take on the matter rather than an Abrahamic one: there must be something shared between the self and the other or no encounter can take place; but one must speak of this shared universal as emptying itself out, a “None” rather than a “One.”

But why should we think this way? A particularly evocative quote in Davis’s talk helped give me a clue in explanation: “I am truly myself by way of not being myself; I live by dying.” Now it seems like we are dealing with the paradoxes of hedonism: when all we seek is our own happiness, we don’t get it. We are most fulfilled when we live for something bigger than ourselves; a life centred entirely on the self will fail even on its own terms. Perhaps I’m getting more sympathetic to this sort of view as I approach marriage – realizing the fulfillment in a life choice that requires a certain self-overcoming, requires you to live for someone else as they live for you.

Skholiast makes two criticisms of Wilber, which are closely related to each other, and which reflect his interest in 20th-century “continental” thinkers, especially Emmanuel Lévinas. The second criticism is probably the more fundamental: Wilber, according to Skholiast, is too much of an “ātmanist,” too beholden to nondualist philosophies (of which Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta is the prime example). He doesn’t leave room for the priority of Lévinas’s philosophy, namely encounter with the other.

But while the immediate ancestors of Skholiast’s view may be in the likes of Lévinas, he is right to claim an older pedigree for it. For Vedāntic monism indeed makes an uncomfortable fit with Western monotheisms, in which to say “I am God” is a heresy.

Skholiast reminds me a little here of the Indian debate over Sufi mystical experiences. While Sufism is a controversial phenomenon in the Arab “heartland” of Islam, in South Asia Sufism basically is Islam. That Sufi mystical practices such as dhikr chanting are valid spiritual pathways – this is not widely disputed in South Asia. Rather, as I understand it, the dispute between conservative and tolerant Islam happens there within Sufism. South Asian Muslims have typically all agreed with the Spanish mystic Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabī that dhikr or similar practices can get you an experience of cosmic oneness, where the boundaries between yourself and the rest of the world all break down. The debate is over what this oneness means.

Ibn ‘Arabī preached an idea which later comes to be called wahdat al-wujūd, the unity of existence. For him God is the only being that is truly real; everything else is an illusion. (The similarity to Śaṅkara should be obvious here.) The experience of unity in dhikr allows one to perceive that true oneness in existence.

Another Indian Sufi, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, criticized ibn ‘Arabī. Instead of wahdat al-wujūd, he described Sufi experiences as merely wahdat ash-shuhūd – a unity of experience. One does indeed perceive that everything is one, but that is only a first step: one must go beyond that oneness because everything is not one. To identify creator with creation is a heresy. Rather, the experience gives you a sense of the true greatness of the one who created everything: “Not ‘All is Him’ but ‘All is from Him.’”

These are meaty debates and I don’t have space to try and figure out my own position on them here. Where I do take a stand is on a methodological issue in Skholiast’s first, related, point. Mostly because of the second criticism, Skholiast argues that Wilber doesn’t do “emic justice” to the Abrahamic traditions. Wilber, according to Skholiast, claims that the majority of Christian saints have got it wrong about Jesus – presumably those who are not “ātmanists.” Skholiast says that this claim “would be astounding if he made it about chess masters’ opinions of the Ruy Lopez, or music critics’ estimations of Beethoven’s late quartets, or even of Zen masters’ account of the Tathagata.” I have some serious methodological problems with this approach, if I understand Skholiast’s criticism correctly. I’m all for humility in the face of great thinkers who have gone before us, realizing they might have depth we haven’t yet seen in them. But the great spiritual masters disagree with one another on matters of fundamental import. If the grace of Jesus of Nazareth is the only way to human salvation, then following the Noble Eightfold Path simply will not get one there. Each side may well be (and probably is) partially right, but at least one side must be partially wrong.

Here I think Skholiast’s analogy to chess masters and music critics is quite misleading. As non-experts we are reluctant to say chess masters are wrong about chess because they have a specialized expertise we do not have; this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to speak accurately about natural science. But it is surely a gross misunderstanding of Christian saints’ claims about Jesus to take them as a matter of specialized expertise. On their own understanding, Jesus is not a specialty, a limited field of human knowledge; He is universal, a truth who saves us all. Jesus doesn’t just happen to be there “for Christians,” he is the Way, the Truth and the Life. If we get Jesus wrong, we get the truth in general wrong. But once one makes that sort of universal, nonspecialist claim (and I think it’s a legitimate claim to make), one necessarily opens oneself up to nonspecialist criticism: if the truth in general isn’t what you say it is, then maybe Jesus isn’t what you say he is either. I’m not at all sure I agree with Wilber’s ultimate position, but I do think that methodologically he is on firm ground.