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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsay’s talk – I hope I will be interpreting it correctly – delved far enough into the technical details of Buddhist theoretical debates that some introductory remarks are in order. Those familiar with these debates should feel free to skip down a couple of paragraphs. Buddhist teaching deliberately and thoughtfully attacks certain aspects of common sense and common linguistic usage, and yet nevertheless needs to make some use of that linguistic usage. This point is most universally applicable to the existence of the self, which most Buddhists deny – and yet, from the historical Buddha onward, nevertheless refer to (“I tell you there is no self.”) So Buddhists nearly always accept some idea of “two truths”: an ultimate (saṃvṛti or paramārtha) truth, according to which there is no self, and a conventional (vyavahārika) truth according to which there is a self. The conventional truth is not truth in the strictest sense; it is a teaching device employed for pragmatic purposes, because nobody would get to the ultimate truth if not through the conventional. (I have not yet discussed this distinction in a blog post, but it has come up a number of times in comment discussions, most notably on this post.)

Where Buddhists have their greatest disagreements is on the nature of the ultimate truth. The earliest Buddhist philosophers, the composers of the Abhidhamma, took it merely as atomism and reductionism: at the conventional level we can speak of a self, but ultimately the self is nothing more than its mental and physical component parts. Those parts, however, are real and can all be spoken of in language without serious difficulty. It was this latter view that was challenged by Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka school: here, even the atoms and components are unreal, and the ultimate reality is at some level ineffable, inexpressible. (I had some comparative thoughts on the transition from Abhidhamma to Madhyamaka here.)

The Tibetans divided the Madhyamaka school further than this. How radical, they asked, was Nāgārjuna’s skepticism? They distinguished a moderate skepticism associated with Bhāvaviveka (a thinker who goes by several names) and the Svātantrika school, and a more radical skepticism associated with Candrakīrti and his Prāsaṅgika school. (The “Svātantrika” and “Prāsaṅgika” names were a later, retroactive invention of Tibetan commentators, who also identified Śāntideva as a Prāsaṅgika; they remain the object of some dispute among Western scholars today.) Bhāvaviveka argued that there were at least two kinds of ultimate truth (and therefore, effectively, at least three truths): a transcendent (lokottara) truth free of concepts, and a “pure but worldly” (suddhalaukika) truth that could be expressed in concepts but was nevertheless true. Candrakīrti denied the existence of this “pure but worldly” truth – the real truth, the truth that was not merely a pragmatic means of teaching, could not be expressed in words. (On this he quotes Nāgārjuna: “If I had any position, then I would have a flaw [in my argument]. But I have no position; therefore I have no flaw at all.”)

To return to Lindsay’s talk: his tentative conclusion, as I understand it, was that Burnyeat’s criticisms of Sextus Empiricus apply to Candrakīrti and the Prāsaṅgikas, but perhaps not to Bhāvaviveka and the Svātantrikas. Sextus (according to Burnyeat) had argued that to achieve mental tranquility (ataraxia), one must banish all beliefs from one’s mind – a claim with remarkable parallels to Śāntideva’s in Bodhicaryāvatāra IX.34: “When neither an entity nor a nonentity remain before thought, then thought, with no object, is pacified because it has no other destination.” (Tibetan hagiographies held this verse in very high esteem – they said that as Śāntideva recited it, he floated up into the air and disappeared, so that the rest of the text was read by a disembodied voice.)

In his chapter “Can the sceptic live his scepticism?”, Burnyeat argues that in order for the Skeptic to genuinely attain the peace of mind he seeks, he must actually hold such a belief, and be satisfied with it – which is contrary to the view that all beliefs must be banished. Lindsay was largely persuaded by Burnyeat’s critique, but thought that Bhāvaviveka – unlike Candrakīrti – might be able to get around it because he owns up to the view that some beliefs are necessary and theses should be advanced.

My own thoughts after this talk moved away from Burnyeat; I was trying to think about how a Prāsaṅgika view might itself be lived. It seems to me that a Prāsaṅgika view would claim that, rather than being a view strictly speaking, it would be what is left over once all views are gone. But why would we expect that someone in such a situation would become liberated, get the Buddhist equivalent of ataraxia? Here I think it may be important to consider the common Buddhist claim that the teachings are like a snake which can be wrongly grasped – and the fact that Candrakīrti, Śāntideva, Bhāvaviveka, Nāgārjuna and the historical Buddha were all monks, who had devoted their lives to cultivating good Buddhist practice. In Śāntideva I get the sense that once they are liberated and fully understand ultimate truth, buddhas continue doing good out of habit; without beliefs there is no longer anything that can deter them from doing so. Buddhist texts never suggest, as far as I know, that one can learn this ultimate truth without already being extremely virtuous. But suppose, hypothetically, that one could – it might then turn out to be a bad thing. If somehow I (or most of my readers), living a life that involves making money and having sex and seeking out delicious foods, were to reach the ultimate truth and a state without belief, it would make things worse, because I’d be stuck in that state instead of in bodhisattvahood.

It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself a number of times. Being anti-political is a position I’ve flirted with a lot, especially over the course of writing my dissertation, and my personal views are closely entangled with the ideas I address there. In many respects I see the dissertation’s main contribution to Śāntideva scholarship as pointing out the strongly anti-political nature of Śāntideva’s thought, and the underlying reasons for his anti-politics. Śāntideva is, I think, often thought of as a great friend to the Engaged Buddhist program of Buddhist political activism, since he is probably best known as the favourite thinker of that noted activist Tenzin Gyatso, the present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; I claimed in the dissertation that such a placing of Śāntideva is mistaken.

The dissertation explains this point in great detail (mostly in its fourth, fifth and seventh chapters), but I haven’t yet said much about it on the blog, and I probably should. Briefly: Śāntideva says very little about political action, but what he does say (in the Śikṣā Samuccaya) indicates that he rejects it. He gives a list of genres of information that are not worth knowing or learning about, and includes law and political science (daṇḍanīti) on this list. When he gives advice to kings, it is that they give their kingdoms away.

Why is this? I argue that it’s because Śāntideva rejects or devalues most of what Martha Nussbaum (following Aristotle) would call “external goods”: things not under our control which we would normally want, including relationships, social status and (above all) material goods. For him these things are neutral at best, and most often actively harmful (as I discussed here.) Śāntideva does say that one should give these things to others – one of the reasons why Engaged Buddhists like Stephen Jenkins see him as arguing for political action on behalf of the poor. But Śāntideva’s reasoning for giving things to others, I argue, is not that they benefit from possessing the gift – indeed, they may be harmed. But such harm is worth it when they receive a gift from a bodhisattva, because it produces esteem (śraddhā) toward the bodhisattva – it makes the recipient more likely to listen to the bodhisattva’s dharma teaching. A crucial feature of this gift encounter, however, is that the gift come directly from a bodhisattva. Donations from a government or NGO will not do the trick. And this, I argue, is why Śāntideva does not care about governments; action to help others in politics has no genuinely beneficial effect.

I came to these ideas slowly. When I first presented on Śāntideva at a graduate student workshop, I was excited to talk about what Śāntideva could teach us in a contemporary context; a respondent claimed that if he urged political quietism, we could not be able to accept such a worldview in the present age. (I mentioned this response in this early post.) I was a little cowed by this response at first, and it took me a while to figure out an appropriate reply: but then I realized that that political quietism was, in many respects, itself one of the most important things that Śāntideva has to teach us. Whether we agree or disagree with it, his anti-politics is a profound and impeccably Buddhist idea, one that challenges us in a way we must think about and respond to.

For me, it was intoxicating to discover such an idea at a time when I needed to get away from politics, when caring about politics brought nothing but pain. I felt validated in my search for a better, happier life outside politics. The seventh chapter of the dissertation juxtaposed Śāntideva’s ideas against Nussbaum’s more politically charged philosophy, effectively defending Śāntideva against Nussbaum’s objections.

What the dissertation did not do was take up my own substantive, constructive position on the question at hand – for such constructive positions are largely frowned upon, if not scowled upon, in academic religious studies. But such a lack of attention to constructive views allowed me to get off the hook too easily, to defend Śāntideva’s anti-politics without thinking too hard about whether I really believed it.

For in the end I don’t reject external goods; on that basic question I do stand closer to Nussbaum than to Śāntideva. Again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got married; the logical practical conclusion from Śāntideva’s thought is the monasticism which he himself practised. Some external goods are genuinely good. They can indeed be negative, as in the case of the hedonic treadmill; and in some cases their absence can strengthen us, as Śāntideva also claims and as I noted in an earlier post. But I do not think that this negativity is the norm – especially at the lower end of the social ladder, where governments are most likely to direct their help. External goods are often genuine goods, especially when they are what we often call “basic needs.”

In short, Śāntideva’s position on external goods – and therefore on political action – cannot be mine. So where do I stand? Well, I haven’t settled that yet. This is part of the reason I’ve lately been trying to explore the concept of altruism: the value of politics depends a lot on who we are ultimately trying to benefit. Should we aim for an enlightened self-interest, for the good of those close to us or whom we identify with, or universally for the good of all? Śāntideva takes the latter, universal position, in no uncertain terms. But I suspect he may be only able to do this because he devalues external goods, because the good of all is identified as their spiritual liberation. To value external goods and still seek the good of all is basically to be a utilitarian, a terribly frustrating and perhaps ultimately counterproductive way of life.

the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Without a belief in rebirth, we do not have anything like the infinite eons Śāntideva envisioned in which one could progress slowly on the bodhisattva path. He thought it was urgent for us to become monks and dedicate ourselves to liberation in this lifetime, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get another chance for billions of years. Yet just as importantly, eventually, after some unimaginable amount of time, we would get that chance, in a way that now seems unlikely at best. Without rebirth, death places an absolute limit on our time. Saving time is in a sense saving a life – for when we speak of “saving” a life, all we can ever mean is prolonging that life, which is in turn to say giving that life more time.

Saving time, then, can be among the noblest of human goals. The reason “convenience” looks so suspect, however, is that very often it doesn’t really save us time, doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. The biggest trap is the pattern all too familiar in the US: one spends one’s money on conveniences (convenience foods, labour-saving devices, and so on), in order to save time – and then spends the newly available time making more money, much of which itself is spent on conveniences. Little if anything is gained here. One might well argue that little time is genuinely saved. For too often we are trapped in the belief that our paid work should be our life’s fulfillment when, as Marx long ago noted, it is by definition alienated: to the extent that we work for pay, we work for others and not for ourselves. We might be lucky enough to find work we enjoy most of the time, but there is no reason to expect that paid work should be any more fulfilling than cooking or washing the dishes. Perhaps we are still a little too wedded to what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic, which rejected the use of money for pleasure and enjoyment (vacations, eating out, beauty products) but endorsed spending it on “comfort,” an idea not too far removed from “convenience.” The idea of making money to save time to make more money may have made sense within the dour world of Calvinist theology, but it’s a little bizarre that the rest of us would continue to follow it.

Still, these points all raise a related question: what, exactly, should our time be used for? Suppose that, as Marx imagined, we really could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” – should we do all of these? Thanks to the heroic work of the early twentieth-century labour movement, most of us have two days a week on which we can do exactly what Marx says – at least if we do not raise children in addition. But how then should we make decisions about how to use this precious “spare” time? Should we indeed spend the day in pastoral and agrarian pursuits followed by dinner, and then write critical philosophy in the evening – or should we spend the whole day doing one or the other if that’s what we love? Or should we play games and sports with friends and loved ones? Or should we raise children and spend the time doing that? Once we realize how finite our time on earth is, the way we spend it comes to take on great importance.

Riffing on a “digression” in Plato’s Theaetetus, Critchley comes up with a creative definition: the philosopher is one who takes time. Plato’s Socrates contrasts such a philosopher to the lawyer, the “pettifogger,” the specialist – for whom time is money, for whom a result must be reached quickly. It is likely not a coincidence that Socrates made his living from stonecutting, not from philosophy. The “digression” is introduced when Socrates’s interlocutor asks “Aren’t we at leisure?” and Socrates replies “It appears we are.” The pettifogger asks “What do I need to know right now, for this practical purpose?” The philosopher explores the bigger picture, takes the leisure to explore at length.

This picture of the philosopher seems to describe Socrates very well – or the monastic philosophers like Buddhaghosa or Śāntideva or Aquinas, who were charged to spend their lives in contemplation, and were fed and clothed and housed for doing so. It might even describe the tenured research-university philosophy professors of the 20th century, who had a guaranteed income for life as long as they showed up to teach a few classes and refrained from having sex with their students.

But what a different world faces the young man or woman who dreams of being a philosopher today! Our elders and betters tell us incessantly: figure out what you love, and then find a way to make money from it. And with the exception of a few (very, very rare) independent philosophers like Ken Wilber, to make money from philosophy is to be a philosophy professor. And those who aspire to be philosophy professors today epitomize a lack of time.

Noelle McAfee notes: “the academic system robs even we supposedly otherwordly philosophers of the leisure of time. There is a constant pressure to rush through things to get things done.” I wouldn’t say “even” us philosophers; rather, especially us philosophers, for whom the academic job situation is so dire. In graduate school and as a junior professor, there is a constant sense that every moment you spend at leisure could rob you of your only chance to ever get that semi-mythical leisured state of tenure – a state which the majority of current PhD candidates in philosophy and religious studies will never have. (If you’re unfamiliar with the apocalyptic state of the academic job market in the humanities, see here and here for a primer on the current situation; and see the acute analyses of Marc Bousquet if you would like to think it’s ever going to get significantly better.) McAfee tries to address the situation with the stopgap time-management measure of taking 20 minutes for every professional task she undertakes, thus creating a minimal amount of leisure for each task. Within the unfortunate position of the junior academic, that may be the best you can do. But it’s not very much. When you are teaching four courses a semester and struggling desperately to simultaneously publish articles in the knowledge that you’ll never get tenure without them, the idea that you can have any “leisure” is entirely implausible, no matter how you arrange your time.

Instead, if one is really to live the leisured philosophical life that Socrates and Critchley speak of, why not seek leisure in the more conventional sense? If we fight to hold on to the imperilled work schedule our grandparents fought so hard to get – a 35-40 hour week, with sick days and a few weeks a year of paid vacation (much more than this if we live in Europe) – and we don’t have children, we can have genuine leisure time, genuine spare time in which we can think about philosophy at a slow, leisurely, thoughtful pace. Such a job is the complete antithesis of the academic philosophy career track. Which is to say that one can best be a philosopher in Plato’s or Critchley’s sense if one has a completely unphilosophical job.

It seems to me, then, that a young person can most truly be a philosopher today if – like Socrates and Spinoza – she does not try to make of philosophy a profession. For them, philosophy was neither career nor hobby. For them, as for the nearly-extinct tenured professor, philosophy was genuine leisure. Their path seems the surest route for the aspiring young philosopher now.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture.

I’ve noticed that a fairly large number of my posts have to do with “religion and science,” and the supposed relation between them. This wasn’t my original intent, since I don’t care much for the idea of “religion” in the first place, as most of those posts attest; and the most animated question in “religion and science” debates – the relation between evolution and Hebrew Bible accounts of creation – is of relatively little interest to me, since I’ve never bought any of those accounts to begin with. But I’ve been realizing something about most people today, even well educated people who might be expected to know some philosophy, and not only in the Western world. When moderns look for the things that Greek and Roman philosophy was supposed to provide – answers to big questions about the purpose of our lives, our proper view of the world and our place in it, ways of dealing with death – they don’t turn to philosophy. They turn to “religion” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, various “Hindu” traditions – and they turn to natural science, above all to psychology. It is in the realms of religion and science, that is to say, that philosophy is found today, especially any sense of philosophy as a way of life. Scientists often claim their work to be value-free, but especially for those who are not part of a “religious” community, much of the guidance we receive in life comes from scientific evidence and the people charged to apply it to our daily lives. The title we use for those people – “doctor” – originally referred to learned Christian religious. It is doctors who warn us that our behaviours are self-destructive, that we need to change our views and habits and ways of life, and that we fail to do so at our own peril – and this advice often involves codes of behaviour toward food that rival Leviticus in their complexity.

But philosophy – that is what we don’t have. Hadot reminds us that the ancients did. It’s not just that their academic work was not so carved up into disciplines, so that the inquiries now called “science” would have been known as “philosophy” (though of course it was that). The Stoic practice of prosoche, attention to one’s soul, bears a startling resemblance to Buddhist mindfulness – conducted in the name of philosophy. When the Greek explorer Megasthenes explained ancient Indian society to his fellow Greeks , the name he gave to the brahmins and to the samana wandering monks – the Buddhists, Jains and their ilk – was “philosophers.” He recognized what the Greeks called philosophy in what they were doing. It is in the Christian (and Islamic?) Middle Ages, Hadot notes, that philosophy loses this status, becoming “the handmaid of theology.” It is not a huge step from there to the analytic philosophy of today, which (I think it would be hard to deny) sees itself largely as “the handmaid of science,” answering only those questions left over from the empirical inquiries of natural science.

Now the terms “religion” and “science” seem unlikely to go away any time soon. We are probably stuck with them. Perhaps more importantly, the realms of knowledge and practice that the terms cover – from Kierkegaard to prayer, from Einstein to psychotherapy – are of inestimable value to human life. As much as I might wish for a world where these terms went away (at least the “religion” term), I would find it devastating if the phenomena were to disappear. So for better and for worse, “religion” and “science” are here to stay. So while I have always identified the present venue as a blog about philosophy, it necessarily also becomes a blog about religion and science.

What then happens to “philosophy”? Can it ever again become the way of life that Hadot tells us of? Not in the terms of the ancient world. If one were to start a monastic garden of philosophers the way that Epicurus did – even if one were explicitly to call it Epicurean – most people would invariably call it a religion (or worse, a cult). At the same time, I think philosophy takes on a crucial role in the world of “religion” and “science,” as a middle ground between the two. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, full of bile toward “religion,” nevertheless affirm the value of (at least analytic) philosophy; and philosophy, even today’s academic philosophy, has tools to examine even conservative forms of “religion” critically on their own terms, terms that science does not have. Even to the fundamentalist who denies philosophy as heretical, one may still ask the fundamental questions: why is scripture inerrant? Why must faith take precedence over knowledge? The answers to these questions can be interrogated by philosophy, but not by experimental science. One might even say that the problem with Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA is that, in separating the realms of science and religion, it ignores the third realm that unites them, namely philosophy.

This all is at the theoretical level. But it matters at the level of practice as well. One can always try to live one’s life entirely within the guidance specified by a particular tradition of inquiry, including the tradition of natural science. But once one tries to be both at once – to be both “religious” and “scientific,” or even to inhabit more than one “religion” – then one needs philosophy to settle their differences. One can no longer take philosophy by itself as a way of life. But philosophy may yet turn out to be an inescapable part of the best way of life today.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samupp?da or pratitya samutp?da) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. The first of the twelve links in the chain of causation is ignorance; and out of this chain comes suffering. All of the things conditioned by causation, the First Noble Truth says, are suffering, dukkha. The hope offered by the Buddha, in the Third Noble Truth, is to offer us a way out of this suffering interdependent world of sa?s?ra – to get us to nirvana, something unconditioned, in some sense even independent. You usually won’t hear this part in Yavanayāna affirmations of interdependence. Early Buddhism offers us a worldview strikingly similar to the Jainism that preceded it and the Yoga Sūtras that followed it; and these are probably the strongest integrity traditions there are, more “Cartesian” than Descartes himself. We progressively reduce our dependence on the world around us until we transcend even dependence on life itself, entering the ideal state, the Jaina and Yoga version of nirv?na, which is called kaivalya: aloneness.

Neither does this integrity orientation change where one might most expect it to change: the rise of other-oriented Mahāyāna, where one remains in the world to free others. In Indian Mahāyāna thinkers like Śāntideva, this freedom is itself understood as independence. Śāntideva teaches the importance of the kaly?na mitra, the good spiritual friend – but this friendship is understood in a necessarily unbalanced and hierarchical way. When I was a TA for Diana Eck, she gave me some wise advice about the proper boundaries for a teacher: “You can be your students’ friend, but they can’t be your friend.” And this is exactly the way the kaly?na mitra works. The kaly?na mitra is a guru, someone more liberated than you are; you can trust, rely on depend on this guru, but the guru can’t depend on you. Ultimately, the goal is to become a kaly?na mitra for others, to allow them to depend on you – but they can depend on you because you are advanced enough not to depend on anyone else.

Where all of this does change, as far as I can tell, is in East Asia – where the intimacy worldview was philosophically entrenched long before Buddhism arrived o the scene. I’m no expert on East Asian Buddhism, but as I understand it, schools like Huayan do indeed stress the world’s interdependence and see it as a good thing. This point, however, seems to have much more to do with East Asia than with Buddhism. It’s part of the reason I see Buddhism as the exception that proves the rule in Asian philosophy, the constant between South Asia and East Asia that does more to show their differences than their commonalities. Buddhism is an integrity philosophy like Jainism and Yoga when it’s in India alongside those philosophical systems; it’s an intimacy philosophy like Confucianism when it’s beside Confucianism in East Asia. Macy, however, tends to act as if the Theravāda Buddhism she has learned from is Confucian in this way, when it really isn’t, and she’s not alone in thinking that way.

Now why stress this point? I do think that acknowledging our dependence is a good thing in many ways, especially if we’re not going to try and go it alone in a monastic lifestyle. Yet at the same time, there’s something important to the idea of controlling our emotions and reducing our attachments. Feminists of the boomer generation, like Macy, fought against the stiff-upper-lip ideal of men who repressed their emotions, and there’s surely something to their critique; at the same time, there’s something to that ideal as well. It’s valuable to get our emotions under control so they don’t control us; that doesn’t mean we need to repress them. Similarly, as much as we do need to acknowledge our dependence on others, we also need to cultivate some amount of healthy independence, to be comfortable in our own skins independent of what others think of us, to be the “rock” that others can lean on. In my view, classical Buddhism as it was, and Macy’s distortion of it, both tend to be one-sided.

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. One can claim in the context of editorial journalism that consistency is merely a modern invention, and in the context of historical scholarship that it is an ideal as ancient as philosophy. That’s inconsistent, but consistency doesn’t matter.

Fish’s answer to the religion-science debates depends on just such a view: “the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.” In a sense, Fish is taking up the logical implications of the NOMA view more seriously than Stephen Jay Gould had himself: “science” and “religion” can remain separate domains, not because they don’t contradict each other on important matters (it should be obvious that they do) but because that contradiction itself doesn’t matter.

Fish’s argument makes the case from everyday life. It’s not hard to imagine a fundamentalist Christian medical student during the week learning biological ideas founded on the presumption that human life evolved over millions of years, and then going to Bible fellowship on Sunday and speaking about human life on the assumption that human life was created by Jehovah in one instant. People can and do live with contradictions. Why should contradictions bother anyone, beyond pedantic philosophers bothered by obscure details?

Well, for starters, most of us already are bothered. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is fairly well established in social psychology: the perception of inconsistency among our own beliefs and actions is a motivating factor in its own right, one that makes us want to reduce this inconsistency. Perhaps Fish’s preferred form of spiritual practice would be a kind of therapy or meditation that makes us comfortable with such inconsistencies. He doesn’t, however, describe how such a practice could work, nor why we might want to follow it rather than just trying to make our beliefs and practices more harmonious. So we’ve already got a prima facie reason to try and reduce our inconsistencies and contradictions.

More than that: consistency is important for the efficacy of self-transformation as well. If one is trying to practice Osho‘s ideal of free expression for pleasure and sexuality, one will be hindered by simultaneously trying to practice the ascetic self-denial of a Theravāda monk; and vice versa. One’s efforts to become a better Christian will be hindered by learning in science class that core Christian beliefs are false. Attempting to practise contradictory ideals is like taking an expectorant and a decongestant at the same time: one undermines one’s own efforts. Perhaps Fish has never tried to become a better Christian or a better Buddhist or just a better person more generally, and has never had to deal with this problem; but for those of us trying to improve our lives, it’s a big issue. Consistency matters, and the differences between competing worldviews will not be resolved this easily in practice, let alone in theory.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy:

• Asceticism: probably the most common answer in Indian philosophy, this is the favourite answer of the historical Buddha, and many traditions both before him (early Jainism) and after him (the Yoga Sūtras, Advaita Vedānta). It became highly popular in Christianity too, with its monastic traditions and suspicion of worldly desires. Everyday life is suffering, a suffering caused by our everyday desires, which arise from our ignorance of the true good. We need to take ourselves out of that everyday mode of life, to a higher and better way that disciplines those desires – renounce the everyday world, take up the chastity and poverty of a monk. Asceticism usually takes up a metaphysics in which the world as we know it is in some sense unreal, or a poor reflection of a higher reality.
• Traditionalism: probably the most popular answer in the history of philosophy, because it tends to accept “common sense,” unlike the other two which make a radical critique of our everyday views. It’s probably argued for most explicitly by Confucius and Hegel, though it’s implicit in oral traditions that preserve older ways of life, such as dharmaśāstra. Here the best life accepts time-tested practices and social conventions, passed down to us by our ancestors. We should start a family and raise children, as our parents did for us; we should do the work that they did, or work that preserves and contributes to the social structures that took so many centuries of others’ effort to build. Epistemologically we want to “save the appearances,” as Aristotle put it: our knowledge starts where it is, and intellectual innovations need above all to make sense of that starting point. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, traditionalism is likely to take an intimacy orientation, whereas the other two lean toward integrity.
• Libertinism: an answer increasingly implicit in modern forms of life. Premoderns who expressed this view (Mozi, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, the Cārvāka-Lokāyata school) usually didn’t stick around for too long; but it has become more and more widespread in the modern era, especially now among the urban educated classes. The view finds its classic expression in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism: the good is pleasure, full stop, and the best life is one that increases that pleasure. That utilitarians seek to increase others’ pleasure and not merely their own is just a variation within libertinism, as the other-oriented Mahāyāna Buddhists are a variation within asceticism. While Nietzsche scorned pleasure-seeking as such, his emphasis on the aesthetics of life is strong enough to give him close affinities with this position. Libertinism typically relies on an empiricist metaphysics like that of Hume, one which often denies that it is a metaphysics: neither a higher reality nor commonsense tradition is to be trusted. True knowledge is to be found only through our senses – and our senses tell us that pleasure is good and pain is bad.

One frequently finds these positions combined, of course. Classical Christian thought puts together a Jewish traditionalism (affirming the goodness of God’s created order) with a Platonic asceticism (suspecting the goodness of this world in favour of a world to come) – leaning much closer to the asceticism in Augustine and to the traditionalism in Aquinas’s natural law. (The Bhagavad Gītā also combines those two: be a traditionalist on the outside and an ascetic on the inside.) Libertinism has become common enough in the modern age that our common sense tends to mix libertinism and traditionalism, especially in an other-oriented way: left-wing politics is typically about allowing others to seek pleasure as well as maintain their work and family. And asceticism mixes with libertinism above all in Epicurus and his school, who believed that pleasure was the only good – but that the way to get the most pleasure is by isolating oneself in an ascetic community without being pulled around by one’s desires.

I find myself tossing around this categorization a lot because I find some appeal in all three. Practically speaking, libertinism comes very naturally to me, and I do find the goodness of pleasure quite apparent; it is probably the closest to the way of life I have chosen and am choosing. Asceticism also holds a strong appeal to me, especially in Epicurus’s terms: our desires often lead us astray and make us miserable, and we need to find ways to control them. I have decided against the monastic life, but I respect it greatly and note the happiness of those who follow it. By contrast, I’ve usually been suspicious of traditionalism as a practical philosophy, which has seemed like it may be mere self-deception. And yet in theoretical terms, I find myself being most persuaded by traditionalism and its epistemological conservatism, which seems like the best way to take account of the many partial truths offered by different traditions. I suppose all of this is just to say how hopelessly confused my own philosophy feels at the moment, but I hope these reflections are of some value to others who are trying to think life through as well.

Apologies for the giant mess of tags and categories on this post – it seems necessary for such an attempt at a broad generalization over the history of philosophy.