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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a strong philosophical allure to consequentialism, the view that the best actions are those that produced the best consequences (of whatever sort). But a problem with consequentialism is that consequences, by definition, happen in the future – and eventually there will be no future. A traditional Buddhist will believe there are potentially infinite futures ahead; but if we do not get reborn, and I do not think we do, then our lives come to an absolute end. At that last moment it is foolish to do anything for one’s own future, for there is no future left. One must live in the present. Even a few seconds before that moment, it would seem strange to act for the sake of the very last one, when one has so few left. At that point if not before, egoistic consequentialism is completely futile.

A similar point applies even to altruistic consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is a species. The future we can affect is always short-term, when we look at the big picture; even the greatest world-builders will someday be forgotten. The time from the ancient Egyptians to now is a blink of an eye in geological terms; the ecological lessons we have recently learned, about the fragility of the systems on which human life depends, should give us reason to believe that human life will not last forever. A life lived solely for the future, one’s own or others’, seems unsatisfying. Thus a major part of the appeal of ascent philosophies, which seek to take us beyond the transient world of change and death and connect us with something that endures.

In his comment on the earlier post, Thill properly questioned whether this way of thinking is justified. Our life achievements and enjoyments have value, he says, even if impermanent. “We don’t cease to enjoy a song because it has an ending!” Such a claim would certainly be disputed by the Buddha of the Pali suttas – the impermanence of conditioned things is central to their being unsatisfactory, dukkha. But I don’t agree with him; if I did, I’d be a monk now.

Still, there’s room for further reflection on the role of time in human ends. I had once asked why the Epicureans’ philosophy, one of the few in history that depends neither on politics nor the promise of an afterlife, had not lasted; later I referred to death as a possible answer. Now historically that could be the case – it could be that Epicurus’s answer to the big questions did not resonate with the wider world – but we must note that Epicurus still had an answer. It is the answer that Pierre Hadot, explaining Epicurus, quotes from Goethe: “only the present is our happiness.” The Epicurean theory of happiness is eons away from utilitarian maximizing: a single moment of happiness is as good as an eternity of it. Where a consequentialist examines every action with reference to the future, the Epicurean considers only the present – as with Thill’s reference to the song we enjoy despite, or even because of, its ending.

And that Epicurean view takes me back to the East Asian Buddhist tradition of sudden liberation – the view, as I understand it, that we can be liberated in a single moment. As I noted before on the subject, I used to dismiss this idea but have begun to come around to it. Now the liberation that is spoken of in sudden traditions must be quite different from that spoken in the earlier, gradualist Buddhist traditions. Nibbāna to a Theravādin or nirvana to Śāntideva is not something you can lose; those eons of effort pay off forever. Sudden liberation, on the other hand, disappears; for those who have attained it so often slip back into their old bad habits. I’m not quite sure I’m giving an accurate portrayal of sudden liberation as it is described in Ch’an or other traditions; but what I’m describing strikes me as a good and helpful picture of self-improvement. I previously expressed my skepticism about the Third Noble Truth: I’ve never met anyone I would consider to have attained nirvana, a fully liberated one. But the idea that one could be fleetingly perfect just for the space of one vanishing instant, that one could get everything right just at that time: now that makes sense to me.

A while ago I felt I didn’t really understand Epicurus for these very reasons. If only the present moment is our happiness, why bother with any spiritual practices of self-cultivation? Why build an Epicurean garden if you can just go ahead and carpe diem right now?

Well, because it’s not as easy as all that. Being happy and embodying virtue even within one fleeting moment is pretty tough. The same critique can be, and has been, made with respect to Buddhist sudden liberation: why bother with Ch’an practice, or any other, if you can be liberated right now? Those who’ve studied East Asian Buddhism in more detail than I have tell me that even the advocates of the sudden path typically admit that supposedly sudden liberation usually only comes after a long period of significant effort. There’s a gradual path leading to sudden liberation; the two are not as far apart as they might first seem.

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.’” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. He adds: “I think that Zhu Xi is led to this reading [that the great man doesn't lose a natural childlike heart] because of the Buddhist influence on his thought, which encouraged him to seek something akin to a pure, underlying Buddha-nature as the source of the Way.”

Here, I did a double-take. Wait, you seriously think Zhu Xi got the idea of a naturally good humanity from Buddhism? That’s the exact opposite of traditional Buddhist views – that’s like saying Jewish influence made you an atheist.

But then, Marx and Freud – two of history’s most famous atheists – were Jewish. And as it turns out, this optimistic view of human nature actually does show up a lot in Buddhism – just not in Indian Buddhism. I was reminded of all this while reading Jason Clower’s The Unlikely Buddhologist, on the 20th-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan. Mou is firmly committed to Mencius’s idea that human nature is good – and he praises those systems of Buddhism which accept this idea, the ones that claim we all have an “original enlightenment” or “Buddha nature.” He acknowledges that such an idea, tathāgatagarbha in Sanskrit, may have had its roots in India; but Indian philosophers never did a lot with it. Clower says: “It was only in China, Mou thinks, with its indigenous Mencian tradition of optimistic universalism, that such a theory had a chance to grow and flourish.” (114)

Now this account sounded a lot more plausible to me. Notice, though, how it seems diametrically opposite to Van Norden’s. For Mou, the negative early Indian Buddhist view of human nature could be supplanted in China because of the influence of Mencius. For Van Norden, we misread Mencius by attributing to him an overly positive view of human nature that actually originates in Buddhism.

So does any of this matter for constructive philosophical reflection? Well, it seems to me, it does matter how we view human nature – and that view is going to be tied to the rest of our philosophical commitments.

The way we view humans’ natural tendencies has implications for the way we cultivate ourselves. This point came out in the comments on last week’s post. Jim Wilton, commenting about Gretchen Rubin, linked her approach to the Zen thinker Shunryū Suzuki. Both, in some respect, take the view that happiness comes in some respect from letting our true self, our “original nature,” shine through. Jim is probably right that Suzuki’s Zen view is deeper than Rubin’s, but they’re going in the same direction. It seems to me a different direction from the one that Elisa Freschi sensibly recommended on the same post: the things you don’t like (say, the particulars in novels as opposed to philosophical abstractions) can also be your blind spots. By cultivating desires for things you’re not naturally predisposed to, you can make yourself more whole. Our natural tendencies may lead us to exacerbate our flaws, not our virtues.

And so to the contrast between South and East Asian Buddhism. It’s no coincidence that the idea of sudden liberation flourished among the East Asians, who also took a much sunnier view of human nature – whether or not we see that view as beginning with Mencius. If you think that our original natures are basically and generally good, then getting in touch with that basic goodness is something you can do more or less suddenly, immediately. You just have to remember it. But if our basic nature is one that keeps us mired in suffering, as the South Asian Buddhists generally believed, then it’s going to be a long, slow, gradual, potentially painful slog getting us out of it to somewhere better.

Something clearly changed in Buddhism as it went from South to East Asia, from India to China. It seems likely to me that it came from Confucian influences, including those of Mencius. But even if the change came about somewhere else on the way, it still has big consequences for ideas about life and how we should live it.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.

The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)

It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.

But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.

Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.

Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.

Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.

What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. 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.

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. My thoughts here go back to an exchange on an early post of mine, dealing with C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” about Jesus. Lewis tries to argue against those who see Jesus as a great human moral teacher. Following from the (highly arguable) claim that Jesus claimed he was the only begotten son of God, Lewis tells us we have only three options: Jesus actually was the only son of God; he was lying; or he was insane. I pointed to the example of Mohandas Gandhi as someone who was at least a little bit insane, and yet also a great moral teacher. Defending Lewis, commenter DJR argued that – assuming Jesus did in fact believe he was the Son – such a belief is far more insane than Gandhi’s morally questionable beliefs and quirks. In my reply I noted:

Suppose you actually were the only begotten Son of God. How would you know? Whatever certainty you might have, whatever reasons you might have to justify the belief, couldn’t there also be someone who wasn’t the Son and had the same beliefs and certainty? Psychologically, from the inside, it would seem hard to tell the difference, unless there’s something I’m missing. The upshot of all this would seem to be: if Jesus the Christ can be relied on as a great moral teacher, then why can’t Jesus the mere human being? The core belief is true in one case and false in another, but it’s very difficult to tell which.

But I realize in retrospect that there would be a way to know. If you really were the Son of God as that idea is typically understood, you would know everything. And if you knew everything, then you could be certain that you were the Son – and you could be certain of everything else too.

I say this because I think the necessity of doubt follows from our status as finite and limited human beings. Whatever we’re most confident of, there are always other very smart people out there who have thought about the issue at length. They may very well have come up with something that we didn’t. Even assuming (as I do) that truth as such is out there and does not vary from person to person, we still can’t have absolutely reliable access to it as individuals; we could always be wrong.

A genuinely omniscient being, on the other hand, would have no such constraint. Such a being, by definition, would already know every argument that had ever made or ever would be. (And someone who was such a being could likely verify this knowledge with little difficulty.) Only in this position of omniscience would one eliminate the need for doubt, and have absolute certainty.

I suspect these points are among the reasons for the widespread popularity of belief in omniscient beings. Even early Buddhists, whose beliefs don’t depend on any kind of divinity, still claim that the buddhas are omniscient. The thing is, such a belief helps wrap up a tricky philosophical problem: given that our knowledge as finite humans is necessarily limited and partial and subjective, how can we say anything about what’s actually or objectively true? If you posit an omniscient being, you can be done with it in a sense: the objective truth was found by that guy over there, whose knowledge isn’t finite. This step seems to have been taken most explicitly by the Jains, with their theory of anekāntavāda: they argued that we each see a limited side or part of the truth, but it is only the tīrthaṅkaras, the fully liberated beings, who can see the whole thing.

The problem with taking such a step, of course, is that then you, as a finite human being, still have to establish that the tīrthaṅkaras or the buddhas or Jesus or whatever similar beings actually were omniscient. I’ve yet to see a good argument for that, and that’s why I don’t believe that there are omniscient beings. But I understand the urge to create them.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God?

Most of the answer to the question will hinge upon how we define God. But let us assume that God has one characteristic attributed to him by almost every believer, even by deists: that he is the creator of all that is, directly or indirectly responsible for everything that happens except (perhaps) those events caused by human free will, and perhaps the will of other free beings like angels.

If that is so, the verdict is severe: God’s track record is no better than ours. Too often we think of the “problem of evil” rather than, more correctly and appropriately, of the problem of suffering. And then we neglect to think the problem through, and blame it all on human free will. For when we live so close to the twentieth century, the readiest examples of grave horrors are human-caused; the mere mention of the names Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot make it easiest to question God. But this version of the question is also the easiest to answer: the universe would not be as good if we were not free, and this freedom is worth the possibility of evil.

But how small this human-caused misery begins to look compared to the misery caused by God. In Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Asian tsunami we have plenty of recent examples of suffering not caused by humans. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer have killed more than Hitler or Pol Pot ever did. The tortures of ALS make the gas chambers look humane. Crippling diseases, natural disasters, animal attacks: we didn’t do that. God did.

And that’s just a deist God, a God inferred from creation. The evidence against the God of scriptures is worse still. In the book of Exodus, God punishes every Egyptian family with ten “wonders” – diseases, crop failures and more – culminating in the deaths of all their firstborn children. They are punished not for their own actions, but for the actions of their Pharaoh – even though the text explicitly says that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” God deliberately caused the Pharaoh to do the very thing that Pharaoh is punishing him for. Later God sends horrible afflictions, including the death of his children, on his most faithful servant Job, just in order to win a bet with the Accuser (“the Satan” in Hebrew). Worse even than all this is the idea of a literal hell, not necessarily attested in the scriptures but widely believed in the traditions, including by Augustine himself. Whatever Pol Pot did to his victims, it always ended with death. God keeps going, tormenting people for all eternity, with no deterrent purpose whatsoever, leaving sheer vengeful retribution as an end in itself.

It seems to me the evidence against God is, quite literally, damning. Augustine, it seems to me, is right that humanity is fallen and sinful, not worthy of trust. The problem is that God is worse. (And let me stress again that it is not God’s existence I’m addressing here. Like Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I would not trust a creator God even if he did exist. Maybe especially if he did.)

It is not only Western traditions that face this problem. These reflections came to me when I began reading Rāmānuja‘s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. Rāmānuja begins the text with a long homage to Vishnu as the creator of all things, who appears in the Gītā in the form of Lord Krishna. The purpose of life, according to Rāmānuja, is to reach knowledge of and devotion to this Lord. But Krishna always appears as a morally questionable sort of deity, from his childhood stealing butter, through his adulterous sexual affairs – to the advice he gives in the Mahābhārata itself. In the Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna to kill his cousins and their armies because he should always do his duty (dharma) irrespective of the consequences. Even if one thinks this morally sound advice, the same Krishna later tells Arjuna to kill his rival Karna while Karna is fixing his chariot – an act that clearly violates all applicable rules of dharma – in order to achieve the consequence of winning the war. So too, it is Krishna who tells Yudhiṣṭhira to mislead Drona about Aśvatthāman the elephant, an act for which Yudhiṣṭhira later receives a karmic punishment – again, breaking the duty of truthfulness in order to bring about the best consequences. Krishna tells others to break the rules he himself sets out, and does so with impunity. Krishna’s bad deeds might not quite reach the scale of the Judeo-Christian God, but he is far from a moral paragon. He may be better than Pol Pot, but a human saint could surely outdo him.

So whether we are speaking of Vishnu or Jehovah, I do not think Augustine’s answer to human fallibility is acceptable. Perfect goodness is not to be found in men or in gods. But a chastened intellectualism without God seems to leave us with two unpalatable alternatives: a tyranny like Xunzi’s, or a life of miserable neurosis like Freud’s. I think this may be why Nietzsche and the existentialists view life without God as a terrifying (if perhaps ultimately fulfilling) “abyss”: if you don’t trust in God, you have to trust in man, and that’s not very comforting.

Or do you? I wasn’t thinking of it this way at the time, but I suppose all this might be part of the reason why, when I needed to pray, I turned to the bodhisattva Manjuśrī rather than to a God or Goddess as such. For Mañjuśrī, while perhaps omniscient, is not omnipotent. He lets much of the world suffer not because he chooses to – as God does – but because there’s too much he can’t prevent. A being who is omnibenevolent but not omnipotent – you can’t completely trust in such a being, because he might let you down; he can’t do everything. But if he exists – and maybe even if he doesn’t – he is at least more worthy of trust than either a human being or a creator God.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mahāyāna s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mahāyāna was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post‘s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.

The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.

A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (r?pa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.

Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)

Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).

I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.

I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.

Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.

I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.

Aaron Stalnaker addresses this point in his book Overcoming Our Evil. It compares Augustine and Xunzi, two thinkers from faraway contexts who share a commonly pessimistic assessment of human nature. I had some serious methodological concerns about Stalnaker’s work in the sixth chapter of my dissertation – basically that the work isn’t as relevant to constructive ethical reflection as it claims to be – but I’ve softened a bit on those concerns since writing the dissertation. While I still don’t think that Stalnaker’s work itself makes the constructive contributions it claims to make, I do think that its categories are helpful for others who do want to make such contributions.

Specifically: what Augustine and Xunzi have in common, according to Stalnaker, is “chastened intellectualism.” While they agree that we can know a great deal of the truth about how we should live, they also agree that knowing the truth is not enough to make us act accordingly – contradicting at least some readings of Plato. Some sort of further practice is required. Pierre Hadot points out that in Roman times such practices were viewed as integral to philosophy. (Jonathan Schofer, on my dissertation committee, kept insisting that I pay greater attention to Śāntideva’s accounts of practices, and now I’m seeing why.)

I’m very sympathetic to such an account, from my personal experience. It was one thing to realize that my own attitudes and behaviours were the big problem in my life. It has been quite another to actually change those attitudes and behaviours.

But then seekers like me face a problem. Augustine and Xunzi recommend practices that are embedded within a particular tradition – Christianity and Confucianism respectively – each of which I find highly problematic. There’s a lot I disagree with in Buddhism as well; I don’t think any tradition has managed to fully grasp truth (though I also certainly don’t claim to have done so myself!) Some traditions of practice (like Goenka’s) claim to be non-sectarian techniques, but nevertheless incorporate a great deal of their tradition’s own teachings. (At the same time, Goenka’s technique didn’t do a lot for me, with one major exception.)

What then are we seekers to do? Should we swallow the practices of an existing tradition whole even while disagreeing with it, as a part of developing a necessary humility? Or should we pick and choose to make our own practice, retaining intellectual integrity but giving ourselves less chance to learn from what’s out there?