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.

We have been debating the extent to which truth can properly be understood as correspondence to reality. I think it generally can, but insisted that that reality should not just be understood as “outer” reality. Our understandings of our inner, subjective states can also be true or false in the sense of succeeding or failing to correspond to reality (as when we are incorrect about being happy).

Elisa continued this debate with a post on her own blog (as I’m now doing in return). She argued that the experience of pain is “subject-dependent,” and cannot be understood as corresponding to a reality beyond the subject’s own understanding: “No scientist could convince me that the pain I am experiencing is unbearable if I can bear it (and vice versa, different people react very differently to what seems to be the same neuronal stimulus).” I responded in the comments that we can indeed misjudge pain, like happiness; I mentioned a physiotherapist friend who gets frustrated when he asks people to rate the pain from a minor injury on a scale of 1 to 10 and they immediately say 10. Elisa replied as follows:

It is not fair to ask someone who has only experience of a feeble pain to collocate it on a scale from 1 to 10. She would, rightly, collocate her present pain on the 10th level, because the ’10′ as a level of pain sensation can only make sense in regard to the pain we have actually experienced. A child will say that 10 is the pain one experiences after a minor fall, a woman who has just given birth will describe the 10-level-pain as something different, but they are right in maintaining that the pain they are presently experiencing is the highest they have ever experienced. The physiotherapist asks them to conform to an objective scale, valid for everyone, hence his disappointment.

My response: the assigning of a level-10 pain can be erroneous. Suppose I get a minor muscle spasm that I think is the most painful thing I have yet experienced. I therefore rate it a 10 on the pain scale. The following week, I am stung by an Australian box jellyfish, which produces pain so intense that victims sometimes die simply from the shock of the pain. I realize then that what I would have rated a 10 wasn’t really a 10, more like a 4. I just didn’t know it then. I might have been justified in believing that the earlier pain was a 10, but my belief was not true. (Even the idea that it’s justified seems suspect, if I have some awareness of the kinds of pains other human beings have been in and some empathy towards them – I should know that there are others who have had pains like this, and additional pains more severe than this.)

A further example: suppose that I had been stung by a box jellyfish several decades before the muscle spasm – but so long enough ago that I had forgotten about it. In the ensuing decades I have had very little pain, so much so that the muscle spasm appears to be the most intense pain I have ever experienced. I rate it a 10. An old friend hears about this, and says: “That was a 10? Compared to the jellyfish sting?” So I reply: “Wow, I’d forgotten about that! Yeah, actually this is really more like a 4, not a 10.” It seems clear to me that I was wrong when I rated it a 10.

In both cases, my own opinion of the same subjective experience has suddenly changed. As a result of different information, I have now decided that my previous view was wrong. That means that if I am right now, I was wrong then, and vice versa. It is not possible for me to be right now that this subjective pain is a 10 and to have been right then that this subjective pain was a 4. I have to have been wrong about my own subjective experience; my own understanding of that subjective experience did not correspond to reality, and was therefore a false understanding.

In a slightly different direction, Elisa’s post also suggested a theology of mystical experience: rational disproofs of God’s existence do not change the fact that Teresa of Ávila had an experience of God: “What she cannot be mistaken about, I argue, is that she is perceiving God sending an arrow towards her hearth, etc. The theological side of this God is, in fact, not part of her sensation.”

But I think this is not true. Teresa is perceiving something that seems like God, looks like God, feels like God. But that doesn’t mean she is actually perceiving God. If I think I see a snake in the road, but on later reflection I see it turns out to have merely been a rope, then I did not in fact perceive a snake. I perceived a rope which I thought was a snake; I only thought that I perceived a snake. But I was wrong.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?

This is the kind of objection we would likely associate with Freud, though one sees versions of it in Nietzsche’s attacks on morality – moral blame and criticism, for Nietzsche, is its own form of passive aggression, a less healthy outlet for anger than angry words or blows. Does their objection defeat Śāntideva?

I think it’s possible to put the two together. Śāntideva is not criticizing only the outward manifestations of anger, after all. Anger expressed in the passive-aggressive’s sighs and eyerolls is still anger, just like anger expressed in screams and fists. Anger that has been repressed hasn’t really been eradicated in the way that Śāntideva advocates.

The question remains: is it possible to genuinely eradicate anger, as opposed to merely repressing it? I suspect that the answer may be no – in the context of the hubbub of everyday life. (Śāntideva tells us to be monks, and the monk’s single-minded focus on virtue may make it a more serious possibility.) Nevertheless, I think it’s still possible to reduce anger in a way that does not repress it. Sometimes anger really does go away without resurfacing – through talking it through, through understanding its causes, through meditative introspection (all practices that Śāntideva recommends). The trick is in distinguishing the two; and that may be something you can only learn through practice.

(I don’t think Śāntideva actually says any of this, mind you, and I wish he said more; but I do think this position is compatible with what he does say.)

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?