My specialty as a technologist has been to help faculty adopt ePortfolios – electronic collections of student and faculty work, typically with the intent of making student learning visible to an outside audience. There are a variety of purposes to ePortfolios, but one of the most common is assessment – figuring out whether students are really learning what they’re supposed to be learning.

Educational institutions have come to emphasize assessment more and more in the past decade. Assessment is sometimes resisted in the humanities because of an emphasis on quantification – often with good reason, as in the case of the UK’s catastrophic RAE and its relentless insistence on quantity over quality of scholarship. But there’s no reason for humanists to be opposed to assessment in principle. We always claim that our students come out of our classes better than they were when they began – better writers, more careful readers, more thoughtful, more critical, more knowledgeable, more engaged citizens, whatever. If they didn’t improve in some such ways, there would be no point in our teaching them. And surely at least some such improvements can be observed, even if we resist attaching numbers to that improvement beyond the grades we give. Moreover, some of those who have tried to observe whether students do indeed improve in these ways in their college classes – notably Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa – have found that in many cases, in the US at least, they don’t. This fact, if true, would be disastrous, considering that US students typically go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for their educations. Surely we cannot merely assume that this is money well spent. And so assessment of some sort seems to me quite a valuable task.

Working professionally with assessment has led me to think more about the question: how do we assess philosophy? It is this question, I think, that may have contributed the most to the notorious divide between analytic and “continental” philosophy.

It has been a commonplace for some time that the concerns of analytic and “continental” philosophers overlap considerably. In the past couple decades, philosophers in the two traditions have started reading each other’s work considerably more than they had when the divide was at its peak. Yet the gap endures – a student trained in the continental Boston College philosophy department is unlikely to be offered a job at analytical NYU, and vice versa.

It’s understandable to bemoan such a gap; I’ve done my share of this bemoaning myself. And yet I’d also like to suggest that the gap currently exists for good reason. It is not, as partisans on either side usually have it (and as I have thought in earlier periods of my life), because one side does philosophy so much better than the other. Rather, it is for the related reason that the two sides disagree on what good philosophy is. They disagree, that is, on assessment – right down to the matter of assigning marks (grades) to student essays and exams.

I saw this difference firsthand as a teaching assistant at Harvard. I taught in two courses, Michael Sandel’s “Justice” and Jay Harris’s “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted”, which I think exemplified the divide. Both courses were offered under the now-defunct rubric of “Moral Reasoning”, in which all Harvard undergrads at the time had to take a course. Neither course was taught by a philosophy professor – Sandel taught in the department of government, Harris in Near Eastern studies – and yet the courses still effectively managed to reproduce the analytic/continental divide, evidence that this divide is not merely a matter of the parochial turf wars of philosophy departments.

In Sandel’s course, argument was all. Students were given a specific question on which to take a position (e.g. “Should governments torture terrorists to gain information about future attacks?”) We marked the papers on whether they had a clear thesis; gave clear, logical and relevant arguments to demonstrate the truth of that thesis; and anticipated potential objections and responded to those. If you did that, you got a good mark; if you didn’t, you didn’t. Kant and Mill and Rawls and Aristotle were on the reading list, but as resources for arguments about the particular cases, deeper theoretical sets of reasons to underlie the arguments students made. Whether you interpreted them correctly was of secondary importance.

That wasn’t the case in Harris’s course. I had a bit of difficulty adjusting to that course, because after two semesters with Sandel, I expected to continue marking on the basis of argument. But for Harris and my fellow TAs in that course, argument was secondary. There was a wide variety of topics to write about, some of which would barely even require the students to have an argument, just explore an interesting position. Much more important was interpretation – and not merely a correct interpretation, but a deep interpretation, one that could explain not merely what Kant said, but why he said it.

Harris’s approach here was much closer to that typically taken in continental Europe. I found it very enlightening to read a short piece in a Harvard magazine by a student who’d gone on a study-abroad program in France. She noted that in French humanities classes – not merely in philosophy – students were expected to open their papers not with a thesis, but with a problématique, an explanation of the various aspects of the problem to be explored.

I’m not even talking here about the difference in content taught between the two classes – but about assessment. The two professors effectively disagreed about what constitutes good philosophy. And it’s that disagreement, I think, that makes the analytic-continental split so enduring.

Now couldn’t one say that both rigour of argument and depth of interpretation are important, and get over the dispute that way? Well, sure, and I would argue that that’s the right way for philosophy to go. The trick is that doing it is not as easy as it sounds. Pedagogically, it’s easier to focus on teaching students a single skill than multiple ones. And I might be tempted to argue that there’s a deeper problem – that the two goals can in some respect interfere with each other. But that’s a topic for another post.

[EDIT: Earlier version of the post didn't have links to the BC and NYU philosophy departments, just notes to myself to include them. Whoops. Thanks to Jeff for pointing that out!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m led to think about Wittgenstein by a few recent comments from Thill, quoting a text called On Certainty. Readers might recall that in my most extensive reading of Wittgenstein to date – looking at the Philosophical Investigations – the main effect he had on my thought was to push me away from his thought and closer to the thinkers he disliked, like Plato and Augustine. But a brief look at On Certainty does even less for my estimation of Wittgenstein as a thinker.

The main aim of On Certainty, as I understand it, seems to be to dispense with the kind of doubt that René Descartes expresses in the Discourse on Method and the Meditations. In my own reflection on certainty I expressed sympathy with Cartesian doubt – but not with his solution, so that even “I think therefore I am” is uncertain to me.

But Wittgenstein wants to do away with all this. Some things, he thinks, simply should not be doubted: “Even if I came to a country where they believed that people were taken to the moon in dreams, I couldn’t say to them: ‘I have never been to the moon. – Of course I may be mistaken’. And to their question ‘Mayn’t you be mistaken?’ I should have to answer: No.” (section 667) Why? “From its seeming to me – or to everyone – to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.” (section 2, emphasis in original)

I don’t see how Wittgenstein can say it doesn’t make sense to doubt it. The Matrix gives a clear and graphic illustration of what it would mean to doubt our everyday experience, to show that the world could be completely other than we imagine. It’s not necessarily plausible; but what seemed hugely implausible or even impossible to past generations (the earth revolving around the sun, the adaptation of living species without the help of an intelligent designer) has turned out, as far as we now know, to be true.

While Wittgenstein isn’t thinking about the Matrix, he does seem to have some similar cases in mind. One might think here about possibly the most famous passage in the work of Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, wakes up, and then wonders if, rather than Zhuangzi having dreamed he was a butterfly, he is actually a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. (I’m not entirely sure that this doubt is the real point of Zhuangzi’s passage, but it can be used to illustrate the point at hand, which is the important thing for the moment.) Wittgenstein isn’t much for such uncertainty based on dreams. Yet the very conclusion of On Certainty, in attempting to refute a position like Zhuangzi’s, seems effectively to defend it. Wittgenstein says:

I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says “I am dreaming”, even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining”, while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

Was Wittgenstein unaware of lucid dreaming? The existence of lucid dreaming, in which one is aware that one is dreaming but continues to dream, is well attested scientifically; I’ve done it once or twice myself. I don’t see how one can judge the lucid dreamer incorrect about the fact that he is dreaming. Section 383 says: “The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.” I don’t see how claims made in a lucid dream are meaningless, given that the same words can be intelligibly recalled when the dream is over – is Wittgenstein turning to the juvenile habit, so endemic among logical positivists, of declaring “meaningless” anything that he does not wish to put in the effort to understand? Perhaps Wittgenstein has a different point in this passage; but then again, perhaps he’s just being willfully ignorant. The latter seems to be the case in section 108 of On Certainty, pointed to a while ago by Chris Mathews at Philosophical Misadventures:

If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it. For this demands answers to the questions “How did he overcome the force of gravity?” “How could he live without an atmosphere?” and a thousand others which could not be answered.

As we all know, these very questions were all in the process of being answered definitively right as Wittgenstein wrote, to the point that in 1969 – the very year On Certainty was published – Neil Armstrong did indeed walk on the moon. What might have once appeared to have been a profound aphorism turned out shortly afterwards to be just plain wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me if recent attempts at lucid dreaming wound up refuting the previous passage in the same way.

There’s plenty more to Wittgenstein’s thought than On Certainty, of course, and I’ll try to say more next time. But for the moment, I will note that I feel mostly certain that Wittgenstein is wrong in that text. The only reason I can find to doubt that he’s wrong is itself based on the fact that I disagree with him, and think that to a certain extent we can and should doubt everything.

But Gadamerian prejudices can still be prejudices in the pejorative sense as well. Common sense is common only to a given social context; it is not common to humanity in general, and it is often not very sensible either. What was common sense to our ancestors – that the sun revolved around the earth, that women are intellectually inferior to men – is absurd to us, and within a couple hundred years our common sense will look absurd too. This is to be expected, for we are finite and limited human beings; we know what has been taught to us. But the more we rely on common sense, the more parochial our reasoning will be – the more we will be limited to our own context and the more absurd we will appear to future generations.

All of this is another reason why I think philosophy needs to consider historical context; we need to be aware of the big gaps between the common sense of other times and that of our own. What appears absurd to us did not appear absurd to others, and often for good reason. If our reaction to an important thinker’s apparently absurd claim is haughty dismissal, we close ourselves off to learning, and remain within the parochial shell of our own common sense, the sense that will be absurdity in two hundred years. But if – as Thomas Kuhn rightly advocated – we instead ask how an intelligent person could have made such an apparently absurd claim, then we may start learning about the assumptions taken for granted behind the text. And those assumptions may well teach us far more than anything the text explicitly claims.

Thill insisted on separating the history of ideas from their evaluation, in order to avoid genetic fallacies – the form of circumstantial ad hominem according to which explaining an idea serves to refute it or confirm it. Thill provides a good example of this in those vulgar Marxists who would identify an idea’s “bourgeois” provenance as sufficient to refuting it. Of course such fallacies are to be avoided. But the way to avoid this is not to juxtapose the premises of the arguments we read against our own assumptions, and immediately pronounce them false if they fail to match. Rather, to really find the truth in a text, we need to consider not merely what it says on the surface, but also the unspoken assumptions that gave rise to it, what phenomenologists might call its “taken-for-granted world” – its common sense, which will be so different from ours, and may be just what is needed to call our common sense into question.

For calling common sense into question, it seems to me, is one of the key tasks any philosopher is charged with. And this is often not a matter of mere abstraction. Common sense itself can be at the root of history’s darkest atrocities. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that anti-Semitism in early-twentieth-century Germany was simple common sense. One could differ on proposed solutions to “the Jewish problem,” but to say that Jews were just people like anybody else and posed no significant difficulties to the greater well-being of society – a view that has become common sense now – would have seemed the height of absurdity. Goldhagen’s view was more than confirmed to me when I read Marx’s famously anti-Semitic essay On the Jewish Question: this is not an argument for anti-Semitism, it simply assumes anti-Semitism. Everybody knows the Jews are a problem – that’s a given for the piece. But from that starting point, Marx argues that the real problem isn’t their religion, let alone their race, but the (supposedly) characteristically Jewish activity of “huckstering,” of capitalism. With such a view, Marx had managed to be several levels more enlightened than the common sense of his time, though not as much as we might hope with hindsight. But if we want to avoid the kind of atrocities that made perfect sense to Germans a few generations later, it is vital that we not limit ourselves to common sense as they did.

The attempt to identify such universal categories, I think, is central to the work of analytic philosophy. It drives the characteristically analytic attempt to classify Buddhist ethics according to the categories of 20th-century ethics: is Buddhist ethics consequentialism or virtue ethics? For that matter, is Śāntideva a determinist or a compatibilist? The problem with such attempts, in my book, is that they take it for granted that the questions of 20th-century ethics (consequentialism, deontology or virtue?) are the most important ones to ask. Such an approach, it seems to me, strongly limits one’s ability to learn anything of substance from other traditions. Foreign traditions (and this includes the Greeks and the medieval Christians as much as the Confucians or Vedāntins) can teach us different questions to ask, not merely different answers to those questions. That’s why it’s important to me that when we do think in more universal categories, we try to involve categories (like ascent-descent) that are derived from the study of multiple traditions.

Part of the point of thinking across traditions in this way, to me, is that metaphilosophy shouldn’t only be about universals, but about particulars – specifically, historical particulars. I have no problem in saying that philosophy aims at universal truth; but it does so only through the eyes of individual philosophers, who are all finite, particular and historically limited human beings, shaped greatly by their historical context. And for any given philosophy – including one’s own – that context is an essential reason why it is the way it is.

For me, what makes any kind of history exciting is the window it opens on the present, the ability to see why things are the way they are because one can see when they became the way they are. For this reason, Canadian history became a lot more interesting to me in the past year after I learned about the Seven Years’ War, which created the English-dominated bilingual society that is contemporary Canada. (Schools in Québec and Massachusetts both teach this as a fundamental event in the creation of their worlds, which it was; schools in Ontario do not teach it, though it was just as important. Our history classes began with 1867, when Canada had long already had more or less the shape it has now; and so it’s no wonder I learned to regard Canadian history as really, really boring.) I generally didn’t care about history at all until, sometime during my undergraduate degree, I would start to see past philosophers appear in the present – and not just present philosophers. I would hear other students argue moral issues – outside of philosophy classes – and I would think “they’re getting this from Kant, whether they realize it or not.” Perhaps more fundamentally, I looked at the epistemological empiricism I myself held at the time, and realized that it came from David Hume. My own philosophy, even though it aspired to a universal truth, was still rooted in a particular time and place.

Philosophy is always instantiated in the views of particular philosophers – and I had come to see just how much those views, including my own, were historically conditioned. This point, I think, is central to Martin Heidegger‘s philosophical activity: he wanted to get us over what he saw as the mistakes of the Western philosophical tradition, but he knew that we would keep repeating those mistakes unless we knew that tradition very well. Thus he kept turning back to the first Western philosophers, the pre-Socratics.

Now it is crucial here not to make a mere circumstantial ad hominem fallacy: to say that a given philosophical view is wrong because it can be explained by its historical context. Such a view leads past relativism to nihilism, since one could make such explanations of any philosophy, and therefore “refute” all of them. That’s not what Heidegger is up to, of course; he is trying to get at a real truth of some sort, he’s just convinced that most of the Western tradition has missed it, and that he has missed it as well insofar as he is still under the influence of that tradition.

I think that this attention to the history of philosophy is generally shared in some such respect by those on the “continental” side of the contemporary divide. It certainly seems true of postmodernists like Jacques Derrida who, following Heidegger, seek to overthrow the Western philosophical tradition. But it is also true of those who value that tradition and seek to sustain and advance it – among whom the key figure is G.W.F. Hegel.

I have kept returning to Hegel throughout my philosophical career, not merely for this blog, because of his powerful attempt to blend these two approaches to metaphilosophy: to link the search for universal truths and the understanding of historical particularity, put them all together. Hegel’s own discussion of the history of philosophy is manifestly inadequate, for he treats South and East Asian philosophies as being without any inner development, merely the starting point for Western tradition. One can refute him on that score with a relatively cursory knowledge of those traditions. Yet for those who see the power and truth behind both kinds of metaphilosophy – recognizing that one needs to look for universal truth, but also recognizing that historical particularity is a part of every philosophy at a very deep level – Hegel’s project remains an essential starting point.

But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.

I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? (Epicurus is perhaps the clearest example of a figure who avoided both supernaturalism and politics – but Epicureanism as a system did not last, and even those who sought to resurrect Epicurus’s philosophy have sometimes ditched his anti-politics.)

Last time I mused on the subject, I turned to an explanation from Simone Weil: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” Humans, Weil seems to imply, will always seek some sort of absolute perfection: the choice is to seek it in an otherworldly realm, or in the future of this one. Eric Voegelin appeared to see the same choice as Weil, and view the latter choice as disastrous: there will always be an “eschaton,” a Final End that human life aspires to, and if we immanentize it – that is, set it in this world instead of a transcendent world beyond – then we will end up with totalitarian states that goosestep over the messy imperfections inevitable in human life. Whether or not there were any other world in which to transcend, according to Voegelin, the absence of belief in such an other world leads us to terror in this one.

But I asked before: do we really have to seek an absolute good? What about just seeking modest improvements, trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it? As non-supernaturalists, shouldn’t we just try and make sure that people set their eyes lower than Weil and Voegelin do?

Well, one answer that comes to mind for that question is: death. The existence of a final death seems to pose a major problem for any sort of egoistic consequentialism, any idea that one should seek out the best consequences for oneself – including the virtue and tranquility that Epicurus himself seeks. For eventually, there will be no further consequences no matter what one does. At the last moment of one’s life, there is no future, nothing to maximize and no reason to do anything. And at the previous moment, all the egoist can act for is something better in that last moment. In the earlier moments of life, the moments that one can improve will run out before one knows it. As important as this one life looks while we’re in it, it begins to look pretty small when one faces impending death, whether it is impending in seconds or in decades.

By contrast, an absolute good – an “eschaton” – outlasts the individual self, it is something bigger to strive for. Even striving for the good of one’s immediate circle of friends and relatives seems hollow when their death will follow in a few decades as well. But the state – that offers the promise of something more lasting. The Jacobins are long dead, but the capitalist world unleashed by the French Revolution is still with us. The possibility of a classless communist society offers the same intoxicating thought of a world in which one’s contributions live on long after death, a world where one’s life is more important than its mere length.

Politics, then, offers a way to transcend death through what Freud called cathexis – as might one’s children and one’s work. We break down the boundaries of our selves and identify them with something that outlasts ourselves, such as a state or new classless society.

But there remains a basic problem with transcending death through cathexis in this way: the object of cathexis has no guarantee of immortality either. Lenin’s classless society lies in ruins today. What guarantee have we that the perfect society we think we’re building will not do the same? Let alone the more minor improvements we might make to politics as it is. This seems to me the greatest problem with descent philosophies of whatever variety: however much one might accomplish, in the end it comes to naught. Lucretius is right that when we die we won’t care about that nothingness. But that doesn’t stop it from casting a shadow over all we do in life, raising questions about the point of it all, whether it’s really worth bothering or we’re just fooling ourselves.

And so I start to turn to ascent philosophies, views that turn us in some respect away from the world we see. But then we are back to the original problem: most ascent philosophies, especially the ascending intimacy philosophies, are supernaturalist. They depend on an afterlife, turn us away from this world toward the one that is supposed to come after death – but to one who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, it would seem like there is no such thing.

However, those philosophies of the afterlife have one thing in common with the descent philosophies. They both put the absolute good, the eschaton, in the future, whether a transcendent or immanent future. A great appeal to me of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy is that it gives us an eschaton which is beyond time itself, and therefore essentially not in the future. We have an absolute good that is already there at all times; it’s just a matter of realizing it. Does Śaṅkara get us entirely beyond the supernaturalism-or-politics quandary? Probably not – he believed in rebirth himself, after all, and the main point of bothering to realize the absolute good would be that one would do so in the future and avoid the suffering attached to future ignorant births. It makes for an interesting alternative way of viewing the problem, but not necessarily a solution to it.

One can always argue the details of this textual question in any given case. In Śāntideva’s case it’s not only a matter of arguing whether “his” two major works (the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣā Samuccaya) were written by the same person; it’s also the fact that these texts may themselves be the work of multiple writers, in that there’s an early version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (the “Dunhuang recension”) which differs from the received version known to tradition. But there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?

Gyatso greatly admired the works of Jacques Derrida, who threw doubt on the idea of authorship, and often focused on the “margins” of texts in order to highlight inconsistencies and ways in which the texts break down. Her course on Buddhist philosophy highlighted parallels between the work of Derrida and of Nāgārjuna. In some respects it’s not hard to see why: Derrida questions the idea of the subject or self, as most Buddhist thinkers do. If the self is unreal, as so many Buddhist thinkers have said, then so is the author. Thus perhaps Śāntideva’s disavowal of his own originality and profundity at the beginning of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. (I have tended to insist that the difference between Derrida and Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy is that Madhyamaka has a point. But that’s a topic for another time.)

It does help, I think, to be careful with questions of authorship – to think carefully about what one means when one speaks of “Śāntideva” (or “Plato”), when the texts come to us from such questionable sources. But I also think it’s all too easy to take the point too far. When one discards the search for coherence entirely, one discards most of one’s ability to learn from the texts one reads.

From the first draft of my proposal to the final draft of my dissertation, my research was guided by this quote from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (from p. xii of his The Essential Tension)

Significant words here include “important thinker” and “sensible person.” You might find plenty of contradictions or other absurdities in the ramblings of an everyday, average person. But the writers of great works like the Bodhicaryāvatāra put a lot of thought into those works, and their value has repeatedly been discovered anew by thinkers in the generations that follow them. They’re not going to drop random inconsistencies into their work and just think “oh, that’s okay.” If there are contradictions, they’re going to be there for a good reason; at the very least, contradictions need to be explained.

It was this method of looking for coherence that allowed me to find what I think is the most innovative and important part of my dissertation’s interpretation of Śāntideva: the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I was looking at the combination of Śāntideva’s advice that material goods are harmful, and the fact that he urges one to give those gifts to others for their own benefit. Was there a way these two ideas could go together without contradicting each other? Sure enough, there was – you just had to get rid of the idea, which seems like common sense to us but not to Śāntideva, that the purpose of gift-giving is to ensure that the recipient possesses the gift. I could have shrugged my shoulders and said “well, this is a composite text, of course it contradicts itself.” But if I had, if I hadn’t taken contradiction in the important thinker as a problem, I wouldn’t have seen what I came to see.

As far as I know, it was just such an approach that led Kuhn to write his most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a physicist, Kuhn was trying to read Aristotle’s Physics, and found it full of what appeared to be unpardonable errors in logic and observation. Just from looking at the world around him, Aristotle should have known better. Now Kuhn could easily have said “well, we all contradict ourselves and make dumb mistakes; why should we expect better of Aristotle?” But he didn’t. He did expect better from the thinker whose works had been taken as canonical for a thousand years, and rightly so. Once he did, it fell into place: Aristotle was asking entirely different questions, for different purposes, from the questions a Newtonian physicist would ask. Aristotle’s work would make perfect sense if one’s underlying assumptions changed.

More broadly, I think, it’s this search for coherence in the great and admired minds of the past that leads us to find genuinely new insights, ones that change our current perspective. In constructive study, where one seeks to learn from a tradition and not merely about it, there is always the danger that one will only find what one was already looking for – pick out the ideas one already agrees with, and not be challenged by them. One of the best ways to avoid this, to learn something genuinely new, is to focus on those “apparent absurdities,” the things that don’t make sense, and ask how somebody intelligent could have believed them. One might not come to believe in the thing one thought was absurd; but one will likely come to see the world in a new way that will challenge other ideas.