But I don’t want all these criticisms to make it sound like I think Wilber’s thought is silly, fruitless or otherwise wrong-headed. Quite the opposite. I engage with Wilber’s ideas this much precisely because his project is so important and valuable. Granted, his writings don’t stand up well to either analytic or continental assessment: his arguments are sometimes maddeningly imprecise, and his readings of other thinkers tend strongly to the superficial. But what Wilber lacks in precision and depth, he makes up for in breadth.

For the thing about both the analytic and continental standards of assessment is that they are both generated in the context of contemporary academia – and that is a context that gives out all its rewards to those who think small. When good work is considered to be that which gets the details exactly right, it’s much easier to generate endless articles saying new things, because there are so many new details to talk about. The nonacademic book publishing industry has its own problematic incentives, but they are not the same ones. They don’t push authors to precise nitpicky detail in the same way; and that’s a valuable counterbalance to academia. I do think academia’s details matter a lot. But they matter because they are part of a larger whole. We will not really be able to make sense of the world and our lives if we can’t understand what that whole is, how everything fits together. And that’s where Wilber comes in.

Wilber’s project is an audacious one: to integrate all the different realms of human knowledge, including the “great wisdom traditions” like Buddhism and Christianity. He tries hard to bring together “religion” and science, and he understands that philosophy has a key role in that process.

It would be one thing to make a mere catalogue of these different kinds of knowledge, a road map to the most important books. That much has been done before. Wilber, by contrast, actually tries to consider the truth of the ideas he studies. And not just in terms of declaring them true or declaring them false, but trying to find the truth in all of them. He proclaims, rightly I think, that “no human mind can produce 100% error.” And more than that: when an idea comes to last across multiple generations, that suggests there is particular truth to it – it’s not tied to the madness of one particular clique or the whimsy of one era, but is reinvented with every new birth who take it up and find it valuable for explaining the world and our place in it. Somehow, the ideas need to go together.

This approach too has been taken before to some extent. G.W.F. Hegel tried harder than most. While I think Hegel was more methodologically sophisticated than Wilber, there is a lot missing from Hegel’s synthesis. Science, especially, has changed a lot, making Hegel’s philosophy of nature difficult to accept; so too, Hegel’s thought has no room for the shining achievement of the 20th century, namely feminism and the liberation of women. And while Hegel at least attempted to include Asian philosophies in his synthesis, in a way that few had before, they were stuck at the earliest and lowest level of his philosophy, making Hegel “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space”. All of these vast gaps in Hegel’s thought – science, feminism, Asian philosophy – Wilber has tried hard to give a central place in his thought. His attempted synthesis is the widest one I know of – much more so than that of, say, Mou Zongsan, who says little if anything about Judaism or Advaita Vedānta, let alone feminism and science. Wilber gives us some vision of what a unified synthesis now could look like.

I don’t accept most of the contours of the synthesis Wilber comes up with, but some of the concepts that make it up have been very valuable to my reflection, especially ascent and descent and the pre-trans fallacy. And beyond the particular concepts, the nature of the project itself is particularly valuable in the era of detail-obsessed academia. Philologists and analytic philosophers usually can’t see the forest for the trees. Wilber’s sweeping generalizations give him the opposite problem: he has a hard time getting the whole forest because he doesn’t understand the trees that make it up. But when the structures of textual production today lead so overwhelmingly to a focus on nitpicky details with no larger context, Wilber’s problem is a good one for a thinker to have.

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. There is always much more to the reasons a philosopher says anything than the arguments that she makes for it. Certainly the arguments matter. They always do. But they are not the only thing that matters. Michael is right that depth of interpretation requires a serious attention to detail – but arguments are not the only details.

So what else could we be speaking of here, other than arguments? I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine what that could be. An argument consists of premises leading to a conclusion. But where do those premises come from? Sometimes from other arguments – but not always. We can follow a chain of reasoning back from one argument to another argument to another, but eventually it’s going to stop somewhere. There will be a premise that is simply asserted – or at least as often, and this is particularly important, a premise that is not even stated but merely assumed. And if one merely understands the structure of a thinker’s arguments but not the assumptions that underlie them, one will not have understood that thinker.

I should note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with an assumed premise, or one asserted without argument. Indeed, one has to do it at some point; one cannot say everything, or one would run out of space. It’s just that if one is going to assume or assert a premise successfully, it must be an assumption that is shared by one’s intended audience. That’s the point that is typically missed by overeager campus missionaries: you are not going to get anywhere by telling me that Jesus is God’s only son because the Bible says so, since I don’t accept your assumption that the Bible as an authority on that matter. If I did, your argument would be sound; but I don’t, so it isn’t.

Within analytic philosophy, when these shared assumptions are highlighted it is usually with the term intuition. I find that term highly inappropriate, because it suggests that these “intuitions” are something more than mere shared assumptions. But it’s not wrong to ground one’s arguments in those shared assumptions that get called “intuitions” – simply because, again, one has to start somewhere. On the “continental” side this point was one of Gadamer‘s key insights: new knowledge is always measured against the “prejudices” (Vorurteilen) we already have. (I find Gadamer’s “prejudices”, or Martha Nussbaum’s “prevalent ordinary beliefs” – a term derived with reference to Aristotle’s phainomena – all much more appropriate terms than “intuitions”. For the purposes of this discussion, I think it’s fine to call them “assumptions”.)

Now where all of this gets us into trouble is when we start dealing with thinkers who don’t share our assumptions (and we don’t share theirs). Such thinkers exist even within our own time and place (as with the overeager campus missionaries). But the greater the distance in time and space, the greater the disconnect of assumptions is likely to be – and the more crucial it is to consider not merely the explicit arguments but also the assumptions of the thinkers we hope to learn from.

Figuring all this out was crucial to my own dissertation work. Śāntideva, I noted there, believes that material goods are harmful and still urges one to give them to others for their benefit. If I’d merely considered his explicit arguments and nothing more, I would have had to have stopped there: Śāntideva is a fool who contradicts himself, and there’s an end on’t – and in that case, why bother studying him any further?

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I followed the method of looking for coherent authorship, as stated by Thomas Kuhn: I tried to ask myself how an intelligent person could have written such an apparent absurdity. And that required looking deeper into Śāntideva’s assumptions: the things he believes but doesn’t say. Key among these was the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I argue in the dissertation that if you look at the things Śāntideva does say, you can infer that Śāntideva believes this, and it makes sense out of his explicit arguments in a way that you can’t get from looking at the arguments alone. Such an approach, I think, is crucial to making sense of any philosopher outside of one’s own immediate cultural milieu. If all you’re going to consider is the arguments, you might as well not bother. And indeed, most analytic philosophers don’t bother much with thinkers from distant times and places, which, considering their method, is just as well.

But that is not to say analytic philosophy is worthless. Not at all! It just doesn’t prepare you very well for studying the history of philosophy (which is why that history tends to be relegated to the sidelines of analytic departments). What it does very well is attempt to get to truth within a given context, namely ours – to take the incoherent mess of “intuitions” or prejudices, with which we must always begin our philosophical reflection, and start to hammer them into something that actually makes sense. For that reason I often refer to analytic philosophy as the scholasticism of the liberal tradition. Like medieval Christian scholasticism, analytic thought provides an extraordinary level of detailed reflection within one given context, which is necessary if those within that context are going to seriously strive to reach a truth about their lives. But it also makes that thought look parochial from a foreign context; I strongly suspect that the majority of analytical reflection will look as bizarre to people 500 years from now as Christian scholasticism looks to us today. Those people of the future may well be able to benefit from the argumentative details of 20th-century analytic philosophy; but it will require someone with the interpretive approach of a continental philosopher to figure out just what it was the analytic philosophers were going on about.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. And one might well trace much of this single-mindedness in the West back to Plato, with his focus on the good as one and single. Most notably, the single-minded Plato banished the poets from his ideal city. He did this for a variety of reasons, but all of these had to do with the poets’ leading us away from the single true good: their works portrayed the false idea that external goods matter to a good life as much as virtue; they imitate the bad as well as the good; and their very practice of imitation leads one to mistake falsity for truth.

Marxism – about as modern a political philosophy as one can get – has paralleled Plato (and the Salafis) in a political single-mindedness. Plato’s ideal state seems totalitarian in theory; implementing Marx’s vision turned totalitarian in practice, even if that was not his intent. Self-proclaimed Marxists pursued the vision of a classless society with a zeal that overrode any and every other possible goal. Pol Pot justified some of his atrocities – the evacuation of the cities, the mass murder of intellectuals – with the chilling words: “If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?”

Now in saying this I am not agreeing with the distorted account of Karl Popper. While I would dispute Popper’s interpretation of Plato and Marx to some extent, more important in this context is his unfortunate lumping of G.W.F. Hegel in with these two; for Hegel’s vision strives directly to encompass the particulars of everyday life without sacrificing them to a higher ideal. Yes, the state is necessary to human fulfillment, and Hegel’s state is less liberal than those we are accustomed to, but it does not dictate the details of life in the pursuit of a single ideal, in the way of the Platonic state or of existing Communist states.

Indeed, I find the unabashedly Hegelian thought of James Doull perhaps the most helpful way to theorize and think about philosophical single-mindedness. For Doull, the most abiding philosophical issue is a conflict between the universal and the particular – between the one singular truth or good that Plato picks out, and the manifold reality that surrounds us. Single-mindedness is then a dogged focus on the universal that disparages the particular.

And if we understand single-mindedness in this way, with Doull, then we can start to note its appearance in South Asian traditions as well — most clearly in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta. For Śaṅkara as for Plato and Mao, everything of significance reduces ultimately to one driving universal thing that’s most important, and nothing else compares. One may contrast particularist thinkers like the Sophists or postmodernists for whom there is no universal, and the details are all that matter. The project of Aristotle, and his followers Hegel and Doull in turn, is to harmonize these viewpoints and acknowledge both the one and the many, the universal and the particular, as having great significance – a significance found perhaps especially in the relationship of the one and the many to each other.

Personally, I find Doull’s reflections particularly helpful because I am very much a big-picture thinker. It’s probably one of the big reasons I was so impatient with the philological questions that preoccupy so many scholars of religion; I was always asking “but what’s the point?” On the Myers-Briggs personality test I scored near the middle on three of the four dimensions, but off the charts for “iNtuiting” over “Sensing” – which is to say that I gravitate toward abstract concepts, theories, larger significance, and away from details and particulars. In many respects philosophy appeals to me precisely because it deals with the biggest questions of all — the most important things, the universals. But the problems of modernism — to say nothing of Salafism and Communism — are a good cautionary reminder of why the details really do matter. One may well find a universal ultimate that is most important; but that does not make everything else unimportant.

And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.

To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found?

The quickest, easiest and most tempting response is to throw up one’s hands and say no, or effectively say no: there’s no way to decide between these different answers. This is the postmodern or relativist response, and it’s one to which undergraduates gravitate very quickly – and understandably – when faced with the big questions. But this answer very quickly reveals itself to be both incorrect and unsatisfying – for reasons beyond the performatives I have previously discussed.

For to say “there is no answer” is itself an answer, and an answer that is itself in disagreement with those very great minds. Plato and Aristotle might disagree significantly on the answer to the question of Ascent and Descent, but they will certainly agree that there is an answer to be found. Take the Descent and you will reject Plato; take the Ascent and you will reject Aristotle; say there can be no answer and you will reject both. There’s no way around fundamental disagreement with at least one of the great thinkers on any perennial question.

Or is there? There is another way to address such questions, but it is more complicated than any of the options discussed so far: taking one side over the other; adopting one thinker’s solution as truth; rejecting attempts to find an answer. Skholiast nailed it in his response to my first post on perennial questions. On perennial questions like that of Ascent and Descent, there is in the great thinkers always a dialectic: an attempt not merely to refute the opponent’s position but in some way to incorporate it. Skholiast describes the dialectical process using Hegel‘s complex but key German term Aufhebung (which is the noun form; the verb is aufheben in the present tense, aufgehoben in the past). Aufheben is often translated ineffectively with the word “sublate,” a word which has no real English meaning other than as a translation of aufheben. Ken Wilber renders it as “transcend and include,” which provides a much more helpful understanding of what the German term gets at, but is wordy enough to be awkward. I prefer “supersede,” which covers a lot of the sense of the German word. The new edition of a book (ideally) supersedes, aufhebs, the old. It cancels the old in a sense, moves beyond it and makes it unnecessary, but does so by preserving what is most important in the old while adding things that are new and better.

In the case of Plato and Aristotle, it’s easy to fall into the temptation of portraying them roughly as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, or as Raphael does in The School of Athens: as polar and mutually exclusive opposites, Plato seeking only to escape the fortunes of the world and Aristotle to embrace them. But as Skholiast notes and as I have tried to emphasize in my own posts, there is always a Platonic element to Aristotle, an attempt to embrace and incorporate Plato’s transcendence within a philosophy whose overall tendency is more worldly. This Platonic Aristotle comes out above all in sections X.6-8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle says that the contemplative life is the highest and best because it is the most godlike. This is a passage that Nussbaum has a hard time dealing with; she says effectively that Aristotle is contradicting the rest of his work (Fragility 375-7). But she agrees that he feels the power of Plato’s Ascent ideal, and is trying to consider it. It strikes me that his goal was very likely to supersede Plato, to transcend and include him, to be not merely a Descender but a Descender who includes Ascent within his thought. If Nussbaum’s interpretation is right, it may mean primarily that he failed at that task.

The point I’m trying to make is that the perennial questions are best addressed through a dialectical synthesis. What the greatest thinkers do when they address a perennial question is not merely to take a side, Ascent or Descent, ātmanism or encounter. If they do take a side, they will attempt to incorporate the best of the opposing side in their view.

There are two critical elements to the process of dialectical synthesis. First, it is an attempt to find synthesis, not compromise; it is not about finding a middle ground. The middle ground can turn out to be a vicious mean and not a virtuous one. (Compromise, I have argued, has its role in political practice but not in philosophy.) More important is to take seriously the underlying concerns that animate each side and bring them to where they are, and answer those concerns in a way that could be genuinely satisfying to those who have them.

And second, this process of “taking seriously” is a dialectical one: one starts from the positions one tries to supersede, and shows their inadequacies from within, making the opposing positions part of the process of reaching one’s own. It is in this sense that Nussbaum’s and Wilber’s major works are not themselves dialectical, though I think they may aspire to be; the endpoint of the inquiry has already been reached at its beginning. In their works, opposing positions are discussed only to be refuted. Nussbaum tries to make a movement from Plato through various other thinkers and ending in James Joyce; but by the time she gets to Joyce, there isn’t any Plato left.

Not much of what I’ve said here today is new; I’ve made most of these points in the various posts I have linked to above. But I’m trying to bring them together just because I do see my project as one of trying to work out some answers, however tentative they must be, to perennial questions – and I do not believe I’ve found those answers yet. In some respects this post is an attempt to remind myself, and hopefully others with me, of the best ways to think about the great questions – just because dialectical synthesis is such a difficult path to follow, and I think I’ve typically fallen short of it so far myself.

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?

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.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well.

Only in such a context can one make sense of what I have found perhaps the most annoying behaviour of Massachusetts natives: the habit of responding to the phrase “Hi, how are you doing?” with another “Hi, how are you doing?” Such a response would never be uttered by an Ontarian in response to another Ontarian, any more than they would say “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” in response to “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” (In my experience, this has also been true of most of the rest of the English-speaking world.) I have always believed that “How are you doing?” is an actual question, and therefore merits an actual response. So, in recent years when I have been convinced of the vital importance of truth-telling, if I am not feeling well I have tried to respond to this question with a shrug and a “meh” – or a similar response that implies that, while I am not feeling particularly well at the moment, it’s not a particularly big deal and the questioner should feel no obligation to distract herself with concern about it.

Feser’s approach, while intended to explain away a pleasantry that is in some sense false, also helps explain pleasantries like the Massachusetts greeting that are literally nonsensical. In Massachusetts, the phrase “how are you?” does not mean anything more than “hello,” and people are occasionally startled when the question receives an answer. The words themselves have no semantic meaning at all.

I’m reminded here of Frits Staal‘s study of Vedic sacrifices and recitation. It has long been noted that many Indians in history (including some still alive) have been able to recite all the words of the Vedas without knowing a single word of the Sanskrit language in which they were composed. Staal used his study of Vedic practitioners to argue against those who searched for an intellectual meaning to every ritual, especially to ritual words like mantras, magic spells. He would claim that many rituals are “rules without meaning” – comparing them and the words spoken in them, instructively, to birdsong. (Insert a joke about Twitter here if you wish.)

If we think of pleasantries as analogous to birdsong, I think we learn something important about them – and we do not necessarily diminish these activities for doing so. Since Aristotle it has been a commonplace that human beings are rational animals – and the “animal” is often just as important as the “rational.” We have a need for wordless reassurance, just like our pets.

One might even apply the term more generally to all the kinds of human behaviours that Confucians call “rites” (li 禮) – patterns of interpersonal behaviour sanctioned by tradition, from solemn ceremonies like weddings and funerals to polite gestures like pleasantries. If we think of pleasantries and other speech rites like birdsong in this way, we return to something like the performance theory of ritual that I had criticized in this post: analyzing spoken words in terms of what they do rather than what they mean. But as I later noted, my earlier criticism was too harsh: many rites should be thought of in terms of what they do rather than what they mean, but we should be clear to include our own rites among these. And here it’s worth noting that this applies to rites that consist solely of words, such as “How are you doing?”. Sometimes, we mean what we say. Sometimes, we just chirp it.

Speaking of rites, I don’t expect to post on Sunday, because I’ll likely be busy with festivities for American Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

I suppose I’ve long been predisposed against Wittgenstein because of the unfortunate ways his thought is used in religious studies. In that discipline, Wittgenstein is most often quoted for sections 66-7 of the Philosophical Investigations. Here he introduces the awful analytic concept of “family resemblances,” which has given too many contemporary religionists an all-too-convenient way to defend those concepts, especially “religion” and (premodern) “Hinduism”, that interfere with our understanding more than help it. In the Investigations, referring to the concept of “game” (or rather the German Spiel), Wittgenstein tells us that there is no essential meaning underlying the concepts, only a network of interrelated meanings which he calls “family resemblances.” And I have read far too many articles and books that note how “Hinduism” and “religion” cover a range of concepts that effectively have nothing to do with one another. But then, rather than taking the logical next step and saying that those concepts are misleading and should be avoided when one is speaking precisely and carefully, they find it adequate oto say that “Hinduism” or “religion” is a family-resemblance concept, and expect that the debate is ended by waving the wand of Wittgenstein’s words.

I, on the other hand, am persuaded by Wilfred Cantwell Smith‘s refutation of this concept in What Is Scripture? (p.365-66): “the metaphor gains its plausibility from being based on a fundamental and quite ‘objective’ linkage underlying the observed diversities of a literal family: namely, the genetic commonality of blood kinship with certain genes that constitute the family (and gives rise to some resemblances).” Even if one were to substitute a different metaphor, I don’t find this “network of relationships” approach an adequate way of looking at concepts. Some concepts mislead us and deserve to be thrown out. One could just as easily look at the various phenomena which scientists once tried to describe as phlogiston and say, as these scholars do about “Hinduism” and “religion,” that phlogiston is a family-resemblance concept, thereby keeping it around. Or, one could do the far more plausible thing and recognize that phlogiston is a worthless concept, purging it from our vocabulary.

Wittgenstein often liked to complain that philosophy “bewitches” us with its supposed misuse of language. I often suspect it is Wittgenstein himself bewitching us with his romantic persona: the young philosopher wandering into stodgy turn-of-the-century Cambridge and throwing off all established convention, clad in a leather jacket, actively homosexual in post-Victorian Britain, even waving a fire poker at Karl Popper – and yet getting away with it all because even the dons were impressed by his intellect. Who wouldn’t be dazzled by such a personality? Haven’t all of us wanted at some point to be the cocky young firebrand whose ideas are so brilliant that the rules don’t apply to us anymore? One gets so infatuated by this anti-authoritarian mythos of Wittgenstein that one accepts the authoritarian tone of his philosophical writing, the way so many of his ideas are phrased as commands to be obeyed. (“Don’t think, look!”)

I am deeply tempted by such an account, explaining Wittgenstein’s appeal as all style and no substance. It seems clear to me that Wittgenstein’s personality gives his ideas more of an appeal than their intrinsic worth is likely to merit; no matter how great his thought was, nobody is going to make a movie dramatizing the life of Immanuel Kant. But that’s not to say that there’s no substance there at all. Indeed, I suspect that there must be, for the most un-Wittgenstenian of reasons: my own Hegelian tendencies. The most important philosophical truths I’ve found have been guided by the insight that great philosophers become great for a reason – and not a merely superficial reason, but an important truth that their ideas have caught hold of, something that needs to be incorporated in any future synthesis. (A similar tendency underlies my embrace of Thomas Kuhn’s perspective on authorship, asking how an intelligent person could have written apparent absurdities.) Thus I am inclined to extend the sort of charity to Wittgenstein that he never seems willing to extend to his own predecessors. There’s got to be something worthwhile in Wittgenstein; I just haven’t figured out what it is. And I fully admit I have read very little of him. Readers, you seem to like Wittgenstein a lot better than I do so far. What do you think I’m missing?

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.

But a dialectical synthesis is more than this. A dialectical mode of thinking or inquiry, as it progresses through conceptions it finds inadequate, incorporates the best within these conceptions. But it engages with each of these conceptions deeply enough that they each leave their mark on the inquiry itself, and on what its conception of “best” would wind up being.

I might be best able to explain dialectical thinking by showing what it is not. Fortunately, there are handy examples of this in two books I have greatly enjoyed, by two of the contemporary thinkers I admire most: Ken Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought. Specifically, its third part, whose content I had discussed in my first post on ascent and descent. Here Nussbaum proceeds to examine different accounts of love in various genres, beginning with Plato and ending with James Joyce (while passing through Augustine’s Confessions and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder), ending in a “transcendence by descent” that fully accepts our worldly imperfections.

When I discussed this work of Nussbaum’s in the ascent-descent post, I called her method dialectical, but I was missing something in doing so. Nussbaum’s approach bears a resemblance to dialectical thinking in that (as I said before) she sees each view or account of love as “responding to the inadequacies of the view before it, and in that respect providing a more adequate view.” But – I realize now – it is not dialectical in the kind of Hegelian sense I had in mind. (I used “phenomenological” as a rough equivalent for “dialectical” in that message, the Phenomenology of Spirit being the classic work that exemplifies Hegel’s dialectic.) It’s not even really dialectical in the more limited sense of dialectical argument, as opposed to demonstrative argument. A dialectical argument (like Zeno’s arguments for Parmenides or my arguments against Peimin Ni’s postmodern relativism) begins from the opponent’s point of view and tries to point out its inadequacies from within. Nussbaum is doing the opposite here: it is demonstrative argument. She has established what she takes to be first principles, and from these, she deduces each opposing position to be wrong – on her terms, not the opponent’s.

This is the key reason that Nussbaum’s account is not dialectical: she has already decided her criteria of evaluation in advance. Before we even begin the journey from Plato up (or down) to Joyce, Nussbaum gives us a couple paragraphs telling us what an adequate view of love needs to have: it needs to encourage compassion, reciprocity (so that people treat each other as agents and ends), and the recognition of individuals as separate and qualitatively distinct. Then as we encounter Plato we find him lacking in all three qualities, so we move on to the next thinker (Spinoza) who is almost as lacking, through many different thinkers and texts until eventually we get to their best exemplar, James Joyce.

The problem with this approach is that one is left wondering why Nussbaum bothered writing those hundreds of pages on everybody up to Joyce. They are mere pūrvapakṣas, opposing views placed there to be refuted. If Nussbaum had have skipped everybody from Plato to Whitman and just given her account of Joyce, there would have been little to no change in the final, substantive position that she presents. Moreover, the chapters do not work particularly well even as refutations of pūrvapakṣas, for the very reason that they are demonstrative and not dialectical arguments. (A Platonist may well not have cared so much about her terms of compassion, reciprocity and individuality, and her discussion of Plato will do nothing whatever to convince such a person; she needs to convince the Platonist on his terms, not hers.) A dialectical account would have learned something from Plato and Augustine on the way up (or down), well beyond “their approach is wrong and inadequate.” A Hegelian dialectic supersedes (aufheben in German), which is to say it transcends and includes.

Ken Wilber regularly refers to “transcending and including”; in that respect he gets the concept of dialectical thinking. What he doesn’t get is dialectical argument: starting from the opponent’s point of view and reasoning from there. The different stages of human thought put forward in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality – which Wilber himself has frequently referred to as his most systematic work – often are not responded to with arguments as to why they’re inadequate. Rather, when Wilber identifies different kinds of thought as more or less advanced, it’s based on Jean Piaget‘s empirically derived stage model of human development, extending it to spiritual development at levels that go beyond Piaget’s. One stage typically comes after the other, therefore it is a higher stage.

But this won’t do. If this stage model is not accompanied by sympathetic arguments revealing why each stage is better and not merely later than the one that came before it, then one might end up taking an Alzheimer’s patient, with cognitive faculties impaired by old age, as the ultimate end of human achievement. Happening later in human development doesn’t itself make something better. For example, Wilber claims that this development includes a move from “egocentric” through “sociocentric” or “ethnocentric” to “worldcentric” ways of moral thinking – becoming concerned about an ever larger group of people. But I never found any good arguments in Wilber’s book why egocentric ethics is wrong or inappropriate, certainly not ones that would make sense to an egocentric thinker. In effect, Wilber is making the kind of fallacious criticism often applied to Ayn Rand’s egoistic philosophy, that it is most popular among snotty teenagers who can’t get over themselves, and they’ll grow out of it. But Rand’s egoism is plenty popular among grown men and women as well, and one can’t show that their thinking is juvenile in this pejorative sense unless one can also show that their reasoning is inadequate on their own terms, which Wilber never does. Unlike Wilber, Hegel does not fall victim to a fallacy of “after this therefore better than this”; his account of the history of philosophy is an account of progress, of philosophy getting better, but he tries to draw out the reasons why this actually is a progress, why each stage responded to real rational inadequacies in the previous one. (Whether he succeeds at this is a different question.)

True dialectical thinking is not easy. I don’t think most of my own posts accomplish it. But I think it’s tremendously important if one wishes to do real justice to the great thinkers of the past and the truths they have found.