So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.)

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them.

For one thing, they reach very deep. The other perennial questions I named in the later post – free will and human nature – do have ramifications both theoretical and practical, but I’m not sure that they colour the overall tenor of a philosophy the way ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity do. A philosopher’s position on free will or human nature seems to me less likely to affect her views on the basic nature of reality and knowledge, say, than these two do. I’m not entirely sure that this point holds up well, but it’s probably worth mentioning.

The more powerful reason to work with these two classification schemes, I think, is that they name perhaps the most abiding differences between philosophical traditions. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that the modern West generally takes an orientation of integrity descent, in its secularism and its atomistic individualism. Thomas Kasulis’s book, from which I draw the intimacy-integrity distinction, takes the modern West as the paradigm of an integrity approach; Ken Wilber, in theorizing ascent and descent, identifies the recent history of the West with the “dominance of the descenders.”

What I find particularly interesting about these classifications, though, is that they don’t merely name distinctions between the West and the non-West, or modern and non-modern. Those kinds of distinctions have been done and done to death, especially in the early- and mid-20th century sociological work that asked why the rest of the world hadn’t “modernized” the way the West had. (Max Weber’s work is probably the most famous in this genre, but far more of them were written.)

Rather, these classifications also catch distinctions between the major non-Western philosophical traditions, those of East Asia (especially China and Japan) and South Asia (especially India). I noted previously that Kasulis’s intimacy-integrity distinction at first struck me as just another forgettable example of the attempts to characterize the modern West against the rest of the world, until Parimal Patil pointed out the fact – right under my nose – that in nearly every aspect of Kasulis’s classification, classical Indian thought had an integrity orientation at least as strong as the West’s. Ever since then, I’ve found the classification indispensable. One might similarly note that the ascent orientation in classical Chinese thought is not significantly stronger than it is in the modern West – not, at least, until Buddhism begins to arrive there from India.

In other words, Kasulis could not have written a book characterizing ancient India as an intimacy culture in the way that he did with modern Japan. Wilber, meanwhile, notes that contemporary Westerners (especially of his baby boom generation) are much more likely to recognize a lack of intimacy in their own culture than a lack of ascent; he reserves significant criticism for the widespread ecological views that exalt our interdependence with nature but do not recognize a spiritual dimension in which we strive for something beyond it. And it can be no coincidence that, with such a project, Wilber refers far more often to Indian tradition than to Chinese. Nor, conversely, is it a coincidence that Alasdair MacIntyre – whose philosophical writings have long been aimed at moving contemporary Western thought to a more intimacy-oriented worldview derived from ancient Greece – has written significantly on Confucian thought, but said absolutely nothing (that I’m aware of) about anything Indian or Buddhist.

It seems to me, then, that when modern Westerners turn to other traditions to seek something missing in their own, they look to China if they think the “something missing” has to do with intimacy, and India if it has to do with ascent. A notable exception to this tendency (of looking to India for ascent and China for intimacy) is Yavanayāna Buddhism, which looks to the Buddha’s Indian Buddhism for an intimacy philosophy that celebrates the interdependence of all things – something it is not. But I suspect the chief reason it can do this is the presence of East Asian Buddhism, which does celebrate interdependence in a way that would be quite alien to the Buddha himself. In this respect, I think Yavanayāna is the exception that proves the rule.

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.

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.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. One might narrow logic down a bit and say it is the study of reasoning; but reasoning is very much a part of psychology’s subject matter as well. Their differences are not in their subject matter. There is certainly a difference in method; but that difference flows from a more fundamental difference between the two.

Namely: psychology (or at least certain branches of it) tells us how we do in fact reason. Logic tells us how we should reason. Psychology tells us about the circumstances under which we do or do not follow the rules of reasoning that logic sets down as proper. Which is to say: logic is a normative discipline. That is, logic, like ethics and aesthetics, is concerned with goodness and value – with what should and should not be the case, not merely with what is and is not the case. The idea of a truth that is better than falsehood, and of the methods to discover that truth, is part of what makes logic possible.

The relationship between logic and psychology, taken in this way, is more or less the relationship between ethics and ethics studies, between the philosophy of science and science studies, or between theology and religious studies as religious studies is very often conceived. The latter member of each pair tells us how we do reason (or act); the former tells us how we should. But where the ideals of science, ethics and theology tell us how to reason within their particular fields of inquiry, logic tells us how to reason in the general case, including all the others.

Logic is a normative discipline – a discipline concerned with value – because it is fundamentally concerned with truth. And it is part of the nature of truth to be a value, to be better than falsehood. To deny the intrinsic value or goodness of truth makes no sense, as I argued before in claiming that truth has a value independent of pleasure.

The normative nature of truth holds true whatever one might understand truth to be. Analytic philosophers most commonly identify three theories of the truth of statements (or more generally propositions): correspondence, coherence and pragmatic. Speaking broadly, on the correspondence theory, propositions are true if they correspond to reality; on the coherence theory, propositions are true if they cohere with other propositions we hold; on the pragmatic theory, propositions are true if they are effective. But what is presumed by all three theories is that truth is a good thing: other things being equal, propositions that correspond to reality or that cohere with other propositions or that are effective are better than propositions that do not do these things. And when this is true of the more limited analytical theories of truth, how much more so of more expansive theories of truth that do not limit themselves to propositions, like those of Augustine or Gandhi. Augustine probably goes the furthest on this point: truth is goodness – which is God.

The fact that truth and logic are normative and value-laden has important consequences. For one thing, it gives the lie to simplistic claims of “value-free” science or social science (including psychology itself). All intellectual inquiry is predicated on at least one value, namely truth itself. More sophisticated defenders of “value neutrality,” like Max Weber, will argue that the scholar of a scientific field needs to put truth above other values – but we must recognize that this argument is itself a value argument, an ethical argument for the importance of truth relative to other values, at least within certain areas of inquiry. The argument that one should place truth above other values is a normative and value-based argument.

Now the discussion above should not imply that all true statements are good statements, or all true things are good things. It is true that outlying areas of Bangkok were recently hit by disastrous floods; it is not good that this happened. The relation between truth and goodness is and must be more complex than that.

The fact that not all true things are good probably seems obvious to anyone who isn’t a philosopher; but it nevertheless poses some problems. For someone like Augustine who identifies truth with goodness, it would seem to be at the very heart of the problem of bad. If truth is goodness, how can there be things that truly exist but are nevertheless bad? Augustine ingeniously deals with this problem (or at least this aspect of the problem) by identifying badness as a lack of the existence of good – in the same way a modern physicist identifies cold as simply a lack of heat. Absolute evil, on his account, looks very much like absolute zero.

It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.

Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. You go to New York because you want the best of everything – for indeed, in New York you get the best of everything, at least if you can afford it. I like to talk about the great Thai food at a couple of restaurants back home in Boston, being as good as it is in Thailand, but these were blown away by a truly stunning Northeastern Thai restaurant that recently opened up in the East Village neighbourhood – the sauce on their laap was pure perfection. The Boston places are very good, but they can’t keep up. Nor is the Boston subway nearly as fast or as extensive; nor does a brand-new store selling cheap, quality, high-tech Japanese clothing open up all around the city. Nor are there browseable bookstores four storeys tall – one of which was the place where I purchased Annas’s book. And these are just examples I experienced on a four-day trip, with relatively limited funds – no attempt to, say, see Jon Stewart live.

But as I noted before, all this is just the problem. You go to New York because you want to have the best of everything – and that means you will always be wanting more. I remember, on one of my first trips to New York years ago, speaking to the New Yorker closest to me, who was already making an income likely higher than anything I’ll ever make – but spoke of his frustration that this was less than his MBA classmates. You don’t go to the place that has the best of everything if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be satisfied with the life you have. In the terms of Herbert Simon and Barry Schwartz, New Yorkers are maximizers rather than satisficers. And this, in turn, is probably why the people in this wonderland are the unhappiest in the United States.

Which brings me back to Julia Annas’s quote. Like Simon and Schwartz, she uses the language of “maximizing” – in her case, to describe what it is that “ancient philosophy” does not advocate. You can maximize your variety of food choices, but you can’t maximize courage. John Rawls popularized the highly unfortunate term perfectionism to describe virtue-focused ethical theories; it is an awful term, since virtue theories are in this respect the opposite of perfectionism in the usual sense of that word. Perfectionists, as we normally understand the term, are the consummate maximizers, never satisfied because they strive to make everything perfect, including themselves. But Annas is pointing out that the ancient Greeks and Romans from Aristotle onwards are very different from this: their philosophy cannot be put in terms of maximizing, not even the maximizing of virtue. Rather, try to live a flourishing life – a life with which you can be satisfied.

I think it’s important to stress and illustrate Annas’s point because it helps illustrate an alternative to consequentialism, the widespread view according to which the best actions can be defined in terms of bringing about the best total consequences. Consequentialism is the philosophy of maximizing, the worldview that built New York. (Philosophical utilitarianism, the most common variant of consequentialism, is a direct ancestor of modern economics.) The “ancient” view offers us something quite different, in a way that Rawls’s “perfectionism” concept obscures.

It’s important to have this alternative because consequentialism is so filled with problems. I think Schwartz and Simon point us to a paradox at the heart of consequentialism – at least of hedonistic forms of consequentialism, which is most of them. I’ve attempted to note this before: trying to maximize our own happiness is like trying to get to sleep; thinking about it gets in the way. But the same is true about maximizing others’ happiness. Happiness is there in the moment. At some point, you have to be happy with what you have now, and even with what others have now. Eventually, you are going to die; and if you keep trying to maximize, you are going to die unsatisfied. This was the point behind my rejection of utilitarianism: there’s a fundamental problem behind a life devoted to making others happy as possible, when doing so makes you unhappy yourself. If everybody lived the way you did, they would all fail at their goal.

It is true, as commenter Ethan C-F pointed out before, that we can realize a good for others that will come about after we’re gone, even if it too will eventually perish in the cosmos. But it seems to me that if we’re going to strive to benefit others, we need to see a good in the striving itself, in the doing of good works for others, and not in their consequences – successful or not. It is that attitude that allows us to be happy satisficers rather than miserable maximizers. I think that this point is what underlies the enduring popularity of the Bhagavad Gītā, the reason the pacifist Gandhi drew his inspiration from a text that advocates war: if you tie your happiness to the consequences of your actions, you will not be happy, and neither will anyone else who does so. I suspect that Jack Layton had figured out this lesson, which is why he was as inspiring as he was.

The Gītā’s worldview, to be sure, is quite different from Aristotle’s – all about adherence to an externally defined duty rather than the cultivation of flourishing. But they share the rejection of consequentialist maximizing; they are willing to let virtue be its own reward.

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Well, the first part is easy. Rejecting Marx’s form of hope, political hope, is something I found essential to living a happy life. Right now I’m quite excited about tomorrow’s Canadian election – where the socialist NDP, which I’ve long supported, seems poised for an unprecedented breakthrough. But it is as a spectator sport, the excitement of a Boston fan seeing the Red Sox on the cusp of winning the World Series, where one shrugs and gets on with life if one’s favoured team turns out to lose as it has so many times in the past. If my happiness were tied to a real hope that politics in Canada or the US were going to get significantly better – as it was in my teens – I would be setting myself up for crushing disappointment. No, I continue to endorse at least some form of the anti-politics that I learned from Buddhism: we cannot let our well-being be tied too closely to the external goods of politics, things we cannot control. It is best to free ourselves from political hopes and focus on our own virtues, which we can control. I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

But there’s a problem here. This move from the external to the internal, from what we can’t control to what we can, is characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans. But Augustine’s perceptive critique is directed squarely at these Hellenistics: we cannot actually be as good as we think we can. The Stoics move us from hope about politics to hope about virtue. But in Augustine’s diagnosis, that hope too is bound to disappoint. Our bad habits persist; we enlist reason in the name of self-improvement, but too often it turns into rationalization. More than that, even virtue can be a matter more of luck than of effort. This is the main theme of John Rawls’s early Christian writings, which I have been finding more interesting and thought-provoking than the later political theory that made Rawls famous. Our patient endurance or our honesty themselves arise as a result of the biological and social circumstances that made them possible. The clearest example may be the case of Phineas Gage, whose former virtues of self-discipline and respectfulness nearly disappeared after he suffered brain damage. (Such a line of reasoning does suggest a denial of free will which sits uncomfortably with Rawls’s and Augustine’s other Christian convictions, but never mind: I am not concerned with whether the claim is Christian but with whether it is true.) We cannot put our hopes in our virtue, but only in God.

Now this kind of hope seems to propose a greater problem, require a greater pessimism, than does Marx’s. If politics is a problem with no solution, then fine, withdraw from politics and focus on ourselves. But what if our own virtue is a problem with no solution? If we can’t really be all that good, as Augustine says, but his God does not exist and would not deserve worship even if he did? How can such a conclusion lead us to anything but darkness and misery?

Looking back on it, I think that Buddhists provide a helpful answer, and that – as Jim Wilton argued – I may have counted the Buddhist critique of hope out too quickly. And the reason has to do with an important debate within Buddhist tradition, one that I don’t think I’ve explored enough yet: the debate between sudden and gradual liberation.

In traditional Indian Buddhism, my graduate area of study, liberation from suffering is a long, slow, painstaking, gradual process. It doesn’t just take years; it takes millennia, as you work to improve yourself across multiple rebirths to become a perfected person, an arhat or bodhisattva. But in East Asia, and above all in the Ch’an/Zen tradition – to which Jim’s comments about kōans refer – liberation comes suddenly, is experienced in a single moment. I had long been skeptical of the sudden-awakening school. It sounds too much like the worst hippie clichés of Yavanayāna Buddhism, where you don’t actually have to do anything, you can just be yourself as you are and you’ll be perfectly enlightened. It seemed to get you out of all the hard work of making yourself a better person.

And yet in contexts like the present one, I come to see the wisdom in the sudden-liberation approach. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to take the unscientific concept of rebirth out of the picture. But more importantly, it reflects a psychological truth about the achievement of happiness: that as long as one’s attention is focused primarily on happiness, one will not have it. The same is true of several virtues: if one strives to be an exemplar of perfect humility, one will not be very humble. The sleep study noted by James Maas, demonstrating that it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re trying to do so, seems to me like it can be analogically extended to a lot of noble human goals. At some point along the path, you have to stop trying and just be.

All this, I think, is why Jim effectively defended my earlier characterization of Buddhism as a critique of hope, and rejected my later presentation of the Third Noble Truth as a form of hope, the hope of nirvana. At some point along the path, a good Buddhist stops hoping; as long as there’s hope, there’s attachment and not liberation.

And I think that Jim – with the East Asian Buddhist traditions – thereby puts his finger on the reason I felt so happy after that pessimistic post, better than I had myself. The last sentence of the post struck me as upbeat then and still does: “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.” What I was trying to get at is a transition from the future to the present – an ability to enjoy life and be good just as things are, even in the face of one’s own insurmountable imperfections.

To say that is to risk the very pitfall that made me so suspicious of sudden liberation in the first place: thinking that one is already great just as one is and doesn’t need any improving, leaving one’s weaknesses and problems to fester. But then it seems to me that finding this balance is its own kind of virtue – and like any other virtue, it is a mean between two vices. I don’t know what to call it, but it seems like a sort of meta-virtue: the ability to maintain the effort at cultivating one’s own virtue, while still remaining immersed in the moment of the virtues one already has.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble?

The answer will necessarily be “no” if we define “virtue” (or any of its species) strictly, so that virtue is by definition individual. But I see no clear reason why we should do this. Going back to earliest accounts of the concept, Aristotle does not limit virtue to individuals; in explaining aretē, the word we translate as “virtue,” he speaks of the aretē of a knife: a virtuous (or excellent) knife is one that cuts well. Even thinking of common English usage, we can speak of an honest car dealership, one where all the sales staff are genuinely expected to be upfront with their customers and act accordingly. We can speak of a courageous action taken by a political party, when it adopts a platform that is politically unpopular but is nevertheless the principled thing to do.

Now common usage can and should be criticized; everyday speech is often inaccurate. Are these examples of category mistakes? Virtue is realized and expressed in action; if human collectivities can take action, that fact suggests that they can also be virtuous. But is it inaccurate to speak of an action taken by a collectivity? When we speak of an honest car dealership, a generous government or a humble tradition, is this merely an inexact way to say that these collectivities are generally made up of honest, generous or humble individuals?

I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. The idea that the virtues or actions of collectivities are merely those of their constituent individuals – this puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” But in this very quote Thatcher shows that she’s not ready to carry a reductionist individualism all the way: there are families, which she grants an existence distinct from the individuals who make them up. If families are not merely the individuals that make them up, then surely other institutions – including society itself – can also be more than their constituent individuals.

Collectivities can take on a life of their own. (I say “collectivities” rather than “groups” because the latter term tends to connote a mere aggregation of individuals, prejudicing the discussion in that direction.) We understand this point when we make the important distinction between the rule of law and the rule of men (or women). A government (or a corporation) works best when its members act not according to their arbitrary individual preferences, but according to the interest of the whole organization and the precedents that have been collectively established. When an organization successfully acts according to the rule of law, it is that organization as a unit and a whole, and not merely the individual members who make it up, that is acting justly. It is a just organization, not merely a bunch of individuals who happen to be just by themselves. To describe the organization as just is no category mistake; it is correct.

It is in terms similar to these that I think one may accurately speak of the humility of a tradition – and as something quite separate from the humility of individuals. As Jabali108 noted, defining the terms matters here. I set out a basic sketch of the idea of a tradition two weeks ago, as consisting of both a normative ideal and a set of institutions which often does not live up to that ideal. Thill, rightly I think, pointed out a third separable element of a tradition: its body of accumulated knowledge.

As for humility, I take it to mean the awareness of one’s limits and weaknesses, not only in an intellectual sense but also in a practical one – acting on the recognition that one is fallible and dependent on others. In a more specifically intellectual or epistemological sense, it means listening carefully, recognizing that one has never thought of everything, that others very often have something valuable to contribute – even when one maintains the courage to defend one’s own sincerely held convictions. Above all, perhaps, the readiness to admit when one has been wrong. A mean between the vices of arrogance on one hand and meekness or timidity on the other, as I said to Thill. (If this definition seems imprecise, that’s intentional: spelling out the nature of a virtue too precisely implies that one already knows exactly what to strive for, which in my books itself demonstrates a lack of humility.)

On these terms I defend my previous claim, developed with Ben: natural science maintains an institutional humility as a tradition, because it does not take its claims as infallible, is ready to see them overturned when better evidence comes to light. The ideals of scientific tradition encourage its institutions to act in a humble way. This institutional humility is a very different thing from encouraging the humility of individuals; and indeed the two are in distinct tension with one another. When a tradition emphasizes its own unchanging rightness, as Buddhism or Christianity does, it is much more likely to foster a sense of individual humility – a recognition that one as an individual doesn’t have all the answers, that one has been wrong before. I think this is typically a good thing for the individual within the tradition; but it’s not so good for the health of the tradition itself. Science is a whole made humble by its arrogant members; the “religions” are wholes made arrogant by their humble members.

After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. For the answer is right there in that very sentence. Talk of humility – humility as an ideal – is directly comparable to Druyan’s quote, which is, of course, itself talk. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Ideals are good things to live up to. It’s just that in practice we fail to do so.

The chastened intellectualists named by Aaron Stalnaker – the Christian Augustine and the Confucian Xunzi – tell us exactly the idea spoken in Druyan’s “whisper.” In the few decades we humans have on earth, we remain very new at this whole living thing. We may well be mistaken about a great deal; we have been wrong before. Even our reason can mislead us, a point on which they agree with Freud: too often it serves only to come up with rationalizations for the troublesome desires that are in fact bad for us. I have argued before that humility is, if anything, even more important for Judaism and Islam – for there the gulf between imperfect humans and perfect God is far greater than it is in Augustine’s Christianity, where a human being could be God.

Sagan’s reference to “talk” suggests a gap between ideals and practice. We are all too familiar with the arrogance of zealots, the Bible-thumping preacher and the unpersuadable New Age Buddhist who refuse to admit any doubts in their views. Such people fail to live up to their traditions’ own “talk of humility,” the ideal that Sagan himself identifies: they fail to acknowledge that they are mere humans and not an omniscient God or Buddha. But once we acknowledge that humility here is a gap between ideals and practice, then science does not seem so very different. It is not clear how often science changes because those who held falsified ideas recant them, and how often it changes because those whose beliefs didn’t fit the evidence simply die off. Here we are dealing with my point from last week: in scientific tradition as in “religious” traditions, there is a gap between theory and practice, the normative ideal the tradition advocates and the historical institutions charged with bringing that ideal to life.

This gap can be bridged, of course. Sagan does about as good a job as anyone can at the difficult (because paradoxical) task of demonstrating his own humility, when on pages 256-7 he comes out to list several cases where he has been proven wrong. But in this he is not so far from Augustine, whose Confessions is a book-length account of the various ways he has been wrong in his life to this point – and a painful acknowledgement of the ways he still falls short of the ideal.

There, Sagan (like Augustine) personally lives up to the ideal of humility he espouses. What he doesn’t show us is humility in the scientific tradition he advocates for. In arguing that science is humble in practice as well as theory, he proudly claims that “We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.” He proceeds to cite several examples of cases where young and up-and-coming scientists have managed to overturn ideas previously cherished. But this is no example of humility. It is no humility at all to show how someone else is wrong. Typically, that is the very opposite of humility, which requires acknowledging where you have been wrong. To reward those who generate new ideas and disprove the old can encourage an arrogance that goes against the scientific ideal. For if your data only serve to confirm your null hypothesis – the existing established views – you may well be tempted to fudge that data to get the new and exciting view you wanted, the one that is rewarded. The academic humanities and social sciences often proceed similarly on the model of rewarding those who demonstrate new things, and I can vouch those who have been so rewarded tend to have outsized egos.

Humility is hard work, harder than many other virtues. André Comte-Sponville calls it a contradictory virtue, because he who claims to have it does not. One of the more reliable ways to get it is to submit to the ideals of an established tradition, rather than exalting your independent ideals as the highest good. In this respect, scientific tradition is quite comparable to the traditions we call “religious.”

The first, normative meaning is the one with the most philosophical significance. This is the one with normative weight; it is in this sense that, if we call something unscientific, we are saying something bad about it. I haven’t pinned down the details of this normative sense as much as I’d like yet, but I think it involves testing falsifiable hypotheses, making controlled experiments, controlling for variables, and above all rejecting hypotheses that turn out to be falsified. I expect to say more about this normative sense of science in the near future.

Overall I think it is that first (normative) sense of science that’s most relevant to philosophical inquiry, inquiry about the nature of reality and how we should live in it. But the second sense also matters, if only because we need to isolate it as a way of understanding the first. In this descriptive sense, science is what scientists do, and scientists are people who have been trained in academic science departments. This is the realm where scientists fudge data to fit their own political agenda or that of their corporate funders. It is also what Thomas Kuhn famously catalogued in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where the consensus among scientists moves much more randomly and haphazardly than the normative ideal should indicate. There is something about science in the first sense that is (I would argue) inherently good; this is not the case about science in the second sense. A man who has a PhD in biology but regularly falsifies data to fit his preconceptions is a scientist in only the second (descriptive) sense, not the first (normative) sense.

What strikes me about this distinction, though, is that much the same distinction could be made about any given “religion.” Not about “religion” as such, for this pernicious category is almost never itself taken as an ideal, but about the various traditions it is taken to encompass: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism. When one Christian tells another “that’s not the Christian thing to do,” she is speaking in the normative sense. She is not saying “you are not acting in the manner of historical Christians, such as the Borgia popes and the Inquisition.” She is saying “you are not living up to Christian ideals”: ideals of charity, hope, forgiveness.

And so likewise in Buddhism. I have a longstanding beef with scholars of Buddhism like Gregory Schopen, who wishes that Buddhist “texts would have been judged significant only if they could be shown to be related to what religious people actually did.” For Schopen, scholars of Buddhism should study Buddhism in the descriptive sense, and the descriptive sense alone. And Schopen’s view predominates in the field; this is why Glenn Wallis could write his Buddhist Manifesto only after he had left the mainstream academy. (Thus the highly problematic, but still predominant, view that anyone who calls herself a Buddhist is a Buddhist.)

The same applies to the study of most other traditions, as when scholars of “Hindu” traditions follow Vasudha Narayanan’s populist injunction to study “lentils” rather than “liberation.” It is sad that such a view prevails in religious studies, though fortunately it does not prevail in the study of science. As I noted before, if the study of science were to take its methodological cue from Schopen and Narayanan, the sociology of creationism would be held more valuable than evolutionary biology. (On this prevailing approach, even ethics starts to get used to mean the study of what other people do, irrespective of what actually is good or bad.)

The one tradition that gets an exemption from all this is Christianity. Since its early days as the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the American Academy of Religion – the main North American academic institution for the study of “religious” traditions, the organization which one must join if one wishes a scholarly job in the field – has embraced a large number of Christian theologians. They get to talk about Christianity in the normative sense, about what it is to be a good Christian. There are plenty of anti-theological scholars who would like to see the Christian theologians expunged from the AAR, but the theologians are much too powerful and entrenched; the anti-theologians mainly exert their weight in the studies of other traditions. The result is a division of labour that is Orientalist in Said’s pejorative sense: Christianity, and no other tradition, can be examined as a normative ideal, a way that people should be and not merely a way that they are. In that respect, in the North American academy, it is Christianity and Christianity alone that can be studied as science is, with a normative eye to its values and truth claims as well as a descriptive eye to its history and sociology.

I once battled to gain this kind of respect for non-Christian traditions; no longer striving to be a professor, I no longer care so much about the dysfunction of the profession. I go over the point because I think it’s instructive in thinking both about what science is and what “religious” traditions are: the grubby history of scientists as a profession does not in itself tarnish the ideal of science for which most of them have strived, just as Schopen’s research showing Buddhist monks owned property does not in itself tarnish the ideal of the propertyless monk free from worldly attachments. Human beings are flawed, and regularly fail to live up to their ideals. That fact does not make the ideals unworthy.