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.

One of the more interesting elements of teaching at Stonehill was explaining Protestantism to a student body composed largely of ethnic Catholics. I remember giving a lecture on the history of Protestantism and having a student ask, “But what do Protestants believe?” It was a great question, for in my focus on history I’d neglected to say much about, say, the relative emphasis on the Bible or on Mary. The fault was mine for naïvely assuming it would be something students already knew. And so in later versions of the course, I gave students a much more detailed account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in turn these differences became much clearer to me myself.

I particularly came to realize how evangelical Protestantism – the growing Protestant wing of which fundamentalist Protestantism is basically a subset – is basically a more extreme form of Protestantism itself, “more extreme” in the sense of being much more characteristically Protestant and less Catholic. And what I found central in evangelicalism specifically but to some extent in Protestantism generally is something analogous, and perhaps even homologous, to modernism.

This central thing might be called single-mindedness: the tendency to focus on “what’s really important,” at the expense of the ancillary details. That’s the attitude behind all the ugly modernist architecture: the most important thing is to give people a comfortable, hygienic, convenient place to live. You can do without all those frivolous aesthetic details; focus on the big stuff, and people will learn to like it, as they should.

This same tendency seems to me to underlie evangelical Protestantism. The really important thing is the saving power of Jesus Christ; the rest, one might say, is gravy. And so evangelicals typically congregate in highly modern buildings, most notoriously the “megachurches” like Lakewood Church in Houston, a former sports arena, and often play rock music in their services. You don’t need the beauty and mystery of a centuries-old cathedral and its incense and pipe organ; you need Jesus.

The older, non-evangelical streams of Protestantism, such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism – usually referred to in the US as “mainline” – do not take this extreme approach. They still meet in the old churches, pray in an older style. And yet I think their founders, too, had something of the modernist tendency to privilege the big picture over the details. For Luther as I understand him, Christian tradition had become needlessly packed with irrelevant accretions. History still mattered to him – but the history that mattered was the history recounted in the Bible, not anything that had happened since then. All those sacraments and rituals were of a piece with selling indulgences. One may note that Luther derives a great deal of his thought from Augustine, and Augustine shares some of this same single-mindedness of focus. Augustine in his work expresses a worried ambivalence about liturgical music – he’s all for it if the lyrics bring people into Christian tradition, but he’s worried that it will be counterproductive if people start enjoying the music for its own sake. (And while many of Augustine’s views did become part of official Catholic tradition, they were typically tempered by the more worldly Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.)

This kind of single-mindedness is not confined to Christianity or secularism, either. This single-mindedness is also the most prominent feature of the Salafi or Wahhabi strain of contemporary Islam. At first glance, Salafi tradition is as opposed to modernism as can be, for it claims that Islamic tradition was perfected in its first few centuries and every following innovation is worthless or worse. But the Salafis share with the modernists a single-minded disdain for the details of established tradition. And aesthetically the two come to look very similar. In recent years the Saudi Arabian state, which officially endorses Salafi Islam, has deliberately destroyed most of the historic sites of old Mecca and Medina, partially to make room for more infrastructure for pilgrims, but just as much because of Salafi ideology. People offered veneration and prayer at many of those sites, such as the grave of Muhammad’s mother. But to a Salafi, such activity is idolatrous, associating partners with God and compromising his unity. Better not to have them around. (Evangelicals, I might note, often take a similar attitude to many Catholic traditions, especially the reverence for Mary.)

Further musings on philosophical single-mindedness next week.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.”

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!

Instead, I now turn back to a different categorization I didn’t have time to mention in the puruṣārtha post: the intersecting axes of ascent and descent, and intimacy and integrity. These two ways of classifying philosophies seem to me to do more justice to East Asian thought, while still going “all the way down”: extending from theoretical foundations all the way up to life as lived.

The distinction between intimacy and integrity modes of thinking and being, as developed by Thomas P. Kasulis, is identified specifically with East Asian philosophy in mind, as a tradition deeply rooted in the intimacy approach; and it is also intended to cover all realms of philosophical endeavour, whether theoretical or practical. The ascent-descent distinction, developed most by Ken Wilber, brings South Asian concerns of transcendence more explicitly to the fore; and I think it also expresses the combination of theoretical and practical philosophy.

I’ve explored each of those distinctions in the earlier posts. Here I want to say more about their intersection, as a potential fourfold classification of philosophies and lives, which I only began to touch on in the ascent-descent post. Can we fruitfully classify philosophies into ascending integrity, ascending intimacy, descending integrity and descending intimacy? Assuming, again, that the categories are Weberian ideal types between which historical examples are expected to be a middle ground?

The category of ascending integrity is relatively continuous with, if a bit more narrow than, the ascetic way of life as I described it before (and then attributed to the mokṣa puruṣārtha). Epitomized by the Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra, one seeks to transcend the everyday world for a higher truth that lies in some respect separate from it, away from the suffering it contains. One seeks to stand alone, metaphysically separate from entanglement in the everyday; epistemologically, breaking things down into component parts is an important step on this path. Plato’s identification of higher truth with a realm of rational and other-worldly Ideas would seem to fit this category as well.

In the opposite corner, the category of descending intimacy comes close to what I have called traditionalism (or the dharma puruṣārtha), with Confucius as the characteristic example. Human beings and human knowledge, on the traditional view, are properly situated within chains of ancestors and descendants who were there long before we arrived and will be there long after we are gone. (The idea of deliberately not having children is highly suspect for a traditionalist.) Epistemology properly comes from two sources: custom or common sense (the knowledge passed on to us indirectly by the ancestors) or the knowledge our ancestors had that recent generations lost (Torah, dharmaśāstra, the Confucian classics). Either way, the right place for us is in this world, immersed amid intimate networks of our fellow human beings. Maimonides, with his worldly Aristotelian view of the Torah, may be a comfortable fit here.

“Descending integrity” may be a better category than either “libertinism” or “artha-kāma” to describe the default position of the modern West, according to which individuals are treated as atomized bearers of rights, reason and experience. Its metaphysics is empiricist – bound to sense experience away from speculation – and atomist, reducing things to their component parts. And the goals of life are similarly worldly: if they go beyond pleasure, it is to flourishing defined in terms of an individual’s capabilities and achievements in this world (something like Nussbaum’s capabilities approach). Mozi then lies somewhere between the two kinds of descent, less intimacy-oriented than Confucius but not going all the way to the integrity orientation of the modern West. Placing him in this middle ground seems to make much more sense than placing him between traditionalism and libertinism, as the old scheme might have had to do, since pleasure per se is of little importance to him.

Each of the three categories above matches roughly but not exactly with the previous schemes (ascetic/traditional/libertine, mokṣa/dharma/artha-kāma). But this scheme adds a fourth: ascending intimacy. I mentioned this possibility briefly before, associating it with Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON (the Hare Krishnas). But I think ascending intimacy goes well beyond Prabhupada and his Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava tradition. The idea of bhakti – loving devotion to a divine being – became very widespread in medieval India, and pervades much of what is now called “Hinduism”; and it is also, in many ways, a characteristically Christian attitude. In ascending intimacy as in descending, relationships are central to a good life; but the relationships with our familial and local intimates on earth are less important than our relationships with a transcendent, eternal deity. Epistemologically, the deity is the source and arbiter of truth, and we are not ourselves the deity. For Kasulis, in intimacy approaches true knowledge is more like knowing a person than knowing a fact (in French, connaître is better than savoir); but where for descending intimacy this true knowledge is of concrete phenomena in the perceptible world (including other people), in ascending intimacy it is of a divine and higher being. Augustine had been a Christian paradigm of my older ascetic category; while he would likely fit in this category with his continued poetic declarations of love for God, he does not exemplify it the way he did asceticism, because his Platonist tendencies pull him closer to the integrity side. Rather, Christian exemplars of ascending intimacy would likely be the female medieval mystics like Teresa of Ávila, overwhelmed by their experience of God.

I’m leery of attempts at schematizing everything into diagrams the way Wilber does, but this classification seems to call out for a summary table, with characteristic examples of each of the four categories:

I’m feeling relatively satisfied with this classification scheme; I think it’s the most robust one I’ve come up with so far. I’m particularly pleased that it seems to do more justice to Christianity as well as East Asian thought. But I wouldn’t be surprised if gaping holes remain. What do you think?

The problem is not merely a matter of some thinkers lying between ways of life – if, say, Mozi lies between traditionalism and libertinism, as Aquinas lies between traditionalism and asceticism. Schemes like this are (and probably must be) Weberian ideal types: the possibility that real-world examples will fall somewhere in between the categories is not just anticipated, it’s intended. The point is to have a universal heuristic to understand the particulars better, not to have a classification where one can file everything neatly into one folder or the other. (There is something rather Platonic about the ideal-type method, in that one never expects to encounter a perfect or exact manifestation of the category in the real world.)

No, the serious problem is more particular to the scheme, with its third category of “libertinism” encompassing those thinkers who do not embrace asceticism and whose critiques of tradition are relatively radical. Chinese tradition features many such thinkers – but, contrary to my category of “libertinism” as defined in the earlier post, almost none of them highlight pleasure as a (let alone the) central feature of a good life. The point ties back to a key feature of Chinese thought that I’ve noted before: subjectivity is not a major Chinese concern. And pleasure, whatever else it is, is a highly subjective feeling, especially to the extent it is taken as normative and valuable. A behaviourist could understand pleasure entirely in terms of neurons and pleasure-expressing reactions, but on such grounds it seems bizarre to take a utilitarian approach according to which pleasure is the good. If that’s all pleasure is, then why privilege this pattern of neurological movements over any other?

Mozi, the fierce critic of Confucianism, would seem like the most obvious example of such a thinker, going beyond these categories. Stephen noted that Mozi can be far more traditionalist than he appears, citing the ancient sage kings as justification just as the Confucians do – but he still criticizes the modes of life that people have lived in for generations. The Daoists, too, seem to advocate a worldly life that is neither traditional nor libertine.

I have very limited expertise in Daoism, so I asked Stephen what kind of life the Daoists endorse, if neither traditional nor libertine. He noted that they generally appeal to pragmatic efficacy, to sets of variously defined practical worldly goods, such as physical health or family relationships. And that point made me think I was right on track with my earlier response to him: we might just be better off classifying ways of life and even philosophies according to the classical Indian scheme of the four puruṣārthas!

Puruṣārtha means “human aim” or “human end.” There are traditionally said to be three, or four, puruṣārthas, and while they are referred to all over Indian literature, it is surprisingly rare for them to be theorized: one finds almost no discussion of why these are taken as the aims of human existence or what they add up to. They are probably discussed at greatest length in the Mahābhārata, but its accounts are not very systematic.

And yet I have often found the puruṣārthas to be a surprisingly robust account of the aims that humans seek, one that might even expand into a valuable cross-cultural classification of philosophies. In early texts the three puruṣārthas are: artha, worldly success at pragmatic aims such as statecraft and the acquisition of material goods; kāma or pleasure, especially but not only of a sexual kind; and dharma, adherence to norms of duty, especially as found in traditional texts like the Vedas. Later, in post-Buddhist times, is added the fourth aim of mokṣa, liberation or release from suffering.

If we apply this fourfold classification to the history of philosophy and the possible ways of life, we find mokṣa corresponding closely to what I have called asceticism: the quest for transcendence of the world, tied theoretically to the view that the world is a poorer or worse version of some higher and better reality. Augustine’s Christianity is a mokṣa philosophy. Dharma is traditionalism: the attempt to preserve the world as it is and has been, to “save the appearances” in theory and in practice, accepting common-sense ideas and carrying on the continuity of one’s community with children. Aristotle and Confucius are dharma philosophers.

What I previously called “libertinism” is divided: a kāma philosophy continues to take pleasure as the highest good, as do Jeremy Bentham or Epicurus. But an artha philosophy, while refusing (as a pure kāma or even mokṣa philosophy would) to take established tradition as the ultimate authority, also avoids identifying pleasure as a central goal of life, instead urging success at particular worldly goals that – while often urged by tradition – may nevertheless be directly at odds with tradition. If this categorization works, then John Rawls would appear as an artha philosopher along with Mozi and the Daoists.

The trick with the puruṣārtha approach may be at the level of theoretical philosophy. Asceticism as I described it is not just a way of life, it’s also a view of a higher truth beyond this world. Traditionalism is also an epistemology that privileges common sense and the wisdom of the ancestors. And libertinism privileges empiricism, a focus on the evidence of the senses in our lives here and now. It is in this respect that artha and kāma philosophies do not seem so different from each other.

So I’m not yet sure whether I think this classification is better than the previous one. It has the advantage of noting that goals of artha are often closely linked with dharma, frequently more than they are with kāma, as in the case of Mozi. As a result, it does seem to make better sense of Chinese intellectual history than the “three ways” classification – and the fact that an Indic scheme of categories is useful for describing pre-Buddhist China is itself quite interesting.