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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.

The analytical movement in early twentieth-century philosophy rejected not only “religion” but most forms of metaphysics, looking with deep suspicion on any claims about the universe that could not be demonstrated empirically. As a result, they came up with (highly implausible) theories about ethics and value that often dismissed them entirely. For A.J. Ayer, value claims are entirely meaningless; C.L. Stevenson argued that they mean nothing more than the expressions “boo” and “hurrah,” with no rational content. G.E. Moore wasn’t quite as dismissive – the word “good” did mean something real – but it was also something undefinable, like “yellow” (referring to the subjective perception of yellowness as a colour, not the way in which yellow objects happen to refract light). What this effectively meant was that it was impossible to argue rationally about what was good; you just knew. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who knew Moore well, witnessed firsthand the anti-intellectual bullying that resulted from such an approach in Moore’s social circle:

How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue…. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method — greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity — Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility … Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”)

These various analytical attempts to analyze value judgements are all pretty clear failures, to my mind; in many cases they explain away value judgements rather than actually explaining them. But they all come within a shared context of rejecting metaphysics – and thereby rejecting any metaphysical status for goodness in the universe. It seems to me that the rejection of a metaphysics of goodness leaves them bereft of any ability to speak reasonably about what goodness actually is. Alasdair MacIntyre, with the Nietzschean wit that characterizes his early work, compares the analytic philosophers to Hawai’ian natives who would explain prohibitions by saying that they are taboo, but not be able to explain what taboo means – so that soon enough King Kamehameha II could abolish the taboos without any serious objections arising:

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten…. But had the Polynesian culture enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is clearly the name of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been available to show that taboo is the name of such a property.

MacIntyre then compares Nietzsche to Kamehameha II, shattering the pretensions of those who claim “good” still means something in the absence of the “background beliefs” that make that meaning possible. It is not that Nietzsche wins the debate, that good means nothing; but that for us to see the meaning of good we must have the kind of underlying beliefs that the twentieth-century analytic philosophers did not.

What are those underlying beliefs? It seems to me that, at base, they require goodness to have a real, objective existence, beyond that which people happen to value at any particular place and time. Reality, the larger stage in which our lives take place, what Ken Wilber calls the Kosmos – what is most often called “the universe” or “the world” except that these terms usually limit themselves to the physical – it must somehow have value and goodness as a part of its nature, at least insofar as human beings exist within it. Seeing that goodness at the heart of the world is a lot easier if you take the next step and view that world as the creation of an omnibenevolent God. But then, of course, it winds up being a lot harder to explain the world’s observed badness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Mou thinks the Buddhists provide conceptual tools to discuss this relationship which the Confucians didn’t have.

The key metaphysical distinction Mou takes from the Buddhists is between “perfect theories” (yuanjiao 圓教), monist theories according to which existing things are ultimately identical to the one good, and “separation theories” (biejiao 別教) in which they are fundamentally distinct. Mou identifies Tiantai Buddhism as the key example of perfect theory, and Yogācāra as separation theory; both believe in “buddha nature” as an ultimate value in the universe, but for Tiantai we are identical with it in a way we are not for Yogācāra (or so Mou claims). He is a strong advocate of “perfect theory,” and with that monism he sets his Confucianism apart from many others’. Especially, he rejects the thought of Zhu Xi, probably the most influential Confucian thinker since ancient days, because Zhu insists that Heaven (tian 天, the ultimate source of goodness in Confucianism) is separate from the human mind.

The debate Mou examines between perfect and separation theories may seem like the kind of abstract technical debate that is relevant only to Buddhist-influenced neo-Confucians. But I don’t think it is. I’m coming to think the distinction is quite a powerful one for cross-cultural philosophy – because it applies even to traditions Mou doesn’t really think about or care about. It seems to me that in key respects it is the same debate that I – following Skholiast – have previously characterized as a debate between ātmanism and encounter.

Perfect theories are “ātmanist”: they claim that created things, trees and jars and human beings, reveal themselves in the end as equivalent to the ultimate truth or good. The idea of ultimate “encounter,” by contrast, requires that the ultimate source of value (Heaven, Buddha-nature, God) remain ultimately distinct from flawed, fallen worldly beings. Here’s the thing: I spoke of this debate primarily in the terms of Indian Sufism. Sufis typically aim at an experience of mystical oneness with God; the Indian Sufis debated whether this meant that human beings really were one with God, or whether God must ultimately be irreducibly distinct from us. That is exactly what’s at issue between perfect theory and separation theory as Mou describes them – even though Indian Sufism is a tradition which, to my knowledge, Mou had absolutely nothing to do with.

It goes further. Skholiast, in setting out the terms of ātmanism and encounter, was drawing on still other traditions. He used the term “ātmanist” to refer to Ken Wilber, who draws perhaps most heavily from Aurobindo, and clearly draws the term from Advaita Vedānta, the tradition whose central teaching is that everything is all one ātman (self). And “encounter,” with which Skholiast contrasts Wilber and Advaita, draws heavily on the thought of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Yet neither Judaism and Vedānta registered much on Mou’s radar either – when he looked outside of China philosophically it was mainly to Kant, with occasional references to Christianity and Indian Buddhism.

It seems to me, then, that in exploring perfect and separation theories, Mou is asking a perennial question. Across very different philosophical contexts, people have struggled at length with perfect and separation theories, the question of the relationship between ultimate value and everyday things. It’s a question well worth thinking about.

Mou’s answer also bears some thought, because it leads in a fairly distinctive direction. The perennial questions I’ve most commonly examined have been the questions of ascent vs. descent and intimacy vs. integrity. How do perfect and separation theories (ātmanism and encounter) relate to these questions? At first, perfect theories seem to map relatively well onto theories of integrity ascent, like Advaita, which aim to transcend this world for a solitary unity, and theories of intimacy descent, like those of Lévinas or Martha Nussbaum, which embrace the physical world and its relationships. Integrity-ascent views, like perfect theories, point us at a metaphysical unity we can identify with if we cast off our mistaken identifications with the physical world. Intimacy-descent views, like separation theories, warn us of the arrogance of a quest for perfection and ask us to embrace a flawed world that will never fit a perfect good.

Mou, however, flips this all around. His metaphysical “perfect theory” is combined with an ethics of intimacy descent. In practical terms, Mou is resolutely Confucian. Not for him any monastic rejection of worldly goods; the human life is best lived in the everyday world of work and family. We live best when we recognize that ultimate metaphysical value is found right in all of these everyday things. Mou is unusual in thinking that perfect theory makes a good fit with an intimacy-descent life. His approach resembles that of the Bhagavad Gītā: act in the finite with your eye on the infinite. Moreover, I think it gets around the objection that Nussbaum makes to the Gītā’s kind of view: she claims that one isn’t really living in the material world if one doesn’t identify with it, if one goes through the motions like a “play-actor.” Here Mou’s view of perfect theory is distinct: unlike Advaita, the material world for him is no illusion. Heaven or buddha-nature, the source of ultimate value and goodness, are all there in the material world, and that’s exactly why it’s so important to live in it and play by its rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thill notes that by this criterion, “claims of alien abduction, alien visitations, presence of aliens on Mars or the Moon, claims that cancer is caused by a virus, etc.” would count as supernatural. The points about aliens don’t strike me as a problem for the definition; claims made about aliens (with insufficient scientific evidence) would fall with little difficulty under the category of the “paranormal,” which seems close enough to “supernatural” to me. Claims that cancer is caused by a virus, however, are a bigger problem – as, perhaps, are claims that vaccines cause autism. It would be hard to call these pseudoscientific claims “supernatural”; they ignore the scientific evidence, but they do not presume any interruption in the usual processes of natural causality.

For the concept of “supernatural” is properly used in contrast not to science, but to nature. So I could try here to spell out a more careful definition of “supernatural” – but I won’t, because I have yet to find the concept of nature particularly useful in philosophical reflection. Unlike “religion,” I don’t think “nature” obscures more than it clarifies; I just don’t see it as clarifying very much. When I use the term it’s mostly to think about “the nature of a thing” (like “human nature”), rather than “natural laws” or “nature in general”; and I think it’s the latter with which “supernatural” is generally contrasted. It may just be that I haven’t thought enough about “nature” yet; if nature comes to be more important to me, I’ll probably need to rethink the supernatural as well. (One possible reason: in the previous discussion about transcending death, I noted the appeal of Śaṅkara’s position, in which the human end is a oneness placed beyond time itself: while this is not unscientific, in the sense I outline below, its appeal might be supernatural in that it goes beyond death as a natural process.) But for the moment, at least, it instead seems best to me to switch concepts – to stop talking about the supernatural and start talking about the unscientific.

I think I’ve been reluctant to speak of the unscientific because the concept has a whiff of the empiricism or scientism I disdain: the idea that scientific claims are the only ones worthy of discussion. But it’s not so hard to work around this problem: one simply has to distinguish the unscientific from the nonscientific. Non-empirical facts can be established by a priori argument. These are not established through science but they are compatible with it; indeed some of them are necessary for it. The practice of science itself depends logically on certain key propositions (such as the validity of sense experience to truth) which cannot themselves be demonstrated through science. I’ve recently finished Ken Wilber’s interesting edited volume Quantum Questions, which collects the writings of some of the world’s most noted physicists (including Einstein, Schrödinger and Max Planck) on philosophical and metaphysical questions. Against the book’s self-description, these thinkers are not all “mystics,” nor are their writings all “mystical”; some hew to a more-or-less Kantian view of the human subject, which isn’t about spiritual paths or mysteries or transcendent experiences. Nevertheless, what these great scientists do have in common is a view that scientific evidence can’t answer every question; they believe in nonscientific claims, despite their commitment to refuting all that they deem unscientific.

Now what does it mean to speak in terms of the unscientific rather than the supernatural? What difference does this difference make? Well, I’ve already noted an implication in my comment to Skholiast, which Thill was replying to. My post (and its predecessor) had explored the idea that very few thinkers in the history of philosophy had taken an approach which was neither supernatural nor political, and I wondered why that would be. But if we phrase it as “neither unscientific nor political,” the field changes a bit. For my exemplar of a thinker who was “neither supernatural nor political” was Epicurus, whose views never really lasted, for whatever reason. But while Epicurus seems relatively non-supernatural, denying the existence of an afterlife and even many gods, I don’t think he’s particularly scientific, any more than most of his contemporaries. Given the knowledge people had at the time, gods seemed like decent explanations for many of the world’s phenomena. Indeed, until Darwinian evolution came along, God might well have been the best hypothesis available to explain the adaptation of species. Epicurus’s follower Lucretius opposes ideas of God and the afterlife not so much because empirical evidence oppose them, but because of the deleterious effects these ideas have on human well-being.

If our emphasis shifts from the supernatural to the unscientific, then the question seems to become “Why do thinkers become more political as they become more scientific?” And then it would seem we are asking about the nature of that rough beast called modernity – that strange historical condition in which natural science, a politicized citizenry, and a capitalist economy emerge roughly in the same places at the same times. The nature of modernity has perplexed minds greater than mine. That doesn’t mean the question is unanswerable; but at any rate I don’t think I can answer it in this post.

I thought of one important answer to this question because of some friends who are interested in Frithjof Schuon and his fellows in the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. The members of this school believed, and continue to believe, in a philosophia perennis, a kind of philosophical wisdom that persists across cultures throughout the ages. Central to this perennial philosophy is the idea of an ultimate Reality distinguishable from the everyday world we perceive with our senses – an ultimate One which Plato, Śaṅkara, and Zhu Xi might all arguably be said to have found, more or less entirely independently of one another. The perennialists tend to believe that the reason so many came to this conclusion in so many places is because it was the truth – it was really there, to be observed or deduced by any human being anywhere if they cared to take a serious look.

As for me, one reason I find classification of philosophies so important is that I’m only willing to meet the perennialists halfway. I am struck by the recurrence of different ideas across philosophical traditions, and I suspect at least some of that is indeed because it is true. What I don’t buy is that the thinkers cited by the perennialists were the ones who found the correct answer. For those thinkers who seek an ultimate Oneness beyond the world of the senses, like Śaṅkara and Plotinus, are basically Ascent thinkers, almost by definition. And yet Descent thinkers, who embrace the material world and its flaws, are just about as common in the history of philosophy – probably more so, since they’re so much closer to that elusive beast called “common sense.” Indeed, as I noted in my post on Asperger’s, many of the greatest ascent philosophers (Plato, Augustine, Śaṅkara) were followed soon enough by a more descent-oriented thinker (Aristotle, Aquinas, Rāmānuja) who tried to harmonize those ascending views with a more everyday understanding of the world – to “save the appearances,” as Aristotle put it. That’s not to mention the thinkers who didn’t bother harmonizing with the ascent tradition and preached a pure descent of sorts – while ubiquitous today, they also have significant historical precedent in thinkers like Mozi.

What I’m getting at is this: the question of ascent and descent – of whether we should ascetically seek a perfect world beyond, or embrace the world of the senses with all its flaws – strikes me as a perennial one, widespread throughout the history of philosophy. But it is the question that is perennial, rather than the answer – or at least, the perennial answers are multiple. Human beings, when they have started to think about questions beyond their immediate survival, have tended to think about the kind of questions that I refer to as ascent and descent – and they have answered these questions both ways. I strongly suspect that whatever truth is out there to be found is going to be somewhere in the middle; and it is by identifying these ideal-typical answers that we can more successfully locate where that middle will be. As many difficulties as I have with Ken Wilber’s thought, this is a reason I keep coming back to him: I think he gets this point, and really tries to harmonize ascent and descent. (The big danger in doing so, one I’m not sure Wilber avoids, is reaching merely a compromise and not a synthesis.)

I’m not quite sure whether the same discussion (mutatis mutandis) would apply to Kasulis’s distinction of intimacy and integrity, but it might. East Asian thought often seems to have embraced the intimacy orientation wholeheartedly; one finds some elements of the integrity orientation in Mozi, but even he doesn’t seem to go all the way. I suspect glimmers of it do keep showing up there, as Daoists and Buddhist monks retreat out of the wider society. But suppose that isn’t so – suppose East Asian thought is basically all intimacy. Then intimacy-integrity is not quite a perennial question in the way that ascent-descent is – it is not a question that is asked everywhere. Even so, it seems like the distinction remains essential for those seeking philosophical truth, because so many great thinkers come out on either side. If one is to do justice to the concerns of humanity’s great thinkers, if one is to really find truth, it seems to me that one must find some sort of synthesis (and not merely compromise) between intimacy and integrity, as between ascent and descent.

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?