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.

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna.

McMahan, more than most observers of Yavanayāna, rightly notes the extent to which Buddhist modernists affirm the very phenomena that the early Buddhists were most suspicious of. I’ve noted before how Yavanayāna Buddhists often treat “interdependence” as something to be celebrated and rejoiced in – the very opposite of the Buddha of the Pali suttas, for whom it was something to be escaped. But McMahan extends the point to two other phenomena I’d thought less about: nature and everyday life. The old texts see the forest as a fearful place, full of dangerous animals, far from contemporary ideas of celebrating nature and our harmony with it.

And in what seems to me the most original and insightful of McMahan’s contributions, he points to the way that Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to treat “mindfulness” as an appreciation of the beauties and even sacrality of everyday life in the world of mundane work and family. Drawing on Charles Taylor‘s work, McMahan notes that modernity in the West has characteristically involved just this kind of orientation. Using the term found in Ken Wilber and Martha Nussbaum, I have characterized it as Descent. Indeed for McMahan, the affirmation of everyday life is found most characteristically in modern novels, especially those of James Joyce, which highlight the subtle and particular details of everyday experience and consciousness; and it is Joyce whom Nussbaum takes, in Upheavals of Thought, as the ultimate paradigm of the descent she advocates.

It strikes me that the affirmations of interdependence and nature are themselves forms of Descent – embracing the connections of the material world with all its flaws and imperfections, avoiding attempts to transcend it. The advocates of affirming nature and interdependence tend to see themselves as opposing scientistic and technological views of the world that attack nature; but I think they’re also in their way opposed to the early Buddhist texts’ quest for an other-worldly (lokottara) nibbāna/nirvana. Buddhist modernism, then, seems to be characterized by a move from Ascent to Descent orientation – as, it would seem, is modernity in general. (I might argue that in many respects Buddhist modernism is also a move from an integrity orientation to an intimacy orientation – and in this respect it is against the grain of modernity in general. But that could be a post of its own.)

But there’s more to the story of Buddhist Ascent and Descent than this. McMahan is rightly ready in his book to note that none of the features of Buddhist modernism have been entirely novel; they all had some precedents in premodern tradition. But those precedents were found far more often in Mahāyāna than in Theravāda – and above all in East Asian Mahāyāna. Yavanayāna has a stronger Descent orientation than does Ch’an or Tiantai; but those in turn have a stronger Descent orientation than the older Indian Mahāyāna, which in turn is more of a Descent than the oldest Buddhism recorded in Pali (or Gandhari or other ancient Indian languages).

So perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that it is in some sense linear. Depending on one’s own orientation, one could view it either as progress or as decline; but it is a continuous progress or decline, moving toward one point and away from the other. The Buddhism of the Pali suttas is not all that far removed from its contemporary rival Jainism, about as thoroughgoing an Ascent tradition as one could name – a tradition whose monks practised self-mortification in order to achieve a superhuman state of transcendental solitude. Perhaps one could even identify early Jainism as the very first step, before early Buddhism, in an Ascent-Descent movement whose latest stage is Yavanayāna.

With the rise of Mahāyāna, Indian Buddhism takes a Descending step, especially under the influence of Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna claims that saṃsāra and nirvana are not different from one another; nirvana is merely this world viewed properly. This statement sounds like an affirmation of everyday life, a descent, and it will be used that way later; but it only goes so far. For Indian Mahāyānists like Śāntideva, the important thing is that we normally view this world improperly, and that wrong view mires us in the terrible suffering that constitutes everyday life. Transcending that everyday world is still paramount, and one is best suited to do it as a monk, leaving work and family behind. Nature, too, remains suspect – the Indian Pure Land sūtras describe a world of beautiful buildings and carefully manicured gardens, and view it as a marked improvement on the chaotic and dangerous nature that normally surrounds us.

East Asian Buddhism, as I understand it, takes a step past Indian Mahāyāna toward Descent and immanence. For pre-Buddhist East Asian thought was already far less anthropocentric than Indian thought, more oriented to what we in the West would call nature; and Buddhism in East Asia absorbed such an orientation to the physical world. McMahan notes that classical Ch’an/Zen literature is full of stories of monks liberated at the sight of mundane natural images, like a frog jumping into a pond; this is not an idea one would find in India. Relatedly, the Huayan tradition begins to talk about interdependence in something like the positive light it takes on in Yavanayāna. For the Huayan thinker Fazang, we do not need to transcend the world, not even through knowledge of its illusory nature as in Nāgārjuna or Śāntideva: interdependence or dependent origination is the “marvelous manifestation of the cosmic Buddha,” so properly seeing the world means only “seeing it as the wonder as it is.” And East Asia also introduces the idea of sudden liberation: taking Nāgārjuna a step further, liberation is now something we can achieve not only in this life but in this moment, right here and now. (It increasingly seems to me that the Chinese and Japanese changed Buddhism at least as much as the modern West ever did.)

Despite all of this, East Asian Buddhism still retains an emphasis on monkhood. Buddhists soften their criticisms of family life when they defend the tradition in China, to win acceptance in a society whose ways of ethical thinking are heavily Confucian; but they continue to emphasize the detached, ritualized life of the monk. Ch’an and Zen affirm the everyday world, but McMahan notes that it is the monk‘s everyday world. He notes that the Zen master Dōgen had said “There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.” But, says McMahan, “In contrast to contemporary interpretations of Zen spontaneity however, this meant an intensive formalization of every activity, from meditation to using the bathroom.” (234-5) The “practice” spoken of was not merely being mindful of events in the everyday household life, but in the ritualized life of a monk. “True spontaneity, on this model, was not doing whatever one wanted; it could only come about when the extremely formal gestures and acts that made up the monastic life became ‘natural’ and effortless. Then they could be understood as expressions of buddha-nature.” (235)

Here Yavanayāna takes one more Descending step. Even though some of its most influential figures (like Anagarika Dharmapala and Thich Nhat Hanh) were and are monks, Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to downplay the importance of monasticism. Indeed, S.N. Goenka‘s organizations effectively prohibit it. One is allowed to live at a Goenka vipassanā meditation centre (and help run its activities) for a period of a few months; but one may not do it for the long term. Even if one wishes to, one cannot leave worldly society for a Goenka Buddhist society, in the way that the most devout would have been expected to follow in traditional Buddhist societies. That path of Ascent is forbidden. From the original disparagement of everyday life, Buddhists – even Theravādins like Goenka – have now moved to requiring it.

EDIT: Due to a technical glitch, the podcast was not yet available when this post first appeared. It is now available: http://newbooksinbuddhiststudies.com/2011/09/02/david-mcmahan-the-making-of-buddhist-modernism-oxford-up-2008/

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.

Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:

What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)

What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.

The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.

By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.

Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.

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.

The example intrigues me because I’m the exact opposite. I’m in love with spicy international foods of all kinds, one of the most delightful and satisfying pleasures in my life (and one of the biggest reasons why I love being in New York). And music brings me a deep satisfaction – my worst days have often been brightened, even amid the traffic snarls of the Southeast Expressway, by hearing a beloved song. Children’s literature, on the other hand, does little for me – and so, I have to admit, do novels more generally. I have enjoyed a good number of novels in my day, but I don’t go out of my way for them.

The point is one I’ve had to think about whenever I read Martha Nussbaum’s work on philosophical form (in what probably remains her best known work, the first chapter of Love’s Knowledge.) Nussbaum’s argument, broadly speaking, is that literary form and style make implicit claims about what is important, in ways that can undercut themselves if we’re not careful. So Spinoza’s abstract, dispassionate universalistic rationalism, for example, is very well expressed in the geometric theorems of his Ethics. But the kind of philosophy that Nussbaum herself advocates – prioritizing particular human individuals, valuing strong emotions – is best expressed in literary forms that tell the stories of particular individuals and evoke emotions, and above all in novels. This claim made it more difficult for me to get deep into Nussbaum’s thought.

I’ve tried to engage with Nussbaum’s philosophy at some length, as in my dissertation. While reading up on her ideas I tried to read a novel she takes as exemplary, one she quotes and analyzes at length: Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. I clearly did not experience this novel the way Nussbaum did; the first phrase that came to my mind to describe the experience of reading it was “Chinese water torture.” James’s plodding Germanic sentences, combined with the novel’s slow pacing and relative lack of major events, made it an ordeal. A minor ordeal, to be sure – nothing like breaking a bone or losing a job – but not even remotely a pleasurable experience. Even philosophically, I got more out of Nussbaum’s commentary on James than I did out of James himself.

I’ve been thinking about related points in the past couple of weeks, during which I have been obsessed by the recent Canadian election and the resulting transformations in the country’s political landscape. I have several times expressed my suspicion of politics and how political concern can mess up a human life. And yet I love following politics – not even the ideas so much as the “horse race.” Since my teens I have been a “political junkie,” fascinated by seat counts and electoral systems. Am I then unhealthy?

The point here isn’t to go on about my personal likes and dislikes. Rather, it’s to raise a related question about the “Be Gretchen” idea itself. Suppose Nussbaum is right that one learns best about true philosophy from novels, but Rubin is also right that one is happiest when staying true to one’s own desires, loves, preferences. What then should someone do in my position of not particularly liking novels? Or, suppose Plato is right that the greatest of the arts is music – where does that leave Gretchen Rubin, when she doesn’t particularly care for it?

As with most philosophical questions, there probably isn’t a single, easily stated answer to be found here. This too strikes me as a matter of finding the virtuous mean between two vices – akin to the “meta-virtue” I previously discussed with respect to pessimism. To stay entirely in one’s comfort zone and never let one’s choice of pleasures be guided by those whose judgement one respects – this is a vice. It’s a sure way to remain mired in the situation described by Lorraine Besser-Jones in which virtue does not become pleasurable and pleasure does not become virtuous. At the same time, to ignore one’s own preferences and passions in the hopes of reaching an unrealistic ideal of what one should like – this too is a vice, one that sacrifices one’s happiness and likely one’s virtue as well. How does one negotiate the middle ground?

That question may need to be answered on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if one believes one should like something one doesn’t currently like, one might examine the reasons for liking that thing and see if there is an appropriate substitute. For example, Nussbaum recommends reading novels because they tell the stories of particular people, in such a way that the details of those people’s lives matter to us, and matter emotionally. But it is not only novels where one gets this exploration of character; one can find it in any medium that tells people’s stories at length and in depth. I have learned a lot about the subtleties of human personality in media as diverse as the Fox TV show King of the Hill and the teen webcomic Penny and Aggie – both of which derive their humour from richly drawn characters, people who feel real.

As for politics, I recently noted a solution that has worked for me: view it as a spectator sport, as a Sox fan does the World Series. Enjoy the excitement, but don’t get too wrapped up in the outcome. And yet that too has its pitfalls. In Canada, despite the ascendance of the Conservatives I oppose, I was elated to see the rise of the socialist NDP as the opposition, at the expense of the centrist Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois. In recent weeks on Facebook I was trash-talking the latter two, just as a fan of the Sox might against the Yankees – even after the election was over. An old friend implied that this might be hurtful to hear for those who now have to live under a Conservative majority government. When your health care is on the line, politics remains more than a spectator sport. Here as elsewhere, there are no easy answers.

Thill is, I think, getting at an important philosophical debate here: over the value of compassion. Most of us, were we to be faced with the necessity of euthanizing a horse, would feel a painful emotion occasioned by its suffering – that is, compassion. The same would happen if we needed to discipline a child – even if, in either case, we had all the best reasons to believe that this action was the best action to take. But there is still a question: is this feeling a good thing?

Or to put the question more strongly: does a disposition to that feeling make a virtue? Compassion figures strongly on many lists of human virtues, from the Pali brahmavihāras to André Comte-Sponville. But not every such list. Nietzsche, for one, sees compassion as a form of weakness, a pitiful way of exacerbating suffering by adding additional suffering to it. Before him, the Roman Stoic orator Seneca said that compassion

is the sorrow of the mind brought about by the sight of the distress of others, or sadness caused by the ills of others which it believes come undeservedly. But no sorrow befalls the wise man; his mind is serene, and nothing can happen to becloud it. Nothing, too, so much befits a man as superiority of mind; but the mind cannot at the same time be superior and sad. Sorrow blunts its powers, dissipates and hampers them; this will not happen to a wise man even in the case of personal calamity, but he will beat back all the rage of fortune and crush it first; he will maintain always the same calm, unshaken appearance, and he could not do this if he were accessible to sadness.

And if Aristotle does really believes the idea I’ve attributed to him above – that the fully virtuous person takes pleasure in that virtue – then it seems that he, too, must oppose compassion. For compassion, whatever else it is, is painful by definition. The etymology of English com-passion, like German Mitleid, is suffering-with, shared suffering: the suffering, the painful feeling, is what compassion is. It is a feeling characteristic of Christianity – Jesus on the cross, physically suffering for others, seems to exemplify it. And if compassion (or a disposition to it) is a virtue, then that virtue is itself a form of suffering. For compassion to be pleasurable would be a form of masochism. And masochism certainly sounds like an accusation that Nietzsche would level at Christianity; but it doesn’t sound anything like the Aristotle I know.

Martha Nussbaum defends compassion at some length in Upheavals of Thought, and she claims that Aristotle defends compassion. I’m not so sure about this. Nussbaum describes Aristotle’s account of compassion or pity (eleos) in The Fragility of Goodness at some length, and his definition of it does sound a good deal like her own. But there’s a crucial difference: it is nowhere clear from Nussbaum’s account, or from anything I have read in Aristotle, that he considers compassion to be a good thing overall. His long account of it is in the Rhetoric, which gives a descriptive account of the emotions we do in fact feel, not a normative account of what we should feel. It may be that Aristotle agrees with the Stoics in being suspicious of compassion.

But leave aside how we interpret Aristotle for the moment. Turn instead to the constructive question: does the best kind of person, the most virtuous agent, actually feel compassion? It seems to me that the truly ideal person, the perfect person, would not feel compassion; she would do what is best and take pleasure in it because it is best. Other things being equal, pleasure is a good thing; to always do the right thing with pleasure is better than to always do the right thing and sometimes suffer for it. In this I differ strongly from Śāntideva, whose ideal bodhisattva overflows with compassion.

That ideal, however, is only theoretical. In practice – disagreeing with Śāntideva in a very different way – I don’t think there are ideal people. This point is tied to my rejection of the Third Noble Truth, and to my sympathy with chastened intellectualism. Not only are we not ideal now, we’re not ever going to be ideal in this life, and I don’t think we get any additional ones. And for people who aren’t ideal, compassion is very important. When we feel pained at others’ pain, it reminds us that others’ pain is a bad thing; it is a check on the bad actions that we are always all too likely to fall into. That’s why I would generally agree with Thill that the virtuous person is likely to feel pain when putting a dog out of its misery. Not that compassion is necessarily a virtue in itself, but that it supports our other virtues.

Mencius, however, may be taking the opposite approach from what I’ve just said. In section 1A7, he reacts to the story of a compassionate king who could not bear the suffering of an ox that was to be slaughtered for meat, and ordered that the ox be spared (and a sheep put in its place). Mencius praises the king’s compassionate reaction: “Gentlemen cannot bear to see animals die if they have seen them living. If they hear their cries of suffering, they cannot bear to eat their flesh.” But this compassion seems to be a virtue only in itself; it is not a virtue because it helps cultivate other beneficial qualities, let alone because it leads to good results for others. For Mencius’s conclusion is: “Hence, gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen.” Be compassionate – but let the less compassionate do the dirty work.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.”

Trunk identifies happiness with contentment, in a move similar to the utilitarians who identified it with pleasure. Now it’s true that many will say pleasure or contentment is not real happiness, that true happiness consists of something larger than that state of mind – but I suspect that they primarily do this because they are wedded to older and mostly extinct uses of “happiness,” ones that survive mostly in translations of Aristotle. Etymologically, “happy” used to mean something like “fortunate” or “blessed.” But outside of a few idioms (“a happy coincidence”), we rarely use the term this way in English anymore. Rather, happiness is about contentment or pleasure, a pleasant, enjoyable, perhaps peaceful state of mind. And for Trunk, that’s not good enough.

Trunk’s rejection of mere happiness is far from a truism. It’s not only the utilitarians (such as Neil Sinhababu) who defend happiness in this sense – a view we could reasonably call hedonism. The ancient Epicureans practised a “sophisticated” hedonism, in which we should find the happiness that comes with freedom from mental disturbance. Such a hedonism is arguably quite Buddhist as well: while the early Buddhist texts are often cagey about what exactly nibbāna implies, what descriptions there are sound a lot like Epicurean ataraxia. Tranquility. Peace. Freedom from disturbance. Above all, an end to suffering. This sounds a lot more like happiness.

But is this really the best goal to pursue? At least, is it the only goal worth pursuing? I am finding myself increasingly persuaded by Trunk’s position. We’ll have plenty of time for freedom from disturbance once we’re dead. Life gives us a shot at something more.

What is that “something more”? Trunk often contrasts the happy life with the interesting life. This point comes out in her posts about New York, which I’ve discussed before: life in rural Wisconsin is happy, but it’s not interesting. Life in New York is interesting, but it isn’t happy. But maybe that’s okay. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point in “Transcending humanity,” the last chapter of her Love’s Knowledge: when the nymph Calypso offers Odysseus a chance to live with her in immortal bliss, we hope he turns it down, for we would lose the rest of the story. To be sure, a truly interesting life is often something we would only wish on somebody else, especially somebody fictional. One thinks of the apocryphal “Chinese curse”: “May you live in interesting times.” The reason this phrase is popular (and attributed, probably falsely, to the Chinese) is the idea that being interesting may be a curse, even though it’s something we often want. And while it’s true that often, on reflection, things get interesting in a way that on reflection we don’t want, that’s not necessarily the case.

The idea of this “curse” suggests that if we really thought about it, we’d realize that being happy is more important than being interesting. But is that necessarily true? Trunk doesn’t think so, at least for herself. Some of us, at least, would willingly accept a life that’s more exciting in exchange for its being less happy. Imagining myself in my eighties or nineties – knowing my death would come before too long – I would like to be able to look back on a life that’s been full and interesting, not merely happy. (It’s relevant here that for Aristotle, eudaimonia is an activity, as contentment and pleasure are not.)

Beyond Trunk’s post, there’s a point I tried to make to make to Neil Sinhababu: it seems there must be something good about truth in its own right; it’s basically self-contradictory to think otherwise. What follows from the goodness of truth, again, is harder to establish, but it’s another aim that seems like, in some cases at least, it’s worth pursuing at the expense of happiness.

The tougher question is what we do to decide or arbitrate among these competing ends: truth, interest, happiness. I suspect the question can’t really be decided in the general case; one must learn what’s more important in particular cases, and learn that through experience as one learns any other skills. I think this is a very Aristotelian answer, and it’s one reason I begin to see the vagueness in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia as an asset rather than a flaw.

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.

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?

It’s easy, though, to misinterpret the idea of virtue as a mean. Virtue is not merely the middle ground. It is not a combination or a compromise between two vices. Virtue requires that the middle ground one occupy be specifically a good middle ground. It needs, essentially, to preserve what is best in each vice – to be a synthesis rather than a compromise.

On the virtue of justice, for example, a lack of justice may be expressed in a greedy sense of entitlement, claiming things that are not one’s own. As I expressed before, against the criticisms of Grotius, there may also be an excess with respect to justice, of not feeling entitled to things that really are one’s own (an unhealthy submissiveness that is often taught to women). But it is possible to combine these two in an unhealthy way, and I think this is the pattern among narcissistic personalities. Contemporary psychoanalyst Andrew Morrison claims that “shame and narcissism inform each other”: a narcissist can veer between experiencing himself as matching a false and overinflated ideal, and as contemptibly vile for falling short of that ideal; between believing himself entitled to everything and believing herself deserving nothing. Submissiveness and sense of overentitlement, the excess and the lack, can coexist in the same person, both getting in the way of justice. This is a middle ground between simple submissiveness and simple overentitlement, but it is vicious, not virtuous.

I noted the point briefly in the final chapter of my dissertation. I had presented an earlier part of the dissertation at the AAR conference, examining the questions at issue between Śāntideva and Martha Nussbaum on external goods: Śāntideva telling us that having possessions or close relationships will produce dangerous attachments, and Nussbaum saying that they are essential to a flourishing life.

As a respondent to my presentation, Mark Berkson had suggested a middle ground between their two views: one could live with the outward form of Nussbaumian flourishing — living in the world with property, human relationships, political participation — while inwardly renouncing all attachment to them, as is advocated in the Bhagavad Gītā. But I responded: this is indeed a middle ground, a compromise, but it is not a synthesis. Without further justification, at least, the Gītā approach does not answer the concerns of either Śāntideva or Nussbaum. As I said in the dissertation:

Nussbaum sees not merely one’s outward relationships, but one’s inner engagement and attachment, as central to the good life. Something fundamentally human is lost if one goes through those relationships like a play-actor, as surely as if one renounced them entirely for the monastic life. So too, Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation warns us of the dangers posed by external objects themselves, at least if we are not sufficiently advanced. If we did try to go through the trappings of a worldly life in this way, it would affect our minds, bringing us back into the attachment and anger we tried to escape.

One could argue, then, that the life promoted by the Gītā satisfies neither concern: one does not experience the joys of a Nussbaumian life passionately tied to attachments, but also doesn’t get Śāntidevan serenity because the attachments creep back in when one doesn’t want them to. It is the worst of both worlds, and not the best. I’m not arguing here that the Gītā’s proposed life actually is this bad (although I do find that view plausible), merely noting why a compromise is not good enough without being synthesis: one must make sure that the mean is virtuous and not vicious.

Whether one is putting together different worldviews or trying to navigate between the vices that prevent one from being a better person, one must constantly be aware that merely putting two things together or inhabiting two worlds is not enough. If one does not make sure to get the best of both worlds, one may easily end up with the worst. I am reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) exchange between an aged George Bernard Shaw and a beautiful young dancer. The dancer told him they should have children together: “Imagine a child with my body and your brain!” “Yes,” Shaw demurred, “but what if it had my body and your brain?”