This is a broadly Hegelian account of the history of philosophy. Judging by his use of the term Aufhebung, Skholiast has intended it to be such. My own sympathies with G.W.F. Hegel are no secret, given my influence by James Doull and his school. But while expressing my admiration for Hegel before, I also expressed my biggest concern about his system: that it fails to do justice to Asian thought.

Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy argue that philosophy proper begins with the Greeks and only develops in the world that they influenced. Much of this comes out of an idiosyncratic definition of philosophy, one that ties it closely to the individual political freedom that the Greek citizens had. I’ll admit I don’t understand Hegel well enough to understand why he defines philosophy this way, but it seems highly suspect to me – especially given that he is perfectly content to consider feudal Christian thought philosophy, at a time where there was little political freedom to express wide individual differences in thought, and when Greek democracy had disappeared.

Probably more important than mere definition is the question of timing. Hegel places Asian thought at the start of philosophy, in a way that presumes Asian systems of thought to be static. In Hegel’s defence, the project of translation was only beginning; Hegel had little access to Asian thought beyond the classics. If one hadn’t read any Western philosophical texts dating from the common era, it might look static too. With only the Asian classics available, it might be easy to characterize Asian systems as lost in one side of the truth: the Chinese lost in the particular and pragmatic details of statecraft and etiquette, the Indians lost in the abstract universals of metaphysics and logic. And so in neither one do you get something that Hegel (more plausibly) takes as central to philosophy: a universal principle that is nevertheless expressed in the particulars of reality. I’ll admit some of my own generalizations might sound like they support Hegel’s claims here – but that is because they are generalizations, and therefore by their nature must leave out some significant details.

For once one explores the later development of both Indian and Chinese thought, one can find major thinkers who take the particulars of the world as real expressions of universal principles, in the Aristotelian way that Hegel takes as so crucial – and what’s more, they do so in a way that could not have happened if not for the centuries of philosophical development that preceded them. I think here of Rāmānuja in India and Zhu Xi in China. Rāmānuja articulated an understanding of the world’s particulars as the real expression of a divine unity, refuting Śaṅkara’s view of those particulars as an illusion. But Rāmānuja was also building on Śaṅkara’s exposition of the nature of that unitary universal (braḥman); and both of them developed their views with the tools of logical argument first developed by Buddhists. All of this happened well after the classical era that Hegel’s books refer to. So too, Zhu Xi saw the particulars of the world as expressing a universal principle or pattern, li 理 – but he got that term from Chinese Buddhists who had equated this li principle with the emptiness of all things (a rather un-Hegelian view). It was his Confucian commitments, his desire to synthesize Buddhism and Confucianism, that led him to develop the idea of li as expressing a pattern in real, concrete things. And the idea of li among Buddhists had itself been a new Chinese development beyond the Indian schools it had derived from. In both places there is an active working out of philosophical positions in history – and one which leads, at one major medieval point, to a synthesizing view that puts together universal and particular in a way that Hegel should be able to respect.

If all of this is the case, it implies that there is a recognizably Hegelian development taking place in three different and parallel philosophical traditions, not merely in one. But this fact complicates any Hegelian story of philosophy’s history, because Hegel characterizes the history of philosophy as a single story with a single telos, a single development. The Marxist geographer David Harvey said perceptively about Marx’s thought that it is “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space.” This insight, I think, was the foundation of Harvey’s project to turn Marx’s historical materialism into a historical-geographical materialism. I wonder whether one could take what Harvey did with Marx in social theory, and do it with Marx’s mentor in philosophy.

People describing Grandin often reach first for words like “extraordinary,” “fascinating,” “remarkable.” These are not the words that come to my mind. I say this not because I find her accomplishments limited – they are major – but because I find her story very familiar. I don’t know if I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s myself; but I do know that Asperger’s is part of a spectrum, with full-blown autism on one end. At the other end, I think, one finds the behaviour of typical science-fiction geeks and absent-minded professors, in whose company I unquestionably fall.

The central features of Asperger’s syndrome are a difficulty with social cues and a narrowness of interest; one falls far outside the normal realms of human interest and interaction. (My interests are almost opposite Grandin’s, yet this makes me sympathize with her more. Where Grandin has been obsessed with animals since her youth, my mother recalls that I was the only child to be completely uninterested when a bunny rabbit was brought into our classroom.) The subtle interplay and social niceties that come so naturally to most people, must be learned deliberately and consciously, as one learns mathematics – and learning these is often far more difficult than learning math.

There are a number of philosophical implications that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome might have. In today’s post, I want to focus on its implications for the history of philosophy.

I’ve recently been noticing a repeated pattern in Indo-European philosophy: one great philosopher posits a realm of pure reason, absolute abstraction, an abstract Good set above and beyond the particulars of the everyday world; and then that abstract philosopher gains a disciple (whether known personally or hundreds of years later) who takes the first philosopher’s abstract ideas and embeds a modified version of them in the concrete everyday world. The first philosopher is to some extent an Ascent thinker, trying to transcend the material and social world, and the second is more of a Descender, trying to embrace it.

The classic version of this pattern is in Plato and Aristotle. Raphael’s The School of Athens immortalizes their differences – Plato pointing up vertically to a transcendent world of Ideas and Aristotle emphasizing the horizontal world of matter – but Aristotle nevertheless embraces much of Plato’s worldview, agreeing the Ideas exist but situating them in matter instead of in their own outer realm.

I see at least three places the pattern repeats itself. In Christianity, Augustine points to a transcendent God, sublime in infinite majesty compared to a world of darkly fallen, sinful humans, hoping that through God’s grace we can ascend to something better than our worldly fallen state. Much later, Thomas Aquinas works God much more deeply into the world of human interaction, seeing it as the working out of God-given natural laws. Here the repeated pattern is explicit, with Augustine drawing deeply from Plato and Aquinas from Aristotle.

No such influence is present in Vedāntic India. Yet I think the same pattern appears. Śaṅkara, clearly influenced by Buddhists, sees the world as full of suffering and produced by ignorance, and advises us to transcend it to realize our nature as a single entity of pure knowledge and consciousness. Then Rāmānuja draws on Śaṅkara’s account of cosmic oneness, but sees it as manifested in the physical world.

Finally, one can see a similar pattern among the great thinkers of modern Germany. Consciously attempting to move away from the supernatural transcendent worlds proposed by Plato and Augustine, Kant nevertheless identifies a realm of pure reason that would exist even in the absence of anything concrete; and tells us our moral goodness lies in following this reason, as opposed to the natural inclinations of the physical and social world. Soon enough, Hegel tries to take Kant’s pure reason and show how it underlies the physical and social world of desire and inclination. (An acquaintance once proposed to me the analogy “Kant is to Hegel as Plato is to Aristotle”; I would now add “as Augustine is to Aquinas as Śaṅkara is to Rāmānuja.”)

So to return to the earlier concerns of the post, I can’t help but wonder whether the first philosopher in each pairing had Asperger’s syndrome, while the second did not (or had it more mildly). I imagine that the same sense of being outside the normal world, which drove Temple Grandin’s animal research, also drove Plato and Augustine and Śaṅkara and Kant – but then in each case someone more normal and well-adjusted then sat down and tried to adapt their theories so they could fit into the everyday world. This seems to be confirmed in the case of Kant and Hegel, where we have the most reliable information about their personal lives. Kant never married, and was said to have been so obsessive about punctuality that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by his daily walk; Hegel, meanwhile, had a wife and children and seemed to live a relatively normal personal life by the standards of nineteenth-century Prussia.

I seem to recall Graham Harman noting a while back (I can’t find the reference) that most great philosophers today begin by making an extreme and exaggerated claim that draws attention, and then gradually pull back to a more moderate position. I wonder if the same thing may occur interpersonally: a weird outsider with an autism-spectrum disorder is needed to get the philosophical world to pay attention and shake things up, and then someone more socially well adjusted is required to give those theories wider acceptance. Grandin suggests that Asperger’s may be one of the world’s great wellsprings of creativity: “if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses…. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.” (quoted in Sacks 292) Perhaps one needs a maladjusted, socially inept genius to create a great idea and then an “accountant” to make it stick. (Sacks’s piece mentions Wittgenstein as someone who might have had Asperger’s, and there is a certain transcendent aspiration in some of his work; it may have been the whole 20th-century school of analytic philosophy that brought his work down to earth.)

At least, that seems like it may be the Indo-European pattern. I don’t see anything parallel in East Asia, perhaps because East Asian thought has so much stronger of an intimacy orientation. (At the SACP two years ago, I said to an East Asianist colleague that I thought explicit argument and disagreement were essential to the progress of philosophy. He said he thought that I was being Eurocentric; when I noted how much explicit argument there is in India, he modified it to “Indo-Eurocentric.”) For better or for worse, people with Asperger’s tendencies seem to have found much less of a home in East Asian thought. Perhaps that should be no surprise: after all, Aspergians make terrible Confucians. A philosophical climate that stresses etiquette and social relationships is about as uncongenial an environment as can be imagined for someone like Temple Grandin. The thought of such a person might have had a much harder time getting a foothold there.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God?

Most of the answer to the question will hinge upon how we define God. But let us assume that God has one characteristic attributed to him by almost every believer, even by deists: that he is the creator of all that is, directly or indirectly responsible for everything that happens except (perhaps) those events caused by human free will, and perhaps the will of other free beings like angels.

If that is so, the verdict is severe: God’s track record is no better than ours. Too often we think of the “problem of evil” rather than, more correctly and appropriately, of the problem of suffering. And then we neglect to think the problem through, and blame it all on human free will. For when we live so close to the twentieth century, the readiest examples of grave horrors are human-caused; the mere mention of the names Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot make it easiest to question God. But this version of the question is also the easiest to answer: the universe would not be as good if we were not free, and this freedom is worth the possibility of evil.

But how small this human-caused misery begins to look compared to the misery caused by God. In Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Asian tsunami we have plenty of recent examples of suffering not caused by humans. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer have killed more than Hitler or Pol Pot ever did. The tortures of ALS make the gas chambers look humane. Crippling diseases, natural disasters, animal attacks: we didn’t do that. God did.

And that’s just a deist God, a God inferred from creation. The evidence against the God of scriptures is worse still. In the book of Exodus, God punishes every Egyptian family with ten “wonders” – diseases, crop failures and more – culminating in the deaths of all their firstborn children. They are punished not for their own actions, but for the actions of their Pharaoh – even though the text explicitly says that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” God deliberately caused the Pharaoh to do the very thing that Pharaoh is punishing him for. Later God sends horrible afflictions, including the death of his children, on his most faithful servant Job, just in order to win a bet with the Accuser (“the Satan” in Hebrew). Worse even than all this is the idea of a literal hell, not necessarily attested in the scriptures but widely believed in the traditions, including by Augustine himself. Whatever Pol Pot did to his victims, it always ended with death. God keeps going, tormenting people for all eternity, with no deterrent purpose whatsoever, leaving sheer vengeful retribution as an end in itself.

It seems to me the evidence against God is, quite literally, damning. Augustine, it seems to me, is right that humanity is fallen and sinful, not worthy of trust. The problem is that God is worse. (And let me stress again that it is not God’s existence I’m addressing here. Like Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I would not trust a creator God even if he did exist. Maybe especially if he did.)

It is not only Western traditions that face this problem. These reflections came to me when I began reading Rāmānuja‘s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. Rāmānuja begins the text with a long homage to Vishnu as the creator of all things, who appears in the Gītā in the form of Lord Krishna. The purpose of life, according to Rāmānuja, is to reach knowledge of and devotion to this Lord. But Krishna always appears as a morally questionable sort of deity, from his childhood stealing butter, through his adulterous sexual affairs – to the advice he gives in the Mahābhārata itself. In the Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna to kill his cousins and their armies because he should always do his duty (dharma) irrespective of the consequences. Even if one thinks this morally sound advice, the same Krishna later tells Arjuna to kill his rival Karna while Karna is fixing his chariot – an act that clearly violates all applicable rules of dharma – in order to achieve the consequence of winning the war. So too, it is Krishna who tells Yudhiṣṭhira to mislead Drona about Aśvatthāman the elephant, an act for which Yudhiṣṭhira later receives a karmic punishment – again, breaking the duty of truthfulness in order to bring about the best consequences. Krishna tells others to break the rules he himself sets out, and does so with impunity. Krishna’s bad deeds might not quite reach the scale of the Judeo-Christian God, but he is far from a moral paragon. He may be better than Pol Pot, but a human saint could surely outdo him.

So whether we are speaking of Vishnu or Jehovah, I do not think Augustine’s answer to human fallibility is acceptable. Perfect goodness is not to be found in men or in gods. But a chastened intellectualism without God seems to leave us with two unpalatable alternatives: a tyranny like Xunzi’s, or a life of miserable neurosis like Freud’s. I think this may be why Nietzsche and the existentialists view life without God as a terrifying (if perhaps ultimately fulfilling) “abyss”: if you don’t trust in God, you have to trust in man, and that’s not very comforting.

Or do you? I wasn’t thinking of it this way at the time, but I suppose all this might be part of the reason why, when I needed to pray, I turned to the bodhisattva Manjuśrī rather than to a God or Goddess as such. For Mañjuśrī, while perhaps omniscient, is not omnipotent. He lets much of the world suffer not because he chooses to – as God does – but because there’s too much he can’t prevent. A being who is omnibenevolent but not omnipotent – you can’t completely trust in such a being, because he might let you down; he can’t do everything. But if he exists – and maybe even if he doesn’t – he is at least more worthy of trust than either a human being or a creator God.

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. The worst of these is the “First Cause” version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, that you need to have something setting the world in motion. Even if that argument works, it proves nothing like the existence of any God that has been ever worshipped. A mere First Cause is no more significant than any other cause. If God is a mere Divine Watchmaker who sets things in motion and then goes away and is no longer involved – as this hypothesis would suggest – then the universe with him is hardly different from the universe without him. This is not a God that matters.

Rather, nowadays, if you’re going to get rationally to anything like the traditional Abrahamic God, you need to keep science at arm’s length. This is one of the beauties of Anselm’s argument – it has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical evidence, it is 100% a priori, and therefore natural science simply can’t touch it. If it is wrong, its wrongness can and must be demonstrated without reference to natural science. The same seems to be true for ibn Rushd’s First Explanation cosmological argument when properly understood, though not for First Cause arguments in the usual sense. For here the question is not “what caused everything?” but “how can there be causation in the first place?” It is an explanation going much deeper. Unlike Anselm, it doesn’t necessarily get you to an omnipotent or omnibenevolent God; but it does seem to get you to something like the brahman of Śaṅkara’s or Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, a cosmic principle underlying everything, and such a principle does a lot to change the way we see the rest of the universe.

To me it’s been clear for a long time that any attempt to find God must go a priori, must not try to look in the empirical world. But looking back on Darwin’s story, it’s easier for me to realize that many people don’t see it that way. And that helps me understand contemporary views that have always struck me as a little curious. Not just the intelligent design movement, but the arch-materialistic atheists of contemporary analytic philosophy, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, who look at neuroscience and conclude that consciousness and free will don’t exist. They actually think that consciousness and free will are empirical hypotheses whose existence can be refuted with empirical evidence. Once upon a time, they, like God, might even have been exactly that.

Let’s back up a bit for those who aren’t familiar with Advaita Vedānta (or theodicy). Vedānta is philosophy based on the “end of the Vedas,” the Upaniṣads – sacred Indian texts often considered “Hindu” (although there are a lot of problems with that term). The Sanskrit advaita means “non-dual”; Advaita Vedānta, associated above all with the philosophical teacher Śaṅkara, is the kind of Vedānta that says everything is really one, and not two (or more). Especially, there is no duality between subject and object. The universe is all one, and each of us ultimately is that one. We seem to perceive multiplicity in the world, but only because of our ignorance. Multiplicity is an illusion; really, all is one. This one is expressed with the word sat, meaning existence, truth, even goodness.

But the difficult question for an Advaitin to answer is: where does that ignorance come from? How can it even exist? Śaṅkkara’s great critic Rāmānuja, from a different (theistic) school of Vedānta, thought that this was a damning criticism of the Advaita view. Either ignorance is part of the one truth or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then things are not one after all; ignorance is a second thing. But if ignorance is a part of the truth, how can it maintain its status as truth, as goodness?

Advaitins have proposed some answers to this question. But what interests me here is the status of the question itself. As far as I can tell, it strikes at the very heart of Advaitin tradition in exactly the same way that the problem of suffering strikes at the heart of Abrahamic monotheism. Jews, Christians and Muslims accept, as fundamental to the universe, a being who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Such a fact would seem to imply that the world is perfectly good. How then can we live in a world full of suffering, of earthquakes and plagues and hurricanes and degenerative disorders? Similarly, Advaitins accept that fundamental to the universe is a single perfect truth; how then can we live in a world in which everyone is ignorant? (For Advaitins, as for Buddhists, ignorance is a central cause of suffering.)

Getting into the prevailing answers to these questions (which I’m not yet sure I understand) is a subject for another time. What I’m interested in here is the structural similarity of the questions, which seems to point to still deeper similarities. Reality’s bad features are difficult for both Advaitins and monotheists to explain; they’re difficult because both effectively seem to place goodness at the heart of reality. (One might then suspect that Plato, with his view that the Good underlies being, would have a similar problem.)

By contrast, little of this seems to be a problem for Buddhists – at least South Asian Buddhists. Robert Gimello once said, in a class I took, that “Where does ignorance come from?” is a problem for Buddhists comparable to theodicy, in that it is seemingly unsolvable. The twelve-step process of causation in paṭiccasamuppāda, “dependent co-arising,” begins with ignorance; we don’t hear where it comes from. But for the Buddha of the Pali suttas, at least, it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. That’s a “question that tends not to edification,” a question that does nothing to get us out of suffering. Not all metaphysical questions fall in that category; we need to know the true nature of the self and of karma, or we’ll remain mired in ignorance and therefore in suffering. But where the ignorance comes from? Not important. By contrast, knowing the nature of the ultimate truth is essential to Advaita; and understanding God’s perfection is central to understanding God at all. The difference, it seems to me, is that early Buddhist thought, unlike these other two varieties of thought, does not see goodness at the heart of existence.