As I did last week, I will assume that my readers have read the two posts that preceded this one on the subject; I will not assume that you have read the comments to those posts. In his first comment, Thill very helpfully gives us his definitions of three key terms whose meanings have so far been elusive in this debate:

The word “plausible” also has the meaning “worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable” and this is exactly sense in which I am using that word. Interpreting “plausible” in terms of “apparent truth”, as Amod does, is at odds with this sense.

The word “reliable” means “credible; trustworthy; dependable.” That which is plausible (= worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable) is, therefore, also reliable in this sense.

The word “infallible” means “indubitable; exempt from and incapable of error”. That which is true is also infallible. Truth excludes error and doubt. Hence, knowledge of truth also excludes error and doubt. Therefore, truth and knowledge of truth are infallible.

The distinction made here was surprising to me. As it is described here, the distinction between infallibility (on one hand) and plausibility or reliability (on the other) appears to be a distinction between truth and justification. If something is infallible, that means that it is actually true. If it is merely plausible or reliable, that in turn means that it is worthy of being accepted as true, worthy of our trust, credible, believable – that is, we are justified in believing it. Plausibility and reliability are about justification, not truth as such. And there must be a distinction between the two, for Thill’s entire argument depends on there being a significant difference between infallibility and reliability (or plausibility), and with these terms defined thus, that requires a distinction between justification and truth. If we are only justified in believing those things that are actually true, then only the infallible (that which must be true) is reliable (that which we are justified in believing); but that is exactly what Thill’s argument requires him to deny. For Thill there must exist some claims which are reliable but not infallible; and according to the definitions above, these are claims which are at least potentially false but which we are nevertheless justified in believing. (Unless, of course, the ground of these definitions shifts beneath our feet.) If we are never justified in believing false things, then the distinction between reliability and infallibility – as expressed here – collapses.

So assuming the distinction between truth and justification in this way (thus allowing for the distinction between infallibility and reliability), let us continue to “common sense” – in Thill’s definition of the term, as beliefs which can be learned by human beings without special training (which has also not yet been defined). Thill, as I understand it, wishes to claim that common sense is “worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable” and “credible; trustworthy; dependable” – qua common sense. That is, insofar as something can be learned without specialized training, it is worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable.

Now, let me return to my favourite counterexample. Since we learn without specialized training, from the evidence of our senses, that the sun goes up and down as a thrown baseball does, this fact clearly belongs to common sense as Thill defines it. (And I will reiterate that if common sense merely tells us that the sun appears to go up and down, then it must be superseded by specialized training when it comes to the actual truth, for it tells us only about appearances and not truth. If common sense is to have any of the philosophical weight claimed for it, certainly if it is to be considered reliable, then it must tell us about reality and not merely appearance.) It is for that reason – it has been in response to this claim – that Thill has already accepted or at least implied, repeatedly, that common sense is not infallible. As must be the case, for in this case the conclusions of common sense are simply false.

Now what of reliability and plausibility? If common sense qua common sense is “worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable” and “credible; trustworthy; dependable,” this too must include the false claim that the sun literally rises and falls. Thill introduces the distinction between infallibility on one hand, and reliability or plausibility on the other, in order to claim that every single common-sense claim is, if not infallible, still reliable and plausible. But this set of claims includes the claim that the sun rises and falls. The claim of the sun’s rising and falling, because it is a member of the set of commonsense claims, must therefore be considered “worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable” and “credible; trustworthy; dependable” – even though we have already agreed it to be false. We cannot avoid such absurdities so long as we consider a commonsense claim “worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable” merely on the grounds that it is common sense. (And if you don’t like this example, I reiterate that if common sense is indeed not infallible, there must be cases where it is wrong, and those cases may be substituted here mutatis mutandis.)

Now several of the critiques that the commenters have made to my posts have suggested that they assume common sense is all or nothing: if I say (as I have) that common sense as a category is not reliable, that must imply that every member of the category is unreliable. But, as Ben has rightly and repeatedly noted, this assumption is a pretty basic logical mistake. I have never said that everything which falls in Thill’s category of “common sense” is false, or even that most of it is. I am merely saying this: the bare fact that a claim falls within the category of common sense is insufficient reason to consider the claim worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable. Each claim must be accepted on its own merits, based on the variety of sources of knowledge we have available to us (logic, perception, trustworthy authority). The fact that something is learned without specialized training does not make it worthy of belief, any more than the fact that it is learned with specialized training.

This point (in addition to brevity) is why I entitled the earlier post “lack of training is not reliable” rather than “beliefs achieved without training are not reliable.” Some beliefs obtained without specialized training are indeed reliable, in the sense discussed here; but their reliability does not stem from the absence of specialized training. I reiterate: the fact of a belief’s being learned without specialized training does not make that belief worthy of being accepted as true or reasonable – let alone actually make the belief true.

One further note: So far I have been pushing ahead with objections to the common-sense advocates’ views and their logical flaws. I have not yet addressed a central objection that they have made to my view: that ways of knowing other than common sense (such as science) themselves depend for their reliability on common sense itself. This point should be addressed, especially given some of the claims I have just made in this post, and I intend to do so. (Ben has already made some important points on the topic.) I intend to take it up in a post soon, but this one is already long enough. Let us discuss the matters here in the meantime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” The history of violence across traditions is of course long and bloody. So, in an effort to prevent such violence, one smooths the differences over to the point that they no longer really seem to matter. The traditions, effectively, no longer say anything.

I was reminded of this point when I attended the National Seminar on Comparative Religion at the University of Allahabad in 2005, celebrating the founding of a department of comparative religion. In a country racked by conflict between Islam and “Hinduism,” the presenters had the laudable goal of trying to celebrate commonalities – but often in ways that presented more harm than good. One non-Muslim presenter even said she stressed her respect for Islam by placing an idol of Muhammad beside the other statues she prayed to – apparently not realizing that Muslims have traditionally considered idolatry of any kind to be a cardinal sin, even forbidding depictions of Muhammad. She was perhaps the clearest example of something the advocates of “interreligious dialogue” so often do: she missed the point of the tradition she was dealing with.

It is of course difficult to speak of “the” point of any given tradition. And some forms of some traditions are quite compatible with this approach to interreligious dialogue. The best example I know of is Reconstructionist Judaism. As I understand it, Reconstructionists see different traditions, such as Judaism, as “civilizations,” cultures laden with history and ritual, more than beliefs or paths to enlightenment or codes of ethics. This Judaism is more of an ethnicity than a soteriology.

Such a view might similarly suit much of what is today called “Hinduism.” Vasudha Narayanan, former president of the AAR, once in its journal juxtaposed “liberation and lentils.” Raised Hindu, Narayanan associated her tradition more with cultural rituals, such as her relatives’ choosing the auspicious kind of lentil for particular festivals, rather than the philosophical and mythological accounts of liberation that were spoken of in her graduate coursework. This “lentil Hinduism” sounds a lot like the Reconstructionist account of a religious civilization. And that account does indeed seem to fit many members of such traditions, so closely associated with a particular ethnic or national group.

But, one might ask, what about the thinkers classified as “Hindu” who do stress “liberation”? They might be a minority, but they’re there. Nobody reading the works of Śaṅkara or Rāmānuja could imagine that their traditions are all about finding the auspicious lentils for the right occasion. Śaṅkara is not trying to give us a culture, a set of traditional practices that give a group its ethnic identity. Like a Buddhist, he is trying to free us from the suffering inherent in worldly life. And his path is not necessarily compatible with others.

Śaṅkara himself provides an important challenge to the advocates of Dabru Emet-style reduction of differences among traditions. For he’s often taken to be saying all paths are equally valid – but he isn’t. True, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita tradition, it doesn’t matter which god you worship; any deity can be a viable path to the ultimate. You can worship Gaṇeśa, or Krishna, or Jesus – it’s up to you. But that’s because in some respect the gods you see ultimately reveal themselves to be illusions, compared to the one ultimate truth. More importantly, the Buddhists, who don’t worship gods, are just plain wrong, and he spends a large portion of his work attacking them and explaining why.

There are real differences between – and within – traditions, and those differences matter. The life of the ideal Confucian, deeply immersed in family life and politics, is worlds away from the
life of the ideal Jain, seeking monastic liberation from all the fetters of this world. It matters a great deal which one is right – or if both or neither are right. It makes all the difference in the world. That is why I’ve defended the practice of apologetics, of attempting to convert others, even when performed by relatively ignorant people like FOX’s Brit Hume – it is ignorant attempts to convert, not attempts to convert as such, that are the problem. It may be the case, especially in places like India, that one should publicly diminish the differences between traditions for pragmatic political reasons – pretending to agree when one doesn’t, in order to reduce violence. Here finding the truth of the matter is less important than keeping people alive. But as Levenson points out, such an approach has no place in a document whose Hebrew name means “to speak the truth.”

My critique of Wallis’s older work is hardly limited to Wallis; one could make it about a great number of works produced in contemporary religious studies. Anne Monius encouraged her students to ask of the texts and rituals they study: “Why bother?” and “So what?” Why do people bother doing this, and what is its significance for their culture? What she never asked students was to turn those same questions on ourselves: ask of our own work, “Why bother?” and “So what?” But it seems to me like these are the most pressing questions to ask of a work like Mediating the Power of Buddhas.

No such problem exists in the Buddhist Manifesto! Here, we find a call to arms, a clear vision for Buddhist life and thought, intended to transform Buddhists’ own understanding of themselves and their tradition. And no surprise, Wallis published this after he left Georgia and took a position at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies – a new postsecondary institution focused on applied Buddhist teaching, the integration of Buddhist thought and practice. A document like this would have been laughed out of court in any of the major academic journals pertaining to Buddhism. From what I observed of Wallis’s old department at Georgia, if he had published this before receiving tenure there, I’m betting he never would have attained it.

I am delighted that Wallis has found an environment where he can speak up and say the things that really matter, and I am very encouraged that he has published the Buddhist Manifesto. In a spirit of sympathetic cooperation, I’d like to investigate some of its claims further.

The upshot of the document is to draw a distinction between “Gotama,” the original or ultimate Buddha, and “Buddha,” an imagined figure created by later tradition. It proceeds in what I think is the spirit of Walpola Rahula, attributing to Gotama a view that looks very much like what I have called Yavanayāna Buddhism: a heavy emphasis on meditation, and a criticism of “religion.” “Religion” here refers to the colourful rituals, stories, temples, paintings which everywhere form a component of Buddhism as it is practised, but which Wallis, like Rahula, takes to be inessential. (Wallis, with refreshing frankness, acknowledges the beauty of these “religious” phenomena but is concerned about them as a distraction from the more important projects of meditation and awakening: “I love it all! Don’t you? But can we ask: at what cost, our love?”)

But what makes this figure of Gotama; how is he different from the Buddha known to “religion”? What makes Wallis’s manifesto different, and what I think distinguishes him from the likes of Rahula, is that Wallis does not try to claim that his Gotama is the person we will find historically at the beginning of Buddhist tradition if we use academic historical methods to separate out the original from the later accretions. (He is moving away, then, from the kind of approach taken by the Jesus Seminar.) He recognizes that, given the data, such a project is likely not even possible:

I will begin by saying that I am not interested in the old philologists’ project of separating out the original (good) teachings of Gotama from later (bad) accretions. Given what we now know of the textual history of the Buddhist canons (e.g., that they are heavily edited translations of older oral compositions), that project is no longer viable. (p2)

But if not on the basis of historical accuracy, then on what ground do we separate “Gotama” from “Buddha” – and follow the former rather than the latter? As far as I can tell, Wallis identifies his fundamental premise, his first principle, as this: “Gotama was an unsurpassed scientist of the real.” Gotama, here, seems almost to be defined as that figure who had the most important things figured out. Most of what Wallis says takes off as demonstrative argument from this first principle. But why should we accept it? What is the dialectical argument that would lead us to this first principle?

Wallis says his premises – the one about Gotama above and those which follow from it, such as a distinction between Gotama and the traditional Buddha – are “obvious, fair, and accurate.” All of these terms are debatable; as my recent posts on “common sense” should indicate, I’m rather skeptical of appeals to the “obvious.” More important overall seems to be Wallis’s following claim for these premises: “They constitute our starting point as Buddhist practitioners.” (p3) And later he adds “It is so basic to Buddhism that it hardly requires comment.” (p5) Here Wallis’s strategy reminds me of Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who starts with the assumption that his readers are all Christians and doesn’t bother addressing any others, so that the fact of that Christianity can be the opening point for debate. Wallis, speaking to Buddhists, asks: what constitutes your Buddhism? What is the purpose and the point of it – and how much of your practice actually has to do with that purpose?

I daresay that most Buddhists throughout history, and even most Buddhists alive today, would identify their Buddhism very differently. One thinks perhaps of the Burmese Buddhists found in Melford Spiro’s anthropological study Buddhism and Society, for whom interactions of the Buddha were first about magic spells for mundane purposes and secondarily about acquiring good karma; awakening was a distant goal. Such Buddhists, I think, are in some sense the proper target for Wallis’s arguments. It would be fascinating to see their responses to claims like his – defending a more aesthetic or more ritualized Buddhism. So far, too much of that defence has been left to outsider scholars, people who do little more than point out the fact that far more Buddhists in history have been concerned with ritual and stories than with meditation. Wallis raises a fair point, which those scholarly works do little to answer: maybe those Buddhists are wrong.

I suppose I’ve long been predisposed against Wittgenstein because of the unfortunate ways his thought is used in religious studies. In that discipline, Wittgenstein is most often quoted for sections 66-7 of the Philosophical Investigations. Here he introduces the awful analytic concept of “family resemblances,” which has given too many contemporary religionists an all-too-convenient way to defend those concepts, especially “religion” and (premodern) “Hinduism”, that interfere with our understanding more than help it. In the Investigations, referring to the concept of “game” (or rather the German Spiel), Wittgenstein tells us that there is no essential meaning underlying the concepts, only a network of interrelated meanings which he calls “family resemblances.” And I have read far too many articles and books that note how “Hinduism” and “religion” cover a range of concepts that effectively have nothing to do with one another. But then, rather than taking the logical next step and saying that those concepts are misleading and should be avoided when one is speaking precisely and carefully, they find it adequate oto say that “Hinduism” or “religion” is a family-resemblance concept, and expect that the debate is ended by waving the wand of Wittgenstein’s words.

I, on the other hand, am persuaded by Wilfred Cantwell Smith‘s refutation of this concept in What Is Scripture? (p.365-66): “the metaphor gains its plausibility from being based on a fundamental and quite ‘objective’ linkage underlying the observed diversities of a literal family: namely, the genetic commonality of blood kinship with certain genes that constitute the family (and gives rise to some resemblances).” Even if one were to substitute a different metaphor, I don’t find this “network of relationships” approach an adequate way of looking at concepts. Some concepts mislead us and deserve to be thrown out. One could just as easily look at the various phenomena which scientists once tried to describe as phlogiston and say, as these scholars do about “Hinduism” and “religion,” that phlogiston is a family-resemblance concept, thereby keeping it around. Or, one could do the far more plausible thing and recognize that phlogiston is a worthless concept, purging it from our vocabulary.

Wittgenstein often liked to complain that philosophy “bewitches” us with its supposed misuse of language. I often suspect it is Wittgenstein himself bewitching us with his romantic persona: the young philosopher wandering into stodgy turn-of-the-century Cambridge and throwing off all established convention, clad in a leather jacket, actively homosexual in post-Victorian Britain, even waving a fire poker at Karl Popper – and yet getting away with it all because even the dons were impressed by his intellect. Who wouldn’t be dazzled by such a personality? Haven’t all of us wanted at some point to be the cocky young firebrand whose ideas are so brilliant that the rules don’t apply to us anymore? One gets so infatuated by this anti-authoritarian mythos of Wittgenstein that one accepts the authoritarian tone of his philosophical writing, the way so many of his ideas are phrased as commands to be obeyed. (“Don’t think, look!”)

I am deeply tempted by such an account, explaining Wittgenstein’s appeal as all style and no substance. It seems clear to me that Wittgenstein’s personality gives his ideas more of an appeal than their intrinsic worth is likely to merit; no matter how great his thought was, nobody is going to make a movie dramatizing the life of Immanuel Kant. But that’s not to say that there’s no substance there at all. Indeed, I suspect that there must be, for the most un-Wittgenstenian of reasons: my own Hegelian tendencies. The most important philosophical truths I’ve found have been guided by the insight that great philosophers become great for a reason – and not a merely superficial reason, but an important truth that their ideas have caught hold of, something that needs to be incorporated in any future synthesis. (A similar tendency underlies my embrace of Thomas Kuhn’s perspective on authorship, asking how an intelligent person could have written apparent absurdities.) Thus I am inclined to extend the sort of charity to Wittgenstein that he never seems willing to extend to his own predecessors. There’s got to be something worthwhile in Wittgenstein; I just haven’t figured out what it is. And I fully admit I have read very little of him. Readers, you seem to like Wittgenstein a lot better than I do so far. What do you think I’m missing?

One of the more curious features of American political conversation is Americans’ attitude toward their Constitution. In American politics, the Constitution is a scripture, a sacred text; and I do not mean this at all metaphorically or analogically. The Constitution literally is a scripture, for it has the most important hallmark that a scripture has: while the meaning of the text is endlessly debated, the text itself is universally regarded with great reverence and respect. Both of the warring sides of American politics accuse the other side of disrespecting the Constitution (the language used is typically stronger than “disrespecting,” often involving bodily functions of some variety). Some might argue that the Constitution is not a scripture because it is not “religious,” but this is already to beg the question; I have yet to find an adequate reason to distinguish between the “religious” and the “non-religious,” or reasonable way of classifying the two.

This attitude toward the Constitution has perplexed me since before I arrived in the country. Here questions of free speech – debated throughout the modern world – are referred to as “First Amendment questions,” as if free speech would somehow not be a meaningful or important concept if this constitutional amendment had not been passed. The text of the Constitution is often quoted as definitive – the idea that one might disagree with a document written by slaveholding white men sometimes does not seem to enter consideration. And strangest of all, American institutions sometimes legally require their members to “support and uphold” the Constitution. During grad school, while thinking toward a future in academia, I noticed that many American universities – in a holdover from the McCarthy era – require their professors to swear American loyalty oaths. But these oaths are declarations of support not for the American people, but for the Constitution – the usual language is that one promises to “support and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” (A similar promise is required when one becomes a citizen.) That language concerned me. I don’t believe that everyone should have a right to own guns, or that every state should have the same number of senators, as the Constitution provides. To me, the Constitution seems like a flawed document – as I think it does to many Americans who agree with me on these and similar issues. So could I really claim, on good conscience, to support it? My worries were not assuaged when I posted my concerns on an online forum for PhD students and a common response – from graduate students, perhaps the most left-wing segment of the entire American population – amounted to “If you don’t support the Constitution, then leave.”

Where is all this coming from? Why are Americans so ardently devoted to a document that, in many cases, they themselves disagree with in large part? Doull helped clear this up for me, through a few brief comments on Plato’s Politicus (Statesman). For Doull, and I think for Plato, a political community’s constitution is “its ideal ordering to the good.” A constitution is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a political community and its state; a state’s constitution, by definition, is its essence, what makes that state what it is.

If we view constitutions in this Platonic or Doullian light, the strangeness of American political discourse gets displaced. It no longer seems strange that Americans would be passionately devoted to their constitution – for to be devoted to the American constitution is merely to be devoted to America. That attachment to a constitution is no more and no less than the nationalism that is found throughout the modern world. (Which, while curious in its own way, is nevertheless easily understood at a gut level for those who have grown up in that world.) To declare loyalty to the constitution of any country is just to declare loyalty to that country; it only makes sense that one seeking citizenship in a country would declare loyalty to its constitution. (Whether universities should require loyalty oaths of their employees is a very different, and tangential, issue.)

Instead, on a Doullian account, the real strangeness of the American system is that the Americans identify “the Constitution” with that written document, adopted in 1787 and infrequently modified. Properly considered, a constitution includes all of the most fundamental things that make a country what it is, throughout its history; there is much more to the constitution of the United States than the written document of “the Constitution.” I suspect it is no coincidence here that Doull, like me, is from Canada, where the idea of the Constitution is much more nebulous, referring to a much wider set of documents along with unwritten codes, traditions and history.

I have been wondering lately whether the American approach to the constitution derives from the role of conservative Protestants in the nation’s founding. For the idea of a constitution as a single and fixed written scripture would come naturally to those whose entire worldview is itself all about a different single and fixed written scripture. The role of the British Queen in Canadian politics bewilders my wife as much as the American Constitution bewilders me – how could the result of a significant political crisis be decided by a person whose job description is Queen’s representative? It seems to me that where the American constitution is Protestant, the Canadian constitution is Catholic: rather than a single written scripture which everybody respects even as they disagree over its content, Canada’s institutions are based on history, custom and tradition, all of which vest ultimate nominal authority in a single individual who commands a certain amount of respect, even as most members of the institution ignore that individual in all their everyday doings. Here I am turning to metaphor, to analogy rather than homology, for even though there are more Catholics than Protestants in Canada, almost half of them are anti-monarchist French Québécois. Still, the Christian sects seem helpful as a way of making sense of the two North American states, what they fundamentally are and how they work – which is to say, their constitutions.

But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.

At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” As William Wainwright’s excellent book notes, “philosophy of religion” means almost entirely different things to analytic philosophers of religion (who usually belong to the American Philosophical Association and continental philosophers of religion (who are much more at home in the AAR). For APA philosophers of religion, the only real problem is God: does he exist or doesn’t he, and if so, what are his characteristics? For AAR philosophers of religion, the problems are more varied. But neither side would dream of saying that the central task of their field is to demarcate religion from non-religion! For the AAR philosophers, that task, if it matters, is a task for religious studies in general, not just philosophy of religion; for the APA philosophers, it is a trivial side matter compared to the object of religion, God.

And yet I would say there is something vital to Popper’s question, a good reason why demarcation might be more important in philosophy of science than in philosophy of religion. Asking the question “what is religion?” is generally useless and gets us mired in pointless debates that do nothing to enlarge our understanding. I don’t think the same is true of the question “what is science?”

What makes science different and important, in my view, is two things. First, it has a normative weight; to say that something is scientific is to say something epistemologically good about it, to say that we have particular reason to believe it. (I referred to this concept of normative weight or normative force before, in discussing dialetheism: to note that even Graham Priest, while arguing that there can be true contradictions, nevertheless agrees that something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.) Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that science in some sense deserves that normative weight.

This is not, of course, to say that science is necessarily superior to everything else or that it’s the only kind of knowledge worth having. Such a claim is self-refuting, as I’ve noted before, since it’s not scientific. Normative claims, including the claim that science has a normative weight, are not scientific either, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So then what is science? And why does it have this normative weight (if indeed it does, as I claim)? That’s a question for another time – first it’s important just to establish that the question is worth asking.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture.

I’ve noticed that a fairly large number of my posts have to do with “religion and science,” and the supposed relation between them. This wasn’t my original intent, since I don’t care much for the idea of “religion” in the first place, as most of those posts attest; and the most animated question in “religion and science” debates – the relation between evolution and Hebrew Bible accounts of creation – is of relatively little interest to me, since I’ve never bought any of those accounts to begin with. But I’ve been realizing something about most people today, even well educated people who might be expected to know some philosophy, and not only in the Western world. When moderns look for the things that Greek and Roman philosophy was supposed to provide – answers to big questions about the purpose of our lives, our proper view of the world and our place in it, ways of dealing with death – they don’t turn to philosophy. They turn to “religion” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, various “Hindu” traditions – and they turn to natural science, above all to psychology. It is in the realms of religion and science, that is to say, that philosophy is found today, especially any sense of philosophy as a way of life. Scientists often claim their work to be value-free, but especially for those who are not part of a “religious” community, much of the guidance we receive in life comes from scientific evidence and the people charged to apply it to our daily lives. The title we use for those people – “doctor” – originally referred to learned Christian religious. It is doctors who warn us that our behaviours are self-destructive, that we need to change our views and habits and ways of life, and that we fail to do so at our own peril – and this advice often involves codes of behaviour toward food that rival Leviticus in their complexity.

But philosophy – that is what we don’t have. Hadot reminds us that the ancients did. It’s not just that their academic work was not so carved up into disciplines, so that the inquiries now called “science” would have been known as “philosophy” (though of course it was that). The Stoic practice of prosoche, attention to one’s soul, bears a startling resemblance to Buddhist mindfulness – conducted in the name of philosophy. When the Greek explorer Megasthenes explained ancient Indian society to his fellow Greeks , the name he gave to the brahmins and to the samana wandering monks – the Buddhists, Jains and their ilk – was “philosophers.” He recognized what the Greeks called philosophy in what they were doing. It is in the Christian (and Islamic?) Middle Ages, Hadot notes, that philosophy loses this status, becoming “the handmaid of theology.” It is not a huge step from there to the analytic philosophy of today, which (I think it would be hard to deny) sees itself largely as “the handmaid of science,” answering only those questions left over from the empirical inquiries of natural science.

Now the terms “religion” and “science” seem unlikely to go away any time soon. We are probably stuck with them. Perhaps more importantly, the realms of knowledge and practice that the terms cover – from Kierkegaard to prayer, from Einstein to psychotherapy – are of inestimable value to human life. As much as I might wish for a world where these terms went away (at least the “religion” term), I would find it devastating if the phenomena were to disappear. So for better and for worse, “religion” and “science” are here to stay. So while I have always identified the present venue as a blog about philosophy, it necessarily also becomes a blog about religion and science.

What then happens to “philosophy”? Can it ever again become the way of life that Hadot tells us of? Not in the terms of the ancient world. If one were to start a monastic garden of philosophers the way that Epicurus did – even if one were explicitly to call it Epicurean – most people would invariably call it a religion (or worse, a cult). At the same time, I think philosophy takes on a crucial role in the world of “religion” and “science,” as a middle ground between the two. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, full of bile toward “religion,” nevertheless affirm the value of (at least analytic) philosophy; and philosophy, even today’s academic philosophy, has tools to examine even conservative forms of “religion” critically on their own terms, terms that science does not have. Even to the fundamentalist who denies philosophy as heretical, one may still ask the fundamental questions: why is scripture inerrant? Why must faith take precedence over knowledge? The answers to these questions can be interrogated by philosophy, but not by experimental science. One might even say that the problem with Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA is that, in separating the realms of science and religion, it ignores the third realm that unites them, namely philosophy.

This all is at the theoretical level. But it matters at the level of practice as well. One can always try to live one’s life entirely within the guidance specified by a particular tradition of inquiry, including the tradition of natural science. But once one tries to be both at once – to be both “religious” and “scientific,” or even to inhabit more than one “religion” – then one needs philosophy to settle their differences. One can no longer take philosophy by itself as a way of life. But philosophy may yet turn out to be an inescapable part of the best way of life today.