We are currently scheduled to talk with Owen Flanagan about his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. I’ll put up the formal “topic announcement” when I have a better idea what the discussion will focus on (i.e. after we actually interview him). For now, anyone who is already familiar with the book, or his work, or this topic in general is welcome to weigh in here and try to steer us through this. If you post some questions for him that strike us as particularly cogent, we’ll try to bring them up with him.
Read Seth’s earlier post about this. I highly encourage you to listen to the episode of The Secular Buddhist podcast that Flanagan is on; that will likely give you enough material to post some questions here.
I would be interested in knowing how naturalized Buddhism differs, if it does, from phenomenology, ie does it go beyond explaining/exploring 1st person experience? thanks
see Evan Thompson and co @
Cool, looking forward to the episode! I’d be interested in what position(s) in contemporary debates on free will naturalized Buddhism most closely approximates. Same with metaethics.
I think that asking Flanagan to expand on his interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia and how his project of Eudaimonics contrasts (or fits in) with the dictates of a consumer driven society whose main source of ethical principles are defined by a ubiquitous and hegemonic market system (where a narrowly defined and truncated “homo economicus” competes for “domination”).
The question might seem vague or off topic but i find it hard to discuss any principle that relies on “cross-cultural” and inter-subjective considerations without referencing the most prominent and daily ethical system everyone in the world is subject to everyday.
I would also think that a Buddhist critique of materialism, as defined through the lens of consumerism, would be relevant as it relates directly to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism itself.
It would also be good to hear an expansion of the idea of “Karma” in a “naturalized” form of inter-subjective ethics. (An interesting discussion on divorcing Karma from rebirth as to “naturalize” Karma can be read here: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2011/01/wright01.pdf and a response to that can be found here: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2011/01/cokelet01.pdf)
Ok. Lets see. My questions are, ” Why stop at Buddha’s Brain?”, “Why discriminate against the brains of Jesus, Krishna, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, etc?” Why use our privilege of existence itself to naturalize anything anyway? Is any naturalization of any non-existent religious figure considered to be ignorance with an naturalistic attitude? I thought Buddha’s brain could not be naturalized. Wasn’t it Buddha himself that said that if i should meet him (Buddha) on the road (of natural existence), and he says, “I am Buddha!”, that I should kill him? Is Buddhism based on a brain, or a practice (phenomenology)? If it (Buddhism) is a practice, why should only the brain factor in when it is only the equipment used by existence? would that not that be abstracting what was never to be abstracted? I am really looking forward to this interview, because as you see, i need to be educated on this topic. Thank you.
Hi, Tony, I’m trying to unravel your question; I’m not going to ask him this, because I think hearing a summary of what he’s actually trying to do in the book would likely put you on track to ask something more pointed.
He’s trying to prove to his Western colleagues that there’s something valuable in Buddhist ethics that we should pay attention to. He argues that Buddhist insight into impermanence and no-self are perfectly compatible with what many analytic philosophers think about these things, and that you don’t have to buy into any kind of supernatural anything to be OK with what Buddhism is arguing for ethically. He thinks (as have philosophers like Nietzsche before him) that this is easier to do with Buddhism than with the Abrahamic religions; Buddhism is nominally atheist, so even though many Buddhists say things that sound like they advocate intelligent design, there’s enough room in interpreting the classical texts to argue that Buddhism doesn’t have to be committed to this, whereas someone like Schleiermacher has a much tougher time arguing something like this about Christianity.
I should say that despite the name of the book, neuroscience only comes up in a couple of chapters, and mostly negatively: he argues that claims by some neuroscientists for the link between Buddhism and happiness are utterly unfounded.
Your latest book sounds interesting and I plan to read it soon, but having only so far listened to your secular buddhist interview, your primary concern would seem to be taking on correct states of mind given the best acquired evidence in order to lead better lives, and also that happiness will come about as a pleasant side effect to this way of living. As far as I can tell, my state of mind is at least most directly a product of my environment, that being a bigoted, decaying empire pockmarked by minimalls, a viciously every man for himself capitalistic state in which no way of life adopted by those of us who every day choose to go on living directly at the expense of the global poor can be held up as much more ethical than another. It also seems to fly right in the face of modern neurochemistry that we should go on concerning ourselves with personal happiness whatsoever, even if that always be carefully positioned secondary to a moral life, without devolving in to a sort of “brave new world” chemically placated society. What would you say to someone who believes themselves to hold largely the same understanding of the world as you espouse, but feels apathetic toward such inert programs as epistemology and metaphysics rather than finding any sense of beauty inherent to them, who sees your attempt at naturalizing buddhism consist in hacking away at it with an axe until you wind up with another veiled nihilism?
I find that many people today share your view that, “as long as your beliefs only affect your own life and don’t negatively impact others, I can’t prevent you from holding them.” Would you agree that it’s too easy for anybody who necessarily remains complicit to capital to tell ourselves that we aren’t actually a detriment to life in general?
Hello, Marsden Hartley here,
Oh right,
Physical scientists are going to be interested in some sort of moral code derived from Buddhism.
And they will adopt this on what basis–experiment, or what?
What physical experiment will prove one act moral and another immoral ? Sorry, scientific experiment does not decide such questions; no scientist would claim that correct value can be decided by experiment.
No physical scientist would be interested in trying.
One could, I suppose, simply presume that such and such experimental outcome indicates that value x is correct and value y is not. But, any such presumption, I assure you, would be far outside the physical science circle of concern and tradition.
Why would most scientists have any concern to adopt such a thing as a purportedly science friendly moral code?
Scientists would have to abandon the physical scientific standard of proof to accept the moral theory as proven and so worthy of adoption!
From the strictly scientific point of view the whole project is silly and rather naive.
And from the Philosophical point of view the whole thing is based upon the presumption that
the scientific viewpoint is solely the valid one, which presumption cannot itself be proven scientifically.
Compatible with science?
The moral code of Buddhism is based on compassion. What are you going to do, try to convince physicists at the LHC in Cern that they should be looking for a compassion particle in addition to the Higgs?
If any such science friendly moral code is adopted, it won’t be for scientific reasons.
But in the meantime nothing prevents one from interpreting religious texts as purely metaphorical or analogy– heaven and hell, for instance, can be seen as personal experiences in the here and now.
And nothing prevents one from acting from compassion for living beings.
Compatibility or no compatibility, the whole issue is and will remain, I assure you, outside the purpose and methods of experimental physical science.
Hi, Marsden,
I think you’re confusing the project of trying to ground ethics upon science (Sam Harris’s project) with considering religious alternatives that are compatible with science.
Where science comes in in judging ethics is, in this book, judging claims Buddhists have made that Buddhism more reliably leads to happiness than other world views. Now, most of the work in deciding this is looking at the concepts involved (i.e. philosophy, not science), including working out an ethical philosophy that to me looks very much like the pluralist-within-limits-grounded-in-biology-and-culture view that we discussed in our Hume/Smith episode (which I generally support). But given a particular conception of virtue and a particular conception of happiness (and Flanagan admits that both of these will be different for the Buddhist than for other world views), you can still ask: does being Buddhist-virtuous generally lead to Buddhist-happiness, and that’s an empirical, i.e. scientific question. You don’ t have to just think in terms of physics and chemistry to talk about experimental verification.
A basic tenet of Buddhist philosophy is that the world and mind arise from being and all things are forms of being–including what we would call the material world.
Pure being is unmanifest and prior to all else.
There is no greater contrary to the scientific view than this; science posits only the material world, and so the reductionist scientism such as Mr. Flanaghan subscribes to, I submit, is irreconcilable with this foundation of Buddhist Philosophy, which stands the scientific view on its head.
Any assertion that such a view can be “naturalized” to the scientific seems then absurd.
And ultimately Buddhism is not about answering a Philosophical question. Rather it is about realizing that silent being from which all comes–including all thought.
Silent being is empty yet complete, and since all comes from it, all is at once empty and yet not empty.
But, in the highest, all such machinations are irrelevant; Buddhism is not about subscribing to words and concepts. In a very real sense, the depth of Buddhism is not a thing to be understood.
I fear Mr. Flanaghan has mistaken Buddhist Philosophy for Buddhism —they are not the same thing–and to assert so is to misrepresent Buddhism.
Apparently he lacks even the basic insights that would enable him to get beyond the surface of his subject.
Philosophically he may have much to say, but it must be said, he remains unfamiliar with the vital heart of Buddhism.
Hi, William,
I’m not sure what to make of your comment. In our Nagarjuna episode, we looked into a variety of Buddhism that says that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying: there is no “pure being,” i.e. substance. That’s the point of emptiness. Flanagan interprets this by characterizing the ontological view of Buddhism as equivalent to Heraclitus: everything is flux, where flux is not a substance, but just a way of describing the ultimate baselessness of everything. While he acknowledges that the doctrine of emptiness is a Mahayana (Nagarjuna) addition, and really doesn’t spend much time on ontology in general in this book, he characterizes even Theravada Buddhism as committed, due to its claim that everything is impermanent, to something like the emptiness view: nothing lasts, so there are no substances in Aristotle’s sense, and certainly no souls (atman). What you’re describing as being sounds more like the underlying Brahman-stuff that Buddhism was specifically reacting against.
I’ll bring this point up with Flanagan: what are the ontological commitments of science? I don’t think on his view you have to as a scientist, be an a priori physicalist. His physicalist commitments (which don’t require him to, e.g. reject the existence of consciousness as is alleged of Dennett) come from abduction, i.e. a belief that in cases of considering the relation of consciousness to the brain and in considering the origin of the universe, the best scientific hypotheses we have available don’t require positing a mind-substance or intelligent design (i.e. mind-substance writ large). If we found in experiments or our own experience (he considers first-person phenomenology a part of “the natural method,” i.e. something scientists typically have to incorporate) something requiring a different ontological commitment, then that would be feasible.
I get the gist of the bulk of your post here, though: you’re advocating some kind of Zen/Chan Buddhism, which he for the most part ignores in the book (except to say that the initial move toward Zen, back in our Nagarjuna episode, of saying that emptiness must in itself be empty, is a conceptual mistake: emptiness is not a “thing” that has to be empty; it’s a predicate describing the state of things, i.e. a higher order concept… see Russell’s theory of types). He does have two partial answers to the kind of objection you’re raising. One is that in his experience, there are lots of kinds of Buddhism, and everyone thinks that theirs is the true one. Second is that a religion held by millions of people just can’t be as esoteric and mystical as you’re making it out to me. Yes, it takes long-term conditioning (practice of some sort, though not necessarily actual meditation, which the vast majority of Buddhists worldwide don’t do) to see things as impermanent and to be mindful and feel compassion based on that, but that doesn’t require the sort of quietude that only a monk can attain. Flanagan understands very well that Buddhists don’t need to have the explicit doctrines on hand and intellectualized in order to be authentic Buddhists, just as Christians might have only a very surface-level grasp of their own theology yet feel the Spirit of Jesus act through them. I’m guessing from your tone that you have a great deal of experience with Buddhism personally, but I’m also guessing having read his research that he probably knows more than you do about the ways it’s practiced globally, and I’ll further guess that your criteria rule out the actual practices of many devout Buddhists.
Please may I ask his opinions regarding the relationship between ‘flow’ and Buddha mind / no mind.
Please may I also ask for an interpretation of enlightenment? In particular the differences between the satori / awakening approaches?
Thxz! 🙂
Hi, Martin,
I’m using responses here as a way to practice articulating these things before talking to him:
According to Flanagan, the Buddhist metaphysical view is that of the Heraclitean flux: there are no underlying substances behind any of what we experience, just temporary matters. Now, they can still have conventional reality, which enables us to, for instance, have projects and cultivate virtues (if our selves really died every moment as some Buddhists claim, then this wouldn’t make any sense). But no-self is just another instance of this general doctrine of no-substance.
He doesn’t talk about satori at all in the book that I saw. He acknowledges there’s a difference between intellectually knowing that everything is impermanent/empty and living that belief, and practices such as meditation (though, again, barely anybody in the Buddhist world meditates) can help us internalize this wisdom and otherwise work on ourselves to reduce desire, increase compassion, etc. So “enlightenment” would just be really getting this, in this world, not after death. He does talk about “nirvana” in this sense; I’ll try to ask him if he thinks there’s anything more to enlightenment than that.
One of my best friends is a naturalistically inclined Buddhist (Im a philosophically inclined scientist) and there are two questions that he and I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of:
One: is enlightenment for a naturalized Buddhist a unitary thing, or are there multiple enlightenments? Ie, could we understand Nietzsche, or Einstein as being enlightened? Or do all paths to enlightenment lead, in some sense, to the same place?
Two: comment on the asceticsm of Buddhism: there seems to be tension between Buddhist morality, with its focus on personal enlightenment, and consequentialism, which is concerned with what happens in the world. Is this a fundamental clash of values?
looking forward to the episode
Evan, why divorce “personal enlightenment” from “concern with what happens in the world?” I seek to be an informed and conscientious person, a process that requires introspection and reflection but that does not entail cutting oneself off from “wordly matters.” I see no “fundamental clash of values” since “enlightenment” for me DEMANDS an engaged relationship with the world and with other people.
The term “Bodhi” merely means “awakened”, one can interpret this in any number of ways and i am sure that at least one of them would be compatible with “consquentialism”.
“Can Buddhism be re-discovered as a naturalistic and comprehensive philosophy that is compatible with the rest of knowledge, yet capable of pointing us to a path of human flourishing? Owen Flanagan is James B Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.”
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1298
cf. pg 76.
“No buddha is omniscient, she is just very enlightened”
well, have to beg to differ with this remark.
One very characteristic quality of the enlightened mind found in Mahayana schools such as Hua Yen, is that of “omniscience”. Moreover, the entire “multiverse” scenario just now becoming a point of interest in cosmology and quantum physics (cf. David Wallace’s forthcoming book, THE EMERGENT UNIVERSE) smack of ideas whose ideological (quinean notion) roots go back to the early centuries after Christ.
The various ideas of Dharmadhatu, and the celestiel domains, the qualities of the “omniscient enlightened mind”, etc.are all hypotheses used by those studying and practicing esoteric buddhist (tantric) meditations several hundred years after Christ.
The Dunhuang scrolls are now revealing these findings as they pertain not only to buddhism (dzogchen schools of Bon Zhuang Zhung) but the Chinese esoteric cults in northeastern China stemming from Ch’an’s “Northern School”.
Though Ch’an, Tibetan Bon, Nyningmapa, and other cults in China associated with Taoism (precursors to the Quanzhen) schools in the 12th century don’t focus on the celestial metaphysics, the “tantras” of the dzogchen schools, mention the ideas of multiple “universes” and multitudes of planets from which the teachings have descended.
So organically, the notion of “evolution” was ensured WITHIN the traditional notion of “transmission” of an ORIGINAL TEACHING, encoded, enfolded, “rolled up” in phenomena of LIGHT and the necessary yogic moments of appreciation that are part of this “en-light-en-ment” training.
The fact that cognitive science, contemporary psychology, marketing & communications science do NOT wish to study, and perhaps reveal a rather “universal”, primal-human VALUE that is to be discovered in “returning to one’s primordial nature”, tathatagata gharba, is a testimony to its own ideological focus on consumerism, contemporary ideologies of mass ideation, consumption, disregard for the “aboriginal”, the original as a source of AUTHENTICITY.
Why is this ? Why can’t the idea of ROOTS be coherent, contemporaneous with the ideas of progress preached by Neo-darwinians ?
Well, because darwinian school’s of thought preach indefinite, even – if resources are sufficient – infinite VARIATION… not integration.
This last idea is one that is NOT at all discussed in Flanagan’s book though it is CRUCIAL, CENTRAL, KEY.
The notion of mandhala as an organizing, cosmic (micro,macro,cosmological) principle within the SPACE of the flowering personality of a human being, is an example of this integration force at work.
One integrates to a formless, spaceless, timeless “center” that is like the sliding “point” analogy of some eternal cosmic process. I posit that the “soul” is just this dimensionless/ful point that like a dharma-dhatu, is but on of an infinite variety of “worlds” – each full of motivations, each linked, each playing off the others.
To my lights, the REAL is an infinite FLUX in which we endlessly take on forms until we have re-discovered that we ARE this atman, this center without a center, one dhatu following the dharma, budddha-nature, tathatagata.
Kapstein, Ruell, Karmay, D.Germano, J.Garfield, H.Guenther, A.Wallace, Davidson, etc as well as many others specialized in philosophy of mahayana & tantric buddhism (mahayoga, anuyoga,atiyoga) have discussed the consequences of many of the questions Flanagan has only evoked summarily.
There’s a wonderful set of parallels between much of modern science, buddhist philosophies & metaphysics, anthropologies, etc waiting to be exploited.
Modern science won’t get there as there is a very different set of items on the agendas of research groups, corporate conglomerates, ideological thinktanks, government research that are clearly oriented toward the nihilism inherent in”economic theories”.
What if the (h)Indic concept of “lila” could be explained as game-theoretic, “karma” as information/decision-theoretic ?
What if we were “allowed” (by Science 🙂 to stipulate that the purpose behind anthropic universal process (ala David Deutsch’s and other transhumanists) is @ top, @ bottom a rehearsal for each of our “souls” commandeering indefinitely future “universes”, spaces in the plethora wherein we get what we deserve… reap what we have sown in the other “test ground” spaces we inhabited otherwhens ?
THAT would be much closer to the KALACHAKRA metaphysical vision of the endless eternal unfolding of space-as-time-as-value-as-learning.
at least that will be my world 😉
thanks for your time
I might add, having thought about it more, that there is absolutely no commitment in the Dalai Lama’s understanding of absolute reality that it be something “natural”; as in Naturalism.
More like, and I would defend this to the death, Tibetan buddhism, in particular tantric buddhism, relies on the idea of “platonic like worlds” (realms in that they correspond and only “occur” as a function of Mind, mind’s constructing them ).These platonic realms are evoked by human minds operating physically and all, but their “creations” and their effects (having dissolved the meditations) are “other worldly”.
This is the point; Dalai Lama’s USE this world to vehicle their works (Christian equivalent of compassionate action).
Their metaphysic absolutely depends on a PARADOX: the coopted, “temporary” spaces: because evocable, evocative, “worlds”, created by meditative (highly advanced yogic) practices which because they DO exist (in our minds physically) and DO work (because we learn from these phantasmagoric adventure in “mind-body work”, suggest that there is something else going on but dumb,wet meat, consciousness of the sort measured and meeted out as normative in university research centers.
No, the paradox is that there MUST exist things which don’t in order to create the optimal praxis IN THIS WORLD.
Now if you solve the paradox by inventing a bunch of intra-psychical processes, and say that it’s all in a brain’s days work to invent even the most incredible of stuff, then you have to wonder, physicalism assumed, WHAT an eventual TOE will amount to other than “yet another pipe dream” (physicist’s, cosmologist’s, mathematician’s, philosopher’s).
But do we really believe THAT? I want to refer you to an essay by David K Lewis, ELUSIVE KNOWLEDGE in which he makes the point that we must trust what we come to think we know.
Ok, I would extend that plea to those master yogi’s and philosophers of NON-scientific traditions; I would ask of our smarter than thou scientists and philosophers to try to understand the “content” of the analogical thought.
Try to understand what that nature of what the SYMBOLICAL Is “pointing at” is maybe as real (though never will be naturalistically “proved” so).
I would even posit that our inability to integrate the poetic dimension and its metaphysical perceptions is a main cause of the contemporary dilemmas in lifestyle and mental health that are plaguing consumer society.
Don’t believe me, meditate on the idea, go talk with your local yogi, and remain open to the idea that all that is may include some of what we’ll need to “know” by other than rational means.
cheers
I think that only now I am ready to be into Buddhism. I was coming to it for long years. And I need to get so much knowledge, techniques. I think this book is full of good material for thinking.