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Continuing our discussion of Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011).
Are the basic tenets of Buddhism compatible with a respect for science? In episode 53, Owen Flanagan outlined a science-friendly project of comparative ethics, and touched on Buddhism’s empiricist theory of knowledge and its metaphysics of impermanence. If that was the lecture, this episode is the discussion section, where the regular foursome expands upon these themes and hopefully makes some of the previous discussion more understandable to folks new to philosophy.
Folks that like hearing us free associating among anecdotes and rants about movies and discussion of our ground rules will enjoy this, whereas those impatient to hear about Buddhism are free to jump past the first 20, or even 40 minutes, at which point we get down to business and talk about karma, nirvana, emptiness, no-self, and the four noble truths. Read more about the topic and get the book.
End song: “Who Wants to Love Me,” a new song by Mark Lint (with some elements recycled from 1992 or so)
first 15 minutes, classic.
I love how Seth has to step in on some of these discsussions (been listening to alot of previous episodes since I just found out about the podcast a few months ago), like this one, and say, “Wait, how the hell did we get to talking about this?”
I’m still not sure whether that whole magic discussion here was terrifically on point, but it was fun anyway.
It’s definitely one of the best non-Kantian diversions so far (though I grant you, I’m only up to 22 from the beginning and have been listening since 49).
I love the diversions, personally, cause it reminds me of the discussions me and my friend would have when were were philosophy undergraduates, although our diversions tended to be much more absurd.
Speaking of Magic via “Superstition”: In Defense of Superstition
“Consider one “law of magic” that people tend to put stock in: the idea that “luck is in your hands,” that you can affect your fate via superstitious rituals like knocking on wood or carrying a lucky charm. We often rely on such rituals when we are anxious or want to perform well, and though they may not directly have their intended magical effects, these rituals produce an illusion of control and enhance self-confidence, which in turn can improve our performance and thus indirectly affect our fate. ”
Not exactly Harry Potter but there you go.
I think you guys share in the ubiquitous misconception of the Budda’s #1 insight, and this is a big cause of confusion in understanding many subsequent Buddhist tenets, even impacting attempts to view Buddha in a naturalistic way.
Life is suffering which results from desire. The 8-fold path is how one must address this so as to achieve higher value from living. This is what most people will agree with, but it is not the kernel insight of Siddhartha.
Desire for that which we cannot attain is the cause of suffering. This is Buddha’s actual insight and it is far more explicable of Buddhist ontology and ethics (particularly personal ethics).
An animal seriously injured or about to be destroyed desires a different situation to be manifest – when the desire is seen as unattainable, the creature’s suffering is intensified excruciatingly.
Desire is not bad. It is what drives the universe, especially living creatures. Humans associate their desire w/ workings of the self-reflexive ego, which has a real problem with being satisfied. Since insatiable desires cause suffering, losing ego can go a long way in leading a happier life.
Desire for the well being of others is good – it is compassion. The painful side kicks in when your desire is totally unrealistic. Desire that cannot possibly be realized – like maybe returning to Tibet anytime soon – this will cause suffering.
Desire for the certainty of immortality also causes suffering, as do all metaphysical wishes, like a theory of everything via our reason. Suffering happens, like excrement. But if we know our limits, then disengaging in activities direct at going beyond them makes serves as a foundation of major Buddhist tenets.
As I mentioned on another post, it is easy to see a close kinship of what Buddha really said here and Stoicism. Know and respect your limits, seek contentment in the humility that the flux pauses for no one.
somewhere down the road might be useful to read some of Ian Hacking’s “the Social Construction of What?” for a podacst:
http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hacking-the-social-construction-of-what2.pdf
Nice suggestion. I haven’t looked at that book in a long time, but you’re absolutely right that it would fit right in.
-Dylan
I absolutely love that book (and the larval subjects blog). I do think this would have been VERY relevant to this discussion too Dmf.
perhaps the major historical conflict in the development of the various buddhisms was what did it mean that the historical buddha continued to exist after his enlightenment experience. so there was (and in some traditions/practitioners remains a sense in which it would be correct to say that non-existence is the goal) but much as how christianities have had to adapt to the non-return of Jesus there are many more ethical/psychological approaches to suffering and compassion as part of continued existence/coping. I would think that perhaps we should be less concerned about what is doctrinally correct (except when we are ascribing idea to authors/people) than what works or not for our concerns.
one important hold over of this old tension is the history of crazy/drunken teachers (and the now cliched “if you see the buddha on the side of the road”), and this would be a significant break from neo-aristotelian/kantian virtue ethics that tie in with ideas of civics-civility and other social norms of being right-eous as being correct. Here there is some resonance with Lacanian anger over Americans and Brits who turn Freud into a ego-psychologist/behavioral-manager.
have you folks gotten into the whole Nirvana/death-drive sections of Freud?
I really enjoyed the intro tangents and felt they tied in with the relevant themes so would keep it up.
so if we naturalize Husserl/Heidegger as Dreyfus has, naturalize Hegel along with the Pittsburgh folks, and so on have we done away with Philosophy as something other than reflections on scientific endeavors?
I suggested in the thread on Witt that he eventually sees ethics as outside of the philosophical (strictly logical) and would be interested in hearing if this matches up with where you all come down.
here is Dennett vs Philip Clayton:
I can’t understand what Philip Clayton was getting at with this interrogation but it sure is an awfully funny way to hold a conversation. Am I wrong in thinking that this is one hour of Philip Clayton flailing his arms about, while Daniel Dennett performs an ongoing charity service by even so much as attempting to address these talking head types and provide one single alternative voice to a large segment of the beaten down american religious fundamentalist public?
seems to be a conversation about the powers and limits of reason/reasoning (and naturalism/causality), I was struck in the context of this podcast by Dennett defining philosophy as what we do until we have a workable question/problem and then the work is in the realm of the sciences, as well as his considerations about social organization/ethics/folk-psychology. Clayton wants to say that Dennett is being un-reasonable in how he is limiting the discourse but PC is also not being forthright about his commitments to scriptures and church histories as foundations of his sense of “ultimate” reality. I would say that as long as you are ascribing Necessity to any such all too human source/resource than you are doing theology/apologetics and not philosophy.
Maybe the least squishy question that came up:
Does glass flow?
Ha! Nice.
But to be fair, it just means he needs to change his metaphor.
Yeah, I thought of jumping in there (Why are some glass windows thicker on the bottom? Because if you have uneven glass, then you put the heavy side down!), but it didn’t seem worth breaking up the flow…
Mostly just for fun, but it also makes a point…
HALLELUJAH SHINE (by The Gourds)
If you want to talk about it
you gotta go down there brother
If you want to talk about it
You gotta get in the water
If you want yer hallelujah shine
you gotta go under
You gotta go under Jordan’s mighty waters
This hallelujah shine is mighty dark & old
If you want to meet the Jesus
You gotta go down there brother
If you wanna meet Muhammad
You gotta get in the water
If you want yer hallelujah shine
you gotta go under
You gotta go under Jordan’s mighty waters
This hallelujah shine is mighty dark & old
If you want to know what Jesus did
you gotta go down there brother
If you want to meet the Buddha
& kill him on the road to glory
If you want yer hallelujah shine
you gotta go under
You gotta go under Jordan’s mighty waters
This hallelujah shine is mighty dark & old
(G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903, Chapter 1)
‘When we say, as Webster says, The definition of horse is A hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus, we may, in fact, mean three different things.
(1) We may mean merely When I say horse, you are to understand that I am talking about a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus. This might be called the arbitrary verbal definition: and I do not mean that good is indefinable in that sense.
(2)
We may mean, as Webster ought to mean: When most English people say horse, they mean a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus. This may be called the verbal definition proper, and I do not say that good is indefinable in this sense either; for it is certainly possible to discover how people use a word: otherwise, we could never have known that good may be translated by gut in German and by bon in French.
But (3) we may, when we define horse, mean something much more important. We may mean that a certain object, which we all of us know, is composed in a certain manner: that it has four legs, a head, a heart, a liver, etc., etc., all of them arranged in definite relations to one another. It is in this sense that I deny good to be definable. I say that it is not composed of any parts, which we can substitute for it in our minds when we are thinking of it. We might think just as clearly and correctly about a horse, if we thought of all its parts and their arrangement instead of thinking of the whole: we could, I say, think how a horse differed from a donkey just as well, just as truly, in this way, as now we do, only not so easily; but there is nothing whatsoever which we could substitute for good; and that is what I mean, when I say that good is indefinable.’
I think Mark asked the key question: “how can real normativity exist in a purely natural world?” Or, as Wes might like to put it, how can we get ought from is? These questions assume a pretty hard line between facts and values. As reasonable as the line may seem, attacking the fact/value distinction is the best approach (that I know of). It’s going to be almost impossible to naturalize values if one insists on defining “natural” in physicalist terms. Naturalism can be more broadly defined as the assumption that supernatural or magical forces cannot or should not play a role in the explanation. The more specific forms of scientific naturalism (Tractatus-inspired positivists) are going to insist that values are scientifically meaningless.
Is the fact/value distinction itself an unassailable fact or is it more like an ontological claim? Isn’t the line predicated on metaphysical assumptions that begs the question before it’s even asked? That kind of naturalism makes values unreal and then asks how we can “naturalize ethics”. If one can’t get out from under those assumptions, the answer is always going to be a stretch, at best. Going after those assumptions is a huge task but, I think, that’s what it takes to get out of the trap. And so you have to attack the problem on a different level, at the level of basic assumptions, and reframe things so as to soften or even erase the line between facts and values. It’s not exactly outrageous to say that values are natural or to say that some realities aren’t physical. One can remain committed to the standards of logic and empirical evidence but still reject the narrower form of naturalism.
“It’s not exactly outrageous to say that values are natural or to say that some realities aren’t physical. One can remain committed to the standards of logic and empirical evidence but still reject the narrower form of naturalism.”
Count me in on this project. Animals in the wild may exhibit a primitive code of ethics, of sorts, but our emergent mental capacities allow us the possibility of transforming that crude kernel of desire for something better – something more aesthetic – to be ushered in.
It may only appear in fits and starts throughout our human history, but hopeful rumors have it that a peaceable kingdom may one day be realized. What the king is like, I do not know.
I have adopted the following definition of Naturalism since it is more comprehensive and less restrictive than the one you provided David:
taken from this essay
That is excellent.
But when you tell others about it, isn’t it simply that all that is…is in Nature, and we have a long way to go in being sure of what that is.
Meanwhile, we must be content in our fits and starts at attempts to ‘eff’ what is ineffible”.
Burl- “But when you tell others about it, isn’t it simply that all that is…is in Nature, and we have a long way to go in being sure of what that is.”
Yes. We cannot be certain that Naturalism is true and we cannot claim to have absolute knowledge of “nature”. But, we can offer the above definition with a certain level of reasonable justification, backed by a myriad number of scientific disciplines as a foundation for that “reasonable justification” in my humble opinion.
I guess you have a different project in mind, Burl, because the idea of a future kingdom of peace never crossed my mind. Utopian visions are too grandiose and otherworldly to be naturalized and, I think, are a result reading symbolic language literally. If heaven and nirvana are taken as states of mind rather than transcendent realms, divine places or the culmination of history, then we are basically just talking about psychological development. If we the symbolic language of these stories (Jesus, Buddha, etc) as symbols and thereby take the more esoteric meanings, the whole thing is much easier to naturalize.
Seth’s remarks on the meaning of suffering and its relation to desire came closest to the way I understand it. There is suffering in the sense that we face thirst, hunger, and sickness and there is that exoteric injunction to not be a lusty, greedy bastard but I think the more exoteric idea of suffering is something more like the pain of anxiety. We can see something like this in the Christian tradition too, I think. “Consider the lilies, do they toil or weep?” One could take this to mean (childishly) that god will provide and we should just have faith in that. But it’s better, I think, to read it as a lesson about the ego as the cause of suffering. It’s not so much that we can extinguish hunger, thirst or lust. As long as we’re embodied, that sort of desire is not avoidable although it’s somewhat manageable. On the exoteric level this means walking a middle path between hedonism and asceticism. But as a kind of psychological therapy, at a more esoteric level, it means walking a middle way between essentialism and nihilism. That’s how we get this seemingly strange combination of a virtue ethics centered around emptiness, the odd mix of insisting there is are right and wrong ways to live while always remaining vague as to what “right” is going to mean, exactly. On this psychological level, to say that desire is the cause of all suffering is to say that egotism is the cause of your anxiety, or something like that.
If the story is taken literally, belief in the bodily death and resurrection of Jesus is the essence of being a Christian. Today several hundred million people are celebrating this as the single most important supernatural event in history. But this story can be more plausibly read as a symbolic death, as the death of the ego and the beginning of a new kind of selfless life. Even that can be taken too literally, as if the aim is to simply kill the ego but that wouldn’t produce a peaceful or heavenly of state of mind so much as it would get you locked up in the nuthouse. It’s more like you no longer identify with the anxious, ego-centered self such that one can stop being a control freak. This is what generates so many regrets, fears and worries – the desire for certainty and control is something like the psychological equivalent of the desire for physical safety and security. To the ego, doubt can feel as threatening as claws and teeth. I think that’s the kind of suffering that has to be eliminated. That’s the problem to be solved, the hell from which Buddhism is supposed to save us and I’m not sure if peace or happiness is anything more than the end of – or at least the mollification of – that kind of suffering.
Or one can just ignore all that and take a pill instead. That’s what a good percentage of Americans (literally millions) do to manage (mask) their anxiety, not to mention self-medicating millions. I mean, this is not about the afterlife. It’s about a whole lot of hurting. You know, because hurt people hurt people.
…And that’s why I put holy water in my Buddha-shaped bong. 😉
I challenge Mark to make a song out of “holy water in my buddha bong”!
Yeah, my thoughts about naturalism are more about nature, as in ecology. I’m less keyed-in to the psychological take on suffering, and more taken up with eliminating physical suffering. Human physical suffering has been radically reduced thru medicine and thru advances in technology. I would like to see the same happen in the animal kingdom, perhaps starting with eliminating industrial ‘harvesting’ and ‘rendering’ of animals.
I was not just being symbolic when I threw out the peaceable kingdom thingy. As we become more ecology-minded, our relations with all creatures could lead in novel evolutionary directions where there is less dependence on bloody tooth and claw in nature. Domesticated animals already exemplify this in many ways.
I do not scoff at the possibility that ethologists may someday in the near horizon allow us to communicate with other species and perhaps ultimately alter both our behaviors for the better.
Whether it is a natural telos, a luring deity, or just wishful illusion-filled thinking, the world seems to be improving aesthetically/ethically (it would help here if we could bracket out the bloody 20th century).
I know it places me in a minority on PEL when I say I am not at all convinced of atheism, though the ubiquity of creature cruelty/suffering does make a limited/improving form of God look more plausible than the one preached in most churches. So I claim agnosticism, and hope for a more peaceful evolution for nature. (On the other hand, you might be right about the peaceable kingdom as symbolic, and it may only be what physicists mean by the final state of total entropy.)
Pretty sure Jesus didn’t see his shadow today, but it’s been so long since I was in church that I forgot what the consequences will be for this year. Hope it’s not something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFzlX9X3E18
Okay, Burl, that’s my newest favorite song. Thanks for that, but otherwise I’d like to distance myself from your Doctor Doolittle Utopia, which is both silly and irrelevant.
That song is a riot.
Hand-in-hand with anthropocentrism, it is common to also encounter narcissistic conceit. When anyone who solely focuses studies on her/his own species (as appears to me to be the case in most modern philosophy), they riskbecoming too self-focused and thus in danger of not seeing nature in its widest context.
This might become quite relevant when attempting to naturalize some conceptual system or other, no?
Case in point, at about 81 min or so in the ‘cast the statement was made to the effect that human desire is not like the desire of other creatures, and only humans can desire the desire of others.
Well, if this is so, what are all the many species-specific mating rituals about? Or, more simply, why will one of my dogs eagerly seek petting or attention when another is being petted? Further, where does this unique-to-human desire jibe with what is a tenet of the emerging field of affective neuroscience (the field Owen is aligned with in his naturalization project with Davidson)?
As was said early in the ‘cast, desire necessarily drives everything. I think Pirsig would agree, as would any Platonist when discussing Eros. Desire is good, as I emphasized earlier when correcting the common mis-statement of the Buddha – not desire, but unattainable desire is the root of suffering (also see Rene Girard social theory on scarcity, greed, and scapegoating).
In animals (and AFAIK Darwin is generally deemed correct in placing us among this group), desire is what affective neuroscientists call seeking. It is an emotional (e-motive) state of readiness in which we perpetually find ourselves searching and encountering situations of other emotional states.
But perhaps it is simply silly of me to have brought up the shared plight of other creatures who suffer like us, seek encounters with us, and engage our ethical tenets at every turn. This obviously bears no connection with naturalism, ahimsa, ecology, or Buddhism in general.
On affective neuroscience, buddhism, Davidson, embodied emotions and their impact on neuroplasticity, and how a changing ecology changes animal emotion. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/the_scientific_argument_for_being_emotional/singleton/
I think it’s only reasonable to expect relevant comments, to refrain from highjacking threads. This general rule is just a matter of common courtesy – nothing wrong with good tangents and such. But more specifically (and personally), it seems you don’t care what point I was actually making because your response is on a different topic entirely. What does talking to the animals have to do with Buddhist conceptions of happiness? Wanting to stay on the topic does not mean that I hate animals, or whatever. Since Buddhist happiness is about the ego, animal desires simply aren’t relevant.
…Well, my dog seeks fame and honor above all things but she’s the exception.
David,
Glad to hear you have a dog…I think they have egos.
I had read your 1st post, saw the Pirsig in it, and gave my kudos. Perhaps I should have quoted it this way…
“And so you have to attack the [fact/value] problem on a different level, at the level of basic assumptions, and reframe things so as to soften or even erase the line between facts and values. It’s not exactly outrageous to say that values are natural or to say that some realities aren’t physical.”
My take was to then show a naturalism that sees value built-in to the cosmos – somehow.
The peaceable kingdom and subsequent talking animals were both along the lines of your mention of outrageous (or at least uncommon) thinking.
But I read you clearly.
In your second post about taking myth literally, why would you assume I do that? I have posted enough to indicate I respect the power of myth pretty well.
When you then went into suffering, I saw no hint that my early on thread post clearing up the buddhist doctrine was addressed – by anyone else either, as it stands.
You said “To the ego, doubt can feel as threatening as claws and teeth. I think that’s the kind of suffering that has to be eliminated” And I had little to add, as I mentioned.
The points I went on to make in my reply to your 2nd post were to demonstrate that powerful, gripping myths most likely emerge from as yet ineffible reality. And as for compassion, I see it dimly evident even amid the bloody tooth and claw, and I think evolution to less suffering is worth betting on.
I read, agreed in reply to, offered similar ideas to, and never dissed your thoughts.
it’s funny, just before listening to this episode, I was listening to another podcast directed at fantasy writers, and the episode was about constructing plausible magic systems in one’s fiction. didn’t expect for the same conversation to carry over here! you guys pretty much nailed it though – the generally accepted principle is that when a book or film uses magic to solve problems within the story, then there should exist consistent rules that the magic follows and the reader or viewer should be given a decent idea of what they are, otherwise it’ll break suspension of disbelief. if the magic isn’t being used to progress the narrative, the rules are less important. interesting to hear what I had just been thinking of as a writing convention discussed in terms of naturalism!
Dylan’s comment that “supernaturalism is always already science” (or however he phrased it) is spot on, and it’s why the category itself is a silly one. either the phenomenon in question can be explained by current scientific laws, in which case it’s natural, or it can’t, in which case the laws must be modified to account for it, thereby making it natural. logically, there’s no “outside” to naturalism. I wonder if when self-proclaimed supernaturalists posit there being an actual dichotomy between the two, they’re not just confusing map with territory, so to speak (the explanatory “laws” of science as a field of knowledge vs the “laws” by which the universe consistently conducts itself).
if the idea of an “outside” is taken seriously (as metaphysical rather than just epistemological), then it seems like the discussion essentially wraps back around to some of the issues covered in the theism episodes, i.e. if god is posited as the ultimate cause of the universe, but is himself uncaused, then the concept provides no additional explanatory value from the concept of the universe itself being uncaused…. or am I just linking up two things that don’t make sense to be linked?
two other things that came to mind regarding the magic discussion:
1) one often overlooked chapter in the history of philosophy is the enthusiasm about spiritualism and the paranormal among many late 19th century intellectuals. William James of course was the first president of the Society for Psychical Research, the explicit goal of which was to submit supernatural claims to scientific testing. Henri Bergson was likewise interested in the same issues, and his sister was one of the founding members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. there are many other examples as well – leading figures in science as well as philosophy. if anyone reading is interested in the topic, I can’t recommend this series of lectures enough: http://www.academicearth.org/courses/science-magic-and-religion
2) I’ve been reading Marcel Mauss’s “General Theory of Magic” (which is basically a cross-cultural taxonomy of magical practices throughout the world and throughout recorded history) and one interesting observation he makes is that magic often mimics the language, imagery, and ritualized physical actions of the dominant religions of the culture, but in cultures where science has somewhat supplanted religion’s authority over knowledge, magic will often in addition mimic the language, imagery, and actions of science. you can see that a lot if you look at contemporary new age movements, which are constantly using scientific sounding mumbo-jumbo to try to justify their claims (misinterpretations of quantum physics most especially). it’s fascinating to me how those who believe in the supernatural will treat science as a false dogma which needs to be fought against at the same time that they opportunistically appropriate its sense of credibility.
see! your digressions are actually thought-provoking! keep ’em up!
Tim
Science is still pondering what Nature is (dark matter/energy, Higgs Boson, consciousness, etc.). So, how can we know what lies outside of it versus what might actually be a part of it?
On what created god, is it possible she.he.it evolved out of the universe along with it? God-quakities might not be the most fundamental aspect in Nature, as we seem to assume would be the case.
all those things you list are natural phenomena though, regardless of how well we understand them. I’m curious how you would you define something as being “outside nature.” the only way the concept makes any sense at all to me is if I think of it as being akin to the mind-body problem, though I don’t think bridging the mental and the physical is quite the same as bridging the natural and the “non-natural,” whatever that would mean. even if they can’t be reduced to physical phenomena, mental phenomena are still “natural.”
well, everybody seems comfortable with matter and energy both being in nature and of one nature – like ice and steam.
as for pulling this equivalence off with objective physicality and subjective mentality, it’s been done by Russell as neutral monism, and whitehead as subjective experience in a present moment of time that becomes objective brute fact for the next moment to experience it as data. there are pure materialists and idealists, but reality looks to be far more complex.
my take is something like we should focus on energy/emotion as the energy that moves atoms and morphs at higher life levels to emotion, up to and including conscious awareness. emotion is what flesh does.as energy moves in the atoms of stars and rocks. trees are somewhere in between.
as always, further research is needed!
Tim
In case you did not know, pirsigfan is burl (on a laptop I seldom use)
Just stumbled on this discussion of Owen Flanagan’s book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain. Flanagan’s perspectives are interesting in and of themselves, but his understanding of Buddhism is superficial, and sometimes just plain wrong. So please read and discuss with the understanding that nothing Owen Flanagan says about Buddhism should be taken as authoritative.
If you are interested in a book by somebody who “gets” Buddhism, a much better choice would be _Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice_ by B. Alan Wallace. Wallace’s views are radically different from Flanagan’s in just about every respect.
Welcome, Barbara,
Thanks for the reference. However, it would likely help us more here if you’d be up for putting forth some particular important insight that you think that Flanagan and/or our discussion has missed.
I will freely admit that, likely because I am someone who is merely curious about Buddhism as a philosophy and not committed to it as a religion, I’ve been unmoved by the couple of objections I’ve heard so far in response to this and our previous episode on Buddhism of the “you just don’t get it” variety. Inevitably, any specifics I can get out of the person amount to a change in emphasis or interpretation that may be interesting but doesn’t seem to undermine the different version we put forward (to be fair, this could be said for many of the comments we get about many of our episodes, not just the Buddhism ones, though Buddhism fans tend to be more protective than most).
Crucially for the current context, Flanagan states (and I see no reason to disagree) that there is no “Buddhism,” only “Buddhisms,” and the interpretations he’s putting forward are based on extensive discussions with acknowledged Buddhist masters and studying a number of the original texts in their original languages with such masters on hand, so I see little reason to just dismiss his findings as hackwork. He uses the diversity of actual practice to defend his decision to then pick and choose and stretch and tweak the insights which he thinks will be most helpful to Western non-Buddhist philosophy types. Though he does not cast his book as an introduction to historical Buddhism, the tenets he focuses on are pretty basic ones; his descriptions of impermanence, no-self, and compassion, for instance, seem pretty uncontroversial in outline.
Relatedly, since there is no “authority” a la the pope in Buddhism, and Buddhism is a religion practiced by many many people with no philosophical propensities at all, one would expect that just as with Christianity, the basic tenets are going to by necessity be “superficial,” if this means simple and easy to understand (though not necessarily easy to internalize and live by, that being the point of the emphasis on practice). What’s difficult (for me at least) are, for instance, the metaphysical disputes growing out of the analysis of someone like Nagarjuna (see my posts re. Jan Westerhof’s book: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/?s=westerhof), but those are clearly beyond the scope of Flanagan’s aims, and beyond what ordinary Buddhists would think about, just as lay Christians don’t spend much energy on the exact ontological relationship between God and Jesus.
I’d like to add that as somebody who has always been very skeptical of western attempts at reappropriating Buddhism, I found Owen Flanagan’s perspective really refreshing, and probably in the same sense as a lot of people are criticising him for rejecting the unfounded traditional aspects, while leaving us with good ideas that anybody can draw from. I don’t get why it is important that there is no one Buddhism, that just comes across as infantile cultural relativism to me. Flanagan was able to provide a convincing explanation of the topics you mentioned, impermanence, no-self, compassion, among others, and I imagine that many Buddhists could abide by something like those ideas as core tenets. I don’t know how we can have a sufficiently prefaced laymen’s conversation from the frame of “absolutely anything goes.” You put down the gauntlet, there are claims which Buddhism makes that the listeners of your podcast will be able to understand, and you might be wrong, but you don’t just get to have invented your own form of Buddhism if you are.
I also think it is important to every Christian that they do examine the exact ontological relationship between God and Man (who Jesus sometimes stands in for), and although they might not know what the word ontological even means, they are performing this investigation during every moment they choose to lead their own life as informed by theism. Maybe there is no relationship there, maybe there is a highly personal one, and as I understand it Christians are want to swing wildly back and forth between these polar claims internally over the course of normal daily life, even while projecting an outward image of unending faith. We shouldn’t be so much more accepting of Christian hysterics than we are from any other religion, only we’ve been coerced on to putting up with it far more readily than we would say, Buddhist karma driven reincarnation. It’s exactly the difference between a critical theory of the practices of a certain community, and pure outlandish speculation.
“I will freely admit that, likely because I am someone who is merely curious about Buddhism as a philosophy and not committed to it as a religion, I’ve been unmoved by the couple of objections I’ve heard so far in response to this and our previous episode on Buddhism of the “you just don’t get it” variety.”
I have been a formal Zen student since 1988, studying with the late John Daido Loori for ten years, and am currently studying with another dharma heir, Susan Jion Postal. I also write and report on Buddhism and Buddhist issues for the New York Times company’s reference website, About.com
Let me speak bluntly: Flanagan doesn’t know Buddhism from broccoli. He is flatly wrong about a lot of it, and while he understands some parts of it on a cognitive level, it’s a very shallow understanding.
So go ahead and find him refreshing, but don’t take him as an authority on Buddhism.
Point taken. Thanks for contributing. (Some specifics would still be helpful.)
“I have been a formal Zen student since 1988, studying with the late John Daido Loori for ten years, and am currently studying with another dharma heir, Susan Jion Postal. I also write and report on Buddhism and Buddhist issues for the New York Times company’s reference website, About.com”
Let me speak bluntly, but respectfully: so what? Most people have some claim to authority or they wouldn’t attempt to speak with it. Although you do sound like an interesting person–one with a curiously strong sense of ego–for the purpose of discussion, what would be even more interesting to those of us who are looking for understanding is to know what you feel was inaccurate rather than a blanket dismissal.
I feel like I know a little more about your claims about yourself Barbara, but I still have a very shallow understanding about your claims regarding Buddhism.
St. Fish works his usual rhetorical practices on the relations between scientific and religious analyses to our daily lives:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/evidence-in-science-and-religion-part-two/
OK, I may be mixing two a few points here. The one in defense of Flanagan’s expository accounts of Buddhist doctrines is a matter of pluralism. Since there’s no Buddhist authority, but instead a jillion texts and ancient and modern sects and ways of practicing today, then to legitimately describe a Buddhist idea only requires relating some version of the story that comes from one (or hopefully, a representative sample of) these many sources.
On top of that, there’s the usual hermeneutic difficulties with any text, i.e. different reasonable interpretations one could make with regard to it, matters of emphasis, etc., which are most likely reflected in that diversity. So one can squabble about exactly what’s wrong with desire (Is it the desire itself? Unreasonable desire? Attachment to the outcome of desire?) or in what sense life is suffering (due to the impermanence of happiness, as Flanagan emphasizes, or just because we’re just physically built to suffer more than not, as an epicurean might emphasize), but to me, it’s silly to emphasize one of those interpretations to the exclusion of the others, because given that the Four Noble Truths have been out there dissected by millions of people, it’s very likely that every reasonable interpretation will have been championed by someone, such that settling which is right can’t just be a matter of decent scholarship. If you take an interpretation and use it to dismiss Buddhism (as Nietzsche did, calling it despising life), then that’s a problem, but it’s less a problem of accurately reflecting the scholarship than of being uncharitable and so losing out on the potential value of the enterprise.
It was very odd for me during the discussion in that I felt like we weren’t trying to establish the best doctrinal interpretation (as we would do with a regular text, i.e. figure out how best to read it or at least get clear about the points of disagreement in the literature about it), but just to establish that this general enterprise is not obviously archaic/crazy, i.e. necessarily in opposition to a mature, non-reductive naturalism. Consequently, we stayed at a very high level re. most of the actual tenets, and I can’t say that the prospect of really clarifying the most reasonable interpretation of each of those tenets strikes me as a particularly interesting enterprise philosophically… I’m still trying to figure out exactly why, but I think to me the kind of phenomenology that underlies the insights involved is predominantly comparable to that involved in interpreting literature: interesting, but a bit bullshitty, and nothing to get too worked about if two astute people differ in their interpretations. If I really took seriously the idea of using a Buddhist life outlook to reform my personality, I likely would see matters differently.
…And this is I think what attracts me to Flanagan’s book. Because he’s an outsider, he can play with and evaluate the ideas on hypothetical-practical grounds rather than on clinical-existential grounds (i.e. as he would were he a practicing Buddhist). I could certainly imagine one seeing that as a problematic approach on similar grounds to what Kierkegaard argues, i.e. that you can’t “get it” unless in advance you’re committed to it, but I didn’t like Kierkegaard’s use of that argument either.
Pardon me for butting in… I’d like to make a case that being an outsider could be a fairly serious problem. Please consider the quasi-famous Buddhist injunction to “go see for yourself”. This should be taken to mean, I think, that actual experience is most legitimate authority in these matters. If the Buddha himself blocks your way, they say, kill him. David Scott and other scholars have described the Buddha himself as a “radical empiricist”, which is specifically a reference to William James’s work but it’s also describes a general attitude toward experience. You know, you gotta get in the water. This empirical demand is approximately the opposite of a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
Think about all the fancy education and training that’s required to produce a professional scientist. They have to become conversant members of a tradition as a prerequisite, before they’re allowed to design an experiment or otherwise produce empirical data. Being an expert meditator isn’t very different, except their tradition and techniques are aimed at investigating inward things, if you will. These would be something like psychological and phenomenological techniques and, although it’s not given to the kind of precision or certainty one finds in the physical sciences, these techniques can be learned and the “experiments” are repeatable. I realize that most Buddhists don’t meditate and even fewer are experts – and Flanagan doesn’t want to go down that road – but I think inward is the best way to go if the aim is a naturalized virtue ethics. It’s not reasonable to say Flanagan (or anyone else) can’t write on the topic until he’s an expert meditator. But if we can respect scientific knowledge expertise without being a professional, then it’s not such a huge stretch to do the same for Eastern disciplines. We Westerners might have to learn a few things about it first and maybe try it for first time – but it’s not magic. I mean, you don’t have to do the chanty kind with bells and shit. The idea is just to get a taste of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. So you do a little reading, a little sitting and – hopefully – you see for yourself what they’re talking about. No big deal.
But what’s the status of the “seeing for yourself?” That was the whole point of the phenomenology discussion in ep 53.
There may be more or less “deep” (i.e. not obvious to discern at the surface) truths at issue here. “Life is suffering” does not seem to me in this sense a deep truth. We all live, we all suffer; we should all be able to converse about the degree to which and the way in which that sentence is true. If someone claims that only a Buddhist expert can REALLY know what this amounts to, I cry bullshit… that to me would point to, e.g. someone being indoctrinated in a particular artistic view of life and so, upon deep reflection, finding that artistic view confirmed.
A “deeper” truth might be anatman: no-self, in that the sense in which this doctrine is true (assuming it is) isn’t obvious. Still, though, we saw with Sartre and Flanagan cited Parfit as two examples of ways in which phenomenological reflection gets you at this basic truth. As with the “life is suffering,” then, I’m going to be suspicious of any claim that “I have a deeper understanding of no-self than these two trends in Western thinking can provide,” but I’m more open to argument on that point, in that phenomenology is tricky, and there are more conceptual issues involved.
A very deep truth would be, maybe some particular technique for how to increase compassion or decrease detachment. These would be psychological facts which just can’t be discovered until you get in there and really work on yourself. I think there’s still some room for self-deception, which is where the accusations we were making against Buddhists who claim to be so loving but are probably repressing and passive aggressive, but still, I’m willing to grant that there’s productive work to be done on oneself in this way. However, none of these particular techniques seem essential to me in spelling out the basic tenets of Buddhism: these are not the things that Flanagan focuses on in the book or that one could accuse him of being wrong about.
Lastly, then, there would be the overtly philosophical claims, that I think pretty clearly just can’t be phenomenological. If you’re claiming that your experience reveals to you the truth of dependent origination across lifetimes, i.e. the tortuous Mayahana vision of rebirth, then you’re deluding yourself, and I feel comfortable saying that a priori. However, since those are not confirmable by experience, then a commentator like Flanagan might well read the history wrong, though I doubt, given who he was consulting with in prepping for this book, he would do that. (This goes for his comments on emptiness and such.)
The most difficult case here would be the ethical claims. As Kant insists, you can’t just look at your emotions to know what virtue is, or anything else normative, but as we’ve tried to argue through the Hume/Smith, Nietzsche, Aristotle, and other episodes, there has to be some relation between our intuitions and emotions on the one hand and what we can sensibly call virtuous. Flanagan claims that Buddhists have a fruitful tradition of reflecting on this question such that we’d be foolish to ignore their thoughts, and as with the metaphysical claims, I’m not seeing a lot of room to fault his scholarship or dismiss his summary of these as superficial.
“If you’re claiming that your experience reveals to you the truth of dependent origination across lifetimes, i.e. the tortuous Mayahana vision of rebirth, then you’re deluding yourself, and I feel comfortable saying that a priori.”
No, I’m not claiming anything like that. As I understand it, meditation is not supposed to reveal the truth about anything except the consciousness of the meditator and the doctrine of dependent origination is epistemology, not cosmological or supernatural or anything like that. Also, I’m not saying that Buddhism has a monopoly on inward investigation but it seems that there are richer and older traditions in the East.
Personally, I’m already a big fan of a Westernized, naturalized Buddhism. My favorite American thinkers (James, Dewey, Pirsig, etc.) are all quite compatible with Zen and Darwin and of course Pirsig does an East-West fusion quite deliberately. All three of these guys emphasize the importance of immediate, unanalyzed experience. It’s the pivot point of their thinking and the aspect that makes them compatible with Eastern philosophers and yet Flanagan just doesn’t go there. I’d call that a sin of omission.
Hi Mark,
I know it’s annoying, but I’m going to keep pushing back against that interpretation of Kierkegaard. I don’t believe Kierkegaard was arguing you can’t “get it” unless you’re committed in advance to his religious worldview. Yes, his books are written (I say ironically) with that worldview as a starting assumption, but the skein of uncertainty and doubt is evident throughout his literature, if one reads between the lines. (Or perhaps I’m reading K. with more sensitivity than he warrants.)
I never saw K. as an apologist, or demanding or assuming a Christian worldview. For example, take this quote from “Fear and Trembling”:
I suppose one could read that passage, and assume K. is demanding readers to accept “all or nothing” of his arguments, or that K. is lazily assuming a Christian worldview. But to my ears, he’s effectively saying, “Fundamentally, I must believe this stuff for no other reason than that it makes life go down easier.” That’s like no kind of apologetic I’ve ever read; it reads to me more like an internal debate.
To me, the whole theme of Fear and Trembling is how one reconciles that desire, quoted in the paragraph above, with all the crazy stuff K. felt he’d have to force himself to believe, simply to keep life from being “empty and devoid of comfort.” Even that argument, if I’m characterizing it correctly, is itself open to critique. But I don’t think it’s the same thing as saying K. was expecting readers to “get it” or give up.
Maybe to take another tack: Kierkegaard’s diaries reveal he was rather taken with Schopenhauer and The World as Will and Representation, even to the point that K. wondered aloud what Schopenhauer would make of K.’s own writings. That doesn’t sound like someone who had no time for unbelievers, and it tends to seriously color my view of how to read Kierkegaard.
I guess my bigger point is that our choices shouldn’t have to be [“eat the entire 3-course meal”] or [“I get to pick which bits I like a la carte, but still refer to the meal by the same name”].
I don’t have to be a “Kierkegaardian” to like much of what Kierkegaard wrote. (Similarly, I don’t have to be a Freudian to like much of what Freud wrote, even though Freud would — more than Kierkegaard, I think — insist that I’m not understanding him unless I also buy into his sexual obsessions.) But the simplest way to describe that, then, is to say that Kierkegaard and Freud had neat things to say, even though I’m not Kierkegaardian or Freudian.
To circle back to Flanagan:
I mostly agree with you and Ryan. I see value in Flanagan’s work. I’m glad I bought the book, and I’m glad you did the episode with him.
But I do think stylistically (and maybe this circles back to Kierkegaard), Flanagan often tries to have it both ways. His preface has a funny anecdote about how he’s been accused of discussing “Buddhaganism” rather than “Buddhism,” and he even concedes the point. But then he goes on to describe what Buddhism does or doesn’t promise, what Buddhists say or don’t say, etc.
I think it’s fair to ask whether Flanagan hasn’t stripped away so many of the central tenets underlying Buddhism, that it’s no longer fair to call it Buddhism. And I think it’s a fair critique of the book that he never really resolves it. And look, from the Christian tradition as well — some Christians are so liberal as to want to strip Christianity down to the Golden Rule. Flanagan seems to be saying, “Well, why can’t I?” I think my response would be, “Because it’s confusing and unnecessary!” Further, I can see how more committed Buddhists might describe Flanagan’s project as trivializing Buddhism, in the same way that winnowing Christianity down to the Golden Rule might also be deemed trivializing.
It feels to me that Flanagan essentially advocates a Buddhism not meaningfully different from Roman Stoicism, a la Marcus Aurelius. I think that’s interesting in itself, though it leads me to question why we shouldn’t just read the Roman Stoics, then. Or more precisely, why can’t he simply say that he’s not Buddhist, he’s not advocating Buddhism as such, but that there are certain aspects of the Buddhist intellectual tradition Flanagan finds appealing, and leave it at that? Why instead must Flanagan write a book saying announcing he his naturalizing Buddhism? He himself raises this question in the book, but then he never really resolved or answered it to my satisfaction.
But I concede this may simply mean I resist Flanagan’s stylistic affect, in a way perhaps similar to your resisting Kierkegaard’s posturing.
OK, correction: substitute “Mackie’s reading of Kierkegaard in the arguments for the existence of God book I read much more recently than anything actually by Kierkegaard” for “Kierkegaard.” This was mentioned only in passing on that episode, and our guest Robert on with us thought that was a crap version of K as well. 🙂
I don’t doubt that in some sense Flanagan is cashing in on the rise of the Dalai Lama and other buddhist celebrities as a way to get a wider audience for his work (outside of this blog atheism is still a rather suspected moral position) but let’s not forget the context of a whole series of discussions/conferences around the relationship between buddhist practitioners and neurophenomenologists (See Evan Thompson and co.) and of course the longer history of buddhisms and more traditional phenomenologies.
for me the broader value is in developing better technologies of the self to borrow a phrase.
as for Kierkegaard to deny his deep commitments to Christianity (not to say he can’t be used for secular purposes, I certainly have) is to not just read between the lines but to write write whole new texts in them but that’s another day/topic, Jack Caputo has a short and readable book on how to read SK if people are looking for a starting place.
Hi dmf,
I’m not denying (and I don’t think anyone else was either) that Kierkegaard was committed to Christianity. What I am suggesting is that (a) K. didn’t necessarily require the reader to be a believing Christian to “get” his arguments, and (b) the fact that K. was committed to Christianity doesn’t negate the fact that was riven with doubt about the subject, and therefore his arguments already anticipate a skeptic’s response. That’s precisely why he defined Christian belief as an act of will (and not knowledge), and a very difficult one at that.
hey dh, I think we may be thread jacking now (but maybe after the Wittgenstein show we will have more grounds to discuss the limits of human grasping) but the matter for SK is finally one of the limits of human capacities including will, tho not unlike zen koans fully committing before failing is essential to getting “it” experientially (so not just “difficult” but impossible, such that only a God can save us), this ties in later with Heidegger on anxiety and the uncanny.
Nice, and I don’t quite disagree on that, though I fear we’re now talking past one another re: what was meant by “getting it”. I’ll declare a forfeit due to my increasing irrelevance to Mark’s OP!
Back to diversions for a moment, here’s a fun fact related to one of Seth’s comments: when Jesse “The Body” Ventura became the governor, he started calling himself Jesse “The Mind” Ventura.
Interesting idea to attempt to derive an “ought” from an “is”.
This is a rather old problem, and has been formalised using modal logics – the deontic logics.
The fundamental problem is that operators such “necessary”, “possible”, “contingent” and “ought” are introduced. Then there are rules required to transform the modes – and this is where the trouble starts (not just ensure that the underlying language is consistent).
Let me give one example – the “is” to “permissable” from nature. Alice and Bob are arguing about the permissiveness of homosexuality – and Alice is a conservative Christian/Muslim/Jew: Bob is an agnostic.
Alice: Homosexuality is unnatural and contrary to God’s laws.
Bob: Some animals exhibit homosexual behaviour. For example, if two male rabbits are caged to together without female rabbits they will have apparent coitus with each other. Thus, homosexuality is natural and therefore permissible.
Alice: If a male lion finds a female lion with cubs, he will kill the cubs and take the female into his harem. Thus infanticide of non-offspring in new partners is natural and therefore permissible.
Here both are using the same inference to derive a “permissible” from an “is”.
To avoid this, other constraints may be included, but they all end up with the same fundamental problem. And one has to also argue why the constraints can be included – which is often had to do from a Naturalist position.
Maybe a good way to start is to qualify my terms, especially the term “naturalize”. As I’ve already mentioned elsewhere, I’m not talking about exoteric “Buddhism” or Buddhist fundamentalism, which is full of supernatural beliefs and metaphysical entities, but the more esoteric, introspective, philosophical forms such as Japanese Zen Buddhism. This is naturalism in the sense that it’s not supernaturalism, in the sense that it’s compatible with atheism. I suppose that it’s normal to assume that “naturalizing” Buddhism means explaining it in terms of our scientific worldview, and that usually entails realist and physicalist assumptions. This is especially true in this case because that’s just how educated Westerners see things and that’s where Flanagan is coming from. James, Dewey and Pirsig begin with a different set of assumptions, one that treats scientific truths as secondary concepts rather than nature itself. On this view, the primary reality is experience itself and the universe as it’s described by science is a secondary addition, is what we have carved out of experience.
DMF recently linked us to a paper titled “Dewey’s Zen”. The unknown author explains it like this: “It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties, and relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience. What are primary are pervasive qualities of situations, within which we subsequently discriminate objects, properties, and relations.”
“The crux of Dewey’s entire argument is that what we call thinking, or reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without the felt qualities of situations.”
“Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human experience is not atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a “situation,” by which he meant, not just our physical setting, but the whole complex of physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions that constitute any given experience—experience taken in its fullest, deepest, richest, broadest sense.”
“Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience, nor is it a mere window to objective mind-independent reality. Mind is a functional aspect of experience that emerges when it becomes possible for us to share meanings, to inquire into the meaning of a situation, and to initiate action that transforms, or remakes, that situation.”
There is radical difference between this radically empirical starting point and the starting point assumed by scientific realism. To simplify a bit, the latter takes “nature” to be a universe of physical objects and their relations but for Dewey (as well as James and Pirsig) this kind of scientific realism is just an elaborate set of secondary concepts and taking them as primary ontological realities is to reify those concepts. They all want to point out that we discriminate or carve out objects, properties and their relations and these products of reflection are always derived from experience. For these guys, experience itself is reality, the starting point from which our ideas are derived and to which our ideas must answer.
David Scott’s paper on Buddhism and William James gets into this area as well. But also, he makes a point of explaining James’s interest in the atheistic forms of Buddhism.
“James was one of the earliest persons to bring Buddhism into this academic debate. As he put it, ‘controversy comes up over the word divine, if we take our definition in too narrow a sense. There are systems of thought, which the world usually calls religious, and yet do not positively assume a God. Buddhism is in this case. Popularly, of course, the Buddha himself stands in place of a God; but in strictness the Buddhistic system is atheistic’ (1902, p. 50). The case of ‘Buddhism’ led him to focus on the experiential consequences of religion:
“The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and Buddhistic pessimism, on the other hand, make to the individual and the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless, or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’ and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.” (William James 1902, p. 52)
if memory serves that was mark johnson of lakoff and johnson fame.
Whew! It could have been much worse.
buddhism vs zizek
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-nichtern/radical-buddhism_b_671972.html
Mark,
Have you or any of the other contributors heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti? He was apparently a well known eastern philosopher/writer/speaker & I think in terms of trying to look at the philosophical aspects of eastern religions he had some very interesting ideas. Below is a link to a series of conversations, “A Wholly Different Way of Living” he had with a Dr Allan W Anderson of San Diego St in 1974. There are about 14 or 15 or so videos in total & each is about an hour long. He touches on the idea of transformation/enlightenment, desire, freedom, religion & authority etc etc…at the very least I think his ideas would make for an interesting podcast.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMfC_EW9N3Q
There are 18 (an hour each) videos altogether in the dialogues between krishnamurti and dr allan anderson. I’ve watched all of them, and I don’t think the gang would be interested to be honest. Krishnamurti resented when people drew analogies between his teachings and that of buddha’s. Even though the commonalities between them were clear as rain. He even resented the philosopher title when his anti-philosophy proves itself a philosophy. The guys taking interest in his work would be akin to them reading a book about how philosophy sucks. The man was against philosophical abstraction altogether. He’s said this himself at every opportunity he’s had in his lectures.
I’d more interested in them taking up on al-ghazali’s work and his impact (albeit imo, negative) on muslim philosphy & science. I don’t see much novel ideas put forward by jiddu k, other than a constant undermining of the idea of the self.
So, some ideas you guys touched on but didn’t really go into.
You guys got into “chasing impermanence” – this is the key point in understanding desire and suffering. When discussing Buddhist positions, you have to go back here. It’s the first 2 noble truths and the basis of everything else.
The Christian solution to this is to create something that really is permanent (everlasting life in heaven). So that if you are good and follow God’s rules, you really can satisfy that desire. From the Buddhist point of view, the creation of God and heaven is a recognition of these truths and is just avoiding the problem by inventing a make-believe permanent thing that it’s ok to attach to.
On metaphysics: Why does the Buddha not answer those questions? Because chasing metaphysics is chasing impermanence. There is no true, permanent metaphysics. It is “empty.” Creating a permanent metaphysics is counter to the first 2 noble truths. So forget about it. Metaphysics does not ground the rest of your beliefs, it distracts you from what is important.
I really enjoyed the banter in this one. I would definitely pay a little bit for a “Best of Banter and Outtakes,” or whatever. I’ve listened to so many of these that in a way I just think of you guys as my friends and hanging out with you like that was fun.
Also, Dylan’s comments about science and magic, particularly about how almost any high-level law-like concept such as the conservation of energy can be abstracted into something else as needed by the model, made me wish for a big philosophy of science episode. It’s a huge topic and you guys touch on it regularly, but you’ve never had one that focused on it. You could start with Popper and Lakatos and move on to van Frassen and Psillos and Larry Lauden or something like that.
OK, I’m not entirely sure of what I am trying to get at here but here are some thoughts about the subject of “naturalizing” Buddhism.
The whole discussion about magic or “supernatural explanations” as a science (with rules that can be learned, experiments that can be repeated, etc.) vs. just some random thing that you either have or not, is an interesting one. I have been a fairly serious “student” of the I Ching for over 25 years. The I ching occurs at an interesting place on the continuum between “science” and, what do you want to call it, “just is-ness”. There are “rules” that describe the universe of the I Ching (things wax and wane and you have to “groove” with it). On the other hand, there is no way to “prove” that the random fall of coins has any thing to do with anything at all except for some sort of vague sense of a “synchronistic” relationship between everything that is happening at a given moment in time. The problem with synchronicity as an explanation of how something “works” is that, it is, by definition, an acausal connecting principal. Natural science is absolutely committed to the notion of causality and seems to accept no other criterion for one thing having anything to do with another.
Anyway, what you can say about the I Ching, which is fairly systematic in its underlying philosophy can be objected to in the same way Popper objects to psychoanalytic theory, that is, that any outcome could be accomodated within the system making the system “non-falsafiable”.
All this to say that the project of “naturalizing” Buddhism is probably going to be plagued with the same problems that naturalizing any “pre-scientific” system of explanations about the world. At a certain point you can’t tell where the “effects” you are trying to measure are coming from, putting you in the kind of situation Newton was in in trying to “explain” what gravity IS (the old “hypothesis non fingo” thing). If you can’t say what it is but only what it DOES you are hard pressed to say with certainty whether anything is doing anything in particular.
In the context of your discussion with Flanigan, this problem shows up in the guise of what, if ANYTHING is meant by “flourishing”. You all correctly noted that if flourishing means different things in different social contexts it is hard to say whether you are talking about the same thing at all. When I was in university I used to have a lot of fun with other philos majors along these same lines with the idea of beauty. I have always maintained that the PHENOMENON of beauty is something distinct from culturally defined lists of what makes, a woman for example, beautiful. Certain people would maintain that perhaps there is no “essence” of beauty since people could disagree radically about what is beautiful. I maintained, and still do, that if there was no essence of beauty you wouldn’t be ABLE to disagree about what it is because you wouldn’t know you were talking about the same thing.
This kind of reminds me of the old saw about what pornography is “I don’t know what it IS, but I know it when I see it”. It seems like a lot of what has come of trying to reconcile philosophy with science is a question about how seriously is a reasonable person allowed to take something for which he has no CAUSAL explanation. So, if a decent explanation of “flourishing”, for example could be found AND you could show that Buddhists have a higher coinsurance of what we call flourishing, you couldn’t say with certainty that Buddhism “caused” the flourishing, especially if you could find similar flourishing in Christians, or users of psychedelic drugs for example. Is the question whether flourishing is real?
I guess for me as a fan of philosophy the question is whether philosophy must at all times and all cases defer to “naturalism” as understood by science in order to make valid claims. Nor am I necessarily preposing reference to supernaturalism. If synchronicity is a real thing in the world this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a supernatural thing unless we want to say that ALL natural things are causally connected to some other thing (also natural).
OK, I better stop here.
Enjoyed the podcast immensely.
Thanks
I just wanted to chime in and say:
For years I’ve avoided the Buddhism episodes, as a matter of personal taste. I was missing out! The banter and “magic” discussions here were excellent! I like my philosophy dry, but my podcasts with some flare. You’re all brilliant here. Cheers.
The thing that Flanagan talked about that grabbed my interest was the diversity possible in virtue ethics. The difference between Aristotle’s and Gottama’s virtuous person (and then the Christian as well).
I was hoping you’d follow this up in your discussion. I guess I’ll just have to search around on virtue ethics and see if this comes up anywhere else.
Hey what’s up guys, just curious and perhaps this is directed more towards seth and wes but dylan and mark can feel free to chime in,How come you guys hold a unfavorable opinion of sam harris? Ive noticed this as i have gone through the podcasts. Funny too cuz his name was brought up in this buddhism podcasts, perhaps not surprisingly as he promotes mindfulness meditation and discusses buddhism and one can see how his philosophical views are perhaps influenced by buddhism(being atheist and not believing in free will). I love your podcasts, it has definitely inspired me to learn more about philosophy and so i just wonderng what’s up with hatin?lol
might have something to do with him posing as a philosopher…
I fear this question may go unanswered and you seem to share this position, dmf, so i pose it to you, What makes Harris unfavorable? The reason I ask is because I am a fan of his work and am sympathetic to his views but I am also aware of my ignorance on the works of many other philosophers and even the works of more well known ones, thus why i am here. My intention is to learn,besides the fact if they are better philosophers to follow, i would like them to be pointed out and not waste time with this “poser”. So if you could provide a more detailed answer i would appreciate. Otherwise i can only assume your beefs are more superficial then substantive.