If the dialogue between Buddhism and American intellectuals like Owen Flanagan is part of a fashionable trend, then it has to be one of the longest lasting fads in history. Henry David Thoreau published the Lotus Sutra in the first issue of The Dial in 1844. William James was absorbing Transcendentalist ideas at the family dinner table, where his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson often held court. Later in life, James's friend and neighbor was a Scholar of Sanskrit and his friendly rivals on the faculty at Harvard, Josiah Royce and George Santayana, were dabbling in Buddhism. (The Theosophical Society was also "channeling" Buddhism in the 1870s and 1880s, while a kind of proto-New Age occultism was all the rage in the parlors of Boston.) Chicago held a Parliament of World Religions in 1893, bringing Zen Buddhism from Japan and the Theravada tradition from Sri Lanka. Such was the intellectual climate in William James's America.
Now, almost exactly one century after James's death, he might be astonished to find that scholars are debating the convergence of relativity theory, quantum mechanics and brain imaging technology with Buddhism's anti-essentialism, its anti-metaphysical stance, and its denial of what we'd call the substantial (Cartesian) self. If Alan Wallace is right, William James's work is not only still relevant to this ongoing dialogue, it's just what the Doctor ordered.
There are a few technical glitches in this video from Oxford. In fact, most of the Q&A portion at the end has audio only. Also, Alan Wallace is not the most prestigious name in the field. However, he's probably one of the biggest William James fans I've ever encountered and he does a pretty good job of explaining the importance of the first-person perspective or direct phenomenological investigations - as opposed to behavioral or neurological studies, which are indirect, third-person investigations. He thinks that all three should be employed in what he calls "a three-dimensional science of the mind". Wallace also spends some time connecting this approach with various kinds of flourishing, connecting it with ethics and he engages with a list of possible objections to this Jamesian, introspective approach. You'll quickly notice that Wallace's lecture is only one of a dozen videos recorded that day in Oxford.
"A general stance of Buddhism is that it is inappropriate to hold a view that is logically inconsistent. This is taboo. But even more taboo than holding a view that is logically inconsistent is holding a view that goes against direct experience." -- The Dali Lama
-David Buchanan
Image Note: "Introspective" by Bayo.
And regarding the first part there, ‘Enlightenment’ was an interest of, if only for appropriation and re-interpretation, the 18th century Enlightenment tradition and the Age of Enlightenment.
The terms not only have very different meanings, they each come surrounded by different world views. I mean, it would be interesting to see what a European man of science and reason would make of Eastern claims about Nirvana, Satori and the like. It must sound like hocus pocus to a Newtonian. (Although Newton himself was way into Alchemy and was otherwise quite religious.) Do you happen to know any juicy stories about this appropriation?
No juicy stories, really. But come to think of it, I remember reading in an introduction to classical modern philosophy, a book edited by Jeffrey Tlumak (it has a conspicuous green cover if you are interested), that Descartes’ rhetorical style in the Meditations on First Philosophy was purposely modeled on appropriated the meditative state Buddhists were thought to put themselves in in order to enlighten themselves about some matter.
There is a kind of consistency with the Western appropriate of ‘enlightenment’ as a concept and what I would suppose would be its original usage. In both cases, enlightenment is conceived as an attempt to achieve some higher state of consciousness or awareness beyond the ordinary state or states people find themselves in. For the Western tradition, though, the means to achieve this enlightened state was interpreted to mean something like using one’s own reason and inquiry to determine truth, following any argument or investigation to its logical conclusion. This entailed not accepting something just because some authority said it. Although folks will do this in practice, it does seem that an authority should in principle be able to justify its existence as an authority; otherwise it is illegitimate. I quite like this appropriation, to tell the truth, and many respects I view it as the quest for enlightenment (or ‘Enlightenment’ with a capital ‘E,’ if you’d like) taken down a different avenue. It’s kind of like the way that Stoics, Cynics, and the other school of philosophy following Socrates took the teachings of Socrates.
Sorry about all the spelling mistakes in this: I wrote it while I was listening to an audiobook. :/
Let us not forget the string of books that mixed “Eastern” philosophy and thought with Quantum Mechanics. From Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics , to Fritjof Capra The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, and Michael Talbot’s Mysticism and the New Physics, there was a small industry based around the supposed philosophical connections between the two, very divergent, takes on reality (and, although i would not defend the premises or the physics involved in any of the books above, i will admit that i did enjoy reading them even though they often had me shaking my head in disagreement). These works, and others of similar and related themes, helped spawn the “field” of Quantum mysticism.
We should also not that David Bohm was very much influenced by Buddhist and Hindu thought, something that is evident in his work and helped shape his interpretation of quantum mechanics (And, to digress, if we wish to discuss the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, two famous followers of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, “discovered” a young man named Jiddo Krishnamurti, who they were convinced was the the incarnation of Lord Bodhisattva Maitreya, the fifth Buddha. Without going into long detail, Krishnamurti would break with Theosophy, begin traveling the world, and would formulate his own brand of “consciousness raising” that did not adhere to any particular religion. Krishnamurit would go on to influence Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and many others. He also became friends with David Bohm but the two had a rather bitter parting of the ways that ended that friendship.)
We could also reference the effect of “Eastern thought” on Schopenhauer. (One argument in favor of this idea can be read here and another can be read here). One could ask if Schopenhauer’s “Will” was related to the universal spirit of the Upanishads? The Philosopher Bryan Magee makes the argument, in his book The Philosophy of Schopenhauer that Schopenhauer’s “..ethics—unlike Kant’s, which are based on reason—are based on compassion. So he alone among major Western philosophers takes genuine account of Buddhism, yet at the same time gives full weight to science.” (BTW, here is Magee interviewing Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer). And, it certainly seems true that the that the ontological primacy that Schopenhauer assigns to “will” over intellect – desire before thought – is generally counter to the wider “western” tradition (but i could be wrong since i only have a superficial knowledge of Schopenhauer’s work to base this claim on).
Just throwing in some random additions here.
Yes, I remember being excited by Capra’s “Tao of Physics” back in the day – but my father-in-law was a physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and quickly talked me out of it. Capra later talked himself out of it too, mostly.
Flanagan mentioned Nietzsche and other mid-19th century Europeans picking up on the nihilistic themes in Buddhism. I have since learned that the English tended to import its Buddhism for the Theravada traditions whereas Americans have tended to focus on Zen and other Mahayana schools. Then, as was discussed on the facebook page a couple of months ago, Heidegger was importing Japanese Buddhism without being entirely forthcoming about his hidden sources.
And it probably hasn’t been mentioned because everybody already knows but I’ll say it anyway; The Beat poets, the Beatles, bohemians, hippies and other pop-cultural leaders helped to make the East seem cool. Alan Wallace went East to study Buddhism around the same time as the Beatles went to India, in fact.
I didn’t realize it when I wrote this little post the other day, but as it turns out Alan Wallace has worked as a translator for the Dali Lama and so he knows Thupten Jinpa quite well. Jinpa, you may recall is featured in a video posted in this blog by C. Derick Varn on April 12th. http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/04/12/some-questions-on-buddhism-and-science/
Tangent: I recently heard an old debate between Copleston and Bertrand Russell. Russell ate him for lunch.
The most recent episode of the BBC’s “In Our Time” features a discussion of neoplatonism. If Peter Adamson (who does a great podcast on “history of philosophy without any gaps”) is right about Plotinus and neoplatonism, Western philosophers were already borrowing ideas from Indian philosophy in the 3rd century. (I’d recommend subscribing to the podcast. It’s well informed and almost always interesting.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01g62w1
Eugene Taylor said (on 12/18/01, in an email to the William James Society ListServe):
“James was less well read in Buddhism than Hinduism. He left Vedatnta for Royce to follow up (Royce, a Christian monist, had even studied Sanskrit briefly), while in Hindu philosophy James actually mastered some of the metaphysics of the Samkhya-yoga school and published a few snippets in defining the early field of personality theory in psychology (Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia,1895–98). He knew about the translations of the Pali Text Society from Charles Rockwell Lanman, James’s colleague, neighbour, and friend on the faculty at Harvard. Lanman was then editing the Harvard Oriental Series and brought James as a guest to the meetings of the History of Religions Club (personal communication with Lanman’s daughter before she died), where James would have been exposed to the latest in Buddhist scholarship. James also knew Anagarika Dharmapala, a Theravada Buddhist meditator, and announced in public that one day Dharmapala’s would be the psychology of the future. He also met practicing Buddhists at the salon of Mrs. Ole Bull, who ran the Cam- bridge Conferences on Comparative Religions. More recently, David Kalupahana has written Principles of Buddhist Psychology (SUNY Press, 1985), in which he bases the book on a comparison of James’s views on consciousness in The Principles of Psychology with Theravada and Mahayana epistemology.”