I liked the meta-discussion that kicked off the second PEL naturalized Buddhism episode, specifically on what knowledge we gain by assessing the supernatural “rules” contained within “religious” Buddhism. Even after rejecting a supernaturalist stance, there’s value in reviewing the form of life revealed within Buddhism’s supernatural tenets. In that spirit, I enjoyed Boddhisatva’s Brain most for its comparison of different philosophical worldviews. Reading the book, I asked myself how Owen Flanagan’s purely philosophical Buddhism meaningfully differed from, say, the Roman Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. But Flanagan might respond that juxtaposing a “naturalized” Buddhism against Roman Stoicism is inherently interesting for its own sake. Flanagan says that comparing Eastern and Western traditions…
might disabuse us of several related blind spots: ethnic chauvinism, the view that non-Western traditions are esoteric in a bad way, for reasons beyond their unfamiliarity; the idea that Religion (with a big “R”) is inevitable for psychological reasons; and that it is required, true or false, to shore up meaning and morals.
But if comparison is good, maybe meta-comparison is even better! For an alternative to Flanagan’s vision of a naturalized Buddhism, check out this 1960 episode of the public television series Eastern Wisdom & Modern Life, presented by a clean-shaven, Eisenhower-era Alan Watts. (I’m agnostic on the kitschy stage set, but mostly approve.)
In this episode, Watts takes a distinctly Jungian approach to compare Buddhist and Christian mythologies. Watts was an earlier proponent of a kind of naturalized Buddhism,
-Daniel Horne
as usual Watts is talking in terms of vague generalities that suit his own purposes, I think we should stick closer to looking at specific texts/acts when we get into these matters if we are interested in how people actually live and or could live, more “thick” descriptions (tho Geertz needs some correcting) might be in order, perhaps after we do Wittgenstein this will become clearer.
http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm
Hi dmf,
Well, Watts was no more attempting to craft an argument to suit his own purposes than was Flanagan, which is kind of my point. Everyone’s got a narrative to sell – including you and I – so this was an example. And given that it’s a half-hour TV program, you can’t really expect a very detailed analysis of “specific texts”, different media lend themselves to different strengths and weaknesses.
hi dh,he is clearly speaking on behalf of (with the authority of) Buddhism and Christianity with his “mythography” as the pseudo-scientific means (see the podcast on structuralism) while Flanagan was explicit about his intentions/means, as for the medium his books weren’t any better.
ps given our inability to do other than manipulate wouldn’t the “meta” move to make be more like that of Kuhn a study of how things play out and perhaps to imagine/fashion/test alternatives?
Good! I agree that would be another equally interesting “meta” move!
On whether its “the” meta move, I’m a bit more skeptical. I’m dubious of assertions that there’s only ever one “move” to be performed.
I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss to assess, though, because you’re name-dropping Kuhn and not really explicating your point about Kuhn’s move in your own words. If you’re saying that “You’d understand what I’m saying if only you read this hyperlink on Kuhn (or Geertz),” I’ll probably just have to forfeit!
Kuhn (not intentionally) became one of the pivot points to a whole host of post-modern movements that saw history not in terms of the evolution of Ideas (or Spirit/Reality/Logic) but as the doings of specific people in specific environs/relations, a move that started to shift the emphasis from criticism/hermeneutics to construction/composition. When one starts to take aspects like contingency, specificity, complexity, and context seriously than our abilities to generalize get much narrower, especially in the social realm.
This started to come thru here in looking at the shifts in Foucault’s work and some of his students like Paul Rabinow (also a student/colleague/gadfly of Geertz’s) have taken the message to heart.
I understand that we all have differing interests/schedules (the links are just meant to be suggestions) but if we limit our conversations here to what we can put in these little boxes than we won’t get very far/deep.
Hi dmf,
I’m not sure I follow. How is he speaking “on behalf of” Buddhism and Christianity, as opposed to speaking “about” Buddhism and Christianity? And if you’re opposed to mythography (as opposed to looking at specific texts/acts, I guess?) as being psuedo-scientific, I guess I understand you better.
But Watts is purporting to take a historical approach, and is not claiming to perform a scientific analysis, pseudo- or otherwise. It seems to me that a review of the historical and social context of these religions is edifying. Either you disagree with a historical approach, or you think Watts got his history wrong?
Anyway, if you’re opposed to the idea of mythography, then a lot of the more serious scholarship (i.e., Jung, Campbell, etc.) gets thrown out as well. I certainly don’t think they would have claimed their work to be particularly scientific, and certainly they didn’t claim to have come from a structuralist camp.
And I can understand if you didn’t like what you read in Watts’ books, though I have to wonder how many of them you read before you decided to stop. Watts certainly got praise for his scholarship from authorities better credentialed than you or me, so I’ll just chalk that up to “you can’t please everyone”!
Actually, I’ll walk back from one of my comments…
If Levi-Strauss’s mythography is uncontroversially structuralist, then is it fair to say that all people engaged in similar enterprises are to be considered “structuralists”? That seems fair, though if so it makes me more sympathetic to the enterprise. I’m not ready throw out all interdisciplinary approaches like this, and am not ready to just red-line it all as “psuedo-scientific.” But I think I can better understand your beef if that’s the issue.
Watts wasn’t doing careful work to come to an understanding via history/sociology (both of which are at least quasi-scientific or at least aim to be in terms of their legitimacy/accuracy) so yes I’m all for detailed and specific ‘micro’ analyses and against quasi-transcendental generalizations. Not sure how you are deciding what is “serious” scholarship but Jung was dependent on outdated modes of genetic inheritance and anthropology (plus a weak mis-reading of Kant) and has almost no following among social-theorists, Campbell is a more interesting case but to the degree that he was dependent on Jung has been largely discredited (all of these folks, including Huston Smith have come under careful and damning criticism within religion studies for having created/proselytized a theology while claiming to be doing historical/ethnographic work). I went thru a Watts/beat phase in high school and read many (more than 5 or so if memory serves) of his books before realizing that I was better served by reading folks like Suzuki and Gregory Bateson. Jung and Campbell certainly saw their work as being continuous with the sciences (part of the secret keeping of the Red book was based in a fear of losing legitimacy) and made much use of social theory/work and even in Jung’s case physics.
Good! I agree that Watts wasn’t as careful as some, and was more careful than others. I find Foucault less careful (or at least equally careless) as compared with Watts on their respective subjects, for example, but presumably value remains. Again, if Watts made errors in his review of the history, I’d be keen to hear it. But academics like FSC Northop at Yale was reading Watts while teaching at Yale, and still had praise for one of Watts’ better books. Not all of Watts’ work was of equal quality, I’ll totally grant that, but one could say the same about many other prolific writers, including Russell, Sartre, etc.
With respect to who can claim to be serious scholars, then yes, I’ll include Jung and Campbell as having greater claim to seriousness than you or I. Or, at least, I’d not as ready to discard their work because the social sciences have moved on. Even Wittgenstein suffers under that kind of analysis, but I’m not ready to discard all of W. just yet.
Agreed that Suzuki is “better” than Watts — had I a video of his to post, I would have done so! But even Suzuki has his critics for having been a bit sloppy at times. I think my standards for value are probably a bit looser – I’ll concede that…the risk of dilettantism!
I’m thinking about one of the East-West oppositions in particular. As Watts frames it, there is the Western conception of reality as a creation, as an manufactured artifact, as opposed to the Eastern conception of reality as ordering itself, as something that grows. Aristotle wasn’t a Christian, of course, but we can still detect this Western conception in his view of the good life. As Flanagan put it, you don’t know if a guy is happy until you see how his grandchildren turn out. There is in this a conception that each thing has its own telos, its own ultimate aim or purpose. And this purpose could be seen in the design of each thing, the way a pitcher is made for pouring and good pitcher pours well. This sort of artifactual conception is applied to a human life, which is supposed to have a particular purpose and fulfilling that aim means happiness. These fundamental assumptions are not shared in the East, along with lots of other very basic differences and, as tricky as it is, these underlying assumptions have to be taken into account when we compare Aristotle’s happiness (or scientific naturalism) to the Buddhist’s conception of happiness (liberation from suffering).
Nice. Presumably we can close the loop with Thomas Aquinas for directly injecting Aristotle into Christian theology…?
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aq-moral/