Category Archives: philosophy

translating Mind is Mind-Made

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Few lines of text have been memorized by as many human beings over as many centuries as this one:

manopubbangama dhamma, manosettha manomaya

You don’t have to know the language to glean that it is verse. It consists of two pairs of eight syllables–a pattern that repeats for many subsequent lines after this one. Gama rhymes with dhamma, and three different words begin with mano.

You can’t tell from the Latin characters alone, but this line scans in a classic rhythm called siloka in Pali, which uses “light” (short) and “heavy” (long) syllables. You could get some sense of the metrical pattern by reading aloud the following string of English words:

Short short longer longer
Short longer longer longer
Short short longer longer
Short short short longer

These features make the line enjoyable and work as mnemonics. Regular verse is easier to memorize than prose.

All the words are very abstract, and they mark out zones of meaning that have no equivalents in English. In fact, some translators use the Sanskrit dharma to render the Pali word dhamma in English. Dharma can mean law, duty, doctrine, righteousness, experience, phenomena, thing, or truth. A modern English-speaker may get more from that one famous Sanskrit word than from any single English word chosen to render it.

There is no verb, because Pali, like Latin, can leave the verb “to be” implied.

The first person who translated this line into English, F. Max Müller, wrote, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thought” (1898).

Asked to translate it literally, ChatGPT proposes, “Phenomena have mind as their forerunner; mind is their chief; they are made by mind.” Claude says, “Mental phenomena are preceded by mind, mind-chief, mind-made.”

Gil Fronsdal (2018) has:

All experience is preceded by mind, 

    Led by mind, 

    Made by mind.

His version employs the open typography and plainspoken diction of modernist verse to offer a valuable perspective on the ancient text, which is dense, formal, and abstract.

I cannot do better than Fronsdal (or AI), but I can explore alternatives. For example, what if we tried to make the English mnemonic?

In advance of whatever we find is mind. 
The mind is in charge; it makes the mind.

Or what if we expanded each Pali word into several English counterparts, to indicate its range of meanings?

Things, or what we experience, the truth--
What comes before and is responsible
For all this is the conscious stream. Mind is 
The chief and what's foremost. Mind is mind-made.

The next verse begins with the same four Pali words as the first one, but to repeat my extended translation of them would become tiresome. So I could make that line more concise, and continue:

Mind comes before all experience and truth:
If the mind is serene and bright, then ease
Follows like a shadow that will never depart.

By the way, I am not sure I agree with this text. If you suffer pain because of an injury or violence, I don’t think it’s all in your head. Nor does a serene mind inevitably bring ease; the eternal note of sadness rolls back in.

This verse comes with a whole metaphysical basis that is worth considering but not necessarily correct. But it could also support some sensible ordinary advice: when something seems bad, you may be able to change your reaction to it rather than altering the thing itself.

The text is the Dhammapada (v.1). I got help from both ChatGPT and Claude. See also: the fetter; The Tangle; This is beautiful, scolds the mind; on translation as spiritual practice; Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses; and Mani Rao’s innovative Sanskrit translations (with a mention of Anne Carson).

what about human life is essential to preserve?

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At the beginning of the 20th century, people could presume that we are terrestrial creatures whose habitat is Planet Earth. They could predict that we will continue to live as humans until our far-distant natural demise or an end decreed by God. They could define human beings as creatures who work (homo laborans) and make tools and who understand the tools we’ve made. They could presume that we alone speak and reason in language, unless divine beings also interact with us.

Technology changed all those presumptions. It became clear that we could live on other planets, we could wipe out the species in a few moments, we might be able to automate all work, we might make machines that exceeded our own understanding, and we might build machines that could reason and talk, perhaps better than we do.

Hannah Arendt mentions each of these developments in the Preface to The Human Condition, which she published in 1958. Some of the traditional assumptions about humanity had already collapsed by then, due to atomic weapons and space exploration. So far, there were no machines that could do all our work or think better than we can, but she saw that those developments were coming unless we blew ourselves to dust first. Just five years later, she worried that “electronic ‘brains,’ devised and constructed by men” will “not only do man’s brainwork incomparably better and more swiftly (this, after all, is the outstanding characteristic of all machines), but can do ‘what a human brain cannot comprehend” (Arendt 1963, 530.)

She therefore posed the question: what is the human condition? She wanted readers to consider what is essential to us. This is what must be preserved if we love humankind. For her, love of our species was not contingent on our being excellent in some way–for example, the best thinkers on the planet. It was a fundamental ethic.

Clearly, human life will end if we vaporize ourselves. Presumably, we can live as humans on other planets: science fiction has envisioned that situation vividly. Whether we can be human without working or once we share the world with machines that think better than us are harder questions, and the answers depend on what it is to be us.

Later in the book, Arendt will explain that part of being human is to “act.” In her specific meaning of that verb, to act is to discuss what to do with other people who are independent and heterogeneous (Arendt’s “plurality”) and then to do or make things together.

Because many interacting people are required to decide what to do, Arendt cannot tell us how to address developments like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. We must think them through together. She writes:

To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible (p. 5).

Why should we make decisions together instead of just doing the right thing? Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (p. 4).

We live in a meaningful world–a world with meaning to us–only if we create it together. The question of the moment is whether our world will remain meaningful to us if we transform it through artificial intelligence that we no longer understand.

What are the “truths beyond speech” that Arendt mentions here? The most obvious candidates are transcendent truths, such as religious insights that a person might receive as revelations or intuit by introspecting. But there is a way in which science and technology are also “beyond speech.” Of course, scientists must communicate. However, for them, communication is a cost, a means to the end of analyzing nature. The less talk is necessary to produce knowledge, the better.

Ideally, scientists and technologists apply impersonal methods to generate knowledge that accumulates. A technician can install a light fixture or even design a new electrical device without reading and discussing the words of Alessandro Volta and Nikola Tesla. Historical contributions are now embedded in current techniques, some of which are algorithmic. And if a library is a device for accumulating knowledge, then a Large Language Model may be a better one.

Arendt is a solo scholar, applying her learning and methods to analyze how our thinking has developed so far. Her narrative in The Human Condition is the work of one thinker, yet she is in constant and explicit dialogue with previous writers and with her readers. Thus her contribution lies between “truths beyond speech” and “practical politics.”

The purpose of her text is to set questions that we must answer collectively by thinking and acting:

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing (p. 5).

Sources: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963). See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the papal encyclical on AI

do the liberal arts accomplish civic education?

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Next weekend, I’ll participate in a discussion at a famous liberal arts college about the various crises facing such institutions.

All the other participants will be liberal arts college professors. Although my institution is a research university, the intersection of the liberal arts and civic learning also matters to me.

First, the crises that confront the liberal arts (from the cost of college to the rise of AI; from Donald Trump to cultural challenges within the academy) also threaten the parts of a university where I work.  

Second, we face an important conceptual question whenever we try, at universities like mine and many others that I visit (and in k-12 education) to strengthen civic learning. Are the liberal arts automatically “civic”? In other words, is saving the liberal arts a way to accomplish “education for citizenship” (which will be the title of my talk next weekend)? In practical terms, can we say that a student who has a good basis in the liberal arts is also educated for citizenship? Or is there a distinction between civic and liberal education?

In short, my answer would be that the liberal arts provide education for a good individual life. But the specific question for citizens is how to do good things together. Citizens need collective agency.

Most or perhaps all of the liberal arts are useful for collective agency. A group of people concerned with the condition of their community can benefit from understanding economics, the carbon cycle, liberalism and its critics, and the origins of their language, to name just four examples. However, a mass of such knowledge may not sufficiently inform them about how to act well together. They also need the Tocquevillian art and science of association, the “mother science” in a democracy.

We can learn how to associate effectively and wisely from experience. If one grows up amid functioning voluntary associations and participatory democratic institutions, one may learn how to make them work well without having to study that topic extensively. However, most modern Americans lack such opportunities.

Besides, since the challenges of forming and sustaining effective groups have grown and changed in the 21st century, accumulated experience may not suffice. Civic education requires the explicit study of collective agency, often based on texts.

Note that the scale of collective action ranges from pairs of collaborators to the whole human species. A nation is one “we” among many others.

The precise topics of civic education may vary depending on students’ interests and needs. However, as illustrative examples, it can be very useful to understand how the grassroots leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement formed effective nonviolent organizations, or how a 21st century nonprofit should develop a strategic plan, or how to analyze an argument about values, or how to collect relevant environmental data, or (indeed) what James Madison advises about the problem of factionalism in Federalist #10.

These are classic topics in the liberal arts, likely offered in departments from history and biology to philosophy. What matters is the spirit and purpose of the inquiry, which must involve collective agency. The primary question is not how things work, or how things should be, or what someone thought, but what we (a group to which a person belongs) should do.

Both pedagogy and content are relevant. To learn to govern things together, it is valuable to practice discussing and writing about texts and data. These are forms of pedagogy. But it is also valuable to understand the difference between a labor union and a corporation–that is content, which can be conveyed in a lecture. Both matter.

Three quick historical illustrations may help to convey this ideal.

The earliest attested use of the phrase “liberal arts” occurs in an early and minor work by Cicero, De Inventione (1.35). He is not discussing the liberal arts. The phrase occurs in a long list of ways that people differ. A person can be male or female, strong or weak, Greek or barbarian. (I would like to ask a classicist whether Cicero, a Roman writing in Latin, considered himself a barbarian on account of his country or a Greek because of his education.) A man’s character also depends on “who he had as teachers of the liberal arts” and “who has instructed him in living.”

This brief mention is hardly a theory of the liberal arts. However, Cicero opens the book with this problem: wisdom is moot without eloquence (no one will act wisely unless persuaded), yet eloquence is morally neutral and can be used for evil. His stated objective is to serve “our republic” by uniting wisdom with eloquence. In that context, the liberal arts appear, along with moral exhortation, as ways of making men lead good lives–men who are not only individuals but also citizens of a republic.

Now compare the image of Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts by the remarkable woman Herrad of Landsberg (ca. 1185), which accompanies this post. Here Philosophy is the Queen. Philosophy says that the liberal arts flow from her as seven streams of wisdom, and she gets her wisdom from God. At the bottom of the picture are four bad men (listening to black birds instead of Philosophy) who violate the liberal arts. One of those is a Magician, and another is a Poet, consigned to the bottom because he makes up false stories.

Herrad may have been an exemplary participant and leader of a group–the abbey whose nuns elected her as their abbess in 1167. Nevertheless, her conception of intellectual life is religious as opposed to republican. For her, knowledge is abstract and divine, discovered not created by people. Education leads one up and out of human affairs.

Finally, Hannah Arendt aimed to recover the republican ideals that animated the young Cicero but for modern times. In 1958, she wrote:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.(The Human Condition, p. 4).

Herrad of Landsberg’s truths are definitely beyond speech and relevant to the individual soul, because they are truths about God. But I think the ordinary modern liberal arts also pursue truths beyond “speech” (in Arendt’s idiosyncratic terminology). For example, pure mathematics belongs to the liberal arts. One might think that any science which relies on impersonal methods pursues truths without intrinsically requiring “speech,” and its truths can matter to people. But the liberal arts also involve truths that we make together by talking and acting. That is where the liberal arts and civic education intersect.

See also: love of the world; is Black Studies Civic Studies?; A Defense of Higher Education and its Civic Mission (2013); the humanities as civic education etc.

navigating the social sciences

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Here is a tentative effort to map the social sciences for a novice, such as a student who’s thinking of taking some social science courses. (It is a counterpart to my recent post on the humanities.) I will risk over-generalizations to offer some pointers.

I would start with three familiar cases:

  1. Researchers want to understand and, if possible, predict a situation in which many individuals face a similar choice that is concrete and observable. For example, people can buy a specific good at a given price, apply for a job, pursue a particular kind of education, marry, or vote. Although individuals’ motives and beliefs vary, there is a typical reason that one would do each of these things (e.g., one buys a good to possess it) as well as costs, disadvantages, and competitors. Thus it should be possible to model the whole situation with an equation that shows the outcome on one side of the equal sign. To test the model, we want to collect as much data as possible, and the data tend to be concrete and unambiguous. It may not be necessary to work with samples if data can represent all the relevant behavior, as a price reflects all the recent purchases of a given good or an election tallies all the votes. Economics relies heavily (but not exclusively) or large-scale data that markets generate or that bureaucracies collect for planning purposes. The mathematics that’s most useful includes statistics (especially statistical tools for inferring causality) and calculus, which reveals maximum values subject to constraints.
  2. Researchers want to understand a mental characteristic that is not measurable with a single datapoint. For example, they want to understand anxiety, hand-eye coordination, prejudice, or knowledge of the American Civil War. They will probably study specific human subjects, rather than use data to describe populations, and they will devote attention and ingenuity to deriving measures of unobserved, latent, and/or unconscious characteristics. This is the point of a laboratory test of perception, a multi-item survey that measures an attitude, an in-depth interview, or an exam, which might include graded essay questions along with multiple-choice items. Again, statistics is a useful tool, but now often the main statistical question is whether an individual differs from the mean of a relatively small sample that shows a lot of variation. Qualitative research becomes more prominent. And a different kind of math emerges as useful: factor analysis and related methods that turn many datapoints into scales.
  3. Researchers want to interpret a whole human situation: a cockfight in Bali, adolescence in Samoa, a ceremonial feast in the Pacific Northwest, or indeed, a US high school or a physics lab or a Manhattan apartment building with a doorman. The key questions are what happens and what that means. Often the important happenings (cockfights, gifts, rites of passage, holiday tips) recur regularly and may not seem optional or determined by the individuals’ characteristics, such as their personal desires. Quantitative data become less relevant. Instead, the researcher’s main method is to spend a considerable amount of time in the community, observing intensively and listening to many informants.

The bastions of these approaches are, respectively, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Each discipline arose to study a restricted range of topics and then expanded by applying its favored methods to other topics.

Economists began with markets but have studied topics like voting since at least 1942 (Schumpeter) and probably earlier. Some of the pioneering anthropologists sought to understand what they then called “Man” by conducting ethnographies of people who were presumed to live as early humans had lived. Several assumptions of that approach are now rejected, and ethnography is now applied to all kinds of communities. And psychology emerged from early studies of perception and cognition by people like Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and William James (1842-1910) plus efforts to define and treat mental illnesses by doctors like Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The discipline now extends to all areas of human and animal life.

As a first approximation, I would say that sociology and political science are not defined by their favored methods; they are methodologically pluralistic. Instead, they are defined by their topics: respectively, society and politics. That said, both make more use of representative surveys of populations than other disciplines do. (Economists would rather work with revealed preferences, and psychologists often intensively study smaller samples.)

Also, economics and psychology are often (not always) methodologically individualist, meaning that they seek to analyze group phenomena as aggregates of individuals’ behavior. But sociology has contributed powerful models and methods that treat other things–such as classes or institutions–as the causes of outcomes. Similarly, political science contributes a focus on power, which can be missing in models that presume that people have psychological traits and choose accordingly.

Unfortunately, I do not read much research in geography, but its unique contribution is spatial analysis. A characteristic tool of geographers is a map. Public health employs many of the methods favored in the other social sciences (including maps), but it addresses diseases and syndromes that affect human beings. “Epidemiology” is derived from the Greek words for “upon the people.” Focusing on non-human factors that are “upon us” requires studying phenomena like contagion and mutation that apply to bacteria and viruses in relation to people.

Disciplines like public policy, communications, and education are methodologically pluralistic and defined by their topics. In fact, some professors of these disciplines hold PhDs in the liberal arts and apply methods that they learned there. However, experts in these fields might rightly emphasize their distinctive approaches to research. For instance, public policy research has a distinctive emphasis on feedback loops (how policies affect society, which then affects policy). And education thinks developmentally.

Finally, history is often classified among both the humanities and the social sciences. A cultural historian who seeks to enrich our perception of human artifacts is very much a humanist. Likewise, a narrative historian who weaves events and intentional action into a nonfiction narrative is humanistic. But it is also possible to employ methods like econometrics and epidemiology to the past, in which case history operates as a social science.

See also: navigating the disciplines (from 2020, with a video); the humanities for specialists and for everyone; against methodological individualism; three cores of contemporary social science (which is worryingly similar to the current post, but written in 2016); is social science too anthropocentric? etc.

Karpowitz and Patterson, The Politics of Individualism

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In The Politics of Individualism (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher F. Karpowitz and Kelly D. Patterson make an important contribution by defining a new construct, moral individualism. They show that it is prevalent in the USA and may help explain various concerning outcomes, from resistance to public health measures to low voter turnout.

This post is a short review. Anyone who is attending this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association is welcome to an authors-meet-critics session about the book on September 6 from 8:00 to 9:30 am (early on a Sunday morning!) with comments by Michigan’s Yanna Krupnikov, Stanford’s Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, North Carolina’s Marc J. Hetherington, and me.

Karpowitz and Patterson define moral individualism as the conjunction of two beliefs: 1) any “authorities external to the self’ must curtail or abridge a person’s liberty, and 2) “only moral choices that are self-authorized are legitimate” (p. 32).

They measure this construct in nationally representative samples using an ingenious survey design. In part, they ask respondents to name who is most important when they’re deciding how to live their lives or what is best for society. The ten response options include a religious leader, a scientist or expert, and a family member, among others.

Respondents are then asked to evaluate ten statements about how to treat their chosen source, e.g., “Nobody, not even [the favored source] can decide what is right and wrong, except for me” and “The world has many truths, and whatever I learned from [the favored source] is just one of them.”

A moral individualist is someone who does not feel bound by what their own most important sources may say.

Scores on this scale do not correlate strongly with measures of economic individualism, such as “Any person who is willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.” Thus economic and moral individualism are not the same construct. Likewise, moral individualism does not have a partisan valence: it is found on both sides of the aisle. It does not correlate strongly with attitudes toward Donald Trump or MAGA.

Moral individualism does, however, correlate with important outcomes, even when other factors are controlled. It predicts lower odds of voting and serving other people, less commitment to family, less religious attendance, weaker sense of efficacy (confidence that one can make a difference), less support for patriotism, much less support for public health measures during COVID, and more suspicion that other people were violating COVID restrictions. Controlling for party, ideology and support for Donald Trump, moral individualism correlated with less opposition to the riot on January 6.

Traditionally, governments have tried to counteract moral individualism. For example, public schools and colleges (as well as private and parochial ones) not only instruct students to honor various external authorities–from the Constitution to science–but they also present the school itself as something that should be honored. Military recruitment campaigns often emphasize one’s duty to country. In WWI, Uncle Sam said, “I want you for U.S. Army!” Karpowitz and Patterson trace the evolution of the all-volunteer Army’s slogans from the communitarian “Join the People Who Have Joined the Army” (1973-1980) through “Be All You Can Be” (1980-2000) to the individualistic “Army of One” (2001-6).

State-supported efforts to combat moral individualism may not work today and could provoke a backlash. Indeed, there may be legitimate debates about whether and in what ways moral individualism is a public problem. Moral individualism correlates with outcomes like religious attendance and patriotism–but also voting and political confidence–which may concern some of us but not others.

In any case, institutions apart from the government have stakes. For example, the statements that measure moral individualism are explicit rejections of the various kinds of authority that religions tend to claim, and (as noted) the construct correlates with lower church attendance. So religions might want to work against moral individualism.

I couldn’t improve on the authors’ analysis of the American population (by way of large samples). But I am curious about distinctions that might emerge in more intensive qualitative studies, particularly if the samples included relatively thoughtful and self-conscious subjects. I think that people who are moral individualists could differ on dimensions captured by three broad questions:

1. To what extent are you concerned about other people’s moral autonomy?

You can believe that your life is your own business and that no one should interfere with it. That belief can be the basis for not feeling compelled to do anything for anyone else. Or you can believe that you and all other humans have the right to be the authors of their own lives and that this principle is worth fighting for.

Let’s say you are an American who believes that every human being has a right to moral autonomy. You should probably conclude that your own moral autonomy is pretty extensive and safe but that other people (from those incarcerated in US prisons to all citizens of North Korea) are not able to decide for themselves what is right. This is a reason to work and even sacrifice to enhance all people’s moral autonomy.

Karpowitz and Patterson ask people to respond to the statement, “Only I can decide what is right. I cannot even trust [my preferred source] to help me decide.” I am curious whether respondents would say that other people should also be allowed to decide what is right for them (most Americans would probably agree so far) and that they have an obligation to defend other people’s freedom (which would probably be rarer). This distinction would divide selfish or egoistic moral individualists from altruistic ones.

2. How demanding is it to decide for yourself what is right?

Karpowitz and Patterson ask for responses to this prompt: “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite source’s] judgment.” Moral individualists agree with that statement.

But what must an individual do to make a judgment? Some people may think of judgment as synonymous with “preference” or even “desire.” Nothing should be binding on me except what I happen to want. But at least some people may think that the burden to decide what is right falls on the individual and is a heavy one.

In breaking with the Catholic Church, Martin Luther upheld the individual obligation of each sinner to discern the actual truth. He was not relativistic or morally permissive (at all) but was a kind of moral individualist.

Michael Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, practice, and experience with which the subject carries out the transformations on himself that are necessary to have access to the truth” (Foucault 1982). According to practitioners of spirituality, to know the truth, one must make oneself deserving of it, which may require intensive study, prayer, meditation, confession, direct engagement with the original Word, or even fasting and self-mortification.

To be sure, spiritual practices can be collective, but they can also be individual or even solitary. Science, on the other hand, presumes that truth arises from organized, transparent, cumulative work that does not require any particular kind of spiritual preparation. Thus we might imagine that some serious practitioners of spirituality are moral individualists, whereas scientists should not be.

We could divide moral individualists between those who think that deciding what is right is hard and those who think it comes automatically. Emerson, cited several times in the book as a moral individualist, may also be a serious spiritual striver, in the way that Foucault means.

3. What is the role of other people in supporting your moral individuality?

Reformation theologians offered a particular kind of moral individualism when they preached the Priesthood of All Believers and the doctrines of Faith Alone and Scripture Alone. They removed the mediation of the organized Church, claiming that each believer stands alone before God.

The question then arose: Why should there be Protestant churches at all? The dominant answer was that although each person is ultimately responsible, we need other people’s support. Someone who holds this view might agree with this item in Karpowitz and Patterson, “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite authority’s] judgment,” even if they’ve chosen their pastor as their authority. God judges you as an individual, weighing your personal faith; you get no points from the clergy’s behavior. Nevertheless, most Protestants have assumed that they are more likely to find their way to truth and good behavior if they belong to an organized community whose congregants and leaders can give them reminders and encouragement.

In sum, I think that moral individualism could be compatible with some altruistic, introspective, and communitarian values. I suspect that those combinations are rare and that most Americans who score high on Karpowitz’ and Patterson’s scale are also selfish, unreflective, and isolated. But the exceptions might be important.

Source: Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du suject: cours au Collège de France (1981-2) (Gallimard, 2001), pp. 16-18. See also: the classical liberals versus the “egoists”; bootstrapping value commitments; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; why be introspective? etc.