Category Archives: Buddhism

The Way of Skepticism

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Here is a pitch for a book that I have finished drafting, with the title The Way of Skepticism:

In 2025, I was invited to give philosophy lectures in Kyiv, Ukraine (on the day of the third-worst bombardment in the war so far) and then at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank. In both settings, I spoke as a philosopher and essentially made the following argument:

There are no answers to questions that have sometimes been thought to provide a basis for overall happiness, such as “What is the purpose of human life?”

You might expect that someone who teaches or writes about philosophy will offer ideas that you should believe. Famous philosophers and religious traditions have recommended various beliefs as the foundations of a happy life.

But beliefs are easily overrated, especially when we use them to assess a person’s authority or character. A strong attachment to beliefs can distort judgment, inhibit listening, and substitute for action. Disagreement about beliefs produces unnecessary distress and hostility. On the other hand, suspending the search for such truths can bring valuable relief if we renounce the pursuit in a wise way.

We can experience good things, such as pleasure and justice. These experiences are real enough, but there is no reason to presume that they fit neatly together, so that (for example) being fair to others will surely bring inner peace.

Paying close attention to particular people and animals, both oneself and others, reinforces skepticism about general matters, such as the purpose or the nature of life, by reminding us how different everything must seem to creatures who have different bodies and who experience different circumstances.

A focus on individual people and animals also encourages compassion for them. Genuine compassion spurs action on their behalf. And a life infused with compassion and beneficial action is better than one without those things, although it does not guarantee happiness.

There is an important difference between fact and error. Valuable information can be discovered, stored, shared, and revised collectively and can guide action. The problem is not knowledge (a social good) but individuals’ adherence to beliefs.

Skepticism does not imply that reality is only what can be empirically observed. Human understanding is limited, and reality exceeds what our minds can grasp. Skepticism can coexist with religious faith. It is not a theory of reality but a practical way for finite, fallible beings to navigate a world of suffering.

Skepticism about beliefs does not imply moral relativism. We make good and bad decisions. Ethical responsibility arises most powerfully in face-to-face encounters with other people. Being present with others creates moral demands. Decisions to act or to be present should arise from invitations and relationships. We should be committed to people (and animals), not to beliefs.

My lectures had mixed success, for reasons that I discuss in the manuscript. In neither setting would it have been appropriate for me to share a much longer argument. In the book, I offer more detail.

First, I ground the general points summarized above in a rich intellectual tradition. This tradition begins with the ancient Skeptical School (represented by Pyrrho of Ellis and Sextus Empiricus). Their arguments were intriguingly similar to portions of the classical Buddhist Pali Canon, which I also interpret and discuss.

Renaissance authors rediscovered Sextus’ work, and Michel de Montaigne developed a version of Greek Skepticism while drawing on other sources and adding his own insights. Montaigne did not know anything about Buddhism, but his commitment to compassion made his form of Skepticism resemble the Pali Canon as much as it resembled Sextus. Montaigne’s Essays suggested Skeptical themes to Shakespeare, which echo in John Keats and several modern authors for whom either Montaigne or Shakespeare have been touchstones.

I believe that my position benefits from close readings of Montaigne and some of his predecessors and influences, because these thinkers are complex and persuasive.

Second, the ancient Skeptics did not simply offer arguments in favor of Skepticism. (In fact, as they acknowledged, an argument against belief would risk self-contradiction). More usefully, they practiced and taught methods or meditative exercises that could reduce our level of belief in beneficial ways. Sextus offers several lists of these “modes” (the standard translation of his word for such methods), reaching a maximum of 10 in one text. Montaigne practices some of Sextus’ modes and discusses other ways that he has pursued equanimity.

In modern European authors and in some Mahayana Buddhist texts, I have found mental exercises that are fundamentally consistent with ancient Skepticism but more appropriate for our period. The bulk of my manuscript presents ten such modern Skeptical “modes”:

  1. Don’t strive to be original but think vividly. This method involves acknowledging that our best beliefs are often clichés (which is a specifically modern complaint). Seeing a belief as a cliché reduces our attachment to it without making us negate it.
  2. Adjust your relationship with the past and the future. This method involves identifying problematic mental states, such as dread and nostalgia, that depend on beliefs about time that we can challenge.
  3. Learn from shifting moods. Sextus and Montaigne try to shake our commitment to beliefs by showing that they depend on the mood that we happen to be in. Science offers methods that are supposed to combat all form of subjective bias, including moods; however, science cannot reveal what is good or right. Drawing on Heidegger, I argue that we can derive specific insights from each mood (because it is one way for us to be in the world), while also loosening our commitment to the beliefs associated with any given mood.
  4. Appreciate being oneself. Montaigne is a great student of his own experience, a phenomenologist before that word was coined. He gains happiness from this exploration. (“There is no description so hard, nor so profitable, as the description of a man’s own self.”) The goal of Do-It-Yourself phenomenology is not to discover general truths that will make us happy or better once we believe in them. Instead, DIY phenomenology can reveal complexities, mysteries, and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.
  5. Consider the boundaries of experience. Sextus and Montaigne emphasize that the world that we consider objective is actually contingent on whatever senses, values, and reasoning powers we happen to have. A different creature must inhabit a different world. The Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), William Blake, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein derived consolation from realizing that the world infinitely exceeds our capacity to know it; and we can learn from them.
  6. Don’t try to be perfect but appreciate the turn toward it. Let’s define a “sublime” experience as something far better than our usual life. From a classical Skeptical perspective, sublime experiences are neither true (revealing that the world is really better than it seems) nor false (as if we merely imposed our wishes on reality). Sublime experiences are simply experiences among others, but they are much more enjoyable. Therefore, we should seek them out.
  7. Recognize others in sublime experiences:Many modern views of the sublime are highly individualistic. They assume that anything of spiritual value must be timeless and can be appreciated by a lone individual who is in the right frame of mind. But we always learn what to value from other people, both living and dead. A sublime experience depends on the particular people who have influenced its creator and its audiences. This is a Skeptical point, suggesting that we would find different things beautiful and moving if we had different backgrounds. But it also gives us an opportunity to be grateful to the people who have shaped our values, and this gratitude can deepen our sublime experiences.
  8. Do things for their own sake. Many authors and even whole traditions offer the same valid advice: focus on doing the right thing, not on whether it has the intended outcomes. Derive satisfaction from the act, not its goal. I justify this advice in a Skeptical way and turn it into a “mode.” First try to identify morally good actions and then view them as intrinsically valuable ways of being, not as means to any end.
  9. Be compassionate (not sympathetic). Montaigne is a great proponent and exemplar of compassion. Properly understood, compassion is not a mirroring of someone else’s emotions, so that if they are angry, we must also feel anger. It is a specific emotion that can be positive (or at least calm) and must result in action. I draw on Buddhist texts and Emmanuel Levinas to present a view of compassion that is compatible with Skepticism.
  10. Decide what to do in conversation. Perhaps the most serious criticism of Skepticism is that it may discourage action. If we have no beliefs, then why should we do anything? Yet many people suffer, and we should help them. As Sextus and Montaigne emphasize, we have limited intellectual capacities and unreliable motives. Besides, as individuals, we cannot accomplish much. To put it bluntly, we are both stupid and weak. But we do have other people around us. By listening, talking, and working with others and reflecting on the results, we can make ourselves at least a bit wiser and stronger. Even when a group errs, we are at least in solidarity with the other members.

We live in a period of polarization and conflict, including several cruel wars. These challenges have political causes and require political solutions. Becoming a Skeptic is not a solution to such problems, but it is a way for an individual to navigate our current world with a dose of sanity and responsibility.

This book is also an argument for practicing the humanities–the disciplines that interpret human culture–to improve one’s inner life and one’s relationships with other human beings and animals. Reading for pleasure is in decline. The academic humanities are under political attack for being (allegedly) leftwing and economically unprofitable. And reading and writing risk being replaced by artificial intelligence. This book argues that engagement with texts can improve the inner life, but it also justifies other modes, including ones that require no texts.

(Revised for clarity on 1/7.) See also: three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; consider the octopus; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; notes from the West Bank; etc.

gratitude and the sublime

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Let’s define a sublime experience as one that is dramatically better than life as usual, since life involves suffering—at least in part and over the long run.

I doubt that sublime experiences reveal a truth: that everything is redeemed. Nor are they false, mere fantasies of people who cannot face reality. Rather, they are part of human experience, within our available range.

Life may be suffering, but it also encompasses the sublime. We are constituted to enjoy some things, and that is a wonderfully good fact about us. Just as we may lament our human proclivities to violence, despair, and cruelty, so we can celebrate our ability to savor what we find sublime. And not only celebrate it but actively cultivate this appreciation and share it with other people through the representations that we create.

Some wonderful experiences intrinsically involve interacting with other people. These activities include romance and sex, athletic competition, and success in any collective effort, including (I presume) victory in battle. I will leave this category aside for the present purposes, although it is desirable to gain emotional highs by interacting with other people while also being ethical.

I want to focus, instead, on that diverse category of experiences in which a person encounters an object that seems sublime, whether it is a view of nature, a song or a picture, a religious ceremony, or a meditative insight. Indeed, the word “sublime” is generally reserved for this category.

A classic debate in aesthetics asks how we should interpret such experiences. Does the object cause the experience? If so, do some things merit being called sublime while others should not be treated that way? (Can we be wrong to relish something that is not worthy?) Did the creator of the object have a powerful and positive emotion that the object now communicates to us? Or are observers more responsible for causing our own emotions by how we choose to perceive an object (Peacocke 2024)?

Our answers to those questions may differ if the object is a poem, a sunset, or a meditative exercise. For instance, an author has emotions while writing, so we can ask whether a poem conveys the poet’s inner state to us. But some would say the same about nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) detects a Divine Father behind all “dappled things,“ like “skies of couple-colour” or “a brinded cow.” “Praise Him,” says Hopkins. On the other hand, some doubt that an author’s emotion is relevant in any case, even when a sensitive human being has made a work. They think it is all about the object or the observer.

This debate continues. I want to add a different dimension, not only because I believe it is true, but also because it can enrich our experience.

I think we often relish things because we have been taught how to perceive them. This is a skeptical point. It reminds us that we would enjoy very different things if we lived in a different time and place. It provokes some (appropriate) doubt about whether our reactions are true.

For instance, I like a snowy day. I believe this appreciation is something learned. I do not simply see the snow; I see it with things already in my mind, like Christmas decorations, paper snowflakes on second-grade bulletin boards, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow,” Han-shan’s Cold Mountain lyrics, Robert Frost’s “lovely, dark and deep” woods, Hiroshige’s woodblock prints of wintry Japan, Rosemary Clooney with Bing Crosby. In short, I have been taught to appreciate a winter wonderland, a marshmallow world, and a whipped cream day. Some of these influences probably detract, but they were meant well.

It is sometimes said that when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux (in Provence) in 1336—simply to enjoy and describe the view—he was the first European ever to do such a thing. Clearly, some people outside of Europe had loved mountain views long before Petrarch. I find it plausible that certain communities of people appreciate alpine vistas, while others do not. And some of us may have learned the sublimity of landscapes from a chain of people originally inspired by Petrarch, although he was surely influenced by classical sources. We all see what we have learned to see.

Let’s say that I am looking at a large and dramatic sky, with ragged clouds that are mostly dark but illuminated here and there by a hidden sun. Perhaps there are also wind-blown trees in view and small signs of human habitation.

I believe that I appreciate this vista in part because I have studied and enjoyed 17th-century Dutch landscape painters and some later artists whom they influenced, such as John Constable, the Americans of the Hudson River School, and Impressionists. These artists do not explain nature to me. They do not reveal why the background color of the sky is blue and leaves are generally green. Their representations of nature would not convey sublimity to a different species, such as my dog Luca or an alien from Mars. As Thomas Nagel (1970) says, “A Martian scientist … would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud.”

Instead, these artists help me to see what is in my phenomenal world: how clouds pile up and sun peeks through. Come to think of it, our phenomenal world is a bit strange. It includes an object that is so painfully bright that we avoid it, and it has borders that we cannot see because they move as we shift our gaze. This is also the world that the Dutch painters present on canvas.

In turn, I enjoy Dutch landscapes more thanks to Svetlana Alpers’ 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, which I read when it was still fairly new and have returned to since. Alpers’ project is not to praise the artists whom she discusses; she does not practice “art appreciation.” She identifies a way of thinking about images, an epistemic framework, that explains what the Dutch painters were up to and that distinguishes them from Renaissance Italian painters (without suggesting that either is preferable). Her insights have enriched my understanding of the original works. And she is only one in a sequence of critics and historians, collectors and curators, and subsequent artists who have turned 17th-century Dutch landscape painting into a category and helped us to value it and see it better. Again, how I see that art influences how I see nature, especially when the landscape even remotely resembles Holland.

I hold a doctoral degree and have chosen to visit museums and read academic criticism for decades. I am not claiming that reading scholarly books and labels in museums is the best (let alone the only) way to enrich current experiences. Many people learn to name, value, represent, protect, and use objects from their elders without needing written words. Religious communities also develop ceremonies and observances that convey the creativity of previous generations. Academic criticism is unusually explicit and transparent about its sources; that is the purpose of footnotes. But all human communities accumulate and transmit ways of experiencing the world.

Sometimes, people are motivated to ignore or conceal the influence of previous observers on their own sublime experiences because of an implicit assumption that the sublime should be pure and universal and stand outside of history. Just as an example, North Americans who experience anapanasati, or Buddhist breathing-meditation, may be told (or may tell themselves) that this is the original practice of the Buddha himself. They envision themselves as doing something pure and personal that reveals absolutely general truths, such as the non-existence of the self. A person who may have lived in what is now northern India and Nepal more than two thousand years ago not only did the same thing as modern meditators but is causing us to practice anapanasati now, because we hear the Buddha’s “teachings.”

But we might look around the room, which probably (not invariably) incorporates some aesthetic elements from East Asian art, along with 20th century European minimalism: bare wood, a simplified statue. People speak English with a sprinkling of Sanskrit words. They sit cross-legged and meditate but do not maintain shrines, prostrate themselves, make pilgrimages, or give alms, which would be common manifestations of Buddhism in East Asia (Moon 2024)

Many participants may identify as white and think of what they are experiencing as Asian. Indeed, they may classify the Buddha as an Asian man, notwithstanding that he predated the distinction between Asia and Europe. Rev. Cristina Moon (a Zen priest from Hawaii) recalls:

Over the fifteen years before coming to Chozen-ji [a temple and monastery founded by Asian Americans], I sat with more than a dozen different Buddhist communities where I was often the only Asian and sometimes one of the only non-white people in attendance. When non-Asian Buddhists (particularly at American Zen centers) wore Japanese clothes, bowed to me theatrically, referred to me as “Cristina-san,” responded to requests in English with “Hai!”, and expressed rigid attachment to the technical accuracy of certain Japanese and Buddhist forms, it looked more like cosplay [dressing as a character from a movie] than a means to enter Zen, (Moon 2024)

In the US, there is a certain tendency—I don’t know how widespread—to see Buddhist thought as ahistorical. The Buddha is treated as a contemporary; the meditating mind lives only in the immediate present. There is also a tendency to acknowledge Buddhism’s roots in Asia but to depict Asian or Eastern “culture” as monolithic, apart from superficial aesthetic differences that people can browse like consumers.

The white or European-American Buddhists whom Rev. Moon has encountered may differentiate between the transcendent truths of the Buddha and optional traditions and behaviors that they label “culture.” They then pick and choose from the traditions without recognizing that they (highly educated, mostly White Americans) are every bit as immersed in their own stream of inherited behaviors, aesthetics, beliefs, and values, which influence their choices about what to borrow from Asian contexts. Linda Heuman writes:

The French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour famously described it this way: “A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.” A modern Buddhist, in Latour’s sense, is someone who believes that Asian forms of Buddhism carry the “baggage” of their host cultures but who remains unreflective about the assumptions that shape his or her own modern adaptation (Heuman, 2015).

For instance, sitting in a minimalist pine room feels pure, although it reflects the same Modernist aesthetics as a boardroom in a skyscraper, whereas prostrating before a brightly colored Tibetan shrine would seem like “culture.”

Any mind is ineluctably historical. As we develop from speechless infants into adults, we absorb a vast array of classifications, assumptions, and values that other people invented before us. We can never escape this historical contingency. You might think that you can have an unmediated experience of nature, but your tastes in nature, your words and concepts for nature, and even your physical location in front of a specific patch of nature are all historically conditioned. 

History is highly complex, diverse, and often cruel, whether we happen to know the details or not. Evils are widespread—consider, for example, the use of Buddhist ideas in imperial Japan or in Myanmar today. Human beings widely and blatantly violate principles that they expressly teach, such as nonviolence and compassion. On the other hand, people all over the world also create practices and institutions that reflect wise goals and choices. What we think we know is a result of this complex, globally interconnected, and fraught past.

Cristina Moon’s description of cringy behavior at North American Zen centers is a portrait of people who want to pick and choose ideas and practices that they find comfortable without taking seriously the historical development and interconnection of those ideas, without being genuinely open to practices that might challenge them, without being careful about their own status and impact, and without wrestling with the connections among racial hierarchy and exclusion, everyday culture, and the abstract beliefs that we might classify as Buddhist philosophy or theology. Yet the solution is not to declare these beliefs off limits (nor does Moon suggest we do so), because everyone should always be looking for good beliefs to adopt. We must simply do it with a lot of care–not only about the ideas and their effect on our inner lives, but also about the other people we touch.

To me, our debt to other human beings only deepens the sublime. Nature was not created for us; it just is. And we were not created to enjoy it, although—very fortunately—we do. But our fellow human beings have deliberately shared their appreciation and heightened our own, which means that we are the beneficiaries of benevolent intelligence after all.

In “Of Dappled Things,” Hopkins writes, “Praise Him.” I would (also) say, “Praise them.”

This is a combination and reformulation of previous posts (apologies for the repetition), including: the sublime and other people; the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s Lines Above Tintern Abbey; notes on religion and cultural appropriation: the case of US Buddhism

Sources: Antonia Peacocke, “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.); Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 394-403, p. 443; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Cristina Moon, “From ‘Just Culture’ to a Just Culture, Tricycle, Oc.. 29, 2020; Linda Heuman (2015) “A New Way Forward,” The Tricycle, Spring.

The Art of Solitude

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I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.

Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.

Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.

Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:

Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …

Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)

Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).

At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.

Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.

Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).

There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.

Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.

Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)

Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.

Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).

See also: Montaigne and Buddhism; three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?

Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

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Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

Le Vase blue, Paul Cezanne

happiness, for skeptics

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Perhaps human beings are designed for a purpose or end, the pursuit of which brings us happiness. Aristotle is a major proponent of this view (“teleology”), and his theory has influenced each of the Abrahamic faiths.

But what if one is skeptical that we have any end, or that pursuing any “telos” promises a good life for us?

One school was already skeptical more than two thousand years ago. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism (the ubiquity of suffering) is incompatible with teleology, and the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination says that things arise just because previous things happened–not for any end.

The Third Noble Truth implies that we can escape permanently and completely from pointless suffering by understanding and transcending our will, thus entering the state variously understood under the word “Nirvana.”

What if one is skeptical of Nirvana as well as teleology? What if one doubts either an end or an exit? Is there anything to gain from the Aristotelian-Abrahamic tradition or from Buddhism?

I think there is much to be learned. I would offer these six points.

1) It is not peace but the turn toward peace that yields our happiness

In “The Poems of our Climate,” Wallace Stevens imagines a pure image that could come from East Asian or European modernist art: “Clear water in a brilliant bowl / Pink and white carnations.” He posits that this image could represent “complete simplicity / Stripped … of all one’s torments.” For a suggestive illustration, consider a “Blue Vase” by Paul Cézanne from 1890 (above), to which I will return later.

Such an image, Stevens says, cannot represent peace or happiness for creatures such as us. It cannot satisfy anyone who has a “never-resting mind.” Since “the imperfect is so hot in us,” our “delight” lies not in pure and permanent simplicity but in those moments of relief that art or nature can offer. In other words, we can never be the brilliant bowl and cut flowers, but we can relish objects that are purer than ourselves.

I paid homage to Stevens’ poem with one of my own that relates my relief at hearing a Bach oboe concerto in my earphones during a flight on a hectic day. “That turn, / For us—with our minds so noisy— / Our delight lies only there.”

This principle has a limitation. Like Stevens’ poetry, it is all about the individual who experiences things. What about all the other sentient creatures who also suffer? We should care about each as much as we care about ourselves. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Šantideva, 8.102-3).

2. Compassion combats suffering

It’s a very small step from understanding the truth of other creatures’ suffering to feeling compassion for those who suffer. The disposition of compassion is grounded in a clear view of reality. That is one argument in its favor.

Another argument is that compassion is what people (and some animals) need from us. Sometimes, they need us to fix their problems, and compassion may necessitate action. But we cannot make others happy or liberate them from suffering, and therefore action rarely suffices. Nor do creatures need pity or that mirroring of emotions that I would call “sympathy.” If you are sad, you don’t want me to be sad sympathetically. You want me to will your relief.

After the Buddha has defeated an elitist student, Ambattha, in a debate, Ambattha’s teacher calls this student a “fool” and says, “Please forgive him.” The Buddha replies, “May the student be happy”: sukhi hotu, a Pali phrase that now serves as a greeting. We want people to extend this wish to us–and to mean it (Long Discourses, Sujato trans. DN3).

A third argument is that compassion can fill one’s mind, replacing the kind of self-oriented will that is (per the Second Noble Truth) the source of suffering. In my skeptical view, compassion can only ever take up some space, leaving room for willfulness and pain to persist, but it is worth expanding.

Universal, undifferentiated compassion is a virtue–perhaps most appropriately a monastic one, because a monk renounces individual attachments. For those of us who deeply prize specific relationships, compassion is not the sole positive emotion that should fill our thoughts. There is also love, which borders compassion but differs by being focused and by needing to be reciprocated.

3. Each mind is a ripple in the river of history

Looking at pink and white carnations, or hearing one’s own breath, or observing someone in pain, we naturally presume that the self is directly experiencing the object. Not so. Our minds are deeply structured by language, judgments, memories, and other cultural inheritances that arose before us and will continue after.

For instance, we enjoy flowers because our predecessors have named, raised, bred, sold, collected, drawn and painted, and praised these particular plants.

At the time of each day that we call sunset, the big ball of rock on which we live is turning so that we can no longer see a huge and remote ball of fire. Yet we experience the sun as moving across our sky toward its “setting,” and we think about closure, sleep, or even death and rebirth. We must think about these things (at least occasionally) at twilight because they are inherent in our languages and stories. Science describes the solar system, but not our experience of it, which has a human past.

It follows that we are never alone. Others speak through us. The stream of thoughts that constitutes a self began before and continues after a person.

There is no reason to presume that the whole stream flows toward happiness or justice. But we do know that the species can accomplish more than any person could in the space of one life. To me, this realization makes some sense of the doctrine that achieving enlightenment requires many lives. And it makes me less attached to my own life and less interested in being original, authentic, or influential. The 13-century Zen teacher Dogen writes:

It is an unshakable teaching in the Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. … Although there is birth and death in each moment of this life of birth and death, the body after the final body is never known. Even though you do not know it, if you arouse the aspiration for enlightenment, you will move forward on the way of enlightenment. The moment is already here (pp. 116-117).

4. We can do things that have outcomes for their own sake

This is an Aristotelian argument that I owe to Kieran Setiya (2017):

Many of our actions have concrete and immediate goals. We work to make money; we wash the dishes so that they are clean. When we behave this way, it is difficult to escape from suffering because the mind is set on the future, and there is always more to do.

We also do some things for their own sake, like listening to music or watching carnations or paintings of them. But we cannot depend on intrinsically valuable activities to obtain happiness. They are rare for most of us, and if they come to occupy all our time, how can we be compassionate? Only the idle rich can spend their whole lives on intrinsically enjoyable experiences.

The solution is to perform tasks that have objectives as if they were ends in themselves. I can grade papers not to complete the task but to be an educator. This is not always easy, and such an attitude would be harder if I cleaned toilets or processed chickens instead of teaching college students. But it is something to strive for in our own lives and to make more attainable for others.

5. Reality rewards a close and open-minded inquiry

We evolved to have brains that can do many things, but we do not know what we cannot fathom, just as my dog has no idea that he is unaware of politics, cosmology, or Shakespeare. In an entirely abstract way, we know that our reality of suffering, delight, and finitude is not the only reality.

Specifically, we evolved with brains that are not very well designed for understanding consciousness itself. Our minds prove evasive to our minds. Neverthless, highly disciplined and strenuous efforts to describe consciousness yield glimmers that expand our consciousness and bring–if we use them right–some happiness.

Merleau-Ponty begins his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” this way:

He needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only an essay, an approach to painting. In September, I906, at the age of 67–one month before his death–he wrote: ‘I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive. . . . Now it seems I am better and that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am still learning from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress.’

What was Cézanne working so hard to accomplish? According to Merleau-Ponty, he strove to present the experience of nature without the tools that people had created for that task, such as “outline, composition, and distribution of light” and linear perspective. “He was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature.” For him, “reality” meant neither the object in itself nor the subjective appearance of it, but the way they unite in our experience.

The “Blue Vase” shown above is harmonious and calm, yet close inspection reveals choices that a classically trained painter would avoid. For instance, the base of the vase is perpendicular to the plane of the painting, whereas the table on which it stands tilts down. And the color of the flowers seem to have influenced the shadows, making them bluish.

Similarly, in Stevens’ poem, the color of the bowl infuses the space around it: “The light / In the room more like a snowy air, /
Reflecting snow.”

Such choices are more obvious in an 1880 painting that Cézanne left unfinished (right). Here the vase clearly stands separate from the table, with entirely different vanishing points.

Our experience does not encompass the whole world at once, lining everything up together. We focus on objects that have names and significance for us, then move to other ones. The color of one object depends on its relationship to others. We do not perceive a world made of borders filled with color, but something much more complex and dynamic.

Although the following paragraph from Merleau-Ponty’s essay is not about any particular painting, it could describe Cézanne’s 1880 vase:

Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. …. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth-that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality ful of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swelling of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. [Compare the outlines of the flowers above.]

We can attend closely to positive experiences, such as the sight of flowers. We can try to analyze suffering, although that requires impressive equanimity. I am especially interested in the close investigation of states that I find mildly problematic, such as my own regretful and appreciative awareness that a current pleasure is transient. This is roughly the same as mono no aware in Japanese aesthetics, or, as I have named it, “nostalgia for now.” It affords insight into time, just as the phenomenology of other states reveals other truths. And one can focus on other people’s experience or on relational states, including love.

Cézanne’s explorations brought him no happiness, Merleau-Ponty describes the artist’s “fits of temper and depression.” In short, Cézanne was obsessed. Wallace Stevens also devoted his career to a constant exploration of consciousness, and he seems to have been far from happy.

These people failed to balance their expeditions into their own consciousness with concern for other people. Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne, “His extremely close attention to nature and to color, the inhuman character of his paintings (he said that a face should be painted as an object), his devotion to the visible world: all of these would then only represent a flight from the human world, the alienation of his humanity.” Stevens has a similar tendency and writes, “It is the human that is the alien.” Wisdom requires a combination of intense inner inquiry with care for others.

Exploring consciousness can enhance compassion rather than distract from it, since we can learn to feel the depths of others’ experience. Glimpsing hidden worlds can shake our attachment to our everyday circumstances. And the curiosity that motivates our expeditions into the inner life can supplant anxiety and discontent. But it is more likely that we will obtain happiness by looking at a painting by Cézanne or by reading a poem by Stevens than by trying to be either person. They are not models but they left us gifts, as have many others.

6. We must embody truths, not merely acknowledge them

Important thinkers have provided arguments and reasons for each of the preceding five principles. Although these conclusions cannot be proven from axioms, they can be defended.

However, assenting to a principle of this type or acknowledging the arguments in its favor accomplishes little. One must consistently feel the truth of the idea. That requires practice, ritual, meditation, and other cultivated habits.

To return again to Cézanne’s flowers: it will do no good to glance at them or to read a learned article that explains them. One must take the time to see the object itself, must “come back / To what had been so long composed” in order to realize that “the imperfect is our paradise.”

Sources: Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambala); The Long Discourses translated by Bhikkhu Sujato on Suttacentral (2018); Kieran Setiya Midlife (Princeton, 2017); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964). The paintings are Le Vase bleu (1889-90) in the Musée d’Orsay and Flowers in a Blue Vase (1880) in the Orangerie. I quote the Stevens Poems “The Poems of Our Climate” from Parts of A World and “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” from Transport to Summer.

See also: many previous posts, which I have collected and organized as Cuttings: A Book About Happiness.