Category Archives: Continental philosophy

Hegel and the Buddha

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{May 2022: I see that this old and rather casual post gets a fair amount of traffic, presumably from people who are searching for combinations of “Hegel[ian]” and “Budd[ism].” A better post of mine would be “a Hegelian meditation.” See also: T.C. Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism” or Ariën Voogt, “Spirituality in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An analysis in the wake of Foucault,” Metaphilosophy 52.5 (2021): 616-627.}

Contrary to popular belief, Hegel’s dialectic has nothing to do with “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” The characteristic pattern is rather:

  • Consciousness: one experiences, thinks, and acts according to habit, custom, or instinct;
  • Self-consciousness: one becomes aware of one’s habits, customs, or instincts, leading to irony, discomfort, conflict, and creativity;
  • Reason: One chooses a particular way of thinking and being.

The cycle can repeat if one realizes that what looked like “reason” was, from a more distant perspective, an arbitrary choice.

I studied Hegel long ago and have found his structure widely applicable. Only lately have I paid serious attention to the thinker we call the Buddha. A characteristic pattern for him is:

  • Suffering: the experience of all sentient beings, which inevitably includes frustration, fear, pain, and loss;
  • Attachment: suffering that arises from wanting something that one cannot control (and often from knowing that what one wants cannot be had);
  • Cessation of suffering, which arises from renouncing attachment;
  • Equanimity, which is not complete dis-attachment or lack of concern but rather deliberate engagement with the world without a futile sense of frustration.

The parallels seem to me interesting and fruitful, although not exact.

homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School

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In New York City–At 6 pm today, I will speak at The New School on a panel entitled “Civic Engagement and Higher Education in the United States: What Do College Students Gain From Civic Engagement Experiences?” My co-panelist is my friend and collaborator Connie Flanagan from University of Wisconsin. Admission is open to the public and free.

The New School was where Hannah Arendt taught from 1967 (when I was born) to her death in 1975, and her concept of “natality” is fundamental to the whole issue of youth and politics.

We often give pragmatic or utilitarian arguments for engaging young people. For example: (1) Teenagers perform much better in school when they are attached to communities. (2) If we seek an equitable political system in the future, we need to intervene with our youth today, to give them all the skills and motivations to participate. (3) Today’s young generation already has praiseworthy values and talents that will help them to reform the society that we older people have messed up.

These are valid reasons, but Arendt gave deeper ones. Her teacher Martin Heidegger had seen mortality, the inevitable movement toward death, as the fundamental metaphysical fact. In politics, he had been a Nazi. Without naming him, Arendt replied to him in The Human Condition (p. 9): “Since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, not mortality, must be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical thought.”

This was the response of a little-“d” democrat, someone who believed that we should create the world freely but together. She derived this commitment from the fact that human beings are constantly being born, thus renewing the world and making its future basically unpredictable and up to us. Racism, to name just one example, is not written in nature but is produced by people, and the new people who arrive on earth every few seconds do not have to reproduce it. Later in the same book, Arendt elaborates:

    The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their glad tidings: ‘A child has been born unto us.’

I have written elsewhere about hope and loyalty as cardinal intellectual virtues. (See also this post on loyalty in academia.) Arendt was right–I believe–that our highest calling is to love the world. To love the world is to remake it in each generation with our contemporaries, which is “politics.” We count on the newly born to replenish our efforts, and we owe them the virtues of hope and loyalty. We owe them, in short, a genuine welcome to the political world.

upside-down Foucault

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Hypothesis: every space where Michael Foucault discovered the operation of power is also a venue for creativity, collaboration, and a deepening of human subjectivity.

By way of background: I respect Foucault as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Although deeply influenced by other writers and activists, he made his own crucial discoveries. In particular, he found power operating in places where it had been largely overlooked, such as clinics, classrooms, and projects of social science. Further, he understood that power is not just a matter of A deliberately making B do what A wants. It rather shapes all of our desires, goals, and beliefs. Its influence on beliefs suggests that knowledge and power are inseparable, so that even our understanding of power is determined by power. Despite the skeptical implications of Foucault’s epistemology, he struggled in an exemplary fashion to get the theory right, revising it constantly. He traveled a long intellectual road, directed by his own conscience and experience rather than any kind of careerism.

So it is as a kind of homage to Foucault that I suggest flipping his theory upside-down. Just as close, critical observation of people in routine settings can reveal the operations of power, so we can detect people developing, growing, reflecting, and collaborating voluntarily. To be sure, social contexts fall on a spectrum from dehumanizing to humanizing, with prisons at one end (not far from office cubicles), and artists’ ateliers at the other. But it would be just as wrong to interpret a whole society as a prison as to view it all as a jazz band. And, I would hypothesize, even in the modern US prison system–swollen in numbers, starved of resources for education and culture, plagued by rape and abuse, and racially biased–one could find evidence of creativity as well as power.

Leo Strauss, Friedrich Nietzsche

One advantage of a blog is the opportunity to rebut. I recently came across the following passage in Catherine H. Zuckert, Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (2006). (Strauss, by the way, was a highly influential and interesting emigré political theorist, several of whose followers played significant roles in the Bush Administration.)

    A particularly clumsy and unpersuasive effort to treat Strauss as an esoteric writer [i.e., one who thinks the opposite of what his texts say on their surface] is Peter Levine’s Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities. He maintains that Strauss is an ‘esoteric Nietzchean.’ For evidence of Strauss’ Nietzscheanism he quotes passages from Strauss’s essay on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, an essay intended to give an account of the German’s thought. Since Strauss frequently distanced himself from Nietzsche, it is quite unacceptable to cite Strauss’ presentation of Nietzsche’s thought as if they were his own. By this method, one could identify Strauss with Thucydides, Hobbes, Rousseau, Weber, and a large number of others as well as Nietzsche. It really will not do to argue, in effect, that (a) Strauss is (obviously) an esoteric writer, that is, he doesn’t say openly what he believes; (b) Strauss frequently rejects Nietzsche, Heidegger, historicism, and nihilism in his texts; therefore (c) Strauss must be a Nietzschean, a Heideggerian, a historicist, or a nihilist. To prove that Strauss is a nihilist, Levine brings to bear such other ‘evidence’ as Strauss’ expressed doubts about Plato’s theory of ideas. In rejecting that theory, Strauss is trying to ‘show that Plato was a secret nihilist.’ Since Aristotle also rejected the Platonic Ideas, Levine no doubt considers him a nihilist as well.

Trying to maintain a civil tone, I will say:

1. In my book, I fully acknowledge Leo Strauss’ explicit critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, historicism, and nihilism. That is how I begin my section on Strauss.

2. I quote Strauss’ essay on Nietzsche not to assert that Strauss was endorsing the views he attributed to Nietszche, but in order to show that Strauss considered Nietzsche a historicist. There are many other interpretations of Nietzsche, and I wanted to show that this was the Nietzsche whom Strauss had in mind.

3. My argument that Strauss actually held the views he attributed to Nietzsche is not based on the assertion that he rejected those views but was “obviously” an esoteric author. The key evidence is “his deployment of devices he finds in or attributes to the writers he identifies as esoteric.” That last sentence is quoted from Zuckert–from the paragraph in which she describes “much better attempts” than mine to read Strauss as esoteric. But the method she accepts is precisely the one I employ. I show, for example (pp. 263-4), that key nihilist quotations, ostensibly rejected by Strauss, appear in the precise centers of his own texts without rebuttal–a technique that he attributes to other authors who are esoteric. One of those authors is Nietzsche. Strauss argues–and I agree–that Nietzsche used esoteric writing techniques such as numerology. Those are the same techniques that we find in Strauss.

4. My point about Plato is not that Strauss rejected Platonic idealism. So do most authors, including myself. My point is about Straussian hermeneutics. I write, “Strauss says that Plato cannot have been serious about the doctrine of Forms, which is ‘utterly incredible, not to say … fantastic.'” Aristotle certainly disagreed with the Platonic theory of Forms, but he did not claim that “the Republic was actually a veiled warning against the tyranny of Socratic men.” That claim of irony or duplicity is Strauss’s and is hardly orthodox.

My reading of Strauss was not especially original and probably was clumsy. When I read that section now, it strikes me as poorly organized. Some of the key evidence is buried in footnotes. But there was much more to it than Zuckert noticed, understood, or was willing to acknowledge.

entropy and dialectic

The world grows more alike. Global culture is more uniform today than at any time in the past. Ecosystems are more similar, thanks to human interventions and the mixing of species. Although there are countervailing trends toward diversity, the pressure for similarity is palpable and powerful.

two explanations

I think two theories help to explain this pressure. The first is entropy. In nature, when unlike things come into contact, they become more alike. Likewise, when cultures interact through trade or conquest, they come to share features.

A natural system loses dynamism as entropy grows, to the point that a perfectly entropic universe would be a smooth and inert field of matter. If there were no differences, then time itself would end. Some of the anxiety about globalization derives from fear that cultural differences will disappear, and with them, human dynamism. Some of the impetus for environmentalism arises from fear that all ecosystems will become alike. (This is why biodiversity seems so precious and “invasive species” are such a concern.)

Entropy is fundamentally mindless. It is “noise,” the opposite of a meaningful “signal.” In nature, only intelligence can reduce entropy. For example, by sorting objects into separate piles, a person can make a heap less entropic. In the domain of culture, human beings can use their intelligence to wall themselves off from contact with outsiders, but such barriers always ultimately weaken. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies: the entropy of a closed system tends to increase. However, intelligent beings can also deliberately create new cultural forms in opposition to global averages. Even by the simple act of remembering the diversity of the past, we can make our own minds more complex.

The second explanation is Hegelian. Contrary to popular belief, Hegel never said anything about a thesis meeting its opposite (the antithesis) and generating a synthesis. His model is much more plausible. It starts with consciousness: naive thinking and doing. In a world of diverse people and cultures, a conscious person or group will sooner or later encounter and recognize alternative values and ways of being. At that point self-consciousness arises. This is an uncomfortable feeling, full of tension and doubt; but it is also generative and dynamic, and it can lead to what Hegel calls reason. Hegelian reason is the deliberate and informed creation of values and beliefs, based on the available alternatives. Reason will again become self-consciousness whenever, having built a satisfactory solution, a person or a group realizes that there are other available solutions. That new stage of self-consciousness can again become reason. The whole cycle is “dialectic.”

Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Hegelian dialectic leads ultimately to universal sameness, but it is a sameness deliberately constructed by human beings through the application of intelligence and will. Barring a catastrophe, world culture should become more uniform but also more sophisticated, because it will encompass more history and more awareness of alternatives. It will not be a static state of sameness, but a dramatic narrative leading toward consensus, recorded in the minds of the human actors.

Perhaps the most profound issue of our era is whether we will grow more alike through dialectic or through entropy. Since I am unable to think of any other way to explore this tension, I have made it the theme of a long narrative poem (only part of which is online so far).

consumerism and creativity

I suspect that entropy is connected to the problem of consumerism. Raw materials have been globally traded for a long time. However, the salient feature of “globalization” is the exchange of finished, consumer products. The volume of such trade has surely increased with deregulation and with new communications technology. As a result, people can choose from rapidly growing menus of cultural products. This choice increases as a result of market exchanges, but it is also something that we fight for–for instance, when people who favor “diversity” in education demand more choices in the curriculum, or when civil libertarians assert a right to purchase information from abroad.

Everyone who can choose from a global list of finished cultural products becomes more like everyone else: a phenomenon that Russell Arben Fox insightfully describes. This is a passive, detached, inert sameness. The only way to prevent it is to block people from exercising consumer choice, which restricts their freedom–and never works for long.

In contrast, when we make things, we put our own stamp on them. We thereby exercise Hegelian “reason.” Unlike restrictions on trade and communication, policies that support the local creation of cultural products expand freedom. And even if everyone’s creations turn out to be increasingly similar as history proceeds, at least the resulting sameness will be something that we human beings have made. Likewise, an environmentalism devoted to creativity (rather than preservation) would make the world less entropic even as we put a human stamp on nature.

[This post is being discussed on the Philosophy New Service “community” page]