Category Archives: philosophy

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized

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After proposing my own interpretation of a Buddhist doctrine recently, I enjoyed Owen Flanagan’s book about Buddhism. Flanagan (a proponent and practitioner of analytical philosophy and natural science) read a lot of classical Buddhist texts, interviewed the 14th Dalai Lama on several occasions, talked to many other Buddhists, reviewed the results of brain research on Buddhist monks, and explored scholarly literature from East and West. He concludes that:

  1. The Buddha’s own metaphysics and epistemology are strikingly consistent with modern science–a point made by Einstein and others but worked out here in more detail;
  2. Buddhist ethics is appealing from a modern liberal’s perspective, complementing liberalism with its deeper account of a good inner life, but offering a thin account of justice that needs development;
  3. Buddhist philosophy and practice might have some bearing on personal happiness, but that is a complex matter, and the causal link is by no means automatic. Becoming a Buddhist won’t just make you happy, but Buddhism has interesting things to say about happiness (what it is and how to pursue it).
  4. The brain science related to Buddhism is interesting and worth pursuing but has been hyped beyond recognition. The most straightforward causal hypothesis is not about Buddhism and happiness but about the impact of particular forms of meditation on mental health. The studies on that question are inconclusive. In Flanagan’s view, there are also empirical questions regarding the impact of Buddhism on happiness, but they cannot be settled by brain science alone, because Buddhism is much more than meditation, and happiness is a contested term requiring normative analysis.

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morality as a network (revisited)

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(Syracuse, NY for a conference on Self among Selves: Emotion and the Common Life) Each of us holds many moral propositions. Some are abstract and general, like “Every person has equal moral worth.” Some look like rules or commands: “Do not kill human beings.” Some are more like positive or negative emotions about particular things or people, but we could translate them into propositions.

Some are intuitive. When they are very obvious, it can even seem obtuse to ask why they are valid. (“Why should you not randomly kill people for fun?” is a bad question.) But some of most important moral thoughts are rather particular, idiosyncratic, and in need of justification. For example, I sit here writing with a view of Tufts University, which is my employer. I feel some commitment to and fondness for Tufts, and I believe that my writing supports my work for Tufts (because it will ultimately find its way into an article). Those feelings could be translated into propositions. But each one requires justification and evidently connects to other propositions. To show that I am doing the right thing, I would owe a description of Tufts University and some premises about moral commitment (i.e., Why should one be committed to anything?). In the ensuing conversation, factual information might be relevant: Tufts actually does certain things. Morally evaluative terms would also arise and would need to be justified. The conversation about Tufts might well shift into related topics, such as the role of scholarship in a democracy, the value of democracy, the place of philosophy as scholarship, or the quality of my scholarly work.

We could view all the morally relevant propositions that I hold as nodes in a network. My relationship to each node may be a straightforward endorsement, but it may be more complicated than that. (See the concept of propositional attitude.) For instance, Anne Swidler finds (Talk of Love, 2001) that many middle class Americans have in their heads what they call a “Movie” ideal of love. They do not believe it. They view it with some irony. But they appeal to it in certain situations and they feel its force over them. If we translated that Hollywood ideal into propositions (e.g., Every individual has a perfect romantic match;  finding that person guarantees happiness), most Americans would both endorse and strongly deny those statements.

Many of my moral beliefs and ideas are connected to other nodes, but not necessarily in one way. Depending on what two nodes say, it can be the case that:

  • A logically entails B
  • A causes B
  • A makes B more likely
  • A is a step on a long path toward B
  • A and B are in fruitful tension: incompatible, yet both worthy of support
  • A resembles B
  • A prevents B
  • B echoes A
  • I am impressed by people who believe A, and they also tend to believe B
  • People with a given kind of experience tend to believe both A and B
  • A and B are examples of C

… and so on.

When we try to assess whether people are good, or whether what they does is right, we often ask about the separate propositions that these individuals hold. For instance, anyone who thinks that Jews are evil is worse for that reason, regardless of what else he may think or do. That is a node in his network, and we have a strong moral intuition about it.

But in many cases, we do not have confident intuitions about the separate nodes, nor should we, because they have no moral valence out of context. So a different question to ask about a network is: How is it structured?

I think that question has been addressed too narrowly (in the philosophical writing that I know). The question always seems to be whether the network is coherent and whether each component is entailed by broader, more abstract, more “foundational” premises. Kant, Mill, Rawls, and many others analyze morality that way. They presume that a moral network map should be organized as a tree, with abstract generalities at the root, and particular applications at the branches. But that is only one type of diagram. I see no reason to assume it’s the best; it is certainly vulnerable to skepticism about the premises that lie at the root. Nor is coherence evidently desirable: I admire more a person who is aware of moral tensions and inconsistencies than one who has simplified his principles to remove all conflict.

A very common goal of moral reflection (not only among professional philosophers) is to weed out the weaker aspects of a person’s network. “Critical thinking” is supposed to be a matter of getting rid of the mere prejudices and unsupported assumptions, conflicts, and fallacious connections. Professional philosophers often impose what Amartya Sen calls “informational restraints” to weed out nodes and links. They certainly disagree about which considerations to ignore: for example, Kantians reject consequences, Rawls erects a veil of ignorance to hide our place in society, and utilitarians screen out motives as primary evidence about what should be done. Most, however, will agree that anecdotes about specific individuals are subject to bias; that simple arguments from authority are fallacious; that strong emotional responses must be translatable into valid propositions; that evidence about consequences only matters to the extent that we can assess outcomes by an independent standard; that the use of precedents and comparisons requires justification; and that rules or principles that can be generalized are more reliable than those that are narrow and ad hoc.

As Bernard Williams writes in a slightly different context, theorists tend to criticize–and seek to delete–intuitive or conventional moral concepts, but “our major problem now is that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.”

Instead of seeking to delete nodes or connections that are unreliable, and instead of trying to make the whole network look like a flowchart with the summum bonum at the base, I would ask:

  • How extensive is the network?
  • How many connections does the person draw? (How dense is the network?)
  • Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively correct?
  • Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively weighty?
  • Have the conflicts been recognized and led to appropriate conclusions, or have they been ignored?
  • Are there free-standing nodes, and if so, are they justified in any way?

(I have  explored related ideas in posts on How to Save the Enlightenment Ideal and Moral Thinking as a Network.

does naturalism make room for the humanities?

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On the New York Times “The Stone” blog (contributed by philosophers), the Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg wrote recently that he is a naturalist. He explained, “Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge.”

Near the end of the article, Rosenberg asks whether history and literary theory “provide real understanding.” He acknowledges that these disciplines can be valuable even if they don’t. Maybe we human beings need them for psychological reasons or simply enjoy them–much as we enjoy fiction. But that doesn’t mean they offer knowledge. He doesn’t quite say whether they do or not, but he writes, “if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than forgoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge.”

By the the last clause of this passage, Rosenberg seems to be saying that history and literary theory do not generate knowledge. (In a reply piece in “The Stone,” William Egginton simply says, “Professor Rosenberg’s answer is as unequivocal as it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be ‘fun,’ but neither one qualifies as ‘knowledge.'”)

But that can’t be right. Here are two examples of findings from the humanities. From history: “George Washington was the first president of the United States.” From literary criticism: Dante’s character Francesca da Rimini speaks almost entirely in misquotations from earlier literature. These are verifiable (or falsifiable) claims.

Indeed, if we had no naturalistic information about literary texts or about the past, it would very strange. Ordinary documents (novels, poems, etc.) would be mysteries, and we would be like amnesiacs, with no access to the past. Rosenberg can’t mean that.

I think the nub of the issue arises in this sentence:

If semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism transparently flout science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.

Earlier, Rosenberg had mentioned history, literary criticism, and literary theory as disciplines that may not be naturalistic and that may not produce real knowledge. But his specific examples are all approaches to literary theory that arose in Germany and France  after 1900 and have powerfully influenced humanists at Duke University. They are approaches to reading texts–but more than that, they are philosophical doctrines. Most of them are explicitly critical of naturalistic philosophy in the tradition of David Hume.

Rosenberg is entitled to criticize those philosophies: they are in conflict with his own. (So are some views taught and studied in philosophy departments.) But his apparent identification of particular theories, such as structuralism and deconstruction, with the whole disciplines of literary criticism and history seems problematic. It reflects, I think, some lingering bitterness between particularly influential postmodernists and analytical philosophers at institutions like Duke.

Perhaps he means that the humanities are inherently untrustworthy because some of their most prominent practitioners have endorsed theories incompatible with naturalism, whereas hardly any biologists or chemists have done so. But Rosenberg doesn’t make that point explicitly and instead seems to raise doubts about our knowledge of the past (“history”) and of literary texts. Strangely, his skepticism seems to resemble post-structuralism. Or perhaps all he wants to do is endorse forms of history and literary criticism that make verifiable claims. So would many humanists. Unless I misunderstand him, Rosenberg is operating with stereotypes about humanists that are no more fair than some stereotypes that one hears about analytical philosophers.

rebirth without metaphysics

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Death, according to Martin Heidegger, was a fundamental fact about human existence. Life was movement through time toward an end.

Birth, for Heidegger’s critical ex-student Hannah Arendt, was the fundamental fact about human beings as moral or political creatures. At birth, our life course is maximally open, unpredictable, and, in that sense, free. Birth or “natality” symbolizes our power to start anew.*

Rebirth, for the man we call the Buddha, was the fundamental fact about life. At least according to one tradition, he did not mean a literal transfer of the soul into a different body at death. When one of his monks taught that doctrine, the Buddha apparently rebuked him, saying, “From whom have you heard, you foolish man …, that I have explained the dharma in that way? Foolish man, have I not declared in many ways that consciousness is dependently arisen …?”**

What then did he mean? Here is a sympathetic reconstruction:

  1. I cannot directly perceive my self or its effects. All I perceive is a sequence of sensations, judgments, desires, and other ideas. The Buddha is a strict empiricist. If we cannot perceive something by any means, it is nothing. As David Hume wrote, I am “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
  2. Each of these ideas has a cause. It does not arise from nothing but depends on something before it. We might identity the causes of ideas as other ideas or as physical processes in the brain. That is merely a difference in the level of analysis. Either way, the core premise is “dependent origination” (pratityasamutpada). Every idea is part of a long causal chain.
  3. My ideas do not have the same span as my life. When I was one day old, I had none of the ideas that now fill my brain. Many of the ideas that I had when I was 5 or 15 are forgotten, although their indirect effects may linger. Some of the ideas in my mind today were in my father’s head before I was born. I will forget some of my ideas while they still are alive in other minds.
  4. I was not born free, in the sense of having a self capable of choosing its beliefs and desires. I was born as a thinking organism which learned its beliefs and desires from experience, strongly shaped by the already-living people around me. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1928, “even if the rest of one’s life consisted in one long process of negation and destruction of the natural world view acquired in youth, the determining influence of these early impressions would still be predominant.”
  5. My thoughts may have consequences (“karma”) for others, going beyond my lifespan. Even if you sharply disagree with me, by sharing my idea with you, I have affected you.
  6. If the self is a bundle of constantly changing ideas that are caused by other people’s ideas and shared in part with other people, then the moment of my biological birth was not the beginning of “me,” nor will my biological death be the end. The bundle that is me is constantly being reborn, in my consciousness and in other minds.
  7. Notwithstanding 6, different minds are not the same. I am not you. Individuality is real, in some sense, and biological death matters.
  8. Notwithstanding 2, the sensation we have of choosing and controlling our ideas is valid (morally, if not metaphysically).

Rebirth captures this combination. A birth is a new beginning but not ex nihilo. It is wonderful but not literally miraculous, being the result of regular natural processes.  It marks a break with a past, yet the newborn is completely dependent on and thoroughly influenced by adults. We might view rebirth as a metaphor for life, but if one thinks (with the Buddha and Hume) that the “self” is fictional or metaphorical, then what is metaphorical is the assertion that life begins in infancy. Literally, life is continuous renewal, and that makes rebirth more literal than birth.

*This paper argues that the contrast between Heidegger and Arendt on birth/death is overblown.
**Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.

Tocqueville the particularist

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I believe that: 1) moral knowledge is irreducibly experiential and particularistic; hence 2) efforts to replace moral judgment with general methods and principles cannot succeed; and thus 3) we need democratic deliberation by people who also have diverse practical experiences.

The particularistic part of this argument (1)  seems an overlooked element in Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Consider vol. 2, book 1, chapter 3 of Democracy in America:

THE deity does not regard the human race collectively. He surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed; and he discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them. God, therefore, stands in no need of general ideas. …

Such, however, is not the case with man. If the human mind were to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual cases before it, the immensity of detail would soon lead it astray and it would no longer see anything. [So people are forced to generalize, but …]

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect; for there are in nature no beings exactly alike, no things precisely identical, no rules indiscriminately and alike applicable to several objects at once.

De Tocqueville is not quick to connect particularistic thinking and democracy. Quite the contrary; he presumes that democracy encourages the habit of hasty generalization:

In the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated, and weak. The movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself. In order, therefore, to explain what is passing in the world, man is driven to seek for some great causes, which, acting in the same manner on all our fellow creatures, thus induce them all voluntarily to pursue the same track. This again naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and superinduces a taste for them. … When I repudiate the traditions of rank, professions, and birth …, I am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself, and this leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great number of very general notions.

His leading example is his own people, the French, who are both egalitarian and prone to quick generalization and abstract thinking. But the Americans are an exception (chap. 4):

This difference between the Americans and the French originates in several causes, but principally in the following one. The Americans are a democratic people who have always directed public affairs themselves. The French are a democratic people who for a long time could only speculate on the best manner of conducting them. The social condition of the French led them to conceive very general ideas on the subject of government, while their political constitution prevented them from correcting those ideas by experiment and from gradually detecting their insufficiency; whereas in America the two things constantly balance and correct each other.

I am not interested in distinctions between French and American people, but in the ideal model that de Tocqueville attributed to the United States of his time. Because Americans made relatively few social distinctions, and great masses of people could vote on legislation, they were in danger of embracing general ideas that would distort reality. Indeed, this has been a recurrent frailty of our political culture. However, because we Americans “direct public affairs ourselves,” we learn to accommodate our general principles to complex reality. Denying Americans the right to participate directly–for instance, by dramatically limiting the role of juries in criminal law or, in general, by over-empowering an expert class–will make Americans worse at thinking and judging.