Category Archives: philosophy

Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery

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In the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, a large room replicates a Zen monastery in Kyoto where originally 30 large silk panel paintings of animals were hung with a triptych of the Buddha between two bodhisattvas. Ito Jakuchu painted all these panels between 1757 and 1766.

They are superficially uniform: all the same size and shape, hung on the same luxurious cloth backgrounds, showing small animals in shallow scenes that are gently or evenly lit so that barely any shadows emerge. But they are far from monotonous. Some are placid; others vibrant, crowded, even violent.

The technique varies widely. White paint is sometimes spattered on the back of the sheer silk panel to shine through and represent snow. In other cases, the artist builds up a large patterned area by coloring small planes that are surrounded by negative space (blank silk) instead of painted outlines. Certain objects are depicted with radical abstraction: a stream is just a serpentine block of paint. Other objects are represented in obsessive detail.

The room as a whole is arranged according to subtle patterns, with interesting parallels between each panel and the one facing it from the opposite wall.

I know little about Jakuchu’s cultural context and have read only that he was somewhat eccentric, independent of artistic schools, and a Sinophile Buddhist. But I imagine him saying something like this. “The snow doesn’t form subtle patterns above a pond for our delectation or by anyone’s design. It just falls that way because of what happened to occur before it fell. There is no plan or purpose to nature. Yet, because of the way we have evolved, we happen to find it lovely. We also love any physical object that represents such a scene. It too is the result of random and impersonal forces, the forces that created Ito Jakuchu and ultimately ended his life. Those white paint spatters on the back illustrate the “dependent origination” of this work. And yet they are not random. They were spattered by a man who was trying to recreate nature for his own delight and yours.”

Life may be a bridge
Between darkness and darkness,
But look at the birds.

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.

unhappiness and injustice are different problems

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The ancient sources do not specify which specific miseries flew out of Pandora’s box, but I would suggest they came in three groups.

Some forms of suffering happen to human beings because of the kinds of creatures we are. We can postpone death, aging, disease, pain, and fear, but they are inevitable. These are the natural woes. Our very existence requires the death of other people, or else the earth would be too crowded for the living.

Injustices are miseries for which we rightly blame our fellow human beings. What counts as an injustice (as opposed to a natural phenomenon), is a matter of dispute. I would include sins of omission, such as my own failure to help people even though I own superfluous resources. I would include both unjust actions and inequitable states of affairs. Those are controversial claims, but no one doubts that some kinds of injustice exist.

The third category, unhappiness, is a failure to flourish, thrive, enjoy, and achieve equanimity or satisfaction.

These three categories of woe are empirically related. For example, even though death is inevitable, injustice causes millions to die early. It is difficult to be happy if one is suffering from disease and pain, or if one is a victim.

Yet the connections are loose, not logical or inevitable. In a wealthy suburban subdivision where injustice is absent and natural afflictions are normally remote, people may still be miserable to the point of suicide. In a poor village under a repressive government, people may be happier.

Even if injustice does not necessitate unhappiness, it is still an evil, not to be excused. But unhappiness is evidently a separate problem.

We pay far more attention to mitigating or postponing natural afflictions than to fighting injustice–and even less to unhappiness. Also, European and American philosophy since 1800 has much more to say about injustice than about unhappiness.

A just society harnesses science to reduce suffering. Science is also beginning to give attention to positive states of mind, like flourishing and equanimity. That opens the possibility that we could develop new methods of enhancing happiness. But if freedom is also valuable, or is a component or aspect of happiness, then the idea of engineering happiness is disturbing.

Politics is a tool for mitigating natural afflictions and preventing injustice. In liberal democracies, happiness is not seen as a political objective. A government cannot make people happy and may threaten their freedom if it tries.

Some authors (Nietzsche, Emerson) have said something like this: My duty is limited to avoiding injustice. I cannot make other people happy. At best, I can contribute to the happiness of children or partners in intimate relationships. Thus I should concern myself with achieving equanimity for myself and perhaps serve as a model for others.

I can’t accept that such a high degree of self-involvement is either ethically acceptable or compatible with happiness, properly understood. So then the question becomes how to achieve happiness while helping other people to be happy without abridging their freedom.

blaming the individual, blaming the war

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“The government is going to want to blame this on an individual rather than blame it on the war” — John Henry Browne, defense attorney for the US staff sergeant accused of murdering 16 Afghans [NY Times].

I have lately been dwelling on the question of human agency versus social context or structure. It is a major theme in Cathy J. Cohen’s book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics, which I am in the midst of reviewing. And it came up explicitly in committee work last weekend.

We were discussing standards for civic education, and the question arose whether to make “agency” (probably not by that name) a core educational value. In practice, this would play out in settings like a history class on slavery. The older historiography emphasized structure: slavery as an overwhelming influence on the victims. Recent historiography has recovered the agency and creativity of slaves. The danger in a k-12 classroom would be teaching kids that slavery was basically OK because the victims were still agents and made choices.

The staff sergeant accused of the Afghanistan massacre made a choice that vast numbers of other US soldiers have not made and would not make. To deny his responsibility for what he allegedly did is to deny his agency and that of his fellow soldiers–it would make them all seem like automata or victims instead of responsible professionals. At the same time, he wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been sent for the third time, against his will, into a bloody counter-insurgency war halfway around the world. So the context or structure matters.

That is an extreme case, for which the word “evil” seems appropriate, but the same logic arises when kids drop out of high school or have  unprotected sex. These are acts that involve both context and agency. How we weigh the two will affect how we respond.

In my view, we should not simply aim to make structures better (e.g., get out of Afghanistan or improve schools). Those are valid goals, but people should also have agency. Institutions and policies will turn out better if we all help shape them; also, actively shaping the world is an aspect of a flourishing human life. In concrete terms, that would mean not only reforming education so that kids have better outcomes, but enlisting youth in reforming education. At our best, we now strive to enhance the human capital or market power of young people. We rarely even try to enhance their political agency.

We should also recognize agency wherever it does emerge. Even in extreme cases, like prisons and war zones, people are agents as well as objects. Dismissing their action as the mere product of structure or context diminishes them. On the other hand, to assess the limits and constraints on their agency is a precondition of enhancing it. If you think that kids are simply choosing to drop out of high school and are not in any sense being pushed out, you will diagnose their situation wrong. Likewise, it’s naive to think that American soldiers in Afghanistan have been placed in situations where they are free to do a lot of good.

Dickens and the right to be loved

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It’s a philosopher’s cliché that every right implies a “correlative duty.” If I have a right to live, you have a duty not to kill me. If my kid has a right to an education, someone has a duty to pay for it–whether that’s me or the people of my town, state, or nation.

One of our greatest needs as human beings is to be especially loved by someone else: first as a child, then as a partner or a close friend. The need for partial or exclusive love may vary somewhat, but it is strong and widespread.

Alas, in many cases, no one has a duty to love a particular person. If you have a serious need but no one is required to meet it, you do not have a right. When people have unmet needs without rights, that is a genuine tragedy. It is an example of a problem that may not be solvable politically, i.e., that might still trouble an ideal society.

Dickens’ Great Expectations (which I just finished reading to my aforementioned child) provides an extraordinary number of cases in which it is debatable or problematic whether A has a duty to love B. For instance:

  • Pip is orphaned and raised by his sister, who does not love him and perhaps resents the obligation. But her husband loves Pip–despite having a questionable obligation to do so–and later Pip fails to reciprocate. Presumably, Mrs. Joe acquired a duty to love Pip against her inclination, and Pip is obliged to love Joe just because Joe loved him beyond duty.
  • Compeyson has an obligation to Mrs. Havisham to love her because he wooed and promised to marry her, but he has no intention of fulfilling his duty.
  • Estella is orphaned as a baby and given (with her assent) to Mrs. Havisham, who does not love her and who teaches her to be unable to give love.
  • Magwitch loves Pip (or the idea of Pip as a gentleman) in a way that puts Pip under a most unwelcome obligation. But Pip comes to love Magwitch because of the latter’s need.
  • Pip loves Estella, and she acknowledges a kind of right to be loved in return, but she insists she cannot give it.
  • Mrs. Havisham’s family becomes Pip and Estella, yet she does not love either until late in the novel.
  • Pip and Herbert love one another (Platonically) as friends, even though they begin by physically fighting over Estella. Pip secretly assists Herbert in order to love him without conferring an obligation.
  • Pip assumes that Biddy will love him as a wife once he settles for her, but he has no right to marriage. His willingness to accept her friendship indicates his moral progress.

In Dickens’ original ending, harmony was restored among Pip, Joe, Biddy, and Herbert, but Estella and Pip were never united. I assume that was because they had no right to each others’ love, having acted badly. Bulwer-Lytton persuaded Dickens to change the ending so that they were united, although the last sentence is slightly ambiguous as to their future. Presumably, Dickens was persuaded that they deserved each other. But even with its more conventional happy ending, the novel still makes one wonder: Who has a right to the love of whom?