{"id":8692,"date":"2012-04-13T16:05:50","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T20:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=8692"},"modified":"2024-08-19T14:22:30","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T18:22:30","slug":"hegel-and-the-buddha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=8692","title":{"rendered":"Hegel and the Buddha"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{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 &#8220;Hegel[ian]&#8221; and &#8220;Budd[ism].&#8221; A better post of mine would be &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=26293\" rel=\"bookmark\">a Hegelian meditation<\/a>.&#8221; See also: T.C. Morton, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.romantic-circles.org\/praxis\/buddhism\/morton\/morton.html\">Hegel on Buddhism<\/a>&#8221; or\u00a0Ari\u00ebn Voogt, &#8220;Spirituality in Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology of Spirit: An analysis in the wake of Foucault,&#8221; <em>Metaphilosophy<\/em> 52.5 (2021): 616-627.}<\/p>\n<p>Contrary to popular belief, Hegel&#8217;s dialectic has nothing to do with &#8220;thesis, antithesis, synthesis.&#8221; The characteristic pattern is rather:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Consciousness: one experiences, thinks, and acts according to habit, custom, or instinct;<\/li>\n<li>Self-consciousness: one becomes aware of one&#8217;s habits, customs, or instincts, leading to irony, discomfort, conflict, and creativity;<\/li>\n<li>Reason: One chooses a particular way of thinking and being.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The cycle can repeat if one realizes that what looked like &#8220;reason&#8221; was, from a more distant perspective, an arbitrary choice.<\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Suffering: the experience of all sentient beings, which inevitably includes frustration, fear, pain, and loss;<\/li>\n<li>Attachment: suffering that arises from wanting something that one cannot control (and often from <em>knowing<\/em> that what one wants cannot be had);<\/li>\n<li>Cessation of suffering, which arises from renouncing attachment;<\/li>\n<li>Equanimity, which is not complete dis-attachment or lack of concern but rather deliberate engagement with the world without a futile sense of frustration.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The parallels seem to me interesting and fruitful, although not exact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{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 &#8220;Hegel[ian]&#8221; and &#8220;Budd[ism].&#8221; A better post of mine would be &#8220;a Hegelian meditation.&#8221; See also: T.C. Morton, &#8220;Hegel on Buddhism&#8221; or\u00a0Ari\u00ebn Voogt, &#8220;Spirituality in Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology of Spirit: An [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,48,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism","category-continental-philosophy","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8692"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26328,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8692\/revisions\/26328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}