Maverick Philosopher

Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism . . .

. . . and whether the self is an illusion.

Top o' the Stack.

The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli

Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin what I will call moral self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects moral self-denial with metaphysical self-denial. Thus Buddhism denies the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of eliminativism about the self. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of Buddhism and the Christian doctrine of the self.  Just as the full appreciation of the mother tongue comes only to those who study foreign languages, the  full appreciation of the 'mother religion' comes only to those who study foreign religions.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are the powers active within me -- will, with its energy -- mine. Nor does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements, which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either . . . . And I myself belong not to me, but to God. (Unseen Warfare, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995, p. 172)

I'll hazard a gloss: I am not the master of my fate nor the captain of my soul. Everything I have I have from God who created me ex nihilo and sustains me  moment-by-moment. I am not my own man. I do not have property-rights in my body nor in any attribute or adjunct of what I take to be my self. For this very reason, suicide is a grave sin. If a substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then I am not a substance: only God is a substance in the plenary sense of the term.  

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the  Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of each of which it is true that "This is not mine," etc.  Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of the khandas or personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies them, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one's very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact falsely identify ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) My house, my child, my brilliant insights.  A theologian might identify himself with his theology, when he must know that his theology could be light-years away from God's theology (God's self-knowledge).

These false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfulness consists in. (The forward slash in my typography stands for inclusive disjunction, the inclusive 'or.')

Thus Scupoli (whom I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one's outer or inner experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.) can in truth be one's self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows.

If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that nothing is such that I have complete control over it. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control argument' against the existence of the self.  Scupoli has something similar:

Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin? Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us;  nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take credit for or take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it "independently of anything else." But nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything. Here is a reason why pride is listed among the Seven Deadly Sins.

But does this amount to a metaphysical denial of the very existence of the self?  Not within Christian metaphysics. For that what is needed is the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one's actions or attributes, then one is not a self  in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.  

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli set the standard for selfhood very, and perhaps unattainably, high. Both claim that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. None of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one's body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, distinguished career, foolish mistakes, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

Having set the standard for selfhood so high, Buddhism must deny that we are selves.  Christianity, however, is far less radical, holding as it does that we are selves all right, but ontologically derivative selves: we derive our being from the Creator, who is Being itself. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.) We are creatures of the one and only Absolute Self who brought us into being and sustains us in being. On Buddhism, nothing at all has 'self nature' in the eminent and plenary sense; on Christianity, one thing does, God. For Buddhism, there is no Absolute Self, there is in reality nothing like the Hindu Atman. For Christianity, there is an, or rather, the uniquely unique Absolute Self, namely, God. 

What about us? One thing is clear to both Buddhists and Christians: no one of us is identical to the Absolute Self.  For Buddhists, there is no Absolute Self, and for Christians, while there is an the Absolute Self, no one of us, no finite self, is or ever becomes identical to it, not even in the Beatific Vision.  If the visio beata involves a participation in the divine life, this does not involve a total assimilation: the finite self never loses its self-identity or individuality. In the Beatific Vision, creator-creature duality is mitigated, but never wholly eliminated.   

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control, our derivatively real selves. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

So in what sense does Scupoli embrace a 'no self' (anatta, anatman) doctrine? In the sense that in orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christian metaphysics no one of us enjoys selfhood in the plenary sense of the term.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

Substack latest.

Does causation have a moral dimension?

This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism.

He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books he has recently published. A veritable writing machine, he's out-Fesering the phenomenal Ed Feser. And it's good stuff. I dove into his  Trinity and Incarnation this morning and will be discussing in future posts the shift in his views from orthodox or what he calls catholic (lower-case 'c') Christianity to a position reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta he calls "Qualified Monism."

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Substack latest. Excerpt:

One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it.

Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist

Substack latest.

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that all is unsatisfactory?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why? 

Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique

Substack latest. 

Martin Buber's critique of Buddhism, and of mysticism generally, is formidable.

 

Against Spiritual Self-Help

Because we are spiritual beings, we pray. Because we cannot be lamps unto ourselves, we need to.

A Difference Between Jesus Christ and Buddha

"And Jesus wept." (John 11, 35)

Another Note on Buddhism and Christianity

We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be  protracted unto nirvanic oblivion, and it is in Buddhism. That might be taking it too far.

Renunciation and world-flight in Christianity, by contrast, are for the sake of a higher life in which finite personhood is, in an Hegelian trope, aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. "I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) Jesus did not preach extinction. He preached personal transformation. Buddhism is radical: the renunciation is total. This aligns it with metaphysical pessimism and indeed nihilism, whereas Christianity is full of hope and promise.

One thing is clear: to seek the final fulfillment of desire in this life is a mistake. But could desire itself be a mistake, as the Second Noble Truth has it?  If desire itself is a mistake, then life is a mistake.

But you and I have been through that
And this is not our fate;
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.

Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Analysis here.

Buddhism, Suffering, and One Reason I am not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that all is unsatisfactory?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why? 

Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   If it were fully satisfactory, why would you be inclined to repeat the pleasure? Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit, bad infinity.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had.  One also suffers when the satisfaction sought is achieved but revealed to be less than what one expected.

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected and inordinate; the problem is desire itself.  The solution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root (radix) of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated).  It is a radical solution.

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' -- to hazard an oxymoron -- the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent. It brings the meta-physical or super-sensible to bear in the evaluation of the physical or sensible.   Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real, truly important, and truly satisfactory. But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I question both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is arguably faulty because arguably incoherent: it presupposes while denying the existence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be its own self-extinction.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.  These other doctrines are inseparable from the doctrine of suffering, and they, like it, have a radical meaning. It is not just that things change, but that they are in Heraclitean flux.  It is an observable fact that things change, but the nature of change cannot be 'read off' from the fact of change.  Is change Heraclitean or Aristotelian?  If the former, then everything is continuously changing; if the latter, then there are enduring substrata of change which, for a time at least, do not change: one and the same avocado is first unripe and then ripe.  Neither of these views of change is empirically obvious in the way that it is empirically obvious that there is change.

Now it is radical impermanence that underpins radical unsatisfactoriness and that also implies the doctrine of anatta, which, in Western terms, is the denial of the existence of  substances. This denial, too, is radical since it is not merely the denial that substances are permanent, but a denial that there are any substances at all. 

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously --except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

Is Buddhism a Religion?

Julius Evola in The Doctrine of Awakening, pp. 9-10, states unequivocally,

. . . Buddhism -- referring always to original [Pali] Buddhism -- is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies supernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding our relationship with this reality that we know more or less as 'religion.'

What he means is that there is a strong tendency in the West to identify religion with faith-based religion, and that Buddhism is not a religion in this sense, based as it is on knowledge and direct insight, not faith or revelation.

. . . Dahlke sums up the matter, saying that one characteristic of Western superficiality is the tendency always to identify religion as a whole with religion based on faith.14 [P. Dahlke, Buddhismus als Religion und Moral (Munich and Neubiberg, 1923, p. 11) Beyond those who "believe" are those who "know," and to these the purely "mytho­logical" character of many simply religious, devotional, and even scholastically theo­logical concepts is quite clear. It is largely a question of different degrees of knowl­edge. Religion, from religo, is, as the word itself indicates, a reconnecting and, more specifically, a reconnecting of a creature to a Creator with the eventual introduction of a mediator or of an expiator. On the basis of this central idea can be built up a whole system of faith, devotion, and even mysticism that, admittedly, is capable of carrying an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. However, it does so to a large extent passively since it is based essentially on sentiment, emotion, and suggestion. In such a system no amount of scholastic explaining will ever completely resolve the irrational and sub-intellectual element. (p. 9)

Summing up, we can say that pure Buddhism is a 'religion' without faith, revelation, sentiment, emotion, or devotion.  Alternatively, if those features are deemed essential to religion, then Buddhism is not a religion. 

We can easily understand that in some cases such "religious" forms are neces­sary; and even the East, in later periods, has known something of the kind, for instance, the way of devotion-bhakti-marga (from bhaj, "to adore")-of Ramānuja and certain forms of the Sakti cult: but we must also realize that there may be some who have no need of them and who, by race and by calling, desire a way free from "religious" mythologies, a way based on clear knowledge, realization, and awaken­ing. An ascetic, whose energies are employed in this direction, achieves the highest form of ascesis; and Buddhism gives us an example of an ascesis that is outstanding of its kind - -in saying "of its kind" we wish to point out that Buddhism represents a great historical tradition with texts and teachings available to all; it is not an esoteric school with its knowledge reserved for a restricted number of initiates.

For some, the spiritual quest is impossible without devotion and such accessories as pictorial representations such as icons along with other sensory aids including bodily postures (kneeling, etc.), gestures (sign of the cross, etc.) incense, candles, medals, water, ashes, oil, bread, and wine all appropriately sanctified within the context of simple or elaborate rites. Thus ordinary water, appropriately blessed by a priest, becomes 'holy water' and ordinary bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the Catholic mass, undergoes transubstantiation into the body and blood of Christ.  For Buddhism, this is all in the end "mythological," including the subtle logic-chopping and dialectical maneuvers involved in the scholastic theology of transubstantiation.  Discursive prayer and other devotional practices may be necessary for some to make spiritual progress, but they can become a distraction and a form of superstition.  The Ultimate Realization lies beyond all of these 'bhaktic' or devotional practices and of course it lies beyond all theological dialectics.  And even if there is realm beyond this gross realm, a subtler realm which we will enter at death, that would only be a higher level of samsara and not nirvana, the ultimate goal of Realization. 

In this sense we can, and indeed we must, state that Buddhism -- referring always to original Buddhism-is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies su­pernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding one's relationship with this reality that we know more or less as "religion." The validity of these statements would in no way be altered were one to set out in greater detail to defend the excellence of the theistic point of view against Bud­dhism, by charging the Doctrine of Awakening with more or less declared atheism. This brings us to the second point for discussion, but which we need only touch upon here as it is dealt with at length later in this work.

The atheism of the Buddhist is not the crass atheism of the materialistic worldling devoid of spiritual depth and spiritual aspiration. The atheism of the Buddhist is the denial that  any God, even the ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas could be the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Ultimate.  This, I take it, is logically compatible with the belief that there are gods and even a unique God in higher samsaric realms this side of the Absolute.

We have admitted that a "religiously" conceived system can carry an individual to a certain level of spiritual realization. The fact that this system is based on a theistic concept determines this level. The theistic concept, however, is by no means either unique or even the highest "religious" relationship such as the Hindu bhakti or the predominant faiths in the Western or Arab world. Whatever one may think of it, the theistic concept represents an incomplete view of the world, since it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex. From a metaphysical and (in the higher sense) traditional point of view, the notion on which theism is based of representing "being" in a per­sonal form even when theologically sublimated, can never claim to be the ultimate ideal. The concept and the realization of the extreme apex or, in other words, of that which is beyond both such a "being " and its opposite, "nonbeing," was and is natural to the Aryan spirit. It does not deny the theistic point of view but recognizes it in its rightful hierarchic place and subordinates it to a truly transcendental concept.

We are being told that theism is an incomplete worldview because "it lacks the extreme hierarchic apex."  Theism doesn't go all the way to the top. Even if  God is self-subsisting Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, as on the rarefied conception of Aquinas, which is beyond the prevalent 'God is a being among beings' conception, there is something still higher in the hierarchy, namely 'something' which is beyond Being and Nonbeing. The God of Aquinas is. He is an ens, even if he is also esse.  He is also a personal being. The Absolutely Unconditioned, however, is beyond personality and impersonality as it is beyond Being and Nonbeing.  God is not denied by Buddhism, but placed below the ultimately transcendent.

It is freely admitted that things are less simple than they seem in Western theol­ogy, especially in the realm of mysticism, and more particularly where it is con­cerned with so-called "negative theology." Also in the West the notion of a personal God occasionally merges into the idea of an ineffable essence, of an abysmal divin­ity, as the έν conceived by the Neoplatonists beyond the όν, as the Gottheit in the neuter beyond the Gott, which, after Dionysius the Areopagite, appeared frequently in German mysticism and which exactly corresponds with the neuter Brahman above the theistic Brahmā of Hindu speculation. But in the West it is more a notion wrapped in a confused mystical cloud than a precise doctrinal and dogmatic definition conforming to a comprehensive cosmic system. And this notion, in point of fact, has had little or no effect on the "religious" bias prevalent in the Western mind: its only result has been to carry a few men, confused in their occasional intuitions and visions, beyond the frontiers of "orthodoxy."

Evola's point seems basically correct: the negative theology of the mystics never became mainstream in the way that Aquinas's conception became mainstream in the Catholic church. 

That very apex that Christian theology loses in a confused background is, instead, very often placed consciously in the foreground by the Aryo-Oriental tradi­tions. To talk in this respect of atheism or even of pantheism betrays ignorance, an ignorance shared by those who spend their time unearthing oppositions and anti-theses. The truth is that the traditions of the Aryans who settled in the East retain and conserve much of what the later traditions of races of the same root who settled in the West have lost or no longer understand or retain only fragmentarily. A contributing factor here is the undoubted influence on European faiths of concepts of Semitic and Asiatic-Mediterranean origin. Thus to accuse of atheism the older traditions, particularly the Doctrine of Awakening, and also other Western traditions that re­flect the same spirit, only betrays an attempt to expose and discredit a higher point of view on the part of a lower one: an attempt that, had circumstances been reversed, would have been qualified out of hand by the religious West as Satanic. And, in fact, we shall see that it was exactly thus that it appeared to the doctrine of the Buddha (cf. p. 85-86).

The recognition of that which is "beyond both 'being' and 'nonbeing'" opens to ascetic realization possibilities unknown to the world of theism. The fact of reaching the apex, in which the distinction between "Creator" and "creature" becomes metaphysically meaningless, allows of a whole system of spiritual realizations that, since it leaves behind the categories of "religious" thought, is not easily understood: and, above all, it permits a direct ascent, that is, an ascent up the bare mountainside, without support and without useless excursions to one side or another. This is the exact meaning of the Buddhist ascesis; it is no longer a system of disciplines de-signed to generate strength, sureness, and unshakable calm, but a system of spiritual realization.

Buddhism -- and again later we shall see this distinctly -- carries the will for the unconditioned to a limit that is almost beyond the imagination of the modem Westerner. And in this ascent beside the abyss the climber rejects all "mythologies," he proceeds by means of pure strength, he ignores all mirages, he rids himself of any residual human weakness, he acts only according to pure knowledge. Thus the Awak­ened One (Buddha), the Victor (Jina) could be called he whose way was unknown to men, angels, and to Brahma himself (the Sanskrit name for the theistic god). Admit­tedly, this path is not without dangers, yet it is the path open to the virile mind-viriya-magga. The texts clearly state that the doctrine is "for the wise man, the expert, not for the ignorant, the inexpert." The simile of the cutting grass is used: "As kusa grass when wrongly grasped cuts the hand, so the ascetic life wrongly practised leads to infernal torments."' The simile of the serpent is used: "As a man who wants serpents goes out for serpents, looks for serpents, and finding a powerful serpent grasps it by the body or by the tail; and the serpent striking at him bites his hand or arm or other part so that he suffers death or mortal anguish-and why is this? Because he wrongly grasped the serpent-so there are men who are harmed by the doctrines. And why is this? Because they wrongly grasped the doctrines.'

It must be thus quite clear that the Doctrine of Awakening is not itself one particular religion that is opposed to other religions.

In sum, Buddhism on Evola's account is neither crassly atheistic nor crassly antireligious: it does not deny  supersensible Transcendence.  But this Transcendence is not a personal creator God who reveals himself to man, his creature, but the Unconditioned Absolute the ultimate path to which is not the path of faith and devotion but the path whereby one seeks to realize the Unconditioned Absolute in one's own consciousness by finally overcoming every duality of the discursive intellect.

Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

Vito Caiati writes,

 . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?

What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor.  (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.

But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up.  And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it.  It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.  

I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.  

The same problem does not arise for Christianity.  In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance.  Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization.  There is no need for special experiences.  Perhaps we can say that the soteriology  of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic.  But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.

As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had.  They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.  

But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA.  This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat.  And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.  

Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes, 

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority.  For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience.  Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center.  This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere.  Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing.  The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise.  A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov.  The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process.  The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind.  One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)

My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra.  (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.)  He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this.  He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.  

I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

I conjecture that what  Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side.  Christians not so much.  But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation.  The unity of a sentence without which  it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.

Double Cultural Appropriation!

Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.  

My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong. 

To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form.  If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong.  Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on. 

One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns.  I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take.  I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?

Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day.  Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major? 

Who owns truth?

Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.

There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen.  Their appropriation cannot be illicit.

My appropriation of Asian wisdom -- which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern -- is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation.  Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good. 

ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:

Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.

Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe. 

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on.  Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity.  Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction? 

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect.  Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense?  If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss . . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, floats insubstantially before the merely speculative reason, which incurs no cost in allowing either the one or the other to vanish entirely.  (A613 B641, Norman Kemp Smith tr. corrected by BV)

God thinks to himself: I am a necessary being: I cannot not exist. What's more, I am unconditionally necessary: I do not derive my necessity from another like numbers and other abstracta; they derive their necessity from me, but I have my necessity from myself.  And yet, while my nonexistence is impossible, I can conceive of my nonexistence: the question Whence then am I? makes sense.  My nonexistence is thinkable without logical contradiction even if it is impossible. This is troubling.  I do not exist of merely logical necessity, but of metaphysical necessity, which is a species of real necessity, and the latter suggests some hidden contingency, some hidden dependence.

God thinks further to himself:  Am I truly unconditioned? I am who am: my nature is to be, to exist.  (Exodus, 3:14) I do not have existence like my creatures; I am existence itself in its primary instance.  As such, I cannot not exist, and I cannot cease to exist. I cannot commit suicide. I have no power over my own existence. I am bound to exist.  It is my nature to exist, and I have no power over my nature. How then am I absolutely sovereign?  I am bound by a condition over which I have no control. 

How then am I absolutely unconditioned?  I am not that than which no greater can be conceived.  For I can conceive a greater, a being that is not bound by existence but is free to enter nonexistence.  If I were absolutely unconditioned, then I would be beyond existence and nonexistence. I would be master of that distinction, and not subject to it. I would be beyond all duality.

As subject to the distinction between existence and nonexistence, I am not the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Unconditioned. I am merely the highest being. I am at the apex of the samsaric pyramid -- but still samsaric. The truly Unconditioned is beyond Being and Nonbeing.

With this, his final thought, God entered nibbana.

Reading Now: Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening

Excellent introduction to Pali Buddhism. Will blog portions later.

You say Evola was a fascist? Well, Sartre was a Stalinist; Frege was an anti-Semite (according to Michael Dummett); and Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were members of the Nazi Party. Are those affiliations good reasons to not read those great authors? Not to a sane person. Only to a leftist crapweasel. You know my motto: "Study everything; join nothing."   No book burning, no de-platforming! Stand up for free speech and open inquiry! Defend the universities against the Pee Cee!

To hell with the Left and its index librorum prohibitorum. To hell with the Democrat Party. Man up, gear up, bone up. 

Spiritual Practices and Metaphysical Dogmas

It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of metaphysical dogmas dissuade you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their implementation. Don't let the weakness of the three pillars supporting the Buddhist edifice, anatta, anicca, dukkha, keep you from a long and salutary session on the black mat.

Related: A 'No' to 'No Self'

Meditation as Inner Listening

Our friend Vlastimil V. worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to Vlastimil to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to Vlastimil an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order.  But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

 

A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication.  The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha  which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory.  So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position  all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta).  They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha)  drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy.  In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent  and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?

No!

For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God.  The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and  cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory? 

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Critical Question

How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued  relative to a  nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?

I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable.  Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it.  It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.

To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.

The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."

To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value.  Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life  that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.

As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either :  this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world  it falls short of.

I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned  a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader  for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic,  existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving.  And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.

 

 

 

A Similar Pattern in Benatar

One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.

To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists. 

But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent.  Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live -- that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort. 

If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real -- elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order. 

Buddhism

We are told not to become attached to the usual objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, land and stand. Why not? Because they are impermanent (anicca), insubstantial (anatta), and do not ultimately satisfy (dukkha).

So there is something permanent, substantial, and finally satisfying?

No!  Nothing is!

Well then, you have no basis to devalue ordinary objects of desire! If nothing is or can be permanent, then it is no argument against anything to point out its impermanence. And similarly for the other two marks.

Buddhism in its root (radical) Pali form issues in nihilism.  If everything bears the three marks, then nothing is worthy of pursuit or avoidance. The quest for Transcendence voids itself.

The mistake is to think that desire as such is the root of woe when it is misdirected desire.

These ideas are presented in rigorous and scholarly fashion in my No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument, International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4):453-466 (2002). 

This here is but a bloggity-blog summary.

Pratityasamutpada

Claude Boissons writes to express puzzlement over the following quotation pulled from a Buddhism site:

Everything exists dependently upon everything else. Nothing exists independently in and of itself. Therefore, everything is empty of inherent existence. Every phenomenon is empty of true existence, therefore emptiness is the ultimate nature of everything that exists.

Professor Boisson remarks:  

I don’t understand how the second "therefore'' is used. Is it true that if nothing exists independently, the consequence is that nothing exists, period? And so I feel there is a play on words in moving from "empty of inherent existence" to "empty of true existence." 

 

Maybe some day you might tell us what you think about this?

How about right now?

Charitably understood, the Buddhist claim is not that nothing exists, period. For that would fly in the face of what we all know to be the case. The claim is not that nothing exists, but that what exists lacks self-nature.  This is the famous doctrine of 'no self' or anatta, which, along with anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering), make up the three pillars of Pali Buddhism.

The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' We can explain this in Western terms as follows.

If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. The world is a Heraclitean flux of momentary items, dharmas, each of which is insubstantial, impermanent, and something which breeds suffering among the ignorant who try to cling to what in itself cannot be clung to.

Causation in such a system is understood as paticcasamuppada (Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) usually translated as dependent origination or dependent arising according to which all dharmas arise in dependence upon other dharmas.

What is puzzling you is the move from 'empty of inherent existence' to empty of 'true existence.'

There is no puzzle if you understand 'empty of inherent' existence to mean 'empty of substantial existence' and 'true existence' to refer to a mode of existence that Buddhists claim nothing has.

Let me know if this makes sense to you. Of course, I am not endorsing it.

More on the Question: Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Just over the transom from Jacques:

Enjoying your posts as always!  Thanks for writing so regularly, at such a high level.  Reading your posts on Wittgenstein on religion I have a few quick thoughts about religion (or Christianity specifically).  When I first started reading Wittgenstein, I initially thought that he had in mind some very different reason for thinking that historical evidence or facts were irrelevant to religion.  Then I realized this was just what I wanted to think, for my own reasons; I think you've done a good job here of explaining what he and his followers probably have in mind, and why it seems so absurd.

Still, I have sympathy for his claim that it just wouldn't matter if it turned out that all the Gospels were fabrications (for example).  I'm not a Christian--at least, I don't think I am one?  But I have the strong intuition that the story of Christ is just true, in some ultimate sense, so that if it's not historically true that would only show that history is a superficial or irrelevant kind of truth--that it just doesn't matter what happened historically if we want to know about ultimate things like God, the soul, the afterlife.

If I learned that Christ never existed, for example, then I'd be inclined to interpret this "fiction" as some kind of intrusion of a higher reality into our lame little empirical world.  God might well pierce the Veil of Maya in a "fictional" story, right?  If this world is illusory or second-rate somehow, it wouldn't be that surprising if that's the way it works.  The prisoners in the Cave might first intuit the real world outside by seeing (similarly) "fictional" representations of the real world produced by the figures in front of the fire.

So I think Wittgenstein overlooks an important third possibility:  the truth of Christianity might be neither "historical" nor some set of "truths of reason" but instead some other truth that is just as "objective" (i.e., independent of any language games) but which is only grasped by means of a historically false narrative (or by means of participating in a certain language game for which questions of truth and falsity with respect to the empirical or historical world are irrelevant).  I realize this is kind of sketchy and vague!  Do you know what I mean? 

This is fascinating and I encourage Jacques to work out his ideas in detail and in depth.  

A comparison of Christianity with Buddhism suggests itself. As I understand Buddhism, its truth does not require the actual existence of a prince Siddartha who long ago attained Enlightenment by intense seated meditation under the Bodhi Tree and in so doing became Buddha. This is because one's own enlightenment does not depend on what some other person accomplished or failed to accomplish.  There is no Savior in Buddhism; or, if you will, one is one's own savior. Salvation is not vicarious, but individual. Buddhism is a religion of self-help, or 'own power': if one attains the salvific state one does so by one's own power and doing and not by the mediation or help of someone else. History, then, doesn't matter: there needn't have been someone in the past who did the work for us. The sutras might just be stories whose truth does not depend on past events, but is a function of their efficacy here and now in leading present persons to the salvific state (nibbana, nirvana).  Verification in the here and now is all that is needed.

What Jacques is saying sounds similar to this. The Christian story is true, but not because it records historical facts such as the crucifixion, death, and Resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth, who took the sins of the world upon himself, the sacrificial lamb of God who, by  taking the sins of mankind upon himself and expiating them on the cross, took away the sins: agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. Jacques is telling us that the Christian story is true whether or not it is historically true, and that its truth is therefore not the truth of an historical account.  And he agrees with Wittgenstein that the truths of Christianity are not propositions discernible by reason. I think Jacques is open to the idea that the truth of Christianity is revealed truth, a sort of revealed 'fiction' or 'myth' that illuminates our predicament.  But Jacques disagrees with Wittgenstein, and agrees with me, by denying that Christianity is a mere language game (Sprachspiel) and form of life (Lebensform).  That would subjectivize it, in contradiction to its being revealed truth. 

Jacques is proposing a fourth way: Christianity is the revelation by God of a sort of 'fictional' or 'mythical' truth that does not depend on what goes on "in our lame little empirical world."  To evaluate this one would have to know more about the sense in which Christianity is true on his reading. Buddhism doesn't need historical facts because its truth is a matter of the efficacy of its prescriptions and proscriptions in inducing in an individual an ever-deepening detachment from the samsaric world in the direction of an ultimate extinguishing of desire and the ego that feeds on it.  

I seem to recall Max Scheler saying somewhere that the Buddhist project is one of de-realizing the sensible world.  That is a good way of putting it. The Buddhist meditator aims to see through the world by penetrating its radical impermanence (anicca) which goes together with its total lack of self-nature or substantiality (anatta), the two together making it wholly 'ill' or 'unsatisfactory' (dukkha).

Christianity, however, is not life-denying in this sense. Christ says that he came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly.  This life is a transfigured life in which the self is not dissolved but transformed.  Christianity does not seek the eradication of desire, as does Buddhism, but its re-direction upon a worthy object.  

Orthodox -- not majuscule but miniscule 'o' -- Christianity is not susceptible to Jacques' reading. Christianity is a very strange religion blending as it does Platonic and Gnostic elements with Hebraic materialism and particularism.  (How odd of God to choose the Jews.) Although Gnosticism was rejected as heresy early on, Platonism is essential to Christianity as Joseph Ratzinger rightly argues in his Introduction to Christianity.  (Ratzinger was Pope before Bergoglio the Benighted. The German has a very good theological-philosophical head on his shoulders.) But Jewish materialism and particularism are also essential to Christianity.  No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

How the mystical-Platonic-spiritual-universal  elements (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, et al.) can be made to fit with the material-historical- particularist elements is not easy to say.  There are a number of tensions.

But the main thing that speaks against Jacques' interpretation is that Christianity does not propose an escape from this material world of space, time, flux, and history.  This world is not illusory or the veil of Maya as on such Indian systems as Advaita Vedanta, nor is it anicca, anatta, and dukkha in the precise senses that those terms have in original, Pali Buddhism.  This world is not a product of ignorance or avidya, and the task is not to see through it.  The goal is not to pierce the veil of Original Ignorance, but to accept Jesus Christ as one's savior from Original Sin. The material world is real, albeit derivatively real, as a created world. 

Is this world "second-rate"? Well, it does not possess the plenary reality of its Source, God.  It has a different and lesser mode of Being than God's mode of Being. And it is a fallen world.  On Christianity, it is not just mankind that is fallen, but the whole of creation.  What Christianity proposes is not an escape from this world into a purely spiritual world, but a redemption of this world that somehow spiritualizes the gross matter with which we are all too familiar.

So on my understanding of Christianity, the problem with the material world is not that it is material, but that it has been corrupted by some Event far in the past the negative effects of which can only be undone by subsequent historical events such as the birth of Christ, his atonement, and the Second Coming. History is essential to Christianity.

Like Jacques, I too have Platonic tendencies. That may come with being a philosopher.  Hence I sympathize with his sketch.  Maybe the truth lies in that direction.  But if we are trying to understand orthodox Christianity, then Jacques' approach is as unacceptable as Wittgenstein's. 

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Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis.  A taste:

A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann)

Years ago I noted the strange similarity of some arguments found in Nagarjuna and the late Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus. (Memo to self: blog it!)

Is Islam a Religion? Buddhism?

Claude Boisson writes,

Given your criterion 3 for an ideology to be a religious doctrine, it is doubtful that Islam could be viewed as a religion (it is also a socio-political system with a supremacist agenda, but that is another matter).

 

In Islam, man can err, has to be obedient to Allah, but man is not fallen, and needs no redemption.

 

When he is born, a human being is pure (and a Muslim by nature). His primordial nature (fitra) is not wounded, corrupted, fallen, and needs no regeneration. 

 

Even more, according to the most extensive interpretation of the (belated and somewhat anti-Qur'anic) doctrine of ismah (the impeccability of prophets), prophets, including Muhammad, never sin intentionally. 

 

Here again are my tentatively proposed  seven criteria for an ideology's being a religion:

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality and thus mind-like. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

 

As I understand Islam, a normative Muslim could accept my (1) and (2).  But as Professor Boisson makes clear, (3) implies that Islam is not a religion.

We can now argue in two ways: If anything is a religion, then its satisfies my criteria; Islam does not satisfy my criteria; ergo, Islam is not a religion.  Or one could insist that Islam is a religion and that my (3) ought to be jettisoned.

What about Buddhism? It is a religion of self-help, a religion of self-power as opposed to other-power.  Among the last words of the Tathagata:

Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Rely on yourselves, and do not rely on external help.

Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Seek salvation alone in the truth. Look not for assistance to anyone besides yourselves.

[. . .]

I now exhort you, saying: ‘All component things must grow old and be dissolved again. Seek ye for that which is permanent, and work out your own salvation with diligence.’

My (4) rules out self-help wisdom-paths.  We cannot achieve salvation by our own power. We need divine grace.  So if Buddhism is a religion, then (4) must be jettisoned.  If, however, (4) is upheld, then Buddhism does not count as a religion.

We note en passant that my (4) also rules out Stoicism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism as religions.

This leads to the thorny question of what one is doing when one sets forth criteria as I have done.  I am obviously not involved in a project of pure stipulation.  On the other hand I am not trying to give a lexical definition of 'religion.' Dictionary definitions are of little use in inquiries such as this one. (See The Dictionary Fallacy.) I am trying to pin down the normative essence or nature of religion.  

But does religion have an essence? Not clear. It may be that the concept of religion is a family resemblance concept, one to which no essence corresponds.  But even if religion does have an essence, how do I know that my criteria articulate this essence?  In particular, how do I justify (3) and (4)?

But suppose religion does have a normative essence and that I have captured it.  Then Islam and Buddhism are no more counterexamples to my definition than the existence of a three-legged cat is a counterexample to a definition of 'cat' that includes being four-legged as one of its essential marks.  A three-legged cat is not a normatively normal cat; it is a defective cat.  Islam and Buddhism are arguably not normatively normal religions; they are defective religions. They leave out essential features of the 'true' religion.

It is important to realize that none of these questions will ever be resolved, here below leastways, to the satisfaction of every competent practitioner of the relevant disciplines. It is therefore eminently stupid, besides being morally wrong, to violate and murder our ideological opponents, except in self-defense against the adherents of the 'religion of peace' to employ a contemporary example. 

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Pyrrhonism and Buddhism

Anyone familiar with both will have noticed the similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism. The theme is explored in an on-line book I just discovered but haven't read: Adrian Kuzminski, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. 

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Sunday Morning Sermon: Awareness of Death as Cure for Existential Drift

Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is thus instrumentally good: it demands that we get serious. To face it is to puncture the illusion that one has all the time in the world.

You might be dead before nightfall. In what state would you like death to find you?

East and West, death has served as the muse of philosophy and of existential seriousness.

Gotama the Buddha: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (said to be the Tathagata’s last words.)

Plato: "nothing which is subject to change...has any truth" (Phaedo St 83).

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Further Questions About Meditation

 This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes,

I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice?

Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you think that vipassana practice as such is not exerting that tendency and that the tendency is rather exerted by the combination of the practice with certain doctrines brought into the practice.

E.g., yesterday I read (in a Buddhist manual by Daniel Ingram) that when practising vipassana -- in a way that increases the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our sensory experience -- "it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not there when you don’t. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. ... Knowing this directly leads to freedom."

Will the vipassana practice tend me to believe that "useful" assumption, so useful for becoming to believe the Buddhist doctrines? Also, can I make any serious progress in that practice without making that assumption?

A. One Way to Meditate

Let me tell you about a fairly typical recent morning's meditation.  It lasted from about 3:10 to 4 AM.  

After settling onto the meditation cushions, I turned my attention to my deep, relaxed, and rhythmic breathing, focusing on the sensation of air passing in and out through the nostrils.  If distracting thoughts or images arose I would expel them on the 'out' breath so that the expulsion of air coincided with the 'expulsion' of extraneous thoughts.  If you have already learned how to control your mind, this is not that difficult and can be very pleasant and worth doing for its own sake even if you don't go any deeper.  

(If you find this elementary thought control  difficult or impossible, then you ought to be alarmed, just as you ought to be alarmed if you find your arms and legs flying off in different directions on their own.  It means  that you have no control over your own mind. Then who or what is controlling it?)

I then visualized my lungs' filling and emptying.  I visualized my body as from outside perched on the cushions.  And then I posed a question about the awareness of breathing.

There is this present breathing, and there is this present awareness of breathing.  Even if the breathing could be identified with, or reduced to, an objective, merely physical process in nature, this won't work for the awareness of breathing.

What then is this awareness?  It is not nothing.  If it were nothing, then nothing would appear, contrary to fact.  Fact is, the breathing appears; it is an object of awareness.  So the awareness is not nothing.  But the awareness is not something either:  it it not some item that can be singled out.  There is at least an apparent contradiction here: the awareness-of is both something and nothing.  A Zen meditator could take this as a koan and work on it as such.

Or, in an attempt at avoiding logical contradiction, one might propose that the awareness-of is something that cannot be objectified.   It is, but it cannot be objectified.

I am aware of my breathing, but also of my breathing's being an object of awareness, which implies that in some way I am aware of my awareness, though not as a separable object.

Who is aware of these things?  I am aware of them.    But who am I?  And who is asking this question?  I am asking it.  But who am I who is asking this question and asking who is asking it?

At this point I am beyond simple mind control to what could be self-inquiry. (Cf. Ramana Maharshi)  The idea is to penetrate into the source of this awareness.  One circles around it discursively with the idea of collapsing the circle into a non-discursive point, as it were. (I just now came up with this comparison.) 

B.  Does doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs?

I don't think so.  The Vipassana meditator's experiences are interpreted in the light of the characteristic Buddhist beliefs (anicca, anatta, dukkha).  They are read in to the experiences rather than read off from them.  A Christian meditator could easily do the same thing.  I reported an unforgettable experience deep in meditation in which I felt myself to be the object of a powerful, unearthly love.  If I take myself to have experienced the love of Christ, then clearly I go beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  Still, the experience fits with Christian beliefs and could be taken in some loose sense to corroborate it.  The same goes for the Vipassana meditator.

C. Impermanence

For example, does one learn from meditation that all is impermanent?

First of all, that

T. All is impermanent

Can be argued to be self-refuting.

Here goes.  (T) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (T), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (T) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing, and indeed continuously changing.)

Note also that if (T) is true, then every part of (T)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (T), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (T) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (T) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Now perhaps the Vippassana meditator gets himself into a state in which he is aware of only momentary, impermanent dharmas. How can he take that to show that ALL is impermanent?

There is also a question about what a belief would be for a Buddhist.  On my understanding, beliefs are "necessary makeshifts" (a phrase from F. H. Bradley) useful in the samsaric realm, but not of ultimate validity.  They are like the raft that gets one across the river but is then abandoned on the far shore.  The Dharma (teaching) is the raft that transports us across the river of Samsara to the land of Nirvana where there is no need for any rafts -- or for the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?

Assuming that meditation is pursued as a spiritual practice and not merely as a relaxation technique, I would say that the serious meditator must assume that there is a 'depth dimension' of spiritual/religious significance at the base of ordinary awareness and that our ultimate felicity demands that we get in touch with this depth dimension.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) I would add that meditation is the difficult task of swimming upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.

As St. Augustine says, Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.  The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within. 

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William Empson on Buddhism and Christianity

Karl White refers us to this quotation from a John Gray piece on William Empson in The New Statesman.

Empson’s attitude to Buddhism, like the images of the Buddha that he so loved, was asymmetrical. He valued the Buddhist view as an alternative to the Western outlook, in which satisfying one’s desires by acting in the world was the principal or only goal in life. At the same time he thought that by asserting the unsatisfactoriness of existence as such – whether earthly or heavenly – Buddhism was more life-negating and, in this regard, even worse than Christianity, which he loathed. Yet he also believed Buddhism, in practice, had been more life-enhancing. Buddhism was a paradox: a seeming contradiction that contained a vital truth.

Is Buddhism more life-negating than Christianity?  No doubt about it.  Empson is right on this point if not on the others.  I would put it like this.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions in that they both reject the ultimacy and satisfactoriness of this life taken as end-all and be-all.   But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of Nirvanic extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place. 

Now that is one radical solution!  It should appeal to anti-natalists and Schopenhauerian pessimists.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices. Mindfulness exercises and other practices can be usefully employed by Christians.  Christianity and Buddhism  are the two highest religions.   My own view is that a spiritual practice that draws on the resources of both is the way to go.  They are of course incompatible in their metaphysics.  But metaphysics is a product of the discursive intellect and to be transcended in any case.  Both religions terminate, 'ultimate,' if you will, in the Mystical.  

For Buddhism the problem is suffering.  All is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory.  The cause is desire as such.  The solution is the extirpation of desire.  The way is the eight-fold path.  I have just summed up Buddhism in five sentences.

Pace the Buddhists, the problem is not desire as such, but desire inordinate and misdirected.

Buddha correctly understood the nature of desire as infinite, as finally unsatisfiable by any finite object. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, on the Buddhist conception, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

Christianity enjoins redirection of desire upon the Right Object.

The two great religions have this in common: both preach the nihilism of the finite.  I would say that any religion worth its salt must preach the nihilism of the finite, namely, the understanding that in the last analysis nothing finite is ultimately real.  In fact, I would erect this into a criterion of the religious nature.  If you have the insight into the nihilism of the finite, then you have a religious nature.  If you do not, then you do not.

But while both of these great religions preach the nihilism of the finite, Christianity in its highest manifestation -- Thomistic Catholicism you could call it -- takes a positive line with a respect to the Absolute: the ultimate state and goal is not one of  Nirvanic extinction and nonbeing, but of participation in the divine life via the Beatific Vision.

We are now hard by the boundary of the Sayable as we ought to be if we are serious truth seekers.

We can now define the worldling or secularist and the nihilist.

The worlding takes this world to be ultimately real, and the only reality.  He is spiritually dead to its ontological and axiological deficiency.  He is a Platonic troglodyte, if you catch my drift.  He is incapable of transcendental speleology since he cannot see the Cave as a Cave.

The nihilist  is spiritually awake as compared to the worldling.  The nihilist sees the nullity and the vanity (vanitas = emptiness) of the finite and transient, but thinks it exhausts the Real.  The adolescent nihilist's T-shirt reads:  The finite sucks! (on the front) and There's nothing else! (on the back).

Reference

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Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.

King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Orthodox* Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est. It is vain, void, empty, delusional.

Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man of whom it is related that he saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough as far as we are concerned; his historical existence unnecessary.  'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.'  Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's  becoming the Buddha.  Suppose that Siddartha never existed, or existed but didn't attain enlightenment.  We would still have the idea of a man attaining enlightenment/salvation by his own efforts.  The idea would suffice.  (One might wonder, however, whether the real possibility of enlightenment needs attestation by someone's actually having achieved it -- which would drag us back into the realm of historical fact -- or whether the mere conceivability of it entails, or perhaps provides good evidence for, its real possibility.)

Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that  cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help.  Non-attachment extends to the Buddha and his teachings.  Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an  enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara.  One can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power.  There is no need for supernatural assistance.  If Buddhism is a religion of self-help, Christianity is most assuredly a religion of other-help.  On the latter one cannot drag oneself from the dreck by one's own power.

Trouble is, how many attain the Buddhist goal? And if only a few renunciates ever attain it, how does that help the rest of us poor schleps? By contrast, in Christianity, God, in the person of the Word (Logos) made flesh, does the work for us. Unable ultimately to help ourselves, we are helped by Another. And the help is available to all despite their skills in metaphysics and meditation. As Maurice Blondel observes, . . . if there is a salvation it cannot be tied to the learned solution of an obscure problem. . . It can only be offered clearly to all. (Action, p. 14) (By "do the work for us," I of course do not mean to suggest the sola fide extremism of some Protestants.)  

I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of Buddhistic self-help optimism. Try to hoe the Buddhist row and see how far you get.  One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear.  I know of no enlightened persons.  But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks.  I have encountered Buddhists who become very upset indeed if you challenge their dogmas such as the anatman ('No Self') doctrine.  The ego they deny is alive and well in them and angry at having the doctrine  to which their nonexistent egos are  attached questioned.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions in that they both reject the ultimacy and satisfactoriness of this life taken as end-all and be-all.   But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of Nirvanic extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place.  Some solution!  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices. Mindfulness exercises and other practices can be usefully employed by Christians.  Christianity and Buddhism  are the two highest religions.  The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions.  

Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is over-refined.  The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of  sexual intercourse.  Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.'  'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering.  The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: salvation through annihilation.  What Christianity promises, it must be admitted by the intellectually honest, is very difficult to make rational sense of.  For example, one's resurrection as a spiritual body.  What does that mean?  How is it possible?  For an introduction to the problem, see Romano Guardini, The Last Things, "The Spiritual Body," pp. 61-72.

Admittedly, my rank ordering of the great religions is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words.  And, as usual, political correctness be damned.  For details on Buddhism see my Buddhism category. 

I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Many of the sutras are beautiful and ennobling.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously -- except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.   An interesting and important question is whether Muslims are better off with their religion as opposed to having no religion at all.  The question does not arise with respect to the other great religions, or if you say it does, then I say it has an easy answer.

There are some affinities between Christianity and Buddhism.  One is explored in The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli.

As for why I am not a Buddhist, I give one reason in  Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am not a Buddhist.  Others are in the Buddhism category.

Here is something for lefties to think about.  While there are are some terrorists who are socioculturally Buddhist in that they were raised and acculturated in Buddhist lands, are there any Buddhists who terrorize from Buddhist doctrine?

___________________________________

 *By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.

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When we master desire and aversion in the present we mortify what will soon be dead in any case.

"That may be appropriate wisdom for you, old man, but I'm in the full flood of my youth and vigor.  I love, hate, and live passionately.  Why should I mortify what will be dead?  I should further enliven what  is now alive!"

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before:  "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?"  This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite.  I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment.  Now if our desire is infinite, then it is arguable that only a truly infinite object could satisfy it, and that such an object cannot be a being among beings, not even a being supreme among beings, but must be an absolute reality, that is, God as Being itself.  To put it another way, the ultimate good for man cannot be a good thing among good things, not even the best of all good things, but must be Goodness itself.  Anything less would be a sort of high-class idol.  So let's start with an analysis of idolatry.

I

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?

That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never fully satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

For thinkers of this stripe,  all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our deluded desire does not understand this.  Our deluded desire is played for a fool by the trinkets and bagatelles of this fleeting world.  It thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry.

Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of virgin A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for virgin  B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not an absolute good exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

II

Suppose you accept what I just wrote about desire being infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable by any finite object.  Would this show that God cannot be a being among beings?  Not obviously!  The supreme being theists could agree that infinite desire is ultimately satisfiable only by an infinite object, but that the omni-qualified supreme being fills the bill.  Furthermore, they could argue, plausibly, that talk of Goodness itself and Being itself, which imply the divine simplicity, is just incoherent to the discursive intellect.  To which one response is: so much the worse for the discursive intellect.  The ultimate goal is attainable only by transcending it.

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A 'No' to 'No Self'

Dale Tuggy is in town and we met up  on Thursday and Friday.  On Good Friday morning I took him on a fine looping traipse in the Western Superstitions out of First Water trail head to Second Water trail to Garden Valley, down to Hackberry Spring, and then back to the Second Water trail via the First Water creek bed.  We were four hours on the trail, 6:55 - 10:55, both of us wired up (in both senses of that term) for one of Dale's famous podcasts.  One of the topics discussed was the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine which we both respectfully reject.  I believe that Dale concurred with all of the following points I made and with some others as well:

1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.

2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

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Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I  read the seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1998 when it first appeared.  I am currently re-reading it. It is once again proving to be page turner for one who has both a nostalgic and a scholarly interest in the far-off and fabulous '60s.    But what a gushing liberal and naive romantic Merton was!  Here is but one example:

Yesterday, quite by chance, I met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his secretary . . . . Chogyam Trungpa is a completely marvelous person.  Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. [. . .] He is also a genuine spiritual master. (October 20, 1968, p. 219, emphasis added)

Unfortunately, the 'spirituality' of many 'spiritual masters' is of the New Age type, a type of spirituality that fancies itself beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous case of Rajneesh. Chogyam Trungpa appears to have been cut from the same cloth. According to one report,

. . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma.

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that this gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

That Merton could be taken in by the fellow says something about Merton.  A phrase such as 'genuine spiritual master' ought not be bandied about lightly. But perhaps Trungpa's excesses were not in evidence at the time.

Herewith yet another indication of why philosophy is essential to balanced thinking and living.  Jerusalem and Benares are both in need of chastening, and Athens wields the rod.  Although I maintain that philosophy needs completion by what is beyond philosophy, that maintenance is not a license to abandon rational critique.  Every sector of life requires critique, including Philosophy herself, and Philosophy is the Critic.

As for putative 'spiritual masters,' run as fast as you can from any such 'master' or 'guru' who has something to sell you or is not in control of his lower self.

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Contradiction and Koan

What is a contradiction from one angle is a koan from another. In a contradiction, logical thought hits a dead end.  Discursive thought's road end, however, may well be the trail head of the Transdiscursive.

The Competency of Desire

Human desires regularly show themselves to be highly competent when it comes to the seduction of reason and the subornation of conscience.

A man murders his wife and the mother of his child in order to collect on a life insurance policy.  Why? So that he can run off with a floozie who shook her tail in his face at a strip joint and then pledged her undying love.  Upshot? The man does life in orison  prison, the child grows up without parents, and the floozie moves on to her next victim. 

(O felix erratum! Actually, prison would be a good place for orison if you were 'in the hole,' where I would want to be, and not in the general population ever having it proved to one that "Hell is other people." (Sartre, No Exit))

Pace the Buddhists, the problem is not desire as such, but desire inordinate and misdirected.

Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite, as finally unsatisfiable by any finite object. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, on the Buddhist conception, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

Buber Contra Buddhism

The following quotations are from Martin Buber's I and Thou (tr. Walter Kaufmann, Scribner's, 1970, pp. 140-141):

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . .

All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.

The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (as Buddhism proclaims with its central doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal and universal  Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God. Perhaps the underlying issue can be put, roughly, like this:  in the end, does the One absorb everything and extinguish all finite individuality, or in the end does duality and (transformed) finite individuality remain?  In soteriological terms: does salvation in the end consist in a becoming one with the One or is duality and difference preserve even at the highest soteriological levels?

Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more literal translation is 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  (141).  I take it he means that spirit is not in an individual man, to be reaized in the depths of his isolated interiority, but between individual human beings and individual humans beings and between individual human beings and what is not human.  Spirit is thus actualized only in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln (to gather, collect, concentrate) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.  Samadhi is not an end in itself but a means to an end.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second and more important question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life-affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

On my definition. "And where did you get it?"  From examning the great religions, the greatest of which are Buddhism and Christianity.

UPDATE (12/15).  Karl White comments:

I assume Buber and many strains in Judaism would answer that loving God for his own sake and the world for its own sake is the highest form of religiosity. To ask what 'use' is God would be tantamount to idolatry, as it consists in an instrumentalisation of God in order to serve one's own needs or less prosaically, to save one's own sorry ass.

Cf. Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Those who would question, indeed those who lost their faith in God as a result of Auschwitz “never believed in God but in God's help… [for] one who believes in God … does not relate this to belief in God's help” (Accepting the Yoke, 21).

This is a very trenchant and very good comment that opens up numerous further cans of theological worms.  I am immediately reminded of the the extremism of the jewess Simone Weil.  Here is part of what I say in the just-referenced entry:

Although Weilian disinterest may appear morally superior to Pascalian self-interest, I would say that the former is merely an example of a perverse strain in Weil’s thinking. One mistake she makes is to drive a wedge between the question of the good and the question of human happiness, thereby breaking the necessary linkage between the two. This is a mistake because a good out of all relation to the satisfaction of human desire cannot count as a good for us.

What “good” is a good out of all relation to our self-interest? The absolute good must be at least possibly such as to satisfy (purified) human desire. The possibility of such satisfaction is a necessary feature of the absolute good. Otherwise, the absolute good could not be an ideal for us, an object of aspiration or reverence, a norm. But although the absolute good is ideal relative to us, it is real in itself. Once these two aspects (ideal for us, real in itself) are distinguished, it is easy to see how the absoluteness of the absolute good is consistent with its necessary relatedness to the possibility of human happiness. What makes the absolute good absolute is not its being out of all relation to the actual or possible satisfaction of human desire; what makes it absolute is its being self-existent, a reality in itself. The absolute good, existing absolutely (ab solus, a se), is absolute in its existence without prejudice to its being necessarily related to us in its goodness. If God is (agapic) love, then God necessarily bestows His love on any creatures there might be. It is not necessary that there be creatures, but it is necessary that God love the creatures that there are and that they find their final good in Him.

The Leibowitz remark deserves to be mulled over carefully.  Part of what Leibowitz suggests is right: Auschwitz is no compelling argument against the existence of God. (Sorry Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.)  But I humbly suggest that it is border-line crazy to suggest, if this is what Leibowitz is suggesting, that belief in God is wholly out of relation to the human desire for ultimate happiness and to belief in God's help in securing such felicity. 

There is more to say but I must get on with the day.

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When functioning optimally the body can seem, not only an adequate vehicle of our subjectivity, but a fitting and final realization of it as well.  Soon enough, however, Buddha's Big Three shatters the illusion: sickness, old age, and death.

Everything partite is slated for partition.  Shunning inanition, maintaining a wholesome spiritual ambition, work out your salvation with diligence.

A glance at the graphic to the left suggests that the order is: old age, sickness, and death.  Prince Siddartha, forsaking the unreality of the royal compound, goes out in quest of the Real and the Uncompounded.  But who is the figure standing on the ground? Siddartha the seeker as opposed to Siddartha the prince?

"The trouble is, you think you have time." (Attributed to Buddha)

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Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 45 years ago today, securing his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more … genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.

The Logic of Buddhist Philosophy

Beyond True and False, by Graham Priest. (HT: Allan Jackson)

Why are the Corners of Buddha's Apartment so Dirty?

The Tathagata has no attachments.

(He has no theories about the nirvanic Vacuum either.)

(I got the idea from this guy.)

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Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief

One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience.  Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely.  I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation.  I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love.  I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone.  Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do. 

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition.  He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described  as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent.  Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief.  Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term.  But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief.  The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either:  I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories. 

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality.  There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open.  First, is it of something real?  Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of? 

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain."  But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd.  The experience was certainly not of that.  The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined.  [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it. 

Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience. 

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions.  Are there perceptual beliefs?  If yes, are they not overbeliefs?  I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me.  But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes.  The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief  if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief?  Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective?  Beliefs are either true or false.  Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences.  I think James would reject this.  For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs.  I'll dig up some passages later.

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation.  But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief.  One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self.  Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses.  The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object.  Granted.  It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self.  To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real.  How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience?  It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance.  Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed.  Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self.  Buddhism is a religion.   

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Peter Lupu e-mails:

In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not follow that the self does not exist. I agree.

But a stronger complaint can be advanced. Harris (and Hume) must answer the following question: Who (what) is doing the introspection (meditation) which allegedly reveals no experience of the self? I suggest that there is no reasonable candidate for such a role other than the self. And so now an explanation can be given to the puzzle how come introspection does not reveal the self; it fails to do so because the self is inevitably absent from the introspective field in order to perform the introspective function. But the self leaves its own recognizable trail behind; it is the trail of a conscious subject which unifies the various experiences encountered by the introspective self as belonging to the same person. If it were not for this trail, the introspective self would have no reason to think that this toothache and that memory or desire belong to one and the same subject.

I think your searching-for-my-glasses-on-my-nose example illustrates well the point.

It is a pleasure to have Peter as a sort of philosophical alter ego who sees many matters as I do.  Here are the main points and I think we agree on all of them.

1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.

2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Therein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

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Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics.  (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:

I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity.  There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6.  One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here.  Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5).  Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss.  My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights.  Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience?  Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion.  But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation.  I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period.  Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds:  there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it. 

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy.  An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses.  He searched  high and low, from morning til night.  Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place.  His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well.  From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes.  My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place.  Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self.  It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own. 

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

 

 

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The Atheist

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Conquer Desire or Misdirected Desire?

The Buddhist cure is radical all right: it goes right to the root, radix, of the matter: desire.  But eschewing a salutary horticulture, it e-rad-icates the root.  That is like curing a disease by snuffing out the life of the diseased.  The problem is not desire, but misdirected desire.  The solution is not the uprooting of desire, but its proper direction.

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The 'Control Argument' for the Anatta Doctrine

The Dalai Lama and the Self: An Anti-Buddhist Argument

The 'Control Argument' for the Anatta Doctrine

In other posts I have sketched the Buddhist doctrine of 'No Self.' I now consider an early Buddhist argument for it. Here are the words of Buddha according to the Anattalakkhana Sutta, his second discourse, the Sermon on the Mark of Not-Self:

 
     The body [rupa], monks, is not self. If the body were the self,
     this body would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible
     (to say) with regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body
     be not thus.' But precisely because the body is not self, the body
     lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with
     regard to the body, 'Let my body be thus. Let my body not be thus.'


Buddha then goes on to argue similarly with respect to the rest of the five aggregates or categories of personality-constituents (khandhas, Sanskrit: skandhas), namely, feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), consciousness (vinnana), and mental formations (sankharas). All are claimed to be not-self. Thus we are told that feeling afflicts us and is not amenable to our control, whence it is inferred that feeling is not one's self, not one's own inner substance. The tacit premise of this enthymematic argument is that one's self would have to be something over which one would have complete control.  The tacit premise is that the self is  something wholly active and spontaneous and self-regulating.  And it is clear that something wholly active will not suffer: to suffer is precisely to be afflicted by something external over which one has no control.  To suffer is to be passive.  An agent in excelsis is an impassible agent.  (In the West, impassibility became one of the divine attributes.) 

After arguing that each of the personality-constituents is outside of our control and brings suffering, Buddha argues that each of the constituents is impermanent and for this reason as well is lacking in
self-nature. The over-all argument of the Anattalakkhana Sutta may therefore be reconstructed in a generalized form as follows:

     1. If anything were the self, then it would have two properties: it
     would not be liable to disease, decay, destruction or change
     generally, and it would be self-determining, i.e., it would have
     complete control over itself.
     2. But nothing in our experience has either of these two
     properties, not the body, or feeling, or perception, or
     consciousness, etc.
     Therefore
     3. Nothing in our experience can be identified as the self.

I have structured the argument so that it is not only valid in point of logical form, but also has plausible premises. (A charitable reconstruction can aim at nothing less.) Thus the addition of 'in our experience' in premise (2) makes this premise more plausible than without the addition. But this gain in plausibility exacts a price:   the conclusion (3) cannot then amount to the unrestricted anatta doctrine according to which nothing at all is a self or has self-nature. It is one thing to say that nothing in our experience can be identified (veridically) as a self, and quite another to say that there is no self.

The Pali Buddhist, of course, wants to arrive at the conclusion that there is no self at all, that nothing at all has self-nature.  I would insist, however, that one cannot validly move directly from (3) to

    4. Nothing can be identified as the self: there is no self at all.

For it may well be that the existence of a (transcendental) self that is not experienced is a necessary condition of establishing that whatever is experienced is not a self. After all, if I come to see  that my body, feelings, perceptions, and so on cannot be identified as my very self, then it is presumably I myself who come to this insight.  If I come to reject body-identification, feeling- identification, etc. as false self-identifications, then presumably there must be at least the possibility of a true self-identification, even if only of the  tautological form, 'I am I.'  If every self-identification were false, then 'I am I' would be false. But that is either a contradiction, or implies that there is nothing that body, feelings, etc. are distinct from, which is again incoherent. For if 'I am not this body' is true, then in some sense I must exist as that from which my body is distinct.  The first-person singular pronoun cannot be wholly referenceless if it is to be true, as it is true, that I am not my body, my feelings, my thoughts, the pain in my neck, etc.

Furthermore, if anyone needs and desires liberation, it is presumably in every case I myself who needs and desires it, and I myself who, if all goes well, achieves it, and indeed achieves it on the basis of my own insight into my non-identity with any of the five khandhas or with the psychophysical complex composed of them. The self who needs, desires, and possibly attains liberation is obviously distinct from each of the khandhas and from the psychophysical complex. My body, obviously enough, cannot come to realize its non-identity with itself, for the simple reason that it is not distinct from itself. The same holds for each of the khandhas, and for the lot of them taken together.

And to suppose that no one desires, needs, or attains liberation would appear to make hash of the whole Buddhist system of soteriology. Buddhism is an existentialist system in roughly Kierkegaard's  sense:  it is the salvation of the "existing individual" that is the unum necessarium and sole desideratum. It is therefore arguable that the   existence of a transcendental self is a cognitive and soteriological  presupposition: it is presupposed if there is to be the insight that no object of experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self, and it is presupposed if there is to be something that is saved from the samsaric predicament.

The gist of the control argument is this. There is no evidence of a self since nothing with which we are acquainted is immutable, and nothing with which we are acquainted is something over which we have complete control.

But this raises an obvious question: Isn't the standard for selfhood being set unattainably high?  The argument isd tantamount tosaying that if I am not God or a god, then I am not a self.  Arguably, God to be God must be impassible; but must a self to be a self be impassible?

For a richer and more rigorous development of this theme, see W. F. Vallicella, "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466

The Dalai Lama and the Self: An Anti-Buddhist Argument

A friend refers me to a rather poor article, "The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and Creation,"  in which the dubious claims of the Dalai Lama are ineptly rebutted by a Catholic journalist.  We read:

Beyond the complex world of nature, Buddhism asserts a fundamental “nothingness.”  Buddhist thought sees as illusory all distinction between beings.  As the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom, “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.” 

This is  one of the central pillars of Buddhism, the doctrine of anatta (Pali), anatman (Sanskrit), 'no self.'  The idea is that nothing, or at least nothing in the realm of samsara, has self-nature, substantiality, own-being, ontological independence, even relative ontological independence.  And that includes persons (selves).  You and I are not independent existents.  The distinction between us is illusory.  From the point of view of Christian metaphysics, this cannot be right.  God is an uncreated  self, and we are created selves.  Although we depend for our existence on God, this fact is thought to be compatible with our genuine (though dependent) existence as self-same individuals numerically distinct from other such individuals.

It is not enough to pit worldviews against one another.  You have to get down to the nitty-gritty of trying to resolve the dispute by careful analysis and argument.  There is no reason to be sanguine about the success of such an enterprise, but you are no philosopher if you do not make the attempt.

I will now argue against the anatta doctrine by arguing that the conscious self cannot be a Heraclitean flux of instantaneous  entities but must be an individual that remains self-same through the flux of its conscious states.

I

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly  perceived. It is not as if
there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these are taken distributively or collectively.

II

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of
Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But
now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

 
For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this
implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of
them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.

III

Now consider a synchronic example, the hearing of a chord.  Hearing the major chord C-E-G, I hear that it is major, and hearing the minor chord C-E flat-G, I hear that it is minor.  How is this possible?  The hearing of the major chord cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But
this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  Once again the unitary self is given: it is given whenever we hear a chord.

IV

There is also this consideration.  Phenomenologically, mental change is not existential change, but
alterational change, or in a word, alteration.  Existential change, as when something comes into being or passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to exist is no longer available to be that in which  this change occurs, and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to exist to be that in which this change occurs.  We express this by saying that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however, requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the same individual is in different states at different times.

Pali Buddhism, with its interconnected doctrines of radical impermanence and universal selflessness,
implies that that ultimately there is no alteration, that all change is existential change.  For alteration requires substrata of alteration, and substrata are incompatible with anatta.  But if mental change were existential change, there could be no consciousness of it.  If the pleasant visual sensation simply passes out of existence to be replaced by the painful auditory sensation, then there is a change all right – a change in the way things are – but not a change of which there could be any consciousness in the one in whom the change occurs.  Furthermore, there would be no awareness of
dukkha – the starting point of Buddhist soteriology – because there would be no possibility of a perceived contrast of the dukkha-state with the earlier sukha-state (the pleasant awareness of the sunset).

To be aware of the change from the pleasurable state to the painful one, I must endure through the change. Therefore, since there is consciousness of mental change, mental change is alteration and thus requires a substratum that is numerically identical across the change.  The point was appreciated by Kant, who wrote that “A coming to be or a ceasing to be . . . can never be a possible [object of] perception.” (CPR A 188 = B 231)

What this shows is that there is direct awareness of the self as that in which the two distinct states are united.  The fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine. There is not just an awareness of one state followed by an awareness of a second; I am aware of myself as the transtemporal unity of the two states.  Unity, of course, is not identity: so talk of the unity of the pleasurable and painful states is consistent with their numerical distinctness.  The self, therefore, is directly given in the experience of mental change; but it is of course not given as a separate object wholly distinct from its states.  It is given in and through these states as their transtemporal unity. The self is not one of its states, nor the sum of all of them, nor  something wholly distinct from all of them; the self is their self-unifying unity.  Thus one must not think of the substratum of mental change as wholly distinct from its states.  It is not like a pin cushion into which pins are stuck.  A pin cushion without pins is conceivable; a self without conscious states is not.  The self is not an unconscious something that supports consciousness; it itself has the nature of consciousness.   Consciousness/self-consciousness is a sui generis reality that cannot be understood in terms of crude  models from the physical world. 

Against Irrationalism

The problem is not that we conceptualize things, but that we conceptualize them wrongly, hastily, superficially. The problem is not that we draw distinctions, but that we draw too few distinctions or   improper distinctions. Perhaps in the end one must learn to trace all distinctions back to the ONE whence they spring; but that is in the end. In the beginning people must be taught to conceptualize, discriminate, and distinguish.

A superficial Zen training that attacks the discursive intellect in those who have never properly developed it does a great disservice.

More on Trishna

A reader usefully supplements my post Reininger Contra Buddhism:

Dear Professor Vallicella,

With reference to your recent post 'Reininger Contra Buddhism' you might be intrigued by chapter 5 of D. T. Suzuki's Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist where he talks about trishna at length and states:

"The later Buddhists realized that tṛiṣṇā was what constituted human nature--in fact, everything and anything that at all comes into existence--and that to deny tṛiṣṇā was committing suicide; to escape from tṛiṣṇā was the height of contradiction or a deed of absolute impossibility; and that the very thing that makes us wish to deny or to escape from tṛiṣṇā was tṛiṣṇā itself. Therefore, all that we could do for ourselves, or rather all that tṛiṣṇā could do for itself, was to make it turn to itself, to purify itself from all its encumbrances and defilements, by means of transcendental knowledge (prajñā). The later Buddhists then let tṛiṣṇā work on in its own way without being impeded by anything else. Tṛiṣṇā or "thirst" or "craving" then comes to be known as mahākaruṇā, or "absolute compassion," which they consider the essence of Buddhahood and Bodhisattvahood." (Section XI)

I suspect that his unusual interpretation was possibly influenced by his documented reading of Eckhart and Swedenborg, as much as any Buddhist sources, but I found it interesting to read such a famous Buddhist figure interpreting trishna in this way.

Thank you for your excellent blog.

Reininger Contra Buddhism

Robert Reininger, Philosophie des Erlebens, p. 227:

   Gegen Buddhismus: Trishna nicht ertoeten (ausloeschen), sondern durch
   Ueberhoehung in den Dienst des Vernunftwillens stellen -- sonst fehlt
   diesem die lebendige Kraft, die nur der Daseinsbejahung eignet (A 751,
   1932).

   Against Buddhism: Trishna is not to be killed or extinguished, but
   elevated and placed in the service of the rational will. Without this
   sublimation, the rational will lacks the vital force appropriate to the
   affirmation of existence. (tr. BV)
  

Trishna is Sanskrit for desire, thirst. Central to Buddhism is the notion that the suffering and general unsatisfactoriness of life is rooted in desire, and that salvation is to be had by the  extirpation of desire. Reininger's point is one with which I wholly  agree. The goal ought not be the extinction of desire, but its sublimation. Desire as such is not the problem; the problem is misdirected desire. Properly channeled and sublimated, desire provides the motive force for the rational will.

See my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)