Missing Out
Thursday March 11, 2010
A couple of years back I reviewed Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age
And there are certain works of art — by Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres Cathedral: the list is endless — whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbeliever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment. (p. 607)
The claim — here made in relation to art, but also frequently made in relation to other aspects of human experience — is that by believing, or not believing x, one is simply missing out. One can see this claim on both sides in the seemingly interminable debates between the religious and the irreligious: the religious may claim that life with God is simply better; and the irreligious may claim that life without God is simply better. And both will claim that the other is missing out.
But there is something a bit suspect in all of this. Take Taylor’s challenge for example. If one assumes — as, one imagines, Taylor does — that on the scale of good things, God is about as good as it gets (that is, he is better than a posse of porcupines, or a tub of ice cream, or the complete works of Leo Tolstoy), then on this view it is hard to see that any non-theistic register could be a way of responding to these artworks without impoverishment. “Non-theistic” for Taylor already implies impoverishment, and if one goes along with this implication, then his challenge is impossible to meet. If one assumes at the outset that God is an ultimate source of richness, then this supposed impoverishment is of a fundamental order.
One can see why Taylor makes these claims; but I am less sure why thinkers who take a more naturalistic position should use the rhetoric of missing out. After all, a naturalistic position is one that does not need to make claims about ultimate sources of richness. It is true, on the one hand, that absolutely everything we might deem good is also a kind of missing out on something else that we might also (or that others might also) deem good. If for my holidays I go out drinking and partying, I am missing out on the quiet delights of birdwatching; and if I spend my holidays holed up in a hide on some remote marsh, looking for rare warblers, then I am missing out on drinking and partying. Every form of life is a missing out on some other form of life; indeed, every form of life is a missing out on innumerable other forms of life. To be sure, when I listen to Bach, or when I read Dante, my experience is impoverished in respect of not having that whatever-it-is that believers may have when they experience these things; but then when believers experience these things, their own experience may be differently impoverished.
And it is here, I think, if one takes a broadly naturalistic position, one has an advantage over the theists – an advantage, at least, in terms of not having to worry quite so much about whether one is, or is not, missing out. Theism implies a scale of ultimate value in which, if I miss out on God, I miss out on the very best, most important thing that there is. But if one takes a naturalistic position, one can recognise that our sense of the value of things is rooted in the various conditions of our lives, in our histories and social worlds and habits of thought. It is not inscribed in the fabric of the world. And if it is not inscribed in the fabric of the world, then there is no ultimate missing out. Taylor talks about “fullness”. But fullness is not a scale that leads only in one direction. There are many kinds of fullness, and we do not need to assume that they are necessarily in contention with each other.
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Ethical Friskiness
Sunday February 28, 2010
This weekend, I’ve been doing philosophy of sorts. I’m writing a chapter for a forthcoming book on Coffee & Philosophy, which has been a lot of fun. The piece I’m writing is a defence of idle lounging in coffee shops when one really ought to be doing something more apparently useful elsewhere, and takes as it’s main starting point the following text from my old philosophical friend (in the sense that I’ve read his books, rather than in the sense that he and I ever shared a cuppa together), Emmanuel Levinas:
The café is a place of casual social intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One goes in not needing to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty. All because one does not want to stay in one’s room. You know that all evils occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in our room. The café is not a place. It is a non-place for a non-society, for a society without solidarity, without tomorrow, without commitment, without common interests, a game society. The café, house of games, is the point through which game penetrates life and dissolves it. Society without yesterday or tomorrow, without responsibility, without seriousness–distraction, dissolution. At the movies, a common theme is presented on the screen; in the theatre, a common theme is presented on the stage. In the café, there are no themes. Here you are, each at your own little table with your cup or your glass. You relax completely to the point of not being obligated to anyone or anything; and it is because it is possible to go and relax in a café that one tolerates the horrors and injustices of a world without a soul.
This is a peculiar passage, and one that says an awful lot about Levinas’s approach to ethics. Playfulness is, for Levinas, the very antithesis of ethical sobriety, a kind of disavowal of our responsibility towards others. I don’t want to anticipate the contents of the chapter, but my response is roughly something like this: to argue that places of respite – coffee shops, parks, Epicurean gardens – are necessary, if we are to be able to creatively reimagine the world, if we are to respond to the ethical demands upon us with any measure of grace and of skill. Or, in other words, it may be that the responsible thing, at times, may be to lurk in a coffee shop, to lounge in the park, or the hang out drinking wine and eating cheese in the Epicurean garden: at least until, as Śāntideva says, our ethical action itself becomes as joyful as the capering of an elephant on a hot day, plunging now into this cool pool of lotus flowers.
I suspect Levinas would disapprove of all this caffeine-fuelled ethical friskiness. But then, Levinas was apparently never a great coffee drinker: it seems that he enjoyed tea instead, and then only in moderation. Once, according to Simon Critchley’s book On Humour
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Let's Get Radical?
Friday February 19, 2010
I don’t often listen to the news at the moment, nor do I spend a great deal of time reading the newspapers. There are, after all, other things to read – and if I want to make any headway with the wonderful Dream of the Red Chamber, I need to focus my attention a bit more.
Nevertheless, on occasion I do catch a bit of the evening news reports if I happen to be in the kitchen cooking at the right time, and when I do – partly because I listen to it less, and therefore I’m not so habituated to it – what often strikes me is the sheer oddness of the language used not only by those in the media, but also by those who speak to them. One particular oddness that crops up again and again, and that seems to me to raise some interesting questions, is the recurrent idea of “radical” change. No new initiative, it seems, can be introduced without it promising such change, no media pundit can resit saying that we live in rapidly changing times and thus we need to find radical responses to the radically different circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What strikes me about this language is that we are, perhaps, not very good at thinking about change. Western thought, in particular, seems to be very wedded to an idea of stasis as the fundamental condition of things. OK, we think to ourselves, so things change and they move: but only if they are pushed. And in this picture, what needs to be accounted for is not why things stay the same (for a while), but why things change. This is not the case across the board in Western thought – for example, Lucretius’s physics is predicated on a model that sees stability as a kind of local and temporary condition, and that sees motion as a more general picture – but it does seem to be the general picture.
One of the things that has always attracted me to Buddhist thought is the recognition of impermanence, which turns this pretty much on its head. This recognition is much more than a recognition of the fact that the span of our life is limited, that the cake we have in the morning may well be gobbled up by the evening, and so on (what the Tibetans call “coarse” impermanence); it is also a recognition that things are in constant moment-by-moment transformation (what the Tibetans talk about as “subtle” impermanence). It has to be said that if we respond to impermanence only on the first level, then it seems a fairly bleak idea; but if we take into account subtle impermanence, the moment-by-moment arising and passing-away, then the world comes alive again, it begins to buzz and hum with a kind of liveliness. And there is something that I find wonderfully quickening and enlivening in the thought of subtle impermanence. The fact that things are subtly impermanent requires a kind of subtleness of response, a nuanced approach to the things of this world.
If change is seen as the background against which we must make sense of temporary stability, rather than stasis the background against which we must make sense of change, then the world begins to look rather different. The question becomes not how can we change things?, as if things themselves needed a bit of a shove for them to change at all, but how can we respond to and participate in the changeability of things?
When I listen to political rhetoric about radical change, I can’t help thinking that there is an odd – and mistaken – idea of what change actually involves. It seems to me that this rhetoric is rooted in a view that for anything to change in the world needs a kind of dramatic intervention, a deus ex machina, that breaks with how things currently are; and this seems a view that is profoundly uncomfortable with both stability and change. I am uneasy with the dramatic register of this rhetoric. It isn’t just that I’m unconvinced that “radical” change is what the world needs or that I’m unconvinced that seeing the world as “radically” different from before is particularly useful; it’s more that I can’t help thinking that this language may obscure the deeper and broader conditions that underlie the changeability of things, and may therefore cloud our judgement so that we are no longer able to see – insofar as we are capable of directing the multitudinous changing things of which we are a part – how it might be possible to direct change more to the benefit of ourselves and of others.
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Easy, Tiger
Friday February 12, 2010
Recently I’ve been up to my ears in a very early draft of the next philosophy book, which draws fairly extensively – more extensively than I imagined it would at the outset – on various traditions of Chinese philosophy.
Alongside my reading, I’ve also been trying to get my Chinese up to scratch, and this has been enormous fun: I quite like the feeling of being utterly out of my depth, the sense that here is a task unlikely to be exhausted any time soon. I’m both trying to get a handle on modern Chinese, and also to develop some ability to read literary Chinese, which should – somewhere down the line – open up all kinds of philosophical resources.
My language learning has been given a kind of increased urgency, as I’ve recently heard that I’ve got the funding to head to China later this year for a month and a half, to do some research towards the next novel, and to spend a bit of time adding some final touches to the forthcoming philosophy book. As it will be my first trip to China, if anybody has any advice about anywhere that I really shouldn’t miss, or knows of any friendly Chinese philosophers I should look up, then let me know.
I’ll write more, no doubt, about the next philosophy book as time goes on. But now I have to go back to my labours over a hot stove: this weekend I’m hosting a tiger party to celebrate the coming Chinese New Year, and tomorrow a bunch of friends are coming to help welcome in the year of the tiger. There’s still a lot to do: there are tiger cookies to make, and I still have to paint some stripes on Bodhicattva, the thinkBuddha cat.
So I’ll leave things here, and wish you all a happy new year!
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Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...
Friday January 29, 2010
OK, so I’ve written about this before, but I’m still not sure that I’ve got to the bottom of it, so at the risk of repeating myself I’m going to have another stab at it. Or, at least, at reframing, once again, the question that has been recently haunting me.
As regular visitors will know, I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what some folks call the cognitive unconscious. My cognitive unconscious is not some terrible area of inner darkness where, unbeknownst to me, lurk various childhood repressions and Oedipal shenanigans, but instead the large chunk of my mental processing, as a living creature going about its business in the world, that goes on unbeknownst to what I call “me”. Despite the claims of some that Buddhist meditation is a sure-fire way of finding out about our inner world, of mapping our internal geography, or of consciousness becoming transparent to itself, so to speak, there is increasing evidence that much of our functioning is, and forever will be, cognitively closed to us, at least from the point of view of first-person methods, whether meditative or otherwise. And this has interesting implications not just for how we see meditation, but for how we see ourselves.
Here, I think, things get rather interesting, because we tend to think that our minds are our own affairs, curious little empires for which we are the sole authoritative ambassadors. But if much of what takes place in our minds takes place in a fashion that is closed to us (and that may always be closed to us, which was the thrust of my previous post on the subject), then this does tend to erode this sense of self-certainty, and it tends to eat away at the authority that we often claim for ourselves. For there are a great many philosophical constructions of what it is to be a self, or an agent, or a perceiver, that simply do not fit with what we now know about the cognitive unconscious, with what we now know about how our minds work.
So this is what I’m still not sure I’ve got to the bottom of: what does this fact that most of my mind’s business is really not something I will ever have access to mean for the way that I conceive of myself? What does it mean for the sense I might have of being me? Because it seems to me that the more we know about how we actually function, the more this knowledge makes strange what we might otherwise take for granted in experience. And this is where the fun starts.
Something, as Bob once said, is happening here. But I don’t know what it is.
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A Viable Way
Friday January 15, 2010
The other day, I was browsing through the town library here in Leicester, and I decided to have a look through the shelves of books in Chinese, to see if I could find anything to give me a bit of reading practice. It was there that I stumbled across, How to Marry a Western Woman, a handy guide for the Chinese male; and although I’ve no plans to marry a Western woman just yet, I though that this would be worth a look given that I had fifteen minutes to spare. Because, after all, you never know… Anyway, as I was making my way through the book, I came across a passage in which several topics of conversation were suggested, just as ice breakers. And here I found the following interesting assertion: that one of the most popular questions amongst Westerners is this: “What do you want to be doing in ten years’ time?”
Now, I’m not sure whether this really is the killer chat-up line that the authors of the book might like to claim; but, anyway, this all got me thinking. Over a year back, when I was applying for university jobs, I found that almost inevitably I would be asked this question during the interview; and almost inevitably I found myself at a loss when it came to answering it. And part of the reason for this is that I have always had a strong sense of the contingency of things. The idea that the world just gets on with doing the same old thing (and that we ourselves remain the same), is possible only with a hearty dose of amnesia. The thing about the future is that it is fundamentally unforeseeable. That doesn’t mean that we cannot make plans, attend to the way things seem to be going, and so on. But it does mean that these plans need to be held rather lightly, that we should be cautious about fixing them in stone.
Recently I was reading a delightful essay by François Jullien called “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (see the link here – although sadly this is only accessible by members of subscribing institutions), which explores this question in the light of Chinese thought. Jullien’s essay ends with an exploration of the term dao (道) – often translated as “way” – as it appears in early Chinese thought. Whilst we are familiar with metaphors of paths in the West, Jullien’s claim is that in the Chinese context, this way is not a way that goes anywhere. What constitutes the way is not that it gets you to anywhere in particular, but that it is viable. Here is a short passage:
The way recommended by wisdom leads to nothing. No truth – revealed or discovered – constitutes its destination. As wisdom sees it, the essential quality of the way is that it is viable. It does not lead to any goal, but one can pass along it, one always can pass along it, so one can always move on (instead of becoming bogged down or finding one’s path blocked). It is a practicable way.
There is, I think, something in this. Seen from the point of view of philosophy, it suggests to me an approach to thinking recalls Calvino’s passage where he writes of words as a “perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety” (see his Six Memos for the Next Millennium
About ten years ago, a friend asked me what I wanted out of life. I said back then that what I wanted was to have interesting conversations. At the time, this seemed a strange thing to say, and even at the time I was not entirely sure what I meant. But, looking back, what I think I perhaps could have meant was not that I wanted to spend my days in hot debate about the Meaning of Life, but rather that my sense of a life well-lived is rooted not in an idea of some final destination, but rather in a kind of open-ended engagement with things and with others. Conversation, after all, is not really a means to an end, or only minimally so. It is not really a path anywhere, but it is a kind of attention to the changeability of things and to their unfolding. And there’s something attractive in the idea of a broadly conversational life, a life of this kind of engagement.
Glancing back over these few thoughts as they have unfolded, from cross-cultural conversational ice-breakers to Jullien’s viable way, to Calvino and back to the question of conversation, I’m not quite sure yet where it is that I’ve ended up. But then, that is not unrelated to the point I think I may be making: if, on setting out, I cannot be certain where I want to be at the end of scribbling a brief note that takes only an hour to write, then – as long as I attend to the viability of things – I’m content to leave the question of ten years’ time an open one.
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Meditating and Knowing
Saturday January 2, 2010
Firstly, I should wish all visitors to thinkBuddha.org a happy New Year, if a little belatedly. Since I got back from retreat, I’ve had my head down working on the next philosophy book, and it has been good to have some time away from teaching, and a bit of the clarity that comes from meditation, to really get some thoughts on paper.
So for a few days, we were up before five in the morning and on our cushions for the first sit of the day. And when the sky started at last to lighten, the view from the window of the meditation room when I opened my eyes was – pleasingly – that of a bare branch against the sky, strikingly similar to the image at the head of this site. Anyway, the question that I was preoccupied with on this retreat was this: what kind of knowledge comes from meditation?
I should give some background to this question. I’ve been recently reading Paul Sheldon Davies’s book Subjects of the World: Darwin’s Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in nature
Now this is interesting in terms of meditation for sometimes it is suggested that in meditation one can experience the arising and the passing away of mental events directly, without any mediation, such that the mind becomes transparent to itself. And whilst something goes on in meditation – a settling down of the everyday noise, greater attunement to the various fizzes and pops and crackles of the mind going about its business – what interests me is the question of what degree of knowledge we can really hope for from meditation. What I want to know is this: how transparent? How inerrant is this knowledge that comes from meditation? Because I see no a priori reason to assume that this knowledge gained from meditation is any less subject to distortion, confabulation and “spin” than the daily, non-meditative chunterings of our mind. Or, to put it differently, if we can be wrong about things that seem convincing in daily life, can we also be wrong about things that seem convincing in meditation?
These questions might seem to be hard to answer; but at the same time, I think that it would be perfectly possible to design some cunning experiments to test whether the kind of first-person perspective that is claimed to arise from meditation is any more accurate than the first-person perspectives of our day-to-day lives. And even if we do not do the experiments in the meditation hall itself, it is said that there are those who are so well established in meditation that they can keep this kind of awareness up when they are not on the cushions, so we could test them in the lab whilst not engaged in meditation, and see if the have any less propensity to error. This might be a lot of fun. One could run the kinds of cunning experiments that researchers in psychology like to perform to see if there is a difference between what is actually going on, and first person accounts of what the subject thinks is going on (see Sue Blackmore’s website for some details on the experiments undertaken by Wegner, for example), but do these experiments on meditative virtuosos. And we might, of course, find that there is a difference in performance. But I suspect that we might find something else rather interesting: that these meditators were, like the rest of us, saddled with human minds that are largely opaque to themselves. If this was the case, then there would be interesting consequences, not least for how seriously we could take at least some of the claims made for meditation.
It may be, however, that there would be rather less than general enthusiasm at the idea of taking part in experiments such as this. A lot of the research into meditation tends to be into the benefits of meditation. Experiments aiming to explore the limits of meditation, rather than the spiffiness of meditation (although they might tell us some interesting things) might have a rather harder time attracting recruits.
Even if seasoned meditators, like the rest of us, have minds that are opaque to themselves, I do think that meditation as a method may still have some kind of important role in helping us to understand our minds, even if it is not a matter of bringing us direct knowledge of the mind’s inner workings. The role of meditation may be more negative than positive. For there are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of rhetoric when it comes to meditation in Buddhism. Very crudely put, on the one hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a path to inerrant, inner knowledge – meditation is a way of knowing our minds, of reaching certain knowledge, and on the other hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a means of overturning the things that we think we know, as a means of unknowing or not knowing. And I have a hunch – it is no more than that – that the second approach to meditation may have a really rather powerful role to play in the understanding of the mind. For many of our everyday concepts for dealing with the mind seem to me to be concepts that are rooted in complex metaphysical stories, stories that (as the Madhyamikas might like to say) tend to dissolve under analysis. Much of what I read on philosophical approaches to consciousness seems to be founded on a mass of false first-person “certainties”, certainties that some forms of meditation can call radically into question. Could it be that meditation could be a way of freeing us up from the myths that we spin about our minds (the myth of agency, the myth of some kind of inner, substantial self, and so on). I like to think of this not as a form of phenomenology (gaining data on what the mind is like) but as a form of unphenomenology (unpicking the assumptions that we have about what the mind is like, recognising that we don’t really know what we think we know). And perhaps in the space that is thereby created, we might be able to come to a quieter, more sober, more subtle and truer perspective on what it means to be a minded, embodied creature, here in the midst of the world.
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