Wow, that was superb. It seems I have the same epistemological stances as you. Interesting that you said, "...actually I usually just say Buddhist" when asked, "Are you a materialist". But in the beginning of the article you tell us that many Buddhists take other positions on the nature of objects. I am curious if you could give a broad-stroke taxonomy of a few present day Buddhist sects positions on this issue.
My impression is that many in the Zen circles are not epistemological realists -- or at least not in conversation (though I am sure they live their lives that way).
Anyway, since a great many Buddhists are not realists, saying "I am Buddhist" doesn't help the listener understand your epistemology since there are many different epistemologies among Buddhists. Yet if they ask further, you can always point to this fine article.
I don't really do comparative religion. Or philosophy either really, I was just annoyed about the simplistic terms of the discussion and wanted to spice it up!
I really don't do those either -- nor anything really well -- to be painfully honest. :-)
But .... On further thinking, I have a problem with one smal part of your post, though I am not sure I can verbalize it, but shall try: Like you, I put myself forward as a pragmatist (kind of a "Skillful Means"ist, eh?). But here is my problem: What if embracing a certain belief (which is not true) because it works for me, reinforces sloppy thinking in other realms for others or myself. Wouldn't it be better to embrace "truth" which can accomplish the same? Is that clear?
Show me this "truth" you wish to embrace? Then prove to me that it is true; that this truth can guide all of your actions better than self-awareness. And how is this pragmatic?
I never use the phrase "skilful means", with reference to myself, and don't identify with it.
Hypothetical ethical problems are seldom helpful, and seldom lead to any great insights I find. I don't want to get into it on the net, but, if you want my advice, you need to think in terms of actual behaviours and their actual impact on others (and you, specifically on your meditation practice), not this vague "what if" stuff. It's a waste of time.
A project I have considered is "Buddhism for xkcd readers" -- i.e. a presentation of Buddhism for people who have some understanding of the real world and are impatient with "spiritual" claims. If Buddhism is going to succeed in the West, it has to appeal to people who make a difference and create the future. Most current presentations seem to be aimed at airheads.
I am looking forward to the QM discussion. I have been toying with writing about this myself. A main difficulty here is that "quantum mysticism" is underwritten by accredited quantum physicists. This means that any objections to it can be dismissed with "you just don't understand quantum physics -- famous physicists say quantum mysticism is right."
The answer to that, I think, is that that physicists are not trained in philosophy, and are lousy at it metaphysics. Another xkcd cartoon is relevant: physicists have an annoying tendency to think that because they can do one hard thing (physics) they are omniscient and intellectually omnipotent. Actually, the specific ways physics teaches you think do not work well in other domains.
So a really good response to quantum mysticism has to start with, "Yes, I DO know quantum physics, and I also know the literature on metaphysics, which those guys don't." Not many people can do that.
Short of that, "quantum physics is obviously irrelevant here" is the right answer -- but it can't conclusively address the "that's not what quantum physicists say" objection.
Thanks, and yes I enjoyed that xkcd physicist cartoon as well. The QM blog is written and ready to role on Fri. I wait with interest to see what you make of my approach, but it sounds like we have some common ground.
I'm not against mysticism per se, and think we need to leave room for such emotions as awe and wonder; but I do find a hard-core rationalist and mystical *explanation* of such feelings equally unsatisfactory. The fact is we don't know, and the stories we tell are prapañca. But I'm also a fan of Joseph Campbell and believe that some universal stories - such as the hero's journey myth - can inform us about our humanity. Somehow credulity causes everything to be mushed together, and no allowance to be made for metaphor and symbol to have their place as a different mode of understanding. Everything gets reified, or deified, and it all becomes vague and ill-defined. That's what I'm against.
I am currently writing about eternalism and nihilism. It seems to me that the "hard-core rationalist" denial of the meaningfulness of non-ordinary experience is nihilist, and the "mystical woo-woo" tendency to take non-ordinary experience as proof for implausible metaphysical claims is eternalist. (As I am using the words "nihilist" and "eternalist", which might not be quite the same as in any Buddhist tradition.) These tendencies, of denial and reification, seem pervasive to me, and to explain a lot.
@ David "Most current presentations seem to be aimed at airheads." Agreed! Analyzing "airheadedness" is tough.
"because they can do one hard thing (physics) they are omniscient and intellectually omnipotent" I see this in some Buddhist thinking too. Just because a person has some insight or some emotional maturity, that "enlightenment" is assumed to be global for that person.
I have seen other religious groups grab QM as their own -- Buddhist, Christians, Sufis ... I look forward to Jayarava's analysis.
@Josen -- I think part of the key to understanding "airheads", and the contemporary Western presentation of Buddhism, is monism.
David McMahan's book _The Making of Buddhist Modernism_ alerted me to this. Building on work by Thanissaro Bikkhu, he points out that much of what is called "Buddhism" nowadays is actually early 19th Century German Romantic Idealist philosophy. That sounds wildly implausible, but the more I have investigated, the more I think it is right.
In actual Buddhist philosophy, these wrong ideas were called "monism", and were rejected. (They are central to Advaita Vedanta, which was a major competitor to Buddhism for several centuries.)
Monism holds that "all is One" (which is a big part of quantum mysticism") and that one's True Self is magically identified with The Universe As A Whole (pretty close to quantum mysticism's false claims about the relationship between consciousness and the quantum wave function).
Monism says that what is "really" real is the One -- the Absolute, the All-Encompassing abstraction. Specifics are illusory. Monism is attractive because it says that the unsatisfactory aspects of life can be ignored -- they are not where the action is. Denying the reality of specifics is what makes monists airheads. If All is One, distinctions don't matter, and wooly-headedness is a virtue.
I think it's time to sound an alarm that Buddhism has been infected with monist ideas. I am not necessarily against doing mashups of "Buddhism + X", but I think you need to be explicit that that is what you are doing. Also, when X is something that Buddhists universally explicitly rejected until recently, if you are mixing it up with Buddhism, you ought to explain why you think the traditional Buddhist rejection was mistaken.
I don't see anyone doing that. I think most of the Buddhist (and quasi-Buddhist) teachers who are teaching monism are unaware that it contradicts core Buddhist logic.
Re 19th Century German Romantic Idealist philosophy see this recent blog post from one of my favs: http://theravadin.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/a-religion-of-the-year-2360-ce/
I know that Sangharakshita was influenced by German Idealism and tended to talk in terms of 'The Absolute' or 'The Transcendental', in the 60's and 70's. He has recently said that though he used such terms metaphorically he was inevitably misunderstood, and would not use such terms now.
I abandoned such terms a few years back as incongruous with my understanding of the Dharma and was relieved to hear of his rethink.
The way you describe monism (Sanskrit?) is redolent of the Upaniṣadic brahman - and of course that was one of the major influences on Advaita (not-two-ist) Vedanta.
Interesting about Sangharakshita. I'm trying to follow up David McMahan's work and trace the influence of German Idealism on Buddhism in detail. Actually I think he discusses Sangharakshita's teachings on art in this connection.
According to the Wikipedia (not always reliable, of course) the Pali word is ekatta. I'm not sure what the corresponding Sanskrit would be; I don't know either language.
The Wikipedia cites an unnamed sutta as associating monism with eternalism, which is certainly true in both Advaita Vedanta and German Idealism. On the other hand, the tradition associates dualism (or "pluralism") with nihlilism, which works for Indian schools like Carvaka, and Western materialism in the pejorative sense, but doesn't work for the "Western" religions, which are eternalist and dualist. In at least one Vajrayana interpretation, eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism are independent axes.
Quantum mysticism, and contemporary pop spirituality in general, are monist-eternalist, like Advaita and German Idealism.
It's not coincidental, I think, that the people who invented quantum theory were mostly German, and had been exposed to German Idealism to some degree. When they tried to make philosophical sense of quantum weirdness, it's not surprising that they turned to Idealism as a conceptual resource. Unfortunate, though.
@ Jayarava Do you have a short-list of recommended "Sangharakshita readings which are up-to-date on his present thinking or present method of expressions, that would help introduce his thinking?
@ David (Meaningness) I have gone to some of your links and started reading. Damn! More interesting stuff. But I don't see that you have a blog -- just writings on webpages -- so no interaction. So perhaps this is wise -- for you will be spared all the sorts of questions that I plague poor Jayarava with. I find Jayarava's writings extremely cogent, interesting and instructive and he is kind enough to engage me. I am going through his writings systematically -- for now. Meanwhile I will start yours in a similar fashion. I wish you had a blog to interact with -- do you.
Interacting with a fine author while you read their book is what any student could only wish for -- that is why I enjoy Jayarava's blog and wish you had one.
Thank you for the link to the Vajrayana site on Aro's discussion on emptiness. I just figured out that it is also your site. You have many sites. I soon got an e-mail saying that commenting was disabled. I guess you prefer writing without comments. Oh well. I will just enjoy the readings.
Anyway, fantastic writings. Hope to keep seeing you here on Jayarava's site.
Yes, Jayarava's work is outstanding! A splendid combination of meticulous scholarship, insight, and good sense.
All my sites are supposed to accept comments. You did leave one, so probably whatever problem you had is solved... but I would like to solve it for other people too. Maybe you could post to me the "no comments" email you got, at http://buddhism-for-vampires.com/contact ? Then we won't have to abuse Jayarava's hospitality here to sort out the problem.
Kevin Lovett at Reformed Buddhist has just done a Buddhist post on Quantum Mechanic implications in Buddhism with a new Hologram theory test! In case you need an example in your upcoming post.
meh. I predict they will announce after a couple of years that the detector isn't sensitive enough; and the new one will be 1000 times more sensitive and funnily enough cost 1000 times as much. It's an incremental way of generating media interest which helps to sway the funding bodies to supply toys for the boys.
Remember that they haven't found gravity waves yet; and they are supposed to be bigger than the Planck scale by 11 orders of magnitude!
the simplistic duality being proposed: either one is a materialist, or a non-materialist ... I see the European Enlightenment as a good thing (unlike some of my colleagues).
Couldn't we take the same approach to the Enlightenment? That is to say, we need not conclude that the method of thinking and behaving which flowered at and from this point is either 'good' or 'bad' - it had some extremely positive and some extremely negative consequences (how to categorise these as such would depend on your point of view).
Personally I think that, in the West at least, some of what I would see as problematic forms of Buddhist non-materialism are related less to Buddhism and more to the anti-rational ideals of the 'new age' (inasmuch as this was the portal through which Buddhism entered Western social consciousness and which, for better and for worse, still shapes Western Buddhism deeply) - ideals which were addressing a genuine and deep-seated problem, but had a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and also to conceal and/or deny their own internal problematics and inconsistencies.
Having said that, one thing I think that often goes unrecognised by the 'materialist' side of the argument (or, hopefully, conversation) is that the position the materialist comes from is an ideological viewpoint in itself - that is, an approach to any subject in which the individual, conceptualising themself as such and as a freely acting agent, ponders upon a matter in the light of their personal knowledge and personal history before coming to a conclusion which is rational and objective according to the lights of that knowledge & history. To identify this as a particular viewpoint in itself, not as the neutral point from which other views may be judged, has been one of the most important functions of the postmodern or deconstructionist endeavour, I would argue.
Yes. Recall that my comments were in the context of, and a response to a particular style of critique. I wasn't aiming for an overview.
The "materialist" (by which I presume you mean something more like "empiricist") may be thinking in the terms you suggest, but they do so in concert, constantly referring the observations and deductions of others. A single observation is not sufficient to change the paradigm (though try telling this to the popular press!). Science is a body of knowledge built up by repeated observation, by thorough checking and repetition. It is far more than the subjective views of isolated individuals. And this is why our worldview is forever changed by the conclusions of scientists; and why it has the level of glamour it does, and why Buddhists seek to align themselves with it.
I think the post-modernists painted themselves into a relativist and nihilist corner from which they could not escape, and have become increasing irrelevant as the 21st century proceeds without them. That said I have been re-reading Foucault's "The Order of Things" recently and enjoying his insights into the changes in episteme around the time of the Enlightenment (though I think he mistakes the worldviews of intellectuals as representative of worldviews generally and this is clearly not the case!). I'm not convinced tht resemblance entirely died out as a source of knowledge in Europe generally or how do we explain the invention of homoeopathy, and the persistence of astrology? I'm also a fan of Barthes "Mythologies". But on the whole I think Physics is a more useful paradigm.
Best Wishes Jayarava
Friday, December 03, 2010
Mike said...
Thanks for the reply/redirect to this article. It made my day- I really enjoyed reading it. I feel the Yogacarins mind-only school, and I suppose by extention recent Quantum science observations, serve, like Newtonian physics or karma, a useful purpose. The mind-only school, though still just a view to be ultimately discarded, could serve as a useful angle to investigate for someone rigidly adhering to a pure materialist/nihilistic worldview- perhaps to be discarded later for the mightier Mādhyamaka school (said somewhat ironically). In quantum science, as well, I find great use in the compassionate perspective it can create- perhaps on a daily basis we don't observe all the universe to be connected, i.e. the tea I drink does not actually seem to affect the weather, or vice versa, however, the quantum view (well, recent popularized quantum revelations) does profoundly affect my relationship with the world and the people in it. To adopt a vast perspective of direct interconnection with the entire universe and all the beings in it is very helpful and often helpful. In addition, it may be true- you or I do not know that these 'superpowers' we have heard of from Buddha are not something that manifests when one's consciousness becomes enlightened. All I know is that I DO experience a positive difference in the quality of my relationships when I meditate upon these ideas. Perhaps, like the mind-only school, this imaginative (and perhaps burdensome) view can be abandoned when compassion and fearlessness flow more uninteruptedly in me, but for the time being, I find the videos focussing on the intersection between the mind and the universe to be inspirational.
That said, I can't wait till your next blog entry when you demolish the idea that Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics have anything in common- I'm hooked on your blog, sir!
I am materalistic but as well yogi too...Nice Post !!
Friday, April 29, 2011
[Image]Recently on the Buddhist Geeks website my enthusiastic endorsement of the scientific method was referred to as "dry", "reductionist", and (shock horror) "materialistic". I thought the terms of the discussion were a bit limited. I'm not really much of a philosopher, and have not studied much Western philosophy, but I don't think of myself as a materialist. I understand my philosophical position to be this: I'm a sceptical epistemological realist; and more vaguely, a transcendental idealist. Though I'm also a pragmatic Popperian empiricist.The basic position of an epistemological realist is that objects exist independently of your mind. Many Buddhists take the position that objects do not exist independently of your mind, but only exist in conjunction with your mind, or indeed only in your mind. I think this takes the Buddhist argument on the nature of experience too far. I go back to the basic Buddhist teachings and base myself on the idea that consciousness is always specific to the sense associated with it, and arises in dependence on contact between sense equipment, and sense object.
Since all the information we have about objects comes through the senses there are limitations on what we can say about them. But certain consistencies occur. For instance objects are recognisable, and memorable. With reference to any particular object, people agree (more often than not) that there is an object, and also agree on its general characteristics, even though specifics may be disputed. If you could see me writing this you'd probably agree that I'm sitting at a desk, in a room, in a house, in a town, etc; or you'd be open to the charge of madness. If someone else sees an object and communicates to me about it in a way that suggests that they see the same object as I see, then I take that as evidence pointing towards the independence of the object from either of our minds. When everyone laughs at the same time in a movie then it suggests the movie is external to all of us. Explaining observations like these becomes very difficult if objects only exist in our minds.
The view that objects only exist when I observe them at best is egocentric. But consider - when I leave my room and go downstairs to make a cup of coffee, it seems nonsensical to me that my room and all of the hundreds of objects which fill it cease to be because I'm not there to see them. And what about when I blink? In that fraction of a second when I do not see the things, do they disappear? And do they then reappear when my eyes are open again? What happens to them during my blink? Trying to explain this is much more difficult, much more cumbersome, than assuming than that the objects simply exist. However I don't think we can say much about that existence, which is why I am a sceptical empirical realist.
It is my view that the Buddha was unconcerned with the nature of existence, or reality. That is to say he was not concerned with the nature of the objective pole of experience. This lack of concern with existence (and non-existence) is clear in, for instance, the Kaccānagotta Sutta, and strongly re-emphasised in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The duality between subject and object is uncontentious in the Pāli Canon, it is simply a given. The conceptualisation of the problem of suffering, all of the analysis, and all of the practices, focus on the subjective side of experience. The nature of the object is simply irrelevant, it has to be there of course, but the arising of suffering is to do with our internal relationship to our perceptions, not with the objects of perception.
I've also said that I'm a transcendental realist, which in a way flows out of the previous paragraph. I must say I'm not a very sophisticated transcendental realist, and not very well versed in Kant or other philosophers of that ilk. Kant began with a problem. Hume had showed that a purely empirical approach to knowledge denied the possibility of metaphysical concepts like causality, time, and space. On the other hand empirical scientists, exemplified by Newton, had shown that we can say very definite things about causality, time, and space. Newton's well-known laws of motion are example. Kant's solution to this was to propose that the human mind interpreted sense experience in terms of inbuilt, or a-priori, categories of knowledge. The very usefulness of Newton's laws showed that a-priori categories had, to some extent, to reflect reality. Kant showed that the subject was involved in the creation of all knowledge, but that knowledge thereby created was valid. We can know useful things about the universe and how it works. Things are more or less as they appear to us.
In terms of my approach to Buddhism what this comes down to is, again, a focus on understanding the subjective side of experience, trying to understand the a-priori, what we bring to our interpretations of experience. This comes out of a study and practice of Buddhism, but in terms of relating it to the categories of Western philosophy this is as close as I've come. The fundamental problem is that we interpret experience in ways that cause us misery. Experience arises out of contact between objects and our sensory apparatus - but it is not the experience per se that is problematic, not the raw experience anyway. It what we make of experience, and how we relate to experience, the stories we tell ourselves about experience that cause us suffering. In other words it is not pleasure per se that is evil, only the pursuit of pleasure with the thought that it will make us happy. Hence the knowledge we need is knowledge of our relationship to experience; knowledge of the way we process experience into views and reactions. It is this kind of knowledge that will be liberating.
The last label I referred to was "pragmatic Popperian empiricist". Karl Popper was to some extent reacting against a trend in European thought which sought to evaluate all knowledge by the criteria of 'verifiability'. That is to say some philosophers were not prepared to accept knowledge as valid unless it could be verified. Sadly, although this philosophical position has long been superseded, it is more or less the popular view that science operates along these lines. But any living scientist will acknowledge the contribution of Karl Popper. At one time it was axiomatic that all Swans were white, because no European had ever seen a Swan that was any other colour. The statement "all swans are white" had become a standard in textbooks of logic even. However when Europeans got to Australia they discovered black swans. One can never anticipate when one might find a black swan which falsifies the statement that all swans are white. And this is the essence of Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, which informs my own understanding, and all of modern science. Facts and laws are only ever provisional because at any time a counter-example may disprove them. Theories might prove to be useful, but they can never be proved once and for all.
I said I'm also a pragmatist and this is because though they cannot be falsified, let alone proved, some forms of knowledge and some forms of practice are useful, or better helpful (I'm not a utilitarian). Some forms of knowledge which have been falsified on one level, even retain their usefulness on another. It is a fact that Newton's Laws remain useful in some contexts - say landing a human on the moon, or designing an aeroplane - even though observations have shown them to be inaccurate, for instance, when considering objects moving close to the speed of light. Then there is the placebo effect, the phenomena that we heal better, if we believe that we have had an effective treatment - even though it may be false to state that we have actually had an effective treatment, still we fair better than if we had no treatment at all. I argued this in the case of karma, which cannot be either verified or disproved, but is still useful as a view in helping to determine how we should behave. That is, I believe the theory of karma is morally helpful, even though it has doubtful truth value, if only in a provisional sense. (see Hierarchies of Values). Despite my definite preference for the rational, factual truth is not the only criteria that I apply when assessing the value of an idea. I may also form an opinion on the basis of helpfulness, or more aesthetic qualities such as elegance or beauty.
I don't feel entirely comfortable with this kind of discussion, or with these kinds of labels, I'm all too aware of the extent of my ignorance of Western philosophy. But when someone calls me a materialist because I'm educated in, and enthusiastic about, the scientific method, I need a way to respond which doesn't buy in to the simplistic duality being proposed: either one is a materialist, or a non-materialist. This simple opposition is not very helpful. People don't really hold views that are either one or the other, but have a far more sophisticated relationship to the objective pole of experience. One simply cannot be a practising Buddhist, as I have been for 16 years, and maintain a purely materialist view of the world. Clearly I do have a view about the material world, and I do think science can tell us far more about the material world than can Buddhism, but my focus is very much on the subjective, on the relationship to perception, on the nature of experience. Traditional Buddhist approaches to knowledge are rooted in pre-technological world-views that are frequently little better than superstition - the Buddha has a magical ability to know ultimate reality through super-powers - which just doesn't chime with my own experience of Buddhists and Buddhism. I see the European Enlightenment as a good thing (unlike some of my colleagues).
The other aspect of the criticism was that scientific investigation is reductionist. Reductionism by definition is the attempt to "explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set" (the free dictionary). Which means of course that Buddhist doctrine is on the whole reductionist, because at its heart are explanations of phenomena in terms of short lists of mental states and events; and simplified models of dependent arising. By contrast some people try to explain phenomena in terms of more complex, often metaphysical or even mystical, ideas; they go against Occam and invent new entities to explain what they experience. What to call this kind of approach? Inflationist? The inflationist critique of science is that it tries to explain the unknown in terms of the known; whereas inflationists try to explain things in terms of the unknown, and the more mysterious the better. Apparently no one likes to admit that they simply don't know the cause of some experiences, nor the nature of them. If someone claims to remember a past life and I express doubt then I am, apparently, a materialist. But I don't see why an experience should be interpreted in terms of mysterious entities and processes as opposed to known entities and processes, if the truth is that we just don't know.
The charge is that experience is reduced only to that which can be measured. I would turn this around: it seems to me that inflationistists tend to project their subjectivity onto the world, and assign it an objective status which it does not deserve. There are many examples of inflationism stemming from interpretations of Indian religious ideas. Despite all evidence to the contrary people treat cakras, for instance, as really existent rather than symbolic or at best subjective; similarly they insist that the mysterious 'third eye' has some physical manifestation in the body (a past acquaintance assured me that it was connected to the pineal gland!) . I know many people who have seen or felt ghosts, because the house up the road (which is occupied by members of my order and community) is haunted. In fact it is supposedly one of the most haunted houses in the UK. I do not doubt that people have had uncanny, strange, unnerving, and inexplicable experiences. However I also do not necessarily accept that ghosts are the best explanation for those experiences. Some experiences do not have external objects, as anyone who has ever meditated, dreamed, taken psychedelic drugs, or gone mad will confirm. Actually anyone who ever thought, or remembered, or imagined anything is not (necessarily) working with external objects. A ghost certainly has more mystique, than a hallucination, but is it more likely? I'd have to say no. Plus at least half of the weird experiences are obviously caused by sleep paralysis. [See also today's xkcd cartoon]
So, am I a materialist? No. I'm a sceptical epistemological realist, a transcendental idealist, and a pragmatic Popperian empiricist (or something like that - actually I usually just say Buddhist). As such I don't have much to say about the nature of existence or reality (or any of that material stuff). Although I really enjoyed those Brian Cox documentaries and read Stephen Hawking, these days I'm mostly interested in the nature of experience. I do see an empirical approach to investigating it as the most useful; though I'm prepared to be pragmatic about what is helpful for that investigation. The main point is that I reject the dumbing down of religious discussions, especially in the area of the interaction between religion and science. If anything is dry and reductionist, and frankly boring, it is the idea that everyone interested in science is necessarily a materialist.
Next week [22 Oct 2010] I attempt to demolish the idea that Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics have anything in common. See Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat.
21 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formWow, that was superb. It seems I have the same epistemological stances as you. Interesting that you said, "...actually I usually just say Buddhist" when asked, "Are you a materialist". But in the beginning of the article you tell us that many Buddhists take other positions on the nature of objects. I am curious if you could give a broad-stroke taxonomy of a few present day Buddhist sects positions on this issue.
My impression is that many in the Zen circles are not epistemological realists -- or at least not in conversation (though I am sure they live their lives that way).
Anyway, since a great many Buddhists are not realists, saying "I am Buddhist" doesn't help the listener understand your epistemology since there are many different epistemologies among Buddhists. Yet if they ask further, you can always point to this fine article.
Thank you again, that was good reading.
Friday, October 22, 2010
I don't really do comparative religion. Or philosophy either really, I was just annoyed about the simplistic terms of the discussion and wanted to spice it up!
Friday, October 22, 2010
I really don't do those either -- nor anything really well -- to be painfully honest. :-)
But ....
On further thinking, I have a problem with one smal part of your post, though I am not sure I can verbalize it, but shall try:
Like you, I put myself forward as a pragmatist (kind of a "Skillful Means"ist, eh?).
But here is my problem:
What if embracing a certain belief (which is not true) because it works for me, reinforces sloppy thinking in other realms for others or myself. Wouldn't it be better to embrace "truth" which can accomplish the same?
Is that clear?
Friday, October 22, 2010
Show me this "truth" you wish to embrace? Then prove to me that it is true; that this truth can guide all of your actions better than self-awareness. And how is this pragmatic?
I never use the phrase "skilful means", with reference to myself, and don't identify with it.
Hypothetical ethical problems are seldom helpful, and seldom lead to any great insights I find. I don't want to get into it on the net, but, if you want my advice, you need to think in terms of actual behaviours and their actual impact on others (and you, specifically on your meditation practice), not this vague "what if" stuff. It's a waste of time.
Jayarava
Friday, October 22, 2010
Amen, brother!
A project I have considered is "Buddhism for xkcd readers" -- i.e. a presentation of Buddhism for people who have some understanding of the real world and are impatient with "spiritual" claims. If Buddhism is going to succeed in the West, it has to appeal to people who make a difference and create the future. Most current presentations seem to be aimed at airheads.
I am looking forward to the QM discussion. I have been toying with writing about this myself. A main difficulty here is that "quantum mysticism" is underwritten by accredited quantum physicists. This means that any objections to it can be dismissed with "you just don't understand quantum physics -- famous physicists say quantum mysticism is right."
The answer to that, I think, is that that physicists are not trained in philosophy, and are lousy at it metaphysics. Another xkcd cartoon is relevant: physicists have an annoying tendency to think that because they can do one hard thing (physics) they are omniscient and intellectually omnipotent. Actually, the specific ways physics teaches you think do not work well in other domains.
So a really good response to quantum mysticism has to start with, "Yes, I DO know quantum physics, and I also know the literature on metaphysics, which those guys don't." Not many people can do that.
Short of that, "quantum physics is obviously irrelevant here" is the right answer -- but it can't conclusively address the "that's not what quantum physicists say" objection.
Best wishes,
David
Friday, October 22, 2010
Hi David
Thanks, and yes I enjoyed that xkcd physicist cartoon as well. The QM blog is written and ready to role on Fri. I wait with interest to see what you make of my approach, but it sounds like we have some common ground.
I'm not against mysticism per se, and think we need to leave room for such emotions as awe and wonder; but I do find a hard-core rationalist and mystical *explanation* of such feelings equally unsatisfactory. The fact is we don't know, and the stories we tell are prapañca. But I'm also a fan of Joseph Campbell and believe that some universal stories - such as the hero's journey myth - can inform us about our humanity. Somehow credulity causes everything to be mushed together, and no allowance to be made for metaphor and symbol to have their place as a different mode of understanding. Everything gets reified, or deified, and it all becomes vague and ill-defined. That's what I'm against.
'Talk' to next week I hope.
Jayarava
Friday, October 22, 2010
Yes, that all sounds right to me.
I am currently writing about eternalism and nihilism. It seems to me that the "hard-core rationalist" denial of the meaningfulness of non-ordinary experience is nihilist, and the "mystical woo-woo" tendency to take non-ordinary experience as proof for implausible metaphysical claims is eternalist. (As I am using the words "nihilist" and "eternalist", which might not be quite the same as in any Buddhist tradition.) These tendencies, of denial and reification, seem pervasive to me, and to explain a lot.
Looking forward to your next post!
David
Friday, October 22, 2010
@ David
"Most current presentations seem to be aimed at airheads."
Agreed! Analyzing "airheadedness" is tough.
"because they can do one hard thing (physics) they are omniscient and intellectually omnipotent"
I see this in some Buddhist thinking too. Just because a person has some insight or some emotional maturity, that "enlightenment" is assumed to be global for that person.
I have seen other religious groups grab QM as their own -- Buddhist, Christians, Sufis ...
I look forward to Jayarava's analysis.
Friday, October 22, 2010
@Josen -- I think part of the key to understanding "airheads", and the contemporary Western presentation of Buddhism, is monism.
David McMahan's book _The Making of Buddhist Modernism_ alerted me to this. Building on work by Thanissaro Bikkhu, he points out that much of what is called "Buddhism" nowadays is actually early 19th Century German Romantic Idealist philosophy. That sounds wildly implausible, but the more I have investigated, the more I think it is right.
In actual Buddhist philosophy, these wrong ideas were called "monism", and were rejected. (They are central to Advaita Vedanta, which was a major competitor to Buddhism for several centuries.)
Monism holds that "all is One" (which is a big part of quantum mysticism") and that one's True Self is magically identified with The Universe As A Whole (pretty close to quantum mysticism's false claims about the relationship between consciousness and the quantum wave function).
Monism says that what is "really" real is the One -- the Absolute, the All-Encompassing abstraction. Specifics are illusory. Monism is attractive because it says that the unsatisfactory aspects of life can be ignored -- they are not where the action is. Denying the reality of specifics is what makes monists airheads. If All is One, distinctions don't matter, and wooly-headedness is a virtue.
I think it's time to sound an alarm that Buddhism has been infected with monist ideas. I am not necessarily against doing mashups of "Buddhism + X", but I think you need to be explicit that that is what you are doing. Also, when X is something that Buddhists universally explicitly rejected until recently, if you are mixing it up with Buddhism, you ought to explain why you think the traditional Buddhist rejection was mistaken.
I don't see anyone doing that. I think most of the Buddhist (and quasi-Buddhist) teachers who are teaching monism are unaware that it contradicts core Buddhist logic.
David
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Re 19th Century German Romantic Idealist philosophy see this recent blog post from one of my favs: http://theravadin.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/a-religion-of-the-year-2360-ce/
I know that Sangharakshita was influenced by German Idealism and tended to talk in terms of 'The Absolute' or 'The Transcendental', in the 60's and 70's. He has recently said that though he used such terms metaphorically he was inevitably misunderstood, and would not use such terms now.
I abandoned such terms a few years back as incongruous with my understanding of the Dharma and was relieved to hear of his rethink.
The way you describe monism (Sanskrit?) is redolent of the Upaniṣadic brahman - and of course that was one of the major influences on Advaita (not-two-ist) Vedanta.
sugaccha
Jayarava
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Interesting about Sangharakshita. I'm trying to follow up David McMahan's work and trace the influence of German Idealism on Buddhism in detail. Actually I think he discusses Sangharakshita's teachings on art in this connection.
According to the Wikipedia (not always reliable, of course) the Pali word is ekatta. I'm not sure what the corresponding Sanskrit would be; I don't know either language.
The Wikipedia cites an unnamed sutta as associating monism with eternalism, which is certainly true in both Advaita Vedanta and German Idealism. On the other hand, the tradition associates dualism (or "pluralism") with nihlilism, which works for Indian schools like Carvaka, and Western materialism in the pejorative sense, but doesn't work for the "Western" religions, which are eternalist and dualist. In at least one Vajrayana interpretation, eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism are independent axes.
Quantum mysticism, and contemporary pop spirituality in general, are monist-eternalist, like Advaita and German Idealism.
It's not coincidental, I think, that the people who invented quantum theory were mostly German, and had been exposed to German Idealism to some degree. When they tried to make philosophical sense of quantum weirdness, it's not surprising that they turned to Idealism as a conceptual resource. Unfortunate, though.
Best wishes,
David
Saturday, October 23, 2010
@ Jayarava
Do you have a short-list of recommended "Sangharakshita readings which are up-to-date on his present thinking or present method of expressions, that would help introduce his thinking?
@ David (Meaningness)
I have gone to some of your links and started reading. Damn! More interesting stuff. But I don't see that you have a blog -- just writings on webpages -- so no interaction. So perhaps this is wise -- for you will be spared all the sorts of questions that I plague poor Jayarava with. I find Jayarava's writings extremely cogent, interesting and instructive and he is kind enough to engage me. I am going through his writings systematically -- for now. Meanwhile I will start yours in a similar fashion. I wish you had a blog to interact with -- do you.
Interacting with a fine author while you read their book is what any student could only wish for -- that is why I enjoy Jayarava's blog and wish you had one.
Thank you for the link to the Vajrayana site on Aro's discussion on emptiness. I just figured out that it is also your site. You have many sites. I soon got an e-mail saying that commenting was disabled. I guess you prefer writing without comments. Oh well. I will just enjoy the readings.
Anyway, fantastic writings. Hope to keep seeing you here on Jayarava's site.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Essential Sangharakshita. Wisdom, 2009.
Don't be put off by the grumpy picture. Stupid decision to use that one I thought!
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Hi, Sabio,
Yes, Jayarava's work is outstanding! A splendid combination of meticulous scholarship, insight, and good sense.
All my sites are supposed to accept comments. You did leave one, so probably whatever problem you had is solved... but I would like to solve it for other people too. Maybe you could post to me the "no comments" email you got, at http://buddhism-for-vampires.com/contact ? Then we won't have to abuse Jayarava's hospitality here to sort out the problem.
Best wishes,
David
Monday, October 25, 2010
@ Jayarava:
Kevin Lovett at Reformed Buddhist has just done a Buddhist post on Quantum Mechanic implications in Buddhism with a new Hologram theory test! In case you need an example in your upcoming post.
Monday, October 25, 2010
@Sabio
meh. I predict they will announce after a couple of years that the detector isn't sensitive enough; and the new one will be 1000 times more sensitive and funnily enough cost 1000 times as much. It's an incremental way of generating media interest which helps to sway the funding bodies to supply toys for the boys.
Remember that they haven't found gravity waves yet; and they are supposed to be bigger than the Planck scale by 11 orders of magnitude!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
the simplistic duality being proposed: either one is a materialist, or a non-materialist ... I see the European Enlightenment as a good thing (unlike some of my colleagues).
Couldn't we take the same approach to the Enlightenment? That is to say, we need not conclude that the method of thinking and behaving which flowered at and from this point is either 'good' or 'bad' - it had some extremely positive and some extremely negative consequences (how to categorise these as such would depend on your point of view).
Personally I think that, in the West at least, some of what I would see as problematic forms of Buddhist non-materialism are related less to Buddhism and more to the anti-rational ideals of the 'new age' (inasmuch as this was the portal through which Buddhism entered Western social consciousness and which, for better and for worse, still shapes Western Buddhism deeply) - ideals which were addressing a genuine and deep-seated problem, but had a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and also to conceal and/or deny their own internal problematics and inconsistencies.
Having said that, one thing I think that often goes unrecognised by the 'materialist' side of the argument (or, hopefully, conversation) is that the position the materialist comes from is an ideological viewpoint in itself - that is, an approach to any subject in which the individual, conceptualising themself as such and as a freely acting agent, ponders upon a matter in the light of their personal knowledge and personal history before coming to a conclusion which is rational and objective according to the lights of that knowledge & history.
To identify this as a particular viewpoint in itself, not as the neutral point from which other views may be judged, has been one of the most important functions of the postmodern or deconstructionist endeavour, I would argue.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Hi Genrenaut
Yes. Recall that my comments were in the context of, and a response to a particular style of critique. I wasn't aiming for an overview.
The "materialist" (by which I presume you mean something more like "empiricist") may be thinking in the terms you suggest, but they do so in concert, constantly referring the observations and deductions of others. A single observation is not sufficient to change the paradigm (though try telling this to the popular press!). Science is a body of knowledge built up by repeated observation, by thorough checking and repetition. It is far more than the subjective views of isolated individuals. And this is why our worldview is forever changed by the conclusions of scientists; and why it has the level of glamour it does, and why Buddhists seek to align themselves with it.
I think the post-modernists painted themselves into a relativist and nihilist corner from which they could not escape, and have become increasing irrelevant as the 21st century proceeds without them. That said I have been re-reading Foucault's "The Order of Things" recently and enjoying his insights into the changes in episteme around the time of the Enlightenment (though I think he mistakes the worldviews of intellectuals as representative of worldviews generally and this is clearly not the case!). I'm not convinced tht resemblance entirely died out as a source of knowledge in Europe generally or how do we explain the invention of homoeopathy, and the persistence of astrology? I'm also a fan of Barthes "Mythologies". But on the whole I think Physics is a more useful paradigm.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Friday, December 03, 2010
Thanks for the reply/redirect to this article. It made my day- I really enjoyed reading it. I feel the Yogacarins mind-only school, and I suppose by extention recent Quantum science observations, serve, like Newtonian physics or karma, a useful purpose. The mind-only school, though still just a view to be ultimately discarded, could serve as a useful angle to investigate for someone rigidly adhering to a pure materialist/nihilistic worldview- perhaps to be discarded later for the mightier Mādhyamaka school (said somewhat ironically). In quantum science, as well, I find great use in the compassionate perspective it can create- perhaps on a daily basis we don't observe all the universe to be connected, i.e. the tea I drink does not actually seem to affect the weather, or vice versa, however, the quantum view (well, recent popularized quantum revelations) does profoundly affect my relationship with the world and the people in it. To adopt a vast perspective of direct interconnection with the entire universe and all the beings in it is very helpful and often helpful. In addition, it may be true- you or I do not know that these 'superpowers' we have heard of from Buddha are not something that manifests when one's consciousness becomes enlightened. All I know is that I DO experience a positive difference in the quality of my relationships when I meditate upon these ideas. Perhaps, like the mind-only school, this imaginative (and perhaps burdensome) view can be abandoned when compassion and fearlessness flow more uninteruptedly in me, but for the time being, I find the videos focussing on the intersection between the mind and the universe to be inspirational.
That said, I can't wait till your next blog entry when you demolish the idea that Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics have anything in common- I'm hooked on your blog, sir!
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Hi Mike
That post was written over a year ago. The follow up on Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics is here
Thursday, April 14, 2011
I am materalistic but as well yogi too...Nice Post !!
Friday, April 29, 2011