Whether false idols or
a true god, I am
troubled by the idea of
worship.
Not because I am too good.
Not because I lack humility.
There is something
unthinking
in that word “worship.”
There is something
crudely objectifying, distancing
in the notion.
With some questions we
just can’t help our-
selves.
Buddhists answer one way.
Hindus answer another.
Both say we’ve got the wrong idea
of what the self is or isn’t.
I’m not sure what to think…except…
that they, that we, are likely all a bit off
in our estimation.
Is it a bit like when in
the Boy Scouts, on a camping
trip, the older scouts would make the
younger scouts excited about snipe hunting?
And so off we’d go
looking for something we could never find
because it didn’t exist,
though we were convinced that there must be some-
thing to which “snipe” refers.
In an attempt to get clearer, and less hyperbolic, about the value of suffering, I earlier suggested the idea of a suffering threshold, which is the “point” at which suffering loses its (positive) value and warrants easing. The idea of easing suffering leads directly to compassion/pity and this passage from section 338 of Nietzsche’s the Gay Science:
The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed–all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, the “religion of pity” (or “the heart”) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly. (Kaufmann’s translation)
The last line in German is: “die ‘Religion des Mitleidens’ (oder ‘das Herz’) gebietet zu helfen, und man glaubt am besten geholfen zu haben, wenn man am schnellsten geholfen hat!” Kaufmann translates “‘Religion des Mitleidens’” as “‘religion of pity’”; however, the German “das Mitleid” can be translated as either “compassion” or “pity,” among other things. Perhaps nothing hangs on the difference between “compassion” and “pity.” However, Jeremiah Conway notes a possible difference of importance. In “A Buddhist Critique of Nussbaum’s Account of Compassion” he writes:
In the well-known parable of the arrow, the Buddha responds negatively to the usefulness of answering certain metaphysical questions. The point that he makes is that they are not important for furthering the goal of alleviating dukkha (suffering/existential dissatisfaction):
Whether the view is held that the world is eternal or not, Malunkyaputta, there is still birth, old age, death, grief, suffering, sorrow and despair – and these can be destroyed in this life! I have not explained these other things because they are not useful, they are not conducive to tranquility and Nirvana. What I have explained is suffering, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering and the path that leads to the destruction of suffering. This is useful, leading to non-attachment, the absence of passion, perfect knowledge. (Found here. My emphasis.)
The Buddha seeks to live a full life, but one that eliminates suffering and the cycle of rebirths. Since the whole purpose of Buddhism is to alleviate suffering, it isn’t wrong to say that suffering has a negative value for Buddhists. This need not imply that it is never instrumentally valuable for the Buddhist; nevertheless, any instrumental value it has is to be transcended, ultimately leaving the suffering behind, negatively valued. For more detail on the value of suffering, see here and here.
Buddhism’s view of suffering and happiness is not as crude as Bentham’s, for whom pain varied only in intensity, duration, certainty/uncertainty, and propinquity/remoteness, but not quality: consider the difference between stubbing your toe, nausea, and the death of a loved one. Nevertheless, for both suffering is bad and happiness is good, even if “happiness” means very different things for each. An important difference between Buddhists and Bentham is that the Buddhists don’t understand all pleasures as being intrinsically valuable. They would presumably say the pleasure of meditating is positive (barring attachment to it), whereas the pleasure of heroin and a dozen donuts at one sitting is negative. Bentham, on the other hand, seems to say that when considering actions, it’s simply a matter of summing pleasure and summing pain, and if the balance is on the side of pleasure, then the act tends toward good and vice versa (See chapter IV of Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation).
It has long seemed to me folly to assume that one thing can determine the right or the good in all contexts in the way that, for example, Kantian deontologists and utilitarians claim. Each time I teach global ethics, this “feeling” is heightened. Why could it not be the case that in one context consequences are more relevant and in another intentions?
For example, a person is careless while driving, looking at his iPod, and ends up killing someone, quite unintentionally. In another case, a young man intends to hurt another but bungles it, and there are no bad consequences, except, perhaps, in regard to his self-image and how he might act in the future.
I’m quite sure that the Kantian and the utilitarian could explain the wrongness in each case, and the countless others that one might invent. But I’m guessing they could cover all such cases only via various contortions of reason and mis-descriptions of the facts.
On the other hand, there might seem to be a real problem if we were to say different things account for the right/good in different contexts, for then how do we determine which is salient in each case? How do we know that here it is the intentions and there the consequences that really matter?
But is this really a problem? Most of us don’t operate consciously, purposely, or explicitly as deontologists or consequentialists in daily life. Isn’t this a good place to appeal to a kind of Aristotelian idea of learned competence that is akin to chicken sexing? Perhaps that takes it too far into the inexplicable. For we do debate in normal contexts about whether motivations are more relevant than the consequences. As we grow up and become responsible moral agents, we develop skills in sorting out what is relevant and what not. Some of us are better at this than others, but the point is that we do it quite naturally. So why assume that we need some principle to appeal to in order to say what’s relevant when? Isn’t that just making the same mistaken assumption that for all cases there is some condition or set of conditions that make something right/good?
Perhaps, however, I have oversimplified matters. Perhaps the contortions of reason and the mis-descriptions I worried about earlier would be mitigated by distinguishing, as people do, between wrong actions, blameworthy actions, and actions warranting punishment. So the bungled attempt of the young man to harm another is blameworthy from the consequentialist’s perspective even if the bungled action wasn’t wrong per se, and as such still warrants punishment. It’s not clear, however, how one accounts for the blameworthiness of the bungled action without appealing to some kind of consequences: either the bungled action really produced bad consequences after all or we need to recognize that, according to a rule consequentialism, willing harm, successfully or not, leads to worse consequences than not in the long run. But then, the action is blameworthy because it is wrong. Perhaps the kind of cases I’m thinking about where it makes sense to separate out the bad from the blameworthy are those, for example, where one causes harm unavoidably and without fault, e.g., when the brakes give out in a new car, but no one was negligent, and someone is run over and killed. The driver is not to blame, did not act wrongly, though the consequences are bad. The point here is that it’s not clear that adding the above distinctions will solve the problem at hand.
I have focused here on Kantian deontology and consequentialism for simplicity’s sake and because they seem to go wrong in similar but opposite ways. The Kantian seems to neglect the importance of consequences and the consequentialist the importance of intention. And we are left wondering in one case why the consequences aren’t relevant and in another why the intentions aren’t relevant. Clearly, Kant and Mill were subtle thinkers; Kant surely acknowledges our intuitions about consequences and Mill the importance of intentions. While nothing I’ve said here is definitive, my aim has been “merely” to push the question: But why think that there has to be some one thing that runs through all right actions that makes them right? I would greatly appreciate being helped out with this question.
A view of knowledge that acknowledges that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of ‘science’ seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. (Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 5)
There are, of course, a great many things that humans do quite naturally, e.g., acquire a mother tongue and fall in love. Just as naturally as those, there is the human need to understand the world, not just the Great Clod under our feet, but ourselves, where we are and who we are, each other and our relationships, and our relationship to the world as a whole. While we may make a distinction between understanding and knowing, the desire to understand the aforementioned things is reasonably seen as understanding through knowing. We seek to know that such and such is the case—specifically, what constitutes the world, how those “parts” relate to one another, and how we are related to those “parts.” We seek to understand via propositional knowledge.
This need to understand, to know, has been attempted through such “things” as religion, philosophy, and poetry. But perhaps the most “successful” means we have found is that of science and the scientific method. We have to be careful, however, for we need to be clear about the kind of success we are talking about. There are two main ways that science is successful, ones that are closely related, but which while still separate are easily confused or mixed together. There is the success at discovering the truth about particular areas of inquiry, e.g., the structure of the animal cell and the atom, and there is the success of technological innovations used to solve practical problems, e.g., ways of communicating over long distance, and to provide various luxuries, e.g., air conditioning. Again, the two are obviously related, the former providing the partial means to the latter. This distinction is important to keep in mind, I believe, because its being ignored is partially responsible for the denigration of the success of philosophy and poetry as means of knowing certain truths of our world.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are not ends. They are variously fodder, grist, ports in the storm, and storms to be sailed into. The same for epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic—for philosophy.
Living well is an end, a goal, though it is not a final point. It is more like a buoy in the open ocean—it can perhaps be reached, but vast openness, danger, and uncertainty lie beyond.
Greatness means overflowing with a multitude. One must, for example, have a multitude of projects, not just one. Therein lies a central difficulty, a great obstacle. It is difficult to produce one thing worthwhile, much less produce multiple. Here, too, we see the danger of the siren call of comfort—the need to welcome discomfort with open arms.
How is one to foster, to foment (after all, greatness can be dangerous) such a multitude? Surely a multitudinous diet. Hence, the danger of being a scholar.
Greatness is an end that does not require recognition from without. It also has contributory value in regard to living well, assuming living well doesn’t simply mean decadent-happiness.
Today is “black Friday” and the masses are waiting in absurd lines, dealing with absurd crowds, rubbing elbows in fear and anticipation, waiting to fork out money on “deals,” hoping to buy things for their greedy friends, relatives, and children. Why? Because those desires, those wants, when satisfied by the material goods and gadgets will make them happy, finally, or bring them that much closer to ultimate and final satisfaction. Being the compassionate souls that we are, we want to make our friends and family happy.
Perhaps that was in part what Schopenhauer was getting at: we act as though we want ultimate satisfaction and without it we can’t be happy. We think that once we have, x, y, or z, we’ll finally have what we need to be happy. But, of course, we get x, y, AND z and we are still unsatisfied, either because it is not enough after all or because we have reached boredom. Happiness seems out of reach; ephemeral at best. But we don’t blame the process, the approach; we convince ourselves that we just haven’t found the right thing, person, or product.
After teaching about Buddhism this past week and Nietzsche’s ideas on creativity and greatness, and after watching Limitless last night, the following thoughts came to me.
In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:
How does one become stronger?— By coming to decisions slowly; and by clinging tenaciously to what one has decided. Everything else follows.
The sudden and the changeable: the two species of weakness. (Section 918)
In Limitless, a creatively blocked writer takes a drug that allows him to utilize his brain more completely and efficiently. Part of that involves an intense ability to focus and make connections.
In mindfulness meditation—for example, where your attention is on your breath—it becomes clear how true it is that we naturally have “monkey mind.” Monkey mind is when one thought or idea leads to another, often only tangentially connected, thought or idea. For example, you have a pain in your lower back that reminds you of how uncomfortable your chair is at work, which makes you think of the project that’s due next Wednesday, which makes you think of the doctor’s appointment Wednesday, which makes you think of your sick uncle, which makes you think of that time he took you to the amusement park, which makes you think….
I have long been drawn to Buddhism and to Nietzsche’s ideas. After much thought, I propose a reconciliation; I propose the creation of a Nietzschean Buddhism. How could this be a possibility? After all, the third noble truth of Buddhism is that there is a way out of suffering, and the fourth noble truth gives us the way out. Suffering is optional, as is staying in samsara, the eternal recurrence of rebirth and a life of suffering. How is that reconcilable with Nietzsche, who writes:
You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction desirable (Beyond Good and Evil, 225).
Yet it is exactly along the lines of the value of suffering that a most fruitful reconciliation is possible. I want to sketch out a way in which Buddhism and Nietzsche’s thought can combine along the lines of the value of suffering, the nature of compassion, the importance of psychology, and the role of mindfulness. I will not address all of these issues here. Those that I don’t will be addressed later.