When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharmas intimately. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.

I would venture to say that part of the value of Dōgen’s writing, like that of many good poems and prose, is that it is open to multiple readings (though that is, of course, not to say that anything goes—it’s possible to misinterpret his writings). What follows is an attempt to say something about what the above lines might mean.

In my own experience meditating and trying to be present both on and off the cushion, I have come to appreciate more and more the importance of cutting off the way the present moment is usually taken to point beyond itself. (To be clear, the cutting off is a letting go, not a furrowing of the brow, chopping sort of thing.) Here is what I mean by cutting things off, not letting them reflect anything else. This morning it was raining hard while I was meditating. There are, at least, two ways that I might experience the rain. I might experience the sound of the rain hitting the roof as that sound or I might experience it as the sound of the rain hitting the roof of the house that I’m renting and have been renting since spring of 2012 and which I originally moved into with my now ex-girlfriend, etc. Similarly, when I notice the pain in my hands, I might experience it as pain in my hands or the pain in my hands that I have been experiencing off and on since January and which seems to be related to my arthritis and which I will likely have to keep experiencing into the future with the possibility of its getting worse. In both examples, the sound of the rain and the pain are reflecting something else, pointing beyond themselves to something else.

We might say that this pointing beyond is the embedding of the present moment in a particular narrative. Part of the narrative, the past, we think we know. Part of the narrative, the future, we think will come. Moreover, each moment is a part of my narrative, the narrative of a substantial, independently existing and persisting self who hears the rain….and whose persisting pain it is.

The present moment illuminated and the other side darkened means removing (at least in a substantial way), the present moment from the narrative. It means taking the objects of experience at face value. It is the narrative that allows us—compels us—to perceive the things of the present moment as good or bad, meaningful or not. And it is this latter that opens the door to suffering, specifically the suffering of a substantial, independently existing and persisting self.

A interesting complication is that we might, of course, not just experience the sound of rain or a particular pain, but a deep suffering. That suffering is illuminated, it is what is present. Since I have claimed that suffering arises from the embedding of the present in a narrative that points beyond the present, concentrating on the suffering means, in some sense, concentrating on the narrative. With practice, one can come thereby to see the role of the narrative in the suffering and gain insight into the nature of the narrative. This would presumably put one in a better position to work on the narrative while also decontextualizing the present moment from the narrative. Both of which would help to lesson suffering.

Another (potential) complication can be seen when we consider that decontextualizing the present moment, letting the non-present darken, not only puts an end to suffering but also might remove certain opportunities for joy. For example, when meeting someone at the airport whom you haven’t seen in a year, and whom you’re excited to see, you would experience that person as not having been seen in a year and that would add to the joy of seeing them now. Take that context away and you are seeing the person now and that is it. Less joy? Maybe.

Perhaps the answer is that when practicing meditation, it is important for the non-present to darken, to as far as possible let go of the narrative—decontextualize the present as far as possible. But when living off the cushion, we can distinguish between a) living in a way that is attached to the narrative, attached in such a way that one experiences oneself as a substantial, independently existing and persisting self whose experiences these are, and b) living in a way that is aware of the narrative but not attached to it, where one does not experience each moment as the experience of a substantial, independently existing and persisting self. The darkening of the other side is needed in meditation practice because it is intensive practice that is supposed to enable you to detach from the narrative in one’s daily, lived experience off the cushion. The second way minimizes suffering while still allowing the joy that comes from seeing an old friend or a loved one who has been abroad.

We all play various roles, whether student, professor, parent, brother, close friend, etc. The question is whether those roles are better seen as masks or actual identities. What I mean is: should we identify ourselves as our role or think that there is something more basic underlying the roles, something that we are, such that those roles are really “just” masks or personas that this more basic “thing” wears? I want to argue that there is a more basic aspect to ourselves that implies that these roles are more akin to personas. However, this aspect should not be thought of as some kind of thing or (simple) essence, e.g., pure consciousness or a soul. Rather, this more basic aspect is a particular way of comporting oneself to the world and one’s personas, such that a person is both her personas and not her personas.

The poet Li-Young Lee makes the following contrast in regard to poets in an interview:

Marshall: For many twentieth-century poets, that voice [the voice of the universe] only comes through in riffs, fragments, rather than a complete discourse—Eliot’s ability to shape only a fractured answer to his quest. Pound’s Drafts. Is this a fundamental change in poetry?

 

Lee: The way I read it that fractured quality is bad faith the poet experiences. Say, for instance, religion lets him down. So he turns his back on religion, and he faces the profane life. But there’s a danger in that; in a way, it’s a kind of death. A poet’s dialogue is not with a human audience. Yes, the poem communicates: that’s a by-product. When a poet writes the poem, the dialogue is actually with the universe, and if we don’t realize that, our poetry and our art is in jeopardy. When the dialogue is carried on horizontally, with the culture, that is lower form of art. When it is a dialogue with the universe, that is the highest realization of art. (Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee, ed., Earl G. Ingersoll, 126)

Regardless of what one thinks about Lee’s views expressed here on poetry, I think we can pick up something of profound importance for philosophy. Namely, doing philosophy in the right spirit is to have a conversation with the universe, with reality. Professional philosophy very much involves dialogue, conversation, with other academics. But such conversations can be viewed in at least two ways, as a kind of competition to see who can be the best academic or as engaging in a joint conversation with the universe. One of the differences between the two is that the former primarily operates within the limited scope of her time but the latter doesn’t. That is, the former is rooted in both the debates that are popular at a particular time and in the ways to be seen as a leading academic at a particular time, for example, number of journal articles published, the ranking of the journals, the prestigiousness of one’s institution, etc. Another difference is that in competition one identifies oneself so thoroughly with one’s role as an academic, or even as “philosopher.” Whereas, to see oneself as engaged in a (joint) conversation with the universe is to, as far as possible, eschew one’s roles.

This eschewing of roles comes about, in part, because a key part of the conversation with the universe is calling everything into question, not just one’s beliefs about God or knowledge or the fundamental nature of the universe, but also one’s beliefs about one’s roles. For example, the role of the professor: What does it mean to be a professor? How should it be carried out? What’s the purpose of such a role? Should I be one? Every answer to these questions should be seen, I’d say, as tentative. They are tentative because any possible answer will always be subject to revision. This calling into question of the nature, meaning, and purpose of one’s roles allows one to see them as kinds of masks. Necessary ones, but masks all the same.

Importantly, one is engaged in a conversation with the universe to the extent that one is not merely paying lip service to the ideal of calling into question everything, including one’s roles. This is, in part, why I am using the somewhat mystical sounding conversation with the universe. One might think, at first, that all that is going on with such a conversation is that one wants to get at the objective truth, understand the true nature of reality. However, one could have that as a goal without that meaning one really calls everything into question. Presumably scientists, for example, seek objective truth without that meaning that they are engaged in a conversation with the universe in the way I am specifying here. Even the “philosopher” can seek objective truth without that meaning she is having the kind of conversation that I am lauding.

One might object that such a conversation isn’t really possible, since one cannot literally call everything into question at once. Just as one must keep a significant portion of the ship one is sailing on intact while repairing parts of it, one must endorse a significant portion of one’s belief system in order to question any particular part of it. While there is something to that, the key aspect of calling everything into question is the seeing any particular belief that one entertains/affirms as tentative, fallible, subject to possible revision. Calling everything into question does not mean actively, explicitly challenging everything at once. Further, while a person is certainly the product of her time, and thus cannot fully transcend it even when questioning everything, one can try as far as possible to go beyond the limits of her time and place.

One of the parts of the conversation with the universe that I’m emphasizing is our roles, particularly our identification of ourselves with our roles. Part of the problem is that such an identification is necessarily limiting and potentially dangerous. It is limiting because our roles are inherited, and very much the product of a particular place and time. Further, because they are inherited, they are through and through a matter of tradition, and we should never rest content with tradition. That is, while traditions can be valuable, they can also be dangerous because of their power to compel behavior, behavior that is only as good as the tradition. While one can identify oneself with one’s role and still call things into question, it seems that doing so psychologically blocks fully questioning that role, its meaning, value, etc.

One might well ask, “Isn’t seeing oneself as involved in a conversation with the universe just another role, another mask?” The answer is in one respect “yes,” but in another “no.” It is “yes” because of it one should ask: What does it mean to have a conversation with the universe? Should I engage in it? Etc. And the answers, again, should be seen as tentative. But that is also why it is not just another role. A defining feature of having a conversation with the universe is calling everything into question, accepting all answers as tentative. It is this that propels one away from identification with a role. It is what fuels the thought, “I am a human engaged in a conversation with the universe; I am not most basically a professor/student/lawyer/accountant/factory worker.” But this gives us: “I am a human engaged in a conversation with the universe; I am not most basically a human engaged in a conversation with the universe.” In this “self-undermining” respect, it is not just another role. It calls itself into question. Thus: only when one calls one’s conversation with the universe into question can one really be engaged in such a conversation.

None of this is to deny the importance of our roles or the responsibilities that constitute them. Nor is anything here (necessarily) inconsistent with such conceptions of self that see the self as (at least partially) constituted by its social roles. Seeing the roles as kinds of masks isn’t to see them as unreal or unimportant. It is to see them for what they are: tentative ways of comporting oneself toward the world and others. Taking the mask for the face is to lose sight of this and to engage in a shallow kind of conversation—a horizontal one in Lee’s sense.

But what if I am wrong to value my continued consciousness so highly? What if there was some other aspect of me that was more valuable and which might continue on in some fashion upon my bodily death? What more could I be though, besides my conscious body, which will expire? I have long given pride of place to my consciousness when thinking about death. No consciousness = no me = sad/terrified/uneasy me prior to death. But since the death of my former wife, Jennie Wrisley, I have been intensely interested in achieving a better understanding of what it is to be a person, to figure out whether I am contained between my hat and boots—whether any one is (though not between MY hat and boots). My anxiousness about death and my drive to understand personhood is why I am teaching a class called “Death and Awe” this fall. I plan to use it as an opportunity to get clearer on these issues.

It is my desire to understand the self, personhood, in relation to death that has motivated a number of essays in which I explore possible reasons for and ways of thinking that a person is more than body and consciousness (for example, here and here). However, one thing that has nagged me is that even if I am more than my consciousness and body, what’s really important to me, what I really value, is my consciousness. I’d gladly take on a new body if I could continue this stream of consciousness. Or so I think. So it doesn’t really matter, as regards my death, what else I might be constituted by beyond my consciousness. But there lies a mistake in this line of thought. That is, without knowing what other things might constitute me, I cannot know that I am right in valuing my consciousness most highly. Say, for example, that it turned out that my projects and the people I love also constituted me. It is more than conceivable that those things might be more valuable to me than my own consciousness. This would not negate the value of my consciousness; I might still feel pretty lousy knowing it’s going to cease to exist sometime in the next sixty years. However, I might be less concerned about that knowing that my projects and loved ones (at least some of them) will carry on and be well beyond my limited sixty years. Thus, even if we quite reasonably value our consciousness highly, we have good reason to be concerned, as regards death, to understand the full nature of the self, what goes into making a person a person. For it is only by achieving a better understanding of what constitutes the self that we can be in a position to assess what’s truly lost upon bodily death.

Simone de Beauvoir, the companion of Jean Paul Sartre, growing old, finished the third volume of her memoirs, Force of Circumstance, with a review of the life she had so passionately affirmed:  “Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing…. If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to…what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place, I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live.  The promises have all been kept.  And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.”  (p693, From Hans Küng, Does God Exist?)

This is quite a depressing attitude. All those things and experiences will cease to mean anything once de Beauvoir ceases to exist. But why must their meaningfulness depend on her continued existence? Does it really? Let’s try to answer this latter question by looking at what might it mean to say that in a million years nothing we do now will matter? Here are some possibilities:

1) In a million years, even if there are humans, no one will be talking about, concerned about, know about what we did now (during our lives).

2) In a million years, all of the effects of the things we do now (during our lives) will have become so “dispersed” that they won’t really exist any longer.

3) In a million years, nothing we do now (during our lives) will have any value.

4) Nothing we do now (during our lives) has any value now (during our lives).

1)-4) are not likely not exhaustive of the possible meanings, but I take it that they are key candidates. Importantly, they aren’t mutually exclusive; they could all be true at the same time. As a matter of fact, I take it that the real worry is 4) and that possible reasons for believing 4) are 1)-3). So we ought to ask whether 1)-3) actually do give reason to believe 4) and whether 1)-3) are true. We then ought to ask whether there is another other reason that might support 4).

An all important question in this context is: What is supposed to be the source of value of what we are, what we do, what we believe, etc.? For in order to evaluate whether the truth of 1)-3) would negate that value, we need to have an idea of the source and nature of that value. For example, if the value of what we do is subjective in the sense that it comes solely from our emotional or cognitive response (or something similar), then if we are no longer around in a million years, then that would seem to mean that 3) will be true assuming no one is valuing what we did. However, in this case the truth of 3) does not seem to imply the truth of 4), that nothing we do now has value now.

However, it’s not so clear that that’s exactly right. A further point to keep in mind is that if in a million years nothing we do now has value, but it did have value now, then in a million years what we do now still has past value in the same way that even if this essay no longer exists in a million years, in a million years it will still be true that it existed now (million years past). This is important to note, since it seems that what should really concern us is whether what we do has value now, not whether that value will somehow persist continuously present into the future. This seems to point out an ambiguity in the formulation of 3) above. That is, 3) might mean 4) or it might mean something like, 5) In a million years, nothing we do now (during our lives) will presently have value. Under a subjective theory of value 4) is false. What about 5)? Let’s return to it in two paragraphs.

What about sources of value that don’t depend on our subjective responses? Ones that are, we might say, objective in the sense that they do not depend on any belief, thought, attitude, feeling, etc., from us to be what they are? For example, we might reasonably think that a human life (if not life in general) has objective value. Even if no one attributed value to another human being or had an attitude of valuing or anything else, that would not mean that a particular human life wasn’t valuable. Even if no one valued an innocent baby, it would still be wrong to boil it alive, and it’s being wrong would depend on its objective value. Trying to give an account of objective value is not particularly easy. Thankfully, we needn’t worry about doing so here. The point is simply that if there is such a thing as objective value and if some of the things we do have objective value, then it won’t be true in a million years that nothing we do now has value now. If writing a book has objective value and I write a book, then that act will have value now.

So the result we have is that regardless of whether value is subjective or objective 4) is false, i.e., it’s false that nothing we do now has value now. What about our 5): In a million years, nothing we do now (during our lives) will presently have value.? In a million years nothing we have done will still exist (at least according to presentist theories of time—theories of time that grant existence to the present moment alone). Whether in a million years what we had done will have present value seems to be a non-issue, since those actions don’t still exist. Worrying about whether they will presently have value in a million years would be akin to worrying about whether this piece of gold (which, say, ceases to exist in 20 years) will presently have value in a million years. The fact that it doesn’t is due to the fact that it doesn’t exist then. But, again, that doesn’t negate the fact that it has value now. The same with our actions, etc., that have value now. Thus, while 5) might be true, at least on presentist theories of time, that needn’t be a concern and it doesn’t make 4) true.

Some may worry about 1) and 2) from above. Those, again, are the claims that 1) In a million years, even if there are humans, no one will be talking about, concerned about, know about what we did now (during our lives) and 2) In a million years, all of the effects of the things we do now (during our lives) will have become so “dispersed” that they won’t really exist any longer. It seems to me that these might be a concern insofar as one seeks some sort of posthumous “existence.” One says, “I don’t have a soul, but at least I’ll live on in people’s hearts and minds, and by the good effects I’ve had on the world.” But in a million years it is unlikely that that will be the case. This might indeed be a troubling concern. But it seems to me not to be the main issue regarding the idea that nothing we do now will matter in a million years or that the finitude of our lives negates the meaning of our lives or what we do.

Turning explicitly to the issue of meaning, it seems it could go in various ways. One way of thinking of meaning is simply in terms of value in the senses already covered above. If that’s how it’s meant, then the finitude of our lives doesn’t negate the meaningfulness of our experiences, actions, etc. On the other hand, if meaning is thought of as significance or importance, then it seems to reduce to value, for something is significant or important insofar as it is perceived as having value. Given these considerations, it’s hard to see how the young de Beauvoir was gypped. The fact that her life, her consciousness will end and take all of those experiences with it does not make them valueless or meaningless. It “merely” means that there is a point in time at which they are no longer consciously remembered. And if Bernard Williams is right regarding what he says in The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, it’s the fact that de Beauvoir’s life is finite that allows her life to have had (subjective) meaning, i.e., significance for her. An unending life is one where things lose their personal significance.

If the above considerations of value not being destroyed by finitude are correct, then even if the universe were to reach a state of death, i.e., uniform dispersal of energy where nothing lives, all is dark, then that would not make nothing matter now. This is surely a good thing.

My concern with personal identity is primarily due to its implications for death. In the west it is usual to either identify oneself as a soul that will go to heaven or hell, or with one’s body, in which case death means the cessation of existence. Things are, of course, more complicated than this. Leaving aside the possibility, much less the nature, of a soul, philosophers are less than agreed as to what constitutes personal identity, what makes person A at time t1 the same person as B at time t2.

Describing the difference between his view and that of Judith Jarvis Thompson, Derek Parfit writes:

We are asking when it is true that some future person will be me. On Thompson’s view, that person will be me if and only if we have the same body. On my view, that person will be me if we have the same brain, and are uniquely psychologically continuous. If we have different brains, and are not psychologically continuous, that person will not be me. In other cases, on my view, there is indeterminacy, or no answer to the question whether that person will be me. (180)

See Eric T. Olson for an important complication and confusion that arises from my and Parfit’s way of characterizing the question of personal identity.

Olson distinguishes, rightly, the persistence question regarding personal identity—what makes it true that “some future person will be me”?—from the ontological question of “What am I?” Regarding this latter question, he writes:

What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I and other human people? What is our basic metaphysical nature? For instance, what are we made of? Are we made up entirely of matter, as stones are, or partly or wholly of something else? If we are made of matter, what matter is it? (Just the matter that makes up our bodies, or might we be larger or smaller than our bodies?) Where, in other words, do our spatial boundaries lie? More fundamentally, what fixes those boundaries? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or an aspect of something else, or perhaps some sort of process or event?

However, these two questions are clearly related. If the answer to the ontological question is that I am essentially a soul, then the answer to the personal identity over time question is that what makes it true that a future person is me is that he have the soul that I presently have.

The debate that Thompson and Parfit are engaged in is important, but I think that in large part it misses an important point about personal identity, about why you might be concerned about the question of what makes you the person you are. In past essays I have made a case for the claim that personal identity is relational. In particular, who I am is in some significant way constituted by certain relations in which I stand to other people. If this is right, it has implications for the persistence question regarding identity over time. I want now to give different reasons for thinking that persons are partially constituted by certain relations.

Part of the reason that the debate that Thompson and Parfit are engaged in misses the point is because deciding whether the same person persists from t1 to t5 due to the continuity of body or because of the continuity of psychology ignores the aspects of our lives as persons engaged in projects.

In my philosophy classes, I have regular opportunity to emphasize the importance of our projects, e.g., a person’s writing a book, working on a PhD, raising a child, etc. And I emphasize that one of the central projects that they have as students in college is to work out what projects they will engage in, e.g., who they want to be. A project, then, is some long-term goal in which we invest much time, effort, concern, and, so to speak, heart. I am not giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for what a project is. Rather, the above is a rough and ready characterization that should serve our purposes sufficiently.

With the concept of a project in hand, let us ask: What is the source of our concern with our continued survival? Is it the value we place on consciousness/experience? Or is it the value of our (unfinished) projects? Does death matter because it would be the cessation of experience or because it would end our engagement with our projects? (The two options are not meant to be exhaustive, nor are they meant to be exclusive.)

Our consciousness is vital to our experiences and we easily identify ourselves with our consciousness (together with memory). But what about our projects, the things we set up our life around, put our hearts, time, and effort into? Where is the line between our projects and our selves?

Our projects are a mix of process and product. Some are finished and still in play, e.g., a piece of artwork or a book; others are both product and process, e.g., an organization, son/daughter, or a relationship between lovers/partners/friends. Some of these projects can be taken over by others and survive our absence (a company that researches greener energy), some not (becoming a doctor).

An important point is that insofar as our projects can endure the loss of our physical presence (including our consciousness and will), and insofar as our projects are partially constitutive of what we are, a vital part of us can survive bodily death. (And we might further ask: What is the value of the initially all-important consciousness/experience in the absence of all projects?)

But why should we believe that our projects are partially constitutive of what/who we are? I can only gesture at an answer to this question here. An initial reason, at least, is that in the absence of projects an instance of Homo sapiens is not truly a person: A central aspect of what it is to be a person is to engage earnestly in projects. A possible objection to this is that it confuses the engagement with a project with the project. That is, we can admit that engaging in projects is necessary to be a person without that implying that the projects engaged in are literally a part of the person. In response, I think this artificially divides the project from the engagement. That is, the engagement is not separable from the project. One way to see this is to notice that our projects not only make us persons but also kinds of persons, and that the two are not separable, as one might suppose. We naturally describe a person whose project is to be an influential scholar as a scholar—that is who they are (And I know Sartre would have a field day with this claim). While having projects is a necessary condition for personhood, I am claiming, the project itself determines the kind of person. This is all very loose and too general. At this point, I want to offer a promissory note for a better defense of these claims in the future. For now, I want to draw out some of the implications of the idea that our projects are partially constitutive of what/who we are.

Given the uncertainty of our (bodily) life spans and the certainty of our bodily deaths (and the likely lack of a immortal soul), it is imperative to engage in meaningful projects, particularly since at least some of them are likely to “outlive us.” This conclusion is not new or surprising. We “know” already that we ought to make something of ourselves in order to make our lives meaningful. The aspect that I am emphasizing is that a meaningful life through meaningful projects is partially constitutive of our identities and that an important aspect of these identities can continue to exist and thrive after bodily death and the end of consciousness.

An implication of all of this is that an important act of love toward another is the concern for their projects before and after their “death.” Regarding the time after death, as we take great care to respect the bodies of the dead, we should do the same with their projects as they are a part of the person.

An even greater implication of the view so far outlined is that insofar as others are among our projects, they are a part of our selves. Having another person as a project seems, at first, to be best suited for a parent-child relationship. Lovers/partners/friends might not be thought of as so readily taking each other as projects, perhaps the relationship but not the person. But insofar as a person’s projects are partially constitutive of her, and insofar as we take as a project the projects of another, then we take the other person into ourselves.

An important question at this point is: What is it to take another person’s project as our own? Clearly it is not literally a matter of making it our own, for that would be theft or mere copycatting. A part of doing it must, then, be concern to further another’s project. In this way, we make another person our project in a way that is not limited to the parent-child relationship.

So, if it turns out to be correct that our projects are partially constitutive of what/who we are, then we have further reason for thinking that what an “individual” is is not, paraphrasing Whitman, contained between his hat and boots. If a project of mine is you (and the success of your projects), then an essential part of me is you. And if “you” die, then I can continue to support, at least some of, your projects, and “you” and “I” before and after death are not separate entities.

There is something
unthinking
in that word “worship.”
There is something
crudely objectifying, distancing
in the notion.

Worship! Such
connotations of limit.
Calling to mind the need
for knees that will bend,
for walls to contain
the sacred.

Better: acts of reverence,
acts of wonder.

An “Itadakimasu,” before that
which was alive becomes a
part of your life—the
great web of inti-
mate connections.

The purposeful peeling
of an orange;
the patient seeing of a banana
slug, in all its small
enormity and grace.

The recognition that,
among a myriad other things,
we are the process of
the universe being
conscious of the universe.

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.

What kind of freedom did we achieve, once
we knew the truth?

Or is it more like when in
earnest, the fool takes a tour
of the university’s buildings, visits
classrooms, talks to professors and students,
but after all is said and done he remarks,
“This is all nice, but where’s this thing,
the university? I want to see it”?

What does he achieve, once
he realizes his mistake?

It has long struck me as funny, or,
perhaps, better: enlightening,
that Buddhists do their thing,
enter their deep states,
and Hindus do their thing,
enter their deep states,
yet the first come away empty handed—and this leads
to awakening,
enlightenment,
freedom from samsara,
and the second come away with the most substantial
thing possible—and this leads
to awakening,
moksha,
freedom from samsara.

Perhaps they’re really answering
different questions, though they’d swear they’re not.
Is one realizing we’d long been on a snipe hunt?
Is one coming back from a snipe hunt proudly holding a rabbit?
Or are they, are we, just playing the fool?

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:

I find it significant that there is only one Greek word, eleos, for the English terms pity and compassion. For a Buddhist, the distinction between pity and compassion is great, while I find Aristotle (and Nussbaum to a lesser degree) blurring the two. Pity is motivated by a desire to help the other, but in such a way that a hierarchical difference between the helper and the helped is maintained. According to Buddhism, compassion is not hierarchical. It operates, not as giving help to the needy, but as life in service to another manifestation of life. Pity, ever conscious of its difference from the other, is necessarily judgmental, constantly evaluation [sic] the worthiness of the other to receive attention. (p12)

Conway’s distinction between pity and compassion from a Buddhist perspective is helpful, first, because the kind of compassion/pity I will address is what he calls “pity”; second, it is the Buddhist (and Christian) view of what Conway calls “compassion” that I wish to call into question (with Nietzsche—though likely not as vehemently as he does).

In the Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Bernard Reginster reads “das Mitleid” in Nietzsche’s writings as “compassion.” In setting up Schopenhauer’s understanding of compassion for Nietzsche’s revaluation of it, he writes:

Compassion is a disposition to deplore the sufferings of others, and so to avoid causing suffering to them and to try to alleviate their suffering whenever possible. To make a virtue out of compassion is in fact to declare that suffering is something that ought to be deplored and eliminated. (p162)

Nietzsche rejects this understanding of compassion because it sees suffering as essentially negative, and because it leads to ill effects for the person offering compassion and the one receiving it (see Reginster 185ff for an interpretation of Nietzsche’s reasons why). I have great sympathy for Nietzsche’s revaluation of suffering, and what it implies for compassion; nevertheless, he doesn’t always give clear suggestions on how to proceed. I introduced the idea of suffering threshold to try to make things more precise and Nietzsche’s ideas more practical.

If we are right to believe that there is such a thing as a suffering threshold, then an important question arises as to its identification in given instances of suffering. This epistemological issue is extremely important, since it determines what we should do for ourselves and others. In Conway’s terms, the pity that goes with suffering thresholds requires us to constantly evaluate the worthiness of the recipient of pity. However, given Nietzsche’s understanding of compassion/pity, this evaluation of worthiness takes on a different meaning from Conway’s. As Reginster reads Nietzsche, pity/compassion means being willing either to let a person continue to suffer or to inflict suffering upon her, if it will help the person grow, be creative, become better, etc. (Reginster, p186-187). Reginster quotes Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “‘But if you have a suffering friend, be not a resting place for his suffering, but a hard bed as it were, a field cot: thus you will profit him best’ (Z II 3)” (p187).

All importantly, Reginster notes that this revaluation of suffering and compassion/pity doesn’t mean that we are never to ease the suffering of another:

It is worth noting that none of this implies that Nietzsche’s own brand of compassion cannot be aroused by the sufferings of others. Still, it will no longer be a response to suffering as such, but to the suffering that causes “precious capabilities” to be “squandered,” or “halts” someone at “something less than he might have become.” Nietzsche is mindful of the fact that even the strongest individual cannot fight all the fights, and that some challenges might provide better opportunities for growth and overcoming than others. But he largely ignores such complications in his focus to debunk morality’s wholesale condemnation of suffering. (p187)

Hence, the importance of recognizing suffering thresholds. Regarding the epistemological issue of how to recognize when someone’s suffering warrants easing, I have no formula in mind. Rather, it seems that the first important consideration is how well we know the person in question. In Nietzsche’s terms, is the person more of a higher type or a lower type? What are the person’s projects and responsibilities? To what extent and in what ways is the person already suffering? To the extent that we can’t answer these questions about a person who is suffering, it seems that the appropriate response is to err on the side of caution and attempt to help ease the suffering. And, of course, there may be types of suffering that should be eased no matter what, e.g., a person’s drowning or bleeding out. Why err on the side of caution? Is that not to devalue suffering? No. As we have seen, we can recognize the positive value of suffering without holding the absurd view that all instances of suffering have positive value. To help another, for Nietzsche, is, in part, to help them grow. That growth has value (we, of course, can question this) and to hedge our bets by erring on the side of caution is to err on the side of not wanting to let someone suffer on the wrong side of the threshold such that her growth is imperiled. But moreover,  part of the view that Nietzsche seems to be rejecting is the idea that suffering always has either a negative value or merely a short-term instrumental value. In rejecting that, we needn’t go all the way in the other direction and say that it always has a positive value and should never be alleviated because it is suffering.

A second epistemological consideration is how well we know ourselves. That is, we should ask, are we really competent judges of another person’s needs, even a person whom we know very well? If we are capable of being honest with ourselves, and the answer we come to is, “No,” then we again should err on the side of caution, for the same reasons given above. Further, regarding self-knowledge, we should ask whether we are clear about our motivations. Not only “Are we a competent judge of another person’s needs?” but also: are we judging that they need to suffer out of a kind of revenge or sadism, or because we truly want to help them? These are difficult questions. “Know thyself!” is never an easy task. And, as David McRaney nicely elucidates in his recent You Are Not So Smart, it may be even more difficult than we ever thought.

A consequence of needing to defer to our knowledge of a person when evaluating the kind of compassion/pity warranted is that we will most likely and most often be in a position to let suffer, or to inflict suffering upon, those who are closest to us: our close friends and loved ones. This surely has further implications on the kinds of people we might associate with; but more importantly on the kind of person we are required to be:

What belongs to greatness.— Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering? Being able to suffer is the least thing; weak women and even slaves often achieve virtuosity in that. But not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering—that is great, that belongs to greatness. (the Gay Science, section 325.)

Those of us unwilling or unable to let suffer or to inflict suffering on others out of a desire to help them grow, create, etc., are weaker types in Nietzsche’s eyes. Given the strength required for Nietzschean compassion/pity, and given the epistemological condition regarding how well we know the other and how well we know ourselves, we are left wondering how prevalent such compassion could be. A world that embraces Nietzschean compassion and appropriately and skillfully employs it may not be radically different from the way it is now. Though, perhaps, if Nietzschean compassion were taken seriously, then it might give rise to more and more “higher types” and an increase of instances.

References:

Conway, Jeremiah. 2001. “A Buddhist Critique of Nussbaum’s Account of Compassion.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, vol. 8. No. 1.

McRaney, David. 2011. You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself. Gotham Books.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974.  The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufman. Vintage Books: New York.

Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London.

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).

This leads us to the views of Aristotle, as explained by Martha Nussbaum in her “Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology.” As she emphasizes, emotions are centrally connected to judgments about how things are in the world:

Fear, for example, involves (in Aristotle’s view) the thought that there are serious damages impending and that one is not entirely in control of warding them off. Anger (again in Aristotle’s view) involves the thought that a serious and inappropriate damage has been willfully inflicted on me or someone or something one cares about, and also the thought that it would be good for that damage to be made good somehow. (S92)

This view of the emotions has implications on the appropriateness of our emotional responses. If I get angry because you have not invited me out to join you at the restaurant for which I have given you a gift certificate (think of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, season 7, “the Hot Towel”), we can explain the inappropriateness of my response by pointing out that my judgment of my being wronged is problematic. Thus, as Nussbaum writes:

For all the ancient thinkers, a necessary and sufficient condition of an emotion’s being truly positive—in the sense of making a positive contribution toward a flourishing life—is that it be based on true beliefs, both about value and about what events have occurred. Many instances of good-feeling emotion are actually quite negative, inasmuch as they are based on false beliefs about value. […]

By the same token, many negative-feeling emotions are appropriate, and even very valuable. […] Anger is a sign of what we care intensely about and a spur to justice. Aristotle does not urge people to be angry all the time; indeed, he thinks that the appropriate virtue in this area should be called “mildness of temper,” in order to indicate that the good person does not get angry too often. But if someone did not get angry at damages to loved ones or kin, he would be “slavish,” in Aristotle’s view. (S93. My emphasis.)

This brings us to the issue of the death of those dear to us and grief. I take it that grief is a clear example of an intensely difficult, painful, and unpleasant emotional state. As such it is inconsistent with the Buddhist’s goal of alleviating suffering: enlightenment, Nirvana. That is not to say that an enlightened Buddhist could not prefer that the deceased were still alive or regret the loss, but such states of mind would not amount to the suffering that typically characterizes grief for the unenlightened. And, again, this more typical grief is inconsistent with the Buddhist goal of the cessation of suffering.

From the Aristotelian perspective, this goal of ending suffering, and the instances of suffering involving grief, is abhorrent. While the Buddhist has a number of reasons (I’m leaving aside whether they’re any good) for thinking that the death of a loved one should not give rise to suffering, those reasons are ultimately motivated by the negative valuation of suffering. And it is the judgment that suffering is always essentially negative that the Aristotelian perspective claims is false. Thus, to respond to the death of a loved one without grief reflects poorly on the character and judgment of the “bereft.” Moreover, we might imagine the Aristotelian response to the Buddhist’s desire to bring an end to suffering as itself slavish, even if that desire was, for the Buddhist, properly free of craving and attachment.

I have not given reasons for thinking that the Aristotelian perspective is right and the Buddhist perspective wrong. However, as much as I value Buddhism, I do think that its blanket negative valuation of suffering is flawed. One of the reasons for that is because of what it implies for human greatness and achievement. See again here. Another reason Buddhism’s negative valuation of suffering is flawed is because of its implications for the appropriateness of emotions like anger and grief. There is something deeply human about responding to the loss of loved ones with deep grief, the willful harm inflicted upon us with anger, and the perception of imminent harm with fear. The Buddhist will have a response to this – part of which will be that these negative emotions stem from delusive impressions of a substantial self or atman. Such responses are, I believe, inadequate. I’m not arguing that here; the point of this essay is to articulate clearly the nature of the dehumanizing defect in Buddhist thought, its negatively valuing emotional responses such as grief.

Reference

Nussbaum, Martha. 2008. “Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology.” Journal of Logical Studies, vol. 37. S81-S113.

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.