gratitude and the sublime

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Peter

Let’s define a sublime experience as one that is dramatically better than life as usual, since life involves suffering—at least in part and over the long run.

I doubt that sublime experiences reveal a truth: that everything is redeemed. Nor are they false, mere fantasies of people who cannot face reality. Rather, they are part of human experience, within our available range.

Life may be suffering, but it also encompasses the sublime. We are constituted to enjoy some things, and that is a wonderfully good fact about us. Just as we may lament our human proclivities to violence, despair, and cruelty, so we can celebrate our ability to savor what we find sublime. And not only celebrate it but actively cultivate this appreciation and share it with other people through the representations that we create.

Some wonderful experiences intrinsically involve interacting with other people. These activities include romance and sex, athletic competition, and success in any collective effort, including (I presume) victory in battle. I will leave this category aside for the present purposes, although it is desirable to gain emotional highs by interacting with other people while also being ethical.

I want to focus, instead, on that diverse category of experiences in which a person encounters an object that seems sublime, whether it is a view of nature, a song or a picture, a religious ceremony, or a meditative insight. Indeed, the word “sublime” is generally reserved for this category.

A classic debate in aesthetics asks how we should interpret such experiences. Does the object cause the experience? If so, do some things merit being called sublime while others should not be treated that way? (Can we be wrong to relish something that is not worthy?) Did the creator of the object have a powerful and positive emotion that the object now communicates to us? Or are observers more responsible for causing our own emotions by how we choose to perceive an object (Peacocke 2024)?

Our answers to those questions may differ if the object is a poem, a sunset, or a meditative exercise. For instance, an author has emotions while writing, so we can ask whether a poem conveys the poet’s inner state to us. But some would say the same about nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) detects a Divine Father behind all “dappled things,“ like “skies of couple-colour” or “a brinded cow.” “Praise Him,” says Hopkins. On the other hand, some doubt that an author’s emotion is relevant in any case, even when a sensitive human being has made a work. They think it is all about the object or the observer.

This debate continues. I want to add a different dimension, not only because I believe it is true, but also because it can enrich our experience.

I think we often relish things because we have been taught how to perceive them. This is a skeptical point. It reminds us that we would enjoy very different things if we lived in a different time and place. It provokes some (appropriate) doubt about whether our reactions are true.

For instance, I like a snowy day. I believe this appreciation is something learned. I do not simply see the snow; I see it with things already in my mind, like Christmas decorations, paper snowflakes on second-grade bulletin boards, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow,” Han-shan’s Cold Mountain lyrics, Robert Frost’s “lovely, dark and deep” woods, Hiroshige’s woodblock prints of wintry Japan, Rosemary Clooney with Bing Crosby. In short, I have been taught to appreciate a winter wonderland, a marshmallow world, and a whipped cream day. Some of these influences probably detract, but they were meant well.

It is sometimes said that when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux (in Provence) in 1336—simply to enjoy and describe the view—he was the first European ever to do such a thing. Clearly, some people outside of Europe had loved mountain views long before Petrarch. I find it plausible that certain communities of people appreciate alpine vistas, while others do not. And some of us may have learned the sublimity of landscapes from a chain of people originally inspired by Petrarch, although he was surely influenced by classical sources. We all see what we have learned to see.

Let’s say that I am looking at a large and dramatic sky, with ragged clouds that are mostly dark but illuminated here and there by a hidden sun. Perhaps there are also wind-blown trees in view and small signs of human habitation.

I believe that I appreciate this vista in part because I have studied and enjoyed 17^th-century Dutch landscape painters and some later artists whom they influenced, such as John Constable, the Americans of the Hudson River School, and Impressionists. These artists do not explain nature to me. They do not reveal why the background color of the sky is blue and leaves are generally green. Their representations of nature would not convey sublimity to a different species, such as my dog Luca or an alien from Mars. As Thomas Nagel (1970) says, “A Martian scientist … would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud.”

Instead, these artists help me to see what is in my phenomenal world: how clouds pile up and sun peeks through. Come to think of it, our phenomenal world is a bit strange. It includes an object that is so painfully bright that we avoid it, and it has borders that we cannot see because they move as we shift our gaze. This is also the world that the Dutch painters present on canvas.

In turn, I enjoy Dutch landscapes more thanks to Svetlana Alpers’ 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, which I read when it was still fairly new and have returned to since. Alpers’ project is not to praise the artists whom she discusses; she does not practice “art appreciation.” She identifies a way of thinking about images, an epistemic framework, that explains what the Dutch painters were up to and that distinguishes them from Renaissance Italian painters (without suggesting that either is preferable). Her insights have enriched my understanding of the original works. And she is only one in a sequence of critics and historians, collectors and curators, and subsequent artists who have turned 17^th-century Dutch landscape painting into a category and helped us to value it and see it better. Again, how I see that art influences how I see nature, especially when the landscape even remotely resembles Holland.

I hold a doctoral degree and have chosen to visit museums and read academic criticism for decades. I am not claiming that reading scholarly books and labels in museums is the best (let alone the only) way to enrich current experiences. Many people learn to name, value, represent, protect, and use objects from their elders without needing written words. Religious communities also develop ceremonies and observances that convey the creativity of previous generations. Academic criticism is unusually explicit and transparent about its sources; that is the purpose of footnotes. But all human communities accumulate and transmit ways of experiencing the world.

Sometimes, people are motivated to ignore or conceal the influence of previous observers on their own sublime experiences because of an implicit assumption that the sublime should be pure and universal and stand outside of history. Just as an example, North Americans who experience anapanasati, or Buddhist breathing-meditation, may be told (or may tell themselves) that this is the original practice of the Buddha himself. They envision themselves as doing something pure and personal that reveals absolutely general truths, such as the non-existence of the self. A person who may have lived in what is now northern India and Nepal more than two thousand years ago not only did the same thing as modern meditators but is causing us to practice anapanasati now, because we hear the Buddha’s “teachings.”

But we might look around the room, which probably (not invariably) incorporates some aesthetic elements from East Asian art, along with 20^th century European minimalism: bare wood, a simplified statue. People speak English with a sprinkling of Sanskrit words. They sit cross-legged and meditate but do not maintain shrines, prostrate themselves, make pilgrimages, or give alms, which would be common manifestations of Buddhism in East Asia (Moon 2024)

Many participants may identify as white and think of what they are experiencing as Asian. Indeed, they may classify the Buddha as an Asian man, notwithstanding that he predated the distinction between Asia and Europe. Rev. Cristina Moon (a Zen priest from Hawaii) recalls:

Over the fifteen years before coming to Chozen-ji [a temple and monastery founded by Asian Americans], I sat with more than a dozen different Buddhist communities where I was often the only Asian and sometimes one of the only non-white people in attendance. When non-Asian Buddhists (particularly at American Zen centers) wore Japanese clothes, bowed to me theatrically, referred to me as “Cristina-san,” responded to requests in English with “Hai!”, and expressed rigid attachment to the technical accuracy of certain Japanese and Buddhist forms, it looked more like cosplay [dressing as a character from a movie] than a means to enter Zen, (Moon 2024)

In the US, there is a certain tendency—I don’t know how widespread—to see Buddhist thought as ahistorical. The Buddha is treated as a contemporary; the meditating mind lives only in the immediate present. There is also a tendency to acknowledge Buddhism’s roots in Asia but to depict Asian or Eastern “culture” as monolithic, apart from superficial aesthetic differences that people can browse like consumers.

The white or European-American Buddhists whom Rev. Moon has encountered may differentiate between the transcendent truths of the Buddha and optional traditions and behaviors that they label “culture.” They then pick and choose from the traditions without recognizing that they (highly educated, mostly White Americans) are every bit as immersed in their own stream of inherited behaviors, aesthetics, beliefs, and values, which influence their choices about what to borrow from Asian contexts. Linda Heuman writes:

The French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour famously described it this way: “A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.” A modern Buddhist, in Latour’s sense, is someone who believes that Asian forms of Buddhism carry the “baggage” of their host cultures but who remains unreflective about the assumptions that shape his or her own modern adaptation (Heuman, 2015).

For instance, sitting in a minimalist pine room feels pure, although it reflects the same Modernist aesthetics as a boardroom in a skyscraper, whereas prostrating before a brightly colored Tibetan shrine would seem like “culture.”

Any mind is ineluctably historical. As we develop from speechless infants into adults, we absorb a vast array of classifications, assumptions, and values that other people invented before us. We can never escape this historical contingency. You might think that you can have an unmediated experience of nature, but your tastes in nature, your words and concepts for nature, and even your physical location in front of a specific patch of nature are all historically conditioned.

History is highly complex, diverse, and often cruel, whether we happen to know the details or not. Evils are widespread—consider, for example, the use of Buddhist ideas in imperial Japan or in Myanmar today. Human beings widely and blatantly violate principles that they expressly teach, such as nonviolence and compassion. On the other hand, people all over the world also create practices and institutions that reflect wise goals and choices. What we think we know is a result of this complex, globally interconnected, and fraught past.

Cristina Moon’s description of cringy behavior at North American Zen centers is a portrait of people who want to pick and choose ideas and practices that they find comfortable without taking seriously the historical development and interconnection of those ideas, without being genuinely open to practices that might challenge them, without being careful about their own status and impact, and without wrestling with the connections among racial hierarchy and exclusion, everyday culture, and the abstract beliefs that we might classify as Buddhist philosophy or theology. Yet the solution is not to declare these beliefs off limits (nor does Moon suggest we do so), because everyone should always be looking for good beliefs to adopt. We must simply do it with a lot of care–not only about the ideas and their effect on our inner lives, but also about the other people we touch.

To me, our debt to other human beings only deepens the sublime. Nature was not created for us; it just is. And we were not created to enjoy it, although—very fortunately—we do. But our fellow human beings have deliberately shared their appreciation and heightened our own, which means that we are the beneficiaries of benevolent intelligence after all.

In “Of Dappled Things,” Hopkins writes, “Praise Him.” I would (also) say, “Praise them.”

This is a combination and reformulation of previous posts (apologies for the repetition), including: the sublime and other people; the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s Lines Above Tintern Abbey; notes on religion and cultural appropriation: the case of US Buddhism

Sources: Antonia Peacocke, “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.); Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 394-403, p. 443; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Cristina Moon, “From ‘Just Culture’ to a Just Culture, Tricycle, Oc.. 29, 2020; Linda Heuman (2015) “A New Way Forward,” The Tricycle, Spring.

The Art of Solitude

Posted on August 28, 2025 by Peter

I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.

Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.

Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.

Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:

Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …

Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)

Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).

At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.

Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.

Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).

There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.

Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.

Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)

Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.

Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).

Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Peter

Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

happiness, for skeptics

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Peter

Perhaps human beings are designed for a purpose or end, the pursuit of which brings us happiness. Aristotle is a major proponent of this view (“teleology”), and his theory has influenced each of the Abrahamic faiths.

But what if one is skeptical that we have any end, or that pursuing any “telos” promises a good life for us?

One school was already skeptical more than two thousand years ago. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism (the ubiquity of suffering) is incompatible with teleology, and the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination says that things arise just because previous things happened–not for any end.

The Third Noble Truth implies that we can escape permanently and completely from pointless suffering by understanding and transcending our will, thus entering the state variously understood under the word “Nirvana.”

What if one is skeptical of Nirvana as well as teleology? What if one doubts either an end or an exit? Is there anything to gain from the Aristotelian-Abrahamic tradition or from Buddhism?

I think there is much to be learned. I would offer these six points.

1) It is not peace but the turn toward peace that yields our happiness

In “The Poems of our Climate,” Wallace Stevens imagines a pure image that could come from East Asian or European modernist art: “Clear water in a brilliant bowl / Pink and white carnations.” He posits that this image could represent “complete simplicity / Stripped … of all one’s torments.” For a suggestive illustration, consider a “Blue Vase” by Paul Cézanne from 1890 (above), to which I will return later.

Such an image, Stevens says, cannot represent peace or happiness for creatures such as us. It cannot satisfy anyone who has a “never-resting mind.” Since “the imperfect is so hot in us,” our “delight” lies not in pure and permanent simplicity but in those moments of relief that art or nature can offer. In other words, we can never be the brilliant bowl and cut flowers, but we can relish objects that are purer than ourselves.

I paid homage to Stevens’ poem with one of my own that relates my relief at hearing a Bach oboe concerto in my earphones during a flight on a hectic day. “That turn, / For us—with our minds so noisy— / Our delight lies only there.”

This principle has a limitation. Like Stevens’ poetry, it is all about the individual who experiences things. What about all the other sentient creatures who also suffer? We should care about each as much as we care about ourselves. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Šantideva, 8.102-3).

2. Compassion combats suffering

It’s a very small step from understanding the truth of other creatures’ suffering to feeling compassion for those who suffer. The disposition of compassion is grounded in a clear view of reality. That is one argument in its favor.

Another argument is that compassion is what people (and some animals) need from us. Sometimes, they need us to fix their problems, and compassion may necessitate action. But we cannot make others happy or liberate them from suffering, and therefore action rarely suffices. Nor do creatures need pity or that mirroring of emotions that I would call “sympathy.” If you are sad, you don’t want me to be sad sympathetically. You want me to will your relief.

After the Buddha has defeated an elitist student, Ambattha, in a debate, Ambattha’s teacher calls this student a “fool” and says, “Please forgive him.” The Buddha replies, “May the student be happy”: sukhi hotu, a Pali phrase that now serves as a greeting. We want people to extend this wish to us–and to mean it (Long Discourses, Sujato trans. DN3).

A third argument is that compassion can fill one’s mind, replacing the kind of self-oriented will that is (per the Second Noble Truth) the source of suffering. In my skeptical view, compassion can only ever take up some space, leaving room for willfulness and pain to persist, but it is worth expanding.

Universal, undifferentiated compassion is a virtue–perhaps most appropriately a monastic one, because a monk renounces individual attachments. For those of us who deeply prize specific relationships, compassion is not the sole positive emotion that should fill our thoughts. There is also love, which borders compassion but differs by being focused and by needing to be reciprocated.

3. Each mind is a ripple in the river of history

Looking at pink and white carnations, or hearing one’s own breath, or observing someone in pain, we naturally presume that the self is directly experiencing the object. Not so. Our minds are deeply structured by language, judgments, memories, and other cultural inheritances that arose before us and will continue after.

For instance, we enjoy flowers because our predecessors have named, raised, bred, sold, collected, drawn and painted, and praised these particular plants.

At the time of each day that we call sunset, the big ball of rock on which we live is turning so that we can no longer see a huge and remote ball of fire. Yet we experience the sun as moving across our sky toward its “setting,” and we think about closure, sleep, or even death and rebirth. We must think about these things (at least occasionally) at twilight because they are inherent in our languages and stories. Science describes the solar system, but not our experience of it, which has a human past.

It follows that we are never alone. Others speak through us. The stream of thoughts that constitutes a self began before and continues after a person.

There is no reason to presume that the whole stream flows toward happiness or justice. But we do know that the species can accomplish more than any person could in the space of one life. To me, this realization makes some sense of the doctrine that achieving enlightenment requires many lives. And it makes me less attached to my own life and less interested in being original, authentic, or influential. The 13-century Zen teacher Dogen writes:

It is an unshakable teaching in the Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. … Although there is birth and death in each moment of this life of birth and death, the body after the final body is never known. Even though you do not know it, if you arouse the aspiration for enlightenment, you will move forward on the way of enlightenment. The moment is already here (pp. 116-117).

4. We can do things that have outcomes for their own sake

This is an Aristotelian argument that I owe to Kieran Setiya (2017):

Many of our actions have concrete and immediate goals. We work to make money; we wash the dishes so that they are clean. When we behave this way, it is difficult to escape from suffering because the mind is set on the future, and there is always more to do.

We also do some things for their own sake, like listening to music or watching carnations or paintings of them. But we cannot depend on intrinsically valuable activities to obtain happiness. They are rare for most of us, and if they come to occupy all our time, how can we be compassionate? Only the idle rich can spend their whole lives on intrinsically enjoyable experiences.

The solution is to perform tasks that have objectives as if they were ends in themselves. I can grade papers not to complete the task but to be an educator. This is not always easy, and such an attitude would be harder if I cleaned toilets or processed chickens instead of teaching college students. But it is something to strive for in our own lives and to make more attainable for others.

5. Reality rewards a close and open-minded inquiry

We evolved to have brains that can do many things, but we do not know what we cannot fathom, just as my dog has no idea that he is unaware of politics, cosmology, or Shakespeare. In an entirely abstract way, we know that our reality of suffering, delight, and finitude is not the only reality.

Specifically, we evolved with brains that are not very well designed for understanding consciousness itself. Our minds prove evasive to our minds. Neverthless, highly disciplined and strenuous efforts to describe consciousness yield glimmers that expand our consciousness and bring–if we use them right–some happiness.

Merleau-Ponty begins his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” this way:

He needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only an essay, an approach to painting. In September, I906, at the age of 67–one month before his death–he wrote: ‘I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive. . . . Now it seems I am better and that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am still learning from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress.’

What was Cézanne working so hard to accomplish? According to Merleau-Ponty, he strove to present the experience of nature without the tools that people had created for that task, such as “outline, composition, and distribution of light” and linear perspective. “He was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature.” For him, “reality” meant neither the object in itself nor the subjective appearance of it, but the way they unite in our experience.

The “Blue Vase” shown above is harmonious and calm, yet close inspection reveals choices that a classically trained painter would avoid. For instance, the base of the vase is perpendicular to the plane of the painting, whereas the table on which it stands tilts down. And the color of the flowers seem to have influenced the shadows, making them bluish.

Similarly, in Stevens’ poem, the color of the bowl infuses the space around it: “The light / In the room more like a snowy air, /
Reflecting snow.”

Such choices are more obvious in an 1880 painting that Cézanne left unfinished (right). Here the vase clearly stands separate from the table, with entirely different vanishing points.

Our experience does not encompass the whole world at once, lining everything up together. We focus on objects that have names and significance for us, then move to other ones. The color of one object depends on its relationship to others. We do not perceive a world made of borders filled with color, but something much more complex and dynamic.

Although the following paragraph from Merleau-Ponty’s essay is not about any particular painting, it could describe Cézanne’s 1880 vase:

Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. …. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth-that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality ful of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swelling of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. [Compare the outlines of the flowers above.]

We can attend closely to positive experiences, such as the sight of flowers. We can try to analyze suffering, although that requires impressive equanimity. I am especially interested in the close investigation of states that I find mildly problematic, such as my own regretful and appreciative awareness that a current pleasure is transient. This is roughly the same as mono no aware in Japanese aesthetics, or, as I have named it, “nostalgia for now.” It affords insight into time, just as the phenomenology of other states reveals other truths. And one can focus on other people’s experience or on relational states, including love.

Cézanne’s explorations brought him no happiness, Merleau-Ponty describes the artist’s “fits of temper and depression.” In short, Cézanne was obsessed. Wallace Stevens also devoted his career to a constant exploration of consciousness, and he seems to have been far from happy.

These people failed to balance their expeditions into their own consciousness with concern for other people. Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne, “His extremely close attention to nature and to color, the inhuman character of his paintings (he said that a face should be painted as an object), his devotion to the visible world: all of these would then only represent a flight from the human world, the alienation of his humanity.” Stevens has a similar tendency and writes, “It is the human that is the alien.” Wisdom requires a combination of intense inner inquiry with care for others.

Exploring consciousness can enhance compassion rather than distract from it, since we can learn to feel the depths of others’ experience. Glimpsing hidden worlds can shake our attachment to our everyday circumstances. And the curiosity that motivates our expeditions into the inner life can supplant anxiety and discontent. But it is more likely that we will obtain happiness by looking at a painting by Cézanne or by reading a poem by Stevens than by trying to be either person. They are not models but they left us gifts, as have many others.

6. We must embody truths, not merely acknowledge them

Important thinkers have provided arguments and reasons for each of the preceding five principles. Although these conclusions cannot be proven from axioms, they can be defended.

However, assenting to a principle of this type or acknowledging the arguments in its favor accomplishes little. One must consistently feel the truth of the idea. That requires practice, ritual, meditation, and other cultivated habits.

To return again to Cézanne’s flowers: it will do no good to glance at them or to read a learned article that explains them. One must take the time to see the object itself, must “come back / To what had been so long composed” in order to realize that “the imperfect is our paradise.”

Sources: Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambala); The Long Discourses translated by Bhikkhu Sujato on Suttacentral (2018); Kieran Setiya Midlife (Princeton, 2017); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964). The paintings are Le Vase bleu (1889-90) in the Musée d’Orsay and Flowers in a Blue Vase (1880) in the Orangerie. I quote the Stevens Poems “The Poems of Our Climate” from Parts of A World and “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” from Transport to Summer.

See also: many previous posts, which I have collected and organized as Cuttings: A Book About Happiness.

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three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Peter

I am attracted to two views that have been enormously influential for thousands of years.

The first view began with Aristotle and has influenced billions of people by being incorporated (with variations) into all three Abrahamic faiths.

According to this theory, humans can be happy in the same way that we might describe a lush and towering tree as happy–or a fox that is busy hunting rabbits. It’s not about these organisms’ sensations of pleasure or pain, but whether they are doing what they are designed to do. “Flourishing” may be a better translation than “happy” for Aristotle’s Greek term, eudaimonia.

How do human beings flourish? Aristotle says it is by thinking, since that is our distinctive characteristic and evidently the advanced task for which we are optimized. But we think many things, including ugly thoughts and idle ones that fail to motivate our actions. We know the difference between good and bad thinking because we are taught to recognize virtues.

Unfortunately, it is not always evident what a given virtue means, or even whether something called a virtue deserves the title; and the various virtues can conflict. We need a master virtue that is about deciding which virtues to deploy in each situation; call that “practical reason.”

At least some people may also flourish by exercising a purer kind of reasoning that does not motivate action; for Aristotle, the very best way to spend one’s time is by contemplating the divine.

To sum up, a happy human life is one guided by practical reason, perhaps with a dose of contemplative reasoning (also known as worship). A person of virtue is fortunate and happy in the same way that a fox flourishes if it can hunt rabbits all day. They live their best lives.

A very different view is also influential, because it is the root of Buddhism, which has about half a billion adherents today. In contrast to Aristotle, Buddha taught that we are not designed for any particular end. Like everything else in the universe, we exist because previous things just happened before. Since we have turned out to be sensitive creatures, we are bound to suffer; suffering is intrinsic (the First Noble Truth). It arises wherever there is a will, because desire is inevitably frustrated (the Second Noble Truth).

However, we can introspect and discover that the self that we have valued so highly and that seems to intend and to want so many elusive things does not really exist. Specific phenomena just happen one after another, resulting from previous phenomena. This realization allows us to stop attaching our will to things. Instead of feeling wilful and frustrated, we can allow our minds to fill with compassion for ourselves and for everyone else, understanding everyone as determined by events beyond their control.

This escape can be complete and final, so that we no longer suffer (the Third Noble Truth). No supernatural force is required for escape; it is just a matter of realizing how things really work. Once that happens, we can live a life of active compassion toward others (the Fourth Noble Truth). The conclusion is rather like Aristotle’s vision of a virtuous life, but with a different underpinning and a more dramatic moral.

I am no means against either view, both of which instruct and inspire. But I am skeptical that we are designed or optimized for anything. We emerged as a result of impersonal forces, especially biological evolution. Insofar as we have intrinsic purposes, I doubt that they are all about reasoning, since we have bodies as well as brains, and our brains are embodied. In essence, for me, the First Noble Truth trumps Aristotle’s idea that any natural species has a special natural purpose or end.

Aristotle defines a virtuous life as happy or eudaimonic. He draws this link because he sees human beings as naturally designed for virtue. If we doubt this premise, then there is no reason to hope that virtue will bring happiness. On the contrary, virtue can easily enhance suffering in the form of guilt, disappointment, and frustration. We should strive to live virtuously for the good of others but not expect it to make us happy.

At the same time, I am also skeptical about the Third Noble Truth, the idea that a complete escape is possible if one fully embraces the truth that there is no self or any intrinsic purposes in nature.

I just used the word “skeptical” in relation to both Aristotle and Buddhism. Skepticism was one of the ancient Greeks’ philosophical schools, a rival to Aristotle’s tradition. In 16th-century France, Michel de Montaigne read and developed the Skeptics’ ideas, and his work has influenced–or at least found echoes–in many subsequent authors, European and otherwise.

Montaigne’s skepticism does not rest on a theory of the natural best life for human beings, nor on the idea that human selves are illusory and can be transcended. Montaigne views each human being, including himself, as something imperfect, a bit miscellaneous, without clear boundaries, and largely opaque–yet complex, distinctive, fragile, and precious. “For sure, man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and wavering subject. It’s a queasy business to try to base any constant and uniform judgment about him” (Montaigne 1580, 1:9).

For creatures like this, there is no natural best way to live, nor any escape from suffering. But there is much to be appreciated–even relished–if one attentively studies any particular person. Close, appreciative listening brings moments of compassion and consolation.

Montaigne wrote mostly about himself. “I wish to be seen in a simple, natural, and ordinary manner, without striving [he changed the word to “study” in the 1592 text] or artifice, for it is me that I paint” (Montaigne, 1580, “To the Reader”). This was his revolutionary contribution. Before him, authors in the European languages had never made subjects of themselves in a similar way. St. Augustine had written a great autobiography, but he had seen his life as an illustration of a universal story: the sinner finds God and is saved. Montaigne, in contrast, saw himself as himself. Inventing the very word “essay,” he inaugurated practices of self-description that have become ubiquitous. And he made the search for himself interesting by demonstrating how elusive we are to ourselves.

Today, we probably suffer from a bit too much self-exploration and self-description. The Romantic movement and some of its successors have encouraged writers and other artists to focus on themselves to a far greater extent than Montaigne could have imagined. In a secular and individualistic market-economy, self-presentation literally sells. Some memoirs and confessions are valuable, particularly when the authors have compelling stories. But people like me–we whose lives are quite unremarkable– should pause before we assume that anyone else needs to hear about us.

That brings me to the other side of Montaigne’s essays. He says that his subject is himself, but what does he do with his life? He spends it in his library. The self that he presents in his Essays is a devoted reader, that is, a compassionate observer of many other people, both authors and subjects, living and dead.

I’ve posted a book-in-progress on this blog entitled Cuttings. My main purpose there is not to understand texts or to explain them to anyone, but rather to experiment with compassionate attention as a modest form of consolation. This is not an original ideal. I take it from Montaigne and many others. In the book (¶20-21), I even criticize originality as another Romantic ideal that has been overemphasized. Generalizations about important matters that are right and good are also likely to be clichés, because why would any of us suddenly discover truths that had been hidden before? Still, the book is full of concrete observations rather than generalizations. It is, in fact, a collection of “cuttings.”

...
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

    -- Theodore Roethke, "Cuttings (later)," 1948

Source: Montaigne, Michel Eyquem (1580), Les Essais. See also: some basics; Montaigne and Buddhism; varieties of skepticism, etc.

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generosity as a virtue

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Peter

Summary: I will argue here that generosity is a virtue when it is involves respectful care for an individual. Therefore, paradigm cases of generosity involve acts of personal attention and two-way communication, such as carefully selecting an appropriate gift or making a kind remark. To assess a transfer of money, it is better to ask whether it manifests justice, not generosity. Aristotle launched this whole discussion by drawing a useful distinction between generosity and justice. However, because his ideas of justice were constrained, and because he analyzed generosity strictly in terms of money, he left the impression that generosity was not a very appealing virtue. We can do better by focusing on acts conducted in the context of mutually respectful relationships.

To begin: virtues are traits or dispositions that we should want to cultivate in ourselves and in others to improve these individuals’ characters, to raise the odds that they will benefit their communities, or both.

Generosity is found on famous lists of virtues, such as Aristotle’s twelve (or so) and the Buddha’s six paramitas. However, generosity receives much less attention than most other virtues in contemporary English-language philosophy. Miller (2018) finds only three “mainstream philosophy” articles about generosity prior to his own. Ward (2011) finds little discussion of generosity in scholarship on Aristotle, notwithstanding that a whole section of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is focused on it.

I would propose this explanation. Aristotle continues to provide the most influential framework for theories of virtues in the academic world, partly because he is often insightful, and also because he shaped ethics in the three Abrahamic religions. However, his account of generosity (eleutheriotes–more literally translated as “liberality”) makes it a problematic trait. And that is why the virtue does not receive much attention in Anglophone and European academic philosophy.

Aristotle introduces his discussion of generosity with an explicit mention of money:

Let us speak then of freeness-in-giving [eleutheristes, generally translated as generosity or liberality]. It seems to be a mean in respect to needs/goods/property [chremata], for a man is not praised as generous in war, nor in matters that involve temperance, nor in court decisions, but in the giving or taking of goods, and especially in giving them–“goods” meaning all those things whose worth is measured with coins (NE 1119b–my translations).

For Aristotle, generosity does not mean transferring money to people who have a right to it, because that is the separate virtue of justice. Rather, generosity means donating material things voluntarily because one is not overly enamored of them, and doing so in an excellent way.

Things that are done in virtue are noble and are done for their nobility. The generous man therefore will certainly give for the nobility of it. And he will do it rightly, for he will give to the right people, in the right amount, at the right time, and whatever else counts as right giving; and he will give with pleasure or at least painlessly, for whatever is done virtuously is pleasant and painless, or at least not distressing (NE 1120a).

The appropriate recipient is not one who deserves the money (again, that would be an act of justice), but rather someone whom a person of generous spirit would desire to help. I imagine a land-owner being generous to his tenant or to a retainer of long standing.

Aristotle acknowledges that a person with less money can be as generous as a rich man, since the appropriate measure is the proportion of one’s wealth that one donates. Nevertheless, his paradigm of a generous person is a man of inherited wealth who is liberated enough from the base appeal of material things that he voluntarily gives some money away in a gentlemanly fashion (NE 1120b).

I will not claim that the ideal of generosity in the Buddhist canon is the same as in Aristotle, but the early Buddhist texts also appreciate people who give things away because they are free from a desire for goods:

Furthermore, a noble disciple recollects their own generosity: “I’m so fortunate, so very fortunate! Among people full of the stain of stinginess I live at home rid of stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, loving to let go, committed to charity, loving to give and to share.” Then a noble disciple recollects their own generosity, their mind is not full of greed, hate, and delusion. This is called a noble disciple who lives in balance among people who are unbalanced, and lives untroubled among people who are troubled. They’ve entered the stream of the teaching and develop the recollection of generosity (Numbered Discourses 6.10.1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).

One difference is that Aristotle mainly thinks about generosity to people who are poor against their will, whereas the paradigm of generosity in early Buddhism is a wealthy layperson’s donation to monks, who have voluntarily renounced worldly goods. In fact, I am not sure that monks can be generous in the Pali Canon, because their role is to receive alms. Another difference—typical when comparing Aristotle to classical Buddhism–is that the Buddhist path leads toward complete liberation, whereas Aristotle expects us to navigate happiness and suffering until death.

In any case, for Aristotle, generosity is relational (one person is generous to another), and it usually accompanies an unequal relationship. As Ward writes, it “abstracts” from justice. When we are being generous, in Aristotle’s sense, we do not have justice on our minds, although we might also act justly.

If one accepts inequality and suffering as natural, then justice is simply a matter of paying one’s debts, honoring contracts, and otherwise following the current rules; and generosity easily accompanies justice. A true aristocrat exhibits justice by paying his bills and taxes. He may also make generous gifts, although never giving so much as to threaten his social standing. (Aristotle defines prodigality as giving so much as to ruin one’s own resources: NE 1119b–1120a.)

However, if we decide that the current distribution of rights and goods is unjust and should be changed, then we will not be impressed by a person who is generous yet not just. More than that, we may feel that justice is the only standard, and generosity is virtuous just to the degree that it approximates justice. Then a gentleman’s holiday gifts are virtuous insofar as they diminish an unjustifiable disparity between the lord and his tenants. The effect is probably quite small. It would be better if the gentleman were prodigal or if his lands were reallocated. Meanwhile, if he takes satisfaction in his own gift-making–as evidence that he is free from base material desires–then he looks worse, not better. If he makes gifts, he should demonstrate respect for the recipients by making the payments seem obligatory and insufficient.

By alluding to land reform, I am suggesting that a social system should be egalitarian, and some powerful force, such as a modern government, should make it so. This is not necessarily correct. Adam Smith makes a different argument for generosity. In his view, a market economy is best for everyone because it continuously increases prosperity. But rich people should be generous, not only for the sake of those with less but also because a reasonable person will not be overly attached to his own wealth and will know when he has more than enough.

When “a man of fortune spends his revenue chiefly in hospitality” (benefitting friends), he demonstrates a “liberal or generous spirit” and also puts his wealth into circulation, thus contributing to the “increase of the public capital.” On the other hand, by hoarding his money for himself, a person would manifest “a base and selfish disposition” (Wealth of Nations, ii:3). It is less clear whether Smith recommends generosity toward poor people who are not one’s friends (discussed in Birch 1998). But in general, virtues are good for the individual and contribute to a civil society. Generosity is just one example; “humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem” are others (Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV).

Whether you endorse or reject Smith’s view of markets, at least his theory of generosity is connected to his theory of social justice. Ward argues that Aristotle also considers generosity in the context of his view of a good community. She discusses the sections in the Politics where Aristotle says that the best regime empowers the middle classes. They are neither arrogant, like the rich, nor craven, like the poor (Pol. 1295b5).

A democracy dominated by the middle classes enables deliberation among peers. Equal citizens can look one another in the eye, say what they think, and cast equal votes to set policy. To the extent that Aristotle appreciates this kind of political system, then his discussions of generosity (giving moderate amounts of money to individuals) and munificence (giving lots of money to the city) begin to seem ironic. These are virtues of oligarchy, and Aristotle prefers democracy (albeit with qualifications).

I appreciate Ward’s argument, but I suspect that for Aristotle, equal standing or eisonomia can only work for an elite (even if it extends to the middling sort), and they should be generous to those who are naturally inferior. Members of the Assembly should treat the large majority of humans who are non-citizens generously, while treating one another with equal respect. However, once we embrace universal human rights, then everyone should be a citizen–somewhere–and the Aristotelian versions of generosity and munificence begin to look problematic.

As long as we are thinking primarily about the transfer of money or goods that money can buy, then I think that justice is the relevant virtue, and generosity is a poor substitute. This point does not depend on a radically egalitarian theory of social justice, because a libertarian should also put justice first and generosity well behind.

However, we naturally use the word “generous” for things other than money. For instance, “generous reading” is a common phrase for interpretive methods that seek to reconstruct persuasive positions from texts. Ann Ward reads Aristotle generously by combining his discussion of generosity in the Nicomachean Ethics with his analysis of democracy in the Politics.

Likewise, we can make “generous remarks” at a colleague’s retirement party, and our words will offer real insights about the colleague’s contributions. We can also give things or people our “generous attention.”

Our partner the Vuslat Foundation defines generous listening as “active, empathetic engagement with another person’s thoughts and feelings. At its core, generous listening is about creating a space for authentic dialogue.”

Think of a colleague who skillfully chooses holiday gifts, wrapping them nicely, and adding thoughtful notes. The objects may have limited monetary value yet reflect generous attitudes toward their recipients because they match each person’s desires and needs. Finding the gifts required time, and during that time, the donor focused on the recipient. We would not object if the skillful donor takes pleasure and pride, just as we generally appreciate cases when people derive happiness from their own virtue.

Whereas money is fungible, the generosity in these examples is specific to the individuals involved. Aristotle (like the Buddhist sutra I quoted earlier) is most interested in generosity as a display of freedom on the part of the giver, but in the cases I am sketching, the donors focus on the recipients. And these forms of generosity are relatively independent of the social system. I presume that generous speeches at retirement parties are appreciated alike in state socialism, corporate capitalism, and the nonprofit sector.

We might, then, agree with Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that generosity is one of the virtues that “appear in every respect agreeable to us.” Generosity is agreeable regardless of the social or economic system, and apart from justice. But it is a virtue that requires benevolent respect for the recipient, listening and speaking as well as giving. Contrary to Aristotle, it is least relevant to monetary transfers and does not reflect a gentlemanly insouciance about private wealth. Rather, it is best manifested in reciprocal relationships, when the parties devote time and attention to one another.

Sources: Christian B. Miller, “Generosity,: in Michel Croce and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, eds., Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy (Wiley, 2018): 23-50; Ann Ward, “Generosity and inequality in Aristotle’s ethics.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 28.2 (2011): 267-278; Thomas D. Birch, “An analysis of Adam Smith’s theory of charity and the problems of the poor.” Eastern Economic Journal 24.1 (1998): 25-41.my translations of Aristotle use the text from Project Perseus.

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how thinking about causality affects the inner life

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Peter

For many centuries, hugely influential thinkers in each of the Abrahamic faiths combined their foundational belief in an omnipotent deity with Aristotle’s framework of four kinds of causes. Many believers found solace when they discerned a divine role in the four causes.

Aristotle’s framework ran afoul of the Scientific Revolution. Today, there are still ways to be an Abrahamic believer who accepts science, and classical Indian thought offers some alternatives. Nevertheless the reduction of causes from Aristotle’s four to the two of modern science poses a spiritual and ethical challenge.

(This point is widely understood–and by no means my original contribution–but I thought the following summary might be useful for some readers.)

To illustrate Aristotle’s four causes, consider my hands, which are currently typing this blog post. Why are they doing that?

Efficient cause: Electric signals are passing along nerves and triggering muscles to contract or relax. In turn, prior electrical and mechanical events caused those signals to flow–and so on, back through time.
Material cause: My hand is made of muscles, nerves, skin, bones, and other materials, which, when so configured and stimulated, move. A statue’s hand that was made of marble would not move.
Formal cause: A hand is defined as “the terminal part of the vertebrate forelimb when modified (as in humans) as a grasping organ” (Webster’s dictionary). I do things like grasp, point, and touch with my hand because it is a hand. Some hands do not do these things–for instance, because of disabilities–but those are exceptions (caused by efficient causes) that interfere with the definitive form of a hand.
Final cause: I am typing in order to communicate certain points about Aristotle. I behave in this way because I see myself as a scholar and teacher whose words might educate others. In turn, educated people may live better. Therefore, I move my fingers for the end (telos, in Greek) of a good life.

Aristotle acknowledges that some events occur only because of efficient and material causes; these accidents lack ends. However, the four causes apply widely. For example, not only my hand but also the keyboard that I am using could be analyzed in terms of all four causes.

The Abrahamic thinkers who read Aristotle related the Creator to all the causes, but especially to the final cause (see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:1 or Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q44). In a well-ordered, divinely created universe, everything important ultimately happens for a purpose that is good. Dante concludes his Divine Comedy by invoking the final cause of everything, “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

These Jewish and Christian thinkers follow the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, who even considers cases–like scratching one’s beard–that seem to have only efficient causes and not to happen for any end. “Against this objection, Avicenna maintains that apparently trivial human actions are motivated by unconscious desire for pleasure, the good of the animal soul” (Richardson 2020), which, in turn, is due to the creator.

However, writing in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon criticizes this whole tradition. He assigns efficient and material causes to physics, and formal and final causes to metaphysics. He gestures at the value of metaphysics for religion and ethics, but he doubts that knowledge can advance in those domains. His mission is to improve our understanding and control of the natural world. And for that purpose, he recommends that we keep formal and final causes out of our analysis and practice only what he calls “physics.”

It is rightly laid down that true knowledge is that which is deduced from causes. The division of four causes also is not amiss: matter, form, the efficient, and end or final cause. Of these, however, the latter is so far from being beneficial, that it even corrupts the sciences, except in the intercourse of man with man (Bacon, Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, II;2).

In this passage and others related to it, Bacon proved prescient. Although plenty of scientists after Bacon have believed in final causes, including divine ends, they only investigate efficient and material causes. Perhaps love moves all the stars, but in Newtonian physics, we strive to explain physical motion in terms of prior events and materials. This is a methodological commitment that yields what Bacon foresaw, the advancement of science.

The last redoubt of final causes was the biological world. My hand moves because of electrical signals, but it seemed that an object as complicated as a hand must have come into existence to serve an end. As Kant writes, “it is quite certain that in terms of purely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible.” Kant says that no Isaac Newton could ever arise who would be able to explain “how even a mere blade of grass is produced” using only “natural laws unordered by intention” (Critique of Judgment 74, Pluhar trans.). But then along came just such a Newton in the form of Charles Darwin, who showed that efficient and material explanations suffice in biology, too. A combination of random mutation plus natural selection ultimately yields objects like blades of grass and human hands.

A world without final causes–without ends–seems cold and pointless if one begins where Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas did. One option is to follow Bacon (and Kant) by separating physics from metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics and assigning the final causes to the latter subjects. Indeed, we see this distinction in the modern university, where the STEM departments deal with efficient causes, and final causes are discussed in some of the humanities. Plenty of scientists continue to use final-cause explanations when they think about religion, ethics, or beauty–they just don’t do that as part of their jobs.

However, Bacon’s warning still resonates. He suspects that progress is only possible when we analyze efficient and material causes. We may already know the final causes relevant to human life, but we cannot learn more about them. This is fine if everyone is convinced about the purpose of life. However, if we find ourselves disagreeing about ethics, religion, and aesthetics, then an inability to make progress becomes an inability to know what is right, and the result can be deep skepticism.

Michael Rosen (2022) reads both Rousseau and Kant as “moral unanimists”–philosophers who believe that everyone already knows the right answer about moral issues. But today hardly anyone is a “moral unanimist,” because we are more aware of diversity. Nietzsche describes the outcome (here, in a discussion of history that has become a science):

Its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to ‘prove’ anything any more; it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there, – it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and ‘describes’ . . . All this is ascetic to a high degree; but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, make no mistake about it! You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, – an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as not to peer in? or peer back? . . .). Here there is snow, here life is silenced; the last crows heard here are called ‘what for?’, ‘in vain’, ‘nada’ (Genealogy of Morals, Kaufman trans. 2:26)

Earlier in the same book, Nietzsche recounts how, as a young man, he was shaped by Schopenhauer’s argument that life has no purpose or design. But Nietzsche says he detected a harmful psychological consequence:

Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? to nothingness? – precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sickness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of compassion [Mitleid], casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a new Euro-Buddhism? to – nihilism? (Genealogy of Morals, Preface:6)

After mentioning Buddhism, Nietzsche critically explores the recent popularity of the great Buddhist virtue–compassion–in Europe.

Indeed, one of the oldest and most widely shared philosophical premises in Buddhism is “dependent origination,” which is the idea that everything happens because of efficient causes alone and not for teleological reasons. (I think that formal causes persist in Theravada texts but are rejected in Mahayana.)

Dependent origination is taken as good news. By realizing that everything we believe and wish for is the automatic result of previous accidental events, we free ourselves from these mental states. And by believing the same about everyone else’s beliefs and desires, we gain unlimited compassion for those creatures. Calm benevolence fills the mind and excludes the desires that brought suffering while we still believed in their intrinsic value. A very ancient verse which goes by the short title ye dharma hetu says (roughly): “Of all the things that have causes, the enlightened one has shown what causes them, and thereby the great renouncer has shown how they cease.”

I mention this argument not necessarily to endorse it. Much classical Buddhist thought presumes that a total release from the world of causation is possible, whether instantly or over aeons. If one doubts that possibility, as I do, then the news that there are no final causes is no longer consoling.

Secondary sources: Richardson, Kara, “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History, Harvard University Press, 2022. See also how we use Kant today; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?; spirituality and science; and the progress of science.

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one supple line

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Peter

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than a quarter of a million Americans work professionally as graphic designers. Each designer produces many images, many of which are reproduced widely. Of course, other countries also have designers and commercial artists. Thanks to them all, we are awash in billions of images: illustrations, logos, advertisements, cartoons, explanations, warnings, decorations, and more.

Coming after modernism, today’s designers often produce abstracted images of real-world objects, highly simplified for impact and legibility. I assume that we can interpret such images because of conventions that we learn, plus the natural inclination of the human eye and brain to match patterns to observed realities (Gombrich 1961).

I illustrate this post not with a contemporary graphic image but with a painting by the noble courtier Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614) entitled “Meditating Daruma.” Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, who probably lived about one thousand years before Nobutada and is credited with introducing Chan Buddhism to China. In turn, Chan evolved into Japanese Zen.

One of the main stories about Bodhidharma tells that the Emperor Wu of Liang asked this barbarian monk how much merit he had earned for his generous support of Buddhism. Bodhidharma said “none,” because the emperor had acted with worldly intent. The monk then meditated in front of a wall for nine years. I assume this is what he is doing in this painting. The text says: “Quietness and emptiness are enough to pass through life without error.”

I would submit that this image is very fine. I tried copying it freehand, and every version that I made was worse than Nobutada’s. Thus the image passed Leon Batista Alberti’s test of beauty (“nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”). However, I was the one conducting the test. I can easily imagine that many of the professional graphic artists working today could reproduce it perfectly, or indeed rival it.

In the process of trying to copy this painting, I discovered that each of my outlines of a hooded figure looked like a person who was staring into the distance, albeit at a different distant point each time I drew it. Although Bodhidharma is often depicted as irascible, here we cannot see his expression, and his back conveys peace.

The design of a meditating monk is simple, and today we are surrounded with highly effective simplified designs; but I find this one far more moving that most others. The reason is its source. This is not a logo for some modern business. Instead, it is an object that is about four centuries old (from long before the deluge of mechanically reproducible images), made by an artist who pioneered a new form of Zen art. The simplification here is his invention, not a prevailing style.

In his discussion of Nobutada, Stephen Addiss writes, “Ignoring the colorful and delicate style of court artists of his day, he brushed simple ink paintings of Zen avatars on coarse, sometimes recycled paper. Like his new style of calligraphy, these paintings were revolutionary” (Addiss 1989, p. 23).

Furthermore, by representing Daruma in meditation, this artist presented an aspirational self-portrait. Although Nobutada was a rich courtier rather than a monk, he must have performed sitting meditation, or at least honored it. Thus the image is a trace of a real person’s life, which, in turn, was inspired by the person he depicts.

We might consider that art, in general, has these two dimensions. One is the form of the object as perceived by human beings, with our naturally evolved eyes and brains. We tend to match the form to objects in our environment. The other is the story of the object’s origin within a larger historical context. Here, for example, we see a single line that conjures the idea of person wrapped in a robe, and we also see also an artifact of Konoe Nobutada, of early 17th-century Japan, and of the Zen tradition extending back for a thousand years. The provenance of the painting not only raises its monetary value but also makes it more genuinely moving than a contemporary image would be.

This idea–an abstract and universal concept is also the outcome of a human act–seems resonant with Buddhism. Although Bodhidharma is quasi-mythical, he has long been associated with the Lankavatara Sutra. That text begins with the standard formula, “Thus I have heard,” and it purports to be a recollection of the actual Buddha by his disciple Ananda (he of the perfect memory). But it can’t possibly be historical, or told by Ananda, or written by Bodhidharma. Its authorship is a fiction excused by the thesis that it conveys: namely, that “There is no one who speaks, nor is there anyone who hears. Lord of Lanka, everything in the world is like an illusion.”

Sources: Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1961); Stehen Addiss, The Art of Zen (Echo Point, 1989); The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Red Pine (Counterpoint, 2013). The digital image and translation of the Chinese verse come from the Mountain Cloud Zen center. See also Verdant mountains usually walk; the sublime and other people; Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery; on inhabiting earth with inaccessibly beautiful things; and (from 2004), aesthetics and history.

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does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Peter

I think of myself as less sure about most important matters than are most people I know–more equivocal and conflicted. Maybe I shouldn’t be so confident about that comparison! Regardless, my self-perception often makes me wonder about skepticism as a stance. Is being skeptical a flaw, a virtue, or (most likely) a bit of both?

The virtues and drawbacks of skepticism have been an explicit topic of discussion for at least 23 centuries. In this mini-essay, I organize some of that conversation–from Greek, Indian, and modern sources–and conclude with a proposal, meant mostly for myself. As the great skeptic Montaigne wrote, “This is not my teaching, it is my studying; it is not a lesson for anyone else, but for myself. [But] what helps me just might help another” (ii.6).

On one hand, it seems that our duty is to glean what is right and then to act accordingly, to the best of our ability, always with an awareness that we could be wrong. Whenever we decide, act, and stand ready to reflect on the results, we are entitled to derive satisfaction.

For instance, if an election is coming up, we should decide whether voting is a worthwhile way to affect the world. If it is, we should determine whom to vote for. We should remain attentive to what happens, because we could have been wrong. Yet as long as we reason and participate–not only in politics but in innumerable other domains–we may and should feel content.

Socrates presents a particularly strong version of this view. Arguing with Protagoras, who espouses some form of relativism or skepticism, Socrates recommends a “science of measurement” (metrike techne) that gradually improves our objective understanding of right or wrong by detecting and overcoming various kinds of bias. This techne, “by showing the truth, would finally cause the soul to abide in peace with the truth, and so save its life” (Prot. 356d). Similarly, near the end of The Republic, Socrates advises that when misfortune comes, we should not “waste time wailing” but “deliberate” about what has happened and then “engage as quickly as possible in correcting” the problem (Rep. 10.604b-9). Here, Socrates likens this approach to a medical art for the soul.

In these passages, Socrates has not proven that knowledge is possible, but he has claimed that lacking knowledge is–and should be–a cause of discomfort, for which the only appropriate cure is to pursue the truth.

David Hume reaches a comparable conclusion in a somewhat different way. Hume reports that when he considers fundamental questions (“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?”), he is struck by the “manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason” and feels “ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and [to] look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another.”

But this is not a happy conclusion. Instead, “I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.”

For a time, Hume is able to cure himself of this “philosophical melancholy and delirium” by distracting himself with ordinary life. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” But this mood must also pass, for it is “impossible for the mind of man to rest, like those of beasts, in that narrow circle of objects” Ultimately, “we ought only to deliberate concerning the choice of our guide. … And in this respect I make bold to recommend philosophy” (Hume, 1739, 1.4.7).

Hume says that he cannot be “one of those sceptics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falshood” because it is naturally impossible to remain in that posture. We make judgments for the same reason we breathe; because what we are designed to do. “Neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly” a skeptic (1.4). The only way forward is to reason about what is true.

On the other hand, it seems that to hold any strong views about the world is a source of disquiet. Our thoughts rarely influence matters or convince others, and they may prove incorrect. Opinions are sources of frustration. Therefore, members of the ancient Skeptical School advised that we should attain mental peace by convincing ourselves that we do not know what is true.

The Greek verb epekho usually means to “present” or “offer,” but in the Skeptics’ jargon, it meant actively convincing yourself that it is impossible to know what is true, either in a specific case or generally. This “suspension of judgment” (as the related noun is usually translated) is an accomplishment, not a passive state. Effort is required to counteract the tendency to make judgments, which Hume claimed was natural. Epikhe is not a shrug-of-the-shoulders but a deep realization that knowledge is impossible.

The Skeptics provided lists of techniques or practices (generally translated “modes”) to induce such suspension. One mode that sometimes works for me is to reflect on how fundamentally different everything would seem to a different species. This form of relativism has impressed people as diverse as William Blake; Friedrich Nietzsche (“Man, a small, wild animal species …”: Will to Power, 121); the Zen master Mumon Yamada; and the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, who suggests that the way “this world embraces and exceeds [the family cat] Soapy’s understanding of it” opens the “possibility of an existence beyond this one” (pp. 162-3).

These people have reached divergent conclusions from their shared premise that each kind of sentient being perceives a fundamentally different world. Blake concludes that “everything is holy.” Nietzsche sees “unbelief” as a “precondition of greatness” and “strength of the will” (Will to Power, 615). In Zen, the moral is to be aware of one’s experience. For Robinson’s Rev. Ames (as for St. Augustine), an awareness of human limitations permits a faith in the things not seen that are disclosed in Scripture.

For the Greek Skeptics, the outcome of suspending all belief was calm or equanimity. Sextus Empiricus says, “The skeptics at first hoped [like Socrates] that untroubledness would arise by resolving irregularities of phenomena and of thought, but, not being able to do this, they held back, and when they suspended judgment, untroubledness [ataraxia] came as if by chance, like a shadow after a body. … For this reason, then, we say that untroubledness about opinions is the goal, but about things that we experience by force, moderation” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1:29).

Nearly two millennia later, John Keats praised “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1817). For a writer, the easier path is to adopt and promote one’s own views. Negative Capability is a difficult alternative with the potential to cure “irritability.” Keats’ main example is Shakespeare, who depicts myriad characters without divulging (or perhaps even holding) opinions of his own.

The Buddha and Nietzsche on Skepticism

I would like to draw attention to two (or two-and-a-half) thinkers who have discussed skepticism in a somewhat similar and interesting way. These people could be described as skeptics, and they use some of the techniques–those that the ancient Skeptics called “modes”–for undermining beliefs. Yet they explicitly disparage practitioners of skepticism on the basis of character. In other words, although they are skeptical, they think that the main proponents of skepticism lead bad lives.

I mainly refer to the Buddha as described in the Pali Canon (1st century BCE?) and Friedrich Nietzsche. (Ironically, in the relevant passages, Nietzsche disparages the Skeptics as “Greek Buddhists,” but he did not know the Pali texts). I also refer to Michel Foucault, who can be classified as a kind of skeptic and who writes in detail about the ancient Greek philosophical schools, but who interestingly omits any mention of Skepticism.

In the first Long Discourse in the Pali Canon, the Buddha canvasses 62 possible views about metaphysical matters, such as whether the cosmos and the soul are immortal. (These are much like the questions that troubled Hume). After summarizing each position, he repeats a close variant of this formula:

The Realized One understands this: ‘If you hold on to and attach to these grounds for views it leads to such and such a destiny in the next life.’ He understands this, and what goes beyond this. And since he does not misapprehend that understanding, he has realized quenching within himself. Having truly understood the origin, ending, gratification, drawback, and escape from feelings, the Realized One is freed through not grasping (S?lakkhandhavagga, DN 1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).

Among the 62 views are four that sound like Skepticism. The Buddha calls proponents of these four views “endless flip-floppers.” (Maurice Walsche translates the same word as “eel-wrestlers.”) Presented with each major issue, some of them think, “‘I don’t truly understand … If I were to declare [a view], I might be wrong. That would be stressful for me, and that stress would be an obstacle.’ So … whenever they’re asked a question, they resort to verbal flip-flops and endless flip-flops: ‘I don’t say it’s like this. I don’t say it’s like that. I don’t say it’s otherwise. I don’t say it’s not so. And I don’t deny it’s not so.’”

The three other types of “flip-floppers” behave the same way but for different reasons. Some fear that they would feel “desire or greed or hate or repulsion” as a result of holding beliefs, some fear that they would be defeated in a debate, and some are simply “dull and stupid.”

Apart from the dull and stupid, the “flip-floppers” sound like Skeptics, and the Buddha rejects them with the same formula that he uses in response to all the dogmatists: “‘If you hold on to and attach to these grounds for views it leads to such and such a destiny in the next life.'” The Realized One “understands this, and what goes beyond this. …”

In short, the Buddha is a skeptic about Skepticism. Near the end of the Discourse, he elaborates his own view. All opinions, he says, “are conditioned by contact.” In other words, we believe everything we do as a direct and unavoidable result of previous events. Specifically, the events that lead people to hold philosophical opinions are feelings of craving. This is as much the case for the flip-floppers as for everyone else. They have chosen Skeptical opinions because of their feelings, which include an aversion to being moved or criticized. The real path to enlightenment is to see all opinions as fully conditioned, a realization that permits one to escape from the whole fisher’s net of beliefs.

Is the doctrine that everything is conditioned (“dependent origination”) just another metaphysical position that could be explained away on psychological grounds? Or is it self-refuting?

One answer might that it is self-refuting, but in a good way, a ladder that we can push aside once we have climbed it. Meanwhile, it offers insights about specific positions. When you adopt any given idea and find yourself committed to it, you can ask what prior psychological experience must have generated it and thereby release yourself from it, as a form of therapy.

I think a similar view can be attributed to Nietzsche. His supposed doctrine of Will to Power alleges that all beliefs result from “will,” including the doctrine itself. Like dependent-origination, Will to Power it may be self-refuting, but in a good way.

Deeply distrustful of epistemological dogmas, I loved to look now from this window, now from that, was careful not to get stuck in them, considered them harmful – and finally: is it likely that a tool can criticize its own suitability?? – What I was more careful to note was that no epistemological scepticism or dogmatism ever arose without ulterior motives – that it has a secondary value as soon as one considers what basically forced this position (Will to Power, 179).

Nietzsche’s treatment of the ancient Skeptics (whom he calls Pyrrhonists, after their founder, Pyrrho of Ellis) parallels the Buddha’s analysis of “flip-floppers.” Nietzsche criticizes the Pyrrhonists psychologically. They manifest a “desire for disbelief” that has base motives. “What inspires the sceptics? Hatred of the dogmatists – or a need for rest, a weariness, as in Pyrrho” (193).

Nietzsche argues that the earliest Greek philosophers had been creative, noble (vornehme), and “fertile.” They weren’t right (nothing is right), but they left behind beautiful works. Pyrrho was “necessarily the last”: he killed this creative tradition. His philosophy was “wise weariness”:

Living among the lowly, lowly. No pride. Living in the common way; honoring and believing what everyone believes. On guard against science and the mind, even everything that puffs you up…. Simple: indescribably patient, carefree, mild, apatheia, or even prautes [a word for ‘mild’ in the New Testament]. A Buddhist for Greece, brought up amid the tumult of the schools; late comer; tired; the protest of the tired against the zeal of the dialecticians; the disbelief of the tired in the importance of all things. He has seen Alexander, he has seen the Indian penitents. To such late comers and refined people, everything low, everything poor, everything idiotic has a seductive effect. That narcotizes: that makes you stretch out (Pascal). On the other hand, in the midst of the crowd and confused with everyone else, they feel a little warmth: they need warmth, these tired people…. Overcoming contradiction; no competition, no desire for distinction: denying the Greek instincts. (Pyrrho lived with his sister, who was a midwife.) Disguising wisdom so that it no longer distinguishes itself; giving it a cloak of poverty and rags; doing the most menial tasks: going to the market and selling milk pigs…. Sweetness; brightness; indifference; no virtues that need gestures: equating oneself even in virtue: ultimate self-conquest, ultimate indifference.

Nietzsche’s epithet for Pyrrho, a “Buddhist for Greece,” may turn out to be true (if Pyrrho was a practicing Buddhist), yet a bit unfair if we attend to the Buddha’s reported criticism of eel-wrestling skeptics.

Michel Foucault can also be seen as a kind of skeptic. He describes his project as “making things more fragile” by showing that the combinations of concepts and practices that shape our world arose recently, have contingent origins, and therefore “can be politically destroyed” (Foucault 1981). He does not offer prescriptions but shakes his readers’ confidence in what they think they know. Foucault’s practices of genealogy and archaeology sound like Skeptical modes and strikingly resemble the Buddha’s technique of demonstrating that beliefs arise contingently.

Especially in his last four years, Foucault turned from critically investigating forms of power-and-knowledge to exploring ways that individuals have cared for themselves. In this period, he focused on the ancient Greek philosophical schools that offered various forms of therapy. Citing Carlos Lévy, Frédéric Gros comments;

Foucault, in fact, takes the Hellenistic and Roman period as the central framework for his historico-philosophical demonstration, describing it as the golden age of the culture of the self, the moment of maximum intensity of practices of subjectivation, completely ordered by reference to the requirement of a positive constitution of a sovereign and inalienable self, a constitution nourished by the appropriation of logoi as so many guarantees against external threats and means of intensification of the relation to the self. And Foucault successfully brings together for his thesis the texts of Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Musonius Rufus, Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch. [However,] The Skeptics are not mentioned; there is nothing on Pyrrhon and nothing on Sextus Empiricus. Now the Skeptical school is actually as important for ancient culture as the Stoic or Epicurean schools, not to mention the Cynics. Study of the Skeptics would certainly have introduced some corrections to Foucault’s thesis in its generality. It is not, however, the exercises that are lacking in the Skeptics, nor reflection on the logoi, but these are entirely devoted to an undertaking of precisely de-subjectivation, of the dissolution of the subject. They go in a direction that is exactly the opposite of Foucault’s demonstration (concerning this culpable omission, Carlos Lévy does not hesitate to speak of “exclusion”). This silence is, it is true, rather striking. Without engaging in a too lengthy debate, we can merely recall that Foucault took himself for . . . a skeptical thinker. (Foucault 2001, p. 548).

Foucault’s silence about Skepticism is impossible to explain conclusively but provocative. One possibility is that he did not know how to address thinkers like Sextus because they were too close to his own approach.

Despite some similarities, it is worth distinguishing these thinkers’ goals. The Buddha of the Pali Canon promises “a complete and permanent end to desire, attachment, and aversion” (Segal 2020, 110)–let’s call that “enlightenment.” The Skeptics offer “untroubledness about opinions” and a moderate response to suffering in this life–a version of worldly happiness. Nietzsche admires greatness. The Will to Power bears the epigraph: “Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak with greatness: with greatness, that is, cynically and with innocence.” And Foucault seems to offer some kind of liberation, albeit always partial and provisional.

For myself, I cannot endorse what I take to be the fundamental goal of the Theravada texts: permanent release from a cycle of literal rebirth into suffering. Although there is an enormous amount to learn from these works, their core purpose doesn’t work for me. My view is closer to Rev. Ames’: “this life has its own mortal loveliness” (Robinson, 184).

Foucault was engaged in something deeply important, and it’s tragic that he wasn’t able to continue his exploration of how to cultivate the self. We are left with impressive critiques and hints of a positive program focused on the inner life. I’d like to think Foucault would have written explicitly and interestingly about Skepticism, but he did not have that opportunity. Foucault also recommends that “Montaigne should be reread … as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self” (Foucault 2011, p. 251), but he was not able to offer that re-reading.

As for Nietzsche: I agree with him that most cultural and intellectual figures, and some political leaders, who leave a significant creative legacy are firmly committed to opinions of their own. They are often “hedgehogs” (those who know one thing, even if it’s cynicism or nihilism), not “foxes” (those who know many things and are prone to change their theories). I admit that I sometimes resent the disadvantage that arises from being an equivocal fox or an eel-wrestler–from being chronically unsure. However, at least for me, the point is not to be great (which is surely out of reach), but to live reasonably well. And if I can make progress on that, “what helps me might help another.”

Thus the questions reduce to these: Should we want worldly happiness in the form of untroubledness, and if so, does suspension of belief help us get there?

How circumstances have changed

Jonathan Barnes, an expert on Sextus (with whom I studied many decades ago) finds the Skeptics’ therapeutic promises implausible and even “reprehensible” (Barnes 2000, xxxviii). He acknowledges that “Skepticism is offered as a recipe for happiness…. Sextus thinks that we should read Sextus in order to become happy.” However, he writes, “I find it difficult to take this sort of thing seriously” (p. xxx)

Barnes offers an example: “Suppose that I suspect that I have a fatal disease: unsure, I worry, I become depressed; and in order to restore my peace of mind I decide to investigate — I visit my doctor.” Unfortunately, the doctor is a Skeptic, so he persuades Jonathan that it is impossible to tell whether or not he has a fatal illness. He “lets me leave … in the very state of uncertainty which induced me to enter it.” This result shows that the purported therapist is “a quack” (xxi).

We might think that it’s actually better to suspend belief about whether one has an incurable, fatal disease rather than to learn that one is dying. This question seems debatable. But I would like to draw attention to the genuine value of–in this case–medical knowledge. Sextus is said to have practiced as a physician, but there was rarely much that an ancient doctor could do for you. Matters were not much better in 1811-14, when John Keats received his medical training. Nowadays, however, a doctor has a pretty good chance of determining what ails you and may be able to assist, if not with a cure than at least with effective palliatives.

It’s not that a modern doctor, as an individual, has far more knowledge and better perception than Sextus had. Rather, medical science is deeply collaborative and cumulative. Your physician sends your blood samples to a lab, which uses protocols and instruments developed in other labs, based on previous findings from still others. Much of the physician’s individual knowledge is about how to navigate this human system. Socrates’ metrike techne has become a group effort.

Trust is essential: not only trust in one’s own senses and reason (which Skepticism challenges), but also trust in other people and institutions. This is the case not only for medicine but also for engineering, academic research, government statistics, journalism, market data, and other forms of organized knowledge.

By displaying appropriate amounts of trust in cumulative human knowledge, we can find partial solutions to human suffering. Even if we agree with the Buddha that suffering always remains, compassion compels us to do the best we can. Blanket skepticism interferes with our ability to help ourselves and others. That is what happens when people who doubt medical science or professional journalism or government statistics refuse to do things like take vaccines or use currency or participate in politics.

Yet we must always remember that we and others can be wrong and should build the possibility of error and bias into our institutions and processes. Robert K. Merton saw “organized skepticism” as one of the defining features of science, and constitutional democracy offers mechanisms for identifying and challenging errors.

At the personal level, we might learn from both the Theravada texts and the Greek Skeptics about the drawbacks of identifying too strongly with our own ideas. A moderate kind of Skepticism encourages not to cling to what we believe, because that is a cause not only of dogmatism but also of disquiet. It increases the odds that we will be frustrated when our ideas fail to persuade.

One of the Skeptics’ techniques, “The Mode of Dispute,” attempts to attain peace by observing the unresolved disagreements among previous thinkers. The Buddha also practices this mode. At one point, he is asked, “The very same teaching that some say is ‘ultimate,’ others say is inferior. Which of these doctrines is true, for they all claim to be an expert?” The Buddha replies that sages “take no side among factions.”

Peaceful among the peaceless, equanimous, they don’t grasp when others grasp. Having given up former defilements and not making new ones, not swayed by preference, nor a proponent of dogma, that wise one is released from views, not clinging to the world, nor reproaching themselves. They are remote from all things seen, heard, or thought. With burden put down, the sage is released: not formulating, not abstaining, not longing (“The Longer Discourse on ‘Arrayed for Battle,'” trans. by Bhikkhu Sujato.).

Here I would emphasize the Buddha’s attitudinal stance. The takeaway is not to be skeptical about everything but rather to avoid clinging to one’s views, submitting to mere preferences, or reproaching oneself for one’s errors and failures to change the world. The text recommends a mild detachment, which is compatible with trying to determine the best thing to do and acting accordingly. This, I think, is the form of skepticism that encourages a tranquil mind.

[I revised and expanded this post on 8/27/24.]

Sources: I translate Montaigne from the 1598 Middle French edition (“Ce n’est pas icy ma doctrine, c’est mon estude : & n’est pas la leçon d’autruy, c’est la mienne. … Ce qui me sert, peut aussi par accident servir à un autre”); the Greek texts from Project Perseus; and Nietzsche from the Max Braun 1917 edition (which seems to omit some valuable material). Also quoting: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739; Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel, Farrar (Straus and Giroux); John Keats, letter to his brothers (Dec. 21, 1817); Jonathan Barnes, introduction to Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Scepticism, translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge 2000); Michel Foucault, “What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth; Gros’ note to Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France (1981-1982), Palgrave, 2001; and Seth Zuiho Segall, Buddhism and Human Flourishing (Palgrave 2020). The Pali translations are by Bhikkhu Sujato via the amazing SuttaCentral.net.

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