The Way of Eastern Philosophy

It's regrettable that I often come across philosophers who decry Eastern philosophy for it's "lack of rigour", or who find fault with the lack of argument*. After deciding to undertake a concerted study of Eastern philosophy it quickly became apparent to me that here lay two very different modes of engaging in the work of philosophy. In a nutshell, misunderstandings come down to quite different methodological approaches which uncover truth in two different respects. What stands as truth in one mode does not stand as truth in another. 

With this considered, it is easy to see why a "Western" philosopher may disregard Eastern philosophy as nonsense, because the way to truth in which the Western philosopher typically moves is different. There is no premise-conclusion structure. Claims seem merely to appear on the page.** In lieu of an experiential connection to phenomena, thought relies on cognition to deliver us to truth. When confronted with this situation we begin from things which we are reasonably sure are true and then produce the logical consequences of those things in order to discover further truths which we are not independently sure are true. A claim which simply stands on a page can lead us down neither route.

Much philosophy which comes from what you might call a broadly "Eastern" perspective lays great emphasis on practice. And by that I mean it is much closer to what you might typically think of as the development of a skill such as painting rather than aptitude in largely cognitive operations. In Eastern philosophy a great deal of effort is made towards ammending one's way of being (gardening, walking, practicing sitting meditation, etc.) As far as I can explain it with words, the basic idea is to stop your racing thoughts because the ways in which we habitually think are too hasty/shallow or simply block us from seeing a phenomenon which we're attempting to perceive. The central claim is that learning to calm these thoughts can alter the mode of your perception in such a way as to open you up to different kinds of insights, unable to be appreciated in other modes.

Instead of offering arguments or providing evidence, then, the business of this kind of philosophy gets underway in inviting somebody to see for themselves by practice. In this respect there is hope for mutual understanding: our shared respect for concrete experience. And I can tell you that it is possible to discover truths in this way, but I cannot hope to convince you of that. What I do know is that you will never be able to appreciate the truth as disclosed through such methods by reading words off a page. And that is why they don't present arguments.

Another unfortunate misunderstanding of Eastern philosophy is that because it cherishes "ignorance" that it is for stupidity and laziness. But again, this comes down to a failure to appreciate the different modes in which one can discover truth. It is not what we think of as ignorance which these methods espouse, but rather having too much knowlege and not enough understanding. The idea is that one becomes more ignorant the more knowledge one acquires. Knowledge can give us access to truth, but too much knowledge can prevent us from seeing the truth. It's simple enough to appreciate this and doesn't even require hours of skillful stillness under a cherry blossom! We can all recall times when we got in trouble by hanging onto too many beliefs about how things are, disregarding what was before our eyes. This popular dismissive understanding of Eastern philosophy is arguably one such case.

________________________________

* I am well aware that there is a body of argumentative philosophy in India, China, and elsewhere - I do not aim to defend these philosophies here, and all references to Eastern philosophy should be taken to refer to the various forms of what is perhaps shortsightedly described as "mystic" philosophy. I am also aware that many of these "mystics" did engage in public discussion (Chuang-Tzu would often wind up Hui-Tzu, for instance), but the work is not to be found solely or even primarily in debate.

** This criticism often lands on the doorstep of many Western philosophers. I have heard it said of Nietzsche and it is certainly not uncommon to find this said of Martin Heidegger's work. There are well documented similarities in methodology between Eastern thinkers and the particular stream of Western philosophy in which Nietzsche and Heidegger stand. This short essay can stand as a defence of those philosophies as well.

Understanding understanding

When we stop orienting ourselves towards things by beholding them, making use of them, producing them, criticising them, or otherwise comporting ourselves to them in any way, the nature of understanding (which rests at the heart of all possible comportment) can be made manifest. In this way understanding comes to meet itself, and by that I mean it actually comes to see itself, to grasp itself - understand itself... When there is nothing beholden to the understanding, understanding is left simply to understand itself. Accordingly it makes available to understanding the very openness to being which it is itself.

Clouds

Inevitably through the course of life our skies accrue many clouds.

Overcast, our horizon seems bleak -

Separated from the sun.
Thus you must let your clouds burst!

Let the rain fall down your cheeks

And you’ll be redeemed in the radiance

Of your own being

Once again.

But there will never be sunshine while your clouds lay dormant in the sky.

Words & Worlds

Words are bred from significance. Significance is bred from existence. Therefore words are bred from existence. Significance and understanding are the same. Existence and understanding are the same. Times and cultures change, our way of existing does not stay the same. Therefore neither does our understanding. Therefore neither does our language.

Yet it is a tendency of man to hold fast to the words which have arisen from understanding, held as it is in a time and place. Once a mode of approach has uncovered significance,* a lingual community crystallises into definite articulated worlds. From here a culture emerges. But significance speaks silently. Attachment to the definitions which have formed from this sways man away from the silent source of his words and into a world of simple words and ideas set up like a harbour to harness the tide of change.

---

* This means discovering something as something based on your perspective. You perceive the phone as for calling a taxi when you need to get somewhere. You perceive a lush foreign landscape as a resource if you’re chasing wealth at any cost. You perceive it as beautiful if you don’t ask anything from it.

Altruism & Cynicism

I've heard it said that no one does anything unless it benefits them in some way. I've also heard this used to justify embittered views regarding the alleged vanity of human kindness. It's the purpose of this short post to expose the mistaken direction such thinking takes.

The argument typically begins with an instance of alleged altruism, let's say the act of giving money to a homeless person. Ordinarily we might assume that giving money to a homeless person is a selfless act, as you are surrendering your own money to somebody and expecting nothing in return. Or are you? The proponents of what we'll call the "selfishness argument" argue that we do expect something in return. We would not, after all, have given them the money if we did not ourselves feel good about doing so. In effect, they believe that there is actually a kind of transaction taking place - money for a smug feeling of self-gratitude. And we will not disagree insofar as some people do exactly this, trying to appear selfless either to fool themselves or others into thinking that they are a nice person.

But what if our giving money to the homeless person did not emerge from out of a yearning to feel good about ourselves ("aren't I generous!") but rather from out of our feeling genuinely terrible for the person, and beside ourselves at their situation? We expect nothing from our act of generosity other than making the homeless feel that someone cares about them. What then? A keener proponent of the selfishness argument will nevertheless claim that we have given money to alleviate our own guilt/grief, and therefore we are still acting with selfish motives in mind.

In fact, particularly sophisticated cynics will even push the argument further. It is impossible to be altruistic, they say, because everything you do must be motivated by your own feelings and is therefore down to satisfying one's own self. And how could we possibly argue against such a strong claim?

What proponents of this argument fail to see is the soil from which such feelings grow. They take as their starting assumption (and never let it be questioned) that we are from the ground up individuals isolated from one another. But is this really true? That someone else's situation has the power to move you in the first place before any such feelings take hold of you is the true source of altruism, and a symptom of the existential condition we find ourselves in. By focusing on the particular feeling itself and not rather the ground from which the feeling emerges, the cynic finds their justification - "all people are selfish!" But is it not rather touching, astonishing perhaps, that the toil of others has the power to ellicit those feelings in us in the first place?

That we are always already moved by others (unless we suffer from certain neurological/behavioural difficulties) before we take note of ourselves and declare "I am" is the most original fact of morality, and one mercilessly concealed by our Western (and more specifically, Cartesian) mode of thinking. All we need ask is why we can feel that way in the first place. It's not up to us to choose what we feel, nor is it up to us to choose that things can ellicit such feelings in us. In this respect we are most certainly not isolated individuals.

(For more on the source of passions/reasons I invite you to take a look at my dissertation - particularly the third section).

On The Error of Justifying Philosophy

[Taken and expanded upon an answer I gave over at r/AskPhilosophy]

The common understanding of philosophy is that it is a "subject" among other "subjects" - standing alongside art, physics, history, mechanical engineering, biology, and so on. Where all of these subjects study their corner of the world, philosophy itself is supposed to have a corner of the world which it studies - a range of specialist questions tentatively related to other fields (as certain parts of physics relate to certain parts of engineering) but otherwise in a sphere of their own. And yet the one thing we immediately notice is that philosophy seems to show up everywhere. There's a philosophy of art, of science, of psychology, of history, etc. - what accounts for the ubiquitousness of philosophy in all of our other subjects?

You might say the "philosophy of history" is only an area in the subject of history, along with other areas like medieval history, the history of medicine, Chinese history and so on. As we could get on with the business of history without studying Chinese history (though we'd perhaps be poorer for it) so we can get on with the business of history without studying the philosophy of history. But is this the correct way of coming to terms with the ubiquitousness of philosophy? How are we going to figure this out? Well, it seems to me like the most sensible way would be to see if philosophy permeates the rest of the subject, so that a "philosophy of" is not merely a possible and non-essential theme which we can study within a subject, but is rather an essential directive lying at the heart of the questioning which a given subject takes as its own.

First, a little history. Before the first academy was founded by Plato, there were no explicitly divided subjects. Thinking was free to roam, and this thinking was known as "philosophy". Just as a discussion we would have with friends can wander unimpeded along "subject lines", from ethics to politics to philosophy, so it was with the first thinkers. However, when the Academy came into being this freedom of thinking was split into three "subjects": physis, ethos, and logos. From there the phenomena uncovered by thinking, previously discovered as a whole by thinkers, were formally divided into regions. Where the first philosophy had simply thought the world in an holistic manner, now thinking had become specialised.

And indeed, we're still a part of the wave of "splitting" and "isolating" which our Western way of being fosters, and which led to Plato's tripartite scheme. So what does this have to do with justifying philosophy? Well, we have now gained an insight into the notion that philosophy as a thinking unfettered to any region of phenomena, initially, covered all phenomena now split into regions of beings along "subject lines" (which are now manifold). Thinking has thereby found itself bound to different regions of beings. Perhaps it is this common origin which accounts for the fragment of philosophy we find everywhere, a shard of that shattered first questioning which still remains in every subject now isolated from its ground in original thinking.

And what is this shard? Well, when a subject conducts its investigations it makes a variety of tacit presuppositions. Law, for example, presupposes a notion of responsibility (tied to an understanding of free will and therefore an understanding of the being of man), along with notions of good conduct, justice, etc. Where law pushes ahead on the basis of these notions, the "philosophy of law" looks backwards to clarify these fundamental concepts and assess them for soundness. But it is philosophy proper and not just "philosophy of law" which deals with these questions! These questions did not first emerge with the formally defined subject of law but have demanded attention throughout human history. How to live good lives is a question which emerges not out of a detached thinking about things, but is rather demanded of us by simple virtue of the fact that we first find ourselves having to live in some way. We did not and could not choose this way of being in which we have to choose (the way of being which makes possible moral and therefore legal responsibility) - the question of how to live blossoms like a flower from the soil of our very being. 

Now, the philosophy of law is the manifestness of law's rootedness in this original questioning which, before something like law is possible, must already be supposed. We need not explicitly presuppose these notions (indeed, as we have seen their presupposition emerges from a question posed implicitly from out of the simple fact of our existence). That we don't need to make these presuppositions the object of an explicit enquiry and can "get by without asking them" is the ground of the reason why people typically see philosophy as a non-essential subject among other subjects. However, philosophy has already taken place in the very fact of existence which summons the investigations of a subject forward. And if we are at all concerned about the nature of the investigations of these subjects, founded on implicit philosophical assumptions, we will study them and assess them. How would the legal system look, for instance, if everybody accepted that there was no free will and therefore no responsibility? How do the findings of quantum mechanics look dependent on your stand in the realism/anti-realism debate? Indeed, even the conceptualisation of neural mechanisms bear the mark of implicit philosophical assumptions. Calling the neural system dealing with detached contemplation "the default mode network" only makes sense if you begin from cognitivist assumptions about the being of man.

So any question of justifying philosophy has already come too late! Philosophy as first thinking is presupposed by all subjects - to ask for justification is to commit a category error. Philosophy is not like a subject among other subjects. Philosophy is the explicit ontological investigation of fundamental concepts necessary for the pursuit of any and all ontic investigations. As these presuppositions arise from everybody's existence, in some sense everybody is a philosopher - which is why we can all ask these questions, and how we can step into various specialist subjects on the basis of our pre-conceptual philosophical understanding.

On Reason III: Towards the Essence of Reason

*

Prologue

Following on from the first and second parts, we're now in a position to press on to the source of normative reasons for action. Having considered two sides of the argument, the distinction thesis of Smith and the identity thesis of Hume, we've revealed both understandings of reason to be unsatisfactory. Unable thus far to capture what is essential to reason, we're forced into a phenomenological apprehension of reasoning itself where we discover the essence of reason in our affectively articulated interests.

IV

Originary Affectivity and the Evaluative Scheme

This brings us to the final phase of our investigation into the source of our reasons for action. In this last section we will be looking at reasons to suppose that the evaluative scheme is necessarily disclosed in advance of any possible reasons and that it is disclosed affectively. In order to do so we will take a look at the phenomenological structure of decision-making so we might get clear on what choosing on the basis of reasons specifically involves. Contrary to the Humean account where we equate normative reasons for action with customarily elicited passions we are going to seek the origins of normative reasons for action in our interests[1] which, as we’ll come to see, are the basis of eliciting passions. We will also come to see how belief, in Smith’s sense, also presupposes the pursuit of interests.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that thinking about morality begins with a question: “how should I live my life?” The sense of asking this question prior to establishing the various possible means and modes of living virtuously is questioned by some philosophers.[2] We’re going to be exploring reasons to think that an answer to Aristotle’s question (whether tacit or explicit) is a necessary requirement for any further thinking regarding our personal conduct.

(i) Consider the following - if we have decided that we want to do well at university, we not only presuppose motivation to do so but by making this resolution we pre-disclose what it makes sense for us to do. By choosing to live in a certain way (in taking on certain interests, e.g. being a sensible student) options are signified in terms of how conducive or obstructive they are to the specific way of life we’ve assumed. If we have a lecture to attend, for instance, then we should attend. But let us suppose we have woken up without enough sleep and so also desire to stay in bed. That we have in advance decided to pursue success at university gives us our answer. That we’ve made it our business to do well therefore gives us a normative reason to get up and go into university. Attending the lecture means more to us than staying in bed, no matter how much we currently want to sleep.

Now, recall how our disagreement with Smith was not his claim that desires and values can come apart but rather the notion that values are ontologically distinct from our feelings. The fact that it means something for me to do well at university gives me my normative reason to turn up. What this clash of inclinations confirms is that we can, as noted in part II, lose our motivation to do what’s best for us when we find ourselves in certain states of anxiety or exhaustion, etc. But if we began to miss university an awful lot we might worry that our project of getting a good grade had become threatened and so, given that we’re quite keen to do well, this prospect might make us fearful.

It seems like the ways of living which we spend our time pursuing bear a significant connection to our feelings. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger offers a phenomenological elucidation of such affective states, giving the example of fear. In it he discovers three structural moments: (1) the fearful thing, (2) fear itself, (3) that for which we are afraid.[3] The first, in this case, is the prospect of not accomplishing our task, the second is the feeling of fear, and the third is the possible way of living which we are pursuing (being a good student). How something (e.g. missing lectures) can take on the character of being threatening is how it stands with regard to those interests we make it our business to pursue. Does this option mean our project is no longer possible? No longer likely? How would that make us feel?

The notion upon which Heidegger proceeds is that we’re always pressing forward into some possibility or other. When going to work, for instance, it is for the sake of earning money (or if we’re lucky enough to be in a job we enjoy, for the sake of the work itself). When we come to make choices we find ourselves already in a situation, like the student who wakes up tired - and we must make that choice based upon what we want our situation to look like in future. It would make no sense to insist that this choice is based solely on one’s desires because desiring presupposes being initially directed towards things (going into university or staying in bed) on the basis of some possible way of living (being a good student). “Only a being which is concerned in its being about that being can be afraid”.[4]

Eating ice cream, for example, isn’t going to threaten our intentions and so, ceteris paribus, it’s not going to feel threatening.[5] Activities like this are pre-valued in terms of how they stand with respect to our interests. If we were not initially concerned with something, nothing could have the character of being threatening as we would have no interest which could then be threatened. This capacity to be affectively moved by something on the basis of our interests we call originary affectivity.[6]

So we see now that it is a pre-requisite to be intending upon things concernfully in order for something to be able to move us.[7] The threat of imprisonment or of starvation moves those beings which are already concerned about avoiding what imprisonment or starvation mean for them. If the foregoing is correct, the possibility of being moved emotionally in this way is thereby grounded in the fact that we primarily find ourselves pursuing some way of living. Satisfying, thwarting, or delaying what we pursue elicits our feelings, but the feelings themselves are not the fundamental explanatory basis – concern is.

(ii) It will be observed, however, that even though Aristotle’s teleological approach invokes such purposeful activities right from the very start it nevertheless remains a problem that explicitly taking over a way of living is not the only way in which we inherit normative reasons for action. If this was the case we would have no normative reasons until we explicitly took such a stand on ourselves, but this is clearly not the case. Often we take over ways of being without making a conscious decision of any sort. This way of tacitly assuming of a way of living begins early on:

“A Japanese baby seems passive […] he lies quietly […] while his mother […] does [a great deal of] lulling, carrying, and rocking of her baby. She seems to try to soothe and quiet the child, and to communicate with him physically rather than verbally. […] the American infant is more active […] and exploring of his environment and his mother […] does more looking at and chatting to her baby. […] In terms of styles of care-taking of the two mothers in the two cultures, they get what they apparently want […] A great deal of cultural learning has taken place by three to four months”.[8]

As John McDowell puts it:

“Human beings are […] initiated into […] the space of reasons by ethical upbringing, which instils the appropriate shape into their lives. The resulting habits of thought and action are second nature.”[9]

So initially, we take over ways of living our lives prescribed to us by means of imitation/upbringing. Explicitly choosing the way in which you will live your life is not the only way in which you might step into a way of living. It is often certainly the case that, in lieu of an explicit answer to Aristotle’s question, we still have an idea of how it is we should live, what we should do with ourselves, etc.

(iii) What it is important to recognise, however, is that these background interests which make up our way of living are a necessary requirement for reasoning. When we make the decision as to whether or not we’re going into university we do so on the basis of interests already taken over by us (even if not explicitly). If the things which are valuable to us are valuable in terms of how they stand in relation to those interests, and if reasoning is a matter of choosing what we’re going to do, then it’s clear that reason itself cannot produce the evaluative background. We cannot choose the basis on which we make our choices because there needs to first be that basis on which we can make a decision! This basis we’ll call our evaluative scheme. What is valuable to someone in a situation is that which is conducive to whatever it is one makes it their business to pursue in life.

So we need to already be working within an evaluative scheme in order to have options to choose between and reasons for choosing them. However, this background need not be held ‘in mind’ in order for it to prescribe normative reasons. We don’t need to be aware of all the things which it makes sense for us to do based on our interests. If we want to get fit we don’t need to know the ideal amount of cardiovascular exercise we ought to do in order to meet our weekly objectives. There could be an agent-centred normative reason for us to run three miles, three times a week based on our interests which we’re simply not aware of.

Nevertheless, existing in such a concernful manner opens the possibility of something mattering to us in the sense of appealing to our feelings, with the consequence that our evaluative scheme is articulated affectively. That we are always already intending upon interests articulated affectively is the grounds of the possibility of having normative reasons for action. We must have these interests necessarily before we have reasons. Belief in a proposition like “if I were practically rational I would do X in circumstance C” presupposes already intending upon a scheme of affectively articulated interests/projects, which vary from agent to agent. Belief cannot therefore serve as the fundamental basis of explanation either, contra Smith.

We can now see how Smith’s account makes a questionable assumption about the nature of rationality. Smith has it that “under conditions of full information and the resolution of conflicting desires all agents would converge on the same desires”.[10] But if the foregoing is correct, our passions and the reasons for action which we begin with are given through our own way of living (the interests we make it our business to pursue, and from out of which the possibility of feeling threatened, etc. emerges) and so the idea that everybody could verge on the same desires is contrary to the grounds of rationality itself. Smith’s “practically rational” agent turns out to be a difficult notion: that there is, prior to taking on interests and points of view, an objective scheme of evaluation underpinning the possible deliberation of all agents regardless of their own ways of modes of living (which, as we have seen, actually serve as the basis of what one values).

(iv) What we now have is an account of normative reasons which does justice to two plausible yet seemingly contradictory intuitions which we discovered in Hume and Smith, respectively:

(a) Reason is inseperably tied to the passions.

(b) What we desire and what is in our best interest can come apart. 

What Smith’s examples showed us was that it is possible for us to desire something which we have no normative reason to acquire. However, Smith’s interpretation of this fact in terms of the metaphysical distinction of values and desires does not necessarily follow from (b). Rather, what we have discovered is that value is affectively articulated on the basis of our interests themselves. The result of this is that even if the passions can motivate us to act in ways which run contrarily to the best of our interests, what we value must nevertheless still have some affective import.

---

[1] I will be using the terms “interests”, “concerns”, “projects”, and “ways of living” interchangeably. 

[2] Annas, J. “The Morality of Happiness”, Oxford University Press, 1993, Ch. 

[3] Heidegger, M., ‘Being and Time’, SUNY Press, 1927, p. 136 (2010 edition) (cited henceforth as ‘BT’)

[4] Ibid. p. 137 (emphasis added)

[5] Unless perhaps you are trying to lose weight as well, in which case, based on that way of living, you would have a normative reason not to eat the ice cream. 

[6] It is important to clarify that originary affectivity is not to be identified with any actual particular feelings that we have, but is to be understood as our capacity to be moved by things in general. 

[7] Heidegger, M., ‘BT’, pp. 81-87 

[8] Caudill, W., & Weinstein, H., ‘Maternal Care and Infant Behaviour in Japan and America’, in Dreyfus, H., ‘Being-in-the-World’, The MIT Press, 1991, p. 17 

[9] McDowell, J., ‘Mind and World’, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 111 (emphasis added) in Dreyfus, H., ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Nov. 2005), pp. 47-65 

[10] Finley, S. & Schroeder, M., ‘RFA’, (1.2.3)

Bibliography (Parts I-III)

Annas, J. “The Morality of Happiness”, Oxford University Press, 1993

Caudill, W., & Weinstein, H., ‘Maternal Care and Infant Behaviour in Japan and America’, in Dreyfus, H., ‘Being-in-the-World’, The MIT Press, 1991

Copp, D. ‘Belief, Reason, and Motivation: Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem’, Ethics, Vol. 108, No. 1 The University of Chicago Press, 1997

Finlay, S. & Schroeder, M., ‘Reasons for Action: Internal vs. External’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-internal-external/

Heidegger, M., ‘Being and Time’, SUNY Press, 1927 (2010 edition)

Hume, D. ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’, Norton, D (ed.) & Norton, M (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1739 (2009 edition)

McDowell, J., ‘Mind and World’, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 111 (emphasis added) in Dreyfus, H., ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Nov. 2005), pp. 47-65

McIntyre, Jane L. ‘Hume’s ‘New and Extraordinary’ Account of the Passions’ in Traiger, S (ed.), “The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise”, Blackwell Publishing, 2005

Plato. “The Republic”, Penguin Books, 1987 edition

Setiya, K. ‘Reasons without Rationalism’, Princeton University Press, 2007

Smith, M., ‘The Moral Problem’, Blackwell Publishing, 1994 (2008 edition)