What do you think of the value and limits of the ego in life and human thinking. Is ego a stumbling block in philosophy? To what extent has it led to humanity's downfall and is possible to achieve a vision beyond the perspective of egoism? — Jack Cummins

Ego is really 'the self's idea of itself'. I take it to refer to our conscious self-image, how we see or imagine ourselves to be. For Freud ego is the conscious, rational part of the mind that mediates between instinctual desires (the id), moral constraints (the superego), and reality

In spiritual philosophies, such as Eckhart Tolle's, or the popular forms of Indian spirituality from which his ideas are drawn, ego is something to be overcome or released. But then, this is also central to the Christian gospel. Consider such injunctions as 'He who saves his life will loose it, he who looses his life for My sake will be saved' (Matt 16:25). This is clearly an injunction for the sacrifice of self or ego. But in more contemporary terms, it can be understood as relinquishing the inner narrative of 'I, me, mine' and all of the clinging and attachment that comes with it.

Bernadette Roberts’ book is relevant here, because she distinguishes ego-transcendence from the much rarer experience of “no-self,” which she argues is neither moral self-denial nor loss of agency, but a structural shift in subjectivity itself, from within a strictly Christian devotionalism. See 'The Experience of No-Self'.

But you also find many injunctions against egotism in the indian sage Ramana Maharishi, who's entire teaching was grounded in seeing through the illusion of egoic existence.

Of course not all of us can be spiritual renunciates in the sense that they convey. Ego has real value: it enables reasoning, responsibility, creativity, and ethical life. The problem arises when ego becomes totalising — when its perspective is taken as exhaustive of reality. Ego may not be a stumbling block to philosophy as such, but philosophy that never questions the egoic standpoint is something else. Traditions that point toward a “life beyond ego” are valuable not because they negate ordinary human life, but because they reveal the limits of the standpoint we so easily mistake for the whole. So I think it's healthy to recognise those who call to a 'life beyond ego', as it is so radically different to what we generally encounter in an individualistic and 'ego-logical' culture such as ours.

Naturalism says we need to explain who is explaining in terms of what is being explained. :roll:

Me, I'm still partial to 'God breathing life into clay'.

If the cycle is beginningless, then the very existence of the 'cycle' is unintelligible. — boundless

'Saṃsāra has no beginning, but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning, but it has no end' ~ Buddhist Aphorism (quoted on Dharmawheel.)

Intentionality, on this view, is not a basic feature of the world but a higher-level property that arises from the structure and dynamics of complex physical systems. — Tom Storm

A lot of people will say that, but you never see intentionality in the data. It is always only imputed - and by whom? For what reason?

Do you believe in God, or is that a software glitch?

Only language can carve out concepts like perception, and then that these concepts themselves as objects of consideration. If you believe naturalism can explain language use, then it can explain such questions. — hypericin

Excellent question. I agree that minimal, functional aboutness—I’ll use intentionality—poses no special problem for naturalism. For a signal to be useful, it must in some sense inform the organism about the world, and evolutionary biology explains this very well. A bird of prey does not ask whether its perceptions are true, yet it obviously matters that they are accurate in ways relevant to its form of life. An early bird must indeed catch a worm.

The philosophical problem arises with the emergence of language and symbolic reason, where representation becomes normative rather than merely functional. Once we can make claims, give reasons, and distinguish truth from mere success, intentionality is no longer just a matter of reliable correlation with stimuli. It involves answerability to how things are in a much broader sense, including domains—logic, mathematics, counterfactual reasoning—where there may be no immediate adaptive payoff. That is the sense of intentionality that invites explanation.

Stephen Talbott, in a great series of essays, argues that biological explanation already operates with two distinct kinds of “because”: because of physical law, and because of reason or meaning. Physical causes are law-like and invariant; reasons are context-sensitive and intelligible only in relation to the organised whole of the organism. Biology cannot dispense with the latter without distorting its subject matter. On Talbott’s view, this marks the core limitation of naturalism as it is usually conceived: it attempts to reduce context-driven, interpretive behaviour to physical causation alone. That is the conflict in a nutshell.

If this distinction between physical causation and meaning already applies at the level of basic biological organisation, then it becomes unavoidable in the case of what Terrence Deacon famously describes as the symbolic species (in the book of that name): beings whose cognition is organised around language, norms, and counterfactual structures that outrun immediate adaptive utility.

In a review of one of Daniel Dennett's books, the reviewer asks 'if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else.' So I would suggest that the attempt to explain reason in biological terms of tends to be reductionist, for the above reasons. Not that more extended forms of naturalism, such as those Deacon and Talbott are attempting, can be described as reductionist.

Well, sure, because always we have a situation to deal with. We live in a context. So we're participants, not simply spectators. As a primer on Kant says, 'Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions.'

From philosophical biologist Steve Talbott:

The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context… Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws. [But] In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after… Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason — the tapestry of meaning. — Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?

To try and summarise what I've attempted to spell out.

Formal ideas such as logic, mathematics, and natural laws can be understood as structures of consciousness—not in a psychological sense, but as necessary structures of rational insight. They are what Gottlob Frege meant by “the laws of thought.” After all, if someone asks you for a mathematical proof, you have no choice as to what answer to give.

But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding.

In deference to pre-modern philosophy, I don’t see the pre-modern intuition of an intelligible world as simply archaic or superseded. Rather, it reflects a genuine insight articulated without the later conceptual distinction between intelligibility as inherent and intelligibility as disclosed. For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate.

In that context, it was entirely natural to say that intelligibility inheres in nature. There was no felt pressure to ask whether intelligibility was “in the mind” or “in the world”—that bifurcation simply had not yet hardened. The emergence of that sense of separateness from nature is a distinctly modern development, and arguably a defining feature of the post-modern condition.

:ok:

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. — Joshs

Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.

This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.

The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'.

I don't consider myself expert. An expert has considerable training in a discipline or subject area. I'm very much aware of gaps in my knowledge and training. I like to think I had an epiphanic moment that disclosed something all at once — not in detail, but in outline, 'aperçu' as it is said— and I’ve been orienting myself by it ever since. The image that comes to mind is being lost in a dense forest during a storm, when a flash of lightning briefly illuminates a magnificent structure on a distant hill. You can no longer see it, but you can’t forget that you did see it, and everything since has been an attempt to find a way toward it.

I'm with you on Lloyd Gerson - I wonder if there would be a gap in the market for a book about Gerson for non-academic readers (although you'd have to be an expert to write it.) Have a read of Joining the Ur-Platonist Alliance (Edward Feser).

Not expertise, just reading.

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. — jkop

But this is basically naive realism. It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object', as if we were assuming a perspective outside both 'our knowledge of the object' and 'the object'. But that is precisely what we can't do, for the reasons given by Kant.

Premise 1: Naturalism explains everything in terms of physical causes and effects.
Premise 2: Physical causes and effects, by themselves, have no meaning or “aboutness.”
Premise 3: Human thoughts, beliefs, and concepts are intentional—they are about things and can be true or false.
Premise 4: Intentionality (aboutness, meaning, truth) cannot be reduced to or derived from purely physical processes.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain intentionality; the intelligibility of thought points beyond purely naturalistic causes. — Tom Storm

That OP I drafted recently, 'the predicament of modernity', is basically about this. It says, there's a clearly discernable historical geneaology behind this problem. It is the 'Cartesian division', elaborated from and by the primary/secondary qualities, Galileo's quantification of nature, the split between mind and matter. All of which are fundamental to what Vervaeke calls 'the grammar of modernity', that is, they're sown into the way we think about 'everything', consciously or not (and most of us aren't.) Some of the best lectures in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are about exactly this point (the ones around 'Death of the Universe', Descartes, Luther etc.) So it gives us a world in which 'the universe' is vast, blind and indifferent, in which we, the sovereign individual, who is responsible for defining 'freedom' and 'happiness' on our own terms, are cast adrift like accidental tourists.

Speaking of D B Hart, an extended passage from his review of Daniel Dennett's last book:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order. — D B Hart, The Illusionist

That pretty well nails it.

For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. ...

Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts. — Joshs

I don’t think the break is as radical as you’re suggesting. The deeper difficulty, it seems to me, lies in how the reality of number—using “number” here as a stand-in for intelligibles generally—is being conceived. As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.)

Seen this way, Husserl’s position doesn’t strike me as radically anti-Platonist so much as anti-reification. What is rejected is not intelligibility as a feature of reality, but the idea that intelligibility must take the form of quasi-things standing alongside empirical objects. The Kantian and post-Kantian insight that intelligibility is bound up with the conditions of experience need not be read as a denial of reality to intelligibles, only as a rejection of a certain ontological picture. I’m tempted to locate it earlier, in the shift toward univocity, where intelligibles begin to be treated as objects rather than acts. In Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory: knowing is an act in which form is shared, not a relation to an abstract item. Once intelligibles are reified, the debate inevitably becomes about where they are located—mind-independent realm or transcendental constitution. Husserl’s resistance to Platonism looks to me less like a denial of intelligibility than a rejection of that reification.

This is where the 'error of empiricism' (per Jacques Maritain) becomes evident: it insists on the idea of a mind-independent empirical object, that reality is what exists independently of any cognitive agent. That's the deep contradiction in modern thought.

As regards politics: I'm aware of the connection between these kinds of critiques and conservative or reactionary political movements. You see it also in the connection between the perennialist and their hostility to modernity. I'm dismayed by it, and certainly would not want to be identified with any of the conservative politicians you mention, whom I generally despise. But, you know, 'modernity' as a state of mind really does have some gaping holes in it. But it's the water in which we swim.

Mind you a lot of people will definitely take that the wrong way (God bless ‘em).

It’s very important to grasp that the term ‘anatta’, which means ‘not self’ or ‘no self’ is always used as an adjective in the Pali (early Buddhist) texts. All things (or experiential states) are said to be ‘without self’ (also to be annica, impermanent, and dukkha, unsatisfying). But when asked ‘is there a self or not?’ the Buddha declines to answer (ref).This is very important. It is mistaken to say that ‘the Buddha says there is no self’. But nor that there is a self. Why? To affirm that the self exists is to fall into the mistaken view of eternalism, the idea that there is a permanent unchanging self which migrates from life to life, or which underlies but is different from all experiences. To say that there is no self is to fall into the mistaken view of nihilism, which is the view that there are no karmic consequences of actions. Of course this is difficult to fathom, but that is the canonical view. It is elaborated in the Madhyamaka, ‘middle way’ teaching of Nāgārjuna but it is there in essence from the earliest teachings.

Furthermore, the Buddhist teaching on rebirth does not say that you — understood as a persisting personal subject, ego, or bearer of identity — will be reborn. That is precisely what the doctrine of non-self (anattā) rules out from the start. If there were a “you” in that sense, rebirth would amount to reincarnation - a single self which is born again and again, and which Buddhism explicitly rejects. That is the ‘eternalist’ view. But the idea that actions in this life have no consequence beyond physical death is the opposite mistake, the ‘nihilist’ view. (An implication being that modern thought is basically nihilist in orientation.)

What continues is the causal process that underlies and gives rise to living beings. There is continuity without strict identity. And that stands to reason, because all of us are both the same as, and different to, the person we were in the past. Self is a dynamic stream of consciousness, ‘cittasantana’ but without an unchanging kernel or eternal existent.

The aggregates arise, function, and cease. If ignorance and craving persist, the causal conditions for further arising persist. This is why the Buddha consistently avoids answering questions like “Is it the same person who is reborn?” or “Is it a different one?” Or for that matter “who experiences Nirvāṇa?”Such questions are posed on the basis of a false conception of the nature of self, which is why they are left unanswered.

I guess one could go onto argue that language already presupposes access to logical form, universals, truth, and intentionality. — Tom Storm

I always thought that is what Nietzsche meant when he said we hadn’t got rid of God because we can’t get rid of grammar, although I’m not much of a Nietzsche fanboy. But I agree with the way you put it in your last sentence.

Postmodernists believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world. — Joshs

Naturalistic replies (e.g. jkop) often emphasize evolutionary utility: cognition tracks what matters for survival, not truth. That story can explain why certain representations work, but it doesn’t obviously explain aboutness—why representations are of the world rather than merely correlated with stimuli in ways that happen to be useful. After all, reptiles and birds of prey have survived for millions of years without any concern for whether their perceptions or internal representations are true. That preoccupation seems uniquely human, and it is not clear that evolutionary biology, as such, is equipped to explain it.

This is where the classical argument bites. If cognition is fundamentally geared toward fitness rather than truth, then the remarkable reach of human reason—abstract mathematics, cosmology, modal reasoning, counterfactuals—looks explanatorily extravagant. Every other species gets along perfectly well without them. One can always say “it just turned out that way,” but that response functions more as a dismissal than an explanation. The question isn’t whether evolution can produce brains that adapt successfully, but why beings like us can uncover deep, non-local, non-obvious structures of reality at all—necessary truths, in fact. And such truths are not contingent in the way sensory experience necessarily is.

But notice that in even posing this question, you’re already stepping beyond the explanatory limits of naturalism. Naturalistic explanation ultimately trades in empirically tractable causal relations, whereas the issue at hand—how thought can be about reality, or why reason should have normative authority—cannot be captured in purely causal terms. Whenever you start to ask what must be the case, and why it must be so, I say you’re already appealing to facts which are strictly speaking beyond the remit of naturalism (and which I and others say points to a deep contradiction in naturalism.)

You might object that science itself makes constant use of such modal notions—and that’s true. But science does not explain logical or mathematical necessity; it presupposes it. In securing its proofs and models, science relies on principles that stand to reason: inference, consistency, implication, and mathematical structure. Although science introduces new mathematical formalisms, these are not confirmed or disconfirmed empirically in the same sense as empirical claims. Yet they are among the constituents of scientific discovery.

So the question simply reappears at a deeper level: where, exactly, is this necessity to be found? Not as a contingent feature of the empirical world, and not as a causal product of it either. Yet without it, the enterprise of science would not even get off the ground. I agree in some ways that these arise as constituents of our experience-of-the-world, as some postmodernists would put it, but this was already anticipated in the participatory dimension of classical metaphysics.

The religious dogma has been ripe in this discussion. — unimportant

Especially for those who equate all religion with dogma, which is, of course, a dogma in its own right. And it’s understandable, considering the dynamics of religious history in Western culture. It gives rise to this often-unstated sense of there being a barrier or fault-line, generally between what is acceptable in naturalist terms, or potentially intelligible to science, and the rest. (Not for nothing was Alan Watts’ last book called The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are.)

It needs to be acknowledged that Buddhism is a supernatural religion. ‘Supernatural’ is of course a boo-word, something which nobody wants to be associated with in polite company. But one of the traditional epithets of the Buddha is that he is ‘lokuttara’, which is translated as ‘world-transcending’ ‘trans-mundane’ and so on - all of which are euphemisms for ‘supernatural’ (definition.) And the reason is that the Buddha is not subject to rebirth (except, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, there is the implicit understanding that the Tathagatha may elect to be born for the wellbeing of others, which, perhaps incongruously, has deep resonances with the Christian mythos.)

But again, this ‘natural v supernatural’ distinction is also very much an historically conditioned one. Its outlines are not hard to discern in European history. The Trial of Galileo and the Scientific Revolution are central to it, the subsequent division between religion and secular culture, the ‘culture wars’, atheism old and ‘new’, and the rest of it. The original charter of the Royal Society, the first institution dedicated to modern science, explicitly forbade discussion of ‘metaphysik’ which was deemed the ‘province of Churchmen’. And, at the time, trespassing into that province could have dire consequences!

But the boundaries, so-called, keep shifting, as they were never very clearly drawn in the first place, except for in respect of ‘dogma’ which has created the sense of the division between secular and sacred.

Years ago, before I even started posting on forums, I read an interesting editorial by conservative writer David Brooks (who incidentally has just announced his retirement) in the New York Times called The Neural Buddhists.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects. — David Brooks

Amen to that ;-)

My follow-up essay on Michel Bitbol, Phenomenology Meets Buddhism, has been published on Philosophy Today site on Medium. 'Friend link' is here. (I'm still mostly offsite for the next little while working on a creative writing project.)

...how exactly would a person go about doing that -- ie. not letting "ideas about reincarnation stop you from understanding Buddhism better"? — baker

Right view functions as the precursor to the noble eightfold path that according to the early Buddhist scheme of mental training needs to be undertaken in order to reach liberation. This need not be taken to imply, however, that rebirth must be accepted on blind faith in order to be able to embark on this path, since alternative modes of describing right view exist. One of these is the exact opposite of wrong view and thus affirms rebirth and the results of karma. Another definition instead speaks of insight into the four noble truths. Although the four noble truths build on the notion of rebirth, the basic attitude and practices they convey can be put to use without affirming rebirth.

The fact that the discourses present such an alternative definition of right view leaves open the possibility that someone may engage in practices related to the Buddhist path to liberation without necessarily pledging faith in rebirth. It does not leave open the possibility of denying rebirth outright, however, since that would amount to holding wrong view.

The point that emerges in this way is that one who wishes to embark on the Buddhist path of practice need not affirm rebirth as a matter of mere belief. The question of rebirth might simply be set aside as something that such a person is unable to verify at present, without going so far as to deny rebirth and affirm that there is nothing that continues beyond the death of the body. — Analayo Bhikkhu, Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research (pp. 47-48), Kindle Edition

I am confident Buddhism is exactly what it takes itself to be, a way to end suffering. The issue for me is what framework of understanding it uses to define suffering and its alleviation. There are those who see suffering through a very different lens, such that ending it is not only not desirable but also an incoherent notion. — Joshs

The 'framework of understanding' is that of 'depedendent origination' (Pratītyasamutpāda) - the sequence of stages which culminate in birth (and hence sickness, old age and death). In religious studies, it is called 'soteriological', meaning concerned with salvation, although the word 'salvation' is more typically associated with Christianity. The Buddhist term is Nirvāṇa (nibanna) which refers to the complete cessation of re-birth and therefore of suffering.

Plainly, Buddhism, like the Vedic tradition from which it broke away, is embedded in a very different conception of the nature of existence, than is the Judeo-Christian tradition. The way Christianity developed in Western history was was shaped by the belief in the Eschaton, the culmination of history, which arguably gave rise to the ideology of progress which still holds sway, even if it has abandoned its original, religious rationale. (I entertain the idea that the belief in the possibility of interstellar exploration represents the sublimated longing for heaven.)

The underlying intuition of both Hinduism and Buddhism is that of cycles of existence, or creation and destruction, birth and death, from the individual to the cosmic scale, taking place over 'vast aeons of kalpas'. The Buddha, then, is said to show 'the way' (Marga) of liberation from the cycle of birth and death. (I don't think there is a direct equivalent of the Hindu and Buddhist terms 'mokṣa' or 'Nirvāṇa' in the English lexicon, so they are usually equated, incorrectly, with the Christian idea of salvation.)

However here the distinction between Mahāyāna and Theravada (Pali) Buddhism is significant. H H The Dalai Lama expressed it like this:

There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer. Regarding the first, due to ignorance negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. This is the way ordinary beings circle incessantly through existence like the turning of a wheel. Even under such circumstances ordinary beings can engage diligently with a positive aspiration in virtuous practices in their day-to-day lives. They familiarise themselves with virtue that at the time of death can be reactivated providing the means for them to take rebirth in a higher realm of existence. On the other hand, superior Bodhisattvas, who have attained the path of seeing, are not reborn through the force of their karma and destructive emotions, but due to the power of their compassion for sentient beings and based on their prayers to benefit others. They are able to choose their place and time of birth as well as their future parents. Such a rebirth, which is solely for the benefit of others, is rebirth through the force of compassion and prayer. — H H The Dalal Lama, Statement on the Issue of HIs Reincarnation

This plainly introduces a very different conception of suffering in that it provides for the possibility of voluntary re-birth, and therefore voluntary suffering in the Christian sense. The aim of Theravada Buddhism is cessation tout courte, with no mind to the suffering of others. Hence the centrality of compassion in Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The intention of 'secular Buddhism' aims to retain the therapeutic and emotionally remedial aspects of Buddhism, without the soteriological framework within which it was originally posed. Which is all well and good, as far as it goes, but from the Buddhist perspective, that is not necessarily very far!

I've been logged out for a couple of weeks, working on writing, but decided to log back in and respond to some comments. But the formatting has gone really out of whack, at least for me (Mac OS Sequioa 15.7 Google Chrome. Even worse on Safari.) Many user avatars having 'missing image' icons, and the controls bar at the top of the reply window is displaying vertically not horizontally. If i open on Safari I don't think it's picking up the CSS at all so the whole site appears as plain text in a vertical orientation. Also the Quote button not appearing at least on the comment i'm wanting to respond to.

Might be something to do with caching on the desktop computer everything appears fine on iPad. But then the formatting is also broken on FireFox on iMac, so I don’t think it’s a client-side problem. Sigh. I will go back to what I’m supposed to be doing, finishing my draft.

The bug was CloudFlare Warp - wasn't allowing the .css to load.

All of which is premised on the assumption that Buddhism cannot be what it describes itself to be, which is, a way to the total ending of suffering. Not amelioration or adjustment.

It also began as a renunciate movement outside the social structures of Vedic religion and the caste system. It has of course subsequently become intertwined with cultural and social structures but that was not its original rationale.

Chill. It's just, like, 'keep an open mind'. Myself, I have no doubt of the reality of re-birth, something in which I take no comfort whatever. But I don't push it.

There is a significant element in Hegel regarding time and history. Can that be approached through an enlargement of the general ideas or does the new philosophy introduce incompatible ideas? — Paine

I think Hegel's philosophy of history is really important in its own right - not in relation to Kant only. I've discovered an Hegel scholar called Robert Pippin (read about him here) - although I admit I'll probably never get the book out of the library. At this stage of life, there are only so many authors I can take on. But generally speaking, I understand Hegel is going through a bit of a renaissance, considering writers like the above, and many other commentators. I think it is likely true that Hegel was a genius (notwithstanding Schopenhauer's scorning of him.)

But the theme I keep coming back to is really a very basic one, like Kant 101 - that the mind is not a 'blank slate' upon which experience engraves knowledge, but an active agent that builds its world as it goes.

-----------------------------------------

And, speaking of About Time: this is all from Wayfarer for the immediate future. I'm working on a novel, I'm at around 66k words, but I'm procrastinating, and logging into the Forum every day is splintering my attention. To finish it needs undivided attention for probably the next couple of months. I'm not terminating membership, and I look forward to participation in the future. I've often said, and will say again, I've learned an immense amount from the contributors here, about topics, ideas and philosophers I hadn't even known existed, and I highly value The Philosophy Forum. (Oh, and the novel is in the hard science fiction genre, 'hard' meaning no spaceships or aliens, but a seemingly plausible series of inexplicable events. I'm caling it a 'psi-phi' novel.)

But for now, for that reason, I must suspend my involvement. I will probably not respond to PM's unless from Board Admin (particularly regarding site migration). So bye for the time being, and keep up the great conversations! :heart: :pray:

@Jamal, @Tom Storm, @Banno @Esse Quam Videri , @Astorre, @Joshs, @Corvus, @Janus, @AmadeusD, @Punshhh, @Gnomon, @boundless, @Metaphysician Undercover, @Philosophim (and anyone else interested who's ID I can't bring to mind.)

On the first passage (and leaving aside the digression into his commentary on Plato and Aristotle) - there's still a more 'charitable' reading of the 'in itself' in Kant, which is not so vulnerable to Hegel's criticism (or caricature). As Kant scholar Emrys Westacott says:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

So the in-itself is a boundary, if you like. It’s only when 'the noumenal' or the ding an sich is treated as a 'mysterious unknown thing' that it becomes a reification — a thing about which nothing can be said. ("What is the thing we can't say anything about?") Whereas the appropriate stance is more one of unknowing.

Notice in that passage you quote that 'The Thing-in-itself (and under 'thing' is embraced even Mind and God)...' - this is uttered so casually, as if the manifest nature of both mind and God is something that ought to be obvious to any intelligent observer. But isn't it Hegel who is here introducing the reification ('thingifying') the 'in itself'? 'Nothing you can know so easily' - or rather, think you can know, hence the famous prolixity of Hegel.

(All that said, I don't believe Kant has the "final word" on the limits of knowledge. But it would take us too far afield to begin to consider that topic. Here, in the thread 'About Time', the basis of the argument is simply the ineluctably subjective grounding of time.)

With regards to (3) specifically he (Allison) seems to say that belief in the resurrection is more akin to committing to a total vision of reality or interpreting history through a larger horizon. — Esse Quam Videri

That could be said of practically all of the major religions, couldn’t it? That it doesn’t come down to peer-reviewed evidence, so much as a moral vision of the nature of reality or the meaning of life itself.

I notice in Allison’s book description, “Allison moves on to consider the resurrection in parallel with other traditions and stories, including Tibetan accounts of saintly figures being assumed into the light, in the chapter "Rainbow Body" (‘In Tibetan Buddhism, a supreme state of spiritual realization where an advanced practitioner's physical body transforms into pure light at death, signifying complete enlightenment, often leaving only hair and nails, or even vanishing entirely’). This is something I heard about when a participant in Buddhist forums.

Philosophically speaking, my view is that religions generally are an attempt to communicate insights into such radically different states of being. They are extremely hard to communicate, and rarely understood, hence clothed in symbolic language and mythological allegories (thus also prone to enormous misunderstandings). I also notice in the comments on Allison’s book ‘his willingness to take seriously the reality of religious experience’. Such ‘experiences’ (better, ‘realisations’), do sometimes result in the complete re-orientation of an individual’s sense of what is real. Again, very hard to communicate or describe. (See William James Varieties of Religious Experience for a classic on this.)

(Around the mid 2000’s, an archaeologist made the startling claim that he had discovered an ossuary in Israel that contained the physical remains of Jesus. We had a dinner-table conversation about this news story, during which I said that, were it proven, it would be catastrophic for Christianity, undermining the foundational mythos of the religion. Others at the table were more sanguine, saying that the Resurrection was ‘only symbolic’ and that Christ’s moral commandments and teachings were the real essence. I insisted that to say that, betrays an ignorance of what Christianity means, which provoked a furious row. But I still believe it to be the case. I’ve also found with other family members, that even those who have remained Christian express doubts that the resurrection was literally true, whereas I, who am not a Church-going Christian at all, have no trouble believing that it was, for reasons I can’t really defend. The claim about the ossuary, by the way, was soon dismissed by other archeologists.)

Well, here is an interview featuring both of them, so I might take the time to listen to some or all of it.

I take Levin to be conjecturing that inherent within matter itself is a "space" of possible forms, and a kind of inherent instinctive intelligence and agency that is capable of, to use Whitehead's terminology, "creative advance" whereby novel forms "ingress". The idea is that both living and non-living matter is "organic" or "self-organizing", yet not with any antecedent "purpose" or transcendent mind at work. It certainly seems right to me that there is no strictly mechanical explanation for the mysteries of morphogenesis. — Janus

Yes I meant neo-neo-platonist. Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues.



thank you I will find a quiet minute or 30 to take that in.

Right. It was a pretty dense review, I admit. Of course, I'm highly sympathetic to Levin's neoplatonism, but that critic seemed to have some pretty good points to make about whether his ideas really are able to be validated empirically. (In the book I'm writing, there's a character called Don LeVan who is basically Levin's character.)

The proposition put forward in the OP is that there is "no secular basis for morality."

This implies that all morality grows out of a religious tradition.

No. The morality came first. We evolved the neurological capacities for it. Our evolution as a social species refined it — Questioner

Straight out of the Dawkins Dennett playbook. Evolution displaces religion becuase it's scientific. You clearly haven't understood anything I've said about it, so no use repeating myself.

agree. I find him pretty difficult, although I very much appreciate what he's trying to do, at a high level.

I am not going to try to persuade you that Eric Reitan's blog post is correct. It may well not be! It made interpretive sense to me, that's all.

Surely this passage at least hints at that:

If my understanding of myself is at odds with what I am in myself, Hegel thought this would become apparent as I attempt to be (in practice) what I take myself to be (in theory). There arises a clash between my self-concept and what the self really is, a clash that manifests itself as a “contradiction,” one that then forces a revision in my self-understanding. When I try on this new self-understanding and attempt to live it out, another contradiction emerges. And so on. The resulting “dialectic” (Hegel’s name for this evolutionary process) continues until (at the end of history, so to speak) I finally reach a self-understanding that generates no contradictions when lived out. At that point, the phenomenal self has collapsed into the noumenal self—and I come to see what I am in myself.

According to Hegel’s own developed philosophy, the vision I have of my noumenal self turns out to be not just a vision of one small piece of the noumenal realm, but rather a vision of the Absolute (Hegel’s term for the ultimate noumenal reality).

I only selected that post by Eric Reitan because of its very specific focus on the question of the unknowable nature of the noumenon, and also the unknowable nature of the subject who knows ('mere cognition').

Of course, in a blog post comprising half a dozen paragraphs, nobody is going to capture the massive sweep of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' or his dialectical method.

If all of this (i.e. Kant's argument) is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And...this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

What follows is not intended as a summary of their responses, but mainly to point out that they were reacting against Kant's declaration of the unknowable nature of the in-itself.

If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The question is improperly framed as it presumes that morality can be explained by neurology.

WE learn more about the development of moral codes by studying the development of moral codes than by studying the human brain. . — Ecurb

:ok:

The Immanuel Kant Song

If brain capacities are not the result of our evolution, what is your alternative explanation? — Questioner

The evolution of the h.sapiens brain, along with the the upright gait, opposable thumb, and much else, is one of the most, if not the most, spectacular examples of evolutionary development in the annals of evolution. But whether all of the capabilities that arrive as a consequence can be understood or explained in terms of evolutionary biology is another matter. It's subtly reductionist - it equates human ethical and intellectual abilities with the kinds of adaptive advantages that are provided by claws and teeth. If, as someone asked, reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (This observation is the source of a vast amount of literature, by the way.)

So your concern is not that the science may be "right" but that it displaces religion? — Questioner

No, that was not the point. The point was, that it is often treated as a substitute for religion, when it is held up as an explanation for morality or ethics or other distinctively human abilities. I suggest that the appeal to 'evolution as the source of morality' arises from that. But it fails to recognise the differences which arise due to the human capacity for self-reflection, reason, story-telling, invention, science and such capacities. Yes, we evolved to the point where such capacities become available, but whether they can be understood as a result of evolution is another matter.

No, the theory of evolution, which works by natural selection, does what scientific theories do - they provide explanations based on the best available evidence. — Questioner

They certainly do, for the evolution of species.

//see also Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion//

the capacities for love, hate, empathy, a sense of fairness, a sense of right and wrong - and the cognition to make decisions - are the drivers of morality - and these capacities evolved through brain evolution — Questioner

Thanks for the elaboration. You acknowledge the importance of factors such as upbringing and culture, which I agree are of fundamental importance. But that is a far cry from acknowleding that evolutionary biology provides the 'building blocks of morality'. And I question whether the biological theory of evolution really does account for those capacities. It is a theory about the origin and evolution of species, and of the traits of species, seen through the perspective of adaptive fitness.

I'm sceptical about the way that evolution is invoked as a kind of catch-all theory of eveything about human nature. But then, the historical circumstances of its discovery were such that it came to fill the cultural vacuum, left by the abandonment of the religious traditions. For some, then, it inherited the mantle as the source or arbiter of values, as it seemed a natural fit. But the theory was never intended as the basis for ethics (or epistemology for that matter.)

Eh. don't see it like that. Did you choose to be born? Do you choose to die? Not everything is of your own choosing.