Philosophy and life, p.11
Philosophy and Life, page 11
The compilers of the Daodejing regarded its doctrines as greatly superior to those of other schools, which in their view were evidence of a decline from an age when the Way was properly followed: ‘When the great Dao declined, the doctrines of humaneness and uprightness arose. When the ideas of knowledge and wisdom came along, hypocrisy arose. When relationships are out of harmony, ideas of filial piety and love for children arise. When the country is disordered, praise will arise for good ministers. Abandon these ideas, and there will be wisdom, and uprightness, there will be filial piety, and love.’ The idea implicit here is that in the era before organized society, people behaved naturally and spontaneously, with effortless (wuwei) goodness. With society comes the need for effort to be humane, honest and filial – effort that too often fails, not least because in ‘trying too hard’ effortfulness is self-defeating.35
Wuwei, literally ‘non-action’, does not literally mean doing nothing at all; as just suggested, ‘effortlessness’ is the more accurate interpretation, to mean doing things in a relaxed, non-striving manner. In the Zhuangzi it denotes non-attachment and serenity. (Later Legalist philosophers took a hint from this and advised rulers to observe wuwei in the sense of ‘masterly inaction’, letting things take their course without interference.) Daoist masters use various analogies to explain the idea, typically likening wuwei to water flowing around rocks in a stream. ‘The wise man acts without effort, teaches without many words, produces without possessing, creates but is indifferent to the outcome, lays claim to nothing, and therefore has nothing to lose.’ In the term for ‘naturalness’, ziren, the zi component means ‘self’ and ren means ‘thus’, ‘as it is’. The idea is that what one is and does comes from within, from inner nature.
Daoism’s other great classic, the Zhuangzi, is named for its author, Zhuangzi (‘Master Zhuang’). He was born in the year that Socrates died, 399 BCE, and lived a very long time – a good advertisement for the Way’s unstressful approach to life. The Zhuangzi is more playful than the Daodejing, more sceptical, more critical, and full of entertaining anecdotes drawn from animal and insect life. It poses questions and puzzles but teasingly leaves them unanswered. Among the tales is the story of the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, and on waking wondered whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.
Some commentators regard the Zhuangzi as more sophisticated both in its writing and teaching than the Daodejing. It sees the Way less as a means to worldly success and more as a personal inward journey. It is not clear what the respective dates of composition of the two works are, nor therefore what their relationship is – is one a development from the other, or an alternative, or are the differences between them simply of emphasis and tone?
The Zhuangzi advises its readers to eschew politics and practical life. Striving and overthinking things is wrong, Zhuangzi says; conventional values are a distraction. The ideal is just to wander along the Way.
From early in the first millennium CE and for a thousand years afterwards, a form of Daoism known as ‘Highest Clarity Daoism’ – the Shangqing school founded by Lady Wei Huacun – was popular among the elite. One of her followers, Yang Xi, ‘almost certainly under the influence of cannabis’ according to the historian Joseph Needham, claimed that the texts setting out the school’s doctrines were dictated to him by spirits. The role of cannabis in developing the school’s theories is mildly implausible given that the school was expressly opposed to the use of drugs and potions for achieving enlightenment, instead advocating meditation. But in any case, as shown by the role accorded to ‘spirits’, what Shangqing yet again demonstrates is that the evolution over time of schools of thought is not guaranteed to improve them. Consider Buddhism in its migrations from northern India; what began as a philosophy soon accumulated superstitions, spirits, apsaras, bodhisattvas, gods and elaborate rituals and legends, clouding and degrading the original inspiration. When it comes to ethical schools, it would seem that the purest water is to be found at the spring.
Despite the elaborate accretions that now envelop Buddhism’s various versions, its original ideas remain steady at their centre: the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path to liberation from existence by attainment of nirvana. The Four Noble Truths are that life is suffering, that suffering arises from ignorance and desire, that suffering can be escaped, and that one can achieve liberation by living an ethical life and by meditation. The Eightfold Path of the ethical life is Right Vision (understanding), Right Emotion, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood (work that does not harm others), Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Meditation. When one reflects on these ideas one sees that, in essentials, they summarize the teachings of all the ethical schools already described. The single tweak, so to speak, might be meditation, though the withdrawal from conventional activities, and particularly from absorption in futile distractions of the moment, is paralleled in the Hellenistic schools; and as we will see in Chapter 12, there is a highly plausible view that followers of Hellenistic schools regarded ‘living philosophically’ as a practice requiring exercises in which repeating the doctrines and meditating on them were key. This brings the Eastern and Western philosophies even closer together.
The difference between Buddhism as a heterodox (nastika) school and the orthodox (astika) schools of Indian philosophy lies less with the ethical practices enjoined as in their respective underlying views of reality. The astika schools share a common point of departure in the concept, central to the Upanishads, of the relation between Atman (the individual self or soul) and Brahman (reality as a whole, ‘the Absolute’, the universal soul). In the classic Upanishadic view, Atman and Brahman are two sides of the same coin, subjective and objective respectively; the Advaita ‘non-dualist’ form of Vedanta specifically teaches that they are one and the same. This is the meaning attached by Advaita to the mahavakya, the ‘great saying’, of the Upanishads: tat tvam asi, ‘that thou art’, interpreted to entail ‘I am that’ (‘Atman is Brahman’) and hence ‘I and the universe are one’. The soteriological point – achieving liberation from suffering – is that understanding this, overcoming our ignorance, will free us from attachment (and, via endless rebirths, reattachment) to this illusory world.
Buddhism agrees with the soteriological point, but not with the underlying metaphysics. Instead Buddhism asserts that there is no Atman, no Brahman; there is not only no such thing as self but no permanence of any kind. In short, there is no reality at all. Postulating the existence of a permanent self is not merely a mistake, it is the very source of suffering. When we see that the things we take to be real in the course of ordinary experience have no substance – that they are empty, a mere flow of nothings – we understand why they are not worth the craving we have for them. As long as we believe that they are substantial we will continue to suffer.
The purpose of meditation in Buddhism is understood variously in its different schools, but generally its purpose is to still the mind, to empty it of the tumult of distractions that prevent enlightenment entering, and to promote mindfulness. According to the Madhyamaka school it is not a reaching-down into fundamental layers of reality, because ex hypothesi there are none; there are only illusions. The Yogacara school, however, argues that if appearances (as ‘secondary existents’) are illusory, there must be something real which the illusory appearances hide from us (a ‘primary existent’), and they nominate consciousness – not ordinary phenomenological consciousness, but the deep stream of fundamental, ultimate consciousness itself – as fulfilling this role: ‘mind only’, or cittamatra. Meditation enables us to reach this fundamental level. The next step is to see that reaching it is to achieve emptiness, given that pure consciousness is not divided into itself and something else, a duality of subject and object, so the vanishing of a putative self into the undifferentiated stream of consciousness is extinction. Yogacara accordingly reaches the same terminus as all other versions of Buddhism, but provides itself with a justification for placing yoga at the centre of its practice.
One of the most attractive schools of ethics in any tradition, East or West, is Jainism, though it is a hard one to live. Its teachings are owed to the sage Mahavira, who lived in the sixth century BCE, but Jains say their doctrines were formulated long before him; indeed they regard him as the twenty-fourth Tirthankara or ‘discoverer of a ford across the sea of endless births and deaths’ (samsara), and as having not devised but revived and refreshed the teachings. Tirthankaras are those who attain a true understanding of the self and thus are able to cross samsara, leaving guidance behind them for others to follow so that they can likewise achieve liberation (moksha) from existence.
Jainism’s name derives from jina, ‘victory’ – victory over the suffering that is existence. It teaches asceticism and ahimsa (doing no harm), detachment, and acceptance of the fact that reality is infinitely complex and many-sided, which makes it impossible to give a single definitive description of anything. This means that everything we think or say can at best be only partly true, and even then ‘only from a certain point of view’, which implies that every point of view might have some truth in it.36
A common feature of all Indian soteriologies is that they are gnostic: liberation from suffering, whose source is ignorance, is achieved through knowledge. Once again the analogies with the Western schools is striking. Although the Western schools do not regard the world of ordinary experience as unreal, they do regard the conventional values attached to it as illusory, and therefore a right understanding of what really matters is liberating, leading to ataraxia and eudaimonia in this life. The slogan that applies across the whole compass, geographical and philosophical, is therefore the truth will set you free. The key thing, obviously, is to identify what the truth is.
I would guess that quite a few readers who combine having come this far with honesty might regard Cynics and Daoists with nervous dislike (their counterparts today being hippies and dropouts); would wish others to be Stoics (well-behaved and sober) while themselves being Epicurean (undisturbedly enjoying the good things of life), though believing themselves to be Aristotelian (reasonable, sensible); and would regard Buddhists and Jains with distant admiration but no desire to adopt their outlook or ways.37 Such at any rate would likely be the case for any homme moyen sensuel. On the other hand, of course, given that the ‘we’ of this book is a self-selected minority, we might be any of these things with sincerity, and quite likely a chosen amalgam of the best of most of them.38
But the point of this survey is not to set out a menu of doctrines to choose from, as if the option is to choose just one of the ‘-isms’ mentioned (in fact, the invitation is to cherry-pick from among them all), but to provide background for the discussion in Part II of the pressing matters that need to be addressed in answering Socrates’ question. In those discussions we shall frequently see, as part of the process, what these schools of thought might contribute.
4. Avoiding a Wrong Turning
The premise of the discussion in this book, in line with the implication of Socrates’ challenge, is that individuals have to choose their values and goals for themselves and take responsibility for living accordingly. No one says that doing so is easy or that the result will be perfect; rather the contrary, on both counts. Among the big advantages, however, is that one can truly ‘live with oneself’ – have self-respect – because the endeavour to live a chosen and self-directed life is a noble thing. Provided, of course, that the choices one makes include respect for others’ right to choose and to live lives worth living, for to choose to live in ways that self-regardingly exploit or harm others is as ignoble as it is wrong. That should be obvious.
But what of views that explicitly or implicitly reject the premise of this book? As already acknowledged, the majority of people do not think about what answer to give the Socratic Question, but live according to a predetermined answer to it – namely, the beliefs and conventions of the society into which they are born: normativity. The majority of this majority live according to the outlook of one or another religious tradition, falling on a spectrum between, at one extreme, a vague ‘there is a power greater than us’ view – useful as a resource in moments of psychological distress and as an indistinct anchorage for conceptions of right and wrong – and at the other extreme the totalizing commitment of the fundamentalist in which the tenets of the religion dictate thought and action so completely that each such epigone of each such faith is indistinguishable, in all but inessentials, from every other. Most believers are situated somewhere along this spectrum, generally speaking closer to the first in traditionally Christian ‘Western’ society, and closer to the second in orthodox Jewish, Islamic and Hindu societies. But it is not many centuries since Christian societies were much more like these latter.
Perhaps, however, many will ask: why not adopt a religion as your philosophy of life? After all, having a philosophy of life is meant to provide not only guidance and values but to help one through difficult times, and for the great majority of people religions provide exactly this; they are ready-made philosophies of life that obviate the necessity of working one out for oneself. For practical reasons having to do with their viability over time – by reinventing themselves to suit historically local conditions – some religions allow their followers a degree of latitude in choosing which parts to believe and practise, against a general background that differentiates them from other religions, so that Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and so forth can be told apart; though Islam generally, and more enthusiastic versions of other religions, continue to be highly prescriptive, shaping the daily lives of devotees quite closely. Nevertheless, one thing they all have in common is that they provide meaning, strength, consolation and solace. So, why not adopt a religion?
The straightforward answer – to pull no punches: a much more detailed answer is referenced in this endnote1 – is that adherence to a religion requires accepting a particular and problematic collection of claims, fables and meaningless formulae as true or at least especially significant, and it also helps continue and even promote the serious harm that religions cause in the world, which the good they do in art, music and charity – good also done by the non-religious – does not excuse. You could ignore both points and continue to rely on a religion as your philosophy of life by thinking – as regards the first point – that the important thing is comfort, and comforting myths are better than uncomfortable truths; and, as regards the second point, that you consider interreligious conflict, wars, pogroms, inquisitions, persecution of homosexuals, subordination of women, brainwashing of children, denial of science, and so forth, to be a price worth paying so long as you and some other people feel comfortable.2 It is not too difficult to do this if you deploy the argument that what humans do with their religions is not the fault of the gods; but in this case you have to justify why our sources of information about the gods – texts like the Bible – have to be highly cherry-picked to preserve us from their currently unpalatable parts (like the instruction to stone to death adulterers, homosexuals and those who do not go to church on the Sabbath).
It is not impossible that you might study the claims and doctrines of a religion and conclude that the claims are true and the doctrines appealing, and hence become an adherent of it; in which case you will at least have satisfied a demand that the Socratic challenge makes, namely to think things through, to use your reason, to evaluate and critically examine. This relates in a crucial way to the cherry-picking point just made. For example, you might find that there are rationally disciplined ways of deciding which assertions in the documents of your chosen religion are to be treated literally and which metaphorically, and how to render the literally interpreted ones as consistent with apparently competing claims, for example in physics, palaeontology and biology. Take the case of a commitment shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam: that a deity created the world: as follows.
There is first the question of what a ‘deity’ is. We can agree at the outset that it is at least supposed to be some kind of supernatural agent, the nature and properties of which are unknown other than by negation on the properties of human beings: humans are mortal, limited, finite, so a deity is immortal, unlimited (omniscient, omnipotent), infinite. Humans (until very recently) are confined to the surface of the earth, move slowly, can only access a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum through vision and hearing, need to ingest food and water by mouth – whereas by contrast deities fly, can be everywhere (or at least many places) at once and instantly, see through walls, consume the sacrificed oxen on the altar by inhalation of its fumes or by mystical means, and so on. Of course modern theology has dispensed with these primitive ways of conceiving of deity, despite the only sources for speculation about them being writings set down a long time ago, giving us these – our only available – descriptions of what is being talked about. The extremely refined speculations of modern theology have taken recourse to abstractions and gestures such as ‘god is love’, ‘god is life’, ‘god is the essence of all things’, some of which (e.g. ‘god is love’) are difficult to square with natural evils – cancer, tsunamis – and moral evil (as creator of all things and, being omniscient, able to foresee or at least infer the consequences of the creation, a deity would not just have had Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao on the radar, but intended them). Yet despite the sophistications of modern theology, the churches continue to read out the texts and preach as if the original descriptions still apply. Challenged, theologians fall back on their refined abstractions, excusing the continued literalist usages on the grounds that as symbolic or figurative means to a relationship with the deity they are suitable for (the lesser intellectual powers of) non-theologians. Challenged in turn on these refined abstractions, they fall back yet again, this time to their last line of defence: our finite minds cannot capture the infinite nature of god, god is ineffable, it’s a great mystery, there is nothing more to be said; just believe in – whatever it is.
