Whereas the quilt of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the e-book attracts its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating affect seems to be pragmatism. There’s no downside with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the issue is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and excessive that it guidelines out of courtroom all opinions that differ from it – together with, it seems, these of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.
The extreme pragmatism in query is expressed above all on this sentence: “at any time when we ask ‘what’s the which means of “X?”‘, we’re actually asking, ‘what’s the significance of “X” for sustaining and enhancing our lives.’” (107) This pragmatic declare is solely not true. Some of us are actually asking the latter query once we ask the previous. Seth would like it to be the case that each one of us are asking the latter query. However it’s not.
Many explicitly reject Seth’s interpretation on that time – and never simply conservative monotheists. Think about Rachael Petersen, a Harvard divinity scholar who had undergone one in all Roland Griffiths’s psilocybin trials, and had a full-fledged mystical expertise because of it. In a panel about the experience, Petersen critiqued the language of integration that’s usually utilized in discussing psychedelic experiences: “I used to be informed, it is advisable to combine this expertise into your life. And I used to be like, wait, I simply encountered an final actuality. Wouldn’t that indicate that I must combine myself into it?”
That highly effective quote has caught with me ever since that panel. For Petersen, there was a downside with viewing this encounter’s significance merely by way of “sustaining and enhancing” her personal life, and even these of others. She believed that she had encountered one thing larger and extra necessary than these; the actual query of significance wasn’t the importance of that final actuality for her life, however her life’s significance for that final actuality.
The fashionable Japanese Buddhist thinker Nishitani Keiji within the opening of Faith and Nothingness elaborates the same critique:
to say that we want faith for instance, for the sake of social order, or human welfare, or public morals is a mistake, or no less than a confusion of priorities. Faith should not be thought-about from the perspective of its utility, any greater than life ought to…. Of the whole lot else we will ask its function for us, however not of faith. With regard to the whole lot else we will make a telos of ourselves as people, as man, or as mankind, and consider these issues in relation to our life and existence. We put ourselves as people/man/mankind on the middle and weigh the importance of the whole lot because the contents of our lives as people/man/mankind. However faith upsets the posture from which we consider ourselves as telos and middle for all issues. As a substitute, faith poses as a place to begin the query: “For what function do I exist?” (2-3)
Seth can actually say that Nishitani and Petersen shouldn’t be asking the query in these phrases, that they ought to be asking in regards to the significance of faith or mystical expertise for sustaining and enhancing their very own life. (Assuming, in fact, that he’s prepared to take up the duty of arguing to persuade somebody!) What he can’t legitimately say is that they are “actually” asking about faith’s or the expertise’s significance for their very own lives – when they explicitly say that they aren’t, that fairly they’re asking about their lives’ significance for an final or “non secular” actuality. Right here once more, Seth isn’t residing as much as his own advice to “take heed to your beliefs and clarify why I imagine mine”. When folks explicitly say that “what’s the which means of ‘X’?” does not merely imply its significance for enhancing and sustaining their lives, he doesn’t pay attention.
Seth does acknowledge some position for faith as a supply of which means (111-13), in that restricted sense of enhancing and sustaining our lives. And certainly, our lives are usually enhanced and maintained by a transcendence of self. However the which means from this self-transcendence is paradoxical: we have to transcend ourselves with a purpose to actualize ourselves. After we communicate of that going-beyond solely by way of meaning-for-us – of “sustaining and enhancing” our lives – we deprive it of its energy. I believe right here of Bruce Cockburn’s lyric: “with out the could-be and the might-have-been, all you’ve bought left is your fragile pores and skin, and that ain’t price a lot down the place the dying squad lives”. A therapist might not want to deal with that paradox himself: it’s the therapist’s job to be involved with sustaining and enhancing a consumer’s life. But when the consumer is deriving which means from self-transcendence in the best way that Petersen and Nishitani do, then from the consumer’s perspective it should essentially be about one thing extra.
Seth, although, takes his unjustified pragmatic declare about which means to an excessive even additional than this. He extends this method to “which means” not simply to the existential which means mentioned to this point (“what’s the which means of life?”) however to cognitive which means, the which means of phrases. Now even fact is decreased to a matter of mere usefulness – the placing view expressed in his earlier blog comment that “I believe it’s greatest to surrender claims to something being ‘final actuality’ — when have such claims ever gotten us anyplace helpful prior to now?” He makes the eye-opening declare that even the reality of mathematical ideas has to do with nothing greater than their utility:
… the which means of the article for me is its potential utility in furthering my means of residing. It’s the identical once we inquire into the which means of summary phrases such because the which means of affection or the mathematical image “π”… The which means of “π” can be all of the issues it means in your life and our frequent social understanding of issues—”the factor I want to recollect when determining the realm of a circle from its radius,” or “the factor I want to grasp if I’m going to move math.” (108)
Aristotle would by no means agree with such a relentless utilitarianism! (I’m usually settlement with Richard Rorty’s declare that pragmatism is simply utilitarianism utilized to data.) When he wrote an entire e-book that gave its identify to what we now known as metaphysics, he started it with the sentence “All males by nature want to know.” For Aristotle, to know the true natures of issues, and our quest to take action, had an intrinsic position in our eudaimonia, our flourishing – not its utility for passing exams or developing buildings, however as a constitutive a part of eudaimonia in itself. (And, in fact, as Kieran Setiya notes, Aristotle judges philosophies by their fact: “Aristotle believed that his philosophy was true—one measurement suits all—not a superb search for some that others needn’t sport.”)
Seth outlines a set of a number of domains of flourishing – what classical Indian texts would name puruṣārthas. I agree that there are a number of such domains and it’s price making an attempt to catalogue them. However I discover that in each his record of domains – relationship, accomplishment, aesthetics, which means, whole-heartedness, integration, and acceptance – and his different associated record of “greater targets” – “freedom, equality, justice, wealth, energy, respect, magnificence, intimacy, safety, excellence, serenity, sanctity, and ecstasy” – fact is conspicuous by its absence.
The issue with such a listing is that, as Aristotle notes, seeing or understanding fact is actually one thing human beings search, not merely as a result of honesty is one of the best pragmatic coverage (as Seth discusses on pp 58-9), however simply as usually for its personal sake. To ask “when have claims of final actuality ever gotten us anyplace helpful?” is very like asking “when has magnificence ever gotten us anyplace helpful?” There are solutions about utility that may be made – Śāntideva, in chapter IX of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, claims that understanding the in the end empty nature of actuality is what liberates us from struggling – however there may be additionally an extent to which, as with magnificence, to ask in regards to the function of fact is to overlook the purpose. Fact and sweetness are the purpose.
Certainly, if there may be one puruṣārtha the Pali Buddhist sutta texts do clearly acknowledge as invaluable apart from the removing of struggling, it’s yathābhūtadassana, seeing things as they are – that very looking for of true data which Seth implicitly excludes from his record. An inventory of domains of human flourishing that doesn’t embrace fact – or one thing carefully associated to it, like appropriate seeing or data of actuality – is incomplete. And as soon as it’s added in there, we get a really completely different view about which questions are vital.
