In a number of publications, I have had the audacity to propose an explanation for certain developments in the history Indian philosophy.1 A simple assumption made clear how and why Indian thinkers had adopted a number of at first sight counterintuitive views, including the satkāryavāda, ajātivāda, śūnyavāda, anekāntavāda, etc. Very simply put, the thinkers concerned found it problematic that in situations described by statements such as “the potter makes a jar” there is no jar. The above-mentioned views were believed to solve this problem.
It goes without saying that these solutions will convince few modern readers, because most of them do not find it problematic that there is no jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. And without problem there is no need for a solution. Most modern readers will therefore conclude that the problem of the ancient thinkers was ill conceived and perhaps based on a somewhat naive understanding of the relationship between language and reality.
Given all this, it is not a little surprising that some scholars attribute naiveté, not to the Indian thinkers referred to above, but to the researcher who drew attention to their way of thinking, i.e., to me. Consider the following:

… we wish to note that naive referentialism, which is implicitly adopted by several Sanskritists who attempt to analyse the ancient Indian philosophy of language (see for instance the way the problem is framed in Bronkhorst 1999), does not, or at least not always, represent a good explanatory framework. This is so not only because it is not tenable in general, but also because, in particular, it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic (Freschi & Keidan 2017: 260).

I have some difficulty with his passage. It appears to accuse me, rather than certain early Indian thinkers, of implicitly adopting naive referentialism. This, of course, would be a case of killing the messenger, and therefore bizarre.
Let us therefore assume that what the authors of this article really wanted to say is that I attribute naive referentialism to certain early Indian thinkers. This does not in their opinion “represent a good explanatory framework … because it is not tenable in general”. This observation seems to presuppose that all the views and opinions of Indian thinkers were “tenable”. It excludes the possibility that they could ever be wrong or mistaken. I fail to believe that the authors of the article seriously accept this position.
One point remains: One should presumably not attribute naive referentialism to early Indian philosophers “because … it does not represent a fitting parallel to the ancient Indian thinking on this topic”. This point might be taken seriously, were it not for the fact that it contains a generalization that is hard to sustain. What is this “ancient Indian thinking” on cognition, language and reality that was accepted by all during all the phases of the development of Indian philosophy? What we do come across in the literature is a variety of opinions that are not always in agreement with each other (or indeed with modern thought).
My observations so far might be considered irrelevant if the attribution of more sophisticated ideas to the early Indian thinkers could provide a better explanation of the appearance of satkāryavāda and related doctrines. I cannot a priori exclude that this may be possible, but have not seen evidence that anyone has made the effort. Until and unless someone will successfully make that effort, I find it hard to see what is wrong with my explanation.
To illustrate my position, let us look at one passage that “proves” satkāryavāda. Śaṅkara on Brahmasūtra 2.1.18 states:

prāg utpatteś ca kāryasyāsattve utpattir akartṛkā nirātmikā ca syāt /
If the effect does not exist before it arises, the arising would lack an agent and would be void (taken from Bronkhorst 2011: 66).

The context of this line shows that it concerns the statement “the potter makes a jar”. Śaṅkara clearly thinks that the jar is there before it arises. He links this conviction to the linguistic expression, for he then states that, if there were no jar in the situation, one would say “the potter, etc., which are causes, arise” (kulālādīni kāraṇāni utpadyante) instead of “the jar arises” (ghaṭa utpadyate).
I conclude from this example that Śaṅkara somehow believed that the presence of the word “jar” guarantees that there is a jar in the situation described by “the potter makes a jar”. This conclusion is not waterproof, of course, but I do not succeed in coming up with a more plausible and more appropriate interpretation of this passage. If this means that I attribute to Śaṅkara “naive referentialism”, so be it. I am more than willing to change my mind if a better interpretation of Śaṅkara’s remarks is proposed that attributes to him more sophisticated notions regarding the relationship between cognitions, words and things. So far I have not seen any.
The critical remarks discussed above occur in an article that makes the point that a specialist acquaintance with modern ideas can help the interpretation of ancient texts. Indeed, “[a]ncient scientific treatises can be very sophisticated and anticipate modern insights; they should therefore not be considered ‘primitive’ or ‘naive’ by default” (p. 251). This is, in my opinion, a valuable observation, and the article gives some examples of misunderstandings in modern scholarship that are due to the neglect or ignorance of this principle.
However, there is no guarantee that all that is said in ancient Indian scientific treatises anticipates modern insights. An overzealous application of the principle may induce scholars to impose interpretations on ancient texts and overlook direct interpretations that do not anticipate any modern insights. The study of Indian philosophy should not become a game in which overly clever scholars “find” one modern insight after another in texts whose authors, to the best of our knowledge, were unaware of those insights. The presence of modern ideas in ancient texts remains something that is in need of demonstration, not something that can be taken for granted.

References:

Bronkhorst, Johannes (1999): Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne. Turnhout: Brepols. (Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses, 105.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2011): Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought. Translated from the French by Michael S. Allen and Rajam Raghunathan. Revised and with a new appendix. Leiden – Boston: Brill. (Brill’s Indological Library, 36.)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2013): “The correspondence principle and its critics.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 41(5), 491-499.
Freschi, Elisa & Keidan, Artemij (2017): “Understanding a philosophical text: The problem of ‘meaning’ in Jayanta’s Nyāyamñjarī, book 5.” Reading Bhaṭṭa Jayanta on Buddhist Nominalism. Ed. Patrick McAllister. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Pp. 251-290.

Notes:

1. Primarily Langage et réalité: sur un épisode de la pensée indienne (1999) and its English translation Language and Reality: On an episode in Indian thought (2011); further “The correspondence principle and its critics” (2013).

Author: Johannes Bronkhorst
johannes.bronkhorst@unil.ch

The philosophy department of Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Karnataka has a faculty position open in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit studies. They are looking for a young scholar to teach courses in Indian philosophy and/or Sanskrit literature. Apart from the teaching responsibilities, the potential candidate would actively participate in developing the Department as a hub of interdisciplinary dialogue in South Asia studies. For more information, please view the position announcement on LinkedIn.

I want to turn now to what I think are the really interesting questions raised by Justin Whitaker’s latest post on the Sigālovāda Sutta. These are questions of hermeneutics, of method in interpretation. As noted, the previous post was exegetical: I think everything I say there could have been endorsed by a historically oriented religion scholar with no stake in Buddhist tradition. But Justin and I are not that: we are Buddhist theologians, who consider ourselves Buddhists and seek to apply the tradition to our lives. So I now want to take the previous post’s ideas into that wider theological context.

I think there is value in the two methodological sentences that Justin returns to from his earlier post. I have been aiming throughout this discussion to follow the first piece of advice, “dig beyond the specific wording of the instructions to perceive the underlying reasoning behind them.” The reasoning, as I understand it, is that worldly pleasures, like the theatre, are inherently unsatisfactory, leading one (as the sutta says) to always want more of them, and therefore the ideal life is a monk’s life that renounces them; there are still better and worse ways to pursue a household life, but the better ones emulate monkhood, and one of the ways that one would do this is to avoid the theatre.

I don’t think Justin’s points about benefits in this life make a difference in that regard: from the perspective of the reasoning underlying this sutta and others like it, as far as I can tell, monks too are getting benefits in this life, and the benefits householders accrue are those that come from being like a monk. The sutta’s reasoning is that we benefit in this life from not attending theatrical shows because shows are as unsatisfactory as any other worldly pleasure, and we should reject them alongside other worldly pleasures – just as, if we were further along the path, we would reject familial love and get an even bigger benefit in this life from becoming monks. I derive this interpretation from looking at the sutta in the light of other suttas, and Pali texts contemporary to them, that express similar ideas. I think that is the most effective way to figure out what the reasoning of text’s authors was.

That much remains exegetical. But Justin’s next piece of advice gets constructive, and that’s where I think it gets both more interesting and trickier – for both me and Justin. That is: “Once one understands the reasoning, the difficult work of applying it to one’s own life begins.” For us as theologians, application is essential. But it is not at all clear to me that we want to apply everything in the suttas to our own lives, when there is a significant amount in there that is wrong and perhaps even potentially harmful. Consider here the Kamboja Sutta in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, whose entire text says this (in the Bhikkhu Sujato translation):

At one time the Buddha was staying near Kosambi, in Ghosita’s Monastery. Then Venerable Ānanda went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Sir, what is the cause, what is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia?”

“Ānanda, females are irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent. This is the cause, this is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia.” (Aṅguttara Nikāya II.83)

Are we going to apply that idea to our own lives? That women and girls are “irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent”, and that’s the reason why they shouldn’t work for a living? Or even, are we going to apply the underlying reasoning behind that idea? Because it sure seems to me that the reasoning here is that the author – a man observing a patriarchal society – observed women in inferior positions, and therefore reasoned that they must be of inferior capacity (a line of reasoning that still gets applied to black people). I wouldn’t want to apply that underlying reasoning to my life, and I’m willing to bet Justin doesn’t either.

From my perspective, the idea that a good householder does not frequent theatrical shows – an idea that remains in the text, no matter what anybody else has said about the text in the two thousand years since its writing – is a bad one, just like the idea that women shouldn’t work for a living because they’re jealous and dumb. I look at what’s in the texts, I infer the underlying reasoning from them and from other texts in the canon, and I conclude that we are better off not applying either of these ideas to our lives.

Now I think Justin could push me further on these points because of the interpretive stance I previously took discussing Rudolf Bultmann. Walter Kaufmann had described Bultmann as interpreting instead of saying no; I had supported Bultmann’s method as follows:

I find it valuable when Bultmann says his “criticism of the biblical writings lies not in eliminating mythological statements but in interpreting them; it is not a process of subtraction but a hermeneutical method.” (99) It is this approach, of not eliminating but interpreting, that is involved in the project of naturalizing karma.

What the present conversation is helping me to realize is how much can be involved in “not eliminating but interpreting”. I think it is exactly that approach that Justin wants to take to the Sigālovāda Sutta, and I am sympathetic to it: we want to avoid rejecting a classical text, eliminating it. We may disagree with what the sutta says or appears to say, but we can still interpret it on a different, perhaps higher, level. This sort of interpretation is what I have called reinterpretation: it is constructive, rather than exegetical, interpretation. So when I noted last time that I was not reinterpreting the Sigālovāda: well, this response would go, perhaps I should be!

Now two points are important regarding such a response. First, Bultmann is still willing to admit that, on an important level, the text does mean what it says. He believes the world picture in the New Testament actually is a mythical one, fanciful and supernatural, and he thinks that those claims are wrong as stated: the world is not really like what the New Testament authors thought it was. The point for him, though, is that there’s a deeper level of meaning, existential meaning, that was there in the mythical picture and is also there when we read it now without the myth. That deeper level is what has value to us now. We are trying to get at that deeper level without denying that the text often also had literal meaning for its authors; as responsible historians, we need to recognize the latter is real.

Second, though, it seems to me that if we really take Bultmann’s approach to the fullest and try to reinterpret everything rather than subtract it, then that doesn’t just apply to the Sigālovāda Sutta; it also applies to the Kamboja Sutta. I think that what the Sigālovāda says about the theatre is awful; I think that what the Kamboja says about women is even more awful. The simple and straightforward approach to these texts is subtraction: we just ignore the advice that we think is wrong. We can also say that these are both sacred texts of our tradition and we must take them seriously on a deeper level, but that is much harder – and we will then need to do that with the Kamboja as well as the Sigālovāda. And I’m not sure what that would involve.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

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There is a lot to do in the European intellectual history, with, e.g., major theories that await an improved understanding and connections among scholars that have been overseen or understudied. Using a simile, one might say that a lot of the territory between some important peaks (say, the contributions of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Heidegger) is still to be thoroughly investigated.

When one works on the intellectual history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis*, by contrast, one still needs to map the entire territory, whose extension still escapes us. Very few elements of the landscape have been fixated, and might still need to be re-assessed.

What are the mountains, main cities as well as rivers, bridges, routes that we would need to fix on the map? Key authors, key theories, key schools, as well as languages and manners of communication and how they worked (public debates? where? how?).
I mentioned authors before schools because for decades intellectual historians looking at the Sanskrit cosmopolis emphasized, and often overemphasized the role of schools at the expense of the fundamental role of individual thinkers, thus risking to oversee their individual contributions and to flatten historical developments, as if nothing had changed in astronomy or philosophy for centuries. This hermeneutic mistake is due to the fact that while the norm in Europe and North America after Descartes and the Enlightenment has been increasingly to highlight novelty, originality is constantly understated in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. It is not socially acceptable to claim to be novel and original in the Sanskrit world, just like it is not acceptable to be just “continuing a project” in a grant application in Europe or North America.
Still, schools are often the departure point for any investigation, since they give one a first basic understanding of the landscape. How does this exactly work?
For instance, we know that the Vedānta systems were a major player in the intellectual arena, with all other religious and philosophical schools having to face them, in some form of the other. However, it is not at all clear which schools within Vedānta were broadly influential, where within South Asia, and in which languages. Michael Allen, among others, worked extensively on Advaita Vedānta in Hindī sources, but were they read also by Sanskrit authors and did the latter react to them? Were Hindī texts on Vedānta read only in the Gangetic valley or throughout the Indian subcontinent? The same questions should be investigated with regard to the other schools of Vedānta (Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śaivādvaita…), the other vernacular languages they interacted with (respectively: Tamil and Maṇipravāḷam, Kannāda…), and the regions of the Indian subcontinent they originated in. And this is just about Vedānta schools.
Similarly, we still have to understand which other schools entered into a debate with philosophy and among each other and which interdisciplinary debates took place. Scholars of European intellectual history know how Kepler was influenced by Platonism and how Galileo influenced the development of philosophy. What happened in the Sanskrit cosmopolis?
Dagmar Wujastyk recently focused on the intersection of medicine (āyurveda) alchemy (rasaśāstra) and yoga. Which other disciplines were in a constant dialogue? Who read mathematical and astronomical texts, for instance? It is clear, because many texts themselves often repeat it, that Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vyākaraṇa (hermeneutics, logic and grammar) were considered a sort of basic trivium, to be known by every learned person. But the very exclusion of Vedānta from the trivium (it cannot be considered to be included in “Mīmāṃsā” unless in the Viśiṣṭādvaita self-interpretation) shows that the trivium is only the starting point of one’s instruction and is not at all exhaustive. And we have not even started to look at many disciplines, from music to rhetorics.

One might wonder whether it is not enough to look at reports by today’s or yesterday’s Sanskrit intellectuals themselves in order to know what is worth reading and why. However, as discussed above, such reports would not boast about innovations and main breakthroughs. Sanskrit philosophy (and the same probably applies to Sanskrit mathematics etc.) is primarily commentarial. That is, authors presuppose a basic shared background knowledge and innovate while engaging with it rather than imagining to be pioneers in a new world of ideas. In a commentarial philosophy, innovations are concealed and breakthroughs are present, but not emphasised. Hence, one needs a lot of background knowledge to recognise them.

I would like to map the territory to realise who was studying what, where and how. How can this be done? The main obstacle is the amount of unpublished material, literally millions of manuscripts that still remain to be read, edited, translated and studied (I am relying on David Pingree’s estimate). Editing and translating them all requires a multi-generational effort of hundreds of people. However, a quick survey of them, ideally through an enhanced ORC technology, would enable scholars to figure out which languages were used, which theories and topics were debated, which authors were mentioned, and who was replying to whom.

This approach will remind some readers of the distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti. I am personally a trained philologist and a spokesperson for close reading. However, moving back and forth between the two methods seems to be the most productive methodology if the purpose is mapping an unknown territory. Close reading alone will keep one busy for decades and will not enable one to start the hermeneutic circle through which one’s knowledge of the situation of communication helps one better understanding even the content of the text one is closely focusing on. As hinted at above, this is particularly crucial in the case of a commentarial philosophy, where one needs to be able to master a lot of the author’s background in order to evaluate his contribution.

*As discussed several times elsewhere, I use “Sanskrit philosophy” or “Sanskrit intellectual history” as a short term for “philosophy in a cosmopolis in which Sanskrit was the dominant language of culture and everyone had to come to terms with it”, as with the use of “philosophy in the Islamic world”, that includes also thinkers part of the Islamic world but who were not themselves Muslims.

(The above are just quick notes. Any feedback is welcome!)

I return now to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker about the Sigālovāda Sutta, the Pali text so often viewed as a guide to the household life. Justin helpfully begins his latest post with a list of the previous correspondence we have exchanged on the topic so far, so I won’t repeat the list here. (The opening list unfortunately doesn’t include hyperlinks to the earlier posts, but those links can be found at the bottom of the latest post.)

From my previous post on the more general philosophical issues, I think we can now return to the sutta itself. Justin is correct that I read the Sigālovāda Sutta as “an overly strict and dour text that sucks the joy out of householder life”. He claims that this is a misreading. Is it? Let us take a look at the feature of the Sigālovāda that most leads me to such a reading: what I characterize as its prohibition on attending theatrical shows. I will examine that prohibition in detail this time, and next time talk about we do with it as Buddhist theologians – a topic that I find more interesting. (Since Justin and I have been pursuing this debate at a slow pace, I will post the next one on my usual schedule in two weeks, and I recommend he wait for it before posting a reply.)

I will start with a point about reinterpretation, which will be relevant again next time. I think it is important to head off a confusion here between exegetical and constructive analysis. The focus of my next post will be constructive – about how we as Buddhists should apply these passages now – but this one is just exegetical, about the meaning of the text itself. Justin says “Later, Lele agrees that I’ve pushed the point that he is reinterpreting the sutta, referring to this post. I’m not quite sure what Justin means by this sentence; it sounds like he means that I agreed that I was “reinterpreting the sutta”. That is not true, and if you read the post) you will see that I did not say that. I said that “my own take on Buddhism is a reinterpretation, a departure from the classical Pali suttas”. That is to say, my constructive take on Buddhism in general is a reinterpretation, in that there are points where I openly admit disagreeing with what many of the classical sutta themselves say. (I’ll say more about this point’s implications next time.) I think Justin disagrees with classical Buddhism, and reinterprets it in this constructive sense, at least as much as I do; the question may be how much we’re ready to admit it.

What I have not been doing is reinterpreting the Sigālovāda Sutta itself, and I never claimed to be. At least, not beyond a very basic (and in this case trivial) sense that every interpretation is a reinterpretation by virtue of putting things in words that hadn’t been used before. I am presenting what the sutta actually does say, in a way aiming to be as faithful as I can be to the original text and its authors; I reinterpret the tradition by leaving the sutta out of the tradition as I take it. It is Justin who I think is reinterpreting the sutta, as I said before. I hope it was clear that my previous title, “Reinterpreting the Sigālovāda’s prohibition on theatre“, was referring to what I thought Justin was doing – because, as I said there, that is a departure from what the sutta actually says.

Here’s what I mean by “what the sutta actually says”:

inasmuch as the noble disciple is not led by desire, anger, ignorance, and fear, he commits no evil…. What are the six channels for dissipating wealth which he does not pursue? Indulgence in intoxicants which cause infatuation and heedlessness; sauntering in streets at unseemly hours; frequenting theatrical shows…
There are, young householder, these six evil consequences in frequenting theatrical shows. He is ever thinking:
(i) where is there dancing?
(ii) where is there singing?
(iii) where is there music?
(iv) where is there recitation?
(v) where is there playing with cymbals?
(vi) where is there pot-blowing?…
In four ways, young householder, should one who brings ruin be understood as a foe in the guise of a friend:
(i) he is a companion in indulging in intoxicants that cause infatuation and heedlessness,
(ii) he is a companion in sauntering in streets at unseemly hours,
(iii) he is a companion in frequenting theatrical shows,
(iv) he is a companion in indulging in gambling which causes heedlessness.

I’m quoting Narada Thera’s online translation; if Justin thinks there’s anything wrong with that translation I’m happy to use another or refer back to the Pali. These passages are why I think the text prohibits theatre. Justin refers to this as my “reading quite literally”.

I’m not clear what the alternative to “reading quite literally” is supposed to be in this context. Are we to take these passages as a metaphor or similar figure of speech? Are we to understand that when the sutta says that the noble disciple does not frequent theatrical shows, that frequenting theatrical shows has six evil consequences, and that to be a companion at theatrical shows is to bring ruin as a foe in the guise of a friend, it means something else? (Justin, you do agree that it says all of these things, right? That these phrases are there in the text of the sutta?) If so, what exactly would these passages mean instead, and why would we think that that the sutta means that other thing instead of taking the simpler interpretation that the sutta actually means what it says?

The greatest non sequitur in Justin’s post is to say my interpretation is somehow “not traditional” because “theater exists and has existed in relatively conservative Theravāda countries such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand…” Uh, sure. Theatre existed in the time the sutta was composed as well: that’s how the sutta can tell you not to go there! If theatre hadn’t existed, there would be no need for a prohibition on it. (Thus the sutta includes no prohibition on spending one’s days at home playing video games: since there were no such games when it was composed, there was nothing to prohibit.) Some other things that also exist and have existed in some or all of those “relatively conservative Theravāda countries”: the capitalist pursuit of excesses of wealth, the murder of non-Buddhist minorities, exploitative prostitution. If I were to say that Buddhist suttas frown upon these things, would that make my interpretation untraditional?

I hope you see my point: what happens to exist in Theravāda countries, now or in the past, has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the ancient suttas. It doesn’t even necessarily have anything to do with their interpretation by later tradition. People frequently ignored the suttas’ advice at the time of their composition, they frequently ignored it in Buddhist countries in the intervening centuries, and they frequently ignore it now. That’s a pretty basic observation of the field of religious studies, in a way hardly limited to Buddhism.

Justin would have more of a leg to stand on here in calling my interpretation “untraditional” if he could point to premodern historical commentaries that interpreted the sutta as saying it was fine to go to the theatre. If he knows of any, I’d be interested to read them. (He says “I have seen no evidence that monastics and laity throughout history have read the sutta in terms of any kind of ‘prohibition of theater.'” Does he have evidence that they haven’t? Without such evidence, I don’t think it’s responsible to just make up an interpretation that’s convenient to us and privilege that over what the sutta actually says. That is what I would call a misreading.) Modern commentaries are relevant too, but they do less to establish what is a “traditional” interpretation: people who write modern commentaries are part of the tradition, sure, but so is Justin and so am I.

So, I feel very comfortable in saying, exegetically, that the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibits laypeople from attending the theatre. Obviously this is not a legal prohibition, since the sutta was never intended to have the force of anything like law – unlike vinaya rules for monks, say, which are enforceable. But there is a prohibition in an ethical sense: if you know what’s good for you, you won’t go to theatrical shows or hang out with friends who recommend you do. On the grounds that that is indeed what the sutta actually says, I’m happy, too, to take the hypothesis that that is a traditional interpretation of the sutta, unless and until I see evidence that it isn’t – and so far I’ve seen none.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The case of combination variants like dadhi and dadhy is used by Nyāya authors as an evidence of the fact that words are produced and modified. Mīmāṃsā authors, who think that language is without beginning, need to respond to that and explain therefore that dadhy is not a modification of dadhi, but an alternative word, and both are used in specific phonetic contexts.

Veṅkaṭanātha in his commentary on PMS 1.1.16 elaborates thereon and explains that they are described as archetype and ectype of each other for pedagogical reasons only (in order not to further multiply the number of words to be learnt). At this point, he faces two very different objections.

The first opponent says that the archetype-ectype relation could be reverted according to a different grammatical analysis. This probably means that dadhy could be considered as the archetype and dadhi as the ectype. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that one should choose the grammatical analysis based on its pedagogical merits, and the one suggested by the opponent is not pedagogically easier.

The other opponent says that the ectype-archetype relation is real and based on the similarity between the two. The “similarity” is not further elaborated upon, but we can guess something more about it through Veṅkaṭanātha’s reply. Veṅkaṭanātha answers that if similarity were the ground for real archetype-ectype connections, then there would be no way not to avoid over- and under-extensions. On the one hand, one could over-extend it to other cases of similarities, like yogurt (dadhi) and jasmine flowers, that are similar insofar as they are both white, although they are not considered to be archetype and ectype of each other. On the other hand, cow-dung and beetles are dissimilar, but are considered one the ectype of the other (beetles are believed to be a transformation of cow-dung).

Now, my problem regards a terminological choice. The first opponent says: vyākaraṇāntareṇa prakṛtivikṛtivaiparītyam. In his answer to the second opponent, Veṅkaṭanātha says na ca sādṛśyāt prakṛtivikṛtibhāvaḥ śaṅkhyaḥ, vaiparītyasyāpi prasaṅgāt. However, vaiparītya in the first case seems to be the opposite of what should be the case (the inversion of dadhi and dadhy as archetype and ectype). By contrast, in the second case vaiparītya seems to indicate just a different set of consequences. Comments welcome!

(Cross-posted on my personal blog, elisafreschi.com)

The concept of mental health – and even more so its converse of mental illness – has become ubiquitous in the modern West, and it deserves serious examination by philosophers. Many, probably most, cultures would not recognize the claim that a mind that sees demons or refuses to speak or commits suicide is in a condition analogous to a body with a fever or a broken limb.

The idea of mental health and illness is the central idea in the psychological approach that we typically refer to as the medical model. The term “medical model”, in its most basic sense, means that one approaches a given field of human endeavour in the manner associated with medicine: that field may then be considered a part of medicine, or simply analogous to it. I believe the term was coined by R.D. Laing, the prominent critic of psychiatry, and so it often takes on a negative cast, for the application of specific aspects of modern medicine in areas where it is inappropriate to do so.

It does not have to, though. Unless we reject modern medicine in its entirety (which would be a stupid idea), we are going to accept some aspects of the medical model for at least the practice of medicine itself. Modern medicine has accomplished a great deal, even in its application to phenomena of the mind: antipsychotics and antidepressants are not cure-alls by any means, but for a great many people, their mental lives are much improved as a result of these medicines.

Moreover, the term “medical model” is used, and I think rightly used, to describe certain philosophical approaches from long before the rise of modern medicine. The medical model as we know it was certainly a shift from earlier Western ways of viewing harmful mental abnormalities, sometimes regarded as sin or as demonic possession. But it is important that medical models of the mind as such are not a modern Western invention.

Consider the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, often stated in the one-word summaries of dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, magga: suffering, origin, cessation, path out. These four could describe the components of medical practice: diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, treatment. In both medicine and the Buddhist dhamma, one identifies the basic problem, its cause, its future course, and what to do about it. And I’m hardly the first to observe this similarity. The observation doesn’t just show up in a lot of Western introductions to Buddhism; it was made by Buddhaghosa, the preeminent Theravāda philosopher, himself. He proclaims that “the truth of suffering is like the disease, the truth of origin is like the disease’s cause, the truth of cessation is like the relief of the disease, and the truth of path is like the medicine.” (Visuddhimagga 512.8-9)

Buddhaghosa, then, explicitly treats a core teaching of the dhamma as analogous to medicine. We have a medical model for our mentally caused suffering and how to get out of it. And Buddhaghosa is hardly alone in this. An article by Albrecht Wezler (Indologica Taurinensia 12 (1984)) goes into marvelous detail on how this fourfold model shows up not only in Buddhist texts but in medical literature (the Caraka Saṃhita) and non-Buddhist philosophical texts like the Yoga Bhāṣya and Nyāya Bhāṣya. Intriguingly, though, Wezler notes that the Four Noble Truths are the earliest attested form of this model: that is, it appears in them before the medical literature. So it could be that rather than Buddhist treatment of the mind being originally modelled on Indian medicine, it was vice versa.

Nor was the idea of a medical model unknown in the West. The Hellenistic philosophers (the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics), referred to their philosophies as therapeia, the Greek word for medical care, and the root of our modern word therapy. Thus Martha Nussbaum entitled her excellent book on these thinkers The Therapy of Desire. In it, she shows how the Hellenistics believed that we are in some significant way sick, and philosophy offered a way of treating it.

The Hellenistics and Indians did not model their philosophical paths on modern experimentally based medicine, but they did see the paths as analogous to medicine nonetheless. There remains one big difference from the modern medical model of mental health, though. And that is that the Four Noble Truths are a diagnosis, etiology, prognosis and treatment of the normal human condition. That is also how the Hellenistics viewed their philosophical therapy: it could benefit everyone. The modern medical model, by contrast, has viewed “mental health” as the normal state of being. And, it seems to me, that is what it gets wrong!

Even when applied to physical health, there is something a little strange about the word “health” being used as a binary: you’re healthy or sick. As one goes through one’s forties and fifties and the daily medications one takes for minor troubles begin to add up, it’s hard to see the divide being so clear-cut. Surely health is more of a continuum. But even if one can accept that a typical twentysomething is physically “healthy”, it’s still not so clear how that term can apply to the mind.

Martin Seligman founded the flourishing field of positive psychology out of frustration with this approach. Psychology had traditionally viewed itself as “curing” the “sick”: taking you from an unusual state in which you had a “disorder” into a normal state of “health”. But when Seligman, a lifelong “grouch”, observed that his five-year-old daughter had done more work on improving her mood than he had as a trained psychologist, he realized something was wrong. One could be perfectly “mentally healthy”, on 20th-century psychology’s model, and still be miserable – or still be a jerk.

It is for this reason that a stigma has long been attached to seeing a therapist: to do so was to indicate that you were “crazy”. It seems that these days the stigma is diminishing – many current pop songs mention seeing a therapist – and I think that is a great thing. The ability to talk out one’s mental problems and find solutions is valuable for most if not all people, not just “crazy” ones. But the “crazy” view of therapy is the logical conclusion of a model that views mental health as normal, and “mental illness” as a deviation from that norm: a model that divides the world into normal people and crazy people. The classical Buddhist model is much wiser when it tells us: we are all crazy. Some of us are just crazier than others.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The book on Veṅkaṭanātha I am working on is an attempt of doing history of philosophy in the Sanskrit context, given that no agreed canon, chronology, list of main figures or main questions has been established for the history of Sanskrit philosophy. Therefore, in the Sanskrit context, doing history of philosophy does not amount to reconstruct some aspects within an established picture, but rather to understand what is the picture altogether. This also means that it is impossible or counter-productive to do history of philosophy in just an antiquarian way in the Sanskrit context.
The book also takes on the challenge of talking about Sanskrit philosophy without reducing it to ahistorical “schools” which are depicted as unchanging through time, so that while talking of Nyāya one can mix 5 c. CE sources with 11 c. ones. In contrast to this approach, the book focuses on the role of individual philosophers within such schools.

Accordingly, the book reconstructs the intellectual figure of Veṅkaṭanātha and his philosophical and theological contribution to what we now call “Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta”. Its main thesis is that Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as we know it now is mostly a product of Veṅkaṭanātha’s brilliant mind. He connected various texts and theories into a harmonious whole, so that readers and practitioners looking at the time before Veṅkaṭanātha now recognise them as pieces of a puzzle. Once Veṅkaṭanātha’s contribution is in place it is in fact easy to look back at authors before him and recognise them as pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. However, it is only due to Veṅkaṭanātha that the entire jigsaw puzzle exists and the various texts and ideas could have remained disconnected, or could have led to different developments without him. The book analyses Veṅkaṭanātha’s contribution in shaping the school, a con- tribution that goes so deep that it is hard to imagine Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta through a different lens. Veṅkaṭanātha’s synthesis was not, or not just, the result of a juxtaposition, but itself a philosophical enterprise. Veṅkaṭanātha re-interpreted a large amount of texts and ideas connecting them in a higher-order theory. In this sense, he is a philosopher doing history of philosophy as his primary methodological tool.

The book investigates this synthesis, its range and its theoretical foundations. In this way, it also attempts to reframe the usual understanding of Veṅkaṭanātha’s impact on Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, shifting him from the position of a learned successor of Rāmānuja to that of a builder of a new system, with a different scope (ranging well beyond Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and incorporating much more into it) and possibly with a different basis. Consequently, this book deals with philosophical themes in connection with their intellectual development.

Among the tools used by Veṅkaṭanātha in crafting his synthesis, of particular interest is his emphasis on the unity of the system holding between Vedānta and another school, called Mīmāṃsā. This is a school focusing on the exegesis of the Vedas and therefore on epistemology, deontics, philosophy of language and hermeneutics. Veṅkaṭanātha borrowed from it the tools to reconcile sacred texts seemingly mutually contradictory, as well as a well- developed dynamic ontology and account of subjectivity. However, the Mīmāṃsā school was also atheistic and considered the Vedas to be only enjoying a deontic authority, not an epistemic one. Both claims (especially the first one) contradict basic tenets of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. Therefore, in crafting a single system out of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta Veṅkaṭanātha needed to find a way not to deny these claims while at the same time transcending them. Last, some readers not too familiar with Sanskrit philosophy might find a lot of topics Veṅkaṭanātha deals with “non-philosophical” or at least “non-philosophical enough”. For instance, why does he spend so much time on the injunction to learn the Vedas by heart? As an interpreter, I might have just used the debate in order to extract from it what is relevant for what is recognised today as “philosophy of action”, e.g.: Can someone be motivated to undertake an action whose results will only take place after years ? Does this even count as an action? What at all counts as motivation with regard to a course of action involving multiple years? Can a cost-benefit analysis still work in such cases? Which concept of subjectivity is needed for complex actions extending over multiple years? Alternatively, I might have just depicted the relevance of the debate in the historical setting in which it took place. In general, I gave hints going in both directions, but I primarily tried to reconstruct the debate in its own terms, because a global approach to philosophy means being open not just to new answers to old questions and to new questions within known fields, but also to altogether new fields of investigation. The unitary Mīmāṃsā system is in this sense a treasure house of ideas leading to a philosophy of exegesis and a philosophy of ritual.

Comments and criticisms, as usual, more than welcome!

Scholars of Sanskrit (as well as ancient Greek, classical Tamil, Chinese…) are familiar with translations oscillating between the following two extremes:

• A translation which closely follows the original and is chiefly meant as an aid to understand the Sanskrit text (as in Kataoka 2011)
• A translation which smooths the text, so that it sounds as if it had been originally written in the target language

It seems that the choice of approaching more the one than the other partly depends also on one’s target language and on the cultural expectations linked to a certain literary civilisation, since readers of, e.g., English or German appear to have very different expectations concerning what counts as a good translation, with the former being much more positively impressed by texts which sound as if they had been composed in their own language, whereas the latter tend to expect from the translation that it transmits part of the flair of the original language, as if it could be partly transparent and let one glimpse the original through it (see Venuti 1995). The other element of the choice is the reader one has in mind. The first model presupposes a reader who knows Sanskrit fairly well and uses the translation only as an auxiliary, the second one assumes the reverse.

A third element worth considering regards the translator themselves. They need an extremely good command of English in order to translate in the second way (which is not my case). Moreover, they need to think of the duration of one’s translation. Each language rapidly evolves so that translating in a very idiomatic way runs the risk of rendering the text less understandable for non-native speakers or speakers who will live in a not so distant future. As a non-native speaker of English, I have, for instance, had problems deciphering the English idioms used in a translation by Anand Venkatkrishnan (in Venkatkrishnan 2015, see the discussion here: http://wp.me/p3YaBu-jz) and many readers of mine had asked me what “ones” in Edgerton 1929 or “ain’t” in other authors could mean. In other words, a strongly idiomatic translation is restricted —in at least some aspects— to native speakers of the present
and immediately following decade.

My translation of the SM aims at being close enough to the text to make it conceptually understandable to a public of Sanskritists as well as to scholars of the history of philosophy and theology. It does not reproduce the complexity of Vedānta Deśika’s prose, nor does it attempt at capturing the beauty of his verses. I tried to make the translation readable also to non-Sanskritists, while being at the same time extremely cautious in not over translating the Sanskrit text. As a rule of thumb, I used the concept of functional equivalence, which was used, e.g., by Raimon Panikkar in discussing comparative theology. Accordingly, I changed passive forms (which are the rule in scholarly Sanskrit) into active ones, since the latter are the rule in scholarly English. I also made pronouns and copulae explicit and avoided causative clauses when possible, since this is the rule in scholarly English. I also broke long sentences into shorter ones, since the length of an acceptable sentence varies massively between scholarly Sanskrit and scholarly English. Nonetheless, the resulting text will not be smooth, because the source text is extremely complex and causes real head-aches to its readers. Smoothing it completely would have meant unpacking all the points it presupposes and hints at.

Whichever type of translation one favours, translating a Sanskrit text always remains a difficult task. In my opinion, this is due especially to the fact that contemporary readers lack almost completely the background assumptions which are required in order to understand each instance of communication, including philosophical texts. While reading a text by Plato, a contemporary reader educated in Europe will automatically be able to identify most of the trees, places (e.g., the Piraeus, at the beginning of the Republic), social institutions (e.g., the role of theater, the names of gods and goddesses, the presence of slaves) and the other realia he mentions. Readers will not be scared by reading geographic or ethnic names (e.g., hoi Thrâkes, in Republic A 327), nor by proper names (e.g. Socrates or Glaucon, ibid.). This familiarity is also reflected in the fact that there are English (as well as French, German, Italian, Spanish…) versions of these terms. Even more, readers will likely be at least slightly familiar with many of Plato’s ideas, such as the maieutic method or the realm of ideas.

The situation is completely different in the case of Sanskrit texts, where Euro-American readers often need to deal with unfamiliar terms, contexts and ideas. Let me call the lack of familiarity with names, works, contexts, customs, etc., circumstantial unfamiliarity and the lack of familiarity with philosophical ideas philosophical unfamiliarity. The unfamiliarity with ideas might be something readers are willing to live with —after all, they started reading a book about an unfamiliar philosopher. What they are probably not prepared to have to overcome, is the additional effort required to just overcome the circumstantial unfamiliarity.

For this reason, one might decide to strongly alter the text, in order to substitute the background assumptions with ones more familiar to the contemporary reader. This substitution may regard minor details, e.g., the substitution of “Devadatta” with “John Smith” as the placeholder for whoever a person, or the inclusion of pronouns, copulae, punctuation and other elements which can be deduced out of the context or of the literary usage of scholastic Sanskrit. I have been generous in making implicit linguistic units explicit, but I did not dare translating proper names and terms referring to realia and to culturally specific elements into more familiar ones. This is because I want to create a reliable translation of the SM that is readable for at least some decades —also given the fact that I do not foresee new translations
of the SM being prepared in the short- and mid-term. Furthermore, I did not want to limit my assumed readership to European readers, and I am not sure that “John Smith” will remain the standard way of expressing the same thing as the Sanskrit Devadatta for all future and remote readers.

Coming to philosophical unfamiliarity, there are again two kinds of it. On the one hand, there is the unfamiliarity of the main thesis one is reading about, in the present case, the idea of aikaśāstrya. On the other hand, there is the unfamiliarity of other philosophical ideas being mentioned only in passing. In the former case I believe I can expect the reader to be patient enough to tolerate some Sanskrit words and some translations sounding alien,
and give themselves enough time to understand what is being discussed. In the latter case, by contrast, I would like to provide the reader with enough information to go forward with the text without having to engage deeply with each of the ideas and theories being mentioned in it without extensive explanations. This means, that in a chapter focusing on the instrument of knowledge called śabda, I might expect the reader to bear with my complicated translation of it as linguistic communication as an instrument of knowledge', whereas I will not hesitate to translate anumāna just asinference’ and adding a word of caution in, e.g., a footnote only. Vice versa, I would translate śabda just as `testimony’ (with a word of caution in, e.g., a footnote) while translating the chapter on anumāna by a thinker of the Nyāya school.

If this principle is followed, a reader will receive a lot information about some key terms and only minimal information about less relevant ones. How can one organise this information so that a reader can find all the information they need to go forward with the main thesis while understanding enough of the other philosophical ideas mentioned?

For this purpose, one needs more than just a reader-friendly translation. One might decide among at least three options:

1. Adding extensive comments in footnotes or endnotes (as it has been done in Preisendanz 1994)
2. Adding the same comments within the text in separate paragraphs, perhaps in smaller font size (as it has been done in Taber 2005)
3. Adding the same comments in an extended introduction (as it has been done in Bilimoria 1988)

The choice partly depends on one’s target readers. Philologists are more likely to appreciate the first solution, whereas the latter two are more likely to appeal to a public of more general readers, who might be more interested in the philosophical content than in the text itself. In this book, I adopt the third model (as I did already in Freschi 2012), although I will recur to the first one whenever the text demands a punctual explanation of a specific point having little bearing with its major concerns.

A specific paragraph needs to be dedicated to the use of parentheses and brackets. I used parentheses:

1. to indicate which Sanskrit word I am translating in specific cases (i.e., while introducing for the first time the translation of a technical term, or whenever a term has to be understood in an unexpected way).
2. to insert short explanations which are needed to understand a specific point of the text and cannot therefore be postponed in an explanatory footnote nor advanced in an introductory study.

As for square-brackets, I used them to insert words which were not present in the Sanskrit original and which could not be directly inferred on its basis. In other words, I would not put I'' inI am going” within brackets if this translated gacchāmi, since the first-person subject is obviously present in the verb form. I also did not put within brackets obvious complements, such as “sacrifice” while translating sacrifice’s names such as darśapūrṇamāsau or citrā as the full- and new-moon sacrifices' andthe citrā sacrifice’. By contrast, I used brackets to highlight for the reader that a certain concept is not actually found in the text, so as to make them aware of the fact that I am suggesting an interpretation of it. For instance, God’s attribute vimuktipriya (within the opening verses of the SĀṬ) literally means who is fond of liberation'. I rendered it asHe who wants [people to achieve] liberation’.
I also use brackets to introduce identifications of speakers.

Comments from fellow translators and/or readers of philosophical texts from afar welcome!

Veṅkaṭanātha follows the standard śāstric style when it comes to the
general way of asking questions, discussing answers, and of providing
rationales for each claim.

To that, he adds his command, evident in his non-śāstric works, of figurative language, so that the dry style of śāstric reasoning gets populated by powerful metaphors, like that of scholars clinging to a Rahu or to a Kabandha kind of Veda only.¹ Other metaphors are even more difficult to decipher (e.g., “butt by the horns of the Prābhākaras’ head” (SM 1971, end of p. 86)), since we lack their original context and perhaps also the pragmatic context of an actual debate.

Similarly, Veṅkaṭanātha’s style, though often similar to Rāmānuja’s one, is terser. There are more compounds, often built of more members, possibly because Veṅkaṭanātha presupposes some familiarity with basic tenets of Rāmānuja and other authors, and summarises them in a handy compound, like a contemporary scholar would do by just referring to, e.g., “Hume’s view on religion” or “the liar paradox”. Finally, Veṅkaṭanātha’s poetical inclination makes him at times choose to use uncommon words (e.g., dārḍhya, present both in the SM and in the ŚD 3) in what seems like a conscious choice to be expressive and to have his readers pause and consider what he is saying.

Veṅkaṭanātha comes back to the same topics in several of his śāstric works and at times repeats the same metaphors (e.g., comparing in SM and ŚD 3 the unitary teaching of Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā to a building done by more than one person, but still unitary). Nonetheless, in most cases the focus of the argument varies, possibly in accordance with the target readership and the general agenda of the work. Metaphors can therefore become less cryptic by looking at cross-references in Veṅkaṭanātha’s works. Arguments, however, are neither verbatim repeated, nor conceptually reproduced, but rather adapted to a new context and
reshaped in it. Consequently, the parallel passages from other works by Veṅkaṭanātha are interesting, but not really significant to reconstruct the actual reading of a given passage in the SM.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is opening a position (check later today for the updated page) for history of philosophy with a focus on a non-European and non-African tradition (since they are already covered for these):

https://www.academictransfer.com/en/310260/assistent-professor-in-history-of-philosophy-tenure-track/

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

I haven’t heard anyone use the phrase “blogosphere” in a long time. That in itself is no problem: neologisms come and go. More concerning is the reason it isn’t used: the referent of the term “blogosphere” has faded from view, and may not even exist at all. Circa 2010, even though I didn’t yet identify as a Buddhist, I was still in dialogue with a “Buddhist blogosphere” that contained the likes of the Bitterroot Badger and Marcus. That is, there was a network of many Buddhist blogs whose authors read each other’s. But most of those blogs are gone now, and I haven’t seen others come up to replace them.

This isn’t a coincidence. In the ’00s, when I started Love of All Wisdom, blogging was an exciting new technology – but no technology stays new and exciting for long. Already at educational-technology conferences around 2012 I was hearing people disparaging blogging as “old tech”. (I replied “What’s wrong with old tech?” But in those days edtech was too often about getting dazzled by the latest shiny thing.) It feels hard to believe now, but as Twitter started getting popular – around the same time – one of the most common terms to describe it was “microblogging”. That is, in order to explain and understood what Twitter was, people thought of it as “like blogging, but shorter”.

What happened next, of course, was that the immediacy and ease of Facebook and Twitter drove blogs to the sidelines. The positive side effect of this development was that, where blogs had been viewed as frivolous ephemera in the ’00s, in the ’10s they became a site for serious reflection by comparison. By 2012, if you had a quick and goofy hot take, you no longer needed a blog for that; you had Facebook and Twitter. Blogs, by contrast, had become a space left for serious essays. The problem, though, was that people seemed to have less attention span for that serious long-form reflection. Facebook was enough. And so, it seemed, the world came to pass blogs by. They came to seem like a relic of an earlier time.

And yet. Technology’s moving-on didn’t stop with Facebook and Twitter. Young people across the generations want to have places to interact without their parents and teachers watching, and they come to find such places in the newer technologies the parents hasn’t found. That had already been true for me and my friends in the 1990s when we started an email list together, and it remains so: once parent-age people like me got established on Facebook and Twitter, the young quickly moved on to Instagram. Now that we’re on Instagram, they’re moving to TikTok. (And to Snapchat, where they can wisely keep all their naughtiness away from the eyes of posterity.)

As for us adults, in the mid-’00s, especially around 2016, most of us came to discover just how toxic the culture on Facebook and Twitter could become. Twitter’s length restriction – without which it would not be Twitter – makes serious reflection impossible; Facebook’s algorithm actively promotes hostile interactions and delivers users to conspiracy theories. Even though the written word is a medium I prefer over pictures, I moved most of my own social media presence from Facebook to Instagram, because it turns out that the pictures were more likely to be wholesome and positive. If you must have the fast interactions of social media, better they be smarm than snark.

And in the past few years there has come a particularly interesting twist. Out of the angry social-media culture of Twitter and Tumblr arose a left-wing movement, focused on racial and gender issues, which has become the ruling tendency in mainstream journalism and is not very comfortable with opinions that dissent from it. Those who do dissent openly have often found it difficult to continue their work in established journalistic venues. For example Matthew Yglesias left the publication he founded because his coworkers there said his disagreement with them made them feel “unsafe”; Glenn Greenwald left the publication he founded because it insisted on censoring his criticism of Joe Biden during the election; Bari Weiss left the New York Times when her colleagues reacted to her dissenting opinions by calling her a Nazi and posting an ax emoji next to her name. Notably, none of these were even remotely close to the far right or to Trump; Yglesias is of the centre-left, Weiss of the centre-right, and Greenwald an unrepentant socialist.

But these various pressures against non-conforming opinions created an opportunity: in 2021 it all led to the runaway success of a new platform called Substack, which now effectively employs Yglesias, Greenwald and Weiss. Substack is a way to distribute paid newsletters, in the retro-seeming format of email distribution, and these thinkers (among several others) have made now themselves a comfortable living as independent writers, outside environments hostile to them. Substack has been growing rapidly at a time when journalism as a field is notoriously struggling. Its success even spilled back over to the mainstream media: John McWhorter, a linguist whose centrist views on race put him at odds with New York Times orthodoxy, had a Substack so successful that the Times eventually hired him as an opinion columnist.

And here’s the thing: what comes out of the shiny new technology of Substack looks a lot like… blogging! What I receive in Yglesias’s Substack email newsletter – long, informed takes on a variety of issues – would all look comfortably in place on a scholarly blog. Technologically, I’ve heard Substack described (accurately, I think) as simply “WordPress with a payment platform” – WordPress being the versatile blogging software which has always powered Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog (and which now powers a large number of non-blog websites). So the exciting buzzworthy new startup of 2021 turned out to be about – blogging, via email. Blogs are alive and well today, when we call them newsletters.

I very briefly entertained the thought of moving my writing to Substack to be where the cool kids are, but there was no real reason for me to do so. Blogs retain one key advantage over Substack, which is the community that forms around a reasonably moderated comments section; there are interactions here that could not happen in an email distribution service. Moreover, I’ve never expected to get paid for my writing. I started Love of All Wisdom during a period of career transition, so I gave it a .com domain in case there was ever some way of making money from it, but I didn’t expect that then, and I know it’s not going to be the case now. By all accounts, Substack writers do not come remotely close to making a living on their work if they are not as famous as Yglesias or Weiss.

But Substack didn’t just take off because of the money. From a reader’s perspective – aside from the obvious pent-up need to hear dissenting voices! – an advantage of Substack is that its posts get pushed to that other now-hoary technology known as email. Blogs are generally viewed as something that exists on the web, such that you have to go to the blog’s website to read it. There’s an advantage to that view with respect to old posts; many many people have found Love of All Wisdom on the web with Google searches about Asperger’s syndrome and philosophy or the difference between modernity and modernism. But only a real die-hard is likely to remember to actively visit a website every two weeks to find the new posts. Substack gained its success by sending its posts to you.

Luckily, WordPress can do that too! It requires a little technical work – Google killed the FeedBurner tool that I used to do it with, and the replacement tool was buggy for the first few weeks – but WordPress is quite capable of email distribution with the right plugins, and that is the case here. The sidebars on Love of All Wisdom and the Indian Philosophy Blog each have an option where you can enter your email address to sign up to receive new posts as they come out. Instantly, a blog becomes a newsletter. (If you prefer; it can also still remain a blog, from which you receive updates by old-fashioned means like Facebook and Twitter.) If you want to get newsletter-style email updates from multiple blogs and manage them in one place, there’s also a site called follow.it that will let you do that.

So I end this post with an advertisement of sorts: if you like the posts on LoAW and/or the IPB and you’re not already getting them in your email, why not go to the sidebar(s) and sign up for them? It turns out blogging is cool again when you receive the posts by email. And if you were already receiving these blogs’ posts by email, well, I guess you’re ahead of the curve.

Cross-posted on Love of All Wisdom.

I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

For me there is a deeper question that underlies any answer to the questions in the previous paragraph. That is: are there any goods that it is worthy for human beings to pursue irrespective of their contributions to the allevation of suffering (and/or the pursuit of truth, correct seeing)? In more classical terms, are there proper purisatthas (puruṣārthas) other than dukkhanirodha and yathābhūtadassana? It is pretty clear to me that the Pali suttas, in general, take the answer to that question to be no. And it is that No answer that underlies both the suttas’ advocacy of monasticism as the highest goal, and their viewing of the good household life as the one described in the Sigālovāda: an imperfect approximation of monasticism. For, the suttas say, it is monasticism that truly allows one to shed the attachments and pleasures that trap one in suffering. Monasticism does not guarantee this goal by any means – as Justin notes, there are plenty of bad monks – but it advances the goal much better than the household life does.

I disagree with the suttas on this approach; I would answer that deeper question Yes. I believe that both familial love and aesthetic pleasure have value in themselves, irrespective of whether they help us reduce suffering. Justin describes a joy that he felt in the “friendships, occasional alcohol, and romance” he had as a youth. I recognize this joy and see it as something that is worthwhile and worth celebrating, not something to be shed. I do admire monks for their single-minded focus on the cultivation of a virtuous mind, and I do think we laypeople have a lot to learn from monks – but not by trying to make our lifestyles closer to theirs, not unless we are going to take the plunge and join them.

Justin says that “the family life has value as part of the path”. I would push on this point: the path to what? And how does family life contribute to it? It seems to me that what Justin is saying here is not the traditional view of the Pali suttas. In the suttas, the magga is a path to the end of suffering, and family life, if anything, interferes with that path. The Sāmaññaphala Sutta tells us: “Household life (gharāvaso) is hindered, a path of dust. Pabbajjā (going forth into ordination) is air. Not easily does one who inhabits a household enter an extremely full, extremely pure, brightly perfect holy life (brahmacariya).” (DN I.62-3) Most people will stay back in that dusty household life – because we’re not good enough and strong enough for the pure and bright life of the renouncer. It seems to me that that is what underlies the Buddha’s advice that Sigāla stay back in the household life.

By contrast, Justin says he does not see his family life as a lesser path. Neither do I. But why not? Justin says “I was and am fairly good at being a partner and now a father.” I have every reason to believe him on this. I would like to think that I am also good at being the former. But neither of these achievements takes away from the Sāmaññaphala’s claim that this path is lesser. As far as that sutta is concerned, the time and mental effort involved in being a partner and father distracts from the really important pursuit of shedding the āsavas and kilesas, the mental hindrances that keep us out of nirvana. If one must take up such a path, then by all means do it well, take care of the partners and children one is trusted to care for. But to engage in such a path is still to be limited in one’s pursuit of true liberation – a limit, again, that the Buddha noted when he named his son Rāhula, “fetter”. The son was a fetter, a tie to the dust of worldly life, an impediment to liberation.

Unlike the Buddha, I do not believe that one should think of children as impediments, and I imagine Justin doesn’t either. But that is a point of our disagreement with him. The classical texts do have their reasons for seeing children that way. Strictly speaking, having children may well increase suffering – whether in a classical sense in which there are now more beings on the wheel of rebirth, or in the modern studies that repeatedly and replicably show people get less happy when they are raising kids. But it seems to me that, properly understood, the value of having children is not because they reduce suffering – if that is the goal, they will disappoint – but rather in another goal entirely, a broader sense of fulfillment that comes from familial love.

Justin refers to “the wide Buddhist path”. I do not think that the path spelled out in the suttas is indeed wide, if “wide” means that it has two lanes, a household and a monastic, that are equally valid to travel on. In the suttas the path is not wide but long: one lives this life virtuously as one can as a weak householder, in the hopes that in the next life one will be strong enough to be a monk.

When I claim familial love and aesthetic pleasure as goods in themselves, Justin is right to question whether this claim “hangs well within a Buddhist moral or philosophical framework”. My view is a departure from the view of the suttas – just like the rejection of rebirth, which I think this departure is closely connected to. Justin is himself (rightly) ready to explicitly abandon significant elements of the suttas’ teaching, notably on gender. When Justin says his family life is not a lesser path, I think that too is a departure from the suttas. But I do think that a framework which acknowledges family life and aesthetic pleasure as intrinsic goods can still remain Buddhist in the most significant senses despite its departure from the suttas (and I think that matters). It is just that, once we depart from the suttas in acknowledging the intrinsic value of familial love, I think we should do the same in acknowledging the intrinsic value of aesthetic pleasure. And that is why I do not find the Sigālovāda Sutta a good guide.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Please see the following announcement of two post-doc fellowships in the Philosophy department at Ashoka University:

Indian Philosophy is one of the areas that the committee is particularly interested in. I apologize that I did not post this earlier, as the deadline is now imminent: Feb 10th. If you would like to apply but cannot quite make this deadline, send me an email and I will ask the search committee if they can slightly extend the deadline in your case:

alex dot watson at ashoka.edu.in

Medhātithi discusses corporeal punishments whenever Manu does, but in two different ways: At times (e.g., in his commentary on MDhŚā 9.248) he just repeats what Manu says, without adding further elaborations and without attempting a general argument about the overall consistency of the punishments suggested. At other times, he allows the jurist and philosopher of law within himself to talk and gives more details about the purpose of the punishments. These are the passages I will focus on in this post.

1. Terminology: One of the things not completely clear in MDhŚā (and consequently in Medhātithi’s commentary thereon) is what kind of corporeal punishment are meant by māraṇa ‘imposing death’, hiṃsā ‘violence’ and vadha ‘killing’. All could just mean ‘death penalty’ (and hiṃsā and māraṇa are used in the commentary on MDh 8.318 as if they were synonyms). However, in other cases other forms of corporeal punishment (śārīra daṇḍa) are mentioned, e.g., aṅkana ‘branding’ (so Medhātithi on 9.236). Could these be included within maraṇa, vadha and hiṃsā as well? It will be evident in the following that Medhātithi takes advantage of each vagueness in MDhŚā in his efforts to make the text consistent.

Medhātithi on 9.249 comments on a passage speaking of vadha, but ex- plicitly broadens the concept, so as to encompass other types of punishment apart from death penalty. It is noteworthy that he mentions two topics that will be highlighted also in section 3.3, namely holding back crimes as a purpose of punishment, and the distinction between visible and invisible purposes:

“This mention [in the MDhŚā] of vadha is for the sake of summarising (upasaṃhṛ-) suppressive [punishments] (nigraha). Therefore, according to the law code (yathāśruti) this vadha can occur through various manners. In this context, given that the mention of vadha [in the MDhŚā] is meant for the sake of perceptible purposes, it does not need to be necessarily a killing. Such being the case, there is no flaw if [the punishment] is realised also through other means, e.g. detention (bandhana).”

(nigrahopasaṃhārārthas tv ayaṃ vadhopadeśaḥ. ato yathāśruti citravadhopāyaiḥ kartavyaḥ. […] tatra dṛṣṭaprayojanatvād upadeśasya na niyato vadhaḥ. evaṃ ca saty upāyāntareṇāpi bandhanādinā ’viniyacchato’ na doṣaḥ.)

2. Multiple purposes for corporeal punishments: In the commentary ad MDh 8.324 Medhātithi discusses the different pun- ishments (ranging from a fine to beating and to death) for stealing, as pro- portioned to the moment in which the stealing has been committed and to the purpose which could have been fulfilled by the stolen item. For instance, stealing war animals during a war encounters a more severe penalty than stealing them at a normal time. Similarly, stealing a rare medicine when it would have been needed by a certain patient encounters a severe punishment, whereas stealing the same medicine when no one needs it receives a smaller punishment. The mention of paying a fine vs death as punishment in the various circumstances in which one could steal a sword strongly suggests that fines are considered the smaller punishment.

3. Corporeal punishment vs. fines: Notwithstanding what has been seen in section 2, the choice between fines and corporeal punishment is not just driven by the severity of the crime.

The passage I will analyse here is the commentary ad MDh 8.318. Looking back at the Mīmāṃsā 6-fold dialectical scheme above, the topic here is corporeal punishment, even though it remains implicit. The doubt is also implicit, but it can be reconstructed as: Does corporeal punishment have an invisible purpose? A further implicit background assumption only became clear to me at the end of my analysis: There are either monetary punishments or corporeal ones.

Thus:

• topic: corporeal punishment [implicit]
• doubt: Does corporeal punishment have an invisible purpose? [implicit]

1st speaker (Medhātithi): punishment in the form of fines is useful to the king (implicit: because he earns money), [hence] corporeal punishment must be useful to the person who undergoes it.

2nd speaker (Obj): No, it is needed for the sake of protecting other people from crimes.

(Medhātithi): Why should protection not be possible without hurting?

(Obj): Without the hurt, the person would repeat the act

(Medhātithi): This could be achieved also by reprimanding them etc.

(Obj): By seeing them punished, others would desist.

(Medhātithi): The suffering could be brought about even by fines.

(Medhātithi): Moreover, even though criminals are punished, thousands of people are found to do the same act again and again!

Conclusion: Corporeal punishment purifies the person who undergoes it by creating an invisible force, so that they can be admitted to heaven like innocent people, as said by Manu. What follows at this point seems a redundant addition, since it seems to come after the conclusion:

• 1. There are restrictions concerning the cutting off of limbs…
• 2. Also prescriptions such as the one about the elephant, etc.
• 3. Therefore, it is established that one is liberated from one’s bad karman only once there is corporeal punishment,
• 4. And analogously, branding (aṅkana) will be prescribed in the case of major offenders, to whom everything has been confiscated, and who are punished by entering into water, so that people avoid getting in touch with them. The figure below summarises the whole discussion.

4. Unspoken strategies: Medhātithi does not feel the need to spell out strategies and premisses he is mostly reusing from Mīmāṃsā.

The first unspoken premiss of Medhātithi is: Never question the juridical corpus one is commenting upon, just try to make sense of it (as Mīmāṃsā authors do with the Veda). This means that Medhātithi cannot conclude that corporeal punishments should be avoided. He can discuss the why, not the whether. Correspondingly, the juridical corpus can be interpreted, not refuted.

The second unspoken assumption is: Every action needs a purpose (cf. prayojanam anuddiśya na mando’pi pravartate, Kumārila). This leads to the conclusion that punishment needs a purpose.

A third unspoken assumption is that there is a distinction between visible and invisible purposes (dṛṣṭa and adṛṣṭa in Mīmāṃsā terminology).

This is accompanied by the forth unspoken assumption, namely, the preference for visible purposes whenever possible, and by the fifth one, namely that only one purpose is possible (ekārthatā), both of which borrowed from Mīmāṃsā. Therefore, Medhātithi only concludes that corporeal punishment has an invisible purpose once he has ruled out possible visible ones.

A sixth unspoken assumption is that ceteris paribus, we should not harm any living being, because of the Vedic prohibition “One should not harm any living being” (na hiṃsyāt sarvā bhūtāni), largely discussed in Mīmāṃsā.

5. Corporeal punishment and adultery: As seen above, corporeal punishments are not a deterrent to crime (although they can have other purposes). However, Medhātithi ad 8.359 seems to admit of corporeal punishments as deterrent, while discussing punishments for adultery. The passage reads as follows:

“If by [minor things] like talking together there were only a minor penalty, then people would keep acting. Then, inflamed by the deity of love, overpowered by another conversation with another man’s wife, and attracted by the arrows of love, they would consider the king’s correction as negligible and disregard [even] their bodies’ sustenance.

By contrast, if by the first undertaking they were caught, it would be possible to drive them away, given that their desire has been interrupted (aprabandhavṛtti). Hence, it is correct to have major penalties even for people just whispering to other people’s wives.”

Is this passage in sheer contradiction with the previous one? Should not fines be enough? This question brings us back to the kind of Mīmāṃsā Medhātithi is following, which is possibly a Maṇḍana-flavoured Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā in which the addressee of a command can evaluate costs and benefits (for instance, of fines and theft). However, in the case of love and lust, people are unable to calculate costs and benefits. Hence, the only way to protect women is by eliminating their potential seducers. Thus, corporeal punishment in those cases might just aim at making adultery impossible by removing the potential seducer.

6. Conclusions: Punishments are prescribed by Manu on different bases. Medhātithi partly tries to systematise Manu’s lore and in several cases discusses a multifaceted structure of punishments. For instance, in the commentary on MDhŚā 8.334 Medhātithi specifies that Manu’s reference to the cutting of a limb as a punishment for theft only regards “one who is repeatedly addicted to stealing” (transl. by G. Jhā) after they have been repeatedly fined. This is relevant as a harmonising comment, because the previous verses of Manu had mentioned fines.

According to Medhātithi, punishments can be nuanced based on multiple factors. The first and main factor is the purpose to be achieved by the punishment: discouraging crimes (e.g., stealing weapons during war is severely punished in the commentary on MDhŚā 8.324), making crimes literally impossible (as in the case of adultery in the commentary on 8.359) allowing the king to increase their financial resources (commentary on 8.318), warning other people that they are dealing with a convicted criminal (commentary on 9.236), purifying the criminal (commentary on 8.318). This means that although fines are in principle a smaller punishment than corporeal punishments, they can be the preferred option depending on the purpose to be achieved with the punishment.

For some random crimes, such as stealing in normal circumstances, Medhātithi does not aim at eradicating them completely, hence fines are the best strategy (they discourage crimes while increasing the king’s finances). Other crimes (such as adultery, stealing medicines from sick people or stealing a weapon from a person who is directly confronted by an armed enemy) are seen as more threatening and therefore need to be actively discouraged or literally made impossible with extreme measures.

The broadest systematising effort by Medhātithi with regard to punishments seems to occur in his commentary on 8.318, where he lists all punish- ments as being either for the benefit of the punisher (fines, benefitting the king) or for the benefit of the punished (corporeal punishments, purifying the criminal).

Does the reconstruction above convince you? Do you notice other strategies?

I noted before how there are two objections to the concept of “the West” or “Western”. I dealt previously with the objection that “the West” is meaningless, and the subpoint that it’s tied to whiteness. Now I turn to people who accept that something like “the West” exists, but don’t want to use the term.

This latter approach seems fairly specific to philosophy. Garfield and Van Norden and others understandably do not want to use “Western” – but, for reasons I can’t fathom, they replace it with the far worse term “Euro-American”, a term with absolutely nothing to recommend it. As a way of replacing “Western”, the dreadful neologism “Euro-American”, appears to be in use pretty much exclusively among 21st-century philosophers. If you Google “Euro-American”, you’ll mostly find references on Americans of European descent, including the Wikipedia page on European-Americans – also known as “white Americans”. When normal people hear “Euro-American”, they do not hear it to include Europeans who remained in Europe – or philosophy made by non-white Americans. That’s one strike against “Euro-American” right there, though I think it’s far from the worst.

Me, I naturally recoil from the phrase “Euro-American” having been born and raised English Canadian, in a place where we define ourselves against the people I now belong to, the people who actually call themselves Americans. So it is obvious to me that “Euro-American philosophy” excludes Charles Taylor or James Doull.

That much is apparently not obvious to others online, including others in Canada, as I’ve got pushback multiple times when I’ve claimed that Canadians are not Americans and get offended when they are referred to as such. I found it a little startling to get such pushback on something which has always seemed obvious to me, after being born and raised in Canada and having lived there for more than twenty years. But for the sake of the present argument, let’s assume something I would never dare say in Ottawa or Halifax – i.e. that Canadians are totally fine with being called “Americans”. Even so, even with that assumption, the term “Euro-American” is still worthless for achieving its intended purposes.

I’m happy to admit that “Western” is not a good term. It’s fuzzy: west of what? But it is the term we have, the familiar one. As such, if and when it is replaced, it should at the very least be replaced by something more accurate. It confuses matters and wastes people’s time to try to replace an existing and understood term with one that’s no better. It is far worse to replace such a term with a term that is less accurate. And that is exactly what “Euro-American” is.

One of the bigger disadvantages of “Western” is that it semantically excludes Australia and New Zealand, which are clearly culturally Western. Peter Singer and Annette Baier were Western philosophers long before they came to the UK and US. But of course “Euro-American” excludes them too – even more explicitly than “Western” does. At least you could keep going west from the Americas and get to Australia. It’s a stretch, but that’s better than you can say for including Australia and New Zealand in “Euro-American”.

A similar disadvantage of “Western” is that it implies that the non-West is “the East”, when major parts of the non-West (especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa) are geographically further west than parts of “the West”. Before the conquest, notably, the Americas and their indigenous people were not part of “the West” but were still west of it. Yet “Euro-American” does nothing to fix that problem either, since in the sense implied by “Euro-American” they too were American!

And “Euro-American” has disadvantages that are far worse than all of this. It contributes to the racist discourse that equates Western civilization with “whiteness” – because it forgets how much of the history of Western philosophy never was either European or American. It makes the West white when it is not. From its very beginning, as I noted last time, Western philosophy is neither European nor American, and a term that limits it to those two is playing into the hands of racists.

A further disadvantage of “Western” as a term is that it has historically excluded the Islamic world – the Middle East, as opposed to the West. And this is yet another exclusion that “Euro-American” makes worse! Islamic culture begins in exactly the same parts of the world as the other cultures classified under the West: its founding on the same West Asian peninsula as Judaism and Christianity, its philosophy from Greece. The central role of Islam in Western history, just like the origin of Western philosophy in Asia, is hidden from view by “Euro-American”. And of course, that Islamic philosophy then becomes essential to the history of later European thought: there is no Aquinas without ibn Rushd, possibly even no Hume without al-Ghazālī. Excluding Islam from “the West” is one more way of whitening “the West” illegitimately – and that is what “Euro-American” does yet again, by leaving out the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. (ibn Rushd himself was “Euro-American”, living in Spain as he did, but the thinkers he learned from were not – thinkers like ibn Sīnā, who began ibn Rushd’s project of integrating Aristotle into an Abrahamic monotheism).

In the long span of history, these Asians, and Africans like Augustine, have arguably been overall more important to the development of Western philosophy than has anyone in the Americas. The latter, after all, have only begun to be relevant to Western philosophy in the past century and a half. Why then isn’t it “Euro-Asian-African” tradition? (On the Americas’ past relevance I suppose one could try to make an exception for Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century bishop of Chiapas, sinceBrian Tierney’s history importantly notes that his defence of indigenous people shaped modern Western ideas of rights. But Las Casas was born and raised in Spain, and composed his defence there too, so it’s a stretch to consider him as being of the Americas.)

If the idea was to be talking only about the current state and not the history of philosophy, well, the 20th-century Western traditions of analytic and “Continental” philosophy are now practised in academic departments in much of Africa and Asia too. It is their history, not their current state, that makes these philosophical traditions “Western” or “Euro-American”. And that history points us away from “Euro-American” for all the reasons above.

There is, in short, absolutely no good reason to use “Euro-American” over “Western”, and there are many reasons not to use it. Everything that’s wrong with “Western” as a term is even more wrong with “Euro-American”. I hope that someone will eventually come up with a brilliant alternative term that is actually superior to “Western”, and then I will be happy to embrace that. But the worthless “Euro-American” sure isn’t it. Let us banish “Euro-American” from our philosophical vocabularies. It should never have been there.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

There’s a new book series that may interest readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog. You can find the information below.

Oxford University Press is seeking submissions of proposals for a new series:  Philosophy Across Borders.  OUP is committed to publishing high quality philosophical work that draws on broad sourcing to create novel philosophy or novel approaches to recognized problems, methodologies, or approaches.  The hope is that books in the series will exhibit conversation between traditions or cultural sources not often engaged together.  This might include, e.g., engagement between underrepresented traditions and more widely studied western sources, but it could also include work that engages multiple underrepresented traditions not often engaged together.  The goal is not to re-create comparative philosophy, but to provide accessible philosophical work that simply does philosophy in an idiom that is open and global.  If you have a proposal for the series, please contact any of the series editors below or the OUP editor, Peter Ohlin.

Series Co-editors:  Kristi Dotson, Bronwyn Finnigan, Jonardon Ganeri, Amy Olberding, Evan Thompson

In the discourse of the United States today, everything is supposed to be about race. That particular American view infects any American discussion of the West. Overt racists like Lothrop Stoddard associated Western civilization with racial whiteness. Today, the American left often seems to agree with Stoddard, viewing “the West” as code for racial whiteness – as when Natalie Wynn says “the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface”. But the Greek, Semitic and Latin historical roots that make the West go back much earlier than the 17th-century concept of the “white race”; Westerners thought of themselves as “Christendom” long before they thought of themselves as “white”. Anti-black and anti-native racism are the US’s original sin, but we mislead ourselves in a deeply parochial way if we think of the whole world in those American terms.

Rather, it seems to me that the important thing is to reclaim the West from that recent (and harmful) concept of whiteness. “Whiteness” never was constitutive of the West as a historical complex, and the last thing we should do is treat it that way now. For as it turns out, the history of the West is in key respects not even European.

To see why, let’s take a look at the history of the West. Philosophy forms a key part of that history, and this is a philosophy blog, so the history of Western philosophy is as good a case study as any other.

Let’s start at the beginning – the very very beginning. Who was the first Western philosopher, ever? Aristotle, and most philosophers after him, have effectively answered this question with Thales, the sixth-century (BCE) Greek-speaking thinker who first looked for the ultimate principle (archē) of reality, and identified it with water. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that Thales was the first Western philosopher.

So, where did Thales live? Where was he from? If you answered “Greece”, you are wrong, if by “Greece” you mean the European landmass which now belongs to a country by that name. Thales was born and raised, and founded his school, in Miletus – a Greek-speaking town located in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. And not in Thrace, that tiny part of northwestern Turkey which is physically part of Europe. No, Miletus and Ionia were in Anatolia, the Turkish landmass that was the first place ever to be called Asia, and gave its name to the rest of that vast continent. That is to say: the first Western philosopher was an Asian. So was his student Anaximander – from whom we have the earliest surviving lines of Western philosophy. And so was Heraclitus of Ephesus, author of that famous early line that one can never step into the same river twice. Western philosophy begins in the continent of Asia.

Note further that yavana – the Indian term for the Greek-speakers who came over in Alexander’s conquests, which I used to use to describe Westernized Buddhism – itself comes from “Ionian”. When ancient Indians thought about Greek-speaking Westerners, the word they used referred to a part of the continent of Asia. And while the term “Asian” has shifted its referent enough that one could perhaps argue “Asian” shouldn’t refer to Ionians anymore, that doesn’t change the fact that Ionians were and are not European. (And not American either, of course, which will become relevant next time.)

Nor is the early Asian referent of Western philosophy an isolated fluke of history. For the first two thousand years of Western philosophy, its centre was not Europe but the Mediterranean Sea, which borders three continents. We saw in a previous post how Africans have played a major role in the history of Western philosophy – including Augustine, arguably one of the most important thinkers in the entire history of Western tradition. This isn’t even to mention the fact that Judaism, Christianity and Islam – without which Western philosophy would look nothing like it currently does – all have their own origins in West Asia, “the Middle East”. The one possible exception, the one possibly non-Asian founder of these three traditions, is Moses – for, if the biblical story were right, he would have come from Africa.

Most of the story of the West is the story of the three continents that touch the Mediterranean. The people of those three continents regularly mixed with each other. And if we are going to apply the modern concept of “race” to the people who created the West, the most important thing to recognize is that very mixing. To the Greek and Roman worlds, with their thriving Asian and African centres, people with pale skin and blonde hair were savage barbarians, but the swarthy citizens of Miletus were not. “Whiteness” could only be invented centuries after the cultural centres of the West had moved into the northern corners of Europe – which is millennia into the West’s established history. That invention of whiteness comes alongside colonialism – and colonialism, for its part, begins the process of moving the West out of Europe into the Americas and Oceania.

All this history matters because it creates the culture of the West that we now have today. Especially, it shows that that Western culture has been multiracial and multi-continental long before the concept of race existed.

In the present day, the multiracial nature of the West has been obvious in my personal experience. When I travel to India, my dress and mannerisms mark me clearly as a Westerner. This point came out most vividly when, as a long-haired youth, I checked into a cheap hotel in Andhra Pradesh and the clerk told me: “When foreigners stay here there’s more paperwork, so don’t put down your name, put an Indian name.” It did not even occur to her that I might have an Indian name. But an even more striking thing was my own reaction. In my previous couple weeks’ travelling around India, the locals’ reactions to me had made me feel so obviously a Westerner that it didn’t even occur to me that my own name was appropriate. So, in response to the clerk’s request, I put down an Indian friend’s name – without it even occurring to me that I had a perfectly good Indian name of my own! All this, even though in the West my skin tone marks me as visibly non-white. I’m not white, but I am a Westerner; of that, there is no doubt. (This is one of the countless reasons it irritates me when navel-gazing Americans or Australians insist on referring to modernist Buddhism as “White” – even in the face of modernist Buddhists who obviously aren’t.)

So too are African-Americans. A black American friend of mine worked for the Peace Corps in a Mali village in his youth. He told me that the locals said to him in no uncertain terms: “You’re not African. We don’t know what you are, but you’re not African.” And it should not be a surprise to hear that said about someone who had spent the majority of his life in the United States. When Asians decry “Westernization”, they are often concerned about the influence of the very African-American art forms of rock’n’roll and hip-hop. Philosophically, Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois and the late bell hooks are all very much of the West.

We people with non-European ancestral origins are part and parcel of the West – and we always have been, since before “whiteness” existed. And so: no, the association between whiteness and the West is not “always lurking between the surface”; wherever it does so lurk, it shouldn’t. The West has always been bigger than the harmful colonial concept of race. And it’s also always been bigger than Europe.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

When one studies Indian philosophy, or Asian philosophy in general, one is always faced with its other: a philosophical tradition with origins to the west of India, which, after the history of colonialism and modernity, is in the background of everyone now. What should we call this tradition?

The term in by far the most widespread use is Western. It’s not a very good term, but it is the one we have, and I think there is good reason to keep it. I’ll be arguing that point in a series of three posts. I’ve seen two camps of people who discourage the use of “Western”. One (found within philosophy) merely discourages the term, in favour of the term “Euro-American”, which I find far worse; I will deal with that in the final post. The other thinks that “the West” doesn’t even name a meaningful referent at all, such that there should not even be a term to replace it. As I think that that’s a deeper criticism, I will start with it, in both this post and the next.

Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints argues that the “Western” tradition isn’t a real thing. Wynn rightly points out how places like Latin America and the Middle East have been traditionally excluded from “the West”, even though their cultures are part of the same Greek and Semitic historical complex. Wynn is right to note that that exclusion is a problem. But as far as I’m concerned, that isn’t actually an argument against getting rid of “the West”, but for including those places in it, to some extent at least.

I suspect Wynn argues for dropping the concept because she imagines that a “West” including Latin America and the Middle East would then look so broad as to be meaningless. But it does not look that way at all to those of us who study South and East Asia. More than half of the world’s population lives east of the Khyber Pass (and south of the Altai Mountains and north of the Timor Sea). People in those places inherit traditions with origins in northern India and China, independent from and other to a West that includes the Arab world and Latin America – and Eastern Europe. A concept of “the West” that includes all three of those regions is meaningful and significant to those concerned with the more than half of the world that is none of them.

That’s not to say that the whole Islamic world is of the West. “The West” is too big if it stretches from Nigeria to Indonesia. But there’s a difference between the Islamic heartland – the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa and the Middle East (plus Turkey) where Islam began, which both deeply influenced and were influenced by Greek and Roman culture – and the many other places that Islam eventually spread to. Bangladesh is not a Western country despite being majority Muslim, just as the Philippines are not a Western country despite being majority Christian.

And yes, it is absolutely ironic that two of the three regions I’m arguing are of the West – Eastern Europe and the Middle East – have “East” in their names! Indeed it was these “Easts” that the concept of the “West” was originally defined against: coming out first of the East-West Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. That usage persisted through the days when Eastern Europe was a Communist Other: “Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.” But, with the “Eastern Bloc” decades behind us, relatively few use the concept of the “West” in that way anymore. More often now we wrongly assimilate “the West” to a racialized “whiteness” – and Eastern Europe is of course “whiter” than Spain or Italy. But its “whiteness” is not the reason to include Eastern Europe in the West. Rather, what Eastern Europe does share with Western Europe is a set of historical roots, roots which they both share with Latin America and the Middle East (and North America and Oceania) – and not with sub-Saharan Africa or South or East Asia.

It is those historical roots, I would argue, that make “Western” tradition or civilization a thing. The contemporary cultures of North and South and Central America, Western and Eastern Europe, the southern and eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula, all derive from the innovations of two original places: the classical Greek world of the northeastern Mediterranean, and the Semitic world rooted in that small stretch of land on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Red Sea. (Each of these worlds, note, first arose in lands further east than Warsaw or Sarajevo.) The pan-Mediterranean Roman Empire brought the two together, and eventually came to be dominated by a tradition whose sacred scriptures are half in Hebrew and half in Greek. As that empire declined, a new Semitic tradition arose which promptly turned back to the Greeks for its intellectual life – and whose learning would later prove essential to Northern Europe once it eventually came to be civilized for the first time. I don’t think it’s too hard to see the continuities among the cultures whose main roots go back to these Greek and Semitic worlds.

Latin America may be a question mark here because they have non-Western historical roots from their indigenous peoples – but that is also true of North America! I suppose that on these grounds one could make a reasonable case that the mostly indigenous Guatemala, say, should not be counted as a Western country – but if Canadians and Americans (let alone Australians) are Westerners, then Argentinians and Uruguayans definitely are too. Note that that distinction should be on cultural grounds, not racial ones; the issue is not that Guatemalan indigenous peoples aren’t white, but that their indigenous cultural heritage arose independently of Europe and the Mediterranean – as that of the Muslim Middle East did not. More on the supposed “whiteness” of the West next time.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.