Has the Enlightenment/modernity resolved anything?
It is a simple question. Answers to that question may not be simple, but it is a simple question. Please do not turn a simple question into something complicated. We are talking about the epoch of the last 500 or so years that we are told has replaced superstition and mysticism with rationalism; replaced dogma with ever-self-correcting science; liberated the autonomous individual subject from the oppression of tradition and organized religion; replaced tyranny with democracy; replaced the communal with homo economicus, property rights, the "invisible hand", etc.; etc. Please, no tangents splitting hairs over chronology, the definition of science, etc. Please, no tangents like, "Well, the Enlightenment never promised to resolve anything". Just address the question, please.
The question is, basically, if anything has been resolved.
The ideal political system? I think that it is safe to say that that is still highly in doubt.
The meaning of life? There is no meaning of life, some say. With other people, ask 100 of them and you will likely get 100 different responses. Doesn't sound like anything close to a resolution to me.
Right and wrong? If I had a penny for every theory, viewpoint, opinion, etc. about what is right and what is wrong...
The ideal economic system? Ditto.
Etc.
Of course, a case could be made that the questions themselves are Enlightenment/modernist creations--that people 3,000 years ago did not ask, say, what is the ideal political system, let alone try to come up with the answer.
Maybe it is just my own subjective experience, but this is predictable: spend a lot of time acquainting one's self with intellectual history and the latest ideas, think that you have found an answer, and somebody else who has acquainted him/herself with intellectual history and the latest ideas will tell you that that answer is false.
I don't know if there are any precedents in pre-history and history. Maybe the inhabitants of pre-historic Easter Island thought that their intellectual heritage made them unique and exceptionally knowledgeable and wise. I just know that I live in a culture and time where I have been told as far back as I can remember that thanks to our exceptional institutions and intellectual tools we now have astronomical amounts of knowledge and wisdom that exponentially exceed the combined knowledge and wisdom that preceded us, yet if one delves into all of that knowledge and wisdom he/she will not find a definitive, conclusive, objective answer to any important question.
I think that if we are honest we will acknowledge that we really do not know much. However, that is just my subjective opinion. No assertion there.
However, if this epoch has in fact yielded definitive, conclusive answers and there are now questions next to which we can put a check mark under the "Resolved" column, please take this opportunity to clear things up and tell us what those questions and answers are.
The question is, basically, if anything has been resolved.
The ideal political system? I think that it is safe to say that that is still highly in doubt.
The meaning of life? There is no meaning of life, some say. With other people, ask 100 of them and you will likely get 100 different responses. Doesn't sound like anything close to a resolution to me.
Right and wrong? If I had a penny for every theory, viewpoint, opinion, etc. about what is right and what is wrong...
The ideal economic system? Ditto.
Etc.
Of course, a case could be made that the questions themselves are Enlightenment/modernist creations--that people 3,000 years ago did not ask, say, what is the ideal political system, let alone try to come up with the answer.
Maybe it is just my own subjective experience, but this is predictable: spend a lot of time acquainting one's self with intellectual history and the latest ideas, think that you have found an answer, and somebody else who has acquainted him/herself with intellectual history and the latest ideas will tell you that that answer is false.
I don't know if there are any precedents in pre-history and history. Maybe the inhabitants of pre-historic Easter Island thought that their intellectual heritage made them unique and exceptionally knowledgeable and wise. I just know that I live in a culture and time where I have been told as far back as I can remember that thanks to our exceptional institutions and intellectual tools we now have astronomical amounts of knowledge and wisdom that exponentially exceed the combined knowledge and wisdom that preceded us, yet if one delves into all of that knowledge and wisdom he/she will not find a definitive, conclusive, objective answer to any important question.
I think that if we are honest we will acknowledge that we really do not know much. However, that is just my subjective opinion. No assertion there.
However, if this epoch has in fact yielded definitive, conclusive answers and there are now questions next to which we can put a check mark under the "Resolved" column, please take this opportunity to clear things up and tell us what those questions and answers are.
Comments (78)
Each of us know as much as we have experienced. As a population, we probably know more than we did a few hundred years ago (knowledge is gained and lost). But nothing has been resolved and never will be because there is no such thing in a universe that is in a continuous flux of evolution.
Also, as @Rich said, it's a work in progress. We're in the middle of a movie that hasn't finished telling its story.
- OK, apart from inaugurating mass literacy.
- Yeh, but as well as showing us how the cosmos works even if there aren't any gods.
- No, but, aside from liberating millions of poor schmucks to enjoy art and culture and everything.
I just don't know how that scene ends. Maybe : 'Yes, but they never resolved a single important question, did they?'
That is not the story I get when I study intellectual history.
Western intellectual history, as it has been presented to me, is not just a bunch of critical thinking. People, movements, etc. seem to clearly have / have had agendas like trying to create the perfect society, trying to demolish certain things/structures (feminism seems like a demolition crew on a mission to destroy "the patriarchy", not a bunch of critical thinkers "questioning the answers"), etc.
Quoting TheMadFool
First, we are talking about rationalism, not mere rationality.
Second, the issue is not answers. I doubt that there has ever been a shortage of answers.The issue is definitive, conclusive answers.
Quoting TheMadFool
Anybody can employ any evaluative tool to assess the quality of his/her inquiry and the quality of its results. It depends on what one's wants and needs are.
To assume that the wants and needs of everybody--past, present and future--are the same as the wants and needs of Enlightenment founders and disciples is a mistake, not to mention an extreme form of narcissism and ethnocentrism.
Quoting TheMadFool
It is some people's work in progress.
If one is not one of those people invested in that work, why should he/she pay any attention to any of it if it does not yield definitive, conclusive answers to the questions that are important to him/her?
Speaking of rational, maybe the rational response is to say, "We have spent tons of time, money, stolen/plundered land, and other resources asking questions like what is the meaning of life, what is the origin of the universe, etc., yet we do not have any definitive, conclusive answers to those questions and we spend even more time and other resources quarreling/fighting over our disagreements about the answers. We need to get a life. I am not paying any attention or in any way giving any credence to any of it any longer".
It sounds like you are saying, "We have been liberated to spin our wheels endlessly asking questions".
Every individual can access knowledge/truth/reality, and reason is the way. No culture, church, clergy, etc. needed.
Okay, but when you look at the results no clear knowledge/truth/reality seems to have emerged.
Pre-modern individuals were blind and in the dark, if you like those kinds of metaphors.
Maybe a lot of us are no longer blind or in the dark. Maybe a lot of us are now empowered by reason. But we sure seem to be extremely confused.
It's an interesting topic but perhaps too broad a question! Many things have been resolved, but many other questions have been raised.
I think the real question you're pursuing is this one:
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
That is very much a consequence of the ascent of 'the scientific worldview' and what can generally be characterised as 'secular humanism' - which is the idea that science replaces religion and philosophy as a guide to conduct and outlook. It is the basic philosophy of the 'secular academy'.
I too have been studying this question although my approach has been grounded in the conviction of the reality of enlightenment in the Eastern rather than European sense, and through comparative religion and philosophy.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
The crucial issue is that secular humanism/scientific materialism has torn the Western intellectual tradition from its moorings in the Judeo-Christian tradition. What has happened, at a very high level, is that science has filled the space left by the collapse of religious faith, and put the Cosmos into the role formerly assigned to Deity. The cardinal difficulty is, however, that science is fundamentally quantitative - 'the book of nature is written in mathematics', said Galileo. The individual as an atomistic self is supposed the provide the foundation of moral judgement, informed by scientific reason. But the problem is, that one of the basic suppositions of the 'scientific worldview' is that the Universe itself is devoid of reason, that things simply happen as a consequence of thermodynamics or some other basically dumb process. Reason itself is then 'instrumentalised' as a product of adaptive necessity rather than as sovereign in its own right (for which see The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer.)
Part of the historical narrative is that everyone before 'modernity' was basically marooned in an ocean of superstition, whereas we now are bathed in the brilliant light of the realisation that the Universe exists for no reason.
Here are some current books which specifically address this theme from several perspectives:
De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being, Paul Tyson
This book is a part of a Christian intellectual movement called Radical Orthodoxy.
Wisdom in Exile, Lama Jampa Thaye - a Western Buddhist convert who surveys similar themes from a Buddhist perspective.
The Theological Origins of Modernity Michael Allen Gillespie
'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descartes and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which according to Gillespie dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will.'
I thought that it is not about subjective satisfaction. Most people are subjectively satisfied being dumb, ignorant, passive fools who never question anything.
I thought that it is about objectivity and intervention.
We sure have intervened a lot--so much so that our activity is believed to be dramatically altering the Earth's atmosphere (climate change).
But the objectivity part seems to have resulted in individual and collective confusion and chaos, not any significant clarity or order.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I think that it is best assessed by people's experiences, not by taking a few "achievements" out of historical, geographic and sociological context.
In Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner state that modernity has caused much untold suffering.
It has also caused a lot of known suffering. Just ask the Native Americans.
But that larger context seems to always get left out. It is always just a self-congratulatory story of independence from tyrants, conquering disease, unprecedented economic productivity, long periods without military conflict, etc.
In the 1600's there were about half a billion living humans. Today there are over seven billion living humans...
Life expectancy in 1600 was about 40 years of age. Today global life expectancy is over 70- years of age, and over 80 in first world countries.
The enlightenment lead to an understanding of how to live healthier and longer lives, in much greater numbers. That's an important advancement. But I would also say that the enlightenment is in and of itself a resolution to a particular problem: "how do we reliably gain useful knowledge and discard falsity?". If you weren't taught by someone to explicitly and inherently question things, and if you were never offered an understanding of the material world produced by science, would you have ascended to your current state of avant guarde critical prowess?
I reckon you would be stuck in a rural farm, worrying mainly about this year's crops and whether or not your wife will die as a result of her pregnancy (or you from yours), and any notions of objective truth and meaning would remain mostly out of sight and mind and culturally moored by the authority wielded over you by your lord, and his lord over him.
I believe I've offered this explanation to you before, but the since the enlightenment we've come to realize that just because it fell out of a king's ass doesn't make it sweet. We learned to question things and test them for their validity and utility, and also to innovate in spite of dogma and tradition. Everything that you wave off as unimportant is to someone else priceless. Curing even a single disease is important, and we have cured many. The double edge of modernity causes some suffering and poses continuing risks, but the payoffs have been worthwhile and we've done more good than harm according to the statistics. We could go back to merely scrounging in the dirt to sustain our existence; would you like that? If it's not a return to some kind of hunter-gatherer primitive lifestyle that you envision, what is it you believe is the way forward?
How do we become more knowledgeable by blindly and emotionally discarding anything that is not perfect in every way?
In other words, the ends justify the means.
On the other hand, again, those "means"--slavery, child labor, genocide, colonialism, cruelty to non-human animals, etc.--are almost never acknowledged, and on the rare occasion that they are acknowledged they are viewed as nothing more than hiccups on the march of "progress" and "liberty", not as necessary contributors to the outcomes that we congratulate ourselves for ad nauseam.
Do you honestly believe that slavery, child labor, genocide, colonialism, and cruelty to non-human animals were or are "the means of the enlightenment/modernity?".
This may surprise you, but all these things did not come about as a result of the enlightenment or modern ways of thinking, they have been occurring as a standard of human civilization throughout all of recorded history. But they were in fact reduced and somewhat abolished by it...
It was enlightened thinking that lead to the abolition of slavery in Europe and in the Americas. It was modernity that brought the idea of public school systems as a way to reduce poverty and the need for child labor. Full blown genocide has rarely occurred in the modern world and it certainly has not been the means of it's creation. Yes the modern world is still putting some of the pieces together from the old world which the enlightenment eventually broke (i.e: far flung colonies slowly developing their own governments and infrastructure), and so your sentiments make it seem like you're trying to blame the broad and tragic history of mankind on the very thing which altered it for the better, just because it did not do so perfectly and universally....
So I ask again. Are you suggesting we would be better off if the enlightenment never happened? If modernity never arrived? If not, what are you trying to say?
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
I don't think it is a simple question.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
You were expecting the epiphany, perhaps?
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Yes, of course. Were you to speak at a symposium and announce that the sky is blue, some scholarly person would rise to angrily dispute your totally erroneous idea. Is this not a consequence, even a definitive one, of the enlightenment? There is no authority who can now finally and for all time decree that the sky is blue.
There is a joke, wrongly assigned to the late Chou Enlai, who was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. A scholar asked the very patient Chou whether the French Revolution was a good thing. Chou said, "It is too early to tell." People take a long time to digest epochs. Clearly the Enlightenment is still "in progress" and is still producing it's conclusions.
Lots of people have, at least temporarily, sworn off taking the Pope's, or the Chief Rabbi's, a Mullah's, or the Dalai Lama's word for anything. People feel free in some parts of the world to believe pretty much whatever they damn well please. Isn't that an Enlightenment Thing?
But, as it happens, there are also people reacting to the "whatever they damn well please" practice by reasserting the primacy of earlier "values". Family values, Bible Values, Koran values, ancient values... We don't usually burn people at the stake (at this time), but the disputes are definitely heating up.
This thread.
In a sense it does, as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, a kind of ghost of the Empire. And otherwise, in the civil law of most European countries (and it seems the state of Louisiana), the Romance languages, the Republic of the United States the government of which mimics in certain ways that of Republican Rome. An empire which lasted around 1500 years counting from the principate of Augustus to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (though in diminished form as the years passed), and before that was a major player and then dominate power in the Mediterranean for about 300 years before that. For good or ill, the Western World is what it is due to the Roman Empire.
No, I think it's mostly about your satisfaction. The things you think important have not been resolved, alas. I wouldn't expect postmodernism to resolve them either, if I were you (not, of course, that I can truly understand you, or anyone or anything else, not really). Nor do I think Heideggerish fear of technology will make us better people.
But I don't think the proponents of the Enlightenment have ever claimed it has or would resolve all questions and make us perfectly good and just, and to complain because it has not done so is therefore rather pointless. It merely provided a method to more successfully explore the world and provide answers to its workings in comparison with, e.g., praying or thinking really hard about abstracts.
If truth is not like postmodern theorists say--completely situated/contextual--and if, as Enlightenment champions seem to insist, it is something that all rational minds can arrive at, we have a problem.
If you follow intellectual life in the modern world you wouldn't know that there is any truth that a significant number of people, let alone all rational minds, have arrived at. Instead you find--from my vantage point, at least--nothing but confusion.
And I asked at the beginning of this thread for one--just one--definitive, conclusive question and answer that this whole Enlightenment/modernist epoch has produced. No response.
Gee thanks. I thought I provided one - but, no response.
Maybe I overlooked it.
Not a good time for me with respect to mental health.
Speaking of time, not much of it. Two jobs, a lot of hours, very little time off.
Well, look again. I suspect I'm the only poster in this thread who responded to the specific question you're asking.
If you would but consider that your belief that we were promised that the Enlightenment/modernity would establish heaven on Earth is mistaken, you might recognize that certain things have been resolved. For example, with regard to what have previously been fatal diseases, like malaria, polio, smallpox, typhoid fever, tetanus, diphtheria. Of course, the resolution of diseases merely saves and prolongs life, and you may consider that insignificant.
Yes, it does strongly feel like personal and collective spiritual and intellectual life are now in the clutches of narrow secular worldviews that may be backed by more oppressive government control and funded by more resources than the pre-Enlightenment oppressors could have ever began to imagine or dream of.
But when you can incarcerate massive numbers of people who are not useful in the oppressors' system and subdue everybody else with anti-depressants and an entertainment industrial complex (opening? Saturday of college football tomorrow!), who needs heretics to burn at the stake? And you can congratulate yourself for how progressive and humane your methods are compared to the "barbarism" of those less civilized pre-Enlightenment people!
Kind of like how you get to congratulate yourself for how your weapons of mass destruction and your mutually assured complete destruction of each other has created unprecedented global peace!
I have had the subversive thought, that the whole aim of liberal democracy is to make the world a safe place for the ignorant. (I mean 'ignorant' in the spiritual sense.) It provides everyone with the freedom to do what they want, but at the same time has lost the philosophical or spiritual sense of what 'freedom' actually implies or requires. I mean, in classical cultures, it was understood that to be a 'slave to the passions' was philosophically and ethically harmful; say that to the proverbial man in the street nowadays, and they wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about. I think this is the meaning of that well-known 60's counter-cultural manifesto, Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, although at the time that was popular, I wasn't into leftist stuff, so had no idea what it was about.
But the 'forces of oppression' are not 'the system', and they're nowhere outside yourself. Sure, modern culture has no concept of spiritual liberation, but they don't have the means to deprive us of freedom; spiritual freedom is something we have to discover ourselves.
I don't know of anything that can be attributed to the European Enlightenment that aids in that discovery.
People like to point to the Gutenberg Bible, the printing press, mass literacy, etc., but that implies that pre-literate societies and illiterate individuals had/have no spiritual life. It also ignores that literacy is often used to consume entertainment and "information" rather than to pursue anything spiritual or intellectual.
Speaking of the Bible, it seems to be full of stories of personal spiritual encounters, not puppets being manipulated by authorities and needing liberation through becoming autonomous agents? of reason.
I can't think of any work that has helped me grow spiritually and intellectually that owes its inspiration to the European Enlightenment.
Well, one thing it provided me was the ability to explore the question on my own terms. That should never be taken lightly. However, it took me a lot of study and reading to understand the sense in which Biblical Christianity is concerned with 'spiritual freedom' at all, because that kind of terminology is foreign to their lexicon. I was more interested in the Eastern idea of liberation which I learned about through the 60's counter-culture - think Sgt Peppers - although in the end, I have come to understand that there is perhaps more in common between the two approaches than meets the eye.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
You're compressing an awful lot into a single paragraph. I will see if I can unpack it a bit. First - 'personal spiritual encounters' - I do believe that these are the basic substance of the Bible (not that I am well versed in the Bible.) But I think they have an existential depth and immediacy which most of the 'cultured despisers of religion' are blind to, as they reflexively reject the entire narrative as myth (and 'merely' myth).
But on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that the Church exploited its position as the self-appointed sole custodian of the faith for immense political power. That was one of the major motivations behind Protestantism. And their aim was to restore the purported rightful relationship of man to God through faith rather than through priestly intermediaries and the vast machinery of the Church. But then, the Protestant God tended to vanish into the heaven of abstractions, leaving us in an 'all or nothing' position - either blind submission, 'salvation by faith alone', or wholesale rejection. I see a lot of what grew out of the Enlightenment, therefore, as an historical reaction against Christian dogma, conceived of as a regressive political apparatus, peddling superstition to maintain its power.
I think that was what Kant had in mind when he wrote his famous essay which is one of the foundational documents of the enlightenment, aptly named 'What is Enlightenment'?
I have to say, I can't see a lot wrong with that, except that when it became allied with positivism and the rejection of all religious metaphysics, it naturally tended towards scientific materialism. But it really didn't have to; Kant was an absolutely implacable foe of materialism, he never would have endorsed such an idea. It was he who said 'I had to declare a limit to knowledge to make room for faith' (although his faith would never be any kind of fideism, or clinging to dogma).
But there's a lot in this. I really think you ought to try and find some courses on it. You will find there are many rich resources around on this very subject, and that it is a fascinating and rewarding topic.
I hope that it is correct that certain diseases are "resolved", but I don't think that anything is that simple.
For one thing, a case could be made that modern science and technology have only corrected problems that they created. And that while some people have lived longer and healthier lives other people have been made worse off.
And it could ultimately be a losing battle. All of the antibiotic use, vaccinations, etc. could result in a superbug that costs more than the sum of the benefits we have accumulated to date.
There's a wild card out there. It's called "It may be a zero-sum game".
Freedom through Christ.
Quoting Wayfarer
Just looking at the Gospels--although I am sure the same theme could probably be found in the Old Testament and the rest of the New Testament--we don't seem to get a picture of illiterate masses at the bottom and top-down teachings, doctrine, etc. from a few people at the top. We seem to get a picture of Jesus constantly on the move ministering directly to whoever he encounters, crowds following him, etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
That states it more clearly--and unbiased--than anything I have seen before. Very helpful.
I think that Protestant fundamentalism can be understood the same way: a reaction to the excesses of science and capitalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that the "not in lack of reason" part needs to be emphasized more.
In other words, it's not like Europeans suddenly discovered reason and the ability to use it in the 18th century. Reason was simply elevated, brought to the forefront, for the first time. At least that is the way that I, nowhere near having a PhD in History, would characterize it.
True, but he also said 'he with ears to hear....'
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Not for the first time. As far as its proponents were concerned, this was a return to what made the Western philosophical heritage great in the first place.
But, they're great questions and worthy of a lot of thought.
You emhasised that you would like a simple, straightforward answer to the question you posed at the start of this thread, namely, "Has the Enlightenment/Modernity resolved anything?" So here is my response...
Before I set it out, I must remind you that as a verb, the term "resolve" has a number of different connotations, so I am going to presume in my reply that you are using the word in the sense of its meaning: "to settle or find a solution to a problem or contentious matter."
To begin with - as Wayfarer reminds us- Kant, the last and indisputably the greatest of the Enlightenment era's philosophers, coined the dictum "Sapere aude !" (Dare to know !) in order to provide what he felt was a fitting motto for enlightenment. Kant's earnest plea - "Sapere aude !" - exhorts us to have the courage and firm resolution to use our own ( independent, "untutored") human reason in seeking (the) truth. In urging man to have the daring and bold tenacity to use his own reason to seek (absolute) truth, alone and unaided by any external mode of learning, Kant is effectively rejecting any role for supernatural faith ( i.e. the knowledge delivered by Christian revelation) in humanity's quest for (Absolute) truth.(And) over the past 500 years I believe his advice has been increasingly accepted by Western modernity, to the extent that it has, indeed, become its dominant intellectual principle. In short, what most distinguishes the era of Enlightenment/Modernity is the manner in which human reason (both the empirical reasoning associated with scientific theory and research, and, the speculative reasoning of philosophy ) was ever more radically sundered and isolated from faith in Christian revelation (theology).
Returning to the your OP, I would like to propose, therefore, that the fundamental and most important question that calls for resolution with respect to Enlightenment/Modernity is whether or not its strident exhortation and guiding principle - " Sapere aude !" - was, in retrospect, a triumph or a catastrophe for modern man ? That is, was the project of unaided, unguided, independent and unfettered human rationalism ultimately successful in helping to illuminate the path to ( absolute) truth and draw mankind closer toward to it? In my view, as I will try to briefly explain below , the answer is a resounding "No, it did not !" , and what Enlightenment/Modernity has served to "resolved" for human beings today is that when human reason is arrogantly and radically severed from its proper foundation in faith ( Christian revelation), man's search for the truth is not only destined to fail, but to fail indeed in the most disastrous and destructive manner.
The progressive sundering of reason from faith in modernity that began in the humanism of the Renaissance and its keen revival of philosophical interest in Aristotalian logic and reason, and then flourished in the atheism and deism of key Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and Newton, reached its zenith in the 20th century with the ascention of various forms of atheistic humanism expressed in philosophical terms which viewed faith as alienating and damaging to the flourishing of full rationality. They did not hesitate to to present themselves as new religions serving as a foundation for projects on the social and political planes which soon gave rise to totalitarian ideological systems which proved catastrophic for humanity. Never before in the history of humanity had evil stalked the globe the way it did during the last century. Consider, for example, the rise of National Socialism in Germany under Hitler that ultimately resulted in the death of 50 million human beings in the Second World War including the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, the indiscriminate nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the appalling brutality of Stalinism in Russia, the ten years of violence, terror and death by starvation brought to bear on the people of China during Mao Zedung's "Cultural Revolution", the sinister Pol Pot and his lethal brand of communist utopianism which saw 2 million men, women and children hacked to death with primitive axes and hoes in the "Killing Fields" of rural Cambodia between 1975 and 1977/8 , the insane brinkmanship of total nuclear annihilation that played out through September and October of 1962 in the terrifying "Cuban Missile Crisis" standoff between Nikita Kruschev and John F Kennedy, and the catalogue of murderous mayhem, rampant moral evil, human misery and suffering, devastation and destruction that marked the last century as the most benighted and God-forsaken 100 years in human history goes on and on.
Turning now to the role of science in the culture of Enlightenment/modernity...The scientific revolution triggered by thinkers like Isaac Newton and John Locke during the Enlightenment led to the great Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. William Blake famously lamented the destruction of nature and enslavement of millions in the dismal working conditions of its "dark satanic mills" as a manifestation of human evil , though in the time since then to date an increasingly unbridled and unfettered technology has, ironically, seen Enlightenment reason turn even more destructively on itself to become an instrument not of human liberation and political /intellectual freedom, but of profound human oppression and ruthless domination. In the modern era, the rise of scientism in the West ( in particular, over the past 60 years ) has seen a pervasive positivistic mentality take hold which has not only abandoned the Christian vision of the world but rejected every appeal to a moral or metaphysical vision. Lacking any ethical point of reference this scientism has, for instance, fuelled a market-based logic that has, in turn, created giant corporate, techno-capitalist cartels that continue to cast their shadow apace over increasing portions of the globe.Their rapacious exploitation of the natural world has, amongst other things, generated climate change through global warming, a phenomenon that now constitutes one of the gravest, most threatening and potentially apocalyptic moral issues humanity has ever faced. At the same time, in the sphere of human affairs, corporate techno-capitalism has become the late West's dominant politico-economic ideology, creating extreme plutocratic republics like the United States where the obscene greed of a super-rich ruling elite minority has fomented wide-spread ,bitter social division and, as recently witnessed dangerous levels of political instability.
Today, in the West, as a result of the crisis of Enlightenment/Modernity rationalism, what has finally appeared is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it seems to have a certain appeal for the people of our time. Its academic adherents (in such fields as postmodernist philosophy) claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of (objective) truth. In the nihilist interpretation, life is no more than an occasion for sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral and evanescent have pride of place. Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which advises us that a definitive commitment should no longer be made, because everything in human life and the world is fleeting and provisional. As we stand amidst the current crisis of rationalism in the West we see ,as well, that different forms of agnosticism and relativism ( moral, epistemological and metaphysical ) have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting ,sands of widespread skepticism. In recent times we have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of of positions has now yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based on the assumption that all positions are equally valid, and this is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. Even certain conceptions coming from the East betray this lack of confidence, denying truth its exclusive character and assuming truth reveals itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one another. On this understanding, everything is reduced to mere opinion; and there is a sense of being cast adrift., While, on the other hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues - existential, hermaneutical or linguistic - which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God. Hence, we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being's great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, man in the modern West now rests content with partial or provisional truths, no longer seeking to to ask radical questions about the meaning and and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has all but died.
I am beginning to ramble and rant I fear, so let me now quickly "cut to the chase" of this post.That is, in answer to your initial question, I would argue that what Enlightenment/ Modernity has very clearly resolved is the fact that human reason - however daring and courageous it may be, cannot by itself - alone and unaided - succeed in guiding humanity closer toward (the) truth. Rather, it would seem, as the great "Angelic Doctor", St Thomas Aquinas, taught us so long ago, that the boldness of human reason must always be matched and complemented by a firm foundation in the parhesia of supernatural faith (in the divine knowledge Christian revelation). But this, of course, is a topic for a separate post.
Regards
John
Well, not a very good case, I think. We're the cause of the problems which afflict us, not science or technology. The Enlightenment can't be blamed for the fact that we're corrupt, stupid, greedy, selfish, cruel, ruthless, ignorant, immoral etc. We always have been, and were so long before the Enlightenment, in defiance of and in blithe if not eager disregard of what's being referred to in this thread as the "Judeo-Christian tradition" or Christianity itself, and for that matter were before the moral insights and wisdom of the pagan philosophers which Christianity relied on so entirely in its theology, though combining them with the mythology which grew around the figure of Jesus through the efforts of Paul and others has never been an easy thing.
Is it really thought we were "better" people in pre-Enlightenment times?
Ha. The radical arm of the Enlightenment (i.e. Spinzoa, Diderot, Bayle, d'Holbach, et al.) decisively showed the inconsistency and intellectual poverty of the 'Moderate Enlightenment' (i.e. Kant, Voltaire, Newton, Leibniz) the latter of which aimed and failed to marry faith to reason.
Everything in life is fleeting and provisional (empty), and for Buddhists and people like myself, it is this belief that advises a definitive commitment should be made, because doing otherwise will result in more suffering.
If there's a lack of definitive commitment in the world today the loss appears to be shared rather equally between theist and atheist. To me, that doesn't suggest a loss of values but rather a shifting of values, a shift towards materialistic values.
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
I believe the Buddhist concept of emptiness is true, but I'm not a Buddhist. There are many aspects of Buddhism that I think are not true and are therefore meaningless to me. I have no use for religion in general because I believe it's essentially just a neatly packaged system of meaning, and nothing more. Though I think it's in our nature to desire meaning in our lives I think we can find it for ourselves. That's one of the gifts of the enlightenment, as I see it.
This is a brilliant answer. I know you are not supposed to make entries with simply agreeing with someone else, but this is not simply an agreement; it is an expression of admiration for a genius mind.
Therefore, science, technology and the Enlightenment are the creations of corrupt, stupid?, greedy, selfish, cruel, ruthless, ignorant, immoral people.
Yet, apparently we are supposed to believe that science, technology and the European Enlightenment are somehow exceptions to or somehow transcend humanity.
Heck, it wouldn't surprise me to find that "humanity" is itself a creation of the European Enlightenment and that no such concept existed before it.
If we really believe? that science and technology somehow transcend humanity then I guess it is no surprise that we now have transhumanism and people calling for decision making by humans to be replaced by AI.
I would say that anybody who thinks a human creation like science is some innocent being that has done nothing but good in spite of its creators is really desperate to deny reality and find something to cling to.
No.
But any honest, objective evaluation of the epoch of the last several centuries in the West must consider everything in that epoch, not cherry-picked anecdotes about science eradicating certain infectious diseases.
I don't think that we have the tools to undertake such an honest, objective, thorough evaluation. We'd have to account for all suffering, such as all of the suffering of animals on factory farms that made it possible for only a small percentage of the population to be employed in agriculture and freed other people to do things like develop vaccines. And so many other things, like the nearly complete destruction of the indigenous people of the land that is now the United States of America.
Not only is it not acknowledged that a thorough accounting is not possible, most accounting that can be done, such as the treatment of Native Americans by Europeans and the United States of America, is almost never brought into the conversation and is something that 99.9% of people are oblivious to.
But nobody is oblivious to science, technology, modern medicine, etc. We are socialized from the moment of birth with constant messages in education and the mass media about how great science, technology, etc. are.
The more that I write about it the more that this whole epoch in the West from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to present looks like a very long, drawn-out episode of extreme narcissism.
For several years now I have wondered if the ethnographic record shows any people more self-congratulatory than the people of the modern West. That question now seems especially appropriate.
And, almost predictably, discussions of the legacy of the European Enlightenment always seem to include at least one reference to how pre-Enlightenment people were worse or no better. My guess is that they did not see life, society, the world, etc. in terms of moral superiority and inferiority. I don't know if moral superiority was an Enlightenment goal or is just a byproduct of other Enlightenment developments, but it seems to be an irrational obsession among the disciples and heirs of a movement that supposedly epitomizes the appreciation of rationality.
That would be a good idea. Would take a lot of work, though.
You claim that...
"Everything in life is fleeting and provisional ( empty), and for Buddhists and people like myself it is THIS belief that advises a definitive commitment should be made..."
I am sorry to have to tell you, my dear fellow, that this statement expresses a logical contradiction.
The belief that everything in life is transient, fleeting, provision ( empty) IS nihilism. Nihilism is a philosophy of nothingness, and one cannot make a "definitive commitment" to anything in world wherein one believes that no-thing has any absolute, objective, enduring meaning, value or purpose. In other words, please explain for me to what PRECISELY it is that you ( a nihilist) claim to make your "definitive commitment" (?)
The Buddhist doctrine of "voidism", by the way, is nothing more than a morbid form of passive nihilism; indeed, insofar as Buddhism can be defined as a group of philosophical/religious traditions grounded in the "Four Noble Truths" of the Buddha, I am more than happy to quickly demonstrate for you that Buddhism is based on a set of logical contradictions.
Regards
John
But science, of course, isn't a being at all, you see, So it makes no sense to think of it as innocent, or for that matter guilty. It's something we do, or some of us do in any case, like painting. Painting isn't innocent either. But when someone spray paints a swastika on a synagogue, we don't blame the paint, or painting, or even the technology by which the spray paint can was invented.
Science, or the scientific or experimental method, has allowed us to understand the way many things work, make predictions, do things with things, as it were, much more successfully than we have in the past by recourse to such things as prayer, deductive thinking, trial and error. There are no absolutes and so it's unreasonable to condemn a method because it doesn't establish matters to an absolute certainty. It's also unreasonable to condemn a method because its results are misused.
Maw,
Newton was a deist and Kant an agnostic. To "cut to the chase", both Kant and Newton denied the notion of the revelation of ( divine) supernatural knowledge from the Biblical God and therefore the Christian conception of faith.
Thanks
John
If it's maintained that the Enlightenment is especially "bad" it's entirely appropriate to respond that there's nothing especially bad about it.
I doubt if moral superiority or anything in particular was an Enlightenment goal, although it's clear certain Enlightenment figures had agendas. Certain Enlightenment thinkers, like Voltaire and the Frenchphilosophes, thought it appropriate to "enlighten" people and society by exposing the flaws of institutional religion and noting the manner in which it restricted thought. I'm one who would say it was appropriate for them to do so, as it was appropriate for certain Renaissance thinkers to rediscover those pagan philosophies and art which had been ignored or condemned by the Church (yes, I know Aquinas and others were aware of Aristotle, for example, but Aquinas's time was the beginning of the Renaissance, I think).
I won't know why we need to blame the enlightenment for not resolving issues. Nothing else ever has. If they had been resolved by the Church, by Christianity, by Aristotle or Socrates or Plato, then there would be nothing for the Enlightenment to resolve.
No. The achievement of the enlightenment is not resolving things, but proudly presenting new things to resolve:
- what is the self
- is there a god
- does morality exist outside of religion
- biblical self-contradicions
- self-contradictions in the Christain fatih, and how to resolve them
- solving world hunger (at least we are now thinking about it)
- preserving the environment (ibid)
- preserving species (ibid)
- is abortion wrong
- why we ought not to smoke cigarettes -- resolved, they cause disease and kill people, one resolution for sure
- allotting the possibility that animals have souls, they are sentient (some of them)
- why giraffes have long necks -- yeah, this one has been resolved, too, btw, the fact that evoution is a much more viable explanation for biodiversity than creation or the biblical explanation. The only people who deny that are religious, and they have a vested interest in denying it. The vested interest is not reason, btw.
You claim "there are no absolutes". I take that you therefore deny the notion of absolute truth ? Is that correct?
John
I'm not a nihilist and I didn't claim to make a definitive commitment. I said that my belief advises a definitive commitment should be made. That doesn't mean that I've made a definitive commitment. To answer your question as to what, in Buddhism it's the cessation of suffering. My personal goals are not so lofty.
Quoting John Gould
Please do. I think we might be able to stay relatively on topic.
" I am not a nihilist and I didn't claim to make a definitive commitment. I said that MY BELIEF advises a definitive commitment SHOULD be made."
Your belief in WHAT ?
Regards
John
PS: I am being called right now to high tea, so I shall have to ask you to wait until tomorrow morning for the critique of Buddism you have requested, I provide ( as it may take me some time to type out for you).
Emptiness = nothingness. Nihilism is, by definition, a philosophy of nothingness ( Latin: "nihil" = nothing) therefore , you are, logically, and for all reasonable intents and purposes, a nihilist.
John
Emptiness doesn't mean nothingness. If it interests you I suggest that you study the concept to better understand it. If you'd like to discuss it further I suggest starting a new topic on the subject.
If you are referring to that labyrinthine corpus of semantic waffle promulgated by certain Western intellectuals who endeavour to differentiate the Buddist conception of "emptiness"( as it appears in doctrines like the Mahayana "voidism" of the current Dalai Lama) , from what is "nothingness" ( in the sense of what the "nothingness" that defines Western nihilism connote) ) let me tell you straight up that none of it cuts any ice at all with me. I have already read enough of this fringe, quasi-intellectual pulp to see it for what it actually is, that is, nothing more than an elaborate exercise in obscurantist sophistry. It seeks , in short, to inject higher meaning into what is clearly meaningless and in doing so fails dismally.
So , with respect, I do not believe I need to study the "concept ( of Buddhist "emptiness") to better understand it" because I believe that I understand it very clearly already. I understand it as clearly representing a core foundational construct in what is essentially a morbid philosophical system of passive nihilism. (And) any claims to the contrary are ( pardon the vernacular) in my opinion pure 100% bullshit and I will demonstrate this for you tomorrow as promised.
Regards
John
I believe this is the first incidence of the term "high tea" on this forum.
You must adore Depak Chopra then. He is not getting laid for nothing by slender blonde beauties of the upper echelons of society in the prime of their reproductive years ten times more than you and I combined. Erm... how many times must you multiply zero to get fifty thousand? Not ten. So then I underestimated him.
Looking forward to it. And do enjoy your evening.
I am envisioning a quaint British castle overlooking pristine shire-land below, dotted with fields, cottages, and cattle. In a cobble room adorned with banners and sigils John's man sits in dictation as our humble castellan paces the room in meditation, pausing occasionally to glance at a very old and jeweled great-sword mounted on the wall...
Quid est veritas? Pontius Pilatus had a point, though it's not one he intended to make, I think. To answer your question or any such questions I'd have to know what you mean by "absolute truth." Are tautologies "absolutely true"? [If so, who cares?]
What I was referring to was more in the way of absolute certainty of judgments made in science or in life.
I tend to think that the most correct judgments we can make are those made based on the intelligent assessment of the best available evidence, but there's always the possibility that other evidence may become available which will require a reassessment. That may be extremely unlikely in some cases; not so unlikely in others. But we live in a world of probabilities. This made people like Kant nervous, or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that Hume made him/them nervous. I don't think it a problem. We successfully make decisions/predictions/judgments all the time and are warranted in doing so.
In answer to your question, what I mean by "absolute truth" is THE truth. The ONE, unchanging, eternal , absolute truth of God the Father Almighty.
Don't be like Pilate. Don't make the same mistake. I exhort you to realise how much is at stake in Jesus' claim to have brought THE truth to this world; to realise that It is literally a matter of eternal life and death; to realise that YOUR own life is on the line right now as we speak. You are an intelligent man. Pick up the Gospel and read. Do this and THE truth will set you free.
Regards
John
John, you are preaching. You did two things in your previous one post people are not allowed to do on this site.
Whether your post gets flagged or not, is up to how vigilant the monitoring of this site is. I am new here, so I don't know if it will happen.
Newton was absolutely not a deist, and while Kant did not believe that there were sound arguments that evidenced or proved God, he was a Christian on pure faith. I recommend actually reading Kant and Newton, and additionally Jonathon Israeli's magisterial trilogy on the Enlightenment to cure yourself of your ignorance on the subject.
Now, that would be a shame. "Ignorance is power." As long as you don't know your subject material, you can assert and claim anything.
Then again, that works better for an audience of dilettantes than for an audience of experts.
That's actually the trick and salvation and damnation of Donald Trump's political success: he bedazzled those who don't have a clue about anything, and they are the majority of the voters. And now Trump faces all these Yale and MIT and whatever-graduated eggheads who are looking at him with stern expectations written on their countenance and body languagem, and god have mercy on Trump should he try the same tactics on them.
Dear Wayfarer
Thank you very much indeed for your link to the introductory essay on the topic of the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" which I have now read. Unfortunately, I am afraid I have to tell you that it does very little to change my opinion that Buddhism is a fundamentally nihilistic system of thought. Here is a brief explanation of why I think this is so...
I am not a professional expert on Buddhism, though I believe my understanding that the "Four Noble Truths" of the Buddha serve to shape the fundamental thinking of almost all of the different Buddhist schools, sects, traditions is pretty much correct, at least for most reasonable intents and purposes ? (Please let me know if I am mistaken in making this general assumption).
I interpret the "Four Noble Truths" to mean the following:
(1) Suffering exists.
(2) Suffering is caused by desire.
(3) It is possible to eliminate desire and consequently suffering.
(4) The cessation of desire ( and thus suffering) is achieved via the eight-fold path which terminates in nirvana.
To begin with , let's look at the second noble truth, the claim that suffering is caused by desire.
It is true that unsatisfied desires, whether positive or negative, are the source of suffering. In the negative case, if I desire not to be hungry, to feel pain, or to be cold, one could say that my desire is the source of my misery. If I could come to terms with the fact that I am hungry, in pain, or cold, such that I no longer desired the cessation of those feelings, I theoretically might no longer suffer. In the positive case, I might want sex, or money, or power, or expensive consumer good/services, and my inability to attain these things might cause me to suffer. If I didn't want these things in the first place, I could not resent not having them.
But, there are two ways to deal with desire - one way is, as Buddhism suggests, to eliminate it. The other way is to actually achieve what you desire, to get what you want. There are entire moral theories that suppose that desire satisfaction is the principle source of good. So, though desire may be the source of suffering, it may also be the principle source of goodness. How else can we be benevolent to towards others other than by helping them to get the things that they want or ought to want. The kind of benevolent/charitable (compassionate) behaviour Buddhists are taught and encouraged Yet that does indeed seem to be the goal of Buddhism - those who achieve nirvana cease to reincarnate and cease to be. to engage in via the eight-fold path seems to require that they fulfill the desires of others (?) How can the path to enlightenment entail leading others away from enlightenment ? It's contradictory !
Next we have the third noble truth ( and consequently the fourth) which are the beliefs that desire,( and thus suffering), can be altogether eliminated. But to eliminate desire altogether would not merely eliminate suffering, it would eliminate happiness, since happiness is the product of satisfying our desires. In order for it to be possible to eliminate desire, we would have to actively pursue an entirely NEUTRAL mental state. And how could we pursue such a mental state without, on some level, DESIRING that mental state itself ?
More importantly, if we are not desiring anything -if we are in a perpetually neutral mental state, are we really alive in any meaningful sense? Does not life entail pursuits of one kind or another ? The man without any goals or dreams is a man already in the grave. Yet that does indeed seem to be the ultimate goal of Buddhism - those who achieve nirvana cease to reincarnate and cease to be. So the goal of Buddhism does seem to be well and truly non-existence. This leads to a very disturbing contradiction. The point of life, according to Buddhism, is to achieve permanent, eternal death (?)
In which case, doesn't Buddhism imply that we ought not to create life in the first place ? If all beings that are alive are beset with desires and suffering until they achieve nirvana, and most beings never achieve nirvana, isn't creating life an overwhelmingly harmful activity ? Yet Buddhism does not explicitly oppose childbirth anywhere that I can see, and it certainly does not advocate for the humane killing of other beings in order to eliminate the suffering that goes with life for most of them.
But perhaps, in order to achieve permanent death all we have to do is behave benevolently towards other for some length of time. But what meaning does this benevolence have if all of these other beings are themselves best off permanently dead in a state of non-existence ? How else can we be good to someone whose life purpose is not to be happy but to achieve death ?
You may say that I am an ignorant fool who is drawing crude, simplistic conclusions about the complex nature of the concept of Sunyata; that I am one who lacks a fittingly nuanced understanding of the Buddhist doctrine of Voidism and the Buddhist void, but, as an ordinary, non-expert layman of at least average ( I hope) intelligence, I have to tell you, Wayfarer, I sense a definite stench of nihilism about all of this. All human projects are the result of desire, so Buddhism negates all human projects. At the same time, Buddhism maintains that we should behave benevolently ( charitably/compassionately) towards one another, but if benevolence consists of making others happy and happiness for others means achieving their projects and humans having projects is the source of human suffering, then being benevolent under Buddhism consists of preventing people from achieving their rightly considered life purpose, the fulfilment of permanent death. And how could we all simultaneously attempt to achieve permanent death when doing so involves sating one's another's desire that we are all mutually committed to eradicate ? In the end, all of this must be resolved one way or another - the contradiction is too strong.
Either, Buddhism is a nihilist theory in which life's only purpose is its end, or Buddhism is a moral theory of how we should treat one another, in which case Buddhism's methodology for eliminating suffering is not really about desire, but is really about just being nice to other people. In the later case, either Buddhism is mistaken about what suffering is, or Buddhism is mistaken about whether or not it can be eliminated or ought to be eliminated.
In sum, it just doesn't hold together. While desires lead to suffering, they also lead to happiness if we can manage to to achieve them. The entire human project has, for thousands of years, been about improving the quality of the human condition by achieving human goals. Buddhism rejects the very idea that human beings ought to have projects, tasks, dreams or goals that they desire to achieve, and in doing so Buddhism denies the human project " in toto". If that's not nihilism, Wayfarer, then I don't know what is !
Regards
John
Paul's joke was a satire on the hypocrisy of society's obsession with dishing out happiness to everyone, on one hand, and on the other hand, the hugely ineffective ways it can deliver its goal and promise.
Part of your article and criticism of Buddhism reminded me of this: get rid of the desire to get rid of the need and suffering.
My addition to your passionate condemnation of Buddhism is this: Nobody can get rid of any amount of suffering when they are in need. I urge any Buddhist to eliminate the need to breathe via meditation. When they are finished doing that, I invite them to exhale all air from their lungs that they can, and not breathe for ever after that. Since they desire has been eliminated.
Buddha says the desire can't be completely eliminated. I say it can't be eliminated even an iota. At least not via transcendental meditation or via counselling.
I stopped reading after about the second paragraph. In Buddhism it's believed that suffering is caused by ingnorance, John, not desire. Once you understand that you may have a better understanding of emptiness.
I know Augustine wrote he once heard a voice telling him to "take up and read," but doubt I'd react as he did if I were to do so. And I have, in fact, read the Gospels (and heard them recited, for a long time, from the pulpit); even some of those considered non-canonical. But it's been quite some time since I did.
I was once a Catholic, or a kind of Catholic. Never a very good one, I'm afraid, but I retain a sort of fondness for it as I remember it from when I was young. Now, I'm if anything an aspiring Stoic. I find the simplicity of Stoicism attractive and think its conception of the divine less unreasonable than others. It doesn't require a commitment to a transcendent God, which would be unknowable as we cannot know what isn't in the universe though we can know something about what's a part of it, as we are. Nor does it require a belief in the divinity of Jesus and that he was fully God and fully man, whatever that means, which raised so many disputes in the early Church and which I think has never made much sense. What I know of the history of the ancient Western world leads me to believe that institutional Christianity is remarkable indeed, but as a kind of conglomeration or hodgepodge of the beliefs of pagan philosophy and mystery cults, and Judaism.
But I thank you for you kind words.
That is pure "eyewash" and you know full well that it is.
The first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths is that all existence is "DUKKA" ( "suffering", "anguish", "pain", "unsatisfactoriness").
The second noble truth is that THE CAUSE OF "DUKKA" IS CRAVING (i.e. desire).
Regards
John
Does ignorance about Buddhism also cause suffering? If you are fine, praxis, then you just proved the Buddha wrong.
Ignorance about our true nature does, according to Buddhist thought.
Quoting szardosszemagad
I'm not fine because I haven't realized my true nature or emptiness, though I may have an intellectual understanding of it.
Skimming through your post, I believe some of the apparent contradictions you point out can be resolved with a more than surface level investigation of the 4 noble truths.
I agree with some of what you write. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a Buddhist and don't subscribe to all their beliefs.
Praxis
As this is a philosophy forum, please enlighten us as to what precisely your intellectual understanding of our true human nature might be according to Buddhist thought.
Thanks
John
I didn't say anything about our true human nature. All things are apparently transitory in nature and therefore lack an inherent identity or existence.
Your belief that "ALL things are apparently transitory (fleeting, ephemeral, evanescent) in nature and THEREFORE lack an(y) inherent identity or existence" is a cardinal symptom of NIHILISM and the pervasive realitivism ( moral/ethical, epistemological and metaphysical) and skepticism accompanying it that have now taken a firm hold in contemporary, advanced Industrial Western societies as a result of the crisis of Enlightenment rationalism.
To begin to understand yourself, you must understand , first and foremost that you are a victim of your times - your historical circumstance. That is, you are a victim of the current crisis of rationalism in the West.
Regards
John
It's a simple observation. Can you point out something that is fixed and permanent?
Quoting John Gould
I am in a sense a product of my culture, as we all are. That doesn't mean that I'm a slave to it. Indeed weren't people more a slave to their culture prior to the enlightenment? We can be the architects of our own development and experience, and perhaps find a way out of this so called iron cage. You, by the way, are in the cage with the rest of us.
Consider these biblical injunctions:
'For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. '(Matt 16:25)
'Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.' (Matt 19:21)
Do you think they're nihilistic sayings? They're quite close in spirit to the meaning of renunciation in Buddhism, also. Scholars have noted that the original monastic code of Benedictine has many functional similarities with the Buddhist monastic code; despite the differences in doxology, the practical application of both teachings is quite similar.
The word translated as 'desire' from Buddhist texts is t????, which can also be translated as 'thirst' or 'craving'. It is a more than simply craving, although it is also that. It is the deep-rooted sense of un-satisfaction or incompleteness. It is what 'drives the wheel' of birth and death. One meaningful parallel from Western philosophy is Schopenhauer's conception of the Will.
Quoting John Gould
All due respect, your depiction is incorrect. Buddhism is often mistaken for nihilism by its Western interpreters, and indeed there may be a tendency towards nihilism amongst certain Buddhists. But it is definitely not nihilist.
Buddhism and the God Idea.
They are not nihilistic. They are just counter-intuitive. Show me two, just two average Americans who have done this and called it the American Dream.
Truth is, American Christians play lip-service to God. If they followed the bible, they would not be the strongest military nation in the world. They would not be the strongest industrialist society. They would not be the technologically most advanced society. The bible in America... is mere lip service. Nothing more, and that is how it should be, actually.
I agree that America has long abandoned the pursuit of any genuinely Christian vision. There is a conspicuous typo in the nation's official motto "In God We Trust". The error is the letter "s" in the word "trust".Here is the correction : "In God We Tru$t". Alternatively, you can correct the motto by, for example, placing the word "Incorporated" after the word "Trust" in the official 1956 motto, like the hard punk band the" Dead Kennedys" did in the early 1980s with their EP entitled : "In God We Trust Incorporated".
I do not agree with you that this is a good thing. I do not think that this " how it should be, actually".
Well, according to Christianity, you ought to turn your other cheek (to the Indians, to the French, to the Loyalists), and which the Americans never did. If they did, America never would have got off the ground.
According to Christianity, wealthiness is a sin, greed certainly is. The entire capitalist system, which buoyed America head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world was built on cruel, unforgiving, greedy capitalism. This would never have happened if Americans were TRULY Christians.
In fact, Christianity, when obeyed to the letter, is absolutely counter-survivalist UNLESS all people behave the Christian way.
So I have to ask you... when was the time, or time period, do you think, when Americans never frayed form the pursuit of genuinely Christian vision?
If you'll allow me to chime in with a slight generalization, I've often thought about what's in it for the sage. If we tame our more animal or childlike desires, then (as you ask) what the hell are we still hanging for? If the goal is nothingness, then suicide is the shortest path to that goal. The only goal that seems plausible to me (and which I can even relate to) is the attainment of a narcissistic serenity. In quasi-Hegelian terms, Spirit enjoys itself as Spirit in an orgy of self-loving self-consciousness. Of course this self of the sage or philosopher is white light, a harmonization of all human nature. He is no one and everyone. So harmonized humanity loves itself in and through him. That he is "no one" testifies that only an extremely sublimated or dis-identified narcissism is appropriate here. So the goal is something like an un-death enjoying itself with one foot in the grave and the other in the womb. In my view, there's a tendency to project innocence and purity of imagination on the sage, but I think this desire for innocence is one of the childish attachments that the sage/philosopher moves beyond. This desire for innocence manifests as a disgust for the world as it actually is and conceives of outrage as wisdom itself. On the other hand, a serene affirmation of the world more or less requires that we see how "good" and "evil" are entangled or interdependent. Progress, drama, development, the stuff of life itself all require inequality, variety, difference, confusion, noise, "sin," "evil." (I put these last words in quotes because yanking them out as absolutes is the exactly the view I'm criticizing.)