I’ve experienced a gradual set of shifts in the way I understand Buddhist practice over the years. There was a time when the Buddhist teachings on non-self, interdependence, awareness, impermanence, and dukkha provided the totality of the frame within which I understood the aims of Buddhist practice. These teachings remain important to me, but I now understand them within a larger non-Buddhist framework.
At first that larger frame was primarily neo-Aristotelian: Buddhist practice is a means for promoting virtue, wisdom, and flourishing. By flourishing, I mean a life that is happy, psychologically rich, and praiseworthy, takes the well-being of others seriously, and is manifested in the multiple domains of relationships, accomplishments, aesthetics, mindful presence, meaning, wholeness, integrity, and resilience. Virtues are the intra- and inter-personal skills that make flourishing possible, and wisdom the faculty that allows us to balance conflicting moral and non-moral considerations. I’ve subsequently come to understand Buddhist and Aristotelean flourishing, wisdom, and virtue from within the even larger frame of Deweyan pragmatism. I want to briefly describe this larger frame and what it implies for Buddhist practice.
Aristotle and Dewey were both naturalists. Their view of human values and purposes did not rely on beliefs concerning the existence (or nonexistence) of a God or gods, an afterlife, rebirth, and anything supernatural. They were also realistic about the upper limits of human improvement. Aristotle and Dewey did not believe in the possibility of some magical apotheosis that could turn us into transcendent (and trans-human) perfect beings. We may be able to flourish better than we currently do, and we may be able to become wiser and more virtuous than we currently are, but we cannot become perfectly wise or perfectly virtuous. Their frameworks rule out the possibilities of the traditional Buddhist goals of perfect enlightenment or rebirth in some better afterlife. What they do not rule out is the possibility of increased compassion, equanimity, lovingkindness, sympathetic joy, generosity, non-harming, and mindfulness.
Dewey and Aristotle part company over Aristotle’s essentialist views on truth, human nature, and ethics. Unlike Aristotle, Dewey thinks beliefs are neither “true” nor “untrue” but only more or less adequate for given purposes. We work to justify our beliefs with evidence, but can never collect all the evidence we and posterity might possibly uncover over many lifetimes, and so our beliefs can only be provisional at best—good enough for present purposes and more useful than competing hypotheses for those purposes—but open to revision as we encounter more evidence. For Deweyans, the search for better beliefs is always an open-ended process of continued inquiry.
Dewey believed that there is no such thing as an essential human nature but only the way we happen to have turned out given a particular train of genetic and social evolution and personal experience. Human nature may change over time given further genetic and/or social change. All we can say is what humans are like now and what the historical record says we were like in the past. Can we humans overcome our selfishness, competitiveness, tribalism, and aggressiveness in some ideal future? We can’t appeal to some essential human nature to answer that question. The answer can only be “who knows?” and maybe, “we shall see.” In this way, Deweyans share the Zen attitude of “not knowing.”
Morality is also contingent on social evolution. What was moral for honor, warrior, or frontier cultures is not what is moral for industrialized Western democratic cultures today. Aristotle, in his day, did not extend his esteem for the Athenian male aristocracy to women, slaves, or barbarians. As pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty suggested, moral growth occurs through acts of imagination that allow us to understand the perspectives of people we once thought of as “not like us.” As we consider their perspectives and take them into account, we often enrich our own.
We are currently in the midst of a set of transitions in moral values as we, as a society, rethink older values regarding premarital sex, sexual consent, marijuana use, gender roles, and the status of “outsider” racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and differently-abled groups. A good deal of today’s political turmoil is due to the conflict between those who have re-thought these older social values and those who wish to retain them as-is. Fundamentalists believe there is only one way to be moral and it never changes. Deweyans inquire into existing social values to discover whether they still do (or ever did) enhance human flourishing or whether they stand in need of revision given present social circumstances.
This is the larger context within which I now view the aims of Buddhist practice. Deweyan Buddhists are not Buddhist fundamentalists—things are never true just because the Buddha said them. Every Buddhist tenet is open to inquiry, and if our investigations lead us to different conclusions, so be it. Deweyans adopt Buddhist ideas when they enhance flourishing and modify them when they no longer do (if they ever did) given the evidence.
From this frame of reference, certain aspects of Buddhist dogma no longer make sense to me. For example, I don’t believe we ought to give up desire, full stop. Instead, we ought to aspire to right desire—wanting the things that genuinely enhance flourishing and wanting them in the right sort of way—not rigidly, compulsively, or obsessively. Similarly, I don’t believe we ought to eschew sensual pleasure. Sensual pleasures ought to be pursued ethically and shouldn’t crowd out or undermine our other goals and aspirations—but they do have an important role to play in our well-being. We also don’t have to dwell eternally in the present moment. While we are better off when we find a larger space in our lives for being present, and while we benefit from growth in our ability to be mindful and discerning regarding our thoughts, emotions, and desires, this still leaves plenty of room in our lives for planning for the future and learning from the past.
Finally, I don’t believe we ought let go of our attachments to loved ones or treat everyone with the same degree of love and compassion. It seems natural for us—and good for our flourishing—when we are partial to loved ones, are emotionally attached to our family and friends, and care more about them than we do distant neighbors, grocery clerks, insurance salespersons, or people we’ve never actually met. We can acknowledge all relationships are impermanent—that people eventually change, leave, or grow old and die—and still value how these relationships contribute to our flourishing. Buddhism is right in suggesting we can grow our good will, care, and concern for everyone, and that it’s possible to make a general level of good will our default attitude much of the time. Buddhism seems mistaken, however, in suggesting we ought to (and can) feel the exact same degree of emotional connection to (or disconnection from) everyone.
One thing we Deweyans think Buddhism does get right is its redefinition of human being as “interbeing.” We are deeply social animals who care about the well-being of our families and communities. Their well-being is an essential part of our own well-being. Post-Renaissance Western cultures have tended towards an excessive individualism at the expense of an appreciation of our deep embedding within families, societies, cultures, and ecosystems. We humans are also beings who are oriented toward the future in that we care about the future well-being of our family, society, culture, and planet. Dewey stressed that organisms couldn’t be understood in isolation, but only in the context of their relations and transactions with their natural and cultural environments as they creatively pursued solutions to problems in those relations and transactions as they arose.
It’s inevitable that as we experience more, read more, and learn more, we eventually come to see our older ideas in a newer light. This newer light isn’t something we deliberately seek out—it just “happens” along the way. Is it ever otherwise? It seems consistent, howewer, with the Buddhist teachings on non-self and impermanence—there’s no unchanging you or me, and no unchanging understanding of Buddhism.
Given this new “Deweyan” frame, I thought about changing the title of this blog from The Existential Buddhist to The Pragmatic Buddhist. When I started this blog I was more interested in existentialism—especially existential approaches to psychotherapy and phenomenology. Alas, there is already an existing approach to Buddhism called “Pragmatic Dharma”—one that has little or nothing to do (as far as I can tell) with the American pragmatist tradition of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Rorty. That makes calling myself a “pragmatic Buddhist” problematic—I would always need to qualify it by explaining “I’m not that kind of pragmatic Buddhist.” Changing domain names and redirecting older readers to it also seems more trouble than it’s worth. So, the name Existential Buddhist stays—new wine in an old bottle—and I will just put up with needing to explain “I’m not that kind of existential Buddhist.”
The quote below from Abraham Heschel is one test of a workable framework for a naturalistic philosophy of religion – one that doesn’t attempt to reduce religious experience to physicalism or escape into a supernatural realm, to connect with heightened state of experience. IMHO, Dewey meets this test.
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel
Hi Seth, we were conversing recently over on Amod’s blog. I hadn’t been following your blog, so I missed this post when it came out earlier, but perhaps you would still appreciate some comments that came to mind. You wrote:
The transitions you describe from your intra-Buddhist to neo-Aristotelian to Deweyan phases remind me a little of three of the levels of psychologist Robert Kegan’s constructive-development framework:
(1) socialized/traditionalist/3rd-order,
(2) self-authoring/modernist/4th-order, and
(3) self-transforming/postmodernist/5th-order.
Kegan’s is just another framework, not privileged over any other and not without its weaknesses, but I wonder how much you think it fits your relationship to Buddhist traditions, if you’re familiar with Kegan. Kegan was trying to point to structural changes in personal epistemology, which also seem to be part of what you’re saying: not just a change from one set of concepts or ideology to another, but a bigger and more systematized perspective on what came before.
I would note that Thich Nhat Hanh, for one, was ahead of you on many of these points—he said much of this years ago!
I wouldn’t attribute the bare deontological “ought to” to Buddhism in general. The bodhisattva ideal is to feel connected and compassionate to all, but it’s an orienting ideal, a “try to” instead an “ought to”. I would also distinguish, as Buddhist teachers have done, between what we can achieve in our minds and in the world: I can want to give everything to everyone in my mind while recognizing that I can’t really do it in the world, and I shouldn’t set arbitrary limitations on my mind at the start by thinking that I can’t do it even in my mind. It’s like the opposite of Master Yoda’s “Do or do not; there is no try”—in the bodhisattva mind (with whatever practices that support that mind) it’s all about the try. This is compatible with pragmatism, for example, Nicholas Rescher’s Ethical Idealism: An Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ideals (1987). As he wrote in “The Pragmatics of Betterment” (2013): “Three conclusions emerge: (1) that we can never secure categorical assurance that something we do with the aim of improving matters will actually succeed; (2) that we are nevertheless morally obligated to try for improvement; and (3) that in one somewhat ironic regard we are bound to succeed, because even merely by trying for improvement we make the world [or at least our own minds!] a better place than it otherwise would be.” More on Rescher in a moment.
I would say more here about the change that comes with learning versus change in general. Does the growth of our knowledge and of our understanding of it—i.e. epistemological development—always just happen along the way? Perhaps it does with a sufficiently facilitating environment. As with the bodhisattva ideal, it wouldn’t hurt to be taught about the ideal of epistemological development at an early age (before the end of formal education) so that it can consciously guide personal and collective learning.
I wonder how many personal and social problems are due in part to not having learned and practiced such an ideal? Dewey pointed to this, and libraries full of other research could be cited. In keeping with the pragmatist theme of this post, I would point to Nicholas Rescher as another pragmatist philosopher who has written many relevant works on epistemological development: for example, his books Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (2001), Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2003), Epistemetrics (2006), Philosophical Dialectics: An Essay on Metaphilosophy (2006), Dialectics: A Classical Approach to Inquiry (2007), and Pragmatism: the restoration of its scientific roots (2012). There is a lot of overlap between his books, so it’s not necessary to read them all!
Welcome, Nathan, to this site! I am afraid I haven’t read Kegan or Rescher, so I can’t comment on them. Rescher looks interesting, but he will have to wait until I get through my other reading projects. (Right now one of my philosophy reading groups is about to plow through all 36 of the Platonic Dialogues, while the other is still finishing-up a re-reading of Taylor’s A Secular Age.) Which of his books should I start with first?
I resonate with all your comments here. And I agree it’s best not to read the Budddhist tradition as deontological but as “try to,” or better yet, “discover what’s possible.” On the other hand, there may be something conterproductive in urging people to levels of even-handed universal compassion that are really unattainable. I am more attracted to Confucius’s and Mencius’s view that benevolence (仁）starts within the matrix of the family and that we gradually learn to extend it outwards, but that it has a natural limit and we always ought to expect greater attachment to family/loved ones than to insurance salesmen and people across the world we’ve never met. To try to give up special attachments so that one loves everyone the same is a bit like Bernard Williams famous quip of “one thought to many” when trying to decide whether to save one’s wife from drowning or a stranger. I think this is the point I am trying to make here–try to deepen your humanity, not transcend it.
I also agree I overstated things a bit when I wrote “this newer light isn’t something we deliberately seek out—it just ‘happens’ along the way. Is it ever otherwise?” Maybe a better way to write it is that new understandings (almost inevitably) arise out of the project of open inquiry, but that we can’t fortell what those new understandings might be. We maybe only fully appreciate them in retrospect, after they have occured.
Rescher’s Pragmatics of Betterment, by the way, reminds me of Stephen Batchelor’s “ethics of uncertainty,” that we are obligated to try to try improve the world even though we can never predict the outcomes, good and bad, of anything we do with any certainty.
It is always good hearing from you!
Thanks for the kind response! On Rescher: I would recommend reading only what looks most relevant to your own projects. Since you’re very interested in pragmatism, I would guess that his Pragmatism: The Restoration of Its Scientific Roots (2012) would be interesting and useful even though it would cover some familiar territory. It’s a fast read, and I would even say it’s a must-read for any self-identified pragmatist. I probably should have mentioned just that book and not the others.
I see the reasonableness of your doubts about the bodhisattva ideal, and I agree that it is about deepening one’s humanity, not transcending it—about adding devotion to others and not subtracting it. The way you described “Confucius’s and Mencius’s view that benevolence starts within the matrix of the family and that we gradually learn to extend it outwards” seems to me to describe people who grow up in Confucian or Mencian families! But for a person who grows up in a Buddhist family where the bodhisattva ideal is taught and practiced from day one, could the different cultural expectations produce a different ethical orientation in the person? I would guess so; I didn’t grow up in a Buddhist family, but I grew up in a liberal Christian family where ethical idealism was “in the water” so to speak, so perhaps that’s why I’m very comfortable with the bodhisattva ideal and indeed I would feel strange to be asked to give it up. I was eager to give up the family religion when I reached maturity, but perhaps it was, in part, my unwillingness to give up my deeply inculcated ethical idealism that drew me to Soto Zen. I am open to the possibility that my biological heredity intertwined with my cultural heredity and my own reasoning all condition which ethical ideals feel natural to me, and the bodhisattva ideal feels natural. There is also the fact that I am an unmarried only-child, so I have little “family matrix” remaining—there is not much left for me to devote myself to other than all beings! In conclusion: many factors contribute to one’s personal ethical ideals and to what degree one is inclined toward and capable of unbiased affection for all others. I’m glad the bodhisattva ideal is available for those of us who want it.
An interesting reading. One of ways in which Buddhism as a pragmatic cultivation of goodness in the world can be seen in the life and thoughts of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar who studied with Dewey. He fought for the civil and political rights of India’s marginalised communities and eventually wrote the constitution of India.
He went back to India’s ancient religion, Buddhism, seeing the possibility of realising liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity, and justice in the teachings of the Buddha.
Thanks for pointing this out, Mangesh. I am reading Scott Stroud’s The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoic of Reconstruction (Univerity of Chicago Press, 2023) right now. It is an excellent account.