A Brief Meditation on Disputation

This is certainly not brief and it meanders, but I'm simply trying to get some scattered thoughts down, so bear with me:

I read and I think and I recognize a pattern in the ethics materials that I've been mulling over lately. In brief, I've been considering the Mahabharata (ever since the first reading, the text that I will always return to), the Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Martha Nussbaum's strategies for reading literature as ethically relevant, and those few notes from Wislawa Szymborska that I've linked elsewhere about writing poetry.

Szymborska, in his notes to aspiring poets, wrote about the difference between prose and poetry; in prose, something happens, something takes place. Poetry, on the other hand, is about observing and discovering and making something happen from the words, not from action. This is the appreciation of things in themselves, and it's one of the reasons poetry can (and should) be discussed and even argued about, in order to find out how it can compel a response from us without forcing action. I'll argue with anyone, endlessly and passionately, that the line "the woods are lovely, dark and deep" in Frost's "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" is best taken as an adjective and two modifying adverbs rather than three consecutive adjectives because I think that's how the poem best acquits itself to us. That's how the description becomes something more than flat description - it's how something happens.

Aristotle posed the essential ethical question, how should one live a good life? And as I've been reading and ruminating on and arguing about some of these texts, I keep coming back to that framing question as a way of reading and, more importantly, as a way of cultivation. In literature, something happens as well, and great literature can be read as a narrative or simply for the flavor of the language, the descriptions that evoke and are powerful as poetry. This is why we have to re-read, so that we can walk familiar paths again and savor all of the details that may have missed us when we rushed through the first (or second, or third, etc) time. We can also embody the story, internalize the narrative and let it work on us as thinking, feeling individuals. No matter how craven the individual, anyone can remember some kind of story with a moral from their childhood or some piece of literature or other art that made them aware of something beyond themselves. That's what great art does - it removes us from our own experience and gives us an experience we did not (or could not) otherwise have. And that's why it's so vital to be exposed to many types of art, to be granted the full range of human experience that can only be captured by artists in various forms, prismatic experiences of aesthetic beauty.

But even as we wax rhapsodic about aesthetics, the ethical is alongside. There's been a lot of discussion in current events about empathy, especially with regards to the current Supreme Court vacancy, but what does empathy mean and how can we cultivate it? I would always make the argument that we can develop empathy not only through our own direct experience but also through aesthetic experience. When we read literature and travel alongside a character, we can gain insight into the way other people think and how they make decisions, and see how those decisions have consequences for them and for people around them. When we read, say, Dumas' "Count of Monte Cristo", and experience the pain of his loss and his steely resolve, we have access to a situation that most of us will (hopefully) never have to face. And when, after traveling with him and his pain and resolve for a time, we experience his vindication, that vindication can be ours as well. And when he shows mercy and compassion, we can experience that too and reflect on why it is the right (or wrong) choice.

This is what leads back to Aristotle's question, because the question of how to live a good life makes us reflect on how we can make good decisions. Aristotle's question often leads us to virtue ethics, the cultivation of personal virtues which guide us in life rather than dealing with situational ethics, asking about the right decision in relation to problems as they come up. I'm a virtue ethicist myself, so I'm very sympathetic to the way Nussbaum brings Aristotle's question into a relationship with Victorian and modern literature. Yet I think there's something missing as well, because there's always been something that bothered me about virtue ethics. It's all well and good to cultivate the virtues, but what is the ultimate goal? Can we become perfected? What does perfection look like? Or are we just struggling in a world that's hostile and does not permit perfection?

Now here's where I take a few conceptual leaps to get to what I really think is at stake here: I think that at least one model of perfection offered by virtue ethics most closely corresponds to a type of art-less sagely character that is most commonly found in Taoist, Zen, and Hindu sources. It's not a type of mysticism (although it is often tied to that), but instead represents a perfection of human ways of acting in the world such that actions happen spontaneously, not willed, but in perfect proportion to the surrounding world. These actions (reactions might be a better word) reflect the situation at hand rather than trying to impose a type of interpretation that complicates circumstances. The problem is that these sagely characters go against everything we try to do in the world, which is interpret and judge and be proactive in our actions.

So what, then, are we to do about this whole situation? The Zhuangzi gives us one approach: deny distinctions, and cultivate a mirror-like response to the world. We become sage-like when we deny everything that encourages us to make judgements. Zhuangzi gets his point across by constantly undercutting our attempts to pin him down to a philosophy in his eponymous text, and instead flits across character identities, strange parables and iconoclastic behaviors. Each episode is beautiful and self-contained in itself, but simultaneously interlocks with and dissolves the meaning of other episodes in the text. I'm not really sure how we can take the text in the end, or even if a kind of discursive understanding is possible. I think a type of aesthetic understanding is possible, and that people can share in that kind of understanding, but I'm not sure whether that can be transmitted verbally.

I think the Mahabharata offers another way of getting to this sage-like position, and this is the one that I find more interesting on a personal level. I think that the Mahabharata uses some similar tactics to the Zhuangzi in terms of constantly undercutting attempts to settle on one teleology for the text, but on a much larger scale. It's fascinating because anyone who I talk to about the text has a different idea of what constitutes "the good life" in the Mahabharata, and each of them can be persuasively argued. Yet in the very process of arguing about these different notions, new vantage points open up, and I come away with a deeper understanding of how episodes in the text can be interlinked, how different proclamations can be considered authoritative, etc. And so the text invites me back into it, to discover things that I may have overlooked before, and to walk its paths again.

Yet isn't this a type of ethical practice that follows from what I described above? In this case, with a mammoth text which invites interpretations and then objects to them with such seeming glee, can there be anything but disputation? I'm not sure if there can be, but I do think that the disputation is enough for ethical work. This applies to other texts as well, because as I've said above, we can argue about poetry and its affect as easily as about narrative and its discursive value. But disputation requires a re-engagement with arguments and understandings, and in the process, it makes us question our distinctions and judgments. It forces us to embrace other points of view and figure out how to agree or disagree with them. Strangely enough, this process doesn't lead to a sort of facile relativism, since we can know what a good or a bad interpretation is, but instead aids us in understanding what it means to make judgments and interpretations. Whether that process leads us to Zhuangzi's end, that we reject all such judgments, or whether it leads us to a strong, legalistic type of virtue ethic, I'm not sure. And that leads to an interesting question, which is whether we have to choose virtues or whether we can follow an amalgam of them and trust that they lead us towards some sort of human perfection.

Authority

I've been thinking a lot about what we consider authoritative in terms of what we believe, whom we believe, and how that affects the way we live in the world. After a recent post on my other blog regarding the arguments of the anti-theists, a friend commented:

Do they have to believe in the narratives, to get the results of believing? In other words, regardless of the truth of the stories, do people have to think they are true to be good people?

This has interesting parallels with Socrates's refutation of Divine Command Theory. Does God command things because they are right, or are they right because God commands them? In short summary, Socrates argues that to accept that they are right simply because God commands them, makes for a very limited ethical viewpoint that is not particularly useful. I would agree, and draw my parallel here: people should act morally from a logical, rational viewpoint, and not because of a religious narrative or divine command.

Rather than put an academic argument in the comments there, I wanted to respond here. These are my thoughts (written to my friend) on the matter:

There are levels of belief. I could give you the ten commandments (or any religious ethical text) and you could use it for a guide for living a good life regardless of whether you believe it is divinely inspired ("thou shalt honor no god before me" might be a difficult commandment to follow in a secular mode, but you get the idea). You have to believe in its utility as a guide for your life, but as far as inspiration, it depends on how much you can reconcile your own beliefs with the stories about a code's origins.

The only problem I'd have with your second point and your conclusion is that you're assuming that faith is incompatible with rational thought. We all have first principles from which we derive our arguments, and I would argue that those first principles are no different for science than they are for faith. The content is obviously different, but logical principles remain sound regardless of how you apply them. In other words, A=B, B=C, therefore A=C is used no differently by the devout than by the secular. As far as our daily actions go, we reason from our principles in this way, so to claim that a "logical, rational viewpoint" is incommensurate with "religious narrative or divine command" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Some of the greatest works of philosophical logic (Aquinas, Augustine, Sankara, Nagarjuna, etc) have been written based on religious first principles or a model of the world in which the divine is capable of giving us commands. Does that invalidate their arguments?

As a final point regarding narrative, I'd ask you what your distinction is between, say, someone who follows the moral teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita and someone who follows Ayn Rand's objectivism. In either case, you have a text that you think contains truths that are useful and authoritative for you. You think that the person who wrote the texts can claim authority that compels you to listen to them. You can claim that Ayn Rand was an actual person (if you want to deny the possibility of divine inspiration), but then I would ask why Ayn Rand, someone you've never met, has any authority in your eyes. If you answer that the arguments contained in the text are compelling and convincing for you, I would then say that the Bhagavad-Gita doesn't claim that you should listen to it only because it was divinely inspired, but because it gives you a model for the way the world works and a method for living ethically within that world. Just because the first principle is karma and not self-interest doesn't make it a less useful ethical model. I would argue that you have to prove that belief in karma is either a) false, or b) harmful, in order to deny it as a way to live your life in orientation to the divine.

Aporetic philosophy

More on this to come, but here's the germ for an interesting post:

Speaking of Aristotle,
"An aporetic philosopher is a philosopher who supposes that puzzle-stating and puzzle-solving form the heart of philosophical activity...detailed and diverse problems present themselves to a philosophical mind, and the philosopher's principle task, or perhaps his sole task, is to solve these problems - or to dissolve them."
-from Jonathan Barnes' article in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle on "Life and Works", pg 23.

This is a non-systematic way of doing philosophy, and any expectation of theorizing or systematizing would be pointless. I'm not sure how much I agree with this; one of the central tenets of my study of religious ethics is that ethics is more than problems which need solutions, but instead is a way of living life which provides answers as they are needed. Yet it's an interesting model of philosophy.

As I said, more to come as I have a chance to think about this a bit more.

अस्त्युत्तरस्यां दिशि देवतात्मा हिमालयो नाम नगाधिराजः ।
पूर्वापारौ वारिनिधी विगाहय स्थितः पृथिव्या इव मानदण्डः ।।
Kalidasa, Kumarasambhava 1.1

Kinetic Energy

I was watching the Discovery Channel last night and they had that show on that uses the super slo-mo cameras to record interesting things and show how physics works in some odd situations. Long story short, they had a kendo practitioner on slicing through various meaty things with a katana. It was amazing how easily the effortlessly the blade moved through even pork shoulders, showing no slowdown even through thick bone. I've done a bit of reading into the techniques used in forging katanas, especially the careful balance between softer metal which makes up the core of the blade and the harder, more brittle material that comprises the blade. In order to maximize energy transfer and prevent shattering, while also ensuring a strong cutting surface, both need to be proportional. The New Yorker had an article a few weeks ago in the food issue about a modern knife forger who has attempted to integrate some of the elements of the Japanese style of forging into his kitchen knives (although truthfully we still don't understand all of the metallurgical principles that goes into the traditional Japanese forging techniques).

Yet what I thought was most interesting was the explanation from the swordsman, who was talking about energy transfer in what sounded like martial arts terms, and how those tenets were even more apparent in his strikes. The small amount of kendo that I have studied deals with an entire system of principles for combat which go far beyond the physical. Energy (and I'm purposely being vague here) is transferred not only through the blade and the strike itself, but also through other means of control. One of the key principles of kendo sparring is controlling the center line. When I trained, I was always told that the blade should come out in a straight line from a point between the groin and the belly button, at a specific angle to the body but without inclining the blade to the left or right. When sparring, we were supposed to make subtle movements to disrupt that center line, with the goal of dispelling the opponent's focus and energy, kinetic and otherwise, for long enough to move in for a strike. With katanas, it was easy to see how quickly a small loss of focus could open you up to a fatal strike.

The hosts of the show, however, interpreted this short bit of discussion about energy as kinetic energy transfer, showing kinetic transfer with techniques like the one-inch punch, etc. Biokinetically, this makes sense...at karate I think a lot about how to generate power through precise muscle control (mass is not particularly variable, but speed can be trained). But because more often than not there are not a lot of other high-level students, we don't get to explore the other side in practice, other types of energy transfer which were integral to the original martial arts systems. Energy transfer and redirection is a part of the techniques that I've studied, and re-applying those principles of transfer to earlier techniques has been enormously productive. Yet even kinetic energy is not directionless in my experience. In my religious studies work, I think a lot about intention and interpretation, and I think similar ideas apply to physical praxis, especially somewhat ritualized practices such as kata. Not being a particularly large man, I'm aware of the importance of precision and target recognition. When sparring with students who are larger than me, and lower ranked, I have noticed that the haymaker is very popular; kinetically, this makes sense. Swinging the arm all the way around makes for a far more powerful strike. But they very rarely set up the strike well, which is equally important - anyone with a reasonable amount of experience can see a haymaker coming from a mile away and avoid or block it. And when that intention is clear, it's easy to provide distraction, dispelling that energy in a way that isn't physical alone. A short jab to certain muscle groups or nerves will stop or drop an opponent who has committed that much power...this isn't using force, it's using awareness. And I think that's what the hosts of the show missed. Physical kinetics is not the reason the one-inch punch works, at least not exclusively. There's a certain amount of intention and understanding that makes the physical act possible, and without understanding those causes, the understanding of the greater phenomenon is faulty.

These ruminations might have been because of reading Braudel recently; his plea for cooperation between the human sciences resonated with me. But without trying to get into a polemic, I think the same problems apply to a lot of the work I do. In martial arts, I think most students who stick with it and devote themselves to it come to an understanding, conscious or not, of other forces at work besides just the martial; the 'art' portion of the term is just as important, if not more so. And in my academic work, when I mention that I study religion, people want to talk about Islam or Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' or what have you (I'll reserve comment...). Yet none of those things come close to what I consider to be the real import of religious studies work, which is placing other systems of thought, other human endeavors alongside our own experience in order to foster dialogue. Once again, Braudel's emphasis on models reather than narratives was a breath of fresh air to me, even though he wrote the articles that comprised "On History" over half a century ago. A model is contructed from the various contributions of the human sciences in order to explain a phenomena, but it is always susceptible to revisions as more information and analysis becomes available. A historical narrative imposes on events and puts them into a framework that is not nearly as malleable, and that has repercussions. Even with narratives that aren't as extreme as nationalist explanations of history, it can trap us into making predictions based on a story rather than on the actual circumstances. This isn't to say that we can or should ignore narrativizing, because that's neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, models become narratives the moment we utilize them for anything beyong their component elements. But it does mean that we should question those narratives and be receptive to other explanations of events or phenomena.

From kinetic energy to Braudel in four paragraphs...if that doesn't demonstrate the way various forces are inherent in any phenomenon, requiring multiple levels of explanation, I don't know what does.

I've been watching the Daily Show and thinking about Mumbai.

I do religious studies for a variety of reasons, mainly because it's interesting. But what it does is push out into other related fields, right now ethics and history. I've been reading and grappling with Foucault (Archaeology of Knowledge) and Braudel (On History) and wondering about structures and discourses and statements, and more than that, of possibilities. Braudel and Foucault both open up new ways of looking at possibilities, for academic studies and otherwise. Foucault (at least in Archaeology) wants to create a metadiscourse, a discourse about discourses. And when we look at discourses, when we analyze statements, we find out what's possible for us to think, what's possible for us to study. Foucault fights against structures (for reasons I have to go back and re-explore), but does it in such a way that he opens up new modes of analysis, new tools for use. But enough about Foucault; he's one of the seminal thinkers for a reason, and I'd need to do a deeper look at his nuances to feel more comfortable talking about him.

Braudel is interesting because of the ways in which he is a structural thinker, but not in the traditional sense of the term. He's not bound by structures, but instead is invested in methods and undercurrents, not slave to individual events but attempting to master them by putting them in a much larger stream. But more than that is his plea for the human sciences to begin listening to each other, contributing to the greater understanding of humanity/culture/civilization. I'm unclear on this first reading whether Braudel agrees with Levi-Strauss in saying that mythology is a type of longue duree, but I think it's certainly worth taking those tools outside of the human sciences and into the humanities.

The point of all of this (besides getting ruminations off of my mind) is to say that the situation in Mumbai needs to be addressed differently. There's a huge historical and theological component here that isn't being addressed; I know that kind of commentary tends to come after some more facts have come out, but in this case it's being overshadowed by this whole Pakistan situation. Historically, there's a whole lot going on here and we're getting a lot of rhetoric about American views on terrorism and very little about India. The long history of Islam and Hindu relations deserves closer examination. The problem is that our American discourse is conditioned by 9/11 and, in many cases, Islamophobia, and that does a disservice to the uniquely Indian elements of the Mumbai attacks. I read comments about how India may have gotten word about these attacks days beforehand and not done anything about it, and I wonder why that's particularly relevant in this case. What matters now is how we move forward; terrorism is a long-standing element of history, as is inter-religious or inter-national violence. How have those elements manifested themselves in different ways throughout history and how have we dealt with them? How have they changed now, and how should we think about those changes?

In some sense, this is a larger ethical question. I skim around on the internet, highbrow and lowbrow, and I keep on running across people who refuse to acknowledge the point of view of anything besides their own familiar context. Secular or religious, Euro-American or otherwise, I wonder whether there is an obligation, a duty to try to put oneself in the position of another. I'm fascinated by literary ethics, the work of Martha Nussbaum but even the ethical content inherent in Eco or the Sanskrit literary philosophers. We are permeable, and especially in traumatic or emotionally wrenching situations we have the opportunity to reflect and ruminate. Perhaps because we don't track personal change on the internet as easily as we do in real life, we don't get to see those changes very often, but there is a lot of obstinence and talking past one another.

I read an article recently that said that we've become a post-modern society, that the European schools of postmodern thought had the last laugh in the end because of the ways in which modern discourse analyzes events and news. We ask what identity means, what McCain's claims that we don't actually know "the real Obama" meant, we deconstruct and are willing to deal with subtler claims and how those claims are made. Yet as often as those are used as critical tools, they are very rarely used in a comprehensive mode of critical thought, one which is then applied back on oneself. This is one of the debates I have with myself: I don't do theology in the traditional sense, I may study it as a discourse or anthropologically or historically or one of any number of other ways, but not as a normative field. Yet in religious ethics and semiotics, I think there is a normative aspect (leaving aside the fact that I would claim that there is ethical content in any field of study or worldview) (and yes I am conflating ethics and normativity here for the moment). Is it the place of such fields of study to actually compel us to change on a personal level, not just on the level of discourse? Should we develop tools of analysis which we then apply to ourselves outside of our studies? I'm not so blase as to think that is possible.

This is the first post, the third time I've tried to start one of these blogs. I want this to continue because I think that discourse needs a partner, many partners, whether they agree or disagree. We'll see what develops, and I would like to look back on this in a few years and laugh at the development of this space, tentative early gropings at Foucault and Braudel and vague ruminations on ethics.