Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. New York: Farrar Stauss and Giroux, 2004.
There seemed something very grand about the concept of freedom, about the individual's liberation from the constraints of traditional society, and his frely chosen right to movement, occupation, speech, religious belief and property. It was why an Indian of my background could not easily challenge the idea that the modern nation state, absolute and impersonal, could be the liberator of the new individual from his old chains.
Indeed, to look at the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe was mainly to admire intellectuals like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Marx who had upheld the potential of the human being to master circumstances instead of being a slave to them [...]
but
Marx had ideological reasons to fear what endlessly renewed needs of the individual might lead to. He thought that "modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells".
But even Adam Smith, the proponent of free trade, had wondered early in his life if power and wealth, "those great objects of human desire", can make one immune to "anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death". He considered the idea that happiness could be secured through desiring more things than one needs a deception and had eventually concluded that it is "well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
[...]
Smith's influential vision of human growth and competition, which had been transformed into the ideology of imperial conquest, and which still drives much of international politics, had not gone uncontested in Europe. Its greatest critic was Rousseau, who I knew only as the intellectual father of the totalitarian state. He had despaired of the lack of virtue in a society built upon unfettered pursuit of desire. For him the state was necessary precisely to regulate this emerging society of commerce and money, of envy and inequality, in which he thought individuals would be hostile strangers to each other.
pp.322-224
Trapped in its subjectivity, the self recognized each image of the world as something to be made use of or exploited. This is how it entered into a purely instrumental relationship with nature as well as with other human beings, whose subjectivity it did not acknowledge. In pursuit of its desires, it reduced everything in the world to the level of "things", which were either an aid or a hindrance to the fulfilment of desire. The occasional fulfilment of desire strengthened the belief that one was a self, distinct from others; and such a belief fixed one further into the grid of such emotions as greed, hatred and anger.
The Buddha tried to reverse this process by advocating a form of mental vigilance that undermined the individual's sense of a distinctive unchanging self with its own particular desires. To observe even temporarily the incessant play of desire and activity in the mind was to see how the self was a process rather than an unchanging substance; how it had no single identity across time; and when assumed to be unchanging could only cause suffering and frustration.
p.332
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
David Graeber — Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value
Graeber, David. Toward and Antropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
The debate between Parmenides and Hericlitus is at the source of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heraclitus, everything is always in flux, in a process of becoming, whereas for Parmenides, everythings is fixed and change is really an illusion. Parmenides won the argument in the Western tradition, leading to Pythagoras (math and science) and Plato (ideal forms). And in fact science could not have been created without the parmenidean moment because things have to be in some way fixed for us to be able to understand them, to seize them with our intelligence.
p. 50
Hegel's dialectic as an attempt to integrate these two poles into a process. Marx criticises this dialectic because Hegel starts from abstract concepts instead of lived human experience.
p. 57
(The Buddha's main insight was also, that things and individuals are "aggregates" coming together and then falling apart. Perhaps he also had this intuition of an articulation between movement or process and unity, but he put it as "emptiness is form, and form is emptiness" — meaning perhaps that the self and individual things do exist at some level, at least in how we apprehend the world, but they are also always in a process of becoming that undoes them again, revealing their interconnectedness to all the other causes and conditions. But in Buddhism, enlightenment doesn't come with a logical, dialectic resolution of the emptiness/form duality, but with the lived experience of this ineffable dual nature of reality, which is neither "either, or" or "both" or "neither, nor". It is beyond reason: this paradoxical "further shore" of liberation.)
Outlining Roy Bhaskar's "critical realist" approach to ontology:
1. Realism. Bhaskar argues for a "transcendental realism": that is, rather than limiting reality to what can be observed by the senses, one must ask instead "what would have to be the case" in ordr to explain what we do experience. In particular, he seeks to explain "why are scientific experiments possible?," and also, at the same time "why are scientific experiments necessary?"
2. Potentiality. His conclusion: while our experiences are of the events in the real world, reality is not limited to what we can experience ("the empirical"), or even, to the sum total of events that can be said to have taken place ("the actual"). Rather, Bhaskar proposes a third level ("the real"). To understand it, one must also take account of "powers" — that is, define things in part in terms of their potentials or capacities. Science largely proceeds by hypothesizing what "mechanisms" must exist in order to explain such powers, and then by looking for them. The search is probably endless, because there are always deeper and more fundamental levels (i.e. from atoms to electrons, electrons to quarks, and so on), but the fact that there's no end to the pursuit does not mean reality doesn't exist; rather, it simply means one will never be able to understand it completely.
3. Freedom. Reality can be divided into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be entirely reduced to physics, so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below; it would be impossible even to talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical or biological processes.
4. Open Systems. Another element of indeterminacy comes from the fact that real-world events occur in "open systems"; that is, there are always different sorts of mechanisms, derived from different emergent strata of realit, at play in any one of them. As a result, one can never predict precisely how any real-world event will turn out. This is why scientific experiements are necessary: experiment are ways of creating temporary "closed systems" in which the effects of all other mechanisms are, as far as possible, nullified, so that one can actually examine a single mechanism in action.
5. Tendencies. As a result, it is better not to refer to unbreakable scientific "laws" but rather to "tendencies," which interact in unpredictable ways. Of course, the higher the emergent strata one is dealing with, the less predictable things become, the involvement of human beings of course being the most unpredictable factor of all.
pp. 52-53
About Piaget's use of Gödel:
Here Piaget invokes the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who managed to show that no logical system (such as, say, mathematics) could demonstrate its own internal consistency; in order to do so, on has to generate a more sophisticated, higher level that presumes it. Since that level will not be able to demonstrate its own principles either, one then has to go on to generate another level after that, and so on ad infinitum.
p. 61
About Lacan's mirror stage:
A similar distinction between action and consciousness is played out in Jacques Lacan's notion of the "mirror phase" in children's development (1977). Infants, he writes, are unaware of the precise boundaries between themselves and the world around them. Little more than disorganized bundles of drives and motivations, they have no coherent sense of self. In part this is because they lack any single object on which to fix one. Hence Lacan's "mirror phase," which begins when the child first comes face to face with some external image of her own self, which serves as the imaginary totality around which a sense of that self can be constructed. Nor is this a one-time event. The ego is, for Lacan, awlays an imaginary construct: in everyday life and everyday experience, one remains a conflicting multiplicity of thoughts, libidinal drives, and unconscious impulses. Acting self and imaginary unity never cease to stand opposed.
p.97
Very close to Buddhist understanding of the self. Except that for the Buddhist the imaginary unity we spontaneously create, our ego, is a hindrance to liberation, not the device with which to build up and structure one's healthy individual psyche.
About Mauss's socialism:
[...] Mauss was not trying to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interests and altruism, freedow and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain the degree to which it had failed to do so; to explain why so many people — and particularly, so many of the less powerful and priviledged members of society — found its logic morally repugnant. Why for example, institutions that insisted on the strict separability of producers and their products offended against common intuitions of justice, the moral "bedrock," as he puts it, of our own — as of any — society.
p.162
All in all, Mauss' work complements Marx because it represents the other side of socialism. Marx's work consists of a brilliant and sustained critique of capitalism; but as Mauss himself observed, he carefully avoided speculating about what a more just society would be like. Mauss' instincts were quite the opposite: he was much less interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism than in trying to understand — and create — something that might stand outside it.
p.163
Mauss was into cooperatives, grassroots stuff...
Here is a good critical review by Bruce Edmonds:
http://scive.blogspot.ca/2013/04/a-review-of-david-graebers-towards-and.html
Edmonds boils down Graber's argument to:
And here is a good synthesis by conceptual artist Sal Randolph:
Graeber’s key insight is to see the elusive relationship between values and valuable objects as one based on time. And what mediates this relationship is action. We may think of values as being part of the present, but really they are all about the future. They are potentials, templates for new action. They state in advance what we care about and how we intend to behave. Valuables, on the other hand, are values in the past tense. They represent or show the effects of actions that have already happened, actions which evoke or were based on values. We can’t literally see these values when we look at the object, instead they exist in a field of associations, a cloud of knowledge and fantasy. They are projections; histories, stories, names, things we know or imagine. As Graeber puts it: “when one recognizes value in an object, one becomes a sort of bridge across time. That is, one recognizes not only the existence of a history of past desires and intentions that have given shape to the present form of the object, but that history extends itself through one’s own desires, wishes, and intentions, newly mobilized in that very act of recognition.” Valuables have a kind of secondary agency because they are able, through the values they collect around themselves, to inspire action.
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uselessness-refusal-art-and-money-encounters-david-graebers-towards-anthropological-theory-value
I think the main point of this book is that the most important (valuable) thing that people do is to "create" other people — socialized beings. This is where the value is in a given society, because that is what people expend the most time and energy doing: creatively fashioning other people and, thereby, contributing to shape the structure of society itself.
The debate between Parmenides and Hericlitus is at the source of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heraclitus, everything is always in flux, in a process of becoming, whereas for Parmenides, everythings is fixed and change is really an illusion. Parmenides won the argument in the Western tradition, leading to Pythagoras (math and science) and Plato (ideal forms). And in fact science could not have been created without the parmenidean moment because things have to be in some way fixed for us to be able to understand them, to seize them with our intelligence.
p. 50
Hegel's dialectic as an attempt to integrate these two poles into a process. Marx criticises this dialectic because Hegel starts from abstract concepts instead of lived human experience.
p. 57
(The Buddha's main insight was also, that things and individuals are "aggregates" coming together and then falling apart. Perhaps he also had this intuition of an articulation between movement or process and unity, but he put it as "emptiness is form, and form is emptiness" — meaning perhaps that the self and individual things do exist at some level, at least in how we apprehend the world, but they are also always in a process of becoming that undoes them again, revealing their interconnectedness to all the other causes and conditions. But in Buddhism, enlightenment doesn't come with a logical, dialectic resolution of the emptiness/form duality, but with the lived experience of this ineffable dual nature of reality, which is neither "either, or" or "both" or "neither, nor". It is beyond reason: this paradoxical "further shore" of liberation.)
Outlining Roy Bhaskar's "critical realist" approach to ontology:
1. Realism. Bhaskar argues for a "transcendental realism": that is, rather than limiting reality to what can be observed by the senses, one must ask instead "what would have to be the case" in ordr to explain what we do experience. In particular, he seeks to explain "why are scientific experiments possible?," and also, at the same time "why are scientific experiments necessary?"
2. Potentiality. His conclusion: while our experiences are of the events in the real world, reality is not limited to what we can experience ("the empirical"), or even, to the sum total of events that can be said to have taken place ("the actual"). Rather, Bhaskar proposes a third level ("the real"). To understand it, one must also take account of "powers" — that is, define things in part in terms of their potentials or capacities. Science largely proceeds by hypothesizing what "mechanisms" must exist in order to explain such powers, and then by looking for them. The search is probably endless, because there are always deeper and more fundamental levels (i.e. from atoms to electrons, electrons to quarks, and so on), but the fact that there's no end to the pursuit does not mean reality doesn't exist; rather, it simply means one will never be able to understand it completely.
3. Freedom. Reality can be divided into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be entirely reduced to physics, so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below; it would be impossible even to talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical or biological processes.
4. Open Systems. Another element of indeterminacy comes from the fact that real-world events occur in "open systems"; that is, there are always different sorts of mechanisms, derived from different emergent strata of realit, at play in any one of them. As a result, one can never predict precisely how any real-world event will turn out. This is why scientific experiements are necessary: experiment are ways of creating temporary "closed systems" in which the effects of all other mechanisms are, as far as possible, nullified, so that one can actually examine a single mechanism in action.
5. Tendencies. As a result, it is better not to refer to unbreakable scientific "laws" but rather to "tendencies," which interact in unpredictable ways. Of course, the higher the emergent strata one is dealing with, the less predictable things become, the involvement of human beings of course being the most unpredictable factor of all.
pp. 52-53
About Piaget's use of Gödel:
Here Piaget invokes the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who managed to show that no logical system (such as, say, mathematics) could demonstrate its own internal consistency; in order to do so, on has to generate a more sophisticated, higher level that presumes it. Since that level will not be able to demonstrate its own principles either, one then has to go on to generate another level after that, and so on ad infinitum.
p. 61
About Lacan's mirror stage:
A similar distinction between action and consciousness is played out in Jacques Lacan's notion of the "mirror phase" in children's development (1977). Infants, he writes, are unaware of the precise boundaries between themselves and the world around them. Little more than disorganized bundles of drives and motivations, they have no coherent sense of self. In part this is because they lack any single object on which to fix one. Hence Lacan's "mirror phase," which begins when the child first comes face to face with some external image of her own self, which serves as the imaginary totality around which a sense of that self can be constructed. Nor is this a one-time event. The ego is, for Lacan, awlays an imaginary construct: in everyday life and everyday experience, one remains a conflicting multiplicity of thoughts, libidinal drives, and unconscious impulses. Acting self and imaginary unity never cease to stand opposed.
p.97
Very close to Buddhist understanding of the self. Except that for the Buddhist the imaginary unity we spontaneously create, our ego, is a hindrance to liberation, not the device with which to build up and structure one's healthy individual psyche.
About Mauss's socialism:
[...] Mauss was not trying to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interests and altruism, freedow and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain the degree to which it had failed to do so; to explain why so many people — and particularly, so many of the less powerful and priviledged members of society — found its logic morally repugnant. Why for example, institutions that insisted on the strict separability of producers and their products offended against common intuitions of justice, the moral "bedrock," as he puts it, of our own — as of any — society.
p.162
All in all, Mauss' work complements Marx because it represents the other side of socialism. Marx's work consists of a brilliant and sustained critique of capitalism; but as Mauss himself observed, he carefully avoided speculating about what a more just society would be like. Mauss' instincts were quite the opposite: he was much less interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism than in trying to understand — and create — something that might stand outside it.
p.163
Mauss was into cooperatives, grassroots stuff...
Here is a good critical review by Bruce Edmonds:
http://scive.blogspot.ca/2013/04/a-review-of-david-graebers-towards-and.html
Edmonds boils down Graber's argument to:
- The most important 'product' of most societies are the people it produces
- Individuals' important actions mostly aim at producing their social structures
- It is the actions of individuals that are the key rather than any products
- Value is a socially developed way of comparing important actions
- Sometimes action is fetishised into objects
- Each society achieves this in different ways which change over time
And here is a good synthesis by conceptual artist Sal Randolph:
Graeber’s key insight is to see the elusive relationship between values and valuable objects as one based on time. And what mediates this relationship is action. We may think of values as being part of the present, but really they are all about the future. They are potentials, templates for new action. They state in advance what we care about and how we intend to behave. Valuables, on the other hand, are values in the past tense. They represent or show the effects of actions that have already happened, actions which evoke or were based on values. We can’t literally see these values when we look at the object, instead they exist in a field of associations, a cloud of knowledge and fantasy. They are projections; histories, stories, names, things we know or imagine. As Graeber puts it: “when one recognizes value in an object, one becomes a sort of bridge across time. That is, one recognizes not only the existence of a history of past desires and intentions that have given shape to the present form of the object, but that history extends itself through one’s own desires, wishes, and intentions, newly mobilized in that very act of recognition.” Valuables have a kind of secondary agency because they are able, through the values they collect around themselves, to inspire action.
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uselessness-refusal-art-and-money-encounters-david-graebers-towards-anthropological-theory-value
I think the main point of this book is that the most important (valuable) thing that people do is to "create" other people — socialized beings. This is where the value is in a given society, because that is what people expend the most time and energy doing: creatively fashioning other people and, thereby, contributing to shape the structure of society itself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)