Part Time Vegetarian
Monday July 19, 2010
Some fifteen years ago now, when I was in Indonesia, I was sitting on a tiny boat heading down the coast of a small island. The owner of the boat had thrown a line over the side which he was dragging behind the boat as it chugged southwards. Suddenly there was a tug on the line – a fish had bitten. It was a large fish, and it struggled like hell. And as I watched it struggle, I realised that I wanted to give up eating meat. It was as simple as that. When I wrote to my family to say I was coming home, I began with the words “Kill the fatted aubergine…” So began my life as a vegetarian.
My unease with the business of procuring flesh began much earlier. One summer, we went to stay with our relations in Scotland, and on one day – I must have been ten or eleven – we went fishing. I can remember sitting in a boat in the streaming rain as my cousin reeled in a fish and then killed it. I think I sobbed. This is not to say that I was an excessively sensitive child. I loved eating meat. But when brought face to face with the question of where the food I was eating came from, I was more uneasy.
More or less, since that time in Indonesia, I have been vegetarian. Not absolutely strict, but vegetarian all the same. But when I decided to come to China, I made the conscious choice that I would eat meat whilst I am here. Not, of course, all the time. In fact the way that it is more or less working out is that I am eating meat when I find myself a guest of other people, but when I order my own food, I try to avoid meat as much as possible. This is not quite as easy as back home. In the West, tofu and meat are like matter and anti-matter: it is as if, were they to be brought together on the same plate, they would automatically annihilate each other. In recognition of this fact, sensible restaurant owners and chefs avoid any mixing of the two in a single dish. But in China it is different. This evening, I ordered everyday home tofu (jiachang doufu 家常豆腐), but when it arrived it had strips of pork elegantly nestling amid the beany goodness.
How do I feel about this return to a meatier diet? From a lot of points of view, I simply prefer not to eat meat. But this is, as ever, a complex world in which there are all kinds of other things at stake. Given that I have neither the ability in Chinese nor the enthusiasm for enquiring about every last ingredient of what is placed before me, then it seems reasonable to order in good faith and to hope. Perhaps it could be said that I need more ethical rigour. But rigour is not the only thing in ethics, indeed I sometimes wonder if too much rigour is an unhelpful thing. Perhaps I need to be clearer about my principles, but my sense of ethics does not really work in terms of principles. I’m sure that when I return home at the end of the summer, I’ll revert to almost total vegetarianism. But for the time being, I have to say, that the jiachang doufu was pretty tasty…
Have your say! [6]
On the dangers of being too philosophical...
Sunday May 9, 2010
As many visitors to thinkBuddha.org may know, Middlesex University has decided to phase out its philosophy programme on the grounds that it is of no financial value. This, despite the fact that philosophy was the highest rated research subject at Middlesex – for what it is worth – in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (which, to those of you who are uninitiated, was the name given to the mildly demented bureaucratic procedure for judging the quality of university research outputs, now superseded by the arguably rather more demented Research Excellence Framework. But I digress…)
This is, perhaps, only the beginning. Now that the election here in the UK has come and gone, there is much talk of public spending cuts, and higher education will be in the firing line. The message, increasingly, is only those courses that can serve the interests of the business world will be the ones to survive. The tender-hearted amongst us (and, alas, I am one such sensitive soul) might protest that surely there is more to education than serving the interests of the business world. But this seems not to be the common view. Just over a year ago, I put this very question to a high-ranking university official who I chanced to meet. “I understand,” I said, “that universities are keen on forging links with business, but what happens when there are conflicts of interest, when pedagogical and intellectual demands conflict with the interests of the business concerned?”
He hesitated. “Well…” he said, “I think possible to get too philosophical about these kinds of questions.” Then he went on to explain that there never had been any such conflicts of interest at the institution with which he was involved. This, I suggested, struck me as more than a little odd. Surely there should be conflicts of interest in any such collaborations, and surely these conflicts were the kinds of things that demanded that we should get just a little bit philosophical about some of the issues involved.
But the moment had passed and the conversation moved on. One cannot, apparently, be too philosophical in the world of higher education. This is something that the philosophers at Middlesex have found out to their cost. And they will not be the last. All of which is bad for higher education. But philosophy itself has not – after all – always lived in the academy; and it may not necessarily flourish best in these circumstances. When I lived in Durham about a decade ago, there was a curious individual who two or three times a week used to set up a table and a couple of chairs on a bridge over the river Wear. On the table he placed a sign reading something like “Philosopher: Please talk to me (free of charge)”. I now regret that I never took him up on his offer. Who knows what I may have learned, what wisdom he may have been able to impart?
This is hardly a utopian vision; but perhaps in the coming years, on the bridges of our cities, we can look forward to a flowering of philosophers and sages, each setting up their stall, where those seeking genuine wisdom might come to debate the deeper questions of life’s mysteries and problems. At the very least, those who want to ask these kinds of questions might save on spiralling tuition fees, leaving the universities to go about their serenely unphilosophical work of serving the interests of the world of business whilst they themselves get on with asking the serious questions presented by human life.
For a petition to save philosophy at Middlesex go here.
Have your say! [10]
A Hedge of Roses: thoughts on ethics and aesthetics
Saturday April 24, 2010
A week or so ago, I made the final edits on an essay for a forthcoming collection on coffee and philosophy – two of my most persistent vices. The essay is a relatively light-hearted response to the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote the following stirring condemnation of idling around in coffee shops:
The café is a place of casual social intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One goes in without needing to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty. All because one does not want to say in one’s room. You know that all evils occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in our room… Here you are, each at your own little table with your cup and your glass. You relax completely to the point of not being obligated to anyone or anything; and it is because it is possible to go and relax in a café that one tolerates the horrors and injustices of a world without a soul. (Nine Talmudic Readings 111-112)
All of which is entertaining and interesting in equal measure. Anyway, if you want to read my response to this, you will have to look it up in the book when it is published, some time next year. But whilst I was writing this essay, I was reminded of what a peculiar book Levinas’s Nine Talmudic Readings
As is often the case with when I read Levinas, the image seems suggestive and powerful, even when I don’t read it in the same way, or would rather take it in another direction. Lifting this idea from the context in which Levinas discusses it (a context that, I confess, I do not fully understand, having cloth ears when it comes to religion, and having little understanding of the Talmud), I think it can be used to say something about the aesthetic dimensions of ethics.
Let me return to the image. A hedge of roses, first of all, is not a brick wall. It is perfectly possible hack or to push your way through, with relatively little effort, if you really want to. We might like to think that there is an impermeable barrier between ourselves and those acts of which we might disapprove, but the evidence is to the contrary: most of us, given the right conditions, are capable of fairly terrible things. Many of us may hold the conviction that we are not like other people who do terrible things; but I can’t help thinking that this conviction is unwarranted. At the very least, we must confess that simply don’t know how we might be capable of acting, given particular sets of conditions – a thought that should, I think, occasion a certain queasiness. So the first thing that this image does is, for me at least, it suggests that there is a kind of permeability between our everyday lives and those things that we might (and perhaps do) condemn in others.
Not only this, but the image is also one that suggests that when we cause suffering in others, we cannot help but cause some degree of suffering for ourselves – you cannot shove your way through a rose-bush without a few scratches. But, interestingly, it also suggests that these sufferings that we ourselves might experience may be relatively trivial – surface scratches – in comparison with the damage we might cause. It is a common idea in certain Buddhist circles that the so-called “law of karma” is a kind of cosmic eye-for-an-eye, and this kind of view is common elsewhere in everyday sayings such as “what goes around comes around”; but I can’t help thinking that moral consequence, insofar as there is such a thing, is a more complex thing than this; and the possibility that we may be able to come through doing terrible things with only a few scratches – even if it offends some lurking sense we might have of cosmic justice – is one that is worth reflecting on.
But it is perhaps the aesthetic dimension of the image that intrigues me the most. If the barrier between ourselves and those actions of which we may disapprove is permeable, and if the damage that we might sustain in breaching this barrier is potentially only trivial, then what holds us back? When I think of this image, I can’t help thinking that what holds us back may be, in part, a kind of aesthetic awareness, a dislike of the crassness of trampling upon the roses, and a desire to preserve beauty because, well, it is beautiful.
Have your say! [1]
Exacting ethics
Saturday March 20, 2010
Thoughts are strange things. They swim into your head, and sometimes they take up residence; but even once they have done so, it can be a time before you realise that they are there, or before you work out quite what kinds of thoughts they are or how they can be expressed.
I spent today at a one day festival of literature for small press publishers here in Leicester. It was a wonderful event, chatting to publishers and writers, hanging out with friends, attending readings, and giving a reading from my novel in the afternoon. Nevertheless, coming at the end of what has been a really busy few months, this evening when I arrived home, I slumped down in a beanbag by the radiator, incapable of doing anything much. Sensing that he was in the presence of kindred spirit, Bodhicattva the thinkBuddha cat came and hopped onto the beanbag next to me and fell asleep. And there we sat, doing nothing, me letting those thoughts swim to and fro, and Bodhicattva snoring ever so slightly, and letting out the occasional sigh of pleasure.
It was after sitting here like this for some time that the following thought surfaced, and once it surfaced I realised that it has been knocking around for some time, in one fashion or another. I’m not sure, just at the moment, if it is a thought worth pursuing. I’m tired out, and incapable of thinking very much. Perhaps tomorrow I will decide that this is a thought to be scrapped, and will find myself wondering why I found it so compelling the day before. At the moment, however, the thought seems worth noting down.
It is this: that many of the ways in which we talk and think about ethics are simply too exacting. As if we can never do enough. As if we will always fall short. As if ethics is a business of constant struggle, without any end in sight. I may just be tired. But at the moment, I really can’t be doing with all that constant demand. There is something in all that dissatisfaction with the way that we are, ordinary human beings going about our lives, trying to do as best we can, that seems distasteful. Just now, as I sit here (Bodhicattva letting out another sigh), I wonder: is there something monstrous, something inhuman in the kinds of demands that the ethicists put upon us?And, in the height of the demands they place upon us, are our ways of talking and thinking about ethics always rooted in a sense of lack, a sense of all that is not right, and therefore at risk of failing to see the extent of sheer, ordinary goodness there is in the world? But then, as I say, I may just be tired…
Have your say! [12]
Ethical Friskiness
Sunday February 28, 2010
This weekend, I’ve been doing philosophy of sorts. I’m writing a chapter for a forthcoming book on Coffee & Philosophy, which has been a lot of fun. The piece I’m writing is a defence of idle lounging in coffee shops when one really ought to be doing something more apparently useful elsewhere, and takes as it’s main starting point the following text from my old philosophical friend (in the sense that I’ve read his books, rather than in the sense that he and I ever shared a cuppa together), Emmanuel Levinas:
The café is a place of casual social intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One goes in not needing to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without being thirsty. All because one does not want to stay in one’s room. You know that all evils occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in our room. The café is not a place. It is a non-place for a non-society, for a society without solidarity, without tomorrow, without commitment, without common interests, a game society. The café, house of games, is the point through which game penetrates life and dissolves it. Society without yesterday or tomorrow, without responsibility, without seriousness–distraction, dissolution. At the movies, a common theme is presented on the screen; in the theatre, a common theme is presented on the stage. In the café, there are no themes. Here you are, each at your own little table with your cup or your glass. You relax completely to the point of not being obligated to anyone or anything; and it is because it is possible to go and relax in a café that one tolerates the horrors and injustices of a world without a soul.
This is a peculiar passage, and one that says an awful lot about Levinas’s approach to ethics. Playfulness is, for Levinas, the very antithesis of ethical sobriety, a kind of disavowal of our responsibility towards others. I don’t want to anticipate the contents of the chapter, but my response is roughly something like this: to argue that places of respite – coffee shops, parks, Epicurean gardens – are necessary, if we are to be able to creatively reimagine the world, if we are to respond to the ethical demands upon us with any measure of grace and of skill. Or, in other words, it may be that the responsible thing, at times, may be to lurk in a coffee shop, to lounge in the park, or the hang out drinking wine and eating cheese in the Epicurean garden: at least until, as Śāntideva says, our ethical action itself becomes as joyful as the capering of an elephant on a hot day, plunging now into this cool pool of lotus flowers.
I suspect Levinas would disapprove of all this caffeine-fuelled ethical friskiness. But then, Levinas was apparently never a great coffee drinker: it seems that he enjoyed tea instead, and then only in moderation. Once, according to Simon Critchley’s book On Humour
Have your say! [5]
Ethics is like navigation... stories are like the sea.
Thursday November 26, 2009
Next Tuesday I am going down to London to launch my philosophy book, Finding Our Sea-Legs
The book is about ethics and storytelling (the big give-away is the subtitle – “Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories”). This is something that interests me from two angles. As a fabricator of tales and writer of fictions, I’m interested in the ethics of what I do; and as a philosopher fascinated by ethics, I can’t help noticing how, when it comes to ethics, we find ourselves again and again having recourse to storytelling. So the book explores two propositions. The first derives from Aristotle, and could be put like this: ethics is like navigation. The second proposition is one that I first came across in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, although it has a fairly long history at least in the Indian tradition, and it goes like this: stories are like the sea.
The argument of the book (or the story that I’m attempting to tell) takes place between these propositions. This is territory that I have explored to some extent in a post that I wrote here some time ago, and of course I don’t want to tell you the whole story, because I’d rather like it if you rushed out to buy the book; but perhaps I can say a bit more about one thing that interests me when it comes to this connection, and about my approach to stories.
Here I am also the making good of an old and as yet unfulfilled promise. In the earlier article, I suggested that the ethical force of a story lies not in some moral appended to the end of the tale, but rather in what Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling calls the “shudder of thought”. At the time I admitted that this idea was rather cryptic and would require some further exploration. But somehow, back then, I never quite got round to going back to this subject. Consider this an attempt, then, to fill that gap.
It seems to me that the temptation when looking at the relationship between stories and ethics is to see stories as somehow illustrative of ethics. Once a storytelling friend and I told a story at a Buddhist event. When we had finished, there was a tangible sense of… well, I’m not sure what of, but there was a tangible sense of something in the air, that kind of curious breathlessness that descends after the telling of a good story. But then master of ceremonies of the event cleared his throat and said, “So, what that story tells us is that we ought to…” And whilst what he said was well-intentioned, you could feel that curious breathlessness evaporate almost immediately as the story collapsed into a snappy little ethical maxim. Now, there is nothing wrong with snappy little ethical maxims; but I could not help feeling that in appending this particular maxim to this particular story, something was lost. It seems to me that this temptation to tack a moral on to the end of our stories (as in certain translations of the Jataka tales) is one that often seems to kill stories dead. Stories are more than ways of encoding moral propositions or exhortations.
Philosophers, too, often tend to see stories as somehow subordinate to a more deliberative mode of thinking. Even Paul Ricoeur – who appreciated narrative more than most – says that narrative is a preparatory stage for ethics. It clears the way so that the real work can begin. This is why Kierkegaard is important. His “shudder of thought” reminds us that stories cannot be contained so easily. The idea of the shudder of thought is one that arises in the middle of his discussion of the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Book of Genesis. The story is well known: God grants Abraham a son, Isaac; and then when the boy has grown, he asks Abraham to make a human sacrifice of him. Abraham, obedient to the last, takes Isaac on a pilgrimage up to Mount Moriah, prepares a sacrificial altar, binds the boy and puts him on the altar, lifts his knife… and then at the last moment an angel stays his hand. Now, I confess that I am not particularly interested in the theological ramifications that Kierkegaard sees in the bizarre and brutal story of Abraham and Isaac. But I am interested in the force of Kierkegaard’s insights into the nature of storytelling itself. What I think Kierkegaard is trying to do is to return us from a view of stories in which they are merely illustrative of ethics to something much more fundamental. The story he has chosen is useful for him because it simply cannot reasonably be taken as a story with a simple moral. And so because of this, it leaves us with a kind of shuddering that we cannot do away with. When we have no snappy little ethical maxims that can do away with the force of the story, we are left confronting this uncomfortable, peculiar shudder.
This shudder is, I think, the heart and soul of storytelling; and it is also what gives stories their ethical force. Stories are not just propositions in coded form, but they affect us, they act upon us in ways that we don’t quite understand. They act upon us physically, as flesh and blood beings, and not as philosophers bobbing around in the stratosphere of pure and heady reasoning. And because of this, I think that in many ways, although it is often maintained that stories are for the simple-of-mind, whilst philosophy is for real grown-up thinkers, the ethical demands that stories put upon us are greater than the ethical demands of ethical philosophy. After all, it is a relatively simple thing to debate the finer propositions of ethics. It is not hard to enumerate the thirty seven senses of the word ‘good’ according to its position in the sentence; neither are there any difficulties in pondering the mysteries of the categorical imperative, applying it to everyday evils such as lying, masturbation and selling one’s hair to wig-makers (all of which Kant believed to be entirely unacceptable forms of behaviour – even if performed at different times). Philosophers may hate to admit it, but philosophy is relatively easy. Talking about the good is a simple thing. The real challenge is how we actually respond to the needs of others, out there in the world, when we have left our armchairs. And perhaps it is here that stories can help, as a way of weaning us off our certainties, as a way of reminding us that it is because we are flesh and blood beings, who shudder and tremble, or who crave comfort and security, that ethics matters at all.
Image: Section of ‘Guanyin of the Tidal-Cave’, from Wikimedia Commons
Have your say! [4]
Thinking About Free Will
Wednesday September 23, 2009
I’m thinking once again about free will again (see my previous posts here, here and here), having recently read Sue Blackmore’s Ten Zen Questions
So leaving philosophy on one side, I have over the last few years been practising having no free will. That it to say, I have been giving up on the thought that some little homunculus in my head is responsible for directing me, and instead I have been having the thought (or the thought has been having me…) “What if my actions arise not out of some kind of personal freedom, but merely out of various interacting conditions at play in the world as a whole?” What this means, in practice, is allowing the constant internal conversation around acting and the justification of acting to subside. Because much of the time, what our minds seem to be doing is something like this: “Hmm…. those luminous green cupcakes look rather splendid. Should I have cake? It’s sure to be tasty. But it’s also not cheap. And fattening, probably. And I had a large breafkast. Then there’s that paperwork I should be filling in today, so I should get moving and head to work. Perhaps I should come back this afternoon. But what if the cakes have sold out by then? Oh, I don’t know what to do! How to decide? Maybe I should toss a coin…” and so on and so forth. The whole business is, frankly, rather exhausting. And what happens? Well, a decision eventually pops up, and I find that either a) I have sat myself down for the pleasantly luminous cupcake that I do not really need, or b) I have gone to do my paperwork like the well-behaved fellow that I really ought to be, or c) something else has happened. But I have no idea, if I am being honest, how it is that this decision has popped up, nor what it has to do with this curious notion of the “will”.
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve become less and less sure what useful role this kind of internal monologue serves. And the more time goes on, the more I am beginning to think that it’s main function is perhaps to justify those things that I really ought not do. That is to say, when I catch this little mental subroutine doing its thing, and when I just stop myself and say, “OK, forget all this to-ing and fro-ing, and all this ‘I-must-make-a-decision-ing’. Let’s just see what I do next …”, then – perhaps rather curiously – what I do next is often the thing I really ought to do.
The fear is that – if we give up on the idea of this internal decision-maker – somehow we will be giving up on ethics. As I have suggested before, this may just be an internalisation of the idea that without God there is no ethics, with the little decision-making homunculus becoming a kind of internal god directing the whole show. But as time goes on, I have a greater trust in the wisdom of decisions that arise in this “Let’s just see what I do next…” way, than I do in the kinds of decisions that arise in this “Let’s just work out what I ought to do next…” way. This little, insistent subroutine often seems to be decidedly deficient in wisdom, whereas, when I surrender things to my organism as a whole, whilst I’m not exactly coursing in streams of wisdom of unparalleled depth, it seems that there are more resources available to inform whatever choosing I am involved in at that moment, that I am more open to the world as a whole, and that the decisions that arise as if by their own accord are correspondingly rather better informed, rather more elegant and skilful, and just a little bit wiser.
Have your say! [15]
