On the Move
Wednesday June 23, 2010
I’m now in the final stages of preparation for my forthcoming trip to China – not something I’ve blogged about here much, although those who have been following my Twitter feed (in the sidebar of this site) may have been keeping up with my varying successes and humiliations as I try to get to grips with the Chinese language. I’ll be in China for seven weeks or so, doing research for a novel which is still in the very early stages.
The last few weeks have been a whirl of sorting out funding applications, buying tickets, arranging visas, making contacts in China, practising my Chinese, and tying up loose ends here so I can have a fairly clear head over the summer; so there’s not been much time left over to blog. But yesterday I stumbled across the following passage written by Alison Gopnik in her book The Philosophical Baby
Travel and meditation lead to the same kind of experience by opposite means. When you travel you expose yourself to so much new and unexpected external information that you overwhelm the usual mechanisms of attentional selection and inhibition. Everything around you is more interesting than the things that you would normally attend to (like getting to a particular meeting). When you meditate, you starve the usual mechanisms of attention. You give them almost nothing to work with and you consciously try to avoid focus, inhibition, and planning. The result is similar: just as a lot of new information can overwhelm the inhibitory mechanisms, so shutting down the inhibitory mechanisms can make even everyday information seem new.
Meditation and travel seem to end up causing what philosophers call the same phenomenology – the same type of subjective experience. In fact, a lovely thing about meditation is that you can visit Beijing without leaving your room.
Of course, there are many kinds of meditation, leading to very different kinds of phenomenology; but there is something in what Gopnik is saying. Habits of thought – the kinds of habits that in meditation you try to circumvent – are contextual, because we are creatures who are not separated out from the world. We spin worlds around ourselves the way that spiders spin webs. And because these worlds are made up of things that, more or less, stay put – all those shelves of books, the pictures on the wall, the everyday furniture of our lives – we can easily find that this world-spinning can hamper our ability to move through the world with lightness (of course, on the other hand, too much lightness may not be ideal either – but that is for another post), or can lead to a diminishment of suppleness in our thinking and our living. You could perhaps put it like this – reversing Gopnik’s own line: the lovely thing about visiting Beijing is that you can meditate without even sitting on your cushions.
It is perhaps for this reason that I tend to write well when I am travelling. I see writing as a matter of discovery, and of then shaping these discoveries into something that captures something of what it is to be human. When I travel, ideas come easily. But it is only when I stay put that I find that I am able to start on the business of shaping, reshaping, cutting, developing and editing the material that I have gathered.
Anyway, I’ll still be blogging from China, as thinkBuddha.org seems to be unaffected by the Great Firewall, and I hope to take in a fair number of Buddhist sites whilst I am there. If any readers have any suggestions as to where I really shouldn’t miss whilst in China, do let me know either in the comments or through the contact form (accessible from the menu at the top of the screen). I’d be delighted to hear from you.
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How the Revolution Began...
Wednesday May 26, 2010
What to do with all those books sitting on your shelves, taking up valuable space? Why not turn them into a nice, cosy fire to keep you warm through the winter months? From Qin Shihuang to Farenheit 451, book burning has always had a curious appeal; and so I’m delighted to say that my short story on the subject has been published on Necessary Fiction. Here’s an extract.
Two years later, they outlawed books of poetry. There were protests, mainly from the poets themselves, but the reasoning of the authorities was sound: light verse, they said, was inconsequential; ballads were stories in disguise, and thus should, for the sake of consistency, go the same way as novels; love lyrics fostered delusion; sonnets were impossibly elitist; limericks inclined the mind to disrespect; and haiku — well, haiku were just downright odd, and foreign with it. Besides, nobody had read any poetry for years, even if — unaccountably — there were many who persisted in writing it…
There story is here. I hope you enjoy it!
Without authority...
Tuesday August 25, 2009
The other day, I was listening to Australia’s ABC radio philosophy show, The Philosopher’s Zone. I had tuned in to listen to a programme exploring what was rather grandly called the epistemology of blogging. I’m grateful, incidentally, to Loden Jinpa for pointing me in the general direction of The Philosopher’s Zone, a resource that will, I think, provide plenty of philosophical fodder to download to my MP3 player. Anyway, the question under discussion was whether, as a result of blogs, we are ‘epistemically better off’.
Now, this is something that interests me, given that I’ve been writing this blog for something around the past four and a bit years. After all, at times the question “Why am I doing this?” does indeed occur to me. So I hoped that the show might have something interesting to say. However, whilst the discussion was interesting enough, I could not help feeling frustrated by the narrowness of focus. The main questions under discussion seemed to be these: What is the relationship between blogging and the traditional or mainstream news media? Can the clamour of a thousand individual voices build a better picture of reality than a handful of trained, rigorous and dispassionate investigative journalists? And, is the world of the blog parasitic on the mainstream media, or is it independent of the mainstream media?
These are all perhaps questions worth asking, but they are not the kinds of questions that preoccupy me when I write this blog. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, no doubt, it is because thinkBuddha.org is about as un-newsy as it is possible for a blog to be. From time to time, if there is something interesting happening in the world, or in the world of Buddhism or philosophy, I post something news-related. But I’m not usually to be found grappling with the latest issues from the morning news. Secondly – and this is not unconnected – I don’t think that seeing blogging only in the light of the mainstream media is really a useful way of understanding what role blogs play in the way that we deal collectively with knowledge, or what passes for knowledge.
Ultimately the question here is one of authority, a word that was not mentioned in the discussion on The Philosopher’s Zone, but that seemed to be implicit throughout all the discussions. The questions lurking in the background seemed to be these: Who has the authority to speak? And, why should we listen to those whose authority is in question? These, I think, are more interesting questions, because it seems to me that blogging invites a kind of writing that is without authority, whereas the mainstream news media invites a kind of writing that at least pretends to a kind of authority. Put differently, blogging is, I think, an essentially amateur form of writing. By this I do not mean that it is inept or unskilled. There are many inept and unskilled journalists and the world, and there are many good bloggers; conversely there are many good journalists and many inept and unskilled bloggers. Instead, what I mean by “amateur” is that we often approach blogs without the assumption of expertise. Instead, we approach them knowing that the person who is writing is fallible and human, that their perspective is partial and almost certainly skewed. At least, I hope that is how you, dear Reader, approach this particular blog: as fallible, human and skewed. And, whilst I sometimes can be tempted to climb up upon my high horse and wave around my little wooden sword (it’s nice and breezy up there, the view is quite pretty, and there’s a certain pleasure to be had…), nevertheless one of the things I like about writing here is that I can write without any assumption of authority, that I can write to try out ideas that may be stupid or foolish or just plain wrong, and that I can trust that a large number of my readers will read what I have written with a degree of scepticism, saying, “Sounds a bit suspicious… But, then, who the heck is he? It’s hardly as if this stuff is peer-reviewed…”
This certainly gives me a sense of freedom as a writer, a freedom that simply does not exist in the writing of academic papers and tomes. But it is not just about this sense of freedom. Because – to return to the question of whether we are ‘epistemically better off’ thanks to blogs – I suspect that this kind of writing without authority is epistemically extremely valuable, because what it does is it demands of the reader a certain critical intelligence that can be obscured by the pantomime of authority, and in doing so, it opens up a space for the kinds of naive questions that are often unasked between the narrow lines of close, well-referenced arguments. It is not so much a matter of possessing knowledge as it is of exploring in dialogue with others the processes of knowing, or of coming-to-know. And if this is not social epistemology in action, then I don’t know what is.
But, as I said, I’m no authority on any of this. And so, if I were you, I’d take all of the above with a healthy dose of salt…
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Saltwater Buddha
Tuesday July 14, 2009
I was brought up not far from the sea, and I have many happy memories of childhood days spent stomping along the shore-line in wellington boots as the dog hurtled around the almost deserted beaches in search of unpleasant-smelling things (usually dead seals) to roll in. Later on, we got a small sailing-dinghy, and on summer evenings, I would go out sailing with friends as the seals came to bob around the boat, poking their curious heads from beneath the waves. But although all of this planted in me an enormous love of the sea, my relationship with the sea was always somewhat distanced. I was never a great swimmer, I tended to get seasick when things get too rough, out of sight of land, and where I used to sail, everybody knew stories about people who had died out on the mudflats when the tide came in too quickly, or when their boat capsized during an afternoon’s sailing. Such stories bred in me a kind of circumspection, a kind of wary regard that has never left me.
Jaimal Yogis, the author of Saltwater Buddha
Saltwater Buddha is a seductive book: part memoir, part reflection, Yogis writes in a light and breezy style as he traces his restless journey from monastery to monastery, and from surf-spot to surf-spot, all the while wrestling with the tricky business of how to make his way through the world. Written in short, beautifully-crafted sections, with good doses of self-deprecating insight, Yogis pulls off the difficult trick of writing seriously about his search, but without preciousness or self-indulgence. And for all the lightness of touch, there is – whether he is talking about meditation or about surfing – the unmistakable mark of hard-won experience here. By the time he is writing of his experience of watching the sun rise from his surf-board far out from the shores of Kalani, I am almost won over:
We would float out there as the moon sank behind the palms – alone except maybe for tiger sharks submerged under the silvery waves – until a huge orange sun rose right out of the sea. Dolphins swam by, coming just inches from our boards.
There was really nothing better in the world.
Almost, that is; but not quite. It is probably something to do with those tiger sharks, but for all of the considerable charm and insight of Saltwater Buddha, I think I’ll stick to stomping along the shore, and I’ll leave the surf to others. Nevertheless, as I walked along the coastline last week down in Devon, and watched the people out there in their wetsuits riding the waves, I could not help but feel a surge of exhiliration as I watched those saltwater Buddhas going about their everyday business, out there where the waters rolled in from the Atlantic.
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The Intelligibility of Nature
Friday March 27, 2009
It’s been a trifle quiet over here, so until I get round to putting some more thoughts in order for some more posts (I can tolerate a certain disorder of thought – indeed, I find it bracing, but the sheer amount of disorder at the moment is really pretty impressive…), I’ll add a link to my recently published review of Peter Dear’s book The Intelligibility of Nature on the Metapsychology Online website. Dear’s book explores the tensions between science as instrumentality (getting things done in the world) and science as natural philosophy (saying how the world actually is), and along the way raises some interesting ethical questions.
Normal service will, I hope, be resumed soon. Some time, I anticipate, after I have worked my way through the remainder of the pile of student work that is awaiting marking…
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Michael Frayn on Uncertainty and Motivation
Tuesday October 14, 2008
Last week I was down in Birmingham at the book festival. It was good to be back in town catching up with old friends. The evening’s main event was an interview between playwrights Michael Frayn and David Edgar, both of whom were extremely thoughtful and impressive individuals. The conversation was particularly interesting because Frayn was discussing his play Copenhagen, which deals with the 1941 meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen, and he was juggling with some of the issues that I have already discussed on this blog surrounding the drawing upon metaphors from particle physics for thinking through what it means to be human.
Frayn’s main concern was the relationship between uncertainty and human motivation. Perhaps the best summary of the problem is set out in the CERN courier, in an article written after Frayn’s visit last year.
“What fascinated me about the story are the questions it raises: Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen? What were his motives? And you can never really know the answer.” There is an uncertainty with human motivation and an uncertainty with the behaviour of a particle, and though the reasons are completely different, Frayn indicates that both have a theoretical barrier beyond which the human mind cannot reach, although he does encourage debate on this issue.
Of course, “though the reasons are completely different” cannot be stressed enough. We are talking about metaphors, and not about some kind of quantum weirdness underlying human motivation. But understood in this sense, I think that Frayn is really on to something in laying bare the uncertainty that underlies human action. After all, a good deal of drama is based upon the idea that there is a self in there who, if only we can get to them, has straightforward motivations. These motivations (the story goes) may be clouded, they may be complex, but they are – given the right kind of equipment – ultimately capable of being plumbed. Frayn, however seems to resist this idea, not merely by claiming that motivation is hard to establish, but by raising the possibility that there is no single true motivation down there that can be drawn out. What is being looked for – the reason for one’s act – is, in the final analysis, something that cannot be found.
This has quite wide implications. In certain approaches to ethics (although not in all), motivation is all-important, and what characterises an act as ethical or unethical is the motivation behind it. Not only this, but motivation is often given a kind of causal role in action. But what if it is not like this? What if, firstly, motivation cannot be definitively established and, secondly, it doesn’t have the kind of causal role we think it does? For it seems to me that, in the field of human psychology, motivation works (more or less) as an explanatory story after the act rather than a causal mechanism that leads to action. And if this is so, the superficial plausibility of the explanatory story does not mean it is necessarily a good guide to the causation of an event. There have been a great many experiments in which the tendency of the mind to confabulate motivations after the event is laid bare, and when one starts to become alive to this curious storytelling in which the brain indulges, it is possible to become increasingly sceptical about these stories.
Let me give an example. A long time ago now, I had a striking experience of this. I was studying in the beautiful town of Durham, and one lunchtime, having headed out of the office some time before, I found myself wandering the streets of the town in a somewhat vague and unfocused fashion. I came to my senses, and asked myself what I was doing. My mind provided a ready answer. It was lunchtime, so I must have come out for lunch. So I went to a small cafe and bought a bowl of soup and a roll. They made good soup in that cafe, home made, and I was looking forward to it. I ordered, paid, carried my soup to a table that overlooked the courtyard, and sat down.
So far, so good. It is relatively easy to trace the kinds of shortcuts that my mind was making. After all, I was wandering (probably with a vague sense of dissatisfaction) around town at lunchtime. I had been in that kind of situation before. My mind filled in the gaps.
lunchtime + dissatisfaction + wandering aimlessly = you want lunch.
Plausible, perhaps; but as it happened, this was not what was going on at all. Only when I took my first sip of soup did the fact of the matter hit me: I had already eaten lunch! So I stared into my soup and asked myself what the hell I was doing sitting there in the cafe at lunchtime. Why was I wandering the streets of Durham, if it was not for lunch? Was it because I was tired of work? Was it because it was a nice sunny day and a part of my mind said ‘Why not go for a walk?’ Was it because I had unresolved issues left over from childhood that need the probing of a psychoanalyst (may all the gods preserve me) to resolve? And it struck me then that I had absolutely no idea. Indeed, thinking back, I’m not sure whether, in this kind of investigation, you can ever hit bottom and find the motivation for an action – for any action. You can, of course, put forward hypotheses about the strength of various causal mechanisms at work, and these hypotheses can be evaluated for their plausibility, but this is post hoc theorising, and does not seem to naturally lead to a single, unambiguous answer. Of course, you can trace some causal threads which may be convincing, but the idea that there is a single thing lurking in there that is called ‘my motivation’ seems to border on superstition.
This problem is, I think, a problem of meaning, the problem of what we mean to do when we do x. But the question What do we mean to do when we do x? is to put the cart before the horse. The more interesting question – because it admits of a multiplicity of answers and a recognition of causal complexity, rather than of a single answer and an insistence upon single causes – goes like this: given that we have done x, what meanings can we draw from it? Such meanings can never be single because motivation never appears to us, even in our acting, in a clear and distinct fashion. This is, no doubt, why form many psychoanalysis is such an enormously entertaining ways of spending one’s free time: because if there is not, in fact, a single motivation lurking in there, but if it seems as if it is, then one can spend many happy hours projecting superficially plausible, but probably spurious stories, onto any action whatsoever. The disadvantage of such forms of entertainment, however, is that we never find out anything particularly new about the causality of our actions, because we only find a reflection of our favoured causal story, and that causal story is almost always so simplified that it just does not do justice to the phenomena of human action.
But to come back to ethics, I have long suspected that the problem with ethics is the claims that are made to ethical certainty. The idea of ethical certainty is seductive, for it renders a complex world simple and unambiguous; but if motivation itself is something that is neither simple nor amenable to certainty, then perhaps ethics is less about fixating upon certainties, and more about finding our way through the shifting seas of uncertainty. Perhaps ethics cannot do without a frank confession of how little we really know about the causes and conditions of human action.
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Literature and Laughter
Thursday September 25, 2008
Three posts in as many days: it’s uncommonly busy here on the thinkBuddha blog. But I do want to write a brief post to say that my review of Ralph Flores’s book Buddhist Scriptures as Literature
One of the themes I’m interested in thinking about in the review is that of laughter. If one reads texts as literature (i.e. as lies in which not everything is false) then – as I wrote in this earlier post – it allows the possibility of laughter to return, causing havoc amongst the high-seriousness of interpretation, just as Monkey, in the Journey to the West, caused havoc amongst the many berobed officials of heaven. It is striking how little good, subversive fun there is in most interpretation of religious texts. But it should come as no surprise that the Gate-keepers of Truth often seek to abolish laughter and play: they have done so ever since the Greek gods banished the god of laughter, Momus, from Mount Olympus. However, this does not come without a cost: for in so doing, they also threaten to abolish much of the power of the texts that they claim to be speaking for.
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