New Blog

I have moved the blog of the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University to its new home here at WordPress. Please go and have a look at http://cestchula.wordpress.com/

Thanks.

Filed under: philosophy , blog, ethics, science, technology, wordpress

Is This the Best Possible World?

Prowling the net the other day I came across a review of a book by Steven Nadler on “The Best of All Possible Worlds” which is about the thoughts of German philosopher Leibniz, who thought that this world is the best possible world. Things could not be better than what it is now. 

What concerned Leibniz was the problem of “theodicy,” a word coined by him to denote an systematic attempt to justify and explain the problem of evil. What has plagued the monotheistic thought for a long time. Since God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-loving, how could it be that there are evils in the world? How is it that there are earthquakes, tsunamis, wars, famine, violations of human rights, all these nasty events that destroy a large number of lives, while God the all powerful could have prevented them through his power? He has all the motivation since he is all loving. Why did God let all these things happen? If he could not have prevented them, then he is not all powerful. But if he knew it all along, then he is not all loving. Either way this is a trouble for the theologian. 

For Leibniz, as is perhaps well known or at least as Nadler related the story, we need to take a larger perspective. Perhaps the tsunamis have their purposes, their place in the grand scheme of things. Here are the words by Michael Dirda, reviewing Nadler’s book:

The attempt to justify the ways of God to men — theodicy, a term coined by Leibniz — lies at the heart of the matter: “Why is there any evil at all in God’s creation?” Essentially, Leibniz’s answer is: Consider the whole. Explains Nadler, “It is not that everything will turn out for the best for me or for anyone else in particular. Nor is it necessarily the case that any other possible world would have been worse for me or for anyone else. Rather, Leibniz claims that any other possible world is worse overall than this one, regardless of any single person’s fortunes in it.” What is good for the whole isn’t necessarily good for every one of its individual parts or components. As Nadler emphasizes, summarizing Leibniz, “all things are connected and every single aspect of the world makes a contribution to its being the best world.”

So the world is as good as it can be. It cannot be any better; any other possible worlds are all worse. Leibniz has one nifty argument for this which is not mentioned in the review. Imagine that there are two things which are alike in all respects — not a thing that distinguishes one from the other. But Leibniz’s question is how is it possible that God could have created the world such that there are such a pair of things. What explanation is there for there to be these two exactly similar things? God could not have created a scene like this, argued Leibniz, because that would limit God’s infinite capability to create and to be creative. I mean, if he could have created two absolutely similar things, then all the diversity in the world would have been meaningless. That would certainly contradict God’s nature. Thus, there could be no absolutely similar pair of things. This world is really the best possible world.

So there are two topics here — the problem of evil and theodicy on the one hand, and the idea of identity of indiscernibles on the other. The two are closely related. Identity of indiscernibles support the view that this is the best possible world, and since this is the best possible world, the evils in the world are ultimately speaking only temporary and illusory. A very comforting picture. No doubt Voltaire satirized him a lot in Candide.

So what does the Buddhist make of all this? How does Buddhism deal with the problem of evil? Buddhists do not deny that evils do happen. After all, we can’t deny earthquakes, tsunamis or gross human right violations. But since there is no God the creator or the all powerful, there is no one who is responsible for this. Evils just happen. They are natural occurrences and take place according to causes and conditions. When two of earth’s continental plates push against each other, then sooner or later they snap, sometimes violently, killing thousands. But this can be fully explained through natural means. This is all there is for earthquakes. No God is there to prevent it or to let it happen.

And for the Buddhists, is this world the best possible one? Well, I don’t remember any place in the text where the Buddha mentioned the topic. There is a sutra, though, where the Buddha said that this “world” is nothing but our senses — what we see is the world; what we hear is the world; what we touch is the world, and so on. But what this means is only that the world is as good or as bad as we take it to be. If we succeed in eliminating all causes and conditions for suffering, then this world is indeed the best possible one.

Filed under: philosophy , Buddha, Candide, Leibniz, Nadler, problem of evil, theodicy, Voltaire

Buddhism and Schopenhauer

At the end of Book Four of The World as Will and as Representation, Schopenhauer has the following to say:

Thus, in this way, by contemplation of life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and his denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways—is nothing.

This passage is important in that it points toward the role of “nothingness” in his philosophy. The basic idea is clear enough. The denial of the Will, which is the route towward total abandonment of the perceptible world or the world of representations, which leads eventually to total extinction of the Will itself and all sufferings, results ultimately in “nothing”. The world of the saints who have successfully extinguished all their desires is nothing for us. Analogously, our own world, which is full of individual objects and all the desires, is “nothing” for the saints and the holy men and women too.

This may sound quite like Buddhism, but in fact it is not. Anyway it depends very much on how the word “nothing” is interpreted. Does Schopenhauer mean that, beyond the perceptual capacity of an ordinary person who is still under the influence of the Will to perceive, any aspect of reality is ultimately nothing at all? Does ‘nothing’ mean ‘no thing’? But in a real sense the world beyond the Principle of Individuation consists of no thing at all, because for anything to be a thing it has to be individuated, and that requires the work of the Will itself through the Principle of Indivuduation. Since Schopenhauer is saying that the Will itself constitutes the material world, then what results from the denial of the Will should be absolutely nothing, zip, nada.

But if that is an accurate interpretation of Schopenhauer, then not only does this contradict with what the Buddhists, especially Nagarjuna, has to say regarding their own ideas on Emptiness, it also creates a lot of difficulty for Schopenhauer’s overall argument itself. If what results from deying the Will is just nothing, then why spent many hundred pages talking about it as if it is worth taking the effort to do so? Why praise all these saints and holy people since what they finally achieve for their strenuous efforts is, well, nothing? If nothing results from denying the will, then why put this topic as a separate section as if it is something important?

But the problem is that Schopenhauer does not talk much at all about this nothing. Perhaps there’s nothing to say. But at the very end of Book Four he has a quote to a German translation of the Prajñā-pāramitā, which, as Buddhists know, talks about there being “no things” too. Is Schopenhauer confused between the “nothing” mentioned in the Prajñā-pāramitā with the usual conception of nothing in Western philosophy?

In any case, it does not make much sense for Schopenhauer to say that the “nothing” which results from denying the Will is just nothing at all. This also pertains to the bedrock of his system — the argument about the distinction between the representations and the Will itself. I believe that Schopenhauer believes that the two are ultimately one and the same, since he says repeatedly that the representations themselves are nothing but the Will. So if they are separate then the representaions would not be the same as the Will.

So it seems that the “nothing” is not “nothing” at all; there has to be something in the nothing. And this is in accord with what the Prajñā-pāramitā is saying. But what Schopenhauer does not spell out is how something could be “not nothing” (because if it were nothing then there would not be any point to the denial of the Will as I have said)  and at the same time actually “nothing” (because it has to go beyond the Principle of Indivduation). But this is exactly what Nāgārjuna is doing.

Filed under: philosophy , Buddhism, emptiness, metaphysics, Nagarjuna, nothing, nothingness, philosophy, representation, Schopenhauer, will

Schopenhauer and Buddhism

My current project is writing a paper on Schopenhauer and Buddhism for presentation at the workshop on “Reception of Buddhism in German Culture,” which will be organized at Chulalongkorn University next month. So this is something I have been thinking for a while.

This led me to go back to Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea” translated by Haldane and Kemp. The copy from the library that I borrowed is so worn out that it literally crumbles when I open it, so I have to take a rather special care of the book. Moreover, the book has been eaten quite a lot by boring insects. So there is a lot of dust deposited by the book wherever I put it down. So reading it is quite an experience.

As is well known, Schopenhauer expounds that idea that the ultimate reality that underlies what we perceive is the will. The will manifests itself through our body; Schopenhauer said that the body itself is the objectification of the will. What this means is that the will, being the ultimate driving force behind reality, comes to be perceptible empirically only through its action of the consciousness that recognizes itself when it engages in a thought process directed at something. Since only human beings are capable of this action, Schopenhauer says that the will reveals itself through our own (as conscious human beings) act of willing, that is, thoughts, desires, or movement of the consciousness toward something else. And since Schopenhauer has argued earlier that material reality itself is ultimately speaking projection of the individual mind, material or external reality is just a picture that the will puts up. The world is at the same time both “will” and “idea”. It is “idea” in the sense of something directly perceptible as one thing rather than another. It is the same with Locke’s view. The German term for this is Vorstellung, which is perhaps better translated as “representation.” But somehow Haldane and Kemp translated as “idea” so we are stuck with this term in the book.

So the idea of the paper is that I will compare this with the Buddhist teaching, especially Nagarjuna’s view on Emptiness. The will and Emptiness are the same in that they are supposed to be ultimate reality. But there the similarity ends. Nagarjuna himself stated emphatically that Emptiness itself is empty, in that one should not reify Emptiness itself and take it as just another form of ultimate reality. On the contrary, “Emptiness” is just a name for whatever reality that is there for us, only when it is not conceptually or linguistically fabricated. There is absolutely no distinction or difference between Emptiness and perceptible reality. Schopenhauer’s will, on the other hand, has the characteristic of always driving and striving. This is lacking in Emptiness.

This is all for now. I’ll certainly come back to this later.

Filed under: philosophy , Buddhism, culture, dharma, emptiness, German, metaphysics, philosophy, reality, Schopenhauer, will