Suzuki, Negation, and Bad Buddhist Philosophy

Looking again at how the influential Japanese scholar Suzuki Daisetsu Teitaro (1870 – 1966) used the (so-called) Diamond Sutra, I realised that something was amiss. Suzuki called his approach the logic of sokuhi 即非 (Ch. jí fēi). In a very recent book chapter, Yusa Michiko (2019) describes the history of this idea. As Suzuki formulated it:

To say that "A is A" is
To say that "A is not A."
Therefore, "A is A". (Yusa 2019: 860)

Yusa quotes Suzuki referring to this as "the logic of spiritual intuition... If you understand what it means, you will understand not only the Diamond Sutra but also the entire Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra of 600 scrolls" (Yusa 2019: 860).

So my first question is: How accurately does this fit with my understanding of Prajñāpāramitā?

Kyoto School Logic

This expression of "logic" was very influential on the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy via Suzuki's lifelong friend, Nishida Kitarō. The Kyoto School were implicated in the nationalistic aggression of Japan in the 20th Century and have come in for much criticism in the 21st Century.

The adoption of the logic of sokuhi by members of the Kyoto School can also been seen in the light of nationalism. On learning the way Suzuki was thinking Nishida wrote an encouraging letter to him, "We must construct it logically so that it can stand on its own to face Western logic." The idea then was to find a native Japanese approach to logic that could be positively contrasted with "Western" logic.

Remember that this predates the relativism of post-modernism; the point was not simply to undermine the applicability of logic, but to contrast Eastern and Western modes of thought. This (false) essentialist dichotomy was a feature of Suzuki's thinking throughout his life, but the quote shows that it was shared by Nishida. In other words, it looks like a trend in Japanese intelligentsia rather than an attitude particular to Suzuki. Japanese Nationalism was a major theme in the pre-WWII milieu.

Sharf (1993: 40) is emphatic that despite the influence of Suzuki and other Japanese intellectuals on the conception and practice of Zen in America and Europe, they did not represent the Japanese monastic tradition of Zen nor did they have influence in that sphere. Rather, Sharf says, "the style of Zen training most familiar to Western Zen practitioners can be traced to relatively recent and sociologically marginal Japanese lay movements." (1993: 40).

Suzuki was the originator of this logic and, at least according to Yusa, his inspiration for this Japanese logic is to be found in the Vajracchedikā. In order to try to understand this we'll need to look closely at the sūtra.

Note that I resist calling the Vajracchedikā the Diamond Sutra because vajra does not mean "diamond" in Sanskrit;  rather, it unequivocally means "thunderbolt"; i.e., the combination of lightning and thunder associated with storms and originally the weapon wielded by Indra. Moreover, in Sanskrit compounds with -ccheda as the final member, the initial member is the thing that is cut, not the thing that does the cutting. I see no reason that turning the noun into an adjective (-ikā) should alter the meaning from "cutter of thunderbolts". In Chinese, vajra is translated as 金剛 (jīngāng), i.e. "gold hard", though perversely gold is famously a soft metal. The "diamond" in fact comes from the Tibetan name for a diamond, literally "indestructible stone" རྡོ་རྗེ་ཕ་ལམ  (rdo rje pha lam)  pronounced dorjé palam. For some reason the idea that rdo rje also means "diamond" contaminated how vajra is understood. Hence the Perfection of Insight that Cuts Thunderbolts is now called The Diamond Sutra in English. 

Yusa identifies §13a of the Diamond Sutra as the key passage for Suzuki. I discussed the use of negation in the Vajracchedikā in 2013, outlining work by Paul Harrison (2006) to reinterpret the negations that characterise this text. There are a large number of such negations in the Vajracchedikā. Harrison's insights into the text are invaluable (I await his long overdue book on the Vajracchedikā with interest). 

Yusa says two revealing things. Firstly, Yusa points out that the text of Vajracchedikā Suzuki used is not the translation by Kumārajīva, i.e.《金剛般若波羅蜜經》Jīngāng-bōrěbōluómì-jīng (T.235). This is the standard translation in East Asian Buddhism. In this translation, the key passage reads 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜. To this Suzuki appends: 是名般若波羅蜜 (I'll discuss meanings below). Yusa offers the unqualified assertion that "Suzuki must have added the line 是名般若波羅蜜 after the fashion of the traditional Chinese scripture style." (871). But such an amendment can hardly be justified in such a case. Especially when the absence of the line affects the conclusion of the argument.

Secondly, Yusa says, "Here, the second reference to 'prajñāpāramitā' is shortened to 'pāramitā,' and its negation is used." (874). This allows her to read the text as saying "the perfection of wisdom preached by the Tathāgata is not a perfection of wisdom the Tathāgata preached, therefore it is called the perfection of wisdom." (Yusa 2019: 874).

This contradiction made me curious about what the text says, since it clashed with what I remembered from my earlier foray into the Vajracchedikā. So I went digging.

We have two recensions in Sanskrit. The earlier of the two is based on two manuscripts from about the 6th Century, the first from Gilgit in the Karakorum Mountains (Schopen 1989) and the second from Bamiyan in what is now Afghanistan (Harrison & Watanabe 2006). These manuscripts are both partial; however, there is a substantial overlap between the two which confirms that they are substantially the same text and combine to form a single witness of a distinct recension from that time period. The resulting Frankenstein text has been translated by Paul Harrison (2006). We also have an edition, edited by Conze (1957)—though with many mistakes (noted in Schopen 1975)—based on later manuscripts (and with some input from the Gilgit manuscript). The same manuscripts were also edited by Vaidya, though in this case I have not consulted his edition. 

Section 13a and the Negation of Prajñāpāramitā

1. The extra line

We can solve the first mystery of the origin of the phrase 是名般若波羅蜜 quite quickly by looking that Xuanzang's translation of the Vajracchedikā (T220.ix; fascicle 577):

Kj: 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜。
Xz: 如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。
S:  佛說般若波羅蜜，則非般若波羅蜜，是名般若波羅蜜。

Although Suzuki has not followed Xuanzang's wording exactly, but has modified it to look more like Kumārajīva's style of writing, it is clear that he got his inspiration for doing so from Xuanzang's translation. In his Essays on Zen Buddhism (Third Series) the essay on the Heart Sutra does cite a translation of the Xuanzang text. To be clear this method is poor scholarship. 

Before introducing the Sanskrit, let us examine the Chinese more closely:

Kj: 佛說般若波羅蜜， 則非般若波羅蜜。 

The Buddha 佛 has taught 說 Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜, consequently 則 there is no 非 Perfection of Wisdom 般若波羅蜜.

Charles Muller trans. "That which the Buddha calls ‘transcendent wisdom’ is not transcendent wisdom."  

Xz: 如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。 

Thus 如是 is Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜多，the tathāgata 如來 has taught 說為 non-Perfection of Insight 非般若波羅蜜多，therefore 是故, the tathāgata 如來 is to be called 說名* Perfection of Insight 般若波羅蜜多。†

*  說名 to be called (Skt. ity ucyate). 

† Xuanzang adds 多 to the word because the final consonant of Middle Chinese 蜜 mid,  prominent in the 5th Century, was already fading away in the 7th; it is completely absent in modern Mandarin.

Let us now look at the two recensions of the Sanskrit (Gilgit = G  and Conze' edition = C):

G: yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | saivāpāramitā |  (Schopen 1989) 

The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. (Harrison & Watanabe 2006: 126)

C: yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā, saiva apāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti || (Conze 1957: 37-8) 

The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. He calls it Perfection of Insight. (My translation following Harrison & Watanabe).

Note that the older Sanskrit version, G, also lacks the third phrase as Kj does; which is nonetheless in C and Xz.And also note that G does not repeat tathāgatena bhāṣitā. And in this kind of syntax there is no need to repeat it because the two clauses have the same agent. The repetition only makes the sentence awkward and all the translations above ignore it. 

We know that the texts of Prajñāpāramitā sūtras were more or less constantly altered, mainly by being expanded throughout the period of active Buddhism in India. For example, Conze has speculated that this section, i.e., §13, was the original end of the sūtra and that subsequent sections were later additions. Others have speculated that the first two chapters, pages, or the first few paragraphs, were the original Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (c.f. Walser 2018).

As for the expression sokuhi, Kumārajīva alternates between using 則非 (J. nori hi) 9 times, and 即非 (J. sokuhi) 8 times. Xuanzang does not use the phrase at all, but rather his text has 如來說為非 (I will explain below). The difference here is not significant and as we will see makes more sense in the light of the Sanskrit text. 

2. Aparamitā

When we look at the two Chinese texts we see that when the negation comes, it is the whole word  般若波羅蜜 (= prajñāpāramitā) that is negated, i.e. 非般若波羅蜜 (Kumārajīva) and 非般若波羅蜜多 (Xuanzang). In other words, all the texts state that the Buddha spoke prajñā-pāramitā; the Chinese texts then deny that he spoke prajñā-pāramitā, while the Sanskrit texts only negate pāramitā. Given that Xuanzang was typically good at representing his source texts, perhaps there was a recension that negated the whole phrase prajñā-pāramitā, but this would break the general pattern observed in the text as a whole (Harrison 2006, and commented on in my blog).

The two versions of this passage have very different meanings. And Suzuki has clearly relied on the Chinese version for his sokuhi logic.

The Logic of the Vajracchedikā

Suzuki's logic of sokuhi suggests that the negations in the Vajracchedikā unlock the whole of the Prajñāpāramitā. I don't think this can be the case. Although it is likely that the Vajracchedikā goes back at least as far as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, it is not representative of the mainstream of Prajñāpāramitā thinking; striking evidence of this is that the word śūnyatā is not used in the Vajracchedikā. The style of negation we find in the Vajracchedikā only occurs there. It is not representative, but a rather obscure offshoot. Note that the Vajracchedikā was not transmitted to China until the late 4th Century (translated by Kumārajīva ca 402 CE), 200 years after the Aṣṭasāhasrikā and the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā were first translated in 179 CE and 276 CE respectively. If there is a simple key to understanding the Prajñāpāramitā, i.e. if such a thing exists, then we would expect to find it in the Aṣṭasāhasikā and probably in the first two chapters, if not the first two pages (Walser 2018). The Chinese, who privileged the Large Sutra, would have expected to find it there and arguably the Heart Sutra is an attempt to extract the central principles of Prajñāpāramitā as they were understood in China in the mid-7th Century.

But even if the "logic" of the Vajracchedikā were important, Suzuki has been misled by the Chinese translations. His formulation again is:

To say that "A is A" is
To say that "A is not A."
Therefore, "A is A".

However, the logic of the Sanskrit texts is more like this:

What the Buddha calls AB, is without B.

Later, we don't know when, but probably after the 4th Century, this logic is extended:

What the Buddha calls AB, is without B; he calls it AB.

For Suzuki, working primarily from the Chinese texts, the thing stated and negated is the same in each case: prajñāpāramitā. By contrast, as Harrison points out, the Sanskrit text (and the overall pattern of negations in Vajracchedikā) shows that prajñāpāramitā is stated and then said to be without pāramitā. This is not, as Yusa supposed, an "abbreviation" that really means prajñāpāramitā. Rather, the argument is that, though one can name six kinds of perfection, there is no dharma that corresponds to perfection.

Compounds

Harrison argues that exegetes have mistaken the nature of the word apāramitā. In Sanskrit grammar we treat such negated nouns as compounds, i.e. a-pāramitā. They can be one of two kinds of compound. If a-pāramitā is a karmadhārya compound then it means "non-perfection, not a perfection"; but if it is a bahuvrīhi compound then it means "without perfection" or "lacking perfection". While tradition usually takes these to be karmadhārya compounds, Harrison argues that the use of 非 (fēi) to negate rather than 不 (bù) suggests that Kumārajīva understood the compound as a bahuvrīhi and that this is the better reading. 

So the phrase would be saying that the Buddha preached Prajñāpāramitā, but that it is without perfection. In other words there is no entity pāramitā "perfection" that can be observed in conjunction with the idea of prajñāpāramitā. 

Tena

Why would it follow from this that prajñāpāramitā is called prajñāpāramitā (tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti)? Well, it seems that originally it did not. This final phrase is not included in the early versions of the text. Indeed, as we have already noted, Suzuki added it by modifying the passage from Xuanzang's translation while otherwise using Kumārajīva's. But this does not stop Suzuki treating the passage that he has added to the text as very important. 

In Suzuki's thinking the pronoun tena plays a large part. Yusa argues that the "logic of sokuhi" could just as well be "the logic of tena". (875) She cites Suzuki as saying "Tena here has the meaning of 'therefore' in either the sense of 'that is why' or 'for that reason,' of in the sense of 'that is how,' 'in that manner,'"

Note that tena does not occur in the Gilgit version of the Vajracchedikā or in Kumārajīva's translation. In fact, the whole sentence is missing. This doesn't prove that tena was absent from all the early recensions of the text, but it does undermine the idea that tena is central to understanding the message of the Vajracchedikā.

Even if we admit, for the sake of argument, that the late addition is somehow meaningful, it does not appear to mean what Suzuki suggests. The sentence is tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti. If we break the Sandhi then the sentence reads tena ucyate prajñāpāramitā iti. 

Ucyate is a passive form of the verb vacati (√vac). The change from vac- to uc-, i.e. from the consonant to the corresponding vowel sound, is called samprasaraṇa and happens routinely for words that begin with semivowels. Sanskrit grammar dictates that when a verb is in the passive voice then the agent of the sentence is a noun or pronoun in the instrumental case—tena is a pronoun in the instrumental case. 

Pronouns play a connective role, linking back to the agent of a previous sentence. In this case, the Buddha or the Tathāgata has spoken prajñāpāramitā (prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā) and in Buddhist Hybrid English "by him it is called perfection of insight", i.e. "he calls it perfection of insight".

Of course, Suzuki is not completely wrong, tena can form a logic connection. However, it is much more obvious in this case to take it as the agent of the passive verb. It looks like he has seriously misread the text. Or perhaps his goal of justifying the logic of sokuhi led him to this conclusion instead of the one preferred by a straightforward reading of the text.
 

Soku

Suzuki's misreading does not end here. As we have seen, sokuhi 即非 (Ch. jí fēi) is central to his exegesis of Prajñāpāramitā. Yusa cites Suzuki attempting to explain soku 即, obviously referencing the Heart Sutra.

The 'phenomenal' rupa (shiki 色) and the 'principle' dharma (hō 法) are clearly distinguished and stand in opposition, and yet in their very opposition, 'rupa is (soku) dharma' (shiki soku hō 色即法) , 'dharma is (soku) rupa (hō soku shiki  法即色). This is how it is in the world of spirituality. One may call it 'Oneness' or 'Non-duality (ichinyosei 一如性), which is different from the identity of two things. The One is the many, and the many is the One. (2019: 867) 

This is all very well, but in his translations Kumārajīva does not use 即 (jí) this way at all.  I've studied this passage in depth (See Attwood 2017). The relevant passage from the Gilgit manuscript (my transcription) followed by Kumārajīva's translation is:

na hi śāradvatīputrānyad rūpam anyā śunyatā nānyā śunyatānyad rūpaṁ rūpameva śunyatā śunyataiva rūpaṁ. (folio 21 verso)

舍利弗 色不異空 空不異色  色即是空 空即是色 (T.223: 8.223a13-24)

It is evident that Kumārajīva is using 即 to convey sanskrit eva, which is used to indicate emphasis akin to putting the word in italics, e.g. "appearance is emptiness." And this is the basic sense in Chinese as well. Kroll's Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese:

即 jí MC tsik 1. marks a noun or [verb] phrase as being exactly or precisely what is meant: exactly, precisely, just (so), the very" (183-4)

The Sanskrit omits the copular verb in rūpameva śunyatā śunyataiva rūpaṁ, and Kumārajīva could have done so in Chinese as well since it is typical to do so. However, Medieval Chinese aesthetics strongly favours four character phrases so that, rather than 色即空 空即色, Kumārajīva adds the verb 是 (shì). So despite what Suzuki says, it is the context that equates rūpa and dharma in his equation, not the character 即 which only acts as a qualifier. In Medieval Chinese, we could just as easily state: 色空空色 (This phrase is used by some modern commentators to summarise the passage.).

However, as my research further shows (Attwood 2017) this passage is garbled in the Large Sutra and the Heart Sutra. The original phrase found in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā is rūpameva māyā māyaiva rūpaṁ "the appearance is an illusion; the illusion is appearance". This, in turn, must be understood as relating back to the old Buddhist simile, rūpameva māyopama "appearance is like an illusion". 

Rūpa

Note here my translation of rūpa as "appearance". In Chinese translation this is usually 色, which also refers to outward form or appearance. In modern Mandarin it means "colour". The relation of rūpa to the eye (cakṣu) is that of taste (rasa) to the tongue, not that of food (āhāra) to the tongue (jihvā). Similarly, sound to the ear, smell to the nose. This is reinforced by the counterpart of the the kāya or body sense, i.e. spaṣṭāvya "able to be touched" or "touchability". In each case it is not the source of the sound, smell, taste, or felt sensations that correspond to rūpa, but the sensation that comes from the objects. In other words rūpa does not refer to substance or substantiality, but to appearance. 

Some high-profile commentators have erroneously translated rūpa as "matter". However, it is more subtly misleading to translate it as "form", since this has given rise to the almost universal misunderstanding that rūpa refers to substance rather than appearance. What rūpa means, according to standard dictionaries and as we can deduce from the context, is appearance. 

Conclusions

Suzuki's logic of sokuhi is based on a raft of misunderstanding. On investigation, it becomes apparent that Suzuki didn't understand how the term soku (即) was used in the Prajñāpāramitā literature or the significance of the negations in the Vajracchedikā. He didn't understand the Vajracchedikā; and he didn't understand Prajñāpāramitā. Rather, Suzuki tendentiously uses his idiosyncratic reading of the texts to pursue the goal of an indigenous Japanese logic that could compete with and confound Western logic. Indeed, his "logic" was part of a strategy to distinguish and valorise Japan. Perhaps it was this pursuit that caused him to overlook the fundamentally Indian nature of the Prajñāpāramitā and to misread the words. 

It's interesting that another elitist, Edward Conze, read Suzuki and conceived of himself as one of the elect who could understand the esoteric significance of the "Japanese" logic, even going so far as approvingly quoting Suzuki's "logic of sokuhi". 

The general problem is that, like many other Buddhist commentators from Nāgārjuna onwards, Suzuki fails to adequately distinguish between the epistemology of being in the state of emptiness (or cessation) in which no sensory or cognitive experience arises, on one hand, and an ontology in which nothing exists, on the other. 

The vital distinction that we must make is that the cessation of sensory experience does not generalise to the non-existence of sense experience. And in my experience Buddhists are deeply reluctant to abandon their metaphysical positions and are thus unable to retreat to this epistemic stance. And, as a result, Buddhists routine advocate for nonsensical philosophy, all the while insisting that it be taken seriously as an alternative to sensible philosophy. Those who refuse to adopt the nonsensical view are dismissed as lacking insight. 

In the cessation of experience we can expect the breakdown of the usual orientation of the practitioner. In the absence of sensory spatial clues, they cannot locate or orient themselves in space. In the absence of the iterative events by which we measure time, they cannot orient themselves in time or experience time passing. Thus the phenomenology of cessation is timeless and boundless. I have no quibble with this, except that it does not generalise into a metaphysics in which reality is timeless and boundless. 

Furthermore, in the absence of the mental events associated with selfhood, the practitioner undergoing cessation cannot orient themselves with respect to self and other. The subject/object distinction breaks down for them. Again, this does not generalise into a metaphysics in which there is no distinction between subject and object in reality. 

Generalising from private experience to a metaphysical position on reality is almost always bad philosophy. Metaphysical stances by definition apply to all beings in all times and places. In principle, any person can get a telescope and observe the moons of the planet Jupiter and come to the same conclusion that Galileo came to in 1610. The heliocentric model of the universe transcends belief systems; even those people heavily invested in the geocentric view had to come around in the end, even if it took a few centuries. Gravity is not affected by whether or not we believe in it and no amount of hand waving will change this.

This is not to deny that humans are capable of undergoing cessation and emptiness. Nor to deny that, for those people who do undergo it, cessation seems hyperreal and deeply satisfying, nor yet that undergoing cessation is life changing. I fully accept that cessation is within the range of human experience, albeit at the extreme of what is possible. The problem is with how we interpret this experience, and the fact that different people come to different metaphysical conclusions about cessation. 

The metaphysical arguments that Buddhists make on the basis of undergoing cessation are akin to arguing that, because it is possible to experience apparent weightlessness in an aeroplane flying along an inverted parabolic path, gravity doesn't exist. Buddhists then resort to the worst kind of hand waving to explain why we have weight except when travelling in an invested parabolic arc. One such explanation would be that weight is an illusion that we experience because we are unawakened and from the ultimate point of view we are in fact all weightless all the time. Or that in order to experience weightlessness we must all have an eternally weightless aspect of our being that only manifests when we travel in an inverted parabola, which is the true shape of reality. At worst Buddhists insist that unless we experience weightlessness in the same plane with the same pilot then it is not true weightlessness and all we can do is try to perfect flying until the pilot reincarnates some time in the future. 

In other words, Buddhist "philosophy" is the naive speculations of the ignorant elevated to the level of theology, but as a multitude of mutually exclusive speculations about which we argue endlessly. 

The central characteristic of all peak experiences is a quality of hyperreality: of this moment being more real than reality. The worst case scenario is that the peak experience leads one to spend life chasing peak experiences in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the sense of hyperreality. Meditation has a similar effect on some people. Or we see the opposite, that peak experiences are discouraged so the person who easily slips into the bliss of dhyāna starts to feel guilty and holds back from it, leading them to lose interest in meditation.

There is a strong contrast between how different meditators interpret cessation. Some, for example, attest that they have merged with absolute consciousness and discovered that everything about the universe is completely determined; that events simply unfold as they will and our apparent decisions and choices are just illusions. Others deny the existence of an absolute and argue that our choices are significant in how we experience the world; that although conditions determine how events unfold, we can change the conditions. And all kinds of variations on these views exist. Mystics can't agree on the details of mysticism.

It is too big a leap to go from "I felt that everything was part of a harmonious whole" to "I know the universe to be a unified and undifferentiated whole: the One." Just as it is too big a leap to experiencing weightlessness in an aeroplane and declaring that gravity doesn't really exist. For a start, it doesn't take into account the circumstances. 

In the end, Suzuki's "logic" is just word games and hand waving. His early experience of satori is widely remarked upon, so perhaps he experienced a sense of oneness. But this hardly qualifies him to comment on reality. 

Suzuki dressed up his hand waving as "Eastern wisdom" with terms like sokuhi but, in fact, he didn't really understand Prajñāpāramitā and was often relying on ideas drawn from European philosophy, particularly German Idealism and Neoplatonism (probably via Theosophy). Suzuki seems to have been an Orientalist in Edward Said's pejorative sense, using a artificially constructed notion of the Asian (especially, the Japanese) personality to try to ground his approach to Zen. As Robert Sharf says: "while Suzuki’s Zen claimed a privileged perspective that transcended cultural difference, it was at the same time contrived as the antithesis of everything Suzuki found most deplorable about the West" (1995: 47). And not simply "the West" in the abstract, but westerners.

Arthur Koestler was one intellectual who was not taken in by Suzuki's hand waving:

"There is one redeeming possibility: that all this drivel is deliberately intended to confuse the reader, since one of the avowed aims of Zen is to perplex and unhinge the rational mind. If this hypothesis were correct, Professor Suzuki's voluminous oeuvre of at least a million words, specially written for this purpose, would represent a hoax of truly heroic dimensions, and the laugh would be on the Western intellectuals who fell for it" (from the essay 'A Stink of Zen', cited in  Sharf 1993: 41). 

My sense is that Koestler was right to refer to Suzuki's presentation of Zen as a hoax, although I would not endorse all of the anxieties expressed in The Lotus and the Robot. Worse, the Suzuki hoax is now into its third generation and still going strong, especially when it comes to Prajñāpāramitā.  In particular, Conze took Suzuki's approach and gave it his own narcissistic spin. Where Suzuki's attempts to paint the Japanese people as the elite, Conze narcissistically sees himself in this role. The damage done by these two men has been immeasurable. One result is that the universities of Europe and America have all but abandoned research on Prajñāpāramitā texts. Where the texts are read, it is inevitably through the lens of Conze's appalling translations. 

~~oOo~~

Texts of §13a

evam ukte āyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavaṃtam etad avocat | ko nāmāyaṃ bhagavan dharmaparyāyaḥ kathaṃ cainaṃ dhārayāmi | evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmaṃtaṃ subhūtim etad avocat | prajñāpāramitā nāmāyaṃ subhūte dharmaparyāyaḥ | evaṃ cainaṃ dhāraya | tat kasya hetoḥ | yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | saivāpāramitā |  (Schopen 1989)

At these words, the Venerable Subhūti said this to the Lord, “What is the name, Lord, of this round of teachings, and how should I memorize it?” / At these words, the Lord said this to the Venerable Subhūti, “This round of teachings, Subhūti, is called the Perfection of Insight, and this is how you should memorize it. Why is that? The very Perfection of Insight, Subhūti, which the Realized One has preached is itself perfectionless. (Harrison and Watanabe 2006: 126)

evamukte āyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavantam etad avocat - ko nāma ayaṃ bhagavan dharmaparyāyaḥ, kathaṃ cainaṃ dhārayāmi? evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmantaṃ subhūtim etad avocat - prajñāpāramitā nāmāyaṃ subhūte dharmaparyāyaḥ | evaṃ cainaṃ dhāraya | tatkasya hetoḥ? yaiva subhūte prajñāpāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā, saiva apāramitā tathāgatena bhāṣitā | tenocyate prajñāpāramiteti || (Conze 1957: 37-8)

Subhuti asked: What then, O Lord, is this discourse on dharma, and how should I bear it in mind? The Lord replied: This discourse on dharma, Subhuti, is called 'Wisdom which has gone beyond', and as such should you bear it in mind! And why? Just that which the Tathagata has taught as the wisdom which has gone beyond, just that He has taught as not gone beyond. Therefore is it called 'Wisdom which has gone beyond'. (Conze 1975: 51)

यैव सुभूते प्रज्ञापारमिता तथागतेन भाषिता सैवापारमिता तथागतेन भाषिता । तेनोच्यते प्रज्ञापारमितेति ॥ (Müller 1884: 29)

持  佛告須菩提是經名為金剛般若波羅蜜以是名字汝當奉持所以者何須菩提佛說般若波羅蜜則非般若波羅蜜  (T 235: 8.750a11 - 15 = Kumārajīva)

佛告須菩提：「是經名為『金剛般若波羅蜜』。以是名字，汝當奉持。所以者何？須菩提！佛說般若波羅蜜， 則*非般若波羅蜜。...」(Kumārajīva with CBETA punctuation)

* 即 in the Ming Edition of the Tripiṭaka. 

作是語已，佛告善現言：「具壽！今此法門名為能斷金剛般若波羅蜜多，如是名字汝當奉持。何以故？善現！如是般若波羅蜜多，如來說為非般若波羅蜜多，是故如來說名般若波羅蜜多。」  (CBETA T 220-ix: 7.982a7-11. Xuanzang).

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2017). 'Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra.' Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13, 52–80.

Conze, Edward. (1957) Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā. Serie Orientale Roma XIII. Roma.

Conze, Edward (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. 2nd Ed. George Allen & Unwin.

Harrison, Paul. (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra', in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p.133-159.

Harrison, Paul & Watanabe, Shōgo (2006) 'Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā.' in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Vol. III). Hermes Publishing, Oslo, p. 89-132.

Müller, Max. (1881) Buddhist Texts from Japan (Vol 1.iii). Oxford University Press. Online: http://archive.org/details/buddhisttextsfr00bhgoog

Nagatomo, Shigenori. (2000) 'The Logic of the Diamond Sutra: A is not A, therefore it is A.' Asian Philosophy, 10(3): 212-244.

Nattier, Jan. (2003) A few good men : The Bodhisattva path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). University of Hawai'i Press.

​Schopen, Gregory. (1975) 'The phrase ‘sa pṛthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet’ in the Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna.' Indo-Iranian Journal. 17(3-4): 147-181.

Schopen, Gregory. (1989) 'The Manuscript of the Vajracchedikā Found at Gilgit,' in Studies in the Literature of the Great Vehicle: Three Mahāyāna Buddhist Texts, ed. by L. O. Gómez and J. A. Silk, Ann Arbor. 89-139.

Sharf, Robert H. (1993), "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism", History of Religions, 33 (1): 1–43. Online.

Sharf, Robert H. (1993). 'Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited.' In Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture), edited by James W. Heisig and John Maraldo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 40-51. Online.

Walser, Joseph. 2018. Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism: Emptiness, Power, and the Question of Origin. Routledge.

Yusa, Michiko. (2019). 'D. T. Suzuki and the “Logic of Sokuhi,” or the “Logic of Prajñāpāramitā”.' In The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy. New York: Springer. 859-616.

Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered: An Inquiry into the Buddhist Myths of a Just World and an Afterlife

My new book is finished and now on sale.

Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered: An Inquiry into the Buddhist Myths of a Just World and an Afterlife. Visible Mantra Press. £29.99. Purchase online.

Blurb

In this book, Jayarava combines historical scholarship with philology and philosophical enquiry to re-examine the religious myths of the just world and the afterlife as they manifest in Buddhism, i.e. karma and punarbhava or rebirth. 

Taking a multidisciplinary approach he begins with an exploration of the psychology of religious beliefs, seeking to understand why the supernatural is ubiquitous across all human cultures. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and cognitive metaphors the book outlines a theory of religious belief which explains why belief in the supernatural continues to seem intuitive and natural to so many. 

The central part of the book looks in detail at historical instantiations of the karma and rebirth doctrines. Some early inconsistencies led to doctrinal innovations and polemical tracts, but no consensus on karma or rebirth ever emerged amongst Buddhists of different sects. Modern Buddhists sects have very different views on the details of karma and rebirth, even while insisting on the just world and afterlife myths per se. 

A critique of Vitalism opens the way to reconsideration of karma and rebirth from a contemporary point of view. Scientific inquiry shows that, although they remain plausible to many, the just world and afterlife myths are no longer tenable in any form.

Outline 

This book consists of six main sections, each consisting of several chapters.

Before getting into the more detail, I attempt to present some recent ideas on two subjects that will always be in the background as we assess religious doctrines. In the opening remarks I note that one of Dharmacarī Subhuti’s criteria for religious belief is that it be compatible with reason. The first section of the book, Compatible With Reason, explores what reason is and how it works. This is important because classical theories of reason are now acknowledged to be inaccurate and misleading. So establishing some basic understanding of reason is important before setting off.

Chapter 1 is an introduction and chapter two is this outline. Although I expect readers will already be familiar with karma and rebirth, in Chapter 3, Karma & Rebirth: The Basics, I give a bare outline of the two doctrines. This chapter can be skipped over by the well informed. 

Chapter 4, Of Miracles, reviews David Hume’s discussion of miracles and his method for evaluating testimony regarding miracles. Hume lays down some ground rules for reasoning about the claims made by religious people. Since both karma and rebirth break the laws of physics, and can be considered as miracles, Hume’s criteria are highly relevant to the criterion that belief be compatible with reason.

In Chapter 5, Facts and Feelings, I explore the neuroscience of decision-making. Classic theory of reason suggests that emotions play no role in reasoning. Contrarily, research by Antonio Damasio shows that emotions, or at least the interplay of emotional and cognitive processes, play a central and decisive role in reasoning. Break that link and we are unable to make decisions. Importantly the salience of information is encoded by emotions, by how we "feel" about it.  Belief involves decision-making, so understanding how we make decisions is important to this discussion.

Staying on this theme, in chapter 6 An Argumentative Theory of Reason, I review recent research by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier that attacks the classic theory of reasoning from a different direction. Mercier and Sperber point out that most people are very poor at solo reasoning tasks, but that they do much better in small groups. Reasoning, in this account, is not our first line approach to constructing arguments, but only comes into play when we wish to critique or deconstruct someone else’s argument. When reasoning, we all employ confirmation bias, but as a feature rather than a bug.

Bringing this section to a close, in Chapter 7 Reasoning and Beliefs I try to show how Chapters 5-7 constitute the beginnings of a theory for understanding religious belief. Using an example taken from a heterodox economist, I look at how beliefs distort the way that we interpret new information.

In the next section, Religion is Natural, Chapters 8-13, I expand on the theory of religious belief and look at myths such as the just-world and the afterlife. The central proposition here is that religious ideas are intuitive and thus seem “natural”. They are therefore understandable. Such myths emerge from our evolutionary psychology. The two ideas have some distinctive features, but they are closely related. Chapter 8, The Horrors of Life, deals with the myth of the just world. I tackle the idea of justice, the problem of evil, and related ideas such as the moral universe. The desire for an ordered and regular world is entirely understandable for a self-aware species trying to scrape a living in a capricious environment. However, I argue that our experience of the world should convince us that the world is not just. Rather it is amoral and indifferent to us. Chapter 9 looks at the myth of the afterlife and how it interacts with the myth of the just world. The afterlife is how religions get around the injustice of the world. Justice is delivered in the afterlife and often in the form of “balancing”. The image of the balance is literal in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which perfectly illustrates the concept. However, karma is also seen in terms of metaphors of accounting and balancing the books.

When thinking about Buddhist myths of the afterlife I thought it would be useful to see it against the broad backdrop of other afterlife beliefs. However, I found that most discussions of the afterlife do not look at the structural features of the afterlife per se, but rather discuss beliefs according to each religion. They thus fail to see that the afterlife is few variations on a theme. In order remedy this, Chapter 10, A Taxonomy of Afterlife Beliefs, takes a broad approach to the afterlife based on features rather than religious beliefs. There are two basic kinds of afterlife: single destination and cyclic. Buddhism is a hybrid of these: cyclic if you do nothing, and single destination if you practice Buddhism.

Chapter 11 explores Thomas Metzinger’s conjecture that out-of-body experiences might have given rise to the idea of a soul. Several kinds of experience, which we might broadly call religious, make the idea of a mind-body duality seem plausible or even inevitable. I argue that a mind-body duality is necessary for any afterlife to take place. Something about the mental life of the person has to survive the death of the body for there to be an afterlife. However, mind-body dualities have long been abandoned by scientists for good reason: all the evidence we have refutes such a duality.

Nevertheless, in Chapter 12 Secret Agents, I explore the thesis for belief in mind-body duality and supernatural agents put forward by Justin L. Barrett. Barrett argues that evolution has primed us to hold just such beliefs as an indirect consequence of survival mechanisms. For example, it is important to distinguish agents from objects because in nature agents are often prey or predator, or in some way dangerous. And it is better to err on the side of mistaking objects for agents than vice versa. It is better to avoid 100 sticks that look like snakes but are not, than to fail to avoid a single venomous snake.

Finally, in this section, in Chapter 13, Metaphors and Embodied Cognition, I introduce the theory of cognitive metaphors developed by cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson. This allows us to deconstruct the language associated with religious experiences. How we (unconsciously) frame our experiences through language, through the conventions of our society, affects the way we interpret our experiences. In particular, the language of the mind-body duality is deeply embedded within English along with a raft of related metaphors. Understanding the language of religion is a key to understanding what makes religion seem plausible.

We now have a working theory of religious belief and a number of useful tools for evaluating information we may encounter. In the section Evolution of Rebirth & Karma, Chapters 14-18, I begin to explore karma and rebirth directly. Beginning in Chapter 14, Rebirth Eschatologies, I revisit the category of cyclic afterlife beliefs and flesh out how such beliefs work. I explore the notions of “this world” and “the next world” as we encounter them in early Buddhist texts. I note that Buddhists often use the word loka, i.e. “world”, to mean the world of experience.

In Chapter 15, Rebirth in the Ṛgveda, I review work by Polish Scholar Joanna Jurewicz, on the first accounts of rebirth in India. Although, classically, rebirth is thought not to be mentioned until much later, Jurewicz points out that a Ṛgveda verse does seem to mention being reborn amongst one’s family. It seems likely that a cyclic afterlife was a regional feature of India rather than specific to any one religion.

There is some evidence that both rebirth and karma developed over time in Buddhism. In Chapter 16, with help from Gananath Obeyesekere, I explore this development and outline the changes that seem to have occurred overtime. The point is that the belief in rebirth did not emerge fully formed and that change over time was an important feature of the Buddhist belief system. Buddhist eschatology incorporates a number of elements from Brahmanism (devas, asuras, pretas). I follow this up in Chapter 17, Escaping the Inescapable, by showing how Buddhist karma changed over time. In particular, I look at a post-canonical change from karma being inescapable, to the institution of practises that allowed Buddhists to avoid the consequences of their actions.

Finally, in this section, in Chapter 18, I deal with the figure of Yama and the idea of Hell. Yama is a figure Buddhists adopted from Vedic religion. Originally, he is a promethean hero who is celebrated as the first man to discover the route to rebirth amongst the ancestors in the afterlife. This Yama lives in the sky. The Buddhist Yama is the king of Hell, a place of torment and torture for people who have lived extremely immoral lives. The emergence of Hell as a concept, let alone a place, is an interesting phenomenon. I explore the sparse evidence on the subject and the question of how the hero became king of Hell.

In the Section, Conflicting Traditions of Rebirth & Karma (Chapters 19-23) I focus on Buddhism. When we explore the Buddhist tradition in detail we find a range of conflicting opinions and theories about karma and rebirth. In this section, I rely frequently on internecine polemics written by Buddhists about other Buddhists. However, I begin in Chapter 19, Karma & Dependent Arising, by outlining a problem that seems to have driven a great deal of later doctrinal speculation and innovation. I show that as they stand in the suttas the doctrines of karma and of dependent arising are incompatible. One requires that consequences follow actions are a considerable remove, and the other denies the possibility of action at a temporal distance. Sectarian solutions to this problem are associated with the various Abhidharma schools. They all attacked each other’s theories and never reached a consensus. Opposition died out along with the sects that vanished with the decline of Buddhism in India beginning by about the 7^th Century. The conflicts often centred on three key ideas, which I treat separately: in Chapter 20, The Antarābhava or Interim State; Chapter 21, Manomaya kāya, and Chapter 22 Gandharva. In each case I show that these ideas were hotly contested amongst the different Buddhist sects. Each was quick to point out the flaws of the others. All views had valid criticisms levelled against them.

I finish this section in Chapter 23, The Problems of Seeking Singularity, with some reflections on how we look at history. We are usually taught some tidy version of history in which there are differences, but these are only on the surface, beneath which is a broad and deep unity. An actual reading of the historical texts reveals intractable disputes on many fronts. As with the distorting effect of religious beliefs generally, how we approach history affects how we interpret it.

In the section on Vitalism (Chapters 24-28), I take a long digression. A reader could skip this whole section and move onto the next without losing the main thread. Why include several chapters critiquing vitalism in a book on karma and rebirth? As already noted, the idea of a mind-body duality underpins all myths of the afterlife. Similarly, the afterlife underpins the just-world myth, since justice is delivered after death. Just so, the idea of Vitalism, that life is engendered by some external “spark” underpins our views of life and death. In Chapter 24, I introduce Vitalism as The Philosophy That Wouldn’t Die. Vitalism has a long history in the Western world. It takes in ideas about spirits and life. However, vitalism has been abandoned by scientists and most philosophers because the evidence refutes it and it has less explanatory power than more recent ideas.

In Chapter 25, Crossing the Line Between Death and Life, I outline modern attempts to understand the origins of life. I try to show that we are now at the point where, given the conditions, life was no accident, it was inevitable. Chemistry follows a kind of slope of energetic feasibility. Under the conditions of the early earth, the chemistry of metabolism was the most energetically feasible path. It was followed by replication and life, as we know it, got started and has never ceased. No supernatural elements are required for life.

In Chapter 26, Spiritual, I return to the methods of cognitive linguistics. I take apart the concept of “spiritual” and highlight specific frames and the associated metaphors. The whole thing is based on medieval ideas about life. Language does change, but it can be deeply conservative. The language of “spiritual” is anachronistic and references frames that are not relevant to the Buddhist project.

Chapter 27, The Antarābhava as a Vitalist Concept, revisits the idea of the interim state in light of the critique of vitalism. The interim state depends on mind-body dualism and vitalism. If vitalism is not a helpful way of looking at the world (anymore), then neither is the interim state a helpful way of trying to understand life and death.

To close out this section, in Chapter 28, The Science of Reincarnation, I review some of the arguments made for reincarnation by a group of Western researchers, whose “evidence” consists entirely of interviews with young children. The methods employed are deeply flawed and the resulting conclusions don’t explain anything. The “scientists” simply assert that reincarnation is the only explanation for the stories told by infants. Worse, for Buddhists, they assert a form of reincarnation consistent with Hindu conception of a soul travelling from body to body, and inconsistent with the metaphysics of Buddhism.

The final section of the book, Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered (Chapters 29-31) draws together all these many threads and argues that when we consider all the evidence that karma and rebirth are simply not plausible. I begin, in Chapter 29, Objections to Naturalism, by making a defence of naturalism. Experience suggests that those who reject my arguments often do so on the basis that they do not believe in naturalism. I try to anticipate and neutralise these objections to clear the way for the reader to take in the following arguments confident that they are grounded in reality. However, I also note that many of the strongest arguments against karma and rebirth are not scientific, but historical. The chaos of conflicting views already outlined never did produce a consensus.

Chapter 30, On the Impossibility of an Afterlife, recapitulates and expands on the most popular essay on my blog (it has twice as many page views as the second most popular essay). The basic idea comes from an argument outlined by physicist Sean Carroll. I take a slightly different approach to Carroll, but the conclusion is much the same. The laws of physics, and particularly the laws of thermodynamics, rule out any afterlife in which any information about us is preserved. There is simply no possibility that rebirth can be a genuine phenomenon. As a myth, it has informed Buddhism for centuries, but it does not survive scrutiny.

The argument in Chapter 31, The Logic of Karma, is one that I developed independently. I show that the Buddhist theories of karma that we have available all fail to explain how actions can be connected to consequences over time. The explanations are all flawed and it is very easy to show how. This leaves us with no viable theory of karma. Since there can be no afterlife in which moral and immoral acts are balanced out, the idea of karma leading to better and worse rebirths is already in tatters.

The myth of the just-world and the myth of the afterlife are just myths. They are not real. We are born once, live one life, and after death, there is nothing. I understand that the conclusions I arrive at will be shocking and repugnant to some Buddhists. In technical terms, the view is ucchedavāda or “annihilationism”. This is traditionally a wrong view, but we now know that it is the inescapable conclusion of understanding how our world works. There is no life after death.

Despite this, I see no reason to succumb to nihilism. The world is not just, but human beings and human societies can be. There is no afterlife, but that simply means that our actions in this life count for more, not less. Life becomes more meaningful in this view, not less. Everything we do counts. If we are to leave a positive legacy as a result of our one life, then we have to work hard to make a positive difference. There is no scope for drifting or vagueness. The imperative to change ourselves and to change the world, is all the greater. But in the end this is how things are. Deluding ourselves with fantasies that life is fair or that we will not die, only gets in the way of facing up to our responsibilities.

Other Words

So this is my book. It is what it is. It started life as essays on this blog that appeared over a number of years. It is therefore eclectic in scope and content. Had I set out to write such a book my choice of terminology might have been more consistent. My interest in the secondary literature might have been more comprehensive. Also I have to emphasise that despite my enthusiastic engagement with this subject, I am an amateur and and outsider. I have all the usual foibles of the autodidactic. These will be obvious to the professional scholar, though I hope that they will find something here to provoke thought and rethinking.

There have been very few attempts to see Buddhism in a broader context. Buddhism scholars tend to discuss sectarian Buddhism in isolation even from other sects of Buddhism. My experience of comparative religion tracts is that Buddhism is vastly simplified and homogenised before being compared to other religions and even then there is little in the way of critical thinking. So the approach here is quite unusual, especially to a general reader who is used to reading books on Buddhism which are written by starry-eyed enthusiasts and scholars who are critical only in a very narrow sense. I used to be starry-eyed too - some of my early blog essays attest to this. But then I really started reading Buddhists texts and to really pay attention to what they said. And gradually I began to see clearly. I went from being starry-eyed, to becoming a star-gazer in the tradition of Galileo Galilei.

And this book is one result of that.

My next writing project is a book provisionally entitled The True History of the Heart Sutra. To some extent it will begin to answer some of the questions left open by Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered. What is Buddhism without these doctrines? My short answer is that it's experience and the investigation of experience, especially the experiences of the dissolution of the self and the cessation of conscious sensing and cognising. These experiences are subject to very different interpretations from the complete denial of being to affirmation of absolute being; from transcendental liberation to a rigid form of determinism.

~~oOo~~

We Need to Talk About Reason

About a year ago, the Politico website noted a new phenomenon. Young male American conservatives have begun referring to themselves as "classical liberals". Many were aping a notorious academic turned lifestyle guru but, given how obviously illiberal their agenda seems to be, I wondered how they could identify with the term "liberal". It seemed doubly weird, given that conservative Americans are so openly hostile towards "liberals", and use the word as invective. My few interactions with people who claim to be classical liberals suggest that they don't know much, if anything, about classical liberalism. Most are just naively repeating slogans. 

Clearly, liberalism has delivered us many freedoms for which we may be grateful. It is also true that, had classical liberalism prevailed, these freedoms would have remained the preserve of the elite. While classical liberals wrested power from kings for the elite, it was the new liberals, the "bleeding heart liberals" who wrested power away from the classical liberal elite (the bourgeoisie), for the people, if only briefly. It was the new liberals who ended the slave trade, and slavery as an institution, for example. They were the first to see that if liberty were to have any meaning, then it had to apply to all. 

In the previous essay I covered the background to liberalism and the confusion between the different applications of the term. In this essay and several to follow I will pick apart some of the fundamental beliefs of liberalism and show that they are anachronistic, at best. I begin with the classical view of reason; thence to a discussion of the ideology of utilitarianism; through the negative impacts of neoclassical liberalism on democracy; and I will finish up with the most egregious products of liberalism, runaway global warming and mass extinction.

The ideas of reasoning and rational thought are central to the liberal conception of human beings. Arguably, then, to understand the liberal ideology we need to understand how they conceived of rationality. The problem is that we've known since the 1960s that the ideas of rationality they relied on were wrong. And I mean, obviously, comically wrong, like someone's idea of how we ought to be, without reference to any actual human beings. And if liberalism is based on a delusion, then what would it look like with a accurate theory of reasoning? 

The Classical Account of Reason

The sapiens in our Latin binomial classification, coined in 1758 by the Swedish taxonomer, Linnaeus, means "wise". It comes from the Latin sapientia "good taste, good sense, discernment; intelligence, wisdom." It refers to the Enlightenment belief that men were uniquely capable of reasoning. Again, "men" here accurately reflects the classical view that women were not capable of reasoning. This is not my view, but the fact that it was the classical liberal view is very important to keep in mind.  

Classically, reasoning is a specific conscious mental process by which we apply logic to problems and arrive at knowledge of the truth, which then guides our decisions. In this view, actions guided by truth are good, while actions guided by falsehood are evil. This view of reasoning is thus linked to  concerns of metaphysics (truth), epistemology (how we know things), and morality (good and evil)

For much of history, reason coexisted with faith, which supposedly revealed truths that were inaccessible to reason. Until the enlightenment, philosophers employed deductive logic to explain the existence of God, the problem of evil, and other religious ideas. However, deductive logic has a flaw; it tends to reproduce one's starting axioms, or the propositions that are held a priori to be unquestionably true. All of the unspoken beliefs of the thinker influence the selection of valid deductions. So, if a logician believes in God, then at some point they will unconsciously accept a deduction as valid based on this belief. This leads them to the "logical" conclusion that God exists. And they assert that their belief in God is based on reason. 

The initial contrast and demarcation between reason and faith become more of a conflict and contest until, during the Enlightenment, reason combined with empiricism became the weapon of choice for intellectuals to undermine and destroy faith. This was done in the name of liberating people from superstition and the oppressive rule of the Church. And of course liberty is the central theme in liberalism. In the Enlightenment, reason was virtually deified. Natural philosophers, soon to be re-christened as "scientists" were the priests of this new cult. This coincided with the peak of materialism: a reaction against the superstitions of religion, which brought everything down to earth. The contrast and conflict between faith and reason is still one of the defining issues of modernity. 

Reason was what separated man from the beasts. For classical liberals it also separated the elite from the common man, and men from women. The elite reasoned that only they were truly rational, and as they defined rationality as good, then it made sense to them that they, as the only people capable of goodness, should be in charge of everything and everyone. Indeed, had they not ruled, then the irrational masses might have fallen back into superstition and religion. Liberals knew that they had to rule in such a way as those capable of reason obtained the maximum liberty while those incapable were at least not able to harm the capable. It was a difficult job, but someone had to take it on and the classical liberal elite stepped up. Of course, it was only fair that they be well compensated for their efforts on our behalf. And of course it was tiresome having to deal with the lower classes, so the best of them were put in charge of the day to day business of telling the peasants what to do and reporting profits back to their masters. These middlemen were imaginatively called the middle classes. Thus began the era of what David Graeber has called "the bullshitization of work".

We can already begin to see how classical understanding of reasoning was flawed.

Free Will

This ability to reason, free from any non-conscious irrationality, is linked to free will and, in particular, what we call contra-causal free will; i.e., free will in which only reason is exercised and there is no influence from emotion, intuition, any unconscious process, or external influence such as peer pressure. Anyone with a modern view of the mind has to realise that contra-causal free will could simply never exist, because all of our thought processes are influenced by all of these other factors all of the time. Reason as classically defined never happens and we actually have proof of this, but let me continue for now on the theme of free will. 

Free will is, of course, closely tied to issues of morality. The Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God gave Adam and Eve the choice to obey, they disobeyed, evil got a foothold, and they were thus cast out of Eden to lead lives of suffering. Even though, as an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient supreme being, God created it all and could foresee all outcomes, Christians insist that it is not God's fault that we suffer. It is our fault. Buddhists also highlight the wilfulness (cetanā) of humanity as the cause of evil. 

As we have seen, most liberals also blamed humanity for the problem of evil and linked this to inherent flaws in the human character, or psyche. According to the classical liberals, humans are by nature variously bellicose, aggressive, competitive, acquisitive, and/or just plain selfish, although we are also supposed to be rational and the inherent antimony between selfishness and rationality seems to go unnoticed; i.e., it is not rational for a social species to be selfish because it will cause a break down in reciprocity and they will die out. 

In this view, therefore, morality is linked to reasoning. Only those who use reason to guide their actions can be moral. This is to say that, for classical liberals, morality is solely linked to reasoning and thus it becomes the province of rich European men. The bourgeoisie push out the church as arbiters of morality and temporal courts eventually gain jurisdiction even over the Church (thank God).

In reality, no one reasons in this way. Almost everything about this liberal discourse is wrong. The understanding of reasoning, of humanity as a social animal, of women, and of morality are all wrong. And these false ideas continue to dominate the thinking of the bourgeois elite. Before reviewing how we do reason, I want to sketch out some related ideas. 

Madness

Losing one's reason is seen with increasing alarm as the modern world emerges. Whereas the mad were largely harmless and left to themselves up to late medieval times, especially in Europe, madness gradually becomes a  moral issue, which at that time falls under the purview of the Church. Christians begin to see madness as a sign of sinfulness; the mad must be morally compromised or they would not be mad (deductive logic again). No distinctions are made in terms of the organic causes or etiology of madness until much later.

Michael Foucault notes that leprosy was not treated the same as madness. Of course, people were afraid of contagion (though they had no idea how leprosy spread). But they did not see lepers as morally compromised. Indeed, apart from fear of contagion, lepers were seen relatively positively: their suffering now would free them to go directly to heaven at death. Churchs would have places where lepers could observe services through a window, for example. 

According to Foucault, the confinement and punishment of the mad begins just as leprosy was disappearing from Europe, leaving the sanatoriums empty. The lazar houses where lepers has been quarantined soon became lunatic asylums. Since physicians ran the lazar houses they also inherited the care of lunatics.

Thereafter the loss of reason followed the trends of the medical profession. At first ithey treated madness an an imbalance of the humours. Melancholia, for example is an excess of black bile; whereas mania is an excess of blood. When doctors began to be interested in "psychology", treatment of madness moved from physical medicine to psychological medicine. The loss of reason was ascribed to repressed sexual urges or other psychological complexes. Then as antipsychotic drugs emerged, it was ascribed to chemical imbalance. And so on.

Throughout this period of change from, say, 1500 to 2000 the definitions of reasoning and rational hardly changed. Reasoning was an abstract ability possessed only by humans. It has to be exercised consciously. It is completely separate from and superior to other types of mental activity, excluding emotions in particular. It is almost synonymous with the use of logic. The rational human being is typified by the objective, emotionless man of science. They are contrasted with the hedonistic, irrational, emotional peasant man.  

Friedrich Nietzsche describes two opposing ideals in society: Apollonian, associated with logic, order, rules, rule following; and Dionysian with emotion, chaos, spontaneity, and creativity. Freud thought he saw similar tendencies fighting for dominance in the psyche of every man. This trope lives on in the pseudo-scientific description of the left-brain and right-brain in what are effectively Apollonian and Dionysian terms.

But we may say that the classical liberals saw themselves as rational. Despite the fact that they wrested power from traditional sources against the tide of conservatism, they invested it in certain, rational, individuals. And they were terrified of the great unwashed masses who might (and sort of did) do the same to them. Thus we see the double standards of the class system: freedom to the point of hedonism for the elite, combined with strict authoritarian rule and puritanism for the workers.

Thomas Jefferson rails against the institution of slavery throughout his political career, but continues to own hundreds of slaves the whole time because he feels he must take responsibility for them and that they cannot do so for themselves. The liberal elite decide what freedom is and who gets to enjoy it. Liberty for the few and slavery for the rest.

 

Romanticism

There was a significant rebellion against the materialist, rationalist, Apollonian view of humanity  that emerged from the Enlightenment and dominated European and colonial circles for a time. It gave rise to the Dionysian movement we call Romanticism. They turned materialism on its head: they valued emotion over reason, subjectivity over objectivity. And so on. However, materialists and romantics agreed one one thing: the primacy of the individual.

In England, romanticism resulted in an outpouring of emotional poetry from upper-class layabouts high on opium, but it also left a lasting sentimental imprint in attitudes to "nature". In Germany, things took a more philosophical turn, towards forms of Idealism that denied the very reality of the material world and posited that everything was simply one's own subjectivity.

Emerging from this German-speaking milieu was a new theory about madness in both its florid aspect of what we now call psychopathy (a disease of the psyche) and the more everyday irrationalities we call neurosis (an abnormal condition -osis of the nerves neuro). The new idea was that our conscious mind was only the tip of the iceberg and that lurking below the surface were many mental processes and "complexes" which could, and did, hijack our will. By far the most influential of these new doctors of the mind was Sigmund Freud. 

Freud's theory was that sexual urges were so strong that they governed every aspect of our lives, from birth to death. He was able to reinterpret everything in terms of sexual urges acted on or repressed. In this view, repressed sexual urges simply become acted on unconsciously, causing aberrant behaviour. Freud shared the generally dim view that classical liberals have of humanity:

"Man is revealed as 'a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.'" — cited in Rifkin, J. (2009) The Empathic Civilisation. Polity Press.

Freud's views on women were even more aggressively regressive than those of his English contemporaries. All these guys were certainly the products of their times, but there's only so much apologising for stupidity of people who are hailed as the leading intellectuals of their day. Freud was a fucking idiot whose puerile theories should have rung alarm bells for anyone paying the least bit of attention to humanity. But he lived in a time when abstract theories about people thrived in contradiction to the practice if empiricists observing nature.

Despite the obvious lunacy of his "theories", Freud and his followers became incredibly influential on modern society. The language of psychoanalysis and psychology was co-opted by popular culture so that we now glibly speak of ego, the subconscious, neurosis, Oedipus complexes, and so on. We have no problem imagining emotions having an agency all of their own, so that when repressed they behave like wayward pixies and make us do and say naughty things. 

The focus on subjectivity found a happy home in post-war France where philosophers also asserted the primacy of subjectivity and began an assault on all expressions of objectivity. This was not in the spirit of a scientific revolution, but more of a tearing down the idols of the bourgeoisie and destroying their authority. French philosophers attacked all forms of authority and all attempts to legitimate it. In some ways we can see this as a libertarian project with echos of the French Revolution, which saw the aristocracy guillotined in their hundreds. To the extent that it was a reaction to early 20th Century modernism, the new French movement could accurately be called "post-modern", though in my view this is something of a red herring. 

Summing up the ever more complex history of ideas across the European and colonial world over a few centuries in such a short essay is quixotic at best. I'm highlighting just a few of the major features on the map and suggesting connections that might not be entirely obvious to all. The result is a sketch of a terrain from which the reader, drawing on their own detailed knowledge of history and philosophy, can imagine the background against which I will now paint a contrasting figure. 

Modern Views on Reason

It has been clear for at least fifty years that this is not how humans make decisions, is not how we think, is not how we reason, and that this is not how reason works. I've written at length on this subject, drawing on work by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in particular, so I don't want to go over it all again in detail. However, having listened to Antonio Damasio's podcast discussion with Sean Carroll, I might need to modify my presentation of this material, but I want to get this out and so I'll have to review it in the future.

Suffice it to say that all liberals, espousing all forms of liberalism, have been completely wrong about the role that reason plays in our lives. Despite the classical view of reason being untenable, and widely known to be untenable, it is still the dominant view outside certain branches of academia. Economists, journalists, and activists all presume that humans are rational in their theories (and most add that we are self-interested, a stupid claim that I will deal with separately).

What we now know, and seems obvious in retrospect, is that humans are capable of using reason in narrowly defined situations that don't typically include making economic and moral choices. We do not use reasoning to make choices at all; rather, we use reasoning to justify choices in retrospect; i.e., to produce post hoc reasons. We make choices using unconscious processes of inference that in all cases involve felt responses to knowledge that we possess. Emotions play a pivotal role in how we assess the salience of any given fact. So, presented with the same facts, and both agreeing that they are true, two people may come to entirely different decisions based on what they perceive (through felt sensations) as most salient amongst the facts.

The other time we use reasoning is in social situations when we are assessing the ideas of others. When making decisions and presenting options to others in this situation we do not use reason, we use other inferential processes. In this social setting it pays for each proponent of an idea to present the best case possible, meaning that confirmation bias (which is virtually universal in such situations) is a feature, not a bug.  

Michael Taft has quipped that "beliefs are emotions about ideas". And as Cordelia Fine puts it, emotions are physiological arousal combined with emotional thoughts. In other words, what we believe, and most of us believe we are a little more rational than the people around us, is emotional.  Not in the Romantic sense, not elevating emotions to revealing the truth better than reason, but simply stating a fact. Emotions colour how we assess the salience of information, which we know from studying people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. When we are unable to link information with the feelings that tell us how salient the information is, then we lose ability to make decisions.

Free Will

In this view, we can see that an individual's decisions are still important. However, it is also clear that contra-causal free will is irrelevant. An individual human cannot be considered apart from their social context, because we are social primates who live a social lifestyle. In fact, isolation can make us mentally and physically ill. 

The question becomes, "Under what conditions to we have conscious choices and what is the extent of our ability to choose?" A social mammal cannot just decide, "Fuck it, I'm not sharing my food with anyone," because that isolates them and they die during the first general food shortage because no one will share with them. In a social group, refusal to share most likely brings immediate repercussions in the form of active punishment from the group. In chimps, for example, groups round on and beat up any member that displays overt selfishness. The selfish individual weakens the group.

As urbanised humans we have a problem in that in our set-up selfish people can rapidly become so rich and powerful that we cannot easily punish them. And enough other selfish individuals are normalising and rewarding this behaviour that our disapproval and anger as a group don't seem to matter much. Classical liberalism was always about preventing the group from punishing individuals who display sociopathic levels of selfishness. By the way, sociopathy is defined as a pervasive and pronounced pattern of disregard for and deliberate violation of the rights of other people (viz slavery, genocide, and expropriation). 

There are many different views on the question of free will in the light of modern science. Many argue that because determinism is seen to apply at some levels of reality it must apply at all. Determinists argue that there can be no freewill in any meaningful sense. Morality in this view is not even a subject because no one can be held culpable for actions they did not choose. Deterministas frequently cite experiments by Benjamin Libet, as I explained in Freewill is Back on the Menu (11 March 2016); Libet's interpretation of his results was questioned by his colleagues at the time and has been quite thoroughly debunked now. Psychologists don't cite Libet, but many physicists still do - because of confirmation bias.

Others, myself included, hold that while determinism does apply at some levels it does not apply at all and that this allows for some freedom of will for animals. This is called compatibilism.

There are a dozen more variations on this question, but all of them call into question basic assumptions made by Enlightenment thinkers and particularly by liberals. If we call into question the very notion of freedom, then the ideology that deals with liberty loses all traction. What can liberty mean if no one is truly free? 

In fact, I believe this issue is clouded by confusion surrounding the meaning of free will. Most people seem to take it to be synonymous with contra-causal free will. But we've already ruled out contra-causal free will as a useful idea. No one ever had contra-causal free will.

At the very least, we can say that we experience ourselves making decisions. When called upon we formulate reasons for our actions. People around us hold us accountable for the decisions and the reasons we give for those decisions. But we are social animals whose behaviour is strongly influenced by our social milieu. So is there a better framework to discuss this? I think there is, and it emerges from the world of primatologist Frans de Waal.

The Evolution of Morality

Growing up we absorb a worldview—a complex web of beliefs (i.e., emotions) about the world and people and ourselves. We unconsciously absorb, through empathy, how others feel about the topics they are discussing and also about topics that are taboo. Many of us never question the basic assumptions we make because when we hear statements that agree with our belief we feel good about it and about ourselves. This is how we navigate the moral landscape.

In the language of John Searle, rather than consciously following moral rules, we develop unconscious competencies that guide our actions to be within the rules most of the time. We have agency, but in a prosocial animal it is delimited by what contributes to the survival of the group because that is how social species survive. All social animals have a dual nature as individuals and members of groups. 

We also, mostly unconsciously, modify our behaviour all the time based on ongoing social feedback. As social animals we are attuned, through empathy, to the disposition of other members of our group. And we also keep track of the network reciprocity amongst our group. We know, and love to discuss, who is sleeping with whom, who is in debt, who likes/hates their job, who has kids and what they are doing. This all creates a sense of belonging which is essential to good mental health in social mammals. Of course the modern industrialised world has disrupted this pattern on an unprecedented scale and we're still not sure what the result of that will be. But we have a sneaking suspicion that it is tied to the rise in mental health problems we are seeing across the industrialised world. 

The combination of empathy and reciprocity, which comes from the work on chimps and bonobos by Frans de Waal and his group, gives us the basis for the evolution of morality. The social lifestyle puts us in a situation were we know how other members of our group feel and we know the extent of our interrelationship with them: we know the extent of our obligations. From obligations come the idea of rights and duties. Thus, morality evolved as a deontological dimension to social life. And from this we can derive notions of virtue; virtue is primarily fulfilling or going beyond the requirements of obligation. Similar consequentialist accounts rely on an understanding of the expectations that come with obligation. And outcome is not good if it harms others, but this assumes an obligation not to harm.

This framing of agency and decision making as part of being a social primate embedded in networks of mutual obligation gives us a much better sense of the kinds of decisions we have to make as social primates. Legacy concepts like free will and the classical view of reasoning seem to have little relevance here. We are both individuals and social. Choices are always emotional, always with reference to our milieu. We are not isolated, selfish, or rational. Indeed, "rational" really requires a completely new definition.

As organisms we aim for homeostasis; i.e., to maintain our bodies within the limits that make continued life possible. Societies also have something like homeostasis, a kind of dynamic equilibrium, or set of chaotic oscillations through a range of possibilities consistent with the continued existence of the group. But now we scale the group up to millions of people crammed into tiny spaces. And this defies our evolutionary adaptations, very often leaving us to navigate by our wits rather than relying on our natural sociability.

I want to finish this essay on reason with a word on those who seek to grab our attention and subvert our decision making processes.

Propaganda

Many political activists are still fixated on putting the facts before the people and letting rational self-interest do its work. They haven't realised how humans make decisions. I find it difficult myself. In trying to persuade people that liberalism has run its course and that we need a new socio-political paradigm based on mutual obligations, I'm mainly using facts. Of course I'm trying also to construct a narrative, but it's mainly for other people who do like facts and who might be persuaded by a factual narrative.

We already know that few liberals or neoliberals will be persuaded by the narrative I am relating here.  A proper cult does not crumble at the first hint of criticism and liberalism is a couple of centuries old now. I feel the frustration of this. I feel that I want to break out of the faux formalism of essay writing and get someone excited about a new world through some creative story writing. I write non-fiction because I find it valuable in many ways.

Those who have really internalised the reality that humans are not rational are the modern propaganda industries; i.e.. journalism, advertising, public relations; spin doctors, speech writers, press secretaries, copy writers, lobbyists, etc. These are the people who know how we really make decisions and how to exploit that for profit or to gain power.

This is why the UK is doing a volt-face on Europe: through a targeted campaign of disinformation; using millions of profiles illegally obtained from Facebook to create illegally-funded attack ads on Facebook, the radical British nationalists hijacked the referendum and then exploited a very narrow majority of voters on the day (actually just a third of the electorate) to force us out of our most important international relationship, with our biggest trading partner (and the biggest single export market), voiding trade deals with every major trading bloc, and all for what? So a few British sociopaths could tell the rest of us what to do without interference from the sociopaths in the EU.

And even with all of these facts in the public domain, the process carries on with, if anything, even greater momentum. It really is completely mad.

The modern propaganda machine was helped by the sideways shift that psychologists took from psychotherapy to mass manipulation. They were led by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and student, who used knowledge gained from psychology to orchestrate a campaign of manipulation to break through the American taboo on women smoking in the 1920s. He thus doubled the profits of American tobacco and condemned millions of women to death from cancer, emphysema, and other diseases associated with smoking. 

Why do the activists advocating for action on global warming and mass extinction have such a hard time getting their message across? At least partly because they erroneously believe it is simply a matter of putting the facts before the people and waiting for them to do the rational thing. But this has never worked, because reason does not work like this. We believe in such strategies for purely ideological reasons.

Against us are massed the propaganda corps of a hundred industry groups who employ top psychology and business PhDs to work in think tanks and lobby groups to target law-makers with disinformation.

Because we are working on out-of-date information we are extremely vulnerable to propaganda. Whole generations are now growing up saturated with propaganda.

Conclusion

We know that the classical account of reason is wrong.  Evidence has been stacking up on this since the mid-1960s. I found reading Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason profoundly shifted my understanding of reasoning and rationality. But I don't think I've internalised it yet. 

The classical account of reason is hard to shift partly because of the ways in which it is wrong. It is persuasive precisely because the false impression it creates is one that we want to believe - we like thinking of ourselves that way. The truth is much less glamorous, but worse we also have negative narratives about the truth. We feel strongly about reason and the supposed role that reason plays in our lives. And, for many of us, our aspiration to a cool, unemotional rationality still defines our identity. Many people, for example, admire Jordan Peterson because he is never emotional when under attack and he knows how to provoke emotional responses in other people. And in the classical paradigm this means he is rational and his emotional opponents are irrational. And because rationality is explicitly linked to morality, he appears to have the moral high-ground. 

But look at this another way. Someone who is unemotional when attacked is generally speaking alienated from their emotions. If your train in martial arts you have to learn to suppress emotions in order to stay focussed and fight. Samurai undertook Zen meditation techniques the better stay calm in combat; to be more effective killers.

We evolved emotions and the ability to read emotions in others to help us deal with intra-group conflicts. To conceal your emotional state gives you an advantage in a conflict. Being able to easily manipulate other people into expressing emotions, makes for a strong contrast. One is saying, "I am in control of myself and that other person is not in control of themselves". The emotional person is under the control of hostile forces. 

In the classical view, reasoning, thoughts, are voluntary and under our control. We are free to the extent we can suppress our emotions and employ logic. Emotions by contrast are also called passions. A passion is something involuntary that overtakes you. Art depicting Jesus being crucified by the Romans, is often called "The Passion of Christ." In this view, allowing yourself to be overcome by emotion is a form of weakness. And part of this narrative, of course, is that women, who are freer with their emotional displays precisely because they do not view social interactions as combat, are weak. This is the patriarchal argument that is used to oppress women. 

I grew up hating soccer because of the emotional reactions of English players to scoring a goal - they would become visibly elated, hug each other, and run about wildly. In the 1970s, when the game was still played by amateurs, my heroes, the New Zealand rugby team, would never celebrate scoring against the opposition. The goal scorer would simply turn around and quietly walk back to their position, along with teammates. Scoring was a team effort and no individual could or would take credit. Showing off, let alone rubbing the opposing team's face in it, was deeply frowned on. That was my ideal. Soccer players seemed effete and lacked humility or dignity. The British do like to get in your face when they win. 

On the other hand, men's uncontrolled rage, often towards women, is justified as a form of righteousness. As a man, one may not lose control and cry, for example, but one may lose control and punch someone who has offended you. There is a trendy term for this dynamic, but I don't use it, because we have enough problems without the additional stigma of labels. 

Popular culture likes to imagine large external threats, be it aliens, zombies, gangs, or killer bees. And humans usually survive these potential catastrophes by combining our two strengths: individual genius and working together as a team. In the movies, someone figures out how to survive the crisis, they are charismatic enough to convince everyone to try it their way (perhaps after token resistance), and then everyone works together to implement the plan that liberates us from the threat. 

There is a reason for this trope. As smart social primates, this is how we survive: full stop. The smart ones amongst us come up with clever plans. The persuasive ones get everyone on board and organised. But then everyone pulls their weight. Except that in wild primates, the greater one's capacity as a leader, the more obligation one carries to the members who are led. 

However we came to the classical account of reason (and I suspect nefarious intent), we now know that is it wrong. A central pillar of liberalism is rotten and has to be replaced. Liberalism will have to change as a result. Liberty is certainly an admirable goal but is has been used to avoid obligations and responsibilities. For example, the narrative of liberty has been used to continue to pollute our air, water, and land because  environmental legislation has been treated as an unjustified infringement on the free enterprise system. And yet, clearly, to poison the air I breathe or the water I drink is to deprive me of liberty. 

The advisory body Public Health England told me in an email that they estimate between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution. Try to imagine that a group of insurgents are going around shooting 30,000 people per year and what the government response would be.  In 2018, 272 people were killed by assailants wielding knives and there is an ongoing public outcry. But 30,000 deaths from air pollution hardly raises an eyebrow. This has to change, too.

Humans are not rational. We are so not rational. And this has nothing to do with making good or bad decisions (or how we define good and bad). We all need to take this on board and start rethinking morality, society, politics, economics, and pretty much everything else. 

~~oOo~~