Heh, Michael Levin seems to be tangential to almost everything I'm interested in these days. I keep encountering his name in strange places and more often than I'd expect even as an interested party. He seems to occupy a particular niche in reality right now and his works feels almost numinous in a weird way.
This is profound, thanks for sharing. I need to chew on it a bit more - it's hard to fully grasp what religious practitioners mean when they talk about the importance of love, but this has helped me to understand that a bit better.
Great writing as ever! The asymmetry is real, which I guess is why manicheist views of an eternal battle between good and bad kind of miss the point. The association of evil with dullness and ignorance is real.
Cool reference from Thomas Doctor et al. Care *is* intelligence, not just another thing that an intelligent being can do... I think I can get behind that. Btw, Thomas Doctor is a well know scholar-practitioner-translator within the Tibetan strand of Buddhism. This is not a group of western secular thinkers choosing a Buddhist veneer for their spiritual-ish theories. It includes at least one committed Buddhist reaching out to advocate for their cherished bodhisattva vow in halfway secular terms.
Which brings me to your theist complaint that this kind of Buddhist view seems to have a God-shaped hole in its center. Let me try to convince you it doesn't.
> But every movement toward the infinite presupposes an infinitude which can be moved towards; an asymptotic approach requires an asymptote. The article describes participation in something already infinite, which is simply what classical theism has always meant by God: not a being among beings, but Being itself, intrinsically blissful and loving, the transcendent source and ground of all finite instances of care and understanding.
In Buddhism there are plenty of names that refer directly to this asymptote. Since we were talking about bodhisattvas, the Mahayana tradition has many such names: Dharmakaya ("body of reality"), Trikaya ("triple Buddha-body") Dharmadhatu ("space of reality"), Tathagatagarbha ("Buddha Nature"), Nirvana, Tathata ("suchness"), shunyata ("emptiness"), Dharmata ("nature of reality"), paramarthasatya ("truth of ultimate meaning"), "prajnaparamita" ("transcendent wisdom")... the list goes on.
The major difference between all those terms and the Western word "God", is that the Buddhist terms are all technical terms, each of which tries to convey something about its target ("the asymptote") from a different conceptual direction. Despite having the same ultimate denotation, they are not synonyms, and in Buddhist discourse they are not interchangeable. What this means, is that none of these words is ever meant to give the impression to your conceptual mind that it has a handle on "it". This is how far Buddhism goes to avoid reifying what it tries to point to.
Buddhism makes the choice to be a real stickler about not ever making its target into a "thing", even metaphorically. Check your inspired paragraph above: there is a real effort there to avoid divine reification, but then comes "participation in someTHING".
You could say that in a Buddhist view, transcendence is real, and all its qualities of power, love and wisdom (which match quite closely with the three characteristics of the triple-omni-God!) are real too. But assigning those to a singular Being or source is just an unnecessary hypothesis, or an unwanted metaphor. They are just there, accessible if you are blessed with the sensibility or someone teaches to you to pay attention and your ears perk up. Instead of using metaphors of divine unity or extraordinary causation, Buddhism honestly gives you the paradox, the point where the logical mind is kindly asked to step down from its model-making. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. You are Buddha, yet you appear confused and suffer.
This makes Buddhism a spirituality without a designated center, and that is a good thing as far as I can tell! I don't really call myself a Buddhist these days, but I've kept the distaste for ideas of control and centrality. If you draw God at the center, by the same token you are separating it from periphery, and it becomes a being among beings, like the Buddha sitting amid a circle of disciples :)
I've noticed a few times that open-minded theists steeped in the Western source of Christianity and Platonism can easily make sense of non-dual traditions like Advaita Vedanta, which *mostly* avoids reification (but still uses the concept of Ishvara ~ God), but sometime balk at Buddhism, especially the Madhyamaka-inspired strands of Mahayana with all their negative talk.
Yet I have very fond memories of Dharma talks by a Catholic nun who also happens to be a Zen master. It happens!
Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful comment as always.
Ok so many things to suss out here. First, I will admit this probably came off as more anti-buddhist than I intended, but there are just so many thorny philosophical issues here it was hard to give all arguments and angles there due. It's certainly true that "this is not a group of western secular thinkers choosing a Buddhist veneer for their spiritual-ish theories" but at the same time there is nothing in this paper that indicates anything beyond a materialist metaphysics, which I think you and I both think is just incoherent, culturally harmful, etc. Although Buddhism does have some notion of transcendence as you point out, it lends itself to this physicalist psycho-technology interpretation, and I think this should be called out for being a false interpretation of Buddhist metaphysics and bad metaphysics in general. The authors could have pointed out how consonant their thinking is with classical theism, but they don't and choose to go with Buddhism for this reason.
I'm no expert in Buddhist metaphysics however (so please tell me if I'm wrong here), but it seems like so much of this is just semantics and different emphases, two sides of the same paradoxical coin - god or emptiness, everything or nothing, apophatic or kataphatic theology.
You write: "If you draw God at the center, by the same token you are separating it from periphery, and it becomes a being among beings, like the Buddha sitting amid a circle of disciples :)"
But that is exactly not what classical theism is not saying - God is not the center, or even a being, but rather the foundation of all Being (I know that you know this, but its telling how easy it is to slip back into God as cosmic demiurge kind of language/thinking, which is kind of the whole reason DBH wrote his book). I guess my beef, if you can call it that, with the kinds of Buddhism you describe is it sort of just refuses to answer - "why is there something rather than nothing?". "God" isn't much of an answer, but it least it is to the extent that it affirms the validity of the question, whereas in Buddhism it just seems like the response is - we reject the question, existence, suffering, Buddha, etc. just simply is, and that's that. Which is fine, refusing to reify/deify some concept as the answer has its virtues as you say, but, well, I am creature who likes questions and answers and stories and ideas, and that is a part of my being and of Being too :)
Hmm. This is interesting. I don't really understand what you mean by God affirming the validy of the "why is there something rather than nothing?" question.
Frankly I've always found that question kind of baffling, and its long been a fundamental point of divergence between myself and a number of people. The Buddhist answer/non-answer has always made intuitive sense to me, before I knew anything of Buddhism - its part of what made it attractive to me. I've engaged with people who are very struck by the question and their various answers and have been mostly (maybe entirely) unmoved...
So I suppose I am questioning the validity of the question, but not in a 'you fool how could you think this' way. Rather it bemuses and sometimes disturbs me that there is this divide between people who think that wuestion is deeply meaningful, and people who, intuitively or after analysis, feel it to be trivial, or nonsensical in a kind of wittgensteinian sense, or just unhelpful... I don't really understand much at all why this divide exists.
If you have any thoughts on that I'd love to hear them - or if you could elaborate on why "God" as an answer does something for you?
Like I said above, on some level this just all feels like a necker cube/two sides of the same coin thing - God or emptiness, cataphatic yes-saying or apophatic nay-saying, rejection of the question or affirmation, etc etc. You can play all the word games you want, but the question remains. Of course it's a paradox, why would we expect otherwise?
I also think this is all born out empirically. I have no doubt that Buddhist sages have experiences which reveal to them the emptiness of existence and the absurdity of why something/nothing and that Christian mystics have experiences that reveal to them a God who is love and being and the answer to all whys.
That was fun! How did the Care as the Driver of Intelligence paper come to your attention?
Thanks! I think from following Michael Levin on twitter? The paper is from his group (he's the last author).
Heh, Michael Levin seems to be tangential to almost everything I'm interested in these days. I keep encountering his name in strange places and more often than I'd expect even as an interested party. He seems to occupy a particular niche in reality right now and his works feels almost numinous in a weird way.
Indeed. Have you sampled any of John Vervaeke’s work too? Awakening from the meaning crisis is an enjoyable series
Alaina, are you referring to the 56 year old biologist or the 82 year old philosopher Michael Levin?
Oh, I'm referring to the biologist! I didn't know about the philosopher 😅 but I am familiar with Vervaeke and enjoy his stuff too.
I’m a fan! A friend introduced me to his work a few years ago. I published this related piece a couple months ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/jivespicoli/p/care-as-intelligence?r=xah9r&utm_medium=ios
This is profound, thanks for sharing. I need to chew on it a bit more - it's hard to fully grasp what religious practitioners mean when they talk about the importance of love, but this has helped me to understand that a bit better.
I feel this in my bones, it was so gratifying to read it in words. 🙏
:D
Great writing as ever! The asymmetry is real, which I guess is why manicheist views of an eternal battle between good and bad kind of miss the point. The association of evil with dullness and ignorance is real.
Cool reference from Thomas Doctor et al. Care *is* intelligence, not just another thing that an intelligent being can do... I think I can get behind that. Btw, Thomas Doctor is a well know scholar-practitioner-translator within the Tibetan strand of Buddhism. This is not a group of western secular thinkers choosing a Buddhist veneer for their spiritual-ish theories. It includes at least one committed Buddhist reaching out to advocate for their cherished bodhisattva vow in halfway secular terms.
Which brings me to your theist complaint that this kind of Buddhist view seems to have a God-shaped hole in its center. Let me try to convince you it doesn't.
> But every movement toward the infinite presupposes an infinitude which can be moved towards; an asymptotic approach requires an asymptote. The article describes participation in something already infinite, which is simply what classical theism has always meant by God: not a being among beings, but Being itself, intrinsically blissful and loving, the transcendent source and ground of all finite instances of care and understanding.
In Buddhism there are plenty of names that refer directly to this asymptote. Since we were talking about bodhisattvas, the Mahayana tradition has many such names: Dharmakaya ("body of reality"), Trikaya ("triple Buddha-body") Dharmadhatu ("space of reality"), Tathagatagarbha ("Buddha Nature"), Nirvana, Tathata ("suchness"), shunyata ("emptiness"), Dharmata ("nature of reality"), paramarthasatya ("truth of ultimate meaning"), "prajnaparamita" ("transcendent wisdom")... the list goes on.
The major difference between all those terms and the Western word "God", is that the Buddhist terms are all technical terms, each of which tries to convey something about its target ("the asymptote") from a different conceptual direction. Despite having the same ultimate denotation, they are not synonyms, and in Buddhist discourse they are not interchangeable. What this means, is that none of these words is ever meant to give the impression to your conceptual mind that it has a handle on "it". This is how far Buddhism goes to avoid reifying what it tries to point to.
Buddhism makes the choice to be a real stickler about not ever making its target into a "thing", even metaphorically. Check your inspired paragraph above: there is a real effort there to avoid divine reification, but then comes "participation in someTHING".
You could say that in a Buddhist view, transcendence is real, and all its qualities of power, love and wisdom (which match quite closely with the three characteristics of the triple-omni-God!) are real too. But assigning those to a singular Being or source is just an unnecessary hypothesis, or an unwanted metaphor. They are just there, accessible if you are blessed with the sensibility or someone teaches to you to pay attention and your ears perk up. Instead of using metaphors of divine unity or extraordinary causation, Buddhism honestly gives you the paradox, the point where the logical mind is kindly asked to step down from its model-making. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. You are Buddha, yet you appear confused and suffer.
This makes Buddhism a spirituality without a designated center, and that is a good thing as far as I can tell! I don't really call myself a Buddhist these days, but I've kept the distaste for ideas of control and centrality. If you draw God at the center, by the same token you are separating it from periphery, and it becomes a being among beings, like the Buddha sitting amid a circle of disciples :)
I've noticed a few times that open-minded theists steeped in the Western source of Christianity and Platonism can easily make sense of non-dual traditions like Advaita Vedanta, which *mostly* avoids reification (but still uses the concept of Ishvara ~ God), but sometime balk at Buddhism, especially the Madhyamaka-inspired strands of Mahayana with all their negative talk.
Yet I have very fond memories of Dharma talks by a Catholic nun who also happens to be a Zen master. It happens!
Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful comment as always.
Ok so many things to suss out here. First, I will admit this probably came off as more anti-buddhist than I intended, but there are just so many thorny philosophical issues here it was hard to give all arguments and angles there due. It's certainly true that "this is not a group of western secular thinkers choosing a Buddhist veneer for their spiritual-ish theories" but at the same time there is nothing in this paper that indicates anything beyond a materialist metaphysics, which I think you and I both think is just incoherent, culturally harmful, etc. Although Buddhism does have some notion of transcendence as you point out, it lends itself to this physicalist psycho-technology interpretation, and I think this should be called out for being a false interpretation of Buddhist metaphysics and bad metaphysics in general. The authors could have pointed out how consonant their thinking is with classical theism, but they don't and choose to go with Buddhism for this reason.
I'm no expert in Buddhist metaphysics however (so please tell me if I'm wrong here), but it seems like so much of this is just semantics and different emphases, two sides of the same paradoxical coin - god or emptiness, everything or nothing, apophatic or kataphatic theology.
You write: "If you draw God at the center, by the same token you are separating it from periphery, and it becomes a being among beings, like the Buddha sitting amid a circle of disciples :)"
But that is exactly not what classical theism is not saying - God is not the center, or even a being, but rather the foundation of all Being (I know that you know this, but its telling how easy it is to slip back into God as cosmic demiurge kind of language/thinking, which is kind of the whole reason DBH wrote his book). I guess my beef, if you can call it that, with the kinds of Buddhism you describe is it sort of just refuses to answer - "why is there something rather than nothing?". "God" isn't much of an answer, but it least it is to the extent that it affirms the validity of the question, whereas in Buddhism it just seems like the response is - we reject the question, existence, suffering, Buddha, etc. just simply is, and that's that. Which is fine, refusing to reify/deify some concept as the answer has its virtues as you say, but, well, I am creature who likes questions and answers and stories and ideas, and that is a part of my being and of Being too :)
Hmm. This is interesting. I don't really understand what you mean by God affirming the validy of the "why is there something rather than nothing?" question.
Frankly I've always found that question kind of baffling, and its long been a fundamental point of divergence between myself and a number of people. The Buddhist answer/non-answer has always made intuitive sense to me, before I knew anything of Buddhism - its part of what made it attractive to me. I've engaged with people who are very struck by the question and their various answers and have been mostly (maybe entirely) unmoved...
So I suppose I am questioning the validity of the question, but not in a 'you fool how could you think this' way. Rather it bemuses and sometimes disturbs me that there is this divide between people who think that wuestion is deeply meaningful, and people who, intuitively or after analysis, feel it to be trivial, or nonsensical in a kind of wittgensteinian sense, or just unhelpful... I don't really understand much at all why this divide exists.
If you have any thoughts on that I'd love to hear them - or if you could elaborate on why "God" as an answer does something for you?
Good question.
Like I said above, on some level this just all feels like a necker cube/two sides of the same coin thing - God or emptiness, cataphatic yes-saying or apophatic nay-saying, rejection of the question or affirmation, etc etc. You can play all the word games you want, but the question remains. Of course it's a paradox, why would we expect otherwise?
I also think this is all born out empirically. I have no doubt that Buddhist sages have experiences which reveal to them the emptiness of existence and the absurdity of why something/nothing and that Christian mystics have experiences that reveal to them a God who is love and being and the answer to all whys.
Well said, I pretty much agree.
There are ways of looking at it where the difference between approaches dissolves or is sublated, which in some moods I'm partial to.
To quote the Smashed Pumpkin: "and god is empty, just like me!"
+1 for the smashing pumpkins quote :)