Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy

Owen Flanagan and Beyond

Bongrae Seok, Bongrae Seok

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000712964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Naturalism, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy: Owen Flanagan and Beyond is an edited volume of philosophical essays focusing on Owen Flanagan's naturalized comparative philosophy and moral psychology of human flourishing. Flanagan is a philosopher well-known for his naturalized approach to philosophical issues such as meaning, physicalism, causation, and consciousness in the analytic school of Western philosophy. Recently, he develops his philosophical interest in Asian philosophy and discusses diverse philosophical issues of human flourishing, Buddhism and Confucianism from comparative viewpoints. The current volume discusses his philosophy of human flourishing and his naturalized approaches to Buddhism and Confucianism. The volume consists of five sections with eleven chapters written by leading experts in the fields of philosophy, religion, and psychology. The first section is an introduction to Flanagan's philosophy. The introductory chapter provides a general overview of Flanagan's philosophy, i.e., his philosophy of naturalization, comparative approach to human flourishing, and detailed summaries of the following chapters. In the second section, the three chapters discuss Flanagan's naturalized eudaimonics of human flourishing. The third section discusses Flanagan's naturalized Buddhism. The fourth section analyzes Flanagan's interpretation of Confucian philosophy (specifically Mencius's moral sprouts), from the viewpoint of moral modularity and human flourishing. The fifth section is Flanagan's responses to the comments and criticisms developed in this volume.

Section III
Flanagan and Naturalized Buddhism

5 Consciousness, Naturalism, and Human Flourishing

Christian Coseru

Introduction

What does Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics have to contribute that would be of interest to analytic philosophers? In his engaging and intellectually daring foray into cross-cultural philosophy, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, Owen Flanagan tackles this question head on. The answer – for philosophers who would care to listen – is that Buddhism offers a metaphysics anchored in such robust principles as impermanence, no-self, and the ubiquity of causation, an epistemology that is thoroughly empiricist, and a eudemonistic ethics that prizes compassion. Most importantly, argues Flanagan, is the claim “that there are logical connections between these three” (Flanagan 2011, 206), and the promise of reliable frameworks for exploring them. A philosopher working at the intersection of multiple spaces of meaning would find that these logical connections open up new possibilities for enhancing, refining, and expanding the range of philosophical arguments and possibilities, the ultimate and obvious aim of which is to make progress in solving enduring philosophical problems.

At first blush it may seem as though Flanagan’s aim in The Bodhisattva’s Brain is a modest one: Unpack for a broader, mostly philosophical, audience unacquainted with Buddhism what scholars have known all along – that Buddhism is host to a complex array of theories and practices of unique scope and enduring relevance that could be put in the service of addressing many of our most pressing existential and metaphysical concerns. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals it to be, in Flanagan’s own words, “a work of advocacy for something that doesn’t yet have any traction, at most a tenuous foothold” (Flanagan 2011, 4), but that he thinks ought to exist: namely, Buddhism naturalized. Given that most philosophers today take scientific naturalism to provide a robust basis for advancing empirical claims to knowledge – and, according to some (Kitcher 1992; Stroud 1996), the only such viable basis – if Buddhism can be shown to support such claims, then it stands a good chance of making a viable contribution to ongoing debates about causation, agency, and human flourishing. As someone who has argued at length for the need to make Buddhist epistemology receptive to the findings of cognitive sciences (Coseru 2009, 2012, 2018), I am quite sympathetic to Flanagan’s approach. But neither Buddhism nor the sciences of the mind speak with one voice, notwithstanding popular representations of Buddhism as a sort of mind science on the brink of revolutionizing Western conceptions of consciousness and cognition (Wallace 2003). The situation is further complicated by the fact that, as Flanagan himself has admitted elsewhere (Flanagan 2006), naturalism lacks a common core.

In what follows, I want to pursue the question of precisely what conception of naturalism, if any, is best suited to capture the scope of Buddhist Reductionism, and whether this conception can still accommodate the distinctive features of phenomenal consciousness (e.g., subjectivity, intentionality, first-person givenness, etc.). In the first section, I review dominant conceptions of naturalism, and their applicability to the Buddhist project. In the second section, I provide an example of problematic issues more stringent conceptions of naturalism under the guise of neurophysicalism confront, and evaluate Flanagan’s response to these issues. In the third section, I consider briefly the reflexivity thesis (the thesis that consciousness consists in conscious mental states being implicitly self-aware), specifically as articulated by Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and their followers, and use this thesis to articulate a conception of minimal agency as mineness that, I argue, further challenges Flanagan’s neurophysicalism stance and his compatibilist account of moral agency. I conclude, in the fourth section, by suggesting a way in which no-ownership conceptions of reflexive self-consciousness can help us both to get the structure of phenomenal consciousness right and to ground our conceptions of agency, intentionality, and moral responsibility.

Naturalism and Buddhist Reductionism

A term with multiple and imprecise meanings, ‘naturalism’ denotes a specific philosophical attitude and methodological approach that gained momentum at the beginning of the last century, when calls for philosophy to discard the supernatural and ally itself with science were first heard. As such, naturalism reflects a growing conviction, strengthened by advances in the empirical sciences, that reality is exhausted by nature. Given the rather imprecise meaning of ‘naturalism’ in contemporary philosophy, coming anywhere close to a unified view would be a daunting task. Undeterred by such a challenging task, Flanagan draws a sprawling, if eclectic, list of its varying and contested uses. Among them some read like rules of etiquette (“1. Philosophy should ‘respect,’ ‘be informed by,’ and ‘wholeheartedly accept’ the methods of science”), others like grownup advise (“6. There is no room, or need, for the invocation of immaterial agents or forces or causes in describing or accounting for things”), and yet others as enticements (“10. Naturalism is a form of non-reductive physicalism; there are genuine levels of nature above the elemental level”) (Flanagan 2006, 431f).

However capacious and enticing naturalism might be in its many (and often conflicting) guises, there are clear objections to its adoption as a methodology for philosophy, and Flanagan is careful to mention two of the most obvious: First, Wittgenstein’s (1922) claim that philosophy “aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” (Tractatus 4.112) and “is not one of the natural sciences” (Tractatus 4.111); and second, Bouwsma’s glib dismissal of naturalism for its belief (bordering on faith) in the “universal applicability of the scientific method” and its ignorance of the role that mathematics plays in experimental science (Bouwsma 1948). To these objections, we may add the observation of phenomenologists who, from Edmund Husserl to Dan Zahavi, have argued that what makes philosophy, especially after the phenomenological turn, immune to naturalization is that it conceives of itself as a form of transcendental inquiry that seeks to reflect on the conditions of possibility for experience and cognition (Zahavi 2013; Moran 2013). Of course, this conception of the task of philosophy, which goes back to Kant, does not rule out the possibility that empirical studies of consciousness might one day vindicate some version of naturalism finetuned to accommodate mental phenomena. Varela’s neurophenomenological project (1996) – first sketched in Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili (1992) – speaks to this vision of cognition as embodied, embedded, and enactive, and thus, as seemingly continuous with the environment of which it is a part (Lutz 2002; Lutz and Thompson 2003; Thompson 2007).

Considering the centrality of Abhidharma reductionism, with its cardinal principles of momentariness, dependent arising, and no-self, it would seem that Buddhism is friendly to naturalism, at least in a prescientific sense that reflects commitment to empiricism. As I have argued elsewhere (Coseru 2012, 3f), epistemological inquires in India never gave birth to the sort of anti-naturalism that is associated in the West with the legacies of Descartes and Kant. Nor did Indian epistemology introduce a distinction between causal questions (How are veridical states of cognitive awareness produced?) and questions of justification (What criteria ensure that we are justified in holding a particular belief?). This lacuna, rather than indicating a shortcoming, simply reflects the pragmatic orientation of epistemological inquiry in pre-modern India, where pragmatic rather than normative concerns drive most debates about knowledge, its mode of acquisition, and its function. With Dharmakirti, an examination of the underlying process of cognition becomes instrumental in determining which epistemic practices are conducing to effective action, giving birth to a rich scholastic tradition of both empirical inquiry and debate that continues in parts of Asia to the present day.

Can the Abhidharma reductionist accounts of experience, then, be extended to accommodate the findings of cognitive science? And would such an extension of its scope offer a viable way of integrating its methods, ideas, and arguments into contemporary philosophical discourse? Describing it as the “First Moral Psychology,” Flanagan finds in its techniques of moral and mental discipline a useful parallel to the Socratic directive that an unexamined life is not worth living. But he is quick to point out that, unlike Socrates and his followers in the West, Abhidharma is a normative rather than a descriptive project: One does not merely build a register of mental states as they become manifest in contemplative practice; rather, one learns to identify them as wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral. For the uninitiated, Abhidharma is likely to come across as metaphysics rather than cognitive psychology. In effect, given its focus on property particulars and their relations – the much disputed elements of existence and/or experience (dharmas) that are constitutive of all composite entities – Abhidharma is best understood as a trope theory.

Consider, for instance, Vasubandhu’s account of the operations of analytic insight in light of Buddhist reductionism:

One examines the body with regard to its proper and general characteristics, as well as sensation, mind and the other constitutive elements of existence. Their own nature is their proper characteristic. But the general characteristic is the impermanence of produced things, the fact that everything that is connected with the four afflictions is suffering, and the fact that all things are empty and not the self.

(Pradhan 1975, 206)

On the view articulated here, the practice of analytic insight that enables us to apprehend the specific characteristics of phenomena, also discloses their partite nature, and, given the principle of momentariness, also their impermanence. At first, it would seem that what motivates the Abhidharma project are metaphysical considerations about personal identity and causality (the first, concerned with establishing the no-self view, and the latter, with the idea that to exist is to have causal efficacy). But in advancing a conception of causation that includes consciousness and cognition as efficient causal categories, Abhidharma also presents us with a metaphysics of experience: The irreducible elements of existence and/ or experience (dharmas) are not essences or substances, but activities, properties, and patterns of connectedness. The project of identifying and mapping out these irreducible elements (e.g., sensations, volitions, etc.), with a view of achieving specific ends (e.g., virtues such as mindfulness, compassion, and equanimity), is both descriptive and experiential. It is, thus, a kind of naturalized phenomenology (Roy et al. 1999), that is, as a method for bringing into focus, capturing, and categorizing variable mental operations and contents that are normally difficult to attended to, while also submitting to empirical scrutiny about their causal and conditioning factors (unlike, say, the conception of phenomenology that Flanagan appeals to, which stands for a sort of introspective awareness).

That such an attentional skill is itself realized within a continuum of causally interconnected states does not mean that its phenomenal properties are attributable to some sort of persisting entity or to a formal and invariant structure of consciousness. Metaphysical explanations typically look for a substratum or process, a self or self-grasping tendency that can explain why experience has the features that it does. In rejecting such a permanent owner and/or locus of experience, however, Buddhism offers an opportunity to explore the structure of awareness and the problem of personal identity not only on metaphysical and empirical grounds, but also in terms of its descriptive and constitutive features: The question why self-awareness comes bound up with a sense of self (whether owned or merely occurrent) can thus be pursued independently of metaphysical concerns about what a self is and what its fundamental attributes are. It also allows for an analysis of the structure of attentive awareness without assuming that such structure reflects an external relation of ownership between consciousness and its self-specifying features (or their analogues in the dynamic structures of brain activity).¹

I think what Buddhism naturalized ends up looking like largely depends on whatever conception of naturalism is in play. A stripped-down, bare bones Buddhism without beliefs, set free of its ancillary ‘hocus pocus’ notions of rebirth, a karmic system, and ‘bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves’ – the sort that Flanagan favors – most likely will appeal to those who reject outright the existence of ‘nonphysical states of mind’ (Flanagan 2011, 3). If we are to advance on behalf of the Buddhist any robust metaphysical claim – the story goes – nonphysical states of mind cannot be any part of it. The metaphysical claim in question is that of physicalism – essentially the view that everything that exists is physical or supervenes on the physical (Stoljar 2010). The problem with this claim, as critics have argued at length, is the very conception of the ‘physical,’ which, in the absence of a definition of the essential features that all physical things have, but which nonphysical things lack (a task well-nigh impossible prior to a complete investigation of all things physical), is too vague to serve as a foundation for a complete theory of what there is (Chomsky 2006; Dowell 2006). Briefly, defining ‘physical’ simply as that which is acknowledged by the science of physics, faces the well-known Hempel dilemma: If defined in terms of current physics, well, that is an incomplete science; and if defined in terms of a future, perhaps ideal physics, well, that is too vague to serve a useful explanatory function (Hempel 1969, 1980). Methodological and demonstrative definitions, likewise, run into similar difficulties. The first, which defines the ‘physical’ in terms of what is acknowledged by the basic methodology of physics, turns a metaphysical question into an epistemological one: It defines what there is in terms of how we discover basic facts about the world. The second, which singles out a representative sample of physical stuff (‘matter’ of various sorts and the middle-size dry goods that can be fashioned from it) as unequivocally representative of the ‘physical’ assumes that we can specify the conditions of similarity and difference for everything else. Lastly, demonstrative definitions too assume, rather arbitrarily, that if something is physical it is exclusively non-mental (Howell 2009, 87f, 2013, 19f).

The question, then, is this: Are there any alternative ways to advance the naturalism strategy that neither embrace physicalism wholesale nor reject the explanatory role of efficient causation in settling questions about the metaphysics of mind? As I have already noted, later Abhidharma, specifically Yogacara conceptions of the mental offer precisely such accounts, even as they bracket considerations about the ultimate irreducibility of the mental to a more basic substratum that serves merely as a repository for phenomenal qualities.

Neurophysicalism and the Selfless Mind

Like people seeking membership into a new and more progressive polity, ideas too, especially when hailing from our prescientific past, must undergo a process of naturalization to gain standing in our modern, scientifically grounded, republic of letters. Naturalism may cut a different profile in philosophy than it does in science; ultimately, however, it reflects a common ethos: the rejection of supernaturalism and of the whole repertory of principles, forces, or agencies whose actions are not amenable to efficient-causal explanation. Championed in America by such key figures in the pragmatist movement as John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, and Roy Sellars, naturalism was first conceived in transactional terms, as the tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• SECTION I Introduction
• SECTION II Flanagan, Human Flourishing, and Meaning of Life
• SECTION III Flanagan and Naturalized Buddhism
• SECTION IV Flanagan, Moral Modularity, and Confucian Philosophy
• SECTION V Owen Flanagan's Responses to His Critics
• About the Contributors
• Index