In texts, through thoughts, with pleasure

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 53 days ago.
Keywords: Tibet today

On offer on the website of the German radio station Deutschlandfunk: an interview with the sociologist Ulrich Beck about religion and violence (information page, direct link to mp3 download).

At some point during the conversation, the interviewer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs addresses the situation in Tibet. Beck pays much attention to the potential for violence that he sees inherent in religion. Now, Heinrichs ask, what would one then make of a case like Tibet, where violence is exercised by the state against religion, or against a group that sees itself as religious? The implication is that here it isn’t religion that is the source of violence. (The implication is also that this particular religion, Buddhism, is rather a source of peace.)

Rather curiously, Beck replies by speaking about how religion contributed to a theologization of nationalism in the 19th century, and about the involvement of protestantism in antisemitism during the Nazi regime. How this is related to the Tibet issue? No idea.

Comment [1]

This is a: snip, written by Birgit Kellner 63 days ago.
Keywords: downloads

Quite a number of the works of the great Belgian Buddhologist Louis de la Vallée Poussin (1869-1938) are already in the public domain, including all volumes of his translation of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa – they have been deposited for download at archive.org, contributed mostly by the kind souls of the Universities of Toronto:

Works by LVP at archive.org

Available in PDF and DjVU formats, and also as TXT.

Comment

This is a: article, written by Birgit Kellner 75 days ago.
Keywords: Buddhist philosophy , subjectivity , Vasubandhu , Dharmakīrti

Several researchers in Buddhist studies recently brought up Thomas Metzinger’s being noone in conversation. Aiming at naturalizing philosophy in the sense of making it consistent with state-of-the-art scientific theories (neurosciences, in this case), Metzinger more or less ends up declaring the self a fiction. Parallels to Buddhist theories of non-self, or no-self (_anātmavāda_), are apparent. But how to spell them out, and how to give a more precise account of them, remains to be seen.

At a symposium about Subjectivity as a principle of relationality in the context of the hermeneutics of religion currently held in Vienna, Eberhard Guhe today gave a very interesting paper with the title “‘Being no one’ or ‘being someone’”.

Guhe first sketched Metzinger’s theory of a “self-model” and then drew largely upon Pāli sources (canonical passages, Buddhaghosa, and in the discussion also some Milindapañha) to point out certain parallels in Buddhist thought – including, for instance, Buddhaghosa’s famous passage about there being no thinker apart from the thought.

He also pointed to the phenomenologist Dan Zahavi’s criticism of Metzinger, published as Being Someone, and also to Metzinger’s reply (Kudos to the journal Psyche for making all these materials freely available for download!).

As Guhe pictured things, there was Metzinger’s denial of a subject (and of subjectivity) on the one and and Zahavi’s defence of a subject as a process on the other; the Buddhist theories Guhe cited fell squarely in Metzinger’s camp. At the end of his talk, Guhe problematized the relationship between Metzinger’s and Zahavi’s accounts and offered to see them not as diametrically opposed theories on the same level, but rather as accounts on different levels that are linked via supervenience relations.

Interesting in this representation was that Buddhist theories fell clearly into the “noone” camp – a useful starting-point for further reflection.

When I worked through the pudgalapratiṣedhaprakaraṇa of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (maybe 5th century) a few years back, with the help of Claus Oetke’s Ich und das ‘Ich’ (shamefully neglected in the English-speaking world, I dare say), one of the questions that kept popping up at the back of my mind is: Does Vasubandhu deny the existence of a self as a substrate and subject of mental states, or does he deny subjectivity as such? There is a difference here: One could argue that subjectivity is a fact, but that it can explained in a way other than proposing that a self, identified as a subject, ontologically exists in separation of mental states that somehow belong to it.

At the time, I interpreted Vasubandhu to recognize subjectivity: to propose an account of a subject’s identity over time, for instance, without having to posit subject as substance – by positing a succession of momentary mental states. Viewed from this perspective, at least this particular version of a Buddhist theory falls into a “being someone”-camp.

A recent lecture by Georges Dreyfus at Columbia, “Self, Consciousness & Subjectivity: A Preliminary Buddhist Account” (podcast here) made me think again. Dreyfus would have Vasubandhu reject subjectivity altogether, and contrasts this with Dharmakīrti’s theory of “self-awareness” (_svasaṃvedana_) where subjectivity becomes built into the very notion of a mental state itself.

I am not sure whether I agree with Dreyfus’ assessment of Vasubandhu, but tend to agree with is assessment of Dharmakīrti. When I say “tend to agree”, I would like to highlight that there are to my knowledge no clearcut statements in Dharmakīrti’s works to the effect that subjectivity is an integral part of mental states – that, for instance, mental states invariably arise as being perspectival. But there are passages that seem to presuppose such a notion, or that when taken seriously imply this.

In any case, where Buddhist philosophical theories fall within a “being noone” and a “being someone” spectrum remains to be seen. And to make things more complicated, what has to be factored in are that different levels of explanation and analysis are applied in various Buddhist theories that correlate with stages on the Buddhist, which requires a transformation of consciousness: subjectivity may be recognized as an explanandum within a lower-level theory, but when it comes to spelling out the mental state of the enlightened one, things might turn out differently.

Comment