Thanks for doing what I would never do, that is giving up a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to hear a philosophy talk. I’m going to be talking fairly informally in a somewhat loose way. This isn’t going to be a formal heavy duty lecture. And so I’d like you to also feel free to interrupt me at any time with questions, with objections, with refutations, or expressions of disgust. I’d be wasting my time and you’d be wasting your time if I stood up here for a long time and bored you or confused you.
That’s a really terrible waste of a sunny Sunday afternoon. And so do me this favor. If at any point I I am saying something that is incomprehensible, either because of my speaking very, very quickly in an incomprehensible American accent, or because it’s just muddy and obscure, then stop me. Ask for clarification. Ask questions.
And in general, what I will do is adopt a convention that is to interpret silence as rapt interest, complete comprehension, and universal applause. Okay? So if you don’t intend to convey all of those messages, don’t be silent. Because if you’re silent and you don’t intend to convey those messages, that makes you a liar, which is bad. And it also makes me an ineffective teacher or lecturer, which is also bad.
So don’t, you know, don’t do that. So I will re I will rely on you and trust you to, to interrupt me when when need be. Okay. So I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about the idea of emptiness and to do that from a Western perspective, which might seem like a strange thing. And one of the reasons that I like doing this, I want to give a little bit of very general background before I actually start talking about some philosophy.
In October nineteen ninety, I was in Dharmasala when his holiness the Dalai Lama was giving Lama Chöpa teachings, the Guru Puja teachings, which is a very, very interesting set of teachings. But for me, one of the most interesting moments was when his holiness turned to the group of westerners who were there. And, you know, when you a lot of you probably been up to Dharamsala. Some of you haven’t, but it’s one of these surreal scenes where you’ve got every conceivable kind of person with every conceivable connection to Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy there, among whom are a certain cadre of Westerners who are doing their very best to transform themselves into Tibetans in various ways. You know?
And one of the things his holiness said when he turned to the group of Westerners, he said, look, you know, it’s really great that you’ve got this interest in Dharma. It’s really great that you’ve got this interest in Buddhism. And some of you have become Buddhists and Buddhist practitioners, and that’s really great too. But remember that by becoming Buddhist, you don’t thereby have to become Tibetan. You don’t have to grow long fingernails on your fifth finger in order to be a Buddhist.
And you don’t need to wear a stupa if you’re more comfortable in jeans. And you can still be a Westerner and be a Buddhist. You don’t have to give up your culture. And Tibetan culture isn’t necessarily somehow identical with Buddhism. And part of what that a train of thought that that set off in my thinking, is part of why I’m here today, is that it’s also the case that in order to get at philosophical ideas that are very central to the Buddhist tradition and the Buddhist practice, you don’t always have to get at those ideas by reading them in texts that were originally written in Pali or Sanskrit or Tibetan.
Because a lot of the ideas that are central and important in Buddhist philosophy are also developed in interesting, fruitful and related ways in various parts of the Western tradition. And there’s no reason just because the text was written by, you know, a white guy in England, to think that it’s junk, any more than, you know, you need to be proper to be properly dressed, you need to wear a stupa. So, partly, it’s this idea that I want to focus on that you can be interested in Buddhist practice and Buddhist ideas and use the Western tradition as a mine of valuable resources. What His Holiness was saying wasn’t, of course, completely original. Because all of you, by now, as a result of hearing many, many Buddhist teachings, have heard the remark that the Buddha himself made to his disciples, don’t believe what I say because I say it.
Test it. Rub it. Scratch it. And so forth. And part of the import of that isn’t just that anything that one finds in the Buddhist canon ought to be subject to analysis, and accepted if and only if it passes your own analytic test.
It also suggests that if something passes the same analytic test that comes from outside the Buddhist canon, the fact that the text itself is outside the Buddhist canon doesn’t make it junk. It can, that is, you could have a a text which satisfies exactly the same standards of analytic rigor that, as I say, happens to be written by an English guy or a French guy or something like that. And we’ll be talking about some texts here written by Greek guys, English guys, and German guys today, none of whom were Buddhist. Now there is, however, not only a kind of adventitious conceptual connection between the tradition in the West that I’ll be talking about and the Buddhist tradition. And so let me say right now, the tradition in the West that I’ll be talking about is a tradition that you can very broadly and loosely call the neo Pyrrhonian tradition of philosophy in the West.
Pyrrhon, I’ll start talking about Pyrrhonian a minute, was an important classical Greek philosopher and the founder of the school known as Pyronian skepticism. Pyronian skepticism was a big deal in Hellenistic philosophy in Greece. That is the period of time when the academy founded by Aristotle was flourishing for several hundred years. And a lot of the treatises, a lot of the doctrines of Pyronian philosophy were systematized and encyclopedias by the great philosopher Sextus Empiricus. Now, the reason I say all of this now, and I’m actually going talk more historically in a moment, is that in the seventeenth century, especially in Scotland and England, but not exclusively there, there was this amazing revival of interest in Pyronian philosophy.
And part of the fruit of that revival is the work of David hume, who really resurrected methodology of Pyronian skepticism and a lot of the concerns in very dramatic ways and wrote these brilliant treatises, like the Treatise of human Nature and the Enquiries and the Dialogue of the Natural Religion. Now hume, as most of you will probably know, becomes an extremely important philosopher in the early modern period and subsequently, and we’re also fortunate to be living in the midst of a gigantic hume revival over the last decade or so in, the English speaking world. hume was influential on a lot of people. Kant for one, Schopenhauer for another, and Wittgenstein for another, as well as Nietzsche for that matter. And so you’ve got these kind of trickles of the that move up through the Western tradition.
And you can generally identify a stream of thought, starting with Piero and kind of ending yesterday afternoon, that we can broadly call a Neo Pyronian tradition, even if, you know, Piero himself isn’t quite, in evidence through all of this. It’s generally also called the skeptical tradition. And what I’m going to be doing is taking arguments, texts, insights from the Western skeptical tradition and using them as vehicles for expressing views that are generally associated with the Madhyamaka or Middle Way tradition in Mahāyāna Buddhist schools. Now, that was a long digression, coming back to saying that there isn’t simply an adventitious conceptual relation between these two, schools. There’s also an interesting historical relation.
Because Piero didn’t stay in Greece all his life. See, there was Alexander the Great. And Alexander went to India, as you know, with armies of of conquest. And everybody knows about Alexander’s military accomplishments. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Alexander wasn’t only a kind of crazy military genius, but he was also on these conquests taking along a team of academics.
He took along biologists and geographers and cartographers and physicians and philosophers because he wanted to sort of, you know, figure out what the you know, what people thought all over the world. And he took two philosophers with him, Piro and Timon. So Pyrrho turns up in India round about the time that the Mahāyāna is getting going. Round about the same time that depending on your taste, the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras are either being rediscovered or composed. Round about the time that Nāgārjuna and his students are off doing some interesting things, Pyrrho shows up in India.
Now, Greek accounts of Piero and Piero’s biography, especially if you read Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, are quite interesting. So, you know, Pyrrho went to India and came back saying the strangest things. Piero came back saying, things have no nature of their own, but are determined by convention. We should not say of anything that it is, that it is not, that it both is and is not, or that it neither is nor that it is not. But human convention governs existence.
Things are neither this way nor that. One should have no philosophical position. These are all quotes attributed in the Greek tradition to Pyrrho and Timon. Sound familiar? Now, so that now we get the skeptical tradition, rooted in Pyrrho, that comes up through the West, and it shouldn’t be surprising that there are certain affinities.
Now, there’s this whole cottage industry in Western classical scholarship right now that’s devoted to the following question. Do the Indians get Madhyamaka from Greece? Or did Westerners get skepticism from India? Right? And people advance all these arguments.
So some people say, well, hey, if you look at the horizon of the Mahāyāna in India, there wasn’t really anything very much like that before Alexander shows up. Alexander brings Pyrrho and Timon, and these people start saying these amazing things which sound pretty Greek. So probably Mahāyāna Buddhism is a Greek invention. Other people say, well, skepticism doesn’t really arise in Greece until Piero comes back from India. So probably skepticism is an Indian invention.
I can’t get real excited about this debate myself. And I can’t get real excited about it because, again, it seems to me to pose a false dichotomy. What it ignores is the fact that this period is historical smudge where you’ve got a lot of Greeks showing up in India both before and after Alexander. You’ve got Greek universities in South India and North India. You’ve got Greeks coming and getting silk and spices and things and dropping off olives and such like India.
And you’ve got Indian traders from the Malabar coast trading with Greeks in Aden and in, Cairo and places like that. And you’ve got the Silk Road, which is a large going concern. So you’ve I figured during this period, which is an extraordinarily fertile period in, Middle Eastern and, Indian history, you’ve got a lot of a lot of people talking to each other about a lot of ideas. And I think that right now, there’s not much point in trying to find this cold trail and say, who first uttered a tetralama or something like that. But anyway, you get the idea.
No matter how you draw, where you want to put the root, if you care about that or even if you don’t care about that, there’s a lot of interaction between classical Greek Pyronian philosophy philosophy and early Madhyamaka philosophy. And so, again, it’s not surprising that we’re gonna find some Madhyamaka ideas percolating through the Western tradition. So that that’s another reason for thinking about trying to approach emptiness from the West. Now given that, why should one bother to approach emptiness from the West? I mean, after all, if we already have a bunch of really superb texts written in Tibetan and Sanskrit, and some of them translated into English at varying degrees of success.
Why not just read those and forget about the Western texts? I think there are good reasons for not doing that. I mean, not not for not reading the Indian text. Believe me. It’s fun to read the Indian text and really useful.
But why should you also read Western text? Well, I think that’s for a bunch of reasons. The first is this. For the same reason that I always castigate my Western philosophical colleagues for calling their departments philosophy departments when they ignore philosophy of half of the world. Said, call a Western philosophy department if you want.
There’s nothing wrong with having Western philosophy departments. But if you’re not going to offer Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Tibetan, Arabic philosophy, stop calling it a philosophy department, please. I think for the same reason, if you’re interested in studying Buddhist philosophy, don’t think that you’re studying the ideas if you’re only studying them as they’re articulated in one set of texts. I mean, after all, you’d think you were pretty narrow if you just read Madhyamaka texts, didn’t read Yogachara texts, didn’t read Sama, you didn’t read in the Pali Canon or something. You’d think you were narrow.
I think you should also think of yourself as narrow even if what you care about is Buddhist philosophy if you don’t read texts that are developing similar ideas in the West. And the reason for that is because you do get differences of expression. You get different idioms. You get different presuppositions. You get different kinds of examples.
You get different kind of applications. And you just get a presentation that might be more tuned to the cultural background that you bring to the text. And so very often, I think it’s the case, you can actually get an easier entree or a better entree into some of these ideas by reading them in your home culture. So that, for instance, when I teach Western philosophy at Tibetan universities in India, which is one of the stranger things that I do, very often I find useful to explain a western text by contextualizing it with respect to an Indian or Tibetan text that my audience is already familiar with. And you can explain the alien western text by putting it into this more familiar background.
Similarly, I think that you’ll find it easier to approach Indian and Tibetan texts if you sometimes approach them by contextualizing them with respect to a background of more familiar presentations that you might find in the west. So I think they’re actual positive there’s positive value for a lot of reasons. Besides, it’s a good multicultural experience to learn your own culture as well as others. I’m always amazed when I teach classes in Buddhist or Asian philosophy, you know, tell students, well, you know. Oh, that’s great.
I’ll give you one one one antidote, then I’ll start doing philosophy. I was teaching a Buddhist philosophical text in a course last year, amusingly called The Meaning of Life. And a student raised his hand. We were talking about a text by Shanti Dev, a guide to the Bodhisattva’s way of life. And the student asked a question.
He said, look, is this connected in some way to the Job story? I thought about a really interesting question. So then I put it back to the class. Said, well, what do you think? There were these blank faces.
Finally, this one timid person raised his hand and said, what is a Job? And it transpired that in a class of fifty people, only two could identify Job and knew that it just had something to do with the bible. So I began to wonder about this enterprise of this multicultural enterprise of teaching people who had not a clue about their own culture about some other. So anyway, another good reason for reading Western philosophy is you can find something out about your own culture, which actually is a pretty cruel culture. Alright.
So now I’m gonna start talking about emptiness. Because the what I really wanna talk about is approaching emptiness in the West, and so I wanna explain what I mean by emptiness, first of all, before we do that. The first thing to say is that the the term empty is a relational term. Right? It’s not what we call in the jargon a one place term.
So I can say truthfully that I am now speaking to an empty room. I don’t mean that in any deep philosophical sense. I mean it is utterly bereft of camels. It is empty of camels. There’s not a single one in this room.
Now, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not empty of people. Right? But it is empty of something. So when you say that something is empty, you always have to ask empty of what? So even if this bottle, well, isn’t.
I need an example. We’re empty of water. It wouldn’t follow that it was completely empty. It might well be have plenty of air in it. So when we talk about something being empty, we always have to ask the question, empty of what?
And in a Buddhist philosophical context, and in the peculiar Western philosophical context that I’ll be introducing, when we speak about emptiness, we mean emptiness of essence or emptiness of substantiality, emptiness of inherent or independent existence. And all of these, I think, are roundabout ways of coming at the same thing. Part of it, an interesting philosophical enterprise, is to explain just why all of these ways come to the same thing. And maybe some of that will emerge as I talk today. But when we talk about emptiness in this sense, we mean emptiness of essence, substantiality, independence.
When we think about essence, what we mean is emptiness of any very special characteristic or identity that makes a thing the thing that it is independently of convention, independently of other phenomena. That’s what we mean by emptiness. Okay? So when I talk about when I say that something’s empty, I don’t mean that it’s empty of camels. I don’t mean that it’s empty of water.
And in particular, don’t mean that it’s empty of existence to the court. Right? But there are some things that are completely empty of existence. I hate to break the news to you, but Santa’s law was among those. Empty of any kind of existence at all, could they be fictional existence.
Right? Even Santa Claus got some kind of existence. But, even for a committed Pyrenean skeptic, this glass isn’t independent, isn’t empty of existence in the same sense that Santa Claus is. It’s not fictional. It may be empty of substantiality.
It may be empty of essence, but it will have some other kind of existence more of that anon. So first of all, that’s what we’re going to mean by emptiness in general. Okay? Clearly. Secondly, I’m going to want to talk about three general divisions or three general kinds of emptiness.
Or gen not kinds, but gen get my mouth working. Three different domains of emptiness is a better way to put that. I want to talk a little bit about the emptiness of external phenomena, that is of ordinary things out there in space and time that are objects of perceptual knowledge, the kinds of things we bump into and trip over and so forth. I want to talk about emptiness of the self, that is the subjective side as opposed to the objective side, emptiness of the thing that I call I or me or J or hey you. And then I will also want to talk at the very end, briefly and obscurely, about the emptiness of emptiness.
Because preview of coming attractions, it would be very odd for us to end up arguing, or even examining arguments for things being empty of essence and then to argue that, therefore, emptiness is their essence. So emptiness itself has better come out to be not only essencelessness, but essenceless. And we will look at examinations of that possibility. Now, all three of these different domains of emptiness receive very specific and very careful attention in the Mahāyāna, and in particular, Buddhist philosophical tradition. And it’ll be specifically the tradition that I have in mind.
So that if you read Nāgārjuna’s wonderful text called Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Mula Madhyamaka Karika, it’s the Sanskrit title, Or if you read Candrakīrti’s text, Madhyamakāvatāra, the Entrance into the Middle Way, you see these examined in a great deal of careful detail. Both of these are available in English, so I would invite you to look at those if you’re interested in reading really terrific texts about the, about these issues. But these are yes? Yeah. No.
I don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to write with. The I can give you English editions of those really quickly. University of Hawaii Press has published a translation by Geshe Namgyal Wangchen and Chris Huntington of Madhyamakāvatāra called The Emptiness of Emptiness.
And that’s available in paperback on University of Hawaii Press. And it’s a very, very nice addition and a very nice translation job. There’s a really good translation of an excellent Tibetan text that’s a lot about emptiness. It’s called Lam Rim Chenmo or Great Treatise. And the that’s translated by Jose Cabezón, and the title is A Dose of Emptiness.
It’s and that’s, State University of New York Press. Yeah. The and then the Nāgārjuna’s Mula Madhyamaka Karika. There’s about a half dozen different translations into English, and you can take your pick. There’s one by Strang that’s on Abington Press, which is really hard to find.
There’s one by Kenneth Inada that’s on a Japanese press whose name I forget. Do you remember the name of the press? The publisher’s name. It might be Ejida Press, but I’m not sure. There’s one by David Kalupahana on State University of New New York Press called what’s Kalupahana’s translation called?
Called I should know that. I forget. Kalupahana, k a l u p a h a n a. There’s Whose am I forgetting? There are two more.
One of them I’m not forgetting, but the other one I am. And then, there’s one that I did recently that’s on Oxford University Press that’s called Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, but I’m forgetting one of the others. Strang Sprung, Mervyn Sprung is a translation that’s pretty good too. So anyway, there’s lots of different translations and it’s useful to read two or three of them side by side and to triangulate them. Sprung is published by Prajñā Press.
Okay. So anyway, these are good texts to read if you’re interested in traditional presentations of emptiness. But I’m gonna give you texts to read that’ll give you nontraditional presenteachings, Western presenteachings of emptiness. And if you want some of these texts and bibliographic references, Sextus Empiricus outlines of Pyrrhonism, which is, there’s a really nice, abridged English edition on Hackett, which is really cheap, by Hallie called, Sextus Empiricus Selected Writings on Skepticism Man and God. And I’ll be talking about David hume’s Treatise of human Nature.
And I’ll be talking about philosophical investigations. And all of those, of course, are widely available in a number of different editions in English and are good text to read. So anyway, it says that all of these three divisions of emptiness or three domains of emptiness are well treated in the Indian and Tibetan tradition. So this is a traditional kind of taxonomy. But I’m going to, talk about them specifically as they’re developed in the western tradition.
Now, let me talk a little bit more about emptiness here. Emptiness in the Madhyamaka tradition is thought of and analyzed in terms of dependent origination or interdependent origination, depending on how you like to translate this term, co dependent origination, co dependent arising. The idea that things all exist, come to exist, stay in existence, pass out of existence, and have their identity in dependence on other things. And that’s a different way of saying that things are without their own essence or nature or characteristic. And the idea is that emptiness doesn’t stand as a separate thing independent of dependent arising, but emptiness is, as it were, the flip side of the coin of, conventional reality and dependent arising.
Now when we think about dependency and interdependency in this sense, we can again think of interdependency on a number of different dimensions. And there are three dimensions on which I want to talk about it. The first is dependence of things on various causes, conditions, and other kinds of circumstances. So that, for instance, when I say that there’s water in this glass, the water didn’t just get there all by itself. And it doesn’t just stay there all by itself.
The water got there by being poured in, so there was a cause that brought it the water’s being in the glass into existence. The water doesn’t just stay there all by itself either. A combination of gravity and the relative solidity of the glass is also kept there by my not drinking it too fast. See? Moreover, we can ask why is the water there, and we can give purpose for it being there.
It’s there so that I can have a handy philosophical example and occasionally slake my thirst. So for all of these different causes, the water is in there. Without those, there’s no water in there. The water’s not just somehow there by itself. And if you think about any particular kind of phenomenon, we can talk about its dependency on a range of causes and conditions like that.
Moreover, though, we can talk about dependence in terms of dependence of holes on their parts and parts on their holes, hole part dependence. So, again, to have this much water in here, however much that is, about two ounces. I still think in ounces. I haven’t been in Australia long enough to do it in milliliters quickly enough, So we’ll talk ounces for a minute. So you’ve got this much water here.
That’s dependent upon there being all these little particular molecules there. Right? And all of those molecules being parts of the water in this glass depend upon there being a volume of water in that glass in which they participate. Similarly, when we think about it from our side, we can say, gee, my my body or myself doesn’t exist all by itself. It exists in dependence on a whole range parts.
And each of those, in order to be Jay’s body parts, requires the existence of the whole for them to to be body parts. You know? So if you even if you just had this thing right here lying gruesomely on the table, even though you would have a hand, you wouldn’t have j’s hand if it weren’t attached to the rest of me. Right? That sort of gives it its point.
Do not try this at home. And finally, the third kind of interdependence and one of the most interesting kinds is dependence upon conceptual imputation. And this is the one that you take a long deep breath before making plausible and explaining. But it’s actually not a complex or bizarre idea. Okay?
In particular, it’s not the idea that somehow my thought magically brings the world into existence. It’s not idealism. It’s not some kind of magic. Rather, it’s the idea that things have their identity and their identity conditions in dependence upon conceptual and linguistic practices. Let me be specific here.
I’m gonna change examples for a moment. Question. This is not magic, no trick questions, nothing up my sleep. How many things am I holding in my hand right now? Here’s one good question answer to that question.
One, you’re holding a bottle of water. Here’s another good question, answer to the question. You’re holding two things, a bottle and some water in it. Here’s another answer to the question. You’re holding three things, a bottle, some water in it, and a label.
You get the picture. There’s also an answer that says, oh, billions and billions and billions of things. All these little atoms swarming around. Right? All of those are possible.
Here’s another. Your hand you you don’t have anything in your hand. At best, you’ve got a part of something, namely a part of a case of bottled water that’s out there, one part of which happens to be here. Now, answer. Which of these is correct?
What is this thing independent of any individuation convention, independent of any kind of designation? Is it a part of a case of water that happens to be here? Is it a zillion things? Is it one thing? Is it three things?
Answer. What a stupid question. Right? Answer. Depending on the convention you adopt, any of those answers will do.
And that’s a way of saying that this thing owes its identity as a single thing to a nominal or conceptual imputation. And that’s another way of saying that it’s empty of having any identity or essence that makes it the thing that it is independent of that imputation. Now here’s the thing. If you think about dependence and interdependence as at least three-dimensional on these different on these different dimensions, you can you can play with this idea as often as you want, and there are lots of different divisions and and explanations of emptiness. But let’s just take these three.
And if you think about it, everything you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or tripped over, including yourself, is interdependent in all three of these senses. Owes its existence, its coming into existence, and its characteristics to a whole range of various causes and conditions. Owes its existence to the various parts that it’s got and owes its existence to its existence to its status as a part of a larger whole and has its identity conditions in dependence on conceptual imputation. Everything’s like that. And that’s a way of saying that everything’s dependently arisen.
But when you say that everything’s dependently arisen like that, that’s another way of saying that nothing exists independently, that nothing has an essence that makes it what it is independently of convention, that nothing is some kind of an independent autonomous substance that merely happens to have some characteristics. That is that’s another way of saying that things are empty of inherent existence. Okay? So emptiness is not some deep hidden occult mystery. Mystery.
It’s just a fairly clear standard, way of providing an analysis of what it is to be an entity. So to take an old Majumaka slogan, to understand emptiness this way, we don’t say that because things are empty, they are nonexistent. We rather say that because things exist, they are empty. Emptiness is what existence amounts to on this particular analysis. Okay?
So in particular, we’re not talking about some kind of an appearance reality distinction or some kind of a veil of illusion of existence that if only you peeled it back, you see this incredible luminous void and suddenly be sucked into endless bliss. Right? That’s not what we mean when we talk about emptiness. It would be nice if the world was like that. It would make philosophy a lot easier.
Right? All we have to do is, you know, find the place where you pull up the screen and all bliss out. But the idea is more that emptiness isn’t something behind ordinary reality that’s in us. It’s basically the mode of existence of ordinary things. The trick from the standpoint of Peyronian skepticism and the standpoint of is to figure out ways to convince yourself of that fact and to actually make that fact part of your ordinary cognitive apparatus.
So, so far, all I’ve talked about is what we mean by emptiness and the relationship between emptiness and interdependence. And the reason that I do that is because, emptiness and is because the kind of arguments and analysis that we’re gonna see in the West, like those that we typically see in Asian philosophy for emptiness, are, in the first instance, arguments for certain kinds of interdependence. And so the claims about non substantiality and essencelessness come out of arguments that are in the first instance for interdependence on these various dimensions. So it’s not as though by arguing for interdependence, we’re arguing we’re beside the point. Rather, that simply is the point.
Okay? So now let’s start talking a little bit about external objects and specifically how folks like Sextus, empiricists, and David hume think about external objects. So so far, what I’ve done, I want to sort of again let sort of give you a summary of where we’ve come so far, is I’ve given you a very general historical warm up as to why you ought to be doing this. Then what I’ve done is given you a completely non textual analysis of the relationship between emptiness and interdependence that I have claimed, and you might believe me or not, that is reasonably common to both of these philosophical traditions. And now I want to talk about how it’s articulated, specifically in the Western tradition.
In the Western tradition. Are there any questions so far? Because I don’t want to have succeeded in losing anybody. Okay. Clear enough?
Now remember how I’m interpreting silence. So if you’ve got questions or objections or puzzles and you’re being silent now, that makes you a very bad person indeed. You see? Here’s somebody who has to worry about being a very bad person indeed. It’s a long time before the next sell, John.
So Yeah. That’s a very good question. Did everybody hear the questions? You should repeat it. Okay.
The question is when I talk about conventional imputation, do I just mean imputation that depends upon linguistic conventions? Or are there more basic kinds of imputation that are nonetheless conceptual and imputational? And the example given was that of a spider who’s creeping along the wall and sees a fly and has to impute existence to the fly in order to pounce on it, sink its fangs into it, and, you know, all that other gory stuff. And so the question is, is this this spider who knows nothing of any linguistic conventions also engaged in imputation. Yeah.
I think that’s a more fundamental, more basic kind because part of what we mean by imputation and I think we ought to be careful about this. I mean, I don’t know much about spiders. I mean, I just like I’m I I don’t know any to whom I speak regularly. Because so now there’s two stories we can tell about spider consciousness. Okay?
Here’s one story you might tell about spider consciousness. The spider has to represent to itself the existence of a fly in order to leap on it, sink its fangs into it, liquefy it, and drink it. Right? If so, then the spider has to be engaging presumably through some kind of hardwired stuff that its little spider nervous system does in taking a range of sensation and imputing an existence as an external object to this. That’s one story we might tell about spiders.
Spiders, however, might be a little more basic than that. Spiders might not, for all I know. I mean, like I say, I’ve never asked a spider. Spiders, for all I know, might not engage in any representation of the fly as an external object. They might just have certain sensations which cause their legs to leap and their fangs to to go in and and not be guilty of this kind of ontological profligacy at all.
But to the extent that they are ontologically profligate, then yes, there had you have to make room for a kind of in of of imputation that’s, say, a little bit more basic than kind of nominal conventional imputation that we talk about. But I’m sort of assiduously now restricting myself to the human domain. And I’m restricting myself to the human domain because I want to talk about the ontology that we know and love. Because especially if you believe the argument of Sextus Empiricus, for all we know, a spider world may be entirely different from ours, and it may not contain any imputeachings of external objects. See, now I’m getting into sextus, which is good.
I could have paid you for this question. It’s a good question because one of modes what Sextus does, you see, is he argues Sextus, like Nāgārjuna, for instance, argues that he’s not defending any philosophical position. He doesn’t have any philosophical position. And that his goal is the destruction of all philosophical positions and views. And he says that skepticism isn’t a philosophical view.
Rather, he says it is an ability, the word that he uses, to place in antithesis, to place in opposition philosophical theses or philosophical theses with appearances so as to get people to reject those philosophical theses. And Sextus’s idea is that I mean, Sextus kind of sets himself up as, you know, the kind of old fashioned Western American gunslinger. Right? You come into town with a philosophical position, hombre, and I’m gonna refute it. Okay?
That’s the way Sextus sets him up himself up as a philosopher. Not as somebody who’s gonna be offering another one, but just somebody who’s gonna be, erasing other philosophical positions. And Sextus’s, arsenal, if you want, the kind of range of weapons, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons that he has to borrow another metaphor, is a bunch of arguments that he calls modes. And each of these arguments, Sextus says, is not one which establishes any claim about the nature of things, but rather is an argument which enables you to take any claim about the fundamental nature of things and show that it’s unjustified, unjustifiable, and nonsensical. And Sextus’s idea here is that the reason that the modes work is that the very idea of the nature of things, the way things are, is a really bad philosophical idea because there isn’t anything called the nature of things.
And this, of course, might remind you, those of you who have read the eight thousand line Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, of the wonderful line that says, things have exactly one nature, that is no nature. And it’s a wonderful paradoxical line, but Sextus actually says virtually the same thing and virtually the same words. So one of Sextus’ first modes, in fact, the one called the first mode, is the mode from difference in animals. And sex just says, look. If there’s a nature of things about which we can be confident, then it should be, one, that we can have some kind of access to.
Because the only things that we can talk about externally are things that we know. Right? We’re not talking about things nobody’s ever seen, heard, ever thought about. But he says, look. If we imagine the way a thing looks to us and we imagine the way the thing looks say, another animal, a spider, for instance, it may look very different.
It may look small to us, large to the other animal. We may have a certain set of senses that reveal various characteristics of it that may not be shared by that other animal. Animal. The other animal might be sensitive, say, to electromagnetic fields or something like that. Who knows?
We have a sense of taste. The other animal may have only a sense of smell and so forth. Sextus says, if you think about this and you recognize that the world that we live in, the world of external objects, is a world as delivered by our senses. And the world that an animal lives in is a world delivered by its senses. And then we ask, okay, who’s got the nature of the thing as opposed to the way the thing appears?
Sextus says you’ve got a problem. Because if you imagine yourself in a debate with a spider regarding the fundamental nature of reality, spiders have lots of eyes, for instance. Right? They’ve these incredible compound eyes. Some of them have, like, sixty, seventy eyes on their heads, and they don’t integrate if we understand spider perception.
Right? They can in fact, they’re kind of like watching a multi cinema. Okay? And we ask and the spider says, you know, the world’s incredible. It’s like a kaleidoscope.
And we say to the spider, no. It’s not. You’ve got distorted vision. And the spider says, no. No.
No. You are stark with these defective monocular eyes. Poor human being. The world that you the world that is in fact kaleidoscopic looks unitary to you. We say, no.
No, spider. The world that’s in fact unitary looks kaleidoscopic to you. To whom are we going to turn as an arbiter? We say, let’s turn to the dog. The spider says, no, thanks.
I’ll have the house fly. More compound eyes, right? And we’ve got a problem here in trying to figure out what the nature of the world is. Now, sexist’s diagnosis is, the problem is that what each of us has really good access to is our appearances, the way things appear to us. And the world that we live in is a world of appearances, a world of things as they appear to us.
But our concept of the nature of things, of things having a fundamental nature, is the concept of there being something that underlies those appearances. If there is something that underlies those appearances, there ought to be some way of getting some access to it, and the spider in us should be able to do it equally well. Or if one of us can’t, one of us should be able to show the other one why we can’t. But if all we ever have access to are the appearances, that explains why we and spiders can’t agree about anything. Right?
And the idea that, well, there might be something behind that that neither of us are getting access to, Sextus points out, is the idea of not the nature of the things that we know and love, but now we’re talking about the nature of something that nobody’s ever seen, heard of, or could see or hear of because all we have access to are appearances. And that’s not what you meant by the essence of things. Again, the parallel here to Candrakīrti in the sixth chapter of Majamaka Avatara, Avatara, the entrance to the middle way, where Candrakīrti is worried about somebody who says, look, I don’t mean the nature of the things that appear to me. I just mean the nature of something itself independent of any knowledge. Candrakīrti says, look at.
The thing that is the basis for grasping and the thing that’s the basis for depositing of identity is a nature of things you think you experience. When I say I think that this bottle has a substantial independent existence, I mean the bottle that appears to me, not some other bottle that nobody and no animal has ever seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted. But what sexist is arguing in the first mode is all that appears to me are a bunch of appearances, and the appearances are strictly speaking relative to my sensory apparatus. This leads Sextus to the, third mode. I’m gonna I’m skipping modes around here.
There’s ten of them. We’re not gonna do all of Sextus’ mode. But it’s one of my, favorite modes, and that’s what he calls the mode of admixtures. And it’s very deep mode indeed. Because let’s pay attention to these appearances now.
You might say, well, gee, Sextus, That’s right. All I have access to are my appearances. But the appearances to which I have access are appearances of the objects and reflect properties of appearing to have a mountain on it. Sextus points out, though, that any appearance you have is a consequence not only of the object itself, but of the structure of your sensory organs in gooey and disgusting detail. So for instance, the light that lets me know that this bottle has this particular characteristic or leads me to suspect that this bottle has this particular characteristic has been refracted through the lens of my eye and then has gone through some really weird fluid that fills my eyeball.
And then it’s landed on my retinues and caused electrochemical activity in a bunch of cells there. And then it’s been that electrochemical activity has been translated into electrical activity up my optic nerve. And then there’s been all these neurotransmitters and stuff like that. And then somewhere way back in my occipital cortex, some pattern of neural activity, I managed to confuse for a pattern of light on the bottle. Now, you can tell the same story about ears and noses, right?
When you tell about ears, it’s even weirder, right? But anyway, what Scheck just points out is that what we get as appearances aren’t even plausibly things located in objects. What we get as appearances are things in us that arise in interdependence on a range of causes and conditions and that most of the interesting causes and conditions are internal, not external. Okay? So, again, when I think, gee, this bottle has a nature, and that nature has something to do with my perceptions, sexist wants to argue, not at all.
Anything that you know about that bottle, any bottle that you know, is a consequence only of this vastly complex set of causes and conditions, most of which are entirely internal to you. The bottle you know is empty of having any of the properties that you think it has. Yes? I don’t know this property if it being being to force the same thing by the library and everything. Oh, well, it certainly has that property.
But now the question is, where is that property to be located? And how is that right? Because what we’re asking about now is not whether the bottle is perceptible. All of us are going to grant that and sex is going to grant that. We’re not arguing that the bottle itself is nonexistent.
All of us parent is existence, sex is manifest. So, again, I want to emphasize this point and it’s related to a point that I made earlier. It’s very easy confusion. When you read Madhyamaka or when you read Western Pyrenean skepticism, it’s really easy to think that these guys are arguing that we are deluded when we see things. It’s really easy to argue that Think about a mirage.
Drive down the road on a hot day, you’ll see a mirage. Looks to you it looks like water, but there’s no water there. So you say that, gee, there’s really no puddle of water there, but it would be false to infer from that there’s nothing there. In fact, it is something that you saw, like refraction pattern of water through air of different temperatures. Right?
You’ve got a real mirage, but unreal water. Similarly, you’ve got a real perceptible bottle, but an unreal set of independent properties. Now the analysis that we get of the real perceptible bottle is an analysis of it that reveals it, sexist is right, to be an interdependent phenomenon. Each of its properties can only be specified interdependent. Okay.
Yes. An important point. Good point. Sure. It’s pretty empty.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now now, hume actually expands on these ideas and deepens them considerably. And hume really connects a lot of these ideas to questions about conventional identity and nominal imputation in very interesting ways.
And so I wanna talk a little bit about hume and the idea of an external object. And I wanna pose the problem in the way that hume poses it. hume, in a very instructive and, again, I want related to this question, one of, again, one of those questions I could have paid for. At the beginning of his discussion of the external world, says very famously, ’tis vain to ask whether there be body, whether there are external objects, for that is something we must take for granted in all of our reasons. The interesting question is, what induces us to believe in body, and what is our idea of body?
Okay? That’s the interesting question. What we’re not going to do if we’re doing philosophy, if we’re gonna be taken seriously, is to argue that there are no external objects. If you start arguing that there are no external objects, there’s a padded room waiting for you someplace. Right?
Rather, the question we need to ask is this. What do we mean by an external object, and what are the identity conditions for an external object? Thank you very much. In doing this, hume points out that naively, if we start in a kind of at a ground level position, what we mean by an external object is something that has a continued identity through time that is independent of our particular mind or our particular psychology. So that one of the one of the things that makes our favorite bottle here an external object is that it sort of persists through time outside of me and so forth.
Now, hume focuses on the notion of identity here, as well as the notion of independence, and points out that we can overstate both of these in ways which can be deeply confusing and which can lead us into a kind of substantialist metaphysics of reification. The first distinction that he draws is a very important one that he calls between numerical and specific identity. This is a tight philosophical distinction. When we talk about numerical identity, we mean a kind of strict and complete identity. Let me give you an example.
The current prime minister of Australia is numerically identical to John Howard. He’s not just a lot like him. Right? He’s not just his kind of identical evil twin. They are absolutely identical.
Wherever you see the current prime minister, you see John Howard and vice versa, and that is no coincidence. Right? Alright? Never been photographed separately. Now there’s other kinds of identity that aren’t quite so exact.
There’s what we could call specific identity. So I’m guessing that this is in fact not the very bottle that I handed you, right, refilled. Looks like it has a new seal. So we might say, look, I’ve got an identical bottle to the one I had a few minutes ago. Right?
There’s the Mountain, same brand, same everything. But we don’t mean that it’s literally identical. We mean it’s a lot like it. Right, in the sense that identical twins are identical. They’re not literally the same person.
They’re a lot alike. Now hume asks us an important question. When we talk about the identity of a thing through time, do we mean numerical identity? Or do we mean specific identity? When we talk about specific identity, mean being the same species or kind of thing.
The word specific now is a cognitive species. We mean being the same kind of thing. So two identical twins are specifically identical because they’re both the same kind of thing in a very restricted sense of kind. And this bottle is specifically identical to the bottle that I had before, noncontroversially. Okay?
Now when we think about an object through time, we have to ask ourselves, do we mean the numerical identity or specific identity? hume points out that if we imagine, for instance, a mountain, say a nice, very large mountain, Mount Wellington where I come from. Suppose that I say, I’ve had enough of Mount Wellington. It’s not going to exist anymore. And I drive up to Mount Wellington with my trusty teaspoon.
I take a teaspoonful of dirt off the mountain and take it home and say, see, the mountain has changed. It is no longer the same mountain that it was. Gonna rename it Mount Garfield. Mount Wellington was the one that had, you know, an extra teaspoonful of dirt. This slightly smaller mountain completely transformed is Mount Garfield.
Again, I do this often enough, and people start backing away from you. On the other hand, if I had, you know, a little plate with a teaspoon full of sugar, and I said, look, I don’t want this, I want something different, and I took that teaspoon off, then I might in fact have something different. I might have an empty plate. If I had two teaspoons of sugar, I might still have something different, right? So identity conditions depend a lot on just how much you change things.
Right? I mean, all, if I had not another bottle of Summit Spring Water but a bottle of Hart Spring Water, I might say, well, it’s not quite an identical bottle. Somebody might say, well, it’s still the same. It’s still spring water. It was not close enough to be the same.
I really like sun. Now, again, think about the identity of an object through time. If by identity, you mean strict numerical identity, hume points out no object retains that kind of identity through time. For instance, this very glass is now an hour and five minutes older than the glass I began with as an example at the beginning. It is a different glass.
It is different because it has gained and lost a few molecules. It’s got more history, more things have been said about it, more people know about it, have thought philosophically about it. It’s a very different glass indeed. Now it’s still a lot like the glass that I had at the beginning. In fact, it’s probably so much like the glass that if the person who lent it to the lecture hall says, want my glass back, and we gave it to her, she’d say, good.
That’s the same glass that I gave you before. Poor benighted fool. Right? It’s almost the same glass. Now now, hume says what we obviously mean when we talk about identity through time is specific identity.
But the point about specific identity is that specific identity is always conventional. It’s conventional because it is up to us to decide what counts, here’s the the precise way of putting it, as a species. What counts as being close enough to be identical. What counts as the kind of thing that we have in question. So, for instance, the person who lent us the glass may figure this change of of history, this this aging process, isn’t enough to make it a different glass.
But a seriously worried philosopher might disagree. Right? Most of us think that Mount Wellington hasn’t undergone much damage when I take the teaspoon off. But somebody who really thinks about the mountain in a very, very precise way might lament that it will never be the same again. Of course, it’s never same anyway.
Now, if what we mean by identity of external objects is always specific identity, and if specific identity is always conventional, then conditions of external objects are always strictly conventional. That’s another way of saying that an external object is empty of anything that makes it the particular object object that it is, that gives it an identity over time. Now you might think, well, there’s got to be something. There’s got to be some basis, something continuing, that makes that the same thing over time. In response to this, hume invites you to consider an example.
This is a wonderful example. He uses the example of a church. Let’s suppose that a long, long time ago, a couple of hundred years ago, a bunch of people arrived here in Adelaide. And one of the first things they do is they found the first Presbyterian church in Adelaide. And they build a building out of wood, and they’ve got a churchyard, and there’s fourteen members, Right?
And so we can say what the first Presbyterian Church of Adelaide is. It’s this whitewashed wooden building with this nice little churchyard and these fourteen people who go to church every Sunday. Well, you know what happens. One week, somebody dies. Only thirteen members of the church now, and there’s a body in the churchyard.
Same church or a different church. Well, if we want strict numerical identity, we’ve got a slightly different church here. But nobody’s really gonna say, gee, now we’ve gotta call it the second Presbyterian church of Adelaide, right? Then a few more members join and the church gets a little bigger, and so people have to kind of extend the hall. Same church or different church?
Well, any ordinary person would say it’s the same church, but now you got a few hundred members in a much bigger prayer hall. Then you know what happens. There’s a fire. Poor wooden church burns down, and they decide we’re gonna get smart. We’re gonna build the next next church out of sandstone.
So on the same place, they build a small sandstone church. Same church or different church? Well, again, if you wanna count buildings, you might say, alright. They’ve gotta change the name now. It’s now the second Presbyterian Church of Adelaide.
But most of us would say it’s the same church. They just built a different building. Well, you can continue this story for a long time. Right? The church moves.
They sell the plot of land, put it someplace else. Soon everybody moves yes? I just thought of a wonderful argument and it destroyed it completely. Oh, good. The basic assumption always is that identity is a question of perception.
Again, again, good question. I’m gonna suggest that you are confusing the question of real existence with the question of real identity. Okay? Now let me remind you of the questions of the remark that Hughes begins the section with. It is vain to ask whether there be body.
It’s something we must take for granted in all of our reasoning. So I paraphrase, ’tis vain to ask whether there be mother. This is something we must take for granted, had he hit us over the head with a brick. The question that we then have to ask, though, is what causes induce us to believe in the continued identity of that mother? So let me give you let me now put this point in a short way.
Suppose this is the guy’s first attempt. You know? He sameness of body didn’t apply in the case of the church, but we were willing to apply identity to the church. Right? But here, we think the same as the body is important.
Here’s hume’s point. In some context, some things count for identity. In other context, other things count for identity. And it’s up to us to figure out which ones we’re gonna take most seriously. There are cultures in the world, for instance, where children get a name at birth, and then after puberty, right, their name is changed.
They become a different person. Yet they somehow retain memories of this other individual. Same person or different person. Well, you might say, gee, from our cultural standpoint, same person, different name. From their cultural standpoint, different person.
Or take another example. There are cultures in the world that systematically identify persons across deaths that have reversed. There are cultures like this. Believe me. Again, we might say, is the fourteenth dialogue the same person as the thirteenth or different person?
You might say, a Western perspective, different person because we have a convention of identification that sort of marks the end at physical death, new identity at physical birth. In that culture, it’s the same person that adopted the convention, which is willing to identify stages of persons separated by death and birth as the same person. The concept of person here, we’re getting the selflessness of the person pretty quickly here. But again, it’s meant to also be according to humans by clarity of argument, the conventional concession. The idea here isn’t that we want to say that the mother doesn’t exist or that whether or not he exists is up to you.
What we do want to say is that his conditions of identity, what makes him the person that he is, what make him one person as opposed to say two, a right hand side of the person and the left hand side of the person stuck together Okay. It’s a good argument, though, and and and a good question. I just so I wanted it’s I wanna of tease out the difference between existence and identity in this sense. Again, neither Buddhist Madhyamaka nor Western Pyrrhonism is directed against the real existence of things. There are philosophical schools, mind you, who do want to argue that external objects don’t really exist, both on the political and the western side.
hume, in particular here, has those guys as his target. So Berkeley, writing a few years before hume, famously argued that there are no external objects. They’re all hallucinations and illusions, even your mother. And then I have to tell a pretty strong dance about how God puts these hallucinations into the writing. Could go here.
hume has Berkeley in his size. He wants to say, look, Berkeley, You’ve got part of it right. External phenomena don’t have these independent essences. But if you infer from that that nonexistence, you’ve mistaken the import of skeptical argument. Similarly, Candrakīrti in Madhyamaka Avatara has Buddhist idealists in his sights because that great brother act famously argued a couple of centuries before that there are no external objects.
They’re only appearances. So that so be we’re looking at. Existence for substantiality, for inherent existence, for essence. And so, again, you wanna make it clear what the target is here. The target isn’t phenomena.
The target is the essence of phenomena. I don’t wanna say I don’t have a glass in my hand. What I do wanna say is I don’t have a substantial, independently existent, inherently existent glass with its own essence and identity condition in my hand. Why not? Not because nobody gave me one, but because there ain’t no such thing.
Okay? So I’ve already kind of segued through that question from external phenomena to the self, but now you begin to get the idea. The same kind of argument that applies to the church, that applies to the glass, can also apply to myself. One tends to think of oneself as a substantially existent, inherently existent phenomenon that continues through time with its own nature and essence. So I think that I am surely the same person who began this lecture.
How else could I remember the things that I said at the beginning of the lecture? Could I be the, you know, have such an identity of views and so forth? And somebody like hume or Sextus says, no problem. We can account for that simply by talking about a complex set of causal relations between the guy who began the lecture and looked a hell of a lot like you and the person now giving the lecture. And there’s a lot of causal relations, memory relations, relation to physical causality.
But to say that I’m exactly the same person would be foolish. I’m over an hour older than that guy. How could we be the same person? I’ve nearly completed a lecture that he had only begun. How could we be the same person?
Right? We don’t have we have all these differences between us. But we’re a lot alike. We’re, in fact, as we say in America, we’re close enough for government work, and in fact, we have the same passport. So there’s a kind of identity that we have, and it’s a specific identity, not a numerical identity.
But again, specific identity is always a matter of convention. There’s nothing that you could find. Again, cut me open, Dissect me. Take out the pieces one by one, and see when you find the one that contains my essence. Dissect my experience, my phenomenology, my desires, and my personality, and find the thing that you can say, yeah.
That’s what Garfield Garfield is. Take that away. It’s not Garfield. Put that in, and no matter what else you’ve got, you’ve got Garfield. Do not try this at home, please.
But even if you do it, you’re not gonna find anything. Right? human sex just both say. Now that’s to suggest not that I don’t exist, but that whatever makes me who I am isn’t something that I carry in me independently, but something that is, imputed and is dependent. Again, three kinds of dependence.
Dependent on causes and conditions, part whole dependence, and imputational dependence. Now, I wanna conclude with a very, very small bit of talking about the emptiness of emptiness. I’ve been talking for too long and you’re if you’re not bored by now, there’s something deeply wrong. As I said at the beginning, we want to talk, we don’t want to replace the idea that things don’t have essence and are empty of essence with the idea that emptiness is the essence of all things. And this move, which gets made very early in the Buddhist Pyrrhonian tradition, the Buddhist skeptical tradition, as early as the very beginning of the Madhyamaka in the Prajñāpāramitā sutras and the writings of Nāgārjuna, gets made fairly late in the Western Pyrenean tradition.
And it really gets made for the first time. But it depends how you think about it. There’s two ways of thinking about how it gets made. There’s an implicit way and an explicit way. The implicit way is this.
Remember a moment ago that I said, oh, lot of moments ago, that one way we can understand what emptiness is is that it’s conceptually the flip side of dependency and interdependency. Now there’s a very nice argument that you can make here, and that is that if that’s so, then to the extent that dependency itself is empty, you can get to the emptiness of emptiness immediately. Because if emptiness is dependent arising and if dependent arising is empty, then emptiness is empty. Now one form of dependent arising is causality, the dependence of things uncaused and conditioned. And hume’s greatest philosophical achievement, most people would argue, is his penetrating analysis of causality, where he argues that the causal link itself is purely conventional, non substantial, that there are no causal powers in nature.
That if you look at relations between causes and effects, look as closely as you like, you’re gonna find precedence, succession, you’re going to find the need to classify things, you’re going to find regularity, but what you’re not gonna find are little powers. There’s no essence to causal relation. And that when we talk about things being causally relevant to one another, we have to talk about classes of events being regularly related to other classes of events. And if the class because classification requires convention, causality is merely conventional. So in hume, you’ve got a very deep, very important, and somewhat implicit argument for the emptiness of emptiness.
A more sophisticated, subtler argument for the emptiness of emptiness arises in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Philosophical Investigations. When Wittgenstein argues determines our ontology, that is what determines what kinds of things there are, what their identity conditions are and Wittgenstein extends this not only to external objects, but to our own thoughts, to the meaningfulness of our own thoughts, is always conventional and determined by language. And then argues that linguistic meaning is purely conventional. And it’s there’s a kind of closed circle here and a very interesting circle. The conventions are constructed in language.
Language itself has a purely conventional meaning. And that the what counts as an entity, what counts as a meaningful thing is itself determined by these sets of conventions. We have the notion that the this crucial kind of dependency dependency on imputation is itself empty of any essence. That you don’t start you don’t can’t take meaningfulness. You can’t take the kind what makes the thing the thing that it is and then say, ah, now that is convention.
Say, okay. Now we can figure out what convention is independently of convention because convention itself is conventional. Now don’t have time to rehearse those arguments in deep detail. That’s an interesting argument. But what I do wanna say is all these arguments are there.
And so we can begin in the Western tradition, the sex disempiricus, and find the emptiness of physical objects or the emptiness of the person. Find those arguments repeated, emptiness repeated, deepened, and made more sophisticated in the work of hume. Find those arguments raised to a very subtle level in an investigation of the nature of language imputation and convention itself in the work of Wittgenstein. And each of these arguments represents a kind of version or a parallel to arguments that anybody who has studied Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, anybody who has studied Nāgārjuna, anybody who has studied Candrakīrti, anybody who studied Tsongkhapa or Kedrup are going to recognize as arguments in the Indo Tibetan Madhyamaka tradition. So if the arguments that I’ve been presenting have been of any assistance to you at all in clarifying what we mean by emptiness dependency and the relations between them, then I’m right that you don’t need to go to Asian texts in order to be able to spell these things out.
This is not an argument against reading Asian texts. It’s an argument against ignoring Western texts because you decide, my god. There’s just so much death, profundity, and coolness in the east. Too bad we live in such a shallow culture. We don’t.
Thanks a lot. If you want to ply me with any questions, I have time before we have to go to the airport, right? We have a little time before we have to go to the airport. Or you can all walk out because it’s, I’ve kept you inside for a very long time on a very beautiful day and I’m sorry for that. Any questions?
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a very good question. Let me start by talking about sexism self. Okay?
And about Pyrrho. Sextus in a discussion in the outlines of Pyrrhonism called the ends of skepticism. Now, as we know, why do we do why do we do this? Very famous line. Right?
He says, a man who believes that things are existent and have their nature by themselves is pursued as if by the Furies, craving all of those things he believes to be intrinsically good, and when he gets them, being deeply dissatisfied. Because first of all, he discovers they weren’t as good as he thought they were. And secondly, even if he likes them, he has to worry about defending them against all comers and has to worry about losing them. And he’s afraid of the things that he doesn’t have because he thinks they’re intrinsically bad, and such a person is always perturbed and upset and leads an unpleasant life. But the person who recognizes that things do not have their natures intrinsically can lead a happy, peaceful life.
So Sextus also thinks that skepticism leads to a better form of life than reification. And he argues that the only reason for being a skeptic is it’s gonna make you have a happier life. Moreover, Sextus famously was a doctor. Right? He was a physician by profession.
And so he was worried about the, about medicine and what it was, and about medical science. And he was the phrase empiricist on his name means that he was a member of a bunch of factions of physicians at this time, the so called scientific physicians and the empirical physicians. And he was an empirical physician. The scientific physicians, this is old fashioned history of Greek medicine, it’s sometimes interesting and interesting to this point, Argue that here’s how you do medicine. First, you figure out the nature of the body and the nature of disease, and then you deduce from the nature of the body and the nature of disease how you ought to go about curing it.
You may have theories about this. Sextus argued, the empirical doctor said, the way you do medicine is you’re basically learning a craft, like learning painting or sculpture or music. You learn how to figure out what’s wrong with people and how to cure them, and you don’t need to have a theory about the nature of the disease to do that. Sexist smell. Whether or not we think this is a good way to do medicine, right?
Sexist is basically an opponent of basic research and in favor of a lot of kind of clinical practicum work. Okay? That’s one way of thinking about it. It probably made more sense in Greece than it does today, classical Greece than it does today. And I think basic research wasn’t quite as effective as it is these days.
But the analogy that Sextus wants to draw is to life. Sextus thinks the task of philosophy is instruct you in the art of living well. And that the art of living well is not a matter of figuring out the fundamental nature of reality and then how to engage with them fundamental natures, but rather how to to live successfully as an essenceless being in an essenceless world. hume expands on this, and hume is interesting. We haven’t don’t have time in one lecture to talk about that.
Interesting because he connects all of this to morality very directly and argues that this kind of skepticism is the only possible foundation of the cultivation of compassion, which is extremely interesting. And it also partly accounts for the kind of resurrection of hume right now. Because hume has been resurrected in part through feminist ethics, through a bunch of wonderful essays by Annette Beyer arguing that hume is the quintessential feminist moral philosopher because of his emphasis on compassion as the foundation of ethics. And this requires a long digression into feminist moral theory and into hume studies, which we’re not gonna do. But it is interesting to say that hume, like Candrakīrti, connects the discussion of the essencelessness of persons to the cultivation of compassion.
Now, the other thing to say is, what made Peyronian skepticism popular wasn’t that people thought Peyron was really smart, though they did. Peyron was was in amazement when he got back from India for how happy, serene, and calm he was, and what a nice guy he turned out to be. And in his honor, his city forever exempted philosophers from paying taxes. Philosophers from paying taxes. You wonder why I like Pyronian skepticism.
Now, the point that I want to make, and of course, there’s also the wonderful remark about hume and about Wittgenstein. Here’s some remark. This is all curious. hume, when he hume is an immensely popular guy. Right?
He was a famous party giver, great billiards and backgammon player, and he was The Buddhas the Scottish ambassador to the court of of France, and was very popular in Paris. He was referred to as Le Bon David, the good David. And when he died, there was this long obituary in the Paris newspapers just talking about what an incredibly kind, generous man he was and how, despite a very long painful illness, he faced death with confidence and good cheer. And of course, Wittgenstein’s famous last words, tell them all I had a wonderful life. Now, all of these folks, all of these folks, interestingly, are refuted for this kind of connection between philosophy and praxis.
All of them thought that philosophy was deeply connected to how you lead your life. This is interesting. It’s also unusual in the Western tradition, okay? I mean, we have Heidegger in the Western tradition too. So these are people who all thought that philosophy was deeply connected to the way you lead your life and that the reason you do philosophy, Wittgenstein said, the reason you do philosophy is so you can stop doing philosophy, so you can relax and lead a good life.
Now, to come back to your question, none of this has to do with the cultivation of specific kinds of technologies of self transformation, meditation techniques, tantra, or anything like that. You don’t find that parallel between Western Purianism and Indo Tibetan at all. But you do find this kind of parallel practical view about philosophy that is practical in the sense that philosophy is is connected with a practice, mainly a practice of living well and of having a good moral life. So some connection, not identity. I don’t wanna claim.
Alright. Nobody walked out of here and said, Garfield claimed that the Western Puranist tradition is identical to the Tibetan Majumaka tradition. That I didn’t say. I said there are important historical connections, important conceptual parallels, and a lot of the same kinds of arguments and insights can be found in each tradition. You have an identity.
Very good question. Other questions? Yes. How do things you discuss today compare to the rest of the concept of assault? Well, hume and Sextus are both arguing that the concept of a soul doesn’t make any sense.
Right? hume has this, hume’s metaphors are are wonderful here. hume said at one point, he said, look. If you look inside yourself and you find a soul there when you introspect, good. I don’t find one nor does anybody I know find one when he or she introspect.
And hume then developed this idea of the self as being a bundle or a heap is the word he uses. Quick, everybody, what’s the translation of the word heap? hume says that there’s a heap or bundle of different impressions, perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and ideas succeeding one another, each one momentary, and succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity. You’ve heard this analysis before, by the way. And that’s hume.
That’s not a Buddhist talker, right? And so he says the whole notion of a soul, of a unified substratum, is incoherent. Now also connected to this in this whole section on the self, hume has another very interesting argument. It’s called the fuge argument. And I actually quoted the preamble to this argument in the paper I read in the philosophy department the other day where hume said, look, here’s the other reason besides crazy introspection and bad metaphysics that people posit a soul or a self.
They say if we have thoughts and sensations and perceptions, then there’s got to be some place or container or something that’s having those thoughts, perceptions, and so forth. Again, those of you who have read Vasubandhu and Asaṇga will recognize this intuition. And those of you who have read Candrakīrti will recognize hume’s wonderful reply. He says, I venture to say that a thing can be and yet be nowhere, and that the great the greatest variety of beings exist in precisely this way. And he gives examples of things like principles, and things like this that can exist perfectly fine, but not have a substantial locus.
And so hume argues that all of the perceptions, sensations, and ideas and so forth that he notes, which succeed one another in a momentary existence within conceivable rapidity can simply be a succession of events without having a soul as a substrate. Sextus offers similar arguments against the existence of the soul and Wittgenstein’s ethos. Well, hume’s response, as is Wittgenstein’s instead, is that we can appeal to a whole set of relations, relations of causality, association, similarity, and so forth. And you say, well, gee, what accounts for those? You say, well, other patterns of relations and so forth.
And you say, but what is the foundation of it? And the response to William James’ famous phrase is, it’s turtles all the way down. Right? But you don’t the the analysis doesn’t bot doesn’t bottom out. Right?
Wittgenstein in the Tractatus has a very wonderful line where he says, you know, people today treat the laws of nature in the same way that people in past generations treated God or fate, as the thing which explains everything. But, of course, the point is precisely that if what you think is that something’s only explained, if you have something more fundamental than it that explains it, then even if you think that it’s causality or the laws of nature or the self, you’re still pushed back for an explanation. So often when people encounter a Peronian or a Madhyamaka analysis, they say, but if there’s no substantiality there, what’s holding all the properties together? Or if there’s no self there, what’s doing all the thinking? Now as though somehow there’s an there’s an explanation missing, what they don’t see is that all they’re doing is arbitrarily stopping the regressive explanation and saying, I’m gonna call a self or a substance an ultimate explainer, and I’m not gonna worry about explaining that.
Well, if you’re happy enough positing an ultimate explainer and not worrying about explaining that, then stop one level up, is all sexist is saying, and just take thoughts, conventions, similarity relations, and those are all gonna explain it. Sexist or and hume, though, will say we can do one better than that. We think that each of these phenomena does have an explanation. And each of those phenomena has an explanation. And each of those phenomena has an explanation.
And it’s explanations all the way down, and it doesn’t bottom out. You can always ask why and how and get a deeper answer. But that doesn’t mean you’re ever gonna get the single answer to everything because, guess what? The universe may not be that simple. Yes.
Oh, did you have a I’m sorry. Did did you have a question? Didn’t hear Okay. I’m sorry. I had question here, and then I’ll get to you.
Sorry. Okay. Let’s come back to the question of last year in the Lam Rim classes. Okay. To imagine a life that would be more fun than the one that I get to lead.
You know, I get to come to places like Adelaide and talk philosophy.