Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin traces striking parallels between Western skeptical philosophy and Buddhist Madhyamaka, showing how Sextus Empiricus, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein arrive independently at conclusions about emptiness that match Buddhist teachings. Using concrete examples—a bottle, Mount Wellington, a Presbyterian church—she demonstrates how Western philosophers dissolved the notion of intrinsic identity long before encountering Buddhist texts. She covers Hume’s distinction between numerical and specific identity, the conventional nature of identity conditions, and how this applies to the self as a bundle of causally connected phenomena. She emphasises that both traditions connect this philosophical insight to a practical outcome: the cultivation of compassion and a peaceful way of living. Valuable for readers studying Buddhist philosophy who want to ground these ideas in Western thought.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 E.mp3
UUID: d7b26119-a995-4982-a4bf-c75539ebf921
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Approaching Emptiness from the West (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~6,844
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 retinas 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 on the of of of light on the bottle. Now the you can tell the same story about ears and noses. Right? And when you tell about ears, it’s even weirder.
Right? But anyway, what Sextus 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, Sextus 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. The same thing by. Oh, well, it certainly has that property.
But now the question is, where 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 grant its existence, Sextus grants its existence.
What we’re going to be asking about is the further inference, excuse me, from its existence to its having some particular property essentially and independently. Now what you said is, correctly, it has the property of being perceptible by all of us. But that’s a relational property. What? That’s a relational property.
Right? That’s a property which depends as much on our having a particular kind of sensory apparatus that we do as any facts about the bottle. Sextus’ point, the conclusion Sextus wants to draw from the So again I want to emphasize this point and 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 Pyrrhonean 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 that they’re arguing that things are really non existent or purely illusory. Instead, you’re not you’re short of automatic philosophy. To give you an analogy, there’s an analogy that comes from the inside, but it’s not a really good one. Think about a mirage. Drive down the road on a hot day, you 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. There’s refraction pattern of water through air of different temperature.
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, sex, this is right, to be an interdependent phenomenon. Each of its properties can only be specified interdependent.
And as long as we understand it that way, we’re cool. To understand it that way is to understand it as essenceless. If it were part of the bottled essence that it looked this Okay. Important point. Good point.
Okay. 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 been paid for. At the beginning of his discussion of the external world, said 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 reasonings. 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 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 the distinction 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, oh, look. I’ve got an identical bottle to the one I had a few minutes ago.
Right? There’s the Mountain Spring, 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 cognate with 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 non controversially.
Okay? Now when we think about an object through time, we have to ask ourselves, do we mean 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 teaspoon full 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. We’re 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. Yeah. 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 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 a bottle of 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 the scent. 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, I 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 is 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 lend 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 the same anyway. Now if what we mean is by identity of of external objects is always specific identity, and if specific identity is always conventional, then the identity 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 that it is, that gives it an identity over time. And now you might think, Josh, there’s gotta be something.
There’s gotta 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 church yard and these fourteen people who go to church every Sunday.
Well, you know what happens. One week, dies. Only thirteen members of the church now and a body in the church yard. Same church or a different church. Well, if we want strict numerical identity, we’ve got to say we’ve a slightly different church here.
But nobody’s really gonna say, gee, now we’ve got to 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 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 the story for a long time. Right? The church moves. They sell the plot of land, put it someplace else.
Soon everybody moves yes? Just thought of the one that blighted and I destroy you completely. Oh, good. The basic assumption always is that the identity is a question of perception? Well, not necessarily a percept a question of perception, Again, it’s a 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 she was beginning to section with. She 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 sharp way.
Suppose this is the guy’s first defense. You know? He’s had a pretty good life up until now. Been have a blameless human being. Right?
He’s a beautiful wife. The next moment, he is a criminal. Same guy, a different guy. Well If you think that to be the same person, you’ve gotta have the same criminal record. Then he’s not.
He’s a different guy. He’s now got this this kind of guilt that he didn’t have before. But if you think, well, same guy means, you know, more or less the same body and and same kind of causal connection. Connection, then you think, okay. It’s the same god.
But I noticed that that 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 a puberty rite, their name has changed. They become a different person. Yet they somehow retain memories of this other individual.
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 and rebirths.
Cultures like this, believe me. Again, we might say is the fourteenth Dalai Lama the same person as the thirteenth or different person? You might say from a western perspective, different person because we have a convention of identification that sort of marks the end at physical death, newborn, 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 hume, by parody of argument, a conventional perception. 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 did, what makes him one person as opposed to say two, a right hand side of the person and a left hand side of the person stuck together are matters of convention, matters of imputation. What we’re arguing against is not his existence, but his essence. Okay?
I’m arguing that the identity condition makes it what he is isn’t something he carries with. Okay. I’ll keep that. That’s his last piece. Okay.
It’s a good argument, though, and and and a good question. I just so I want it’s I wanna sort of tease out the difference between existence and identity in the 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 Buddhist 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 to even your mother. And then I have to tell a pretty common dance about how God puts these hallucinations in you, right, if you could still hear it. Hume has Berkeley in his sights. 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 they’re non existent, you’ve mistaken the import of skeptical argument. Similarly, Candrakīrti in Madhyamakāvatāra has Buddhist idealist in his sights because that great other famously argued a couple of centuries before that there are no external objects, there are only appearances. And Candrakīrti says, look, you got part of it right, But if you thought that the fact that things don’t have essence doesn’t mean they don’t exist, you’ve gone too far. You’ve mistaken existence for substantiality, for inherent existence, for inherent existence.
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 looked who 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. And 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. 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 desire, and my personality, and find the thing that you can say, yeah. That’s what 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? Hume and Sextus 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 because 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 essence with the idea that emptiness is the essence of all things. And this move, which gets made very early in the Buddhist skeptical 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 Pyrrhonean tradition. And it really gets made for the first time.
Well, 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 well, a lot of moments ago, that one way we can understand what emptiness is is that it’s conceptually the flip 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 the is causality, the dependence of of things on causal condition. 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 going to find are little powers. There’s no essence to the 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 because classification requires convention, causality is merely conventional.
So in hume you put 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 that what 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, as always conventional and determined by language. And then argues that linguistic meaning is purely conventional.
And if 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.
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 Sextus Empiricus, and find the emptiness of physical objects or the emptiness of the person. Find those arguments repeated, deepened, made more sophisticated 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 has 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 depth, profundity, and coolness in the East.
Too bad we live in such a shallow culture. You don’t. Thanks a lot. If you want to apply me with any questions, I have time before we have to go to the airport, right? Yeah.
We have a little time before we 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. I’m sorry for that. Any questions? Yeah.
It’s a very good question. Let me start by talking about sexism himself. Okay? And about Pyrrho. Sextus in a discussion in the outlines of Pyrrhoianism called the ends of skepticism.
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 there were a bunch of different factions of physicians at this time, 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 not sometimes interesting and interesting to this point, argued 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 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. Sextus, now, whether or not we think this is a good way to do medicine, right? Sextus 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.
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 to 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 how to live successfully as an essenceless being in an essenceless world. hume expands on this, and and hume is interesting.
We haven’t don’t have time in one lecture to talk about that, but hume is 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 to 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 Pyrrhonian skepticism popular wasn’t that people thought Peyron was really smart, though they did.
Pyrrho was held 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. You wonder why I like Pyrrhonian 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 a remark.
This is all curious. hume when he hume was an immensely popular guy. Right? He was a famous party giver, great billiards and backgammon player, and he was the Scottish ambassador to the court of of France and was very popular in Paris. We refer 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 noted for this kind of connection between philosophy and practice. 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 or self transformation, meditation techniques, tantra, or anything like that.
You don’t find that parallel between Western Pyrrhonism and Indo Tibetan Madhyamaka 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, namely a practice of living well and of of a 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 Pyrrhonist is identical to the Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka 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, not with the open identity. Very good question. Other questions?
Yes. How do things we discuss today compare to the the rest of the concept of the soul? 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 says 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 introspects. And hume then develops this idea of the self as being a bundle or a heap is the word he uses. Quick.
Everybody, what’s the Sanskrit translation of the word heap? Skanda. 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 heard this analysis before, by the way. And that’s hume.
That’s not a Buddhist talk. Right? So and so he said the whole notion of a soul, of a unified is incoherent. Now also connected to this in this whole section on the self, human has another very interesting argument. It’s called the peg 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 greatest variety of beings exist in precisely this way.
Let me give examples of things like governments, principles, and things like this that can exist perfectly fine, but not have a substantial locus. And so hume argues that all of the perception, sensations, ideas and so forth that he notes which succeed one another in a momentary existence with inconceivable rapidity can simply be a succession of events without having a soul as a substrate. So Hume and Wittgenstein and Sextus. So, yes, there’s a deep connection. It’s a critical account on the notion of a soul or a self.
It’s a no self. Yeah. Isn’t this stream of successive events without any substrate? How do we account for patterns Well, hume’s response, as is Wittgenstein’s and Sextus’, is that we can appeal to a whole set of relations, relations of causality, association, similarity, and so forth. And you say, 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 you is William James’ famous phrase is, it’s turtles all the way down. Right? But you don’t the the analysis doesn’t doesn’t bottom out.
Right? Wittgenstein in the Tractatus has a very, 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 Pyrrhonian 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 Sextus is saying, and just take thought, conventions, similarity relations, and those as ultimate explainers. Sextus and Hume 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. Okay. You have a I’m sorry. Did you have a question about anything?
Okay. I’m sorry. Had a question here, then I’ll get to you. Sorry. Okay.
Can I just come back to the question of asking an immunologist or a detective? Of course. I find it hard 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.