From the vaults
Domain forwarding from my old blog, The Gadfly’s Buzz, is now in operation, which means that a good proportion of the people who arrive at this site are following a link that originally directed them there. Moreover, the several nifty stats applications on that Austin Web Development supplies allow me to find out what they were looking for. I’ll try to get that stuff reposted here.
Foremost among those sought-after posts is the exchange with Bill Vallicella that gave this blog its name. I have been very badly remiss in keeping up my end of the conversation with Bill, for which I publicly apologize; here, without further ado, is a reposting of a couple of my earlier posts.
from 02/12/2005:
anicca, anatta, dukkha: Bill Valicella describes himself as
a recovering academician, [who] taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad before abandoning a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. Following an ancient tradition, [he] entered upon a life of creative leisure, dedicated to serious pursuits under the guiding ideal of otium liberale, of cultured retirement, free of the constraints of the academic marketplace.
From his desert hermitage he runs the website The Independent Philosopher and its associated blog Maverick Philosopher. On the former, he announces that the site has three interrelated purposes:
— “to provide online access to some of my technical work in philosophy, both published and unpublished”;— “to illustrate how one goes about being an independent philosopher”;— “to promote rigorous and critical thinking among the educated public about the important issues of the day, especially those with long and tangled philosophical roots.”
Given that we here at The Gadfly’s Buzz have fantasies of pursuing those latter two goals also, Vallicella’s site is quite a find for us.
Among the numerous worthwhile papers are a pair which criticize the Buddhist anatta (no-self) doctrine. The first, “No Self? A Look At A Buddhist Argument“, was published in December 2002 in the International Philosophical Quarterly The second, Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?“, is an unpublished analysis and critique of the Buddhist argument in the Milindapanha. (In addition to that link to the text itself, here’s a brief summary).
Since it is a work in progrss, Dr. Vallicella welcomes online comments on the paper. It’s been extensively commented on by Kevin Kim at BigHominid in couple of posts, which Valicella has responded to; the entire exchange is online here and here. It’s a lengthy exchange, and it’ll take me some time to work through it all. But let’s get started.
Not far into his initial presentation of the issues, Vallicella states the following:
It is no part of Milinda’s position as I shall reconstruct it that the individuals denoted by proper names be absolutely permanent entities: they could well be relatively permanent. Thus one is not forced to choose between saying that ‘Nagasena’ has no referent in reality and saying that it has an absolutely permanent referent. Charitably construed, Milinda’s position is that the unitary and self-same individuals corresponding to names like ‘Nagasena’ are relatively permanent entities possessing relative self-nature. If Milinda’s position so construed were correct, then of course Nagasena’s would collapse.
Kim raises an objection here:
Unfortunately, this sounds like a bogus notion to me: permanence strikes me as a yes/no proposition: things either are or aren’t permanent. This is certainly the frame of reference from which the Buddhist makes the claim that all phenomena are impermanent. I don’t know who first introduced the notion of “relative permanence,” but it seems to be a convenient redefinition that allows one to claim permanence where no permanence is to be found.Dr. Vallicella (or whoever) is free to redefine permanence as he sees fit, but the question then becomes whether his critique of the Buddhist position is still aimed at the actual Buddhist position.
From my preliminary scanning of the exchange, it looks like this issue, whether “relative impermanence” is a coherent notion, remains point of contention throughout. This is a boon for the ambitious but lazy commentator like myself, because it allows me to throw in something relevant to the entire dialogue without having read very much of it yet.
Kim to the contrary, relative permanence is a perfectly sound notion, for the reasons that Vallicella adduces; moreover, it has a respectable pedigree in Buddhist thought, where it occurs as the distinction between the original doctrine of impermanence and the more radical notion of momentariness. Here’s a passage from David Kalupahana’s Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, pp. 82-3:
[T]he Sarvastivadins and the Sautrantikas, in their attempt to present a logical analysis of the doctrine of impermanence (anicca), came to accept a theory of moments, which in turn led to several theories not consistent with early Buddhism. . . . What, then, is the theory of impermanence as found in the early Buddhist texts? Hardly any evidence can be gathered from the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas to support the view that things were considered to be momentary(ksanika, ch’a na). We do not come across any statement such as “All forces are momentary.” The theory of momentariness is not only foreign to early Buddhism but is contradicted by some statements in the Nikayas and the Agamas. For example, two suttas in the Samyukta called Assutava describe how a man should give up attachment to the physical body made up of the four primary existents because the body grows and decays, comes into being an perishes. Comparing the vacillation of the mind with the change taking place in the physical body, it continues: “This physical body made up of the four primary existents exists for one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred or more years. That which is called the mind, thought, or consciousness arises as one thing, and ceases an another whether by night or by day.” That description of mind and body is not inspired by a theory of momentariness. In fact, it seems to refute the idea of momentariness when it says that the physical body is comparatively more stable than the mind. Physical bodies are experienced as enduring for some time, although they are subject to change and decay, which change is not perceived as occurring every moment. Nor is there any suggestion that the mind is subject to momentary changes. The suttas merely emphasize the relative speeds at which the body and mind change.
Of course, Kalupahana’s views are controversial among scholars. (They wouldn’t be scholars otherwise.) But the considerations he cites should be sufficient to establish that the theory of momentariness is not the universally accepted interpretation of anicca.
from 03/03/2005:
Bill Vallicella and Kevin Kim have both had responses and links to my first Milindapanha post up on their blogs for some time now. Kevin in particular raises some substantive issues that I’ll try to address at some point, but in order to avoid getting sidetracked from my original intent, in this installment I’m going to concentrate on Bill’s original paper. In his blogpost, Bill says that I take his side in his argument with Kevin. ThatÂ’s correct as far as it goes, since I think BV clearly gets the better of KK in their exchange so far; but I should make it clear that my underlying intention is to defend (some version of) the anatta teaching, or at least gain merit in this and future lifetimes by trying :>) , and to show KK how to formulate better arguments in favor of his positions.
I propose that there are two basic lines of argument that the defender of the anatta doctrine might raise contra BV’s paper:
(1)That BV has misconstrued Nagasena’s position and/or argument;
(2)That BV’s response to Nagasena’s argument, namely that referring terms can refer to a whole of parts in a definite arrangement, is correct as far as it goes, but this does not support BV’s defense of the substantiality of the self in the manner he claims.
I intend to press the second objection, but first I want to explore objection (1) more tentatively. Tentatively is the only way that I, at least, can approach the issue, since I don’t have access to the original texts or the skills to understand them if I did. It’s interesting that no complete translation of the Milindapanha (into English or another modern European language) seems to exist on the Internet: the version I linked to before is incomplete. The only version I could find with the corresponding text in Pali is even less complete, and doesn’t include the chariot passage we’re primarily concerned with here. Even if I had the Pali, I can’t read it, only try to decipher it with a dictionary, and make ignorant guesses as to what it really means. In the absence of that kind of scholarship, it’s foolish to try to rely too much on textual exegesis. (I’ll provide an example to bolster my point in a moment.)
Let’s begin by noting a few things about the dramatic or dialectical structure of the passage. We are told that King Milinda is
a man who was learned, experienced, intelligent and competent. . . . As a disputant he was hard to assail, hard to overcome, and he was recognized as a prominent sectarian teacher.
Nagasena is called to Milinda’s court by the local monastic sangha, who complain to him that Milinda
constantly harasses the order of monks with questions and counter-questions, with arguments and counter-arguments. Please go, Nagasena, and subdue him!
Nagasena goes to the court, and when Milinda begins the conversation by asking him his name, he replies:
As Nagasena I am known, O Great King. . . . But although parents give names such as Nagasena . . . . nevertheless this word “Nagasena” is just a denomination, a designation, a conceptual term, a current appellation, a mere name. For no real person can here be apprehended.
To reinforce my point about scholarship: clearly the words translated here as denomination, designation, conceptual term, appellation, and real are all technical terms, understanding the precise meaning of which would be essential to figuring out exactly what Nagasena is and isn’t saying about how names refer. The whole series of has the ring about it of one the series of synonyms that abound in the Pali canon; and in fact it occurs again in the mouth of Milinda, in the admission in which Nagasena presumably wins this round of the debate.
Meanings of terms aside, we should note that Nagasena pretty clearly is choosing the ground on which he’ll engage the king.
Milinda’s objection to NagasenaÂ’s reply comes in the form of the following argument:
(1)Milinda’s interlocutor has called himself “Nagasena.”
(2)For the dhamma to have meaning and be practicable, terms like “Nagasena” must have some referent.
(3)On a proffered analysis of the ontology of complex entities, “Nagasena” has no referent.(The proffered analysis is the one BV presents in the 3 premises P1-P3; I’ll call it the tripartite argument.)
(4)Therefore, Milinda’s interlocutor has spoken a falsehood.
Nagasena then asks Milinda how he arrived at their meeting, and Milinda answers, “In a chariot.” Nagasena applies the above argument to Milinda’s reply, only with “chariot” substituted for “Nagasena.” In response to the conclusion that he has spoken a falsehood, Milinda repeats the “denomination, designation, conceptual term, current appellation, mere name” formula to explain how the term “chariot” refers.
The crucial point to notice here is that it is Milinda, not Nagasena, who initially puts forward the tripartite argument that is crucial to the alleged refutation of Nagasena’s position. Nagasena never puts it forward as a position he himself is defending. This leaves it far from clear to me that the author of the Milindapanha really means to say that the chariot argument is a valid argument, or at least the best argument, in favor of the anatta doctrine. Later Buddhist figures like Nagarjuna (as well as Advaita Vedantins like Sankara and Sriharsa) practiced a “negative dialectic”, in which they claimed to put forward no positive argumentative propositions of their own, to make use only of the terms, concepts and assumptions of their opponents. Nagasena and/or the author of the Milindapanha may be doing something similar here; demonstrating that, based solely on assumptions that Milinda has put forward, Nagasena can bring the king around to agreement with his own position. On this analysis, I think we’d have to explicitly reject the tripartite argument as a correct analysis of Buddhist doctrine.
In addition, thereÂ’s something odd about Milinda’s repetition of the formula that Nagasena initially introduced. The king is depicted as a worthy opponent, one who has mastered many of the details of Buddhist doctrine for the purpose of refuting those doctrines in debate. In his final admission, he responds with a highly technical formulation. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect as a commonsense explanation of how terms refer, or the sort of thing someone would say if, impaled on the horns of a dilemma, she spontaneously blurted out an admission revealing that she was implicitly committed to the truth of a proposition she’d been denying. Is the point to show that Milinda has become so immersed in the dhamma that he has implicitly accepted its truth and spontaneously speaks in Buddhist terms? Is Milinda perhaps not committed to the truth of this final answer? Does he put it forth in the spirit of “This is the answer you Buddhists would give”? It isn’t clear to me.
There’s a lot more that could be said on these topics, but let’s move on. To set the groundwork for my response to BVÂ’s arguments, I will provide an outline of the structure of his paper. It has 4 parts:
I. BV offers a logical reconstruction of the Chariot Dialogue, in the form of the following tripartite argument:
P1. No concrete partite thing is identical to any of its proper parts.
P2. No concrete partite thing is identical to the mere(ological) sum of its proper parts.
P3. No concrete partite thing is identical to something wholly distinct from each of its parts.
C. Singular terms denoting concrete partite things, useful as they are for counting and classifying, do not refer to anything real.
(back)
BV argues that the argument is invalid because it rests on a nonexhaustive disjunction. In fact there is a fourth possibility, that concrete partite things are identical with the whole of their parts in a definite arrangement. BV defends this view.
II. BV considers the validity of the argument as an analysis of the soul or personhood. He presents 3 examples, which he elucidates to argue that a person is a whole of parts in a different sense than an inanimate artifact like a chariot is a whole of parts. The three examples are: the transition from pleasant to painful mental states; the perception of a melody; and the perception of a musical chord. He argues that Âgthe fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine.
III. BV presents a further argument in favor of the substantiality or self-identity of the self. Positing the dependency of any perceived unity on a unifier or ground of unification, he argues that the anatta doctrine entails a vicious infinite regress.
IV. BV considers the Buddhism/Hume analogy, and draws further philosophical conclusions from that comparison.
I find the argument in Part III by far the most challenging and philosophically interesting. And, as I indicated earlier, I accept, provisionally at least, BV’s conclusion in Part I. (The proviso is because I may have to revisit those issues when I get around to considering Part III.) But letÂ’s dive into Part II, and consider BV’s first example:
Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful. Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector. Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful. The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived.
Although BV’s subsequent examples, the musical ones, concern more complex phenomena and are arguably more relevant to the issue of personal identity across time, this example is striking because it so perfectly illustrates the point of the Buddhist teaching about anatta. (Given BV’s obvious extensive acquaintance with Buddhism, I suspect he may have deliberately chosen it for polemical purposes.)
I donÂ’t want to get into the issues surrounding the degrees and stages and kinds of enlightenment or nirvana and all that. Instead, to make my point, IÂ’d like to rely on a version of the fundamental teaching of the Buddha that I once saw on a bumper sticker:
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Or in terms of this example: There will always be smoke detectors, and hearing them will always be painful. But we do not have to experience the additional suffering caused by the transition from pleasurable to painful states, because that suffering arises from the mind’s craving for, and attachment to, pleasurable experiences.
Most of us (unenlightened beings) would concur that Âthe transition from a pleasurable to a painful state is itself painful. I don’t see that we have to parse that statement literally, though; in other words, concurring with that statement does not imply that painful must be predicable of some directly perceived relation of transition. It could be, for example, that painful states are simply innately more painful when they follow after pleasurable states, and that’s all we really mean when we say that the transition is painful. Or it could be that painful states are more painful when we compare them to pleasurable states we have experienced in the past, where the relevant sort of comparison does not involve any direct perception of transition. All that is required is that in the present state we be in some way aware of the previous state.
This, then, is the general form of my response to BV so far: Our awareness of a moment B as the temporal successor of moment A only requires that there be some trace, memory, or representation of the earlier moment as part of the directly presented contents of moment B. No relation of transition need be directly perceived, much less a subject of experience. (This will be the basic form of my response to the musical examples as well, when I get around to considering them, although additional issues may arise there.)
Regarding the pleasure-to-pain example in particular, though, I am inclined to think that BV’s analysis (of samsaric experience) is more or less correct here; we do strictly speaking experience the transition from a pleasurable to a painful state as itself painful. However, our perception of the transition in that way arises out of mental attitudes (craving and clinging) that ordinarily arise in the first moment of experience, but need not so arise.
Here I’m getting far beyond anything I can profess to know through direct experience, at least well enough to be able to talk about with any confidence. So I think IÂ’ll let that suffice for this installment.
Finally, since I’ve recently taken to concluding my blogposts with suggestions for further reading, here’s a paper discussing the historical context of the Milindapanha that some may find interesting.
buddhism
Thank you !!!
Domain forwarding from my old blog, The Gadfly’s Buzz, is now in operation, which means that a good proportion of the people who arrive at this site are following a link that originally directed them there. Moreover, the several nifty stats applications on that Austin Web Development supplies allow me to find out what they were looking for. I’ll try to get that stuff reposted here.
Foremost among those sought-after posts is the exchange with Bill Vallicella that gave this blog its name. I have been very badly remiss in keeping up my end of the conversation with Bill, for which I publicly apologize; here, without further ado, is a reposting of a couple of my earlier posts.
from 02/12/2005:
anicca, anatta, dukkha: Bill Valicella describes himself as
a recovering academician, [who] taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad before abandoning a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. Following an ancient tradition, [he] entered upon a life of creative leisure, dedicated to serious pursuits under the guiding ideal of otium liberale, of cultured retirement, free of the constraints of the academic marketplace.
From his desert hermitage he runs the website The Independent Philosopher and its associated blog Maverick Philosopher. On the former, he announces that the site has three interrelated purposes:
— “to provide online access to some of my technical work in philosophy, both published and unpublished”;— “to illustrate how one goes about being an independent philosopher”;— “to promote rigorous and critical thinking among the educated public about the important issues of the day, especially those with long and tangled philosophical roots.”
Given that we here at The Gadfly’s Buzz have fantasies of pursuing those latter two goals also, Vallicella’s site is quite a find for us.
Among the numerous worthwhile papers are a pair which criticize the Buddhist anatta (no-self) doctrine. The first, “No Self? A Look At A Buddhist Argument“, was published in December 2002 in the International Philosophical Quarterly The second, Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?“, is an unpublished analysis and critique of the Buddhist argument in the Milindapanha. (In addition to that link to the text itself, here’s a brief summary).
Since it is a work in progrss, Dr. Vallicella welcomes online comments on the paper. It’s been extensively commented on by Kevin Kim at BigHominid in couple of posts, which Valicella has responded to; the entire exchange is online here and here. It’s a lengthy exchange, and it’ll take me some time to work through it all. But let’s get started.
Not far into his initial presentation of the issues, Vallicella states the following:
It is no part of Milinda’s position as I shall reconstruct it that the individuals denoted by proper names be absolutely permanent entities: they could well be relatively permanent. Thus one is not forced to choose between saying that ‘Nagasena’ has no referent in reality and saying that it has an absolutely permanent referent. Charitably construed, Milinda’s position is that the unitary and self-same individuals corresponding to names like ‘Nagasena’ are relatively permanent entities possessing relative self-nature. If Milinda’s position so construed were correct, then of course Nagasena’s would collapse.
Kim raises an objection here:
Unfortunately, this sounds like a bogus notion to me: permanence strikes me as a yes/no proposition: things either are or aren’t permanent. This is certainly the frame of reference from which the Buddhist makes the claim that all phenomena are impermanent. I don’t know who first introduced the notion of “relative permanence,” but it seems to be a convenient redefinition that allows one to claim permanence where no permanence is to be found.Dr. Vallicella (or whoever) is free to redefine permanence as he sees fit, but the question then becomes whether his critique of the Buddhist position is still aimed at the actual Buddhist position.
From my preliminary scanning of the exchange, it looks like this issue, whether “relative impermanence” is a coherent notion, remains point of contention throughout. This is a boon for the ambitious but lazy commentator like myself, because it allows me to throw in something relevant to the entire dialogue without having read very much of it yet.
Kim to the contrary, relative permanence is a perfectly sound notion, for the reasons that Vallicella adduces; moreover, it has a respectable pedigree in Buddhist thought, where it occurs as the distinction between the original doctrine of impermanence and the more radical notion of momentariness. Here’s a passage from David Kalupahana’s Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, pp. 82-3:
[T]he Sarvastivadins and the Sautrantikas, in their attempt to present a logical analysis of the doctrine of impermanence (anicca), came to accept a theory of moments, which in turn led to several theories not consistent with early Buddhism. . . . What, then, is the theory of impermanence as found in the early Buddhist texts? Hardly any evidence can be gathered from the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas to support the view that things were considered to be momentary(ksanika, ch’a na). We do not come across any statement such as “All forces are momentary.” The theory of momentariness is not only foreign to early Buddhism but is contradicted by some statements in the Nikayas and the Agamas. For example, two suttas in the Samyukta called Assutava describe how a man should give up attachment to the physical body made up of the four primary existents because the body grows and decays, comes into being an perishes. Comparing the vacillation of the mind with the change taking place in the physical body, it continues: “This physical body made up of the four primary existents exists for one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred or more years. That which is called the mind, thought, or consciousness arises as one thing, and ceases an another whether by night or by day.” That description of mind and body is not inspired by a theory of momentariness. In fact, it seems to refute the idea of momentariness when it says that the physical body is comparatively more stable than the mind. Physical bodies are experienced as enduring for some time, although they are subject to change and decay, which change is not perceived as occurring every moment. Nor is there any suggestion that the mind is subject to momentary changes. The suttas merely emphasize the relative speeds at which the body and mind change.
Of course, Kalupahana’s views are controversial among scholars. (They wouldn’t be scholars otherwise.) But the considerations he cites should be sufficient to establish that the theory of momentariness is not the universally accepted interpretation of anicca.
from 03/03/2005:
Bill Vallicella and Kevin Kim have both had responses and links to my first Milindapanha post up on their blogs for some time now. Kevin in particular raises some substantive issues that I’ll try to address at some point, but in order to avoid getting sidetracked from my original intent, in this installment I’m going to concentrate on Bill’s original paper. In his blogpost, Bill says that I take his side in his argument with Kevin. ThatÂ’s correct as far as it goes, since I think BV clearly gets the better of KK in their exchange so far; but I should make it clear that my underlying intention is to defend (some version of) the anatta teaching, or at least gain merit in this and future lifetimes by trying :>) , and to show KK how to formulate better arguments in favor of his positions.
I propose that there are two basic lines of argument that the defender of the anatta doctrine might raise contra BV’s paper:
(1)That BV has misconstrued Nagasena’s position and/or argument;
(2)That BV’s response to Nagasena’s argument, namely that referring terms can refer to a whole of parts in a definite arrangement, is correct as far as it goes, but this does not support BV’s defense of the substantiality of the self in the manner he claims.
I intend to press the second objection, but first I want to explore objection (1) more tentatively. Tentatively is the only way that I, at least, can approach the issue, since I don’t have access to the original texts or the skills to understand them if I did. It’s interesting that no complete translation of the Milindapanha (into English or another modern European language) seems to exist on the Internet: the version I linked to before is incomplete. The only version I could find with the corresponding text in Pali is even less complete, and doesn’t include the chariot passage we’re primarily concerned with here. Even if I had the Pali, I can’t read it, only try to decipher it with a dictionary, and make ignorant guesses as to what it really means. In the absence of that kind of scholarship, it’s foolish to try to rely too much on textual exegesis. (I’ll provide an example to bolster my point in a moment.)
Let’s begin by noting a few things about the dramatic or dialectical structure of the passage. We are told that King Milinda is
a man who was learned, experienced, intelligent and competent. . . . As a disputant he was hard to assail, hard to overcome, and he was recognized as a prominent sectarian teacher.
Nagasena is called to Milinda’s court by the local monastic sangha, who complain to him that Milinda
constantly harasses the order of monks with questions and counter-questions, with arguments and counter-arguments. Please go, Nagasena, and subdue him!
Nagasena goes to the court, and when Milinda begins the conversation by asking him his name, he replies:
As Nagasena I am known, O Great King. . . . But although parents give names such as Nagasena . . . . nevertheless this word “Nagasena” is just a denomination, a designation, a conceptual term, a current appellation, a mere name. For no real person can here be apprehended.
To reinforce my point about scholarship: clearly the words translated here as denomination, designation, conceptual term, appellation, and real are all technical terms, understanding the precise meaning of which would be essential to figuring out exactly what Nagasena is and isn’t saying about how names refer. The whole series of has the ring about it of one the series of synonyms that abound in the Pali canon; and in fact it occurs again in the mouth of Milinda, in the admission in which Nagasena presumably wins this round of the debate.
Meanings of terms aside, we should note that Nagasena pretty clearly is choosing the ground on which he’ll engage the king.
Milinda’s objection to NagasenaÂ’s reply comes in the form of the following argument:
(1)Milinda’s interlocutor has called himself “Nagasena.”
(2)For the dhamma to have meaning and be practicable, terms like “Nagasena” must have some referent.
(3)On a proffered analysis of the ontology of complex entities, “Nagasena” has no referent.(The proffered analysis is the one BV presents in the 3 premises P1-P3; I’ll call it the tripartite argument.)
(4)Therefore, Milinda’s interlocutor has spoken a falsehood.
Nagasena then asks Milinda how he arrived at their meeting, and Milinda answers, “In a chariot.” Nagasena applies the above argument to Milinda’s reply, only with “chariot” substituted for “Nagasena.” In response to the conclusion that he has spoken a falsehood, Milinda repeats the “denomination, designation, conceptual term, current appellation, mere name” formula to explain how the term “chariot” refers.
The crucial point to notice here is that it is Milinda, not Nagasena, who initially puts forward the tripartite argument that is crucial to the alleged refutation of Nagasena’s position. Nagasena never puts it forward as a position he himself is defending. This leaves it far from clear to me that the author of the Milindapanha really means to say that the chariot argument is a valid argument, or at least the best argument, in favor of the anatta doctrine. Later Buddhist figures like Nagarjuna (as well as Advaita Vedantins like Sankara and Sriharsa) practiced a “negative dialectic”, in which they claimed to put forward no positive argumentative propositions of their own, to make use only of the terms, concepts and assumptions of their opponents. Nagasena and/or the author of the Milindapanha may be doing something similar here; demonstrating that, based solely on assumptions that Milinda has put forward, Nagasena can bring the king around to agreement with his own position. On this analysis, I think we’d have to explicitly reject the tripartite argument as a correct analysis of Buddhist doctrine.
In addition, thereÂ’s something odd about Milinda’s repetition of the formula that Nagasena initially introduced. The king is depicted as a worthy opponent, one who has mastered many of the details of Buddhist doctrine for the purpose of refuting those doctrines in debate. In his final admission, he responds with a highly technical formulation. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect as a commonsense explanation of how terms refer, or the sort of thing someone would say if, impaled on the horns of a dilemma, she spontaneously blurted out an admission revealing that she was implicitly committed to the truth of a proposition she’d been denying. Is the point to show that Milinda has become so immersed in the dhamma that he has implicitly accepted its truth and spontaneously speaks in Buddhist terms? Is Milinda perhaps not committed to the truth of this final answer? Does he put it forth in the spirit of “This is the answer you Buddhists would give”? It isn’t clear to me.
There’s a lot more that could be said on these topics, but let’s move on. To set the groundwork for my response to BVÂ’s arguments, I will provide an outline of the structure of his paper. It has 4 parts:
I. BV offers a logical reconstruction of the Chariot Dialogue, in the form of the following tripartite argument:
P1. No concrete partite thing is identical to any of its proper parts.
P2. No concrete partite thing is identical to the mere(ological) sum of its proper parts.
P3. No concrete partite thing is identical to something wholly distinct from each of its parts.
C. Singular terms denoting concrete partite things, useful as they are for counting and classifying, do not refer to anything real.
(back)
BV argues that the argument is invalid because it rests on a nonexhaustive disjunction. In fact there is a fourth possibility, that concrete partite things are identical with the whole of their parts in a definite arrangement. BV defends this view.
II. BV considers the validity of the argument as an analysis of the soul or personhood. He presents 3 examples, which he elucidates to argue that a person is a whole of parts in a different sense than an inanimate artifact like a chariot is a whole of parts. The three examples are: the transition from pleasant to painful mental states; the perception of a melody; and the perception of a musical chord. He argues that Âgthe fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine.
III. BV presents a further argument in favor of the substantiality or self-identity of the self. Positing the dependency of any perceived unity on a unifier or ground of unification, he argues that the anatta doctrine entails a vicious infinite regress.
IV. BV considers the Buddhism/Hume analogy, and draws further philosophical conclusions from that comparison.
I find the argument in Part III by far the most challenging and philosophically interesting. And, as I indicated earlier, I accept, provisionally at least, BV’s conclusion in Part I. (The proviso is because I may have to revisit those issues when I get around to considering Part III.) But letÂ’s dive into Part II, and consider BV’s first example:
Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful. Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector. Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful. The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived.
Although BV’s subsequent examples, the musical ones, concern more complex phenomena and are arguably more relevant to the issue of personal identity across time, this example is striking because it so perfectly illustrates the point of the Buddhist teaching about anatta. (Given BV’s obvious extensive acquaintance with Buddhism, I suspect he may have deliberately chosen it for polemical purposes.)
I donÂ’t want to get into the issues surrounding the degrees and stages and kinds of enlightenment or nirvana and all that. Instead, to make my point, IÂ’d like to rely on a version of the fundamental teaching of the Buddha that I once saw on a bumper sticker:
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Or in terms of this example: There will always be smoke detectors, and hearing them will always be painful. But we do not have to experience the additional suffering caused by the transition from pleasurable to painful states, because that suffering arises from the mind’s craving for, and attachment to, pleasurable experiences.
Most of us (unenlightened beings) would concur that Âthe transition from a pleasurable to a painful state is itself painful. I don’t see that we have to parse that statement literally, though; in other words, concurring with that statement does not imply that painful must be predicable of some directly perceived relation of transition. It could be, for example, that painful states are simply innately more painful when they follow after pleasurable states, and that’s all we really mean when we say that the transition is painful. Or it could be that painful states are more painful when we compare them to pleasurable states we have experienced in the past, where the relevant sort of comparison does not involve any direct perception of transition. All that is required is that in the present state we be in some way aware of the previous state.
This, then, is the general form of my response to BV so far: Our awareness of a moment B as the temporal successor of moment A only requires that there be some trace, memory, or representation of the earlier moment as part of the directly presented contents of moment B. No relation of transition need be directly perceived, much less a subject of experience. (This will be the basic form of my response to the musical examples as well, when I get around to considering them, although additional issues may arise there.)
Regarding the pleasure-to-pain example in particular, though, I am inclined to think that BV’s analysis (of samsaric experience) is more or less correct here; we do strictly speaking experience the transition from a pleasurable to a painful state as itself painful. However, our perception of the transition in that way arises out of mental attitudes (craving and clinging) that ordinarily arise in the first moment of experience, but need not so arise.
Here I’m getting far beyond anything I can profess to know through direct experience, at least well enough to be able to talk about with any confidence. So I think IÂ’ll let that suffice for this installment.
Finally, since I’ve recently taken to concluding my blogposts with suggestions for further reading, here’s a paper discussing the historical context of the Milindapanha that some may find interesting.
buddhism
Thank you !!!
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