Bhikkhu Bodhi's essay on non-dualism and the Buddha's pragmatic philosophy

Dhamma and Non-duality

In contrast to the non-dualistic systems, the Buddha's approach does not aim at the discovery of a unifying principle behind or beneath our experience of the world. Instead it takes the concrete fact of living experience, with all its buzzing confusion of contrasts and tensions, as its starting point and framework, within which it attempts to diagnose the central problem at the core of human existence and to offer a way to its solution. Hence the polestar of the Buddhist path is not a final unity but the extinction of suffering, which brings the resolution of the existential dilemma at its most fundamental level.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_27.html

Aristotle's "Anger"

I was surprised today to read Aristotle's account of anger, in the Nichomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 7:

In what concerns anger too there is an excess, a deficiency, and a mean;
and although these are pretty much nameless, let us call the mean gentle-
ness, since we speak of the person in the middle as  gentle.  Of those at
the extremes, let he who is excessive be irascible, the vice irascibility, and
let he who is  deficient be a sort of "unirascible" person, the deficiency
"unirascibility." 

That "gentleness" is the mean of "anger" is quite contradictory by our contemporary definitions, is it not?

Certainly I recall reading (I believe in The Art of Happiness) that the Dalai Lama claimed that emotions such as anger and hatred are at the core of violence; thus placing anger in the category of irredeemably negative emotions.

However, it seems that what Aristotle must be talking about here is not anger as we tend to think of it, but rather a sort of 'concern' which can be, in excess hot-tempered and in deficiency apathetic.

We are helped in this change of terminology in the translator's definition of thumos:

SPIRIT, SPIRITEDNESS (thumos): The seat of anger andof"natural courage"; it is also translated as "heart" in the quotation from Hesiod in book  I  (1095 b13). (p.315)

 Aristotle goes on in Book 4, chapter 5:

The person who gets angry at the things and with whom he ought, then, and, further, in the way, when, and for as much time as he ought, is praised. Hence this person would be gentle, if indeed gentleness is praised. The gentle person wishes to be calm and not led by his passion, but rather  as reason may command, and so to be harsh regarding the things he ought and for the requisite time.

...

For those who do not get angry at the things they ought are held to be foolish, as are those who do not get angry in the way they ought or when or with whom they ought. For such a person seems to lack perception and even not to feel pain; since he does not get angry, he seems not apt to defend himself against an attack. Yet to hold back in this way after having been treated insolently, and to overlook such treatment of one's kin, is held to be slavish. 

The wikipedia page on the topic gives us:

Concerned with	Mean	Excess	Deficiency
anger (orgē)	Gentleness (praotēs)	Irascibility (Rackham), Irritability (Sachs) (orgilotēs)	Spiritlessness (aorgẽs

Just some thoughts.

Deontology in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

For simplicity, hard lines are often drawn between Aristotle, Kant, and Mill, as ideal exemplars of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. However, whenever we look more closely, we will find a mixture of these 'systems' of ethics in each thinker. Or at least we can, depending on how we define our terms.

I have before me the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, which on pp.200-201 defines deontological ethics. It begins:

1. According to deontology, certain acts are right or wrong in themselves. ... Note that deontology is not the same as absolutism, according to which certain acts are wrong whatever the consequences. 

The second part of this will be addressed later. But the first part, that certain acts are right or wrong in themselves can be found almost verbatim in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 6, where Aristotle discusses virtues in terms of means between extremes:

But not every action or every passion admits of the mean, for some have names that are immediately associated with baseness-for example, spitefulness, shamelessness, envy, and, when it comes to actions, adultery, theft, and murder. For all these things, and those like them, are spoken of as being themselves base, rather than just their excesses or deficiencies. It is never possible, then, to be correct as regards them, but one is always in error; and it is not possible to do what concerns such things well or not well-by committing adultery with the woman one ought and when and as one ought. Rather, doing any of these things whatever is simply in error. 

 I think we can take "in error" to mean the same thing as "wrong". 

Must all 'Philosophy' include metaphysics?

Such is the assertion at the outset of T.K. Abbott's translation of Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals, Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), translated by Abbott as The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics:

If there exists on any subject a philosophy (that is, a
system of rational knowledge based on concepts), then
there must also be for this philosophy a system of pure
rational concepts, independent of any condition of in-
tuition, in other words, a metaphysic.

He goes on:

It may be asked
whether metaphysical elements are  required also for
every practical philosophy, which is the doctrine of du-
ties, and therefore also for Ethics, in order to be able to
present it as a true science (systematically), not merely
as  an aggregate of separate doctrines (fragmentarily). 

So are metaphyics (or a metaphysical edifice) necessary for ethics? Only, perhaps, if that ethics is to be presented systematically rather than fragmentarily (a key difference between Kant and the Buddha's teachings, perhaps).

As regards pure jurisprudence, no one will question
this requirement; for it concerns only what is formal
in the elective will, which has to be limited in its exter-
nal relations according to laws of freedom; without re-
garding any end which is the matter of this will.  

I'm not sure what exactly to make of this sentence. For 'pure jurisprudence', I take it to mean abstract reasoning on the good, in itself, free from particular instances. 'Without regarding any end...' I take to mean without any particular goal in mind, again trying to understand 'the good' in an abstract form. If 'the good' is to be understood on par with matter or mathematics, it must be examined in the most abstract manner possible. And so, Abbott continues:

Here, therefore, deontology is a mere scientific doctrine (doc-
trina scientiae).

Abbott goes on to make a distinction similar to Kant's own in the Groundwork, namely that our reasoning about ethics must begin with the concept of duty in its most abstract form, not from feelings, either the quest for maximizing happiness or avoiding suffering (again a distinction from Buddhism, which begins and ends with suffering). If we are to do this, we ally ourselves with 'feeling by whatever it may be excited' and thus endless possibilities in the empirical realm.

For instance a greedy drug-maker who stumbles upon a miracle drug that saves millions and accidentally releases its patent (and thus earns nothing) might be hailed as a hero as great as Jonas Salk (who did the same but purposely didn't patent the polio vaccine). The consequences of each man's work might be the same, but only one acted according to a sense of duty toward humankind. Thus, for Kant and his followers, only one acted morally.

Abbott then reiterates Kant's understanding of how morality leads to happiness, namely that a 'thinking man' conquers the temptations of vice and is conscious of having come to act according to duty, and 'finds himself in a state of peace and satisfaction which may well be called happiness, in which virtue is her own reward' (p.10). The happiness-seeker, on the other hand, argues that this happiness was the motive all along and our thinking man merely acts out of duty for the sake of that happiness.

[Now, this may look conspicuously like Buddhism, but I'd argue the opposite. The Buddhist practitioner might start with a quest to just overcome his/her own suffering, but this morphs over time with the realization of interconnectedness, etc, toward a recognition of the need to help all beings, thus abandoning a merely selfish goal and taking up a sense of duty to be of service. It is this shift from a selfish goal toward a universal one that marks a stream-enterer; or something like that. I need to gather sources and justifications, but the point is that the Buddhist 'thinking man' who has conquered vice and done his duty and feels peace and satisfaction will have done so out of an attraction to goodness (kusala) itself in the end.]

In any case, if the Buddhist practitioner merely seeks after whatever appears to remove suffering, he will no doubt chase after a million chimerical solutions, running this way and that. It is only with a firm grasp on certain realizations (or acceptances) about the nature of reality can he/she move forward in a straight line in life. Obeying duty (Dhamma) often means abandoning one's search for the latest happiness-producing-activity. And this is the key point. If one's allegiance is toward happiness, one will not abide by duty, which often requires suffering, temporary as it may be.

Thus the need for this metaphysical distinction between ultimate aims. As Abbott concludes:

If this distinction is not observed; if eudaemonism
(the principle of happiness) is adopted as the principle
instead of eleutheronomy (the principle of freedom of
the inner legislation), the consequence is the euthana-
sia (quiet death) of all morality. (p.11)

So we have begun with a call to the need for metaphysics and ended with that metaphysics differentiating two key directions that moral philosophers might take: one toward physiology and joys/sorrows as its justification, and one toward a transcendent, unknowable (but feelable) duty or dharma. 

Kantian Subject vs Nibbana

(after discussing the 'conditioned' world...)

Nibbana, by contrast, is depicted as the allaying of differentiation. For example, while in AN IV. 174 Sariputta spoke of that beyond the six sense-contacts as ‘non-complication’ he says in the previous sutta:

However far the six spheres of contact go, that is how far differentiation goes. However far differentiation goes, that is how far the six spheres of contact go. With the remainderless fading and stopping of the six spheres of contact, there comes to be the stopping, the allaying of differentiation.
(AN IV. 173) 

Insofar  as  it  is  unconditioned  by  qualities  pertaining  to  the  six  spheres  of contact, nibbana seems notably parallel to Kant’s (1787, A404) ‘noumenal subject’, namely, as ‘not a real whole but a simple’. I interpret Kant to mean here that the noumenal subject, as a simple, is undifferentiated by any empirical or conceptual determination. But while Kant believes the deliveries of sense and reason to exhaust the scope of human knowledge and experience (perhaps rendering the noumenal self to be little more than logical abstraction) this does not seem to be true with respect to nibbana. The idea that nibbana, beyond the differentiated sense-realm, can be directly experienced and understood – (and as I have argued, not as a separate object of experience) – sets it apart from Kant’s humanly unknowable noumenal subject:

Therefore  Bhikkhus,  that  base  should  be  understood,  where  the  eye ceases and perception of forms fades away. That base should be understood, where the ear ceases and perception of sounds fades away ... That base  should  be  understood  where  the  mind  ceases  and  perception  of mental phenomena fades away. That base should be understood.
(SN XXXV. 117)

Miri Albahari, Analytical Buddhism: The Two-tiered Illusion of Self 2006, p. 41

Kant on Virtue (or character)

The human being who is conscious of having character in his way of thinking does not have it by nature; he must always have acquired it. One may also assume that the grounding of character is like a kind of rebirth, a certain solemnity of making a vow to oneself; which makes the resolution and the moment when this transformation took place unforgettable to him/ like the beginning of a new epoch. - Education, examples, and teaching generally cannot bring about this firmness and persistence in principles gradually, but only, as it were, by an explosion which happens one time as a result of weariness at the unstable condition of instinct. Perhaps there are only a few who have attempted this revolution before the age of thirty, and fewer still who have firmly established it before they are forty. - Wanting to become a better human being in a fragmentary way is a futile endeavor, since one impression dies out while one works on another; the grounding of character, however, is absolute unity of the inner principle of conduct as such. - It is also said that poets have no character, for example, they would rather insult their best friends than give up a witty inspiration; or that character is not to be sought at all among courtiers, who must put up with all fashions; 6 and that with clergymen, who court the Lord of Heaven as well as the lords of the earth in one and the same pitch/firmness of character is in a troublesome condition; and, accordingly, it probably is and will remain only a pious wish that they have inner (moral)* character. But perhaps the philosophers are to blame for this, because they have never yet isolated this concept and placed it in a sufficiently bright light, and have sought to present virtue only in fragments but have never tried to present it whole, in its beautiful form, and to make it interesting for all human beings.

from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in Anthropology, History, and Education (p.392)

Why Philosophy: From Bertrand Russell

If we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called “practical" men. The “practical man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but Is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time. 

. . . Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), selections from Chapters 1, 14, and 15.