Self-Cultivation
Philosophies in Ancient India, Greece, and China
CHRISTOPHER W. GOWANS
3
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Names: Gowans, Christopher W., author.
Title: Self-cultivation philosophies in ancient India, Greece, and China / Christopher W. Gowans.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021016489 (print) | LCCN 2021016490 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190941024 (hb) | ISBN 9780190941048 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-culture—India—Philosophy. | Self-culture—Greece—Philosophy. | Self-culture—China—Philosophy. | Education, Ancient—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC LC32 .G69 2021 (print) | LCC LC32 (ebook) | DDC 371.39/43—dc23
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190941024.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
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Preface
Could philosophical reflection play a significant role in improving our lives? In particular, could seeking to understand fundamental questions about our selves, our world, and how we ought to live help us ease our anxieties, alleviate our frustrations, transform our desires, expand our moral concerns, or enlarge our hopes? For example, could philosophy equip us to live well in the wake of the death of those we love or in the face of our own mortality? Philosophy as it mostly exists today—an academic subject researched and taught in colleges and universities—has a divided response to these questions. Nearly everyone who teaches or seeks a degree in philosophy supposes that it has some value. Yet only a few academic philosophers suppose it could play a crucial role in transforming our lives, in enabling us to live a good life. By contrast, many ancient philosophical traditions in a variety of cultures answered these questions affirmatively. This has been increasingly recognized in recent years—at least by some. My aim in this book is to show that a specific form of inquiry and practice, what I call self-cultivation philosophy, was promoted in several prominent ancient philosophical outlooks in India, the Greco-Roman world, and China.
I recognize that this will be regarded as a work in comparative philosophy as commonly understood. However, I prefer to think of it as a form of fusion philosophy in my favored sense of that term, namely as a challenge to commonly accepted categories for thinking about the subject and a proposal to envision alternative ways of regarding philosophy—similar to what we find in fusion music, where standard genres are interrogated and reconfigured to create new possibilities.1 Starting in India and ending in China is part of this endeavor. We need not suppose that ancient Greek philosophy, or the contemporary philosophy seminar room, is the paradigm—the beginning or the end—of what counts as philosophy.
My primary aim is to establish that self-cultivation philosophy is an informative interpretive framework for comprehending and reflecting on several
1 See Gowans, forthcoming. This understanding of fusion philosophy differs from the original conception in Siderits 2003, xi.
philosophical outlooks in three quite different ancient cultures. I do not think that all philosophy is or should be a self-cultivation philosophy. However, self-cultivation philosophy was very common in the ancient worlds of India, Greece, and China. Establishing this requires two kinds of inquiry.
The first is an interpretation of the texts in which these philosophical outlooks were expressed. In many cases, these texts have been read in quite diverse ways. This is not surprising in view of their complexity and the different perspectives people bring to them. Many of these diverse interpretations have value. My main concern is less to critique other approaches than to argue that it is insightful to interpret these texts as self-cultivation philosophies, that this approach directs us to something real and important in these texts. Of course, this may preclude alternative interpretations in some respects, but I am not claiming that self-cultivation philosophy is the only valuable standpoint for understanding these texts.
The second is reflection on the philosophical issues raised by these texts. An important part of understanding the texts is grasping how they did or might or could respond to debates about these issues. In these discussions, I sometimes have a viewpoint, but this is not the place for a detailed defense or critique of specific philosophical positions. My central aim is to explain the texts by showing how they generate philosophical debates and to provide some direction for exploring these further.
On both fronts, textual interpretation and philosophical analysis, I have benefited greatly from the work of specialists. However, I am not writing primarily for specialists—for example, of Sāṃkhya, Epicurean, or Daoist philosophy. Though I hope specialists might benefit from seeing how a particular person, text, or tradition is understood in the self-cultivation philosophy framework, my primary audience is persons of diverse philosophical backgrounds who are willing to think about philosophy in terms of selfcultivation philosophy in a variety of ancient cultural contexts. Hence, the chapters are written to be accessible to a broad audience of persons interested in philosophy.
I explain and defend the concept of self-cultivation philosophy in the first chapter. After this, the book is divided into three parts: India, Greece and Rome, and China. At the beginning of each part, there is a brief introduction that provides historical and philosophical context for the chapters in that part. These are intended primarily for persons who are not familiar with this background. Each of the main chapters is organized in light of two perspectives. One is the four-part structure of self-cultivation philosophy
that I describe in the opening chapter. The other is the specific nature of the particular texts or tradition under consideration. In some cases, it made sense to apply this structure to a sequence of two or three texts. In other cases, however, I judged it best to organize the discussion in different ways (as will be explained). Each of these chapters begins with a brief vignette that provides an entrée into the philosophy. These are mostly accounts and stories that are well known and important in the tradition, even though they are not always historically accurate. They emphasize that self-cultivation philosophy is centrally about people’s lives, not simply philosophical theories. In almost every chapter, there are complex scholarly issues about when, how, and by whom the texts discussed were generated. I note these issues quite briefly and make clear the editions and translations I employ (on occasion translations have been altered slightly, mainly to ensure consistency in the chapter). Notes direct readers to scholarly literature pertaining to the interpretation and analysis of the texts.
It is natural to wonder about the contemporary relevance of these ancient self-cultivation philosophies. In fact, a central reason for interest in them is the thought—or at least, sense, suspicion, or hope—that they, at least some of them, might be of value to people living in the world today. I share this thought. However, my purpose here is not to develop these philosophies into viable outlooks for the contemporary world. In my view, the world has changed too much, and we have learned too much about human history as well as psychology and related subjects, not to mention philosophy, to accept any of these perspectives without significant adaptation. I hope this book provides resources for such endeavors. However, I do not undertake them here, though I do discuss issues of philosophical cogency in the traditional texts and make occasional asides about ways contemporary psychology might be relevant to them. In some cases, of course—for example, Buddhism, Confucianism, and even Stoicism—these outlooks have a significant presence in the contemporary world. My focus in this book, however, is the ancient roots of these traditions, not their current manifestations. I will return briefly to the question of contemporary relevance in the afterword.
In writing this book, I have benefited from conversations, feedback, and various forms of assistance from many people. They include several colleagues at Fordham, John Davenport, John Drummond, Stephen Grimm, Brian Johnson, and Dana Miller, as well as recent graduate assistants Xingming Hu, Marcus Schweiger, Christopher Myers, Michael Au-Mullaney, and Ricky DeSantis. I have also learned from conversations with two other
x Preface
graduate students, Jingsi Teng, visiting from China, and Bobby Karle, SJ, who introduced me to yoga philosophy. I have benefited as well from discussions with two students when they were undergraduates, further back, when these ideas were first germinating, Joy Brennan and Abhinav Avi Goswami. I appreciate all my students, both undergraduate and graduate, for their interest, thoughts, and responses in a variety of classes where I have discussed ideas pertaining to self-cultivation philosophy. I have also benefited greatly from helpful feedback from and discussion with many colleagues elsewhere. These include Jeff Blustein, Nicolas Bommarito, Owen Flanagan, Jonardon Ganeri, Jonathan Gold, Philip J. Ivanhoe, David Konstan, Hagop Sarkissian, Mark Siderits, Michael Stocker, Karsten Struhl, and Bryan W. Van Norden. I also received valuable comments from several anonymous referees. In addition, at Oxford University Press, I am grateful to Lucy Randall for her encouragement and advice in enabling me to understand the nature of my project, and to Hannah Doyle for her help and patience in bringing the book into production. I would like to thank Fordham University for time off from teaching during two Faculty Fellowships and a Research Grant for financial support. Finally, and most importantly, this book would not have been possible without the patience and encouragement of my wife Coleen and my two daughters Hannah and Gabrielle. Their support has been the most valuable of all.
I completed this book in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic spread through New York City and much of the world. We were all reminded of our vulnerability to one of the most ancient threats to human life despite our extraordinary technological advances. Such vulnerabilities were one of the primary motivations for the development of many of these ancient self-cultivation philosophies. Though these philosophies are the products of cultures very different from our own, there is a clear sense in which they speak to human concerns that are largely unchanged since they were written.
Abbreviations
Where standardized forms of reference are widely accepted, I employ them.
AN The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012. Anal. Confucius. Confucius Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003.
BCA Śāntideva. The Bodhicaryāvatāra. Translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
BG The Bhagavad Gītā. Translated by Winthrop Sargeant. 25th Anniversary Edition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
DDJ Laozi. The Daodejing of Laozi. Translated by Philip J. Ivanhoe. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003.
Disc. Epictetus. Discourses. In Discourses, Fragments, Handbook. Translated by Robin Hard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
DL Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Translated by Pamela Mensch. Edited by James Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
DLP Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Pyrrho and Timon (9.61–116). Translated by Elizabeth Scharffenberger and Katja Maria Vogt. In Katja Maria Vogt, ed., Pyrrhonian Skepticism in Diogenes Laertius, 16–51. SAPERE Series vol. 25.
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.
DN The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya. Translated by Maurice Walshe. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987.
DRN Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001.
Fin. Cicero. On Moral Ends. Translated by Raphael Woolf. Edited by Julia Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
IG Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, eds. and trans. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. 2d ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Lin. Linji. The Record of Linji. Translated by Ruth Fuller Sasaki. Edited by Thomas Yūhō Kirchner. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.
LS A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, eds. and trans. The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1: Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
M Sextus Empiricus. Against the Ethicists (Adversus Mathematicos XI). Translated by Richard Bett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Men. Mencius. Mengzi with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Bryan van Norden. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008.
MN The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya. Translated and edited by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995.
PH Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Translated and edited by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
PS Huineng. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the TunHuang Manuscript with Translation, Introduction, and Notes. Translated by Philip B. Yampolsky. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
SK Īśvarakṛṣṇa. Sāṃkhyakārikā. Translated by Gerald James Larson. In Gerald James Larson, Classical Sāmkhya: An Interpretation of its History and Meaning, 2nd ed., 255–77. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1979.
SN The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. 2 vols. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000.
TD Cicero. Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Translated by Margaret Graver. In Margaret Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4, 3–70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
TE Bodhidharma. Two Entrances. Translated by Jeffrey L. Broughton. In Jeffrey L. Broughton, The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen, 9–12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Vism. Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) Translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli. Seattle: Buddhist Publication Society Pariyatta Editions, 1999.
Xun. Xunzi. Xunzi: The Complete Text. Translated by Eric L. Hutton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
YS Patañjali. The Yoga Sūtras. Translated by Edwin F. Bryant. In Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 477–506. New York: North Point Press, 2009.
Z Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Brook Ziporyn. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.
What Are Self-Cultivation Philosophies?
Self-cultivation philosophies propound a program of development for improving the lives of human beings. On the basis of an understanding of human nature and the place of human beings in the world, they maintain that our lives can and should be substantially transformed from what is judged to be a problematic, untutored condition of human beings into what is put forward as an ideal state of being. As such, self-cultivation philosophies are preeminently practical in their orientation: their primary purpose is to change our lives in fundamental ways. In this respect, they emphasize practical wisdom more than theoretical wisdom, in contemporary terms “knowing how” over “knowing that.” Yet, in promoting their practical ends, these philosophies typically make substantial theoretical, as well as empirical, claims about human nature and the world in which we live.
In this book, I will argue that the concept of self-cultivation philosophy is a valuable interpretive framework for understanding, comparing, assessing, and learning from several important ancient philosophical outlooks in India, Greece, and China. In particular, I will maintain that nine philosophical perspectives may insightfully be interpreted as self-cultivation philosophies, three from each of these three ancient civilizations. The self-cultivation philosophies from India are those expressed in:
• The Bhagavad Gita,
• The Sāṃkhya and Yoga philosophies of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Patañjali, and
• The teaching of the Buddha and his followers Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva.
The philosophies originating in Greece, with subsequent development in the Roman period, are the most prominent Hellenistic approaches:
• The Epicureanism of Epicurus as well as Lucretius and Philodemus,
• The Stoicism of Chrysippus along with Epictetus and Seneca, and
• Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus.
The self-cultivation philosophies from China are:
• The early Confucian outlooks of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi,
• The classical Daoist perspectives of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and
• The Chan tradition of Bodhidharma, Huineng, and Linji.
There are other self-cultivation philosophies in these civilizations, in other ancient cultures, and throughout the world up to the present day, including the contemporary Western world. It is obviously not possible to consider all of these in a single work save at the cost of superficiality or extraordinary length. The nine philosophical perspectives from India, Greece, and China examined here have been selected for several reasons. The first is that each of them has inherent interest and value. The second is that the comparison of all of them together helps to demonstrate that, from early on, there has been important philosophy outside the Western world, especially in India and China, something that continues to be largely underappreciated by contemporary Western philosophers. Finally, these nine philosophies have attracted a great deal of attention in the contemporary world by both scholars and, at least in most cases, a variety of ordinary persons seeking a meaningful or worthwhile life. Though many philosophies have not been self-cultivation philosophies, many ancient philosophies were, and it will be illuminating to see the aforementioned nine outlooks interpreted as self-cultivation philosophies, each quite distinctive and yet with numerous similarities to one another.
In this introduction, I will explain the concept of self-cultivation philosophy, defend the sense in which it involves philosophy, outline the basic structure of self-cultivation philosophies, and discuss the nature of the texts in which these philosophies were often expressed.1
The Concept of Self-Cultivation Philosophy
The phrase “self-cultivation philosophy” requires some explanation. In thinking about this, it will help to distinguish between the concept of an
1 In formulating this account, I have been influenced by the traditions in which the ancient selfcultivation philosophies have been expressed and developed as well as by many recent interpretations of these. In Indian philosophy, these interpretations include Ganeri 2010 and 2013; Halbfass 1991; and Kapstein 2001 and 2013a. In Greco-Roman philosophy, they include Hadot 1995 and 2002; Nussbaum 1994; and Sorabji 2000. In Chinese philosophy, they include Ivanhoe 2000a; Slingerland 2003; and Wei-ming 1998.
idea and particular conceptions of it.2 The concept is the basic idea of selfcultivation philosophy, an account of the characteristic features typically shared by different forms of self-cultivation philosophy in virtue of which they are classified in this way. Conceptions are specific ways of developing, explaining, and applying the concept by particular self-cultivation philosophies. Hence, various conceptions of self-cultivation philosophies may differ radically from, and may be quite critical of, one another. Each may express a distinctive and controversial understanding of what a worthwhile selfcultivation philosophy should be. But these conceptions are nonetheless all instances of the concept of self-cultivation philosophy. What follows is an account of the concept of self-cultivation philosophy that allows for diverse conceptions of it.
The expression “self-cultivation philosophy” is not a common one in philosophy, though traditional Chinese philosophies have often been related to self-cultivation programs.3 The term ‘cultivation’, originating from the Latin verb cólere (to take care of, inhabit or revere), has two primary uses. It refers to the activity of growing living things, usually plants by farmers and gardeners, and it pertains to the acquisition of human culture by persons, sometimes with rather elitist connotations of gaining knowledge and appreciation of “refined” arts and literature.4 In both cases, cultivation concerns a kind of training, based on purported knowledge, that human beings undertake to guide living things in what is thought to be a valuable direction. It is with this in mind that the term is appropriate for what are presented here as self-cultivation philosophies. On the basis of what is typically portrayed as some form of wisdom, these philosophies put forward training programs to help human beings attain a good life.
One drawback of the term ‘cultivation’ is that it is sometimes used to distinguish one conception of these philosophies from another. For example, it is quite suited to Mencius’s philosophy, with his emphasis on cultivating our “moral sprouts,” but for the same reason poorly suited to Xunzi’s philosophy, since he denies that we have such sprouts. However, any alternative term, such as ‘development’ or ‘transformation’, is likely to have similar difficulties. Since the phrase ‘self-cultivation’, broadly understood, already has
2 For the concept/conception distinction, see Rawls 1971, 5–6, and subsequent discussions in Korsgaard 1996, 113–17 and Van Norden 2007, 16–21.
3 For example, see Ames 1985; Angle 2009; Ivanhoe 2000a; LaFargue 1994; Wei-ming 1998; and Van Norden 2007.
4 In the second use, the term ‘culture’ is widely discussed and disputed in anthropology (see Prinz 2020).
considerable currency in discussions of Chinese philosophy, it is best to stay with this term.
What is trained is specifically “the self.” However, this term is somewhat problematic partly because it is understood in so many different ways, often with attendant controversies, and partly because many of the self-cultivation philosophies in the ancient traditions maintain that ordinary understandings of the self are deeply mistaken. In fact, Buddhists deny that there is a self at all. Nonetheless, it may be argued that all of these philosophies are plausibly and fruitfully interpreted as explicitly or implicitly promoting a cultivation of the self, where the cultivation often takes the form of contesting, sometimes in radical ways, everyday conceptions of the self. The everyday conceptions mark out, in a rough-and-ready way, the scene where cultivation first gets started. The understanding that cultivation produces may involve a very different interpretation of the scene than that accepted at the beginning. For this reason, these philosophies often distinguish different senses of the self, and even Buddhists find ways to speak about the self (for example, by admitting it to the realm of conventional rather than ultimate truth). Other terms might be suitable in some respects—terms such as person, human being, individual, or soul—but these are often awkward vehicles for expressing the central contentions of these philosophies. Moreover, there is a host of expressions involving self that naturally lend themselves to the programs of these philosophies—for example, self-reflection, self-knowledge, selfcontrol, self-discipline, self-fulfillment, self-realization, and the like. Hence, the term self, though not without limitations, is the most suitable way to designate that which is to be cultivated in these self-cultivation philosophies.5
It is important to observe that self-cultivation means training of the self, not necessarily training by the self alone. Though there could be a solitary self-cultivation project, what is more commonly proposed in these traditions is training in a specific social context under the guidance of some master (though, of course, the self being trained needs to participate in this). Moreover, self-cultivation is not necessarily a self-centered pursuit in which one’s own cultivation matters more than having concern for other people. Though it could take this form, it might also be quite opposed to this, as for example in the Bodhisattva vow to seek enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. Hence, the concept of a self-cultivation philosophy as such is not defined as being either a solitary or a selfish undertaking.
5 For contemporary philosophical discussions of the self, see Gallagher 2011.
We need next to consider how self-cultivation and philosophy come together. It is evident that there are self-cultivation programs that do not involve philosophy in any significant sense, and there are philosophies that have nothing to do with self-cultivation. A self-cultivation program is a selfcultivation philosophy insofar as it involves philosophy in some important way—for example, by urging people to attain wisdom through learning a philosophy or engaging in philosophical activity. Likewise, a philosophy is a self-cultivation philosophy insofar as it has a specific practical orientation: it strives to help people live a good life. In short, self-cultivation philosophies advocate a program of transformation of the self that involves philosophy and is directed toward living well. However, this brief description probably leaves many questions unanswered, and more needs to be said to clarify the way in which philosophy relates to self-cultivation philosophies.
The Nature of Philosophy in Self-Cultivation Philosophies
Philosophy is a contested concept, and some of the controversies concerning it raise questions about the extent to which self-cultivation philosophies, especially in their Indian and Chinese renditions, involve philosophy. After all, their training programs usually consist in part of an array of “therapeutic” or “spiritual” exercises that may include the development of moral virtue, the reshaping of desire and emotion, different bodily and breathing exercises, various kinds of meditation, and other forms of self-discipline. We might wonder what all this has to do with philosophy. An important part of the answer is that these techniques are often elements of an interconnected set of practices that are directed to attaining wisdom that is existentially meaningful by effecting a deep transformation in a person’s life. A central premise of self-cultivation philosophies is that the key to achieving a truly good life is gaining this transformative wisdom. These philosophies typically suppose that becoming wise also requires, in addition to these other practices, a particular discipline involving some form of philosophical understanding, both for its direct insight and in order for the whole ensemble of practices to be effective.
Of course, this raises the question: philosophy in what sense? There are two common objections that may be raised here. The first is that philosophy is a theoretical discipline, not a practical one, that its aim is knowledge for its own sake and not for any benefits it may bring. The second is that the proper
method of philosophy is reason or argument, and by this measure the selfcultivation philosophies (or some of them) are suspect. I will now propose an account of the concept of philosophy and show how it allows us to respond to these objections.
The root meaning of philosophy—the ancient Greek term philosophia is love of wisdom. As it developed in ancient Greece and beyond in what we now call the Western world, philosophy became a distinctive kind of inquiry directed toward wisdom.6 In my view, there are three characteristics of human beings that give rise to philosophy and help us understand its nature and importance: first, we care about and value many aspects of the world and our lives; second, we have the capacity to imagine that the world might be different than what we think it is and that we might live differently than the way we do live; third, we have the ability to reflect on our beliefs and values, to think about whether they are correct or should be modified, and to change them if we think we should (though often this may be difficult to do).
In ordinary life, we engage in a variety of practices rooted in fundamental assumptions about the world and our lives. To a considerable extent, the success of these practices requires that we not give much attention to these assumptions. They usually remain in the background. But because we are beings who value, who imagine, and who reflect, as just noted, it is sometimes important for us to wonder about these assumptions. Philosophy arises on these occasions. The ancient Greeks were correct in supposing that philosophy begins in wonder, at least in a broad sense.7 For example, we might wonder: Are we valuing the right things? Are we living in the right way? Do we have adequate grounds for our ways of life? Philosophy, on this account, is a reflective practice that seeks understanding of fundamental questions such as these.
For the Greek philosophers, as well as for those in India and China, the central topics of philosophical reflection were the nature of human beings and the world we live in, the extent to which and ways in which we can have knowledge, and how we ought to live. The self-cultivation philosophies addressed all of these concerns to some extent. However, as philosophies that were practical in their orientation, their central concern was the last topic.
6 Since it is widely accepted in the Western tradition that philosophy began in ancient Greece, I begin with this perspective. However, though there is no word in classical Indian and Chinese languages that directly translates as philosophy, the activity I describe here as philosophy plainly existed in ancient India and China.
7 See Plato, Theaetetus, 155d in Plato 1961 and Aristotle 1928, 982b. For historical texts, references are to standardized pagination when common.
The focal point of their interest was what Bernard Williams called Socrates’s question: “How should one live?”8 The interest in human nature, metaphysics, and epistemology on the part of the self-cultivation philosophers was, at least at the outset, largely guided by this concern.9 The Socratic question is, as Williams noted, a very general one, and there may be some temptation immediately to make it more specific. For example, it might be taken to be a question about what will promote our self-interest, or what morality requires of us, or what a member or leader of a political community should do. These are important distinctions and they may be useful in thinking about particular conceptions of self-cultivation philosophy. But at the outset, in providing a concept of self-cultivation philosophy, it is best to characterize it as responding to Socrates’s broad question by teaching us something similarly broad: how ideally one—someone, perhaps anyone—should live (or, as it might be put, what a good life, broadly speaking, would be for a person).10 This question is meaningful on its own without refinement we might find natural.
We can now address the first objection, that philosophy aims only at theoretical understanding without concern for any practical benefit. This may well be a valid way of thinking about some subjects or forms of philosophical inquiry, but we have ample reason to resist it as a characterization of the concept of philosophy itself. In particular, it would be extraordinarily odd to insist that an inquiry into the question “How should one live?” would, in some sense, cease to be philosophical as soon as we supposed that our answer has some practical bearing on how one should live. Moreover, to a very large extent the ancient Greek philosophers thought that philosophy had, or could have, a practical aim. Williams attributes this view to Socrates and Plato,11 and Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “the present undertaking is not for the sake of theory, as our others are (for we are not inquiring into what excellence (aretē) is for the sake of knowing it, but for the sake of
8 B. Williams 1985, 4. See the whole of Williams’s first chapter for an account of the importance of this question.
9 My contention is that the self-cultivation philosophies I consider in this book were guided by the Socratic question. I am not claiming that all philosophies were or should be guided by this question, as Van Norden (2017, 151) suggests.
10 Williams himself resists understanding the question in terms of a good life (see 1985, 4 and 20), but for my purpose this is acceptable as long as ‘good’ is not taken to mean something specific such as morally good. There is an important issue about whether or not the self-cultivation philosophies were intended to be relevant and applicable to all human beings or only some. In some cases, it appears that they were addressed to all human beings, at least in principle or in some way, but this was not always the case. In the discussion here, I leave this issue aside.
11 Williams 1985, 1.
becoming good, since otherwise there would be no benefit in it at all).”12 In addition, nearly all the Hellenistic philosophers would have agreed with this statement attributed to Epicurus:
Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers therapy for no human suffering (pathos). For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not expel the suffering of the soul.13
Not only is it obvious that a philosophical inquiry into Socrates’s question is likely to be animated by practical concerns, the idea that philosophy has—or at least could have—a practical aim was a commonplace among many ancient Greek philosophers. In this respect, they had much in common with the ancient Indian and Chinese philosophers.14 Hence, there is no merit to the first objection.
The second objection raises several issues and requires more discussion. It states that the correct method of philosophy is reason, meaning arguments, and that the self-cultivation philosophies, especially those in India and China, are inadequate by this standard. A common response to this objection is to point out that, as a matter of fact, these philosophies do employ arguments.15 This response is certainly correct, at least in many cases, but more needs to be said about the main premise of the objection, that the method of philosophy is reason in the form of argument.16 In my view, this is a partial truth and we need a fuller account to properly understand the method—it would be better to say methods of philosophy, in the Western world and beyond. We should begin by thinking about the nature of the enterprise. If philosophy seeks to understand fundamental questions, then presumably its methods should make use of whatever cognitive capacities human beings possess for
12 Aristotle 2002, 1103b27–29 (emphasis added). The fact that Aristotle goes on to declare that “reflective activity” is the highest form of human excellence (see bk. 10, secs. 7–8) does not negate the practical purpose of the book.
13 Long and Sedley 1987a, sec. 25C. Nussbaum 1994 has shown that a similar medical analogy was accepted by virtually all the Hellenistic schools (Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonian skepticism). See also Cooper 2012 and Hadot 2002.
14 Insofar as these philosophers thought, as perhaps Epicurus did, that philosophy must have such a practical aim, they are going beyond my account of the concept of philosophy, which permits but does not require that it have a practical aim such as overcoming suffering. In this connection, see Halbfass 1988, chap. 15.
15 For example, see Van Norden 2017, chap. 2.
16 Williams, Cooper, and Nussbaum largely agree that the method of philosophy is reason, though Nussbaum embraces some of the points I make subsequently.
achieving this understanding. Reason is obviously a prime candidate for such a capacity and it was much emphasized in Greek philosophy. However, it is not the only candidate, and even within Western philosophy there are diverse views about the nature and value of reason. There are several points to be made here by way of elaboration.
First, even the most canonical philosophers in the Western tradition have sometimes acknowledged that rational thought can take different forms. Two well-known examples come from prominent authors of works in logic. Aristotle said that “it is a mark of an educated person to look for precision in each kind of inquiry just to the extent that the nature of the subject allows it,” noting that in ethical matters we need to be content “to show what is true about them roughly and in outline.”17 And John Stuart Mill wrote that, with respect to justifying utilitarianism, though there “cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term,” this does not mean that accepting or rejecting it “must depend on blind impulse or arbitrary choice.” Rather, “Considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine.”18 In addition, in recent years there has been discussion of contrasting “styles of reasoning” employed in philosophy.19
Second, more generally, the nature of rationality is one of the topics that philosophers consider, and there are disagreements, within Western philosophy, about how to understand rationality. A survey of texts that are ordinarily included in the history of Western philosophy reveals a wide range of understandings of kinds of rational reflection. In the modern period alone, examples from Montaigne and Pascal to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche tell us that there are many forms that rational philosophical discourse can take besides those of such “mainstream” figures as Descartes, Hume, and Kant.
Third, there are significant traditions within Western philosophy that challenge rationality in a variety of ways, with suggestions that it has significant limits, generates paradoxes, undermines itself, has little value, etc. These skeptical voices are, as it were, rational expressions of concern about rationality, and they have been heard recurrently since the time of the ancient Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptics. Taken as a whole, then, the Western philosophical tradition has had a complex and sometimes ambiguous
17 Aristotle 2002, 1094b21–26.
18 Mill 2002, chap. 1, para. 5.
19 See Ganeri 2019, 16.
relationship with its commitment to rational inquiry. The same can be said of the Indian and Chinese traditions.
Finally, in philosophy, rational reflection is often understood specifically as employing arguments (deductive or inductive) and so valuing consistency. However, if rational reflection is understood in this way, nearly everyone tacitly agrees that philosophical reflection involves something more than argument (dissent might come from some forms of coherence theory). This is largely because there are frequent appeals to what is accepted or understood without inference. For example, in the Meditations, Descartes relies on what he calls the “light of nature” as a source of indubitable truth.20 He also says that nature teaches him that he has a body that has various sensations and needs. He puts this forward as a datum that he supposes anyone would recognize and hence that must be accounted for in his philosophical theory.21 Again, in the Treatise, Hume says that “the only solid foundation” for his theory of human nature is “experience and observation.”22 In general, it is widely supposed that philosophy, even when relying on argument, also requires something that may be referred to broadly as epistemic awareness.23 This may result from commonly recognized capabilities such as sense experience or memory (for example, when we are aware of something by seeing it), but it might also include such things as the deliverances of common sense, intuition, instinct, introspection, innate ideas, conscience, testimony, revelation, or meditation. In each case, it may be claimed that there is some cognitive capacity—some basis for knowledge—in addition to reason taken as the capacity to make logical inferences. These other capacities might provide support for the premises of arguments. But they might also be put forward as sources of understanding quite different from—and perhaps in opposition to or incomprehensible by—rational analysis.24 Of course, there might also be skeptical challenges to the validity of these capacities, and we need not suppose that they are accepted uncritically. Even within Western philosophy,
20 See Descartes 1993, Meditation 3, 38–42.
21 See Descartes 1993, Meditation 6, 80.
22 Hume 1967, xx.
23 The term ‘awareness’ is apt for what I intend here since it implies an immediate understanding or cognitive grasp that can take many different forms (perceptual, intellectual, moral, spiritual, etc.). An alternative term would be ‘apprehension’.
24 For two quite different but well-known examples, consider Pascal’s claim that the heart has reasons about which reason knows nothing (see Pascal 1966, sec. 423) and Jonathan Haidt’s report of people condemning a case of sex between siblings without having a clear reason why (see Haidt 2012, 44–48). Sometimes a striking personal experience changes a person’s outlook on life in an important way. It is not obvious that this is always unwarranted or would be warranted only after a suitable argument was found to justify the change.
there is considerable diversity in the attitudes taken toward these different forms of awareness, just as there is diversity in attitudes taken toward reason. This suggests that we should define the concept of philosophy as an attempt to understand fundamental questions on the basis of whatever cognitive capacities we possess, where it is recognized that which cognitive capacities are legitimate sources of understanding is itself a philosophical issue.
One way of articulating this concept of philosophy draws on contemporary work in virtue epistemology.25 This is commonly divided into virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Both of these are relevant to the concept of philosophy, but virtue reliabilism is initially most helpful. Virtue reliabilists emphasize the importance of epistemic virtues understood as cognitive faculties that are truth-conducive. That is, these virtues are capacities that stably and reliably generate truth rather than falsehood. Virtue reliabilists typically maintain that there are several cognitive faculties. Common examples are reason, perception, introspection, intuition, and memory.26 The feature of virtue reliabilism that is important here is the fact that reason is only one of the cognitive faculties and that the other faculties involve some source of knowledge in addition to reason. In various ways, these other faculties are usually thought to refer to some input from the world.
From this perspective, it is natural think of philosophy as an inquiry that seeks understanding of fundamental questions on the basis of whatever cognitive faculties we have, where it is supposed that we may well have more than one. These faculties typically include reason as inference, but they might also include forms of awareness such as perception, intuition, conscience, and perhaps meditation. The last is especially important in the Indian and the Chinese philosophical traditions. Of course, there are numerous disagreements among philosophers about the kinds and comparative importance of both reason and awareness in philosophy. One way to represent these disagreements is to suppose that there is a spectrum of possible views among philosophers from those at one end who stress the importance of reason over awareness to those at the opposite end who emphasize the importance of awareness over reason (in both cases, where there may be diverse understandings of reason and awareness). At each extreme, we may find philosophers with deep skepticism about the value of the opposite
25 See Battaly 2019.
26 Virtue reliabilism has antecedents in ancient philosophical traditions, especially in India and Greece, and it is arguably a common-sense perspective.
extreme (radical rationalists and radical anti-rationalists, respectively). In between these extremes, there are a variety of positions that, in diverse ways, endorse the value of both reason and awareness. It is a philosophical question which epistemic approach is appropriate for philosophical inquiry, or for a particular kind of philosophical inquiry, and hence this question is one about which proponents of different conceptions of philosophy have often disagreed. For example, could non-conceptual awareness attained in some form of meditation be a source of understanding? And how might this relate to the understanding of rational analysis? According to the concept of philosophy I am proposing, these questions are both philosophical questions, and if non-conceptual awareness were a genuine source of understanding fundamental issues, then this awareness would have a place within philosophy. In fact, these topics have been widely discussed in Buddhist thought, and they are one form philosophy can take.27
Finally, it is worth noting briefly the relevance of the other form of virtue epistemology, virtue responsibilism, to understanding self-cultivation philosophy. Virtue responsibilists emphasize the importance of valuable intellectual character traits such as attentiveness, conscientiousness, openmindedness, courage, etc. Ordinarily it is supposed that these character traits are acquired and we are responsible for their possession and/or exercise. Though reliabilism and responsibilism are often regarded as competing versions of virtue epistemology, they may be thought of as complementary approaches, each of which has an important contribution to make.28 From this second perspective, if we think of philosophy as an inquiry that seeks understanding of fundamental questions, then it is natural to suppose that philosophers will require good intellectual character traits such as the responsibilists discuss.
Moreover, we can regard some of the practices advocated by selfcultivation philosophers as exercises for the development of such character traits, for example, by purifying one’s mind of disruptive desires or emotions so as to be able to reason or be aware in a calm, attentive, and impartial way. For instance, part of the Stoic critique of the emotions may be understood in this fashion. Epictetus says that emotions render us “incapable of listening to reason.”29 The Confucian Xunzi makes a similar point: since “the desires of one’s eyes and ears” can ruin thinking and frustrate concentration, the
27 For discussion of this, see Kapstein 2013b and Tillemans 2013.
28 For example, see Battaly 2008, 651.
29 Epictetus 2014, 3.2.3.
sage in training needs to transform desires so that this no longer happens.30 Similarly, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that desire is the “eternal enemy” and “evil demon” that “destroys knowledge and discrimination.”31 In general, many exercises of the self-cultivation philosophies may be understood in terms of the cultivation of intellectual virtues, the development of epistemic habits that are conducive to understanding, in a manner that may be illuminated by virtue responsibilism.
In sum, in the self-cultivation philosophies, philosophy is an attempt to understand Socrates’s question “How should one live?” and related topics on the basis of some purported cognitive capacities typically involving reason and awareness broadly construed. This provides an answer to the second objection. All of the traditions discussed here from India, Greece, and China are properly considered philosophies—as I hope will become evident in the chapters ahead.
It is important to remember, however, that not all philosophies are selfcultivation philosophies. Saying more about why this is will help to clarify this account. In metaphysics, for example, theories that aim simply to give the correct account of universals, time, or material constitution are not as such self-cultivation philosophies. Likewise, in epistemology, theories that only attempt to give the proper understanding of induction, probability, or the Gettier problem are not as such self-cultivation philosophies. Similar points can be made about other areas such as the philosophy of mind, language, art, and the like. There are many philosophies that have as their only aim an explanation of some fundamental assumptions in our understanding of an aspect of the world or human life. These may be pursued solely for the sake of better comprehending the particular topic and without any direct concern at all for how this bears on living a good life. Someone might well defend a philosophical theory about material constitution or induction without advocating anything that could be called a way of life. Such philosophies are not self-cultivation philosophies. However, it is also true that the development of a self-cultivation philosophy typically involves metaphysical and epistemological concerns. For example, this has obviously been the case with Buddhism, Stoicism, and Daoism among others. Hence, aspects of self-cultivation philosophies may coincide with the interests of other philosophies that are not directly concerned with self-cultivation.
30 See Xunzi 2014, chap. 21, 288–314 (in the translator’s numbering system).
31 Sargeant 2009, 3.39–41.
Since moral philosophies usually have some bearing on how we ought to live, they have a closer connection to self-cultivation philosophy. But a similar point can be made here as well: not every moral philosophy is a selfcultivation philosophy as such. There are topics in metaethics that may be explored without putting forward a conception of a good life or explaining how we might attain such a life. For instance, theories about the meaning of moral terms, whether an “ought” can be derived from an “is,” or whether accepting a moral judgment has a necessary connection with motivation, can all be defended without necessarily advocating a self-cultivation philosophy. A similar point can be made about normative ethics. For example, a philosophical theory that says that the moral rightness of an action depends only on its consequences, or a theory which denies this, is not by itself a self-cultivation philosophy. Of course, these topics may well be relevant to the concerns of some self-cultivation philosophies, and developing a selfcultivation philosophy ordinarily involves some of the common issues in moral philosophy. Hence, as before, a self-cultivation philosophy may have overlapping concerns with moral philosophies that are not themselves selfcultivation philosophies.32
The Structure of Self-Cultivation Philosophies
The styles in which the self-cultivation philosophies of India, Greece, and China are expressed vary widely. There is no common format of presentation in the texts available to us. In fact, the genres of writing are often radically different from one another. Nonetheless, there is an underlying structure of thought that I hope to show they all share to a large extent. One important indication of the nature of this structure is the fact that they commonly saw their enterprise as similar to medicine. We have already seen this for the Hellenistic philosophers in the medical analogy from Epicurus cited earlier. But something similar may be found in the other traditions as well. For example, the Indian Theravada commentator Buddhaghosa depicted the Four
32 It might be supposed that self-cultivation philosophy has some kinship with virtue ethics insofar as both emphasize the development of character. There are some similarities; however, caution is required in making such a claim. It may mislead as much as it informs. Much depends on what is meant by the phrase “virtue ethics,” and there are many different views about this (see Nussbaum 1999). There is also a great deal of diversity in self-cultivation philosophies. Some of them are certainly quite different from the virtue ethics of Aristotle or recent philosophers such as Philippa Foot or Alasdair MacIntyre.
Noble Truths of Buddhism in comparable terms: “The truth of suffering is like a disease, the truth of origin is like the cause of the disease, the truth of cessation is like the cure of the disease, and the truth of the path is like the medicine.”33 Later in China the Chan master Linji said, “All that I teach is just provisional medicine, treatment for a disease.”34 In fact, in these ancient traditions there were often close connections between philosophy and medicine. This was especially true in China, where there were sometimes significant relationships between medicine and both the Daoist and Confucian philosophical traditions. For example, in both there were self-cultivation programs involving such things as qi (vital energy) and the complementary forces of yin and yang.35 The comparison with medicine emphasizes the practical nature of self-cultivation philosophies and suggests that, explicitly or implicitly, any self-cultivation philosophy will have four key elements: an underlying account of human nature (and our place in the world), a depiction of our existential starting point, a portrayal of the ideal state to be attained, and a program of transformation by which persons may move from the starting point to the ideal (roughly analogous to biology, illness, good health, and medical treatment).36
First, the self-cultivation philosophies all assume some understanding of human nature, usually centering on aspects of our psychology. Sometimes this is directly explained in considerable detail, and other times it is more in the background. This is hardly surprising. There could not be a selfcultivation philosophy that did not in some way imply at least a minimal account of human nature. Related to this, the self-cultivation philosophies often also accept a broader understanding of the world in which we live and our relationship to it. They adhere to a metaphysics or cosmology or some general picture of the overall context of human life. The remaining three elements of self-cultivation philosophies all presuppose this, as illustrated in figure 1.1. An understanding of human nature explains why human life is unsatisfactory and how we might live differently so as to improve our lives.37 Various
33 Buddhaghosa 1999, chap. 16, sec. 87. For discussion of the medical analogy in Buddhist and Greek philosophy, see Gowans 2010.
34 Linji 2009, 13.
35 For example, see Raphals 2011, 2017; Stanley-Baker 2019; and Wang 2010 and 2012. For accounts of medicine and philosophy in India, see Larson 1987b, and in Greece, see Edelstein 1967.
36 The medical analogies do not mean that there is no difference between self-cultivation philosophy and medicine. The value of the analogies is that they encourage reflection on differences as well as similarities (see Gowans 2010).
37 This is true even of Buddhism, which denies that there is a self and, in Mahayana forms, denies that anything has an intrinsic nature (what is called emptiness). Despite this, Buddhists have a good
Existential Starting Point → Transformation Program → Ideal State of Being
Understanding of Human Nature (and World)
Figure 1.1 Structure of Self-Cultivation Philosophies
models may be proposed to distinguish these accounts. For example, some of them suppose we have the potential to attain the ideal and need to develop this, others assume this potential is lacking and so we need to radically transform ourselves, and still others maintain the ideal is already within us and needs only to be recovered.38 Insofar as these philosophies make such claims about human nature, an assessment of their value for people today could benefit from relevant empirical work in contemporary psychology.39
Second, the self-cultivation philosophies maintain that the ordinary default condition of human beings is in some important and often pervasive respect problematic. That is, they propose that in the absence of pursuing their favored program of transformation, our lives would be flawed in some significant way. This is our existential starting point. Though we may be more or less happy, on the whole our life is unsatisfactory because we have a propensity for such “negative emotions” as sadness, grief, disappointment, despair, frustration, craving, envy, anger, fear, and anxiety. This propensity is rooted in a complex of psychological dispositions concerning such phenomena as sensations, perceptions, thoughts, desires, feelings, motives, choices, and actions. These dispositions often affect one another, and at the heart of this complex are some mistaken beliefs (delusion, confusion, ignorance, etc.) about human beings and the world. Moreover, in the language of dual-process theories in contemporary psychology, these dispositions often involve mental processes that tend to be automatic, non-conscious, and fast
deal to say about human nature, and they put forward extensive metaphysical and cosmological accounts of the world.
38 These correspond to what Van Norden (2007, 43ff.) calls the development, re-formation, and discovery models of ethical cultivation. Other classification schemes have been proposed, for example in Ivanhoe 2000a and Slingerland 2003. Development models may suggest that self-cultivation is a kind of perfection of human nature; hence, they may have some kinship with perfectionist theories of well-being (see Bradford 2016). However, though self-cultivation philosophies typically presuppose some understanding of human nature, they do not necessarily construe self-cultivation as perfecting this.
39 For example, the research on the moral dispositions of infants by Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn might be relevant to the debate between Mengzi and Xunzi on the moral sprouts. For an accessible summary, see Bloom 2013.
