[Buddha-l] The Shape of Ancient Thought

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 06 September 2006 14:52, Malcolm Dean wrote:

> Readers should be aware of the larger debate which encompasses the
> questions of culture and cultural transmission, Cognitive Archaeology,
> the transmission of ideas, and memetics (not the same thing). 

For most of my academic career I have been astonished at what enormous 
conclusions classicists draw from very skimpy evidence. Some of my teachers 
seemed bent on showing that anything good in India must have come there from 
the Greeks, while others, the reverse Orientalists, seemed just as determined 
to show that anything of value in Europe must have come from India. (Some of 
my LSD-loving friends were convinced that both Greece and India got 
everything of value from Atlantis or Roswell.) My own tendency was to meet 
this whole question with a big shrug. (Shrugging has always been my main 
source of aerobic exercise, so I do it as often and as vigorously as 
circumstances will permit.)

Admittedly, I am a exceptionally poor historian and have never been able to 
get a handle on how historians think. I'm even worse at social sciences, As 
for Cognitive Archeology, the fact that I've never heard of it is almost 
enough to convince me that there is a god who has been protecting me until 
now. (The fact that I have now heard of Cognitive Archeology is almost enough 
to convince me that my protector god is dead.)

While historical and paleographic ruminations bore me almost as much as 
philology, I have to confess to finding philosophical questions always 
intriguing. That being the case, I can warm up to people like Mark Siderits 
and Jay Garfield and James Duerlinger and Bill Waldron, who discuss Indian 
philosophy by bringing in classical, medieval and modern philosophical ideas 
for contrast. Trying to figure out to what extent Vasubandhu is a bit like 
Hume or Locke or Parfit seems a better use of my time than making wild 
guesses about whether the Buddha might have said something that eventually 
found its way to Athens in some barely recognizable form. 

But one's love of philosophy and disdain for the social sciences is surely 
just a matter of personal taste, of no greater significance than the fact 
that I love jazz and hate baseball, basketball and even ice hockey.

Speaking of tastes, I am discovering that tastes have changed considerably 
during the past forty years or so. I grew up with a generation in which 
people read the trial of Socrates and beat their heads in agony that such a 
wise and sensible man should meet such an ill fate at the hands of 
petty-minded demagogues. (We still cheer on Chavez, Obrador, Castro and 
Ahmedinejad as they rail against the idiots who are running and ruining 
America and the rest of the world.) Now when I teach Socrates to the current 
crop of freshmen, they openly confess they can't stand the guy, because (they 
say) they find him arrogant, sarcastic and sacrilegious. (Yes! That's why I 
love him! How could anyone NOT love someone who manages to be so brilliantly 
arrogant, sarcastic and sacrilegious?) 

What is happening to our youth? Is it because they eat 47 tons of sugar by the 
time they have hit the age of 18 that they like only people who are cloying 
and saccharine? Have they no taste for the sour and the bitter? Can they only 
giggle and purr? Can they not scowl and growl?

Now I've gone and worked myself into a fit of vituperative curmudgeonry. I 
need to go do some serious shrugging.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes