[Buddha-l] Views of morality, culture, and religion

[Richard Nance]

On 9/7/06, Malcolm Dean <malcolmdean at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you believe in Buddhism as a system of morality, or as a religion,
> the contradiction you point out would hold. If you believe in Buddhism
> as a form of scientific endeavour, then it does not.

I think you've missed my point. The point is that scientific endeavor
is a form of human practice. As such, it's goverened by normative
assumptions. If there weren't such assumptions, then there would be no
easy way to separate what you want to call "scientific endeavor" from
the kinds of endeavor that don't hold the same appeal for you.

> Buddha typically says something like "the end of suffering is
> (specific actions or thoughts)." He does not say something like "to
> end suffering you *should*..."

Buddhas are portrayed as saying all sorts of things; I haven't read
enough of the enormous (and largely untranslated) wealth of texts said
to represent buddhavacana to know what counts as "typical." Perhaps
you have. But, as I've pointed out here before, the presence or
absence of modal operators, optative verbs, imperative verbs, etc. is
is not a very reliable guide to the functions that a text can end up
being called upon to serve;  prescription doesn't always wear its
heart on its sleeve. (There's no "should" in a sign reading "The white
zone is for loading and unloading only" -- yet few of us have much
difficulty recognizing the sign as prescriptive.)

> You appear to hold some form of Post-modern view of normativity, such
> that anyone's ideas can be called normative, with no hope of
> experimental results which would support one hypothesis over others.

Ah, the post-modern card. You didn't read my remarks carefully enough.
Let me clarify what I was trying to say. Everybody's ideas are,
indeed, informed by normative assumptions. This fact entails nothing
about the rightness or wrongness of specific  assumptions (or the
explicit claims that inform and are informed by them). Obviously, I
hold some claims and assumptions to be better (more accurate and/or
more useful) than others. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother engaging in
this discussion. My point is simply that any assessment of correctness
or incorrectness  -- whether pertaining to a method, a practice, a
path, or something else -- is going to be informed by a range of
normative assumptions about the world, what it's really like, how one
ought to behave in it, how one ought to describe it, and which
practices -- whether "scientific" or otherwise -- reveal the nature of
things to us most effectively.

Nothing I have said implies that a scientific approach shouldn't hold
pride of place among these competing practices. Rather, I have tried
to call your attention to the fact that the very claim that a
scientific approach (or a Buddhist approach, or whatever) *should*
hold pride of place is a *normative* claim. That's all.

> I think the thrust of Buddhism is that there is, at last, a
> fundamental nature to the Universe, and it is accessible given effort
> and guidance. Is that simply normative belief, or is that reality?

I think that we may be talking past one another. Again, let me try to
make myself clearer. The "that" in your sentence above refers to a
claim: "there is, at last, a fundamental nature to the Universe, and
it is accessible given effort and guidance." This is a claim in a
natural language. To make a claim in a natural language is to subject
oneself to conditions of meaning. One of those conditions is a
condition that seems to me to be irreducibly normative: if I'm to find
an utterance meaningful, I require some notion of what it would mean
to offer an adequate paraphrase of what the utterance says. (Note the
personal pronoun used above: I can't understand Chinese, but I'm
certainly not going to deny that utterances in Chinese are meaningful
to others). Of course, ideas about adequacy are context-bound; what
may be adequate in one situation could prove disatrously inadequate in
others. But this idea of adequacy, flexible though it may be, is a
normative idea: it's an idea about how I *should* go about discussing
what has been said if I'm going to get it right (or, if you prefer,
render it useful to others), under specific circumstances. Without an
operable notion of adequacy hovering in the background, the utterance
just won't succeed in meaning very much.

So the distinction you've tried to draw between "normative belief" and
"reality" is one that isn't as simple as you may think; claims about
reality are ineluctably embedded in normative frameworks - and they
have to be if they're going to stand a chance of meaning something.
Again, this does not imply that all such frameworks ought to be viewed
as equal. But again, to argue in favor of pride of place (or even in
favor of equivalence) is to engage in an argument invested with
normativity, like it or not.

> When students bring their normative moralities, their
> shoulda-woulda-coulda's, do Buddhist teachers respond by advising them
> against performative contradiction?

I don't know. Should I not do this?

Best wishes,

R. Nance