[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 23 October 2007 09:38, curt wrote:

> As Dan Lusthaus has pointed out (here:
> http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/articles/intro-uni.htm ) western
> philosophy tends to start from ontology (things) whereas Indian
> philosophy tends to start from epistemology (consciousness).

This is something I have heard several people say, but I'm not entirely 
convinced. Every Indian philosopher I can think of from the time of the 
Buddha until, say, the coming of Islam to India has promoted an entire system 
of thought in which metaphysics, epistemology, theory of language and ethics 
are inseparably intertwined. One of my professors in graduate school, A.K. 
Warder, was famous for insisting that Buddhism was entirely free of 
metaphysics, but Warder's use of the term was already deeply pejorative. The 
pejorative, as opposed to descriptive, use of the term "metaphysics", and the 
attendant preference for logic and epistemology as legitimate philosophical 
pursuits is very modern, even post-modern. Nothing in pre-modern India comes 
even close to the disdain for metaphysics and the love of epistemology that 
one finds in the modern West.

> Personally I think that the "ontological" emphasis only comes in with
> modern western philosophy, or, possibly with what passed for
> "philosophy" during the Middle Ages.

Perhaps a slightly more accurate claim is that the tendency to separate out 
the branches of philosophy and to try to treat them independently as isolated 
disciplines is modern. Next semester I'll teach a course in metaphysics, and 
in past semesters I've taught logic and epistemology. Although I have learned 
to teach such courses, in my own mind it is madness to try to teach any topic 
in philosophy without studying its implication for every other topic in 
philosophy. Metaphysics without epistemology, or either of those without 
ethics and psychology and (yes) even theology, makes no sense to me at all. I 
confess: I was born in the wrong century.

> In fact, however, both Greek and Indian philosophy take as their stating
> points "self-knowledge" and ethics - which are seen as inseparable - and
> everything else flows from asking basic questions such as "who am I?"
> and "how should I live?"

I think it is a mistake to say of either Greek or Indian philosophy that it 
starts from any one vantage point and then flows into others. Both these 
traditions, it seems to me, begin with nothing less than everything as a 
problem that requires our full attention. To say that it all starts with 
ethics, or epistemology or metaphysics and then moves on to other things is 
to ignore the complexity and interconnectedness of most human enterprises 
before the advent of the professionalism and specialization of knowledge that 
has characterized modernity. Greeks and Indians began with a full deck of 
questions: "Who am I?", "What is there?", "How do I know?", "What should be 
done about it?" and "How can we avoid being governed by incompetent jerks?" 
were all fully in play, none of them more basically or fundamentally than any 
of the others.

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