Who’s Afraid of Reductionism?
In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.
Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.
In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.
Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.
Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:
1. If agents were inherently existing things, then they would be static and unchanging (this is part of the definition of “inherently existing”).
2. Action is change.
3. Thus in an inherently-existing-agent-action pair, the agent would be static, unchanging, and thus inactive (see #2).
But if action and agent are completely nonexistent (what Nāgārjuna is not arguing, but is often accused of), then there is no action, no cause, and no agency. Since the world is constantly changing, and we do see cause-effect pairs, we certainly don’t want to claim actions and agents don’t exist. However, if we reify them, or claim that they have inherent existence, apart from their dependence on one another, we make action impossible.
Thus, positively, Nāgārjuna says “Action depends on the agent / The agent itself depends on action / One cannot see any way / to establish them differently.”
What he is saying, then, is not that there are no causal patterns in the world that we can evaluate, but that we can do so without reference to static things like “essences” and “properties” that have some mysterious way of existing on their own.
Well, then, what about the worry that by saying everything is empty, I empty myself of any meaningful existence? If I am empty, and just relationships between neurons, psychological states, cells, etc., how can I have any desire to continue existing? It seems like we’ve just swept the rug out from underneath of any claims to purpose.
In fact, Nāgārjuna wants to say it is the opposite. Central to Buddhism is the idea that agents performing actions have effects–namely the diminishing of suffering. Even if our selfhood as an essential thing is an illusion, that does not mean that we cannot maintain the self as a useful conventional truth. Further, if we try to understand it as an inherently existing thing (like a soul), we wind up with precisely the problem that Kim described: we have no account of how it can interact with anything meaningfully. Even more–and something which is not part of Kim’s account–we need to understand the “self” in relationship with its actions, its thoughts, its beliefs, its desires. Selves are formed and constantly changing in connection with other individuals and our own self-conception.
In conclusion, I want to point to some articles in the most recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Vol 76, No 2, June 2008). The subject is reductionism and religious study “in the age of cognitive science.” Scholars lined up on different sides of the question–should religious studies welcome cog-sci with open arms or be afraid of its implicit reductionism?
Edward Slingerland, in his article “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism?”, references the Buddhist conception of two truths. He does so in passing, towards the end, as he draws his conclusion that we can be simultaneously reductionist (”human beings are merely physical system”) and yet maintain our sense of personhood and the “pull of human-level truth” (since these are, after all, a evolutionary faculties).
Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier, in their reply, “Reductionism: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid”, charge that Slingerland is wrong in associating “absolute truth” with physicalism,* but that he should pay closer attention to the notion of emptiness. They claim that ideas like “consciousness” and “personhood” could be useful, then, in certain contexts (like ethics) and a die-hard reductionism would strip us of that use. Further, they say, “ideas matter because the story we tell ourselves about who we are directly impacts the way we treat each other as bodies” and the reductionist story can only justify the strong against the weak.
Even though I earlier suggested that David Brooks was mashing together all kinds of ideas in his editorial, I do contend that Buddhism has a lot of conceptual framework which can help the debates centering around religion and reductionism. It seems that nearly everyone wants to reference Buddhist concepts, but that they’re tossed around like a philosophical band-aid. Recognizing the debates within Buddhism over these very questions (rather than assuming there is an essential thing “Buddhism” which fixes our contemporary problems) and applying those disagreements as a heuristic is a first step.
*Edit 5.28.08 - I should note that Slingerland, in his reply to Cho and Squier, complains that they attribute an incorrect view to him, namely that ultimate truth = physicalism. Rather, he says, it is “the best working explanation we have.” In my opinion, unless we clarify what context “best” operates in, we’re still perilously close to asserting ultimacy to physicalism.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Nothing to say about reductionism, but I wanted to comment on your interpretation of a famous Buddhist doctrine. In glossing “dependent origination” you suggest it means that reality is relational. But what does that mean? Here is one possibility. Reality is relational because there are no intrinsic properties. Is that the right idea?
May 27th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Yep, precisely. That’s the idea. It means that there is no “bottom” to our levels of explanation, and that the quest for ultimate causal origins (or, equally, properties) is in vain. So the misidentification of physicalism with “ultimate truth” is wrong because the ultimate truth is *not* that we are merely matter, but that we are empty. There’s a distinction.
A good encyclopedia article about this by Dan Arnold (from U of C, who does comparative East-West stuff) is here. I’m afraid I’m a novice in the field, so my discussions will inevitably leave out some of the debates within Buddhism (though that’s what I’m aiming to delve into in my PhD).
May 27th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
From that encyclopedia article, to clarify more on your concern with truth claims (as opposed to ontological concerns like causes):
“One way to make sense of this is to attribute to Madhyamaka a basically deflationist account of truth – that is, one according to which calling a claim “true” is to be explained not as predicating a metaphysical property (such as “correspondence” with “ultimately existent” things) of it, but simply as committing oneself to it. On such a view, to the extent that the (Ābhidharmika) idea of “ultimate truth” has been shown incoherent, all that remains is the level of “truth” that is characterized by common-sense realism.”
Emptiness puts us back to the level of conventional properties but without clinging to them inordinately as if they were intrinsic, essential, etc. etc.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Great stuff! I can’t wait until you’re writing street level books on the matter.