Part II: Being wrong, being wronged, and forgiving

Read Part I

Dear Friends,

There is a well-worn Buddhist case, or koan—a riddle-like phrase used as a tool for contemplation. Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers. During enlightenment, mountains cease to be mountains, rivers cease to be rivers. But after enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. That contemplative practice transforms our perspective is perhaps the principal tenet of Buddhism. In a similar way, the Western philosophic tradition’s Socratic dictum, wisest are they who know they do not know, serves as a starting point for many philosophy courses, but after a period of study and practice, our understanding of it tends to be quite different than when we began—but what has changed?

This humble spirit toward our ability to understand the nature of reality, our epistemic access to the world, is shared between Buddhism, Daoism, Hellenic traditions like Skepticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, many ancient indigenous ways of life, forms of religious mysticism, and a slew of modern and postmodern philosophical positions. Radical doubt is a continuous thread through philosophy’s history. These positions (and probably others not exhausted by the categories listed above) recognize and celebrate that mystery is an essential feature of life. 

But mystery’s essence is to have no essence, to not be a feature of life, to not be able to be contemplated, and yet, absurd as it may seem (and this is exactly the word French existentialist novelist and essayist Albert Camus uses to describe our human predicament) trying to contemplate what cannot be contemplated is somehow powerful medicine for the mind. It stretches our imagination, it changes our brains. And in each tradition the result of continued practice is a complete realization to a new way of engaging the world. This transforms the practitioner via their perspective and thus changes the world itself. And yet, nothing ostensibly changes, only the perspective of the practitioner—but this shift is profoundly felt, at once laughably trivial and sublimely terrifying.

It’s worth noting here that adherents and commentators from virtually all philosophic systems argue we should not think of these transformations as goals or ends we may strive for. To do so undermines the project in a variety of ways and can even be quite dangerous. To practice is itself the goal. Practicing not knowing. Not judging or having an opinion. Just experiencing life openly. Just be-ing. In a sense, the most powerful perspective shift is simply that perspective shifts. It is both laughably trivial and sublimely terrifying. 

The self-undermining nature of these views—that is, if we are to doubt everything, we must also doubt the method of doubting itself—can serve as protection against developing any kind of overreliance or overconfidence on any of the methods themselves. By keeping our thinking suspended in skeptical paradox—knowing we know nothing—we cannot settle in certainty even about the lack of certainty. We would settle down if only we could get a good enough hold on the thing.

We really do need guidance, however. It can be deeply upsetting for us to face the stark limitations in the scope and depth of our knowledge and the fragility of our belief systems and moralities. But there is also so much terrain to cover, there are so many ways to begin developing ourselves philosophically, and part of beginning is learning “where” we’re beginning.

We frequently don’t recognize our worldview as a worldview, as philosopher Viola Cordova argues (echoing Wittgenstein), we often must come into contact with an alternative perspective to recognize that we ourselves have a particular point of view.

There can be no unbiased perspectives—but we can adopt a wider one. We must start, therefore, by recognizing that our view of the world does not exhaust the world itself—we mustn't mistake the map for the territory (to borrow another analogy from work in Native American epistemology). It helps, therefore, to work with someone with a more detailed map than ours. Someone who can show us the way to find our own way. Once we get oriented, we can develop an idea about which path(s) make sense for our needs, recognizing, of course, that they will necessarily change. 

Although we tend to think of our interactions with teachers like rituals in devotion, the inherent risk of cult-like adherence to a favored system is actually mitigated by working with a teacher who can identify dangerous and misleading assumptions and challenge us on them before they root. And the concern of developing an overweening attachment to a teacher can be mitigated by realizing that, by the lights of many philosophical positions, there is no feature of our experience that is not our teacher. We can always be learning. In fact, we are learning whether we notice it or not; best, therefore, for us to practice paying better attention. 

Philosophy is a way of paying attention that requires passion and fortitude. It’s no surprise that so many philosophers, mystics, poets, artists, etc. have been such strange creatures. To live in complete openness is a life one adopts under a certain kind of duress; it appears in some sense to not be optional, not merely the only suitable choice. And so, it is perhaps for good reason that most universities do not require philosophy for all students. The schools that do, however—or at least those that manage to really teach open-minded inquiry as a method, rather than merely instill a sort of core bias by which to measure the world—recognize the civic need for good thinking, both morally and logically. For the philosopher, these two senses are achieved by the same method of open-minded critical reflection.

Keeping an open, philosophically attuned mind, therefore, might be seen as a sort of moral (civic, prosocial) obligation. It can be met through perpetual self-examination and critical inquiry—this reminds us that the most accurate worldview must recognize itself as such, and thus is necessarily incomplete but ever expanding.

Engaging critically with an idea, perspective, position, person, etc. is a recognition that we do not completely understand our world; it is a practice of intellectual or epistemic humility—knowing what we don’t know.

We must be prepared to submit all of our own ideas to the same scrutiny as any other ideas. But in order to even know what our own ideas are, we must continually explore our world’s philosophical terrain. This means the only thing we can rely on as stable is the activity of critical inquiry itself, since employing it today could always lead us away from a position it led to yesterday.  

Similar to the image of philosophical engagement as an exercise in cartography, the Buddhists refer to practice as the vehicle and life as a path. But vehicle and path—the metaphor itself as well as the worldly conditions to which it refers—are merely concepts and experiences that we can’t be too sure about. By the position’s skeptical light, we cannot take anything too seriously. We tend, however, to be convinced that our perceptions and ideas have a special, stable reality. This leads us to (un)consciously defend our versions of the world as if they were precious territories. Ones that we would otherwise cede to an ever-encroaching world that wants nothing but to dominate us. The temporality of this whole affair is likely a core cause of this, along with the aforementioned resource scarcity and culture of competition, but to posit an explanation is just further delusion. The Buddhists prescribe facing the terrifying reality of death, suffering, and our profound ignorance with a radical clarity. All thoughts and perceptions are illusions, and that includes dualities of good and evil, life and death, self and other, as well as esoteric philosophies which deny stable reality of concepts and the distinction between existent and non-existent. If even the seemingly most stable features of reality should not be taken too seriously, then we should also, perhaps especially, resist rigid attachment to the method of non-attachment itself.

This is the way of a radical epistemic humility. So skeptical we believe nothing yet consider everything. Attention must be paid to the constant possibility that we could be wrong, we could be wrong about being wrong, we could be wrong that thinking in terms of right and wrong makes sense for the occasion, and then wrong about that too.

And we can be all these things at the same time; this makes for a rather wide-open space, conceptually speaking. As a controversial figure of Tibetan Buddhism in the West was fond of saying, the bad news is we are in free fall, the good news is there is no bottom.

This is how practicing philosophy is like entertaining a paradox. It is the bottomlessness of our understanding that enables practitioners to resist settling in belief about some state of the world or theory, even the certainty of death. That you cannot know that you know nothing, you must be open to the possibility that further inquiry will reveal something that you can finally rest on. By giving up on the notion that we should ever be able to rest our thoughts in belief, we realize that the practice, the vehicle, the philosophic way is the unflappable stability we felt we needed when we were defending our leaky ideology. But because it’s so highly active and emotionally/intellectually demanding, we’ve passed it over as a possible source of peace and, even now seeing our “mistake,” will do so again and again. If you do not see the way, you do not see it even as you walk it: another esoteric East Asian Buddhist saying. And so, we must actively, continuously reorient and keep moving. The method is not active in the sense of being outwardly controlling, but instead it is inwardly searching and expanding, as in opening our mind to be more nuanced and responsive with every breath, with every thought. It’s practicing being receptive and understanding. It’s the activity of practicing mental pliancy—of training our imagination to keep wondering and relating to the world openly, seeking new ways of engaging this (waves hands around, wildly).

 While being ideologically untethered in a culture as laden with injustice, divisiveness, propaganda, conspiratorial wormholes, and snake oil cures as ours may seem dangerous, if the method is understood and practiced well, it is probably the safest way through. In fact, it’s a way so simple and straightforward that realizing we have forgotten it is the ultimate punchline; the most important moral teachings have somehow resisted clear comprehension (lucky for us). Perhaps they haven’t been imperatives intended to control selfish agents as they have often been sold.

What if instead we regard these moral teachings as invitations to practice humility and forgiveness and that this practice fully realized is literally heaven, nirvana, the good life?

There are ancient philosophical traditions demonstrating just this, but we can always benefit from reconsidering their work—it’s what our teachers want from us. It’s our greatest obligation and privilege.