Tag: philosophy

I grew up in a non-place. My home town does not feature in movies, books, plays, or any other artistic medium. The town does not distinguish itself by industry, tourism, or natural features. Its name marks a highway exit easy to forget. Beyond its residents, the town has made no mark on the wider culture. The one major historical event associated with the location is usually named by the nearest large city because it took place before the town’s founding.

Growing up in a non-place, I learned about a world that always felt distant and inaccessible. Major events in politics, business, or entertainment happened elsewhere, in places I could name before I could locate them on a map. As a small child, I did not understand that my town was in the United States because “the United States” seemed so remote. As an adult I feel a lingering wonder and disdain for these cultural focal points. They are pilgrimage sites that offer a taste of their enhanced reality but require the lion’s share of attention as their price.

In my adolescence I began to see the choice between staying and leaving as existential. Some people escaped and changed their lives. The ones who stayed became part of the obscurity of the place, gradually decaying into the various despairs of poverty. To be in a non-place is to be easily forgotten, a statistical consequence made abstract by uncaring law and policy. My family, my schoolmates, and my community appeared to the world only as part of aggregate poverty.

Once I found my escape, I continued to run. Home remained a spectre, a place I could find myself if I failed and could not recover quickly. The fear of that despair, falling back among the forgotten and abandoned, primed me to prefer desperate risks to the familiarity of home. I moved away, and I stayed away. I moved further away, and when I found myself pulled back once, I swore it would be the last time. On each opportunity I chose to place more distance between myself and my place of origin.

Now that my immediate family is gone and the house dispossessed, I feel both comforted and saddened. There is no longer a refuge for me there, but also no more trap. I am not afraid of needing one if I fail anymore. The town would have been a grave rather than a refuge had I ever needed it. Nevertheless, I have no more reasons to walk streets I know so well. The familiar and the poisonous blend with memory. As I fear being alone, my family’s graves are alone, unvisited by a more distant extended family. The most familiar place holds no belonging for me. I am from no-place, and I belong no-place. Only the body is home.

In Indian philosophy, karma is part of the tradition’s account of causation. The word means “act” or “action” literally, but in the context of causation metaphysics it refers to the continuity between a cause and its effect. An action has consequences, and then nature of those consequences will reflect the nature of the action. Attributes that would describe the consequence indicate the attributes of the cause. One can anticipate the consequences by reflecting on the characteristics of the originating action. Any action is an effect of past causes as well as the cause of future events.

Categorizing “good” and “bad” karma reflects an oversimplification of this continuity between cause and effect. Karma can be described as beneficial or harmful depending on the kinds of effects that might follow. An action performed in anger will have effects that are marked by anger. Bringing about physical health in the future depends on taking actions that contribute to physical health. A wise person focuses on beneficial actions in order to encourage a happy future.

Beneficial and harmful karma do not negate or balance one another. Every action sits in its own stream of causation, and one cause can produce both beneficial and harmful effects. One must work through the effects of harmful karma in order to be free of its continued influence. For karma associated with guilt, one might have to atone. For karma associated with pain, one might have to forgive. The decisions a person makes based on their karma determines whether future results are harmful or beneficial.

When included in an ethical framework, karma defines a dimension of reasoning in line with causation. The normative world of moral “ought” often overlooks the complexities of the causal world. Analyzing a decision karmically requires identifying characteristics the decision inherits from its causes and potential characteristics of likely effects. Karma enables one to identify the limits of their agency in the consequences visited on them by the actions of others, such as generational cycles of abuse. At the same time, one can also identify the when their agency can be effective in transforming the future of their situation.

In contemporary Paganism, theism generally means polytheism. Some polytheist Pagans view the various gods and goddess of different traditions as merely facets of an archetypal God and Goddess, enabling them to validate all traditions equally. Both frameworks contain echoes of colonizing Christianity. Collected mythology summarizes content by removing the original voice of the text. The recounted stories are filtered through the Christian worldview, and in some cases no pre-Christianized examples exist. Abstraction opens the way for the reductive collapse of a diversity of symbols and archetypes into two, a single binary around which the world turns.

One might frame theism as belief in the divine as framed by a specific tradition. A strong theist not only believes in the existence of the divine but can also describe the object of their belief. Weak theism would require only the belief, allowing that one may be open to different views of the divine. Christian theists tend to be strong theists as their specific concept of “God” serves as the object of their belief. While potentially open to different views of their “God”, Christian theists all agree that the object of their belief is “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who sent his son to die for all sins and be resurrected.” Pagan theists tend to be weak theists in that they embrace theological pluralism. The Pagan community remains unified in part by admitting multiple, sometimes mutually exclusive, concepts of the divine.

Both strong and weak theism make an ontological claim about the divine. They claim that at minimum one concept of the divine refers to a real entity that exists in the world. An atheist would deny that ontological claim, rejecting as epistemically invalid all personal experience of the divine. If the divine exists, one can infer that experiencing the divine is likewise possible. If the divine does not exist, purported experiences of the divine cannot be more real than dreams.

Ontological claims concern existence and the kinds of entities that exist, but the limits of ontology are not also the limits of truth. Phenomenal claims concern experience and the contents of experience. A phenomenal claim of the form, “I experienced X” would be true if and only if I had indeed had experienced X. An experiencing subject can make true claims about ontologically false entities insofar as they are phenomenal claims. One who believes that experiences of the divine are phenomenally real but does not take any position regarding the ontological status of the divine could be called a “phenomenal theist.”

While phenomenal claims may not or may reveal any ontological truths, they may still be intensely meaningful for the experiencing subject. Ecstatic states of consciousness can help the subject reorganize their view of themselves and their place in the world, their aesthetics, and their morality. An individual’s experience of the divine can clarity their values, their understanding of beauty and good, and change the course of their life. Phenomenal claims may not have a bearing on ontology, but they can have a bearing on self-knowledge and value, both key facets of the human experience.

“Mysticism” refers to practices that induce ecstatic states of consciousness in order to contact the divine. William James discusses the mystical experience at length in his study of religion because he found mysticism at the foundation of organized religious traditions. According to James a mystic’s revelation becomes dogma as it attracts followers who create lasting institutions. Mystical experiences consistently include a language-transcending insight delivered in a temporary state of consciousness characterized by a feeling of union or surrender to something greater than the self.

A mystical experience that prompts a significant change in the mystic’s religious identification might be called “a conversion experience.” Such an experience conveys so much plausibility that the mystic abandons old beliefs for new. Conversion experiences demonstrate the knowledge-carrying nature of mystical experiences as they appear to serve as strong reasons for a subject to rearrange their beliefs, something that often takes much time and many episodes of reflection.

James allows that the mystic may accept the experience as knowledge and form beliefs accordingly, but he does not offer any account of how one might examine such insights critically. The Pragmatic approach James defines in “The Will to Believe” would direct the mystic to judge whether the resulting beliefs that have a beneficial effect. Observable effects serve as the principal epistemic criterion for all knowledge in the Pragmatic account, so both the mystic and their audience judge the insight by the same standard. Under this account the knowledge-bearing quality of the mystical experience does not do any epistemic work even though the conversion experience demonstrates otherwise.

A mystic inclined to rationality and critical examination seems left in the lurch here. Despite the wide recognition that descriptions of mystical states differ only in diverse views on the same ineffable point, mystics lack many paths to dialogue and shared examination of their insights. The best examples generally reflect examination inside of a tradition where shared frameworks ease the path. Efforts across traditions often rely on common ground and shared influences to bridge the gap. These efforts support critical examination of mysticism by separating content from framework and creating space for recognition of shared values and a wider community.

Buddhist missionaries carried their tradition across the world since the time of the Buddha. Lineages took root far beyond the boundaries of India, often syncretizing with complimentary local elements to form new and distinct approaches to core Buddhist philosophy and practice. Buddhism arrived in North America in several waves as immigrants brought their lineages with them. Teachers in some lineages opened meditation halls to anyone and wrote books to introduce Buddhism to a wider audience. Zen teachers are particularly well-represented in this group, continuing the missionary legacy of that tradition. Some teachers in the 21st century begin to use the phrase “American Buddhism” to describe the syncretic lineages that have taken root in North America.

American Buddhism can be distinguished from Asian lineages by the absence of elements deemed superstitious by Modern sensibilities. Recognizing a distinction between “religion” as sacred and “philosophy” as secular, Americans tend to associate Buddhism with the latter due to the absence of a deity as a focal point. The Zen tradition’s iconoclasm assists this framing as Zen often introduces Americans to Buddhism generally. Devotional observances like chanting and offering incense tend to be framed as cultivations of mindfulness rather than generating merit to ensure a more fortunate future life. Days of observance like Vesak are often absent from American Buddhist calendars. Instead, the holidays celebrated by semi-secular Christian North America such as Thanksgiving and Christmas mark the passage of the time. Since North American secularism retains many implicitly Christian values and aesthetics, the Buddhist elements most complimentary to that tradition spread more widely as uncontroversial alternative interpretations of similar values.

Modern Paganism in North America shares a similarly awkward relationship with Christianity. The first generations of both American Paganism and American Buddhism largely converted from Christianity. When Pagans look to the past for help reconstructing pre-Christian beliefs and practices, they find a lack of information beyond traces left in syncretized holidays such as Christmas and Easter, traces usually impossible to separate from later Christian contributions. The Pagan Wheel of the Year aggregates different pre-Christian festivals and solar observances, but it maps well onto the progress of seasons in North America and Europe. Most associated customs have been lost or transformed by Christianity, so Modern Pagans rebuild with the material they have, including Christian aesthetics and values.

Given Paganism’s shared lineage with the New Age, Buddhist beliefs and practices often resonate with modern Pagans. If one goes beyond the appropriated versions of these concepts, a Pagan can find complimentary concepts in formal Buddhist philosophy. The Zen tradition places a high value on practice and direct experience, as does modern Paganism, but it also supplies techniques and conceptual frameworks to support those experiences. The mystical traditions of pre-Christian Europe have been erased or subsumed into Christian mysticism, so the modern Pagan is very much in need of guidance that does not presuppose Christian concepts of divinity and faith. Zen teachers push students toward direct insights, but the tradition also provides epistemic and logical boundaries to test and refine insight derived from mystical experience. Paganism lacks such material in the absence of unbroken tradition.

Furthermore, the Zen tradition provides those barriers without rejecting the pluralism that Pagans value. Zen philosophy assumes that a teacher’s awakening cannot be the same as the student because each event takes place in a unique time, place, and perspective. One must see for oneself. Attempts to intellectualize and align personal insights indicate mistaken thinking according to the Zen tradition. Reconciling mystical experiences by reinterpretation hinders rather than aids the student’s progress.

A Zen approach to Paganism would emphasize direct experience and insight into gods, nature, reality, and oneself. Cultivating mindfulness through regular meditation practice helps clarify the mind and trains the focus needed to investigate experience at a very fine grain. Regular ritual practice trains thoughts and behavior to direct effort toward moral goals, self-development, and rigorous inquiry. Compassion forms the foundation of morality because every individual exists in the web of interdependence, so the well-being of each one influences the well-being of everyone. Regular meditation practice and self-reflection identifies patterns of thought and behavior that interfere with well-being. One must then investigate experience of the self, the natural world, and the human world to find and establish patterns that promote personal and collective well-being. Knowledge must be based on direct experience or coherence with overall patterns anchored by direct experience. What is true is what is experienced.

Zen Paganism would share features with Daoism given Daoist influence on the foundation of Zen in China and Paganism’s positive view of the natural world. Daoist philosophy emphasizes careful study of nature and the complex causal relationships of ecosystems. Working with the active causes of nature offers a path of least resistance when accomplishing any aim. In such cases success hinges on a deep humility and trust that playing the right small role in a complex event will bring more beneficial results than ego-centric control and interference. Pagans who value cultivating awe in complexity and power of the natural world would logically embrace such ideas as well.

The practice of magick may also be framed by Zen Paganism. Finding the path of least resistance and the smallest but most effective intervention places a boundary on operational magic. A Zen Pagan witch should employ their investigative practice to identify the right nudges to achieve their desired result without trying to control every element of the causal chain. Overly specific requirements or attempts to control the process and the outcome should be avoided as wasteful and poorly informed.

In political philosophy “pluralism” refers to agnosticism about an ultimate good or ideal way of life. Political pluralism supports an open society where multiple cultures can form communities and cooperate on shared interests. Without pluralism communities would fracture across differences and could not tolerate even simple disagreements about value. As such, pluralism enables large and diverse communities that can benefit from an array of strengths and perspectives.

In a theology “pluralism” refers to neutrality among different concepts of the divine. Theological pluralism admits that humanity can only have incomplete knowledge of the divine either because of humanity’s limited capacity or the divine’s inherent complexity. Contemporary Paganism embraces theological pluralism in the absence of a unifying systematic doctrine. Pluralism has allowed contemporary Paganism to form communities united primarily by methods and practices rather than by a shared concept of the divine.

These approaches represent different senses of “pluralism.” Political pluralism allows multiple valid frameworks for defining the good life but also provides boundaries for acceptable frameworks. Only ways of life that are compatible with disagreement and alternative values can be admitted to a functional and peaceful pluralist community. Views of the good life that demand conformity from others irrespective of their beliefs or consent introduce fundamental conflict into the community. One might consider this form of pluralism “strong pluralism” because it provides some structure and boundaries that protect the continued coexistence of different views.

The religious pluralism that shows up in the Neo-Pagan community lacks a comparable organizing character. Instead, Pagan theological pluralism enables community in the absence of wide agreement or shared experience. The contemporary Pagan revival enjoys a diversity of fraudulent claims of tradition that stretches back to its origin with Gerald Gardner’s publication of Witchcraft Today. The community that developed around theatrical personalities, flawed scholarship, and escapist imagination preferred unity to fragmentation, so substantial discourse on theology, metaphysics, and morality cannot rise beyond sharing beliefs and experiences and evaluate those beliefs critically. Without any protective boundary confidence artists and abusive personalities prey on people seeking spiritual experiences or knowledge, and the community at large can do little more than warn and condemn at a distance. Neo-Pagans have no way of identifying a shared value that cannot be diminished by appeal to personal insight.

Traditions that embrace the mystical experience tend to formalize a stronger pluralism. Teaching lineages in Buddhism protect against harmful divergence from the philosophical heart of the tradition. While not a perfect preventative, lineage holders can censure or disown harmful teachers who borrow credibility from the tradition in order to exploit or abuse others. Zen Buddhism in particular stresses continued examination and criticism of insight from both intellection and mysticism, often with the assistance of a more experienced teacher who can direct the student back to fundamental prinicple.

Using such a model Paganism could have a stronger community with boundaries that do not enable predators. Lineages of initiation that value cultivating insight critically provide the means to diminish abuse of personal gnosis for personal gain or domination. Strong pluralism does not require dogma, only boundaries and the means to maintain them.

Race serves to divide the working class by bribing one group with privilege over the other. Membership in racial groups varies across history, widening and narrowing to serve the needs of the privileged group. Irish and Italian immigrants were granted membership into whiteness to maintain alignment against Black people during the Jim Crow era. Race is a condition inflicted on a people to make them vulnerable to the imperialist machinations of the owner class. Once one accepts that race is socially constructed, one must also accept that whiteness, the privileged identity group, is also socially constructed.

Even though whiteness is the privileged group, individuals who identify as white remain vulnerable to being denied whiteness. Just as previously distinct identity groups were admitted to whiteness, any identity group can be made into an Other and ejected from the privileged group. Any immutable characteristic can be totalized to define an identity group distinguished from the “default” whiteness. Even mutable characteristics can be leveraged as markers of degeneracy that disqualify one for the full privileges of whiteness. Any person born “white” might find themselves on the wrong side of privilege by choice or circumstance.

Across the diversity of identity groups and intersecting identities, the pattern of vulnerability remains. Conforming to the privileged group’s values and expectations may grant some share of advantage, perhaps limited by one’s ability to “pass” as the privileged identity. Such grants remain contingent on the perfection of one’s conformity and the convenience of the privileged group.

The only social grouping not vulnerable to being divested of privilege are the owner class. The owner class utilize whiteness and other divisive tools to maintain control over people and resources. Ultimately, as long as an individual retains enough wealth and influence to remain in the owner class, they are able to purchase any privilege. To align with the interests of the owner class is to abandon other identities for exploitation. Individuals who ascend to the owner class from a low-status identity group may face residual discrimination, but they leave behind fears of the martial class as long as they have wealth and its signifiers.

If one accepts these arguments, the working class vulnerability to discrimination becomes evident. While members of privileged identity groups may benefit temporarily by supporting the exploitative hierarchy, their own interests will be abandoned when they no longer intersect with the owner class. At such a time the owner class may redefine the social constructs that uphold privileged groups, and the workers now branded as degenerate take their place alongside the oppressed.

Even if the owner class extends privilege on a limited basis, workers who are so “elevated” do not share the long term interest of the owner class. As long as one can be deprived of those privileges, a worker’s interest is best aligned with their fellows, even across the boundaries of identity groups. Solidarity does not require forsaking identity, only recognizing that class conditions provide an avenue for trust across identities. Shared vulnerability to the owner class provides a basis for trust as long as one guards against the short term temptation to embrace the bribes of fragile privilege. The owner class relies on the success of those temptations to keep the workers divided against themselves.

As an imperialist political economy, capitalism expands to fill available space. Whatever it touches turns into a commodity in the network of owners and owned. The market model and theory of property eclipse older ideas and draw what was public into private hands. After generations of imperialism, imaging alternatives to commodity markets and private ownership becomes difficult if not impossible. When workers object to exploitation by the owner class, the owners point to the prevalence of the economic theory as proof of its success. Only capitalism can deliver the liberty, plenty, and prosperity that contemporary society has to offer, even if it only delivers those things to the owners. Alternative theories have been tried and collapsed into capitalism, serving as further proof of the theory.

Capitalism’s colonization works similarly to other totalizing theories. Concepts posited by the theory are read backward in time, forcing old arrangements into the mold of the new theory. Nuances are reduced to the model’s terms to erase traces of the changes wrought. In particular measuring value by quantities of currency allows the capitalist to subsume any exchange of goods or services into their market model. Once capitalism is entrenched, students learn history through the capitalist lens and as such often cannot imagine any alternate arrangements.

Progress through history is a key assumption of modernism and one that implicitly supports the captialist supremacy narrative. The conceit of many Modernist scholars is that human civilizations develops through a similar set of stages from nomadic hunter-gatherers to citizens of nation-states with complex economic, social, and technical institutions. This perspective, sometimes called “whig history”, reflects imperialist attitudes that drive the Modern era. Northwestern European society was hailed as the triumph of civilization, so “less advanced” societies would be served by accepting the values, technology, religion, and customs of Northwestern Europe, especially liberalism and its capitalist political economy. Whig history lends justification to “the white man’s burden” to bring the light of civilization to the world. As a component of political liberalism, capitalism then serves as the beacon toward which all developing economies should move.

The narrative of historical progress breaks down significantly under critical scrutiny. Scholars who have rejected the imperialist bias find that technology, customs, and politics change over time but not in a uniform direction. Post-modernists call into question the very framing of “direction” since it still assumes that some political orders or customs can be placed on an objective value hierarchy. Rejecting whig history, one can instead see capitalism as a movement in human civilization, one with both a beginning and an end. Capitalism is not the most robust economic theory possible, nor even the most robust theory to have been implemented. Where we do judge politics and customs, we should do so according to overarching moral principles not by comparison to any given “most advanced” society.

Ethics defines a few principles that bound morality. Among these is the axiom “ought implies can.” Moral responsibility ends where capability ends. This principle affirms that one is never expected to do the impossible even though our feelings of guilt or regret may indicate otherwise. One cannot demand and should forgive someone who fails to keep an obligation due to circumstances beyond their control.

Usually, “ought implies can” appears in arguments about the limit of moral responsibility. A person is morally obligated only to the extent fulfilling the obligation is possible. One may have a moral duty to pull someone away from a ledge before they fall, but one does not have a duty to fly into the air to rescue someone already falling. On the other hand, increased capability implies an correspondingly elevation of moral responsibility. The more one can do, the more one should do.

While ethicists generally agree that one is not obligated to accept harms to themselves in order to do good, luck egalitarians argue that people have an obligation to use their natural talents or accidental advantages to benefit others. Assuming that some people simply find themselves in advantaged situations or in possession of inborn talents, those people have an obligation to make themselves worthy of those gifts. By taking on that obligation, naturally advantaged people redistribute their good fortune, using it to help others. They become morally obligated to do so because of their capability and the circumstances that bestowed them.

As such, one might conclude that circumstance also informs capability from a moral perspective. Much like natural talents, an agent cannot control happening upon a situation in which some good needs to be done. If an agent sees an injured person while on a walk, and there does not appear to be any assistance on the way, the agent should act on the moral duty to prevent harm. If the agent recognizes that moral duty, they have an on-going obligation to watch for potential harms insofar as they are capable. Where multiple agents recognizing this duty are in the same situation, any one may abstain from intervening as long as at least one takes up the duty to prevent. Where one is alone, one must assume that duty oneself. Circumstance and ability may position an agent to be the sole possible candidate for accepting a moral duty. In such cases capability and circumstance bestow the obligation.

Collective action problems can arise when multiple agents who agree on the scope of moral duties all recognize an opportunity to enact their duty that can fulfilled by any one of them. If all agents involved wait for another to act, the situation may pass without fulfilling the duty. These issues can be mitigated if one also considers bias to action a component of moral duty. A moral duty defines an action to be performed, so the normative force of the obligation must likewise motivate an agent to respond to the duty with action unless another agent has already done so. In other words when an agent finds themselves looking for someone else to do something, they should then accept that the duty falls to them and take action.

Philosopher Tim van Gelder argues that metaphors for the mind reflect popular technological paradigms. During the latter 20th century, computing metaphors dominate philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Functionalist explanations of the mental states mirror the binary logic of Alan Turing’s machines. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of subconscious influence on speech and action resembles the need to relieve excess pressure in a steam engine. While technological models assist in reasoning about more abstract phenomena, the phenomenon remains logically prior to the model. One should be careful when drawing conclusions from the framing metaphor since the metaphor need not conform perfectly to serve as an explanatory device.

Modern witchcraft and New Age lore often focus on an undefined “energy” that can be gathered, directed, and released in service of operational magic. Descriptions of energy work often recall the dynamics of electric current. For instance, excess energy requires “grounding” when a ritual is complete or else the discharge may be dangerous. Beyond these phenomenological descriptions, the energy remains undefined.

In Yoga traditions control over breathing assists with directing focus and developing meditative concentration. The word for breath, “prana,” indicates both the physical breath and a more subtle current that carries vitality through the body. Traditional Chinese Medicine recognizes a similar concept designated with the word for breath, “qi.” The similarity should be unsurprising since the Silk Road connects these traditions, and they compare well with New Age “energy” due to its appropriation from those cultures. These concepts reference an observable phenomenon to anchor imagination of a subtle phenomenon.

While metaphors are useful for making the abstract concrete, conclusions cannot reliably follow from the metaphor alone. Breath and electricity behave according to observable physical principles, but one cannot infer the behavior of a more subtle “energy” from the behavior of electricity. Imagining the breath as a flow of electric current can stabilize and focus awareness, but these metaphors describe an experience using imagery. They are not sensory descriptions of a magical power.

Setting aside the metaphors, all of these models do seem to refer to the same phenomenon. During meditation one can settle into a feeling of expanded awareness where the immediate sensory environment transforms into something “inside” the mind rather than “outside” the body. The expanded awareness can be focused on specific sensations to unpack the arising, presenting, and passing of sense experience. The flow of breath or electricity can be used to describe intentional direction and focus of the expanded awareness. Chaos magicians describe reaching a state like this one when directing intention toward a sigil, training one’s awareness to the sigil and the outcome it encodes.

While one should not rely on this technique to spin straw into gold, expanded awareness is foundational for the cultivation of mindfulness in both Buddhism and Yoga. Being able to release passing tensions and focus on the task at hand can make a mundane task soothing. Gathering resolve through expanded awareness shines light on habits we want to break. The metaphors should help us achieve the state of consciousness by giving us a mental map, a technique for cultivating it. They do not need to convey metaphysical or ontological facts about the world to serve this function, so inference from the model should be limited to practical application.