Buddhism and The Threat of Nihilism
Buddhist pragmatism and the secular reconstruction of morality
In so far as Buddhism features the Four Noble Truths, this religious philosophy is essentially pragmatic.
These four truths are (1) that life in samsara is characterized by dukkha, by suffering one disappointment after another; (2) that this suffering is caused by a mental deficiency, namely craving or the emotional attachment to things; (3) that this suffering can end by correcting that deficiency and renouncing what was craved; and (4) that the Noble Eightfold Path is a plan for correcting that inner deficiency.
Notice, then, that there’s no normative force to any of these essential Buddhist teachings. Even the eightfold path, which speaks of “right speech,” “right conduct,” “right effort,” and so forth assumes only instrumental rightness. The rightness of the prescribed ways of acting consists only of their effectiveness in achieving the goal set out by the Four Noble Truths, specifically the fourth one.
Certain ways of acting are optimal in retraining the mind and ending suffering in the Buddhist manner. But this is a far cry from declaring that God commands that we be Buddhists or that the universe is designed such that we’re all destined to end our suffering with enlightenment. The essence of Buddhism is strictly an observation of a certain hidden causal pattern. Whereas most people suffer for such and such fundamental reasons, there’s another way to go as a matter of sheer causality. Speaking of causality isn’t the same as issuing an imperative or declaring that we ought to prefer one of the two paths.
This therapeutic pragmatism is consistent with Buddhism’s deconstruction of metaphysics and theology, and with the Buddhist explanation that the self is empty, as is every other form that appears in the sensible world. Instead, in this realm of appearances or sense experiences, everything arises as being dependent on something else, so the identity of this tree, that stone, or this person is smeared out in the causal fabric.
That’s why it’s wrongheaded to cling to anything as though that thing could save you like a supernatural superhero who stands outside the causal chains, or like an immovable stone that resists the tide. The stone is connected to the water as part of a larger, cosmic tide, as is the superhero to the supervillain and to the ordinary bystanders, as it were. Salvation from suffering is found only when we stop fixating on things, stop mistaking shadows for substances, and start treating our experience as a field of illusions. That way we won’t be disappointed when we don’t get what we want, because we won’t be so inflexible in our desires. We’ll learn to flow in our mental states the way things in the world flow as parts of the causal field.
Pragmatic or Cosmic Buddhism?
Notice, second, how similar this is to Stoicism. For the Stoics, too, we should realize there’s much we can’t change, even while there are some things we can. The outer world is largely lost to us because it’s being impacted from countless directions, as part of that field of causality. But internally, we have some autonomous control over how we feel about what happens to us. As in Buddhism, the Stoic trains his or her mind to have the right expectations, to not presume that we should expect much in life, given our meager control over the course of events. There’s a luck factor in how events unfold which humbles the wise person.
However, there’s a crucial difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, which is that the latter is beholden to the rationalist tradition of Greek philosophy. Stoics thus supply an additional reason why the sage should assent to whatever happens in the outer world, which is that the causal order is itself rational; thus, everything happens for a greater good. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, for example, was a determinist who thought the universe was organized as a grand harmony. This brings Stoicism closer to Daoism than to Buddhism.
(In The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilley compares the goal of the Four Noble Truths to the general one in Greek philosophy of achieving ataraxia or of being detached, dispassionate, and content with whatever happens. Wisdom in ancient Greece and India was a kind of settling down to avoid extremes out of deference to something greater than us.)
Technically, the Four Noble Truths are neutral about any such metaphysical basis of Buddhism. The enlightened Buddhist isn’t on the side of the cosmos whereas sufferers languish in the world of sensory and cognitive illusions. All the essence of Buddhism provides is that the enlightened person is free of the type of suffering that’s caused by a common mental deficiency.
More precisely, this suffering is caused by the mind’s natural functioning. The “deficiency” of craving or attachment is normal for creatures in so far as we’re being played by evolution or by our genes and animalistic impulses. We’re drawn into natural processes that make fools of us, that narrow our attention and blind us to the big picture. Enlightenment is the awakening from this automated mode of life, which occurs when we recognize the cosmic aspect of events, in which case we take events to be mere nodes in a causal field, waves in the universal ocean, or shadows cast on the cave wall (to borrow Plato’s metaphor).
Cosmically, everything we encounter is empty of substance and is dependent rather than independent. Likewise, from that perspective, there’s not even a unified, freestanding self. All we can detect through introspection are fleeting mental states, just like the situations we encounter in the outer world that come and go. Thus, we shouldn’t be attached to the illusion of our immortal, immaterial self.
Amoral Buddhism
As an explanation of the foolishness of the selfish behaviour that generates endless rounds of suffering (especially disappointments), Buddhism is exemplary, its logic impeccable. However, the austerity of this reasoning leads to the problem that pure pragmatism is amoral.
Let’s take this step by step to avoid confusion. As outlined above, Buddhism undermines egoism. The Buddhist identifies an enlightened way of looking at both outer and inner experience, which makes egoistic grasping seem wrongheaded. And the Buddhist provides a program that will suffice, instrumentally speaking, to end the suffering that’s caused by that common wrongheadedness.
But now the Buddhist faces a question: Is she content with the amorality of her cosmic perspective? If so, she can afford only a pragmatic answer to the question of whether we should all be Buddhists. That is, she could say only that Buddhism offers such and such benefits: we can choose the Buddhist path or the path of egoistic craving and suffering, and there’s no philosophical, theological, or any other higher imperative to dictate our choice between them.
The amoral Buddhist could only hold out the two paths as separate causal chains that have different endpoints. Those causes and effects would have no inherent value, according to the Buddhist’s cosmic perspective on the dependent arising of all events in sense experience.
Let’s frame the question more forcefully: Is Buddhist tranquility better than egoistic suffering? Is it better to be enlightened than unenlightened? Better to end our cravings and disappointments or to be absorbed in the field of illusions? As far as I can tell, the essence of original Buddhism is silent even on these questions of fundamental value. There’s only the pragmatic understanding of different causal paths. The Buddha’s goal was to provide a therapy which is a guaranteed cure, but whether the cure is better than the disease is up to each patient to decide.
As it happens, of course, people do want to end their suffering — for unenlightened reasons. We prefer pleasure or peace to pain, because we’re attached to ourselves and to our animal instincts and social conditioning, which train us to prefer one to the other. We think we’re great in our starring roles, so we infer that we deserve to be happy. That’s why we would rush to Buddhism for its cure. Yet the Buddhist cure throws the baby out with the bathwater. Suffering ends only when we recognize that we’re not so great after all, that we don’t deserve happiness because we’re only a drop in the cosmic bucket. And that’s why many folks flee from Buddhism.
Nihilistic Buddhism
Does it even make sense to speak of Buddhist morality, from the cosmic perspective in which all forms are empty of independent content? The inner self isn’t so real that we should be attached to it as a heroic refuge from the storm of causality. “Everything flows, so get used to disappointment!” That’s the upshot of Buddhism and of Stoicism too.
If we’re as illusory as the appearances that flash before our senses and which we concretize by giving them the stamp of our cognitive approval, why not treat all our values as being as arbitrary as those concepts that mislead us into thinking of appearances as independent substances? Ironically, we mislead ourselves in our very attempt to understand phenomena. We filter the barrage of contents with our preconceptions and reifications.
Thus, we shouldn’t be disappointed when we don’t win the lottery because the lottery is just one drop in the cosmic bucket, like every other event that transpires in the field of human experience. We shouldn’t grow attached to the thought of winning that lottery because playing the lottery is a fool’s errand. Becoming emotionally invested in the lottery would amount to attaching ourselves only to a phantasm, to a reification produced by our cognitive filters. In its dependence on countless other events, the real event of the lottery is hollow, which is to say inhuman. Caring about something that can’t care back is mentally disordered.
We understand natural events by humanizing them, but in themselves they’re alien and nothing as fortunate as a steppingstone made for our benefit. Unless the lottery is rigged, it’s a random event that isn’t concerned about pleasing or disappointing anyone. It just happens. More precisely, there is no lottery, not any unified entity that matches the tidiness of our concept of lotteries. Instead, there’s a field of causally ordered micro and macro events that are local nodes in a field of appearances which we simplify (humanize) with language, concepts, memories, stories, and feelings. There are networks of ignored events that add up to a so-called lottery that occurs at some time and place, but really there’s no time, no place, and no lottery; in reality there’s only the total, unknowable causal field of samsara.
Neither is there you or me: there’s no lottery and there’s no one to care about that oversimplified event. There is no real, independent container of our mental states. We have bodies, but those bodies are beholden to the environment in myriad perceived and unperceived ways. We’re not as autonomous or as substantial as we like to think. Therefore, neither can we be so straightforwardly valuable.
Buddhism runs up against nihilism in this fashion. There are Buddhist answers to this problem, of course, such as the distinction between conventional and real truth. The world of appearances might be called conventionally real but unreal in a deeper sense. But this is a word game that fulfills the social function identified by Leo Strauss. To avoid offending the unenlightened herd, Buddhists may conceal the implications of their key arguments, but the implications follow as a matter of logic. You can speak of “conventional reality,” but that’s a fig leaf worn over mass confusion.
Natural Creativity and Secular Values
A better response to the threat of Buddhist nihilism via its pragmatism and cosmic perspective is the one I present elsewhere, which is just that of modern naturalistic philosophy. The world of appearances is real, not just reified, because we’re not the only things that busy themselves with constructive projects of simplifying the totality of natural events. Nature is also immensely productive. Thus, nature builds its forms with complexified, evolved, and emerging phases and levels of natural order.
For example, planets are real even though they’re not the whole of reality. They’re not just figments of our imagination. And to understand how planets form is to understand the depth of their reality. It’s the same with selves or minds: we evolve by natural selection and we develop further by social conditioning. We thus depend on various conditions, so our reality is limited as Buddhists say, but our independence and autonomy aren’t therefore illusory. Our identity may correspond to conceptual simplifications, but those concepts aren’t pure fictions. We constrain our realistic concepts with rational inferences, which enable us to understand how natural forms arise.
Whether we’re sufficiently independent and substantial to warrant our egoistic adventures is another matter. Is it wiser to credit limited things with limited value or to give up on all evaluations because everything fades to nothing in the end? Should we renounce all human pastimes because our cognitive efforts are biased and flawed? Or should we appreciate how human knowledge has progressed to the point of empowering us with modern science and technology, which in turn are no mere illusions but are outgrowths of nature’s evident creativity?
Still, reconstructing morality in naturalistic, secular terms isn’t straightforward. We may be biologically, psychologically, and socially real creatures, but we’re just creatures and indeed only drops in the cosmic bucket in existential terms. The Buddhist may prefer to ignore the question of absolute value, to focus on the pragmatic imperative of ending suffering. But Buddhism and naturalistic philosophy more generally face the threat of nihilism.
