What is Western Philosophy, also compared to Buddhism

I've recently joined a couple of Facebook philosophy groups and it can be disappointing how far discussion falls from the range of philosophy, even aside from people switching to insulting each other and such.  I don't mind slightly off-topic questions like "do you believe in an afterlife" but lots of what gets posted is just nonsense, like arguing for or against vegetarianism, without really even doing much with arguments related to that.  So I've decided to explain what philosophy is, to the extent that anyone can really do that.

As background, I studied philosophy to get two degrees in it, also covering a good bit of Buddhism and some religion scope.  If it matters the undergrad study was at the University of Colorado, and Master's at the University of Hawaii (at Manoa), after prior industrial engineering study at Penn State, more related to work I do now.  I'm no expert, but I've put some time in studying a lot of scope.  So lets do this.

What is philosophy?  Starting with history.

It really covers a broad range of themes, and I won't do justice to explaining all of those.  As far as the vague impression it might delve into the meaning of life, it mostly doesn't, since that's way too vague to get a handle on.  Modern topics are more like philosophy related to language use, issues related to self and mind, along with classic topics like ethics (study of morality) and aesthetics (study of the nature of beauty, more or less).  Modern study still refers back to earlier scope, so courses and review of Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche are still relevant.  The main branch I studied under last, analytic philosophy, the one typically pursued in the US, narrows scope in a way that's not so easy to describe, with emphasis on a narrow range of approaches, and on logic, and certain subjects and thinkers.  It all cycles a bit, so what is interesting or how classic works are interpreted changes decade to decade.

The history of philosophy is relevant because study of prior thinkers keeps being renewed, and forms the basis for modern approaches and ideas, so I'll say a little more about that.  For the most part it's narrowed to include only Western philosophy, as studied in the West, although I was in an academic program in Hawaii where they branch out a bit to Eastern thought as well.  Oddly they retained a very narrow approach related to how they interpreted Chinese and Indian ideas, so things got a little strange, but at least they were reaching out, sort of.

Socrates

It starts with the Greeks.  Plato is the first main writer, sort of basing his early thought on his teacher, Socrates, with him as the main character in most dialogues.  It's hard to say how Socrates's own thinking and conclusions varied since he didn't write.  There are pre-Socratics, earlier thinking, but not much survives, just fragments like "no man ever steps in the same river twice" (Heraclitus).  Surely some developed thinking went along with those fragments, and people do work on trying to reconstruct it, but Greek philosophy in main forms is mostly Plato and Aristotle.


It doesn't summarize well what they covered since it went pretty far, and since later interpretation of their works expands what they really meant way beyond the scope of what they actually said.  My impression:  Plato's early works seem to focus more on what Socrates probably said, more a review of ordinary thinking, using questioning to investigate worldview assumptions and such, with later developed thought building more of a model of experience.  Aristotle went into natural sciences quite a bit, and along with that built up some of a model of the basis for mind and mental experience (metaphysics), which isn't exactly something we keep around as a modern model for mind today.

Oddly the Romans don't get as much attention, although of course they were still writing about philosophy.  It almost seems that's because Plato is so interesting, and medieval thought more linked to modern schools, so it drops out because it's not one of those (as Aristotle does too, to some extent, but his work seemed to link together with later Christian thought, so it tended to be set aside much later when Christianity study started to seem less interesting).  Descartes is where most people pick up the trail of Western philosophy again, and he didn't really have lots to say we still need to consider.  He questioned how we know that experience itself is real, how we know we don't live in the Matrix, more or less, so in a sense he did help do some background writing for a popular modern movie.  From there another half-dozen main philosophers bridge the gap on to Kant, who sort of brought together a few main ideas and themes and re-set how people put it all together.  Reading his work is a rough go, as much from the odd style of writing, lacking organized structure of main points and never really summing up what it all meant, although to him he probably was really covering both.  He influenced philosophy so much that his work is still around in how it influences people, although some key aspects weren't retained.

Kant!

I just wrote a blog post on Kant in relation to tea tasting, over on the main blog I write actively, about tea, here.  In a way writing about his aesthetics ideas misses the main points because his main work really deals with the structure of mind and mental reality, cognitive functions and judgments and such.  Ethics / morality really works better as a secondary theme.  A comment on that work in a tea discussion site (by Cwyn, a fellow tea blogger) really fills in the background that frames aesthetics within his system well (her own writing about tea is a bit out there, interesting in its own way, here):


Kant tried to separate the idea of pure judgement of taste, as an abstract notion, specifically free of the perception of pleasure, what he called “disinterested.” He wanted his criteria for a pure judgement to come from a priori principles that are abstract, applying to every aesthetic judgement. So, in other words this concept is more similar to the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment.

He did not dismiss the idea of a judgement on taste with pleasure. These are based on “schemas,” what you refer to as constructs. The example Kant uses is the “savage” who has never seen a house. He cannot judge a house because he has no schema. But with repetition he learns about houses and then begins to forms schemas which he uses to judge their aesthetic merit. Judgement with pleasure or based on schemas are what he considers subjective, because the thinking is not pure or disinterested coming from an abstract principle.

A key point is the idea of the “demand for agreement” on one’s judgement. Kant seemed to feel that with pure judgement, everyone is coming from the same abstract a priori principle. But with schemas and judgements that include a pleasure response, the demand for agreement becomes arguable, and therefore end up subjective. People aren’t agreeing because their schemas differ. But under the pure judgement criteria, agreement is unified and stemming from the abstract principle.

Today, the accepted theory is that no objective pure principle exists, that it is all schema or construct and these are laden with political, cultural and personal ideas. That what we once called objective or pure was a notion of European white men etc. etc.


Clear enough?  My own post talks through more of the background, but basically Kant throws something like wine tasting out of the range of his main aesthetics theories, the parts relating to well-defined judgments relating to his main cognitive-aspect categories, for the reasons she just mentions.

Nietzsche sort of wasn't a philosopher, in the ordinary sense, but his work is interesting, so I'll mention him.  He didn't set up models for solving philosophical problems, and didn't frame his work as arguments.  Instead he said lots of cool or crazy things in oddly formatted works, sometimes in long story form (Thus Spake Zarathustra) but more often as short sayings, which can make for interesting quotes.  He didn't really set up a clear model of how people think or experience things, or even try to solve a problem like what morality is based on.  He said things like "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger," and reading it all can be interesting, it's just not offered as any sort of explanation or guidance for how to approach reality, beyond how the diverse sayings and ideas come together, which is not so much.  He seemed to think people were developing toward some sort of higher ideal, which groups of people like the Nazis took in a really negative way, but what he did say wasn't clear enough to work as something to plan around, without adding most of the specific content to it.

As for modern philosophy, that gets to be diverse.  It's not as if it's a hot topic, in general, so there are lots of people working in lots of directions, tucked away within academic programs talking it all out in conferences or in academic publications.  Some are still plugging away at really old formulations of problems and others are "breaking new ground," keeping on with changes in subjects like philosophy of mind or language, which can draw some input from related but different fields.

What is philosophy?  More on how it works.

That's already the basics, but it's still probably not at all clear how this ties back to ordinary experience.  A lot of it really doesn't.  That can be odd, since it's based on themes of human experience, about mind, or morality, language use, logic, etc.  Maybe delving a little deeper into how that might work or might not work out would help.

Philosophy can't really set up a great, comprehensive model for mental reality.  Strange, isn't it, since they've been at it awhile?  To some extent some of that is psychology, so once things get to be more practical, about how patterns or trends in thinking or view of self go, or about things that can go wrong with that, then you are on a different subject.  Someone could try to work the grey area, covering how philosophy could support what psychology does, for example to examine use of logic.

Logic is a funny thing, a good place to discuss further, since it really means a set of different things.  One part is logic related to arguments, fallacies and such.  That could be taught as a philosophy class but in general it's not really considered within the scope of modern philosophy.  Another part is closer to Boolean algebra, laws that govern how your computer "thinks," binary logic, and that is philosophy.  There are different ways to describe something like arguments, more like math problems really, a bit like a software code, but at the same time quite different.  The problem with all that is that we don't really think in terms of a binary logic, crunching truth and falsity of assumptions and derivations of conclusions in ordinary thinking.  To some extent it might seem like we do, until you look a bit closer.  Patterns in thinking aren't that clear, and aren't necessarily binary (hardly anything is true or false, although of course some things are), and thoughts and arguments aren't laid out that way.  It's too bad because the math aspect is sort of cool.  Computers do think like that, much as a very different form of information processing could be called thinking, although it's more wrong than right to use that label, so a different version definitely works for them.

What about morality, surely there must be a way to map out how we are judging right and wrong, even if it wouldn't be completely consistent or complete?  Not exactly.  It works a lot better than some other subjects, and it does seem to boil down to two general approaches, neither of which is exactly what we are doing, but both may inform part of it.  One part is from Kant's thinking, basically saying that we use and follow reason to determine what is right from some objective form of judgment about such things.  As with the review of aesthetics the problem is that reasoning isn't actually based on objective, universal principles (these sort of don't exist), and the patterns and mental functions aren't as clear as Kant's system would make them out to be.

The other main school works out well, but also has limitations:  consequentialism or utilitarianism (see more definition of schools and branches here).  The idea is that doing what's right is what leads to the best outcomes, so that what seems like relatively abstract rules, maybe based on religion or something else, are actually helping people to do the right thing in a broader sense.  Oddly I think we are actually doing this, to some extent.  We don't kill each other because society needs us not to do that to remain stable.  But what about lying?  Here it gets odd.  Society as a larger system benefits from order and structure, from people acting on the greater good rather than their own immediate goals, but there are limits to how much an individual is going to go with all that, and how practical it could be.  There has to be some balance.  Lying is functional, almost necessary in some cases, but murder isn't.  Of course there are always exceptions; we define war, capital punishment, suicide or abortion as not being murder, as being ok, and then people tend to disagree over the definitions and allowances.  Laws fill in where the balance settles out, like restrictions on drug possession and use, but then even those can change over time.

Western philosophy covers lots more scope, way more than I could ever get into.  Problems about self and mind and language can be interesting, although the format those tend to be framed and discussed in wouldn't be interesting to most, maybe a bit dry, or abstract.  It takes a lot of work running through the prior thinking and some related schools of ideas so although we have minds and use language we couldn't really embrace the discussion and join right in, without putting in lots of research and effort.  In the end philosophy doesn't tend to really solve those anyway, because people are so complicated, and vary so much, so it's as much about people just having the interest, or basing their careers on the academic path, getting the next teaching job or tenure or paper published.  Undergrad philosophy classes can become a bit of an afterthought, although that does serve as one basis for all the rest.

All of this, compared to Buddhism

taking Buddhism as religion a bit far, with a cool cat

Is Buddhism philosophy?  Not really.  Maybe that's too simple, since lots of people take philosophy in lots of directions, and the same is true for Buddhism.  I studied two different sets of ideas as analytic Western philosophy (a very narrowly defined type in terms of approach, but covering a broad range):  Indian philosophy, in particularly Nagarjuna's Madhyamika Buddhism works, and Tibetan philosophy, sort of along the same lines, academic stuff, kind of abstract, pretty far removed from the eightfold path and dependent origination and the other Buddhism basics.


It's hard to do justice to what those ideas are about, or how the approach works.  Really it was part of an ongoing discussion (two, one for each country, school, and time period), what they were considering philosophy at one point, which in modern times philosophical study can see as close enough to be interesting (although to very few people).  If you wanted to look into all that Jay Garfield is probably the name that comes up the most related to modern study.

Back to placing conventional Buddhism, the rest of it.  A lot of how Buddhism is taken is religion, plain and simple, Zen and such.  It's definitely not philosophy in the modern Western sense but of course there can be undergrad philosophy classes on the subject anyway, and people writing papers, etc.  Zen is a good example of moving to the other side of the spectrum related to explanations of basic subjects, like how people experience reality, since it's more about indirect guidance for practice of changing that experience, about meditation and such.

One interesting part of Zen relates to use of koans, sort of an unconventional puzzle, for example "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"  There is no answer, of course, the idea is that if can somehow internalize the question you can break free of the constraints of normal perspective, to some extent.  How that works isn't supposed to be clear.  Someone could express their take on it, their experience of the meditation, a status of their own "internalization" process, to an instructor for their review, so to some extent coming up with answers makes sense, but not in an ordinary sense.  One hand can't clap, as they intend the question, so they don't mean that you can strike your palm with your fingers instead.


It might seem like basic teachings like the dependent origination model of human experience is much closer to philosophy (here is one reference on that, and the Wikipedia article, but really reading a few sources would make more sense to really get the sense of it).  The basic idea is that the Buddha talked about concepts like self (really in rejecting their was a permanent self, mostly, but what he meant isn't necessarily simple) and about experience, related to attachment (in a special sense), and this sort of maps out how ordinary mental experience works.

It's pretty far from logic, or modern philosophy of mind, or even modern psychology models.  Maybe if the subject of philosophy is interpreted broadly enough it is philosophy, but that's sort of cheating, since so is psychology and much of religion, if one stretches the concepts to mean things they normally don't, and they you still have the problem of one thing being in two categories.  So Buddhism is like philosophy, on a vaguely related but different scope, just based on completely different approach with completely different models, and different goals.

One main difference is that philosophy is supposed to be descriptive, about how all those subjects really work out once you analyze them more closely, and the basic theme of Buddhism is prescriptive, about not just describing how things are but filling in how to do better, how to experience things in a fundamentally different way.  It's not like Christianity, where some basic rules and teaching work together with some beliefs, ideas one is supposed to accept, since it's more complicated, and not tied to an afterlife or deity scheme.  Or at least in most forms it's really not, but it can be a bit diverse.

As with Western Philosophy even though the subject is human experience, which we are all already "doing," it's not necessarily easy to just jump right into discussion.  One would need to learn some basics first, and then learn further related to specific ideas one wants to follow up with more consideration of practice (meditation, changes to everyday life approach, etc.).  So this is a second main difference from Western philosophy, a lot more emphasis on doing specific things, and not just leading a more enlightened life in some general and abstract sense, typically.

To circle back to where all this started, it might sound like I'm saying that people with very little exposure to both Western philosophy and Buddhism might not have any luck with meaningful discussion in a Facebook group.  To step that back a little, I think with a more informed starting point they might be able to, without going out and getting a college degree, or cracking a half-dozen difficult texts.  But I think it would tend to run to nonsense if based on common sense takes instead, starting point questions like "the Buddha said that no self exists; what do you think?"  He meant something specific by that, and you don't get to the interesting considerations until you move a couple steps past ordinary understanding of such concepts.

Maybe most people don't even have an ordinary working understanding concept of "self," but whatever that would be it's not really what the Buddha was talking about.  One has to dig into the ideas a bit to see where it is all coming from and going, and only then can the process of applying the ideas to one's own experience can begin.  You don't have to memorize 30 or 40 Pali terms and read a few dozen core texts and interpretations but an ordinary worldview and common-sense level of understanding of Western psychology is not adequate preparation to make something of the ideas.

Put that way it sounds so judgmental, doesn't it?  Not to worry; that's just my take.  People can feel free to go on about misconceptions about quantum physics and vibrations and tuning in, and remain convinced that it really does somehow relate, or make sense.  Of course it's all complete nonsense, so they might as well be watching baseball instead, but as long as they don't screw up the rest of their worldview too much it wouldn't matter.  The internet being what it is they could even find other people that talk in similar ways, using similar words that make no real sense, that also imagine connections between the forms of nonsense and everyday life practices, like actual morality, or vegetarian diet, aligning chakras, wherever they take it.

Conclusion

In my own experience real Buddhism can be interesting, perhaps even helpful related to reviewing and slightly shifting an ordinary worldview.  It functions as a form of informed introspection, when both the ideas and then application to related practices and then to everyday life come together.  It's quite difficult to get some basics down, and finding a teacher to simplify or guide the process would be much more likely to be problematic than to be helpful, so a lot of good judgment would be required.


To some extent all of the same could be true of Western philosophy, or at least it could just be interesting.  Grabbing a random text and reading it might not be so meaningful but it couldn't hurt, and you never know.  Random, uninformed online discussion doesn't need to be completely irrelevant and slightly annoying but so far that's what I'm seeing.  To some extent it wouldn't take much of a starting point or much background for common sense to kick back in as being relevant.  For example related to the issue of whether morality as prescribed by society or religion is really just the best interests of society being expressed as a code to enforce best interest on a societal scale.  Someone could think about that without reading utilitarianism and might come up with some interesting ideas.  It wouldn't hurt to catch what others have said as well, the prior thinking, and the consideration and discussion would likely be much more developed and useful, if one had did that.

If anyone reading this has suggestions about the one exception out there where the discussion is just great let me know (maybe tell me on Facebook, here).  I meant no offense to anyone about their own views or discussion, and apologize if I've caused that.  There is room for a lot of different takes in every subject and this is all just my own related to philosophy, and of course it's only a rough sketch.