In the Bhagavad Gita, our hero, Arjuna, finds himself in a position of either fighting his cousins and elders, who have gone to war against him, or losing his kingdom and abandoning his duty as a warrior. As he surveys the battlefield, he turns to Krishna, who is taking the form of his charioteer, and inquires about how to make this decision and the nature of the good life.
The answer is a recipe: realize that pursuing happiness and pleasure is a trap. The fulfillment of a craving simply results in another craving. You might be tempted to solve this by getting really rich and then fulfilling all your cravings, but then you will find that old age, disease and death are not solvable through wealth (yet?).
The solution presented to the trap is to cultivate tranquility and serenity, through ample heaps of loving-kindness meditation (on the figure of Krishna). To be unattached from the fruit of one's actions but nonetheless do one's duty. And to orient one's life around a combination of attaining wisdom, loving devotion, and doing good actions.
Therefore, Arjuna should kill his cousins and regain his kingdom, following his duty. In so doing he should regard Krishna in awe and hold him in constant adoration.
This recipe is presented mostly in the first six chapters and the last two, with some but not great detail on the specific methods and meditations. Beyond that, there is a whole lot of religious trappings. But these trappings are useful, because they give examples of beliefs whose resulting emotional valence I could test out and play with. I read the whole thing asking myself three things: what is the belief that is being stated? what are the effects of this belief? How do I feel in my body holding this belief? Is there something close that is true and insightful?
For instance, consider the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. The belief being stated is that you are reincarnated after you die in a better or worse form depending on your actions. The effect of this belief is to work harder towards being a better person. The true and insightful part of it, I find, is that my personality and characteristics are pretty close to that of my father, and my life is influenced by his actions in the same way I will influence the life of possible future children. So the pattern lives on, and past instantiations of the pattern affect future instantiations. But it's not the case that you are literally reincarnated[^phenotype].
Here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?country=<del>IND&tab=line is a chart of the population of India. Under a stable population regime, the number of souls is constant and so reincarnation, and the notion that souls are eternal (neither appear nor disappear), is more plausible. But under an exponential population regime that is less plausible.
Some other beliefs and their implications that caught my attention were:
- One who thinks of Krishna at the time of his death goes to Krishna (a better state, essentially heaven) => people will think more of Krishna
- Nature of Krishna as a divine principle, and need for devotion to it => some very soothing and relaxing effects when meditating on it as an icon
- Emphasis on disciplic succession => strengthens the formal institutions who are able to provide access to that succession
- Belief in an afterlife => fighting more bravely => group succeeds
- acceptance of one's duty according to caste => greater social harmony
Anyways, a few decades ago, an Indian monk took this story and built a religious movement atop it, the Hare Krishnas. From the preface to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, recommended to me by a very attractive Hare Krishna adherent:
The forgetful living entities or conditioned souls have forgotten their relationship with the Supreme Lord, and they are engrossed in thinking of material activities. Just to transfer their thinking power to the spiritual sky, Krishna has given a great number of Vedic literatures. First He divided the Vedas into four, then He explained them in the Purāṇas, and for less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata. In the Mahābhārata there is given the Bhagavad-gītā.
I find it interesting that there is some level of design for this religion, where more advanced concepts that are not literally true are presented through metaphors and fables so that their beneficial consequences are accessible to the broader population. Followers of the Hare Krishna end up being extremely happy moment to moment (very good), but also end up believing the literal content of those fables (bad when it touches on real world decisions). For me, the challenge is to translate the 70 IQ fable version from 200 BCE to the 150 IQ version today, mining its insights. This might be changing something like worship of an icon into something like receptive contact with reality and ongoing gratefulness for its fruits, and implementing the mental motions behind the beliefs rather than adopting the beliefs themselves. Or meditating on an icon without believing in it literally.
In comparison with other ideologies I've been exposed to in my life, I notice I'm grateful to EA (Effective Altruism) for getting the part about happiness not coming from an attachment to material delights. But they didn't yet combine it with the part around orienting one's mind towards holding love (maybe towards some icon) moment to moment, and so depression is, or was, pretty common in those circles when I was more involved. I also notice that my interpretation of the core story here is very influenced and very colored by past Buddhist readings, perhaps too much. And I'm disappointed in my time spent on Greek and Western philosophy, because it just doesn't come out and give you as convincing[^nico] an anwer to the nature of the good life like that, and even the question it gives is more muddled.
These last years, I've been drifting around after Effective Altruism ceased to be a great container. I think pairing good actions with knowledge about the mental architecture I'm working with, and the mental motions that lead to satisfaction and towards stepping off the hedonic treadmill provide some of the answer I've been looking for.
[^phenotype]: I'm actually currently fairly confused about this, because besides having kids, you could also support people like you who are similar but don't share your genes.
[^nico]: E.g., compare with the Nicomachean Ethics.
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Notes -
Worth remembering that the Nichomachean Ethics is probably Aristotle's equivalent of boiling his philosophy down for 70 IQ plebs, maybe 100 IQ. Philosophers have esoteric doctrines just as much as prophets.
No! He was boiling it down for his own son, who was presumably pretty smart. And I read it when I was a 17 y.o. lad and honestly did not get that much out of it.
It was well-appreciated at the time that the written works of philosophers in general and Aristotle in particular were their exoteric arguments, not the full doctrine. Both Plutarch and Gellius describe an incident where Alexander reproached Aristotle for writing books, to which he responded:
I did exaggerate a bit, in that Aristotle probably also wrote some more popular, dumbed-down works which have since been lost. But the Nichomachean Ethics is not a 'treatise' in the modern sense, where an author unambiguously states the fullness of their argument. I don't believe the Greeks thought you could teach anyone that way (see the Meno, where Socrates teaches Meno about knowledge and virtue by step-by-step argument. Meno agrees, and then goes on to betray the Ten Thousand to the Persians). Paradoxically, in leaving Western philosophy and moving to these religious texts, you may have found the way to read that philosophy.
It's slightly different, of course. I'd tentatively say that the difference is that religious figures tend to believe they have a great truth, but one that is hard to get through to people who are less intelligent or temperate. Philosophers believed they had a great truth, and a truth that conferred great power, which as a result must be hidden from people who will half-grasp and misuse it, or who are smart enough to understand some but will fear and hate it. As such, their tactics of concealment and revealing differ.
Ok, this is a great point that was totally ommitted in my philosophy education. Do you have a best guess as to the esoteric content of Aristotle's philosophy?
I don't think anyone knows. In some sense it's lost to history, just as we can't truly know much of the esoteric stuff in the early Church. I think Heidegger gets a lot of it, and the new-ish Joe Sachs translations of Aristotle really change the game for reading Aristotle in English. Leo Strauss came up with this whole framework, but he's very cagey about saying what he thinks the esoteric doctrine of any given philosopher actually is. IMO this is because, for Strauss, esoteric writing is about more than just protecting the polis or the philosopher from bad actors - it's because all direct expression is inherently historical, grounded in its time, and so esoteric writing is necessary to address the eternal questions which span historical eras. It's in the process of puzzling out the esoteric doctrine that we get to touch those eternal questions.
Gun to my head, I think it's that Aristotle is much more of a process philosopher, even a sort of pan-vitalist, than he lets on. There's also probably a religious or mystical component to this that was never written down. Most of the things that we consider states of being in Aristotle are actually processes. Joe Sachs gets at it when he takes the word "Entelechy", usually translated as "Actuality", and translates it as "Being-at-work-staying-itself." Any Aristotle scholars reading this are probably groaning and saying yeah of course we knew this, but that's because it took Heidegger and Sachs to draw that out of Aristotle and return it to our knowledge.
So for instance, Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology:
Even though Heidegger likely believes that he's surpassing Aristotle here, I think this is probably a truer statement of Aristotle's beliefs and critique of Plato (accurate about Plato, though). This is somewhat symmetrical with his discussion of the Four Causes earlier in the essay, which makes me suspect that Heidegger knows this and is trying to overcome the simplistic readings of Aristotle that had become calcified into philosophical tradition.
Edit: rereading this, you know what, this just isn't a question I'm The Guy to answer. I'm too much of a Heideggerian; I'll always read Heidegger back into Aristotle. But, in my biased opinion, that's one of the better ways to read him.
Ok, then as a reader I'm torn beteween finding this really interesting, and a nice mechanism for forcing readers like myself to think more about stuff, but I will also gravitate towards mining insights from books that are more accessible and not so esoteric. So my initial dig does go through: the Bagadav Gita and the tradition of knowledge within which it is contained seems more transparent and fruitful to me.
I would say it is more transparent (if you think Aristotle's bad, wait till you get to Kant and Hegel. I don't think they even need to try to write esoterically...) for sure. I am generally suspicious of Western readings of Eastern texts, since the barrier for true scholarship is so high compared to Western philosophy - i.e. can you trust your secondary sources, translators, etc. - but you should go with what works for you. Western philosophy, outside of the Greeks and Romans, tends to avoid the question of happiness, and when it addresses that it generally focuses on the first steps of freeing oneself from pain rather than happymaxxing.
Have you looked into Jhourney at all or the Jhanas more generally?
Well I do speak German and I did get to some Kant and some Heidegger, found them very readable, but as you say it addresses a different question.
I looked into Mastering the Core Teachings of the Budha and buddhist introductions in that style but never really took it off. Jhourney looks interesting but also expensive.
Interesting, I found Kant an enjoyable read because of the ideas, but god, the prose - partly, I think, that's because the English Kant tradition makes a lot of really annoying translation choices, like "intuition" for "perception of an external object".
I've done a Jhourney retreat and it was great. I didn't hit a Jhana but many people did and I still found it very rewarding. Their approach is to treat the Jhanas as simply mental states, without a lot of the religious or mystical baggage, and try to find efficient ways to reach them. Very rat-adjacent. But yeah, super expensive for the in-person retreats and the online ones aren't exactly cheap either, definitely priced for their tech audience.
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