Gotama as Philosopher

Siddhattha Gotama as Philosopher

Because of his insistence on speaking of his achievement in the terms that he did—realization, freedom, ease, liberated consciousness, well being—Siddhattha Gotama (ca. 4th century B.C.E.; aka. the Buddha) invites a comparison to the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. Like them, he considered clarification of the matters given in these terms to be an obvious and necessary human pursuit.

But what does it mean to call him a “philosopher”? Certainly, he was not a philosopher in either the modern or scholastic sense of the word. That is, his intent was neither a comprehensive systematization of human knowledge nor an apologetics for divine revelation. Significantly, and contrary to how we typically conceive of philosophy today, Gotama considered his theories—about reality, perception, consciousness, etc.—to be rough schematizations of empirical observations. These observations, furthermore, ensued, he insisted, directly from something he referred to as cultivation (bhavana). Cultivation was two-fold. First, it involved a precise, sustained, and meditative investigation into the processes underlying the practitioner’s mental and affective experience. Second, in the very act of engaging in such an investigation, specific qualities were “aroused, developed, and fulfilled” by the practitioner. This valorizing of praxis as method, of course, in itself disqualifies Gotama as a philosopher in the mode of practitioners such as Hegel and Aquinas. Somewhat ironically perhaps, it also disqualifies our prototypical western philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle. This point, however, is not as self-evident as I make it sound.  The work of Pierre Hadot, the French scholar of Hellenistic and Roman thought, is helpful here.

Hadot has made it his life’s work to establish what he sees as the original function of philosophy in the ancient world; namely, as a “mode of life, as an act of living, as a way of being.” He writes,

Philosophical discourse . . . originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice-versa . . . . This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally to justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world. (What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 3)

Although this formulation may initially sound vague, it nonetheless serves to instigate our reorientation toward a revaluation of what we mean by “doing philosophy.” Today, what commonly counts as philosophical practice is the presentation of a set of tightly arranged propositions constituting, on the whole, an argument. Ancient philosophical practice, by contrast, consisted in “an invitation for each man to transform himself.” “Philosophy,” Hadot adds, “is conversion, transformation of the way of being and the way of living, the quest for wisdom.” “Wisdom,” indeed, was ostensibly the very purpose of the philosophical quest now and then.

“Wisdom” can, of course, be a simultaneously vacuous and grandiose notion. Too often, it connotes special knowledge of “mystical” matters, or of insight into cosmic truths normally veiled by human foibles. For both the Greeks and Gotama, on the contrary, wisdom meant practical knowledge concerning the living of life, of this very life. Both this knowledge and this living require, necessarily, insight into nothing more or less than reality as it is. This reality as it is, as it, that is, appears (in the sense of manifests) to us (yathabhuta was Gotama’s term, phenomenon, the Greeks’), however, is not, like Kant’s Ding an sich, a quality of being beyond the reach of the sensorium. On the contrary, it indicates precisely that which fills and permeates the sensorium; namely, the continual unfolding of one’s subjective experience. It may seem counterintuitive that knowledge of such an unfolding requires practice or cultivation to achieve. For, such knowledge, by definition, must be immediately available. But it is in fact a major presupposition of both Gotama and the Greeks that a clear-eyed view of our actual—that is, our phenomenologically evident—human situation (as desiring, cognizing, feeling, emoting, in short, experiencing, beings) is something acquired, or cultivated, rather than habitual.  As such, what was required of the practitioners of philosophy was the practiced removal of delusion. It was precisely this practiced removal that constituted “doing philosophy.”

I wonder what would  happen to Gotama’s teachings if we placed them–and Gotama’s life–in the milieu of the classical philosopher as outlined here. Would we have “Buddhism” at all? Would there be a place for the supernatural elements we find in the teachings of so many Buddhist teachers of the past and present? What price do we pay for continuing to see him as a kind of holy man? What might we gain by humanizing him?

I think that viewing Gotama’s teachings through the prism of the classical philosopher would significantly advance our understanding of the actual nature of his achievement and of his enduring legacy to humanity.

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