Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) — Book Review

23 March 2012

Citation

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (MIT Press, 2011)

Two preliminary questions and answers — what is a “bodhisattva” and what does “naturalized” mean in this context?

Bodhisattva — definition

Buddhism generally takes “bodhisattva” to mean one of two kinds of enlightened persons.

Note

The other kind of enlightened person is an arhat/arahant.

And the last step in the purported spiritual development process is sometimes thought of as being a buddha.

The bodhisattva designation can also mean someone, who is not yet enlightened, but who has courageously sworn to:

(a) become so

and

(b) to aid all other people and “sentient beings” to achieve enlightenment, as well.

I use the word “courageously” advisedly. A bodhissatva is roughly the equivalent of a (genuine) Christian saint. The determined self-sacrifice is essentially the same.

In the bodhisattva’s case sacrifice continues through what most Buddhists believe to be a very long cycle of lives, until that time that all “sentient beings” no longer suffer.

Given the eons foreseeably necessary to fulfill it, the bodhisattva’s vow is not a trivial one.

Naturalized — definition

Flanagan uses “naturalized” to indicate that he is trying to see whether one can strip Buddhism of its superstition and supernaturalism — and still have a life philosophy that accords with what science knows about the Universe.

His answer is yes.

My summarized assessment of this book? — For most readers, the volume’s tediously delivered intellectual obtuseness will outweigh its valuable insights

This is probably true, even for most of the tiny fraction of American readers that the title might appeal to.

Establishing a baseline for this review — a premise about effective writing and thinking

Three defining characteristics of an excellent communicative intellect are its abilities to:

(i) divide unrelated issues

and

(ii) stay clearly

and

(iii) concisely on track in the pursuit of each.

Evaluating The Bodhisattva’s Brain according to the above premise? — a sloppy miss

Flanagan’s writing and analysis are ornately self-indulgent, thematically incoherent, and mind-bogglingly repetitious.

The author’s painful verbosity presents an ironic antithesis to the simple Buddhist principles that he examines. Only rarely does one see such a (smack-the-face-silly) stylistic contrast between the examiner and the content he or she is looking at.

Nevertheless — once bought, the book’s bibliography and scattered Buddhist textual extracts do have very significant value

The most concise and insightful language in The Bodhisattva’s Brain comes from the Buddhist thinkers he quotes, not from Flanagan. But they are there.

And Dr. Flanagan’s bibliography is outstanding. Especially in regard to listing previous authors who have examined various Buddhist traditions. These are important scholarly titles that do not show up bookstores.

Despite my criticisms, I will keep my highlighted copy of the book.

Most telling negatives — (i) lack of thematic clarity and (ii) organizational incoherence

Dr. Flanagan never definitively describes his theme.

Without a clearly presented question or issue, readers are left to infer Flanagan’s purpose from the book’s title and from almost randomly distributed observations throughout volume. The absence of a clearly delineated theme accounts for the book’s annoying lack of analytical structure.

However, the book’s introduction does hint at what Flanagan was trying to do.

I have split the pertinent (and ridiculously long) paragraph, from which these two samples are taken, into shorter segments:

Imagine Buddhism without rebirth and without a karmic system that guarantees justice ultimately will be served, without nirvana, without bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, without Buddha worlds, without nonphysical states of mind, without any deities, without heaven and hell realms, without oracles, and without lamas who are reincarnations of lamas. What would be left?

Flanagan’s reply:

My answer is that what would remain would be an interesting and defensible philosophical theory with a metaphysics, a theory about what there is and how it is, an epistemology, a theory about how we come to know and what we can know, and an ethics, a theory about virtue and vice and how best to live. This philosophical theory is worthy of attention by analytic philosophers and scientific naturalists because it is deep. Buddhism naturalized . . . is compatible with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and with a commitment to scientific materialism.

However, the only point at which the reader gets a significant glimmer as to where Flanagan’s “naturalizing” argument is headed is by making inferences based on these words:

[A]mong the world’s still living spiritual traditions, Buddhism naturalized offers, along with Confucianism, which was always pretty naturalistic, an interesting, possibly useful way of conceiving of the human predicament, of thinking about meaning for finite material beings living in a material world.

“So, Pete — in the absence of a clearly stated theme — what do you think Owen Flanagan was trying to do?”

Based on my reading of the book’s introduction (and everything that followed it), Dr. Flanagan’s writing was intended to argue that:

(a) Buddhism can be sifted down to some core elements,

which

(b) accord with scientific Reality

and

But Flanagan badly trips himself with the first sentence of the “happiness hypothesis” he addresses at the very beginning of Chapter 1

There he asks:

What is the evidence for the claim that there is a connection between Buddhism and happiness?

This “happiness” question is irrelevant to proving the logically mandatory elements of Flanagan’s presumed theme

One would think that a book asking whether Buddhism’s core principles are in accord with science would begin by defining what sorts of evidence are required to prove the proposed compatibility.

But Flanagan skips this logically necessary step.

Listed in the logically necessary sequence of proofs, the elements of Flanagan’s deduced theme are:

Does Buddhism have core elements?

Can they be winnowed to accord with Reality?

Would living them result in a satisfying life?

Therefore, when Dr. Flanagan begins Chapter 1’s much too soon inquiry about the neurological basis of happiness, he gets the logically necessary sequence of proofs exactly backwards.

As he later repeatedly admits, a satisfying and virtuous life need not be a happy one.

There is another subtle oddity to Flanagan’s thinking in regard to raising the happiness issue first. Buddhism’s core principles are not about achieving happiness, at least insofar as Westerners understand that state of being.

Therefore, by focusing on happiness at the outset of his book, Flanagan is illegitimately taking:

(a) an incidental byproduct of living according to Buddhist principles

(b) a rigorous proxy for that religion’s compatibility with:

(i) scientifically described reality

and

(ii) pleasurable contentment.

This makes no sense. Why would I select something, which a religion specifically says it is definitively not about, to evaluate its worth in its own or anyone else’s eyes?

Happiness has nothing to do with seeing Reality accurately. And it has arguably little to do with living according to moral virtue.

One can even argue (as Flanagan eventually does) that seeing Reality for what it is might very well make one unhappy — no matter which spiritual principles one is living.

So, why did Dr. Flanagan begin Chapter 1 with a question that is essentially irrelevant to the “virtuous” and “flourishing” lives that he repeatedly emphasizes?

Where did Dr. Flanagan’s reasoning go wrong?

Analytically speaking, if an author is going to pretend to be rational, why not follow rationality’s rules regarding:

(a) precise issue definition

and

(b) incrementally constructed analytical sequence?

Flanagan’s “happiness” error introduces the book’s larger analytical disorganization

The Bodhisattva’s Brain fails to competently progress from one idea to another. It never builds “to” anywhere.

It is as if Dr. Flanagan pasted separate lectures on the same (inarticulately expressed) theme together — in the vain hope that the random assemblage would afterward miraculously display logical development.

Readers will know as much about Flanagan’s hazy perspective after finishing Chapter 1, as they will after closing its (final) Chapter 6.

The author says the same amorphous things, at length and equally obtusely, in six (only arbitrarily separated) chapters.

It is only when one reads the volume’s Postscript that one finally gets a glimmer of:

(a) what Flanagan organizationally thought he was trying do

and

(b) the conclusion he personally drew after his meandering effort.

Flanagan’s surprising failure to explain the book’s order, until readers get to his terminal after-thought

Flanagan competently states the organizational elements of his theme only in the book’s postscript:

The book you have just read has two parts, which overlap, intersect, and interweave in what I intend to be useful ways. I call part I “An Essay in Comparative Neurophilosophy.” It was devoted to introducing what, if anything, contemporary Buddhism has to offer as a theory of well-being, flourishing, and happiness.

The above selection is followed by more than a page of blather, and then this:

In part II, “Buddhism as a Natural Philosophy,” I used the deconstruction of the first part to advance the analysis of Buddhism as a form of life with attractive features for contemporary folk, specifically for members of two tribes I interact with regularly, indeed tribes that I belong to — analytic philosophers and scientific naturalists. Buddhism, I claim, should be of interest to philosophers because it offers a metaphysics that accepts the wisdom of impermanence, no self, the ubiquity of causation, and emptiness, an epistemology that is empiricist, and an ethics that prizes compassion . . . . Outside of Plato in the West, I know of no other philosophical theory that draws such intimate connections among metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

Dr. Flanagan’s lame excuse for his disorganized reasoning

Dr. Flanagan too generously lets himself off the hook in his postcript. He says that philosophy (as a subject) does not lend itself to the definitive proofs that mathematics does.

In making this non-apologetic statement, he seems to have forgotten that most people expect rational analysis to go incrementally somewhere, in a logical step by step fashion. Even under circumstances that eventually necessitate an, “I don’t know,” conclusion.

Poor organization aside — there is also a consistently displayed inability to write toward concisely delivered meanings

I illustrate my criticism of Dr. Flanagan’s writing style with four extracts.

On the positive side — if you can tolerate the slightly cavalier obtuseness of Sample One — you will (a) be able to finish the book and (b) take away its message.

On the negative side, Samples Two, Three, and Four illustrate the annoyances you will have to overcome to get there.

Sample One — Dr. Flanagan’s mildly inelegant writing style

I selected the following sentence because it is shorter and significantly more coherent than the occasional head-banging, paragraph-long monstrosities that Flanagan sometimes integrates into the text:

One reason eudaimonism is sexy, and flourishing and happiness are in, is because there is a perceived lack in what Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) calls the “project of enlightenment” — exemplified by consequentialist and Kantian moral theories — to pay adequate attention to personal flourishing or (what is related, but different) to the structure of human personality that would reliably lead people to do what is good and right as well as to flourishing and happiness.

Sample Two — excessively parenthetical writing

This second extract better illustrates the overall intellectual and organizational tone of the book.

I left this snippet as densely packed as it appears in the text:

Eudaimonia^Buddha = a stable sense of serenity and contentment (not the sort of hppy-happy-joy-joy-click-your-heels feeling state that is widely sought and promoted in the West as the best kind of happiness), where this serene and contented state is caused or constituted by enlightenment (bodhi)/wisdom (prajna) and virtue (sila, karuna) and meditation or mindfulness (samadhi). Wisdom consists of deeply absorbed (intellectually and meditatively) knowledge of impermanence, the causal interconnectedness of everything, that everything (buildings, plants, animals, stars) lacks immutable essences (emptiness), and, what follows from these, that I am anatman, a passing person, a person who passes, a process or unfolding that is known by a proper name, but that changes at every moment, until it passes from the realm of being altogether. The major virtues are these four conventional ones: right resolve (aiming to accomplish what is good without lust, avarice, and ill will), right livelihood (work that does not harm sentient beings, directly or indirectly), right speech (truth telling and not gossiping), right action (no killing, no sexual misconduct, no intoxicants), as well as these four exceptional virtues: compassion, lovingkindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Sample Three — verbosity in stating the obvious

Flanagan often states the obvious in unnecessarily prolix ways:

And it may be that, although the relevant conceptions of true virtue and true happiness are not intratheoretically defined in question-begging ways, the two respective conceptions are suited and/or designed to co-occur in the relevant ecologies. This may not be due to any mischievous sleight of hand, but rather to deep-seated and defensible ways that local ecological conditions have evolved and are designed to make the co-occurrence happen.

Sample Four — irritating dependence on Aristotle to make points about Buddhism — which have rationally nothing to do with Flanagan’s original “naturalistic” premise

Western philosophers frequently seem to have trouble recognizing that generic philosophy does not logically have to depend on Aristotle and Plato. Theirs was not the be-and-end-all of rational thinking. Yet, every time one turns around, up pops Aristotle as somehow comprising the relevant intellectual standard.

Flanagan engages in the following kind of reader-flagellating nonsense over and over again:

Aristotle and his Hellenistic heirs did have a response to these sorts of possibilities. But it is not clear that is save AL or Al’. The only standard of argument accepted by the bona fide therapists of desire — Hellenistic, possibly by Buddhist therapists too if one takes seriously the claim that false belief is bad, period — was one that legitimately showed that, and how, suffering could be alleviated and happiness of contentment won. Insofar as AL or AL’ is assumed, all such arguments have the same logical structure revealed by their major premise, which is stated explicitly or assumed as common background: treatment of ѱ leads to ethical improvement and only ethical improvement leads to happiness. If there were such things as grief or sadness fixes or euphoric joy producers that could do their magic by introducing false belief (“Your loved one is now happy and with God, you will join her later”), they were considered morally wrong. Aristotle’s law, either AL or AL’, if true, and according to the interpretation on offer, entails that the best such magic fixes can do is introduce a counterfeit of happiness, not the real thing.

The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized is not recommended — except for the very few people who have an intense interest in Buddhism’s scientifically acceptable core principles

This book’s stalled logic and its repetitious verbosity will overwhelm almost everyone else.

And, even if you are one of the chosen few, be sure to highlight the passages that interest you. Otherwise you will never find them again.

The book’s logic development is so disorganized that readers cannot depend on its (non-existing) progression to re-orient their memories regarding which interesting observation is hidden where.

On the other hand, Flanagan’s postscript and bibliography are good.

As I have indicated, I will keep my copy. But, knowing what I do now about Dr. Flanagan’s writing style and his lost-in-the-woods analysis, I would not re-buy it.

PeteFree.com

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) — Book Review