A daily slog by a few Catholic men through the Summa.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Q5A6: Now that's more like it. The good is composed of the useful, pleasurable and noble. The noble is defined as the telos of desire. Excellent. This reminds me of what Chesterton has to say about the antipathy between Christianity and Buddhism. The Faith is about the fulfillment of desire, not its extinction.
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As I work on Q5A1-2, I'm debating making a series of connections to Heidegger and to Buddhism (I think the convergence at Heidegger and the Kyoto School is one of the least-well-known titanic epochs in philosophy and religion). But long story short: I don't know that I would agree that Buddhism is (or must be) "pessimistic" or focused on "extinction" in the sense commonly thought in the West. I chalk this perception up mostly to Chesterton's having precious little opportunity to hear actual Buddhist thought (and to dour, dour Schopenhauer being one of the principle conduits of Eastern thought--from badly-translated Hindu works--to Western philosophy).
ReplyDeleteIn Thomistic terms, I would argue that Buddhism seeks a world of unlimited potential; and that it does so because it correctly recognizes that potentiality is "reduced" to actuality within our narrowed scope (i.e., with no purely actual God), and that this "reduction" is linked to the desireability of actuality (which is what it means to say things come to be, and are good).
If there is no pure-act God, as Buddhism presupposes; and if there is indeed moribund desire which perpetuates the [deeply privated--we might say "depraved"] actualization of potentialities far inferior to those which we cannot help thinking are real potentialities; then weakening the desirable/actual link, or rather reducing the pace of interactions caused by desire-and-actualize events, would seem to be a way to enjoy a better world, one of unlimited potential for good because of total lack of desire to actualize any of that potential.
Now, one might still take this as "pessimism," but I think we should speak of optimism or pessimism with regard to the prognosis, not the diagnosis; Buddhism says that the world has become enmeshed in futility, but it says that the world can return to its full potential, if we just understand the laws of reality. But the key, I am increasingly convinced, is that Buddhism rejects the priority of being over goodness, of intelligibility over desireability.
Hmmmm.....