PHILIP J. IVANHOE, OWEN FLANAGAN, VICTORIA HARRISON, HAGOP SARKISSIAN, AND ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL
The Oneness Hypothesis
A number of East Asian and Western thinkers argue that, in various ways, the self is inextricably intertwined with, a part of, or in some sense identical with the rest of the world. In recent interdisciplinary work, this general idea has been described as the “oneness hypothesis” (Ivanhoe 2015). The relationship between the self and the rest of the world at issue is more than the simple claim that we are connected with other people, creatures, and things—a claim that is not only in some sense obviously true but practically and morally ambiguous. At times, we find ourselves connected with other parts of the world to which we would strongly prefer not to be connected and have no obligation to be so united (think of malignant bacteria or tumors). The connections the oneness hypothesis advocates are those that conduce to the health, benefit, and improvement of both individuals and the larger wholes of which they are parts. This is why, as we shall see, the ideal of oneness often gets expressed by metaphors of natural organic unity and spontaneous activity, for example, about how a healthy person is connected to the various parts of her own well-functioning body.
While the oneness hypothesis is often described in terms of a “loss” of independence, self, or autonomy, the idea of organic unity shows this to be mistaken; the oneness that serves as the ideal is more accurately and helpfully understood as an argument for, or as providing ways to imagine and achieve, a more expansive conception of the self—a self that is seen as intimately connected with other people, creatures, and things in ways that conduce to their greater happiness, advantage, and well-being. In contemporary analytic philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, this general issue is more commonly discussed in terms of the “boundaries of the self,” and versions of a oneness view are found in such areas as epigenetics and process ontology for organisms (Dupré 2014) in biology. Eric Scerri draws upon a notion of oneness that he rightly sees as an “aspect of Eastern philosophy” to propose an alternative account of the history of science in which “the development of science should be regarded as one organic flow in which the individual worker bees are all contributing to the good of the hive” (Scerri 2016, xxiv, xix). Kathleen M. Higgins, developing R. G. Laing’s insights about the importance of being “ontologically secure,” argues that music has the capacity to engender a greater sense of connection between the self and the world, including “feelings of being at home in and supported by the world” (Higgins 2012, 147). Recent work in the field of extended cognition also challenges traditional assumptions that the proper scope of the mind and by implication the self stops at the boundaries of the skin and skull (Chemero 2009, Menary 2010). The implications of such a view are quite remarkable and directly challenge accounts of the self that are found in a broad range of disciplines including (but not limited to) philosophy, religion, political theory, sociology, environmental studies, and psychology. This volume focuses on philosophy, religion, and psychology but draws upon other disciplines, such as evolutionary theory and cognitive neuroscience, when these are revealing or otherwise analytically helpful. This more expansive view of the self challenges widespread and uncritically accepted views about the strong (some would say, hyper) individualism that characterizes many contemporary Western theories of the self, but it also has profound implications for a range of practical concerns such as how we conceive of and might seek to care for the people, creatures, and things of the world.
The aim of this volume is focused on describing versions of the oneness hypothesis as found in a variety of philosophical, religious, and psychological writings, evaluating their plausibility, and exploring some of their major implications. We intend this anthology to serve as an important first step in the larger project of developing a new and psychologically well-grounded (Flanagan 1991) model for reflecting on conceptions of the good human life and, in particular, our relationship to and responsibility for the rest of the natural world that can inform and guide a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. How would our view of ourselves change, and how would our approach and views about ethical, social, political, or spiritual life change, if we begin with the belief that we all are deeply and inextricably interconnected with other people, creatures, and things, and that our own flourishing and happiness is bound up with the well-being of the rest of the world?
Two aspects of the oneness hypothesis can be distinguished: a metaphysical aspect and a normative aspect. Metaphysical oneness involves an expansive conception of the self as a metaphysical object—a self that extends to include or partly include family, community, or large parts of the environment. Normative oneness rejects the idea that rationality depends on an individualistic conception of one’s “self-interest.” The metaphysical and normative aspects of oneness are separable. For example, a philosopher might accept a strict metaphysical individualism while embracing normative oneness. However, they are also related in that commitment to a strong form of metaphysical oneness renders the normative individualistic conception of “self-interest” incoherent.
Indeed, much contemporary ethical, political, economic, and social theory assumes, without evidence or argument, a picture of the self that is strongly individualistic, what we call the hyperindividualistic conception of the self (Freud 1949, Nozick 1974, O’Neill 1993, Rawls 1999). Such a self is thought to pursue largely self-centered calculations and plans and to enter into agreements and contracts with others in a strategic effort to maximize its own best interests. Even though this model has been shown to be extremely poor at predicting how people actually behave (Sen 1977), and is even less successful in leading people to actually track their best interests (Haybron 2008, 225–51), it is still widely employed and largely regarded as representing not only the best way to be but also the way people are. The first of these claims is highly dubious and the last is patently false. Many cultures around the world, especially those in Africa, South and East Asia, Southern Europe, and South America have developed and employ conceptions of the self that are relational—organically and inextricably interrelated with other people, creatures, and things. Similar views have been and are defended in regard to ethical and political forms of life.
Buddhism, a complex, venerable, and influential global religion, is well known for its view that there is no separate and enduring self, and that the delusion that such an enduring self exists is the source of all suffering. While the expression of this core claim about the nature of the self varies across the different strands of the tradition, the idea can be understood as describing the polar opposite of the hyperindividualist view. People in Buddhist societies throughout time and around the world have lived perfectly normal lives in light of such a conception of the self, and many have lived lives of exemplary virtue and especially of immense compassion. Daoism is another of the several East Asian traditions that maintain the world is a grand interconnected whole, with each and every aspect enjoying the same moral status; as Zhuangzi (370–287 BCE) describes it, conceiving the world in such a fashion is a “sorting that evens things out.” Many Daoists believe that it is only humanity’s propensity to puff itself up and see itself as the only locus of genuine value among things that leads it to disrupt the natural harmony of the world and prey upon one another as well as other creatures and things. Like Buddhists, Daoists do not deny the genuine and healthy everyday regard we have for our own interests; the object of their criticism is not so much a concern with the self but a mistaken conception of the self that leads to self-centeredness and even selfishness (a related but different failing). Confucians agree with Buddhists and Daoists that the self is more a corporate than isolated entity, that human beings are familial, social, and cultural creatures whose natural state is community, and whose innate tendencies for cooperation and compassion have made their distinctive form of life possible. Such a view of human nature highlights the degree to which meaningful, satisfying, and happy human lives require recognizing, respecting, and caring not only for other people, but for other creatures and things as well. Under the influence of Daoism and Buddhism, later Confucians, known collectively as neo-Confucians, developed a dramatic version of such a view based on the idea that morally cultivated people “regard heaven, earth, and the myriad things as one body” (tiandi wanwu wei yiti 天地萬物為一體) (Cheng and Cheng 2004, Wang 1997, Zhang 2004, Zhu 1986).
Such a conception of the self is by no means exclusively South or East Asian. In the West, the notion of the Great Chain of Being (scala naturae), an idea with a long and venerable history, offers another example of this kind of view. It finds some of its earliest forms in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and was later dramatically developed into a powerful new form by Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, in the third century CE. Primarily through Neoplatonism, it became an important part of a great deal of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought, evolving into its most mature expression in the early modern Neoplatonism of the Middle Ages. For our purposes, the Great Chain of Being is important because it links every part of the natural world—living and nonliving—as well as every feature of the supernatural world in a strict, hierarchical structure believed to have been designed and decreed by God. At the top of the hierarchy stands God and below God are all supernatural beings—the different forms of angels and demons. Farther down the hierarchy one finds the stars, planets, moon, and other celestial bodies, then kings, princes, nobles, commoners, domesticated and wild animals, plants, precious stones and metals, and more mundane and common minerals. Setting aside the strictly hierarchical ordering, the crucial thing to note in this grand scheme is that not a single thing exists in isolation, and each and every thing has a form and function within the whole. Human beings are not independent individuals who set and pursue ends that are largely of their own design; rather, they too have a distinct and normatively binding role to play in the great drama that is the cosmos.
Modern thought has generated several wholly naturalized versions of the oneness hypothesis, and the present project reflects several of these. In general, environmental ethics begins with the recognition that human beings are related in complex and intricate ways not only to other people, but also to other creatures and things as well. We are not separate from but integral parts of the greater environment or world, both historically and relationally, and through recognizing this connection and its implications for all concerned we come to see that we have moral obligations that are not evident or salient from the hyperindividualist perspective (Leopold 1968, Callicott 1989). Political philosophy too arguably begins with some kind of recognition of at least our relationship with and obligations toward other people (though the strength and degree to which this insight is maintained and defended varies considerably). Political theories like communitarianism express a view of the self that is closely related to the general form of the oneness hypothesis, insisting that human beings are inevitably embedded within, and partly defined by, the complex set of relationships they find themselves suspended within—simply by virtue of being human. We are not—as hyperindividualist theories of politics would have it—“unencumbered selves” (Sandel 1984) but beings who are to a significant extent constituted by our relationships. More directly and fundamentally, some modern theorists of the self take their inspiration from recent work in evolutionary biology, arguing that environment—from cytoplasm, to uterus, to family and social setting—plays a dominant and underappreciated role in the formation of the self: epigenetic factors take precedence over things like genes. A related, social-scientific expression of such a view is found in those theorists—American Pragmatists (James 1890, Dewey 1925, and Mead 1934) as well as advocates of the dialogic self (Bakhtin 1981)—who emphasize the primacy of the social over the individual.
Brief Descriptions of the Contributions to This Volume
In our first contribution to part 1 of this volume, “Oneness: A Big History Perspective,” Victoria S. Harrison explores the oneness hypothesis from the perspective of big history, seeking to place the idea that we are intertwined with other people, creatures, and things in the “broad context of global intellectual and cultural history.” Big history conceives of human history as marked by a fairly small number of dramatic and large-scale transformations in social and cultural paradigms, patterns, and practices. Such transformations result from complex processes that often build up gradually over time but then profoundly and fundamentally alter the way human life is conceived, lived, and experienced. On such a view, history is seen more in terms of paradigm shifts, which punctuate the course of historical events and alter its trajectory. Most big historians recognize at least three examples of such major historical transformation. The first occurred about fifty thousand years ago in response to the challenges posed by the last ice age and marked by the earliest appearance of various forms of symbolic representation. The second occurred at the end of the last ice age, about eleven thousand years ago, when humans started to show a preference for more settled life, marked by things like the domestication of animals and plants. The third episode occurred around five thousand years ago, when the first cities and states began to take shape.
Harrison contends that big history can offer important insights into “ideas about the self and the significance of human life in the context of the wider cosmos,” which might well lead us to conclude that “prior to the move towards urbanisation the self was predominantly experienced and understood within the framework of possibilities provided by … a oneness perspective.” Very roughly, the thought is that prior to this time people experienced and conceived of themselves primarily in terms of the clear roles they played and the positions they held within families, tribes, and the larger biological environment; in other words, they saw themselves as intricately interconnected with other people, creatures, and things—as one with them. The Axial Age (800–200 BCE) marked a dramatic shift away from forms of life focusing on one’s place in the cosmos and one’s obligation to maintain it through ritual and sacrifice to those calling upon individuals to engage in different forms of more personal spiritual transformation. This change reflected a profound big history shift in how human lives were lived during this period: life in urban settings presupposed complex and fine-grained divisions of labor, opened up new vocations, and called on people to negotiate other dramatic, novel, and fast-changing social conditions that did not sit well with the earlier perspective of oneness.
Nevertheless, since these new forms of human life emerged out of and overlaid older models that had existed and shaped human beings for vast stretches of time, the old ways were never wholly effaced. As Robert N. Bellah, echoing Hegel, notes, “nothing is ever lost” (Bellah 2011, Xiao 2015). As a result, “traces of a oneness perspective can still be discerned within later philosophical and religious worldviews that do not seem immediately aligned to it.” Harrison suggests that perhaps a general form of the oneness hypothesis may explain features of human experience that are embedded in “our biology and our long history as a species.” This would not only leave open but to some extent favor the development of contemporary conceptions of the self that either are based upon or incorporate important features of the oneness perspective. In any event, if Harrison’s account is true, it shows that such a perspective is not only a possible resource for contemporary people but also comes with a long, complex, and well-attested history.
In our second contribution, “Oneness and Its Discontent: Contesting Ren in Classical Chinese Philosophy,” Tao Jiang identifies and analyzes what he sees as an important underlying tension between humaneness (ren 仁), which he understands as expressing a conception of oneness, and justice, which he understands as offering a contrasting picture of the self and morality, among pre-Qin Chinese philosophers and in particular among early Confucian and Mohist thinkers. He understands humaneness as an agent-relative virtue defined by the natural tendency to care more for, and on this basis show partiality toward, “those who are spacio-temporally close to us, especially our family members.” In contrast, justice is an agent-neutral virtue characterized by disinterested appraisal based upon clear, publicly available standards. One of Jiang’s aims is to challenge the common scholarly tendency to associate humanness with Confucianism and justice with Mohism; rather, we should note that the tension described by the juxtaposition between these two moral ideals served as a shared theme and site of contention within both schools of philosophy, with the Mohists highlighting and harmonizing the tension expressed by the Confucians.
The tension that Jiang explores is represented clearly in Analects 13.18, where Kongzi (Confucius) famously claims that an upright son should cover for his father if his father steals a sheep. Rather than seeking to resolve this tension, Jiang argues we should use it as a lens through which to understand and appreciate the conflicted “moral universe presented in the Analects.” He does this by proposing readings of several passages in the Analects that concern ren, that present it as deeply and centrally concerned with justice. Another way Jiang works to make his case is by offering an interpretation of Kongzi’s formulation of the Golden Rule—which explicitly concerns the concept of ren—that highlights the ways in which it supports an obligation to treat others with justice. In particular, Jiang notes and develops the idea that Kongzi’s version of the Golden Rule insists that actions be “reversible” between agents and recipients, generating “a leveling effect … neutralizing the moral agent’s personal preference and privileged status when it comes to the determination of what is and is not proper” and that such “reversibility lies at the heart of any conception of justice.”
One of the most original and provocative aspects of Jiang’s essay is his claim that members of the Mohist school “disambiguate the notion of ren in Confucius’s teaching by putting the Golden Rule into practice and push ren to its logical conclusion, thereby pioneering a powerful theory of impartial care and universal justice in Chinese intellectual history.” In other words, Jiang sees the Mohists as taking up Kongzi’s idea of the Golden Rule, following out its implications, and developing it into a systematic and powerful moral theory. This theory is most clearly represented in their signature teaching of impartial care (jian ai 兼愛). Impartial care is the “logical conclusion” of applying the Golden Rule to ren. The thought seems to be that we should love or care for others as we want to be loved and cared for. If we reinforce this idea with the Mohist belief that Heaven cares for all impartially, we might come to believe we should care for all in the same manner and can do so by expanding and being guided by our own desire for care. Such a view combines benevolence with justice by advocating an obligation to take care of, and perhaps even care for, all, with partiality toward none.
Many systems of ethics challenge us to give greater consideration to the needs, desires, and dignity of other people, creatures, and things and thereby to overcome a natural human tendency toward self-centeredness and selfishness. In this respect, ethics often and perhaps fundamentally ought to be concerned with encouraging a greater sense of oneness between ourselves and other parts of the world. Ethical systems that encourage care or benevolence certainly rely upon our inclination to believe that others feel, need, and value in ways quite similar to the ways in which we feel, need, and value; they thereby endorse the idea that in these respects we are one. On the other hand, those who advocate justice in its various forms insist in one way or another that we owe others many of the same basic rights and goods that not only we desire but that every creature of a certain kind merits and can demand. This leads, in thinkers like Kant, to embracing the ideal of a kingdom of ends, or in the case of the Mohists to an imperative to take care of and perhaps care for all impartially. Perhaps such views as well can be understood as more formal ways to express the normative ideal of oneness.
In “One Alone and Many,” Stephen R. L. Clark provides a nuanced and original reading of Plotinus that seeks to illuminate the connection between his mysticism and his moral outlook. Clark argues that a correct interpretation of Plotinus will regard “the flight of the alone to the Alone” not as a rejection of community and morality, but rather as a turn toward these. Monos, as Clark explains, is often misleadingly translated as “solitary,” and this leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding of Plotinus’s position. Plotinus was not principally concerned with solitude, Clark avers, but with purity and undistractedness—both of which have profound implications for moral practice. In line with this interpretation, Clark provides a way of reading certain passages of Plotinus that have struck other readers as uncompassionate and as having little bearing on practical moral action.
Clark begins his argument by exploring the contours of the contrast frequently drawn between “mysticism” and “morality.” Clark argues that the familiar neat contrast between the mystic, who is concerned with matters beyond this world, and the moralist, who regards the desire to improve the world as of primary importance, cannot help us to understand Plotinus. According to Porphyry, as Clark recounts, Plotinus was actively concerned with practical moral issues and acted according to his moral convictions. Clark provides the example of Plotinus looking “after the property of the orphans left in his care, in case they turned out not to be philosophers.” As Clark also notes, Plotinus was not lacking in practical ambitions for the betterment of society. He wanted, for instance, to found a city. Yet this was the same man who wrote that “we should be spectators of murders, and all deaths, and takings and sacking of cities, as if they were on the stages of theatres” (Enneads III.2 [47].15, 44f).
The first step toward reevaluating Plotinus’s moral position and coming to a more accurate appreciate of the delicate balance he achieved between “morality” and “mysticism” lies in ceasing to read him through the lenses provided by our contemporary moral assumptions, which are permeated, Clark argues, with the conviction that pain is to be avoided. As Clark points out, in the ancient world much pain simply could not be avoided. The pressing moral question concerned how it could be borne. Plotinus’s answer to this question was presented within the framework of his account of the relationship between the One and the many, a relationship that Clark discusses using Plotinus’s metaphor of a dance to depict the all-encompassing reality of which every individual is a part. Through this metaphor and a careful rereading of key passages, Clark persuasively argues that in Plotinus’s work “we find a mystical expression of oneness that entails a practical morality of profound and universal care.”
In “Oneness, Aspects, and the Neo-Confucians,” Donald L. M. Baxter defends the characteristic neo-Confucian metaphysical claim of identity with the universe and everything in it as well as its related normative teaching that “this identity explains a natural concern for everyone and everything, not just for our narrow selves.” Baxter sees clearly the critical and tight relationship between neo-Confucian metaphysics and ethics and recognizes that if the metaphysical picture cannot be defended, neo-Confucians will lose the primary foundation for their distinctive ethical claims. Neo-Confucian metaphysics is not self-evident and in fact seems to involve some rather challenging claims. Many of the things we encounter in the universe differ from one another in the sense that they have qualities that others lack. But if all of these apparently different things are in the end one and the same, then the one thing they all turn out to be differs from itself and this seems to involve a contradiction. Baxter draws upon his theory of aspects—a theory of qualitative self-differing—in order to resolve the apparent contradiction; according to his account “I and everyone else and everything else are aspects of the One—the universe itself.” After introducing, motivating, and defending his theory of aspects, he goes on to discuss two objections concerning the ethical view that rests upon neo-Confucian and other related claims about oneness, namely, that it challenges the possibility of altruism, and that it entails equal concern for everyone and everything, including concern for unappealing or despicable aspects of the universe.
Baxter begins by introducing his theory of aspects, which explains how numerically identical things can differ qualitatively. Aspects are not entities nor are they qualities, though they possess qualities. Aspects are numerically identical to but not the same as the individuals of which they are aspects; they are not the same because they lack some of the qualities the individuals have yet they are not simply parts of these individuals. Baxter refers to such cases as “qualitative self-differing” and stipulates that what self-differs in such cases are the “aspects” of the individual. He sums up the view by saying, “For the case to be one of differing, one aspect must have a quality that somehow the other aspect lacks. For it to be a case of self-differing, the aspects must be numerically identical with the individual that self-differs.”
Baxter motivates his theory of aspects by presenting an account of someone who is torn about what to do or how to feel. Euripides’s Medea struggles with herself about whether to kill her children to punish their father, Jason, who has abandoned her. Deploying his notion of aspects, Baxter argues against any interpretation that describes this struggle in terms of different parts of Medea being in conflict. The struggle is within a single person, a unified consciousness; it is between two aspects of Medea, “Medea insofar as she is enraged at Jason versus Medea insofar as she loves her children.”
One common objection to views like Baxter’s theory of aspects is that it violates Leibniz’s Law (also known as the Indiscernibility of Identicals), which claims, roughly, that if two things are identical then anything true of either is true of the other as well. Baxter fends off such objections by arguing that Leibniz’s Law “applies only to complete entities such as individuals.” Since aspects are not complete entities they escape this objection and provide a way to defend conceptions of identity or oneness like that espoused by neo-Confucians, which claims there is only one individual—one body—the universe itself and that “everyone and everything, including oneself, are aspects of the One.”
Baxter then turns to address two apparently troubling ethical implications of such a view. First, if all is One, there are no others who can stand as the recipients of altruistic concern; second, even if there were such others, it would seem that our universal concern would extend to the undeserving and even the repugnant as well as the deserving good among them. Baxter defends his aspect account of oneness from both these challenges. In response to the first, he notes that, on his view, beyond the aspect of the One that is the narrow self are other aspects of the One, and these can be fitting objects of altruistic concern. In response to the second challenge, Baxter argues that the fitting concern one should have for everyone and everything as aspects of the One does not entail equal and indiscriminate concern for each and every aspect. It is fully consistent with and possible under the theory of aspects to recognize that some are more deserving than others: “Universal concern need not entail universal impartiality.” This final point might appear to reintroduce grounds for excessive partiality for the narrow self and its interests and concerns. Baxter fends off such criticism by noting that the oneness that lies at the heart of his theory of aspects removes the foundation needed to justify “our overweening concern with the narrow self.” Having eliminated this foundation, self-centeredness and selfishness have no basis or support.
In “One-to-One Fellow Feeling, Universal Identification and Oneness, and Group Solidarities,” Lawrence Blum explores four related themes concerned with compassion or fellow feeling for other human beings, which are sometimes expressed in the language of “oneness.” The first of these is whether compassion is particularized by being directed toward a specific human being or universally expressed toward all. Blum’s second concern is the nature and extent to which subjects of fellow feeling are aware of, and focus upon their identities as distinct from, those toward whom they have fellow feeling. Third, he examines the relationship between oneness and different group solidarities, such as those of a racial or ethnic character. Blum’s fourth and final concern picks up a theme that animates much of Flanagan’s contribution: the relation between metaphysics and ethics.
Blum begins his essay by describing and analyzing the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who argued that compassion, by which he meant “an affective phenomenon involving taking the weal or woe of another as a direct motive of action to assist the other,” is the basis for morality. He notes that Schopenhauer regarded compassion as psychologically mysterious—a form of “practical mysticism”—and that he offered several not wholly consistent accounts of what compassion means, ranging from recognizing and loving “his own inner nature and self in all others,” which seems problematically self-centered, to “making less of a distinction” between self and other, which seems quite preferable. We need metaphysics in order to justify compassion: “In the noumenal world, everything is one, a unity, so the compassionate person is in touch with the reality of that world because he makes no distinction between himself and others.” It is not altogether clear, though, whether for Schopenhauer the compassion follows from a grasp of the metaphysical truth or is simply an expression of the way things fundamentally happen to be. Here we see themes that also engaged the attention of Flanagan.
Max Scheler, who was influenced by Schopenhauer, writes on many of these same topics but emphasized, in a way Schopenhauer did not, that the person expressing compassion must have a clear sense of herself as an individual distinct from the one toward whom she feels compassion; she must not confuse herself with the target of her feelings, as compassion does not involve the identity of self and other but rather extends the self to include others, thereby transcending the self. Without this vivid recognition of the difference between self and other, the person feeling compassion will lack the appropriate sense of the other as other and this is necessary in order for concern to have moral worth. Blum notes the similarity between this aspect of Scheler’s views and those of a number of contemporary feminists. He also provides a careful comparison with the related but contrasting view of Iris Murdoch, who proposed a more cognitive, perceptual view grounded in a larger frame of moral realism. Her view refocuses attention on the ways in which metaphysics can and perhaps must play a role in ethics and how it does so in views, like hers, inspired by Plato.
Group solidarities present a clear example of nonmetaphysical oneness and Blum offers a range of insights based on the particular example of ethnic or racial group solidarities. One can identify with other members of such groups based on their shared group identity while being clearly aware of other differences between oneself and other members of the group—for example, through a different understanding of a shared experience. Group solidarity entails concern for a group and for members of the group as members. However, in almost all cases such concern in not all encompassing, but instead limited to particular features of shared experience or history, or to certain circumstances or times. Here we see a permeable, fungible, and complex array of different senses of oneness within groups. Blum introduces the African American philosophers Charles Johnson and Tommie Shelby as offering particularly interesting and powerful insights regarding how such group identity can offer a ground and starting point for group or universal teaching and identity. It is simply true that as a group African Americans have suffered more than most. This can be the source of solidarity within the African American community, but it can also testify to a basic condition of humanity—the fact of suffering—and inspire solidarity beyond the community.
Blum further explores the sense of oneness and solidarity by discussing aspects of the film Selma, about a march for voting rights led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965 in Alabama. The film “vividly recreates the sense of solidarity among the marchers, all seeing themselves as part of a single entity, a movement, with which they all identify. When some marchers are beaten, others rush to help them. They do not feel a sense of separateness from one another.” This sense of oneness need not be confined to race- or ethnicity-based forms of solidarity and indeed this was shown (both in history and in this film) when King reached out to those beyond the African American community to join in the pursuit of its noble ends. This example leads Blum to argue for three bases of solidarity: experience, group membership, and political commitment. Such sources of solidarity can inspire a form of universalism expressed in Martin Luther King’s vision of “the beloved community,” which Blum describes as “a vision of the future in which white, black, and other would live together in harmony, accepting one another as fellow citizens and fellow human beings in an overarching community of care and concern.” Reprising some of the themes with which he began his contribution, Blum makes clear that King’s vision did not aim to erase racial identity or the distinct individuality of members within the different communities that comprise it. In these ways, the beloved community and the different racial and ethnic groups that constitute it offer important lessons about and an ideal example of healthy forms of oneness.
It should be evident to all that the capacity for and practice of care has been critical for the success of our species and profoundly shapes the forms that human societies take and the values we find within them. Nevertheless, as Kittay points out in her contribution to this volume, “The Relationality and the Normativity of An Ethic of Care,” a description and analysis of care “as moral theory is still in its infancy—at least in the West.” Most of the work aimed at articulating different expressions of an ethics of care has been done by contemporary women philosophers; the most influential examples of such work not only explicitly address the question of the nature of the self but also challenge the dominant hyperindividualism that is characteristic of mainstream philosophical writings. Such views clearly should be understood as expressions of the oneness hypothesis; they hold, as Kittay explains, that “selves are porous and connected, situated in a web of relationships where even those far from us are bound to us with invisible but morally important threads.”
At the heart of Kittay’s essay is a highly original, insightful, and challenging account of the nature of care. One of the first features she argues for in crafting her account of care is the need to care about care. Drawing a parallel with Royce’s analysis of loyalty, she shows how caring about care is necessary in order to ensure that one works to create and protect the conditions to pursue what we might call first-order care. Without such second-order concern, caring will lack the “moral validation that makes a practice fully normative.” This point is related to another key feature of her account of care, which concerns attending to what she refers to as “people’s CARES”; she means by this term “those things people care about, which figure in their flourishing and in the case of persons who need care, they cannot accomplish without the proper assistance.” Attending to people’s cares offers an example of caring about care, for it keeps us alert and attentive to creating and preserving the conditions and environment required to perform acts of first-order care. This not only honors care as our supreme and organizing good, but also keeps in focus the importance of interpersonal connection, which is part of the conception of self associated with this expression of oneness. If we recognize the priority of care, we accept the priority of relationships as constitutive of the self and will work to preserve conditions and environments conducive to such relationships as well as the particular relationships we are in.
Drawing upon her extensive and inspiring practice of care, Kittay goes on to explore another important but unrecognized dimension of caring: the ways in which the reception of care constitutes a critical part of the practice and how it completes care. The core claim here concerns what Kittay calls the “taking up of care.” It is often thought that when we care for and benefit another, the recipient of our care is largely passive. This in fact is one of the reasons the reception of care often goes unnoticed. But in order for care to be “something we do for another’s benefit” (as opposed to to them), it is something we must do “with their engagement.” This feature of care distinguishes it from many other dispositions widely regarded as virtues. Caring is a distinctive type of activity. It requires that the agent providing care intend to care in a way attentive to the taking up of care; it also, though, requires that this care in fact be taken up by the recipient of care. This latter claim distinguishes Kittay’s account from other theories of care; on her view, even the most well-directed and sincere effort to care is at best “partial” if not taken up by the recipient of care.
The fully normative account of care that Kittay describes and defends entails additional implications, which she points out and discusses in the closing sections of her essay. One of these involves a novel understanding of the notion of moral luck. More familiar conceptions of moral luck would accept the idea that many of the background or enabling conditions for care often involve luck: one needs the ability, resources, and opportunity to provide care. Kittay’s account, though, which insists that even competent and sincerely offered care be taken up in order to be complete, entails an additional dimension of moral luck; care givers must enjoy good fortune in order for the care they offer to be received by the cared-for. This need for the reception of care leads to a final implication: whether there exists an obligation to receive care. Kittay argues that there is such an obligation, though it is limited to cases of appropriately offered care. Such an obligation is warranted “because refusing care when it is offered in good faith and with requisite competence is harmful, both to myself and to the carer.” One might add that refusing such care fails to honor the imperative to care for care, for it almost certainly harms the conditions within which care can be offered.
Kittay’s contribution to this collection of essays offers a trenchant and highly stimulating account of care and particularly care in regard to cases of dependency. She makes a compelling case that such dependency extends far beyond human relationships, “to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we consume, the animals and creatures who share the world with us.” In light of such dependency, care is called for as a fundamental moral stance with universal application, founded in a view of the self as inextricably interdependent and one with the people, creatures, and things of the entire world.
Mark Unno contributes the seventh essay in our collection, “Oneness and Narrativity: A Comparative Case Study,” in which he explores the relevance of conceptions of oneness within the narrative context of human life, a theme or ideal that informs and guides a person’s story. This narrative approach to oneness not only enables us to see how this concept is enacted and made real in the course of different human lives but also allows us to examine some of the similarities and differences manifested in these variations on the shared theme.
Unno carefully presents and analyzes three contemporary first-person narratives for examination: one Zen Buddhist, one Pure Land Buddhist, and one Protestant Christian. The Zen Buddhist narrative describes the life path of an Irish American woman, Maura O’Halloran (1955–82), who went to study Zen Buddhism in a rural area of northern Japan. The Pure Land Buddhist narrative presents the story of a Japanese man, Shinmon Aoki (b. 1937), who, through a series of unanticipated events, finds himself making his living as a mortician, which, even more unexpectedly, ushers him on a journey that leads to Pure Land Buddhist awakening. The third and final narrative, that of a Protestant Christian, is the tale of Michael Morton (b. 1954), who after being wrongfully convicted of murder, spends nearly twenty-five years in prison, which leads him to embark upon a journey toward faith and to encountering the light of the Divine.
In each of these narratives, some element of the protagonist’s dominant master narrative proves oppressive or inadequate, generating counterstories that retell, alter, or overturn it. The emergence of these counterstories hinges on critical junctures or turning points where a personal realization of oneness either erupts from “deep within” or descends from a “higher power.” In the first case he explores, Maura O’Halloran sought a way to free herself from the master narrative of free-market capitalism in the global economy, which she found wholly unfulfilling. She set out on a different and demanding path, pursuing a three-year period of intensive Zen practice at Kannonji in rural Iwate Prefecture, Japan. After a prolonged and strenuous course of study, practice, and reflection, she was recognized as an awakened teacher; she fully realized the distinctive Zen understanding of oneness, the state where “ ‘ought’ issues spontaneously from ‘is’-ness,” as well as that great compassion “is the self-expression of the practitioner’s own self-identity as inseparable from the world.” Unno explores other dimensions of her life narrative and how it served as a vehicle for the expression of oneness by discussing and analyzing her struggles with the male-dominated, patriarchal culture of the Zen monastery at Kannonji, poignantly described in Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind, a collection of her journals and letters. This adds further richness, texture, and nuance to the story of her exemplary life and our understanding of oneness.
The next narrative, that of Shinmon Aoki, author of the memoir Coffinman, turns around the more lay-oriented Shin tradition of Pure Land Buddhism, the largest sectarian development of Japanese Buddhism, which focuses on the dynamic between blind passions and boundless compassion or foolish being and Amida Buddha. As a young man, Aoki finds himself facing the collapse of his business and with a family to support. Having few prospects, he answers a vaguely worded help-wanted ad, only to find out after accepting the job that it was for mortuary service, cleaning and dressing corpses for funerals. Shin Buddhism has made a special effort to embrace those on the margins of society, subject to prejudice because of “impure” livelihoods, such as morticians. And so, through the turning of fate, Aoki finds himself excluded by society’s master narrative, pushing him to develop his own counterstory that resonates with and finds support and fulfillment in the Pure Land tradition.
One day, Aoki’s practice leads him to a situation that holds great dread but proves to be of singular spiritual significance: he is asked to perform a coffining procedure at the home of his former girlfriend. Prospectively mortified to appear before her in this capacity, Aoki instead finds her deeply appreciative of him and his work. She becomes the conduit for boundless compassion, embracing him, a foolish being, just as he is. This acceptance and embrace lead him to see and embrace others and to understand and appreciate the work he does in a wholly different light, seeing it—and his own dignity and worth—for the first time. Aoki’s story presents multiple visions of oneness that “break through the conventional or master narrative of social expectations, and … empower Aoki to propel his self-narrative.”
In 1986, Michael Morton was wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder and separated from his three-year-old son, and he spent the next twenty-five years of his life in prison. It was only because of DNA evidence produced through the work of the Innocence Project that his conviction finally was overturned, and he was released from prison. The tragic course of his incarceration and struggle, however, led him to discover and embrace a greater truth and brighter light, the truth and light of the Divine, which he experienced one night in the darkness of his prison cell: “What I had seen and felt and heard was divine light—and divine love—and the presence of a power that I had sought, in one way or another, all my life.” This miraculous turning point in Morton’s life was preceded and precipitated by a great deal of suffering and a bottoming-out, reaching the point of having been ground down and worn away, standing without any sense of power or hope on the edge and staring into the abyss. In that moment the experience of being bathed in the oneness of the divine light gave Morton the strength to endure and to forgive; it freed him from the master narrative that had consumed him and everything he had held dear and opened up a new path for him to follow: a path that led him to freedom, redemption, and reconciliation. The counterstory he constructed, along with those of O’Halloran and Aoki, allows us to touch in imagination different manifestations of oneness and feel its palpable presence in these three remarkable lives.
In “Kant, Buddhism, and Self-Centered Vice,” Bradford Cokelet argues that the Kantian conception of treating people as ends in themselves and not mere means, while offering us an important insight into moral behavior, cannot be adequately understood much less attained within a Kantian framework, and that Buddhist philosophy has resources that can help address such shortcomings. In order to achieve the goal of treating others as ends we need to begin with a substantive account of the ideal that, Cokelet suggests, “calls on us both to reach out to others in a positive way (to treat others as ends in themselves) and to exercise self-restraint in our interactions with others (to never treat them as mere means).… The ideal calls on us to act with both love/devotion and respect.” A full account of the ideal of treating people as final ends will also describe and explain negative motivations or vices that obstruct the attainment of (and are ruled out by) the realization of this ethical ideal. Cokelet focuses on the first requirement and is particularly concerned with the positive aspect of the ideal, which calls on us to treat others as ends in themselves by acting out of love or devotion. His view, roughly, is that realizing the moral ideal of treating people as ends requires an agent to overcome self-centeredness and that, contrary to what the Kantian account implies, self-centered people cannot be perfectly morally motivated.
Cokelet develops a line of argument described and advanced by David W. Tien (2012) and Philip J. Ivanhoe (2017) that contends that self-centeredness is distinct from selfishness and that one can be problematically self-centered while acting altruistically. Among the insights he adds to this discussion is the general point that self-centered motivation is problematic primarily because it tends to involve an undue concern with getting or meriting approval, esteem, or pride. Inordinate concern with, or false beliefs about, the worth of one’s self often is manifest in self-centered patterns of thought and behavior that can impede treating others as ends in themselves. Cokelet divides such inordinate concern into three categories, “self-centered attention, self-centered judgment, and self-centered interpersonal interaction,” and then shows how each of these can seriously impede our ability to behave morally. For example, excessive self-centered attention will inhibit one’s ability to empathize well simply because one will not notice others at all, how they are doing or what is happening to or with them. Some forms of self-centeredness lead to disrespect, others to failing to nurture healthy independence and confidence; in such cases, self-centeredness directly undermines the ideal of treating others as ends in themselves.
Self-centered people can fail to treat others as ends in themselves because they either fail to respect the other person’s dignity or treat the person in a loving way. Cokelet draws upon Iris Murdoch’s rich and productive example of a mother-in-law judging her daughter-in-law to make the case that Kant’s moral philosophy lacks the resources needed to explain fully how such moral failures can occur. Kant claims that self-centered vice is motivated by an agent’s concern for her own happiness and that respect for the law strikes down her self-conceit and thereby curbs her self-love. But Cokelet offers an interpretation of Murdoch’s case in which the mother-in-law “nonetheless has a Kantian good will because she treats the daughter-in-law with respect and benevolently wishes that she ends up happy,” which shows that “good Kantian moral motivation is insufficient for treating people as ends in themselves.”
In the final section of his essay Cokelet takes up the challenge of showing how certain Buddhist insights into oneness, understood here in terms of an appreciation of the true empty nature of both self and world, can help overcome self-centeredness. Roughly, his argument is that Buddhist insight into oneness undermines the efficacy of—and may even succeed in eliminating—those self-interpreting emotions that support the kind of self-centered vice he has identified in the course of his study. This is achieved through a variety of related paths having to do with Buddhist claims about the limitations of one’s propositional understanding of oneself and the world and Buddhist arguments aimed at undermining a clear sense of a separately existing self. Buddhism is famous for its assault on the notion of a separately existing self and its general claim about the impermanence of all existing things, and Cokelet presents a compelling case that versions of these claims can serve us well in undermining a pernicious tendency toward self-centeredness and enabling us to attain the noble goal of treating others as ends in themselves.
Whereas most of the essays highlight the positive potential in oneness, Kendy M. Hess’s “Fractured Wholes: Corporate Agents and Their Members,” questions such a too-ready acceptance of oneness as tending toward the good. As she puts the point, “There are ways of forming wholes, of ‘being one’ that are not wholesome, and these are increasingly common and increasingly problematic.” Her particular concern is the way that people come or are brought together to form collective, corporate agents. Such aggregation often produces large, powerful, efficient, and productive entities, but too often such agents are indifferent to the harm associated with their self-organization. She is careful to point out that there is no necessary connection between the formation of corporate agents and bad results; to the contrary, one of her primary points is to alert us to the potential hazards and urge us to create “ ‘wholesome wholes’ rather than the incomplete and fractured wholes we’ve usually created thus far.”
Hess begins by sketching an account of what it is to be a collective agent that engages in action-expressing shared intentions. Such shared intentions are needed to establish the kind of agency and responsibility that distinguishes robust examples of such agents from mere groups. The members of a team usually share a number of important beliefs, commitments, and aims that help to organize and execute their collective behavior in ways that a crowd of people waiting to get into a concert do not. There are, however, collective agents—Hess refers to these as “corporate agents”—that do not share commitments or intentions in this way. (For example, the members of a modern corporation, university, or state, while governed by a shared set of commitments, need not and often do not personally hold the commitments by which they are governed and that inform and direct the action of the corporation or firm to which they belong. Often, in fact, the members of such organizations have personal commitments that conflict with those of the corporate entity to which they belong and for which they work.) And so, “the unity of a corporate agent is not the intimate, internal unity of most collective endeavor, driven by the distinctive, shared commitments of their members.… A corporate agent is not … bound by the commitments of the members and closely linked to the members’ own goals and preferences.” Such agents are what she calls “fractured wholes,” entities that are unified from the outside or top-down rather than the inside or bottom-up.
The members of such organizations almost all have to adapt in order to fit into the preexisting structure, ethos, and aims of the corporation, and often are asked to leave many of their personal commitments and aims “at the door” while taking on its values, commitments, and style of reasoning. As Hess describes this, “the ‘fractured wholes’ of the title comprise ‘fractured selves.’ The members of corporate agents need to sever (or at least repress) those aspects of themselves that run counter to the corporate project … bringing only that part of the self that fits with and is valued by the corporate agent.” This is where we begin to see the potential for moral hazard and in particular a threat to healthy versions of personal and social unity or oneness; anyone working in such a corporation must abandon the hope of harmonizing many of her basic values and commitments with the work that she performs each day. In many cases, she will find her personal values and commitments in deep conflict with those of the organization for which she works. This harms and may destroy any sense of personal unity or oneness and preclude enjoying the kind of psychic harmony that has been valued across a variety of philosophical and religious traditions. Moreover, there is equal threat to the aim of attaining some kind of unity between the corporation and the larger society and world. If a corporate agent acts hermetically sealed off not only from the values and commitments of its constituent members but also from those of those outside the corporation, it may and probably will often find itself in conflict with the values, commitments, and aims of society at large and perhaps humanity in general. Such conflict does not conduce to the health of the corporation any more than to that of those inside or outside of it.
In her conclusion, Hess sketches some possible response to the problems she has described and analyzed in the course of her work. She makes a good case for steering clear of more utopian approaches that seek to find a way to preserve the complete wholeness of individuals who enter into such corporate entities or that hope to reshape and refine the corporate cultures in ways that bring them into complete harmony with the rest of the world. Among other things, the former approach would undermine the organizational capacity and efficiency of corporations in ways that largely defeat their very purpose; the latter would damage the capacity of corporations to set and pursue the more limited goals, which gives them their reasons to exist. Such efforts undercut the need for individuals to, at times, suspend their personal agendas and join in cooperative ventures with others whose values and commitments they do not share, which is an important aspect of life in a pluralistic democratic society. In different ways, the aim of excessive harmony or oneness is harmful and arguably even more harmful than the current state of affairs. Instead, Hess advocates pursuing a more ameliorative approach that aims to respect the personal or private but allows for, protects, and appreciates the impersonal corporate point of view as well. Her contribution highlights some of the potential dangers of conceptions of oneness while making clear that there are healthy conceptions of oneness that not only can accommodate but also see value in tensions they allow.
In “Religious Faith, Self-Unification, and Human Flourishing in James and Dewey,” Michael R. Slater compares the religious philosophies of James and Dewey with particular attention to their respective views on religious faith, self-unification, and human flourishing. Slater argues that both philosophers endorsed a version of the oneness hypothesis, understood broadly in terms of two claims: “first, human beings are capable of realizing a more expansive sense of self by making connection with, and understanding their personal identity as inextricably intertwined with, an object of faith that exceeds and transcends themselves (a descriptive claim); and second, that realizing an expanded sense of self of this kind is an important, and possibly even an essential, ingredient in human flourishing at both the individual and social levels (a normative claim).” Slater goes on to argue that the differences in their respective accounts of oneness arise primarily from differences in their metaphysical commitments and epistemological theories but that both have important insights to offer “about the relationship between religious faith and the widespread human longing for happiness and a sense of wholeness.”
James is well known for insisting that religion is primarily a practical as opposed to theoretical affair with the basically therapeutic aim of providing happiness—understood not hedonically but in terms of human well-being or flourishing. This helps us understand his deep study and broad use of psychology and why he saw this as essential for addressing the question of the nature and role of religion in human life. His research and reflection led him to conclude that religion plays an important role in human happiness (a claim supported by a great deal of contemporary empirical research), that this is the result of people achieving a proper relationship with an “unseen order” or a transcendent higher power that is concerned about human happiness, and that these shared features of religion are equally present in and accessible through a variety of different traditions and experiences. The nature of the proper relation between the self and the transcendent brings us to James’s conception of oneness; he thought what is needed is to identify with a higher “wider self” that incorporates the transcendent within the everyday or ordinary self. This is where James parts company with those who insist on a strict naturalism; he defended a limited appeal to the supernatural. As Slater is careful to note, though, his defense of piecemeal supernaturalism is made indirectly, on the basis of the practical importance such beliefs have in the actual lives of religious people.
Dewey argued for a wholly naturalistic conception of faith on pragmatic grounds: in terms of its power to unify the self and to strengthen commitment to a set of secular moral values and ideals. He sought to locate such faith in the territory between traditional religious belief and militant atheism by rejecting what he took to be their common focus on supernaturalism. In other words, he sought to shear supernatural claims from religion but retain what he righty saw as the power religion has to give unity, shape, meaning, and moral direction to life. For Dewey religious faith is the expression of a strong commitment to worthy ideal ends. Such a commitment takes as its object a not-wholly-specified and open-ended moral vision, which stands in place of traditional theistic teachings about God. Dewey claimed this secular faith has the power to bring unity to the self, to connect the self with the rest of humanity and ultimately with the rest of the world. This is a sketch of the nature and function of Dewey’s ideal of oneness between the self and other people, creatures, and things.
One profound challenge for Dewey’s ideal, ironically, concerns the pragmatic force of his secular substitute for God. As Slater insightfully notes, “an idea of God all by itself does not plausibly have the power that Dewey wants to ascribe to it, any more than the idea of Batman all by itself could frighten criminals or make a large city a safer place to live.” Just as James’s defense of piecemeal supernaturalism tends to leave confirmed naturalists underwhelmed and perhaps bemused, Dewey’s secular God will strike most religiously inclined people as hollow and uninspiring; Dewey promises a great show and sets an impressive stage, but in the end no one shows up to perform the main act. This by no means implies that his or James’s view is without considerable merit, insight, or force. Slater’s comparative study makes clear that they have much to teach us and that among the most interesting and powerful shared feature of both James’s and Dewey’s writings on faith and human flourishing is the critical role that conceptions of oneness play in their respective accounts.
Professor Cho Geung Ho provides our next contribution, “The Self and the Ideal Human Being in Eastern and Western Philosophical Traditions: Two Types of ‘Being a Valuable Person,’ ” which offers a far-ranging exploration of cultural differences in terms of two contrasting conceptions of the relationship between individuals and their societies: the culture of individualism, which is the cultural type dominant in North America, Oceania, and Northern Europe, and the culture of collectivism, which is dominant in East Asian countries. Professor Cho argues that these alternative conceptions of the relationship between individuals and their societies have led to different concepts of selfhood and worldview, and to contrasting schemes of personal character and behavior among those raised and living within these respective cultures.
Professor Cho pursues two primary lines of arguments in his contribution. First, he maintains that the cultural differences just sketched between Western individualism and East Asian collectivism have their ideological roots in liberalism and Confucianism, respectively. Second, he seeks to show that Western liberalism and East Asian Confucianism develop and advocate characteristic and contrasting ideals for being a human being. These contrasting ideals in turn lead to different accounts of what is valuable in life and different conceptions of what constitutes a good person in each of these two cultural spheres.
In arguing that the culture of individualism offers the philosophical underpinnings of Western liberalism, Professor Cho defends the very strong claim that such a liberal point of view “is a system of thought that attempts to find human ontological significance in the individuality of persons who are independent and have clear boundaries from one another.” He further claims that such a system of thought entails an eliminative reductionism in regard to social phenomenon resulting in the view that “society is no more than an aggregate of independent and equal individuals.” In stark contrast, Professor Cho claims that collectivism provides the dominant character of East Asian societies. In this case, the correlate of Western liberalism is Confucianism, “a theoretical system whose goal is to find human ontological significance in the sociality of a person.” Drawing upon a particular interpretation of the Confucian self, Professor Cho asserts that persons exist within Confucian societies only in terms of their social relations; “outside of such relations, the person loses her very ontological significance.” This seems to imply not only that there is no person apart from social relationship but also that society is not an “aggregate of independent and equal individuals” but a collection of instantiated social relationships.
The contrast between Western liberalism and East Asian Confucianism supports and generates a range of differences in their respective understandings of what a human being is and what the ideal human being might be. According to Professor Cho one important difference that connects views about what a person is and can be concerns whether human beings are stable entities or variable beings. The former seems to be the view that human beings have fixed and unchanging characteristics, while the latter is that each human being “is in a constant process of changing.” The precise meaning of these alternatives is not altogether clear, but at the very least the former seems to imply that people are destined to live out a particular, preassigned character and personality in the course of their lives, while the latter highlights the ongoing challenge of developing and improving oneself in the quest to realize an ideal of human goodness.
Western liberalism conceives of each and every person as free and the bearer of rights, a view that engenders and prizes attitudes such as personal independence and autonomy and focuses on the individual person’s inner qualities. Professor Cho argues that this leads to more self-centered psychological and behavioral characteristics that emphasize individual uniqueness and independent action. East Asian Confucianism understands individuals in terms of their particular social relationships and Confucian societies generate and prize attitudes such as caring and harmony. As a consequence, such collectivist societies highlight and advocate emotions such as compassion, sympathy, and a sense of shame, which support and engender the building of interpersonal relationships.
Professor Cho explores other dimensions of the individualistic (Western liberal) and collectivist (East Asian Confucian) ideals he describes and concludes by discussing the degree to which such cultural differences determine one’s conception of what is valuable in life and what constitutes a good person. It would of course be wrong to assume that one’s cultural context determines one’s values and ideals; some born and raised in Confucian cultures are more individualistic and some born in Western liberal cultures are more collectivist in orientation and action, and “Cultural differences only reflect average differences between cultures.” Nevertheless, the cultural differences Professor Cho has identified, analyzed, and discussed are real and significant.
In his concluding remarks, Professor Cho poses the question of the future of the individualist and collectivist ideals he has explored. In an increasingly global and interconnected world, where ideas, values, and practices flow more quickly and widely around the world, one might be inclined to believe that such cultural differences will be mitigated over time, as cultures increasingly blend into one another and “converge somewhere in the middle.” This is surely one possibility, but other scenarios are equally in play; for example, one or another of the two ideal types might absorb or come to dominate the other. Alternatively, societies that represent one or the other of the two ideals might hold more tightly to their distinctive ways of life or, perhaps, individuals or groups within one or another cultural type might choose or adopt or adapt the alternative view and make it their own.
In “Hallucinating Oneness: Is Oneness True or Just a Positive Metaphysical Illusion?,” Owen Flanagan begins by noting some recent arguments, declarations, and initiatives dedicated to the goal of achieving what Pope Francis called a “global ecological conversion,” in which “the oneness and indivisibility of the natural, social, and spiritual realms is fully recognized and then acted upon.” Flanagan offers a novel approach to such proposals by considering—as the title of his contribution makes clear—the possibility of embracing oneness as a positive illusion: a false (or probably false) belief that brings with it good features or consequences. The chances that one will contract some debilitating disease or suffer a severe accident are what they are, but it matters, in terms of one’s psychological state of mind and the myriad consequences that follow from this, whether one thinks that the good or bad objective probabilities apply to one. To think the former may be wishful thinking but tends to produce a better life for one and those around one: “positive illusions are epistemically negative, but existentially positive.”
Flanagan distinguishes between metaphysical illusions and metaphysical hallucinations. Metaphysical illusions involve “false beliefs about Being, about What There Is, which have good existential effects.” In contrast, metaphysical hallucinations involve “an altered state of consciousness in which the shape of reality and the structure of values are envisioned in a fantastical but entirely appealing and transformative way.” There is good evidence to support the claim that certain metaphysical illusions can lead to greater good for individuals and groups, but something stronger—something along the lines of a metaphysical hallucination—seems necessary in order to “mark, announce, or motivate the life of a bodhisattva, or a Christian saint, or make possible the sort of grass roots global ecological conversion Pope Francis seeks.” Flanagan explores the possibility that “ ‘making believe’ that certain metaphysical theses that pertain to oneness … that are false are true or, what is different, are worth aiming at, committing to, trying to make so.”
Buddhism, in general, holds that people do not exist as separate and subsisting things but instead are intimately interrelated to all sentient beings through a comprehensive and infinitely extending system of causes and effects mediated through karma and stretching over a myriad of lifetimes. If we see ourselves and our relationships to other people and creatures in such terms, we will see the folly of self-centeredness; in light of an accurate picture of Being and What There Is, we will see ourselves as in some deep sense identical to all sentient beings and as a result will take up and practice great compassion and loving kindness to all. This brief account offers a sketch of the relationship between a belief in oneness and a life of compassion and loving kindness, illustrating the more general linkage one often finds between metaphysics and ethics.
Flanagan makes clear that to move from grasping the intellectual propositions constituting the Buddhist view in no-self—a view that is held for the most part by Western philosophers such as David Hume, Derek Parfit, and Galen Strawson as well—to living a life of compassion and loving kindness requires a form of “noetic confidence” in the truth of the view described: “believing that no-self is false is compatible with thinking it good to believe (or as I should say ‘make-believe’) in no-self, and that it is even better, morally good, to hallucinate no-self, and then to live as if the hallucination was true.” Embracing no-self is necessary if one is to successfully live the kind of life that such a view seems to imply. The question, though, is whether one needs the reasons provided by the truth of the metaphysical view in order to generate and sustain the ethical life with which it is aligned.
Things are more complicated even than this for, as Flanagan notes, there are many different conceptions of oneness even within Buddhism. He describes five possible interpretations of Buddhist-like oneness, with each making a stronger or weaker claim for metaphysical identity or connection between self and world. (Even the weakest of these, care oneness, which holds that we “naturally care … about the weal and woe of others,” works to undermine self-centeredness, offering what we might describe as a “less myself” rather than “no-self” view.) None of these five, though, provide what is needed to support a life of compassion and loving kindness, for none entails that “my well-being is ONE with the fate of the universe.” This highly robust form of oneness, what Flanagan tags as ONENESS*, is characteristic of religious views that link a metaphysical view of oneness with a heroic obligation to care for all the world. A question remains: Would it be good to hallucinate one’s way to such a view and be able to live such a life?
Flanagan gives several examples where believing in views one deems false or highly likely to be false seems to have nothing but upside, and he notes that work in contemplative neuroscience and renewed research on hallucinogens at several leading medical centers (as part of their whole life treatment of terminally ill patients) appear to offer evidence in support his view. Yet it is important to appreciate the radical nature of his proposal, which, as he makes clear, goes beyond the ethics of belief (or right to believe) espoused by people like Clifford or James. Flanagan is proposing an existentially more strident alternative. At the very least, Flanagan’s bold excursion challenges the traditional linkage between metaphysics and ethics and presses us to consider the possibility that the latter should inform or at least influence the former. This line of argument might lead one to think more about, and draw upon, Freud’s helpful distinction between illusions and delusions (Yearley 1985).
According to Freud, an illusion differs from a simple error in two ways: illusions are derived from human wishes and are not necessarily contrary to reality (though they can be). More importantly, they are beneficial to oneself and those around one. In contrast, it is part of the essence of delusions that they conflict with reality and prove harmful to oneself and others. Freud was an avid advocate of the power of art and its role in good human lives, and of course art is a clear example of an edifying illusion. By contrast, Freud considered religion an infantile and largely debilitating illusion best banished from awareness or rendered impotent in ordering and motivating our beliefs and actions. Now there are reasons, some along the lines provided by Flanagan, to take issue with Freud’s view (Ivanhoe 1998). But if we are to save religion or versions of the oneness hypothesis from being delusions, we need to ground them at least to some extent in reality. Perhaps the best illusions will always involve some connection to actual states of affairs and will enlarge, extend, or embellish a feature or features of the world in ways that preserve some sense of reality within a symbolic or metaphoric expression that conduces to the human good. Perhaps even our wildest hallucinations (like all acts of imagination) can’t but be grounded at some level in our experience of the real world. Or perhaps we should simply not remain tethered to the world but embrace metaphysical hallucinations, according to which “the shape of reality and the structure of values are envisioned in a fantastical but entirely appealing and transformative way.” Whether such are good or bad may depend more or simply on the range of their application and the nature of the good they provide and not whether or to what degree they are connected to actual states of affairs.
One common theme across the contributions just discussed is that self-centeredness can interfere with a person’s having such a more expansive conception of the self, or experiencing oneness. This continues in “Episodic Memory and Oneness,” where Jay Garfield, Shaun Nichols, and Nina Strohminger discuss how Buddhism has traditionally tried to undermine “egocentricity,” or the tendency to focus on oneself. Their contribution begins by outlining the views of the eighth-century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva on moral progress.
Śāntideva notes that before one has realized the emptiness of the self (and, indeed, of all phenomena) one’s “cognitive and conative states are still pervaded by an instinctive ego-grasping that she or he nonetheless knows—at a more reflective level—to be deluded.” Put another way, coming to an inferential or “merely cognitive” understanding of the truth of no-self and the emptiness of all phenomena is by itself insufficient to dislodge one from egocentricity. The latter is only possible through direct realization or immediate awareness of these truths, after which one can start to give up the idea that one matters more than others and begin to see oneself as part of a greater whole. The process begins with an aspiration to see the world as it really is, and only ends when one directly experiences it as such.
Garfield, Nichols, and Strohminger go on to argue that at the heart of egocentricity is a particular form of memory—namely, episodic memory or memory of experiences. “It’s widely thought that when a person remembers an experience, she remembers the experience as having happened to her. Theorists in both Eastern and Western traditions maintain that episodic memory involves representing an event as having happened to one’s self. The memory has to present the experience as having happened to me.” They note the prevalence of this idea in thinkers ranging from Thomas Reid, James Mill, and William James, on the one hand, to such Indian philosophers as Uddyotakara (of the Nyaya school) and Dignāga (a Buddhist), on the other, before pointing out that “there are within the Buddhist tradition conceptual resources for understanding episodic memory in the absence of self or of self-consciousness”—for example, in the teachings of Candrakīrti and Śāntideva in India and Tsongkhapa in Tibet. This is because one can think of an organism-centered egocentricity, as opposed to a self-centered egocentricity. Rats, plausibly, have organism-centered egocentricity, including egocentric spatial memory and recollection; representations are relative to the position of the rat as an organism, even without having any representation of the rat as a self. So even though episodic or experiential memory may inevitably be egocentric, this may not run afoul of the view that there is no self, because “Buddhists, like those in many other philosophical traditions, reject the idea that the organism is the self.”
The problem, then, is not egocentricity, but rather how the self is interjected into memory during the process of recollection. “The real problem posed by experience memory … is that when we reflect on our experiences—something rats can’t do—we naturally represent the experiences as having happened to the self … as an experience that happened to me.” Buddhists, of course, hone in on this problem and recommend that we rid ourselves of the illusion of the self. But is this possible? Here, Garfield, Nichols, and Strohminger draw on empirical studies suggesting that it is indeed possible to recall experiences without identifying with them (that is, thinking of them as having happened to oneself) under certain conditions, and suggest that there may be legitimacy to the classical Buddhist strategies to rid one of the notion of a self—for example, through analysis and meditation. However, more recent and targeted work on Tibetan monks suggests a potential stumbling block: despite denying the reality of the self and saying that this realization helped them cope with death, these advanced Buddhist practitioners nonetheless showed great fear of death and pronounced selfishness in wanting to extend their own lives, especially when compared to Christians and Hindus. Garfield, Nichols, and Strohminger try to explain this unexpected empirical result by highlighting the stubborn recalcitrance of identity in episodic memory and the sustained effort required to overcome it, using examples drawn from autobiographies of advanced Tibetan practitioners to illustrate the point. They conclude that, “although it might be possible to have experience memories without the sense of personal identity, this seems to be a remarkably difficult feat to accomplish in an enduring way.”
Several of the essays just discussed advert to notions of relational or collective selves as being ways by which to think of oneness, or more expansive notions of the self. This theme continues in “Confucius and the Superorganism,” where Hagop Sarkissian articulates a particular sense of oneness that he finds operative in early Confucian thought. It is a sense of oneness that, he argues, is accessible to many persons today, as accepting it requires no commitment to any demanding metaphysical or spiritual views. It is not a sense of oneness with all of humanity, let alone with all the creatures under the sky or all the elements of the cosmos. Instead, it is a sense of oneness that stems from the existence of large, coherent, and interconnected social networks.
Sarkissian takes as his starting point a passage in the Analects suggesting that the dao of the founding sage kings of the Zhou Dynasty (mythical heroes long since dead) remains embedded within the people of Confucius’s home state of Lu (the cultural inheritor of the Zhou). Drawing on this and other passages, Sarkissian claims that the people of the state of Lu comprise a latent superorganism—a term he borrows from social and natural sciences. However, this superorganism remains scattered, disorganized, and unrealized, for it lacks a central node through which it may become organized and coherent. Confucius plays precisely this role, facilitating the revival of the Zhou superorganism by threading it together. Confucius both is constituted by the larger Zhou superorganism (in the sense of being embedded, shaped, and connected with it) and constitutes it in turn (by being a central node through which its culture, practices, and ethos flow).
The superorganism, then, consists of a large social network, including all the connections and ties within it. The nodes of the network are the individual selves, and constitute both particular points upon which the forces of the larger network impinge and particular points from which various forces emanate. These forces can be understood as behaviors, norms, and information, as well as moods, dispositions, and other forms of affect. They spread from one node to another (also known as dyadic spread), but also continue to influence other nodes several links away (also known as hyperdyadic spread). Sarkissian relates these ideas back to some central passages in other key Confucian texts such as the Daxue (or Great Learning). He also argues that the classical Confucian concept of de, which refers to the particular ways in which individuals influence others in their midst through noncoercive, effortless ways, can be fruitfully compared to the ways in which nodes influence one another in the networks within which they’re embedded.
Sarkissian argues that this helps us understand the great importance placed on the ruler in early Confucian thought. He points out that “one of the fundamental axioms of network theory is that the opportunities and constraints of any particular node—the degree to which it is both susceptible to network effects and susceptible of affecting the network—hinges on its position within the network.” The ruler, being at the center of the superorganism, is positioned to have enormous effects on it, and so the power of the ruler to shape the polity (as emphasized in several early Confucian texts) can be explained by his central position, from which he had tremendous potency. A ruler’s de influences his senior ministers, who in turn affect their subordinates, engendering a resonant chain that would extend out to villages and clans. Through his own personal excellence, and owing to his centrality, the ruler would thus bind the network together.
Sarkissian concludes by suggesting the utility in thinking of oneself as a node of influence on one’s own network, and the importance of minding the ways in which one might be both influenced by it while also being a source of influence within it. A paradigmatic way of influencing others is, of course, through discrete, volitional actions. However, this corresponds to a very narrow conception of agency and a very strict and unrealistic conception of the boundaries between individuals. A more expansive notion suggests it is naïve to think that influence consists merely in such acts. Instead, influence across networks occurs automatically and effortlessly; one cannot be a node without shaping the network to some extent or other, even while being subject to influence in turn.
The relationship between death and oneness is explored again in the following chapter. In “Death, Self, and Oneness in the Incomprehensible Zhuangzi,” Eric Schwitzgebel portrays the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi as having an “incomprehensible” view, that is, a view so loaded with contradiction that it defies coherent, rational interpretation. Schwitzgebel’s Zhuangzi is a philosopher who openly shares his confusions and shifting opinions, inviting us to join him as he plunges into wonder and doubt, including wonder and doubt about what constitutes the boundaries of the self.
On the question of death, Schwitzgebel argues that Zhuangzi embraces three inconsistent ideas: (1) that living out one’s full life span is a good thing and preferable to dying young, (2) that living out one’s full life span is not preferable to dying young, and (3) that we cannot know whether living out one’s full life span is preferable to dying young. All three of these views appear to be advocated more than once in the text, and although there are various ways in which they might be reconciled (including attributing the relevant passages to different authors who separately contributed to the text we now know as the Zhuangzi), Schwitzgebel argues that the passages have a similarity of voice, style, and vision. Although when reading most of the great philosophers in history it makes sense to attempt to render passages consistent with one another when possible, even if superficially they seem to conflict, this interpretative principle should not, Schwitzgebel says, be extended to the particular case of Zhuangzi. Both the content of the text and facts about style and presentation suggest that if any philosopher is OK with expressing contradictory views in different passages, it should be Zhuangzi. Schwitzgebel recommends that we relish, rather than attempt to resolve, Zhuangzi’s inconsistency.
One advantage of this interpretive approach is that it allows the reader to take Zhuangzi’s sometimes radical-seeming claims at face value, without having to tame them to render them consistent with his more moderate-seeming claims—and also without treating Zhuangzi’s radical claims as fixed dogmas. (Interpreted as such, they might be indefensible.) We can instead treat the radical ideas as “real possibilities” worth entertaining, without taking those possibilities too seriously. For example, one of the many quirky sage-like figures in Zhuangzi’s text speculates that after his death he might become a mouse’s liver or a bug’s arm. Schwitzgebel interprets this as a humorous, colorful way of imagining that after one’s bodily death one might find one’s consciousness continuing in some other form, perhaps in some other part of nature. Even without positive evidence for such continuation, we can entertain it as a real possibility. And doing so might help us break out of our ordinary assumptions, creating a more vivid and skeptical sense of the possibilities.
Schwitzgebel’s portrayal of Zhuangzi feeds into the oneness hypothesis as follows. The ordinary reader might enter the Zhuangzi with an ordinary set of suppositions about the boundaries of the self: I begin at my birth; I end at my death; I am essentially a human being; my hands and feet are part of me but the trees and rivers and people in Yue and Chu are not part of me. Maybe the reader is hyperindividualistically committed to a picture of the self as entirely distinct from everything else, or maybe the reader is only a moderate individualist. In reading the text, the reader encounters radical possibilities presented nondogmatically, in a charming way: I might wake to find that all of what I took to be normal life was in fact a dream; I might die and become a mouse’s liver; my feet are no more or less a part of me than the people in Yue and Chu; human form is just a temporary manifestation that I should be happy enough to give away. If Zhuangzi is successful, he induces doubt and wonder, shaking the reader’s commitment to individualism, opening the reader to the possibility of a more radical oneness, or at least to the possibility of a moderate view with a less sharp, fixed, and certain sense of the boundaries of the self than you had before.
“Identity fusion” is an important concept in social psychology that has been explored at length over the past decade in a series of papers by William B. Swann, Jr., and collaborators. In “Identity Fusion: The Union of Personal and Social Selves,” Sanaz Talaifar and Swann synthesize this work along with work by other authors, exploring the history of the concept of identity fusion and the social and psychological importance of feeling “fused” with a social group. Like Putilin in his chapter, Talaifar and Swann see their work as partly growing out of classic work by Henri Tajfel, which showed that even nominal or trivial group memberships tend to trigger in-group/outgroup favoritism. One feature of Tajfel’s view is that there is a competition between personal identities and social identities, so that attention to one’s status as an individual tends to diminish attention to one’s status as a member of a social group. The essential insight behind the concept of identity fusion is that the personal and social selves need not compete. To the extent that one’s personal identity is “fused” with one’s social identity, attention to one can harmonize with attention to the other. High commitment to a social group needn’t require subjugating personal identity; instead, in identity fusion, the personal self “remains a potent force that combines synergistically with the social self to motivate behavior.”
Strongly fused people identify intensely with a social group—for example, their nation. They feel a visceral sense of union, or oneness, with that group. They tend to agree with statements like “I am one with my group” or “I have a deep emotional bond with my group.” When asked to select a depiction of their relationship to their group, they will favor pictures in which a circle representing the “self” and a circle representing the “group” are largely overlapping rather than separate or minimally overlapping.
As Talaifar and Swann detail, high levels of identity fusion predict a range of behaviors, including whether a person is likely to undergo gender reassignment surgery (higher fusion with the future gender predicting follow-through with surgery) and extreme pronational behaviors, including fighting and dying for one’s country. Evidence from a variety of sources, including observation of combat troops and controlled studies using hypothetical scenarios, suggests that highly fused people tend to reason more intuitively, emotionally, and spontaneously than less-fused people when acting on behalf of their group. Talaifar and Swann suggest that part of the underlying explanation is that people who are highly fused tend to think of other members of their group as “fictive kin,” thereby drawing upon well-known, evolutionarily selected psychological mechanisms that favor loyalty to and sacrifice for one’s kin group.
Talaifar and Swann acknowledge that high levels of fusion are morally bivalent. High levels of fusion can lead both to heroic action and to extreme violence against outgroups. However, they conclude with the hopeful thought that people might expand the group with which they feel fused until eventually, ideally, it includes all of humanity, giving those people an emotionally powerful reason to work toward the good of everyone.
In “Tribalism and Universalism: Reflections and Scientific Evidence,” Dimitri Putilin begins with the unambiguous—and disconcerting—results of research on in-group versus outgroup attitudes and behavior. Work by Henri Tajfel and others has shown that even ad hoc, arbitrarily established groups of people immediately behave preferentially toward their in-group and discriminate against the outgroup. Moreover, those within each group “expected outgroup members to behave as they did.” In-group favoritism is the dominant and default form of behavior; fairness and care tend to operate only when dealing with members of one’s in-group.
Many religious and philosophical teachings around the world offer a starkly opposing view, calling on us to have equal and universal concern for all others and not just for oneself and the members of one’s in-group. This, in essence, is what the Golden Rule—a principle found throughout the various religious and philosophical traditions of the world—teaches. Putilin notes and is encouraged by the ubiquity of the Golden Rule, but is interested in the question of whether such advice is “plausible as a practical guide to behavior”; he seeks to answer this question by exploring some of the psychological abilities and barriers that are relevant to the effort to live according to this high-minded moral principle.
One of the first issues he examines is whether we are psychologically able truly to care about another’s needs at all: Are we capable of genuinely altruistic behavior? C. Daniel Batson’s research offers compelling evidence that human beings are capable of genuine altruism. Moreover, he shows that empathic concern, by which he means the emotional state of valuing the well-being of another who is in distress, is an important source for altruistic motivation. After presenting a detailed account of Batson’s work and analyzing a number of its key features, Putilin summarizes this research: “Batson and his colleagues have successfully demonstrated that, when exposed to a person in need and instructed to consider how that person is feeling, people are more likely to value his or her well-being as an end in itself, to experience the emotional state of empathic concern, and to be increasingly willing to engage in helping behavior at a cost to themselves.”
In response to Batson’s research, R. B. Cialdini, J. K. Maner, and others have produced research that shows that the degree of kinship or perceived similarity between an observer and observed sufferer simultaneously increases empathic concern, helping behavior, and what they called “oneness” on the part of the observer. Arguing that such “oneness” constitutes a merging of observer and observed, they conclude that “by helping the victim the participants were in fact selfishly helping themselves.” If their conclusion is valid, altruism is simply an illusion masking distinctive forms of selfish behavior. Putilin shows that this conclusion is unwarranted and for a number of overlapping reasons. First, a careful examination of the research shows that observing participants recognized “both the majority of their own identity and that of the victim as unique and separate from whatever it was they shared in common.” In other words, there was a sense of deep connection but no complete merging of self and other. Second, even though participants came to see the victim’s problems as to some extent their own, an important asymmetry remained: “the actual victim has no choice but to deal with the aversive circumstances in which she finds herself, the potential helper (that is, the participant) has the ability to walk away from the problem.” Such asymmetry would not persist in cases of genuine merging between self and other.
While Putilin shows why we should reject some of the conclusions of the advocates of oneness, he maintains that they make a compelling case for the role of a sense of interdependence or oneness and care, for “although the motivation produced when we feel empathic concern for another is altruistic—that is, focused on increasing their well-being, rather than attaining some benefit for oneself—such motivation is most likely to arise when we are exposed to the suffering of another with whom we are interdependent: a member of the in-group.” Putilin explores a number of evolutionary advantages such a predisposition seems to offer but notes that such a disposition is neither inevitable nor ideal, since a “trait evolved under one set of conditions may become maladaptive when environmental circumstances change.” In our increasingly global and interdependent world, we may need to work against our evolutionary inclinations—what Putilin calls our “disinclination to altruism with outsiders”—which is reinforced by a “misguided pragmatism” concerning our interests.
To address this, Putilin draws upon the work of William James, whose ideas are insightfully discussed by Michael R. Slater in chapter 10 of the present work. Specifically, James argued that our degree of closeness with others not only can fluctuate significantly over time but also is something we can influence and control. We are capable of expanding our sense of connection or oneness with other people, creatures, and things, and thereby transforming our initially tribal altruism so that it embraces “more universally inclusive ends.” Putilin goes on to explore a number of techniques for achieving this more inclusive sense of care, including recategorization (the changing of group boundaries) and identity fusion (as described by Sanaz Talaifar and William B. Swann, Jr., in chapter 16 of this work).
Putilin concludes his contribution by providing justification for the more expansive view of the self and more capacious feeling of care just described. Roughly, he argues for a richer account of what constitutes well-being and concludes that “altruism may not be the optimal way of amassing material fortunes, but it provides wealth of a different kind.” So, in the end a life of care reflects a form of enlightened self-interest, though one, perhaps, that is supported by a goal one cannot aim at directly; we must in some sense give up caring about a narrowly construed conception of the self and genuinely care for others in order to nurture and enjoy the goods associated with a greater self. Putilin goes on to describe how certain exemplary individuals—specifically Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.—seem to have advocated and lived in accordance with such an expanded sense of self or oneness and its corresponding imperative to care for all the world. The encouraging implication of his analysis and discussion of our psychological resources and limitations is “that the gulf between ourselves and … exceptional individuals … may not be as unbridgeable as it appears at first glance: it may be one of degree, rather than kind.”
In “Two Notions of Empathy and Oneness,” Justin Tiwald explores two forms of empathy and two conceptions of oneness and, drawing upon the writings of two neo-Confucian philosophers, relates these to the moral ideal of seeing oneself as part of a larger whole and the role this might play in supporting moral motivation and other-directed moral concern. The first type of empathy, in which one reconstructs the thoughts and feelings someone else has or might have, is “other-focused” or “imagine-other” empathy. The second type, “self-focused” or “imagine-self” empathy, involves imagining how one would think or feel were one in another person’s place. Tiwald explains that the Song dynasty neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi朱熹 (1130–1200) insisted that other-focused empathy is more virtuous or “benevolent” (ren 仁) than self-focused empathy, because self-focused empathy tends to undermine the sense of oneness with others, whereas Dai Zhen戴震 (1724–77) defended the superiority of self-focused empathy because, on the one hand, he rejected Zhu’s metaphysical beliefs and, on the other, he relied instead on human psychology and anthropology as the basis for ethical concern.
Tiwald begins by noting that Zhu Xi understood “being one with a larger whole” in terms of “forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things” and believed that contributing to and caring about “widespread life-production” make us one with other people, creatures, and things, and thus warrant seeing oneself as one with them. Tiwald is careful to make clear that for Zhu, it was by virtue of caring and contributing in this way that we are one with the people, creatures, and things of the world. Zhu explicitly rejected subtly different views, for example, that such caring and contributing are a natural consequence of being metaphysically one or that it is some unanalyzable brute fact and intuition.
Moreover, Tiwald explains that Zhu believed attaining a proper state of oneness “requires eliminating attachment to one’s own interests as such, a primarily subtractive project directed at oneself, rather than the more constructive, bidirectional project of building relationships in which one becomes more attached to others in light of the fact that contributing to their well-being tends to enhance one’s own.”
Like Zhu Xi, Dai Zhen rejected more mystical accounts of oneness and believed we attain oneness by contributing to the widespread production of life. But Dai insisted that the role we play in nurturing life requires a special sense of mutual identity—“mutual nourishment” and “mutual growth.” In contrast to the kind of self-abnegation advocated by thinkers like Zhu Xi, he insisted that we are united with others through mutually beneficial relationships. Dai also rejected the metaphysical picture underlying Zhu’s notion of oneness, which held that oneness requires the recognition of a fundamental identity between our nature and the nature of others. On Zhu’s view, oneness was in some sense a discovery, an insight into the underlying oneness already there in the universe; for Dai, oneness is an achievement, something we come to through sustained and concerted efforts at developing and embracing relationships of mutual fulfillment, seeing ourselves as contributing to life-production more generally, and coming to identify ourselves with the world and our inextricably shared welfare.
Tiwald next notes that neo-Confucians were interested in the relationship between their core virtue of benevolence (ren 仁) and a certain kind of empathic state described in ancient texts as shu 恕, a term and concept associated with Confucius’s formulation of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others as one wouldn’t want done to oneself.” While shu was widely regarded by neo-Confucians as the proper method for cultivating benevolence, it was also seen as falling short of benevolence itself. Zhu Xi believed that the principal difference between shu and the full virtue of benevolence is that when we rely on shu, we need to make the effort of comparing others to ourselves in order to elicit right feelings and motivations, whereas the fully benevolent need not make such effort or refer to themselves; their care for others flows freely, unencumbered by thoughts of themselves. A number of leading psychologists focusing on empathy, such as C. Daniel Batson, Ezra Stotland, and Martin Hoffman, distinguish these two forms of empathy using paired terms such as imagine-self and imagine-other or self-focused and other-focused empathy, and their research provides solid empirical support for this conceptual distinction.
In opposition to Zhu, Dai advocates self-focused empathy. Tiwald characterizes one of Dai’s most important arguments by saying, “If we really want to use empathy to understand and be motivated to act upon the interests of others, we need to simulate not just their first-order desires for things like food and shelter, but their broader-scope and often higher-order desires that their lives go well in various respects.” Since Zhu strongly implies that dwelling in this way on one’s own needs and interests will undermine the effort to effectively adopt another’s point of view, Tiwald offers a number of responses consistent with, and in defense of, Dai’s view. First, he notes that at times “our own needs and interests converge with those of others, because we want what they want.” Second, as Martin Hoffman has shown, while we often learn to empathize through perspective-taking, empathy can become automatic, and so it need not rely on adopting another point of view at all.
Tiwald summarizes and concludes his essay by expressing the hope that his description and analysis of two types of oneness and empathy in light of Zhu Xi and Dai Zhen’s philosophy are sufficient “to elucidate the tremendous importance of these connections between feelings of oneness and the two kinds of empathy, and to show that there are historical resources that address these issues with great subtlety, subtlety unmatched by contemporary treatments of the issue.”
Among the most fundamental and important points to be learned from this collection of essays is that one’s conception of oneself is not something that simply can be discovered, like the orbit of a planet or the mass of a stone, but is instead the product of a range of biological and psychological facts about the needs and capacities of human beings in combination with culture, imagination, and reflective endorsement. There are many alternative conceptions of the self to be found in philosophy, religion, and psychology (Parfit 1986, Collins 1982, Gallagher 2011) and there are yet more to be crafted; among these are various conceptions of a more expansive self connected with the oneness hypothesis. Until recently, no one has sought to press the more general point about the open nature of the self or explore the implications of conceptions of oneness in a careful and systematic manner, with the aim of ascertaining whether such alternatives might prove more conducive to human well-being, their happiness, satisfaction, and fulfilment, and thereby perhaps more attractive as personal and cultural ideals.
This volume is part of a larger, ongoing project, Eastern and Western Conceptions of Oneness, Virtue, and Happiness (http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/ceacop/Oneness/index.html), supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The goal of the larger project is to explore what different fields of endeavor look like when pursued with a view about the self as organically and inextricably interrelated to other people, creatures, and things as opposed to proceeding, as they often do, with the assumption of hyperindividualism. We believe this will constitute a paradigm shift or at least an important and productive disruption to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It seems eminently clear that as a matter of fact, throughout almost all of their history and much of their prior evolution, human beings have existed and understood themselves as deeply embedded in personal, familial, social, and cultural contexts, and as systematically related to other creatures and things—in other words, as in some sense “one” with the rest of the world (Lovejoy 1936, Wilson 1984, Kellert and Wilson 1993). Equally clear, as a matter of fact, human beings are inextricably embedded in complex relationships with other people, creatures, and things; no human being exists or can clearly conceive of herself apart from these different parts of the environment. One thought motivating this far-ranging exploration of the oneness hypothesis is that our most pressing moral, political, social, and spiritual problems often arise from trying to conceive of ourselves as wholly distinct and separate from the rest of the world and to live as if there were a sharp moral and metaphysical boundary between ourselves and other people, creatures, and things. To accept hyperindividualism as self-evident, metaphysically well-founded, or psychologically inevitable is simply untrue; indeed, as has been argued in this introduction and shown in many of the contributions to this volume, to deny certain senses of oneness—for example, to deny that we are partly constituted by our relationships to the other people, creatures, and things of this world—is not only to have a bad view of the self but also to have a false one.
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