The Clash Between Ancient and Modern Sages

Early Buddhists and the ancient Greek philosophers, from Democritus and Plato to Epicurus and Protagoras, were convinced that philosophical knowledge is a comfort in that it reconciles you with the world so you’re at peace.

The Greeks called this enlightened state “ataraxia,” meaning tranquility or imperturbability.

As Thomas McEvilly explains in The Shape of Ancient Thought, “Both Indian and Greek philosophers held the highest ethical good to be an attitude which regards with the same emotion or valuation those events which are to one’s personal worldly advantage — such as pleasures and fulfilled intentions — and those which are not — such as pains and frustrated intentions…The ethics of imperturbability involves an attempt to get one’s mind beyond the fluctuations of pleasure and pain.”

So, the wise person was expected to be mentally stable and to avoid extreme emotional reactions. “The happiness of tranquility is like the mental state of a god, whose natural condition is stable, as opposed to the immediacy of grasped-at pleasures which come and go.”

Yet present-day, late-industrial philosophy features an existential reaction to the fruits of the Scientific Revolution, and according to that view, there’s a crisis of meaninglessness, of life’s apparent absurdity, which makes for the opposite of inner peace.

Are these ancient and modern conceptions of wisdom compatible? Is one conception superior to the other? How should we think of the apparent conflict between them?

McEvilly points out that there were roughly two kinds of Indian and Greek philosophical systems, the transcendental and the naturalistic. To attain imperturbability

is to disengage oneself from the ordinary patterns of motivation. In some contexts the disengagement is prescribed to promote a transcendentalist motivation. Sensations are considered unreal in comparison with some hypersensual realm; the goal is to become “dead to this world” (impassive, impartial, equanimous, indifferent) to gain access to higher Being. This transcendentalist approach is found in Platonism and Neoplatonism, the Vedanta, and most schools of Mahayana Buddhism.

In other contexts, such as Theravada Buddhism and Epicureanism, this-worldly experience is accepted as what is given to deal with. Imperturbability is advised not in hopes of attaining a transcendental viewpoint but on naturalistic grounds, in response to the uncontrollability of experience.

So, the former systems were essentially dualistic, the idea being that there’s a hidden, abstract reality that redeems the apparent unfairness, impermanence, and suffering in nature. Philosophical knowledge amounts to knowledge of the hidden, unnatural world, which leads the sage to disassociate from the material plane and specifically his or her emotions. The transcendental sage exercises rational self-control rather than being led hither and thither by emotional reactions to stimuli because the sage is fixated on a metaphysical unity of all things or on Plato’s intellectual Forms, which are recognized by introspection or reason.

Meanwhile, naturalists like the atomists and Epicureans were more like the early Buddhists in taking the object of philosophical knowledge to be the causal order. Knowledge of the great extent to which events are causally determined and thus forced to happen, together with mindfulness of how unwholesome psychological mechanisms afflict us, opens the possibility of retraining the mind to observe causal chains without being manipulated by stimuli and buffeted by natural events.

As McEvilly says in relation to early Buddhism,

The condition of mind which results from this alteration in mental process is characterized by stability or steadiness (thitata). The steadied mind no longer runs this way in pursuit of unobtainable pleasures or that way in flight from inescapable pains. It is no longer thrown about by the impermanence of the vedanas [sensations]. Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, good and ill repute, and so on, are experienced with the same feeling tone, that is, with equanimity, imperturbability, steadiness, and so on.

The ancient naturalists were empiricists and even, in some cases, protopositivists who dismissed abstract theorizing as part of the problem since speculations can imprison us in unrealistic thought patterns, setting us up for disappointment when nature doesn’t oblige those vain preconceptions.

Despite these differences between the two outlooks, the upshot is the same: for these ancient philosophers, deep knowledge is supposed to put us at peace. Those who are not content with how things are are confused by their senses or by frivolous philosophy and religion. The unwise person gets caught up in conflicting shadows and fictions. She fails to appreciate either that there’s some structure beyond natural events or that these events can be observed from a mental distance without the emotional attachments and traumas.

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By contrast, the philosophy that builds on the profound discoveries of modern scientists is more likely to unsettle than reassure the wise person. Indeed, it sounds paradoxical even to speak of “modern wisdom” because the mark of the modern mentality is alienation, and we’d be more likely to pity an alienated person than revere him or her or seek this person’s guidance.

Were modern philosophers such as existentialists like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger led astray, or did they come to learn something about which the ancients were ignorant? Alternatively, is the difference one of mere emphasis?

Let’s set aside the transcendentalists and mystics like Plato, to make for a more direct comparison between ancient and modern naturalists. At first glance, it might look like the crucial difference is that modern philosophers know much more about how nature works. But this could amount to a mere multiplication of examples on the modern side, which might not be so crucial a distinguishing feature.

The Buddhists, Atomists, Epicureans, and Sophists were equally naturalistic in denying the possibility or at least the relevance of miracles, as in acausal events. They explained happiness and suffering as results of psychological mechanisms that were susceptible to therapies. Does adding empirical knowledge of ten thousand other natural mechanisms, including those that operate in distant galaxies, justify modern alienation or account for the sense that deep knowledge is disturbing rather than tranquilizing?

Possibly so, as the Sorites paradox shows. At some point, if you keep adding grains of sand to a heap, you build a mountain. There’s no obvious dividing line that separates the two, but the point is that differences in quantity can make for one of quality. A higher-level quality (being a mountain) emerges from lower-level activities (the adding of grains, one at a time).

Likewise, the vast increase in empirical knowledge of the extent of natural causality could entail a sobering realization that a fitting attitude towards nature isn’t neutrality or contentment but something like horror or alienation. In short, as I’ve argued elsewhere, scientific knowledge presents the universe as an inhuman monstrosity.

But let’s set that aside, too, for the moment. Another difference would be the broader cultural one that seeped into philosophy, namely what we regard as Western economic, political, and moral progress. The ancient world was known for its stability and its cyclical conception of time. Cycles predominated both in nature and the rise and fall of empires. Slavery, patriarchy, autocracy, and imperialism were the norms that recurred with the seasons, as it were.

As advanced as ancient societies were in comparison to what stripped-down life in the wild would be like, by numerous objective measures, human advancement — which is to say empowerment — took off with the rise of widespread science, capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law.

To take just one example, the global population started to rise sharply in the eighteenth century, and stratospherically in 1900, due to medical advances that reduced child mortality. The human population reached its first 100 million only in the second millennium BCE, and the first billion in the nineteenth century CE.

Possibly, then, what made for the modern rethinking of enlightenment as a form of alienation or a reckoning with the horror of reality is the juxtaposition of those two revolutions: the realization of nature’s inhuman scale plus the anomaly of relatively recent human progress. Life seems absurd because of how this stunning progress occurred despite nature’s indifference, which makes that progress seem precious due to its unlikelihood and its estrangement from the rest of the universe.

In other words, what existentialists emphasized is human freedom despite advanced knowledge of causality in nature. Moreover, that emphasis wasn’t arbitrary, but was based on the experience of human progress which the ancients couldn’t have imagined.

Now, while some of the ancient philosophers were determinists, others maintained that we have limited freedom. Indeed, they argued we had just enough self-control to adjust our mental habits and reduce our unnecessary pains. But what modern progress shows is that our species has all along been potentially at war with nature. Our freedom extends far beyond the ability to tinker with our expectations. We project our values onto culture, which initiates feedback loops that alienate us from the wilderness, as we adhere not so much to the laws that regulate animal behaviour, but to fabricated social conventions that mass fictions prop up.

The ancient naturalistic sage holds out the freedom only of detached observation, not the collective production of an alternative, artificial world. This is to say that the ancient world was, of course, traditional and conservative, not revolutionary and progressive. More precisely, the ancient sage failed to credit the potential for the systematic unnaturalness that was apparent — as we now know from our greater knowledge of deep time — even in the advent of behavioural modernity in the Upper Paleolithic and the transition from nomadic tribes of foragers to sedentary societies.

The “freedom” in question is practically a synonym for how psychologists and philosophers would account for personhood. What it means to be a person rather than just a wild animal is to have a decisive measure of self-control, and this is the opposite of being tied down by natural causes.

The question at issue is the extent of that autonomy. Could we hope to end a state of natural suffering only by escaping to an outsider’s vantage point of serenity, exercising freedom strictly from emotional attachments? Again, what sets modern philosophers apart from their ancient counterparts is the confirmation of a second, collective refuge. Of course, modern developed societies aren’t utopian since they include many forms of suffering, but the point is that these social hardships aren’t part of the natural causal order. Instead, they’re self-imposed as part of our collective flight from naturalness or the universal wilderness.

Thus, in a sense, the ancient philosophical therapy would be superfluous in the modern world. The sage would recommend detachment from unhelpful mental habits, even in a world in which developed countries have systematically detached from nature’s unhelpful wildness!

To appreciate the unprecedented power of human freedom, as evidenced by scientific, capitalistic, democratic, and moral progress beginning in the fifteenth century CE, is simultaneously to notice how alien and precarious that freely undertaken adventure is in nature. The modern self-conception is practically schizophrenic in that we must hold together opposing bodies of knowledge. We must comprehend both the physical world’s godless indifference to every eventuality, and the human world’s effective rebellion against that indifference, the rebellion that takes the form of advanced industrial civilization.

What’s unsettling to modern sensibilities is that so much progress could be both possible and, in the long run, probably pointless. We know more than the ancients not just about the universe but ourselves. Moreover, this advance isn’t due to introspection but to the accumulation of knowledge of the past, which enables us to recognize the contrast between conservative and progressive societies.

Ancient philosophers may have been unsurpassed in their first-person scrutiny of mental processes (although cognitive scientists would beg to differ). But what the ancients couldn’t have studied were the wealth and power of modern societies that sustain populations of billions, and that grappled with quantum mechanics, took astronauts to the Moon, and liberated hundreds of millions of women and enslaved people from squalor.

Is it the case that the more you know, the more imperturbable you ought to be? No, because what you learn isn’t unity but disunity, the disjunction between wildness and artificiality, between nature’s neutrality and the pride of progressive humanity, between the universe’s pointless evolution and the ideals that inspire civilization.

The mark of a modern sage isn’t mental stability but the inner struggle to reconcile those evident dichotomies. The struggle may begin with existential angst and dread before it moves on to a coping mechanism such as artistic sublimation or comedic release.

We can detach emotionally all we want from our cognitive routines, serenely observing them and mirroring nature’s amoral oneness. In the modern world, that kind of objectivity will only call to mind the scientific methods that drive our technological and social progress, and that accentuate the split between how nature cares about nothing, whereas we care a lot about our capacity to be relatively unnatural.

Thus, the ancient wisdom takes us swiftly to the modern kind.