Buddhism naturalized? Review of Owen Flanagan,the Bodhisattva’s brain: Buddhism naturalizedCambridge: MIT Press, 2011

Matthew MacKenzie

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

In The Bodhisattva’s Brain: BuddhismNaturalized, Owen Flanagan undertakes a projectof what he calls ‘cosmopolitan philosophy’, with an aim to develop and interrogate anaturalized Buddhism. Cosmopolitan philosophy, for Flanagan, involves an on-goingpractice of, “reading and living and speaking across different traditions as open, non-committal, energized by an ironic or skeptical attitude about all the forms of life beingexpressed, embodied, and discussed, including one’s own . . .” (Flanagan 2011: 2).

A project of naturalization requires a conception of naturalism that can serve as ahermeneutic and philosophical standard against which certain things may be judgednaturalistically acceptable or unacceptable. To his credit, Flanagan admits that ‘natural-ism’ is a vague concept, but its basic motto, he says, is ‘Just say no to the supernatural’.That is: “What there is, and all there is, is natural stuff, and everything that happens hassome set of natural causes that produce it–although we may not be able to figure outwhat these causes are or were” (Flanagan 2011: 2). Of course, these characterizations arecircular, and thus it remains an open question as to which things will turn out to benaturalistically acceptable and which will not. On Flanagan’s account, Buddhism‘naturalized’ is primarily a Buddhism, “without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus-pocus” such as “rebirth, a karmic system . . . , without nirvana, without bodhisattva’sflying on lotus leaves, . . . without nonphysical states of mind, . . .” (Flanagan 2011: 3).Instead, he sets out to sketch a version of Buddhism (or a new view inspired by it) that isconsistent with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and scientific materialism, including‘neurophysicalism’ or the view that “mental events are brain events” (Flanagan 2011: 3).Why bother sketching a naturalized Buddhism? According to Flanagan, naturalizedBuddhism (along with Confucianism) offers, “an interesting, possibly useful way ofconceiving the human predicament, of thinking about meaning for finite material beingsliving in a material world” (Flanagan 2011: 6).

Phenom Cogn SciDOI 10.1007/s11097-013-9330-2

M. MacKenzie (*)Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USAe-mail: matt.mackenzie@colostate.edu

The Bodhisattva’s Brain is divided into two parts. Part I, “An Essay in Compar-ative Neurophilosophy,” intervenes in a discussion between contemporary neurosci-ence, psychology, and philosophy as to whether Buddhism (or certain Buddhistmeditative practices) can reliably produce happiness or flourishing. Part II, “Bud-dhism as a Natural Philosophy,” engages central questions in Buddhist metaphysicsand epistemology from a naturalistic point of view.

In part I, Flanagan addresses the recent neuroscientific studies of both happiness andvarious forms of meditation. Neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson (UW-Madison)and Paul Ekman (Berkeley) have investigated the links between happiness and medita-tion by investigating the brain activity of long-term Buddhist meditators. This researchhas led, as Flanagan points out in chapter 1, to some rather sensationalist media reportsthat Buddhist practice produces happiness or that certain Buddhist meditators (e.g.,Matthieu Ricard) are possibly the ‘happiest people in the world.’Here Flanagan is at hisbest in carefully sorting through the methodological and philosophical tangle of thisdiscussion. In particular, he usefully appropriates the distinction between eudaimonia asa particular state (flourishing) or way of being (living well) articulated and pursuedwithin a particular tradition and happiness as a subjective feeling state (Flanagan 2011:11–12). One basic problem with the current discussion, Flanagan argues, is a tendencyto conflate eudaimonia and happiness, and then proceed to treat (supposed) neuralcorrelates of subjective happiness with scientific proof that meditation producesflourishing or well-being. It should be noted, though, that Flanagan does not accuseresearchers such as Davidson and Ekman of these problems.

Having distinguished flourishing and happiness, Flanagan goes on to characterizewhat he calls ‘eudaimoniaBuddha’, the distinctive form of flourishing pursued in theBuddhist tradition. This conception involves two aspects:

1. A stable sense of serenity and contentment (not the sort of happy-happy/joy-joy/click-your-heels feeling state that is widely sought and often promoted in theWest as the best kind of happiness).

2. This serene and contented state is caused by or constituted by enlightenment orwisdom and virtue or goodness and meditation or mindfulness as these arecharacterized within Buddhist philosophy (Flanagan 2011: 16).

He calls the first aspect ‘happinessBuddha’, whereas the second aspect characterizesthe form of life constitutive of or conducive to happinessBuddha. Flanagan claims that,so characterized, eudaimoniaBuddha is naturalistically acceptable, in part because itdoes not rely on the notions of nirv!ṇa or rebirth. Yet it is far from clear that whenproperly contextualized the Buddhist path can make sense without the notions ofkarma, rebirth, and especially nirv!ṇa. Nirv!ṇa is the ultimate goal of Buddhismand accepting that ‘only nirv!na is peace’ is traditionally considered a necessaryfeature of the path. Thus, unlike “bodhisattvas flying on lotus-leaves,” the concepts ofkarma, rebirth, and nirv!ṇ a constitute a central part of the inner logic of the traditionin such a way that it is highly questionable that a Buddhism shorn of these elements isBuddhism at all. Be that as it may, Flanagan’s clear and insightful discussion of theconnections between virtue, wisdom, happiness, and flourishing in the Buddhisttradition constitute the strongest aspect of the book.

In part II, Flanagan begins the work of a naturalistic reconstruction of centralaspects of Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. In chapter 4, he interprets

M. MacKenzie

the doctrine of an!tman (no-self) as a rejection of the substantial self, in favor of abroadly reductionist, psychological continuity account of personal identity, similar tothose found in Hume, Locke, James, and Parfit. Here Flanagan is on firm interpretiveand philosophical ground, though he intentionally avoids the more radically reduc-tionist forms of the no-self doctrine defended in classical Indian Buddhism, which hedubs ‘an!tman extremism’. Chapter 5 takes up the supposed connection betweenBuddhist wisdom qua insight into how things are—impermanent, dependently orig-inated, and selfless—and a Buddhist ethics of compassion. In particular, Flanaganinvestigates the possible connections between the doctrine of no-self and Buddhistethics. On his interpretation, while there is no logical entailment from a metaphysicsof no-self to an ethics of (morally) selfless compassion, deep experiential appreciationof the metaphysics can facilitate the cultivation of compassion.

In chapter 6, Flanagan takes up a comparative study of Buddhism, Aristotle’sthought, and the Hellenistic schools on the relation between virtue and happiness. Inparticular, he argues that both Aristotle and Buddhist philosophers such as "!ntideva(8th cent. C.E.) espouse what he calls ‘Aristotle’s Law’:

(1) Virtue is a necessary condition for happiness (along with reason); (2) normally(barring bad luck, including lack of basic necessities and neurochemical imbal-ances) it is sufficient to cause/produce happiness (Flanagan 2011: 170).

Arguably, however, much of Buddhist thought on this question is closer to themore radical Stoic claim that virtue—including in the Buddhist case the virtue ofinsight or wisdom, prajñ!—is necessary and sufficient for happiness (at least‘happinessBuddha’). That is, nirv!ṇa as the cessation of the causes of suffering andthe realization of the virtues of wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, is thought toinvolve a form of happiness that is not conditional upon one’s circumstances. Yet, asFlanagan points, it is hard to see how this more robust notion of liberation could benaturalized in his terms. His more modest interpretation is that Buddhist flourishinginvolves, “an active life of wisdom, virtue, and mindfulness,” and that, “the life of aeudaimonBuddha reliably, but not necessarily, yields happinessBuddha” (Flanagan 2011:201). This view is also well represented in the Buddhist tradition, though it isunderstood within the context of a path that traverses many lifetimes and retains asits ultimate goal nirv!ṇa in the more robust sense.

Flanagan’s project is both philosophically and hermeneutically ambitious. Theresults, however, are mixed; The Bodhisattva’s Brain offers both valuable insights andworrisome blindspots. The book is at its strongest as a study in comparative‘eudaimonics’, the empirical and philosophical study of human flourishing (Flanagan2011: 18). On these issues, Flanagan makes important contributions to a moreglobally informed discussion of ethics and moral psychology, including a nuancedcomparative study of Aristotelian and Buddhist ethics. On the other hand, Flanagan’sproject of naturalizing Buddhism strikes this reviewer as much less successful.

First, the notions of nirv!ṇa, karma, and rebirth, even if false, are not merely“mind-numbing and wishful hocus-pocus” that can be easily removed from a ‘mod-ernized’ or ‘demythologized’ Buddhism. Rather, they are part of the basic theoreticaland practical framework of the Buddhist tradition. To jettison or radically reinterpretthese ideas runs the risk of seriously distorting the inner logic of the tradition. Second,there is inner tension within Flanagan’s project. On the one hand, he wants to pursue a

Buddhism naturalized? Review of Owen Flanagan

cosmopolitan project that involves “an ironic or skeptical attitude about all the formsof life . . . including one’s own” (Flanagan 2011: 2). On the other hand, he wants tomake Buddhism both interesting and safe for naturalistically inclined analytic phi-losophers. This creates a dialogical asymmetry in which Flanagan’s own naturalismand scientific materialism becomes the standard of what is philosophically accept-able. Thus, Flanagan’s own version of naturalism and neurophysicalism is neverreally up for serious challenge in the book. Indeed, it appears that, on Flanagan’sview, rejection of nonphysical states of mind and acceptance of (at least) the token-identity of mental events and brain events marks the boundary of an acceptablecontemporary account of mind.

Yet, classical Buddhist philosophers rejected this kind of view on philosophical, notmerely dogmatic, grounds. For instance, they argued—to gloss it in contemporaryterms—that luminosity (the capacity for phenomenal presentation) and cognizance(intentionality) are the defining features (svalakṣaṇa) of mental events and that theseare not the defining features (indeed appear not to be features) of any uncontroversiallyphysical events. Thus there is reason to reject the identity of mental and physical events.Yet, we observe regular co-variation between mental and physical events such asactions, and in a way that supports the relevant counterfactuals needed to warrant theattribution of a causal connection. Despite the functional interdependence betweenmental and physical events, however, these thinkers argued that there was no epistemi-cally transparent account of how the physical could produce the mental (or vice versa).That is, Buddhist philosophers saw that phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, andmental causation present serious problems for materialism. These considerations,among others, lead many Buddhist thinkers to endorse an interactionist event dualismalong with a type of phenomenological psychology geared toward describing andclassifying the basic features and connections that constitute the flow of consciousmental life. This view, or one close to it, is arguably compatible with the nomologicalsupervenience of the mental on the physical and is not far from the forms of naturalisticdualism defended today by David Chalmers and others. Perhaps Flanagan’sneurophysicalism will turn out to be the better overall account of the mind, but a moredirect engagement with the sophisticated philosophical anti-materialism of Buddhistphilosophy of mind would have strengthened Flanagan’s laudable project of cosmopol-itan philosophy pursued in The Bodhisattva’s Brain.

M. MacKenzie