A Tale of Two Philosophies: Phenomenology and Buddhism on the Ethical, Jon Joey Telebrico, CMC ’23

A Tale of Two Philosophies:Phenomenology and Buddhism on the Ethical

Jon Joey Telebrico, CMC ’23

External Submission–Second Place for Best Essay

I. Introduction

The dominant tradition of phenomenology is characterized and known as a philosophical methodology through which one’s “lived experiences” are described. In doing so, the fundamental subjective insights developed through the practice and application of phenomenology serve to illuminate broader notions of philosophical significance. This essay is concerned with two primary questions: first, how do we achieve the moral experiences that guide us to the ethical, and second, what do these experiences tell us about that which is ethical? To resolve these two questions, I first ground my analysis of the subject within moral strands of phenomenology and its relevance to ethical matters and move to highlighting the affective dimension of Buddhist ethics and practices such as Qigong as one possible means of guiding moral experiences and ethical orientations. Throughout this essay I aim to ultimately examine phenomenology’s value as a means with which to arbitrate over ethical concerns, drawing upon moral phenomenology to identify a metaethical paradigm made possible through alternative Buddhist philosophies and their phenomenological undertakings.

II. Phenomenological Perspectives and Groundwork

First, I will outline how the bifurcated Eastern and Western philosophical traditions might come into dialogue with one another in order to establish a conceptual framework that the essay’s analysis will build off of. One might presume that the relation between Buddhist philosophy and phenomenology’s place in continental European philosophy appears loosely connected. However, the essay turns to the centuries-long historical contingency of Buddhist reflection on how consciousness is affected through various meditative states, arguing that this is indeed a form of phenomenology. While there are certainly differences between the tenets of Buddhism and phenomenology—namely, the ontological characterization of essence—Jingjing Li argues that the overlap between particular ideas within Husserl’s phenomenology, such as emptiness as the affirmation of the existentand the situation of essence within Buddhist idealism, are actually compatible with one another, and function to resolve some of the differences that would function to delineate the two as incommensurable traditions. Similar to comparative scholars who turn to epistemology to prevent dichotomizing the two,1 I seek to analyze the traditions’ affective moral dimensions and construct a broader metaethics by illuminating how particular Buddhist meditative practices can achieve moral phenomenological reflections.

To begin, my analysis is rooted at the primary site of the body and more broadly, the key phenomenological concept of embodiment. Rather than conceptualizing the body as a physical substance, Edmund Husserl—one of the most prominent of phenomenology’s scholars—considers the body as a locus, or lived center, of experience defined by our movement capabilities, sensations, and perceptions.2 Building upon this insight, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty establishes in Phenomenology of Perception that the body and the world are inextricably linked: we come to know the world through the medium of our bodies.3 In coming to understand that the body both structures the self and our experiences,

the dimension of embodiment emerges as a constitutive component of articulating how one navigates the world and interacts with other embodied agents within it. Indeed, the core idea to be examined herein is that the body can function concretely as a value modality with which one is able to embody and enact their moral bearings or beliefs.

Where might this connection between embodiment and morality come into play? Again, we turn back to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception, wherein he argues that “one phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out.”4 Specifically, we can situate his account of motivation and the apparent linkage between phenomena within what Bryan Lueck describes as “virtue ethics’ commitment to metaethical internalism.” In its most basic principle, metaethical internalism holds that moralistic value judgments entail a sort of motivation to do some action. Lueck argues that this motivation is internal to a moral sensitivity and evaluation derived from a Merleau-Pontean model of perception: a perceived situation offers us moral reasons to respond with and enact an action.5 The basis for Lueck’s argument extends Merleau-Ponty’s description of “gearing in” to a particular situation, where “to be geared in in the right way is to experience the situation itself as motivating an appropriate response.”6 Gearing in—in this sense—can be considered adopting an orientation towards things that is necessary to bring out their moral sense. Indeed, if we are to take this idea of gearing in as a sufficient condition for achieving an appropriate moral response to a situation we perceive, then we must examine where this motivation for gearing in comes from and what specific orientations of gearing in might entail.

For our purposes, I identify two ways of gearing in that aligns with the Merleau-Pontean account: gearing in to the world and gearing in to others. I will explore both cases, although the Buddhist articulation within this essay will primarily focus on the latter. Beginning with the former, however, we can use the terminology of Husserl wherein he articulates an operant intentionality: “the corporeal subject is inserted into the world that provokes questions or problems that must be resolved. Therefore, one can speak of a motivation on the part of the world, although not of a necessity, because the response is not mechanical or determined.”7 Thus, in order to respond to the moral provocations of the world one finds themselves in, one must then undergo an active process of adaptation to the world, modifying one’s moral responses and actions. Merleau-Ponty more accurately describes how this process works:

My body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world.8

In other words, “the posture that the body adopts in a situation is its way of responding to the environment” in order to establish its existence and respond to what it perceives.9

This dynamic posturing of the corporeal scheme, however, can be best understood by how subject-environment interaction occurs vis-à-vis the body. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes a dialectic that occurs between two layers: the present body which possesses capacity for action, and the habitual body, which “presupposes a form of ‘understanding’ that the body has of the world in which it carries out its operations.”10 Here, habit is expressed as reconciliation between the environment and subject, a relational understanding between oneself and the world prior to engaging in any sort of conscious or moral evaluation. To MerleauPonty, habit is distinct from the normative

sense of the word: it “is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action… It is knowledge in the hand, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made.”11 The idea of knowledge or understanding as intrinsic to the body appears novel and incomprehensible, but this is precisely why Merleau-Ponty aims to reconceptualize it.

Merleau-Ponty, in clarifying this form of bodily understanding or knowledge, furthers: “To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance— and the body is our anchorage in a world.”12 As an example, when we touch another object, we fulfill an intention or conviction that is directed towards that object in the world—it “expresses our power of dilating our being-in-theworld, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.”13 As we navigate the world, then, we are necessarily conditioned by a prereflexive projection of intention that posits meaning about our being and the world as a sort of bodily knowledge central to habit. To be geared in towards the world thus draws upon a worldly motivation that is achieved when we orient our bodies to respond to the environment before us within the possibilities carved out by habit.

Next, we examine what it means to be geared in towards others. Here, emergent strands of morality become more evident as we engage with other embodied agents or perceivers. Indeed, “for Merleau-Ponty, that is, the body plays a constitutive role in experience precisely by grounding, making possible, and yet remaining peripheral in the horizons of our perceptual awareness”—our body is constantly perceived by others and we even come to understand ourselves as being bodies.14 In this way, we experience phenomenological intersubjectivity which tends towards a reality in which we possess—in relation to others—similar bodily gestures aimed at a shared world. Merleau-Ponty calls this process an “intentional coupling or impregnation of gestures,” which Douglas Low argues, carves out moral possibilities through recognition of the other as another human being and recognition of the other’s human world. Here, Low notes that the Merleau-Pontean idea of recognizing man qua man is accomplished through a recognition of the unique structure of the human body and the gestural coupling of human bodies. Through this, Merleau-Ponty articulates a morality of experience, “evoking and invoking ‘an ideal community of embodied subjects, of an intercorporeality.”15 One might consider this intercorporeality as a bodily being-in-theworld and personal bodily awareness of the world that is shared and intertwined with others.16 On this account then, Merleau-Ponty is able to create a moral orientation towards others through the body, developing a theory of human nature that is necessarily perceptual, experiential, and perspectival.

Gearing in, however, must first be achieved as opposed to being a presupposed state that one embodies. Indeed, as understood by Merleau-Ponty, “it is something that must be accomplished; the fit is not guaranteed in advance. As a result, the process of gearing in can fail in a way that it rarely does in the literal case.”17 I argue that to circumvent the possibility of failure outlined here by Lueck’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, gearing in towards others requires apprehending or interrupting the habitual action we foster from gearing in towards the world. This is to say that habit is still necessary—for “habit represents the overarching disposition in virtue of which we respond more easily to certain possibilities, because we possess a pre-reflective attunement that guides our behavioural response.”18 This guided behavioral response, however, does not always embody the proper moral response. For example, you might consider that someone who can become extremely frustrated might subjectively express this frustration through a forceful physical action such as kicking a rock—this perhaps could be considered their subjective gearing in towards the world, in which “my

perceiving body ‘has already sided with the world’ and ‘is already open to certain of its aspects and synchronized with them.’”19 When interacting with others, we are often already faced with moral situations that resemble the moral questions the world provokes at us. Yet in this instance, we observe that while we have similar moral propositions to resolve our frustration, we cannot resolve it in the same way— such an action enacted towards others would not be an appropriate moral response, as a gearing in towards others demands an emotional expression that does not cause harm to others. Gearing in towards others may therefore require that an individual first processes a moral situation through habitual action, and then proceeds to redirect a course of action after further conscious evaluation. In this way, gearing in towards others represents a sort of attitude shift that allows us to foster a moral attitude—wherein we do not automatically act upon our prereflexive habitual response, but instead evaluate the moral sense of a situation at hand and act upon that evaluation.

III. Affect and Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics

In “Making Consciousness an Ethical Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-Racism,” Jessica Locke outlines further connections between Buddhist ethics and phenomenology. Indeed, she notes that “the entire Buddhist path is predicated upon human beings’ ability to work to transform our phenomenological orientation in order to extirpate ourselves from the fundamental ignorance that causes our suffering and our ethical failures.”20 In the previous section, we articulated how one might phenomenologically orient the self towards the world and towards others. However, Buddhism here departs from one of the premises of this notion with defining an essential self, wherein Buddhism in contrast possesses “the no-self doctrine, that the self, what we experience as the self, is actually not some permanent, inherently existent, substantively real, solid thing. It’s actually a bunch of processes that are… converging and intersecting and always moving.”21 This is perhaps encapsulated by Lao-Tze’s description of Qi, a central Eastern philosophical concept that can be understood as a substance of “vitality” or “life energy” that flows through our body along meridians—or pathways—where both Qi and blood circulate throughout the body: “Qi exists throughout the universe. When it assembles, the human dies. Therefore, do not worry about life and death. Live naturally and freely as you are.”22 Rather than viewing the human body as an essential and finite existence, certain Buddhist principles hold that the body is simply an assemblage of the universal Qi.

If this is the case, does Qi offer us an alternative conception of being that can be applied towards our phenomenological orientations? Here, I turn back to phenomenology’s emphasis on affect, and how that manifests as a particularly moral phenomenology. Locke articulates, “the real ethical work that moral phenomenology suggests lies in addressing the contradiction between our reflective, consciously avowed values and our pre-reflective unconscious feelings and responses that comprise the conditions under which we gear into our ethical lives.”23 Not only does Locke use the Merleau-Pontean notion of “gearing in” to our ethical lives, but she claims that the comportment of ourselves in the world is conditioned by the aforementioned habitual, phenomenological structures that exceed epistemic commitments to the ethical. Locke argues to move away from a deluded egocentrism—placing oneself at the center of the world—toward a liberated state of non-clinging, which she conceives as a process of ethical self-cultivation.24 Buddhist monk Zhiyi also points out that “both ‘meditation with prolonged sitting’ and ‘meditation with prolonged walking’ are needed for self-cultivation.” Thus, an affective measure moving from the phenomenological sense of self to the self-

cultivation described by both Zhiyi and Locke appears necessary.

This affective component links back to the idea that our bodies are constituted by Qi. Incorporating the meditative components discussed by Zhiyi is the practice of Qigong, “a combination of meditation, breathing and physical movements that is used to manage the vital energy (Qi) in the body and improve spiritual, physical, and mental health.”25 Resembling our discussion of habit as subject-environment interaction, Qigong is an ancient mind-body exercise that uses breathing or movement to emphasize a harmonious interaction between humans and the environment’s Qi energy.26 Analyzing the practice of Qigong in urban green spaces, researchers from Taiwan conducted a survey of Qigong practitioners in order to compare it to the Western concept of flow, in which when activities go smoothly, so too does the subject doing the activity experience similar feelings.27 Finding positive correlations and similarities between the Qi and flow experiences, the researchers noted participants’ experiencing loss of selfawareness, embodied energy transfer, and even the transformation of time. Qi here, functions as a sort of bridge between the subject and the external wherein “it is believed that an exchange of [Qi]28 between the external world and the internal body occurs. In other words, Eastern medicine understands the body as an ‘open system’ connected to the external world.”29 Already, one can see how Qi is distinct from the Western tradition in its lack of dualistic orientations towards the world and how one might navigate one’s own environment.

How does a practice like Qigong affect our bodily orientations and responses? In Alia AlSaji’s “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” she describes a process in which the hesitation induced by meditation is a form of waiting, and to “to wait is to testify that that time makes a difference for experience, that all is not given in the present. To wait, without projection, is… to be open to… a past that can be dynamically transformed through the passage of events, and that grounds the creative potential of events.”30 Indeed, in relation to habit, hesitation takes one’s bodily knowledge and maps out new possibilities through a temporal modification. By slowing down the subject—to the point that meditated hesitation may even allow one to “step out” of time—hesitation seeks to unroot our tendency to act upon seemingly sedimentary habits and turn them into ongoing activities that are instantiated continually. In a Merleau-Pontean sense, habits “are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment; they offer me a sense, but this is a sense that I reflect back to them. In fact, the acquisition that is available to us expresses, at each moment, the energy of our present consciousness.”31 I am interested in what Merleau-Ponty describes here as “a sense that I reflect back to them.” Tracking our previous discussion of metaethical internalism, we find that gearing in causes the expression of bodily habits to emanate a moral sense which we can act upon, as articulated by Merleau-Ponty. Here, what we are reflecting is a comportment or orientation that has been acquired, shaped, and enacted within the site of the body—a reflection made possible through a responsive hesitation operating at the level of habit that opens up new possibilities that can transform the moral imperatives that define our action.

Where does this reflection come into play in terms of our orientation to a given situation? Let’s consider the previous example of a person who is frustrated, only this time, the cause of their frustration is recognition of their enemy, or a person who has caused immense harm to them in some way. Here, recognition has taken a negative directionality, spurring the subject to express their frustration as violence enacted upon that person. Sustained practice of something such as Qigong, however, possesses the capacity to condition our habits such that a similar person in this

instance might be able to “suspend the movement… and to stay with the present thought, emotion, or bodily sensation.”32 The suspension of movement and mindful awareness of the situation made possible through the affect of Qi flowing through one’s body demonstrates how a phenomenology of hesitation leads one to necessarily be “conscious of his bodily spaces as the matrix of his habitual action.”33 Indeed, Al-Saji notes that “responsive hesitation inserts indeterminacy into habit… other responses to this map… creates possibilities that have been hitherto foreclosed and which can transform actuality. This is to say that for responsive hesitation the future is unpredictable and open; it is yet to be created.”34 Indeed, in the face of a competing habitual response and its competing moral compulsion, one necessarily overcomes habit to achieve a proper moral response. This reflection thus operates through an ethically salient emotion as a modality of attunement to one’s embodied experience—rather than using their body to enact violence as a manifestation of their frustration, one comes to reconsider their moral stance and response after hesitation and reflection.

This idea of utilizing Qi as bodily affect appears in other parts of Buddhist traditions as well. In the Si-Meng lineage of Confucian ethics, the opening lines of the Chinese text “Discourse on Nature and Feeling” provide a phenomenological description of how a person might ethically evaluate some moral situation, reading, “affective energies (qi 氣) of happiness, anger, longing, and sadness are a matter of nature naturing… If in beginning one remains close to feeling, consummating one will be close to optimal appropriateness (yi 義).” Indeed, our feelings about situations can be understood as determinate of how we imaginatively ameliorate our situated experience and realize relational flourishing through ethical agency, evoking the Merleau-Pontean notion of gearing in towards others.35 The metaethical dimension is illustrated more clearly with this example in which the affective dimensions of Qi lead one to sustain feelings and hold them close to moral appropriateness. In this way, it becomes possible to attune one’s own self to the continuous nature of one’s bodily habits, the reactive emotions it embodies, and reflective consideration of appropriate responses to moral perceptions, engaging in a broader, virtuous project of self-cultivation evident within the Buddhist tradition.

IV. Conclusion

While the disciplinary conceptions of phenomenology within Eastern and Western philosophical traditions seem to come into conflict, this essay demonstrates that we can turn to the site of the body as a way to reconcile matters of moral and ethical concern. Analyzing moral phenomenology and the affective role of Buddhist ethics, one can come to cultivate a metaethics that informs our subjective moral experiences and collective ethical modalities. Therefore, Buddhist philosophies and its affective phenomenological tenets emerge as a critically valuable means with which to develop models of moral behavior that guide our orientations to the ethical.

Endnotes 1 Jingjing Li, “Buddhist Phenomenology and The

Problem of Essence,” Comparative Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2016): 62. 2 Elizabeth A. Behnke, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (2011). 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and

Perception (London and New York: Routledge

Classics, 2002), 94. 4 Merleau-Ponty, 57. 5 Bryan Lueck, “Merleau-Ponty, Moral Perception, and Metaethical Internalism,” The Journal of

Speculative Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2020): 266. 6 Lueck, 266-267. 7 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David

Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), quoted in Patricia Moya, “Habit and

embodiment in Merleau-Ponty,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014), 1-2. 8 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 292. 9 Sean Gallagher & Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of

Mind and Cognitive Science (New York:

Routledge, 2008), quoted in Moya, “Habit and embodiment in Merleau-Ponty,” 2. 10 Moya, 1. 11 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 166. 12 Merleau-Ponty, 167. 13 Merleau-Ponty, 166. 14 Taylor Carman, “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (1999): 208. 15 David Michael Levin, “Tracework: Myself and

Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-

Ponty and Levinas,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 361. 16 Douglas Low, “The Foundations of Merleau-

Ponty’s Ethical Theory,” Human Studies 17, no. 2 (1994): 181-182. 17 Lueck, “Metaethical Internalism,” 269. 18 Elisa Magrì, “Towards a phenomenological account of social sensitivity,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2020): 644. 19 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 251, quoted in Lueck, “Metaethical Internalism,” 268. 20 Jessica Locke, “Making Consciousness an Ethical

Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-Racism,” In Buddhism and

Whiteness: Critical Reflections, ed. George Yancy and Emily McRae (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 161. 21 Jessica Locke, interview with Ellie Anderson and

David Peña-Guzmán, “Buddhist Practices and

Anti-Racism,” Overthink (podcast), 25:31, January 26, 2021, accessed January 2, 2022, https://www.overthinkpodcast.com/episode-14transcript. 22 S. Tsuyoshi Ohnishi and Tomoko Ohnishi, “Philosophy, Psychology, Physics and Practice of Ki,”

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative

Medicine 6, no. 2 (2009): 177. 23 Locke, “Making Consciousness an Ethical Project,” 163. 24 Locke, 164. 25 Shih-Han Hung, Ching-Yung Hwang, and Chun-

Yen Chang, “Is the Qi experience related to the flow experience? Practicing qigong in urban green spaces,” PLoS One 16, no. 1 (2021): 1, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240180. 26 Hung et al., 2. 27 Hung et al., 3. 28 This modification is because the authors of the following citation use the Japanese word Ki for the Chinese equivalent of Qi, whereas the essay discusses Qi within Chinese Buddhism and the diasporic practice of Qigong. 29 Ohnishi and Ohnishi, “Philosophy, Psychology,

Physics and Practice of Ki,” 176. 30 Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation:

Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and

Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany, SUNY Press: 2014), 148. 31 Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Helen Ngo, “Racist habits: A phenomenological analysis of racism and the habitual body,” Philosophy and Social

Criticism 29, no. 9 (2016): 863. 32 Céline LeBoeuf, “Reforming Racializing Bodily

Habits: Affective Environment and Mindfulness

Meditation,” Critical Philosophy of Race 6, no. 2 (2018): 172. 33 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, 119. 34 Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 154. 35 Joseph Harroff, “Resolute Agency in Confucian

Role Ethics,” PhD Dissertation, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, April 30, 2018, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/62668/2018-05-phd-harroff.pdf.