What is well-being? The shortest, simplest, and easiest answer is, it depends. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would have us believe it’s rooted either in hedonism, desire, or an objective list, a sort of collection of objective concepts that compose it i.e. friendship, health, etc. Or perhaps it’s completely subjective, in which case other questions can follow, if one can look within to define well-being for themself, we might ask, is well-being my goal? Is it beneficial to strive toward? Can it be achieved? Is my well-being tied to someone or something else, or is it solely mine? No matter the answers to these questions, it is evident, overwhelmingly so, that well-being is becoming a principal goal of our society. There is a proliferation of self-help commerce, autodidactic spirituality, online therapy, fitness, health, diet, attention, and focus on it. Is this because we are more interested in well-being, or because we are worse off? Or, is this a false meta-narrative, have we always been concerned with well-being? No matter, there is without a doubt a piqued interest, sometimes bordering on obsession, with well-being in aspects of our culture today.
What this paper aims to do is illuminate how well-being is tied fundamentally to our metaphysical epistemological worldview, by this I mean, the way in which we construct our knowledge from its origin. It is epistemological in the sense that it’s concerned with how we come to know, and metaphysical in the sense that the sort of knowledge called into question is the origin of knowledge itself, logic, experience, and thought. I aim to put Buddhism and Kant, spirituality and reason, into a conversation through the use of a new dialectic, and in doing so show the connections between well-being and epistemology.
The sides of my dialectic are divided knowledge, and undivided knowledge.
The question posited by this paper then becomes, does one type of knowledge or the other constitute well-being and or oppose it? In order to answer the question we must first understand the distinction.
Division
Divided knowledge is everything we know that we can see in the world that we’ve come upon through reason and abstracted experience. Immanuel Kant and his philosophy on what constitutes reality becomes relevant here. For Kant, the world is made up of human reasoning and the ideas we generate from it. Kant wrote,
“Reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply to its questions.”
A sentiment that could be boiled down to as follows, our reason does not conform to the objects of the world, the objects of the world conform to our reason.
Thus, human reason abstracts from the underlying nature of the world and composes the world with the will of its human reasoners.
An example which supports a Kantian outlook is our handling of dog breeds. The primary purpose of the AKC is to provide a strict standard for dog breeds, in other words, using human reasoning we abstract from the various properties of dogs in order to classify them as certain breeds. From a Kantian point of view, reason is a map that influences the territory, and the AKC is the map guardian, making sure each dog breeder continues to follow the instructions on the map, and doesn’t mess with the territory as we’ve idealized it. One might imaginably say here, “of course a great dane and a Chihuahua are two different breeds, thats clear, there is little reasoning required in making that distinction.” That’s true, but for other breeds it’s not so simple. Take the Rhodesian Ridgeback for example, this breed has a distinct ridge of fur that runs opposite the direction of the rest of the fur on its body. According to the Code of Ethics for the breed, should a Rhodesian Ridgeback be born without this distinguishing ridge, the owner is required to neuter it, not breed it, and cannot enter it into any shows. Therefore, using our human reasoning, we exert a condition on the world, influencing how it will manifest, that would otherwise not exist, in order to hopefully one day enjoy a world where there is no such thing as a Rhodesian Ridgeback without a ridge.
Another helpful example in understanding how we abstract and divide our reality to come to know it is how we come to know a tree. To know a tree, we must first come to know it as a “tree” by distinguishing it from other similar structures through its common features, or forms, via its oscillating values of said forms like branchiness, height, barkness, etc. Accordingly, the US forestry Service’s definition of a tree is,
“Though no scientific definition exists to separate trees and shrubs, a useful definition for a tree is a woody plant having one erect perennial stem (trunk) at least three inches in diameter at a point 4-1/2 feet above the ground, a definitely formed crown of foliage, and a mature height of at least 13 feet.”
This otherwise arbitrary definition is a testament to the inexactness of human reason and knowledge by division. Most objects of the world are accurately and predictably defined through their respective forms, but what this definition of a tree reveals is that our divisions may be more mutable than we think. Divided knowledge then, is scientific knowledge, in fact, it is any knowledge that exists in language, in human reasoning. The primary questions of scientific knowledge are questions of what to divide, how, and why. To most of us divided knowledge is just knowledge, there is nothing else, and it’s this mentality which is directly opposed in those who follow.
Undivision
Undivided knowledge is unknowable through language and some may go so far to say, in contradiction to even calling it knowledge, that it is unknowable period. So any attempt to describe it with words is a form of division and thereby not truly undivided. It is the primary dictum of Zen Buddhism where it is cultivated primarily through meditation. In Monism, it is the fundamental substance from which all emerges. In Monotheism, it is the ineffable mystery of God whose will we can never grasp. Those who fall into the philosophical school of Skepticism, or the idea that we can never really know the truth, might be cheering here, but I would argue against classifying undivided knowledge and its primarily theological and philosophical adherents as Skeptics, for they are making claims on what it is like to possess undivided knowledge, and that it does itself constitute a truth or even, the truth.
Undivided knowledge might be classified many different ways, as intuition, as spiritual truth, mysticism, as bodily knowledge, or even a sort of Animism. Robert Pirsig in his Novel Lila provides a definition for undivided knowledge when he describes the mystic state of mind of certain Native American cultures and what that entails,
“Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding”
From this point of view, undivided knowledge is “real understanding”. It is the truth of the way the world is, it is reality.
The philosophy of Japanese Zen Buddhism, or as some call it the anti-philosophy, is a practice rooted in cultivating this real understanding, this undivided knowledge. It is done primarily by ridding oneself of the ties one has to the ego-consciousness, which is upheld by the world of divided knowledge, since the dualistic nature of ego-consciousness goes hand in hand with the dualistic nature of divided knowledge, or the idea that the mind can stand as an entity, a “self”, separated out from the world to which it belongs and observe it “objectively”. For Japanese Zen, there is no true understanding of the world brought about through division, or reason, it is attainable only through the transcendence of divisive thinking. And yet, it’s not unique to Eastern Philosophy, many pre-Socratic Greeks, Native American religions, and even European thinkers have posited aspects of an undivided knowledge in their theories.
What’s important to take away is that undivided knowledge is often posited as the “real truth” the truth that we cannot obtain through our traditional efforts of reason and Aristotelian logic.
Is undivided knowledge really possible?
Parmenides wrote that there are two ways of knowing the world, but that as long as we are human and exist as human beings, we will only ever know one of them. Those two ways are: the way of truth, and the way of opinion. The latter being the one which we are stuck in.
For Parmenides everything which we know as humans falls into the way of opinion. All that is actual is of course the way of truth, a sort of oneness, but not “one” since that would imply a “two”, this “way of truth” is of course, undivided knowledge. But for Parmenides it is unobtainable while we are alive as human beings. On the way of opinion Parmenides had this to say,
“The mortals lay down and decided well to name two forms (i.e. the flaming light and obscure darkness of night), out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray“
In Parmenides argument, undivided knowledge is the truth, as other proponents of it remarked above, yet for Parmenides, there is no way for us to transcend the world of opinion, it is what we are tragically bound to.
In contrast to Parmenides, Buddhists make the claim that we can transcend the way of opinion. They claim through rigorous practice and a dismantling of the Aristotelian logic and our adherence to the division of our “self” or ego-consciousness from the world and the world itself, we can return to an undivided way of truth, so to speak.
Yet divided knowledge has without a doubt given rise to many material benefits, most human “progress” as we may define it, has occurred from divided knowledge. The question becomes, can our world pragmatically overthrow the very divided knowledge that has made our materially abundant existence possible in favor of a spiritually driven quest for undivided knowledge?
Well Being
One of the principle minds leading the charge for undivided knowledge, from his grave, is Alan Watts. Watts has published many titles translating Eastern philosophy for the Western layman and does so with a distinct style.
Alan Watts wrote that suffering emerges from dividing our mind out from the world to which it belongs. In his early work The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts writes that the division of the mind and the world, the mind and the body, the perception and experience, the feeler and the feeling, causes anguish. We divide out an “I”, an experiencer that is separate from the world and its feelings, when this “I” is indeed a part of the world, and its feelings as such are not “its”, but the worlds. (This division is a point of view traditionally referred to as dualism, championed by enlightenment thinkers, specifically Renes Descartes, but really underpins aspects of human thought dating back millennia.) To do otherwise (dualism + divided knowledge) is the principle cause of suffering. Literary figures, theologians, and philosophers such as Watts, Buddhists, Hindus, certain aspects of Christianity, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Aldous Huxley, William James, Baruch Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Marcus Aurelius, and countless others have all remarked how the cause of our suffering is our increased abstraction (divided knowledge) that alienates us from the way things really are.
“The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.” – Watts
What connects this to epistemology, how we come to know, how we define truth, is that seeing the world through a lens of division is a source of suffering because this way of seeing the world is farther from the truth, and to be farther from the truth causes suffering. Spiritual schools of thought more than philosophers or literary figures, present an antidote to the divided nature of our knowledge by offering up a more “true” way of knowing the world. When we begin to experience our daily life in such a way that brings us closer to the “truth” as outlined by undivision, that we are not divided out from the world, that reality is not a game of either-or, that we don’t stand opposed to the world as objective observers, but are active participants in it, we reduce our suffering. When we drift from the truth, through the attachment to dualistic concepts, through reductionist attitudes, and an either-or zero sum logic, we increase our suffering. This is the bedrock of the claims of well-being as it relates to undivided knowledge. This is because our division is an illusion, helpful in allowing our material manipulation of the world, but not helpful in getting us closer to seeing the world for what it really is, which is undivided. To live in this illusion is the cause of suffering.
This stands in stark contrast to the form of well-being mentioned at the top of this article, the meta-analysis of well-being published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which characterized theories on well-being as belonging to either hedonism, desire fulfillment, or objective lists, and is without a doubt rooted in ego-consciousness.
Of course, we take for granted the world of undivided knowledge, it’s insights and oracles are necessary only because the mind and experience is at its base level divided. The common experience of most people is the divided one, not the undivided one. Our world is divided into home, work, play. Each home is divided into rooms, each room is divided into the different objects that go in that room, objects are divided into their components which are divided into materials, molecules, atoms. An orange is an orange, but orange flavoring is divided or abstracted out into our food and drink. Protein is a substance divided out from beans, meat, etc and resold in a raw format. Calculus, is the division and calculation, or abstraction, of an infinite number of tiny straight lines added up in order to map a curve.
As we specialize in more discreet scientific thought we grow more divided in our knowledge. And this scientific knowledge aims to solve the problems of well-being just as well as its spiritual predecessors. The answer to the problems of the human mind in the West have followed the same divisive approach. In Psychology, apart from Gestalt Psychology, we divide the mind up into multiple characteristics, subconscious, conscious, child mind, adolescent mind, hierarchy of needs, etc. With it we have a slew of mental diseases, and their subsequent names and definitions. In this state we’ve come to see well-being as something that can be achieved through division. In direct opposition to the philosophy of the undivided we are taught to overcome our depression and anxiety by becoming aware of the physiological sensations that accompany them and naming it anxiety, or depression. Watt’s argues against naming, “When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,” etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead.”
The point being, that there are two paths that aim at achieving well-being, those rooted in ego-consciousness and those in undivision, and though similar behavior may manifest while following the dictums of each (vegetarianism for example), on a fundamental level they seem opposed.
Which one makes me well?
The story of the Garden of Eden is an allegory for the moment that humans came unto division. We went on enjoying ourselves, living wholly in the moment of paradise, until we ate the forbidden fruit. The fruit is an allegory for human reason. The forbidden fruit is reason itself, and its knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of division, made possible by reason. Undivision is correct, but so is division. Our undivided experience is possible, it’s what we temporarily feel when we participate in an act that no conscious preparation could help us to partake in. Catching a wave while surfing, running down a mountain, and during numerous other activities, one can feel the marriage of mind and body, conscious and subconscious, to complete these acts. Yet, we’ve chosen in many ways a divided world, rather, we’ve chosen what to divide in the face of our inevitable experience of division. It seems then that the evidence is stacked against division when it comes to well-being. Not only is division the moment when man experienced his downfall in Christianity, it is the illusion in Buddhism, and yet, is it really so bad? What of our world would we have without it? Our ability to differentiate between objects and subjects has got to make up a large part of our joy as well as our suffering no? Would we trade this suffering world of division for one in which the primary experience is a never ending oneness punctuated by moments of differentiation? In such a scenario we could well imagine the source of suffering being flipped.
If we want to become the master of our environment, and perhaps even a master of the world, then divided knowledge and the tools that accompany are the correct path. If we want freedom from the tyrannical suffering of the “I”, the “feeler” of our “feelings” and the liberation of transcendence, then undivided knowledge is the correct path. Or can Kant and Watts be unified in their approach? Can we achieve an undivided mind in a world of our chosen division? Toeing the line and existing in the tension of this balance?
Maybe we only experience undivided reality in short visceral bursts. Smelling the grass, stepping out into the sun from a dark hallway and feeling the squinting of our eyes, a moment of sport, or a wave of love. Perhaps, these bursts are even the silent motivator for life. Perhaps we don’t have to choose between divided and undivided at all.
Then does existing in a balance between divided and undivided or not constitute a better or worse life? Of course we can look out and point to a bad life can we not? Morbid obesity, intense drug addiction, spiraling neuroticism, criminality, are those not symptoms of spilling over into too much division or undivision? Or, is the pursuit of well-being the ironic blockade to it? Is well-being more likely found in indifference to knowledge divided or undivided?
Albert Camus in The Stranger suggested that the well-being won from an indifference to death costs us the tragedy of life, as such, when his main character is greeted with the possibility of appeal in the face of his death sentence, he begins to suffer for the first time in the story. This implies suffering is rooted in our aversion to life, not death, and if life is experienced as division, and division does not achieve well-being, this suggests that well-being may well be, overrated. Perhaps division and undivision, and the tragedy of the tension between each is what makes life worth living. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy that the invention of tragedy was the method by which the pre-Socratic Greeks reaffirmed life.
Contemplation and Conclusion
After much galivanting in my mind between the undivided and divided I wondered – Why am I even having this internal debate? What is it that Watts and Kant, Camus, philosophers around the world, writers, artists, and the most noble of scientists all have in common? Contemplation, and not contemplation as reasoning, but the sort of contemplation found in non attachment to governing principals of that which is being contemplated, less logic, more leisure. As pointed out by Joseph Pieper,
“Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and “go under,” almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go… The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery — is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep?”
Could contemplation be the source of well-being? Of course, contemplation can never be undivided can it? Yet, in it we’ve conceived of undivided knowledge, and in it we’ve conceived of how to strive toward it. In contemplation lies the enumeration of options and therefore the possibility of choice. Without contemplation there would be no undivided knowledge, for it would never have been divided out. As such, contemplation gives rise to the divisions we want to make, in contemplative reasoning, in our viewing of the world, in our extreme self-awareness we are able to transcend the throes of mere division for the sake of division. Rather, there is division for the sake of undivision. Contemplation promotes a radical self-awareness, or more so, world awareness, it promotes a sort of dynamic vacillation between division and undivision, it defeats the dichotomy itself by synthesizing it. Even though we can rarely escape our divided mind but for moments of trance, we can contemplate endlessly. Divided and undivided knowledge are united in contemplation. Contemplation is the means by which we strike the balance between the two.
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gregorykelsh 