The Worlds We Shape through Habit: On Ethical Self-Cultivation in Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle, and the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong Tradition 公开
Locke, Jessica Elizabeth (2016)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation is a cross-cultural philosophical work that examines the role of habit in shaping our experience of the world and, based on that, how we respond ethically to it. Further, my dissertation inquires into the prospects that we have for re-habituating ourselves in ever more ethically felicitous ways. The main resources that shape my approach to these questions are Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Aristotle's virtue ethics, and the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong ('Mind-Training') tradition. I read these perspectives on habit alongside one another, addressing the puzzle of what it means to re-habituate ourselves. In the works of Merleau-Ponty and Aristotle, I find detailed accounts of how habit shapes our lived experience and defines us as ethical agents. In Lojong I find a set of practices that claims to effect a moral-phenomenological shift in its practitioners, revising the habitual structures that underwrite both ethical action and conscious experience. While each of these articulations of habit speaks in its own voice about the obstacles and opportunities that lay before the person who wishes to re-habituate herself, I argue that together these three philosophies of habit indicate the ever-unfolding futurity of our ethical subjectivity. Habit shows us not only how our ethical subjectivity takes shape historically and culturally; it also invites self-cultivation in the interest of ethical growth.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
I. Making Experience an Ethical Project
II. Habit as a Site for Ethical Self-Cultivation
III. Methodology of Cross-Cultural Philosophy and Outline of Chapters
Chapter One 11
Acquiring a World through Habit
I. Introduction
II. Origins of the Life-World
III. Perceptual Habit and the Formation of Our World
IV. Habit and the Ethics of the Gaze
Chapter Two 43
"All the Difference" that Habit Makes: A Problem in Aristotelian Moral Psychology
I. Introduction
II. What Is the "Difference" that Habit Makes?
III. How Character Directs Our Actions
a. Practical wisdom (phronēsis)
b. Imagination
c. Upbringing, Affect and Perception of the World: Are we Prisoners of Our Character?
IV. Can We Be Authors of Our Own Character?
V. Conclusion
Chapter Three 73
Ethical Re-Habituation in the Lojong Tradition
I. Introduction
II. What Do We Do When We Do Buddhist Ethics?
a. Two Western Approaches to Buddhist Ethics
b. Buddhist Ethics as Moral Phenomenology
c. Bodhicitta and Moral Phenomenology
III. Lojong: Bringing Bodhicitta within Reach
IV. Lojong Pedagogy in Two Seminal Texts: The Seven-Point Mind Training and the Wheel-Weapon
a. The Seven-Point Mind Training
i. The Phenomenological Significance of Contemplation of Aphorisms
ii. The Phenomenological Significance of Tonglen Practice
b. The Wheel-Weapon
i. The Ethical Productivity of Suffering
ii. Conceptual Construction as the Source of Suffering
iii. Habituation as Familiarization
V. Conclusion
Chapter Four 109
The Coming-About of Moral Subjectivity: Prospects for Re-Habituation
I. Introduction
II. The Available Trajectories
a. On Merleau-Ponty
b. On Aristotle
c. On Lojong
III. Re-Habituation and the Total Choice of Our World
IV. Conclusion
Conclusion 137
The Future of Re-Habituation
Works Cited 143
Non-Textual Works Cited 147
About this Dissertation
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