Interbeing
A consistent theme of the human experience is our need to see the world in new ways.
For the tough-minded we need to adapt how we see to develop new technologies that make our lives easier. From a tender-minded perspective the cultivation of new kinds of human perception is the well-spring of caring and creative cultures1. Either way though these transformations are crucial to achieving a flourishing life.
To consistently see the world anew we need a method. For most of us today this boils down various kinds of exploration through problems and arguments. We encounter a particular problem and make arguments to come up with an answer. The answer is our new way of seeing the world.
This process is familiar in the context of scientific discovery. In that domain we face problems like understanding how much water evaporates from a lake in an hour and arguments that involve natural laws and measurements of surface area, temperature, and pressure.
Equally though we understand our world in terms of problems like “What leads to a healthy democracy?” or “How can I create a happy family?”. In these cases too we use reasoning like lengthy political debates or the CBT techniques of psychotherapy to come to an answer.
It is a commonly held belief that this approach to finding new views of the world is the natural end point of our philosophical heritage. The story begins with a set of Greek philosophers in Athens who developed a way of understanding the world that was only satisfied when they had an answer to a question.
This approach developed through the Christian Era, was given new importance during the renaissance, and in the modern period was reified into the scientific method and promulgated to all member of society.
However, this understanding of where our culture of problems and arguments comes from may be a mischaracterisation. Based on a close reading of the original texts Pierre Hadot suggested that ancient philosophy was not focussed on problems and arguments as a unique way to transform our views of the world.
Instead, Hadot argued that the primary aim for these thinkers was the transformation of self. Rather than crafting the best argument for answering a particular question, the philosophers were aimed at changing their own characters and associated ways of seeing. The dialogues and debates they participated in were just one of many spiritual exercises that were used to get there2.
In short, the argument goes that the history of philosophy is better read as a history of spiritual exercises than a history of problems and arguments. Our current preoccupation with this way of thinking only developed more recently.
If true, this implies that our culture of problems and arguments is not a kind of end-point in humanity’s journey. We have not reached the zenith of a uni-directional development towards discursive reasoning. Instead, this way of seeing the world is only one very specific, limited, method.
It is clear that this method has born some powerful fruits, at least in the areas where we have seen great scientific achievements. Though it is equally clear that framing the world purely in terms of problems and arguments prevents other kinds of growth in our perception.
The world is complex. No matter how hard we try we will not be able to respond to all the problems it poses with our arguments. To effectively encounter all that life has to throw at us will mean employing non-argumentative approaches. This is a kind of multi-scale requisite variety3. When arguments are called for we can deploy them. When, however, we encounter situations that require intuition, courage, story-telling or illustrations we should be able to bring those instead.
Moreover, it is simply not true that all of life is made up of problems to be solved - sometimes life contains moment to enjoy, dreams to inhabit and sorrows to bear. A life that going from one problem to the next with no opportunity for leisure or reflection would be quite empty.
While we can point out these flaws it is not obvious how we can adapt ourselves away from such a restricted approach. We still need to transform our perception and many of the historical spiritual exercises that we once used for this now seem remote.
The idea of “Interbeing”4 offers one kind of spiritual exercise that could help us past this impasse. In simple terms, interbeing is a way to express the interdependence between all beings.
As you read this essay you are intimately connected to the world around you. Your ability to read depends on the light coming out of the screen. That light depends on electricity that was generated in a power plant. That power plant depends on fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, or a renewable source like wind. In your experience of reading these words all these things exist, they have no independence from each other.
You can trace this insight to any situation you might find yourself in - whether it is the food that we eat, the shelter we inhabit, the way we travel, or any of the other things that make up our lives. In every case we are subject to a vast web of interbeing. We depend absolutely on things that may seem far removed but are as essentially a part of our experience as our own eyes and hands.
This realisation of interbeing is a spiritual exercise in the sense that Hadot explored. By carefully paying attention we can trace the course of dependent entities that go into every object and every occasions. By realising this web of relations we can transform the way we see the world through appreciating the links that bind us together.
Despite interbeing’s genesis as a non-discursive spiritual exercise, as a practice it has a cousin in complexity science. Complexity science studies complex systems. Complex systems occur when components of a system are coupled in some way. This coupling when aggregated and viewed at the scope of the whole system causes behaviours that cannot be predicted at a smaller scope. These emergent phenomenon and the associated system dynamics give rise to the richness of our everyday life.
Complexity science studies these dynamics and the coupled systems that generate them to uncover structural elements. One way to think of the practice of interbeing is as a way to look at this coupling directly. By seeing how the components of our world rely on and respond to all of the other components we can intuit some of the learnings of complexity science at a personal rather than intellectual level - peeling back the layers of naive rationality that dominate our normal ways of thinking.
We all want ways to transform how we see the world. Many of us though are rightfully unhappy with the restrictive view that believes all transformation proceeds from problems and arguments. The practice of interbeing can offer us a profound spiritual exercise to practice as part of our daily lives.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this essay.
Links
Why in E. Asia a copy is as good as an original
Byung-Chul Han is a modern philosopher and cultural critic currently receiving some renewed focus. He has much to say about the issues of modernity and has been an attentive observer during the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay seems like a good introduction to his approach and thinking. He looks at how the idea of a “copy” can have very different meanings in East Asia and the Western world.
Is Old Music killing new music?
This Substack essay was promoted by Patrick Collison on Twitter a couple weeks back. It looks at the current data around music consumption to show that as a proportion of consumption new music is declining at a rapid rate. For anyone that cares to live in a dynamic culture this should be an incredibly worrying fact. There are a few good ideas presented around what might be causing this trend and how we might go about reversing it.
Nuclear startup Oklo Shutdown
This article talks about how a new nuclear power plant technology in the the US was blocked by regulators. The most important line is this: “…no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation”.
Nuclear power is not a pancea. There are serious problems and risks that are usually unaddressed by the technology’s proponents. I wrote down some of them on Twitter.
That said there is a bull case for nuclear as an existing technology that has serious benefits over our current fossil fuel technologies and could be rapidly deployed. Our World in Data put together the data for that here. If we stubbornly avoid any innovation or creativity in this area we will not be the better off for it.
From a less practical perspective we might also say that cultivating the ability to see more clearly is a path to a more abstract truth, and with it goodness. Claims like this though can be hard for many people to resonate with these days so will leave that aside for the purposes of this essay.
Hadot chose the term “Spiritual Exercises” carefully despite potentially misleading connotations of a particular religious bent as he wanted to emphasise that they required the involvement of the “whole person” and there was no better language for expressing this.
As the IEP puts it: “Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions (6a), are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” They also utilize rhetoric and imagination in order “to formulate the rule of life to ourselves in the most striking and concrete way”
Interbeing was an idea first developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and one of the most important Buddhist leaders of the 20th century. Sadly Thich Nhat Hanh passed away just over a week ago at the age 95 .
During the Vietnam war Thich Nhat Hanh was an outspoken peace activist. After the conflict he was unable to return home and he became a Buddhist educator in exile. He set up Buddhist centres in France, the UK and the US. He was also a prolific writer. Wikipedia lists 58 books under his bibliography though that is likely an underestimate.
These books have been incredibly meaningful for many people. In my case I first read one of his books The Miracle of Mindfulness when I was about 16 years old. It was a turning point in my life where I realised the value that could come from a cultivated awareness. I wrote a bit about that book here.