buddhistethics posted: "ISSN
1076-9005 Volume 27, 2020 The Buddha versus Popper: When to Live? Jongjin Kim
Korea University Rohit Parikh The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City
University of New York We discuss two approaches to life: presentism and
futurism. We "
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New post on Journal of Buddhist Ethics
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ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 27, 2020
The Buddha versus Popper:
When to Live?
Jongjin Kim
Korea University
Rohit Parikh
The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York
We discuss two
approaches to life: presentism and futurism. We locate presentism
within various elements of Buddhism, in the form of advice to live in
the present and not to allow the future to hinder us from living in the
ever present now. By contrast, futurism, which we identify with Karl
Popper, advises us to think of future consequences before we act, and
to act now for a better future. Of course, with its emphasis on a
well-defined path to an ideal future ideally culminating in
enlightenment, Buddhism undoubtedly has elements of futurism as well.
We do not intend to determine which of these two approaches to time is
more dominant in Buddhism, nor how the two approaches are best
understood within Buddhism; but simply we intend to compare and
contrast these two approaches, using those presentist elements of
Buddhism as representative of presentism while contrasting them with
those elements of futurism to be found in Popper and others. We will
discuss various aspects of presentism and futurism, such as Ruth
Millikan’s Popperian animal, the psychologist Howard Rachlin’s social
and temporal discounting, and even the popular but controversial idea,
YOLO (you only live once). The primary purpose of this paper is to
contrast one with the other. The central question of ethics is: How
should one live? Our variation on that question is: When should one live?
We conjecture that the notion of flow, developed by Csikszentmihalyi,
may be a better optimal choice between these two positions. Read article
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