On Ableist Language and Taking Offence

Towards the end of Stephen Rohde's review of Robert Boyers' The Tyranny of Virtue, he considers the question of whether expressions such as "stand up for", "turn a blind eye to", and "take a walk in someone's shoes", constitute "ableist" language, and whether they should be considered offensive. In doing so, he  quotes approvingly a disability rights advocate, who recommends that people not use such phrases, out of sensitivity to the disabled. 

My initial response to this idea was skeptical, but it set me thinking about what the justification for my position was. After all, many terms we no longer consider acceptable were once used by people who had no conception that there was anything wrong with them, so why should I not be one of those people with regards to potentially ableist language? Also I think our default reaction to people claiming that something is hurtful to them should be to take them at their word, and examine our behaviour first rather than defensively dismissing their complaints, even if ultimately we conclude that we are not at fault. 

So is there a case to be made that expressions such as those mentioned above are ableist and inappropriate to use? I believe in this case there is not, and that we can make a principled distinction between such language, and other language we deem genuinely inappropriate. 

My immediate reaction was to draw this distinction based on the speaker's intention: if no harm or offence was intended, then the speaker did nothing wrong. While I think intention plays a large role in evaluating behaviour, it is clearly not the whole picture. For we can unintentionally do and say things that we nevertheless recognise as wrong, and we even often feel remorse over our unintentional behaviour. 

Another thing to consider is whether an expression, even when not used to deliberately demean or insult someone, can still have this effect indirectly. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this are the many once-ubiquitous expressions that are now considered sexist, and have been replaced by gender-neutral alternatives. A title such as "chairman", for example, was never intended as an insult to women, but nevertheless the case could be made that its use has contributed to the perpetuation of prejudices and stereotypes that have entrenched men in certain leadership roles and excluded women. If this argument holds, it provides at least a potential reason for wanting to change the language. 

I don't believe such a case can be made for the supposedly "ableist" expressions mentioned in the review. Not only have such terms never been used to intentionally diminish disabled people, but neither does their use result in any "negative externality" to society at large, as in the case of unintentionally sexist language. If I "stand up for" someone, I am not inadvertently perpetuating the idea that people who can stand are morally superior to those who can't. If I "turn a blind eye" to something, I do not thereby contribute to a culture of disrespect towards the blind. I would maintain that such expressions do not produce or encourage any of the potentially negative effects that could be alleged in the case of sexist language. 

But if someone personally takes offence or experiences some other negative emotion in encountering such language, is this not itself an example of some kind of harm - a harm that we should avoid if we can? I believe it is not morally required to do so. If the person who uses such language does so without intending any offence, and if we can't point to any ways in which such language inculcates further discriminatory behaviour, either from the person using the language or from an audience acculturated to hearing it as part of normal conversation, then it should be regarded as acceptable. Our criterion of unacceptability cannot be simply the personal offence taken by individuals, absent any other discernible harm. To do so would be to uncouple the emotion of offense from its psychological and communicative role of alerting us to injustice, and so to completely lose its effectiveness as an aid to our collective moral development. Harm (actual or potential) should be a cause of offence; offence itself is not a harm.

This may sound very obvious when pointed out, but I think it is important to be clear about what distinguishes the different cases. Some people seem to think that any speech that causes offence is automatically wrong, while many people believe that whether or not speech causes offence is strictly irrelevant to its acceptability. Arguments framed in terms of offensiveness can therefore lead to entirely fruitless debate. The principle we should be considering is not whether the speech causes offence, but whether it causes any harm beyond simply offence. 

I think the motivation behind the desire to curb these perceived examples of ableist speech stems from an "err on the side of caution" principle: if something could even potentially have negative effects on someone, the moral thing to do is to avoid it if possible. This might sound reasonable, but I believe it is not always the right solution, and I believe that one need not appeal to contested arguments about the overriding value of free speech in order to dispute it. For it ignores the fact that moral development is not only a matter of behaviour, but of emotion. And just as we can train ourselves to do the right thing, so we can train ourselves to feel the right thing. Offence is an emotion that can motivate us towards moral ends, but if it causes us to find fault with things without actually improving the world in any way, then it is no longer of any use. We can and should train it towards serving the goals we are actually striving for. 

Introduction to Philosophical Logic - Part 1

As an introduction to philosophical logic, and a foundation from which to approach deeper philosophical subjects, I will be reading and summarizing Mark Sainsbury’s “Logical Forms: An Introduction to Philosophical Logic” (2nd ed), and occasionally adding my own thoughts or questions relating to the content as I go.

Chapter 1: Validity

The study of logic is concerned with whether we have good reasons for our beliefs.

We can mean different things when we talk about “reasons for belief”. For example:

1. Reason in the sense of an explanation as to how someone came to believe something. “He believes x because he read it in a book.”

2. Reason in the sense of justification; a proposition or set of propositions that aim to provide evidence for a belief. Logic is concerned with this second kind of reason.

Justification is a relational term. The question is, how does one set of propositions (call them premises) come to justify another proposition (the conclusion)? 

We will be looking at deductive logic, which is concerned with the formal validity or invalidity of arguments. A valid argument is one in which the premises, if accepted as true, guarantee the truth of the conclusion. The premises cannot be true, while the conclusion is false. 

Validity is therefore a relation between the premises and the conclusion. It is irrelevant whether or not the premises actually are true. Validity only ensures that, if the premises were true, then conclusion would also necessarily be true. Validity is therefore a formal property of arguments. It is something arguments have or fail to have, by virtue of the form of the propositions and the relations between them, not with the actual content of the propositions. 

“Inductive logic”, on the other hand, is concerned with arguments that aim to show that their conclusions are probably true. Evaluating inductive arguments requires more than just examining their formal characteristics. It requires evaluating arguments by the contents of their propositions, and in the light of certain unstated, background assumptions or theories. 

How can we test whether a deductive argument is valid? That is, how do we know that, if the premises were true, the conclusion must also be true?

Consider the argument: “Fido is a dog [premise]. Therefore he cannot sing ‘Happy Birthday' [conclusion]”. You might think that it is impossible for the conclusion to be false, given the truth of the premise, and therefore this is a valid argument. But to a logician, this argument is not valid. 

To see why, we could appeal to a distinction between logical possibility and physical possibility. It is not physically possible for a dog to sing, but suppose you had never heard of a "dog" and were unaware of this fact. Then you would have no way of judging the validity of the argument.

While it is true as a matter of physical fact that dogs cannot sing, it nevertheless might be logically possible that dogs could sing, if the facts about the world were different. We could then say that an argument is only valid if it were logically impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. But now we will need to provide a definition of logical possibility. 

We could define logical impossibility in terms of consistency and inconsistency: two propositions are inconsistent if they cannot both be true at the same time. For example, the propositions “today is Monday” and “tomorrow is Friday”. These two propositions are inconsistent because they cannot both be true simultaneously. (Note, however, that they could both be false.) 

We can also define a subset of inconsistency, known as contradiction. If two propositions cannot both be true nor both be false, they are contradictory. And a subset of contradiction is negation, which is simply contradiction that uses the word “not” or an equivalent word or phrase. Eg. “Today is Monday” is the negation of “today is not Monday.” 

Note:

These definitions sound simple, but they can trip you up if you’re not careful. Consider the propositions “I hope she will arrive soon” and “I hope she will not arrive soon”. These are inconsistent (they cannot both be true), but they are not contradictory (they could both be false; I might have no feeling one way or the other).

Or consider the propositions “you must walk on the grass” and “you must not walk on the grass”. These propositions are not negations of each other, despite the use of the word “not”. Once again, both propositions could be false; walking on the grass may be permitted but not mandatory. The negation of “you must walk on the grass” could be stated as “it is not the case that you must walk on the grass”. 

We can now use these notions to define validity. We said that a valid argument is one in which it is logically impossible for its premises to be true and its conclusion false. But if the conclusion is true, then its contradictory must be false. So we can rephrase our definition as: it is logically impossible for the premises to be true and the contradictory of the conclusion to be true as well. And we have said that if two sentences cannot both be true then they are inconsistent. Therefore, an argument is valid if its premises are inconsistent with the contradictory of the conclusion.

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Digression:

So now we have defined validity in terms of logical possibility, and logical possibility in terms of consistency. But how do we determine whether two propositions are consistent or inconsistent? Isn’t it simply by weighing them up in our minds, and declaring it logically possible or impossible for them both to be true? So what is logically impossible is inconsistent, and what is inconsistent is logically impossible. Is this a circular definition? And does this represent a problem for the foundations of logic? 

The answer (I think) is that this is not so much a problem for logic, as it is a feature of our language. After all, every word is defined in terms of other words, in an ultimately circular manner. Languages work nevertheless because the speakers of that language share a broadly similar worldview, and agree on the conventional meanings of their words. The circularity in the definition of “inconsistent” is nothing special in this regard. We simply have to agree on whether any two propositions are inconsistent, based on our shared understanding of the words of the sentences concerned. 

This does not undermine the foundations of logic, however, because language, while it is conventional, is not arbitrary. We use language to refer to things in the world. So to the extent that words are conventional, we can disagree over the meaning of a proposition. But to the extent that words refer to the world, there is a fact of the matter about whether the proposition is true or not. 

Suppose we ask if the following two propositions are inconsistent: “Socrates is a man. Socrates is not a man.” They certainly seem to be inconsistent, but can we be sure? Do we need some kind of independent test? How could we argue against a person who held that they were not inconsistent? To do so, we would not need to appeal to some mysterious “logical laws” which ensure that something cannot both be and not be. We could simply appeal to the conventions of language, and point out that by asserting both the first and the second propositions, our imaginary speaker has not actually asserted anything at all. He has not made a claim that can be evaluated, because he has denied the claim in the very act of making it. And if he were to maintain that, actually, it is possible for Socrates to both be and to not be a man, we would just have to conclude that he is not using the same definitions for his words as we are.

Therefore we can rely on a consensus understanding of the meaning of words to determine the consistency of a set of propositions, without this undermining the usefulness of the concept of validity. 

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Some properties of Validity:

Validity logically guarantees the preservation of truth. If you start with true premises, and you argue validly, you will always end up with true conclusions.

However, valid arguments can have false premises and/or false conclusions. 

Furthermore, invalid arguments can have true premises and/or true conclusions. 

Monotonicity: There are no degrees of validity; an argument is either valid or it is not. And because validity is a product of the relation between premises and conclusion, once an argument has “attained” validity, it cannot be made invalid by adding new premises, no matter what those premises are. 

Transitivity: chaining arguments together will preserve validity. This means that, if “A, therefore B” is valid, and “B, therefore C” is valid, then “A, therefore C” is also valid. 

“B" does not need to be stated as a  premise because it is already established by “A”.

Reflexivity: if the conclusion of an argument is also a premise of the same argument, the argument is automatically valid (regardless of what other premises there are). For instance, if your premises are “A”, “B”, and “C”, the conclusion “therefore B” follows validly.

This shows that circular arguments are valid (though they may not be very useful).

An argument with inconsistent premises is valid, whatever its conclusion (this is called the “principle of explosion” - if you start with inconsistent premises you can validly deduce anything). But since inconsistent premises cannot all be true, we cannot really infer anything from these arguments.

For example, given the premises “A” and “not A”, you can validly derive the conclusion “Therefore B”. This argument is valid, but it cannot tell us anything about the truth of B, because one of the premises must be false.

If it is logically impossible for a proposition to be false, then any argument with that proposition as conclusion will be valid.

eg. If pigs can fly, then the moon is made of cheese.

      Pigs can fly.

      Therefore either Socrates is mortal or Socrates is immortal.

The conclusion is necessarily true (Socrates must be either mortal or immortal). Therefore the argument satisfies the technical criterion of validity: it is impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false. 

Relevance and Persuasiveness:

An argument can be sound (meaning that its premises are true) and valid, but still useless. eg. “Canberra is the capital of Australia. Therefore all dogs are dogs.” The premise of this argument is true, so the argument is sound. And the conclusion cannot be false, so the argument is valid. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how this argument could be relevant to anyone. Nor would it be persuasive to anyone who did not already accept the conclusion.

Propositions and Sentences:

Declarative sentences are sentences that can be affirmed as true or false (“the car is red”), as opposed to interrogative sentences which ask how things are (“is the car red?”), or imperative sentences which order things to be a certain way (“close the door”).

Subjunctive sentences express a hypothetical (“were the car red”), and can be used in if-then sentences (so-called "subjunctive conditionals").

A proposition is what is expressed by a meaningful, declarative sentence.

It can be useful to think in terms of propositions, rather than sentences, because the meaning of a sentence can change with context, eg. the phrase "I am hungry" means one thing if I say it, but something different when you say it, because the word “I” does not refer to the same entity in both cases. The proposition is what is affirmed or expressed by the sentence, so in this case we can talk about two different propositions being expressed by the same sentence. 

Truth Conditions:

Truth conditions are defined as the circumstances in which a sentence is true. The sentence “snow is white” is true given the circumstance that snow is white. This seems like a simple concept, but it allows us to make a new definition of validity:

An argument is valid if the truth conditions of the conclusion contains the truth conditions of all of the premises. That is, any circumstances in which the premises are true will also be circumstances in which the conclusion is true. The truth conditions of the latter set of circumstances "contains" the truth conditions of the former.

This has the consequence that you can replace a sentence in an argument without affecting its validity, as long as the new sentence has the same truth conditions as the previous sentence. 

Formal Validity and Argument Forms:

An argument form is a sentence or set of sentences containing a number of variables. The variables represent any words that can be substituted into the sentence. When the variables in an argument form are substituted with appropriate words, the result is an argument. We can say that the argument is an instance of that particular argument form.

An example of an argument form might be: “All F are G. x is F. Therefore x is G.” where F, G, and x are the variables (in general, lower-case letters stand for proper names, while upper-case letters stand for predicates - expressions that can be used to describe or qualify names). An instance of such an argument form might be: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.”

An argument form is valid if and only if, necessarily, each of its instances is valid. 

An argument is formally valid if it is an instance of a valid argument form.

Are all valid arguments formally valid? That is, do all valid arguments conform to a valid argument-form? No. Consider the argument: 

Tom is a bachelor. Therefore Tom is unmarried.

This is valid, but it is not formally valid (its argument form is "x is F. Therefore x is G". This is not a valid argument form, because not all of its instances would be valid).

In fact, all valid arguments instantiate multiple argument forms, some valid and some invalid. For example, we could have said that the previous example is an instance of the argument form “x is a bachelor. Therefore x is unmarried.” This argument form is valid, because every instance of it would be valid (under a conventional definition of “bachelor”). To be formally valid, an argument only has to instantiate one valid argument form, regardless of what other invalid forms it also instantiates.

In order to make useful generalizations about valid and invalid argument forms, we can restrict the definition to say that an argument form consists only of variables and logical constants.

Logical constants include words and phrases such as:

    It is not the case that

    And

    Or

    If… then…

    If and only if

    Some

    A

    Everything

    All    

    Is 

    Are

    Is the same as

These words and phrases have constant interpretations - they operate the same in any proposition in which they appear. In principle, we could assign a constant interpretation to any expression we choose, but in logic we are interested in words with meanings applicable to any subject area. Logical constants are therefore topic-neutral. (So, for example, we could assign a constant, unambiguous interpretation to the word “bachelor”, but this would not be considered valuable as a logical constant, because its use is limited to very narrow contexts.)

So now we can say that an argument is valid if and only if it can be written as a valid argument form containing nothing but variables and logical constants.

Formalisation:

Formalisation is the translation of natural language sentences into argument forms. Natural language sentences often obscure the logical form of the propositions they express, because natural language is subject to various kinds of ambiguity, and missing information that must be supplied by the audience. 

To unambiguously test the validity of a proposition, all the logically relevant features of the proposition would have to correlate with distinct features of the sentence expressing it. The aim of logic is to create artificial languages to facilitate this. Formalisation is the translation of natural language sentences into such an artificial language, so they can be written with only logical constants and variables.

Natural languages can be unsuitable for this purpose in different ways, such as:

Lexical ambiguity - the same word having different meanings.

Structural ambiguity - eg. in the sentence “Tom is a dirty window cleaner” (none of the words on their own are ambiguous, but the sentence as a whole is ambiguous - it can yield two different interpretations). Structural ambiguity even affects the logical constants, eg. "Tom has written a book about everything" - the constants "a" and "everything" are ambiguous (is that a single book that covers all topics, or a different book for every topic?). 

Syntactic ambiguity - let us say that two expressions belong to the same syntactic category if they can always be substituted for each other without turning sense into nonsense, either in the premise or in the conclusion of the argument. eg. in the argument “John is a teacher. Therefore someone is a teacher”, replacing "John" with "no one" yields "no one is a teacher. Therefore someone is a teacher". The substitution invalidates the argument, so “John” and “no one” can be said to belong to different syntactic categories. The words themselves are not ambiguous, but they function differently in the syntax of a sentence. We need to be clear about the differences between syntactic categories so we can specify what counts as a valid substitute for the variables in a sentence of propositional logic. 

Again, consider two examples of the argument form: F are G. a is an F. So a is G.

1. Human beings are sensitive to pain. Harry is a human being. So Harry is sensitive to pain.

2. Human beings have an average height of 5 feet. Harry is a human being. So Harry has an average height of 5 feet. 

The former would appear to be valid, but the invalidity of the latter establishes that the argument form is in fact not valid. The rules governing predicates will need more spelling out if we are to generalize about valid argument forms. 

There are other ways in which natural language sentences can exhibit syntactic irregularities. For example, take the sentence "I will marry you if you change your religion". This is unambiguous as it stands, but if we preface this sentence with "it is not the case that", it is now open to different interpretations (either, "I could only marry if you did not change your religion" or "I will not marry you even if you change your religion"). The resulting sentence becomes ambiguous, rather than clearly producing a negation of the original proposition. 

Formalisation is intended to remove problems of interpretation like those described above. The task is then to be able to pair every natural language sentence with a sentence in a formal language which is, or reveals, the logical form of the original. 

We can then discover fully generalizable rules about validity using the formalism, and translate these artificial sentences back into natural language. 

It is helpful to keep in mind this intended function of a formal language. There are times when sentences written in this language will behave very differently to a normal English sentence. For example, we saw above how we can use inconsistent premises to prove absolutely anything, or derive a true conclusion from premises we know to be false. Such arguments, while technically valid given our definitions, are not conducive to conveying useful information about the real world. It is natural to ask what is the point of such a language, then, if it can diverge so widely from how we actually communicate? 

But a formal language is not designed for everyday communication. It is designed so that its sentences can be unambiguously and unchangingly interpreted. This means that we can be sure when the conclusion of our argument follows validly from its premises, and when it does not. We can always translate the formal language sentence into some natural language equivalent if we wish (thereby risking the introduction of some ambiguity), but the reverse is not the case; we cannot always translate a natural language sentence into an argument form, as we saw above, because of ambiguities of interpretation. The formal language (and, we might say, the study of logic itself) is a tool we use to derive conclusions, and to test their validity, in an unambiguous way. Such, at least, is the goal. We have yet to discuss how we might attempt to construct such a language.

The Ancient Buddhist Worldview: Reading the Pali Suttas - 1. The Brahmajala Sutta

This series of posts is intended to be a compendium of certain topics of interest to me in the Pali suttas. They do not intend to be complete summaries of the suttas, nor are they concerned specifically with the "teachings" (eg. ethical, meditative, psychological, etc.) found in them. It is not hard to find this information elsewhere. My interest is in anything to do with mythology, cosmology, metaphysics, supernatural and spiritual beings, and abstract philosophical concepts of the ancient Buddhist worldview. I will also briefly consider each sutta as a literary work, looking at them as narratives and not only as "sermons". Finally, I will note anything relating to ethical teaching that stands out as strange or apparently contrary to a modern ethical worldview.

Section and paragraph references are to The Long Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Maurice Walshe. All quotations are from this translation unless otherwise stated.


An introductory note on cosmology:
Buddhist cosmology presents a hierarchy of planes of existence or worlds (31 in the Theravada system, but there are minor variations elsewhere). They are divided into 3 levels, which are also referred to as worlds. The first is the world of sense-desires, and consists of 11 planes, including the human world. The second is the Form, or Fine Material, world (16 planes), while the third is the Formless world (4 planes).

The names of these last two divisions indicates a connection with the so-called form (or rupa) jhanas and the formless (arupa) jhanas respectively, and indeed being reborn into these worlds is said to be dependent on having experienced the corresponding jhanic state in a previous existence. This connection between psychology and cosmology raises some questions of interpretation.

1. Are the various planes of existence simply metaphors for mental states, or real realms of existence? 
Both. The doctrine of rebirth certainly treats the various worlds as genuine destinations for someone after death, but the description of jhanic states of consciousness also describe the experiences that are said to be had by the beings that inhabit the corresponding world.

2. So should we think of meditators as temporarily "visiting" these worlds during the experience of jhana, or are they experiencing a kind of simulacrum or foretaste of the true experience to be had in these realms?
I don't know whether any sources address this question specifically, but I suspect it's a moot point. The important thing about these worlds is not their physical description or location, but the mental states available to those within them. If you are experiencing, say, the first jhana during meditation, then you are experiencing the kind of mental states and experiences that are characteristic of beings in the worlds that correspond to the first jhana. The experience is what matters, whatever your view of where the mind goes during meditation or the physical reality of the heavenly planes of existence.

3. What came first, the cosmology or the psychology? That is, did early Buddhists invent heavenly realms to correspond to their meditative experiences, or did they apply the description of those experiences to a pre-existing cosmological scheme? 
Presumably the final description of the 31 planes of existence and the systematising of Buddhist meditation developed alongside one another over time, but it would be interesting to be able to piece together the precise course of this development insofar as this is possible with the evidence available to us.

4. Why was the experience of jhana chosen as the major organising principle of the cosmological hierarchy? Why not other meditative, spiritual, intellectual, or ethical attainments?
Once again I can't give a detailed historical answer to this question, but again we can see the importance of the possibilities of mental experience in this cosmological picture. One does not get to the two higher worlds of existence by increasing wisdom or ethical conduct alone, for wisdom and morality are both compatible with lives of great joy or of great suffering, and everything in between. The point of the hierarchy of Buddhist worlds is that as one moves up through its various levels, one's experience becomes more and more joyful and peaceful - the possibility of suffering becomes more and more attenuated - until one escapes the cycle of rebirth and eliminates the possibility of suffering entirely.

Since my interest in these notes is in mythology and ancient cosmology, I will be referencing passages that talk about the Buddhist world system in those terms. I will not be considering passages that explicitly deal with Buddhist psychology or meditation techniques, and I will be taking mythological and cosmological descriptions at face value without trying to give them a psychological or spiritual interpretation. 

LITERARY CONTEXT:

This sutta is introduced with the wanderer Supiyya, and his disciple Brahmadatta, following along the same road as the Buddha and his disciples. Although they are not deliberately accompanying the Buddha but simply taking the same road, Brahmadatta has apparently been impressed by the Buddha, his teachings and his followers, and praises and defends them against Supiyya's attacks. The effect of this opening is to stress the harmony of the Buddhist sangha, in comparison to the dissension between Supiyya and his pupil. It also subtly highlights the superiority of the Buddha's teachings, as Brahmadatta, in the presence of his own teacher, is won over by them simply by spending some time  in the Buddha's vicinity during his travels. 

The praise and censure that the Buddha receives from Brahmadatta and Supiyya lead into the teaching section of the sutta. The Buddha begins by discussing the correct response one should have towards praise and criticism, and goes on to discuss why the Dharma is appropriately deserving of praise by contrasting it with 62 incorrect views that it refutes and corrects. 

The discourse then continues on to the end of the sutta, with no closing narrative.

COSMOLOGY & SUPERNATURAL BEINGS:

The Abhassara World; the Brahma Palace; Contraction and Expansion of the Cosmos:

When the universe begins to contract, beings are mostly reborn in the Abhassara Brahma world (2.2). After expansion begins, an empty "palace of Brahma" (meaning the Mahabrahma world that had been destroyed in the contraction phase) appears. Beings are described as falling from the Abhassara world to the Brahma palace, and some of them then falling to our world (2.3-6).

Inhabitants of Abhassara World:

They are described as "mind-made", and as "feeding on delight" (piti) (2.2).

The Great Brahma:

He arises in a newly arisen Brahma world during the expansion of the cosmos, having fallen from the Abhassara world. After more beings arise in the Brahma world, he is deluded into thinking that he has created them. He comes to believe that he is the all-powerful Creator god (2.2-5).

Devas:

The devas known as "Corrupted by Pleasure" fall from their state "by the dissipation of mindfulness" (2.7). The devas known as "Corrupted in Mind" fall through becoming "weary in body and mind" (2.10). The devas known as "Unconscious" fall from their state as soon as perception arises in them (2.31).

World-systems:

At the close of the buddha's sermon, the "ten-thousand world-system" is said to have shaken (3.74).

The (In)finitude of the Cosmos:

The Buddha declares as wrong views (1) that the world is finite, (2) that the world is infinite, (3) that the world is both finite and infinite, and (4) that the world is neither finite nor infinite (22.16-21). The first 3 of these views are said to be reached through the experience of different levels of jhana meditation.

METAPHYSICS:

Recalling past lives:

Up to many hundreds of thousands of past lives can be recalled (1.31).

Examples given of gaining the ability to recall one's immediate past life, but no previous lives (2.6, 2.8, 2.11)

Causes of Rebirth:

The devas known as "Corrupted by Pleasure" fall from their state "by the dissipation of mindfulness" (2.7). The devas known as "Corrupted in Mind" fall through becoming "weary in body and mind" (2.10). The devas known as "Unconscious" fall from their state as soon as perception arises in them (2.31).

Beings are described as falling from the Abhassara world to the Brahma palace "from  exhaustion of [their] life-span or of [their] merits" (2.3).

The Eternality of the Self and the Cosmos:

This incorrect view can be reached by having knowledge of past lives, and subsequently inferring that the self persists eternally through all its transmigrations (1.31). It may also be reached by achieving knowledge of past periods of contraction and expansion of the cosmos, and inferring that the cosmos therefore persists eternally (1.32, 1.33). Or it may be reached by spurious logical reasoning (1.34).

Another incorrect view holds that Brahma is eternal, but that the self is not eternal (2.6), or that some devas are eternal but the self is not eternal (2.9, 2.12), or that the senses and the body are not eternal, but that there is an eternal self that consists of the mind or consciousness (2.13).

The Arising of the Self and the Cosmos:

The Buddha denounces as wrong the view that the self and the world arise by chance (2.31-32).

The Self After Death:

The Buddha declares as wrong views various conceptions of the self as having a conscious existence after death (2.38), of the self as having an unconscious existence after death (3.2), and of the self as having a neither-conscious-nor-unconscious existence after death (3.6).

Annihilationism:
The Buddha declares as wrong views various conceptions of annihilationism, ie. that the self is completely destroyed at death. The first version of this view holds that the self is identical to the physical body that is destroyed at death (3.10), while the rest hold to some version of a spiritual self, each of which is associated with different meditative experiences (3.11-16).

Nibbana:

The Buddha declares as wrong views various conceptions of nibbana here-and-now; namely, that nibbana is to be identified with sensual pleasure, or with one of the four jhanas (3.19.25).

ETHICS:

The Buddha is said to refrain from "damaging seeds and crops" (1.10). The next paragraph elaborates: the Buddha refrains from the destruction of plants that are "propagated from roots, from stems, from joints, from cuttings, from seeds" (1.11). This would seem to distinguish them from food plants that grow wild, and so do not require human cultivation, but what the ethical significance of this is I am not sure. The following paragraph also notes the Buddha's abstention from food and drink that has been "stored up" (1.12), so again the point may be that monks should subsist on unneeded leftovers rather than goods requiring special resources.

The Buddha refrains from watching or performing dance, music, singing, or shows. The context is a passage that also disparages practices that involve greed or luxury (1.10, 1.13).

The Buddha exhorts monks and ascetics against metaphysical and philosophical speculation (eg. "talk about being and non-being"), and against debate and disputation (1.17-18).

The Buddha exhorts monks and ascetics against all kinds of magic and divinatory arts (1.21-27). Poetry and philosophising are condemned alongside divinatory arts (1.25), and many medical practices are also condemned (1.27). The point would seem to be that these practices do not constitute right livelihood, and are not to be practiced for gain or reward, not that they are wrong in and of themselves.

A Case Study in the History of Fantasy Literature: "The King of Elfland's Daughter"

Modern fantasy has its roots in Victorian fairy tales and various medieval genres, but it did not really constitute a distinct genre in itself until the success of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in the middle of the 20th century. The path that led to Tolkien has been largely overshadowed by his enormous presence, but we can see the trends and influences he drew on by looking at some of his predecessors. One such predecessor is Lord Dunsany’s 1924 novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It tells the story of Alveric, prince of Erl, who journeys into Elfland and brings back the Princess Lirazel as his bride, his quest to find her again after she returns to Elfland, and the consequences of the contact between their two kingdoms. Dunsany was popular in his time, greatly influencing writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Tolkien, and this book illustrates several of the trends that characterise this period of fantasy literature.

Magic:

The defining feature of fantasy literature is that it contains some element of the supernatural. Whether it be through deities, monsters, magic, or some other impossibility made real, fantasy presents us with a world that is in some way enchanted. Therefore the history of fantasy can be told through the changing conceptions of and attitudes towards the supernatural, through the shifting boundaries between the real and the unreal, between the material and the spiritual, between magic and science.

The magical note is struck immediately in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by establishing that the everyday world of the story exists alongside the “lands of faerie”, or Elfland. Before Tolkien, there were very few examples of stories taking place in “secondary worlds” that existed completely autonomously from the real world. Instead, the setting was recognisably the real world with supernatural elements added, or there was a clear distinction within the story between the everyday world and the domain of magic that existed alongside it. Dunsany follows this tradition by making a clear distinction between the human world and the magic Elfland. His characters can move between the everyday world and the lands of faery, but the connection between the two is not one of geography. Rather, the symbolic nature of Elfland is impressed on the reader in several ways. 

First, it is frequently referred to as a place that is only told of in song. It cannot be found on a map, but can only be entered at the border of night and day, ie. in the period of twilight (throughout history magic has often been associated with liminal or “threshold” times and places, where the usual boundaries between categories are blurred and dissolved). Within its borders, time does not flow as it does in our world, its inhabitants do not age, and it suffers no decay or destruction. We are told that the magic of Elfland can be encountered in our world, but that it has no place in the language or concepts of science. Most never visit Elfland, but it is said to be occasionally glimpsed by poets and other visionaries, and reflected in the songs that this vision inspires in them. From all these descriptions, it is clear that “magic” in this story has a metaphorical meaning, inviting interpretation as a spiritual dimension of human life, existing not in the here and now but in a mythic time and space that is only accessible to people in certain special circumstances. 

This spiritual meaning is exemplified by the elfin princess Lirazel when she is brought to our world from her home in Elfland. She worships the stars, praying to their images and reflections, and her worship is characterised by the spontaneous, unselfconscious expression of joy and gratitude, especially in communing with the natural world. This closeness to nature is also signified by Dunsany, in another age-old staple of myth and fairy tale, with the magical ability to converse with animals (exhibited, for example, by the troll who enters our world from Elfland in an attempt to find Lirazel and bring her home). 

This picture of nature worship and living in harmony with our natural surroundings is commonly associated with “primitive” or pagan religion, as opposed to the more “civilized” forms of organised religion. But organised religion also exists in this story, in the form of Christianity. It is portrayed as less relevant and authentic than Lirazel’s simple acts of devotion, and is unable to accommodate the conception of spirituality that her magic represents. The priest who represents the Christian church in the story cannot sanction the marriage of Alveric and Lirazel because, as a native of Elfland, she is beyond salvation; Elfland, and the dimension of life it represents, is not recognised by the constricting forms of established religion.

Elfland is also characterised as a place accessible principally to the young; Alveric finds it easily at the beginning of the story, when he is a young man caught up in the quest for adventure and romantic love, but cannot repeat the accomplishment as an older man. Dunsany is illustrating the stultifying effects that age and the passage of time can have on spiritual and artistic vitality, which he links thematically with the eternal, unchanging perfection of Elfland.

Narrative Elements:

Folk and fairy tales are the immediate ancestors of modern fantasy, and The King of Elfland’s Daughter in many ways feels like a traditional fairy tale. This is principally attributable to the language and style Dunsany employs (see below), but the plot also borrows several common fairy tale tropes, such as the quest of the prince to win his bride and ascend to the title of his kingship, and the fairies that appear auspiciously at the christening of the new heir to the throne. As ever with fantasy literature, we are not being asked to read this as we would a realistic historical account. The unreality is the point. Markers of fairy tale tell us that we are dealing with archetypal characters and mythic themes.

Medievalism:

Modern fantasy literature was heavily influenced by medieval sagas and romances (where “romance” refers to a popular genre of prose and verse that featured tales of knights, warfare, adventure, and chivalry). Authors like William Morris (The Well at the World’s End, The Wood Beyond the World), and later Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, borrowed elements of the setting, themes and style of these genres to create a sense of history and to revive a tradition that had died out with the rise of realism and the modern novel. The King of Elfland’s Daughter reveals this influence in its medieval setting, complete with feudal political structure, Christian population, and pre-industrial level of technology. More specifically, and again like Tolkien after him, Dunsany uses elements from Norse/Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian culture, including trolls, runes, and the Anglo-Saxon root of the word for “elf” in the name of his protagonist (Alveric).

Style:

The medieval and fairy tale ancestry of this story is discernible in several elements of Dunsany’s style. In addition to a certain archaic flavour to the language, we find storytelling conventions and techniques common to fairy tales, such as:

• A sentence structure based on independent clauses strung together linearly, like beads on a string, by simple conjunctions (usually “and”), rather than utilising dependent clauses embedded one within the other. The result is a momentum from one clause to the next that propels the reader along from start to finish. This simple technique is firmly associated with an archaizing style, which I suspect has a lot to do with the distinctive rhythms of the King James Bible which has had such a pervasive influence on English literature (“...and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said…” etc). Therefore, and especially when combined with the other stylistic features described below, this technique establishes an exotic, fairy tale atmosphere very effectively. (When combined with different subject matter and the right diction, it is also instrumental in the “high heroic” style that mimics the medieval romances, and which Tolkien was later to so effectively deploy, as in this passage from the end of The Two Towers, Book V, chapter 5: “For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.”)
• The frequent repetition of certain phrases and descriptions (such as the recurring designation of Elfland as the “place that is only told of in song”, or of our world as “the fields we know”). Such oft-repeated phrases act like incantations, imbuing the things so described with a mysterious quality and power. 
• Thinly drawn characters, with very little description given of their inner lives. Again, the effect is to present them as archetypal or mythic characters, rather than real people. This is also achieved by a relative scarcity of dialogue; it is as if we are being distanced from the story to see its symbolic nature, rather than being caught up in it as participants. 
• An ornate, poetic use of language and imagery. This further draws the focus away from realism, heightening the dreamlike, fantastic atmosphere of the story.

The combination of poetic language, incantatory phrasing, and fairy tale atmosphere has the effect of casting a spell over the reader, creating a sense of the mystic and the mysterious. Literary spell-casting can be effective, but it is hard to sustain over long stretches of prose. Beautiful as the writing often is, the effect does tend to wear off after a while, and the simple sentence structure, in addition to the long passages of description unalleviated by dialogue, can gradually shift from enchanting to wearying. 

The King of Elfland’s Daughter is an extended, poetic fairy tale that uses the element of magic to represent the entrance into our earthly lives of a spiritual dimension of experience. In its medieval setting and deliberately archaic style it illustrates some of the major trends in the development of fantasy literature.