We worship the Good Mind of the Lord. . . and the Good Faith, the good law, and Piety the ready mind within your people!
--Zarathushtra [1]

1. The Axial Age initiative of attitude thinking

We have already used Jaspers' conception of a mid-first millennium BCE "Axial Age" to frame an account of appeal thinking. The same approach is needed to enter understandingly into attitude thinking, its close companion, since another of the compellingly relevant novelties of Axial Age teaching is the project of explicitly defining a right attitude of the subject responsive to supreme appeal. Axial Age teachers show that the most promising orientational strategies for relating effectively to great appellants, great attitudes, are greatly appealing things in their own right.

But we must proceed under a warning flag. Although attitude engineering is manifestly a central Axial Age concern, there is no Axial Age word that can accurately be translated "attitude." Like valueand appeal, attitude is a modern concept that presupposes, among other things, the modern state of historical, psychological, and sociological interest in a pluralism of norms. Ancient people certainly were concerned about changes of mood, differences of temperament and character, alternate basic states of motivation, and deep issues in the justification of intentions, and they did regularly use terms corresponding to terms we use for specific attitudes; they did not, however, set about surveying and correlating these things with an emphasis on the variable as variable. That is our modern emphasis. About a hundred years ago, we rather suddenly began to ask the term "attitude" to carry a large part of the psychological and normative load of our effort to think through pluralism, and we have been speaking of attitude remarkably often ever since.

A good example of the oldest documented attitude thinking will be found in the "Sumerian Variation of the 'Job' Motif." One modern translator assures us it was "composed, no doubt, for the purpose of prescribing the proper attitude and conduct for a victim of cruel and seemingly undeserved misfortune." [2] Clearly there is a righteousness motif in the text. Significantly, though, the text's primary focus is a prosperous relationship with a god rather than a good attitude for its own sake:

Let a man utter constantly the exaltedness of his god . . .
Let his lament soothe the heart of his god,
(For) a man without a god would not obtain food . . .
"I am a young man, a discerning one, (yet) who respects me prospers not,
My righteous word has been turned into a lie . . .
You have doled out to me suffering ever anew,
I entered the house, heavy is the spirit,
I, the young man, went out to the street, oppressed in the heart,
With me, the valiant, my righteous shepherd has become angry, has looked upon me inimically . . .
My god, you who are the father who begot me, [lift up] my face,
Like an innocent cow, in pity . . .
They say--the sages--a word righteous (and) straightforward:
'Never has a sinless child been born to its mother' . . ."
The righteous words, the artless words uttered by [the young man], his god accepted,
The words which the young man prayerfully confessed,
Pleased the . . . flesh of his god, (and) his god withdrew his hand from the evil word,
. . . which oppresses the heart . . .
The encompassing sickness-demon, which had spread wide its wings, he swept away . . .

He turned the young man's suffering into joy,
Set by him the . . . good . . . spirit (as a) watch (and) guardian,
Gave him . . . the tutelary genii of friendly mien.

To us it seems obvious that by praying the young man adjusts his balance and perspective so that he can live more happily in a morally challenging world. The final provision of a "good spirit" of "friendly mien" fits this interpretation perfectly. But what the speaker explicitly worries about is whether he is on friendly or inimical terms with a powerful god. He avows his sinfulness not to modify his sense of himself but to "please his god." We might suppose that the "good spirit" that will help him is a figure for his own attunement, but he himself--as far as we can tell--thinks of it as a real, separate being. Even as the translation nudges the speaker's understanding nearer to our own at key points, we can readily see, once we watch for it, a great difference between the way the young Sumerian sizes up his life and the way we typically do. To be sure, it is a fair hypothesis on our part that attitude formation is on the agenda of this ancient discourse. But it should be recognized that something has happened in conceptual history that enables us to state and trust a much stronger attitude claim (that the prayer's point is "to prescribe the proper attitude") than an ancient Sumerian would have found plausible or even intelligible.

The most important part of the shift between Bronze Age attitude thinking and our own occurred through the middle of the first millennium BCE and flashes out in expressions like this: "He does not boast of what he will do, therefore he succeeds . . . He does not contend, and for that very reason no one under heaven can contend with him" (Daodejing). [3] Here an attitude is asserted not merely as a requirement in a specific context of practice or worship but as lying in the very grain of reality and so as a universal desideratum for human agency. The eighth-century Hebrew prophet Micah might be making a very similar assertion: "[Yahweh] has told you, O man, what is good . . . to walk modestly with your God; then will your name achieve wisdom"; whether we are justified in interpreting this particular text in this way, we can scarcely doubt the trend of foregrounding attitude by the time we read "Humility precedes honor" in Proverbs and "Blessed are the meek" in the Christian New Testament. [4]

By what logic does this change occur? Elsewhere I discuss the historical development of a newly individual-centered communicative situation in the Axial Age civilizations. Here it will be useful to identify the anthropological and cosmological assumptions about how human life can be centered that become available to Axial Age thinkers and that fundamentally shape their proposals.

The idea of a personal center, expressed by words that we usually translate as "heart" or "mind" or "soul," plays an important role already in the "Theology of Memphis" (early third-millennium BCE):

Ptah the Great, that is, the heart and tongue of [the gods] . . gave birth to the gods . . .

There came into being as the heart and there came into being as the tongue (something) in the form of Atum. The mighty Great One is Ptah, who transmitted [life to all gods], as well as (to) their ka's, through this heart, by which Horus became Ptah, and through this tongue, by which Thoth became Ptah.

(Thus) it happened that the heart and tongue gained control over [every] (other) member of the body, by teaching that he is in every body and in every mouth of . . . everything that lives, by thinking and commanding everything that he wishes . . .

The sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, and the smelling the air by the nose, they report to the heart. It is this which causes every completed (concept) to come forth, and it is the tongue which announces what the heart thinks.

. . . Thus life was given to him who has peace and death was given to him who has sin. Thus were made all work and all crafts, the action of the arms, the movement of the legs, and the activity of every member, in conformance with (this) command which the heart thought, which came forth through the tongue, and which gives [the dignity of] everything. [5]

This text reflects not only the heady discovery that one can think of all reality as proceeding from the centralized command of personal agency in its royal aspect but also the pre-Axial Age tendency to multiply such centers--in large rosters of gods, on the cosmic scale, and in specialized centers within the individual human being corresponding to different issues, like the ka for travelling or being imparted. (Homeric Greek psychology is interested in the distinct dynamics of the thumos in which an agent is emboldened or intimidated, the noos of perception, and the psuche or life-breath that departs upon death.) The persuasive model of the living human body suggests a concrete diversity of organ-functions and manifoldness of expression at the same time that it shows a certain unification by intent.

Axial Age thinking, in contrast, plunges into the depths of the principle of unity, taking the heart, mind, and soul concepts with it. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad prepares for this plunge with a litany on the centrality of the heart:

Who is the god of the southern quarter? --Yama. --On what is Yama founded? --On the sacrifice . . . --On what is the sacrificial gift founded? --On faith, for a man gives a sacrificial gift only when he has faith . . . --On what is faith founded? --On the heart, for one recognizes faith with the heart . . . --You're absolutely right, Yajnavalkya!

Who is the god of the western quarter? --Varuna. --On what is Varuna founded? --On water. --On what is water founded? --On semen. --On what is semen founded? --On the heart. For that very reason, when someone has a son who is a picture of him, people say: "He's dropped right out of his heart!" . . . --You're absolutely right, Vajnavalkya! [7]

Then comes the move to atman:

On what is this heart founded? . . . --What an imbecile you are to think that it could be founded anywhere other than ourselves! If it were anywhere other than ourselves, dogs would eat it . . . --On what are you and your self (atman) founded? [Various breaths are mentioned, then:] --About this self, one can only say "not _____, not _____." He is ungraspable . . . undecaying . . . has nothing sticking to him . . . neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury. [8]

This self is indescribable because it is conceived as centering as such--not a material nature at all, but a function. In the cosmologically oriented counterpart to this idea offered by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, the centering principle is still understood materialistically, yet in sharp distinction from all other matter:

All other things have a portion of everything, but Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing but is all alone by itself. For if it was not by itself . . . the things that were mingled with it would hinder it so that it could control nothing in the same way as it does now being alone by itself. For it is the finest of all things and the purest, it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest power . . .[9]

This is an intellectual adaptation of the royal version of the centering principle. Adapting Anaxagoras in turn, Plato proposes a correspondence between the inner rule of reason in each of us and the world-rule of a cosmic intelligence; these powers are conjointly enabled by the primal possibility he calls the Good.[10] Then Stoicism takes additional cues from Heraclitus's idea of logos and Anaximenes's idea of a breathlike world-uniting pneuma to argue for a living world-soul and rational world-intelligence of which each individual person's life and reason is a microcosmic token.[11]

That is but one illustration of how the problem of a fully valid centering of human life can be worked out. Collectively, Axial Age texts suggest three quite different (but not necessarily incompatible) models for attitude centering:

1. Monadic agency. The how of a monadically conceived centering, like that of "self" or "mind," is basically person-like: if it brings order, that is conceived (as by Anaxagoras) on the model of a ruler's administration; if it contains peace, that is conceived (as in the Upanishads) as a subject's bliss. Attitude ideals based on such a conception tend toward the idealization of either one supreme agent or a fellowship of agents in the world. To appeal to a great mind or self is to place one's hearer in an inwardly strengthened position insofar as he or she does identify with the ideal--even though he or she may be decentered in being located at some distance from it or placed in a role complementary to it.

2. The Way. Rather than build right attitude into a single ideal personality, one can take one's bearings by attending to a way that is found in the world and that can be predicated of the world or the world's root causes. The Way does imply an agent, as it is a sort of thing that is taken by an agent, but it is not itself an agentic capacity. To the extent that the Way determines attitude, the how of attitude-centering is externally guided by patterns of possibility or occurrence rather than internally generated by a personality. Way appeal decenters a subject permanently, placing him or her in the essentially complementary position of a performer in an ensemble; one could say that the Way appeal creates through its distinctive summons a more profoundly sociable subject. In classical Greece, the conception of moira as an ultimately unchallengeable apportioning of opportunities and goods is fundamental for thinking about justice and virtue. Plato's Form of the Good can be understood as a non-agentic Way, although in the whole scheme of Plato's thought this Way is dominated by the imperious operations of reason. (The Hindu dharma can be similarly overshadowed by the soul's quest for blissful freedom from attachments.) The profound Greek trust in the way of conflict, agon, so richly expressed in sports and drama, was influentially articulated by Hesiod, who praised competitive emulation, and Heraclitus, who proclaimed strife the father of all things.[12] The Pythagoreans may have been devoted to a way of harmony.[13] The best-developed examples of explicit Way thinking, however, to be examined presently, are Confucian and Daoist claims about an unchanging and unchangeable, effortless, supremely effectual Way of Heaven.

3. Inspiration. Whereas a Way appeal addresses the problem of plural intentional centers by drawing agents into a sort of dance, an inspirational appeal short-circuits the division between agents by means of a visitation of one by another. Whereas the strongest aspects of a Way are its stability and sustainability--the true Way being independent of the chances and flaws of actual occasions--an inspirational appeal banks on the power of a specific actual connection to establish the best orientation. Thus the frightening or violent aspects of an inspiration are secondary to the impressively reassuring sense it gives of direct connection to the first cause of right order. Inspirational appeals thrive in a personalized cosmos like that of the Hebrew prophets, but even Kongzi could make one: "Heaven begat the power that is in me. What have I to fear from such a one as Huan T'ui?"[14]

Combinations of these models can be very powerful. In the Christian New Testament, for example, inspiration becomes a steady Way and a great agency all at once in the conception of a divine Spirit that will constantly, actively guide the members of the Christian community after the earthly departure of Christ.[15] Paul writes: "If you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law . . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control . . . If we live by the Spirit, let us be guided by the Spirit." Christians propose to take on inspiration as something like an acquired second nature when they speak of being "born" in the spirit and, on this basis, living in the world "from God."[16] This is an ideal of maximum intimacy and solidarity between a supreme intentional center and imperfect worldly selves, conserving at the same time the real distance and difference between a divine self and a worldly self.

2. The featured attitudes of Axial Age teaching--an overview

Supplication of the ancestor, god, or lord is a very old kind of discourse in which certain pressures shape the selection of attitudes to emphasize. When an agent has power that might fatefully impinge on us, we have a vital interest in understanding and influencing that agent's intentional state. A benign disposition is desired. When the agent is outside our everyday sphere of direct communication, or operates even when present in a larger frame of reference than we can oversee or hope to exert influence in, we will want to be able to appeal to the construct of a firmly established, always-and-everywhere-effective favorable attitude. So a powerful, sublime agent is customarily addressed as gracious and merciful.

The appeal to the powerful agent is most intensely formulated as the appeal of a complementary sort of agent--for instance, a lowly appellant whose humility or fallibility serves as a foil to the greatness of the one appealed to. In this way, the appeal posits an order not merely advantageous to the appellant but inclusively wholesome. An Egyptian prayer of the 13th century BCE does this shrewdly: "Though it may be that the servant is normal in doing wrong, still the Lord is normal in being merciful."[17] In the prologue and epilogue of his 17th-century BCE law code, Hammurabi projects a powerful combination of righteous majesty (for he is the officer of the gods) and careful humility in his dealings with the gods, which his subjects are called upon to emulate.[18]

In earlier appeals for relationship with a superior, the attitude of one party corresponds typically not with the attitude but with the factual capacity of the other--that is, mercy corresponds not with humility but with fallibility, humility not with mercy but with superior power. The explicit tone is prudential. Later, though, with increasing confidence in the intrinsic power of the attitude appeal, attitude typically pairs up with attitude: "At scoffers He scoffs, but to the lowly He shows grace" (Proverbs). Now a certain tenor of relationship is posited as an end in itself, offering a type of solution that no longer depends directly on the motivation of practical-empirical problems: a consciously spiritual justification. The prescribed attitudes are taken out of their original practical location in ruler-subject relations and universalized in scope.

There is a priestly version of this situation wherein universalizing attitude prescription is fostered by and ambiguously related to an essentially esoteric cult of communion between initiates and divinity. But for our purposes it is the exoteric outcome that is most important: the figure of the Israelite priest who is able to enjoy an ideal heart-to-heart relationship with Yahweh within the temple, for example, is changed, when published through scripture, into the figure of the wise or righteous person whom all adherents of the scriptural faith are called to be.[19]

The most celebrated religious attitudes all have a strong rhetorical rationale as complements to the imputed greatness of a sublime power-holder: the reverence in which appellants avowedly hold the great agent, showing that they fear to lose what the relationship provides; the fidelity with which appellants attend upon the great agent, insisting that they will allow no higher priority or distraction to upset the relationship; the hopefulness with which appellants address the future while staying in the great agent's good graces.

But the relationship with the great agent, compelling as it is, does not exhaust the significance of such attitudes. For peers in a society can reasonably suppose that their life together will go better if all are disposed to be careful not to give offense, to be serious about keeping promises, and to work cheerfully and energetically. Indeed they can legitimately worry that the absence of any of these attitudes would cause a social problem; an irreverent society would be plagued by insult and injury, a disloyal society by betrayal and confusion, a hopeless society by depression and sloth. From an administrative point of view, the utility of these attitudes is great--so great, in fact, that a lord has as much prudential reason to maintain the ideal imperiousness, steadfastness, and graciousness of the appellate lord as the lord's appellants have to be reverent, faithful, and hopeful. The lord is well advised both as administrator and as spiritual leader to appeal to subordinates to maintain those attitudes, construing the attitudes themselves as great insofar as they are necessary parts of their society's greatness.[20] Ordinary people can recognize the same benefit in the idea of a great appellate ruler, not necessarily one with whom they have actual dealings: "Muses . . . tell of Zeus your father and chant his praise . . . For easily he humbles the proud" (Hesiod).[21] Such considerations contribute to the universalizing of attitude prescriptions in which attitudes attain their normatively strongest form. (Notice that the logic here differs from the Feuerbachian logic of constituting divinity by projecting our own human strengths, maximized, into its image.)

Excessive self-assertion is a predictable problem for good public order whether in pragmatic or spiritual perspective. Labelling the problem "pride" covers it morning, noon, and night in all agents and also invites humbling comparison with a Great Agent supremely powerful by virtue of his or her place in the practical system, as in the case of a king, or sheerly by definition, as in the case of an idealized god. Like Zeus, Yahweh and Indra are portrayed from early on as mighty foes of human hauteur.[22] It follows that humility deserves praise, some of which we have seen above. During the Axial Age, humility progresses from being seen as the human complement of divine power to being seen as peculiarly beautiful and powerful by its own spiritual and metaphysical virtue. Even God and Nature become humble in stories of divine condescension (as in creaturely incarnations) or self-emptying. Complementariness becomes an end in itself rather than an auxiliary of hierarchical order.

Before the sense of a universalized humility can be seen, however, the ideal of righteousness offers a robust solution of the problem of excessive self-assertion in that it can be applied in all situations to all agents, human and divine alike. A righteous person is one whose own ordering principle is the same as the ordering principle in all other ideal members of a greater order. This subjective principle is essentially universal, like its objective counterpart, justice; in Greek and Hebrew the words for righteousness and justice are the same (dikaios/dike, sedeq/sedaqa). The social order in which righteous persons live is not necessarily egalitarian as regards who is allowed to perform which worldly action. The point of righteousness is to play a somehow justified role consistently--whether in fierce partisan loyalty, which is the tenor of the righteous Israelite's covenant responsibility, or out of deep personal resources of insight and fortitude, as in the case of the righteous Greek philosopher Socrates. Demonstrations of a sense of propriety may be all the more pungent thanks to divided social rankings and roles, as in this Confucian anecdote told by Mengzi (Mencius):

[Mengzi:] "Duke Ching of Ch'i went hunting and summoned his gamekeeper with a pennon. The gamekeeper did not come, and the Duke was going to have him put to death . . . What did Kongzi [Confucius] find praiseworthy in the gamekeeper? His refusal to answer to a form of summons to which he was not entitled."
"May I ask with what should a gamekeeper be summoned?"
"With a leather cap. A Commoner should be summoned with a bent flag, a Gentleman with a flag with bells and a Counsellor with a pennon. When the gamekeeper was summoned with what was appropriate only to a Counsellor, he would rather die than answer the summons . . . Rightness is the road and the rites are the door."[23]

Although the story celebrates and justifies class division, its more important point is the gamekeeper's equal social entitlement. The righteousness ideal posits that each person is intellectually and practically capable of doing what is necessary to sustain the greater order.

A specifically intellectual or communicative version of righteousness is the reasonableness to which Heraclitus summons his audience: "Although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding . . . Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one."[24] "All things are one" can be read as applying both to the perceiving of a unity of being, for which a sober attitude is requisite, and to the project of forming a common understanding with one's fellow subjects, for which a collegial attitude is requisite. Indeed it is characteristic of appeals to "wisdom" to be concerned as much with building a community that will see things the same as with perception of how things occur in the same ways, as the ideal of agreement of perceptions and the ideal of perceived regularity essentially imply and so involve each other.

Righteousness is a personally sustainable attitude, in principle, because one can feel that one is flourishing in it; there is a distinctive satisfaction in living uprightly, irreproachably, responsibly in one's role. But righteousness by itself does not answer for the composition of the greater order it serves, beyond the abstract form of justice, and so its motivation can be undermined by all appearances of undeserved inequality; neither does it answer for the complete, highest well-being one would hope to reach within its constraints. Thus it seems advisable to buttress righteousness with a reverent fear of offending (this is an ideal motivation distinct from the rhetorical construction of the reverent appellant discussed earlier) and with a benevolent inclination toward others that will foster personally and socially happy outcomes even where the conditions for righteousness are imperfectly met. Reverence and benevolence can function as auxiliary cooling and warming influences that help keep the precarious balance of righteous other-regard from being lost. More importantly, they are attitudinal reasons for righteousness; righteousness can take a wrong direction in the absence of either, as is shown incisively in Confucian texts:

The "Duke" of She addressed Kongzi saying, In my country there was a man called Upright Kung. His father appropriated a sheep, and Kung bore witness against him. Kongzi said, In my country the upright men are of quite another sort. A father will screen his son, and a son his father--which incidentally does involve a sort of uprightness (Analects 13.8).[25]

An Emperor cannot keep the Empire within the Four Seas unless he is benevolent; a feudal lord cannot preserve the altars to the gods of earth and grain unless he is benevolent; a Minister or a Counsellor cannot preserve his ancestral temple unless he is benevolent; a Gentleman or a Commoner cannot preserve his four limbs unless he is benevolent. To dislike death yet revel in cruelty is no different from drinking beyond your capacity despite your dislike of drunkenness (Mengzi 4.A.3).[26]

Although reverence and benevolence are motivationally stronger than righteousness, neither is guaranteed fulfillment. Experience can give me the impression that my own disposition has no significant relation to other agents' exercise of power or access to well-being; why then should I be respectful or benevolent toward anyone? In intellectual life, experience can mock my commitment to reasonable interpretation; why then should I be reasonable? So the question of motivation has a further depth. The search for a fully sufficient determination of an attitude or way of life can only end with the adoption of a kind of attitude that by definition fully mobilizes and commits the subject. Faith and devotion-love are such attitudes. They are heavily featured not in the first wave of Axial Age texts but in subsequent texts that exploit and respond to the attitude openings of the Axial Age--most influentially in the New Testament, Bhagavad Gita, and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. To lack reverence, benevolence, or righteousness is to be defective as a member of society, but to lack faith or devotion-love is, in the later perspectives, to miss contact with reality altogether.

Faith and devotion-love presuppose a relationship with a person or truth--a person who figures as a truth, or a truth treated as a person--and propose that salvation comes in an utterly unreserved, energetic confiding of oneself to just the good that is available in and through that relationship. The emphasis in faith (Hebrew emunah, Greek pistis, Sanskrit shraddha) is on the firmness of attachment to the other; faith is the opposite of doubt. The emphasis in devotion-love (Hebrew ahaba, Greek agape, Sanskrit bhakti) is on the fervent seeking of togetherness with the other; it is the opposite of indifference. Both faith and devotion-love preclude going one's own way, which they qualify respectively as failure and betrayal. Faith and devotion-love are more obviously impossible to realize perfectly than reverence, benevolence, or righteousness because the claim they make on the person's will is explicitly infinite. (Religious subjects do not normally pray or otherwise take special measures to increase their reverence, benevolence, or righteousness.) A classic Christian bundled prescription of devotion-love and faith is: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." "Believing in" the Son-figure means adhering unreservedly to the supreme benevolence of divine love that is bodied forth in the sending of the supremely dear one. Adherence to that principle is stipulated as the one valid way toward eventually receiving eternal life from God or else as constituting eternal life in itself.[27] Either way, a motivational maximum of impeccable orientation and perfect fulfillment is indicated.

Devotion-love involves passionate attachment and is quite different from benevolence, which, as Kongzi notes, flourishes with sympathy: "You want to turn your own merits to account; then help others to turn theirs to account . . . the ability to take one's own feelings as a guide--that is the sort of thing that lies in the direction of ren [benevolence]" (Analects 6.28). One can most readily be benevolent toward colleagues or inferiors; devotion-love all but negates the distance and difference inherent in those relations. Classic Chinese ethics has little in common attitudinally with the Hebrew drama of love between Yahweh and Israel, with its fierce avowals of election and reproaches for Israel's infidelity; even the Mohist program of universal love is in a coolly rationalist, utilitarian mold. Where passionate attachment does appear in the Chinese teachings is in the love of wisdom that sages exhibit. Kongzi says: "There may well be those who can do without knowledge; but I for my part am certainly not one of them" (Analects 7.27). "I have been faithful to and loved the Ancients" (7.1). "Only those who burst with eagerness do I instruct; only one who bubbles with excitement, do I enlighten" (7.8).

In Indian scriptures, faith is most often taken for granted as the basic religious posture--paradigmatically, that of reaching toward the invisible gods by sacrifice, not doubting that such gestures are meaningful--or treated as a virtue instrumental to the best life. Faith is not glorified as the centrally interesting issue in life, in the Christian manner. Christianity maximizes the interest of faith by seeing it not merely as an enabler of the highest love but as the very warp or woof of the highest loving--loving the universal God in spite of God's invisibility, loving neighbors in spite of their unattractiveness or enmity, loving colleagues in spite of their fallibility. Such love cannot reach a supremely satisfying togetherness if it is not joined with perfect trust. In the Upanishads, however, knowledge of the character of reality is seen as the key to salvation, and so faith is characteristically bundled with knowledge rather than love, a pattern that holds also in the Bhagavad Gita: "Faithful, intent, his senses subdued, [the man of discipline] gains knowledge; gaining knowledge, he soon finds perfect peace."[28] The Gita then adds devotion-love to this bundle as part of its theistic amplification of Upanishadic wisdom: "Focus your mind on me [says Krishna], let your understanding enter me; then you will dwell in me without doubt . . . the man of devotion is dear to me."[29]

The Gita's praise of devotion-love, bringing the energy and enjoyment of passionate love to the faith-relation, reflects a momentous new turn in Indian thought and a new tension and divergence in religious perspectives. The theme of "perfect peace" had emerged in the Upanishads as the leading classical Indian attitude motif. This ideal proceeds from a recognition that passion upsets an individual's inner order much as self-assertion upsets public order. Indeed the two problems are linked insofar as excessive self-assertion is driven by passion. But the disruption of inner order is the more serious problem intellectually in that it blocks apprehension of the supremely appealing Brahman. Passion's antidote is detachment; the state of maintaining detachment, a state that is its own blissful reward, is tranquility. The pursuit of tranquility is encouraged by comparing ordinary life with a supremely calm agent-state, like a Buddha's bliss. Dominant appeals to detachment and tranquility arise in Hinduism and Buddhism in India, in Chinese Daoism, and in Hellenistic philosophy. In all of these teachings the counsel of detachment is logically linked to a perception of a general impersonal order in the cosmos that reveals attachment to be inherently painful and futile. But now the theistic approach of the i puts a personal twist on cosmic order and so reinstates the kind of intentness that confirms the distinct existence of lover and beloved for the sake of relating them. An emphasis on love-relation henceforth marks major currents in Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism.

Ancient Hebrew culture is distinctive in never developing the idea either of an impersonal cosmic order or of a corresponding subjective autonomy. The book of Ecclesiastes, a controversial inclusion in the Hebrew Bible, looks like the exception that proves the rule: "All is futile! What real value is there for a man in all the gains he makes beneath the sun? . . . There is nothing better for man than to enjoy his possessions, since that is his portion. For who can enable him to see what will happen afterward?" But Ecclesiastes does not point to a power by which an individual can get the better of this frustrating world. Its ideal is enjoyment of what one happens to possess, a moment-by-moment freedom from contingencies of consequence, not tranquility in freedom from the very principle of contingency (world-illusion or attachment, in Indian thought). In the Hebraic context it is not possible to be so completely separated from a god's will (like a Skeptic, Epicurean, or Buddhist) or so merged with it (like an Advaitan Hindu or Stoic) as to claim that degree of independence.

Thus is composed a very full menu of prescriptively irresistible attitudes, the fruit of a tremendous Axial Age optimism (to use a modern attitude category) about the possibility and utility of specifying such things. It is challenging for us that the classic attitudes are not simply harmonious. Any given pair of them can be either combined or driven apart, depending on context and motivation. Detachment and devotion-love form an especially difficult, seemingly antithetical pair, but no less popular a teaching than the Bhagavad Gita shows us how they might belong together.

*

We can improve our grip on the issues raised by the classic attitude conceptions by probing more deeply into each of the great Axial Age literatures. Each literature brings to light a distinctive set of noteworthy concepts and questions. These realms extensively overlap, as I have been indicating, yet each has its own integrity, its own intellectual and spiritual and historical stubbornness. By examining each more on its own terms (though still quite selectively and summarily) I hope to make more evident how the real quality of our attitude thinking today depends on our partnership with these sources--which is why they are properly called classic and why we properly think of ourselves, even as thinkers, as historical.

3. Attitude in classic Chinese thought: the power of a Way

A passage from the Book of Odes cited earlier draws a sharp focus on the issue of right attitude in the ruler: "August was [Zhou founder] King Wen, continuously bright and reverent . . . Make King Wen your pattern and all the states will trust in you."[30] The king was a pivotal figure in the ancient Chinese spiritual economy. Ideally he would maintain reverence for Heaven and benevolent concern for the welfare of his subjects, others would prosper in sharing in those attitudes, and whoever fell out of tune with them, ruler or subject, would come to grief. In ancient states generally the king is typically seen as the fulcrum of the people's relationship with the divine--the subject-point at which the people's needs and appeals are focused, the agent-point from which divine power is directly applied to their affairs. In the Chinese version of this ideal, the "son of Heaven" governs not so much as the strong-armed officer of a higher paternal-royal authority (a court of ancestors or Supreme Ancestor) but more as the sagely exemplar of an impersonal pattern, a distillate of what makes persons worthy--and so not by the stormy force of divine intervention but rather by the spiritual cogency of heavenly order, a cogency like that of musical harmony. The most obvious question this conception raises concerns the extent to which one person's maintaining of an attitude can be influential on others. To rule one's own life well simply in taking the right attitude, that is plausible--but to rule a country? Under what conditions does an agent's right orientation produce desirable consequences in the wider world?

It is not known how much help the early Zhou rulers actually got from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. We do know that the Zhou social order was in serious disarray by the mid-first millennium BCE, and that Kongzi could address the crisis by modifying the ideas of a Son of Heaven and the Way of Heaven to apply more directly to everyone, so that, in principle, there can be as many decisive points of contact with goodness as there are individuals. Laozi (Lao-Tzu) could speak of a ruler sharing the greatness of the Heavenly Way and be understood to refer to anyone at all who understands that greatness.[31] "By being inwardly direct, I can be the companion of Heaven. Being a companion of Heaven, I know that the Son of Heaven [the emperor] and I are equally the sons of Heaven"--by the time of the Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu) this was a familiar proposition that could be poked at.[32]

Kongzi is an expert on traditional ritual forms--that is his marketable skill--and the Analects make it clear that he finds scrupulous observance of customary forms of propriety to be essential to a life worth living.[33] But the Analects also show that Kongzi is keenly interested in the centering of propriety in basic right attitudes. He appeals repeatedly to ren, an ideal of being a true noble among nobles that he helps to transform into the broader norm of humaneness.[34] "He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon Goodness (ren) will dislike no one" [Analects 4.4]. Implementing the master orientation of ren in a younger passage in the Analects are the more specific attitudes of courtesy, magnanimity, faithfulness, diligence, and kindness, all of which have manifest good consequences.[35] A personal partnership with Heaven grounds, frames, and protects the cultivation of ren (Analects 7.22).

Two other principles that may be regarded as "one thread running through" Kongzi's teaching are "loyalty" (zhong) and "consideration" or "likening-[others-]to-oneself (shu)."[36] The idea of zhong, broadened beyond its primary meaning of loyalty to one's superior, is to apply oneself wholeheartedly to the right. This has an attitudinal root in sincerity. Zhong becomes one of the official Confucian virtues.[37] The implication of shu is that one will not do to others what one does not wish done to oneself; it is affiliated with the attitude of sympathy.[38]

For Kongzi, ren is a natural human potentiality, but he does not think of it as a spontaneously budding power to the degree that Mengzi does.[39] Nor is ren inherently stable once acquired. Instead, it is a difficult target for mind and will to hold on to:

I for my part have never yet seen one who really cared for Goodness . . . One who really cared for Goodness would never let any other consideration come first . . . Has anyone ever managed to do Good with his whole might even as long as the space of a single day? I think not. Yet I for my part have never seen anyone give up such an attempt because he had not the strength to go on (Analects 4.6).

The habit of being considerate of others is helpful in the pursuit or construction of ren:

As for Goodness--you yourself desire rank and standing; then help others to get rank and standing. You want to turn your own merits to account; then help others to turn theirs to account--in fact, the ability to take one's own feelings as a guide--that is the sort of thing that lies in the direction of Goodness.[40]

A. C. Graham suggests that ren be conceived as "an orientation which makes right action effortless, following attainment of just the right balance between self and others, a precarious balance which hardly anyone is able to sustain."[41] Why then, one wonders, is the balance of goodness so hard to maintain?[42] It is noteworthy that in Analects 7.33 Kongzi denies that he is a man of ren, though he takes credit for putting forth unsurpassed moral effort and claims elsewhere that "at seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right." Perhaps it is the great intrinsic value that Kongzi sees in learning and in eagerness to learn that makes him unwilling to cap off the pursuit of ren; a disciple of ren would no more claim to embody ren than a true scholar would claim to be the master of all knowledge (7.21, 15.30). Or ren-fellowship is conceived more fundamentally as an open, ideally inclusive community of seekers than as a distinction of attainers from non-attainers. Alternatively, Kongzi's thought in 7.33 may be related to his complaint that he has never been placed in the right social position "to show what I could do" (7.32). The implication would be that the full attainment of ren requires active reciprocal relations, not merely an individual's subjective readiness for them. That fits the well-recognized way in which Kongzi's ethics and spirituality are oriented to a social scheme--a social scheme crucially supported by individual dispositions--rather than to individuals' qualities or experiences considered in separation from practice.

We should not think of ren as difficult in the manner of a brilliant technique, like juggling swords, for a favored image of right orientation is the actionless action of the sage-king Shun. "What action did he take? He merely placed himself gravely and reverently with his face due south; that was all" (15.4). It is more like tightrope walking. The point is to center life properly, a practice that will appear outwardly simple or delightfully harmonious even though meeting its inward preconditions poses a great challenge.

Kongzi set great store also by the attitude of filial piety, which became the chief theme of one of the Confucian Classics.[43] "Surely proper behavior towards parents and elder brothers is the trunk of Goodness?"[44] We saw that Kongzi disapproved of a man who wanted to uphold his reputation for righteousness by testifying in court against his father. Each of us should be deeply mindful of our debt to our parents, as appropriately ritualized in three years' mourning for a parent's death; on the other hand, a younger Analects passage limits attention to dead ancestors by asserting that service of the living is more important.[45]

The external referent of right attitude in Confucianism is the Way of Heaven. It is ultimately the appeal of Heaven's "greatness" that inspires and then radiates from the sage: "Greatest [as sage-king] was Yao . . . 'There is no greatness like the greatness of Heaven,' yet Yao could copy it" (Analects 8.19). It came to be said about Kongzi that "only the most sagacious in the world . . . are expansive like Heaven . . . thus they are said to be the complement of Heaven."[46] In Mengzi's view of the sage's goodness, however, the relationship-distance between Heaven and humanity might seem to be superseded:

The desirable is called "good." To have it in oneself is called "true." To possess it fully in oneself is called "beautiful," but to shine forth with this full possession is called "great." To be great and to be transformed by this greatness is called "sage"; to be sage and to transcend the understanding is called "divine."[47]

But Mengzi also praised King Wen in these terms: "[He] gazed at the Way as if he had never seen it before."[48] So the commanding appeal and the most-responsive attitude remain key reference points for him as well.

*

The philosophical Daoism of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi wears the appearance partly of an ancient indigenous wisdom--perhaps as old as the Upanishadic wisdom in India, to which it is similar in content--and partly of a riposte to Confucianism and other leading Chinese philosophies of the later first millennium BCE. Whereas Confucians value human culture, custom, and deference, Daoists value the "natural," the spontaneous, and the idiosyncratic. Whereas Confucians trust reasonable discourse, Daoists are fond of paradoxes, riddles, and dreams. Whereas Confucians are content within the ordinary limits of mortal life, the imagination and desire of Daoists run beyond these limits. But Daoists share with Confucians the premise that an identifiable right attitude, accessible to any individual, is the sovereign justifier and ultimate benefit, and that this attitude can helpfully be conceived as participation in the Way of Heaven (or as a state of being "mated to heaven").[49]

Daoism proposes to form a perception of Heaven's Way more radical than the observation of natural regularity, already a commonplace of Chinese thinking. What is the ultimate ground of existents, occurrences, patterns, and distinctions generally? It cannot itself be an existent, occurrence, or pattern of the ordinary sort; it must precede distinctions; and yet it must somehow be essentially related to the world of which it is the ground. "The Way is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled. It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world . . . a deep pool that never dries. Was it too the child of something else? We cannot tell" (Daodejing 4). "Because the eye gazes but can catch no glimpse of it, it is called elusive" (14). "It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang" (1). The appeal of the Way is universal and implicit: "Dao gave them birth . . . perfected them, giving to each its strength. Therefore of the ten thousand things there is not one that does not [in essence] worship Dao and do homage to its 'power.' No mandate ever went forth that accorded to Dao the right to be worshipped" (51).

How is Heaven's Way related to our practical choices? It can be stipulated as an a priori truth that the most practically estimable way in which we can imagine things being done cannot diverge from the most-basic Way by which everything in our universe has happened and does happen, the Way that has made and does make everything possible. This Way alone is necessarily successful. But such a principle of sure success holds self-evidently only from an ideally unlimited perspective and might have no implications for human practice, or very dangerous ones (even assuming one can genuinely perceive a cosmic Way as opposed to projecting one wishfully). It might lead to immoral power-worship, paralyzing fatalism, or wild fantasticality. Thus it must be shown how a human agent in fact achieves the best pose and poise by replicating the cosmic Way. The Daodejing sketches this demonstration by relating empirical observations of practical futility to its analysis of the derived and alienated state of ordinary existents and intentions. "Those that would gain what is under heaven by tampering with it--I have seen that they do not succeed . . . Those that tamper with it, harm it. Those that grab at it, lose it"--the basic cause of this situation being that "among the creatures of the world some go in front, some follow; some blow hot when others would be blowing cold. Some are feeling vigorous just when others are worn out" (Daodejing 29). The way of the world is a jostling and straying of things in their individual, limited forms, with their limited and errant forces. The ideal agent, however, "has all the time a power that never errs [because] he returns to the Limitless"; he is the non-tamperer, "the greatest carver [who] does the least cutting," the one who cuts no special figure in the world (28).[50]

Seen outwardly, the hallmark of effective action is that it does not interfere or destroy. It is yielding and permissive, like the source of all things. The ideal of the the great carver who does the least cutting is fascinating and could be of great practical-hermeneutical power. But one cannot actually set about carving things without cutting or ruling the land while remaining unknown (Daodejing 10). This side of Daoist prescription floats before us as a vague practical utopia. Where Daoist prescription directly touches us is in the realm of attitude, and the strongest appeal in philosophical Daoism is inherent in the attitudes it recommends--especially in the appeal of peacefulness.

The ideal Daoist attitude-complex comprises desirelessness ("Only he that rids himself of desire can see the Secret Essences; he that has never rid himself of desire can see only the outcomes"),[51] undemandingness, moderation, humility, submissiveness ("the female by quiescence conquers the male"),[52] calmness, and openness (Daodejing 34, 9, 22, 45, 16). The Daoist sage is truly helpful, though not in the obtrusively learned and "humane" manner of the Confucians (27). The key to the authentic Daoist attitude implied by all these descriptions is, paradoxically, not to take an "attitude" at all, for to pose or be poised as one being among others is to give oneself over to strife. Thus Daoist attitudes are best understood as the worldly facets of an inward transcendence of the world:

Of old those that were the best officers of Court
Had inner natures subtle, abstruse, mysterious, penetrating,
Too deep to be understood.
And because such men could not be understood
I can but tell of them as they appeared to the world:
Circumspect they seemed, like one who in winter crosses a stream,
Watchful, as one who must meet danger on every side.
Ceremonious, as one who pays a visit;
Yet yielding, as ice when it begins to melt.
Blank, as a piece of uncarved wood;
Yet receptive as a hollow in the hills.
Murky, as a troubled stream--
Which of you can assume such murkiness, to become in the end still and clear? (15)

Certain appropriate attitudes and actions clearly have a place in the Daoist life. What is proposed is not a complete negation of psychology and practice but a turn from the world toward the Nameless lurking within the world-constituting relations between the Nameless and inferior levels and domains of goodness. The Daodejing lays out the order of dependence in its description of the world's degeneration:

After the Dao was lost, then came the "power" [de, innate "virtue"];
After the "power" was lost, then came human kindness [ren].
After human kindness was lost, then came morality.
After morality was lost, then came ritual.
Now ritual is the mere husk of loyalty and promise-keeping
And is indeed the first step toward brawling (38).

Confucians would endorse the notion that meaningful ritual must be grounded in morality, morality in kindness, and kindness in the Way. They think that all these elements of goodness can be in force concurrently. The Daoists differ by warning against giving any credence to supposed forms of goodness other than the Way itself. To do so is to be alienated from the Way and so fated to err. Therefore the "right Daoist attitude" may be appreciated as such only out of the corner of one's eye, so to speak, as one turns toward the Nameless. It would perhaps be equivalent to say that Daoism prescribes one perfect attitude of flexible receptivity and responsiveness, an attitude that never stiffens into a pose.

With this important qualification of Daoist attitudes noted, then, we find that Axial Age China produced not merely one classic set of attitude conceptions and claims but a classic opposition of attitude complexes, Daoism revolving around stillness and acceptance, Confucianism revolving around exertion and discriminating regard. The opposition itself became ingrained in Chinese culture as the ideals of Confucianism were applied especially to public life while Daoist ideals were applied to private life. As the two teachings matured in what Waley calls the "moralistic period" and Graham calls "the [period of the] discovery of subjectivity," both granted an ever more central and powerful role to the individual human agent.[53] "For a man to give full realization to his heart is for him to understand his own nature, and a man who knows his own nature will know Heaven . . . All the ten thousand things are there in me," says Mengzi.[54] Xunzi (Hsün Tzu) disagrees with Mengzi's claim that goodness is humanly innate but agrees on the structuring premise that the Way is known by the "heart."[55] To aid in the full realization of the heart, Chinese literature by the third century BCE abounds in general attitude prescriptions.[56] The argument that a basic orientation makes all the difference to a person's meaning-world gets more elaborately developed than in the earlier summary praises of sincerity or quiescence (still, however, in the absence of a term for "attitude"):

Most listeners of the age are penned in somewhere, so when they listen they are sure to get things the wrong way round. There are many reasons for being penned in, but the crucial ones are sure to result from what a man is pleased with and what he dislikes . . . There was a man who lost an axe, and suspected his neighbor's son. He watched the way he walked--he's stolen the axe. The way he looked--he's stolen the axe. The way he talked--he's stolen the axe . . . When digging in his own yard he found the axe. Afterwards when he saw his neighbor's son again, there was nothing in gesture or posture to suggest a man who steals axes. It was not that his neighbor's son had altered, it was himself that had altered. The alteration was from no other reason than being penned in somewhere (Lü Spring and Autumn 13.3).[57]

The fable of the axe implies that attitude, understood as a conjunction of perception, knowledge, and desire, is what fundamentally rectifies one position and makes another wrong. It also shows a recognition that attitude is liable to be suddenly changed according to what is perceived, known, or wanted.

*

The Chinese Axial Age produces a complex understanding of the power of a right Way. Heaven's Way, observable on the large scale and in the long run, is unconditionally superior and omnipotent. There are durably relevant opposed (or, from a later perspective, complementary) ways to participate in Heaven's way, the Yang-aggressive way of Confucianism and the Yin-recessive way of Daoism. Taking the Daoist way leads to a transcendence of ordinary human agency, a sort of immersion in primal nature. In this orientation, all goes well simply because all fundamentally does go well. Taking the Confucian way leads toward the perfection of ordinary human agency in its distinctively high, socially constructive position within the natural order. In the ideal Confucian order, all goes well because we all mean well. (Mengzi combines these suppositions from a Confucian point of view: "The people turn to the benevolent as water flows downwards or as animals head for the wilds.")[58] That all does not in fact go well does not tell more against one of these views than the other; instead, painful experience continually gives each view grounds for appealing against the other and so jointly bolsters them. A thoughtful person is called from quiescence to earnestness, from earnestness to quiescence, each attitude functioning more credibly as a sovereign attitude in the situations to which it is better suited. (Here too Mengzi proposes a synthesis, seemingly more verbal than substantive: "Benevolence is man's peaceful abode.")[59]

We can state in summary thesis form several major points of attitude thinking that emerge in the work of the Chinese sages:

(1) Attitude is the most crucial normative issue because one's basic attitude is one's most fundamentally determinative relation to a cosmically real, indestructible and inescapable Way, harmony with which is a necessary condition for the flourishing of all beings.

(2) A sovereign (fundamentally and comprehensively life-rectifying) attitude is accessible to all hearers of the right teaching.

(3) The sovereign attitude or Way is elusive, however, and endlessly calls on all a subject's powers to attain it or participate in it; it may not, strictly speaking, be humanly attainable, but only divinely so.

(4) The sovereign attitude or Way is implemented in worldly life by more specific attitudes, "virtues," among which filial piety can be seen as most important.

4. Attitude in classic Indian thought: the power of detachment and attachment

The best-known Axial Age Indian thought centers on a strategic insight into the oneness of reality that implies the ultimate unreality of formed, diverse beings. Much as Confucianism and Daoism bring the Mandate of Heaven from the actual king to Any-Individual, the Upanishadic teachers offer any hearer access to an actual yogin's realization of oneness. Amplifying the very old example of the yogin is a new literary and philosophical development of the first millennium BCE in which the ideal of an individual realization of oneness is gradually distilled from the Vedic hymns and the practical formulas of Brahmanism. In this process the prayer-word brahman becomes (like Hebrew ruach and Greek pneuma) a principle of cosmic communion and the rectification of relationships, a principle that is already praised in its own right in the Rig Veda.[60] The transitional Aranyaka literature shows increasing interest in the symbolic meaning of priestly ritual, making the knowledge of that meaning an end in itself.[61] Finally, in the Upanishads, the knowledge of an ultimate essence of this meaning is proclaimed to be sovereign and salvific: "When a man rightly sees, he sees all, he wins all, completely."[62] But on what understanding of "seeing" could seeing or knowing of itself, an inward formation of an individual, constitute winning, the rectification of interactions with other beings? What exactly makes for seeing "rightly"?

Assuming that we are disturbed by our experiences and prospects of loss and that conventional prayer and sacrifice cannot really cure this problem, Upanishadic reflection leads our attention to the unchanging, indestructible source of all things on two tracks: (1) the cosmological or ontological order of dependence in which a pervasive invisible essence of all things is prior to all concrete existents, even gods, and (2) a psychological or intentional order in which, according to one discussion in the Chandogya, the power of naming depends on the power of speech, speech on mind, mind on intention, intention on thought, thought on deep reflection, deep reflection on perception, and perception on strength.[63] The summary claim repeated throughout the Upanishads that ultimate reality, brahman, is the same as the true self, atman, encourages a combined sorting out of these two orders of dependence. Radical independence in being must turn out to be the same as radical independence in knowing, since the restrictions that brahman and atman surpass in their respective orders are the very characteristics by which the outwardness of existence differs from the inwardness of knowing and vice versa. The pure being of brahman comprehends and centers everything as only mind can, and the pure mind of atman participates in the extension of everything as only pure being can. In the pure mind we discover our "real desires" that cannot be frustrated.[64] If we perfect our identification with the common essence of all--unknotting our private subjectivity by surrendering words to the mind, the mind to the knowing self, the knowing self to the great self, and the great self to the peaceful self (according to the Katha Upanishad)--we enjoy the informing and powering of all things and no longer suffer from attachment to forms of being that we do not possess.[65] Thus we transcend the common religious scenario of appealing to a god's generosity or mercy.[66] What is truly pivotal for a human subject's well-being is its own disposition, not a contingent relation with an external being.[67] The "veneration" of a religious object in the sense of "worship" of it can now be inwardized as "meditation" on it.[68]

The Mundaka Upanishad mocks the limited otherworldly-yet-worldly salvation achieved by priestly practices: "Deeming sacrifices and gifts as the best, the imbeciles know nothing better. When they have enjoyed their good work, atop the firmament, they return again to this abject world" (1.2.10). This sets up a characterization of the superior way:

But those in the wilderness, calm and wise,
who live a life of penance and faith . . .
Through the sun's door they go, spotless,
to where that immortal Person is, that immutable self.
When he perceives the worlds as built with rites,
A Brahmin should acquire a sense of disgust--
"What's made can't make what is unmade!"
To understand it he must go, firewood in hand,
to a teacher well versed in the Vedas, and focused on brahman.
To that student of tranquil mind and calm disposition,
who had come to him in the right manner, that learned man faithfully imparted
The knowledge of brahman,
by which he understood that Person--the true, the imperishable (1.2.11-13).

In this text a number of attitude qualifications (calm, tranquil, penitent, faithful) prepare for a climactic "knowledge of brahman." A natural reading is: One must be calm in order to receive the knowledge; the desirable attitude is a means to obtaining the desirable apprehension. But the relation between attitude and knowledge appears to be even closer than that, for we are told presently that knowledge of brahman involves perfect calm: "The seers, sated with knowledge . . . become free from passion and tranquil, and their selves are made perfect." (The same claim is made for the knowledge of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism.)[69] And we have been told that to understand the rites is to be disgusted by them. One cannot be in tune with the rites, expecting them to be of the highest benefit, if one sees that they cannot produce the highest benefit; on the other hand, one cannot be brought to see the incapacity of the rites to produce the highest benefit as long as one is entirely in tune with them--hence the preliminary kicking at "the imbeciles who know nothing better" and the praise of renunciation.

It might seem preferable to interpret detached tranquility as an "experience" rather than an "orientation," when it is a question of the very substance of salvation. For the knowledge and self-perfection cited here are a fulfillment, not a scheme for fulfillment. In this context, however, it is not clear how to draw a line between experience and orientation. To be sure, the "sated" knower is not to be conceived as merely "well oriented" or rightly aimed toward other beings--for in an important sense, other beings as such are no longer in the picture--but neither is he or she to be conceived as merely "having" a flawless mental representation of a world or pleasure in a world, for the "self" that would draw such things out of a world to have for itself has been undone.[70] The great point is that all has come right. Insofar as a private self and a plurality of beings are still in the picture, the perfect state does necessarily involve a right orientation of the self in relation to those beings. Insofar as private self and plurality of beings have been transcended, the perfect state transcends both orientation and experience in their ordinary senses. Certainly the bliss that is promised in the perfect state may not be identified with any sort of pleasant experience that would be the object of passionate attachment.[71]

In comparison with the Buddhists and the Greek Skeptics and Epicureans, who quite provocatively subordinate the pursuit of knowledge to the maintenance of a desirable attitude--advising us to choose what and how to believe according to the effect of beliefs on our tranquility--the Upanishadic teachers do not baldly present their reasoning as tranquility-technique. But it is an open question whether the Upanishads are really different in this respect, since their reality descriptions seem for the most part to be rigorously constrained by the value of tranquility. To make out a difference, we might distinguish between tranquility (1) in its character as freedom from all bias, as a condition for true perception of reality, and (2) in its character as an ultimately desirable state, as a condition on what can be believed or registered fully of true reality--interpreting the Upanishadic ideal along the lines of (1) rather than (2). But (1) and (2) can run together, as our passage has shown: one is freed from the illusion of believing in the independent reality of dependent beings by one's disgust with them, which is grounded in one's desire for perfect happiness and stabilized in the attitude of detachment. Upanishadic philosophy differs from Buddhist and Greek cognitive instrumentalisms, then, not by abjuring perspective (2) but by affirming (1) together with (2), that is, by granting a determining power to perception as such as well as to desire and disposition. Thus it supposes that progress can be made with purely logical arguments like "What's made can't make what is unmade!," whereas the strategy that is standard in Skepticism and popular in Buddhism is to neutralize all arguments with counter-arguments of potentially equal validity.

The Upanishads do not single out and revolve around an attitude ideal in the way that Skepticism and Epicureanism revolve around tranquility (ataraxia), or even in the way that the Bhagavad Gita highlights detachment and devotion-love. Nevertheless, there are clear Upanishadic signals of the practical primacy of attitude.

Man is undoubtedly made of resolve. What a man becomes on departing from here after death is in accordance with his resolve in this world. So he should make this resolve: . . . "This self (atman) of mine that lies deep within my heart--it contains all actions, all desires, all smells, and all tastes; it has captured this whole world . . . It is brahman. On departing from here after death, I will become that."[72]

The theistic Shvetashvatara Upanishad dramatizes the relationship between the speaker and a personalized Ultimate Reality: "Finer than the finest, larger than the largest, is the self that lies here hidden in the heart of a living being. A man who, by the creator's grace, sees that desireless one as the majesty and as the Lord will be free from sorrow" (3.20). "There is no likeness of him, whose name is Immense Glory. His appearance is beyond the range of sight . . . Those who know him thus with their hearts--him, who abides in their hearts--and with insight become immortal" (4.19-20). Responding to the "grace" perceived in the "creator" together with the epistemological requirement of apprehension by the "heart," the attitude of devotion-love (bhakti) appears in the Shvetashvatara's formula for the linking of insight and attitude in mortals: "One should never disclose [this supreme secret] to a person who is not of a tranquil disposition . . . Only in a man who has the deepest love for God, and who shows the same love towards his teacher as towards God, do these points declared by the Noble One shine forth" (6.23).

Just here we arrive at a significant midpoint in the Axial Age shift to a focus on inwardness. Devotion-love and detachment are each conceived at this stage as a balance of relational comportment and inward formation. Devotion-love is perfect commitment both in the sense of dedication to the service of another and of concentration of one's forces. Detachment is perfect freedom from external bondage and perfect peace within. The Bhagavad Gita amplifies this compound ideal by weaving together many variations of benign attitude:

One who bears hate for no creature is friendly, compassionate, unselfish, free of individuality, patient, the same in suffering and joy. Content always, disciplined, self-controlled, firm in his resolve, his mind and understanding dedicated to me, devoted to me, he is dear to me . . . Disinterested, pure, skilled, indifferent, untroubled, relinquishing all involvements, devoted to me, he is dear to me (12.13-16).

*

Talk about attitudes becomes proportionally much more conspicuous in the Bhagavad Gita than in the Upanishads. The Gita's teaching resembles Buddhism in this respect, whether due to the influence of Buddhism upon it or simply due to the larger Axial Age trend.

Early Buddhism shares with Upanishadic thought the general project of publishing as a teaching the yogin's key to liberation from entanglement in an essentially dissatisfying world. It is like Upanishadic thought also in conceiving salvation as tranquility and in putting more faith in the attitudes of detachment and tranquility than in cultic practice or the observance of worldly dharma duties. This makes sense, again, because of the link between tranquility and a completely general perception of the ultimate unreality of worldly beings (or, we could perhaps equivalently say, a general detachment from all worldly beings). Buddhism's most important difference lies its emphasis on compassion.[73] The dominant Upanishadic perspective on salvation is a challenging one: the seeker must be wholly committed to discovering the truth, rightly aimed, and fortunate enough to find a qualified teacher. What reason is there to think that a worldly individual could ever become truly well-aimed? This difficult question was addressed in a new way by the Shvetashvatara Upanishad's hint of divine "grace." The appeal to grace in personal relationship that just peeks out in one of the latest of the principal Upanishads comes to full flower in Buddhism, which announces that the world-savior came with his teaching "for the happiness of the multitudes, out of sympathy for the world."[74]

Buddhist scriptures grant an important role to sympathy in the sense of a general resonance with the sufferings of others (anukampa), as Buddhism initially depends on that attitude for its appeal.[75] A more definite systematic role in Buddhist practice is accorded to the four "sublime attitudes" (brahma-vihara, "godlike ways of living") of benevolence, compassion in the sense of being concerned with (though not saddened by) the unhappiness of others, sympathetic joy or being happy with the happiness of others, and equanimity.[76] These attitudes are thought to be fundamental for progress toward enlightenment, yet not of the very substance of enlightenment; cultivated as ends in themselves, they lead to rebirth in a divine world rather than to liberation from all worlds.[77] (An attitude is relevant and finds fulfillment only in some sort of world.)

The attitude of equanimity must not be confused with the equanimity that is a "limb of enlightenment" itself.[78] This second equanimity is a norm for the meditating mind. Sympathetic relations with worldly beings form a supportive platform for the direct cultivation, in meditation, of the equal-mindedness of radical release from all attachment to beings (as distinct from the attitude of nondiscriminatory regard for all beings). Subsequently, in the worldly comportment that follows meditation, the sublime attitudes again come into play, drawing support in their turn from enlightenment--as for example threats to sympathy and practical equanimity can be repelled by the full realization of the unreality of all beings.

Benevolence and the varieties of sympathy are thus essential to the Theravada Buddhist life, though not to the Theravada conception of the ultimate goal. Mahayana Buddhism, in contrast, asserts that benevolence and sympathy must belong to the substance of enlightenment, since solidarity with all worldly beings is the ultimate expression of nondiscrimination:

When the Bodhisattvas [at the highest stage] face and perceive the happiness of the samadhi of perfect tranquilization, they are moved with the feeling of love and sympathy owing to their original vows . . . made for all beings, saying, "So long as they do not attain Nirvana I will not attain it myself." Thus they keep themselves away from Nirvana. But the fact is that they are already in Nirvana because in them there is no rising of discrimination.[79]

The perfect bodhisattva, Mahayana's ideal, is "selfless" in a different sense than Theravada recommends. This is a "selflessness" that is an attitude and belongs in a world; without a world there could not be nondiscrimination.

*

Axial Age Indian thought is rivalled only by parallel developments in Greek philosophy (and to a lesser extent by Chinese Daoism) in its commitment to analysis of the structure of reality as the high road to the rectification of human existence. On the strength of an intellectually penetrating analysis of the general character of experienced reality, the Upanishadic or Buddhist mind sees through all worldly beings to a non-concrete ground of all. From this extraordinary vantage point, worldly beings can no longer figure as objects of attachment. In the absence of attachment it is possible to maintain an attitude of perfect tranquility. From this tranquility flows a personal (yet not merely personal) experience of bliss and a peaceful, compassionate mode of participation in worldly life.

The decisive insight into the illusory and impermanent nature of all concrete beings, which is finally validated by the achievement of calm, is originally accessible only by means of a thorough calming; indeed, there may be no meaningful distinction between "knowledge" of brahman or atman, on the one hand, and the "attitude" of tranquility, on the other, when both knowledge and attitude are fully realized. In the midst of the classical Indian pursuit of detachment, however, there leaps up the flame of bhakti, an idealized wholehearted attachment to the divine. Henceforth there is an ambiguous relationship between the intentness of the calm sage and the passion of the devotee (and correspondingly between non-theistic and theistic versions of Hinduism and Buddhism). Polemicists can claim that one attitude or the other is inauthentic and dangerous; irenicists can argue that the object of both attitudes must ultimately be identical, and that the two attitudes must converge in their full rounding out.

These are some distinctively Indian attitude theses:

(1) The ideal attitude can (in the case of tranquility, at least) contain the very substance of life-rectifying knowledge and experience. Without it, knowledge and experience will be incorrigibly distorted by our passions.

(2) Ideals of perfect detachment and perfect attachment can be harmonized--when detachment is from worldly beings and attachment is to a transworldly divine being.

(3) A sovereign attitude can support but also override social pieties--as Arjuna's world-detached attachment to Krishna overrides his pious reservations against attacking his relatives in the Bhagavad Gita.[80]

(4) The attitudes that make for a well-lived life, such as benevolence and equanimity, remain distinct from the sovereign attitude, just as worldly life remains distinct from full enlightenment.

5. Attitude in classic Greek thought: the power of the rational soul

According to intellectual historian Bruno Snell, Heraclitus (ca. 500 BCE) is the first Greek thinker to make a theme of "soul" in the sense of a power of self-centering and inwardness, but the concept is already brewing in the archaic lyric poets. Archilocus of the early 7th century explicitly considers how human beings are oriented, in each case modifying a thought in Homer:[81]

[But those things, I suppose, were dear to me which a god put in my heart;]
For different men take delight in different actions (Odyssey 14.228).[82]

Each man has his heart cheered in his own way (Archilocus 41).

For the spirit of men on the earth is as the day
that comes upon them from the father of gods and men (Odyssey 18.136).

Such a mind . . . do mortal men have
as Zeus may usher in each day, and they think their
thoughts in accord with their daily transactions (Archilocus 68).[83]

Homer records changes of human attitude as relatively simple effects, like the darkening of the ground when a cloud passes before the sun. The newer view opens up human inwardness as a problem to explore; the mind is seen as subject to multiple determinations, including self-determinations. Heraclitus sights an endless territory and at the same time announces an infinite responsibility when he says, "You would not find out the boundaries of soul, even by travelling along every path: so deep a measure does it have."[84] How can a thing of such immeasurable "depth" be rightly attuned and aimed?

Heraclitus stands in the sixth-century tradition of Ionian speculation on the constitution of "nature" that stems from Thales, but he dramatically changes focus from the objects of experience to the manner of its interpretation: "Although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding" (195). The concept of an eminent "word" that is common by definition, a principle of unity in understanding, is implied by the whole Ionian project of ascertaining through an ideally open discussion what must be true of reality; given a grounding of its own, this logos becomes the guarantee of the meaningfulness of that enterprise and its results. At the same time, logos is an appeal and a principle of attitude. "Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one" (196). For Axial Age minds enjoying a new degree of freedom from the constraints of mythic narration and custom-bound value judgments, the idea of a "logical" orientation toward general articulability, commensurability, and systematic unity is a powerfully relevant new proposal because it promises a more intelligent and collegial community. A logos-word is not someone's dictatorial pronouncement but a "measure," a "reckoning," a "proportion" expressing publicly ascertainable forms and relations. Logos could, of course, betray freedom rather than strengthen it, depending on how it is conceived and policed. It could be a diamond cage imprisoning our minds. But the effective openness of discussion under the sign of logos will be its redeeming feature, however limited or limiting its deliverances at a given juncture might be.

It is very late-modern of me to place so much emphasis on discussion in the operation of logos. Heraclitus, in contrast, thought of logos objectively as the "steering of all things through all" and of its subjective aspect more in terms of a sense-mediated actual communion with the world (227). It is the most inclusive perception, wakeful and sober, best attuned to the working-together of the world-system. "In the waking state [our mind] again peeps out through the channels of perception as though through a kind of window, and meeting with the surrounding it puts on its power of reason" (234). (The arch-rationalist Parmenides, Heraclitus' near contemporary, sought to "put on the power of reason" in a pure reflection on the conditions of thinkableness that yielded an uncompromising conception of pure Being, Being as such, as the only reality. Parmenides was as intent as Heraclitus on orienting the mind toward reality as a whole.)[85] But even if Heraclitus did not particularly tout philosophical discussion, he did prescribe "reliance on what is common to all" in political activity and warned that individual insolence (hubris) is more dangerous than a conflagration.

Hubris, a famous preoccupation of classical Greek tragedy, figures as a great threat precisely because the human mind's own resources are now seen in a fascinating new light as extraordinarily powerful. If all goes well, human powers will be managed in such a way that the human city-state will itself embody and guarantee holiness; there will be a time "when Athens is extolled with peerless praise for reverence, and for mercy!" (Sophocles), having been established by the humane god who appeals to "that spirit in reverence which hears Persuasion and which thinks again" (Aeschylus).[86] But the city-state has a tough row to hoe. The Athenian persecution of the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates in the later fifth century reflects, among other things, a felt upset of the balance of orienting powers in the Greek ethos: free inquiry into matters of heaven as well as earth is seen as hubristic or, to state it the other way, asebes, "impious," insufficiently disposed to credit the ancestral gods and ways. Impressive as they are to us, the efforts of the Ionians, Pythagoreans, and Eleatics to stabilize an understanding of ultimate reality and worth under the auspices of logos are not at all confidence-building at the time; the results of philosophical inquiry are difficult to grasp, often wildly counterintuitive (as in Zeno's disproofs of plurality and motion in support of Parmenides' affirmation of Being alone), and impractical-seeming. The mischievous logos-merchants known as sophists seem to excel only in "making the weaker argument [appear the] stronger," a scandal animating Socrates' accusers.[87]

The charges against Anaxagoras and Socrates tellingly represent the Axial Age turn in the history of Greek attitude thinking because they make their foremost appeal not to a law or the will of the gods but to an attitude, eusebeia. The issues raised by these charges are laid out in Plato's dialogues that deal with the prosecution and punishment of Socrates, the Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues could be called the Piety Cycle since their main concern is to explore what is at stake in appeals to piety, what in principle justifies the trumping claim that an action is pious or impious, and how the rational reconstruction of piety by the philosopher breaks from traditional or popular forms of piety. On his way to court, Socrates questions the self-appointed religious expert, Euthyphro--a man whose piety is highly suspect, since he has chosen (like his Chinese counterpart "upright Kung") to prosecute his own father for an ambiguous offense--and finds that no consistent formula for "holiness" (to osion), that is, no consistent norm for piety, can be deduced from facts about what pleases the gods.[88] Although holiness continues to elude definition in this dialogue, the important suggestions emerge that it has to do with rightness in the human relationship with the divine and it serves the purpose of preserving the family and the state.[89]

Next, in the Apology, Socrates' peculiar relationship with the divine is disclosed--it involves heeding a command from the oracle at Delphi to test all claims of wisdom, and more generally heeding a personal daimon, a sort of gyroscopic implant of goodness, that warns him against taking unjustified steps--and this relationship is vindicated against an incoherent traditionalist piety invoked by his opponents. The dialogue argues that Socrates' kind of piety could not lead him to corrupt the youth, contrary to what is charged; that it makes him take his civic responsibility more seriously than others do; and that it enables him to face death undaunted.[90] The most telling application of true piety comes at last in the Crito, where, in order to ground the claim that his escape would unjustly harm the state, Socrates adduces a no-harm principle in these terms:

Socrates: Is it right to requite evil (kakos) with evil, as the world says it is, or not right?
Crito: Not right, certainly . . .
Socrates: For doing evil to people is the same thing as wronging them (adikein).
Crito: That is true.
Socrates: Then we ought neither to requite wrong with wrong nor to do evil to anyone, no matter what he may have done to us. And be careful, Crito, that you do not, in agreeing to this, agree to something you do not believe; for I know that there are few who believe or ever will believe this. Now those who believe this, and those who do not, have no common ground of discussion, but they must necessarily, in view of their opinions, despise one another . . . therefore consider very carefully whether you agree and share in this opinion, and let us take as the starting point of our discussion the assumption that it is never right to do wrong or . . . to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.[91]

Socrates calls an "opinion" (doxa) what obviously must be more deeply rooted and encompassing in scope than any ordinary opinion. The orientation never to do wrong or evil is a "starting point" (arche) and "assumption" of ethical argument, he indicates; it is not subject to logical examination in the way that ordinary opinions are. (Compare Aristotle's assertion in the Rhetoric that a speaker's eunoia, "goodwill," is a basic condition of credibility.)[92] It is not a personal "virtue" of, say, sensitivity, although sensitivity and other virtues might be necessary for its full psychological and practical implementation; nor, on the other hand, is it an impersonal sort of "principle," since people will despise each other in not sharing it and will not be able fairly to discuss its merit. It is a centering of a person (the sustaining of a poise, virtue-like) by the center of a larger manifold (a posing, principle-like). It is a basic attitude. Plato wants us to see that the righteous basic attitude taken by Socrates does not accord with the way of the world, the popular attitude; like Heraclitus' orientation to the logos, it is a counter-attitude.

Plato's dialogues everywhere show keen interest in human character qualities--not only their distinguishing features but their natural variation, the conditions of their formation, and their relation to wisdom and right ordering on the large scale. The Republic lays out a plan for cultivating in each soul a good disposition or manner of life (euetheia)--the inward counterpart to the eunomia of good government that Solon classically praised two centuries earlier[93]--with attention to good rhythm (euruthmia), good diction (eulogia), and good deportment (euschemosune).[94] The stability of this ideal culture depends on the good orientation of its philosopher-guides, those whose cognitive quest for excellence has led them to postulate and so far as possible embrace the unchanging essences of things and who are led in this quest finally to the Essence of essences, the Good, which is to reality and rational understanding what light is to visual experience.[95] Plato's approach to the Good is quiveringly attitudinal:

Socrates: It is right to consider [knowledge and truth] as being like the good or boniform, but to think that either of them is the good is not right. Still higher honor belongs to the possession and habit [hexis] of the good.
Glaucon: An inconceivable beauty you speak of, if it is the source of knowledge and truth, and yet itself surpasses them in beauty. For you surely cannot mean that it is pleasure.
Socrates: Hush . . .[96]

Socrates' "hush" is euphemei, "speak well," a religious caution against blasphemy. It expresses most immediately the difference between the orientation to the ultimate good and an orientation to near-term private consummations. (Plato presents his optimistic theology in Laws and Timaeus as a warranted and consistent "speaking well" of the gods.)[97] To be centered by the all-enabling center of all essences, the Good, the individual soul must turn to seeking that center in the light of the illumination it gives from beyond. But Plato tells a parable of prisoners in a cave to suggest that the soul must be turned, released somehow from its fetters, like an exceptional prisoner (representing the philosopher) who is allowed to turn away from the deceptive fire-shadows on the cave wall toward the sunlight at the cave mouth (Republic 514-18). At this juncture the claims of the Republic all hinge on the main practical premise and rhetorical emphasis of right worship in the sacred cult: the soul's chance of salvation lies in "conversion" (metastrepho, "turning around," and periagoge, "leading around of a way of life"), a turning like that from the transiency of the world to the mysteries of resurrection or from false gods to the true God (518e). Such conversion depends crucially on the appeal of the Good in its aspect as Beauty. It will not come about simply as the result of the soul's having a good idea. But it presupposes also an attunement of the soul to the Good, indeed an "indwelling power in the soul" (518c).

One more twist of attitude engineering is needed before Plato can end this phase of his discussion. It resembles the compassionate Mahayana twist on the classical Buddhist conception of enlightenment, although its root attitude is different. The good-loving philosophers must be induced to apply their wisdom for the benefit of their fellow human beings rather than enjoying it peacefully on their own, as they would selfishly prefer. They will be tempted to scorn political work as the relatively dismal occupation it is, but in civic piety of the Socratic type they will shoulder it--since, after all, the state raised them, and their civic debt must be respected (Republic 519-21).

*

Socrates' contemporary Democritus is credited with a treatise on "good spirits," Peri Euthemies, one surviving passage of which suggests that he saw an ethical application of his atomistic physics:

Good spirits come to men through temperate enjoyment and a life commensurate (biou symmetrie). Deficiencies and excesses tend to turn into their opposites and to make large motions in the soul. And such souls as are in large-scale motion are neither in good balance nor in good spirits.[98]

This dynamic empiricist approach to setting the soul in right order stands in stark contrast to the rationalist Socratic-Platonic strategy of conforming to the one transcendent Good. Seen together, the two approaches prefigure the great opposition of Epicureanism and Stoicism that dominated ethical discussion in the Hellenistic period and long after in the West.

Plato's student Aristotle stands in the middle of all these developments and his ethics is in many ways the most mature Greek expression of the Axial Age. He makes articulate, rigorous use of concepts of the practical good of happiness, practical intelligence, emotion, "state" or "disposition" (hexis), character, and virtue understood as a functional excellence of the soul adhering to rational principle; he provides a systematic guide to specific virtues and vices, with their associated feelings; he rationally reconstructs divinity as a blessed self-thinking of pure Mind and optimistically affirms our intellectual kinship with perfect, imperturbable Mind despite the necessity of dealing with "things that could be otherwise" in our world; most importantly, his ethics has the great appeal that it promises to enable any mature and non-vicious individual to steer himself (or herself, we would add) toward the best life. Aristotle cautions that practical intelligence is concerned with good order not only in the individual's life but in the community as well, and his method of inquiry, quite different from the oracular procedure of a Heraclitus, involves a communal sifting of opinions on the best life.[99] Nevertheless, it is impossible to miss in Aristotle the basic theme that philosophy is the path of individual mastery of the good life through rational self-exertion. Aristotle never worries how, in Plato's terms, a cave prisoner might come to be unfettered and so brought into the basic right order. He is already sufficiently knowing and calm in his contact with Mind. He admits that the happy person needs some luck--for circumstances outside one's control can hinder or advance one's fulfillment--but sees no call for grace. Aristotelian discourse retains only the mildest religious gestures. Rather than concern himself with reforming piety as Socrates and Plato did, Aristotle operates post-piously. In this regard he is a harbinger for the attitudinal plausibility of Skepticism and Epicureanism, and perhaps also a trigger for the pious backlash of the more devotional elements in Stoicism.

*

Aristotle's younger contemporary Pyrrho, the founder of Skepticism, breaks fundamentally with the Platonic and Aristotelian orientation to theoretical insight. The conclusions he draws from the impressive yet interminably clashing appeals of dialectical argumentation are: (a) that no knowledge claim can be conclusively sustained; (b) that since no belief can be secure, no belief can be salvific; and (c) that the salvation of perfect tranquility is available through a methodical suspension of belief.[100] Thus Pyrrho offers his followers not a new theory but a new agoge, a happy way of life.

Epicurus, of the same generation, boldly makes belief a function of desire. "We do everything for the sake of being neither in pain nor in terror."[101] While the Skeptics seek a blessed state through the complete avoidance of believing, the Epicureans seek peace through the adoption of congenial metaphysical and theological doctrines. The atomic theory of Democritus suits them very well metaphysically, for example, since it implies that death is the simple discomposition and end of an individual's existence--a most calming view. Nothing prevents them from introducing an indeterministic swerve in the motion of the Democritean atom in order to relieve the mind of worry about fate.[102] Belief in blissfully indifferent gods makes for a less anxious view of worldly affairs.[103]

The classic opposition of Stoicism and Epicureanism--as structurally important in the intellectual culture of the Roman Empire as is the analogous relationship between Confucianism and Taoism in imperial China--makes an important subject in the conceptual history of attitude. Here too the opposition is founded on a deep agreement. The Epicurean view of reasoning as strictly a means to the attainment of the pleasant life does have importantly different implications than the Stoic idea that in reasoning we realize the goodness of "nature," cosmic reason, and the world-soul, for Epicureans place their orientational confidence just in the individual pursuer of the happy life, whose body is the seat of pleasure, and find a transindividual center only in the contingently useful philosophical constructions of friends comparing notes, while Stoics look to a single great cosmic center and satisfaction and think of themselves as responsible citizens of a cosmopolis. Epicureans decenter time (to free us from gloom about our impending nonexistence) and causation (to give us personal freedom to pursue accessible goods), while Stoics center time and causation in "the substance of god" and the sympathetically interconnected "condition of nature" and Fate (to which we can gladly be resigned).[104] The Stoic strategy is to strengthen the very kind of appeal that Epicureanism is dedicated to neutralizing. Nevertheless, both schools agree that reasoning is central in human life because it frees the individual from mental bondage to the variable external circumstances of life, thus assuring tranquility (ataraxia), the condition most congenial to the soul and most godlike. Both schools adopt what Martha Nussbaum calls the "medical model" of philosophy, directly addressing causes of disturbance in the individual.[105] The late Stoic Marcus Aurelius repeats the slogan "Either God or atoms," reminding himself of his rational ability to sift and master the implications of different world-views, as one might take a daily pill.[106]

Although the discourse of virtue superficially connects Epicureanism with classical Greek philosophy, the Epicurean derivation of virtue from the self-regarding orientation to tranquility is conceptually foreign to Plato and Aristotle, for whom intellectual grasp of the good is the supreme soul-fulfillment and the basic condition of human excellence. Despite the resemblance between Stoicism's interest in harmonizing individuals with divine providence and Plato's approach to the Good, Stoicism is involved in the same subjectivist shift that we find in Epicureanism, for Stoic harmony is guaranteed by the principle that "thinking makes it so."[107] Stoicism construes the content of thought to fit its agenda, and its agenda is control:

Make it, therefore, your study at the very outset to say to every harsh external impression, "You are an external impression and not at all what you appear to be." After that examine it and test it by these rules which you have, the first and most important of which is this: Whether the impression has to do with the things which are under our control, or with those which are not under our control; and, if it has to do with some one of the things not under our control, have ready to hand the answer, "It is nothing to me" (Epictetus).[108]

Stoics offer many arguments for divine providence from the order in the world, but the clincher, in which the fundamental commitment to rational control becomes apparent, is: "Since [the world] embraces all things and since nothing exists which is not within it, [it] is entirely perfect; how then can it fail to possess that which is the best? but there is nothing better than intelligence and reason; the world therefore cannot fail to possess them."[109] The greater Center that Stoicism appeals to is deliberately projected from the individual human center, specifically my rational "leading part," and not an independent reality, function, or appeal--unless I choose to think of it as one; this in spite of the preservation of the form of establishing an independent appeal through sheer recognition of reality ("And contemplating the heavenly bodies the mind arrives at a knowledge of the gods, from which arises piety, with its comrades justice and the rest of the virtues, the sources of a life of happiness").[110] The really good news is that my "unconquerable" reason can be satisfied "with its own righteous dealing and the peace which that brings."[111]

It can be argued that the Stoics, like Heraclitus earlier and Kant later, transcend subjectivism when they submit to an autonomous supraindividual force of reasoning.[112] From another point of view, however, Stoicism's most significant strength lies precisely in the enlightened subjectivist posture it shares with Epicureanism. The two schools together form a classic touchstone in Western culture because, in sharing the premise that our fear- and hope-tilted basic orientation provides the ultimate warrant of our beliefs, they can plausibly claim to exhibit the most difficult global issues of life most honestly.

An alternate interpretation of Epicureanism and Stoicism would pull them back from the extreme subjectivist ground that Skepticism occupies and locate their interest and strength rather in their balancing of subjective and objective warrants. On this view, the physics and logic developed by Epicureanism and Stoicism are to be taken just as seriously as their characterizations of the good life inasmuch as both schools make a sustained attempt to coordinate immediately felt issues of subjective orientation with empirical and logical data. "He that knoweth not what the Universe is knoweth not where he is."[113] (Yet "the study of physics is not to be taken up for any other reason than to distinguish good from bad.")[114] Such an interpretation seems to fit Stoicism better than Epicureanism because of Stoicism's distinctive attitude of reverence for the greater whole--although an Epicurean's prudential curiosity might not be inferior to Stoic reverence in motivating objective inquiry.

*

Classical Greek attitude thinking gives distinctively strong support to these theses:

(1) We can find within our own power of reason--not simply as a perceptual or intuitive faculty but as a manageable procedure--the means of most fundamentally rectifying our lives. (On an important minority view held by Plato, a divine inspiration and "conversion" are necessary to right reason.)

(2) In being rational we are consubstantial with cosmic goodness--either because our rationality is that goodness in us, as Plato thinks, or because we best exercise our rationality in managing our beliefs such that we live in a congenial world, as Hellenistic philosophers tend to think.

(3) Civic piety can be a decisively important element of the rectified life. (The position Socrates takes in the Crito resonates with much else that is polis-affirming in Plato and Aristotle, and then with the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics.)

6. Attitude in classic Hebrew thought: the power of personal responsibility

Psalms and Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible are treasuries of attitude prescription. The spiritual summarizing and codifying process at work in these texts continues in the Christian New Testament as well. To understand the force of the now-clichéd formulas that fill these books, we must consider how specific conceptions of right attitude were forged in the context of Israelite Yahwism under the ideological leadership of a distinctive class of Axial Age teachers, the classic Hebrew prophets. Again under a warning flag, I offer "personal responsibility" as a rubric for these conceptions without a corresponding Hebraic term, and perhaps with too much contemporary resonance; but it seems that no other rubric accommodates as well the implications of the Hebraic way of stressing relationship issues.

Broadly speaking, "prophets" are designated communicators with divine beings, and they were common in ancient societies. They certainly were abundant in the ancient Israelite kingdoms. We are told that in Elijah's time, at the height of a persecution of Yahwism, only 100 prophets loyal to Yahweh were saved in Israel as against 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah (1 Kings 18). It is apparent also that even within the land of Canaan there were significantly varying conceptions and styles of prophecy, depending on individuals, institutions, and circumstances. But a normative mold of prophecy is formed by a certain succession of biblical writers who collectively develop a powerful rhetoric of religious appeal keyed to attitude terms such as righteousness (sedaqa) and love (hesed). Like Zarathushtra, they think good attitudes belong originally to the divine being and prescribe them to humans on the assumption that humans can and should share in the divine orientation. Enabling and framing this sharing is a definite partnership, a covenant worked out historically between Israel and its god Yahweh.

Generally the job of prophets is to inquire how a god will react to human actions; the target of wonderment is the freedom of the god, human motives and prospects being treated as relatively straightforward. The needy people appeal to the god via the prophet and hope the prophet can obtain a useful answer. For the classic Hebrew prophets, in contrast, the deep question is not about what Yahweh will do--for Yahweh's justice and mercy are utterly assured, his rewards and punishments predictable--but instead about human unholiness. The classic Hebrew prophet poses as a conduit, like any prophet, but functions more as a mirror, like a moralist. The prophet embodies Yahweh's concern for the people as an appeal to the people. Yahweh's anger or grief or creative resilience in response to the people's missteps is a more important theme than the neediness of the people. It characteristically comes out as an exclamation to turn from sinning and turn back to Yahweh, the return getting its direction from a historic covenant made between Yahweh and Israel, a covenant like that made between a king and vassals. Because Yahweh holds so preponderant a power in his relationship with Israel, a prophet can exploit the most startling implication of the concept of attitude as distinct from character or motivation by offering the prospect of a sudden, momentous turnaround: "Be your sins like crimson, they can turn snow-white . . . If then, you agree and give heed" (Isaiah 1.18-19); "Cast away all the transgressions by which you have offended, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, that you may not die, O House of Israel" (Ezekiel 18.31).

The most important attitude key-words in prophetic discourse are righteousness and mercy. Conceptions of humility, reverence, and faithfulness also play a significant role.

1. Righteousness (sedaqa). The common meaning-element in sdq-words in the Hebrew Bible is right order. The idea of being in right order evokes questions about the basic nature, the particular facet, the cause, the site, the appearance, the internal dynamics, and the fruits of right order. There are ordinary moral expectations of right order, such as for sincerity and equity. Fallible humans could expect to be set in right order through regular procedures of worship at a sanctuary, for example, or simply by trusting God as Abraham did: "And because he put his trust in the Lord, He reckoned it to [him as] sedaqa"(Genesis 15.6).[115]

Amos (mid-8th century BCE), the earliest writing prophet, issues an oft-quoted call for righteousness: "Let me not hear the music of your lutes. But let justice (mishpat) well up like water, righteousness (sedaqa) like an unfailing stream" (Amos 5.23-24). Sedaqa for Amos is not simply an umbrella term for right actions. Although he does condemn unjust actions taken by the Israelites, notably abuses of the poor, he seldom refers directly to rules of right action.[116] He speaks frequently of "the Lord," but not as of a giver of commands that must be obeyed; rather, he counterposes a general word of promise, "Seek the Lord and live," with references to Israelite communities that seek death, in effect, by choosing evil (5.4-15). He is interested in a general principle of intentional order, in rightness. The cause of evil, he thinks, is a comprehensive perversion of will, a turning away from divine justice and mercy. "You have turned justice into wormwood." In turning away from God, Israel has adopted an evil source for its life; accordingly, God "loathes the Pride of Jacob" and turns away from the melody of Israel's worship. "Righteousness," however, would be the immanent source of goodness in life. Thus Amos's best hope is that righteousness will flow as beneficently and reliably as a permanent river, due ultimately to the spring-like beneficence of the divine moral orientation. Righteousness is a principle of human choices but not the product of this or that particular choice. Taking human freedom in relation to God as the central problem, the prophet's examination of the overall orientation of human freedom leads to affirmation of a divine function: the true principle of human righteousness is divine righteousness.

The prophetic discourse of righteousness is especially intense in the book of Isaiah, where sedeq or sedaqa appears at least 59 times.[117] The book develops Amos' hope of a flow of righteousness from God to humanity: "Till a spirit from on high is poured out on us . . . then justice shall abide in the wilderness and righteousness shall dwell on the farm land" (Isaiah 32.15-16). Isaiah of Jerusalem associates righteousness with an ideal sense grounded in or closely related to the attitude of reverence: "[The Messiah] shall sense the truth by his reverence for the LORD: he shall not judge by what his eyes behold, nor decide by what his ears perceive. Thus he shall judge the poor with sedeq" (11.3-4).

In a summation of Isaiah's view in chapter 26, two models of God's relationship to righteousness coexist ambiguously: (1) an extrinsic relationship whereby God desires, commands, and rewards righteousness in humans, and (2) an intrinsic relationship according to which righteousness is conceived as God's own good way of being, immediately and sufficiently beneficial to humans who share in it.

The path is level for the righteous man;
O Just One, You make smooth the course of the righteous.
For Your just ways, O LORD, we look to You;
We long for the name by which You are called.
At night I yearn for You with all my being.
I seek you with all the spirit within me.
For when Your judgments are wrought on earth,
The inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.
But when the scoundrel is spared, he learns not righteousness;
In a place of integrity, he does wrong--
He ignores the majesty of the LORD (Isaiah 26.7-10).

Similarly, we can understand the threatened blinding of the people both as retribution for disobedience and as an immediately necessary effect of its failure to share in the divine attitude:

Because that people has approached [Me] with its mouth
And honored Me with its lips,
But has kept its heart far from Me,
And its worship of Me has been
A commandment of men, learned by rote--
Truly, I shall further baffle that people
With bafflement upon bafflement;
And the wisdom of its wise shall fail,
And the prudence of its prudent shall vanish (29.13-14).

A counsel of attitude rather than action holds the most promise: "'You shall triumph by stillness and quiet; your victory shall come about through calm and confidence.' But you refused. 'No,' you declared. 'We shall flee on steeds'--therefore shall you flee! 'We shall ride on swift mounts---therefore your pursuers shall prove swift!" (30.15-16)

For Second Isaiah, writing after the fall of the kingdom of Judah, the promised salvation of God seems to have the same nature:

Listen to me, you who pursue justice [sedeq],
You who seek the LORD . . .
teaching shall go forth from Me,
My way for the light of peoples.
In a moment I will bring it:
The triumph I grant is near . . .
Listen to Me, you who care for the right [sedeq],
O people who lay My instruction to heart!
Fear not the insults of men . . .
For the moth shall eat them up like a garment . . .
But My triumph shall endure forever,
My salvation through all the ages (Isaiah 51.1-8).

2. Mercy (hesed). "For I desire hesed, not sacrifice" (Hosea 6.6). Whereas Amos had pleaded for righteousness instead of worship, his near successor Hosea pleads in a similar formula for hesed, variously translated as steadfast love, kindness, goodness, or mercy. Hosea heightens the role of love in the Yahwist imagination by adopting the model of adultery for Israel's disobedience of Yahweh, bringing an intense pathos to their reciprocal orientation. The prophet is able to look beyond Israel's failure to a glorious conclusion made possible by the perfect faithfulness of love (more fundamentally, by the adjustableness of attitude): "I will heal their affliction, generously will I take them back in love; for my anger has turned away from them." "I will espouse you forever," Yahweh promises: "I will espouse you with righteousness and justice, and with goodness and mercy (hesed), and I will espouse you in faithfulness" (2.21-22). Second Isaiah returns to this theme in the Babylonian Exile: "In slight anger, for a moment, I hid My face from you; but with hesed everlasting I will take you back in love" (Isaiah 54.7-8) Can a spouse so perverse be taken back into a meaningful marriage? In Jeremiah's version of the prophecy, Yahweh will write a wholly new covenant in the "hearts" of the people so that "no longer will they need to teach one another and say to one another, 'heed the LORD' . . . for all of them shall heed Me" (Jeremiah 31.34). The attitude problem will be solved forever.

The Hebrew Bible gives much attention to Yahweh's hesed but relatively little to human hesed--as though hesed is too great for humans or is the prerogative of Yahweh in his king-like role of supreme power.[118] (Ahaba-love, predicated freely of Yahweh and humans alike, centers on the fact of personal attachment rather than on a principle.) Considering the holy asymmetry between the divine and the human, humans might more properly hope to act "for goodness' sake" rather than in that extraordinary goodness. Still centuries away is the Pharisaic idea, adopted also by Christianity, of the direct imitation of God in love, being loving as God is loving.[119] We read in Micah 6.8 that hesed ought to be loved: "[The LORD] has told you, O man, what is good, and what the LORD requires of you: Only to do justice and to love hesed, and to walk modestly with your God." This formula of loving love can be read as calling attention to the standing, ineliminable issue of basic attitude--the difference between the current intention one has and the attitude one is called to take--and also (perhaps equivalently) as preserving a respectful distance between human and divine agency.

3. Humility and reverence. There is no one frequently repeated keyword for humility or reverence in the Hebrew Bible, but these attitudes are often commended in one way or another. Human pride is a chronic problem. Isaiah of Jerusalem speaks especially often of bringing low the haughty, so that "none but the LORD shall be exalted" (Isaiah 2.11). He also attacks the false greatness of idols: "Men shall turn to their Maker [and] not turn to the altars that their own hands made" (17.7-8). Second Isaiah steps up the synthesis of the cognitive critique of idolatry with the call to right orientation:

To whom, then, can you liken God, what form compare to Him?
The idol? A woodworker shaped it, and a smith overlaid it with gold . . .
Do you not know? Have you not heard? . . .
Have you not discerned how the earth was founded? . . .
[The] Creator of the earth from end to end . . . never grows faint or weary . . .
They who trust in the LORD shall renew their strength.[120]

Meanwhile, Second Isaiah's songs of the Servant exemplify humility most powerfully.[121] This bruised Servant is the extreme antitype to the popular ancient ideal of the unruffled sage.

The fear-words yare and yira occur very frequently, but usually as verbs, and often in commands to "fear not"; they mean "reverence" in propositions like "You shall each yare his mother and father" and "Yira for the LORD--that was [Zion's] treasure."[122] While Proverbs makes a mantra of "yira of the LORD," neither here nor elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible can we find a free-standing noun "reverence" or the adjective "reverent" comparable to the Greek eusebeia and eusebes.[123] The absence is significant, because words like "fidelity," "wickedness," "upright," "loyal," etc. do very frequently appear. Furthermore, the book of Job features a paragon of reverence as memorable in his own distinctive way as is the knight of faith, Abraham. We can say at least that the linguistic restriction, whatever its causes, fits with a general Israelite mistrust of being dispositionally available to revere anything other than Yahweh. Fear of the Lord explicitly overrides ordinary regard for fellow human beings: an Israelite is commanded to kill (almost) anyone who proposes worship of false gods, even a sibling, spouse or child.[124]

In the Hellenizing Greek Septuagint, it is another story. To "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 1.7), for example, the Septuagint adds "and eusebeia toward God is the beginning of discernment."[125] The New Testament is generally more cautious, referring by eusebeia to a general pagan reverence that is at worst an impotent alternative to faith, at best a desirable predisposition for hearing the Gospel, but never, except in the more Hellenized Pastoral Epistles, the main tenor of the Christian life itself.[126] Eusebia's essential affinity is with an encompassing order of things, not with one personal God.

4. Faith. Faithfulness-in-relationship (aman, emuna) is an important orientational ideal in the Hebrew Bible, but it has importantly different meanings depending on whether the divine party to relationship and the relationship's objective are considered to be present or absent. Thus Israel as the recipient of a yet-unfulfilled promise "has faith" that God will do something, as for example Abraham (a type for the imperilled people later) has faith that God will enable him to have many descendants; Israel as the recipient of an address or command, on the other hand, is expected to be "faithful" in actual situations and subject to known requirements, much as spouses should be attentive and loyal to one another. Either way, Israel should hold its Godward aim. Yahweh's own emuna, his "truth," is his comprehensive steadiness. It guarantees that Israel's faithfulness will be meaningful. Characteristically, Yahweh's emuna is cited, not as a sort of philosophical principle, but as a dimension of a personal act: "[The LORD] was mindful of His hesed and emuna toward the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth beheld the victory of our God" (Psalm 98.3).

Later, the theme of faith (pistis) dominates Christianity in quite a new way. Faith is seen in the New Testament as the requisite less of an already functioning partnership (as between Yahweh and Israel), more of a bold new initiative by which humans can participate in the inbreaking rule of Heaven (according to Jesus) or in the mystical body of Christ (according to Paul). Faith for Jesus is a variable power, and life goes well as a function of one's faith; he admonishes those of "little faith" and admires those of "great faith."[128] ("Great faith" works much like the "extraordinary spirit" ascribed to Daniel in the second-century BCE book of Daniel, thanks to which this worthy was elevated to power by the Persian emperor and kept safe when unjustly thrown into a lions' den.)[129] The Gospel of John's Jesus promises eternal life just in aiming oneself trustfully and obediently toward the "Son" who already stands in this relation to the divine "Father."[130] For Paul, faith is the crux of a momentous decision to enter into a saving relationship with God. Paul evokes the figure of Abraham, in whom the venture of Israel began, as the prototype of the new venture of the Christian church, a community formed by God's right ordering of human lives through the death and resurrection of Jesus:

We say, "Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness" [Genesis 15:6] . . . He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised (Romans 4.9-12).

Faith in the sense of "believing that" salvation is available on certain terms is different from faith in the sense of "trusting in" a God with whom one lives; although the two aspects of faith are not ultimately separable, the dominance of the first makes for a markedly different spiritual climate than the dominance of the second. It fits with an attitude of estrangement from the world.[131] It is liable to become a self-absorbing fetish, as the Letter of James warns: "Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?" (James 2.20-21). Faith can separate the believer from the world either in the relatively benign manner of a quietist attitude of detachment or in the malignant form of world-hating--the latter possibility conspicuously risked by the Johannine literature as it plays up the theme of the world's enmity toward God.[132]

*

The Hebraic heart. Its reliance on the model of intense personal relationship with a god makes the Hebraic way of describing or prescribing attitudes especially volatile. The question of how human "return" will come about to rectify this relationship is of dominant interest, like the question of how true lovers will get together in a romantic plot. God's lover-appeal is the biblical plot's motive force. Only in the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy of an appealing divine Beauty and in the love and lovableness of Krishna and bodhisattvas in the bhakti strain of Indian religion are there close parallels to the Hebrew view in other classical literatures.

One way to express this distinctive Hebraic understanding of attitude is to say that the Hebraic "heart" is often presented as in motion, not stable as in a firm ruler or tranquil sage. "Heart" in the Hebrew Bible is, as elsewhere in Axial Age literature, a ubiquitous invocation of an agent's intentional center, moral force, and susceptibility to appeal. To ground the description of an agent in the agent's heart is to claim full confidence in the description; thus, one cannot fully "believe in" someone's love or justice without conceiving of a heart in which love or justice is rooted. (Nor, for that matter, can one fully believe in anyone or anything except "with all one's heart.") Heart talk is centering; heart drama, therefore, is wrenching. The passionate, oft-disappointed quest for love and justice in the history of Israel makes a roller-coaster ride for the Hebraic heart. Even Yahweh's promise to uphold the Davidic dynasty turns on the fact that David was dear to Yahweh's heart (1 Samuel 13.14). This is to say in effect that David was an event, a turning point, for Yahweh. The heart always is the responsibility of its possessor, that is, the agent's power of response; that Yahweh can harden Pharaoh's heart against the Israelites' plea for freedom, or give Saul another heart to become a prophet (1 Samuel 10.9), or give all Israel a new heart under the new covenant envisioned by Jeremiah underlines the way in which personal responsibility always crystallizes afresh at a certain juncture in a history. Even a generalizable prescription like "True sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart" (Psalm 51.19) is naturally more occasion-specific, more responsive to the latest turn in a relationship story, than is the case with a prescription to attain tranquility.

Israel's experience in governing its heart, as biblically attested, is not encouraging. According to Martin Buber, the "unformulated insight" derived from this experience by rabbinical Judaism is that the human heart lacks a stable orientation of its own, and its confusion is continually worsened by worldly experience; it requires divine direction as granted in the Torah.[133] A rather Chinese-sounding Talmudic saying is, "One does much, the other little, if one only directs the heart to heaven!"[134] On this view God is more like a lodestar, less like a passionate partner. The New Testament moves in the same direction insofar as it almost never ascribes a heart to God.[135]

In general, one goes into an agent's "heart" to see or to show actual and possible changes in the personal center, but the New Testament writers are sure not only that God's intentions are immutable (as Hebrew prophets would have agreed) but that the divine-human relationship is a settled thing. Divine desire, grief or anger of a personal sort (as opposed to the impersonal "wrath of God" of which Paul speaks) have disappeared. Nevertheless this more thoroughly eternalized God is still intimately related to human hearts. God is described twice as kardiognostes, "heart-knowing," and is said by Paul to "test" and "direct" hearts.[136] Jesus claims that God gave the inadequate divorce law of Deuteronomy in consideration of the hardness of the people's hearts.[137] The intense pathos realized in the prophets' expressions of God's angry or grieving heart reappears in Jesus' emotional disturbances, Paul's groaning with creation, and the horror-scenes of John's Apocalypse.[138] Compensating for the loss of drama in the divine heart is a new excitement in the human heart; expressions in Luke, "How slow of heart [you are] to believe all that the prophets have declared!" and "Were not our hearts burning within us . . . while he was opening the scriptures to us?" (Luke 24.25, 32, emphasis added), reflect a time-sensitive urgency in the prospect of participating in the heavenly kingdom. This usage hints at the important contrast between the Christian ideal of conversion as a great turning point in accepting Christ that ought to be the axis of every individual's life and the Jewish ideal of a continuously appropriate return (teshuva) to God mediated by the already-given spirit of the covenant. But it is affirmed in both perspectives that God gives the good heart.

*

In summary, the preeminent theses of Hebraic attitude thinking are:

(1) The condition of right orientation is turning to God, which can happen at any time, even against heavy odds. (The Bhagavad Gita endorses the possibility, though not the Platonic or Hebraic necessity, of a divinely empowered turn.)

(2) Humans are properly exhorted to attend and adhere to a rectifying attitude rather than to embody it--to judge with righteousness rather than to be righteous, for example, or to love mercy rather than to be merciful. This way of speaking preserves a distance between actual and ideal psychology and between the human and the divine.

(3) The notion of a free-standing sovereign attitude--that is, the possibility of regarding anything like "piety" or "faith" or "love" as an absolutely good thing in itself--is avoided, perhaps even actively distrusted. Perfectly rectifying orientation must be actively relational and God-directed. In comparison with the mandated orientation to God, filial and civic piety are planted in relatively shallow soil.

7. Classic attitude issues

We can trace a general development of attitude thinking in the first millennium BCE from (1) an essentializing of the agency of masterful and servile figures to (2) universal prescriptions of attitude, followed by (3) taxonomies of dispositional components of better and worse lives (the virtues and vices). At the hinge of this development, the high Axial Age literature is keenly interested in what is meaningfully and helpfully prescribable with regard to the centering of feeling, thought, and action in individual agents in the best possible relation with a greater center. Among the themes of Axial Age attitude thinking that deserve to be cited as essentially enabling or troubling of our normative thinking today are these:

1. The sovereign attitude and the problem of the preemption of rectification. The Axial Age texts move toward formulating an attitude that can plausibly be identified very closely with complete rectification of a life, whether as the substance of that rectification or as a uniquely powerful cause of it. Often the sovereign attitude is presented not as one distinct attitude but as a composite, like Hosea's bundle of righteousness, mercy, and faithfulness or the faith-tranquility pairing in the Upanishads. Not rarely, however, a single attitude conception exerts a hegemonic fascination such that every other consideration is pulled into alignment with it, as tranquility does in the Upanishads (along with classical Buddhism and Hellenistic philosophy), benevolence does in classical Confucianism, and love begins to do in the Bhagavad Gita.

The appeal of attitudes as manners and sites of rectifying life and the appeal of the idea that there are recognizable and attainable attitudes in which one's life is rectified merge with the appeal of the view that there is a single such attitude which one can be wholly intent on recognizing and attaining. As for which attitudes are best able to carry such a normative load, we have seen three manners of deepening and broadening the right poise: one that plunges into the heart to enlist all possible energies there, as in the appeal for devotion-love; one that clears out all troublemaking tendencies in the heart, as in the appeal for tranquility; and one that features and fine-tunes the balance between the subject and other beings, as in the appeal for piety or benevolence.

Ultimately, we will have to face the implications of the diverse and divergent Axial Age sovereign attitude proposals as posing a live issue for our own normative thinking. If, as seems likely, it will be desirable to find a way to reconcile the different orientations, not letting any one entirely eclipse the others--supposing that each corresponds to a durably relevant aspect of meaningful life--then some qualification of sovereignty claims will be required. But even before we take that issue up, a problem that stares out at us in this first reconnaissance is that the idea of a sovereign attitude is dangerously close to being self-contradictory, in this way: the sovereignty of an all-rectifying attitude must have its seat in the larger situation and not within the subject whose life needs to be rectified; but the appeal of being able to enjoy the benefits of the exercise of that sovereignty is hard to separate from the appeal of acquiring that power for oneself.

The problem is deeply inscribed in the discourse of virtue. An "excellence" (Greek arete) or "essential power" (Latin virtus, Chinese de) of an individual agent belongs to that agent in quite a strong sense. The agent may have gained a virtue only through cultivation and may be able to lose it, as a knife may lose its sharpness, but still the virtue is a characteristic of the agent so long as it obtains. But virtue is also defined as a generally approvable disposition and in that sense must be a function of the agent's justification in relation to other beings. One could think of virtue in its cognitive aspect as a divinely or socially chartered pilot directing the subject to adopt right attitudes. One could think of the virtuous disposition quasi-physically as a shaped responsiveness to stimuli, like a metal needle's responsiveness to a magnetic field. On this model, a virtuous person always points to the good as a compass needle points north. The project of virtue is to fashion such persons; on the most optimistic ancient view, an attainable virtue or set of virtues is sufficient to rectify one's life. But this view is in tension with the insight that rectification depends on attitude. For even granting that a person can become so constituted as to choose and act reliably in generally approvable ways, the possession of that constitution is not the same as the possession of a right attitude, since attitude is a variable in an open system of relations (which is why it can always change in a twinkling). To say that a being has a characteristic is to say something about what that being foreseeably brings to actual occasions, not to determine comprehensively how it stands in actual occasions. No being can have the characteristic of being rightly oriented in relation to all other beings. A compass can have the characteristic of always lining up in a certain way in a magnetic field, but it cannot have the characteristic of always pointing in the right direction--unless it is conceived as miraculously divinatory. A key can have the characteristic of always fitting a lock, but it cannot have the characteristic of always opening the right door--unless it is a "lucky key." Similarly, only a "lucky virtue" could be guaranteed to produce fully approvable results or to rectify an agent's life.

Augustine challenged the implicit "lucky virtue" conception of popular virtue ethics--the basic idea shared by the Hellenistic schools that rational self-cultivation produces eudaimonia, "happiness," a state of full flourishing--by asserting that pagan virtues are really vices: aiming to acquire a sufficient power to rectify their lives, or claiming to possess such power, agents remain sunk in the spiritual coma of selfishness.[140] An Augustinian formula for the true situation is that "will is to grace as the horse is to the rider": regardless of how an agent is accustomed to choose and act, how the agent is in the world is an open question that the agent can address at any moment proudly or humbly, passionately or detachedly, but never conclusively.[141] "Free will" is Augustine's anthropological conception of the inherent openness of the question on the human individual's side, "grace" his theistic conception of how the question is ultimately capable of being resolved. Using this language, the concept of sovereign attitude threatens to annul both free will and grace.

2. The problem of attitude's relation to cognition, action, and feeling. Although Axial Age teachers do not see the relation of basic orientation to cognition, action, and feeling in one standard way, they explore and strengthen the linkages among these variables--to show true knowledge and true peace as identical, for example, or to make idolatry or insensitivity to divine "signs" a function of faithlessness and vice versa, or to weld faith to works or the Four Noble Truths to the Eightfold Path, or to show that the higher pleasures are necessarily virtuous or that the virtues must be pleasant. As the basic challenge accepted by attitude thinking is to think through the centering of life, all of these dimensions must be integrated in an adequate representation of rectified life. The cognitive and volitional linkages tend to give each subject more control over his or her attitude, and expanding individual control is generally an Axial Age priority. The linkages with will and feeling, on the other hand, involve intimate discovery of the actuality of rectified life, whether in horrified estrangement from righteousness and love or in reassuring virtuous pleasure.

There is an obvious difficulty here with finding an adequate justification for one normative psychology against others, since such accounts are profoundly stipulative and the grounding of one can never preclude the grounding of others in principle but will prevail only practically, tactically, and rhetorically, according to the concrete exigencies of a communicative situation. But another, often subtler problem in the background of attitude discourse is that the full exploitation of possible linkages between these dimensions of subjective existence threatens to make all such reference points indeterminate. An attitude becomes the psychological night in which all cows are black and a spiritually disastrous practical anaesthetic if it leaves no relatively independent roles for cognition, will, and feeling to play in the subject's life. The attitude ideal of tranquility effectively preempts our receiving any cognitive notification of appellants, for example, if it stipulates that nothing upsetting can ever be learned or stated. The ideal of piety preempts all freedom of initiative if it makes one's will radically compliant. The ideal of love preempts feeling access to appellants if it homogenizes the texture of all contact with beings (what then does it mean to love an enemy?). Strong claims for an attitude ideal will risk one or more of these semantic and practical collapses caused by the attitude solution overwhelming the elements of life it is called upon to rule.

3. The problem of temporal bias. A main thread in Axial Age philosophy and religious teaching is the critique of customary observance, especially of sacrificing. Traditionalism is under attitudinal attack in every movement we have touched on, even in Confucianism, which demands that tradition be resuscitated, reconstructed, and validated by the reasoning of diligent "learners." There is a shift of religious interest in the Axial Age and its aftermath away from a past-oriented pious deference to ancestral ways and toward a hopeful, future-oriented faith in a messianic worldly salvation or a release into an otherworldly or nonworldly salvation. The felt irrelevance of pious deference in light of a manifest inadequacy of customary good order opens attitudinal space for hopeful faith, as is especially evident in post-exilic Judaism, Christianity, the Hellenistic mystery cults, and Mahayana Buddhism. In India, however, where a future-oriented hope of obtaining earthly and heavenly goods was already a prominent Vedic theme and strongly endorsed as a rationale of priestly practice, some Axial Age critics saw the future as no less distracting and useless than the past. Thus the Upanishads transposed the Brahmanical faith in the possibility of a heavenly reward for merit into a faith in the possibility of release from all worldliness; this release could most helpfully be conceived as a present possibility, ideally a present actuality. To know Brahman is to be radically tranquil; to be radically tranquil is to know Brahman; knowledge of Brahman can be actualized at any moment, under the tutelage of Upanishadic revelation. In this respect Upanishadic thought is the earliest on a trail taken by all the classic Axial Age movements. The right attitude is happiness. A good man cannot really be harmed, say Socrates and Kongzi.[142] Heaven's way is at hand, say the Confucians and Daoists from their different angles (and Jesus later). Submit to the divine order, says Stoicism (and later Islam). Awaken, says Buddhism.

The bias toward the present will come in for profound questioning later, as we shall see in our review of attitude-sensitive modern Western thought. A structurally basic problem worth noting here in brief is that the determinacy of a basic attitude prescription depends on an ontological determinacy in its real vis-à-vis, and the minimally requisite ontological focus in the target of a great attitude always implicitly picks out one time-phase over others--the zone of the already-constituted (past), of the to-be-constituted (future), or of constituting as such (present). In taking an attitude one turns toward one aspect of reality, preferring it to others. Being grateful, for example, involves turning appreciatively to something in the realm of what has been done. One cannot be grateful with regard to future possibilities any more than one can be hopeful about past accomplishments. But a fully inclusive supreme appeal or fully competent sovereign attitude could not fail to have regard for all dimensions of reality. Can an omniattachment be conceived that simultaneously plunges into past, present, and future? Can a perfect detachment achieve comprehensiveness except at the price of disregarding everything, in which case the whole problematic of rectification is elided?

*

The Axial Age legacy of attitude thinking consists partly of a web of classic disagreements. The most obvious of these we have seen in the specifying of rival sovereign attitudes and in basic underlying divergences between strategies of attachment and detachment. But there are metaphysical disagreements to consider here as well: a basic orientation must be deployed in some system of space, time, substance, and causality, all variables that may be apprehended in various ways. Thus Axial Age teachings take different positions with regard to the plurality of beings, ranging from ideals of benevolence, piety, and righteousness that presuppose and affirm an apportionment of living opportunities among beings to ideals of faith, tranquility, and ardent love that imply a transcendence of interbeing division and thus of the world in the ordinary sense. There are also differences regarding the dynamism of human agency along a spectrum ranging from the maximum of self-exertion in Confucian self-cultivation to the tenacity of filial piety or messianic faith to "non-action" and contemplative quietism, and these are related to the different appreciations of time that inform an optimistic self-application to the Way or a fervent eschatological hope or a serene eternalism or nonchalance.

Living commonsensically, one supposes that one's attitudes will continually adjust according to "how life is treating you," either helpfully or hinderingly, through ever-changing circumstances; but Axial Age teachers begin to assert that those who adopt a certain basic attitude live in a different reality than those who do not. To what extent and with what importance do metaphysical commitments really depend on attitude-taking? That remains to be argued out in two great waves--first, in deriving civilization from institutionally sustained religious commitments, as in the medieval "Christendom" and "house of Islam" projects, and second, in reassessing and reconstructing civilization after religious traditions lose their preeminent authority, as in the modern European Enlightenment. As we ourselves are enmeshed in the Enlightenment problematic--less, I think, for the negative reason that traditional religion is weakened than for the positive reason that the Enlightenment renews the radical directive scene-setting that makes our Axial Age classics classic--we can move the present inquiry more directly forward by picking up the thread of attitude thinking in Kant and his successors than by examining the religious attitude deepenings of a Bonaventure, an Ibn al-'Arabi, a Kabir, a Wang Yangming, or other great contributors to premodern segments of our spiritual history.

NOTES

1. Yasna 37.5, trans. J. Darmesteter and L. H. Mills, in Robert E. Van Voorst, ed., Anthology of World Scriptures (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994), p. 203.
2. S. N. Kramer, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed., ed. James B. Pritchard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 589-591, emphasis added. Jacob Klein translates this text as "Man and His God" in William W. Hallo, ed., The Context of Scripture, Vol. 1: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 573-575; the slight differences in Klein's version do not affect my argument.
3. Daodejing 22, cited by the chapter number and using the Arthur Waley translation in The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove, 1958), but with updated romanization.
4. Micah 6.8-9; Proverbs 15.33; Matthew 5.5. Hebrew Bible quotations are taken from the New Jewish Publication Society translation, New Testament translations from the New Revised Standard Version.
5. Pritchard, p. 5.
6. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (New York: Dover, 1982), Chapter 1.
7. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.9.21-22. Upanishad translations are from Upanishads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), except as noted.
8. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.9.24-26.
9. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), no. 476.
10. See Timaeus 30-32, 37, 90.
11. See e.g. Diogenes Laertius 7.88, 7.135-139; trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings (Indianapolis; Hackett, 1988), pp. 136, 96-97.
12. Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 11-24; Heraclitus, nos. 211, 212 (eris and polemos).
13. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, pp. 232-235, 325-330.
14. Kongzi (Confucius), Analects (Lunyu) 7.22, trans. Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage, 1938). All numbering and translations are Waley's except as otherwise noted.
15. John 14.15-17, 25-26.
16. John 3.3-8, 1 John 4.4-6.
17. Pritchard, p. 380.
18. "I am Hammurabi, noble king. I have not been careless or negligent toward humankind, granted to my care by the god Enlil, and with whose shepherding the god Marduk charged me . . . the great gods having chosen me, I am indeed the shepherd who brings peace, whose scepter is just. My benevolent shade is spread over my city"--Epilogue, in William W. Hallo, ed., The Context of Scripture,Vol. 2, Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 351.
19. I derive this idea from Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 14-15, 19-20.
20. See e.g. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's abdication speech [1555] in Eugen Weber, ed., The Western Tradition, Vol. 1 (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995), pp. 432-433.
21. Works and Days, ll. 1-2, 6, in Hesiod, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
22. For Yahweh, see e.g. Isaiah 2.5-17; for Indra, see e.g. Rig Veda 2.12.10. The political significance of the story of the humbling god is plainly stated in the Mahabharata: "Like disciples humbling themselves in the presence of preceptors or the gods in the presence of Indra, all men should humble themselves before the king"--Book 12, P. C. Roy ed., quoted in John Weir Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters. The Mythology of Kingship (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 127.
23. Mencius (Mengzi) 2.B.7, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
24. Heraclitus 195, 196. I use the fragment numbering and translations of G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield in The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
25. Kongzi, Analects 13.18. I substitute "Kongzi" for "Master K'ung" and "The Master."
26. For Mengzi it is so obvious that benevolence is most fundamental that he gives relatively more emphasis to the need to exercise benevolence intelligently, heeding precedents and laws (e.g. 4.A.1).
27. Some passages seem to point more one way, some more the other; e.g. "Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going" (John 14.1-4) vs. "He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life" (John 3.34-36).. Analects 7.27.
28. Bhagavad Gita 4.39. All Gita translations are from The Bhagavad-Gita (New York: Bantam, 1986), trans. Barbara Stoler Miller, except as noted.
29. Bhagavad-Gita 12.8, 19.
30. The Book of Odes, "King Wen," trans. Burton Watson, in W. T. de Bary et al., eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 38.
31. Daodejing 25.
32. Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), section 4, p. 56.
33. See Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) on this class of persons (ru, "scholars") generally.
34. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle: Open Court, 1989), pp. 18-19.
35. Analects 17.6. This passage has the look of the attitude-happy third century BCE or later and is identified as a later interpolation by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 180.
36. The "thread," Analects 4.15. On zhong and shu, see Graham, pp. 20-21.
37. As defined in The Lore of the Way (Dao Shu) by Jia Yi of the 2nd century (Graham 21).
38. Shu is translated as "empathy" by Brooks and Brooks.
39. Mengzi 2.A.6 argues that all humans have germs of goodness, which if developed will grow "like a fire starting up or a spring coming through." If one fails to develop them, however, one will be morally crippled.
40. Analects 6.28--a third century BCE interpolation, according to Brooks and Brooks (there numbered 6.30), p. 176.
41. Graham, p. 22.
42. Graham's interpretation may underrate the distance of goodness from us--in effect, its transcendence. Graham quotes Analects 7.30: "Is jen [ren] so far away? As soon as I desire jen, jen arrives." But the point of this passage may be to remind us ironically that true willing of ren is extraordinarily difficult. Consider also the pathos of 8.7: "Master Tseng said, The true Knight of the Way must perforce be both broad-shouldered and stout of heart; his burden is heavy and he has far to go. For Goodness is the burden he has taken upon himself; and must we not grant that it is a heavy one to bear? Only with death does his journey end; then must we not grant that he has far to go?" A more positive reason to think of ren as transcendent lies in the model of lifelong learning that Kongzi promotes (e.g. 7.21, 15.30).
43. The Classic of Filial Piety, in The Sacred Books of Confucius, trans. Chai and Winberg Chai (New Hyde Park: University Books, 1965).
44. Mengzi: "The Way lies at hand . . . If only everyone loved his parents and treated his elders with deference, the Empire would be at peace" (4.A.11).
45. Analects 17.21, 11.11; Brooks and Brooks, p. 158.
46. The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong Yong) 30, giving "Heaven" for tian, trans. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames in Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 241.
47. Mengzi 7.B.25. Hall and Ames comment: "The classical Chinese alternative to the dualism of creator and human creature is this continuum: the human being in striving to realize himself becomes deity" (p. 242).
48. Mengzi 4.B.20.
49. Daodejing, trans. Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove, 1958), 68. Subsequent references to this source are in the text.
50. On this carver, see Chapter 3 of the Zhuangzi.
51. Daodejing 1. Graham thinks the intent of this couplet is "to smash the dichotomy of desire and desirelessness by contradictory commands" (220). Hall and Ames' rendering suggests balance: "Thus, to be really objectless in one's desires is how one observes the mysteries of all things, while really having desires is how one observes their boundaries"--Daodejing. A Philosophical Translation, trans. Roger T. Ames and David Hall (New York: Ballantine, 2003), p. 77. However, quenching desire seems to be the main emphasis throughout the Daodejing.
52. Daodejing 61; Hall and Ames have "equilibrium" instead of "quiescence" for jing.
53. Waley, The Way and Its Power, pp. 17-39; Graham, p. 95.
54. Mengzi 7.A.1-4.
55. Xunzi 21.34-39, in Graham, p. 253.
56. Graham, p. 161.
57. In Graham, p. 98.
58. Mengzi 4.A.9.
59. Mengzi 4.A.10.
60. "I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing all creatures" (10.125, trans. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in The Rig Veda. An Anthology [London: Penguin, 1981], p. 63). For an overview of this thought in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda see William K. Mahony, The Artful Universe. An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 114-116.
61. Ainslie T. Embree, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, 2nd ed., Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 29.
62. Chandogya Upanishad 7.26.2.
63. Chandogya Upanishad 7.2-8. "Strength," in turn, has conditions in food, water, heat, and space (7.9-12), which have conditions in memory, hope, and lifebreath (7.13-15); clearly the intent of this discussion is not to segregate the mental from the physical. Cf. Katha Upanishad 6.7: "Higher than the senses is the mind, higher than the mind is the essence, higher than the essence is the immense self; higher than the immense is the unmanifest. Higher than the unmanifest is the person, pervading all and without any marks . . . His appearance is beyond the range of sight . . . with the heart, with insight, with thought, has he been contemplated--those who know this become immortal."
64. Chandogya Upanishad 8.1.4.
65. As spelled out later in the Adhyatma Upanishad: "Wise people should abandon the concept of 'I' and 'mine' in the body and in the senses, which are not really Atman. Having known himself as an embodiment of the Self, the witness of the awakened intelligence and of its activities, one should ever think 'I am That' . . . Thus, one should see Atman as pervading all things and as existing autonomously by itself" (in Mahony, p. 187.) I follow Mahony's translation of the Katha Upanishad 3.13 passage cited here (p. 195). Mahony speaks rightly of a perfection of Vedic sacrifice in the sacrifice of the mind (pp. 195-196).
66. In this development, one side of Vedic atittude discourse supersedes the other: the prescription to act with a good heart, devotedly, etc. is fulfilled and the praise of divine generosity, mercy, etc. is eliminated. Thus the core of a typical Vedic thought such as "King Soma, have mercy on us for our well-being. Know that we are devoted to your laws . . . If we break your laws, O god, have mercy on us like a good friend" (Rig Veda 8.48.8-9, O'Flaherty p. 135) is revealed to be "we are devoted." The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad notes wryly, "The gods, therefore, are not pleased at the prospect of men coming to understand this" (1.4.10).
67. As Mahony observes, "The mind thus stands [in the Upanishads] as a pivot of sorts. It can direct its attention and energy outward, thereby entrapping the human spirit in the ephemeral and transient manifold world of multiplicity . . . Or the mind can turn its attention around and direct its energy deeper, toward its unified, sublime source. This latter, inward movement frees one from the frustrations, disappointments, and pain of [the manifold world]" (p. 195).
68. Olivelle translates upasana as "veneration," while the Advaitin Swami Nikhilananda translates it as "meditation" (The Upanishads [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], see comment on p. 282). Many passages obviously bear the meaning both of respectfully addressing an external thing and forming an inward realization; thus: "He should venerate this Saman [chant] with the thought, 'I am the Whole!'" (Chandogya Upanishad 2.21.4).
69. "Those whose intellect has awakened to these four holy truths, and who have correctly penetrated to their meaning . . . they will gain the blessed calm, and no more will they be reborn"--Ashvaghosha, "Nanda the Fair" [Saundaranandakavya], in Buddhist Scriptures, trans. Edward Conze (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 113.
70. But cf. the perfected mind "being a single mass of perception; consisting of bliss, and thus enjoying bliss" (Mandukya Upanishad 5).
71. "The highest bliss can't be described . . . Does it shine? Or does it radiate? There the sun does not shine, nor the moon and stars . . . Him alone [Brahman, the changeless], as he shines, do all things reflect" (Katha Upanishad 5.14-15). The imagination-stretching argument that the bliss of the world of Brahman is exponentially more than lower forms of "success" and "wealth" (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.33) either confirms attachment or breaks it. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
72. Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.1-4.
73. That is, as a theme of the classical literature. Compassion is a major concern of Vedanta spirituality today.
74. The Book of the Gradual Sayings [Anguttara Nikaya] i.22 (p. 3). Cf. The Book of the Kindred Sayings [Samyutta Nikaya] i.105 (p. 14). All quotations from the Pali canon in this section are from the Pali Text Society translations. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Harvey B. Aronson, Love and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980), my source for this material.
75. Aronson, pp. 14-18.
76. Aronson, pp. 60-77.
77. Dialogues of the Buddha [Digha Nikaya] ii.251 (p. 71).
78. Aronson, pp. 86-94 (here arguing with Winston King's characterization of Theravada Buddhism's ethic as ultimately world-indifferent).
79. From the Lankavatara Sutra, in E. A. Burtt, ed., The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (New York: New American Library, 1982), p. 143.
80. Bhagavad Gita 1.36-44.
81. Snell, p. 47; all Archilocus fragments are translated by Snell on this same page and are cited by Diehl number, as in Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1954).
82. Additional line supplied from A. T. Murray's translation in the Loeb series, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
83. Cf. Proverbs 16.1-3: "A man may arrange his thoughts, but what he says depends on the LORD. All the ways of a man seem right to him, but the LORD probes motives. Entrust your affairs to the LORD, and your plans will succeed."
84. Heraclitus 232. This and subsequent references are to fragment numbers in Kirk, Raven,and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers.
85. Peter Kingsley ascribes a quasi-Upanishadic program to Parmenides, stressing the significance of the attitude of stillness (hesuchasm) to which he was reportedly led by his teacher, in In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999). Hesuchasm as godlike stillness is a surprisingly important idea in Plato as Ali Gocer shows in "Hesuchia, a Metaphysical Principle in Plato's Moral Psychology," Apeiron 32 (December 1999), pp. 17-36.
86. Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 260-262, trans. Lewis Campbell, in Fifteen Greek Plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 258; The Eumenides, ll. 885-887, trans. Gilbert Murray, in ibid., p. 153. Cf. Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1004-1007, p. 280, "of all lands that yield the immortal Gods just homage of true piety, [Athens in her glory] is foremost"; ll. 1124-1127, p. 283, "Only in Athens, only here i' the world, have I found pious thought and righteous care, and truth in word and deed."
87. Plato, Apology 19b, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). This volume is the source of all Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito translations used here.
88. Euthyphro 9e-11b.
89. Euthyphro 12e, 14b.
90. Apology 24c-26a; 31a-33a; 28b-30b.
91. Crito 49c-d.
92. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1378a5.
93. "This it is that my heart biddeth me tell the Athenians, and how that even as ill-government [dusnomia] giveth a city much trouble, so good rule [eunomia] maketh all things orderly and perfect"--quoted from Demosthenes' On the Embassy in Elegy and Iambus, Vol. 1, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).
94. Republic 400d-e.
95. Republic 507b, 508b.
96. Republic 509a, from Paul Shorey's translation in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
97. Laws, Book 10; Timaeus 29a-30b.
98. Democritus 594; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, pp. 429-433.
99. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1141b30-1142a10.
100. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapters 1-12--e.g. in Sextus Empiricus. Selections from the Major Writings, ed. Philip P. Hallie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), pp. 31-42.
101. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 128, in Inwood and Gerson, p. 24.
102. Cicero, On Fate 22-23, in Inwood and Gerson, pp. 37-38.
103. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 76b-82a; in Inwood and Gerson, pp. 13-15.
104. "The entire cosmos and the heaven are the substance of god . . . nature is a condition (hexis) which moves from itself, producing and holding together the things it produces at definite times, according to spermatic principles . . . [and] aims at both the advantageous and at pleasure"--Diogenes Laertius 7.148-149, in Inwood and Gerson, p. 97.
105. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
106. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3, 6.24, 10.6, 11.18; cf. 8.17, 9.28, 39.
107. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.15, 4.3.
108. Encheiridion 1, in Epictetus, Vol. 2, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925-1928).
109. Chrysippus reported by Cicero in De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) 2.38, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951).
110. Cicero 2.153.
111. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.48, 7.28, trans. C. R. Haines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).
112. It seems to be primarily for this reason that Nussbaum feels able to say that the Stoics "in no way subordinate [practical reasoning] to the good of apatheia [detachment]"--p. 492.
113. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.52.
114. Chrysippus quoted in Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions, in Inwood and Gerson, p. 154. The possible contradiction in Chrysippus is that he also said that in philosophical studies "we must put the logical first, the ethical second, and the physical third," with theology capping off physics as a "final revelation" (p. 153).
115. See J. J. Scullion, "Righteousness," in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
116. "For three transgressions of Judah, for four, I will not revoke [punishment]: because they have spurned the Teaching of the LORD and have not observed His laws" (Amos 2.4)--possibly a later addition. Tyre is blamed in 1.9 for "not remembering the covenant of brotherhood," but this reads more as an expression of horror at Tyre's inhumanity than as a citation of disobedience. Compare Isaiah of Jerusalem--"Because they transgressed teachings, violated laws, broke the ancient covenant . . . That is why a curse consumes the earth" (Isaiah 24.5-6)--and Second Isaiah: "I the LORD am your God, instructing you for your own benefit, guiding you in the way you should go. If only you would heed my commands! Then your prosperity would be like a river, your triumph like the waves of the sea" (Isaiah 48.17-18). On abuse of the poor, see 2.6-7, 4.1, 5.10-12.
117. These words also occur frequently in Proverbs and in the Psalms, generally to announce a connection between God's righteousness, human righteousness, and life: "The Lord is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold His face" (Psalm 11.7). "The road of righteousness leads to life; by way of its path there is no death" (Proverbs 12.28).
118. Some exceptions to this rule: Israelite scouts are said to exhibit hesed during the conquest of Canaan (Judges 1.24), the good kings Josiah and Hezekiah are credited with it (2 Chronicles 32.32, 35.26), and the wicked person is faulted for lacking it (Psalm 109.16).
119. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 133b; New Testament, Matthew 5.48.
120. Isaiah 40.18-21, 28, 31. Compare Hosea 14.4: "Nor ever again will we call our handiwork our god, since in You alone orphans find pity!"
121. Especially Isaiah 50.5-6, 53.7.
122. Leviticus 19.3; Isaiah 33.6.
123. There is, however, hanef, "profane," translated "impious" in the NJPS version (Proverbs 11.9).
124. Deuteronomy 13--with the significant exception that one's parent is not named as a possible offender (13.6). The logic of the ban on idolatry does not really spare parents, but the text refuses to envision this case.
125. The Septuagint with Apocrypha, trans. Lancelot C. L. Brenton (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1992).
126. Acts 3.12, 10.2.
127. See eusebes in Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 7, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), pp. 175-184.
128. Little faith, Matthew 6.30, e.g.; great faith, Matthew 8.10, e.g..
129. Daniel 6.4 ("extraordinary spirit") and Chapter 6 generally. The story was a favorite with early Christians.
130. E.g. John 3.31-36.
131. This is part of Martin Buber's thesis in Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
132. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus and his followers are sent by God to redeem the world because of God's great love of the world (3.16), but the world, being dominated by the "evil one," hates them (17.14-18). But cf. 1 John 2.15-17: "Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world--the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches--comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever."
133. Buber, Two Types of Faith, pp. 63-64.
134. Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 17a.
135. The one exception is a Hebrew Bible quotation: I Samuel 13.14 at Acts 13.22.
136. Kardiognostes, Acts 1.24, 15.8; Paul, I Thessalonians 2.4 and II Thessalonians 3.5.
137. Deuteronomy 24.1-4, at Mark 10.5.
138. Paul's groaning, Romans 8.26. Abraham Heschel elucidates pathos in Hebrew prophecy in The Prophets, Vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), esp. Chapters 1, 3-4, 7.
139. Bhagavad Gita 9.30-32.
140. On pagan virtues as splendid vices, Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans 19.25.
141. The idea that will is to grace as horse is to rider is attributed to Augustine by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, Q. 110, Art. 4, Obj. 1 and by John Calvin in Institutes 2.4.1.
142. Apology 41c-d; Analects 7.22.