Care-Based Processual Philosophies for a Just Society Evidence from Pāli Texts

Abstract

This article reconstructs from Pāli texts a care (karuṇā)-based philosophy for building an isonomic, complex society. The Greek term isonomia (lit. equality), in Karatani Kōjin’s sense of no-rule, means a categorical rejection of any ruler–ruled social hierarchy. I extend this use of isonomia to include practices of spiritual cultivation that relinquish habitual tendencies of the ruler–ruled mentality such as domination, coercion, and submission. To better appreciate this kind of care-based philosophy of isonomia, I argue, one needs to sidestep rights-based conversations, adopt a processual paradigm, and rethink what counts as sociopolitical philosophy.

 As the analysis in my article reveals, a core feature of relation-centered, care-based sociopolitical philosophies is that they diffract seemingly stable categories such as the inner psyche, personhood, group, community, institution, and nation-state into recurring patterns of motivated actions, coactions, and consequences of actions and then guide the reassembling of non-coercive patterns of thoughts, actions, habits, and social relations so to build a friendlier, more pluralistic future.

 This study is as much an effort to recover a marginalized voice from the past as it is a future-oriented project of testing out new ways of thinking about key issues concerning humanity and the planet. A baked-in flaw of established social contract theories is that they presume a rational, autonomous agent and in doing so relegate the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled to the realm of the unthought or the afterthought. In contrast, a care-based processual philosophy of isonomia has its theoretical origins in the existential reality of interconditionality and precarity. Thus, it offers vital insights into how to reimagine justice, equity, freedom, and pluralism in processual terms of care and equal support for life and liberation.