All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

The Trouble with Revisionism

Critical Thinking, History, Psychology, Religion, , ,

Almost everything we do is in some way an attempt to improve on what went before. Even tidying up a room involves what we see as an improvement on its previous state. When we consider traditions of human thought and activity, too, each new development of a tradition tries to address a new condition of some kind and thus also remedy a defect: for example, the Reformation was a response to dogmatic limitations and perceived abuses in the Catholic church, and new artistic movements respond to what they see as the aesthetic limitations of the previous movements that inspired them.

In many ways, then, its not surprising that both individuals and groups gradually evolve new ways of doing things in response to past tradition or custom. What creates a problem, though, is when we essentialise that tradition and try to appropriate its whole moral weight to justify our current approach: believing that we have found the ultimately right solution, the true answer, or the ultimately correct interpretation of that tradition. When we do that, we’re not just contributing to a new development that we acknowledge to be different from what went before, but also imposing that development on the past. In effect, we’re projecting the present onto the past. Revisionism - Executed Yezhov removed from photo of StalinThis is an approach to things for which ‘revisionism’ seems to be a good label, though it’s most typically been used for those who more formally impose their preconceptions on the interpretation of history, such as holocaust deniers. This photo shows such revisionism in action in the Soviet Union: the executed commissar Yezhov removed from a photo featuring Stalin.

In a sense, we’re all revisionists to some degree, since this tendency to appropriate and essentialise the past is wrapped up in common fallacies and cognitive biases that we might all slip into. We’re especially likely to do this when considering our own past, for example underestimating the extent to which our mature experience differs from our youth and projecting the benefit of hindsight onto our judgements in the past. In working on my next book Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief, I’ve been thinking a lot about these cognitive biases around time recently. There are many concerned with the present and the future, or with non-specific times, as well as the past, so I won’t try to discuss them all, but just a couple that focus particularly on the past.

In terms of Critical Thinking, the fallacy of absolutising the past is equivalent to the Irrelevant Appeal to History or Irrelevant Appeal to Tradition. This is when someone assumes that because something was the case in the past that necessarily makes it true or justified now. Simple examples might be “We haven’t admitted women to the club in the hundred years of our existence – we can’t start now! It would undermine everything we stand for!” Or “When we go to the pub we always take turns to pay for a round of drinks. When it’s your round you have to pay – it’s as simple as that.”

A common cognitive bias that works on the same basis is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which Daniel Kahneman writes about. When we’ve put a lot of time, effort, or money into something, even if it’s not achieving what we hoped, we are very reluctant to let go of it. Companies who have invested money in big projects that turn out to have big cost overruns and diminishing prospects of return will nevertheless often pursue them, sending “good money after bad”. The massively expensive Concorde project in the 1970’s is a classic example of governments also doing this. But as individuals we also have an identifiable tendency to fail to let go of things we’ve invested in: whether it’s houses, relationships, books or business ventures. The Sunk Cost Fallacy involves an absolutisation of what we have done in the past, so that we fail to compare it fairly to new evidence in the present. In effect, we also revise our understanding of the present so that it fits our unexamined assumptions about the value of events in the past.

I think the Sunk Cost Fallacy also figures in revisionist attitudes to religious, philosophical and moral traditions. It’s highly understandable, perhaps, that if you’ve sunk a large portion of your life into the culture, symbolism and social context of a particular religious tradition, for example, but then you encounter a lot of conflicts between the assumptions that dominate that tradition and the conditions that need to be addressed in the present, there is going to be a strong temptation to try to revise that tradition rather than to abandon it. Since that tradition provides a lot of our meaning – our vocabulary and a whole set of ways of symbolising and conceptualising – it’s clear that we cannot just abandon what that tradition means to us. We can acknowledge that, but at the same time I think we need to resist the revisionist impulse that is likely to accompany it. The use and gradual adaptation of meaning from past traditions doesn’t have to be accompanied by claims that we have a new, true, or correct interpretation of that tradition. Instead we should just try to admit that we have a new perspective, influenced by past traditions but basically an attempt to respond to new circumstances.

That, at any rate, is what I have been trying to do with Middle Way Philosophy. I acknowledge my debt to Buddhism, as well as Christianity and various other Western traditions of thought. However, I try not to slip into the claim that I have the correct or true interpretation of any of these traditions, or indeed the true message of their founders. For example, I have a view about the most useful interpretation of the Buddha’s Middle Way – one that I think Buddhists would be wise to adopt to gain the practical benefits of the Buddha’s insights. However, I don’t claim to know what the Buddha ‘really meant’ or to have my finger on ‘true Buddhism’. Instead, all beliefs need to be judged in terms of their practical adequacy to present circumstances.

This approach also accounts for the measure of disagreement I have had with three recent contributors to our podcasts: Stephen Batchelor, Don Cupitt and Mark Vernon. I wouldn’t want to exaggerate that degree of disagreement, as our roads lie together for many miles. and in each case I think that dialogue with the society and exploration of the relationship of their ideas to the Middle Way has been, and may continue to be, fruitful. However, it seems to me on the evidence available that Batchelor, Cupitt and Vernon each want to adopt revisionist views of the Buddha, Jesus and Plato respectively. I’m not saying that any of those revisionist views are necessarily wrong, but only that I think it’s a mistake to rely on a reassessment of a highly ambiguous and debatable past as a starting-point for developing an adequate response to present conditions. In each case, we may find elements of inspiration or insight in the ‘revised’ views – but please let’s try to let go of the belief that ‘what they really meant’ is in any sense a useful thing to try to establish. In the end, this attachment to ‘what they really meant’ seems to be largely an indicator of sunk costs on our part.

Middle Way Thinkers 4: Jung

Great Thinkers, Psychology, ,

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the great Swiss psychoanalyst, had a long and rich life and left a huge body of writings behind him. I think he offers a huge contribution to our thinking on the Middle Way. Though his approach has been dismissed by some who regard themselves as hard scientists or analytic philosophers, I would argue that these criticisms are often based on prejudicial misunderstandings of his work and its significance. More than anything, I think his contribution is philosophical, in the sense of offering us new and helpful ways of understanding and assessing our beliefs and the ways we interpret our experience. He also offers a personal narrative of his incredibly rich and inspiring inner life. Questions remain about his effectiveness as a therapist – a point that I don’t feel in any position to assess – but even if he ‘cured’ nobody, his interactions with patients provided a strong basis of experience that supports the philosophical and cultural value of his work.

Jung was the son of a Protestant pastor, and qualified in medicine before specialising in psychiatry. He encountered and was influenced by Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but rejected some of Freud’s dogmatic assumptions, such as his materialism and his reduction of desire to sexuality. In this respect you could compare Jung’s position to that of other philosophical disciples who have learnt much from but greatly surpassed their masters (such as Plato and Aristotle), primarily by identifying dogmatic assumptions that were holding back their masters and freeing themselves of those assumptions.Carl_Gustav_Jung

Jung saw himself as a man of science, and constantly  strove to meet the standards of objectivity that he felt were necessary to meet what he saw as the exacting standards of science. This is what led him to be so cautious during his lifetime in publishing accounts of his inner experience. This commitment seems to me double-edged: it led him towards a genuine objectivity of approach, but also led him to attempt what was probably impossible, to convince those committed to a naturalistic approach to science that phenomena as remote from publically-verifiable, reproducible proof as the unconscious or the archetypes should be taken seriously in scientific terms. In my view it is science that needs to try to live up to Jung’s high standards of objectivity, not the other way round. Jung was not afraid of the use of ‘private’ experience, or of material from cultural or religious traditions, and thus did not unnecessarily narrow the field of investigation, or impose likely conclusions that are the result of limitations in the methodology, in the way that those who insist on ‘hard’ scientific evidence have to do. His hypotheses about these areas of experience provide us with a valuable basis of understanding that is well supported by Jung’s experience, and by the provisionality that went with his scientific approach.

Jung’s biggest contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way has to be the concept of integration – which Jung more commonly referred to as individuation. Recognising that our experience comprises a variety of energies, symbols and beliefs that may be in conflict, with some repressing others and the repressed elements often unconscious, Jung saw the goal of human life as overcoming these conflicts and bringing these energies together. This insight has huge implications far beyond the medical model of psychotherapy – for example as the basis of moral objectivity – though this is a point that Jung himself only seems to recognise implicitly rather than advertise explicitly.

I prefer the term ‘integration’ to ‘individuation’, because this makes it clear that integration is not only the process of psychological development in an individual, but can also be applied at a social level. Again, I would say that Jung also recognised this point implicitly, but did not discuss it explicitly because of the extent to which exploring these philosophical implications might potentially threaten the scientific credentials he wanted to maintain. I see integration as the Middle Way inside out: rather than just avoiding dogmatic beliefs on either side, integration brings together experiential beliefs and energies that at first were unnecessarily opposed. Each supports the other, because it is only by avoiding metaphysical beliefs (that cannot be integrated) that we can make integration possible.

Jung’s other huge contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way lies in his development of the concept of archetypes. There has been much confusion about what Jung meant to assert about the status of archetypes, much of which has arisen from his use of the term ‘collective unconscious’ where he placed the archetypes. Some people have mistaken the collective unconscious for some kind of Platonic realm of absolutes, but Jung makes it clear that he is only referring to the universality that comes from genetic similarity between human beings, that gives us all similar psychic functions. These psychic functions need to be expressed by symbols, but the form of those symbols will differ between cultures. Thus, for example, the Shadow archetype is the one we encounter in symbols like Satan, Darth Vader, Sauron and Voldemort – an embodiment of evil found in all cultures because it reflects the psychic function of rejecting what we do not identify with. Any creature with aversions will have a Shadow of some kind, however it is expressed.

Archetypes are very important in understanding the Middle Way, because they allow us to distinguish between meaningful symbols that are found universally (because of their psychic function) and metaphysical ‘truths’. So, in the case of God, for example, the God archetype came first, and is meaningful to us because it represents a psychic function, regardless of whether or not we ‘believe’ in God. Belief or disbelief in God seems to me completely irrelevant to the meaning of the archetype. I think this is what Jung probably meant when he said that he did not believe in God, but that he ‘knew’ God, probably in the sense that he directly encountered God in experience.

After the Buddha, perhaps, I can’t think of any thinker whom I think is quite so rich and rewarding as a source of insights into the Middle Way as Jung. I am not really well-read in later Jungians that others recommend, such as James Hillman, so I must reserve judgement on their value. But whether you read more recent Jungians as well or not, I’d highly recommend going directly to the source. His autobiographical book ‘Memories, dreams, reflections’ is a very good place to start, because it gives you a big picture of Jung the man, and of his rich inner life, as well as of his scientific development.

 

Link to index of posts in the ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ series

Migglism: A Beginner’s Guide to Middle Way Philosophy, now published

Middle Way Philosophy, News, Society events, ,

After a number of months of preparation, and helpful input from a number of people in the Middle Way Society, my new introduction to Middle Way Philosophy, Migglism, is now finally published. It aims to provide a brief and accessible way into the ideas, and is illustrated with cartoons by Norma Smith and Peter Goble.Migglism Cover Katja

Migglism is the first book to be approved by the Middle Way Society publications committee, which is formed to give the society’s support to self-published books about the Middle Way. This facility is open to any author who wants to publish a book relating to the Middle Way and submit it to the society for approval.

The book is available in both paperback and e-book versions. Currently it is only available from Lulu, but within a few weeks it should also be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other major online sources. Please note that a greater proportion of money goes to me, and less to Jeff Bezos, if you buy from Lulu rather than Amazon.

Here are the links to the Lulu pages where you can purchase the book:

paperback

e-book

Here is the ‘blurb’:

‘Migglism’ is a short term for Middle Way Philosophy, a practical philosophical approach developed by Robert M. Ellis in a Ph.D. thesis and a series of books. Middle Way Philosophy brings together insights from Buddhism, philosophy and psychology to offer a framework of thinking for a range of integrative practices. This book aims to introduce these ideas in an accessible way.

‘The Middle Way’ is not a compromise, but a process of navigating between dogmatic extremes. By avoiding either positive or negative claims that go beyond experience, we can find a new way of thinking, valuing and practising.

“The middle is the chaotic and confusing place between the extremes. While the extremes are simpler and more attractive, it is the mess in the middle where the interesting and creative activities occur – it is where we should be. Robert sets out a foundation for a way of thinking about the middle ground as a place to move towards.”
Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Walt Disney, and author of Creativity, Inc.

Meditation 14: The hindrance of doubt

Meditation, Practice, ,

There are two possible senses of ‘doubt’, just as there are two senses of ‘confidence’ as its opposite. Doubt can be a disabling paralysis preventing us engaging in actions we have decided upon, or it can be a liberating questioning of views that have previously been understood dogmatically. How do you tell the difference? Well, disabling doubt is disintegrating and disempowering, but liberating doubt is integrating and empowering. Disabling doubt is a voice making negative dogmatic assertions that undermine you without justification, whereas liberating doubt is balanced and merely makes us aware of our degree of uncertainty as embodied beings.

This distinction between two types of doubt is found in the traditional Buddhist discussion of doubt as a hindrance in meditation. Doubt as a hindrance is a translation of the Pali term vicikiccha, and is something every meditator will have come across regularly. Unfortunately this is sometimes badly translated as ‘sceptical doubt’, which can only be based on a major misunderstanding of scepticism: I much prefer the translation ‘disabling doubt’ which tells you about its practical effects. Sceptical doubt as I understand it is liberating doubt, enabling us to let go of attachments to dogmatic claims wherever they are found.

The way I experience disabling doubt in meditation is as a loss of confidence that meditation is worth doing, or is worth persisting in. For example, I could sit for a while, find myself going round a spiral of distractions, and conclude “There’s no point in sitting here any longer – I’m just wasting my time.” Or  maybe I don’t even start in the first place. Perhaps I get up in the morning, feeling a bit groggy, and “Oh, it’s obviously not worth trying to meditate this morning – I’ll never get anywhere.” At this point I also hear the voice of past meditation teachers from somewhere in my superego saying “Ah! But that just goes to show that meditation is the very thing you need most!”, but, if the disabling doubt is disabling enough, I will of course ignore them.Doubting Thomas Johann Jaritz

How do I know that this disabling doubt is not liberating, sceptical doubt? A case could be made. Perhaps I am hanging onto an idea that I should be meditating every day, regardless of the evidence. But perhaps it really isn’t very useful to try meditating at this juncture. Meditation is not a panacea for every situation, as you need a basic degree of starting integration to make any progress with meditation in the first place. Perhaps this doubtful voice is just saving me the trouble of wasting my time when meditation would indeed be fruitless? Perhaps I am also attributing dogmatic authority to the voices of past meditation teachers?

Of course, this is possible, but I think there are also some ways to spot disabling doubt when it tries to assume the mantle of liberating doubt. One, that I’ve already mentioned, is that disabling doubt is negative dogma. It won’t be open to real examination of the question of whether meditation would be useful – it will just be offering rationalisations to support a feeling of not wanting to meditate. If it’s liberating doubt, you should be aware of arguments on both sides, and be in a position to weight them up. Ask yourself whether that’s really the case. Another way of spotting disabling doubt is that it will probably be accompanied by quite a negative emotional state: a retractive, shrinking away from things.

The traditional Buddhist answer to doubt is usually ‘faith’ – involving at least an element of unconditional commitment to metaphysical claims, such as the Buddha’s enlightenment. Interpreted in this way, I don’t think that approach is any help at all. At best it is a way of experiencing group pressure to conform and do the things that the group does, symbolised by their metaphysical commitments. You might decide that some group pressure will help you stick to your commitments, but this will just be repressive if the commitments themselves are made under group pressure, especially if this is reinforced by appeals to tradition.

Instead, I’d suggest that, yes, we do need to commit ourselves to meditation practice, and follow it with some sense of discipline, in order to make it work. If we allow ourselves to re-assess that commitment every time we meditate, regardless of the mental state we are in, it will undermine the practice. However, in order for meditation practice to be justified by experience rather than group pressure and dogma, we do need to review it regularly and thoroughly. Is it really worth doing? Is it really making progress? The answer ‘no’ has to be a real possibility if you are really asking these questions, rather than just going through the motions to satisfy a group that claims to be open and critical but isn’t. If you know that you have thought through your commitment to practice for the time being, it makes sense to suppress (not repress) any contrary impulses for the moment, and just sit down and meditate regardless.

My personal experience is that sometimes I have answered ‘no’ when I asked myself if meditation was working for me. At that point it wasn’t. But I have always come back to it, because if I don’t do it then I miss it and notice the effects. By allowing doubt free enquiry in the appreciation of uncertainty, I am reasonably confident that my commitment to meditation is founded in experience rather than dogma.

Index of previous meditation blogs

Picture: Doubting Thomas photographed by Johann Jaritz  (Wikimedia Commons)

Middle Way Thinkers 3: Aristotle

Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, ,

raphael_athens_platoIn Raphael’s famous picture ‘The School of Athens’, the highlighted two standing philosophers in the middle are obviously intended to be the most important. They are Plato and Aristotle. Plato is pointing upwards, symbolising rationalism and its appeal to transcendent reason, but Aristotle is pointing downwards towards the Earth, to symbolise the empirical appeal to experience and the earth. The Buddha is also sometimes depicted touching the ground, in a way that could be taken to symbolise the ‘groundedness’ of his view of things.

The Buddha’s relationship to experience can be seen as the basis of his Middle Way, avoiding either positive or negative metaphysical claims. But can we say the same for Aristotle? The resemblances, at first sight, are striking. Not only is Aristotle often regarded as the first empiricist in the Western tradition (and also the founder of Western science, the first to seriously use observation to support his claims), but he also taught a virtue ethics, with the famous Golden Mean as a guide to how we could identify a virtuous quality. A practical virtue, he said, is found mid-way between the excess and the deficiency of a quality. For example, courage (a true virtue  in his view) is found mid-way between cowardice (the deficiency of courageous quality) and foolhardiness (its excess). Is this an ancient Greek version of the Middle Way?

Sadly, not quite. There is much to admire in Aristotle. He was a multi-talented figure who took an interest in everything from biology to poetry. He learnt from his master Plato and went beyond him. His Ethics, and particularly the chapter on friendship, are of particular interest today. Aristotle can be a great source of inspiration, but he should certainly not be assumed wholesale to have hit the Middle Way. Nor should the Middle Way be described as ‘Aristotelian’. For there are still some basic ways in which Aristotle remains in a set of metaphysical assumptions that might take us off in a different direction.

Aristotle did challenge the metaphysics of Plato, but he also developed his own metaphysics. Rather than basing this on absolute reason like Plato, he made the assumption that we could observe the truth about the world through the senses. Where Plato evidently believed that the Forms (ultimate essences) lay in reason alone beyond the world, Aristotle believed that they lay in each individual thing in the world. Through observation we could work out the essence of a thing, and thus its true purpose. He thus assumed that the world was formatted in a way that would allow scientists to understand it correctly, and that observation of human beings could also show us their true nature and purpose. ‘Man’ he famously wrote, ‘is a rational animal’: meaning that what is essential and distinctive about humans is their rationality. Our true purpose, he believed, can thus be fulfilled by developing that rationality.

The Golden Mean, then, needs to be understood in its context. It’s not a method for taking into account the limitations of our understanding in the whole of experience, as I take the Middle Way to be. Rather it is Aristotle’s account of how he thinks humans can be good and fulfil their true purpose. He believes that we should develop our rational virtues, which help us judge whatever we meet, but we should also develop our practical virtues , which are gained through practice and involve a balance between excess and deficiency. Instead of using the Middle Way to judge both facts and values, Aristotle treats each differently. The facts, he thinks, are known by examining the world and understanding the essential truths about each thing and its purpose. Right values, however, are developed by applying what we have learnt, even though doing that requires practice as well as theory. Even though he has an attractive ethics that emphasises balance and has a strong practical aspect, Aristotle was a naturalist.

Aristotle’s general approach can thus easily be used to justify practices that are believed to have been observed in the world, even though they’re obviously the product of the assumptions made by the observers. That’s why his ideas are still invoked by the Catholic Church today (via their interpretation by St Thomas Aquinas) to support the belief that sex is ‘naturally’ for procreation, and that to use it merely for pleasure is a sin. One can, of course, observe the link between sex and procreation, but the belief that procreation thereby becomes the essential purpose of sex, and then that to do otherwise is wrong, involves a whole pile of dogmatic assumptions.

To get closer to the heart of the Middle Way in ancient Greek philosophy, I think, we must look instead to Aristotle’s near-contemporary Pyrrho. I will discuss Pyrrho in more detail some other time, but the key point here is that Pyrrho was able to pursue sceptical arguments against the supposed ‘truths’ that Aristotelians thought they were able to observe. Sceptical arguments show that there can be no such known ‘truths’, only provisional beliefs. Pointing us downwards towards our experience is a step in the right direction, but empiricism, too, can be dogmatic. It’s only if we can hold our empirical beliefs with genuine provisionality that we start to get closer to the Middle Way.

Link to index of ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ blogs