Category Archives: Middle Way Philosophy

Critical Thinking 17: Appeal to moderation

Critical Thinking, Middle Way Philosophy,

This particular fallacy is well worth considering here, because it can so easily be confused with the Middle Way. An appeal to moderation (or argument from moderation, or false compromise) consists in the assumption that a belief must necessarily be correct because it falls midway between two extremes. If used in an argument, this is fallacious, because the midway point is not necessarily true or good. To assume this is the case is, indeed, an absolutisation of the middle – of the kind I have sometimes been falsely accused of myself.

A classic example can be found in the biblical story of the judgement of Solomon. The story goes that two women came to Solomon as he sat in judgement, arguing over the possession of a baby. Each of them claimed that the baby was really hers. Solomon then offered to resolve the dispute by cutting the baby in half. Now, that of course neglects a key condition – that the baby needed to remain alive to be helpful to anyone. The (rather incredible) story then goes on that one woman agreed to this solution, whilst the other (the true mother) who really loved the baby was so distressed that she immediately offered to give it up so as to save its life. Of course, one then has to ask why a woman who wanted a baby at all (whether or not she was the true mother) would consent to it being killed: which suggests that she rather represents a very narrow left-hemisphere view of the matter in which an obsession with one outcome blinds one to all other conditions.Judgement of Solomon Boucicaut Master

This story also shows the problem with any kind of assumption that compromise is necessarily right. It does not tell you what the compromise is of or between, nor what the surrounding conditions are. Another example illustrating this is the  philosopher’s ‘paradox of the gentle murder’.  If person A wanted to violently murder C, but B did not, a compromise between A and B might be to only murder C gently. This illustrates how you can distort a compromise just by setting the boundaries of the ‘extremes’ to be negotiated closer to your desired outcome: a technique known to salesmen and known in psychology as anchoring. If a salesman wants to get £100 for an item that in market terms would only be worth £50, he just has to start the negotiations at £150, so that by the time you have beaten him down to a ‘compromise’ £100 you feel you are getting a bargain.

So how is this different from the Middle Way? The extremes to be avoided in the Middle Way are not conventional or manipulable, but consist in positive and negative absolutes. Such absolutes are focused on conquering their opposites, and tend to exclude all third alternatives to their opposite. By considering alternatives, and addressing the conditions as widely as possible, we may end up with a position that superficially looks like one of the extremes, or one that looks like a compromise: but it will not be the fact of it being a compromise that made the difference and justified the judgement. For example, if you’re trying to give up an addiction, the ultimate desirable outcome is obviously not to partake of the addictive substance at all (which looks like one extreme) – but the absolutes you encounter are likely to be the lure of the addictive substance versus the belief that you should give it up. The Middle Way requires you to find ways round this obsessive polarity, but the further solution is not a compromise at all.

To return to the earlier example, in the judgement of Solomon the absolutes might be those of justice (in the sense of fairness between the women) versus those of truth. Solomon employed what Buddhists would call a ‘skilful means’ to find a solution that only on the surface appears to be a fallacious appeal to moderation. His deeper purpose seems to have been to find out how the two women would react to his proposal. In doing so he recognised that he couldn’t reach the absolute ‘truth’ of the matter without doubt, and nor could he reach an absolutely just solution without a means of sharing the indivisible baby. The Middle Way here is widely recognised as a good way of resolving the situation, even though it does not ultimately either find out the ‘truth’, nor is it ultimately ‘just’ to all concerned. Instead, the questioning of the two absolutised extremes leads us to recognise third, alternative values: those of the value of the baby being cared for, even if the carer turns out not to be the genetic mother and even if the disappointed party turns out to indeed be the genetic mother.

In the paradox of the gentle murder, the Middle Way does not involve the acceptance of the positions of A and B as ‘extremes’. Instead, the extremes need to be absolute beliefs. These might be the value of whatever motivates the murder, versus the absolute wrongness of murder. Since a murder of any kind is most unlikely (in most cases) to fulfil the desires that motivated it once they were integrated beyond a certain very limited state of obsession, murder does not have to be absolutely wrong to justify a conclusion that it is wrong in this, and the vast majority of other cases. People who seriously contemplate murder are usually just not aware of all the horrendous short and long-term effects murder has – on the victim, the murderer and others. Such effects would not be greatly reduced by doing the murder gently. So, again, the ‘compromise’ solution is very likely to be wrong, and the Middle Way points towards an approach that looks very close to one of the extremes. Even if the solution looks like just following the rule against murder, however, the motive of a Middle Way approach is more far-reaching and, by allowing the absoluteness of the rule against murder to be questioned, actually offers much stronger experiential reasons for refraining from murder.

Finally, in the example of the salesman who exploits our anchoring vulnerabilities, the Middle Way requires us to become aware of anchoring and compensate for it. Of course, if this proves impossible this will just remain as a condition we have to put up with, and we will continue to be taken in by the ‘compromises’ of salespeople. But psychological evidence suggests that people can make progress with anticipating anchoring in the contexts where it is more likely to have an effect. If we are sufficiently aware of anchoring, we can insist on more acceptable parameters for ‘compromise’ at the beginning of the negotiations.

In practice, moderation often has a lot going for it as a rule of thumb. For example, my own approach to alcohol is based on moderation. Some people might not find this practicable, and prefer to abstain altogether, but for me, moderation generally works. However, it is quite possible to absolutise moderation – and the Middle Way should on no account be confused with a tendency to do this.

Exercise

Do these examples show an appeal to moderation? If they do, how does it differ from the Middle Way?

  1. John and David are arguing over a cake. John wants to divide the cake in half, but David wants all of it. “OK,” says David, “Let’s compromise. I have three-quarters of the cake, and you have a quarter of it.”
  2. Lena and Olga are sisters engaged in a lengthy lawsuit contesting their sadistically patriarchal father’s will. The most recent will states that Lena should receive the whole estate, but only on condition that she is married. If Lena is not married, Olga inherits the whole estate (whether Olga is married or not). At the time of her father’s death, Lena was not married, but she has since married. Lena is contesting the award of the estate to Olga, but Olga proposes an out-of-court settlement whereby she gives Lena one quarter of the estate.
  3. In the recent Climate Change talks in Paris, the world’s nations agreed to pursue efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels. However, no detailed programme was agreed to actualise this aspiration, only further ongoing reviews. Critics complained of the inadequacy of the non-binding target, but defenders insisted that more progress had been made than might have been expected, and that the agreement was the best compromise available.

Making sense of non-dualism

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Video

The term ‘non-dualist’ is widely used to refer to various types of spiritual philosophies or practices, but there are a number of difficulties and confusions involved in the use of term. When I first started developing Middle Way Philosophy in a Ph.D. thesis 15 years ago, I used the term as a primary one to describe my position. But as I found it subject to a great many misunderstandings, I let it recede to the background – though it has still been present as a potential term for the Middle Way.

I have recently made this video to present some of the key ideas around non-dualism and try to head off the misunderstandings.

A useful sense of ‘non-dualism’, then, as I argue here, involves a degree of faith in the possibility of avoiding absolutised beliefs. We do not need to structure our lives around absolutised beliefs, nor assume them for everyday living. That doesn’t mean that we will necessarily get rid of them entirely, but it does mean that experience offers us alternatives to the dualistic stranglehold of opposed and conflicting basic beliefs.

More commonly, however, the term ‘non-dualism’ is conflated with ‘non-duality’, and this is seen as some kind of ultimate truth about the lack of subjects and objects in the universe. Such ‘non-dualism’ is self-undermining and contradictory, because the belief in non-duality itself involves absolutisation. We might have meaningful, archetypal ideas about non-duality, but it cannot helpfully be an object of belief. The same goes for the related term ‘monism’. Monism is the belief that everything in the universe is ultimately one. Again, this is just another metaphysical belief, and does not help us to psychologically identify and work with absolutisation. There is nothing practically different about believing that everything in the universe is ultimately one, and that it is ultimately two or multiple: either way we have to impose that view on our experience and in the process repress alternatives. Our experience is not of ‘things’ nor of the absence of ‘things’, prior to the ways in which we designate ‘things’ for practical reasons.

I made this video tributary to the one on incrementality, because I think incrementality is the aspect of the Middle Way that most directly addresses dualism. Wherever we find a questionable separation between objects and/or subjects,  try re-conceiving that discontinuous distinction as an increment or a matter of degree. This is the basis of a range of potential practices that can help us to undermine absolute thinking.

The Four… Noble Truths, Tasks, Principles, or Curates?

Buddhism, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion,

Reading Stephen Batchelor’s ‘After Buddhism’ has recently reminded me of the ongoing issue of the relationship of the Middle Way to ‘the Four’. Perhaps those who have encountered the Middle Way from some other direction will be quite reasonably uninterested in this question. But those coming to it via Buddhism, where the Four get so much emphasis as a starting point, may have many questions about the relationship that may be quite fruitful ones. What can we learn from ‘the Four’ – what do they have to contribute to integrative practice? Are they, in some sense, the same as the Middle Way, or are they a diversion from it? My answer, as with many such issues, is that the response to such questions depends what interpretation of ‘the Four’ you adopt.

As a quick refresher, here are the ‘Four Noble Truths’ presented in traditional Buddhism (though I expect that most people reading this will have met them before):

  1. Dukkha: suffering, frustration, unsatisfactoriness
  2. Samudaya: The arising of dukkha, craving, greed, reactivity as a cause of frustration
  3. Nirodha: Cessation of dukkha through the cessation of craving
  4. Magga: The path leading to the cessation of dukkha

The four ‘truths’ thus tend to be glossed as that suffering is a fact of existence, that suffering is caused by craving, that nirvana ends craving, and that the Buddhist path leads to the end of suffering.Seated_Buddha_in_the_Attitude_of_Preaching_-_Walters_Art Museum CCSA3-0

However, the Four are not, and cannot possibly be, ‘truths’, in the sense of ultimate or metaphysical statements about reality. There I’m entirely in agreement with Stephen Batchelor. They don’t fail to be truths because we know them to be untrue, but because neither I nor you nor the Buddha have any capacity to know ‘truths’. We are fallible embodied creatures who can, at best, make helpful generalisations relying on acknowledged metaphors that we hopefully share sufficiently to communicate with practical benefit. If the Four are in the category of helpful generalisations (like the ones I hope I am making now), then they cannot be regarded as ‘Truths’, especially if we expect them to be compatible with a Middle Way that clearly rejects any such ‘truths’. Nor is it particularly helpful these days to describe them as ‘Noble’ or ‘Aryan’, since we no longer tend to associate insight specifically with the upper classes. If a class metaphor is required, we should probably call them ‘The Four Middle Class Truths’ – but I jest.

So, if they’re not truths, then what are they? In ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’, I suggested that they should be renamed the Four Principles, and re-ordered so that the Fourth became the First and the First, Second and Third became the Second, Third and Fourth respectively. I also argued that they all required the Middle Way for helpful interpretation. Each of them can be interpreted in a metaphysical way or an experientially fruitful way.

The First, for example, is often read as a belief about existence that we should adopt so as to come to terms with its true meaning – ‘life is suffering’. This has contributed to a pervasive popular idea that Buddhism is pessimistic – one that is not entirely undeserved, since pessimism is a dogma and the precise content of the dogma is less important than its form. The non-dogmatic way of interpreting dukkha, however, is that a recognition of a problem is needed before we can improve anything: whether you see that problem as being a pervasive one in human experience (such as ‘suffering’) or something more limited and specific. Without problematizing, there is no critical process and no wisdom. We can endlessly confirm our biases by finding evidence that appears to fit them, and never consider that our experience could be interpreted differently. An experiential interpretation of the First, then, requires us to avoid both the dogmatic belief that ‘life is suffering’ and its denial.

A similar problem applies to the Second. This is traditionally read as claiming that the whole of existence (that suffering existence) is created by craving, through the system of karma and rebirth. We are born again because, most basically, we crave existence. Even within our current lives, our suffering is said to be caused by craving. This is not only dogmatic metaphysics, but also (as Stephen Batchelor notes) contradictory: at some points ‘craving’ is a specific type of motivation, at others its totality. But neither should we jump to the reverse position and assume that the Second has no insights to communicate. For a more experiential version of this that does not merely patch it up in an ad hoc fashion, you could do worse than using Stephen Batchelor’s term ‘reactivity’ instead of craving. At least, then, we are talking more provisionally about a specific type of desire that we can experience, with negative effects that we can experience.

However, one of the several holes in Batchelor’s book is that he says little about what ‘reactivity’ is. One could be forgiven for assuming that some types of craving are reactive and others are not. Personally I am convinced that that would be a basically wrong way of understanding the experiential basis of the Second. Desire is simply energy that can be channelled in different ways, and the problem lies in the conflict and repression of desires. Desires are ‘reactive’ because they create conflict and thus distort our understanding, rather than because they are intrinsically bad. There is plenty of scope for dogma in the very way we categorise our cravings, and I can’t see any way to avoid that without a thoroughly incremental view of our desires as better or worse rather than good or bad.

The Third is traditionally seen as a final state or a perfection of the human condition – nirvana. Again, the traditional interpretation is dogmatic, because it sees the Buddha’s experience as proving absolute insights into reality, but this does not justify us in jumping to the reverse and denying the Buddha’s insights. My suggestion in ‘the Trouble with Buddhism’ is that we see this experientially as simply the recognition that progress is possible. Batchelor suggests that nirvana means ‘moments when we are not determined by reactivity’: a suggestion that I do not think is adequate because it is not incremental. We do not have to have moments pure of reactivity to make progress, only moments that are relatively free of conflict.

The Fourth, the cultivation of the path, could also be interpreted absolutely if it is taken to mean the following of certain absolute principles of action. On the whole, though, the path is the one of the Four that is most obviously experiential, because it involves constant judgements of application. We may need some general principles to prescribe any path, but these can hardly be sufficient without changing ourselves and our judgements so as to interpret them optimally.

My suggested re-ordering in ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’ was based on a recognition that we need to start practising the path in order to be able to judge the other principles of the Four and to avoid absolutising them. So the Fourth, being about the path, is needed prior to the others. Specifically, it is the Middle Way understanding of the path (or at least something functionally equivalent) that we need to practise, if we are to avoid setting off in on an absolutised path rather than a helpful one accordant with experience. Thus in I argued that the Middle Way is prior to, and more basic than, the Four. I see no reason to revise that judgement now, though ‘The Trouble with Buddhism’ was written eight years ago and I might well now express it slightly differently.

One could, of course, also argue the converse: that the Middle Way needs a problematizing stimulus, a recognition of the ‘reactive’ extremes to be avoided, a faith in the possibility of progress, and some account of the path. But the Middle Way remains a more basic idea that not only integrates the Four, but helps us interpret them and make them comprehensible. The Middle Way is useful without the Four in a way that the Four are not without the Middle Way.

Many of Stephen Batchelor’s arguments on this topic at least parallel mine in seeking to avoid dogmatic interpretations of each of the Four and developing helpful ones – which in effect means experiential ones. However, instead of the ‘Four Principles’ he talks of the ‘Four Tasks’ and relates each of them to a practice. He also sources these practices in the earliest layer of discussion of the Four in the Pali Canon. Suffering is to be comprehended, craving or reactivity is to be let go of, the ceasing of reactivity (not suffering) is to be beheld, and the path is to be cultivated. Batchelor also recognises these Four Tasks to be inter-dependent, and I imagine that he would agree with me, at least in some respects, that the path needs to be undertaken to some extent in order to start comprehending the problem. To talk of the ‘Four Tasks’ is obviously just a different emphasis, and each of them involves both theory and practice.

I will review Batchelor’s book more fully in its own right. It is a book with its heart in the right place, which will help Buddhists to re-interpret their tradition in a way that lets go of traditional absolutisations, and all that is praiseworthy. It is implicitly based on the Middle Way throughout. Yet at the same time, the total lack of explicit engagement with the Middle Way in it is also extremely puzzling. It is not as though the Middle Way was not in traditional Buddhism, not discussed explicitly in the Pali Canon, or not a central part of Batchelor’s thinking. Indeed it is the implicit basis on which, not only Batchelor’s discussion of the Four, but also many other Buddhist doctrines, are sorted and interpreted. Yet it is not even listed in the index of Batchelor’s book, and only given passing mentions in relation to other doctrines. It is as if a man were to write an autobiography about a life that has been shared with a wife who massively contributed to all his enterprises and supported his personal confidence throughout his adulthood, yet his memoir only includes a few passing references to ‘my wife’, and she is not even named, just utterly taken for granted. Batchelor is not alone amongst Buddhists in treating the Middle Way in this fashion, but it is most surprising in him.

As for the Four, then, there is little point in disputing whether they are principles or tasks – but whatever they are, I think they are possibly useful in some ways but also dispensible. There are plenty of other possible ways of understanding the role they play in the path: particularly in terms of positive and negative feedback loops, and in terms of integration. It is only the authority of Buddhist tradition that unnecessarily gives priority to the Four over these other models. For those approaching the Middle Way from a Buddhist direction, the Four are perhaps most centrally neither principles, nor tasks, but stand-ins for the Middle Way, whose credibility depends on that of the Middle Way. They are locum doctors, or curates doing the job in the vicar’s absence. If there was no role for the vicar, that of the curates would have nothing to stand in for. Similarly, without the Middle Way, the Four might well be just be another set of dogmas with little to help them stand out from many other dogmas found in religions, philosophies and ideologies throughout the world. With the Middle Way, however, they have a kind of importance that is largely borrowed, and which the application of the Middle Way could just as easily bestow on many other traditional beliefs.

Picture: seated Buddha (preaching): Walters Art Museum CCSA3.0

 

New videos on embodied meaning and optionality

Middle Way Philosophy, Psychology, Video, ,

Two new introductory videos have recently been added to the site:

Embodied Meaning and Scepticism explains how the recognition that meaning lies in our bodies shows the delusion involved in absolute beliefs, and thus supports the Middle Way.

Optionality explains how an aspect of the practice of provisionality is having different options available to us: which is not merely a matter of ‘choice’, and helps us adapt to different new conditions.

These are both part of the introductory series of videos on Middle Way Philosophy, all of which can be accessed by hovering over ‘media’ and ‘Middle Way Philosophy introductory videos’ on the menu above.

Jung’s Red Book 4: Embodied symbol

Jung, Linguistics, Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion

There are several points in the Red Book where Jung discusses meaning and symbol, all of them suggesting to me a radical understanding of meaning in which Jung was implicitly before his time. Jung recognises that meaning is experienced in our bodies, that it emerges over time, and that meaning needs to be separated from belief. These are insights that can now be more strongly supported using the findings of neuroscience (particularly the differing roles of the brain hemispheres) and the embodied meaning theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: but Jung was a pioneer who (at least as I interpret his text) implicitly understood the basis of these developments.

Perhaps the most interesting episode in the Red Book where Jung engages with issues of meaning is his conversations with Ammonius, the Anchorite. Jung encounters Ammonius as a solitary in the desert, devoting himself to endlessly reading the scriptures and finding ever new meanings in them. But typically, Jung’s relationship with Ammonius changes in the course of his two main encounters with him. Jung starts off as a disciple respectfully approaching the master, but ends up being thought of as Satan and lunged at by Ammonius. Jung, like the rest of us, can learn from his inner figures, but can also challenge them and teach them, even suffer reactions from them, as he recognises their limitations.

As Jung writes of Ammonius

He wanted to find what he needed in the outer. But you find manifold meaning only in yourself, not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings. The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. (p.262)

I take this to mean that although Ammonius sought multiple meanings in scripture, he still assumed that the meanings lay in the scripture. His solitary studies in the desert reinforced that, as he became more abstracted and ceased to relate to others. But the meanings he was looking for lay in himself. Jung especially stresses the temporal aspect of this recognition. “Meaning is not something that is given at the same time”, as it would be, not only to scripturally-obsessed believers, but also analytic philosophers and naturalistic scientists, who take meaning to consist in a relationship between words and an actual or hypothetical reality, processed in a way that takes no account of the temporal aspects of our experience of meaning. But meaning takes time, and depth of understanding comes from the linking of experiences over time to ever-richer symbols. Meaning is experienced physically, in a gestalt way, through our right brain hemispheres in a way that depends on gradually accrued experience coming together, not just abstractly and hypothetically through the left. The very metaphors we use to describe the process take time: things “sink in”, or we “get our heads around” something. By “taking part in life” we can enrich that process, as meaning depends on experience rather than only on abstraction.

At the final moment when the previously respectful Jung gets lunged at and called Satan, Ammonius switches from right hemisphere receptivity to left hemisphere suspicion. At one moment he is open to Jung’s suggestion that he might find more of the meaning he seeks by returning to human society, but the next he shuts down. Becoming confused, he blames his confusion on Jung. This can stand for any occasion when a self-sufficient absolute belief is challenged, and the problem created by the challenge is projected onto the messenger by a person who feels threatened and defensive.Mandala_from_Jung's_Red_Book_2 Joanna Penn CCBY4-0

Elsewhere, Jung discusses the richness of experienced meaning in relation to symbols. For him, the distinction between a sign and a symbol is important. The sign merely represents, but the symbol connects with the wider gestalt experience of meaning.

The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognises it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind. If one accepts a symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. (p.392)

Perhaps the most startling symbols are those of the kind Jung encountered in his visions (such as Ammonius himself, or the Tree of Life discussed in the previous blog), or that we otherwise encounter unexpectedly in dreams. What Jung particularly conveys throughout the Red Book is the importance of exploring the meaning of such symbols in a provisional space of meaning, held apart from any concerns about what we believe.

However, it seems that any word (or visual image, or sound) can be a symbol that evokes a range of associations, connecting more deeply to our embodied experience through the emotions. Signs, by contrast, are supposed to merely denote something within a certain model of belief: think of numbers, for example. But of course, signs are merely dried out symbols or dead metaphors that have been over-handled by the left hemisphere. They still depend on their connection to a set of embodied associations to mean anything at all for us, however clipped and controlled they may have become.

Obviously we need words, and we need both signs and symbols. the challenge is  to use the words for their limited contextual purposes and then (like the Buddha’s raft once it has crossed the river) let go of them. In this final passage that I will quote, Jung directly links the balanced use of words to the Middle Way, and recognises the practical reasons for turning words into beliefs: as long as those beliefs are also provisional.

The word is the guide, the middle way which easily oscillates like the needle on the scales. The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people.. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night.  (p.393)

 

Previous blogs in this series:

Jung’s Red Book 1: The Jungian Middle Way

Jung’s Red Book 2: The God of experience

Jung’s Red Book 3: The Tree of Life

 

Picture: Mandala from Jung’s Red Book by Joanna Penn (CCA 2.0)