Category Archives: Philosophy

What is a sceptic?

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Science, ,

This is a re-blog of an article that some people have found helpful on my old ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ blog.

Scepticism (or skepticism, US style) is potentially a big liberating factor in our lives, yet like most ideas that started off in a blaze of insight, it has become caught up in entrenched dualistic conflicts. All scepticism involves some degree of recognition of uncertainty about what others take to be true – but the crucial thing is how you then respond to that uncertainty. Pyrrho of Elis, the first Greek sceptic, was very probably inspired by Indian sources, and his approach contains many crucial elements of Middle Way thinking. Yet the overwhelming use of the word ‘sceptic’ today is that of a mere denier of a widely-held view on one topic: we hear much more about Climate Change sceptics and Euro Sceptics than we do about Pyrrhonian sceptics.

I can identify at least four meanings of the word ‘sceptic’. Philosophy textbooks talk about the distinction between ‘global’ and ‘local’ scepticism – being sceptical about everything as opposed to being sceptical about only one or a few things. Then there is another distinction which I think is hugely important but widely unappreciated: between denying a position and remaining in balanced agnosticism. Put those two sets of distinctions together and you get an analysis of four types of sceptic:

  1. The local denier. This is by far the most common use of the term ‘sceptic’ at present. It refers only to people who disagree with another position and have a definitely contrary position. Such ‘scepticism’ is often applied to revelatory religious belief, for example, or to a public issue like Climate Change. Such ‘sceptics’ take advantage of uncertainties in the position they are opposing, but are almost never prepared to recognise the often equal degree of uncertainty in their own position.
  2. The local agnostic Just occasionally, scepticism about a particular issue does lead to a genuine open-mindedness in which the uncertainties of one’s own position are also appreciated in relation to that issue. This is the case, for example, with agnostics about God who have not yet recognised the same degree of uncertainty in many other issues. However, such agnostics suffer from a cultural prejudice against agnosticism in the West, which depicts agnostics as wishy-washy and indecisive. On the contrary, agnosticism, even just about a single issue such as God, often requires a fair amount of courage.
  3. The global denier This is the belief that because all positions are uncertain, therefore they should all be definitely denied. Following the assumptions of David Hume, most western philosophers since have wrongly interpreted Pyrrho in this way: but in the ancient world this view was represented not by Pyrrho but by his opponents – ‘Academic’ sceptics such as Carneades. I think Hume was right in thinking that nobody could seriously and practically hold this position as though they meant it, because it is impossible for us to live our lives without some beliefs about the world around us. It is also self-contradictory, because global scepticism is itself a belief to be denied. The problem was just that Hume thought that was all there was to scepticism.
  4. The global agnostic This is the belief that there is uncertainty about all possible beliefs, and that uncertainty should lead us to hold all beliefs provisionally to the extent that we can justify them through experience. This is the view that I hold, or at least aspire to hold, myself, and that I think is broadly the most helpful interpretation both of Pyrrho’s scepticism and of the Buddha’s Middle Way. One of its implications as I see it is that we should reject dogmatic views that cannot be held provisionally – what I call metaphysical beliefs. So, for example, you cannot hold the belief that God exists provisionally – you either believe it or you don’t. Nor can you hold the belief that God does not exist provisionally. So it is essential to remain determinedly agnostic about God’s existence, whatever the cultural pressures towards one side or the other. Far from being impractical, as Hume depicted scepticism, this kind of scepticism is deeply pragmatic, as it clears the ground for beliefs that we can justify and act on only in experience and removes delusions that are likely to interfere in our effectiveness when acting in the world.

I don’t think that there is one essentially right way to use a word, or that older or ‘original’ ways are necessarily better. Nevertheless, for practical reasons, I lament the decline of scepticism, firstly at the hands of Hume, and then more recently at the hands of the scientific naturalists, who have tried to appropriate both scepticism and critical thinking to support approaches that are not philosophically even-handed. It seems that the understanding of scepticism even amongst those who count themselves as sceptics is haunted both by the idea that global scepticism is impossible and by the assumptions that you have to be naturalistic to apply scepticism. For example, to quote from the ‘About us’ section of the Skeptic magazine website:

“Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when Socrates observed: “All I know is that I know nothing.” But this pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. If you were skeptical about everything, you would have to be skeptical of your own skepticism.”

That all depends on how you interpret Socrates. For some reason the idea that we don’t have to make claims about truth or knowledge, but could accept just degrees of justification for provisional beliefs, doesn’t seem to be on the horizon of such self-identified sceptics. It is just assumed that knowing nothing requires that you also believe nothing – which seems obviously false, since knowledge is normally defined as justified true belief, not just as belief. We can maintain provisional beliefs with a degree of justification without claiming that they are true. Scepticism itself can also be part of a provisional framework adopted for practical reasons.

The same source goes on:

“Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions. Some claims, such as water dowsing, ESP, and creationism, have been tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can provisionally conclude that they are not valid. Other claims, such as hypnosis, the origins of language, and black holes, have been tested but results are inconclusive so we must continue formulating and testing hypotheses and theories until we can reach a provisional conclusion.”

I applaud the evident intention of provisionality, and of balanced testing in relation to experience here, but such scepticism cannot be even-handed when it incorporates a prior filter of “naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena”. It is being assumed in such an approach that there is a “nature” with universally consistent laws (usually assuming physicalism and determinism) that are open to scientific investigation, and that “supernatural” explanations can be ruled out from the start. The requirements of public reproducibility in conventional scientific method also rule out from justified provisional belief all areas of individual experience that are not open to that kind of testing.

So this kind of scepticism, however much it may try to assume the mantle of Pyrrho and Socrates, is selective and local: it does not subject its own assumptions to sceptical scrutiny. Its naturalism also means that it slips into denial of supernatural phenomena from the start. I am not recommending belief in supernatural phenomena – but “natural” phenomena in the sense of those following absolute known universal laws which rule out the supernatural are equally beyond our experience. Thus I find this appropriation of scepticism by scientific naturalists misleading.

However, my reasons for preferring a global and agnostic understanding of scepticism are only based on a provisional understanding of the greater usefulness of this wider approach. Scepticism is a powerful tool for overcoming delusions, but only if it is used even-handedly rather than selectively. Used selectively it is all too often a tool of dogma that actually has the effect of preventing us from facing up to conditions, because it seems to effectively shoot down one side whilst leaving the other standing. It is no wonder that many people are unnerved by scepticism – it is powerful – but it is for that very reason that we need to use it with great care.

The MWS Podcast 33: Iain McGilchrist on Dogma and the Brain

Philosophy, Podcast, Psychology,

In the first of a series of regular dialogues with thinkers on various subjects, the chair of the society Robert M. Ellis discusses dogma and the brain with psychiatrist , author and patron of the Middle Way Society Iain McGilchrist.


MWS Podcast 33: Iain McGilchrist as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_33_Iain_McGilchrist

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The quarrel between philosophy and poetry

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Poetry, The Arts, ,

‘”The part which relies on measurement and calculation must be the best part of us…. So is not the part which contradicts them an inferior one?”

“Inevitably”‘ (Plato’s Republic, 603a)

Thus does Plato provide the basic rationale for his condemnation of poetry, along with the other arts. He says that the works of the poet, like those of the artist, have “a low degree of truth” and “he deals with a low element of the mind”. “We are therefore quite right to refuse to admit him to a properly run state” continues Socrates, in pronouncements that are only echoed and accepted by others in the dialogue. Thus begins the long quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

It is easy to see this quarrel as reflecting that between those who judge solely on the basis of the representations of the left brain hemisphere at a particular time, and those who, using the right hemisphere, want to look beyond such certainties and integrate the contents of the left hemisphere at different times. Plato, through the mouthpiece of his dramatised Socrates, appears to reflect that left brain certainty: that rightness dwells only in the apparent clarity of our current representation, and in its tools of positive measurement, critical analysis, and planning. Humour, ambiguity, and grief should not be publicly shared in art, he says, but rather repressed and made objects of shame, made subject to the control of ‘reason’.raphael_athens_plato

Fortunately, Plato’s ideal Republic of the left brain was never created in the fashion he envisaged it. However, he has had many imitators, particularly in the shape of political revolutionaries of a kind who wished to purge the world of all untidy ambiguity that did not fit their utopian vision. Rather than keeping them out of the Republic entirely, the Fascist and Communist regimes of the twentieth century subjected poets and other artists to censorship and control, so that they could only publicly express what fitted the party line.

Plato attacked poetry because he believed it was a form of rhetoric, which would stir up and manipulate uncontrolled emotions, but ironically it is philosophy that has too often become allied to rhetoric by offering naïve political schemes or supporting conventional views of the world, at odds with the immediacy of poetry. It is the poets who have generally understood rather better that meaning resides, not in representations, but in embodied experience. Language that does not speak to that experience appeals only to the shared lowest common denominator of human experience. Without poetry we are too often left to the clichés of the crowd and its groupthink, unable to summon creative responses to new conditions because the very tools of our thinking have been blunted by the platitudes of conventional certainty.

I have recently come across a quotation from the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats that gives wonderful expression to this poetic counter-attack:

“Ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense…. Manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour.” (from J.M.Synge and the Ireland of his time, 1910, quoted recently in a TLS article by Roy Foster)

Of course, philosophy is a varied thing, but if modern philosophy has a consistent theme (with only a few exceptions) it is the overwhelming dominance of limited, ‘flat’ left hemisphere thought in which the wider use of thinking in experience is completely ignored. In the case of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, it may be precise, analytic and highly technical, but nevertheless have the effect only of reinforcing conventional attitudes, or (in the case of post-modernism) it may be highly critical of all conventions, but again in a decontextualized way that gives no attention to the depth or breadth of experience or the practical context in which it is read. Whilst this kind of philosophy may seem of marginal interest to most people in modern society, that marginality might be seen as the unintended and ironic outcome of Plato’s approach. By relying entirely on an inadequate conception of ‘reason’, philosophy has made itself marginal. However, the conventionality, parochialism, cynicism and relativism that dominate it are shared with much of the rest of society.

Has either side ‘won’ the debate? On the one hand it seems that philosophy has ‘won’ in the sense that poetry is extremely marginal in our society, and superficial representationalism rules supreme. On the other hand, however, it seems that poetry has ‘won’, because it has not been banished from the state, and every new generation finds new ways of connecting with the imagination, however puritanical the public discourse. It is, of course, an unwinnable war and a delusory conflict, because both philosophy and poetry address central areas of human experience. Every time we machine-gun down the ‘opposition’, it is likely to pop up again, like an army of indestructible revenants.

It’s time for a new attempt at lasting peace negotiations. Part of a lasting solution, in my view, involves the deconstruction of the wrong assumptions on which the whole conflict has been based. No helpful philosophy can be assembled on the basis of a representational view of meaning that denies the body and its shaping effect on even the most abstract of our constructions. But if we begin with this recognition and face up to its revolutionary implications, philosophy can be shaped anew in a way that works in co-operation and peace with poetry. Metaphor is the way in which we appreciate meaning and connect it to bodily experience, not a dispensible ornament on a ‘literal’ base. Beliefs constructed on the assumption that they are even capable of reflecting reality become dogmatic, entrench us in inadequate attitudes, and create conflict. ‘Emotion’ is part of our basic response to the world, and is not ‘subjective’ and ripe for repression, but rather, like ‘reason’, part of our provisional account of the world, to be shaped with increasing adequacy.

Poets have been telling us about the power of metaphor and the need to face up to repressed ’emotion’, for thousands of years. Now it’s time to start listening, and to incorporate that view into a richer and more adequate kind of philosophy. I will close with a quote from Seamus Heaney (who died a year ago), which I also found in the same TLS article as the one from Yeats above:

“Within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic…. each form of knowledge addresses the other and… the frontier between them is there for the crossing.”

The MWS Podcast 31: Robert M. Ellis on Cognitive Biases

Philosophy, Psychology

In this latest interview Robert M. Ellis, the chair of the society, talks about cognitive biases, what they have in common, how you go about recognizing them and how you can work with them.


MWS Podcast 31: Robert M. Ellis as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_31_RobertMEllis

Middle Way Thinkers 5: John Stuart Mill

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, , ,

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves…unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement….In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This is how John Stuart Mill, writing in his autobiography, tells us about the great crisis in his life: what we might now call a nervous breakdown. Mill is one of philosophical history’s great infant prodigies. Urged by his pushy utilitarian father, he was also intended as a living demonstration of the power of a rationally ordered way of life in pursuit of utilitarian objectives. Famously, John Stuart Mill started to learn Ancient Greek at the age of three. By the time of his breakdown at twenty, he had already been through a high pressure education and become a utilitarian campaigner. We can guess, however, that in this pressurised environment a great many other feelings were repressed. As repressed feelings tend to do, they made themselves unexpectedly, distressingly and disruptively manifest.

What makes Mill such an inspiring figure is the way that he dealt with this inner conflict. He neither tried to repress the inconvenient feelings further, nor did he entirely give way to them. Instead he learnt from them and modified his view of the world. He seems, in fact, to have integrated the conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs that lay behind this inner turmoil, by working through them in his philosophy. What had started off as a narrow, puritanical utilitarianism was broadened and modified in an attempt to recognise the importance of emotional and aesthetic experience. Mill became especially known for his essay On Liberty, the key founding text of liberalism and a hugely creative advance in the political thought of the time. In addition, with the collaboration of his wife Harriet, his essay On the subjection of women also became a key early text in the attempt to persuade the repressive male-dominated nineteenth-century world that women should also share men’s liberty as equal partners.

As with any other thinker one might identify as making an important contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way, Mill found a balance in some ways more than others. For example, Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism moves beyond the narrowness of his early mentor Jeremy Bentham, it still has the limitations of Utilitarianism in general.  Bentham wanted to reduce moral decision-making to a ‘hedonic calculus’, in which the pleasures and pains likely to result from different possible actions would be quantified and weighed up in a notionally mathematical fashion. In the scales of this calculus, Bentham argued that every pleasure weighed equally, and should be measured only by its intensity, duration and other quantitative features: in his famous phrase “Pushpin is as good as poetry” (pushpin being a fairly mindless game played in pubs at the time). After his breakdown and recovery, Mill began to argue that some pleasures were better than others. However, he did not really have a convincing account of why poetry was better than pushpin that went beyond the weight of social consensus. That poetry might have benefits in terms of the meanings it offers us is too intangible an idea to fit easily into a utilitarian framework.john mill

It is in  On Liberty that I find Mill at his best and closest to the Middle Way. The utilitarianism is nominally there, but fades into the background beside Mill’s passionate argument for the freedom of expression and action. If you allow people to express unorthodox views and behave in unconventional ways, Mill argues, society as a whole will benefit, because these people will be able to develop and test out new and better ways of thinking and acting. Adults should thus be allowed to act as they wish provided they did not harm others in the process. Mill challenged those who thought they knew the truth as to whether they thought themselves (and the socially accepted view) infallible: if not, he argued, the possibility of error needed to be tested out in a free discussion in which better justified views would become evident. Mill here gives a very practical expression to the Middle Way in the recognition of basic uncertainty, and draws out its implication of tolerance that allows people to reach their own autonomous, but justified, conclusions.

Mill goes on “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it be suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but…the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason and personal experience.”

Mill here puts his finger on some of the key features of metaphysical dogma. By repressing alternative views, it not only prevents debate and experiment that might help us address conditions more effectively, it also represses emotions and creates conflicting psychological states that inhibit creativity and well-being. Personal experience may give rise to new ideas and beliefs, but these potential innovations must be crushed at source in order to ensure social conformity with the dominant beliefs. Unhappy individuals and rigid, fragile societies are the result. So much of nineteenth century literature is about this: the struggles of individuals to find sustenance and fulfil their vision in a stiflingly conventional society. But before the nineteenth century society was no less dogmatic and conformist. It was due to people like John Stuart Mill that awareness of the possibility of an alternative began to spread in a way it had not existed before.

Perhaps many people in the twenty-first century take this as old hat. We take tolerance of harmless individual differences for granted, at least in theory. Mill’s liberalism in its turn has now become the basis of a kind of social orthodoxy, which sometimes just goes through the motions of supporting creative individual freedom, but sometimes also genuinely does support that freedom to great positive effect. The Middle Way has now become much more a question for individuals, because dogmas can be carried around with us inside as well as laid on us from outside. But the fact remains, that without that basic degree of liberalism, our ability to find a Middle Way is severely curtailed by social pressure and control. That, perhaps, is why modernity is a much better context to practice the Middle Way than the traditional and hierarchical societies of the Buddhist East, even though these societies transmitted the Buddha’s idea of the Middle Way for many centuries.

 

Link to index of other posts in the Middle Way Thinkers series