What is authenticity? How can the individual make judgements that are their own responsibility and not over-influenced by the power of others? This quality, much discussed by existentialist thinkers like Sartre, is closely related to integration and the Middle Way, and is discussed in a new introductory video. Please see this page to view the video.
Cosmopolitanism is the belief that one is a citizen of the world, not just of one particular piece of it that happens to have been sectioned off in a particular fashion by geological movements or medieval bloodshed. Such a position could be over-idealised, but I think it could also be understood as a realistic and balanced position that addresses wider conditions as well as more immediate ones. What’s more, I very much feel we need more cosmopolitan thinking in the UK at the moment, where the media is often consumed in a blaze of narrow arguments about the EU, leading up to the June referendum on membership.
Almost all these arguments, even those of the ‘remain’ camp, concentrate overwhelmingly on an assumed national interest. But personally, when I vote on June 23rd, I shall do so not just as a citizen of the UK, but also as a citizen of the EU and of the world.
In this video, Kwame Anthony Appiah (a philosopher working in the US, who is descended from Ghanaian chiefs on one side and Sir Stafford Cripps, UK cabinet minister, on the other) gives a persuasive account of cosmopolitanism and its advantages.
As Appiah explains here, Cosmopolitanism recognises the value both of our commonality with the whole world, and of cultural difference. His most important message is that our moral concern does not and should not end at national borders. Why should it, when national borders are the arbitrary results of geography, past conflict, and absolutised tribal, linguistic or religious difference? Borders of any kind are an attempt to absolutise differences that are merely incremental and that (however strong they may be) in any case do not necessarily require separate political organisation. Borders are also a political reality that we have to adapt to, but hardly one that we should be spending our energy strengthening when there are so many better places to put that energy. As the Pope memorably said recently with reference to Donald Trump’s wall-building aspirations, we should be building bridges, not walls.
As with any ideology, there is a risk that cosmopolitanism could become idealised and absolutised. It could start to ignore the political borders that do operate, and the even more important psychological condition of people’s limited identification. It may well be that the EU has made some misjudgements based on such idealism, particularly its admission of Greece to the Euro without adequate scrutiny of its long-term financial stability. Integration of the world needs to be incremental, and cannot proceed too much in advance of the integration of the individual people who are its citizens. The EU has made some astonishing achievements in integrating Europe both politically and culturally during the past 50 years or so, but it probably needs a period of consolidation now, for the people and their culture and economic life to catch up with it. However, the EU’s mistakes, such as they are, are hardly an argument for reversing many of its achievements by withdrawing one of its most Important states from the union.
If we focus on a recognition of our embodiment and its limitations, that may seem to bring with it a more localised focus, recognising the strengths of our immediate environment and culture. But a localised culture is not necessarily a parochial culture that tries to separate its interests from those further afield. Our embodiment is also a source of universality, as we have pretty much the same basic body and brain structure as all other humans throughout the world. All that we have to do to recognise our cosmopolitanism is to recognise our embodied humanity, and to give it more importance than narrow tribal identity. If you want to look more beyond narrow tribal identity, then look to the influences you expose yourself to. For example, your media sources: populist UK newspapers like the Daily Mail will expose you to the assumptions of narrow tribal identity day after day, and I’m sure there are similar sources in other countries. Don’t assume that such narrow sources won’t have an effect. It will have an effect because you have a body, rather than being a disembodied reason that can consider every issue afresh at every moment.
I do think that cosmopolitanism is an ideological approach that could quite readily be an expression of the Middle Way in most cases, provided we are careful not to absolutise it. For most of us, dogmatic nationalism is a far greater danger in practice than dogmatic internationalism, and cosmopolitanism combines an internationalist outlook with a full respect for cultural difference and localised autonomy. I think it is only through such an outlook that, in the longer-term, it is possible to address the conflicts in the world adequately. I also see the EU, whatever its short-term errors or limitations, as a cosmopolitan institution whose founding principles of internationalism linked with subsidiarity try to follow that balance. So there are not too many prizes for guessing which way I will be voting on 23rd June.
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People do seem to like lists for some reason. When I suggested Five Principles of Middle Way Philosophy (scepticism, provisionality, incrementality, agnosticism and integration) these seemed to have been helpful in providing a way in. The Five Principles have the advantage of being (largely) positive, but they may not bring out how Middle Way Philosophy challenges current ways of thinking: a more negative, but necessary argument. It is that role I have in mind for this list of Seven Contentions, which has evolved out of some earlier, similar lists.
Why ‘against the academics’? Well, I’m obviously not against academics as people, but I do want to challenge the effects of academic over-specialisation, and the over-confidence in one’s assumptions that often seems to come from academics spending decades working in one particular niche. What these Seven Contentions all do is challenge widespread assumptions in Western academic culture that I think seriously hold us back. Like the Five Principles, it is necessary to understand them together rather than piecemeal, so a relatively short summary like this may help to put them all in view together. I am well aware that there are a few academics that might agree with me on some of these, but I have yet to find one that recognises them all in relation to each other.
1. The Middle Way is a method of judgement, not a claim about reality
This is the most important point where I part company with the way in which most Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism tend to present the Middle Way. For them the Middle Way story tends to be that the Buddha gained awakening to a ‘reality’ beyond the delusions of ordinary existence by avoiding eternalism and nihilism: but beliefs ab
out such a ‘reality’ tend to then undermine the Middle Way in Buddhism at every point by creating new metaphysical beliefs about the Buddha’s achievement and authority. The Middle Way needs to decisively move away from metaphysical ways of thinking, and it can’t do this if it is understood in metaphysical terms itself. Instead it needs to be seen as a method of judgement that avoids both positive and negative absolutisations. Once you accept that, you also need to start looking at the huge implications: that it offers a universal basis of more adequate judgement for both science and ethics, and thus does not necessarily need to be understood in the terms of Buddhist tradition at all.
For more on this see The Buddha and the Middle Way.
2. Full-blooded scepticism is not a threat, but rather a stimulus to provisionality
We can question everything as much as we like – no holds barred
– and there cannot possibly be anything ‘extreme’ about such scepticism as long as we remember to treat negative claims with just as much scepticism as positive ones. Scepticism is then just a helpful prompt to provisionality in our judgements, making us aware that we have no certainty. It is not about to destroy science or make anyone’s life impossible, but on the contrary brings us back from abstract certainties to fallible experience.
For more on this see The misunderstanding of scepticism.
3. Metaphysics is not inevitable
The standard objection to this whole approach from analytic philosophers and related academics is that metaphysics is inevitable, because it is taken to consist in basic assumptions we make in our lives. But no basic assumptions are absolutely beyond question – even that the universe exists, or that the world didn’t begin last Tuesday – even if we do often take them for granted. If we treat such assumptions as beyond question then they become absolutisations that are potentially rigidifying our thinking. But if we start to recognise them as ultimately questionable, even when we actually have a lot of confidence in them (99.99% confidence), we stand a chance of avoiding that absolutisation. The view that metaphysics is inevitable has become part of academic culture, but it is most unhelpful, because it tends to distract people from recognising the damaging effects of absolutes that repress alternatives and claim to have the whole story.
For more on this see the video ‘What’s wrong with metaphysics’.
4. Objectivity is a matter of degree
There is an incremental sense of ‘objectivity’ as a matter of degree in widespread use. However, for some reason there is also a widespread academic view that an absolute, God’s eye view of ‘objectivity’ is the default (and that it is opposed to ‘subjectivity’). But the God’s eye view sense is in practice completely irrelevant to human beings. How did we manage to let a practically irrelevant sense steal the show? If we see objectivity as a matter of degree (incremental) we do not have to believe in ‘truths’ beyond experience, only recognise that at some points we judge in a bigger and more adequate way than others.
For more on this see the ‘Objectivity’ page.
5. Meaning is both cognitive and emotive: inextricably
A great deal of common academic reasoning is fatally undermined by the assumption that ‘real’ meaning is solely cognitive – the kind of meaning one can look up in a dictionary – and that this can be separated from emotive meaning (how things feel to us). But this distinction is a merely abstract one, having no basis in our experience where every word or symbol that denotes something also connotes and vice-versa. This purely abstract distinction is then allowed to run the show in all sorts of other ways, by deciding the basis on which we will think about how to justify our beliefs or about what is right. If our experience of meaning is embodied, as linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have shown, then cognitive and emotive meaning can no longer be separated, and we can no longer justify academic ‘business as usual’ proceeding on the basis that they can.
For more on this see the ‘Embodied meaning’ page.
6. Facts cannot be divided from values, nor reasons from emotions
If cognitive and emotive meaning cannot be separated, 
nor can the beliefs about ‘facts’ and ‘values’ or ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ that are erected on the same assumptions. These are false dichotomies on which huge intellectual edifices have been built, solely on the basis that facts and values can be distinguished in abstract analysis. But in human experience they are never separated, every fact involving values and every value involving presumed facts. Neuroscientific investigation has also failed to find an independently operating part of the brain for ‘reason’ as opposed to ’emotion’. Any adequate ways of understanding how to make judgements in our experience have to deal with these things together. That implies that reductions of issues both to logical processing and to intuitive insight are equally likely to be mistaken.
For more on this see the ‘Facts and values’ page.
7. I encounter myself as a wish, not a thing
I am an ego (and probably you are too!). That means that I consist in a set of desires or identifications – or at least, that’s what I encounter when I experience ‘myself’. I can’t encounter myself either as a thing or as the absence of a thing, and these are just wishful thinking abstractions foisted onto my ever-changing experience of wanting to be a thing. Academia often seems to have rejected Descartes’ view of the absolute self, but not to have taken on board all the implications of doing so – which includes there being no single self to make ‘rational’ philosophical or scientific observations. How well I can judge the world around me seems to depend on how well I can integrate the conflicting desires that threaten to distract and delude me. I cannot be assumed to simply have such a stable self, and thus the scientist also cannot be discounted from science by maintaining a model of ‘God’s eye view’ objectivity.
For more on this see the ‘Self and ego’ page.
Picture credits: 2nd: ‘Change your mind’ by Dr CVSB, CCSA 4.0; 3rd: cartoon by Norma Smith, reproduced from ‘Migglism’; 4th: Boy with blocks by ragesoss, CCSA3.0
Wisdom is our most important practical quality, but it often seems to be more the basis of fantasy than cultivation. Given an educational system that will barely mention it, it is hardly surprising if wisdom to many people primarily means wizards with long beards and flowing robes. If we have not even reflected how far we have it ourselves, it’s not surprising if it’s projected onto distant figures. But wisdom is about how you make judgements: about, say, what to eat for lunch, or how to respond to that irritating colleague, or whether to spend the evening reading or browsing the internet. We all have it to some extent, and we lack it in other respects.
Wisdom should not be confused with knowledge. It is not about what you know, unless it’s about recognising how little you know (as Socrates famously said, he was only wise in the sense of recognising his ignorance). That means you could conceivably be quite wise with little education. Nor is wisdom an automatic benefit of age: you only have to reflect on the narrow-mindedness into which some older people sink to see that.
Instead, I want to suggest that wisdom is a quality dependent on how well we use the experience we have. If we only interpret experience in terms of narrow assumptions, that experience will be useless to us, and will not enable us to learn. Instead, experience will only re-confirm the assumptions we already carry. That’s the positive feedback loop we can get into if we are fixated on ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’, believing that we have these things and then making our experience fit.
To become wiser, then, we will need to avoid these kinds of fixed beliefs, whether they are positive or negative, but investigate closely, even amongst sets of beliefs we otherwise reject, for ideas that are relevant and helpful. That means that, for example, the wise socialist will try to learn from conservatives even whilst rejecting dogmatic elements of conservatism (and vice-versa). Or if you have a strong belief in yourself as, say, destined to be a successful artist, but end up rejecting that belief as unrealistic, to cultivate wisdom in relation to that belief you will search around for aspects of that artistic aspiration that you can carry forward into other visions of your life.
Wisdom is often contrasted with compassion, but I want to suggest that the two are only conceptually distinguished: in practice they are inseparable. That’s because ‘reason’ is inseparable from ’emotion’, and it’s only a series of unhelpful cultural and philosophical habits that makes us often separate them too sharply. To be wise is to be compassionate, because whenever you challenge fixed beliefs about a person, you also challenge fixed feelings about them. By entering into more open beliefs about them, you also enter into more open emotional responses. By developing provisionality you also develop love, in a sense that avoids both hatred and possessiveness. Of course, the development of wisdom can only continue from wherever you start in emotional as well as cognitive terms, and someone who finds empathy difficult will not magically find it easy because of greater wisdom: but they will be more compassionate than they were before.
I’ve recently completed a video that explores the theme of wisdom in terms of the integration of belief. The integration of belief is simply a term for that process of sifting absolute beliefs from more helpful provisional ones – the process of developing wisdom and compassion. Here’s the video.
Picture by Ferdinand Reus (Wikimedia Commons) CCSA 3.0
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher, novelist, dramatist, and public intellectual. As befits the cultural prominence of philosophy in France, his funeral cortege in 1980 was followed by 50,000 people. Generally the philosopher who best fits the label ‘existentialist’ (which, unlike Heidegger, he used himself), Sartre was in many respects a bold and original thinker – he was concerned with imagination, action, and practice as much as theory, and above all focused on human experience as our source of information (phenomenology).
To my mind Sartre’s important contribution to Middle Way thought lies in his unflinching recognition of human responsibility. Very much a moral philosopher, Sartre argued that we are not only responsible for how well we follow moral rules, but also for the rules themselves. By selecting and obeying such rules, we give them their moral justification and validity. In his famous example of Abraham from the Old Testament (also used by Kierkegaard), Sartre pointed out that when Abraham heard God telling him to sacrifice his son, he could not justifiably pass on the responsibility for the deed to God – for it was Abraham who was responsible for interpreting what he had heard as the authoritative voice of God.
In this recognition of our responsibility for our judgements, Sartre contributed an important part of the case against metaphysics, and against the doleful but dominant insistence that it is inevitable still found today in much philosophy and science. But whatever we experience, whether it is a big voice in the sky or a scientific observation that seems to neatly fit a theory, there are always alternative possible interpretations, and thus we can never be compelled to accept one necessary interpretation. If we remain consciously unaware of alternatives but might, with considerable effort, have become aware of them, we also remain responsible (though, to clarify Sartre, I would say that we do so only to a small degree). Humean naturalism, which asserts that we can’t help what we believe, is shown up as dogmatic by Sartre’s recognition of our responsibility.
Unlike previous philosophers and theologians who attributed our responsibility to a metaphysical soul, Sartre did not seek any justification for it beyond experience. We are responsible because we experience responsibility. However, Sartre also recognised conflicts in that experience: we often find that responsibility uncomfortable and cannot face up to it, so we slip into the ‘bad faith’ of pretending that we are not responsible, because God told us or the universe itself told us, or we couldn’t help it or we were just following orders. If we can face up to our responsibility we can be ‘authentic’.
Sartre also did recognise that our choices are made in a context of certain conditions that are already set for us. He called this ‘facticity’. At every moment when we make a judgement, the openness (or ‘nothingness’) of mere potential is closed and becomes facticity. But then we are faced with yet another choice and another. Sartre pointed out that our choices have to be constantly remade for as long as they take to be put into action: for we could always potentially reverse our decision.
The focus on judgement in Middle Way Philosophy owes much to Sartre. Like Sartre, I think that it is the quality of a judgement itself, rather than its content, that makes it better or worse. However, it must be added that the content does have a big effect on the quality of the judgement, together with the character of the person who makes it. Thus, for example, a judgement to commit murder is extremely likely to be a bad judgement because it’s only likely to be taken by someone who ignores or represses their awareness of many of the consequences of committing murder. Sartre put a lot of emphasis on what is often taken to be a form of relativism (or subjectivism): that is, denying that there are any absolute rules that make one choice better than another. But I think it is debatable whether Sartre should be read as a relativist at all. For him an authentic (and thus, we can surmise, integrated) judgement is better than one made in bad faith that does not recognise our responsibility. Such arguments will apply in science as well as in the generally accepted moral realm.
There are several less helpful aspects of Sartre’s thought, though, that seem to take him further from the Middle Way. One is his rejection of psychology and public disagreement with Freud. He seems to have been understandably reacting against Freud’s determinism, but in the process also rejected the concept of the unconscious, which could have been very helpful to him in developing a more psychologically adequate account of ‘authenticity’ and ‘bad faith’. Another is his long-term flirtation with Marxism, although he did not join the Communist Party and later described himself as an anarchist. Nevertheless, Sartre has been blamed by his critics for leading others towards Marxism without sufficient scrutiny of its dogmatic assumptions and authoritarian practice. It does seem that, without a very developed psychological idea of what an authentic judgement would look like, Sartre sometimes seemed to make judgements (like that in favour of Marxism) that were more the product of an individual choice made in a vacuum than a careful scrutiny of conditions.
Sartre tends to stress the openness of our responsibility at the expense of balance. Though he tries to avoid metaphysical assumptions, he does not seem to be sufficiently aware of the dangers of negative metaphysics, and sometimes, arguably, he slips into it whilst reacting against traditionalist absolute positions. Thus he may not come across very much as a Middle Way thinker in his general style and approach: he is more of an enfant terrible. Nevertheless, Sartre’s contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way in respect of judgement can hardly be underestimated.
Link to index of previous ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ blogs