Category Archives: Philosophy

Excavating agnosticism

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Practice, Religion, Video, ,

You may think you know what agnosticism is, but I think there is far more to it than meets the eye once you start digging. I have just finished producing a series of videos in which I try to make a comprehensive case in digestibly-sized chunks. Agnosticism

First of all, agnosticism is a practice, not a failure of decision. It is not just about God, but God just happens to be a particularly well-known example of a pair of metaphysical opposites (theism and atheism) to which agnosticism offers a third alternative. It does not involve hanging onto impossibilities, but rather coming to terms with them. Far from being passive, it involves an effort not to be sucked into the absolutizing extremes that dominate discussion (the diagram here, though it may remind you of a football referee, represents the potentially isolated position of the agnostic between dominant groups).

If those points surprise you, you will need to start by looking at the introductory video on agnosticism.

But there’s much more to be said after this. What, after all, is wrong with the extremes in the first place? I want to argue that it’s not simply a dogmatic failure of justification that’s wrong with it (though that is bad enough), but much more seriously, the role of metaphysical (i.e. absolute) beliefs in repressing alternatives, and thus constantly limiting the new conditions we can address, as well as creating conflict. In ‘what’s wrong with metaphysics’, I argue that metaphysics should not be confused with basic or prior claims (a common move by philosophers), that absolute metaphysical claims cannot be held provisionally, and that their only function is to maintain unconditional loyalty to groups or authorities. Metaphysics is a power ploy rooted in a past era when it may possibly have been necessary – but it now greatly hampers us. It’s geared for ancient armies, not modern democracies. That’s why we really need to be agnostic.

But after showing what’s wrong with absolute belief, it’s then very important to rescue the meaningfulness of absolute terms. Terms like God, truth, Satan, nature, beauty etc. should not be objects of absolute belief, but they can still be fully appreciated as archetypes with crucial meaning in embodied human experience. That means that we really can have our cake and eat it: we can participate in religious life without compromising our integrity or triggering the repression and conflict that often accompanies religious ‘belief’. Metaphysical belief is in no way necessary to what religion has to contribute to human experience. All we have to do is separate absolute belief from archetypal meaning.

The practice of agnosticism also demands clarity about what it is we’re avoiding, and the balanced treatment of positive and negative kinds of absolute claim as equally unhelpful. This is the subject of the final two videos. ‘Sceptical slippage’ deals with the tendency to slip from agnostic to negative positions. It offers some explanations as to why we tend to do this, and thus why agnosticism is so unfairly treated in much dominant thought. The final video, ‘Even-handedness’ offers some practical principles for maintaining a clear balance so as to be able to practise agnosticism without giving too much weight on one side or the other.

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 MWS Podcast 90: Adam Briggle on when philosophy lost its way

Philosophy, Podcast,

My guest today is Adam Briggle, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is the author of A Rich Bioethics, co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction, and author of A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking. He recently had a joint article with the philosopher Robert Frodeman published in the New York Times entitled When Philosophy Lost its Way and this will be the topic of our discussion.

If you’d like to find out more about Adam and Robert Frodeman’s work, check out their website philosophyimpact.org


MWS Podcast 90: Adam Briggle as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_90_Adam_Briggle

Click here to view other podcasts

The limitations of secularism

Current Affairs, Education, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Religion,

The group of people who first agreed to set up the Middle Way Society in 2013 came in contact with each other in the context of ‘Secular Buddhism’. But one of my personal motives in wanting to create a society distinct from Secular Buddhism was considerable dissatisfaction with that label. The best things I found in the Secular Buddhist movement seemed to me neither distinctively Buddhist nor distinctively secular; and the worst were both, somehow managing to combine two types of dogma in unholy alliance. The label was both unhelpfully ambiguous and incoherent, and instead I wanted to put forward a clear and positive account of the best of the values that I found under it, in the form of the Middle Way. Middle Way Philosophy is not Buddhist because, however much it may owe to the Buddhist tradition (which is probably less than instant pigeon-holers assume), it does not accept any authority from it and is far from culturally defined by it (see recent video). But the question of in what ways it is not secularist is an even more vexed one. What does secularism mean? For some people (such as Stephen Batchelor) it seems to mean something similar to the Middle Way, whilst for others it evokes figures like Richard Dawkins and the metaphysical certainties of scientism.Secularism march Andrew West CCSA4-0

My thinking on this point has been stimulated recently by reading this article about the efforts of the French education minister to overhaul the principle of secularism in French schools. The French principle of laicité, often translated as ‘secularism’, means the separation of church and state, so that the state is neutral and religion a matter for the individual. The French minister is concerned that the principle is being misinterpreted by Muslim students as an anti-religious attack on them and their beliefs, and that this is contributing to Muslim radicalisation amongst French young people. French secularism is innocent of contributing to such reactions, the narrative goes, because it is actually there to protect religious minorities and has just been misunderstood. However, I think there are two kinds of problems with this narrative: one concerns the meaning of ‘secularism’, and the other the idea of state neutrality.

The philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully distinguishes three senses of the term ‘secularity’. Secularity 1 is the separation of church and state, as constitutionally required in both France and the US since the eighteenth century. Secularity 2 “consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church” (A Secular Age, p. 2). In this second sense the UK is a much more secular society than the US. Secularity 3 is a social transition “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others”.

Secularism, then, could probably be similarly divided, as the belief in the value of each of these respective types of secularity. The French minister’s laicité is Secularism 1. The promotion of atheism and anti-religious sentiment, as in the work of Richard Dawkins, is Secularism 2, which probably in most cases also encompasses Secularism 1. Secularism 3, however, seems to simply mean support for an open society where metaphysical beliefs are not imposed by the group – in that third sense, then, I’d be happy to count myself a secularist (along with most people, including most religionists, in Western society). But the dogmas that threaten open societies are by no means limited to religious ones, making ‘secularism’ possibly a misnomer for this third form. The USSR and other Communist regimes, for example, were probably not secularist in this third sense, given that there were no alternative possibilities, even though they were in the first and second.

The problem encountered by the French minister of education is the association of Secularism 1 with Secularism 2. She argues that keeping religious symbols such as the hijab out of French schools or other public places is not anti-Muslim. However, to me it doesn’t seem so surprising that people often have trouble telling the difference between Secularism 1 and Secularism 2. In practice they may look very similar.

The problem here lies in people’s assumptions about boundaries and about the possibility of neutrality. In official and legal terms the state is neutral, but the state is in practice represented by people, and people are not – indeed cannot – be neutral. Nor can the Secularism 1 of the Republic as a whole necessarily dictate the motives of the flesh-and-blood people who enforce the rules, which may well stray a long way into Secularism 2. The civil servant or other public employee is obliged to try to force neutrality onto herself by repressing her individual beliefs, when these are contrary to the role she has undertaken, and these are very likely to manifest themselves in terms of the body language, tone and whole approach of the ‘neutral’ person. Rather than unsuccessfully attempting to be neutral, the state should be much more selective in its fights and firm in maintaining values that will benefit all, and these may also be easier for the state employee to fully support: but the principle of division of church and state may interfere with that needful discrimination.

In the UK, of course, we also have plenty of problems with this type of false neutrality, associated as it is with bureaucratic managerialism, where paperwork replaces trust, and conceptual ideas of desirable goals are often substituted for informative experiences about how far they are actually occurring. But in matters of religion in the UK, the population has largely been able to persist in its steady drift away from the Church without usually needing to pretend neutrality in religious allegiances. There are up-sides to having an established church, when it is so broad and tolerant. So, broadly I think we have an incrementality about religious commitment that, although riddled with inconsistencies and political hypocrisy, has allowed Secularism 3 to emerge without as much conflict as is found either in France or the US.

So, the trouble with secularism in general could be summarised thus. The separation of Church and State (Secularism 1) is difficult to achieve in practice without anti-religious secularism (Secularism 2). Anti-religious secularism creates conflict, not just in society, but also in the individual, who may repress the religious dimension of their experience and fail to integrate the archetypes that are still powerful even in the strongest atheist. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some degree of separation between Church and State, particularly so as to try to avoid discrimination against religious minorities: but the absolute neutrality of the state is a fiction. Secularism in the sense of the open society (Secularism 3) is desirable and achievable, but hardly controversial in the West. To call oneself a secularist in the third sense when it is so strongly associated with the first and second senses doesn’t seem to be useful.

Instead, of course, I think the Middle Way is the answer here. Rather than committing itself to an unattainable neutrality, I think the state should recognise and promote the importance of Secularism 3 as the key to a harmonious and progressive multicultural society. Except that there’s really no need to call it secularism and thus antagonise the religious – it’s a Middle Way approach, and can be associated with agnosticism rather than atheism. A Middle Way approach requires us to recognise where we start, including the metaphysical beliefs that we may start with. At the same time, though, it is both more decisively anti-dogmatic and more even-handed than secularism usually is, in recognising that absolute beliefs are not desirable whether they are positive or negative. With students in school, one needs to recognise their beliefs fully and allow them to be expressed, but at the same time challenge them through a critical and psychological education that undermines both absolute belief and its denial. The riches of a student’s religious tradition at no point need to be denied, but their absolute interpretation of that tradition can be legitimately challenged at every point, and it is the state’s duty as educator to promote such challenges. What is the point of banning the hijab, when in some cases it may be merely a symbol with no practical implications, and yet leaving the underlying absolutist beliefs unchallenged?

The motives behind secularism are often ones that recognise the damaging effects of absolute belief, but secularism can too easily become an absolute belief itself, not only by denying claims that lie beyond human experience, but also by erecting absolute conceptual boundaries between church and state (or between public and private life). It seems to me that many secularists, if they were to look more closely at these issues, might well arrive at a Middle Way position. But it is important to keep the Middle Way separate from secularism so that it remains a basis on which people from any background can find common ground in experience.

Related pages:

Middle Way for Atheists

Religion resources indexed

Review of ‘The Moral Landscape’ by Sam Harris

 

Picture: Secularism March by Andrew West (CCSA 4.0)

The happiness delusion

Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology

Everyone wants to be happy, it seems – except that we have very little idea what that actually means. We know it’s good, whatever it is, and we associate it with whatever’s ultimately good for us – whatever that is. It’s apparently not just pleasure, but then it’s not moral good either. Perhaps at our most deluded, we think that consumer goods will make us happy – and judging by the shopping rampage likely to be going on today across much of the Western world, a lot of people do still think this. If we’re slightly less deluded, we might think that mindfulness, or creativity, or loving relationships, or a politically reformed society will make us more truly happy. But do they? Does happiness mean anything genuine in our experience at all, or is it just an endlessly manipulable word to be attached to anything we want to sell? A lot of psychological investigations of happiness depend on self-reporting of how happy people feel – but what scientific use could this possibly be if what is being reported may be largely or entirely delusory?Goethe-Schiller-Denkmal Ludwig Silvio CCSA3-0

Let’s apply a Middle Way analysis here, by identifying positive and negative extreme beliefs that can be associated with happiness, which will then hopefully help us to find more integrated experience somewhere in between. On the one hand we could believe that happiness is just what I identify with as pleasant right now. A cold beer on a hot day, or a reassuring hug, or an orgasm, or caffeine rush hitting a dopey brain – all of these can be felt as pleasant in slightly different ways. But mere pleasure does not make us sustainably happy, because the pleasure will end, and in some cases we may even have to pay a painful price for it. At the other extreme, then, we can identify happiness with permanence: the ultimate happiness of heaven, or of nirvana, or of the ultimate Communist eco-society that will mark the end of history. But these idealisations of happiness are in practice beyond our experience, and have nothing to do with happiness itself as we might experience it.

In between the belief in momentary happiness and the belief in eternal happiness is the incremental experience of degrees of happiness. In general, I’d suggest, we are happier when we are more integrated, just because integrated beliefs and desires no longer conflict with each other and are more stable, so anything that makes us happy at one time is more likely to continue. At the same time we are likely to have modified our appreciation of what makes us happy to longer-term and more sustainable experiences: for example, long-term relationships rather than just one-night flings, sustained works rather than just flashes of creativity, and actions that are broadly compatible with the good of society rather than just thrilling transgressions.

But if someone asks “Do these things make you truly happy?” there is no answer. There is also no clear answer to the question of what makes happiness different from pleasure – the degree of happiness I’m describing here might just as well be described as sustainable pleasure, or just as the fulfilment of desire. In fact the whole idea of ‘true’ happiness involves a delusion – the assumption that happiness is somehow separate from and beyond our experience of it. You don’t know in advance what is likely to make you happy, and both philosophers and psychologists have noted the ‘hedonic paradox’ – that the more closely we pursue our desires, the more the fulfilment of those desires in the form of pleasure or happiness tends to elude us.

That’s why I really don’t sign up to the happiness industry. The more people’s belief in traditional morality crumbles, the more they seem to seek alternatives in ideas of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is doomed: firstly, people don’t know what they’re seeking; secondly, the conditions around and within them keep changing, so any happiness they achieve is likely to be short-lived; and thirdly, even if they get it, we can always reasonably ask whether such happiness is a good thing. If we manage to create a bubble of happiness, isn’t that often at the expense of addressing wider conditions of suffering – like an exclusive beach resort in the middle of a third world country, or an alcoholic on a bender?

Integration seems to me a much better incremental goal to maintain than happiness. The more integrated you become, the greater the potential to address conditions, because the blockages to your understanding of the world will have been loosened, your energies more unified, and interfering conflicts (both internal and external) lessened or removed. Whatever you want, more of you needs to want it, in a more sustainable fashion. That also means that your beliefs need to be more adequate to make those fulfilments possible. The more integrated you become, the more likely you are to start moving beyond the narrow limitations of your previous obsessions: whether those are with yourself, with certain others, with possessions, or with a narrowly defined cause.

More happiness, on the whole, may well follow from that. But there are no guarantees: you cannot rely on a law of karma to ensure that your efforts will necessarily pay off. In any case, if you become more integrated, your ideas about happiness and fulfilment will probably change. The ‘happiness’ you find, if any, may be totally unexpected in nature from your present perspective.

The other Important advantage of prioritising integration rather than seeking happiness is that it removes the widespread alienation from ethics. Instead of ethics being a disregarded abstraction in the distance, the object of irrelevant social expectations or parental naggings, the pursuit of integration can also make ethics a genuine part of our experience. As our judgements become more integrated, they also become better, increasingly taking into account the conditions both of our own situation and of the wider world. Again, it does not become so through the finding of an absolute ‘true’ ethics: only from the recognition that ethics consists in an incremental improvement we can actually experience.

Happiness itself is not necessarily a delusion: just, a vague, ambiguous and uncertain element of experience. But it can very easily be absolutised, whether into momentary pleasure, ethical truth, or pseudo-scientific statistics. There’s nothing wrong with using the word as long as we take that uncertainty into account. The belief that happiness is the prime value that should be pursued, however, does seem to be a delusion of confirmation bias, in which we pursue what we think happiness is and in the process confirm to ourselves that it is worth pursuing. Happiness is just not an end in itself, but rather a potential side-effect of integration and accompanying moral development. Integration, in contrast to happiness, always offers an element of the unknown and uncertain – also entailing the possibility of pain and frustration. Intuitively, we often recognise that dwelling on happiness involves the likelihood of falsity, and it is in adversity that integration is more likely to advance. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears” said Churchill during the Second World War – a period fraught with unhappiness in most respects, but often looked back at by those who experienced it as their time of greatest fulfilment nevertheless.

Picture of Goethe and Schiller monuments by Ludwig & Silvio, CCSA3.0