Buddha, Socrates, and Us
Buddha, Socrates, and Us
Buddha, Socrates and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, by Stephen Batchelor (Yale University Press, 2025) Review by Robert M. Ellis Stephen Batchelor reveals in this book that he has been writing for nearly 50 years. In that long career he has developed from an in-house scholar of Tibetan Buddhism to a challenging and radical advocate of a universal (‘secular’ in his usage) practice that constantly faces up to uncertainty. In my reviews of his last three books, and now in reading this one, I have felt increasingly that his heart is in the right place: that is, that he is committed to the practical Middle Way, and is not about to sell out to metaphysics any time soon. I can’t think of any other contemporary writer that I could say that about with such confidence. That’s remained the case, whatever my reservations on some of his presentation of more specific points that he discusses. Though there’s been a five year interval since the last one, this book communicates the same commitment and the same trend – it is part of his Bildung, the story of his personal development to that point. This book is the previously promised companion volume to ‘The Art of Solitude’, which I reviewed in 2020. Where ‘The Art of Solitude’ obviously focused on individual (though not always strictly solitary) practice, this book focuses instead on ethics – which, at least in 2020, Stephen seemed to think of in terms of a more social emphasis, balancing out the previous book. It is also a similarly constructed ‘collage’, winding its way between a number of topics in the hope of illuminating the core approach from a number of angles. The topic here include (obviously) the Buddha and Socrates, but also lots of autobiography, reflections on other aspects of Buddhism, Greek tragedy and comedy, Hellenistic philosophies, brief dips into more recent philosophers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Arendt, and an exposition of the Eightfold Path. The central theme at the beginning is the comparison of the Buddha (Gotama) and Socrates, whom Stephen calls ‘fraternal twins’: on parallel, but obviously not identical, tracks. They were roughly contemporaries, and both, he writes …Advocated and enacted an ethics of uncertainty. They shared a passionate resolve to lead a virtuous life that did not rest on metaphysical commitments. They led a life of questioning and self-examination without positing any absolute truths. With reasoning and by example they sought to convince their interlocutors to become autonomous ethical agents, liberated from unthinking adherence to the norms of their societies…. (p.33) Both clearly used dialectical methods, and introduced radically new critical modes of thinking that hugely stimulated their successors, initiating entire traditions of thought and practice. Both, Stephen points out, were also denounced before assemblies of fellow citizens, indicative of the tensions such methods can create. Both are presented as practitioners and advocates of the Middle Way. If one interprets this simply on the level that both figures can inspire helpful practice in parallel ways, this should be uncontroversial: but there remains a constant danger in such comparisons of staking a practical comparison on contentious textual and historical claims. Stephen still seems too attached to specific historical assertions to decisively dodge the inevitable scholarly reactions he will get: but these will miss the key point of these figures as sources of practical inspiration. As I previously wrote about ‘The Art of Solitude’, I found this book much more convincing as a work of art than as a work of philosophy. That has remained the case, although there was a lot more discussion of philosophers in this book. What makes it convincing from the point of view of art, or indeed from that of inspiration, is the meaningful links he sets up for our attention: for instance, between the Buddha’s response to human suffering and Greek tragedy, or between the Buddha’s Middle way and the incremental model of love as practice offered (with Socrates as mouthpiece) in Plato’s Symposium. This book is worth reading as a free-roaming jeu d’esprit on Buddhism and various ancient Greek sources of inspiration. However, if one interprets this book as a work of philosophy, one expects some sort of reasonably detailed critical case to be made, and there one will be disappointed. Not only are the ideas not followed through in much detail, but anticipation of the most obvious critical voices is absent. I have come to expect this, after reading quite a few of Stephen’s books, but it bothers me as creating a basic incoherence in this book particularly, as it is largely about philosophy. Philosophy, for me, is a practice: a practice of critique, in which one separates the wheat from the chaff in a philosophical theory or argument. This book clearly advocates that practice, and shows more of the fruits of Stephen’s application of it to the Buddhist tradition (already discussed more fully in his After Buddhism, reviewed here); but its treatment of Greek and other Western philosophy is, in contrast, brief and superficial, showing no sign of such practice. For example, we get a brief account of Plato’s cave which presents it merely as an analogy to illustrate delusion, without even any mention that this is overwhelmingly regarded as the central narrative of rationalism, and that the ‘delusions’ it presents us as stuck in are not those of abstracted belief, but on the contrary those of immediate experience. It is hard to imagine anything more directly opposed to the use of mindfulness and direct appreciation of experience that one finds in the Buddhist practice Stephen advocates. Plato’s cave has supported millennia of conspiracy theorizing, with its one-sided abuse of sceptical argument to support the conviction that everyone else is deluded but we see the truth. As another example, in the book’s brief treatment of Heidegger, we not only get a similarly bland, selective interpretation, but also a claim that Heidegger was trying to ‘overturn metaphysics’ (p.211), which in my understanding is also inaccurate, given that Heidegger was obsessed with ‘being’ and spent his time trying to reconstruct metaphysics. With not even a mention of the huge difficulties around the philosophies of such figures, there is no encouragement to exercise the very dialectical skills that Stephen seems to be advocating. The issue of treating philosophy philosophically, along with that of not getting hung up on historical claims, also come together in some questions that remain for me about the treatment of Socrates. Stephen recognizes and discusses the different sources of information about Socrates, and particularly that our chief source of information, Plato, offers contradictory views of him. The Socrates we’re presented with in Plato’s early dialogues is the open but persistent enquirer who claims to ‘know nothing’, but the one in the later dialogues, by contrast, is a mouthpiece for Plato’s rationalism. The dialectical enquiry in the subsequent later dialogues is focused only on criticism of any reliance on experience, whilst Platonic rationalism is presented uncritically to an audience that accepts it as ultimate wisdom. In my view the point of transition seems to happen in the Meno, where at one point Socrates quite rapidly shifts from gadfly, getting others to clarify their views, to sage, expounding the doctrine of innate knowledge (and very unconvincingly trying to prove it by getting a slave boy to solve a geometry problem). The problem I find in Stephen’s account of this is not a failure to recognize that difference in principle, but rather a failure to confront us more fully with the sizeable shadow of Socrates in his later Platonic version, or to engage with any of the issues of sorting the earlier ‘Socratic’ Socrates from the later ‘Platonic’ Socrates. How do we know that the earlier Socrates depicted by Plato is the historic one, and the later one not? Stephen makes interesting use of the limited material we have about Socrates in Xenophon, which he finds consistent with the Socratic Socrates rather than the Platonic one. But how do we know that, for instance, the two writers did not present Socrates inconsistently because he was inconsistent? The historical claims about Socrates, as in Stephen’s interpretation of the Buddha, rest on a scholarly interpretation that is likely to be immediately contested as soon as you ask any other scholars about it. This creates completely unnecessary hostages to fortune, when the point of the whole enquiry is obviously practical and inspirational. The key difference between the two Socrates’ from a practical perspective is simply that the open sceptical one was helpful to us in ways that the later rationalist one was not. At least, I think, we need to acknowledge that apart from being associated with dialectical enquiry and key advances of philosophical method, Socrates is also deeply associated with rationalist certainty. The shadow of Plato’s Socrates is still with us today. Plato’s false certainties that the world must have an essential and knowable structure, revealed to the elite through purely abstract enquiry, and that this elite was thereby entitled to impose its enlightened rule on others, was hugely influential throughout the Middle Ages, and can now be traced in the political attitudes of figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Socrates is radioactive material – that can be used for good or ill. Ethics under uncertainty, the key theme of this book, in my view involves judgements that take into account the conditions we work with, and then stretches them in the direction of the ideals we may develop. Recognizing those conditions means accepting the shadows that come with them, which is why I remain uneasy with depictions of figures that may offer inspiration, but are depicted in a two-dimensional way that lacks such shadows. The depiction of the ethics of uncertainty in practice in this book relies heavily on Stephen’s account of the Eightfold Path in chapters 27 and 28. Here he is prepared to push his translations of traditional terms into ones that have an admirable practical vibrancy: for instance, right effort becomes ‘application’ and right speech ‘voice’, but I also found too little connection between this exposition and the wider theme of uncertainty. Do we accept this path because the Buddha taught it, effectively appealing to his authority, or just because it is an implication of the uncertain state of human experience? To make sense of the full challenge to metaphysics offered by the Buddha’s Middle Way, the concept of provisionality as an alternative is vital. Stephen does make some mention of provisionality, importantly to explain that it forms the condition for preventing his own teachings from turning into dogma (p.230). However, we are given no detail on what provisionality involves, or how we practise it. Much use could be made here of embodiment, of scientific method, of the psychology of biases, and of hemispheric neuroscience (which is very briefly mentioned, but not discussed), any of which could be used to put much more useful practical flesh on these fleeting mentions. Another helpful perspective on provisionality is offered by balancing feedback loops (a concept found in both systems theory and Buddhism): we can only judge provisionally in a psychological state where we can imagine alternative options sufficiently to add new challenging perspectives to the constant self-reinforcement of entrenched beliefs. This is briefly mentioned (p.249), although unfortunately here Stephen wrongly uses ‘positive feedback loop’ when he means negative or balancing feedback loop (the implications of it are ethically or emotionally positive, but the feedback loop itself is negative – an easy confusion to make). In other places, Stephen emphasises the imagination (p.244-6), but its link to provisionality is not made clear. Instead of further exploration of what’s involved in the provisional judgement that makes ethics under uncertainty possible, Stephen often seems to fall back on an appeal to intuition as the basis on which we can make judgements under uncertainty. For instance, in his concluding chapter: For we intuitively know the virtues through the way they are enacted in our own and other’s behaviour. We recognize wisdom, courage, and justice as soon as we witness them embodied in the words and deeds of a real or fictional person. (p.279) This intuitionist cop-out really needs fuller investigation. Daniel Kahneman’s investigations into intuition make it clear that it is a way of unconsciously processing relatively subtle concrete experiences over a period of time, but no good at all for informing us reliably about wider conditions we have not experienced so much. Firefighters have brilliant intuitions about when a building is going to collapse, and we may develop good intuitions about the emotional states of other people whom we know very well. For those we don’t know, however – such as for instance the people we encounter through the medium of text only on the internet – let alone for general abstract issues, our intuitions are at best no better than random guesses, worse because of the false certainty we are likely to attach to them. Perhaps the use of the term ‘embodied’ here signals some recognition that we need direct and concrete experience of the things we can reliably intuit, but a lot more caveats need to be given with such appeals to intuition – if only for the benefit of the many millions of people who intuit, for instance, that Donald Trump is a reliable, honest person. This intuitionist shortcut also seems to conflict with what Stephen says elsewhere about the need for an integrated approach: for example, he describes the goal of Socrates’ enquiries as encouraging people towards “an ethical life in which their values, words and deeds would no longer be at odds with each other”. In such a life we cannot solely rely on intuition, any more than we can solely rely on the abstract reasoning and absolutized models favoured by Plato. There are many different sources of information, meaning and justification, and we need to use all of them as far as we can manage, resolving conflicts between them through a reframing process. Every time we neglect one source of possible insight, we may be ignoring important conditions that are making themselves known through that medium. There is much more I could say about both the insights and the limitations of this book. Overall, though, by far the most important thing I get from it is the affirmation that there are no shortcuts past uncertainty. Propounding more beliefs (however subtle) that claim to tell us about ‘reality’ (i.e. metaphysics) does not confront us with that uncertainty but merely evades it, and ethics needs to be understood in terms that face up to those conditions of uncertainty through the practice of provisionality as part of the wider path. Although in my experience many Buddhists, and some others, have an inkling of this, very few indeed are free of confusion and equivocation on this central point. Stephen Batchelor has got it and faced up to it. As long as Stephen sticks to that important, controversial, and vitally insightful position, he will have my overwhelming support and approbation, whatever reservations I may have about hostages to scholarly fortune, patches of superficiality, or even evident contradiction in his work. There is, however, very much more to say about the issues he is beginning to broach – most of which does not seem to have been said by anyone. Obviously I am trying to say some of it myself, but many more perspectives and voices are needed to spread understanding of the Middle Way. The fate of Socrates may be at least a powerful warning fable about the magnitude of what we’re up against and the sheer difficulty of making much impression on it, whether in individual practice, in groups, or in the wider political sphere of the world. I’m sure Stephen would agree that he should not be taken as the last word on these topics, but rather as a source of stimulation and inspiration for facing the difficulties of that path.