Middle Way

The Middle Way as understood by the Society is a principle that can help us make better judgements. It is not a truth about the universe, and it is not the property of the Buddhist tradition. Rather the Middle Way is an effective way of facing up to conditions, that could be discovered to varying degrees by anyone in any context. The man known as the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), who lived in India about 2500 years ago, provides what is probably the clearest articulation of it, but it can also be found articulated to varying extents by many other people.

Middle Way symbol

The central idea of the Middle Way is that we understand conditions in the world or in ourselves better by relying on experience, but our learning from experience is often blocked by fixed beliefs. These fixed beliefs are known as absolutizations or metaphysical beliefs, which the Middle Way suggests that we should avoid. An image that might help one see how this works is that of a ship sailing through a narrow passage between dangerous rocks. The ship needs to get through the strait whilst avoiding the rocks on either side, and we don’t have to know where the ship is ultimately going to be clear about that . Here the rocks represent the metaphysical beliefs. If you make it through the strait you might get a slightly clearer view of where to go next, but if you strike the rocks you will be stuck, and not even get that far.

How do you identify an absolutization? Here are some of its typical features:

  • absolute justification (e.g. appeals to God, ultimate reality, ‘nature’, or their denial)
  • must be accepted as totally true or false, rather than as a matter of degree
  • provides an illusory sense of certainty
  • assume a representational meaning rather than an embodied meaning
  • dualistically opposed to its opposite as the only alternative
  • gains its authority from association with a group

Religious beliefs that appeal to some source of revelation (e.g. God’s word, the Buddha’s enlightened experience) are obvious examples of metaphysics, but there are many other less obvious ones in our everyday lives: for example, a fixed idea about one’s self and its identity, a belief in absolute freewill, a belief in determinism, or a belief that science has discovered ‘laws of nature’ that tell us how the universe ultimately is. Errors in personal and political judgement, and even criminal actions, can all be traced to the effect of such beliefs. 

The Middle Way provides a way forward in all kinds of judgements, whether scientific, moral or aesthetic. Its key insight is one that joins psychology to philosophy: that there are certain types of views that can only be held in a state that involves psychological rigidity, and thus are not well justified in a wider philosophical perspective. This insight can be supported using a variety of recent academic advances:

  • the work on embodied meaning of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which shows that the very assumptions about meaning on which metaphysical thinking is built are mistaken
  • the understanding of the specialised functions of the two halves of the brain developed by Iain McGilchrist, which shows how the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for metaphysical thinking
  • much recent work on cognitive biases, for example by Daniel Kahneman, which shows that many of the mistakes we make in judgement can be understood as applications of metaphysical thinking
  • the development of systems theory, which shows ways of adapting to complex and unpredictable conditions in a system which take into account the limitations of our model of that system rather than assuming we have a complete (i.e. metaphysical) model

The ways in which these insights come together needs much further exploration and discussion.

However, the Middle Way is primarily a practical way forward beyond the limitations of both religious and secular styles of thinking. There are many practices whose value is explained and contextualised by the Middle Way, such as meditation, psychotherapy, the arts, or critical thinking, If we do these practices motivated by the Middle Way, we may also find that we do them differently, because we recognise that balancing our perspectives is at the heart of what makes them effective in addressing conditions.

Robert M Ellis

Links to further pages on the Middle Way:

Introductory Videos

The Buddha and the Middle Way

Madhyamika Buddhism (Middle Way in Mahayana Buddhism)

Middle Way for Christians

Middle Way for atheists

Middle Way for scientific naturalists

Scepticism and the Middle Way

Homeostasis

20 thoughts on “Middle Way

  1. Hi.I’m new to the site,so apologies if this topic has been covered.It relates to how matters of principle interface with incrementality and compromise.For example,during a discussion about the monarchy,it was suggested to me that the monarchy was “evolving” by allowing “commoners” into its ranks.I replied by suggesting that the monarchy was predicated on bloodline,so doesen’t that undermine the whole concept?(I’m not a monarchist,but that’s not the point here,obviously)
    Similarly,a proposed solution to the fox-hunting dilemma was to allow fox-hunting under licence.That’s still fox-hunting isn’t it-or am I missing something?

  2. Hi Howard,
    Welcome to the site, would you agree that we try to reach a compromise on many topics in our every day decisions, it is a way of avoiding conflict?
    The royal family has a strong motive to survive, so compromise for them is accepted as necessary, if they had faithfully followed the blood line route it is quite possible that we would have different members in the royal family. Hunting with dogs divides public opinion, if they need to be culled shooting would be less cruel, usually the availability of food regulates breeding. Some see hunting as a valid country pursuit, I think the philosopher Roger Scruton would argue in favour of it, unless he has changed his mind. Drag hunting is a compromise, but still foxes are killed.

    1. Thanks to Norma and Robert for their replies.I think compromise is great if it reaches peaceful solutions.For example,I understand that the Basque region of Spain has enough autonomy for most people to put arms aside and live with it,whatever their ideals might be.I certainly wouldn’t poke a stick at it if violence is avoided.However,I do feel that sometimes principles are important.Would we allow an employer to pay some women less than men for the same job,on condition that he “compromised” by agreeing not to do it to all female employees?

  3. Hi Howard,
    It looks like the underlying issue here is that of essentialism – whether you assume that a particular term has a fixed or essential meaning. Plato believed in essentialism, and it is a popular assumption, but I think that fixing the meanings of words is just one of the unhelpful ways our egoistic left hemisphere tries (unsuccessfully) to fix the world around us. There’s no reason why the meanings of terms like ‘fox-hunting’ and ‘monarchy’ can’t change, because the only thing that determines what these terms mean is their usefulness to us as symbols. Given that we are changing embodied beings, those uses keep changing.

    A look at linguistics or etymology can also underline this point. None of the words we use now are the same as they were in the past. For example ‘nice’ used to mean precise only 200 years ago. So arguments about how a word is used need to be pragmatic arguments, based on anticipation on the effects of using it one way or another, rather than assuming a fixed meaning and objecting to all changes. There are some words that I have consciously tried to move on myself (e.g. objectivity), and others where I think it would be better to avoid changes that are otherwise fashionable (e.g. the relativisation of ‘truth’). It all depends on what other terms are available to express the same idea, and what role the current use plays in tending to make us think in a certain way. With a political institution like the monarchy, I’d suggest that there are probably strong arguments for supporting changes in meaning along with changes in society, because political institutions need to constantly change to be adequate to new situations. If you reflect that parliament in the 13th century was a meeting of King John’s barons, it is obvious that there is no essential meaning of ‘parliament’, but rather one that has evolved with political change.

  4. Hi Howard,
    I agree with you that sometimes principles are important. They can stretch us to be more objective by being more consistent, so I think they have a role in ethics. For example, dropping one piece of litter has little effect by itself, but it’s making an exception of yourself if you would dislike everyone else doing it. On the other hand principles can also get rigid and be a way of avoiding objectivity. It all depends whether the use of a principle would impart more objectivity to a situation.

  5. Hi Howard
    Welcome to the site! A suggestion of Robert´s that I really like is to think of the three most common ethical strategies as useful tools in your ethical toolbox and you choose the appropriate tool for what the situation most objectively requires. For example, a consequentialist or utilitarian approach to a situation is often useful as it helps you to consider the consequences of any action or set of of actions. Its weakness of course is that it relies on your finite ability in assessing those consequences. Just think Iraq. As Robert said rule based ethics aid consistancy and encourage one not to make an exception of oneself in a “what if everyone else did that” kind of way. However, as the classic example goes, if you were harbouring a Jewish family in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came questioning about their whereabouts at your door, to “tell the truth” here, would arguably be too rigid a stance to take. Virtue ethics, ie the cultivation of good habits and practices such as honesty, patience, courage etc is a very useful long-term strategy, but might not be so appropriate in a heat of the moment situation where one of the other approaches might address conditions better. Robert puts these ideas across a lot more effectively than me in the following podcast: Practical Ethics using the Middle Way

    1. Hi,
      Listening to the weather news on television I’ve heard the description ‘Nature’ being used by some who accept it as the cause of the flooding. We may have a fixed idea of what we think is Nature, but the flooding may have other causes, global warming, very active sun spots, poor management of land drainage or houses built on flood plains. As Robert says, meanings do change.

      1. The problem with ascribing the flooding to ‘Nature’ is that it places it beyond our control. But there’s a complex interaction of forces that are more and less under our control, that are oversimplified and underestimated by the use of the term. It’s also interesting how we polarise in views of ‘Nature’ as charming one moment and ‘red in tooth and claw’ or consisting of frightening forces the next.

  6. I like what you all are trying to get at- what you are trying to uncover. I offer this from The Bab ( Siyyid ‘Ali- Muhammad Shiriazi, 1819-1850) The Herald Prophet of the Baha’i Faith. There is a book out now called Gate of the Heart by Nadier Saiedi which delves into the Bab’s Writings, many of which deal with The Middle Way. here is the quote:

    “For intellect conceives not save limited things. Verily, bound by the realm of limitations, men are unable to gaze upon things simultaneously in their manifold aspects. Thus it is perplexing for them to comprehend that lofty station. No one can recognize the truth of the Middle Way, between the two extreme poles except after attaining unto the gate of the heart and beholding the realities of the worlds, visable and unseen.”

    1. Hi Mike,
      Thanks for your interesting comment. I know little about Baha’i, so if you think it has useful things to tell us about the Middle Way I’d be interested to know more. My issue with the wording of what you’ve quoted would be that I don’t think there is (for our purposes) a ‘truth’ of the Middle Way. If there is it’s not something we can attain as finite beings. Rather I see the Middle Way as a method.

  7. Could you also bring some women thinkers into this article?

    At least five men are mentioned (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Kahnemann…). Not a single woman gets a mention.

    So it seems unbalanced to me.

    1. Hi Andrea,
      I disagree with a basic assumption you seem to be making in your comment, which is that the balanced nature of a view should be judged according to who holds it. This is one of the ways that I want to depart from Buddhist tradition, which often seems to be tied to the Buddha as a personal arbiter of what the Middle Way means. If the main thinkers that have influenced me in thinking about the Middle Way happen to be male, that is not particularly relevant to the important content of what they are saying, which would be equally balanced in the ways that matter whether they are male or female. Although the meaning of the Middle Way for each of us is understood in varying embodied ways that will vary between gender or other types of difference between people, it is that understanding in us that is crucial to the balance of the Middle Way, rather than where it comes from.

      I would make a similar point here if you pointed out other limitations in the people referred to: their age, nationality, education level, class or ethnicity might also be bunched one way or another. But the Middle Way is universal. That they might have something to say about the Middle Way and that this might be helpful to us does not depend on any of these specific categories of person. I make no apologies for merely referring to those thinkers that I have encountered in my own experience rather than attempting to make them representative of variations in the population. They are not representatives, but thinkers, and it is the thoughts of thinkers that matter rather than who they are.

  8. Hi Andrea

    The page was written by the chair of the society Robert Ellis who is away on holiday until the 13th August, so he won’t be able to respond to you until he comes back.
    For my part, there are several women in public life who appear to hold somewhat of a Middle Way perspective on things. Kathryn Schulz springs to mind and her book ‘Being Wrong’ about which Robert wrote this review. There’s Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability and shame. The philosopher Mary Midgley also appears to have a very balanced, holistic outlook on things. Here’s her review of McGilchrist’s book ‘The Master and his Emissary’.

    Fellow member Nina Davies also recommends the work of Judith Butler and Donna Harraway in this regard. Here’s a podcast interview a had with her a few weeks ago in which she talks in more detail about them.

    I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at Robert’s work in depth and I can’t speak for him personally, however Lakoff, Johnson, McGilchrist and Kahneman do seem to have been able to offer a different perspective or departure point for the Middle Way in terms of the theories of embodied meaning, brain lateralization and cognitive biases that they have put forward. Do you (or anybody else) have any particular women in mind that could contribute in this way to our understanding of the Middle Way? I’d certainly be interested and I’m sure Robert would too.

    1. Hi Andrea,
      I agree, more female philosophers would be desirable generally, especially those who also have a middle way approach to how we live our lives. I would also be happy to see more women taking part in politics, education and running large companies, sadly women artists, even today are in a minority.
      There have been several podcasts by women on the Middle Way you may find interesting such as Vidyamala Burch on Kindly Awareness, the more women the better I think who contribute to the Middle Way Society by sharing their views and recommending further reading.

  9. I think the attempt to explain or position or modulate our experience of reality: the middle way, theism, atheism, realism or idealism, sexism, capitalism, stamp collecting, etc. is ultimately destined to fail or collapse in on itself because reason has no ultimate reference point …everything is relative to the position of everything else which is contingent and unfixed…this is the nature, but not the essence, of all form. Contradiction is at the sub-atomical heart of all created matter, even God (lovingly through Jesus) and subjectivity – without ‘nothing’ there’d be no ‘being’. There’s a rupture in the fabric of reality itself that the egoic mind reduces to oppositions for its own survival. The Middle Way wouldn’t and couldn’t be a reality without its antitheses of left and right antagonisms which it uses as a reference point to define itself. It’s like science using modern empirical tools to disprove faith – they’re different sides of the same coin and until you leave the matrix of reason and meaning reality, truth or faith will be concealed. Love, as Hegel discovered, is the true way (italicized to indicate the inadequacy of language, the end of meaning and the ineptness of symbol – Kant’s legacy). The Middle Way is an egoic mind construct invested in creating meaning and control as tools of self-preservation. It’s the same as saying green fields are really blue because I’m colour blind (they’re green and blue at the same time just like a seed is imbued with its every potentiality) or believing the myopic belief that universals are disproved by their own inner contradiction. All logic is circular. All human reasoning is relative and ultimately destructive and dualistic because the ego cant live with or tolerate contradiction because it would mean its own demise. Christ the way is not another egoic survival ideology or power play but a narrow path out of the egoic insanity of misidentification with intellectual concepts and humans’ obsession with getting high on ego tech.

    PS: I love this site and what you’re attempting to achieve and disseminate for the cause of love and helping humanity grow and evolve. I look forward to reading and getting off on reading and commenting on more of your ideas. But ideally, I’d find a fellowship because that’s what we’re all looking for at the end of the day regardless of the guise or form it adopts. My egocentricity is your humility and we’re much obliged.

    Peace & Love & Joy – in perfect synthesis

    1. Hi Parmenides,
      Thankyou for your comment. However, I think you’ve misunderstood the Middle Way as presented here if you think it’s “attempt to explain or position or modulate our experience of reality”. As made clear at the beginning of the article above, it is not a “truth about the universe” – that means that it isn’t any kind of appeal to “reality”, but rather a principle of judgement for how we should operate in the position of uncertainty we find ourselves in. I agree with you that reason is “relative” in the sense of having no absolute justification, but that does not imply that all judgements are of the same value: rather some face up to the position of uncertainty better than others. The problem with the idea of the “egoic” as a way of understanding delusion is that it is undifferentiated, but our experience gives us plenty of justification for holding one view rather than another without any need to appeal to “reality”.

      To describe love as the “true way” carries the danger of running into the same problem due to the implicit absoluteness of “true”. Love, in the sense of agape, does require us to look beyond false certainties, and thus in some respects is identical to the Middle Way – but it is not solely an ’emotional’ state differentiable from a ‘rational’ one, is indistinguishable from wisdom, and has to be renewed at each moment.
      Best wishes,
      Robert

  10. Hi Bob

    Just for bit of fun I thought I’d bounce the following off; good to know what you think…

    The Middle Way is an epistemological theory/argument as valid and relative as any other theory of knowing, which is principally the impossible task of overcoming the subject/object split or contradiction at the heart of being. Its fundamental principle and theory of negative reasoning puts it in a similar category of existential nihilism or Krishnamurtiism – all truth is non-conceptual and subjective, therefore, it’s relativistic belief system in the mould of classical Eastern philosophy. It avows the same underlying absolute of the logical and semantic structure of the mind, presupposed in methodologically disciplined language. It is a theory of logic or semantics that uses logic or semantics in order to do this, even if it denies it. That its fundamental flaw; its denial of being a truth about the universe…is a truth about the universe! This absolute at the heart of all epistemological theories: dialectical, metaphysical, relativistic, existential is at the heart of the Middle Way. The Middle Way presupposes the validity of logic in argument; therefore the consistent Middle Wayer (relativist, existential nihilist, Buddhist) cannot argue but can only shake his or her head.

    Sincerely yours

    PD

    1. BTW, I think the Middle Way is logically closer to dialectical than nihilistic or relativist. but that still makes it a logical theory based on the presupposed absolute in methodologically disciplined language.

  11. Hi Parmenides,
    My name is not Bob, just so you know. Nearly all Bobs are Roberts, but not all Roberts are Bobs.

    Your argument is familiar to me as the product of the dominant underlying philosophical assumptions in the culture we live in, but I do not accept those assumptions. There is no “contradiction at the heart of being”, because we can have no knowledge of “being”, by which to know about any such contradiction between subject and object. Whether we apply a dichotomy of subject and object to any particular judgement depends on whether the alternative of thinking incrementally about the issue is available to us at that point.

    As I have already explained to you, I am not making any claims about “truth”. The way out of such claims does not consist in affirmation and denial, but in provisionality. We can find our way out of truth-falsehood dichotomisation, not by finding some new “true” conceptual model, but by judging provisionally both when we communicate and when we interpret others. So if you insist on interpreting what I write in terms of the dominant ontological obsession, then that will be your responsibility, and it will be you who is missing the point. I am thus not claiming that “truth is non-conceptual and subjective”, nor that such a statement is false – only that I don’t know such a thing, and am also not interested. I’ve also already explained why and in what sense this is not a relativist position – in the ways that relativism needs to be avoided for practical purposes.

    “The logical and semantic structure of the mind” is not an “underlying absolute” – again, that’s an agnostic “not”. Logic and semantics are conceptual tools that we can use in provisional or absolute ways, and using them absolutely is something we can avoid – not through a simple choice, but at least through sustained practice and cultural change. To claim that all theories are necessarily absolutes by definition simply puts you in a self-reinforcing closed feedback loop of thinking. The way out of such a loop comes through allowing creative thinking and supporting this through committed practice of provisionality.

    The relationship between different elements in a conceptual argument about the Middle Way does not come from an appeal to “the validity of logic” as an absolute, but from the relationship of meaning between the elements. Conceptual models create consistency within a particular metaphorical structure, even though the meaning for us comes from our bodily experience, not from the logical relationship between the elements being related (for more on this, see ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’ by
    Lakoff and Johnson). That meaning varies between each individual experiencing the same language, but communication can still take place to the extent that that meaning is shared.

  12. Hi Robert (apologies for getting your name wrong; but what’s in a name when it’s impossible to identify anything and when nothing is self-identical?)

    “Your argument is familiar to me as the product of the dominant underlying philosophical assumptions in the culture we live in, but I do not accept those assumptions.”

    That means you deny the structure of logic in the human mind and ascribe to a metaphysical epistemology which is accepting the contradictory antithesis of your argument, firmly placing your Middle Way theory in the post Kantian (reason encounters contradictions when it tries to think beyond experience…) – Hegelian dialectic (‘the contradictions that we encounter in knowledge reveal that being itself must be contradictory…).

    The final conclusion is that we encounter contradiction as necessary only at the end when we fail to escape it in all possible ways. This is Hegelian absolute knowledge.

    Joke: I tried to read Hegel once but found out that I Kant…once you understand this, you understand everything!

    Maybe you’re right I’m trying too hard to rationalise the Middle Way and that’s precisely why I can’t grasp it.

    Have a great day Robert, hope you’re bearing up well. Any philosophical advice for managing the pandemic crisis?

    PD

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