All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Objectivity training

Critical Thinking, Middle Way Philosophy, Psychology

In my account of practice in Middle Way Philosophy, I have identified three (interlinked) kinds of practice area, which I call integration of desire, integration of meaning, and integration of belief. To integrate desire the central practices will be meditation, or other practices involving body awareness. To integrate meaning the central practices are likely to be the arts. To integrate belief, so far I have often focused on critical thinking as a central practice. To distinguish these types  of integration and link them together in this way seems to involve a distinctive emphasis: but still, the practices of meditation and the arts themselves are widely recognised as beneficial in all sorts of ways.Desire meaning and belief stacked venn I have been thinking more recently of the third area as one on which I need to focus, because, although it has all kinds of links to academic practice, it is rarely either seen as integrative or linked effectively to the other types of integration. Instead, the habit of many people seems to be to fence these areas off as ‘intellectual’ concerns of interest only to a minority of boffins. The whole area of working with awareness of our beliefs and judgements, perhaps, needs a re-presentation.

Lately I have hit on a label for the whole enterprise that might be helpful in doing this. ‘Critical thinking’ has not really been doing that job well for several reasons. People tend to associate being ‘critical’ with narrowness and negativity, which obscures the ways in which it can help one cultivate the reverse. Critical Thinking courses are also often narrowly focused on the structure of reasoning and mistakes we can make in reasoning: which are good things to study, but they miss out the whole important psychological dimension of the integration of belief. What should we call the whole study and practice of mistakes we make in thinking (not just in ‘reasoning’, but also in our emotional responses and the attention we bring to our judgements)? It has struck me recently that ‘objectivity training’ might be a better term to use for this. The term ‘objectivity’, of course, is also still used by too many philosophers and scientists to mean a God’s eye view or absolute perspective of a kind we can’t have as embodied beings, but surely if it is paired with ‘training’ it’s going to be reasonably obvious that we’re talking about helping people to make incremental progress in avoiding delusion and facing up to conditions?

So how can you train someone to be more objective? By helping them to be aware of the kinds of cognitive errors we are all inclined to make, and helping them to train attention on such errors. That’s never going to provide any guarantee that your judgement is right, but it can help us avoid certain easily identifiable sources of wrongness that we can all easily fall into through lack of attention. If you can avoid the errors, you will then have a more trained judgement, and that will give you a much better probability of making adequate responses to whatever the ‘reality’ we assume to be out there may throw at us.

There’s lots of evidence available of what those errors are, and why human beings generally tend to share them. That evidence comes from both philosophy and psychology, and one of the distinctive things I want to do is to fit the contributions of both these studies together as seamlessly as possible, with Middle way Philosophy as the stitching thread. The kinds of errors we make can be encountered in three categories:

  • Cognitive biases as identified in psychology (or, to be more precise, the elements of cognitive biases that we can do something about, and that are not just unavoidable aspects of the human condition): for example, actor-observer bias or anchoring
  • Fallacies, particularly informal fallacies, as identified in philosophical tradition: for example, ad hominem or ad hoc argument
  • Metaphysical beliefs in dualistic pairs, as recognised and avoided in the Middle Way : for example, realism and idealism, or theism and atheism

In the end I think there is no ultimate distinction between these categories, and they often mark the same kinds of errors that have just been investigated and understood from different standpoints. What I think they have in common is absolutisation: the tendency for the representation of our left brain hemisphere to be accompanied by a belief that it has the whole picture and that no other perspectives are worth considering. We can absolutise a positive claim or a negative claim, but when we do so we repress the alternatives.

For the full argument as to how absolutisation links all these kinds of errors, you’ll have to see my book Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief, which makes the case in detail. However, the main reason for focusing on absolutisation is the practical value of doing so. Objectivity training is a training in bringing greater awareness to spot those absolutisations when they happen, realise they are not the whole story, and open our minds to the alternatives before we make mistakes, entrench ourselves in unnecessary conflict, and fail to solve the problems we encounter due to an inadequate engagement with their conditions.

What does objectivity training actually involve? Well, it’s something I want to focus on developing further and testing out in the next few months or years. Here are the general lines of what I envisage though:

  • Becoming familiar with cognitive biases, fallacies and metaphysical beliefs – not just as isolated abstractions, but in relation to each other
  • Developing understanding of why these errors are a problem for us in practice
  • Becoming familiar with examples of these errors
  • Identifying these cognitive errors in actual individual experience: this might involve reflection on past experience, critical reading and listening, observation of others with feedback, anticipating contexts where errors will take place, development of attention around judgement through trigger points and general use of mindfulness practice.

This is not just ‘logic’: rather it focuses on the assumptions we make. Though some of the mistakes may be identifiable as errors of reasoning, most will not, and part of the problem may well be that our narrow position seems entirely ‘rational’ to us. Nor is it just therapy, though it may have some elements in common with cognitive behavioural therapy. It needs to be an autonomous aspect of individual practice, rather like meditation and mindfulness (with which it needs to have a near-symbiotic relationship).

I think it’s really important that more people in our society learn these kinds of skills. They can be applied to our judgements everywhere: in politics, in business, in personal relationships, in spending judgements as consumers, in scientific judgement, in our attitudes to the environment, in our judgement about the arts, in leadership, in education and so on. In some of these areas, such as environmental judgement, we very urgently need to improve people’s judgement skills.

I think there is huge potential for this type of training, which is why I want to focus on developing it. But the other forms of integrative practice are also very important, which is why I hope that other people will emerge in the society who are able to take more of an effective lead in developing and teaching distinctive Middle Way approaches to meditation and the arts.

New review of ‘Greek Buddha’

Books, Buddhism, History

A new review is now up on this page of an extraordinary new book that turns Buddhism on its head using rigorous historical scholarship.Greek Buddha Beckwith argues that the Buddha taught the Middle Way, not the other elements that have become associated with Buddhism such as the 4 Noble Truths, karma or nirvana. He argues that the Pali Canon is not a reliable source on early Buddhism, but bases his account on a variety of other sources: Greek, Chinese and Persian texts and Indian rock edicts. Though the Middle Way does not depend for its helpfulness on any historical source, this book will nevertheless be of much interest to anyone who is approaching the Middle Way via Buddhism.

‘Middle Way Philosophy’ Omnibus Edition E book now available

Books, Middle Way Philosophy, News

The e-book of the Omnibus Edition of my ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ seriesMWP Omnibus is now available. This includes the full texts of all four volumes of ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ (see the pages for each on books/ Middle Way Philosophy books on the menu above). At £7.50, this ebook is by far the most economical way to access this text, which offers a detailed working-out of this whole approach to philosophy, psychology, desire, meaning, belief, ethics, politics and practice. To purchase a copy please follow this link. In time it will also become available from Apple, Amazon, Kobo etc. As previously posted, it’s also available as a paperback.

Reflections on ‘Narziss and Goldmund’ by Hermann Hesse

Books, Fiction, Literature, The Arts,

‘Narziss and Goldmund’ is a moving, symbolic novel of friendship between a cerebral teacher who becomes a monk (Narziss) and a restless, wandering artist (Goldmund), which in many ways strongly illustrates a process of integration and the Middle Way. Beginning in a cloister when Goldmund is a boy being taught by Narziss, the story unfolds in a medieval context of plague and political instability in an unnamed area of the Holy Roman Empire. But the story is not so much historical romance as fable, and gains greater universality from the relative vagueness of the medieval context. The psychological acuteness of the fable (published in 1959) must owe much to the psychotherapeutic tradition, particularly the world-view of Jung.Narziss and Goldmund

Narziss is a classic left-brain dominant intellectual, a classical scholar familiar with theology and philosophy. However, his abilities in understanding people also seem to have a strong intuitive element, and lead him into positions of teaching and leadership. Goldmund, however, has much stronger right-brain abilities: particularly a capacity to recall images vividly and in great detail. He has physical poise, confidence and resourcefulness, a strong sex drive with accompanying relationship to the archetypal feminine, and an acute sensitivity to suffering. With these strengths come countervailing weaknesses: Narziss, shaped by the monastic environment, lacks the immediate access to love that Goldmund experiences, even though he was himself able to help Goldmund access that capacity for love, through repressed memories of his mother, early in the story. Goldmund, on the other hand, is prone to restlessness and inconsistency: in some ways he is a Romantic figure, drifting around the countryside as a homeless vagrant in pursuit of an elusive fulfilment in freedom from bourgeois commitments.

Just as important as the contrasts between the two friends, however, are the similarities. Both have an openness in their response to experience, and a pragmatic avoidance of dogma in the response to religion. Both (though perhaps in inconsistent ways) ‘believe in’ God, but recognise the imperfection and suffering of the world in a way that helps them avoid any unhelpful expectations of God. Prayer in the context of the cloister is definitely a spiritual practice rather than a demand for revelation or intercession. Both friends also go through an integration process of learning from their experiences – in this respect participating in the great German tradition of the Bildungsroman (novel of education or personal development). Both find creative ways to channel their differing energies in a harsh environment.

The main focus of the novel is on the struggles of Goldmund after he leaves the cloister and thus finishes his formal education, by taking off abruptly into vagrancy. Along the way he seduces a great variety of women, in search not only of pleasure but the fulfilment of his mother archetype. However, whenever he starts to be in a position of settling down, he is either overtaken by restlessness or sabotages his position, by taking great risks in his seduction of forbidden maids or wives.

Goldmund only realises his talent and vocation relatively late – as a wood carver. One day, he is transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary, and then seeks out the carver of that statue, Master Nicholas, in order to beg training or apprenticeship from him. Nicholas is impressed enough by Goldmund’s artistic abilities to support him, but once Goldmund has honed his abilities for a couple of years and produced a superb carving of Narziss (as John the Baptist), his former restlessness and suspicion of bourgeois settlement overcome him again. Despite the honours offered by Master Nicholas, including his daughter’s hand in marriage, Goldmund has to throw up everything he has achieved in the settled life.

After another period of wandering, this time in a country devastated by plague, Goldmund returns to the city where Master Nicholas works. However, this time he encounters Narziss, who has been elevated to abbot of the monastery in which Goldmund was originally educated, but manages to save Goldmund from capital punishment after he has been caught fleeing from a rendezvous with the mistress of the ruler of the city. Having deep insights into Goldmund’s abilities and worth despite the vagrant and even criminal path he has sometimes taken, Narziss takes Goldmund back to the monastery and sets him up again with a workshop, where he once more starts to produce outstanding carvings. Now, too, Goldmund begins to recognise the limitations created by the indiscipline of his life, and begins to learn and appreciate religious practice. But once again, after a while, he becomes restless and goes wandering one more time – this time for the last time.

This novel reflects important aspects of the Middle Way in several respects. Although set in medieval Germany and taking a Christian context for granted, it shows how that context can be used for integrative growth drawing on its spiritual and artistic traditions. This illustrates the potential dynamism that was still present in European societies during the Middle Ages, despite what may now seem to us as deeply dogmatic assumptions and crudity of belief. More importantly, though, the novel shows the growth of two related individuals through a friendship in which each recognises strengths in the other that they themselves lack. Rather than merely defending the interpretation of experience that each may have arrived at by temperament, each draws on the others’ experience and insight, learning with great difficulty how conditions extend beyond the world each most easily believed in. Each avoids either absolutising the beliefs he has arrived at, or on the other hand failing to place confidence in the experience that has helped him reach the approach to life he has developed.

We all may identify a Narziss and a Goldmund within us, because we all have a left brain and a right brain. Though more like Narziss myself, I could also identify with Goldmund’s Romantic restlessness. In the end, unfortunately, the integrative progress that Goldmund makes did not seem to be sufficient, and there is another strength of the book. Despite showing the process of integration for both characters, it avoids easy resolutions on the strength of that integration. Instead it leaves us with a sense of the possibility of progress, yes, but only one tapering into uncertainty. To apply my accustomed language about the different types of integration, Goldmund’s integration remains temporary and asymmetrical because he integrates meaning without really integrating his beliefs (and thus is unable to entirely curb his self-destructive tendencies). Narziss’s integration is more stable because it is so much based on integration of belief, but the philosopher’s tendency to assume certain meanings as the basis of reasoning rather than explore new ones also creates an asymmetry in his integration.

Perhaps the Jungian kind of psychological acuity in Hermann Hesse’s work may now seem a bit dated for some, but to me it seems well worth rediscovering. The integration (and conflict) of the individual is a theme that German literature has particularly pursued, through figures such as Goethe, Mann and Hesse. In English literature that same theme was taken up by George Eliot, who was much inspired by Goethe. If one is looking for a stream of artistic achievement with a particularly strong relationship to the Middle Way, this seems like one well worth following as a source of inspiration.