Review of ‘The Art of Solitude’ by Stephen Batchelor (Yale University Press, 2020), by Robert M. Ellis

In his recent short talk at the Arts Symposium at the Virtual Festival of the Middle Way, Stephen Batchelor described himself as an “artist manqué” (with the confident articulation of “manqué” one would expect from a fluent French speaker). He portrayed himself as someone who might have been an artist, but somehow ended up as a Buddhist writer instead. On reading this book, however, I wasn’t so sure about the “manqué”. This book is a piece of art, and best regarded as such, clearly created by an artist. If I read it as a piece of philosophy, even of an entirely practical kind, then I feel it has a lot of weaknesses, which resemble those in his previous books: Batchelor does not elaborate, justify or question his claims very much. However, if I read this book primarily as a work of art, I find it both inspiring and satisfying in other ways. It communicates Batchelor’s experience at the front line of practice with vividness and well-honed selectivity, putting together a set of tableaux in an arrangement of great elegance.

I won’t attempt to repeat here Stephen’s explanation of the ‘collage’ arrangement of the different elements of the book, which he provides both in the Arts Symposium talk, and (in a slightly different form) in the podcast he did with Barry about the book. The main thing to note is that the arrangement of the book is very deliberate, with interwoven themes around the topic of solitude. There are discussions of his experiences of solitude (such as solitary retreats), of his ongoing experiences of meditation, of taking ayahuasca, of artists, of experiences of Asian Buddhism, of the Buddha, and of the life and writings of Montaigne. These give us different experiential angles, not just on people who happen to be alone, but on the art of solitude, which comes down to the practice of working with one’s own states without reactivity. One does not necessarily have to be literally alone to practise this art.

A recurrent theme is also the “Four Eights” a section from the Sutta Nipata of the Pali Canon, which Stephen believes to be one of the oldest and most authentic Buddhist texts, taking one to the heart of Buddhism’s practical insights in a way free of later accretions. Batchelor offers his own translation of this in the appendix. So in some ways, this is a kind of free-wheeling experiential commentary on a Buddhist text. But this is another strand woven into the art, rather than anything one would normally expect in a scholarly commentary.

I think that the parts of this book that I found most rewarding were the ones that engaged most with difficulties in Stephen’s experience. Towards the end, for instance, he is movingly candid about how mixed his experience of meditation is. He sees meditation, not as an end in itself, but as cultivating a sensibility that “encompasses mindfulness, curiosity, understanding, collectedness, compassion, equanimity, care”. “Each of these,” he goes on, “can be cultivated and refined in solitude but has little value if it cannot survive the fraught encounter with others” (p.140-1). I find here a sane, mature voice who uses meditation in the Middle Way – avoiding the absolutisation of any one particular practice as a panacea, and starting from where he is every time.

The sections on his experiences with ayahuasca were ones I had more mixed feelings about. Although they were certainly very authentic as autobiography, they seemed to have a less clear relationship to the overall theme of the practice of solitude. We have several scenes of Batchelor taking ayahuasca in a sacralised shamanic context, feeling terrible, vomiting and eventually feeling purged. This left me with considerable doubts about how much the experience had actually been of spiritual value, even though I appreciated the candour with which the story was told. Some commentators, such as Brad Warner, have reacted rather puritanically to this, and interpreted it as an implicit encouragement to drug taking. However, that seems to me to involve rather a superficial reading of what Batchelor has actually written (indeed, I don’t think Warner has actually read the book). If anything, I found the account very off-putting, and it did not encourage me to try ayahuasca at all. Even if others are lured by the prospect of vomiting ‘purgatives’ more than I am, it seems most unlikely that they will want to do it too often. 

Stephen is also very aware of the moral ambiguities of what he is doing. At one point (p.144), he confesses that a friend has died from an overdose of an opioid, and he worries lest he has implicitly contributed to this through his liberal attitude to drugs. I can very much respect that moral frankness. Batchelor recognises fully that we make our moral choices in a position of uncertainty, and that there is little point in hindsight condemnation. In that position of uncertainty, it is not obvious that taking all recreational (or ‘medicinal’) drugs is always wrong, but he does not underplay the risks, nor advocate it for anyone else.

So, my doubts about the ayahuasca sections of the book are not so much moral as artistic. I’m not entirely convinced that they fit into the book as well as the other elements, or that taking ayahuasca is really part of the art of solitude he wants to depict. From a moral point of view, I was much more disturbed by the approach to some of the material about Montaigne.

Some of the material about Montaigne consists of extended quotations from Montaigne himself, an early modern French Pyrrhonist who made great use of solitude, self-confined to his tower in southern France. Montaigne certainly had impressive levels of self-awareness, and managed to combine the art of solitude with a public role as Mayor of Bordeaux. There are traces of the Middle Way in Montaigne, both in his full recognition of uncertainty and in the way he tries to work effectively with limiting conditions. “The soul’s greatness lies not so much in reaching lofty heights and making progress as in knowing and respecting its range” he says (p.62).

However, Montaigne was also a man of his time, who managed to combine Pyrrhonism with devout acceptance of the doctrines of the Catholic Church. This reflects a common pattern of response to sceptical argument during the Renaissance period (also found in Erasmus), that is politically and religiously quietist. Because we are uncertain, therefore “we need to be guided in our behaviour by the customs and traditions of our time and place” (p.126). This interpretation also fits what we know of ancient Greek Pyrrhonism, but is in stark contrast to any understanding of the Middle Way that takes scientific method or democratic governance seriously, and that appreciates what these post-Renaissance innovations have done to help us address conditions. In scientific method and democracy, we advance through provisional beliefs that are open to question and may be contested rigorously, but that nevertheless may be held with a justifiable confidence that is not absolute.

Batchelor, however, quotes Montaigne as saying “it is highly doubtful whether any obvious benefit can come from changing an established law, whatever it may be, compared with the evil of contesting it”. He does so without any evaluative comment, but the very fact that he refrains from any attempt to put this in context or to evaluate it, itself has unavoidable moral implications that were far more problematic for me than the ones around drug-taking, because much more far-reaching. One implication of sceptical argument, in my view, is clearly that there can be no absolute boundary between description and prescription. If you quote something in a general context of approval, you can hardly object if people interpret you as advocating it. But the implications of agreeing with Montaigne on this point would be profound: we apparently shouldn’t risk questioning, for instance, racist laws such as those established in Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa. Nor should we try to upset the legal status quo that enables accelerating climate change, despite the threat to the entirety of human civilisation that it brings with it. I doubt if Batchelor intended to imply this, but I’m frustrated by his apparent avoidance of the moral requirement to give things a critical context when they need it.

This draws attention to some of the ways that the ‘art of solitude’ is the Middle Way, but that anyone who writes about it can hardly avoid some of the central issues around what the Middle Way consists in. Literally being alone can be of enormous value if we are able to use that aloneness to control our reactivity or absolutisation, and thus develop our overall awareness free of group pressures. Stephen recognises that we can’t entirely leave those group expectations behind, in the sense that our solitude still occurs in the wider context of society. However, the Pyrrhonist attitude of quietism goes further than that, by assuming that there can be no such thing as a creative intervention in society or politics, and thus making solitude limited in value to the individual considered in isolation. The possibility of provisionality, as we find it developed in the best scientific and democratic discourse, adds a helpful and empowering dimension to the Middle Way that I simply don’t find either in the traditional Buddhist sources, the classical Greek sources, or indeed Renaissance sources. If solitude enables provisionality, it can be a powerful force for good in wider society, but not if it merely promotes quietism.

Stephen has promised a second book, similarly patterned, in which he considers our relationship to others, as a follow up. I look forward to that, but I also hope that he will take the opportunity in that to engage with some of these issues more decisively. He does not necessarily need to break the overall artistic power of the medium he is using to do that: just, I think, add a bit more of a responsible critical frame in those chapters where he engages with what are unavoidably critical issues.