Again, knowing Mr. Batchelor's methods in the past, and his tendency to twist history and to find doubtful parallels to support the conclusions he desires (that Buddha was primarily an ethics driven rational and worldly figure uninterested in metaphysics), I remain skeptical until I hear what actual historians and philosophy specialists would say regarding his conclusions. So far, I am not finding many reviews, but this one writer offers a counterpoint:
So ... as I seek to remain open minded and rational ... the jury remains out.
Gassho, J
stlah
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. LINK
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. LINK
Gassho, J
stlah
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