Absolutization and the power of synthesis: Interview with Robert M. Ellis, PhD.

 

I am delighted to have Robert M. Ellis, author and founder of the Middle Way Society again for a second conversation. This time, we will focus on his upcoming book "Absolutization: The source of Dogma, Repression and Conflict" which will be available in 2022, published by Equinox. I offered Robert some comments for his book while it was in edition, and I was impressed by its scope and how he traces the phenomenon of absolutization through different angles and formulations. Enjoy the interview.

- Please tell us a bit about your upcoming book on absolutization and why you selected and focused on this topic.

-I’ve been working for around twenty years on the Middle Way as a universal practical principle of judgement that we can live our lives by. The basic model, or metaphor, involved in the Middle Way is that of navigating between extremes. However, to understand this, one needs to understand the nature of the extremes that we are trying to avoid. They are not necessarily the same as what people would conventionally identify as ‘extreme’ morally or politically, because conventional judgements about these things are often just reactions to what is not generally approved in one’s own society – this can change, and varies a lot between different cultures. Absolutization is the best term I have arrived at to label the extremes we need to avoid in order to follow the Middle Way. The Middle Way lies between absolutes, because absolutizations come in binary pairs that are opposed to each other. We constantly encounter such absolutizations when we make judgements about our lives or the world around us, from the identification of small objects through to life-changing personal decisions. We can make better, more adequate judgements when we avoid them by not getting caught up in the binary opposition they create.

My new book about absolutization (due out in Sept 2022) is the first of a series on Middle Way Philosophy to be published by Equinox. I’m starting with this topic, because in order to develop an understanding of the path, we need to start with the extremes that define it before going onto other more positive aspects of it. I’ve also realized that clarifying the nature of absolutization is the key to understanding what is distinctive about the Middle Way, so that we understand it in our own experience but also see its full scope and importance. The book presents various different dimensions of absolutization that can each be most easily understood from slightly different angles or backgrounds, but to get a distinctive understanding of absolutization they need to be seen together in relation to each other.

-How would you define absolutization? What is the importance of this phenomenon for human experience and practice?

My accessible short definition is that absolutization is the assumption that we have the whole story. In other words, when you make a judgement, if you do so in the belief that this must be the correct judgement, and that you have taken everything into account that you need to take into account, then you are absolutizing. That could either involve a momentary forgetting, or a longer term failure to acknowledge, our limitations as finite creatures with limited senses, limited minds, a limiting location and a constraining culture. There’s a great deal we don’t know – in fact I’d say that we don’t ‘know’ anything in the strict propositional sense of ‘know’, but we have great difficulty remembering this point or following through its implications when we make judgements. That’s not just a philosophical point, but a matter of our neural and psychological states whenever we make judgements. Whenever we forget this limitation, we are absolutizing.

This is obviously of huge importance for us, because it’s the working ground of our lives. Our judgements, and whether they are absolutized or not, makes a crucial difference to how we develop as individuals, how we interact with others, whether we understand and benefit from what education or research can offer us, what sorts of societies we create, and how we treat the ecosystems we are part of. If there were not differential outcomes – that is, if we could not practise so as to avoid absolutization – then it would be of less interest. However, given that we are constantly making judgements, and that each judgement can potentially either be absolutized or be provisional (with nothing inevitable about it), it is of crucial moral importance that we understand absolutization and work to avoid it. Indeed, I’d suggest that this is the whole basis of ethics and responsibility, in all the different ways we apply it. The reasons for taking it seriously and seeking to understand it are totally practical.

- In the book, it is clear that you nourish your understanding of absolutization from different traditions of thought and science, such as Buddhism, neuroscience, psychology and systems theory. Why is a multidisciplinary approach to absolutization desirable?

In my work on this topic, it’s become increasingly clear to me that one of the ways we absolutize is by assuming that a specialized view of something is sufficient – when actually it’s part of a complex system that can be understood in many ways from different angles. Obviously, some degree of specialization makes things more efficient, whether in a factory or a university, but the problem with the way that academic thinking has been shaped in the last 100 years or so is that it’s become over-specialized, to the extent that different specialists working on what are basically the same complex phenomena don’t usually understand each others’ perspectives. This has been especially negative in its effects where the human mind and its judgements are concerned. In this area, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, systems theorists, Buddhists and Christians (for instance) can all be talking about the same things from different points of view, but because they are using different language and don’t interact sufficiently, they often don’t even realize that they are doing so. 

What I call absolutization can also be called (for instance) metaphysics, dogma, bias, conflict, over-dominance of the left pre-frontal cortex, representationalism, reinforcing feedback loops, proliferation, delusion, or evil. Just to mention such a list in one sentence may puzzle your readers – what do all these things have to do with each other? We are so used to thinking about them in totally different terms from each other. However, they can all be understood as rigidity of judgement, caught in a state where we think we have the whole story. The culture of over-specialization needs to be severely challenged, if we are to make progress in seeing the relationships between all these perspectives that we have unnecessarily separated, and pool their insights.

-How important is synthesis for you as a method? What is your diagnosis of the use of synthetic thinking in science and philosophy in the West?

Synthesis is basically how I work, or at least what I have to offer most distinctively as a writer or a philosopher. Of course, I also do analysis in the context of synthesis, but in a world with too much analysis and not enough synthesis, I try to focus more on synthesis.

We have too little synthesis because of the long-term effects of over-specialization, and – partly as a result of this – because education in synthesis, and effective methods of synthesis in philosophy or other theory, are insufficiently developed. The most effective synthesis is critical, using the perspectives of different approaches to question each others’ assumptions, and provisional, being prepared to constantly re-formulate in response to critical feedback. Criticality and provisionality, though, are also synthetic processes, because they demand simultaneous awareness of different perspectives seen in relation to each other, not just set routines of questioning. 

Philosophy is the subject where you would normally expect synthesis of other subjects to take place, but the very place where it usually doesn’t, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, which is rightly called ‘analytic’ philosophy. People get it trained out of them at least by graduate level, where they are drilled into the assumption that synthetic theory must be either speculative or vacuously uninformative, so they don’t learn to do synthesis well and to combine it with analysis appropriately. Instead, they simply analyse the implications of a particular (often mainstream) perspective, so are unable to question the assumptions of that perspective in the light of alternatives. Even in the Continental tradition of philosophy, where some types of synthesis do take place, I often feel that there is little development of the skills of doing it well with adequate criticality and provisionality. Then there is systems theory, which is trying to do the synthetic job that philosophy is failing to do, but often not applying the available philosophical skills to that task. The philosophers and systems theorists largely seem to ignore each other, with a few notable exceptions.

On the individual level, there are a few individuals who have managed to do notable synthetic work. Iain McGilchrist is, for me, probably the most outstanding of those figures. Most academics, however, will only be allowed by their professional environments to write synthetically at the end of a long and distinguished career in a specialism, by which time the limiting assumptions of that specialism have taken root intractably. Much supposedly inter-disciplinary work in universities also turns out not to be critical or provisional enough, but to be largely based on the assumptions of the social sciences. The world is full of creative thinkers who could be trained up to do good synthetic work if the academic world took them seriously enough, but they don’t – so of course they do their own thing on the internet and become cranks, perhaps with sporadic insights, but without rigour.

-In which respects is synthetic thinking different from analytic thinking? Does it require a different attitude towards theorizing?

In short, synthetic thinking brings things together, whilst analytic thinking pulls them apart. That means that synthetic thinking is creative, because it combines elements of meaning in new ways. Analytic thinking, however, is not creative, because it takes its starting point for granted and then investigates its components, without having any other standpoint from which to question that starting point. Once you have a creative theory, then you need to use analysis, of course, to test its consistency. However, the most important tests to help us justify or reject a theory  are those that relate it to experience – which involves synthesis, not analysis. There is thus a synthetic element in science, but it is usually restricted to the comparison of data with theory, rather than the comparison of theories. 

I would see the standpoint of human experience as being basically a synthetic one, because whenever we are open to learning from experience we have to synthesise that experience with our existing beliefs. Helpful philosophical synthesis as I see it is basically an extension of that process, investigating how well different theoretical views relate to the standpoint of experience. However, synthesis can only work in that helpful way as long as it remains provisional, and does not get caught up in the self-certifying purely abstract processes typical of absolutization. So it’s really impossible to separate the wider question of why synthesis is so important, and why I approach my work with synthesis, from the question of how absolutization is so damaging to us, and the way that provisionality offers an alternative to it.