Embracing Existential Doubt and Uncertainty for Ethical Living
TL;DR
- Cultivating existential doubt, rather than mere skepticism, fosters a deeper engagement with life's fundamental questions by making existence itself a personal inquiry.
- Embracing life and suffering as the first task involves affirming reality without resignation, establishing a foundation for more appropriate and effective responses.
- Letting reactivity be, the second task, means observing emotions like anger without repression or entanglement, allowing them to naturally fade and creating space for mindful awareness.
- Dwelling in a non-reactive space, the third task, cultivates inner peace and transforms perception, revealing life's richness and wonder by quieting the mind's chatter.
- An ethics of risk, acknowledging that judgments and choices are inherently uncertain, encourages learning from mistakes and fosters a more adaptable approach to complex situations.
- The tension between justice (valuing certainty) and care (valuing uncertainty) highlights how situational, compassionate responses can be more effective than rigid adherence to abstract rules.
- Opinionatedness in politics is a reactive state that traps individuals, hindering dialogue and requiring a conscious effort to live more lightly with convictions and maintain curiosity.
Deep Dive
The core argument is that cultivating doubt and embracing uncertainty are essential practices for ethical living, particularly in navigating complex political and personal landscapes. This approach, drawing from Buddhist and Socratic traditions, offers a path beyond rigid certainty and reactive thinking, fostering greater curiosity, empathy, and nuanced judgment. The implications are profound, suggesting a fundamental shift in how individuals and societies can engage with disagreement, suffering, and the inherent unknowability of life.
The practice of repeatedly asking "What is this?" or embracing existential doubt, as explored by Stephen Batchelor, moves beyond intellectual curiosity to an embodied experience of wonder and perplexity. This process, initially challenging, quiets the mind's tendency to grasp for fixed answers, revealing a deeper, more present awareness of existence. The second-order implication is a profound shift in one's relationship with life; the world and its inhabitants are no longer taken for granted but are approached with a sense of strangeness and attentiveness, fostering a more nurturing connection. This embodied questioning provides a framework for thinking that is grounded rather than purely cerebral, allowing for more authentic responses to situations.
Batchelor outlines a four-task framework for ethical living: embracing life and suffering, allowing reactivity to be, dwelling in non-reactive space, and cultivating a path. The critical implication lies in the third task, dwelling in non-reactivity, which is not about emotional suppression or avoidance, but rather about creating a calm, centered internal state. This non-reactive space, often experienced fleetingly in everyday activities, transforms perception, making the world appear more vivid and rich. The fourth task then becomes about leveraging this inner peace to make more effective, value-aligned judgments and choices, recognizing that these decisions are inherently risky and require continuous learning from their consequences. The danger of spiritual practices is their potential misuse as a strategy for avoidance; however, Batchelor emphasizes that the goal is not blissful equilibrium but enhanced capacity to respond effectively to the world's suffering.
In political discourse, this framework challenges the prevailing "opinionatedness," which is characterized as a reactive state that traps individuals in rigid views. Batchelor contrasts an ethics of justice, which treasures certainty and abstract rules, with an ethics of care, which treasures uncertainty and situational responsiveness. The former can be rigid and cruel, while the latter prioritizes minimizing suffering and responding with love and compassion to the unique circumstances of individuals. The implication for politics is significant: maintaining a degree of self-doubt, an "inch of light between you and your certainty," is crucial for fostering curiosity and enabling genuine dialogue across differing perspectives. This is where the Socratic method, with its relentless probing and acknowledgment of not knowing, becomes a valuable model for navigating political disagreements and reducing polarization.
Ultimately, embracing uncertainty and doubt is not about discomfort but about enlivening one's experience of life and fostering a culture of tolerance. By releasing the grip on absolute certainties, individuals can allow for greater openness to diverse viewpoints and navigate the world with a more profound sense of connection and ethical responsibility. This approach suggests that true ethical living is an ongoing, open-ended practice, a continuous process of waking up rather than a destination of final enlightenment.
Action Items
- Audit personal assumptions: Identify 3 core beliefs and question their certainty using Socratic probing (ref: Buddha, Socrates, and Us).
- Create a "What is this?" practice: Dedicate 5 minutes daily to pause and question immediate sensations or thoughts to foster curiosity.
- Draft a "Four Tasks" reflection: For 2-3 recurring reactive patterns, document the situation, initial reaction, and non-reactive alternative.
- Measure opinion flexibility: Track 3-5 instances where personal opinions shifted after engaging with differing viewpoints.
Key Quotes
"I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices. One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?”"
Ezra Klein explains that he prefers to focus on personal practices and intentions at the start of the year rather than traditional resolutions. He introduces the practice of repeatedly asking "What is this?" as a central theme for his personal work and for the episode.
"Stephen Batchelor’s latest book, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times,” explores those dimensions of doubt more fully. And so I wanted to have him on the show to discuss the virtues of both certainty and uncertainty, the difficulty of living both ethically and openly."
Ezra Klein highlights Stephen Batchelor's book and his intention to discuss the balance between certainty and uncertainty. This frames the conversation around ethical living in a world that is inherently unpredictable.
"Initially, of course, the mind comes up with all kinds of clever answers, but after a while, hour after hour after hour, the mind kind of gives up, and you find yourself actually in a state of puzzlement, curiosity, wonder, perplexity, in which a lot of my knowledge of Buddhism was just gently put to one side."
Stephen Batchelor describes the initial stages of his intensive meditation practice, where the mind initially resists by offering intellectual answers. He explains that over time, this mental resistance dissolves, leading to a state of genuine wonder and a detachment from prior knowledge.
"A very good way of summing this all up is an aphorism that we find in Zen Buddhism: Great doubt, great awakening; little doubt, little awakening; no doubt, no awakening."
Stephen Batchelor introduces a Zen Buddhist aphorism that directly links the depth of doubt to the potential for profound understanding or awakening. This highlights doubt not as a negative state, but as a catalyst for growth.
"I find doubt to be a very healthy and very difficult emotion to cultivate in my meditation practice, in my politics. I think people often hear it as skepticism, which can also be good, but can also be negative, practically only externally directed."
Ezra Klein expresses his view that doubt is a valuable, albeit challenging, practice in both meditation and politics. He distinguishes this productive doubt from skepticism, which he suggests can be externally focused and potentially negative.
"I mean, doubt, even in Zen Buddhism, is understood to have two quite separate meanings. There's the doubt that actually inhibits you from doing anything... but rather a quality of doubt that somehow lies at a much deeper place within your experience. I might call it an existential doubt."
Stephen Batchelor clarifies that "doubt" can have different meanings, distinguishing between inhibiting doubt and a deeper, existential doubt. He defines this existential doubt as an uncertainty about fundamental life questions, rather than a hesitation to act.
"Justice, which you say treasures certainty, and care, which treasures uncertainty. That's right. Talk me through that."
Ezra Klein prompts Stephen Batchelor to explain the distinction between justice, which relies on certainty, and care, which thrives on uncertainty. This sets up a discussion about different ethical frameworks.
"I think of this as an ethics of risk, and accepting the fact that it's a risk, but it's important to learn from the mistakes you make... we make mistakes, we're fallible... so it's an ongoing practice."
Stephen Batchelor describes his ethical framework as an "ethics of risk," emphasizing the inevitability of making mistakes and the importance of learning from them. He frames ethical living not as achieving perfection, but as a continuous, fallible practice.
Resources
External Resources
Books
- "What is This" by Stephen and Martine Batchelor - Mentioned as a book detailing a Zen meditation retreat focused on the question "what is this."
- "Buddhism, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times" by Stephen Batchelor - Mentioned as Batchelor's latest book exploring doubt, Socratic questioning, and the wisdom of Buddhist and Hellenistic philosophy.
- "Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises" by Jonathan Blay and Niels Gilman - Recommended for its reflection on imagining governance beyond the nation-state to address global issues like climate change.
- "Work Like a Monk: How to Connect, Lead, and Grow in a Noisy World" by Shokei Matsumoto - Recommended as a down-to-earth book based on a hypothetical conversation between a business person and a Japanese Pure Land priest.
- "The Second Body" by Daisy Hildyard - Recommended as an essay exploring the concept of a "second body" that extends beyond one's physical self to encompass global impacts, such as waste production and labor conditions.
Articles & Papers
- Religious Landscape Study (Pew Research Center) - Mentioned as a comprehensive study providing data on religious beliefs, practices, and identities in America since 2007.
People
- Stephen Batchelor - Guest, author of books on Buddhism and meditation, discussed in relation to his practices of sitting with doubt and uncertainty.
- Martine Batchelor - Co-author with Stephen Batchelor on "What is This."
- Socrates - Referenced for his method of relentless probing and questioning, embodying an ethics of uncertainty.
- Voltaire - Quoted on the discomfort of uncertainty versus the stupidity of certainty.
- Carol Gilligan - Feminist ethicist whose work on the distinction between justice and care was influential in the discussion.
- Jonathan Blay - Co-author of "Children of a Modest Star."
- Niels Gilman - Co-author of "Children of a Modest Star."
- Shokei Matsumoto - Friend of Stephen Batchelor and author of "Work Like a Monk."
- Daisy Hildyard - English novelist and author of "The Second Body."
Organizations & Institutions
- Betterment - Mentioned as an automated tool for growing wealth and saving on taxes, with a paid client ad.
- Pew Research Center - Sponsor of the podcast, mentioned for its Religious Landscape Study.
- The New York Times - Mentioned in relation to its video content and its "Well" section, emphasizing journalistic standards in health and wellness reporting.
Other Resources
- Zen meditation - Discussed as a practice involving the question "what is this" to foster wonder and curiosity.
- Socratic questioning - Referenced as a tradition of doubt explored in Stephen Batchelor's work.
- Four Tasks (Buddhist teaching) - Outlined as a framework for understanding Buddhist teachings: embracing suffering, letting reactivity be, dwelling in non-reactive space, and cultivating a way of life.
- Cognitive estrangement - A concept from science fiction mentioned as a way to gain a new perspective on the world.
- Ethics of Care - A feminist ethical framework that treasures uncertainty and situational responses.
- Subsidiarity - A political concept suggesting nested areas of responsibility, mentioned in relation to "Children of a Modest Star."
- Dharma - The Buddhist teaching, referred to in the context of the Four Tasks.
- Nirvana - Discussed in relation to non-reactivity and the goal of Buddhist practice.