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Stephen Batchelor: Buddha, Socrates and Us

Stephen Batchelor: Buddha, Socrates and Us

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 Stephen Batchelor is a writer, teacher, and former Buddhist monk known for his contemporary, secular approach to the Buddhist teachings. A longtime critic of traditional metaphysics in religion and philosophy, Batchelor reimagines Buddhism as a philosophy of life grounded in finite human lives of uncertainty and creative freedom. His widely influential books—including Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Art of Solitude—suggest contemporary ways of living grounded in personal autonomy and the acceptance of inevitable human uncertainty. In today’s conversation we explore his latest book Buddha, Socrates, and Us and how ancient wisdom from both India and Greece might open insights for our 21st century lives.We offer the vast majority of our work on Fire Philosophy for free. If you find it of value, please share it with your friends and consider practicing the art of generosity and supporting our work with a paid subscription. 🙏Conversation Highlights How did the ancient Greeks address the question of suffering, which is arguably the preeminent starting point for the whole Buddhist endeavor? And yet Plato doesn't talk about suffering at all, only once I think it's mentioned.  It occurred to me then that if I had been an Indian and a student of the Buddha in the early years of his teaching, and if for some reason I then found myself all the way over in the west, in the city of Athens, how would I have understood how this community, which clearly had very deep philosophical inquiry going on, would have addressed the issue of suffering? So you have these two figures both alive at the same time. They clearly didn't know about each other and yet I found increasingly resonances between them. Of course this depends on how you read the Buddha… But I think my real thesis isn’t derived from a historical comparison, which is frankly, not really my forte. I'm not a historian. But really what I wanted to keep asking myself was: What do these two men who, especially the ideas they hold in common, what do they have to say to us now?  Both Socrates and the Buddha put metaphysics to one side very clearly, although the later traditions of course, revived it all. But the fact is they quite clearly had no real time for these kind of abstract philosophical questions. They were interested exclusively in how to live well. For the Buddha this manifests most explicitly in his four tasks, the last of which is to cultivate a way of life that incorporates the totality of our humanity.  And for Socrates, his questions were primarily about what does it mean to live a good life? What does justice mean? What does courage mean? What does piety mean?  We want things to be organized. We want certainty, we want clarity. We want reason. And anything that somehow threatens that gets marginalized and put to one side. We don't want quirky human beings. We want saints, we want quasi perfect individuals who somehow embody all the virtues that they speak of. I hope in our contemporary world, [with] our much greater focus on being somehow truthful and realistic, that we might be able to overcome that tendency.  I think that [lack of explicit thinking about war] leaves the Buddhist community largely powerless in engaging effectively with conflicts such as those that we're experiencing in our world today. And that's troubled me to some extent. Whereas Socrates is able to uphold the same basic virtues—he's applying the same kind of rigorous critique to other forms of thinking; he's clearly a man of enormous integrity. And yet he also recognizes that he has a duty as a member of his society to defend it if it comes under threat. And Buddhists do the same, but they have no real theory or view that somehow makes that behavior in accord with the needs of the society at that time. Probably in both cases these men were seen as troublemakers and both died shortly after they were denounced at Democratic assemblies— the Buddha, probably a year or so after the denunciation and Socrates about a month after his trial. And that suggests to me that neither of these men were people who made other people feel comfortable. I think they were both disquieting and I think you get that very much in Buddhism: its critique of the self and its emphasis on impermanence and contingency and change. So many of those core teachings are effectively dismantling the notion that there is any hope of a kind of final certainty as to what you should do and how you should live.  I would encourage young people to always think for themselves; to become freethinking, rational, autonomous, ethical beings. And that is the message I hope to get through in what I've written in this book. Autonomy is absolutely central. And I do think the great threat of social media is that it compromises our autonomy. We become so dazed and dazzled by these media that we really lose the capacity to really think for ourselves. Everything's moving so fast, we don't have the time to...
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