The Capitalist Self

Autonomy and the social construction of reality. From Freud I learned about fantasies of omnipotence and primary narcissism - the world and others as extensions of self with no independent value and reality. Autonomy. What Trump does in politics – socially constructs reality to suit his egoism – has been the cultural norm for his class for centuries now. 

    The prototype was Milton’s Satan – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  Acknowledging value in others, in the world – which is to say, acknowledging that something outside the ego is real – limits the ego, which both defines our humanity and must be rejected at all costs by modernity. To violate a forest for profit the self first demeans it: sees it as "raw material" or "natural resources." If the Ukrainians are in Putin's way, his propaganda demeans them as "Nazis." If that vulgar traitor Trump needs to get people hating poor immigrants, he demeans them as "vermin." If a man needs to betray his wife, she gets turned in a means for his happiness that no longer performs her function. I could continue this for the rest of my life without coming to an end.

     Freud might not have described human nature as such, but it certainly seems he captured the nature of men and women in capitalist society. It is curious how philosophers labor to build ego-centered, capitalist man / woman into a metaphysical system – I don’t think that is just an accident. 

    I will end with a thought of Goethe that my students translated today. Here is the German with my translation:

Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrtum nicht, und zwar aus einem einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen sollen, der Irrtum schmeichelt uns, wir seien auf ein oder die andere Weise unbegrenzt.

 

Truth is unnatural for us; falsity is not – and this is for a simple reason: truth forces us to recognize our limits whereas falsity flatters us into believing that we are in some way without limits. 

 

 Human Image, World Image

Metaphysics. I define it like this: that which is beyond the reach of physics, chemistry, or biology because it is about the interpretation of the world – being, reality – as a whole, about who we are and our place in it. It is about our essential relation to other people, nature, the community, and God. What does it all mean? What do particular beings mean? What is reality itself?

 

We all have a metaphysical worldview. You will sometimes hear people say that they have no metaphysics. Well, they are mistaken. Their metaphysics is implicit in what they take for granted about the world. It is so deeply rooted in their everyday lives they are blind to it in the way some people can’t see what is right in front of their nose.

 

Phillip Sherrard. Our picture of ourselves as human beings is part of this. We far too often treat the world and each other with contempt and violence because we have a certain picture of the world. And we have that picture of the world because we have a certain picture of ourselves. That this picture of ourselves is false needs no other demonstration than to look at the fruits of that picture (You know the tree by its fruits. The most profound epistemological principle ever uttered.) To change the way we treat the world and each other – indeed ourselves – we must strive to replace the rotten pictures of ourselves and the world.

 The Self, the Soul, and Human Nature

Aristotelian analogies. The blossom, scientifically, is a means to the end of reproduction. Which means that even for science ‘purpose’ belongs to the natural realm, at least to what is alive. From a perspective within the realm of meaning, however, I hope I may be forgiven for seeing the blossom – or beauty – as the end to which a snowdrop or a daffodil strives. The potential for beauty so apparent that even I can perceive it is contained in the seed of the flower. All kinds of things may prevent the flower from reaching this end – a lawnmower, for example, or a drought. But the potential to reach blossom is essential to the flower, and what a flower is can only be apprehended by the finished product, so to speak.

       Now in this I see a strong analogy between the blossom and the human soul. For the evolutionary reductionist, our inner lives are nothing but an adaption that at one point served the end of reproduction. From within the realm of meaning, the soul is the telos or final purpose of our kind, what makes us human, our essence. From within the realm of meaning, this is the natural order of things. And it is “good, very good.” Aristotle characterized our essence by writing what might be translated as ‘human beings are animals with the potential to reason and understand’ – to grasp the essence of things from a limited point of view. But we are more than creatures blessed with the potential to reason. We are animals with the potential to be souls, and the soul, though it includes the intellect, is more.  

         I don’t care here about any metaphysical belief or theory concerning the soul: whether it is immaterial and immortal, for example, or whether it emerges from the physical body (my view). I’m referring unmetaphysically to that which can show itself in the human face. A soul is just a person insofar as they can love and be loved; insofar as they can respond to and perform acts of justice and mercy; or insofar as they can respond with joy and wonder to beauty and goodness; through the soul, life can be meaningful; we can hope, have faith, and say ‘yes’ to existence insofar as we are in touch with our souls; because we are souls, we grieve when a loved one dies or lost; suffer remorse over evil done. The soul is the self in purity, the self as it should be, stripped of all corruptions and strengthened by the virtues. To ‘lose your soul’ is to be cut off from all love for whatever is ‘other’ to the self, to be so imprisoned in a self that it finally becomes a stranger to the soul. We are, most of us, on the way to our souls; we rarely ever get there. 

As the flower needs earth, water, good weather, the right environment, and sunlight to thrive, the soul needs five connections to blossom:      

• Genuine love as a child (a loving family): Love = "wonderful that you exist"
• Recognition of itself as a soul by other souls, rather than being treated as an object (morality), a product of evolution, a psyche, an identity, or a self. [I confess: "I identify as..." seems a soulless expression to me.]
• Freedom from oppression, corrupting influences (e.g. much social media), and ignorance (a nurturing community that passes on the treasures from the past); a community based on justice, mercy, and truth.
• A place in the world, including the nature and history of that place (roots) that understands itself as part of a common humanity.
• Joy, affirming love, hope, and faith – or the grace to receive a relationship to the mystery of our being (the sacred)

 

The breaking of these essential connections uproots the soul, and the capitalist social form, at least in its present incarnation, breaks these connections as even the much more oppressive regimes in the past could not. I also think to realize our potential and find our meaning we need a lot of luck.

   In fact, I wonder if these conditions have ever been met anywhere? No wonder wherever I look - starting with myself - I see damaged souls struggling to be. That seems to be part of our nature, of part of the human condition: to have to become what we should be under adverse conditions. 

...

I am exploring the "essence" of the idea of the "soul" - not trying to find the right theory. To ask, ‘What is it?’ - What is the soul? - can mean many things, but at the most radical level it involves concept formation. To ask, ‘What is a human being, really?’ is both to ask about what makes possible sense to us in terms of the way we conceptualize ‘human being’ and to ask about the being of this phenomenon. What is it? The answer: everything meaningful that has been said, is being said, or could possibility be said about it in the future, in any form: everyday life, poetry, philosophy, science - whatever. That the answer is a limit you can always only approach, never reach. Reality transcends our ability to make sense of it (I hope). Essence is not a definition. 

.. .

Limits of Philosophy. What is a human being? What is the soul? These are metaphysical questions: science has no more or less to say about them than it does about death or birth, good or evil.

     Metaphysics – like translating a great, indeed the greatest poem ever written: Being. It can only be done from what can be revealed in finite aspects in our particular language and history. The essence of, for example, a tree is far from being definitely given by an Aristotelian definition or a logical definition with necessary and sufficient conditions, however adequate such definitions may be for thinking about reference /extension. All the good poems and stories about trees, the traditional lore about particular trees, the experience of wonder, beauty, or fear, the sense of violation when certain trees or forests are seen as nothing but a ‘natural resource’ – all this and every intelligible use of 'tree' discloses what a tree really is / can be. This is even more true of the soul, a human being. There can never be closure until the human mind is closed.

 

 

 Two Contradictory Pictures of the Self

Think for yourself and the city of Dis. It almost seems, with horrible irony, a cliché: the fully mature human being uses their own understanding to judge how to act, to live, to be. As Kant meant it, that means: accept nothing on authority; reject the authority of parents, teachers, religions, cultures, traditions, the community, the poets, the philosophers, the great books – everything is under suspicion for the mature, enlightened one who uses their own understanding, who needs good reasons, objective evidence, the best ‘rational’ (objective evidence-based) explanation, all subject to the immutable thinking-grammar of logic. If that is what is meant, then I would question whether it is compatible with maturity. It seems more the attitude of the teenager in rebellion.

      In the sense that Kant understood his slogan, I think the perfect image for it is to be found in Dante of all places – in his depiction of the city of Dis and its inhabitants (from the Inferno). Dis as a prefix means 'apart,' 'asunder,' 'away'; it has a privative or reversing force; it can be contraction of 'dives' meaning wealth; it can also refer to a Roman God of the underworld - all these meanings are in play for Dante. 

     Virgil and Dante have passed through the upper circles of Hell where the sinfulness of the various carnal sins is graphically pictured – carnal sins being the terrible addiction to things that are in themselves good (sex, food, wealth), the addiction destroying intellect and love in the person. (Intellect recognizes the true value of these goods and orders one’s life accordingly. Addiction, excessive love for food, sex, or wealth, destroys one’s capacity to love oneself genuinely, to love others, the Creation, and God.) 

      In Dis they confront sinners of a radically different nature: those who actively reject God and any idea of the Good external to their will. All Good, which is to say, all reality for these sinners must be conferred by a private/subjective act of will; nothing is intrinsically good or real. To Virgil’s astonishment, Dis is not a prison for these souls, but a fortress. All their energy is spent keeping God (love, reality, goodness) out! (I learned this from Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining.) 

      Why? Milton’s Satan gives the answer: he “would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven”; “A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.” In other words, Satan will not conform himself to and love any Good, any reality, he did not create himself. But like us, angels cannot create value. The souls are damned precisely because they define themselves as “autonomous,” self-contained. They are utterly deluded in that they see themselves as little absolutes, as gods. 

   We can make a picture of our selves as autonomous, as the source of all value and reality, and thus define ourselves, others, nature, God according to what fits in with our self-image; or we can acknowledge reality and goodness are objective realities not reducible to our self-conceptions (wishes, desires, etc.) and live so as to conform our finite and fallible minds and hearts to reality, to goodness - as parents do everyday when they love and care for their children; as a gardener does when they love and care for their garden; as the language student does when they strive to understand the rules of use of the foreign language; as nurses and doctors do when they assess their patients needs; as the astronomer does when they try to solve the mysteries of the physical universe; as the philosopher does when they contemplate reality as a whole and our place in it; as the theologian does when they attempt to imagine the ungraspable essence of the Divine. In all these cases, from gardener to theologian, being a good one comes from patiently and lovingly attending to a reality that is not reducible to the self; failing is mostly caused by placing one's own self and its wishes over this patient attention to reality. In a way, the main failure is a failure of love. 

You can't be both autonomous and have the humility necessary to search for truth or to do your duty. Don't go to any autonomous doctors. Do let an autonomous teacher teach you. 

   Even the decision what to do with your life is limited by the reality of your self. I was somehow meant to teach. I was not meant to be an engineer. Teaching is a recognition of my own reality, my limits, my gifts (such as they are), my loves. And I did not create myself. The Enlightenment idea that we define our own life purposes, without qualification, makes no sense to me. 

      By making themselves into little absolutes, the autonomous exclude themselves from genuine love, settling for a narcissism that can only be counterfeit. They exclude themselves in their lack of humility from real goodness, from reality itself so as to be the final judge: this for Dante (and I think for all the monotheistic religions) is sin at its most radical. For Kant, and then in a remarkably similar spirit despite the radical differences between them, for Nietzsche, their embrace of autonomy is a function of their rejection of God, in Kant’s case at least as conceived by the great religions.

      If someone asked me whether I affirmed the value of ‘thinking for yourself’ – I would have to say: well, depends on what you mean by that. If you mean conforming your mind and heart to reality, to the truly good, then yes; if you mean what Milton’s Satan meant, then no. And sorting that distinction out is perhaps the first act of thinking for yourself.

Afterthought

Notice how the answers to questions like "What is real?" or "What is good?" or "What can I know?" depend on answers to questions like "What am I?" or "Who am I?" If I reserve to myself the right to determine what is real and good, then I have just made my self or my will to be the only thing that is good per se. I have just taken away from nature or community any intrinsic value. If my self-determination requires me as a farmer to get rich so that others won't look down on me, then I can transform the fertile, sustainable, beautiful farm that I inherited into an agrobusiness nightmare: the farm I inherited, the land, makes no claim on me, if my ego-centered suffering over how other perceive me is the standard for the real and the good. (Of course, that stupid perception and the failure to honor good farming - i.e. to honor what is good - are also responsible for the destruction of the farm.) The point is to recognize the reality of what is other to myself, to acknowledge the claims it makes on me (children!), is already to acknowledge limits to my will, things not are resistant to my will as objects of care. But your self-image, world-image, community-image, God-image (if any) - and much more - are all intertwined. 

A Further Thought on the Self or the Soul

 

I would like to return to this:

 

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes.  Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.

 

It’s hard to untangle sense from nonsense in this passage. The “stable, controlling entity” – part of us – for Plato was Reason, understood as the mind’s ability to see the essence of things in the fleeting, changing stream of consciousness informed as it is by a multiplicity of phenomena. Or to recognize the Good even in the social arena with its many simulacra of Good. My reason blocks out the thought of gaining something by harming another person: of gaining sexual pleasure by betraying my wife, for example. If my reason is in charge, if my mind is in conformity with the moral reality of my situation (with what is Good), then such thoughts, should they occur at all, will weigh nothing. If, however, Reason is not in charge of my self, an inner conflict could occur between Reason wanting to do what is good and appetite – aided by fantasy – wanting immediate pleasure. Or if Reason has not been developed at all in me, then I will be at the mercy of whatever desires happen to arise. These are three very different types of “self.” Or “soul” (psyche).  Plato was a Western thinker. Just one. There are a myriad of interpretations of “soul” or “self” in Western thought. To reduce this complexity to “a stable controlling entity” is silly.

   And what does it mean “the self is an illusion”? An illusion is writing this? Perhaps like my belief that “I” am writing this is like a dream? Perhaps my brain is writing it? Give me a break.

   Of course, our conscious beliefs and pictures of reality can be cut off from reality, can be pure fantasy. We can be in the grip of an ideology making us into compliant tools of the powers that be. We can be in the grip of self-gratifying fantasies that console or make us feel like we are better than someone else. Like the Buddhists, Plato believed that it was difficult to escape such “false consciousness” (Marx’ definition of ideology). To the extent that fantasy or ideology condition our picture of our “selves”, then it makes sense to say that self-image is illusory.

   But to say that all possible conceptions of self are illusions because science proves there can be no such thing as a self at all, deluded or not – that is something else entirely. I have known people in the grip of fantasy, and loved them. I have been in the grip of fantasy and prayed that I might be loved. Obviously, it is not the fantasies of the relentless ego that anyone could find loveable. If there is anything loveable in us, therefore, the illusory self can’t be the whole picture. An illusory self presupposes a self that is not illusory, a true or authentic self. I call that the soul, to distinguish it from the ego. It is what gives sense to the idea that there is something precious in human beings, that even the worst of us is a limit to our wills, can’t be shot down like vermin, for example. It is why parents love children even when the children are driven by fantasy into self-destructive lives. It is what makes the thought they we are loved by God intelligible. It gives sense to the Golden Rule: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” If all of us were just illusions, nothing by computer-like brains processing data in accordance with hardware written by a mindless nature, none of this would make sense.

   That is what we are doing: trying to make sense. When we try to make sense, we are talking about meaning. Meaning, in turn, depends on our deepest pictures of reality as a whole, which further experience may revise. Questions of meaning are not possible questions of science.

A Thought of Iris Murdoch, with Help from Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man is the creature that makes a picture of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. ~ Iris Murdoch.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 These thoughts of Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein have long been in my thoughts. Liberal philosophers posit that man is a possessive individual, a covetous machine. And society gets built according to that picture and people in that society come to resemble it, taking themselves as paradigms of human nature. Christianity made a picture of us as born alienated from God, born guilty sinners deserving of Hell – as babies! (Read Dante’s Inferno or Thomas Aquinas if you don’t believe me) – and low and behold evil becomes a part of our “nature” in a way it never could have for Homer.

   But what interests me most is the fact that we must make pictures of ourselves (and Being, our place in Being) because we cannot know these things as we can know commonsensical or scientifically provable facts. Wittgenstein imagined the world as the set of all facts. ‘My Latin grammar book is on my desk,’ ‘The coffee cup the boys gave me for Father’s Day is on the book,’ ‘The book is green,’ ‘The cup is black’ – etc. ad infinitum. The facts don’t mean anything per se, taken apart from the meanings some of them have in our lives, in our world. In and of itself, the death of the girl Anne Frank on a certain date in a certain place is just as much a fact as the number of hairs on my head or fingers on my hand. As facts, they are equal. If one is more significant, it is not due to its being a fact; it is due to what it means for us. And what it means for us has nothing to do with its being a fact; it has to do with the pictures of the world and ourselves, pictures that are like the light in which we see the fact, in which the fact has meaning (or not). And these pictures differ: for the accursed Nazis, the fact was no more significant than getting rid of one more pest. For anyone whose picture of the world includes the belongingness of a common humanity, the murder of a little girl full of life is an unspeakable evil. But it is not a fact that it is either, at least not in the strict sense. (Truth is deeper than facts.)

    We don’t have a view from nowhere of Being as such. If God were somehow able to mind-meld with us and reveal the absolute truth of everything, we wouldn’t have to make pictures.  We can’t get outside of pictures of the world as such and our place in it to compare them with the world as it is unperceived, undescribed, unconceptualized, uninterpreted – and just think how many there are and have been, and how much incommensurability there is between them. We can’t. And yet we can’t make sense of our lives without some picture of the whole and our place in it. We either see the world, however vaguely or implicitly – as a limited whole interpreted in some way, or with live with absurdity. No, the absurdity becomes the picture we live by.

 

. . .

 

We make pictures of ourselves, too. Strange, since you would think we have private, privileged access to our conscious thoughts and feelings, that thus we would know these even more intimately than any fact. Only I can feel my pain or anger, my pleasures and loves. But just like the facts that make up the world for Wittgenstein, our states of mind only mean anything, perhaps only arise because of the pictures of our Selves and the world that we live by. And these can be very different. We can’t directly observe our self, soul, spirit, ego, subconscious, etc. We can measure brain states but then we just have more facts in the world without significance unless we interpret them.

   A friend sent me this not too long ago.

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes.  Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.  This false sense of self, which is often equated with the incessant internal dialogue, contributes significantly to human mental suffering.

There are two pictures of the self here: the so-called Western picture and the Buddhist picture. The passage asserts that science settles the matter in favor of Buddhism. So there is after all a fact of the matter? One factually true self and a slew of false or illusory pictures?

      That makes no sense at all. I have no idea how neuroscience proves anything, but assume for the sake of argument that neuroscience provides factual evidence to believe “that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality.” That we create narratives – another metaphor, substituting for pictures – is obvious. That a part of our brain is active while people try to interpret reality (everything from the birth of a child to the death of a father, one’s own history and the history of one’s people, etc.) is, well, rather obvious. That’s it’s the left hemisphere – well, interesting for neuroscientists, I guess.

   But brains don’t grieve for loved who have died, feel remorse for evil done, love another human being, leap down on the track to save a stranger, betray a friend; brains don’t try to make sense of life with religion, philosophy, science, literature, or history. People do. Brains don’t interpret reality in the literal sense.

  At most at the perceptual, preconscious level brains “interpret” – though process would be a better word. Our brains receive impulses from the senses and generate conscious images before we ever interpret anything. Our brains perhaps predispose us to conceptualize in basic ways: in time and space, with cause and effect, objects relating to objects in various ways, moving in and out of spaces in one direction or the other. But at the level of self-consciousness, brains don’t interpret, unless you want to say that Romeo didn’t really fall in love with Juliet such that he could not go on living without her was really nothing but a certain empirical, measurable biochemical reaction in the brain. Certainly things were going on in Romeo’s brain as he was falling in love with Juliet and resolving to take his life when he judged her dead. That is just to say that Romeo in not a pure spirit (an angel) or a ghost. But no one could no what the measurement of the brain event meant without knowing what love means, what it is to love someone, and all the implicit interpretations of life that make such a thing intelligible. (If Romeo’s picture or human life saw love as nothing but a biological impulse planted by evolution accompanied by an illusion, he could not have fallen in love and would not have killed himself.) The passage reduces the realm of meaning to the realm of biochemistry. That is not a scientific fact but a picture of the self, one that – in contrast to Buddhism – makes no sense at all to me.

. . .

  My own picture, such as it is, is close to that of Iris Murdoch. I agree

 

that human beings are naturally selfish seems true on the evidence, whenever and wherever we look at them, in spite of a very small number of apparent exceptions. About the quality of this selfishness modern psychology has had something to tell us. The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognize ourselves in this rather depressing description. – Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”

I think this is more a product of social injustice and thus unnatural human life forms than evolution. The form this ego consciousness takes in advanced capitalist societies tends to be narcissism. The idea that the self is like a thing with an unchangeable essence – an ‘identity,’ a what more than a who (I wish to have nothing to do with a person who reduces me to a man, or an American, or as “white” or any other fashionable identity) – is another particular form this narcissism takes. Be that as it may. We are capable of suspending such ego consciousness in a variety of ways: in the contemplation of great art, for example, as Schopenhauer recognized; in the doing of simple duties, as Kant recognized; when we strive for truth, strive to form our minds to something not reducible to our fantasies – even learning a language or math has this good effect; and above all in the many forms love takes – when authentic. As Murdoch wrote:

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

I call the aspect of the self that is capable of truth, of approaching truth, the mind. I call the aspect of the self capable of love the soul. For what it’s worth.

  I will end on another thought of Iris Murdoch:

 

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

 

 

 Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

Two thinkers on religion I find worth reading and thinking about, though not without an alert, critical mind. Here is what they share, I believe:

·         Religion is at bottom an attitude towards life, existence, the universe, reality. ‘Attitude’ in the older sense e.g. a person sitting in a certain attitude, or the attitude of a compass needle – not so much a consciously held attitude / belief. Here is a passage from Wittgenstein that illustrates this: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. . . . .”  The context is being with a person in pain: we respond or automatic ways, given our culturally and biologically deeply ingrained attitudes about what it can mean for a human being to be in pain.

·         A religious attitude is formed around limit experiences and cultural deposits of these: joy over the birth of a child, wonder over the world, terror over death or sudden destruction, despair, deep love, the feeling of being absolutely safe, the inability to believe in utter meaningless, the beauty of a just action, etc. Religious attitudes are those that let affirmation in, even in the face of strong doubt or counter-evidence.

·         A religious attitude is not in the world; it is a light, or a way of seeing the world as a whole – ‘the world of a happy man is different from the world of an unhappy man.’ The world of facts is the same; it is the light in which one sees it that makes the difference. The attitude is like a light – only physical things are reality, but they only have value and meaning – or not – in and through an attitude. An attitude is like a criterion for judging the value and meaning of that which is real.

·         Does the attitude connect with anything outside the mind and the world – ‘anything’ in quotes since we cannot speak of that ‘anything’ in the same sense we speak about anything in the world. Is the light a projection from our deep wishes or is it a leak from another realm (or both)? There is no observer evidence that can be conclusive. It might be wishful thinking, or some evolutionary mechanism, or it might be a leak from another realm. It is deep in one’s inner life that one begins answering this question, and not from a scientific point of view.

·         A religious attitude is bound with ecstasy – literally a standing outside the self, the everyday self of wanting, having, getting, desiring things like money or the pleasures that money can buy; the self that compares itself to other selves and competes for social prestige, etc. From the point of view of the religious attitude, the things valued by the worldly self are qualified, relativized, or devalued. The life of ego consciousness – ‘the fat, relentless ego’ – is seen as inauthentic. A higher self, or soul, takes root in conscious experience. Compassion is central to most religious attitudes – a form of the recognition of the worth and reality of that which is other to the ego.

A Few Quotes from Weil

To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what is relative to the good.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

 End of the Reflection of On Religion: A Dialog

The basic thought I have been exploring, here expressed by thoughts like these:

Philalethes. …the naked truth must be so simple and intelligible that it can be imparted to all in its true form, without any admixture of myth and fable, without disguising it in the form of religion.

Demopheles. You've no notion how stupid most people are.

…

Demopheles.  "Mystery," is in reality only a technical theological term for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. Properly speaking, a mystery is a dogma which is plainly absurd, but which, nevertheless, conceals in itself a lofty truth, and one which by itself would be completely incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding of the raw multitude. The multitude accepts it in this disguise on trust, and believes it, without being led astray by the absurdity of it, which even to its intelligence is obvious; and in this way it participates in the kernel of the matter so far as it is possible for it to do so.

…

Demopheles. How often must I repeat that religion is anything but a pack of lies? It is truth itself, only in a mythical, allegorical vesture. 

 

I have questioned the notion that the pure, plain, abstract, difficult prose of philosophy is radically different from and superior to myth, religion, and art when it comes to expressing metaphysical truth i.e. a view of Being as a whole or true Being as it is in itself, which is transcendent to us at least because of our dependence on sense perception and limited conceptual thinking. If there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than our sensory perception and intellect can know and/or express in language – which is possible; we may be like dogs watching TV, metaphysically speaking – then philosophy has no privileged position vis-à-vis myth, art, or religion.

      The only access to a dimension of Being that we are cognitively cut off from could be non-cognitive: a set of possible sublime experiences – our ego life is suspended momentarily, there is an eclipse of desire, of ego, our hidden spiritual antenna is activated; and we are afforded a glimpse, an intimation of the world sub species Aeternitas, from the perspective of eternity. It can come from a crisis in your life, and its resolution: 'unless something like this is true, the whole world would be a mistake,' one might think.

      We experience the sublime. Such experiences can always be counterfeit. Such experiences may be powerful illusions born of desire, fear, or religious longing (Sehnsucht), if the world is nothing but what our science says it is. Such experiences can be like receiving something of a leak from a dimension of nature our everyday experience cuts us off from. If so, we cannot be said to know it. It’s not like seeing something through a telescope. To accept it as authentic is possible on faith alone, that the feeling of reality corresponds to something, something that reveals some profound truth about life. But if so, it is beyond philosophy and even language. We have to express it in the best case only symbols, perhaps analogies from our experience, probably just metaphors.

   Of Christ, in the Christian belief God himself comes down to us to ‘translate’ a reality that is to us sublime in terms we can grasp. But that, too, is an act of faith if you accept it.

. . .

   Socrates to a lesser extent reveals God. This is what goes deep about Socrates: even if there is no God, no afterlife, no reward, nothing: he still loves the Good, still practices “a good man can’t be harmed” and “it is better to suffer than do evil” – and that a life devoted to the pursuit of truth and goodness is the only worthy life for a human being. Goodness is not related to rewards or praise by others. If I do a deed to reap a reward in Paradise or appear good before others, it is not good. (Jesus also taught this.) Goodness is a response to the independent reality of another or the world, at least an implicit reality.

   Aubrey Wesley, a 50 year old construction worker and father of two, lept on a subway track to save a stranger:

Next thing Autrey knew, 20-year-old Cameron Hollopeter staggered across the platform and fell onto the tracks. Autrey left his girls with two strangers, and jumped down after another. The downtown "1" train was rumbling into the station. "The driver hit the horn so I knew from that sound we wasn't going to make it," Autrey said. So Autrey tackled the man into murky, filthy water. He stayed on top of his back. Crouching down in a space all of 21 inches deep, from the ground to the bottom of the train, it barreled over them, with less than an inch to spare.

He didn’t do that as a means to get into Heaven. He didn’t do that to be praised as a hero and bask in fame afterward. He did it because it was the only way to save the young man. Clearly, saving a young man at the risk of one’s own life and even family would make no sense unless somewhere in the back of his mind the idea existed ‘he is a human being and the life of a human being is precious.’ A slave owner would not risk his own life to save his property in human flesh. This is not only an image of goodness but goodness coming into the world, in the flesh so to speak. The best philosophy, perhaps, would be to record all such stories – not just of heroic actions but patient love even in the darkest places (e.g.) – there are many different forms of goodness, from the everyday love of a parent to the saintly heroism of  Edith Stein showing love to others in a death camp. And then tell of such people and their stories over and over. That absolute goodness – love of fellow man and perhaps even the world as it should be – is what is common to Jesus and Socrates.

   That reality makes life livable. Makes the world something to love, at least as it should be. Also beauty. Also the joys that imagination can afford.

 . . .

   I have always struggled to believe the things the Church says are essential. My response to the Sermon on the Mount, and even more the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the saving of the adulteress from stoning has always been deep, heartfelt affirmation. Reading these teachings can result in a sublime feeling that I feel free to interpret as being in the presence of God. If the Creator exists, and if the Creator is God (Goodness and Being itself), then those teachings reveal the divine essence to me, insofar as I can grasp it.

·        The virgin birth: I don’t know what to make of that at all, except mythically. God impregnating Mary: if my faith depended on accepting that as some kind of historical, magical fact, I would be in trouble.

·        The incarnation: somehow Jesus – and perhaps Maria – had an antenna to God that allowed a sharing of consciousness, or a translation of infinite goodness into a limited, human form. Only way I can make sense of that.

·        The miracles (walking on water, etc.): logically possible if God intervenes in nature and history, but play no role in how I think about Jesus. I would respond to the Sermon on the Mound in the same way if nothing had been written about Jesus walking on the water.

·        The resurrection: I go back and forth between accepting it based on the testimony of the earliest Christians and skepticism – not so much because it is biologically impossible but because of my problem with the picture of God it presupposes (see my remarks on the “ransom theory”).

 This is a hard one for me as almost all churches teach that if Christ did not rise from the dead, there would be no salvation and the whole life of Jesus would not have meant what it did. Jesus would have just been a good man and a wise teacher; not the redeemer. God had to die and be born again to release us all from Satan’s power.  

Here is the Catholic Catechism:

651 "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." The Resurrection above all constitutes the confirmation of all Christ's works and teachings. All truths, even those most inaccessible to human reason, find their justification if Christ by his Resurrection has given the definitive proof of his divine authority, which he had promised.

 652 Christ's Resurrection is the fulfilment of the promises both of the Old Testament and of Jesus himself during his earthly life. The phrase "in accordance with the Scriptures" indicates that Christ's Resurrection fulfilled these predictions.

 653 The truth of Jesus' divinity is confirmed by his Resurrection. He had said: "When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he." The Resurrection of the crucified one shows that he was truly "I AM", the Son of God and God himself. So St. Paul could declare to the Jews: "What God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, 'You are my Son, today I have begotten you.'" Christ's Resurrection is closely linked to the Incarnation of God's Son, and is its fulfilment in accordance with God's eternal plan.

 654 The Paschal mystery has two aspects: by his death, Christ liberates us from sin; by his Resurrection, he opens for us the way to a new life. This new life is above all justification that reinstates us in God's grace, "so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." Justification consists in both victory over the death caused by sin and a new participation in grace. It brings about filial adoption so that men become Christ's brethren, as Jesus himself called his disciples after his Resurrection: "Go and tell my brethren." We are brethren not by nature, but by the gift of grace, because that adoptive filiation gains us a real share in the life of the only Son, which was fully revealed in his Resurrection.

 655 Finally, Christ's Resurrection - and the risen Christ himself is the principle and source of our future resurrection: "Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. . . For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." The risen Christ lives in the hearts of his faithful while they await that fulfilment. In Christ, Christians "have tasted. . . the powers of the age to come" and their lives are swept up by Christ into the heart of divine life, so that they may "live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised."

 

So the resurrection is central and essential to Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant Christian teaching.

   I don’t want to flat-out deny it, but Christ’s truth was accepted in my heart; my heart didn’t need the resurrection to accept it. Great if true! But not necessary for me to confirm anything.

   Moreover, the having to make sense of Jesus by understanding him in terms of Old Testament predictions is not important to me. As I understand Jesus’ teaching as a correction of the image of God as presented in the Old Testament. I can’t acknowledge the Old Testament as scripture, though there are some diamonds in the rough. And thus the aspects of the New Testament that try to make sense of Jesus in the context of the Old Testament also do not speak to me.

    Furthermore, as I have already written, the “ransom theory” makes no sense to me. I am not sure the deep feeling of being born a sinner and alienated from God prior to even beginning my life reflects our deepest reality. True, prior to living our lives we are born into an unjust, untrue world for the most part and are predisposed to understand ourselves as an isolated ego with its self-centered desires. Call that original sin if you want. But that my children would belong to Satan had God not paid the ransom to let his son (himself in one aspect) be tortured to death is a myth predicated on a deep feeling of guilt, of being born guilty. The God revealed by Christ as I felt from those key teachings would not want us to imagine ourselves so any more than I as a father want my children to imagine themselves as born guilty. The guilt we acquire during the course of our lives seems more than enough.

  Finally, I don’t exclude the possibility of a life beyond this one. It would be wonderful as long as it is vastly different from Dante’s in The Divine Comedy or C. S. Lewis’ in The Great Divorce. (I would forgo an afterlife even on the assumption that I were saved if things were as portrayed in those two – hellish – fantasies.) But I hope – and here the resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense – my love of the world, which is largely a gift of those teachings of Jesus I have mentioned, does not depend on it. I would say yes to my life even if an angel told me that death was the end. Harder would be accepting the final death of those I love. Harder still accepted the final death of those who died suffering evil.  These latter feelings are why I can’t think of the possible afterlife as unimportant. And Jesus believed it in and promised it. But it is not essential for me: I don’t love the Good for the benefits I can get from such love. 

  That is my very personal, current thinking on the supernatural parts of the Christian story. It is clear that I am close to Tolstoy. It doesn’t follow that I think Jesus was just a wise and good man, and did not embody something divine. I think he was a leak from another dimension. His life and teachings – undiluted by subsequent attempts to understand him as consistent with Jewish tradition – brought something wonderful into the world from a place outside it.

 Religion and the Supernatural - continued

     Schopenhauer’s protagonists are of course disparaging things like the Christian belief in the immaculate conception, Jesus walking on water or feeding the multitude, waking the dead, and rising from the dead after three days, ascending to Heaven in his physical body, etc. Or with Islam the archangel Gabriel speaking Arabic to a merchant warlord, revealing in detail all the answers to the questions of life in a final, definitive way. (I’ll restrict myself to Christianity, though the critique applies to all three monotheistic religions.) Even the existence of a personal God who has a plan for us and miraculously intervenes in time can be seen as an anthropocentric myth.  

    If the Jesus story were openly understood as myth or allegory – like the stories about Odin, for example, or Milton’s Paradise Lost – there would be no issue between Schopenhauer’s protagonists. The problem is that the faithful believe such things literally, as historical events. Philalethes and Demopheles just assume that such things didn’t really happen, or rather, there was no conceptual space in their worldviews for such things to be possible.

   Most Christians – like C. S. Lewis – agree with Philalethes: if those supernatural events did not happen, the religion is worthless. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, he is not the savior, not the son of God, and his teaching at best is human wisdom that cannot save. To see the Christian narrative as myth or allegory would be to empty the religion – the connection to God – meaningless. The moral teaching only matters within the supernatural framework. (Or if a Muslim came to believe that the archangel Gabriel didn’t really speak to Mohammad, that Mohammad made the thing up based on his readings in Judaism and Christianity, and adapted those religions to his own culture, then the ground would disappear out from under the teachings (also the moral teachings). The teachings that both Philalethes and Demopheles find true – the moral teachings – depend (as Philalethes points out) on the belief in facts of history that modern people who care about truth cannot really believe in.

    Consider this thought of Wittgenstein:

What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. — If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, — what I need is certainty — not wisdom, dreams of speculation — and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. – Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Or this:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, – but: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, – don’t take the same attitude to it as you do to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.

Philalethes would have nothing but contempt for these thoughts. They seem irrational, choosing ignorance for the sake of metaphysical comfort (being “saved” and “certainty”) over truth. As the young Nietzsche – under the influence of Schopenhauer – wrote to his sister:

Does it really matter whether one attains the true vision of God, the world, and reconciliation that provides the greatest comfort? Isn't the result of one's research rather indifferent to the true investigator? Do we seek tranquility, peace, and happiness in our pursuit? No, only the truth, even if it were most revolting and ugly.

    One last question: If from our youth we had believed that the salvation of the soul emanates from someone other than Jesus, say, from Muhammad, wouldn't we have partaken in the same blessings? Indeed, faith alone blesses, not the objective reality that stands behind faith. I write this to you, dear Lisbeth, to counter the most common proof that people of faith rely on, those who appeal to their inner experiences and derive from them the infallibility of their faith. Every true faith is thus infallible; it accomplishes what the believing person hopes to find within it, but it offers no basis whatsoever for establishing an objective truth.

    Here the paths of humanity diverge; if you desire peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire. 

. . .

    Well, is it irrational to believe things like Jesus rose from the dead? Such things have no place within the scientific understanding of the universe, to be sure. But perhaps there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamed of in our science – I for one hope so. Whether there is a Creator is that Being and Goodness, whether the Creator reaches out to us and reveals something of “his” nature – that is not a possible scientific question. The belief that what science studies is the limit of reality is just that: a belief. No experiment could prove it. No observations or logical proofs either. If there is a Creator, it is possible that “he” has reached out, has intervened in the normal course of things. We have the testimony that he has: the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To believe such testimony is not irrational in the sense that violates science. (This is the argument of C. S. Lewis.)

    Perhaps the picture of God that informs this belief makes no sense. If God can intervene, why does he allow all the suffering to which we are fated, more horror, more evil than we can even imagine? Why isn’t Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov right to reject such a God, not because science leaves no space for a God but because such a God is incompatible with goodness. Unable to reconcile the horror of unjust human suffering—particularly the suffering of children—with the idea of a loving God, Ivan is consumed with doubt and argues that even if God does exist, he is malicious and hostile: i.e. not God. Indeed, he would not even save his “son” from horrendous torture and death.

    If God is absolute – as by definition he must be – then we cannot know his mind. His wisdom is beyond ours. We can only hope and believe on faith that all is justified and will be made right in the end. Such is the classic response. Lewis – following G. K. Chesterton – also argues that the very craziness of the image of God as revealed by orthodox Christianity:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

You can’t make this stuff up as an argument for the truth of Christianity: interesting.

   Plato also believed in an absolute, in transcendence, and sometimes referred to it as God but usually as “the Good.” We experience the Good, for example, in remorse over evil done; in the absolute feeling that ‘I cannot do this, it is evil’; in the joy of love, the conviction that it is absolutely good that the beloved exists; or in the conviction that others are an absolute limit to my will as is nothing else in nature. It is better to suffer than do injustice, Socrates believed. These experiences are like a leak from another realm, something that human reason alone cannot really comprehend. Here we have a conception of the Absolute without a personal God – without the need to believe in supernatural facts.

   Something like this influenced Tolstoy’s conception of Christianity. Tolstoy did not subscribe to Christ’s teachings because he thought Jesus was a supernatural being. Similarly, Tolstoy did not believe Jesus performed miracles like walking on water. Rather, Tolstoy admired Christianity because — as he explained in a letter to Gandhi, “The difference between the Christian nations and all other nations is only that in Christianity the law of love has been more clearly and definitely given than in any other religion…” Tolstoy thought that the teachings of Christ reflected the moral law, which he often referred to as God’s will. Similarly, in his book The Gospel in Brief, he wrote that “I regard Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as a historical phenomenon, but as a teaching which gives us the meaning of life.”

   Masks of the Good? Masks of God? I have already given my suspicion that the ransom theory, on which the need for salvation and thus the need for supernatural events rests, might have been connected to church building. But it can also rest on a deep feeling or mood: I am a wretched sinner in need of salvation (Wittgenstein passage above). The truth is not enough. Do we need to believe in the factual reality of the immaculate conception, the walking on water, and the resurrection from the dead? Or is the leak from another realm that we experience in the absoluteness of the Good (and evil) enough? It is enough to follow Socrates in his search for wisdom and goodness? It is enough to follow Tolstoy in seeing Jesus teaching as a divinely inspired key to reality and the meaning of life? Does the stress of the supernatural intervention just get in the way of a pure faith?

 

I will try to express my take on this later.