Comments on Schopenhauer's On Religion - A Dialog, continued

So the truth can only be expressed in philosophical prose. Religious mysteries, myths, allegories – translate, usually badly, these truths in a way that the weak of mind can understand in the best case, or replace them with a pack of consoling fantasies on the other. That is the disagreement between Schopenhauer’s protagonists.

    If Schopenhauer is right, if the very fact that reality only comes to us through experience, and experience is always conditioned by the senses, by the concepts of our language that depend on the senses, by the categories of time, space, and causality which make experience possible and which our mind contributes to experiences – if, in other words, by the very fact of experience we can only represent reality from a human point of view, if we can only know reality as it appears to us and not as it is in itself, then: anything we write about reality as it is in itself can only have a symbolic or analogical meaning. We can write about what is beyond us in the way we write or speak about the world that appears to us.  This is as true of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation as it is for the mythical parts of scripture.

     If we want to picture ultimate reality as beyond being and call that God, and picture his relation to us as that of a “father”, then that is a figurative use of language. I am a father. God as some understand him is not a literal father as I am. But in an experience that is either sublime (if an intimation of a reality beyond our concepts and senses, beyond the principle of sufficient reason, magical in a sense) or an example of consoling fantasy – and there is no empirical fact of the matter that confirms or refutes either possibility in general – the language used to express that experience can only be metaphorical (within Schopenhauer’s metaphysics). God, though transcendent to our categories of understanding, is felt in the deepest heart to be somewhat like the best human father in that his love for us, who have our being from “him” (another figurative use of language). We use something from our experience (fathers) to understand through projection something that is utterly beyond our experience based only on a sublime experience that somehow God is love – God again also having to clear reference. Based on either an intimation or a consoling fantasy to interpret a feeling through a metaphor.

    These feelings are radically personal, radically subjective, whether intimations of reality as it is in itself breaking through like a leak from another realm or consoling fantasy (no doubt such feelings usually are nothing but consoling fantasy but perhaps not always). That means that there is no way to decide between incommensurable feelings that seem sublime, at least no way that is not equally radically subjective. Schopenhauer could not conceive of my Christian images as being anything from consoling fantasy. The sublime feeling that gives sense to his metaphysics was no less subjective, however. Perhaps this passage, taken from The World as Will and Representation (vol. I), describes it:

And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring.

This feeling went deepest for Schopenhauer, as the feeling of love went deepest in a Christian. To go deep in one is to have the sense of making contact with a reality beyond our everyday experience, the reality of the world as it is in itself. Such sublime experiences are our only possible access to it. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics expresses truth as revealed by this experience of the world even as the Sermon on the Mound expresses truth as revealed by the experience of sublime grace or love for all of humanity.

     Both The World as Will and Representation and the teachings and parables of Jesus as well as the myths associated with his life use language in a new key, language. The very indeterminacy of the feeling, its joy or terror, the sense that it is a response to what goes deepest in life, the concomitant sense that the feeling expresses man’s relation to a transcendent reality whether called “God” or “Will” is captured in both metaphysical and mythical language. Both have a ‘meta’ character, the gap between the sublime feeling and the everyday world is symbolized by these different forms of language. Granted, it is harder to read a tome like Schopenhauer’s masterpiece. But the metaphysical philosophy – again, if we press it to its own conclusions – is no less symbolic than other works of art that attempt to picture sublime reality, reality transcendent to our everyday ways of experiencing and representing.

   So Lewis wrote: I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This is what the expression of our deepest feelings and intimations of life in art, religion, or philosophy do for us: they make sense of reality as a whole, our experience of it, our place in it. They are analogous to the axioms of geometry in which sense: themselves unprovable, self-evident in a sense, they allow us to go on making deductions, understanding things. As Wittgenstein put it:

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.

Now I  could paraphrase for Schopenhauer, who presents himself as a disciple of truth in the spirit of Socrates but in his life put forth his masterpiece that makes sense of his innermost feelings toward life

       The World as Will and Representation is not based on a scientific truth; rather it offers us a (metaphysical) narrative and says: now believe! Isn’t it just like this! Can’t you now grasp the meaning of the world!? If you are in tune with the picture of the world I lay out in the book, change your life! You are beyond the “veil of Maya” most people dwell in.

But whether a person will respond to Schopenhauer, The Sermon on the Mound, or some other interpretation of the world as such depends not on the intellect alone, but what (if anything) goes deepest in that person – which may or may not be in touch with reality as a whole. Ultimately it is what feels most real to the clear mind and heart that decides how to respond.

    Schopenhauer’s protagonists in On Religion – A Dialog make it seem like two physicists who understand Relativity and Quantum Theory discussing the truths of physics relative to the common folk for whom the sun still rises and whose world consists of everyday objects. That is a very misleading picture.

 

  I am not done. I still want to reflect on his dialog in light of Lewis’s statement that ““The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”