Meditation of Critical Philosophy or Transcendental Idealism (Kant, Schopenhauer)

I. Transcendental Idealism: Axiomatic propositions

 

1. “The world is my representation”

“The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it.” 

 

2. We have no access to reality as it is apart from our experience.

For that the objective existence of things is conditioned by a representer of them, and that consequently the objective world exists only as representation, is no hypothesis, still less a peremptory pronouncement, or even a paradox put forward for the sake of debate or argument. On the contrary, it is the surest and simplest truth…. (World as Will and Representation, vol.2, p.5)

“Nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and hence immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty…”

True idealism…is not the empirical, but the transcendental. It leaves the empirical reality of the world untouched, but adheres to the fact that all object, and hence the empirically real in general, is conditioned by the subject in a twofold manner. In the first place, it is conditioned materially, or as object in general, since an objective existence is conceivable only in place of a subject and as the representation of the subject. In the second place, it is conditioned formally, since the mode and manner of the object’s existence, in other words, of its being represented (space, time, causality), proceed from the subject, and are predisposed in the subject. . . . This proves that the whole of the material world with its bodies in space, extended and, by means of time, having causal relations with one another, and everything attached to this – all this is not something existing independently of our mind, but something that has its fundamental presuppositions in our brain functions, by means of which and in which alone is such an objective order of things possible. For time, space, and causality, on which those real and objective events rest are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain; so that, therefore, this unchangeable order of things, affording the criterion and the clue to their empirical reality, itself comes first from the brain, and has its credentials from that alone.”

 

…things and their whole mode and manner of existence are inseparably associated with our consciousness of them. Therefore he who has clearly grasped this soon reaches the conviction that the assumption that things exist as such, even outside and independently of our consciousness, is really absurd.

 

GL: The thought is this: since we cannot transport ourselves outside of our conscious awareness, and compare our ideas (representations, Vorstellungen) of things (e.g. trees, people, the state, etc.) with the things as they are in reality, we have no basis for believing that our ideas of things conform to reality. On the contrary, our very idea of reality is conditioned by the way our brains have to represent reality if we are to have any experience at all. It is as though consciousness were enclosed in a submarine without windows or any direct access to the sea. All we can know is mediated through our instruments that relay data through electrical impulses to our instrument panels. We cannot get out of our submarines to compare what is on our instrument panels to the sea itself, and indeed, we have no basis for asserting that the ways our instruments (our sense, programmed by our brains) can translate what we call the sea (reality) at all into ideas/concepts. Thus our ideas/concepts reveal only the nature of our consciousness – not that of which we are conscious.

  Again, the core assumption is this: what we experience cannot ever in principle be taken for reality; it must always be assumed to be our subjective or intersubjective way of processing reality. Everything we experience, and the very conditions for experiencing anything at all – time, space, causality, object, plurality, unity, self, etc. – cannot be understood as real. Even our bodily life, even our experience of our conscious selves: not reality; nothing but appearance, phenomena.

   Everything we can possibly experience – except for the sublime (later) – is appearance. I cannot get outside my mind, which is in time, which experiences time flowing by, to check and see whether my experience of time matches the way reality is apart from my experience of it. That would be like asking a character in a Dickens novel, say, Scrooge, to get outside the novel to see whether his world is real. Or like asking someone in the Matrix to get outside the Matrix (well, that was possible in the movie: so to make the analogy right, you would have to exclude that possibility).

   Phenomenal and noumenal world, the world as it is beyond experience, the transcendental world: no time, so space, no matter or substance of any kind, no objects or plurality – in short, nothing that belongs to our experience of the world of appearances can be attributed to reality. No concept or idea applied to it, except negatively: reality is not in time or space; there is no cause and effect in the real world; there are no substances in the real world. Reality from our point of view is Nothing, No-thing. It is beyond Being.

   Within the phenomenal world of experience, as a condition of the possibility of any experience, the world must be experienced as objects existing in space and time, subject to the principle of causality (or sufficient reason). The appearances we take as the world – and as described by science – exist within a closed system: not because nature is a closed system, as physics assumes, but because our brains can only experience anything at all in such a way.  

     This turns everything on its head. For example, in classical mechanics (Newtonian physics), if the initial conditions of a system are known with sufficient precision and the laws of physics governing the system are deterministic (such as Newton's laws of motion), then the future evolution of the system can be determined with certainty – and the past as well. We can say whether there was a full moon or not when Ceasar crossed the Rubicon. But this is only because our brains are, as it were, programmed to experience the world in this way. For Schopenhauer it is all like a dream – the moon, time, space, causality – it all exists only in our minds.

     In classical thought, reality was believed to imprint itself on the unclouded mind. We could know what a thing was. The essence of a triangle was thought to lie in its defining characteristics, namely, having three straight sides and three angles that add up to 180 degrees. By grasping these essential features, one can understand what it means to be a triangle. But this is not the mind conforming itself to an independent reality for transcendental Ideality, but the mind becoming aware of part of its own programming – in this case, the program determining how space is experienced. A human being was an animal that was different from all other animals by being self-conscious, aware of itself in time and aware of its own mortality, language-using and symbol-creating, able to know to a certain extent a knowable universe, etc. Again, what is happening here is the mind examining how it has been programmed to produce and then experience an appearance of its own making.

      The best analogy might be the creation of virtual worlds by game designers, such as Minecraft. The world as it appears on the screen, the events that happen and can happen in that world, the kinds of objects that can appear in that world – all this is the function of the programming, and it is the programming that determines what we can experience in that virtual world. We know the world on the screen in virtual but suffer from the illusion that our everyday world and the world as revealed by science is somehow real. It is just as virtual as Minecraft, even if we can’t identify the source of the programming.

    This is not crazy. All of our access to the world comes through our senses. Our senses without exception pass information to the brain through electrical impulses that the brain translates into images and experience. If an engineer could mechanically feed the brain with the right electronic impulses, that engineer could make us experience whatever he wanted. It is the electrical impulses that the brain directly interprets and not the objects in the world. How can we know that the brain’s interpretation corresponds to anything real given that we cannot get outside of the brain to compare?

    Kant and Schopenhauer were aware that his implied – all things being equal – metaphysical skepticism. We can know nothing about reality. Everything we know is confined to what we can experience, to the world of appearances generated by our programming.  But they at least thought the phenomenal world was basically the same for everyone: Euclid described the programming used to produce and experience space, Newton the programming used to produce and experience nature, etc. At least we could be aware of the programming. But now we believe that space can be programmed in a vast variety of ways, from non-Euclidean geometries to the works of Escher and the surrealists; nature from Einsteinian physics to Van Gogh. Etc. Cultural and artistic variety in the human species means much of our experience is determined through cultural and even individual software working to interpret the hardware components of space, times, cause, object, etc. Reality – that which is unconceptualized, uninterpreted, undescribed – doesn’t force anything on us (though the practical needs of survival might).

      Nelson Goodman draws the logical conclusion of this way of thinking in Ways of Worldmaking: reality cannot serve as a foundation to which our various world versions can be compared to see which one is right. The idea of reality – a real world existing undescribed, undepicted, unperceived – is an empty concept, an X as Kant put it. There are as many worlds are there are world versions, one of which can be considered reality. All are phenomena, appearances. If you – within certain logical constraints – want to live in a world with 72 genders or 2, reality will not stand in your way. It’s like you – whatever that means, for the self is also an appearance, a “construct” in the parlance of our times – have just agreed to have different experience-software downloaded into your brain.

 

I am not finished with this; I want to say something about the different ways Kant and Schopenhauer thought within this framework and show its influence on contemporary culture. But I will pause here. I agree that the mind cannot simply mirror reality; that our concepts cannot be like wax imprinted by reality so that they copy reality somehow. But I reject any philosophy that cuts us entirely off from reality, that makes the world absolutely phenomenal, appearance. There is a position in between the mind-as-a-mirror-of-nature and the mind as the producer of nature. Schopenhauer himself gives a couple of excellent metaphors that support what I think and, as I believe, work against the transcendental idealism that I have crudely sketched here.  

    

Just as we know of the earth only the surface, not the great, solid masses of the interior, so we know empirically of the things of the world nothing at all except their appearances, i.e. the surface.

We complain of the darkness in which we live out our lives: we do not understand the nature of existence in general; we especially do not know the relation of our own self to the rest of existence. Not only is our life short, our knowledge is limited entirely to it since we can see neither back before our birth nor out beyond our death, so that our consciousness is as it were a lightening-flash momentarily illuminating the night….  (“On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance,” from the essays).  

 

Now if transcendental idealism is right, a radical metaphysical skepticism follows. We cannot know reality, and thus we must give up philosophy as it was traditionally conceived. Like castaways on a deserted island who find a message in a bottle washed up on shore, believing it from the outside world, only to find that they themselves had written the message (Peter Kreeft). We can become aware of the programs that run our experience, but not what the world is like outside of our programmed experience.

   But Schopenhauer’s metaphors, we do know something, the surface of things, the world as revealed in a flash of lightning. The surface is not appearance; what we see in the lightning flash is not appearance. Thus I deny the axiom that the world is not but my representation, or rather, that my representation cannot reveal anything of the world, even if it can’t reveal the whole.

     We cannot know all of reality from a point outside it, outside our consciousness, from God’s point of view; but we can experience the surface. And that is not nothing. I experience my children through my senses but also my love for them. I don’t know if they were accidents of nature, creatures of God, or what. But I do know they are real and loveable. I know that a world version, a metaphysics, that denied their reality, that saw them as nothing but appearance, or nothing but a collection of atoms in space and time, would be missing something essential even. This would be my counter philosophy that I need to unpack.

   But I would start off like this. A bee sees this:

A human sees this:

Which is the true way of seeing? That probably makes no sense. But we and the bee both see something, a flower, a poppy. If the poppy were an illusion, the bee couldn't get its nectar or transport its pollen. The thing itself is what we both see. It is not virtual. But we both see it from a finite perspective. What we can't achieve is the vision (knowledge) of a perfect, absolute consciousness - God. 

Fake emotions in religious life. Nietzsche traced religion to the feeling of resentment. To understand him just recall the sickening facial expression of some Christian – Catholic or protestant, it is the same – imagining others in Hell. Today resentment takes a different form. The bane of religion in general – what transforms a sacred space into a Satanic one – is of course sin. And the form sin takes in this society in the inner life of the devout is sentimentality, a kitsch view of reality.

       Many moderns follow Schleiermacher in describing religion as a feeling, though they so not following him in identifying the religious feeling as one of absolute dependence. Feelings are pure when uncontaminated by narcissism, defined not so much as ‘self-love’, which is ambiguous, but as the damaged ego’s drive to create the world anew so as to protect or elevate itself – often both. It is for the damaged ego – and whose ego isn’t damaged – that Eliot wrote: “Humankind cannot bear much reality.” Indeed, we all know the powerful desire to contain our minds, to limit our experience to a comfortable zone subconsciously created to allow us a chance at living a life without shame, without guilt. We create our reality and thus (in a terrible irony) become part of a mass.

           Sentimentality is the form of relationship to the world taken by narcissism. Like authors of dime store romances, we cut our conscious experience off from heart-breaking reality and live in a matrix of our own making, through the script Capitalism provides. It is not that reality is terrible, and facing the terrible truth would destroy us. In that case, sentimental ignorance would indeed be bliss. No. Even in the face of all that is terrible, life, existence is wonderful as deep down we know. Every person is a soul. Because we are cracked vessels (Donne), we cannot fully experience it as such. We pass on the damage we have suffered to others, to the world. Something in us – call it our soul – cannot live with that knowledge. We cover ourselves up with a fig leaf, fake reality – not to escape what is terrible, but to escape our own damaged reality. We idealize, falsify, re-invent realities in to be able to see ourselves as innocent, good, authentic, real – a fake.

        This can and does show itself most powerfully in religious life. We take the tools religion provides us and enter a world in which we are special, loved – which, of course, as creatures loved by our Creator we are as long as we do not construct a world for the sole purpose of fabricating the counterfeit feeling of being special and loved. A Catholic may experience the Eucharist or a Muslim prayer as a feeling that has no other psychic purpose than to make them feel good, to reinforce their constructed self-image. The danger is perhaps at its greatest when we convert to a faith. Religion can become kitsch, never reaching its telos, imprisoned in the damaged self. I have no words to convey just how abysmal this is. Yet who of us who practice a religion can honestly say that they are free of such damnable feelings? Isn’t this related to the very problem Christ saw in the role models of faith in his own time: the Pharisees?  All genuine religion is a practice of de-selfing – of healing the damage and so again coming into contact with the soul, other people, the Creation, and the sacred.

 

 

The belief that all values are subjective is false. Therefore, a pillar of modern culture is false. Therefore, the universe is not meaningless. Science does not have the last word over reality. 

      The Good is grounded in reality. When we find something truly beautiful, we are not merely projecting our feelings onto the blank screen of a meaningless, beauty-less nature or work, but responding in our human way to something very real. 

Or when some of us are saddened and disturbed by the brutality inflicted on animals in the meat industry, we respond to the violation of the real animals; we don’t project feelings onto the blank screen of the animals because we enjoy being disturbed (unless we are sentimental). Our intellects and our feelings both work together to reveal reality - in this case, in all its horror:

If we believed we were projecting feelings – that we were sentimental – then the ground of our sadness would be removed. If you are not moved by such suffering, you don't know what you are seeing; you are meaning-blind.

     When the victims of war crimes cry out for justice, it is because violence, terrible wrong has been done to real human beings. We don’t project our horror onto beings that are objectively without value or meaning. If that is what we believed, then our horror would mean nothing.

       When we value something, when in thought or action we respond to anything according to some judgment or pre-judgment of what it is and its true value, we respond to reality, adequately or inadequately. I think you have to have a brain dried out by too much modern philosophy to believe that values or emotions are just "subjective." To believe the universe is meaningless and valueless you have to be a kind of an idiot.

    To want to make ourselves the creator and judge is value is to want to become like God – or better, like Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

The Real and the Good. If it were true that there were in fact witches – beings who entered a pack with Satan to receive supernatural powers to do malice to their neighbor – then what the medieval church did with the witch interrogations and burnings would make some sense. If nature and human nature were in fact as the Nazis conceived it – superior and inferior, even parasitic races; war as a means to high evolution – then Nazi policy would have made sense and did make sense to many Germans of that time. What you do, how you feel, what you say, how you live – the Good – is grounded in what you take to be reality.  Thus the attempt of power people to "control the narrative" or, in the case of Trump, to construct a fantasy version of reality for his cult.

       But it would be too simple to believe the medieval Church and the Nazi’s got their facts or science wrong. A scientifically minded inquisitor or Nazi ideologue who wanted to test their ‘theories’ empirically could probably think of ways (ways that would sound sick to us). Each could use an army of undercover agents with doctorates in anthropology to infiltrate communities of witches or Jews, for example, to test some of their conjectures. Such a study might have the power to modify or qualify their views. For example, Harry Potter style witchery – making things appear out of thin air or changing people into animals – might be refuted; overt malice on the part of Jewish families against Aryans might not show itself to the investigators. But given that in each case we are dealing with a priori beliefs and conceptualizations of the respect target groups – witches and Jews – such empirical research would not be enough to refute the problematic beliefs. These a priori beliefs are not data-based, not scientific beliefs subject to empirical falsification. 

 

 

Not facts, but belief systems are given when it comes to metaphysics.  When we are dealing with beliefs and related concepts about the world as a whole – or large parts of it - a believer’s statement can be made logically to fit into any circumstance. Scientifically, it may not be meaningful; it may have no definitive empirical implications. The absence of overt magic on the part of witches can simply be interpreted as witch-magic working covertly. The absence of overt malice on the part of Jews can be interpreted as a conspiracy never to openly show it. A person who equates all reality with the closed system of physics would interpret a visit by an angel as a hallucination. And so on. It is the belief system as a whole that makes sense of the world – or not. Belief systems cannot be dislodged in the same way a scientific theory – e.g., Newton’s theory of light and gravity – can be (although this is also complex). 

      This is almost the exact definition of what it means to be finite, and thus potentially fallible. We cannot know all of reality from a divine perspective. Our deepest convictions about reality – and therefore, the Good – are not amenable to rigorous, certain proof (as in geometry) or empirical methods (as in natural science). When confronted with an incommensurable worldview, we are thrown back on this factum of human nature. We come to terms through historically and socially situated common sense reason, our response to beauty, and listening to our hearts. Or rather, if we are not damaged, unable to respond to beauty, unable to access the goodness that is somewhere inside our hearts (i.e. our ability to love and accept love), then we have these resources. It is through the purest moments of joy and love, but also when despair stairs you in the face, that we can access what is real beyond the everyday shadows we live with. 

 

 

Trauma and world. That so many people in the Middle Ages and in the Germany after the Great War were traumatized makes it no accident that their souls were nearly cut off from the damaged ego-consciousness. True, Naziism makes no sense to me. It is obviously evil. But then, I was loved as a child; I am not a man traumatized by losing an unimaginably terrible war in which all that I was taught to believe came crashing down and then thrown into a situation of mass insecurity. 

        Of course, other factors than trauma can cut a person off from beauty and goodness. Mental illness, for example. Not every child is born into a loving family. The injustice that is as pervasive today as it was at the time of Jesus lacerates souls. Christopher Lasch has argued (persuasively to me) that our socioeconomic structure gives rise to narcissistic personality types by destroying forms of public, communal, and family life, substituting a therapeutic ethic and a consumerist mentality to the questions of life. Social media has poured gasoline in that fire. I could go on.

 "You can't use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they did use reason to get into" – Neil Degrasse Tyson

      I would qualify – unless you can bring it about that they come to feel differently, mostly through coming to see something they hadn't before or through coming to see something in a different light. Like the Grinch, when confronted with the reality of what he had done to the Whos down in Whoville: "and then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” [example from Dr. Suess]

                                     

        People can come to feel shame over some of their attitudes. The heart has its reasons, but since most scientists (Tyson is a contemporary Carl Sagan) don't believe in the heart, and by reason they mean only empirical scientific reasoning, they can’t see that shame, in some cases, is a rational response to reality because it is appropriate to the meaning of their previous attitude. I think many opponents of the Civil Rights Movement felt this rational shame and did change their views because of an argument (made by MLK and others). Of course, if what a man means by reason is just science, then Tyson is right. But human reason cannot be divorced from meaning, and thus not from emotion, or catastrophe will result. To equate science (or scientifical rationality) with reason is like putting blinders on reason, like mistakenly deciding that all of reality appears within that reduced field of vision. 

 Schopenhauer on Weeping

     Schopenhauer - 

wrote something profound and moving on weeping.

 

This is also the place to discuss one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to the manifestations that distinguish man from the animal. Weeping is by no means a positive manifestation of pain, for it occurs where pains are least. In my opinion, we never weep directly over pain that is felt, but always only over its repetition in reflection. Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture or representation of it; we then find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him. Now we ourselves are the object of our own sincere sympathy; with the most charitable disposition, we ourselves are most in need of help. We feel that we endure more than we could see another endure, and in this peculiarly involved frame of mind, in which the directly felt suffering comes to perception only in a doubly indirect way, pictured as the suffering of another and sympathized with as such, and then suddenly perceived again as directly our own; in such a frame of mind nature finds relief through that curious physical convulsion.

  In this passage I find everything I love and hate in Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics I would caricature (but I hope my caricature is of something there) thus: 1) reality, Being, the world is necessarily human constructions of reality, and our constructions (re-presentations, Vor-stellungen) necessarily cannot reach their objects; we are cut off from any knowledge or true understanding of Being; 2) with one exception: we know our acts of willing directly; they are least are not constructed, no matter how constructed the objects are to which are will is directed; 3) thus, ultimate reality is the blind, cruel will-to-exist; the phenomenal world we live are manifestation of this underlying force; 4) the will-to-exist expresses itself only in the self-assertion of the individual existent in the battle to survive, to expand, to increase its power (the range of willing); 5) there is no other meaning or purpose to existence; existence is horrible; pain is its essence; better not to have existed 6) knowing this is sublime, a negative sublime, a kind of disgust or horror; 7) the point is to escape this prison of the will – art allows temporary escape, especially music; above all, pity, compassion negates the will-to-exist, the source of all suffering; 8) pity and compassion can ultimately only be for the self-as-center-of-willing, the only reality any of us can know, the only reality any of our acts can be directed to; 9) thus when we pity the suffering of others, we negate our own will, we become objects of our own pity.

      This weird conclusion follows only if it is true that our compassion reveals nothing about its object – another human being, an animal, or whatever. But other human beings, in Schopenhauer’s system, can be nothing other than constructs, re-presentations – they are never fully real. But to love another human being, without sentimentality or false pathos, is just a response to something deeply real – no less that response to the beauty of a sunrise is a response to something real in nature and not just a construction of nature, though of course it can be that, too, and often is (a travel brochure enticing paying tourists to the beach with a picture of a sunrise). For Schopenhauer pity is the only form of love that reveals reality. Other forms are masks for the ruthless, pitiless primeval will. We are lovable only in our suffering. 

      To me the problem with so many philosophers, metaphysicians like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – they take a common perversion, mistake the perversion for some a priori truth about whatever they are writing about, and then draw metaphysical conclusions about the reality of nature or humanity. Nietzsche perceptively sees resentment at work in much of what is called morality and Christian religion; he then writes as though morality and the Christian religion as a whole were nothing but masked expressions of reality such that we know, a priori, that when we encounter moralists and Christians we know at some level they are eaten up with resentment. So Schopenhauer: he has a good insight – much of life is ruled by unconscious forces expressed through the will that one might see as a blind struggle for survival, kind of war of all against all. He makes that into a metaphysical principle such that we know, in advance, that anything and everything anyone does, except in rare moments of compassion and moments when we are entranced by great art, is nothing but the expression of this blind instinct. So weeping is a form of pity for existence itself.

      More charitably, apart from any reading of his metaphysics, I guess one could see in this passage the recognition of a common humanity in a community of suffering, a kind of ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ thought. I still love this passage though.

 Are morals just feelings one approves of?

My thesis that feelings are, like thinking, like ideas, like checking facts and doing experiments, disclose reality, or cover it up, depending. Love and grief – when authentic (not sentimental or counterfeit) disclose the being of the beloved person; remorse discloses the evilness of the action and the human dignity of the person wronged; awe and reverence disclose our relation to the universe (as can fear); desecrating life as in the horrid practices of industrial meat reveals the being of animals precisely through its violation; the silence during the Eucharist is appropriate to the occasion and partly discloses its sublimity; the jubilation at the end of WWII in allied countries disclosed the significance of the victory.

    Emotions can conceal reality when not a lucid response to it.  The tourist who beholds the Grand Canyon and says, “yeah, and? A big hole” cannot see the Grand Canyon; their reaction is that of a blind person. The person who can only use the “grief” over the loss of a pet or relative to garner attention to themselves as an object of sympathy is cut off from the reality of the pet or relative. The bastards who acquired logging rights to the redwood forest, reducing it to “natural resources” waiting to become profits, are spiritually retarded. Feelings, emotions not only reveal and conceal reality, but reveal very clearly the reality of the person responding.

   And said feelings, emotions – I could add moods – give rise to our basic attitudes toward life and the world as a whole, which then color our perceptions and beliefs all the way down (and not worried about precise distinctions between these words at this point). The bastards who profited by destroying large parts of the redwood forests were perhaps stunted by an unloving family or hated nature because of some fear or past trauma. We humans are not free to love and hate, see and not-see, as are the angels, as we are creatures of flesh and blood, living in a history conditioned significantly by violence, injustice, and disharmony. If we see and feel as a response to reality rather than our seeing and feeling being blocked by past damage to our souls, then we are more lucky than deserving praise. [I think this is the background for Christ’s “let he who is without sin cast the first stone…” and “for he maketh. his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” But I digress.] We develop attitudes (Einstellung) to life and the world always under the pressure of our lives growing up – attitudes in Wittgenstein’s sense: a comprehensive stance or perspective that goes beyond a simple cognitive opinion. It involves the person's entire orientation – including emotional responses, personal values, and the overall way in which they engage with whatever. The original meaning of both the German and English suggests a sense of positioning or orientation, suggesting a way in which an individual positions themselves mentally or emotionally in relation to a particular concept or experience (the attitude of a compass, in an older usage; or in a Jane Austin novel, how a character sits in a certain attitude.). And these attitudes condition one’s feelings – upon seeing the Grand Canyon or the Redwood forest, etc. Again, I digress.]

                                                            

  

    Now I put forth a thesis, which I will now refine: this whole complex of “subjective” feelings, emotions, moods, and, importantly, the attitudes that condition them, attitudes formed under the pressures of an individual life . . . this whole complex of emotions, for short, gives rise to myth, gives rise to metaphysics (intellectualized myth, purely cognitive content abstracted from its living source in poetry, myth, imagination, emotional response to life), gives rise to religion (though power is often what shapes and perpetuates religion – officially sanctioned myth). Rational thought, when it goes beyond the kinds of things we can understand through the disciplined use of our senses and intellect, through theories, conceptual analysis, empirical testing, etc. – in short, through “natural reason” – … rational thought is conditioned by this matrix of “subjectivity,” itself conditioned by history, culture, economy, and so on.

 

. . .

      And so I am reminded of a deceptively similar approach to thinking about morals, religion, art, and metaphysics that came out of the logical positivist style of philosophy: emotivism. I first learned in a book titled After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) by Alasdair MacIntyre – a book that I have thought a lot about over the years. This is the way MacIntyre characterizes emotivism:

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. Particular judgments may of course unite moral and factual elements. ‘Arson, being destructive of property, is wrong’ unites the factual judgment that arson destroys property with the moral judgment that arson is wrong. But the moral element in such a judgment is always to be sharply distinguished from the factual. Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others (14).

 

So am I an “emotivist”? (I dislike jargon in philosophy.) No, at least I hope not. Like emotivism I do assert that feelings/emotions – certain feelings/emotions, experienced in a particular quality conditioned by deeper attitudes – are the source of myth, religion, art, and morals. But for me this part of our inner lives (the whole complex I just mentioned) reaches out to and responds to something real and can, if ‘pure’ reveal essential aspects of the reality they are responses to. In this they are like thoughts – and I don’t consider thoughts something logically clearly distinct from these kinds of feelings. The thought ‘Both the slaughter of the people at the music festival as well as the people in Gaza through the retaliatory bombing involve unspeakable cruelty’ is a thought and the thought is intelligible unless cruelty provokes some emotional response; it is a thought-feeling. More importantly, it is not reduced to psychology. It reveals something about the person’s inner life, no doubt. But also something about its object.

  [Again, the will to reduce emotions to psychology – the subjective – stems from the logical positivists' faith in the metaphysical myth that science was not just science but also metaphysics: that scientific methods reveal the entire essence – or lack thereof – of the universe. While it is true that science must make assumptions about nature – that it is uniform, for example – it is not a possible scientific hypothesis that Being can be reduced to what science can understand of it. If anyone believes that nature is reducible to what a finished science could understand of it, then they live by a faith as unsupported by science as an evangelical. Indeed, there was something fundamentalist about the scientism of the logical positivists: they never tried to give an argument for their metaphysics because they thought all metaphysical argument was meaningless – it was on their narrow understanding of meaning and truth – and thus left no room for any awareness that their entire project of eliminating metaphysics and religion always presupposed their metaphysical scientism: an example of a world version exploding from an internal contradiction.]

    But I do think at the level of myth and metaphysics, since they make sense of our most profound responses to life, some incommensurability does exist, intellectually. I don’t think there are proofs or knock-down arguments against many possible incommensurable belief constellations. Emotions are cognitive, connected with thought. But reality is big, and we all experience it through our own lives. Perhaps some emotivists would feel that is the core of emotivism. Our finitude, our fallibility (that stems not only from our finitude but the ways we all get damaged during the course of a life) mean that natural reason can only take us so far, and that subjective certitude (or lack thereof) has to pick up from there. So Nietzsche was right when he wrote to his sister:

 

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.

 

But Nietzsche was referring to the level of belief systems here – Christianity, Islam – or by implication metaphysical systems like Hegel’s. I am talking about immediate responses to life. My child is born; joy fills me. Therefore, I cannot accept a belief system like Schopenhauer’s that makes the individual an illusion and life a mistake. The infallibility and certain do not come from the tenets of Christianity or Islam; the infallibility is at the level of the joy over the new life. You don’t believe that you have joy, as a proposition that may be true or false; the unquestioned joy forces certain beliefs on you, if you at another time come to inquire. The incommensurably comes because not everybody can respond to the birth of a child with joy. The question is: how do we see that? As a tragedy? I must see it that way because I cannot doubt and have lived with this certainty through thick and thin that life – despite all the bad stuff – is in its core a gift, and that it is terrible (sin) that this is covered up by the things people do and the power structures they some people erect and perpetuate.

 True and False Myths

An example of the sense in which a myth can be true – or reveal our relationship to a reality that is beyond our ability to know in the way we can know things about nature through science or about actions through the judicial system, and so on. That the Creation of man in Genesis, as understood by Michelangelo in his famous Sistine Chapel work:

           

The point is not to give a realistic portrayal of God and Adam, though it uses the pictural language of representation. That would reduce the picture to absurdity, imagining the painting substitutes for a camera taking a snapshot. The point is to symbolize God's love reaching out to mankind, mankind’s love reaching out to its Creator. It is communicated in 'factual' i.e. representational mode, the same mode as is used to paint real people we know and can compare to representation to – this wanting to represent holy or spiritual things disturbs Muslims and iconoclastic Christians, who can only see works like this as attempts to photograph that which cannot and may not be photographed, i.e. represent anthropologically that can’t be so represented without making an idol. (Many Muslims don’t like to be photographed, suggesting that the self or the soul is also transcendent and made into an idol by doing so – interesting.) I see no problem with such representations on the condition that they are understood in the sense that I am understanding them here, which is the same as both the Roman and Orthodox Churches do understand them. I confess I cannot relate to Michelangelo's work even though I think I understand it: the trope of God as an old man with a gray beard, used in so much caricature and comedy, has destroyed my ability to relate to it, perhaps giving some credence to iconoclasm. 

     If myth is like Michelangelo’s painting, a symbolic representation of our relationship to a reality transcendent to our everyday modes of knowing, indeed, to our ideas and language, how can it be true? How can it connect with reality if not through stating facts, falsifying hypotheses through scientific experience, following up on leads as the detective does,  realistically depicting physical objects as in portrait painting, constructing models that can predict future events as in meteorology, proving something deductively – all the ways our minds do make contact with reality.  Even in illustrating a storybook, the illustrator makes contact with the reality of the text – such as this illustration of Beatrix Potter’s character Mr. Jackson (a frog):

The illustration makes contact with the story, brings Mr. Jackson to life. In a way, Michelangelo did something like that with God and Adam, but the difference is that the Genesis story is a myth in the deepest sense, connecting us to a transcendence we cannot otherwise have access to. Again, how can that connect to reality?

     My answer: it pictures transcendence as it could or must be if we are to trust our deepest experiences of life. Wittgenstein related a feeling he experienced during his time as a soldier in WWI:

…the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.

A crazy feeling when you are subject to regular artillery barrages and sniper fire even when not engaged in direct combat. I know this irrational feeling. I could just discount it as a defense mechanism, as Freud would. In many cases, it is probably just that, or something like it. But with Wittgenstein, the feeling came to have absolute or intrinsic value. With me it is connected to the feeling of being unconditionally loved. Also crazy. Freud would say, I suppose, that such a feeling is the echo of an infantile experience of mother love. Perhaps it is, or something else like that. I relive that feeling every time I take communion. Again, Freud would say I am trying to get back into an infantile state, a defense mechanism against a reality in which I am certainly not loved unconditionally. Unconditional love among human beings is rather like an oasis in the desert: rare. The mother who loves and pities her son about to be executed for a horrible crime. The man who puts himself in front of a speeding subway to save a stranger. The soldier who remains behind to face certain death to give his brothers time to get away. I guess these are forms of unconditional love. Whatever its origin the feeling has absolute value for me and so I cannot reduce it to its speculative origin or reduce it to psychological categories. The myths of God reaching out to us in love, and the continuation of that story in God self-revealing and self-sacrifice on earth connect to reality in that they make contact with this sublime feeling – or crazy feeling, depending on how you see it. (You are not irrational if you see it as crazy.) The access to God, to Christ, to a reality beyond our ideas and evidence-based knowledge, is literally this feeling, which I guess you can liken to an inner eye. The rituals (Modern philosophy has no use for inner eyes because it has no use for the idea that feeling can reveal – as well as distort - reality.) All the myths and representational art like Michelangelo’s work – as well as all the conceptual thought that attempts to make sense of the myths – are attempts to illustrate or make sense of something our rational intellects proper can’t: sublime feelings, something we can’t observe in the physical world, can’t empirically test.

Some comments on this:

·       Christianity is great myth, as C. S. Lewis wrote. But it also, for most believers, claims to be history. That raises different issues that are not relevant to my consideration of the truth of myths.

·       Do the myths give rise to the sublime feelings, or do the sublime feelings give rise to the myths? Chicken-and-egg question. But I suppose, logically, the feelings must have come first. It really doesn’t matter to the point I am trying to make.

·       Sublime feelings disrupt normal, everyday experience. They are prägende (soul-forming). Your normal work-a-day relation to people, objects, the world becomes unstable and you either drown, emotionally, or reconstitute the world in terms of a symbolic relation to it. Language or images can only hold in place a symbolic relation to a perception of literally what lies beyond or behind everyday, prosaic experience. This is the source of myth. Examples: to see a loved one in a radically different way through grief over their death; the awe or reverence one may feel in the presence of great natural beauty or heroism – or moral goodness; the transformation of a woman when experienced in the light of a pure Eros; the horror of a Colonel Kurz when faced with the darkest possibilities of human cruelty; the joy over the birth of a child; the pain of a lucid remorse, revealing evil done. These and more are the source of myth.

·       I resist the modern will to reduce feelings to prosaic psychological categories, to cut them off from Being and imprison them in the human brain. The will to do this stems from the general modern will to de-mean “external” reality to conquer and subdue it for human purposes. To do that, “external” reality is seen as science-technology-capitalism must see it to go about their business of conquering nature – including human nature. It is no more or less scientific to believe that science-technology-capitalism exhaustively reveals reality as it really is, absolutely, conclusively, without remainder. That is a metaphysical view, as untestable as Creation by Plato’s Demiurge. If you believe that, it is not for any scientific reason. Indeed, metaphysical theories are like intellectualized myths – which does not mean they are necessarily “false.” Indeed, the myth from which the metaphysical interpretation of reality held by science-technology-capitalism stems is best captured by Milton’s Satan, who states: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.” To embrace that myth I would have to deny the absolute worth of the feeling of being “unconditionally loved” – would have to see it as Freud would have perhaps. To embrace the myths that help explain the world to me, the capitalist would have to give up the project of conquering nature and the elevated feeling of power and possibility that go with it. Myth confronts reality at this level.  

·       A false myth – and this is completely circular reasoning, but nothing else is possible – is one that it used to justify injustice or other forms of evil by demeaning something good, from an animal to the world as a whole. Earlier in the journal I wrote about the myth of Thanksgiving, based on the idea that the natives were “noble savages.” I contrasted that with the extermination of the natives in New England through disease and massacres (yes, the natives also engaged in massacres) in which the noble savages were “merciless savages.” Here rather than myth-making, a cool-headed anthropologist would have been better. The point: real people were seen in light of myths that demeaned or sentimentalized them because they supported a political agenda. The myth was not truth-seeking and sense-making; the myths that support a political regime do not symbolize our relation to transcendence but exploit a purported relation to transcendence for legitimate very worldly purposes, political or personal.