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.

 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.”

Comments on Schopenhauer’s On Religion: A Dialog

 

Schopenhauer’s On Religion: A Dialog shows two friends (of sorts) discussing religion from different points of view: Philalethes (lover or friend of truth) and Demopheles (friend of the people, I think). Philalethes loves truth and has contempt for common people; Demopheles is an enlightened man but qualifies his contempt for illusions if they help the common people get through the day. Both assume that Christianity in particular, and the monotheistic religions in general, are not true: “a pack of lies” according to Philalethes; for Demopheles, they are “allegory.” I am not interested in the attitude toward the common people, who are incapable of philosophy and, indeed, are basically children who need comfort through stories. I don’t want to examine the idea that ordinary people are too limited to do philosophy or the role of priests in keeping culture in a primitive state; rather I want to reflect on the relation between religion and truth Schopenhauer has his two characters explore in this dialog.

 

     So here is Schopenhauer’s apologist for the common man, Demopheles, on the relation of religion to truth:

For, as your friend Plato has said, the multitude can't be philosophers, and you shouldn't forget that. Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it: let it therefore command external respect, for to discredit it is to take it away. Just as they have popular poetry, and the popular wisdom of proverbs, so they must have popular metaphysics too: for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension. Consequently, this interpretation is always an allegorical investiture of the truth: and in practical life and in its effects on the feelings, that is to say, as a rule of action and as a comfort and consolation in suffering and death, it accomplishes perhaps just as much as the truth itself could achieve if we possessed it. Don't take offense at its unkempt, grotesque and apparently absurd form; for with your education and learning, you have no idea of the roundabout ways by which people in their crude state have to receive their knowledge of deep truths. The various religions are only various forms in which the truth, which taken by itself is above their comprehension, is grasped and realized by the masses; and truth becomes inseparable from these forms.

 

The people have no direct access to truth. The various religions are only various schemata in which the truth, which taken by itself is above their comprehension, is grasped and realized by the masses; and truth becomes inseparable from these forms.

 

But religion is not opposed to truth; it itself teaches truth. And as the range of its activity is not a narrow lecture room, but the world and humanity at large, religion must conform to the requirements and comprehension of an audience so numerous and so mixed. Religion must not let truth appear in its naked form; or, to use a medical simile, it must not exhibit it pure, but must employ a mythical vehicle, a medium, as it were.

 

The mythical, the mystical are understood as masks, ornaments – or perhaps to take something from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, a “veil of Maya”, the world as seen not as it is but as distorted. But some truth can shine through the distortions – and that means the mythical elements: God, the angels, Christ as savior, life in heaven or hell after death, the immaculate conception and virgin birth, the resurrection: everything that Christianity means for most of the faithful. Throwing gasoline on the fires of the ego for Schopenhauer, giving the ego hope of everlasting life, of a God that has a good plan for it and will help it on its way, etc.  The mythical and mystical elements – the fairy tale elements, the supernatural elements – feed the ego while the diamond in the rough, the pure moral teaching, gets passed along with it, a diamond which usually gets lost.

     The disagreement between Schopenhauer’s protagonists involves the value of keeping what they both agree are the fantastic elements that constitute the core of religion. If they were understood to be allegories, Philalethes would have no problem with religion. Both agree that most people cannot grasp truth – they would need to grasp metaphysical philosophy, they would need to be able to grasp Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Myth, allegory can at best present an introduction to the truth for a child – much as a fable of Aesop can present a childlike or folk version of morality whose truth can only be intellectually understood in a treatise like Aristotle’s Nichomachaen Ethics. So the Christian stories give a child a way to grasp the truths contained in The Sermon on the Mound, which expresses the diamond in the rough.

     This misrepresents things in two ways. First, a metaphysical masterpiece like Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation has a lot more in common with myth and allegory than Schopenhauer allows his protagonists to admit. Schopenhauer claims that we have a metaphysical need – a need that comes with the knowledge of our mortality, the experience of the self as a separate and valuable being (from the species, from nature), and the experience of evil, of suffering. These and other facts of life give rise to the need to make sense of it all. Religions like Christianity or Hinduism as well as metaphysical philosophies such as presented in The World as Will and Representation give us interpretations of the world as a whole and our place in it.

      But on Schopenhauer’s own understanding, his vision of the world as a whole concerns a reality beyond human conceptual thought, beyond even the purest Ideas of reality. Thus in any attempt to interpret reality as a whole we run up against the limits of conceptual thought and representation. Schopenhauer’s philosophy contains an inherent tension: putting a vision of reality as a whole – by definition beyond thought and language of creatures bound to their experience and languages – in the language of philosophy. How can Schopenhauer’s work represent reality as a whole except symbolically – as language that represents the gap between a particular human interpretation and transcendent reality as it is in itself? He is trying to express in language what cannot be expressed in language – on his own account.

    Neither myth nor philosophy gives us a description of reality as it is in itself. At best, both can communicate an intimation of transcendence. Schopenhauer himself believes that such an intimation of transcendence is possible through the aesthetic contemplation afforded by (great) art. Great art – especially music, because it is non-conceptual, close to being non-representational – allows for a suspension of the individual will or as Iris Murdoch put it “the fat, relentless ego,” which Schopenhauer rightly interpreted as a suffering ego. It is like our ego (Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation, which is at the same time a veil of maya casting a distorting light onto the real world) is suspended when, in my case, I am lost in listening to a work of Bach, say the second movement of the Organ Sonata No. 4, like a solar eclipse. The light of the ego goes out and I can see the night stars beyond the everyday world i.e. I can feel the world as it is apart from my ego, my desires, wishes, striving, agendas, hopes, dreams, etc. I have an impersonal experience of reality sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity i.e. not from the perspective of my distorting ego. It gives rise to a kind of compassion for the world itself and all the people in it - a feeling that has nothing to do with me. 

    Not all art can allow this prison break. Sentimental art idealizes and falsifies reality to feed the ego. Imagine a painting  called “Nostalgic Reverie.” "Nostalgic Reverie" is a painting that evokes a sentimental longing for the past, creating a romanticized depiction of reality that elicits a self-gratifying feeling in the viewer. The scene is set in a picturesque countryside, with rolling hills, lush greenery, and a quaint cottage nestled among trees. The sky is painted in soft hues of pink and orange, suggesting the warmth of a sunset. In the foreground of the painting, a young couple sits on a rustic wooden bench, holding hands and gazing lovingly into each other's eyes. A gentle breeze rustles the leaves of the trees, and the sound of birdsong fills the air, creating a sense of tranquility and serenity. The cottage in the background is adorned with blooming flowers and ivy-covered walls, exuding a sense of coziness and charm. Smoke rises from the chimney, suggesting the comfort of a warm hearth and home-cooked meal. The scene is imbued with a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality, inviting the viewer to escape into a romanticized vision of the past. As the viewer gazes upon "Nostalgic Reverie," they are transported to a world of idyllic beauty and romantic fantasy. The painting evokes feelings of warmth, nostalgia, and longing, allowing the viewer to indulge in a self-gratifying reverie of a simpler, more romanticized version of reality. Thus the ego escapes from its own everyday reality through a flight of fantasy it constructs for its own comfort. (Used to be one of my favorite past times, daydreaming.) It is all ego. Such art is not an escape from ego but a projection of it.

     So it is with religion and myth – and philosophy. It can be such that it allows an escape from ego and its fantasies or is reducible to the same. Of course, religion can be either like Bach’s sonata or the sentimental work “Nostalgic Reverie.” Both protagonists assume that because it is not plain, hard philosophy, because it is art or like art (myth, religious stories), it must be sentimental, ego construction.

     That is wrong on Schopenhauer’s own account. Philosophy too can be contemplation, can like music allow for escape from the ego and thus allow one to have an intimation (not a concept, a representation) of Being as such. But philosophies can be sentimental too. Not all philosophy is great philosophy. The question is: does one achieve a degree of emancipation from the ego, the principle of individuation? Does one eclipse the sun to be granted a glimpse of the stars beyond?

    Another way to transcend the ego for Schopenhauer is through compassion for the suffering of others. Again, compassion can be genuine, in which case it allows for a view of the world beyond what the ego affords – and thus all of conceptual language and thought as these have their source in the ego, in the principle of individuation – or it can be shallow or sentimental i.e. counterfeit, i.e. have its source in the ego (e.g. one enjoys thinking of oneself as compassionate, or feeling superior to those who are not compassionate, or presenting oneself to others on Facebook as compassionate, etc.).

   Philosophy is not inherently superior to myth or art. Religion is not untrue because it is not expressed in the language of philosophy. To me, Schopenhauer himself would have to grant this to be consistent.

 

I am not yet finished. I want to continue this reflection following this quote from C. S. Lewis:

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

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.”

 

Our Convictions

   The tree is known by the fruit. With respect to a person’s professed religious or non-religious convictions, there is a simple test to judge the fruit: do they divide you from other souls, your family, your community (if you have one), the nature of your place, the nature of your own body, or a rich inner life. Are the convictions the fruit of an alienated ego? Do the convictions themselves alienate the ego from the soul? Do they undo essential connections? That is the essence of sin: to isolate the ego, to make the ego absolute, its own judge over good and evil, over reality. To undo essential connections. To imprison the ego in its own fantasies, its own virtual reality.

    The whole Israeli-Palestinian Hell, for example. But also on the spiritual micro level: the tendency to de-mean the intrinsically good in whatever way. Think of all the myriad ways people demean others with their self-definitions and ‘identities.’ I’m an x; therefore, I am superior to the entire world of y’s – whereby the y’s also include nature. I believe x; therefore, I am superior to all who believe y.

It amazes me how much of human life - including my life - is determined by this simple principle. Which is in religious terms: determined by sin.

. . .

A disagreement is not necessarily a division. My father and I had many political disagreements, for example, but these disagreements did not diminish the love between us in the least. Neither of us was demeaned by the other's beliefs or arguments in support of those beliefs.

    There is something wonderfully impersonal about the search for truth. We are all limited in so many ways – by our cognitive capacities, by the fact of being born into one time and place and not another, by the limited amount of time we have for inquiry, etc. etc. etc. And thus fallible. It’s like we are all human chess players; every move expresses a belief or an argument supporting a belief. The other player can refute that belief or argument – or not. Often the game ends in a draw. But just because it doesn't end in a draw is no reason to think the belief or argument is therefore proven true beyond doubt. The greatest possible chess player – God, or if you prefer, the most advanced possible computer chess program imaginable – defines Truth (with a big ‘T’), and none of us are anywhere near that level. Our differences relative to the absolute chess player are vastly more significance than the relatively minor differences between our own limited abilities. Therefore, there is no reason to resent a conversation partner who disagrees with you than to resent a chess partner. Of course, unlike chess a genuine conversation is more thoroughly cooperative, lacking the competitive spirit of much chess.  

       We make each other better – we advance our game, our insight and understanding – every time we ‘play’ i.e. converse about what is true, good, or beautiful. I assume I can learn from ‘good players’ from almost all philosophies and religions. Nothing is demeaning in this, even if I have to revise some of my beliefs. It is all quite impersonal, even when it goes deep in us.

     The problem comes only when one person’s different opinion is not the first move in a conversation whose point is to get wiser, but to prove who is better: smarter, better educated, more moral, more fashionable, more patriotic, or whatever. Then we see the presence of the fat, relentless ego. Truth is no longer what drives communication, the form of truth-seeking is perverted into a war of one ego against another; its purpose is to destroy the opponent and elevate itself. Conversation becomes “rhetoric” (propaganda). Words and thoughts become weapons to defend and destroy egos rather than the means by which we erase a bit more of our ignorance, partly through conversations between people who see things differently.

    Jesus, when questioned by Pilatus, uttered these words: "For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." The second part always puzzled me but now I think I understand. But the Pharisees and high priests were not of the truth. They felt threatened and demeaned, their social status also called into question. It was not about truth for them but defense of the ego. They defended their egos with the cross.

    The same in the corrupted state of American political discourse. Nobody - neither MAGA nor WOKE or any of the other camps - believe they are fallible, and thus it is not a matter of finding the truth, of overcoming one step at a time our deep ignorance. Disagreement about what is true is translated immediately into one person's attempt to reduce and demean another. We can disagree about what is the best policies for the country, but we can't disagree about our "identity" (alienated egos) when the very existence of one is understood as an attempt to demean the other; when indeed the one is defined as essentially demeaning to other other. Disagreement about matters of truth presupposes transcending ego, and disintegrates whenever egos are at stake. 

    And the belief that all search for truth is nothing but such a contest between egos is one of those beliefs that divide one soul from another such that disagreement implies demeaning. I like to remember how far apart my father and I were from that. 

 Meditations on the limits of our knowledge

 

 Thinking about God, philosophically. Two openings to God seem available to us, apart from direct revelation. We can start with the universe and try to think back to its origin as well as reflect on our responses to it. The line from the poet Gerald Manly Hopkins catches the experience I am referring to: “The world is filled with the grandeur of God.” Or we can we reflect on the experience of the sacred and the absolute claim of the Good. Here I follow Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” – adding the experience of the sacred, which might have been out of Kant’s reach (unless his ‘sublime’ is a synonym). In the experience of the sacred or the absolute demand of goodness, we experience something that feels like a leak from another world. Our experience travels to the edge of the world, to its horizon, glimpsing darkly through a glass a dimension that transcends space and time. 

        Now the skeptical or naturalistic response to these two openings must be: they are illusions. No middle ground exists: either such experiences are illusions or they are a dark window into what lies beyond Being as we can experience it. Is there a knockdown argument that proves they are illusions? Such experiences take place in time and space – in someone’s brain. All explanation is by definition showing how the phenomenon under question has its place in the natural world – understood as a closed system in which events cause other events according to mathematically predictable patterns. Thus, we explain such experiences as we explain everything else: scientifically. Or culturally perhaps, such experiences arise from the attempts of the individual to make sense of their life by reading into phenomena our deepest wishes. These wishes, finding no natural or human cause that could possibly satisfy them, we imagine lead us to transcendence. But everything real has an explanation, and all explanation takes place within the closed system of nature. Thus our wishes or hopes – no spiritual phenomena – either have a footing in this closed system, or they are mere wishes or hopes.

 

 

The ground under our feet. We cannot – so Kant – think beyond the realm of the human: the realm bound by space, time, and causality. We can only stand on this ground. There is no ground that reaches beyond. And no matter our subjectively certain we may be, no sublime experience offers the slightest logical proof that our experiences of the divine are not illusions. To achieve knowledge of what these experiences are, we must not look at them from the inside, from the 1st person perspective, but from the outside, as astronomers learned to look at the solar system. We must look for a naturalistic explanation – such as an anthropologist explains the religious rites of ‘primitive’ cultures. Religion must be explained as any other phenomenon – explained in terms of its social or evolutionary development and function, and then physically as brain events. There is no opening to another world. 

        If this way of thinking is right, then religious thought and experience is a fiction – one that might have practical or evolutionary advantages. Such advantages, however, do nothing to explain what the fictitious experience really is. Whatever is in us – if anything – that presses some of us to imagine windows looking out into eternity, it must be explained in these terms. If we cannot ultimately live meaningfully without projecting a narrative or a vision onto the whole as a limited whole (sub specie aeternitatis), again that does not allow us to leap beyond the system of nature in which we are, as it were, held tight. 

      This is not a knockdown argument. Even if we accept – as I do – that science tells us something about reality, science as science does not force us to discount the 1st person perspective. The proposition that reality is reducible to what scientists can explain within the closed system of nature they must posit to do science at all, cannot be scientifically elevated to a metaphysical interpretation of Being as such. Our inner lives become meaningless or illusionary only within a metaphysical (not scientific) system that denies a priori (deducing from propositions taken to be axioms) the possibility that our 1st person perspective can be a window onto anything. About what lies beyond science, science itself has nothing to say. This is not an argument proving that the two openings, cosmological and sacred-moral, are truly openings. It does put the burden of proof on those claiming such experiences are fictions to justify their metaphysical argument.

 

 

Subjective, objective – no thanks. I dislike the ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’ dualism – a hangover from Descartes and logical positivism that is still powerful culturally together with the fact-value dualism that underwrites it. Rather than the subjective-objective distinction, I prefer to distinguish between a belief, thought, or judgment that logically must embody the concrete life of the individual, their quality of self-awareness, as opposed to such mental acts taking place in a restricted context – like science or forensics – that are logically, epistemologically worldview neutral. Affirming the import of an experiment in physics or a mathematical proof means accepting the ‘rationality’ (the method) of physics or math, which implies bracketing out all other aspects of my concrete life. Some beliefs, thoughts, or judgments we can justify apart from who we happen to be (i.e. purely as a scientist, etc.) and the core convictions we happen to hold. Other beliefs we cannot justify independently of who we are, our core convictions, and the larger life world we are a part of. 

           My understanding of the experiment has nothing to do with whether I am Christian or atheist, secular humanist or nihilist, shallow or profound, narcissistic or mature. Making a judgment about Macbeth, however, does depend on having the right ‘horizon’ to read it with understanding. Much of my concrete life – core beliefs, memories, etc. – serves as the window (more of less clear, more of less rightly positioned) through which the meanings show themselves to me through my translations of them – not into another language, but into my understanding of them. Our understandings of Macbeth are like translations: each distinct, with overlaps and differences; each growing out of the original though with irreducible differences that come from the ‘translator,’ who is always also an interpreter. Only for someone with no insight into Shakespeare could these various understandings of the play be merely ‘subjective.’

But they aren’t ‘objective’ in the sense of logical positivism either, which doesn’t mean they make no claim to be ‘translations’ of a reality that is the original.