Going on with my project (1)

     Start with something simple. I am taken by contemplating the night sky. This is a memory from my life in Camburg (near Jena). It was on a Friday, after work. I was returning home from a walk in the woods up on the ridge. The evening sky was crystal clear as the humidity was very low. The first planets had appeared. Venus is brightest and Jupiter was very close to Venus. Clear, pure points of light in the sky, the sky almost like glass or crystal.  I know they are planets and can roughly picture their place in the solar system. But I think of a verse from Dante’s Purgatorio, a poem that in those days I read every year during Lent. It think it was Lent when this happened.

The gentle hue of oriental sapphire

gathering in the serene aspect of the sky,

pure as far as the first horizon,

restored delight unto my eyes

soon as I issued forth from the dead air

that had afflicted both my sight and heart.

The lovely planet that emboldens love

was making all the orient smile,

veiling the Fishes that escorted her.

 

Dante had just come into the sweet light from the darkness of Hell. The contrast was not so abrupt for me, but I am sure it had been a hard day, and the beauty or quiet sublimity of the evening sky with the Evening Star shining brighter than I had ever seen it in my Kentucky home, where the air humidity is so thick, somehow struck me and reminded me of that verse – which I looked up, I don’t know it by heart; but I recall the feeling when I read it.

    Now a lot of this description is personal. Not many people will think of the Purgatorio when contemplating the evening sky. Not many will see God’s love in the light of the stars. But beneath the symbols standing in for and expressing from a particular perspective the mood in question, I suspect many people will connect to that mood. It is difficult to put into words. A kind of quiet awe, reverence, and something even deeper: an almost wordless recognition of beauty that was not just aesthetic but seemed to mean something. It was not merely a passive observation but a response to something beyond me self, a response that felt as though it had been elicited rather than self-generated. This mood was not the shock of the sublime as in terror before the vast or the overwhelming. It was gentler, more intimate, yet still filled with depth. The words that come to me now are serene, clear, pure, delight – these are significant. There is something about the clarity itself, the sharp distinction of Venus, Jupiter, and Mars against the crystalline sky, that seems to call forth a sense of meaning rather than mere visual appreciation. Above all, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s joy: the mood evokes a certain kind of longing or Sehnsucht that cannot be fulfilled in this world but a desire so intensely pleasurable in a painful way that you are sad when the mood passes.

       What deductions about reality can one make, if we choose not to reduce the mood to social constructions or subjective-psychological wiring? – and nothing rationally forces us to choose such a reduction. I am using deduction here in a special sense (for philosophy nerds akin to Husserl’s term eidetic deduction). To put it simply: Instead of asking what happens in my brain or psyche when I experience love or beauty, I ask what must be true of love or beauty for them to be what they are. This is not empirical deduction (which derives conclusions from observed facts: the glove didn’t fit, therefore it does not incriminate O.J.), but a kind of essential seeing (Wesensschau), in which one attempts to grasp the necessary conditions that make a given experience possible. For example, if I reflect on the experience of grief, I come to see that it necessarily involves a relation to a beloved person lost, a sense of irreplaceability, and an implicit recognition of the value of the lost person (place, animal, etc.). These are not contingent aspects of my own grief, but essential features of grief as such. In my example, I might ask: What must be true about reality for this experience to be disclose something about it? Does this experience disclose an essential relation between the human mind and Being? Does it suggest that beauty, order, or meaning are real features of the universe rather than mere projections? This form of deduction is thus a philosophical method that seeks to articulate features of reality from lived experience. It does not "prove" anything empirically but reveals that which gives intelligibility to our experiences.

       So what can be ontologically deduced from such a mood, assuming we do not live in a Matrix of illusions?

1.    Beauty is Real. The experience of beauty, even in its quietest forms, is not just an arbitrary projection of the mind onto an indifferent world. The world offers beauty, and we receive it. If beauty were purely subjective, it would be strange that so many different people, across different cultures, respond to things like the stars, the ocean, or certain harmonies in music with similar awe. This intimates that beauty is not an illusion but something disclosed.

2.    Being is Good. The experience of this gentle awe does not feel like an encounter with a cold, indifferent universe. Instead, it feels like a silent gift, as if existence itself is gracious. This fits with Aquinas’ idea that being and goodness are interchangeable. If existence were neutral or meaningless, why would it seem to us, in these moments, luminous with something good?

3.    Reality invites a response. The fact that we respond to the stars with something akin to recognition suggests that reality is not just a brute fact but is intelligible in a way deeper than mere scientific explanation. If I felt my children were precious because I bestowed that meaning upon them, that would be one thing. But the feeling in these moments is that the world presents itself as meaningful, as if reality invites a response rather than being arbitrarily imposed upon by our emotions. Like thoughts, moods and emotions can be more or less in tune with reality’s invitation.

4.    We participate in Something Greater. My thinking of Dante in that moment is telling. He emerges from the "dead air" of Hell into this celestial beauty, and it restores him. The mood as described shares something of this quality. It does not merely provoke an internal feeling; it feels as though it aligns us with something outside ourselves. It hints at a reality greater than ourselves but not indifferent to us.

5.    Love is a Fundamental Reality. If love is what makes the world visible in a certain way, then love is not just an emotion but an epistemic mode, one that discloses reality. If it is intelligible to see the Evening Star and think not merely of astronomy but of grace, then perhaps this is because love itself reveals something that the merely rational mind might miss. And if love reveals, then it must correspond to something real – not just as a human emotion, but as a fundamental quality of being itself.

At the deepest level, this line of thought seems to move toward the idea that the ground of being is not merely intelligent or necessary, but something closer to Dante’s vision in the final lines of the Paradiso: "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars." Not as a sentimental hope, but as the best interpretation of what this mood discloses about reality itself.

. . .

      Now I must make a distinction between the “deductions” that are more like inferences and the deductions that are colored by interpretation and clearly belong within the hermeneutic circle – in this case, within Christian mythology if I may call it that without calling its truth into question. If such experiences (when pure and not sentimental) genuinely disclose something – rather than merely project our inner states onto an indifferent universe – then it follows that the universe is not wholly neutral to our spiritual moods. There is, at minimum, a meaningful correspondence between consciousness and the structure of reality.

    From here, several inferences could follow:

1.    The universe is not indifferent to meaning. If moods like wonder, reverence, and love reveal something real, then reality is structured in such a way that it welcomes or makes room for these responses. This would contrast with a purely mechanistic or nihilistic view in which beauty, love, and longing are merely epiphenomena of an indifferent cosmos.

2.    Being is not neutral. If awe before the evening sky is not merely a subjective projection but an encounter with something real, then the universe is not simply there as brute fact. It is intelligible and potentially responsive.

3.    The Good is ontologically prior to the neutral. If the experience of beauty or love is disclosive of reality, then goodness and value are not merely subjective human constructs but have some kind of independent reality. The alternative would be to say that love and beauty arise from nothing, which seems both psychologically and metaphysically implausible.

This is where the inference to love as the ground of being becomes at least a plausible hypothesis. If the highest moments of human perception disclose something real and not illusory, then the ultimate nature of reality must be something that accommodates, gives rise to, or even is that which is disclosed. Perhaps love, beauty, goodness.

     This isn’t a strict syllogistic, logical deduction, but it has the character of eidetic necessity I discussed above: meaning, given the nature of these experiences, it is difficult to see how a fully indifferent, meaningless, or mechanistic reality could generate them in a way that is genuinely truth-revealing rather than simply subjective.

    References to Dante, Christian mythology, or even just the feeling that love and beauty disclose something real all belong to what could be called the "hermeneutic layer." They are ways of reading an underlying ontological reality. However, the existence of different cultural-religious representations does not necessarily undermine the idea that something real is being disclosed. Rather, it implies that human beings, across traditions, have encountered something common, some aspect of reality that is, in itself, beyond any one tradition's full articulation. The fact that different cultures represent the structure of reality in different ways does not entail that there is no reality. It may instead suggest that reality is complex, inexhaustible, and capable of being disclosed in multiple symbolic languages. As a poem in a foreign language is disclosed in multiple good translations over time (Dante’s Divine Comedia being a perfect example).

    Thus Dante’s Purgatorio, a Sufi poet’s vision of divine beauty, and a Daoist sense of harmony in nature may all be different interpretive lenses on an ontological reality that resists a single, exhaustive formulation. Or there may be a hierarchy of adequate “translations” with some more revealing of essence than others, although this itself is interpretive. Each tradition may capture something true, though none captures the whole. This fits well with what some of my favorite philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch claim: that attending to reality always requires humility, a recognition that what is disclosed to us is partial, mediated, yet nonetheless real.

    Thus while there is an interpretive aspect to some dimensions of these experiences, this does not mean they are merely subjective or arbitrary. It just means that humans, by necessity, grasp reality in ways conditioned by language, culture, and history. The question then becomes: is there a way of identifying convergences across traditions that point to something more universally valid? (Also part of Husserlian Wesenschau – this for philosophy nerds like me). If love, reverence, beauty, and longing for the transcendent appear again and again across cultures, this indicates that they reveal something real about Being.

 The Philosophy Book I Would Love to Write

My philosophical project, so to speak, is to explore some of the metaphysical/ontological/epistemological implications of my core convictions and the assumption that certain responses to the world are authoritative. Here are central ones I want to focus on but the list could be greatly expanded:

·        Love (in its diverse forms) as a response to the independent reality of people and other beings.

·        Grief as a response to the independent reality of a beloved person's death.

·        Remorse as a response to the independent reality of a person (or animal, place) you have harmed in some way.

·        Awe and reverence as responses to the sublimity of a clear night sky.

·        Awe and reverence as a response to great art or the disclosing of deep truths.

·        Awe and reverence in the presence of true heroism and self-sacrifice.

·        A related but different kind of reverence as a response to the beauty of certain sunsets.

·        Delight as a response to children, their imaginations and capacity for joy.

·        Moral horror and bewilderment over great evil: the Holocaust, the stabbing of a two-year-old as happened in Germany recently – the list is sadly very long.

·        Fear as a response to the danger of the destruction of that which is precious.

·        Outrage over a vulgar narcissist like Trump demeaning the heroism of people like John McCain and destroying the moral substance of a country.

·        Wonder over existence.

·        Anxiety over the ever-present possibility of misfortune.

·        The special kind of longing or Sehnsucht C. S. Lewis called joy: i.e. “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” 

But first, as though to get it out of the way and to introduce a more fruitful way to think about metaphysics, I would like to show the limits of science and even classical philosophy by focusing on the standard arguments for atheism based on the incompatibility of theism (leaving the content of the Idea of God open) and scientific rationality. A misleading conception of God as a super-being (the old man in the sky) lies behind classical and new atheist thought i.e. God as one being among others in the universe, although of course privileged and possessing magical powers. I have rarely encountered an argument for atheism that wasn’t a refutation of a straw man.

     The "super-being" conception – where God is imagined as an entity within the cosmos, albeit vastly more powerful – underlies many of the standard atheistic arguments, from the problem of evil to arguments from scientific explanation. If God is thought of as one being among others, then He could, in principle, be subject to empirical investigation like any other entity, and His existence could be confirmed or refuted in the same way. This assumption is especially evident in figures like Richard Dawkins, who treats God as a kind of scientific hypothesis, akin to a yet-undiscovered law or force of nature. The underlying premise is that God, if He exists, must be continuous with the natural order. Classical theism, by contrast, holds that God is not a being but Being Itself, the necessary, self-sustaining reality that underlies all contingent existence. This view means that God is neither an empirical object nor a scientific hypothesis but the condition for the intelligibility and indeed the possibility of being as such. However, this metaphysical understanding is often ignored in contemporary debates, making the arguments of New Atheism largely strawman attacks.

. . .

    Assume now that an atheist rejects the classical conception on a more logical argument: say, a being outside of beings, an existing thing that is at the same time no-thing, is just nothing, it is a logical impossibility. What then does such an argument leave as a possible answer to the question "Why is there something and not rather nothing?" To me it seems only

1) the material universe is eternal. In this view, something has always existed; there was never "nothing." The universe, or perhaps a multiverse, simply is: uncreated, self-sustaining, with no deeper explanation needed or possible. This was a common position among ancient materialists (like the Epicureans) and some modern cosmologists. or

2) The material universe just magically popped into existence out of nothing. This is the more counterintuitive view but one that some atheists, especially in contemporary physics, entertain. They argue that the universe emerged spontaneously from a "quantum vacuum" or that “nothingness” itself is unstable in such a way that it gives rise to existence.

These explanations are not coherent.

 

Response to 1). The eternity of being runs into the problem of infinite regress. If everything that exists is caused, as science assumes, then the assumption that the universe or some form of matter-energy is eternal is incoherent based on the unintelligibility of infinite regress. If nothing comes into existence except by being caused by something else, then logically the whole chain never gets started unless you posit an uncaused first cause. (A classical proof of God’s existence.) Therefore, if everything is caused, the universe itself must be caused by something outside itself. I don’t see how that can be refuted.

Response to 2). The “nothing” of the physicist cosmologists is not really nothing. It is more like the Chaos of many pagan creation myths. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss argue that physics shows how something can come from nothing but his "nothing" turns out to be a highly structured quantum field, not true metaphysical nothingness. This is playing with words.

    The fundamental problem with an eternal universe is that its existence is contingent. It could have not existed. If its existence could have been otherwise, then its factual existence calls for an explanation. That explanation cannot be just another contingent thing (since that would push the problem further back), so we need something necessary, something that must exist and cannot fail to exist. Thus philosophers like Aquinas, Leibniz, and others argue for a necessary being (which Aquinas conceives as the very act of existing itself). If we reject that, we seem left with a brute, unexplainable fact. Not very intellectually satisfying!

. . .

  But all you can say about this necessary being is that it is the "ground of being." Here God is a necessary hypothesis, a logical precondition for the possibility of something actual. Nothing more is implied. That is still a far cry from theism, it seems to me. This is why some thinkers, even non-theistic ones, have accepted the idea of a necessary being but remained agnostic about whether it has any of the attributes traditionally associated with God. For example, Spinoza identifies this necessary being with Nature (Deus sive Natura), an impersonal, self-sustaining reality. Some modern physicists speculate about a necessary quantum reality or a self-existent mathematical structure that generates the universe. A pure metaphysical skeptic might say the necessary being is simply “whatever reality ultimately is” but refrain from further speculation. (Spinoza has always attracted me.)

      I think (as Thomas Aquinas showed) further deductions are possible about this unmoved mover, the necessary existence, Being itself.

·        It must be purely actual, without potentiality. If it had potentiality, it would need something else to actualize it, contradicting its necessity.

·        It must be simple and indivisible. If it had parts, those parts would require a cause to be arranged in the way they are, contradicting its self-sufficiency.

·        It must be eternal and unchanging. Change implies moving from potential to actual, but a necessary being is fully actual already.

·        It must be the cause of all contingent things. Since contingent things exist, and they cannot be self-explanatory, they must derive their existence from the necessary being.

·        It must be immaterial. If it were material, it would be composed of parts and subject to change, violating the earlier conclusions. I don’t know what it means to say of any x that it exists but it is not material, but it must be assumed.

But still we are a long way from God.

     The inference from a necessary being to an intelligent or conscious being is a further move that requires its own justification. There are several classical arguments for this, but they are not strictly deductive in the same way as the earlier metaphysical reasoning. Instead, they tend to rely on inference to the best explanation. Here are three of the most well-known arguments:

The Argument from Order and Rationality

• The universe exhibits intelligibility and order: laws of physics, mathematical structures, and fine-tuned conditions that allow for life.
• Intelligibility suggests a rational principle behind it: to be understood, something must be intelligible; to be intelligible, it must arise from intelligence.
• If the necessary being were not rational or intelligent, how could a rational order emerge from it? The best explanation is that the source of intelligibility is itself intelligent.

The Argument from Final Causality (Teleology)

• In the natural world, things seem to be directed toward ends or purposes, even when they lack minds (e.g., the acorn grows into an oak, not a pine; the laws of physics consistently operate in specific ways).
• St. Thomas Aquinas argues in his Fifth Way that this goal-directedness cannot be random: something must be "directing" unintelligent things toward their proper ends.
• The best candidate for this “director” is an intelligence, because only intelligence can determine ends or purposes.
• If the necessary being is the first cause of all things, and things have directed purposes, then the first cause must be intelligent. Of course, evolution and self-organizing systems could explain apparent purpose without intelligence but evolution presupposes laws of nature, and self-organization still follows consistent patterns. The question remains: Why do those patterns exist rather than chaotic randomness?

The Argument from Abstract Objects and Mathematics

• The universe operates according to mathematical and logical structures that seem to exist independently of human minds.
• Many scientists and philosophers argue that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented.
• If mathematical truth is independent of us, it must exist in some kind of intellect.
• If the necessary being is the ultimate reality, and mathematical truth is part of reality, then the necessary being must be an intellect that grounds mathematical and logical truth.

Augustinian Argument

• An essence or Idea of some being is what is intelligible about it. I discussed the essence of apples in an earlier entry. Ideas don’t just float around in abstract space as Plato seems to have believed. An Idea belongs to intellect. The mind of God is a more logical address for Plato’s Ideas than spiritual space. When I grasp the essence of apples, and then deepen that grasp, I am thinking the thoughts of God (from a finite perspective) after him.

None of these arguments strictly prove that the necessary being must be conscious or intelligent in a qualitatively infinite way relative to human consciousness and intelligence. The last two seem strongest to me. But they all at least point in the direction of an intelligent first cause as the best explanation for the rational, ordered nature of reality. If is not an irrational belief even if not provable in the sense that the Pythagorean theorem is.

. . .

    I follow the tradition on this. These are arguments of probability, possible explanations for what is actual - intelligibility, etc. This is as far as "natural reason" gets you. Our exchange on this rather confirms my thinking on it. So now the next move, the move starting with my convictions as axioms, the idea that Being is (partly) disclosed through moods and emotional responses like grief, remorse, wonder, joy, reverence, longing, moral terror, fear in some cases, etc. It seems that if you start there, you are not very far away from attributing a kind of love, beauty, and thus goodness to the ground of being. For if, say, my children are revealed as precious in the light of my love, it follows that something precious exists, something precious is real. The same in the moral horror that is a response to evil done to children, i.e. that which is precious. Thus the universe is not blind or neutral, allowing the inference – again probable, best explanation, logically, but existentially certain – that the ground of being is perhaps love (1 John 4:8). Of course, I fear wishful thinking here. Seems too good to be true.

    So the approach I want to explore starts from the premise that certain emotional and moral responses (grief, joy, reverence, moral terror) are genuine responses to real features of the world. This flips the common question: “What is the nature of the world that gives rise to these responses?” into “What does the nature of my response reveal about the world?” This framing offers the possibility that the emotional and moral landscape is not just subjective but is a way of knowing (a form of participation in truth), especially when it pertains to things like love and beauty. By seeing the preciousness in my children through love, or feeling the horror of evil, I maintain quite commonsensically that these emotional responses reveal something true about the nature of reality: that reality itself is not cold and indifferent but that it possesses intrinsic value. These kinds of experiences are ex hypothesi not a random evolutionary byproduct but an intentional engagement with reality.

     I would have to show this, but the idea that the ground of being might be love is what our most profound emotional responses point to. This approach recalls Bernard Lonergan’s idea of “the law of the heart,” which suggests that the emotional response is integral to our grasp of the world. According to Lonergan, emotional responses to beauty, goodness, and suffering are cognitive acts that reflect the deeper structure of reality. Even the experience of moral horror points to goodness as a real quality in the universe. That goodness must exist beyond human constructions if we are to take moral experience seriously as a response to real evil. My approach harmonizes with Christian metaphysics (1 John 4:8: “God is love”) but I want to explore this idea philosophically.

       My approach draws on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, who also explores how our emotional responses to existence, especially in despair, love, and faith, reveal the reality of a God who is both transcendent and immanent. His theological reflections often assume that God is disclosed to us in our feelings, particularly our longing and love.

     Simone Weil reflected on the attention to suffering as a form of spiritual knowledge. She believed that emotional responses to human suffering (and, importantly, to beauty) were ways of knowing something deeply true about the universe and God.

      Also I have learned from the work of Raimond Gaita. Gaita’s approach to ethics and metaphysics posits the irreducibility of moral experience, especially love and compassion, without trying to reduce them to mere psychological or naturalistic explanations. Like Wittgenstein, Gaita is wary of metaphysical claims, preferring to let the moral life be a guide to understanding the world. However, his work suggests that moral phenomena may have some ontological weight though he doesn’t make metaphysical deductions based on them as I want to do.

     Iris Murdoch is important to me. Her reflections on attention and love show how the act of loving others is a way of perceiving reality. For Murdoch, love is not merely a subjective emotion but a way of seeing the world clearly. Her emphasis on the objectivity of moral experience (love as seeing beyond the self, etc.) suggests that love reveals what is true and real about others and the world. Our moral failures are failures of love.

     I must add Martin Heidegger to this list. Though hard to read, his insights on Being as revealed through moods and emotional states as well as his insights into truth as an uncovering of Being, which encloses and transcends us, are of central importance.

. . .

   This is my wish. To further argue that emotions like love, grief, and remorse are not only revelatory of human nature or morality but that they actually point to ontological truths about the structure of reality itself. These affective responses reveal their object, not simply what the object means to the moral life, but what the object is, ontologically. This means that love, for example, doesn’t just reveal the psychological or social value of the beloved but points to the real, objective value of the beloved and, by extension, reveals the ground of being itself.

 The Closing of the Mind

      It is not a contradiction: You can be a great scientist with a closed mind. I still pity such a man, Nobel Prize or not. Or you can be a dishwasher or a garbage man with a mind on fire. I don't think a mindless life is worth living whether Nobel laureate or dishwasher.  It is unworthy of a human being, a form of disrespect to the Creator even. And since there are very few people like Jesus or even Socrates walking around to converse with, most of us need books to talk to them. The devil – let's imagine there is one – would absolutely want to close the human mind and lock us up in the hell of our own egos, leaving his work to the corporate or autocrat-serving influencers responsible for making sure the thus imprisoned mind never comes into contact with reality, with beauty, with truth, with the souls of other people (a person as knowable though love), with God. The devil perhaps invented the modern school, a place where the minds of children are closed like no other, unless it be the screen, which is controlled either by the capitalist or the autocrat, which is to say, controlled by the devil. There is a strange interdependence between thoughtless and evil, as Hannah Arendt wrote. And our humanity lessens to the degree we cease to think and to be capable of thought. (You only get good at something by doing it.) Socrates uncovered the source of thoughtlessness or mindlessness – the lazy, self-satisfied, ego-centered conviction that one already understands everything or understands enough of everything, or understand enough to believe that understanding doesn't matter. The thoughtless or mindless person will not know or be bothered by their mindlessness. A man already has to be pretty thoughtful to understand how ignorant he is of what matters most.

 My Dogmas: A Reflection on my Philosophy

   Though at bottom I dogmatically believe things like: my love for my children (and other people's) is a response to their independent reality; my reverence for the beauty of a glorious sunset or the sublimity of the night sky is a response to the independent reality of nature; my horror over the evils that occurred during WWII is a response to the independent reality of the people and goods that were violated in the most terrible ways. I could go on. I believe my grief is a response to the independent reality of a loved one who has died. I believe my remorse is a response to the independent reality of a person I have wronged. I believe my fear of death to be a response to the independent reality of living. And so on.

     Certain things – love, beauty, horror, grief, remorse, etc. – are responses to a reality that is independent of our constructions, interpretations, or linguistic games. These are not merely subjective feelings or social constructs; they are rooted in something out there, in the world, in people, in nature, and in history. My commitment to this is deeply philosophical and also deeply moral: it’s the kind of foundation from which I interpret the world and try (too often unsuccessfully) to live my life. These core responses to real, tangible realities that transcend any intellectual exercise. I’ve found my grounding, but it's a grounding that can still be shaped by experience, in ways that keep me open to ongoing reflection. A philosophy or lifestyle that seeks to make social constructs, etc., out of these convictions is automatically subject to a reductio ad absurdum refutation for me, though not for everyone. In this I am as dogmatic as the Catholic Church.   

    I suspect everyone has a core dogma whether they know it or not. I don’t think we can live and act without one. Mine puts me in a critical relation to many others. My conviction that love, awe, beauty, moral terror, and the like may be, when not sentimental, authoritative responses to the world reflects not just an individual subjectivity but a universal human response to something transcendent or real about existence itself. The irony is that, while they are deeply personal, these convictions are intimations of the world as it ought to be experienced; of truth, beauty, and goodness that transcend one person’s individual existence but still cannot be entirely separated from it. Truth, beauty, and goodness – revealed by the responses to the world I take as authoritative – are like the light of the sun: greater than any single window through which they shine, yet only visible to us through the particular glass we look through. Some windows (through fortune) are clear, allowing the sweet light to stream in, revealing the world beyond. Others are fogged, cracked, or even covered over – by childhood traumas, by ideological blinders, by the corporate regime, etc. – so that the light appears dim, distorted, or absent altogether. To those looking through such windows, the very idea of a sun may seem like an illusion, a story told by those who claim to see more than they can prove. 

   Or perhaps it's like this: the apprehension of metaphysical reality through certain moods or emotions like love, reverence, or moral horror are like the melody of a great symphony, written long before any of us were born, resounding through Being, waiting to be heard - idea from Tolkien's Silmarillion. Some through fortune more than merit have attuned their ears to its harmonies and can recognize its themes wherever they arise. Others hear only noise, the fragments disconnected, as if the instruments are playing at random. And some deny that any melody exists at all, believing instead that what seems like music to others is only the mind imposing order on meaningless sound.

     Perhaps what makes this so difficult to articulate that I have to resort to metaphor – or liturgy, music, art, paradox, symbol – is that these responses feel both deeply intimate (they belong to me) and at the same time undeniably real (they correspond to the way the world ought to be perceived). In this sense, my "personal" assertions about these responses being authoritative might in fact be the most authentic claim to metaphysical truth we can make. This is partly definitive of our finitude and should not be confused with subjectivism. Reality at it deepest dimensions discloses itself in the inner life and is expressible through art, music, metaphor, symbol, ritual, and liturgy. Moderns of a certain kind are rationally free to reject this, of course, but I think are impoverished by the rejection. 

    Should it bother me that my core beliefs are held in a way that seems resistant to counter-argument because they are anchored in my experience, in what I know to be true at the deepest, personal level? Aren’t they also, in a sense, fragile in the way that human beings are fragile: the capacity for awe, love, horror, beauty, and reverence is not immune to life's’s most terrible possibilities. Let something happen to one of my children – would my convictions survive that? I cannot truthfully say. No one can. But I will say that if they did not, it would prove nothing, no more than Winston’s Smith confession in Orwell's 1984, extracted under extreme torture, that 2+2=5 and that he loved Big Brother proved anything other than we all have a breaking point. The question is actually less about whether our convictions would survive suffering but more about how they are sustained, perhaps reconfigured, in the face of suffering and misfortune, and whether they are enough to give meaning to our lives, even when it feels as though everything is being taken away.

        Perhaps the question is also: which responses to the world are authoritative? To me, the ones I mentioned are. I think they must reveal reality but about this, ironically, one can only speak personally. Love, awe, horror, indignity, sadness, grief, remorse, beauty, joy, longing, and reverence are authoritative because they feel like true responses to the reality of the world, even though, ultimately, what they reveal is not something they can be known in a matter-of-fact way. No verification principle could confirm them as “knowledge” and yet in a way I as certain of them as I am that I have two hands. They condition my attitude toward Being and thus in what light I see any particular fact-of-the-matter.

     That is where I always end up. Attempts to express what is true but cannot be proven in a purely deductive or empirical way. Instead, such truths are apprehended through conviction, experience, love, and the deep structure of understanding itself. They cannot be forced upon someone who lacks the capacity or disposition to see them, no more than the beauty of the Prelude of Bach could be forced on a soul for whom Death Metal reveals life's truth. Yet for those who do (through good fortune mostly) have the disposition, they are as undeniable as the axioms of logic or mathematics.

   These responses to the independent reality of the world function as conditions of meaning rather than as conclusions of an argument. That is, they are not inferred but recognized, disclosed in love, awe, horror, or reverence, just as we recognize a face or a melody rather than logically deducing it. And because they are conditions of meaning, any attempt to "prove" them ends up either presupposing them or reducing them to something lesser. This would explain why they are, in a way, self-evident – not in the sense that they are obvious to everyone, but in the sense that once they are grasped, they serve as foundations rather than as objects of proof.

 . . .

  I recognize the existential moment in my thinking. I think the attraction of thinkers like St. Thomas has been that, although faith, love, and hope are central, when it comes to the natural reason and nature, well, there is no need for faith, hope, or love, no need for the existential choice. You can just know it if you clear your mind in contemplation. For Aquinas, at least as he is often understood, the natural world and its truths are available to us through the faculty of human reason alone. If we cultivate our intellect and engage in careful, systematic thought, we can come to knowledge of the world and its essences, whether it's the nature of a human being or the logical principles that govern existence. Aristotle uncovered natural reason. In this sense, Aquinas offers a vision where reason and faith aren't in conflict but are distinct domains, each with its own role. Faith is concerned with the divine mysteries – things like the Trinity or the salvation of the soul – which can't be grasped through mere reason. But the natural world is not hidden in the same way. Its truths are accessible to human reason, provided we engage with it properly. A person who has sold their soul to the corporation or a saint will have the same understanding of the worldly world, just like the corporate hack and a saint would not have different physics in modern science. (I actually no longer read Aquinas that way but it is a common way of reading him, the way I used to read him.)

     This clarity of the natural order, the possibility of knowing without existential choice or the need for subjective faith, has a certain comfort and security. It presents a world that is structured and ordered, where human reason can find solid ground, and there's a definite sense of "rightness" in knowing the world in this way. That has always exerted an appeal for me. This juxtaposition – the clarity of the natural order and the existential depths of human experience – makes Aquinas, or the Aquinas-reading pointed to above, particularly attractive. He offers an intellectual system where one can confidently know the world in terms of natural reason, while also recognizing the deeper, more mysterious, and ultimately transcendent aspects of human existence. It's a philosophy that gives structure to the natural-moral world but leaves room for the richer, more mysterious facets of human life that are only revealed through faith and personal experience.

    But this kind of dualism doesn’t completely account for the deeper dimensions of human life. While we can "know" things about the world, we still have to live with our inherent limitations, our subjective experiences, and the awareness that much of our existence lies in the realm of faith, love, and hope – things that can’t be grasped by reason alone. My view is that faith, hope, and love – or the absence thereof, or the skepticism thereto – condition our engagement with nature and worldly life all the way down. (There is a way to read Aquinas that is compatible with this.)

    Faith, hope, and love aren’t just concerns for the transcendent or for things beyond the natural world; they are foundational – affirmed or denied – to how we engage with the world and nature itself. In other words, they aren't confined to the "realm" of the divine or existential, but shape and guide how we perceive, interact with, and understand the very things around us. This changes the way one approaches both the natural world and our place within it. Rather than seeing faith, hope, and love as external, otherworldly forces that we bring to bear on the world of reason and fact, I believe that these virtues (or the absence of them) are intertwined with the very process of knowing and being. They aren't just things we apply to distant or invisible realms; they shape our perception and engagement with the tangible world, the very stuff of everyday life.

     While Aquinas might argue that we can know nature objectively through reason alone, I think it rather the case that our reasoning, our understanding, is always already inflected by our emotional, existential, and moral engagements with the world. Faith, hope, and love are not just philosophical add-ons or optional extras; they – or their absence – are embedded in how we perceive, interact with, and even interpret the world. Thus even in the most rational or empirical disciplines the way we see and experience the world is always conditioned by our attitude toward it on a deeper, emotional level. For example, we might study the beauty of a sunset scientifically, but it’s the experience of awe and wonder that makes that beauty matter to us. That awe isn’t just an external response; it’s part of how we process, interpret, and know that beauty.

    We can't just "clear our minds" in contemplation and gain an objective, detached understanding of reality; instead, we're always immersed in it, shaped by it, and shaped by our relationships with it. (Heidegger and Gadamer contra Aquinas are right about this.)

. . .

Credo ut intelligam / I believe so that I may understand. (Augustine)

  I think the circularity of my attitude is not viciously circular. You cannot prove life has a meaning from the outside, from a position of neutral reason (i.e. such that the conclusion would be obvious to anyone with a brain, as in geometrical proofs). Reason, the life of the mind, is only fruitful to a soul who already stands in the right relation to the world. It is logically impossible to prove the meaning of life, or the meaninglessness of life for that matter, and thus to put oneself in the right relation to one’s own soul, other people, the community, nature, and God. It is only those who already have the right relation to their own souls, their fellow man, the community, nature, and God – and the key here is love (see my core convictions) – that can understand anything about it. This, a commonplace among religious thinkers from Augustine to Anselm to Tolstoy, is rejected by the Enlightenment and thus modernity. So it is not surprising that the central spiritual problem of modernity is nihilism. Within modernity, as Nietzsche put it, within a kind of rationality based on radical skepticism of all that we somehow know from the purest human experiences: “There is no answer to the Why.”

. . .

I think a well-meaning person who had never studied philosophy at all, once they got past some of the weird, non-standard ways I express certain everyday truths, would find what I have written here to be the plainest common sense. I don't know why I am so concerned to respond to those ultra-skeptical pop-postmodernists or pop-logical-positivists, those folks for whom everything is discourse, or narrative, or social construction, or just subjective emotion. 

Commentary on Tolstoy's What is Art? (chapters 1-4) 

Tolstoy’s What is Art?

    Ever since I can remember, art has been an important part of my life, from the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Andersen to songs to movies that deeply moved me and were partially prägend – forming me as copper is formed into a penny. At college I learned to read many “great” works and to love them: from Homer to Sophocles to Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare. Although I studied philosophy, I have come to believe that the deepest truths are communicated through art, which when it does what it ought is in touch with the inner life; and that philosophy at its best depends on this deeper dimension of the inner life.

    One of the artists whose works I learned to love was Leo Tolstoy. Not, I confess, War and Peace. It held my interest well enough for a few hundred pages but I just couldn’t finish it. But I did read, and later re-read, Anna Karinina, pitied Anna and was involved in Levin’s spiritual development. I read the late novel Resurrection, found it did speak to me, but not enough to re-read it, and now I have a hard time remembering it. This is probably due to my limits as a reader than the merits of the books. I did learn to love the shorter fiction: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Father Sergius, Master and Man, Strider, and Hadji Murat – and many of his folk tales. His contempt for sex in stories like A Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness is, well, interesting but too dark for me.  He was a damned Puritan, no doubt, believing that sex inherently cannot be transformed by love or, conversely, that love requires celibacy or at least seeing sex an unpleasant duty necessary to people the world. But his Confession, What I Believe, and his (somewhat idiosyncratic) translation of parts of the New Testament are of permanent religious value for seekers like myself.

       His What is Art? is also of permanent value, in spite of his streak of contrariness and his rather dry summary of aesthetics in chapter 3. I want to try to say why.

       I think the way he frames the central question is right on: What is art good for? What is its deepest purpose? The view he thinks is wrong is this: the purpose of art is to give us pleasure. The tradition had disguised this as beauty – the purpose of art is to make that which is beautiful. He rejects the classical French view that there are objective (formal) standards of beauty, finding the source of the emphasis on beauty in the subjective though disinterested pleasure it gives more worthy of criticism. According to the English sentimentalists, to experience x as beautiful is just to experience a certain kind of pleasure. And for this very reason He argues that pleasure – entertainment in modern terms –  cannot be the intrinsic end or natural fulfillment of art. For Tolstoy that reduction cannot make sense of why art is important. First, beauty (pleasure, entertainment) is subjective. The qualities required to understand art’s important are objective, matters of truth, not taste. Tolstoy used a homegrown analogy with food. An account that focused only on what tasted good to particular people would be of no use in telling us what was essential: whether the food was healthy. A diet filled with sugar and ultra-processed foods might taste good to the people who have been brought up on it, but the question is whether it is nourishing to the body. What makes food good, i.e. nourishing as well as tasty: that is the question. Analogously, the question of art concerns its role in human life, how it works for good (health) or evil (loss of health) of the human person as a whole. That some art is analogous to fast food seems too obvious to belabor. A steady diet of art that does not nourish but to some degree has a corrupting influence on the soul; and other art does provide important, perhaps essential nourishment to the soul is a fundamental distinction for Tolstoy as it was for Plato.

      Every kind of art involves communication of a special kind and thus a relationship between makers and users of art, or as Tolstoy put it: “Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.” Not communication in the sense that I tell my son I am going out for a walk. Not all communication is art. But all art is communication. The essential feature of the communication that is art is that I express feelings (experiences, meanings) that another can somehow come to share them. If one person laughs, others will laugh: the laughter is infectious. If my one cries, I am full of compassion and concern: again the feelings are somehow infectious (that is Tolstoy’s metaphor). This phenomenon for Tolstoy is the root of art.

     Art goes beyond these spontaneous bodily gestures (laughing, crying) and makes conscious signs – words, pictures, musical notes – to produce the feelings (meanings, experiences) and the possibility of sharing them. Art is the conscious making of works that evoke the infectious sharing of feelings – Tolstoy sticks to feelings; I would add meanings, experiences, understandings, thoughts, insights. Tolstoy himself made Anna Karenina such that her fate evoked compassion and a judgment against the false society that was as a prison to her, for example. We feel what Ivan Ilych feels when he realizes that his whole life had been devoted to apparent goods that were not really good at all. Art transforms subjective states of mind into conscious, intersubjectively experienceable emotions, feelings, judgments, or insights.

      Tolstoy sees art primarily rooted in everyday life:

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings, statues, poems, novels.... But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind—from cradle-song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

So following Tolstoy, imagine two boys encounter a wolf in the woods and were terrified. The first arrives and, obviously upset, not very coherently, informs others of the encounter with the wolf. The second boy arrives and not only confirms the encounter but makes his experience of it come to life by means of the story he tells. And the others by means of the story come to share in his experience, an experience they themselves did not have. He didn’t just tell people what happened – the first boy did that. He re-created the experience for others. Here is a primitive, everyday experience of art. The genuine artist can re-create events we have never experienced at all. Thus Tolstoy understands art:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them (Emphasis Tolstoy). Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity (emphasis mine).

 

(Tolstoy cannot fully share Plato’s view but is sympathetic to it and prefers it to modern conceptions precisely because Plato at least realized that art is a serious matter.)

     Art is not purely instrumental. While we are listening to a story we are interested in the story itself, not what usefulness it has to us. Nevertheless Tolstoy maintains art has an essential role to play in our humanity. Well, good art anyway. How does he distinguish good from bad art? Well, it is not strictly true that all art unites everyone. Some art – propaganda films, for example – incite hatred based on the demeaning of others. If art is to accomplish its role for good, it must be judged not only in aesthetic but moral terms. A propaganda film, even if as well-done as one of Leni Riefenstahl’s – is bad art because it does not unify but divide men. Good art generates harmony and well-being, compassion and understanding. To quote from Iris Murdoch, who was influenced by Tolstoy:

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

To portray people, even wretches like Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov (of Dostoevsky’s Brother Karamazov) or the shallow Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin in a way that includes them in our pity is to see them in the light of love. This I believe was a feature of good art for Tolstoy; its absence a mark of bad art.

      Art is so important because it allows us to imagine the inner lives of other people, making them as real to us are we are to ourselves: a foundation of the experience of a common humanity. Good art educates our feelings, allowing us to see others in the light of love and compassion. Through art our minds and hearts somehow include the experience of people from different times and places, and are thus enriched. It is perhaps the antidote to Grimm’s fairy tales, which I also love and which I believe children need. But there to learn good from evil, hope from despair, we find pure archetypical expressions of innocence or wickedness in human beings and supernatural beings. If this were taken out of Fairy and imported into the human world, we get the kind of bad art that reduces human beings to essentially good or wicked. We need to learn to see even the wicked and shallow as “one of us.” Without thusly educated emotions, barbarism threatens, as Tolstoy explicitly writes:

As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them, and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Hauser.

And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself, and as generally diffused.