Going on with my project (6) - Goodman, Irrealism, Pragmaticism.

    Now I will shift and use Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, to show that the underlying conception of "neutral reason" such that evidence must be external (independent of quality of inner life) is connected with his irrealism or idea that there are many worlds. I think if you, under the rug, so to speak, smuggle in a concept of reason that axiomatically excludes lived experience and the possibility that a "subjective" response like remorse, grief, joy, etc. discloses aspects of reality rather than only our psychology or forms of social consciousness, then Goodman's irrealism is what you get. To use the examples above, both the reductionist versions and my account, from the point of view of neutral reason, can account for the "data." Goodman would not claim, I think, that the "subjective" aspect disqualifies "my world" as an intelligible world version, as would the logical positivist or more generally reductionist. But to justify a claim to truth (in the genuine sense of uncovering reality) we would have to be able to escape our frames-of-explanation, our world versions, and compare them with reality itself – rather like Einstein’s relativity hypothesis being tested by the solar eclipse of 1919 in science. And this, I agree, is absurd since metaphysical reality is not ‘in’ the universe but how the universe is as a whole, what we should see the universe as. To test Einstein’s relativity did not require we get out of our conscious experience itself to compare it to reality-in-itself – an absurd idea, as Goodman makes clear. But the metaphysical aspect of Goodman’s view – the plurality of worlds – only follows if you accept neutral reason at the metaphysical level. i.e. that we use the same form of reason to think about Being as such as we do in physics, or a courtroom case.

     Take an extreme examples, from a speech by Heinrich Himmler concerning the role of the SS in murder and cruelty on an industrial scale.

“I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person – with exceptions due to human weaknesses – has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.” (emphasis mine)

This is a chilling passage, the logic that informs it horrific. Himmler – unless he was a master of cynicism, which is possible – believed that engaging in systematic mass murder on a fantastic scale while remaining “a decent person” is a mark of moral superiority. Thus he in Nazi fashion redefines morality as obedience to an ideological imperative (the will of the Führer, in which reality is perfectly present) rather than as based on human dignity. “Decency” is linked to emotional detachment and the ability to carry out systematic killing without succumbing to what he dismisses as "human weaknesses" (meaning guilt or remorse). The inversion is complete when he calls this “a glorious chapter,” turning an abomination into something glorious. His language evokes compassion for the men who must do the unpleasant work of mass murder, whereas compassion for the victims would be a sign of “weakness.”

    The speech is built on a biological determinism that holds that races are fundamentally distinct moral categories. Jews are not just a different people, but a different kind of being, one whose extermination is a “programmatic” necessity. The phrase “the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew” captures this: individual Jews may appear good, but their ontological status (their racial being) still marks them as outside the moral community. This reflects a racialized essentialism, akin to Aristotle’s concept of “natural slaves” but stripped of any paternalistic duty toward the lesser group. The extermination is not presented as an unfortunate necessity but as a historical mission, part of a “glorious chapter.” This implies a quasi-religious eschatology, in which purification through killing is necessary to create a better world (for the superior race).

     In a traditional moral ontology, goodness, truth, and justice exist independently of human will. Himmler denies this by making morality a function of ideological commitment: the good is whatever serves the racial state. There is no higher tribunal (God, natural law, conscience) against which the extermination can be judged.

     This is a world version in Goodman’s sense. Now imagine an android intelligence that wanted to evaluate it with respect to its truth against a competitor – say, the Christianity of Edith Stein, revealed as a saint according to the Catholic Church for the miraculous love she manifested in Auschwitz. Let me describe this intelligence and its theory of rationality before going on. (I think this fits 95% of analytic philosophy perfectly. Alternatively, it is how an anthropologist studying modern philosophical culture might analyze it.)

 

Android rationality: a model of neutral intelligence

   An android rationality would be:

1.    Formally Logical. It could perform logical deductions, identify contradictions, and evaluate syllogisms with precision.

2.    Empirically Rigorous. It could process vast amounts of data, identify correlations, and determine probabilities with high accuracy.

3.    Meta-Theoretically Neutral. It could recognize that different world-versions (e.g., Himmler’s vs. Edith Stein’s) exist and even describe them from the outside, but it would lack the ability to inhabit them from the inside.

4.    Lacking Lived Understanding. It would not be inside the beam (to use C.S. Lewis’s metaphor), meaning it could not experience meaning from within. Love, remorse, awe, and moral horror would be analyzed as data points, not as disclosures of truth.

5.    Unable to Resolve Ultimate Disputes. Faced with competing world-versions (Himmler vs. Stein), it could compare them in terms of coherence, historical influence, or predictive success, but it could not judge them from within a moral or existential framework. At best, it could analyze trends in human moral intuitions, but it could not grasp why one vision of reality is truer than another.

   In the jargon of analytic philosophy, android rationality features epistemic externalism without internal access. It can catalog all possible interpretations of a set of facts. But it cannot see from within a world version, meaning it cannot recognize that some interpretations might be truer than others because they disclose reality more fully or more justly. Evidence, moreover, is reduced to external verification rather than the internal understanding of meaning. It can assign probability values to different interpretations based on the available data. However, it cannot experience – or rather, a human being must discount any such experience – why something must be the case or ought to be believed in a way that involves existential-ontological participation (i.e. the kind of understanding that comes from being a part of reality or some reality). It can tell you the statistical likelihood that humans in a given culture will find moral horror in Auschwitz, but it cannot grasp why that horror is an authoritative disclosure of evil (i.e. cannot allow any such grasp to matter philosophically as it is “subjective”.)

      Because its rationality is based on a neutral, externalist framework, an android must treat all moral claims as human constructs rather than as truths embedded in reality. It can recognize that Edith Stein’s Catholicism and Himmler’s racial ontology are different but has no internal grounds for declaring one as truer than the other. If pressed, it might choose based on social consensus or predictive outcomes (e.g., which world leads to a more stable society?), but not based on a direct insight into moral reality.

    Furthermore, it can analyze aesthetic preferences and recognize patterns in what humans call "beauty," but it cannot experience beauty as a revelation. Similarly, it can identify religious beliefs and study their cultural effects, but it cannot recognize holiness, transcendence, or moral purity – discounted as “subjective”. An android could partly describe the rituals of a mass or a Buddhist meditation practice and explain their significance sociologically, but it could never see what those engaged in them see.

    The android can process and generate language at a syntactical and even probabilistic level (as AI does), but it cannot grasp what Wittgenstein would call the depth of meaning in lived expressions like:

§  "I am sorry."

§  "I love you."

§  "I cannot do this evil act."

It can recognize these as functional or pragmatic within a linguistic framework, but it cannot see that such statements might be disclosures of reality rather than just conventional (pragmatic) uses of language. It is mirrored in the “academic” language I try to get my students not to use: a language devoid of allusions, connotations, associations – of poetry! A depersonalized, flat, dry language. The language of an android (passives, nominalizations, jargon, wordy and trite expressions, etc.).

      All of this rests on one massive presupposition: this is the way to see the world as it really is. The subjective life of even the wisest and most profound of human beings is irrelevant to knowledge. What makes this so persuasive to many (to me as well in the past) is the "faith" that you see the world right this way, by blocking out the subjective life, by eliminating the inner life from language (using words denuded of connotation and cultural or personal associations, by eliminating the personal perspective, etc. Like describing a lab experiment in chemistry. And that is because of a prior ontological commitment to the view that reality just is, absolutely, as natural science reveals it to be. If that is how reality is in fact, that android rationality would be rationality as such. This largely subconscious commitment assumes it is not metaphysical and actually eliminates metaphysics. But it is in reality metaphysics gone mad.

    This kind of rationality (that I am calling it android rationality but is better known as scientific-objectivist rationality) persuades precisely because it presents itself as the absence of metaphysical commitment, as if stripping away subjectivity, emotion, and personal perspective leads to a pure, unbiased, and finally true way of seeing reality. But that’s an illusion, because this very way of seeing is itself metaphysically loaded to the brim.

    I know why it appeals to people because it once mightily appealed to me. (My childhood hero was Spock, who precisely embodied this rationality in the old Star Trek series but grew out of it in the later films.) It feels like you’re avoiding error when you eliminate subjective and intersubjective experience. The scientific method – which rightly brackets out emotion in its practice – is misapplied as philosophy (as an ontological stance) – as if all knowledge should look like a chemistry lab report. The immense success of natural science makes it seem like this must be the right way to think about reality in general. Science does give us knowledge of a certain kind (depersonalized, e.g. regularities that can be captured in mathematical equations) but that does not mean its method is the only valid way to understand reality. Its cultural power consists in creating the illusion of escape from the hermeneutic circle, allowing one to feel as a god standing outside of and above mere human existence and its “folk metaphysics.” Epistemologically, one feels as if one has stepped outside of bias and into an objective “real” world. But what is actually happening is the adoption of a particular perspective that denies it is a perspective – the typical move of metaphysical naturalism. It is a massive metaphysical commitment, just a hidden one.

       Since it cannot account for these, it either dismisses them or reduces them to epiphenomena of the physical world, which is precisely the error of scientism.      And as Wendell Berry has so often pointed out, it demeans and then destroys what it cannot account for. Because this rationality assumes only neutral, external, depersonalized descriptions are valid, it cannot account for: l love in all its forms, moral horror, remorse, beauty, grief, joy, longing, and much more – not as psychological states but as disclosures of reality. Indeed, it cannot account for the very things that make life meaningful. Is it any wonder that this is an age of Nihilism – es fehlt die Antwort auf das Warum (the answer to the Why? is missing); and is it any wonder why when the dominant metaphysics, become ideology, denies the very possibility of the reality of everything that could give answers to the Why?

     Natural science does give us real knowledge – insofar as it is benevolent, I love science. But that does not mean all knowledge must take its form. The assumption that it does is a metaphysical totalization, not a neutral stance. And thus android rationality is not a window to the world as such; more like a microscope or an x-ray. As an interpretation of reality as such it is a negative metaphysics; one that does not see but erases. It is not metaphysically neutral as it assumes a materialist ontology as given; defines reality by what can be measured; denies the evidential weight of lived experience; and cannot justify its own starting assumptions. This is why it is metaphysics gone mad. It is not neutral reason but a self-blinding dogma, one that feels like clear thinking because it eliminates uncertainty and subjectivity but only by eliminating the conditions for recognizing deeper truths.

I

Goodman’s Problem  

    If neutral rationality is the only way to know reality, then why accept Goodman’s world version pluralism? Why not just say there is one scientific world, and everything else is illusion? Why study philosophy at all? If science is the only route to truth, then philosophy is obsolete. Goodman knows this is wrong, which is why he insists on world-versions. But he cannot escape the android stance when he operates at the meta-level.

    Goodman would allow for different conceptions of rationality internal to particular world versions. But when he is on the meta-level, as he is as a philosopher in his book, he definitely decides from a neutral rationality. This is an internal contradiction.  If rationality itself is world-relative—if different world-versions operate with different conceptions of what counts as evidence, good reasons, explanation, etc.—then there should be no privileged, neutral standpoint from which Goodman, as a philosopher, can adjudicate among them. But when he is operating at the meta-level, he implicitly relies on a neutral conception of rationality to analyze and compare world versions. This is a contradiction because for him there should be no neutral rationality. If rationality is always embedded in world versions, then there should be no universal standpoint from which to analyze all world versions. But in Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman does presuppose that there is such a standpoint when he discusses world-construction at the meta-philosophical level. His own philosophical method assumes criteria that his theory denies. When Goodman compares different world-versions, he still presumes that logical consistency, coherence, and empirical adequacy are relevant criteria. Yet, if rationality is only valid within world-versions, those criteria themselves are just another world-version’s rules rather than universal measures.  

     The "view from nowhere" problem. Goodman’s irrealism rejects an independent reality that adjudicates between world-versions. But his own philosophical project, as a meta-theory of worldmaking, presumes he can make valid statements about world-versions from outside any particular one. This is analogous to an AI cataloging world-versions as an external observer without being able to step inside them. If Goodman were truly consistent, he should say: “I am offering one world-version of rationality, no better or worse than others.” But instead, he implies that his philosophical analysis is objectively valid across world versions, meaning he is, in effect, stepping outside his own relativism when it suits him. Goodman’s meta-philosophical stance – no independent reality against which to compare world versions; the world is representation, and we can’t get out of representation to see how it really is – presupposes precisely the kind of privileged (android) rationality that his system claims does not exist.

   How could Goodman have failed to anticipate this objection? I think the answer lies in his pragmaticism. He might have thought pragmatic success could justify his meta-framework: worldmaking is useful for understanding knowledge, so we use it, no need for further justification. But that doesn’t solve the contradiction; it only shifts the justification to usefulness, which is still a universal criterion he cannot objectively invoke.

    Goodman seems to believe that pragmatism allows him to sidestep metaphysics, as if adopting a pragmatic approach means he doesn’t have to answer foundational questions about truth, reality, and reason. But then, he proceeds to make metaphysical claims anyway, particularly about how knowledge and worldmaking function. This is a classic case of smuggling in metaphysics while pretending to avoid it. If he were really just a pragmaticist in the sense of James or Dewey, he should simply say:

We construct world-versions because it works for us, and there’s no need to ask about ultimate reality.

But when he says "there are many worlds," that is an ontological claim – not just a statement about human knowledge, but a statement about reality itself. If he were truly pragmaticist, he would just say, "We describe things in different ways," not, "There are many worlds." But Goodman doesn’t stop there. He develops an ontological framework that says there are many worlds, not just many interpretations of one world. That is not a mere pragmatic move; it is a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality itself.

     Pragmatism, however, cannot justify metaphysical claims. Pragmatism can partly explain why people believe what they do (e.g., we adopt beliefs that are useful for survival, for knowledge-making, for social order). But pragmatism cannot tell us whether any of those beliefs are true in a deeper sense i.e. whether they correspond to reality or disclose something fundamental. Goodman tries to make a pragmatic case for metaphysical irrealism but that’s a contradiction. Pragmatism only justifies belief in terms of usefulness, not truth. Pragmaticism is not philosophy at all but the refusal to think philosophically. And so he ends up doing metaphysics anyway, and is guiding by android rationality.

    I think Goodman’s pragmatism reveals an underlying fear of metaphysics in much of modern thought, and it’s deeply tied to the cultural obsession with autonomy and the domination of nature (including human nature). To think metaphysically is to attempt to learn about reality beyond the self, beyond personal construction, beyond mere human projection. But the very idea that there could be a truth or an order not of our making is threatening to a worldview that insists on individual autonomy and the conquest of nature as its highest goods. Figures like Goodman, Rorty, and postmodernists try to avoid metaphysics by claiming that truth is just a matter of what works or what we construct within language-games and world-versions. But this just covertly engages in metaphysics while denying it. The irony is that by refusing to think metaphysically, they still make implicit metaphysical claims, just without admitting it.

     Other modern thinkers flee from metaphysics into science as the only legitimate form of knowledge (as seen in logical positivism or contemporary materialism). But this is also a metaphysical stance: it assumes that only what is empirically testable (Empiricist tradition) or logically demonstrable (Rationalist tradition) is real, which is itself an empirically or logically unprovable metaphysical claim. It also denies the authority of moral, aesthetic, or existential experiences as modes of knowing reality.

    In popular culture the aversion to metaphysics has different root. Metaphysics, like religion, if taken seriously, might impose demands on us. If reality includes moral truth, then we are not (contra Nietzsche and his many followers) entirely free to invent meaning. The modern ideal of autonomy, in line with the desires of egoism, dogmatically believes that we can construct our own values, our own identities, and our own meanings without reference to an independent reality. Partly understandable as “nature” has often enough functioned as an ideology legitimating injustice and oppression. I get that. Still: to accept metaphysical reality would mean acknowledging that not everything is up to us, that some truths are not human constructions but authoritative disclosures of Being itself. That is precisely what modernity, in its most radical forms, does not want to confront. Just because the Catholic Church legitimated the feudal class system by appealing to “nature” does not mean that all appeals to reality are wrong – e.g. the Holocaust was evil.

     The fear of metaphysics is not an intellectual problem but a moral and existential one. It stems from a deep-seated resistance to the idea that reality might not be entirely malleable to human will.

Goodman’s evasion of metaphysics is just one intellectual expression of a broader cultural impulse: to refuse to look at anything that challenges the supremacy of autonomy.

    I think that this fear of metaphysics leads to deliberate blindness. Modern thought often refuses to consider whether reality might disclose itself through love, remorse, joy, and beauty, because to acknowledge such disclosures would mean surrendering the illusion of total control, the foundation of autonomy and the domination of nature. But reality leaks through anyway – in moral horror, in awe, in remorse, in grief, in joy, in longing, in love. The very things modern rationality tries to reduce or explain away are the things that most stubbornly resist neutralization.

    Metaphysics is unavoidable. Philosophy is avoidable, clearly, but living without an implicit metaphysics is not. The only question is whether one faces it honestly or suppresses it in bad faith. That is what my argument lay bare, I think.

 

Goodman on my example.

    For Goodman it makes no philosophical sense to imagine Himmler and Stein leaving their experience of life behind, taking their pictures of life in a purely theoretical sense, and comparing these pictures with an uninterpreted world. Thus the android/Goodman would have to conclude that Himmler and Stein were both “good” within their frame-of-reference, but the question which was really good would be mute. The rationality of Goodman indeed operates much like this android intelligence at the meta-level i.e. the philosophical level.  It acknowledges multiple "versions of the world." It restricts itself to analyzing internal coherence and external consistency. It can only see a constructed nature of human meaning-making but it cannot step inside and grasp some meanings as more real than others; nor can it see love, remorse, or joy as modes of disclosing reality rather than just psychological states. In other words, it cannot transcend the assumption that all truths must be externally verifiable, thus dismissing disclosive forms of truth as merely "subjective" or "interpretative" – rather than more or less insightful understandings of a world that ultimately transcends us. Thus the android intelligence:

·        Can process facts but not meaning.

·        Can evaluate coherence but not disclosure.

·        Can compare frameworks but not see from within them.

 

 

A note on Star Trek’s Data.

I have often used Data as a model of the rationality preferred by most philosophers in the English-speaking world. Without a body of flesh-and-blood, he was devoid of emotions and thus should be perfectly rational on the Stoic and modern assumption that emotions reveal nothing of reality and get in the way of clear thinking. Data from Star Trek actually exceeds this android model. But Data actually goes beyond android intelligence as I have just sketched it. What makes Data different is that he desires to understand what he lacks. His curiosity about human emotions and moral insight means that he is not a purely external observer. He actively seeks participation in human meaning. He does not experience emotion but recognizes that emotion is an insight into reality that he lacks. He does not love, for example, but he respects love as real rather than as just a biochemical phenomenon. He cannot grasp music as a human would, to take another example, but he seeks to experience it in a way beyond mere mathematical appreciation. This is why Data, in a sense, moves beyond neutral rationality. Indeed, his very curiosity signals that he is open to a reality he does not control. He is not trapped in a world of pure logic because he acknowledges that something escapes his logical net. That makes him profoundly different from Goodman-style rationality, which simply flattens the problem and denies the need to account for what cannot be formally captured.

The Metaphysical Significance of Birth

 Going on with my Project (5) - The Birth of a Child

 I want to try one more such exercise and then offer another kind of argument. Up to now, my argument has had the logical form of a hypothetical or conditional statement: If some of our moods and emotional responses disclose aspects of reality, then reality is meaningful, and indeed love (and thus morality) is woven into the very fabric. I want to explore one more such conditional and then see what I can argue in support of the truth of the antecedent.

     The emotional response I want to focus on now is the response to the birth of one’s child. I remember stories of how extremely happy my father and especially grandparents were when I was born. I didn’t quite understand that as a child. As a father, while the difficult circumstances of my relationship to the mothers of my children complicated things – indeed, my first reaction on the new that they were pregnant was panic as my life as I had known it was over – that did nothing to dim my joy when my children arrived. I will not try to express it in words except to say a quiet joy was involved and awareness of the significance of being a father. 

    I would like to juxtapose this with a memorable line from a Bob Dylan song, “Masters of War”: “You have thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled / fear to bring children / into the world.” This against the background of possible world war and nuclear holocaust. I also know it is not uncommon for women who have given birth to be unable to bond with their newborn baby. I suppose much of that is explained by childhood traumas but I suppose it is possible a woman’s attitude to life and her own life might also generate this inability to love and feel joy, i.e. it is also in some cases connected to implicit metaphysics. If this complex of attitudes and emotions reveals anything about Being, if we are not just puppets attached to evolutionary or psychological strings, what do they disclose? And as we are animals how can such “spiritual” attitudes emerge? Are our responses reducible to those of a mother cat or a swallow? Surely not, but neither are they cleanly divisible from such instincts. How to make sense of that?

    When my first child was born, I had no language to express what I experienced, being at that time a typical modern secular materialist. When I second child was born, a thought-emotion welled up inside me, seemingly spontaneously: “he’s a gift.” Even if your worldview leaves no space for a Giver, this metaphor would be understandable to most people. Instead of a Giver, just substitute Mystery. It is the idea that the birth of a child transcends not only biology and social conventions, even as we express this transcendence with conventional metaphors, but also cannot be contained in any reductionist or subjectivist ontology – a bad way of saying that the advent of a new life is sublime. If we are true to this experience, we cannot believe in a meaningless, indifferent universe. Indeed, across cultures and historical periods, the birth of a child is surrounded by celebration, ritual, and deep personal transformation.

    We cannot reduce the whole experience to evolution or social convention, although we do need a language of love to express it, and all language is in part conventional. “He’s a gift” is part of the language of love. The emotion-laden experiences brought to expression within the language of love are in tune with reality. Without that language – as with my first child – your experience remains mute. Outside the language of love and the matrix of experiences that live within it, a person is blind to the reality of the child. The radiance of love, the light it shines on being, is what makes this life-affirming attitude authoritative.

     If our emotional responses to birth disclose reality rather than merely reflecting arbitrary or subjective feelings, what do they tell us? They tell us that life itself is meaningful, that love is not just an epiphenomenon of survival but intrinsic to Being, and that human beings are neither wholly animals nor detached spirits, but creatures in whom the physical and the spiritual intertwine. If this is true, then the experience of welcoming a child is not just an emotional response but a disclosure of a deeper truth about the world: that existence, at its core, is good, and that love is not an illusion but a deep aspect of Being itself.

    Of course, this response is not uniformly present, indicating the weakness of instinct. Mother cats nurture their kittens and then let them go. Human mothers and fathers have more freedom. The possibility of withholding love is a necessary condition for there to be love. Some women – men too, but women are more intensely bound to the birth – due to trauma, depression, or other psychological factors, struggle to bond with their newborns. If love and joy at new life are natural responses, then their absence raises questions. Are such women simply deprived of the "natural" neurochemical responses, a reductionist might ask? Or are the neurochemical responses different because the woman was traumatized or suffered from a lack of love in her own life? Seems like a chicken-egg problem. 

     There is also a deeper dimension: an implicit metaphysical stance toward life itself, which is connected to biography but is also generated by social structures. Is the inability to experience joy in childbirth connected to a view of life – a perspective on the person’s life – as fundamentally bleak or devoid of meaning? Or isn’t this a common attitude in our society? The dominant value of “autonomy,” which holds that the self is the only source of value in an otherwise indifferent nature – we demean what we intend to exploit or destroy – leads to seeing the unborn child as an intrusion of nature, an obstacle to freedom. Technology is the “solution.” If value is created solely by individual will, then a being who enters the world unbidden and whose presence places demands on another is often seen as a burden rather than a gift – conditioned of course by the ideology of autonomy, which social roots in capitalist society. This view, however, blinds people to the deeper reality revealed by love: that the child is not merely an imposition but a revelation. In the presence of a newborn, we are confronted with a truth that precedes our will, a being whose “value” is not contingent on our desires like other market commodities but intrinsic. The failure to see the child in the light of love, to acknowledge this given reality, is not merely a failure of sentiment but a failure of metaphysical vision. The ties between metaphysics and emotion is evident here: one’s deepest assumptions about reality shape how one experiences even the most fundamental human realities.

     Another angle on this I have taken from a line in a Bob Dylan song, “Masters of War,” perhaps Dylan’s darkest. This line is: "You have thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled / fear to bring children / into the world." Dylan captures an existential dread, a response to a world that seems fundamentally threatening of humanity, where the very act of bringing forth new life appears reckless or even cruel. It points to the metaphysical dimension of birth: the fear of bringing a child into the world is, in some cases, the fear that life itself cannot be affirmed, at least in the real-existing world, while the joy of welcoming a child affirms the opposite. Indeed, the ability to experience joy at the birth of a child serves as an absolute standard by which to judge social and political reality. A just and ordered society is one in which new life is welcomed with hope and celebration. When this joy is replaced by fear, it signals a profound disorder, not only in society but in the metaphysical assumptions underlying it. A society that makes birth itself a source of anxiety rather than joy has betrayed something fundamental about the nature of life and love. Conversely, a society or culture may be said to be in line with human nature when space is there for people to feel joy over the birth of a child.

   I seem to just be asserting that love is authoritative, its absence a form of meaning-blindness. Once I grant that emotions (moods, feelings, attitudes) can be revealing, I am confronted with the fact that people have incompatible emotions. This is not unconnected with different metaphysical assumptions about self and others, nature and society, and God. And this is not unconnected with personal experience within a particular social-historical-economic matrix. I need to explore my love is authoritative.

Afterthought 

In Zustimming zur Welt, eine Theorie des Festes, one of the most important philosophers for me, Josef Pieper, argues that true celebration is an affirmation of the goodness of existence. For him, a genuine feast is not merely a break from work or a diversion but an acknowledgment of reality as fundamentally meaningful, indeed rooted in gratitude for existence itself. This ties directly into my train of thought about the birth of a child as a moment of metaphysical disclosure. If birth is a reason for celebration across cultures, it is because it affirms something beyond individual will, something given and good in itself.

[Now logically it could also follow that this phenomenon is just part of our genetic wiring and doesn't disclose anything. You need more than universality for that. I think - logically - you end up where Nelson Goodman did, it "irrealism" or a plurality of incommensurable worlds. You have to look at it from inside experience, inside the beam to use C. S. Lewis's metaphor, to find the light love shines on things authoritative. I will have to go into this later. But while universally normative responses to birth might be a starting point, they don’t automatically reveal metaphysical significance. The key lies in how these experiences are interpreted and understood from within, in the context of lived experience – in the "beam" in C. S. Lewis’s toolshed. The light that love shines on things is not something that can be proven empirically or rationally in a strictly scientific sense; it must be understood existentially, from the "inside" of human experience. Therefore, I need an account such that within this experience there is an authoritative quality, something like an intuitive grasp that transcends mere instinct or biological drive. This "light" uncovers a deeper dimension of reality, one that speaks to the heart, to the goodness of life and love. Thus I would avoid Goodman’s "irrealism" by showing that meaning is not something that can be easily reduced to subjectivism but is authoritative, revealing itself through our experience of birth, love, and joy among other phenomena.]

   [A philosophy professor once told me that when you begin relying on "intuition", you know your argument is in trouble, and that seems a good warning sign. But two great Bach interpreters might argue about how to play a certain composition, and someone unfamiliar with Bach or the musical tradition would be locked out of such a discussion, which relies on lived experience. He would be like a dog watching TV. Therefore, some truths are just like that, not accessible to neutral rationality. To me, it is part of our finitude. Some degree of trust or faith that things are at least partly as our best experience reveals them to be is indispensable.]

 

So for Pieper – who is right – festivity is the lived expression of a metaphysical vision in which Being is received as a gift rather than as raw material for the will to manipulate. A true feast is not just a social custom or a psychological need; it is an act of recognition, an acknowledgment that existence is not neutral or indifferent but fundamentally good. A society capable of genuine celebration is one that implicitly affirms the meaningfulness of life. Conversely, when celebration withers as when birth is met with fear rather than joy, when gratitude gives way to anxiety, this signals not just a shift in cultural practice but a deeper loss: the inability to see the world as love-able.

[The existential dread expressed in “Masters of War” – the fear of bringing children into a world that seems unfit for them – is a rupture in the human capacity for celebration. When birth itself ceases to be an occasion for joy, it is not merely an economic or political problem but a metaphysical crisis. It reveals a world in which love is no longer seen as woven into the structure of reality but as something fragile, contingent, even illusory. A society that loses the ability to celebrate birth has, in a sense, lost the ability to affirm life as meaningful. Cf. the life-negating culture of abortion.]

    A celebration of birth such that the celebration affirms life and connects individuals to the deeper truths of existence, can be found in many forms of life. A good example is the traditional Jewish celebrations of birth, especially the Brit Milah (circumcision) for boys and Simchat Bat (celebration of a girl’s birth). the Brit Milah embodies as a festivity an affirmation of life. It is not merely a biological event but a sacred event. It is a celebration of life. The ritual is not just about the child’s entry into the world but about the broader meaning of life, community, and spiritual continuity. The ritual ties into Pieper’s account because it elevates the biological act of birth onto a transcendent plane. It shifts the focus away from the individual’s autonomy or survival and onto a shared cultural and spiritual life. The Brit Milah is an acknowledgment that the birth of a child brings new life into the world, not just biologically but spiritually.

     The Simchat Bat is a celebration of the birth of a girl in Jewish families. Traditionally, the arrival of a girl is celebrated with a festive meal and blessings, where the community would offer congratulations and joy. This celebration is less formalized but still reflects a deep acknowledgment of the value of new life, regardless of gender. The birth of a girl is seen not just as the continuation of the family line but as an opportunity to celebrate the unique and irreplaceable value of every individual. This accords with Pieper’s idea of festivity as a recognition of life’s inherent value.  It shows that the celebration of a girl’s birth is not just a personal or familial event but a profound affirmation of the goodness of life itself. It would be a moment where the child is seen not through the lens of utility or practicality but as a being of inherent worth, deserving of joy and celebration.

     Such celebrations are meaningful because they acknowledge life as a gift, giving reality to exactly the subjective feeling I experienced upon the birth of my child. They stand in stark contrast to a secular, utilitarian view of birth, where life is seen as a neutral event, perhaps even a burden or an obstacle to personal freedom, as in the modern concerns about overpopulation or ecological strain. For Pieper, celebration is about standing in awe of life’s goodness regardless of the personal costs or challenges. A celebration of birth, whether a Brit Milah or a Simchat Bat, affirms life as it is when not falsified: namely, as a gift to be received with joy and gratitude.

      Here I will only allude to the celebration I know best: Christmas, in its religious meaning as a celebration of the Incarnation – God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. In Christian theology, this birth is not just the coming of a child but the coming of God himself into the world in human form, as a little child. In this sense, birth is imbued with an extraordinary significance: the Creator enters creation, the author of the human story enters into the story as a character, affirming its inherent goodness and value (“For God so loved the world...”). The birth of Christ is the ultimate celebration of life, not only because it brings a child into the world but because it reveals that life is good, it is worth living, and it is worth experiencing, despite suffering and mortality. We are invited to see God in the birth of every child, as indeed I have with my own children. (How capitalism has covered up this dimension of the Christmas celebration is well-known.)

 Going on with my project (4) - What Evil Reveals

I want to focus on what evil reveals about the human race, particularly the fear and horror that are in many forms the normal human responses to it. I will forgo citing terrible examples, which are legion. I just can’t bear to delve into this. I have just listened to a historical account of the Belgian Congo under the wicked King Leopold. Too much.

       Evil done to children I experience – like others – as so horrible as to call into question the purpose of Creation. Instead of citing real examples of evil, I will quote at length Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s character from Brothers Karamazov; he is reacting against arguments to justify God in the face of evil:

 Listen: if everyone has to suffer in order to bring about eternal harmony through that suffering, tell me, please, what have children to do with this? It’s quite incomprehensible that they should have to suffer, that they too should have to pay for someone else’s mill, the means of ensuring someone’s future harmony? I understand the universality of sin, I understand the universality of retribution, but children have no part in this universal sin, and if it’s true that they are stained with the sins of their fathers, then, of course, that’s a truth not of this world, and I don’t understand it. Some cynic may say that the children will grow up and will in time sin themselves, but he didn’t grow up, that eight-year-old torn apart by the dogs. Oh, Alyosha, I’m not blaspheming! I understand how the universe will shake when heaven and earth shall unite in a single paean of praise, and all that lives and has lived will cry out, “You are just, O Lord, for your ways are revealed to us!” When the mother embraces the murderer whose dogs tore her son apart, and all three shall cry out weeping, “You are just, O Lord” – that, of course, will be the summit of all knowledge, and all will be explained. But here’s the snag; that’s just what I can’t accept. …. While there’s still time I want to guard myself against this, and therefore I absolutely reject that higher harmony. It’s not worth one little tear from one single little tortured child, beating its breast with its little fists in its foul-smelling lock-up, and praying with its unexpiated tears to its “Dear Father God!” No, it’s not worth this, because those tears have remained unexpiated.

 

. . .

 I will keep this section brief. Others have written deeply about evil – Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, for example. I will organize my brief remarks around three questions.

 

1. What does the horror and repulsion over evil reveal about reality? If such responses are revelatory, if we are not just puppets dancing on biology’s or society’s strings, what must be true about reality to authenticate these responses?

    If horror and repulsion at evil are revelatory, then they must disclose something fundamental about the nature of the world. The fact that we recognize evil as evil rather than merely as a biological or social inconvenience is linguistic and existential (spiritual) “proof” that morality is not an arbitrary construct or instinct but uncovers something very real, something that goes to the core of our reality as human beings. Our responses to evil of course presuppose that the universe is imbued with meaning (unless you don’t want to count us as part of the universe). Ivan Karamazov’s horror at the suffering of children is not an idiosyncratic whim but an indictment of reality itself. If our horror is not an illusion, then it reveals that reality is, or better: ought to resolve around moral truth. As Joseph Pieper put it:

Alles Sollen gründet im Sein. Die Wirklichkeit ist das Fundament des Ethischen. Das Gute ist das Wirklichkeitsgemäße. Wer das Gute wissen und tun will, der muss seinen Blick richten auf die gegenständliche Seinswelt. Nicht auf die eigene ‚Gesinnung‘, nicht auf ‚die Werte‘, nicht auf eigenmächtig gesetzte ‚Ideale‘ und ‚Vorbilder‘. Er muss absehen von seinem eigenen Akt und hinblicken auf die Wirklichkeit.

Everything of moral significance—from how to act in a particular situation to how to live—is grounded in being. Reality is the foundation of the Moral. The Good is that which corresponds to reality. Whoever seeks to know and do the Good must direct their gaze toward the objective world of being – not toward their own ‘disposition,’ not toward ‘values,’ not toward arbitrarily established ‘ideals’ and ‘role models.’ They must look away from their own subjective act and toward reality.

   Moreover, evil can only be seen as a violation or destruction of the Good. Therefore, the Good is ontologically prior. Classical theodicies (Augustine, Aquinas) thus rightly argue that evil is a privation of good, a disorder in Creation. Our horror over evil testifies to this. Evil is not a thing in itself but the perversion of an original good. The life and being of the nine-year-old child on the Christmas Market in Magdeburg in December, 2024, was precious, her destruction by the perpetrator of that attack evil.  Even if we judge the perpetrator unbalanced (of course he was!) the act itself is by definition evil: it destroyed something – someone – precious. This is why we experience evil not merely as a violation of something real.

     If a child is precious and a child is part of the universe, then it follows with necessity that we live in a meaningful universe and the Good and the Moral are part of the universe. If we were mere puppets of biology or society, our moral intuitions would be reducible to evolutionary conditioning. But if our horror at evil is more than just an adaptive reflex, it suggests that human moral responses correspond to something beyond mere survival mechanisms. To seriously live as though that were true would itself be wicked. To take our horror at evil seriously, at least one of the following must be true: either Good and evil are not subjective preferences/biological reflexes but disclose an objective moral reality (that the child was truly precious and her destruction was a destruction of something precious, love-able, i.e. having a claim on us to exist and be respected if not loved); or our inner life is a socially and/or biologically generated illusion – basically like the Matrix (the film). That latter, though logically-theoretically possible (no one can refute because no one can get outside of experience to compare metaphysical beliefs to factual states of affairs), this option is highly improbable and does the dirt on life. Our horror at extreme evil, therefore, ought not to be seen as just our brain chemistry reacting to stimuli or a social construct designed to ensure social stability; it is an encounter with a moral reality that demands acknowledgment.

      If our authoritative responses to evil are revelatory, then there must be a transcendent source of moral meaning – at least transcendent to our subjective life and indeed our science and philosophy.  If our sense of justice and outrage at evil is not reducible to blind evolutionary processes, then the universe is meaningful and moral. This is at least an intimation of an intelligence, a Goodness, perhaps a kind of love that infuses Being.

     Finally, if moral response is real, then we must in some certainly limited and conditioned but real sense be free to do good and refrain from evil. (One way of thinking about the original moral imperative.) And thus we must in a meaningful if not absolute sense (we are not angels) be responsible for our acts and lives. If we were deterministic machines, moral outrage would be meaningless. This relative responsibility is essential for it preserves the possibility of pity, mercy, forgiveness. We are not demons though at the extreme we can become like demons. There are certainly human limits to forgiveness such that only a Christ could find forgiveness intelligible. That subject I would treat later.

 

2. What does the absence of compassion reveal about the state of a person’s soul? What does the capacity for extreme evil reveal about human nature?

The absence of compassion, especially in cases of extreme cruelty, may reveal a profound spiritual deformation. The absence of compassion for victims of evil (and even for evil-doers: better for the soul to suffer than do evil, as Socrates said) means that a person has cut themselves off from the moral reality that binds human beings together. C. S. Lewis describes damnation as a soul collapsing inward, shutting itself off from the good. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” indicates another form of spiritual deformation. She claims that some perpetrators of great evil are not sadistic monsters but ordinary people who have lost their ability to see moral reality. This is a kind of meaning-blindness, where evil is carried out without awareness of its enormity. In any case, if our horror at evil reveals something about moral reality, then the absence of compassion indicates a soul disconnected from that reality. In extreme cases, this might not just be a moral failing but a metaphysical one: the soul becomes a kind of void, an absence of being. Nihilism as a philosophy eventually translates into a numbness to the reality of other people and Creation itself.

 

3. What does the capacity for extreme evil reveal about human nature?

That human beings can commit acts of extreme evil – often with deliberation and even pleasure – raises disturbing ideas about human nature. Unlike animals, which kill out of instinct, humans can kill out of ideology, resentment, or nihilism. Human freedom is dangerously open-ended; we are capable of great good but also of radical evil. The capacity for evil, then, may stem from the distorting one’s perception of the good. Moral failures are failures of love (Murdoch). Indeed, the Christian tradition speaks of mysterium iniquitatis: the mystery of evil’s existence. Unlike suffering caused by natural forces, evil has a deliberate, chosen quality that. This is why the worst evils leave us not just saddened but spiritually shaken. This is an opinion that I would have to defend, but I think the possibility of evil does stem from a kind of ignorance or meaning-blindness (Socrates), and this is cultivated in the more or less unjust societies into which we are thrown.

     Evil also, perhaps ironically, reveals our common humanity. It exposes the fragility of all human beings, the depths of our moral responsibility, and the fundamental reality that we are not isolated individuals but deeply connected to one another: any one of us is an absolute limit to the will of others (and even oneself). Ivan Karamazov’s protest in The Brothers Karamazov reveals a common humanity. He does not merely reject suffering in the abstract; he is outraged precisely because he recognizes the innocent child as one of us. The very capacity to be horrified by evil presupposes an intuitive sense that we share (ontologically, morally) in a common humanity that evil violates.

      If suffering and moral struggle reveal our shared humanity in its vulnerability, then love – both in its everyday expressions and in moments of great sacrifice – reveals this reality in its highest dimension (John 15:13). Compassion, in particular, acknowledges the reality of another person’s suffering and responds to it, affirming that we are not isolated but bound together in reality if not always in appearance. This touches on Dostoevsky’s vision: that true understanding of humanity comes not just through suffering, but through love. Ivan Karamazov protests against theodicy because he refuses to reconcile suffering with love, while Zosima and Alyosha embody the opposite conviction: that love is the answer to suffering, not its justification but its redemption.

     Any human endeavor must in the end be judged by that foundational experience of love and suffering. To sever oneself from it, to pursue greatness while denying the reality of suffering or the demands of love, is to risk a kind of inhumanity. This is why certain forms of ambition, ideology, or even utopian thinking (French Revolution) can become dangerous: they try to transcend the human condition by rejecting its most fundamental realities. By contrast, the highest expressions of human greatness – acts of heroism, artistic masterpieces, profound philosophical insights – seem to arise from an engagement with love and suffering, not an escape from them.

 Going on with my project (3) - Remorse

   I would like to focus on remorse next and what it reveals ontologically. (I think Raimond Gaita has thought most deeply about remorse in Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, and I draw freely on this book.) Rather than an example from my own life, of which there are too many, I would like to focus on Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. As I read it, he is oppressed by poverty, which produces a kind of meaning-blindness in him. From this matrix he latches on to a kind of corrupt version of Nietzschean philosophy, one that sees morality as a decadent social construct, an ideology of resentment. He thinks the superior man is free from concern about moral conventions and remorse over alleged evils done. He sees Napolean as such a man. (“There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it,” as Voldemort put the same thought.) He believes himself to be such a man and tests this belief by murdering the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, whom he sees as a "louse" whose death would benefit society. (We always de-mean before we violate or destroy.) Raskolnikov is tormented by anxiety and guilt after the murder, though he does not experience a single dramatic "Oh my God!" moment early on. His descent into Hell is gradual. At first, his sickness and paranoia seem psychological rather than moral; he fears being caught rather than truly feeling remorse. The real breakthrough comes primarily through Sonia Marmeladov, the young prostitute (!) whose humility and faith shine light into his darkness. Through her, he begins to see the true meaning of what he has done and indeed what he has become: a murderer. She reads to him from the Gospel of John, and in her presence, he starts to understand his crime existentially, indeed spiritually. His eventual surrender to the police and confession is more than just admitting to the crime; it marks his seeing the truth, seeing therefore his guilt, and as a result needing redemption.

    What can we deduce about reality, what aspect of reality shows itself in and through Raskolnikov’s remorse, if we assume it is not reducible to evolutionary-psychological-social categories? The reality of the pawn-broker. Not as the empirical person she was (very unlikeable). Indeed, in a purely worldly sense the world might have been better off without her.  But as a child of God or a human being loved by Christ. In secular terms (more superficially) as a human being and thus as an absolute limit to the will. Her human reality is revealed through his remorse, his pained recognition of guilt.

    As said, before the murder he had objectified her, reducing her to a louse to be exterminated. In doing so, he denies her a soul and sets up an ontological divide between the valuable or superior human, the one who has a claim to be, and the all-too-human who makes no claim on the superior men to exist.  Through his remorse, she is restored to reality – not just as an individual, but as an absolute moral limit, an entity who ought never to have been killed.

   Remorse discloses the preciousness of every human life, as contrary to worldly common sense as that might seem. The moral dimension of the humanity of the victim is revealed not in theoretical reflection but in the existential weight of guilt. Guilt “proves” we are the kind of being (or creature) that can be de-meaned and violated or destroyed, and that doing so pollutes the soul of the evil-doer, opening up a spiritual abyss that only forgiveness or redemption can close.

. . .

   The true nature not only of the crime but also the punishment is disclosed (Never was a novel better titled!). At first, Raskolnikov sees punishment externally, as something imposed by the state. But after his transformation, he accepts it as something he must undergo, not merely to satisfy the law, but as part of his moral and spiritual redemption. Dostoevsky shows his readers the essence of punishment as a kind of purgation. It is not just retribution but a path toward the restoration of the soul. This we see in the epilogue where Raskolnikov, now in Siberian exile, experiences the beginnings of rebirth through Sonia’s patient love and through an inner awakening. This is a very Christian universe. Sonia is like a window through which Christ’s truth-love shines through, clarifying the reality of things. But I don’t think it depends on an explicit affirmation of Christianity. Pure love is possible among non-Christians as well. It is the purity of the love that matters i.e. the absence of the “fat, relentless ego” (Iris Murdoch) from the love.

. . .

 Again, what aspects of reality does true remorse disclose?

Remorse discloses moral reality. If morality were merely a social construct or an evolutionary mechanism ensuring social cohesion, Raskolnikov should have been able to "construct" a justification and remain free of guilt. But he cannot. His remorse reveals that morality is not a human invention but an absolute structure of reality, something one collides with. (It is not proof of this, granted. The reader is still free to see him as pitifully dominated by conventional morality. But again, I am assuming here for the purposes of ontological deduction that the remorse is authentic.)  His remorse is not reducible to regret over consequences; it is a fundamental recognition that he violated something real and inviolable.

    Other people, fellow travelers to the grave, fellow sinners if you will, are absolute limits to our will and thus “good, very good” at core, no matter how badly our actual lives cover this up. The reality of the pawnbroker as a human being transcends Raskolnikov’s will. He wanted to see her as a mere object, but remorse forces him to recognize that she was never reducible to his conceptual scheme. This supports an ontological claim: human beings are not just material beings but bear a reality that demands recognition beyond mere social agreements.

    Punishment cannot be eradicated from our nature. Punishment is not arbitrary or merely a social construct. Rather, it is written into the structure of being itself. Guilt demands atonement. If punishment were purely a social or psychological construct, Raskolnikov could have eluded it psychologically. But he finds no peace until he embraces suffering as necessary for redemption. Thus suffering, when borne rightly, can have a transformative role in human existence. It is not just punitive but purgative.

. . .

    Of course, many moderns are skeptical of remorse, seeing it as a hangover from Christian morality and metaphysics, a kind of conditioning Raskolnikov couldn't free himself from. And there are of course inauthentic forms of remorse most ontologically significant emotional responses – sentimentality being at the top of the list, but also a kind of behavioral conditioning. But again, rejecting the power of remorse to reveal the person wronged and the nature of the wrong and the damaged soul of the wrong-doer seems to turn life in its head, and results in a terrifying nihilism. If it were no longer even intelligible that a man could suffer genuine remorse for murder, we would be in a brave new world indeed.

     The skepticism toward remorse, particularly in modernity, stems from a broader rejection of moral reality as real and the suspicion that guilt is a social construct rather than a metaphysical condition of human existence. If genuine remorse were debunked, then moral crime would no longer have an inner reality but would be merely breaches of convention. This leads to a chilling consequence: there would be no inner transformation of the wrongdoer, only external correction by force or re-education. This is precisely what many totalitarian regimes attempted by erasing remorse through ideological conditioning. Moreover, the rejection of remorse follows from what Weber called the disenchantment (Entzauberung) of modernity (science-capitalism-technology), where everything real about the inner life is explained away by psychology, biology, or sociology. No metaphysical truths allowed! (Even my man Wittgenstein could not really get out of this cage.) If remorse is just an illusion, then crime is merely an error in judgment or social maladjustment, not something that damages the soul of the wrongdoer. This is terrifying because it implies that human beings would no longer be responsive to their own moral failures in any deep, spiritual sense. i.e. it implies nihilism. 

. . .

Not all remorse is genuine. Some is mere sentimentality, social conditioning, or self-pity. How do we distinguish real remorse from inauthentic forms? Here are some possible criteria:

a) Authentic remorse is oriented toward the person wronged. False remorse is self-centered (e.g., "I feel bad because I got caught"). True remorse is outward-looking. It sees the reality of the wronged person, not just the consequences for the wrongdoer. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s remorse is initially inauthentic (fear of being caught), but through Sonia, it becomes authentic – he recognizes his victim has a shared humanity with him, a soul.

b) Authentic remorse cannot be resolved through mere external actions. Some forms of guilt can be "managed" socially (e.g., paying a fine or apologizing to satisfy expectations). But real remorse demands something deeper: an internal transformation. The fact that we recognize unforgivable acts (e.g., betrayal of a loved one) intimates that remorse points beyond external correction.

c) Authentic remorse is not merely emotional but transformative. Sentimentality can mimic remorse but is fleeting. Genuine remorse leads to a reorientation of the will. The person does not merely feel guilty but becomes someone new. Raskolnikov’s confession is an act of transformation, not just a relief of guilt.

d) Authentic remorse is an encounter with an objective reality. If remorse is merely a psychological state, we should be able to suppress it. But real remorse forces itself upon us; it insists on its reality. Thus remorse is not just a feeling but an encounter with a reality beyond the self.

If remorse were entirely dismissed as mere conditioning, the result would be nihilism. The denial of remorse would make crimes against human dignity meaningless beyond pragmatic consequences.

. . .

   This is just a footnote, but I wonder how deeply this train of thought is connected to Christianity and may even be a prima facie argument for it. I don't think atheism can account for remorse in the full sense. For example, Sartre – a more consequential atheist you will never find – lets remorse into to his thinking through the backdoor, as it were. His description of "bad faith" is just a secularized version of remorse. A person who deceives himself about his moral failures (e.g., a Nazi official denying responsibility) experiences existential anxiety. Though Sartre denies absolute morality, he truthfully maintains that human beings experience an unbearable sense of alienation when they fail to live authentically. Rather than conscience or God or love, I suppose it is to the self that one must confess and seek forgiveness? And without morality being real, if the universe is indeed indifferent and meaningless, if the only source of meaning is human subjectivity, on what ground should the Nazi suffer from bad faith for denying responsibility?

    I read Camus’ The Fall as a student. In the world of that novel, where no moral reality is recognized, remorse becomes paralyzing rather than redemptive. Because of his awareness of his moral failures and the hypocrisy he recognizes within himself. Clamence, once a successful and seemingly virtuous lawyer, has a moment of revelation when he did not do anything to prevent a woman's suicide. He heard her scream for help but did nothing. There is no higher power and no moral reality in Camus’ world. Thus Clamence's remorse is not entirely one of genuine moral recognition or true repentance. It seems part of his self-loathing alienation from others. He sees himself as a coward. He speaks of a fall from grace, both in a personal sense (his shift from self-righteousness to self-contempt) and in a broader, existential sense, reflecting humanity's fall from innocence or purity. But that narrative signifies nothing real. It is rather a metaphor for a psychological state. As he tells his story to an anonymous listener in Amsterdam, his remorse acts as a form of self-punishment and a way to justify his continued sense of superiority over others (the fat, relentless ego is very much still there; he remains untransformed). His constant self-examination and confessions are, in part, a defense mechanism against guilt at a higher level of self-consciousness. So while remorse haunts him, it is also a kind of mask for his continued, though tortured, self-assertion.

      This seems an honest account of remorse in a godless world. Clamence is unable to seek redemption. His remorse becomes unbearable because there is no higher moral reality to resolve it. Remorse becomes a trap. Since there is no God to forgive him, Clamence develops a nihilistic philosophy, claiming that everyone is guilty, so remorse is meaningless. Yet, he cannot escape it. It is a picture of Hell in my view. Thus even in an explicitly atheistic setting, remorse is still inescapable. Camus intimates that remorse demands something more than mere psychological management. But since Camus cannot bring himself to recognize a moral reality, given his uncritical acceptance of modernity, he does not resolve this tension.

    Another book I read as a student was Kafka’s The Trial. is a surreal, dystopian depiction of guilt and punishment. Josef K. is arrested without knowing why and subjected to an inscrutable legal system. While there is no explicit "remorse" in a conventional sense, Josef K. gradually moves from dismissing his guilt to suffering from it. Unlike Raskolnikov, Josef K. never actually commits a crime, but he feels guilt growing within him. Why? For living in a certain social form? This implies that guilt and remorse are not just responses to legal or social condemnation but existential conditions, and honestly that makes no sense to me without some pretty strong metaphysical commitments. In Kafka’s world, there is no grace or forgiveness – only endless, inescapable guilt.

   To me, these are honest, courageous attempts to deal with remorse in a godless universe and reach similar conclusions. The contrast with Dostoevsky could not be starker.

. . .

     It is interesting to consider Nazi criminals in this context (standing for a whole slew of others). How rare true remorse seems to have been. Many high-ranking Nazis either clung to justification (e.g., Eichmann’s bureaucratic rationalizations) or displayed only a pragmatic form of regret. Unlike Raskolnikov, who is shattered by his guilt, most of them seemed unable to undergo a transformation that would fully reveal the full reality of their wrongdoing. This absence of remorse might be more revealing than its presence, showing that sustained participation in evil requires a fundamental blindness that cannot easily be undone.

      Perhaps the guilt was too horrible to a mere human to bear? (This would not only apply to Nazi criminals.) This is why most former Nazis either denied, minimized, or rationalized their actions rather than facing them. True remorse, in the sense of Raskolnikov’s existential awakening, would require an almost supernatural courage, indeed grace; a willingness to see the true horror of what they did. If (genuine) remorse means truly seeing the victims as real, in all their humanity, then for a Holocaust-maker, that act of seeing could be spiritually annihilating. It is a terrifying thought. True remorse demands that we see reality as it is, and for those who have committed unspeakable horrors, that reality is too terrible to look at. This is why so many perpetrators cling to denial, justification, or moral numbness: a self-defense against truth. Hell.

      Human beings in general live in a fantasy. It requires effort and virtue even to let a little reality in. On such a level as we are talking about, there is something sublime about genuine remorse, something that rises above the human-all-too-human. I think of it as grace. The "defense mechanisms" have to collapse. And yet, the rare cases of authentic remorse when they do appear are extraordinary. They stand out precisely because they break through the wall of self-deception and evasion. If such a Nazi truly repented, it would not only be a personal transformation but a metaphysical event, a rupture of normal human psychology. It would be as if the man or woman had been resurrected from spiritual death.

    When the defense mechanisms fail, what is left is the soul utterly naked, stripped of all illusions. Genuine remorse is not just an emotion but an event, an encounter with reality in its most unbearable form.  Most people (I don't exclude myself) cannot bear to see themselves as they are, to stand before the abyss of their own sinfulness, without some comforting narrative to shield them. (How comforting many postmodern "discourses" can be to those who can believe them! Have there ever been bigger philosophical liars than Foucault and Derrida?) It requires a kind of inner death, a death of the false self, the one who can justify, evade, or explain away. There is something awe-inspiring, sublime in those moments when remorse is not just regret or guilt but a total collapse of self-deception, an absolute submission to the moral reality of what has been done. And yet, it is a kind of suffering that most would rather die than face. (Hell)

     Yet these rare cases of true remorseful insight are authoritative. They judge all the rest. These rare moments of pure, unclouded remorse are like a leak from another world (Gaita) breaking through the fog of self-justification and evasion that characterizes most human lives (not excluding myself). They are authoritative not because they compel agreement by force, but because they uncover a reality that, once seen, cannot be unseen. This is why genuine remorse judges not just the person who experiences it, but all who would seek to explain it away. It renders shallow notions of morality empty by comparison. Even those who do not feel it themselves are, in a sense, judged by it because its very existence refutes their rationalizations. There is even something prophetic about it. It is as those who suffer true remorse bear painful witness to moral reality.

     Gaita was right to focus on remorse. But I see no reason to refrain from drawing metaphysical inferences.

. . .

   Socrates thought evil was a form of ignorance. If a man knew, really knew an act was evil, he could not do it. This account of remorse explains that. The truth one knows on the other side of remorse transforms the soul in such a way that the man could never do such a thing.

. . .

  Ultimately, remorse is mysterious. modernity often seeks to flatten mystery, to explain it away or render it trivial. Modernity is a gigantic ideology that functions as a defense mechanism. But reality resists such efforts, and the deepest experiences like remorse, love, grief, remorse, wonder, and joy continue to break through, refuting modernity.

  Remorse follows from the individual conceived as knowable by love. 

 Going on with my project (2) - Grief

It must have been in the autumn of 1983. My cousin Eric, one of the most likeable and loveable people you would ever meet, who had just been married the weekend before (unwisely most agree), was killed when a young man trying to kill himself crashed head-on into Eric’s vehicle. Eric was killed, but the perpetrator survived. It was traumatic for the whole family but especially his parents. I still have the image of my uncle trembling uncontrollably at the funeral. There is no anguish like the death of a beloved child. I witnessed other chilling expressions of grief from parents who had lost their children when I worked in the Emergency Room. My aunt and uncle never really recovered. Time did little to lessen the pain of their grief.

    Assume the grief disclosed something about Eric, and my aunt and uncle; about human reality, and Being as such. Assume the grief is more than a biological virtual reaction programmed into us by an Artificial-Intelligence-like  natural Matrix (referring to the movie). What does such grief disclose? What must be real for the grief to be disclosing? Let me start from the most general and end with the most culture-specific deductions.

 

1)   Grief discloses the depth of human bonds. The strength of grief corresponds to the depth of love. It reveals that relationships are not mere accidents or conveniences but essential to our being.

2)   Grief affirms the unique irreplaceability of persons. No one grieves in the same way for two different people. The person lost is not just a sum of qualities but an unrepeatable existence. This means that individuals have a reality beyond their mere attributes or functions. As Raimond Gaita put it: “Our sense of the preciousness of other people is connected with their power to affect us in ways we cannot fathom and in ways against which we can protect ourselves only at the cost of becoming shallow. There is nothing reasonable in the fact that another person’s absence can make our lives seem empty. The power of human beings to affect one another in ways beyond reason and beyond merit, has offended rationalists and moralists since the dawn of thought, but it is partly what yields to us that sense of human individuality which we express when we say that human beings are unique and irreplaceable. Such attachments and the joy and the grief which they may cause, condition our sense of the preciousness of human beings. Love is the most important of them.” – A Common Humanity

3)   Time does not dissolve true grief. While some wounds heal, deep grief does not "go away" but remains, showing that love and loss transcend time in a way that mere biological or psychological explanations struggle to account for.

4)   Grief contradicts the idea that death is merely a natural event. If death were simply a neutral biological fact, grief would not be so existentially painful. Human life has a meaning that death appears to negate.

5)   Grief implies that what is worthy of love is not merely subjective. The sorrow of loss is not merely a feeling but a response to something real. If the worth of the person lost were purely subjective, grief would not have the same weight. Imagine consoling someone with thoughts like: “It is only a subjective reaction. Don’t worry, it will dissipate over time.” Only an android like Data could say such a thing. 

6)   Grief reveals an orientation toward eternity. The desire that a loved one should still exist is irrational if everything is simply finite and passing. The very structure of grief suggests an implicit demand that love should not end, which points toward a reality where it does not. To love someone is not to believe in their death (Gabriele Marcel). I can confirm this. I went to my grandmother’s funeral a confirmed atheist materialist who considered talks of souls and afterlife superstition. This belief system did not survive her funeral. It felt like a betrayal.

7)   Grief suggests that love has ontological priority. If grief is a measure of love’s depth, and if love is the most real thing we experience, then love itself may be the most fundamental reality. This aligns with the idea that Being itself is Love (1 John 4:8).

8)   Grief might be a response to exile from our true home – In a Christian framework, suffering and loss are not the final truth, but symptoms of a fallen world awaiting redemption. The endurance of grief, rather than a meaningless torment, could be understood as a sign that we were not made for death.

. . .

    But a skeptic will point out that grief is far from universal. Some people feel no grief, or even worse, feel grief only sentimentally, to draw attention to themselves. The fact of meaning-blindness, however, is not an argument against the existence of grief and the realities it discloses. Such people may have numbed themselves to avoid suffering; the refusal to acknowledge grief could be a defense mechanism against the unbearable weight of loss. Or they may lack a developed sense of love. If one does not experience grief at all, it suggests an inability to recognize the irreplaceable worth of persons. This could imply a blindness to deeper realities, not just emotional but ontological. They might, moreover, live within an impoverished metaphysical framework. If one truly believes the universe is indifferent and people are just arrangements of atoms, then grief may appear irrational. That seems to be Socrates’ view in the Phaedo! Many Stoics seem to have believed this. But such beliefs might be symptoms of alienation from reality rather than an insight into it. These are not refutations of my point.

     A reductionist, evolutionary theory-driven philosopher might interpret grief as an evolutionary byproduct. The pain of my uncle and aunt’s grief is a result of natural selection. Strong emotional bonds increase the chances of offspring survival, so grief is merely an unintended consequence of this evolutionary mechanism. Therefore, so the argument, grief has no intrinsic meaning; it doesn’t tell us anything about reality except what the evolutionary biology already assumes a priori: the survival of the fittest. Like all emotions, grief is just the firing of neurons shaped by survival pressures. While it feels profound, it is ultimately no more meaningful than hunger or the fight-or-flight response.

   Indeed, such folk would argue that love itself is an illusion. Love is not a metaphysical reality but a biochemical trick to promote reproduction and group cohesion. The feeling of irreplaceability is a useful fiction. The persistence of grief can thus be explained away as an unfortunate quirk of brain wiring. From a strictly functional standpoint, prolonged grief is maladaptive; the most efficient survival strategy would be to "move on" quickly. The fact that grief lingers is an evolutionary "bug," not a feature.

    My aunt and uncle’s grief already acts as a lived refutation of such a reductionist stance. Their grief vastly exceeded any plausible survival function. If grief were purely about evolutionary success, we would expect it to dissipate quickly or be overridden by survival instincts – as with mother cats. But it often deepens over time, persisting far beyond any adaptive usefulness. Nor can reductionism cannot explain the irreducible particularity of grief . The evolutionary account might explain why humans grieve in general, but it cannot explain why this father grieves this son. There is something in grief that is not generic, but profoundly particular. If grief is an illusion, then so is love, yet no one lives that way – a person who did would be considered insane. A strict materialist might say love and grief are just neural phenomena, but they do not behave accordingly. No parent treats their child's death as a mere rearrangement of molecules. The refusal to do so suggests a deeper, inescapable truth. Imagine a materialist consoling my aunt and uncle with such an argument that in their experience of grief they are nothing more than instruments being played by nature.

     The whole reductivist program turns life on its head. If grief is meaningless, then moral outrage at tragic deaths is irrational. If my uncle's grief is just brain chemistry, then so is our moral horror at his suffering. But this would make all ethical judgments arbitrary. Nothing would truly be tragic or unjust. Our world, the world we experience and live in, would have no more reality than the virtual world of the Matrix. Therefore, the reductionist must either deny or trivialize human suffering. If grief is just neurons misfiring, then we are forced to say that the greatest sorrows of human existence have no more weight than an upset stomach. But this conclusion is so out of step with lived experience that it effectively collapses under its own absurdity.

       The reductionist view is also guilty of the genetic fallacy: it tries to dismiss the significance of grief by explaining its origins rather than engaging with what grief is. The genetic fallacy occurs when someone argues that because an idea or experience can be explained in terms of its origins, it is therefore discredited or reduced to those origins. Suppose someone says, “Grief is just an evolved survival mechanism; therefore, it has no deeper meaning.” This is like saying, “Mathematics evolved because it helped our ancestors survive; therefore, numbers are not real.” Or, “Religious belief evolved as a social cohesion tool; therefore, all religious claims are false.” The fallacy lies in assuming that explaining where something comes from explains what it is. But origins do not necessarily determine truth or value. Even if grief did originate through evolutionary pressures, this does not mean it lacks intrinsic meaning. In fact, the persistence and depth of grief suggest that it points to something beyond its mere origins. Thus, the attempt to reduce grief to its evolutionary history does not answer the fundamental question of what grief reveals about love, loss, and being itself.

. . .

That I consider "axiomatic" such convictions – which I cannot prove empirically – as grief reveals the meaning of the death of a loved one, which is to say, is a response to reality is thus not as an abstract logical exercise in deduction. I consider them axiomatic because to call them into question would mean to question the reality of the meaning of my uncle's grief. That would be a terrible betrayal of my uncle and cousin. It would be disgraceful to do so. So my "axioms" are grounded in moral absolutes.  Thus, my approach is not arbitrary. My axioms are not abstract assumptions. They are grounded in what we actually experience as real and undeniable.

     These thoughts exposes the moral stakes involved in these problems. To reduce grief to mere chemical processes, say, is not just an error in reasoning but a failure of moral imagination and reason. It would mean looking at something deeply human and responding with inhuman detachment. One can either acknowledge grief as revelatory of something real (about love, loss, and being) or deny it and embrace an impoverished, reductionist view of reality. But such a denial is not just intellectually dubious; it is morally suspect.

      My thinking draws on Simone Weil’s. For her, truth lights up the moral demand it shows us. If a man sees suffering and remains passive, the problem is not just an intellectual mistake but a failure of heart and a soul that has been deprived of light. I don't say that as someone who is above that, not at all.