Theses on Faith and Reason

 

      Averroes (Ibn Rushd 1126-1198) is known (among other things) for the following claim: as “truth cannot contradict truth” – affirmed by Aquinas – justified beliefs in philosophy and science cannot contradict claims of sacred scripture: for him, the Quran. As an Aristotelian, science and philosophy were not strictly separated for him as they are for us. Both reached conclusions using reason and careful method. Averroes believed reason in this sense was the most reliable road to truth. Crucially, when scripture seemed to be at odds with reason, scripture had to be subjected to interpretation or allegorical understanding to remove the logical tension. And who shall perform this interpretation? Those “rooted in knowledge” – philosophers. The Quran was rhetorically powerful, appropriate for communicating truth to the illiterate in the only form they can receive it: through poetry, allegory, symbolism, etc. For the educated, those truths can be more fully understood through the disciplined application of reason. You can imagine how that went down with the established Islamic authorities. I have yet the read the full treatise in which Averroes argues this thesis – I plan to do so as soon as I can afford to buy the book. But I have my own take on this to me crucial thought on the boundaries between faith and reason. Here presented only as theses.

 

I.          By reason Averroes marks out boundaries, limits to what can be claimed as true, to what can be justified as knowledge. I share that much. Reason is by definition that capacity that allows our intellect to grasp something real, to thus conform our ideas and propositions to reality. But limiting reason to the purely philosophical and scientific – the logical and the empirical – is too narrow. My argument:  Averroes Aristotelian conception of reason is too narrow because it presupposes what cannot be presupposed: namely, that our purely cognitive capacities are adequate to first conceptualize and then investigate all of reality. That reality is just that which we can ideally know – that with the right use of reason, we can know everything there is to know. For Aristotle that meant even the nature of God.  Logically, it is possible and indeed probable that reality transcends the capacity of our intellect, of human reason, to know or understand it. It follows that there is conceptual space for a lucid sense of faith.

 

II.         Faith has many meanings. One meaning that makes sense in thesis I is this: to believe some x is false on the basis of “reasons of the heart” – that is, not because I can give a knock-down argument or proof that x is false, but because x must be false if some certainty y that goes all the way down in me is to remain certain. For example, although I cannot prove that Richard Dawkins reductionist view of the universe is false, I believe it is false because if it were true, then many parents’ love for their children (and much else) would be illusory. This I cannot believe. This is the reductio ad absurdum, which is not a proof that x is false, but only that my certainty y – itself not provable, though I cannot doubt it – is incompatible with belief in x. I suppose the faith here is really the certainty that the unprovable, indeed axiomatic y is true. Practices like giving children names rather than numbers only make sense if the birth and life of an individual human being has the kind of dignity or significance most of us who are not steeped in evolutionary biology or some form of biologically grounded racism axiomatically ascribe to it. Such beliefs transcend reason; they cannot be reached as the conclusion of an argument (or experiment). Indeed, they are the necessary premises for the kind of things we can reason about.

 

III.       Another form of faith that the limited nature of human reason creates conceptual space for is more connected to what religious people mean by the term. If there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy or science, then conceptual space exists that could be inhabited by the sacred, the divine. The sacred, if real (though in a sense that transcends what we can understand as real), may communicate with special individuals – the author of Job, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed – who then translate their knowledge into terms others can understand. Or some people may just have a spiritual antenna to the sacred realm. In any case, we may believe x is true because we trust and believe in the messenger and their prophetic communication. We don’t know x, cannot know x through human reason. But I believe that what Jesus revealed when, defending to woman who had committed adultery from being stoned as Deuteronomy (22:22) demanded, he proclaimed ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone (John 8:7).’ That to me had the force of prophecy, or to put it more logically, seemed axiomatically true. It was a revelation to me. It changed how I saw myself and others. It was and is sublime. Like a leak from another realm. My faith in Jesus derives from partly from this. But again, I cannot prove it, and thus if the passage doesn’t strike you as it did me, it does not mean you are irrational. It means something, many things perhaps, but not that.

 

IV.        The limits of reason as understood by Averroes also excludes Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” – the seat of emotion – as a source of understanding. Love or joy can go very deep in people, so deep that they reveal aspects of ultimate reality or even the sacred. Despair or fear, the same. Actually most thoughts are interwoven with emotions, and emotions are interwoven with thought. I behold the beauty of an unspoiled part of earth and am filled with joy, which implies a judgment, a thought that the world is truly wonderful. I witnessed a child dying because the parents abused him, and recoil in horror at the evil of the deed. That also contains the thought that the child was wonderful, also innocent and needy, dependent on his parents’ love and care – all this violated in terrible ways. Such emotion-thoughts or thought-emotions are responses of the whole person, undivided between heart and head. Of course, people are different, some people are damaged; indeed, we are all damaged to some extent, and some of us are damaged to the point that they may even react with indifference or sentimentality to the things I mentioned.

 

V.         Metaphysical or religious truth is not reducible to whatever a person happens to believe – otherwise, truth would not enter into it – but the capacity to grasp truth does depend on the person and is a function of their concrete life. The point of philosophical and scientific reasoning is to separate truth from the person (and their heart), such that anyone competent in the method can achieve the same results. But unless all of reality is accessible to impersonal reason; if some reality can only be known through a thinking-feeling response of the whole person; then claiming that impersonal reason is the only reliable guide to truth is itself irrational. The rationality of elevating impersonal reason to the only way to truth depends on accepting the metaphysical proposition that reality equals what a human being competent in philosophy and science can know as axiomatic. But that proposition is more than debatable.

 

VI.       If, however, I expand the conception of reason to include the response of the whole person, indeed make reason a function of the quality of response and thus the quality of the person, then Averroes claim that scripture must be subject to reason makes sense. Jesus attitude toward to woman who had committed adultery, to take the previous example, revealed to me something essential about being human. Thus based on the truth I was able to grasp, I accepted the story as scripture, as revealing ultimate truth, as coming from a source far greater than myself. But when I read Deuteronomy 22:22 – the command to stone anyone caught in adultery – I am horrified. I know this still happens. The command is indifferent to the reason why a person may have committed adultery: whether from pure lust or out of desperation with a hellish marriage, it doesn’t matter. And even in the worst scenario, if the adultery was done in lust and was a betrayal, then stoning the person to death…terrible. At most such punishments may symbolize the terribleness of some sins – some cases of adultery are disgusting; for others we may have compassion – show us the meaning of such transgressions. But to actually kill the woman by stoning – that is not something any being I can imagine as divine or good or godly would do. It is so merciless. And it was Jesus that showed me this, activating my moral imagination.

 

VII.      Believing in Jesus – trusting Jesus – as a guide here is for me an act of reason, too. Thus when scripture conflicts with reason in the expanded sense, it is reason that I trust; not scripture. (In my Deuteronomy example, scripture conflicts. But I also do not believe God would kill the first-born or Egypt or order all the inhabitants – including children and animals – of a certain city to be put to the sword. Nor do I believe God would consign my good father to hellfire for not believing the right things about him.)

 

VIII.    This means that I – like Averroes – reject a common understanding and practice of religious faith. Some believers need to be impressed by God’s radical otherness and unlimited magical power. They accept especially wherever in scripture that strains human understanding precisely because it strains human understanding – as proof of God’s sublimity. Our reason – also in my expanded use of the term – is nothing compared to God. Who are we to question scripture? Who are we to put God in the dock? God puts us in the dock, not we him! This is the God of the Torah, of the book of Job. It is the God of Luther and Calvin. Nothing we think, feel, or do can reveal anything about God. Nature – the Creation – does not reveal God. Our only possible attitude is obedience and submission. Ours is not to question why, but to do or die. As though the scriptures and their authoritative interpreters were clear mouthpieces for God himself. I cannot live with that, and neither could Averroes.

 

IX.       I also find it contrary to reason in the expanded sense this attitude: scripture is a magical text, with magical power, written directly by the hand of God himself. Thus to be itself worshipped or adored, as though it provided a direct, unmediated, uninterpreted, magical-mystical encounter with the divine itself. Most practicing Jews,  Christians, and Muslims do see scripture in this light. At times, I have wished I could. But when I read passages like Deuteronomy 22:22, the spell is broken. So much finds its way into scripture that strongly appears to be human-all-too-human. Again, I am thrown back on my intellect-heart. To mindlessly accept such passages as from God - especially those repudiated or qualified by Christ - would seem a betrayal of something I think is God-given: love of truth, love of the Good.

 

X.        Another view I reject amounts to enclosing religious views in pure subjectivity or sentimentality – transforming the encounter with the ultimate other into self-consoling fantasy. An extension of this is a ‘liberalism’ in theology that would simply make religious truths out of contemporary fads or wishes. This is perhaps as great a danger than the ‘fundamentalist’ view, given that the ‘fat, relentless ego’ strives non-stop to translate everything in life into self-consoling or self-gratifying fantasy. The account of Jesus’ saving of the woman accused of adultery in John, for example, is far from self-consoling fantasy. The adulterer and the vengeful mob – that is who I am. That is not flattering to my ego. For a man truly to recognize himself as a sinner is a terrible, ego-breaking event.  The story reveals a truth that my ego could never grasp, a truth about my ego that can only be grasped from a perspective outside my ego – reason informed by the heart. The only comfort of the story is that one knows the truth.

 

XI.       Of course, it would be presumption for our finite reason to put God in the dock or believe it was up to us to determine what was real, good, true, or beautiful. God’s mind/heart is infinite – whatever that means; ours are radically finite and fallible. But as a matter of faith we have space to believe that our deepest responses to the world – love, joy – are at least analogous to or related to those of our Creator. The Good as Socrates and then Plato grasped, we experience as absolute, puzzling, and sometimes as sublime. We can experience that which is good, true, and beautiful in however limited and fallible a way. Yet it is the most powerful guide to truth we have. It is where scripture speaks to us – or not. The men who canonized the Bible and the Quran depended on the Holy Spirit or Allah; but the Holy Spirit or Allah could only communicate to them through their intellects informed by their hearts – the really existing intellect-cum-hearts that they brought to the task. God didn’t directly do the editing himself.

 

XII.      Conscience has been called the voice of God in us. It can be activated or expanded – for example, by the story of Jesus I related – by revelations. Our intellects-as-informed-by-our hearts may function as spiritual antennas. But no revelation can make sheer power, however infinite – loveable. No revelation can make genocidal commanders loveable. In short, scripture, revelation can inspire us precisely because the truth revealed is something we were created to understand, even in a finite way. The shore of the ocean is still the ocean. Our minds/hearts may indeed be too limited in our ability to know and love to grasp the infinite mind/heart of God. But as the dog I loved grasped something of my love for her without really having an adequate understanding of what she grasped, so it may be with us and God. Indeed, I read this as a main revelation of Christ. But I can only know in my heart (mind-informed-by-heart) that it is true. That is where truth happens.

 

XIII.    I would not know how to love the power-God of Calvin. If I believed that such a power existed, I would be prudent not to offend him least I be punished beyond my endurance. I might choose punishment to preserve my dignity, but I guess I would not have the courage for that. In truth, I would prefer not to be born into Calvin’s Creation. I would prefer a reductionist universe ala Richard Dawkins. But even if I believed in such a punishing, all-powerful, to me arbitrary God, a God I had to obey out of fear, I could no more love him than Winston Smith could truly love Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. Nor could I believe such a God could love me. Indeed, that is my reading of Jesus’ truth. 

The Limits of Moral Arguments

 

      Now in an imaginary philosophical discussion between the slave owner and a Socratic philosopher who was also a convinced abolitionist:  with good reason it might be considered morally wrong, rationally discussing whether a black African can be an individual in the same sense as a slave-owning white American of that time. What does this reveal? The presence of absolute value. A philosophical (Socratic) discussion presupposes the possibility of being wrong, of having the arguments and conceptual understandings that flow into one’s convictions refuted. In this case, that means being prepared to entertain the possibility that one’s convictions that slavery is a terrible evil, terrible really beyond words, is in whatever sense wrong. And that enslaving Africans with all that follows from that (from the lash to the separation of families, to above all the ways humanity is degraded) might be compatible with morality, or even as some argued a kind of duty for the white man. But to seriously entertain that possibility is itself evil. That implies the unshakable conviction that no fact, no possible evidence, and no change of conceptual understanding would matter. It implies that the subject is not appropriate for philosophical discussion; the slave owner is either blind or evil – if the former, he needs enlightenment, not argument; if the latter, he needs punishment.

         And even if there were some case for the abolitionist, despite the repugnance he felt, to engage in the discussion with something resembling the spirit of Socratic inquiry, what philosophic reasons could he offer for the slave owner to change the way he sees the world – based as that is on attitudes based on upbringing and form of life? It might, for example, be pointed out to the slave owner that the African has all the anatomical features of whites, but he knows this. It might be pointed out that they show grief behavior when someone dies, but he knows this. It might also be pointed out that they ‘have projects and categorical desires with which they are identified’ (B. Williams), but he knows this too.  It might be pointed out that the DNA is the same, but he could know this too. As Gaita writes, the slave owner believes slaves are like ‘them’ (whites) only in an attenuated sense, an attenuated sense of the individuality that in white folks conditions the slave owner’s sense that they are unique, irreplaceable in ways we experience in authentic grief. For the slave owner, Africans demonstrate grief behavior, but it is not real grief – it can’t go that deep ‘for them.’ He doesn’t understand their lives as fully meaningful; their names more resemble pet names; their faces lack the ability to express profound emotion (analogous to the caricatured faces of the Christy Minstrels); their sexual bodies are not objects of profound, tender love, and thus they cannot marry in the full meaning; it might not be a fine thing to do, but raping a black slave is no crime, given the construction of African bodies and sexuality. Their relation to their children might be emotional, but shallow – they’ll forget about them soon enough when they are sold away. And so on.

       Obviously, the argumentative – more missionary – purpose of the dialog would be to convert the slave owner, to get him to see the slaves more truly; to get him to overcome the meaning-blindness that his form of life and his internalization of that form of life have brought with it. It’s not that the abolitionist and the slave owner can step out of their forms of life, their attitudes, and convictions, look at the facts of the case, and then determine who is right. The ideology of slave society – for obvious reasons – was constructed to blind those people to the meaning other lives can have, and to reduce those victimized lives to their constructed picture of them, so that they could go on with their slave economy. The facts are the meanings; they are perceptible only from the outside of that way of seeing and within a form of life open to them. This is characteristic of absolute value.

       Only ad hominem or question-begging arguments are possible, seen logically, given that nothing could conceivably count as evidence against the absoluteness of the conviction or underlying attitude or no overriding concern could remove the duty to act. Others who do not see the world through the lens of the absolutely held attitudes or convictions are either meaning-blind (by fault or circumstances, or morally deficient). In any argumentative formulation, the first premise –that the outsider would doubt – would be self-evident to the person with the absolute conviction/attitude. But you might also reasonably think that the real leap of faith is involved here. 

Fact and Value – Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics

 

          In this lecture - he hardly ever lectured - Ludwig Wittgenstein assumes  something like “the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic or true by definition (tautologies): e.g. bachelors are unmarried men, a triangle has three sides, etc. i.e. giving us no information about reality (our conceptual nets may be thought of as the set of possible logically true statements and their implications).

       When you make an assertion about the world, you must at least in principle if not always practically be able to verify or test it. If you can’t, the utterance is not a proposition. It may have the grammatical form of a proposition, but logically in it meaningless. Propositions (possibly meaningful)

 

·                     My son is finished with supper.

·                     My pants are black.

·                     I have bronchitis.

·                     My mother is not home.

·                     Water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.

 

Pseudo-propositions (meaningless or indeterminate meaning):

 

·                     God exists.

·                     Angels exist.

·                     The world is good.

·                     The external world is a dream.

·                     The soul is immortal.

·                     God is dead.

 

Philosophy presupposes that logical, rational argument i.e. conclusions that are justified by sound arguments, is the most rational (=most likely to arrive at truth, make contact with reality). Arguments consist of statements or propositions (we have that term before): propositions can either be premises (reasons) or conclusions. Logic presupposes that propositions can be either true or false, but not both. The tradition from which the verification idea of meaning comes is known as ‘Empiricism’ – which is premised on the assumption that all access to reality comes over the senses, must be translatable back into sense experience. So ‘My son is at the playground’ is meaningful, because I can go and see (with my senses, my eyes) whether it is true i.e. whether he is really at the playground i.e. whether the utterance expresses a proposition that is not only logically possible (it is) but actual i.e. corresponds to a real state of affairs in the world. ‘God exists’ or ‘God is dead’ cannot possibly correspond to a state of affairs in the world that could be verified or falsified; therefore, it is not really a logically meaningful, possible assertion despite obeying all the rules of English syntax.

       That being said, there is something else about language here: the conceptual logic of particular concepts can also be meaningful or not. Consider this: 

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these [ethical] expressions is that each of them is actually used in absolute sense on the other [emphasis mine]. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon [emphasis mine]. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard [emphasis mine]. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal. Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.

 

In other words, there is an analogical relationship between different relative uses of ‘good’ all unified by a core meaning: “coming up to a certain predetermined standard.” What makes a use of ‘good’ ethical (conceptual remark about ‘ethical’) is that it violates this, being used absolutely. And that makes no sense! You can’t ask ‘What is it good for?’ Many people, for example, see images of animals in a slaughter factory and say things like ‘you can’t do that to other creatures’ or that is horrible, cruel, or that is a desecration, etc. = that is not good? Why not? What predetermined standard is not being met? Well one could say – it causes disease, it makes more economic sense to be kinder, etc. – i.e. it would be good relative to these ends to stop that practice. But that is not what people mean when they use language like I mentioned above. The idea is not only that this absolute use of good is an equivocal use to the relative uses, but that is literally makes no sense at all, comparable to ‘I found a triangle with four sides.’ This a statement like ‘It is absolute wrong to do that to animals’ (whatever people find terrible, horrible, cruel, evil, etc.) is an ethical statement and it is meaningless. There are no ethical propositions. There can be no philosophy or science of ethics. This is different from the idea that only sentences that assert something about the world that can be in principle checked, but has the same result.

      And both make perfect sense if we think of reality as brute, valueless objects in definite factual relations. Indeed, if we conceive the universe as intrinsically without value or meaning, if we think all meaning and value emanates from the human subject and gets projected onto the indifferent screen of the universe; and if language, to be meaningful, must model or picture pure value-free facts, and thus only descriptive, value-free language can be meaningful – “all propositions are of equal value” – then what Wittgenstein is saying here follows – unless you want to deny the reality of ethics altogether? The choice is between a radical, ineffable, other-worldly mysticism or nihilism.

       But if we take our thoughts, feelings, language of ethics to be meaningful, as I do – and not merely as expressions of the subjective-psychological –, then neither the picture of the universe as meaningless and value-free nor the idea that meaning requires reference to states of affairs that can be verified will seem plausible. The price of defending that metaphysical thesis at all costs is a radically other-worldly mysticism or nihilism. There is no independent position from which to decide this definitively. We have to wait for God.

 Theory versus Seeing-As: Reflection on a Thought of Wittgenstein

                                       

 

      Consider these pictures or understandings of ‘that which is’ – Being, reality, the cosmos, the universe, names that are themselves different understandings.

1.   The whole of Creation is a looking-glass, a reflection of God in time and space that originated in the mind of a loving God; a story authored by a loving God.
2. “There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao (Tao Te Ching).”   One achieves harmony with nature through accepting that the Tao connects all things, of which you are a part, and accepting your place in the interconnectedness.
3. The world is made up of two things: spirit and matter. Spirit is things that cannot be seen or touched whereas matter is things that can. Spirit is more important than matter because matter can be destroyed and spirit cannot. The world is an illusion. Maya is a veil that stops people from seeing the truth of everything around them. The only point of existence is to reach enlightenment so that we can clear their minds of concern with material and temporary things. All matter will go through different stages:  everything is created, remains in existence and then is destroyed. This links to the Trimurti, as Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva is the destroyer.
4. Physicist: I'm talking about the universe. All space, all time, just.....a temporary convulsion. And I get paid to prove it. // Writer: You feel sure of that, when you look out on a night like tonight...and see all those millions of stars? That none of it matters? // Physicist: I think it's just as beautiful as you do. And vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away. But then my professional perspective overcomes me,// a less wishful, more penetrating view of it and I understand it for what it truly is. Haphazard, morally neutral and unimaginably violent. (Woody Allen, September)
5. “The whole land is sacred.” A member of the Navajo describes the religious significance of land, “Every inch of ground, all vegetation and the fauna on it are considered sacred because they exist.”
6.   The world is a canvas for human beings to create on.
7.  “The world is nothing but spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical objects and properties [i.e. subatomic particles]. You and I, rocks and galaxies, toads and scrambled eggs are just processes, the successive states of which are spatial arrangements of elementary physical objects. These elementary physical objects, arranged in different configurations, account for all the astonishing variety that we encounter in our day-to-day lives.” (Paul Humphries)
8.  Same as above, but add the human capacity for technological rationality and an autonomous will that defines for itself value and reality.
9. Reality is chaos, and human life a constant defense against reality.
10. The physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world, in the realm of Ideas and archetypes.
11. The world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner. Earthly life is filled with suffering. In order to nourish themselves, all forms of life consume each other, thereby visiting pain, fear, and death upon one another (even herbivorous animals live by destroying the life of plants). In addition, so-called natural catastrophes -- earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, volcanic eruptions -- bring further suffering and death in their wake. Human beings, with their complex physiology and psychology, are aware not only of these painful features of earthly existence. They also suffer from the frequent recognition that they are strangers living in a world that is flawed and absurd.

Obviously, I could add to this list. I want to call these world versions, after Nelson Goodman. Now consider a few epistemological images, equally condensed.

-Our minds and hearts are either more or less in tune or out of tune with the way the world really is.

-The world is a subjective representation structured by inherent categories of the mind.

-We construct world versions according to community needs, power relations, and psychological urges.

-Evolution plants such programs into our brains in the service of perpetuating the species.

-We are really brains in vats, and our world versions are downloaded into our brains by an Artificial Intelligence.

-Our world versions are myths, public dreams, symbolic intimations of a transcendence that must remain a mystery.

-God has given us an inner eye with which we can see the world as it really is – as Creation.

 

Notice the world versions and the epistemologies are related, parts of the same whole. So the world version of Woody Allen’s physicist is more compatible with the idea that our world versions are products of evolutionary computing than insights of a divinely-given inner eye.

   Now I will just assert here that these world versions and epistemological versions are not susceptible of empirical testing. They are not possible scientific hypotheses. It is not possible to imagine conditions under which any could be definitively refuted in a definitive scientific sense – as some aspect of Newton’s physics is thought to have been refuted by Sir Arthur Eddington’s  confirmation of Einstein’s hypothesis as a result of the solar eclipse of 1919. It’s not that “evidence” or sorts is completely lacking. The death of children by cancer, famine, pestilence, or war makes the view of Woody Allen’s physicist seem probable, or supports the Spartan view of nature as chaos to be mastered. However, such evidence is never definitive. The view of nature as Creation, a looking glass was taken from a novel dealing with a child dying of cancer and the novel was quite persuasive. All of these world versions, even the brains in vat, make sense of certain kinds of experience, organize experience in such a way as to make sense of experience that is taken to be fundamental.

 

   Rather than seeing world versions or epistemological versions as pseudo-scientific hypotheses, I see them as cases of what Wittgenstein termed ‘seeing something as….’ Wittgenstein somewhat misleadingly uses the rabbit-duck illusion to illustrate the principle.

 

                                         

                          

 So you can see it equally well as a rabbit or a duck, depending on your perspective  – the image supports both. Reality doesn’t dictate seeing it as one or the other. The evidence is equally good for one or the other.

 

          Consider these images of a human fetus.

                                            

           

 

                                             

                      

  Then ask how someone inhabiting some of the world versions would see these images and the reality (or phenomenon if you don’t want to admit that the fetus is real) represented therein.

 

·   - an offspring of a human or other mammal in the stages of prenatal development that follow the embryo stage (in humans taken as beginning eight weeks after conception) (dictionary definition)

 

·    - “my baby”  (a pregnant woman I know)

 

·    - a creature, an ensouled body or a bodily soul, loved by God (Thomist Christian)

 

·   - “…the fetus is indeed part of the maternal organism. First, it is immunologically tolerated by the pregnant organism. Second, it is directly and topologically connected to the rest of the maternal organism via umbilical cord and placenta, which is composed of fetal and maternal-origin cells, without a clear or defined boundary between the two. Third, the fetus is physiologically integrated  into the pregnant organism, and regulated as part of one metabolic system. Whilst none of these are perfect indicators of organismic parthood, they jointly pose a very strong case. Note that all of these change radically at birth: the baby is no longer topologically connected (and placenta and umbilical cord are discarded); the baby is now its own physiological, homeostatic and metabolic unit (although still heavily dependent on maternal care/provision and care); and it is no longer in direct contact with the maternal immune system.” (Elselijn Kingma, Associate Professor of Philosophy)

 

·   - A soul in the process of being imprisoned in a gross material body, condemned to an existence in the evil physical world. (Gnostic)

 

·  - A great source of stem cells and other useful materials for biological research. (corporate executive, genetic engineer)

 

·  - one arrangement among many of the elementary particles described by physics (scientific reductionist)

 

·   - depends on the race of the fetus (racist)

 

You can, in a purely logical sense, see the fetus as all of these things and more.  Some ways of seeing don’t exclude others – there are levels of depth involved. Unlike the duck-rabbit illusion, however, reality does talk back to you.  My ex-wife, the mother of two of my children, a woman who has done me some wrong and is in many ways a damaged human being, just lost her baby (her description) in the 7^th month while the baby was still in her womb. Her grief was inexpressible. We all felt grief. The child was lovingly delivered. The child was lovingly buried. Obviously, she – and no one of the family – could see the child as a great source of stem cells; the race plays no role. Was it nothing but a part of her body? Would she grieve over an appendix that was removed? Moreover, the thought that her grief was nothing but an instinct, a leftover from evolution, a culturally programmed behavior, a form of patriarchal brainwashing – or whatever reductive explanation you can imagine – doesn’t do justice to the grief.  The thought that “therapy” could cure her by cutting the thread that connects her grief to reality – i.e. making it purely subjective, disclosing nothing about the reality of the baby she lost – should make one sick. This is an example of life (reality) – not philosophical argument – refuting reductive world versions.

      The point I wish to make is this: the meaning we attach to a being such as a fetus – what we see it as – depends on such experiences and the world version within which we make sense out of them. Two obstetricians, one in a Christian world version and the other in the one inhabited by Woody Allen’s physicist or the philosophy professor, could both know all the science there is to know about the fetus, yet still see it as something radically different. If we start out with the intelligibility of using fetuses for stem cell research, of course the grief and burial could only seem sentimental – not a lucid response to reality. If maternal love is nothing but an instinct, no different from a cat’s, then the grief and the loving burial would also seem less than a lucid response to reality. The mother cat soon forgets her dead kitten (we suppose) and goes on to make more. (‘You can always have more’ would not really console the grieving woman who had just lost her baby.) She didn’t throw a party in gratitude that the baby’s soul was liberated from the prison of its nasty flesh, as a true Gnostic might.

       The grief – or the intelligibility of grief; it does not depend on every woman actually suffering grief – belongs to a world version; the grief radiates out, making the world version clearer even as the world version allows the grief to be and be intelligible. Seeing the baby as an intelligible object of love and grief is illuminated by some world versions, made sentimental or absurd by others.  That does not imply one concrete world versions. Grief for an unborn child is consistent with different world versions I am familiar with. If you are born into a Christian world, some version of that larger world version may comfort or make sense of the loss. Of course, sentimentality is always possible; only the lucid responses matter. But at bottom, the grief of a mother is something humanly natural, something grounded in the reality of the thing itself. Only an ideology imposed from the outside makes it sentimental in principle. A Spartan or the kind of genetic engineer or the liberal-feminist I have in mind might reproach my ex-wife for her grief. To them it might seem that she were grieving over nothing that should lucidly evoke grief. But that is only because – a priori – they have come to inhabit a world version in which such humanly natural responses to loss are denied a place, denied conceptual space.  A world version that denies conceptual space for a mother grieving over the loss of an unborn baby is thereby refuted, though not in any logical or scientific sense. I cannot give an argument to refute them. But they are refuted in a human sense.

     You might say: but you admit that you have only ultimately subjective reasons for your world version or set of world versions that you could take seriously. That means you have no grounds for finding your world version in any sense true. Well, I admit the subjective sources in human experience; I see no non-question-begging argument why a world version that flows from this source may not be taken seriously – i.e. may not be in some sense true. All world versions have their source in human experience – where else should they come from? The strip miner who sees the forest covering the mountain and the coal inside the mountain as neutral resources just waiting to be extracted and turned into profit and things of value for consumers has a no less subjective source for his view of nature as raw materials to be exploited.   

            Still, I also appealed to something humanly natural (grief over the loss of a baby) as limiting for the world versions that I can take seriously and that make sense to me. In other worlds, such humanly natural things as grief, remorse, horror over evil-done, love, the celebration of a new life, joy over beauty – that which can be seen as related (positively or negatively) to that which is good without qualification – can be seen not just as products of certain world versions but as independent sources of justification of a world version that makes space for them.

      Now you might object that the strip miner can say that deforestation and mountaintop removal are humanly natural things to do, since human beings are partly defined by the power they have over nature and other human beings in the form of tools and technologies. And who would like to live a pre-human life completely devoid of any tools or technology. Human existence itself, he could argue, naturally exploits nature.  

      Another example: some women suffer from post-partum depression and experience no love even for a newborn baby. Other women feel resentment against the fetus that comes into being in an unwanted pregnancy. Moreover, a strip miner might feel nothing for the forest and the mountain because he has inhabited a world version in which nature was seen only as raw material, whereas money and economic productivity were keys to all that did matter. Such things, too, are humanly natural, just as natural as grieving over the loss of a baby. Therefore, we are back with the rabbit-duck illusion: reality (here the humanly natural) doesn’t really make any demands on us; it doesn’t talk back. We are free to see nature so or so.

     My reply: when I chose the expression ‘humanly natural’ I did not mean ‘humanly natural’ in the mere sense that human beings do it or suffer it. In that sense, all kinds of bad things are humanly natural. Evil itself is humanly natural. In my use, humanly natural intended only those things that make humanly potentially loveable; that make human life something worth affirming, the loss of which leads can lead intelligibly grief or the violation of which can intelligibly lead to remorse. A mother might feel resentful towards her newborn baby, perhaps for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. And while I would never presume to judge such a woman, it is perfectly intelligible that she might come to feel some sense of remorse or regret at some point in her life that she couldn’t love the baby – who is innocent – as the very being of the baby cried out to be. That view of things in any case makes more sense to me that a woman believing the baby was nothing but a certain arrangement of subatomic particles in space and time or a biological automaton such that any such emotion as remorse would be irrational or sentimental. Clearly, none of my response is world-version-neutral – and that should not be a criticism of the world version but a kind of non-viciously circular justification of it.

      With respect to the strip miner, while it is true that our humanity is bound to being creatures whose technology mediates between human nature and nature itself, and thus that a relation to nature and each other mediated by technology is humanly natural in a neutral sense, it does not follow that all and any possible uses of technology to exploit nature and other human beings are humanly natural in the sense I intended it. Raping nature does not make anyone loveable. Using machines to degrade human labor doesn’t either. I actually ceased being an adherent of the secular Enlightenment – the Star Trek world version – over this. And whereas before under the influence of Hayden White I also saw roots of the destruction of nature in Christianity, in Genesis (1:28)

 

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

 

I was later taught by Wendell Berry and Philip Sherrard how poor a reading of scripture that was. Indeed, the Christian idea of the relationship between technological man and the Creation was stewardship: the Creation is “good, very good”; it is of God and God’s will and pleasure keeps it in existence; humanity has been permitted the use of the Creation for genuine human good, but privileged also to be able to share in God’s love for it. That, too, is not world version neutral. It is a world version within a world version, so to speak.

     You can take all my personal takes or leave them. What I have tried to do was to show how and why world versions illuminate our experience and our experience illuminates our world version – or not. In that they are not unlike theories in that they are tested – by life. It is even rare that a scientific theory is refuted by one knockdown argument or experiment. An accumulation of experience and reflection on that experience can undermine a world version or deepen it. I have been through that. That is as much as philosophy can do. 

        This brief, highly condensed sketch served as an illustration of the kind of thing we do when we think about world versions. Even if you thought reality was a blank screen onto which we project our emotional life, or an arrangement of matter and energy in time-space, and I asked you to justify your view, your account would be – necessarily I maintain – just a reflectively personal. Indeed, it is through reflection that we may deepen our world version, or even come to reject it. It is through the will to understand and the love of truth – not world version neutral – that we make a world version our own, become individuals in Simone Weil’s sense of becoming a unique perspective on the world. An unreflective life is unworthy of a human being – I will end with that quote from Socrates and the belief that no world version that does not leave space for that truth can escape being superficial. And I would add, that any world version that leaves no conceptual space for a love of the world or any world version that does the dirt on life are self-refuting versions that reveal a damaged soul or culture. I think Socrates’ attitude toward philosophy was connected to a profound love of the world.

       There are other attitudes to the relationship with the world versions that people inhabit: narcissists take and alter world versions that elevate their ego vis-à-vis others; many people relate to world versions that rationalize guilt; others relate to the world version sentimentally, idealizing reality into constructs that offer comfort or self-righteous emotions.  But for my money, Socrates’ attitude is infinitely more humanly valuable.  

 

 Dante – Parting from Virgil and Beatrice 

 

    What is the world worth? I have read Dante almost once a year since I left college and several times while in college. I have a definite love-hate relationship to his great work (how I wish I could read it in its original language!). Many scenes disturb me; here three are relevant: Cato’s rebuke of the souls gathered at Purgatory for enjoying beautiful music that reminded them of the best of their earthly lives; Beatrice’s rebuke of Dante for his tears at the departing of his beloved guide and mentor, Virgil; and the negation of Dante and Beatrice’s earthly (erotic) love in the presence of the Divine. Here are my paraphrases of the relevant parts.

 

i.          Dante and Virgil have just passed through Hell. They are come to a part of the Earth uninhabited by human beings. Before them the towering mountain of Purgatory. Dante must wash himself and do other purification rituals. They meet a gathering of soul newly departed from the earth, souls that are saved but that must endure the purifications of Purgatory to be fit to enter Heaven. There Dante, still a living man, encounters a musician and poet, Casella) whose work he has loved. There before all these souls meeting one another in amazement, he asked his friend for some music. It beauty affects all present, both with its beauty but above all with its memory of the sweetest aspects of the earthly life the souls have just been deprived of. A very beautiful and moving scene. Then the old Roman puritan, Cato, severely chastises them for rather dwelling in the sweet memory of life on earth rather than fanatically racing to the mountain to begin their purification and ascent to Heaven, the implication being that compared to Heaven (the contemplation of God) all earthly pleasures and joys count for nothing. This scene has always left a bad taste in my mouth. (Purgatorio, Canto II, 115-133)

 

ii.         Virgil and Dante have ascended to the top of Mount Purgatory, where they behold a vision of Earthly Paradise and a Heavenly pageant that foretells of the blessed realm to come. One of the most moving aspects of the Comedy has been the portrayal of Dante’s relationship to Virgil. On the one hand, we always read that Virgil, a Stoic and the greatest poet of Rome, is limited by the human horizon, by human Reason, Virtue, and indeed poetry at its best – which of course falls short of the truths and states of being only made possible through Christian revelation and the grace of God’s intervention into the world He created. But Dante relationship to Virgil has been that of a loving son and student to a gracious, wise, and loving father and mentor. There is a tremendous bond of love and affection. And, to make a symbolic point about how far human reason can take the soul, Virgil, atop the Mountain of Purgatory in the vision of Earthly Paradise, disappears as the Christ (or Mary) figure of Beatrice appears (his very earthly love in life) and Virgil just disappears without a trace. Understandably, Dante is distraught and weeps. Any decent human being would show understanding and comfort him. Not the Beatrice who has torn herself away from the beatific vision of God to save Dante’s soul. She is pitiless, and gently but firmly scolds him for weeping over Virgil with such bliss waiting for him. Again the point being all earthly loves pail to insignificance in comparison with the vision of God – the sole purpose of our creation in Dante’s cosmos. (Purgatorio, Canto XXX, 49-81)

 

iii.        Now the relationship with Beatrice is without a trace of earthly love. Yet Beatrice was basically his girlfriend, one who in this poem actually takes on the role of Christ or Mary – what a tribute to a girlfriend! What a testimony to the power of sexualized love! But all that means nothing to Beatrice, who is a soul in bliss, completely without any connection to earthly life at all except for the pity shown Dante – well, at least something! She scolds Dante for anything that indicates a love for anything having to do with his life on earth. And having achieved her purpose, joyfully takes her place in the beatific vision, giving Dante a smile before her soul is absorbed in the divine high that is the vision of God. To me, I think of souls who have joined a sect, the way a person just disappears, the way nothing in their previous life matters at all – the love for the family, lovers, art, or whatever. And how can it? Beatrice’s parents may be in Hell, and the torments of those in Hell are part of the joy of the beatific vision in Dante’s (and Aquinas’) theology. Having achieved bliss himself, it is clear to Dante that everything that gives earthly life meaning has become nothing now. He is never going to look back at Beatrice. (Paradisio, Cantos XXX and XXXI)

 

        In all these scenes, my heart is on the side of earthly life, as much as I typically suffer from it. I keep thinking of the words of my respected intellectual and spiritual opponent, Nietzsche: ‘be true to the earth.’ A theology that requires me to disown the Creation, to see the gift of life as nothing but a stepping stone to a greater bliss in the face of which all earthly loves are as nothing – no. I get it: earthly loves cannot have an absolute value; there are things I cannot do even for the love of my children, much less out of self-love (e.g. murder another child to save my own). But what kind of father would I be if my sole purpose in raising my children would be to merge their ego, bliss, and existence into my greater existence? A tyrant. Is God to be thought less than a mere human father? I feel rather grateful to my Creator for the gifts of love I have known is this life, loves that are good in themselves and not mere steps to be trod and forgotten on the way to Heaven. A picture of a God that gets off by having his creatures erase their own limited existence in perpetual adoration of their Creator, who actually doesn't need them – sounds more like a human fantasy to me, a kind of narcissism in theology run completely amok.