Creation Hymn From the Rig Veda

Have been reading a bit of Asian philosophy lately (mostly because I often hear it discussed but know little about it firsthand and suspect most of the characterizations I hear about it are really more caricatures than accurate descriptions).  Found this creation hymn from the Rig Veda particularly interesting and thought I would share:

There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.  What stirred?  Where?  In whose protection?  Was there water, bottomlessly deep?

There was neither death nor immortality then.  There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day.  That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse.  Other than that there was nothing beyond.

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water.  The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat.

Desire came upon that one in the beginning; that was the first seed of mind.  Poets seeking in their hearts with wisdom found the bond of existence in non-existence.

Their cord was extended across.  Was there below?  Was there above?  There were seed-placers; there were powers.  There was impulse beneath; there was giving-forth above.

Who really knows?  Who will here proclaim it?  Whence was it produced?  Whence is this creation?  The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.  Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen-- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not-- the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows-- or perhaps he does not know.

Thought Experiment: Carl Rogers and Post-Modernism

It has been a very busy semester for me here at Yale, and as a result I have been pretty inactive in the blogging world of late.  Have several partially completed posts in the line-up for the future, but as a first foray back to the blog, thought I'd throw up some stuff I've been reading lately and see what people think.  I am currently engaged in the final research and writing push for a paper on philosophy that I'm excited about because I think it will integrate a lot of things I am interested in the ares of hermeneutics, existentialism, and psychology.  A significant part of my research the last few days has been focused on one of the leading psychologists of the last century, a fellow by the name of Carl Rogers, one of the founding figures of a movement known as "humanistic psychology" which attempts to move psychology away from the supposed scientific rigor of behaviorism and reconnect with philosophy, especially the existentialist philosophers of Europe.  If most of that introduction was meaningless to you, that's fine.  I find this stuff very exciting, but I'm an odd duck, I know.


What I've posted below is a lengthy selection from an essay Rogers wrote in 1978 titled "Do We Need 'A' Reality?"  This is perhaps one of the most succinct and compelling presentations of what a "post-Modern" worldview might look like that I have read, and I want to do a little thought experiment with it.  Experiment might not be the right word, as I think about it, but work with me.  What I'm very interested in is how other people react to this passage.  I've included very briefly some of my own thoughts below the quote, but I'm mostly interested in your reactions.  What do you agree with?  What do you disagree with? Where is Rogers right on the money?  Where is he lost at sea?  Is his vision attainable or is he too idealistic?  Let me know what you think:

I, and many others, have come to a new realization.  It is this: The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive and experience it as this moment.  The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perceive and experience it as this moment.  And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different.  There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!  This creates a most burdensome dilemma, one never before experienced in history.  

Form time immemorial, the tribe or the community or the nation or the culture has agreed upon what constitutes the real world.  To be sure, different tribes or different cultures might have held sharply different world views, but at least there was a large, relatively unified group which felt assured in its knowledge of the world and the universe, and knew that this perception was true.  So the community frowned upon, condemned, persecuted, even killed those who did not agree, who perceived reality differently.  Copernicus, even though he kept his findings secret for many years, was eventually declared a heretic.  Galileo established proof of Copernicus’s views, but in his seventies he was forced to recant his teachings.  Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for teaching that there were many worlds in our universe.  Individuals who deviated in their perception of religious reality were tortured and killed.  In the mid-1800’s, Ignaz Semmelweis, an intense young Hungarian physician-scientist, was driven insane by his persecutors because he made the then absurd claim that childbed fever, that dread scourge of the maternity room, was carried from one woman to another by invisible germs on the hands and instruments of the doctors.  Obvious nonsense, in the terms of the reality of his day.  In our American Colonies, those who were even suspected of having psychic powers were considered witches and were hanged or crushed under great stones.  History offers a continuing series of examples of the awful price paid by those who perceive a reality different from the agreed-upon real world.  Although society has often come around eventually to agree with its dissidents, as in the instances I have mentioned, there is no doubt that this insistence upon a known and certain universe has been part of the cement that holds a culture together.  

Today we face a different situation.  The ease and rapidity of worldwide communication means that every one of us is aware of a dozen “realities”; even though we may think some of them absurd (like reincarnation) or dangerous (like communism), we cannot help but be aware of them.  No longer can we exist in a secure cocoon, knowing that we all see the world in the same way.

Because of this change, I want to raise a very serious question:  Can we today afford the luxury of having “a” reality?  Can we still preserve the belief that there is a “real world” upon whose definition we all agree?  I am convinced that this is a luxury we cannot afford, a myth we dare not maintain.  Only once in recent history has this been fully and successfully achieved.  Millions of people were in complete agreement as to the nature of social and cultural reality-- agreement brought about by the mesmerizing influence of Hitler.  This agreement about reality nearly marked the destruction of Western culture.  I do not see it as something to be emulated.

In Western culture during this century-- especially in the United States-- there has also been an agreed-upon reality of values.  This gospel can be stated very briefly:  “More is better, bigger is better, faster is better, and modern technology will achieve all three of these eminently desirable goals.”  But now that credo is a crumbling disaster in which few believe.  It is dissolving in the smog of pollution, the famine of overpopulation, the Damocles’ sword of the nuclear bomb.  We have so successfully achieved the goal of “a bigger bang for a buck” that we are in danger of destroying all life on this planet.

Our attempts, then, to live in the “real world” which all perceive in the same way have, in my opinion, led us to the brink of annihilation as a species.  I will be so bold as to suggest an alternative.

It appears to me that the way of the future must be to base our lives and our education on the assumption that there are as many realities as there are persons, and that our highest priority is to accept that hypothesis and proceed from there.  Proceed where?  Proceed, each of us, to explore open-mindedly the many, many perceptions of reality that exist.  We would, I believe, enrich our own lives in the process.  We would also become more able to cope with the reality in which each one of us exists, because, we would be aware of many more options.  This might well be a life full of perplexity and difficult choices, demanding greater maturity, but it would be an exciting and adventurous life.

The question may well be raised, however, whether we could have a community or a society based on this hypothesis of multiple realities.  Might not such a community be a completely individualistic anarchy?  That is not my opinion.  Suppose my grudging tolerance of your separate world view became a full acceptance of you and your right to have such a view.  Suppose that instead of shutting out the realities of others as absurd or dangerous or heretical or stupid, I was willing to explore and learn about those realities?  Suppose you were willing to do the same.  What would be the social result?  I think that our society would be based not on a blind commitment to a cause or creed or view of reality, but on a common commitment to each other as rightfully separate persons, with separate realities.  The natural human tendency to care for another would no longer be “I care for you because you are the same as I,” but instead “I prize and treasure you because you are different from me.”

 If you have read much of this blog you will probably recognize from the first paragraph of this quote that I am very sympathetic to at least some of what Rogers is saying here.  Two criticisms that I have, however, are worth mentioning.  First, I think Rogers moves too quickly from epistemology to metaphysics.  I agree with his assessment of the human condition in so far as we are able to "know" reality, but I'm not sure this means what he takes it to mean concerning whether or not there "is" a reality.  Second, I think Rogers is too idealistic.  I share his desire for a world of peace and tolerance, but I'm not sure its attainable by the human means he outlines.


That's all the assessment I'm giving here.  Want to hear what others think.  Enjoy!

Faith, History, and Eschatology

Just finished reading The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade, thought I would share some sections of the book here.  This is not meant to be a summary of the book’s main argument, I’m intentionally focusing in on a few things that I found particularly interesting.

The book is dealing with ancient/ “primitive”/ “archaic” understandings of humanity’s relationship with metaphysical concepts like “reality” or “being” or “time.”  To give you a little background:

The metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a metaphysics.  - 3

In other words, religious myths and religious actions were a major locus of how such concepts were understood in the ancient world.  

[On the] “primitive” ontological conception: an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype.  Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is “meaningless,” i.e., it lacks reality...  Hence it could be said that this “primitive” ontology has a Platonic structure. - 34

Insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of “history”; and he who reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place. - 35

Essentially, Eliade argues that for the ancient world a kind of dualism pervaded their philosophy in which that which was truly real was that which could escape the changing flow of time.  This was enacted through the retelling of religious myths, which were timeless, and the participation in religious rituals, through which Eliade writes “[ancient man] repeats the gestures of another and, through this repetition, lives always in an atemporal present.” - 86

For contrast, take a modern view of time and history as exemplified by Hegel:

For Hegel, history is “free” and always “new,” it does not repeat itself; nevertheless, it conforms to the plans of providence; hence it has a model (ideal, but none the less a model) in the dialectic of spirit itself.  To this history which does not repeat itself, Hegel opposes nature, in which things are reproduced ad infinitum. - 90

And now for the really interesting bit, contrast both these models with Eliade’s interpretation of the relationship with time and reality in ancient Hebrew thought:

For the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.  This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on)... It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.  We may even ask ourselves if monotheism, based upon the direct and personal revelation of the divinity, does not necessarily entail the “salvation” of time, its value within the frame of history. - 104

What makes this even more interesting is the way in which this conception of history takes on an eschatological dimension:

Under the “pressure of history” and supported by the prophetic and Messianic experience, a new interpretation of historical events dawns among the children of Israel.  Without finally renouncing the traditional concept of archetypes and repetitions, Israel attempts to “save” historical events by regarding them as active presences of Yahweh.  Whereas, for example, among Mesopotamian peoples individual or collective sufferings were tolerated insofar as they were caused by the conflict between divine and demonic forces, that is, formed a part of the cosmic drama, in the Israel of the Messianic prophets, historical events could be tolerated because, on the one hand, they were willed by Yahweh, and, on the other hand, because they were necessary to the final salvation of the chosen people.  - 106-07

Out of this eschatological dimension develops a new perception of God which makes possible faith (interesting to note that Eliade’s understanding of faith here is being influenced by Kierkegaard):

Abraham’s religious act [the sacrifice of Isaac] inaugurates a new religious dimension: God reveals himself as personal, as a “totally distinct” existence that ordains, bestows, demands, without any rational (i.e., general and foreseeable) justification, and for which all is possible.  This new religious dimension renders “faith” possible in the Judaeo-Christian sense.  - 110

In another gesture to Kierkegaard, Eliade then describes how this kind of faith, made possible in Judaism and Christianity, has struggled to catch on:

Neither in Christianity nor in Judaism does the discovery of this new dimension in religious experience, faith, produce a basic modification of traditional conceptions.  Faith is merely made possible for each individual Christian.  The great majority of so-called Christian populations continue, down to our day, to preserve themselves from history by ignoring it and by tolerating it rather than by giving it the meaning of a negative or positive theophany.  - 111

In other words, Eliade seems to be suggesting, for the majority of the Christian tradition the locus of religion is still found in ritual (which recalls the idea of participating in an eternal present) and not in “faith.”  I find this whole comparison very interesting for a few reasons.  First, it definitely seems to be a jab at Catholicism in the name of promoting a kind of Kierkegaardian, perhaps even evangelical, conception of “faith.”  It is also interesting because of the way in which “faith” in this sense is intertwined very closely with eschatology.  Any thoughts?

Nietzsche, God, and the Cross

Of all the challenges posed to Christianity in the modern age, I think the ones raised by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche are among the most serious.  While many debates center around the notion of the existence of God or of the historical Jesus, Nietzsche cuts to the very core of Christianity, to the very logic of the story itself, and attempts to show why the logic not only doesn’t work but is in fact, on his view, evil.  Now Nietzsche is a double-edged sword.  He makes very similar attacks on the philosophy and science of his day, and probably for that reason he has been relegated to the sidelines of philosophy, someone you talk about in the context of the existentialist movement but not someone you take seriously if you are doing philosophy or theology (especially not in an “analytic” context).

Yet, for all of this, I think Nietzsche deserves to have a more active place in our theological discussions.  Nietzsche’s attacks on both religion and philosophy are motivated in part by his concerns about objectivity, which is a popular theme in my own thinking.  Nietzsche is also concerned with what he sees as a hostile taking over of ethics by those who wish to confine humanity to live within certain docile “norms.”  Nietzsche in some respects might be said to want to “unleash the beast within,” and this is partly what happened with his thought when it was co-opted by Nazi Germany as philosophical justification for the atrocities of the holocaust.  While we must be careful to avoid such errors ourselves, perhaps a more favorable interpretation of Nietzsche might be this: Nietzsche believes that we are most human when we are most free to express ourselves in our unique, individuality.  Nietzsche wants us to be pure individuals not constrained by any other.  In this sense he actually has great respect for Jesus, it is more Jesus’ followers Nietzsche is upset with because he feels they have hoisted constraints onto humanity which have prevented true individuals from coming into existence.

Now with this overarching interpretation in mind, we can consider Nietzsche’s distinction between the Nobles and the Plebes in society.  The Nobles are those who are strong, successful, powerful and therefore free from constraints which might make them incapable of being a true individual.  They can shape their identity in whatever way they would like, they are not dominated by someone else.  The Plebes, on the other hand, are forced to see themselves in relation to the Nobles.  They can only exist at the pleasure of those higher up the food chain than they are.  They depend on them for their support, and they therefore resent them.  This distinction gives rise to two types of morality, in Nietzsche’s estimation.  The first type, associated with the Nobles, celebrates all that is strong and inherently good in itself.  It finds virtuous those who are able to enact their will without relying on others.  The second type, associated with the Plebes, is rooted in the notion of “revenge.”  Dominated as they are by others, the Plebes dream up an eschatological system of morality, one based on a “final judgment” which will bring down the “evil” Nobles (from the Plebes’ point of view) and exalt the humble Plebes.  It is easy to see from this description how Nietzsche goes about critiquing Christian morality and theology.

One other detail of Nietzsche’s thought will be useful to note here before launching into my own response to Nietzsche.  That is Nietzsche’s conception of how the two systems of morality he has sketched would make sense of an “enemy.”  On the common, Plebian notion of morality the enemy is one to be detested and hated and most importantly viewed as “evil.”  Not so with the Nobles.  When two Nobles view one another as enemies, they have a core of deep respect for the other’s individuality and strength.  Whatever rivalry they feel towards one other, whatever opposition, they still acknowledge one another as equals (at least in worth and dignity).  To use Nietzsche’s own words, “He tolerates no other enemy than one in whom nothing is to be despised and a great deal is worthy of respect!”  (First Essay, On the Genealogy of Morals).

There are several different ways of responding to Nietzsche, many of which I think miss the point of his arguments.  My own response to Nietzsche is not an attempt to rebuff his critiques of Christian ethics or theology (even if I do not agree with all of his characterizations of either) but instead to note a problem with his notion of individuality as it might exist in the real world.  Something later existentialist writers (such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir) will emphasize which Nietzsche does not is that we are always existing in relation with other people.  As such, we are always subject to the influence of others, always defining ourselves at least to a certain extent in respect to others, etc.  Given the expansiveness of human relationships it seems as though it is impossible for “true individuals” in the sense meant by Nietzsche to exist in this world.  It is important to note that this move does not negate the force of Nietzsche’s arguments, but it may have the effect of saying that in some respect all of us are Plebes and there are no true Nobles.

This analysis opens up a very interesting possibility to me.  The truly unique individual is one who is entirely free of the constraints of other people, not in any way dependent on them for its own life and self-understanding.  We have suggested that such an individual cannot exist in this world because of the expansive and inter-connected nature of human relationships.  I want to go a step farther and suggest that such a description of “Nobility” could be applied to the notion of God.  Now I recognize that Nietzsche just turned over in his grave at my writing this, but I also think that such a notion of God would be radically different from the traditional conceptions of God that Nietzsche was reacting against.  God as the wholly unique, self-defining individual is not the eschatological God of much traditional Christian rhetoric. This is not the God who can be coaxed by human ritual and action into bringing about the kingdom of bliss for the underdogs.  This is not the God who can be made in our image to justify our own endeavors.  This is a fiercely unpredictable God, the God of Job who brings calamity on the faithful without explanation, the God of Noah who can destroy humanity if it is so pleases him.

As frightening as this image of God is, I think Nietzsche also provides a very intriguing way of conceptualizing what happens at the cross.  Remember that in Nietzsche’s conception of the Noble morality, an “enemy” is one who must command complete respect.  A true Noble will not look on the Plebes as his enemy because they are unworthy of the same respect as he has for himself or another Noble.  Seemingly this means that Nietzsche cannot conceive of the Christian notion of redemption because it implies a higher being condescending to care about lower beings.  Yet I think that endowed with the notion of “incarnation” the cross can take on a new and profound meaning in Nietzsche’s system.  The cross can be seen as a moment exemplifying the concept of an “enemy” in the Noble system of morality.  At the cross God the Father is put in opposition with God the Son, who because of his own divine nature can embody a being whom the Father must fully respect and see as a worthy equal, something which could never be accomplished by a human “plebe.”  In other words, at the heart of the Christian story is a moment in which God has become God’s own enemy on behalf of humanity.

Now I fully recognize that Nietzsche would be intensely dissatisfied with this interpretation of his own philosophy.  I’m also going to openly admit that I’m not certain I believe the theological interpretation I have just given (though I think this “Nietzschean theology” is a perspective that could be valuable to theological discussions).  I do think, however, that this is a very interesting way of thinking about both God and the cross drawn from within Nietzsche’s thought (even as he attempted to derail both the notion of God and the cross).  It is food for thought if nothing else, a way of conceptualizing Christian theology which also wrestles with some of the greatest challenges to Christian theology.

Meaning, Self-Determination, and Relativism

We left off our last post with some pretty big questions.  What I hope to do in this post is sketch in a very broad outline the direction I see answers to those questions as going.  Then in future posts I will flesh that out a bit more through some more concrete discussions of different issues.  What that means is that this post will probably be a bit more “technical” or “jargony” than I would like, but I hope it will still be relatively clear. 

First, meaning:  We ended by saying that meaning is defined by the one bestowing meaning.  That actually is too simplistic for the reason that we are all bestowing meaning on a shared collection of objects.  Further, we are influenced in our own bestowing of meaning by the meanings others have bestowed.  There is a back and forth going on that is far more complicated than a single direction of movement or even a two-directional dialogue between “object” and “interpreter.”  It is more like trying to pinpoint a person in a crowded room where everyone is moving and swirling around.  We can find the person-- we can bestow meaning-- but it involves a serious amount of maneuvering and jostling past other people trying to do the same.  This is what we can call the “hermeneutical situation.”  Objects exist a certain way in themselves.  But we can only comprehend them in the way we perceive them, in the way we bestow meaning on them or interpret them.  But these perceptions and interpretations are influenced by the way our culture has taught us to perceive and interpret objects.  But even that is filtered through our own sets of categories, which have been influenced by a myriad of factors from our family situation to our particular education to our conversations with others.  So in the end, we bestow a particular meaning on things, but that is not merely a process of us arbitrarily deciding something will mean x for us.  Understanding and parsing through all the various influences on us and how they impact our own understanding of the world (our own efforts to bestow meaning), what we can call the hermeneutical process, is as much an exercise in psychology as it is in philosophy.

Second, self-determination:  Just as all of the various cultural and experiential factors we have noted above work together to shape the way we understand the world, so they work together to shape us into who we are.  Seemingly this “determines” us and makes us products of our culture and situation.  However, there is a sense in which we do and must have freedom in the midst of this process.  That sense is in our choosing to embrace what we are.  We are self-determined in that we decide that we are satisfied with ourselves, that we are who we are and are not something else which has failed to accomplish its own being.  That sense of self-acceptance, of choosing ourself, is the existential endeavor.  It involves understanding ourself, just as with the hermeneutical process above, and deciding that the self whom we understand is in fact “us.”  That does not translate into a static existence-- we are always in motion and on certain trajectories.  But it involves us recognizing the trajectories on which we are moving and consciously choosing to embrace them, understanding and accepting their consequences for our being.

Third, relativism:  What needs to be kept in mind is that the things we have discussed are primarily epistemological and don’t necessarily translate into concrete metaphysical implications.  The limitation introduced by our subjective perspective is an epistemological limitation.  But what we are able to know has no bearing on what is.  The meaning we perceive in the world is not somehow imposed on the world by our perception of it.  So many perspectives exist and we must recognize the limit of our own perspectival viewpoint.  This is not the same as saying that all such perspectives are true in the sense that they correspond to metaphysical reality.  While the claim could be made that since we don’t have access to objective knowledge of the world the best we can do is formulate our own subjective understanding of it, this is not the same as saying that our individual subjective understanding describes the way the world actually exists.  In fact, to make this relativist leap, to claim that all beliefs are metaphysically true, is to negate the value of holding beliefs.  If no perspective can be valued as “better” or “worse” than another then there is no reason to choose any perspective.  This is not to say we wouldn’t choose-- that is a natural consequence of being human, we have a perspective and an understanding of the world-- but it would be to say there would be no basis for the choice except luck or chance.  This, in turn, fundamentally negates the value of our own existence.  To find our own existence meaningful we need to “choose” it in the sense of self-determination as we have already discussed.  To do that we need some reason to “value” it.  We find that reason by comparing different perspectives, thinking through issues in different ways, and embracing that which we find most compelling.  In effect, when we make this choice, we are claiming that as best we can tell the perspective we have adopted is the “most true” of all the options available to us.  This is not the same as saying it is “objectively true.”  But neither is it the same as saying that all beliefs are true, which is effectively the same as saying no beliefs are true and no beliefs are meaningful.

The Blog is Back!! Essential Traits and Existentialism

This last semester was insanely busy and I took a bit of a hiatus from blogging to keep on top of everything.  But the semester is finally over and so now the blog is making a comeback.  There are several posts that I had started and never finished that will hopefully be getting revisited and prepared for posting in the near future.

This post aims to summarize some of what I have been thinking about this semester in my own studies and tie that in to some familiar themes on this blog.  Much of my work this semester has had to do, either directly or indirectly, with the school of philosophy known as existentialism.  I find this branch of philosophy fascinating because of the kinds of questions it is asking and the way it approaches these questions to posit answers for them.  Existentialism is very motivated by the kinds of epistemological limitations that I have discussed in previous posts to approach philosophy from a very different angle.  Rather than attempting to paint an objective metaphysical picture of the world, existentialism begins by noting our subjective perspective on the world and attempts to describe the way in which we might live "existentially" given this finite/subjective viewpoint.

A particularly famous example of this way of thinking is found in the writings of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.  To briefly outline Sartre's claims, Sartre believes that as far as human beings are concerned, "existence precedes essence."  What Sartre means by this is that nothing "essentially" defines "me" as "me."  I simply exist as "me" and however I define or understand myself determines what the essence, or core being, of "me" really is.  To illustrate with a simple example:  If I cut my hair (which I should probably do, though I was just informed that I look like Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol…), have I become a different person?  Most people would easily say "no."  What if I dyed it blonde?  My girlfriend might be pissed at me, but I don't think this would constitute me being someone else.  These are relatively simple examples.  What if I do something more complicated- I get plastic surgery and replace my chin and my nose.  I am now unrecognizable.  Am I a different person?  I think most people would still say that it is "me" beneath these changes, not someone else.  Let's get really complicated- what if I underwent surgery to have my gender changed?  My gut is still to say that I would be the same person, even if in a very different physical manifestation (without getting into a discussion about transgendered persons, we are assuming in this example that it is me, a male who has no doubts about being a male, that is our subject).

So far we have only discussed potential physical changes.  Let's talk more abstractly.  What if I woke up one morning and decided I would no longer hold any religious beliefs.  I became an abject atheist and quit all associations with Christianity.  Would I be someone new?  What if I became convinced of solipsism- that I am the only person that exists?  Would that make me someone new?  What if I underwent therapy and radically changed my personality to become extremely extroverted and aggressive?  Would that make me a different person?  What if I lost my memory and could not recall who my friends and family were?  Would I still be "me"?

The point of this lengthy list of questions is simply this:  I don't think that any of these questions presents us with a "change" which would actually result in a new person coming into existence (at least not on most accounts of personhood that I am aware of).  So if I can change almost everything about me, from my personality to my appearance to my beliefs to my memories, and still be "me" what is it that is essentially "me"?  Sartre claims such an "essence," such an underlying core being, simply doesn't exist on its own.  Instead, that core being is whatever I make it to be.  I exist, how I exist is up to me to decide.

Now, I think Sartre might be willing to push this a little bit farther than I have thus far.  So far we have only talked about individual persons and their "essence" or core being.  What happens, however, if we broaden this to talk about the human race as a whole?  Is there anything that is "essentially" human-- anything that to lack would make us "un-human"?  The predominant philosophical tradition has been that rationality defines the essence of humanity-- the ability to think and reason is what makes us "people."  But what about the person born with a severe mental handicap?  It is possible to conceive of someone who was born without the cerebral capacity for reason even if their basic biological functions were intact.  Would such an individual, with their human DNA and human appearance but without any higher reasoning capacities actually be a person?  My sense is that most philosophers would be quick to say "yes" and seek some explanation for this seeming exception to the rule.  We could make similar cases, I think, about many other things- two arms are not required to be human.  Nor two legs.  Nor two eyes.  Nor any other physical feature, really.  DNA might mark off the human species, but everyone has slightly different DNA and human DNA is remarkably similar to the DNA of other species.  So does that minuscule difference from other species while accounting for variations within our species actually separate people from "not-people"?

In then end, we might come to a similar point: Nothing in particular defines the "essence" of humanity.  Humanity determines its own essence through the way it constitutes itself.  Now, however, I want to push this point farther than Sartre takes it, at least in my knowledge of Sartre.  Can we define the essence of anything?  Pick an object or a creature, any one, and see if we can find an underlying "core" that must be present for it to be what it is.  I think a case can be made that no such core exists for any object, that the meaning of things is defined by the one bestowing meaning on it.  That final statement is certainly a very radical one, and that is something we will have to explore in a bit more depth in other posts.  In particular, I want to address down the line three related questions:

1.  What does it mean for someone to bestow meaning?

2.  How is bestowing meaning related to determining our own essence in the way Sartre describes?

3.  What happens when we bestow different meanings on things?

Telling Stories

Whenever we tell a story, we are being intentionally selective in the details we include.  I am right now sitting in the common room of the Divinity School at Yale.  There are people in the corner opposite me having a conversation.  There are several people at tables working on various things (I can’t tell what from my vantage point).  Occasionally someone walks thru.  Even though I am narrating events in this room, I am not telling a story.  There is no point to the narration, no movement, no plot.  I could sit here all day and list everything that happened in this room and we would have an extensive amount of observations about life in the common room at a divinity school, but not a story.

Likewise, if we wanted to describe a “science” or “philosophy” of something, we have to be selective. If we wanted to make some sociological conclusions about divinity school students based on my rambling observations of a day in the common room, we would need to choose particular observations and organize them in a particular way to come up with anything that made any bit of sense or held any significance.  We would need to look for patterns of behavior or something else that we could use as an organizing paradigm.

The same would be true of history.  A list or cataloguing of events is not really a history.  History attempts to explain why events happen, and to do that you need to be selective, look for patterns and connections, causal relationships, etc.

What I think this all gets at is that the universe in its raw form is simply too much to take in.  Which seems at first a very trivial statement, but I think it is one of extraordinary importance.  We can’t simply observe and soak in everything that happens around us, we need to organize it all in some useful way.  We make stories, scientific theories, philosophies, histories, etc., all for the sake of organizing and simplifying a literal universe of data that we could not otherwise make sense of.

Now, in light of what I said the other day about a subtle circularity in logic, I want to observe that the same kind of subtle circularity exists in almost every other “organizing scheme” we might develop.  When we narrate events, why do we choose the details we choose?  Because those details form the structure of the story we want to tell.  In other words, the story in its totality is already in some sense assumed by the details that make up its parts.  I think we could say the same of all our methods of organizing our experience of the world- they are all intentionally selective, and in the process of being selective are to some extent assuming themselves.

What does this say about how we organize data?  Does this mean all our reasoning is fallacious and that we can’t know anything?  If we just stopped here it might be taken that way, but I certainly hope that this is not were we stop.  I have written plenty of times on this blog about the idea of coherence, and I think it is the key to understanding how reasoning can function.  In a way, I am working with the ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, though there are plenty of ways in which he and I would strongly disagree with one another.  But he at least provides a starting point for us, which is the idea that we, functionally, must organize data.  The world is too much for us to take in as a brute reality, we have to organize our experience of it into some sort of system of understanding, some sort of paradigm.  That understanding or system can take a variety of forms, be it a story or narrative, a rigorously logical philosophical system, a strenuously tested scientific model, a quasi-mystical/otherworldly perspective, or perhaps some other way of thinking.  What matters, at least so far as this post is concerned, is not so much the form that it takes as that it “works”: that it makes sense of our experience and puts it all together into some sort of worldview that we can operate out of.  When it fails to do this, whether because of an internal “inconsistency” or because we encounter new experiences that we cannot make sense of in our old way of thinking, we are forced to abandon our understanding and seek out another one, a remarkably unnerving or “shaking” experience for many if not most of us.

That these understandings or paradigms in some sense assume themselves is, I think, a natural product of their selectivity which I think serves to underline our subjectivity.  Here is where Kant, who has given us a starting point, and I would diverge (or at least I diverge with some of his interpreters, I’m not as clear that Kant actually says what I’m about to attribute to him).  The “Kantian” view would be that we all have a common set of mechanisms for forming our understanding of the world and thus can come to some sort of “objective” understanding.  My own view is that our understanding of the world is much more individualized, that the selectivity required to tell a story or form a theory is rooted in our own individual, subjective selves and the viewpoint associated with that self, not an inborn or innate system of categorization.  So we all in some sense “assume” the story we tell because we are the ones telling and crafting it.  Is this fallacious?  Is this “subtle circularity” damaging to the credibility of our systems?  Perhaps, but I don’t think it needs to be.

This “subtle circularity” has the potential to be damaging if we make a leap to the claim that our assumptions objectively reflect reality.  If I make the claim that the story I tell is the only story that can be told about the day in the common room then I committed an error, the “subtle circularity” which guided my telling of the story has become a fallacy.  If I acknowledge that the story I am telling is one among several then the assumptions which shaped it are no longer damaging, they are merely acting to set off this particular story as its own story.

It is important to note here, as I wrap this post up, that what I am arguing for is very strictly an epistemological limitation.  I am not attempting to make any metaphysical claims about the nature of reality or truth via this argument.  There is much more to say about that, but it will have to wait for another post.

Critique of Pure Logic

When I was in high school taking math, the thing I hated more than anything else was doing geometric proofs.  Not because I didn’t understand them or couldn’t get them right (which was, in fact, my problem when we moved on to trig...) but because they were so bloody meticulous.  I could usually see the solution pretty early on, but writing out every step to get there was such a drag and a bore and I hated it.

In college I was introduced to symbolic logic, which is effectively doing “proofs” with a sentence by replacing its clauses with symbols.  My professor, who remains one of my favorite teachers ever, was convinced solving logical proofs was the greatest thing any human being could aspire to do.  I had to disagree (actually, even though I respect this man tremendously, we didn’t agree on much of anything...).  Learning the rules of logic was extraordinarily useful, but it was not what got me going in the morning.

Logic was touted to me by my very analytic professor and a few others as a way of thinking objectively.  It was as if logic put limits on reality.  Which was an interesting notion that I never really dwelt on until very recently.  For whatever reason, I was thinking about the kinds of proofs we did in that logic class or in the geometry class I took in High School.  Some of those proofs were designed to “prove” the very rules we used to solve other problems.  In thinking about that process, it occurred to me that you can only “prove” one rule at a time.  Further, when you do that you assume other rules are true so that you can solve the proof.  It is as if the rules of logic are the supporting beams of a structure.  You can perhaps take one beam out at a time to inspect it, but if you do more than that the structure becomes unstable.  There is no such thing as starting a logic problem from complete scratch with no rules whatsoever.  It just wouldn’t work.  To me at least it seems that the implication of this is that the system of logic is dependent on itself, that the full system in some sense assumes itself.  There is, in other words, a subtle circularity to any system of logic.

Now by invoking the term “circular,” which is a term generally associated with fallacious reasoning, I seem to have just thrown logic out.  That is not actually the move that I would like to make, but I want this realization to be the kind of starting point for the next move I do intend to make.  So even though this post is insanely short compared to how much I normally write, here is where we end for now.  Later on I will consider how we might “redeem” logic as it were from the apparent problem we have uncovered.

Defending the Orthodoxy of Open Theism

This is an idea that occurred to me recently in the context of discussion about human freedom.  The idea might not be worth much of anything, but I think its at least worth floating here.  Open Theism is the theological claim that God does not know with certainty every even that will happen in the future because the future is “open” and might “change.”  Frequently this is lambasted by evangelical theologians as being an unorthodox view of God.  For instance, the polar opposite of Open Theism, the Reformed theological tradition, makes the claim that God knows with certainty every future event.  What is worth asking, however, is how God has this knowledge in Reformed theology, and the answer is that it is because Reformed theology is deterministic- in Reformed theology God knows every future event because God will personally bring about or orchestrate every future event.  With that in mind, I think we can construct two arguments for comparison:

Reformed Argument:

1. God knows with certainty every event in the future that God will personally bring about or orchestrate.
2. God will personally bring about or orchestrate all future events.
3. Therefore, God knows with certainty all future events.

Open Theist Argument:

1. God knows with certainty every event in the future that God will personally bring about or orchestrate.
2. [Human freedom entails that] God will not personally bring about or orchestrate at least some future events.
3. Therefore, at least some future events are not known by God with certainty.

The first thing we can notice is that both arguments have the same first premise.  The second thing we can notice is that the second premise forms the basis for the difference between the two arguments, with both conclusions following from the two premises.  So in evaluating these arguments, the real question is about the second premise of each.  Will God personally bring about or orchestrate all future events?  What I think this means is that the argument over Open Theism is not an argument about God’s omniscience but one about human freedom.  In other words, since both arguments have the same first premise, the question about the orthodoxy of Open Theism is actually a question about the orthodoxy of the second premise of the Open Theist argument- if “free-will” is considered an “orthodox” doctrine, then Open Theism is within the orthodox tradition, as “non-traditional” as its conclusion may seem.  Historically, it seems very apparent to me that free will is within the traditions of orthodoxy.  So it seems to me Open Theism can be considered an orthodox theological view.  What do others think?

NB:  This post is not a declaration that I am an open theist.  It is merely a thought experiment about whether or not open theism should be considered an orthodox "option" in theology.

Aristotle and Cosmological Arguments

This is the condensed and slightly modified version of a paper I wrote last semester.  Longstanding in the great monotheistic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has been a popular argument for the existence of God known today as the "cosmological argument."  Its current expounder-in-chief among Christians, William Lane Craig, has adapted a version of the argument derived from the Kalam tradition of Muslim scholarship.  Similar arguments were advanced by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and can even be seen in some Hellenistic Jewish literature among a variety of other sources from ancient times to present day.  The arguments for the most part take their starting point in the writings of Aristotle and in particular the argument laid out in Metaphysics XII concerning an "unmoved mover."  Yet there are some significant differences between Aristotle’s original argument and contemporary manifestations of the cosmological argument.

Aristotle’s cosmological argument occurs amidst discussions of substance and causation, and that context is extremely important to understanding the argument.  Substance for Aristotle is what “certain thinkers assert to be capable of existing apart” (1069ab).  Aristotle's argument can be understood as a critique of the Platonic notion of the Forms.  Essentially, Aristotle's argument is that the principles which cause change in individual substances- by which he seems to mean “formal change,” i.e., the things which demarcate individual substances as being a particular thing, whether they be shape or color or size or texture or movement or any other such factor- only exist as they are actualized in the particular things.  Thus, Aristotle seems to say, we can note ways in which these causes are analogous between one another, but we cannot make the conclusion, as Plato attempts to do, that such causes exist as universal Forms that stand apart.

Aristotle begins his argument by asserting that movement must have always existed, and if this is the case then time must have always existed and likewise space (1071b).  From this starting point he argues that substances must have always existed because without them this movement could not have existed (1071b).  Further, he argues as another critique of the Platonic notion of the eternal Forms, these eternal substances cannot exist in a state of potentiality but must be actualized for motion to exist.  The most significant point of this argument is that substances must be eternal.

In an interesting turn, then, Aristotle next adopts one of the key components of his teacher Plato's ideology, namely that the moving, changing, actualized world is somehow less real than the stable, unmoving, eternal world.  Based on this idea he will conclude that while moving objects exist eternally, they exist only in an intermediate state.  What is really needed is an unmoving object to ground everything, and what this object must be is eternal, actual, and most importantly a substance (1072a).  This Platonic idea that the ultimate cause needs to be free from the vagaries of motion or change is important for understanding the conclusion of this argument, a conclusion which has had profound implications on much of later theology.  This leads to the final conclusion of Aristotle:

It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things.  It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible.  But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place.  1073a

This substance is the famous "unmoved mover" who is eternal and separate.  From this will be derived many of the classical ideas about God in the monotheistic traditions: that God is eternal, transcendent and distinct from the world, indivisible, unchanging, etc.  This cosmological argument, we might claim, is not simply significant for its apologetic value but also because of the way it shapes the theological tradition.

In stark contrast to some more contemporary cosmological arguments, such as that advanced by William Lane Craig, which hold that the universe has a definite temporal starting point of which the "unmoved mover" is the first cause, Aristotle maintains that motion has eternally existed as we have discussed above.  How, then, is the "unmoved mover" a "first cause"?  The answer, I believe, lies in this discussion of substance.  For Aristotle substance is what underlies matter to allow it to take its form.  What I believe this argument establishes is essentially a hierarchy of substances.  This is Aristotle's twist on Plato's notion of the Forms existing as a hierarchy.  Since Aristotle denies that merely potential Forms can exist, he insists on the actuality of all substances.  The substances underlie matter and allow motion to exist.  What underlies the individual substances, however, and allows them to exist?  Other substances, in a kind of genetic tree or in a kind of motion of their own.  Aristotle thus thinks he has solved the problem of the universe's existence (NB: not its origin, because it has always existed) by the idea of underlying substances tracing back to a “first,” or perhaps better put “primary” or “foundational” substance, the first cause or “unmoved mover,” which exists eternally and apart from other substances but whose existence gives rise to the existence of the other substances.

Whether or not Aristotle’s argument ultimately works or convinces us that there is such an “unmoved mover,” what I think Aristotle does establish is an alternative type of causation to what we typically think of today.  We can call this more familiar type of causation, which underlies the Kalam argument, “temporal causation.”  It has to do with the sequence of cause-and-effect stretching back through time.  The Kalam argument maintains that there must be a definitive starting point to this sequence of “temporal causation.”  The alternative type of causation that Aristotle has presented we can call “ontological causation,” having to do with a hierarchy of substances from which others are derived ontologically but not necessarily temporally.  Interestingly, while I think Aquinas followed Aristotle’s notions of causation here fairly closely, for the most part the Christian tradition of philosophical theology has not employed this notion to particularly great affect (at least not the Protestant tradition).  I think the potential implications of this distinction, though, are fairly significant, especially as regards discussions about human agency/free-will and divine causation.

Aristotle and Free Will

Once again this topic rears its head… But two interesting connections have occurred to me based on some recent reading of Aristotle.  I have to say on the front end that this is not a topic that Aristotle ever consciously discussed- the debate over the nature of freedom post-dates Aristotle, believe it or not.  That said, I am trying to avoid being anachronistic.  My claim here is not that Aristotle argued for a particular model of freedom but that some aspects of Aristotle's thought can be useful to explaining a later idea of freedom as espoused by more existentialist thinkers.

The first idea is a distinction that Aristotle makes between two parts of human reasoning: the “mathematical” and the “deliberative.”  The mathematical follows "necessary" principles to reach its conclusions.  The deliberative part is a bit more open-ended, though.  Its principles are not "necessary", they are in some sense dependent on the goal of a person's life or existence.  They are, in other words, deliberately chosen by the individual as part of the development of that person into their individual self.

The second idea from Aristotle that I think is particularly useful is his notion of chance.  For Aristotle "chance" does not imply the kind of randomness we think of perhaps associating with the string of numbers we might get from rolling a twenty-sided die over and over again or the order of a well-shuffled deck of cards.  That kind of randomness is not what Aristotle means when he says something happens by chance.  Nor does he mean "without cause," which is often what libertarian freedom is accused of implying.  What Aristotle does mean by chance, however, might be termed "unintended circumstances."  Two causally determined chains of action cross in a way not intended by either.  The farmer plowing their field comes across a chest buried there long ago.  The chest is not there "randomly"- it was intentionally hidden there.  Nor is the farmer there "randomly"- he intended to be plowing his field.  But neither the person who hid the chest nor the farmer intended for this discovery to happen, these two paths have crossed in a way that was unexpected, creating an "unintended circumstance."

The model of free will I have found most compelling is one that I think can be greatly aided by both these concepts.  This model is one that I think is representative of how many existentialist writers think about free will, and in more analytic thinking something similar is argued for by Robert Kane.  Basically, the model argues that not every decision must be "free" in the sense of having "alternative possibilities."  Instead, freedom refers to our ability to shape ourselves, to oversee the formation of our character and beliefs.  This requires that at crucial junctures in our life, what Kane calls "Self-Forming Moments," we have the ability to choose which way we will go.  From Aristotle I think we can construct an account of how this works.  These moments arise from the kinds of "unintended circumstances" that we encounter throughout life.  In these moments where the chain of action we have taken part in leaves us entirely unprepared for the circumstance we find ourselves in, a decision must be made which will set the course of a new chain of action.  That decision is not necessitated by any of the previous actions that brought us to this place- it is a "new" moment, as it were.  Thus, we must deliberate and determine what principles will guide us through that moment.  It is in exactly these sorts of circumstances that our character is "formed" into the kind of person we are.