Is Faith Oppressive?

I will get back to the last installment of my expert knowledge series soon, once I figure out what I'm actually going to write for it - I had planned what is there already, and I want to see where it all leads as much as anyone else (assuming that others are interested). But first, a brief tangent that I was thinking about: is faith in a given revelation oppressive?

Now, of course, such a question cannot be answered for all cases of faith, nor perhaps can a definitive answer be given in any case. I merely want to raise some issues. It seems to me that Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (and I've seen similar Buddhist statements) make a virtue out of faith and a vice out of doubt. One should believe authority by default; the Bible says it, the church says it, the Qur'an, the Vedas, enlightened beings, etc., and so you ought to believe what you have been told. A skeptical, critical attitude has often been regarded as not simply a misfortune keeping one from the truth (perhaps you merely have a bad luck to not be able to rationally accept an important belief, even though you have virtuous mental habits), but something evil in itself: it is a vice, and it is blameworthy.

Two things have made me think about the oppressive character of this attitude. First, I went to a conference on a text by the medieval Jewish thinker Judah Ha-Levi. The text was about a king who was searching for the right way to lead his country, and who asked a philosopher, a Christian, and Muslim, and a Jew about what he should do. The text went beyond typical religious polemics and actually gave a thoughtful response and some interesting empirical investigations into what should mark a true religion. One can still quibble with the naive trust of scriptures given, but overall Ha-Levi gave a better response than I've seen from anyone else in the Middle Ages, and probably a better response than I've seen in most contemporary apologetics. Is part of this due to the fact that the Jews were marginalized, and had to actually work through their beliefs, while Christians and Muslims have been able to mandate belief from a position of power? How could any believer hold to the obviousness of her faith without at least a history of power backing it up? Even conservative members who feel themselves under attack from the surrounding culture can only feel under attack because they used to hold the more dominant view.

Second, my master's thesis was on concerns about certain interpretations of Zen Buddhism. Some of these concerns were about the social and ethical ramifications of Zen belief: one throws away rational critique (supposedly) and therefore loses the ability to analyze one's society. This lack of critique has led to Zen involvement in WWII, and sexual abuses by roshis in American Zen centers (to put it simply; of course, there are ways in which Zen can save itself, I think). But (to make a claim which I don't have space here to elaborate), it did not seem like the problematic Zen attitudes were any different from expressions of faith in, say, an Abrahamic tradition, in which one puts some authority beyond rational critique in order to have peace (whether internal or communal). But this has led to social problems whenever it has occurred: groups become marginalized and oppressed, because the the group members are considered malformed and cannot accept the revelation that all truly virtuous people accept.

The Jews should obviously accept the New Testament because they already have the prophecies concerning Christ; the Buddhists are obviously wrong because their practices don't have the sattvic characteristics of the Vedantins; the Qur'an is obviously the work of God and anyone who says otherwise is obscuring her original nature as a Muslim; polytheists are obviously wrong because, well, they're just plain stupid, because no one has ever sat down to think through the pagan worldview. And because of this obviousness, we are justified in putting the authority beyond criticism and expecting others to do the same. For anyone who says otherwise, that this is not how the virtue of faith has worked, point me to a single work of apologetics that does not grant a special status to a view which cannot rationally support itself and that deals honestly and faithfully with other positions. Heck, simply get me one that can take simply the general skeptic's position seriously.

Now, of course these aren't the only expressions of these traditions, and not everything is wrong with some sort of faith (although in my more cynical moments I do tend to think that all acts of religious faith whatsoever are problematic in this way). I mean, I do consider it worthwhile to dedicate my life to studying religious thought, after all! But there does seem to be some problem here, and I hear enough assertions by various believers to this effect (that they know best and everyone who disagrees simply doesn't see things appropriately) that something needs to be done. We live in an age of multiple, competing authorities. We can't just wish them away, and each one calls all of the others into question. We now have a better vantage point to see how oppressed groups have been treated in the past, and we have an ethical imperative to act conscientiously.

(To point out a couple of problems with the above broad sweeps, in interest of fairness: early Christianity does seem to have the emphasis on faith even without much power, and one can see a positive role for skepticism in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. And some Islamic views concerning our original nature as Muslims are content with any affirmation of the unity of the source of being. But I think that the problems I've raised are real enough, even if the narrative is incomplete.)

Expert Knowledge - Part 4 of 4

In the previous posts, I have argued that (1) knowledge is built on expert communities, (2) these communities legitimately structure knowledge claims in a hierarchy, and (3) they can by and large avoid issues of oppression insofar as they stick to their own internal goals without adding in extraneous concerns. Whether I have argued these well is a separate issue, and I am sure that they need (and probably have received elsewhere) much more fleshing out. But in any case, I want to see what happens with religious expert communities. I will first start with the relation of communities to each other, in a couple brief senses; it really is going to be two posts in one, but I want to finish this series and I've already labeled it as as 4 post series. I may (highly) edit this and add in some citations to risk sending to a conference at some point, so please, please, PLEASE leave a philosophical criticism or two on these entries to help improve the mess if you have the time. Or let me know if this has all been said before by some continental guy I haven't read (which would be any of them) and who has said it better.

Novices vs. Ousiders

There is a difference between two different sorts of non-knowers. The first group is that of the novices, who belong to a given expert community for the time being and so are responsible to that community. If one starts asking medical questions, one is beholden to the medical experts if one actually wants to understand medicine; if one does not, one is not really asking medical questions. On the other hand, there are outsiders. If someone does not want to learn about dead white men, then those communities who specialize in dead white male culture (should) have no control over them. So one can be in a community without being considered a knower. A problem here is that outsiders may have nowhere else to go, but that is another (albeit important and relevant) issue.

Essence vs. Existence

There is also a difference between knowing about a particular topic, and knowing how it fits with other topics. A physicist may know physics thoroughly, but this does not mean that her opinion concerning the relation of physics to other sciences (or worse, to politics or religion) has any weight, except insofar as it is knowledge of physics. Of course, this is already extremely problematic; even what "physics" is has been determined by different conversations between different and interrelated communities sharing many individuals. One cannot simply delineate "this" community from "that" community in reality. But for practical and general purposes, there seems to be some sort of knowledge in which the physicist participates, being trained and ratified by a given community within which she continues to dialogue, and I can't think of a better shorthand term for this sort of knowledge than "physics".

I will refer to this division as between the essence of a body of knowledge (what it is about) and its existence (that is obtains within the broader context). There can be a community of experts about (put your favorite pseudo-science here), and they can legitimately have some body of knowledge, but there are also the interrelations between this community and other communities to be considered. Every body of knowledge both is something, but also fits within the larger context of humanity in a certain way, and these are separate issues. "Existence" as I am using it here refers only to how a thing exists, since it must already exist in some way as a communal practice if any community discusses it, but it seems for the present to make a handy technical term so I will keep it unless someone objects. Someone can talk about a phoenix, and even state truths about it (a phoenix is a bird, for example), so it must exist in some way, or we would have nothing stable to talk about. We could (in theory) disagree over whether it exists in physical reality (whereupon I could reach out and touch it) or merely in the reality of social construction (or perhaps, a differently constructed social reality than the physical one and less likely to harm me via physical contact).

The essence of the topic is something understood truly only by the given community; math is understood by mathematicians and medicine by medical experts (although again, these are not necessarily clearly delimited and defined essences which can be neatly separated from each other). The existence of the topic, though, is even less clearly delimited. There are wider communities which can discuss such issues: how physics exists is discussed in the wider community of modern science, for example. But poets and philosophers and university boards all have some relation to the different ways in which the physics community interacts within the larger world, and ultimately, so does all of humanity (and beyond, if we were to encounter other beings capable of considering these issues). Essence then is largely decided within communities, while how the essence exists is decided within ever-increasing circumferences. To fully and completely understand how anything exists, we would need all of the approaches available to us.

Members of a community must, then, listen to those outside of the community in this respect in order to understand their own field better. The mathematician does not need to listen to everyone concerning what mathematical theorems are true, but she does need to listen to others in understanding what math is. The poet may be clueless when it comes to physics, but can both heighten our appreciation of the grandeur which physics shows us as well as call into question its unjustified dominance; for this reason, the physicist may need to listen to the poet to understand physics. In the end, knowledge and communities are both internally and externally constituted and any individual (whether a human being or a specific community) is also made up by the other communities.

Religious Expert Communities

So, where does this leave religious communities? First, different religious communities set their own rules on a lot of things according to their own internal life. Muslims get to exegete the Qur'an, not Christians or Hindus. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox each get their own communities of understanding their authoritative sources and of understanding. Different religious groups have their own specific experts, and in order to be considered a knower, one must be trained and accepted by these specific experts, as in any other field.

It is one thing to be the spokesperson for a given group; it is another to say that one's given belief really obtains, and this is why I wanted to refer to an essence/existence distinction (which probably makes more sense here with religions than it did with, say, physics). The Christian can argue that, within the Christian community, God's justice needs to have been satiated by Christ's atoning death. But this pulls in notions of justice which are shared by other communities; it is not Christian justice which demands God's act, but some feature of reality which should be accessible to people in general. (In general, any rational argument is such that it should connect together ideas appropriately; other communities may disagree with one's starting position, but if you have a good argument from your own premises, this should be widely recognized or else suspicious). When no one else gets the necessity of atonement, ostensibly argued from concerns beyond those of the Christian community, the Christian community needs to revise its claims. Otherwise, it is stretching beyond its community's own inner life and being either oppressive or foolish, dictating what, say, "justice" is to others without having formed the proper expertise. The Christian community, in this case, can (a) restrict their claims to some specifically Christian form of justice which of course no one else holds by definition (but then, what about original sin?); (b) reject the argument and work within the larger community to come to a better understanding of justice and how it fits with the Atonement (as many contemporary theologians are doing); or (c) revise their arguments so that they actually explain their arguments appropriately to others so that the others can see the internal logic of the Christian position (but then the Christians must also listen to other voices in response).

So the Christian community in this case is making claims beyond itself, as it seems to me that world-wide religions must all do to preserve their claims to heal the human spirit in general. While Christians are the finally arbiters on what Christians actually teach (and not, say, militant atheists or well-meaning religious pluralists), they are not the arbiters on what they say that falls within the scope of humanity at large or within other groups' expertises'. To say otherwise would be like allowing a peculiar sort of Christian math which can trump everyone else's math, perhaps because of some rounding found in the measurements of the bath in Soloman's temple. But this is ridiculous; the community which actually understands math through constant practice and training and in which one can be recognized for knowing math is the arbiter for interpreting Christian mathematical claims, not vice versa. But at the same time, when Christians are confronted by other communities, it is the Christian community which decides how to respond based on its own internal life. It may be oppressive (or foolish) to continue claiming knowledge outside of the community's marked expertise, but there is no single response to having a problem pointed out, as shown in the example above with justice. Religious communities must change based on their own internal principles, as mathematics did in the 18th and 19th centuries when it split into modern math and physics.

Religious Expertise and Laypeople

So this goes some way toward outlining how communities can relate to each other, though it is at best a beginning. But what about the novices in the community of faith? How do they relate to the experts of their faith? Are professors, pastors, and priests more members of a given faith than the common people? That depends on the faith and what it requires for practice; one can practice correctly without complete understanding. The experts in the community decide what is actually the knowledge-base of that community. But, since that community does not have any say outside of its own legitimate principles without becoming oppressive, novices in religious understanding may be the relevant experts in some areas upon which the religion touches. When the experts of the community say that the Bible denies evolution, the microbiologist within that particular church is dependent on those experts for their understanding of the Bible; evolution, however, is also discussed by the scientific and especially biological community, and so she is the expert there. One could also say that married people are better experts on family and procreation than celibate priests, no matter how well the latter have been trained in their own expertises.

So the common people of the religion do lack the sort of knowledge which the experts of their religion have. Further, insofar as religious dialogues are concerned with intersecting expertises, lay people uninvolved with these expertises will be left out. But some issues have broader human concern, and so while many people will have no legitimate opinion about the essence of any of these bodies of expert knowledge, they do have some say on how these bodies of knowledge exist. The working-class person's opinion of what is true in physics is irrelevant, but her opinion of how physics impacts her own life (perhaps in being replaced by a machine at work?) is part of the larger discussion. So too does the person sitting in the pews (or standing, or sitting on the floor, or kneeling in prayer) have some aspect in which her religion is affecting her, as will even the ardently non-religious.

Expert Knowledge - Part 3 of 4

In my last post, I argued that it does make sense to include certain people within the category of expert knowers and others outside as non-knowers. However, this raises the specter of unequitable power relations, with which I hope to deal in this post.

Someone may criticize this view as being elitist, and the concern seems to come up often enough that it should be dealt with. Is the attribution merely descriptive, or pejorative? If descriptive, then it probably fits; so what? If pejorative, then what exactly is wrong?

It is the denial of elitism that is problematic. On the one hand, it is harmful to deny one's own superiority in a given area if one clearly knows more. I rely on my doctor having more medical knowledge than myself; if she were to play humble and average Jane on me, claiming that she really doesn't know any more than I do, or any more than I could figure out on my own relatively efficiently, then she would have trouble curing me.

It also seems that a frank admission of elitism, that some people really do know more than others, that some people really are experts and this is something that it takes years of effort to achieve (and so is not open to the general public for scrutiny), is the ground on which we can even talk of oppression. If people are oppressed, they are actually oppressed. They are actually deprived of some good. To act as though we are all equal when we are not in actuality is to say that those deprived of an education have not actually missed out on anything; that is, they have not been oppressed, and we can all breathe more easily.

In addition, to deny elitism in this sense is to place either an undue burden on the individual, who must now shoulder all responsibility herself for everything she needs, or we must cheapen knowledge acquisition, as if understanding the world and the Other were a simple business. We live and learn communally, which entails our dependence on others who know better than us, even if dependence can be painful.

With that said, the problem with expert knowledge is deciding who the experts are. When we fill the concept of "rationality" and "expert" with content determined by the experience of white males, for example, then this perpetuates a cycle. Men do math, because men are good at math; they are the ones rational enough to do math. Which means that in the next generation, mostly men will be drawn to do math, which means that the stereotype sticks. Maybe a couple women are "unfeminine" enough to be mathematicians, but most women (and all the "real" women) stay out. And of course, examples could be adduced; it was the experience of privileged, rational, land-owning Whites who gave content to the Enlightenment notion of a person, for instance, such that it was a simply matter to consider black slaves as non-persons.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that we multiply the final causes (that is, the goals, that which unifies) of a discipline. We implicitly (since we dare not explicitly) hold both that medicine must work empirically, and that the doctors conform to our image of what a doctor should be. But what is it within each disciple that justifies it? We have our expert community pursuing a discipline; what justifies that community?

It seems important here that we can pick out some immanent criterion, something tangible and readily within experience. If we say that the certainty of math is what legitimates it, then the current experts are the ones who tell us what certainty is, and who can have it. This seems to me to be a way in which those experts in power continue their dominance against minority voices, perhaps illegitimately. But this problem is lessened if we look for a clear mark. What has distinguished the mathematical community of experts? Their unanimity. If a sizable body of people claiming to do math, and who have put in the requisite time for study, come to different conclusions, they could not simply be written off. This is because writing them off would both assume unanimity (which is why they must be wrong) and deny it (since not everyone has agreed). Therefore, this community must be admitted and their claims critically analyzed from within the community, perhaps leading to a redefinition of mathematics.

This can come about because communities are not static. Every expert community can have its common goals for the time being which unify that community. These may need to change; there is no reason to assume eternal essences to disciplines. After all, mathematics today is not the same discipline as of a couple centuries ago. Leibniz saw no need to have a mathematical basis for continuity, because everything in nature is continuous. Modern math doesn't care about the natural world, although it can be applied to it, and no principle can be left undefined. But the changes in math came about due to internal specifications of its goals, and internal processes changing those goals. When the goals split in different directions, we got two different bodies of experts: the mathematicians (favoring logical rigor) and the physicists (favoring description of the natural world). But both of these communities naturally grew out of earlier mathematics.

How does this relate to power relations? The goals of a community are what define the community; these in themselves do not seem to set up unjust power relations. If you don't want to empirically test medical techniques, you're simply not doing what the typical modern medical community is doing. Other aspects (to be covered below) may create injustice, but for the present we are simply defining the communities. Therefore, what creates the power imbalance is the community ignores its unifying principle, its form of life, for tangential concerns. If medicine is defined by being empirical, but we don't even bother to look at the empirical investigations of other sources of medicine or of medicine done by certain minority groups, then we have transgressed the inner life of the medical community itself. But racism within medicine is not to claim that medicine is set up such that minorities are bad doctors; it is to claim that the minorities would be good doctors but are prevented from being such by extrinsic concerns (if minorities would truly be bad doctors, they shouldn't be doctors, since they wouldn't be able to cure people well; I simply don't admit the starting hypothesis). Racism and sexism are problems precisely because they are at odds with the internal goals of the community.

So now the question might be: what keeps there from being a community which defines itself in terms of being white and male, and dedicated to preserved the white male culture? Nothing, really, and I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this. Kant and Plato said some good things, after all, and it would be a shame to lose them. But there should also be room for a community dedicated to preserving, say, black culture. There would be two reasons why our white male community could be problematic. First, it could dictate the concerns of other communities, preventing the black cultural community from existing, or at least flourishing. Second, and perhaps simply a variant of the first, such a community could create exocentric values; that is, values for those outside of itself (and poisoning individuals within, for that matter), which state that not only does the community have its own goals and processes and standards, but that these should be normative for others: people in general ought to study white male culture, since it is superior to other cultures.

Both of these points, though, seem to be illegitimate uses of expert knowledge. The specialist in white male philosophy is only an expert in that area, and so unless she is an expert in, say, black culture as well (and all expertise must be ratified by the community itself), she must defer to the experts in that field when making claims about it. Similarly, the mathematical community can say what it wants to about math, but mathematicians cannot in themselves set the value of math for everyone else (although they can extol the praises of why they themselves love math). There is a plurality of expertises, and experts in one field do not thereby have any claims in other fields until they have proven themselves again.

In summary, then, it would seem that a strategy for reducing unjust power relations in expert communities would be for such communities to a) pay attention to their own internal workings and to hold themselves to such internal standards, and b) respect other communities as being other with their own separate expertise.

Of course, this leaves other problematic issues. Do we say that Nazi Germany was free to abide by the inner life of its own community? It seems to me that political entities have their own problems, not least because the criterion of expertise is missing (there seems to be relatively little knowledge required for political behavior, other than how to gain power for oneself). At any rate, I do not claim to be solving all problems of injustice in this essay; I merely want to lay out some ways in which expert communities can keep their claims to expertise and their stratifications of knowledge-bearers, without thereby necessarily introducing concerns about race, gender, etc.

Now that I have something of a working theory, I would like to turn it to the problem of knowledge within religious communities as given through testimony.

Expert Knowledge - Part 2 of 4

In the last post, I argued that even deductive systems of knowledge such as math are based on socialized systems of expert knowledge. Now, I will analyze ways in which we separate knowers from non-knowers.

If I am a math teacher, and some arrogant high school student claims to know more about math than I do, I am justified in dismissing their claims. It could always be the case that I have a Carl Friedrich Gauss in my classroom, and I am truly in the wrong. Or there are cases when I may be wrong in a given problem on the board and the student correctly points out my mistake, which was a temporary blip on my part and not a product of habitual ignorance. When it comes to substantial mathematical claims, though, assuming typical (and even precocious) students, I don't have any reason to listen to their concerns insofar as I am a mathematician. Insofar as I am a teacher, I should respond to their concerns, but even here, I am the knower communicating to the non-knowers.

So people may agree to this example; no one really likes math, so no one cares if they don't really know math. But what about medicine? People care about their health, and will follow any crazy diet or alternative source of medicine they can find to support themselves. The trained doctor, though, seems to have real knowledge on this score. If the patient disagrees with the doctor, the doctor, again, doesn't have to pay attention to any epistemological concerns that may arise; the doctor only has to pay attention insofar as it means that she has a stubborn patient that needs extra persuasion. This case is more difficult, since there is greater disagreement within the medical profession than within the mathematical. In addition, it is not as though traditional medicines of other cultures have been entirely non-empirical, and they could potentially bring something to the table that modern scientific medicine has ignored. But in most cases, the medical advice offered by average people who have not done the research is bogus. It doesn't matter that it impacts their lives more than math.

This is leading up to the touchy subject: ethics and religion. So it seems justified to have expert communities of knowledge; mathematicians really know math better (as demonstrated by near-unanimous agreement) and doctors really know medicine better (as demonstrated by empirical efficacy). And as seen with medicine, the fact that people care about the subject does not make them knowers. So why should the principles concerning how we live our lives be any different? The person who spends time familiarizing herself with long hours of study concerning how to live well, and who engages in constant dialogue with others doing the same, all the while paying attention to how the great experts in thinking and living in the past have done the same thing, therefore knows better how to live than the person on the street. The person investigating religious truths in whatever manner is appropriate to them, who spends long hours studying the appropriate material and engaging in dialogue, etc., knows the religious life better in a way that entails that the average person does not know the religious life as well.

I want to return to the latter point in discussing some points in the nature of religious faith and testimony. But a problem arises here: while it seems right to say that in some cases, we have the right to ignore opinions of those who do not know, this same attitude has in the past also been used to silence minority voices in order to preserve positions of privilege. So next, I will discuss how relations of power should also introduce a skeptical element into expert communities.

Expert Knowledge - Part 1 of 4

When one gets right down to it, it seems that, at least from our standpoint, all knowledge comes down to expert knowledge. Practice within a field and a developed intimacy with the object of knowledge precedes any statements about logical certainty and deductive reasoning.

Let's take math, for example. Math is the most straightforwardly deductive and certain of all of our bodies of knowledge, and so if I can show that math is based on expert knowledge, then it would seem that all knowledge would be. As a math student, I had to be taught how to reason mathematically. I had to be inducted into the community of mathematicians and taught their methods of argument. When I started learning, the experienced certainty which I had of some wrong arguments was no different from the experienced certainty of many right arguments. My experience of certainty, then, was not on its own a sign of mathematical truth. I had to practice the field and learn how the mathematical community goes about doing things. Therefore, I had become an expert from the experts; it was not a bunch of reasoning which I could just show to any supposedly rational human being and have them come to the same conclusion.

Does this mean that that knowledge was just a human construction, or that there is nothing more than the agreement? Not at all! In math, the experts almost unanimously agree on the main part of the subject. In other fields, by contrast, there is a greater degree of disagreement, and so therefore the agreement does not appear to be the socialization in itself, since the practice of socialization is shared across the disciplines. It would seem that the greater the agreement is in the community of individuals looking at the object, the better our knowledge of that object is. If a bunch of people look at a visible object and agree in their description of it, it is likely that the object is what they see (more or less, subject to metaphysical and epistemological qualifications). If the people disagree, then they may not be looking at the same object, or they may not be equipped to see the object properly (perhaps it is dark). But their report of the object becomes suspect without agreement.

But if we don't have certain deductive knowledge to fall back on, since that arises out of expert knowledge and not vice versa, then the problem of competing viewpoints becomes difficult. And we cannot fall back onto deductive knowledge itself, until someone can provide a way in which I can have certainty which does not come through my own (fallible and socialized) feeling of certainty; even if they could offer anything other than a purely dogmatic assertion to the point, how would this non-perceived certainty be the certainty of my knowledge? But if we start from any system of knowledge which relies on consensus within the community, then Any time people disagree on a topic, we would seem to have reason to believe that they are not really apprehending the object of knowledge. But expert knowledge relies on stratified communities; that is, some people are included as knowers, others as non-knowers, with a range in between. It is this to which I will turn in my next post.

Negative Platonism

How is it that we know that something is bad, or imperfect? What makes a bad argument such, or a bad society? It would seem that there can only be a bad if there is a good, and there can only be an imperfect if there is a perfect. But we do not seem to have any real examples of perfection. For something to be more or less beautiful, there must be some formal constitution of Beauty itself as Plato argues. But it does not appear that we need to know these Forms through their presence, as a legitimization of our own self-satisfied certainty. Rather, perhaps we know the Forms through their absence. This could be how they gain their existence from the supreme Form of the Good which is beyond being: the Forms are not present, and so "are" not, but they are what we strive after while making what is to be good. We are Eros, born of Poverty and Craft, pursuing Aphrodite whom we have not yet grasped. We notice that a law is bad through the absence, disorder, and impropriety which is the absence of a good law, and so, without knowing exactly what a good law on the topic is or having an existing good law, we press forward anyhow.

Religious Dialogue and Dissertation Topics

I've been thinking over a couple of dissertation topics which my advisor has been throwing my way. The first one would give me a solid grounding in history of philosophy and experience in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. If you don't want the details, skip down to the next paragraph. It would be a study of secondary causation of God's knowledge through Proclus (5th century Neoplatonist, held that the One emanates out the world in a dizzying array of steps to account for multiplicity) and Dionysius (likely 5th-6th century Syrian monk heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; made God the direct cause of all the things Proclus split up), al-Kindi (9th century Arabian philosopher, instrumental in having works translated from Greek and Syriac, including a paraphrase of Plotinus which became known as "The Theology of Aristotle", and who held that God is the only literal agent), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (10th-11th century Persian philosopher, held that God only knows universals and that the world emanates from God in a set of stages), Ibn Rushd/Averroes (12th century Andalusian philosopher, held that God knows things as their cause), and finally the 13th century Christian philosopher and theologian Aquinas, who held that God knows everything directly as their act of being, and who seems to develop this view while working through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. A possible conclusion would go on through to the 14th century with Scotus and Ockham, and where this focus on the individual might end up.

But I'm not sure that I'm going in that direction; it'll be a good stuff for papers, but the second idea grabbed my interest more: the epistemology of religious dialogue. It exciting me to think that I might be able to go back to doing some contemporary stuff. I can do the historical stuff well, and I always want to keep one foot in it since I still think that that is where some of the best philosophy has been done, but I want to create, to be active, to do more than sitting over texts. I don't have the attention span to be a full-time scholar, if nothing else.

So, what would be the basic problematic? On the one extreme, we have groups who engage in some sort of dialogue, but who refuse to budge. The lines have been drawn, the communities have been fixed, and now the task is to refine their own views and to figure out how to live with the either group in the political arena. For this reason, I consider this to be merely political dialogue; the religious issues would only be brought up insofar as they are relevant to how we live together without changing too much. There is a place for this too, but I do not think that it is genuine religious dialogue. I think that Plantinga' basic belief arguments would end up here, if there were to work at all.

The other extreme is pluralism. Religious pluralism might try to circumvent the issue, by saying (to put it simplistically) that we're already agreeing on the important aspects. But this is one view among others, not one view encapsulating others, and so must join the dialogue as an alternative religious vision. Pluralism still would make sense: it would still be a rejection of any overly particular claims to special revelation while an acknowledgment of a spiritual reality which has bee explored by thinkers across traditions. But that doesn't solve the problem of dialogue.

So, where does that leave us? Religious dialogue, it seems to me, must leave one open to the dialogue partner. One must be able to come to the partner expecting to hear something one does not yet understand. And this seems to me to mean that, in any genuine religious dialogue, the possibility for self-conversion must be present. This is not the necessity of conversion, or even the probability, but I must always leave it the possibility open that I may hear something new which could convince me. Otherwise, to have closed the possibility, is to have predetermined what I can hear from the partner.

But now we get to what is really tricky. Religious beliefs depend a great deal upon testimony, whether from divine revelations, the primordial sounds of the universe, or from enlightened humans who realized something we are not likely to catch on our own. If any of these form of revelation are true, it is likely that there are true things about the world for which I must really upon testimony. And so, in religious dialogue, there will be a tension: one the one hand, I must leave myself open to the possibility of self-conversion, or else it is not dialogue; one the other hand, both of us hold to a possible truth that transcends us and our ways of knowing, and for which we rely on the testimony and experience of others, which we do not give up simply because we here one thing that contradicts it. Given this tension, how does the epistemology of religious dialogue work?

If I were to go this route, I would like to spend most of my time in concrete studies. One direction I could take it would be an analysis of historical Muslim inter-religious contexts, in line with my interest in Arabic thought. There's Andalusia, with its mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; there's the Mughal empire in India and the different ways in which Muslims and Hindus interacted; then there's Muslim appropriations of Confucianism over in China. It's just a thought, right now, but it would be nice to get back into my interest in world religions through my graduate studies.

Sin vs. Imperfection

I must confess that I just can't make any sense of the notion of (Christian) sin as a general concept applied to humanity any more. I would thus like to lay out in a dialectical format just what the problem is.

I imagine that there is already a chorus of voices saying, "Just look at the world! Look at the wars, at the poverty, at the injustice. How can you not believe in sin?" And if that were all that sin was, then sure; I can accept that. Sin is really messing things up. But then, it is hardly obvious that everyone is sinful. Some people, presumably unregenerate non-Christians in the eyes of some of my readers, seem to live perfectly upright, just, noble, loving lives. How are they sinful, if we pick out sin primarily by looking at the horrible events of the world?

"But even they aren't perfect. I bet they've told lies and cheated people at some point in their lives." But here is where I fundamentally disagree with the standpoint of sin. Sin assumes that people should start off perfect, and then they are penalized for not being such. It is not merely a comment on how people go wrong, but an expectation that it is perfectly reasonable that they should never have gone wrong in the first place. Rubbish. People start off with nothing and have to work their way up. When you learn math, you don't start by knowing math. Errors are a necessary part of the learning process; I bet that Jesus didn't start off by making perfect masterpiece cabinets. So why is it that suddenly in matters of character and social living, in the excruciatingly difficult process of bringing our desires into harmony with the world around us, errors are suddenly unforgivable, when they are taken for granted in calculus? People are imperfect; that is, incomplete, finite, continuing to grow, and given desires (perfectly natural ones) that conflict with the world around them; and this is often (if not always) all that is needed for explanation.

"Some people do what is right, even when it is difficult; therefore, we are all expected to do the same, even if it is hard." But how are we comparing people? If person A was given a good upbringing with a solid foundation of virtues and guidance, and person B had to make do in a horrible family environment where she had to put forward inhuman effort to not become total scum, then they are not comparable. You cannot, say, place both in the same temptation of cheating on their spouses, and then hold up A as a model for what B should have done. The present objection assumes an awful lot about what the power of human free will, which is not empirically borne out (and requires a ton of metaphysical work even for the dissidents). We are tremendously influenced (maybe even constituted) by our circumstances and even by pure moral luck, whether or not we are perfectly determined. It may be that no two cases of action are actually comparable, and so moral role models are merely models and not standards of judgment.

"But we still blame people for doing wrong, and this applies to everybody. That's what systems of justice are all about; everyone agrees that this is what justice is." That is what systems of law do, and how law may need to operate to practically govern society. Why should God be driven by the practical concerns of the polis? As for the assertion that "this is what everyone considers to be justice," I really have nothing to say other than this: get educated.

"But there is still some metaphysical principle of goodness in the world; those who follow it are rewarded, and those who don't are damned, regardless of anything else you want to consider." What is this metaphysical principle? Why is this the way things necessarily are, rather than some just-so story? Why can't God continue working on "sinful" souls until they do pursue the good? Why can't God annihilate those who are incorrigible?

"How about the Holocaust? Is that merely an 'imperfection'? How can you explain that?" At least as well as any Christian who takes the Old Testament literally. God commanded genocide, therefore genocide in itself is not evil. Hitler simply lacked the divine command, but there was nothing intrinsically evil about his actions. And whether or not one interprets the OT literally, God still knew that the Holocaust would happen and let it happen. Even that, then, cannot be an absolute evil (assuming such would make sense), but merely a relative evil for us petty human beings who can't realize our greater place in the universe. As a relative evil, it is an imperfection of some human beings, both the perpetrators and the victims. Any account of "sin" would be secondary to this and subject to the points above.

On Astrology, Ptolemy, and the Four Elements: The Use of Bad Theories

I was finally getting around to reading the last book of the Hitchhiker's Guide pentology, and I find a quote in there on a topic for which I had already written down some notes order to write a blog post:

"I know that astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?" "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations."

So, what is the importance of theory, especially in philosophy?

It seems that I can look at theories that seem to be flawed, and still learn from them. I can read the Renaissance Platonist Ficino on astrology, and still make sense of what he is doing. His division of the world into spheres controlled by the different planets, each under the aspect of a god, a muse, and an aspect of Bacchus, can be insightful even when his reasons for the division have been thoroughly discredited. Similarly, personality theories can be helpful for understanding oneself. Myers-Briggs may lack rigorous scientific evidence, especially insofar as it posits specific explanations of how and why people act, and I may never fit completely into the INTP mold, but I still think that it is more useful for my own self-understanding than the scientifically developed Big Five test, which can group personality characteristics accurately but does not give anything underlying explanations.

Similarly, I can look at scientific achievements in the past which were grounded in bad theories. Astronomy was developed by and large within the Ptolemaic framework. And don't think that this was simply because everyone started with the theory: the data was explained rather well at first by the theory (we experience things rotating around the Earth, and most of the stars seem to stay in their places without big changes). People could continue to revise the theory to deal with the data, and even after people like Copernicus and Galileo, it took Newton and Kepler to establish why the Heliocentric model actually did explain the data better. A lot of astronomical data was accumulated in those Ptolemaic times. Would we have been able to understand as much as we did about the sky, without a wrong theory to organize our data and make it manageable?

Also, take medicine. Western medicine was by and large built on a four-element view of the world: things can be hot or cold, and they can be wet and dry, and different pairings give you the different elements. Makes sense, for a rough-and-ready view of the world. And you can read Galen or Avicenna or Maimonides using this theory in understanding medicine. They may not have been completely right, but they weren't completely wrong either; good doctors in any time or place generally leave their patients in better condition for the visit, or they get labeled as quacks. People notice if Doctor A's patients all die. So the empirical observations of these doctors were still a progress in knowledge, even though their theory was wrong: the four elements were not constituents of the world as building blocks for material mixtures. But this theory also let them be able to process complicated accounts of the human body; could there have been medicine without it?

One issue that has been coming up is that we seem able to advance in empirical knowledge in spite of, and even because of, wrong theories. But what about philosophical understanding? I hear it often said that, due to our increased knowledge of neurological processes, there is no place for dualism anymore. Hogwash. People have always known that if you get hit upside the head, your cognitive faculties will be impaired. We just know a bunch more ways to impair them, now. Avicenna had a rather dualistic account of the person, but again, he was a doctor. He knew about material interactions which interrelated with thought, and they were extensive. In general, medieval cognitional theory is pretty sophisticated and saves any sort of non-bodily cognition only for the highest and hardest cases involving pure intelligibles, which even then often still require some sort of material correlate. I fail to see how modern neuroscience changes the basic framework here, even if it can inspire utmost awe at the marvelous workings of our brains. It fills out the description, but leaves the general categories untouched.

So even within wrong theories, good philosophical categories may persist. And in addition, returning the the original quote, self- and humanistic-knowledge seems to arise clearly in some ways independently of theory. Is this part of the reason for Plato's fondness of myths?

Standards of Evidence in Religion

Sorry to bog down the blog with another anti-apologetic posting. But I have been thinking about an issue which I think is serious, and I would like to hear some critical thought on the matter. Let's put down issues of the extent to which someone should doubt or be critical of what has been given them on any absolute scale. Let's have a relative standard of evidence: the evidence we ask from history should be comparable to the evidence we ask from our daily lives.

Ask yourself this: what would it take to convince you that someone was genuinely God incarnate, here and now? What would make you leave your religion, as people left their families and ways of life, and eventually Judaism or paganism to follow Jesus? Take this standard of evidence, and apply it to the historical record. If you had four texts claiming to be eyewitness accounts, and reports about people having seen someone rising from the dead, would you go and follow that person? If not, why do you accept the Biblical account?

Note that you cannot simply imagine yourself as someone who was an eyewitness, or receiving secondhand reports. This is not the relation we have to the historical data. It has been mediated to us; at very best, we may have some books of the NT written by eyewitnesses to a significant portion of Jesus' life, and that even is not indisputable. You can't go ask eyewitnesses yourself, because you cannot go ask ask the eyewitnesses whom Paul references. You would have the same distance from the evidence for the person here and now, as you currently have from the life of Jesus. Would you then believe the claims of the next religious leader?

Also, you must compare like cases with like. You can't say, "Well, the evidence claims that Jesus rose from the dead, but this other person only did significant miracles/got reincarnated/etc.", unless you can give a very strong reason why being resurrected is categorically different from the others. I'm not sure that it's even the oddest miracle out there; being both God and man seems to be infinitely greater, if it even makes sense, and I'm not sure what counts as good evidence for that in any time period. At any rate, miracles need to be judged insofar as they are miracles, religious claims need to be judged insofar as they are religious, and so on. If you can't accept some miracle-worker who claims to be a Boddhisattva, then would you really accept claims that some guy got resurrected, showed up to a few people, and alone was identical with the single, categorically-different-from-creation God? The former would seem to require much less evidence, even though its truth would at least be a significant problem for Christianity.

At this point some people may say, "But Scripture tells us to watch out for miracle workers and such," or "Scripture tells us that Christ was it. There is no new revelation." Or related things; fill them in as you like. But, you can't assume what you want to prove. We are weighing the evidence for Christianity here, and so we cannot assume that the Christian story/Scripture/our pastors are correct before looking at the evidence.

Finally, I have heard one concern a few times (worded almost eerily the same; maybe it's coming from some common source?), and it absolutely puzzles me. It goes along of the lines of this: "We don't have any more evidence to give, what do you expect? Why should non-Christians have paid attention to what was going on at the time of the Resurrection, in order to provide an alternative perspective?" But I don't see how this is relevant. I'm asking about whether the evidence we have is sufficient to establish truth, and that has nothing to do (or very little) with what evidence I can expect. Let's take the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics. It has not yet been proven. Even if it could not be proven, this does not mean that I then can expect to get anywhere by picking the side that seems to have the most evidence. That evidence does not meet the standards for mathematical argument, and becomes completely null and void (unless, perhaps, I am a practiced mathematician with an excellent grasp on related issues, in which case I may have intuitions which would raise my opinion slightly above random guessing). Although history is more complicated and admits of degrees of evidence (as well as corresponding degrees of assent), even if we can't expect more evidence, this doesn't make the evidence we have any more conducive to a decision. Arguing merely from what we can expect, or from what is available, is simply fideism.

So, if you truly and honestly would go and follow some contemporary religious teacher under the same standards of evidence upon which you base your current faith, then I simply ask that you have that integrity. If not, then stop claiming any evidence for your faith: you are a fideist, or a pragmatist, but you do not have the support of rational argument.

Blake on Infinite Desire

William Blake's "There is No Natural Religion (b)":

I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover.
II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
III. [This proposition is missing.]
IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V. If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII. The desire of Man being infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
Conclusion.
If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
Application.
He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

(For context, in (a), Blake argues that if we can only perceive what we have senses for; if you were to have no sight, you would not be able to even think of visual things. See http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/nonatrel.htm.)

So if our desire is to have any chance at being satisfied, there must be a way of encountering the infinite here and now:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

(- "Auguries of Innocence")

Programming Languages and Ontology

A rather whimsical idea struck me: are ontological systems reducible in some way to programming languages? In particular, there are four main types of programming languages: procedural, object-oriented, functional, and declarative. Each takes a different paradigm. And they are all Turing-equivalent.

A procedural language is pretty straightforward: just type in your commands in order. If you've programmed in C or Basic (including on your graphing calculator), you know what a procedural language is. Do x, do y, do z. This is like a narrative mode of accounting for the world, running straight through the information in a linear fashion.

An object-oriented language, like C++ or Java, focuses more on objects. One packages the structures which one is using in a particular way: there is a class with certain functions, and one instantiates objects of this class. This is a substance ontology, of an Aristotelian sort at that.

A functional language, like Lisp (the greatest language ever), by contrast focuses entirely on functions. This is a process ontology. Everything is a function (in good style), and functions simply call functions to get things done.

A declarative language, like Prolog, is relational. It is a logical system, concerning with the interrelations between the terms. It basically just is formal logic as a computer program.

But, in the end, all of these are Turing-equivalent. What does that mean? It means that they all do the same stuff, even though they go about it in different ways.

So what could be an implication of this? If ontologies are computable, if they cut up the world in ways similar to a computer program, then all of the wrestling back and forth over these particular options is over practicality and elegance, not over which one actually describes reality, since if one does then any does. This wouldn't mean that either reality or our minds are in themselves computable, but merely that once we introduce individuation and differentiation into the world, once we have started to cut it up, the world-pieces can be put together as narratival, as substantial, as processual, or as relational equally well.

But isn't starting from world-pieces (or bits of zeros and ones) already an ontology? Perhaps, but one imposed to have anything to say; this is our boot-straps by which we pull ourselves up. Communication requires some digitalization, which we hope approximates analogue reality. The pieces, though, do not come with relations already ingrained. We add those. But the pieces are amenable to the relations; the relations aren't merely imposed, but the pieces are potentially related in the various ways. Practical concerns aren't simply a construction of reality, but a revelation of it.

An Imperfect Elitism

What's wrong with elitism? It seems to me that elitism is simply the statement that some people are better than others. Now, surely we take some people to be better than others on a relative level; person A is stronger than person B, B is more knowledgable with regard to medicine than A, and so on. And some ends we consider to be more important than others: it doesn't matter whether Charles Manson was really a great artist, he is still inferior as a human being to Gandhi. And if I had to choose between these two whose life was more valuable, I would not hesitate in my choice, so it seems odd to me to say that all humans have been created equal in value. For those who may bring God into the picture, saying that God holds everyone equal, I will point to those whom God has completely separated from all means of salvation as well as basic human needs; you may as well convince me of square Euclidean circles than that God loves people equally, perhaps barring some form of universalism. So I do not understand why we reject out of hand the idea that some people are simply better, other than from a misplaced democratic affection which wills that since we want everyone to be equal, they all are already.*

Now, I am not saying that this is the happiest situation, that we should embrace the fact that there is a human elite and rejoice in it. Feel free to wish that all people were equal, and work to make this true. Just do not mistake it for a present reality.

But that brings up a problem. Formerly, we would wish for the elite to have a prodominent voice in society, whether they be philosopher-kings, aristocratic gentlemen, academics, or whatnot. In turn, we have had similar situations in terms of cultures; culture A sees itself as superior to culture B, and proceeds to colonize. That has yet to work out. It seems to me that there are two fundamental problems. First, we don't know exactly who the elite are. In a society run by culture or education, others outside of power structures have been known to poke fun at those in charge, at their emptiness and book-knowledge. And how does one cull the best people for an aristocracy without lapsing into oligarchy? Concerning intercultural relations, we are still trying to get down the basics of understanding each others' cultures; how can we judge between them? What values are truly important, and who instantiates them? How do we avoid simply picking random differences and playing them as trumps, such as skin-color?

Second, even if we were to properly pick out the elite in the given situation, would they be elite enough? We can think of siblings playing, where the older sibling convinces the younger to do something really stupid. The older sibling most likely is truly more experienced, intelligent, etc. than the younger, but just enough so to get them in trouble. So just because one group is better than another, this does not automatically mean that the better group can legitimately lead the worse, let alone force their decisions.

So we appear to be stuck with an imperfect elite. If it were elite enough and recognizable enough, it could run things and this would be best for society. If there were no elite, then everyone could participate in everything equally in a true democracy. As things stand, there are many who really should be silent, but they should not be silenced. Not all voices are equal, but no one is meet to judge among them. To let everyone have a say leads to carnivals on urgent issues like health care, to fully blameworthy behavior on the part of truly ignorant oafs, but is this worse than Mao or Stalin? Is there a solution, other than doing our best to educate people that by default they should shut up on political matters until they have a worthwhile, studied opinion?

What would such a studied opinion be? There is a difference between opining that one is jobless (a claim I'd most likely accept), that one's community is mostly jobless (a claim I'd accept pending a search into how well this one represents her community), and that one knows how to solve the job situation (a claim at which I'd most likely be skeptical for most people having the problem, and at least without some significant insight into general structures of society). Everyone can attain the first, of their own personal experiences. Those of practical wisdom along with community involvement can attain the second. The third is for those with a more theoretical background. Both the second and third need the voices of the first for their data, but that is where the first ends; those who do not learn anything beyond their own situation have no right to politics. The voices of practical and of theoretical reason, in turn, never reduce to each other, since the practical person will does not, as practical, understand the broader relations outside of her context, and the theoretical person, as theoretical, does not know the lived, material conditions.

---

* What if even saying that all people are of equal value is misleading, since there simply is no relation of measurement between people at all? What if people are to be accepted, not compared? I'm thinking mainly along more Daoist or Zen lines here, in particular, that our judgements of good and bad have created the problem. I'll have to think more on this one, but it does at least go against my basic suspicions (which come with no guarantee of truth); if nothing else, politics seems to me about relative problems of managing groups of people, and relative problems create relative standards of judgement applicable within the sphere of the problem.

The Role of Creation in Art

About a week ago or so, I had mentioned that apologetics is more like art than like science: it is about applying one's ideas to a given matter, rather than trying to objectively interpret that matter itself. And as was brought up, this is not quite like how artists look at their work; artists can be just as surprised as anyone else by what they come up with. This seems to me to be a legitimate problem; so what is the difference between the scientist and the artist/apologist?

It seems that we cannot really separate out creation and discovery, subjectivity and objectivity. The pure "artist" would be entirely subjective, purely creating without any worry for the object matter. God is the only one who would fit here, and even then we would have to talk about the relation of essences and nature to God's creation. The pure scientist would be entirely objective, purely discovering what is in the world. It seems that this is a legitimate view of the ideal scientist, while the above is not necessarily the ideal artist; many artists want to explore their art and not purely create, it seems to me. Still, I don't have a better word coming to mind right now, so I will talk about the ideal scientist and the ideal artist.

It does seem that artists still fall closer to this ideal than to that of the scientist. Once one decides on a musical motif, or on a particular image or character for a literary work, the rest of the work may very well already be determined. A well-cohering work demands that things fit together in a certain way, after all; the good artist is feeling out the essential structure of such things (or if you don't like talk of essences, then simply "the way something is and its tendencies" or some such equivalent). But despite this determination of a work once certain elements have been chosen, the elements and a general notion of the work would seem to be necessary in the first place. This is applied to the matter in a work closer to that of creation than of discovery, even if everything after is closer to something discovered.

Of course, someone could point out that artists often just come up with their ideas. Some flash of insight arises, and they go to work, but they didn't plan out their insight. True, and perhaps this is moment of genius is what happens in most truly good art even. I at least know that works for which I had a sudden inspiration tend to work out better than ones which more fully plan out, although that is in part my own lack of skill. But even if this is still outside the control of the artist, it comes about in a different way than the application of the idea to the matter. Both may be more or less determined, but they are determined in different ways, and it is this difference between the more ideal/spiritual/mental/etc. arising of the idea, and the working out of its consequences in the matter, in which I am interested.

So, with that said, the artist (along with the apologist) is not merely creating, just as real scientists aren't merely discovering. But it stills seems that placing them at different points of the continuum is reasonable.

Spiritual Exercises and Historical Analysis

We had a couple of really good talks here at Marquette last weekend. Last Friday, Michael Chase (among other things, translator into English of some works by Pierre Hadot) gave us quite the journey. He started with ancient skepticism, and talked about Hadot's views on how ancient philosophy (by which, I mean ancient Greco-Roman philosophy) was about spiritual exercises as much as anything else; it was about a way of life. Next, he talked about Nassim Taleb's modern-day skepticism, which takes the epistemological pieces but declaims the practices as being too hard for actual people.

The most cogent of Taleb's criticisms was that we are hardwired to make certain judgments about the world, and so the skeptic ideal of suspending judgment is illusory. Chase brought in modern accounts of brain plasticity and studies on how mindfulness meditation seems to make certain sections of the brain larger, which allows for increased ability to sit back and observe a situation without judging. Now, as he mentioned in the question-and-answer session, this can be seen to be simply part of the skeptic practice of arguing both sides of the problem. But it does seem to provide evidence for increased ability to suspend judgment after putting in the hard work, nevertheless. And even if perfect suspension of judgment is only an ideal, progress seems to be possible.

Next, Chase showed that there are some key features of modern mindfulness meditation (which is in turn taken largely from Buddhist sources, and generally without recognition of any Western roots). These same key features show up in ancient skepticism, and in ancient philosophy in general. True, people weren't sitting around counting breaths, but that is only a technique. The goal of apatheia, of objective and detached analysis of the world and of increased insight into one's own inner workings, are there (he went into a bit more detail, showing five core points that have been established in mindfulness meditation and identifying each one with practices in ancient philosophy). So ancient skeptical practices, insofar as they intending to advocate a lifestyle and not merely academic discussions, would seem to have had some effect on actual suspension of judgment.

It was nice to here of philosophy as something beyond academic disputations. But what interested me at least as much was that Dr. Chase had given a talk the day before, looking at a neglected commentary of the Neoplatonist Porphyry and digging up references which clarified Porphyry's views on cognition. The detailed historical analysis wasn't something other than what he was talking about in the more exciting talk; as he told me when I asked him afterward, the work of analysis and translation are also spiritual exercises, making him put away himself with his interests and concerns for the time. Interesting way to think of the work that I am doing.

The Difference Metaphysics Makes

I was reading through the Nicomachean Ethics recently, and something struck me: Aristotle has a lot in common with Buddhism. Or rather, it seems that a couple highly important doctrines of Buddhism can be found in Aristotle. But Aristotle and the Buddha end up in such different positions. While this could be due to any number of reasons and any one of many dissimilarities between them, I would like to advance the metaphysics of the human person as a key issue.

To sum up what I see as the similarities, both have an ethics based on the doctrine of the mean, and both have accounts of a non-permanent human soul. These, further, are at the very heart of Buddhism, second only to the notion that all life is suffering (duhkha). The doctrine of the mean at least is also key to Aristotle's ethics, though we may quibble over how important the supervenient soul is to Aristotle's anthropology (I would say that it is important, insofar as forms need to be enmattered for Aristotle, and matter is necessary for all change, so a permanent soul which may or may not exist in matter would go against the grain of Aristotle's physics). So the similarities are as such non-trivial.

But where Buddhism suggests that we therefore seek a way out of this life, Aristotle recommends that we seek to live this life to the fullest; the Buddha points to the suffering of life, while Aristotle looks at the excellence possible. And one difference which seems to me to push them in opposite directions is the fate of the human person. The Buddha believes in reincarnation; no matter how good this life is, you have to live again. And again, and again. For Aristotle, this life is what there is; your mind, your nous, may be immortal, but that doesn't have anything to do with what you consider to relate to your particular personhood.

So if you have to keep on living multiple lives, then what seemed to be excellence in this life may or may not have benefit in the next; the things considered to be "excellences" may actually harm you ultimately. At any rate, they may make one life more bearable, but leave the underlying problem unchanged. For Aristotle, there is no point in pushing things off to the next life. This is what there is, and wisdom concerns how to live this life well.

This also shows that the account of the human person does not necessarily determine what one should do about life. Granted, there are significant differences between the Buddha and Aristotle over the status of the person, but they both seem to agree that you are inseparable from your constituent material parts, which will come apart, and so to this extent you lack an enduring self. Buddhism likes to point out that recognition of this will lead to more compassionate, selfless behavior; but Aristotle champions aristocratic virtues concerned with building up what there is of the self.

So metaphysical problems concerning the afterlife do have an effect on our actions here and now, perhaps more so than the precise nature of the human being or general ethical theories.

Hölderlin (and Epictetus) Quotes

Just some quotes from recent reading that I found interesting.

The first two quotes are from Höderlin's epistolary novel, Hyperion, in a letter that waxes eloquent about the nature of philosophy and the classical Athenian spirit, as the eponymous writer overlooks the ruins of Athens.

"The man," I resumed, "who has not at least once in his life felt full, pure beauty in himself, when the powers of his being merged like the colors in the rainbow, who has never felt the profound harmony that arises among all things only in hours of exaltation - that man will not even be a philosophical skeptic, his mind is not even capable of tearing down, let alone of building up. For, believe me, the sceptic finds contradiction and imperfection in all that is thought, because he knows the harmony of perfect beauty, which is never thought. The dry bread that human reason well-meaningly offers him, he disdains only because he is secretly feasting at the table of the gods." - Hölderlin, Hyperion

(As a side note, it's probably just because of the odd mix of stuff I've been reading as of late, but I certainly seem to hear similarities between this and Henry of Ghent's view of divine illumination, coming from Augustine. It's all rather Platonic, in any case.)

Reason without beauty of spirit and heart is like an overseer whom the master of the house has set over the servants; he knows as little as they do what will come of all their endless toil, he only shouts: 'Get busy,' and is almost sorry to find the work being accomplished, for in the end he would have nothing more to oversee, and his part would be played. Mere intellect produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the limited perception of what is. Mere reason produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for ever greater progress in the combination and differentiation of some particular material. - Hölderlin, Hyperion

And a pithy quote from Epictetus, on how to study philosophy:

... so never look for your work in one place and your progress in another. - Epictetus, Discourses I.IV.17

Against Logical Consistency

Should I be concerned if someone points out a logical quibble with my statements? Or should I spend inordinate amounts of time establishing the internal coherence of every one of my propositions? It seems to me that if my statements are arising as genuine interpretations of my experience, these issues should not be first and foremost in my mind.

Let's say that I explain to you that I have seen a table which was completely red and completely blue. You, being the logician, simply tell me that I am speaking nonsense and dismiss my claim. Technically, you are correct; but who cares? Assuming that I am not merely making something up, I have expressed reality more meaningfully in my contradictory statement than you in your criticism. Granted, my statement may not be the most felicitous one. I may want to seek a better explanation, both to better understand my own experience (interpretations can always be improved) and to better communicate it to others; perhaps the table is purple, and so a mix of the colors. But it is both a logical contradiction and meaningful.

There may even be instances in which may statement is better than a coherent statement. Perhaps the table is simply covered in so much blue and so much red in such intricate patterns that they seem to completely interpenetrate, though nothing contradictory has happened. My expression that the table is completely blue and completely red better expresses the wonder and amazement at the phenomenon, and better communicates some of its phenomenology, than would the perfectly logical statement which lists the table's attributes.

Mystical experience would seem to be placed in a similar position; if you haven't had the experience, your logical quibbles are almost worthless. Maybe the mystic would be a better communicator bf being more precise and analytical, but she thought that being paradoxical was a perfectly good way of expressing her experience. Start from this point, and try to figure what she is expressing. No one who cares about truth will start from the logical transgression.

It might even be that language has a purely practical function, as a pointer to reality, and that logical consistency is more or less worthless. "But what you are saying is supposed to be true, and so therefore is not false. Otherwise, I couldn't understand what you are saying." What I'm saying isn't meant to be understood; it is meant to be used. Look, and stop analyzing. "But if you contradict the law of non-contradiction, then you affirm it." Only if you have initially presupposed it; I am rising above the dichotomy (which therefore means also using it at times), not taking the other side. I do not agree with the idea that the law must either always hold or never; I must look at the content in any given proclamation, at any given use of a sentence (and not the sentence itself!), and determine what to do from there. Yet again, look at where my words point, and shut up about the words themselves.

Aims and Arguments

Last year, Professor Garber gave a talk at the Aquinas Lecture at Marquette (the lecture has been printed as What Happens After Pascal's Wager?: Living Faith and Rational Belief, and I would recommend it as a relatively short but thought-provoking read). I think I had talked about it then, but it's relevant to some stuff that's been on my mind as of late.

The point of the lecture was this: Pascal asks us to first engage in Christian practice, and then we will come to see the Christian faith is rational. The problem, though, is that there doesn't seem to be any link between the practice and the rational justification, in part evidenced by the fact that other groups claim the exact same thing (to simplify the argument for my present purposes and memory). But the question came up afterward: don't scientists do the same thing, in having their practice which gives them their aims which then they go on to rationally prove? So my concern is, what is the difference between the (ideal) scientist and the (stereotypical) apologist?

We do have to have aims before we go to work on anything, and we do have to be embedded in a practical context. We're finite creatures; we can't seek everything at once or start from a positionless point, and so we have to start from somewhere going in some direction. This is the condition for all inquiry. So, we criticize the apologist for having her goals already set before she starts seeking the truth. She has already decided where she will end up. But, as someone brought up after the lecture, the scientist already wants some result from an experiment. What is the difference?

The difference (in two abstract cases away from the complexities of actual human behavior) seems to be to be this: the apologist seeks the goal while using the means, and the scientist seeks the means while using the goal. The apologist must reach her goal, and arguments must be shaped accordingly, despite how they appear at first glance. The scientist needs to orient herself, and uses aims and desires to do so, but once oriented, she looks at the evidence (again, ideally). She displays detachment to the goal, while the apologist is very strongly attached.

Of course, science doesn't actually proceed in this way. One piece of evidence can always be reinterpreted, and it takes a lot of difficulties in interpretation before one gives up a scientific cause. So the scientist has her research program, with some pieces that can be changed without throwing away the program as a whole. Doesn't the apologist do the same? Perhaps, but there seems to be much more reticence to give up the program in apologetics. Scientists take a couple generations to give up a deficient program; apologists perhaps several centuries, if at all. The idea of giving up the program is valid in science, even if costly; it is invalid in apologetics, causing a rift between the former apologist and colleagues.

Apologists do not seem to be doing the same thing as scientists, then. But they do seem to be similar to artists: they see their idea, and they plan out how to enfold it in some sort of matter (that of logical arguments, in this case). The apologist is therefore creative (or should be), and this is a good thing for communities. Science tells minimalistic and unstable stories, after all, and fuller, more constant (though flexible) stories need to be written for a community's narratival life. The only problem is when the apologist attempts to claim that such creativity also bears the marks of objective science. One can only claim such if one is willing to completely subject one's aims to the evidence, to argue as if one's position can actually change as a result of research.

Mysticism and Physical Mediation

It is my understanding that mystical experiences, experiences of oneness with the universe and stuff like that, can be brought on by severe injury, fasting, sensory deprivation, etc. I, admittedly, have not read the articles saying how this comes about; I really should fix that at some point. However, I have been thinking about how this should affect whether one can take mystical experiences seriously, and whether these indicate some evidence that our mental states supervene on the physical.

The first reaction is to say that mystical experiences are simply caused by trauma and such, and are not valid. They are simply the result of neurons firing, so how could they signify anything else? But this is too simple. One standard argument in response seems to be that everything which you sense is mediated by neurons firing as well, with all of that physical stuff thrown in. But we think that our senses tell us something about reality, whatever that may be. So the fact that mystical experiences are mediated by brain activity is not in itself a mark against them.

But that doesn't seem to be a complete answer either. There appears to be something ad hoc about these experiences, unlike sensory experience. Holding an object in front of my eyes should correlate to me seeing it; that's what seeing is. Suffering trauma does not seem to be connected to mystical experience in the same way. The mystical experience appears to be some accidental byproduct from chemical stimulation.

But then I turn around again. Why do I take sensory experience to be valid? Because (1) I have plenty of opportunities to test it, (2) different senses correlate with each other (it's much less likely that all are ad hoc in tightly corresponding ways), and (3) there are general features which the senses pick out that relate to what they sense (sight has light, hearing sound, etc.); ad hoc-ness comes from specific instances matching up without any underlying general principles.

But mystical experiences don't seem to happen regularly enough to test them. Even mystics do not appear to have them all of the time; I think Plotinus for example only ascended to the One four times in his life. And the fact that there is no other type of mystical sense by which to test mystical experiences is no mark against them. And finally, there may be a general principle which causes these experiences: these causes are all activities which push away the material world, which would explain fasting, sensory deprivation, and severe trauma, while cohering with the nature of the world given in mystic's accounts.

But back again: there also seems to be a commensurability between sensing and the physical processes involved. What is sensed is finite and differentiated, and causing similarly finite and differentiated brain signals. There is room for some sort of mathematical isomorphism between the two, copying the information in one process to the other. But a mystical experience suddenly realizes the entire oneness of everything in the universe; how does any single object of "sense" yield this?

And again back: mystics themselves have realized the opinion that their experiences could all be hallucinations. Either Al-Ghazali or Suhrawardi (I can't remember which) brings this up, and notes that anyone who has had these experiences would clearly know that they are not hallucinatory. It's not like it took modern science to figure out that mystical experiences could be misguided. Even though aware of the possibility, mystics have denied it. Without having such experiences myself, what could I say against them? Or for them, for that matter.

So that is my line of thinking, most of which I am working on clarifying. It seems that there are broadly three options (perhaps not mutually exclusive) which one could take. First, the material world in its diversity is primary, and mystical experience are simply the odd result of certain neurons firing. Second, the mystical/mental/ideal/spiritual/psychic/etc. world is primary; either the mystical experience is the result of leaving behind the physical, or there is some deeper structure involved in which the physical event triggering the experience is itself an effect/emanation/manifestation/etc. of some previous mental/etc. cause/etc. which is directly connected to the mystical experience in the mental/etc. plane (ao, physical event A seems to cause mental event B, but mental event C caused physical event A and mental event C; the physical supervenes on the mental). Third, we're simply looking at two different levels of explanation. Mystical experiences may not give us any scientific knowledge of the world, but are real enough and legitimately understood on their own terms regardless of what neuroscience teaches.

The Lives of Flies

Two flies were sitting on a wall. One said,
"It won't be that much more until we're dead."
The other stared at him a thousandfold,
Responding idly that three days is gold.
"What would any insect do with more?
Four days even would become a bore.
We only sit on walls and land on food,
Which then we take back to our home and brood.
Now shush, the game is on again." With that,
He buzzed on down to where the snacks were at.
The first fly tried to stoically embrace,
Indifferent or resigned, his lowly place.
No matter what, though, still his spirit filled
A larger field than what his lifespan tilled.
Some desperate escape he tried to find,
Such musings filled up all his lack of time.
He brought out his alembic and his athanor;
He didn't know his friend was soon no more.
He meditated in a mass of poses;
Twelve generations looked upon their Moses.
He sank down into knowledge of the ages,
Passing lives as if they were mere pages.
The world outside he scarcely even saw,
Engrossed upon his labors still to draw
Another mark into his line of life.
Uncounted flies went by in love and strife.
It might have been a day for all he knew,
So bothered by how little he could do.
And times again it was within his grasp,
But long life seemed so awfully hard to clasp.
At length he found his secret, and that was that.
But then a truck came by, and with it splat.

By Faith Alone

A couple musings on faith which I've been pondering as of late; both a criticism and an affirmation. First, I criticize most religious understandings of faith that I've seen which put it contrary to reason and experience. Second, I affirm a more mythological faith.

When I talk about faith normally, I don't oppose to it reason and personal experience. Quite the contrary; faith is built on these. Faith is the willing to trust someone, but it is only virtuous if I know the person, her character, and her abilities; preferably both on a propositional level (certifications and her own past experience in the relevant area as documented facts) and on a level of personal knowledge (track record with me at doing what I trust her to do, and perhaps more indefinable characteristics).

Now, the level of reason I must have before I trust someone will change depending on what I want to trust her for. I don't need much reason before I lend five bucks. Lending my car is a bit more iffy, and letting someone watch my kids (were I to have any) would require significantly more reason. Further, were I not to have such reason before entrusting my kids to a stranger for an extended period of time, this would not be commendable, or better faith; it would be irresponsible.

When would I trust a relative stranger with a matter of extreme, perhaps absolute importance? I can think of only two cases. In the first, I would be in extreme, immediate danger and there is no other choice. Faith in such a circumstance is simply a necessity; this is not virtuous, but would be merely a difficult fact in less than ideal circumstances. In the second, it would be because I am an idiot, and perhaps a vicious one at that. Religions of faith may be able to play the first card, though it would seem that I would have plenty of time in my life for God/a Boddhisattva/whatever to give me the amount of reason appropriate for what I am being asked to trust them for.

In general, then, the concept of a "leap of faith" seems to me to be disgusting, unless I'm in imminent peril. There should be no leap, except into action, and an omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent God (or Dhyani Buddha) would be able to help each of us reach that point in full view of the necessary step to take.

Now, I have also heard some people talk about having faith in faith, and others criticizing the notion; how can one have faith unless in something? By the above, this "something" is often not something worthy of faith, so I don't see how it would play any more of a role than an abstract or mythological faith. But in any case I think that such an argument ignores the fundamentally pragmatic character of religious pluralism and liberalism.

Consider James' thought experiment in The Will to Believe. A rock climber needs to make a jump across a chasm. If the rock climber believes she can make the jump, then her odds of actually doing so dramatically improve; if she does not believe she can, then she will plummet into the pit. What one believes changes what is true; one cannot simply and objectively regard the world because there is always a subjective element.

Now, one wants to believe that one can jump over the pit because of the result: one would rather not fall and die. But in order to believe, it helps to have an explanatory story. Maybe one just pushes everything else aside and wills oneself across; but one could also remind oneself about all of the training one has been doing. Heck, one could convince oneself that one is a reincarnation of the Monkey King Hanuman. As long as one gets across, that's the point.

Similarly with faith. People with faith may benefit, but a good portion of this seems to be from the faith itself and not necessarily the object of faith. Not that the latter is completely irrelevant, but in any case one can attain a certain peace of mind and courage of existence by believing that something is taking care of oneself. And if one walks into a church, it seems to be that people will give the pragmatic reasons for having faith: the peace, the presence and love of Christ, etc., and these are precisely what are comparable between faiths.

So what do we do? We tell ourselves stories. The mountain climber doesn't have to believe that she is Hanuman; she just has to suspend disbelief for the moment and live in the story she is telling. That will be enough. Similarly, the religious pluralist can approach faith with a myth. It offers a mythological faith, the faith of a story; a faith of suspended disbelief instead of belief. But if that does the trick, what's the problem?

Perhaps we could even see how to go from here to beef up the notion of myth. If one pretends to be Hanuman and actually makes the jump, than there was some truth after all in the myth; one did have the power and agility of a monkey for the moment, and suspending disbelief helped cause this to be true. So first, the myth does in a roundabout way suggest something objective: one did make the jump. Second, what the myth represents is not something other than what is causes, and so cannot be treated as a set of propositions. Well-wrought religious stories, philosophies, theologies, etc. would then offer very good and very intricate myths of this sort, with many far-reaching consequences beyond simply accomplishing one action or another.

At this point, some of my more conservative readers may be saying, "Yes, but that doesn't fix the problem of sin. The pluralist is still living in her sin and must be judged unless she has faith in Christ." Well, yes, we could all be wrong. But one must be convinced of the problem before one would have any need of the cure, and I for one would not be convinced of the specific problem of sin as laid out in certain Christian catechisms until convinced first of the Christian story, in which case I could have a legitimate rational faith and not have to worry about all this. Until then, though, I don't have need of heeding every quack diagnosing me with every illness known to man and then some. And again, the actual, observable effect of faith seems to be portable across objects of faith, suggesting that we are looking at psychological facts and not, say, the Holy Spirit.

Logic vs. Math and Newcomb's "Paradox"

I got into a tiff the other day over Newcomb's "Paradox". My position is simple: there is no paradox, only a simple payoff table with a logical constraint and an easy choice. Paradox only comes in when someone decides not to play by the rules of the thought experiment, which defeats the entire purpose of a thought experiment. But more interestingly than that, it seemed that our debate came down to a mathematical argument on my side, and a logical one on the other. So the interesting point to me is: why do I place so much more trust in math than logic, and what is the difference?

Math and Logic both have perfectly precise, rigorous forms. An argument necessarily follows formally if it is admissible as an argument at all. And any element used in both fields strictly according to their formal structure is rigorously defined. Maybe we could go so far as to say that the form of mathematics is logic; that is, every single argument structure and basic element general to the field as a whole is taken from logic. But that point need not be made now.

The significant difference is the content. Mathematical content is also rigorous and well-defined. A line is defined by its relations and functions; anything at all which satisfies those relations is a line, and anything which fails them on the minutest point is not. A number 3 is a number 3; not 2, not 4, and 5 is right out. It's not even 3.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. So, the form of a mathematical argument has this perfect structure on which it is arguing. If you can count anything in reality, if quantity at all applies, then the math will be perfectly rigorous so long as you don't decide to change what you are counting.

Logic, on the other hand, has a serious flaw at this point: it is only the form of the argument. The argument itself must be populated with outside information, and in the end the argument is only as precise as its content. If I say that my cat is either in the room or not in the room, this would be perfectly fine as far as logical form. But what it neglects is that "cat", "room", and "in" are not well-defined. What if my cat is standing in the threshold? Does "in" cover this? What is the essential part of the cat? How far does the room extend? And so we either introduce limits which are not part of our standard talk about such matters, or we admit that the logic is imprecise and it fails in application. And if we introduce limits, these limits are either arbitrary or well-studied; and too often they seem to be the former.

And this seems to be the case in most situations that we care about: the concepts over which we are arguing are not well-defined. What is a soul, at any rate? A true metaphysics would avoid this problem and resemble mathematics in this respect, but it's debatable about whether such does exist.

So, in Newcomb's problem, my argument was that one should clearly choose box B. Set up your payoff table: you have 4 boxes with their respective values, but 2 boxes are inaccessible by hypothesis. Therefore, one picks both boxes and receives $1,000, or just box B and receives $1,000,000. All other discussion must build off of this basis, or it is no longer talking about the world of the thought experiment (except perhaps to say that a Predictor is incoherent, which is just a debate over the old issues of divine foreknowledge and future contingents).

The rival argument goes as such: when you enter the room, either there is something in box B or not. Either way, you are better off taking both boxes. This argument then tries to introduce issues like backwards causation and the like to discredit the other side. But to force the entire choice into a single dichotomy distorts the problem. True, either there is something in B or not; but in both cases, there are two described payoffs: one for whether the Predictor sees you picking both, and another if the Predictor sees you picking B. A rational decision must always consider the payoffs stipulated; the argument for choosing both boxes implicitly tries to sneak in its own payoff table, which is only disagreeing with the problem as set up.

Claiming that I must be adding in some metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is not a valid response. The situation could be this: assuming determinism, there is a single causal nexus N at time T1 which will express itself in the Predictor making her predictions at T2, filling the boxes at T3, you walking in the room at T4, and you making your choice and receiving your payment at T5. There is no backward causation, because it is the same causal nexus which determines all events; T5 just got expressed later than T4, but both were equally caused and mutually conditioned at T1 along with the prediction itself. Now, this scenario does not seem to me to have any problems relating to backwards causation and the like. But if it works, then we can go back to saying that the Predictor just knows irrespective of the explanation how, and we should have the same solution.