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.