The Meaning of a Poem

I've been musing about the act of writing poetry as of late. I sat down to pen a couple while fidgety at a conference. But what are the meanings of these poems? This got me thinking about the meaning of writing in general. I know many have brought up this topic, and I haven't really read them, but here are some of my own naïve musings on the matter.

The gut instinct for many is to refer to authorial intent. But, I noticed that even when I had penned a poem with a very specific situation in mind, I could also take the poem and look at in in other lights expressing other matters. Are these matters any less "meant" by the poem, even though they were not what I had intended? Perhaps to an extent, but even I, the author, with full knowledge of authorial intent, want to say that there is meaning exceeding what I had thought.

So, is it about the reader's response? But different responses could be better or worse, and so this cannot be constitutive of the meaning. Some responses take into account more of the poem, for example, while others are more persuasive for one reason or another.

I would hold that a better place to locate meaning is in the poem itself. More coherent responses from the reader which take into account more of the poem are better responses because they more accurately represent the object which is the poem. Maybe more powerful and persuasive interpretations are the same. Whatever I had intended as the author is certainly one of these, but there may be other coherent ways of approaching the poem as well which are legitimate. The poem is a concrete object really existing (in a way) in the world and every interpretation of it will give a different perspective of it. A multitude of perspectives, no matter what the source, can coexist, since the poem is an object standing outside of us. Language exceeds both the author and the reader.

Of course, this view has its own problems. What is the poetic object? If I change a word, is it still the same poem? How about when language itself has changed in the next couple hundred years, or in a different community? Is a translation still the same poem? I think that at this point, it is easiest to say that the poem is a pragmatic object; I can consider it as an individual object for practical reasons and really work with reality in this way, but it is not ultimately speaking and apart from certain uses an individual object. This does not mean it is not real; it means that a full description of its reality must include a complex network of interrelations, and the poem itself is an ill-defined and fuzzy (but actual) region of this network.

Another way of thinking about the place of a poem is on the level of mathematical objects (as much as non-mathematicians may balk at the idea). What is the number 2? Is it this quantity of boxes, or that of books? Is it a measurement, capable of being divided as many times as I please, or a count, which only comprises this individual and that? Is it the start of the prime numbers? Is it a symbol with relatively little meaning other than the fact that it does not have a rational root? Even if the number arises in a concrete setting, say, in my count of how many boxes are in front of me, this does not exhaust the meaning of "2". Each of these other meanings are also in a way included implicitly, and new applications and branches of mathematics can expand the meaning of (or at least our awareness of the meaning of) "2". "2" is a mathematical entity which is its own objective reality even while having meaning in various contexts.

The difference is that I have no problem considering "2" as a real object; unlike the poem, "2" and other mathematical entities are very clearly and precisely defined. Something is two, or it is not, and if there happens to be any ambiguity then it resides in the question instead of the entity "2". So, maybe we can metaphorically consider math as the "discrete" version of that which poetry (and perhaps language in general) is a "continuous" version; I can pick out the mathematical objects (even in talking about "continuous" phenomena like the real numbers or functions) one by one, while all attempts to do so with language must flow into "surrounding" objects.

God and Personality

One of the theoretical I've been struggling with in my religious thoughts is whether God could even be a personal being. I've been thinking that the cosmological argument may be sound; but if it is, it may actually work against the typical religious notion of God.

First, what is a person? It seems that to be a person, one must be both finite and infinite. What the heck do I mean by that? I mean that one must be delimited in certain ways: one makes some actions instead of others, is in encounterable in some times and places instead of others, and so forth. Without these delimitations as well as contingency, I really don't know what it is to be personal in any contemporary sense. But at the same time, persons also exceed their given situations. A person is not merely their current circumstances, but can continue past them. A person is open to new thoughts, new experiences, new life, and in this way is not delimited.

So, if this is what it is to be personal, then there are two ways in which something could be impersonal. A rock, for example, is subpersonal. It is finite, but it lacks the openness which constitutes persons. It may not even technically exist at all because of this as an individual rock, but I leave that for another discussion. Alternatively, something could be suprapersonal by lacking finitude.

Now, the cosmological argument basically says that everything we encounter is finite and contingent, and that some infinite, necessary cause grounds the world. But, if this cause is truly freed from all concerns of finitude, then it would for that reason be suprapersonal. How does the infinite and necessary choose to create this world instead of that? How does it answers these specific prayers and not those? How is it encountered in this way and not that? How does it make these decisions and then those? These are all contingent and finite actions. The Necessary Existent, by constrast, must be by its very nature necessary and infinite; these are not simply added accidents, but constitutive of what it is. I'm pretty sure that such an Existent must be simple too, though I realize that this is not popular in much modern thought.

If this is the case, then, then that which grounds all reality, the Ultimate Being, is suprapersonal. It is not the God which many people go out to worship; the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But if the cosmological argument does not work (and I think that the ontological argument would result in the same problem), or if it somehow gave us a being that merely had the status of being a brute, necessary fact about the world (whatever the heck that might mean), then it would be useless for showing that there is any explanation for the world as it is.

Does this mean there is no personal God, then? I'm not sure that it does. It merely shows that such a God cannot be the Ultimate Being. But must God be such a being? Maybe God is merely the highest personal being; that being which, although finite and contingent in many ways, is still more powerful, wise, and worthy of worship than any other personal being, and enough so to run the world of other contingent and finite beings. Such a God would not have created the world ex nihilo perhaps, but maybe that is not required either (Genesis doesn't require it, for example); God would then be a demiurge instead, like in the Timaeus or in some Hindu thought. And maybe worship can only properly be given to another person, so the fact that God is still below the Ultimate Being (or being itself, or the ground of being) isn't the worst thing in the world. Although it would still seem to make God a relative end, rather than an absolute final cause of the world and our affections, but that is another issue.

Musings on the Intellectual Life

I have a few ideas which I've been tossing around to post here, including a discussion of whether math is created or discovered with reference to Schelling's aesthetics (in short, it's both), as well as working on some arguments from Plotinus to the effect that there must be more than the material world to explain the beauty of this world. And I just finished Crime and Punishment; perhaps I'll jot down some thoughts on that. Maybe I'll actually get around to posting those at some point. But for now, I'm just going to think out loud as to what I'm trying to accomplish in my field, to try to recover some sense of what my purposes are. It'll be a bit of a hodgepodge.

So, I'm committed to searching out the truth through intellectual analysis. What does this entail? What does this leave out? It means that I will never really be able to commit myself to anything involving a substantial historical component; history can never be well-enough established for complete committal.

I'm skeptical about what reason can attain; I don't use it because my own reason is a great tool, but simply because it's the best one that I have and the views of most other people have not shown them to be trustworthy enough. Even if I "prove" another side wrong, it could always be my own lack of insight and imagination which leads me to my conclusion. Great minds in the past have often blatantly misrepresented their intellectual opponents, so why should I think that I will necessarily do better?

While reason and history don't really satisfy me, they are what I have. Proving someone wrong or right may not really prove anything, but it is a way to get deeper into the issues; Shankara may have completely missed the point of Buddhist and Jainist arguments, but his refutations still helped to delimit his own views and increase his insight into reality. So reasoning does have a point, if I leave aside my foibles about really being correct in all my references (but more on that in a moment).

In addition, historical analysis helps me to see the human side of thinking, how many people have struggled with these issues; this struggling itself seems to be where I can really see the issues, rather than in some proposition or in some single argument from some single source. Plus, I tend toward odd views; just because they aren't popular or even considered viable today, doesn't mean that they aren't deserving of attention. If nothing else, a revival of odd views helps to challenge reigning orthodoxies.

Both the historical and the philosophical sides of my work, though, are in vain if they are for me to get things right. I probably won't. Instead, my goal really should be to further our knowledge as a human community; I'll be one step in that process, just like all those authors which I read and appreciate, or even like those who have been forgotten but who were necessary at one point. My goal should not be to get the arguments and the scholarship right; it should be to make a worthy contribution. Sometimes that comes about better by being wrong, but being wrong spectacularly. It's hard to look for the truth while simultaneously knowing that it will most likely only be found long after one is dead; but it is some comfort to think that progress is possible and that one's work may be a step in the right direction. And easier to justify as being possible.

If I really am committed to the truth, this can either be as something for myself to possess or something which I want o be made clear. The former is selfish if taken on its own; the latter is what is truly important, that I can help to make the truth clear to others. And that does not require that I understand it all myself.

So, that is how I think that I should see my goal of pursuing the truth, and to some extent the pursuit of it by intellectual analysis. But why intellectually? I would want this pursuit to be open to all. Regardless of the Bhagavad Gita's whole view of the caste system, it does have one uplifting analysis of it toward the end: people from all walks of life can attain the religious goal without leaving their natural inclination. Rulers attain Brahman by ruling well, servants by serving well, and so on. In fact, if one is by nature a servant, one should not try to attain the goal by intellection, nor should the intellectual by war and ruling. While there is much to dispute about the caste system as a caste system, this insight of the multiple ends for the human person seems attractive.

More than attractive; I look around, and it is a good thing that non-intellectuals can attain the ultimate end of human life. Intellectuals often do not seem to be the best role models out there, while there are many non-intellectuals who do seem to be exemplary (St. Francis of Assisi, anyone?). If only intellectuals could attain the human end, than this does not bode well for humanity.

But there are also reasons for why the intellectual life seems worth pursuing, and why it seems to be more tightly connected to living the good life. It is only (at least as a necessary, though probably not sufficient condition) through the analysis of reasons that one can attain to a non-accidental understanding of the good. It might happen to be that we can trust our intuitions and feelings, it may be that we can trust Religious Authorities X Y and Z, but these do not in and of themselves show the necessary connections between themselves and the good. Thought does not make walking the path any easier, but it is the only tool we have for mapping out that path with any degree of accuracy.

What does this say for the role of the intellectual in the community? How does this work, if there are multiple ends open to humanity but only reason can really test the paths to see what is good (or at least, reason does it better than any other tool we have)? Does this mean that the community lives and dies by both the quality of its intellectuals and the degree to which it listens to them (for good or ill depending on the ideas proposed)? Or is there another path which not only gives a subjective feeling of certainty (shared by many of the opposing views in any case), but also provides the necessary connections to ground that certainty?

It would seem that the good is ultimately something immanent; if you can't tell that it really is good itself, then how is it good? Reason is necessary then to show what will be good in the future, say, or what would be a better good, but everyone has access to what the good is right in front of themselves. So the intellectual isn't quite as important. But I'm still uneasy about jumping from here to saying that everyone has access to the knowledge of their ultimate ends with the same degree of accuracy as the intellectual. It seems that even if I have established that the good is immanent for every person, and that everyone can understand that immediately within their own position, it still would take reason to establish that point and keep it from merely being some whim.

Against Plantinga's Anti-Naturalism Argument

I don't really like Plantinga's anti-naturalism argument in Warranted Christian Belief, and I've been meaning to put down my thoughts on it for a while now. I don't have my copy of the book around, or what is much the same it is lost in some pile somewhere, so please correct me if you feel that I am misrepresenting Plantinga.

To begin: Plantinga argues that if both naturalism and evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties may utterly misrepresent the world; therefore, we would not be able to trust our theoretical science which tells us that evolution is true. He give the following thought-argument: a guy sees a sabre-tooth tiger, and thinks that the sight of a sabre-tooth marks the beginning of a foot-race. His thought is not reliable as far as knowledge is concerned, as his cognitive faculties are not fashioned for the purpose of knowledge; they are fashioned for survival, as the evolutionist needs. His running a foot-race will save him from the tiger, ensuring survival. This scenario is either probable or inscrutable for Plantinga, thereby showing that on naturalistic (and so unguided) and evolutionary (and so geared purely toward survival) grounds, it is either (a) probable that we do not have cognitive faculties geared toward accurate knowledge, or (b) we have no idea whether they are geared toward knowledge, which lands us in much the same situation. Of course, there is more to Plantinga's argument, but this is the crux of it it seems to me.

My counter-argument then is this: there is a probable scenario under which, within a materialistic evolutionary account, we have accurate theoretical knowledge of the material world. Plantinga's thought-experiment, and all similar ones, cannot even get off the ground because it cannot account for how the random thought about running foot-races (or any other concept so divorced from reality) could have arisen, other than perhaps as a massively freak mutation of genes (which would be quite improbable on the naturalists account). I do not claim to be building an air-tight argument. For one thing, it is probabilistic like Plantinga's own, and for another, I simply do not understand what the force is behind Plantinga's account. If nothing else, then, hopefully this will help to frame the issues at stake.

First, let us start with what Plantinga's argument is not doing. it is not an argument that either life or self-reflective consciousness in themselves would be improbable for the materialist. Therefore, I can assume that materialism could account for these, and leave it to other arguments to show whether or not this is the case (I'm fine with saying it is not; I have no predilection toward materialism myself). Also, Plantinga does not give sub-arguments in this argument as to things like mind-body dualism, or for the reality of individual organisms as such, and neither do I think that the materialist should grant this.

I set out the following propositions which would seem to be probable for the materialistic evolutionist:

1. Physical Holism: we live in a physical field. Any organism that arises within it is still part of the field. The behavior of that organism is not something completely separate from its environment; simply regarding the physical field, it is the field acting on itself.
2. Pragmatism: just as the rise of life is not a clean break from the regular actions of the physical field, so to concept-formation is not a clean break from behavior. There is a progression of thinking, and it is tied to behavior; there is no purely mental realm unless one wants to be a Platonist, and the materialist does not want this.
3. Mental Holism: Concepts are not single thoughts. Concepts interrelate amongst themselves. If I think about foot-races and sabre-tooths conceptually, this is already tied to other thoughts about foot-races and other thoughts about sabre-tooths.
4. Regularity: Behaviors that arise for survival are regular; maybe not perfectly so, but in tendency. If an animal cannot regularly tell the difference between suitable residences and unsuitable, or between predators and prey, it does not much of a shot at survival. Survival mechanisms must in general be regular; if they were not, they would be random, they would not help survival since they could not respond to the environment appropriately.

I am not going to argue whether all of these are right in themselves, merely that they make sense for the materialist. Regularity follows from survivability, and Physical Holism seems to me to simply follow from saying that (a) all that exists is material, and (b) all material interacts. However consciousness evolves (as a phenomenon, whether or not it entails immaterial properties or substances), it must come from matter and in line with what that matter is doing. The principle of Mental Holism seems to me to simply come from what it is to have a concept; a concept of "foot-race" is meaningless unless it has multiple uses which are related.

If this is the case, then regularity exists at the level of the physical organism. It must behave in some regular way within its environment in order to survive. When it starts meeting predators, it starts developing avoidance behaviors. When concepts form, these avoidance behaviors are already present; the evolutionary history makes our foot-runner to have fear long before foot-races. The concepts further are developed insofar as they are related to behavior, since all explanation is material and therefore concepts need recourse to material action for their explanation. The regularity of behavior demands that, as a survival mechanism, concepts are similarly regular in relation to the environment.

If all of this works, and I think that it is a least probable once one starts trying to think like the materialist on their own grounds, then we have a way of preserving theoretical science. Our thoughts are regularly formed in relation to our environment. I make regular distinctions between different colors based on the regularity in the environment; if there were no regular stimuli, my experience would not be regular (or at least, it is much more implausible to posit a cognitive scheme in which that chair is always brown and that futon always blue separate from any difference in the stimuli). Science is aimed at looking for and analyzing these regularities. I don't catch all regularities in the world, but science doesn't need that.

So, maybe I can find real regularities in the world, but maybe my thoughts about the world do not match up with it; my cognitive faculties would be ill-formed. But I'm not sure what this would even mean. The concepts interrelate; every single thought is both based on regularities in the environment and Mental Holism. My concept of "red" is not something separate from my concept of "blue", since they condition each other. If both are regularly formed from the environment, and so are all the rest of my mutually-conditioning thoughts, what is left for my cognitive faculties to be egregiously wrong about?

Maybe I think that something is red, but it is not in itself. I have no idea what color is in something itself, but let's assume this for those with better imaginations than my own. Who cares? As long as I can differentiate the different colors, and I can see the continuity between the colors in the rainbow, what difference does that make? So, then, what about color-blindness? But I would have to counter that color-blindness is no different than the fact that most of us can't see ultraviolet on its own. The color-blind person has less information about the world and so can investigate less regularities, but this is not in and of itself the same as making "false" judgments. And it seems to me that any time one wants to fill our regular concepts with content in this way, one reaches the same conclusion: the content didn't actually matter for either practice or theory. I'll hold to that until someone can give me a genuine alternative.

At this point, someone might say that I have missed Plantinga's point. And certainly my argument has come to a very different place than Plantinga's epistemology. But my point was that he was completely misconstruing the situation in the first place in ways that the materialist would not care for, so whatever point I missed is one that the materialist would ignore anyhow.

History of Early German Idealism

So school's out for summer, and I have on my mind several blog posts that I've been wanting to do. I'll probably burn myself out today and blog again around the time school starts up in the fall. But in the meantime, I'd like to recap some of what I've learned this semester, both to solidify the knowledge in my own mind as well as to hopefully interest other people in the areas I've been studying. First: Early German Idealism.

I'm mainly going to jot down the history between Kant and up to, but not including, Hegel. So, Kant wants to say that we have two sources of representations. On the one hand, we have receptivity: the senses. On the other hand, we have spontaneity: concepts. Kant's system in the Critique of Pure Reason is then a way of showing how there must be necessary (and so therefore objective) connections constituting and combing the appearances, so that we can have mathematical and scientific knowledge; why must we think of the world in terms of cause and effect, or as divided up into quantities, for example.

Kant also has his practical program, in Critique of Practical Reason. Part of his first Critique was that, in order to cognize something, you must both be able to think about it and be given the object in experience. Things like God, freedom, and the soul can never be given in experience, however, so they can never properly be part of our theoretical knowledge. Instead, they are postulated by our practical reason, which tells us how to act. It may be the case that we are not free, but if reason alone can determine the will (the condition under which we can have morality), we would have to be free, and so since we have this sense of morality we must presuppose freedom in order to act according to it. God and the soul are similar cases.

Next enters Reinhold. He was first training to be a Catholic priest, then part of the radical Englightenment, became a Mason and part of the Illuminati, and became a Protestant pastor. Philosophically at this time, he started as a critic of Kant, then one of Kant's boldest supporters, started his own project, became a Fichtean, left Fichte for a "rational realism", and finally worked through his own liguistic philosophy (source: SEP). I can understand someone like this. I will talk about his support of Kant for the moment.

Reinhold thought that Kant's philosophy was the perfect solution to the problems of skepticism and religious enthusiasm of the day (between Aberglaubt and Ueberglaubt). Kant agrees with the enthusiasts that one cannot give a purely rational argument for God's existence, while at the same time agreeing with the skeptics on the importance of reason. To this end, Kant had the notion of a "rational faith" in his practical philosophy, which unites both head and heart. This is how Reinhold popularized Kant, going so far as to liken Kant's program with that of Christ in bringing together religion and reason.

However, Reinhold started believing that something was missing in Kant's system. Kant had kept his system full of all these dualisms, such as that between theory and practice and between (passive) appearances and (active) concepts. But the only way to know whether it is consistent is to make it properly scientific and ground it on a single principle. Reinhold took from Kant that we have things which are represented (i.e. the object), while we represent (as the subject). There must be some faculty of representation which underlies the two, even though we can never experience it. Representation, or Vorstellung, is most likely an infelicitous term; "intention" might be better, and our professor wanted to make the case that Reinhold was even a proto-phenomenologist.

Reinhold together with Kant were attacked in a work entitled Aenesidemus, at the time anonymous but revealed to be by G. E. Schulze, later the teacher of Schopenhauer. This review charged the Kantian philosophy with illegitimately assuming things about both the object and subject of cognition, defeating its own transcendental standpoint. Whatever the merits of Schulze's work itself, it prompted Fichte to respond.

Fichte thought that Reinhold was right in giving a single starting point to Kant's philosophy, but that problems arise by making it a separate fact, or Tatsache, which would involve one in making Schulzian errors. Instead, this "faculty" of representation must be an action, or Tathandlung: the Absolute Ego posits itself as an activity. In so doing, a non-ego against the ego is posited, and this is the start of the subject-object or representing-represented dichotomy.

Various other options come up after this; the usual history goes from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, where Hegel went through the Subjective Idealism of Fichte to the Objective Idealism of Schelling to get to his own Absolute Idealism. The picture is not quite so simple. Schelling did give a higher priority to nature than did Fichte. Fichte had to explain why one must start with the subject instead of with the object. Fichte then proceeded to claim that one could start with the object instead and proceed to dogmatic metaphysics, but that one could never explain freedom. One would have to choose what philosophy one works in based on one's own character: the person who is overly concerned with things would start with the object, and the person who actually cares about freedom and hence morality would start with the subject.

Schelling gives a more positive account of the object. One can start with the object and proceed to natural philosophy, or one could start with the subject and proceed to transcendental idealism. Eventually, Schelling would say that there must be an identity between the subject and the object, and starting with either could not get you to this identity. The Absolute in a way must remain unknown; this became his critique of Hegel (I don't really know Hegel; I think Schelling's critique is more or less that Hegel can explain what happens when you start thinking just fine, but that Hegel cannot explain the existence of thinking in the first place). In addition, the unknowable Absolute behind thought became influential (so I hear) for people like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Finally, the last figure we studied: Hoederlin. Hoederlin was friends with Schelling and Hegel, and most likely highly influential on their systems. Unfortunately, Hoederlin did not publish any of his philosophical work, and not even all of his poetry. He went crazy at a relatively young age as well, which didn't help matters, though it did give Hegel an excuse to drink an extra bottle of wine on his friend's birthday in memoriam.

Hoederlin wanted a poetology which would blur the distinction between philosophy and poetry, and for this reason some of his philosophical thought is found in his poems. I'm still not quite sure what he was saying; On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit is easily the most difficult piece I've ever read, and that's in a semester where I read most of the Critique of Pure Reason. One point he makes, I think, is that language is not a product of us, but we are a product of language; write anything and you are the spokesperson for language. The "I" in a piece of poetry is not you or any other person, but reflects this poetological underpinning to the subject and the object. Also, poetry can balance dichotomies and so bring them to their original state which philosophy in its analytic mode must take apart.

Magic and Knowledge

A couple months ago, I was reading through the book Persuasions of the Witch's Craft by T. M. Luhrmann. I haven't yet finished it, but what I read I think does bring up interesting problems for epistemology.

Luhrmann was an anthropology student at Cambridge at the time, doing her dissertation on the practice of ritual magic in contemporary England. One of the key points which she brought up was that what she encountered was not limited to these groups; it applies to any time in which a person specializes and learns to look at the world through new lenses. It just so happens that magic makes a good test case; it is not as though magic were widely believed in our society, so everyone who enters one of these groups must undergo a pretty significant change of mind.

And most of these people entering these groups do go in with a skeptical frame of mind. This is in fact encouraged by the community, which is often made up of intellectuals and prides freedom and rigor of thought. The people who do come to believe in the efficacy of magic believe that they have rationally tested the data and that the evidence is overwhelming.

However, it is not as though these people are conducting scientific experiments. What they are doing is probably too complicated and fuzzy for such experiments, any how; magic for them is not just about, saying, making a quick buck or casting "magic missile". The results are often supposed to be influences on various matters, and sometimes large-scale influences, say on the well-being of the country as a whole. In addition, much of what goes on is about self-transformation as much as anything else; I was struck by the similarity of some of these rituals to, say, Tibetan tantrism in its imagery and use thereof.

So how do these people think that they have rationally assessed magic and found it to be defensible?

• We remember when things go really well. That one spell that had miraculous results sticks out in our minds, rather than the few that were so-so or those that had no visible results. The author talks about her experience in reading a detailed horoscope; inevitably some sections would be dead-on, and these made her want to believe the rest even though she logically knew that as a whole the horoscope did not perfectly fit her.
• There are ways in which we can fail. This may sound counterintuitive, but if things can go right, they must be able to go wrong as well. If you can't muck up a magic spell, then under what conditions does it work? Instead, people start looking for alternative ways in which the power of the spell had released itself. Luhrmann gives the example of some people who were inviting a potential business investor over, and so made everything in their house correspond to certain symbols of Jupiter (itself associated with business and worldly success), such as colors and the numbers of things around the house. Nothing happened with business, but a couple days later the person mentioned (for pretty much the only time in his life) that he was thinking about going into the priesthood. Turn out that Jupiter also symbolizes religion. Other examples were using magic for something water related, or something with watery associations, and then having the pipes burst. We can then pick out the associations and know that something was going on.
• Tied to this, the magicians start learning to look at their world by picking out different aspects, focusing on things which they never before would have noticed. If you are looking for certain things, you will start finding them; start reading your horoscope while looking for ways in which it applies to your life, and it will start applying to your life more.
• Finally, magic is hard. It's complicated and demanding. People who have been in it for a couple decades remark that they are still beginners. So, if one's first attempts do not succeed, is that any surprise? There are reasons why one does not see the results, and reasons to press on.

The issue that comes up is, are any of these ways in which people come to believe in magic any different from how we conduct ourselves in our everyday lives, where we want to believe that we rationally look at the world and assess it properly. It also comes to bear in joining up with any group, such as a religious one (or an academic one), that claims to let one rationally come to that group's conclusions.

So, what exactly is the problem here? Maybe magic works, and society at large simply doesn't realize this. I don't really see enough evidence either for or against it to make a firm decision; the problem is that competing worldviews all claim to be rational, while our ability to be rational in contingent or complex matters is (maybe totally?) conditioned by our own worldview. So, how do we really get to the truth?

Plotinus on Play

I came across this quote from Plotinus in my reading today:

Suppose we said, playing at first before we set out to be serious, that all things aspire to contemplation, and direct their gaze to this end.... Then are we now contemplating as we play? Yes, we and all who play are doing this, or at any rate this is what they aspire to as they play. And it is likely that, whether a chlid or a man is playing or being serious, one plays and the other is serious for the sake of contemplation, and every action is a serious effort towards contemplation; compulsory action drags contemplation more towards the outer world, and what we call voluntary, less, but, all the same, voluntary action, too, springs from the desire of contemplation. - Enneads III.8.1

Revealed and Non-Revealed Religions

I would like to analyze the concept of "revealed religion"; specifically, is there a split between revealed religions and non-revealed? I think that these two categories do make some practical sense. However, first I'll deconstruct them myself, to show their limits.

Any religion is in a way revealed, simply because I myself had to go to some other source and read about it. It comes from outside my own knowledge, and so must have been revealed to me. Even if I were to just sit down and think about matters, all of my concepts, all of my language would come from my community, as would the type of inferences I would make.

Ok, with that out of the way, I would say that we could look at revealed religions, as those which contain a revelation which must always exceed my knowledge. There is no way even in principle whereby I could know on my own that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah, or that I should perform a particular Soma ritual, or that Jesus is God Incarnate. These are all outside of my possible reasoning capabilities. Why? It would seem to me to be because either (a) they are contingent facts about the world, or (b) because my mind is not structured in such a way so as to reach truths of such a sort about the world ( some sort of Kantian turn perhaps, or maybe simply synthetic truths about reality lying at the intelligible core of the world).

A non-revealed religion, by contrast, may (would) have texts. These texts would express truths which would exceed my understanding, and the tradition itself may very well admit that I would not be able to understand the truths within them on my own without much, much practice. But, eventually, I could understand every single truth; they are all rational, in the strong sense that I can reason my way to them.

Does a non-revealed religion really make sense? Buddhism would seem to be one, on its own claims; however, I may have to wait several uncountable eons before I can advance far enough to attain enlightenment and see the truth for myself. However, it seems to me that one can talk about ideal claims and pragmatic claims in this context.

• (Ideal) If I had perfect human understanding, attainable by continuous progression from my current state, then I could understand religion x.
• (Pragmatic) My reasoning about religion x can be brought closer to the ideal, and so whether my reasoning matches up more and more closely with the teachings of x is a sign of its truth.

The pragmatic claim doesn't necessarily follow from the Ideal, but it is reasonable to think that it would in many circumstances (say, with proper guidance, and my own willingness to critically look at reality).

The pragmatic claim, if true, seems to be what really differentiates non-revealed from revealed religions. If Buddhism were true, then I should be able to reason my way more and more closely to its total truth on my own, though I may need a guide at first. If my reason were to come apart more and more from Buddhist teachings, then I would have grounds for holding Buddhism to be false.

If Christianity were true, then my own reasoning may or may not have anything to do with reality. I don't mean my strict, logical demonstrations, but rather reasoning taken in a more general way. I can't rationally explain the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Atonement (among other things), and my reasoning will never get me closer to an understanding of them or to their truth no matter how hard I try. Sure, I can tell you that the Trinity is 3 persons in 1 substance; but what the heck does that mean, even if I wax eloquent on subsistent relations or processions? I don't even know whether my claim makes sense, and I am doubtful that most lay confessions of the Trinity and the Incarnation are anything but nonsensical or heretical. So, if my reasoning comes apart from Christian teaching (except in the case of valid statements of illogicity), then a legitimate answer someone could always give to me would be that I simply need to obey, not to understand.

I guess that makes sense, based on the standpoint of revelation. But if that can always be an answer, then could there be any sufficient proof of revelation? If it is contingent, then who knows why it is the case? And if it exceeds our capabilities to understand, then how is this different? In short, revealed religion must always run into Lessing's ditch between truths of reason and truths of history. Because of this, I would also always have the suspicion that the truths are in place as part of power claim by certain groups of people, rather than as statements about reality. There would not be proof of this, of course, but the sort of situation has lent itself to abuse.

Now, a further problem arises. Even with "non-revealed" religions, am I really bringing my reason more and more in line with the religion in question? Or am I simply being inculturated? Pascal argues that one should start attending Masses and taking holy water, and one will start to have reasons for belief. Al-Ghazali holds that one can have a direct "taste" of God which is above all reason, and he was a pretty astute (anti-)philosopher himself who thought quite highly of reasoning. D. T. Suzuki claims that if one puts aside one's questioning about philosophical problems, then one will attain to their true answers after reaching satori. In different religions, in other words, people claim that one is justified in a way that will satisfy even the rational person, if one just follows that religion. Nice; but everyone claims it, and everyone disagrees, so any individual claim is suspect. Is the "rational" assent to Buddhism, or (perhaps) Advaita Vedanta, etc. any different? Next, I'll bring up some points about a book I've been reading which I think brings out some of these points more clearly: Persuasions of the Witch's Craft by T. M. Luhrmann, about how a anthropologist joined some British magical communities for a couple years in order to study their culture and how they came to believe in something so contrary to the expectations of the society arond them.

Bhatta Jayanta's Much Ado about Religion

This play, by Bhatta Jayanta (c. 9th-10th centuries CE), is an interesting look at religious dynamics in the Kashmir region. It is the journey of a zealous Mimamsaka graduate from his determination to overthrow all religious dissenters, to a sort of pragmatic pluralism. He succeeds in having some heterodox communities exiled, such as the "black-robes" who flaunt the usual ascetic practices. He teems up with a Vaishnavite against the materialists; an interesting arrangement. Mimamsakas are more or least atheistic, but held his tongue while the Vaishnavite gave the teleological argument to support his position in order to defeat a common enemy. Finally, the protaganist is caught up in court politics, and lets a Nyaya logician argue for the equality of all religions which the king approves (that is, which don't overthrow the social order) and which come from a trustworthy source (or are held by respectable, intelligent people), assuming that they are all different ways of reaching the Absolute. This apparently includes even heterodox groups such as the Buddhists and Jains.

The play is somewhat dry; it is mainly speeches and debates by the characters, with a good deal of references to Indian logic and assorted texts. It is good to see a concrete representation of the relationships of different religious groups in India, as well as to look through how they formulated their philosophical and theological arguments.

Summer Presentation

If anyone just happens to be in Denver toward the end of June, and has some cash to spare to get into a conference, then feel free to come on by to the University of Denver for the "Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions" summer conference. I'm excited; it'll be my first conference presentation (well, if you ignore a couple valiant undergrad efforts). I'll be giving a paper on Ibn Bajja (aka Avempace) and Suhrawardi, on their critiques of the Peripatetic tradition. Basically, both argue against linguistic definitions and the limitation of our own individual concepts. In turn, they argue for for a direct perception of intellectual reality, thereby bringing about returns to Platonism in Andalusia and Persia. How could that not be thrilling?

A New Direction

I've been doing anti-apologetics here for a while, and I think that I'm at an end. The arguments aren't perfect, and I don't think that they will convince every open mind or that they will open many closed ones, but I'm satisfied. I see little or no rational reason to believe in Christianity, and no reason to non-rationally believe in Christianity. In addition, I find myself becoming increasingly a worse human being the longer I stay on the fence on the issue; the polemic spirit, the hot-headedness toward those who don't want to try to understand other positions, the bitterness toward the church, and the self-centeredness of being so focused on preventing my own damnation through reasoning (not that I didn't have these traits before, my struggles are just making them worse). If exclusivist Christianity is true, I'll go to Hell unless God decides to love the creation which God decreed must lack the support of blind faith; and I'll just have to accept that and try to be a better human being while I'm alive before roasting to the Glory of god. In the meantime, I'm going to start trying to make positive cases for other religions, and I'm going to start with Buddhism.

Why Buddhism? Well, in part, because I see no other choice. I desperately need a community around me, both for social reasons and for wisdom and support. The latter in particular is important; I need some wisdom for my life, and I need it from people that I know can rationally look at the world and critically assess it. I don't see much of that in the church, nor have I had much practical advice for how to achieve the Christian life (which somehow isn't a work, though it takes an awful lot of effort). So, I need to find some social group with religious concerns.

Other revealed monotheisms fail for the same reasons as Christianity; they never support their claims enough to give me something to legitimately trust. Plus, I see very little evidence of providence or a personal God. So, Islam, theistic Hinduisms, and Judaism are out (not that the latter is looking for converts). I see more philosophically inclined Hinduisms as still too ethnic, at least in my area; the same for Jainism and Sikhism (I want a religion, not a cultural get-together, and I want something with some experience in adapting itself to different cultures). Liberal Christianity and Unitarianism seem to lack any cohesion; even less liberal churches have struck me as more like congenial get-togethers with "inspiring" messages. Do-it-yourself religion doesn't really appeal to me; I plan on cobbling my own thoughts together from different sources, but I want to pull from the best of those traditions through the last couple thousand years and under the guidance of people from those traditions. I'm not sure where Baha'i fits in; there is a nearby temple, but I'm wary of too-new religions. And Pluralism? I can't stomach the thought of deluding myself into the mythological type, if I have any thought that some religion could be substantially more right than others; and I'm too skeptical of reason for the Rationalist sort. I'm not sure of what other sorts I could find.

Buddhism seems to be the remaining choice, at least for a start. It entails less commitments, if nothing else; the doctrine of non-self seems to be more important from a phenomenological standpoint than a metaphysical one (some traditions even sound like Neoplatonism or Vedantic Hinduism, when pushed), and while most versions are officially atheistic, I don't see how this is necessitated (and indeed, in Euro-American contexts some Buddhist thinkers have used God-language; it just can't be a personal God who demands specific worship for the ultimate good of our souls). If nothing else, meditation looks like a way to calm me down, get me out of this pit of anxiety and depression, and help to be less of a nuisance to my wife, while I'm looking for something else.

So, which kind of Buddhism? There are three kinds in particular which I would take seriously:

1. Theravada: They have Vipassana meditation, which seems to make even less metaphysical demands than other schools (it is quite often billed as "non-religious", not requiring you to sign onto any specific beliefs other than that this sort of meditation may help you somehow). Theravada Buddhism also doesn't have much in the way of speculation or pantheons. However, I do find their reasoning to be overly simplistic when they do start doing their metaphysics, which would be necessary for prolonged practice.
2. Zen: A wonderfully iconoclastic way of cutting through the BS of life. Again, most Zen places around here don't care what religion you are, and the Buddhist oaths at least for the Chicago Zen Center are pretty non-committal (they are ethical precepts, which I could have taken without a problem as a Christian). But I'm concerned that Zen cuts out a little too much; I don't understand how it could critique a corrupt community, even if it can make individuals better. Having done a thesis on potential ethical problems in D. T. Suzuki's writings has sensitized me to this issue, as well (and has also lead to my dissatisfaction with Christian notions of a leap of faith, for similar reasons; ditch careful rational thinking and you lose social criticism).
3. Tibetan: Upfront about its commitments, and it does fit better with some of my Platonic ways of viewing the world; it (especially insofar as influenced by Yogacara) really does strike me as Buddhist Neoplatonism, or maybe Vedanta with a transcendental turn. It would be an easier way of staying philosophical within Buddhism, given the Tibetan scholastic tradition and their rigorous debates. But some of the stuff in some schools is just crazy; I would need to find one that doesn't do guru yoga, at least.

Perhaps I could find a less sectarian place, which could combine some of these features. Or maybe that would get back into DIY religion. I don't know. So, let's see whether there is any hope toward finding some intellectual stability (probably not).

Inadequacy of Pragmatic Arguments for Christianity

I've talked to a few people who advocate practical arguments for Christianity, of the sort which say that one chooses Christianity out of practical need instead of merely theoretical reasons. I will assess three different ways of going about this, and how I think they fail: (1) Simple pragmatism, (2) Christian-specific pragmatism, and (3) Live-option pragmatism. However, I do think that I see some individuals who practically choose Christianity without theoretical justification, and so I will end by going through different kinds of these practical individuals and in what ways they may be justified.

All of this applies to intellectuals, to those who have the luxury and responsibility to think through the issues involved; I don't think that easy answers can be given for the person in the pew who works 12 hour days with several kids to raise, nor that I have the experience to say anything about them. I think outright fideism is either a separate topic (and as I've noted in the past, I question the morality of the fideistic line), or a version of (3); I haven't decided yet.

First, simple pragmatism. By this I simply mean arguments which have the form: (a) We have a need, (b) Christianity meets this need, (c) Therefore we should become Christians. Pascal's wager is a version of this: we face the possibility of Hell if we are atheists, Christianity gives (approximately) equivalent or better rewards than atheism whether it is right or wrong, therefore the best choice is Christianity. As I've noted many times in conversations, these arguments simply don't take seriously the fact that there are other religions. They get their force from positing a simple and complete disjunction between Christianity and Atheism/Secular Humanism; if this really were the case, they would work. But there are Islam, Buddhism, Hinduisms, etc. as well, and therefore there are other options to solving the problem than Christianity. Pascal's Wager would need to take into account the Islamic hell, the Buddhism never-ending hells, Madhvacharya's hell in Dvaita Hinduism, and so on; the wager looks to be rather less compelling a case for Christianity at this point. I have seen one article which addressed this problem for Pascal's Wager, but its conclusion was that we should choose a non-sectarian religion and not Christianity. Other practical arguments seem to suffer the same fate: there is a universal problem (or at least general; I'll use universal throughout, but as long as it applies to people from different belief systems then my criticism stands) which is given a particular solution, which happens to be only one solution amongst many. Therefore, the proposed solution in all probability doesn't work, which is a problem since working would be kind of the point of a pragmatic argument. The next two options will try to either narrow the problem or the solution set to solve this issue. If the narrowing attempts are unsuccessful, then the attempt to find a working solution to one's problem in Christianity fails as well.

Maybe the problem is Christian-specific, and so Christianity is really the only solution. The practical argument would not be given to a Buddhist, but only to someone within a Christian community using Christian standards. Since Christian notions of Hell, sin, and other problems to be avoided are specifically Christian, no other religion could satisfy them. This is Christian-specific pragmatism. But in any case where one is arguing for the practical use of Christianity to solve another's problem, the other is not already a Christian; if one is merely trying to exhort the other toward a more authentic Christian life, this is another matter entirely. So one must already be using a concept which is not merely Christian-specific; some sense of sin and despair which one could recognize in oneself even without believing in the Triune God, for example (this is to leave aside the extent to which even within the tradition, the concept of, say, sin is equivocal). But once the problem is more universal, then the solution must match the problem, and it is doubtful that Christianity is the only solution once again. People read Kierkegaard as Buddhists or generic Theists and make sense out of the problem of despair, while either reworking his solution of faith as a generic faith or dismissing it as too facile an answer to the problem. There could be a person's own idiosyncratic problem which can only be solved within Christianity, and therefore merely a particular problem which can take a particular solution. However, this is a separate issue; my hunch is that (i) there can be no arguments for or against such a position since, as idiosyncratic, it is not open for public discussion, and (ii) one is taking on far more commitment within Christianity and its universal claims than would be warranted; one's personal problems should not lead to statements about the salvation of humanity (but is this any different from any pragmatic argument? something doesn't seem quite right with this criticism of mine; maybe it is an example of the next category? another possibility to explore?).

Maybe Christianity is not the only solution to the problem, but maybe it is the only live option which one can take; this is the thorniest way of approaching the argument, so please bear with me. If one is in a Christian culture, maybe converting to Buddhism or Islam is not really practical, and so even if there are technically other solutions, they don't need to be considered. With only one option left, one has only one particular solution even if the problem is more universal. This may have applied when there truly was little knowledge of other religions and no avenue for practice, but most of us know of these other religions and could find a community around ourselves. We could convert, even if this may come at a cost. We may narrow down our live options because this suits our lives better, but it seems like this can only happen because we do not comprehend what is at stake. Our salvation (from whatever to whatever) is at stake, as individuals and as within the communities we influence around us; it is not merely an ethical and individual choice, but a profoundly political one as well, shaping the lives of others to possibly a huge extent, given how people are influenced by role models and concrete examples as much as anything else. Given the shear scope of the problem and the ultimate value of its solution (or non-solution, if Zen happens to be right), how can we ever be justified in artificially limiting our options? (but more on that in a moment). Just because one has invested oneself in Christianity up until this point, just because one's family and friends are all Christians, just because one's life will be more difficult as a minority, does not come close to legitimately limiting the options once the problem is looked at clearly. To say that Christianity is one's only live option, then, would seem to be a point about one's own flawed way of looking at the world, which would shirk responsibility and be impractical for truly attaining one's ends (since religion, or at least plenty of views we call religion, is about our ultimate end). Also, even as a pragmatic solution, it just stuns me that anyone could place their salvation (and the matter of salvation across humanity) in the hands of what their utterly contingent (and often unquestioning) culture considers to be spiritually relevant; and what else is a live option in many cases, other than what the culture has constrained?

But the last argument is certainly weak; we can pick out people who are Christians for practical reasons who do not seem to be such monstrous blockheads as my evaluation would have them out to be. It seems to me that there are three categories (or maybe better: archetypes) of those who choose Christianity for practical reasons, or at least that the following three categories are useful for getting into the problem whether or not they are either precise or exhaustive.

First, we have finite time and energy, and can only work at keeping so many options live. One could look at other religions, but one also has other similarly important things to do, like feeding the widows and orphans. These other things to do both take away one's time for delving into the theoretical questions in greater detail, and demand some standpoint from which one works (one serves humanity because of Christ's example, for example). In this case, especially if one keeps thinking through the questions within the religion insofar as one has the opportunity, there seems to me to be no question in that such a person is justified. This may require that one is focused on the ends of others which are generally considered to be important, and important enough to avoid looking to one's own salvation (maybe love really is about giving up one's own concern about salvation for the good of others?); being an Evangelical missionary to take care of the salvation of others, when justified purely through pragmatic means, I think would fit in one of the next groups (though I am thinking through that one).

Second, some people make the practical decision for a given religion themselves, but are tolerant of others' choices in the matter. They recognize the tenuousness of their decision, and even though they may choose recklessly, they do not call others to do so. They listen and take the time to understand those who disagree with them. Given the political nature of our choices as well as the individual problems which would arise, I cannot say that I can agree with such a position, but these people are at least much nicer to live with than others and do genuinely display virtues in their lives. This kind of life would lead me to think that such people have some justification in believing they way they do, though the broader implications in leading people away from the truth if they are wrong would lead me to think that they have some culpability as well.

Third, some people make their practical decisions and expect that others should do the same. They keep themselves ignorant of other views which could challenge their own, which would reveal the fragility of their decisions; they do not take the trouble to sincerely understand other perspectives. They may adopt a dogmatic stance within their religion and come up with fideistic epistemologies to lock themselves and others in. I have no great fondness for this type of decision, as I'm sure everyone is aware; they not only harm themselves, but do great harm to others who would find such a life attractive, and to communities in which people do not have the luxury of thinking through their beliefs. Not only do they mislead others directly in the case that they are wrong, but this sort of non-self-critical attitude prevents them and their communities from recognizing other problems (such as racism and sexism). In another way of looking at matters, this is the ancient problem of rhetoric vs. philosophy played out within religion, with the present category representing the rhetoricians.

Maybe one could fit somewhere in between the second and third kinds of believers some other category, but I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader. Also, figures such as Reb Saunders in Chaim Potok's The Chosen come to mind, as dogmatic individuals who are nevertheless virtuous human beings who have had to take a rigid stance in order to keep their communities alive and healthy; they have given their lives over to others, and their pragmatic stance on religion is necessitated from this. But I take it that such an individual would be exceptional, although this raises significant political issues for my criticism.

So, in conclusion, some people are pragmatically justified in choosing Christianity, given finite human nature. Others are not justified but can still have some virtue in doing so. Still others are completely flaunting their responsibilities. The arguments themselves, however, fail; one has the practical need to choose Christianity only because of one's own individual situation which is never commensurate with the answer given, nor is the particular solution of Christianity commensurate with the general problem of humanity which can be recognized by non-believers before making the decision.

Addendum: But now, some second thoughts. I find myself in the place where I find that, (a) to dive into Christianity would be to ignore my reasoned judgment, and so to give up seeking truth; (b) to stay where I am will only exacerbate the bitterness, irritation, and self-centredness which attend my criticisms and daily life under the stress of seeking while still in the church, and so I would be giving up seeking goodness; and so (c) to leave Christianity would be the only way to seek both truth and goodness. This would seem to be a pragmatic argument for leaving Christianity; does it fall prey to the above criticisms? Does a negative solution in a pragmatic argument yield the same problems as a positive? Does the inclusion of theoretically rational considerations change matters? How about a universal solution, such as religious pluralism, or some sort of transcendental condition for hope?