Island

2011-11-03T14:30:00.001Z

Goodness, is it really almost a year since I wrote anything on this blog? I need to get back to it but meanwhile here is a little squib:

http://philosophyinthecity.info/what-would-jesus-do-what-would-kant-say-michael-mcghee-on-st-pauls-occupation/

Remembering Neil

2011-01-27T11:53:00.002Z

we lose touch with our university friends ... I still remember my first meeting with Neil as a first year student at the hall of residence, Halliday hall in Clapham Common. It was at a common room meeting, rather over-crowded, and I had a seat and he didn't and the meeting was long and the room was hot and I became more and more aware of how he was shifting from one leg to the other ... I gave him my seat and we became friends. There were three of us, Neil Collings, John Keast and me and, because there were lots of theolog students we became known as the holy trinity ... Neil, of course, was God the fatherand anyone who knew John would realise that he would have been God the Son ... and so on ... I would regularly stumble as I rushed up the stairs (I still do) and he, following ponderously behind, would judiciously calculate the least helpful moment for saying 'Careful!' The three of once went on a trip to the Lake District ... I remember us wandering around Cockermouth and visiting Dove Cottage ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/neil-collings-visionary-dean-of-st-edmundsbury-cathedral-2031135.html

2010-12-24T14:15:00.000Z

Is Nothing Sacred? A (Secular) Philosophy of Incarnation

During his Papal Visit to the United Kingdom in September 2010 Pope Benedict XVI gave an Address in Westminster Hall[1] in which he expressed his concern ‘at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity’. He went on to say that ‘There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere’. Using strikingly similar language the Catholic philosopher John Haldane has remarked in a recent collection of essays on ‘the exclusion or ‘silencing’ of religion within philosophy’. ‘Religion has become an unwelcome presence’, he says, ‘and efforts to introduce it are generally resisted’.[2]
Meanwhile, In a recent interview (July 2010) in the New Statesman[3] the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was invited to respond to the question, Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? He resp0nded to this question in the following terms:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
And, echoing this talk of the necessity of reference to ‘the sacred’ the philosopher Gordon Graham has written in the following terms[4]:
(I)f we characterise ‘the sacred’ in terms of absolute requirements and prohibitions, it appears that something more needs to be said about the authoritative nature of these absolutes. Since ‘absolute’ here contrasts with dispensable or negotiable, and nothing that arises from human will or inclination alone … is non-negotiable, we need some further step that makes submission of the will intelligible. In most religions the further step is evident, because encounters with the sacred are encounters with a divine or supernatural realm, a different order of reality that is (in some sense) beyond or greater than the natural world of human pleasure and welfare. Anyone who wishes to retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on.
Pope Benedict went on to urge his audience ‘to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.’ He remarks that ‘the world of reason and the world of faith—the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief—need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation’. The Pope supports this contention with the following brief outline of a position:
The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers … but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles, this “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed … partly because distorted forms of religion … can be seen to create social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fail to take full account of the dignity of the human person.
Benedict talks about his Church’s ‘overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God’, and he remarks in terms that echo those of Rowan Williams, that ‘if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident.’
Benedict’s measured remarks take the form of an invitation to a dialogue with ‘secular rationality’ in a cultural atmosphere, as he perceives it, and not without grounds, of indifference or hostility to religion. It is certainly true that the more populist exponents of secularism have sometimes been intemperate in the expression of their opposition to religion, and usually in ways that identify it with the distorted forms that Benedict refers to, those of fundamentalism and sectarianism. However, the irony of popular polemic and public pronouncements on both sides is that each views the other as the harbinger of moral catastrophe.
But the conditions for the possibility of a dialogue between religion and secularism are not unavailable. They do, however, involve a frank assessment by both parties of the terms in which they and their partners in the dialogue conceive the terms of the discussion. The way that Benedict casts those terms naturally reflects his own understanding of the world of faith or religious belief, but it also reflects his understanding of the world of reason. Although the Catholic Church has a tradition of vindicating the reasonableness of faith, it is noteworthy that in referring to the way in which reason and faith need each other, and after he has glossed ‘reason’ as ‘secular rationality’, Benedict talks about ‘the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion’ (my italics). This is an unlikely role for ‘secular rationality’ and suggests some suppressed scepticism about the reality of the mutual need—‘secular rationality’ can be ‘corrected’ by religion, whereas the latter has nothing to learn from the former. The context here is the very specific one that related to the traditional Catholic view that ‘objective norms’ can be discerned through the use of reason. ‘The “corrective” role of religion is to help to purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles’. But why can religion offer this “corrective” role?—because although reason has access to ‘objective norms’ prescinding from revelation, these norms are nevertheless also revealed and so religion is in a privileged position: it can determine whether or not ‘secular rationality’ gets it right. Secular thinkers may agree that reason can fall prey to distortions in the form of ideological manipulation, for instance, without agreeing that reason is to be saved from this by the corrective supplied by religion—though this is not to say that the religious tradition cannot be one of the sources by which distortions of reason can be corrected. For one thing, distortions in the particular uses of reason can be corrected by further particular uses of reason, as any good Marxist would tell us.
But now, although the doctrine is that reason has access to ‘objective norms’ independently of revelation, it does not follow from this that the objectivity of these norms can be grounded independently of revelation—as reflecting God’s will, for instance. There seems to be a convergence here in the thinking of Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the philosopher Gordon Graham, a convergence on the idea of the necessity of ‘the sacred’ as a transcendent grounding. There is a further convergence on the idea of the special role of religion in protecting the dignity of the human person, in the absence of which this dignity is in jeopardy.
2
In casting ourselves in the roles of partners in dialogue we need to articulate at some point not only our general sense of our own position but also our sense of our interlocutor’s—both parties need to stand ready to be corrected in their version of the other. As we have seen, Gordon Graham has offered a challenge to the secular thinker about the nature of their commitment to ‘sacred value’ and this provides a convenient starting-point, since he makes certain assumptions about what must be a difficulty for such a person, a difficulty he expands on as follows[5]:
Distinctive attitudes separate moral and religious absolutes, however, the latter being more naturally characterised by the language of veneration and desecration. The difference enables us to explain the following sort of example … if circumstances were to bring it about that you were driven to steal from your mother, it is sufficient (perhaps) to explain the wrongness of doing so in terms of quite general moral obligations and prohibitions and/or her well being. But suppose you are invited to trample on a photograph of your dead mother. What exactly is objectionable about doing this? There is no obviously moral dimension—since no right is violated and you could not be doing her harm in any obvious sense …. Yet at a minimum most people would be deeply reluctant to do this, and need some very strong reason to counter this reluctance. Anyone who finds this reluctance puzzling and thinks there is no real objection because ‘it’s only a picture’ reveals themselves as oddly inhuman … to this extent they lack any sense of the sacred; which is to say, while they can judge what is useful and beneficial, they have no place for the veneration of things.
There are several things I want to draw attention to here. The first is the idea that if we are to talk of the absolute we need an account of its ‘authority’ which will render intelligible submission of the will; the second is that whatever can properly be called ‘absolute’ cannot derive from human will or inclination alone; the third is that there is a distinction between a sense of the sacred and ‘morality’; and the fourth is that in talking of the sacred we are talking of absolute requirements and prohibitions.
The direction of thought, if I understand Graham correctly, is that someone can practise ‘morality’ without having any sense of ‘the sacred’. But it is the sacred which gives morality its absolute force in the form of requirements and prohibitions which compel the will’s submission—and in the absence of any such source ‘morality’ would become no more than a negotiable product of the will. A religiously-minded person will refer ‘sacred value’ to a supernatural source—and the challenge to the secular thinker is that they need to give an alternative account of the sacred—if they wish to retain the notion—if they wish, that is, to resist the thought, as they surely should, that morality is a dispensable product of the will, They need, in other words, to explain
what prevents it from collapsing into a mere affirmation of the Ubermensch, in itself groundless and without implications for others (as Nietzsche acknowledged). We can interpret Kant’s Groundwork as an attempt to attach veneration to morality (through ‘reverence for the moral law’) and this is a move that contemporary thought often makes in its assertions that human life is ‘sacred’ and human rights ‘inviolable’.[6]

Graham goes on to remark that ‘the secular aspiration to retain sacred value without supernatural warrant has more work to do’ and voices the suspicion that ‘any purely naturalistic account of the sacred will reveal a philosophical instability that can only be resolved when the supernatural is invoked as its ground’.
When we make claims as philosophers there is usually something that we wish to resist through the contrary force of what we assert. I am sympathetic to Graham’s resistance to the idea that morality can be grounded in the bare affirmation of the will, but am not so sure that I want to turn in the same direction as he does—I suppose, indeed, that I should want to offer a purely naturalistic account of the sacred, if I were convinced that it had any (grounding) role to play at all.
It looks as though the thought is that if we cannot locate the ground of morality in the human will then there is nowhere to go but the divine. I say it looks as though this is the thought, but it is rather the case that Graham is re-asserting the status quo ante in the form of a very specific theology—that the source of the good is to be found in God’s will. The peculiar thing is that Sartre’s atheistic existentialism shares that theology: if God does not exist then the source of the good must lie not in his will but in the will of human beings. I agree with Graham that this will not do and that we must find something that informs and compels the will. It is significant that in his lecture Sartre does make a significant concession and offers us just that—the consideration that in choosing for myself I choose for all. We have to ask the question, with what does he thereby seek to inform the will, what is the essential guiding information? By the same token philosophers have been dissatisfied with Kant’s appeal to reverence for the moral law since it raises the question what is it about the moral law that merits reverence and if we seek an answer to that question we go outside the terms of Kant’s own discussion. My problem with Graham’s position, though, is that it moves too quickly back to the default theology, to the thought that if we cannot ground absolute value in the human will then we must return to the original position and locate it in the divine. It is not that we cannot have something that we call morality in its absence—though it is most likely to be the tense negotiation of power and interest that belongs to the state of nature or as commended by the hard men of Plato’s Republic—but what we cannot have is the idea that human life is ‘sacred’ or that human rights are ‘inviolable’. We might have a brief consensus, to use Benedict’s word, in favour of treating human rights as ‘inviolable’ but that is not what makes them such and is no kind of ground.
I want to look more closely at the way in which Graham is using this term ‘morality’ as it emerges in his discussion of the case of the photograph. Here someone is invited to trample on the picture of their late mother. It seems to me that the repugnance most of us would feel is a moral repugnance. But Graham remarks that there is ‘no obviously moral objection’ and does so on the grounds that since she is now dead no harm is done to her and no rights have been violated. But this position relies on a deracinated notion of morality in which judgment and action are cut off from their own moral grounds and distinctive reasons. It is obvious that many people will want to say that to trample on her image would be an act of ‘desecration’, and also that in using this expression we reach into a religious lexicon, and in doing so register our sense of the gravity of the act. The invitation is to an expression of contempt towards a representation of the mother and therefore of the filial bond that grounds concern for her well being. The photograph is a representation in both senses of that term: it pictures the mother but also serves as a concrete universal, evoking the parental relationship more generally. If you say, but you don’t harm her, I reply that you have been invited to show contempt for a moral idea. It is inviting someone to express an attitude that is contrary to that which would inform their conduct.
Part of the problem is that the notion of morality has been reduced to a system of requirements and prohibitions, which thus understood would always be thought of as an external constraint upon one’s freedom rather than an expression of inner necessity—and if that is a false impression the language needs to be altered. Paradoxically, the focus is not exclusively on requirements and prohibitions, but also on judgments of harm or well being. But such judgments are an expression of our moral intelligence in the presence of which it is difficult to see the function of the language of requirement and prohibition. The motivation to avoid what one sees will harm someone is different from the motivation to avoid what is prohibited. It is true that we are unreliable and double-minded beings and there is room for the imperative voice within a divided self—but such an imperative is self-addressed to a recalcitrant but morally responsive intelligence. By contrast, the motivation to do what is required and avoid what is prohibited must presumably be obedience to the authority that such language presupposes, in this case the will of God. But it seems strange to think that the source of one’s reluctance to trample on the image of one’s own mother is that it is against God’s will.
Graham’s challenge had been that anyone who wished to ‘retain sacred value while abandoning the supernatural must therefore explain what it is that enables the sacred to require veneration, to forbid desecration and so on’. The qualification of ‘value’ by the term ‘sacred’ is intended to mark our readiness to talk of human rights, say, as ‘inviolable’, or of human life as ‘sacred’, so that this inviolability is properly an object of veneration and can be desecrated. What I have sought to resist is the introduction of the language of requirement and prohibition here on the grounds that they are external to what is venerated or desecrated, so that we are looking for reasons for action that are external to the nature of the acts themselves, reasons connected with obedience to authority. We have by contrast to find an aspect of the object that is venerated that compels or draws out our veneration, not as a requirement but as an expression of necessity. The theistic version of this is that ideally the believer is conformed to God’s will and falls in with it (love God and do what you want), but not for the sake of obedience to that will.
3
As far as the silencing or exclusion of religion in philosophy is concerned many would respond, perhaps too precipitately, that it is not suppression but ennui: it is a story we have stopped listening to. The New Statesman interviewers had asked Rowan Williams whether we can make sense of morality without a notion of a transcendent or supernatural being and although this question lacks definition I would hazard that most philosophers would say that of course we can make sense of morality without this religious notion. The trouble is that we are not operating with a single and commonly understood notion of morality and even those who wish to give a religious account might differ in their view of how we should understand morality. I said ‘too precipitately’ because we might not have got the story right and, to return to the theme of the responsibility of partners in a dialogue, some religious thinkers may protest that indeed the secular thinker has not understood the story. My concern in what follows is to explore whether there is a religious account that a non-theistic, secular thinker can do business with. I believe that Rowan Williams offers the sketch of such an account, but first I want to examine a popular picture of what is involved in bringing God into morality, and the discussion will continue themes from Graham’s account of sacred value.
But God torments me. That is the only thing that is tormenting me. What if he doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin is right, that it’s a fiction created by mankind. For if he doesn’t exist, then man is the master of the earth … But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.[7]
These remarks of Dmitry Karamazov (Mitya) repay attention, of course, but the comment that has received popular philosophical attention through Sartre’s treatment of it is his brother Ivan’s reported comment that if there isn’t a God then everything is permitted. As Mitya puts it, ‘if there is no God and no afterlife, you can do what you like. Everything is allowed.’[8] Sartre’s purpose is to underline our abandonment and our responsibility, and, indeed, the real apodosis is not that everything is permitted but that we should stop thinking in terms of permission—which is only dubiously a moral category at all, implying, rather, a Kantian heteronomous subject. The common nineteenth century anxiety about the consequences of the loss of belief was partly about social control. In terms of the moral education of the species, sapere aude notwithstanding, the general population is not only incapable of making moral judgments independently but the loss of belief removed the significant sanction of eternal punishment.
The description of Mitya’s perplexity reflects this background. The object of his anxiety is the loss of a moral compass and of sanctions. But this alarm is driven by the standards themselves. His concern that if there’s no God then you can do what you like posits a rampant human subject who lacks moral discernment and instruction and can act with impunity. It would be self-defeating to claim that this is the condition of the human subject as such, since it is a description offered by a human subject from a position that transcends what it describes. But the anxiety about moral heteronomy thus conceived tends to conflate the idea that an action is wrong with the idea that it is prohibited, with the result that the idea of transgression, which is always prompted by the forbidden, strays into the ethical. Indeed it would be bizarre if the protest against their father’s murder was that it’s not allowed rather than that it’s an act of murder. We act morally when we refrain from an action because we have some reason to judge that it is wrong, not because we believe it to be prohibited. An action’s being wrong is one reason for public prohibitions and sanctions imposed on unreliable moral agents, but if we can see the reason then the prohibition is redundant. If there were no God, to continue with this simplistic theology, the reasons we have for judging that certain actions are wrong would still obtain, even if God wasn’t around to ban them as it were.
But Dmitry’s anxiety thus expressed locates the motivation for moral action outside of what otherwise might be counted as a moral reason for acting. The grossness of the idea that someone would refrain from murder because it is not allowed rather than because it is murder shows, even as we multiply examples of people thinking in just this way, that motivation is being sought outside morality. Someone may be moved to refrain from violent action through the threat of dire consequences. But this is precisely a motivation outside morality itself and it depends upon a notion of effective authority. By the same token, and to repeat, we have a similar problem with the language of moral requirements and prohibitions. If we think of it as a moral requirement that we should do no murder we are already locating our motivation for this outside reflection on the nature of the act itself and we should have to ask what it is that would move us to act according to a requirement. If we simply refer back to the nature of the act then we have already cancelled the need to talk in terms of requirement and prohibition. Otherwise we should have to locate it in obedience to authority: we are moved to do what is required of us, to refrain from what is prohibited, and we as a human subjectivity stand over against what is thus perceived as a restraint, rather than invoking the internal language of what we might feel compelled to do or what we might recoil from.
I labour this point about the language of requirement and prohibition because, if we persist in using it, there are consequences for how we understand the motivation for moral action. It would have to be understood as a motivation for not doing what is prohibited and it is hard to see how this could be grounded in anything other than obedience to authority. If God is conceived as the source of what is permitted and what is prohibited then if we stop thinking theistically we need also to abandon talk of permission and prohibition at all, unless we can show that there is some alternative basis for that talk, some alternative basis for the notion of authority that is implicitly appealed to. But it is not so easy to disentangle oneself from the theological conception and the forms of language we inherit from it. I have heard a well regarded philosopher declare that the fundamental question in moral philosophy is ‘what may we do?’—and philosophers routinely talk of ‘moral requirements’ and ‘moral prohibitions’. But this seems to reflect a particular experience of ‘morality’, one which sees it as a constraint upon rather than an expression of one’s human freedom. The model is too obviously that of political obligation, the necessity of obedience and the threat of sanctions, a language which is superimposed upon and then distorts the theistic doctrine of love.
When we start to reflect philosophically upon morality we are all too likely to find a moral language ready to hand and we enter it unthinkingly and systematise and rationalise what is thus presented as a given, but which for all that determines a conception of moral life which ought really to have been brought into question. Nevertheless, with the language of requirement and prohibition ready to hand, it is relatively easy for a theorist to transfer the source of the authority from the will of God to the consenting will of human beings who see such an arrangement as in their interest. Whether this is adequate to the complexity of moral psychology is another matter.
4
How else can we understand the question raised by Rowan Williams’ interviewers—Can we make sense of morality without a religious notion of a transcendent or supernatural being? Surely they can’t be asking whether morality tout court would be possible without such a notion—but what conception of morality can we sustain if we break the connection? This indeed is the thrust of Graham’s challenge to the non-theistic thinker. Perhaps we can frame the question in this way: is the idea of an ‘absolute’ morality an essentially theological conception that is unavailable to the secularist? I shall in what follows contend against this ‘essentially’ and suggest instead that this idea has one of its settings within a theistic culture but is not limited by that setting.
It is time to consider Rowan Williams’ response to the original question, which I shall reproduce here for convenience:
I think that to make sense of unconditional rights or claims, we need to be clear that there is such a thing as universal human nature and that this has some intrinsic dignity or worth. To try and ground this independently of the idea of a transcendent source of value seems to me not finally feasible. People do, of course, make such claims, and do so in good faith, but I don’t see how you can define a universally shared, equal, independent-of-local-culture-and-habit conception of human flourishing without something more than a pragmatic or immanent basis.
In other words, I think morality ultimately needs a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian that means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.
Instead of taking up the generic and opaque ‘morality’ Williams refers to the ‘intrinsic dignity’ of human beings and of unconditional rights or claims in terms which echo the reflections of Gordon Graham and Pope Benedict.
To seek to ground these ideas independently of a transcendent source of value is, he thinks, ‘not finally feasible’. This is a brief answer at the opening of a more wide ranging interview and we cannot expect any further elaboration. The idea of a ‘source of value’, transcendent or otherwise, is not quite clear as it stands but I shall seek to concur in one possible interpretation, viz that we are talking about the idea of a source of our moral evaluations, though whether we can think of that source as ‘transcendent’ is another matter.
I take it that Williams is insisting that in the absence of such a ‘transcendent source of value’ we cannot sustain or are not entitled to the idea that the ‘dignity’ or ‘worth’ we accord human beings is ‘intrinsic’ or that human rights, for instance, are properly to be thought of as ‘unconditional’. To a secular mind, as Williams knows full well, this does not seem remotely plausible. Surely, we might say, if we talk about human rights as ‘unconditional’ we simply imply a determination not to allow any other consideration, such as expediency, to take precedence—and, since we let such considerations take precedence rather frequently, imply that at least when other people override them it is a crime. We do not allow their possession to be determined by any specific privilege of status or citizenship, for instance. When we say that a human being’s dignity or worth is ‘intrinsic’ we imply that it belongs to them simply as a human being (and then, of course, we owe an account of what a human being is in virtue of which we accord them this dignity). And we deny that a particular way of treating other human beings (‘never merely as a means’) depends upon privilege or social status, race, gender or sexual orientation. To use a phrase deployed by Gordon Graham, we are simply insisting that these things are non-negotiable, that you need to meet no further condition to be the recipient of such a right than that you’re a human being.
But to say that these values are ‘non-negotiable’ does not mean that we cannot betray them; when we talk about human rights as ‘inviolable’ we do not mean that they cannot be violated because we violate them all the time, that is why there are rights:—the ‘cannot’ here is that of moral impossibility. We do not give expression to a metaphysical truth but to a moral ideal towards which we are determined to strive—and the significant thing for our purposes lies in the source of that determination to strive. The point is that if we ‘negotiate’ over something non-negotiable we do not register a simple alteration in the direction of the will but a betrayal … of those for whose sake we conceived the ideal.
If we are not to ground our claim that human rights or other moral claims are unconditional or absolute in the bare act of our so willing—because this is no kind of ground at all—it must lie in something that informs and governs the direction of the will and only those who are already theistically inclined will see God’s will as the conceptual alternative ready to hand, though it is a popular error to suppose that this is to replace one arbitrary will for another, since God’s will is that of a being whose essence is goodness. This is not to deny that wicked things are done in the name of this will. Nevertheless Williams’ thought does seem to be that we are not entitled to this unconditionality unless we can refer it to a divine or transcendent source, that if we cannot draw on the divine will to secure it then nothing is unconditional. If we insist that values are absolute then we are committed to a transcendent source, committed to the ‘sacred’. Otherwise all we have left as it were is a morality or, better, a politics of expediency, calculation, advantage, the state of nature. The secularist is unwittingly drawing on a theological view of the world when they seek to defend an absolute conception and since they have rejected that view they have lost the support that secures such claims.
Part of the problem with coming to address this position lies in the opacity of the idea of a source of value, as opposed to a source of moral evaluations. The metaphor of setting a value on something leads us to think that it is something that we confer and that this intentional act is an act of choosing and it all looks like a bare act of will or affirmation again—and, again, the thought is then that if it is we who thus confer value on an object the act is defeasible. Whereas the real point is to see what reasons bring us to attach importance to the object since it is these reasons that inform and direct the will. If we were to talk about what we attach importance to rather than about what we attach value to the voluntaristic language would have less of a foothold and we could replace it by talk of what compels us and what we recoil from. We do not so much confer value as find it and to say that we don’t confer it does not imply that another, divine, will does so confer value, as in conferring dignity on human beings. We do not choose that one kind of reason governs our thinking rather than another.
5
However, it seems to me that Williams himself is thinking in rather different terms, terms which depend upon the idea that would anyway be endorsed by Graham—that it we are to talk of God’s Will we are also talking about the God of Love. The issue for us is not whether as non-theistic thinkers we should steal quietly away, but to see whether there is the possibility of common ground, the possibility of dialogue.
Although it may be misleading to talk in terms of a ‘source of value’ it does make sense to talk about a source of our moral evaluations, or, more to the point, about a source of a language and tradition of recognisably moral evaluation. The root question in all of this is why anyone would care, except for the sake of their own self interest. What is the source of or the motivation for our readiness to accord any human being a dignity that is intrinsic to their being a human being at all, so that the reduction of anyone to ‘bare forked animal’ is a reduction and a violation? The poignancy of the question is marked by the limited scope of the first person plural here. It must have something to do with a view of and an attitude towards what it is to be human at all. The attainment of such a view and such an attitude depends upon the development of a particular formation of subjectivity that is itself what we seek to protect when we seek to protect humanity ‘as an end’.
In order to get a sense of this we need to start with the formation of human solidarity that depends upon a widening of our sympathies, of what david Hue called the natural sentiments of humanity. A condition of such widening is the achieved access to reflection upon one’s situation as that of a human being, rather than, say, as a member of a slave class or warrior caste. An example of this would be the first person plural reflections we might come to have when we confront affliction, mortality or contingency—‘For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ or ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ….’. the solidarity here is of recognised common human experience.
David Hume’s comments about the natural human sentiments are made already from such a position of human solidarity:
Tho’ there was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity would lead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of the omission arises from its being a proof, that we want the natural sentiments of humanity. (Treatise (Book III Section V)
The remark is made from a position of solidarity (‘our humanity would lead us to it’) which already represents a widening of natural sympathy to human beings generally and it is from this perspective that Hume criticises indifference as wanting the natural sentiments of humanity since such indifference afflicts the miserable. But it is out of the formation of such an educated sense of common human experience that the possibility of human solidarity begins to form, as when one starts to recognise one’s own adversity as an instance of human affliction. To put it another way, to see oneself as one person among others is a moral achievement rather than a demand of rationality. Sympathy , however, is not enough.
Now Williams claims that the idea of the intrinsic worth of a human being cannot be merely ‘pragmatic’. I take him to mean that such a notion makes no sense as a matter of policy or strategy, for instance, that might be altered if our interests change and it becomes an inconvenient burden. He also says that the grounds cannot be ‘immanent’, a term he doesn’t explain in his interview, but which I take to imply that the notion cannot simply be left ungrounded, as when we might say, this is just what we do, this is our practice, it is self evident that human rights are sacred, and so forth. What he is saying, rather, is that love is the source of the dignity we accord any human being. Williams is not talking about sympathy or solidarity here, but refers to God’s love, and I think this is instructive and helpful, as introducing an additional and necessary dimension which, however, I should prefer not to treat theistically:
I think morality ultimately needs the notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this means understanding all human beings without exception as the objects of an equal, unswerving, unconditional love.

This position seems to come close to Graham’s—morality needs a transcendent source of value—a notion of the sacred—and for the Christian this is the unconditional love of God … if you are not a believer you need some other notion of the sacred, some other notion of what would constitute a transcendent source of value. What is there to commend itself to a non-theistic humanist in this position?
It is worth pointing out that there is indeed a non-theistic analogue of this claim, in the sense of a perspective on humanity—in the form of the Bodhisattva who weeps in compassion for the state of suffering humanity. It is important to repeat that this is not an instance of human solidarity, which is a matter of a sympathetic response to fellow human beings rather than compassion for the state of humanity as such. This looks as though it is a perspective on humanity from a position beyond it, an idea suggestive of some kind of ‘transcendence’. (The Buddhist version of ‘love’, metta or loving-kindness, expresses itself as mudita or sympathetic joy when it encounters well being and karuna or compassion when it encounters suffering or distress).
But isn’t a secular thinker going to look askance at this implied claim that their passion for justice, say, ‘needs the notion of the sacred’? I think that they might want to reply that ‘morality’ understood as moral action needs a source—precisely the passion for justice, they may say, and may go on to say that we can dispense with the idea of the ‘sacred’, though someone may want to say, perhaps, that this passion is ‘sacred’. Some people may use this term to register our proximity to that whose loss would destroy our humanity. But wouldn’t it be a mistake to regard, say, the passion for justice as the candidate here? Is there not an additional dimension which makes sense of the passion for justice, the compassion of the Bodhisattva, for instance, which drives that passion? In that case it is this self-conscious vision of what it is to be a human being at all and the perspective on humanity, whose loss is to be feared. The fear of such a loss is the fear of our losing what may be regarded as most precious—not a self-regarding, individualist fear but a moral fear about the loss of a perspective in whose absence humanity would destroy itself.
What is crucial here is the idea of humanity as a possible object of attention in the first place. we are familiar with the mythological representations which provide the means of looking at humanity from afar, as it were, whether this is the archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas whose gaze and intervention is incorporated into the Wheel of Life which turns around the greed, hatred and delusion of humanity, or the Olympian gods looking down satirically, though sometimes with concern, on the dealings of human beings, or the God of Genesis regarding the waywardness of his own creation. All of these represent ways in which humanity becomes an object of attention for us, an object of attention from a perspective that regards us with love and concern. So that we can come to ‘love’ humanity, see the humanity that we are part of, with an attitude of love, pity, compassion for the human struggle, for the conflicted human animal, for the species that is destroying itself, and so forth.
I suggest that in this perspective we have a source of morality—or at least, one way of understanding it is as humanity regarding itself from a position beyond what we might call the state of nature—humanity regarding the turmoil of the all too human world. The way we understand Hume’s talk of ‘wanting the natural sentiments of humanity’ is instructive here since it has a double aspect. On the one hand we can feel sympathy for someone on the wrong end of this indifference, who is adversely affected; but we can also feel pity for mankind and its progress, vitiated by the prevalence of its indifference and cruelty, and so forth—a compassionate diagnosis of our condition which, as such, is the object of a particular kind of distress whose disposition is to intervene.
These representations of humanity come from a position ‘beyond’ it as it were and from a perspective of which it is largely unaware, from the point of view of which, however, humanity needs to be ‘saved’ from itself. But the ‘beyond’ is of course misleading. The perspective depends upon a capacity I have already mentioned, that of seeing the universal in the particular, seeing the particular as representative—so that we can suddenly stand back from some tribal skirmish, say, and see the epitome of human folly, the pity of war.
What Williams says puts him in a position of dialogue with this non-theistic humanism. He does after all talk about understanding all human beings as the objects of unconditional love. What we can share is the vision of, the brief participation in, such a fugitive perspective, and the common task of embodying it in a naughty world. Now it is natural to take his comments as a form of the assertion (the ‘faith claim’) that we are all God’s creatures and that each of us is the object of an enduring divine love. But Williams doesn’t quite make this traditional claim, or at least not explicitly, and it is this reticence that puts him in dialogue. The explicit reference to deity is omitted. Disagreement would arise at the point at which those of us who are non-theistic humanists would take the view that the faith claim that we are all the creatures of a loving God is one, culturally determined, expression of a vision, aspects of which can be shared. I emphasise the word ‘vision’ because what we have here, whether it is contemplation of the wonder of the world or of the universal in the particular, is a rare, fugitive experience of a nevertheless potent perspective inhabited briefly by exemplary human beings whose representations of that vision have entered the written and oral traditions, influencing the forms of culture and language, including the forms of expression of practical imperatives that derive from the perspective but which are in competition with the instincts and imperatives of our ‘lower’ nature, the gredd, hatred and delusion that keep the Wheel of Life turning.
Humanism can share aspects of this vision, though they may prefer other forms of imaginative representation than those of the traditional scriptures. But it seems to me that reference to the vision or the perspective thus disclosed is a conceptual necessity.
We might talk, in shorthand, as Richard Norman has done, about the ideal of universal benevolence that we have inherited from Christian and other traditions. And we might add that the ideal has generally been expressed in the midst of the countervailing forces of tyranny and arbitrary power. Against this background, in the midst of which the ideal is conceived and into which it is thrown, talk of universal benevolence sounds both benign and bloodless, lacking battle experience as it were, and as a phrase it fails to catch the passionate note which belongs to its barely heard and self-sacrificing presence in our bloody histories—Christ before Pilate is the enduring image of the meeting of spiritual and worldly power. So we need to make a distinction between this perspective on humanity and the ‘love of humanity’ that Dmitry Karamazov refers to:
But how can he be virtuous without God? That’s the question. For whom will he love then? Man, that is … Rakitin says that one can love humanity without God. Well, only a little snivelling half-wit can maintain that. I can’t understand it.
I imagine that part of the point of this dismissive gesture is that to a believer like Mitya engaged in his own spiritual struggle, it must look like an attenuation and parody of the great commandment of the New Testament, whose spirit subverts the whole idea of commandment—to love God with your whole strength and to love your neighbour as yourself. The energy, as it were, goes into loving God and the love of the neighbour is an expression, a natural outflowing of this. Or at least it is if we conceive loving God as participating in the life of love that constitutes his nature. In its absence the love of the neighbour must appear effete and ungrounded, nerveless and abstract, since it has lost its driving, motivating force. But perhaps there is a clue here and the scepticism is itself suspect.
It insinuates that love of the neighbour could not become the commanding passion of subjectivity. Nevertheless, if we are to talk about a passion in such terms then we need an objective correlative in the form of a representation of humanity that makes it an intelligible object of that passion, so that love of the neighbour continues to be an expression, but of a love of humanity that sees it for what it is, and sees it with compassion, a commanding perspective that reveals the plight of the neighbour—as a member, like ourselves of a self-conscious species, riven by division and inner conflict, which needs to be saved from its own excesses, is capable of cruel tyranny and heroic self-sacrifice.
This is a God’s eye or Bodhisattva’s view of humanity: a species in need of salvation, a conception of it as a whole and from a great height, from a position beyond it, a view imbued with pity and delight. But these high attitudes, once refracted in the dense obscuring light of human life, express themselves in our evaluations of and responses to human conduct—including our own. The perspective on humanity is one thing, but if it compels action it needs to find forms of expression in the transformation of the human community, saving ourselves. This necessary duality of perspective, the global vision and the immersion in action, may be one of the insights that a non-theist may find in the myth of the Incarnation. How does the pity for the human world express itself in the world, make its voice heard. Seeing the plight of humanity God sends his only begotten son into the world … the world knew him not, and so on … and even the Olympian gods were sometimes oved to intervene in human folly, the Buddha draws quiet attention to the diagnosis and the remedy.
We are at once capable of this vision and go on to act in the world in ways that reflect or neglect it, with Jesus as the exemplar or ideal embodiment of a life and mind wholly ordered by this vision and impulse of sacrificial love. However, the picture is of a human duality that ‘morality’ both confronts and represents in its own language. It has to be added that the representations of this vision, the forms of its reception, coming into the world, are perverted by virulent movements that appropriate this language to their own ends; and that it can become an oppressive ideological tool.
I can see, then, that a Christian might want to say that to the extent that we live this kind of life we participate, although imperfectly, in the life of God, and that loving God is this participation, whose natural expression is love of the neighbour. And to this extent they will want to say that God’s love for his creation is the transcendent source of value. What a humanist can find here is a more muted form of transcendence: this perspective is rarely achieved and is usually beyond the horizon of, even as it is the condition of, recognisably moral evaluations.
Those of us whose thinking is secular or at least non-theistic have the same evanescent experience of or access to this revelatory perspective on humanity and the conceptual point is that to the extent that it has been culturally received, it determines a recognisably moral outlook and sense of justice. We can call this a source of value if we like.
Seeing love as the source makes good sense of moral scepticism in the spirit of the hard men of the Republic, who do not think in these terms. Someone who demands to know why they shouldn’t use violence to achieve their ends is not, as was sometimes claimed by philosophers, ignorant of the meaning of their own words but, rather, express their alienation from and contempt towards the evaluation that is inscribed in the language. You might say they don’t understand the real nature of the evaluation. The point here is that we should not be thinking of this fundamental perspective as embodied or active in any particular individual or set of individuals: they may be wanting in the natural sentiments of humanity, and unaware of or contemptuous of the spirit of Hume’s description. Its penetration into human life is variable, unstable, ‘fragile’. What does have to be assumed, however, and this is a feature of the intrinsic dignity we have referred to, is a capacity for responsiveness in these terms. The idea of a moral appeal is an appeal to care, to love, embedded in the culture (it has ‘taken’) but the appeal is to an individual, is made by someone on behalf of someone to someone else. As an appeal it seeks a response that it may not find. But the form of the appeal is crucial because it shows the connection with love. It is not to the fact of a requirement or a prohibition, or to the rightness or wrongness of an action, but is rather made by or on behalf of someone in terms of how they are to be affected. The action or restraint that is called for, in other words, is for someone’s sake. If we were to talk of sympathy here we should recall that sympathy is precisely for someone and towards remedial action. It does not engage abstractly with ‘distress’ but with ‘someone’ who is in distress.
6
I have to acknowledge that these reflections are inchoate and theologically unsophisticated. But they are intended as an opening of a conversation, on the part of a non-theistic humanist, a Buddhist, with religious thinkers who have challenged the coherence or ultimate feasibility of an absolute conception of ethics without a transcendent or supernatural grounding. I take that challenge as the expression of an honest anxiety about the consequences of a failure to understand the world aright, as it were. That is a matter for serious conversation, not for cheap polemic. What I have sought to make sense of as a necessary aspect of what we call morality is the translation of pity for the world into the way that such pity might express itself in the world. Moral philosophers tend not to discuss such topics, leaving it to the theologians, but it seems to me that if we can indeed make sense of the idea of pity for the world then our thinking needs to be incarnational, at least in the sense that we need to arrive in our own world and save ourselves from further disaster.
St Tredwell’s House
Papa Westray
Orkney, UK
KW17 2BU
mcghee@liv.ac.uk
[1] http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2010/09/17/papal-visit-2010-the-popes-speech-in-westminster-hall-full-text/
[2] Haldane, J. 2010. Reasonable Faith. Abingdon, Routledge, p 4f
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/07/interview-religious-human
[4] Graham, G. 2009. ‘Religion and Theology’ in Cornwell, J & McGhee, M. (eds) Philosophers and God, London, Continuum, p 229
[5] Ibid p 228
[6] Ibid p 230
[7] Dostoyevsky, F. (1880) trans Magarshack, D. 1958. The Brothers Karamazov. Volume 2. Harmonsworth, Penguin, p 695 (Part Four Book 11)
[8] Ibid p 691

2010-11-01T15:40:00.002Z

It is a long time since I recorded any thoughts on this blog ... I may have more time now that I have finally 'retired'. I am certainly glad to be free of the often absurd burdens of administration in the higher education sector, to be free of its institutional anxieties and tiresome neuroses. On the other hand, I miss teaching, which I enjoyed.

I wrote something for a Guardian discussion a couple of weeks ago, about whether a university can have a soul .... Meanwhile I have undertaken a salutary exercise, copying out by hand a series of recently published papers which I want to form into a book length study of the idea of philosophy and its relation to religion and spirituality.

Once you start to write out what was once a finished piece it becomes fluid again, and you see what was tentative and what was wrong and, occasionally, what makes good sense. The other advantage is that you gain a panoramic view of a set of preoccupations that are not as it were finished with you, you see yourself circling round the same points, again and again, see the same metaphors at work, the same dependence on a key phrase or trope ...

There are six rams in the garden, obligingly munching away at the grass ... three Shetlands, a Texel and a couple of Suffolks.

2010-06-20T19:53:00.002+01:00

Here is a link from the Facebook page of the Cardiff Humanist Group. It is by Julian Bennett:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=33780953675&topic=14097

It is probably a bit obsessive on my part to go on about the issue of Belief, but I am struggling to get something right, to not misrepresent what we call religious belief, which is not the same as being blandly uncritical. Anyway, here is my response below, which Julian has seen:

The main thing for me is to get a clear sense of what is really involved in theism and to avoid misrepresentations of it. This is not of course the same as ‘defending’ it, as I’m sure you will agree. On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get a clear sense of what an accurate representation might be, I find the work difficult.

I was disappointed that so many people took me to be saying that someone could believe in God without believing that there is a God when in fact I was questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right category, whether that there is a God is the proper object of a belief.

Now questioning whether ‘belief’ is the right epistemological category is not to rule out theological realism, so isn’t by itself reductionist and certainly doesn’t imply that the alternative is ‘commitment to a way of talking’. This latter is pretty sub-Wittgensteinian in my view, even worse than ‘commitment to a way of thinking’: commitment is a matter of making a decision and I don’t believe a person chooses how they (should) think.

Anyway, the crucial part of what you wrote, as far as I am concerned, is the gloss you put on my alternative suggestion, that believers (come to) conceive or see the world as contingent etc., Your gloss on ‘conceive’ is in brackets: ‘aka believe that’.

First, though, notice that I just referred to ‘believers’. I use that term to refer to those in the Abrahamic tradition, where to be a believer is to trust in God or Jesus or the Prophet or whatever.

I think that the way we have come to reflect upon what we call ‘religious belief’ sits uneasily between this form of discourse (which naturally tends towards talk of commitment and choice because it is about trust and fidelity) and that of empirical inquiry. Critics and defenders of ‘religion’ alike generally seem to me to bring that language of trust and fidelity to bear upon this disputable notion of belief that there is a God and at this point most critics and some defenders of religion also assimilate this to the language of hypothesis formation. The defenders say it is all about committing yourself; the critics say, how can you talk like that when we need evidence. (Some defenders probably say, well we talk about commitment because there is no evidence; others say, well there is evidence, and so it goes on, interminably). And of course there is no evidence, but to think that there should be is an intellectual error. And no one gets away with anything. My point is that we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of belief here at all. ‘Archaeologists now believe that Stonehenge was a centre of healing’. This is a hypothesis that needs to be tested, they need to find evidence to see whether what they believe is actually true or to be rejected: and so they start digging. We can understand this readily enough. That isn’t the whole story about belief but it is a good part of it, and the obvious point is that this archaeological enterprise depends upon an epistemological context of inquiry with a whole series of presuppositions already written in. The religious viewpoint doesn’t lack all this, as though it ought to have all this background. I’d say it is a different game, but you might say, I knew he was a Wittgensteinian! This is why it is more appropriate to think of it in terms of conceiving the world, or, even better, as deriving from a leap of religious imagination. Now this is not to deny that this conception has ‘cognitive content’ or that it can be expressed in terms of particular propositions, but a proposition is not the same as a belief, even though some propositions can be believed. I wanted to say that it is a matter of conceiving the world as contingent, etc., rather than forming a hypothesis about the world or about some higher existence. It is an act of imagination that comes from contemplating the world as a whole. Now forming a hypothesis is also of course an act of imagination, but it is a matter of a conjecture of how things might be in the world, which we can then find out. The leap of religious imagination is seeing the world itself as the handiwork of God, or as God’s gift, or whatever.

As to realism: as far as the believer is concerned it seems to me that the phenomenology is, as it were, one of ‘disclosure’. The image of the spirit of God moving over the waters presents itself in the form of a revelation of how things really are. There is no ‘evidence’ for this, nor is it therefore ‘arbitrary’—as it would be if there ought to be evidence. The crucial thing, though, is that it conceives the world as a whole in the first place. But to talk of disclosure or revelation does not amount to any form of endorsement of the content of the vision. All the believer can say here, it seems to me, is that this is my faith, and it comes from a transformative moment. A realist is someone who takes it that statements about God are true or false, and this quite independently of our powers of verification. But there is no such thing as verification in this context. All the believer has is the vision and if we talk of commitment at all then it would be a matter of committing oneself to keeping the vision alive, say.

Those of us who do not share this vision can at least see that it is just that—a vision that presents itself as a disclosure. The interest for us then is what it seems to secure for believers: we want to know their conception of justice, etc. And, as you say, they have the intractable problem of evil to deal with.

Guardian Comment is Free

2010-05-28T17:29:00.002+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/28/theology-philosophy-theodicy

2010-05-18T12:37:00.000+01:00

Lord Jim's Dad

2010-05-18T10:25:00.002+01:00

I'm getting round to thinking about an essay on the theme of religion and morality. I'm supposed to provide a Buddhist perspective ... Coincidentally, though, I have been reading Conrad's Lord Jim, a sobering novel when it is not terrifying. Here first, though, is a sentence from Conrad which must effectively set the scene:

Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings (Conrad)

Near the end of Lord Jim Marlow writes to a friend explaining the contents of a package he has sent him. It includes an old letter from Jim’s father, who was a country parson. Marlow says of Jim:

He had treasured it all those years. The good old parson fancied his sailor-son. I’ve looked in at a sentence here and there. There is nothing in it except just affection. He tells his ‘dear James’ that the last long letter from him was very ‘honest and entertaining’. He would not have him ‘judge men harshly or hastily’. There are four pages of it, easy morality and family news … the old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his dear James’ will never forget those ‘who once given way to temptation in the very instant hazards his total depravity and ever-lasting ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong’

Marlow remarks that this letter was never answered but

who can say what converse he may have held with all those placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger and strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so many things ‘had come’. Nothing ever came to them, they would never be taken unawares and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they are all evoked by the mild gossip of the father … gazing with clear unconscious eyes …

I suppose Jim's father is not the exemplar I would propose for an account of the relationship of morality and religion. The 'serenity', the 'equability' and so on go with the inviolable shelter. It is that and the 'clear unconscious gaze' that is frightening. If I have been there, it has always also been with a sense of something stirring beyond the periphery, a sense of foreboding ... Marlow is perhaps not entirely just but, he sees the old parson from a position unavailable to him and his offspring, Jim's siblings. He knows just what they are unaware of and what makes them unaware. These people are also in Plato's Cave, but to leave the cave is in effect to be expelled from Eden ...

2010-04-26T23:08:00.003+01:00

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's Face to Faith column the other day:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/17/this-tedious-fixation-on-belief

Perhaps it was a strategic error: with such a small word limit one can only offer an impression, cannot spell things out or correct misunderstandings. Perhaps it is the start of a conversation, though.

I found this entry in a blog by Norman Geras:
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/04/me-and-michael-mcghee.html

Norman seems to think that I am telling people that they can believe in God without believing that there is a God, and he is surely right to dismiss such a position. He says, moreover, that I ‘out-Armstrong [Karen] Armstrong’, though I have not read her on these issues and so cannot comment on this. I take it that what he has in mind is a facile non-realism of some sort, though whether she is guilty of that I have yet to investigate.

In fact what I was trying to communicate was the thought that there is a distinction between 'believing in God' (the Abrahamic venture of trusting God) and 'believing that there is a God'. Thus Abrahamic trust is not itself a matter of believing that there is a God.

Indeed I was casting doubt on the good sense of this latter notion, which some have said is a philosophical construct. But to cast doubt on this notion is to cast doubt on the idea of a belief that there is or that there isn’t a God. Now this is to imply that whatever our view of the existence of God it is not a matter of believing something. The trouble is that talk of belief has a particular conceptual identity within empirical discourse but also another conceptual identity within religious discourse and it seems to me that we confuse them.

This will irritate some people, who will want to say that believing that God exists is surely implied or presupposed by believing in God's Word ... and they are likely to go on to say that we need to justify this existential claim before we can be said to be justified in 'believing in God's word'—if believers can’t prove this existential claim then their faith is ‘blind’.

(It might be worth saying here that I am not seeking to 'defend' religious belief or to ‘immunise it against criticism’ (the identikit picture of ‘the Wittgensteinian approach’). It seems to me, however, that we need an accurate account of the phenomena and if we are non-believers we should be clear about what it is we seek to deny): we should give the Devil his due, but also God.

What I have suggested as an alternative is that the believer conceives (or comes to conceive) the world as contingent upon a transcendent creative agency.

Thus they do not, for instance, form a belief that there is a transcendent being, and then conclude that the world must be dependent upon his creative activity. Nor, pace many theistic philosophers, do they conclude that the world must be contingent, and that therefore it must be contingent upon a transcendent agency.

It is rather that they see or come to see the world as a limited whole … dependent upon a transcendent cause—which is to express philosophically what is represented pictorially in various scriptures. The point about this is that it amounts to (conversion to) a total vision of the world itself, a vision of how things are that is ungrounded but which is experienced as compelling assent.

This conception of things is not a hypothesis to explain the way things are, nor do I think that it offers an explanation of why there is anything rather than nothing. It seems to me by contrast that it arises in the context of the experience of wonder at the beauty of the world and the image of the creative artist is taken as an intimation of a truth. However, those who respond in terms of this vision must then confront it with the more dreadful aspects of nature, including our human nature, which is to say, the problem of evil rears its head again. Indeed all the familiar problems apply. How can we verify such a claim, how can we know that it is true? Well we can’t know that it is true, and it cannot be verified, is beyond the scope of any possible verification. But it doesn’t follow that it is an arbitrary vision or that it is blind. As for the latter a ‘belief’ is blind only if there are reasons for or against it that are disregarded. Some believers will want to insist that this vision represents a metaphysical commitment, and that does not seem to me to be particularly problematic. It doesn’t get us any further than denying, rightly, that we are involved in an anti-realist position here. Things go wrong, however, when believers try to insist that they are right (which is slightly different from insisting that they have a conception of how things are). One thing more, this is not a belief about the world, it is rather a world picture, a picture within the terms of which beliefs may be framed, and it is also important to note that the form that conversion to this picture, this conception, takes is that of submission or worship. Yes, it is a conception of how things are, that the world and humanity is dependent upon a creative power beyond our conception .. There follow, of course, all the virtues and vices of what we know about organised religion: which is why I referred to our treacherous and mutual duality .... As a secular humanist there are believers I can as it were do business with and others who are beyond any dialogue I could think of myself as having.

However, some theists wish to tie morality to this conception of the world’s contingency upon a divine being. It seems to me, though, that the sense of a brooding care for the world which is imaged by the idea of a divine being that sees that its creation is ‘good’ comes from a profound contemplative sense just of the world as a whole, a vision which itself must now contend with our inner duality, our divided self.

This is an attempt to represent what it is to think theistically. I don’t think in these terms myself … and maybe believers will tell me that I have got it all quite wrong. But my complaint about the tedious fixation on belief is that it is a conversation that is almost completely sterile and that real dialogue has to be about the interior conditions of action.

*******************
Here is an extended version of what I have been trying to say

Spirituality for the godless
Michael McGhee
University of Liverpool

1. How to be spiritual without being religious

‘Godless’ was never a neutral term: in 1528 William Tindale talked of ‘godlesse ypocrites and infidels’ and a ‘godless generation’ is one that has turned its back on God and the paths of righteousness. An atheist, by contrast, a new and self-conscious atheist perhaps, might now wear the term as a badge of pride, to indicate their rejection both of belief and the implication of moral turpitude. Traditionally, though, those who declared themselves ‘atheist’ had a hardly better press than the ‘godlesse’, since ‘atheism’ was and in some cases still is considered a form of intellectual and moral shallowness: thus Sir Francis Bacon offers a bluff refinement of the Psalmist’s verdict on the fool who says in his heart that there is no God:
The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so he rather saith it, by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it.

In these sentences from his essay On Atheism Bacon expresses the irritated commonsense one associates with a certain kind of believer, who cannot take non-belief quite seriously, but treats it as a kind of wishful thinking or self-deception. Bacon, however, goes further: ‘as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty’.
I shall in what follows speak up for the secular humanist project and defend it against the charge of shallowness and the charge that it leaves us without the resources to overcome our human frailty—though I shall also suggest that the plausibility of the defence depends upon the appropriation of some of the phenomena covered by the term ‘spirituality’. This may seem at first sight incompatible with the project, which is to develop and promote a conception of ethics independently of religious belief, and surely, it will be said, ‘spirituality’ cannot be disentangled from such belief since it has to do with our relationship with God or the things of the spirit—though the clue to what can be retrieved lies in the implicit opposition, viz., with the things of the world or the flesh: an opposition which reveals an ethical estimate of two ways of living from the point of view of one of them. I wish to recommend the notion as a repository of wisdom and experience as we seek to understand and confront the conflicted moral condition which gave rise to that distinction between spirit, world and flesh in the first place. Some secularists have a faintly absurd antipathy to anything that sounds ‘religious’ and may react against my suggestion. Such reactivity, though, is to be found also in their opponents, and it would be unfortunate if all believers and non-believers had in common was an unjust and inaccurate estimate of each other’s position. If dialogue between believers and non-believers is to prosper, then it must be premised on the correction of false perceptions.

ii

The opening verses of Genesis draw on the imagery of artistic production and appreciation and convey a judgment of artistic success. They draw on our experience of the moment when the artist knows their work is achieved and loves it as their offspring—God saw that what he had made was good. But the image of an artist or creator expresses a sense of wonder and delight in the earth’s beauty and, crucially, in the original beauty and innocence of humanity. This sense of wonder, at the earth and at ourselves, takes the imaginative form of delight in what the artist has created and represents the impulse of protective care towards it—towards humanity and the earth. It is the sense expressed in Blake’s thought that ‘everything that lives is holy’. The verses express, but also promote, a common but fugitive human experience, that of inclusive love and benevolence, and this universal sense becomes the half-remembered measure of moral endeavour. It is the felt Sorge that motivates the diverse phenomena that we collect under the term ‘morality’, an experience of the moral sentiments in their universal expression. Now it is certainly true that this is a suspect way of talking—‘he loves humanity but doesn’t like people’—but, as I shall suggest in the conclusion, this inclusiveness or universality may be expressed in and precipitated by the particular, and doesn’t so much embrace all as any. Nevertheless, and this is really our theme, there is a gulf between the acknowledgment, even the love, of the ideal or measure, and the ability to live by that standard.
These moral sentiments are not only independent of ‘religious belief’, but they inform its narratives, and, in the case of the theistic traditions, therefore, have determined (changes in) how God has been conceived in those narratives, both in terms of what he commands and what he sanctions, as exemplified in the familiar difference in conception between the wrathful Jehovah and the ‘still small voice’. Some theists may want to say that we have over time come to a better understanding of God’s will because he has disclosed it gradually and according to our lights, but secularists will simply note the moral improvement enshrined in how that will has been conceived.
In any case, that we describe the moral sentiments as ‘moral’ in the first place indicates our cultural approval of them, and it will be asked what the grounds of that approval might be. It is not as though we exist as a neutral consciousness impartially judging the merits of opposing tendencies: we find, rather, that we have already taken sides. Our approval seems to rest in this underlying but evanescent attitude of inclusive benevolence which I suggested informed the opening of Genesis. It is a fundamental orientation that is, however, often overlain, though its bass note is audible even when most muffled or distant, in the form of disquiet or remorse. I would call it a primal and ungrounded moral vision or perspective, an internal moral ideal, a conscience, perhaps, though I use that term with caution since ‘conscience’ is liable to manipulation and perversion, particularly by what John Buchan called dogmatic enthusiasm, and by creeds that attract (because they express) intemperate mentalities in conflict with this moral ideal. Certainly we cannot give an account of the moral sentiments independently of critical scrutiny of their proposed intentional objects—and the moral sentiments are not, alas, the only human sentiments or impulses to inform the scriptural narratives.
But if we have already taken sides, what are we to make of the idea of metanoia or moral conversion? Surely this is the idea of a ¬re-orientation from a life of crime, as it were, and towards the good. In one sense this is right—in the sense that it represents a self-conscious renunciation of the inner forces that stand in the way of the good, a renunciation motivated by concern for the good, not as an abstract entity, however, but in the sense of concern to avoid the harm and damage one finds oneself doing. The metaphor of the ‘still small voice’ is an apt representation of the phenomenology. Metanoia represents a moment of self-conscious commitment and renunciation that strengthens an orientation that is already in place and is its motivating force. This commitment is activated by the vivid sense of what is endangered by what needs therefore to be renounced. To put it another way, and to draw on diverse sources, metanoia takes the form of a commitment to the processes of self-overcoming or inner jihad—commitment, in other words, to the disciplines of a spiritual life.
To use the language of the state of nature, human beings are capable of sympathy, benevolence and generosity of spirit, though these are limited in scope and force by contending impulses of cruelty, vindictiveness and the ruthless pursuit of power and territory at the expense of others. The antagonism between these fundamental attitudes is also part of the scriptural narrative, though as we shall see the narrative often enough compounds what its history has also sought to resolve. Nevertheless it is a narrative that has plenty to recommend it to humanists since it represents the progress of moral struggle, and spirituality is as it were a body of knowledge that treats of the contours and limits of that struggle. As I have already indicated, and to reassure the more suspicious secularists, the moral sentiments, albeit in contention with our darker nature, are not only independent of religious belief but also inform it, so that religion might be thought of as in debt to morality rather than the reverse.

iii

However, there are two things that the promoters of a humanist ethic would quite rightly dissociate themselves from. The first is that form of allegedly ‘religious’ consciousness and practice which reflects, reinforces and seeks to justify conduct that flows from the dark side of our nature . Recent secularist writers have done this emphatically, but have tended, with a lamentable absence of critical judgment, to tar all religion with the same brush. The second is those ‘moral beliefs’ or ‘moral convictions’ that are determined by credal beliefs or ‘metaphysical commitments’. Needless to say, certain creeds, particularly those which operate with a simple-minded cosmogony, can so represent things that an act of torture becomes a sort of higher kindness and requires one to ‘overcome’ the natural human sentiments even as they appeal to them—they appeal to them, but alter and pervert their objects. One needs to make a distinction here. Humanists would not wish to be associated with a certain kind of justificatory theology or metaphysics even though it endorses moral positions that they hold independently. But nor would they associate themselves with casuistic moral beliefs that are determined by a particular theological or metaphysical position. One thinks for instance of the alleged (but not often self-ascribed) ‘objective disorder’ of homosexuality, and of certain other precise delineations of sexual and reproductive ethics that one associates with the official teaching of the Catholic Church, and to which a rhetoric of moral sentiment is often attached, even though the objects of these sentiments are metaphysically determined and remote.
There is another side to this story, however. In the first instance, ‘being religious’ is quite obviously not all one thing and the resources for a critique of its malformations are available within the history of the traditions themselves, as we have seen and as evinced in Buchan’s wry remarks about the Seventeenth Century Kirk—available even if they are occluded or perverted in certain cultural and political contexts (giving rise to protests and reactions later recognised as ‘movements of renewal’). But even religiously-minded people who would join in the secularist repudiation of religious zealotry will complain that secularists who express admiration for some of the moral teachings of the Bible can in the nature of the case appropriate those teachings only in an incomplete form, and that it is an error to minimise the sharp differences between secularists and ‘people of faith’. It is indeed an error, but there is plenty of common ground, if not about what ultimately constitutes human well being, at least about the justice of striving to establish and maintain the conditions for the possibility of any kind of flourishing at all, and if secularists do not share the hope of eternal life and the conquering of death, they will also note the promise that such a life can be tasted here.
There is, then, a moral content independent of ‘metaphysical commitment’ and ‘religious belief’ that plays an original and determining role in the formation of religious narrative and theology, and is not their outcome—and this notwithstanding the pitiless vein of Realpolitik that also runs through the scriptures, and sometimes distorts and sometimes overwhelms the moral vision. But the articulation and expression of this moral vision requires an account of the conditions for its fulfilment, conditions which are both interior and intersubjective, and I suggest that the concept of spirituality belongs to such an account. Now, the same religiously-minded people who insist that secularists can only partially appropriate the New Testament message will also routinely charge them with a ‘shallow’ and optimistic view of human nature and the possibilities of human progress. This criticism is well-deserved in some cases. It applies to certain polemical writers who have expended their intellectual energies in the refutation of belief and are then too tired or ill-equipped to offer more than a glad gesture towards a glorious future. Nevertheless, the moral vision that the older generation of secular humanists endorsed is precisely a humanist one in its passion for justice and its condemnation of hypocrisy and corruption. But, to return to the issue of spirituality, the humanist movement needs not only to re-endorse this defining moral vision, but also to take seriously the reality of a divided self by incorporating an account of the kind I have just mentioned of the conditions for the fulfilment of that vision.

iv

In his Treatise (Book III Section V) David Hume remarks that
Tho’ there was no obligation to relieve the miserable, our humanity would lead us to it; and when we omit that duty, the immorality of the omission arises from its being a proof, that we want the natural sentiments of humanity.

Hume makes the want of these ‘natural sentiments of humanity’ an object of moral criticism and you might think that he relies in that case on what appears to be the moral judgment that we ought to have them. I have elsewhere tried to defend the view that this kind of ought judgment is an epistemic rather than a practical one—roughly, ‘being possessed of certain sentiments’ describes a condition rather than an action, and there is a shift in the logic of ought as it applies to the two kinds of case. A practical ought judgment is one which implies that there is a reason to do something, whereas an epistemic ought judgment is one which implies that there is a reason to believe something. In the present case the judgment that someone ought to have the ‘natural sentiments of humanity’ implies that there is reason to believe that they will have them, on the grounds that human beings generally do. To have this expectation, though, is relatively naïve since experience shows us all too well that human beings often don’t. But it still makes sense in the face of their absence to insist that they ought to be there—and we thus imply that there must be a special explanation of their absence—and indeed we are usually ready to offer such explanations, usually of a psycho-social nature. But the tone of these judgments depends upon disappointed empirical expectations which have a practical impact—if someone lacks these sentiments then they are dangerous or frightening. There are probably only very few who want these natural sentiments entirely, but we now know well enough how easily they are subverted and overlain or stifled, and not simply by ‘selfishness’ which we have traditionally thought of as the natural contrary of benevolence or sympathy. As we now know a bureaucratic conscientiousness as well as deference to voices of authority can cancel these sentiments in the sense that they cancel awareness of what naturally attracts their attention, and have disastrous consequences for human well-being.
But the idea of ‘having’ or ‘possessing’ the moral sentiments is ambiguous. One can have them in the sense that at least intermittently they provide a perspective on the world, or one can have them in the sense that they dominate consciousness and action in their light flows naturally and without effort. The transition from the one state to the other represents the programme for spirituality.
The problem with the moral sentiments has always been their reliability and their scope since if we are naturally benevolent we are also naturally selfish, fearful and deferential and we anyway exhibit in our sympathy a bias to the near. But, as Hume indicates, we are wanting in the natural sentiments of humanity if we are indifferent to the plight of the miserable, whoever they may be. To be moved to act in the presence of human or other animal misery indicates a widening of the scope of the relevant sentiment of sympathy or compassion. Indeed the very idea of universality as a necessary and ‘objective’ component of morality is in reality a reflection of the internal moral ideal that represents our collective memory of protective care such as informs the opening verses of Genesis. The significant point about them from the point of view of spirituality is that the perspective is easily lost and even when lost we are too full of human frailty to act in its light.
As I have said, we don’t stand over against these opposing forces as a neutral consciousness wondering how to choose, but are, rather, constituted by the struggle—and precisely haunted by one pole of the opposition. The sense of the whole and of an inclusive rather than partial benevolence is not a possibility of our nature that stands on all fours with our appetites, for instance. The latter present themselves already in the form of temptations. The sense of the whole expresses an orientation that determines what we take our nature to be and in the light of which we make judgments about what our demeanour in particular circumstances ought to be, and we explain the absence of that demeanour in terms of desires that we count as wayward just to the extent that they are obstacles.

v

It may be helpful here to consider a suggestion made by the Catholic theologian, Nicholas Lash, to the effect that we should think of the various religious traditions as ‘schools’:
…we would do well to think of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of Buddhism and Vedantic Hinduism, not as ‘religions’ but as schools, schools whose pedagogy … ‘has the twofold purpose—however differently conceived and executed in the different traditions—of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire’.

I want to suggest that secular humanism is also a school in this sense, one whose pedagogy would also in that case have ‘the twofold purpose … of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire’. You do not need to be a theist to warn against idolatry, and not all the ‘schools’ mentioned here by Lash are theistic. Theologians and religious leaders often warn us against the worship of false gods, and there is a long tradition, already invoked in this paper, that laments the unconscious propensity of believers to fashion God in their own (unregenerate) image, and it is often just these conceptions of deity that are the target of secularist criticism (though some secularists are justly criticised in turn by theologians who think that the real nature of theism has eluded them). But the notion of idolatry also has a moral content: it involves turning away from the paths of righteousness.
In suggesting that secular humanism is also a school, I imply that it is more than an intellectual position, and humanists in any case think of themselves as involved in a movement defined by its concern for human flourishing. Richard Norman, for instance, has talked of the need to give an account of how we should live, but without religion, and he sees humanism as ‘the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion’. Notice, however, the collision between Norman’s talk of finding the resources within ourselves and Bacon’s complaint that atheism ‘depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty’. We shall have to return to this, though I think the issue turns on an equivocation about what we are calling human nature, about what belongs to our nature and what belongs to ‘the means’ that exalts it above frailty.
The idea of the purification of desire does not present itself in a vacuum and without context. The premise is that unless desire is purified it is inimical to our ends, eclipses our vision, undermines our power of action—the moral notion of purification is predicated on the lived experience of a divided self. This gives us the agenda for the training and ascesis of the spiritual life. In bringing secular humanism into connection with the religious traditions through the common notion of a school I do not seek to assimilate it to religion any more than I should wish to do in the case of the ancient Stoic or Epicurean schools that Lash no doubt draws his inspiration from. But once we take seriously the idea of secular humanism as a movement and as a school, we introduce the notion of the cure of souls, the well being of its members, and all this invites the question whether humanism should see itself, not as a religion among other religions, but at least as a spiritual community (the suggestion is probably too close to the idea of a church or sangha for some humanists to stomach, though it might also give them reason to reconceive such institutions). In any event, I suggest that what we are talking about are schools of spirituality.
For quite different reasons secularists and religionists will resist this term as applied to a humanist movement. But secular humanists can appropriate an operational notion, not only of spirituality, but also of ‘transcendence’, without being committed in either case to religious belief. Both notions can be understood in moral terms, though they also put pressure on our notion of what it is to be moral at all. Transcendence may be understood in the light of our experience of inner conflict and the state of our self-knowledge. This is important because it lies at the heart of doctrines of grace and accusations of humanist pride. Thus we tend to identify ourselves with our familiar ‘unregenerate’ impulses (we make our frailty our nature, if I might contend against Bacon), impulses which determine the horizon within which our attention ranges—and our more regenerate ones are therefore experienced and received as visitations from beyond that horizon, as opposed to being thought of as the promptings of a ‘higher’ but not yet integrated self. This is the point at which believers invoke the notion of grace and Spirit, both of which are attempts, in a theistic setting, to make sense of the phenomena of metanoia, that switch in the balance of forces when we identify with universal and disinterested ends but find that they are not under our conscious control, or part of our conscious repertoire, part of the habitual and therefore effortless formation of our will. Richard Norman’s talk of humanism as ‘the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion’ needs to be qualified by integrating into that conception precisely this experience of transformation as included within what we take our resource to be.
Nicholas Lash is surely correct in his criticism of some talk of ‘spirituality’, and he puts his finger on the reason that makes me at least feel uneasy about using the term at all:
Nor is it surprising that, since the term [religion] nevertheless still carries ancient overtones of public life and conduct, of established norms and practices, many people prefer to describe the games they play in the private playgrounds of Cartesian consciousness not as religion but as “spirituality”.

However, what Lash draws attention to is a profound misunderstanding of the term. Spirituality does not properly belong within a private inner space but has an essentially public application. It relates precisely to ‘public life and conduct’ rather than to a Cartesian consciousness, and, although it is concerned with the development of the conditions for both vision and action, as a moral category it governs the nature of the relationships within and between communities. When St Paul distinguished between the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit he was referring to the sentiments and impulses that governed the conduct of an allegedly exemplary community.

2. How to be godless without being shallow
‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, declares Sir Francis Bacon, as his producer turns down the sound on his Elizabethan cultural perceptions, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind … God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it …’
The atheist will notice the sleight of hand in the invitation to look upon the world as someone’s ‘work’ in the first place, even though, as we have seen, in a contemplative mood a person’s mind might well turn towards the imagery of making, to the image, indeed of a wonderful artist. But the vivacity of an image, and even the state of wonder induced by good story-telling, can mislead us into taking it ‘literally’—and yield what we now call ‘creationism’, though when we say that creationists take the text ‘literally’ we actually mean, I think, that they read it as belonging to the language game of information, historical reportage, rather than as the narrative which is creatively derived from and takes the form of that language game. However, to claim, by contrast, that we are dealing with metaphors and stories does not by itself imply that they are about us as opposed to a transcendental reality, dimly thus apprehended. And so we come to the very edge of the common ground between secularists and believers.
The idea of a maker comes from a movement of the imagination, and to conceive it or hold the image in one’s mind is hardly by itself to be ‘convinced’ that there really is a wonderful artist at work. To return to Bacon, it is this image of ‘work’, mediating between the world and our wonder, rather than the world itself, that might ‘convince’ someone, who might see in it a revelatory symbol of our dependence on God.
Now, in defence of believers, I should want to deny that this kind of conviction is ‘blind’ and I do so because the linguistic stage-setting that would support that adverse judgment is absent. A belief is ‘blind’ when someone holds it without reference to evidence, whether confirming or disconfirming, and the judgment is adverse just because evidential avenues are open and determining. But where we are talking about the world as such rather than about contingent features within the world, then talk of evidence, or indeed of explanation, is misplaced. This is one reason why some philosophers have claimed, without adverse judgment, that such beliefs are ungrounded rather than ‘blind’, though I would myself rather not call them beliefs at all, mostly because of the way we conflate the notion with that of empirical belief and then confuse this with the quite separate notion of ‘trust’.
‘It is true’, Bacon goes on, ‘that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion’:
For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

But is it true that ‘the mind of man’ must ‘fly to Providence and Deity’? I think that the obvious answer is no, and that Bacon fails to see a middle position between his shallow atheist who rests in second causes and the deeper philosopher who flies to Providence and Deity—viz that of someone who beholds the chain of causes confederate and linked together but does not fly to Providence and Deity.
However, the ethical form of the impulse to fly thither can be shared by the atheist. As we have seen, part of the interest of the Creation story is that it presents the Creator in terms that rely on the experience of aesthetic achievement and protective care, a natural widening of the moral sentiments, a universal benevolence. What informs the narrative is, if you like, an ethic of care—except that patriarchy enshrines a contaminated conception of protective care that we have still not overcome. The story embodies a conception of its subject-matter—it expresses an ethical perspective, endorses the providential care that it narrates, and informs us that we are made in the image of the God who extends to us that providential care, and thus commends this attitude to its hearers. It then laments our moral failure, and our tendency to live lives in conflict with this ideal, lives that are destructive and careless rather than creative of this care. The theologian James Mackey has written very powerfully about how the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament together testify to the history of this struggle between the contending impulses of benevolence and ruthlessness—contending impulses with which the history of philosophy is also familiar.
But the particular interest of Mackey’s analysis lies in his insistence that this heterogeneous collection of writings testifies to the progress of these contending impulses in more than one way:—they give expression to and celebrate the original ideal; they record, from the point of view of that ideal, its conflict with our tendency to self-aggrandisement, to use Mackey’s word, but they are also in many places contaminated and overwhelmed by that tendency and its distortions of vision. In other words, the scriptures reveal the divided self, in the sense of exposing it but also in the sense of betraying it.

ii

But now, before reflecting further on spirituality and ethical ideals, I want to say more about the role of wonder in philosophical theism, since the idea of the world as God’s creation is already an imaginative expression of wonder: some god has done this! Bacon’s complaint was that atheists are shallow because they do not press their questions far enough, and this sentiment is frequently echoed by theistic philosophers. But though it might be thought that the very existence of things is as plausible an object of wonder as the suchness of things, wonder at the existence of things does not naturally take the form of or lead to the question why there is anything at all. It is not even clear that the idea of wonder at the existence of things isn’t simply a variant expression for wonder at what exists rather than at that it exists. Wonder at the suchness of things, by contrast, can express itself in the form of the idea of an artist Creator. Theistic faith consists in taking this image as a revelation or intimation of the nature of things. However, it is only in the light of this idea, already formed and furnishing the mind, that it makes sense to raise the question why is there anything at all—and it makes sense to raise it, the question suggests itself, because we now have an answer ready to hand. To someone who is not already a theist, however, it is not obvious that the question is well-formed.
The late Fr Herbert McCabe is associated with a revival of interest in the question—and he certainly thought, in the spirit of Francis Bacon, that it is a failure of rationality not to raise it. Those who pursue this line of inquiry tend to treat the question as though it were the most general form of—and had the same logic as—the question, why are things thus rather than so, where the implication is already that things could have been otherwise, and are as they are because of the nature of the conditions which have given rise to them. But the latter kind of question is raised in the context of, and is predicated upon, an already acknowledged experience of contingency: that things come into existence that might not have done if the conditions had been different, that things fall out in a particular way and we can find an explanation for this by inquiring into the conditions. The significant thing in such cases is that we presume, take ourselves to be justified in assuming, that there is an explanation even if we do not yet know what that explanation is. But such a presumption applied to the existence of the totality of contingent things lacks its original conditions of intelligibility and simply begs the question, though it is the conclusion that the line of questioning invites.
However, I am inclined to think that the real point of this line of questioning is not so much to compel us to a conclusion as to invite us to think in a way congenial to a confession of theistic faith. In other words, it invites us to think the possibility that the totality of contingent things—‘creation’—is contingent upon the activity of a creator, to think the possibility that there might be an explanation even if we cannot assume in advance that there must be. Someone who professes belief in God already sees humanity and the world we live in as dependent creation, as contingent upon God’s sustaining and creative power, but there is no rational failure in not thus flying to Providence and Deity. But, to repeat, whereas in the case of an empirical feature of the world that we seek to explain we presume that there must be an explanation even if we do not know what it is, this presumption is not available to us in the case of the world itself—we cannot presume that there must be an explanation. This does not imply that there isn’t one, but the question is pressed by those who think there is one—but not because they originally asked this question themselves.
A more plausible route to theism derives from wonder at the suchness of things. Thus we might have a sense of wonder at the immensity of the starry heavens or at the loveliness of a meadow in early May, or at the charm of a young child. And the point about the wonder is that it is an experience associated with rejoicing and care. Genesis expresses wonder, not at the existence of things but at the suchness of things, the glory of Creation, and tells of its fashioning. It is a story about how things came to be as they are rather than about how anything came to be at all—specifically a story about how we came to be as we are, and how we became divided and wayward beings. The categories are moral and aesthetic. The story invokes divine agency but does not argue to (the very idea of) a divine agent. In the face of wonder at the beauty of the world the idea of the work of a creative intelligence suggests itself as a natural metaphor, as I said earlier. So, then, what is in favour of Bacon’s claim that God’s ordinary works ‘convince’ atheism?
I have no doubt that the original Genesis story can strike a person with what we call ‘the force of truth’ and change their lives. It does the latter partly because its conception of Deity already embodies a conception of human ideals, and it can awaken or recall the hearer to their deepest impulses. But there are two things here. In certain contemplative moods the image of a maker naturally suggests itself, and might do so for anyone because we are naturally anthropomorphic. But, as I just suggested, it can also strike someone as a revelation or intimation of the ultimate nature of things.
I use the phrase ‘strike with the force of truth’ to imply that for those who are struck in this way, the story, at least initially, compels assent and this is what is called ‘Faith’—which is also the natural arena of religious doubt. Those who struggle with this doubt struggle precisely with whether what was received as a revelation is genuinely so. However, the reference to an assent that is ‘compelled’ implies that there is no voluntarism involved here (as distinct from the theological virtue of ‘belief in God’ that consists in an attitude of trust in God’s saving power). The story impresses itself upon someone as a revelation of how things are, whether it is understood as a mythopoeic or symbolic representation of the providential care of an eternal being, or, more naively, as a likeness of what it represents. Thus, if I might repeat my earlier remarks about ‘blind’ belief—it might be objected that just because something strikes you as true it doesn’t follow that it is true! That is surely right, but the model invoked by the objector is that of a hunch about a particular, contingent feature of the world that actually stands in need of independent verification, and where this necessity is being disregarded. But there is no such empirical context here, only an ungrounded vision of the world seen as a whole. I do not share this vision, but calling it a vision, or a picture’, does not imply that it cannot be a revelation of how things ultimately are—but ‘faith’ is the bottom-line, faith in the form of a compelled assent. The assent can wax or wane, can appear less than compelling, and then be restored—or dissipate entirely. As far as religious doubt is concerned, it can take the form of a scepticism directed at a literal interpretation in favour of the symbolic, or, more radically, of the symbolic representation also. In either case doubt, like assent, dawns over the whole system of propositions and doubting the existence of God in that case should not be construed on the model of doubting the truth of a single existential proposition—doubt is cast on the revelatory nature of the whole vision.

3. Conclusion

Bacon’s ancestral voice lingers on, but it is worth seeking to accommodate it to some degree. There is a sense in which attention only to ‘second causes’ is in some way shallow, and that to behold them confederate and linked together requires reflection and depth. The shallowness Bacon complains about is that of someone who lives a life of unreflective immediacy, resting in second causes, immersed ‘in the world’, which expression implies moral criticism of the associated formation of subjectivity—one that determines the horizon within which one ranges. Depth, by contrast, is found in the contemplation of the world as a whole that belongs to wonder and its associated attitudes. Our immersion in what we call the world distracts us from what lies beyond that horizon of interest, and when we do see beyond it this comes, as I said earlier, in the form of a visitation, and traditionally, and following Paul, the visitation has been taken to be from the Spirit and its influence. Spirituality is the derived term that refers to the discipline of protecting the conditions for the possibility of that distinctive perspective on the world.
I should like to be more precise and emphatic about this idea of contemplating the world as such. Elsewhere I have described it as ‘aesthetic perception’ and have cited Paul Valery’s remark about how poetry gives us ‘the sense of a universe’. I have also cited Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas in order to indicate the interplay between universal and particular. The thought is that in both art and nature universals can be evoked in and by particulars which are their instantiations. So the beauty of this landscape may sometimes be perceived in its exemplary as well as individual presence as disclosing the beauty of the world itself. The terrified face of this child in Gaza evokes in its particularity the dreadful political world in which it is trapped, and all such worlds. But the interesting thing here is that one is at once moved by the plight of the individual child and by the state of the world that its plight discloses. These kinds of aesthetic perception can be startling because they happen to us and change our mood. By contrast, under the influence of Hamlet’s depression, this goodly frame the earth becomes a stale promontory, this most excellent canopy the air becomes a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What we have here is an example of Nietzsche’s symptomatology of emotions. It is not so much that here are two equal options as that here are two aetiologies, a condition in which one’s inner disposition determines how one sees the world—as precisely contaminated by that disposition—and one in which the sight of the earth’s glories determines one’s inner condition, or, more realistically, gives one a sense of that possibility.
What I have tried to do is present a picture of a moral vision that informs the religious picture we associate with the Abrahamic religions. I suggested that this moral vision informs theology, and I should like to end with a few comments on that.
It is hardly surprising that the scriptures reflect the moral attitudes and self-understanding of their authors, though we know that in so doing they also endorse and justify some of our most brutal tendencies. But nor is it surprising that the engulfing urgency to revenge that follows carnage and slaughter and is perceived as justice, should give way to calmer reflection on the atrocious consequences of escalation, reflection that engages compassion for the human condition. It is hardly surprising, in other words, that what we think of as the ethical development of human beings and the changing conceptions of Deity that reflect that development, should be expressed and even worked out in the history of scriptures that represent some of our earliest forms of self-consciousness. These latter changes are the product of creative imagination and calm reflection, this time on the perceived dissonance between our conceptions of the divine and our experience of dreadful realities. Thus the Lisbon Earthquake in the eighteenth century and the Holocaust in the twentieth have occasioned creative but existentially fraught theological renewal as thinkers have tried to make sense of the problem of evil. But these reflections are arenas for the development of moral insight. Thus the question where was God in the Holocaust finds resolution for some in the thought that God can only act through human hands, a reflection which turns (deflects?) the attention of the believer to the moral condition of humanity. It seems to me that the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of God's 'self-emptying', or of Christ's making himself powerless, is precisely a way of fixing or projecting a moral insight about the nature of power, specifically power over others. When we have someone in our power, so that we can do with them just what we want to do, or when we know that they are eclipsed by our power, then that power needs to be renounced if compassion, or any other moral virtue that allows others to be, is to emerge or flourish. The religions are, then, among other things, expressions of the state of moral insight, and it is obvious that moral reflection can be disconnected from what we call religious belief. But a religious picture that belongs to story-telling about origins can be undermined when it is confronted by the phenomena of natural and human evil, and theologians seem to be people who make adjustments to the story in the light of events and in accordance with their own moral judgment.
A moral philosopher will typically defend an intellectual position, make distinctions that are liable to be overlooked, describe and seek to resolve conceptual difficulties and confusions, and then stand aside. However, as I said in the body of this paper, secular humanism presents itself as more than an intellectual position about the independence of ethics from religion. It also seeks, as a movement, to promote a moral vision. In that case it needs to take seriously the responsibilities of its role as a school of (godless) spirituality.

References
Buchan, John (1928) 2008 Montrose. Cornwall, House of Stratus
Cornwell, J. & McGhee, M. (eds) 2009. Philosophers and God. London, Continuum
Lash, Nicholas 1996. The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
—2008. Theology for Pilgrims. London, Darton, Longman & Todd
McGhee, M. (ed) 1992. Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
—2000. Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Mackey, James P. 2006. Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and its Future among Religions: A Systematic Theology. London, Continuum
Norman, Richard 2004. On Humanism. London, Routledge
Vickers, Brian (ed) 1996. Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Suppressio veri

2010-02-13T09:58:00.002Z

The thing to do, apparently, is to deny with indignation what hadn't been asserted. I have always been naive about these things and my thought that I am being cynical about all this is probably a further expression of naivety ...

It is put to Jack Straw that he 'ignored the advice' of his FCO legal adviser, Sir Michael Woods: and he replies that he certainly didn't ignore it but read it very carefully, thus we are diverted from the issue of his reasons for rejecting the advice.

Now let us suppose, against all the indignant protestations, that MI5 officers had been 'complicit' in the torture of Binyam Mohamed ... and then ask ourselves whether this is denied by Jonathan Evans: "We did not practice mistreatment or torture and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf".

Well, the truth is that it is not denied. The past tense reference denies that we practised torture then but is silent about whether we colluded then. There is then a jump to the present tense in which it is denied that we now collude in torture, using the ambiguity of the continuous present which affirms that we don't torture people to suggest that haven't colluded in torture in the past.

Now we come to Alan Johnson: "The Security Services in our country do not practice torture, they do not endorse torture, they don't encourage others to torture on our behalf, they don't collude in torture". Leaving aside the 'in our country' (which leaves open what they do abroad) Johnson's remarks say nothing about what we might have done at Bagram or Guantanamo in the past. You don't need to encourage others to torture to take advantage of it, nor do you need to have colluded in it in order to be complicit.

Now we come to the Foreign Secretary in conjunction with the Home Secretary: "the allegation that our security and intelligence agencies have license to collude in torture is disgraceful ... the government's clear policy is not to participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture". Again the present tense diverts us from what actually happened in the past. 'Have license to' is significant. I take it to imply that it would be illegal and that therefore we could never admit it. The reference to our clear policy asserts something about our policy and says nothing about what might have happened except to iply that if it did happen we should have to deny it.

A Mirror up to Nature: the Philosopher as Satirist

2010-01-23T11:30:00.002Z

Here is a paper I gave at a recent conference at Liverpool. It is only a draft

‘Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise’

1.
In the midst of philosophical activity we can lose our sense of philosophy. In this loss of perspective we can come to think that because we are philosophers, philosophy must be just what we do—what we were apt for and trained to do. But there is a creative as well as critical aspect of philosophy, and there is a transmission between generations in the philosophical community which can nevertheless favour one set of aptitudes and interests at the expense of others.

It may not seem so to sceptical outsiders—and it is ironic that the philosophers have for so long been a fitting topic for satire—but there is a diversity of interest, aptitude and sensibility within the philosophical community and a corresponding diversity of perspectives which taken alone and excluding integration with others become narrow tunnels of vision.

When they are put on the defensive by these same sceptical outsiders philosophers will re-iterate the Platonic thought that the unexamined life is not worth living, and assert when required that philosophy is the discipline by which that examination is conducted. But this is often a smokescreen, behind which philosophy remains absorbed in a conversation with itself, in a competitive, not to say neurotic refinement of the terms of the elenchus, with little regard for the life that waits patiently to be examined. The criticism has been, in other words, that philosophy has lost its way. This caricature has as they say the advantage of throwing prominent features into relief even as they exaggerate them.

Philosophy is supposed to (re-)examine itself from time to time, and is prompted to do this when a sense emerges that something is lacking or amiss. This cannot happen, though, if the terms of reflection on its own activity—and this is the danger of reflection—pleasingly reduplicate the terms of the activity and allow us comfortably to re-endorse them.

But that there is something unsatisfactory about the state of philosophy is almost a commonplace now among those who stand outside the mainstream. So, what is it to be a philosopher at all? I shall try here to advance a claim that is by no means original: a conception of philosophy as a moral endeavour with an emancipatory intent.

2.
There are two aspects to this intent, just as there are two aspects to emancipation, what one is liberated from and what one is liberated for, and this distinction corresponds to that between the critical and the creative aspects of the philosophical dialectic. It is unfortunate, however, that the critical aspect—the elenchus—has in practice almost eclipsed the other, and that the role of the elenchus has been almost lost sight of by those caught up in a self-proliferating analysis of its terms.

For most of us the process of asking questions, of analysis and argument for and against a position, almost defines philosophy, it is what we do. Its role is essential, but it is one of negative critique, which is not to condemn it as destructive, though I have heard people express bitterness about the casual destruction of their beliefs by someone cleverer or more experienced than themselves. The point of the elenchus lies in the uncovering and dismantling of the confusions and errors that prevent us from seeing the truth, and it is destructive only when it is cut off from the other, creative aspect of philosophy—a good teacher can, after all use the creative tension of aporia to liberating effect.
But now, the elenchus does not deal well with inattention, with ungrounded, undisciplined, distracted forms of attention—which demand a training which would be available only in an ideal philosophical community. It is of course, something we neglect—we see ourselves as engaged in an analytical and forensic task and that doesn’t include a strategy for distracted and absorbed attention.

Consider the prisoners in the Cave, for instance, who have no reason to believe that they are prisoners, and there is nothing in their experience, apparently, that tells for or against such a claim—we know they are looking in the wrong direction and are too absorbed in what they are doing to turn around. There is nothing in their experience that tells for or against the claim that they are prisoners but, on the other hand, though most of them are ignorant of their position, we can imagine that some of them are also deluded: they have a view about their experience, viz that it encompasses reality.

The prisoners, though, are an image of ourselves and, although it may seem that we have no reason to believe that they reflect our own condition, the possibilities of its application are evident—we can at least think that we once were or that others are.

What interests me about the liberated prisoner is not their onward and upward path to the noonday sun—it is their discovery of a perspective which allows them to see the whole scene, to see for the first time the mechanisms which had previously determined the form of their experience, the scope of their vision, the focus of their attention. Their release allows them, in other words, to stand in a place from which they can see the limits and the conditions of an earlier perspective.

The dialectic in its elenchic aspect seeks to dispel illusion and mere appearance, and it is destructive or even wanton if it fails to fulfil its role of clearing the way to wisdom and virtue—but it does not, as I said, include a strategy for inattention, except of course that in its other, creative aspect philosophical dialectic does have a strategy, as we have just seen. It holds a mirror up to nature, offers images that show us our condition from a point of view we are uneasily half aware of. It holds a mirror up to nature, but a particular mirror, it offers images that reproach and challenge consoling or pleasing self-images that simply reflect the terms of our absorption. The significance of the philosophical or genuinely creative metaphor is that it embodies an idea or estimate of what it represents. The consoling or flattering self-image is a form of self-authentication, reflecting back not the form of our desire but its object as perceived under the sway of that desire, whereas the philosophical metaphor is creative just to the extent that it implicitly queries what it represents, carries a perspective on it, an idea of it—it is not a replication of the terms of the perspective it represents, but sees it as a conditioned whole from a position beyond it. In the third Critique Kant makes the distinction between talent and genius reside in the latter’s power to awaken ideas and, as it were, to see (human) nature as phenomenon in the light of those ideas. In Kantian terms the philosophical metaphor awakens an idea—not, to use one of his examples, an enticing iage of fame or celebrity, say, that reflects its glamour as an object of desire, but leads us to see it clearly and see it whole.

3.
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is
All mere complexities
The fury and the mire of human veins

Our attention is distracted from the fury and the mire of human veins when it is caught by the beauty of the moonlit dome—an aesthetic moment in which our immersion is suspended—a dome which, in its contrasting magnificence, casts a critical light, or allows us to cast a critical eye on what we were immersed in, from a point beyond it. Attention to this reflected light upon the cathedral dome leads us towards its source, which is itself a form of reflected light, and so on, in a graduated progress, not unlike that of the liberated prisoner, in which a perspective emerges upon human nature that waits to be incorporated into a larger conception that depends upon an embodiment through the ordeal of purification.

The elenchus is only a part of the dialectic, a necessary set of tasks which can be destructive if it fails to fulfil its role of clearing the way to wisdom and virtue. The terms ‘confusion’, ‘error’, ‘appearance’, ‘illusion’, are forensic terms that refer us to states of the human subject—from whom the truth is concealed. And the traditional, critical function of the elenchus then makes way for a second, creative function—disclosure, revelation, unconcealment of what is unacknowledged by or hidden from the subject thus compromised.

Diagnosis and cure are both parts of the philosophical enterprise, but they express a human concern that explains the freed prisoner’s return to the cave. The disquieting thought is that the freed prisoner is an image of homo philosophicus—one whose passion for wisdom is a passion to become wise but also a passion for wisdom to prevail

In Plato's Symposium the philosopher is symbolised by Eros but part of the discussion of eros is juxtaposed to a discussion of poiesis and we need, I think, to look at both of these notions to draw some conclusions about what it is to be a philosopher at all.

However, that eros and poiesis work together will start to become evident if we look at a third aspect of the discipline, viz the creative act by which the community of philosophers is brought into and then sustained in being in the first place—viz the foundation of the Academy. The creative necessity for this foundation is expressed obliquely in the dialogue essay, and it comes in the description of the ascent of eros:
The next stage is for him to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of body; the result will be that, when he encounters a virtuous soul in a body which has little of the bloom of beauty, he will be content to love and cherish it and to bring forth such notions as may serve to make young people better; in this way he will be compelled to contemplate beauty as it exists in activities and institutions, and to recognise that here too all beauty is akin … (210c)

Why will he be ‘compelled’? Because the forms of activity and of what we institute as a practice provide the conditions under which beauty of soul may flourish.

4. In his Notebooks Wittgenstein wrote:

Philosophie dϋrfte man eigentlich nur dichten

And the young John Stuart Mill wrote in a letter to Thomas Carlyle that

… one thing not useless to do would be to … make those who are not poets understand that poetry is higher than logic, and that the union of the two is philosophy

Mill’s suggestion that philosophy is a union of logic and poetry might be compared with Descartes’ remark to Princess Elizabeth, that the human being is a union of soul and body, une seule personne, as he puts it, not a soul within a body. Philosophy, on this view, would have its own integrity as an art-form, and the ‘poetry’ would be integrated into the form of interrogative and discursive dialogue. Nevertheless, to think of philosophy as a distinctive art form we shall need to think of it as at least sharing some of the characteristics of poetry, see it in other words as a related form of poiesis, a form of creativity.

If these remarks and those preceding it put pressure on our conception of philosophy—and our view in consequence of the current condition of the discipline—they also put pressure on our conception of poetry—in either case the pressure takes the form of the charge that we have allowed a dichotomy to arise where there ought to be a union, and if we need to reassess our conception of philosophy we also need to reassess our conception of poetry, or at least reflect on what it might be to think of philosophy as in some significant sense ‘poetic’. We have a dichotomy, an intellectual distortion that nevertheless determines in advance the direction of conscious reflection, when two elements that belong together within an integrated whole, are cut in two and treated independently and out of all connection with one another. Overcoming the dichotomy is a matter of restoring the connections and finding a way back to the sense of an integrated whole. If in Mill’s terms philosophy without poetry is reduced to logic it is tempting to identify logic with the critical, elenchic function and poetry with the creative and revelatory. But what essential characteristic of poetry is being invoked, and what is the nature of the convergence? To explore this further we shall need to look at Diotima’s remarks about the nature of poiesis as the creative activity of bringing into existence something that did not previously exist—and in the case of philosophy I should want to say that it takes the form of bringing into existence a form of self-understanding that was not previously there, one that constitutes a transformation of subjectivity, so that something new is brought into being.

In any event poetry must be more than ‘the merely decorative word’, as Pound once said,—not ‘what oft was thought’ but rather what we are by its means only now able to bring to thought at all, showing us what we had previously been unaware of, making new sense—in the spirit of Shelley’s ’marking the before unapprehended relations of things’—which poetry does, he says, just because it is ‘vitally metaphorical’. This is the function that poetry shares with philosophy, or, rather, contributes to the properly integrated discipline of philosophy. But we need an account of its revelatory function that comes within the scope of the emancipatory intent. The form of the philosophical metaphor is as we have already seen one that reveals the possibility of inhabiting a perspective upon the world as a limited whole—to give us the sense of a universe as Paul Valery put it, but to see it from a position beyond it—to form an estimate of (human) nature as phenomenon that informs and enhances that nature. This philosophical intent is available widely in literature of course, as when Dennis Potter, for instance, seduces us into a state of desire as we gaze at some scene, only to confront us with its vicious nature, in a way and with a force that depend upon the success of the seduction.

We should understand metaphor here, not as an ornamental way of expressing what we already know, but as an access to understanding, a means of disclosing, not an item of knowledge, but a world. It might be helpful here to reassert the point that we should not think in terms of a category of ‘metaphorical meaning’ but think of metaphor rather as a function of language that depends upon literal meaning to bring about what has been called a burgeoning of meaning. Thus, to use the example famously discussed by Stanley Cavell, ‘Juliet is the sun’ does not, bizarrely, describe the girl, making a ‘wildly false’ statement about her, but rather reveals to Romeo a source of possible descriptions, not, again, of the girl, but of the form of his relationship to her, which can then be unfolded in a series of comparisons. In fact this free-standing metaphor has the form of an identity statement. The identity statement is the metaphor, and it depends for its effect upon the literal use of the terms that compose it, and just because of that it produces a degree of conceptual shock: we are forced by our own recoil to ask ourselves how it could possibly be true.

Gerard Manley Hopkins does something similar when he tells us that ‘the mind has mountains’, etc, where the metaphor is unfolded in the poem itself. The series of illuminating comparisons are not, however, between the mind and mountains, but the mentality of grief and despair is compared to the weariness and the danger, the terror and vertigo confronted by a climber. And you need to have hung there. Here again, the form of the experience of mental life coalesces and is seen, brought into focus, where before it was simply endured, in a way that may remind us of Spinoza’s discussion of the conditions under which an affect that is experienced as passio comes to be experienced as actio as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.

But the pressure towards metaphor comes from the painful inarticulacy that precedes insight, where it is no clarity about what is to be articulated. The creator of the metaphor, who seeks to communicate the form of an experience with which they are coming to grips, is not in any great degree different from the recipient. The appropriateness of the comparisons is registered unconsciously and in advance, we see ahead of conscious recognition. The interesting metaphors are precisely those in which there is unconscious recognition that one thing, whose nature has been unclear to us, is like another whose nature is clear to us. The recipient of the metaphor is also brought under the same conceptual pressure. But how remarkable, that features of the natural world, the sun shining, for example, should be available for comparisons that illuminate the form of our own human life, and that our attention can be focused on things external because we have already started to see in them an isomorphism with things internal.

5.
In the Symposium Plato famously presents us with a metaphor which succeeds at once in representing the form of life of the philosopher and at the same time makes that life the figure of a human subjectivity whose character is illuminated by that metaphor. So Eros is the figure of the philosopher who is the figure of the human being in process of becoming. Both Socrates and Alcibiades count as philosophers, in the sense that they both desire wisdom, though of course Alcibiades is presented as someone who thinks of wisdom as something that he can have as a possession, and is thus shown not to understand the nature of what he desires.
Now Diotima declares, somewhat disingenuously, that:
The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of eros and appropriate for it the name of eros which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ a different name for the other kinds of eros.
She makes similar remark a few moments later about poiesis: we assign exclusively to verse the name of ‘poiesis’ or poetry, even though there are other activities that are equally ‘poetic’ in their creatively bringing into existence what did not previously exist.
I say ‘disingenuous’ because the cases are somewhat different—poiesis is a generic term for creative activity and it is clear enough that the various arts can be assembled under that heading—anything that brings something into being that was not there before is a form of poiesis, though the kind that interests Diotima is that which brings into being wisdom and virtue—which would make the poetry she cites as exemplars of this—Homer and Hesiod—philosophical poets. As philosophers we have been trained to make distinctions and to look for difference under the appearance of identity, but sometimes it is important to see identity under the appearance of difference and whereas that is straightforward in the case of poiesis, it requires creative and imaginative thought to follow Diotima in her account of eros—which is just what metaphor demands. What is striking, indeed, is that it is by reference to the language of desire and procreation that we have to understand philosophy as a form of poiesis—since the bringing into existence that constitutes it a for of poiesis, indeed the bringing into existence in terms of which we have established a conception of creative life at all, is through the metaphorics of conception, gestation and bringing forth, not to mention Socratic midwifery. And then of course there is begetting, which tends to be prioritised by the male Platonic psyche.

If a metaphor begins with what is familiar to us—in this case, the experience of sexual life and desire, of being an erastes and an eromenos—it does so because what is familiar provides a transferable structure that sheds light on an area of experience that is less familiar. That would be mysterious, were it not that our attention is already drawn to something familiar because we have started to discern, although dimly, its isomorphism with what we are struggling to understand, our attraction to the image is the beginning of coming to grasp what remains unfamiliar—we make progress in understanding through metaphor, it is the medium of unconscious discernment—we already know that it carries across. The essence of Diotima’s claim is that eros provides us with a philosophical metaphor for what it is to be a human being at all, as represented by the philosopher—it gives us a perspective on a form of life.
There is plenty of irony here— a form of experience can be familiar without being well understood, and what Plato offers us is a metaphor from sexual life whose applications allow us then to turn round as it were and locate and shed light on the experience of sexual life itself. But the metaphor is about the process of self-understanding, and it serves to bring that process into focus. Eros or Love is not a beautiful god but is exemplified in the figure of one who is ‘weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless’. This is generally taken to be a figure of Socrates himself, the philosopher/erastes, but it works in part because it is recognisable as a figure of sexual desire seeking its unattained eromenos whom, as Diotima insists, it does not properly seek to possess but with whom rather it seeks to procreate, so that what issues from the union is wisdom and virtue
.
The salient feature of desire is the suffered lack or absence of its object. I find it hard to understand the idea of a desire for wisdom, though, except as a response to or as an aspect of a distressed, negative experience of its absence—whether one thinks of those who wish that they themselves were or had been wiser or less foolish, or those who see the ghastly consequences of human folly more generally and wish that wisdom might prevail. The distressed state is one which forces the question, how then should we live, if not like this? If this is the essential condition of philosophy then the philosopher is someone who confesses to an unsatisfactory condition of subjectivity and conduct:

6. .
.I have already echoed Kant in seeing the philosophical metaphor as one by which we gain a perspective upon a world, upon a totality or limited whole, and I mention this again now because in talking about wisdom and its contrast, therefore, with folly, we enter a crucial and contested area. If we contrast wisdom with folly or foolishness we must contend with a contrast between ‘worldly’ wisdom and what ‘the world’ counts as folly as well as a notion of wisdom for which worldly wisdom is a form of folly. If I express myself here in terms that derive from the Christian New Testament they also reflect the contrast between the cynicism of Glaucon and Adeimantus and the Socratic diagnosis of their attitudes as reflecting a sickness within the soul. This takes us back to the liberated prisoner and the claim I made at the beginning that philosophy is a moral endeavour with an emancipatory intent since the world of the prisoners is precisely ‘the world’ in this sense and the freed prisoner regards it from a position that transcends it.
Diotima tells us that the gods and the ignorant have something in common—neither desire wisdom, the gods because they are already wise and the ignorant because they do not know they lack it. Those who do desire wisdom, on the other hand, are in between these conditions: they fall between wisdom and ignorance, not entirely ignorant because they know they lack wisdom—because, as I have suggested, they suffer from its absence. It is this existential plight that gives the idea of a passion for wisdom its force, a force analogous and related to the passion for justice.

Diotima says
Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things and Eros is the love of beauty, so it follows that Eros must be the love of wisdom and consequently in a state half way between wisdom and ignorance.

But really we need a better objective correlative than this to render intelligible the unkempt figure of Socrates as the representation of that desire. ‘Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things’ does not give us what we need to capture the ordeal of the erastes, does not give us a clear sense of the spur that impels the philosopher forward suffering from the failure to attain it

If we need a distinction between knowledge and wisdom we need to specify a difference. The difference lies in the fact that wisdom is a condition in which one not only knows how things are as opposed, for instance, to how they had seemed to be, but in which we comport ourselves and order our desires in the light of that knowledge: this is the condition of sophrosune and the intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom, the uneasy space between bad faith and acknowledgment, is the crossing line between akrasia and enkrateia, and one main way of lacking wisdom and feeling and thus suffering the lack is in this experience of dissonance between what one knows and how one acts, where the desired unity between them defines the unity of being found in the sophron.

7.
I said at the beginning that the released prisoner sees the mechanisms that had determined the form of his earlier experience, sees them from a position beyond them, and this of course is the crux of the problem of communication, as we shall see. But one should also recall the moment in the narrative when it is suggested that the other prisoners would surely think that the freed prisoner was mad, and would want to kill him, wouldn’t they?—a suggestion which Glaucon incautiously endorses, taking on the role of Plato’s ideal audience. His response is significant as a form of recognition. He endorses a violence of reaction that makes psychological sense only as an expression of mauvaise foi. It isn’t in fact the prisoners who declare that they would indeed want to kill him: surely they are too engulfed in their ignorance to be capable of such a response. But Glaucon’s agreement shows how an audience already and uneasily applies the image to themselves, expressing the resentful half-acknowledgement that it tells a truth about them.

But the image also helps us to track the distinction between being genuinely wise and ‘the wisdom of this world’ since this fits the picture of a perspectivally-challenged judgment on the part of the prisoners. They also represent a picture of absorption or self-enclosure which cannot see beyond the horizon of self-regarding desires. To talk about ‘the world’ in this sense, or to talk about ‘worldly wisdom’ not only marks its epistemological scope as narrower than, as an enclosure within, a larger ‘reality’ but implies an ethical criticism of the nature of that enclosure. ‘This world’ is precisely a function of reality mediated by self-regarding concerns, which is one way of making sense of the ideas that the prisoners see shadows and not substance.

Now the main difficulty with talking of ‘the world’ in this way is that there is no shortage of traditions that populate and offer precise delineations of what lies beyond it. Plato’s liberated prisoner is set up to leave the cave and then return, stumbling back in to announce his discoveries. But any proffered description of the world beyond the cave will suffer systematic distortion by his audience, who will interpret it in the light of their own experience and desires, whereas of course it is partly intended as an implicit critique of the form of that experience.

But the liberated prisoner should not be offering such descriptions at all, should not be offering descriptions of the landscape that lies beyond the confines of the prisoners’ postion. He should rather be offering descriptions of the prisoners. It is only when they are able to free themselves from their bonds that they can start to look around and make their own journey onwards and upwards. This is the point of holding a mirror up to nature and the need for satire, since folly is highly recognisable even if wisdom is not. The liberated prisoner can comment on the prisoners and their conduct—or rather, the philosopher can comment on the human beings whose condition is represented by the story and very regularly shared by themself. Their more ample and encompassing perspective is shown in their attitude to the other prisoners and, if we revert to the early books of the Republic, what Socrates casts his gaze upon and sees as a sickness of the soul is rampant injustice. What is manifest but not necessarily apparent in the demeanour of the liberated prisoner is the compassion that derives from a perspective that cannot otherwise be shared.

If we start talking about what ‘lies beyond’ the world, it looks as though we are talking about a supersensible and noumenal realm. It is true that I instinctively shrink from such notions and probably need to defend that instinct, but in the meantime we can think it as an ethical distinction. In certain contexts, to talk about ‘the world’ or ‘this world’ or ‘worldly’ is just to refer to the absorbed condition of the prisoners, and the position beyond it is an ethical position. The expression ‘the world’ is a term of moral critique as well as a term of epistemology, and refers to an enclosure within reality that is mediated by absorption in shadows. Nevertheless we can still think the idea of a transformation or conversion in which the world is ‘redeemed’ or purified of the egocentric self-enclosure and acquisitive tendencies whose disastrous consequences are now endangering future generations. But in that case we shall still need to mark a distinction between the world and what lies beyond the world. But again it would be a mistake to think that what lies beyond the world, whether purged or unpurged, is reality. It is rather that what lies beyond the world is such reality as we have not so far encompassed and it lies open before us if we had a mind to look. Perhaps this is what Guenther meant when he referred to ‘the open dimension of being’. However, in order to look we need aesthetic or meditative experience, where thought, in whatever terms, is suspended, allowing us look at things for the first time and see further relations of things not yet apprehended.

There is something about this in Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy which bears a striking resemblance to the image of the cave. Animals provide for him an image of those who are aware of what he calls das Offene. It is only our eyes that are turned away—the animals seem to look through us to something beyond that we cannot see. The child is constantly pulled back and made to look at what is already established. There are six references in the short elegy to our being turned in the wrong direction:
Always world
And never Nowhere without not

He thinks we see das Offene only as we approach death, which is when we start to look beyond it:
We are always turned towards creation, and so
See there only a reflection of freedom
Obscured by ourselves

8.
Finally, I want to return to something I mentioned near the beginning. I had made the remark that there s a creative as well as a critical aspect to philosophy, but also that the formation of the Academy was a creative act that sought to protect the conditions for the possibility of the philosophical relationship.

It is tempting here, is it not, to burst into satirical song about how the instrumentalism and the managerial ethos of our Higher Education Institutions, the demand to demonstrate research excellence, to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life, all tend to undermine the telos of the academy as a place in which the philosophical relationship can be embodied in practice and in which its members can flourish. The dissonance is harsh and grating. However, I have it in mind to end with a well known remark of Alasdair MacIntyre:
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us

It may be that Plato’s academy rather than his republic provides the exemplar for such associations because it is dedicated to the release of prisoners.

2009-08-17T12:27:00.003+01:00

An act of forgiveness is essentially a response to an expression of remorse. It is a condition of its possibility that it is asked for. Otherwise it is absurd to ask a victim whether they forgive the wrong-doer, and it is confused to proclaim your forgiveness of someone who hasn't expressed remorse. In such a case all the victim can do is express their willingness to forgive.

Dr David Kelly

2009-07-19T10:18:00.002+01:00

Harrowdown Hill

I shall probably be found, I said,
and I flashed a smile as I spoke, dead

in the woods, and he smiled back,
with that minute shake of the head,

momentary blink of eyes that lack
comprehension, and do not match

the smile, nor for the moment catch,
quite, the dissonance of mood and voice

where I, briefly revealed in speech, rejoice
to hear myself announce the fate

I’d only secretly dared contemplate:
such a blood sacrifice I thought were just

as I watched resentful men dissemble
before the cool courtesy of my call for trust;

I did not know how soon I would resemble
in the stress of my demeanour those betrayed

by the grave, insistent promises I made.
Public dishonour I could stand and face

were not this moral pride my real disgrace:
the woods, God’s glory, and myself, dismayed

into atonement with this blameless blade

2009-05-30T07:38:00.003+01:00

CONT'D

But before we turn to Rahner, I should fill out the Cardinal's remarks, since it brings us back to that anxiety about losing the faith. I don't care what you do, my mother used to say when we were growing up, as long as you don't give up the faith. This was a bad strategic move, like the warning about the fruit of the one tree that you mustn't eat, the one door not to be opened ... except that giving up the faith is not something that one straightforwardly does. Losing the faith can sound like carelessness, and perhaps in some cases it is, though is its loss always a cause for blame? Perhaps one can be blamed for failures one was hardly aware of ... so, the precious gift that can be lost and if lost then lost on account of some failure of will or action or inner disposition that slips below the surface of one's attention. Perhaps even thinking too much? There were those who thought that a blameworthy activity that put one's faith in jeopardy. Anyway, "For Jesus the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils. You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trusts between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people". No, I don't agree with this either, gentle reader, but precisely where does the disagreement lie? And is there some truth that Murphy-O'Connor seeks to convey that one might acknowledge, and recognise that one had not taken into account? Disagreeing is not the same as dismissing it as nonsense, the latter a reactive movement that depends upon misinterpretation of what it is to be a believer.

In any event, commentators in the media were astonished that the Cardinal claimed this at the time of the Ryan Report on child abuse in Ireland. How can the 'inability to believe in God' be the greatest of evils? I suppose they might have gone on to say that surely these cynical priests and nuns and Christian Brothers did evil things and were believers. But actually it is not so clear that they were .... believers, I mean. I know that this will irritate my secularist friends--and I do, honestly, speak as one of them--but the Cardinal is not saying that the greatest evil is to be of the opinion that there is no God. To think so is to misunderstand the nature of belief. To believe in God is to have confidence in the saving power of his Word and thus to commit oneself faithfully to following his commandments --- something like that. I shall have to return to this.

But 'the rule of egoism and the loss of peace' are phrases that echo the thinking of the present Pope. The thought seems to be that the loss of faith amounts to the loss of a vision of the world, including the loss of moral vision. It is the expression of a fear, one we are entirely familiar with from that remark from Dostoevsky, 'If God is dead, then everything is permitted'.. It is the assumed loss of moral vision, and the sense that moral life loses its foundation, that sees the loss of faith as the greatest evil. This is a thought that we have to resist, but should take account of its being the expression of a fear on the part of those who believe and are afraid of the loss of that belief.

When I first read accounts of the mid-Victorian crisis of faith I wondered how late I was to undergo it myself more than a centry later.

2009-05-28T07:01:00.009+01:00

I belong to the Catholic tribe and have in earlier years hoped to have the courage of solidarity. At the road block, the question was a tribal one, Catholic or Protestant? and 'atheist' is the wrong answer. I learnt this sense of solidarity from an Indian Muslim friend. He used to be an atheist, but even then, he said, he hoped that if he were cornered by a Hindu mob he would declare himself a Muslim and stand with his companions.

But belonging to this tribe ... is a difficult life sentence, without parole. I always come back to it. Sometimes it feels as though I am an agnostic/Buddhist/humanist trapped inside a Catholic's body and that reassignment is not available. I say trapped, because it affects the whole of my intellectual life and I cannot move on, though maybe the truth is not to be expressed in this linear way, but rather the circle widens (imperceptibly) and that is a better image. Once a Catholic, you see. A certain set of questions, round and arduously round is how it seems in the bad times, my intellectual life dominated by the attempt to understand and resolve them, a set of questions that defines my life, and maybe that is the point of the idea of a 'world', whose derivation seems to be the idea of the 'life of a man', that its construction or dismantling is the work of a human lifetime. In my case the work seems to be to express the experience of its dismantling, and then to sift through the remains.

But the tribal thing: when we were kids we always knew who the Catholics were, in parliament, in the unions, on the stage, in the literary world, in broadcasting. But that was about us and who we could, should, identify with, take pride in. 'You know he's a Catholic?': rather different in intonation from that perplexing knowledge some people of a certain class tend to have: 'of course, he's Jewish, you know'. For me, nowadays, it takes the form of noticing the news when it turns to matters Catholic, a papal gaffe, a new Archbishop, another embarrassed episcopal interview, the tense, brittle, unyielding and defensive, slightly puzzled voice, about gays or contraception or child abuse, or abortion or embryo research. I am distant enough to note the intellectual disaster zone, close enough to feel their pain and want to shake them, longing for one of them to break out, break free and say what they really think, except, I realise, in many cases this is what they really think. But what is it, really to think something? These guys are loyal sons of the Church, reasonably decent men (of course notice the gender), dedicated to, even infused by the ideal of Love, seeking in their lives to be 'another Christ': but spare me that love when the ideal is mediated by life-destroying theory and ideology, precise and petty regulation, so that, confusing loyalty to Christ with loyalty to the official Church, they help to maim and cripple souls, without noticing, and all in a spirit of love, and to that extent they are victims also, of self-harm, though, again, they do not notice, where to notice is to go deeper into self-knowledge than the maintenance of their world can contain. They are loyal sons of the Church and the Church has a position on many things and one needs to know what it is in order to stand up for it, and the education of priests is a training in its articulation. But, note to self, it is dangerous to charge others with lack of self-knowledge, it tempts the gods ... except that once the world came tumbling down, and after many years I have heard again the ancestral voices in those of my contemporaries, who talk unselfconsciously about Almighty God and what he wills. inhabiting what, in my case, came tumbling down. But the faith and the loss of faith, is a high anxiety area: 'the fool hath said in his heart ...' expresses such anxiety.

In which connection, the other day the Cardinal, at the enthronement of his successor, said things which caused vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a delicious glee of affront. The problem is that the delicious glee, the affront, the outrage, also express a state of the soul, one that passes unnoticed because subjectivity is not so much not thought to matter, as never referred to. One looks out, as it were, and not in, so all unknowing of what determines what one can see. Anyway, the Cardinal. I suppose my complaint about the hierarchy is that its members are compelled to appear orthodox even if their private thoughts are not, like politicians or cabinet ministers, they must defend the line, the position, the policy, even if they are against it, this on pain of expulsion. There are not many rogue bishops, so I assume that for most of them there is no such dissonance between private thought and public utterance, but that their minds are shaped by the official teaching. But to come to particulars, the Cardinal said that in the absence of faith we were left with 'an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human', that people were 'not totally human if they leave out the transcendent'. This is what caused the vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a tabloid glee: 'he says we are less than human!' as though 'less than human' implied 'sub-human'. The trouble is that these people are incurious and do not help the cause of secular humanism, they lack charity, do not seek to see what the man is trying to say, which I take to be that in the absence of faith we are not fully human, that a dimension of what makes us human beings is absent. I offer these brief clarifications not because I agree with him but because they are thoughts that belong to generations of clergy trained in theology and philosophy.

We have, therefore, to turn to one of the eminent catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner ...

2009-03-29T10:35:00.005+01:00

Ramadan goes on to say that without an intra-religious dialogue between Muslims 'it is impossible - and it may indeed be counter-productive - to engage in a 'dialogue of civilisations'. One has to do both, however: 'one should enter dialogue as one looks at oneself in a mirror ... and draw on the ... information that dialogue with the other reveals about oneself ... one should indeed, when starting a critical, constructive dialogue with other civilisations, ask oneself about one's own meaning and objectives.' (p 305). Ramadan is writing of course as a Muslim concerned about the current condition of Islam, but when he says 'one' here he surely refers to anyone who is concerned to start a dialogue, though he finds too many of his fellow Muslims wanting in this respect:

"Referring to ethical outcomes should give rise to a collective, critical and constructive approach of the very notion of "dialogue" and its meaning. Instead of such fundamental reflection, idealistic reflections appear here and there about common values and respectiing diversity'. One knows what he means, but what is the exact nature of its limitations? 'The debate over "civilisations" and "cultures" must not act as a screen and be a pretext behind which the other real problems of contemporary times are hidden ... Depicting the "dialogue of civilisations" as the positive ideology of our time to avoid discussing the strategies of political, economic, cultural and military domination is a smokescreen and, when all is said and done, nothing but hypocrisy ... a twofold displacement is being performed in the North: a kind of ideology of fear is created, fixing attention on differences and on potential disruptions and clashes between religions and cultures, then debates focus on issues concerning civilisations and values, far from any general political or economic considerations. This clever strategy encloses the agents of dialogue in an isolated Universe where issues that suddenly seem the most important are discussed without dealing with previously existing real problems that nevertheless remain essential" (p 306)

Ramadan claims that this kind of displacement occurs nationally as well as internationally, thus, 'in many European countries, problems are being 'culturalised', 'religionalised', or 'Islamisised' while they are in actuality primarily social and political in nature." (p 306)

He goes on to talk about the monolithic construction of one's own civilsation and that of the other, and that the West needs to overcome its own selective memory and recall its hidden islamic sources. Ditto the Muslim world, nurtured by Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian thought: 'it is impossible to start earnest ddialogue about present diversity if one persists in denying the plural reality and diversity of one's own past'. (p 307)

Crucially, 'ideas and values should not only be discussed, but measured through their concrete implementation in reality ... ... we must undertake a true critical and self-critical analysis to measure the gap between our values and our practices. Dialogue between civilisations is meaningful only if it compels its agents and involved parties to ponder the inconsistency between ideals and respective concrete policies. Intellectual probity calls for such self-awareness in the mirror of the other's questioning. One can then realise that the problems encountered have less to do with values, which have often been historically or philosophically shared, than with disagreements about their ideological use or with the inconsistency observed every day in political, social, or economic practices. Both universes refer to dignity, justice, equality, and freedom and in both Universes-to various dehrees-one can observe undignified or wrongful treatment of human beings (from immigration policies to torture), conspicuous injustice ... persistent inequalities ... breaches of freedom' (308)

Some of these realities are presumably to be understood in terms of the 'shadow', thus our self-image is framed in terms of the positive values, our practice is furtive and concealed from ourselves and there is an aura of resistance in the demeanour of the political leaders who announce the one and practice the other. Tony Blair and Jack Straw manifested this kind of demeanour in their public utterances about the Iraq war and it came out most strongly when they resolutely refused to acknowledge what everyone else knew clearly, that the war was a recruting sergeant for violent extremism, which was put down to corrupt forms of Islam, whereas in fact it was expressed in those forms and not caused by them. We quite properly want to counter violent extremism but find it impossible to acknowledge that our own actions and policies have something to do with its growth. Now, it is one thing to acknowledge a link and another to condemn those policies. That is an independent question. In principle, if we think our policies are just then we ought to pursue them and accept that we shall to suffer violent reaction from some quarters. But violence is often allied to a sense of injustice, and if the policies are unjust ...

Ramadan talks rightly about the conditions for the possibility of dialogue, humility, respect, self-criticism and so on, and similarly with inter-faith dialogue ...

2009-03-07T17:16:00.003Z

I have been reading what seems to me an important book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation by Tariq Ramadan. He talks about how 'Popular demonstrations, so excessive in the Muslim world, against the Danish cartoons or Pope Benedict XVI's speech in Germany, reveal far more about societies where critical debate is lacking, where civil society is muzzled (and sometimes cunningly instrumentalized to vent its anger on the outside world, the West), where hypocritical formalism is institutionalized, than they do about the specific object of the anger. The same is true of mobilizations against the war in Iraq or of opposition to the Israeli government's repressive policy towards the Palestinians. From the top leaders to the grass roots of Muslim societies and communities, one can observe emotional mobilizations determined by the timing and the intensity of media coverage. There is no in-depth debate between trends of thought, no critical dialogue, no long-term strategy ... and always the same lack of vision and co-ordination' ( p 305).

School is out

2009-03-06T09:38:00.004Z

Well, it has felt like school is out after a heavy few days inserting other people's proof corrections into a master copy and producing an Index. All is in hand then for Philosophers and God, which should appear some time in the Spring: there are some interesting papers in it, though I say so myself. Anyway, I managed to get out of the house and do a circuit of the north end of the island, the sky blue, the wind not too hard, but one breathed it in like delicious sips of iced water. I was thinking about death again, though not for gloomy reasons. I wonder whether representations of it as an utterly bleak deprivation of sense is precisely a result of attempts to imagine one's own non-existence. There is heaven and there is Hell, of course, neither of which are 'non-existence'. For those who hope for the life to come the problem is that they cannot imagine the positive, only the absence of what belongs to this physical, mortal life. As for 'non-existence' or 'extinction', when the bubble bursts there is no bubble, when the flame is extinguished there is no flame.. Neither of these images are of the sensory deprivation that some people imagine as the negative aspect of a presumed or hoped for survival..

One cannot stress enough the significance of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith. I find it very difficult to think in terms of 'the meaning of life' or the idea that 'life has a meaning'. Both these expressions are predicated, historically, on the idea of a life to come, a life that will make sense of this one, restore the balance of justice and affliction and so forth. In the absence of these concepts ... the trouble is that people will then ask, well what is the meaning of life? Whereas, it seems to me that at best we are dealing in metaphor when we apply this term to 'life'. A person loves their life or hates it, they are anguished at the prospect of losing things they hold dear, they will be relieved of what causes them affliction, they want to live or they don't want to live, they live for this or they live for that, they are bored or in despair, they are absorbed and engaged, and so forth, these are the primary categories. In the absence of what we love, the presence of what we recoil from we might start talking of 'meaning' or 'loss of meaning', but these expressions are derivative and to understand them we have toi refer to what is primary.

I have just taken delivery of something completely different, Hutton's Arse.

2009-02-28T17:31:00.003Z

It is hard to imagine one's own non-existence, one's extinction, one's own life going out like a candle flame, there is the flame, then there is no longer any flame. Well, actually it is impossible to imagine it because one is still there, reflecting on absence or darkness, on some negative or neutral image of non-being, which is no longer non-being just for that reason, that one is there and one is regarding it. But what of hope for the life to come, that we might overcome death? What is the source of the hope, though, why might one hope, what is it that one clings to, that one wants to hold on to, even if one's life ends like a half-finished sent .....

'But hope would be hope for the wrong thing ... '

But what do I think of this. Well, I have no idea, but I think anyone should consider all the possibilities and be reconciled to them. And can one be reconciled to all of them, all the possibilities?

The oyster catchers are back, in the meadows with the geese, one walks quietly along the track in the darkness and they still take alarm and rise in panic from the water-logged fields

Purity of Intention

2009-01-17T19:09:00.007Z

More on the uses of political rhetoric, though as soon as I get hot under the collar about these things I wonder how I could be so naive. There was a discussion of the role of that most frightening of men, Dick Cheney, and the general idea that a State's strategic actions (eg securing the oil) would be routinely concealed under layers of moral justification that had nothing to do with the original and real motivation, justification in terms of the overcoming of tyranny, in terms of liberty and democracy, and so forth. This doesn't give Public Relations a good name as a profession. (Actually, I noticed that Cheney said on more than one occasion that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD. The wilier Tony Blair only ever said that he had no doubt that he had them).

But then the news turned to the situation in Gaza and that angry and eloquent Irishman, John Ging. The Israeli Public Relations team work with routine forms of defensive rhetoric. Thus Hamas intend to kill innocent civilians (which is wrong, certainly) whereas Israeli forces do not intend to kill civilians, they are concerned only to kill militants, and to that extent they are in a morally superior position because they are acting in legitimate self defence (with the implication that Hamas are not, and that rather than acting as a resistance to an occupation are sending off their rockets out of malice and nihilism).

But there is an interesting ambiguity in what they say. They don't intend to kill civilians, even though an awful lot of them get in the way and are killed because there are militants in their midst whom the IDF does intend to kill. The problem is ... that it is not the case that they intend to avoid killing civilians in such circumstances. It is significant that they get very angry when people say this sort of thing. To repeat what I said in an earlier post, it would certainly be wrong of Hamas to use civilians as human shields in a UN facility in the course of a military operation, if this is indeed what they have been doing. One Israeli spokesman said that their doing this constituted a war crime, with the implication that, rather than withdrawing, the IDF would rightly attack the position even in the knowledge that there would be many civilian casualties, civilians that they did not intend to kill but did not intend to avoid killing either. If they did intend to avoid killing civilians then they would have withdrawn.

2009-01-14T09:13:00.004Z

Silence after music, again, as important as the music it is coloured by and follows.

It is in such silence, and just occasionally, that one regards the human condition, and thus one's own life, from a position beyond it. Well, I say beyond it, but this possibility is also part of it, isn't it, except that when one refers to the human condition one has in mind its bliss and blunder, its turmoil and calm, and I am talking about a regard that casts its gaze upon all of this gathered into a single whole. I should like to say that this regard is one of love, since that seems to be its quality, though it also takes the form of compassion.

I think I really do mean a perspective that looks quietly at the whole, often exemplified in a single scene. Thus it is to be contrasted with the real indignation that one feels about what is now being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and this, one might think, is an inescapable moral indignation, but the phenomenon and the response are also part of what one is sometimes aware of in the silence. Both, though, are capable of leading to action, and I wonder whether the transcendent perspective works towards peace and reconciliation, whereas the indignation inclines more to punishment and revenge, even though both seek justice, which is anyway a condition of peace and reconciliation. It would be a grotesque error and self-indulgence, though, to seek to cling to the contemplative aspect of this transcendent perspective at the expense of its active element which, I think, should sublimate (ie raise to a higher condition) the natural feelings of righteous indignation.

More generally, what is one to make of this capacity to be a witness of the whole, the whole nexus of cause and effect in human conduct? The most significant thing is that it is not neutral or 'disencchanted', it is from a point of view ...

And the music? I've been listening to Elizabeth Watts singing Schubert. most of the songs unfamiliar and yet at moments deeply familiar as they evoke memories of other songs by him in moments of the melody.

Naming prejudices and the full moon

2009-01-12T09:15:00.005Z

Many names for racial or national groups start off as more or less descriptive or as abbreviations or metonymies for foreigners with curious dietary practices or common names (such as le bifsteak for a 'Brit' or Mick for an Irish male or Jimmy for a Glaswegian). Many other names are abusive from the start, often coined in times of war or conflict, or after conquest as expressions of contempt for those who are subordinate or inferior. But even the neutral descriptive terms come with an attitude, and the attitude contaminates the descriptive term so that it becomes an expression of racial prejudice, and so a new term is invented, but it is tracked by and then overtaken by the negative attitude, which then contaminates the term, so a new one is devised, but then is tracked by ... until there is no longer racial or sectional contempt. But political correctness can at least raise awareness and make people think about the cultural prejudies they hardly know they have.

You don't have to be drunk to fall into a ditch (though presumably it helps) but if you leave a house late at night on this island and walk back home you are liable to fall into one or walk into a wall if you don't have a torch because the dark is as dark as dark can be, especially if the sky is overcast with cloud. Thus one sees the benefit of a moonlit night which, as a townie I neglected except for its aesthtic aspects. The point is that you can see. On the other hand, I suppose there are circumstances when the concealing darkness is an advantage. One is close to anient times here .. the danger of attack, the advantage of surprise, it is still in the air, somehow, though the local citizenry is of course benign.

2009-01-06T15:28:00.004Z

One thing that might start a person along the path to doing philosophy is just paying attention to the words of politicians, or perhaps one is already on that path when one assesses the relation of these words to the realities. Thus the Hamas spokesperson tells us that this war against the Palestinians is actually against the whole umma itself; thus George Bush says that Hamas is to blame for the current crisis; thus the Israeli spokespersons insist that Israel has a right to defend itself, and tell us that they are making hundreds of thousands of phone calls to request people to get away from the bombs and rockets. There are truths and falsehoods here, but in both cases there is evasion and a refusal to acknowledge the full dreadful reality. Thus it is true that Hamas should be condemned for embedding themselves and their weapons within the city and in the midst of the civilian population, and it is right that it should be condemned by Israeli spokespersons. But these same spokespersons then claim that their smashing of these human shields is just what any nation would do in defense of its own citizens, whereas what they thus do is itself quite wicked. It is the reality of rhetoric that leads to the necessity for dialectic. What is shameful is that the politicians still think that they can get away with it: that is to say, they still have cause to think that their populations are credulous. There is also much anger and much suppressed moral discomfort under the anger, disguised by the raised and indignant voice. There is a certain comfort in anger, it is a familar garment worn easily but not so easily discarded.

On the Meaning of Life

2009-01-04T16:50:00.004Z

This picture of the Skara Brae village remains which look as though they are about to be overwhelmed finally by the waves ... makes me think of the fragilty and contingency of human existence. But as the New Year has arrived it's time to start thinking about work. I'm still reading and benefitting from John Armstrong's book on Goethe, though at some point I need to think my way through the issue of 'the Meaning of Life'. I have even bought a little book on the theme by Terry Eagleton ... I suppose to see what he makes of the question. There are certainly diverse and opposed experiences which some writers will describe as experiences of meaning, the sense that life has some meaning, or that it lacks meaning, and so forth. But I find myself quite doubtful about whether to go along with such assessments. I am inclined, perhaps wrongly, to associate talk of life having a meaning with the idea of its being a preparation for the life to come, though I know that puts it too crudely, with the implication that life does not have meaning after all if we abandon the relevant religious beliefs. But this is just to say that in that case the concept of 'meaning' has no application, rather than that meaning is now absent and it is all 'absurd'. However, there is still the problem of the negative sense of life that sees it is as allegedly pointless or meaningless. I wonder whether this negative experience of life, which is real enough, is better described in other ways, in terms of despair, perhaps, or a sense of futility, as opposed to engagement and fulfilment, absorption. Everthing would then turn on what it was that one found futile or absorbing. No answers here, just a preliminary thought that talk of meaning in relation to life is at best not helpful, possibly a metaphor. I suspect that what is more fundamental is an ethical sense. Okay, just notes ... I think this last thought is not quite connected. I'm thinking about the idea of Bildung or 'self-cultivation' and it seems to me that its deepest impulse is an ethical one, and that this determines the form of the cultivation or attention to the self. I don't say 'should' ...

2008-12-11T10:01:00.002Z

I get incredibly tense at a certain stage of writing philosophy, usually near the beginning of composition, when I have a vague sense of what I want to say but am not sure how to say it or, when I start to find an expression for the idea, I am diverted into a different direction, which shows itself only under those conditions, and I see that this is really the way to go and the earlier thoughts have to be abandoned, even though they brought me to this place I needed to be all along. It's a tension within the body that goes with spasms of mental pain that don't allow you to sit still for more than a few moments, so that you have to pace around the room, and sometimes the pain seems so intense that one feels one must abandon the task and take up fishing or knitting, or anything ... and yet there is a process that is in place and you have no choice but to submit to it and endure... until you have the draft. God, what a fuss he makes.

power cut

2008-12-09T01:26:00.003Z

No light, no electricity, the bread half-baked, no computer, no radio, no television, darkness, flickering of the stove and grey moonlight through the windows, and silence as the brief candle goes out, then the hail storm, then silence again, silence and darkness, one's thoughts compose themselves in the unaccustomed leisure and absence of distraction, the circle of firelight in the surrounding darkness, the primal image, what is beyond is feared, what is caught in the light of the embers known, familiar, comfortable in the ancient sense making us strong, fortifying.

Failure of Speaking

2008-12-09T00:50:00.005Z

Foolishly I start to weep
—the sound of the nocturnes

downstairs, vigorous melancholy,
the piano’s tender agitations

impressed upon the flesh, the body
of feeling—of loss—this house

and its solitary occupant
one spirit of listening melody:

forgotten associations, recalling love
—oh how I love you

And, in an identical house, the pain
of the piano interrupted

by the telephone, the caught breath
and dismay of silence:

what power subjects me,
why can I not speak

the passionate, simple words, or raise
my eyes to meet an answer in your gaze

or reach to the hand you rest upon your knee
—how I do love thee

He could not easily in public utter
whole sentences, his staff watched

and willed words into being
to catch his darting eye

above the podium, enough to stutter
phrases that do not entirely lie.

Rash, inarticulate, ruthless king,
fluent, compliant client, master

now of that strutting martial walk
into the Rose Garden, whose ardent talk,
the catch in the voice, the stifled sigh,
those crafted hesitations, bring
a boyish charm to ethical disaster.

It could have been sex or drugs or drink
or, equally, abstention from them,

but he confronted the difficulties
of any mortal man, found the spiritual use

of the mirror in the bathroom:
shock of the flecked and stricken face

as the basin emptied, the first
salutary greeting from his saviour,

but, refreshed by this cooling water,
he demanded a quick return

from his venture, accompanied now by aides
and heavy security, even the press corps,

into the inner life, no way, this, for a hero
to handle the pursuit of monsters

when the lonely path through the forest
is absolutely de rigueur—oh my love,

forgive my easy proneness to tears,
the startled emotion in the forest

from buried scenes of desire,
or call it love, the relentless

Chopin surges with it, pauses
with recollection of loss, glances

and glimmers in the mind, your face
in the piano’s nervous hesitations

half visible, mirror of my desire,
not yet for flesh (what did Plato know)

but for the holy silence that still
envelops you, and now departs

from me, false sightings
in the station concourse crowd

ah, slender black figure of light,
mourning is my karma, inwardness—love,

the (secret) will for another’s happiness.

Only, I wish—hope—against my own resolve
that moral necessity could dissolve,

submit, then, broken-sandaled, to the role
of mute erastes, possessed—of neither flesh nor soul:
—but, her image, surely, in my heart, shows

the goddess, the glory her face and eyes disclose?
No—it shows you in the aspect of desire

as our bare nature, formed in need,
in our hunger for what we lack—not greed

to have—but to be in love and beauty’s fire.

Ah, that light-footed gaiety of flesh
and supple spirit as she goes
all eager to her lover, my careful pose
of careless distance slips as we pass
uneasily on the stairs, reproach

unperceived, swiftly took its chance,
makes its point and leaves
its poison in a moment’s glance.

I am summoned forward, to present myself
at the tribunal, where a sad judge

leads us through the evidence, I myself
am juror and defendant, my case

and yours reversed, I must feel
the fire of your old desire, endure

the frown of wary withdrawal
unresponsive eromenos,

unfeeling hand caught by yours,
that committed but rejected gesture

and my sentence is: to offer now
in grief, the glad, generous welcome

as we visit and parade the infant
in your study, the quiet courtesies

of afternoon tea, scent of lavender
as we move to the patio, smiling,

as he repeats some ancient anecdote
carefully maintains the flow of conversation
to hold back the flood of his desolation.

Forgive me, that I never said farewell.

Too busy to blog

2008-12-07T11:16:00.006Z

Things have calmed down and I'm free to think again, outside the parameters of established tasks. I have watched the late November sun, the early December sun, rise late in the South Eastern sky and pass low over the length of the loch. People shudder at the supposed absence of daylight up here but there is mysterious light before sunrise and after sunset and in the twilight skies are big and dramatic, even when they are heavy with rain.

I was in Edinburgh recently, en route down to Bakewell, and found a fine, lively book on Goethe by John Armstrong. I remember reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers when I was still at school and being transported by the passionate nature mysticism, which I noticed then much more than the love life, noticed because it gave me a language for the experience of the gorge and the valley, the rushing stream, the rocks, the giant beeches, the wind. This was at the time when I was becoming aware of his lyrical poetry through hearing the Schubert settings. Many years later I was struck by the notion of Entsagung, renunciation, the moment one knows that one has to deny an impulse that before one felt was a proper means of self-expression, so that one grows, but not in the direction one anticipated, or according to any prior and favoured conception of growth.

Armstrong is good and eloquent on these things associated with Bildung, with growth towards maturity as a human being, and this all sits well with the recent turn towards philosophy as a way of life. It is particularly pertinent to my own thinking about the nuances of the term 'world'. Armstrong is surely right to credit Goethe with the question, how should we live in an imperfect world? as the correct development of the bare question, how should we live? And it is good to see him connect this with scepticism about the natural goodness one associates with Rousseau. So the real question should be, how should we live, given that we are flawed beings in a flawed world?

I must find my old copy of Goethe's Italian Journey. There's a wonderful sighting of the young Emma Hamilton dancing on a table in skimpy dress and tambourine in a Roman salon (or was it in Naples, there's a great painting of this in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, outside which gallery as a child I used to send out my green toy yacht into the boating lake as water cascaded from the mouth of some energetic Greek god. She was the mistress, wasn't she, and then the wife? of the elderly British Ambassador. Interesting to read Goethe's observations. Strange that we don't seem to have a reciprocal word for mistress, as in husband and wife: mistress and ...? what does this show us?

Rather drifting away ... The collection of eighteen essays is now with the publisher, probably to be called Philosophers and God: Religion, Life and Reason. Quite tough to write an introduction against the clock. I'm rather weary of all the God stuff, but have to write a paper for the RIP series in February, which I'm calling 'Spirituality for the godless'. I'm wary rather than weary of the term 'spirituality' but it's a good starting off point to take us into the subjectivity of the moral life, indeed into the questions implicit in the Goethe life.

Learning to Converse: Remembering Dayaji and Ramubhai

2008-11-10T15:56:00.002Z

Learning to Converse

The three of us sweated in the heat and swayed with the rhythms of the crowded suburban train as we talked or shouted, rather, to make ourselves heard, hanging by straps in the crush, two Indians, Probal Dasgupta and Prabodh Parikh, and one Britisher, myself—all roughly of an age, in our late thirties. It was 1985 and Probal and I had travelled down from Pune on the Deccan Express to meet Prabodh in Bombay—and it had also been a chance for me to meet the incomparable M P Rege. The polymath and inexhaustible Probal had been a kind (but challenging) friend, and had gently but firmly introduced me to—opened my eyes to—the real life of India, including the nature, diversity and situation of its intellectual life. Things have changed dramatically since those days, a quarter of a century ago, but the urgent agenda then in the face of what was perceived as a monolithic and engulfing westernisation was humorously summed up in an aside by the distinguished philosopher J P S Uberoi, who talked wryly of wielding his lone Indian fountain pen against the massed typewriters of the West. The typewriters may have had their day but the issue of cultural hegemony and its baleful effect on dialogue has not faded with the emergence of what we now call globalisation.
The situation of Indian philosophy at that time could be seen as an instance of a more general kind: how should the Non-Western, post-colonial world respond to a nevertheless increasingly encroaching, not to say dominant western culture? How, in particular, should Indians respond in the light of their own culture, in the light of their own philosophical traditions? Ideally we are talking here about a meeting of cultures and a reciprocal self-re-examination in the light of the encounter with the other, which is surely the essence of philosophical dialogue. In the case of a hegemonic relationship, however, there is no such meeting, at least for the ‘hegemon’, but rather an incurious estimate of the indigenous (‘native’) culture in the terms of their own ideas. For the other, ‘subaltern’, party, however, there is still a question about the reception of an alien or foreign culture at all—how to receive or respond to its institutions, practices and ideas. One has to assess and reassess one’s own culture and the foreign one, distinguish between truth and error, and between both of these and simple difference of perspective on a shared reality, discerning similarity and difference beneath surface difference and surface similarity of idiom and expression. These are indeed pressing questions, especially when it seems that the foreign ideas distort reality, including one’s own, and that the foreign practices and institutions are at best inappropriate to the conditions and at worst morally pernicious—though one has to add that all of these things are a matter of judgment and discernment and the categories themselves can be used as alibis to justify and protect indigenous forms of injustice.
There is particular critical work to be done by philosophers, at least at the level of ideas. But engagement with the western philosophical tradition is one thing, mutual engagement with western philosophers is another. The incuriousness of the old hegemonic culture lingers on, partly these days in the form of a resentfully tolerated ‘multiculturalism’, but manifests itself also in the entrenched attitudes of philosophers who do not expect to learn anything from other traditions—though they are perfectly happy to recruit others to their own cause. Little has changed in western philosophical attitudes since J N Mohanty[1] and Daya Krishna[2] complained more than a decade ago about the ignorance, and hence the facile terms and false dichotomies, that had characterised comparisons made by western philosophers between Indian and Western philosophy:—it is an obvious truth that one needs to be interior to both traditions before one makes (invidious) comparisons. Genuine engagement, however, on the part of pioneering individuals, is liable to be shunted into a siding called ‘comparative philosophy’.

2
Despite Uberoi’s perception of the massed typewriters, ‘western culture’ is by no means monolithic but is constituted by many strands, tensions and contradictions, as is the receiving, in this case, Indian culture. So there is also resistance within the Western tradition to ideas that seem to distort reality and to practices that seem morally pernicious. To put it in one way, ideology (of the mystificatory kind) is not usually either entirely engulfing or entirely overwhelming and some common ground is available between cultures. Perhaps unfortunately there is more than one kind of common ground, and common reactive mentalities can lead to violent opposition between those who feel threatened and alienated, as well as to alliances between them against a common enemy. The mobilisation of threatened fundamentalisms against each other, the ‘expressive’ bombings of night clubs, the briskly repented collateral damage to wedding parties, have been only one kind of manifestation of alienation and unease in the face of the comprehensive westernisation that has surged in the last decades.
The issue, of course, is hardly restricted to India. Thus in his The Mantle of the Prophet[3] Roy Mottahedeh discusses the Iranian writer Al-e Ahmad’s sense of the cultural illness that he felt had stricken the towns and cities of Iran. Mottahedeh comments:
For this illness Al-e Ahmad seized on a newly coined word, and he made this word a rallying cry for Iranians from the sixties to the present. The word translated literally, piece by piece, is “West-stricken-ness”, but even this clumsy translation fails to convey the sense of the Persian original, gharbzadegi. “I say that gharbzadegi … is like cholera (or) frost-bite. But no. it’s at least as bad as saw-flies in the wheat fields. Have you ever seen how they infest wheat? From within. There’s a healthy skin in places, but it’s only a skin, just like the shell of a cicada on a tree”.
The late J L Mehta[4] once talked of the disruptive forces unleashed by the Western ‘marriage of science with technology’: we are one world now through participation in Heidegger’s ‘world-civilisation’. Mehta was well-known as a commentator on Heidegger—he is not making a naïve complaint about the dominance of a culturally neutral western science and technology, but associating himself, rather, with Heidegger’s critique of the reality-obscuring stance of ‘commanding forth’, the Gestell or ‘enframing’ that has determined the form of that dominance, and the form, therefore, of what remains to be resisted by those who are precisely becoming Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’..
Mehta asks whether it isn’t true that ‘Western thought … enters … like a Trojan horse … into the thinking of the Non-Western world’ or like a virus … invisibly altering our perceptions of reality.’ These images, of the Trojan horse or of a virus or an infestation, all carry the sense of an experience of being undermined in one’s identity. The Trojan horse was the great image of stealth, treachery and occupation within the citadel of ideas. The idea of a virus is of something invisible to perception that nevertheless harms, undermines, debilitates, and it is the stealth and the invisibility that finally dismays us in the original sense of loss of power. The idea of an infestation that leaves the exterior skin intact but destroys the centre speaks powerfully of the felt loss of identity as one loses touch with one’s roots by absorbing someone else’s narrative, one in which one’s character has already been assigned, and this by others..
I had already read by the time that Probal and I met Prabodh a notable special issue of Indian Philosophical Quarterly published in 1984 and dedicated to the theme of ‘Svaraj in Ideas’. Self rule or self determination in the political sphere was one thing, precarious as that might have been in geo-political terms, but there was more to be done in dealing with the broken roots of the old colonialism still active in Indian soil. The collection was a set of responses by contemporary Indian thinkers to a percipient discourse to Indian students by Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya delivered in 1929 during British rule. I had found the collection compelling, not least because it further made real to me something of the self-understanding and inherited situation of the philosophers who had contributed to it and in whose midst I now found myself. But it also expressed a set of concerns that echoed my own, concerns which really gave birth to the idea of the Convivium[5] as Prabodh, Probal and I had our loud conversation on the suburban train. What my friends and other philosophers I was now reading were concerned about was the oppressive reality of westernisation and its specific consequences for the work of Indian philosophers and their relationship to their own traditions. I saw and felt some of the same oppressive reality, though I called it by other names, materialism, perhaps, or secularism, or even just a loss of vision in philosophy, an absence of the imagination, of connection with life—and that connection was palpable in the case of Dayaji, Ramubhai and Rege. I wanted to insist that there was nothing monolithic about this ‘westernisation’, but rather that there were counter-currents in the West that mirrored Indian philosophical resources that could be mobilised for resistance; that one had to distinguish between the (super-)imposition of a foreign culture and the specific content of what was aggressively dominant in that culture; and that there was plenty of room for dialogue and a meeting of minds … if the right conditions could be found.
The guest editors of Svaraj (K.J. Shah, Ramachandra Gandhi, Sharad Deshpande and Probal Dasgupta) referred in their introduction to the loss of svaraj in ideas as a form of Indian bondage, and, in so doing, echoed Mehta’s metaphor of invisibility: ‘a bondage more enslaving than political subjugation because of its invisibility and silent, creeping paralysing power, unforgivably persistent even after political independence’.[6] They here followed Bhattacharya himself in his 1929 lecture, who went on to claim that cultural subjection occurs ‘when one’s traditional cast of ideas and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost’ (my italics). He thought that the Indian cast of mind, an indigenous culture of a high degree of development, had ‘subsided below the conscious level of culture.’ If an entire system of ideas and sentiments, those of western culture, have indeed been imposed or superimposed in this way, the consequence is that ‘we either accept or repeat the judgments passed on us by western culture, or we impotently resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own, wrung from an inward perception of the realities of our position’. ‘Hardly any estimates of our own’ … but in their place, someone’s else’s narrative, the received and incurious estimate of the imperial power whose ideology is absorbed in such a way that the colonised receive their identity and trajectory from the colonisers, long after they have gone.
I had visited the Philosophy Department at Poona University when I first arrived in the city and had been warmly received there, particularly by K J Shah and Sharad Deshpande. As it happened, I turned up in time to hear the first in a series of lectures by Ramachandra Gandhi on the philosophy of religion. Although it was clear to me at once that he had a brilliant mind, I was also shocked by what he was saying.
When I look back at the scene I realise now that I was ignorant in fact of the cultural context and fully self-conscious stance of his philosophising, as well as of the dialectical and epistemological significance of what philosophers call the ‘subject position’. I had myself fallen into the trap of the incurious colonist, failing to understand the relativity[7] of my own position which—and this is the point—I was hardly aware of as one position among others: the irony of the subject position is its manifest visibility to all but the subject. I was able to pay lip-service to the idea but I had never really been confronted by the reality, and it is confrontation with reality, I think, that reveals real rather than official attitudes. But I need to explain my sense of shock, and it might be best to start by recording a conversation I had with K J Shah, and by citing a passage from one of Daya Krishna’s papers.
Shah had been discussing[8] with me the significance for Indians of people like Ramana Maharshi, and had observed that “It was the presence in India of men of such great spirituality, even in the twentieth century, that made the difference between western and Indian attitudes to religion; the presence of such spirituality was something that Indians were confronted with and had to take some account of’. Now, in an insightful 1961 paper published in his The Art of the Conceptual Day Krishna had remarked that “The capacity for inner freedom, abiding joy, and relevant response to external situations is so pre-eminent and abundant in spiritual persons that compared to them, ordinary, normal persons appear as deficient human beings” (p 120).
It seems clear enough that Dayaji was saying something similar to Shah. Part of the point is that both philosophers effectively set out criteria by which we can distinguish the genuine from the bogus in the case of ‘spiritual persons’. Much to my own liking and much more important, they make the idea of conduct and demeanour as criteria of an inner condition a central feature of the philosophy of religion—rather than the usual, accepted notion of ‘belief’, a notion which purports to be universal but which in fact betrays an unacknowledged, specifically Christian bias. Of course the notion of ‘belief’ is anyway a difficult and contested concept even within the traditions of Christian theology and philosophy, but here it is its assumed centrality for the philosophy of religion as such that is the issue. In terms of our unself-conscious westernisation, it is an assumed universality: all philosophy of religion is really a philosophy of Christian religion, and what appears to diverge from that model is tied down onto a Procrustean bed and hacked into shape. In the same paper Dayaji precisely remarks on the skewing of philosophy of religion that occurs because of an unconscious concentration on Christianity, an unconscious bias that has hardly changed since he made these remarks:
The other great limitation of the discussion, to my mind, was its confinement, perhaps naturally, to Christianity alone. It was as if one were to reflect on aesthetic experience and confine one’s discussion to Greek art or the Renaissance masters only …. That no one challenged this implicit limitation shows once again the difficulty of getting beyond the perspective of the culture one happens to be born in (p 114)

Ramachandra Gandhi himself was deeply affected by the life of Ramana Maharshi and the title of his 1985 book I am Thou[9] is taken from a remark of Ramana. In the lectures I attended Ramubhai sought to develop a philosophical argument in support of the nondualist Advaita claim that he took to be poetically expressed in that remark. But, my sense of shock … I had introduced a new undergraduate course in the philosophy of religion at my own university in the UK several years earlier and had done so despite the scepticism and misgivings of colleagues who were on the whole of a materialist and ‘anti-religious’ persuasion. They thought that ‘religion’ (by which they certainly meant the Christian religion), theology, metaphysics, had been decisively discredited long ago, and that it was a retrograde step to teach such things, though they probably also thought that at least it would provide an opportunity to discuss certain logical issues associated with philosophical theology. But I wasn’t in fact concerned to teach a course on the philosophy of the Christian religion at all, partly because I had moved away from it—or from a certain model of it that had alienated me from approaches to other models—and become a practising Buddhist. Part of my motivation for inaugurating a course in the philosophy of religion lay in the felt need to articulate and give philosophical expression to the nature and implications of meditational experience, and this was giving me reason to reappraise my understanding of how to approach Christianity from a philosophical point of view as well. It also forced me to the view that conduct and demeanour as criteria of spirituality should replace ‘belief’ as the central topic. But I felt that the dialectical situation in British philosophy was a delicate one. I had to try to write about experience in an environment in which the assumed paradigm was a degraded concept of belief. It was refreshing and reassuring, then, several years later, to read Dayaji’s comment on the symposium at which he gave his paper:
the hours devoted to discussion in this symposium seemed characterised by a singular unconcern with religious experience, which is the raison d’être of any inquiry undertaken in this field at all … There was, for example, much discussion of language in religious discourse, but little, if any, attention was paid to the way in which religious concepts arise from, and find their meaning in, religious experience itself. The ‘operationalism’ so obvious in the field of science did not seem quite so necessary in the field of religion to most philosophers assembled there (p 112).

However, I simply took it for granted that my own delicate dialectical situation was a general one, and that this was what one had to do if one was doing philosophy of religion. And here was Professor Gandhi talking about the ultimate unitive reality of BrahmanAtman without, as it seemed, all that epistemological vigilance that seemed to me absolutely necessary, and had cost me so much intellectual effort—except that the epistemological vigilance that seemed to me absolutely necessary was in fact precisely situated and directed towards a particular set of historical and conceptual concerns that did not affect Ramu’s enterprise: the whole Death of God scenario, the relationship between an apparently discredited philosophical theology that sought to prove that there was a God, and the rationality of belief—whereas Ramubhai was concerned with such categories as moksa or liberation and the ultimate nature of Selfhood, to which the discourse of ‘belief; was irrelevant.
It was not that we would not have had philosophical disagreements independently of our different points of departure, about the role of argument in philosophical reflection on claims about the Self by men and women who met the criteria mentioned by Shah and Dayaji, for instance. I think my shock was caused by a failure to realise that there were different points of departure and then to be confronted by one.

3
In the book mentioned earlier, Mohanty remarks that there now exists the possibility, for Indian intellectuals, ‘not merely of studying Indian thought from the point of view of the Western philosophies, but also, by reversing that strategy, of critically studying the Western philosophies from the vantage-points of the typically Indian modes of thinking’ (p 22, my italics). Whether this can be done at all depends on the vitality and intelligence of the new generation who undertake it. But it also depends upon a reciprocating receptivity on the part of westerners prepared properly to inform themselves of the actual nature of the Indian philosophical traditions, and this is a matter of opening up a dialogue that depends essentially on individual conversations. Taking such a dialogue seriously depends upon the shared premise that reality is transcendent of any particular purchase or perception, and that, consequently, there can be more than one form of insight, more than one form of blindness towards being. There typically goes with this kind of blindness to being a corresponding failure to hear the voices of others. It is not an accident that in The Art of the Conceptual Dayaji should have complained precisely about not being heard. This kind of failure, though, is not a deliberate act, but rather an inability to make sense of new material.
If we assume that we can learn from each other, and otherwise we shall have no reason to incline towards dialogue, then the natural context for this to take place in is, as I have said, that of conversation between a pair of interlocutors, possibly in a small group as long as this does not become an audience. But a possible participant of such a dialogue has to be capable of rapid role reversal, capable, that is, of assuming the role of teacher or pupil, in the very same conversation. As Probal Dasgupta has said elsewhere in this volume, the Convivium series, originally of British and Indian philosophers, was a side show in the formation of contemporary Indian philosophy as it was fashioned by thinkers like Daya Krishna, Ramachandra Gandhi and others. Perhaps it is better to think of the series as a case study. Participation of this kind between thinkers from Britain and from India, with their former colonial relationship, and post-colonial and post imperial neuroses and unconscious attitudes, of arrogance and resentment, was a poignant attempt to embody ‘the ideal speech situation’, and required a great deal of awareness and forbearance on both sides. The idea of a ‘dialogue’ between cultures seems a rather general and ambitious enterprise, but there is an upper limit on the numbers who can engage in a conversation at any particular time, and the notion of ‘conversation’ recalls us to the essentially personal aspect of philosophy. The Socratic enterprise of ‘testing’ a view or belief may leave the one in whom that view is undermined with a sense of helplessness, a condition very different from that loss of identity we mentioned earlier, a sense of helplessness which can lead to reactive aggression, a defence of a previously constructed self image. It is interesting, though, that there are superficial similarities here to the angry and violent rejection of an alien culture that is being imposed, though there is in reality a world of difference between the two kinds of case. The elenchus—the testing, the probing, the Socratic interrogation of one’s premises, of the Hintergedanken, the thoughts that underlie action—puts pressure, then, also on our emotional life, upon our sensibility, in a direct and sometimes dramatic, drastic way. To talk of our sensibility is to refer to our motivating thoughts and beliefs: we move, we are moved, in the world as ‘grasped’ by thought. Socratic dialogue is an occasion for ‘un-grasping’, for rendering oneself receptive to the possibility of the world’s showing itself in ways not available to the disclosure-resisting pictures that held us captive. The Socratic dialogue is effective, though, only if the thoughts one puts to the test are genuinely the thoughts that structure the sensibility we are attached to. If these thoughts lead to contradiction or incoherence, lead the person into aporia (a sense of being at a loss) then their world and thus their orientation is dismantled and unmade, and this is the creative condition of new possibilities of thinking and feeling
The emphasis is on conversation and the conditions for conversation, since this is the context for the friendly agon of genuine dialogue. If Mohanty’s implicit ‘challenge’ is to be taken seriously, then such contexts need to be established, in which genuine exponents of both living and interacting traditions are ready both to question and listen. It was such reflections as these, about the parallels between the lived situations of thinkers from both traditions, that led to the initiation of the ‘Convivium’ series of meetings between British and Indian philosophers, at which Dayaji and Ramubhai, as well as Rege, played such a prominent role. But the idea is one about the ideal conditions for doing philosophy at all, and is not specific to participants from different cultures, though in a way philosophers are always from different cultures, and they do not speak to each other as often as they seem to do, or are, indeed, required to do by the very nature of their discipline. Nevertheless, the kinds of conversations initiated by Daya Krishna and Ramachandra Gandhi have opened up the conditions for the possibility of a new and global conversation between philosophers who are able to draw on the concepts and metaphors, the narratives, of more than one tradition, for the possibility of an intercultural canon.
[1] In Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: an Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992),
[2] In Indian Philosophy: a Counter Perspective (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1991)
[3] Roy Mottahedeh: The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran 1985 Chatto and Windus 296
[4] In Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation (Indian Council for Philosophical Research, New Delhi, 1990)
[5] Mentioned elsewhere in this volume by Probal Dasgupta
[6] This theme had earlier been addressed in Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, Oxford University Press 1983).
[7] This is not of course a relativist claim, a doctrine about truth. It is, rather, a claim about perspective and allows for the possibility of recognising a shared reality and the possibility of a movement from one perspective on it to another. From here this can be seen, but not from over there where that can be seen: we assemble a total picture of the terrain by collating our perspectives, where nevertheless individual perspectives can distort one’s sense of the whole.
[8] See my Transformations of Mind (p 202). CUP 2000
[9] I am Thou: Meditations on the Truth of India IPQ Publications, Pune, 1984

A postscript

2008-10-13T14:54:00.003+01:00

I followed the same path again today, in need of fresh air after several days of pure clerical work ... the tide was as high as I have seen it but near the north extreme of North Wick I saw the corpse of the gannet, a lifeless bundle of matter starting to rot. It must have been washed out into the current and carried down the few hundred yards or so ...

The exhausted gannet

2008-10-10T09:18:00.003+01:00

We were walking along the cliff edge on the North Hill and I peered over the rocks and saw on a shelf of rock below a large, beautiful, white bird with yellow markings that I realised was a gannet. Below it the sea was surging into the geo and washing back to meet a new incoming wave, so that there was foam and turbulence, a huge power of water. There was something awkward about the posture of the bird and we realised it had a damaged or broken wing. Soon it was swept off the shelf in the cliff and was tossed like a white discoloured rag backwards and forwards, seeming to make progress and then washed further back from where it had started, but plunging forward again, and then washed back, with no escape as its strength failed, and yet it showed no signs of distress, simply, as it were, undertaking its task. It was pushed against the rock and this time scrambled up awkwardly and astonishinglyonto another shelf, and it sat there, looking ahead, resting. We walked on, discussing its likely fate, death by drowning when the water reached the new shelf, or to be killed by seals as it entered the waves, unable to fly. Half an hour later it was still resting on its ledge of sandstone rock, but the surge of water was higher ...

Nor hope nor dread attend/A dying animal ... and, as Johnson said, it is not the thought but the prospect of death that concentrates the mind wonderfully and I have more than once seen in the eyes of a dying man the look of one who withdraws from the world, but looks back upon it as a whole ... as though weighing it in the balance as he makes his farewells, having less and less to do with those he leaves behind ...

Another day, another draft ...

2008-09-23T13:54:00.002+01:00

On being at home in the world
1
Near the beginning of Rilke’s first Duino Elegy are some famous and striking lines that have haunted me over the years as I am sure they have haunted others. But we are haunted by what we have failed to come to terms with or adequately address—the lines linger because they both describe our condition and recall us to a task, to something that we are subliminally aware of but keep at bay—an attitude that displays a human weakness whose overcoming is a significant theme of the elegies:

And even the noticing beasts are aware
That we don’t feel very securely at home
In this interpreted world[1]

2
But if these lines intrigue us and make us uneasy, as hinting at what we should accommodate and acknowledge, then they surely sit unhappily with the idea of ‘being at home in the world’, even if we read ‘being’ as a substantive. The intended ambiguity of this innocent phrase—being at home in the world—incorporates three philosophical ideas, that of ‘being’, ‘home’ and ‘world’. It is the complex relation between them that is the real theme of this essay. But before we can come to any conclusions about the implications for that theme of Rilke’s lines we should take the measure of the metaphor that has just suggested itself, that of ‘accommodation’, since it indicates both a place of residence, more or less ample and well-appointed, and what one—as the being in residence—is able to give house room to. It seems obvious that there is a ratio between the one and the other, and of both to the being who is in residence, which may help us in our thinking. Indeed the ratio between home and world is itself a metaphor for the being who is at home. though I suspect that what we can give house room to determines the proportions of the residence rather than the other way around. Or, more to the point, it is implicit in the necessity for constant dismantling and rebuilding.

3
Rilke’s lines tell us that even the animals know that humanity is not securely or reliably at home … but not at home where? He does not say in der Welt—in the world—but ‘In der gedeuteten Welt’. The adjectival ‘gedeutet’ would appear to qualify ‘world’ as such rather than serving to distinguish a particular kind of world from others—though I shall suggest a significant qualification in a moment—and it appears difficult to translate. The Leishman/Spender ‘interpreted’ seems better than the ‘translated’ of the Poulin version, since it carries the suggestion of ‘making sense’ rather than of conveying a sense from one language to another. But perhaps ‘signified world’ would be better than both, as suggesting the, as it were, ostensive, pointed to world that is indicated by our language, with the implication that there are things visible and highlighted by our interests, needs and desires, and, in consequence, things recessive, unnoticed and hidden from view, either in the shadows or invisible in the light of desire. This distinction between what is visible and what is invisible is clearly a crucial one. In part this is an aspect of the metaphor of visibility itself, since it suggests a contrast with what is invisible. If we are in a position to talk at all of a signified world that is visible then we imply a shadow world that remains unnoticed and overlooked, not yet made sense of.
We can connect the idea of a signified world with the early Wittgenstein notion that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. This formulation allows the possibility that we can refer at least to the idea of what lies beyond the limits both of my language and of my world, though I should want to qualify this by talking about what lies beyond the limits of the language that is available to me, and I should want also to speak, less individualistically, of the language available to us. If we do talk in these terms, we have to ask questions about the fundamental activity of making or establishing new sense in the first place, a task which belongs, I think, to the poets, and to philosophy to the extent that it achieves the condition of poetry, a task which involves the turning of the attention from what is visible and salient to what is peripheral and recessive so that the dominance of the one is overturned in favour of the other.

4
Perhaps what Rilke is trying to say is that this ‘not very securely’ is our unavoidable mode of being at home in the world. In other words, we do not consistently enjoy the comfortable, unselfconscious domesticity suggested by the metaphor simply of being at home. The world is our home, where we live, but it is, despite appearances and our best efforts, porous and ramshackle, not entirely wind and water tight and we can hear sounds from elsewhere, more or less menacing. The association of ‘world’ with ‘home’ accords with an important aspect of the use of the former term. Not only is the world essentially ‘gedeutet’—the world as shown in our language—but the underlying metaphor is of a contained space, which can be entered or left, dismantled, undermined, breached.
But if we talk of a space that is contained we imply by contrast a wider and more open space within which it is located, and part of which it therefore encloses … but the open space beyond what is enclosed is, as I have just implied, represented in the imagination as a place of danger, and we would feel perilously exposed if our world should be undermined. To sharpen the point about the sense of the expression ‘world’, we might say, recalling Eliot, that if humankind cannot bear very much reality, then it needs a world to shelter in—to shelter from what we fearfully and sometimes for good reason represent to ourselves as the storms, wild beasts and monsters that lie in wait outside the threshold and the carefully patrolled boundaries of the enclosure, boundaries both internal and external—patrolled, but never with complete success. Indeed ‘the world’ is just such reality as we can bear and a little bit more (the shadow world), and what lies beyond is the natural habitat of Rilke’s Angels, who live in this element and are equipped to do so—and we find them terrifying.
I have referred elsewhere to an intriguing passage in the first paragraph of Freud’s chapter on the ‘Dissection of the Personality’ in the New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in which he says that ‘the repressed is foreign ground to the ego – internal foreign ground – just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign ground’(88)[2]. It is the idea of ‘reality’ as ‘foreign ground’, Ausland, that is intriguing here, partly because there is an implicit contrast between home and abroad, and partly because ‘reality’ seems to refer to more than what can overwhelm us physically. It is rather that there is an internal relation between what is repressed, the internal foreign ground, and the external foreign ground of its intentional objects. To put it another way the repressed and reality stand in a relation of tension to Ego and World.

5
These reflections have been prompted in part by a recent re-reading of the Eighth Elegy, in which Rilke uses an expression that will remind many of his influence on Heidegger. He talks of ‘das Offene’ (literally ‘the open’). I am not equipped to discuss the nature and extent of that influence but in any case I should like to respond to the Elegy both more naively and as from a different tradition or formation of philosophy. As Ezra Pound has said, ‘poetry is not the merely decorative word’ and if it is not that, if it doesn’t merely tell us what we already know, but makes new sense and ‘names’ and brings to light what was previously hidden from view, then we have to learn to listen to it, and also see what it attempts to reveal—and not dismiss it because it must be saying with too little precision something that we already know. Philosophers tend not to like the state of ignorance and the role of pupil, but it does seem to be the proper demeanour before the metaphors of poetry since these are often our first access to what we have not yet appropriated, or, to return to our previous metaphor, accommodated.

With all their eyes the animals all see
What lies open. Only our eyes are turned
As it were away and set like snares
Around their clear way out.

There is a grotesque fusion of ideas here which passes from what is represented by the direction of our gaze away from das Offene to a representation of our eyes as snares set around it. But the thought seems to be that the direction of our gaze implies that we are in some way hostile to das Offene and to those who are aware of its presence. But what does the phrase mean—das Offene?
It is an expression that gathers within itself several modalities of the metaphor of openness. The significant contrast is between the animals, aware of what lies open before them, which is also said to provide a clear way out—presumably of their confinement—and ourselves, whose eyes are set in the opposite direction from what lies open, and open to view—to us, if we only looked, as much as to the beasts.
The image that comes to mind is of domestic animals who see the open gate that would take them outside their enclosure and to freedom, and of us, perhaps scarcely aware that the gate is open because our attention is directed within the enclosure, and the beasts are anyway trapped there just by the power of our scrutiny. So there are three related ideas and corresponding contrasts, between what is open and what is closed, between what is free and what is confined, and what is outside and what is inside, in a context of awareness and unawareness, and where to be free is to be outside and in the open. The gaze of the animals is the image of this ability to look at if not move towards the opening to what lies outside. I have to say, though, that I do not find it a compelling image. Leishman reports Rilke as referring in a letter of 1924 to how the animals ‘are most at home in a broader segment of consciousness’ and he cites an observation of Eberhard Kretschmar to the effect that if ‘we look any animal in the eyes … we shall see that their look … simply does not meet our eyes … and that every animal’s look, even when it is looking at us, looks out beyond beyond us … into immeasurable distances, into the open, into pure space’. It is the second part of these remarks that seem problematic even as they echo the language of the Elegy. There is indeed an uncanny sense that we are looked beyond even as we are looked at by animals, but I am not persuaded that these fellow creatures are gazing into immeasurable distances, even if their demeanour provides an image of such.
But it is not just that we are scarcely aware of the open gate—we have no conception of what is outside:

What is outside we know only from the face
Of the beast; because from its earliest years
We twist the child around and make it see
What is laid down, not what is open
And deep there in the beast’s expression. Free from death.
Only we see that. The free animal
Has its passing always behind it, and God ahead
And when it runs it runs within eternity
As springs of water run

We do not see what is open before us because we are looking back—there are six references in this short Elegy to our being turned in the wrong direction—but we do see death, unlike the animals, who run within eternity. We are different from them:

No, not even for a single day
Have we ever had that pure space before us
Into which the flowers open; always world
And never Nowhere without not: it is pure,
Beyond our scrutiny, we breathe it in, it is boundlessly known
And never an object of desire.

Always world and never, by contrast, ‘Nowhere’—which I take to imply a condition beyond co-ordinates—‘without Not’— and differentiation. So the critical contrast is between world and ‘that pure space before us’, das Offene. I shall return to this theme. Rilke now returns to the image of the child who gets quietly lost in this space but is again jogged back, then says of the dying and of lovers:

Or someone dies and is it.
As we approach death, we see death no longer
And stare ahead, perhaps with that gaze of the beast.
If the other were not in the way, lovers
Are close to it and in awe …
As though through inadvertence is it seen
Behind the beloved … but no one gets beyond
Them, and the world comes back.
We are always turned towards creation, and so
See there only the reflection of freedom
Obscured by ourselves. Or some dumb beast
Looks up and calmly looks right through us.
This is destiny: to be over against and
Nothing else but over against.

‘The world comes back’, ‘We are always turned towards creation’. ‘Who’s turned us round like this?’ It is important to refer to that set of contrasts that I mentioned earlier—open/closed, free/confined, inside/outside—because they give us, I think, the form of a possible experience which may give us access to Rilke’s thinking: the experience of release from confinement as an image of the barely discerned idea of such a release, where what we seek release from, the confined space, is the world, even though the lament is that our collective attention is resolutely focussed within its bounds and away from what lies beyond it, das Offene. The lament must surely remind us of the predicament of the prisoners in the cave and the situation of the released prisoner. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the released prisoner stands ‘outside the world’ absolutely. He stands outside the world of the prisoners, can see the limits of that world clearly, and is witness to the causal mechanisms that determine its limits. And if we wished to apply this metaphor, we could perhaps say that the fixation of the prisoners’ gaze is determined by the energy of the passions, or even the klesas. But the released prisoner still has to make himself a home, as it were, in a larger and more ample world of experience, one which gives him a perspective on the restrictive enclosure of his former fellow-prisoners, with whom now he cannot communicate as he did before. Or at least, he cannot directly communicate the sense of his new form of experience: what he is able to speak about surpasses the limits of the language available to the chained prisoners.
The open and unconfined space into which we may perhaps hope to be released—das Offene—must, therefore, lie beyond the world. This could be familiar in a troubling metaphysical way, but it would be a mistake I think to dismiss it too precipitately. We have to think of an enclosure, an opening in the perimeter of the enclosure and so a way out of it into the open fields, woods and spaces beyond, and the task is to give content to these relationships without descending into the philosophically suspect. Can we make any sense at all of the idea of a contrast between something called the world and something outside it that we call das Offene?
I am inclined myself to think of das Offene in the negative, as the unenclosed. This helps us to see it more clearly as set over against what is enclosed, so we have the idea of what is enclosed and what is unenclosed. However, we still need a content to fill in these terms. Our clue must be that sense of a possible experience—of release from confinement—and how we might articulate it. There is a remark in one of Rilke’s letters that gives us a further and related clue, a remark that describes the dynamic nature of and resistance to what is ‘beyond’, to what is therefore unenclosed, which is also felt at least in some moods and some people, as the open space into which one is released from confinement:

I sometimes ask myself whether longing cannot so stream out of a man, like a storm, that, against it, in opposition to its outgoing current, nothing can reach him … Letter of Rilke14th May 1912)

Although we usually talk in terms of the intentional object of a desire in a way that allows us further to talk of what is salient for us in the environment and what occluded, important as these are, nevertheless this remark gives us a helpful additional sense of how the energy of desire flows out from us in a way that prevents the countervailing energies—the conatus—of the environment impinging upon us. It also implies the idea that our incuriousness is a function of a depleted energy available for action, to user a phrase of Simone Weil’s. But we must also take into account another aspect, if we think of Freud’s remark cited earlier, viz the resistance to acknowledgement of those countervailing energies in the form of a responsive sensibility.
I have said enough to suggest that we can think of a narrower and a more ample world, rather than the world as such with an outside or beyond. If we think in terms of a distinction between what is narrower and what more ample then at least we have one term which allows by contrast the idea of an outside, something beyond our current world, or beyond the limits of the language that is currently available to us. But Rilke talks simply of world and of our constant confinement to it. Maybe we need to make a further distinction, one which is justified by his several references to the direction of our gaze, viz the world and our attitude to the world, where, however, certain attitudes simply determine the world and language we have available. We need to find some aspect of ‘the world’ that gives us a contrast: why should we see the world as the enclosed term in the first place, and as the term that lies over against ‘the open’? And at what point does the world, at what point does enclosure, become oppressive? The emotional contrast is between being oppressively hemmed in and contained, and being released into a state of freedom from the oppression: getting out of the prison. What is open here is what is unenclosed, and it is this that gives force to the way Rilke talks of ‘world’, the idea of a restricting enclosure of space in the midst of the prairie, as it were, though if that is our image we can surely see the need for enclosures and protection from the elements in the form of a homestead. Nevertheless we do have two protagonists here, as we have seen, the restless Rilke and a complacent and incurious humanity, the chained and the released prisoner. At what point does the world become oppressive then? I suggest that it does so when we have intimations or even real but temporary experience of something lying beyond it, and then suffer a closing in of horizons. So it is not enclosure as such that is the problem. As we have just seen we also need enclosure to protect us from the cosmic winds. Perhaps the point is not that the world hems us in and restricts our vision, as that our vision is restricted not by it but to it, and that when this happens, what constitutes the world may dwindle down to what our vision is restricted to.
Our world becomes restricted just to what our vision discloses and it is our own self-enclosure that is the problem. In other words it is not the world as such that is the problem, but the direction of vision—we look at it but not through or beyond it towards a further possibility: viz a larger and more ample world—and this excludes any awareness, except the most peripheral (which is perhaps the point of Rilke’s examples) beyond the enclosure: a limiting incuriousness which prevents other possibilities opening up. Whereas the point about das Offene is that what remains unenclosed—what could never be contained by us—is hidden or concealed, though it lies open to view for those who turn their attention in the right direction. It should perhaps now be clear that we are moving towards the idea of more than one conception of what constitutes the world, conceptions which are potentially at least in collision. If we say our vision is restricted to but not by the world we make a distinction which allows us to say that to the extent that our vision is restricted to the world then that very preoccupation determines the world we inhabit, makes us precisely worldly. This allows us to see the concept of the world as essentially determined by a fusion of the epistemological and the ethical which is implicit in the traditional Christian notion of the ‘world’, which names both a view of life determined by the narrow self interest of the flesh and those who are possessed of that view. To put it another way, our ethical sensibility determines our significant world and we are uneasy with it. To continue to use Christian language, the ‘world’ in its pejorative sense, is just such reality as is appropriated by the unregenerate, who are still blind to what is there and opens up to those who undergo the experience of metanoia. I should want to say something here about the evanescence of mauvaise foi, that what we thus describe is a failure of acknowledgement and a refusal to accommodate what we sometimes recognise but suppress because we cannot support it. But this brings us rather conveniently to conditioned co-production. It does so at least in respect of a significant application of that principle. There arise, in dependence on conditions, which have of course to be spelled out, states of mind that obscure or reveal what lies open before us if only we turned our attention to it. Here talk of dependent origination needs to be mediated by the metaphor of waking up or, to come to Rilke again, of turning round. However, our interest in the principle of dependent origination is not in the general formula but derives precisely from the oppressive sense of dukkha and such applications of the principle as lead us to release into the open dimension of being. But it is not something that is called das Offene that is important to us. What is of interest is what lies open, and here I want to make some final remarks about what I believe to be the mystical escapism of Rilke.

6
The starting point for all this must lie in the distinction between what there is, or reality, or existence, or being, on the one hand, and what of that reality we acknowledge or appropriate or realise, whose content constitutes the world, on the other. But if reality lies outside or beyond the world it is not so in the sense of the world being a copy of reality or something that bears any kind of comparison with a distinct reality. The world is what of reality we have assimilated or habituated ourselves to, or accommodated. In this sense the world is certainly just what we have enclosed and what lies beyond is the unenclosed, still open, undetermined reality we have not yet accommodated. But this is all far too general and needs to be brought down to something much more specific and it seems to me that we are really talking of self-knowledge and the failure of self-knowledge. I quoted a passage from Eliot earlier on, about how humankind cannot bear very much reality. This I think gives us a clue to the fact that we are talking about acknowledgment rather than simply knowledge. There are clearly connections between this talk by Eliot and Rilke’s laments about our condition. However, the reality that we can bear alters with changes in the sensibility that has to bear the weight, and this is a context for talking about how a world can be transformed or undermined. Briefly, our subjective formations are determined by unresolved conflict in our orientation towards the intentional objects of our competing desires and feelings. Now as Rilke recognises very clearly, for example in his marvellous first sonnet to Orpheus, there is an orientation that dominates consciousness and one that is overlaid, and it is through the stillness of listening brought about through music that allows the recessive consciousness to emerge, in such a way that our being is a function of what we are able to acknowledge. But the reality or dimensions of existence that are not within our human enclosure press themselves upon our attention in the form of intimations and images, and hauntings.

But what of Rilke’s alleged mystical escapism? It might be helpful to start with Leishman’s commentary. He remarks, helpfully enough, that

Being or existence perceived as something not-ourselves, Rilke calls ‘world’ and contrasts with what he calls ‘the open’ …

But then he goes on:

In this ‘open’ world there is no time, no past or future, no end, no limit, no separation or parting, and no death as an opposite of life.

He has plenty of warrant for this in the Eighth Elegy, especially perhaps Rilke’s comment about how we see Death but the beast doesn’t; how we see Future but the beast sees all. And the remark that

This is destiny: to be over against
And nothing else, always over against

And ‘never Nowhere without not’. But it is one thing to say that there is no time there and another to say more modestly and less Platonically that we have no experience of time; it is one thing to say that there is no limit and another to say that we have no experience of limit. But the point is that we are being pressed towards a particular application of the idea of das Offene as lying beyond the world. Earlier Leishman had written:

Rilke now insists upon a still more fundamental defect or limitation—the fact that in almost all consciousness there is a distinction between what philosophers call subject and object; the fact that our awareness of Being or existence, as an object, as something distinct from ourselves, prevents us from identifying ourselves with it and achieving a condition of pure Being or pure existence.

But Rilke’s insistence is not expressed quite in these terms, which have been supplied by Leishman. Rilke certainly talks of our destiny, as we have seen, of gegenϋber, immer gegenϋber, which Leishman translates as ‘opposite … always opposite’. What Leishman seems to envisage here is a distinction between one form of consciousness, a defective one, in which there is a distinction between subject and object, and another, higher one, in which we are identified with Being or existence and achieve a condition of pure Being or existence.
But in the first place, there is not one form of consciousness in which there is a distinction between subject and object. Our forms of consciousness certainly reveal how much we are aware or unaware that our own position is as dependent on conditions as the objects of our perception, that there is no duality in that sense. Certainly there are states of pure awareness which we might describe as ‘non-dual’ because there is no awareness of a subject over against an object, but such states are ethically interesting only to the extent that they liberate or reorient us. To the extent that they do not do this then we have an attachment to a kind of mystical escapism of the kind I mentioned. But again, this talk of ‘over against’ is slippery. There are alienated states of consciousness which reflect our alienation from others, in which one experiences oneself as standing over against, in opposition to and separate from them, perceiving them merely as objects of one’s desires. But to overcome the experience of separateness is not a matter of overcoming the distinction between subject and object, but of realising the nature of that distinction and the forms of relation that are available to us.

[1] Und die findigen Tiere merken es sschon,
Dass wir nich sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
In der gedeuteten Welt
[2] “…das Verdrängste ist aber für das Ich Ausland, inneres Ausland, so wie die Realität – gestatten Sie den ungwohnten Ausdruck – äusseres Ausland ist”.

A draft

2008-08-25T20:40:00.004+01:00

I had been incurious about secular humanism, and had not given much attention to the recent debates, promoted by the media, between polar opposite ‘secularists’ and ‘religionists’. But I recently came across a book by a philosopher whose work I knew and respected—it was On Humanism, by Richard Norman, a measured and sober, almost sombre piece of work. Norman did not as some more conspicuous secularists have done lay all our human ills at the door of religion, and nor did he adhere to an easy belief in human progress. On the contrary, Primo Levi’s If this is a Man was for him a crucial text for humanism, which he saw as ‘an attempt to think about how we should live without religion’, as the search for ‘some alternative set of beliefs to live by’. His rejection of religious belief was grounded in the thought that it is false rather than always harmful. Thus Norman writes:

Humanism as I understand it involves not just the rejection of religious belief but, at the very least, the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion. (p 18)

Well, this seemed a familiar and, some may think, an uncontroversial project, though what seems uncontroversial depends on the milieu to which one habituates oneself, but I noticed a slide in Norman’s sentence, from talk of ‘religious belief’ to talk of ‘religion’. I was not sure that one could live a good life without religion, in the sense at least of the resources made available in our religious traditions, although I thought that one could live a good life without ‘religious belief’.
Also quite by chance I came across an article by Nicholas Lash with the provocative title, ‘The Impossibility of Atheism’, provocative if only because the position it announced seemed in the current climate unfashionable and reactionary, a rearguard and hopeless action against a now ascendant secularism. It seemed when I first glanced through it that the paper argued that one could not live a good life without religious belief—or at least that one’s conception of what constitutes a good life is seriously impaired by the absence of belief.

But what is it to reject or embrace ‘religious belief’, or live a good life, with or without religion? One should notice that this talk of ‘rejecting religious belief’ tends to be understood as talk of rejecting theism or belief in God and that theists and secular humanists alike incline towards this assimilation—which makes it difficult for either party to take seriously the idea of a religious attitude or perspective not explicitly or surreptitiously theistic, even though, as I should want to say, such a perspective is not directed, as it were, towards the heavens, but towards life on earth.

1.
The exasperation of theologians has been aroused by secularists who believe they are attacking religious belief and theology as such when in reality, and unawares, they are attacking a form of religious belief contaminated by bad theology—the secularists fail to understand the nature of religious belief and so their rejection of it is suspect, even though it should be admitted that the bad theology is widespread in its influence and humanly damaging to those believers whose lives are informed by it.

Now, if it is true that the project of secular humanism sees itself as founded on a misconception of the religious belief that it rejects then this must have consequences for its self-understanding. But I am not sure that the project is grounded in a misconception: it is grounded, rather more simply, in the absence of belief, in a secular atmosphere in which the question arises, what is it to live a good life? So the humanist project is not necessarily undermined even if it is articulated in terms of the rejection of a misconceived notion of belief: we should at least need to explore further the founding idea that one can live a good life in the absence of belief, even if, as I have hinted, there is some reason for demurring about a good life without religion.

The possibility of rapprochement between secularists and religionists has been enhanced by recent work by the Irish theologian, James Mackey, who repudiates the forms of belief and bad theology rejected by the secularists. He thinks the bad theology, in the form of discredited doctrines of God and creation, still flourishes in the ranks of believers and their ecclesiastical hierarchies, and stand in need of correction by the great secular philosophers of the last two centuries. Perhaps this can be reciprocated— perhaps secular humanism can be corrected by religious modes of thinking, though with no implication in favour of belief. But, as we have seen, there is a complication.

Nicholas Lash follows Karl Rahner in claiming that any conception of the good life cut off from religious belief is disastrously flawed. The message to the secularist appears to be quite blunt. Not only are you wrong about the religious belief that you reject, you cannot have an adequate conception of human nature or what it is to live a good life except under the condition of belief.
Thus Lash cites a view of Rahner’s to the effect that ‘keeping the word ‘God’ in play, even if only as a question, is part of the very definition of what it is to be a human being’, and, more trenchantly:

The absolute death of the word ‘God’ including even the eradication of its past, would be the signal, no longer heard by anyone, that man himself had died.

Now, those of us who are non-believers might be tempted here to sigh, shrug and move on to other things, though perhaps with a slight shiver at that Heideggerian signal no longer heard by anyone, which must be the point of the claim that a conception of the good life cut adrift from religious belief is severely damaged. But I should prefer to pause and dwell on just what Rahner thinks is secured by the use of the word ‘God’ and to see how much of what is thus secured can be appropriated independently of its use, notwithstanding the further comment that the ‘use of this word, and this word alone, brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and the single whole of their own existence’ (my italics).

There are two things here—one could perhaps agree that the use of this word could bring a person face to face with the single whole of reality and of their own existence, and yet disagree that it is through the use of this word alone that a person might be brought to such a pitch.
But first let us return to the alleged misrepresentation of belief in God that brings the self-understanding of the secular humanist into question. If that is what is involved in belief in God, Rahner seems to imply, then we should all be atheists. He writes as follows:

that God really does not exist who operates and functions as an individual existent alongside other existents, and who would thus be a member of the larger household of all reality. Anyone in search of such a God is searching for a false God. Both atheism and a more naïve form of theism labour under the same false notion of God, only the former denies it while the latter believes it can make sense of it

The passage places the ‘atheist’ on the same footing as the ‘more naïve theist’—as labouring under the same false notion of God. But despite the mild condescension, it offers a reason for abandoning one kind of justifications for non-belief. However, just as few people come to belief through the traditional arguments for God, so it may be that non-belief can survive damage to its own critical narrative about the nature of belief—and find little to recommend a corrected account of its nature. Not all religious belief is contaminated by a false notion of God, and nor need all atheism be so contaminated, though it would then have to give a different account of itself.

What of the true God, the God of sound doctrine? Rahner’s remarks, and those by Lash in support of his position, should remind us of two crucial and connected remarks in Aquinas. St Thomas has told us that we can know by the light of reason that there is a God but not what he is. He goes on to say that God, whom he calls that great ocean of being, is not a being, one among others, but is, rather, supra ordinem omnium entium, beyond the order of all beings— so not part of the ‘household of all reality’, to use the Rahner phrase. He is beyond our understanding, so that ‘every way we have of thinking about God is a particular way of failing to understand him as he is in himself’. This thought is echoed centuries later by an entry recorded in one of Newman’s notebooks and brought to our attention by Lash, that in talking about God we can only set right one error of expression by another. This is not a God that can be searched for as an ‘existent’ within the ‘household of reality’, but is rather the condition or ground of that household and a condition, therefore, of the possibility of any kind of investigation into what belongs within it.

2.
But if these grammatical remarks about ‘God’ are in the classical tradition of St Thomas, they also bear a striking resemblance to the work of the Wittgensteinian philosopher, Dewi Phillips, whose sustained critique of much contemporary philosophy of religion appears continuous with the Thomistic/Rahnerian tradition. If God is not a being among others but beyond the order of all beings, if God does not belong within the household of all reality, then it is a mistake to superimpose upon discourse about God a form of discourse that belongs within the natural order. The main burden of Phillips’ work, as I understand it, is that we are constantly tempted to import an alien model into our thinking about God and belief, superimposing on religious discourse a methodology of evidence, hypothesis and probability (precisely the methodology that Richard Dawkins seeks to impose) that belongs to empirical, particularly scientific investigation.

Once one claims that ‘God’ is not the name of an ‘existent’, whose most general characteristic is its contingency, the question whether there is anything that would constitute an inquiry, let alone a method of inquiry, into his existence becomes conceptually problematic—not on the grounds that it isn’t true that God ‘exists’ but because the nature and form of God’s existence must determine the nature and form of what, if anything, would constitute an inquiry. The very contingency of ‘existents’ determines the possibilities and direction of inquiry, into the conditions upon which their existence depends But if we are talking of an eternal and necessary being, one whose necessity implies that it is not within the order of beings which come into and go out of existence, then I do not think that there can be any inquiry by means of which we can establish to our satisfaction that such a being exists, as we can within empirical discourse. All we can do is to inquire into the conditions under which that concept of eternal being is formed, and then follow such promptings of the heart as may there arise. This is not to deny that we can ask whether such a being exists, only to deny that an answer is available other than in the form of whatever prompts a confession of faith and adoration. To put it another way I find myself here thoroughly in sympathy with a remark made by Phillips, that any ‘inquiry’ would take the form of whatever leads to ‘finding God’ rather than finding out whether there is indeed a God. Nor is this, I think, the famous ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ just because we are talking about the conditions of concept formation rather than an inexplicable and ungrounded commitment to belief, and this must lead us back to Rahner’s reference to the single whole of reality.

But first, Phillips has often been dismissed as an ‘anti-realist’ (wrongly in my view) and it will help our progress if we can look at a recent example of this criticism, made by John Haldane, who, in an assessment of his contribution to the philosophy of religion writes that

His approach to religious discourse is reminiscent of that of a tradition of theologians who have sought to interpret Christian belief and practise in ways that free them from the presumption of realities existing apart from human thought, language and action.

And he concludes that

Phillips is right to refer the sense of religious claims to human practice, but wrong in not allowing them the possibility of “transcendent” reference; or put another way, wrong to think that their full meaning is exhausted by their practice-constituted sense.

Haldane has just accepted as fair an account of his own position on the resurrection of Jesus, that ‘the belief cannot be reasonably understood in any way other than as involving a metaphysical commitment’. It seems plausible initially to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It seems plausible because it is a concession that doesn’t require you to take a view about the commitment—it is a remark about believers and you do not need to be a believer yourself or to share that commitment, in order to acknowledge its presence.

But when Haldane says that Phillips is wrong not to allow religious claims ‘the possibility of “transcendent” reference’, the complaint is a rather stronger one—that he fails to see something, not about believers, but about the status of their religious claims. But it is only initially plausible to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It fails to acknowledge that the reductionist makes a revisionist move—effectively proposing an error theory—offering an intellectual re-appraisal of religious discourse. The reductionist doesn’t fail to understand that the religious claims involve a metaphysical commitment but rather sees that very commitment as itself a misunderstanding of the discourse. The point is that the reductionist is already a non-believer and this provides the context in which they offer an explanation of the religious belief they no longer hold, and re-interpret it as, really, and despite appearances, about human life rather than about a divine being. What helps their claim is that such discourse is also about human beings, whatever the status of the claims about God. In the light of that explanation the reductionist sees believers as having a false belief about the nature of their own discourse. The claim is emphatically not that the believers are mistaken in their metaphysical commitment, but that they are mistaken in supposing that there was a metaphysical commitment involved at all. Well, these explanations are often found compelling—they exert over us what Wittgenstein once called ‘charm’. But it is hard to see what would count in favour of the verdict that they are right.

A better route for the secular humanist is to refuse the revisionist theorising of reductionism and simply say that while they do not share the metaphysical commitment there are plenty of insights about human life to celebrate within religious discourse, about how to live, about the interior conditions of action, the subjectivity of moral life and so forth.

But, to return to Haldane, he seems to charge Phillips with a refusal to concede, not that religious claims are about a divine reality, but that there could be a divine being that they are about. This seems close to wanting him to concede that believers could be right in believing in God. And it is surely a modest enough concession. And if Phillips is not, after all, a reductionist, then presumably he would concede that Haldane could be right to believe in God. However, I think that what Phillips ought to reply is that such a concession would be an empty gesture—and to say this is not take a reductionist line after all. It is an empty gesture because there is no procedure for determining that the believer is right.

3.
I should like now to return to the idea that the philosopher can inquire only into the conditions of concept formation and to the idea espoused by Rahner that the word ‘God’ brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and their own existence. In the preceding article, ‘Where Does The God Delusion Come From?’ Lash remarks of the question why is there anything at all? that it is often said that God is ‘the answer’ and he comments that it a ‘very strange answer because it does not furnish us with information: it simply names the mystery’.

Lash is not here defending the argument for the existence of God, renewed and made familiar by Herbert McCabe, which depends on a series of questions asking why this state of affairs obtains rather than that, questions which are answered by showing that what happens to obtain is contingent upon some particular condition; and the series culminates in the great question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, as though that there is anything at all were one state of affairs and nothing at all another, with the invitation to find the presence of anything at all a contingency that depends upon a divine condition. One problem I have always had with this argument is that although the principle of sufficient reason impels us forward to look for conditions for why things are as they are and not otherwise, it is always a further question whether we shall find such a condition. But we find a condition which we presume must exist and are confirmed in the principle when we do find it. Even if we believe that there must be a condition upon which everything depends, it is a further question whether we shall find one, and our failure to find it will put pressure on our presumption that there must be such a condition. But it this gap between presuming and finding that makes this a religious quest rather than an argument, and putting it in the form of an argument comes close to misrepresenting the form of that quest, which depends on an experience of contingency, which those of us who are non-believers do not share, though we can have plenty of experience of the contingency of human life, as I shall come to later, not in the sense simply of encountering it, but rather of having the universal displayed in the particular in a vivid apprehension of the human condition. Part of the problem, then, if we think of it as an argument, lies in seeing the very existence of things as a contingency in the first place. This is not a problem for the believer because they are already schooled in such a view, but it is certainly a problem for the non-believer. As I have said, it seems entirely possible for someone to have an experience of contingency that amounts to an access of faith, and perhaps this is the real force of the ‘argument’, that it is a kind of vademecum by which someone is led to acknowledge contingency where previously they had not, and where to acknowledge contingency is already a confession of faith, and where to acknowledge the possibility of contingency is to acknowledge the possibility of faith.

I find it difficult to grasp one particular response here, which says that to refuse to acknowledge the contingency of things is to commit oneself to the absurd idea that it is all a ‘brute fact’. Now there are plenty of contexts in which one is properly indignant if someone claims that some state of affairs is just a ‘brute fact’, but we do not have the stage-setting in this context that makes it arbitrary to insist that something is a brute fact in the face of obviously available, determining conditions. Perhaps this is the point of the famous Wittgensteinian remark about das Mystische, that our language has its foothold in how the world is, and not in that it is. But that it is—is the occasion for poetry, wonder, gratitude, ecstatic song. And the spirit of God moving over the waters is one song, later turned into cruel and ghastly prose.

4.
But Lash is not, as I said, deploying that argument here. He is rather simply making a corrective grammatical remark about how the word ‘God’ is used and misused, a grammatical remark which seeks to correct the secularist misrepresentation of the doctrine of God. The God of the orthodox believer is not of the kind that is denied by the atheist and accepted by the more naïve theist.

But it is in the context of this grammatical remark that we should try to understand Rahner’s striking comments on how the death of this word would also be the signal for the death of man, and to see how the secular humanist ought to respond. Rahner’s comments augment the account of the grammar of the word God in an important way. To understand their significance we need to look at two further, helpful claims made by Lash, the first that the notion of God is better understand by analogy with ‘treasure’, and the second, that the notion of a god is the notion of what is worshipped, of what one’s heart is set on.

This will remind some of us, and it may have been in Lash’s mind also, of the gospel saying that where your treasure is there your heart is also, with its ethical implication that one’s treasure and therefore one’s heart, can be set as it were in the wrong place: whatever one’s view of gods or God, one’s heart (and treasure) is located somewhere or other, one is, to change the idiom, in some particular state of eros.

The implication of these remarks seems to me that our conception of human nature is to be traced along the whole possible trajectory of desire, around the formations and deformations of the heart. The point about the genuine worship of God for our purposes here is that it rules out other forms of worship, eclipses former idolatries, from which one has now turned away, of which one now repents, so it carries an essential reference to metanoia, a turning away from certain forms of conduct in favour of others.

If I may return to my initial scepticism about the assimilation of ‘religious belief’ and ‘religion’, and to the idea that one can live a good life without religious belief but not perhaps without religion, I should want to say here that ‘religion’ in the sense of our religious traditions is one of the repositories of human wisdom. We can, I think, find a use for the term ‘religious’ which carries no commitment to belief in God, though the term itself, as opposed to its use, is dispensable. A religious perspective is not a perspective upon a transcendent object, but rather a perspective upon the earth and the human condition. The perspective is in this sense itself transcendent, though it is also an ordinary human experience, and is better perhaps seen as essentially twofold, as the vision of a possibility of liberation that at the same time and integrally looks back at human suffering and its causes. When Siddhartha has had his first shattering vision of the human condition through encountering the sick man, the old man and the corpse, the universal mediated by the particular, he famously becomes aware of the fourth sight, that of the mendicant disappearing into the forest, which becomes for him the image of possible liberation, again a particular image that represents a universal possibility. We all of us more or less participate in such visions and perspectives, represented perhaps by the figure of the Bodhisattva or of Rilke’s Angel, and they visit and then leave us, but we recall them as standards of judgment as we continue our progress through mortal life. I can see no reason why a secular humanist should not celebrate such perspectives, even if they are properly wary of using forms of language that owe their origin to traditions they no longer find tenable: except that it is not, on this view, the tradition that is not tenable, but rather that certain aspects of it, possibly misunderstood, possibly not, have been let go of, though there is a whole language of interiority that needs to be kept hold of. But according to Rahner it is the use of this word ‘God’ and, allegedly, this word alone, that leads us to the single whole of reality and the single whole of our own existence. Actually, in one sense Rahner is right—it is the use of this word that leads us to the contemplation of our condition, rather than as it were the use of the word God. If I understand Lash, the claim is that the adequacy of our conception of what it is to be a human being depends upon the extent to which we come fully to realise our creatureliness and radical contingency, and I use that phrase ‘fully to realise’ as my own gloss on his comment that learning the word ‘God’ is a matter of life-long learning, and the worship and adoration of God is the fundamental form not just of one’s knowledge of God but also and therefore of one’s knowledge of oneself as creature. But that formulation is already too individualist, of course—we are talking about the fundamental form of our knowledge of God and of ourselves as creatures. One is not talking of one’s own, personal, private, dependence on the mystery of the Godhead, but our common dependence, and a vital aspect of this realisation is the growth of our mutual solidarity and sense of kinship. And one reason that Lash is right to talk about life-long learning is presumably that we are confronted by all the egocentric and partisan obstacles to realising this solidarity—realising in the sense both of coming to see and making real. This would also explain the Johannine criterion for whether someone genuinely loves God—that they love and do not hate their brother—and it also explains St Paul’s explosive comment about stupid Galatians—since the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit determine the form of a community, and the community that is supposed to represent the church is intended precisely as an image of human solidarity, and a bulwark against the gross cruelties that undermine and destroy it. But surely, surely at this point one needs to say that the whole project of humanism is not an exercise in hubris but a compassionate solidarity with one’s fellow mortals, from a point of view that visits us, though not in obedience to our will, and leaves its traces in our memory and standards of judgment. This seems to me to represent a vision which one may or may not want to call religious, though that hardly matters, but it is one which is entirely available to the good atheist, and it is a vision of a possibility that is secured by its embodiment in practice and by the keeping alive a language of poetic evocation that expresses the horrors and suffering of humanity in a spirit of compassion.

5.
I said that the visitations of this perspective did not depend upon our will, and I did so because I had in mind a serious reservation that John Haldane had about the whole reductionist enterprise that he associated with Phillips, ‘a certain de-spiritualisation … a form of naturalised pelagianism’. But I wish to end with a defence of Phillips, as a kind of memoriam.

Haldane cites the example of Phillips’ treatment of the expression ‘eternal life’, and comments as follows:

a noun phrase such as “eternal life” that might have been taken to refer to an existential state or condition is transformed into a series of verbal expressions such as “participating in the life of God”, “dying to the self”, “seeing that all things are a gift”, with these in turn being referred to such activities as forgiving, thanking and loving”.

I think that the point of Haldane’s drawing our attention to the transition from the ‘noun phrase’ to the ‘series of verbal expressions’ is that the latter seem evasive of the idea that there is some reality, some condition of existence, that the noun phrase stands for, which exists (or doesn’t exist) quite independently of our beliefs about the matter, and is not reducible to our attitudes and activities. Such a transition would, I think, be evasive in the way Haldane suggests. But it seems to me that the whole point about eternal life, to use the noun phrase, is that what belongs within the series of verbal expressions actually constitute the condition of existence that is called ‘eternal life’. But the orthodox view is that such a condition of existence may be enjoyed and anticipated here as well as being the hope and promise of the life to come. Phillips has no need to deny, and nor does the secular humanist need to deny, that Christians live in the expectation of this promise. But for the secular humanist at least some of the content of that condition of existence is available here whatever one may think about lives to come.

Fuchsias were never my favourites ...

2008-08-19T15:01:00.003+01:00

... and yet they do well here and the flowers dangle like whole populations of puppets dancing to the tune of the wind, though there has been little wind, the blue but cloudy sky has been a kind of miracle and I have sat drinking wine and reading beneath a fuchsia bush on a warm sunny evening sheltered by a lichened drystone wall, and thinking also about work, the nature of writing, the ethical demands it makes on honesty and integrity, at every moment, standards that sit quietly there in the form of some particular imagined audience, grave, listening with attention ... ghosts of old teachers, one's peers, one's opponents ... not quite superego, because every challenge and question has to be considered ...

How to be a good atheist

2008-08-12T21:10:00.003+01:00

.... though the title promises more than I am able to deliver. Still day-labouring, but some small progress ... I mowed some lawn, par exemple, but find myself in difficult territory, between Dewi Phillips, John Haldane, Nicholas Lash and Richard Norman, and the usual stuff about realism and anti-realism, reductionism, though all this seems erroneously imported from an entirely different kind of discourse, a view which is, I suppose, very much a Phillipsian position. It's all to do with whether and in what way we should talk of a 'transcendent reference' , as Haldane puts it, for religious claims, and what is entailed by rejecting the idea or endorsing it. In one quite obvious way of course theological statements refer to God ... in a way that anyone could agree with. But is there really a God? everyone asks and at once we are in the wrong territory again, seeking evidence for the yeti. This won't do, so had better stop ... Ian Bostridge is ca'ing the yowes to the knowes ... rather beautifully ... hauntingly, in some kind of echo chamber ... Anyway, the secular humanist is defined, as the name suggests, partly in terms of their rejection of religious belief, and partly in terms of the working out of a conception of human life freed from the oppressive aspects of that belief. But what is it to reject belief? Some theologians are conspicuously exasperated by the doctrine of God that is the real target of secularist critics ...

Blackwater

2008-08-08T19:49:00.002+01:00

Finally back in Orkney after a week on s b Pudge, once of the Dunkirk evacuation, sailing from Maldon to Aldeburgh and back, with visits up rivers, including to Orford, going ashore to pick samphire, anchoring off Osea Island, waiting for high water to get back to Maldon; and now I struggle with my old failures of discipline as I try to write this paper on spirituality and secular humanism. Well, I say my old failures of discipline, but I wonder whether composition follows a pattern that is not subject to my will and I just have to wait until the next thought or sentence comes. This is the least pleasant part of the process. When I have a draft and I am tinkering with it, life is so much easier, the process is absorbing and almost joyful, but just now it is day-labouring ....

foul weather

2008-07-19T08:55:00.003+01:00

The headache clears but the weather is not good, though for all that a busy day, on parade for various events. Comparative philosophy though. Wouldn't you say that philosophy just was in itself comparative, involved in the critical comparison of ideas. So what is the point of this new adjective. It seems to me to be evidence of dissatisfaction, the sense that the dominant forms are inadequate, in a way that now has to be spelled out: a sense that it sees nothing but what it does see, that there are things it fails to see, that remain hidden. And what are those things? And who provides the answer? How can those who fail to do justice to some aspect of reality recognise that fact? And what is implied in the phrase, 'aspect of reality'? Meanwhile, I have to do the dishes, which reminds me of the image of the light on the kitchen table which shows the marmalade you missed when you wiped it.

2008-07-17T22:00:00.004+01:00

These three look like sentinels at the gates of hell:

but these look more benign, and it looks like I was wrong about the murdered chicks, though chicks were murdered: A migraine today so no progress on Corbin and comparative philosophy, but a luminously beautiful day, the horizon clear, the sea still, dark green and turquoise, the singing of the seals ...

2008-07-14T18:45:00.003+01:00

When one writes philosophy, and not just then, of course, but philosophy has its peculiar poignancy, one shows what one understands but also, and unawares, what one has so far failed to understand. Unfortunately, as one grows older a certain complacency sets in as one repeats one's settled insights and gives less attention even to the possibility that there might be things beyond one's reach ... of course one would acknowledge that no doubt there are such things, if the question was raised, but it is not active in one's thoughts, because one has lost the sense of being at the dangerous edge of sense and comprehension.

Inside the burial chamber

2008-07-11T09:41:00.005+01:00

I find these markings disturbing because I feel I should understand them and I don't. It would be easier to think of them as decorative markings rather than symbols, because symbols have a meaning and if they are symbols then they are closed to me. If they are merely decorative then perhaps they are no more significant than wall paper that looks 'nice'. But this chambered tomb should also be a place of strong emotion, reverence, grief, ritual, the placing of a fresh corpse among the stones, to lie in darkness on a shelf of stone and turn to dust. We deal with death in the same way, or Death deals with us in the same way, and we respond as ceremonial animals. At least I understand that death was a significant event for these people, for a family, a community, a tribe, so we have that in common, unlike the curlews, who, for all I know, grieve, for a lost mate, perhaps, but with no conception of death, no reverence, no expressive acts of grief, a marshy, uninhabited island, great gulls and fulmars, seals on the shore, burial chambers, sheep and the lapping then the lashing of the waves, and inlets to hide a boat in ... and being always on the qui vive, alert for danger and enemies is not so remote from us as we should like to think, but we see the evidence of the attitude all around us, it is instinct in us but instinct can atrophy, until our middle class apartment block is shelled ... again.

The curlew and the fulmar

2008-07-09T12:16:00.003+01:00

A couple of curlews were hanging around the garden yesterday, strange creatures, our only point of common experience the sharp pangs of desire, but even stranger was visiting the smaller of the two main burial chambers on the Papay Holm, small standing stones, roughly landscaped as it seems, and the inevitable fulmar sitting enigmatically among them:

I'm slowly getting back into a pattern of work, starting with a piece on 'comparative philosophy' that derives from a paper at Calgary a couple of years ago. What is 'comparative philosophy'?

finis terrae

2008-07-08T22:53:00.007+01:00

I didn't set out to photograph this fulmar chick but I accidentally disturbed the parent bird which started up more or less under my feet and left this vulnerable and slightly anxious being exposed. I did move rapidly on ... But there is something eerie about the landscape here on this northern edge, 'petrified mudflats' seems to do it as an expression:
and at Leaper's Geo I found two corpses on a ledge above the sea, and only one chick with its mother, instead of three:

Birth, copulation, death, finding food and shelter, and the sensations that attach to these, but pure immediacy. nor hope nor dread, and yet on that hill, on this coastline, that is what experience amounts to, the air, the wind, the waves, the diving into the sea, and one human being walks slowly around the edge of this fierce vitality, this utter urgency of desire.

Die Ferien

2008-07-06T20:50:00.008+01:00

Two weeks of visits from friends, walking along the beaches and onto the cliffs, talking about metaphor, Coleridge, humanism, old teachers, philosophy, theology, children, old age, death, and then the feasting, the dining out ... and now back to work and focussing on writing, particularly on themes in the philosophy of religion, and the nature of religious language and its relation to reality. I've been asked for a title for a paper to be given in February: 'Spirituality for the godless' may do it ... Yesterday I walked alone and slowly up the cliffs and around the edge of the north east of the island in an eerie mist that covered land and sea, though not enough to conceal the puffins sitting watchful among the thrift:

Charming and peaceable, as it appears, but always watchful, on the qui vive, anxiously alert, which is not surprising when one sees the languid flight of the great skua, whose picture I snatched (I think) as I turned south (a large bird that eats puffins for breakfast and seizes gulls and drowns them under the waves), turned south

this time with a stranger from distant shores who was as surprised by me as I was by him as we both appeared in the mist, and continued then, together, as far as St Boniface Kirk. That was strange: in such a deserted place one hardly nods briefly at a passing stranger: at the edge of the world one pools ones resources. Not at the edge of the world, perhaps, but it felt like that, until the mist started to lift and burn away in the sun which came out brilliantly as we walked south across the petrified mudflats and saw the hills of Westray still half covered in mist

Findan

2008-06-20T22:03:00.005+01:00

This is a view of the Holm of Papay across from the main island of Papay, papa-ay, priest island. Findan was captured by or given over to a Viking slave-raiding party on the Irish coast (around 845AD) and was en route to Norway. According to Christopher Lowe, '(d)uring an enforced sojourn in Orkney, during which the raiding party rested and awaited a fair wind, Findan was able to make good his escape from an uninhabited island. On meeting a group of strangers, he was subsequently taken to a bishop whose episcopal seat was nearby' (p 8). He stayed with the bishop for two years. The bishop 'had been instructed in the study of letters in Ireland and was quite skilled in the knowledge of this language'. It has been suggested that the uninhabited island was the Holm and that the bishop would have been based at Monkerhoose or St Boniface kirk. Could Findan really have slipped away and landed on South Wick and found 'strangers' who took him to the bishop a mile or so away? Perhaps the raiding party didn't miss him or think it was worth the trouble to go after him. Perhaps they would have met with too much resistance, enough to keep them on the Holm until they got their fair wind? How hard would it be to find him, anyway? But an Irish adventure in Orkney and an episcopal seat on Papay, part of a mission station with good farming land ... An early raiding party, before they got serious. Was there genocide later on these islands?

Stones and the women

2008-06-19T21:33:00.009+01:00

Stone has been on my mind, not just because stone is so visible in drystone walls and flagstone and boulder and rock and pebble, not just because one is surrounded by the stern silent stoniness, the impassiveness of stone, and not by trees (where is my Maytime of beechen green and shadows numberless?) but because it all reminds me of once reading a passage from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, On a Raised Beach, extracts I read in a book about Metaphysics by Donald M MacKinnon, one of those revelatory books that restore your faith in philosophy because you know you are palpably in the presence of a poetic intelligence among so much vacant, directionless, visionless analysis. I once heard one of the four or five women philosophers who flourished from the late fifties, Anscombe, Foot, Warnock, Murdoch, Midgley, I cannot remember which, probably not Anscombe, who was asked in an interview why they were so different from the male philosophers of their generation. Oh, the men had all gone off to the war, and we were taught by MacKinnon. I cannot really remember how I came upon the book, maybe it was a rare moment of browsing in the university library, anyway, it was wonderful and gripping and it had this long passage from MacDiarmid at the end. Perhaps the ubiquitous presence of stone on this rocky island made me think of McKinnon again, made me think of the experience of reading him and its effect on my imagination, enabled by MacDiarmid. I found the book on the internet and it arrived yesterday and at once I realised how tricksy imagination can also be, because the extract was so much shorter than I remembered it. In fact, at first I couldn't find it. At last I came to it and read it again, and since it was so long ago, it was as for the first time, and very quickly I had to throw it down because there were lines I could not read with conviction. That itself is a strange experience, reading bad verse becomes impossible, I can feel the badness in my bones and I rebel with unexpected violence, or maybe it's just embarrassment, I remember having to stop reading out loud a passage from Yeats because it was so bad, the conviction drained at once from my voice ...

The inward gates of a bird are always open.

It does not know how to shut them.

That is the secret of its song,

But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.

I look at these stones and know little about them,

But I know their gates are open too,

Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,

That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer

Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,

Though through them no man can see.

Perhaps it is the McGonigle quality of the last three lines, and maybe it would be better if I knew what it was for birds or stones or men to have their inward gates open. Anyway, it does improve and perhaps I am unjust, but what remained in my imagination, and was not found now, was the echo and repetition of the word, stone, stone, stone, aeons, as he says, of stone, upon whose surfaces the residue of extinct humanity dries and shrivels like seaweed in the sun.

Death steals in

2008-06-18T21:59:00.003+01:00

I knew him as a colleague twenty years ago, he moved on, we hardly met again, once, I think, when I gave a talk in his Department and once when he came to ours, a couple of years ago, when I was struck by how similar were his themes to those he struggled with years ago, our preoccupations deepen, they do not widen, it seems, but at last we start to see our own pattern .... And his girlfriend, who used to visit, then news of their marriage. And now, out of the blue sky whence nothing unforeseen can come, his death after illness is announced, 'his family were with him at the end'. I remember them when they were young, before there were children, how old was he, his mid-fifties, perhaps, a little younger. We are sad and surprised, but it is still a relatively distant death, we do not suffer grief but we think of what it is to die, of what it is to face its prospect.

Seals, they are always there, bobbing in the water, in the surge of small waves, or basking on the shore from which they roll and shuffle when they see us come, but we have a strange affinity, we and the seals, have reason to observe each other: we meet on the foreshore or in the shallows, in and out of each other's element, but only ever in the shallows or on the foreshore. In our element they are ungainly and vulnerable, in theirs so are we. And we merely observe each other, the seals at their edge, regarding us at ours as thus our two worlds touch and shift with the swirl and movement of water over sand and rock. We cannot survive long in their world, nor they in ours, and so we observe each other and, when we think we are unobserved, we creep into or out of the water, to test and bask and rest and float, another world, with struggles and ecstasies we know nothing of, the limits and otherness of death.

Be quiet, I'm thinking

2008-06-17T09:00:00.004+01:00

No particular reason for the title, except that a Facebook friend had announced that they were thinking and I was recalling that for many philosophers thinking is a rare act, maybe an anti-Cartesian thought ...

I picked up my old school copy of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroeger in translation and started to read one of the other stories in it, Tristan. Slightly chilling to realise that these two were published in 1902 and 1903 respectively, and that Death in Venice was published in 1912, all before the Great War. My Irish grandmother would have been a schoolgirl in Ballybricken and her brother Paddy would not have known of course that he was to die quite soon. There was also a cousin Paddy, who fell from a railway bridge and died aged 14, and my mother had superstitious feelings about the name, otherwise my brother would have been christened Patrick. As it is she still calls him Paddy. Anyway, where is this all going. I saw a documentary about VW, Vaughan Williams, and the voice-over recalled that his first wife never quite recovered from the death of her brother in WWI. A similar event caused my grandmother to leave Ireland:

Oh yes, I turned and looked back towards the train,
leaning at Heuston against a pillar,
and wept for your young, slight, long-coated ghost:
'well, Katie Grant, ma’am, so you’re twenty four ...'
the same age as my eldest daughter now,
unable to live in the small cramped house

crowded with sisters, parents and your grief
you left Ireland, wept as the steam train screamed
as it tore apart wildly clutching hands
and fled from Paddy’s death to Liverpool.
Did Mary sadly take you in her arms
for comfort, or did you stand there, stiffly
forbidden to grieve, unless by cold nods
and absences, of mind and in your words?

Was that the task you set me when you died
and I lay in bed terrified you’d come
to break back into my protected world:
to recall the source of your stern-set jaw
lament your bitter, unhealed wound of war?

Tonio Kroeger was an important text for me, reading it in German in the VIth form, the only pupil, sitting with Laz over his exiguous fire. It seemed to give a sense to my adolesccent alienation, to see that my sensibility was after all acceptable in its unacceptability, that there were others ... But, reading Tristan now, I only mention it because it is has a nice image of how we seek to swindle conscience: but it gnaws away at us till we are simply one wound. Well, a touch of the vapours there, but I liked the use of 'swindle'. ...

Walking towards Leaper's Geo

2008-06-16T22:28:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I walked for the first time from South Wick to North Wick and then up along the cliffs to Leaper's Geo and on to Fowl Craig, the sun was warm, the grass was green and springey, the thrift glowing pink, nothing but mild wind, the sound of the sea, the call of birds overhead, and on the sandstone ledges colonies of birds as remote from human life as they would have been a million years ago, though we share some of their simple mechanisms and they throb with life.

A footprint in the sand

2008-06-12T08:56:00.006+01:00

This is not a footprint in the sand

I was bemused a while ago to receive an email from Big Jim in which he described the great Scottish Philosopher as 'that clown Hume', bemused because he is after all the great Scottish philosopher.

But I have been thinking about his empiricism recently and recalling what I had long ago forgotten, that the distinction between impressions and ideas upon which everything in Hume rests, rests in fact upon a metaphor which, if we take it seriously, undermines everything he says. One always forgets things in philosophy, partly because one is carried along by the flow of philosophical writing in which authors settle too readily on a premise and then race to a conclusion. Everything depends for Hume on tracing 'ideas' back to the 'impressions' of which they are faint copies (in fact these ideas or images are better candidates for 'impressions' than the alleged impressions themselves) and Hume's sceptical rejection of our ideas of necessity, causality, the spatio-temporal continuity of bodies, the permanence of the self or soul, relies on obvious features of what he calls impressions as they impress themselves, as it were, upon our minds. Such impressions last as long as they are perceived, they do not hang around unperceived, so what grounds do we have for talking about the same body when all we are aware of is a qualitatively identical impression, etc.

Which takes us back to the footprint in the sand. Now that is an impression, an impression of a foot, just as a crater is an impression of a meteor or a child's handprint on a piece of paper an impression of their hand, etc. The footprint gives us some idea of the size and shape of a particular foot. It doesn't look like a foot, but it shows us the outline and the indentation tells us something about the weight of the body relative to the softness of the ground. But impressions of this kind belong within our epistemological economy and are not its basis. We can reason from footprint to foot because we know about footprints and about feet, and we know what an impression is and why and how it is made. The idea of an impression is the idea of an impression of something that is known independently. In that case Hume's impressions are not impressions, he has no title to that word. We don't see impressions of bodies, we see bodies, we see things, stones, for instance, on a raised beach. The Humean trick lies in persuading us that what we really see is only ... This is not an argument against scepticism about empirical knowledge, it is just an argument against Hume. It doesn't deliver us back a permanent self, either, for that there is no such thing is not to be argued for in terms of Hume's failure to find a self.

The whole discussion of empirical knowledge is vitiated, it seems to me, by a failure to take seriously the grammatical or conceptual difference between talk of objects which are essentially mind-dependent, and things, which are not. Philosophers are always talking about objects as though they were talking about things and things as though they were objects, and they get the grammars tangled.

Now how can I say this in a semi-public space without sounding mad: when I say that we see things and not merely impressions of things, I am not asserting in Johnsonian spirit that we see things, I am saying that it is a mistake, conceptually, to claim that we see impressions of things. What we see are things and if we are to raise sceptical questions, as we should, in a spirit of epistemological vigilance, then we must address the issues in those terms, and not in terms of impressions, which is a bad place to start from.

small teething issues

2008-06-10T22:01:00.005+01:00

Well, of course the car wouldn't start after ten weeks in the garage. It did start, actually, for as long as it took to get out of the garage, and then it died, to be revived with the help of T's jump leads, so to charge up the battery I headed off briskly to North Hill and then down towards Moclett Bay where as we passed over the cattle grid (by 'us' I mean that animate of metal, the car and me, who am animate of dust) the accelerator had no response and animate of metal petered out, gracefully, but without remorse:

But, hey, it's June, and the grass is green and the fields are yellow with buttercups, and the sky is blue, though the wind be strong and the clouds on the horizon heavy, and I need a walk, and a mile or so is no great thing, though in the end I got a lift from a satirical builder friend who was forced to attend later after I realised that despite the reassuring sound of the pump the radiators were not getting warmer nor the water hot. I had misread the oil levels, there were no oil levels, the cupboard was bare, the tank empty, the next boat on Friday, and 900 litres will cost more than £600. A helpful fifty litres were not enough to force an oil flow along the almost level gradient, so I starve until Friday or, more accurately, go without hot baths. Now is there an immersion heater that no one told me about, pray? But everything is so green here, so sharp the change from early April, and there is so much good will here ...

Stones

2008-06-07T07:36:00.000+01:00

Heading north

2008-06-06T19:42:00.004+01:00

Well, sunrise on Tuesday in Orkney will be 0401 hrs and sunset 2220 hrs. I have spent the day cleaning in a slightly feckless way, recycling paper, trying to pack and work out the logistics of taking 23kg on one plane but only 15kg on the Islander. Solution: the boat, I can get to the ferry after 7am with plenty of time to reach the airport. Then meet the ferry when it arrives mid-afternoon. It leaves Kirkwall at 1030 but goes to North Ronaldsay first. Tomorrow to Lancaster via the dump and the university library ... entrain Monday, meet a friend in Edinburgh, fly to Kirkwall, overnight stay. Unfortunately, from the point of view of convenience, I have to do some external examining later in June, a quick dash to Norfolk and back to receive friends. There is much to do down here but I need a change and a chance to orient myself towards future writing tasks.

Walking through the shopping mall, two very young women with prams, both smoking hard, sad, but they look cool and it gives one a certain poise, alas. Thinks. Do I leave my Bose, hidden in Birkenhead or do I send it up by post?

A dance of branches, sea gulls call

2008-06-05T10:36:00.005+01:00

I am clearing my desk in the Department, my door is open, as is the window, one is in a dreamy state as one makes a basic assessment of papers, to be kept or recycled, sounds from the corridor, traffic noise, footsteps in the street, and voices, the ash tree, green, a cooling breeze through the window, calm, change, the possibility of change, the wind, the metaphors, touch my brow.

A girl of seventeen

2008-06-04T22:51:00.002+01:00

Ma mere, in the early days of the war, presumably 1940, she is 85 now and still has that truculent, independent look of an irish colleen on her face, and six years before I was born. She starts to grow frail and angry that she can't do things, like work in the garden, still feels as though she is in her twenties but now trapped in a body that is is less cooperative than it was ...

But when you think about it ...

2008-06-04T08:32:00.005+01:00

... in a way, religion is almost irrelevant to the troubles that afflict our planet, except for the extent to which it intensifies them, and when it does it is mostly because it is a product rather than a cause, an expression of reaction, though one which can also reinforce reaction, and also to that extent an irritant and an obstacle. Perhaps it is safer to say that it is 'good' religion that is almost irrelevant.

The thing that we most have to contend with is human nature in its negative aspects, and all we have at our disposal is our own nature in its positive aspect, and it is already in our nature to make that distinction in those terms. All that really matters is states of mind and their expression in conduct, as I constantly tell my students. Those men and women of 'good will' who profess religious convictions may be inspired by their spiritual traditions, as any of us might be by the right kind of literature, and our admiration for them is entirely a matter of our moral judgment about what they propose and what they condemn, about what they do. Basically, what we contend against is greed, hatred and delusion, grasping, cruelty, indifference, narcissism, self-preoccupation, sloth and arrogance. And all we have to contend against them with is generosity of spirit, energy and compassion. Who cares whether there is an uncaused cause of all there is? Well, yes, lots of people care about that, and some will say that it is because it is true, but even if it is, what difference does it make? Answer, it makes no difference at all except as one source of ethical inspiration among others.

This is also basic Buddhism as well as 'humanist' and maybe the point for me is that humanism just needs to develop its moral language and learn from the kind of ascesis found in that tradition, an ascesis that seeks to overcome the hindrances, undermine the sway of the passions without repression, in favour of a newly energised compassion for sentient beings, including, naturally, oneself, 'let me be to my sad self, hereafter, kind/ Charitable ...' as Hopkins wrote.

Why I needed a new camera

2008-06-03T19:37:00.002+01:00

(I found these notes in a suitcase and this is one way to preserve them)

I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw; full oft 'tis seen
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

There is no single metaphor of light and darkness, but several, and they can appear to contradict each other even when they don't. We have to start from the human experiences which we seek to make sense of and give coherent form to by reaching out to evocative comparisons. Of course there is an association that we make between light and darkness, good and evil, it is one of the oldest associaations: the image of the dark engulfing the light, the Manichaean story of the interpenetrating pendulums, light and darkness, good and evil, separate and distinct and then their mixing, always though with the sense that it is the light that shall be swallowed up, that will falter in the presence of darkness. Two eternal, metaphysical principles. But although this pattern fits in with theism in different ways, God's light but also his darkness, we do not need to attach the imagery to strictly theistic reflections: it can shed 'light' on our progress through life in other ways.

Primal emotions, fear, dread, hope, relief, associated with the coming on of night, the dawn, the coming of evil times, the possibility of rescue, or of being 'saved'. The sense of the presence of evil, a vivid reality, always also cold, the sense of dark and relentless forces. But in another context, not unrelated, we think of the light of understanding and the darkness of ignorance, partly because we think of these already in moral terms, understanding is a good, ignorance an evil.

However, we can become over-attached to the light and over-fearful of darkness. Unconscious forces, the shadow, fear of looking into the dark places of the psyche, because we put things now in the wrong order and associate darkeness too readily with evil (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Enduring the darkness, and learning to distinguish between what is merely an object of fear and what is genuinely evil. Lawrence and Nietzsche on the desire to be rational, conscious, daylight at any cost, etc. But we can also be 'fearful of light and enlightenment' (maybe it is the same thing expressed in an opposite way) and there is the instinct of concealment of action ('light thickens and the crow ...') but we are also night's black agents: we do not wish to be discovered, exposed to the daylight.

But in another context it makes sense to embrace the darkness in a positive way: the ordinary light of day can conceal a greater light but it can also conceal the presence of the heavenly bodies. An ascesis of becoming familiar with the darkness, enduring, living without the stimulation of the senses, in the hope that with their cessation and that of quotidian desire, new insights might dawn ...

But what about 'grace'?

2008-06-01T17:59:00.012+01:00

Nor hope nor dread attend
A dying animal.

A walk in Sheffield, or the outskirts thereof, memories of the late eighties, bringing up children, and the unexpected heron, so primeval, what has it to do with Sheffield or any city, any human habitation, working before Sisyphus to stay alive, alive, alive until it dies, dies, nor hope nor dread ... no beating of spirit wings, moving out of life with slow and awkward grace.

If what I said about karma and Sharon Stone earlier is right, then surely we have exactly the same problem with talk of grace, as when someone says that such and such an event which had perhaps a significant effect on their lives, was a grace of God, or was the action of God's grace. Surely that won't do, either? We should have to say that the comment acknowledges something true, viz that it was not through my action that this happened and saved me from myself, but then tries to explain, which it cannot do, since all this belongs to a realm of unknowing, though even that turn of phrase is merely a kind of concession. All this sounds like D Z Phillips and yet is surely no less right for that,Dewi, who died last year, in the library at Swansea, in the middle of his projects, had been complaining of dizziness a few weeks before at the memorial for Bob Sharpe.

Talking of grace might provide someone with a general picture of what it is like to live in this world, a general truth about the multiple ways in which we are dependent in our moral lives on forces that we do not command and do not expect, but it can never then come down to particulars ... but of course, for religious people, it always does come down to particulars, a particular event seen as God's intervention, whether it is to save us from ourselves, or to punish us for our sin, and I cannot go there, nor have any inclination to do so, even though there have been many times that I have precisely felt that I was saved from myself by the course of events, by a grace of nature, as I should rather say. Others will talk here of their conviction or their faith that this was the hand of God .... but it is no more than Glenn Hoddle or Sharon Stone talking of karma or the fundamentalist talking of God's punishment of America or whatever it might be. I suppose someone might object here, that they are not on a level, that there are different theologies involved, that God is a God of love and intervenes with grace, but for that reason doesn't punish us in the way implied, and that is certainly true, but still, neither the good theology nor the bad brings us to something that we can establish or know or even have reason for believing.

Contaminations of thought

2008-05-30T22:41:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago I read an article in the Observer about the assassination of a drug baron from Liverpool and found a sentence which announced that 'senior Liverpool criminals' had gathered in a luxury hotel ...', something like that. It was the idea of 'senior Liverpool criminals' that was incongruous, with its implicit tone of respect.

But that is just a random thought occasioned by the fact that I was about to say something about senior university policy makers ... they are more or less forced, out of political expediency, to match the forms of Government discourse and rhetoric in their negotiations about funding, forced, that is to say, to present at least in public an instrumental or utilitarian model of their own activities in the hope that this will sway politicians in their favour. Some of these senior figures do this with a heavy heart and think of themselves, try to think of themselves, present themselves, as providing us academics by this means, by this instrumentality, with shelter, with 'air cover' (as one of them said today), so that we can do what we believe to be genuinely important.

But there is something insidious about the instrumentalism that they thus pay lip-service to (or present themselves to us as paying lip service to: I am a very suspicious person). It starts to infiltrate and infect our own thinking, it leads us to think anyway in instrumental terms, in terms of our competitors, of their vicious competition (a true expression), which is always worse for being global, and in terms of our 'brand' and our 'product', it leads us to think in terms of quantities.

The point is that when we (the infantry) challenge this whole way of thinking then there is the rhetorical move I mentioned a moment ago, viz that this language provides us with air cover and shelter, even though we have just been urged in effect to think in just these terms: it doesn't have that function, it is how we are required to think, and there is an unspoken ambivalence and troubled uneasiness about it all, and to resist or question is merely 'unhelpful'.

And the point and problem of all this is that it is easy to think instrumentally and difficult to think, how? non-instrumentally? Well, that very phrasing itself, the use of the negative, shows the difficulty. What is difficult is to think. And this is what universities are supposed to be for. In fact what I have called 'utilitarian' or 'instrumental' thinking isn't really 'thinking' at all: it is merely reasoning in which the premises are already uncritically accepted and in place And in this context that is a trahison des clercs.

Gillian Howie has written about all this.

Bad karma

2008-05-30T12:50:00.005+01:00

Poor Sharon Stone is no doubt embarrassed by her 'bad karma 'gaffe', which is not to say that she doesn't believe it (like Frank Field apologising for saying in public what he actually believes in private). But here are two kinds of belief, the belief that Gordon is unhappy in his body, whose truth or falsity can be established, and the belief that the recent earthquakes were a karmic consequence for China's monstrous injustices in Tibet. Stone would probably think that she was much more sophisticated than those fundamentalist evangelists who say that the recent hurricanoes were a sign of God's displeasure at human sinfulness, especially that of the gays. But her own comment is on the same logical footing and both of them give 'religious belief' a bad name. Perhaps I just don't want to think of 'religious beliefs' as providing the terms of a causal explanation of events. To the extent that they seek to do this they are merely superstitious and are precisely not religious beliefs which, if they explain anything, 'explain' no more than the human condition and as such are not causal at all.

Deleuze is done and dusted, the thesis read, examined and passed. As for Deleuze, as the Irishman said, I wouldn't start from here.

Rinansey

2008-05-28T20:26:00.005+01:00

Mentally preparing, despite Deleuze, Duns Scotus and Spinoza, for heading North. I just noticed that on Sunday sunset in Orkney (2207) will be an hour later than in London (2107) and sunrise (0411) three quarters of an hour earlier (0449).

Here is one of my favourite North Ronaldsay* pictures:

* Once known as Rinansay.

Scott McClellan's criticisms of the Bush White House and its dishonesty in the way it handled the war will be met with ad hominem arguments and innuendo, ie., they will not seek to argue against the substance of what he says but will merely question his motivation, as though hoping by this means to divert attention away from the issue. This is so basic a five year old knows the game and has probably already played it.

A Bergsonian thought

2008-05-28T10:21:00.004+01:00

A nice couple of sentences: '"Perception as a whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement". Our perceptions are non-veridical in that they are a reduction of what there is in the world: their sole purpose is to facilitate our actions in the world ... Our perceptions do not fashion 'representations' of the world around us out of sensory data, instead they 'lessen' the 'more' that there really is in the world, in order that we can act upon it.'

The continentals

2008-05-26T17:44:00.006+01:00

This is to introduce Molly, the three-legged cat, who takes her pleasures seriously and without self-consciousness.

Interesting enough to read about Deleuze, but these guys are so philosophy finds itself in me, such prima donnas, such breathless prose, which doesn't mean they have nothing to say. In fact I applaud the idea of philosophical creativity that begins to emerge, the idea of a creativity of concepts, which depends, for its sense, on what we are calling a concept ... though it seems to me that we would be talking about an exploration of reality. My main problem is that I am deeply resistant to using their language-in-translation, which is merely barbarous.

But ah! the difference to me.

2008-05-25T21:06:00.004+01:00

What is the difference, pray, between a walk in the park and reading a thesis about Deleuze?

Im wunderschoenen Monat Mai ...

2008-05-20T16:52:00.012+01:00

Almost by accident we found ourselves down in lower Heswall and walked thence along the beach then up onto the cliffs and through Heswall Fields towards Thurstaston on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of May, a brief interlude, for me, from marking exam scripts and dissertations and so forth ....

.... in the intervals I have been thinking about Humanism again, partly because there was a Face to Faith article in Saturday's Guardian by Andrew Copson:

"Humanists believe that the reality we perceive around us - the world and
universe that we make sense of through experience -is the only reality we can
know and that there is no "second layer" to reality in which gods, demons or the
"supernatural" can exist. It is this conviction that also leads humanists to
believe that this life is the only life we have and that morality as we
understand it is a natural product of our social instincts and not handed to
humanity by some divine source."

Well, yes, but there is something jejune about the account, something is missing, and it's not a divine source or anything like that. I have some sympathy with humanism (and it is interesting to see who has nailed their colours to its mast on the website), but I feel queasy when people start talking about 'what we believe'. The idea that 'the reality we perceive around us' is 'the only reality we can know' is the sort of claim made by those who are anxious to distance themselves from anything that suggests 'the supernatural' but it looks too much like it wants to foreclose on the idea of reality as an open-ended concept, which allows for the possibility of an expansion and extension of the reality that we can know, as we free ourselves from the oppressive narrowness of egocentric self-enclosure, for instance, which precisely limits what we (are able to) perceive. I don't see why humanists shouldn't assent to such a claim as this, but their silence about it is not encouraging. I can also see why they might want to cut off the idea of a divine source for morality, but the danger is that too little is said about the way in which our ethical lives can develop into, for instance, a passion for justice that goes far beyond anything that might be found in 'conventional morality', far beyond what could be captured by a phrase like 'social instincts'. Again, I cannot see why humanists shouldn't go in this direction, and maybe they do. This is work for later, but perhaps, for the moment, the point is that to claim to be a secular humanist is a means of denying something ('the supernatural') as well as seeking to affirm something, and that to call oneself a Buddhist humanist, or a Christian humanist, say, is a matter of wanting to emphasise the particular perspectives on reality that those traditions have highlighted, just as the different religions can be thought of, though there is more to them than this, as asserting truths that depend upon particular histories of experience. There is a distinctively Jewish experience, for instance, a particular form of travail and endurance and there are analogies, say, with Shi'ism, so that there are these repositories of learned experience. And repositories of learned experience need to be preserved, so that our humanism should take account of them, should take account of the moral realities of greed, hatred and delusion, for instance, and the way they vitiate perception and conduct ...

As we walked along the meadows, which were strewn with wonderful buttercups, we could look out over the Dee estuary to the North Wales coast, the mudflats below us and the deep channel beyond.

We could also see Hilbre away in the distance:

In the Mouth

2008-05-12T19:40:00.005+01:00

I have finished reading Eileen Pollack's collection of stories and novellas, In the Mouth, and this, I suppose, is a minor plug for an old friend I am proud to know.

The writing is wry and spare and rueful and what she writes about is both funny and sad, as we pass between the subjective impossibility of hope and inevitability of despair, all in the midst of the longing for love, and the memory of it, but in which what had seemed impossible becomes inevitable, and the reversal is not through anyone's choice, but is visited upon them, as in the transforming and unexpected insight in the final paragraphs of Beached in Boca.

I suppose I am inclined to see a philosophical insight here, in the idea of such a transformation of perspective, a perspective which had seemed before no less than an objective description of the facts, but there is no ponderous articulation of a position or doctrine, simply a possibility shown. As Nietzsche remarked, our estimations of the value and purpose of life are simply symptomatologies of the emotions, and Eileen traces the passage and progress of perspectives through the movement of the symptoms, as it were.

And her ear is so acute, not just for the speech patterns of this anthropologically curious little group of Florida Jews that she knows so well, and the subleties of their inflections, but most of all for the failures of comprehension, for the perplexing to and fro and back and forth of inner dialogue and outward demeanour, between old friends, or potential lovers, or father and daughter, who can see in each other only the public demeanour but cannot hear the dialogue, the mutual awareness and insight that cannot be conveyed from the one to the other, except that she has supplied both dialogues in a spirit of irony that makes you weep, and then the swift and nervous little gestures of love and need, and then the desolation of the old widower: wild, old widowers whom you shouldn't really let out of your sight. It's about dentists, there were never such dentists in Britain ... despite what you say.

Cardinals religious and secular

2008-05-09T09:02:00.007+01:00

Hard not be irritated by Dawkins, with his smug, killer question about the 'evidence' for 'God'. He must have read the standard theological rebuttals scores of times, that he is still treating the question of the existence of God as though it were a scientific hypothesis in competition with other and better ones. So maybe he doesn't get it. Not that I am persuaded, either, by the rebuttals, I mean.

Some of my best friends want to say that God is an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing? and it is certainly clear that this is not a scientific answer to a scientific question about why things are thus and so and not otherwise. But then, what kind of question is it, really?

It would perhaps be too crude to say something like, well, if there were a God then we should have an answer to the question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, so long as we assume that God is not as it were a thing among other things. But then there is hardly an independent route by which we establish that there is a God whose existence gives us an answer to the question. It seems to me that talking of God at all here is an expression of wonder and wonder can be expressed in other ways, including by silence, a silence, moreover, within which possibilities present themselves that would not otherwise be available. But the God-talk just looks too like a reading back into Being of our own nature as rational and creative beings, so the mythological story is of rational and creative agency. The Buddhist turn, by contrast, equally following the silence, is to question the causalities of experience and selfhood.

But the fact, if it is a fact, that we can ask the question doesn't guarantee that there is an answer. And anyway, it's not so clear that the question is intelligible. It looks like the most general form of the question why are things like this rather than like something else? which is really the trick that Herbert McCabe relies upon. But there being nothing is not one of the ways in which things are ...

Nor does this leave us with the conclusion that it is 'just a brute fact, then, that there is anything at all' since 'brute fact' gets its sense of arbitrariness from a context in which there are reasons and explanations. How Wittgensteinian.

As for the official Cardinal who properly notes that God is not one thing among others ... the usual things, the Catholic Church can be socially and politically progressive, it stands for justice, is anti-war and against the death penalty, but then there are the no-go areas of the official teaching about homosexuality, contraception. women priests and so forth, about which it is not possible to have a public conversation because these public men and women have to speak like politicians committed to a policy whether they agree with it in private or not. And thank God the Church has no power.

Enough, this is just displacement activity. To the Self Evaluation Document. Once these were called self assessment documents until 'they' noticed what the acronym would be.

The Reunion ...

2008-05-08T19:57:00.006+01:00

An intense few weeks lie ahead of marking, reading manuscripts, a doctoral thesis, reviewing another philosophy programme, then committee meetings, examiners' meetings before I am free to head back north and do some of my own work.

I had a luminous time in North Staffordshire over the Bank Holiday, trees, beech trees, beech trees with young translucent leaves, sunlight on the the eerie, on the lurid green of lichen on fallen tree trunks, trees, what shall I do without trees, trees, great trees soaring, filtering the beams of light onto the primeval faery floor of the Valley and memory, running, racing fleet-footed, young, down the Gorge and along the valley path and splashing through the rapid stream, in May-time, in freezing February snow, in blizzards of rain and sleet, and then now, the formality of the Reunion Mass, sung by old men who moved uncertainly like ancient druids of a lost religion painfully across the sanctuary to read a text or recite a prayer or receive the benediction of the thurifer's incense in the Pugin chapel that is the sole remains ....

The sea will compensate for the absence of trees, the trees will be there, though, palpable in their absence.

A postscript

2008-05-01T08:30:00.006+01:00

I finished reading Jim Mackey's book, cheering all the way, in both senses of that expression. It makes me want, among many other things, to correct my own impression of the High Priests as 'good men' or 'decent men', as I put it. The whole point lies in our account of what it is to be a good or decent person in the first place, the criteria that we use to make that judgment, and Mackey wants to say that the criteria offered by the Christian perspective are different, are constituted by the metanoia that consists in refusing to return evil for evil, a fundamental re-ordering of priorities ... that makes sense, of course, in the context of an individual's conduct but is ultimately to be expressed in the way in which a community organises itself. The fundamental temptation of self-aggrandisement, as Mackey puts it, and which is the closest he comes to talking of an original sin of the species, is constantly re-asserting itself, just as, to put it in quite different language, the state of nature is always before us as a possibility, and re-emerges in every street gang and every tyrant who wants to be a war-lord.

But 'to put it in quite different language' is perhaps the significant thing here. Once one reads the Bible as myth and metaphor, once one sees it as that, then there is no great need to return to its language, except as a source of metaphors that one draws on because one finds them still fruitful, and not all of them are that fruitful ... This is where I came in forty years ago ...

'This is where we came in' ... refers to the practice of turning up at the cinema without regard to the timing of the programme. We would all go in with Dad and sit down in the middle of the Western, making no sense of the action and then at the end wait until it all started again, only to be forced to leave, despite our hissed pleas of 'Dad!!', at the point where we came in, on the grounds, presumably, that we had everything we needed to fit the whole picture together in our minds. How frustrating was that as they say nowadays. He used to say, 'Come on, kiddos, this is where we came in'.

I've been reading Eileen's book, which is terrific fun. It would help to have a glossary for all the Yiddish, though. The Bris was great, about a man on his death bed insisting that he had to be circumcised ...

Two books in the pigeon-hole

2008-04-30T08:01:00.004+01:00

Two books arrived yesterday from Amazon, both from friends, one was the kind, generous, wry, wicked (not to say brilliant) Eileen Pollack's collection of short stories and novellas In the Mouth and the other Jim Mackey's Jesus of Nazareth which I have mentioned in an earlier post, and which I have started reading first because I need to be in a different space to read Eileen.

Although I sometimes feel that I am being clubbed over the head by the constant beat of Jim's sentences (he really does have a clunking fist), they are, taken all in all, powerful sentences which achieve lift-off quickly and you feel the urgency of his message, which is quite simply about the clash within our lives and our own minds and on this lean earth between (the impulse to) coercive power and the power of love, and the remoteness and proximity of the new heaven and new earth that would be constituted by a reign of love. It forces me to re-evaluate the idea of the eucharistic meal. Taking part in such a meal is properly to be understood as an earnest of a mutual commitment, as a visible sign that we are in this together and for the long haul. That is a powerful image, but at the same time, I can hardly imagine the conditions under which this would be a genuine expression of a genuine commitment. But it could hardly be at the communion table. It would have to be a shared meal, as among those on the same journey or pilgrimage. Goodness, where is this taking me? But it also makes sense in the context of the sangha, and the Order meetings which start with a shared meal ... nad it is certainly too long since I have participated.

Secular humanism ...

2008-04-27T09:45:00.009+01:00

I have committed myself to writing something about religion and secular humanism for the autumn, well really I want to find a space between them, if that makes sense. Partly because I have an unclear conception of both of them. My instincts are towards secular humanism in a way, but annoyingly I have left my borrowed copy of Richard Norman's short introduction in the bedroom in Orkney. I have a lot of time for his work. But I think my problem with the proposition set out on Amazon, 'that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief', is that I am completely uncertain about the status of one of the terms of the opposition, viz 'religious belief', and doubtful at least about the other. To put it another way, is Norman trading on a particular conception of religious belief? Well 'trading' is too cheap a word here, but there is something from which he wishes strenuously to dissociate himself, and, if it is spelt out in a certain way, then I would be on his side of the barricades, though presumably that metaphor of civil strife is not quite right. In any event, we should have to ask whether that conception is the only one available, and whether we should conflate 'the religious' with 'religious belief' at all.

I think the crux for me is going to be a conception of the moral life that is at once fully engaged with 'our human capacity for art, literature and the imagination' but which also forces us towards a 'non-religious' notion of 'spirituality' or 'transcendence'. Philosophers have been here before, of course (John Cottingham, John Haldane, Anthony O'Hear) . The question really turns on our answer to the question, what constitutes the human? and on whether we have to find something within what we think of as 'religious' to augment what we think is entailed by the 'secular'. Unfortunately many people think that so-called 'non-realists' about religion are simply secular humanists in disguise, but then they need to tell us what they have in mind when they talk about secular humanism. The real issue is about the nature and the conditions of the moral life that are taken to be involved: by either side.

Still, I have a few months yet. Beacons only have significance when they can shine brightly in heavy seas, where there are strong currents and hidden skerries. We need them, we can see them, only when we are already in danger. For some reason I connect this thought with the concept of spirituality. One thing about writing a blog is that you tend not to look back over older posts, or at least I don't, and so you don't see the pattern that is emerging, if there is one at all ... And so, beacons, danger, the need to find something else, something that rescues us from a condition by which we feel endangered (and you do not head towards the beacon, but keep at a distance), though what is endangered, and what needs to be let go of? The metaphor of 'spirit', 'breath', 'wind' ... indicates a contrast, life rather than death, something heard, news from elsewhere, beyond the bunker, where both of these are metaphors for felt conditions of oppression and release. 'Spirituality' is a term that derives from these metaphors, and so belongs to, in the sense of having its origins in, a particular religious tradition, but the conflicting human possibilities it refers to has wider application and can be understood outside the terms of that tradition. Thus the concept of Buddhist spirituality' makes perfect sense, even though the juxtaposition yields a mixed metaphor ...

Talking of Pilate in the Mersey Tunnel

2008-04-24T13:54:00.011+01:00

A lift home from an esteemed colleague (EC), talking about sympathetic representations of the High Priest and his Council. These were good men doing what they could in the most difficult circumstances. I suppose they were decent men in the way that many politicians are decent men, but find themselves voting to attack Iraq (and I do not present myself as at any moral distance from decent men in whose shoes I have not had to stand). The BBC production of The Passion over Easter made me feel that Jesus of Nazareth really was in the circumstances an utterly dangerous embarrassment ... and please come back after Passover ... otherwise the Romans will come down on all of us with vicious reprisals ... I've also been reading James P Mackey's Christianity and Creation ... and so the point is, what? that even the best of men can descend to this, as EC says, that this is what they will do in these circumstances, the alternative vision is impossible, almost, perhaps, morally impossible, it belongs to the future (the presence of Christ is a visitation from there, he is an image, almost a mirage), which is hardly a way of absolving ourselves, but a condition of the possibility of our thinking that there is something from which we need to be absolved and these best of men are an image of us not of 'the Jews'. It belongs to 'the future' ('new earth, new heaven', not to be realised here), but is the standard by which we measure what we do, which is unavoidable as a response to force majeure. So Jesus of Nazareth is an image of what we are incapable of, of what cannot be incarnated, but whose incarnation we desire, though with all the cautious prevarication of our double-mindedness. In a way, the presence of Jesus, or the fact that it is he who is sacrificed, is hardly relevant, except that he is the image of the other possibility ('my kingdom is not of this world', from which, however, we are unable to detach ourselves, though we make a beginning just when we posit something beyond it), his presence presents and poignantly points the contrast. As I said in an earlier post, he hardly registers, can hardly register, with Pilate. Mackey does the detail of the Feuerbachian thesis in a way, in our myths we see the lineaments of our deepest impulses seeking expression in the form of the story in which we read ourselves, in which we see our conflicted and divided selves only because we see, we glimpse, what conflicts with what: that is the revelation - and can it really be that in some deep part of ourselves we would not return evil for evil, just as we would not wish evil to be returned, to use JM's favourite biblical phrase? Anyway I have just ordered his Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes one needs to state something so that one can with time see what might be wrong with it, what its limitations are. That is the business of dialectic, we need a premiss ... or we cannot start our game. Creation stories also tell us about our own humanity, whatever they might reveal about gods, and the latter doesn't interest me much at all, though I found all that intriguing in JM's book. Here is a link to the opening of a review of it, though you need an Athens log-in to see the whole piece.

A waking dream

2008-04-22T10:51:00.003+01:00

Gordon Brown always took the largest cup. Even now he is seizing MINE. He cannot have it, we wrestle with it and it spills. Yes, but what does it say about ME?

A way of thinking of Art as the expression of emotion: we should distinguish between representing, evoking and expressing ... The tragedy evokes feelings of pity and terror; the character, Macbeth, say, expresses emotion, resignation and weariness; and the actor represents that expression ... my students always conflate these distinctions, taking an instruction to write about expression as one to write about evocation. Sad music? sometimes evocative, sometimes also expressive of sadness in its pace and rhythm. A composer can write to order because they know how to represent a mood or feeling. But they can also express and explore feeling, and the point for us is not that it is theirs but that it expresses this, as in, say, Kindertotenlieder.