September 2012 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it. Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life has no meaning. Thus meaning does not come from God or der Fuehrer or il Duce or the government (as some contemporary liberals seem to think) or the state or society or other people, or anything exogenic, but comes, if it comes at all, from the wellsprings of one's own selfhood.

One could call this subjectivist theory an identity theory of existential (as opposed to linguistic) meaning: there is such a thing as the meaning of an individual human life, but what that meaning is is identical to the meaning the individual in question gives to its life. By contrast, an eliminativist theory of existential meaning would have it that there is no such thing as existential meaning.

Now it seems to me that the subjectivist identity theory just sketched is untenable, precisely for the reason that it cannot be kept from collapsing into an eliminativist theory. (This is a special case of how identity theories, which attempt to reduce A to B without denying the existence of A, often collapse into eliminativist theories. See here and here for more on the general issue.)

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning. And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning. This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly. These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me. It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless.

The attempted identification of meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of meaning.

What we have here is a 'bootstrap problem.' Just as I cannot bootstrap myself into existence, i.e., cause my own existence (since that would require me to exist before I exist), I cannot bootstrap my existence into meaningfulness, i.e., bring it about that my existence has meaning. Just as I cannot exist before I exist, I cannot have meaning before I have meaning. I cannot be the source of my own meaning.

If the only meaning my existence has is the meaning I give it, then that I exist at all is meaningless.

Obama: A Prediction Come True

On 6 November 2008, I wrote into my journal:

The Irony of the Obama Victory. The presidency was handed to him by the financial crisis. But his policies will exacerbate it.

I was right. I now predict that if he is re-elected, four more years of his policies will bring us to financial ruin. Mark my words.

The man is not only incompetent and inexperienced but unserious. Here he is on Letterman admitting that he doesn't know what the national debt is. He obviously doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, or his own partial responsibility for it in irresponsibly pushing another entitlement, popularly known as ObamaCare, when the problem of the long-term solvency of the existing entitlements has not been addressed. Instead, he blames his predecessor while manically digging the hole deeper.

The Wit and Mortality of Christopher Hitchens

I just breezed through a quick first reading of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (Twelve, 2012). The slim volume ends with some fragmentary notes of characteristic wit scribbled near the end. My favorites:

Amazing how heart and lungs have held up: would have been healthier if I'd been more sickly. (88)

I'm not fighting or battling cancer — it's fighting me. (89)

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't [can?] run away from. (89)

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. (91)

Larkin good on fear in "Aubade," with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either. (92)

I reproduce Philip Larkin's poem in my Philip Larkin on Death.

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

Much of what was once in the province of philosophy now belongs to the sciences. Might it be that eventually everything once claimed by philosophy will be taken over by special sciences? I recently took Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for his latest scientistic outburst according to which philosophical problems, "when the grow up, leave home." He maintains that all answerable questions belong in the domain of empirical science. Is that right? Is it true that, eventually, there will nothing left for philosophy to do? Or are there certain problems and questions that will remain specifically philosophical? I suggest that in the following four areas philosophy has and will retain its proprietary rights in perpetuity.

A. Metaphilosophical Questions. Let us first note that the questions raised in my introductory paragraph belong to philosophy. They are questions about philosophy. All such metaphilosophical questions belong to philosophy. The philosophy of science (religion, law, etc.) is not part of science (religion, law, etc.), but the philosophy of philosophy is a branch of philosophy. There is simply no more encompassing rational discipline than philosophy. So right here we have a number of questions that do not belong to any empirical science or to any formal science such as mathematics either. (Whether or not you want to call mathematics science, it is certainly not empirical science.)

Consider the question of scientism. When properly employed, the term 'scientism' means the following.

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science. The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the (hard) sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary. Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

The question whether scientism is true is a philosophical question that cannot by its very nature be answered by any empirical science. Not only is this question not discussed in any physics or chemistry or biology text, it is not a question to the answering of which observation and experiment are at all relevant. The question whether the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowlerdge is not an empirical question. It is not like the question whether high sodium intake is a contributing factor in hypertension or whether galactic recession is taking place.

Those who champion scientism are doing philosophy whether they know it or not, and presupposing that there are specifically philosophical theses. For scientism is a philosophical thesis. Not only is scientism a philosophical thesis, it is an untenable philosophical thesis (as I argue here) the critique of which belongs to philosophy. Both the forwarding of the thesis and its evaluation as untenable are specifically philosophical activities. One of the perennial tasks of philosophy is the debunking of bad philosophy or pseudo-philosophy of the sort produced by ignorant people like Krauss.

B. Normative Questions. There are normative questions of various sorts in logic, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politology. Empirical investigation cannot answer normative questions. Consider the theory of the state. A good chunk of it will be covered by political science which, perhaps, is independent of philosophy. Political science studies the types, characteristics, institutions, and genesis of states and other political entities as they actually exist. It is a non-normative enterprise devoted to facts and their explanation. It will of course treat of the norms embedded in laws and institutions but will study these norms as facts. One can study the content of legal prescriptions and proscriptions under bracketing of their rightness or wrongness. To do so is to study them as facts. Thus one could study the content of the Nazi state's Nuremberg Laws without raising the question of their justice or injustice. Questions about the moral legitimacy of a given state or of any state are quite different from the factual questions treated in political science: they are normative questions belonging to political philosophy. If I study the structure of the Nazi state and its institutions and hierarchies I am doing political science. But if I argue that the Nazi state was a criminal state or an unjust state then I have moved into the normative dimension and am doing political philosophy.

Or consider logic. It does not reduce to the psychology of reasoning, let alone to the neurobiology underlying reasoning. It is a normative discipline concerned, not with how we think as a matter of fact, but how we ought to think if we are to arrive at truth. Similar considerations hold for epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. Suppose you disagree with what I just said about logic. Then we have a dispute in the philosophy of logic, and once again philosophy is seen to be indispensable.

3. Critical Questions. One can raise critical questions about religion, mysticism, law, science and other sectors of culture. A critique of religion, for example, aims to separate out the true from the false and the beneficial from the harmful in religion. It aims to evaluate religion as a cultural form. This is different from the descriptive study of extant religions. A critique of Buddhism, for example, goes beyond a study of characteristic Buddhist beliefs and practices; it is concerned to evaluate these beliefs and practices in the light of such criteria as logical coherence, truth, and whether they help or hinder human flourishing. Such an evaluation is obviously a specifically philosophical enterprise. It cannot be supplanted by the sociology or psychology of Buddhism. Suppose it is established that Buddhism appeals to people of a certain psychological make-up or social class. That is an interesting fact, but is irrelevant to the question whether Buddhism is wholly or in part logically coherent, true, or conducive to human flourishing. The critique of Buddhism, and of any religion, belongs to philosophy. And the same goes for the critique of mysticism, law, and the rest.

4. Metaphysical Questions. These are non-normative but also non-empirical questions. They have no place within the province of any empirical science.

There are the questions of general metaphysics or ontology. Among them: questions about existence, identity, properties, relations, modality. Consider these two claims:

a. Principle of the Rejection of Nonexistent Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x has properties, then x exists.

b. Principle of the Rejection of Unpropertied Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x exists, then x has properties.

I say both are true propositions of general metaphysics. They are items of knowledge about the structure of any possible world, and therefore items of knowledge about the structure of the actual world. But we do not know them by any empirical method: they do not belong in an empirical science.

The principles are not truths of pure logic either. For their negations are not logical contradictions. They are irreducibly ontological truths. The belong to metaphysca generalis or ontology.

The Meinongians deny (a). Where does the dispute about (a) belong? In physics? You would have to be as thoughtless as Krauss to maintain such a thing. It belongs nowhere else but in philosophy.

There are also the questions of special metaphysics, among them, questions about God, the soul, the freedom of the will, and the relationof mind and body.

The Schizoid Left: OK to Bash Mormons and Christians but not Muslims?

Many liberals in the West have become, and many more are becoming, radical leftists out to subvert the very principles that they as leftists supposedly support. Thus arises the phenomenon of the schizoid Left. For example, from the time of the French Revolution on, the Left has been anti-clerical and ever more anti-religious. But now we witness the bizarre spectacle of leftists aligning themselves with, or at least not opposing, the most extreme type of religious fundamentalism on the face of the earth.
They never miss an opportunity to bash Christians and Mormons, but are deeply offended by the amateurish Innocence of Muslims. Bret Stephens:

The film, the [Obama] administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

For a second example of schizoid leftism, consider that lefties traditionally display a prominent libertine and bohemian wobble. Why then do they cozy up to, or at least not resolutely oppose, Islamic fanatics who murder homosexuals, stone adulterers, and circumcise females?

Third, the Left, as part of the Enlightenment project, supposedly champions science over superstition. Yet, in the last 400 years or so, scarcely anything of any scientific value has emanated from the Islamic world. (Bernard Lewis is the man to read on this. ) The same goes for philosophy. Tiny Israel in the mere 64 years of its existence has cranked out more genuine philosophy that the whole of the Islamic world has in 400 years. So what does the Left do? It waxes anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic.

The nihilism of the hard Left — its denial of value and true being to anything that actually exists and provably works — may be turning in upon itself. Unable to destroy Western civilization under its own steam, it aligns itself with Islamists, who, were they to attain power, would of course mercilessly
exterminate all leftists. A curious sort of Selbstaufhebung.

For a leftist, the end justifies any and all means, including ignoring the very real threats of militant Islam while demonizing Christians who pose no threat to speak of. For full documentation, see David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery 2004.

Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left

Ronald Radosh ends his piece as follows:

The truth is that the Left in the West, including our own Left, is largely anti-American, favorable to extremist radical social movements, and sees any one or group who is not on its side as not only incorrect, but morally evil. The answer to Michael Walzer’s own query is still the same: it would be nice if there was a decent Left, but its small and ineffectual numbers prove that its creation is something that will never take place.

Cf. Michael Walzer, Can There Be a Decent Left?

On ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Religion’

Nathaniel Torrey writes to request a link to his post, The Dalai Lama and the Non-Religion of the Future. I am pleased to do so. His thoughts are in line with the ones I expressed in a 25 September 2010 entry,

On 'Spirituality'

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

How typical. Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her 'spiritual' good.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

The Fallacy of Redistribution

Thomas Sowell:

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. [Professor Sowell is referring to the forced collectivization of the Ukraine. If you want to inform yourself of the horrors thereof, I recommend Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford UP, 1986.]

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

Sowell is right of course. People typically do not allow themselves to be jerked around. If California is not business-friendly, business people will move to states like Texas, and the once 'Golden State' will sink deeper into the mire. (Bill Bennett in a recent speech referred to California as the "The Lindsay Lohan of states.") If you tax me at 100% for any amount earned above $100,000, I will arrange things so that my taxable income will be less than that amount. It is just human nature to resist being screwed.

The current debate about redistribution on shows like the O'Reilly Factor is close to moronic. O'Reilly talks as if Obama is for redistribution while Romney is not. But redistribution has been with us for a long time in the form of a progressive income tax code, and that is not going away any time soon. (And I am not even convinced that it should.) So the issue is not redistribution versus no redistribution. The issue is is whether we are going to have more of it, or less of it, or reduce the rate of its increase.

Under Obama we will most assuredly have more of it, a lot more. This will depress the economy, the national debt will increase even more, and we will be on the way to financial ruin.

Anyone who votes for the fiscally irresponsible Obama is a fool who does not understand his own long-term best self-interest. And anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter who is in the White House is also a fool, despite the fact that Romney is a milque-toast and a wimp.

Never forget: politics is always about the lesser of evils. Better a milque-toast and wimpy businessman who understands how the economy works than a incompetent leftist who doesn't.

Escapism

Escapism is a form of reality-denial. One seeks to escape from the only reality there is into a haven of illusion. One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist. Why not? Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality. The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist? It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death. But that does not suffice to make it escapist. It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is. And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.

There is a nuance I ought to mention. In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to return so as to help those who remain below. This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d. In Buddhism, the boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building. He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament (one dripping with dukkha as it were) to a more satisfactory condition. Once there, he reconnoitres the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save his cats. A little cute, a little crude, but it makes the point.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them. But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

Image credit.

Shysters of the ACLU At It Again

"Following a complaint filed by the ACLU, school officials in Cranston, R.I. have ended gender specific activities like father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames to comply with state gender discrimination laws." Story here.

I've often wondered about the etymology of 'shyster.' From German scheissen, to shit? That would fit well with the old joke, "What is the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit?' "The bucket." I am also put in mind of scheusslich: hideous, atrocious, abominable. Turning to the 'shyster' entry in my Webster's, I read, "prob. fr. Scheuster fl. 1840 Am. attorney frequently rebuked in a New York court for pettifoggery."

According to Robert Hendrickson, Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, p. 659:

Shyster, an American slang term for a shady disreputable lawyer, is first recorded in 1846. Various authorities list a real New York advocate as a possible source, but this theory has been disproved by Professor Gerald L. Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla, whose long paper on the etymology I had the pleasure of reading. Shakespeare's moneylender Shylock has also been suggested, as has a racetrack form of the word shy, i.e., to be shy money when betting. Some authorities trace shyster to the German Scheisse, "excrement," possibly through the word shicir, "a worthless person," but there is no absolute proof for any theory.

A little further research reveals that Professor Cohen's "long paper" is in fact a short book of 124 pages published in 1982 by Verlag Peter Lang. See here for a review. Cohen argues that the eponymous derivation from 'Scheuster' that I just cited from Webster's is a pseudo-etymology. 'Shyster' no more derives from 'Scheuster' than 'condom' from the fictious Dr. Condom. Nor does it come from 'Shylock.' It turns out my hunch was right. 'Shyster' is from the German Scheisser, one who defecates.

Companion posts:

The ACLU and the Second Amendment

The ACLU and Mardi Gras

The Unholy Alliance With Islamism: Does the Left Have a Death Wish?

Mike Liccione's name came up over dinner with John Farrell, who has met Mike. Small world. (It also turns out that John now lives on the same street only a few doors down from where I lived for part of my time in Boston. Small world again.) Mention of Mike put me in mind of an old post from 6 November 2009 in which I link to him, a post that is particularly relevant in the light of recent events. The post follows.

………………

Something that has long puzzled me also puzzles Michael Liccione. Mike puts it like this:

Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and
orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.

Substantially correct. But if I may quibble, 'Islamic fundamentalism' may not be the right term. Better would be 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism.' A fundamentalist, as I understand the word, is one who interprets the scriptures of his religion literally, as God's own inerrant word. Thus Islam, if I am not mistaken, holds that the Koran was literally dictated by God to Muhammad in Arabic. Whatever one
thinks of fundamentalists in this sense, it seems obvious that they should not be confused with militants or terrorists. Although fundamentalists and terrorists are sets with a non-null intersection, there are fundamentalists who are not terrorists and terrorists who are not fundamentalists.

It is important to try to think as clearly and precisely as one can about these issues, distinguishing the
different, and forging one's terminology in the the teeth of these differences. And the more 'hot-button' the issue, the more necessary is clear and precise thinking.

Addendum 19 September 2012: I have always been careful to speak of 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism' as opposed to 'Islam.' But now I am wondering whether this distinction is not perhaps a snare and a delusion. The problem may well be with Islam itself and its basic values or lack of values. See Diana West's post to which I linked yesterday.

It is becoming painfully obvious that the values of Muslims qua Muslims are simply incompatible with our Western values, and that to allow them to immigrate is a recipe for suicide. Islamic culture is inferior to ours, the proof being the sad state of the countries Muslims come from – which is of course why they don't stay in their own countries.

Liberals of course support wide-open immigration, legal and illegal, along the lines of 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' These liberal fools hate Christians and conservatives more than they hate the enemies of their own liberal values. I call that contemptible stupidity, stupidity that is morally censurable.

Bill K. comments:

I think it is far more pathological than simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I believe the kind of liberal that wants the government to control everything (as opposed to the fuzzy-headed do-gooders that simply want problems to go away and people to be happy) actually admires and approves of Islam, because of its program of total control. They also fail to understand that they will be the first to go when the Umma arrives. They are so used to talking their way into what they want, that they won’t understand the use of force even when they face the beheading sword. Look at our foreign policy. BO actually thought he could talk the Muslims into world peace.

I suspect that our delusional leftist pals think that they can use Islamism to beat back conservatism and Christianity and then dismiss the Islamists once the job is done. But they are pussies compared to the Islamists and they may be in for a big surprise.

Islam is a Radical Threat to Free Speech

Diana West:

It’s important to realize sharia’s prohibition of criticism of Islam is basic Islam: There is nothing “radical” about it. Indeed, it is this basic Islamic censorship that is at the crux of why Islam itself — not “Islamism,” not “radical Islam,” not “Islamists,” but Islam — is an existential threat to the survival of any free society. It is why free societies, once penetrated by a Muslim demographic over 1 percent, begin to lose their liberties as a means of “accommodating” — appeasing — their new Islamic populations.

The Retreat Into the Private Life

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.

Farrell in Flagstaff

It was my pleasure to meet science writer and long-time reader and friend of MavPhil, John Farrell, in Flagstaff Friday evening. He was in town for a conference on the origins of the expanding universe, as he reports in Forbes here. Flag is a lovely dorf sitting at 7,000 feet amongst the pines and home to the Lowell Observatory. It is an excellent retreat from the heat of the Valle del Sol where you would never catch me this time of year in long pants, jacket, and beret.

John and I are standing in front of an excellent Mexican eatery on old Route 66. I first heard about this joint on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. As luck would have it, Farrell the Irishman is enthusiastic about Mexican chow. Our tequila-fueled conversation was so good that I failed to clean my plate, a rare occurrence as my companions (literally those with whom one breaks bread, L. panis) know.

Perhaps the best thing about maintaining a weblog is that it attracts like-minded, high-quality people some of whom one then goes on to meet in the flesh.

The Atheist

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Volume 12, Part I, p. 96, #14:

He alone can be an atheist who has never experienced a glimpse, or who has been caught and become embedded in a hard dry intellectualism, or in whom ethics and conscience have withered.

The point is quite defensible if put in less ringing terms. Most atheists have either (1) never had a religious or mystical or paranormal experience, or (2) have succumbed to the hypertrophy of the critical faculty, or (3) are bereft of conscience or moral sense, or all three or any two of the above.

Ad (1). A prosaic fellow, earth-bound, who believes only in the visible, the tangible, and the edible, who has never had an unusual experience of the the sort that intimates a reality beyond the sensible, or beyond the grossly sensible, will of course not be inclined to take seriously the claims of religion or the beliefs in God and the soul. He believes in what the outer senses reveal to him and will be inclined to dismiss as incredible the belief that there exist things external to his consciousness that are not certifiable by the five outer senses or by the instrumental extensions (telescopes, etc.) of the five external senses. If he had had a mystical experience or a religious experience or a paranormal experience such as an out-of-body experience then he might have been budged from his narrow empiricism. But lacking these sorts of experience, he sees no need to believe in anything but the objects of sense experience and such scientific posits as may be necessary to explain their behavior.

Our prosaic worldling's attitude is not irrational. He bases himself on what is given, but what is given to him are only the deliverances of the outer senses. He is aware of various a posteriori arguments for the existence of God but they find no purchase with him. For the sheer obtrusiveness of the sense world makes it impossible for him to believe in anything beyond it. And in a battle between the massive testimony, at every waking hour, of this gnarly world of time and change, and the output of abstract reasoning, the former is sure to win in the mind of our sense-bound worldling. And so he uses his intellect to resist the arguments, making of each modus ponens a modus tollens.

And of course there is that not unimportant matter of our worldling's enslavement to the pleasures of the flesh. As Plato observed, each pleasure and each pain does its bit to pin the soul to the body so securely and in such a manner that nothing can be real to such an enslaved soul except that which has a bodily nature. (Phaedo St. 83) Our man may even have had a mystical or religious or paranormal experience or two; but they will be no match for his ground-conviction of the ultimate reality of the material world, a conviction made impossible to break because of his attachment to sensuous pleasure.

Ad (2). A dessicated intellect honed on the whetstone of analysis and powered by the will not to believe will have no trouble finding reasons for disbelief. Anything can be argued, and any argument can be turned aside. Reason in us is a frail reed indeed, easily suborned by the passions and other irrational factors.

Ad (3). Can an atheist be moral? Well of course. There are plenty of atheists who are more moral that some theists, e.g., Muslim terrorists. A different and much more interesting question is whether atheists are justified in being moral. I pursue this question in Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil. And then there is the matter of conscience. What exactly is it? Atheists are typically naturalists. Is there a decent naturalistic theory of conscience? Could there be? Or is the fact of conscience in us not an indicator of our higher origin? And so while it is not true, pace Brunton, that atheists lack a conscience, I would argue that (i) their atheism prevents them from fully plumbling the depths of its deliverances, and (ii) they are in no position to provide an adequate theory of conscience and its normativity.