Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now.
A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you dream: you must believe beyond the evidence if you are to have a shot.
And so I beg to differ with W. K. Clifford:
For a couple of rather more technical treatments, see here.
Why is it so hard to believe these days? Substack latest.
If there are truths that we cannot know but only believe, should we deny ourselves those truths because they cannot be known but only believed?
If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)
Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981. This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of mint-condition Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.
I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girlfriend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.
I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, stories, interviews, arguments for analysis in my logic classes, etc. She of course did not believe that I had found them.
What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.
This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true. Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices. Rational acceptability varies with time and place; truth does not.
"But what about rational acceptability at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?"
Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.
As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too.
_________________
*I am assuming that credibility and rational acceptability are the same property, where 'credibility' is defined as the property, not of being believable by someone, but of being rationally believable by someone. We should also distinguish between the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions. My quondam girlfriend did not question my credibility but the credibility of what I asserted. Finding what I said incredible, she concluded that I was lying on that occasion; an occasional lie, however, does not a liar make. A liar is one who habitually lies just as a drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Same with philanderers and gluttons. (But what about murderers? It sounds distinctly odd to say, "Mack is no murderer; he murdered only one man.")
Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and obedient faith and trust. On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an ethics of belief, we feel the anxious concern for intellectual honesty. His question, Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? is ours. On the other side, that of Thomas, we feel the willingness to take doxastic risks, to go beyond what can be strictly known, or even shown to be possible; we desire truth whether or not it can be philosophically validated; we are open to the allowing of church authority to override the judgment of the individual, even if in the end we cannot accept the Church's magisterium.
Husserl was drawn to the Catholic Church in his later years. But he felt too old to enter her since he would need at least five years to examine each dogma, as he explained to Sister Adelgundis. (See John M. Oesterreicher, Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 80.)
A comparison with Simone Weil is apt. She lurked outside the Church for years but could not bring herself to enter. Intellectual scruples were part of it. She was strongly opposed to Blaise Pascal's bit about just taking the holy water and going through the motions in the expectation that outer practices would bring inner conviction.
Husserl's attitude was that it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept the dogmas prior to careful examination to see if they are rationally acceptable. To which the believer will say: How dare you question God's revelation? God has revealed himself in the Incarnation and you will waste five years 'examining' whether it is logically possible when it is a foregone conclusion that you with your scrupulosity of method will be unable to 'constitute' in consciousness the Word and its becoming flesh? It's a fact that lies beyond the sphere of immanence and irrupts into it, and thus cannot be 'constituted' from within it. What can be constituted is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, not an absolute transcendence. What's actual is possible, and what's possible is possible whether you can understand how. If it is actual, then it is possible even if it seems self-contradictory!
Oesterreicher: "But to do so [to examine the dogmas] is to judge the Judge, to try the word of God, forgetting that it is the word of God that tries us." (Walls are Crumbling, p. 80) Oesterreicher goes on to say that Husserl tries to shift "the centre of being and truth" "from God to ourselves." (ibid.) That is exactly right, and this shift is the essence of modern philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) on. The 'transcendental turn' does indeed make of man the center, the constitutive source of all meaning and being.
"It is this luminous authority which gives faith its certainty." (p. 81) But how do you know that this certainty is not merely subjective? Objective certainty alone is of epistemic worth. And how do you know that the authority really is an authority? Josiah Royce's religious paradox is relevant here.
One option is just to accept the faith and seek understanding afterwards. Fides quarens intellectum. And if understanding doesn't come? Well, just keep on believing and practicing. On this approach, faith stands whether or not understanding emerges. "I accept the Incarnation without understanding how it is possible; I accept it despite its seeming impossible." Faith does not have to pass the tests of reason; reason has no veto power over faith. There is a Truth so far above us that the only appropriate attitude on our part is like that of the little child. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18, 3)
Would this response move Husserl? No. Should it? Not clear.
Perhaps Wittgenstein in his Vermischte Bemerkungen gives the best advice:
Go on, believe! It does no harm.
Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can't then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable. (Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch, p. 45e)
Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959:
He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.
According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?
One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen… "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith…." (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)
This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible, is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wanting to drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort." (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)
The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives. In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anything close to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply present an objection the force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy.
Probative Overkill?
One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.
Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.
For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct? How does he know that? How could he know it? Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view? Does he merely believe it? Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth? Does he want truth, but only on his terms? Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes? Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief? Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith? Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter? Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?
No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefs that translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.
So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.
In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion of the double standard.
A reader inquires,
I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence?
If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any. I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God. A rationally compelling argument for a proposition is a proof; a rationally compelling argument for its logical contradictory is a disproof. When it comes to God, and not just God, there are no proofs or disproofs. There are arguments, some better than others. That's as good as it gets.
Note that my claim that this is so is not a proposition that I claim to be able to prove. I claim merely that it is reasonable to believe. I do believe it and will continue to believe until someone gives me a compelling reason not to believe it. If I am right, however, that cannot happen. For my meta-philosophical thesis is substantive, and if I am right, said thesis can neither be proven nor disproven. So the the best you could do would be counter me with the contradictory of my meta-thesis. But then we would be in a stand-off.
What is it for an argument to be rationally compelling?
In the absence of compelling arguments, what should one do?
I don't believe that there can be talk of proof when it comes to God, the soul, and other big topics, assuming you use 'proof' strictly. After considering all the evidence for and against, you will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live. The will comes into it. One freedom comes into it. I thus espouse a limited doxastic voluntarism. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the theist and that of his opposite number. So it is up to you to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
For me the following consideration clinches the matter. Bring the theoretical question back down to your lived life, your Existenz in the existentialist sense. How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days? Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke? Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake? Will you live life as if it has an Absolute Meaning that transcends the petty particular relative meanings of the quotidian round? Will you take the norms that conscience reveals as so many pointers to an Unseen Order to which this paltry and transient sublunary order is but prelude?
It is your life. You decide. You can drift and not decide, but your drifting in the currents of social suggestion and according to the idols of the age is a deficient mode of decision. Not to decide is to decide.
Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing. Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal after-death experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life. What will they have lost by believing as they did?
Nothing! Nothing at all. You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion and giving themselves and others false hope. But no one will ever know one way or the other. And if the body's death is the last word, then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.
If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere.
I understand that your method is aporetic – you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below.[. . .]My question is: do you think that — even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems — we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options?
(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs.
Definitive answers to the Big Questions are beyond our ken. No one knows whether the soul is immortal, for example, and no proof is available to us either way. There are arguments, and some are better than others. But there are no proofs. (If you have a proof, send it to me, and I will show you that it is no such thing.) So I say: Act as if the soul is immortal. So act as to deserve immortality. 'Act' means 'live.' It does not mean 'pretend.' He who lives as if he has a future lives better than the one who lives as if he doesn't. That is true within this life and beyond it.
It also does not mean: Act as if it is true while believing that it is false. That would be faking it. It means: Act or live as if it is true while not knowing whether it is true.
Does anything I do make a difference? The question is answered, not theoretically, but practically by acting as if what I do makes a difference. So acting, I make it true that acting as if what I do makes a difference makes a difference.
It is widely admitted that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition. One aspect of our wretched state is recognized and addressed by the Pyrrhonists: we want certain knowledge but it eludes us. And so we must content ourselves with belief. But beliefs are in conflict and this conflict causes suffering which ranges from mental turmoil to physical violence.
Ours is a two-fold misery. We lack what we want and need, knowledge. We must make do with a substitute that engenders bitter controversy, belief.
Skeptic solution? Live belieflessly, adoxastos! But that is no solution at all, or so say I.
For details, see the following meatier entries:
Here:
Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”
A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well. And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting. It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief. But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have? Should we adopt them without examination?
Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down? Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters. Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them. Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting beliefs were accepted uncritically from supposed authorities. "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise. Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices. Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.
The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living." For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse. Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative. The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live?
Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal. Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth. To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.
The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.
The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements. Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an inferior unenlightened culture.
Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”
Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.
My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.
Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.
. . . I find it hard to doubt
a) My strict numerical identity over time. When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did. The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense of guilt is evidence that I am strictly the same person as the one who did the regrettable deed, and also that I am not a whole of temporal parts, but a substance, an endurant in contemporary jargon, wholly present at every time at which it exists.
b) The freedom of the will in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. My sense of moral failure entails a sense of moral responsibility for what I have done or left undone. Now moral responsibility entails freedom of the will.
c) The absoluteness of moral demands.
There are arguments against all three points. And there are arguments that neutralize those arguments. The philosophers disagree, and it is a good bet that they always will. So in the end you must decide which beliefs you will take as guideposts for the living of your life. My advice is that you won't be far off if you accept the above trio and such of their consequences as you can bring yourself to accept.
The first two, for example, support the immaterial and thus spiritual nature of the self. The third points us to God.
What if you are wrong? Well, you have lived well! For example, if you treat your neighbor as if he is not just a bag of chemicals but an immortal soul with a higher origin and and an eternal destiny, then the consequences that accrue for him and you will be life-enhancing in the here and now, even if the underlying belief turns out to be false.
Understand what I am saying. I am not saying that one should believe what one knows to be false because the believing of it is life-enhancing. I am saying that you are entitled to believe, and well-advised to believe, that which is life-enhancing if it is rationally acceptable or doxastically permissible.
Your resting in subjective certainty may be only a form of somnolence. What makes a living faith living is its self-maintenance in the face of doubt.
The beliefs of others can be readily explained, and explained away; ours, however, are true!