Category: Metaphilosophy

Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview

For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview.  Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism.  But you would never know it from his technical work which has no direct relevance to the Big Questions. (Possible qualification: the business about the necessity of identity discussed in Naming and Necessity allows for a Cartesian-style argument for mind-body dualism.  See here.)

So I would characterize Kripke as a compartmentalizer.  (My use of this term does not have a pejorative connotation.)   His work in philosophy occupies one of his mental compartments while his religious convictions and practices occupy another with little or no influence of the one on the other.  It is not that his technical work is inconsistent with his religious worldview; my point is that the two are largely irrelevant to each other.  No doubt some of Kripke's examples 'betray' his religious upbringing — e.g., the fascinating bit about Moloch as a misvocalization of the Hebrew 'melech' in Reference and Existence, p. 70 ff. et passim –  but his technical work, or at least his published technical work, is not a means to either the articulation or the rational justification of his worldview.

You may appreciate my point if you compare Kripke with Alvin Plantinga.  He too is a religious man and a theist, an anti-naturalist, and an anti-materialist.  But all of Plantinga's books that I am aware of contribute directly to the articulation and defense of his theistic worldview.  He is out to explain and justify theistic belief and turn aside such objections to it as the ever-popular arguments from evil.  This is clear from the titles of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom, and Evil, Does God Have a Nature.  But it is also clear from Nature of Necessity the penultimate chapter of which treats of God, evil, and freedom, and the ultimate chapter of which is about God and necessity.  The same is true of  his two volumes on warrant one of which includes a critique of naturalism, not to mention his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. 

The late David M. Armstrong is an interesting case.  While he respects religion and is not a militant naturalist or atheist, his technical work articulates and defends his thoroughly naturalist worldview, where naturalism is the thesis that all that exists is the space-time world and its contents.  The naturalist worldview comes first for Armstrong, both temporally and logically, and sets the agenda for the technical investigations of particulars, universals, states of affairs, classes, numbers, causation, laws of nature, dispositions, modality, mind, and so on.  Broadly characterized, Armstrong's agenda is to show how everything, including what appear to be 'abstract objects,' can be accounted for naturalistically using only those resources supplied by the natural world, without recourse to anything non-natural or supernatural.  

For Plantinga, by contrast, it is his theistic worldview that comes first both temporally and logically and sets the agenda for his technical work.

And then there is an acquaintance of mine, a philosopher, who attends Greek Orthodox services on Sunday but during working hours is something close to a logical positivist!

This suggests a three-fold classification.  There are philosophers whose

A. Technical work is consistent with but does not support their worldview;

B. Technical work  is consistent with and does support their worldview;

C. Technical work is inconsistent with and hence does not support their worldview.

I will assume that (C) is an unacceptable form of compartmentalization, and that one should aim to integrate one's beliefs. But I won't comment further on (C) here.  Brevity is the soul of blog.  This leaves (A) and (B).

Now it has always seemed  obvious to me that (B) is to be preferred over (A).  Do I have an argument?  But first I should try to make my thesis more precise.  To that end, a few more distinctions and observations.

Philosophy-as-inquiry versus philosophy-as-worldview

I distinguish philosophy-as-inquiry from philosophy-as-worldview. These are two ideal types of approach to the deepest problems that vex the thoughtful.  Roughly, a worldview is a more or less comprehensive system of more or less precisely articulated action-guiding beliefs and values. Despite the word, a worldview is more than a view; it is a guide to life. It sets goals and prescribes and proscribes courses of action. It provides an overarching context of meaning in which individual actions assume a meaning that transcends their momentary meaning. It is practical rather than merely theoretical.  A worldview is something one lives by, and sometimes dies for. (Transfinite cardinal arithmetic is not a worldview: it has no practical implications. One cannot 'take it to the streets.')

Marxism is a worldview. Its theoretical claims are in the service of action, and are not for the sake of mere understanding.  In the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx tells us us that "The philosophers have variously interpreted he world; the point, however, is to change it." Marxism is worldview philosophy, not philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, and the 11th Thesis would make a fine motto for many, but not all, worldview philosophers. 

The various "therapies of desire" (I allude to the title of a book by M. Nussbaum) are also worldview philosophies: Buddhism, Stoicism, Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and arguably also Christianity. Like Marxism, these therapeutic worldviews advocate  change, but at the personal level: metanoia, ataraxia, nibbana. Their aim is practical: to save the individual from an unsaisfactory predicament, to deliver him from evil, ignorance, sin, suffering.  Such theory as these systems contain is for the sake of the practical end.

Aristotle is perhaps the best example of a philosopher animated by the ideal of philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, much more so than his teacher Plato who combined dispassionate inquiry with soteriology at the level of the individual and political reform at the level of society.

The 'knowledge' embodied in a worldview is not knowledge for its own sake. Obviously, there are many philosophies in this worldview sense, and therefore no such thing as philosophy in this sense.  There is the 'philosophy' of your crazy uncle who has an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Kant, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.  Observe also that a philosophy in the sense of a worldview need not be arrived at by rational inquiry, although it may well be supported and legitimated by rational inquiry.  The worldview of Aquinas is is based on the Judeo-Christian revelation, first and foremost. The most important truths, the salvific truths, are not accessible to man's reason in its current, fallen state.  They are supra-rational, not irrational, and 'knowable' by us only by revelation which must be accepted by faith.  The truths of revelation are cognitiones fidei.  (That there is knowledge by faith sticks in the craw of  post-Cartesians, but it made sense to the medievals.) Reason has it rightful role, however, but it is ancillary: philosophia ancilla theologiae.  

Philosophy-as-inquiry, by contrast is rational inquiry by definition. 

Philosophy as strict science

Edmund Husserl, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Kant,  is perhaps the main modern example of someone who aimed to put philosophy on the sure path of science.  He too wanted a worldview, but believed that a worldview worth wanting had to be one that could be established by a strictly scientific manner. He was willing to suspend his worldview needs until such time as he could achieve a rationally grounded worldview.  He was so willing because he believed that intellectual integrity demanded it.  

Note too that philosophy-as-inquiry need not result in a worldview.  It can end aporetically, at an impasse, the way a number of the Platonic dialogs do, in Socratic nescience, even if the intention was to arrive at a worldview.  And sometimes even the intention is lacking: there are philosophers who are content to devote their professional hours to  some such narrow topic as counterfactual conditionals  or epistemic closure principles, or anaphora.  They are simply fascinated by narrowly-defined problems regardless of their wider theoretical relevance, let alone any practical upshot. They can be said to engage in hyperspecialization.  There are also those less extreme specialists who are concerned with ethics or epistemology but give no thought to the metaphysical presuppositions of either.

We should also distinguish between engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to arrive at a worldview versus engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to shore up or defend a worldview that one antecedently accepts.  This is the difference between one who seeks the truth by philosophical means, a truth he does not possess, and one who possesses or thinks he possesses the truth or most of the truth and employs philosophical means to the end of defending and securing and promoting the truth that he already has and has received from some extraphilosophical source such as revelation or religious/mystical experience.  The latter could be called philosophy-as-inquiry in the service of apologetics, 'apologetics' broadly construed. 

It should now be evident that (B) conflates two ideas that need to be split apart.  There are philosophers whose

B1.  Technical work is consistent with and supports an antecedently held worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and whose source is not philosophy-as-inquiry;

B2.  Technical work is consistent with and supports a worldview the source of which is philosophy-as-inquiry.

My main thesis is that (B2) is superior to (A), but I also incline to the view that (B1) is  superior to (A).  But for now I set aside (B1).

But why is (B2) superior to (A)?   I am not saying that there is anything wrong with satisfying  a purely theoretical interest either by (i) hyper-specializing and concentrating on one or a few narrow topics, or (ii) specializing as in the case of Kripke by working on a fairly wide range of topics.  What I want to say is that there is something better than either of (i) or (ii).

My thesis:  Since philosophy is a search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, one is not true to the spirit of philosophy in the full and normative sense of the word if one is content to theorize about minutiae that in the end have no 'existential' relevance where 'existential' is to be taken in the sense of Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, et. al, and their distinguished predecessors, Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, et al.  One's own existence, fate, moral responsibility, and existential meaning are surely part of the ultimate matters; so to abstract from these matters  by pursuing a purely theoretical interest is, if not logically absurd, then existentially absurd.  In philosophy one cannot leave oneself out and be objective in the way the sciences must leave out the subject and  be objective.  Philosophy must concern itself with the whole of reality, and therefore not merely with the world as it is in itself. It must also concern itself with the world as it is in itself for us, in its involvement with subjectivity. Subjectivity, however, is in every case my individual subjectivity.  In this way, one's personal Existenz comes into the picture.

Of course I am not a narrow existentialist who rejects technical philosophy.

What I am maintaining is that one ought not compartmentalize:  one's technical work ought to subserve a higher end, the articulation and defense of a comprehensive view of things.  As Wilfrid Sellars says, "It is . . . the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise." (Science, Perception, and Reality, 3)  "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (SPR 1)  But I am saying more than this, and words like 'view' and 'worldview' don't quite convey it since philosophy as I 'view' it ought not be purely theoretical.  Somehow, one's theory and one's Existenz need to achieve unity.

I still haven't made my thesis all that clear, but it is perhaps clear enough. 

One argument for my thesis is that specialization gets us nowhere.  It is notorious that philosophers have not convinced one another  and that progress in philosophy has not occurred.  And the best and brightest have been at it for going on three thousand years.  That progress will occur in future is therefore the shakiest of inductions.   Given that shakiness, it is existentially if not logically absurd to lose oneself in, say, the technical labyrinth of the philosophy of language, as fascinating as it is.  Who on his deathbed will care whether reference is routed through sense or is direct? The following may help clarify my meaning.

 Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:

My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.

The suggestion is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and perhaps just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?

If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.

Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145)

As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

Intellectual Hygiene

I am all for intellectual hygiene. But it can be taken to an extreme by a certain sort of analytic philosopher who is afraid to touch anything that might in the least be infected with the murk and messiness of life as she is lived. Such types remind me of neurotic hand-washers and those who, fearful of the Chinese flu, walk around in the open air, alone, in masks.

On Profitable Study of Philosophy

One needs to work through a text slowly, pondering, comparing, re-reading, reconstructing and evaluating the arguments, raising objections, imagining possible replies and all of this while animated by a burning need to get to the bottom of some pressing existential question.  You must bring to your reading questions if you expect study to be profitable.

If one fails to enter into the dialectic of the problems and issues one will come away with little more than a vague literary impression. But real study is hard work demanding aptitude, time, peace, and quiet, a commodity in short supply in these hyperkinetic and cacaphonous times.  Back in the day,  Arthur Schopenhauer was much exercised by "the infernal cracking of whips" as he he complained in his classic "On Noise."  What would he say today?  Could he survive in the contemporary crapstorm of   cacaphony?

So turn off that cell phone before I smash it to pieces!

On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

Is Anything Ever Settled in Philosophy? Meinong’s Theory of Objects

RyleGilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.

Parallel to what?

Parallel to Etienne Gilson's famous observation that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

Has Any Philosophical Problem Been Solved? The case of psychologism in logic.

For Cyrus

……………

A reader is skeptical of my solubility skepticism. He adduces the problem of psychologism in logic which, he suggests, has been definitively settled in favor of the anti-psychologizers.  Here, then, is a problem that supposedly has been solved. There is progress in philosophy after all. My reader is joined by Robert Spaemann who, in his Persons, tr. O'Donovan, Oxford 2006, writes:

The refutation of psychologism in logic, with which Husserl and Frege are associated, is among the very few philosophical achievements that have brought an existing debate to a decisive close. (54)

Would that it were so! But alas it is not.  The existing debate rages on. Having been brought up on Husserl, and influenced by Frege, I was for a long time an opponent of psychologism in logic, and thought the issue resolved. Time to revaluate! Here is a post from August 2004 from my first blog:

ARE THE LAWS OF LOGIC EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS?

Someone on a discussion list recently resurrected the old idea of John Stuart Mill and others that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations from what we do and do not perceive. Thus we never perceive rain and its absence in the same place and at the same time. The temptation is to construe such logic laws as the Law of Non-Contradiction — ~(p & ~p) — as generalizations from psychological facts like these. If this is right, then logical laws lack the a priori character and epistemic ‘dignity’ that some of us are wont to see in them. They rest on psychological facts that might have been otherwise.

But now consider this reductio ad absurdum:

1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for reductio)
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations record what happens to be the case, but might not have been the case.) Therefore,
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true. (From 1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible that p be false. (Def. of ‘contingently true.’)Therefore,
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)Therefore,
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which ‘p&~p’ is true. (From 5 and the fact that LNC is a law of logic.)
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Corollary: if laws of logic were empirical generalizations, we would be incapable of defining ‘empirical generalization’: this definition requires the notion of what is the case but (logically) might not have been the case.

The above is a good, but not a compelling, argument. For it presupposes the distinction between necessary and contingent propositions.  Is that distinction objectively self-evident? Martin Kusch, Psychologism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Massey also invokes the stronger form of the claim that logical truths are not necessary (1991, 188). According to this criticism, the very notion of necessity which is presupposed in calling logical laws ‘necessary truths’, is beset with difficulties. The argument leading to this conclusion was developed in a series of well-known papers by Quine. Quine argued that the notions of analyticity, necessity and aprioricity stand or fall together and that the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is relative rather than absolute. But once this distinction becomes relative, necessity and aprioricity go by the board (Quine 1951, Engel 1991, 268–70). Massey summarises the implications of Quine’s arguments succinctly:

If we reject the concept of necessity … we also forego the concept of contingency. If it makes no sense to say that the truths of mathematics are necessary, it makes no better sense to say that those of psychology or any other so-called empirical science are contingent. But if we may not employ necessity and contingency to demarcate the deliverances of the empirical sciences from those of the formal sciences, how are we to distinguish them in any philosophically interesting way? (1991, 188).

Now I don't much cotton to Quine, but he is no slouch of a logician!  And he is certainly a looming presence in 20th century American philosophy.  So on the basis of his dissent alone, we ought to agree that the psychologism problem has not been solved.   I am assuming that a problem hasn't been solved unless it has been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  It hasn't been solved until the debate about it has been brought to a decisive close. Kusch gives several reasons in addition to the one cited above why this is not the case with respect to the psychologism debate. 

Kleingeld meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, learned from hard experience, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

Clarity and Content in Philosophy: Two Principles of Method

A commenter enunciates two principles:

1) The guiding principle of analytic philosophy – not always observed – is that the author has a duty to be maximally clear.

2) The guiding principle of Continental philosophy – always strictly observed – is that the reader has a maximal duty to understand.

Here are my principles:

A) One guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the writers of it have a duty to strive for as much clarity as they can muster and as much clarity as the subject matter allows, but without loss of content and without evading real problems and genuine obscurities. In addition to those two caveats, it needs to be said that clarity is not enough. "Clarity consistent with content" is my motto.

B) A second guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the readers of it have a duty to try to understand the author in a spirit  that is open-minded and charitable. A good-faith effort ought to be made to understand the author in his own terms and from his own tradition despite the hours of effort this typically requires.  Only then is critique and even rejection justifiable.

Commentary on the Principles

Ad (A).  "Reality is messy," a student once said in response to my drawing of distinctions. I replied, "True, but it doesn't follow that our thinking about reality should be messy." Clearly, we ought to strive to be clear. But 'ought' implies 'can.'  There cannot therefore be any legitimate demand that one be "maximally clear." That is unachievable by us. And it may be unachievable in itself.

The subject matter sets a second limit to our quest for clarity.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book One, section 3, Aristotle famously writes,

Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . .

For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator. (1094b 10-25)

Aristotle was discussing ethics and politics, but the principle holds across the board. Consider the philosophy of logic. If  you stick to logic proper, things are very clear indeed. But if you dig beneath the formalisms and schemata, obscurity soon rears its ugly head. No logic without propositions. But what is a proposition? And how are we to understand the unity of a proposition? There are competing theories, none of them "maximally clear." The prosaic pates who cannot tolerate any degree of obscurity had better stay clear of these questions.

But the great philosophers have never done that. They were not put off by the penumbral. They dug deep.  A great logician, second only to Aristotle, if second to anyone, felt moved to write, in one of his seminal papers, "The concept horse is not a concept." Is that clear? It smacks of a contradiction. And yet Gottlob Frege had excellent motivation for saying it.

Ad (B). A mistake many make is to think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.  One expects this mindset among ordinary folk. Unfortunately one finds it also among philosophers, assuming they deserve that title.

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate. He displays this attitude throughout The Plato Cult.

He  polemicizes churlishly against his spiritual superiors in much of his writing, so I am simply giving him, or his shade, a taste of his own medicine.

When it came time to die, however, his empty polemics and miserable positivism left him in the lurch. His son, who, mirabile dictu, converted to Catholicism, caught him reading the Bible near the end.

Apparently, curmudgeon Stove forgot to consider that philosophy might have something to do with wisdom.

Related: Edward Feser, Can Philosophy be Polemical?

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

In a Philosophical Discussion . . .

. . . three's a crowd and four's a cross-conversation. 

One-on-one, back-and-forth, defining and refining, pursuing the point, focusing like a laser, driven by eros for truth but free of polemos under the aegis of philia.  But also under the aegis of 

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

And with no illusions about achieving agreement. An attainable goal here below is clarity about differences. "I will teach you differences." (Shakespeare, King Lear, Wittgenstein.)

Moving from Religion to Philosophy: A Typology of Motives

People come to philosophy from various 'places.'  Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts.  There are other termini a quis as well.  In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy.  What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy?  I count five main types of motive.

1. The Apologetic Motive.  Some look to philosophy for apologetic tools.  Their concern is to clarify and defend the tenets of their religious faith, tenets they do not question, or do not question in the main, against those who do question them, or even attack them.  For someone whose central motive is apologetic, the aim is not to seek a truth they do not possess, but to articulate and defend a truth, the "deposit of faith," that they already possess, if not in fullness, at least in outline.

2. The Critical Motive.  Someone who is animated by the Critical Motive seeks to understand religion and evaluate its claim to truth, while taking it seriously.  To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, evaluate, assay, separate the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable.  The critic is not out to defend or attack but to understand and evaluate.  Open to the claims of religion, his question is: But is it true?

3. The Debunking Motive.  If the apologist presupposes the truth of his religion, or some religion, the debunker presupposes the falsehood of a particular religion or of every religion.  He takes the doctrines and institutions of religion seriously as things worth attacking, exposing, debunking, unmasking, refuting.

The apologist, the critic, and the debunker all take religion seriously as something worth defending, worth evaluating, or worth attacking using the tools of philosophy.  For all three, philosophy is a tool, not an end in itself. 

The apologist moves to philosophy without leaving religion. If he succeeds in defending his faith with the weapons of philosophy, well and good; if he fails, it doesn't really matter.  He has all the essential truth he needs from his religion.  His inability to mount an intellectually respectable defense of it is a secondary matter.  He might take the following view. "My religion is true. So there must be an intellectually respectable defense of it, whether or not I or anyone can mount that defense."

The critic moves to philosophy with the live option of leaving religion behind.  Whether or not he leaves it behind depends on the outcome of his critique.  Neither staying nor leaving is a foregone conclusion.

The debunker either never had a living faith, or else he had one but lost it.  As a debunker, his decision has been made and his Rubicon crossed: religion is buncombe from start to finish, dangerous buncombe that needs to be unmasked and opposed. Strictly speaking, only the debunker who once had a living faith moves from it to philosophy.  You cannot move away from a place where you never were.

4. The Transcensive Motive.  The transcender aims to find in philosophy something that completes and transcends religion while preserving its truth.  One way to flesh this out would be in Hegelian terms: religion and philosophy both aim to express the Absolute, but only philosophy does so adequately.  Religion is an inadequate 'pictorial' (vortstellende) representation of the Absolute.  On this sort of approach all that is good in religion is aufgehoben in philosophy, simultaneously cancelled and preserved, roughly in the way the bud is both cancelled and preserved in the flower.

5. The Substitutional Motive.  The substitutionalist aims to find in philosophy a substitute for religion.  Religion, when taken seriously, makes a total claim on its adherents' higher energies.  A person who, for any reason, becomes disenchanted with religion, but is not prepared to allow himself to degenerate to the level of the worldling, may look to invest his energies elsewhere in some other lofty pursuit.  Some will turn to social or political activism.  And of course there are other termini ad quos on the road from religion. The substitutionalist abandons religion for philosophy.  In  a sense, philosophy becomes his religion.  It is in her precincts that he seeks his highest meaning and an outlet for his noblest impulses.

Some Questions

A. What is my motive?  (2).  Certainly not (1):  I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking the religion of my upbringing, or any religion, as simply true without examination.  I can't suppress the questions that naturally arise.  We have it on high authority that "The unexamined life is not worth living."  That examination, of course, extends to everything, including religion, and indeed also to this very examining.  Note  that I am not appealing to the authority of Socrates/Plato since their authority can be validated rationally and autonomously.

Certainly not (3): I am not a debunker.  Not (4) or (5) either.  Hegel is right: both religion and philosophy treat of the Absolute.  Hegel is wrong, however, in thinking that religion is somehow completed by or culminates in philosophy.  I incline to the view that Athens and Jersualem are at odds with each other, that there is a tension between them, indeed a fruitful, productive tension, one that accounts in part for the vitality of the West as over against the inanition of the Islamic world.  To put it starkly, it it is the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith (cf. Leo Strauss).  Jerusalem is not a suburb of Athens.

Nor do I aim to substitute philosophy for religion.  Philosophy, with its "bloodless ballet of categories," is not my religion.  Man does not live by the discursive intellect alone.

My view is that there are four main paths to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality.  They are separate and somehow all must be trod.  No one of them has proprietary rights in the Absolute.  How integrate them?  Integration may not be possible here below.  The best we can do is tack back and forth among them.  So we think, we pray, we meditate and we live under the aegis of moral demands taken as absolute.

This theme is developed in Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom. 

B. Have I left any types of motive out?   

Two Ways into Philosophy

Among the riddles of existence are the artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. What started G. E. Moore philosophizing was not so much the world as the puzzling things people such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  That too is a way into philosophy, if an inauthentic one. The authentic philosopher gets his problems from the world, directly.

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.