The eschaton will not be immanentized.
Category: Soteriology
Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life
Substack latest.
Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?
Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.
This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death. My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2) More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?
One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:
[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.
One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all. All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life. She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory. Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.
Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision. I explore the difference in considerable detail in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?
Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests.
This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941, I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):
When my life is through
And the angels ask me
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.
The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead. The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal. One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself. This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'
The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:
When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.
[. . .]
The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world — the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.
[. . .]
The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower.
Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind. We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality — which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality — or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.
Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.
One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers.
Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati
Vito Caiati writes,
. . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?
What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor. (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.
But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up. And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it. It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.
I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.
The same problem does not arise for Christianity. In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance. Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization. There is no need for special experiences. Perhaps we can say that the soteriology of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic. But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.
As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had. They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.
But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA. This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat. And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.
The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart
Here (HT: Karl White):
Let me, however, add one more observation that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Christianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.
Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that. For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.
But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)
Soteriology for Brutes?
Vito Caiati writes,
I have gone back and read your post “Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness” many times since it first appeared in December of 2009. In conclusion to the post, you write:
Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases “sensitive soul” and “intellective soul” are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.
Assuming that you are correct, and I believe that you are, does it not follow that a broader Christian soteriology than that proffered by Aquinas and other scholastics should be open to discussion? For if the souls of animals are subsistent, might they too not survive death and be worthy of salvation of some kind, especially since they are free from the stain of sin?
I raise these questions as someone who has been profoundly troubled for many years by animal suffering from earliest times. I have always carried a sense that there is something rather too narrow in a doctrine of salvation that is restricted to mankind. I do not for a moment wish to conflate the ontological status of humans and animals, but is rationality a sufficient reason to exclude so many living, non-rational beings—especially the higher mammals–that have so often suffered terribly and died violently or in great pain to mere extinction?
RESPONSE
These are important questions about which I have little say at the moment. But my friend Ed Feser weighs in in David Bentley Hart Jumps the Shark: Why Dogs Don't Go to Heaven. It is delightfully polemical in the inimitable Feserian style as he takes on David Bentley Hart whose very name suggests a certain pomposity waiting to be punctured. Now why does Feser think that cats and dogs do not survive their bodily deaths?
The reason is that non-human animals are entirely corporeal creatures, all matter and no spirit. To be sure, the matter of which they are composed is not the bloodlessly mechanical, mathematical Cartesian kind. Non-human animals are not machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure, really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end of Fido.
If human beings were entirely corporeal creatures, the same would be true of us. But, the Thomist argues, human beings are not entirely corporeal. We are largely corporeal—as with Fido, our ability to take in nutrients, to grow and reproduce, to see, hear, imagine, and move about, depends on our having bodily organs. But our distinctively intellectual activities—our capacity to grasp abstract concepts, to reason logically, and so forth—are different. They could not be entirely corporeal.
[. . .]
If human beings do have, in addition to their bodily or corporeal activities, an activity that is essentially incorporeal—namely, intellectual activity or thought in the strict sense—then when the corporeal side of human nature is destroyed, it doesn’t follow that the human being as a whole is destroyed. There is an aspect to our nature—the intellect—that can carry on beyond the death of the body, precisely because even before death it was never entirely dependent on the body. This is why there is such a thing as an afterlife for human beings, as there is not for non-human animals.
Hart, like so many people these days, seems to have an excessively sentimental attachment to non-human animals. Perhaps he simply can’t imagine Heaven being a very happy place without a resurrected Fido to share it with.
Consider this. Christ tells us that there will not be marriage in Heaven, and the clear implication is that there will not be romance or sexual intercourse, either. Young people find it difficult to understand how we could fail to miss all of this, and anyone with an amorous disposition can sympathize. But, in fact, we will not miss it. That’s the thing about the beatific vision: it rather leaves everything else in its dust. And I submit that if you won’t miss sex when you’re in Heaven, it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to give much thought to Fido either.
Feser's answer in a nutshell is that non-human animals are all matter and no spirit; we, however, are matter and spirit. We are spiritual beings in virtue of our capacity for such intellectual activities as grasping concepts, forming judgments, and reasoning from the judgments formed. Despite being wholly corporeal, non-human animals enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also, Feser seems to admit, intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger. I have observed a cat expressing anger at another cat's behavior at the food bowl. The one cat was not merely angry, but angry at something, the second cat's howling and 'acting up.' So the first cat, a big maternal tabby bopped the little noisy cat on the head with her paw. What we have in this example, I think, is intentionality together with a primitive conceptualization of the second cat's behavior as 'offensive' or 'inappropriate' and not just 'kitty kat kwalia.'
Does this prove that cats are in some measure 'intellectual' and thus not wholly corporeal? Of course not. But it gives us a reason to doubt the hard-and-fast Thomist distinction between non-human and human animals. Vito Caiati quoted me as saying, "It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility." I did not properly expand upon this thought at the time, so I will add something now. Suppose the sensing is not just a qualitative state but an intentional state, a sensing that, a sensing that the cat treats in the bowl are stale, for example. The cat cannot articulate the content of his sensing in an explicit judgment either in thought or in language, but it seems reasonable to ascribe a proto-propositional content to the cat's consciousness.
There are also considerations anent the unity of consciousness that tend to blur the distinction between non-human and human animal minds. After a cat has defecated, he sees where the scat is which he then 'decides' to bury or not, and then smells whether he has buried it sufficiently, a smelling which involves intentionality and something like judgment. It is something like what I do when I smell a shirt to see if it is too stinky to wear in public. At the same time the cat is listening to the circumambient noise. If it is normal, he continues his job; if not he breaks it off, and jumps out of the box. What we have here is a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of representations, to employ some Kantian jargon: a unity of seeing, smelling, and hearing. This unity is arguably of a spiritual, non-corporeal, nature since it cannot be located in any part of the cat's body or brain.
My interim conclusion is that Feser is not obviously right as against Hart, and that the question remains open. It has not been definitively shown that such critters as cats cannot survive their bodily deaths. If they do, and there is a sort of salvation for them, then this would amount to a sort of redemption of the horror of animal existence in a fallen world in which nature is red in tooth and claw and animals eat each other alive.
Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.
The Divine Job Description
What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God? I proffer an answer at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.
Salvation and the Value of Life
Patrick Toner comments:
. . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value."
Professor Toner's criticism offers me a welcome opportunity to develop further some of my thoughts on this topic.
1) The logically first question is whether human life is a predicament. I say it is. A predicament is not just any old situation or condition or state but one that is deeply unsatisfactory, extrication from which is both needed and difficult to attain. There are of course predicaments in life. For example, you are hiking in a slot canyon with sheer walls when it begins to rain. You are in a dangerous mundane predicament. But my claim, as you would expect, is philosophical: human life as such is a predicament. I take that to be a datum, a given, a starting point. If you don't experience human life as a predicament, your life and that of others, then what I have to say on this topic won't mean anything to you.
2) Now if human life is a predicament as I have defined the term, then it follows straightaway that some sort of extrication, solution, rescue, or relief is needed, whether or not it can be had. That is, someone in a predicament needs to be saved from it. He needs salvation. Considerations anent salvation are called soteriological. Soteriology, as I use the term, is the general theory of salvation in some appropriately spiritual or religious or mystical sense. Our canyon hiker may end up needing to be physically saved. But the salvation under discussion here, though it may involve some sort of physical transformation, as in bodily resurrection, is very different from being saved from drowning.
3) Now distinguish three questions that any soteriology worth its salt would have to answer: What is saved? From what is it saved? For/to what is it saved? A schematic Roman Catholic answer would be that the soul is saved from venial and mortal sin and the just punishment for such sin (purgatory and hell) so that it may live for all eternity in the presence of God. Toner quotes the Catholic Encylopedia: "As sin is the greatest evil, being the root and source of all evil, Sacred Scripture uses the word 'salvation' mainly in the sense of liberation of the human race or of individual man from sin and its consequences."
4) On a Roman Catholic soteriology, then, sin is what makes our human predicament deeply unsatisfactory, and such that we both need relief, but will have a hard time attaining it. (I should add that on Roman Catholicism, salvation cannot be attained by our own efforts: grace is also needed.) Sin explains why our condition is deeply unsatisfactory. But of course other explanations are possible. Please note that unsatisfactoriness is the datum; sin is the explanation of the datum.
For Buddhists it is suffering that makes our predicament deeply unsatisfactory. Buddhist soteriology is accordingly very different from Christian soteriology. For Buddhism it is not the soul that is saved since there is no soul (doctrine of anatta), and it is not saved from sin since sin is an offense against God and there is no God (anatta again). And of course the salvific state is not the visio beata as on Thomist Catholicism, but nibbana/nirvana.
And of course Nietzsche's aesthetic soteriology is different from both of these. For more on that I refer you to Giles Fraser.
5) I do not understand why Toner balks at my claim quoted above, namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value." This strikes me as obviously true. If this life were wholly satisfactory, we would not seek salvation from it. It is precisely because it is of negative value that we seek salvation in the various ways humans have sought salvation by the practice of austerites, sacrifice, good works, prayer, meditation, and so on. It is precisely the realization that this life is marked by sickness, old age, terrible physical and mental infirmity and suffering, greed, delusion, ignorance, war, folly, torture, death . . . that sets us on the Quest for nirvana, moksha, eternal life. What drives monks to their monasteries and nuns to their nunneries is the realization that ultimately this life has nothing to offer that could truly satisfy us.
Why does Toner fail to understand my simple point? It is because he accepts Roman Catholicism in toto and accordingly he takes the Roman Catholic soteriology to be the last, and perhaps only, word. On this view, this world as we experience it in this life, though fallen, is a divine creation. As the product of an all-good God, it is itself good. This is why he doesn't like my talk of this life as of negative value. He ignored my qualification: "taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds."
That is: taken apart from its interpretation in the light of an antecedently accepted worldview such as Roman Catholicism. An appeal to a hinterworld — Hinterwelt is a term Nietzsche uses — is an appeal to a world behind the phenomenal scenes, a true world in whose light the horrors of this world are redeemed. Absent that appeal, this world is obviously of negative value.
I am sure Patrick is capable of understanding my point since he himself invokes the classic Catholic phrase "vale of tears." It is because we experience this world as a vale of tears that we seek salvation from it. Obviously, to see it as a vale of tears is to see it negatively.
6) As for Nietzsche, he was indeed a homo religiosus who experienced our way through this life as a via dolorosa. The horror of existence tormented him and he sought a solution. What my post exposed was the tension between Nietzsche's negative assessment of life, which motivates his ill-starred attempts at salvation, and his doctrine that life, as the standard of all evaluation, cannot be objectively evaluated.
Related articles
Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life
Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2) I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.
If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value. But how can life be of negative value if, as Nietzsche maintains, the value of life is inestimable? This is the problem. Let us now delve into it.
1) Talk of salvation presupposes, first, that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory. In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born. The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.
Now it seems clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever. The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation makes no sense. To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term.
2) But here's the rub. Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable. As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann. His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible. Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms. Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments. Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline. A negative judgment shows a lack of vitality, a deficiency of will power and a privation of the will to power, which is what everything is at bottom. There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life itself. There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending. Thus spoke Nietzsche.
3) The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (a) Man needs salvation from his predicament in this life; (b) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated. The claims cannot both be true. The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life.
4) Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its proximity to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however, is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis renders soteriology impossible.
Is the value of human life objectively inestimable?
5) Can the value of life be objectively evaluated? Does it make sense to maintain that for all of us it would have been better never to have been born? Or the opposite? Schopenhauer claims that "Human Life must be some sort of mistake." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, Frederick Unger, 1975, p. 232.) Is there a fact of the matter here? Or is Nietzsche right at Will to Power #675 where he speaks of the "absurdity of this posture of judging existence . . . It is symptomatic." Symptomatic of what? Of decay, decline, world-weariness.
Does the project of judging human life with an eye to establishing that it either is or is not worth living make sense? Is there a standard apart from life in the light of which the value of life can be assessed? Or is life itself the standard? A most vexing series of questions.
The questions are logically prior to questions about the morality of procreation. David Benatar has famously argued for anti-natalism according to which it would be better if there were no more humans, and that therefore all procreation ought to be opposed as morally wrong, the deontic claim following from the axiological one. (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 12-13)
This is one tough nut to crack, and I am not sure my 'nutcracker' is up to the job. But here we go.
One relevant fact is that life is always an individual life, mine or yours or his or hers. Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens. Life has the property of 'mineness.' There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair, from a particular perspective, in a particular set of circumstances. Lived life is always mine or yours, etc. What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time: one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit. If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.
A second relevant fact, related to but distinct from the first, is that he who evaluates life is party to it. An interested party. The judger is not a mere spectator of his life, from the outside, as if it were someone else's, but a liver of it, an enactor, an actualizer of it. So it is not just that lived life is always a particular life, but also that a particular lived life is not an object of disinterested observation but a living in which the observing and evaluating are inseparable from the living.
Life judges life and Nietzsche's thought is that negative judgments are negative verdicts on the quality of the life that is judging. There is no standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured. No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard. The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective. The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.
6) "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?" And what would those be?
a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience. In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." I feel your pain, Fritz. Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much? How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow? How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence? Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans? (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely. They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.)
But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence? As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either. Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard? And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness? Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is.
b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction. (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.) Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all: better never to have been born, with second best being an early death? But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting? The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living. Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?
These questions are not easy to answer! Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.
In the end, Nietzsche seems torn. He loves life and wants to affirm it on its own terms. And yet he seeks an ersatz salvation in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. "For all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity."
The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.
While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying. This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object. Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed — but at the unknown, at nothing in particular.
For what horrifies some of us is the prospect of sliding into the state of nonbeing, both the sliding and the state. Can Epicurus help?
If the Epicurean reasoning works for the state of being dead, it cannot work for the transition from dying to being dead. Epicurus reasoned: When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not. So what is there to fear? If death is the utter annihilation of the subject of experience, then, after death, there will be nothing left of me to experience anything and indeed nothing to be in a state whether I experience it or not. Clearly, a state is a state of a thing in that state. No thing, no state.
This reasoning strikes me as cogent. On the assumption that physical death is the annihilation of the person or self, then surely it is irrational to fear the state one will be in when one no longer exists. Again, no thing, no state; hence no state of fear or horror or bliss or anything. Of course, coming to see rationally that one's fear is irrational may do little or nothing to alleviate the fear. But it may help if one is committed to living rationally. I'm a believer in the limited value of 'logotherapy' or self-help via the application of reason to one's life.
I suffer from acrophobia, but it hasn't kept me away from high places and precipitous drop-offs on backpacking trips. On one trip into the Grand Canyon I had to take myself in hand to get up the courage to cross the Colorado River on a high, narrow, and swaying suspension bridge. I simply reasoned the thing out and marched briskly across staring straight ahead and not looking down. But then I am a philosopher, one who works at incorporating rationality into his daily life.
Why then do so many find the Epicurean reasoning sophistical? To Philip Larkin in "Aubade" it is "specious stuff":
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
It seems clear that our boozy poet has failed to grasp the Epicurean reasoning.
Still, there is the moment of death, the moment in which the self helplessly dissolves, knowing that it is dissolving. My claim is that it is this loss of control, this ego loss, that horrifies us. Ever since the sense of 'I' developed in us we have been keeping it together, maintaining our self-identity in and through the crap storm of experience. But at the moment of dying, we can no longer hold on, keep it together. We will want to cling to the familiar, and not let go. This I suggest is what horrifies us about dying. And for this horror the reasoning of Epicurus is no anodyne.
So I grant that there is something quick and specious about the Epicurean cure. If one is rational, it has the power to assuage the fear of being dead, but not the fear of dying, the fear of ego loss.
I consider it salutary to cultivate this fear of dying. It is the sovereign cure to the illusions and idolatries of worldliness. But the cultivation is hard to accomplish, and I confess to rarely feeling the horror of dying. It is hard to feel because our natural tendency is to view everything without exception objectively, as an object. The flow of intentionality is ever outward toward objects, so much so that thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre have denied that there is any subject of experience, any source of the stream of intentionality. (See his The Transcendence of the Ego.)
Everyone knows that one will die; the trick, however is not just to think, but to appreciate, the thought that I will die, this unique subjective unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. This is a thought that is not at home in the Discursive Framework, but straddles the boundary between the Sayable and the Unsayable. My irreducible ipseity and haecceity of which I am somehow aware resists conceptualization. Metaphysics, just as much as physics, misses the true source of the horror of death. For if metaphysics transforms the I or ego into a soul substance, then it transforms it into an object. (Cf. the Boethian objectifying view of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature.) An immaterial object is still an object. As long as I think of myself from the outside, objectively, from a third-person point of view, it is difficult to appreciate that it is I, the first person, this subjective center and source of acts who will slide into nonbeing.
Now we come to "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade," religion, "created to pretend we never die." Although this is poetic exuberance and drunken braggadocio, there is a bit of truth that can be squeezed out of Larkin's effusion. The religious belief in immortality can hide from us the horror and the reality of death. It depends on how 'platonizing' the religion is.
Christianity, however, despite its undeniable affinities with Platonism (as well appreciated by Joseph Ratzinger, the pope 'emeritus,' in Introduction to Christianity), resolutely denies our natural immortality as against what is standardly taken to be the Platonic view. On Christianity we die utterly, and if there is any hope for our continuance, that hope is hope in the grace of God.
Is there then any cure for the horror of death? In my healthy present, my horror is that of anticipation of the horror to come. The real horror, the horror mortis, will be upon us at the hora mortis, the hour of death, when we feel ourselves sliding into the abyss.
In extremis, there is only one cure left, that of the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3. One must let oneself go hoping and trusting that one will get oneself back. Absent that, you are stuck with the horror.
Nothing would be more foolish and futile than to take the advice of a different drunken poet, and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The dim light of the ego must die to rise again as spirit. In fact, it is the ego in us that 'proves' in a back-handed sort of way that we are spiritual beings. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and saying it and thinking it isolate himself, distancing himself from his Source and from other finite selves even unto the ultimate Luciferian conceit that one is self-sufficient.
Easter Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14: Christianity and Buddhism
Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.
King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
Orthodox* Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est. It is vain, void, empty, delusional.
Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man of whom it is related that he saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough as far as we are concerned; his historical existence unnecessary. 'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.' Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's becoming the Buddha. Suppose that Siddartha never existed, or existed but didn't attain enlightenment. We would still have the idea of a man attaining enlightenment/salvation by his own efforts. The idea would suffice. (One might wonder, however, whether the real possibility of enlightenment needs attestation by someone's actually having achieved it — which would drag us back into the realm of historical fact — or whether the mere conceivability of it entails, or perhaps provides good evidence for, its real possibility.)
Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help. Non-attachment extends to the Buddha and his teachings. Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara. One can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power. There is no need for supernatural assistance. If Buddhism is a religion of self-help, Christianity is most assuredly a religion of other-help. On the latter one cannot drag oneself from the dreck by one's own power.
Trouble is, how many attain the Buddhist goal? And if only a few renunciates ever attain it, how does that help the rest of us poor schleps? By contrast, in Christianity, God, in the person of the Word (Logos) made flesh, does the work for us. Unable ultimately to help ourselves, we are helped by Another. And the help is available to all despite their skills in metaphysics and meditation. As Maurice Blondel observes, . . . if there is a salvation it cannot be tied to the learned solution of an obscure problem. . . It can only be offered clearly to all. (Action, p. 14) (By "do the work for us," I of course do not mean to suggest the sola fide extremism of some Protestants.)
I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of Buddhistic self-help optimism. Try to hoe the Buddhist row and see how far you get. One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear. I know of no enlightened persons. But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks. I have encountered Buddhists who become very upset indeed if you challenge their dogmas such as the anatman ('No Self') doctrine. The ego they deny is alive and well in them and angry at having the doctrine to which their nonexistent egos are attached questioned.
Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions in that they both reject the ultimacy and satisfactoriness of this life taken as end-all and be-all. But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of Nirvanic extinction. The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place. Some solution! And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices. Mindfulness exercises and other practices can be usefully employed by Christians. Christianity and Buddhism are the two highest religions. The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions.
Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is over-refined. The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of sexual intercourse. Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.' 'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering. The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: salvation through annihilation. What Christianity promises, it must be admitted by the intellectually honest, is very difficult to make rational sense of. For example, one's resurrection as a spiritual body. What does that mean? How is it possible? For an introduction to the problem, see Romano Guardini, The Last Things, "The Spiritual Body," pp. 61-72.
Admittedly, my rank ordering of the great religions is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words. And, as usual, political correctness be damned. For details on Buddhism see my Buddhism category.
I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed. It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary. Many of the sutras are beautiful and ennobling. Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously — except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself. An interesting and important question is whether Muslims are better off with their religion as opposed to having no religion at all. The question does not arise with respect to the other great religions, or if you say it does, then I say it has an easy answer.
There are some affinities between Christianity and Buddhism. One is explored in The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli.
As for why I am not a Buddhist, I give one reason in Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am not a Buddhist. Others are in the Buddhism category.
Here is something for lefties to think about. While there are are some terrorists who are socioculturally Buddhist in that they were raised and acculturated in Buddhist lands, are there any Buddhists who terrorize from Buddhist doctrine?
___________________________________
*By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.
The Divine Job Description
For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts.
What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?
I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)
1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.
But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)
If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.
"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job — the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all — won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.
If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman — not below but beyond the personal and the human. As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism.
2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Or maybe we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.
Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.
3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value.
4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.
When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.
What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .
Moksha: Soteriological Riddles
Over lunch Friday the topic of moksha (release or liberation from samsara; enlightenment) came up in the context of Advaita Vedanta. Moksha is attained when the identity of Atman and Brahman is realized. My interlocutor wanted to know how such realization is possible. If I realize my identity with the Absolute, then I cease to exist as something separate from the Absolute. In that case, however, there is nothing left to realize anything. How could the state of enlightenment be anything for me if there is no 'me' left after enlightenment? How is moksha different from deep dreamless sleep or from utter nonexistence? A form of salvation that amounts to personal annihilation seems not to be a salvation worth wanting.
Any soteriology worth its salt must answer three questions: Salvation of what? To what? From what? Brahman does not need salvation. It is this indigent samsaric entity that I take myself to be that needs salvation. But if what is saved is destroyed in being saved, by being merged into Brahman, then it is at best paradoxical to call this salvation.
Ramanuja is supposed to have said to Shankara, "I don't want to be sugar; I want to taste sugar."
If I were taking Shankara's side of the argument, I might say something like the following to Ramanuja and my friend:
If I am right and you really are sugar/Brahman in your innermost essence, and you merely taste it, then you are removed from it and haven't yet attained the goal. It is just one more object over against you as subject. Your inquiry into the self, into who or what you really are, has not yet come to an end. The goal is to realize or become aware of your true self. To do that you must ruthlessly disengage from everything that is not-self. If Brahman is your true self, and you realize your identity with it, then you haven't lost your self, but found your self. You cannot be said to dissolve into the ocean of Brahman if Brahman is the true you. To think that you you lose your self when you merge with Brahman presupposes a false identification of the self with something finite. The self you lose is merely an object that you have wrongly identified as your true self; the self you gain is your true self.
This response is not quite satisfactory. Consider the following aporetic triad:
1. Brahman does not need salvation.
2. I am Brahman.
3. My need for salvation is a real (not merely a samsaric, illusory) need.
The first two limbs are parts of the doctrine (Advaita Vedanta) that is the context of our soteriological discussion. So they are nonnegotiable unless we shift out of this context. But (3) also seems true. The three propositions cannot, however, all be true: the conjunction of the first two limbs entails the negation of the third.
So it looks as if the advaitin has to bite the bullet and reject (3). He has to say something like: the very need for release from this hell of an existence itself belongs to maya, the realm of illusion. So both the need for moksha and the one who seeks it are illusory. But this seems to conflict with the starting point of this whole soteriological scheme, namely, that the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of this life are real.
Here is another puzzle.
Using the method of Neti, Neti (not this, not this), we end up with the result that the subject who is seeking is no object, no thing, nothing. Pursuing the question: Who or what am I? I come to the insight that I cannot be identical to any object, whether my car, my house, my clothes, my curriculum vitae, my body, any part of my body, my memories, thoughts, feelings, etc. Any and all objects — inner, outer, concrete, abstract — are to be disengaged from the subject for whom they are objects. The upshot seems to be that any self or subject so disengaged from every object is nothing at all.
On the other hand, I cannot be nothing at all since I am pursuing this investigation. Coming to realize that I am not this, that, or the other thing, I must be something, not nothing. So we bang into a logical contradiction: I am nothing and I am not nothing.
As long as we remain on the discursive/dualistic plane we will get tangled up like this. So one could take these insolubilia as pointing us beyond the discursive intellect. This is what I suggested to my friend. I want him to take up meditation so as to explore the non-dual source of duality. But meditation is insanely hard, and the fruits are few and far between. It can seem like an utter waste of time. Pointless navel-gazing! (But see my plea for omphaloscopy .)
Besides, one can take the insolubilia — if insolubilia they are — as referring us, not into the transdiscursive, but back into Plato's Cave, in particular, into that especially dark corner wherein the Wittgensteinian therapists ply their trade.
Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos
Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.
We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.
Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)
The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.
Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.
This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Buddha was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.
If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.
But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.
So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side.
My Athenian thesis — that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.
Original Sin and Eastern Orthodoxy
There was another point I wanted to make re: John Farrell's Forbes piece, Can Theology Evolve? Farrell writes, "The Eastern Orthodox Churches, for example, do not accept the doctrine of Original Sin . . . ." I think this claim needs some nuancing. (Here is my first Farrell post.)
First of all, Eastern Orthodoxy certainly accepts the doctrine of the Fall, and so accepts the doctrine of Original Sin, unless there is some reason to distinguish the two. Timothy Ware, expounding the Orthodox doctrine, writes, "Adam's fall consisted essentially in his disobedience of the will of God; he set up his own will against the divine will, and so by his own act he separated himself from God." (The Orthodox Church, Penguin 1964, p. 227.) If anything counts as Original Sin, this act of disobedience does. So, at first blush, the Fall and Original Sin are the same 'event.' Accepting the first, Orthodoxy accepts the second.
But both 'events' are also 'states' in which post-Adamic, postlapsarian man finds himself. He is in the state or condition of original sinfulness and in the state or condition of fallenness. This fallen state is one of moral corruption and mortality. This belief is common to the Romans, the Protestants, and the Orthodox. But it could be maintained that while we inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, we don't inherit his guilt. And here is where there is an important difference between the Romans and the Protestants, on the one hand, and the Eastern Orthodox, on the other. The latter subscribe to Original Sin but not to Original Guilt. Timothy Ware: "Men (Orthodox usually teach) automatically inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, but not his guilt: they are only guilty in so far as by their own free choice they imitate Adam." (229)
I conclude that Farrell should have said, not that the Orthodox do not accept Original Sin, but that they do not accept Original Guilt. Or he could have said that the Orthodox do not accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin which includes the fomer idea. Actually, given the context this is probably what he meant.
There is something repugnant to reason about the doctrine of Original Guilt. How can I be held morally responsible for what someone else has done? That is a morally obnoxious notion, as obnoxious as the notion behind calls for reparations for blacks. Surely I am not morally responsible for crimes committed in the 19th century. The more I think about it, the more appealing the Orthodox doctrine becomes.