Wittgenstein on Soul and Body

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), II.iv

A caricature of the Christian hope paints Christians believing that when they die, their souls turn into angels, and they float off to heaven to play the harp. A caricature of the Christian faith paints Christians believing that the spiritual things, such as prayer and a personal experience of God, are more important than the physical things, such as health and work for political reform.  Real Christianity is far from either.

What I like about this brief remark from the great Twentieth Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is how it latches onto something closer to the Christian hope and faith then these caricatures. In the New Testament, there are very few distinctions drawn between a person’s soul and body.The sharp contrast between the soul and the body is something more at home in Greek Philosophy then Christianity.  It is more common for the writers and figures of the New Testament to address people as whole people – soul and body.

In fact, the New Testament often blurs the lines between soul and body in a way that is suggestive that perhaps the human body is the best picture of the human soul: Paul encourages some new Greek converts to Christianity to stop going to pagan temples and using prostitutes because as they take part in these physical activities they damage their soul (1 Corinthians 5-6, 10-11); Jesus insists that the character of a person can be known through their actions (Matthew 7:15-20, 15), physically being dunked in water as well as eating some bread and wine is unreservedly said to affect a persons spirituality, and Paul clearly lays out the Christian hope as being the physical, bodily resurrection from the dead – that is, the way Christians in the future will experience spiritual reconciliation with God is through a resurrected body (1 Corinthians 15).

If you’ve never read any of these bits of the Bible I encourage you to check them out. They make it impossible to believe that Christianity is a religion that cares only about the spiritual, and they are suggestive of a way to understand the interrelatedness of the material and mysterious parts of the person through a simple holism. A holism I think Wittgenstein sums up nicely.

Kant on Human Evil

 

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

– Immanuel Kant

I am always surprised by this quote. Kant is renowned for his monumental attempt to elucidate the proper functioning of human reason, his insistence that such reason could guide human ethics and government, his rigorous and comprehensive philosophical defense of freedom, and his great faith in and respect for the capacities of people. For many, he is the pin-up boy for modernity’s project of replacing the authority of religion with the authority of philosophy and science, for it’s celebration of technological, political, medical and economic progress, and for it’s liberating demand that people think for themselves. What then, is he doing saying something like the remark above?

I think Kant was saying, perhaps in a moment of frustration or somber reflection, that no matter what humanity accomplishes, no matter how era’s of thought and culture move on, no matter how much advancement is made in humanity’s ability to care for one another and improve life, humanity will always have an terrifying capacity for evil, and the ability to destroy. More than this, I think he was saying that the very best human achievements, particularly political achievements, will always contain knots and cracks, due to the ‘crookedness’ of human nature and ability.

To bring the idea forward a few centuries, Kant was saying both that it was unsurprising that something like the apartheid movement occurred in South Africa and, perhaps more sobering, that Obama’s best achievements will be full of knots and cracks. Why? Because out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. This reflection seems particularly poignant coming from Kant.

What does this quote bring to mind for you?

Rowan Williams on Religious Language

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who is researching the nature of religious language – questions like whether it should be taken seriously as trying to communicate truth in the same way science is, or whether it is closer to expressing emotions that need not be referring to any object. I came across this YouTube video of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Cantebury, presenting his thoughts on the matter. He describes religious language, like the classic Christian creeds, as being like footprints left by a large animal. From it you are able to tell a great deal about the animal, but it is in no way exhaustive.

Do you agree?

Reflexivity: The ‘Essence’ of Philosophy?

Positing that any one idea, aim, method or habit is the essence of philosophy will never be a popular move. Philosophers are particularly capable of pointing out the exceptions to the rule, and resisting generalisations. But one of the more promising suggestions I have heard which I am currently entertaining is that reflexivity is the essence of philosophy. The dictionary on my Mac defines this as:

Re.flex.ive. GRAMMAR. Denoting a pronoun that refers back to the subject of the clause in which it is used, e.g., myself, themselves.

To take the normative realm as an example, philosophy asks questions about whether a certain knowledge claim is justifiable, whether a method of thinking is reasonable, and whether certain acts are right and good, without having immediately deployable conceptions of exactly what it would take for a knowledge claim to be justifiable, or what it would take for a method of thinking to be reasonable, or what it would take for certain acts to be good or right. I’ve come across this idea most strongly in Immanuel Kant, who embarked on a Critique of Pure Reason, and encourage others to join him, without explicitly setting up what it would be to constitute ‘reason’, instead taking off down the path of critique and amending definitions, aims and methods along the way through a process of clarification and analysis of new findings.

Perhaps this is one reason for the antagonism between a discipline like theology and philosophy. Philosophy is more inclined to leave a lot of premises, methods, ascriptions and categories open and fluid, and to proceed down a dark and foggy path of clarification and self-scrutiny, whereas much theology is written with strong claims about objectivity and value in place – that is, it has a good idea of what it thinks it would take for something to be justifiable, reasonable, good, right etc. For theology to be continually pulled back to these abstract and foundational categories can be frustrating.

What do you think about this view? Do you think this is a significant source of friction between the two disciplines?

Ethics and Reality – Part 2: Thoreau and Paul’s Reply

There is an alternative to Hume’s critique, which is the insistence that we cannot help but be morally affected by the world in which we live, and the more we give ourselves over to feel and see the moral dimensions in life, the more we will see that ethics and reality are inextricably linked. I’ll unpack this response through some obtuse statements from Henry David Thoreau which seems to echo Paul’s ethics of the New Testament. Thoreau wrote:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and the night…It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep…To be awake is to be alive. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Thoreau suggests that there is a particularly spiritual time of day when reality seems closer, or perhaps when we are closer to reality. He calls this morning because it suggests coming out of a darkness; coming out of a state of resignation, non-engagement and withdrawal, to experience reality in a fresh way. New Testament scholar Tom Wright explains the ethical thought of Paul in a similar vein. In explaining Ephesians 5.14 which screams, ‘Awake of sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you life’, Wright says:

In other words: it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the non-heavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor – it’s like being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. What we all need from time to time is for someone to say, ‘It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!’ — Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope (2007), p. 265

The common link between Wright’s remarks on the ethical thought of Paul and Thoreau’s cryptic words is the theme of being awake. They liken acting morally in the world to being awake and experiencing reality, and allowing that reality to affect and change you. It’s interesting to note that this kind of language was employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement – calling Americans to wake up to the immorality around them, to throw off the sleep of the past.

This is not so much a reply to Hume, as offering a different picture of how ethics and reality may be related. But do you find either more compelling? Do you think that a deep knowledge of reality, possibly including a deep knowledge of humanity, society, science and God, would have necessary ethical implications? Or do you think that ethics is something totally separate?

Ethics and Reality – Part 1: David Hume’s Critique

In this post and the next I’ll be discussing ethics and how it is related to reality. The question I want to pose and offer some thoughts on is: in what sense can our ethics be derived from observing, living in, thinking about, and feeling our way through the reality we inhabit? In ethics, this is usually termed the question of ‘moral realism’, and attracts related questions such as: are there objective moral facts? Are these moral facts universal or contingent? Is certain knowledge in ethics possible? If so, how is it acquired?

Addressing this issue is a good place to begin in thinking about ethics, since what answer you reach on this abstract question will shape how you proceed in the normative and concrete arena as you actually decide upon and judge specific acts. So someone who held that ethics and reality were strongly linked could consistently prescribe moral laws, hold these to be universal, and believe they are justified through reference to a natural or moral order. Someone who held that there is no clear or necessary connection between reality and ethics could consistently hold to a more relativist ethics or an ethics based on personal taste, goals or pleasure, or insist that it is necessary for humans to construct ethics for mutual benefit. I’ll being by addressing this latter kind.

The Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume introduced a famous distinction into ethics, insisting that an ‘is’ is not and ‘ought’. That is, there is no logical connection between statements which describe the world – the world ‘is’ this way – and statements which recommend or command a certain kind of action – you ‘ought’ to do this. For example, there is no logical connection between someone telling me that there is delicious coffee in Newtown, and their telling me that I ought to go purchase some. Hume felt that something was going unsaid here, and there was no clean correlation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements. He states:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.  – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), III.I.i

Hume had Christian and Greek ethics in his sights. Since Aristotle, much of ethics has been was influenced by attempting to derive what the natural function of a thing is, and then to ascribe excellence (or virtue) to that thing if it executed its function well. So to judge whether a human being was virtuous, one needed to engage in the prior task of description in order to ascertain what the natural purpose of a human being was, and then to judge whether this particular human being was executing his natural function. Just as a good hammer is one which is able to do some good hammering, a good human is the one which is able to do some good human-ing. This argument may sound odd or obvious, but it is still frequently appealed to in normative ethical discussions. ‘A study of human biology shows you that human beings were built for heterosexuality, therefore homosexuality is unnatural and wrong’, or ‘Proper activity for young ladies is to get married, contribute to the community and respect their elders, therefore those that don’t are witches and witchcraft is wrong’ (that last one might be drawing a bit of a long bow, but you get the picture).

Christian ethics was influenced by this Aristotelian model in the early church, and it added to it the existence of a God and the existence of a moral order. Hence, most contemporary Christian ethics begins with a description of God, an insistence that a moral order has been placed in creation by the Creator, and normative statements derived from and justified by this.

Hume’s critique stands as a challenge to this whole approach to ethics which seeks to derive any moral truth from a description of the natural or supra-natural world. He maintained that there is a world of difference between saying that something is real about the world, and this necessarily leading us to do something as a result. In the next post, I’ll outline an alternative account of reality and ethics.

Thoreau on Life

Today is the first day of semester, and I’m reminded of a quote I love from Henry David Thoreau. The quote comes from Walden, a book he wrote over a two year period while living a life of simplicity, reflection, stillness, natural education and isolation in a little cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, Massachusetts (picture above). On explaining why he did this, he writes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear to me; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.  — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

I love that Thoreau has a clear vision of what his life is about; I love his determination to resist that which he thinks is damaging to life; I love his determination to resist the trivial and unimportant, and his courageous aim to come face to face with reality in it’s most basic and pure form and discover whether it be mean or sublime; I love his chest-beating about the sheer importance of all this; and I love his resoluteness to never live that which is not life, since life is so dear to him.

The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, alluding to the caricature of philosophers being on a quest for the meaning of life. Most philosophers get slightly embarrassed when a friend at a party asks them whether they have discovered the meaning of life yet, and proceed to explain what philosophers actually do with their time. But I think Thoreau would have embraced this audacious aspiration, and perhaps remarked that in the woods near Walden Pond he had discovered the meaning of life for himself.

I find his quote to be inspiring when thinking about goal setting, new beginnings and the possibilities of a fresh semester. So at the risk of making philosophers around the world groan – read this quote and ask yourself: What do I live for?

Atheism vs. Theism: The Wrong Paradigm?

 

Controversy over Christianity is almost never conducted in the terms in which it is usually discussed by professional apologists, namely, “theism versus atheism”. The options are far wider that these anachronistic choices – choices that smack of Enlightenment-era European debates. To be sure, one might encounter nowadays a discussion between a theist and an atheist, but the theist could well be a Muslim, a Sikh, or a Hindu and the atheist a Thervadin Buddhist, philosophical Confucianist, or postmodern pragmatist. More commonly, however, the question is not, “Do you believe in God?” but “Which God or gods do you believe in?” – John Stackhouse Jr., Humble Apologetics (2002), p. 12

“Are you an atheist or a theist?” In the above excerpt, John Stackhouse suggests that this question is not as important as is usually thought. Debates about religion, faith, philosophy and worldview often come back to this question, assuming that it is the fundamental question that needs to be answered, and that it therefore ought to have a kind of priority over other questions. The thought goes: if we can just sort out whether you are an atheist or a theist and why, then we will be in a better position to move forward, or will know the right kinds of questions to be asking one another. Stackhouse calls this whole paradigm into question, suggesting that this kind of foundationalist thinking is a relic from Enlightenment-era thinking, which we need not see as the best way to discuss worldview and faith.

Stackhouse is saying that although atheism is a more abstract category than Marxism, and theism is a more abstract concept than Christianity, it need not be given a priority as the first issue that needs to be settled, and it need not take up residence as the focus of the debate between worldviews. This thought resonates with me because I see atheism and theism as being commitments which are entailed in other ideologies, where the ideologies themselves are more commonly the objects of decision. To overstate things – it is more common, and perhaps more natural, for people to choose an ideology first, and then to discover that atheistic or theistic commitments are bound up in what they have chosen, and to choose this ideology for reasons not necessarily linked with the atheism vs. theism debate. Most people choose Christianity (or whatever) not because they have first been convinced of theism, and most people choose Marxism (or whatever) not because they have first been convinced of atheism.

To dig a little deeper, perhaps this is because atheism and theism are too abstract to set real agendas, but too large to be ignored. If this is so, it explains why almost all worldviews have something to say about atheism or theism, and goes someway to explaining the plurality within each camp. To focus just on atheism: In a world without God, Marxists are able argue for the unique importance of the political and the urgent need for economic and social change; Feminists are able to argue for the contingency of the status quo and in some cases the fluidity of gender; Continental philosophers are able to argue for the relativity of value; Analytic philosophers are helped in arguing for empiricism as the most reliable way of knowing; and popular individualist consumerism in able to hold comfortably to beliefs in happiness as the supreme good, and the self as being of supreme importance.

This is all very cursory, but the point I’m gesturing towards is that atheism or theism can be employed for various worldviews and philosophies to bolster their own ideology. The five approaches I have just mentioned are starkly different – Marxists are not renowned for getting along with individualist-consumerists and Analytic philosophers are not renowned for getting along with Continental philosophers. It is not that these approaches have reached a consensus that God does not exist, but that atheism is a helpful, but by no means dominant, facet of their worldviews which are ultimately driven by other agendas.

Given this, Christian apologetics and conversation with others ought not to proceed by trying to settle the atheism/theism debate as though the whole ball game was riding on it. Much better to attempt to get inside of another worldview, and compare it’s beliefs, hopes and agenda with the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. This makes the potential apologetic conversation much more complex, as the discussion has moved from comparing two abstract ideas, to comparing one worldview (Christianity) with a seemingly infinite plurality of others. It makes the conversation more exciting, since if atheism vs. theism is not the foundational issue, then it means you may begin to get towards the heart of things – the reasons people have chosen one ideology over another, and why they have done this. For a funny take on all this – check out how quickly the comedian Rick Gervais was able to dismiss Christianity once the conversation was framed in terms of atheism or theism, rather than the agenda, beliefs and hopes of Christianity compared with another ideology.

How Public Ought Apologetics Be?

Justification is addressed to those who disagree with us, and therefore it must always proceed from some consensus, from premises we and others publicly recognize as true.” – John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ (1985)

When procrastinating philosophy students compile their lists of the best philosophers of the Twentieth-Century John Rawls is often one of the first names mentioned. He re-established political philosophy as an important area in Anglo-phone philosophy separate to simply applied ethics, and attempted to give western democratic liberalism its most solid foundations. His works have been quoted in significant Supreme Court decisions in the United States, and in 1999 he was given a medal by President Clinton for reviving America’s faith in democracy – not many philosophers can claim that one! I ramble like this because Rawls is often painted as a philosophical bad-guy: the clean face of political liberalism which distracts you from the exclusionary, exploitative and elitist tendencies of western democracy that movements like Marxism and Feminism so convincingly exposed. Over the last year I have been reading Rawls, and have been surprised to find an extremely rigorous and historically aware thinker, just as interested in ridding liberalism of its flaws as providing a defence of it.

Of great importance to Rawls is the way which people communicate with one another publicly. Since people of all different religions, philosophical beliefs, ethnic backgrounds and worldviews will be members of a society, Rawls insisted that they need to settle on some sort of neutral way to communicate. Debate about and justification of institutions which affect all citizens – such as law and government systems – cannot be done through reference to disputable religious, philosophical or moral premises since those who are affected by these won’t necessarily share these views. Rawls did not think that you could keep all disputable claims out of public discourse, but wanted to rope off a section – the political – where reasonable people addressed each other merely as citizens, putting to one side other parts of their respective belief systems. It is Rawls’s ultimate hope that through this an authentic, stable and enduring community will emerge.

The above quote is an example of this idea in Rawls. It brings to mind a thought about Christianity in the public sphere, specifically about apologetics, and the way in which Christian’s debate, disagree, and attempt to persuade others who don’t share their faith. Rawls held that on matters of political importance, citizens should aspire to speak to one another in a neutral ‘political’ language, which was able to be intellectually followed and understood by others. In one sense, this was motivated by pragmatic concerns. Pragmatic, as this neutral language would be better suited to elicit agreement from others rather than a language loaded with an ideology and worldview.

My question is: should Christians, for merely pragmatic reasons, aim to debate, disagree and communicate with others in the public arena in a publicly accessible language – employing premises and concepts which are comprehensible by those outside of the faith. In my experience, Christians are not quite sure about this. They are caught on the horns of the dilemma of holding that the beliefs of the Christian faith are true, and at the same time recognising that often when you begin a conversation with people by stating ‘God did…’, ‘In the bible it says…’, ‘The resurrection of Jesus means that…’ you will not get very far.

Lately, I have seen two different approaches by Christians, both in opinion pieces written for the Sydney Morning Herald in the last year. The first was a defence of the Christian position on abortion, and a prescription that Australian society amends its laws so to be in greater harmony with this. Controversial premises where drawn upon, religious concepts were deployed, and Christian morality was prescribed in Christian vocabulary. The second was an explanation of the Christian view of marriage. The author deployed no explicitly Christian vocabulary, instead discussing his thoughts about the universal human need for love and security, and the common desire to build something together with another person, and how this expressed itself in his relationship with his wife. This second author had the aim of convincing people about the value of marriage, a belief he held as a Christian, but then communicated this is a neutral way. Both were written by Christian ministers from Sydney.

Do you think that either of these approaches is better? Do you agree with this point I’ve skimmed and appropriated from Rawls: that Christians should seek to communicate their faith and beliefs to others in a way which proceeds from commonly held premises and intelligible concepts? Or do you think the project of trying to escape your worldview, and write neutrally is futile, or perhaps even deceptive?

Is Disagreement in Ethics a Virtue?

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981), p. 6

This quote points to two large question which loom over any ethical discussion, and which moral philosophers often try to ignore. Why is there disagreement in the first place? and What would it even take for one of us to win? I suspect most moral philosophers take it for granted as an unavoidable fact about human culture that there will be different conceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, and also that reaching some sort of consensus on these issue is really beyond the grasp of humanity. The best moral philosophy can do is try to control the tide, and be a means of recommending certain ethical theories over others; or give a rational and articulate voice to people’s present desires. However, if you let these two questions sink in a little bit, they become disturbing and uncomfortable.

MacIntyre suggests that the reason for the confusion, and the reason for the interminable nature of the debate is due to the Enlightenment. During this movement, Christian and Greek ways of talking about ethics were rejected, but the vocabulary was kept – justice, virtue, good and evil. Removed from their context, these words quickly became fluid and muddy, to the point where no-one was really sure of anything in ethics anymore except that there was disagreement, and the prospect of reaching a universal consensus was laughable.

Christianity presents an alternative to contemporary moral debate. It holds that many important meta-ethical and normative concerns are able to be resolved, and that this result would be of great importance to human life. It also suggests that the present confusion about moral issues is not a natural thing, and reaching clarity and consensus on a number of moral issues is a possibility for humanity.

Confusing disagreement with the virtues of open debate, many believe that disagreement qua disagreement is a valuable thing. Perhaps it is time to ask – where has moral disagreement got us as a culture? Why do we have the knee-jerk reaction to value disagreement, and be skeptical of consensus?