The Predicament of Modernity
The Galilean Division
The consequences of the Scientific Revolution are central to understanding modern, global culture. We are all, in a fundamental sense, its products. In what follows I will highlight some broad themes that have had particularly important consequences for life and philosophy in the modern world. These are at the basis of the ideas I have been pursuing since joining philosophy forums about 15 years ago.
First among these is the Galilean division. This marks a major turning point in the history of ideas. In seeking to render nature mathematically intelligible, Galileo distinguished between primary and secondary qualities: the formerextension, shape, motion, and numberbelong to objects themselves and are therefore measurable; the lattercolour, taste, sound, and all that pertains to sense or valuewere deemed to exist only in the perceiving mind. This move, later assumed by the British Empiricists, established the framework of modern science but also quietly redefined reality as whatever could be expressed in quantitative terms. The world thus became a domain of pure objectivity, stripped of meaning, while meaning itself was relegated to the interior realm of subjective experience.
René Descartes
Descartes systematised what Galileo had begun. Taking the measurable world as the paradigm of objective knowledge, he posited a strict ontological division between res extensathe extended, mechanical substance of natureand res cogitansthe unextended, thinking substance of the mind. This dualism safeguarded human subjectivity from the reductionism of mechanism, yet it did so at the cost of severing mind from world. Thought was now a private interior realm looking out upon an inert, external nature. The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subjectliberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.
The Cartesian worldview soon became the framework of modern science. Its success lay in treating the natural world as a closed system of mechanical causes, perfectly describable in mathematical terms and open to experimental verification. By excluding subjective and qualitative dimensions from its domain, science achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological mastery. Yet this very exclusion became an implicit metaphysic: reality was equated with what could be measured, while everything elsevalue, purpose, consciousnesswas deemed epiphenomenal, a by-product of the essentially purposeless motions of matter. Thus the Galilean and Cartesian divisions were no longer simply methodological but ontological, shaping the modern sense of the meaning of being. We're all inheritors of those ways of thinking, whether aware of it or not.
Refs: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012); Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987).
The Meaning Crisis
Once the cosmos was conceived as a neutral mechanism and meaning confined to the private sphere, the moral and social order could no longer appeal to any transcendent or cosmic principlethe subject of Nietzsches death of God. The rise of liberal individualism followed naturally: each person became the arbiter of value within an indifferent universe. This newfound autonomy freed individuals from dogmatic authority but also cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. The modern self is thus torn between scientific objectivity and moral subjectivitybetween a world that seems devoid of meaning and a consciousness that cannot live without it. The resulting tension defines much of modern culture, from existentialisms despair to our present meaning crisis.
The task now, as John Vervaeke spells it out in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is to rediscover a living integration of science, meaning, and wisdomto awaken from or see through the divisions that underlie the meaning crisis. Overview: [hide="Reveal"]"This foundational series unravels the meaning crisis: the loss of spiritual vitality, and the sense of disconnection we experience with other people, ourselves, and the world at large. This series provides a historical genealogy beginning 40,000 years ago that explores the rise and fall of meaning in the West, and the philosophy, religion and science that nurtured it. John examines how human beings evolved to be meaning-making creatures, and why this is so essential to our culture and cognition. He also explores how the decline of meaningful worldviews has paved the way for various modern ailments, such as our political, environmental and mental health crises, and the rising suicide rates in North America and around the world. "[/hide]
The consequences of the Scientific Revolution are central to understanding modern, global culture. We are all, in a fundamental sense, its products. In what follows I will highlight some broad themes that have had particularly important consequences for life and philosophy in the modern world. These are at the basis of the ideas I have been pursuing since joining philosophy forums about 15 years ago.
First among these is the Galilean division. This marks a major turning point in the history of ideas. In seeking to render nature mathematically intelligible, Galileo distinguished between primary and secondary qualities: the formerextension, shape, motion, and numberbelong to objects themselves and are therefore measurable; the lattercolour, taste, sound, and all that pertains to sense or valuewere deemed to exist only in the perceiving mind. This move, later assumed by the British Empiricists, established the framework of modern science but also quietly redefined reality as whatever could be expressed in quantitative terms. The world thus became a domain of pure objectivity, stripped of meaning, while meaning itself was relegated to the interior realm of subjective experience.
René Descartes
Descartes systematised what Galileo had begun. Taking the measurable world as the paradigm of objective knowledge, he posited a strict ontological division between res extensathe extended, mechanical substance of natureand res cogitansthe unextended, thinking substance of the mind. This dualism safeguarded human subjectivity from the reductionism of mechanism, yet it did so at the cost of severing mind from world. Thought was now a private interior realm looking out upon an inert, external nature. The result was a self-conscious spectator of a disenchanted universe: the modern subjectliberated from dogma yet exiled from a cosmos stripped of inherent meaning.
The Cartesian worldview soon became the framework of modern science. Its success lay in treating the natural world as a closed system of mechanical causes, perfectly describable in mathematical terms and open to experimental verification. By excluding subjective and qualitative dimensions from its domain, science achieved unprecedented predictive power and technological mastery. Yet this very exclusion became an implicit metaphysic: reality was equated with what could be measured, while everything elsevalue, purpose, consciousnesswas deemed epiphenomenal, a by-product of the essentially purposeless motions of matter. Thus the Galilean and Cartesian divisions were no longer simply methodological but ontological, shaping the modern sense of the meaning of being. We're all inheritors of those ways of thinking, whether aware of it or not.
Refs: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences; Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012); Michel Henry, Barbarism (1987).
The Meaning Crisis
Once the cosmos was conceived as a neutral mechanism and meaning confined to the private sphere, the moral and social order could no longer appeal to any transcendent or cosmic principlethe subject of Nietzsches death of God. The rise of liberal individualism followed naturally: each person became the arbiter of value within an indifferent universe. This newfound autonomy freed individuals from dogmatic authority but also cut them adrift from any shared sense of purpose. The modern self is thus torn between scientific objectivity and moral subjectivitybetween a world that seems devoid of meaning and a consciousness that cannot live without it. The resulting tension defines much of modern culture, from existentialisms despair to our present meaning crisis.
The task now, as John Vervaeke spells it out in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is to rediscover a living integration of science, meaning, and wisdomto awaken from or see through the divisions that underlie the meaning crisis. Overview: [hide="Reveal"]"This foundational series unravels the meaning crisis: the loss of spiritual vitality, and the sense of disconnection we experience with other people, ourselves, and the world at large. This series provides a historical genealogy beginning 40,000 years ago that explores the rise and fall of meaning in the West, and the philosophy, religion and science that nurtured it. John examines how human beings evolved to be meaning-making creatures, and why this is so essential to our culture and cognition. He also explores how the decline of meaningful worldviews has paved the way for various modern ailments, such as our political, environmental and mental health crises, and the rising suicide rates in North America and around the world. "[/hide]
Comments (262)
I recognize that a lot of modern things suck. But a lot of the received ideas and practices in the past also sucked.
Quoting Wayfarer
Totally adrift? That freedom is what you are enjoying now if you are relatively free. There are many kinds of shared purpose in this modern world.
Indeed, algebraic geometry was one of his major contributions. You know the anecdote, right? He was reclining on his lounge in a tiled room, with a buzzing fly annoying him. But then he realised that the path of the fly could be represented numerically against the grid provided by the tiled wall. Voila! It becomes fundamental to all kinds of science.
Quoting Paine
It's not 'modernity sucks, the ancient world was terrific!' The thread is about something quite specific.
I was contesting:
Quoting Wayfarer
That being a different standard of measure from a golden age idea.
The democratic rub.
It is also one of the themes in Max Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason'. It doesn't age that well, written as it was in the aftermath of WWII, but his basic point stands. Horkheimer traces how the meaning of reason has shifted from a normative, world-guiding principle to an instrumental faculty directed to specific ends. In the classical and pre-modern worldview, reason was understood as objectiveit reflected an intelligible order inherent in reality itself. To act rationally was to conform to this cosmic or moral order, in which reason provided not only the means for action but also the standards by which ends were judged. With the rise of modern science, empiricism, and the Enlightenments emphasis on human autonomy, this conception of reason eroded. Rationality came to be understood as subjective and instrumental, concerned not with what is true or good but with how to achieve whatever ends are already desired. Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the eclipse of reasonthe point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.
This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment.
:meh:
You often seem to come back to this. And a very popular idea right now. Not to say this is wrong but I have some inchoate reactions. By the way, Australian academic John Carroll was arguing similarly in his engaging polemic, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture back in 1993.
I am unconvinced that there is a meaning crisis. Most eras when viewed from a certain perspective are in crisis. Many of the supposed symptoms of TMC, I believe, reflect a complex transition to greater freedom: we are no longer constrained by monocultural expectations around race, work, gender, or faith, and we now face a multiplicity of options, which for many translates into uncertainty.
Personally, I would rather be alive now than in almost any other period in history. Can we point to a time before modernity when the worldview was coherent and therefore life was better for most human beings? Clearly, in many places and subcultures there is a push to turn back the clock and re-enchant the world, attempting to restore older certainties. This, I would argue, is where the instincts of MAGA and thinkers like Vervaeke converge. Different in approach and scale of ambition, both seem driven by a fear of contemporary freedoms and multiple meanings.
Another way of describing uncertainty is to call it choice.
Now, if were talking about environmental destruction and many of the ills of modernity, how much of this can be more accurately attributed to the form of capitalism and corporate control under which we live? And can it be demonstrated that, if God hadnt died, capitalism would have been kind and beneficial to all?
I guess Im wondering about a couple of things. First, theres a problem of attribution: that whatever is wrong with the modern era is blamed on a lack of shared meaning or shared metaphysical agreement (for many this just means god). Second, theres the assumption that before we took the wrong fork in the road, everything was fine and that if only we hadnt taken it, we would never have ended up in this mess.
Thoughts?
You need to understand that the search for meaning is not a script or a dogma. It is not about returning to some imagined pre-modern utopia at all. Every time this is discussed, that is what you assume that I'm talking about, hence your mistaken depiction of me as a 'proselytizing dogmatist'.
Quoting Tom Storm
The world is converging on a series of overlapping crises, political, economic, existential and environmental. If you can't see that, then I won't try and persuade you otherwise.
When has the world not appeared to be in some kind of crisis? That's the point, surely. You are talking about a Meaning Crisis and I've asked a few questions about this, that's all.
Maybe because meaningful is only really meaningful if it transcends mere individual preferences, because it plays a part in a larger whole... that would be the reason for it.
it seems to me, at least, that for very long periods of time, in pre-history at least, that almost nothing happened that is remotely comparable to the crises facing current culture. Certainly there have been previous crises, the coillapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age culture was one, the Black Death was one. But I don't think you can say that all cultures have always been in crises.
The specific crisis of meaning I'm referring to, though, is philosophical and cultural. It is about the way in which our collective culture has engendered that sense of meaningless, alienation and anomie, which I think is unarguably a characteristic of globalised Western culture, and which manifests in specific ways in terms of drug dependency, depression and related symptoms.
Isnt this simply a factor of population growth and the successes and failures of technology and capitalism? We were always flawed; its just that our present technology and population size makes those flaws more dangerous.
Quoting Wayfarer
Is there a significant non-Western culture that doesnt have any of the problems we face, so we can see how it is done?
Quoting Wayfarer
Or do we need to use the freedoms of Western culture to find better ways of living, grounded in more pragmatic approaches to survival?
Id be interested in hearing what some specific solutions might be and how they could help. Clearly, belief in God isnt an obvious solution, given that so much of capitalism and colonisation stemmed from Christian culture.
I don't want to stand against such analyses trying to map out the problems of the modern world. And I am troubled by the speed of many current changes.
Despite all that, I have to weigh all that against the release from the ties of my immediate ancestors. And my son who acts upon the same idea.
I think it is conceivable that modern culture could have developed along radically different lines, although of course, that is one of those speculative issues that can never be proven. But (maybe counter-intuitively) I attribute much of the modern meaning crisis to the structure of pre-modern Christianity. Recall that prior to the Enlightenment, Europe was engulfed in seemingly never-ending religious wars. That individuals were being swept up in religious persecutions and prosecuted for heresy. The way institutional Christianity was structured resulted in many dichotomies and conflicts,with 'right thought' or religious orthodoxy rigorously defined and enforced to the point of the death penalty.
That is certainly one of the major causes of the meaning crisis that I see. Those elements of Greek philosophy that had been incorporated into theology, then became associated with the very religiious authoirities which Enlightenment science sought to differentiate itself from. So I'm by no means recommending any kind of return to an imagined religious source of morality. But at the same time, those elements of the 'perennial philosophy' that Greek wisdom articulated really do capture profound existential truths about the human condition.
When I was doing religious studies, I discovered the Gnostic Gospels and the nag hammadi writings. They were much more concerned with attaining individual insight somewhat along more 'Eastern' lines, I felt. As it happened, the 'pistic' sects of christianity triumphed over the Gnostic sects, and, as they say, 'history is written by the victors'. But had that gone a different way then it could have been a radically different world to the one we now live in. But, as I say, un-proveable.
Quoting Tom Storm
Of course. John Vervaeke has set up a foundation (The Vervaeke Foundation) to explore options, and it's on the internet and streamed via youtube and other technologies. We have to call on everything we have, technology and science included. But the key point is, to overcome or transcend that sense of the Universe being fundamentally meaningless and life as a kind of fluke set of circumstances - even knowing what we know about the Cosmos, which is vastly more, and vastly different, to what our forbears could have known.
Can you explain how the search for and finding of meaning could be universally shared in a world of human diversity? I'm not denying that groups of people can share meanings and purposes within various contexts. But additional to that you have what each individual's life means to each individual, that is the overall sense of direction in their personal live's that they might favour.
I'm not claiming that such favouring is independent of culture, but modern culture offers a huge smorgasbord?a situation quite different from what obtains in traditional cultures?at least in relation to what people gave lip service, if not real dedication, to.
Quoting 180 Proof
Can you elaborate?
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Okay, that's an assertion?can you provide an argument for it? I mean, we all, as members of a society, and to one degree of consciousness or another, play a part in a larger whole?we have no choice but to do that.
Im not convinced that the idea that the world is meaningless is really the problem we face. One can hardly accuse MAGA of this, or China. Surely it is the wrong kind of meaning that ends up causing harm. The hardwired notion that God gave us dominion over the Earth and its animals seems to have something to do with our environmental issues.
Look, weve had about 150 years of genuine secularism in the West (and the journey began before that), but to imagine that thousands of years of theism and religious values are not also responsible for our presuppositions and our current predicament seems distorted.
Each of us has to find meaning in our own way. I think that was actually part of what phenomenology was setting out to do. And existentialist philosophy, generally. The point of the phenomenological epoch?, is not that different to Heidegger's 'clearing' - it is allowing the truth of our own existence to open up, to become meaningful to us. But, where in current culture is that kind of discriminative self-awareness taught or communicated?
Again, Vervaeke's lecture series is a fertile ground for this - he's not trying to 'impose an agenda', but elucidating some fundamental existential facts from all kinds of sources, including anthropology, philosohy, psychology and cognitive science. But he presents it in terms of the salience landscape, of relevance realisation, which he sees as being more compatible with today's world and with science.
(His chapters on the emergence of the Galilean division and the advent of the modern crisis of meaning Episodes 20-22 are amongst the best in that series. )
:up: As I see it the suite of real and dire problems we face as a species has little to do with a crisis of meaning, but rather grows out of a lack of education, critical thinking and respect for science, not to mention consumerism and greed and the paranoia-fueled competition for dominance.
I agree with you that many, or perhaps even most, people do not critically examine their lives. But much of that lack of critical self-awareness comes down to introjected cultural values that emphasize acquiring stuff over inquiring about stuff.
But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members. And maybe that works to some extend for those that have their desires met for the most part, probably not so much for those that are less fortunate.
What counts as evidence? In the 20th century you had a couple of big ideologies fighting it out and trying to fill the void left by religion. People do seem to crave being a part of a larger story, if it isn't religion, than maybe nationalism, or maybe just supporting a sports club or saving the world from climate disaster etc etc...
I'm not the most religious person, but even I do also intuitively feel like just fulfilling my individual desires doesn't quite do it.
So the crisis isnt a call to religion, but a call to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions weve inherited. Science remains indispensable, but it cannot by itself tell us what anything means. One can retain plenty of respect for science while recognising that fact, which is built into the very foundations of the method.
But then, as always, you will interpret whatever I say through your antireligious mindset, which sees any kind of appeal to transcendent values through that prism. And there's really nothing I can do about that.
Maybe you can't. Religion and myth is build on a certain non-literal and wholistic understanding of the world, where the values and meaning naturally flows from.
Literal use of language to describe the world and to accumulate knowledge eventually ends up dissolving that mythical super structure.
If the desires are conditioned into the people rather than being critically realized by them, then of course that's a problem. We come to be blind followers instead of critically active members in our communities.
Today we might say we are brainwashed by culture in the form of advertising and popular media, whereas in the past, in theocratic and aristocratic societies, and today in autocratic societies, critical thinking is not only implicitly discouraged, but explicitly banned under penalty of punishment.
Quoting Wayfarer
Okay then, we simply disagree, because I see those, among other factors, as some of the root causes of humanity's woes.
I don't believe it has anything to do with metaphysics. People who are materialists can enjoy a sense of the wonder of life and existence itself, and all the more so the more they are educated through science to appreciate their mind-blowing beauty and complexity.
Of course metaphysical assumptions should be questioned, if people are even interested in metaphysical questioning, as opposed to endeavoring to understand as much as possible the nature of the world in whatever spheres garner their interest.
For me the only possibility of a universally shared worldview that is not imposed would be an education and curiosity-based valuing and even reverence for the incredible diversity and beauty of people and other animals and the physical world itself.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm with you on that!
This is the nub of it.
Im not convinced that consumerism or the instrumentalisation of knowledge wouldnt still be dominant even if the West had remained committed to Christianity.
Quoting Wayfarer
Im still not sure that the problem is correctly defined, but perhaps a proposed solution would help clarify my understanding. What would be an example of a solution in this context?
Yes. I was thinking the same thing. My family and the people I care about are pretty much enough meaning for me.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes. With an emphasis on for most human beings. I wonder how much of this is the inevitable result of more or less universal literacy even before supercharging by todays communication technologies.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think this is right, but Im not certain that corporate capitalism itself isnt a specific, perhaps inevitable, result of the modernity the OP talks about.
Quoting Tom Storm
I must admit, I do worry that the crises we are dealing with today are somehow more existential than they have been in the past. I joke that my solution to the problems is to die soon. I do worry about my children though.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think this is exactly right. In the past, we always had someplace else we could go when we fucked up the place we live and made it unlivable.
Quoting Tom Storm
Im not usually a hell in a handbasket type, but I guess Im not sure we have the wherewithal to do this. In a sense I guess we need the kind of gumption that comes with commitment to a coherent cultural vision which may no longer be available to us. I think were perfectly capable of driving this bus off the cliff.
A bunch of good posts.
Yes I agree, that's why I've always thought this whole free speech debate we had recently was a bit of a red herring.
The idea that we are these autonomous free agents self-determining what we will be and want to do based on this market of free ideas seems fundamentally misguided. By the time we are mature enough to really begin to discern we have already been enculturated in some or other mores and have inherited certain hierarchies of values we use to discern... doing away with religion only creates a void for advertisers to jump in. Edward Bernays certainly figured that one out.
Fair points and and this is probably right.
Perhaps we will become victims of the too much meaning crisis...
Even the best laid plans...
I am sorry to hear you put it that way.
I figured you were prompting a conversation that is usually covered up by other themes.
Nevertheless, the book of nature is written in mathematics (Galileo) was a radically new view of the Universe, although that is more a matter of history than philosophy as such.
Im eager to hear more ideas though.
And also our economic system thrives on the creation of artificial wants - getting people to want things, driving up demand, and then being the lucky guy who just happens to be have the supply. OK, Im being a bit cynical there, but its something that definitely happens.
Higher cultures of other times and places put much more value on virtue, truth, and beauty. Nowadays economic activity tends to focus more on economies of scale against the backdrop of a utilitarian ethos.
So yes, overall in agreement with what youre saying.
Also, i didnt know about that resistance, but thats very interesting. Im not sure -rather, im inclined to say no- wether there is or not a higher truth, but from what i know, the search for a universal ruler of sorts was indees mostly prominent in old philosophies, mostly under the name of substance (please, correct me if im wrong) and every so often it ended up involving some sort of god. Now, im an atheist but i still think its noteworthy how prevalent the god figure is in humans.
Tell me more about your toughts on meaning, do you perhaps think that meaning is not truly subjective? Why do you feel that it is or isnt?
Id be disappointed if you left. As you know, I greatly value your contributions. My pushback wasnt meant to be hostile, and I apologise if thats how it came across.
One interesting thing about this site is that we rarely see anyone change their mind about fundamental questions of meaning. It happens, but its rare. I wonder if that tells us something about the nature of human sense-making?
While I havent read them, Ive watched quite a bit of Vervaeke and McGilchrist. I still hold some skepticism about the nature of the problem they describe, though their proposed solutions may well be useful. We could probably save the world and restore a shared sense of purpose if everyone became Muslims, Sikhs, or Quakers; the method matters less than achieving widespread adherence.
Quoting Oppida
Hmm. Glad to see good in quotes. Some people feel happy doing bad things to others; why does that feel good? Or is it simply that when people have their needs met (whatever those needs are), theres a satisfying emotional payoff?
I havent taken the time with McGilchrist yet, but Ive invested a bit listening to Vervaeke. He is trying to stay within the bounds of what is scientifically credible, but also address the existential problems which modernity induces. Ive noticed, since I discovered his lectures (in 2022), that hes moved more towards theology, in that he has a lot of talks with scholarly theologians and exponents of philosophical spirituality. But I dont think its a matter of becoming Muslims or quakers or members of a movement. Anything of value in any religion, is only because it points to some reality which is more than just a matter of belief or personal conviction. But I shrink from saying objectively true, at the same time. Thats part of the dilemma.
Interesting, that you so easily move from truth to ruler. That says something, dont you think?
As to whether truth is subjective, my point is that scientific method wishes to bracket out the subjective element, so as to arrive a view which is accurate for everyone - the so-called view from nowhere. But this is associated with the idea that humans are kind of epiphenomenal, the accidental outcome of undirected processes, whose being is really irrelevant to the way things truly are. My attitude, on the contrary, is that truth, as such, always has a subjective pole or aspect, because it must mean something, and for it to mean something, there must be an observer to whom it means something. Hence that there are no truly mind-independent facts, in that specific sense.
Fair enough. What do you think is going on for those who don't see this?
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you think this is a direct belief, or more of a practical outcome of other beliefs, a kind of implicit assumption?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, thats kind of what I was trying to convey. But wouldnt the meaning crisis, strictly speaking, be resolved if everyone became, say, a Muslim? Im not claiming that this particular manifestation of faith is inherently valuable, but the reality is that the issues Vervaeke highlights: meaning, relevance realization, transcendent purpose, insight practices, enchantment, ritual, and awakening of attention, would all be addressed.
Why must you see disagreement as hostility? Also, why would you not expect the same arguments against your position if you keep presenting the same arguments over and over yourself? I don't believe that your narrowly focused conclusions about the actual documented history of ideas are "well-established" at all. If they were everyone would be agreeing with you. Do you have any openness to (radically?) changing your views? It certainly doesn't seem that way.
I don't think the objections are coming to terms with the argument. Again, the argument is, that since the Scientific Revolution, modern culture tends to see the world (or universe) in terms of a domain of objective forces which have no meaning or moral dimension, in which human life is kind of a fortuitous outcome of chance events. Prior to that, the Universe was imbued with symbolic and real meaning, in which the individual, no matter how lowly their station, was a participant. I mean, there's been enormous literature and commentary on this fact. I attempted in the OP to try and distill it the essentials of it. Those books I cited in the OP are among the examples, but there are many more.
Quoting Tom Storm
Pluralism, religious and otherwise, is a fact of modernity, it's part of the dynamic. The traditional religions did address existential dilemmas, but then, they didn't arise in today's interconnected global world with all its diversities and the massive increase of scientific knowledge. The problem is, trying to retrieve or preserve the valuable insights that they arrived at. That's why I think a kind of interfaith approach is an essential part of the solution, something which Vervaeke does in his dialogues. I think religious representatives of good will are able to see beyond sectarianism without devolving into outright relativism.
But overall, the crisis of modernity is a really difficult challenge to deal with. I don't feel as though I've dealt with it at all successfully, although at least I recognise that there is a challenge.
Another of the excellent books I would recommend is by a University of Queensland scholar, Dr. Paul Tyson, 'Defragmenting Modernity'. The cover description:
All very important questions in my view and central to philosophy, or should be.
For the premier poster of original material, and actual philosophical material at that, even if beyond my personal interest, to excuse himself, would adversely affect the forum as a whole.
Theres so much dumb shit on here ..well, everywhere, actually.
Take the light when it comes around, I say.
:up:
And probably more dumb shit from me.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good. I would have to agree with much of this. But it sounds virtually impossible, these things can only happen gradually, not by design, I would think.
Quoting Wayfarer
There's two issues here; describing the problem and suggesting remedies.
I think you describe the problem well enough, but I find it hard to relate to as a concept, probably because I dont perceive a lack of meaning in my own life, and I cant speak for the West as a whole. To me, the West seems to be grappling more with pluralism than with a lack of meaning. No one knows who should be in charge anymore, and culture no longer rests on a set of shared values.
Quoting Wayfarer
I know this is a prevailing narrative. Im not certain that this is how the West actually sees reality. Figures for atheism around the world remain relatively low: Pew says 10% across 42 Western countries. Perhaps 24% self-describe as no religion. I don't think this suggests burgeoning nihilism.
Does Vervaeke's view romanticise pre-modern culture? Wasnt it an era of imposed hierarchies, powerlessness, and widespread pain and brutality? Was it really qualitatively better? Was it not spiritually bereft in other equally detrimental ways?
Did the Scientific Revolution strip the world of meaning? Could it not be said that it freed humans from superstition and arbitrary authority, allowing us to explore reality, exercise agency, and create purpose through reason, creativity, and shared endeavour?
Does it follow that we've become decadent and hollow and lacking in connective spiritual values? Is there something inherently wrong with our time? I couldnt tell you. Maybe thats why I struggle to get on board.
I do think that our old problems are more urgent because the impact of technology is so powerful today. But this isn't a new problem, just a new power.
Quoting Wayfarer
I dont think this passage resonates. Most people are deeply immersed in meaning: love, relationships, work, friends, goals, children, hobbies, future planning, concern for the environment. We are filled with purpose, engagement and transformative experiences.
Can you give me two concrete examples of how dis-integrated knowledge is causing problems.
I was continuing the conversation with Claude 4.5 Sonnet that I PMd you about and that's closely tied to your OP. We wandered into the usefulness of distinguishing the particular/universal from the specific/general distinction (from David Wiggins). Sonnet put its finger on why Id been confused: I was committing a kind of dimensional collapsetrying to line those two distinctions up on a single axiswhereas its much clearer if we define two orthogonal axes. That, in turn, makes it much easier to see Aristotles theoretical and practical sciences as different employments of the same rational capacity within a shared space of reasons.
Still thinking about your OP, I looked up Wikipedias page on Disenchantment, which quotes Ernest Gellner on re-enchantment creeds (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology). Gellner would have none of it. That nudged me (with some help from GPT-5) to Charles Taylors thought that we now live within an immanent frame that can be inhabited in two ways: closed (nothing beyond nature) or open (room for transcendence).
Heres the interesting bit. On Taylors picture, my own neo-Aristotelian view, which is the one Gellner would likely dismiss as an irrational creed, still inhabits the immanent frame in a closed way (naturalist), and yet it isnt therefore disenchanted. Thinking otherwise would be another instance of the dimensional collapse mentioned earlier. Because it accounts for "strong evaluations" (see note below), a virtue-ethical orientation to eudaimonia, and for intrinsically meaningful forms of life, it amounts to a re-enchantment without transcendence.
So, for Taylor, disenchantment vs. re-enchantment doesnt line up with naturalism vs. transcendence. Thats a two-dimensional space. And within it, three live stances stand out:
Naturalist-Disenchanted (e.g., hard reductionism/Cartesiannism),
Naturalist-Re-enchanted (neo-Aristotelian naturalism about substantial forms and teleology),
Transcendent-Re-enchanted (Taylors own theistic take).
The fourth corner, Transcendent-Disenchanted, seems to be occupied by a rare creed!
On edit: "A key feature of human agency, [Taylor] shows, is that it is constituted only within frameworks of strong evaluation whether these are traditional notions of the primacy of honour, Platonic accounts of the virtues of reason and self-mastery, modern understandings of the expressive power of inner selves or the virtues of counting everyones interests equally."
Do you think that full reflection is possible for a person who is inside a paradigm?
Well, Vervaeke argues that there is a burgeoning obsession with people looking to find meaning outside of the paradigm, so the answer must be yes. But that doesnt mean they are right. :wink:
The salient question is what makes an argument convincing to some and not to others? The answer may not be located in paradigms so much as shared beliefs and subcultures.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kant and Hegel took the split between a mechanistic world and a representing subject and united the two on the basis of rational freedom of the Will. Schelling went further by eliminating mechanism from nature. But he retained the metaphysical unity of the willing subject. It seems that Horkheimer and Adorno do the same in grounding meaning in rational thought and rational thought in dialectical materialism. The metaphysical unity of reason doesnt come into question until the irrational, the unconscious and the historical are given equal billing with rationality in the work of Kierkegaard, the hermeneuticists, phenomenologists and Nietzschean poststructuralists. Meaning as affect becomes the ground for meaning as reason. Kierkegaard is where that metaphysical project breaks down. He refuses the reconciliation between reason and the irrational, faith and knowledge, the finite and the infinite.
Quoting Astorre
The same processes that embed individuals within social paradigms shape the nature and direction of reflection. The split between the purely private and inner (reflection) and the socially constructed (paradigm) is artificial.
Do you like Aristotle's metaphysics?, because it does work with that subjectivity trough the "accident" part, which as i understand it accepted a universe that wasnt entirely subjective -concepts were well defined trough "essence"- but that had a central, universal truth which was something about movement or god, i dont remember.
Also, what truth do you mean? do you mean a universal one or some other truth? and how does the fact that said truth, being subjective, has to have a meaning? and what kind of meaning?
Indeed i was talking about the emotional payoff kind of good. For now, lets say that an emotion feeling "good" is an emotion that feels pleasuable. I imagine a lot of people feeling good from hugs, but also a lot of people feeling good from commiting atrocities. Why is that? is it learned?
Fifty hour lecture series. Is there anything he doesn't cover? :grin:
At a glance, the funny thing that comes to mind is that pretty much only religious peoplethose within a particular religious traditionwould be resistant to what Vervaeke proposes, and does that essentially mean that secularism is required to move forward? I suppose that questions like this are covered in the series.
Those are certainly major turning points in the genesis of modernity. I wonder though if today's secularity tends to obscure how much of the modern ethos is theological in origin. So for instance:
Quoting Wayfarer
Historically, such a view of man seems to flow from voluntarist idealizations of freedom and power that first crop up in theology, not secular philosophy. That was originally the whole impetus for attempting to uproot the old metaphysics, and for the resurrection of empiricism itself; absolute divine will can brook no "natures" as a challenge to its freedom in willing.
Modern thought has not so much moved beyond this idea as simply cut God out of the picture and raised man into his place. Sometimes this happens with man as an individual (e.g., some existentialists), but the liberal solution is often instead to democratize this new role for man (e.g., the "language community" makes things what they are by "stipulation," or "we" do, collectively and pragmatically), whereas the *post-modern" response to the grandiosity of making man into God has been to dissolve man into a sort of panpsychic, universal will sea, variously composed on language, social systems, etc., but this "sea" is still ultimately the ground of all being and intelligibility. (I don't even think this is "post" modern because it still seems very much caught up if Reformation dialectics).
Anyhow, those theological concerns, and the aesthetics of freedom as power come to drive the modern view of "science," although a preference for the "abstract" and "non-personal" then developed out of that same "new science," which sort of cuts against the theological and philosophical volantarism. I think this is why modern thought is almost bipolar, and this is most obvious in its anthropology where it can be seen oscillating between the pure freedom of a Kant or Sartre and man as pure mechanism, as in the eliminativists.
The second factor I've sort of puzzled about is how notions of reason become wholly discursive, such that by Hume and Kant's day they can basically just write-off most of past thought (Eastern as well as Western) by asserting this fact about reason definitionally (i.e., dogmatically) and no one calls them out on it. The role for co-natural and contemplative knowledge, and of the cultivation of this knowledge through praxis and doxastic virtue essentially vanishesand this shift too seems to have originally had a theological motivation (e.g., the emptying of the monasteries and convents, often paired with the massacre of their inhabitants, as dangerous alternative sources of authority beside the new princes-made-popes-in-their-own-land).
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and even to [I]participate[/I] in divine Logos. There is an erotic and ecstatic element here.
Taylor provides an excellent framework for these issues and a solid deconstruction of the epistemic and metaphysical assumptions of the "closed-world system" (that reason is wholly discursive and instrumental often being one of its axiomatic assumptions).
It's funny you mention Aristotle here because I've been doing a project that compares modern character education (which is almost always justified using an "Aristotlian" paradigm), particularly in the realm of outdoor adventure education (OAE), with late-antique Christian and Platonist philosophical pedagogy. In doing this, I actually came across an article by Kristján Kristjánsson, who writes a lot on Aristotle and character education, who claims that Aristotle is himself advancing a "disenchanted" view that is "too sterile" to motivate robust character education efforts.
More broadly, I've noticed that the "Aristotle" of the antique Greeks and that of modern "virtue ethics" might we well be two different philosophers. The modern version allows some sort of "telos" for man, in that certain things are "good for him" because of "the sort of thing he is," but seems to have a much greater difficulty making any sort of argument for some desires being "higher" versus "lower," or securing the notion that the rational soul must lead, train, and unify the sensible soul and vegetative soul (logos ruling over and shaping thymos and epithumia). But as far as I can tell this radically destabilizes virtue ethics, since now man is merely loosely ordered (on average) to an irreducible plurality of goods which "diminish when shared."
This seems to me to stem from epistemic and metaphysical assumptions brought to Aristotle in the later context. In particular, the idea of a telos as a sort of "emergent physical property" is often quite unclear and squishy (because "strong emergence" normally is in general).
I don't mean to suggest these issues crop up for all modern versions of Aristotle, or even those committed to "physicalism," but it's just an issue I noticed with the sort of Aristotle that is popular in character education (which of course is tailoring itself to suit the precepts of contemporary liberal education as well, which seems to cause significant tensions with having any positive content for moral education outside a few key areas like racism, sexism, etc.).
[Reply="Tom Storm;1022680"]
Quoting Tom Storm
A big part of what has defined MAGA as against the W. Bush coalition is the outsized role played by the post-religious, post-modern "nu-right" or "alt-right." They tend to recognize something like a "meaning crisis" but are often themselves nihilists, hence the naked embrace of "might makes right" ideologies. Everything is just a sort of natural selection, etc. Hence, accelerationism coming into vogue among them.
There is a pretty close linkage here to the Manosphere. The hyperfixation of seeking validation through sexual conquests, wealth, status, and above all the implicit capacity for violence, and so the obsession with warrior archtypes and societies, seems to me to be a direct result of a lack of any other meaningful thymotic outlets for young men. Which is pretty much what others have been saying.
Anyhow, I don't think this group represents a huge bloc of voters (although it also isn't marginal among younger Republican voters). However, it has played an outsized role in radical organizations, and increasingly in the second term, in policy.
Likewise, the Chinese elite's obsession with making a mark on history through dominance can be seen through a similar lens. Bereft of any ordering logos, and faced with becoming Nietzsche's "Last Men," people see becoming "great men of history," or conquerors as a bid for meaning.
The point of the "meaning crisis," as I've normally seen it presented, isn't that everyone becomes a depressed nihilist (although some do), but that people flounder about looking for meaning and recognition anywhere they can find it, which can lead towards pathological outlets.
[Quote]The hardwired notion that God gave us dominion over the Earth and its animals seems to have something to do with our environmental issues.[/quote]
As opposed to places where Islam and Christianity are more marginal, like China, India, or the Soviet Union?
Genesis has also been used to call for [I] stewardship[/I] over ownership. It seems to me more that the logic of industrialization simply has been successful in bending local cultural/religious norms to it ends, dressing it up in whatever garb is needed to make it more palatable. At the very least, explicitly athiest regimes have had no problem generating ecological disasters of truly titanic scale, such as the Aral Sea.
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Anyhow, I wouldn't say the "crisis of meaning" comes down to "too many choices," or "too much freedom," in the minds of critics at least, but rather something like: "all the myriad choices are bad, and I'd rather have fewer and good choices than an ever increasing menu of the inadequate," and "this is an ersatz freedom that simply amounts to freedom to become a bovine Last Manwhen AI learns to mindlessly consume I'll have no purpose left," or something like that. To reduce it to anxiety over modernity is to ignore the strong positive thrust that often comes alongside it.
Can you give an example of a religion in the pre-scientific era addressing existential dilemmas? Did religions really address the needs of the common folk or was it mostly the needs of the elites? I would like to see you at least attempt to address such serious questions instead of viewing them, on account of their difficulty for your thesis, as hostile.
In the modern era, wherein religious tolerance has greatly increased it would seem that the primary existential need religions have served is the need for community.
Of course, there are still tensions if not outright conflicts between different religious communities.
Most all religions not only address what the point of life is but also why one ought to live life ethically. I say it would be nice to address these same topics without all the religiosity traditionally implied. And to my tastes, the best philosophies do just this in manners devoid of dogma and the bs, such as in presuming to know how existence came about to begin with. And, while it is true that some adults couldnt give a shoot about these issuesthe point of life and how to best navigate an ethical lifemost humans do, a group in which I include both non-voting adolescents and far younger children (who readily ask questions such as, but then how was God created).
Quoting Janus
Though here posed as if mutually exclusive, they in fact are quite amiable to being readily converged: most anything out there can be warped for the sake of authoritarian purposes. A problematic and bad aspect of societal life, most definitely. As just one example, far too often righteous people are perjured and spun into being perceived as the exact opposite for the purposes of maintaining the stability of corrupt status quos, this, most always, for the benefits of some authoritarian elites. But in all of this is implied the very issues: whats the point of it all and what is it that is in fact right (righteous)?
And in todays world, save for traditional religions, what else speaks to these same issues with any sort of authority (not specific to authoritarian authority but also applicable to things such as the authority of reason)?
Decrying these two issues as being either in fact unresolvable or else as being utterly unimportant in either personal or communal endeavors, in many a way, only serves to lead most people into authoritarian religious dogmas wherein they at least are force-fed the belief that the resolution of these two issues is already satisfactorily obtained, this as per the religions' often authoritative dogmas. Which only drives societies into being more authoritarian in their governance due to the preferences of the governed, pivotally in relation to the two existential questions just specified: the purpose/meaning of life and the means of best living life well given the first.
I recommend having a listen. Since discovering Vervaekes lectures in 2022 Ive taken most of the series in, often while working out or driving. Vervaekes grounding discipline is cognitive science, augmented by philosophy, psychology and a fair amount of anthropology. I dont think he romantizes the past. His approach is very much in line with the academic discipline 'history of ideas', which is a sub-set of comparative religion.
The episodes that most directly address the topic of the OP are Death of the Universe, Martin Luther and Descartes, and Descartes vs Hobbes.
Quoting Tom Storm
In which case, they will probably have no interest in this kind of discussion.
You can see Vervaeke kind of wrestling with religious questions - he's upfront about having been born into a fairly dysfunctional fundamentalist family and his rejection of that. But he dialogues with philosophers of religion and theologians - William Desmond, D C Schindler, many others. In his quest to articulate the meaning of 'wisdom' he does grapple with religious ideas, but from many different perspectives and traditions.
Quoting Oppida
I admire Aristotle's Metaphysics, but understanding Aristotle properly is a difficult task. But there are some key ideas from Aristotle that are important to understand, as they are woven into our culture. I think anyone with an interest in philosophy has to have some familiarity with Plato and Aristotle.
As far as 'what truth I mean' - that is the big question! The general drift of the OP, is that modernity is exclusively oriented to objective facts, where objectivity is seen as the primary criterion of truth. What is objective is said to be truly so, regardless of anyone's opinion. But while that is certainly true for many subjects, it is not necessarily true for the philosophical questions of meaning, purpose and value. Modern thought tends to treat such questions as subjective or private matters, up to the individual. But then, this becomes the very divide that the OP is about - a domain of objective facts, on the one side, which exists independently of the individual, and the domain of purposes, meaning and values, which is said to be an individual matter! So there can be no consensus except as regards objective facts, or so it is said.
Perhaps have a look at an earlier thread, The Mind Created World, which tries to address this issue.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Youre seriously going to try and pin MAGA on post-modernism? If by this term youre just referring to a historical era that we all inhabit, then I suppose thats innocuous enough, but it also doesnt say anything about the wide variety of viewpoints that belong to our post
modern condition. If on the other hand youre referring specifically to postmodernist philosophy, Id make two points. First, about 99.99% of MAGA adherents are philosophical traditionalists and hew socially conservative. They not only would not consider themselves postmodernists but are vehemently opposed to anything they see as even tangentially connected with it (marxism, wokism, intersectionality, post-colonialism, gender and queer theory, relativism, critical theory). Second, theorists such as Nick Land, and movements such as accelerationism, have been tagged with the label postmodern simply because some of them studied or mentioned in their work postmodern figures like Deleuze and Foucault. This does not mean that their own work is in any sense postmodern from a philosophical perspective. Ive read Nick Land. His own philosophical orientation is anti-postmodern and rooted in older, more reactionary traditions of thought. He reads postmodern writers like Nietzsche and Deleuze in ways which are directly opposed to a postmodern reading.
And rightly so, I would have thought.
Quoting Astorre
I wouldn't want to try and proscribe what is and isn't possible for others. But suffice to note that historically, at least, many religious cultures were associated with renunciation of society and 'the world'. Those that sought to integrate with society were mediated through codes and rules to maintain the distinction between the sacred and the profane (Eliade). Part of the problem with modern culture is the way it tends to level out all those kinds of differences.
That said, I think it's quite possible to become critically aware of the way we as individuals have absorbed the prevailing attitudes from the culture around us. That was a big part of 60's counter-culture, whether it succeeded or not (see Theodore Roszak).
Quoting Joshs
Rather a sweeping statement. Buddhism originated as one of a number of ?rama?a movements that rejected both society and the authority of the Vedas (another surviving example being Jainism). They were deliberately 'outside' or removed from the prevailing (or any) cultural paradigms, although it is true they went on to form new paradigms of their own. Nevertheless, there is always an element in Buddhism which remains outside paradigms of all kinds (??nyat? as neither a mental nor social construct).
Many thanks, very insightful. I could benefit by reading more of Kierkegaard, difficult though his prose might be.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the central theme of Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, which I read just as i started posting on Forums. Especially the substitution of the physical universe for the Divine.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, true! I'm interested in, but will probably never get around to actually studying, those neo-thomists who grapple with Kant - they're mostly French Jesuits, as I understand it. Also Bernard Lonergan. But Jacques Maritain, for one, while respecting Kant, also declared that the 'intuition of Being' escaped him. On the other hand, there's also Ian Hunter, who says that Kant's philosophy really amounted to an alternative religion - he has a forthcoming book, The Kantian Religion.
Aristotle does have a strong element of contemplative spirituality, though. I think this is what enabled the Muslim and Christian scholars to find in him such a kindred spirit.
[quote=The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11] But if happiness (??????????, eudomonia) consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect (???? nous), or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [?????????, theoritikós)[/quote]
Quoting Janus
That's what they were about, although the term 'existential dilemma' is very much a modern one. But they sought to situate humanity within the cosmic drama, either positively (orthodox Christianity) or negatively (gnosticism). That provided a reason for why we are as we are in terms other than physical causation.
I've always sought the cosmic dimension of philosophy, which is why I lean towards some form of religious spirituality. Apropos of which:
[quote=The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy]...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual 'I'.[/quote]
Note the resonance with the above quote from the Nicomachean Ethics.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
Its my view that for the most part the meaning crisis is a case of too much freedom. For some, that freedom is crippling. It fits with my sense that were in a transition period where no single dominant worldview can readily function unless its imposed by authoritarian figures (MAGA?). But I might be wrong.
Ive just rewatched Vervaekes opening lecture in his Meaning Crisis series. In his outlining of the problem, I dont see anything he describes (increased cynicism, anger, futility, alienation, bullshit) that cant be explained by capitalism and social media. Increasingly people live in bubbles of doubt, paranoia, and reactionary energy, so I can understand why some might struggle to find meaning, and why some academics believe theres a meaning crisis that is more significant than our habitual questioning and despair. Within the current communication and technology frameworks, its easy for ambivalence to intensify into paranoia and extremism. The internet is a great place for doubts to be radicalised. The rest of us manage well enough with family, friends, work, hobbies, and planning for the future.
Im not surprised to hear that Vervaeke comes from a fundamentalist background. Breaking away from that often leads people to try to build a system they can confidently believe in; one that preserves a sense of transcendence without the reductionism of fundamentalism.
Im interested in your thoughts on this meaning crisis. Do you think that, if it exists, its because were in a transition period, still haunted by the old beliefs and struggling to adapt to new ways of understanding? What are projects like Vervaekes trying to accomplish? It feels to me like theyre trying to put the genie back in the bottle. But as someone who isnt looking for his kind of answers, its perhaps easy for me to misread the material.
I think @Astorre is asking about something else, something along the lines of,
"If a person is fully committed to a particular worldview (or paradigm), can they critically examine said worldview/paradigm?"
Namely, a critical examination of a paradigm would require stepping out of that paradigm; but such stepping out would be in conflict with one's committment to said paradigm.
@Wayfarer has the attitude of an old swami, that's what the problem is, as far as a philosophy forum goes. It's not that people resent the idea of some "higher truth" per se. It's that those who claim to know the "higher truth" are a dime a dozen, but they refuse to acknowledge this, what to speak of upping their game.
Then, clearly, you've still got some work to do.
I have to agree.
See my very first post here, 2 years ago.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15012/human-beings-the-self-contradictory-animal/p1
I picture each person today as a boat, some with a makeshift rudder, some with a paddle, but mostly, utterly adrift. In the middle of a vast ocean, at night, with no moon or stars. Occassionally bumping into the other boats and sharing the predicament for a time. But thats it.
Anything else in view seems artifice, and hollow upon inspection.
Philosophy has taken away all illusions of a port, or a compass, or a goal towards which to navigate. Science has only hidden the fact of the boat and the ocean and the darkness (showing us the atom and the galaxy instead, and with mirrors, smoke). Politics hides the very notion of illusion - lies for the sake of your truth, meaning my power. Religion, our original and once only hope, is only understood by a few per generation and practiced by fewer still.
I dont think people want to believe their own eyes. We are mostly, like adolescents, and not in earnest or of good faith. Between East and West, Christ and the pagan, science and our base instincts, we already taught ourselves all we need to know to find meaning - all of the wisdom there will ever be is written somewhere, hidden in so many distant corners. But each new generation mostly rejects what little wisdom it happens upon, because we each want to build it for ourselves anew, as if we are each the only ones to discover this predicament or its resolution. We each think, if I dont build my own wisdom, it cannot be trusted.
If we are in a transition period, and there is something new to be transitioned to, that new place will not forget anything past but will incorporate all of it. That is what I see. Western linear/logical philosophy needs to incorporate eastern circular/paradoxical immediacy, and vice versa. The trend is to reject all of it as not good enough. I personally its combination good enough.
People are too proud of their own suffering. Who can dare to tell you your suffering is insignificant? Who would dare admit that to himself? (But maybe suffering is neither good nor bad - God forbid!)
My conclusion is this: unfortunately, we cannot find meaning by ourselves. There either is no meaning (and the existentialists capped off the enlightenment correctly), or meaning must be given to us as a gift from God. Any other meaning is a game played to avoid meaningless.
We cannot forget death. We each die. Find meaning in death without God. (Rebirth is death and the end of rebirth is life, so that only confused the issue of death). Meaning that dies with me makes any such meaning, meaningless. To me. Im too old to lie to myself anymore.
But I dont want to leave it at that. There really is hope. There really is a source of meaning. It wants you to know. Persevere.
When traditions speak of higher knowledge, the term higher need not imply rank or authority - something that seems to push a lot of buttons! - but rather a difference in mode, scope, or reflexive awareness. In a psychological or developmental register, higher can describe a more integrated or self-aware mode of cognitionwhat cognitive theorists might call higher-order consciousness or skilled cognition. In a philosophical sense, it can mean a level of insight that grasps not just objects of knowledge but the conditions under which knowing itself arises, as in Platos distinction between opinion and understanding. That is metacognitive insight - insight into knowing how we know.
In early Buddhism, the corresponding term to higher is abhi This is found in abhidharma (higher dharmas, the philosophical psychology of the Buddhist canon) and abhijnana (higher knowledge, meditative attainment or insight.) In that context higher designates knowledge that is non-conceptual, direct, and liberating, escaping the self-other dualities that underlie ordinary cognition.
Something similar can be found in phenomenologys turn toward seeking insight into the structure of experience - Husserls epoch?. Husserls wrote admiringly of Buddhist abhdharma .
However it has to be acknowledged that Buddhist (and in general, Indian) philosophy has a soteriological dimension (aimed at liberation or salvation), which is mainly absent in Western philosophy. And this is one of the reasons that any mention of higher knowledge produces such a lot of pushback. Ah, you mean religious And we all know that religious authority is something to be disdained. Why, its dogmatic!
But that reaction is also characteristic of the very division that this thread is about. Its why I said that Western religion is one of the sources of this conflict. The emphasis on right belief or religious orthodoxy, and the exclusivism of the Western religious mind (no other God but me!) has engendered these divisions at a pre-conscious level of awareness, and they condition many of the responses to the very idea of higher truth or higher awareness. (This is one of the reasons that dharma has to be differentiated from religion, but that is for another thread.)
:100: Written in a kindred spirit, so to speak.
If you've crippled a bird's wings are they still free to fly away simply because you've opened the cage door?
Sure, but a crippled bird still knows precisely where freedom lies.
I read this with a heavy heart. But consider: have you ever considered that what you're doing isn't just, or even primarily, an argument, but rather a manifestation of your experience, your lived and learned knowledge, into the world? Perhaps your argument "about the same things" is something more for many? For example, I admit, thanks to you, I've thought about a lot. What if the contribution you make is essentially gratitude to the world for allowing us to reflect on its metaphysical foundations? After all, your arguments also provide a good education and training for ordinary readers like me!
But thank you very much for your words, they are very kind, and I appreciate it. I will continue to post here.
Yes, that's exactly how I put the question. And moreover, what needs to be done to "go beyond the boundaries," to see from the outside? Is it possible?
What I mean to say is that Vervaeke seems to think that religions areto put it plainlywrong. Like Nietzsche, he seems to think that religions are fundamentally nihilistic, in that meaning and purpose can't be found in reality, and that religions binding power lies in shared fictions, collectively believed narratives that create trust, order, and meaning. The fiction is not a flaw; its the mechanism by which religion turns isolated individuals into cohesive communities.
That being the case, how could cohesive communities be bound by a "reality-oriented axis of value"?
What I find is that Galileo's turn toward relativity marked a changed attitude in the discipline of physics, which removed the goal of truth. With his theory of relativity, Galileo demonstrated that physicists could represent the motions of objects from different inertial frames of reference, and each representation would be equally valid. This facilitated physicists immensely, because it removed the need to determine the truth in their representations of motions. So for example, the sun and stars could be represented as orbiting a fixed earth, or the earth could be represented as spinning within a fixed background, and each was an equally valid representation. Therefore the desire for truth is removed, as the physicist is free to model movements in whatever way serves the purpose.
Since then Einsteinian relativity was developed, and this is a relativistic way of representing motions which serves the purpose, with disregard for the truth. The problem though, is that in modern culture the tendency is to think of Einsteinian relativity as the truth. This is a significant problem because relativity is based in the principle that the truth doesn't matter in our representations of motion. So when the belief that relativity is the truth develops, then the attitude which follows is that the truth is that there is no truth. Notice, there is still an implicit "truth" here, as "there is no truth", so the attitude is self-contradictory. This self-contradicting attitude is evident in ontologies like model-dependent realism.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that the issue here is also related to our attitude toward truth. The common notion of truth, and realism are intertwined. If there is such a thing as "the way that things are", independent of human apprehension, then realism is the case, and there is an independent truth regardless of whether human beings apprehend it. However, "the way things are" is conceptual, a description of ideas, and "truth" is a correspondence between this conception and the reality. Therefore independent truth, and realism in general, requires a divinity like God to support it ontologically. Without human beings, something must support the concept of "the way things are".
It is not mere coincidence that the relativistic movement away from truth coincided with the movement away from God. Traditionally, God is Truth. But in moving away from God we also forfeit the other things you mention, which God provides the grounding for, "meaning" and "moral dimension". Because of this there is an inclination to maintain a vestige of realism. People claim natural rights, they claim objective truths, but they reject the ontological principles (God) which support these claims.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the attitude which prioritizes utility as higher than truth. Instead of apprehending us lowly human beings as subject to the truth of the Divine, therefore seeking to determine that truth, we apprehend "the physical universe" as being at our service, there for us to use and abuse as we see fit. Our hypotheses and theories are not aimed at truth, they are created with the intent of facilitating that use and abuse.
Quoting Wayfarer
This I would say is the difference between directing our knowledge toward truth, and directing our knowledge toward using and abusing the physical universe. When physics turned from the desire for truth, to relativistic principles, as described above, the former was replaced by the latter. Now, "truth" has been replaced with "the capacity to predict" as the standard for knowledge.
There is a tendency in all transcendence-based eschatalogically motivated religions to disvalue this world as the source of suffering, the veil of illusion or the vale of tears in favour of an imagined perfect realm.
So it is not really a case of the disenchantment of Nature, but of the disenchantment of the transcendent accompanying a return to nature. This begins with Aristotle...think of Rafael's painting 'The School of Athens'...Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle points to the ground
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[quoted="Tom Storm;1022700"]Im not convinced that consumerism or the instrumentalisation of knowledge wouldnt still be dominant even if the West had remained committed to Christianity.[/quote]
"And Man shall have dominion..."
The key term is the 'the unconditioned'. It is a very elusive concept, if indeed a concept it is. But you find analogies in for example, in Hegel's 'absolute spirit' and in The One of Neoplatonism. Here is an open-access essay on The Unconditioned in Philosophy of Religion although it's rather technical.
My intuitive understanding is that the unconditioned is the goal of spiritual life. One of the Buddha's aphorisms, the Nibbana Sutta, is 'there is that which is unborn, unconditioned, unmade' which represents 'escape' from 'the born, the conditioned, the made' (ref). The goal of the Buddhist path is to realise or live in the light of the Unconditioned (which in Buddhism, is not cast in theistic terms.) It can only be approached through the 'way of negation' - the negating of mental constructions (vikalpa and vijnana) and intent concentration on what is - which is the basis of Buddhist mindfulness meditation.
In my view, the absence of any equivalent to the unconditioned is a conspicuous gap or lack in contemporary philosophy. You will find it in some of the existentialist schools (perhaps Gabriel Marcel?) but in analytic philosophy it is barely considered.
Episodes 8-10 in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are about Buddhist 'awakening', mindfulness and related issues.
Quoting praxis
He doesn't say that at all, from what I've read and heard, which is a quite a lot. In the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he gives space to religious figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Tillich, to name a few - from a critical perspective, to be sure, but certainly not from the perspective of religions being wrong. If you can find anything from him which says that, I'll revise my view.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is the critique of the 'instrumentalisation of reason' - that truth is what works, what achieves the means to an end, and so on.
If he believes that one is right I assume he would be a devout member of that religion.
Vervaeke doesn't see it that way. Maybe give some of his lectures a listen.
Quoting Janus
Seems to me to be a more highbrow version of Alain de Bottons Religion for Atheists thesis; the idea that we need to set aside space for reflection, a sense of the numinous, the cultivation of wisdom, and a connection to the sacred, which Vervaeke describes as something that awakens us to reality, awe, and a reconnection to life. I can see the appeal but I don't personally feel a need for it.
Anyway I think we all desire and/or need different things in order to cultivate wisdom, have a sense of the sacred and feel connected to life...there is no one size fits all...
I think most religion is more about feeling connected to the possibility of an afterlife than about feeling connected to life.
Also I watched about 30 of Vervaeke's lectures a few years ago and found myself waiting for something concrete which didn't arrive, so I gave up. I couldn't discover just what he was proposing.
This rationality becomes blind, a Minotaur, a Frankensteins monster. Look at the leader of the free world we have now, a sad indictment of the progress of the human race. Just when we realise the depth of the omni crisis we are embarking on, the system comes up with a narcissistic manchild to lead the charge.
Im with you all the way on this, Ill illustrate what I mean with an anecdote. Once on my travels in India, I set myself a mission to get to a point where I could see Nanda Devi, across the valley of flowers (the highest and one of the most sacred, mountains in India). Whenever I mentioned what I was doing to local people they would go into a state of reverence, which I found disconcerting at first, as I thought they were somehow revering me, a modest traveller, wearing the same clothes as them and travelling on the same cheap buses as them. After a while I realised that the reverence was for a sense of pilgrimage, or for the mere mention of Nanda Devi. This resulted in a moment of great reverence, magic, wonder and joy, the likes of which I have never experienced in the West. I was explaining what I was doing to a young boy, I thought he probably wouldnt have heard of Nanda Devi, he didnt know what mountain it was at first, so I said its the mountain that often has a cloud hovering above it like a trail of long hair. Then he realised and immediately there was a sense of something sacred and revered. He knew the story about the goddess Nanda Devi with her trailing white hair. The whole group around us were in a state of wonder. I felt like a magician, a conjurer, while at the same time humbled and just as in awe as the rest of them. You could have cut the sense of mystery with a knife, it was so thick.
I realised on many occasions what the rationality of the world I lived in back home had done to us, by comparison.
I've been discussing 'reason' in another context, that of artificial intelligence (of which, by the way, I'm a dedicated user). But the point I've been trying to get at, and this is also what Horkheimer gets at, is the sense that reason 'goes all the way down' (compare Hegel 'the real is rational') . It doesn't mean that everything about existence is intelligible to human rationality - far from it! - but the sense that there are reasons for the way things are. Hence one of my favourite quotes from David Bentley Hart:
I notice that in Western culture the very idea that rationality pervades the natural order is regarded as a sentimental throwback to a less enlightened time (oh, the irony). Again, that it is rational doesn't mean that it's always scientifically intelligible, but that it is meaningful, on a deep level, even if that is often a very difficult faith to maintain.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CampingandHiking/comments/11ns3is/view_of_the_most_elusive_mountain_mount_nanda/
Yes, now do you see how this attitude relates to the statement about Horkheimer posted by Punshhh above?
"This marks the eclipse of reasonthe point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose."
It's an entrapment of the materialistic attitude of modern society. Focus on the means narrows, or limits the end, to that which we're good at. Narrowing the end is a restriction on freedom. That is the impoverishment of purpose.
The very word "crisis" carries a negative connotation. It sounds like the loss of a familiar good. For example, illness is a health crisis, and death is a life crisis.
But what if "crisis" is something bad, but inevitable? For example, our civilization depends on oil, which is finite. When will it run out, will there be a crisis? I hope that by then, we'll be ready and have come up with something. If we take the finiteness of good as a rule, then when creating any system, we should also consider that it's a temporary solutiosolution.
It's funny, but when humanity is offered a new socio-political or social order, no one mentions that it's temporary. Doesn't it seem like we're being fooled every time, and the truth isn't being told?
By the way, I've never heard any advertising like this: this iPhone is the best temporary solution (until the next model comes out)
Quoting Tom Storm
VervaekesMeaning Crisis project stems from a personal crisis he experienced in his 20s. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, but rejected that faith as an adult. He embraced science instead, but found that it only described what is the case rather than how to live, what Aristotle called phronesis and Buddhist traditions call wisdom. He found the answer to his meaning crisis by combining cognitive science, wisdom traditions (Buddhism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism) and meditative practices. This is what he teaches others in his meaning crisis courses.
So is the world in a meaning crisis? I would say only those who find themselves adrift with respect to former belief systems. This does not include those who are happy with their traditional religious beliefs. But what about the majorities in Europe, the U.K., Australia and other places who consider themselves atheists? While Varvaeke is coming late to the game, Europe has had lots of practice, with atheism having become a popular alternative to faith decades ago. I imagine many of those who consider themselves post-theistic existentialists find meaning in what they choose to do. In my own case I became an atheist at age 15 and transitioned immediately from religious faith to finding meaning in creating my own purposes.
I found embodied cognitive science, and later phenomenology, to be very helpful here, since they deal both with questions of how one should live and what is the case. Still, there are many like Vervaeke who grew up relying on a rigid belief system and found themselves in existential crisis when they abandoned that faith and had nothing to replace it with. The craving to replace one totalizing purpose with another is one explanation for the attraction of cults, and Verveakes project does have some cult-like characteristics.
Hell of an interesting article you wrote my friend, indeed. As i understood the general idea of your idealism idea is that [s]ideas[/s] (i'll stop) you are in agreement with an empirical, "self evident truth" -to call it something- that the physical reality does exist, but that the mind has "created" a reality or, rather, interpreted the physical reality to something arbitrary. Why would you say that humans are engineerd this way? Your efforts to try and create a non dualist systems are commendable, by the way.
And going back to the tread's OP objective; im trying to connect some dots here, but, could it be that the idealist origin of the way we interpret reality has something to do with our moral and phylosophical values having meaning? I mean, i can see that your argument could be that, since we have given a certain meaning to a reaity (i.e., given it order trough our brain), every assertion we make about anything has to be true from that interpretation.
In other words, we came, we saw a messy reality, we somehow ordered it trough perception and then, once it was ordered and categorized -arbitrarily- we started making and thinking made up things from a reality that was, again, arbitrarily categorized, which in turn means that
Thus, would i be right to assume that the subjectivity of "truth" comes from the individual's own perception? (which may or may not be influenced by society) tell me if any of this is wrong because i feel it is...
Very much so.
Where are we going now? that science and reason are king?
We are blind.
There were a few comments that I wanted to make but, until I can find the time to do so, I just wanted to say that this whole post of yours, and not just the part where you respond to me, is one of the most enlightening ones I've read on TPF in the last 20 years.
Well in Europe that's probably more the case than in the US. Most non-muslim Europeans are secular nowadays. There have been concerted efforts to do away with it, from different groups over the past few centuries (bourgeois liberals, socialists, academia, hippies etc etc). And that's not to say they might not have had good reason to do so, but there hasn't really come anything in its place.
Quoting Janus
Yes I agree with that I think. A lot of these analysis of the crisis of meaning gloss over the fact that Christianity might itself already have been a part of the problem. They kindof loosely equate Christianity with any religion, whereas it was already a very peculiar kind of departure from the mythological polytheistic religions that came before. Those did enchant the natural world by embellishing it, not by transcending it.
I think that's debatable. If you let poultry with clipped wings loose in the slaughterhouse so that they can walk to their own destruction they'll gladly acquiesce.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's about three more hours than I've seen. I'm mostly familiar with the notion of a "meaning crisis" through the usual suspects, Nietzsche and his successors, Dostoevsky and later Russian writers like Pelevin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre (the slide into emotivism in ethics and aesthetics being a sort of special case of the meaning crisis thesis), William Stace, Bertrand Russell, the New Athiests, etc.
Pierre Hadot's approach to "spiritual exercises" and his focus on Epicureanism and Stoicism as more accessible to moderns, as well as the neo-stoic renaissance in the world of "tech culture" are also good concrete examples of the phenomena.
I would tend to agree with Charles Taylor though that the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions that leave people "spun" open or closed to "transcendence" are themselves largely aesthetic (which is not to say unimportant; the idea that Beauty is of secondary importance is of course merely the presupposition of a particular sort of Enlightenment "world-view.") I think you can see this clearest in people from a solidly materialist atheist frame who nonetheless recoil from the difficulties of the "sheer mechanism" doctrines of the eliminativists and epiphenomenalists, and find themselves open to the notions of God in Spinoza, deflated versions of Hegel, ormost interesting to mea sort of bizzaro-world reading of Neoplatonism where the One is a sort of "abstract principle" in the same sense that the law of gravity might be (suffice to say, I don't think this reading survives contact with the sources in question, which is why it is interesting that it arises at all, or why the material must be transformed as it is).
Quoting Tom Storm
Right, but I would ask if to approach this primarily as a matter of "appeal," enjoyment, or usefulness, etc. is to simply refuse to step into the opposing frame, since it normally includes epistemic and metaphysical claims, and not merely claims about enjoyment or aesthetics. As a contrast, if one was told that one's brake pads had worn out, or that one's air conditioner was destroying the ozone layer, one should hardly reply: "I see the appeal of those claims, but I feel drawn to think otherwise." Or likewise, "I see the appeal of treating people of all races equally, but I find holding to stereotypes to be more illuminating for myself."
There is a similar difficulty in the whole, loose "transcendence industry" that spans areas of "mindfulness" to some elements of "outdoor education." There is a recognition of the importance of some elements of tradition, but given other commitments this tends to merely cash out as there being some sorts of more intellectual "pleasant experiences," sometimes of the sort that they help people develop "good character," "compassion" etc. (although what exactly these mean in modern contexts is another question). This seems to me to be a crucial issue with the contemporary reception of Aristotle vis-á-vis contemplation and the rational appetites. Are these just "pleasant experiences" (perhaps because they are "felt" to be deeply meaningful and even illuminative) or are they experiences of unique and potent epistemic import? This issue comes up with the Western reception of Hinduism and Indian praxis as well. A key question here is whether a faculty of co-natural or contemplative knowledge even exists, or if this is merely an illusion cast by sentiment. I do not think the answer is obvious.
It seems to me that the difficulty often lies in trying to access a foreign frame or "social imaginary" without actually leaving the dominant paradigm (which itself reduces core claims in the parallel visions to mere matters of "taste").
Quoting Joshs
I am not trying to "pin" anything on anyone, I am simply referring to a particularly influential clique in Trump's broader movement using the labels that are normally applied to them.
I think it's obviously false that 99.99% of Trump's influential supporters are "traditionalists" however, since many in the camp I am referring to are outspoken transhumanists or post-humanists, who see custom and tradition simply as tools, and who want to move beyond humanity itself. Likewise, "tradition" in the American context normally refers to Protestantism, or at least Christianity, and yet these folks tend to refer to Christians as "Christcucks" or Christ as a "Jew on a stick" (if they are even that polite).
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I'm glad you found it helpful; I find this area fascinating. The big eye opener for me was seeing how much these broadly "aesthetic" or even "theological" (even for athiests, or maybe "world view" is a better term) inclinations end up driving notions of reason and truth, such that they actually end up playing a major role in epistemology and metaphysics that is often unacknowledged in post-Enlightenment thought precisely because it either still aspires to "dispassioned reason," or else adopts the standpoint of post-modern critique that nonetheless fails to transcend many of the presuppositions of the Enlightenment (this being a pet peeve of mine because then "critique" tends to butcher pre-modern Western and Eastern thought by reading the Enlightenment into it).
-David Bentley Heart.
Not only this, but in that reverence, its inherent sense of community, people naturally become collegiate, eager to contribute towards the common good, and wish to give of themselves, for a greater good or purpose.
By contrast we have in Western society an unassailable reduction to science, material fact and monetary value. Meaning (the deeper meaning you are talking about) has nowhere to go, other than the satiation of personal desires, or the profit motive. This vacuum eventually becomes filled by the exploitative influences of manipulative agencies. Themselves devoid of meaning and purpose. The race to the bottom will take us into dark places like rule by oligarchs and the end of freedoms which during the 20th century we, in the West, took for granted.
They are traditionalists relative to the kind of thinking that falls within the postmodern philosophical sphere. If one wants to be generous, one can point to Kierkegaard as the first postmodernist, or proto-postmodernist. By traditionalist I mean a perspective which is at least prior to Kierkegaard, Marx and Hegel. Please name specific figures associated with this alt-right trans or post-humanism (Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel?) and I'll offer my take on where their philosophies belong on a historical spectrum. Elon Musk and Peter Theils advocacy of that old movement called technocracy envisioning a rational, scientific society run by experts, can be traced back to the French Encyclopedists (Condorcet, Saint-Simon). Saint-Simons idea of a technocratic elite managing production and social welfare was revived almost verbatim by the 1930s technocracy movement.
I agree. Metaphysics was at one time discovered. It wasnt merely invented. Maybe it was partly that we discovered that we invent. We reflected on knowing/sensing. We reflected on the natural as opposed to the artificial. The reflection became a real thing, an object itself to be re-reflected upon. That is meta-physics. A purely personal fruit in the universe.
For some reason, since Hume and Kant (and before them Galileo and Descartes), we think we can overlook this metaphysical elephant now sleeping on the floor in the middle of every room (room being a metaphor for discussion or simply statement about the world.)
Before Galileo (which is an interesting pivot to drive this discussion), Philosophers and theologians became too enamored of the discovery of absolute truth, and let themselves, at times, confuse hypothetical imagination with divine revelation. The corrections of the enlightenment and existentialism were needed. However, the existentialists did their work too thoroughly. The enlightened became too enamored of linear reasoning and scientific method and the possibility of man alone, and post-modernists became too enamored of the space between the subject and everything else, turning everything else into a homogenous deconstructive mess of diversity begetting only change - the unmoored adrift world of only the eternal recurrence of disguised sameness - raw motion with nothing left to move.
But the way I see it, despite the passionate pleas of the enlightenment, the existential romantics and the postmodern, we have never stopped doing metaphysics. This should be meaningful to us.
This is not meant to refute Nietzsche or Buddha, but to recognize what they added to metaphysics and epistemology and ontology; these inquiries remain legitimate avenues to clarify even what Nietzsche said about the human condition and the possibility of knowledge and truth.
Essentially, paradox is not merely the undoing of logic, but one of its fruits. Paradoxes are fixed and in motion at the same time, and so the best examples of complete knowledge, not the worst. We need to persevere in this direction. We need to embrace the paradox with linear reason at the same time.
A tiny example is the following God is dead which for Nietzsche also says there is a new God, namely power. Or there is no truth which also says there is truth that evades us always.
These are not small differences. Weve allowed ourselves in the west to think there is no truth must mean there is nothing said when truth is said, and simply to ignore the nagging fact that by saying there is no truth we really mean I humbly refute myself when I nevertheless assert that I know no truth.
So on the one hand, the west doesnt know how to understand and articulate the paradox, and that feeds the crisis of meaning (because paradox abounds with our absurd human activities). And on the other hand, there is now in the postmodern, an irrational fear and disdain for the totalitarian, the dogmatic and the absolute.
The solution of modernity has been to immediately dismiss anything hinting at being absolute, like the existentialists dismissed metaphysics as a basis for truth.
But if there is any such thing as the absolute at all, like the paradox, how could it truly be dismissed? The answer is, the same way it could be embraced - by an act of the subject. We can lie to ourselves or admit we are subject to the truth of ourselves. So the question becomes: were we lying to ourselves when we discovered metaphysics and were we relinquishing logic when we confronted the paradox, or are we lying now by dismissing metaphysics and ignoring the frustrating paradox as if they are nothing?
But refusing to take up and face the paradox, the absolute and the metaphysical, we do not obliterate them. Today, for many, when confronted by the metaphysical and the paradoxical we cover our eyes and ears. We bury our heads in the sand and say it is in order to seek the sky; but seeking the sky with our heads in the air is already a paradox, and it is just as metaphysical an exercise as finding the sand is, and the sky absolutely is not the sand so it is absolutely, truly, the sky, not sand all along. Postmodernism is a joke, an irony that refuses to see it is ironic. Most are not laughing, and those that do cant see the absolute meaning that is a necessary component to finding something funny. (Perfect summation of my point here is the scene in the silly movie Evil Dead 2 where he cuts his own hand off because it is attacking him and says to his now severed hand, whos laughing now!? We shouldnt laugh at all because of the absolute nature of having a hand and losing a hand, but that is just hilarious, as recognized by the one who cut off his own hand.).
There need be nothing enslaving about embracing absolute truth, eternal meaning and the unconditioned. It is still only internalized by a subjective act of receipt and acceptance.
We can be both our own master and our own slave, at once. We can be a paradox, absolutely.
So, since the times of Nietzsche and the flames of post-modern secular, industrial, western nation-building, we have been fooling ourselves every time we attempt to refute the presence of the absolute. We mask something fixed when we consider only what is relative. But the fixed remains there all along.
We think we can behold motion without beholding that which moves is, to itself, fixed and unmovable. Without motion, nothing comes to be to be fixed; but without the fixed, motion itself ceases moving.
Absolute truthful meaning is. We can know it. So be it.
We are here to fix things in this cauldron of change called the universe. We are like gods. The fruit we bear is not merely from us. We are participants in something else.
Why is there something and not nothing? Put a pin in that, and just admit, there is something. This is absolute knowledge. But now, alongside the absolute, we have to ask why is there something else and not merely something?
Ive given myself permission to accept these things and begin, and do not think anymore that accepting it is an ending.
The question becomes, where must we look to be fulfilled by it. The good news is we cannot avoid the absolute, the unconditioned, the meaningful in itself - but the bad news is we still have to find that which can match the depths of the subjective human longing.
In other words, the good news is, we can truly be right, but the bad news is, we can truly be wrong.
No. I can see the appeal but I don't personally feel a need for it. I dont personally find Vervaeke or Jordan Peterson (who has a similar approach) sufficiently compelling. I do enjoy Krishnamurti, however and could easily sit through a few hours of him. Perhaps it's because I am not sufficiently unhappy or restless to devote much time to deep discussions of meaning. Im a fairly superficial, easily contented individual.
Thanks for the compliment! The way the mind interprets or constructs its sense of what is real is far from arbitrary. It is constrained in all kinds of ways - by the kinds of beings we are, the kinds of minds and sensory capabilities we have, and so on. Also by cultural factors. But the point is that what we typically take to be outside of or independent from us, is not truly so (which was Kant's major discovery). Science typically operates so as to eliminate subjective bias, which is an important and necessary step. But even so, the role of the subject or observer remains indispensable in deciding what to analyse, how to interpret the results - what the findings mean, in short. It is all too easily overlooked or neglected in the pursuit of the objective understanding (a principle basic to phenomenology).
As this OP says, the modern idea of 'the physical universe' grew out of Galileo and Descartes division between the primary (external, measurable) and secondary (internal, affective) attributes of bodies, and the corresponding distinction between matter (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans). These divisions deeply condition the way we think and see the world. That is the key idea.
Quoting Joshs
In which, for the benefit of those reading, Musks maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldemann, was an influential figure, founding a political movement called Technocracy that foreshadowed many of Elon Musks later ideas. Subject of a lot of coverage of late, see for example this article.
Religion can obviously be helpful (and right in its helpfulness)too helpful in many many instances.
Helpful in regard to meaning?
Quoting Janus
From what I gather, Vervaeke holds that the former approach is wrong and the latter (psychological and phenomenological) is right.
By Kant's time, metaphysics had become highly dogmatised and he rightly criticized it on those grounds. But I've found that the neo-Thomist philosophers are still able to make a coherent case for classical metaphysics. Nearly all of them are Catholics, of course, and that's not coincidental, because it provides the experiential dimension that academic metaphysics all too easily forgets.
I agree with your point that classical metaphysics, starting with Parmenides and Heraclitus, was a critical reflection on the nature of knowing. It wasn't simply dogmatic slogans and aphorisms. (see Eric S Perl Thinking Being.) The rejection of all of metaphysics too easily throws the baby out with the bathwater (murky though that water might be).
Quoting Fire Ologist
It is often said that the Buddha rejected metaphysics. In a way, that is true - but on the other hand, the whole basis of the Buddha's teaching, the 'principle of dependent origination', is a metaphysic, although of a completely different kind to the Aristotelian.
But again, the crucial point is that it is always connected to experiential insight rather than dogma. (I first came to Kant through a 1950's textbook called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, which contains comparisons between Kant and Buddhism (reference) This book is nowadays criticized for its perceived eurocentrism but became a foundational text for me as it enabled me to synthesize Eastern and Western philosophy in a practical manner.)
Quoting Fire Ologist
There is much confusion about 'philosophies of the absolute'. On the one hand, most modern and post-modern philosophy will dismiss any consideration of it. Those philosophies that do discuss it often seem cumbersome and obscure. Again my attitude has been influenced by Buddhism, which refuses to reify (make a thing of) any idea of the absolute. Why and how it does that is probably impossible to spell out, but suffice to say that what is required is more than an exercise in rational thought - hence the central role of zazen meditation in Zen Buddhism.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Because we are free to discover, or not to discover. But this is also why an 'ecology of practice' is necessary, which will nearly always end up being religious in nature.
I probably agree with Taylor on transcendence and have made similar points myself. We mostly settle on beliefs because they are emotionally satisfying. Interesting points about materialist atheists. I havent had contact with any folk like this for years, so I couldnt say if you hit the mark. But isnt one of the great cliches of our time the declaration, Im not religious but Im spiritual. Spiritual here generally means an interest in crystals and swimming with dolphins. Or is that too harsh?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Am I right to surmise that for you the history of Western philosophy since at least Descartes amounts to little more than a reshuffling of older theological concepts, and that you would not feel particularly intellectually or spiritually deprived if you had not been exposed to modern philosophy?
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I realised I didnt properly respond to this.
I suppose what Im saying is that if Vervaeke were my mechanic and told me my brake pads were worn out, Im not sure Id trust his judgment and Im fairly certain his proposed solution would be difficult to follow. So Id probably get a second opinion. Of course, in a simple matter like this, it could readily be demonstrated empirically that the claim was true or not; I could see the worn pads for myself.
But comparing Vervaekes ambitious tour through contemporary psychology, world philosophy, cognitive science and religion, to a brake-pad problem doesnt really fit. The epistemic and metaphysical claims involved are less ambitious.
In other words, Im not sure I agree with Vervaeke that there is a meaning crisis in the way he describes it, nor do I find his proposed remedies particularly clear or convincing. I can, however, see how many unhappy or anxious people might find aspects of his work comforting or useful, much as others might be drawn to existentialism or the Catholic Church. I also think Vervaeke might particularly appeal to those who already believe that the West is going to hell in a handbasket. But not everyone is a customer for such a message, and a limited appetite for it does not necessarily indicate a personal deficiency.
I think Vervaeke forgot to address the pitfalls of groupthink and the fact that groups can reinforce comfort, avoid hard questions, and be quite defensive.
Spiritual but not religious sounds a lot like The Religion That Is Not a Religion. Sounds too much like it, I think, and that motivates the impulse to make them distinctto mark the heretics.
Now I see the cultishness.
This might be deviating from the OP, but there's something quite off about all this to me.
Why do many Easterners put their hands together (as Westerners do in prayer) and bow to one another to convey reverence? Is it not because they understand the divine truth, for lack of better concise terms, to dwell both within themselves just as much as it dwells within the otherthis understanding being at least cultural?
Do we Westerners not see ourselves (the sacredness of our own being) in others as well? After all, this is key to sympathy, compassion, and the like. And is the mysticism-produced dictum from the Oracle of Delfi (the mouthpiece of Apollo, the giver of light and its related attributes), know thyself, to be interpreted as some type of egotism-reinforcing doctrine?
All this asked in more or less rhetorical fashion so as to express the view that of course the sacred dwells within us, in me just as much as in you and all others (in purely spiritual, incorporeal beings too, were such to exist). The so-called divine truth doesnt ultimately reside spatially somewhere out there but, instead, within the very awareness upon which our total selfhood pivots. Not just mine or yours but everyones. Everything else is just representations, this in some ways akin to what Schopenhauer wrote about. Granted, some representations are deemed more pivotal than others in respect to the sacred, this relative to each culture (such as per Eliades take on a belief-structures axis mundi: the tree of life (be it depicted as an oak, a palm, or an evergreen) and Mount Olympus (where the Hellenistic deities gather) as well-enough known examples), but they are representations all the same. For one example of this, to deem a wooden cross hanging on the wall as the sacred rather than as a representation of the sacred (this from within a Christian frame of mind) is to be idolatrous, mistaking the symbol for its referent.
As to spiritual but not religious, all it seems to indicate is spirituality minus any of the associated rituals that pertain to any given religion. Maybe more to the point, those who so self-label tend to hold reverence for the divine without either beseeching or brownnosing greater spiritual powers to satisfy egotistic wants. (Example: praying ones lungs out for that luxury car that will put all of ones neighbors to shame, or some such.) An earnest naturalistic pantheist would therefore qualify as one possible example of spiritual but not religious: holding earnest reverence for the divinity of Natureits reason and rhyme, so to speakwithout engaging in any religious practice. And before anyone starts on this theism not being real, it can go hand in hand with the Stoic notions of Logos. And other examples can well be found.
And, as far as I can so far comprehend, none of the aforementioned in any way pivots on egotistic notions of the individual self, this as though any man is an island divorced from the cosmic and universal, to not mention other beings. Am I missing something in Vervaeke's perspectives on the matter?
I think you're misunderstanding the intent of that particular message. Vervaeke would not dismiss nor deprecate any of what you've said in the preceeding paragraphs. Indeed, a large part of his work is restoring 'the sense of the sacred' (e.g. this course). And he's in respectful dialogue with diverse disciplines and traditions.
What that post is criticising is the kind of buffet-style syncretism where you choose the elements you think you want from the 'spiritual supermarket' and attempt to practice them or apply them by yourself. It seems feasible, especially with the abundance of educational resources on the Internet. But this can easily become, and often is, self-centred and self-seeking. Hence the importance of others - a spiritual community or companions on the path.
Vervaeke stresses both 'ecologies' and 'communities' of practice.
Ecology:
Community:
All of which rings true for me. For about ten years I was member of a Buddhist fellowship that met monthly or bi-monthly to present and discuss themes and practices. My practice has really gone downhill since that broke up.
That would be a pity, indeed, and I'll let @Count Timothy von Icarus answer this charge, but his post about voluntarism and what it is that modern Western philosophy tends to obscure also led me to recast what it is that the modern and contemporary philosophers who I admire accomplished.
When reading, say, Descartes, Hume or Kant, two salient approaches are possible (among dozens others). One is to read them proleptically as laying the groundwork for dealing with the new demands of the modern age through decluttering the views of their predecessors from dogmatic, superstitious and irrational elements. This may indeed be what they saw themselves as doing, not knowing where modernity would lead. Another way to read them is to view them as trying to create space in an enchanted world that remained more vivid to them than it does to us for newer social and scientific realities. Those are, for instance, the tasks endeavored by John McDowell regarding Kant, by David Wiggins regarding Hume, by Daniel Robinson regarding Descartes, and by both Putnam and Rorty (in different ways) regarding James, Peirce and Dewey.
The failures of, say, some contemporary virtue ethicists to recover Aristotle's conception of the good life, and of the ultimate good (which Count Timothy purportedly diagnosed) could be a result of them still hanging on to some voluntarist/dualistic modern tendencies to thin up notions of goodness, and keeping them separate from notions of truth. They may not be paying heed to what Putnam sees as a required "collapse" of the fact/value dichotomy.
Eudaimonia cannot survive the surgical operation that separates understanding what we are from what it is that we ought to be and do, and this can justifiably be viewed as a loss of immanence or transcendence depending on which side one locates themselves in Taylor's immanent frame.
At the time, I was quite impressed by these scholars, although I never fully assimilated their books. But as time went on. I don't feel their ouevre has worn that well (ironic, considering the subject matter). Some of those associated with them, notably Julius Evola, became associated with reactionary fascism. (In his later years in Bloomington, Indiana, Schuon became embroiled in controversy over ritual gatherings that included nudity and were alleged to involve minors allegations that were investigated and ultimately dismissed. It did tarnish his reputation though.)
In any case, the point I'm making is that expressed in the title of a critical book about it - Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick (his blog). I have discovered there was quite a lot of common ground between the perennialists and reactionary politics, which I don't want to be associated with. (I was also dismayed to learn that Steve Bannon used to quote Guenon.) Neverthelss, I really do understand why one can be 'against the modern world' and the way in which the post-Enlightenment project can be seen as a kind of degenerate age (the 'Kali Yuga' in the perennialist terminology, taken from a Hindu myth.) I don't necessarily agree with it, or endorse it, but I can see the logic. Guenon might be considered an eccentric, but I don't think that's all he was.
(There's something similar in some of the current French cultural critics - Rémi Brague for example - a more temperate and academically grounded critic of modernity who situates his analysis within the Western philosophical tradition itself.)
I never doubted it for a second.
Are they the only two ways?
Quoting Wayfarer
David Bentley Hart is disparaging of perennialism and proudly announces himself a syncretist. Thats not always the best path either - religious appropriation and incoherence being the most obvious. No doubt Hart would be a fastidious exemplar.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Do you count Nussbaum as one of those failures?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Whats your foundation for eudaimonia? It often strikes me that the most vociferous groups in the human flourishing space are secular moralists of the Sam Harris kind.
How would we demonstrate (in your words) what we are from, what it is that we ought to be and do?
I honestly can't say since I haven't read much of Nussbaum. But I was content here to point at one identifiable tendency of contemporary Western philosophy that could account for what @Count Timothy von Icarus had perceived as a thinning of our conceptions of the good in some virtue-theoretic accounts, which is a tendency that I view Hilary Putnam and John McDowell, for instance, as fighting against, in general.
I view Sam Harris's account of "the moral landscape" to be completely incoherent and so grossly misinformed as not being worthy of much attention, although it can be fun, sometimes, to debunk some if his misconceptions.
It's possible you didn't parse my sentence correctly. There was no comma after "from" in my statement: "Eudaimonia cannot survive the surgical operation that separates understanding what we are from what it is that we ought to be and do[...]"
My claim was purely negative. It was reiterating Putnam's point (to be distinguished from Harris' insistence for collapsing values into the folds of "scientific" facts) that you can't derive what makes a human life good (or an action just) from some sort of factual/scientific investigation into what "objectively" is the case about us.
Regarding foundations for eudaimonia, I am also, like Putnam and Rorty, an anti-foundationalist. It would require much work, though, for me to unpack a positive account here. (There is a very rough sketch here of what I view the be the interdependence between understanding what we are and what it is that we ought to do, in the context of reasoning about human rights. Are they natural/given, willed/instituted, or both?)
Ha! I'm not sure why that's there.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
People seem to love or hate The Moral Landscape.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Got it. Ive never been overly preoccupied by the is-ought problem. I know Rorty regarded the fact/value distinction as ill-founded. Presumably, it becomes more pressing if one views metaphysics as the ultimate grounding for normative claims, but not if, like Rorty, you see moral reasoning as just form of human conversation, where moral oughts emerge from the ways we live together rather than from some deeper metaphysical truth. He might agree with Harris about that point as both seem to be telos free.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Ive found Rorty pretty interesting on this, and Ive enjoyed some of the Putnam lectures Ive heard. I have anti-foundationalist intuitions.
Is it your view that Alasdair MacIntyre is right or wrong when he argues (in After Virtue) that facts about human nature already imply norms about how people ought to treat each other, and that the isought problem only arises if you remove teleology from the conversation? Interesting: I guess I havent really thought much about this until recently.
MacIntyre, as we know, arrives there through Aristotle, while Rorty comes at it via pragmatism and anti-essentialism. It fascinates me that MacIntyre sees the structure of human nature, its inherent purposes, as providing the basis for moral norms, whereas Rorty takes the oposite approach, grounding morality in social practices rather than any inherent human purpose. Which one you endorse will depend on what you believe in - like most philosophy. Thoughts?
I never read After Virtue but always wanted to (and own it). Maybe I will end up only agreeing with MacIntyre in parts. That's because, on the one hand, I don't think we can dispense with the concept of the teleological organisation of our human natural and social forms of life. Social practices, like biological processes, are inherently teleologically organized, and the two (natural and social) are deeply intertwined (my word, not ChatGPT's!) in the concept of Bildung, formation, acculturation, what Aristotle calls second-nature. I view eudaimonia in rational animals like us to be an outgrowth of flourishing in non-rational sentient animals that experience suffering and well-being. And, on the second hand, I view this teleology to be immanent to our form of life and not pointing towards something external or transcendent.
I meant to refer to human nature as what distinguishes it from, say, bat nature or cow nature. We don't echo-locate like bats or (usually) enjoy watching the passing train nearly as much as cows do. But the capability to acquire a second-nature (to learn language, become rational and virtuous) is the most distinctive aspect of human nature, according Aristotle. Our second-nature transforms our first-nature. It doesn't make us escape our human needs and proclivities but reshapes them, enabling us to flourish in new ways suitable for social life. So, a naturalism of second-nature doesn't endorse the naturalistic fallacy of inferring what is good for us to do from what it is that humans are (first-)naturally inclined to do.
Not at all.
What I was going to say is that surely the whole concept of the purposelessness of the Universe, with any sense of purpose or meaning being relegated to the individual prerogative, is precisely what the thread is about. It is also what my earlier thread On Purpose was about (although there it was an effort to provide a phenomenological perspective on the question.)
I agree completely with @Pierre-Normand's Aristotelean perspective on the issue. But I also think we have a burden of responsibility. The fact that we are able to grapple with these questions says to me that we must. It is part of the burden of rational sentient being. In some ways, I think the physicalist denial of free will (a la Galen Strawson et el) really amounts to an unwillingness to face up to that responsibility. It is far easier to believe that we really have no ultimate responsibility for our fate than to face up to what having it might entail. But then, as I've already owned up, I recognise that this is the residue of the Christian concscience that my cultural heritage bequeathed me.
Vervaeke argues that normativity doesnt need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law.
Its implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.
Our is our biological and cognitive architecture already entails competencies that can be exercised well or badly. Ought simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences.
So instead of:
facts ? mysterious jump ? moral prescription (the classical 'is-ought' problem)
he proposes:
cognitive agent ? degrees of competence ? appropriate normative orientation (ought)
Its a kind of naturalized virtue ethics: to be the kind of being you are is to strive to actualize your capacity for insight, relevance-realization, and flourishing.
Furthermore, Vervaeke recognises that as rational, sentient beings, right action isnt an optional add-on but intrinsic to the topology of our salience landscape the way we perceive and value what matters. Acting well refines perception itself. It doesnt require an appeal to a supernatural judge or cosmic law; it arises naturally from our capacity to discern and realise relevance more truthfully. (Which is not to deny there is a cosmic law. Me, I accept the reality of karma.)
[quote=John Vervaeke, AFMC, Lecture 40, 'What is Rationality?']Let's ask ourselves, where do we get these [standards]? The way [this is] asked this is how do we come up with our normative theory not meaning statistically normal here, but normative meaning the theory about the standards to which we should hold ourselves accountable when we're reasoning. So where does our normative theory come from?
Reason has to be autonomous. Let's say I believed that my standards were given to me by some divine being, in the sense that it is commanded of me. There is some Moses of rationality, and then he comes back with the commandments for how we're supposed to reason. If we follow these just because we are commanded to do so, that is ultimately not a rational act. That is to give into authority, to give into fear...
If we follow the standards because we acknowledge that they're good and right, that means we already possessed the standards. This is an old argument that goes back to Plato. It's in the Euthyphro dialogue, right? Where normativity has to be really deeply autonomous. If something is only good because the gods say it, then the gods aren't good in saying it...
So we have to possess the standards internally. This is an argument that's crucial in Kant. Reason is ultimately autonomous it has to be the source of the very norms that constitute and govern reason because that's how reason operates. So we have to be the standard.
Ought implies Can. If I lay a standard upon you, You ought to do this, then you have to be able to do it. It makes no sense to apply a standard to you that you do not have the competence to fulfill So we are the source of the standards. People acknowledge the standard, but they fail to satisfy them. We have to make a distinction between competence and performance.[/quote]
Quoting Wayfarer
Vervaekes view fits squarely within the German Idealist tradition, especially Hegel, with Kantian roots, in his understanding of autonomous reason, freedom as self-determined alignment with rational norms and internalized moral standards. It doesnt seem partially compatible with the existentialist move to deconstruct the metaphysics of rational subjectivity inaugurated by Kierkegaard. For him, faith involves a personal leap beyond reason, sometimes even against ethical universals. Vervaekes insistence on autonomous rational standards contrasts with Kierkegaards focus on faith as transcending rationality. We are responsible for what matters and how it matter to us, but this isnt a rational responsibility.
Why bring in the sacred? Where most cognitive scientists stop at mechanism mapping functions, algorithms, and neural correlates Vervaeke insists on situating cognition within the broader context of human condition: the experience of being a meaning-seeking, self-transcending animal prone to self-deception. His language of salience landscapes, relevance realization, and ecologies of practice attempts to harmonise descriptive science and philosophical anthropology.
But it only adapts when its predictions are challenged.
And those challenges cannot come from within your own preferences.
They must come from participation.
From otherness."[/quote]
But he fails to point out that the baseline for most human interactions is hostility, or in the best case scenario, indifference. The move to individualism (that he criticizes) is actually a defense against the indifference and hostility of others, especially when it comes to religious/spiritual others.
Actually, it seems it was/is your general hopeful/positive disposition that is the most helpful factor for you.
The cognitive science and phenomenology are just tools in your particular case, while for someone else with a similar general hopeful/positive disposition, other tools might be relevant. (And I do so hate to use "tools" in this context ...)
It can also explain the particular shape/structure of one's existential crisis. That is, an existential crisis is not the same for everyone who describes themselves as having an "existential crisis". For example, an existential crisis will look different for someone with a Christian background, as opposed to someone with a Hindu background; and their respective solutions to those crises are going to be shaped differently as well. (For example, one can recognize whether a self-described atheist has a Christian or a Hindu background, even without mentioning anything about them having such a background.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Im all for dissolving the is/ought distinction, and I agree that Vervaeke challenges this distinction as it relates to the fact/value separation. But I wouldnt say he dissolves the binary in the radical way that poststructuralists do. Evan Thompsons comments illustrate the limits of this attempt:
I think it's not about "too much freedom" or freedom being "crippling". It's that the institutions that we are expected to trust and rely on don't care about us -- and yet we're supposed to pretend that they do. It's this latter part that seems to be modern. That the institutions that we are expected to trust and rely on don't care about us is nothing new; what seems to be new is the expectation of the pretense that they do care. This is what adds the insult to the injury, and this is a source of a crisis of meaning.
Freedom becomes crippling when acting on it cripples one. For example, one has the "freedom" not to have health insurance. But what kind of freedom is that?
Good points.
Again, different cultures have different attributes. Health care in Australia is mostly free and accessible to everyone. Its not perfect, but the homeless and the middle class share doctors and hospitals.
What I see are people faced with a smorgasbord of choices: religious, political, and social, with almost no barriers to access because, for the most part, everything is permitted. That abundance of choice seems to make people freeze: what do I do in a world where culture is so varied? How do I focus my life when theres a multiplicity of choices, faiths, and lifestyles all available to me? All potentially true or rewarding or superior.
The groups for whom this isnt always a major problem tend to be hardworking, thrifty migrant communities that still have a dominant culture and a unified worldview. I know quite a few people from the Nepalese, Indian, Afghan, and Vietnamese communities. But their children sometimes come adrift because they dont really know whether to accept proscribed tradition or embrace all the freedoms available to them.
Sure, but the socio-economic structure of religion is still hierarchical, and it is all about rank and authority. Even if the people involved are all loathe to openly admit it.
On the contrary. I think the pushback is the natural reaction to test someone's claims to authority. Especially religious people seem to think that they can go forth into the world, make claims to authority, and the world then owes them submissiveness. Just like that. "I am king and you owe me!" Of course at least some people are going to be skeptical about this.
I think what makes them freeze is that they still haven't realized that they don't actually have all that many choices, realistically.
For example, we have a constitutionally granted "freedom of religion". But this has no bearing on whether one will actually be accepted into a particular religious community, or whether one will be able to understand a particular religion; it also doesn't obligate the various religions to explains themselves to outsiders in a way those outsiders can understand. It doesn't obligate the state to force a religious community to accept a particular person. For all practical intents and purposes, "freedom of religion" is about such things as employers not being legally allowed to discriminate against (prospective) employees on religious grounds.
What is actually available to one in terms of "freedom of religion" is extremely limited; often, it's actually zero. And similarly with so many other things.
The multitude of options is illusory.
I guess we disagree on this.
I wasnt just talking about religion; also beliefs, lifestyles, and choices. I know so many people who drifted from socialism to Buddhism, to Hinduism, to cultural Christianity, to New Age, to hitchhiking, to fruit picking, to unemployment, to drug use, to university, to sexuality, to military service, to music, etc, etc, and none of these things provided any real satisfaction. They were always looking to see what else they could explore what other beliefs were open to them. In the modern world (here at least), in the absence of certainty and clear pathways of tradition everything is "open". Even for those less wealthy, the cities are full of poor country folk who left their towns to experiment with different lifestyles and options.
Now, am I saying that this is true for everyone? No. It is just a noticeable part of contemporary society and, in my view, a significant factor in unrest and anxiety.
I'm not sure why you're asking about this; in reference to what are you asking this?
The problem can be formalized in the emic-etic distinction:
A life without Big Heg and Dusty Dosto? Perish the thought! Plus, modern thought does many things well. Harry Frankfurt's notion of "second-order volitions" may not be very original, but it is advanced with exceptional clarity, which is something analytic philosophy has sometimes done much to improve. And of course, one needs a philosophy for one's own era. Plato could hardly speak to the nature of the modern state, consumerism, capitalism, and the educational system they foster the way Byung-Chul Han, C.S. Lewis, Mark Fisher, or Autumn Kern can.
It's important to note though that your first clause doesn't imply the second. Medieval philosophy certainly is dominated by the "reshuffling" (or refinement, or exploration, etc.) of older theological notions, as is late-antique thought, yet this can hardly be considered a deficit. Or at least it ought not be considered one. I know it is, because we live in an era where even the Oresteia, Aeneid, Commedia, or Troilus and Criseyde get written off as "fan fiction" due to insufficient novelty.
The problem, as I see it, (or at least one problem) is that modern thought has often tended to think that this pattern only affects antique and medieval philosophy. Its own dogmas become transparent (one being the prizing of multiplicity as a sort of proxy for freedom). Hence, the very long catalog of modern thinkers who dismiss the collected works of all past saints and sages, of East and West, as "twaddle" or some such, and then clear the ground to lay out their radical new rebuilding plan (or anti-plan). Well, when this has gone on for several centuries straight, one might suppose that the issue is not so much about what past thinkers have actually said, as about the tradition that keeps feeling to need to engage in such projects.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, the bolded is really not Taylor's point. His main thrust is that the answer is not obvious in the way many people think it is, but not that philosophy necessarily devolves into a sort of emotivism. Also, the common notion that emotional motivations stand in opposition to, or beside rationality would be one of those assumptions vulnerable to deconstruction and genealogical investigation. For instance, in any tradition that has a place for the rational appetites, an answer might be "emotionally satisfying" precisely because it brings understanding (i.e., because it is true), and "all men by nature desire to know."
I agree with you. Religions give general, purportedly universally applicable, answers to these questions and others. The problem, as I see it, is as to how we could ever universally agree on any answer. The religions certainly don't agree except in regard to the most significant moral questions, and the answers they give condemning murder, rape, theft, and so on, can easily be understood to be the answers best suited to communal harmony and flourishing.
Quoting javra
Right, but I was referring more to the "spiritual" answers?the answers that posit a transcendent realm of value as distinct to the immanent pragmatic needs of communities and individuals. So Christianity, for example, might say that murder and the other sins are wrong because God says so, and Buddhism might say they are wrong because if you commit them your rebirth will not be favorable, whereas a secular ethics can simply say they are wrong because they are detrimental to both individuals and communal life.
Quoting javra
I don't see ethics as an authoritarian problematic because people are free to accept or reject authority, even if to reject it will entail punishment. I take the ethical sense to be a function of education and normal human compassion. The pragmatic ethics that evolves out of the need for communal stability, harmony and flourishing I see as being supported by practical reason. I also think that pure reason gives us no rationale for favoring one person over another?any favoring is driven by individual preference and agenda and is not supportable by pure reason. Some contextual favoring may be supported by practical reasoning, but nonetheless there can be no pure reason not to treat all human individuals as being equal before the law, and entitled to equal opportunity regarding education, medical treatment and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
You frame it one way and I would frame it in another way. I would say religions sought to impose ideas about how humanity was situated within the cosmos. As you say they "provided a reason" instead of allowing individuals to work it out for themselves or to be informed by science. And that is why the predominant religions in the West opposed any finding of science which contradicted their central dogmas.
I have no problem with your "leaning towards some form of religious spirituality"?that may be right for you, but it doesn't follow that it's right for everyone. Your leaning is merely one of personal preference, just like the different leanings of others.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Not according to this site:
Europeans who consider themselves atheists are a small minority, except in France and in Sweden, where about 20 per cent say that they are atheists; a vast majority of all Europeans nominate themselves as religious persons.
:up: :up:
I asked this because I face this question daily, even in my everyday life. The point is that any assessment of a system you find yourself in from the inside is very difficult. I even have a rule not to provide legal services to my relatives (even though I'm a lawyer myself). Why? Because it's incredibly difficult to distance yourself from your own reflections on a legal issue when it affects your own life. With ordinary clients, it's easier you can simply be honest, presenting the picture as objectively as possible, and then leave the solution to them. I think I'm not alone in facing this problem.
Returning to the topic of the thread. For example, when we find ourselves in state X, is it possible to challenge its dominant approach to understanding reality, while essentially being an element of that state X? As you indicated above, it's possible (using the method of comparison with other states or history), but is it possible to purely compare, and are you capable of immersing yourself in a different paradigm just as purely?
This is the classic paradox of Crete in epistemology: "All Cretans are liars," said the Cretan. "Paradigm P is true and final," says the person fully formed by paradigm P. Any attempt to go beyond it will be perceived by system P as heresy, madness, or "you just haven't fully understood P."
That is how quite a few here will inevitably categorise any discussion of what they consider religion. As I said upthread, I think much of this stems from the oppressive, indeed authoritarian, role of ecclesiastical religion in historical Western culture. After all, religious authoritarianism is what Enlightenment humanism so painfully liberated itself from. But on the other hand, that requires an implicit acceptance of that this is all that religion or spirituality can mean or amount to.
Consider this passage from Edward Conze, a Buddhologist who was active in the mid 20th c in his essay on Buddhist Philosophy and its European Parallels.
Of course, this is highly politically incorrect and I wouldnt expect many here would accept it - but I still believe that there are such degrees of insight and understanding, and that not everyone has them by default, as it were. Of course it is also true that spiritual hierarchies have often been the source of egregious abuses of power, but theyre not only that, even if that is the only thing that some will see when they look at them.
Good work by the way pointing to the epic/etic distinction, it is something I studied in anthropology and not often noted here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
[quote=David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole; https://transnational.live/2020/11/22/terror-in-the-god-shaped-hole-confronting-modernitys-identity-crisis/?amp=1]The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.
Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding.[/quote]
Quoting Joshs
I remember that passage from Thompsons book, Why I am Not a Buddhist. Whilst I concur with a lot of what he writes in that book, Im not so much in agreement on this distinction (not that Im any fan of Harris, perish the thought.) I agree with Thompson that Buddhism is not the inner science that many of its modern adherents seek to portray it as. But the question of why it isnt or cannot be is not, I think, so clear-cut as Thompson makes it out to be. Agree that whatever evidence there might be, is not empirical in the sense of able to be reviewed in the third person. But at the same time - and this goes for religions other than Buddhism as well - there are fairly coherent and consistent schemas of (lets say) experiential insight that aspirants progress through on the spiritual journey. Whilst not scientific in the sense that physics or chemistry can be, neither do they rest solely on the idiosyncratic expressions and utterances of their adherents (although there will always be idiosyncratic types as well). But then, on the other hand, many of its modern enthusiasts may take it to be a science in the way that is not, in lacking the deep enculturation that its emic adherents naturally possess.
Im not going to get near to resolving that question here, or possibly ever. But I think there are disciplined structures, methods, and practices in these traditions that do traverse and replicate recognised states and stages in a way that popular devotional religions do not. Agree that these practices are not scientific in the third-person sense but I dont know whether that makes them automatically and only doxastic (matters of belief).
As I see it there is a confusion in the way Western commentators and teachers describe and teach and how aspirants operate and form ideas in this endeavour. They are confusing two processes, although one of them they might not even acknowledge is there. Firstly they tend to think that the spiritual endeavour is about working with the mind (and emotions to a lesser extent). That one can control the mind, direct it, deconstruct and rebuild it, in such a way as to result in spiritual insights and progress towards enlightenment, or even if they just get it right, it will happen in a flash. That once they have done this, they can then just perform the necessary practice and lifestyle and they will naturally reach their goal*.
The second process is the actual development of their being**, a development which is following a natural physical and spiritual course one which the person isnt aware of, or can control in any way, other than in removing any conditioned, or cultural blockages in its path. By analogy, a plant cant flower until a bud has grown and is ready to open. The science of this aspect of the spiritual path is entirely absent and unknown from the teaching and understanding.
So, in reality what teachers and aspirants are doing is endeavouring to remove blockages in the being of the aspirant, that is all. Whether they realise it, or not.
*many aspirants fail to reach their goal and then conclude that there isnt a spiritual path to enlightenment at all, or that they are a failure of some sort. While in reality their bud wasnt ready to open.
** a development which will take many lifetimes to come to fruition.
Yes, but...
For Horkheimer, the "Enlightenment's emphasis on human autonomy" led to the erosion of objective reason only because it was not properly realized.
I've been wondering how we are supposed to tell the difference between Horkheimer's and Adorno's critique and the reactionary anti-Enlightenment critique, since the criticism of the Enlightenment looks similar in both cases. I'm trying to identify the central difference, since I don't think it's just the fact that H&A explicitly say that they are pro-Enlightenment, as they do in the preface to DoE:
[quote=Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment]We have no doubtand herein lies our petitio principiithat freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate.[/quote]
So ok, they are open about it: they are not anti-Enlightenment. But there's more, and the key to unlock it is that they characterize their argument as a petitio principii. They set out to critique the Enlightenment's suitability in bringing about freedom while already assuming that Enlightenment and freedom are inseparable; and the very thing they rely on to be critical is what is in question.
There is, they believe, no way out of this circularity, no way of performing a critique from a privileged position outside the circle of Enlightenment. So for H&A this circularity is not actually fallacious, but is central to their self-aware method, known as immanent critique.
The reactionary anti-modern position pretends to a transcendent standpoint, perhaps appealing to a golden age of reason prior to its corruption by liberalism, or to natural law, to God or "higher knowledge" or the cosmic, etc. There is always an external authority claimed as support.
This is not H&A's strategy at all. From the inside, they push the modern concept of reason till it breaks, without external help.
So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference.
NOTE: I'm not saying conservatives and reactionaries can't legitimately make use of their criticisms, and I'm not calling into question your own use of Horkheimer (I'm not saying you're wrong, or anything so crude).
NOTE 2: I couldn't decide between conservative and reactionary so I went with a mix of both.
Because the prevailing philosophical outlook of materialism has nothing to do with the adopting of materialistic values which is so endemic to modernity?
------------
While I'm at it: Children would typically dream of becoming ballerinas and astronauts and the like not too long ago. Ask the typical child what they want to be when they grow up in today's world and what you typically hear is, "a rich tycoon". Materialistic values to the max.
If you mean the prioritization of wealth and status over spirituality, then were speaking of a vice that has long predated modernity, and is perhaps endemic to the species.
But wasnt wealth a means to the good for Aristotle? Status was practically built into the hierarchies of all pre-modern societies.
OK, Ill bite and reply.
Aristotle? The guy gave us the understanding of the unmoved mover as ultimate telos. No, I dont read Aristotle as a man of materialistic values.
Heres my synopsis on the issue:
-- Nonmaterialistic values: Beauty, justice, truths, understandings, kindness, love, among other aspects to be found in humanitys being, are all intrinsically valuable to ones own being. Why? Because they all, of themselves, serve to lead one toward the desirable ultimate telos of ones own beings optimal eudemonia, optimal blissan ultimate telos which is in fact obtainable despite the difficulties and, due to this alone, is impartially, aka objectively, Right (aka, the correct ultimate end). No hocus pocus spirituality is required for this mindset to hold, much less a belief in deities, angels, fairies, etc. (Which, however, isnt to nullify their possibility.)
-- Materialistic values: All there is is matter, hence: here today, gone tomorrow. So you might as well horde as much cash as possible to best establish power over others, all this at the expense of others, while here, this via any means conceivable. Its after all the optimal way of obtaining any semblance of real happiness in this life: that of being top-dog in a dog-eat-dog world. Hence no decrying of corruption if it happens to make one rich and powerful. This since there is no such thing as a governing, existential Right and Wrong that is independent of opinion. There is only Might, of body and of mind. Were you to obtain sufficient might, then, by gosh, all others would readily consent to your decree that 2 and 2 could in fact equal 5. And what a blissful life such would be for you. Besides, in the end, who cares anyway: the incontrovertible fact is that all that therell be is nihility of being for everyone currently living. So to hell with the notion of an intrinsic worth to beauty, justice, truths, and the like; theyre all worthless unless one can capitalize on them via cash and overbearing power, in short: via a despotic authority over others.
Yes, nonmaterialistic values and materialistic values have always competed: within societies and within individuals world over. But once one accepts materialism as fact it gets rather difficult, if at all yet rationally possible, to substantiate the worth of nonmaterialistic valuesmuch less their both short and long-term benefits, especially by comparison to materialistic values.
So nonmaterialistic values get eroded from societies and their constituent individuals. Such as via the pressures of the marketplace under a system of global capitalism founded on the delusion of infinite growth from infinite resources. And one does have to put bread on the table so as to eat. So voila, welcome to modernity. And the kickback toward authoritarian fundamentalist perspectives, many of which happen to be religious, all claiming to be a, if not the, solution to what many humans sense to be problematic about todays state of affairs, most of which are replete with materialistic values.
Now, no, this isnt supposed to be anywhere near a formal thesis on the matter. That said, I do find it informally presents my own generalized understanding of the issue concisely enough.
What Im interested in is the issue of originality, not with respect to capturing what is particular about ones own era, but thematizing what is universally and transculturally true. Do you believe modern philosophers such as Hegel are not very original in this regard in comparison with their Greek and Medieval predecessors? Were pre-modern philosophers and theologians the originators and modern philosophers merely the clarifiers and cultural
particulizers?
These numbers maybe are a bit surprising, not for south and east-central Europe, but certainly for North and Western Europe where I'm from. Very rarely is religion something that is discussed or practiced in public, not with people I meet, but also not more generally in various public media. So in so far they are religious it certainly seems something more private and individual.
Further down the site it says the following:
With the word of the sociologist Grace Davie, its a kind of believing without belonging. People pick and choose religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices and they are mixing and matching them, as they would select food in a cafeteria, so we can talk of cafeteria religion, or as church-free spirituality. Europeans remain religious, their approach is eclectic, and they borrow ideas from several traditions. Meanwhile, many institutionalized churches are running empty, especially in the West.
I'd say maybe they are 'spiritual' rather than religious. It seems to me religion implies something more public with practices and institutions that curate a certain tradition. It's Protestantism, the lack of central organisation, but then without the Book or local church even.
Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.
I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests.
A comment I read about the distinction between the New Left and the conservative religious critique, was 'For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and Enlightenment are dialectically intertwined: Enlightenment arises from myth but reproduces myths structure of domination in a new, rationalized form. Thus, the way out is neither regression to pre-rational faith nor blind progress through science, but a self-reflective form of reason one that is conscious of its limits and its entanglement with power.'
But I still sense a lack in their spiritual anthropology, so to speak. I think, for the religious, humanity has a cosmic signficance with which it seeks reconciliation. I think, perhaps, this is what Habermas was getting at in his dialogues with Ratzinger and his subsequent books.
Quoting Does Reason Know what it is Missing?
--------
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
We did touch on this theme a few posts back. It's an important point. Like many others, I set out to sort the wheat from the chaff of dogma and tradition when much younger. I believed (naively, in hindsight) that there were experiences or epiphanies which would provide first-person insight into spiritual realities outside the strictures of churchianity. (This was the 1960's, when such ideas were in the air). Why only believe, when you can see! This was associated with hallucinogenic experiences, Timothy Leary and Alduous Huxley. (There was an amusing line in a streaming comedy recently where a sub-adolescent girl was told by one of the principles that you meditate so you dont have to go to Church any more.)
There were some real insights coming out of that. Needless to say however such experiences are fleeting and can't be stablised. But I vividly recall the realisation of an ecstatic dimension of existence, the extraodinary richness of natural beauty, and thinking 'why isn't life always like this?'
But what I failed to reckon with was the accumulated momentum of cultural conditioning and of one's own habitual pre-dispositions. They are real obstacles in the development of insight and they're deeply rooted and culturally re-inforced. I'm sure that's where many of the practices associated with religion originated - memorisation, repetition, ritual. They operate on both the symbolic and the somatic level to remove those obstacles. But then over time the original vision is lost sight of and they are repeated because - that's just what we do. That is when they loose their connection with the insight that originally motivated them.
Well, it's a reasonable summary of DoE, sure.
Quoting Wayfarer
Something akin to this is very strong in Adorno's works, though without the actual religion. However, that "lack," i.e., the impossibility under certain conditions of a spritual experience worthy of human beings is often precisely their point, since they do not exempt themselves.
Open Society, Open Wound
So would the efforts of Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, etc. (and later echos in the 20th century) then be a sort of inversion of the bolded, an attempt to clear space in an increasingly mechanistic and instrumentalized world for a sense of "enchantment" that was ever less vivid?
But if [I]that[/I] has to be one's goal, doesn't that already say a lot? Perhaps it's a worthy goal, but if you compare Romantic literature to its inspirations, say to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it seems obvious that the older goal, of simply holding back the darkness (or basking in the glory of the cosmos and ordering oneself to it, as in Scipio's Dream or the Consolation of Philosophy) is always going to be more romantic. And yet, while I wouldn't want to say Cicero or Boethius are naive, I do think there is something gained (as well as lost) in the distance the Romantics have from the sentiment they want to capture.
To borrow a metaphor from the Enlightenment, a common theme was that man had just reached "adulthood" with the Enlightenment. This often took the form of what Taylor calls a "substraction narrative," where "childish superstition and dogmas are overturned an man comes into his own, into the flourishing adulthood on the new reason." Enlightenment adulthood is what is left when childish error is put aside. But I might ask of the lifecycle metaphor if we might not perhaps still be in our adolescence (we certainly seem to be grappling with uncontrollable passions, courting ecological disaster for instance). And with adolescence [I]can[/I] come greater levels of clarity, but also greater levels of self-delusion (normally a mix of both!).
Quoting Jamal
But that's not how they would see it, right? Their argument is rather that the Enlightenment systems leave men enslaved, and what is worse, not merely as outwardly the slaves of tyrants or kings (which it might also do, e.g., communism)leaders who might be more or less wise and justbut what is worse, inwardly slaves to unrestrained passions and ignorance. The result is that "leaders" are generally as fully enthralled as those they rule over.
And this complaint need not rely on any appeal to a "Golden" or even a particularly "better" age, only the notion that freedom requires self-governance, which requires a level of cultivation that Enlightenment thought generally fails to provide because it operates on a "thin" (often wholly formal) vision of freedom.
That is, liberalism and consumerism, communism, capitalism, technocracy, etc. "leave most men, even its societies 'elites,' firmly entrenched in something like 'Plato's cave,' and what is worse, convinces us that watching shadows on the cave wall is the fullest attainment of freedom and power, the most a man can hope for," (the famous cave analogy of course being put to many different sorts of uses, some more or less plausible, in this sort of critique).
Now, it might be easy to dismiss the maximalist versions of this sort of critique, but I think most people will invariably agree with some form them. For instance, for most, Huxley's A Brave New World is not a utopia simply because virtually all of its citizens [I]consent[/I] to their state and find its rule pleasurable. Rather, it is a [I] dystopia[/I] precisely [I]because[/I] all of the citizens "freely" consent to it. (And, unlike many fictional dystopias, ABNW is very honest about how it functions, and the Alphas and Betas at least know exactly how and why it is organized as it is). Likewise, I think most people can sympathize with J.S. Mill's desire to refine utilitarianism by speaking to some degree of differentiation between "higher" versus "lower" pleasures (e.g., pornography and fast food versus learning to appreciate fine art) to at least [I]some[/I] degree. We might have the suspicion that Rawls' man who wants to spend his life counting blades of grass does not have a good conception of what it means to "live a good life" and "be an excellent person," or that a system that tends towards something like Idiocracy at the limit is not, in the end, making men free, regardless of if the "choosing agents" involved "choose" such a system "without coercion."
That is, while "reactionary" (but also many Nietzschean) attacks on Enlightenment values, particularly exclusive humanism might be dismissed as "aristocratic," caricatured, etc., they also exist on a spectrum and to dismiss them all is to be pushed very far to one side of that spectrum. I am not sure if attempts to stake out some middle area of the spectrum, such as Nussbaum affixing "internal" and "external" as prefixes to "transcendence" (the "external" being the bad sort) really resolve the issue here either.
Of course, not everyone feels this way, some are happy to deny any real distinction between the lower and higher, or any "proper ordering" of desire and the authority of logos over thymos (honor and regard) and epithumia (pleasure and safety). For those who do want to hold on to something of such a distinction though, the question is whether they can justify such an ordering of goods on the "thin" anthropology common to liberalism and the Enlightenment more broadly, and I think that is where traditional critiques tend to make their hay vis-á-vis Enlightenment thought's inability to promote true liberty. (And not all such critiques are wholly negative either, sometimes Enlightenment thought plays the role of Stoicism for Boethius, a sort of initial medicine for promoting negative freedom, that is none the less at best prepatory for deeper therapies).
Also, there is the more general notion that categories are oppressive, or at least suspect. Whereas, there is contrary the argument that, since knowledge and understanding are liberatory, and categories are essential to human understanding, an undue skepticism of categories and the universal is in fact corrosive and oppressive.
Well, in the post you're responding to I pointed out that Medieval thought is (and is widely acknowledged to be) largely refining earlier paths, or synthesizing and harmonizing them. This has both good and bad elements. The bad comes in the form of slavish appeals to authority (although the best authors tend to transcend this to some degree), and a lack of flexibility in some areas, or the fact that some novel paths that predict ideas in modern thought are never developed.
Early modern thought tends to be much more original and creative. I also think it is noticeably far more amateurish, and so in some ways it ends up being more creative in the way self-trained artists might be when compared to artists well-trained in some particular school (although this analogy has its risks). This isn't really surprising considering the massive shifts in who is doing philosophy, the type of education they receive, the incentives they face, the factors determining which works become popular, etc. The explosion in creativity is itself not an unalloyed good (just as an explosion in creative medical treatments is not necessarily a good if the treatments are not themselves effective).
But here is a key difference. The medievals and late-antique thinkers' negative tendency to give undue weight to authority is also paired with a strong understanding of their own historical dependence. The general modern tendency to equate multiplicity and potency with freedom tends to obscure this sort of dependency, which in some ways only makes it more potent and inescapable. It's a bit ironic given the huge focus in modern thought on historicism, but I think it's precisely this sort of historicism (e.g., claims that the true thoughts of the sages of yore are wholly inaccessible to us, whereas a medieval might easily think of a thinker, even a Pagan or Muslim, centuries dead as a close teacher and mentor) that actually allows the influence of the past to become transparent, precisely because it becomes inaccessible and so in a sense inert. But the "problem" here isn't the influence of the past, but its transparency, and not even so much its transparency as the fact that what is being passed on (e.g., the conflation of voluntarism with freedom) is corrosive.
One issue here is that many of the foundational categories and dialectics of modernity were themselves self-conscious inversions of past thought, of the via antiqua, etc. They were, as @Pierre-Normand puts it, "exercises in clearing space," (sometimes with good motivations, sometimes political power moves), and so in some sense instrumental and time/goal limited. But the space has long been cleared and yet we are still left holding the same old tools because we think they are essentially an extension of our arms. So, re the "inaccessible past," I think the past, particularly re realist ontologies, the Analogia Entis, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, etc. is not so much necessarily inaccessible, as rendered alien and inaccessible by the very transparency of what were originally self-conscious inversions of these ideas, and that is what I mean by a "failure to transcend modernity."
Just as a quick example, there are innumerable ways to attack teleology and realism, or to argue positively for varieties of nominalism. Yet the fact that arguments on this front so often (and across diverse modern schools) fall into the same dialectic of pitting realism and teleology (often as "authority") against freedom (or creativity) strikes me as one particularly robust manifestation of the old Reformation struggles haunting modern thought.
I appreciate your view, and I understand why people might think that way.
I just dont see how one can move from the belief All there is matter to the rest. I also dont see how physicalism, individualism, human rights, the scientific method, or whatever these days are considered enlightenment thinking, precludes the experience of beauty, love, or meaning. I suppose Nietzsche is prophetic in this regard, but the only way one could reach such a state of nihilism is if one was already steeped in the defamation of the world and the worldly, and have laid the foundation of all subsequent thought on some variation or other of supernaturalism.
Observe the metaphor stripped of meaning when pointing the finger at the use of scientific language to describe the cosmos, as if some words or symbols were a kind of paint thinner when applied to celestial bodies. The language has changed since Galileos time, sure, but the cosmos has hardly changed at all. Its the same with the evolution of the human species. Ideas and words just dont have the evolutionary effect that people imply, and were practically the same animal as weve been for thousands of years. Were just privy to more information than we once were.
At any rate, given the propensity to blame modern authors and words, and harken back to the authors of less enlightened times, its clear that they do not like the language of modernity rather than modernity itself, especially now that the means of communication are practically open to anyone and literacy rates are much higher. They fear the ugliness and disorder that comes with freedom of thought and speech.
If I think about what could be lost should anti-modernism be turned into political action, it may turn out to be the most dangerous form of egoism weve ever seen.
In many ways I agree. But to be clear, at least personally, I'm not "anit-modernism" nor do I hold a desire to return to the days of old. There's no looking back (other than to understand where the present has come from historically). There's only looking forward.
Yes, that was not pointed at you. I believe one can witness a nascent anti-modernism in politics and popular thought. In my view, theyre blaming the wrong things, and should they push their resentment into political action theyre going to pull the rug right out from under themselves. Thanks for the back and forth.
Namaste
I agree with you that many, if not most, people are not philosophically reflective and/ or do not have a good grounding in critical thought. The influence of advertising and the transnational corporations is certainly problematic, perhaps mostly significantly so when it comes to politics and unnecessary consumerism.
I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"?the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?
I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing?
For my part, I think ethics should be taught in school as early as possible.
The noble lie maybe doesn't work anymore, after the 'dead of God'. But the need religion fulfilled before the dead of God presumably hasn't gone away. What is missing in secular states is a sense of the mythopoetical, the Dionysian or however you want to call it... something that moves or inspires people to des-individuate into or unite with the group. There is still some kind of tribal desire if you will to be more than atomised individual subjects of a rational state.
And what we precisely don't want it seems to me, is the state taking up that role, because that is to road to nationalism or worse... fascism. If you don't have some other force like religion, you always risk some great leader type stepping up and using these unfulfilled desires for his ends.
No ideally not, but I'm just not convinced that the current way of doing things will work out in the long run, if you project that forward say a couple of centuries. What I don't want to see is things devolving again like they did in the 20th century.
In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability.
The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.
So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?
Quoting Punshhh
The stability of feudalism was imposed by a combination of church and aristocratic rule. The people were illiterate?so we have no way of knowing what their real thoughts were. They were compelled to give lip service or be punished. I think your view is rosy and simplistic.
So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empires pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for grantedhuman dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine. He says that many secular cultural goods have Christian roots. He argues we need to recognise this transformation if were to assess religions legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture.
Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upani?ads would say, to know the divine is to become like it.
It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? Ultimately the idea of Christian culture means many different things, from Nationalist bigotry to rainbow flag diversity. A belief in transcendence of itself doesnt really say much.
Im interested in why you think we should acknowledge Christianitys impact on our history. In what sense do we need to do this as we move forward and deal with tribalism, authoritarianism and climate change? I would imagine that your belief is that modern culture had borrowed the values without the teleology and transcendence that gave them meaning. Does this in your view lead straight to Vervaeke, et al?
It doesn't beg the question. Begging the question would be 'The Bible is the word of God, because God says it is.' What I was responding to, was the blanket assertion, often made on this Forum, 'religion is belief without evidence'. To which I respond, what counts as evidence? I was pointing out the fact that Christianity, for instance, had a huge impact on the formation of Western culture. That furthermore the sacred literature and testimonial evidence of world religions amounts to an enormous corpus of actual information. Of course most of it is not subject to peer-reviewed scientific analysis, which as good as invalidates if for many of our number.
I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it:
[quote=Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament]Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Platos metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy.[/quote]
Or Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:
(Although as far as empirical evidence is concerned, I recall a 2025 NY Times article on the review of so-called miraculous cures associated with candidates for Sainthood, written by a medical doctor who was called on to revew a case. It might make for an interesting discussion.)
Oops, typo - should have written, "it raises the quesion".
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. How do we approach those who seek a Christian worldview as a solution? Surely, what counts as Christianity is a crucial question that comes directly out of the meaning crisis and the questions you keep positing.
You may not seek to impose a white nationalist Christian theocracy on the world, but many who benefit from undermining liberalism and secular culture certainly do.
This isnt just a shadow side of faith; it is faith at work.
As it happens, I was in a bookshop in October looking at DB Harts translation of the New Testament when a couple of fellow browsers asked me about the text. They were young Christians and we got talking. And guess what? In their view, liberalism had failed, Nietzsche was right about the death of God, secular culture had collapsed, and people were flailing in contemporary culture because their lives lacked a spiritual dimension. The solution: Christianity and Trumpism.
I know what you think of this, but Im more interested in understanding how we can assess the merits of the spiritual beliefs some people propose as an alternative to secular culture. Who's going to be the door bitch?
Subjective, right? Personal preference. Edifying, but personal.
Quoting Tom Storm
That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion.
Maybe. The quesion I keep asking is if there's a big hole in modernity, just who chooses what we fill it with? We cant just overthrow the status quo without expecting that even worse alternatives may be waiting in the wings to fill the void. As iek has said, the problem with the revolution is the morning after."
Not rosy, I realise how the people were controlled with brutality. But at least the rulers realised the benefits of the ideological stability provided by the church.
No, I think a lot will change given the physical challenges, how that exactly will look like I wouldn't know... But I do think these changes will inevitablely also included societal organisational and ideological changes. That is what I see myself doing, looking at a different ideas and how they might fit with a changing world.
I really don't have a concrete proposal in mind, I'm mostly exploring the possibilities... But since religion (and not necessarily organised religion like we have had it) has been an important part of most of human history except maybe for this small slice of Western history we happen to be living through, it seems like something worth thinking about.
I think the picture you paint of religion there is a bit one-side, evaluated from a perspective of the Western tradition that elevates reason or critical thought itself as the summum bonum. It's also merely a belief that it is good that everybody be taught critical thinking skills in order to make up their own minds... as we estabilished earlier, not everyone can or is even interested in doing that.
We "impose" beliefs on people anyway, no matter what societal and religious organisation, just by virtue of the fact that humans don't suddenly pop into existence as blank slate adults.... there's allways a set of beliefs and underlying assumptions people are enculturated in. And if secular states teach people they should look for evidence and examine their beliefs critically and rationally, then yes that would make any mythopoetical belief problematic.
None of this is to say we should do away with critical thinking, if such a thing were even possible, just that perhaps we have overvalued it.
I'm not arguing that it didn't benefit the rulers.
I think religion, in various forms is still a very significant part of modern culture. I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs.
I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? Not that many I'd say, even on this forum, and if they change their minds it's often because of some life-changing experience they had, not because they examined their beliefs rationally.
Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on?
As to how many people change their minds, have you ever heard an argument to support the position that murder, rape, theft, exploitation or torture are morally permissible?
This is probably way beyond the scope of this thread, but the way I see it, is that we inherently/biologically have an emotional wireing, of shame, guild, empathy etc etc that isn't formed or shaped yet in the sense that it is tied to specific moral rules.
Then we get educated into tying these emotions to more specific moral rules according to what the group one gets educated in, deems important. Usually there some people who, rightly so or not, have more of a say in determining what those are.
Because of the interplay of human biology and certain structural demands the world places on us, these will often be similar across different groups. That is maybe a bit similar to something like convergence evolution where different species develop similar attributes, like say wings, because the physical demands are the same.
After all of that we get adults with already formed moral intuitions, moral intuitions that are not properly basic, but the result of biology and eduction. If nothing's going particularly wrong they tend to follow that moral 'programming' by and large the rest of their life.
And then some become philosophers for whatever reason, and question these things incessantly, but one shouldn't presume that everybody is like that.
Perhaps. But isnt it also the case that religious and political groups will hold beliefs that allow for those things - think underaged marriage, wife burning, execution of gay people, use of extraordinary rendition under Bush, corporate exploitation of workers, etc. Its not hard to imagine medieval style initiatives becoming more popular with MAGA for instance.
This is where Nietzsche details that any long obedience in the same direction seems to always reveal something worth living for, as it is that long obedience which begins the process of building a transfiguring mirror. We can see this as early at Birth of Tragedy 3, but also in his later periods in aphorisms like 188 of Beyond Good and Evil.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Right, and I haven't anywhere said otherwise.
Edit: "offering" should have been "othering". Damn spellcheck!
My point is that Christianity provided the moral framework which enabled the development of Western civilisation. Wayfarer put it better than I could. Can anyone suggest an alternative that would have achieved that, I wonder.
I think that part of this crisis of modernity is that society has seen through this legacy and seen it as outdated and causing more problems than it prevents. We are unshackling ourselves from the religious code and looking around for a new moral code for the future. I would suggest it is not going to be easy as the code we are rejecting is much more deeply embedded in our culture than we might at first realise.
Capitalism has sort of stepped into the breach, and along with law and jurisprudence has provided a helpful framework. But now even that capitalism is turning toxic, we might only be left with jurisprudence. The problem here is that government can, in theory, change what the law says and government can become corrupted.
Notice I begun that part of my comment with "For example" and concluded it with, "And similarly with so many other things."
The theme was whether the apparent multitude of options are in fact realistic options.
You can buy yourself a nice pair of shoes, but which don't fit you, they are too small. You can have them in your hallway along with all your other shoes, and have them for ten, twenty, fifty years, but they still don't fit. In other words, physical proximity does not automatically make for a realistic option. In the same way, people can approach religions or careers or marriages etc., stick around for decades, be miserable, but still fail to realize that they weren't ever a realistic option for them. I'm again referring to William James' heuristic for deciding what makes for a realistic option as he presents it in his essay "The Will to Believe", already mentioned here.
The case can be made that it is precisely this failure to realize what is a realistic option for a person or not is the "predicament of modernity".
This depends on the local laws; some legal systems have laws or regulations for state officials and lawyers to exempt themselves from a particular case.
The question is whether one should do that in the first place. How much (philosophical) sophistication is really necessary?
No, it doesn't necessarily operate out of such acceptance.
I'm talking about this: If someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return?
Can you answer that?
Why is it that when religious/spiritual people make claims, especially when they claim to be the authorities for making claims about our inner lives, why must we bow our heads and be at least silent?
Why is this not a conversation, but an ex cathedra lecture??
Ah yes.
If only religion/spirituality wouldn't be so much about coming up with excuses for why its exponents don't live up to the standards they themselves preach and claim to have attained ...
For example, just look at how the local authorities and the Buddhist community interpreted the recent sex + extortion scandal in the Buddhist monastic sangha.
Sure, I'm not disagreeing. But I question the value and relevance of such "insight and understanding". In short, what if someone's "profound spiritual insight and understanding" is actually simply what it's like when one lives a comfortable life where one doesn't have to work for a living, as is the case with many religious/spiritual people? If a person gets to spend all their waking hours thinking about things and writing them down, yes, they better come up with something "profound".
Then tell me: On the grounds of what should one still have faith and still trust them, against facts?
I've been around religion/spirituality for over twenty five years now. I just got tired of inventing excuses and going along with the pretenses as to why the teachers and the "spiritually advanced" don't and don't have to live up the standards that they preach.
They are matters of education. Practicing a religion/spirituality works in the exact same way as going to school or taking up some other course of education or training. It's supposed to transform the student, and in a standardized, predictable way.
Right, but I think there is a quite robust argument to be made that it is secularism and liberalism that has spawned fundamentalism, elevated fideism, etc. The two are not unrelated. It's not unlike how the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and the Gilded Age spawned socialism. Even if one sees socialism as largely or wholly negative (and many do not), it would still be the case that it is precisely deficiencies in the existing system that strengthened it. Addressing these deficiencies (e.g., the erection of the welfare state, etc.) ultimately went a long way to addressing the excesses of the socialist movement, where reforms were made. Invoking the specter of Christian nationalism here might thus be likened to invoking the threat of Stalinism to oppose the New Deal in that, arguably, the New Deal actually made a sort of American Stalinism less, not more likely precisely because it addressed the issues that motivated Stalinism.
Quoting baker
Well, consider you examples. Similar examples could be drawn up to undermine faith in the scientific establishment, modern medicine, the liberal state, Marxism, or Enlightenment rationalism itself. For instance, there is no shortage of examples of doctors treating patients for illnesses they know they do not have and killing them in the process, or knowingly prescribing them addictive drugs in order to make more money.
Yet none of these traditions claim they are immune to corruption, so these examples don't result in a contradiction of sorts. Hence, it seems to me that the more powerful claim would not be that [I]some[/I] cases of corruption exist, but that no cases of spiritual progress exist or that such "progress" is actually itself undesirable (the latter being the more common modern argument, in part probably because the former seems difficult to prove). That is, not "there are people who pretend to be saints," but rather "there are no saints."
Or else it needs to be explained why corruption is a specifically unique problem only for specific sorts of religious/philosophical/spiritual traditions, but presumably not all (since all such traditions have examples of corruption). For instance, is Russellian style atheism and the appeal to "man against the darkness," i.e., being good in a meaningless universe obviated by Russell's sorted personal life (or those of other advocates)? This is precisely the sort of argument religious folks raise"the degeneracy of key athiests displays the inherent folly of their claims to a morality without God," and yet I think this alone is a facile argument because it can be applied against any ideology or ethos, from Marxism to Buddhism to modern medicine.
One might say for instance that, because the Providential nature of the Church it should be immune to corruption. However, Christianity itself has not tended to claim this, in part because Christ and the Apostles repeatedly warn of false teachers and simony across the New Testament and similar sentiments can be found in the Hebrew scriptures.
Likewise, with a faculty of intellectus or noesis (or similar notions in the East), the mere presence of error cannot be decisive, or else it should be equally decisive in proving that we should have no faith in discursive ratio and argumentation. For instance, Plato's warning against misology in the Phaedo is focused on the repudiation of more discursive and formal argumentation, which can prove misleading at times, and yet ought not be disparaged simply because such bad exemplars exist. So too, if such claims are caricatured as a sort of magical, exceptional knowledge, we are essentially already accepting the Enlightenment framing since this is often not how philosophies that embrace them tend to explain them (e.g., as Robert Wallace points out, the sort of "mystical knowledge" Plato often invokes is generally accessible to all or almost all to some degree).
Not generally and not universally, though.
That is, people tend to be tribalistic in such matters: "It is wrong to rape _my_ daughter, but why should I care about what happens to your daughter?!"
People tend to condemn an act as wrong when it happens to them or someone of the same category as they are, but are far more relaxed when the same act happens to someone whom they consider to be outside of their category.
For Ayn Rand, for example, and don't underestimate her influence, lower class people should just endure oppression and exploitation by the upper class. Something she would never approve of for the upper class.
Or look at the concept of tragedy: historically, in ancient Greece, tragedy was reserved for the royal family. Whatever happened to commoners could not qualify for "tragedy", even if it was nominally the same action.
It goes along the lines of, "It's morally permissible when they deserve it". And they "deserve it" when they are the wrong skin color, the wrong socioeconomic status, the wrong age, the wrong whatever.
Quoting Janus
No. I think the "problem" with religion is that it requires a level of street smarts that few people naturally have.
In order to successfully navigate religion, one has to have a refined sense of what to take seriously and what not, how to read between the lines, how to have a private life that is completely detached from one's religious life.
Trumpism is already happening anyway. Look at a forum like this: even his fierce critics are using the same methods he does.
Quoting Tom Storm
Again, Trumpism. Who chooses it? The hunger for power, for stability, for domination.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course there is abundant evidence of such efficacy. But what exactly is it that is efficacious, is another matter.
On the other hand, there are also many studies and reports of people saying how religion makes them miserable.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the positive effects of religion and spirituality can be replicated by people who first turn to religion as (young) adults, as opposed to people who were born and raised into religion.
You have got to be kidding. Or your baseline for human interaction is very, very low.
And so what?
So you know the divine. Then what? Are you beyond paying taxes? Beyond traffic laws?
Those are irrelevant in comparison to the scope of religion. Whether one is wrong or right about science, medicine, the liberal state, etc. has no bearing on one's eternal fate. But with religion, everything and eternity is at stake. Which is why the secular and the religious are not comparable.
When it comes to religion/spirituality, the possibility of "corruption" is either off the table, or it has got to be deliberate.
Genuine mistakes are not possible when it comes to religion/spirituality.
You can't go around killing people in the name of God, and then say, "Oops, looks like I was wrong after all."
You cannot seriously expect people to believe that a religion can preach, say, abstinence from alcohol (to give a less loaded example), and then their exponents get drunk -- and to then write this off as a genuine mistake. Doing so demotes religion to yet another expendable ideology, as opposed to being the source of (one's connection to) eternal life and happiness.
I am not sure I understand. What exactly is it about appeals to eternity that make them different in kind so that false/wicked/corrupt exemplars should be fatal to a tradition's claims?
Second, religions make many claims that aren't related to eternity, would these be invalidated to? Or perhaps more to the point, your critique seemed to target all co-natural, contemplative knowledge, and yet many philosophical traditions that appeal to this sort of knowledge do not make the sorts of eschatological and soteriological claims common to Islam or Christianity. So, are they to be dismissed due to false exemplars as well? For instance, would this be fatal to any sort of strong virtue epistemology? Or would it apply to all traditions that put a heavy emphasis on praxis and contemplative knowledge (and so Platonism, the Peripatetics, Stoicism, etc.)?
I guess I just don't see the connection. And if one takes this seriously doesn't it essentially raise up "anti-metaphysical" Enlightenment thought by default since it becomes immune to false exemplars (which abound in every tradition), but does not make "eternal claims?" (Plato for instance makes many claims about eternity and the nature of the soul's relationship to it).
Quoting Punshhh
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As a precursor, I hold great admiration for Jesus Christ, but deem Christianity per se to be the most violently hypocritical religion that has so far existed. A long story, but as just one example: A good deal of Christians who hold Christs spirit withinthereby revering and honoring Christs being (rather than the institutions that followed and their traditions)are currently imprisoned, this for their opposition in peaceful protests against things such as nuclear proliferation. Maybe needless to add, this imprisonment takes place within a culture that is largely of a Christian-institution ethos. (How many Christians go about "turning their other cheek"? Etc.)
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Was not the Age of Enlightenment directly enabled by the Renaissance, and was not the Renaissance directly resultant of knowledge regarding ancient pagan cultures (arts, philosophies, sciences), which were preserved in the East (namely, in Byzantium and in the Islamic civilization), immigrating its way into Western Europe, this, primarily, following the fall of Constantinoplethis via learned Easterners that then desired a better life? (The Crusaders, dating centuries prior, brought back some knowledge from the East, but, last I checked, by no means knowledge of ancient pagan cultures.)
This narrative, which to me so far chimes true to historical reality, would then stipulate that the Enlightenment was indirectly enabled not via the prevalence of Christian institutions but via the rediscovery of ancient pagan art, literature, myriad philosophies, sciences, societal structures (such as that of Athenian democracy), and the like.
As to what would have been of Europe in absence of institutional Christianity, here's one possible alternative: If Cleopatra would have succeeded in converging the Egyptian empire with that of Romes one might have had Renaissance-like thought, art, politics, etc. throughout Europes history sans the so-called Dark Ages (which roughly lasted about a millennium or so, a considerable time span).
In sum: For reasons just given, I dont find any grounds to uphold the validity of the narrative which maintains that the institution of Christianity has been any form of salvation for the Westbe this intellectually or ethically. And, to come full circle, I say this while holding a great deal of veneration for Jesus Christ per se (but not for the institutional, trinity-pivoted Christianity which was birthed during the first Council of Nicaea circa 325 CE due to political strife, this for reasons partially aforementioned).
I like many of your perspectives. Still, I want to give emphasis to the following: The resolution to the meaning crisis cannot be authoritarian religion (such as institutional Christianity has historically been) if one does not desire a contemporaneous, and likely far more global, Dark Ages to ensue. And, in my take so far, viewing Christianity as having in any way been the Wests salvation can only speak in favor of authoritarian religionwhether its a readopting of an old one (e.g., Christianity) or else the adopting of a newly created one.
If I was overly harsh in all this, my bad. But I do find all this relevant to the threads topic.
BTW, as I've previously mentioned in this thread, as far as resolutions go, my own take is that the resolution should take the form of readily questionable philosophy, and not unquestionable religion.
The scope, what is at stake. Eschatological and soteriological traditions have the most at stake, precisely because they claim to be eschatological and soteriological. They chose that themselves.
It's not that they would be "false", "wicked", or "corrupted", it's that they are actually accurate, desired exemplars, the what-is-actually-intended.
It's that when they say one thing and do another, this discrepancy is actually deliberate, not a mistake, not a failing. That there is a talk to be talked, and a walk to be walked, but they are different things.
People often say one thing and do another. If they are ordinary, mostly unreligious people, one may write off such discrepancies as genuine mistakes or genuine failings. But not when it comes to people who hold a formal position in their religion, or who otherwise declare themselves to have the authority to judge others. With such people, the only reasonable assumption is that they have thought things through and that when there is a discrepancy between what they preach and what they do, it was intended.
I'm not talking about invalidation, falsification, or dismissal. It's that so many religious/spiritual claims aren't actually intended to be taken seriously or at face value.
This seems to be the most accurate way to describe what religious/spiritual practitioners do.
People often say one thing and do another. If they are ordinary, mostly unphilosophical people, one may write off such discrepancies as genuine mistakes or genuine failings. But not when it comes to people who have a formal education in philosophy. With such people, the only reasonable assumption is that they have thought things through and that when there is a discrepancy between their words and deeds, it was intended.
There is an eagerness to absolve religious/spiritual people of all responsibility -- for what they teach, for what they say, what they do. We are supposed to let them get away with murder. We are supposed to trust them unconditionally, regardless of what they say and do. And where has this gotten us?
It's high time we turn this around.
Yeah, it would be hard to overestimate how true this is. Factionalism breeds extremism. When we misrepresent another position in order to make it appear extreme, we are ourselves the ultimate creators of the extremism that will inevitably arise because of our misrepresentation.
For example, we've seen bad faith accusations of "Christian nationalism" for a long time, and now we're getting bona fide Christian nationalists. We've seen bad faith accusations of "Nazism" for a long time, and now we're getting bona fide Nazis. The same thing happens on the right with accusations of "Communism," although that is an older phenomenon.
Yes, it's a fairly frequently made argument and I think it's a reasonable point It's often argued that fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity. That's certainly Karen Armstrong's take.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I would have thought that white Christian nationalism is one of the strong groups behind the current US President. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez charts this influence across 75 years. Interestingly she's a Christian herself and deeply concerned. I think she would agree with Hart that it's closer to a heretic cult. And the false teaching you referenced above.
No reason. This entire milieu revolves around it.
The premiss of the OP is to explore the historical causes of the divisions between religious/secular, mind/matter, and so on, whereas many of the contributions just exemplify the very division at issue.
We are predisposed to accuse others of making wrongful accusations against us. Identity is replacing ideology, which long ago replaced reality.
If we could remove all hyperbole and metaphor from political speech today, I wonder how many words would be left standing. Conspiracy and bad intentions are sought and discussed ad nauseam, by overlooking the plainly spoken, the actual deed, and the heartfelt belief.
This wouldnt matter if life was one long political rally and campaign to inspire reelection, but our elected officials are supposed to be negotiating laws and policies, and executing these policies (and budgets) - not just garnering cheers at rallies and protests, beating the other party, and winning election.
Instead of recognizing our laws and policies the substance of politics, we would much rather argue how each other is Hitler (Trump) or like Mao (Bernie), or like the Messiah (Mamdani) or like Satan (Mamdani); we are the starving and helpless working class who are eternally oppressed by the corrupt, greedy untouchable kings.
Or we are just anxious (like all animals with a nervous system) and dramatic because it plays well on instagram.
We, in the west at least, (maybe not as much in the east, and not so much in the Middle East), we have no sense of what improvement might actually look like, no clear goals, no clear enemies and no clear friends - no sense (anymore) of the unique identity and place in history the west must occupy. Instead, we are eating ourselves alive, handing scraps over to anyone who knows how to seize power. We forget why the constitutional republic was invented - to restrain political power and empower the single citizen against both the government and all other people - so that the individual could remain strong and contribute to the community that individual helps to shape. We are testing this lifeline down and giving it away (while the rich make money off of it.)
But now, there is zero tolerance for meaningful political discussion between opposing factions; there is just exaggerated posturing set to withstand inordinately zealous assault. Throwing grenades to forestall artillery while crafting secret nuclear missiles.
And it is all civil unrest, internecine sabotage. No one wants to forgive or forget anything, or sympathize with the fellow participants in this predicament - we all, instead, only want justice, and have already pronounced judgment.
The predicament of modernity comes from moralizing against each other while admitting there is no good and solid ground for anyone to stand on in the first place. We should focus more on the fact of the predicament than on the many distractions that disable focus at all.
As an undergrad, I was struck by the fact that so much of characteristically modern philosophy (starting with Descartes) was shaped around the unspoken premise of anything but God. It was a pervasive but largely unspoken theme. As Ive explained many times, my own quest was shaped by 1960s counter-culture and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, which at that time I did not associate at all with religion as such. But then I went on to study world religions and the perspective of the perennial philosophies and began to realise that the enlightenment I thought was the sole prerogative of the East was also to be found in Christianity (mainly via the early 20th C scholars of mysticism, Dean Inge and Evelyn Underhill.) It changed my view considerably, and there are now many Christian philosophers whom I hold in high regard (although I must confess a considerable degree of scepticism in regard to Reformed Theology.)
In any case none of this is an appeal to a return to a golden past. But religious symbolism inevitably portrays, in symbolic form, many of the archetypal factors and forces that underlie everyday thoughts and actions. They need to be understood and re-integrated, rather than fought against due to the animus weve inherited from the religious conflicts of the past. Thats where Vervaekes lectures are exemplary.
Is there a religion in the present era that exemplifies the good?
This is one of those kinds of questions. :wink:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes: a rhetorical arms race.
Maybe we set our own sights too high, just as we shoot ourselves in the foot. We ask ourselves for someone among us to be the authority on how to live, as we practice and teach daily how not to live.
But dont we need only one example? Jesus, or Siddhartha Buddha? Isnt one such life enough to inspire all that falls short? I guess there are so few, it seems to permit us to doubt all there is to say about the good.
The way I see it, each generation starts all over building the goal for all of humanity, and each individual within each generation has to do this for him or herself as well. We despair because the task is monumental, and Sisyphean.
But why assume it is impossible? It seems to me we can be made good, so we should seek to be made good. We dont even have to know what the good absolutely is to bow to the good anyway, and emulate it. We are made good, and then we know what it is. We are made good by accident, after believing we can be good on purpose.
Yeah. Peter Simpson sees this as a kind of epistemic reversal, where instead of reasoning from virtues (with Aristotle), one reasons from happiness. Cf. "On Virtue Ethics and Aristotle."
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Quoting Pierre-Normand
I'm not sure I would call Aristotle a "naturalist." That seems not only anachronistic, but perhaps also incorrect. I don't see a lack of transcendence in Aristotle, even if his idea of God was not the Christian God. He does admittedly distinguish the practical man and his moral virtues from the philosopher and his contemplation, but the contemplation of the philosopher looks to be "transcendent." I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' attribution of Platonic themes to Aristotle is quite apt in this way.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think this is important, and I think the way you pointed up the unification of Aristotle's speculative and practical reason is instructive, but modern man seems to have crossed a Rubicon and can no longer "collapse" the "dichotomy." I would be interested to know where Putnam writes about this.
Quoting baker
I don't believe that is characteristic of most people at all. People are outraged at the rape of other people's daughters or sons, are generally outraged by any rape at all.
This is a very interesting point. For Aristotle, how does the practical man provide a foundation for his virtue if not through contemplation?
I just noticed your post now, but what you said in it, seems completely at odds with this conclusion. Karen Armstrong says something very similar:
Which is, admittedly, how they must seem to many contributors.
Quoting baker
Is it? I have not been aware of lecturing. I presented an argument, and am prepared to defend it, but only up to a point. The reference to Edward Conze's essay was intended to illustrate a point. But then, I suppose you take that as an 'appeal to authority', which naturally has to be shot down.
(Moral) virtue is for practical life. For Aristotle the philosopher is not as much in need of moral virtue because he is less engaged in practical life (politics, commerce, etc.). The philosopher is more interested in intellectual virtue. One comes to know (moral) virtue by recognizing one's role models and then in turn coming to discern the individual virtues that such role models possess, and for Aristotle the "role models" will tend to be commonly held, at least by and large.
So one learns about virtue by recognizing particular people who are excellent and happy people, and who one naturally wishes to emulate. But the "foundation" for Aristotelian virtue is very much tied up with practice or "habit." Only by doing something consistently will one become good at it. A virtue is an excellent-making quality of a human being. If one wishes to be an excellent human being then they must have the virtues, and the virtues are had by practice or familiarity. Then, for Aristotle happiness is had via excellence, but excellence is not sought as a means to the end of happiness. It's almost as if Aristotle would say that happiness is excellence seen in a particular light. For a simple example, the man who is an excellent soccer player is brought joy by playing soccer, but the joy and the activity of playing soccer well aren't really two different things. It's not as if he plays soccer well and then goes to the sideline to wait for someone to bring him his joy as a reward.
The suggestion, in Aristotle, and indeed in Greek philosophy generally, is that nous, the instrument of reason, is able to discern immaterial truths, those being the universal forms or ideas. 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the faculty that enables rational cognition. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which animals possess. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same rational ways. Derived from this it was also sometimes argued, in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it'.
While not denying the majority of what youve said, the focus on Christianity seems to me to be somewhat shortsighted. Ill try to succinctly explain why:
The ethos and mores of democratic governance have no historical grounding in Christianity, nor in any Abrahamic religion for that matter, but does have solid grounding in the pagan culture of Athens.
Paganism, be it Greek, Roman, or Egyptian, was to my knowledge always tolerant of differing and novel religions and spiritual practices. This so long as homage was also given to the respective pantheon of the governing body. In contrast, Abrahamic religions, Christianity included, deem all differing and novel religions and spiritual practices as heretical at best, as the beliefs of nonbelievers or "infidels", with labels of devil worship or else of demonic practices punishable by eternal damnation in Hell not at all uncommon, even in todays age. Hence, as historical facts go, paganism at root was (and yet remains) very tolerant. Whereas Abrahamic religions at root in no way are. (E.g., there is no recorded history Im aware of wherein pagan wars were fought on account of whose deities or spiritual beliefs were real or else true. In contrast, Christianity is overflowing with wars justified precisely on these grounds.)
As to pursuit of what can get termed spiritual enlightenment, ancient pagan societies (to be clear, of the West (added because some Christians consider Buddhism and the like to be pagan religions as well, if not outright demonic)) were by comparison to Christianity replete with theseand were never to my knowledge considered heretical, this unlike is the case with Christianity. Ive mentioned the Oracle at Delphi before, this as one well enough known example. Maybe more poignant, however, are the Eleusinian Mysteries, which lasted from who knows when in antiquity until 392 CE, when they were banned by Christian edicts. I dont think the significance of the Eleusinian Mysteries, on their own, can be easily overstated. Cicero, an extraordinary intellect who was himself an initiate of the mysteries, for example had this to say about them:
Quoting https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/eleusis
I'll keep this short.
All that said, as with many another, I value religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. There is no "the true religion" to me; and for those who have faith that their own religion is the only true one out there, I can hardly comprehend how they wouldn't be enamored by an outright theocracy. To be clear, to me, all religions (and at least some forms of atheism to boot) can be viewed as relatively unique paths on a mountain toward it's zenith, with the zenith not being a deity (including any omni-creator deity) but what gets termed as "The Good" (or, more atheistically addressed, "absolute objectivity of awareness/being"). And yet, this view I uphold of itself can well be labeled heretical, if not far worse, by many if not the majority of Christians who "keep the faith", so to speak. I say this form experience. And it's not quite what Jesus Christ had in mind, such as via his parable of the Good Samaritan.
Again, I don't sponsor authoritarian religions. And the institutional religion of Christianity by and large has all the barrings of such ... as in its yearning for theocratic governance (more or less the historic norm of Christendom) rather than for democratic governance and the spiritual tolerance generally required for it.
Yes, great stuff. :up:
So we could draw this back to the OP a bit (which is quite good):
We could reasonably think of Descartes' legacy as truncating the being of humans, and leading to an anthropology where "the highest virtue" is ratiocination or a kind of calculation (in much the same way that calculators manipulate numbers or LLMs manipulate text). The modern virtue of ratiocination is admittedly instrumental, for it is meant to provide power over nature, which in turn serves the ends that were deemed ultimate at that time. From there we get reactionary pendulum swings away from this virtue and this anthropology, such as in the Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the story continues...
For sure. I was thus characterising my own neo-Aristotelian stance and not Aristotle's own though I think his is more amicable to a relaxed naturalism than modern scientistic or physicalistic views are.
His essays on that theme were published in 2004 in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. (I had the opportunity to read most of them before the book was published either because he made the manuscripts available online or he published them separately, I don't recall which.)
:100: And the greater the political power, the greater the likely corruption. It's what checks and balances of power counteracts ... when it's not merely lip-service that gets itself corrupted: Like foxes self-appointed to guard the chicken roost.
Agreed on both counts. That's very nicely put. We indeed are in a difficult predicament.
Quoting Leontiskos
Nice.
I agree with you, but I already acknowledged somewhere in this thread (can't find it now) the role that ecclesiastical Chrisianity had in spawning atheism. Paul Tillich said the same! The inevitable consequence of 'no other God beside Me' and 'I am the Truth.... no other way but Me'. My way or the highway, and woe betide unto anyone who differs.
But again, there are literalistic and esoteric ways of understanding. The Gnostics had a completely different way of understanding these things, but they ended up on the wrong side of history - which is, as you know, written by the victors.
And the jealous God dies hard! A great deal of atheist polemic is clearly derived from its Christian forbears. No other substance, but matter energy, and no way of interpretation, save by the Method! Woe betide unto anyone who differs.
Yea, I very much agree, and find the Gnostic interpretations I've so far read to be far more coherent. Which reminds me: "Turn your other cheek". From what I've gathered from documentaries and such, turns out the Romans had two ways of slapping: with the back of the hand toward inferiors and with the palm toward those deemed of roughly equal worth. Interpreted in this context, to stand in front of a Roman soldier that slaps you as an inferior and turn your other cheek was a horrendously courageous act, in effect telling the armed other "hit my like an equal, not as an inferior". This in keeping with non-violent resistance, in line with that of, for example, Gandhi or MLK. And it makes a hell of a lot more sense than "repeatedly hit me till I die if you want". This being an easy to express alternative interpretation relative to common current culture.
But I wouldn't say the Gnostics were on the wrong side of history. When it comes to history, the fat lady hasn't yet sung, as they say.
[hide]Tillich argued that the God of traditional theism conceived as a supreme being among other beings, a kind of highest object existing out there was an idol (compare Heidegger's onto-theology) When religion presents God as an entity whose existence could be affirmed or denied like anything else, it reduces the Divine to the ontological level of finite beings. (This can be traced back to Duns Scotus' univocity of being', per Radical Orthodoxy).
For Tillich, that conception inevitably leads thoughtful people to reject God altogether. Hence his famous paradox:
1. To say that God exists is to deny him.
He means that existence belongs to finite entities within the world of being; God, by contrast, is Being-itself (Sein selbst), the ground or power of being that gives rise to all existents. To ascribe existence to God is to mistake him for a being within the world, not the depth of the worlds being. That sense of depth (i.e. 'heirarchical ontology') is precisely what is 'flattened out' in the transition to modernity.
2. How ecclesiastical religion provoked atheism
Tillich believed that institutional religion generally cling to mythic or literalized images of God as an external ruler, lawgiver, or cosmic person and demanded belief in these as propositional truths. Once those images lost credibility in the modern scientific and existential culture, faith collapsed, and theism gave way to atheism. But for Tillich, atheism in such cases was not a rejection of God but of an idolised representation (or, simply, idol).
He put it bluntly in The Courage to Be and elsewhere: modern atheism is a consequence of the victory of a particular image of God. When that image became untenable, people denied it rightly so, in his view.
3. The God beyond God
Tillichs answer was to recover a deeper, non-objectifying understanding of the divine what he called the God beyond God. This was not a being but the inexhaustible ground of all existents, and also the source of meaning and courage in the face of nonbeing. In this sense, genuine faith begins after the death of the God of theism. As he wrote in Systematic Theology:
God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.[/hide]
Sure. :up:
And I should say that there is no reason to believe that Aristotle sees this as an overly programmatic or even conscious process. He seems to think that people naturally emulate those they admire, and naturally begin to reflect on the qualities of those they admire as they grow older.
Quoting javra
Might I suggest that this is an overly rosey picture? For instance, across the Roman Empire vast numbers of people were tortured to death, publicly executed, or enslaved because they wouldn't offer sacrifices to the state gods and worship the emperors. Likewise, the Seleucids engaged in similar practices. And of course, aside from the well known attempts to genocide Christians out of existence there is the suppression of the Bacchic cult, Egyptian cults being made illegal on pain of capital punishment for essentially being demonic, etc. This is hardly an analog for modern religious pluralism and secularism.
More pointedly, the Near East had numerous genocidal wars that were framed in religious terms, where foreign peoples were exterminated and their idols and temples destroyed in honor of the dominant groups gods, often with victims explicitly sacrificed to the gods (Assyrian monuments being a fine example). The practice of the "ban" under which all men, women, children and even livestock were massacred as a sort of holy war is a prime example. There is for instance a Moabite monument celebrating the capture of an Israelite city and the sacrifice of all adults and children to Chemosh as offerings (this is not wholly out of line with even later Pagan culture, where Aeneas sacrifices many victims to the shade of Pallas, although here we are at least almost certainly supposed to see this as a lurch towards the beastial; yet it is still something a premier Roman hero could engage in and remain a hero).
Also, re Athens, consider why Socrates was executed. Anaxagoras narrowly escaped similar punishment for calling the sun a flaming stone and Protagoras supposedly had to flee the city for similar reasons (there being other mentions of people executed or exiled for "athiesm" as well).
From what I've seen, Tacitus and Juvenal are not outliers in referring to foreign cults as degenerate and immoral, or effeminate and tied to sexual deviance. A common propaganda point against Mark Antony was that his relationship with Cleopatra had led him to degenerate and essentially demonic foreign gods whose rituals involved sexual deviancy. The idea of foreign gods being malevolent is not new to Christianity; there are plenty of references to evil gods even in the Pagan philosophers. So too, the invective and propaganda leveled against Christians in antiquity wasn't something new, but more of a redirection of old bigoted tropes previously aimed at foreigners.
Pagan religion [I]could[/I] be inclusivist, particularly in terms of rebranding existing foreign gods under the dominant pantheon. It could also be brutally repressive. And in between it could be merely bigoted. The Norse had no qualms with justifying the mass murder, rape, and enslavement of the Christians for instance. But in part, this is merely because many religions called for no justification for wars waged explicitly for conquest, slave taking, rape, and pillage so long as they belonged to an appropriate out-group (often defined by religion in the East, less so in the West). Whereas, if such acts are considered inherently wrong, because all humans have dignity, some other sort of justification is required (and religion can be mustered for these ends).
The norms in question are often quite alien though. For instance, a villa decoration at Pompeii features Cassandra having her clothes torn off to be raped by Ajax; IIRC this is a feature picture for a dining hall. Hence, even outside the realm of religious tolerance, and especially in the realm of sexual norms and sexual violence, it's difficult to hold many "Pagan" cultures up as forerunners of modernity.
Quoting javra
I don't know what you mean here. You don't think that Jesus had in mind that the God of Israel is God and that, say, Jupiter is not? At any rate, "heresy" normally describes false teaching [I]within[/I] Christianity (or is applied similarly outside this context). An Arian who denied the divinity of Christ was a heretic, a Hindu cannot be a heretic because they are not advocating for false teachings related to Christianity.
Anyhow, how can it be that people who hold to a creed (Islam, Christianity, etc.) are in error for judging others to be in error in rejecting that creed, but you are not in error for judging them to be in error for subscribing to that creed? This is a difficulty with various sorts of perennialism too. To say that "everyone is right," but only if they agree that everyone is right, is actually to say that almost everyone is wrong (or to not take their claims seriously).
not to forget Socrates .
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Its not all lazy syncretism. Consider for example Fathers Bede Griffiths and Raymundo Panikkar. Both exemplified Christian virtue in close companionship with Indian religions. And I would think that the ability to accommodate a plurality of outlooks is essential in cosmopolitan culture.
And you could add more vilifying examples to your list. You address a lot of details, yet many details could in turn be presented against Abrahamic cultures. As just one example specific to rapes: Currently, were living though a silent crisis of sex slave trafficking in the West, a large portion of which are children, and our current western culture is by and large Abrahamic. Rape by clergy? Epstein and associates? But I doubt this approach might bring about any constructive ending. So Ill try to keep my argument generalized:
I did say at root. What is it of polytheistic religion as a groupingrather than the people that make use of it for their own political or else egotistic gainswhich instills intolerance for different and new religious perspectives? Perfect tolerance, no, granted. But then, in contrast, can it be soberly affirmed that Abrahamic religion does not at its core, at root, maintain intolerance for different and new religious perspectives?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What I meant is that if my views regarding the Good are not considered heretical, which they could be as you've defined the term, then they have been labeled demonic, with little ol' me being devil-possessed. And this having zilch to do with either my momentary of lifelong conduct as regards ethics.
Ive noted this time and again in debates here. But the problem usually manifests around the issue of the criteria for what can be considered good, because those criteria are not necessarily scientifically adjudicable. Meaning that an argument and an explanatory framework has to provided for what can be considered good, true, or ethically meaningful. And this is where the ever-present who says? or by what authority? enters the fray. At this point, appeals to Kant (deontology) and Aristotle (eudomonia) are considered philosophically acceptable, but if you bring an appeal to religion into the picture, then look out! (@baker) This is because scientific rationalism provides something like publicly-available normative standards, in a way that neither religious nor philosophical judgements seem to. Its objective -whereas philosophical and religious arguments are too easily seen as resting on the individual faith commitments or philosophical proclivities. That is where the false dichotomy that Putnam is describing originates (or so I would surmise, not having read the book.)
So Im trying to break this down in terms intelligible to analytic philosophy. I think the simplest way to portray it is in terms of a vertical axis - the axis of normative value judgements.
Consider the previously-discussed example from John Vervaeke. Vervaeke argues that normativity doesnt need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law and that its implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.
Our is our biological and cognitive architecture already entails competences that can be exercised well or poorly.
Ought simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences.
It might be asked, why then does this not apply to non-human beings such as the higher animals? The reason, I think, is that higher animals, though clearly intelligent and affectively rich, lack the capacity to imagine things being otherwise than as they are. They inhabit what Vervaeke might call an unbroken salience landscape a world of immediate affordances, where meaning is lived rather than reflected upon. Humans, by contrast, can step back from the immediate field of relevance, entertain counterfactuals, and evaluate our own salience-mappings. It also means that things matter to us in a way that they dont for animals. This reflexivity is the root of both our freedom and our moral burden.
As I understand Putnams book, from reading abstracts and reviews, his is not an entirely dissimilar type of argument - Vervaekes from cognitive science and Putnams from analytical philosophy.
In considering this in manners devoid of a cosmic (ultimate) telos, how would ethics not reduce to evolutionary processes of natural selection? Something I so far thought you were opposed to.
I dont think there is much of an argument to be made there. The main reason is that liberalism hardly took off in the first place, and was never present in any of the formative years of modernity. The many-pronged attack against liberalism was effective enough to give us so-called social or modern liberalism, which is liberal in name only (Neosocialism would be a better term). Herbert Spencer, for instance, documented how this occured in England in the mid-to-late 19th century, but classical liberals will attest to it as well.
In fact, any advance towards the freedom of individuals, like laissez-faire economics, is consistently met with a much stronger ideology. That ideology is a mixture of the fear towards the freedom of other men, the manorial love of order and obedience, and the glorification regarding the status of the arbiters of our lives, the state. Illiberalism, the opposite of liberalism, spawned the political aberrations of the 20th century, including so-called social liberalism. Illiberalism is the common thread of modernity and beyond.
And that, I think, is the thorn in the communitarian and ethno-nationalists argument: that their common enemy, liberalism and individualism, never took off in the first place, and indeed was actively supressed wherever it emerged. It simply isnt present anywhere, as a politics or a philosophy. As such, its persistence as a theme of modern decline is largely a bugaboo.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quite right.
The objection that is sometimes directed to the Aristotelian position which says, "Why ought I be virtuous rather than vicious?," could be rephrased, "Why ought I be competent rather than incompetent?" Once we move out of philosophical la-la land we see that such questions make little sense. Either they have more to do with eristic than genuine inquiry, or else they rely on a strong distinction between a moral ought and a non-moral ought that the objector refuses to define.
Back in the la-la land of rational philosophy, many a human is, or can become, quite competent at committing so-called "perfect crimes" where all negative repercussions are evaded, including those of theft, murder, and rape, amongst others.
To most, this then again turns to the issue of "competency at being virtuous" as the standard for ethical conduct--such that crimes, perfect or not, are all deemed unethical irrespective of the competency a human has in committing them.
Just saw that you modified and expanded the paragraph Ive quoted in my previous post. Assuming no further modifications to your previous post will be made:
In life as lived, many an honest enquiry will be eristic, at least to those who hold inconsistent positions.
As to refusal to define, myself, I was never asked, but if I were to be asked, Id succinctly reply thus: Those oughts which further ones proximity to the cosmic ultimate telos of perfected and complete eudemonia (one that is not just personal at expense of others, but globally applicable ... such eudemonia being interpretable as the ultimate good in both Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophies) will be oughts that are virtuous and hence ethical (though not necessarily moral as in slavery being moral in certain societies yet still unethical). On the other hand, those oughts which dont so further, arent virtuous and, hence, arent ethical.
This looks like a strawman coming from a contrarian position, and you seem to have been on a contrarian streak of late.
There is a sense in which competence is neutral with respect to certain ends. For example, the medical doctor's competence provides him with the ability to heal the body and also with the ability to harm the body. His knowledge of how the human body works provides him with both abilities.
Now if someone says, "Would you rather be a competent doctor or an incompetent doctor?," and your answer is, "I would not want to be a competent doctor because that would also make me competent at harming the human body," then I don't see that you've taken any of this very seriously. Instead of quibbling, the serious person would say, "I would rather be a competent rather than incompetent, even though someone who is competent in medicine also understands how to harm."
The deeper point is that indifference to competence or excellence is not a rational position, and only exists in philosophical la-la land. Humans do things, and humans want to do the things they do, well. That's all you need for an Aristotelian approach. The relativist will want to say that there is nothing normative about any human "doing." They would be forced to say, for example, that humans have no reason to prefer "doing" survival to "doing" death, and therefore the medical expert has no reason to prefer healing to harming. But this is irrational in the extreme. There are ends that are intrinsic to humanity, such as the gravitation towards pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Only philosophical la-la land is able to claim that there are no intrinsic human ends, or excellences, or competences. Only philosophical la-la land is able to claim that, "For all X and for all Y, X is not preferable to Y in any complete sense."
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Quoting javra
That's just not true. In fact it looks as though a very strange word game is being played.
Quoting javra
I think you'll find that if you privilege the most common good or telos in this way (as globalists do), then you end up fumbling the subsidiary goods and ends that are constitutive of the "cosmic ultimate telos." More simply, if individuals do not seek competence, then societies do not flourish. Saying, "Worry about the societal flourishing rather than individual competence," is a kind of non-starter. Aristotle links up individual ethics to the communal whole in the second part of the Nicomachean Ethics, namely the Politics. There is a two-way interaction between the individual level and the communal level.
In any case, if you admit that there is an ultimate telos that defines ethics, then you've failed to avoid the notion of competence or excellence, for competence will just be competence in relation to your ultimate ethical telos. Thus despite your contrarian objection, you too will prefer competence to incompetence.
Quoting Leontiskos
You have not addressed the issue other than by now conflating "competence" with "excellence". Which is a red herring.
Competence: 1 (uncountable) The quality or state of being competent, i.e. able or suitable for a general role. 2 (countable) The quality or state of being able or suitable for a particular task; the quality or state of being competent for a particular task or skill.
Excellence is far more ambiguous a term. All the same, the two terms are not synonymous.
Sorta frustrating that I need to explain this, but so be it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Reality? Because no one ever found Socrates's questions eristic, i.e. provoking strife, controversy or discord? Or maybe he didn't engage in "genuine enquiries".
Quoting Leontiskos
It was part of the definition I gave:
Quoting javra
This, in contrast to being competent at performing vices, such as those of perfect crimes.
The relevant word in question is aret? (?????).
Quoting javra
You're engaged in an equivocation between what is eristic and what is falsely believed to be eristic.
Quoting javra
Virtue = aret? (?????).
And yet the word used was "competence" not "virtue" (be it the Ancient Greek term for "virtue" or otherwise).
Quoting Leontiskos
How do you figure that one. Socrates was condemned to death for ...
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, which is, what in philosophical la-la land is termed, begging the question.
:100:
There is something unique to the human. I call it the personal. Reflexivity. Willing reasoning.
This power creates the predicament. We cant always be right, and even if we are right, we cant always (or maybe ever) know we are right.
So we flounder.
Being a person is to be in a predicament. Modernity thought we might be able to reason our way out of who we are. Post-modernity gave up on that, and instead just likes to wallow in our predicament and tries to call it good progress to do so.
Excellent question! Broadly, it means humans are confronted with the fact of their own mortality, in a way that animals are not. (This is not to say that some animals arent aware of death and dying, as elephants clearly are.) But it means wrestling with questions of meaning again in a way that animals do not.
(Speaking of wrestling, this is where John Vervaeke comes closer to a kind of spiritual longing. He speaks of strong transcendence comprising a noetic insight into a more integrated and in that sense higher level of Being, akin to the unitive vision of Neoplatonism. Hes trying to stay within the naturalist lane in all of this although to be honest I think his trajectory the last two years, in dialogue with many religious scholars and philosophers, is drawing nearer to a religious understanding.)
How this relates to evolutionary theory is a big subject. I will observe that in some important ways evolution has become a secular religion, a kind of naturalist creation myth in its own right (See Is Evolution a Secular Religion?, Michael Ruse, incidentally no friend of Intelligent Design.) But one of the consequences of this is the vanishing of the cognitive and existential facts that pertain to the human condition. I think it is because it enables us to see ourselves as a part of nature but in a scientific rather than religious sense. While the basic, empirical facts of evolution are undeniable, the question has to be asked, what philosophical resources does evolutionary biology provide us with? After all the aim of the theory is to demonstrate how species, including h. Sapiens, evolved. The drivers for those processes are biological, genetic and environmental, but it has long been appreciated that were genetically hardly different than our early h.sapiens ancestors of 100,000 years ago. And yet, look what has transpired in those aeons.
All kinds of meanings have been read into it from the theistic (Pierre Tielhard du Chardin) to the atheist (Richard Dawkins.) Without venturing into those difficult waters, all I will say is that the facts of evolutionary theory do not really comprise an existential philosophy, and that this can be said with no disrespect to those facts. Within this ambit, all manner of possibilities present themselves, including the possibility of transcendence.
Amongst all the themes emerging from this debate, one that has struck me is the insight that in h.sapiens, the evolutionary process has become aware of itself. No lesser light than Julian Huxley said the same:
However, I am closer to his more spiritually-inclined brother, Alduous, author of The Perennial Philosophy. Within that context, there are also expressions of the idea that we are life made conscious but set against the understanding that physical existence is but one phase or facet of the totality of Being.
:pray:
I cant find argument with anything youve said, and it was a very nicely expressed.
To succinctly add my own perspectives to its contents: What Julian Huxley refers to as the destiny of man I for one cannot differentiate from what was previously referred to as the cosmic (ultimate) telos. As to Tielhards omega point, from everything Ive so far read of it, it appears to hold an understanding of this very same cosmic ultimate telos, clothing the understanding with verbiage of a highly Christian aesthetic (and yet one that does not deny natural selection): where all life becomes one with Christ or something to the like. While from previous discussions I presume youd disagree, to further, this same cosmic ultimate telos can also, in my comprehension, be at pith deemed one and the same with what in Buddhism is termed Nirvana without remainder (or else certain Hindu interpretations of Moksha). As I previously mentioned, to me, these being different paths of different cultural and semantic scaffolding, each with its own unique understandings, toward the very same cosmic ultimate telos as absolute good: "The Good". Which also jives with Tillichs notion of to affirm Gods existence is to deny the reality of Godthis such that God is here not a supreme deity/being but the very ground to being itself whose perfection, again, is the ultimate cosmic telos. Such that this cosmic ultimate telos is either directly or indirectly, to use Aristotelian terms, the unmoved mover of everything within the cosmos. (Nor does the Gnostic esoteric interpretations of Christ that I've so far read appear to contradict any of this, to add one more example.)
Ill leave this as a roughly expressed food for thought as far as philosophical hypotheses go. (Justifying all this on a forum platform is a bit of a stretch but I can hardly find any logical inconsistency in all this were the premise of a cosmic ultimate telos to be at least hypothesized as true, such that this cosmic ultimate telos is of itself real: thereby entailing that its reality of itself is then the "is" which establishes all ethical "oughts".)
What do you mean? Are you talking about the US? Are you talking about phenomena like national Catholicsm?
In several traditionally Catholic European countries, there is a type of national Catholicism. It's the belief that a particular nation has the right scope of Catholicism and is superior to other nations who are also under Catholicism. So there are Italian national Catolics who believe they are superior to all other Catholics; and Austrian national Catholics who believe they are superior to all other Catholics, and so on. This was especially popular in the 1920's and into WWII. Officially, the Vatican is against it, but some people persist in it anyway.
Quoting Leontiskos
In other words, your description of "excellent and happy people" doesn't help to unequivocally identify particular examples of "excellent and happy people".
Quoting Tom Storm
How about we follow the money and suggest that what is going on is not a politization of institutionalized religion, nor a corruption -- but a correct, exact, adequate presentation of religion/spirituality.
That when we look at religious/spiritual institutions and their practitioners, we see exactly what religion/spirituality is supposed to be.
Quoting javra
From my dealings with religious/spiritual people, I surmise that the purpose of religion/spirituality is that it's a way to have power over other people and to live a comfortable life, without actually having to work for it or deserve it by virtue of one's high birth.
And of course, there are levels to this, not everyone has the same natural talent for it.
Quoting javra
It naturally has to, or else it couldn't be a separate religion.
It is wrong to think, though, that the modern religious pluralism and secularism is "more tolerant" because of some profound insight into the inherent worth of all human beings or some such.
The pursuit and punishment of misfits depends on pragmatic considerations: how much effort and money it will take to pursue them and punish them, and whether such effort and money are available.
The difference between, say, a Scandinavian prison and a prison in some banana republic isn't that the first is incomparably more humane in nature than the latter; it's that the Scandinavians have the money and other means to treat their prisoners kind-of-nicely, as opposed to the poor folks in the banana republic. The motivation --pursue and punish-- is the same in both cases, one side just has far more money and other means.
If modern-day religious/spiritual people don't burn people at the stakes this isn't because they would think that all people have a right to live or some such; but because it would be tedious to burn people like that, given the modern circumstances. But the intention to destroy people who don't fit and who don't obey, the contempt for them is there all the same.
You left out an important part of what I said:
"People tend to condemn an act as wrong when it happens to them or someone of the same category as they are, but are far more relaxed when the same act happens to someone whom they consider to be outside of their category."
For example, for a long time, violence against indigenous women was far less investigated than violence against women of other categories. Hence initiatives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_and_Murdered_Indigenous_Women.
And you suppose wrongly, as usual. And as usual, you take your suppositions as facts about me. (Which you then hold against me.)
The manner in which you conduct yourself in these exchanges is part of your message, don't forget that. And it's also part of the religious/spiritual message.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're barking up the wrong tree.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why should we be more papal than the pope?
Quoting Wayfarer
For no reason? If someone can come along and challenge me, I shouldn't I challenge them in return, end of story. How religious/spiritual.
Does this mean you are anti-relgion?
I resent I'm not as metaphysically street smart as they are.
It almost sounds like you resent the fact you are not immoral in an immoral world?
I can very much see your perspective, for, after all, there is no shortage in the world of myriad examples regarding exactly what you say.
To try to be more impartial about the subject, Ill address non-Western cultures. In Indian religions there are people termed or else considered to be Yogi, practitioners of tantra, a very complex topic on its own but, why I bring this up:
From my learning so far in my life, Ive seen in documentaries or else read of exemplars that, basically, live off the good-will of the cosmos (more precisely, of Brahman, in Hindu terms): nearly but-naked wanders that pretty much die (without much concern of dying to this world with a soul at peace) in absence of (what in the culture is always spiritually meaningful) handouts of food and drink from individuals in the communities they wander into. In Western understandings, a kind of perpetual beggar that does not in fact beg for anything. These I consider to either be authentic yogi of the East or, at worst, authentic seekers of deeper understanding/knowledge. Basically, they dont live for egotistic pleasures or interests but for spiritual awakening. And then drum roll please ... Ive also seen in documentaries self-labeled truly enlightened yogi dressed in as much bling-bling as you can imagine, rich as hell, charging exorbitant amounts of cash to heal others souls/being/karma/etc if only the others go through that leap of faith in granting the self-labeled truly enlightened maestro their property, or their blind obedience, etc. And, given what a yogi is supposed to be, but of course the latter category I then interpret to be pure charlatans that prey on the vulnerabilities of those in need
Even from a perfectly mundane and utterly nonspiritual point of view, it seems rather clear to me in the case Ive just outlined who the ethical individuals (those at least aiming to be as ethical as possible) are and who are utterly unethical.
And all this can easily become complicated. Suppose, hypothetically, that there are some psychics in the world which are both authentic and ethical (not to be confused with omniscient). Why should they not charge modest amounts of cash for their services (which some claim can be taxing) so as to put bread on the table? And yet, this very assumption in spiritual realms (not necessarily pertaining to any one religion, if any) of course then opens up a netherworld of absolute charlatanry for those who are neither authentic nor ethical.
I, again, have no gripe against your apparent derision of both religions and spirituality in general. IMO, one would have to be blind to not see all the wrongs that get done in their name. And its here that I say, to each their/our own convictions on the matter. My own previously mentioned post regarding a cosmic ultimate telos as the Good is, to be forthright, at pith strictly concerned with a rational means of establishing ethical oughts and distinguishing them from those that are not. (Although, as previously mentioned, I find that a forum platform is no place to properly justify it.) And, other than such a telos being incompatible with physicalism as a metaphysical system (and although I myself happen to believe in the possibility of spiritual domains), I quite blatantly can find no reason why spiritual domains and the religions built around them must be in any way adopted within ones system of beliefs, this even if one maintains the realty of "The Good" as just addressed. For that matter, if "a comic ultimate telos as the Good" happens to not make any sense to you, for my part, Id only want that you/anyone not entertain the concept via any sort of blind faith. Basically, to preach to the choir, dont believe things that dont make sense to you. (So not believing, to me, is an important aspect of virtue.)
Can you elaborate? It's not clear to me what is meant by "exactly what religion/ spirituality is supposed to be". Supposed by whom?
Quoting baker
Today, rape, torture and murder are generally considered to be crimes even against the "enemy' in war. That indigenous people were once widely thought of as less than human, usually on account of religious attitudes, is not relevant.
Quoting baker
What does being "metaphysically street smart" look like to you?
I think that is just a tad cynical.
These yogis and swamis, ascetics, for short, are not living in a vacuum. They live in a culture that believes that giving to ascetics is a deed that brings the giver good karma, in this life and the next. Before they set on the path of asceticism, they knew they can rely on the piety of people. It's also why a similar culture of asceticism doesn't exist in the West: prospective "professional, full-time spiritual seekers" know they can't simply rely on the piety of ordinary folks to provide for them. It's just not part of the local culture to do so.
Sure, like the ultimate precariat. Except that they live, like I said above, in a very specific culture, unlike the Western one.
But they rely on other people not doing the same. These ascetics rely on other people _not_ becoming ascetics themselves.
I know Buddhists (very educated monks, actually) who take no issue with monks wearing silk robes and having gold watches. They take such things simply as signs of having very generous supporters. And that's nothing to be frowned upon.
I think this is a rather rosy, naive view.
If we say that a fat doctor advising his patients to lose weight is not wrong and shouldn't be dismissed, nor should his advice be questioned, then why not apply the same logic with the rich yogis? Why should they be considered unethical just because they are rich?
I think the problem is elsewhere. In the traditional Eastern conception of things, people are generally expected to feel grateful to receive any kind of religious/spiritual guidance, and let's say, for the purpose of the discussion, that they typically are. It's part of their culture. Their culture is, after all, one where the student is supposed to beg for religious/spiritual guidance. And then they show their gratitude in terms of monetary donations and favors. And so the system works: the commoners get their spiritual/religious guidance, and the ascetics their upkeep. After all, it all functions in the framework of karma and rebirth/reincarnation.
In contrast, in the West, religious/spiritual guidance is typically forced upon people, against their will, until recently, physically forced on them, under threat of eternal damnation or at least socio-economic ostracism. The Gospel is supposed to be "glad tidings", but how many people are actually glad about it, like, actually glad, not just pretend glad? In the West, people have to figure things out within the framework of one lifetime, and if they get it wrong, it's either all over, or worse, they live with the predicament of eternal torment, with no respite. It's no surprise that the Western approach to religion/spirituality is so gung-ho, and it's precisely because of the conviction of there being only one lifetime in which we can act. And the reason is not authoritarianism, as @Wayfarer likes to suppose; both East and West are authoritarian, but it all works out differently, depending on whether karma and rebirth/reincarnation are taken for granted, or not.
It's not derision, though. I'm not being cynical about it. That's what some of you are reading into my posts. I'm angry with myself for not having figured it out earlier, but that's it.
But why this insistence on a telos, an ethics that is at odds with how the world actually works??
I'm also confident that the Easterners have a quite different conception of the "Good" than the Westerners. To begin with, their idea of "selflessness" or "egolessness" is _not_ what Westerners tend to mean by it.
The real question is, what is that "Good"?
Is it really what some good boy scouts imagine it to be?
I don't doubt there is a "Good"; it seems to follow logically that such a thing exists. However, I question what that "Good" actually is.
By the religious/spiritual people themselves.
Look at the dates in the statistics in the link. This is recent.
For starters, overcoming the good boy scout mentality. I sometimes watch the livefeed from our parliament. The right-wing parties are the religious/spiritual people. The way they are is what it means to be "metaphysically street smart". I haven't quite figured it out yet completely, but I'm working on it.
Cynical is a word used by Pollyannas to denote an absence of the naiveté they so keenly exhibit.
Miss Sloane
If anything, I think you are exemplifying the problem that the OP is seeking to explain. You are the one who is modern, not I.
If you look at the original post, it actually is not about religion. It is more along the lines of intellectual or social history - about how undercurrents in Western culture gave rise to the sense of a meaningless universe. Religion is part of that, but it's not intended as religious apologetics or evangalisation, so a little less 'negative evangalisation', or perhaps, nothing at all, would be preferable.
And this is your projection, that I'm stating 'what is wrong with religion'. You insist on reading that into my posts, and no matter how hard I try to explain otherwise, you won't desist. As if you are the authority over what the truth about my intentions is. You just bulldoze over me. You don't distinguish between my words and your interpretation of them. You have an extremely narrow-minded view of things. You regurgitate the same old notions, and you read other people's posts within the framework of those same old notions.
Ironically, with your particular approach to communication, you're making yourself an example of what you're criticising. It's hard to believe you're not seeing that, or that it isn't deliberate.
You're basically making sure that the discussion remains superficial and within the established framework of your old notions.
Talking to people like you, even I get the feeling that life is meaningless.
Are you saying that the religious people themselves have a cynical view on what religion is supposed to be?
Quoting baker
You're right. I didn't read it more than cursorily. It's certainly true that old attitudes to women and indigenous folk generally, which were certainly significantly driven and justified by religious beliefs, still linger on today.
Quoting baker
OK, I'm obviously less clear on what you mean than you are. Is it something like metaphysics-as-politics? Or, given that the political right is generally associated with the idea that individuals, their personal achievements and the merits and privilege that thereby accrue to them, are more important than social values which support looking after those individuals who "don't make the grade"; is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
We might take that as something unequivocally bad, like Marx for instance... or as something that is a part of a society, but not necessarily for everybody, like Nietzsche.
Not at all. I think they have a very instrumental, down-to-earth (sic!) understanding of the "transcendental".
It's the secularists and the liberals who have it all wrong, because they are trying to paint an image of religion/spirituality that is palatable to their secular and liberal goals and sensitivities. Which makes for a very rosy, naive image, grossly unrealistic, not something that a person could actually live by.
The secularists and the liberals seem to like to forget that money needs to be earned, the earth tilled, work get done.
Secularists and liberals seem to think that wealth and power are dirty, and can only be dirty. I think this is where they are wrong. (And let's not forget that they themselves seek wealth and power.)
A character in a Turkish soap opera (yes, I watch some of them) once made an excellent point: Only God can afford to give without demanding or expecting something in return. A human cannot do that, because humans have only limited resources that they need to use very carefully. One should be wary of a human who assumes to give without demanding or expecting something in return. Such a person will eventually become bitter, cruel, and revengeful. It simply isn't in the power of humans to give without demanding or expecting something in return. And it has nothing to do with being selfish or stingy or otherwise having a bad character.
In contrast, you can frequently see secularists and liberals, sometimes in the garbs of the religious/spiritual, who actually teach that one should be selfless, give selflessly. But this is simply not realistic, and I agree with the insight above.
That too. It's a kind of Social Darwinism, but with a religious/spiritual theme. I find that the religious, at least the traditionalists, are far more serious and realistic about life, about the daily struggle that is life. I appreciate that about them and about religion.
Quoting baker
There is a difference, though, between individuals not giving to others because they have no excess to give, and the supposedly God-given right of individuals to accumulate as much wealth and power as they are able to without being morally required to give at all if they don't feel like it. Their right to do this is predicated on the idea of individual merit?if they have the ability to accumulate wealth and power they should be allowed to do so unrestrictedly. But this ignores that fact that individuals use the privilege and benefits of a society that everyone (ideally and if the able to) contributes to, in order to rise as far as they can on power/ wealth scale. There is no acknowledgement , in that kind of thinking, of what the individual relies on?the societal infrastructure. So, I see it as a kind if willful blindness on the part of the right?and a kind of hypocrisy.
You'll need to try harder:
Quoting baker
[quote=Baker] "There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius."
Of course there is abundant evidence of such efficacy. But what exactly is it that is efficacious, is another matter.
On the other hand, there are also many studies and reports of people saying how religion makes them miserable.[/quote]
[quote=Baker] "David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empires pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted..."
You have got to be kidding. Or your baseline for human interaction is very, very low.[/quote]
[quote=Baker]Only God can afford to give without demanding or expecting something in return. A human cannot do that, because humans have only limited resources that they need to use very carefully. One should be wary of a human who assumes to give without demanding or expecting something in return. Such a person will eventually become bitter, cruel, and revengeful.[/quote]
You can see why I said that this suggests a cynical view of religion, can't you? Or am I reading it all wrong?
Peter L. P. Simpson wrote a book named Goodness and Nature: A Defence of Ethical Naturalism and a Critique of its Opponents. He also wrote a supplement to that book which is meant to elaborate on the historical origins of the problem, and this supplement is freely available: Supplement on Historical Origins. In that supplement he devotes about 15 pages to Descartes, and you might find that section interesting. He pairs him with Bacon rather than Galileo, but this is because his project is slightly different from yours.
Big piece of work! Im impressed by it although have as always a large stack of things I ought to read. But anyway :pray: