Living in the Present

The present is the point at which the past is recollected and the future anticipated.

It is often urged on us to live in the now. That is, to live in the present. It is thought that this involves forgetting the past and avoiding paying attention to the future, for both the past and the future make us anxious. Instead, it is advised that one exist in the moment, what is happening right now.

This is a misunderstanding. For someone who does not recollect himself in the moment, or anticipate the future in the moment, is living nowhere rather than in the moment. It is true that he may be free of anxiety because he is not remembering the past or anticipating the future, but then animals live this sort of anxiety-free life. But to live as a human being means to live in relation to the past and the future.

And even when, for a time, he has this sort of anxiety-free existence (as, for instance, when he loses himself in a hobby in his basement, or becomes lost in the excitement of a championship game) he is not really experiencing the anxiety-free life of the animal; for, at any moment, the spell might be broken and his distinctively human recollection of the past and anticipation of the future will come rushing back in. He will suddenly find himself existing somewhere rather than nowhere, with all the anxiety that entails.

Truly living in the present is the most difficult of art forms. It means recollecting the past and anticipating the future in such a way that it has immediate decisive significance. Man acts in the now, but only as a bridge uniting his recollection of the past with his anticipation of the future. It is an art form because no science of living in such a manner is possible; for science of its nature abstracts from the decisive significance of the present in relation to the past and future.

Kierkegaard, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, takes monks to task for their distinctive dress.  The mistake, according to Kierkegaard, is that it is a false attempt to represent the inner determination of the spirit via an outward material sign. But the "knight of the spirit" is not so easily recognized; in fact, he is not immediately recognizable at all, for the inner determination of spirit may be married to any outward material circumstance.

SK is wrong, I think, in his understanding of the meaning of the monk's simple robe. For us, the robe is simply a witness to the vow the monk has made to a life of simplicity in the following of Christ. The inner state of his spirit is something else entirely; it may wax and wane in its dedication to that vow. It is similar to the ring of the married man, which symbolizes a vow the man has made, not the state of his success in living up to it.

More to the point of this post, for the monk the robe is a continual reminder of his vow, and his uniting of the past with the future in his vow of the simple life for Christ. It is an aid to the art of living in the moment, of giving every moment its due not by forgetting the past and the future, but by a unification of the past with the future in a blossoming of immediate decisive action.

For most of us, such immediately decisive action occurs only rarely. We make a decision on which college to attend, or to propose to our girlfriend, or to move to another city. In such moments we feel truly alive, as we see our past come together in a decisive determination of our future. And we are right, for in such moments we are truly living as distinctively human beings.

The task for our lives is to make more of the unfolding present alive with such decisiveness. This does not mean continually making the decision to move to another city; for that would only rob any particular decision of its decisiveness for the future. No, like the monk, we must find a way to unite all our actions, even the small ones, in the present and in light of the past and in anticipation of the future.

Universalism

By Universalism I mean the position that all are eventually saved; in other words, that the population of Hell will be zero.

Edward Feser has had several back and forths with David Bentley Hart on the issue. My point here is not to enter the debate between Feser and Hart but to consider Universalism from a different perspective.

Let us suppose that Universalism is true, and that we know it is true. Then we know that everyone will eventually enjoy eternal bliss; in particular, I will eventually enjoy eternal bliss no matter what I do on this Earth. For me, at least, this is a very dangerous thing to believe, for I am always looking for reasons to remain in my sins, which I find quite comfortable even if I know intellectually that they are essentially bad for me.

I almost wrote "ultimately" bad for me, but that isn't quite right if universalism is true, for in that case no sin is ultimately bad for me, since I will ultimately enjoy eternal bliss. But even if that is ultimately true, it is nonetheless true that I know I would be objectively happier if I were not sinning rather than sinning.

There is no hurry, though, is there, if universalism is true? I might be more perfectly happy if I shed some of my sins, but I am not unhappy and in fact I'm quite comfortable as I am. So why stress out about confronting and conquering sin? Christ in the New Testament exhorts us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. That's nice advice for someone with ambitions to be a saint, but I have no such ambitions. If I'm ultimately destined for eternal bliss, why go through all the hassle? As the Five Man Electrical Band sang - "Thank you Lord for thinkin' bout me, I'm alive and doin fine."

Sure, I might have to go through some pain in the next life before experiencing that eternal bliss, but that's all a little vague compared to the very real suffering and inconvenience involved with confronting sin in this life. I've never been one to seek out the hard road when the easy road is available - especially when I'm assured they both end up in the same place.

These points are not meant to be rhetorical or flip. I abandoned the Catholic faith after high school because I found it entirely irrelevant to my life. The upshot of my 70's Catholic education was that sin wasn't really a big deal, Jesus wanted to be my friend, and he was always willing to forgive anything - which, I presumed, would include ignoring him. So why not get on with the business of this world and then get back to Jesus sometime later?

It was only later when I began to understand that my Catholic "education" was no education at all that I began to rethink things. For me, the reality of sin and its eternal implications is the only reason to take Christianity seriously in the first place. If universalism is true, then sin is not (in Kierkegaard's terms) "eternally decisive."  Neither is our relationship to Christ in this life decisive. Follow him, reject him, ignore him, twice-a-year Catholic him, what does it matter? Ultimately, it won't.

I wonder if there is a mode of existence in hell that is universalist (this is NOT to claim that anyone believing in universalism is going to hell). But if universalism implies that there are no decisive eternal implications for a lack of a relationship with Christ in this life, why not in the next? Perhaps there are individuals in hell who recognize their sins but are comfortable in them, and tell themselves they will repent tomorrow, with tomorrow (naturally) never arriving. Maybe C.S. Lewis treated this idea in The Great Divorce. It's been a long time since I read that book.

I'm in danger of being one of those eternally procrastinating guys - which is why I find the idea of universalism a temptation to be rejected.

Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

What is it to be "heavy laden"? For me, it has been the effort to make my life meaningful by filling it up. You get one shot at life, I thought, and I didn't want to waste it. So I've got to be something and do things, and I've got to start right now, because life is passing by even as I speak. This was how I thought as a young man.

But be what and do what? That's not so easy a question to answer. For there is the problem of opportunity cost. To do something or to be something is implicitly to choose not to do or be all the other things you could have done or been. To become an engineer is not to become an English teacher, an historian, or a philosopher. Suppose you choose the wrong thing? You will have invested long time and effort to become something you should never have been. And there is no "do-over." You can't get those years back that you invested in becoming something you were not.

I always envied the nerds who knew who and what they were: engineers. No anxious struggle about life's direction for them. I, on the other hand, could be interested in just about anything but not overwhelming passionate about anything. So I would flit from thing to thing, hoping to land on one that I would somehow know was "me", like finding the girl you "just knew" was the one for you.

In his Either:Or, Kierkegaard discusses something he calls the "rotation method": This is a way someone bored with life keeps himself from going crazy. What he does is pursue an interest for a while until it becomes fatigued and he is bored with it. He then moves onto another interest, going from one to another until he eventually, after enough time, comes back to the first which has become interesting again through neglect. This was essentially what I did. My best friend used to ask me what "kick" I was currently on.

There is an alternative. And that is, instead of trying to fill up your life with either things you are becoming or things you are doing, to recognize the futility of that approach, and instead empty your life. But isn't that just giving up on life itself? Yes, it is and would be, and is why the great philosophers like Aristotle did not recommend it. But the fact of Christ changes everything.

For by emptying yourself and taking on the burden offered by Christ, you open yourself to the possibility that Christ Himself will fill you, and satisfy you in a way not possible for anything on Earth. As Kierkegaard would say, it is the difference between filling yourself with the eternal versus the merely temporary.

That sounds all well and good, but how do I know such satisfaction is an actual reality rather than, say, merely a pious hope? For if it is merely a pious hope, then the apparent death that would happen if I empty myself is an actual death. The rotation method may be unsatisfying and ultimately lead to despair, but at least it is something, and I get at least the satisfaction that I am trying.

This is where the matter of faith comes in. Faith in this context does not mean a blind belief in something you know to be false or have no reason to believe is true. It means to act take a chance and act on trust. Is the Gospel true? Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead and show that a life of self-emptying is really a life of true fulfillment rather than a living death? I cannot prove that in any absolute sense. But then I don't think that is necessary. At least it wasn't for me.

It was enough for me to establish that the Gospel was at least plausible. Furthermore, I was and am firmly convinced that something highly unusual happened in Palestine in the first century. For the events that launched the Christian religion form a hinge point in history, one that turned the world from an eternal cycle of civilizational births and deaths, with one epoch not so different from any prior one, to a world launched in history, one condemned to development and change, and charging through time to some denouement to happen when no one knows. (See Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for the classic development of this theme.)

The conviction that something transcendent happened at the origin of the Christian religion, and my own recognition of the futility of trying to make life significant by filling it up, was enough to allow me to make the act of faith in renouncing the life I had been following and instead attempt to empty it and follow Christ. Yes, there was a bit of Pascal's Wager going on here.

What does it mean to embrace a self-emptying life in the name of Christ? It means to sacrifice all things you might have become or done for the sake of following Christ, and that means living for others rather than yourself. For me, it meant that instead of pursuing various hobbies obsessively I would spend that time coaching youth soccer or playing games with my children. It meant accepting a professional career that I might not have been passionate about, but was competent enough at to be successful enough to support a family. And it is to accept that as the years go on, working at a job that is just a job, and getting older and slower, missing the experiences I might have had, that in fact I was not slowly dying but rather accumulating treasure in Heaven, which is Christ Himself.

There are consolations. The vanity of earthly pursuits becomes more obvious as one grows older. And  we find that there are earthly rewards as well: Matthew 6:33. But these rewards also constitute a temptation, for they renew the possibility of life as self-fulfillment: I have filled my life with family rather than experiences or personal development. If we are following Christ, we devote ourselves to our family for His sake, not our own. If we give in to the temptation to the latter, then we are open to grasping after our family (e.g. helicopter parenting, or forcing our children to take their freedom when they are older rather than giving it to them as free equals.)

And it's not like flipping a switch. More like a slow process where one gradually weans oneself from the temptation to grasp at life rather than renounce it for Christ. And I am constantly tempted to grasp, especially in retrospect. The last few years I have taken up long distance running as a way to avoid getting old faster than necessary. Running a weekly 5k fun run here in town, I find myself envying the younger men (in their 30's and 40's) who did not wait until they were 50 to take the sport seriously. I wonder what I could have done had I taken running more seriously back then. But at that time I was changing diapers, or coaching youth soccer teams, or going to little league games, or playing board games with my daughter. I imagine an alternative history in which I have filled my life with such things and am happy, a history that I know is a lie, and thank God that he gave me the grace to see the futility of that life before I had misspent it.

Chesterton and Kierkegaard on the Difference of Christ

What difference does Christ make?

This question has many answers in many different contexts. Two of my favorite writers, G.K. Chesterton and Soren Kierkegaard, focus on the difference Christ makes in terms of human possibility.

Man is different from other animals insofar as he lives self-reflected in a world. Beavers and dogs don't worry about how they relate to the world; they just exist as they are unselfconsciously in the world. They are the world. But man knows himself as who he is in relation to the world. Kierkegaard describes this difference in The Sickness Unto Death in terms of the self as "a relation which relates itself to itself." The fact that man by nature relates himself to the world means his existence, unlike that of non-rational animals, is a dialectic of possibility and necessity. I understand who I am (or think I understand), and I also understand the world and my place in it, and in terms of that relationship life presents a present reality of necessity and a horizon of possibility. I exist as a relationship to the world, but I can know that relationship and (perhaps) change it - I can relate myself to the relationship which constitutes my self in the world.

But I can do that only in terms of the possibilities available to me, and those are constituted by my philosophy. What sort of possibilities are available to the natural but pre-Christian man, that is, the pagan man? Chesterton in Orthodoxy describes the pagan world as a world of pink. The great pagan virtue is moderation; a little of everything but not too much of anything. Red and white mixed together, not too much of each. This is a natural and sensible policy, and in the pagan world it produced great men like Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius. The ideal gentleman is a little bit of a warrior and a bit of a scholar as well. He drinks wine but not too much; he loves others but not too much of that either. For love is a form of madness and madness is unbalanced. Above all he maintains self-control, for he knows that the world contains good things as well as evil things, and that it ends in death. He keeps these facts before him and holds himself well so that he is neither carried away by good fortune, nor destroyed by misfortune, for life inevitably involves both. There is no better wisdom in a world without Christ, especially in a world that cannot imagine Christ. The life of balanced moderation is the best life that the best pagan mind could imagine; it defines the horizon of pagan possibility.

What has changed with Christ? The Gospel of John tells us that His first miracle occurred at Cana, and involved the replenishment of wine at a wedding feast that had run dry. We can assume that the host of the feast had on hand an appropriate amount of wine for the celebrations. It would seem, then, that any additional wine would violate the principle of moderation; we've gone from having a sensible good time to getting drunk in excess. But this is why it is a miracle, for a miracle is more than merely the suspension of ordinary physical expectations; it is a sign and revelation of a new order of existence, an order that breaks through the old pagan compromises and proposes a way of life that answers to the transcendent meaning of Christ. The exhaustion of the wine at Cana symbolizes the exhaustion of pagan virtue and the existential hopes it offered. The party is over; it is expected to be over and the celebrants are prepared to go home; no one can imagine the party continuing, or at least continuing with any propriety. But Christ can imagine it, and through His grace he turns water into wine, that the party may continue, theoretically indefinitely. From that moment forward the horizon of pagan hope has been forever shattered, for the possibility that it is not the final limit, that there is a way of life that is not bound by pagan compromises, has been permanently introduced into the human imagination.

Chesterton describes the difference as a world of pink becoming a world of bold reds and whites; reds for the warriors and whites for the monks. There were warriors in the ancient world, of course, and pacifists as well. But the pure warrior, like the pure pacifist, could not express an ideal human type because he violated the principle of moderation or balance. More significantly, the warrior and the pacifist had nothing to do with each other. Each might despise the other and, if they didn't, by the nature of things they at least expressed different philosophies of life. But in Christendom the martial Knight was as much an expression of the authentic Christian life as was the peaceful Monk. Far from expressing opposite philosophies of life, they both expressed different ways of performing the same mission: Redeeming the world in the name of Christ. Chesterton states the difference this way: In the ancient world the balance of existential possibilities was expressed in the single individual of the moderate, virtuous gentleman. In Christendom, the balance of possibilities occurred in the Church as a whole rather than individuals:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescencies exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold an crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionnaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not walkways in one man's body ad in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon.  - Orthodoxy, Ch. 6

For both Chesterton and SK, the advent of Christ permanently changed the nature of existence and of the world - and that whether you believe in Christ or not. The key point they share in this regard is that Christ revealed possibilities that were unimagined prior to the Incarnation. After the Incarnation, those possibilities cannot be eradicated from the human spirit, even if Christ Himself is later denied. The price of denying Christ cannot be a simple return to the pre-Christian world, for the possibilities he revealed will remain in the human imagination- it is only their fulfillment that will become impossible, since that fulfillment is only possible with the grace of God. The result is that post-Christian life can never be a simple return to paganism; it will instead be one of melancholy and despair.

Science, Philosophy, Direct and Indirect Knowledge

For many, including Jerry Coyne, the significant distinction in knowledge is between scientific knowledge and all other kinds of knowledge (if there are any; in his Faith vs. Fact, Coyne can barely bring himself to acknowledge anything other than science.)

But the more important distinction for us is between direct and indirect knowledge. Direct knowledge is knowledge that is known immediately by us and on our own authority. Indirect knowledge is knowledge that we are related to only through someone else; it is mediated by those others and therefore always involves the issue of authority, for it is on the basis of authority that we determine whom to listen to or not.

Examples of direct knowledge include things like the fact that you can't be in two places at the same time, that you are younger than your parents, and that dogs are produced by nature but automobiles are only products of human artifice. Some (but not all) of mathematics is direct knowledge. You don't need an authority to tell you that 2+2=4. And if you can follow Euclid's proof that there are an infinite number of primes. then the fact that there are an infinite number of primes is direct knowledge for you.

Suppose you can't follow the proof. Then you can still be related to that fact as knowledge, but only indirectly through the authority of someone else who can follow the proof. A consequence of this is that the same piece of knowledge can be known directly by some and indirectly by others. Everyone knows 2+2=4 on his own authority; but very few people know that Fermat's Last Theorem is true on his own authority, for its proof is so sophisticated that only the most educated mathematicians can follow it.

It can be seen that indirect knowledge depends on direct knowledge. If I'm taking something on the authority of another, it is not unreasonable for him to be taking it on the authority of another as well, but somewhere the chain has to end with someone who simply knows it directly. Otherwise we have a train with nothing but freight cars and no engine. (An example is a child who believes in the Big Bang on the authority of his teacher, who in turn believes it on the authority of cosmologists. But the cosmologists know it directly because they have gone through and understand the scientific case for the Big Bang.)

What about science? Jerry Coyne tells us on page 187 of Faith vs Fact that "I see science as a method not a profession... Any discipline that studies the universe using the methods of 'broad' science is capable in principle of finding truth and producing knowledge. If it doesn't, no knowledge is possible." So to have "science" in the strict sense we must produce it through the method that defines science. Unfortunately, very few of us - actually no one - has the time or resources to develop his entire base of knowledge through the application of scientific methods. We must, to a great degree, rely on the application of the scientific method that others have performed and take their results as a given; or, rather, we can only be related to their scientific knowledge indirectly through appeal to their authority as scientists.

The irony of the advance of science is that the more it advances, the less it becomes directly available to any individual man. Back in the early days of modern science, an intelligent amateur could keep abreast of, and perhaps reproduce, most of the crucial scientific results. It's not hard to reproduce Galileo's experiments with rolling balls and, if he can get his hands on a telescope, verify the existence and movements of Jupiter's satellites for himself. And he can easily reproduce Franklin's experiments with electricity or Pascal's with atmospheric pressure. But as science advances, it requires increasingly expensive and elaborate apparatus to construct experiments; and those experiments themselves require a much larger base of knowledge to understand. A high school student can be brought to an understanding of Galileo's experiments in acceleration in the course of one day's class. He'll need another four or so years of intensive education, at least, to understand how and why recent experiments have demonstrated the existence of the Higgs boson, assuming he is capable of mastering the relevant material at all. And that student, while mastering physics, will not be spending his time mastering biology and genetic science, so that, however much he might end up directly related to knowledge in physics, he will still be indirectly related to all that genetic science produces, and all that the other sciences produce. So the more science advances, the more all of us are indirectly related to scientific knowledge, including scientists themselves.

It thus becomes crucial for us to understand the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge, how they are related, and how to handle each type of knowledge appropriately. I've already discussed the distinction between the two types of knowledge. How are they related? As pointed out above, indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge, since indirect knowledge is really just direct knowledge removed some number of times from the original source.

But indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge in another way, and that is subjectively. By that I mean the only means we have available to evaluate indirect knowledge is through direct knowledge. When a scientist says that the Big Bang is true, how do I know whether to believe him or not? I could appeal to some other instance of indirect knowledge, for instance that other scientists agree with him, but this only pushes the problem back a step, since I now have to think about how to evaluate that piece of indirect knowledge. Again, at some point I must have recourse to something I simply know directly, through which I can evaluate competing claims of indirect knowledge.

The process of analyzing and appropriating direct knowledge is philosophy. The crucial distinction with direct knowledge is that it is not mediated; that is, it must ultimately be known without reliance on anyone else. Kierkegaard discusses this in his analysis of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. A true teacher - that is, in my terms, a teacher of direct knowledge - is only the occasion by which someone comes to know, and the process has only completed when the teacher has become dispensable. It is for this reason that philosophy does not "progress" or produce "results" - one of the perennial charges against it. A "result" is knowledge that can be appropriated without reproducing the process by which it came to be known - for example, when an engineer uses the facts about electronic devices to design a system without first proving all those facts scientifically for himself. "Results" are therefore by nature indirect knowledge. Philosophy cannot produce "results" without falsifying itself; and everyone who would make progress in philosophy must reproduce for himself the process by which philosophers have come to know - and in the process, make those philosophers dispensable. There are no "results" that can be handed on from Plato's Republic. But someone who reads it may come to know things for himself that he might otherwise not know.

The fact that the teacher becomes dispensable is one characteristic of philosophy; another is that it appeals to direct experience as its evidential basis, on the eminently reasonable principle that it is the only possible basis. For my own, immediate experience is the only direct contact I have with reality (if in fact I have contact with reality at all); anything else is mediated and therefore a subject of indirect knowledge. This too, like the fact that philosophy doesn't produce "results", sometimes puts people off philosophy, for it makes philosophy seem a matter of purely "subjective" preference. And it is subjective, in the sense that it is only I that have access to my own experience. This is true, necessary and unavoidable, nearly tautological, yet is frequently overlooked. From p. 195 of Faith vs Fact:

"I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

The fact you feel hungry is a fact concerning reality as much as any other. Whether you really need to eat or not is irrelevant to the truth that you in fact have the feeling . Ultimately, science itself depends on subjective knowledge, because scientists must read meters and look through microscopes - "I am seeing an amoeba through this lens" or "The voltmeter says 5 volts." There is really no way to escape the subjective nature of these experiences. For instance, trying to "independently verify" them as Coyne suggests, for instance, by asking someone else whether they see 5 volts as well, may be a reasonable procedure, but it only works because we take our subjective experience of what someone else tells us - "I am hearing Joe say the voltmeter reads 5 volts" - as itself not in need of independent verification. Otherwise, we are back to the familiar infinite regress that comes up so often in this context.

The philosopher faces the fact that all our knowledge - direct, indirect or otherwise - can ultimately be evaluated only in light of our own personal experience. The philosopher serves as an ultimately dispensable aid in analyzing and discovering the significance and meaning of that experience. The scientist simply takes the meaning of personal experience for granted so he can get on with his science. And he is perfectly justified in this, but he is in danger, like Coyne, of misunderstanding the real relationship between science and philosophy - which is really a misunderstanding of the basic human condition.

Coming next: How direct knowledge is used to evaluate indirect knowledge. Hint: Read Plato's Apology.

American Sniper, Extraordinary and Ordinary Virtue

American Sniper is a wonderful movie that I hope is not overlooked at the Oscars for its somewhat politically incorrect moral clarity. Moral ambiguity is nowadays misunderstood as moral sophistication, and a film that draws clear lines between the good guys (Chris Kyle and his fellow American soldiers) and the bad guys (Islamic radicals) is seen as simplistic. But modern moral "sophistication" is really just an expression of the emptiness of contemporary secular ethics, which, failing to find a foundation for simple and obvious moral distinctions - like the distinction between terrorists who use children to deliver bombs, and the sniper who must decide whether to shoot that child before he succeeds - denies the obvious moral distinctions themselves.

But the failure of secular ethics is not my point here. Rather, while watching the film, I kept thinking about the extraordinariness of the heroism of Chris Kyle - his courage in facing down an enemy sniper nearly as lethal as himself, his patience in sitting hour after boring hour in the same position, scanning the horizon for threats to the Marines he was protecting, his prudence in making the split second decision whether to pull the trigger on a target that might be a dangerous terrorist - or might merely be a mother out for a walk with her child. And by extraordinary I don't mean the magnitude of his virtue (although there is that) but the simple fact that it was out of the ordinary - not the normal way in virtue is manifested.

Sniping in war is an extremely unusual occupation, and it is that because it is an unusual occupation in something that is itself unusual - war. War cannot be the norm because it is destructive, and you can only destroy what has first been created. So more fundamental than war must be the peace that allows that which would be destroyed or consumed in war to be created in the first place. This is but an instance of the more general metaphysical truth that good is more basic than evil.

We should keep this in mind if we are tempted by the idea that war somehow rips away a façade and reveals reality as it is. The fact that those who have experienced war have seen things very few of us have seen, and that it is easy to become complacent and fall into the mistake of thinking peace is self-sustaining rather than something that must be vigilantly protected, can lead us into this temptation. And if we have fallen for this temptation, then war might indeed be a process of disillusionment, but only of our mistake in thinking that that which is normal and fundamental therefore needs no effort to maintain. It is normal and fundamental that we breathe, but it would be a tragic mistake to think that we therefore need expend no effort in making sure the conditions are maintained in which we can in fact breathe; this is why we have smoke alarms in our homes, airplanes deploy oxygen masks in emergencies, we have clean air laws, and ships carry life preservers.

The extraordinary virtue of Chris Kyle in war, then, was for the sake of returning to or maintaining the ordinary. And from there we can say that the extraordinary virtue of Chris Kyle was for the sake of the ordinary virtue of normal life. Again, I do not intend extraordinary/ordinary as referring to a scale of magnitude - extraordinary being a lot of virtue and ordinary less - but as referring to their relative normalcy. Ordinary virtue happens all the time, extraordinary virtue only occurs in unusual circumstances like war or a natural disaster.

In some ways extraordinary virtue is more difficult than ordinary virtue, but in other ways it is less difficult. Extraordinary virtue tends to be concentrated in the moment and demands a supreme sacrifice of the individual. He is squarely faced with the choice to live up to his character or not; to charge the machine gun, run into the burning house to save a child, or face down the criminal pointing the gun at him. It tends to be, but is not always, highly visible and has clearly defined and immediate results. There might be glory attached in medals, news stories or even a feature film. There is almost certainly the gratitude of those who have immediately benefited, the buddy you dragged back to the aid station or the mother of the child you brought out of the burning house.

The clarity of the challenge involved in extraordinary virtue may be considered one of its "advantages", even if that isn't exactly the right word. The problem of meaning is eclipsed. The situation is clear and what is required is obvious: The only challenge is in doing what is necessary. Veterans have spoken of the horror of war and don't wish to repeat it, but they also sometimes speak of missing the existential clarity of combat. I remember one Easy Company veteran (from Band of Brothers) wistfully reflecting on the confidence and vigor he felt during the Second World War, something he lost as a civilian and never recovered. (I understand that war is not always morally clear - Vietnam comes to mind - but I am thinking here of the typical individual soldier in the moment of combat. The American GI in Vietnam may have wondered what he was doing there, but those doubts were forgotten when the VC were discovered infiltrating through the wire at 2:00 AM).

The challenges of ordinary virtue are almost never, individually speaking, as difficult in the moment as those of extraordinary virtue. They involve simple things like getting up every morning to be at work on time; doing well in your courses of study whether you enjoy them or not; spending time playing with your children in the evening even though you are tired and would rather not; getting up in the middle of the night to care for a sick infant; putting up with a difficult boss for the sake of making a living for your family; dealing with the rotten kids on the youth soccer team you coach, or taking care of a crotchety elderly relative (not you Dad if you are reading this!) In none of these instances are the individual acts in any real way "hard", certainly not hard in the way of Chris Kyle. But there is also no glory or immediate recognition or "payoff" with them. Your kid may not be grateful with you that you played with him, just annoyed you are making him go to bed. No one will give you a medal for getting up and going to work every day. And everyone thinks his kid is just a joy for you to coach.

Furthermore, ordinary virtue can seem easy or boring because "everyone does it", and extraordinary virtue glamorous because only a few are called on to perform it and those that are, are lionized. But this is partly an illusion based on the fact that we normally live in ordinary times and only occasionally in extraordinary times, so simply by the nature of things extraordinary virtue will be unusual. And in ordinary times, not everyone does in fact do it, but this fact itself becomes blasé, especially in our "non-judgmental" culture.

If the challenge of extraordinary virtue is to find the strength to do what is necessary in the extreme moment, the challenge of ordinary virtue is to discover a moral foundation that can support the unglamorous, repetitive, and perhaps boring ongoing life of ordinary virtue. This was a central concern of Kierkegaard, of course, and in his view, the life of ordinary virtue (the ethical life) is inherently unstable and tends to lead to a crisis that provides the occasion for genuine religious faith. The difference in the challenges of ordinary and extraordinary virtue is not always appreciated, and the man who discovers the strength to face the demands of combat may be confused as to why he finds ordinary civilian life so difficult. Combat is, superficially and immediately, a far more difficult situation than ordinary life. How could the latter pose a problem when one has successfully faced the former? It is because, as we have seen, the requirements of the two situations differ.

The key here is meaning. The immediacy of combat, or any life and death situation, eclipses the more general question of meaning and gives life an urgent and brutal purpose in the moment. There is a temptation to yearn for the clarity that combat gives to relieve oneself of the anxiety of the question of meaning; but that question is not answered in combat, only eclipsed, and the question will return once the extraordinary state of war ceases. For war is only for the purpose of restoring some sort of peace, and ultimately itself has meaning, and is justified, in terms of the meaning of the peace it aims to bring about.

Thus we may admire and appreciate the virtue and sacrifice of Chris Kyle, but we should see that his virtue, while necessary and important, is not the most important type of virtue, because it is a virtue that has meaning only in light of the ordinary virtue of the peace it defends. And that latter virtue should be honored at least as much as the former.

I sometimes wonder if the effusive honor and praise we  currently give veterans is a reflection of our guilty conscience, or our half-buried suspicion that we are not worthy of the sacrifices our soldiers make for us - that our ordinary virtue is not worthy of their extraordinary sacrifice. Do not misunderstand me, I believe veterans deserve to be honored, and surely some of the contemporary effusion is makeup for the disgraceful treatment Vietnam veterans received for many years. But there is a certain over-the-top quality to it, as when I am regularly "thanked for my service", although I only served in the late 1980's for a few years, not in a time of war, and I find it embarrassing to be lumped in with WW2 or Vietnam veterans. In the old days veterans were honored on Memorial and Veterans Days with parades and that was that.

The true way to honor veterans is to live well in the peace that they have provided; and I mean "live well" in the classical sense of a life of virtue lived to as much perfection as humanly possible. But we have lost sight of ordinary life as essentially a challenge in virtue. That is too "judgmental." We see the virtue of the soldier in combat from afar, however, and cannot help but admire it. If we cannot honor our soldiers by the lives we lead, at least we can honor them with parades and benefits.

Perhaps the extraordinary virtue of the soldier is the last virtue a civilization loses. Out of the morass of ordinary life, our nation still produces superlative soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen, police officers and firemen. We admire the soldier who faces his fears in combat, and would both reject and be puzzled by one who shrank from the demands of combat merely on the grounds that he "wasn't up for that." On the other hand, many times I have been met with puzzled looks by individuals when they learn I raised three children, something that was commonplace and hardly extraordinary not so long ago. Isn't that just an awful lot of work and an unreasonable sacrifice, the question is asked (although not typically in those words)? The question is itself an indication that ordinary life is no longer seen as a challenge in ordinary virtue, for it is like asking the soldier why he charges up the hill. The soldier does it because it is what the situation calls for, and I did it because it was what my situation called for.

And I also wonder: How long can a nation that no longer puts ordinary virtue at its center, keep producing individuals capable of the extraordinary virtue required by its defense?

Here we are back to one of the central questions of Plato's Republic.

Goldberg on the Meaning of Life

In his latest G-File (an emailed newsletter), Jonah Goldberg ruminates on the meaning of life. After mentioning Robert Wright and Wright's interview with Edward Fredkin, and Fredkin's take on information as fundamental to the universe, Goldberg gives his view of things: 

But here's the thing. It doesn't matter whether it is literally true. It is metaphorically true. And in a way, metaphorical truth is more important. The meaning of life is found in the living of it. This not a materialistic, "you only live once" argument for hedonism. Rather, I'm simply acknowledging the fact that whatever meaning there is to our existence can only be gleaned from existence. If all you've got are shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, you learn what you can from the shadows.

We are all individually working out the math. I don't mean to belittle or sidestep religion, but to bolster it. Religion is metaphorical too, insofar as God's will is always a mystery and out of reach. But religion helps most people look beyond the material to the deeper purpose of all things. Atheists who hate religion, it seems to me, often really hate the language of religion because it doesn't speak to them or because they lack the imagination to see it in anything but the strictest and most literal terms.

Meanwhile, John Donne was right in the small-c catholic and big-C Catholic sense: No man is an island. And whether you want to say that we are "Each ... a piece of the continent, a part of the main," or whether you want to say that we are each working on our own little bit of the big math problem, you are still grasping at the shadows to describe a truth too big for your hands to recognize, but that your soul can feel. 

There are some things well said here, in particular "The meaning of life is found in the living of it." The reason is that what is known in the meaning of life is one and the same with the process of knowing it; the life that knows the meaning of life is no other life than the one for which the meaning is known. This is different from an objective pursuit like science, where the life of the scientist knowing science is entirely separate from the science known. It is thus possible to know science well but be utterly confused about the meaning of one's own existence. On the comic side, this results in shows like The Big Bang Theory, which feature brilliant scientists who give disquisitions on quantum mechanics one minute and display a childlike level of sophistication in social relationships, empathy and ethical reasoning the next. On the sinister side, it results in the phenomenon of Nazi scientists, who could perform experiments on subject persons that followed the strictest scientific protocols but were justified by the most crude moral reasoning. In contrast, a man such as Socrates, who understands the meaning of his own existence, necessarily reveals this knowledge in the manner in which he lives (see Crito and Phaedo). Offered an opportunity to escape from prison in the Crito so that he might pursue philosophy in some other city than Athens, Socrates demurs because such an escape would prove he is not truly a philosopher. The knowledge Socrates seeks is self-knowledge, which is nothing other than the meaning of his own life,  and since his reasoning has convinced him the citizen must submit to law, he must live that meaning in his own life or prove he doesn't really know what he says he knows.

But where Goldberg goes astray is in the common assumption that since the meaning of life must be found in the living of it, that meaning must be murky or only something you feel. The example of Socrates contradicts this. There is nothing murky or merely emotional about what Socrates tells us in the Crito. In fact it is perfectly clear and stated with Socrates's customary equanimity. What confuses us is that, unlike a solution to a math problem, we can't really know what Socrates tells us merely through his telling it; we can only know it to the extent that we have subjectively appropriated it, and no one can do that but ourselves. As Kierkegaard tells us, the subjective thinker understands that the difficulty with subjective knowledge is not knowing what is required, but in doing it. The modern way of thinking, however, only recognizes the objective aspect to knowledge, and so sensing that something is missing in the objective assertion of the meaning of life, but not grasping the missing element as a subjective thinker, the modern thinker collapses that missing subjective element into the objective equation, perceiving what is in fact plain to be murky or merely a matter of emotion.

There is also the unwarranted conclusion that since God is greater than us, God's will is always a mystery and out of reach. This is true if the only way we can know God's will is through our own efforts, i.e. our own attempts to reach up to God. But what if, rather than leaving us to our own devices, God chooses to reveal Himself to us in a manner that we can appropriate? Then we again have the situation where the real problem is not the objective content of what is known, but the manner and fact of its subjective appropriation.

Objective and Subjective Morality, with reference to Kierkegaard

Steven Novella has a post on objective and subjective morality at his blog here.  He introduces the discussion this way:

The discussion is between objective vs subjective morality, mostly focusing around a proponent of objective morality (commenter nym of Zach). Here I will lay out my position for a philosophical basis of morality and explain why I think objective morality is not only unworkable, it’s a fiction. 

First, let’s define “morality” and discuss why it is needed. Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good. The question at hand is where do morals and morality come from. I think this question is informed by the question of why we need morals in the first place. 

I maintain that morals can only be understood in the context of the moral actor. Humans, for example, have emotions and feelings. We care about stuff, about our own well being, about those who love, about our “tribe.” We also have an evolved sense of morality, such as the concepts of reciprocity and justice.

and later describes his position in this way:

Much of the prior discussion came to an impasse over this issue – are moral first principles, therefore, objective or subjective. This, I maintain, is a false dichotomy. They are complex, with some subjective aspects (the values) and some objective aspects (explorations of their universality and implications).

Novella subscribes to the Enlightenment derived fact-value distinction (empirical facts only describe the way things are, not the way they should be), which is the reason he says values are subjective. By "subjective" he means not rationally justifiable in a way that is publicly compelling, i.e. the way math and science are rationally publicly compelling.

Kierkegaard is invaluable in understanding what is really going on in these kinds of discussions. For we learn from Kierkegaard that this way of using "subjective" and "objective" obscures the truth, the existential truth, of our situation, and in that obscurity ethics can never appear. In fact Novella's entire discussion is taken objectively, and subjectivity is only considered objectively, when in truth subjectivity can only be understood subjectively.

There is only one truly subjective paragraph in the post, and that is the first:

I am fascinated by the philosophy of ethics, ever since I took a course in it in undergraduate school. This is partly because I enjoy thinking about complex systems (which partly explains why I ended up in Neurology as my specialty). I also greatly enjoy logic, and particularly deconstructing arguments (my own and others) to identify their logical essence and see if or where they go wrong.

The subject of a truly subjective statement can only be me; if I speak about someone else's subjectivity, I am speaking objectively about subjectivity. Truly subjective statements inevitably involve a story of becoming, as Novella mentions how he ended up in Neurology. And that is not by accident, because the basic truth of our existence is that it is one of becoming. This is the existential truth that is obscured by speaking about subjectivity and objectivity from a purely objective standpoint, for there is no becoming in objectivity. And it is the truth that provides the only genuine foundation of morality.

"Morality is a code of behavior that aspires to some goal that is perceived as good" Novella informs us. This is perfectly stated from the objective standpoint, but it will never result in an ethics that is subjectively compelling. For what does such a code have to do with me? At what point does the objective discussion of such a code end, or get to the point that I must stop debating it and start following it? Kierkegaard, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, shows us that objective thought can never result in something that is subjectively compelling, precisely because the subject is removed at the outset. The only way to get the subject back in, that is, to make the results of objective thought subjectively compelling, is for the subject to reinsert himself through an act of the will; I must choose to apply the results of objective thought to my life, and that act of choice is beyond reason, for it is "subjective" in the modern (non-Kierkegaardian) sense. This is the real reason for the "fact-value distinction" in modern thought. 

Better, Kierkegaard tells us, is to never lose the subject in the first place. Rather than beginning with a fictitious objective origin to morality in facts about our feelings or evolution, which isn't really a beginning at all, a subjective origin may be found in the fact that I am becoming. This simply means that my being is not static but dynamic. Everyday I wake up I am a day older; every act I do or avoid doing changes me in some way. I am becoming something; the process is unavoidable, and the only question is what am I becoming.  

There is an analogous situation with dieting (or, rather, dieting is a response to the physical fact of becoming). I must eat to live, and what I eat determines what I become. Eat too much or the wrong things and I become fat; do not eat enough and I become weak and underweight. There are people who take a great deal of interest in what they eat and investigate various diet plans to achieve certain physical outcomes, and others who take no interest at all. But whether one takes an interest in diet or not, the existential fact of "becoming what you eat" remains nonetheless, and existence forces one to deal with food one way or the other. There is no mystery, then, in the origin of dieting. I don't need to look for an evolutionary explanation concerning our feelings about food, about what I care and don't care about. I need only recognize that eating is a fact of life, my life, and the only question is whether I will eat well or poorly. A response to food (which is what dieting is) is inevitable given the nature of our existence.

The point may be made general. Life forces me to act, and my actions change me in one way or another, and the only question is whether I will act well or badly, i.e. what will I become through my actions? Note that I become something through eating whether or not I take an interest in what I become. The man who is not interested in dieting and eats nothing but coke and chips all day will get fat and ruin his health; he is not exempted from the consequences of his eating simply because he does not acknowledge that eating has consequences. Similarly, I become something or other through my actions in general, and those consequences follow whether or not I acknowledge them. Ethics is my response to the fact of becoming, just as dieting is my response to the fact of eating.

One criticism of Kierkegaard is that in works like the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he spends very little time debating what most moderns consider the important ethical questions: Rules of behavior and how to tell right actions from wrong ones. This is because, contra our modern view, the answers to those questions are really the easiest part of ethics; they only seem hard to us because we have lost the true starting point for ethics in subjectivity. This becomes apparent when we are brought to a point of approaching ethics subjectively (despite ourselves) through art.

An example of this is the film It's A Wonderful Life, which I explore in detail here. At each critical moment in his life, George is faced with a choice between fulfilling his own ambitions or sacrificing those ambitions for the sake of others. At each point, he denies himself and does what we all know is the right thing to do, sacrificing his own ambitions for the sake of others. The film works because the filmmaker can count on the fact that his audience knows what the right thing to do is in each successive dilemma; the drama is found in whether George can meet the ethical challenge, not whether the ethical challenge can meet some inappropriate "objective" standard of ethics. 

And it is not an accident that Hollywood tends to make films with a pro-life message (e.g. Knocked Up) despite its leftwing political bent. For a film is a story, and therefore a story of becoming, and therefore a story of becoming good (at least if it is a comedy rather than a tragedy). Knocked Up wouldn't work if Seth Rogen abandoned Katherine Heigl, for whatever "objective" reasons he might offer, because we know it is the wrong thing to do and Rogen would just be rationalizing. Similarly, Katherine Heigl can't get an abortion, because the audience, whether or not they are politically pro-choice, cannot but admire a woman has the child more than one that aborts it.

We can agree with Novella that morals can only be understood in the context of the moral actor. But that context must start in subjectivity, not end there.

Christianity and Mystical Experience

I am commenter #58 (J Climacus) on this post over at Ricochet.

One of the basic lessons we learn from Kierkegaard is that grasping the nature of Christianity is not an easy task. That is not to say it isn't a simple task, for often it is the simplest tasks that are the most difficult (another Kierkegaardian lesson). But there is a natural inclination to think that because Christianity has extraordinary implications about the nature of God, man, morality, the universe and indeed reality itself, it must be based on some extraordinary or difficult to grasp evidence.

But it isn't. Christianity is based on ordinary, even mundane experience - the experience of a group of witnesses who met a man, spoke with him, ate with him, and even touched his wounds. Nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that these witnesses had seen this same man crucified and buried several days earlier. It is this extraordinary conjunction of ordinary experience that provides the basis for Christianity's transcendent conclusions.

And it reinforces Christianity's connection to the ordinary. Jesus Christ doesn't replace the ordinary, mundane world with an extraordinary world only reachable through mystical experience; he transfigures the meaning of the ordinary world through His Life, Death and Resurrection. Cana didn't just transform the meaning of a wedding reception in ancient Palestine, it transformed the meaning of all wedding receptions from then on. Wine is never the same after Christ transforms it into His Body and Blood at the Last Supper. The nuclear family is something more than merely a sociological statistic in a world that has seen the Holy Family. And the ordinary fact of death, which once heralded the everlasting end of all that is good, becomes instead a means to conquer evil when death itself is conquered by Christ.

Philosophy and Joining

Is it necessary, or at least helpful, to the philosophical vocation to remain aloof? The Maverick Philosopher's motto is to "study everything, join nothing".  As he explains:

"Join nothing" means avoid group-think; avoid associations which will limit one's ability to think critically and independently; be your own man or woman; draw your identity from your own resources, and not from group membership.

It does seem at first sight that remaining "unjoined" indeed helps the philosopher remain objective in his quest for the truth. But on the other hand we have the example of Socrates who, far from being unjoined, was perhaps the antithesis of the aloof philosopher. He was at one time a soldier in the Athenian army and was respected for his bravery in battle; even as he critically examined Athenian religion, he scrupulously followed its duties, down to making sure religious rituals would be followed on his demise (his last words were "we owe a cock to Asclepius", Asclepius being the god of medicine.) More deeply, he viewed his vocation not merely as a personal, independent search for truth, but in the context of his duty as an Athenian citizen:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead, as Anytus advises, which you easily might, then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly. And that I am given to you by God is proved by this: - that if I had been like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns, or patiently seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you individually, like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard virtue; this I say, would not be like human nature. And had I gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have been some sense in that: but now, as you will perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or sought pay of anyone; they have no witness of that. And I have a witness of the truth of what I say; my poverty is a sufficient witness. (The Apology)

Socrates was not an autonomous philosopher pursuing a personal career, but a man on a mission fulfilling a duty given to him by God for Athens. For Socrates, then, the philosopher is by nature "joined"; this is the reason he refuses to flee Athens when given the chance to escape prison while awaiting his execution.

But does not his commitment to Athens make Socrates "biased"? I think it is a mistake to view Socrates's relationship to Athens as a "commitment", which is a word with an arbitrary flavor to it. Socrates was born and raised in Athens, and only left it when serving in the Army. He was raised by Athenian parents, educated in the Athenian fashion, and is Athenian through and through. His identity is Athenian whether he wishes it to be or not; he is "joined" to Athens not so much in that he has made an arbitrary decision to reside in Athens, but that his being is Athenian to its core. Were he to attempt to adopt a perspective that was somehow independent of Athens, he would merely be kidding himself, for such a perspective is mythical - and Socrates knew it. Man is by nature a creature embedded in culture; culture isn't like a coat he can discard for a new one (or, worse, no coat at all), but is part and parcel of his identity.

The philosophical quest, then, is one that must be conducted in and through culture. Rather than attempting an impossible abstraction from culture in an attempt to avoid bias, the philosopher is better advised to plunge more deeply into culture. The example here is St. Thomas Aquinas, who generated the supreme synthesis of medieval philosophy by embracing to the full his cultural identity as a Catholic and as an inheritor of Greek rationalism.

But suppose Thomas had been born a Muslim rather than a Catholic? Then he may have become an Averroes or Avicenna, Muslim philosophers whom he engages in his Summa. He may have perhaps even come to the point of converting to Catholicism. But the only subjectively true (in Kierkegaard's words) way to do this would have been by embracing his Muslim faith and critiquing it from within, as Socrates critiqued Athens from within. This is why philosophers of divergent faiths like Avicenna and Aquinas could respect each other, for their respective embrace of their cultures served as an indirect communication of their shared subjective understanding. The philosopher who attempts to remain aloof is not a part of this unspoken community; the attempt itself shows that he is confused at a much deeper level than that of objective doctrine.

This also shows us the answer to the perennial conundrum: If you had been born in Iran, you would be a Muslim, and if you had been born in India, a Hindu. You were born in New York of Catholic parents, so how can you claim that Catholicism is the one true religion? It is quite true that if I had been born in India, I would have likely been a Hindu, and it would have been right and proper to embrace that religion through my education. But I hope I would have taken a Socratic attitude with respect to it, and discovered the truth on the far side of a "joined" critique of it.

Maximizing Life... or Minimizing It

I recently discovered an excellent atheist website, The Thinking Atheist, and listened to several of Seth Andrews's (The Think Atheist) podcasts. The Thinking Atheist is very easy listening (he is a professional broadcaster and has an excellent voice) and free of the hard edge found in many outspoken atheists; he is, for instance, willing to admit that most Christians are genuinely good and loving people even if he thinks they are gravely mistaken about the fundamental nature of things. This is clearly a sincere man who is following the truth as he knows it.

What interests me here is an extended exchange he had in one of his podcasts with a Christian named Erin. Erin wondered how Seth could find meaning in life without a hereafter; Seth gave the answer, common among atheists, that the lack of a hereafter makes this life all the more important, since it is the only one we have. As Seth put it, we must "maximize every moment" we have, since we will have no more once we are dead. He mentioned how much he enjoys learning about science, history, etc.

I have always had a great deal of sympathy for this view, and it may constitute the greatest temptation I face as a Catholic. And it is a temptation. For though I would like to maximize every moment of my life, I have come to be quite certain that the meaning of life cannot be found by maximizing it, but only by minimizing it. In fact, it was through years of attempting to maximize life that I finally came to face the fact that it was a fool's errand, although I believe I suspected such a thing all along.

When I was in high school, my friend Joe used to chide me about my "kicks". I would throw myself passionately into something - ping pong or chess, for example - for a month or two, then give it up and move on to something else. Eventually I might come back to the same things. Meanwhile I also spent a lot of time playing tennis, reading history and Agatha Christie novels, or playing the fiddle, among other pursuits. I knew the reason I never stuck with anything too long. It was opportunity cost. On the one hand, I envied the sort of person who was passionate about one thing, and stuck with it long enough to master it or make something of it. I wished I could feel that way about something. And I would, for a time. But eventually whatever I was doing would become stale, and I would move on to something else. More than this, I could never shake the feeling that I was missing out on something by being dedicated to one or a small number of things. Other people were passionately pursuing something else, so there must be something to those things as well, right? How did I know it was better to pursue this thing passionately rather than that thing? My answer, as it turned out in practice, was just to pursue things in rotation (which should bring to mind associations for Kierkegaard fans.) I knew even at the time what was happening, but didn't know what else to do. If life isn't about doing stuff, and I had always been told it was, then what was it about? I didn't want life to pass me by.

For all intents and purposes, I was a case study in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage of existence. I was even self-aware enough to have an inkling of what was going on, although nothing like the revelation that Kierkegaard gave me when I later discovered him. And SK accurately diagnosed the alternative I faced (which I vaguely understood at the time), which was either to change my mode of life at its root or continue down a path which was essentially one of despair. My decision to join the Marine Corps was finally based on the recognition that I needed to believe in something, not in a theoretical sense, but in the practical (existential) sense of actually submitting whole to something greater and grander than myself. The alternative to trying to find things to put into your life is to put your life into something. In SK's terms, it was the decision to become ethical and not merely aesthetic.

The essence of the ethical life is that one no longer tries to "maximize" his own life; instead, the individual sacrifices his own "maximization" for the sake of "maximizing" something worthy of the sacrifice - nation, God, Corps, family or, perhaps, his neighbors (as George Bailey does in It's A Wonderful Life). The ethical life has its own deep struggle, just as does the aesthetic life. The struggle at the heart of the aesthetic life is to keep at bay the despair that is at its core; the struggle at the heart of the ethical life is to perform the sacrifices demanded by duty (and this is why someone in the ethical stage of existence may not always seem "ethical" outwardly; the ethical stage of existence doesn't mean one is always good, it only means that life is lived in terms of duty and its fulfillment, even if there is an occasional failure to fulfill the demands of duty.)

But as George Bailey discovered, a life of duty is a kind of death. One sacrifices one's own hopes and dreams, one's own goals and pursuits, for others. It is a minimization of the self and feels like a slow dying. There is anxiety and despair in such a life because, on the one hand, the individual sees all the wonderful things out there that are genuinely worthy of pursuit, and on the other, he senses that the nature of things just is that he must sacrifice those things for the sake of others.

The answer to this dilemma (an existential answer, not a theoretical one) is religion; specifically the Christian God who "minimized" himself for the sake of mankind and promises the strength of grace to do the same to all who ask for it - "for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." In this light Christianity and atheism aren't competitors, because atheism isn't an answer to the existential question for which Christ is the answer:  The question isn't "Is there a God?", but "Who shall save me in the duty I must perform yet that is extinguishing me?"

My Trouble with Kant

Kant is the greatest modern philosopher because he perceived the far consequences of the premises of modern thought earlier than others, and to an extent that many today still do not appreciate. He is the indispensable philosopher to understand the meaning of philosophy since it began to take its cue from Descartes and Hume.

But that doesn't mean that we must believe that Kant was right. The conclusions follow only if both the logic and the premises are true; Kant is correct in his logic but his premises are not true. In other words,  if Kant is wrong, he was wrong right at the beginning. And his beginning was the assumptions constitutive of modern thought.

It is difficult for us raised in the modern world to get the distance necessary to be genuinely critical of modern thought. The assumptions of modern thought have become the very air we breathe; for us they are simply taken for granted. This is why Kierkegaard is so indispensable. Kierkegaard understood that modern thought must be attacked at its root; and since it is modern first principles that are the problem, those principles must be addressed front and center. Kierkegaard has a wonderful way of getting behind the defenses of his reader and bringing him to a reconsideration of first principles, before the reader knows what is happening and can set up psychological self-defenses:

If it were true - as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks - that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived? Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true; one can be deceived by appearances, but one can also be deceived by the superficiality of shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain that it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake? (From the start of Ch.1 of Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1962).

This passage always comes to mind when I think what is wrong with Kant. For a fundamental modern principle is that doubt is self-justifying: If something can be doubted, then it should be doubted. Kant's transcendental aesthetic gets rolling when he points out that time and space are not something we encounter in experience, but are the conditions of experience itself. So we can only safely conclude that space and time are parameters of our consciousness, not necessarily of reality itself. From this start Kant brilliantly, thoroughly and ruthlessly draws out the logical consequences in his "transcendental philosophy."

But looking at the transcendental aesthetic with Kierkegaard in mind, and granting Kant's point about the conditions of experience, we can still ask Kierkegaard's question about deception: Time and space may be conditions of our experience, but they may nonetheless also be conditions of reality itself. We can go wrong thinking time and space are qualifications of reality if they are only qualifications of our consciousness, but we can also go wrong thinking time and space are not qualifications of reality if in fact they really are. Deception is possible either way. The modern philosopher is simply wrong in thinking his self-justifying doubt is a bulletproof way to avoid deception. And if we do not accept the modern premise that doubt is self-justifying, then we may ask: Why should we grant Kant's conclusions from the transcendental aesthetic? What reason do we have for doubting the reality of time and space beyond the bare possibility of deception?

There doesn't seem to be any such reason, and I suspect there can't possibly be one. Any reason would have to be an argument from experience, which would necessarily take experience for granted, and the argument concerns the conditions of experience itself.

To be continued in a forthcoming post.

Coyne and the nature of philosophy

I've been trying to get around to commenting on the this Jerry Coyne article on free will from USA Today. Rather than one large blogpost - which I don't seem to be able to get the time to do - maybe I can attack it with a series of smaller ones. For this one, I'll comment on Coyne's passing remark about the significance of the question of free will:

"The issue of whether we have of[sic] free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons."

What's interesting about this passage is what it says about Coyne's view of the nature of philosophy, which is a view of it that started in the Enlightenment and is still common. Philosophy, for Coyne, includes "arcane academic debates" that aren't about anything that "affects" us. When we do begin talking about things that affect us, like how we assign moral responsibility or how we punish criminals, we've moved beyond philosophy or, at least, the arcane debates that comprise academic philosophy.

Now the classical philosopher would say that Coyne has it exactly backwards. To the extent that philosophy discusses anything that won't "affect" us, it isn't really philosophy at all. The philosopher is a lover of wisdom, which means living an "examined life." Everything the philosopher discusses, from the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to the ethics of Aristotle, must be in service to the primary goal of living an examined life - or the philosopher isn't really a philosopher at all. To use my favorite example, Socrates in the Crito is offered the chance to escape from his death sentence in Athens so he may continue pursuing philosophy in a different city. Socrates refuses the opportunity because he does not, after philosophical reflection, think there would be justice in an attempt to escape his sentence. To escape his sentence would then be to betray his philosophical vocation, which isn't about merely discussing "philosophy", but leading a life examined by reason and faithful to it. Such a life is what philosophy is; it is not a series of academic debates, arcane or otherwise.

The degeneration of philosophy from the Socratic ideal to a series of academic debates about nothing that "affects" us started in the Enlightenment. We can point to Descartes idea in his Discourse on Method that he would accept nothing until it had survived the most critical form of doubt. What then of his ongoing daily life and the myriad decisions life requires, including mundane ethical decisions? Daily life demands regular decisions from us whether we have prepared those decisions through a Method or not. Descartes solved this problem by living according to a "provisional morality", pending the development of a truly rational,  real morality that would be worked out in due course through the Method. While under development this true morality, of course, had nothing to do with how Descartes was actually living (which was the province of the provisional morality); it wasn't about anything that "affected" him. In truth, whatever ethics might be developed through the Method isn't really an ethics at all, since the subject of ethics is precisely the existing man facing the problems of life as they come, problems for which he can't take a "timeout" pending the development of a truly rational ethics. Socrates facing the problem of escaping from Athens is a subject of ethics; man considered in timeless abstraction through something like the Method is not.

What is interesting about the "provisional morality" is that it isn't open to rational criticism. True reason is only available through the method; since the provisional morality is just that which we live by while the method works out the true morality, the provisional morality is by definition not open to reason. And, in truth, the true morality never does get worked out. This was Kierkegaard's point in emphasizing that abstract reason cannot put an end to itself; in other words, abstract reason cannot of itself issue in a decision, because decisions are demanded by the concrete circumstances of life that are just what reason abstracts from. Socrates did not refrain from escaping from the Athenian prison because he had worked out a logical ethics to completion; he refrained because, as his philosophical reflection told him at the moment, there was no justice in an attempt at escape.

The thing about allegedly arcane philosophical debates, like the one over Descartes and his method, is that they eventually trickle down and spread through the common culture. Descartes' "provisional morality" is, it seems to me, the de facto ethical view of the average American. The average person may believe that you can think about ethical questions, but he doesn't think such thought counts as "real thought" in the sense of abstract methods like math or physics. It's all kind of "iffy." And it certainly doesn't apply to what he himself will do in the moment. That is a matter of "personal choice"; and by that we mean not only that it is up to us as individuals to make a decision, but that the process by which we come to that concrete decision isn't finally open to rational scrutiny. Descartes "provisional morality" has become our permanent morality.

When we do bring what we think is "true reason" to bear on subjects like ethics, then it means approaching them through science in the manner of Coyne. But Coyne's approach isn't, in the end, any more sound that Descartes'. Any system of thought, philosophical or otherwise, that doesn't start with man in his subjective, concrete existence, and stay there, can't have ethics in the true sense as its subject; it can't ever be about the things that "affect" us. Thus the "free will" discussed by Coyne isn't the subjectively experienced free will you are aware of every moment you make a decision. It is "free will" as a scientific abstraction, which isn't really free will at all and is, in fact, incoherent in terms of scientific abstraction.

Kierkegaard and Chesterton

I make no secret that Soren Kierkegaard and G.K. Chesterton are two of my favorite thinkers. I've often thought there was a great deal of similarity between their thought, and if I were doing something like pursuing a master's degree in philosophy, I might propose as a thesis an exploration of their commonality. For, instance, the following passage is a pithy summary of SK's message:

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? - that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. 

It uses some of Kierkegaard's favorite ideas expressed in the Kierkegaardian way: "The instant" as the true subject of philosophy, opposed to "huge syntheses" that distract a man with "talk about ages and evolution", etc. Of course, this passage isn't from Kierkegaard, but from the chapter "The Romance of Orthodoxy" from Chesterton's Orthodoxy. As far as I know, Chesterton never read Kierkegaard and perhaps never heard of him; SK did not become well-known in the English-speaking world until later in the 20th century. The fact that two such distinct thinkers, one Danish in the first half of the 19th century, the other English in the first half of the 20th, could speak with the same peculiar yet nearly synonymous voice is a reason for confidence in their message. The truth, when discovered, is what it is, whether it is discovered by a spiritually-tortured Dane, or a jolly Englishman.

Intellectual Liberation

Andrew Breitbart, in his Righteous Indignation, describes his intellectual liberation in these words:

I was taking ownership of my own education. Words cannot describe the emancipation I felt to discard those confusing works and philosophers that my gut instinct had told me to reject. Nihilism, after all, is never a comforting companion. I had known it was garbage, but I felt that I couldn't tell a Harvard PhD. that I thought it was garbage. Surely my professors had known something I didn't. Now I was realizing that just wasn't true.

I think his phrase "taking ownership of my own education" is apt. Only when this happens can true education begin. Up until that point, one is at best going through the motions. Taking ownership of education happens when we begin to understand the effects of ignorance, and dread them. We begin to see that ignorance is the worst possible affliction; for in our ignorance, we are not even aware that we are afflicted. Of course, the fact that we begin to understand the nature of our ignorance means that we are already on the road of true education, the only road, the one clearly marked once and for all time by Socrates. Socrates must be the foundation of education because the Socratic experience must be replicated in every soul that hopes to be truly educated.

Another interesting aspect of Breitbart's experience is his deference to the established educational authorities. Surely Harvard PhD's can't be shoveling manure? It is a part of wisdom to be deferential to educational authorities; for if we are ignorant, how shall we know where to learn the truth or even how to recognize it should we encounter it? It takes a wise man to distinguish the wise from the foolish, and since we are by hypothesis without education (prior to going to school), we defer to those reputed to be wise. The diabolical state of our educational system is such that the educational authorities use this very faith to abort true education in its infancy. They use their authority to teach that true education is not really possible (there is no truth) or, what amounts to the same thing, that the wise man is the one who understands that there is no "truth" out there for him to know. The soul awakening to its intellectual possibilities is strangled in its infancy by the very people who should be feeding it.

Fortunately, true education is always a possibility; it only awaits "the occasion" in Kierkegaard's terms. The occasion may be someone who simply does not accept the so-called educational/cultural/political authorities on their terms. He sees that the Emperor has no clothes and says so. Hearing this, we see that our own deference to such authorities is no more than a prejudice; a prejudice worthy in the general case when educational authorities deserve it, but unwarranted in the specific case when they don't, as is the case now. And deference is downright vicious when the authorities use it to maintain the populace in ignorance and slavery, as is also the case now. Breitbart's "occasion" happened when he began to listen to AM talk radio and encountered speakers who had limited academic credentials but simply spoke the obvious truth that the authorities spent their time avoiding.

For me, education didn't really begin until I read Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It was then that I began to see my true condition of ignorance, and the fact that I was in unconscious thrall to the "authority" of experts in all things. With Breitbart, I agree that "words cannot describe the emancipation I felt..."

Maverick Philosopher on Man

The Maverick Philosopher has a post on the nature of man, and in particular his destiny, here. He identifies man's nature as problematic because man can soar with the angels, but also grovel with the beasts. With respect to the riddle that is man's nature, he writes:

Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology.  Undiluted Christianity is his answer.  My answer:   live so as to deserve immortality.  Live as if you have a higher destiny.  It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized.  Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life.  Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.

You could be wrong, no doubt.  But if you are wrong, what have you lost?  Some baubles and trinkets.  If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe.  I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.

The argument bears a resemblance to Pascal's Wager, but I think it lacks some of the latter's virtues. For instance, what does it mean to "live so as to deserve immortality"? This implies a real distinction among ways of living; in other words, there is a truth with respect to life. But the Mav explicitly denies the value of truth in the last paragraph. He needs to do this because his argument starts with the premise that man's destiny is shrouded in darkness. (I won't ask if he insists that this premise is true.) But as soon as we've given up on whether we can know the truth about man's destiny, then we've lost any possible ground for offering advice on different ways to live. Thus the Mav can't give any substance to what it means to live so as to "deserve" immortality, and he leaves us with the empty exhortation to live a "higher destiny." Chesterton remarked that philosophers start talking about the "higher" life when they wish to talk about the better and worse, but have denied themselves the possibility of doing so.

The argument is similar to Pascal's insofar as Pascal also does not argue from the truth of Christianity to what man must do here on Earth. But Pascal does require that there is truth with respect to different ways of living. His clincher argument for the Wager is that, whatever happens in the next world, accepting the Wager results in a better life in this one:

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing. (233)

Another aspect of the Mav's argument that is interesting is the notion of "deserving" immortality. Atheists sometimes argue against hell that no one can possibly do anything deserving of eternal punishment. The converse of the same point would be that no one can possibly do anything deserving of eternal reward. Indeed, the classical philosophers did not argue that man deserved immortality. Plato argued that man's soul is immortal by nature; his destiny varied according to its just desserts, but it was immortal either way. The Catholic Church also holds the immortality of the soul as a matter that can be philosophically established. But such immortality does not necessarily involve the fullness of life, for man is only fully alive in his body. "Eternal life" for the Catholic means eternal life in the glorified body that is assumed at the general resurrection, and this eternal life certainly cannot be deserved. It is gained only as a gift freely given through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.