Hindsight being so much better, I’m now seeing the real problem with my post: I set out to explain how I got somewhere, but the process itself doesn’t make any sense until you see where it takes you. I provided a road-map and a couple of snapshots taken along the way, but no pictures of the landscape where I am now. All of that makes the whole journey pretty damned confusing to anyone who doesn’t know me (and that sometimes includes myself — Eve manages to put her finger on things I hadn’t noticed at all, and I’ll get to those).
And so I’ve gotten responses that point out problems with the things I said and problems with the things I think. As to questions of virtue and freedom and the state, I think I’ve expressed myself satisfactorily in a few of these posts. When it comes to questions of tradition and truth, though, I haven’t given such clear answers. Part of that, of course, is that I’m not sure I have them, but this conversation isn’t going to stretch the form of blogging so far that it won’t snap back: it’s giving us a tantalizing hint of a new form entirely. Which, thumbs up.
James begins his long-awaited rejoinder:
First I need to say that Nicola is making, in my estimation, a big mistake by connecting certainty to truth. Of course you can have truth without certainty. Maybe not the truth about the point at which water boils or the size of Australia, but other kinds of truth: nonempirical truths.
If that’s a mistake, I’m still making it: I don’t know how truth can function as a locus of value if we can’t know what’s true. Obviously I don’t need to be able to prove something for it to be true in some ontological sense, but how do we go about evaluating our nonempirical truths? I’m not sure we ever can — and then what do we do when we have two conflicting claims to nonempirical truth? How do we choose? Intuition? I believe that things are true, but I can’t prove them; how do I convince someone else that they’re actually true, rather than useful figments of the imagination?
So this is not to say that truth or reason are unimportant, but that we can’t construct an entire Weltanschauung on the premise that only things we’re certain of can be valuable. This is, I think, what Eve was talking about in the example of the birthday cake of existence. We don’t always start from the bottom of the pyramid and build our way up; sometimes we start with one piece of a complex system and build our way in and out from there. We take one thing we believe and look for the pieces that fit. When we emphasize coherent and intuitive truths over the straitjacket of logical consistency, we’ll never be entirely certain (because we aren’t starting from a self-evident axiom). On the other hand, if we realize that one piece of our structure can only connect to (say) mass murder, we can take that piece out and look for something better to go in its place.
That sort of evaluative reason implies an outside normative standard. Where does it come from?
I started by explaining it as love, but I don’t think that really works. My Eliot-epiphany was largely “wow, this standard-that-isn’t-logical-consistency is also a legitimate way to approach truth!” Love features as an evaluative factor, not the standard itself. When I add a bit to my worldview, I make sure it’s consistent with my valorization of love, but that’s a way of measuring whether it’s consistent with some higher good. So what is the higher good? What am I really gauging truths against when I ask myself about love?
Nicola Karras gives these two really big, intricate apparati, and says that her post is the story of how they’re hinged together, and yet we never get to see the hinge! Now, I’m honestly not sure that a blog post of any length can really draw a hinge (an epiphany) in ways that make sense to strangers. …I think Nicola is trying to describe–to use my terms rather than hers–how she came to conjoin sublimity and morality, the same weirdness of the Jews which Clive Lewis describes in the introduction to The Problem of Pain. But Yahweh is shaped exactly like a hinge, and Nicola hasn’t given us any hinge-alternative.
God would be a nice, easy answer, but I can’t do it. Shouldn’t religious faith — the kind of thing that fills your life with meaning, that changes not only how you live your life but how you see the world — require something more than “oh, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet”? God shouldn’t be just another piece to be slotted into my Weltanschauung; he should be the center. And he isn’t, and (here I am, caught again with the whole reason thing) I don’t have a good reason to put him there.
Can tradition provide an alternative standard? Some people seem to have read me as saying so, but it’s far more complicated; I’ll pick up on that next time.
God would be a nice, easy answer, but I can’t do it. Shouldn’t religious faith — the kind of thing that fills your life with meaning, that changes not only how you live your life but how you see the world — require something more than “oh, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet”?
Well, in a word: Uh-uh.
I mean, that’s a totally understandable line of thinking. Finding religion is generally treated in the media as this rapturous experience, this moment where, yes, your life is filled with meaning. And while I’m sure that happens to some people — and certainly, the Christian fundamentalists, the most public face of religion in the U.S., have done their level best to make it seem like it happens that way a lot — I contend that the most truly worthwhile of those moments happen after you’ve found religion and are typically much less rapturous, occasionally even bordering on the mundane.
Religion is a practice, right? Now think about any other practice. Playing golf, running a business, writing poetry. Sure, you might have a brilliant play or flash of insight early on, but assuming you take a genuine stab at it, you’re going to have a lot more of those the longer you do it, and they’re probably going to be of better quality. In fact, you’ll probably look back at your earliest such moments and think, “Gosh, I was cute back then.” And you can start doing any of these things for perfectly banal reasons, too, not because you’re so psyched about golf or business or poetry, but because you want to make partner or because your dad is sick and you don’t want the family store to go under or because you have to take a stupid class.
We bark a lot about what the fundamentalists are doing to secular life in this country, and that’s legit, but they’ve done at least as serious a disservice to religion. They’ve really made it seem like religion (or Christianity, at least) is a set of hard-and-fast rules, that God is angry when people don’t follow those rules, and that there has to be some Magical Moment involved in finding Him. But, no, religion (or Christianity, at least, or just God, if that’s easier — I really don’t think He’s that picky) is supposed to welcome anyone, and especially anyone who’s looking for something. It definitely doesn’t have to be Something Big, either, like help with their drug problem.
So, this is not an attempt to proselytize, just an attempt to overturn what I think is (again, understandably) the current conventional wisdom about religion. And lastly, no, God is never the easy answer, dude.
It’s like when you’re little and you think being the president would make life so much more simple. I mean, the Guy’s a total cockhead sometimes. He’s worth it, IMHO, but there’s a reason Robert Frost wrote:
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokew on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
JOKES. With an S! Dammit.
First things first: it was your political autobiography that set in motion this series of posts about Pomoco (etc.) at “places I read regularly” that have been consuming far too much of my time, no? This means I’m holding you somehow responsible for the fact that, rather than sleeping, I’m sitting here at 1:45 am reviewing my copy of Strauss (which neither of my roommates has burned yet!).
Moving on, though, but sticking with the theme of holding people responsible: it’s probably Strauss who has me instinctively siding with you on two points. On the certainty/truth (and forwards!) issue, I think you’re fine moving forward without truths of which you are uncertain—mostly because the first thing I read in Strauss that I had a favorable opinion of was his definition of philosophy as, “essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth. . . . Genuine knowledge of a fundamental question, a thorough understanding of it, is better than blindness to it, or indifference to it, be that indifference or blindness accompanied by knowledge of the answers of a vast number of peripheral or ephemeral questions or not.”
But it was your comment at the end about absenting religious faith from your Weltanschauung that sent me back to Strauss to begin with—I knew I felt this was the safer direction to go in, but couldn’t figure out quite why for a little while. Anyway, this feeling of mine has its root in his distinction between political theology and political philosophy: “By political theology we understand political teachings which are based on divine revelation. Political philosophy is limited to what accessible to the unassisted human mind.”
Of course, I don’t know if Strauss is in your background, so this could all be coincidental (or worse: irrelevant—and I could be asleep!).
It was me; and I haven’t read Strauss, though he comes just after Schmitt and Weaver and just before nap time on my to-do list.