Believing versus wanting to believe
Knowledge is usually defined as true belief with sufficient evidence. So knowledge is an objectification of belief. But it is also possible to have true belief without sufficient evidence. This can be accidental, as when a true belief (that the sun will rise tomorrow) is engendered through superstition (the chariot of Apollo pulls the sun); or it can be a kind of intuitive pre-cursor to knowledge, as a yet unproven scientific hypothesis.
However it is also possible to have false beliefs. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of our post-modern world seems to be a crisis, an epidemic, of false belief. False beliefs can simply be inaccurate speculations, as a scientific hypothesis which turns out to be wrong. Or they can be unprovable (aliens will attack the earth one thousand years hence). Or they can be blatantly counterfactual.
The question is, is there a difference in the subjective experience of the believer who tends to believe in true beliefs, versus one who tends to believe in false beliefs? Is someone who believes in false beliefs guilty of the sin of bad-faith, that is of believing something which he knows at some level to be not worthy of belief? In that case, it would seem rather that he has not even really achieved belief at all, but merely the attitude of "wanting to believe."
However it is also possible to have false beliefs. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of our post-modern world seems to be a crisis, an epidemic, of false belief. False beliefs can simply be inaccurate speculations, as a scientific hypothesis which turns out to be wrong. Or they can be unprovable (aliens will attack the earth one thousand years hence). Or they can be blatantly counterfactual.
The question is, is there a difference in the subjective experience of the believer who tends to believe in true beliefs, versus one who tends to believe in false beliefs? Is someone who believes in false beliefs guilty of the sin of bad-faith, that is of believing something which he knows at some level to be not worthy of belief? In that case, it would seem rather that he has not even really achieved belief at all, but merely the attitude of "wanting to believe."
Comments (137)
Presumably you're talking about one who believes false beliefs which turn out to be true? Otherwise I'd have thought the difference was obvious - the believer in false beliefs will far more frequently find things do not turn out as they expect.
Quoting Pantagruel
It depends what kind of thing you hold a belief to be. To me a belief is just a tendency to act as if, to to say "X believes that Y", just means "X has a tendency to act as if Y". By that definition wanting to believe Z rather than Y (as one currently does) is not bad faith, it's just a recognition of behaviour one wants to change - "I keep acting as if Y, but I think I'd get on better if I acted as if Z"
Per my 'catalog,' there appears to be quite a variety of conditions of beliefs. What I have in mind is to discover whether there may be a lot of people in the world who, in fact, cannot really be said to believe much at all. Rather, they only have things that they want to believe are true.
I do agree, as you say, that belief is "a tendency to act." That's definitely one of the main directions in which I'm heading. However, regarding things "not turning out" as expected, this is not an absolute measure. People can believe conterfactually and still believe and be willing to act - consider normative beliefs. Ought is, in an important sense, a contradiction of is.
Ask them. Though they’re unlikely to answer truthfully. But from my experience talking with people like this, it seems that they do really believe what they say. There is no level at which they think it’s false.
I don’t think it’s possible to hold an attitude of “wanting to believe” for very long. I think people in general and especially on this forum underestimate man’s intolerance of contradictions. I don’t think anyone can believe something for long if they know that at some level it is false.
I’d say it’s more difficult to hold a contradictory position than a legitimate one. Qanons, Flat earthers and Bartricks truly believe what they say. Much to everyone’s dismay and bewilderment.
I don't know. I try to put myself in this position and evaluate my own beliefs based on this proposed methodology, I guess a phenomenological analysis of belief. Personally, I really don't find that I have a lot of "concrete" beliefs. I believe that some ways of acting are right and others wrong. I can't even begin to imagine the psychological and epistemological state of mind of someone who believes the earth is flat. I think that is more of a reaction to an overall state of affairs in which not a lot of things are really understood at all.
Can you truly be said to believe beyond the scope of your understanding? I don't think so. I maintain that a lot of people are in a limbo of bad-faith, and really do not even know what they believe. Hence they fall back on the things that they want to believe, and pretend that those are their beliefs.
Or the person has different epistemic priorities and different epistemic standards than a philosopher.
A bit of folk wisdom says "If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything." I imagine that for many people, this is such an important motto and certainty such an important character trait, that they impel them to declare certainty by standards that are alien to a philosopher.
This also explains why the general image of philosophers is so negative: people generally seem to think of philosophers as indecisive, idle doubters, lacking character strength.
Look at Oprah's What I know for sure, for instance. Epistemologically, this is a nightmare, but for the ordinary person, this is probably what "knowing the truth" is all about.
Everything is ultimately psychological (subjective). I'd say it is a 'psycho-philosophical' question....
I don't think so.
An example: I was once waiting in line at the grocery store. I was second in line. So I was waiting, standing still in my spot at the checkout counter, looking around, waiting for the time to pass. When suddenly an older man cut in front of me, placing his items on the counter, ahead of mine, while the cashier still wasn't done with the items of the customer before me. I told him that he cut in front of me, that it was my turn. He insisted that I wasn't waiting in line at all, that I was idly looking around. I told him that it wasn't even my turn, that the cashier wasn't even done with the previous customer. The man didn't care. He kept repeating that I was idly looking around, and that I wasn't really waiting in line (and that as such, he had every right to cut in front of me).
I didn't get the impression he felt the least bit bad about his claims or the beliefs he held and expressed. I think it's similar with flat-earthers and so on.
edit: I have run an online training session for the next couple of hours, so I won't be able to reply for a bit to further posts....
I don't really care what the dictionary says knowledge is, or dictionaries for that matter; it is useful to ledge definitions but is truly not how mind works (the mind utilizes impulses and frequencies more over human symbology).
If knowing is this, then knowledge is what comes prior.
If you know what the sky is, then you must have acquired knowledge about the sky; thus, knowledge is the intrinsic data of experience.
To conclude, there's nothing wrong with belief but belief is in a different realm than knowledge, it belongs in the realm of wisdom. Knowledge is more a logical continuum. If we have to believe in a fact for it to be realised, we'd never realise anything and all we'd know is nothing. Knowledge is harsh nature we have to face; some of us deal with it better than others; it prevails over our sense.
Just because someone says that they believe something doesn't mean that they actually do believe that, does it? This is the rather subtle question of mental state that I am investigating.
A very good question. To answer your first question, we'd have to be aware that we currently have no false beliefs or thoughts. I'd think that it is incredibly unlikely that we currently don't have (at least) many false beliefs. Given that it's very likely that we do have false beliefs, I don't think that there is subjectively any difference between having a false belief or a true one.
A different question is if someone knows or is aware that they are bamboozling someone on purpose. In these cases you can say it's bad faith.
I'd agree that we may have false beliefs, which is why as a good Cartesian, I strive to work from a position of not committing to a belief precipitously. I do realize that on a philosophy forum there may well be fewer people who fall into the category of 'bad faith' with their own beliefs than in the general population. Still, there must be a spectrum of types of belief and I think, if we excavate deeply enough, it may be possible for anyone to reach the point at which we are no longer believing something, but only wishing to believe it. Do I really believe that the essence of my consciousness is a transcendental entity, or do I only wish that to be true?
I think maybe the most accurate way to describe this is that I believe that this should be the case. Most people who are in the position of bad-faith I'm postulating I think mistake believing that something should be true is the same as believing that it is true. Maybe allowing themselves to confuse 'speculative belief' with 'definite belief'?
Ah. I think I understand now what you have in mind.
Honestly? We would like to think that we are rational, open-minded people and that if some evidence comes along showing that one or several of our deeply felt beliefs are wrong, we would not have a choice but to change accordingly. Perhaps this is the case in some instances.
But I think we tend to follow thought patterns or traditions that we tend to find attractive or useful or meaningful in some manner or other. In this deep sense, I'm much more skeptical. It's not as if constantly having to change our deepest intuitions, values or traditions is easy or even in some cases desirable. It takes time and commitment to reach one's views in these matters.
Yes, just so. I think the biggest battle is the one we fight with our own preconceptions. The fact that background beliefs become pre-judicative makes them very resistant to excavation.
I don't think that's the best question to ask. It seems to me the real issue is the relative strength of epistemic justification. This filters out the lucky guesses, and doesn't depend on the unstated premise that the truth is actually available to judge whether or not the belief is false.
Hmmm. I think what we are talking about here orbits around the way that beliefs begin as vaguely intuited and hypothetical and gradually evolve into explicit and eventually validated. So I'm not sure exactly where epistemic justification enters into the picture. At the point of knowledge, epistemic justification is absolutely essential. But I think to what extent beliefs must be epistemically justified isn't clear (as I've said on other threads). Beliefs are more fundamentally psychological than knowledge, and I think authenticity (and bad faith) may be more critical to the validation of beliefs.
And that's the big problem. Given how much time we may invest in a certain way of thinking that adopts certain belief sets, how are we going to discern when it is worth un-attaching ourselves to these beliefs, taking into consideration how much more time and effort is required to readjust ourselves? I think the younger we are, the easier it is to go through such big changes - not that it's easy in that case either.
But the more years accumulate, the more difficult it's going to be to change as you've spent more time with your beliefs while not yet seeing a good reason to abandon them.
"is there a difference in the subjective experience of the believer who tends to believe in true beliefs, versus one who tends to believe in false beliefs?"
--are you applying this to the initial, intuitive hunch, or to a later stage in the belief formation process?
Now this is one thing that I do believe, strongly, fundamentally, and foundationally. It has been intuitively obvious to me almost since I began to be able to think. And I don't feel that this is wishful thinking on my part. To me, this is what reality reveals. As to the persistence or permanence or transcendence of that mind, that to me is not intuitively obvious in the same degree. I think I believe that the mind is also a transcendental entity, but that may be a reach. I don't quite see why it necessarily follows or is a corollary.
Isn't the use of "true" here presuming what you ask to find? If knowledge is validated by something other than belief, how could it be the "objectification of belief?"
I think here you're concerned with what validates a religious belief, what criteria can be appealed to, to differentiate true and false beliefs, or whether it even matters, subjectively.
In 2009 comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong published A Case for God. This was not an exercise in Christian apologetics - it was grounded in historical arguments and comparative religion. But the point she made is that the incorporation of the idea of God into early modern science - such as Newton's frequent invocation of 'God's handiwork' and many other examples - massively distorts the meaning and role of religious belief. Basically, belief in God became propositional - and it was not long before it became obvious it was a proposition with no formal substance. Newton believed that God set the universe in motion and regulated its movements. Many churchmen leapt at this as scientific validation of the faith. But of course within a few generations, others had no trouble dispensing with such an hypothesis; LaPlace famously 'had no need of that hypothesis'.
This is where, Armstrong argues, the emphasis on belief as propositional knowledge originated, and it was definitely a two-edged sword. Just as those who believed saw it as validation, those who didn't saw it as dispensing with the need for such beliefs.
But, she says, in other cultures, and even in earlier Christianity, religious belief was not intended as propositional knowledge, which is part of what she calls 'logos', logic and science. It's properly part of 'mythos', which is the mythical re-telling of human existence, encompassing suffering, redemption, mystery, and many other felt realities which can't be incorporated by logos.
You see this all the time in arguments about God's existence. The implicit sense is that, if God exists, then He must be 'out there somewhere' - and if He's not, then what does such a belief even mean?
Armstrong explains
In respect of the question of validating belief, the requirement is to 'swim' it, or walk the talk, not try and treat it as an hypothetical proposition. Which, of course, is a risk, and a commitment.
I'd have to concur with not over-emphasizing the importance of propositional knowledge. Fundamentally, beliefs are not propositional, and neither is knowledge. Everyone has beliefs, and everyone has knowledge, even if they can't express them. Risk and commitment. Nice.
This is a powerful idea if it is used well.
I'm curious, and you may well decline to do this, but if you were a skeptic, hypothetically making a case against the notion of God (however this looks) what would be some directions you think might be fruitful? This question was put to theologian David Bentley Hart and he immediately said, 'The problem of suffering, especially the innocent and children dying of cancer.' or words to that effect.
Thoughts?
How I interpret the OP is, as I said, arising from the felt need to validate belief - presumably religious belief. What I think Karen Armstrong shows is that the sense in which 'belief' is used in today's world is itself problematical.
I want to pick up on this point:
Quoting Pantagruel
I would take issue with that, because knowledge in the sense of technology and science is propositional. You propose an hypothesis or a theory or a formula, and then you test it against the observation, experiment or result. Left-hand is the proposition, right-hand side the result. Just like Popper says in 'conjecture and refutation'.
That's why, from the positivist perspective, metaphysical claims are nonsensical - there's no 'right-hand side' to test them against! According to the positivists, like Carnap and Ayer, they comprise words that might be gramatically coherent but carry no actual meaning as they don't refer to anything observable or testable.
1. Counterfactuals can't be about the past, the past is and there's nothing you can do about it. Likewise, counterfactuals can't be about the present, what is is. That leaves only the future as a possible state of affairs in which counterfactuals can be true. Ergo, when someone is told a lie, usually a white lie, fae treats it as a future possibility that can be actualized given one makes the right choices. The word "plan" seems apposite to what I'm trying to get across.
2. If you really look at it, living a lie isn't really a problem if one eliminates the risks involved in doing that which are injury or death, injury and death to be understood in the broadest sense of those words. In other words, if the dangers of believing lies are zero, anyone would prefer to live a life of fantasy i.e. in a false reality.
3. This isn't a reason for why people might want to hear lies but it's quite mind-blowing by my reckoning. When people put truth at the forefront what they're actually doing is endorsing the correspondence theory of truth. Compare this to the way falsehoods are sustained or escape detection which is by weaving a coherent story around it which is just another name for the coherence theory if truth.
My two cents worth.
The American Republican party and its supporters illustrate that on a daily basis. :-) (Sorry, don't want to derail, but couldn't resist.)
The existence of atoms is a belief. The fact is, there still doesn't exist a method for observing atoms or their constituents. Therefore, it's more like scientists want to believe in the existence of atoms. The value of such a belief is in how close it approximates to our interactive reality. The working hypotheses about atoms give close approximations for the reality in our closest (hence relevant) environment/proximity — it also hints at why quantum mechanics seems to make things appear to be 'outta wack'.
Another example is how Newton's calculations on gravity are great for applications here on earth but become insufficient when applied to quantum mechanics.
Regardless of belief and/or faith, our experiences have very close approximations. For example, we all live in a world where medicine saves more people than God/Gods with respect to health. Also, God/Gods (as representations of a greater reality) provide greater comfort (through hope) for the majority of people (including the self-proclaimed non-believers) in times of need/desperation than reason.
Quoting Pantagruel
Depends on the kinds of applications the beliefs afford?
Hi, Wayf (from you know who.) I think you are basically correct here but I did refresh my mind on Carnap and found some quotes that remind me as much of pragmatism and Wittgenstein as of positivism. He discusses the existence of numbers.
[quote=Carnap]
From these questions we must distinguish the external question of the reality of the thing world itself. In contrast to the former questions, this question is raised neither by the man in the street nor by scientists, but only by philosophers. Realists give an affirmative answer, subjective idealists a negative one, and the controversy goes on for centuries without ever being solved. And it cannot be solved because it is framed in a wrong way. To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. Those who raise the question of the reality of the thing world itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical question as their formulation seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of a practical decision concerning the structure of our language. We have to make the choice whether or not to accept and use the forms of expression in the framework in question.
In the case of this particular example, there is usually no deliberate choice because we all have accepted the thing language early in our lives as a matter of course. Nevertheless, we may regard it as a matter of decision in this sense: we are free to choose to continue using the thing language or not; in the latter case we could restrict ourselves to a language of sense data and other "phenomenal" entities, or construct an alternative to the customary thing language with another structure, or, finally, we could refrain from speaking. If someone decides to accept the thing language, there is no objection against saying that he has accepted the world of things. But this must not be interpreted as if it meant his acceptance of a belief in the reality of the thing world; there is no such belief or assertion or assumption, because it is not a theoretical question. To accept the thing world means nothing more than to accept a certain form of language, in other words, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing accepting or rejecting them. The acceptance of the thing language leads on the basis of observations made, also to the acceptance, belief, and assertion of certain statements. But the thesis of the reality of the thing world cannot be among these statements, because it cannot be formulated in the thing language or, it seems, in any other theoretical language.
The decision of accepting the thing language, although itself not of a cognitive nature, will nevertheless usually be influenced by theoretical knowledge, just like any other deliberate decision concerning the acceptance of linguistic or other rules. The purposes for which the language is intended to be used, for instance, the purpose of communicating factual knowledge, will determine which factors are relevant for the decision. The efficiency, fruitfulness, and simplicity of the use of the thing language may be among the decisive factors. And the questions concerning these qualities are indeed of a theoretical nature. But these questions cannot be identified with the question of realism. They are not yes-no questions but questions of degree. The thing language in the customary form works indeed with a high degree of efficiency for most purposes of everyday life. This is a matter of fact, based upon the content of our experiences. However, it would be wrong to describe this situation by saying: "The fact of the efficiency of the thing language is confirming evidence for the reality of the thing world; we should rather say instead: "This fact makes it advisable to accept the thing language."
...
What is now the nature of the philosophical question concerning the existence or reality of numbers? To begin with, there is the internal question which together with the affirmative answer, can be formulated in the new terms, say by "There are numbers" or, more explicitly, "There is an n such that n is a number." This statement follows from the analytic statement "five is a number" and is therefore itself analytic. Moreover, it is rather trivial (in contradistinction to a statement like "There is a prime number greater than a million which is likewise analytic but far from trivial), because it does not say more than that the new system is not empty; but this is immediately seen from the rule which states that words like "five" are substitutable for the new variables. Therefore nobody who meant the question "Are there numbers?" in the internal sense would either assert or even seriously consider a negative answer. This makes it plausible to assume that those philosophers who treat the question of the existence of numbers as a serious philosophical problem and offer lengthy arguments on either side, do not have in mind the internal question. And indeed, if we were to ask them: "Do you mean the question as to whether the framework of numbers, if we were to accept it, would be found to be empty or not?" they would probably reply: "Not at all; we mean a question prior to the acceptance of the new framework." They might try to explain what they mean by saying that it is a question of the ontological status of numbers; the question whether or not numbers have a certain metaphysical characteristic called reality (but a kind of ideal reality, different from the material reality of the thing world) or subsistence or status of "independent entities." Unfortunately, these philosophers have so far not given a formulation of their question in terms of the common scientific language. Therefore our judgment must be that they have not succeeded in giving to the external question and to the possible answers any cognitive content. Unless and until they supply a clear cognitive interpretation, we are justified in our suspicion that their question is a pseudo-question, that is, one disguised in the form of a theoretical question while in fact it is a non-theoretical; in the present case it is the practical problem whether or not to incorporate into the language the new linguistic forms which constitute the framework of numbers.
[/quote]
http://www.ditext.com/carnap/carnap.html
As I read this, his object that calling reality as a whole 'physical' or 'mental' makes no real difference, because any distinction that collapses to this or that pole becomes useless, excepting its emotional valence and convenience. The accusations of 'lack of content' are of course implying that only this or that counts as content.
Isn't this just a fancy way of saying that religion traffics in myths and feelings? These can be fine things, to be sure. But 'Jesus is the son of God' is (typically presented as ) propositional knowledge. 'A divine person named Jesus died for my sins.'
[quote = Armstrong]Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.[/quote]
This is a sophisticated and perhaps atypical view of religion (pretty likable!). This line doesn't sound right tho : religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance. Perhaps such doctrines only make sense in the context of rituals or observances. I think even atheists can acknowledge that some kind of poetic supplement only 'lights up' for earnest practitioners who live differently. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.
If Armstrong is right, then religion is not universally rational in some sense. It would be absurd to argue for such doctrines as opposed to simply evangelizing and drawing potential beneficiaries immediately into the practice, so that the apparently incredible becomes believable and believed. If such doctrines are, pre-practice, absurd or incredible, then most philosophers are damned. (I'm sort of joking, but the point is that a certain personality type will be turned off by the doctrines and never try the practice.)
On point.
Instead of two groups of people, I'd think instead of two tendencies in all of us. There's stuff that we believe 'authentically' and stuff that we believe in front in the mirror or the ring light, stuff we can almost believe that almost believe.
Yet another example of the deception I brought up on the other thread. Look at what's been written here. The opening sentence talks very explicitly about the religious 'truth' - ie whether a religious matter is the case or not. This doesn't change meaning when turned into practical rather than propositional knowledge. The toddler does not have the practical knowledge of how to ride a bike all the while they keep falling off, practical knowledge still has a truth-maker.
So Armstrong starts by making explicit reference to this truth-maker. But by the end of the passage what do we find we're talking about - the methodology. We cannot hope to understand what religious practice is trying to do without practice "Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.". I agree entirely with her argument. But despite the clear deception at the start that she was going to make an argument about the 'truth' of the matter (which would be whether these practices actually did result in success at their objective), what we have by the end is an argument which says "you won't know if it works unless you try it" Fine. I completely agree that for some practices I won't know if they work unless I try them. But that's not an argument that they do in fact work once you try them. It's not, as clearly claimed, an argument for the 'truth' of religious practice.
For that, plenty of people have 'tried them' and found nothing at all, or even become worse people. So unless you just beg the question (they obviously weren't doing it right, because it definitely works!), the evidence we have thus far seems to be that it either fails as a exercise in practical knowledge, or the teachers don't actually know what it is they're teaching - ie the success it appears to have in the few, is not, in fact, the result of the practice they think it is.
I have no objection to the idea you put forward about the mythos. I really like that approach.
Quoting Wayfarer
... is brilliant, really nicely put.
But then Armstrong spoils that beautiful sense of shared experience by saying
And in one sentence all that beautiful shared humanity is tossed way in favour of religious doctrine. Now some (and only some) narratives produce the 'truth' ("I've seen the light!") whilst others obviously don't (there'd be no meaning to 'truth' without falsity). Religious apologetics again. What a disappointment from such a genuinely positive start.
One difference here is the 'subjective' element. A person could (I don't) take the view that it's impossible to tell from the outside if someone is 'saved' (in touch with the Ecstasy or 'transconceptual gnosis' or enlightenment, etc.) The toddler falls off the bike. The believer can keep saying the words, which might sound absurd to us, and the believer can explain that we are locked out (of course it may be that the believer is just as much locked in.)
I think the problem is that religious thought is sometimes envious of the prestige and/or function of science. It often can't settle with being 'just' myth, ritual, observance, and tradition that helps people live well together. I don't know, but it might be the case that religious people tend to be happier. I find that plausible. But the idea that outsiders are deluded (living in the cave of illusion or sin or or scientism or whatever) is where the more aggressive element sneaks in.
I get what you're saying (I think) but would that not be surmountable by personal report? If a hundred people attend Catholic liturgy and one of them is thus transported (and reports as much), the other 99 gain nothing (and report that), then does that not demonstrate that the Catholic liturgy is not teaching what it thinks it's teaching?
The one person who achieved rapture obviously did so by some practice, but it clearly wasn't simply the instructions of the priest otherwise all would have. so if rapture is the objective (and I'm obviously just using it as an example), all currently religions are demonstrably wrong in their ideas about what practices lead to it. They are either missing something, or missing everything.
This is what I loved so much about @Wayfarer's initial talk of the Mythos. It had this wonderful fallible sense of us all trying to grasp at the ungraspable, to express in myth the experience we have of life which, let's face it, presents to us as so much more than just the biology or physics of it.
But religious practice is diametrically opposed to that. It defines far more as 'wrong' than it does as 'right', Papal edicts ban a hundred times as many things as they prescribe. Nine out of the ten commandments start with "Thou shalt not...", etc.
And the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 did not want to believe in the existence of atoms.
That's a good objection, but you already mentioned the patch-up. 'If if don't work, you aren't doing it right.' As long as there is some secret interior of the soul, there's room for excuses (hidden variables.) Maybe they said the prayers, abstained from this or that, and so on, but their 'heart' was not right.
I think there are robust studies demonstrating that secular countries have happier citizens. Religiosity may not really be about God all that much and more about culture and community belonging.
I'm with you on the Mythos, for the reasons you mentioned. To me that's just myth, literature, the freethinking study of famous religious texts. Life is definitely more (I agree) than biology and physics -- and more than enacting the scientist or even the philosopher.
That makes sense to me. On the second sentence: that's been my working theory for a while now. I don't believe that most people believe in religious doctrine in any functional or earnest way. It's a little bit of OT traditional morality and little bit of NT forgiveness and communism. But maybe bigger than all of that it's a building that people go to on a regular basis to see friends? (This is far from my lifestyle, but I've seen aunts become religious later in life and this seems to be the buzz...singing the choir, having lots of people around with similar views and lifestyles. )
Yeah. This is the point, I think. If the Mythos idea were as presented then reading The Lord of the Rings would be no less spiritual than reading The Bible, lying on top of a tor watching the clouds scud by no less enlightening than guided meditation.
Right. I liked the Mythos thing but I recognized in it as my own appreciation of Kings and Judges, for example, which are like the Homer but possibly better given the translators.
I'm a huge believer in the ideas of Popper, but both beliefs and knowledge are fundamental to what it means to be human. When you translate beliefs and knowledge into propositions, you are essentially bringing them to reflexive awareness. And science is a relative latecomer. I'm not saying there is no value in the study of propositional beliefs and knowledge, but it isn't fundamental to the basic nature of beliefs. They are performative. The primitive hunter who throws a stone has a "belief" about the trajectory of an object in a gravitational field.
:up:
Yes, I mentioned that also, I do think if we excavate deeply enough we come to this point.
Right. I guess I was trying to develop your lead. It's a good issue.
Quoting Pantagruel
I should have answered your question more directly perhaps. IMO, beliefs like conspiracy theories and some (not saying all) religious beliefs strike me as intermediate in some sense. If one more seriously expects a pleasant afterlife for one's self and one's loved ones, then why cry at funerals? Why exercise much caution? Fret about cancer? Yet I think that some church-going 'believers' do cry and fret. Then there are conspiracy theorists who think that they think that child-abusing lizards rule from outer space rule the world and yet go to their mundane jobs, renew their driver's license, and generally proceed as before, with a new hobby, a new thing to spend their money and time on.
I'm partial to the pragmatist idea that belief is least ambiguously manifested in action. Words are just too cheap. Self-deception or self-entertainment is too tempting. Parents who don't seek medical treatment for a sick child for religious reasons, at the risk of the child's life, are manifesting belief in this sense. I don't approve of such things, but, assuming they love the child,... In the same way, leaping off a high building enacts the belief that one can fly. Again, not recommended. A less morbid example is the rich man who converts and gives away all his wealth. Then there are more mundane examples, like driving into an intersection typically manifesting the belief that no other cars are in the way, or lifting a fork to one's mouth suggesting a belief that what's on the fork is edible.
Exactly. Fundamental beliefs are deeply embedded. I do believe in or have a deep intuition of the transcendence of consciousness. I had lots of stress and anxiety as my dad declined in health during the last few years, but when he passed away, all negative emotions disappeared, and thinking and talking about him immediately brought me nothing but joy. I shed not a tear, but we were very close. My family has a hard time grasping it.
I think that propositional descriptions may not be so much expressions of beliefs as attempts to arrive at or achieve belief. We only think about what is problematic. I hope that in reading this thread some people will have spent some time pondering the nature of their most deeply held convictions and achieve some insight or clarity. That is what motivated it.
Can you explain about Agrippa?
As for the willingness to accept flattery, that is a rock-solid example of the desire to believe something, which I think completely conforms to the distinction I am trying to describe.
That's beautiful, though it might be tough to not be understood by your family.
Quoting Pantagruel
That view reminds me of Peirce's view, and I agree. The idea is something like: inquiry swings into action when belief is threatened. Doubt is 'paralysis' (for refitting habits of reaction), while belief is the smooth, habitual 'movement.'
:up:
There are studies that show that religiosity plays a different role and has different effects if the person is living in a culture where the majority is religious of the same religion, as opposed to living in a country where one's religion is just one of many (and the country is officially secular).
E.g. https://www.livescience.com/18117-religion-happiness-countries.html
And sometimes, it's just more strategy.
I think that a philosophically inclined person is in comparison to the ordinary, extroverted, socially adept person like a muttering idiot in comparison to an academic. I'm not saying this to disparage philosophers or those so inclined, I'm one of them, after all. "Ordinary" people are experts in cunning, faking, pretending, social strategizing. They can do intuitively, in the blink of an eye, what a philosopher needs an hour for.
But can it be said that the ordinary daily struggle for survival really is about acting in bad faith?
If we accept the Theory of Evolution, and with it, the idea of the evolutionary struggle for suvival, and along with that, Social Darwinism, then doing whatever one can in order to get the upper hand isn't acting in bad faith anymore. It's a necessity and it's normal.
Quoting Manuel
Yes. It's takes a while for cognitive biases to develop and to become firm. The man who cut in front of me in the waiting line said, among other things, "Who do you think you are?!" I'm guessing he operated from the bias that he's not going to allow a person visibly younger than himself and a woman at that tell him "how things really are". I never stood a chance. Showing him that there were still items on the counter from the customer before me was irrelevant.
I just don't know how other people live with other people's biases like that.
But when one wants to believe in something even if it is wrong, then it is just an emotional state, which is a desire or wish?
Here are some assumptions that religious people (of different religions) make and I learned them the hard way:
"If a person visits a religious venue for th second time, the only reason is that they believe what is being taught there."
"If a person reads a religious book, this means they believe it and are a member of said religion."
"If a person takes up a religious practice, this means they have committed to said religion."
When I explicated those assumptions and ran them by the religious people, they usually disagreed and had a more what would normally be considered rational, critical attitude. I derived those assumptions from the way religious people talked about others, esp. those that have "failed" and the "doubters".
In short, the religious have a vastly different attitude toward religion than an outsider. (Stick around, and I'll tell you more, I think I've figured this out quite well.)
Of course. One isn't supposed to "try" those practices, one is supposed to just do them. Religious people will even quote Nike and Yoda for this purpose.
No. We're wrong to begin with when we think that there's something to learn, or to "know for oneself" when it comes to religion. Nevermind what official apologetics say.
is such a nice person. Armstrong wrote an academic book. It takes a more crude and direct person to elucidate some points about religion in plain plain terms.
Quoting Isaac
Not at all. One doesn't go to mass to experience rapture. One does religious practices in order to do one's religious duty, not to get something from doing those practices. (And one is supposed to consider oneself fortunate to have a religious duty in the first place and to be able to carry it out.)
I don't think religion (or spirituality) was ever intended for such purposes (such as approaching the "ungraspable").
Doing a religious practice can never convince a person who doesn't already believe.
It depends who the intended audience for such a case against God would be. Some (many, most?) theists will not even listen to someone who disagrees with them.
The problem of theodicy is small fry anyway.
I think it comes down to why they say they believe something. On one end of the spectrum, there is the conman who, for the purposes of betraying others and getting money from them, will say anything that he thinks will sway his target in his favor. On the opposite end are probably those genuinely mentally ill people who are genuinely confused about things to the point that they can't function normally in daily life.
How much terminological precision can rightfully be expected from people? Most probably can't tell the difference between "believe", "know", "hope", "want", "expect" and instead use those words intuitively, esp. when they talk about things that are close to their heart.
Esp. "believe" still seems, for many people, to carry in it its old etymological meaning 'to hold dear'.
True. This is more of a personal project for me, with the understanding that some of these (to me) subtle differences may be 'writ large' in other segments of the population, whether they are capable of being aware or no.
That's some insightful stuff, but Karen Armstrong promised religious 'truth'. How are we to understand a meaning of 'truth' which doesn't have a truthmaker?
It's a bit complicated. If the person is tricking another person for sake of power, it's not good. On the other hand, some people tend to believe almost anything, so they're getting what they seek.
But knowingly bamboozling someone feels off and can also be quite dangerous leading to cults and the like.
The whole Social Darwinism is one angle in which to interpret the theory, there are others, such as Kropotkin's idea of "mutual aid", which is at its most basic: you help me, I'll help you, we all benefit as much as possible given what we have. This type of framework, as well as evidence given to support such claims, is given by John Hands' in his magisterial Cosmosapiens.
Quoting baker
Damn.
Cases such as these, besides being annoying, are intriguing in that one would think a person with such an attitude would've encountered people telling him to calm down and confronting him for having such beliefs. It's just very hard to navigate these issues....
Quoting BrianW
Also,
Quoting BrianW
The information we have about atoms only provides working hypotheses not absolute truth (if it exists).
By having confidence in yourself, believing that you exist for a reason, that you're a worthy person, and so on. Yes, cheap self-help slogans, I know. But I'm earnest about this. It's a contextual reply to your question.
A philosophical quest for the truth, for "knowing how things really are" can sometimes turn into a self-perpetuating obsession that makes one's life miserable. It can start off out of a poor self-image, or it can result in one (and then further perpetuate it and itself).
As they say, Even though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one is still obliged to dress for dinner.
That is written as a conclusion..."So..."; but it doesn't follow. Indeed, it's unclear what objectification
of belief might amount to.
Quoting Pantagruel
To believe some statement is to believe that statement to be true... Those who believe things that are not true are what we in the trade call "wrong"...
That's the trouble with talk of objectivity and of subjective experience: it doesn't help anything.
A bit of a shame that it is posed in religious terms, though. What Armstrong is describing is a 'world-picture" which can be understood in a more general sense.
But in addition, any belief that is sufficiently coherent will be expressible as a proposition. If it isn't cohernt, it's not so much a belief as a sentiment.
I lean toward agreeing with you, but I can imagine exceptions to this rule, depending on the practice.
It is a belief which has been evaluated against intersubjectively validated constraints or condition, which is one usual way of describing objectivity. So 'objectified belief.'
What criterion measures the coherency of a belief? If a belief realizes itself in an appropriate action then it is coherent. The fact that it can also be propositionally expressed is irrelevant to the coherency of a belief, unless it is fundamental to the enactment of that belief.
While it does seem a little silly to doubt atoms, an instrumentalist view of them isn't obviously absurd.
[quote=link]
Mach, in the introductory chapter of his book Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886; Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations), reviving Humean antimetaphysics, contended that all factual knowledge consists of a conceptual organization and elaboration of what is given in the elements—i.e., in the data of immediate experience. Very much in keeping with the spirit of Comte, he repudiated the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. For Mach, the most objectionable feature in Kant’s philosophy was the doctrine of the Dinge an sich—i.e., of the “thing in itself”—the ultimate entities underlying phenomena, which Kant had declared to be absolutely unknowable though they must nevertheless be conceived as partial causes of human perceptions. By contrast, Hermann von Helmholtz, a wide-ranging scientist and philosopher and one of the great minds of the 19th century, held that the theoretical entities of physics are, precisely, the things-in-themselves—a view which, though generally empiricist, was thus clearly opposed to positivist doctrine. Theories and theoretical concepts, according to positivist understanding, were merely instruments of prediction. From one set of observable data, theories formed a bridge over which the investigator could pass to another set of observable data. Positivists generally maintained that theories might come and go, whereas the facts of observation and their empirical regularities constituted a firm ground from which scientific reasoning could start and to which it must always return in order to test its validity. In consequence, most positivists were reluctant to call theories true or false but preferred to consider them merely as more or less useful.
...
Mach and, along with him, Wilhelm Ostwald, the originator of physical chemistry, were the most prominent opponents of the atomic theory in physics and chemistry. Ostwald even attempted to derive the basic chemical laws of constant and multiple proportions without the help of the atomic hypothesis. To the positivist the atom, since it could not be seen, was to be considered at best a “convenient fiction” and at worst an illegitimate ad hoc hypothesis.
[/quote]
https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism/The-critical-positivism-of-Mach-and-Avenarius
My view is something like: it really doesn't matter whether one decides to call atoms 'really real' or 'damn good models.' The practical issue involves enacting the trust of certain predictions and technologies. I like Mach's lifeworld-theory-lifeworld structure. I'd just replace 'sensation' with uncontroversial observation statements (sensations are 'mystical' entities just like atoms.)
No. It's an existential statement. Consider the mythos behind Christianity - that the universe is the creation of an intelligent being with whom the believer has a personal relationship mediated by faith in Christ. So from the Christian perspective, belief in Jesus Christ is instrumental in realising the higher life which they say that this belief is the entry to. It is of course taken for granted ('believed') in secular culture that this is a myth, but if it were true then the implications would be considerable.
I didn't find much to comment on in the Carnap passage. I simply referred to Carnap and Ayer as exemplars of positivism.
There's a Philosophy Now OP on the Wittgenstein and the folly of logical positivism which outlines pretty clearly what logical positivism ignored about Wittgenstein:
Quoting Pantagruel
I would say a hunter knows how to fire an arrow, or set a trap, through experience and by imitation of those already skilled in it. What science brings to the picture is an immense amplification of such felt knowledge by representing the forces involved in symbolic form so it can be used to fire an artillery round or a rocket.
Quoting Banno
I dispute that. This is the shortcoming of 'plain language' philosophy in a nutshell - it reduces philosophy to the language of insurance contracts or legal statutes.
Notice that Kant's violently opposed notion of the noumenal world is objected to most vociferously by those who insist that there is nothing about an object which cannot be known. In other words, those aspiring to omniscience.
Yeah - so that's a fancy way to say "the stuff we agree on".
But knowledge is not just the stuff we agree on.
Quoting Pantagruel
...not if those acts are inconsistent - hence the need to add "appropriate".
An objection that amounts to nothing.
Digression: That does make me laugh and I have sometimes said similar things. But the way it's presented is also highly tendentious, using the word 'reduces' and making a comparison to unsexy legalese is a rhetorical stunt. A good one. And not necessarily wrong. But it does suggest a strong bias and the assumption that truth can only be captured in more elaborately decorative and 'received' wording.
It often seems to me, that belief or disbelief in anything transcendental (by scientific notions, say) partly boils down to a person's aesthetic preferences. Often I hear in the words used and sentiments expressed, descriptions that fundamentally come down to what appeals as a more beautiful or tasteful explanation. Sometimes these debates remind me of heated art discussions I used to overhear about the merits of figurative versus abstract art.
To begin to truly believe (ignoring the ambiguity for a moment) in a benevolent creator would indeed seem to be an entry into a different kind of life. It would feel good, very good even. Songs about the joy of it would make a special kind of 'sense' within the community of believers.
I think we both agree that a such a belief is typically not metaphorical.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure. I don't see the relevance unless I'm supposed to go easy on spiritual claims just because Wittgenstein was moved by certain spiritual writers. FWIW, I think positivism was/is interesting but is hardly the last word (I don't expect the arrival of the last word.)
You make a good point. Hegel was explicitly annoyed by Kantian skepticism as a cowardly retreat from the manifest destiny of philosophy. But I think humans generally want a stable picture of the world. Both 'spiritual ' and 'anti-spiritual' people are biased. IMO, everyone is biased. No one likes big changes in their worldview, with the possible exception of joyful visions (if I was visited by God and he filled my heart with joy and belief in the goodness of all things...)
They are not so much stated beliefs as sentiments; to be seen in music and art, not dissected by philosophers.
:point:
To be fair, half of philosophy perhaps is rhetorical stunts.
Did I say it wasn't? :smile:
That sounds right, and I haven't seen much philosophy by W on the subject. One can find a few quotes like:
[quote=W]
I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)
A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye.
For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.
[/quote]
There are also spiritual-adjacent quotes in the TLP.
But my response is still (politely, I hope): so what? Why should Wittgenstein be an authority on religion just because he was a great philosopher of language?
You did not. :up:
As can bee seen in various other threads hereabouts, he had much to say about belief. Hence his relevance.
I was being pedantic or uptight, but just for clarity: the metaphysicians are referring to observable things like chairs but debating whether they are 'made of' or mind or matter. So I read Carnap as criticizing differences that make no difference. Very close to James' pragmatism. Content is identified with practical content, a step that can of course be criticized.
OK, well I grant his relevance. I thought Wayf was using him rhetorically ('well, W was religious.' ), and that's what I was reacting to. I think we both agree that god-talk usually takes itself for propositional knowledge. I'm aware of something like 'cultural religion' where it's taken as myth and ritual. But that's somethng else (sentiment, as you say.)
I've no idea how this addresses what I said. Perhaps you could expand.
I see your point, but it's being made from a 'third-party' perspective. In other words, you're making a judgement about what you think are the deficiencies of 'religious practices', based on your knowledge or belief about the shortcomings of other people's endeavours to practice them.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not familiar with the expression 'truthmaker'.
I think Armstrong's point is that by immersion in the practice, a different perspective emerges. But it might be difficult or impossible to convey that change in perspective apart from the practice.
ZEN STUDENT: 'I've learned through the practice of Zazen that there's an insight that can't be conveyed in words.'
QUESTIONER: 'Oh yes. And what's that?'
I think you are right that religion offers some people these things. Calling this 'truth' still seems to stretch the word too much. Many an atheist would probably agree that religion makes people feel good about themselves (which is not to ignore that atheism makes people feel good about themselves too.)
[quote=Marx]
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society.
...
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism_and_religion#:~:text=19th%2Dcentury%20German%20philosopher%20Karl,economic%20conditions%20and%20their%20alienation.
I don't agree with Marx entirely, and personally I think humans can get just as entangled with conspiracy theory sans the supernatural for the same 'opium.' Perhaps even Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals, etc. I quote this to make the point that 'mythos and ritual that makes us feel good (but only if one really believes and practices a certain lifestyle)' is not so far from what an atheist might say.
I agree that the Quest can take a sickly form (certain god-and-antinatalism loops come to mind, but also the less offensive stuff Wittgenstein invented therapy for.)
I also like the focus on self-image. I think that's the cornerstone. Which statue am I trying to become?
Absolutely, I recognise that, but my point is that it's no less true then for science. A neuroscientist possessed of the expansive and detailed knowledge of his subject might feel he's accounted for human consciousness. You, a non-practicing neuroscientist, then say "neuroscience cannot account for human consciousness" based only on your third party knowledge of other people's endeavours to practice neuroscience.
I don't see what's different that allows you to make claims about the understanding neuroscience can/cannot acquire as an outsider, but I couldn't make similar claims about the understanding religious practice can/cannot acquire without actually doing it.
If I were to say that ‘neuroscience cannot account for consciousness’ I would not be taking issue with the neuroscientist with regards to her domain of knowledge, but making a philosophical point about the brain-mind relationship which might be outside the domain of neuroscience as such. I don’t think neuroscience claims to understand the philosophical question of brain-mind relationship as it is not necessarily a scientific question.
The point about the perspective of a spiritual practitioner is that it is not objective in the sense that science is. Let’s say it involves a shift in perspective from the ego-logical to an other-oriented perspective. There might be a cathartic experience of seeing through or beyond oneself that is profoundly life-altering but not necessarily scientifically verifiable
I agree with this.
Quoting Wayfarer
True.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think it does to an extent. Several neuroscientists think they'll be able to understand consciousness as a result of their studies. I can see, however, that this might well be more properly considered a philosophical question, so, with caveats, we're still broadly in agreement...
...until here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Now you seem to abandon the approach you took to scientific questions. Why cannot an outsider address the philosophical question of whether a spiritual practitioner does indeed "involve a shift in perspective from the ego-logical to an other-oriented perspective.", whether it could possibly have "a cathartic experience of seeing through or beyond oneself that is profoundly life-altering but not necessarily scientifically verifiable".
Both those question are philosophical ones, just like the question about whether neuroscience does or does not address consciousness is. Both can be asked without engaging in the actual practice itself, just by assessing the methods, what they bracket out, how they assess results etc. Just like we did to conclude that neuroscience takes a third-party approach and so can't deliver first person values.
Basically, I'm not (as I'm often mistakenly assumed to be) advocating that science can answer all of life's questions, I'm merely making the point that it's failure to do so does not lead to a conclusion that the non-science alternatives must therefore be the ones to do so. They may fail too. Their success or failure is completely independent of science's.
Imagine a florist who develops over many years of dedicated practice the insight that 'the world is a purple rose.' She explains that this truth only sounds like nonsense to those who haven't arranged ten million flowers with a pure heart. A critic tells her that surely arranging flowers is not the path to grand metaphysical truths and that this can only be a metaphor of some kind, or perhaps a poem that captures a mood. She retorts that this is a common misconception about flower-arrangement, and the inner meaning of the purple rose also reveals new dimensions of the mind, a trans-conceptual or non-discursive faculty that mostly lies dormant. She even admits that perhaps only some humans have this faculty and are capable of the Insight, but insists that arranging the ten million flowers is necessary for those who do have the faculty.
Agreed! This theory is so important and interesting. As you explained could come from empiricism as Locke developed. It is not only about how someone can convince others of purple rose but how the other part will accept it. This is why I guess is so important here the power of belief and beliefs themselves. There will be people that doesn’t matter how good arguments you put in the table, they will not accept it...
That's a good example. I think intuitively we'd all want to say that the woman in question was suffering from some mental health issues and would possibly benefit from psychiatric help.
There's been a tendency to exempt religions on the grounds of numbers (that many people can't all be mad). I'm inclined to go along with that approach, but in doing so we've pinned religious acceptance to empirical claims (the question of how many people share the feeling) and that takes us away from what people like @Wayfarer want to say about religious investigations, I think.
But yeah, personally, I don't really see any other way out of it. There's no denying the difference between some lunatic believing in their own fantasy world and a religious claim is the number of people ho go along with it, and that does make claims about the success of religious practice empirical, otherwise the lunatic gets their fair shake too.
What I think neither side want is for my claim that one should rub trifle in their hair every day to achieve enlightenment, to sit alongside the claim that one should attend church, meditate, wear a hijab or whatever. And it's not the degree of justificatory narrative around the claim. Anyone who thinks I couldn't come up with whole libraries of justificatory narrative for the trifle rubbing clearly hasn't read enough Terry Pratchett.
And then there is the issue of power struggles between people. We could say that notions of subjectivity and objectivity are born of, created by the power struggle. But even if you do away with notions of subjectivity and objectivity, the power struggle remains, you're still a person in a power hierarchy, and you still have to look out for yourself.
Tying this to our earlier exchange about losers and winners: Feeling like a loser seems to go hand in hand with operating within the dichotomy subjective-objective. I'm not sure what would apply for those who see themselves as winners (possibly they also operate within said dichotomy). Much less can I imagine what it's like not to operate within this dichotomy at all.
Quoting Banno
I agree. Although religious apologists sometimes go to great lengths to present them as objectively empirically testable propositions.
No. I'm saying one has to have those things, or else getting involved with religion is going to squish one.
I'm sometimes amazed by high-calibre thinkers like Marx, Weber, or Nietzsche because they don't account for the cunning of religious people. Instead, they talk of religious people as if a page from De Imitatione Christi were a template for them.
Quoting j0e
Of course, it's possible to jump to conclusions, even encouraged sometimes.
I've seen this in Buddhism, for example, where there was a subtle pressure to conclude, after a few "good" meditation sessions, that the Buddha was enlightened and that the practice of meditation was the one true path to enlightenment.
I'm trying to give a context for approaching religion, a context that tries to make sure that one's involvement with religion isn't going to become something ill.
Quoting Isaac
Eh.
What I'm doing is that I try to establish a healthy and safe distance toward religion. I'm not defending it.
That's where one's self-confidence comes in and intuitively deciding that some claims aren't worth one's time, or are otherwise none of one's business.
One will simply crash and burn if one wishes to give all claims a "fair hearing" or approach them scientifically, testing them or requesting evidence for them.
While in religion/spirituality, "you" are the object of your investigation.
Noone can do that for you, nor can you do it for anyone else.
I can sort of see that. Just not sure why you're doing it in reply to my posts.
Quoting baker
Are they really the only options you see? Either a gut feeling guess or a full blown scientific investigation? What about a rough, informed-but-not-expert, examination of the general picture?
Quoting baker
Yes, no one can do it for, you nor can you do it for anyone else. Absolutely right.
But neither of those negations have any bearing on the matter of whether you can do it for you. Maybe you can't do it for you either, maybe no one can do it for anyone.
It's not just in reply to your posts. It's something I've been working out for myself. Maybe someone else benefits as well.
I think that in some matters, esp. in religion, those are the only options.
Also, why would you need that kind of rough, informed-but-not-expert, examination of the general picture?
Of course. Such are the prospects of any practice.
(But as long as one doesn't believe in eternal damnation, things aren't that bad.)
Could you sketch out where you see the problem with such prospective failure?
OK. Well I could see it working both ways. People need community, or most people do. I can imagine just being accepted by some group could rescue someone. Then the doctrines may flatter the group, and they can all believe it together (that they are saved, enlightened, pure,...)
Quoting baker
In The German Ideology, though, you'll find a Marx's criticism of religion's cunning philosophical forms. Nietzsche's analysis of asceticism in GofM is highly complex (he seeings himself as a late stage of that mutating asceticism.) That said, I agree that in general secular thinkers can neglect the cunning you mention. It's all too easy to chatter on the level of cartoons and stereotypes. Pet theory: the sophistication or complexity of one's theory is mirrored by its internal vision of its opponent.
Quoting baker
I expect more of that the 'good stuff' I reluctantly admit as possible. I had a religious phase long, long ago, that I look back on with embarrassment. I was young and looking for some Meaning, and in retrospect I see in those I was with a mixture of charlatans and sincere seekers (I could say 'marks,' but they were getting some value for their time and money.)
It seems a little wacky to me too. But perhaps our florist is happy. Then I'd classify it as more of the usual human vanity. The woman probably obeys traffic rules and is nice to babies. It's only when you get her started on flowers that she's harmlessly mad. A very nice person recently told me she believes in fairies. She's a hard-working single mother. I nod sympathetically. I like her too much to try and take it from her.
Quoting Isaac
I think this connect to the OP. It's as if people are doing some ritual of claiming to believe. Did the average Trump voter really believe the election was stolen? I like the pragmatist idea that belief is enacted. A Catholic can show up and mouth the Apostolic creed, put a tithe in the basket, try to be nice. The ritual actions have a low cost. Contrast this with a suicide bomber (and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling reminds me of such things, a father sacrificing his miracle son for God, going against norms and common sense to prove his faith.)
Quoting Isaac
I haven't read Prachette, but I like your example. A single madman is a joke. A few is a cult. Many are a religion. At the same time there's the sublimation (or neutralization) of a religion that makes it relatively harmless, in the short run at least.
I agree with this very much. We just can't give every claim an equal hearing.
...and then have their arguments torn to shreds.
:ok:
I understand Baker's quote. It just seems to stretch the meaning of 'investigation.' The notion of 'Direct Experience' is an epistemic disaster. Think of the strong criticisms of sense-data empiricism. This stuff is private by definition, so it makes an absurd foundation for science, however initially plausible. Instead we have to start with (theory-laden) observation statements.
Granted there are journeys into the interior, the self making sense of the self, we can still talk about what 'self' is supposed to mean here and how language works. I think the issue is trying to be philosophical and rational and at the same time gesturing beyond rationality. It's as if the mystic can't leave behind the desire to be recognized as some sort of scientist of the interior, hence metaphors like 'truth' and 'knowledge' for something that's also called 'mythos' or 'gnosis.'
One issue is that a science of the the interior is only possible with the assumption of similarity, but such an assumption cannot be justified via Direct Experience.
Actually in religious disciplines there is, or should be, a distinction between 'experience' and 'realisation'. It is rarely recognized but you do find it in Buddhism.
[quote=Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche]In Buddhism, we distinguish between spiritual experiences and spiritual realizations. Spiritual experiences are usually more vivid and intense than realizations because they are generally accompanied by physiological and psychological changes. Realizations, on the other hand, may be felt, but the experience is less pronounced. Realization is about acquiring insight. Therefore, while realizations arise out of our spiritual experiences, they are not identical to them. Spiritual realizations are considered vastly more important because they cannot fluctuate.
The distinction between spiritual experiences and realizations is continually emphasized in Buddhist thought. 1 [/quote]
Note that the word 'experience' is a transitive verb - 'experience' implies the experiencing subject and an object of experience. Whereas in non-dualism, which arises from 'absorption' (samadhi), that implicit division of self-and-other is no longer a given. That is why 'realisation' is the term that is often used in connection to the states of awareness associated with those practices. That is the distinction being made by Kyabgon Rinpoche.
Quoting j0e
Gnosis is 'higher knowledge', it is not mythos, although to be sure various forms of gnosticism have produced intricate mythological worlds. But it is always supposed that the source of that mythology is insight into a higher reality and the mythical re-telling a way to communicate that rather than a literal description. Actually that goes back to Armstrong's point about the distinction of logos and mythos - to interpret mythos literally is to mistake it for logos, which it isn't.
As I think we've discussed previously, one glaring problem in all this, the elephant in the room, is that in modern philosophy there is no 'higher' - there's no axis against which that can be calibrated. I'm afraid that's always going to be an insuperable barrier.
What is 'height' here? What makes one judgment or proposition higher than another ? Is it generality? That the statement speaks of larger structures in existence? Is it an intensity of feeling? Such a magnanimity, serenity, love? I have no objections to the idea that certain metaphysical judgments 'light up' for those in the right 'place' for them (lifestyle, what they've been through.) Also no objections to the existence of the esoteric. I guess the issue is boundaries, how to treat the esoteric. Is there a performative contradiction in reasoning about something that hides?
On the logos/mythos thing, I see a spectrum. Cognition seems fundamentally metaphorical to me (Lakoff's work, for instance.) I'm with you and Armstrong on the sophisticated reading of spiritual texts as non-literal analogies or just as texts of undecidable status that help people.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you can find some philosophers/philosophies where that's true, but for the most part it doesn't seem accurate to me. Just about every thinker has some story in which there are good guys and bad guys. IMO, you are just throwing all 'atheist' philosophy (I mean that with a non-religious attitude) into the same Flatland bin.
That's the question. Here's a quote from Edward Conze, an irascible Buddhologist from mid last century:
It is within this context that the figure of 'the sage' is understandable, 'the sage' being one who understands, and so exemplifies, these qualities.
Conze contrasts this with the 'sciential' philosophy of the modern West:
Quoting j0e
Actually, I googled that phrase, 'nature loves to hide', which lead me to splashing out seventy five bucks for a philosophy of physics book of that same title. Hasn't arrived yet. Hope I can understand it.
Quoting j0e
Well, I was speaking rhetorically, but I think in the secular academy it is assumed that the Universe is essentially energetic-material with no intrinsic value/purpose/meaning. There are exceptions, but I feel that in English-speaking academic philosophy, the assumed background is explicitly secular.
Great quote. There's some taboo-violation there, right? All men are not created equal. This is the dark side of Nietzsche too, with his idea of ranks of human beings. Becoming what one is, discovering one's fate, one's level. I say 'dark side' because it's taboo but I think intellectual types can't help relating to such elitist concepts. In that quote we get 'more real because more exalted.' But exalted remains undefined as a kind of raw superiority. The more real is what the better people say it is or how the higher man experiences the world. You can find this energy in Nietzsche running strangely alongside his Enlightenment materialism, and I think it's where Art (as a sacred concept) is involved. Art is the mysticism of the Romantic 'atheist.' What Russell types hate in religion they hate in Nietzsche, the perceived arrogance, the claim that some live by different rules.
Quoting Wayfarer
Another great quote, and it does seem to describe the modern West.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you are right that there's a metaphysical belief (vague but powerful) that nature is a dead machine. Secular religion just focuses instead on race, class, gender, freedom, environment, etc., but very passionately. But against the background of a disenchanted nature-machine.
Should be fun! I just got Classics of Analytic Philosophy to make up for having read too much dirty, obscurantist continental stuff so far.
Hey no argument from me! :up:
I would too.
Quoting j0e
Not in my experience (the 'probably' bit). Most delusions cause some contingent problems for the people who suffer from them. The 'harmless belief in fairies' is of the less common kind by quite a long way.
The trouble with delusions is that they have to be tied in in some way to ones general web of beliefs and if they are delusions (ie difficult to marry with the rest of reality) then there's only really two ways to do that without suffering the pain of cognitive dissonance. One is to have the delusion gradually eroded until is sit somewhere with as few threads as possible connecting it to reality (fairies exists but we can't see then, hear them, smell them or detect them in any way and they don't cause anything, nor are they affected by anything...), or they can go the other way, infecting all the threads they touch by altering the neighbouring belief to fit better with the delusion. This just has more and more of an impact on the person's life as the condition progresses.
Your florist may well start of harmlessly mad, but there's a strong chance that if here delusions ore not dealt with they'll creep into areas of her life that would be much better governed by the reality of the physical world than by a belief in the transcendent power of roses.
Quoting j0e
Yes, this is much more like it. Certain beliefs are used as membership criteria for certain clubs, they're not really beliefs in the sense of tendencies to act as if... but merely part of a word game (or ritual enaction) that is played to create a sense of mutual belonging (and of course, exclusion of the other - the dark side).
The problem is, that these otherwise harmless tribal rituals are triggers for more vulnerable people to start the infection of reasonable beliefs that I described above as the course delusion often takes. The suicide bomber is usually someone who is sufficiently low in self-confidence that even the sharing of ritual behaviour and belief-talk is not enough to make them feel they belong to the group. Rather than abandoning the project, they seek to 'turn up the volume' on ritual behaviour and belief-talk, in the expectation that perhaps a louder version might finally do the job. It usually ends in disaster, of course, because the 'volume' of the ritual behaviour and belief-talk was not the reason they were feeling ostracised.
Quoting j0e
Yes. The vast majority of religious practice is just social-bonding ritual and as harmless as a knitting club on a societal scale, but then so's the alternative.
Yes, absolutely. I classify such utterances under "poetic ontology", "poetic epistemology", and other poetic suches. There's plenty of this in literature. It doesn't occur to me to think of the utterers of such utterances as having "mental health problems".
See the beans in my hand in my avatar? I grow them. There is something absolutely transcendental to growing food and other plants. I'm just very careful about what I say about this to whom and when. There are other gardeners who understand very well what I'm talking about. And I know there are people (some of whom garden) who have no clue what I'm talking about.
Edit: Excepting cognitive psychology, probably.
Maybe you're right. I'm just commenting from my anecdotal experience. My wife has clued me in to a culture (largely feminine) of soft but unironic paganism, a mishmash of all kinds of stuff, morning Tarot card readins, a little green witchcraft blended with the wisdom of some wise alien race, and so on. My sense is that some people just like a little bit of magic sprinkled on grocery store reality. On the other hand, I've seen mentally troubled addicts lose their grip on reality, with a paranoid streak in their delusions. Not fun stuff at all.
Quoting Isaac
:up:
Well put!
Quoting Isaac
True. I'm not really trying to defend religious practice. I want to live in Denmark or somewhere like it. I'm tempted to think that some kind of psychopathology of everyday life will always be with us. It's a secretion, some kind of ooze to stick humans into groups, which, as you say, can go terribly wrong.
We might even say explicitly poetic ontologies as opposed to the anti-poetic ontologies of a merely relatively depoetized reason. In other words, even 'rational' ontologies are poetic if cognition is essentially metaphorical.
I think we can say that if the florist is happy and kind, though perhaps vain and preening at times, then it's not madness, or not the kind we should worry about. I speculate that we all might even depend on a little self-flattering bias or some kind of energizing distortion.
Quoting baker
Nice example! I don't grow things, but my wife has a real passion for it. So I can vaguely imagine some kind of esoteric bond.
The florist feels no such need to convince others.
I agree that the ideal florist does not feel that need. But what of the imperfect florist? The aspirant florist? I can imagine ego-battles at the florist convention. I also had @Wayfarer in mind. Is it a performative contradiction to try to defend/explain the esoteric in a 'neutral' or boringly, typically 'rational' conversation?
Does 'nondiscursive knowledge' make sense ? I could live with 'religion as know-how' but that's not the claim, I don't think. 'The world is a purple rose' is a Higher Truth. No doubt it can function internally (all florist nod and repeat it) but if it's not for godless philosophers to understand, then why bring it to the table? Or how can one do this and avoid evangelizing?
Second point: I think people want recognition, sometimes (impossibly) for being beyond the need for recognition. I don't deny that some can temporarily truly be beyond that need. It's even an ego-ideal to transcend such a humiliating itch.
Take a more down-to-earth example of a "private investigation": Recovering after an injury. You, with your particular injury, with your particular socio-economic givens, with your particular psychological and other givens are the subject of the investigation required for recovery. First you'll have to spend the time somehow when immobilized, and then you'll have to retrain the injured limb. Take care of all the changes in your life that have occured because of the injury. And throughout all this time and effort, you will have to think about things, act in very specific ways. You will have to investigate.
I think a big part of the problem is the trend toward general democratization, egalitarization: the idea that just anyone should be able to have access to just anything, on their own terms. Initiation (whether in religion/spirituality, or in the trades and other professional fields) serves some important purposes. It's not just about protecting the "secrets of the trade" or "keeping out the unwanted", it's also for the purpose of not confusing the uninitiated.
Unfortunately, the result of this trend toward general democratization, egalitarization is plebeification and a devaluation of knowledge of a particular field, along with the normalization of lowering the standards of knowledge. Which, at best, leads to a lot of poorly spent time and the blooming of people's egos, and at worse, to dangerous situations (when people don't understand the importance of knowing and doing things properly).
Imagine what would happen to the economy if there would be no guilds (with all their functions of preserving and advancing knowledge of a particular field of expertise, making sure that their practitioners live up to the standards of the trade, and so on): it would collapse, or produce relatively low quality items.
It's what is happening to religion/spirituality.
Oh, the unenlightened florist who hasn't yet learned how to chop wood and carry water again.
Yesssss. I'm guilty of it too. But, in my defense, I'm aware of it, and taking credit for it.
When one learns how to chop wood and carry water again ...
It takes a while to get to that point where Tom Hanks' character in Saving Private Ryan is:
Hence the relationship between perennialism and reactionary political movements. At least, it’s highly non-PC.
Quoting j0e
Described as ‘non-conceptual wisdom’. Obviously a very difficult question as it can’t be conceptualised. Again it is related to that elusive idea of non-duality.
Quoting j0e
I went back and read that post - had skipped it at the time. It’s more like the ‘theatre of the absurd’. Again, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ - ‘religious awakening’ as akin to psychopathology or a best a edifying delusion. I guess that’s because from the outside there’s no way of telling whether ‘the florist’ is a visionary or a schizophrenic. There’s no criterion for that categorisation - but if they don’t hurt anyone..... Nevertheless ‘the world is a purple rose’ is if anything a parody of the pretension of claiming ‘there is higher truth’. (Incidentally when I used to post to Dharma Wheel, that expression was also generally rejected there, despite there being a direct Sanskrit equivalent. But I don’t know how else it can be put.)
Quoting j0e
Interesting question. ‘Evangalizing’ is usually specific to the propagation of the Bible. Commitment to there being a higher truth is a philosophical perspective. But it’s not a popular idea. Why ‘bring it to the table’? Because it’s an important philosophical question.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
The difficult point for me is that some of my favorite philosophers conceptually make a case against dualism. One is led dialectically from crude views to more sophicated views, even perhaps to aporia or quietism.
Quoting Wayfarer
That underlined part was what I was getting at. Part of me (the artist streak) relates to the florist, so it's not simply parody.
[quote=Cor 1:23] But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness...
[/quote]
In this context, the secular philosophers are the 'Greeks.' The 'Jews' would be fundamentalist who take scripture (relatively) literally.
Quoting Wayfarer
To be clear, I wouldn't want such a perspective censored. After all, it's a rich philosophical topic. What do we make of elitist, esoteric 'knowledge' ?
:up:
Quoting baker
Note that you mention guilds. Those make perfect sense to me. That's peer review! That's not the isolated insight that doesn't communicated itself. That's skill recognizing skill. My criticism of Direct Experience is not that it fails to gesture at something vague but important but that any kind of sociality needs more.
This is the guild thing again. Let's say there's a genuine or pure Buddhism but there's no way to check. You know it directly or not at all. The doctrines and rituals would mean nothing ultimately. There would be no sure way to attach words to these 'direct experiences.' (I invoke the 'private language argument' basically.)
Quoting baker
:up:
I like the direct answer.
I tried and failed to come up with an answer to this, but it's a long way from the OP.
Returning to the OP:
Quoting Pantagruel
A lot turns on 'evidence' and what constitutes it. Empiricism puts emphasis on what can be validated scientifically; religious convictions and the like are then presumed to be of the order of poetic expressions or at best noble sentiments, because by definition their grounds of validation aren't amenable to empirical scrutiny. Or you might examine the efficacy of such beliefs with reference to the consequences they have for their adherents in the manner of the social sciences. Put another way, their truth or otherwise is validated inter-subjectively.
So the discussion of 'higher truth' and whether there is any such thing must acknowledge that any such concept is in principle out of scope for empirical method. And that apparently leaves only faith, which is held to be 'clinging to a proposition without evidence'. They are the two alternatives that seem to present themselves.
Tyson, Paul. De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Modern culture does have esoteric knowledge, viz, mathematical physics, which is only penetrable to highly-trained specialists versed in its own secret language, accesible only to the illuminati. It even has a burgeoning occult metaphysics i.e. the 'many worlds interpretation'. But I'll leave that aside for now.
Exactly. I believe that life is a kind of very large scale experiment. The longer we live, the more likely we are to encounter 'complex evidence', where over a long time certain of our behaviour patterns result in certain types of effects returning to us in our lives. Like karma. Objective evidence, but dependent on a lot of subjective experiences. Stochastic effects are common enough in nature. This is why I would never dismiss the concept of God with any kind of trivializing argument. How do we know that the idea of God has not somehow contributed to a material change in someone's world based on certain of their actions?
Religious/spiritual communities function like guilds. Religious/spiritual practices are intended to be taken up within the context of a religious/spiritual community.
On principle, doing things all on one's own, without any connection to a religious/spiritual community is possible, but such isolated approach is generally considered an exception, no the rule.
Also, it is not the case that people would flock together and build religious/spiritual communities based on having comparable direct experiences. Religious/spiritual life isn't a #MeToo kind of movement. Rather, people have some vague interest in some type of religion/spirituality, they join a group, a community, there, they get instructions for practices, they do the practices, and then they have "direct experiences". Which they can then compare, if they feel so inclined, or not.
Quoting j0e
I suggest you read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratyekabuddha
Do tell me what you think of it.
Quoting j0e
It's, basically, what religion/spirituality is all about.
[quote=link]
"The idea of a Paccekabuddha … is interesting, as much as it implies that even when the four truths are not preached they still exist and can be discovered by anyone who makes the necessary mental and moral effort".
[/quote]
To me this accessible to anyone aspect puts some distance between the idea and strict esotericism. For instance, someone else could have and probably would have discovered/invented special relativity if Einstein hadn't. If most of our current scientific knowledge was lost somehow, it might be recovered. If we think of religious insight as (valuable, effective) folk-psychology, the analogy works even better.
Quoting baker
I don't disagree. I'd just say that being accepted in such a community could never depend directly on direct experiences that by definition are understood to be invisible to all but the little ghost in his machine. 'Enlightenment' has a place in the language game or 'sign system' of the tribe.
Why? Could you explain?
Let's talk about the interpersonal aspect, peer to peer. Do I talk the other as an outsider who needs my secret? Or do I see the other as already essentially equal ? Is the sage a different kind of being, a father, or just a brother, older or younger perhaps, but some worth considering, engaging with?
I think of folks projecting either the father or the son on others. To project the father is to hopefully sit at the knee of master. To project the son is to try to get oneself recognized as the father (corrupt/infect the youth with the Cause and its lingo.) The alternative is a wary peer-to-peer attempt to steer around both temptations, or whichever one is our default.
If there's not a Pope or cult leader, interested parties self-organize into fuzzy hierarchies in an charisma or 'bullshit' economy of recognition-value. Philosophy too. Poets negotiating the canon.