The Philosophy of the Individual in the Christian West
Quoting Bitter Crank
Quoting Bitter Crank
Originated here
The principle of individual rights is attributable to the Christian West, where 'freedom of conscience', 'freedom of association', and so on, were originally established. Of course it is true that many such reforms were fought tooth and nail by religious conservatives, but the reformers themselves were also Christian.
— Wayfarer
Many were also deists, freethinkers, and various other sorts of non-Christian.
— Arkady
Quoting Bitter Crank
I always thought that the pre-revolutionary American colonies were characterized by the very active Christianity that would dominate later on. Apparently this was not the case. There is no denying that New England was dominated by the descendants of English Puritans, but the intellectual core of the colonies was, as Arkady noted, free-thinking.
It was especially the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century that brought about the dominance of Evangelical Protestantism--Methodists and Baptists, particularly. Catholicism would become very important through immigration.
The free-thinkers were apparently not much exercised about abortion, sodomy, birth control (such as it was), and obscenity that became critical issues under a movement sponsored by Anthony Comstock beginning in the late 19th into the 20th century. Anthony Comstock, for instance, objected to the profanity used by his fellow Union soldiers in the Civil War. Had his compatriots said things like "Oh dear, my arm's just been shot off" or "Shucks, I missed" our history might have been very different.
So, some of our worst features were brought to us through our much honored religious American traditions, and some of our best features were delivered through the good offices of the Enlightenment.
Originated here
Comments (111)
But I think the historical evidence for the role of Christianity in the formation of the modern liberal state, and the principles I mentioned in the quotation at the top of this thread, are unarguable. The book I mentioned previously in this context was David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, which I received as a gift some years back. I confess to not having read all of it, but the general thrust of the book is quite sound.
Of course it plays a role. But don't we find the origins of the notion of individuality in ancient Greece - overtly in Athenian democracy/Socratic philosophy, and then pragmatically in the earlier Milesian trading cities where being a cross-roads for travellers was already broadening the mind?
So I take the cynical view that a new kind of religious meme was born that involved telling folk they had a soul and a personal relation with God. This disconnected them from their attachment to a traditional communal setting - the local sacred places, customs and spirit figures - and tied them instead to the abstracted institutional notion of a holy church. Even kings were just other humans. Only you and God mattered in the end. Pass the hat around the congregation and funnel the proceeds to Rome.
So sure, Christianity was a good way of organising humans as it was all part of the detaching people from their very local social institutions and creating the kind of organisational scale that an abstracted religious institution can sustain. Just as the Romans also turned Greek city states into organised empires by institutionalising abstract laws of behaviour and governance.
The structural commonality is thus the creation of the abstracted individual to match the abstracted social institution. We teach people they are "unique selves", and that is powerful because that means people start acting in accordance to culturally-evolving abstractions - philosophical or rational ideas like moral codes and rules of law.
The active philosophical question then is, if we understand that to be the game, how should it be played now that we realise it? Christian behaviour does sound like a good way to run a society. It has pragmatic merit. So what would it be in tension with exactly when viewed perhaps from an atheist/enlightenment libertarian camp? Why would we give it special credit except in terms of its practical results (which could be a sense of wellbeing and purpose, as opposed to the nihilism that appears to be grounded on some versions of enlightenment scientism - the line I'm guessing you would take)?
Anthony Comstock, and his numerous co-agitators, performed a greater mischief than they perhaps did or could realize. Comstock was offended by discussions and depictions of sexuality. He worked as a postal inspector in the post-Civil War era, and came across sexual material that was frankly intended to sexually stimulate the reader. He thought it was wrong to stimulate sexual interest through print--or maybe at all, I don't know. Later on, he and his followers proved unable to distinguish between erotic literature and discussions of sexual health--and banned both.
The American Government's ON-then-OFF-then-ON-then OFF-now-back-ON policy (going back to Reagan) of not distributing birth control materials as part of foreign aid is a direct descendent of Anthony Comstock.
It is easy to get waylaid.
There is nothing particularly Christian in Comstock. There is nothing Christian about Capitalism, either. Much of the Christian religion has been governed by quite authoritarian systems, even though many of its values are very useful in democracy. A lot of Christians can not think calmly or positively about the Jewish atheist Karl Marx, even though much of what he said is boring economic theory and some of it is eminently humane.
Christianity naturally played an important role in West, yet of course those Christian values have naturally a lot to do with the values already existing in Antiquity. A thing like the end of slavery (in a way, at least) is indeed notable... even if, uh, Islam was about equality too.
Had there been a Jewish state for longer than now, we could have seen if there is any exceptionality to Christianity or not, because the Israel is quite secular today and similar to Western countries.
Yet I would put the weight more on other political developments. Let's not forget the importance of the Renaissance and all the other events that made the West different from the East.
Hart spells out in much more detail than I can reproduce here, however, the ennui which took hold of the ancient world after the Fall of Rome, and the combination of fatalism, superstition and apathy which resulted from it. The point of the Christian faith, which as we might recall, grew from maligned minority cult to world religion, was the fact that it was utterly open to all comers, regardless of their social connections and position. That was what was one of the radical things about it. Social equality, itself, was a scandalous idea in many ancient cultures, as was the idea of 'the son of God' being born a helpless infant crucified as a criminal. In those days, Gods were invariably authoritarian, you paid them their due or woe betide unto you.
But I do recognize the fact that the Roman church exploited Christianity's popularity for political ends. There is a quotation I read somewhere, where one of the Popes explicitly says how greatly profitable the religion has been. So ironically, the Christian churches began to display at least some of the behaviours of the religions they had ostensibly replaced. Indeed when I was an undergrad I was resolutely anti-religious. My view was, and probably still is, that there is a genuine spiritual treasure with Christian teachings, but much else besides.
But debating the issue all these years on forums has changed my mind again - I'm beginning to think of the baby that has been thrown out with the bathwater.
Quoting apokrisis
If you look at 20th century and more recent atheism or 'secularist' philosophy - there is some effort to find the basis of a moral creed sans any idea of God ('Good without God', is one, and 'The Good Book' - A Secular Bible' is another.) But all of them seem to me to have a pretty poor understanding of what it is they're rejecting. It reminds me of that exclamation by Chomsky - 'Tell me what it is I'm supposed not to believe in, and I'll tell you if I'm an atheist'.
The classical atheism of Sartre, Camus, Nietszche, and others of that ilk, does at least acknowledge the existential terror and the absurdity of life in a universe that has been made devoid of meaning. Camus and Sartre both grapple with the implications and try and frame a meaningful response to it.
But what the supposedly secularist philosophies offer, seems often (as Nietszche foresaw) to culminate in the kind of meaninglessness that Camus and others wrote about. I think now that's just become, sadly, kind of business-as-usual for a lot of people. That's why, again, Nietszche was correct in foreseeing the predominance of nihilism in the world he saw emerging - I think many people are nihilistic without even knowing what it means. (It can be as simple as a shrug and a 'whatever', in the face of difficult ethical choices.)
But I think what Christianity offers first and foremost is a sense of relatedness, and a sense of community, which is a very hard thing for, say, evolutionary materialism to replace.
@BitterCrank - I have read several of D B Hart's essays - he's a regular in First Things - and also his most recent book, 'Experience of God'. He is in some places annoyingly polemical, but he's also a lucid writer and sound philosophical thinker in my view. Here's his essay on the 'New Atheism'.
Quoting ssu
Agree - the Renaissance Humanists - Pico Della Mirandolla, Erasmus and Ficino - were very influential, and their revival of Plato was also formative for the Scientific Revolution. They often skirted heresy and were often not orthodox in their views. But none of them were atheist, either.
That's a great Chomsky quote. As I see it, a merely philosophical God is itself just more "Good without God." We might call it God, but it doesn't show up in a helicopter when we need it. Either the moral creed insisted upon by a living God is already in accord with the better angels or our nature or it is an "alien" imposition against our nature. Of course we tend to think of God (pre-philosophically) as the enforcer of the one true morality that is indeed in accord with our best selves. Perhaps you have in mind that the tradition will wake us up to these better angels, but maybe it's already doing so, without much of the supernatural enforcement tinge.
I've seen lots of my former peer group become religiously political. Some of them were always like that, but others put down the rock-n-roll cigarette and now earnestly bemoan the state of things. (I don't endorse the state of things, but who cares that doesn't already agree with me?) Intersectionality was the buzzword last time I checked, but these shiny new keywords have brief life spans in the information age. They are good, secularly and tolerantly good. It's basically Christianity without the miracles and the creepy stuff. It's Target opposed to Walmart. Do you have Targets on your planet? Maybe no one goes to a building on Sunday, but they practice their religion on Facebook and maybe at the demonstration. I remember religious arguments as a child about whether to baptize in the name of Jesus or in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This is serious business. A baby's soul could end up frying on the flames of eternal justice. These days is an earnest conversation about what to call person from X or with condition X. This is serious business. A person might sound like a racist or sexist and burn in the flames of mutating already obsolete social justice. (I may sound mean, but they really are pretty good people, and it's more reasonable than babies in the fire because of some glitch in a magic spell.) It's my understanding that community service helps get you in to a good school. In short there is religion to spare, at least among the hopefully upwardly mobile. But science has been worked in to this new religion, since it's more or less a religion of progress. Perhaps that's why freedom is crucial. We can't keep waking up the obsolescent present if we don't allow the individuals a little room to experiment. Even if freedom is mostly "wasted," progress (invention) seems to require it.
In Eriugena 'Punishment is simply the absence of beatitude, and sinful souls remains trapped after death in the region of fire, the fourth element of the material world. The good soul also dwells in this realm, but it does not feel the fire as painful, because to the healthy eye the sun is cheerful whereas to the unhealthy eye it is dazzling and painful'. (Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, p32. )
This is in line with the Augustinian 'doctrine of privation', i.e. evil as privation of the good, with no actual existence. Those who pursue what is evil, in effect punish themselves by becoming attached to unreal things which are inherently painful. So they're not being 'punished by God' in the sense often implied by Christian doctrine, they have instead chosen to pursue what is inherently painful or unsatisfactory. (Hence the aphorism, 'the doors of hell are locked on the inside'.)
(Curiously, there is a parallel in Buddhist eschatology. Those in the hell realms perceive water as boiling pus, whilst the bodhisattvas see the same water as nectar. In both cases, it's simply water (from the human perspective) but appears vastly different depending on the perception of the observer.)
But in terms of the general question, the problem is, in my view, that the tropes and metaphors of traditional religion are completely disconnected from the realities of life in a post-industrial, technological society. It belongs to a different age. The idea of 'sacrifice' makes sense against the background of sacrificial religion, which Judaism was at the time; the imagery of the 'Lamb of God' is intuitively understandable in that culture. But the social context has completely and utterly changed.
Yup, same argument I've tried to make on this forum. The problem with this fundamentalist humanist religion is there's no inner spiritual life; their views are marked by a poverty of the spirit. Their morals are the empty shell of the seed of Christian morals. And of course Christianity itself is as much responsible for handing them this empty shell as secularism.
When I was at uni, I thought that many of the secularist philosophies were framed around 'anything but God'; that where the best and brightest would, 500 years previously, all have been part of the church, now the effort was to ground a comprehensive ethic in naturalism and science.
This leads to another point I want to make, which is that the universal redemption offered by Christ was predicated on faith in the Christian ethos. However the way individualism has developed in the West, post-enlightenment philosophy has increasingly rejected the Christian ethos. So even though it might remain true that in the Kantian sense 'persons are ends in themselves', the net effect of the abandonment of the Christian ethical foundation is that the individual ego becomes the sole locus of value. In the original Christian tradition, the ego was redeemed by the self-sacrifice which emulated that of the founder of the faith; redemption was predicated on self-abnegation. In effect one sought fulfilment by overcoming the self, whereas in the absence of that part of the Christian ethos, all that remains is the individual ego as end in itself.
It's all 'cheap grace' described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship.
Well, I shall doodle. My lifetime is the age in which individualism has become enshrined in various 'universal human rights', so I can't say I feel fin-de-siecle about that sort of individualism. It looks to me like it's thriving.
Of course Communism collapsed and there's a McDonalds in every country, plus an American military base handy for most countries. That betokens a different strand of individualism, the Puritan vein that began (in my genealogy anyway, for as Evol says we aren't doing history here) out of a notion that the individual accepts and surrenders to secular power as an amoral or immoral force, beyond 'our' control. Our corporations live by greed, our armies invade and assassinate, and the ethics we debate are not theirs but our 'individual' ethics. We are helpless before Google, Goodman Sachs and militarism. But we use the right word for transsexuals.
There's a doodle for you :)
Right, but some of the basic moral foundations of that ethos remain, especially (and ironically) on the progressive left. And humanism's narrative of self-salvation is the offspring of this ethos as well. My problem currently is trying to understand what, if any, significance this "genealogy of morals" (if you will) has. I guess for me it's a metaphysical conundrum. Do the ideas themselves of the Christian ethos (equality, unconditional love, future salvation) have being or content in themselves, within the evolution of history? Can these ideas breed from religion to religion, worldview to worldview, and if so, will they ultimately breed their own culmination? Do these ideas still have life and are laying dormant in humanism? If so, is it through humanity, through a divine force, through nature (evolution), etc, that they'll come to fruition? In other words, can these concepts survive on their own without their original, mystical-religious context, or are they dependent on that context? The lack of inner spiritual life in secular humanism seems to indicate that Christian moral concepts can't survive without their proper context. But the history of the Church is no more optimistic a view through which to see the concepts, either. The church has failed, yet the humanistic carrying of the torch seems fated to failure as well. This goes back to a neutral evolution of consciousness. Consciousness evolves alongside the physical world, but it's not an evolution from lower to higher morality. Human reason breeds technological innovation, which creates the facade of moral evolution as physical survival becomes less pressing, thanks to those technological developments that insulate us from the harshness of the natural world. It's easier to love my brother when I don't have to fight him for bread or a roof over my head. A real evolution of morals is a much more radical notion, and seems to require either a change in the nature of humanity itself on an inmost level, or divine intervention. The only other alternative seems to be pure, unadulterated nihilism.
So to tie my ramblings back to what you're saying, it seems like the individualism of the ego that you describe is the outcome, the empty shell, of the divorce of Christian concepts from Christianity itself.
My dissatisfaction with this politics-as-religion is (1) that it's not transcendent enough and (2) that it's inherently unstable as a religion of a progress. I personally want spirituality to be bigger than politics. Of course we remain political animals, but there are states of consciousness that perceive the here and now as perfect and complete, where 'evil' is a necessary dissonance in the music.
This is great stuff, with which I agree. I'm personally grateful to various sophisticated interpretations of Christianity.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, here, too. But I continue to insist that today's religion is already largely an update of these tropes in the general framework of Christianity. I suppose I find it hard to understand your resistance to and distance from what is called liberalism in the US. The "liberty" involved is limited to a narrow sphere. Ideally one is nice to Mother Earth, in touch with the folk, respectful of any tradition that is kind, and so on. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is at the heart of it. As with anything, it can be taken to annoying ungenerous extremes (petty self-righteousness about mere words.)
I would say that the concept of free will was first given a formal description by St Augustine, and has since become a central part of Christian morality, and perhaps somewhat exclusive to Christianity. And, I argue that it is the real existence of free will which validates the individuality of the individual. If we give up on the reality of free will, opting for any form of determinism, we also give up the principle which allows us to believe that we each have independent existence, as an individual.
Seems an apt description.
Quoting ernestm
Good point, and a very subtle one. The idea of 'individuation' is one of the key points of Jung's philosophy.
Quoting Noble Dust
Those are the questions. When I went to Uni I enrolled in comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and history. I believed that there was a 'perennial philosophy' that different spiritual philosophies were an aspect of, and that 'spiritual illumination' was a universal source of inspiration in all of them. And I still think that. So a lot of that work was involved in understanding how the different traditions map against each other, why they interpret their fundamental truths the way they do. Comparative religion was the most useful discipline, although that is not really what it teaches. But in the books of Mercea Eliade, Huston Smith, Ninian Smart, and others of that ilk, I found traces of the idea of the 'philosophia perennis'. (One of my classmates was Harry Oldmeadow, and his brother supervised the thesis I did in 2012.)
The basic understanding is that there are "levels of being" (a.k.a. the'great chain of being') within which the more real is also the more valuable; these levels appear in both the "external" and the "internal" worlds, "higher" levels of reality without corresponding to "deeper" levels of reality within. On the lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels. On the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute (from a reader review of Huston Smith's 'Forgotten Truths').
Now you do see this in some forms of Christianity, but not all of them. I think, for example, it is almost dissappeared from mainstream Protestantism. It is in Aquinas and some of the medievals, especially the mystics, at least in part because of their incorporation of the ideas of the 'perennialists' from other traditions, specifically Islamic, and also because of the influence of the neoplatonists, through 'Dionysius'.
So in broad terms, what I think has happened to Western culture is that it has been hijacked by a hostile force, almost a parasitic entity, namely scientific materialism. The last vestiges of the philosophia perennis were preserved in the scholastic traditions, which were on the whole defeated by the emerging nominalist-empiricist schools which gave rise to scientific materialism. Science itself originated in the Christian worldview, but the sapiential elements in the Christian west have been displaced by technocracy and materialism. That is the battle that is going on in the West, but I really think materialism has passed its heyday, and is on the wane. (Someone please tell Dennett.)
Quoting Ignignot
The 'privation of the good' is straight out of Augustine, to whom Metaphysician Undiscovered refers above. (I'm still a total novice with respect to Augustine but he is on my 'must read' list.)
My problem with this is that it is so vague that it can be interpreted as being true either way.
So a systems scientist at least would say that the world is both matter and form - or energetic actions and organisational constraints. So the infinite/absolute is understood rather Platonically as mathematical necessity. There are forms of organisation that simply have to be (because they are the most symmetric states, the ones that have the least action).
And although modern physics doesn't proclaim that it thinks this way, in fact it does. The materiality of atomism has long been replaced by the pursuit of the global mathematical symmetries that are the possible forms of localised excitations. Actual matter has been reduced to nothing but some measured constant to be plugged into the equations. Where the forms feel really concrete, the material bit has become as ethereal as can be imagined.
I think it is important to respect this actual shift in scientific thought. In quantum ontology, a particle has become a sum over all its possibilities. So hammering scientists for being dull materialists has become completely wrong.
So yes, science (as an institution) does still reject transcendent or spiritual causation. But if you are making a comparative religion point, science has shifted away from a material substance reductionism towards the other end of the spectrum - seeing mathematical form as the eternal organising force.
And in doing that, it returns towards ancient immanent metaphysics where chaos, or apeiron, or pure potential are the "material grounds" upon which rational necessity imposes its organisational desires.
So science is pre-Christian in going back to first philosophy notions - that you find also in Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism.
That is the irony. Scientism and Christianity would have more in common in framing the world as matter vs mind or spirit. They accept those two apparently conflicting choices as what they either fight for or against.
You want to crusade against materialists? Actual scientists stopped being that - in terms of operative metaphysics - about a century ago.
Quoting Wayfarer
Certainly you can name your hate figures - Dawkins, Dennett, Krauss ... er, I guess there are a few more who like the limelight and book sales that come with being the Church's loyal opposition.
And certainly, science in general (as an institution) thinks of itself as doing naturalism. So it would reject any transcendent explanations at a gut level, because its successful working presumption is the world is closed for causality - immanent in its material organisation.
But rather than a hijack, you have the Enlightenment creating its very useful machine model of reality. It was a mode of thought that was great at turning us into technological beings. Then you have the variety of responses that turn of events provoked.
I would say the illegitimate response was Romanticism - or at least that aspect of Romanticism that tried to retrieve a transcendent metaphysics.
The legitimate response - in the sense of being metaphysically correct in its analysis - would be the organicism or systems thinking that persisted in the corners of the larger scientific enterprise, and understood its deeper connections to the ancient metaphysical paradigms.
So this is where we are at. Science did take the view that the world is a machine. Culture did respond by saying that "materialism" is fine as far as it goes, but misses the larger metaphysical picture. But that larger picture is either going to include spirit or some other notion of causal rupture - which at worst becomes "a big daddy in the sky" - or it is instead going to presume that the world is an organic self-organisation out of pure possibility, and build some useful scientific model of that.
As I say, we are a century into that new way of thinking about the world. Yet news of that is being drowned out by all the physics-bashing (and I admit, also by the fact that the computer scientists and neuroscientists - reflecting medicine's belief that the body is another machine - do continue to promote the technologist's metaphysical creed).
However dig into the ontology of modern physics, and it seems as immaterial as it gets. You are dealing with mathematical forms imposed on pure possibility - constraints on actions. But the fact that the metaphysics is now mathematical abstraction makes it also rather inaccessible to most. So that is another ingredient here - why the cultural war takes the shape it does rather than engaging with the real philosophical issues.
I would say it's? religion or the transcedent itself which is the problem, a self-inflicted wound of one's own expectations. To be "bigger than politics" (or bigger than recreation. Or bigger than your own wisdom) was a lie all along.
We are only finite. Nothing about our lives has the desired stability because it always being replaced, even when the new is similar. Our world is emergence or creation, not tradition.
So I would say it is mistake to equivocate politics or any other thing people might care about with religion. On some occasions, I these approach religion: the Modernist who thinks are technology utopia is inevitable, a Marxist who thinks we are destined to have economic justice, the free market advocates who imagine Capitalism gives us a world without problems, etc., but most of the time, someone caring about something or considering some idea or practice critical doesn't amount to thinking there must to infinite progress or presence.
Spirituality is bigger than politics, recreation, science, wisdom and even ethics. That's is why it dies in knowledge. Knowledge precludes being "bigger"-- what is known can only be itself: the state of existence or what someone understands.
A somewhat surprising claim. Why do you think this? It shows no signs of abating to me. All the traditional forms of religion that foster the perennial philosophy you speak of are hemorrhaging like mad, and I really don't think there's any other way for such a philosophy to thrive than in traditional institutions (or at least thrive in any healthy or robust sense).
I agree with the severity of that claim, but I'm not sure that's it's an actual premeditated act of metaphysical violence like your language suggests. I'm cautious about any language that suggests "they" have done this or that, or have this or that agenda. It should be "we", which includes "I". Of course there are people like Dawkins and Dennett who seem to have their own agenda, but scientific materialism is as much a failing of Christianity as anything else. If scientific materialism is a parasitic entity, then we've impregnated ourselves with it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm a little confused by this.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, although I have way more studying to do.
Quoting apokrisis
The problem here is that this doesn't seem to have trickled down to society at large. The effects of scientific materialism still exist in the technological race of more and more means without any ends. It's a capitalistic deathgrip on society still. Whether or not people actually believe in materialism is kind of null vs. the fact that a materialistic ethos controls how society functions, in relation to technology.
I agree completely. Spirituality will always be bigger. Loving my neighbor is a spiritual responsibility; what my government says about that responsibility is always secondary. To say otherwise is to rob me of my individuality (or individuation?)
It's a total red herring. Materialism (whatever that's meant to mean) isn't at fault. The West's pillaging of the world by didn't begin the 20th century.
The Christians had been doing it for hundreds of years before, often with business interests in mind-- colonisation, slave trade, dispossession and genocide of indigenous people, environmental degradation for profit, etc.
Here one is not talking about materialism, but rather greed, power and use of technology, to which the much vaunted Christian spirit was no barrier.
I agree. But then that is the target - the way we have wired in a machine-like approach to life in our general social institutions.
You can blame the scientists to an extent. They have jobs because society values the economic return on technological control over the world that their modelling efforts provide. And then some may endorse this at a metaphysical level as the only way to be - a giant resource consuming machine.
But the Dawkins and Dennetts then become symptoms of the disease, not its causes. And to attack what is going on in woolly spiritual terms just ain't going to work. Marx tried it. The hippies tried it. The new agers tried it. Wishful thinking just doesn't scale.
It may also be a struggle for ecological or systems thinking to make a difference. But at least that has a hope if it is a correct basis of analysis. So the only cure for scientism is better science.
Sure, those guys are a symptom. But I'm not using wooly (?) spiritual terms, I'm trying to approach it morally, because that's implicitly what we're all doing when we address this situation at all. Apparently we all agree that this matters. That's what I consider a spiritual dimension to the discussion. Call it metaphysical if you like. This is why it's important to ask how Christian concepts are affecting the situation; it goes back to my question about whether those concepts can be translated and borne by a humanistic approach, or if they can't be cut off from their religious roots.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
And this is exactly an example of this problem. It's well known how hypocritical the church has been in history, but calling them out is only a valid claim if you accept the principles that Christianity espouses. Calling the church out on it's own moral terms without offering an alternative way that does credence to those moral precepts you're using to make your critique is not an argument.
I'm not calling out the Church on its own moral terms. My point is a description of what was done when Christian tradition dominated society.
Wayfarer's argument is based on the premise that our society has become worse with respect to seeking profit, destroying other people, damaging the environment since Christian tradition was abandoned, as if Christian tradition prevent these excesses. By what's happened, this is clearly a falsehood.
The point is not that someone is being hypocritical or immoral where others are not, it is that Christian tradition did not have the protective effect Wayfarer ascribes to it. The way he thinks it's better in this respect is nothing more than an illusion.
It's not the tradition that matters. Greed and power act regardless of tradition. It's always a question of our actions, not whether we are Christians or materialists. In short, the concepts and actions Wayfarer ascribes (and doesn't ascribe) to Christianity aren't just Christian.
Perhaps, but the culture hasn't caught up yet. The underlying assumption of most departments of anglo-american analytical philosophy are predominantly materialist. Recall the reaction to Thomas Nagel's critique, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. One reviewer said he was set upon by 'a Darwinist lynch mob' in response. I think Darwinism per se is generally materialist which is one of the reasons this 'third way' movement is emerging.
Quoting apokrisis
That's why I said 'materialism is on the wane'. You yourself might have been a materialist a couple of generations ago, but the times they are a'changing.
Quoting apokrisis
I read Tao of Physics in 1978, and I've been to Science and Non-duality three times. I notice that Frithjof Capra has a new title, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision:
Quoting apokrisis
I know that you react against what you designate as 'transcendent metaphysics' but I don't know if you actually understand what it is you're criticizing. Tell you what - there's a kind of half-way house, if you like. Have you heard of the Lindisfarne Association? I think they're no longer in business, but their alumni includes a number of people whom I think you might know - like Stewart Kaufmann and Evan Thompson (whose father started it.) Some of their other associates include Joan Halifax whose a Zen roshi.
Quoting apokrisis
On the contrary, the new left and the counter-culture have been highly influential in the very kinds of developments that you often cite. You need to learn who the friends and foes really are!
There's no inherent problem with 'the transcendent' once you learn to accept it's intrinsic unknowability. A lot of esoteric philosophy is concerned with coming to terms with that, and it's an essential ability. That is often couched in riddles and aphorisms - 'he that knows it, knows it not' - but it's necessary to have an intuitive sense of the limitations of knowledge.
Quoting Noble Dust
I think the historical roots are fairly evident, and it does involve actual violence. I mean, Western history is not without violence, and at least some of the conflict was over ideas. At least some of these ideological conflicts are referred to as 'culture wars', after all.
There's a couple of important books that you might find helpful. One is an old title, published 1948, called Ideas have Consequences, by Richard Weaver, who was an English professor. It's (perhaps unfortunately) become a staple of the US conservative movement, but it does have some important ideas in it - specifically about what he sees as the collapse Western metaphysics:
I trace back to around then, the loss of the understanding of the hierarchical nature of being and so, no recognition of, or provision for, higher truth. It's there in Eriugena, but gone in Scotus, about 500 years later. The consequence is a kind of flatland, where reality is conceived in purely physicalist or at least numerically-quantifiable terms.
Another is much more recent, The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie. Important book, in my view.
Materialism is not without its strengths - it is after all the philosophy of scientists and engineers. Analyse the problem, break it down to its fundamental parts, and understand how they work together. It has lead to amazing powers which never would have been developed, had Aristoteleanism and traditionalism retained its primacy. So in that sense, materialism is indispensable. Where it becomes a problem, is when it wishes to displace any understanding of higher truth - when it seeks to become a religion in its own right, which is what I think has happened in Western culture.
I don't want to forget that - it is part of the paradox of the current age.
I would say that it is a fact that we become 'bigger' than our former selves. We are not at 14 who we are at 40. I will agree to something like a self-inflicted wound, but this sore is a rose just as this dog is a god. We expand (in my view) because there is fire at the center of us. Imagination is "nonbeing" that haunts "being." The future possesses us like a demon, commanding that we carve the present into its shape. And we were born for this. It is our ecstasy to crystallize the dream-goo.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Tradition is nothing but slavery and confusion until we've twisted its proteins into our own.
As far as us being finite goes, I'll have to disagree. As soon as we become conscious of an assumption or a role, that assumption and that role become optional. Consciousness is a restless violence. It loosens the fixed and churns the necessary into the arbitrary. This is the "freedom" that is our essence one might say, knowing quite well that we aren't all wired to be turned on by it. Others have their own pet metaphors, which I (jokingly) call spiritual bodies, by which I mean "final vocabularies" or the varying basic systems of mythological-poetic investments-reasons that are more or less our sanity and self-esteem in a pluralistic society.
So why are you giving this description? It's the age old critique of the church, so perhaps I assumed you were calling hypocrisy because of the content. But I'm not sure how saying you were describing said hypocrisy gets you off the hook. In other words, bringing up moral failing within Christianity seems to beg the question. How can you describe a moral failing of a group with specific morals without using that same set of morals to make the judgement? Under what moral conditions are you making your description, exactly? And then my previous questions follow, again:
Quoting Noble Dust
I'll read Wayfarer's comments myself and come to my own interpretations of them, thanks.
Maybe we can sum it up by contrasting Bach's music to some shrill post on Facebook. The lines of my favorite thinkers (and rarely and gloriously my own lines) take me to a different, but similarly transcendent place (more like fire than ice, but nothing I'd call Hell.)
I wanted purple eyes when I was a cub because of that movie with the witches with purple eyes, and no toes. I thought it was so cool.
If you're searching for evil, then you've found it, because I'm a criminal bear.
Growl growl.
Of course I have to agree here; I think what I was more so getting at is that Western humanity itself as a whole is responsible, including the whole genealogy of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the death of God, nihilism, etc. etc. Or, not responsible, but...the cause of the effect we're seeing. You have to look past the "sides", the "other", and see humanity as a whole within the struggle (not an ignoble pursuit on a forum such as this, too). So there's not some atheistic or nihilist plot to destroy moral values...this seems to be the nuanced understanding of Nietzsche, for instance. The death of God is almost a lament.
Indeed. We seem to have many ways of thinking in common, for apparently having differing worldviews.
My question to you and the other contributors is where are we headed?
Also where should we head?
Spirituality, as far as I understand it answers these questions, the non-spiritual philosophies don't appear to address them, or where they do, it sounds fanciful.
I vacillate between the need for humanism to reincarnate God in some form (??), and the need for some new form of Christianity (a mystical form) to take hold. But Christianity taking hold never seems to work out well. But Christian morals, bereft of a religious context don't seem to hold up, which stirs doubt in me about the efficacy of any form of humanism whatsoever. But organized religion is equally destructive to mankind. And why? It's because there's no moral evolution. So then I vacillate between whether it's possible for us to incubate a moral evolution in humanity ourselves (the time being just not ripe yet), or whether we're helpless and simply waiting for divine action...other than that, pure nihilism seems like the only other tenable position. All secular attempts at ascribing meaning to life leave me chuckling bitterly. But, thanks in part to Wayfarer's contributions, I also see the wisdom in "not knowing", and the wisdom in seeking higher forms of reality. There's almost a poetic dichotomy between human "Not-Knowledge" and divine "All-Knowledge". What this actually means in pragmatic terms for humanity in a historical context is hard to say. The mystical path has always been esoteric, rather than exoteric. This also has always been a problem for me. If there really is an inner spiritual path that leads to enlightenment or salvation, then that means most people are not on it, and this bothers me.
One thing I tell my friends in real life when we end up in political discussions is that real politics take place on a personal level. My political influence is those around me; those in my immediate circle. My responsibility is to love them to the best of my ability; to carry out charity, equity, and any other political action, but on an individual level.
If only it were easy....
I would have hoped that green-left politics - critical of corporatism, committed to local-level economies - would provide an alternative, but overall I have been very dissappointed with the way green parties have evolved. They're 'parties of protest' who are far too caught up in social issues - well, here in Australia, anyway.
When the mainstream parties were actually trying to tackle climate change, I was hopeful that a more progressive agenda might be established, but it provoked a vicious backlash culminating in Australia dismantling a very successful, recently-introducted carbon tax. Besides, Trump is a nightmare for all progressive and environmental causes, generally. So things are very dissappointing at this time.
And there are huge challenges ahead for the global economy and environment. I can't help but believe that there is the possibility of global economic collapse, when capitalist economics faces up to the fact that the Earth really is a finite resource and the never-ending growth curve really is going to end.
I firmly DON'T believe that we're going to colonize other planets or conquer inter-stellar space. Earth is the only space craft we have and has to be managed as such. It's going to take an enormous change in mentality for that to happen. For example, the emerging billions - those who will be born in the next ten years - simply cannot consume the energy that Western individuals have been consuming in the last two or three generations. There's simply no way to sustain 'the Western lifestyle' on that scale.
So the world has to re-calibrate its expectations as to what constitutes a good and meaningful life. Endless consumption and meaningless entertainment is not it. But unfortunately the '1%' who are to all intents driving the process, are probably not going to concur.
But in any case, I'm still a believer in the role of technology, science and progress. It's just that the underlying political and economic philosophy has to change, and that is going to take a lot of doing. I think the world needs a movement which provides a way to integrate real spirituality in the sense of personal cultivation of the spirit of peace. Religion as such is all too 'pie in the sky', it's shackled to ancient creeds and dogmas. I don't know what an emerging spirituality looks like but it might be something like what David Brooks dubbed neural Buddhism some years back.
I appreciate your view of mysticism, I think that it's place is amongst a periphery of people who are suited to contemplation. A world of Mystics would, I think, look a bit like Lord of the Rings, so that is not a way forward.
Getting back to my question, where is humanity likely to be in say a hundred years, or five hundred years and with our intelligence, where should we be at those points?
Secondly, (and I think this is the difficult nut to crack) we as a people need to control ourselves as a civilisation and move forward as a coherent whole. It is easy to conclude that we need to mitigate for climate change, help the poor and impoverished, deal with the political problems around the world, develop and strengthen the United Nations etc etc. But putting this into practice is a monumental struggle, while there are people and groups of people who have other less constructive goals, which they are pursuing.
As I see it, we are at a crisis point, in which there are vast power structures metaphorically swaying around in the wind, occasionally clashing during a storm. Which could come crashing down like a house of cards. There is the repeated rising of confrontational and destructive human behaviour within every sphere of life, including religions. Are we at a tipping point? A point where either the vast weight of efforts of the constructive people finally manage to establish stability and constructive collaborations and civilisation settles down*. Or are we at a point where these civil wars continue to spread, economic collapse and a return to another dark age.
*not to mention the problems of over population and exploitation of resources, human want, etc.
Really?... :P
As someone who grew up in the church, there's something to be said for the man of simple faith. There's a pure childlike quality in some of the simplest of people who are below any level of intellectual fortitude. I remember spending a week serving at a home for adults with disabilities. You'd be hard-pressed to find a purer, simpler strand of the beauty of humanity.
Quoting Punshhh
My problem with this is this classic dichotomy of good people versus bad. I think it's part of the neurosis that binds us to a set level of moral stagnation. Trump is bad, Bernie is good, blah blah...this "us vs. them" mentality only fuels the separateness that gives birth to new forms of strife. The hard thing, the mystical thing, is to imagine oneself as...Trump, for instance. Or to imagine Trump as the neglected little child, an empty vessel waiting for parental love that never arrives.
Quoting Punshhh
>:O Fair enough, although there are plenty of less mystical characters to be found there (I'm currently re-reading the series, as it happens). Samwise comes to mind, for instance, or any of the hobbits, except Frodo, who, after several re-readings now, is more and more annoyingly Elvish.
I meant morally good, not good as opposed to evil.
Regarding The Lord of the Rings, the ring is an interesting thing, whoever posses it is compromised. Golem, my favourite character, is a good example.
I didn't take it that you meant to denigrate those people; and you're right that they don't have the ability to lead, or at least not on a political level. But there's such profound wisdom in the parables that involve Jesus celebrating children. Children lead in their own way, sometimes. I guess I was just reacting to what I saw as a claim for intellectual prowess for it's own sake, something I'm probably overly-sensitive towards. As you were.
Quoting Punshhh
I don't comprehend.
Quoting Punshhh
Certainly. There are any number of allegories to pull out of the narrative, except Tolkien eschewed all allegory, on philosophical principle, despite his Catholic faith. He was more concerned with his concept of "sub-creation". From what I can tell, the idea is that art made by us humans is, very simply, a childlike mirroring of the art of the original Creator. It kind of just sounds like a cop-out for allegory, but I take it to mean that he felt he had sufficient permission to create an entire world based on artistic instinct, thanks to his faith in God, and from there, any allegorical comparisons were accidental, but naturally within theological bounds. He felt a freedom to create from instinct, despite his instinct being informed by his religious views. A rare, hard-to-find worldview among artists today. And not just within a religious context.
I think it's the responsibility of those who can understand it to try and do so, and for anyone who is on it to help others.
Quoting Noble Dust
There are all kinds of people, and different ways in accordance with their disposition and capacity.
Quoting Noble Dust
I think children represent guilelessness and spontaneity, which are essential attributes for any seeker. But don't forget the saying, 'be as cunning as serpents but gentle as doves'.
'
Carl Schmitt asserted that "All significant concepts in the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts"
A few thoughts:
I notice that capitalistic societies have substituted the word 'citizen' with the word 'consumer' assuming their equivalent value. Companies study consumer behavior, and they develop & market products that people will consume. They make a profit and that is 'good', as long as these companies protect "consumer rights". Consumer rights and the rights of citizens have become conflated in our society, I think.
Is what is good for a citizen, also good for that person as a consumer. A citizen is a 'free agent', a 'moral agent', a consumer has choices, 'caveat emptor' applies it is the consumer's responsibility to inspect carefully prior to purchase. The consumer expects the market's providential behavior she expects to be satisfied, the citizen becomes reconciled with problematic aspects of reality.
The time of Christianity is past. There can be no such thing as a new Christianity because then it would not be Christianity at all, but a new form of religion. That's how evolution works, it builds on the successes of the past while dismissing the failures. But the new organization is a different "being", as it distinguishes itself from the old, with a rupture of discontinuity. The discontinuity is known in biology as death and extinction.
I do not believe that organized religion is destructive to mankind, because evolution is rooted in organization. This necessitates that any form of revolution against the organizations of the past, must itself be a form of organization. And there is no other form of moral organization other than a religious form of organization, as religion is the manifestation of moral organization. So we have in the past for example, the revolution of Jesus and his followers, as a revolt against the ancient Jewish religion. But this itself was an organized revolt, and it had to be, or else it would not have had the power to be successful. So out of that revolution came another organized religion, Christianity, and that was moral evolution.
It is false to claim that there is no such thing as moral evolution because Christianity is a very good example of this. Prior to Christianity the highest moral principles were to abstain from bad acts. Christianity introduced to western religion, the idea of engaging in the best, or highest act, which is the act of contemplation. This is the nature of free will, as described by St Augustine, to free oneself from the influences of temporal existence, in order to contemplate timeless principles. Engaging with such eternal truths leads one toward correct decisions.
To the contrary, it's still the largest religion in the world.
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And again, from the schism of 1054, to the birth of protestantism, to the splintering of countless denominations, it's all the same religion. This seems obvious to me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps destructive to mankind is a strong phrase.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is a definite evolution of moral concepts, but I see no evidence of a moral evolution of the inner life of the individual or humanity as a whole. Humanity is not becoming more moral as history unfolds. Plus the evolution of moral concepts is parralel to technological and scientific evolution. The result is the appearance of an inner moral evolution of mankind (held up the most conspicuously by the new left), but the actual inner moral evolution isn't there. Look to the proliferation of fundamentalist tendencies like shaming, virtue-signaling and the suppression of free speech (all on the left) as evidence of this lack of moral evolution.
Your thoughts are all well-taken.
Indeed - that is the theme of a book I mentioned previously, The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie.
Max Weber was also brilliant on the interplay of theology, economics and society, especially in his famous Protestant Work Ethic.
Which leads me to mention the (what I see as) malign influence of Calvin. I have never studied Calvin in great depth and detail but I often wonder whether he was single-handedly the most significant figure in the decline of Christianity in Europe. After all his was a totally authoritarian model, in service of an authoritarian God, which brooked no disagreement or even individual judgement. I have heard him described as 'the Ayatollah of Geneva'.
This is all in keeping with the general thrust of the book mentioned above, which sees the scholastic tradition as rationalistic and accomodating of a range of understanding, confronted by the uncompromising nominalism of the Franciscans and others, all of whom depicted God's will as being utterly unknowable and completely sovereign.
Some people wonder why Americans are so religious. (They are compared to Europe, especially). I would say it is (at least to some extent) BECAUSE there has been so much splintering. Every time a group divides, it is re-energized. Ethnic connections to specific denominations has strengthened church activity (in the past, largely). So, there were German Lutherans, Norwegian Lutheran, Swedish Lutherans, Danish Lutherans, Latvian Lutherans, etc. Now, there are mostly Evangelical American Lutheran Church members, because the ethnic and language connections aren't so important anymore.
There was quite a bit of competition: Baptists vs. Methodists; Lutherans vs. Catholics; Presbyterians vs. Congregationalists, etc. and not just good-natured competition.
The churches were more integrated into the daily life of many Americans, providing educational, social, and spiritual services. This has, of course, decreased, along with many kinds of civic engagement (as in "bowling alone").
That's one country. Various varieties of religious experience are provided by Christian churches around the world. As a whole (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox) the Church offers many flavors, even if the fundamental ingredients of the faith do not vary much from one denomination to another. This is an advantage (it might be a vulnerability too, but that's life.)
Events like the Reformation and Counter Reformation helped the entire western church adapt to modernity. (Not that every member, parish, or denomination has done super well adapting to modernity.)
AT LAST!!! The occasion where one of my favorite quotes (since 1983) is appropriate: "Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics." Charles Peguy (a late 19th century early 20th century Frenchman).
A splendid quote indeed, and quite true.
Quoting Bitter Crank
The whole question of whether it's the same or different, is a big one. I bought a copy of a book called The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Brad S. Gregory, as a follow up to the other book I mentioned above.
That's all true, too, but it all becomes tedious. 'He who drinks of the water of which I speak will thirst no more'. Where is that water? It can't be that difficult to find.
I rather like the phlegmatic aphorism of the Vedic sages. '[Religious practices] are like the green stick you use to stoke a fire. When the fire is well alight, you throw the stick in.'
Hah. That's a very good point. The Anglican church in the UK is pretty relaxed about actual belief in God these days. The social service aspect is what counts. So mysticism ending in politics as you say. And the Anglican traditionalists are in Africa now, wondering what happened.
"Moral" refers to the distinction between right and wrong in human actions. So if there is an evolution of moral concepts, then there is an evolution of the distinction between right and wrong in human actions, and by definition, this is moral evolution. However, I don't know what you mean by "moral evolution of the inner life of the individual". But as for humanity as a whole, if there is evolution in our moral concepts, then there is evolution in our ability to distinguish right and wrong in human actions, an therefore moral evolution.
Quoting Noble Dust
Evolution is based in change. What leads toward the survival of the species we might call good change, and what leads toward the extinction of the species we might call bad change, if survival is what is designated as good. To give evidence that some moral principles may change for the worse is not evidence that there is no such thing as moral evolution, as evolution consists of changes for the worse as well as changes for the better.
The difference is knowledge versus practice. This is where religious life comes into play. And I can't believe I'm saying that; I've been out of the church for over a year and am not one who practices a religion any longer. There is a difference between "knowing", or being able to "distinguish right and wrong" in a more and more nuanced way, versus applying that knowledge towards an everyday practice. You seem to assume that the two are interchangeable. This is actually classic Biblical wisdom; it's "head knowledge versus heart knowledge" (ugh, what a gross phrase, yet so true). Practice means consciously applying the actual concepts; things like charity, unconditional love, meditation. Every interaction in your life is an opportunity to put these moral concepts into practice. This is what I mean by "moral evolution of the inner life of the individual". What I mean is: There is not an evolution of more and more people applying the more and more nuanced moral concepts we have to their everyday practice. What we have instead is that the general knowledge of moral problems becomes more and more nuanced over time, but this has nothing to say about the actual application of that knowledge by individuals to their lives. In fact, if anything, the ever-increasing complexity of moral problems just serves to confound the average person, leaving them to fall back on whatever political or religious sentiment is convenient and sufficient enough to stay the tide of overwhelming moral dilemmas that our current world consists of. This is ultimately not about abstract philosophy; it's about personal practice. Morals always ultimately come down to this: the individual person. Conceptions of morality that don't revolve around the individual de-humanize the individual, which is to say that they de-humanize humanity itself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a classic conflation of survival with moral good. Survival is a mechanism of material evolution; taking this mechanism and applying it to the realm of morals is a misapplication, and this is why: To assume that morals are a function of survival undermines evolution itself; so if evolution is based on change, then there will be a change from survival to something else. Morals are a function of that new form of change, and we live in that world now. Our evolution is no longer based on survival.
Eh, what you say about gaining energy through forming a new denomination is undoubtedly true, but there are other reasons America is so Christian. And as far as ethnic sects of the same denomination of Christianity within America, those existed because of immigration; early immigrants stuck together with those of their same race; naturally their unique form of the faith remained in tact while those close-knit communities did so. Once those ethnic communities began to splinter, the ethnic sects of the denominations began to blur.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I don't think there was actual competition between denominations in the early US; the denominations were again cultural, not specifically theological. To the contrary, those denominations would have rather retained only members of their ethnic group, early on. Economics as much as anything else are what caused those ethnic lines to dissolve. From there, I think theological problems were afterwards more responsible for the proliferation of endless new denominations.
The secularization of the mystical also secularized need for religious purity, which becomes violence in its secularization. For some this became the quest for ethnic/class purity as sought by the Nazis, Stalin & Lenin.
This is why many hold that there can be no exceptions to law, that all laws flow from norms, and the judiciary like priests there to interpret what the law entails. [reminds me of the debate between the divine command theory versus the restriction of God by his laws] The US Constitution has a statement regarding the availability of exceptions to the legislative branch. The following from Article III section 2 of the US Constitution:
This is a big gaping exception that means that Congress can craft a law not subject to judicial review. While questioned by justices (John Marshall 1803), there are no laws I am aware of crafted using this exception, but it was attempted in the Marriage Protection Act of 2003 which passed the House but failed in the Senate. Here from the proposed law:
Wikipedia
I think you've set up a division between what is known by human beings in general, and what is practised by particular individuals, and then you try to relate this to "evolution". The problem being that individuals do not "evolve" in any way which is related to the concept of "evolution", So it appears to me like you freely cross category boundaries, perhaps committing category error.
Quoting Noble Dust
So you start off with this distinction of knowledge versus practise, and how it relates to religion. I would assume that "knowledge" here refers to what is held by the religion in general, and "practise" refers to the actions of individuals. If we want to produce categorical consistency, we need to bring "knowledge" into the minds of the individuals. So we make it clear, and unambiguous, that "knowledge" here refers to beliefs which are held by the individual, within the individual's mind. "Religion" then must be a particular type of belief which one holds, a belief in God or some such thing, which is part of an individual's knowledge.
Quoting Noble Dust
Now you need to justify this distinction between head knowledge and heart knowledge, the difference between knowing what is right and wrong, and practising what is right rather than practising what is wrong. So let's say that "knowing what's right and wrong", consists of general principles which one holds, and let's say that practise consists of applying general principles to particular situations. So the distinction here is between what is held in one's memory, and what is actually going through one's mind at a particular time. We can refer to Augustine's tripartite mind, memory (principles held within), intellect (what's actually going on in one's mind, active thought), and will (that which ends the activity, the decision).
Quoting Noble Dust
So this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You refer to "nuanced moral concepts", Does that mean that there are differences in the moral principles which one has to remember. Does this mean that a child can remember the same fundamental moral principle in a number of different ways, such that each way has a subtle difference from the other? So when that person is later in some particular situation, and applying the moral principle, using the intellect, the person can decide, "I like this version of that principle better than that version", so I'm going to apply this version of that principle in this situation?
Is that what you mean when you say that the knowledge of moral concepts becomes "more and more nuanced over time"? It cannot be that the concept acquires more and more particularities, because then it would become less and less applicable. In order to be applicable to the widest range of particular situations, the principle must become more and more general.
Quoting Noble Dust
Here, you need to distinguish between complexity in the world we live in, and complexity in the moral principles which guide our actions. What is confounding the average person is the complexity of the world which we live in, this is the individual's environment. The individual need not adopt complex and confounding moral principles. One can take something simple, like "love thy neighbour", and cling to this as the highest guiding principle. But in a complex societal environment, one might choose a different highest principle, like "be loyal to your family", or "be patriotic". Choosing a different one of each of these principles to support one's practise, as a highest guiding principle, could produce a radically different practise, depending on which one is chosen.
A complex social environment may make it more difficult for one to properly maintain a hierarchy of moral values, requiring more effort, but an individual cannot blame the societal environment for holding a corrupt hierarchy. This would be to shirk one's responsibility by claiming determinism.
So I disagree with you to a large extent. Yes, I agree that it is "about personal practise", because personal practise is what affects the world, what we observe, and how we judge people. But the "abstract philosophy" consists of the guiding principles which influence one's personal practise, so what morality is "really about" is these abstract principles. To slip in one's adherence to the highest principle is what causes corrupt practise. To hold a "nuanced" highest principle within your mind (memory), i.e. to have a choice of highest principles, is that slippage.
To turn the other way now, away from such slippage and corruption, toward the good, we should seek to more clearly define that highest principle, make it more universal acceptable, and more universally applicable. We should establish the necessity and facilitate the application of the highest principle. Looking back at the foundations of Christianity we can see how Jesus' message of love evolved into forgiveness before going into the stages of corruptive decline. I believe we must renew the highest principle, and that we have not completed the evolution of the highest principle.
Quoting Noble Dust
This really doesn't make any sense to me. You have already denied "moral evolution", claiming that there is no such thing, and this I objected to. All you do here is assert that there is no relationship between morality and survival, so you are just begging the question. Your support for this assertion makes no sense to me. How would a relationship between morality and survival undermine evolution itself?
The Second Great Awakening (late 18th, early 19th Centuries) was another reason for religion doing well in the U.S. The SGA was led by Methodist and Baptist preachers. (Baptists hadn't become conservative Southern Baptists yet). The SGA was a continuing stimulant well into the 19th Century.
Because Americans had no state-sponsored church, we were free to wander into all sorts of oddball beliefs. The SGA produced the "burnt over area" of Western New York--an area so heavily evangelized, that all the "fuel" for future conversions had been "burnt up". Several groups sprouted in that area about that time: Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Shakers, et al. In addition, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Women's suffrage movement started here. The Fourierist utopian socialists, as well as the Oneida Society began here. Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel came out of this area.
Immigration did influence Christian and Jewish religious activity. Over time (like, by the 1970s) the ethnic-religious nexus was dissipating.
During the 1960, American religious participation and religious affiliation crashed. The Methodists, for instance, lost 5 million members during the 1960s. This 5 million didn't go somewhere else, apparently, and they never returned. Other denominations experienced the same severe losses. The Roman Catholic educational. medical, and social ministries were greatly diminished by professed nuns and monks leaving their orders. What began in the 1960s did not stop. Only the conservative evangelical and fundamentalists denominations have been able to actually increase their membership over the last 45 years. It is likely that they will experience a decline as well, at some point.
Even with these declines, however, religion and religious belief and activity is much higher than in Europe. "The Church" is in no danger of disappearing.
The chart below combines several measures, so there is no left-hand scale.
The Truth will set you free, but it costs money to report it.
I agree with Noble Dust. It's easy to append the term 'evolution' to everything nowadays, and commonplace to ascribe to 'evolution' what was previously ascribed to 'divine will'. I've been arguing a related argument on this forum all along - that subordinating morality to evolution reduces it to a mere adaption, like a tooth or claw or peacock's tail. There's a very good essay on this called Anything But Human by Richard Polt.
Quoting Bitter Crank
There's also the trend towards 'spiritual but not religious' - those who don't attend church but who have a range of beliefs and attitudes, often syncretist (containing ideas from various traditions). One of those Pew forum reports stated that a signficant percentage of self-reported atheists also believe in a higher intelligence - the subtext being, 'just don't call it God!'.
One individual may return from a long fast in the desert and have a new revelation to report. When people engage in spiritual doodling by themselves, there is rarely revelation or insight. There is no one to challenge the quite likely solipsistic experience of their 'spiritualism'.
I wouldn't say that revelation, a pregnancy of celestial fire, or an anointing by the spirit CAN'T happen by one's self. It just isn't all that likely.
The word 'spiritualism' invariably reminds me of Victorian-era seances.
More to the point, we are nowadays 'individuals' in a manner which wouldn't have been conceivable in bygone days. There was a book by Harold Bloom, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Person, which makes that point very clearly. Whereas in pre-modern culture, there was a lot less room for the individual. But nowadays it's essential, because humans are individualised and expected to be responsible for their own development, in the context of a highly pluralistic and diverse global culture. It's a big part of the predicament of modernity.
That doesn't mean everyone developing a completely idiosyncratic form of spirituality. In Western Buddhist circles, students are constantly encouraged to find a particular centre, teacher or sangha and attend it, so as to avoid wandering up a garden path of their own making. And there are more and less individualistic approaches within those circles. But which one, is always a matter for the individual to decide.
One of the books that influenced me greatly was The Heretical Imperative, by a sociologist, Peter Berger (who was famous for his Social Construction of Reality thesis.)
Where that chimed with me, was that I had thought of spirituality in terms of the search for spiritual experience. I will admit, many of my early encounters were via hallucinogens - some of those expreriences really did open the 'doors of perception'. The question became, how to get back to that plateau without taking substances, as those experiences were always transient. That's what lead me and millions of others towards Eastern spirituality, which was ostensibly all about 'the experience of the sacred'.
Still working on it.
Harvey Cox, a Baptist, liberation theologist, professor in the Harvard Divinity School, and a fairly adventurous believer (he's a about 87 years old now) tried hallucinogens in a quite proper setting -- out in the desert with a bunch of others, a good sound system, wine, etc. He thought it was a worthwhile experience, but I don't think he repeated it. He also wrote a couple of books about eastern religion -- not as a believer, but in an ecumenical context. [Turning East: Why Americans Look to the Orient for Spirituality-And What That Search Can Mean to the West; Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths (1988), (Beacon Press reprint 1992)].
His next to last book was The Future of Faith (2009). Haven't read it, don't know whether I will. I got a great deal out of his earlier books (like The Secular City, 1964) but found some of his later books much less helpful. Anyway, in Future of Faith Cox analyzes the new grassroots Christianity of social activism and the kind of non-institutional spirituality we've been discussing.
Maybe his last book (last year) is/was The Market as God. Here's a link to an excerpt in The Atlantic Magazine
So how would you answer my question to Noble Dust then? How would a relationship between morality and survival undermine evolution itself? As I said to Noble, to make such an assertion is one thing. but how would you support it? The passage you quoted indicates that one cannot turn to evolution to answer one's moral questions, but that's not really relevant. What's at issue in my mind is whether we can turn to morality to answer questions about evolution. Can we look at morality as an instance, an example, of evolution? If so, then since the individual's will is paramount in morality, then we'd have to adapt our concept of evolution to allow for the role of the will of the individual. Rather than reducing morality to mere adaptation, we'd have to consider the role of will in adaptation. It is by turning to ourselves, the individual, that we get a true understand of the individual living being. So I believe we must bring this understanding of the individual, derived from understanding oneself, to bear on the role of the individual in the concept of evolution. Then "divine will" is properly understood through an understanding of the individual's will.
I think evolution is a biological theory. It is about 'how species evolve'. The fact that it has now become a de facto 'theory of everything' is, in my view, a cultural defect and not a philosophy at all. I know evolution occured, in fact sometimes i sense a strong connection with my ancient forbears. But I think trying to combine biological evolution and ethical philosophy is fraught with many problems.
I understand how evolution can be seen as a kind of metaphor for spiritual growth. Sometimes I have thought that Vedic ideas of re-birth and the idea of evolutionary development, could be combined. Tielhard du Chardin and Bergon and others of that ilk talk in those terms. But it's a roundabout way of approaching it, in my view. The overwhelming tendency of evolutionary theory is to depict humanity as 'another species' which is invariably reductive, in my view.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But, it's got nothing to do with evolution, per se. If I wanted to study evolution, I would enroll in biology, to start with, and then study all the requisite disciplines - geology, genetics, and the rest. As I mentioned, that is not what I studied, and I don't see how it's relevant.
We have to face the facts though. We believe in evolution, we know that it occurred. We also know that we are biological beings included within evolutionary theory. So the question is, is it the case that all the properties of living beings are products of evolution, or are there some properties which are special, and are not the products of evolution? Since morality, as a property of living beings, appears to be exclusive to human beings, then how can we account for its coming into being except through evolution? Therefore morality itself cannot be that special property which is not a product of evolution.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point though, is that seeing morality as a product of evolution can give us much better insight into a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the individual and evolution. And what we can find is that there is something which we might call "the will to act", or something like that, which inheres within every individual living being, as a property of the individual. Now we have found a special property of living beings which appears to transcend evolution. It is not a property of evolution because it is common to all living things.
Well I suppose you're articulating a very big issue there, for many people.
I do fully accept that evolution occured - I have no sympathy for any form of creationism or Protestant 'Intelligent Design'.
But I think, to be candid, my understanding maps pretty closely to 'theistic evolution' - which is the general view of the mainstream Christian denominations (outside the US anyway).
I suppose, to put it in a way that is compatible with the scientific view - when h. sapiens evolved to a certain point, then s/he is no longer determined by purely biological factors. At that point we transcend the merely biological. That, I think, is the real meaning of 'the myth of the fall' - that at the point where humans become self-conscious, self-aware, capable of making judgements of 'good and evil' (the fruit of the tree of good and evil), then at that point moral decisions become necessary, and they're no longer governed by purely biological forces. (I'm sure we have discussed this more than once previously.)
And there are respectable evolutionary biologists who would concur. The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who is famous for the aphorism 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution', was also a member of the Orthodox faith, and wrote a book on these very questions, called The Biology of Ultimate Concern (there's a synopsis here).
But don't you believe that not just human beings, but all living creatures have a soul, and therefore all these creatures "transcend the merely biological"? If this is the case, then there's no reason to believe that becoming self-conscious, or self-aware, is what allows transcendence of the biological.
I agree that the capacity to judge good and bad is something special which comes about with self-consciousness, and self-awareness, but I think that "the fall" concerns the loss of naivety. It has to do with the feeling of guilt which comes into existence with the capacity to judge one's own act as if it were external to one's self. One can say "I shouldn't have done that" with regards to a particular act. Once we have that capacity, we can know when we've made the wrong choice and proceed to develop a sense of responsibility. Prior to this, the animals lived in a sort of ignorant bliss. They still chose their acts, attempting to reap the rewards, and avoid suffering the consequences, but without the capacity to recognize the acts themselves as good or bad, there was no capacity for guilt. The feeling of guilt comes from realizing I should have done otherwise. And since human beings will always make mistakes we will always be haunted by guilt.
No, I don't believe that. I don't believe anyone 'has' a soul. If the word has meaning (and it's an 'if'), it's because it refers to the totality of the being - not simply the mind, personality, physique, but the whole being. That is what I take 'soul' to mean.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm quite sympathetic to the Christian idea of conscience. From the Catholic Catechism:
Such ideas are generally not much recognises nowadays.
If you mean the idea that conscience is our knowledge of God's law, then I think you're right, and I think the decline of such ideas is a reason for rejoicing.
On the other hand, if you mean ideas about conscience as our innate feeling of what is right, and our sometimes having internal conflict over what the right thing is, then don't you think that is a perennial theme of fiction, that is as powerful and vibrant today as it ever was? What do you make of Sartre's writings on this, such as the young French man torn over whether to join the resistance or stay and look after his mother?
I admired his pluck in the Resistance, and I also admired him for turning down the Nobel for literature, but overall I detest Sartre.
As I hope I have made clear in this and other threads, I'm not a Christian apologist, so bear that in mind. But I think the idea of 'conscience', and of there being a real moral or ethical law that it indicates, is real. Where I differ from the Christian interpretation is that I don't believe that only Christians understand that. Ideas such as dharma, logos and Tao, also represent notions of a 'universal order' which is perceptible by 'right seeing'. That is what I think 'conscience' represents.
Sartre, et al, was writing in the shadow of Nietszche's declaration of the 'death of God'. For them, the whole point was the the Universe had been revealed by science to be empty of any intrinsic meaning. That was what a lot of 20th C existentialism was about.
However I think Western culture is entering a post-secular phase, to use Habermas' term. Religions aren't simply going to shrivel up and die in the face of the harsh light of scientific truth.
To clarify, I said that if morals are a function of evolution, then this would undermine evolution. So not just any relationship, but a relationship of morals being a function of evolution. So, the very concept of evolution that, for instance, you describe, is about change. The assumption you're making, thanks to our fixation on Darwin still, is that "survival" is a constant. You have to realize that this is simply an assumption. There is no reason to assume that this is a constant; it's a baseless assumption. Evolution is change, and yet survival is not subsumed in that change. Why? Why is survival a constant, rather than a function that is subject to the same change? So, to use one's imagination (oh the horror! oh the taboo!), one can see that if evolution involves change, then this also includes the role that survival play(ed) in evolution. To my mind, it's a simple, obvious thing. More to come tomorrow; I'm exhausted after an over-long night at work.
I must admit, I had difficulty with this, and had to reread numerous times, because "function of" may be taken in numerous ways. I never did resolve the question of what you actually meant. If I look at evolution as a real physical occurrence, then "a function of evolution" would imply that evolution plays a part, a purpose, in a larger role. Morality then, if it were a function of evolution, would be this larger role. But this is inverse from what I meant, what I meant is that evolution would be a function of morality, morality playing the part of the function, in the larger role, evolution. So I'm talking about evolution being a function of morals, morality having the function, of influencing evolution in particular ways.
Quoting Noble Dust
Clearly I'm not assuming survival as a constant. I'm dealing with the individual, and the individual does not survive in evolution. In fact the death of the individual, to be replaced by others which are different is essential to evolution. Furthermore, extinction of certain species is inherent within evolution, so I do not see how survival could be a constant. What we might see as a constant, is the will to survive, or the desire to survive, which is held by the individual, But natural forces always confound this will to survive, as each and every individual is fated to death.
Quoting Noble Dust
Again, I have great difficulty with your use of "function" here. If evolution were for the purpose of survival, then evolution would be a function (having the purpose) of survival. This is a possibility, that since we cannot, as individuals, survive, life as a whole evolves, and survives. But it would make no sense to say that survival is a function of, or has the purpose of, evolution, because no individuals survive, so it is impossible that survival could be a given, which serves as a function toward some larger role.
Quoting Wayfarer
So you disavow these dualist principles? The body and soul are necessarily a unity, and there is no possibility of separation, not even in principle? Do you realize that this is contrary to the fundamentals of most religions?
Not to be lazy, but I was basically trying to make the argument (apparently not very well) that Wayfarer illustrated when he said:
Quoting Wayfarer
And then, taking it a step further, I was suggesting that maybe morality and survival are stages, if you will, along the course of evolution. It's an idea that I'm toying with, that I haven't fleshed out. Basically, morality supersedes survival in the evolutionary process. Maybe with other steps in between, maybe not. I hope that at least makes more sense?
I'm not a very discursive thinker, so I seem to have trouble communicating my ideas to people like you who have a much stronger command of reason and logic. What I'm seeing is this: there is a tendency to try to understand morality through the lens of evolutionary survival. I think that's incorrect. I see this more in the general population, not necessarily in a philosophical realm as much (other than the new atheists, although they're of course not actual philosophers). And I think this is actually an important distinction; it seems like folks like Wayfarer and I on here have a tendency to make observations based on what we see in the population at large, rather than simply marshaling the forces of one's own ideas against the forces of another. This seems like an approach not always taken by others here. Simply an observation, for the sake of trying to understand one another better.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I shouldn't have assumed this. But it's certainly something I see from others. But, what do you see as the purpose of evolution? Is there a telos? If not, then who cares? What's the point?
Not at all, I think you're a very clear thinker and one whom I often tend to agree with.
With regards to the point - have a look at Alfred Russel Wallace's Darwinism Applied to Man. It's couched in rather Victorian language, for obvious reasons. Wallace became increasingly drawn to Victorian spiritualism and non-orthodox religious ideas and as a consequence much of what he says in this genre is nowadays disregarded. But I'm sure you'll find it interesting - he makes a similar point.
My view, as I explained earlier, is that morality comes into being with self-awareness, and also tool-use, language, and ownership. That gives rise to a sense of what is mine, what is self, what is other than me, what can be lost, from which arises the fundamental bases of morality - what I might do, or should do, what are the consequences of that, and so on. I believe h. sapiens evolved to the point where that becomes possible. But, when it is possible, then at that point one is no longer determined by the purely biological.
How could it makes sense that morality could supersede survival? Since we all die, and there is a possibility that life may be eradicated from earth, we haven't yet achieved survival. If we instil morality as the goal or purpose, then how can we ensure that this morality would produce survival? If there are beings which are living, and they do not have morality, then doesn't this indicate to you that survival is of a higher priority than morality? In relation to being in general, don't you think that to be alive is of a higher priority than to be moral. Morality exists as a hierarchy of values, as Aristotle says, one thing is for the sake of another, which is for the sake of something further, etc., until we reach the highest good. But morality is the means by which we reach the good, it relates to the actions, the means to the end, it isn't the good which is sought. So morality must be for the sake of some higher good.
Quoting Noble Dust
I see evolution through the lens of morality, so my thinking is somewhat different from the general population. Notice that we all think in a different way, you, me Wayfarer, and others, yet we always seem assume that there is a way of the general population. The differences are what makes us individuals, yet we always assume that there is something which unites us as "the same". We take this for granted, that we are of the same species, that we follow the same cultural norms, but how do we really justify this? Within the same species, there are different cultures. Within the same culture, people think in different ways. Isn't there a reason why we try to be like others?
Quoting Noble Dust
Come on Dusty, how can you ask me what's the purpose of evolution? Isn't this like asking for the meaning of life? Don't you think that survival is very important? If you want to supersede survival, as the purpose of evolution, then you need to determine the purpose of survival. That's not an easy question.
Because of the possibility of life after death. Or, the possibility of death eventually being overcome. I also don't think my own survival is my ultimate goal. Even something like suicide rates should be enough to at least suggest the possibility that for us humans, things are different. We've evolved past a pure physical state; we've become so complex that there's a type of sickness that for us is worse than life, than survival itself. We want more than survival on an individual level. When we don't achieve this "more than" state, some of us begin to "go off" if you will, and begin down a road that leads us to a point where we'd rather freely end our own survival. An animal will fight for it's life until it's dying breath, but a human person may freely decide to end their own life.
Also, it sounds like you're equating "survival" with something like "ultimate survival" here. Of course we've "achieved survival". We still exist as a species. We achieve survival every day.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I wasn't suggesting morality to be the purpose of evolution. I realize that wasn't clear. I agree with you that morality is the means by which we reach the highest good. Or at least, I agree with the idea that morality is a vehicle, or a structure. I realize I've been framing this discussion in my mind within the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. I don't necessarily buy his ideas, but I'm fascinated by them, and I toy with them sometimes. So, I can imagine the structure of physical evolution giving birth to consciousness, which is almost a sixth sense. With the birth of consciousness comes a new structure: morality. At the least, this makes more sense to me than the idea of morality existing "eternally", or just in some vague abstract sense that's not related to time or physical matter. So in this sense, I can entertain the possibility of the evolution of moral concepts, or the evolution of a moral structure within consciousness in general. But I again appeal to the difference between knowledge and practice here. I don't even necessarily claim this idea as my own opinion. I'm working through possibilities. This is what I mean by not thinking discursively; I'd rather work through ideas intuitively and non-linearly. This seems to be problematic for people.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So do you consider survival more important than achieving the highest good?
I don't think being alive is a higher priority than being moral. See my earlier comments about suicide. Life can be agony. If being alive is a higher priority than being moral, then I'm free to kill anyone who threatens my life. Sounds like moral evolution, right? Wait...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We're the strange type who post on philosophy forums. I don't mean this in a holier-than-thou sense, but there is definitely a trend within the general population to accept a general consensus without using critical thinking to question the consensus. Folks like us tend to go the opposite direction. So there's no need to use people like us as a counter-example to the idea that the general population follows trends.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Is this a continuation of the argument you start at the beginning of that paragraph? I can't really tell; it doesn't make much sense to me in relation to what you initially said. For instance, you seem to be conflating being "of the same species" with "following[ing] the same cultural norms". But then almost immediately you say "Within the same species, there are different cultures."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How can you not ask yourself that question?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's important in the same way that a car engine is important. It gets me from A to B. But it's not the purpose of my trip.
Life after death is contradictory, unless we remove the individuality of living. We can consistently say that life itself continues after an individual dies, so there is life after death, but this doesn't hold up to rigorous logic because it is a category error. In one case, "life" is the property of particulars, individual beings, and in the other, it is a generalization, life in general continues. If we remove the individual, to say that life continues, then we don't have any real grounding for the concept of "life", because we get a nonsense notion of life, without an individual being which is living. It's very difficult to make sense of "life" without that individual being which is living.
So all the ancient traditions, such as the myths recounted by Plato, portray individual souls in the post-death condition. At that time, way back then, and to this day now, our minds have not been able to grasp this generality of life, separate from the particulars, so there has been no portrayal of life in general, persisting after the death of the individual. In all these ancient myths, we always encounter individual souls. This implies that life is somehow bound to the particular, that individuality is an essential aspect of living. We tend to assign individuality to the material body, saying that it is the properties of the material body which make us different from each other. But then when we try to abstract the soul from the material body, i.e., the soul leaves the body at death, we have no way to dissolve the individuality of the soul, and individuality does not get lost in the abstraction. Therefore, individuality is what is essential to the soul. If we follow this into mysticism, that individuality becomes a Oneness, a Unity. But this mysticism breaks the logic, the individual souls are lost into the One, the Soul, and there are no logical principles for this. Just because the individual is a single unity, a particular, or one, this does not justify a One, in the sense of an abstract unity.
The individuality of the resurrected human being is an important issue in Christianity. I believe it was Paul who argued strongly, in the early years of Christianity, that the individuality of "the person" is maintained in resurrection. This is important because it's contrary to the mystical platform of One Soul. But the Christian position opens up a whole new problem, and that is the continuity of existence of the individual. In the ancient myths, there was a necessary continuity of existence of the soul, after the death of the body. When the body dies, the soul must keep living, so it has to go somewhere. The Christians seem to allow a break in the continuity. We die, then later there is a judgment, when we are brought back in resurrection. Now there's a temporal gap which may be filled with the concept of purgatory. If we don't opt for that concept of purgatory, we have to account for this discontinuity. How can the individual soul stop existing for a time, then come back later for an eternal existence? What constitutes this break in existence? What kind of existence does the soul have in this break period? As an analogy, consider a seed, or a spore. Those things can go into a suspended animation for an extended period of time, when they are not living, but then when the conditions are right, they spring into life? What supports this capacity for discontinuity which life demonstrates?
Quoting Noble Dust
This is the category error which I was trying to point out. A species is not a living being. It doesn't make sense to say that the species exists as a thing, because it is not a living being, it is an abstraction. So the same error follows if we say that the species "survives". If we bring "survive" into the proper category, we have to refer to ourselves. Yes, it surely makes sense to say, of course we've survived, I'm here today, and you're here today. You and I have survived. But of what import is that survival when we could both be gone tomorrow, and our own lives are but a flash in the pan anyway? To have survived is not the same thing as to survive. We can give "survival" a more important meaning, by making it a goal, a purpose, to survive after that break in continuity, described above.
Quoting Noble Dust
I haven't yet seen good support for your separation between "survival" and "highest good". To me, I see no reason yet why survival should not be the highest good. You keep trying to drive a wedge between these two, but it seems like a wedge of categorical separation, such that "survival" is something which a species does, while morality is something which individuals do. When you put these both in the same category, then I see no reason why survival of the individual (which includes the above discussed "life after death"), should not be the highest good.
Quoting Noble Dust
The point I was trying to make is that "species", and "norms" are of the same category, and that is abstractions, they are concepts. There is no such particular, individual, existing thing as the norms of a culture, nor is there any such particular individual existing thing as a species. These are concepts, abstractions. As they are both ways of comparing individuals with respect to certain properties, and establishing principles of commonality, I see no reason why we can't make a valid comparison between the two. Why do you keep insisting on denying such a comparison?
Quoting Noble Dust
You don't seem to appreciate the true meaning of "survive". You put survival into the past, to say "I have survived, therefore I have fulfilled my desire to survive". I have made it to point B, therefore if getting to point B was my goal, I no longer have a goal. But this is what "survived" means, it is not what "survive" means. Survival is an ongoing, continuity. It does not end with a conquest of survival, it continues onward indefinitely. If survival ended in such a conquest then there would be no more survival afterwards, and it would negate itself at that point of conquest.
You seem to believe that there is something more important to your life than actually living. What could that possibly be? Being alive is necessary for you to do anything, so how could anything be more important than this? Therefore being alive (and hence survival) is of the highest importance, because anything else which you might do, including being moral, is dependent on this, being alive.
Paradoxes are an important purveyor of truth. Experience here is key; I haven't experienced death and whatever may or may not come after it, so I'd rather retain the simplicity of a child; I'll trust to the possibility of something coming after. But simply just the possibility, not any certainty. I'll strive to seek the purity of heart that wills one thing, along with Kierkegaard.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it's not a nonsense notion of life, it's a notion that acknowledges Not-Knowledge, that acknowledges Un-knowing. It's a notion that acknowledges faith (ultimate concern, via Tillich), as one of the primary functions of how we interface with life. It's a letting go of the need to know.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Surely the survival of a species as a whole is not hard to conceptualize. Seriously...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I can't even parse through the confusing misapplication of terms here. And I've already made my point earlier about this distinction. If survival is the highest good, than an almost comically ironic solipsism is the only way forward. Because, as you say, you only equate survival to the individual. So if survival (the highest good) is only about me, then my "good" is, in truth, the only good that exists. So it's you versus me. Given the last slice of bread left on the planet, it's fair game for me to grotesquely murder you for the sake of my own survival, since survival is the highest good (but only my personal survival, since the survival of the species is not a real thing). And you never addressed my points about suicide. Feel free to vehemently disagree, or whatever. But at least address my points about suicide in relation to this debate instead of attempting to only hit me at whatever weaker points you might perceive to exist in my argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So all abstractions are not real then, logically? Surely you agree.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You misunderstand my analogy (and analogies are imperfect, as this one surely is). When I say that survival gets me from point A to B, I mean that survival moves me along the path of my life. It's only one of the things that does so. It's surely an important driving factor. But, the analogy could be said instead like this: survival is a mechanism of life. It doesn't describe why life exists. the mechanics of the car engine don't tell me why someone might find it beneficial to use a car. Surely this is easy to understand??
I think the underlying truth of the higher religions is the quest to realise an identity that is not subject to death.
I think what Noble Dust is getting at, is that there may be a conception of life, within which virtue is of a higher importance than whether one lives or dies. And I can think of no better illustration of the idea than the Death of Socrates, from the Apology. The detachment shown by Socrates at the approach of his own death, indicates that he at least believes that the death of the body is of minor consequence compared to the overall state of his soul.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, in the traditional understanding, there are many circumstances in which death is a lesser evil than dishonour. If, for example, one had to commit some monstrous evil in order to preserve one's own life, then, given that the fate of the soul depended on the actions, it would be preferable to die than to commit such an act.
Yes. This is a concept that seems to have no traction in an analytic world. And there seems to be no adequate way for that concept to be sufficiently communicated to that world. An example being Metaphysician's future response to this post.
No, I honestly cannot conceptualize this. A species is a concept, an ideal. It is an abstraction. For example, we have many existing beings which we class together as human beings. We form an abstraction and we say that there is a species called human beings, despite racial differences and other differences. The unity here is created by the abstraction, we class all the individuals together as one class, human, and this act of classing them together produces a unity which we know of as the species. Without this unity, there is no entity or "being" called the "species". So it doesn't make sense to speak about the survival of this non-existent entity. And if we speak about survival of the concept, that's a different matter completely.
The entity, the species, is just an abstraction, it has no real existence. The divisions between one species and another are based in conventions put forward by biologists, so any talk about a species surviving or going extinct, is just a reference to these conventions. There is no real entity which is the species, which either survives or does not. For instance we recognize a distinction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. If Neanderthals are understood as a distinct species, then the species which those individuals belonged to, ceased to exist. If Neanderthals are understood as a subclass of the species Homo Sapiens, then the species which those individuals belonged to, did not cease to exist.
Quoting Noble Dust
Placing survival of the individual as the highest good doesn't produce solipsism. You haven't demonstrated any reasonable argument for your assertion that "my good" is not the highest good. And the idea that my good is the highest good does not necessarily produce the perspective of "you versus me". Actually it's quite the contrary, when, with our intellects, we apprehend that cooperation is the means for getting what we need. Numerous individuals working together provide more for each individual than individuals working alone. That's what Jesus demonstrated with the bread and the fish. It seemed like there was not enough food for the thousands of people, so he collected up all the food that was there, and divided it up evenly amongst all the people, and suddenly there was enough for everyone.
I don't see your point with the suicide example, perhaps you could make it more clear.
Quoting Noble Dust
We can say that concepts, abstractions are "real", but we need to recognize an ontological distinction between the reality of a concept and the reality of a physical being. Because of this difference, the survival of a concept is a completely different matter from the survival of a physical being, and we cannot conflate the two, as they are completely different. A very true concept, such as the circle, is said to be eternal. To say that a species survives is to produce a nonsense conflation between the concept and the physical being.
Quoting Noble Dust
"Survival" describes the primary function of life. There are numerous powers, potencies, or capacities of the soul (life) which Aristotle identified. The first one, the primary one, is the power of self-nourishment, which produces subsistence. The other powers, self-movement, sensation, intellection, are built on top of this. These other powers are dependent on that first one. Therefore that primary power, self-nourishment, which is related to subsistence and survival, is the most important power, because it supports the others.
We do not need to understand why life exists in order to understand the powers which living beings have, and understand the hierarchy of priorities of these powers. You seem to take a reverse stand point, assuming that with the intellect, which is the highest, most fragile and unstable power, we can apprehend why life exists. But our only recourse toward understanding this "why" is through understanding life itself, and this means understanding the hierarchy of powers. To say that one power, which is dependent on another power for its existence, is more important than that power which it is reliant upon, is simply wrong. Cessation of the lower power will necessarily result in cessation of the higher power, but cessation of the higher power does not necessarily result in cessation of the lower power. Therefore the lower power is more important.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point I made, is that death only becomes acceptable to an individual when that person apprehends that the individual soul continues it's existence after the death of the body. This is exemplified by the death of Socrates, and the precepts of Christianity. What is believed in, is the continued existence of the person, the individual's soul. When we produce an artificial, and conceptual unity of life, "The Soul", as is found in some mysticism, the importance of the individual is lost.
We can produce a morality of virtue, based in such a unity, the unity of living beings, The Soul, but the reality of this unity cannot be justified. The unity cannot be conceived of as real because of the real separation between individuals, with no apprehended principle of unity. So that unity, The Soul, when apprehended by the logical reasoning of the individual human being, remains as a pie in the sky illusion of mysticism. Then the individual perceives that entire moral system, based in such a fictional unity, as unsound, and not an adequate morality.
Quoting Wayfarer
The idea that the individual's soul continues to exist after death is paramount in supporting such actions. If we remove this idea, of the soul continuing to exist, then one's own death may still be perceived as an option because the nature of free will allows that each individual decides for oneself the best course of action.
This is a very deep question, but I really don't see it in terms of 'survival'. I think the popular notion of living forever in some after-death state is mistaken and that existing eternally as an individual would be hell.
I think in the wisdom traditions, there is an understanding that one has to die to realise the higher states. And dying is not surviving, it is not maintaining one's self or sense of identity. That is symbolised in such sayings as 'he who looses his life for My sake will be saved'. When Jesus was on the Cross, he cried out 'Why have you forsaken me?' And I think at that point, he really didn't know, he was utterly alone and bereft. (As I write this, it's Good Friday.)
So I think the idea that 'I will live forever' is a comforting illusion - just as atheists say it is. But I also don't think it is what 'eternal life' actually means.
In the early Buddhist texts, there are references to 'the deathless state' which is a synonym for Nibanna (see for instance here). However, that verse also says that until it's apprehended, until one attains the direct insight into it, then it is something to take on faith.
But it also should be recalled that the question of whether the Buddha continues to exist after death, or not, is one of the 'undetermined questions' i.e. categorised as metaphysical speculation, not conducive to enlightenment. The Buddha is not conceived of as 'living forever in Heaven', or anywhere, for that matter. 'Exists' doesn't apply; 'doesn't exist' doesn't apply 2. The mode of existence of the tathagatha is inconceivable.
So I don't think about the concept of 'immortality as 'continuing existence'. That is what the ego would like to make of it, but it is not what it means.
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I'm not sure about Socrates, but that seems a fair representation of the beliefs of mainstream Christians about death.
But you have not restricted your comments to Christianity, and thereby you imply that somebody who belongs to a religion that does not say the individual retains its individuality after death, cannot accept their death. Given the very large number of Hindus and Buddhists in the world, most of whom do not believe that, and many of whom manage to accept their death with equanimity - that claim seems in direct conflict with what can be observed.
OK, I agree "survival" is not the best term here, because of the very thing Noble Dust is arguing, the association of "survival" with evolution, and the ensuing connotations. But these concepts of what happens to the soul after death describe a type of survival, or something similar to survival. I do believe that all major religions which adhere to the principles of continued existence after death, maintain that this is somehow the existence of the individual.
Quoting Wayfarer
As I pointed out earlier in the thread, it was argued strongly in early Christianity, I think by Paul, that it is the individual, the person, who will be resurrected, and we will maintain our individuality upon resurrection. We all die, but after some length of time there will be the day of judgement, upon which we will be resurrected, in our own individuality.
Quoting Wayfarer
What would "eternal life" mean to you then? "Life" is meaningless without the individual beings who are living, i.e. the living beings. How might we abstract "life" from particular, individual, living beings, to assume an "eternal life", when individuality is essential to living beings. It is also observed that all individuals die, so it seems like we have this impenetrable cycle. Individuality is essential to life, and death is essential to individuality. Our two possible procedures toward a concept of eternal life are 1) to remove the necessity of death from the individual, and 2) to remove the necessity that a living is the property of an individual. If we cannot remove individuality from life, we have no way of removing death from life, unless the individual may be immortal. This is the western way, to assume the immortality of the individual.
Quoting Wayfarer
So notice, that it is stated in that passage that we can gain a footing into the "Deathless" through discernment, so it is not necessarily taken on faith alone. The western approach, or "discernment", is through a recognition of the role of the individual, and in this approach it must be the individual who is deathless. Perhaps the Buddhist approach sees a way beyond the individual?
Quoting Wayfarer
Any concept, to be a proper concept, must be intelligible, coherent, and consistent, making sense. In western philosophy, immortality only makes sense as a continued existence of the individual, so that's what the concept does mean for us. As I mentioned in an earlier post though, Christianity does introduce a discontinuity, a break after death, such that there is a period of time between death and resurrection, this was later developed as "Purgatory".
Quoting andrewk
I disagree with this. Hinduism clearly describes a reincarnation of the individual soul. I'm not so sure about Buddhism, but I think they generally believe in some sort rebirth, and this again would be as an individual. What is at issue, is whether the individuality of the person is lost to some form of general existence as "Life", or "The Soul", in the continued existence of life after one's death. Are there any religions which have developed such principles, or is this confined to unprincipled mysticism?
In Buddhism and, I think also to some extent in Hinduism, one is condemned to be reborn as an individual until the cycle is broken by attaining the ultimate goal.
Note however that rebirth as an individual is seen as bad - that from which we seek liberation. In that context, expectation of continuation of individuality after death could hardly be seen as something that helps one to accept death.
I find this to be a questionable idea. It may be true, that such things as pain and suffering are attributed to the individual and this is why the ultimate goal of the dissolution of individuality might be posited. It might even be argued that it is the nature of having to be, to live, as an individual which is the cause of such discomforts. However, unless this suffering is so overwhelming, that it would incline one to desire death without obtaining that ultimate goal, rather than to live as an individual, your argument doesn't make sense. Only if one's life were absolutely unbearable would one choose the ultimate cessation of existence over a continuation of individuality after death.
Inability to accept that dogma is one of the reasons I declined confirmation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is the point I was making about the 'undetermined questions' of the Buddha. Please take a moment to reflect on this, it is a central issue here. When asked if the Buddha continues to exist after death, the Buddha refused to answer that question. There's a reason for that refusal.
On the general idea of the dissolution of the individual, as opposed to eternal individual existence - that is a central theme in comparison of so-called eastern or Oriental spirituality and also neoplatonism, distinguished from Christian mysticism. Again it's a very difficult question of interpretation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What is beyond the scope of empirical sensibility and rational understanding, is by necessity non-conceptual, beyond logic. That is no slight on conceptual knowledge, which is perfectly applicable across an enormous range of knowledge.
It's an interesting fact that the undetermined questions in Buddhism, mentioned above, are very similar to Kant's antinomies of reason. (Sorry for the highly compressed post but heading off for an Easter lunch.)
I believe you. You are the best placed of any us at this forum to speak authoritatively about what goes on in your mind.
What you are not in any place to do is to speak authoritatively about what happens in other people's minds.
It is entirely reasonable to say 'I find it hard to imagine how someone that does not believe in the survival of the individual can accept their oncoming death'.
To say 'death only becomes acceptable to an individual when that person apprehends that the individual soul continues its existence after the death of the body' is unreasonable, because it is speaking about that which one does not know - which is what goes on in other people's minds.
Yeah, I've reflected on this before. It really makes no sense to offer an answer to a question when one does not know the answer. And that's the problem with Christian dogma in relation to this issue. Some individuals have spoken very authoritatively on this, when they really did not know what they were talking about. But notice in the passage you referred me to last time, it is stated that this issue may be apprehended through "discernment". Personally, I'd like to figure that out.
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe that things which are beyond the scope of rational understanding, that which you say is necessarily non-conceptual, can be brought into the fold of "understood" through the use of reason, logic, and the act of understanding. So there is nothing, which by its very nature is beyond the scope of understanding. It's just the case that reason and logic have not yet been applied in the correct way to bring these things into the realm of understanding. This is the evolution of knowledge.
So things such as Kant's antinomies of reason are produced by a failure in conceptualization. I also believe that on the larger time scale, the evolution of knowledge takes place through very radical changes. These are changes to the most fundamental principles, what Wittgenstein called foundational or bedrock beliefs. The foundational principles of a society are the oldest principles, and therefore were developed by the most underdeveloped human beings of that society. The problem is that there is always a huge contingent of human beings who refuse to accept the reality that such fundamental principles ought to be subjected to skepticism. Of course that's to be expected because these people were taught, and firmly believe, these principles.
That's what Socrates expressed, skepticism concerning principles which were fundamental to his society. And his trial and death demonstrate the strength and power of conviction of those who refuse such skepticism But it was this skepticism which allowed religion to merge with the scientific principles of ancient Greece, in the form of Christianity. For example, the Greeks held that the sun moon and planets had individual orbits around the earth, each represented by a god. This fundamental representation of these bodies orbiting the earth hindered the progress of ancient Greek science. They met a dead end where much of reality was beyond the scope of conceptualization due to these faulty fundamental assumptions. So the most fundamental, basic, bedrock principles of that society (because they are the ones which are the oldest, therefore most primitive, which the culture was built upon) had to be dismantled and dismissed. Christianity introduced new fundamental principles and laid the foundations for a new society, from which the solar system could be apprehended as one united entity. Those "new" foundational principles have now become ancient.
Quoting andrewk
OK, I agree with you that I should not speak for others. I am a big defender of the idea that every human being think's in one's own individual way, despite the fact that we produce generalizations. I believe generalizations are produced through societal conventions. Societies produce norms in their "way of thinking", and children are trained in these norms through the institutions. This is how generalizations may exist
So let's just dwell on this issue of "death" for a few moments. The idea of death is unacceptable to me. I cannot conceptualize it. When I think of it, as an eternity of time without me, after I'm gone, it renders the fact that I am here now, as totally nonsensical. So either I have to dismiss the idea that my life has some sort of meaning, relevance, or I have to dismiss the idea that after I am dead, I am really gone. if it's the former, I may as well just die right now, and if the latter, I have to make sense of life after death.
You seem to believe that others, perhaps yourself, have found a way of making death acceptable. How do you do this without producing the notion that you might as well just die right now?
Yes, it's a question I sometimes ask myself, especially when I am feeling down. For the present, there are both internal and external reasons to go on. The internal ones include that I want to see what my children do as they make their way in the world. Should they choose to have children, I expect I will enjoy getting to know them. I also want to learn as much more as I can in my areas of interest - like maths and languages.
The external reasons are that my continuance seems to be a net benefit to the world because I do some useful stuff. The most tangible of these are some volunteer work I do and the fact that my paid job pays well, which enables me to give plenty of money to people in need, I think that also, at least for the present, my partner and children would prefer having me around, despite my being frequently quite annoying.
Re your feeling that lack of individual survival after death would render the present nonsensical: have you always felt that way, or has it evolved through life? In my case my attitude to death has undergone several major shifts in the course of my life. I wonder if that's normal, or unusual.
Yet you then say:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Which I think contradicts the first point.
If you say 'there's nothing that can't be understood', then in effect you're saying that we're capable of omniscience, of being all-knowing. But I don't think we are; I think knowledge is determined by conditions and factors, chief amongst them the human faculties of understanding, shaped, as they are, by adaptive necessity. So that becomes the fundamental question of epistemology - what is the nature of knowledge itself. (I don't think science asks itself this question.)
The Western (Christian Platonist) attitude, and the Buddhist attitude, towards the question are very different. Suffice to say the Buddhist view rejects speculative metaphysics. The Buddhist attitude is always to direct you to understand your own processes of thought and emotional reactivity, to pay very close attention to the whole process of knowledge and judgement. One 'goes beyond' that, in a sense, only by seeing through it - which is what underlies the practice of 'vipassana', insight meditation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But historically speaking, the Christian-Aristotelean view reached its apogee with the medieval synthesis, which was geocentric and based around Ptolemy. It was that which was dissolved by the Scientific Revolution, and maybe the Christian foundations of Western culture with it; which takes us back to the point made in original post.
I think you misunderstood what I said. What I said was that the concept of individual survival after death is what makes death acceptable. You said, essentially "speak for yourself", implying that perhaps you have found some other way of making death acceptable. I said death is unacceptable to me (I don't believe in individual survival after death), and I cannot conceive of a way to make death acceptable, without allowing that I might just as well die right now. So I asked you, have you a way of making death acceptable?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't believe there is any contradiction here. Assuming that there is nothing which cannot be understood does not necessarily imply that I am capable of understanding everything. Nor does it necessarily imply that "we", as human beings are capable of understanding everything. What it implies is that I believe everything exists according to intelligible order and is therefore capable of being understood.
What I believe is that human beings are not the most intelligent beings possible, and that there are things which cannot be understood by human beings, yet may still be understood by a higher intelligence. As we discussed earlier in the thread, I also believe in evolution. So I believe it is quite possible that life on earth will evolve to a higher form of intelligence. I think it is quite evident from history, that intelligence is in fact evolving. That life on earth would evolve to the point of being capable of understanding everything is highly doubtful, but this does not negate the possibility that all things exist according to intelligible order and are in principle capable of being understood.
Quoting Wayfarer
My opinion is that the scientific revolution did not dissolve the Christian-Aristotelian foundations, it built upon these foundation. The foundational principles can still be found throughout the sciences, in such things as the divisions of life forms, the divisions of time periods, and how we conceive of matter and mass.
I think that question is a bit misplaced.
The reasoning behind takes the loss of death to mean life's not worth living, that if it's true one's going to die, then one might as well get on to it. In effect, the argument is: "If I don't get to live forever, being here wasn't worth my time," as if we were somehow haggling with someone about our lifetime.
I think it's postering most of the time. Does MU really think their life is a waste of time if he dies? I doubt it. More likely he just has to hear himself say that, to grant him the status of a person beyond death in his own mind, as it quells fear of his own end.
Don't you find that to be unreasonable though? To accept something is to willingly consent to something. I think it's unreasonable to willingly consent to something for no reason. Don't you?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, I am not arguing that "death" means "life's not worth living". This is because we assume that words have a meaning which is objective, or transcendent, beyond what the word means to an individual. What I am saying is that I cannot reasonably accept the impending death of myself, without committing myself to the idea that my life is meaningless.
I believe that this may be because we oppose life with death. So to consent to one is to deny that the other is important. To resolve this, it might be required to remove this opposition. Perhaps being dead is not opposed to be alive, maybe it is just different from being alive, then I might be able to accept death, as a change, rather than as a negation of my existence.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, that's not the point at all. I don't think my life is a waste of time, and that's why I can't accept death. If I thought that my life is a waste of time, I'd have no problem accepting death. The issue is that I cannot bring myself to accept death without forcing upon myself the idea that my life is meaningless. Whenever I think about what will be the case when I die, i.e. the reality of my death, I am completely overwhelmed by the insignificance of my life, such that I cannot continue with those thoughts. Therefore I cannot accept my own death into my own thoughts, because it introduces great insignificance to those very thoughts, negating the will to think.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about willingly consenting to one's death. One can only consent to something from which one has the power to withhold to consent. I can neither consent to, nor withhold my consent from, the law of gravity. The same goes for my death.
I think the common meaning of 'accepting' something, where that something is not a contract between agents, is to not be emotionally disturbed by it. Think of the stages of grief, of which the last one is Acceptance. That doesn't mean consent, as consent has no meaning in that context. It means to no longer be significantly emotionally disturbed by the loss.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover That 'we' applies to Christian philosophy, and to some extent to Western philosophy more generally, but not to humans in general. I find the Taoist perspective much more natural, in which life and death are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. To deny one is to deny the other. Isn't it interesting that this is almost the opposite of the Christian view which may, as you seem to suggest, assert that to deny one is to uphold the other.
There are many things which the laws of nature would incline us toward believing that they are impossible. But through intelligence we can mitigate these so-called "impossibilities". Despite the law of gravity, I can get in a plane and fly. We've also sent humans to the moon. In as much as there is "gravity", clearly we can get beyond that. What about death, can't we get beyond that too?
Quoting andrewk
How are two sides of the same coin not opposites? If it is such that we cannot have one without the other, then they are pure opposites, absolutely, like hot and cold, big and small. This type of opposition, in which we cannot have one without the other, is the type of opposition which we need to avoid when talking about life. We need to conceive of life and death such that one is not dependent on the other. Then we could conceive of life without death. Why should an understanding of" life" be dependent on an understanding of "death"? This makes no sense, because all we need to understand life is a description of what it means to be alive. What it means to be dead is not relevant.
If we assert of something that it is dead, and this is true, then it would be false if this thing is alive, and vise versa. Likewise, of the coin, it must be heads or tails. But why do we describe the coin as having two distinct sides? The two distinct sides is in reference to the properties of the object. So with respect to life and death, then according to this law of two distinct sides, we would be assigning properties to some matter, either it's alive or it's dead. Why ought we think in this way? Why shouldn't we think of living matter as matter which is the property of a living being, and non-living matter is matter which is the property of some thing other than a living being, rather than thinking of living or not living as the property of the matter?
From this perspective, it would be incorrect to say that we cannot have one without the other, because we could have living matter without dead matter, or dead matter without living matter. Matter is a property of the thing rather then the thing being property of the matter. So there would be no reason to base the conception of one in the conception of the other, as we do with proper opposites. Living beings and dead beings are just different things. They are not opposed to one another, they are just different from each other. And of two different things, removing one does not necessitate that the other is removed, because they are different things, not opposite sides of the same thing.
So it all depends on how you conceptualize the two. In conception we cannot have hot without cold, just like we cannot have negative without positive, one defines the other. We cannot have one without the other. But when we apply this, the reverse is true. If it is hot, it cannot be cold, or if it is positive it cannot be negative. In application, one opposite excludes the other, but in conception one is not possible without the other. The distinction you refer to is just two different ways of looking at the same thing. In conception we cannot have life without its opposite, death, but in existing matter, to assign one as a property. negates the possibility of the other. This is just like hot and cold, right?
Your two views then, which you claim are different, are really the same. One says that we cannot have the concept of living without the concept of being dead, so that the ideas of being dead, and of being alive, are co-dependent, while the other says that if something is alive it cannot be dead, and vise versa. Neither of these resolves the problem because one says that you cannot conceive of life without conceiving of its opposite, death, and the other says a thing cannot be one without excluding the other.
Quoting andrewk
OK, that's an adequate definition of "accepting". But how can you think seriously about what it means for you to die without being emotionally disturbed? Your definition implies that to accept death means wone can consider the consequences of one's own death without being emotionally disturbed. I cannot, and that's why as soon as I start thinking about what it would be like if I were dead, I have to change the subject of thought, because that type of thought overwhelms my capacity to think reasonably. So even if to "accept" something doesn't necessarily imply consent, it does imply satisfaction with the identified occurrence in the form of emotional stability. How can one be satisfied with the thought of one's own impending death without referring to the individual's after death experience?
I'm afraid I cannot tell you how it happens. I can only observe that it does. In my case I was disturbed by the notion of death for the first forty years or so of my life, then one day I found that I wasn't. There are all sorts of factors that I can think of that may have been relevant: reading Buddhist and Hindu writings, reading Epicurus and the Stoics, taking up bike riding in a busy, non-bike-friendly city where I feel my life is in danger every day, my children getting old enough that I no longer felt my death would create major financial and logistical stress for them and my partner, ceasing to believe in Hell. But it's all guesswork. All I know is that something changed so that I no longer fear it, and that I do not believe in individual survival after death. Indeed, I feared death the most when I believed in post-death survival - because of that RC Hell thing y'know.
Your writing reminds me of a novella by Tolstoy that I have been meaning to read. What's its name again .... does a bit of Googling ..... ah, yes 'The death of Ivan Ilyich'. Apparently it's about a rich, powerful man who becomes fatally injured as a result of a silly domestic mishap, and who cannot come to terms with his impending death. I had to avert my eyes from the end of the wiki article about it, so as not to spoil the surprise about whether he does eventually come to terms with it.
It's considered a masterpiece. Let's read it. Here's a free e-book of an English translation.
Very interesting. I like Tolstoy, he had a very complex and thoughtful mind, making for some really good reading. And I've heard that "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is worthwhile, so I'm going to try to make time for it.