According to Graham Harman, the designation, Speculative Realism, was selected as a way of accommodating some disparate positions held by the participants. So, as Harman notes:

“Speculative realism” is an extremely broad term. All it takes to be a speculative realist is to be opposed to … the sort of philosophy (still dominant today) that bases all philosophy on the mutual interplay of human and world.

As is probably to be expected of any group identified primarily in terms of what it is not, the Speculative Realists have “already begun to break into various fragments”.²

Steven Shaviro says³ that, despite differences in approaches and emphases, what the Speculative Realists continue to have in common is that they “all seek to break away from the epistemological, and human-centred, focus of most post-Kantian thought” which “gives a privileged position to human subjectivity or to human understanding” and “subordinates ontology to epistemology”. In seeking this break, these thinkers – with the “new questions” they have asked – are supposed to have provided a “shock” to the world of philosophy.

However, that shock would have to arise from something other than the observation that ontology and metaphysics have been subordinated to epistemology. After all, it has been rather apparent for quite some time that the most lauded forms of human thought in our age – both within and outside of philosophy – are those which seem to present the best impersonal justifications for claims to knowledge. But, this situation is likely more directly the result of the rise to cultural prominence on the part of science than it is to the musings of any philosophers.

And it is not at all apparent – in fact, it would verge on the preposterous to assert – that science in any way privileges human subjectivity. Even within philosophy itself there is nothing terribly new in attempting to subordinate, deny, or even eliminate subjects and the subjective in favor of the objective and its constituent objects.

For instance, in his book, Reasons and Persons, first published in 1984, some two decades before the first Speculative Realism conference, Derek Parfit says, “a person is what has experiences, or the subject of experiences.” But, according to Parfit, this is true only “because of the way in which we talk.”⁴ And, he says, we do not actually have to speak in that manner; we do not actually have to speak as if persons were entities.

2.

Just as “[w]e can refer to and describe different thoughts, and describe the relations between them, without ascribing these thoughts to thinkers”,⁵ so, too, could we, if we had need to, locate thoughts – even different thoughts – within a particular brain and body. We could, if we had need to, associate a particular brain and body with “the occurrence of certain other physical and mental events.”

In this way, just as we can discuss thoughts without reference to thinkers, so too can we discuss experiences without referring to an experiencing subject or person as if the person or subject were an entity existing separately from a brain and body; we could discuss experiences without needing to regard or refer to persons or subjects as being in any way distinguishable from particular brains and bodies. We could, instead, discuss experiences as being had by a particular brain and body, or we could discuss any experience as occurring at a some location in a particular sequence of connected or otherwise related physical or mental processes.

This is to say that a particular person is just a particular brain and body and the occurrence of a particular series of interrelated physical and mental events.⁶ In other words:

We could … redescribe any person’s life in impersonal terms. In explaining the [observed or merely apparent] unity of this life, we need not claim that it is the life of a particular person. We could describe what, at different times, was thought and … observed and done, and how these various events were interrelated.⁷

With this sort of Reductionist approach, there would, of course, be some degree of arbitrariness whenever a particular life was demarcated from some other occurring processes. Still, by Parfit’s reasoning, it is perfectly valid to refer to persons as subjects who experience, but, by his reasoning, a person is more a convenience of speech than it is an extra-linguistic ontological fact.

On the face of it, this part of Parfit’s approach hardly seems susceptible to being criticized as privileging human subjectivity. And, given the fact that Parfit put forth his thoughts about twenty years before Speculative Realism started to gain some notoriety, there is at least some reason to question whether Speculative Realism is a distinctively new philosophical direction, at least insofar as that direction is identified with efforts to remove a privilege that has been supposed for human subjectivity and personhood.

This is not to say that the Speculative Realists have to be wholly original in order for their thoughts to be worthwhile.

After all, whatever there is that might be new or worthwhile in Parfit’s work, Parfit himself notes (or, rather, claims) that “Buddha” – who obviously greatly pre-dates Parfit – “would have agreed”⁸ with Parfit’s Reductionist view (including, no doubt, the claim “that personal identity is not what matters”).⁹ In support of the asserted affinity between his own and the Buddha’s position, Parfit cites the Buddha’s statement that: “Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. … There exists no Individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.”¹⁰

3.

The variety of Speculative Realism which is currently most well known is probably Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (or Object-Oriented Philosophy). According to Shaviro, in the essay cited earlier:

Harman proposes a … non-human-centred metaphysics, one in which ‘humans have no privilege at all’, so that ‘we can speak in the same way of the relation between humans and what they see and that between hailstones and tar’.

Based on this description, it is difficult to see how what Harman proposes succeeds at a more thorough disprivileging of human subjectivity than that which is accomplished by the part of Parfit’s approach above characterized. Harman describes himself as an “anti-materialist”, and this might to some extent distinguish him from Parfit. Parfit seems inclined to engage the Reductionism he puts forth in more of (what Parfit would describe as) a Physicalist manner, despite the fact – according to Parfit – that Dualists and Idealists can also ascribe to that Reductionism.¹¹

However, it is important to note that Parfit’s Reductionism – even with its Physicalist strain – avoids what Object-Oriented philosophers sometimes refer to as undermining.¹² Although Parfit does not speak extensively or primarily in terms of objects, although Parfit seems less concerned than are Object-Oriented philosophers with devising an ever more fully fleshed out system of metaphysics, he avoids undermining by maintaining the relevance of those relations which even non-Reductionists regard as critically significant to the individuating characters and identities of persons.

By acknowledging and maintaining the relevant – although Reductionist – relations, Parfit can deny persons and subjects and still speak in terms of persons and subjects, where persons and subjects are ultimately more like conveniences of language than they are independent entities in themselves.

By Parfit’s reasoning, persons and subjects (which – or who – are not independent entities) can be reduced to actually independent entities, but the most proper reduction is one in which those independent entities continue to be considered in terms of what relations there are between the separately existing entities which end up presenting as (or constituting) what is otherwise referred to as persons or subjects.

Whereas Parfit argues against the notion of a person as an entity which exists independent of – or in addition to – some extended brain and body context, Object-Oriented philosophers do say that persons are objects, even “independent objects”.¹³

4.

On the face of it, the notion of persons as independent objects might seem in conflict with Parfit’s contention that a person is not an entity separate or distinguishable (other than as a convention of language) from some brain and body in an extended relational context. However, this conflict may only be apparent, and it may be wholly dependent upon a way of thinking about objects as static things. This is not how Levi Bryant, himself an Object-Oriented philosopher whose views about objects diverge somewhat from those of Graham Harman, conceives of objects: “objects are not brute clods that just sit there doing nothing until acted upon. Rather, they are ongoing activities.” ¹⁴

Bryant has said that “to be a thing” – or an object – “is to be an act”¹⁵ so that it is an error to think that any existing object or thing can be either acting or not acting; all objects are always engaged in some act. Bryant says that because a thing is an act, there is no thing “underneath the deed”. He then further identifies thing and object with substance when he says that the “substantiality of substance is the substance’s activity”, and this leads him to a position which seems more properly described as compatible with – rather than in conflict with – Parfit’s:

I cease to be a substance when my body no longer acts. … the individuality of the substance or system is not a subject that lies beneath … that identity is not an abiding sameness that is invariant throughout change …

Despite this apparent compatibility, there still remains some tension between Parfit’s and Bryant’s approaches. Parfit, after all, is quite openly willing to think that persons – subjects who experience – are conveniences of language without any extra-linguistic independent ontological standing, whereas Bryant, with his greater emphasis on ontology, explicitly insists on regarding persons as objects having ontological standing outside the conventions of language. Bryant says:

My daughter cannot be reduced to the various foods, gases, and chemicals out of which her cells were built, she is not merely a pile of these things, but rather she is a distinct entity unleashed into the world … an entity in [her] own right …¹⁶

Parfit, for his part, and were he to utilize some of the Object-Oriented philosophers’ terminology, could note that a reduction which was so thorough that the only relation left was that of mere proximity would be an undermining which eliminated the “connectedness and/or continuity” (the extended relational context) which is what matters instead of personal identity.¹⁷

Since, for Bryant, a process is a thing and so is synonymous with object,¹⁸ Bryant could take Parfit’s connectness and continuity as another way of describing that object which Bryant would call process, the process of coming to be as well as the process of continuing to be – both of which constitute the process of becoming which Bryant holds to be necessary for objects being objects.

Such a re-presentation of Parfit’s terms reiterates compatibility between Bryant’s and Parfit’s approaches, but it also leaves intact Parfit’s point about person being more of a linguistic convention rather than an entity in its own right. However, inasmuch as it seems to be the case for Bryant that it is the process of becoming – the manner in which connectness and continuity occur – that individuates each person, then it could be said that for Bryant it is not actually the object-ness – or the identity as an extra-linguistic entity – which is what matters most about a person.

5.

It is worth noting that Bryant is not without his own concerns about mis-taking linguistic convention for extra-linguistic ontological standing. This concern is at the crux of Bryant’s considerations about whether events are objects, for example:

… do things such as battles, soccer games, and supernovae exist as independent events in their own right, or are they merely the result of linguistic conventions surrounding how we arbitrarily delineate events? Clearly the realist will wish to treat events as entities in their own right. However, the realist will also wish to distinguish genuine events from events that are merely the result of some linguistic or social convention … not everything we call an event will necessarily be an event in its own right.¹⁹

Bryant says that “objects have an evental structure … in that they come-to-be or happen … they have duration … [and] every object consists of ongoing operations that consist of its activities as they exist from moment to moment.” This description of objects as “evental” has much in common with Bryant’s description of objects as “processual” wherein “there are all sorts of activities going on within objects, all sorts of operations, by which the object endures from moment to moment.”

Bryant also further explains processes in terms of qualities (or what an object does under a given determinate condition) as distinguished from powers (the capacities of an object, which is to say what it can do were the determinate condition in any way different). Bryant actually associates event with what an object does rather than what it can do, and, in so doing, he suggests that event is interchangeable with process so that if processes are objects then, so too, must events be objects.

This is to say that Bryant could just add event to thing, process, individual, entity, and substance in his list of synonyms for object, but all this does is bring back to the fore the question of whether there is any need to ever assert or insist that persons are “independent objects” and ultimately something more – or other – than a convenience of language.

When Bryant says that “qualities are not fixed features of an object, but rather are happenings on the part of an object”, and when he says that these qualities are just what an object – such as a person – does under particular determinate conditions, it seems somewhat unnecessary (other than as an occasional expressive convenience) to assert or insist upon a person as an independent object in addition to those objects which, in relations to each other, are being used to delimit the person under discussion.

Can holding to the position that persons or subjects are actually extra-lingusitic entities somehow reveal something about reality that would otherwise not be made apparent when reducing persons to the connectness and continuity of the more elemental objects and relations which get unified under the term person?

6.

The idea, such as that put forth by Parfit, that there is no such separately existing entity as a person will seem to many to be strikingly nonsensical if not outright insane. Holding persons, as Bryant does, to be independent entities will, on the other hand, come across as clearly sensible even though (or maybe it is because) that position in itself reveals no greater insight into reality.

Parfit’s is the sort of idea and the sort of talk that makes philosophy often seem – at best – abhorrently irrelevant. Even worse, it is the sort of idea, the sort of talk that seems perfectly tailored for use whenever justification is needed for actions that, since “[p]ersons are not … fundamental”,²⁰ disregard or discount the importance of individual persons.

But, this is very much not the effect Parfit intends with “the truth about ourselves”²¹ that he presents, although he is aware that this truth (as he refers to it) could cause some discomfort:

Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was … a further fact [distinct from physical and psychological continuity], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel … When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. …There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my life, and more concerned about the lives of others.²²

Parfit’s metaphysical Reductionism eliminates the common sense notion of a person as a separately existing entity, but that foray into metaphysics ends up serving a decidedly non-metaphysical purpose. Rather than develop a more fully encompassing system of metaphysics, Parfit uses that one metaphysical parcel about persons to investigate “what matters”, which is to say that which makes us as we are, and that, according to Parfit, is what most properly falls within the matters of ethics and morality.

According to Parfit, Non-Reductionists hold that we are all persons, “separately existing entities, distinct from our brains and bodies, and our experiences … a deep, further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity” by which “the deep unity of each life is automatically ensured” – and he adds tellingly – “however … passively this life is lived.”

What Parfit refers to in terms of the unity is the person, but, for Parfit, the person is not a given which is revealed or expressed with life. Instead, the person is something that must come to be during a life. And, because Parfit understands Non-Reductionism as positing each and every person as an always separately existing unity, Parfit thinks that his “Reductionist View gives more importance to how we choose to live, and to what distinguishes different people”.²³

But, what this indicates is that it is not Reductionism per se which is essential to Parfit’s position; rather, the gist of Parfit’s view is that what is important is in some way tied to or dependent upon our choosing how to live or how to be.

Even if it were assumed, granted, or demonstrated that no form of Non-Reductionism can give as much importance to how we choose to live as does the Reductionism which Parfit puts forth, Parfit does not actually delve into what it takes to distinguish between a choosing and any other sort of doing or occurring which is not a choosing.

Parfit says that it is not true that the existence of a person involves or refers to “a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity”.²⁴ What if choosing is no more distinct from doing (or occurring) than person is distinct from “the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical events and mental events”²⁵ where “every mental event is just a physical event in some particular brain and nervous system”?²⁶

Since there is no distinction, for Parfit, between person and the particular brain and body in a particular relational context to which person refers, Parfit can validly use person in substitution for the more impersonal and physically reductive depiction put forth as a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of interrelated events. Can he interchange choosing and doing (or any form of occur) in some similar fashion? Instead of saying that his “Reductionist View gives more importance to how we choose to live”, can he say the “Reductionist View gives more importance to how we do live or to how our lives occur”?

It does not appear so. That substitution seems to result in a reduction of sensibility, and this is because choosing is supposed to indicate a sort of difference which is absent from the terms doing and occurring.

Parfit says that “[t]hinking hard about” the arguments for Reductionism makes a difference for him; it “removes the glass wall between me and others.”²⁷ This thinking is an occurrence as much as it is a type of doing, and it is a doing that effects difference, but that could just be because to say of something that it is an occurrence is just a way of indicating that and where there is a change or difference.

There is nothing contentious about the claim that the occurrence of thought could be in some way necessary for subsequent occurrences (even non-mental physical occurrences), and, to the extent that a choice is a type of mental event otherwise considered a thought, a choice can be necessary to what occurrences are subsequent.

However, when Parfit talks about the Reductionist view giving more importance to how we choose to live, he seems to mean something other than: The Reductionist view gives more importance to having thoughts about life and how to live.

What is it that would distinguish choosing from thinking, doing, or occurring? And, can Parfit’s physicalist Reductionism accommodate the choosing on which he relies without there also having to be “a deep further fact” about persons “distinct from physical and psychological continuity”?

7.

In order for something to be a choice or a matter of choice, it must occur within a context constituted by – or describable in terms of – some relevant indeterminateness. Someone thinks there is a choice when that person thinks there is no determinateness regarding (which is to say that it is not determined) what he or she will do.

A person can think that there is a relevant indeterminateness even if there is none. For instance, a mistaken notion of there being relevant indeterminateness could result from the person being insufficiently knowledgeable about (which is to say the person would be ignorant of) either enough of or all of the facts about a fully determinate context.

However, when a person mistakenly thinks there is relevant indeterminateness although there is, in fact, complete determinateness, the person only thinks there is a choice. There is not, in fact, an occurrence which settles any indeterminateness such as would occur if choice indicated something about reality other than the ignorance of the person to whom the thoughts about choice occur.

A notion about indeterminateness can be found in Parfit’s discussion about personal identity. He says, “If we accept a Reductionist View, we shall believe that the identity of … a thing maybe, in a quite unpuzzling way, indeterminate.” Parfit associates indeterminate with being “neither true nor false.”²⁸

While this sense of indeterminate might initially seem to regard something other than the metaphysically real indeterminateness that is necessary for there to be actual alternative possibilities and an actual occurrence of choosing, it is worth noting something else that Parfit claims:

I can always ask, ‘Am I about to die? …’ On the Reductionist View, in some cases there would be no answer. My question would be empty. The claim that I was about to die would be neither true nor false. If I knew the facts about both physical continuity and psychological connectedness, I would know everything there was to know. I would know everything, even though I did not know whether I was about to die, or would go on living for many years.²⁹

Although Parfit’s primary emphases and interests are not in metaphysics, this passage suggests that Parfit’s notions about what is important in life might be significantly dependent upon there being mind-independent (or objective) metaphysical indeterminateness.

When Parfit describes his Reductionism as physicalist and not dualist or idealist, he maintains that all mental events, including the psychological, are (reducible to) physical events. Other physicalist Reductionists might well insist that stopping the reductive analysis at the level of events is premature or unacceptably arbitrary. These Reductionists would insist on reducing events to whatever is the level of the presumably irreducible constituents which populate and provide the characteristics of a physical event.

When philosophizing, many take the very extensive regularity of the physical as indication that there is no indeterminateness with regards to how the physical occurs. These physicalists maintain that, at the very least, there is no physical (or, for that matter, metaphysical) indeterminateness – certainly at the level of composite entities such as atoms, persons, or events. This is to say that these reductive physicalists would deny there actually is ever any indeterminateness which a person could convert to determinateness by making a choice.

These physicalists would hold that if Parfit knew all of the physical facts, he actually would (be able to) know whether or not his death was about to occur. In addition, these physicalists would claim that if Parfit knew all of the physical facts, he would also (be able to) know what he would do at any time in the future.

Parfit may be a physicalist Reductionist, but his physicalism and his Reductionism apparently allow for and depend upon reality being such that reality consists of some actual, mind-independent indeterminateness.

What this indicates is that, just as it is not Reductionism per se which is essential to – or at the crux of – Parfit’s position, so, too, does it seem to be the case that it is not even physicalism per se which is essential to the importance he places on choosing how to live.

Instead, what is likely of greatest significance to Parfit’s view would be having – or being able to develop – the ability to in some way be aware of and have access to the indeterminateness which must be present in any given context in order for a choice to actually occur. It is by having – actually, by developing – this ability that we would be best able to choose how to live.

8.

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit does not address his apparent dependence upon there being real – and not merely epistemic – indeterminateness; however, more than a quarter of a century later, in Volume 2 of his book, On What Matters,³⁰ in the chapter entitled “Metaphysics”, Parfit does, in effect, take up the issue – not of indeterminateness, but – of whether (it is proper to say that) possibilities exist mind-independently.

In that chapter, Parfit rejects actualism, the view that “[t]o be, or to exist, is to be actual, so there cannot be anything that is merely possible.” Parfit says that actualists must deny that alternative possibilities are ever available from which we can choose inasmuch as it is the actualist position that possibilities do not exist.

Of course, if or where there is no mind-independent or objective indeterminateness, alternative possibilities cannot exist mind-independently within reality or actuality – alternative possibilities cannot themselves be actual. This is to say that indeterminateness within reality would actually ground or include the possibility of alternatives within actuality and its constraints – within a concrete (so to speak) reality rather than in some separate, abstract, or non-ontological realm.

Even if there were some abstract realm which provided for such things as alternative possibilities, there would still have to be some indeterminateness about or within the actual reality in order for reality to ever be able to accommodate an actual choice about which amongst related alternative possibilities come to constitute actuality.

In On What Matters, Parfit does not concern himself directly with metaphysical indeterminateness any more than he does in Reasons and Persons. However, in On What Matters, Parfit does, in effect, accept that there is such indeterminateness when he notes that “much of our thinking about the world, essentially involves the belief that there are such things” as the alternative possibilities which make choosing actual rather than illusory. And he also says that there is “no decisive metaphysical objection to such beliefs … these [beliefs] don’t commit us to the existence of strange entities as parts of reality.”³¹

9.

Parfit is not particularly concerned with whether that metaphysical indeterminateness upon which he relies is naturalistic, by which Parfit means compatible with a scientific world-view and subjectable to investigation by the natural and social sciences. But, then, Parfit believes that “Naturalism … is false.”³² Accordingly, Parfit pursues the matter of choosing and its importance to lives in a manner that is apart from any attempt at a more thorough metaphysical development.

On the other hand, in his book, The Democracy of Objects,³³ Levi Bryant does pursue what can be deemed a materialistic – if not naturalistic – metaphysical accommodation of indeterminateness. Bryant does not specifically mention indeterminateness, and Bryant does not concentrate on or even posit (as Parfit does) any particular “importance to how we choose to live”.

What Bryant does posit is a non-epistemic uncertainty, and he especially notes that the conversion of that uncertainty to the relative certainty of actuality can take place in the case of living things (referred to as autopoietic objects) in a way that is unavailable to the non-living objects (referred to as allopoietic objects).³⁴

Allopoietic objects act “in more or less constant ways”; they act with a stable and significantly limited number of ways in which they respond to what occurs within their environmental contexts. Autopoietic objects, on the other hand, have an ability to increase the ways – to develop new ways – in which to respond to contexts. Of course, autopoietic objects can do this only if the environment contains the indeterminateness of multiple alternative possibilities for the ways in which a particular environmental state can change to another condition.

Consequently, Bryant does, in effect, put forth reality as containing the actual indeterminateness of multiple alternative possibilities. Being a metaphysical rather than a merely logical or epistemic indeterminateness, it is an indeterminateness which is such that there is mind-independent metaphysical uncertainty as to which one of the related alternatives alone becomes sequentially actual.

Such indeterminateness provides a means by which Bryant could put forth events as mind-independently actual composite objects rather than “merely the result of some linguistic or social convention”. An event can be defined, delimited, or characterized in terms of identifiable indeterminateness that becomes settled as per one available alternative to the exclusion of the other available alternatives which all together constitute or characterize the indeterminateness.³⁵

In light of Bryant’s depiction of allopoietic and autopoietic objects, this way of distinguishing the nature of events will most often technically associate events with living things while most often associating non-living things with the ongoing-ness of more general processes wherein the actions of non-living things will occur with a seeming unavoidability, as if those things and their actions were the medium through which some momentum were being uninterruptingly transmitted with predictable certainty.

Events will, of course, also be constituent of processes, but events will refer to mind-independent metaphysical indeterminateness within processes; the indeterminateness indicates situations in which the coursing of the encompassing process could, so to speak, be deflected.³⁶

However, metaphysical indeterminateness cannot and does not itself determine which among multiple alternatives becomes actual; furthermore, this indeterminateness is not sufficient to preclude regularity and effect chaos in what occurs.

Bryant discusses autopoietic objects (living things) as having some ability to develop new ways in which to act, which is to say that these things have – or can have – what can be described as a capacity to take account of and make use of the actual indeterminateness within a context. But, capacity proceeds to actual capability only as a result of development.³⁷

Accordingly, with regards to the importance that choosing – the exercising of choice – has for Parfit, it must be noted that any act of choosing depends upon the extent to which there is the development of the capability to imagine and characterize actual indeterminateness in terms of the multiple alternative possibilities to which that indeterminateness is constricted by the rest of reality.

10.

Parfit essentially assumes that metaphysical reality is such that it can provide for situational choosing between alternatives; however, he does not concern himself in either Reasons and Persons or in On What Matters with the nature of choice as a capability to be developed. This may be at least in part because Parfit’s is most concerned with the nature of reasons, in particular those which are factual as well as non-naturally normative and, therefore, both objective and ethically or morally prescriptive.

Given the mind-independent objectivity of these reasons, Parfit seems to find it important to stress that these reasons are so very mind-independent that they are wholly apart from any considerations about psychological motivations to act on those reasons.

Parfit accuses Hume and others of “mistakenly conflating normative and psychological claims”³⁸ when they consider reasons as being necessarily dependent upon or susceptible to preferences, motivations, sympathies, inclinations, and the like. In contradistinction to those who conflate normative and psychological claims, Parfit says that when he “and other Non-Naturalists … know what [they] have decisive reasons to do … [they] conclude that they ought to do something, [and] that is quite different from their choosing to do it.”³⁹

This suggests that Parfit might to some extent be associating choosing with motives for acting (hence with desires for acting) rather than with mind-independently decisive reasons for acting. This is to say that decisive reasons for doing something are inescapable in the sense that to do otherwise would be to act wrongly. There would still be the indeterminateness that is necessary for choosing, but it would be a motivational matter which would give rise to choosing to act contrary to the act for which there are decisive reasons, and the decisive reasons themselves do not depend upon any such motivation for being inescapably correct.

11.

Alternatively, or maybe in addition, Parfit seems to regard choosing as a wholly conscious occurrence which is not necessary in order to act on decisive reasons. He notes that “[w]e can respond to [decisive] reasons … without knowing that this is what we are doing.” This, however, does not make choosing incompatible with acting on decisive reasons; indeed, Parfit acknowledges that in many kinds of cases a conscious consideration is all that can or will lead to becoming aware of decisive reasons. Then again:

in many other important cases, we should make our decisions in less calculating and conscious ways. … our mind goes through some processes of reasoning of which we, as conscious thinkers, know nothing. When we need to make some important decision, we should start by thinking carefully about the various facts that might give us reasons for … different aims or acts. But we should let these facts sink in. We would often later find, perhaps after a night’s sleep, that we have already made the right decision, and know what to do.

Since decisions presuppose the same sort of indeterminateness that is necessary for choosing, all that Parfit’s remark does, in effect, is note that there is more to us as thinkers than the overtly conscious and extensively linear thoughts by which philosophical considerations – even philosophical considerations of the not-conscious parts of our thinking – get expressed.

It is worth noting that even if choosing were defined as being always a conscious act such that individuals can on occasion know decisive reasons for what ought to be done and act accordingly without (consciously) choosing to so act, the fact remains that an occasion of acting without choosing to act might itself be dependent on previous conscious activity, including choices that were made. After all, according to Parfit, some

people never make claims, or think conscious thoughts, that use the concept of a purely normative reason. But these people respond to such reasons, and they often do that better than Rationalists … If such people are not aware of their responses to reasons, that is not surprising. We often don’t know how our minds work. … Of [those people who deny that there are objectively normative reasons and yet] respond so well to reasons, many, I suspect, earlier believed that there are some normative, reason-involving truths. Such people’s past beliefs may have continuing effects on what they care about and do. If other people never have had such normative beliefs, they are likely to do less well.⁴⁰

Here Parfit seems to be saying nothing more than that having an experience of contexts in which objectively normative reasons are essentially asserted or relied upon can be formative for persons and can have a lasting effect. That effect might well persist even through later thinking which consciously denies legitimacy to thinking in terms of objectively normative, reason-involving truths. The most prominent and lasting feature of this exposure is acting in ways based upon considerations which in essence deny that one’s own desires for one’s own well-being are the foundation or sufficient justification for what one does.

That being the case, it can well be asked: What difference does it make – why is it important – whether a person acts in a particular way because that person (thinks he or she) has non-motivating objectively normative reasons for acting that way or whether a person acts in that same particular way because that person has extensively consistent and coherent desires which motivate the person to act in that very same way despite the person thinking that there are no irreducible objectively normative, non-natural reasons upon which his or her desires are based?

12.

James Lenman notes that Parfit is concerned that the absence of objectively normative reasons can unleash an horrific moral relativism upon the world. Lenman says,

suppose a Hitler arises … determined to kill and cruelly subjugate millions. [Desire theorists who disagree with Parfit and hold that there are no non-natural, objective and normative reasons] might concede that this Hitler does indeed have reason to achieve his aims. But they could still consistently insist that they, motivated as they are by an altruistic concern for the millions thus threatened, have reason to thwart and oppose him.

Lenman prefers to see things differently. For Lenman, “Where there is a space of desires there is a space of reasons but only when those desires are your desires.” From this and from the fact that Lenman does not have anything similar to Hitler’s desires, it follows that Lenman can say that “Hitler … had no reason to murder those millions of Jews.”

Lenman’s semantic maneuver might serve as some sort of apologetic that preserves his use of the term reason so that he can say that he has a reason while Hitler does not. That maneuver might also enable Lenman to use reason in place of desire so that he can say he has a reason to object to or oppose Hitler rather than a mere desire to do so (no matter how strong that desire may be). But, none of that substantially “tames the relativism that troubles Parfit.”

Nonetheless, Lenman is quite correct to note that, if Hitler does not have an internal(ized) reason to desire other than what he has been desiring, it would likely be a “singularly pointless waste of time” to tell Hitler that there are external and objectively normative reasons for doing something other than what he currently desires to do. At the same time, Lenman notes that “there may be abundant reason to express … to all kinds of other people” reasons for opposing Hitler – and these may even include the sorts of external reasons alleged to be objectively normative.⁴¹

Reasons for opposition are expressed constructively when the presented situations give rise to issues that seem to matter and in some way demand the sort of attention which can lead to at least a sense of what actions are responsively correct (or, at least, preferable). Instances of Hitler-type situations force there to be some focus upon the quite common need for different people to come to be of sufficiently like mind – or to be participants in a communal purpose – as a precursor necessary for correct actions to be more likely effective and successful.

This need to instantiate a communal action in turn forces the question of whether any means – including those which bring the acting body together – should be necessarily forbidden.

If there are mind-independent, objectively normative reasons to act in a particular way in a particular situation, is it ever right for those who know those reasons to in any way coerce others to do the acts for which there are decisive reasons? Put another way, do Parfit’s decisive reasons justify paternalism?

13.

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit says:

We do not believe that we have a general right to prevent people from acting irrationally. But we do believe that we have a general right to prevent people from acting wrongly … we believe that it cannot be wrong, and would often be our duty, to prevent others from doing what is seriously wrong … even if this involves coercion.⁴²

It is beliefs such as those in the passage above which lead some to object “that a substantive value-based theory [including Parfit's theory regarding mind-independently objective normativity] ‘opens the door to despotic requirements, externally imposed’.”⁴³

Were that the case, then Parfit would have as much reason to object to his own theory as he does to historically religious ethics wherein, by his reckoning, “Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning.”⁴⁴ After all, given situations for which there supposedly are known mind-independently and objectively normative decisive reasons to act, there would be no need for deep moral reasoning beyond the (most likely analogical) process which associates a situation with an already known decisive reason.

Parfit, however, does not seem to actually think that paternalism is an always justified mode of action. As he says, “It is better if each of us learns from his own mistakes.”⁴⁵

Even so, it would be preposterous to assert that “despotic requirements, externally imposed” follow only from theories, such as Parfit’s, which hold that there are objectively value-based normative reasons. Theories which assert that reasons to act are ultimately only desire-based, for example, can every bit as easily tend towards despotic and externally imposed requirements whenever it seems that there is a need to bring broad communal action to fruition.

14.

Parfit notes that it is quite common to associate the very notion of objectively normative moral facts with the notion of normative authority wherein authority is commonly taken to be a demand for deferential acceptance. But, this is a misconstrual. Parfit says:

Most of us do not … claim authority for ourselves. We would at most claim authority for the principles to which we are appealing. … we would not be demanding influence. That would be to confuse authority with power.⁴⁶

These remarks by Parfit are veritably identical to what Hannah Arendt had to say about authority. According to Arendt:

authority “is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence.” However, the nature of authority is such that it “precludes the use of external means of coercion”. Furthermore, authority is “incompatible with persuasion” inasmuch as authority does not have its effect “through a process of argumentation.” Arendt goes on to say that “[i]f authority is to be defined … then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.”⁴⁷

This means that insofar as it is Parfit’s position that normative facts about what ought to be done are themselves matters of authority, then any ought which is concomitant with normative facts essentially loses its authority once the action which it is right to do is in any way forced upon others.

Since Parfit’s objectively normative facts and reasons are by their very nature matters of authority, it can be claimed that these reasons lose something of their objective normativity once these reasons are used either to coerce action or to persuade rather than simply inform. This being the case, the authority which Parfit finds to be constitutive of what he frequently refers to as decisive reasons is itself a basis for the rejection of paternalism.

Parfit acknowledges that “[m]ost philosophers seem to reject [his] meta-ethical and other meta-normative beliefs”, and he adds that “[m]any of these people don’t even understand what I believe.”⁴⁸ Inasmuch as Parfit relies upon the above-described authority, the fact that he is apparently often not understood should come as no surprise. Arendt noted decades ago that this very understanding about authority “has vanished from the modern world.”

But, then, this understanding about authority is not purely conceptual, because there is an experiential aspect to authority. Authority is experienced as “a compelling of the mind, a compelling which does not resort to coercion or (even implied or threatened) violence or persuasion through argument.”

Religious expressions of the experience had of authority emphasize an awareness of the very otherness of authority, the fact that its actuality – its very being – in no way depends upon the self who experiences authority. Religious expressions indicate authority as experienced “with astonishment, with a wonderment so overwhelming that it seems to demand something, some kind of reaction.”⁴⁹ There seems to be a demand when something of the otherness of authority has been internalized.

In some traditions, this authority is referred to as God. But, relevant to the nature of authority, it is to be appreciated that certain God-traditions advise against referring to authority as either justification or, especially, as a reason to compel others to act. This is the insistence that God’s name not be taken in vain, which is to say as justification for what one does, for what one thinks or knows should be done, or for what one wants done.

This is not to say that authority is maintained only with silence, passivity, or inaction. However, with regards to others, it might be that authority is maintained only when made manifest on an individual basis and when presented in a way to be informative rather than to be persuasive and, possibly, to be inviting rather than appealing.

This is all to say that even if there is non-natural and objective authority, it is not the externality – the very otherness – of this authority which matters; instead, what matters is the means by which it can become internalized and become the fabric of each self.

15.

While, for Parfit, reasons – certainly decisive reasons and particularly those which normatively establish what to do – are external to us owing to their being mind-independent, it is worth considering what might be the value he associates with learning such that it would be better for each of us to learn what act to do rather than have us be coerced to do that act.

On the face of it, what value there is to be associated with learning would seem to be a matter of some sort of personal internalization of what was previously only external to the person. Mere mimesis of acts said to be objectively normative could be regarded as providing some degree of personal internalization in the same way that acculturation occurs only with some degree of personal internalization.⁵⁰ Exposure to whatever reasoning there might have been which brought to light the objectively normative basis for acting in a particular way could effect still further personal internalization; this reasoning provides an opportunity for a deeper – and, therefore, a presumably more valuable – learning.

But, those who deny that there is a non-natural, objective basis for morality – for instance, those who assert desire as the deepest basis or motivation for morality, even when that morality includes Lenman’s “altruistic concern” – may well wonder in what way an objective normativity is necessary if: 1) the personal internalization which comes with learning to do what is right is better (presumably objectively better) than simply doing what is right or being coerced to do what is right, and 2) desired-basis morality similarly values the personal internalization which comes of learning the reasons which support a call to do a particular act.

To put it another way, if the ends sought by those who believe there is a non-natural, objective basis for morality and moral reasoning turn out to be effectively identical to the ends sought by desire-theorists who also reason although without seeking to identify objectively normative sorts of decisive reasons, then is it not the case that the purported objective standing of morality is redundant?

Not quite. Or, not necessarily.

Seeking and finding similarities shared between otherwise apparently dissimilar approaches is good, but it would only be on occasions where the approaches diverge that the non-natural objective authority aspect of Parfit’s position would be most relevant and, therefore, possibly not redundant. And where might such a divergence occur? Or, where is it most likely to occur?

If, in order to maintain the authority of objectively normative reasons, Parfit must concentrate on the distinction between power and authority (a distinction so very complete that power is not constituent of – and may even be incompatible with – authority), then that alone can suffice to make an understanding similar to – or at least related to – Parfit’s differ on occasion from many (although not necessarily all) desire-basis moral understandings.

16.

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit proceeds through extensive considerations about the place of the impartial, the impersonal, and the personal within ethics and morality. None of these in themselves were found to be a sufficient or sound basis for morality or ethics. Consequently, Parfit ends up concluding that “we need a new theory about beneficence”, and he notes that he had not yet found this theory⁵¹ but was hopeful that the field of “Non-Religious Ethics”⁵² would eventually succeed at attaining – or, at least, would soon make further progress towards – this new theory.

In On What Matters, Parfit says:

After starting to discuss these questions in [Reasons and Persons], I intended to think about them further. As the contents of this [later] book show, that is not what happened. I became increasingly concerned about certain differences between my views and the views of several other people.⁵³

The fact that non-natural and objective normativity seems to be inextricably associated with an authority reminiscent of religious thinking makes it unlikely that Parfit will have assuaged those who have disagreed with him. Even so, as the discussion here about the nature of authority suggests, such a thing as non-natural and objective authority can be a fact about reality, but moral development consistent with and in accord with this authority can proceed without first having established the fact of this authority and without directly referring to that authority.

It is a matter of history that “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is a religious statement. Likewise, that statement is supposed to be objectively normative. But, is there any reason why that statement might not also well serve Parfit’s interest in a non-religious formulation of beneficence? Of particular note is how this statement retains the personal within at least all moral (if not all ethical) considerations. This is an issue which has been taken up in other essays⁵⁴ here and will be taken up and further developed in subsequent installments.

——————————————————————
¹ Graham Harman, see here.

² Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy”, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds. Also available here.

³ Shaviro, Steven, “The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations”, pp. 279-290, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds. (Available here)

⁴ Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press (1987), p. 223.

⁵ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 226.

⁶ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 210-211.

⁷ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 251.

⁸ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 273.

⁹ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 266.

¹⁰ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 502.

¹¹ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 241.

¹² Levi Bryant, here.

¹³ Bryant, here:

Objects are always wholes, but they are wholes that are composed of other objects that are, in their turn, independent objects in their own right. Cats are no less objects that cells and atoms, and cells and atoms are no less objects than aardvarks. Likewise, social systems like cities and markets, and large objects like galaxies are no less independent objects than persons.

¹⁴ Bryant, here.

¹⁵ Bryant, here.

¹⁶ Bryant, here.

¹⁷ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 215.

¹⁸ Bryant, here.

¹⁹ Bryant, here.

²⁰ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 445.

²¹ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 280.

²² Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 281.

²³ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 445-446.

²⁴ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 281.

²⁵ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 211.

²⁶ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 209.

²⁷ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 282.

²⁸ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 213.

²⁹ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 214.

³⁰ Parfit, Derek, On What Matters, Volume 1 and Volume 2, Oxford University Press (2011).

³¹ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2, p. 487.

³² Parfit, On What Matters, Vol 1, pp. 109-110.

³³ Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press (2011).

³⁴ Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, here.

³⁵ See, in particular, Section 9 in Revisiting the Cosmological Argument

³⁶ The compatibility between Parfit’s and Bryant’s approaches is again found in Parfit’s remarks from On What Matters, Vol. 2, pp. 466-467.: “… we should claim that there are events and processes … and regard occurring as one way of existing.” It is also worth noting, if only for further clarification with regards to persons, that Parfit rejects a most extreme form of what he calls naturalistic Fundamentalism wherein “[a]ll that exists are sub-atomic particles.” Parfit says “[w]e should claim instead that many physical objects are composite … made up of smaller components … [t]hough many composite objects exist, these objects do not exist separately from their components, since their existence consists in the existence and interrelations of their components.”

³⁷ See Matters of Choice and Free Will

³⁸ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2, p. 454.

³⁹ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol.2 p. 451.

⁴⁰ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2, pp. 461-462.

⁴¹ Lenman, James. “Naturalism without Tears” in Essays on Derek Parfit’s ‘On What Matters’, Suikkanen, Jussi and Cottingham, John, eds., Wiley-Blackwell (2009), pp. 32-33.

⁴² Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 321.

⁴³ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 1, p. 66.

⁴⁴ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 454.

⁴⁵ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 321.

⁴⁶ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2, p. 407.

⁴⁷ See, in particular, Section 15 of About ‘Militant Modern Atheism’ and Religion

⁴⁸ Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2, p. 452.

⁴⁹ See Section 16 of About ‘Militant Modern Atheism’ and Religion

⁵⁰ See Evidence, Beliefs, and ‘Wise Blood’, in particular, sections 2 and 3:

The very otherness of … explanations – the fact that they clearly originate from outside the subjectivity of the person to whom the explanation arrives – tends to impart a sense of (a more) accomplished objectivity (even facticity) to the explanation. However, where the understanding that has been formed only regards how to satisfy the expectation about how an explanation is to be re-presented acceptably, then, with regards to that explanation itself, what has been formulated is a mimesis, a replication, a repetition of the explanation rather than an understanding of the explanation. Such mimesis of an explanation is minimally subjective, to the extent that it is subjective at all. …

⁵¹ Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 451.

⁵² Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 454.

⁵³ Parfit, On What Matters, p. 427.

⁵⁴ For example, see The Tree of Life and The Way of Grace as well as, especially starting from the end of Section 9, About ‘Militant Modern Atheism’ and Religion.

Of particular note are Flynn’s claims that parents “lie” in order to “perpetuate” the myth about Santa, that such “deceptions” lay “traps” for children’s intellectual development and, as a result, promote “unhealthy” fear along with selfishness and acquisitive attitudes among children.

Seriously?!?!?!

Lowder notes that Flynn’s presentation is imbued with “considerable humor”; so, perhaps – and let us hope – that humor is meant to be found in the pseudo-science (to be charitable in characterizing whatever non-sense there is) that is purported to actually support the notion that the Santa Claus myth is to be held in disdain and assuredly avoided.

Do parents “lie” to their children when they tell them tales about Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, or the Ugly Duckling?

Of course not.

If nothing else, myths, stories, and tales are critical – indeed, they are absolutely necessary – to the development of imagination and, therefore, the fullest flourishing of the intellect.

Contrary to Flynn’s (humorous?) assertion – or has it yet attained the status of myth itself? – that the Santa Claus story “encourages lazy parenting”, the shortcomings in parenting come not from the use of such tales; rather, any inadequacies in parenting that there might be come about as a result of parents’ failures to eventually tailor lessons to be had from such stories, including the Santa Claus myth.

Do not work with stable concepts. Do not eliminate counterinduction. Do not be seduced into thinking that you have at last found the correct description of ‘the facts’ when all that has happened is that some new categories have been adapted to some older forms of thought, which are so familiar that we take their outlines to be the outlines of the world itself.

On the face of it, this conflicts with Feyerabend’s argument in his Consolations for the Specialist that proliferation, which Feyerabend is recommending in these lessons, is supportive of a principle of tenacity. This latter principle provides for the retention of stable concepts and theories, even in the face of anomalies or evidence to the contrary, because development and improvement are always possible; indeed, an accommodation between the theory held to tenaciously and the difficulties it faced may eventually be possible. However, in Feyerabend’s explication of the second approach to conceptual and theoretical stability, both principles emerge from a Hegelian perspective.

The influence Feyerabend attributes to Hegel is itself of interest to Feyerabend scholars. (Although the similarity between Feyerabend’s view of the development of theories and Hegel’s thought has been noted by Barnett (1998), he insists that Feyerabend did not mention Hegel.) In setting out the second (Hegelian) model of epistemic change, Feyerabend asserts that, following Hegel, any complete description of an object (such as a concept or a theory) is self-contradictory since it contains its negation and participates in all other objects. Through the dialectic process, which for Feyerabend involves ensuring that concepts interact with observations, experiments and basic statements (and vice versa), the negation of an object does not result in the same thing or nothing at all but instead in an enriched object, which is the unity of the original object and its negation. For Feyerabend and for Hegel, this process is a developmental one: it requires not merely attending to the possibility of change but noting that stable concepts and theories are those for which internal contradictions have yet to be revealed or exposed, and for which the apparent stability is actually born of isolation.

In this reading of Hegel we can perhaps find something of the Popperian Feyerabend: the dialectic process calls for the negation of the theory under examination and this is seen as a positive step. However, the development is more than falsificationism provides for because the original theory is retained: for Feyerabend, we strengthen the knowledge we already possess by subjecting it to negation and vigorous challenging, even to the extent of undermining it, attacking it via alternative theories or by asserting that whatever concepts and theories we believe are secure should be treated with skepticism and assaulted. As an example, Feyerabend points to the Newtonian concept of space, retained for most purposes in spite of the development of Einstein’s version and yet permitting an enhanced understanding of the former’s utility and limitations.

On Feyerabend’s account, this skepticism cannot be selective. The result of such an approach is that we must constantly seek to criticise our theories via undermining their stability and elaborating alternatives, as well as using this process to enhance (and therefore preserve) what we started with. It is here that we find the principles of proliferation and tenacity emerging from Feyerabend’s reading of Hegel, which support the lessons Feyerabend has already taken from Mill (hence his claim in the paper that the second model of epistemic change can be characterised as following from either Mill or Hegel). Note also that these principles, derived from Hegel and Mill, are therefore intended by Feyerabend to be entirely positive.

References:

Barnett, S. (1998) Hegel after Derrida (London, Routledge).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Two models of epistemic change, in P.K. Feyerabend (1981) Problems of empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Consolations for the Specialist, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Eds.) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

To regard evidence as that which fits with (and, thereby, supports) a story is not to suggest – much less say – that being able to come up with a story makes the included evidence or that story as worthwhile as any other simply by virtue of there being a story.

Furthermore, evidence is not disparaged by identifying or regarding it as a facet of a story. After all, to say of something that it is a story is not necessarily to assert that it is comparatively unimportant, fictional, or in any way untrue.

Even so, describing a presentation as a story does often connote that what is presented is either fictional, untrue, more doubtable than not, or more a matter of subjective opinion than of objective fact.

Terms such as narrative and explanation seem less likely than story to suggest the possibility that what is being presented is relatively insignificant, extensively subjective, fictional, or false. Amongst narrative, explanation, and story, it is explanation which currently tends to be more readily, reflexively, automatically related with facticity and truth, and this is probably because explanation is most closely associated with the activities (and accomplishments) of science.

This could seem to suggest that evidence better relates to explanation than it does to story. This, in turn, might seem to recommend considering evidence as that which fits with an explanation rather than that which fits with a story, particularly since not all stories are necessarily intended as explanations.

However, it is when explanation is isolated from any connoted facticity that another characteristic of evidence becomes more apparent.

It is by means of explanation that data come to be presented as evidence, and explanation accomplishes this transformation into evidence by putting forth conceptual connections between what are otherwise merely – and meaningless – data.

The conceptual connection aspect constituent of an explanation always originates from the subjective perspective. Since it is the conceptual connection which produces evidence, this means that there is a subjective aspect present in evidence so long as the subjective perspective remains constitutive of the explanation.

There are ways in which the prominence of the subjective component in an explanation can be reduced, but the matter of how objectivity can be attained or increased is a matter apart from the basic character – or function – of explanation and evidence.

Evidence functions within explanation, but the point of associating evidence with story is to warn or remind – and emphasize – that the subjective tends to persist no matter how much the prominence of the subjective component seems to have been reduced.

The tenacious persistence of the subjective is to be valued rather than regretted, because it is the subjective alone which is the point of access to the understanding contained within an explanation; it is also the subjective which provides for improvement in understanding.

2.

It is by locating or identifying (with) the subjective aspects of explanations that access is gained to the best possible means for intentionally and most directly furthering investigations and improving or expanding explanations and understandings.

Within explanations, the subjective is located where judgments are made, and judgments are found wherever alternatives, other possibilities have been set aside. Of course, alternative possibilities are sometimes missed rather than consciously set aside. Alternatives can be missed because of prejudices (pre-judgments), and prejudices often can result simply from some inadequacy of imagination.

It is only by means of imagination that alternative possibilities ever come to be considered in the first place. Of course, imagination is necessarily subjective, but this just further highlights how an ever keener awareness of (the presence and the functioning of) the subjective is important for the improvement of understandings and explanations.

Yet, the subjective is relevant not only to the improvement of understandings but also to the initiation or formation of understanding. This is to be expected, because understandings are, of course, always subjective.

Many of what might be thought of as a person’s earliest understandings come about as – or because of – exposure to others’ stories or explanations. These exposures most often occur as part of education or (other) acculturation processes, and, in such circumstances, it is commonly the case that the earliest understandings are less about what is being explained than they are about how one is expected to respond to, replicate, speak about, or otherwise re-present the received explanations.

The very otherness of such explanations – the fact that they clearly originate from outside the subjectivity of the person to whom the explanation arrives – tends to impart a sense of (a more) accomplished objectivity (even facticity) to the explanation.

However, where the understanding that has been formed only regards how to satisfy the expectation about how an explanation is to be re-presented acceptably, then, with regards to that explanation itself, what has been formulated is a mimesis, a replication, a repetition of the explanation rather than an understanding of the explanation.

Such mimesis of an explanation is minimally subjective, to the extent that it is subjective at all. Were the objectivity of an explanation in a simple inverse relationship to subjectivity, then mimesis – having the most minimized subjectivity – would be the most objective form both for presentation and response. In that case, understanding (and explanation) would be largely besides the point.

This indicates that there is error in regarding objectivity in explanation as being necessarily in opposition to subjectivity.

An understanding of an explanation – an understanding of that which is explained – requires a more extensive subjectivity, a deeper subjective involvement than is necessary for mimesis. And just as progress from mimesis to understanding depends upon greater subjectivity, so, too, does the development of a yet furthered understanding require still greater subjectivity, a more thorough subjective awareness which comes about with a more extensively subjective involvement.

Of course, this more extensively subjective involvement is not accomplished with or as increased insulation of an already extant subjective perspective. The very otherness of a received explanation and the very otherness of that which is referenced in an encountered explanation instigate consideration which is not exclusively subjective.

What is required is a reaching out beyond the subjective, but this is a reaching out which neither eliminates nor even dilutes the subjective.

3.

With regards to encountered explanations, the move from mimesis to understanding involves – indeed, requires – the imprinting of one’s own subjectivity upon the explanation, an imprinting which, in a manner of speaking, to some extent makes the explanation one’s own, an imprinting which frequently occurs in the form of a personal translation.

The manner in which an encountered explanation is expressed presents the perspective of whosoever produces that explanation. This means that, in order to understand the received explanation, it is necessary to seek out that same perspective. Contributive to the perspective that brings forth the explanation is a context which itself has a history, and included in that history are not just experiences of whosoever provides the explanation but also the manner in which those experiences are themselves interpreted. These interpretations are, to a very great extent, determined by the capabilities which the experiencing subject has – if not at the time of the experience, then – at the time the experience is interpreted. Most prominent amongst these capabilities is the ability to conceptualize, and conceptualization depends upon and is determined by the manner in which the experiencing subject undertakes to provide an explanation, initially for his or her own self.

Conceptualization does not necessarily occur in terms of words (or in terms of words alone). Even when put forth to be received by others, explanations can include non-verbal components such as diagrams – in instruction manuals, for instance – as a way of representing conceived relational connections.

In the case of instruction manual diagrams, the diagrams are intended as the most efficient way in which the person receiving the explanation can imitate the perspective from which the explanation proceeds. When instructions are done well, virtually nothing more than mimesis is required. When instructions are not done very well or are in any way not sufficient, the person receiving the explanation will have to devise his or her own explanation for how the task is to be accomplished. In that case, the person’s own subjectivity has to be imprinted upon the original presented explanation; in that case, mimesis is inadequate, and understanding is required.

The term evidence is not usually used in association with instructions, even though the components (data) referenced in the instructions are presented relationally to produce what would otherwise be recognized as an explanation. Of course, instructions are intended (or expected) to minimize the need for understanding on the part of the person receiving instruction. Therefore, to the extent that there is any distinction between instruction and explanation which is pertinent to this discussion, it remains the case that evidence functions in the bringing forth of understanding, a subjective condition which is wholly apart from mimesis.

Although diagrammatic presentations can often be helpful, the conceptual connections which transform data to produce evidence are usually presented in an extensively verbal form; hence, explanations are, more often than not, extensively verbal in form.

The verbal form of explanation is most often no less perspectival than is a diagrammatic presentation, and, just as the adequacy or success of a diagram depends on both the drafting skill of the presenter and the interpretive skill of the recipient, so, too, does an extensively verbal explanation depend upon the verbal capabilities of whosoever produces an explanation and whosoever receives the explanation.

Inasmuch as ambiguity tends to be a common (even inherent) feature of many or most words and, accordingly, many expressions, the manner in which an encountered explanation is expressed presents not only the perspective of whosoever provides that explanation, but the manner of expression can also give access to some very much deeper detail about the subjectivity necessary for and constituent of the presented perspective.

The ambiguity native to words and expression indicates possible occasions of judgment employed as word choice. The possibility of ambiguity also provides opportunity to make the received explanation one’s own.

The first step towards imprinting one’s own subjectivity upon an encountered explanation most commonly occurs when one modifies the manner in which the received explanation has been expressed.

Merely re-expressing an encountered explanation can amount, at times, to the sort of re-presenting that is more mimesis than understanding; nonetheless, some sort of personal expression – one’s own modification to the presentation – of the received explanation is necessary if understanding is to come to fruition.

After coming to understand a received explanation, one may well end up adopting the received expression as one’s own preferred manner of expression. However, in order to come to an understanding, it is necessary that the expression of the encountered explanation be tested expressively by experimenting with alternative terminology made possibly opportune because of possible ambiguities, including associated connotations.

As previously noted, subjectivity within explanations is located where judgments are made, and those judgments include choices regarding the manner in which an explanation is expressed. One effect of expressively testing an explanation will be a veritable reconstruction of – or alignment with – the perspective (which is to say the subjectivity, the subjective condition) from which the received explanation is presented. To become aware of a perspective is to become aware of the limits that define the perspective. These limits include not only the scope within which the encountered explanation is applicable but also the assumptions and prior bases upon which that explanation is dependent. This suggests that an understanding of an explanation relates to what understanding is had of the limits of that explanation.

One can become directly aware of the scope to which an explanation is limited by substituting manners of expression, and it is at the limits which define a perspective that the work which would expand or improve both explanation and understanding can succeed.

It is to be noted that expression-testing, such as is used to develop some understanding from and about a received explanation, can just as well be used by the person who intends to present an explanation. While the explanation which gets presented will be imbued with the subjectivity of the person who provides the explanation, expression-testing prior to the presentation of the explanation can effect a perspective (and subjectivity) which itself encompasses (such as via abstraction) what might otherwise have been presented as multiple perspectives. The multiple perspectives constitutive of such a subjectivity – as well as the explanation which proceeds from that subjective condition – could, of course, be recovered during expression-testing conducted by a person who seeks to understand that explanation when it is received.

4.

Thus far, evidence has been primarily considered in terms of its fit with a story and how it functions in explanation for the purpose of presenting and developing understanding. The ultimate purpose of evidence (conceptual connections) is to provide for understanding, and, to this point, understanding has been portrayed as veritably inseparable from explanation, whether that explanation is presented to others or whether that explanation is an internal presentation to self.

This close association of understanding and explanation follows from the noted fact that (presumably) all individuals come to many of their understandings either because of or under the influence of exposure to stories and explanations provided by others. This means that understanding is very often posterior to explanation. Since explanations are most often presented and received in verbal form, understanding is just as often extensively dependent upon individuals’ verbal capabilities.

As a consequence, assessment of how well an individual understands a received explanation is commonly based upon how well the individual can present his or her understanding in his or her own manner of expression. However, this manner of assessment presumes that the individual has the verbal facility adequate for optimizing expression of the understanding.

Then again, there are some situations in which assessment of understanding eschews the need for verbal expression and, instead, depends upon the individual’s ability to apply his or her understanding.

This indicates that an individual can have understanding even if that individual is unable to well express that understanding. An individual who cannot well express his or her own understanding may, nonetheless and despite the expressive inability, have actually conceptualized; this individual will have devised the conceptual connections necessary to transform what had been mere data before those connections were conceived. Therefore, in effect, this individual has what would be readily recognizable as evidence were that person able to suitably express his or her understanding.

Yet, others might well deny that this person has evidence for what that individual understands. In fact, some might even decry any claim that what such an individual has is an understanding. Rather than understanding, it might be asserted that this individual has a belief, and it might also be said that this individual would have to present some sort of outward and visible sign that would demonstrate understanding before this person can be rightly said to be in a condition of understanding rather than in a condition of believing.

This outward and visible sign would, of course, be called evidence, but a public demonstration – or evidence – of an understanding in no way changes the understanding as it was prior to its being made public. This reiterates the point made earlier that understanding is always subjective. Furthermore, since understanding depends upon conceptualization, and since conceptualization is itself a matter of conceptual connections which transform data into evidence, this also reiterates the point that evidence (as well as explanation within which evidence functions) always has a subjective aspect.

The subjective aspect of evidence is not reduced when the explanation in which the evidence functions convinces (or is accepted by) any other persons. Consequently, care is to be taken to ensure that objections to an understanding which are cast in terms of – or with reference to – inadequacies of evidence do not amount to mere expressions of passive unconvincedness.

After all, explanations need never be intended to convince, and this is the case even when explanations are presented in the form of an argument.

There are a number of reasons why it is worthwhile for understandings to be presented in explanation to others, despite the fact (maybe even because of the fact) that understandings are always subjective. For like or identical reasons, it is worthwhile to encounter, to receive explanations from others. Whether these understandings amount to beliefs or qualify as knowledge, whether they tend more towards opinion or more towards fact is relatively rarely of immediately critical importance.

Accordingly, in consideration of what amounts to the privileged status currently granted to verbally expressed explanation, in conjunction with the great differences in individuals’ verbal expressive skills, more appropriate than a simple dismissal for lack of sufficient evidence is the charity by which the perspective – and the understanding – of the other person is sought. This charity seeks to devise and suggest explanations which that person has not expressed but which could as favorably as possible present the other person’s understanding.

5.

Philip Kitcher’s “belief model of religion”, which is discussed briefly in the previous essay, is meant to apply to any individual who “believe[s] the doctrines constitutive of that religion” to which the individual is committed, wherein that “belief in doctrine” serves as “the fundamental basis from which the other religious states emerge.” According to Kitcher:

Believing the doctrines she does, including the claim that particular texts are true and represent the divine will, she is moved in particular ways, recognizes particular rules for conduct, forms her plans and goals, and, to the extent that her will is strong, expresses what she values in her actions.

Assuming that the doctrines at the heart of Kitcher’s belief model originate as – or contain some – explanation, the belief model fits well with the current discussion about encountered explanations inasmuch as those doctrines precede an individual’s belief in, or commitment to, those doctrines.

Within a belief model form of religion, there could also be doctrines which were purely instructional and, hence, devoid of explanation and without need of understanding. For instance, there could be doctrines which instruct how and what rituals are to be performed periodically; there could be doctrines which record instructions that only applied to some particular and singular occasion in the past.

It is even imaginable that a religion could be constituted entirely and only by these sorts of purely instructional doctrines. In that case (so long as the actions prescribed for the present did not involve the taking of life, or forced impoverishment, or the like), commitment to that religion and belief in its doctrines would likely be neither benign nor malignant; that commitment would probably be more aptly described as inert, certainly in regards to the valuing and judgment that affects and sets the course of lives. This would be a religion which had nothing to do with morality, ethics, or any goals in life; this would be a religion which would probably end up being regarded as one of Kitcher’s orientations rather than being thought of as fitting with the belief model.

The reason for bringing up such a hypothetically inert religion is to make it plainly apparent that the great bulk of religions which fit Kitcher’s belief model are not religions entirely constituted by (sufficient) instructions. Even if adherents of these religions think of their religions as constituted entirely by instructions, those adherents are likely to admit that those instructions are such that individuals must on occasion make judgments in order to maintain accord with those instructions (doctrines).

Those judgments will be the result of explanations devised as addenda to the relevant instructing doctrines; however, in order for such judgments to be recognized as being in accord with the instructing doctrines, it is first necessary that some understanding have been derived from the instructions. The judgment, then, extends the understanding derived from the perspective which the doctrines provide so that the understanding and the doctrines can be applied in a new context while remaining in accord with the doctrines as they were previously received by the committed believer(s).

This is to say that, although the doctrines were (believed to have been) received as instructions, since they are insufficient to effect mimesis, those doctrines have to serve as explanations. Otherwise, the adherents of the religion will eventually make their religion inert.

Given that there is the need for the development of understanding (rather than mimesis) on the part of persons committed to religions which fit Kitcher’s belief model, it starts to become rather difficult to stringently maintain a distinction between Kitcher’s religious belief model (which he assigns to being assaulted by “militant modern atheism”) and religious orientation(s) (upon which those same assaults are alleged to be less appropriate and likely counter-productive).

Kitcher says that what he refers to as an orientation “does not include factual beliefs”. This is apparently supposed to be in stark contrast to the belief model which includes “specific beliefs” that are, for the sake of contrast with Kitcher’s orientation concept, presumably factual beliefs “about a transcendent entity”. In addition, an orientation “embodies a person’s sense of what is most significant and worthwhile in his own life and in the lives of others” whereas in the belief model it is “suppose[d] that traditional texts contain doctrines that express the will of” the believed-in transcendent entity by which “particular goals are set for” those whose lives fit with Kitcher’s belief model.

There is nothing about Kitcher’s orientation approach which requires that there be no beliefs in – or specific beliefs in facts about – a transcendent entity. Furthermore, there is nothing about the orientation approach presented by Kitcher which is necessarily incompatible with the religious sense that there is an ultimate otherness to virtue, wherein virtue is not a matter of any individual’s subjectivity nor is it a matter of agreement between any number of persons. After all, as was noted in the above referenced previous essay, this notion about an ultimate otherness to virtue is not necessarily a matter of religion.

6.

In light of the discussion in this essay regarding manners of expression and the fact of widely varying expressive capabilities, it is to be noted that there is similarity between the notion about the ultimate otherness of virtue and the notion of “particular [life] goals [being] set” in some way from beyond each individual and beyond any cultural context.

This similarity is sufficient to warrant consideration of the possibility that what seems like a “belief in doctrine”, which doctrinal belief serves as “the fundamental basis from which the other religious states emerge”, might – in fact and despite appearances – be no such thing.

Doctrines, creeds, and rituals all provide means by which an individual can establish and foster his or her identification with a community – whether of a cultural (even secular) sort or of a specifically religious sort. These same insignia of community do not, in and of themselves, reveal anything about a participating person’s committedness or – and this is the issue of interest in this discussion – understanding.

For that matter, a person’s fervent insistence that some doctrines contain or reveal absolute truth does not necessarily reveal the state of that person’s understanding – even if whatever strong community identification there is can be isolated from the belief-commitment which the person expresses.

That fervent insistence, certainly for so long as it is maintained, can certainly make significant inquiry into the understandings had from those doctrines very nearly impossible. And while virtue is not usually associated with precluding honest inquiry, it is also not necessarily the case that there is virtue in expressively assaulting or shaming persons who preclude such inquiry; sometimes the virtue rests with patient silence or, at least, something less than assault.

The doctrines to which people commit themselves are available prior to the commitment (except, of course, when the doctrine is put forth for the first time as the expression of an understanding had by whosoever produces the explanation which is that doctrine).

Those who commit to a doctrine produced by someone else might do so merely in order to be accepted into a community, but this would not be an instance of having received the doctrine as the explanation which it is (at least in part) intended to be. This sort of commitment is not one which depends on or follows from understanding. Such a commitment is essentially identical to the sort of commitment had by a person born into a doctrinally defined community before the person develops an understanding of the explanation contained within the doctrine(s).

As has been discussed, all understanding is subjective; therefore, for a person to understand an encountered explanation, it is necessary that the person imprint his or her own subjectivity (perspective and experience) upon that explanation. In order for this imprinting to occur, the person receiving the explanation must conceptualize that which is being explained. Conceptualization does not necessarily occur in terms of words or in terms of words alone. Given that most explanations (and probably all those called doctrine) are expressed verbally, a person’s understanding of that which is presented in an explanation is often extensively dependent upon his or her own verbal conceptualization capabilities.

In order for a person to reasonably accept an encountered explanation, it is not necessary that the person conceptualize that which is expressed in an encountered explanation in the same way that it is conceptualized by whosoever has produced the explanation. Indeed, it is not even necessary that the person who encounters the explanation have as thorough or well-developed an understanding of that which is explained as does whosoever has produced the explanation.

Instead, acceptance of an explanation often indicates that the person receiving the explanation has discerned an affinity between the understanding had of the explanation and other understandings which that person has.

An individual’s professed acceptance of an explanation – or belief in a doctrine – does not justify putting forth as the only possibility the conclusion that the explanation or doctrine well expresses that person’s understanding. In addition, a person’s inability (which might take the form or appearance of unwillingness) to provide an expression which better presents that individual’s understanding does not justify putting forth as the only possibility the conclusion that the person lacks understanding, nor does it justify a conclusion that the person is unreasoning – unless terms like unreasoning, unreasoned, and unreasonable only assess manners of expression rather than the understandings and beliefs which give rise to the inadequately received expression.

An understanding might be expressed incoherently (for instance, if the presenting person’s expressive capability cannot inadequately convey his or her understanding), or an understanding might only seem to be incoherent because of some sort of inadequate conceptualization on the part of the person who encounters the explanation which contains the presented understanding.

In either case, incoherence in encountered explanation is very often a significant opportunity for charity – not just the charity which takes the form of patient silence but, rather, a constructive charity; not just whatever charity there may be in informing a person that his or her expression is insufficient if not outright incoherent or objectionable but, rather, the charity which presumes and seeks an affinity between its own perspective and the subjectivity of the other person and, therefore, strives to offer expressions which might better present the other’s understanding and establish (some chance for) likeness with one’s own understanding.

7.

Wise Blood¹, by Flannery O’Connor, is a story rife with the very sort of expressive incoherence discussed in this essay.

The story begins by introducing Hazel (Haze) Motes. Recently discharged from the army, he is dressed in a new suit (price tag still attached) and has a “stiff broad-brimmed hat … a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear” as well as “a nose like a shrike’s bill”. He is on a train. As he explains to a woman nearby, he is “Going to Taulkinham. Don’t know nobody there, but I’m going to do some things … some things I never have done before. I ain’t from Taulkinham … I’m going there, that’s all.” The conversation moves on; to make conversation, the woman volunteers some autobiography to which Motes responds, “I reckon you think you been redeemed.”

To another woman on the train, Motes announces, “If you’ve been redeemed, I wouldn’t want to be.” Then he adds, “Do you think I believe in Jesus? Well I wouldn’t even if He existed. Even if He was on this train.” The woman responds with a question: “Who said you had to?” And Motes draws back.

He arrives in Taulkinham but has no place to go. He sees a sign for the restroom and goes into a stall where he notices some writing on one of the walls which says, “Mrs. Leora Watts! 60 Buckley Road. The friendliest bed in town! Brother.” Motes jots down the name and address on a piece of toilet paper, leaves the train station, gets into a taxi, and gives the driver the address that Motes had just written down.

The driver asks, “You ain’t no friend of hers, are you? … She don’t usually have no preachers for company.”

Haze informs the driver, “I ain’t any preacher. I only seen her name in the toilet.” The driver responds, “You look like a preacher. That hat looks like a preacher’s hat. … It ain’t only the hat. It’s a look in your face somewheres.”

Motes becomes more adamant as he announces, “Listen, I’m not a preacher. … Listen, get this: I don’t believe in anything.”

He arrives at Leora Watts’ house, goes inside, and after some time informs Mrs. Watts, “I come for the usual business.” Then he adds, “What I mean to have you know is: I’m no goddam preacher.” Mrs. Watts assured him “in a motherly way” saying, “That’s okay, son. Momma don’t mind if you ain’t a preacher.”

Later, while taking in the sites around Taulkinham one evening, Haze Motes meets a blind man and his daughter waiting outside of a theater for the crowd of people who will soon be leaving. The girl and Haze Motes argue over whether she had given him “the fast eye”, and the blind man, an itinerant preacher named Asa Hawks, proclaims, “He followed me … I can hear the urge for Jesus in is voice.” Motes curses, and the blind man continues, “Listen boy, you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact.” Hawks puts his hands on Haze’s face and says, “Some preacher has left his mark on you, Did you follow for me to take it off or give you another one?”

Haze again mutters a curse, and the blind man announces that he can hear the crowd preparing to leave the theater. He hands some of his tracts to Haze and tells him to repent and go distribute the tracts to the people as they pass. Motes takes exception, “Listen, I’m as clean as you are.” And the blind preacher says, “Fornication and blasphemy and what else?”

To this Haze responds vehemently, “They ain’t nothing but words. If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me. I don’t believe in sin.” People were coming out from the theater, and Haze starts calling out to the people as they pass:

Look down yonder. See that blind man … giving our tracts and begging … Sweet Jesus Christ Crucified. I want to tell you people something. Maybe you think you’re not clean because you don’t believe. Well you are clean, let me tell you that. Every one of you people are clean, let me tell you that. Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you think it’s because of Jesus Christ Crucified you’re wrong. I don’t say he wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere, I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth. Don’t I know what exists and what don’t? Don’t I have eyes in my head? Am I a blind man? Listenhere, I’m going to preach a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified. It won’t cost you nothing to join my church. It’s not started yet but it’s going to be. I don’t need Jesus. What do I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts.

8.

Hazel Motes goes from denying that he is a preacher (despite looking like one) to publicly proclaiming that he is a preacher of truth for a church yet to come. Even before he announces his preachership, Motes is clearly concerned with redemption, sin, and Jesus – the very topics which typify the preaching in the Christian world in which Motes finds himself, but Haze presents these matters in a way which apparently intends to shock those to whom he speaks into realizing that he is no part of their community.

Using words which are familiar to those to whom he speaks – words which the community will regard as terms concerning sacred matters – but using those terms in a way which will strike the community as sacrilegious, Haze Motes could expect – indeed, he might even intend – to raise ire against what will strike his audiences as outright blasphemy. Then again, using terms in an unfamiliar way can lead to new thinking. Regardless of whether Haze intends to anger or inspire, his remarks mostly get politely ignored as if exhibiting the unintelligibility expected of a lunatic who is of no danger to anyone, except possibly himself.

But Haze is not at all discouraged.

He spends the night with Mrs. Watts. The next morning he buys a car – not a new car, but a good car, not a good car in anyone else’s eyes, but a good car as far as Hazel Motes is concerned because, after all, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

Haze starts to drive. Eventually he comes across a large boulder jutting out from an embankment. He notices a sign which has been painted on the boulder: “WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP?” He stops right in the middle of the road and just sits there; then he notices another part of the message written in smaller letters: “Jesus Saves.”

Traffic starts to build up behind him. A man gets out of a truck that is stopped behind Motes, comes up to Haze’s car, reaches through Haze’s open window, places his hand on Haze’s shoulder, and asks him why is he parked in the middle of the road. Motes tells the truck driver to take his hand off him; Haze tells the truck driver that he is reading the sign on the boulder, and then he decides to inform the truck driver that “There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first. That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them. Jesus is a trick on niggers. I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything.”

Haze returns to Taulkinham, drives around town, and one evening he decides to preach in a proper fashion – that is to say he drives his car up to a movie theater, gets out of the car, and climbs “up on the nose of it.”

He raises his arms and cries out to those who happen to be around: “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” Haze points to a boy who is standing there and asks him, “What church you belong to, you boy there?” The boy giggles; a man standing nearby disdainfully dismisses Haze as a “rabble rouser”, and then the boy, “in a falsetto to hide the truth,” says, “Church of Christ.” A woman observes, “He’s a preacher.” And then, as exegesis of her own remark, she adds, “Let’s go.”

Haze, of course, has a mission:

Church of Christ! Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about the church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.

Listen, you people. I’m going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

Another objecting woman shouts at Haze, “Listen, if you don’t have a church to do it in, you don’t have to do it in front of this show. Listen, if you don’t get from in front of this show, I’ll call the police.”

Motes retorts, “My church is the Church Without Christ, lady. If there’s no Christ, there’s no reason to have a set place to do it in. There’s plenty of shows.” Haze steps down off of his car, and that “night he preached in front of three other picture shows before he went to Mrs. Watts.”

9.

Hazel Motes continued to drive around and preach night after night. The church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified had become the Church Without Christ, but Haze’s preaching continued to touch no hearts or minds, despite the fact that his message (such as it was) continued to find new and more refined manners of expression (or so Motes must have imagined):

If you had been redeemed, you would care about redemption but you don’t. Look inside yourselves and see if if you hadn’t rather it wasn’t if it was. There’s no peace for the redeemed, and I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied!

Listen, the truth don’t matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn’t move, neither this way nor that, and if there was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn’t mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus!

One night, outside one of the picture shows where Haze had parked his car and begun preaching, a “plumpish” man “with showy sideburns” wearing “a black suit with a silver stripe in it and a wide-brimmed white hat” was in the crowd which stopped to listen to (or gawk at) Hazel Motes. When the crowd began to thin out – as it always did – even as Haze preached, the plumpish man interjected and spoke up saying:

Friends, I know you’re all interested in the Prophet here, and if you’ll just give me the time I’m going to tell you what him and his idears’ve done for me. Friends, lemme innerduce myself. My name is Onnie Jay Holy … two months ago you wouldn’t know me for the same man. I didn’t have a friend in the world … Then I met this Prophet here. That was two months ago, folks, that I heard how he was out to help me, how he was preaching the Church of Christ Without Christ, the church that was going to get a new jesus to help me bring my sweet nature into the open where ever’body could enjoy it … I love ever’one of you people and I want you to listen to him and me and join our church, the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, the new church with the new jesus …

Haze broke in: “This man is not true. I never saw him before tonight. I wasn’t preaching this church two months ago and the name of it ain’t the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ!”

To regain the crowd’s attention, Onnie Jay Holy (whose real name, it turns out, is Hoover Shoats – Onnie Jay Holy being, in effect, his stage name) spoke up, saying, “Now I just want to give you folks a few reasons why you can trust this church … you can rely on it that it’s nothing foreign connected with it. You don’t have to believe nothing you don’t understand and approve of. If you don’t understand it, it ain’t true, and that’s all there is to it … you can absolutely trust this church – it’s based on the Bible. Yes sir!”

Haze breaks in again and announces that “Blasphemy is the way to the truth, and there’s no other way whether you understand it or not!”

Unperturbed, Onnie Jay Holy continues and eventually invites the people who have been listening to sign up for the new church and contribute a dollar apiece “to unlock that little rose of sweetness inside you”. After the crowd disperses, Onnie Jay Holy invites Haze to team up with him so that they can make some money off of Haze’s ideas and style. Onnie Jay says that all that is needed “is a little promotion.”

He particularly likes this idea of a “new jesus”, one which “would be more up-to-date”, and Onnie Jay wants to know if Haze’s “new jesus” is “somebody you see ever’ day? I certainly would like to meet him and hear some of his idears.”

Haze replies, “Listen here, you get away from here. I’ve seen all of you I want to. There’s no such thing as any new jesus. That ain’t anything but a way to say something.” Somewhat perplexed, Onnie Jay asks Haze, “What do you mean by that?” Haze reiterates, “That there’s no such thing or person. It wasn’t nothing but a way to say a thing. No such thing exists!”

To this Onnie Jay replies, “That’s the trouble with you innerleckchuls, you don’t never have nothing to show for what you’re saying.”

Then he adds, “You watch out, friend. I’m going to run you out of business. I can get my own new jesus and I can get Prophets for peanuts, you hear? Do you hear me, friend?”

10.

Hazel Motes is an intellectual? Could someone actually think that? Seriously? Haze did have some schooling. As a child, he “had gone to a country school where he had learned to read and write but that it was wiser not to”. It turns out that “the Bible was the only book he read”, and he “didn’t read it often”. Can such a person even seem – to anyone – like he is an intellectual?

Onnie Jay Holy, of course, meant intellectual in a damning and dismissive way – damning and dismissing not just Hazel Motes but all people who allow their minds to become concerned with anything that cannot be seen or held. In that sense, Hazel Motes is an intellectual, and the fact that he remains beyond intelligibility to those who meet him only seems to reinforce and certify the judgment that he is an intellectual.

Intellectual or not, Motes has an understanding. But, it is elusive. A significant part of his understanding is his concern with the “way to say a thing.” All he has at his disposal in order “to say a thing” is the expressive manner of the community, culture, context in which he has developed. In his development, he has learned how to use the expressions he has encountered, but the understanding he has come to have is something almost completely dissimilar to the understandings had by everyone else in that very same context.

As Haze sees it, those allegedly sacred terms have been converted into their very opposites – the absolutely trite – by the very people who allegedly believe in the sacredness to which those terms are supposed to refer. It is the triteness – not the sacredness – to which Haze objects, and, so, he struggles with how to restore an awareness of the sacred while assaulting the triteness which is all that the (formerly) sacred terms now convey. But he has no terms for the sacred other than those which point to the trite.

An analysis of Hazel Motes’ assortment of philosophical presentations would be interesting in its own right, but, for the purposes of this discussion with its concern about the relationships between explanation, understanding, and expression, it is Haze’s cited remarks about redemption upon which attention will be focused.

From the start, Hazel Motes insists that he will have no part of redemption, commonly understood and referred to as Redemption. His tirade against Redemption is always accusatory, and the people he is accusing most directly are those whose use of the term Redemption flaunts a too easy belief in Jesus as the Christ whose blood and death has saved them from – and washed away – their sins.

What he means to show when he says, “If you had been redeemed, you would care about redemption but you don’t”, is, first of all, that if those who claim to be redeemed actually were redeemed, then they would think very differently and be very different than how they are.

He denies that there was “the Fall” so that he can deny that Redemption which is understood as a promise for an eventual return to a prelapsarian state of peace. At times, he seems to outright deny Redemption per se, but what he means to indicate – and what he gets close to being capable of explaining – is that there is Redemption. It just happens to be the case that true Redemption brings “no peace for the redeemed”, and that is because the peace expected by those who mistake themselves as being redeemed is an utter passivity. The truly redeemed – those aware of the truly sacred as distinguished from the triteness brought to sacred terms – realize perfected being as an activity rather than as a peaceful passivity; the truly redeemed find peace in activity because there is a sacred, that ultimate otherness of virtue and authority.

Motes indicates that since there was no Fall, there is no sin that caused a Fall. He says, “I don’t believe in sin”, because he does not believe in the Fall. Yet, there is sin: “There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first. That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them.”

For Haze, Redemption is not for washing away acts like whoremongering and blaspheming, because whoremongering and blaspheming are acts, but sin is not in acts; sin precedes acts; sin is more like a condition or a context. Rather than washing away acts like whoremongering and blaspheming, Redemption has more to do with recognizing and realizing a sacred way of actively being. This sacred way of being is not an otherworldliness; it is not restricted to some other world, such as an afterlife, but it is also not worldliness. Haze seems to preach unmitigated worldliness, but what he is indicating is that if what one wants is the passivity often confused for peace along with satisfaction, then an ever more thorough worldliness is the best means to that goal.

Of course, it is the alleged believers in Jesus who Haze finds to be particularly self-satisfied and passive (at least with regards to Redemption); so, in his way, Haze actually denounces those alleged believers for the trite manner in which they regard Redemption and the sacred. In his way, Hazel Motes is providing constructive criticism for those around him.

The problem is that because it seems to them that Haze is the one misusing terms, they never seek to understand his explanation and the understanding – or maybe just the germ of an understanding – it contains.

The eccentric manner of expression which they encounter is thoroughly off-putting as explanation (even if it is somewhat entertaining at least for a brief while). As a consequence, those who hear Hazel Motes preach never see themselves in anything he says despite the fact that he uses the very terms which they profess to revere as referring to those matters allegedly of greatest importance to them.

For others, such as Onnie Jay Holy (a.k.a. Hoover Shoats), it is not so much Haze Motes’ eccentric manner which is the problem; rather, it is the fact that he presents no tangible evidence which would justify the effort necessary to come to an understanding about what Hazel Motes is trying to explain.

——————————————————————-

¹ O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

1.

Philip Kitcher commences his paper, “Militant Modern Atheism”¹, by paying homage to the atheism most commonly associated with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as well as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.² Kitcher says that their Militant Modern Atheism is “an effective and necessary critique of fundamentalist forms of religion”. He then goes on to note that this atheism is also “incomplete (and likely counter-productive)”.³

It is not immediately obvious how a critique can be both effective and likely counter-productive; the militant modern atheists certainly do not intend to be counter-productive.

Kitcher provides a bit of an explanation regarding the conjoining of effective and counter-productive when he reports that he, “a secular humanist, … shares many of the conclusions of the Militant Modern Atheists” but also thinks that “valuable options are being foreclosed” with the approach undertaken by those sorts of atheists.⁴ Basically, then, Kitcher’s point is that the critiques produced by the militant modern atheists are, at best, only initially effective and, even then, only within a very narrow (or shallow) – certainly a very limited – part of the domain concerning religion and faith.

Kitcher’s contention is that Militant Modern Atheism “fails to attend systematically to the roles religion fills in human lives”, and the ultimate “challenge is to develop a well-articulated and convincing version of secular humanism.”⁵ Kitcher clearly intends that this well-articulated secular humanism would attend to those fulfilling roles which – for the most part and to this point, according to Kitcher – have been and are most effectively served by religion. Presumably, Kitcher thinks that the development of just such a secular humanism is in the long-term interests of the militant modern atheists inasmuch as, without it, it is irrational to expect that religion would – or should – disappear.

2.

According to Kitcher, the failures or inadequacies of Militant Modern Atheism are a direct consequence of the manner in which its proponents frame the entire religion issue: If, as the militant modern atheists do, “you start with the thought” – or, rather, as Kitcher regards it, the speculation – “that the predominance of religion in human societies is to be explained by a cognitive deficiency, you will tend to see your campaign for the eradication of myths in terms of a return to intellectual health.” According to that particular atheistic perspective, “you help those … you assail, by leading them … to a better cognitive state … by the unpleasant medicine you administer.” From the militant modern atheist position, it follows that if people “abandon their religions, [they] will be better off by repudiating the false beliefs that have held them captive.”

In contrast to the militant modern atheist position, Kitcher “wonder[s] if the bracing tonics militant modern atheists conceive themselves as administering are – considered overall – a good thing.” As he says, if you frame the religion issue differently, “if you suppose” that there are social factors which “have played a non-trivial role in the spread of the world’s religions, you will wonder if there are psychological and social needs that the simple abandonment of religion will leave unfulfilled.”⁶

Of course, the militant modern atheists will insist that the psychological and social needs about which Kitcher wonders are merely sequelae which will be eradicated via the rectification provided by the better cognitive state afforded by their sort of atheism. However, such a response to Kitcher leaves the militant modern atheists apparently blind to the possibility that a Kitcher-like approach might produce a broader and a potentially more inviting appeal than can ever come from Militant Modern Atheism and its way of framing the religion issue.

This is in no way to suggest that Kitcher is opposed to Militant Modern Atheism or its proponents. In fact, Kitcher goes to some lengths in order to make it quite clear to militant modern atheists that he is very much an ally of theirs and also that his approach is more a refinement of – rather than a replacement for – Militant Modern Atheism.

For instance, instead of holding to the position of Militant Modern Atheism which maintains that:

Polite respect for odd superstitions about mysterious beings and their incomprehensible workings might be appropriate so long as the misguided folk who subscribe to them do not seek to convert … outsiders, but, when the benighted believers invade the public sphere, it is important that they not be earnest”,⁷

Kitcher prefers an on the face of it more moderate expression of essentially the identical position:

[C]ommitment to any definite doctrine, mythical self-consciousness, or doctrinal indefiniteness must not incline the believer to slide into accepting normative claims that would underwrite conduct affecting the lives of others on the grounds that they express the will of some transcendent being … values come first. … there must be a rigorous commitment to the priority of those values that can be shared with proponents of other religions and those who have no religion at all. Public reason must be thoroughly secular.⁸

Kitcher notes⁹ that critics charge the most outspoken advocates for Militant Modern Atheism with resorting to a “primitive fanaticism” which is significantly akin to that of which they accuse those who are their religious targets. And, there is no doubt that the manner in which Kitcher above summarizes part of what he refers to as the Militant Modern Atheism “manifesto” conveys an expressive fanaticism which is absent from Kitcher’s own perspective.

Despite their differences in manner of expression, these two positions – that of the militant modern atheists and that of Kitcher – both privilege their own manners of expression while demanding that religious manners of expression be exiled from (any serious – or earnest – discussions to be had in) the public sphere. Both positions are nothing more than reiterations of the respective manners in which considerations about the nature of religion are framed so as to accommodate the respective already existent (perspectively restricted) understandings. Both positions are philosophically bereft inasmuch as both perspectives utterly isolate themselves from self-analysis/self-criticism in terms of the possibility of (what, for the sake of convenience, will for now be referred to as) religious truth.

3.

The notion of evidence can be expected to be invoked in order to object to this characterization of Kitcher’s and the militant atheists’ positions and as a way of proclaiming an openness to the possibility of religious truth. However, according to its most invariant (and, therefore, arguably the most objective) definition, the term evidence does no more than indicate facets which fit with a particular story (and the way in which the story is framed). This means that it is impossible to be open to the possibility of religious truth as well as to any evidence in support of religious truth without a suitably charitable attempt at adopting (at least temporarily) the pertinent religious perspective.

With regards to Western monotheisms, it is quite common for atheists in particular to try to cast the religion issue as if it were simply a matter concerned with whether or not God exists (generally meaning as a mind-independent object). That way of framing the issue serves to make it seem as though the matter at hand is a simple one – a matter of assessing the quality and adequacy of any evidence there might be in support of the notion that God exists. However, this manner of framing achieves a deceptive simplicity, in part by avoiding considerations into the very nature of evidence.

Evidence is what fits with a story, and that story includes (sub)stories about how (and even why) evidence is (or can be further) developed. This is the case for scientific evidence, and it would be grossly presumptuous to deny that any similar development can or does occur with religion. It would be equally presumptuous to assert that whereas science has at its disposal techniques for producing (what are thought of as) more objective perspectives, religion has no similarly constructive techniques available to it.

Kitcher acknowledges that a “sense of the presence of a deity (or other sorts of beings) is very common across the spectrum of the world’s religions”, but then he adds that this sense of transcendent being (or of a transcendent being) is “[t]oo common, in fact, to play any serious evidential role.” What Kitcher means to indicate is that the evidence is not only not definitive but also veritably useless:

Once you appreciate the widespread tendency of people to arrive at very different claims on the basis of experiences that seem to them both intense and mysterious, and see that these experiences are categorized in terms that derive from the religions with which the subjects are familiar – and to which they often subscribe – it is clear what is occurring. Religious and secular people alike experience things they cannot explain in everyday secular terms, and sometimes grope for categories that will make some sense of what has occurred. None of these assimilations is to be trusted, for none can maintain that it alone is privileged and that rival interpretations are erroneous.¹⁰

Kitcher is correct to highlight the centrality of experiences; he is also correct to tightly bind experiences and interpretations. However, Kitcher is in error when he insists that a sense-interpretation/experience-interpretation cannot have “any serious evidential role” unless that interpretation precludes conceivable alternative interpretations or explanations. Kitcher is in error – he is in error about the nature of evidence – because he too closely associates evidence and proof.

4.

Upon having considered the nature of evidence as well as distinctions between evidence and proof, some might fancy that a call for proof rather than a call for evidence would quickly eliminate any possibility that religion is at all legitimate. Others might find themselves inclined to defend the above-noted close association of evidence and proof in light of what Kitcher refers to as “the ‘proofs’ offered in premodern theology” which remain topics of consideration and reformulation to this day.

Kitcher, however, is too well aware that both Militant Modern Atheism and his own preferred refinements to that atheism are rife with dependence on their own speculations, and, so long as there is such speculation, it is irrational to insist or expect that speculation be absent from religious thinking. Furthermore, at least with regards to “the ‘proofs’ offered in premodern theology”, Kitcher notes¹¹ that:

Whether anyone has ever regarded them as a potential route from atheism or agnosticism to theism is doubtful, and it seems plain that those who constructed the more-or-less intricate arguments did so in attempts to elaborate ideas about a deity to whose existence they were already committed.

Essentially this same point is made by John E. Smith¹² who, with regards to Anselm’s Ontological Argument, notes that upon “return to the original argument without, we may say, benefit of Descartes, who confused the issue by asking for the cause of the idea of God”, what is made more evident is an “emphasis on the importance of the nature of God … Anselm was engaged in a meditative analysis of what it means to believe in God from within, as it were, since the believer is involved in a self-examination” of his own characterization of God.

What all of this indicates is that Kitcher is too quickly dismissive of the evidential role of religious sense and experience. Kitcher would have been correct had he noted that the religious sense or experience – regardless of how common it may be amongst humans – requires further development in order to increase its utility, including in an evidential role. Much the same point is commonly constituent of the religious perspective as well.

5.

Kitcher’s intended audience is not those who have an inclination towards religious faith; rather, his intended audience is primarily those who are, for whatever reason and to whatever extent, already inclined to be dubious of any religious thinking, expression, and faith. Even more specifically, Kitcher attempts an appeal to militant modern atheists in order that they might develop a more versatile and comprehensive manner for dealing with both religions and those who are religiously inclined.

With such an audience in mind, Kitcher’s explication of his own perspective does not actually depend on religious sense or experience lacking any serious evidential role. Nevertheless, he makes (or attempts to make) his perspective more immediately attractive to his intended audience by producing a dismissal of religious experiences and the perspectives which follow from such experiences. To those who prefer the more militant expressions of atheism, Kitcher’s dismissing maneuver can serve to provide assurance that Kitcher’s approach is anything except antithetical to Militant Modern Atheism, even if it might under some circumstances effect a less scathing critique of religion and religious thinking.

Kitcher’s approach is centered around two models of religion – that of belief and another having to do with what he refers to as orientation. With regards to the belief model, Kitcher says:

Defining ‘religion’ is notoriously difficult, but one attractive strategy is to say that a religion consists of a set of doctrines about special kinds of entities (‘transcendent’ entities, different in kind from the everyday constituents of nature), that individual religions are distinguished by their different doctrines, and that to be committed to a particular religion is to believe the doctrines constitutive of that religion. Call this the belief model of religion.¹³

Kitcher goes on to add that “[a]s it stands, the belief model might seem inadequate, in that more than belief is required of the religious believer. Besides beliefs there are emotions, aspirations, desires, and actions … Those who merely believe, if there are any such people, are not full participants in the religious life.” With this inadequacy in mind, Kitcher proposes a “friendly amendment” to the belief model, one which maintains “belief in doctrine to be the fundamental basis from which the other religious states emerge.”¹⁴

Kitcher could just as well have noted that the commitment by which he defines the belief model (whether that commitment is to a religion or to doctrines) is itself at odds (certainly in the case of Western monotheisms) with the religious belief that each person’s commitment is ultimately supposed to be only to God. This is to say that Kitcher could have noted that the sort of belief commitment to which he refers is a veritable idolatry which itself is inconsistent with what is likely the most fundamental belief found in these religions.

However, had Kitcher pursued this line of thought, he would have removed from the militant atheists’ arsenal one quite popular course of attack used in objecting to religious thinking. If nothing else, noting that the belief model is readily criticized from within the religious perspective itself would extend and prolong – more than usually occurs in militant atheist arguments (such as they are) – the possibility that religious thinking might be legitimate. What could be of concern to Kitcher is that such a result might well be sufficient to prevent a significant segment of his intended audience from moving on to and recognizing worthwhileness in his orientation model of belief.

This is to say that by so restrictively framing the belief model, Kitcher can rather easily assert that the militant atheists should (and will) find themselves in familiar territory with his approach when it comes to dealing with religious people whose thinking falls into the belief model. In order to emphasize the great affinity between his approach and that of the militant atheists, Kitcher says, “militant modern atheism is entirely correct in its assault on those types of religious life that fit the belief model.”¹⁵

6.

Kitcher states that rather than understanding or defining religion simply as a “belief in doctrine … from which the other religious states [emotions, intentions etc.] emerge”,

[a]n alternative approach to religion can begin with other elements of the complex of states and processes, psychological and social, found in religious life, selecting some of those states and processes as basic, and viewing the distinctive doctrines as outgrowths, introduced as means of reaching goals marked out by the fundamental attitudes.

At the center of Kitcher’s alternative approach¹⁶ is “the concept of an orientation … a complex of psychological states – states of valuing, desires, intentions, emotions and commitments – … that embodies a person’s sense of what is most significant and worthwhile in his own life and the lives of others.”¹⁷ Kitcher identifies four types of orientation:

1. Secular: The secular orientation “does not give rise to any beliefs about transcendent entities or any participation in professions and ceremonies associated with such beliefs.”

Kitcher includes a secular orientation because, as he says, “[t]horoughly secular people can have an orientation in the sense” of having that complex of psychological states, including valuing, emotions, and commitments regarding what is held to be most significant in life.

2. Mythically self-conscious: People with a mythically self-conscious orientation will likely express themselves at times in “doctrinal sentences”, which is to say they will use the sorts of sentences often found within the belief model. That manner of expression will, of course, suggest significant commonalities between the mythically self-conscious and those who fit the belief model. However, the mythically self-conscious “disavow” any interpretation of those statements which “implies substantive doctrine about transcendent entities.” Kitcher tries to further distinguish between those who fall within the belief model and those of a mythically self-conscious orientation by putting forth “a mythically self-conscious Christian” as one who “might describe herself as oriented by the values … expressed in particular Gospel passages (for example, the Sermon on the Mount), so that she engages with other members of a Christian community to advance these values, while explicitly rejecting any interpretation of the New Testament that supposes a personal being from whose will those values derive, who in any sense created, governs or surveys the universe. Her creedal professions are expressions of a commitment to the fundamental values … [which she thinks] are the significant things for human beings to try to advance.”

Kitcher notes that “the militant modern atheists [would] applaud” the fact that the mythically self-conscious “firmly reject ‘supernatural’ entities”, and he also notes that the militant modern atheists will contend “that what remains [of the mythically self-conscious person's beliefs] hardly” warrants being called – or even being associated with – religion.

3. Doctrinally-entangled: The doctrinally-entangled are distinguished from the mythically self-conscious in that the doctrinally-entangled “hold some beliefs they recognize as implying the existence of transcendent beings, and they take these beliefs to be inspirationally important precisely because the pertinent beings exemplify the fundamental values. … A Christian who believes that Jesus was the incarnation of a being who created the cosmos can see himself as participating in a campaign to achieve important goals – the spread of loving relations among human beings – whose ultimate success is assured. If asked to defend his belief in particular claims about the transcendent, the doctrinally-entangled person will not appeal primarily to evidence, but rather suggest that … such beliefs” are legitimate “because of the positive role they play in the promotion of the most important values.”

Kitcher says that, despite the willingness of the doctrinally-entangled to recognize the existence of any transcendent being(s), this orientation can be seen as “a reasonable expression of epistemic modesty”. He furthermore contends that this orientation “can be justified” in terms of “the socio-cultural environment available”. According to Kitcher, militant modern atheists tend “to overlook this point” about the context of belief, and they, thereby, are simply wrong to think (or assume) “that correction of belief about [transcendent entities] can automatically be articulated into a satisfying vision of what is valuable in one’s life.” Kitcher also claims that these very same points apply to the last of the orientations which he explicates – the doctrinally-indefinite orientation.

4. Doctrinally-indefinite: The doctrinally-indefinite “are not prepared to say … that there is no defensible interpretation of those sentences on which they are committed to the existence of transcendent entities.” They do not “offer any definite interpretation that would provide a content to which they would subscribe. Many of them are inclined to take refuge in language that is resonant and opaque, metaphorical and poetic, and to deny that they can do any better at explaining the beliefs they profess. … Their lack of definiteness frustrates militant modern atheists, who find no value in the resonant phrases that pervade theological discussions, but believers will contend that literal language gives out here, that as with great poetry, religious language somehow functions in ways that cannot be captured in the preferred modes of speech of their opponents.”

7.

It seems that the veritably ineradicable indefiniteness common to much religious expression frustrates many militant atheists to the point that they become virtually (if not utterly) blind to, dismissive of, and unconcerned about anything other than the very mentioning of transcendent conditions and entities. Kitcher notes how, as a consequence of such atheists’ orientation, “humanly important issues can simply disappear from view.”

To more strongly make his point that humanly important issues tend towards invisibility with Militant Modern Atheism, Kitcher refers to some of Richard Dawkins’ own reflections on there being “more than just grandeur in this [his own] view of life” and there being “deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding … The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; … couldn’t we also teach science as something to read and rejoice in, like learning how to listen to music …?”

As Kitcher notes, and as religious believers would also attest, “There is much to agree with in these passages”. Even so, Kitcher thinks that those passages “seduce readers … into thinking that anyone can orient a worthwhile life … on the basis of contemplation of the cosmos as the sciences have revealed it.” The fact is, however, that there are “other features that many people regard as central to the worth of the lives they lead: activity, contributions to social life, virtuous conduct, friendship, and so forth.”¹⁸ It is insightful consideration of features such as these which Kitcher apparently finds to be so strikingly absent from the interests, concerns, and efforts with which Militant Modern Atheism presents itself.

Some militant atheists might respond by insisting that those humanly important features to which Kitcher refers are seemingly absent from Militant Modern Atheism precisely because this atheism is most properly understood as but one, quite narrow aspect of a broader atheism. By this reasoning, Militant Modern Atheism simply indicates an attitude of mind or a style of expression in response to any and all references to transcendent conditions and beings. In addition, it is the broader atheism which takes up what Kitcher describes as humanly important issues.

Such a response might satisfy militant atheists, but it is an apologetics which hopes to cling to rationality by means of evasion. It is a response which merely side-steps the point Kitcher is making. Kitcher uses the Dawkins quotes to emphasize Kitcher’s own point that Militant Modern Atheism is – and is at least somewhat aware of being – incomplete insofar as it fails to come to grips with the human psychological and social states which have for so long found their best fit within religious settings. Aware of such an incompleteness in its very understanding of itself, it makes no sense – no rational sense – for proponents of Militant Modern Atheism to insist or act as if there is some worthwhile satisfaction to be had from simply taking pot shots at religious thinking and religious perspectives. This is especially the case when, as Kitcher demonstrates, Militant Modern Atheism, in and of itself, provides only the most limited sort of analyses of religion with no prospects for greater depth.

Kitcher also points out that even Dennett’s speculations about evolutionary psychology do not protect the militant atheists from Kitcher’s contention about the incompleteness and likely counter-productivity of Militant Modern Atheism. Were Dennett’s evolutionary psychology speculations taken as indubitable fact, were it the case that religious myths are cognitively deficient and replaceable with modern scientific explanations, then it would make no sense – and is likely counterproductive – to continue the trumpeting of denials about transcendent beings instead of moving on to demonstrate to those who are still attracted to religious settings that non-religious thinking is every bit as fulfilling and every bit as capable of succeeding in the achievement of virtuous goals.

8.

If, as noted earlier, Kitcher’s intended audience is militant modern atheists, then he would seem to have made a good case for there being very significant problems with Militant Modern Atheism. However, there are also very significant problems with the expanded view he recommends in order to make Militant Modern Atheism more effective.

Kitcher’s view which expands beyond the concerns upon which Militant Modern Atheism focuses depends on the notion that what is most important (Kitcher might even regard it as being most basic) to the assorted defensible¹⁹ religious orientations is “the commitment to particular goals and values” such as “human equality and solidarity … [and] the spread of loving relations among human beings”.²⁰ Kitcher insists that it is these “considerations of value” alone which “must be primary”.²¹ These values are indicative of the common need which individuals have for a social aspect to life.

The fact that commitment to the cited values very often entails individuals “identifying themselves … with a community”²² built around religion is something which “[s]ecular thinkers can regret … but they should see it as a stimulus … to work towards an intellectually articulated and socially realized version of secular humanism”. According to Kitcher, “enlightened secularism has not yet succeeded in finding surrogates for institutions and ideas that religious traditions have honed over centuries or millenia.”²³

With his insistence on the primacy of values, particularly what can be called social values, Kitcher’s call seems to be for somehow attaining a greater prominence for something like an Ethical Culture Society, but one which manages to make any and all individual religious affiliations entirely superfluous. It is one thing to believe, as per the current Ethical Culture Society, that morality is necessarily independent of theology and that “self-reform should go in lock step with social reform”, but it is another thing altogether – frankly, it is a delusion – to imagine that religion can be rendered superfluous without first having delved into those very religious senses and experiences which Kitcher ignores.

Disregarding religious senses and experiences, Kitcher essentially reduces religion to those values generally thought to be most useful to social concerns and for the assurance of some measure of justice. He can accomplish just such a reduction while appearing to remain true to the religious spirit only because the social follows so very closely upon the religious sense. However, this close association in no way justifies regarding social values alone as being the most basic aspect of the religious perspective. Religious sense and experience must be taken into account, because they impart qualities to the social which are evidently absent from most accounts of other ways for thinking about the social.

This is not to claim that it is impossible for an atheistic approach to manage to effect much the same (if not identical) qualities. This is only to say that, without an investigation into the nature or characteristics of religious sense/experience, there are good reasons to think that a secular humanist project such as that outlined by Kitcher will – and should – fail.

9.

Early in A Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Dawkins offers up a variation on a remark made by Darwin in order to begin what seems to be an explication of some distinctions between the view of life held by Dawkins and the view had from a religious perspective. Dawkins states that “[t]here is more than just grandeur in th[e] view of life” which he holds. Although his presentation of his view can seem “bleak and cold” when, according to Dawkins, it is considered “from under the security blanket of ignorance”, there is actually “deep refreshment to be had”. Rather than delivering “[s]afety … easy answers and cheap comforts” and “living a warm comfortable lie”, Dawkins says that with his view of life, “You stand to lose comforting delusions: you can no longer suck at the pacifier of faith in immortality. … you stand to gain ‘growth and happiness’; the joy of knowing that you have grown up, faced up to what existence means; to the fact that it is temporary and all the more precious for it.”²⁴

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing in those quoted excerpts which suffices to establish that Dawkins’ view of life is not a religious one. However, a basis for distinguishing Dawkins’ view of life from a religious view can be drawn out from some other of his remarks, in particular from an exegesis Dawkins produces²⁵ about “the last paragraph of [Darwin's] On the Origin of Species” in which Darwin says:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Of particular relevance to this discussion is the perspective hinted at by Dawkins’ remarks:

Is ‘the production of the higher animals’ really ‘the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving’? Most exalted? Really? Are there not more exalted objects? Art? Spirituality? Romeo and Juliet? General Relativity? The Choral Symphony? The Sistine Chapel? Love?

… The Darwinian world-view does not denigrate the higher human faculties, does not ‘reduce’ them to a plane of indignity. It doesn’t even claim to explain them at the sort of level that will seem particularly satisfying, in the way that, say, the Darwinian explanation of a snake-mimicking caterpillar is satisfying. It does, however, claim to have wiped out the impenetrable – not even worth trying to penetrate – mystery that must have dogged all pre-Darwinian efforts to understand life.

… When you think about it, our own existence, together with its post-Darwinian explicability, is a candidate for the most astonishing fact that any of us are called upon to contemplate, in our whole life, ever.

… The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the more elusive does the distinction become. … Right up to the middle of the twentieth century, life was thought to be qualitatively beyond physics and chemistry. No longer. The difference between life and non-life is a matter not of substance but of information.

Based upon remarks such as those above, Dawkins’ view of life can be well and fairly summarized by joining his own faced up to what existence means with Kitcher’s as the sciences have revealed it²⁶ to express the idea that what is important is to “face up to what existence means … as the sciences have revealed it.”

Of particular note in the above quoted passage by Dawkins is the prominence held by objects. Objects are certainly of great importance to the religious perspective, and this, in part, is why religious thinkers can embrace scientific investigation with the the same vigor evidenced by those who utterly disavow religious perspectives. So, it is not the prominence which objects have in Dawkins’ view of life that distinguishes his view from the religious perspective. Rather, the distinguishing feature is that Dawkins casts his view of life and its perspective on existence entirely in terms of objects as revealed by and expressed in terms of the sciences.

According to Dawkins, even love, exalted though it may be, is to be regarded ultimately as – and in terms of – object. This concept of love as object, or even as a relation between objects, is antithetical to the religious perspective. This is because, according to the religious view, existence is not – and cannot be fully or properly represented as – a matter of objects or relations between objects. Consequently, according to the religious view, it is critically important that care be taken so as to ensure that thinking not be utterly restricted to being in terms of the objects which populate reality.

As has already been noted, objects are recognized – and afforded great importance – from within the religious perspective. However, it is not objects that are at the core of the religious view. Instead, the religious perspective is a view which concerns itself predominantly with existence in terms of those who experience reality as subjects (those who experience being aware of their experience of subjectivity), not even as constituents (objects) of the social. Love your neighbor as yourself: You are a subject; you experience individually, and you act not as an object but as a subject; love your neighbor as – and for being – a subject who experiences individually.

The gist of the religious view does not find expression in terms of that grandeur to which Dawkins (and Darwin) refer, although the grandeur of nature is recognized and experienced from the religious perspective. The gist of the religious view does not even find expression in terms of those exalted products of the human mind and effort referred to by Dawkins, although they, too, are relished and exalted from within the religious perspective. The gist of the religious view – the religious sense – is, instead, to be found in a far more subtle expression, such as when Karl Jaspers said to Rudolf Bultmann:

My liking for you had begun when, as a boy, I noticed you in the school yard of the Oldenburg gymnasium (you were a few years younger than I). I abstained from seeking your acquaintance. I saw your shining eyes, and was glad that you existed.²⁷

10.

There are those who will see in the Jaspers remark nothing but mere sentiment or outright sentimentality rather than any sort of subtle expression. These same people will wonder whether that is what the religious sense amounts to: mere sentiment or outright sentimentality. Others will see in the Jaspers remark not the concern for a subject as subject in his or her individual experience of reality. Instead, they will see Jaspers’ attention having been drawn to Bultmann in the way that perceived objects – not subjects – commonly draw a person’s attention.

There are some facts about Jaspers and Bultmann which, once known to those who perceive only sentiment or sentimentality in the Jaspers remark, might well force a reconsideration and transformation or abandonment of the initial perception. The fact is that Jaspers and Bultmann were not friends. It is also a fact that Jaspers made that remark in the midst of a highly contentious and ongoing argument with Bultmann in which Jaspers made it very clear that he was “repelled”²⁸ by Bultmann’s position. It is because of these facts that Jaspers senses an importance in referring to his liking for Bultmann which had begun many years ago and which still endured despite an antagonism which had, in fact, itself persisted over quite a few years. Jaspers’ liking and his being glad indicate a condition which is other than – even if it is in addition to – merely personal preference. This liking and being glad could also be said to be beyond mere personal preference. Inasmuch as this liking and this being glad is independent of any feelings of approval or disapproval, this liking and this being glad is certainly not outright sentimentality, and this condition beyond mere personal preference is not mere sentiment.

Of course, those who see in Jaspers’ remark the sort of response had to an object can still insist that Jaspers did indeed respond to Bultmann as if Bultmann were an object. They can insist that the “shining eyes” struck Jaspers in precisely the same way that an exceptional feature of some art object, for instance, can draw the attention of a subject to that art object. And, they can be right that Jaspers did indeed initially respond to Bultmann as though Bultmann were an object. The point about the gist of the religious sense would still apply if Jaspers’ liking and being glad persists (or endures) as the concern for Bultmann as a subject who experiences, regardless of how Jaspers first became aware of Bultmann and so long as Jaspers’ concern managed to remain independent (although not unaware) of any approving or disapproving responses Jaspers ever has to Bultmann.

Mere personal preference is what a subject can have for objects, and that is not what the Jaspers remark exhibits. The remark, when out of all context whatsoever, acknowledges a beginning to a liking which at that beginning seems to be very much like the sort of merely (even if acutely felt) personal preference had by a subject who experiences perceiving something exceptional in an object. However, that sort of beginning always has to it an acuteness which will dull unless periodically honed, and, in the Jaspers-Bultmann case, there is no indication of there having been any such whetting since that beginning.

This in itself intimates that this liking is of some type which is not restricted to, or dependent upon, personal preference. The actual context in which Jaspers made the statement more strongly suggests that any initial personal preference would most likely have been more rapidly and thoroughly dulled rather than honed over time.

And this is why what can be seen in the Jaspers remark is a fully personal regard for another person as a subject who experiences rather than as an object, a regard which is not justified with reasons drawn from the manner in which the other person is perceived based on outward presentment.

This sort of liking and being glad is compatible with personal preference, but it also has no dependence on and extends beyond personal preference. This is what, from within the religious perspective, is commonly referred to as love. This love of persons as subjects who experience, this love of persons for their being subjects who experience – this love is the heart and mind of the religious sense.

11.

Personal preferences can be suitably characterized in terms of relations, but love is properly characterized only by taking into account particular types of acts.

All human persons are subjects by virtue of the fact that they experience. They usually experience rather than encounter their own subjectivity, but they usually encounter rather than experience all which is other than their own subjectivity. Even other persons – other experiencing subjects – are first encountered as objects. However, the religious sense comes of the experiencing subject being wholly, utterly, even painfully aware that its own experience of being is dampened if not diminished so long as it continues to regard an other subject who experiences as if that person were an object:

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes – but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.²⁹

It is only by the acts which characterize (or constitute) love that one person can come to regard (and sometimes even experience) an other in terms of that other’s own subjectivity.

I am known to other men. They know me as object, not as subject. They are unaware of my subjectivity as such; unaware not merely of its inexhaustible depth, but also of that presence of the whole in each of its operations, that existential complexity of inner circumstances, data of nature, free choice, attractions, weaknesses, virtues perhaps … To be known as object … is to be severed from oneself and wounded in one’s identity.³⁰

By love, finally, is shattered the impossibility of knowing another except as object.³¹

The first act of love can be variously described in terms of an opening up, a going forth, even a pouring out from a subjectivity. It is because of love and by love that a person is freed from the concerns which confine a person to his or her own current subjectivity. Although love frees the person from the confines of what had been the person’s subjectivity, love does not obliterate the person’s subjectivity, the person’s experience of being. Instead, with love there seems as if there is a greater abundance of the person’s very being, but it can also seem to the person as if there has come a greater awareness of an abundance of being that had already been present not only in himself but in those parts of reality which are other than himself.

Whether there is, in a sense, a seemingly greater abundance of being or a seemingly greater awareness of the already extant abundance of being, it is with love or because of love that a person’s own experience of being – that person’s own subjectivity – opens up, goes forth, or pours out. In another sense, it is because of love, or with love, or in love that a person’s subjectivity can seem to have been obliterated or cast off as it extends beyond what it had been. But, in any event, there is no elimination of the experience of subjectivity with love; likewise, when there is love, when a person acts in love, there is no diminution to the experience of subjectivity.

The person’s greater awareness is of an abundance beyond that of which the person had been aware both within himself and beyond his own subjectivity. Love effects this greater awareness, but, when a person goes forth out of his own subjectivity in love and with love, it is not only in order to partake of the abundance of objects which populate reality. Rather, upon being more keenly aware of the abundance, the person who loves gives himself, so to speak, or breaks out of the constraints of his subjectivity to make himself more available in order that other subjects might themselves be able to more readily partake of the abundance around them.

It is only by virtue of love (by acting with love) that another person – an other subject – comes to be treated not only not as an object but also not as an alter ego.³² Instead, the other subject is recognized and respected for being his or her own ego.

Sometimes love is (mis)conceived in terms of fusion with another;³³ however, since with love there is neither elimination of the experience of subjectivity nor diminution of that experience, love is not accomplished as – nor does it seek – a fusion. On the contrary, love provides for and hopes to result in a greater participation amongst persons in a manner by which each person’s experience of that person’s own subjectivity is made more abundant in accord with the way that is the uniqueness of each person’s individuality. Such a participation is not a fusion wherein any or all of those who are joined cease to have their own subjectivity, but this participation is also something more than proximity in isolation; there is much which is shared.

Control of an other is never the goal of love. Love does not even seek “to create love in another person”.³⁴ Furthermore, a person who loves “dare not permit another to belong to him in such a way that he is everything to the other.”³⁵

Instead, acts of love are customized according to the subjectivity of the other, and this means that in love what is sought is awareness of the other’s subjectivity for the sake of the other’s own enhanced subjectivity. This awareness is accomplished only by that form of love known as charity.

12.

Although love reaches beyond the confines of subjectivity, love is also always internal in the very same way that thought is internal and hidden from the external. Just as “the utterance of speech is the manifestation” of thought, so, too, are acts the ways in which love is made manifest.³⁶ It is by utterances as well as other acts that a person has access to the subjectivity of an other person.

Charitable acts (acts done in charity) often seem (from the perspectives of other persons) more hidden than speech (even charitable speech). But, charity is never trumpeted. All charity – whether as speech or other acts – is an aspect of the going forth from one’s own subjectivity to make one’s own person, being, and perspective available for others. When one speaks or otherwise acts in charity, it is not for the purpose of convincing or persuading another. When one goes forth with charity, it is in order to be available to others, and it is also with the hope that one’s own availability will somehow be of benefit to, will somehow enhance others. However, this going forth in charity also has the expectation or hope that the opening up of one’s own subjectivity which is necessary for one’s own being charitable will also enhance one’s own subjectivity by making it more capable of receiving insight from an encounter with others that develops into an experience of the other’s subjectivity.

While many charitable acts are done with no expectation of their being noticed by others, it is because of the very nature of speech that charitable speech goes forth with a hope of being noticed. More often than not, concomitant with this hope of being noticed is the hope that a response by an other will be elicited. This hope for elicitation has two constituent facets: the hope that what has been put forth eventually will be of benefit to the other who responds and the hope that the other’s response will make the particulars of the other’s subjectivity more available for one’s own experience of the other.

The availability of an other’s subjectivity can be of benefit to one’s own subjectivity by providing a perspective which might not be already integral to one’s own knowledge. However, the other is not engaged for the benefit of one’s own knowledge, because that would be to treat the other as an object. Indeed, when the other is treated as an object, the other is treated as dispensable, but, when the other is treated as a subject, it is with the hope of extended, even open-ended, engagement.

Tolerance for, or toleration of, the other, whether that other is treated as an object or treated with regard for the other’s experience of his own subjectivity, is not charity. To the extent that tolerance is itself a virtue, it is at best a prerequisite for the greater virtue of charity. In any case, tolerance is neither a substitute for nor is it identical to charity. Charity not only goes forth as speech; charity also resides in the response to how others are presented. In particular, charity resides in the response to the words by which others make themselves noticed.

Charity always seeks to make better understood the individual being engaged; charity does so in order that it might try to tailor itself according to that other individual’s own perspective.

Charity never regards the burden of communication as if it is shouldered only by the other. When there is apparent disagreement or misunderstanding, charity goes forth – whether in the form of question, suggestion, criticism, challenge, even judgment – for the sake of becoming ever more fully aware of the other’s subjectivity and never without at least some reconsideration of one’s own thoughts and expressions. Charity finds no satisfaction in demonstrating inadequacy or insufficiency in the other’s speech. This is because the ultimate interest of charity is not the other’s expression; the ultimate interest is the other’s experience of his own subjectivity.

Charity seeks to determine whether – or to what extent – the other’s manner of expression genuinely reveals the other’s current (and actual) subjectivity, and such a determination can only be conducted in terms of possibilities. There are the possibilities inherent to the manner in which the expressions are interpreted by the person to whom the speech is presented, and there are also the possibilities for how else the other might present (might have presented) the subjectivity being revealed. In addition, and of greater interest to charity, there are the possibilities for how else the other would himself like to be(come).

This means that the person acting with charity seeks to engage the other person in terms of the very manners of expression which the other uses. Charity does not seek to impose a manner of expression on the other. Charity seeks a greater experience of – a greater awareness about – the other’s manner of expression, because the charitable person makes himself more available to the other to the extent that the charitable person can participate in the other’s very subjectivity. At no time has a person’s subjectivity found its best possible expression; nonetheless, it is by re-presenting his own subjectivity in terms more familiar to the other that the charitable person makes himself, his own perspective, his own subjectivity more available for the possible benefit of the other.

People who act with charity, people who act with love – even if it were the most perfect love obtainable – will often find themselves having to admit: “Whether or not I have accomplished anything, I do not know. I do not know if I have done anyone any good.”³⁷

But, this is to be expected, since the hoped-for benefit only really attains when the other person finds his own experience of subjectivity pouring forth out of itself and into its own greater subjectivity. This is ultimately only accomplished by each person’s own response to reality. Although this expanded subjectivity can never be imposed, it can be facilitated by persons who, when they engage with others, keep in mind not only the other as presented but also the possibilities for being which are available to the other from the perspective which is the other’s own actual subjectivity.

Even if charity towards an other is ever known to have succeeded as being of benefit for that other, what satisfaction the charitable person feels is short-lived, because charity’s incessant interest – love’s incessant interest – is in what else can be done. To say that “perfection consists in charity”³⁸ is to acknowledge that with love and because of love there is always the concern with what else can be done.

13.

The religious perspective is never encapsulated by a reference either to what is or to what has been. The most proper way to cast the religious perspective is in terms of its concern with what is yet to be brought about in love, with love, and by love. Bringing about in love is the very nature of morality according to the religious sense and perspective. Love is necessary in order to be able to treat others as subjects who experience rather than as objects. Such love is a matter of conscience and conscientiousness;³⁹ hence, love is the heart of morality.

It is only as aspects of love that any virtues are matters of morality. Just as the subjectivity experienced by an other can become, on occasion, part of one’s experience of one’s own subjectivity, so, too, can virtues become part of one’s own subjectivity. Yet, just as an other’s own experience of subjectivity can become part of one’s own experience of subjectivity without having been produced by one’s own subjectivity, so, too, from the religious perspective, is it that the virtues which become part of one’s subjectivity are not virtues which one creates or produces.

In the religious sense and from the religious perspective, morality is not a matter of law. This is the case even with regards to divine law and commandments. This is not to deny that there are or ever have been any such law or commandments, but it is to note that “in spite of all its many provisions the law is still somewhat indeterminate”, and this indeterminateness is only fixed by acts of love, because “love is the fulfillment” of the law.⁴⁰

Moral law is indeterminate because the moral situation is neither defined nor delimited by any law. Accordingly, although law and “[m]oral treatises will … tell me the universal rule or rules I am bound to apply; they will not tell me how I, the unique I, am to apply them in the unique context in which I am involved.”⁴¹ Morality “does not consist … in copying the ideal”;⁴² morality is not a matter of mimesis, because morality never exists where personal judgment is suspended.⁴³ “No knowledge of moral essences, however perfect, meticulous, or detailed … no casuistry, no chain of pure deduction, no science, can exempt me from my judgment of conscience”.⁴⁴

This is to say that morality demands personal judgment, and imagination and creativity are necessary for judgment to effect morally.

It is a “wholly superficial” morality (if it is morality at all) which is constituted by “outward conformity with common opinion, with the rules and tabus [sic] of the social group”,⁴⁵ even with divine laws. According to the religious sense, to act morally is to act in love; to act in love is to act with charity; to act with charity is to act iteratively, continuing to modify the manner in which one’s going forth is presented in the process of becoming more aware of the other’s own subjectivity. And, it is only with imagination and creativity that one can make manifest any new presentations in response to a changing awareness about one’s experience of one’s own subjectivity and one’s changing awareness about an other’s subjectivity. Without such imagination and creativity, it is impossible to love; without such imagination and creativity, it is impossible to treat other subjects who experience as anything except objects rather than as the subjects who they are.

For those who love, it is as though there is no need of any commandment to love, and this is because the fullness of one’s own being is experienced as the pouring out of love which fulfills (moral) law. In a sense, the law or commandment which prescribes love transforms into one’s very own being. This, of course, is a wholly internal transformation which makes that law redundant to one’s own subjectivity while leaving the moral law in place as a guidance for others.

Despite the hopefully eventual redundancy of the moral law, and despite the fact that love and its constituent virtues are made manifest by one’s own being in one’s own subjectivity, it is the religious sense that love and its virtues do not originate within one’s own subjectivity. The particular ways in which love is made manifest in its pouring forth from one’s own subjectivity will often seem to have originated with one’s own being, but the religious sense or experience is one in which the way and interests of love always seem to originate somehow external to one’s own subjectivity. It is just such a sense or experience which can be found undergirding most, if not all, forms of religion.

14.

By too quickly dismissing and, thereby, completely ignoring the matter of there being a religious sense as well as religious experience, Kitcher makes it veritably impossible for his broader secular humanism project to succeed as a replacement for religion. Being designed around or based upon a commitment to such goals and values as human equality and solidarity, projects such as Kitcher’s tend to impart the sense that there is nothing amiss about regarding, treating, and aggregating individuals as objects. It is just such a sense which stands in opposition to the heart of the religious sense which is always reminding that it is immoral to regard individuals as objects rather than subjects.

It is to be presumed that Kitcher and other secular humanists would object, denying that it is ever (morally) acceptable to treat individuals as objects rather than as subjects who uniquely experience subjectivity. Kitcher might even point out that every bit as much a part of the secular humanism project is a devotion to the spread of loving relations among human beings. However, what is the secular idea of love which would shape and give substance to those loving relations?

As has been shown, the religious idea of love is that love is made manifestly real only when the other is regarded in terms of that other’s own experience of subjectivity. It is never an act of love which reduces the other to the sorts of general terms useful for impersonal and de-personalized categorization. It is precisely because of this religious sense about love that the social sense of justice is so very inadequate a basis for interactions between persons. The “essential difference between charity [which is to say love] and justice come[s] from the preference of charity” to engage with the other in the other’s subjectivity, whereas “from the point of view of justice,” no such engagement is necessary or relevant.⁴⁶ Justice is conceived of as impersonal and as striving for the objective. Justice so conceived depends on objectization of the subject:

To objectise is to universalize. … It is in relation to the individuality itself of the subject … in relation to its subjectivity, as something unique and singular … that objectisation is false to the subject and that, known as object, it is unjustly known, as we have already observed.⁴⁷

This is to say that a justice which is conceived of and practiced in terms of an objectivity, wherein the subject is and remains objectized, is a justice conceived of in a manner that is necessarily at odds with the religious sense. Whereas the secular tends to start with such social notions as equality and solidarity without any expressed basis in the unique and singular subjectivity of each individual, the religious sense and the priority it gives to love pertains to each individual’s experience of subjectivity. With this religious sense, equality as well as solidarity follow not only from the love for the others but also with the presumption that the others do or can love.

It is this love which is central to the religious sense, and, so long as Kitcher’s – or any other – secular humanism project fails to have that religious sense of love at its core, that secular humanism will not replace religion regardless of any and all of the shortcomings to be found in religions. It will not replace religion, because it is the very importance of love which persists despite all those shortcomings that gives a home within religion to the religious sense.

Even if Kitcher’s secular humanism project were to be reformulated in a way that could have love rather than an objectizing justice at its core, there would still be the problem of having to deal with the religious sense that love and all of its constituent virtues do not originate from within humankind.

This sense of the ultimate otherness of virtue is a problem that cannot with honesty be easily brushed aside. This is because it is not a sense had only by those who regard the ultimate otherness of virtue as a religious sense. For instance, Hannah Arendt, who did not regard herself as a friend of religion, eventually found herself face to face with this issue regarding the ultimate otherness of virtue in the guise of what she referred to as authority.⁴⁸

15.

According to Arendt’s analysis, a crisis of authority has been apparent since at least the turn of the twentieth century. Although “political in origin and nature”, this crisis is not reasonably ignored by any secular humanism, such as Kitcher’s, which puts itself forth as having at its very core such goals and values as equality and solidarity, concepts that are (or have come to be) predominantly political in nature.

Where the political suffers from a crisis of authority, it is reasonable to expect and, therefore, investigate whether a secular humanism conceived of primarily in terms of what seem to be essentially political values is also susceptible to a similar – if not the very same – crisis of authority. If, on the other hand, there is something about the religious sense which spares it from this very crisis, then there is reason to take the religious sense/experience into consideration rather than dismissing and ignoring it as Kitcher does.

Arendt says that the crisis of authority is so widespread that “authority has vanished from the modern world.” This crisis is so deep that the very concept called authority does not appear to be either “self evident” or “even comprehensible” except, possibly, to some “political scientist [who] may still remember that this concept was once fundamental to political theory.”

Because of the confusion and misunderstandings which have arisen around the concept called authority, Arendt considers it essential to start with “a few remarks on what authority never was”. She notes that authority “is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence.” However, the nature of authority is such that it “precludes the use of external means of coercion”. Furthermore, authority is “incompatible with persuasion” inasmuch as authority does not have its effect “through a process of argumentation.” Arendt goes on to say that “[i]f authority is to be defined … then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.”

By Arendt’s reckoning, the concept which later came to be known as authority was introduced (or shoehorned) into the political context by Plato as he sought some arrangement other than that provided by (public) tyranny and (household) despotism/domination, as well as something other than the mass movements of public opinions (which themselves rely on persuasion which is always sure to seem to be based on good – when, in fact, it is most often merely valid – reasoning along with a presumed equality which makes believe that all persons are equally capable of rationality). In effect, what Plato eventually put forth was the notion of there being indisputable (or natural) laws which ruled over rulers and those whom they ruled.

Arendt says that it is characteristic of authority that it “always demands obedience”, and, in order for authority to be authority, it is just as necessary that authority exercises no power to control and that it seeks neither to coerce nor to persuade. Putting aside, for the moment, the matter of demanded obedience, it is worth noting that, according to the religious sense, love never seeks to control, coerce, or persuade. To this extent, there is a noteworthy and significant similarity between authority and love.

In addition, just as authority itself is understood as being real and other than a human fabrication, so, too, is it the case that love (according to the religious sense) seems to originate from something other than human preferences and from somewhere other than the human person who acts in, with, and by love. Accordingly, love and its constituent virtues share with authority the characteristic of ultimate otherness.

16.

This still leaves the matter of authority and the obedience it demands and whether, or in what way, the religious sense of love is compatible with the demanding of obedience. Here it is worth noting that Arendt describes the demanding of obedience in terms of a compelling of the mind, a compelling which does not resort to coercion or (even implied or threatened) violence or persuasion through argument. What is revealed by this description in terms of a compelling is not a characteristic of authority; instead, what it describes is a reaction had to the experience of an encounter with authority.

And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.⁴⁹

Authority is realized with astonishment, with a wonderment so overwhelming that it seems to demand something, some kind of reaction. The experience of an encounter with authority results in awe, but, it is when the person who encounters authority opens up his or her subjectivity to an experience of authority that the awe is no longer simply for the otherness of authority. It is a wonderment for the being of authority, and it turns to a wonderment for being. That wonderment is not just for what is but also for what else – and how else – all that is can yet be, and it is upon the opening up of the person’s subjectivity to an experience of authority that the gaze of the person’s subjectivity gets set upon the what-yet-can-be.

How – and whether – a person in his or her own subjectivity undertakes to make more manifest the qualities or characteristics of that which is experienced as authority is a matter of that person’s choice, abilities, and talents. Neither authority nor the awareness of authority – not even the experience of the ultimate otherness of authority – diminishes individual freedom or detracts from the significance of the experience of subjectivity. Actually, very much the opposite is the case: The religious experience is of both greater freedom and enhanced (as well as expanded) and shared subjectivity.

To the religious sense, love and authority are essentially indistinguishable, and it is the ultimate otherness of the authority of love which gives rise to the religious sense. Therefore, whatever the appeal of secular humanism, it will never succeed in attaining such a goal as making religion redundant so long as this humanism either ignores or fails to incorporate the religious sense of love.

———————————————————–
¹ Kitcher, Philip, “Militant Modern Atheism”, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2011.
² Militant Modern Atheism is also sometimes referred to by others as The New Atheism.
³ Kitcher, p. 1.
⁴ Kitcher, p. 2.
⁵ Kitcher, p. 1.
⁶ Kitcher, pp. 9-10.
⁷ Kitcher, p. 1.
⁸ Kitcher, p. 12.
⁹ Kitcher, p. 2.
¹⁰ Kitcher, p. 7.
¹¹ Kitcher, p. 7.
¹² Smith, John E., “Some Aspects of Hartshorne’s Treatment of Anselm” in Existence and Actuality, Cobb, John B. and Gamwell, Franklin I., eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1984); pp. 103-109.
¹³ Kitcher, p. 3.
¹⁴ Kitcher, pp. 3-4.
¹⁵ Kitcher, p. 6.
¹⁶ Kitcher, pp. 5-6.
¹⁷ Kitcher, p. 4.
¹⁸ Kitcher, pp. 10-11.
¹⁹ Kitcher, p. 6.
²⁰ Kitcher, pp. 4-5.
²¹ Kitcher, p. 6.
²² Kitcher, p. 8.
²³ Kitcher, pp. 11-12.
²⁴ Dawkins, Richard. See A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 13.
²⁵ Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth. See here.
²⁶ Kitcher, p. 11.
²⁷ Jaspers, Karl and Bultmann, Rudolf. Myth & Christianity, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005, p. 105.
²⁸ Jaspers, p. 87.
²⁹ Kierkegaard, Soren. See “Translators’ Introduction” in Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love, translated by Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 13.
³⁰ Maritain, Jacques. Existence and the Existent, translated by Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan. Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1958, p. 83.
³¹ Maritain, p. 90.
³² Levinas, Emmanuel. “Time and the Other” in The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, p. 48.
³³ Levinas, pp. 50-51.
³⁴ Kierkegaard, p. 205.
³⁵ Kierkegaard, p. 113.
³⁶ Kierkegaard, p. 26.
³⁷ Kierkegaard, p. 94.
³⁸ Maritain, p. 58.
³⁹ Kierkegaard, p. 136.
⁴⁰ Kierkegaard, p. 110.
⁴¹ Maritain, p. 60.
⁴² Maritain, p. 58.
⁴³ Maritain, p. 67.
⁴⁴ Maritain, p. 60.
⁴⁵ Maritain, p. 65.
⁴⁶ Levinas, p. 48.
⁴⁷ Maritain, p. 87.
⁴⁸ Arendt, Hannah. “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future, New York: Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 91-141.
⁴⁹ The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, King James Version, 7:28-29.

Responding to one commenter’s question about whether the “me” which Wilkins uses has a referent, a referent which might well be the very sort of self which Wilkins seemingly denies, Wilkins explains, “I often rail against what I call the Reification Fallacy: the notion that if we use a word as a noun there has to be a thing the word denotes. ‘Me’ is a social, legal and semantic concept … I, me, we and the other self-referent terms … are just a way to anchor talk. It does not follow that there actually are unitary selves.”

Is Wilkins’ position simply “that selves are dynamic, fractured, [and] transitory” rather than “unitary”? Since “dynamic, fractured, transitory” selves are “obvious”, is it only the “unitary selves” which are illusions?

The state of being dynamic or transitory is not necessarily incompatible with being unitary. Indeed, the very notion of dynamic suggests a coherence – a unitariness – despite changes, and transitoriness does not assuredly preclude unitariness, either by itself or in conjunction with dynamism. This, then, leaves the term fractured as the only descriptor which Wilkins offers that might eliminate the possibility that selves are unitary.

The problem is that fractured is the most loaded of these three descriptors; it can either be intended simply as another way of denying (instead of arguing against) unitariness, or it can be used (in this case by opponents of Wilkins) to indicate an original (even if no longer existent) unitariness. Wilkins could then substitute some other term. He might, for example, replace fractured with disjointed, but it is very highly unlikely that any such substituted term would itself be anything other than a shorthand representation for a more involved argument.

Does Wilkins provide any indication of just what might be such an argument?

Wilkins seems to view favorably the notion that “there is no single you … instead there are a bunch of interconnected, arguing neural networks”, but that notion in no way precludes the unitariness which Wilkins denies. As a matter of semantic fact, that notion actually endorses unitariness (via “bunch” and “interconnected”).

Of course, Wilkins accepts “’Me’ [as] a … semantic concept … just a way to anchor talk”, and it is reasonable to expect that he would be perfectly at ease acknowledging self as a semantic concept. Wilkins would likely also accept the idea of a semantically unitary self, in which case remarks about selves being illusions or fictions are, at best, merely provocative semantics.

But what is the point of such provocative semantics? Is it supposed to effect consideration into the possibility that the self is not irreducible? After all, Wilkins says that it is the notion of experience as (or in terms of ) “an irreducible something or process … that I am disputing.” The question which then immediately rises to the fore is: What does it mean for anything to be irreducible? And, close upon that is this question: Is there anything which is irreducible?

That which were irreducible could be called simple, yet it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone who thinks or speaks in terms of selves regards a self as simple. Wilkins does not object to describing a semantic self in terms of neural networks, but neural networks are not irreducible. For that matter, neurons are not irreducible.

So, what is it that Wilkins thinks distinguishes a reducible neural network (and neurons) from a reducible self?

Well, he does say that “we should not accept things exist that have no definite and expressible nature and which are not investigable.” It is very difficult to imagine how a self is not investigable. On the other hand, it does seem more correct to describe a self as indefinite rather than as definite at least inasmuch as the self is dynamic and since the self is (seems) largely or often unpredictable. Still, these characteristics of the self hardly seem to justify the claim that selves do not exist.

Be that as it may, the really interesting point regards the notion that accepting the existence of a thing somehow depends on there being something expressible about that thing. As a practical or instrumental matter, this is certainly the case. However, as stated, the necessary expressible condition tends towards the most radical conceivable subjectivism, and that certainly is not what Wilkins intends. Rather, it is only the “objective feature[s] of the world” which he seems to mean to have accepted as existing.

Now, the semantics for the term objective is no simple matter. As an antonym of subjective, the term objective is commonly used to indicate mind-independence. In this way an objective feature would be one which exists regardless of whether or not – and regardless of in what way – any mind conceived of or was aware of that feature. In like manner, the term object at its most basic (in this type of discussion) is supposed to indicate something that exists regardless of whether any mind is in any way sensitive to or aware of that object.

A subject, on the other hand, is not just that which is sensitive to any object. A nerve, for example, can be sensitive, reactive, and, yet, it is not a subject. This is why a subject is most commonly equated to a mind. Is a self necessarily something other than a subject? For that matter, is a subject something other than a mind?

If there is no difference between self, subject, and mind, then consistency would demand of Wilkins that if he denies that the self exists outside of semantics, then he also needs deny that subjects and minds exist.

Some strict reductive physicalists will be inclined to deny that minds exist. They will claim that minds reduce to brains. But, brains are also reducible as are the components of brains, and, yet, at some event in the reductive process, awareness is lost.

Wilkins says that “’consciousness’ [is] a word that has, so far as I can tell, no actual meaning whatsoever, and should be abandoned”, and some physicalists may be willing to call for the abandonment of the use of the term awareness for the sake of reductionistic explications in terms of simple physical objects.

The result will be an assured and unremitting unintelligibility (an unintelligibility which might be at least mitigated with a non-reductive version of physicalism).

Wilkins resorts to an apparent attempt at giving some degree of primacy to the matter of what exists. Philosophy of – or in terms of – existence has come to be often referred to as existentialism. There are, of course, varieties of existentialisms, and it is worth noting what Jacques Maritain had to say about this matter:

there are two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the word existentialism. One way is to affirm the primacy of existence … as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be authentic existentialism. The other way is to affirm the primacy of existence, but … as manifesting the supreme defeat of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be apocryphal existentialism, the current kind which ‘no longer signifies anything at all.’ [Existence and the Existent, p. 13]

Eliminativist physicalists (or, possibly more precisely, denialist physicalists), some of them at any rate, may shrug off Maritain’s remarks or assert that it is science alone which provides for the “victory of the intellect” while also claiming that it is their physicalism alone that follows from science. Such physicalists are woefully unreflective about science, and that woeful condition was well captured by Karl Jaspers when he said:

materialism and a naturalistic realism have always been with us; similarly, man’s disposition to believe in the absurd is as unchanged as ever … It is only the contents of this faith in the absurd that are partly new: for example, belief in the advent of a definitive happiness for all in a classless society magically brought to birth through violence. … The absurd faiths of the modern era, ranging from astrology to theosophy, and from National Socialism to Bolshevism, suggest that superstition has no less power over the human mind today than it had formerly. … Absurd modern faiths may very well make occasional use of scientific results, without grasping their origin or meaning.

… This science, however, whose name is invoked by everyone, is known to surprisingly few: indeed, there are many scholars … who are unfamiliar with its principles. A crucial feature of modern science is that it does not provide a total world-view, because it recognizes that this is impossible. … science [at least ideally] is always aware of its limitations, understands the particularities of its insights, and knows that it nowhere explores Being, but only objects in the world. … Down to the present, this science has been accessible to the masses only in the form of final results referring to the totality of things, a form that absolutizes and distorts the actual results of science, giving rise to spuriously scientific total views. These reflect modern scientific superstition rather than real knowledge or insight into the meaning, content, and boundaries of science. [Myth & Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth, pp. 23-24]

Is a physicalism of the gaps any more justified than a so-called God of the gaps? No.

i. Select a example from the history of science of a transition between theories that is paradigmatically accepted as scientific progress;
ii. Demonstrate that those actors involved argued (successfully) in irrational or non-rational terms (whether wholly or in part), where rationality is defined by adherence to the methodology purported to define or characterise science;
iii. Demonstrate further that they could not have achieved progress otherwise; and
iv. Conclude that insisting on the methodology at the time would have forced the actors to give up.

The result was to place the epistemic systematists in the absurd position of advocating a methodology for science that would have killed the very progress allegedly brought about because early scientists followed the methodology.

Although this reductio succeeds, I want to suggest that Feyerabend’s historiography, and perhaps the historical approach in general, is somewhat paradoxical. The aim of his historiography is to free us from methodological or epistemological strictures but we find ourselves using the lessons of history to show that there are no lessons to be learned from history. This is too simplistic, though: what Feyerabend argued was not that there is and can be no methodology worth adopting but rather that all methods have their limits. Nevertheless, the paradoxical aspect comes from considering the use Feyerabend makes of history. Faced with a methodological rule, we can look to the history of science – and to apparently paradigmatic cases of good practice in particular – and show that an application of the rule would have been disastrous. However, it seems that this relies implicitly on a fixed interpretation of the events under consideration; after all, if it were possible for a rationalist or anyone else to recast the episode in a more favourable light for the rule at issue, we might be able to show that in fact its application would have worked then as now. Cases like dogmatic falsificationism are relatively straightforward insofar as they present so restrictive a rule that almost any interpretation would contradict it, but what of others? If, for example, it is possible to view Galileo not as a master rhetorician and opportunist but as a prototypical or actual rationalist, then it would seem reasonable and indeed advisable to not be restricted in historiography any more than in methodology or epistemology.

How might Feyerabend respond? He would probably argue that this is exactly the kind of criticism that is needed and hence that if the rationalist can identify this limitation of the reductio then he will likely also appreciate and accept the limits on his own methodology. It might be objected that Feyerabend’s interpretation of historical events is but one of many, with the rationalist versions at least having the merit of supporting a rational account of scientific history. The difference perhaps lies in Feyerabend’s commitment to proliferation, notwithstanding that he would approve of the tenacity of the rationalist view; after all, we can view Feyerabend’s approving quote of Lenin as pointing to the inevitability of conflicting historiographies. This tension between tenacity and proliferation will be further explored in a subsequent entry.

(See also this previous essay.)

I. When did you first touch my heart?

A voiceover which occurs very early during Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life explains that the way of nature is to seek its own pleasure and to have its own way. The way of grace, on the other hand, is put forth more apophatically: It is not the way of grace to seek its own pleasure; grace does not expect or demand its own way,¹ and the way of grace does not – and does not seek to – lord over anything. From this it is supposed to be apparent that a person who lives by the way of nature lives seeking his or her own pleasure and trying to have his or her own way. In contradistinction, people of grace are not devoted to the pursuit of their own pleasure; they do not demand their own way, and they do not wish to dominate.

This explanation comes in the voice of Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain), and it occurs so early in the movie that there can yet be no indication whether this expression is presented as a supposed fact of reality or simply as the gist of a personal understanding arrived at by Mrs. O’Brien.

One problem with this depiction, a problem which suggests that this voiceover explanation is but a personal understanding and a limited expression rather than a fact about reality is that the portrayal of the way of nature is exceedingly simplistic. That portrayal makes it quite an easy matter for virtually all persons to insist – with justification – that they most certainly do not live in accord with what appears to be the thorough self-serving identified as characteristic of the way of nature.

Whether not failing to be thoroughly self-serving is sufficient to claim to be living by grace is another matter altogether, but the fact that grace and its way seem to be best characterized by extensively apophatic statements contributes to the ease with which any person could claim to live in the way of grace simply by virtue of not being primarily devoted to his or her own pleasure or to having his or her own way.

It is an easy matter to think that the character of Mr. O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt) is to be understood as nothing more than an exemplification of the way of nature while Mrs. O’Brien exemplifies the way of grace. After all, Mr. O’Brien himself makes it quite clear that he has chosen to live according to the way of nature, where the way of nature is more properly identified as the way of the world, where that world is primarily the human social order which makes itself enticing primarily by the rewards it offers.² It is the pleasure and benefits to be had from those rewards which Mr. O’Brien seeks.

Furthermore, Mr. O’Brien himself associates his wife – and very much less so himself – with goodness (a condition of which grace is supposed to be at least constituent), and he also states outright that such goodness cannot succeed out in the world. Having comparatively little contact with the way of the world, his wife comes across as ethereal, so much so that there is even a scene where she floats almost as if an angel. Rather than being merely a matter of surrealistic artistry, this scene serves to emphasize that much of what is conveyed in the movie about the O’Briens are the remembrances, the emotions, and even remembered emotions of the eldest son, Jack (with Hunter McCracken playing the younger Jack and Sean Penn playing the adult Jack).

Coming as it largely does from a child’s mind, this perspective provides reason to consider it likely that the association of Mr. O’Brien with the way of nature and Mrs. O’Brien with the way of grace is just too facile, too superficial, and this superficiality relates directly to the problem found in the rather common notion that the way of nature and the way of grace are incompatible as well as veritable contraries.

Mr. O’Brien tries to prepare his sons for the way of the world: He teaches them about fighting; he demands deference; he even warns them that being good like their mother will do nothing other than assure failure in the world. These lessons in no way recommend even consideration of the way of grace – supposedly Mrs. O’Brien’s way – as an alternative possibility to the social Darwinism which fits so well with the way of nature. But, it is also quite clear that Mr. O’Brien in no way regards the lessons he imparts to his sons as serving his own interests.

It is true that he might be thought of as fulfilling a socially expected obligation to prepare his sons for the world when he teaches them to be at least somewhat dismissive of the way of grace in order to succeed in the world. It is also true that Mr. O’Brien might be concerned about being looked upon with social disapproval if he does not do his part to orient his sons for the way of the world. It might even be claimed that Mr. O’Brien is ultimately sparing himself from the displeasure he would feel were his sons unprepared to succeed in the world. Even so, he could honestly aver that the lessons he seeks to impart are a matter of pure selflessness in that the lessons are entirely for the welfare of his sons; neither the lessons nor the success Mr. O’Brien desires for his sons are for his benefit.

In this way, Mr. O’Brien could rightly insist that he does not live in accord with the way of nature, although he would admit that his life is also not the unmitigated way of grace.

In like fashion, it might be said that, despite a love for her children that is seemingly more unconditional or less overtly demanding than that which her husband exhibits towards their sons, Mrs. O’Brien does not actually live by the way of grace, because she reaps pleasure by loving and also because she might hope for or receive from her children a love requited in appropriate fashion.

All this just serves to reiterate how very simplistic, incomplete, how very off the mark are the impressions most likely to be formed initially from the depictions of the way of nature and the way of grace with which the movie begins (of course, it is worth keeping in mind that these depictions may themselves be remembrances of Jack’s childhood understandings).

Although it is the apophatic manner of expression which most strikingly depicts the way of grace, the film also identifies the way of grace as the way for happiness. In other words, it is simply an error to think that there is no pleasure to be had with the way of grace; it is an error to think that the way of grace entails denying the self of all pleasure or satisfaction; extreme asceticism is not the way of grace.

Furthermore, while the way of grace is the way to happiness, the way of grace is not protected from displeasure or even misery. In fact, it is an error even to think that the way of grace will surely encounter less misery than will be had with the way of nature, and this is a significant part of why love needs to be – and why the way of grace is – patient.³ However, the way of grace is not to be patient for the sake of happiness or to endure and abide with the expectation of happiness as if happiness were a reward. Rather, the aim of the way of grace is simply the love which goes beyond personal preference,⁴ and this is no remote, wholly transcendent sort of love; this is a love to be made manifest and recognizable in this world.

In no way does Mr. O’Brien seem to be a man who does not love. His love may not so clearly be the grace which goes beyond preferential love, yet his sons seem to be very much aware that he does love them. But, at least for Jack, the eldest son, there is something about his father’s love that seems not quite right. It is not as if Jack himself can clearly identify or precisely express what is the problem that he experiences in his relations with his father; Jack is, after all, far too young through most of the movie to be able to do so. In Jack’s case, even resorting to a “You don’t love me” is to be seen as more of an accusation of some sort than as an expression of doubt or denial that his father loves him. And, it is not as if it is unheard of for a child to jab at a parent with the claim that the parent does not love the child.

From the child’s perspective and based on the child’s limited experience, to say that a parent does not love the child is the most horrific charge that can ever be leveled at a parent, because the one thing of which a child is most certain is that for parents to be good people they must love their children.

The closest that young Jack comes to presenting a case against his father is when he goes through a familiar sort of litany, the purpose of which is to present his father as a hypocrite: Mr. O’Brien will not let his sons put their elbows on the dinner table, but Mr. O’Brien puts his elbows on the table. We also know that Mr. O’Brien made a big show of making Jack close a screen door properly fifty times after Jack had let the door slam, and we can be fairly certain that Mr. O’Brien had himself slammed a door – or let a door slam – on occasion without making himself go back and shut it properly.

Jack also grumbles about his father not caring about other people, but none of this amounts to a case – even in Jack’s mind – for the idea that his father does not love him or his brothers. In addition, none of this amounts to an explanation for Jack not loving his father, and that is because Jack does in fact love his father. This is made utterly and unmistakably apparent in the scene where Mr. O’Brien is playing a church organ while Jack stands on the side of the organ watching his father in admiration and with so much adoration that Jack absolutely has to go sit on the organ bench beside his father right in the middle of the piece he is playing. Jack knows that, because of his father’s love, he is welcome – and privileged – to sit with his father.

Still, there is something that is not quite right with – or something that seems to be missing from – his father’s love.

II. Always were you calling me

One evening, Mr. O’Brien is relaxing in a chair, reading the newspaper, when Jack walks into the room, notices his father, and halts as if his mind has now switched from thinking about where he was going to calculating how best to escape from that room, from his father. Before Jack can even begin to leave the room, Mr. O’Brien – with a dispassion that is neither an order nor even a request made with the distractedness which comes of having one’s attention focused elsewhere – lets Jack know that he wants Jack to reach his lighter for him. Jack walks over to the side table next to the chair where his father is sitting and moves the lighter closer to his father. The lighter clearly was already easily within Mr. O’Brien’s reach when he asked Jack to get it for him, and one cannot help but wonder why he wanted his son’s unneeded effort.

Jack then begins to leave, and his father asks him whether he had forgotten something. Jack dutifully gives his father a goodnight hug and walks away. But, before Jack can make it out of the room, Mr. O’Brien asks him whether he loves his father. Jack stops, and does not so much confess his love as accede with uneasiness to the expectation (or is it more like a demand?) that he love his father.

Of course, love is not something that comes to be by being demanded, or simply because it is expected, or upon request. From Jack’s perspective at the time, this entire scene with his father in the living room just reinforces his experience of his father as domineering – something which Jack’s mother is not. Can it be that his mother’s way somehow imparts to Jack a sense that love neither demands its own way nor lords over that which is claimed to be loved? Can it be that Jack has some sense that his father’s love is diseased by a drive to control?

Certainly.

But, this is the impression of Mr. O’Brien garnered from the perspective of a boy of middle school age, and, although love cannot be enforced, discipline can be, and Mr. O’Brien definitely does enforce discipline. However, discipline is not necessarily enforced in order to domineer. A parent can enforce discipline without a desire to control and, instead, only with the desire and hope to eventually foster in the child an appreciation for the value of developing self-discipline and self-control.

Even so, might not the sense which Jack seems to have that there is something not quite right or something incomplete about his father’s love derive from experiences such as that in the living room where love is set as if it is subject to being demanded and enforced?

Possibly.

Yet, such a conflict between love and demand could more directly result from the child having but a very scant understanding of the father’s heart, mind, and situational intent, an understanding which may very well be more scant than is the child’s sense of what love is, or what it is supposed to be like. In that case, it could be asserted that it was a mistake on the part of Mr. O’Brien not to anticipate or consider the possibility that the child might get misled or confused by so close an association of love and demand.

However, even if it is a mistake, is it actually ultimately avoidable? Even if Mr. O’Brien were cognizant of the possibility that such a confusion might arise, might he not have other ultimately more pressing reasons for requesting or demanding expressions of love which happen not to be forthcoming on their own in that place and at that time?

Despite any first impressions that might be had to the contrary, Mr. O’Brien is not a prototypical 1950s American father even if he does seem to exhibit many characteristics of such a supposed archetype. His passion for music and the appreciation for beauty which he tries to impart to his sons does not fit that oft derided archetype. The fact that he has twenty-seven patents further recommends that consideration of Mr. O’Brien not be in terms of archetypical conformity. Rather, he is to be considered in terms of his notable exceptions to any such generalization. (Besides, it is never the way of grace to simply treat any individual as a type.)

Accordingly, it might well be that Mr. O’Brien intends for his sons to come to realize that the disimpassioned and toughened demeanor generally regarded as indicative of manliness need not – and should not – serve to suppress expressions of love. With what goes on between Jack and himself that evening in the living room, it might even be that Mr. O’Brien recognizes that Jack, in particular, has a reticence for expressing love. In that case it could well be that the best course of action, with Jack’s benefit in mind, would be for Mr. O’Brien to indicate frequently to Jack that the expression of love is generally to be regarded as preferable to a reticence to express love.

Emilio Segrè, a Nobel laureate in physics, once said, “When the mind is not prepared, the eye does not recognize.”⁵ When a parent enforces discipline in the hope that the child will eventually appreciate the value and importance of developing self-discipline and self-control, the parent is actually preparing the child’s mind to be able eventually to recognize that it can discipline itself.

Likewise, when Mr. O’Brien presses for Jack to indicate affection and express love, Mr. O’Brien can be trying to prepare Jack’s mind to eventually be able to recognize that the expression of love is not only acceptable but also something important and good.

Furthermore, by pressing Jack to express love and affection at times when Jack clearly has no concurrent intense feeling of affection, Mr. O’Brien can be preparing Jack’s mind to realize that love is something other than a particular sort of intense feeling and also that love is more about that which one loves than it is about one’s own feeling and one’s own self. After all, love (if love it is) abides even when the intensity of feeling wanes, and the intensity of feelings often wanes. In this way, Mr. O’Brien can be preparing Jack’s mind to recognize that love always extends beyond feeling as well as beyond mere preference (including the inclination of the moment).

In effect, then, what Mr. O’Brien can be doing on occasions like the one that evening in the living room is preparing Jack’s mind for the way of grace.

Mr. O’Brien can be doing this, but is he?

Even if Mr. O’Brien acts as he does in order to prepare Jack’s mind for the way of grace, how is it possible that Jack can ever understand that this is his father’s intent? After all, from Jack’s perspective at this point so early in his life, Mr. O’Brien seems to have been most devoted to preparing Jack for recognizing the way of the world. This preparation has been for recognizing that the way of the world supersedes the way of grace, the way of love. From what Jack can tell (based upon what he has been taught about the way of the world), the way of the world, at most, only tolerates the way of grace.

At no time has Mr. O’Brien denied that love never wanes even if the loving feeling does, and at no time has Mr. O’Brien denied that he loves (at least his family); so, Mr. O’Brien basically does not deny the reality of the way of grace. Maybe all he denies is that it is proper to assign primacy to the way of grace.

There are two ways to understand his father which are immediately available to Jack. First, the way of grace – wherein love is enduring and persists despite moment to moment exigencies – is fine so long as it is restricted to one’s own family. Second, when his father demands expressions of love that evening in the living room, he intends to be domineering simply as a reminder that, in the hierarchical nature of family, primacy rests with the father.

This may very well be what Mr. O’Brien is doing; it may very well be that Mr. O’Brien is not trying to prepare Jack’s mind to recognize the way of grace as extending even beyond preference for – or allegiance or devotion to – one’s own family.

But, the glory of grace – the glory of the love which goes beyond preference – is that this love can be made manifest despite the many ways in which attention can be diverted from its importance. The glory of this love is in the frequently surprising ease with which this love can be made manifest despite the many ways and reasons available for restricting its scope to exclude any sort of circumstance at any particular time.

In one sense, love is independent of, does not depend for its existence on, does not come into and go out of existence in reaction to the moment to moment exigencies of the world. In another sense, love depends on those very same exigencies. Those exigencies set the context, the conditions not just in which but also for which love is to be expressed and made ever more particularly manifest. The glory of grace is in the innumerable opportunities which this love (in the person of the one who loves) finds – and, indeed, is intent on providing – for creating the veritably countless, singular ways in which to make yet more manifest the love which goes beyond preference.

In The Tree of Life there is a voiceover expressing a recognition that “Always were you calling me.” Although there is ambiguity regarding just who the “you” is, what is far more clearly the case is that the calling is only – and can only be – by means of grace. But, the means of that love are necessarily of great subtlety, because love in itself invariantly prefers to serve up no demands and only attains its greatest fullness when its very being (its reality) is its whole appeal. Having no desire to lord over anyone, what makes it appealing is not that it imparts the sense of being loved; rather, the appeal of love lies in its invitation to the individual to create new manifestations, new occasions of love where and as only that individual can.

III. The mustard seed

The manner in which the way of the world seems to limit the scope available to the way of grace does not restrict the glory of the way of grace so long as love is localized in any individual. Just as mere preference can serve as a seed for the love which extends beyond preference, the glory of grace rests in the opportunity which this grace itself provides to make love more widely manifest despite the ubiquitous reasons for regarding love as a convenience at best.

In the case of Mr. O’Brien and Jack, it is because of the abiding opportunity which both is and is afforded by the glory of grace that it does not ultimately matter whether Mr. O’Brien was preparing Jack to recognize the way of grace as restricted for the sake of practicality or whether he was preparing Jack to recognize grace as subject to no such limitation. It does not ultimately matter because, the love which Mr. O’Brien exhibits for his sons is itself sufficient to impart the sense that love does not wane with feelings and according to the particulars of circumstance.

Love breaks forth from the seed which is preference when, for instance, preoccupation with the feelings one has for an other gives way to an interest dedicated to the sake of that particular other. This dedication does not waver as feelings vacillate; in effect, the love which came from preference frees itself from the restriction of preference, because that love is not restricted to those feelings which came together as preference.

In like fashion, grace can break forth from the seed which is the love for a particular other when it is realized that love is not defined in terms of restrictions owing to the very fact that love knows no restrictions. The manner in which love is expressed can be constrained (in accord with contexts, for example) without restricting or setting limits to love itself (and its persistent quest for opportunities and ways in which to make itself ever more manifest in the world). Indeed, even if the manner of its expression is rightly constrained (for the sake of others, for instance), it is with the recognition of the fact that the authenticity of love is found in its refusal to be restricted that grace comes forth.

Accordingly, it does not matter whether Mr. O’Brien had it in his mind to prepare Jack for the way of grace. The sense of love imparted to Jack by Mr. O’Brien, the mere sense that love is not restricted to moments of approval and withdrawn at moments of disapproval, can well serve as a seed from which grace might break forth in and from Jack. Grace will break forth if and when Jack ever recognizes that the scope for love is restricted (such as to his own family) only by human contrivance and not because of the nature of love.

Once Jack comes to this realization and allows himself a more extensive and expansive sort of love, he may feel acutely that this same realization had always been available to him, had always been calling to him. But, the glory of grace is in the opportunities it affords; any wallowing in grief over the opportunities Jack missed is to give way to his making grace manifest as, where, and when only he can.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed”.⁶ Since that kingdom is the kingdom of God and since God is most closely identified with love, it is love that is like the mustard seed “which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”⁷.

The fact that the mustard seed is not actually “the smallest of all seeds” and the fact that the mustard is much more often a weed rather than a tree have caused some occasional consternation.⁸ But, the point of the parable remains valid.

Despite being so seemingly insubstantial relative to the world, love – particularly that love localized in any individual – is itself a seed which can produce much that cannot be produced by the way of the world. In addition, from the perspective of the way of the world, what love can produce contributes little if anything to the interests that drive the activities of the world. So, from the perspective of the way of the world, what it is that this love produces – primarily more of itself in a variegation of guises – can seem as very much unwanted as is a weed.

Furthermore, because of the very nature of this love, there is always the chance that it will spread and become, from the perspective of the interests that drive the way of the world, more than just an occasionally inconvenient weed. In fact, the veritable ineradicableness of this love in conjunction with its natural tendency to spread itself, makes this love a threat to the way of the world inasmuch as this love draws people to itself and away from the interests which serve to drive the way of the world. In effect, as this love spreads itself, it weakens the grip that the way of the world has over individuals.

But, love does not spread in order to devastate either the way of the world or those who live in manners which maintain the way of the world. Rather, love only spreads by the very appeal of its way, and love recognizes in the way of the world not an enemy (although there are enemies to the way of love within the world) but, instead, opportunities for new expressions of itself which make love still more appealing by making it ever newer.

Despite itself, the way of the world is rife with opportunities for new manifestations of grace. It is because of these opportunities that the choice is not actually between the way of the world and the way of grace; the choice is the way of grace or not.

In The Tree of Life, there is the impression that Jack eventually comes to be aware of the glory of grace. How he becomes aware of it is not made obvious. Why would it be? Words can prepare a person to be able to recognize, but the actual recognition is an experience rather than words, and the severe subjectivity of experience is not readily shared with words alone.

Likewise, the experience of recognition relies on something other than – and results in something other than – mimicry. The O’Briens were a family that regularly went to church, and Jack no doubt at some point heard that it is just and proper to be kind even to, possibly especially to, outcasts: prisoners, lepers, and the like. And Jack remembers seeing his mother give a drink of water from her own cup to a clearly very thirsty prisoner whom the local police had in custody. There was a crowd of people around, but it was Jack’s mother alone who stepped forth in kindness, and Jack was in no way ashamed that his mother was the exception in kindness.

As a matter of fact, Jack must have reveled in pride about his mother, because, as young as he was, he, too, managed to behave in a similarly exceptional way. One of the neighborhood children had been disfigured in a fire, and it is often the case – particularly for children – that physical disfigurement renders the afflicted to some extent a veritable leper. One day, Jack thought he should express kindness to his scarred friend, and Jack did so by putting his arm on his friend’s shoulder.

Was Jack simply mimicking his mother? Or, was this a genuine expression of close affection, an expression arising out of an experience of recognizing an opportunity for that sort of love that is beyond mere preference?

Ultimately, the glory of that love which is the way of grace is experienced as being awash in opportunities for expressing love in ways that provide for others their own opportunities to have a new or renewed sense of being loved and, also, to love.

—————————————————–
¹ The style and essence of this apophatic expression is found in I Corinthians 13: 4-6, which says, “… love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong”.

² Here the tension between the way of man (identified with mammon) and the way of grace (which is to say the way of God, hence the way of love) recapitulates Luke 16:13 – “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

³ See I Corinthians 13: 4.

⁴ “Make love your aim”, I Corinthians 14: 1.

⁵ Cited in Ohanian, Hans C., Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008, p. 167, and paraphrased on p. 228.

⁶ Matthew 13: 31.

⁷ Matthew 13: 31-32.

⁸ See here for one such recent brief discussion.

This past Saturday night I trekked the sixty or seventy miles into town to see Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life. I went without having read any reviews of the movie, and the only description I had seen was the synopsis which appeared when I went to check out the show times. That brief description read in part:

The Tree of Life is an impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

Aside from the fact that the family actually lives in Texas rather than the Midwest, the synopsis cannot really be said to be flat out wrong; it is just that the description does not come anywhere close to capturing the essence, the spirit of – frankly, the experience which is – this movie.

Of course, an experience is wholly subjective, and anything which is strongly subjective may well be a singular experience. One thing that led me immediately to consider the possibility – maybe the strong possibility – that my experience might not be widely – if at all – shared occurred right in the theater as soon as the movie ended. As the final credits rolled, I overheard the reactions of three gentleman sitting directly in front of me. One of them said, “I don’t know. That went right over my head.” Another wondered aloud whether they should ask their parish priest to see the movie so that he could tell them “what it was about.”

Especially the remark about the movie going over the one viewer’s head reveals something at least about contemporary expectations when it comes to story telling. The common expectation derives from the equally common notion that a story can succeed or please only if it makes sense, and this making sense depends on the story being ordered – being constructed – first and foremost (if not exclusively) for the ways of the intellect. And, in our time, the way of the intellect is extensively identified with (the hope for) a pure rationalism that supersedes or predominates passions, working, as it does, from the presumption that reasoning and passion are necessarily at odds.

Such an ordering is certainly appropriate for narrative simpliciter; however, when a meaningful effect, a dramatic effect – as distinguished from an impression upon the intellect – is the intent, the dispassion of ordered rationality in itself will always be drastically inadequate. This is not to say that drama and dramatic effect can ever succeed absent at least some rational appeal and sensibility; hence, it is absolutely appropriate – indeed, it is reasonable – that rational sensibility be sought and found in order that there may be an experience of the significance which lies beyond an anchoring in the simply rational.

However, the rational ordering found or imposed by the intellect must not be so extensive that it smothers, leaves no room for, or has no heart for the extra-rational dramatic effect. Marshall Fine’s review of The Tree of Life refers to a press note which sacrifices any hint of the dramatic for the sake of constructing a narrative:

(Jack’s) human struggles become part of the cosmos’ vast creative and destructive powers, as he begins to sense his connections to the dust of the stars, to the prehistoric creatures who once roamed the earth and to his ultimate destiny.

It may well be that press notes and synopses in general cannot help but fail to represent or even indicate the dramatic aspects or purposes of such a film as this. It might, nevertheless, be that a synopsis such as the one Fine cites manages to impart a sort of transcendent feeling for some people once they have seen the movie. However, as Marshall Fine says about that description in the press note he cites, “Really? See, I got none of that.”

The Tree of Life is most definitely concerned with connections, but they are not the connections of a mere cosmic, pantheistic, or historical oneness. Rather, as is made apparent very early in the movie in a voice over by Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain), the connection of ultimate interest is that between nature and grace.

In that voice over, the way of nature and the way of grace seem, at first blush, to be contrasted, as if they are incompatible and, therefore, unconnected and always and everywhere at odds. However, as conventional, familiar, or orthodox as this contrast seems, it is, in fact, a concoction born of an incomplete, an immature understanding which itself is a difficult to avoid consequence of the very nature of language and, hence, both narrative and explication.

Language – and probably the written word more so even than the conversational word – is a tool which is most efficient at depicting contrasts. That is why when the way of nature is identified with the self’s satisfaction of its own wants, nature comes across as being in the starkest possible contrast with the way of grace or love which, clearly, is not identical to the self’s satisfaction of its own wants.

This stark a contrast not only seems to establish an incompatibility – in this case, between nature and grace; the very starkness also suggests that complete understanding is had when the contrast is achieved, appreciated, and accepted. The sense of fullness in an understanding that comes from contrast is enhanced by another characteristic of language: the relative inefficiency of language at depicting the subtleties which mitigate or soften without denying or eliminating distinctions.

The efficiency of contrast depiction in conjunction with the relative inefficiency of language at mitigating or qualifying contrasts tends to foster impatience in intellect. And, despite the freneticness which is always part of impatience, a habit of such an impatience can easily arise out of the asymmetry evident between the efficiency of language at depicting stark contrast and its relative inefficiency at depicting subtleties of distinction. An habitual impatience will, more often than not, in turn produce sloth in the intellect as well as a dulling of the imagination.

This is one reason why it is important to realize that contrasts – such as that between nature and grace or the way of nature and the way of grace – are not always or only intended and employed to suggest that the contrast represents some attained completeness in understanding. Instead, a contrast can just as well be utilized in an attempt to stimulate at least considerations into the possibility that the matters being contrasted might not actually be as thoroughly distinct from each other as is suggested by the very fact of those matters having been named and, thereby, designated as being apart from each other.

Of course, the pursuit of this alternative use of contrast requires some patience. And, it is certainly possible with patience to overcome the asymmetry of efficiency in language that favors contrast in order to produce a more fully or more purely rational explication of the relationship between nature and grace or the way of nature and the way of grace. For instance, it could be pointed out that the apparent incompatibility between nature and grace results from a rhetorical ploy rather than from licit reasoning.

Nature and grace are clearly distinct matters, but not all distinct matters are incompatible. And, while it can be legitimate to generalize about the way of nature by defining it as the self’s satisfaction of its own wants, it is rationally illicit to regard this “way” and “nature” as identical or inseparable. In certain contexts, it may be generally accurate to characterize nature in terms of selves driven by satisfaction of their own wants, but, within such contexts, if there are ever any particular circumstances of nature in which selves seem not to be driven by self-satisfaction, then it is not the case that the way of nature is always or only or purely a matter of self-satisfaction. The way of nature may well be predominantly a matter of pure self-satisfaction, but, if grace, for instance, is ever discernible within nature, it is rationally illicit to assert an incompatibility between nature and grace and, frankly, even between the way of nature and the way of grace. The way of nature may be predominantly something other than the way of grace, but such a predominance does not render nature incompatible with grace; a predominance does not establish or assure an incompatibility.

II.

In The Tree of Life, there is one scene of prehistory in which a dinosaur is lying atop some stones beside a stream. Another dinosaur appears, notices the one which is lying there, and comes up to it and considers the dinosaur that does not – or cannot – get up. Then, in one swift and aggressive motion, the dinosaur which had just crossed the stream presses one of its taloned feet on the other dinosaur’s head, but, rather than crush the recumbent animal’s head, the dinosaur removes its clawed foot, hesitates, and then moves on, before stopping briefly to take one more look at that dinosaur which, for whatever reason, cannot or does not get up. Is this an instance of mercy, of mercy in nature, the sort of mercy that can be expected of grace?

What are we to make of the story about two injured bald eagles at a rehabilitation facility? The first one found was a female; the second one, which was found approximately two months later, was a male, and there was no place to put the second eagle except into the flight cage with the female. The problem is that, when raptors are introduced to one another under such circumstances, there is commonly “an altercation”, sometimes a fight to the death.

However, in this case, when the male was introduced to the flight cage, something very unexpected happened:

“I put the male in the cage … and he was very frightened … [the female] spots him and she gets very quiet and she’s bobbing her head around trying to get a better look at him and all of a sudden he makes a call. … And as soon as [the female eagle] hears that … she gets so animated, she’s back and forth on the perch and … goes just out of her mind trying to get his attention. And then she’s going back and forth on the perch, she’s constantly calling to him.”

The female, after many attempts, taught the male how to hop up a series of steps to her perch. She actually jumped down and showed him what to do.

“Once he’s up on the perch, they’re touching each other. They’re standing so close to each other that their … wings are touching each other. … and I’m shocked there’s no fight. It doesn’t make any sense. The behavior is an absolute aberration.”

… a friend who has banded birds for 20-some years … said “that sounds like a mated pair, that sounds like [they had already been] a bonded pair [before each was injured].”

Are these a merely “bonded” pair? Or, is this an instance of love occurring within nature? Or is love, including love amongst humans, actually nothing but a mere bonding?

As has already been shown, we can use reasoning to question notions and counter assertions about the incompatibility of nature and grace. But, that ends up doing nothing more than highlight the incompleteness of understanding, and a purely rational and complete explication (if such a thing is possible) requires that many more matters be addressed, matters including what would be characteristics of grace (if there is such a thing as grace) as well as how or whether it would be possible for grace to be “discernible within nature”.

Yet, even if these and the many other relevant issues could be explicated completely and in a purely rational manner, would such a thing as grace actually be demonstrated? Indeed, could such a thing as grace be rationally demonstrated as something that is objectively real? For what is grace? Grace is (one form of) love, and the fact of the matter is that, so far as we know, love is most definitely the sort of thing that is never rationally and objectively established no matter how thoroughly it is explicated. This is because no matter how well it may ever be understood rationally, love is always a subjective matter of experience.

Since love is a matter of experience beyond the purely (and merely) rational, love can be and has been easily denied – in service to rationality, for the sake of preserving the supremacy of pure rationality – as either an illusion or as epiphenomenal to the physical processes that are said to be the actual constituents of reality.

Such eliminativist tactics need to deny or denigrate experience in order to preserve the purity and alleged supremacy of rationality, but such an experience as love need in no way deny or denigrate rationality (and rationality is not denigrated when accession to its ultimate supremacy is withheld). Although such an experience is a matter that is beyond the purely (and merely) rational, such a supra-rational experience arguably needs rationality at the very least because such an experience is properly regarded not as an end desired for itself but as the catalyst for making this thing that is experienced made yet more manifest.

In effect, such an experience is – or can be – another beginning, but this rejuvenating feature can just as well be found in the discursions of the more merely rational:

my father … never allowed us, my siblings and me, to be satisfied with what appeared to be a dialectical victory … or a success in explaining ourselves. ‘What else,’ he would say when we had assumed, exhausted, that an exposition or an argument was over. And if we replied: ‘Nothing. That’s it. Isn’t that enough?’, he would reply to our momentary wild despair: ‘Why, you haven’t even started yet. Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking. Having an idea …

And, in the context of this discussion, it could just as well be said, “or having an experience” —

or identifying it, is something. But then again, once absorbed, it’s almost nothing: it’s like arriving at the first, most elementary level … But the really interesting and difficult thing, the thing that can prove both truly worthwhile and very hard work, is to continue: to continue thinking and to continue looking beyond what is purely necessary …’ ¹

… indeed, to continue looking beyond what is purely – and merely – rational.

III.

Love is always a subjective matter of experience. That experience can come either in the form of a giving to be received or in the form of the receiving of that which has been given, but there is nothing about this – or any other – experience that demands an abandonment of rationality. Accordingly, this suggests that language, even despite its cumbersomeness and even with the orderliness demanded for a rational sensibleness (such as is usually provided by a plot in movies), can communicate or effect a sharing of experience – even if this cannot be accomplished for all individuals at all times.

Then why is it that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”? Why is it that there “is no plot, in the sense that The King’s Speech has a plot”? And, why is it that “the story reveals itself, incompletely, in fits and starts”?

Experiences of love have been successfully communicated – even experientially shared – countless times. In some cases, for instance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the experience of love is communicated in a way that penetratingly reveals not just the experience but something about the very nature of love, and this communication depends upon “a traditional, linear narrative”.

However, those experiences are commonly of the sort of love which occurs between two people, a preferential love², and the love at the heart of The Tree of Life – that is to say grace – is a love which is inclusive of while also being beyond preference.

Moments of even preferential love are experienced “in fits and starts”, intensely at some times and not at others, and so, too, is it with grace – when and if a person experiences or is most acutely aware of it. Therefore, it is absolutely appropriate that The Tree of Life resort to and emphasize “fits and starts” rather than the “linear”, as it tries to impart an experience – and an awareness – of grace.

Furthermore, grace is supposed to be a much more widely infusive form of love than is preferential love. Therefore, an experience or awareness of grace is less dependent on an extensive linearity; accordingly, an experience or awareness of grace is to be expected to come – maybe initially – within mere snippets of what so often seem to be more commonplace occurrences or possibly even with (or as) the connections between linearly disjointed events. With such a grace – and the experience of this grace – as its core interest, it makes perfect sense that The Tree of Life be constructed largely as an agglomeration or montage of scenes, rather than a smoothly flowing stream of events with a clear chronology.

There are many, more specific details about the movie worthy of further discussion: the dramatic construction; the effect of intimacy imparted by the cinematography; the character of the father, his own personal history and the manner of his interaction with his sons, his eldest son in particular; and the fact that the father’s character is largely revealed according to the eldest son’s childhood perspective and memories. All of which means that this might just be the first of multiple essays here about The Tree of Life.

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¹Marías, Javier. Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. New York: New Directions Books, 2005, pp. 278-279.

² See, in particular, Kierkegaard’s The Works of Love.

The Left has always been a manner of speaking everywhere. I mean, the Left that you … refer to, as if it existed or ever had existed outside the realm of the imaginary and the speculative. You should have seen it in the ’30s, or even before. A mere collective fantasy. Disguises, rhetoric, the more austere the uniform, the more fraudulent, all pompous facets or forms of the same thing, always hateful and always unjust, and invulnerable too. … They’re all oppressors, it’s amazing that people don’t realise this ab ovo, it makes little difference what cause they’re fighting for, what public cause, or what their propaganda motives are. Frauds and transcendental innocents alike all describe these motives as historical or ideological, I would never call them that, it’s too ridiculous. It’s still amazing that some people still believe there are exceptions, because there aren’t any, not in the long run, and there never have been. Well, can you think of any? The Left as the exception, how absurd. What a waste.

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Marías, Javier . Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions Books, New York: 2005, p. 81.