Impure Reason

"Dewey" and "Adorno"

2008-12-01T21:18:00.000-08:00

There are fewer habits more corrosive to thought than the tendency to name-drop and to speak in "isms" and sometimes "ologies." I'm as guilty of this as the next academic, and what I wish to do here is make explicit what's going on with the names I tend to drop. In doing this, I want to keep the names and traditions in our peripheral but not our foveal vision.

When I invoke the name of "Dewey," what I'm trying to bring into the conversation is a commitment to objective fallibilism -- the view that our knowledge and our ethics is both objectively valid and fallible, yet also corrigible, in light of experience -- also a commitment to piecemeal reform; a faith in the capacities of human beings to solve collective problems; a confidence that technology can be used democratically, humanely, and wisely, even though it usually isn't; a view of human beings as inseparable from and continuous with the rest of the natural world, even with respect to our capacities that seem most uniquely human; a sensibility that is respectful of spiritual yearnings even when skeptical of the supernatural; and a recognition that these yearnings often to take on a communal form, even though ecclesiastical hierarchies have usually posed obstacles to the furthering of freedom, knowledge, and justice.

When I invoke the name of "Adorno," what I'm trying to bring into the conversation is a recognition of the dialectical operations of society and culture -- e.g. how specific cultural products -- a play, a philosophical text, a novel -- can simultaneously conceal and reveal the movements of capital and power which generate them; an insistence that the evils of Communism cannot in any way excuse us from turning a blind eye to the evils of capitalism; an awareness of how fundamentally everything in Western culture, philosophy, politics must be re-framed in light of the Holocaust; and the imperative of re-conceptualizing the very nature of rationality itself in terms of a re-orientation of thought towards the sensual particularity that is excluded as "non-rational" by the canon.

The other philosophers by whom I've been most recently and directly influenced -- Buber, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Rorty, McDowell -- are philosophers who I appreciate because of what there is in their work which I can appropriate in the further explication of Dewey and Adorno. (And that turns out to be a great deal!)

And, as the great philosopher Groucho Marx once put it, "these are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Left-Wing Cultural Conservatism

2008-11-15T15:34:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, I mentioned to Kirby (at Lutheran Surrealism) that I regarded myself as a "left-wing cultural conservative." A Leftist Cultural Conservative (LCC) is someone who agrees with the cultural conservatives on most points: the decline of community and tradition; the hypertrophy of the government as diminishing individual liberty and flexibility of response; the rejection of self-discipline, rigorous standards, and commitment to
ideals beyond oneself; and the increase in narcissism or infantilism
generally . . .

. . . but in the left-wing version, all this is seen as symptomatic of a society in which consumerism runs unchecked, and the dynamic which drives consumerism is the dialectical movement of capitalism in its current manifestation. So I find much to agree with cultural conservatives at the level of CULTURE, but I see the motor of these changes as ECONOMIC -- hence the 'left-wing' part. Whereas right-wing cultural conservatives, esp. the Christians but increasingly Muslims -- tend to shift the blame to "the 60s" or to Darwinism, to "materialism," etc.

I'd hasten to point out that I don't mean to put religion firmly on the "right-wing" side without qualification -- there are also devout Christians, Muslims, etc. who are "left-wing cultural conservatives" -- and I would further hasten to add that my peculiar version of Reform Judaism-cum-religious naturalism is indispensable to my version of left-wing cultural conservativism -- the rise of narcissism is concomitant with neglect of considerations of justice for both human others and non-human others.

Forms and Forces

2008-08-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

In the philosophical tradition, there is a hidden but important debate between the advocates of a static metaphysics -- forms are more real than forces -- and a dynamic metaphysics -- forces are more real than forms. It's been said -- correctly, I think -- that one of Plato's accomplishments was to create the appearance/reality distinction in order to resolve the debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides. In those terms, it might said that Nietzsche's move is to reverse this priority. So there are "ousiological" metaphysicians and "metabological" metaphysicians -- metaphysicians of substance and metaphysicians of change.

Lately I've been trying to articulate why I've retreated from my enthusiasm for Nietzsche and for Deleuze, and I now think I'd want to put it this way: forms and forces are phenomenologically equiprimordial. And my quarrel with Nietzsche, but especially with Deleuze, is that they are no more sensitive to this experiential truth than are the philosophers in the tradition from Parmenides to Hegel which they reject.

A Pragmatics of the Multiple: A Brief Sketch

2008-08-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

In a private correspondence, Yusef (of The Enlightenment Underground) suggested the term "a pragmatics of the multiple" for what I want to do here -- a term which I'm happy to accept!

The contrast I wish to draw is between a pragmatics of the multiple and the metaphysics of unity. The former not only allows for but insists on a multiplicity of ways of speaking with the further realization that different ways of speaking are different ways in which human needs, desires, interests, fears, and hopes are given voice -- that is, in which they take on a concrete and public existence in the on-going life and evolution of a culture. Since these multiple ways of speaking can be in conflict, as needs and desires and interests are in conflict, there arises an agonistic dimension to cultural life which cannot be entirely eliminated.

The latter, the metaphysics of unity, is the demand to locate the correct way of speaking -- the way of speaking that fits the world, which shows us how the world really is. Such a way of speaking would put an end to all social antagonisms by showing once and for all what is true and what is false in each sphere of discourse. The impulse or urge towards a metaphysics of unity was born, and not without good reason, in Plato's rejection of the Sophists and of Thucydides. Since then even if one does not embrace the Platonic solutions to the problems he poses, it was felt that one is obliged to formulate an alternative. Thus the panoply of metaphysical doctrines: Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Christianity (Augustinianism, Thomism), Cartesianism, Spinozism, mechanism/materialism, idealism, phenomenalism, Hegelianism, Marxism, process metaphysics (Nietzsche, Whitehead, Dewey, de Chardin, Bergson), phenomenological ontology (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). Each doctrine opposes all the others and sets itself up as the most fundamental or highest truth of all things.

In the science/religion debate as it unfolds before us today, the deadlock is exacerbated by an insistence on the metaphysics of unity. Thus it is asked - do science and religion both refer to "the same reality"? Do they thereby conflict? Or do they refer to different "aspects" of "the same reality"? Or is one merely bias, subjective, opinion, and the other alone describes things as they really (basically, deeply, fundamentally, ultimately) are?

The pragmatics of the multiple offers a way out of this impasse by recognizing the metaphysics of unity as itself simply one more way of speaking. (This is, in effect, Nietzsche's jujitsu move against Plato. Among Nietzsche's Anglophone readers, Rorty has been unusual in his appreciation of the full force of this move.) But the pragmatics of the multiple is not mere Rortyian "conversation" any more than it is Habermasian "discourse." On the one hand, conversation and discourse are decisive turning-points in the trajectory that leads from the apes to the Enlightenment. There is no return to a time before Plato and before the ethics of dialogue, contra Nietzsche and contra Heidegger -- nor would we want such a return. The moral revulsion one feels at the world described by Thucydides is indication enough of that.

Thus a pragmatics of the multiple is also an ethics of dialogue. But it is one which, unlike the metaphysics of unity, does not attempt to put an end to dissent and to "dissensus." Nor, importantly, does it cordon off each vocabulary within its assigned territory -- science here, religion there, art over there in the darkened corner, and so on. Rather the pragmatics of the multiple seeks to enrich each vocabulary through its conflict with the others -- science with religion, art with science, religion with art. (Sanity with madness?) Each vocabulary must remain open to all the others and at the same time respond the provocations it receives from within its own traditions and procedures. A theologian cannot respond to the provocations of neo-Darwinism except theologically; an artist cannot respond to the provocations of religious doctrine except artistically.

In this way a pragmatics of the multiple differs from the demand for mere "tolerance" which asks us to not feel or think about the provocations which are all around us. At the same time it differs from a metaphysics of unity which demands the determination of a final, definitive way of speaking. Nor is it mere relativism, if only because relativism necessarily stands in relation to some absolute against which certain things (vocabularies, concepts, values, etc) are found relative. But the pragmatics of the multiple does not say that the place of the absolute is unoccupied; it says that there is no such place as 'the absolute', or more precisely, that metaphysics of unity is itself a vocabulary, albeit the most curious of them all.

Bounded in a Nutshell

2008-07-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

In a comment to Science, Religion, and Metaphysics, I made this remark which I want to bring up to the front for closer examination:

There is no more conflict between science and religion, nor any more need for reconciliation between them, than there is between carpentry and cooking.

Science, Religion, Metaphysics: Some Preliminaries

2008-07-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

A long-standing motivation for my philosophical work has been the relationship -- sometimes adversarial, sometimes conversational -- between "science" and "religion." [I come to this relationship as someone who has strong undergraduate background in science (neuroscience and paleontology) and as someone who does not identify with a particular religious institution but who nevertheless feels the pull of religious experience.]

Much like Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Stanly Cavell, and Jurgen Habermas, I want to find a way of resisting the temptation to endorse or create a doctrinal metaphysics -- not even a metaphysics of becoming, process, or "difference" in the senses of Nietzsche, Dewey, Whitehead, or Deleuze. (Despite my strong affinity for such metaphysics!)

(This is not to say that I think one can simply dispense with metaphysics; rather I tend to think, along with Cavell and Putnam, that the temptation to metaphysics is deeply ingrained in the Western psyche. I would not want to interpret this temptation as a transhistorical dimension of the human condition, but neither is it something that can be lightly thrown off, as Rorty seems to think.)

The crux of my pragmatic pluralism is that the question "what is there?" must always be re-phrased as "what is there in which respect?" For only when that latter question is answered do we have a specified domain the entities of which can be considered. For example, consider the question, "does Sherlock Holmes' wife exist?" This question can only be answered by first specifying the domain of discourse which is relevant. If the domain of discourse is "the real world," then the answer is "no" (but neither does Holmes, of course). If the domain of discourse is "the world of the Holmes stories as authored by Doyle," then the answer is "no" (but for a different reason -- because Holmes never married.)

But this line of thought works not only for literary creations -- it works just the same way for all discursive practices. Quarks and protons certainly exist -- within the framework of modern quantum mechanics. (Whether we will still say that they exist within the framework of whatever theory eventually succeeds quantum mechanics is an open question!) And even in ordinary language, we are confronted with a plurality of ways of distinguishing between aspects of lived experience.

Suppose I had had chicken for dinner last night instead of steak. Then I today would be a different system of molecules. But it seems odd (to say the least!) that I would therefore be a different person. One might be tempted to side with dualism here. But my alternative is to insist that there is no deep and fundamental truth of "what I am", tout court. Considering me as a system of molecules, and considering me as a person, are not different metaphysical realities -- they are different ways of considering, which is to say, different ways of using language. (As Rorty would say, they are different "vocabularies".)

If one succumbs to the temptation of metaphysics (and it is difficult not to succumb), then one will be interpret science, and/or religion, as metaphysical doctrines. And that is the decisive move which is taken for granted, and which I want to avoid. For once that move is made, everything else follows. Only then can one ask if science and religion are concerned with the same reality or different realities, e.g. "natural" and "supernatural". Or assert that where science and religion conflict, one or the other must be rejected. Both hard-core theism and hard-core atheism emerge only once it is accepted that metaphysics is the only way of speaking.

By contrast, the pluralism I want to develop here is a way of sidestepping the metaphysical impulse entirely. Instead, the question is one of which entities we are committed to speaking about when we employ a certain vocabulary (that of genetics, physics, psychology, literature, art, music, philosophy, etc.). In my terms, the temptation of metaphysics is the dream of a final, absolute, and uniquely correct vocabulary in terms of which everything real can be described. And that dream is one from which I have not only awoken but from which I find myself in the process of constantly having to awaken myself from.

Education and Philosophy (Part I)

2008-07-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

Doing without the usual fanfare and preamble -- that is, doing it by way of loudly announcing that I am doing without it -- I want to introduce two motifs for subsequent elaboration --

that education is the production of freedom and

that philosophy is education for adults

Thus and so!

Doing Without "Facts 'vs' Values"

2008-07-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

In the discussion under Intelligent Design and Evolution, Kirby and Olorin have been going back on forth on the relation between science and ethics.

The proof of the pudding of the sort of pluralism I've inherited and which I'm developing here and elsewhere is in the eating, esp. when it comes to these sorts of issues. Here, I want to contrast pluralism with two bad alternatives.

The first option, and which is in many respects the dominant discourse of academic philosophy and the academy generally, is a version of "scientism." This much-abused term will stand in, here, for the notion that scientific methods are the only legitimate processes whereby objective knowledge (which goes beyond ordinary perceptual consciousness) can be acquired. (I'm not delighted with this definition and may need to revise it subsequently.) On this view, "values" pose a number of interrelated problems. One problem is that when scientific theories are taken as having a monopoly on objective knowledge, values may become seen as "subjective." Apart from the considerable ethical and political problems this causes, it also arouses the philosophical problem of how to fit "values" into a world of "facts." In this case, the relation between science and ethics can be seen as arbitrary, science can be regarded as "value-neutral," and countless other difficulties arise like the heads of the Hydra.

The second option, which stands in a dialectical relation to the first, is to give ethics a metaphysical foundation (see note (1) below). On this view -- which, I must admit, I lack any real intuitive feeling for -- values cannot be merely subjective or conventional, but they also cannot be grounded in the sort of knowledge that science yields (but see note (2) below). Thus values cannot be "natural" but must instead have some sort of transcendent foundation. Alternatively: when the very idea of a transcendent foundation ceases to be rationally compelling and emotionally motivating -- i.e. the moment of "the death of God" -- then the abyss of nihilism threatens to yank out the foundation of civilization from under our very feet. There is something tiring and boring about how this argument then proceeds -- as if on cue, the exhibits are presented -- Exhibit 1: Nazism; Exhibit 2: Stalinism; Exhibit 3: terrorism.

The alternative I wish to explore takes its cue from a remark by John Dewey: "But values are as unstable as the forms of clouds" (Experience and Nature, excerpts available as PDF here). The forms of clouds! Are they not real? To what sort of reductive, scientistic physicalism must one be beholden in order to insist that clouds are not real (are not "really real")? If clouds are not real, I want to say, then nothing can count as "real". And so too are values -- they are as real as anything other aspect of our lived experience as a certain kind of animal -- the sort of animal that engages with its world through a plurality of discursive social practices.

-------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
(1) The dialectic, as I see it, can be seen roughly as if each viewpoint is a reaction-formation to the other. Thus, the Greek atomists reacted against ancient Greek religion and made possible the Sophists; Plato and Aristotle reacted against the Sophists; early modern philosophers reacted against Scholasticism; the Romantics reacted against the Enlightenment; religious fundamentalists reacted against 'modernity'. The "culture wars" have been with us for a long, long time!)

(2) Off the top of my head, I can think of two exceptions in the history of philosophy -- Aristotle and Spinoza -- who hold that ethics is grounded in the metaphysical structure of reality and that science provides insight into this structure. But Aristotle is a tricky case, since "science" does not mean for us post-Baconians what it mean to Aristotle or the Scholastics.

Why Educate?

2008-07-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

In a comment to Intelligent Design and Evolution, Olorin writes:

“Given what you've said above, about the status of intelligent design as a scientific theory (i.e. that it has none), should we conclude that it therefore should be denied a voice within a science classroom?” Well, look at it this way. Do you want me to teach French in your chemistry class? What purpose would that serve? If a theory has no scientific evidence nor any hope of scientific evidence, then teaching it in a science class is not teaching science. Then, too, as I argued before, ID is inherently a religious theory, whether or not it employs explicitly religious terminology. So, besides being a waste of time, teaching ID as science runs afoul of the Constitution by imparting the cachet of science to a particular religious tenet.

As is my usual style, I'll address what I see as the minor points of contention before moving on the big ones. The minor point is this: there's a difference between (1) design theory necessarily entails the existence of at least one supernatural being and (2) design theory necessarily entails the existence of God as conceived by classical theism. ID is "inherently religious" only if (2) is true, not if (1) is true. I don't think I need to show that (2) is false; Kant did a perfectly good job of that in the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. That's why design theorists assiduously avoid claiming that the supernatural designer is God -- it's because they know they can't get away with it -- not in an empirical or even political sense, but in a strictly philosophical sense. (To the extent that the "strictly philosophical" can be separated out from the empirical and the political!)

(In fact, I do believe that most people who support intelligent design are theists, and moreover, theists of a very specific sort. Their theism certainly feeds into their motives for wanting design theory to be true, and their motives for wanting it taught alongside evolutionary theory. But motives are not reasons, and the luminaries of the design revolution are all too keenly aware of that!)

The main point I want to address is this: "If a theory has no scientific evidence nor any hope of scientific evidence, then teaching it in a science class is not teaching science."

Whether or not I accept this depends on what is meant by "teaching science." If "teaching science" just means "conveying to students the best of contemporary scientific theories," then I'll concede the point without reservation. But here is where I demur. Instead, I want to broaden and deepen the meaning of "teaching science" to "teaching students how to evaluate scientific theories, how to appreciate the process whereby theories are generated and tested, and how to situate science in a cultural, historical, and political context."

I suppose I'm feeling somewhat frustrated both by the larger debate and by how this conversation is unfolding here on Impure Reason. What I'm interested doing is breaking down the artificial boundaries between the teaching of science, the teaching of history, the teaching of poetry. How can students appreciate Blake without appreciating Newton? How can they understand Romanticism without the Enlightenment? Or fundamentalism without understanding Biblical criticism and "Darwinism"? (Not to mention neo-Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis!)

What it comes down is this: why do we educate? If we educate so that the next crop of wage-slaves can take the place of those who have moved on, then fine -- but then, let's cut the bullshit about "democracy" and "citizenship." Or, let's put our money where our mouth is -- in which case, let's actually teach students how to think, how to listen, how to speak, how to reason, how to experience -- and if we do that, and if we seriously want to equip students with the cognitive tools they need to actually be the informed and responsible citizens we say we want them to be, then hell yes -- let's "teach the controversy" -- and bring some epistemology and philosophy of science and, why the hell not, some history and poetry into the science classroom too, and some science into the literature classroom.

Practical? Hell no! But worth doing? Hell yes!

Pragmatism and Pluralism

2008-07-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

In a comment below, I was asked as to what motivated my shift from What is Fundamentalism? to Fundamentalism vs. Pragmatism?

The shift in my position was prompted by thinking about fundamentalism in light of what John Dewey says in A Common Faith and Reconstruction in Philosophy. He uses similar language to describe the errors of fundamentalism in CF and the errors of rationalism in RP, and this prompted me to consider their similarities.

I was also reminded of Peirce's essay "The Fixation of Belief" and re-thinking that little essay in light of the posts I read in Uncommon Descent. Several of the regular commentators there are skilled or semi-skilled in philosophy, theology, and law, and they are very good at presenting arguments for their views, and at finding problems with the arguments presented by others.

What they are not good at, however, is recognizing the importance of experiments that can test their premises or their consequences. (It does not seem to me that they even recognize the difference between argument and experiment!)

For example, one of the more astute commenters there repeatedly hammers home the point that world-views must be given proper intellectual foundations. (He makes this point in order to establish that theism is more adequate than materialism.) This is not a stupid or foolish thing to say -- not at all! But it does show what to my way of thinking is a restricted and narrow conception of what intellectual activity consists of. It does not, for example, consider the pragmatist conception of intellectual life as one that is explicitly and emphatically anti-foundationalist, pluralistic, and melioristic.

I have therefore come to think that Peirce, James, and Dewey were exactly right to stress the importance of openness to experience as having a transformative effect on concepts and theories. And I also think that the anti-foundationalistic arguments of Quine and Sellars, but above all Wittgenstein, are, while not decisive, at any rate illuminating in showing us how the world, and our relationships with it, can be seen as drastically different than they are taken to be from within the rationalistic framework.

Which brings me to my next major point for this post: the meaning and value of "pluralism." For the time being, I'll provisionally define pluralism as a negative thesis: the claim that there is no single description of reality that fully satisfies all human needs and interests. There are some needs and interests that are satisfied by science (and of course different needs and interests are satisfied by different sciences in different ways); others by history; still others by poetry, or by music, or by religion, or by communion with bird and trees and wild things; or by love and friendship.

I don't have a perfect term for the contrast with "pluralism" -- "fundamentalism" comes to mind, as does "monism" (of course), "rationalism," and "Platonism." I shall use "rationalism" here as a general term for the thought that there is, or must be, a single description of reality which fully satisfies all genuine human needs and interests. (Notice my use of 'genuine' here -- see note (1) below!)

By this light, classical (non-liberal) Christianity is a form of rationalism, but so too are the metaphysical systems of philosophy -- including those of antiquity, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism -- and those of modernity, such as those of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. But so too is the metaphysical naturalism and 'scientism' that has been a rival to theological metaphysics since the time of Hobbes, and which today finds no shortage of defenders among scientists (e.g. Dawkins, Pinker), philosophers, and cultural critics (e.g. Hitchens). (But see note (2) below.)

In short, my contention here is that religious fundamentalism and 'scientistic' fundamentalism -- the most extreme, and therefore the loudest, of the views in the debate between intelligent design supporters and evolutionists -- are both contemporary fruits of the rationalist tree. The pluralism which I support, and to which I hope to contribute, is therefore critical of both of them.

Notes:
----------------------
(1) A rationalist promises to satisfy all genuine human needs and interests; conversely, whatever needs and interests are not satisfied by a certain description of reality, the rationalist maintains, are not genuine but false or misleading or distorted. This line of thought can be clearly discerned in Platonism, in Christianity, and in Marxism. I do not contend, by way of contrast, that there are no preferences to be made with respect to human needs and interests. On the contrary, I'm a strong advocate of the capability approach when it comes to social justice, and I am something of an ethical perfectionist in terms of self-relations. (Reading 'ethical perfectionism' in a broad sense so as to include virtue ethics.) I am pluralist insofar as I don't think that there is any correct way of hearing, and responding to, the perfectionist call.

(2) There are in fact many different kinds of rationalism and pluralism. For example, Sam Harris in his The End of Faith insists that there is only viable method for assessing beliefs -- the method of science -- but allows that some "religious" beliefs could be vindicated by such a method. In particular, he suggests that the Buddhist belief in reincarnation could be so vindicated. But this does not detract from his larger point, which is that no belief which is not justified through scientific means should be treated as justified at all. Whereas my pluralism goes "all the way down," even to the point of embracing pluralism with respect to forms of justification

What is "Darwinism"?

2008-07-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm wading into the intelligent design/evolution controversy, I want to say something about how I position myself, terminologically.

There's some debate about the meaning of terms such as "evolution," "evolutionary biology," "Darwinism," "neo-Darwinism," etc. I would distinguish between weak Darwinism and strong Darwinism.

"Weak Darwinism" is best characterized through a quote by the philosopher Richard Rorty:

as good Darwinians, we want to introduce as few discontinuities as possible into the story of how we got from the apes to the Enlightenment.

This basic idea -- telling a story that goes from Miocene apes who were the ancestors of both us and chimpanzees, through Pliocene hominids to the emergence of Homo sapiens, and from the rudimentary cultures and forgotten myths of the Upper Pleistocene through to mythologies of ancient Greece and Israel and beyond that to the Enlightenment (along with the immanent critique of the Enlightenment of Nietzsche, Adorno, Dewey, and Foucault) -- that insistence on continuity is what I call weak Darwinism, and I'm proud to consider myself a "weak Darwinian" or a "Darwinian in the weak sense."

It is "weak" because it is not committed to any position about the empirically detectable mechanisms through which these events unfolded.

By contrast, I would call "strong Darwinism" the position that unpredictable mutations and natural selection are individually necessary and jointly sufficient in explaining biological change, including cognitive change. Richard Dawkins is certainly a "strong Darwinian" in this sense.

I am not a "strong Darwinian," because I think -- from my very amateur position! -- that neo-Darwinism must be supplemented with a theory of form. The best candidates for such a theory today, from what I can tell, lie in the sciences of self-organizing systems and what is called "autopoeisis." Recently I have encountered the idea of an "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" (PDF). I doubt that an EES is the complete theory, either, but I would regard it as a helpful step in the right direction of getting us closer to being able to tell a story, with fewer discontinuities, that runs from the apes to the Enlightenment -- and beyond.

Intelligent Design and Evolution: Following Up

2008-07-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

I've had more blog traffic in the past day than I have in the past year. Apparently this is a topic that stirs the passions.

In the comments to the post below, some points came up that I wanted to respond to, as a way of better situating myself among the various options on the table.

For one thing, I must strenuously disagree with Kirby Olson (Lutheran Surrealism) who writes that

The fact that evolutionists believe that theirs is the only theory that can or should be taught is itself a kind of religious faith that asks to be established.

This remark indicates, I think, a confusion of the distinction between a good theory (or the best theory among various alternatives) and a religious or quasi-religious faith. Evolutionists ask that their theory be the only one taught for a reason: because it's the best theory we presently have. The question I want to raise is this: is that a good enough reason to silence all challenges to it?

In all the discussions I've observed and participated in over this issue, one thing has struck me again and again: that people who disagree with mainstream biology feel oppressed and marginalized. The very rhetoric of "teach the controversy" works because it appeals to a deeply American sense of fair play and championing of the under-dog.

You see, what I want to do is quite difficult: I want to articulate a position that acknowledges the sense of resentment at unfair treatment that is associated with criticisms of evolutionary science, but without granting any scientific validity to those criticisms.

I have no qualms with the view that evolutionary theory, in some sense, is the best theory we presently have. And I certainly don't think that intelligent design theory or creationism have any chops as scientific theories -- at least in the versions that have seen the light of day up till now -- and this is not because they involve claims about supernatural beings, but because they claims they do make are not testable.

My suggestion, rather, is that even if that is the case, they still have a place in science education. At stake here in what I'm saying isn't so much about theology or epistemology -- I can't bring myself to care about theology at all, and I have little patience for all the details of epistemology. Rather I'm slowly working my way towards expressing a sentiment I have about what education is, about why education is important, and about the point of having an educational system in a pluralistic society.

Intelligent Design and Evolution: Preliminary Thoughts

2008-07-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've been writing at several blogs (Thoughts in a Haystack, Eye of the Storm) on the debate between advocates of intelligent design and evolution, and I've been taking up far too much space on those blogs with my own ruminations. (I've also been following Uncommon Descent very closely, though I was banned from there due to inappropriate language.)

Thinking over the problem from a variety of perspectives, I've arrived at the following point of view:

1) Intelligent design is necessarily committed to the existence of at least one supernatural being.
2) Intelligent design is not necessarily committed the view that this being must be God.
3) Intelligent design does not succeed as an argument for the existence of God.
4) Intelligent design fails to pass muster as a scientific theory.
5) Intelligent design should be mentioned in science classrooms in high schools and colleges.

My argument for (1) is that intelligent design theorists themselves go so far as to define "intelligence" as "that which is irreducible to the combination of chance and necessity." In this approach, basically reading Plato against Monod, they define intelligence as non-natural. Although biological intelligent design (BID) leaves open the purely formal possibility of design by aliens, this only raises the further question as to where those aliens came from. Either they did evolve, in which one can well ask why that hypothesis is not available for terran life as well, or else they were also intelligently designed. By contrast, cosmological intelligent design (CID) explicitly requires that the fine-tuning argument licenses the inference that there must be at least one being which cannot be described by the laws of the physics of this universe, and that sounds close enough to "supernatural" for it to count. (But see my note (1) below.)

My views for (2) and (3) are basically indebted to the insights of Hume and Kant, though I think that Kant sees the problem in a more general and deeper way that Hume does. (Briefly: Hume only provides a criticism of the argument from design when cast in the form of an argument of analogy; Kant provides a criticism of the argument from design in any form.)

My argument for (4) hinges on the importance of testability. Consider these two hypotheses (thanks to John Pierot of Thoughts in a Haystack for the discussion, based on work I've read by Eliot Sober):

H1: There exists a supernatural being which is solely responsible for the natural order and which wants (or would have wanted) everything to be purple.

H2: There exists a supernatural being which is solely responsible for the natural order and which wants (or would have wanted) there to be exactly as many different, and different types, of purple things as there are.

Firstly, notice that both hypotheses are claims about supernatural beings, and both make claims about the relation between supernatural beings and observable phenomena. But there's a crucial difference. If H1 is true, then there is a set of observable phenomena -- "everything being purple" -- which can be shown to be false. So H1 is testable -- that is, it can be tested, and it can be shown to be false according to the test.

But compare that with H2. The observables entailed by H2 are indistinguishable from observations that can be made independent of H2. There are exactly as many different purple things, and as many different types of purple things, as there are -- regardless of the truth of H2. Since the truth or falsity of H2 makes no difference in what can be expected, it is not testable.

My contention, then, is that intelligent design is like H2 -- it claims that there exists some intelligent being which wanted to produce either the universe (CID) or life (BID) exactly as it is. This yields zero explanatory insight, or what is the same thing, it is not testable.

Having said all that, one might reasonably expect me to argue that intelligent design has no place in the science education of our public schools, colleges, and universities. Here I depart from what is basically an entrenched consensus, on the following grounds.

Firstly, "teaching the controversy" -- that is, bringing the full weight of evidence and reasoning to bear -- is an excellent opportunity to teach students how to think scientifically and not merely master a body of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, science educators are not themselves taught in how to teach epistemology. The easy solution is to ignore the problem. The hard solution, and the better one, is to regard the "teach the controversy" movement as an excellent opportunity for the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) to create a program on how to teach science educators how to teach epistemology and philosophy of science for high school and college students. It's a public secret that we are not teaching students how to think scientifically, we're not teaching students how to appreciate and enjoy what science can and cannot do, and the "teach the controversy" strategy is an opportunity to change that.

Secondly, consider the argument raised by Crispin Sartwell in favor of teaching intelligent design in schools (here or here). In brief, he argues that while intelligent design (or, for that matter, creationism -- though he doesn't mention creationism by name) is anti-naturalistic, and for that matter, anti-scientific, that doesn't mean that it should be excluded from science education. And I agree.

Consider, Sartwell asks us, someone who is deeply religious, and who believes, as part of her faith, that neo-Darwinian explanations are incompatible with that faith. That person is going to be very upset if her child is subjected to nothing but the neo-Darwinian point of view in a school that is supported by her school taxes. But more interestingly, Sartwell points out that it's completely reasonable for her to be upset. It would be puzzling if she weren't upset, given what she believes! Now, does her voice deserve to be heard in the classroom?

I think that the answer is "yes" -- "yes," even though intelligent design is not a scientific theory. That's because science education has be about more than instilling in young minds all the latest scientific theories. It has to be about training people about how to be scientifically informed citizens in a pluralistic and (supposedly) democratic society. And for that reason, anti-naturalistic -- even anti-scientific -- voices should not be excluded. To exclude those voices from the classroom -- or, to put it more pointedly, to silence those voices within the classroom -- is tantamount to isolating science from its social and cultural and historical and political context. And doing that is a failure of science education.

Having said that, I would take issue with Sartwell in one serious respect. On his view, the naturalistic world-view, which is (for him and for me) the scientific world-view (but see note (2) below), is the stance of "reason" -- in contrast with that of "faith." For one thing, I'm not happy with any simplistic, Enlightenment-era contrast of "reason" and "faith." For another, I'm not happy with the identification of science and reason.

If we take "reason" here in a broadly Sellarsian sense -- in the famous phrase, taking part in "the game of giving and asking for reasons" -- then it seems clear to me that anyone who deliberately excludes him or herself from that game has positioned him or herself outside the range of views that are available for dialogue in the public sphere. So if one takes up an anti-scientific position, and in doing so puts oneself outside of the space of reasons altogether, then no, I don't think that position is entitled to a public voice. (I say that even though the division between public and private is itself highly contested.) And I take it as fairly obvious that someone such as P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula) holds precisely that view: that scientific methods and rational inquiries are simply co-extensive. (But see note (3) below)

Therefore, in order to maintain that anti-naturalistic/anti-scientific voices deserve to be heard, I conclude that one can position oneself outside of science without thereby positioning oneself outside of "reason" altogether, and that means that the identity between "science" and "reason" should be rejected.

I don't doubt that this view as outlined here would be of little comfort to either party of the intelligent design/evolution debate, but for the time being, I think it's the most plausible view to hold.

Notes:

(1) However, one might consider the multiverse hypothesis. Suppose there are infinitely many possible universes. Each universe is defined by a set of values of different physical constants. Possibly, a fully developed physics could explain the nature of universes as such. Call this a general physics and the physical laws for each universe are defined by a particular physics. Then a supernatural agent, in keeping with the tradition of theological speculation, would be an agent that cannot be defined in terms of a general physics.

(2) Of course, the sharp contrast should be noticed between my view and that of the advocates of intelligent design. On their view, the identification between the domain of scientifically explicable phenomena and the domain of natural phenomena is precisely what ought to be rejected!

(3) I'm not entirely sure if Myers can afford to be as committed to materialism as a metaphysical position as he advertises himself as being, for the simple reason that it has proven to be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to adequately account for mathematics and for ethics in materialist, or physicalist, terms. Myers is best understood, I contend, as an Enlightenment rationalist whose basic commitments are to science, to liberalism, and to secularism. Whether this is ultimately a compelling view, or whether the work of Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Rorty shows how deeply problematic this view is, is a matter I shall address in a subsequent posting.

Fundamentalism vs Pragmatism?

2008-07-05T14:42:00.001-07:00

In a comment below, Kirby wrote:

You still need some axioms that you take on faith in order to think at all, so I think I prefer fundamentalists to Nietzscheans.

(Not clear who the Nietzscheans are here -- surely not me!)

I'd like to make one minor point and one major one. The minor point is that I object to the use of "axioms" here -- it seems to me that inquiry begins from lived situations which are found to be problematic. To call these problematic situations "axioms" is to put far too 'logicized' a gloss on our cognitive process.

The major point is what really matters isn't whether one has presuppositions and prejudices from which one sets sail -- since it is incontestable that such are always and already at work -- rather, what really counts is whether the presuppositions and prejudices are themselves subjected to criticism based on subsequent inquiry.

The error of fundamentalism, like that of rationalism in general, is that certain premises are held a priori and so immune to criticism, whatever the results of inquiry turn out to be.

Now, I realize that I've just made a sudden shift in my position from my previous post, and that shift deserves emphasis. Below, I fell for the standard line that there is something "irrational" or even "stupid" about fundamentalism. Now I want to shift positions here -- and perhaps pick a fight with WW in the process.

In rough, what strikes me about fundamentalism (whether "religious" or not -- there is also Marxist fundamentalism, Freudian fundamentalism, feminist fundamentalism, etc.) is how basically rationalistic it is. By which I mean, that there are certain assumptions from which one begins, and the consequences of these assumptions are drawn with admirable rigor and acumen, whether those consequences concern the decadence of the West or the foolishness of teaching evolution in public schools.

I want to contrast this rationalism with a different attitude which I identify as pragmatism. The pragmatist attitude is one in which presuppositions and prejudices are revised in light of the results of inquiry. Thus, nothing is a priori in any firm or absolute sense. What is held as stable at a time is just whatever makes possible fruitful inquiry, and any inquiry might allow for rejection or revision in what has previously been held as stable. (And of course the criteria according to which inquiry is evaluated as "fruitful" are themselves revisable!)

In that light, the problem I find with fundamentalism is not a deficiency of rationality but -- if anything -- an excess, a hypertrophy, of rationalism at the expense of correction by experience (scientific, historical, artistic, religious, or otherwise).

What is fundamentalism?

2008-05-12T16:07:00.001-07:00

What if fundamentalism is a tool of the Devil designed to ensnare the souls of those who refuse to use the reason and intelligence that God gave them?

The Difference

2008-05-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

The difference between science and religion is that science does not explain everything, whereas religion explains nothing. This is because it is not the vocation of religion to explain -- nor to mystify! -- but to illuminate.

What is a Rational Animal?

2007-04-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

The reactions against Cartesianism in analytic philosophy of mind have made possible a revival of the Aristotelian term for a human being -- the idea of a rational animal. Descartes famously (or infamously) dismisses this description in Meditation II, where he denies that the cogito can be identified with the Scholastic animale rationale, on the grounds that it is requires categories that cannot be derived from the solipsistic stance of self-consciousness.

By contrast, in the work of Donald Davidson, Alastair MacIntyre, and especially John McDowell, the idea of a rational animal has resurfaced. In doing so, we must confront two questions: (a) what makes an animal rational? and (b) why must the rational entity, so conceived, be an animal?

To be rational, on a model broadly shared between Davidson and McDowell, is to capable of making moves within what Sellars called "the space of reasons": it is to be capable of asserting, of giving reasons for ones assertions, and to be capable of asking others for the reasons for their assertions. McDowell emphasizes that this point holds not only for episodes of knowing, as in Sellars, but for all thought as such. To put the point in terms developed by Bob Brandom, to think is to make a material inference.

An animal is rational if it is not merely sentient but also sapient. "Sentience" entails consciousness, affectivity, and responsiveness to changes in its environment. An animal may be sentient and yet be extremely clever in manipulating objects in its environment, even its fellow creatures. "Sapience" differs in that sapience entails a capacity for reasoning and for recognizing that it is taking up a view on the world and not merely occupying a place in an environment. (Heidegger's distinction between Welt and Umwelt, mediated through Gadamer, is an important influence on McDowell's version of this distinction.)

But McDowell, more than his fellow Sellarsians Brandom and Rorty, insists that the bearer of rationality must be an animal. It must be something intrinsic to the way of life of a particular kind of animal, a human being -- an animal that can acquire culture, Bildung, Geist. Thinking and knowing are part of how we are as animals, as web-weaving is part of how a spider is as an animal. And it is part of McDowell's critique of "para-mechanism" in philosophy of mind -- Millikan and Dennett in particular, also fellow Sellarsians -- that they lose their grip on the fact that what is rational must be animal, and what is animal must be rational.

Haiku for Levinas

2007-03-24T08:12:00.001-07:00

Wild yet unhidden
Open to the elements
Time grows in the mind.

A Challenge to Modern Atheism

2007-03-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

Over the past year I've become a frequent lurker at Uncommon Descent, a website devoted to discussion of "intelligent design theory." There are sufficient criticisms of the epistemology of intelligent design theory that it would be overkill to add yet another, and in any event, there are many far more competent than I to do so. Rather, I want to direct attention to a specific feature of the sort of arguments favored by intelligent design supporters: the critique of materialism.

The argument, as I understand it, goes like this: the problem with Darwinian explanations is that they entail a materialistic metaphysics, and that is bad because materialism is incompatible with deeply-held assumptions that are necessary for social functioning and for personal fulfillment. So Darwinism, apart from being false (as it is held to be) is also extremely dangerous.

This argument finds an eloquent expression in the work of C. S. Lewis (esp. Mere Christianity) and a more sophisticated elaboration in Alvin Plantinga's "self-defeater" argument against naturalism. Here I want to present one version of the argument; in subsequent posts I'll begin to examine what I think is wrong with it.

The conundrum of modern atheism is that it is committed to two seemingly incompatible theses: materialism and rationalism. The commitment to the first consists of the premise that only entities that can figure in a physical theory (however broadly construed -- dark energy is in, pixies are out) can count as real. The commitment to the second consists of the premise that the world as encountered in everyday experience is intelligible to human reason. Historically speaking, the commitment to the second premise has required a denial of the first, for we can be assured of the intelligibility of the universe only if there is an Intelligence who was responsible for its creation.

At work here is the following line of argument, very powerful but surely in need of critical examination:

P1: Only a rational agent could produce a structure that could be comprehended by a rational agent.

P2: This structure can be comprehended by a rational agent (namely, us).

C: It was produced by a rational agent (if not us, then God).

The foremost arguments against modern atheism, as seen for example in C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, are supposed to show that materialism and rationalism are incompatible, so that if one accepts materialism, then one must reject rationalism. Conversely, if one accepts rationalism, then one must reject materialism.

Another way of putting this point is in terms of versions of naturalism. Materialism can be interpreted as metaphysical naturalism: nature, however broadly construed, is all there is. Rationalism can be interpreted as methodological naturalism: the methods of the natural science have priority in adjudicating between competing assertions. The Lewis-Plantinga strategy is to drive a wedge between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Thus metaphysical naturalists such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are put to one side, and methodological naturalists such as Quine are put on another. Dembski says of Quine:

Quine, though a naturalist, was not wedded to the methodological and metaphysical naturalism of Van Till. Quine was a pragmatic naturalist. This pragmatism allowed him to entertain the following possibility: "If I saw indirect explanatory benefit in positing sensibilia, possibilia, spirits, a Creator, I would joyfully accord them scientific status too, on a par with such avowedly scientific posits as quarks and black holes. (from "Naturalism; or, Living within One's Means," Dialectica 1995, vol. 49); see Naturalism's Invincible Ignorance

The alleged incompatibility of materialism with rationalism, and so the alleged incoherence of modern atheism, is closely connected with the alleged incompatibility of materialism with morality. As rationalism is an epistemological thesis, and so is concerned with what one ought to believe, so morality concerns what one ought to do. In both cases, then, what is concern is “oughtness” or normativity.

In both science and in morality, in our theoretical and practical lives, we are rational beings; we occupy what Wilfrid Sellars called, “the space of giving and asking for reasons.” So one way of seeing the Lewis-Plantinga objection to modern atheism is to see it as raising a skeptical challenge as to how anything merely material, and so fully describable in terms of deterministic laws, could nevertheless also be capable of normative guidance, whether epistemic or moral.

The prevalence of normativity in human life is so obvious as to seem undeniable. (And even philosophers who seem to deny it, such as Spinoza and Nietzsche, may seem to sneak it in the back door having kicked it out the front.) In any event, I shall simply take for granted the basic distinction between "the realm of law" (what is material/physical) and "the space of reasons" (what is normatively oriented, i.e. science and morality). What I shall deny is that accepting this distinction requires that one reject materialism/metaphysical naturalism. Instead I shall show, in the course of working through some thoughts of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, just how one can have one's cake and eat it, too.

Darwin, Freud, Hitler

2007-03-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

The discoveries made by Darwin, innovations made by Freud, and atrocities committed by Hitler have exploded any hope one may have had for the Platonic fantasy that the soul is immortal, neither created nor destructible. Darwin's work shows how beings without souls could have gradually, by incremental changes, given rise to ensouled beings. Freud's work shows how the human soul emerges and changes over the course of a lifetime. Hitler's work shows how human beings can destroy both their own souls and the souls of others.

How Do We Believe?

2007-02-24T18:15:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you're one of those "secular-progressives" that Bill O'Reilly is warning us about, you may be slightly alarmed about recent surveys which indicate that, not only do 95% of your fellow Americans believe in a God ("of some kind"), but that 55% accept a literal interpretation of the Bible, just under half believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, usw.

Is this cause for alarm? Depends, I think, not just on what believe, but on how they believe it -- and also, and more importantly, on whether our fellow citizens really believe these things -- or just think they do.

Can one be mistaken about one's own beliefs?

Anti-Anti-Americanism

2007-02-17T22:13:00.000-08:00

In today's cultural-political climate -- and that which has prevailed for most of my entire life -- there is a certain strain among the residues of "the left" which takes pride in a cynical and generalized anti-Americanism. America, it is sometimes thought -- not entirely without justification -- has a massively destructive foreign policy, consumes a massively disproportionate share of the world's resources, and has citizens that are not only apathetic and ignorant, but apathetic and ignorant about their apathy and ignorance.

To combat the dangers of cynicism in myself, and perhaps also a few friends who stumble across Impure Reason from time to time, I want to begin a list of all the things about America that I love and that are worth loving, in no particular order:

1) Bob Dylan
2) Transcendentalism (Thoreau, Emerson)
3) Jazz (Davis, Coltrane, Brubeck)
4) Pragmatism (esp. James and Dewey)
5) the liberal-arts college curriculum
6) the Constitution
7) Walt Whitman
8) Yellowstone National Park
9) Manhattan
10) hip-hop
11) baseball

Add your own in the comments below; I'll update the list as it grows.

Pragmatism, Realism, Etc.

2007-02-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

I've begun reading Putnam's Realism with a Human Face. It's a difficult book, a collection of essays on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and history of philosophy, and it interweaves both highly technical discussions about quantum mechanics and logic with a sensitivity to broad cultural and social concerns. It's not that one cannot see the forest for the trees -- one can! -- but that there are so many trees.

In the first section, Putnam provides a quick sketch of two recent developments in quantum mechanics and in the logic of semantic paradoxes. In both cases he examines the temptation of providing a "God's-Eye View," a theory of the totality. In quantum mechanics this temptation expresses itself in the desire for a theory that includes the observer within the system under examination, even at what Putnam considers to be extravagant metaphysical cost (many world interpretation, Bohmian mechanics). In logic this temptation expresses itself in the desire for a resolution of the paradoxes of self-referential sentences.

Putnam concludes that both temptations stem from an evasion of the Kantian lesson: one cannot include oneself within the system, because -- to rephrase the Kantian point in Wittgenstein-esque terms -- the norms of representation are not themselves among the objects represented. Putnam builds on Kant and on Wittgenstein in developing further the failures of metaphysical realism and the turn towards the life of the agent, towards practice or praxis. But, also like Kant and Wittgenstein, Putnam is mindful of the allure of metaphysics.

What is metaphysics? Is metaphysics possible in any sense "after" Kant and Wittgenstein? If so, how?

Next: Hegel and Deleuze as rival versions of self-consciously post-Kantian metaphysics!

And: the secret affinity between Nietzsche, Carnap, and Rorty!

Immediacy and Mediation

2007-02-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

Immersed as I've been in the Hegel/Marx tradition, and in particular "Western Marxism" (Adorno, Marcuse, and Debord), I tend to frame problems in terms of the relationship between "immediacy" and "mediation." (One can even see criticisms of Hegel in terms of this frame -- for example, by reading Deleuze as responding to Hegel's critique of pure immediacy.)

This frame of reference opened up for me a certain picture of Internet communication. It may seem, to the naive, as though the Internet in general, and blogging in particular, has made possible a new avenue of immediate encounter between human beings. And there is something both true and seductive about this naivete. But this must not be allowed to obscure the fact that I am sitting alone in my apartment as I type this, in a state of undress that would not be widely received in public, and that as you read these words under conditions entirely outside of my capacity to affect.

The situation is not dissimilar from writing in general -- and some theorists have argued for a causal relation between writing as technology and the cognitive transformation that made abstract thought possible -- but for the instantaneous character of Internet communications. The previously unimaginable speed of Internet communications have seemingly collapsed the distance between "the private" (me, in my apartment, lounging in a bathrobe) and "the public" (everyone else).

Yet the distance has only been transformed. When we talk with others in our real lives, the interplay of voices takes place within a context of somatic sounds -- sighs, breaths, pauses, grunts, sniffs . . . lively debates while eating or drinking result in a dialectic of what is going into one's mouth and what is coming out. (Sips of coffee or beer create the openings in which another may speak.) The art of writing removes the somatic cues and rhythms, but in all writing up to the Electronic Age, this was implicitly acknowledged; consequently there was an art of writing in which grammatical and rhetorical structures complemented the loss of somatic context. But the art was informed by a sense of time -- a sense that writing well required an investment of one's time, and that it took time also to read well.

In the Electronic Age, we do not read -- we scan -- and consequently we no longer write in order to be read. What is written is to be read immediately, thereby instilling in us a false sense of immediacy. The mediation is concealed.

The Truth about Types

2007-01-23T08:56:00.000-08:00

There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't.

I was reminded of this adage, if it is an adage, when mulling over the basic difference in temperament between Kant and Hegel. Kant is a thinker of dualisms: sensible intuitions vs. pure intuitions, intuition vs. understanding, understanding vs. reason, pure reason vs. practical reason, practical reason vs. pathological inclination.

Hegel is, while not quite a monist, some sort of "non-dualist." The dialectic is designed to overcome dualisms: the dualisms of mind and body, reason and nature, religion and philosophy, are all to be overcome (sublated, aufgehoben) in the process of the actualization of the Absolute. Or, to put it more precisely, the dualisms are overcome as dualisms; they are retained as distinctions at the same time as they are undermined as dichotomies.

This is perhaps the most important contribution Hegel has made to philosophy; this insight does an enormous amount of work for Dewey, whose debt to Hegel is considerable, and in more recently this insight has been put to significant use by Hilary Putnam; see for example his recent The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays.

Why I Am (Almost) a "Militant Atheist"

2007-01-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

There's been quite a buzz and stir in both mainstream media and the blogosphere over "the New Atheism", as ushered in by a troika of advocates for a militant, take-no-prisoners-rhetoric: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Richard Dawkins. Of these, I shall restrict my attention to Harris, because I've read The End of Faith recently. Despite the adage that "a philosopher is someone who knows what is in books he has not read," I shall err on the side of caution.

Harris' basic claim is, I think, exactly right: we give religious claims a "free pass," and exempt them from the critical scrutiny we routinely give to claims offered in politics, science, economics, history, and so forth. If someone says, "I oppose single-payer health care!" it is expected that others will say, "on what grounds?" But if someone says, "I believe in a God who has revealed Himself in history!" the usual response is not "on what grounds?" but rather "golly, I'm very impressed by the sincerity of your conviction." Harris, much like Slavoj Zizek, shows that this is, at best, mere condescension. Critically examining the beliefs of others, and offering up one's own beliefs for critical examination by others, is precisely how one demonstrates respect for the other as a mature and rational person -- and that one deserves to be so recognized in turn.

Harris defines "faith" as acceptance of unjustified assertions about history and metaphysics. Thus, claims about the revelation at Sinai, or the Crucifixion, are taken to be assertions about matters of fact, both historical and metaphysical. But they fail to pass the test of warrant, or of justification, by the best standards currently accepted. This is the core of the argument. He also makes some slightly hysterical assertions of his own about how religion is the cause of much of the world's suffering and violence, and he ends up taking a position very close to that of Christopher Hitchens: the secular and enlightened West is engaged in a struggle to the death with fundamentalist Islam, and since "they" cannot be permitted to prevail, any action undertaken against "them" is justified, including pre-emptive war, torture of "enemy combatants," etc. I shall not engage with that part of the argument, except to note in passing that it's not an obviously stupid thing to say, and that it deserves a more thorough fisking than it has thus far, to my knowledge, received.

Instead, I want to return to the heart of the argument: that religious claims are unjustifed (and, though Harris dodges this point, he clearly insinuates that such claims are also unjustifiable) assertions about matters of fact. In response, I would offer up several related considerations:

1) that the vast majority of religious practictioners do, in fact, regard their beliefs as assertions, and that religious narratives are taken as on an epistemic par with scientific theories, that is, as actually explaining something;

2) that all assertions and explanations are subject to what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars calls "the space of reasons," a notion much expanded upon by Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom -- that is, no assertion is exempt from the question, "why do you believe that?"

And (1) and (2), taken together, would seem to put me squarely in Harris' camp as a "militant atheist." Nevertheless, I must demur, because

3) I deny that interpreting religious vocabulary as consisting of assertions is the best way of making sense of religious language.

This might seem to commit me to a sort of "emotivism" or "subjectivism" about religion. I don't think so, but maybe. Certainly there are many proponents of religious claims who are deathly allergic to any attempt to interpret religious language in "symbolic" term (Tillich is anathema to many of the soi-dissant "Christians" I've met). To do so, in their view, is to trivialize religion -- to give it a marginal, rather than central, cultural role.

If one accepts the priority of science, in either a metaphysical or methodological version, then it would seem that the only place for art or literature is as an emotional outpouring -- without any truth-value (i.e. neither true or false). (Harris' commitment to both metaphysical and methodological scientism comes to the fore when he considers Buddhism. Buddhism is exempted from the general critique of all other religions because, he claims, Buddhism consists of assertions that can be empirically confirmed.)

As a pragmatist, my fundamental epistemological commitments are different from Harris' version of scientific-metaphysical realism. I take it that there are many different vocabularies at our disposal -- the language of physics, the language of neuroscience, the language of literature. It is therefore no marginalization of religion to say that religious language is more like literature than it is like physics.

And that is why I am almost, but not quite, a militant atheist.

It's True, I Tell You!

2007-01-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

72.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Taking the Bait

2007-01-07T19:07:00.000-08:00

Kirby Olson at Lutheran Surrealism has "tagged" me with a game suitable for the MySpace/FaceBook generation: I'm supposed to reveal five secrets about myself. Why, I haven't the faintest idea. But since I shan't let it be said that I'm not, at least, a good sport, here goes.

1) When I was a child I was fascinated by the process of metamorphosis, especially tadpoles to frogs. My brain is wired to grasp processes and transformations, and it didn't take me too long to see the similarities between metamorphosis, evolution, and embryonic development. (This was around the age of five or six.) I used to keep jars and tanks of tadpoles every summer. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, over the course of my childhood. With only one exception -- a bullfrog named Capricorn -- every single tadpole I ever had died on my watch. So did a salamander named Brian.

2) For a few months, when I was about 9 or 10, I also had a dog named Seiko. My parents didn't know how to take care of a dog properly, and I didn't, and I didn't have anyone to teach me. Why we even got a dog, I don't know. I guess I must have wanted one. One time, the puppy was chained up in the yard behind our house, and it was barking incessantly. I became furious, and I ran at it and I beat it up. All I remember at the time was that I was full of a terrible rage that I couldn't do anything with. Now I'm filled with shame every time I remember how badly I hurt that puppy. We gave him away a few months later because we didn't know how to housebreak him.

3) Given (1) and (2) above, it's hardly surprising that I became what's known as a "cutter": someone who intentionally mutilates him or herself. This began when I was thirteen or so; I'd dig my nails into my arm until it bled. Later I switched to carving patterns in my left forearm with a swiss-army knife. The cutting started up in earnest the night after my first kiss, in freshman year of college. I didn't know how else to deal with the whirlwind of emotions I was going through. The main thing that makes me different from most cutters is that I've never tried to hide the cuts. I have scars all over the left forearm, and I think that this is why I wear shirts with the sleeves rolled up -- to show off the wounds, as if they were prizes earned in battle. (Note: the last time I hurt myself was in 2001.)

4) I was in Kenya for six weeks in the summer of 1995, and while there I was side-swiped by an irate hippopotamus. The impact broke a bone in my wrist and I had to be sent to a hospital in Nairobi. This technically isn't a secret, since it's known to most of my close friends, but it's not known to the friends I've formed in the past two years, nor to my colleagues in the blogosphere.

5) While in Istanbul several years ago (and isn't it wonderful to begin a sentence like that?), I befriended a keyif-smoking carpet salesman who showed me a little archeological find in his backyard -- literally. He'd found, in his backyard, an entrance to a small buried Byzantine palace. There were three or four rooms, huge beehive shaped structures with a central pillar maybe ten feet in diameter, that he'd rigged up with floorboards and track lighting. He asked the Turkish government to help him excavate, but they refused on the grounds that government funds were only available for archeological excavations that post-dated the Muslim conquest of Constantinople. (Why they changed it, I don't know.)

What I'm Reading Now

2007-01-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

Books that I've least half-started, and plan to finish within the new six months:

Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (Robert C. Solomon)

Adorno and the Political (Espen Hammer)

Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Paul Apostolidis)

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Rodney Stark)

A Pluralistic Universe (William James)

The Denial of Death (Ernst Becker)

Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Hent De Vries)

Realism with a Human Face (Hilary Putnam)

Truth and Justification (Jurgen Habermas)

Why Blog?

2007-01-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Having been trolling through the blogosphere for a few years, I decided to go in all the way. Why blog? For my part, I think of blogging as a way of attempting to reconstitute community in the age of the "society of the spectacle" and the concomittant fragmentation of "the public sphere." To be sure, I have turned to the blogosphere (and why "sphere"?) for consensus-formation on key political, cultural, and philosophical problems and issues. To that extent the blogosphere plays a vital role formerly occupied by cafes and salons, a role that cannot be performed by either mainstream media (whether "news" or "entertainment") or by communications technologies that serve the interests of specific institutions. Moreover, the blogosphere is the best forum currently available whereby experts -- artists, scholars, scientists, intellectuals -- can share their expertise with others.

On the other hand, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that blogging is a rationalization of collective graphomania, an obsession with reassuring oneself through compulsive writing that one, after all, really does exist. But this is all the more reason to admire blogging, for it is a way of keeping alive the semblance of personalization and personality in a time where the forces that constitute the conditions of daily existence are increasingly depersonalizing.

It is, in other words, the superficial aspects of blogging, the ways in which it is akin to everything faddish and tawdry, that grant it whatever redemptive potential it may have.

A New Year's Resolution

2007-01-07T15:55:00.000-08:00

Like all of us, I begin each year by going through the charade of making up a New Year's resolution, the annual ritual of achieving escape velocity from history and character through pure exertion of will. (Could the New Year's resolution be found anywhere but in America?) I, too, shall affirm my cultural identity, my annual expression of hubris, with -- as is always the case -- the same New Year's resolution that I make every year:

Resolved: No more New Year's resolutions!

(This post is devoted to the memory of Kurt Goedel and Alonzo Church.)