Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Hereandnow]

Kate
I don't disagree with your presupposition that 'one has to be free' but how does religion present itself in the world other than through ideas, institutions and interaction with others.
If it is in solitude is it some form of a priori knowledge we are seeking?

Solitude is solitude from something. My point would be that it is a departure from the world that would make interpretative claims on what is true. It is so pervasive that foundational questions never even see the light of day, and it is here at the level of basic questions that thought and inspiration about religious matters begins. It is not unlike what a scientist or academic does when s/he is sequestered in the laboratory or behind a text, though for religion, the nature of the inquiry requires a more complete removal. I think religious understanding is nothing if not transformational. Of course, all meaningful thinking transforms, given that thought itself is not some abstraction but is no less real than this lamp on my desk.

But religious insight is something extraordinary, I argue. Religion is not simply a part of the usual genus and species of a categorialized world. It takes a kind of leap out of the world itself, that is, out of the narratives of everydayness. To get to where basic questions are encountered, one must UNDO the conditioning we all have that creates the familiarity in the world which is commonly taken for what is Real. Most live, including myself,obviously, in a reified familiarity. We don't step beyond this and don't give a moment's thought to even the possibility of doing so. The scientist may be sequestered from other things to focus, but s/he retains this "felt sense" of the Real. Religious insight requires us to penetrate this felt sense with a very special kind of inquiry, philosophy, as a beginning. But where philosophers generally keep within a positivist's delimitations (analytic philosophy is nothing but this. Kant, Husserl, Heidegger at all are far more enriching), the seeker of religious wisdom takes a cue from the East: this body of everyday thought that passes though our collective minds reduces the world to trivia, and we are left to live in a diminished and juvenile collective. One needs to be liberated (moksa). Religion is at its heart, liberation from the simple and seductive draw of culture and language.

This is, incidentally, largely my interpretation of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. He was right.

[Thomyum2]

Being careful takes writing. The trouble with writing is that the business here takes far too much. It's not enough to say that others present a body of interconnectedness, a whole culture of thought, that runs along interpretative lines that are inherently counter what it takes to understand human religion. For to even approach the core of religious meaning, one has to look at the world within a suspension of what people talk about and value in plain terms. In other words, it is as it is with all other disciplines: to get to the most significant ideas of physics, biology, chemistry and so on, one has to adopt a completely new perspective which is not available in mainstream thinking. Serious thought becomes specialized. So it is with religion. One has to turn away from the everydayness of interpreting the world to discover and work with religious themes in a productive way.

Thank you for your insightful response - it is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

I do agree with you completely that solitude is important - one needs to get away from the 'noise' of society, the 'whole culture of thought' as you put it, in order to develop new ideas in any area. I think you've said it very well. And my response was directed less at the solitude aspect and more at the suggestion of focus on the self.

Doing good deeds like Mother Teresa did is certainly to the point, but such actions do not reveal the grounding of religiousness. For this one has to analyze the doing of the deed. But what is human agency? Why is it that good deeds need doing at all? What is it to think, feel, experience, be in-the-world? What is the ethical/aesthetic dimension of our existence about? Questions like these are philosophical. They become, I contend, religious when ethics takes the stage. Or more precisely, metaethics and metavalue.

The Christian religious communities are roughly classified into two types: active and contemplative. Mother Teresa belongs to the former and Thomas Merton to the latter. I think that both have their unique role to play. I'm no expert on this, but I suspect that you're right here in that a contemplative order would be more focused on understanding the 'grounding' or philosophical aspects of their faith, while active orders would direct their efforts outwards (perhaps to 'reveal' the grounding of their faith to others?) and find God in the people they serve. But I do know that both orders would say that the primary purpose of their work is one of service to others or to God (which they would also say are one and the same), and that the pursuit of individual interests and goals is secondary. Even in contemplative orders, the foundation of faith is to give up the self. Indeed, being a monk is a difficult life, even as its public image is sometimes distorted to make it appear to be a retreat from the world into a life of blissful peace and inner tranquility.

I see your favorite philosopher is Wittgenstein. I haven't read the Investigations, but I have read the Tractatus and his Lecture on Ethics and others more than once. I disagree with him on the idea that ethics cannot be conceived as factual. He was a very religious person, but refused to allow this to enter into meaningful thought. I never understood this. For me, the transcendence of ethical good and bad is part of the immanence of value in the world, and value is at the very core of religion.

Wittgenstein did run off to a Norwegian solitude, did he not? There, one encounters God, not to put too fine a point on it. It is the Kierkegaarian long nights of inwardness that allow for one's spirit to show itself, which it cannot do when conversation make the world so familiar. At root, there is absolutely nothing familiar about being here.

I'll confess that even as Wittgenstein is my favorite philosopher, I'm a long way from really understanding him well and am thinking that it's probably going to be a life-long process to try to do so! But I tend to lean the other way on this about whether or not ethics can be 'conceived as factual'. The thing I find about about ethics and religion both is that they're like a living being and always defy efforts to put them in a box. As soon as you think you have them, they slip through your fingers. Understanding religion and ethics is more like a relationship in that it is something that is always evolving - there isn't an 'arrival point' for understanding them. Which is why I think Wittgenstein captured it well in saying the philosophy is not a doctrine or body of knowledge, but an 'activity', and also in his analogy of it being the ladder that we discard once we've used it to get to the next level. We never get to a point of complete knowledge or understanding. We're not meant to be God, after all - we are beings of limitations, and we are a part of whole, not the whole itself. We always see things from our unique perspective, but then find purpose when we come to understand how that uniqueness fits into a whole that is greater than ourselves.

So perhaps for some of us, like Wittgenstein, our purpose may be to find God in that solitude, whereas for others it may be to find God through their participation in the world?

[Hereandnow]

Thomyum2

The Christian religious communities are roughly classified into two types: active and contemplative. Mother Teresa belongs to the former and Thomas Merton to the latter. I think that both have their unique role to play. I'm no expert on this, but I suspect that you're right here in that a contemplative order would be more focused on understanding the 'grounding' or philosophical aspects of their faith, while active orders would direct their efforts outwards (perhaps to 'reveal' the grounding of their faith to others?) and find God in the people they serve. But I do know that both orders would say that the primary purpose of their work is one of service to others or to God (which they would also say are one and the same), and that the pursuit of individual interests and goals is secondary. Even in contemplative orders, the foundation of faith is to give up the self. Indeed, being a monk is a difficult life, even as its public image is sometimes distorted to make it appear to be a retreat from the world into a life of blissful peace and inner tranquility.

I would have my cake and eat it, too. To be both active and contemplative.

I like to think of myself close to Wittgenstein in an important way (sans the genius, alas). To get to that place where the transcendent world is raised to awareness, and is brought vis a vis the terrible suffering-in-the-world. What IS this? I have said it before, all the world's "knowledge" bows low before this moral intuition.

Understanding religion and ethics is more like a relationship in that it is something that is always evolving - there isn't an 'arrival point' for understanding them. Which is why I think Wittgenstein captured it well in saying the philosophy is not a doctrine or body of knowledge, but an 'activity', and also in his analogy of it being the ladder that we discard once we've used it to get to the next level. We never get to a point of complete knowledge or understanding. We're not meant to be God, after all - we are beings of limitations, and we are a part of whole, not the whole itself. We always see things from our unique perspective, but then find purpose when we come to understand how that uniqueness fits into a whole that is greater than ourselves.

Kiekegaard had a lot to say on this. There is this: the institutions that make up our practical and distracted world are, if you will, not what "God sees". All talk here is in metaphors: God does not see us through our politics, professions or even "through" our deeds. This leads to an objectification of God, an anthropomorphism we can readily deploy in times of crisis, a manageable thesis. To find God one must loose the world, for the world makes claims on us, diverts and trivializes what is impossibly important about our being here. In human subjectivity, there is the hermeneutic equation (if you have a mind to, see Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics; see also Kierkegaard's Repetition, with attending commentary to overcome K's personality-rich text) where reason and the "dogmatic" recollection of the past tends to possess the individual. Freedom lies with a discovery of the present, the fleeting present in the flux, recalling Heraclitus vs Parmenedes, of time's reproduction of experiences. This "part of a whole" you speak of is, confusingly addressed in his Sickness Unto Death and Concept of Anxiety.

Kierkegaard, for me, showed the way out of Wittgenstein's fly bottle (W was a big fan of Kiekegaard). If you take the time to read him, try not to be put off by his often being what Heidegger called a "religious writer." His was a war on Christendom, the cheap and hollow faith of church going.

[Felix]

Kate: I don't disagree with your presupposition that 'one has to be free' but how does religion present itself in the world other than through ideas, institutions and interaction with others. If it is in solitude is it some form of a priori knowledge we are seeking?

All that is primarily a product of social conditioning. What is beyond the conditioning? That is the question, and the maddening crowd tends to distract one from that inquiry. A priori? In a sense... what is there beyond your personal identity.

[Kate]

Hereandnow. Thank-you for your response, I am largely in agreement with what you are saying. Many mystics have been wise people; for them, solitude and asceticism were a path to to valuable insights.
However, they would not have gained this knowledge if they had not first allowed the possibility that there may be something more to be found. They were wise enough to begin with a more valid presupposition than the assumption that many in our culture make (i.e. that there is nothing beyond the material).

[Steve3007]

To put the matter plainly, to understand religion, one has to be free of presuppositions about religion; discover it fresh and new, as it presents itself in the world, rather than as we receive it through ideas and institutions. One does this in solitude.

So consider: "Authentic" religious understanding can only be achieved in solitude.

This kind of "let's scrub off the barnacles of the institutions that have grown to encrust our religion and start again in solitary contemplation" idea, possibly involving a cave, seems to be so much a part of the history of some of the mainstream religions that it is itself an institution.

Also, I think for many people (maybe for most people) of faith it is the traditions, rituals and institutions that are the attraction, not the abstract metaphysical speculations. It is such things as the smell of village churches, the vestments, the familiar communal rituals marking important points in life and the hymns remembered from childhood that attracts them. Most people of faith who I know wouldn't want to throw these things away and sit alone contemplating the divine in the abstract. That is the opposite of what they want.

[Hereandnow]

Kate
However, they would not have gained this knowledge if they had not first allowed the possibility that there may be something more to be found.

It is the Question, which is the "piety of thought," that reaches out in a desire:

The metaphysical desire has another intention· it desires beyond everything that can simply complete
it, It is like Goodness--the Desired does not fulfill it, but Deepens it

Levinas

[Hereandnow]

Steve3007
This kind of "let's scrub off the barnacles of the institutions that have grown to encrust our religion and start again in solitary contemplation" idea, possibly involving a cave, seems to be so much a part of the history of some of the mainstream religions that it is itself an institution.

Even the most profound ideas become cliches, then get circulated, embedded in a culture, then an article of history. This is part of the objectification process that reduces all things to a measurable form, then all things recede into a background of homogeneity, institutions, as you call them. It is unfortunate the way this stands before us as a kind of derisive Occam's razor for pretense to importance.

It is the fallacy of generalization, this reduction to a concept and a cliche. Take being in love: nothing could more a tiresome as repeats in song, in narrative, in comedy; but to actually be in love: all such encrustations vanish. This is what solitude can do. Read Emerson's Nature (the first several pages, at any rate) not as a concatenation of platitudes. Read it as Kierkegaard would have you read, free of the oppression of recollection, which is I believe the substance of your objection.

Also, I think for many people (maybe for most people) of faith it is the traditions, rituals and institutions that are the attraction, not the abstract metaphysical speculations. It is such things as the smell of village churches, the vestments, the familiar communal rituals marking important points in life and the hymns remembered from childhood that attracts them. Most people of faith who I know wouldn't want to throw these things away and sit alone contemplating the divine in the abstract. That is the opposite of what they want.

I think you are right about this. Not many want out, they want to go further in, into culture and the things that they already affirm, and I have to say, I respect this. After all, speaking plainly, after a hard day's work, and responsibilities upon you, there is simply no time live the transcendentalist's life. No time to look beyond the common culture. So people fixed to an everydayness of living and interpreting will never, or rarely, seek real solitude, and they will never come to understand religion as they look at the religious condition through the eyes of Christendom, (here in the west): the institutions, the liturgies, the metaphysics, the dogma, the faith.
For this mentality, I have little to offer. I only speak to those who are not so fixated. No so different from others things, in this, really. If you want to be a biologist, you put aside a lot of the common foolishness about organic things, you focus, learn systems of classification, etc. Religion is not a science (nor is it removed from this; that would be impossible), but it is specialized and deeper understanding requires a radical reorientation toward the world.

[Pattern-chaser]

LuckyR
I don't disagree, but many would call "religion" without the institution, philosophy.

In solitude we bring our "institutions" with us. But the point is taken: the dogmatic inquirer will learn nothing new regardless of where s/he is. The trick would be to put such things aside and let the world speak, so to speak. The putting aside is easier said than done. I think that we live in a pseudo-clarity from which we can be liberated. Solitude is essential because the presence of others inevitably brings in contexts of shared identity. If they are shared, they belong to a consensus, which abstracts from actuality, and there is only one actuality: the self.

[My highlighting.]

And if, perhaps for fun, we go with the Buddhists, and some others, and accept that the self is an illusion, we end up with ... nothing.

[Hereandnow]

Pattern-chase

And if, perhaps for fun, we go with the Buddhists, and some others, and accept that the self is an illusion, we end up with ... nothing.

To give this kind thing a meaningful response one has to be willing to explore the question, what is the self? An illusion? Well, how does illusion differ from actuality? What are these in their essence? And on, and on. It requires an undying curiosity to take things as far as they can go, because what happens is these questions yield other questions and it gets quite technical.

If you have some prima facie idea of what a self is, I am listening.

[Felix]

Pattern-chaser: And if, perhaps for fun, we go with the Buddhists, and some others, and accept that the self is an illusion.

It's an illusion in the Cartesian sense, i.e., our being/existence is the only thing we can be sure of, so then the question becomes, what is the nature of this being? What is there when you get past all the conditioning?

[Hereandnow]

The eternal present?

[Pattern-chaser]

For truth is what is sought in solitude: that questions tht press on one for understanding which receive from popular religions a rigid and programmatic response, questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? and, is there any genuine and unqualified basis for our being-in-the-world?; these are laid bare, free of presuppositions. Here, I am arguing, is where religion gets its existential foundation, as one comes to realize that at once, such questions demand satisfaction, but that there are no answers that are not qualified by dogma.

[My highlighting.]

There are no answers based on evidence (...then analysis, then conclusions are drawn) because there is no evidence. Serious consideration of such things is quite possible, but a formal analytic (or scientific) treatment is not. Nevertheless, we are not forced to turn to dogma, for there are other (better?) ways of considering these things.