I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same act of philosophical reflection here. Surely, the professional philosopher arrives to the problems with some baggage from his cultural environment and the established theoretical framework of his discipline. But as a philosopher, he is regarded in society as an specialist. I’m not referring to this, but to the common man that apprehends the world and so constructs, with his everyday engagement with the surrounding environment, a worldview. He belongs in history or in a given society to the pre-theoretical or pre-philosophical stage of knowledge, the common sense view which necessarily will become the cultural baggage that the professional philosopher or the scientist will carry with him before he starts digging into the bigger issues. It is his duty to free himself from it, and a good part of doing it implies dismantling, with systematic thought and experimentation, the ordinary illusions created from first hand experience, which appear as the most reliable. These common ideas seem rational, coherent, insofar as they provide basic inferences from naked-eye observations, notwithstanding that at the same time they make use of imagination (a necessary companion of thoughtful reflection) to fill the gaps, while being heavily influenced by cognitive dissonances.
I don't argue against any of this. The devil is in the details: dismantling? This is a reductive move, dismissing what lies outside of the inquiry to isolate what the analysis is all about. Philosophy has one job: to do this reduction down to the level of the most basic assumptions of knowledge claims, which means looking into the the very nature of what it is to even have a knowledge claim. Hence the philosophical category, epistemology. Epistemology is the study of what it means for S to know P, qua knowing at all, and this leads the relation between the knower and the known. I begin such an inquiry with the most basic question: what is this relationship about? How can describe it? What are the features of it that are in play? I mean, if I were a physicist asking about the relation between two things, this would not only be a very good line of questioning; it would be the only way to approach it. So my inquiry into the nature of religion begins with this simple, in terms of the way the original question is conceived, exposure of what this relation really is, at the most basic level.
To know a relationship, I have to know what is being related to what. Here, it is this, call it egoic end of the epistemological relation. Describing this end is going to be a principle concern. I cannot imagine a more sound way to proceed, and the very first thing I encounter is the need for a principle, something is true for all cases, that is descriptive of relations between objects, and when I make this move to the most basic description, I find causality. This is simply manifestly true, but at any rate, I find backing by the quintessential analytic philosopher, Willard Quine holds that
the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states
Of course, Quine was no absolutist, and argued for "indeterminacy" at the very foundation of our knowledge claims, and in fact, he is partly where I got the term for my own position. But he is lso the source of the rub: when I try to understand the relation between the egoic end of the relation and the thing before it as a knowledge claim relation, causality simply, and completely fails. It is not as if the idea holds some promise.I might as well be be talking about the worst historical religious narrative to do my explaining (as Kierkegaard put it, one myth replacing another?). The trouble is so emphatic because causality is not simply insufficient or inadequate. It is a concept that is utterly alien epistemic connectivity. The move is not implication, but entailment: there is nothing in the concept of causality, conceived as an apriori principle or as an evolutionary innateness, that is epistemic.
One would have to redefine the term itself to make it work, and this is the alternative we end up with in the phenomenological exposition.
It is meant, in our statements about the states of the world, what is necessarily true, objectively, universally, regardless of the subjects’ perception. The way that an electron really is entails, among other things, that it has a mass of 9.109 x 10 ^-31 kilograms. By saying that it “really is” we express that we rely on that statement being true independently of the existence of any subject.
But this begs the question of the epistemic relation. It certainly is not the case that what you say about the electron is false. Rather, such talk belongs to physics. The inquiry into the nature of religion only takes physics into account when it conceives of the indeterminacy of its claims. As to the many descriptive and equational propositions that constitute it, each one yields to an aporia when put under inquiry. This foundational aporia is where religion's foundational affirmations begin. This is an important point to keep in mind: Metaphysics is IN physics. This latter is taken to be the authority on basic thinking as a matter of course in the culture of science (and general culture), and this leads in the minds of most to a metaphysics of science, which is usually some for of materialism-physicalism and its variations. Why metaphysics? Physicists don't really talk about metaphsyics, of course. I speak here of the default understanding of the world IN the assumed unquestioned privilege of science: this is an approach that is "explicitly silent" on ethics and aesthetics and epistemology and ontology, and therefore has little or nothing to say here.
Whatever we can say about the psychology of perception or the eidetic moment of apprehension of the world, if it has any bearing on the discussion of our first hand experiences, it has no bearing on the rest of our dynamic experience of the world, which has gone beyond mere contemplation and has tested its objective reality in a continuous engagement with such objects of experience. Even if they can only be apprehended as phenomena, it is with the systematic tools of science and philosophy that we can find the necessary objective connection, with a high degree of certainty, of that which makes the phenomena perceivable, the thing in itself, with the perceived phenomena. Without them, we would be at the mercy of faith.
I like that, "at the mercy of faith." Well said, and I for one am almost singularly motivated to avoid just his. I take religion seriously because I am sure that it is a deeply important dimension of our existence, once the incidentals of its entanglements are cleared away. It is far beyond the sedative of Marx or the fear of Hume.
The thing in itself is a problem. To make sense of a proposed method of discovery, the method has to have within it the possibility of discovery. It has to have that openness that is unique to the purpose of inquiry. What is sought here is the essence of religion, so the matter turns to examining the religious phenomenon itself. I don't look to science for the reason that philosophy, the inquiring at the most basic level, looks to the
presuppositions of science, which is again what epistemology and ontology are about. And then, science does not even begin to examine the most salient feature of religion: the radical affectivity of our existence, and I refer to by far the most salient feature of our existence and existence period, for apart from affectivity, the world is all that is the case, Wittgenstein's states of affairs, or Quine's naturalism, and this as such, in all of its factuality, completely without value. There is no value in a fact qua fact (Wittgenstein argues this in the Tractatus, the Lecture on Ethics and elsewhere) ; might as well be nothing at all.
Affectivity, by any standard of ontology, is astoundingly different, sui generis, this being-of-mattering-and-importance. Science cannot understand this because it is not observable. What is not observable? The dimension of good and bad affectivity possesses. Take two facts: here the distance between the earth and the moon measured in kilometers; there an occasion of agonizing pain. And now the analysis. The latter can be reduced to the former's ontology, if you will, in talk about physical systems agitated, neuronal firings, the evolutionary "choices" of pain as an anatomical feature that is conducive to survival and reproduction; and on and on. One could fill volumes. But now try the phenomenological reduction, and remove the factual content, the explanatory matrix that, to use their language, regionalizes and quantifies what stands there before you, the pain qua pain. Not tough to do in such an intense example: just observe the agony, pretty much all one can do when in actual agony. But the point: there is a residuum that remains after the factual reduction and the understanding's contexts are suspended. This is what Moore called a "non natural property" and I really don't care much for Moore usually, but it does put a finger on something of great importance, which is that the pain is bad in an altogether non natural and nonfactual (recalling Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics) way. It is "stand alone" in its nature. It cannot be assailed, undercut or outstripped. One can relativize it, but then the matter would turn to the conditions that make pain ambiguous in certain settings. And pain can be actually ambiguous, as in something bitter sweet, but it has to understood that when we call things GOOD and BAD in this non natural sense, we are settingup categories that are not in the world, but in the categorical treatment of the world, a Manichean division making that categorical thinking (all thinking, that is) creates. Talk about the GOOD and BAD like this is to point out a dimension of (our) existence, not a quantifiable substance. (Indeed, when science quantifies the world with its measurements, quantifications about other quantifications, note that a. there are no quantifications "out there", and b. such knowledge claims have no qualitative dimension. The world we confront in actuality is a vast horizon of qualitative existence and this makes science's claims to knowledge particularly dubious in addressing foundational questions).
Science is not metaphysics surely, but epistemology is not a competent field to say anything about the ontological commitments of science or to call the findings of science unreliable. It amounts to saying that our belief that there are actual fundamental subatomic particles comprising matter in the universe is unjustifiable or that we cannot have any certainty in the mass the electron being 9.109 x 10 ^-31 kilograms. To sustain such statements implies necessarily dismissing science altogether, and down goes any valuable philosophy with it. What will be left? Theology and epistemological nihilism, of course.
Phenomenology does not throw justified belief to the wind. It simply attends to a different field of inquiry. Physics cannot be assailed on any issue that it raises simply because it doesn't talk about these things any more than it talks about plumbing or the art of geisha. It is about the presuppositions of science. You will find those most devoted to science in philosophy do not believe at all that science rests on a pillar of certainty. They know full well it doesn't and they've all read Kant and they know one will never ever get beyond the the essential epistemic problems he he raises, how it synthetic apriori judgment is possible: this Kantian Critique is the hard way to say the very easy thing I have been putting out there (which, btw, I got from Rorty), namely, that epistemic connectivity is impossible if the bottom line for all connectivity of any kind itself is causality.
Only a fool would argue that science has it all wrong. But it also takes a fool to argue that a physicist can through her knowledge about physics tell us how to dance the tango, or think about philosophy.
To understand religion requires understanding certain social practices as they have evolved throughout history. We put them under certain category for what they share in common and these common attributes we identify them as their nature, their essence, but at the same time we consider their differences, which are as important when we want to describe a particular society. What is contingent is also part of the explanation, because it determines later developments, in other words, it is always a historical development. Also, it is one among other social practices, which have their own historical developments, so what you get is a complex and dynamic web of relations. You can’t fully comprehend concrete practices, religion included, if you don’t look at the relations they have with economy, politics, etc.
And if religion were simply a vacuous social phenomenon, I would agree. But even vacuous social phenomena have an analytic dimension that goes beyond the explicit beliefs it has. I may believe in a sun god, and this may be grounded a cultural setting that has this belief firmly and systematically embedded in everything else. The anthropological way of understanding this would be, perhaps, pretty complicated and historical, but philosophy asks, If you believe in this, let us first understand what it is to believe at all. Obviously, the historical account possesses a multiplicity of incidentals that is discarded readily, for all we want to know is what it means to know, and once this reductive process is complete we have a philosophical perspective. What happens to the ontology, the god himself? Once the justificatory review is in place, he vanishes in the epistemic revelation. But also, I care deeply about my belief and the sun god belief gives relief to my world through supplications. This engenders the question about why one is born to suffer and die such that such relief is necessary, and now we are deep in the ethical indeterminacy of human existence, which I hold is principle part of the essence of religion.
- By The Beast
- By Fanman