16 Wednesday Jan 2019
Posted in Philosophy, Uncategorized
So, if we start with the modern materialist’s conception of matter and start to unpack it, materialism ends up being transformed into one or another of the various views that one would have thought to be at odds with materialism – dualism, panpsychism, Platonism, idealism, or pantheism.
You’ll have to read it yourself You really should be reading him if you are at all interested in philosophy
06 Friday Jul 2018
Posted in Carl F Henry, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized
(Chapter 8, God, Revelation and Authority. Btw, these short takes on his essays cannot begin to cover the density and wealth of thought in Henry. They really must be read, but) Theologian Millard Erickson once said, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”
Secular Man and Ultimate Concerns
There is a Woody Allen joke, “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit, in my name, at a Swiss bank account.” But what sort of evidence would show that God exists. No matter how power an agent were to display itself, would that ever be proof of God? If something as powerful as the aliens in a thousand movies were to appear about a large city, would that prove God? What if the agent were as dazzling as the sun?
In this essay, Henry argues that the radical secularism – which the is the default “intelligent” position of the age – itself bears witness to God. It is an answer to the question, “If God is real, then why don’t I see Him?” To answer this question, Henry speaks of “cognitive levels of experience”. The reason why God is not obvious is because He is not being sought in the right place and the right way. (This is an interesting sort of presuppositionalist argument.)
Western secularism has made naturalism, a radical empiricism to be the entire basis for rational discourse and understanding. This radical naturalism entails a number of related entailments:
A correlative implication of this theory of the comprehensive contingency, total transiency, and radical relativity of all reality and experience is the absolute autonomy of man. Man alone remains, self-sufficient and autonomous, to rescue the cosmos from absurdity and worthlessness. No divine sovereign places human life under unchanging commands, no divine revelation tells man what is true and trustworthy, no divine book stipulates what is permanently right and wrong. External reality supplies no transcosmic supports for human security. A clean break is required with all transcendent, heteronomous absolutes as alien and arbitrary.
Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 139. The universe – and us – are contingent, transient, relative – and somehow also autonomous. It is an odd sort of agency, because it is grounded in absolutely nothing.
This autonomous agent, contingent and existent only for a whisper of time, seems strangely to be completely unable to believe this true. For instance, if we are truly meaningless, then what is the basis and what is the point seeking for “meaning” and security. Then why do we do what we do? “Modern man actually has a much wider range of experience than the naturalistic credo acknowledges.” (145)
This simply does not work.
And when we move beyond just our desire to be meaningful, we run into other problems.
For example, how do we explain any moral fact? Why is murder wrong? It certainly and without question is evil. But why? Because we don’t like it? There is no naturalistic explanation. But what if someone were to make the adaptive argument: not murdering was necessary for the survival of the species and those camps which held to the no-murder position survived better than others. That merely proves it is more adaptive, but not that it is truly right or wrong. Moral facts are just feelings about things, not truths. If one were merely able to overcome the feeling, there would be no morality at all.
Here is where makes the argument for God. God is “inescapably an aspect of everyday experience” (149). God is there and cannot be gainsaid or avoided. The fact of God is built into our consciousness; a “primordial ontological awareness of God as the ultimate given.”
If this is so, then why do we deny its truth:
The reality of God as depicted in his revelation best explains why secular man refuses to order his life exclusively by the naturalistic world life view, while the fact of sin best explains why he refuses to order his life exclusively by the truth and will of God. (148)
He makes an interesting observation which deserves further consideration. The conflict inherent in humanity as a result of a conflict with a sovereign God creates psychological damage within the human being, which we attempt to manage by various psychological and psychiatric methods. (149)
Our very existence, our concern for meaning and morality, our refusal to take our own and other life as utterly meaningless (which is precisely what secular naturalism teaches), is constant undeniable evidence of God. Sin makes hypocrites of Christians; God makes hypocrites of secularists:
Not only his secret alternatives to meaninglessness, but also his distressing anxieties concerning personal worth, imply presuppositions that touch upon man’s responsible relationship to his Maker. The ongoing revelation of God and remnants of the imago Dei in man supply the continuing conditions of man’s humanity. The ineradicable convictions we harbor about the character of reality and the way we frame the fundamental questions of our lives reflect, however unwittingly, a response to God’s revelational confrontation of his creatures. The universal disclosure of God penetrates deeply into all man’s confidences and doubts. God is the Eternal with whom unrenewed man, in all his experiences, has a vagabond relationship. Evidence of God’s reality and power and truth and goodness is ongoingly refracted into the course of man’s daily life. (151)
In short, the espoused secularity of the modern world cannot account for itself. Even the bare attempt to “explain” the world in terms of secular naturalism is itself a contradiction of that naturalism.
20 Tuesday Feb 2018
Posted in Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Uncategorized
Tags
despair, Either/Or, Existential Choice, Existentialism, Jasper, Kierkegaard, marriage, Melancholy, Philosopher, Sartre
Volume 2 of Either/Or is composed of two long, often tedious [the first letter, “Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” can be particularly slow, repetitious, dull], meandering, letters from Judge Vilhelm to man of volume 1 (which includes the famous Diary of a Seducer). A primary aspect of this volume is to convince the seducer of the primacy of marriage (over a life of well… seduction). He argues that one should choose to be ethical.
There is an aspect of irony in all this, because Kierkegaard is arguing to Regina Olson (as has been noted by many) about marriage after he had broken off his engagement to the young lady.
He argues that marriage is no duty — because it is a duty of love, which is something thus done willingly (and then as he makes this argument, he seems to almost contradict himself). Thus, the ethical choice is one of freedom. By way of contrast, the one who lives merely for pleasure has no freedom, because he has made no choice — he has no ability to even reflect upon anything.
I have received second-hand or so some ideas of Kierkegaard and existential choice: an act whereby one chooses in some manner and thus secures some sort of meaning in life. Now, I am not an expert in the history of existential philosophy, nor have I traced all the movements in the area from Kierkegaard through Sartre and Jasper. But what I have seen — and this is perhaps the fountainhead of the concept is this section from Equilibrium in volume two of Either/Or:
That which is prominent in my either/or is the ethical. It is therefore not yet a question of the choice of something in particular, it is not a question of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of the act of choice….As an heir, even though he were heir to the treasure of all the world, nevertheless does not posses his property before he had come of age [an allusion to Galatians 4:1-2], so even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.
He then goes on to explain that the aesthetic man is one not merely lives for pleasure, but one who lives immediately, without an act of choice, “the aesthetically in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical is that whereby he becomes what he becomes.”
But because the aesthetically man is merely what he is — not having chosen something else — is “enmeshed”. He has “no time to tear [him]self loose.” This is in contrast to the ethical man (the writer of volume 2), “I am not enmeshed, either by my judgment of the aesthetical or by my judgment of the ethical; for in the ethical I am raised above the instant — I am in freedom — but it is a contradiction that one might be enmeshed by being in freedom.”
The act of choosing, ‘imparts to man’s nature a solemnity, a quiet dignity, which is never entirely lost.”
The man who merely wants to enjoy life finds himself at the mercy of “a condition which either lies outside the individual or is in the individual in such a way that it is not posited by the individual himself.” For in the inside, he gives the example of a young girl “who for a brief time prides herself upon her beauty, but soon it deceives her.”
For the man who lives constantly for some pleasure outside himself, he gives Nero as the example — nothing is able to sate him, “all the world’s cleverness must devise for him new pleasures, for only in the instant of pleasure does he find response, and when that is past he gasps with faintness.” [His discussion of Nero is particularly interesting.]
But something still troubles Nero, he cannot “break through.” He has a place which terrifies anyone who sees it – he cannot bear for anyone to look into his eyes. “He does not possess himself; only when the world trembles before him is he tranquilized, for then there is no one who ventures to lay hold on him. Hence this dread of men which Nero shares with everyone personality of this sort.”
This seems to match the diary of the seducer, who works out the desire for the woman — but cannot permit her to actually be with him — he cannot make the ethical move to marry (marriage is the constant background of volume 2).
“At least we can both learn that a man’s unhappiness is never due to the fact that he has not the outward conditions in his power this being the very thing which would make him unhappy.” — This leads to melancholy: “But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin instar omnium, for not to will deeply and sincerely is sin, and this is the mother of all sins.”
(It continues on through many twists in turns on the nature of despair for the aesthetic man. Later, in Equilibrium, he writes, “For no intoxication is so beautiful as despair, so becoming, so attractive, especially in a maiden’s eyes (that you know full well), and especially if one possess the skill to repress the wildest outbursts, to let despair be vaguely sensed like a distant conflagration, while only a glimpse of it is visible outwardly.”)
On the other hand is the ethical choice which willing embraces duty: it is here that marriage as the basis of the argument makes sense. He is not merely telling the young man to stop being a cad, grow up and get married — he is explaining that choosing a duty to love another is not a burden but an act of love. To choose to love is an imposed duty, but it is not burden because love is the expression and obtaining of desire: “If I attach my closely in friendship to another person, love is everything in this case, I recognize no duty; if love it is at an end, then friendship is over. It is reserved for marriage alone to base itself upon such an absurdity.” [Here is an example of the maddening paradox of this essay — it is long, twisting and the author never seems to be completely clear even to himself. He makes a point and then argues out another way.]
A historical irony lies here: if this is indeed the basis for the idea of the existential choice of which I heard and read in 20th century philosophers (and their cheaper imitators), then that choice was originally a choice offered by a moralizing older man (a judge no less), to a younger, carefree man to get married!
20 Saturday May 2017
Posted in law, Philosophy, Politics
Tags
When people speak about separation of religion and politics, particularly “legislating morality” as improper, they display a stupendous ignorance.
For example, why is it wrong to lie to get someone’s money? Well, that is fraud. Why is fraud wrong? Because it is lying? Why is lying wrong? The answer to that question is itself a moral proposition.
Morality is either a type of aesthetics or is based upon some sort of transcendent proposition: some morals may be more functional than others (everyone lying would soon destroy all commerce), but even caring about the effects is a moral decision.
The basic premises of Western law have a theological basis – a legislative morality: Consider this proposition:
God has ordained contracts of various kinds, Melanchthon wrote, to facilitate tate the sale, lease, or exchange of property, the procurement of labor and employment, and the lending of money and extension of credit.” God has called his political officials to promulgate general contract laws that prescribe “fair, equal, and equitable” agreements, that invalidate contracts based on fraud, duress, mistake, or coercion, and that proscribe contracts that are unconscionable, conscionable, immoral, or offensive to the public good. Melanchthon was content, for the most part, to state these general principles of contract law in categorical form. Occasionally he applied these general principles to specific cases. He condemned with particular vehemence loan contracts that obligated debtors to pay excessive rates of interest or entitled creditors to secure the loan with property whose value far exceeded the amount of the loan, unilateral labor and employment contracts that conditioned a master’s obligation to pay on full performance from the servant, and contracts of purchase and sale that were based on inequality of the exchange.
Law and Revolution II
Howard J. Berman
Harvard University Press 2003
27 Monday Mar 2017
Posted in Ethics, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Uncategorized
His own own experience, rather than any theoretical requirements, convinced Kierkegaard that man’s real predicament is to be placed between a thoroughly esthetic way of living and a thoroughly religious one. No permanent footing can be maintained on a purely ethical basis, and in this respect Kierkegaard stands opposed to all efforts to make morality self-sufficient. Ethical principles are intrinsically ordained to the religious outlook, and a secular morality is either unaware of its religious significance our only esthetic discourse about being moral. The genuine alternatives are still the world and the cloister, the esthetic and the religious kinds of existing. Recollecting his own battle at playing the Romantic genius and also the tremendous upheaval involved in his return to Faith, Kierkegaard was inclined to state the contrast is being between “perdition and salvation”–between which there can be no compromise for reconciliation.
James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1954) 46-47.
An easy illustration of this can be found when one tries to establish even the most “self-evident” forms of ethics: Why is murder wrong? If you say, Because killing is wrong? The next step is “Why?” Because you killed a person. “Why is it wrong to kill a person?” Where does one stop searching for an answer to the “why”? Wherever one stops implies a religious position (to use Kierkegaard’s term) or an ethical (I simply find this distasteful).
The implicit esthetic morality of many people is apparent in the tremendous transformation taking place in ethics (particularly sexual ethics) in the West — and the speed in which it has happened. It seems that a great deal of public ethics was merely a matter of taste. Indeed, the “religious” positions of many people seem to be little more than taste and convenience.
15 Wednesday Feb 2017
Posted in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Uncategorized
He went on to maintain the Christians of our day have only an esthetic grasp upon the meaning of Christianity. They accept it along with other factors in their folkways, but it never becomes for them anything more than a customary way of acting and meeting crucial events, like birth and marriage and death. All the thoughts that really count, the important free decisions, the attitudes which shape and build the man through his deliberate consent and self formation, are taken from outside the Christian, even the religious, sphere. This meant for Kierkegaard the Christian religiousness had been transformed into a kind of automatic dreaming, and that peoples lives are being shaped by aesthetic rather than religious categories.
James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago: Henry Regency Company, 1953), 41. How little has changed.
14 Tuesday Feb 2017
Posted in 1 Corinthians, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized
The nature of the “aesthetic” man, and the nature of the “seduction” in this diary are well explained by a couple of quotations. The seducer is predatory,:her weakness is the opening for his action, “When a young girl is emotionally disturb, one an successfully venture much which would otherwise be ill-advised.” The erotic here has no true love for her — only for the sensation which the other person produces.
The bare desire for sensation is further underscored in this section,
Social intercourse, it is true, brings one into contact with the fair sex, but there is no artistry in beginning an affair in such surroundings. In society every girl is armed, the occasion is poor and encountered repeatedly, she gets no sensuous thrill. On the street she is on the open sea, everything acts more strongly around her, everything seems more mysterious. I would give a hundred dollars for a small from a girl I met on the street, not ten dollars for a pressure of a hand at a party; that is an entirely different kind of currency.
As one considers this diary, we see that this seduction amounts to almost all of what we call “love”. Love consists in what another person makes me feel. We remain in love as long as that palpable emotion persists. What we love then is our sensation — not the other human being. When I spoke with a behaviorist psychologist, she explained that what we love about another human being are the pleasurable sensations produced in our nervous system — and that loss was the sensation of the loss of those sensations.
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
10 Friday Feb 2017
Posted in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized
(Renoir, Girl Looking Into Mirror, 1912)
She has not even seen me. I am standing at the far end of the counter by myself. A mirror hangs on the opposite wall; she does not reflect it, but the mirror reflects her. How faithfully it has caught her picture, like a humble slave who show his devotion by his faithfulness, a slave for whom she indeed has significance, but who means nothing to her, who indeed dares to catch her, but not to embrace her. Unhappy mirror, the can indeed seize her image, but not herself! Happy mirror, which cannot hide her image in its secret depths, hide it from the whole world, but on the contrary must betray it to other, as now to me. What agony, if men were like that! And are there not many people who are like that, who own nothing except in the moment when they show it to others, who grasp only the surface, not the essence, who lose everything if this appears, just as this mirror would lose her image were they by a single breath to betray her heart to it?
27 Friday Jan 2017
Posted in Apologetics, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Politics, Uncategorized
The “editor” of the “diary” — the whole thing a fiction on a fiction — asks the question of why this “factual” diary had such a “poetical” aspect. The aesthetic aspect of the diary derived from the fact that the “seducer” had such a temperament,
The was the more he himself brought with him. This more was the poetical he enjoyed in the poetic situation of reality; he withdrew this agin in the form poetic reflection. This afforded him a second enjoyment, and his whole life was motived by enjoyment.
This is the “first stage” of human development: the aesthetic, which the first volume of Either/Or seeks to develop and display. This was the whole purpose of the “seduction”. It was the tantalization of desire, not possession of a body, which drove the man, “for he was far to intellectually inclined to be a seducer in the ordinary sense of the world.”
For his part, having brought the girl to the point where “she was read to sacrifice everything”, he broke off the relationship. He did not want her, he wanted the sensation of wanting her. This is what was described in the Immediate Stages of the Erotic, “the erotic here is seduction.”
Thus, the delight derives in the sensation which the seducer manages to derive from the relationship to the other person — the other person is reduced to the object of desire, but has no independent merit as a person. The value of the other is in the sensation they produce in the subject.
This reduction of the other to object, to the sensation they produce does not necessarily mean a pleasant sensation — this is a matter of averting boredom. When we think of this process in such a manner, we can quickly see that the greatest part of our public life and media is built up with human beings who reduce all others into objects to reduce boredom — and, since we are on the other side of Sartre — to create “meaning” (as paltry as it is).
Think of political rallies, demonstrations, riots, demands for “justice” and such in terms of boredom aversion and the creation of “meaning” and they will become instantly more comprehensible. That is why such events and people are not susceptible to reasoned discourse or moral suasion: they are not operating at that “stage” (to use Kierkegaard’s term) of life. Even the other speaking to them exists for the purpose of averting boredom (and creating meaning). This throws an interesting light on apologetics.
24 Tuesday Jan 2017
Posted in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized
The first thing to realize is that “seducer” does not entail anything lurid. The seducer seeks the affection, not the virginity, of his conquest.
The diary is presented as a “rough copy” of some material he had stolen me another’s desk– although he tries to justify his behavior (“but it is futile for me to try to extenuate my behavior by reminding myself that I did not open the drawer.”).
He wrestles with the “temptation” to go through the materials, which he describes as, “artistically perfected, calculated carelessness.” This “diary” is “neither historically exact, or simply fiction, not indicative but subjunctive.”
There is a great irony in the one who has obtained the diary describes the moment of illicit reading,
When now after having looked into the scheming mind of this depraved personality, I recall my situation; when, with my eye alert for every subtlety, I in thought approached that drawer, it makes the same impression upon me as it must make upon a police officer as he enters the room of a forger, opens his belongs, ….
But the man who is stealing another’s papers and passing them along is himself “depraved” — he admits to falling to temptation, to be drawn and then representing something which is not his.
The irony is heightened because Kierkegaard is pretending that he is someone else presenting someone else’s diary. The final irony is that it is believed that the seducer is a vague autobiography of Kierkegaard himself and a veiled letter to Regine Olson (he wrote this after breaking off his engagement with her as a bizarre defense and explanation).
