Life: A mystery or a problem?

Is the life of faith a mystery or a problem?

A few thoughts from Gabriel Marcel, a French playwright and philosopher, who lived 1889-1973:

“The problem is something that I could isolate. Problems have solutions or potential solutions…. The problem stands outside me. Mystery, I'm inside it. Mystery, I can't get distance on myself, or it or that other person."

“A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique…. whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique. It is, no doubt, always possible (logically and psychologically) to degrade a mystery so as to turn it into a problem. But this is a fundamentally vicious proceeding, whose springs might perhaps be discovered in a kind of corruption of intelligence."

“Reality cannot be summed up.”

40

I like "40" by U2, the P-40 aircraft, 40 ounces, the 40 yard line, "40 Days" by Chris Robinson & The New Earth Mud, Isaiah 40, John Berryman's Dream Song 40, Pensees #40 -- and now I see a rainbow.

What makes a friendship? How Shestov and Husserl became buds

Edmund Husserl once said of his fellow philosopher Lev Shestov, “No one has ever attacked me so sharply as he. That’s why we are such close friends.”

From this article in The Jewish Week.

Let's 'know' together

Two quotations by Walker Percy:

1. Awareness is not only intentional in character; it is also symbolic.... I am not only conscious of something; I am conscious of it as being what it is for you and me. If there is a wisdom in etymologies, the word consciousness is surely a case in point; for consciousness, one suddenly realizes, means a knowing-with! In truth it could not be otherwise. The act of consciousness is the intending of the object as being what it is for both of us under the auspices of the symbol.... Mead's major thesis was that the individual trascendental conscious is a myth, that mind and consciousness are indefeasibly social realities.

2. The decisive stroke against the myth of the autonomous Kantian subject is the intersubjective constitution of consciousness. There is a mutuality between the I and the Thou and the object which is in itself prime and irreducible. Once, in theorizing, this relation is ruptured, it cannot be recovered thereafter -- witness the failure of both Sartre and the empiricists to give an account of intersubjectivity.

The first quote is from "Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity," in The Message in the Bottle.

The second quote is from "Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism," in The Message in the Bottle.

Two unrelated philosophical quotes

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the latter half of his career, offered this advice to philosophers who want to understand how words are used:

"Don't think but look!"

"...when investigating meaning, the philosopher must 'look and see' the variety of uses to which the word is put."
-- Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar in their article on Wittgenstein in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

# # #

I know little about Wittgenstein, and even less about Wilhelm Dilthey, but both have me intrigued lately.

Dilthey drew a distinction between natural science and (what is sometimes called) human science with this quote:

"We explain nature, humans we must understand."

Read a detailed article on Dilthey here.

Our intellectual positions and our hearts

“Let us not pretend to doubt in our philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts,” wrote the U.S. philosopher Charles S. Peirce in his book Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.

“Our philosophy” and “our hearts” are separated here in a way that addresses the habits of thought among Peirce’s contemporaries. But Peirce seems to be saying that the distinction between “our philosophy” and “our hearts” is not actually that distinct. His statement strikes me as an argument with a singular point: that we are singular beings, not compartmentalized beings operating in separate realms.

My thoughts jump to this description of Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy as described by William Barrett in his book Irrational Man: “…my existence is not at all a matter of speculation to me, but a reality in which I am personally and passionately involved. I do not find this existence reflected in the mirror of the mind, I encounter it in life; it is my life, a current flowing invisibly around all my mental mirrors.”

So I wonder if heart and critical thinking can operate entirely separate from each other. There is plenty more to say on this. What do you think? Comment below.

-Colin Foote Burch

Russian writers & the Archbishop of Canterbury

I interviewed Lesley Chamberlain not so long ago, when two of her major works on Russian intellectual history were about to be published in the United States.

Now, Chamberlain has interviewed Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, about the work of Russian novelist Dostoevsky.

Here is a key excerpt from Williams' comments:

Dostoevsky famously said: "If there’s no God, then everything is permitted." It’s a view the west might consider more often. Dostoevsky’s not saying that if there’s no God then no one’s watching us and we can do what we like. He’s really asking: what’s the rationale for living this way and not otherwise? If there’s no God, then there’s no shape to our lives. Our behaviour needs to be in tune with something. If there’s no divine tune, how do you know where to go, what to do? To believe in God is not a business of rewards, but an ability to make sense of things.

The objectives of metaphysics, the objectives of science

“If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics.”

-Jeff Coulter and Wes Sharrock, Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science (2007)

Here's another thought

"To ask how I would think if I were brought up outside any particular society, is as meaningless as to ask how I would think if I were born in no particular body, relying on no particular sensory and nervous organs."

- Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

Here's a thought

"What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.... The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Plantinga on natural selection and naturalism

Alvin Plantinga, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, made an interesting comment in the July/August edition of Books & Culture:

"[N]atural selection doesn't care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce."

Plantinga does not rule out evolution in his article.

In fact, the name of the article is "Evolution vs. Naturalism."

How's that?

Here's a hint:

"Naturalism is the idea that there is no such person as God or anything like God; we might think of it as high-octane atheism or perhaps atheism-plus. It is possible to be an atheist without rising to the lofty heights (or descending to the murky depths) of naturalism. Aristotle, the ancient Stoics, and Hegel (in at least certain stages) could properly claim to be atheists, but they couldn't properly claim to be naturalists: each endorses something (Aristotle's Prime Mover, the Stoics' Nous, Hegel's Absolute) no self-respecting naturalist could tolerate." [emphasis added]

Science, brain, mind & metaphysics

I'm reading a book that argues aggressively against the validity of the field of neurophilosophy. Excerpts from the introduction:

"The name 'neurophilosophy' itself, and the hyphenated expression 'mind/brain', are both part of the propaganda, intended to suggest the closest, intimate connection between neuroscience and philosophy....

"It is not physiology which drives this philosophical orthodoxy, but metaphysics, the idea that the findings of the sciences are now providing answers to the questions raised by metaphysics, providing a definitive statement as to what there really (ultimately) is....

"Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. The error which promotes the orthodoxy is, in an important respect, very simple and basic: it is to suppose that 'what anything is' is identical (in the very strongest sense) with 'what it is made of'."

- from Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) by Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester

Who really speaks the truth

"Only mystics, clowns and artists, in my experience, speak the truth..."
- Malcolm Muggeridge




Macolm Muggeridge as a gargoyle, from The Gargoyle: The Journal of the Malcolm Muggeridge Society

Self-renewal in science and free societies

"The life of the scientific community consists in enforcing the tradition of science and assuring at the same time its continuous renewal. A dynamic free society lives as a whole in this way. It cultivates a system of traditional ideas which have the power of unlimited self-renewal."
--Michael Polanyi, from the preface to the Torchbook edition of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

This might explain the success of Christianity, which could be described as "a system of traditional ideas which have the power of unlimited self-renewal."

Metallica and Philosophy

Dude! There's a new book called Metallica and Philosophy!

All this time you've been banging your head thoughtfully, and didn't even know it.

Scott Ian, guitarist for Anthrax, called it, "The most elucidative dissertation on Metallica ever written. And a kick-ass read to boot!!!"

According to the bullet points on the publisher's Web site, the book:

"Maps out the connections between Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Metallica, to demonstrate the band's philosophical significance";

"Uses themes in Metallica's work to illuminate topics such as freedom, truth, identity, existentialism, questions of life and death, metaphysics, epistemology, the mind-body problem, morality, justice, and what we owe one another".

The book comes from William Irwin, the editor of Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing, and The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer.

Here's the link: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405163484?promoid=ERASS07

-Colin Burch

The knowing heart?

The other day I had a brief conversation with a doctor who specializes in neuro-feedback. He said Western folks live out their heads, while Eastern folks live out of their hearts. When we try too hard to do something, he said, we usually don’t do it so well. In a zen-like fashion, corresponding with neuro-feedback therapy (or at least theory), when we’re not straining to do something, we usually have more success doing it.

It occurred to me later that, even in the West, we have a thread of understanding that places the heart at the center of our essential nature. Historically, the West has not been completely wedded to the left hemisphere of the brain.

Several years ago, I found a passage from Thomas de Quincey that tried to describe the heart’s role. In The Poetry of Pope, de Quincey wrote, “The scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or co-operation with the mere discursive understanding; when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of ‘the understanding heart’ – making the heart, i.e., the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite.”

Can we know with our hearts? I’ve been trying to define “heart” in the sense that de Quincey uses it, and so far I haven’t been able to construct an adequate definition from my research of theological and philosophical ideas. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see how some thinkers didn’t believe the left-hemisphere empiricism could say everything important to being human.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher living in the 1600s, looked out into the darkness beyond the outposts of his rational faculties and said, “It is reason’s last step to realize that there are millions of things beyond reason.”

Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher, wrote in his book The Tacit Dimension, “We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Something is going on in us that is valuable yet not centered in the left hemisphere of our brains. This opens a whole can of worms regarding intuition, mind-brain issues, spirituality, and the nature of the “heart” as de Quincey uses it.

The anguished question bears witness that you know

I’ve spent some time reading reputable authors who have made space for religious experience to be valid, and space for our hearts to be organs of understanding as much as our minds.

This is important because I use my mind, not my experiences or feelings, to understand these writers – and yet, the point of my understanding has been to make intellectual space for religion. I grew up mostly in ecstatic faith, where powerful feelings, speaking in tongues and all varieties of allegedly supernatural experience happened.

Why use the mind to make space for the non-rational? Most people have probably heard Blaise Pascal’s saying: “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. We feel it in a thousand ways.” Pascal, a French philosopher, said that in the 1600s, yet some people still see that perspective as valid. In the early 1900s, Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, “We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Polanyi’s present-day advocates point out that our ability to pedal a bicycle down the street is not dependent on our ability to academically describe the physics, mechanics and physiology of what’s happening. Some theologians have speculated that Polanyi’s defense of “personal knowledge” and “tacit knowing” could explain something of how the heart perceives God.

The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, once chosen for to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, put an existentialist spin on our ability to know something about God. Brunner said if you sincerely, desperately seek to know if God is there, “the anguished question bears witness that you know.”

So maybe there is something intellectually solid about considering the experiences others have, or one’s own experience, with God. Yet any confidence I have of this today comes from reading the intellectual cases for it all in books. I have books, and what they teach me, to focus on – not ecstatic experience. Books and sound thoughts protect me from wild, unreliable perceptions and intuitions.

I like Rudolf Otto’s explanation of the human sense of mysterium tremendum – of the ineffable, unapproachable, awe-inspiring, sometimes terrifying Other – as long as I’m just reading about it. Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy was one of ten favorite books of C.S. Lewis, who also wrote about mysterium tremendum. I might have a flicker of that sense once in a while, when I’m looking up at a million unexplainable, glimmering stars. Pascal wrote, “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it.” Well said, but I don’t want to go to a church where everyone is trying to conjure up mysterium tremendum with dancing, shouting, speaking in tongues, and feelings that God is leading them to speak. Books and rituals for me.

Mysterium Tremendum

Have you read The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto? I like Otto’s explication of the human sense of mysterium tremendum – of the ineffable, unapproachable, awe-inspiring, sometimes terrifying Other. Some would describe it as the sense that God is near.

The Idea of the Holy was one of C.S. Lewis' ten favorite books; he also wrote about mysterium tremendum.

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, in recent books, are doing serious work to reduce religious phenomena to natural causes. They are brilliant men. Still, for me, the reductiveness still leaves something to be desired: our imagination, both intellectual and fantastical, moves not from the great things to the small things, but from the small things to the great things, as if we know there's something meaningful beyond us. Isn't imagination itself meaningful, just the fact that imagination is possible?

It was way back in the 1600s when the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, but still, something about his take on reason makes intuitive sense. Pascal argued, “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it.”

When we sense something of the infinite number of things beyond reason, we call it mystery.

Confucius said...

Ancient proverbs carry with them a unique moral and intellectual mentality, and I became influenced by that mentality as a kid, when Dad would read from the biblical book of Proverbs during breakfast.

I think the power of proverbs is this: they're easy to remember, and poignant enough to stick in your head, and usually applicable in a real-world sense at some point in your week.

Thomas Cleary's fantastic little book, The Essential Confucius, provides a great collection of another insightful source of proverbs: The Analects of Confucius. It seems like these proverbs ought to have more of a place in our mass culture, because they make so much sense. A new packaging of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, his ancient Roman sayings, was published a few years ago. Despite my qualms with some of Stoic philosophy, perhaps the fact that a publisher chose to take on yet another edition of the classic sayings is a sign of hope.

Here are some of Cleary's selections, with my comments in paranthesis:

Confucius said, "Study without thinking, and you are blind; think without studying, and you are in danger."

(Think without studying -- that explains celebrity actors commenting on current events.)

Confucious said, "Enliven the ancient and also know what is new; then you can be a teacher."

(It's the old stories, poems and dramas that still provide structure and subterranean sources for today's novels and movies.)

Confucius said, "There are those who act without knowing; I will have none of this. To hear a lot, choose the good, and follow it, to see a lot and learn to recognize it: this is next to knowledge."

(Enough said.)

The Mind-Brain problem gets an EEG

Despite my old-school, Christian-Platonic presuppositions about the mind and soul, I'm realizing just how much we are predisposed (not predetermined) to certain traits due to the wiring in our brains.

And yet there is hope for some of the problems through neurofeedback.

My daughter, like both of her parents to some extent, has met the diagnostic criteria for having attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) and probably its incumbent dyslexia.

We gave neurofeedback a try. Our daughter improved dramatically in matters of mood as well as attention. My wife was also going to neurofeedback sessions, but her assessment, not to get myself in trouble, hasn't meant as much as my observations of my daughter. My daughter is 6, and six-year-olds don't have agendas and presuppositions in clinical settings. Adults will either be skeptical or wholesale believers or something in between, and their beliefs will impact their assessments of their clinical experiences. A child is less self-conscious of her behavior, and in my daughter's case, her moods and abilities to concentrate improved.

The idea behind neurofeedback is that people will self-correct the unproductive concentrations of electrical currents in the brain. My own recent, personal experience with neurofeedback went like this. I had a wire clipped to each ear lobe, and another wire stuck on my head. I looked at a TV screen that displayed a race car on a race track, like a video game. When my attention was relaxed and focused on the screen, the car began to move. The more focused, the faster the car moved around the track. When I was distracted, or became self-conscious, or my thoughts turned inward, the car stopped.

University researchers in Germany have recently added to the research that suggests neurofeedback is highly effective in addressing ADHD. This apparently was the first study of neurofeedback in which the researchers tracked progress with electroencephalographic brain imaging (EEG). Read about their findings here:
http://au.health.yahoo.com/061123/3/zj94.html

Perhaps neurofeedback will increasingly become the cure for the kid about whom it has been said: "He's got a good mind. Why doesn't he use it?" Maybe many kids just need a little help in moving more of their brains' electrical activity into their frontal lobes.