tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-372693942024-02-24T17:03:51.250-06:00DisputationesIt was regular practice in the medieval university for faculty and students to engage in the art of disputation. This blog presupposes the corporate nature of the theological enterprise, supposing that theology, particularly Lutheran theology, can once again clarify its truth claims and provide rational justification for its positions.Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.comBlogger193125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-19676600420837523172024-02-04T22:26:00.008-06:002024-02-04T22:29:41.129-06:00Preamble to a Phenomenology of Congregational Life<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Oftentimes we don't know what we have lost until we don't have it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The phenomenological movement attempted to uncover the fundamental meaning of the entities, properties, and relations in which we find ourselves, in which we <i>dwell</i>. The idea is simple enough. We are always already within a world of meaning prior to any explicit philosophical reflection upon this world. The man at work in his workshop knows how to get around in the shop; he knows what things he needs in order to make the things he wants to make. He "knows" these things pre-reflectively. He probably has not stopped to do an explicit ontological inventory of items in his shop and the properties each has that allow them to be related to each other. Rather he just walks his shop and gets what he needs when he needs them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1985-1980), Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and a host of other thinkers were interested in getting to the immediate meaning of things, to their <i>sense</i> prior to explicit investigation. Husserl, in particular, was interested in what Frege (1848 - 1925) called <i>Sinn, </i>the <i>mode of presentation</i> of objects in the world, the <i>that by virtue of which</i> objects could be picked out in the world and referred to. Frege famously said that names had both sense and reference. Names refer when the sense of the name picks out an existing object. Just because a name does not refer does not mean it has no meaning. After all, the name <i>could have referred</i> were there to be an object that satisfied the <i>Sinn</i> of the name. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Frege's famous example was the Morning Star and Evening Star. Astronomers for centuries were able to identify the Morning Star as Morning Star and the Evening Star as Evening Star without knowing that the Morning Star is the Evening Star. The modes of presentation of Morning Star and Evening star differ, but there is identity in that to which they refer: Venus. Accordingly, the name <i>Morning Star</i> refers to Venus as it presents itself as the Morning Star while the name <i>Evening Star </i>refers to Venus as it presents itself as Evening Star. Within a more comprehensive <i>theory</i> we identify the Morning Star and Evening Star. So what is this world of sense by and through which we believe we have made reference to the world? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) spoke in terms of the <i>manifest</i> and <i>scientific </i>images of the world. He espoused a scientific naturalism that nonetheless sought to <i>save the appearances</i>. In <i>Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man</i>, Sellars characterizes the manifest image of the world as "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world," it is the framework in and through which we ordinarily observe and explain our world. (See Willem deVries, "Wilfrid Sellars," in the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.</i>). Persons and the things meaningful to persons is what has center stage in the manifest image of the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The <i>scientific image</i> of the world is deeper; it is that which we hold ultimately is the case despite how things appear. Sellars famously adjusted Protagoras' statement to "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind). The <i>scientific image</i> states what is the case, while the manifest image states what appears to be the case. Importantly, the manifest image is not merely an <i>error</i>. It is a description of the place in which humans find themselves phenomenally prior to theory and experiment and the <i>reality </i>of how things stand in themselves. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While Sellars held that what ultimately exists is that to which oue best scientific theories appeal in explanation and prediction, he understood that we do not and cannot live our lives merely within the conceptual categories of scientific naturalism. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger in anyway denigrate the activity of scientific theory-formation and confirmation, they really were interested in the <i>world</i> as it appears to and for consciousness. (Heidegger despised the term <i>consciousness</i> for many reasons, but I will use it nonetheless in this context.). Husserl was so interested in what immediately appears to and for consciousness that he advocated a suspension of thinking in terms of our <i>natural attitude</i> of what there <i>really is</i>, and bid us to hold in abeyance questions of what there ultimately is apart from us and concentrate on that which is present to consciousness. His <i>phenomenological reduction</i> advocates that we again encounter the <i>things themselves</i> that give themselves to consciousness, before pressing on to the question of whether those things are <i>real</i>, whether they somehow track with that which ultimately is. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Husserl believe that returning to <i>die Sache Selbst</i> of immediacy allow us to ground science even the more deeply. Heidegger wanted to examine the objects of our intentional acts within the meaningful context in which they dealt in order to get clarity about the nature of the <i>world</i> we immediately inhabit. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While both he and Husserl were interested in the <i>Umwelt</i> in which we find ourselves, Husserl could never find a way ultimately out of his own <i>transcendental image </i>of things. For Husserl, the transcendental ego exists as that which reaches out through its intentional "ego rays" to objects in meaningfully encounters. Heidegger, however, had no time for such metaphysics. What is given to consciousness is being-in-the-world. Instead of an isolated ego related to its world of intentional objects, there is already the unitary phenomenon of hat which is phenomenologically prior to an ego and that which the ego intends. Husserl's transcendental ego becomes Heidegger's <i>Dasein, </i>the unitary being-in-the-world phenomenon that is clearly present in ways that a transcendental ego cannot be. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Heidegger's emphasis was on the immediacy of that which shows itself as itself in the <i>Lichtung</i> (lighting up) of Dasein itself. Dasein is the "there-being" that in its being is always interested in being. While Husserl's project was epistemological, Heidegger's became <i>ontological.</i> What are all those things that are, that in relating themselves to us, make us the kind of beings that have worlds? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We are always already in a world and what it is to be me is to have a world of a definite contour. The manifest image of things, according to Heidegger, has been passed over in the history of philosophy. It has not been deeply explored because our attention has always been drawn away from the immediacy of our life in the world to the question of what lies "present-at-hand" to us beyond that image. We have been traditionally interested in the world of the <i>Vorhandsein</i>, the world of beings that are. But in concentrating on this, we have lost what is before our eyes. We have lost the very meaningful context in which we already live in all of our inquiry. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Sellars understand that we cannot do without the manifest image of things, but he believes what ultimately is cannot be given by what phenomenally stands close by. We need to move to the deeper <i>structural </i>explanation of that <i>surface</i> the manifest image reveals. Heidegger, however, wants us to follow Husserl and <i>attend deeply and passionately </i>to that which displays itself to us in all we think and do. Heidegger's interest in the immediacy of the world and the universal structures of immediacy that ground that world gives him quite a different orientation from Sellars. They latter was interested in science, but the former in religion. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Heidegger's work at Marburg was filled with religious interest. Accordingly, Husserl had designated Heidegger to be his student that could apply the phenomenological method to religious experience and religion as such. What is the <i>world</i> of religion, and what are the deeper structures of religious experience and meaning as such that make possible any religious world? Heidegger is accordingly interested in the <i>facticity</i> of religious life, the meaningful structures within which religious people operate and find themselves. Heidegger famously tried to understand the experience of the early Christian as being-to-the-parousia, an idea he later adjusted to <i>Sein zum Tode</i>, being-unto-death. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of this is is preamble for the topic to which I allude in the title: <i>A phenomenology of congregational living</i>. What is it to live congregationally? In our penchant to treat congregational life using the tools of the social sciences we may shortchange what it is to <i>be</i> congregationally. Clearly, we could seek to understand congregational growth and decline by appealing to general sociological principles indexed for our particular historical-cultural standpoint. This can be extremely enlightening, of course. But in the effort to explain and predict congregational processes, we may lose what shows itself as itself. Were we to attend to the be-ing of congregational life we might find in the <i>manifest</i> image the world itself in which religions lives and moves, the world in which we finally find meaning, a <i>salvific</i> meaning allowing us to live unto the future. What I am suggesting here, <i>inter alia</i>, that it is in the manifest image of things that we find meaning, purpose and ultimately <i>hope</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While the body dies and scientific naturalism finds no basis upon which survival of death is possible -- or maybe even conceivable -- within the manifest image, God is close at hand. <i>Christ saves us</i> and brings us into his house of many rooms. Our fundamental experience of being-in-the-world is not one where meaning is absent and must be constructed. Our fundamental experience is filled with meaning for we are beings who in our be-ing find the question of be-ing at issue for us. As Heidegger says, the ontic superiority of Dasein is found in its ontological constitution. As Augustine said, "our heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord." A thick description of the facticity of Christian being-in-the-world reveals what that life is like, and holds open the possibility that that life which is ontologically possible can be <i>my</i> life or <i>your </i>life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As the embers of western Christianity begin to smolder, it is important for us to know what it was for men and women to have lived this extraordinary life. For many of us, the living of Christian life is always a living of that life within the Christian congregation. We can perhaps remember what it was and how it was decades ago, and we can compare that living to living today. Where was the axes of meaning then and now? What has changed? How was it that we could once recoil at the thought of touching the sky while now such touching is simply business as usual? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the next post I will try my hand at examining the facticity of congregational living. Perhaps we will be granted ontological insight into the preciousness of being-as-communion in Lutheran congregational life. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-63060417904110906042024-01-21T13:37:00.001-06:002024-01-21T13:37:05.895-06:00Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Charles Taylor, in his magisterial <i>A Secular Age</i>, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant <i>social imaginaries</i>. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of <i>subtraction theories</i>, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have <i>inter alia</i> lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: <i>Aude sapere ("</i>dare to know"). It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine <i>positive knowledge</i> of things. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the <i>transcendent</i>; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a <i>closed take</i> hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not <i>wholly irrational</i> to hold otherwise, those in a <i>closed spin</i> assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: </span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of <i>chance</i> within it. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the <i>natural processes</i> that drive forward the development of our species? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or <i>teleology, </i>for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly <i>caused</i> by natural features of the environment. There is thus no <i>pull</i> (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only <i>pushes</i> (efficient causality). </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of <i>natural scientific theories</i>, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional <i>great chain of being </i>understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the <i>imago dei</i>, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the <i>imago dei</i>? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of <i>idealism</i>, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own <i>projections</i>. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy <i>obviates</i> this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not <i>causa sui</i>. Rather, it is a matter of <i>degree, </i>and not ultimate of <i>kind</i>, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by <i>wish</i> and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the <i>courage</i> to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus <i>more cowardly </i>than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also <i>more dangerous, </i>because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now <i>not</i> treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since there are no objective structures corresponding to <i>the good</i>, <i>the beautiful, </i>and <i>the true</i>, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. </span></li></ul><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a <i>closed spin</i>. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a <i>new social imaginary</i> at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even <i>transcendence </i>itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where <i>death is not a problem</i>. <i>In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. </i></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein <i>naturalism makes sense</i>. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between <i>facts </i>and <i>values, </i>and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the <i>values</i> of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly <i>cross-pressured</i>. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a <i>closed spin</i>, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a <i>closed take</i>. While it <i>seems</i> like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the <i>cross-pressuring</i> that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-56915321523928837022024-01-19T15:50:00.009-06:002024-01-20T12:55:08.969-06:00The Contemporary Ethos of Congregational Life in North America: What to make of Science? <p><span style="font-size: medium;">In a recent series of posts, I have been reflecting about congregational life in North America and have suggested that what happens in local congregations is quite extraordinary and anomalous with respect to other human activities and endeavors. Consider for a moment what it would be to come upon congregational life from the outside, as it were, with no pre-understanding of what congregational life is all about. What would one see? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Bob walks into a building with people he does not know, and strangers come up to him exchanging greetings or engaging in conversation with him. He sits down on a chair or long bench and remains dutifully silent while a series of non-mundane events transpire. People speak from the front, sometimes in conversational voices and other times in a very solemn way. Sometimes they read from texts for long periods of time. Someone either in the front or elsewhere in the building starts singing and others join in. Finally, a person in the front addresses those listening for 15 minutes or longer speaking of events from long ago that he or she believes have significance for today. After this, an even stranger event occurs. After some serious words, people sitting on chairs or benches rise from their seats and walk forward, gathering at a rail in the front where they are given little wafers and a sip of wine and told that these things are the Body and Blood of Christ. At other times infants or adults are splashed with water with concomitant solemn pronouncements and prayers. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After more singing, people finally leave their seats and congregate in the back where friendly discussion ensues about divers and sundry matters. Perhaps Bob is invited to go downstairs or into another part of the building to be part of a class, or maybe he is offered coffee and donuts. Bob's experience here might be like Rita's at another time or another place, or it could be quite different. Rita might be asked to help feed people who have limited funds, or to aid in cleaning the building itself, or to bring a dessert next week. Perhaps someone asks her as to what she thought of the address that someone had given. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Christians have been meeting in communities like this from their earliest days in the catacombs. In those days men and women listened to readings from texts and speeches about those texts. They cared for each other and oftentimes pooled their resources to help each other. With people they knew and some they just met they worshipped Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of God's messianic expectation. While contemporary church buildings do not look much like the early catacombs, there remain between those days and today common <i>practices</i> of congregational life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Congregational life happened then and happens now, and people involved in that life seem to know how to participate in that life. One might say that they have an unthematized pre-understanding of the possibilities and inevitabilities of their gathering together. Congregating to worship a God, hearing speeches, singing and murmuring prayers are all activities that are quite unlike what most people do in contemporary societies of the North Atlantic countries. It is so unlike what people generally do, that one naturally wonders whether these things would be done if there was no already operating <i>social institution</i> for doing these things. Already established is the <i>practice</i> of congregational activity and participation. Without this already established practice, would it ever happen that these activities would develop to be practiced again? In other words, if congregational life were not already occurring, would it happen that it would ever come to occur? Without the reality of an historical institutional of congregational practice and participation, would there be any cultural motivation to <i>invent</i> congregational life again? Is there something about us as social animals that would make the development of congregational life <i>inevitable, </i>or is the having of it fully <i>contingent</i>?</span></p><p>I<span style="font-size: medium;"> fear that the answer to the question of inevitability is likely a resounding "no." The fact that there still exist Christian congregations goes against general cultural expectations. I believe that it is because of the unlikeliness of it developing again <i>ars nova</i>, that congregational life is so <i>precious </i>now. Speaking theologically, we might say that the utter contingency of congregational existence is entirely a matter of <i>grace</i>. The practices of congregational living are not something that can be facilely established upon the horizon of contemporary individual piety. One might say that Christian congregations have an <i>ecstatic </i>existence; they live not on their own but out of the life of the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ. They are creatures of <i>grace</i> first, and only secondarily of <i>law</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the last post I began to explore facets of the intellectual and cultural ethos of those today participating in Christian congregational life. I spoke of the general cultural default of contemporary man and woman who judge God morally and find Him lacking. As pointed out then, I follow Charles Tylor in claiming that Christianity has not been slowed in its growth primarily because of the rise of science, but rather because the traditional God of Christianity appears arbitrary, capricious and decidedly <i>old fashioned </i>in His choices and judgments, and thus is either widely rejected or deemed irrelevant. Accordingly, it is God's putative morality that makes His existence suspect for millions of denizens of the North Atlantic countries in the early twenty-first century. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While all of this is true, there is also little doubt that Christianity today is simply a non-starter for many because it appears to violate the very presuppositions of science itself. Many participating in contemporary congregational life carry with them both a sense that God is morally unreasonable or suspect <i>and</i> that the ultimate description of reality is <i>physical</i>, that what ultimately exists are those entities over which our fundamental theories of physics quantify. In other words, what ultimately exists are those entities to which our fundamental physical theories <i>refer</i>. Accordingly, while people might enjoy participating in congregational life, there is a sense that they actually know better, that human existence is ultimately a physical matter and that congregational life is a living <i>as if</i> this were not the case.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is unfortunately characteristic of our time that people generally know little about the practices and theories of science, particularly those of <i>natural science</i>. Most think that science simply deals with facts, not recognizing the deeply theoretical nature of scientific research. Accordingly, some review of what we claim when we make scientific claims is perhaps useful.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Every scientific claim is theoretical.</i> To claim that the earth revolves around the sun is to have a theory in which the terms 'sun', 'earth', and 'revolves' occur. The meaning of a set of theoretical statements is found in the <i>models </i>which make these statements true. 'Sun' refers to a particular entity, 'earth' refers to a particular entity as well, while 'revolves' refers to a complex set of duples or ordered pairs. Theories, no matter how simple or complex, state the way the world might be. At the risk of gross oversimplification, true theories state how the world actually is -- or alternately what is reasonable to believe about how the world is -- and false theories how the world is not -- or what is reasonable not to believe about the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Theoretical claims of how the world is are tentative and provisional because we are never certain that the theory we are assuming won't finally be shown to be false by how the world ultimately turns out to be. It could take hundreds of years to disconfirm statements of scientific theory. For instance, our theory of the early universe makes theoretical statements about states of the universe in its initial nanoseconds, and these statements are presently untestable because we don't have requisite energy to recreate conditions of the early universe to confirm or disconfirm the statements. Maybe 500 years from now we would have the technology to accelerate particles to velocities characteristic of the very early universe, and we can then claim that the theory then regnant is consistent with observations or that it has been falsified by them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When we construct scientific theories, we bring certain values with us as to what a good scientific theory might be. We want our theories to be <i>simple</i> if possible. They should be <i>applicable</i> to our observational experiences and <i>adequate </i>to them. Adequacy means that the theories can deal in principle with all the kinds of experience we have. Theories should be internally <i>consistent</i> and <i>coherent</i>. Coherency means that we should not have in them arbitrarily disconnected assumptions or that we should not appeal to different kinds of entities if explanation is possible by appeal to only one kind of entity. Simple theories that appeal to one principle are often thought to be more beautiful than those making appeal to differing fundamental principles. While there is nothing necessarily in nature that would disallow it from operating upon many different ultimate principles rather than one, human theory-making always attempts to explain experience in terms of one rather than many. Theories doing this are simply assumed by most to be more beautiful than others. Another value we want theories to have is <i>fecundity</i>. Can a theory sustain a hearty research program? Is it properly <i>relatable</i> to other theories? Theories which do not sustain interest or research are simply irrelevant, and science in general does not develop its views of the world on the basis of irrelevant and/or isolated theories. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Scientific theory formation happens by adopting likely stories of explanation, stories which fit our already theoretical views of the world. We establish theories that try to give natural explanations for natural events. Because we assume in the practice of science a methodological naturalism, <i>God cannot be a theoretical entity within scientific theory</i>. It is not that science ultimately excludes God from the universe, but it is rather that the humble <i>practice </i>of scientific theory-building limits itself to explanation in terms of natural processes, events and laws. By its very nature, science does not and cannot appeal to non-natural explanations for natural events. Despite the final metaphysical implausibility of a particular physicalist explanation, natural science must attempt to explain why something is the case by appealing to only those natural entities and processes that can be in principle referred to by standard scientific theory. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">One can see this clearly in the way that explanation often occurs in macro-evolutionary theory. Since 'natural adaptation' is a theoretical notion it can be appealed to in explaining why this particular life form developed in this way and not another. Oftentimes 'natural adaptation' is a notion that can't be profoundly specified. One appeals to it in a way that mimics perhaps the appeal that earlier generations made to God's will. Why did <i>x </i>develop in a <i>P</i> way and not in <i>Q </i>way? God willed it! </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But while all would agree that God willing nature to develop in a <i>P </i>way rather than a <i>Q</i> way is not a persuasive explanation in our time, many nonetheless believe that a simple appeal to natural adaptation can explain <i>P</i> development rather than <i>Q</i> development. But when it comes to the really big issues of macro-evolutionary theory, the devil is clearly in the details. Oftentimes, mechanisms by which putative natural adaptation selects for P development rather than Q development cannot yet be specified, and one is left with a <i>direction </i>and a <i>trust</i> that someday a mature theory will be able to explain this P development. While appealing to the general direction of "nature selects it" rather than "God wills it" has greater plausibility in our time, the <i>logic</i> of the argument remains the same. Unless particular natural explanations can be given that explain the particulars of macro-evolutionary development plausibly no true explanation has been given. Simply put, just because "natural adaptation" is a more popular explanation today than "God wills it," does not mean that the former explanation is, or ultimately will be, more successful. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My point here is simply to say that natural science is a deeply theoretical human activity. In casting about for a natural theory to explain some set of natural events, one must select a theory that "fits in" with the theories that one already has, and that is supported by the observational data. Scientific theory, we now know, is always <i>underdetermined</i> by observation and the acceptance of other theories. It is always <i>logically possible</i> to explain events by appealing to other sets of natural events than those assumed in one's theory, or by explaining things in terms of non-natural events. The point is, that explanation in terms of <i>non-natural</i> events is not the way that the institution and practice of scientific theory formation and confirmation/disconfirmation proceeds. Moreover, there is no scientific <i>decision procedure</i>, no <i>algorithm, </i>on the basis of which "correct" scientific theory is selected and "incorrect" theory rejected. Natural science, like all human activity, is messy. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of this is simply to say that the <i>best explanation </i>for why the universe bears the marks of design can be the fact that God was at work designing the universe. One can reasonably hold this while still holding that such an explanation is not <i>scientific, </i>for it violates the rules by which scientific theory-formation proceeds. It is not a scientific explanation because it appeals to non-natural agency, something clearly disallowed in the doing of natural science. But why think that all rational explanation must be natural scientific explanation? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My point is that few people participating in the life of Christian congregations in these days know how theoretical and <i>rule-governed</i> is the activity of scientific explanation. So again, how can it be that God was involved in creation when our natural scientific models show the universe to be a broken symmetry flowing out of an infinitely dense point without extension? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The answer is not difficult because, in truth, in any explanation we cannot avoid <i>metaphysical models</i>. Ought we explain the universe by making no appeal to non-natural agency? If so, why? The point is that there is nothing in the observational data that disallows a metaphysics of divine action in creation. The choice is ours: Do we want to adopt a materialist/physicalistic metaphysics or not? If so, why, and if not, why not? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But the horizon of most in congregations is that science does explain things, and that this explanation finally does <i>not</i> rest in <i>human freedom</i> as to the adoption of a metaphysics of physicalism or that of theism. However, just because we can give physicalist explanations of most physical events does not mean that we should always do so, or even that it is rational to do so. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In summary, the horizon of many within congregations now is that the morality of God is problematic, and that there is something in the nature of the world or natural science itself that calls for natural scientific explanations for things. I acknowledge that the first problem has no easy and quick solution, but want to point out that it is a certain misunderstanding and ignorance of the scientific process itself which makes many simply assume that science is in conflict with religious faith. Reinvigorating congregational life in North America must deal with the fundamental assumptions of people in the pews today. Of these, two are very important: Can the nature of God be deemed consistent with Christian congregational experience and practice, and can our understanding of the divine escape from the easy physicalisms that dominate much of popular culture today? </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-64785341995028947622024-01-16T13:48:00.003-06:002024-01-16T19:00:26.980-06:00The Contemporary Ethos in which Congregational Life Happens: The Problem of God<p><span style="font-size: medium;">We have in the last two posts been reflecting about congregational life in North America. In the post entitled <i>Putting the Focus Back on Congregations</i>, I spoke of the early days of the WordAlone Network, an effort in the first decade of the twenty-first century to return the Evangelical Lutheran Church to its theological roots. I claimed that WordAlone was trying at the time to point out that Lutherans have traditionally maintained both that the Church is the Body of Christ and means of grace, <i>and </i>simultaneously that it is a group of particular sinners gathered around the Word and Altar. I contended that our then critique of high church presuppositions that undergirded <i>the Concordat </i>and <i>Called to Common Mission</i> was warranted because the ELCA bureaucracy had assumed a non-dialectical understanding of Church, claiming that the baptized themselves in churchwide assembly could be identified with the activity of the Holy Spirit Itself. What was needed then was simply to say that the church is a body of very human sinners begging for morsels from the divine, that it was, accordingly, a very human institution fraught with errors, mistakes, and earthly pretensions. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I also indicated in that first post that the WordAlone critique of a non-dialectical understanding of high church could not become the one and only ecclesiology of the Institute of Lutheran Theology, because Lutheran traditions have not been historically monolithic in their understanding of church or in all the fine points of their theology. I argued that the Institute of Lutheran Theology needed to be a place where Fordean-inspired gnesio-Lutherans, Evangelical Catholics, pietists, confessionalists and neo-confessionalists could all study their traditions, and come to fuller appreciation of the theological accents the differing Lutheran theological traditions possessed. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">At the conclusion of that first article, I spoke of what features a genuine Lutheran <i>Center for Congregational Revitalization</i> might have. Accordingly, it would work to enter into formal and informal relationships with congregations to help in keeping pastors in pulpits, to aid in the funding of theological education, to explore new models of congregational ministry, and to help keep an active and creative <i>normative </i>Lutheran theology at work in congregations. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the second installment, <i>Focussing on Congregations: Why the Decline?, </i>I spoke about the eclipse of congregational life in North America as the congregation moved in many communities from the center of social activity and function to the periphery of community social life. I argued that while it might be tempting to say that it is a <i>good</i> thing to clarify what the mission of congregations really ought to be by pointing to the merely <i>accidental</i> nature of social life within the congregation, it is nonetheless important to understand what has been lost as such accidental congregational social life diminishes. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What is lost, I claimed, are the occasions to <i>hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached</i>, as it were, to ears that while mostly indifferent to the proclamation, are nonetheless still <i>in the pews </i>to hear the proclamation. In the parable, the son comes home to the father because he is hungry and out of funds. In the humiliation of this home-coming he experiences a love that wholly transcends the situation; he experiences a prodigal love that does not return likes for likes, but by grace alone bestows more upon the son than he deserves. Congregational life for Lutherans is not the proper end of Christian life, but it is the very human social context into, and through which, the Word might speak and <i>be heard</i>. While God's love is every where apparent, His prodigal love perhaps is most clearly witnessed in congregational life, where sons and daughters indifferent to the Father are nonetheless loved, and despite their waywardness, counted as precious by that Father. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So let us examine the congregational horizon more deeply. What are the assumptions of many who continue to participate in congregational life in North America? What do they <i>imagine</i> their life to be in this third decade of the 21st century? They attend services and have caring conversations with other congregational members. They might be motivated to engage in projects of the congregation that help the disadvantaged. Possibly, they speak even prophetic utterances to a society that has forgotten the marginalized, that too closely identifies Christian life with the life of the successful American citizen. What are the root assumptions of people in the pews these day in Lutheran congregations in North America? What do they think of God and His benevolence? What do they think about their need for God or salvation? If they are to be somehow <i>saved</i> by hearing and doing the Word, in what does this salvation consist? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is important that we don't wear blinders here. I pointed out that NFS Grundtvig liked to say "human first, then Christian," and I paraphrased this in an earlier post, exclaiming that we are "sinners first, then Christian." If we are going to get clarity into the actual intellectual and cultural horizon presupposed by congregational participants in North America in the third decade of the 21st century, we are going to have to be <i>brutally honest</i>. What is the contour of that initial horizon in which Christian life grows and develops? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is no doubt that there are many within Lutheran congregations that have what might be called a <i>pre-modern</i> understanding of the world. Such people do not really find the existence of God a problem, nor are they much bothered intellectually by the Christian story: God created a universe that is good, that somehow features of this universe created good slipped into sin (the Fall) without God actively willing it, that all who have fallen into sin will ultimately perish eternally, and that God out of His infinite mercy will save some -- through the agency of His Son, Jesus the Christ -- who otherwise would eternally die, and that He thus turns their lives around as a witness to Himself rather than allowing them to remain in a ceaseless drive to their own sinful self-aggrandizements. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>However, for many people participating in Lutheran congregational life, this view of things simply does not ring true any longer. Why is this? For many today, thinking of God in this way is simply not any longer possible. The <i>pre-modern</i> understanding of the Christian story presupposes there is a creator God who either does not anticipate that creation will fall into sin, or, if He does anticipate it, He does not prevent it. The so-called <i>irrational fall</i> from creation into sin must either be understood as an unintended consequence of creation -- a state of affairs that makes God seem to be <i>ig</i></span><span><i>norant</i> -- or a </span><i>design feature</i><span> of the universe itself -- a state of affairs that makes God seem<i> less than good</i>. The problem of the God of the tradition for many today is that He does not seemingly act as well as He ought. If we assume He knows what He is doing, we simply cannot help questioning why He does things as He does. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Our questioning of the goodness of God is not confined to his creation of a universe that falls into sin and death, but it also extends to God's way of redeeming things. We Lutherans who claim that "I by my own reason or strength cannot believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him," must admit that the saving of contemporary man and woman is something that God does, not something that humans accomplish. But this saving seems to many today to be arbitrary and capricious. While somebody might say with confidence and sincerity that "God saved me despite myself," this cannot be generalized by most to statements about God's general saving of humankind, a wholly <i>external </i>saving in which humans might be along for the ride, but are never in the situation of doing any driving on their own. Making such general statements seems to contradict the very goodness of God in Himself. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I submit that this view of things simply does not operate for most educated people today in the North Atlantic countries. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have swam too long in the cultural waters of the west to return to the pristine pre-modern view of the 16th and 17th century Lutheran theological tradition. For most today, there is some sense that there is a God and some sense that in congregational life perhaps some kind of connection to this God is possible. But the God presupposed in the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon is not the God of the Christian tradition. What might be the marks of this other God? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is a general sense, I think, among most educated participants in congregational life that some deep facets of our experience are simply missed or ignored if we look at reality as a product of an <i>evolutionary physicalism</i>. Physicalism is the claim that ultimately the things that exist are those things that our fundamental theories of particle physics quantify over, or presuppose. The idea is that matter/energy is that which is, and this matter/energy has an extraordinary evolutionary history, a history that finally eventuates in the appearance of human beings on the earth, beings of such an extraordinary complexity that one most posit that it took billions of years for purely adventitious processes to produce them. Those who participate in congregational life, while maybe not self-consciously breaking with the assumptions of <i>evolutionary physicalism</i>, yet sense somehow that there must be more than it somehow. This is not to say, that all would claim that there exist some <i>deeper-level </i>objective state of affairs by and through which the universe physically evolved. Perhaps they would say that such a view of things in not <i>subjectively satisfying</i> and claim that participating in congregational life somehow serves the <i>heart</i> if not the <i>head</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What I am suggesting is that active members of congregations today might say that while there is not sufficient evidence in the world to assert God's existence in an unqualified way, there is too much evidence to assert His nonexistence with confidence. Thus, while the contemporary congregational member is no longer sure of the Christian verities of the past, he or she is nonetheless a bit skeptical about contemporary claims of scientific or metaphysical materialists that the universe is as simple as they claim it to be. Having not enough evidence for the traditional Christian God, but too much evidence to be confident that the skies are empty, the contemporary participant in congregational life is exploring those <i>non-cognitive</i> features of experience that make life meaningful, an exploration that they sense can somehow be pursued without denying the central claims of science or the so-called <i>scientific view of the world</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is much that can be said about whether the <i>scientific view of things</i> is an objective fact or merely an ideological commitment, and I will argue in a subsequent post that it is more like the latter than the former. For now, however, I want to return to the question of God. Perhaps there is some "more-than-ness" to the universe to which participants in congregational life witness. How do we think this? Can this be thought about in the way of the God of the Christian tradition or does the <i>problem of evil</i> block that path? At the end of the day, I agree with Charles Taylor in his epic, <i>The Secular Age</i>. Belief in the Christian God has diminished not primarily because of scientific challenges to religion, but more because of the human moral judgment of God. How can the God of the great <i>Omnis </i>-- omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc. -- act as the God of the tradition has reportedly acted? While scientific evidence against God might count in the actual world, the problem of evil applied to God obtains in each and every possible world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We must be brutally honest today. In our teaching and preaching we encounter the default presuppositions of our contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon, the chief problematic one being the very goodness of God Himself. The question we ask is simply this: How is the goodness of God possible given the classical Christian story and our understanding of how God acts <i>sub specie contritio? </i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Any attempt to revitalize congregational life must wrestle with the presuppositions of that life, the first of which is the nature of God Himself. As we try to understand congregational life today we must grasp the changed situation with respect to that life that has occurred in the last 500 years: Whereas people five-hundred years ago generally did not subject God's goodness to their moral judgment, they do so today, and it is not considered by most to be deeply sinful to do so. We shall return to this question in the next post, while introducing another assumption of our time: the general misunderstanding of scientific theory by most educated congregational participants. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-307864189602908772024-01-14T14:26:00.007-06:002024-01-14T14:28:18.594-06:00Focusing on Congregations: Why the Decline?<p><span style="font-size: medium;">We all know that congregational life is dying. These are hard words for preachers or would-be preachers to hear, but they must be heard nonetheless. This is particularly true of Lutheran congregations in North America. It is factually accurate to assert that, for most Lutheran congregations, their days of maximum involvement and maximum relevance to their communities was sixty or more years ago. This is not to say that some Lutheran congregations have formed in the last few decades and have been quite successful. It is only to speak the obvious: In most communities in which there are Lutheran churches, there is less attendance in worship and fewer events happening at the church than was once the case. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We can speculate as to the immediate causes of this. Clearly, school systems and sports programs do not respect the autonomy of congregational programming like they once did. We know that soccer fields on Sunday morning are filled with kids who believe they must be at the soccer field and whose grandparents recall that when they were young the expectations of being in church on a Sunday morning were as great as the coach's expectations now that the kids are on the field for practice or games. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We can also easily point out that the local congregation once served as a place to meet neighbors and friends during an otherwise busy week. Farm life was difficult 100 years ago, and the idea that once could see friends or neighbors at church and coffee or lunch afterwards was a powerful draw for church attendance. Accordingly, the congregation once served a <i>social </i>function it no longer has. It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp clearly how important this social function was. At a time before the worldwide web and cellphones, there was little community outside physical community. Moreover, 100 years ago it was difficult sometimes for adults even to have physical community. Where would they go in small towns across America to meet others and talk with them about their dreams and fears? Families did not go to bars to meet others in 1924; they went to church. Their friends belonged to their congregation or another one in town, and there was sometimes visits of friends to other congregations. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is possible, I suppose, to say that the loss of the congregation as a center for social life is a <i>good</i> thing because it allows us to see clearly what it is that the congregation actually offers and has always legitimately offered. We could speak in the way of Aristotle and say that while the congregation as a center of social life is merely <i>accidental</i> to the being of the congregation, its function of proclaiming the Word is <i>essential </i>to it. The word '<i>accidental'</i> simply means that the congregation can still be what it is apart from its social function; the word '<i>essential'</i> claims that it is part of the very being of a congregation that it proclaim the Word of God to those who sit in its pews. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Some thus welcome today the clarity that the loss of social function in congregations bequeaths. It is clear now, in a way that was not the case before, that the congregation exists to do something else, something quite unconnected to filling one's social calendar: The congregation exists as a place where the Word is preached to sinners, and where these sinners gather around the communion rail to eat and drink the Body and Blood of that Word incarnate, the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I think this way of looking at things does not, however, pay adequate attention to human <i>motivation</i>. The son did not come home to the father because he repented, but because he spent all his money and could no longer party or even eat properly. The Father welcomed the son knowing that the son's motivations were not pure. While the Danish theologian NFS Grundtvig never tired of reminding us that we are human first and then Christian, something quite controversial in its time, I can paraphrase Grundtvig with confidence and say that we are <i>sinners</i> first and then Christian. Accordingly, there are all kinds of motivations why we might want to go to church on a Sunday morning, and very few of them are <i>pure. </i>We go to church to be seen by others, to make business contacts, to do the right thing for our children, to show solidarity with our community, to show others that we are good people who care about the community, to show our spouses that we can do what they want us to do, to display to others our new car or clothes, or to manifest clearly that we are not on the side of soccer programs on Sunday morning. The list goes on and on, and has from the first days of congregational life gone on and on. Who truly can say with confidence that their only motivation for attending church is properly to worship their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that they have <i>no other motivation at all</i> other than hearing the Word? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Congregation life in North America tacitly accepted what was obvious: People participated in the life of the congregation for many reasons, only some of which had to do with what theologians call <i>soteriology, </i>those matters pertaining to salvation. They came to show their new hats, but perhaps heard what Jesus said about humility. They came to connect with potential insurance clients and heard that God's grace extends even to the unlovable. In other words, the congregation was structured the way we are structured. We are sinful and unclean and cannot free ourselves because we ourselves always get in the way of what it would be to move past ourselves. We are self-centered even in our humility. Accordingly, we know that only God's external act of grasping us can protect us from our perpetual grasp of ourselves. Christ draws us to Himself through our activity of avoiding Him and embracing ourselves. Christ chooses us; we don't choose Him. When we say we have chosen Him, we can be sure that we have chosen someone or something that is not <i>Him</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The same is the case within congregations. In the days of congregational social activity that often seemed far away from theological concerns, Christ showed up to claim His own while watching his own run from him in the many ways that fully social beings can. Robust congregations of yore were not filled with Christians of deeper commitments to Christ, but with more people that might hear the Word and be grasped by it. What congregations of 100 years ago had that we don't is <i>people</i>. Whatever the motivation might have been, there were more people in the pews to whom the Word was being preached then than there is now. That is the problem facing us, and no amount of getting clear on the "true motivations" of those now attending services will help us. Human beings run away from God; it is our wont. God through Christ turns some of our retreats around so that we might be put in a position of hearing the Word. The problem for us today is that since there are fewer people participating in congregational life, there are fewer opportunities for people to <i>hear the Word</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So we are back where we began. As congregational life abates in North America, the chances for people to hear the life-giving Word preached in its purity and the life-giving Sacraments to be administered properly decreases. What is requisite, I believe, is to advance a program of actual <i>congregational revitalization</i>. Even though the death of Christendom is upon us and there no longer is the cultural momentum generally to begin or maintain Christian structures and institutions in our society, there still exist sinners who need a life-giving encounter with the Word. <i>Congregational revitalization</i> means that we want to build active congregations in multiple communities that maximize the possibility of encountering the Word. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What is needed is to get clarity on what ILT <i>qua </i>ILT can do to help congregations be those places of possible Word encounter. We need clarity on what specific activities we might do to move congregational life forward. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While I have no empirical studies to point to in support of this claim, I do believe that a change in our <i>social imaginaries</i> is making the very idea of congregational life less attractive to many. Charles Taylor in his epic <i>A Secular Age</i> speaks of these imaginaries, ways that people within a community and society project as possible ways of living fully. Once upon a time in America people assumed that there was a God and that human salvation involved an embrace of <i>transcendence, </i>some state of being that goes beyond this life. Most often, they believed in an afterlife, and thought that their loved ones entered such an afterlife immediately upon death. But the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss beyond death no longer inform our institutional structures and, increasingly, our primary communities. I would argue that the primary impediment to congregational revitalization is not that other institutions (e.g., the schools or sports programs) are crowding out congregational life, but that participating in the life of a congregation simply makes less and less sense to people. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is difficult to play baseball without bats, gloves ands bases. I contend that, in the same fashion, it is difficult to participate in congregational life when the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss are absent. How does one <i>play</i> the game of congregational life when the very presuppositions of that game have been fundamentally shaken? This is the primary question of congregational revitalization, and it is one that I think ILT can address. In our next post we shall have more to say about the precise nature of this address, but for now I simply want to point in the general direction of that address: Our present social imaginaries are in considerable tension with some of the deepest drives of the human spirit. What is needed now is simply to subject these social imaginaries to an interrogation by that spirit. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-79618241432116974202024-01-13T14:03:00.013-06:002024-01-24T12:57:02.816-06:00Putting the Focus Back Upon Congregations<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) has embarked on a new venture called the <i>Center for Congregational Revitalization</i> (C CR). In some ways, of course, there is nothing new at all about ILT being concerned about congregational revitalization. Back in 2001-1008, I was a member of the WordAlone Network (WAN) Board of Directors, and we were deeply concerned about congregational revitalization. In fact, one could argue that ILT was formed directly to deal with problems within congregations, because we were in those days very interested in <i>theology</i>, especially the "working theology" of denominational structures like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Many reading this blog probably recall these days prior to the epic collapse of the ELCA as a relevant and important denominational body in North America. Many of us wrote extensively for WordAlone. The WordAlone Network was formed, one might argue, to save the ELCA from itself. What we did was try to lift up again some of the important features of traditional Lutheran piety and practice in North America. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The ELCA in those days was becoming more and more convinced that the transcongregational denominational entity to which individual Lutheran congregations belonged was itself the church, e.g., the then ELCA Secretary Lowell Almen famously quipped that this entity <i>is</i> the Church and that the congregation is "an outpost of the church." I argued that what needed to be lifted up in that time was that the church for Lutherans had historically been interpreted both in a high and low sense. While <i>high ecclesiology</i> emphasized the role of the Church as the means of grace, and spoke strongly of the identity of the church with the Body of Christ -- the Church in its divine nature --, <i>low ecclesiology</i> emphasized the Church as a fellowship of sinners gathered around the communion rail and accordingly thematized the human nature of the institution. What was needed at a time when the divine nature of the Church was being proclaimed was a reminder of the human nature of that selfsame Church: We are all simply sinners begging at the communion rail for the Word in Body and Blood delivered to each of us. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, <i>the Concordat</i> and <i>Called to Common Mission</i> that sought a common understanding between the Episcopal Church USA and the ELCA of the historic episcopate were documents that presupposed a very high ecclesiology. Just as the Law must be preached in a context of complacency and the Gospel in a context of despair, so must the church be reminded of its very human nature when it is tempted to think that the Holy Spirit itself speaks through the votes of the baptized at a churchwide gathering.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But we within WordAlone were often misunderstood. Instead of understanding the criticism of high ecclesiology dialectically, people believed that low ecclesiology was the position of WordAlone and its minions itself. People thought that the WordAlone critique of high ecclesiology meant that we were non-dialectically committed to a low ecclesiology, and that, accordingly, we could not confess that the Church was the Body of Christ and itself the means of grace. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But I could confess this and did on many occasions. Accordingly, some people were upset that from the beginning I not only allowed but encouraged people from traditions other than a Fordean-style <i>radical Lutheranism -- </i>the genesio position -- to teach and study at ILT. I reasoned that if ILT were to be true to is Lutheran roots, it must allow other Lutheran traditions to be present as well, e.g., Evangelical Catholics, pietists, neo-confessionalists, Grundtvigians, etc. In fact, I thought ILT could not be <i>deeply Lutheran</i> if it were to choose one strand of Lutheranism and proceed as if the other strands were simply misunderstandings or mistakes with respect to that one true tradition. After all, Lutheran congregations in North America are not monolithic in their theological ethos. Thus, <i>to serve actual existing congregations</i>, ILT had to be a bigger tent. If ILT were to be the seminary of a group of committed congregations, it needed to be able to understand the ethos of those congregations, acknowledge their theological ethos as Lutheran in its roots, and actually <i>help</i> those congregations to be faithful and effective in the proclamation of the Word. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We have traveled a great distance at the Institute of Lutheran Theology in the last 17 years. We now have over 160 active students and strong DMin. and PhD programs. We have had accreditation from the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) since 2018 and are having our accreditation visit from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) in March 2024. We continue to gain respect as a theological institution, and our faculty is acknowledged as first-rate. As a school we have never been stronger. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But I think that we are missing something, something that was present at the beginning. While we teach undergraduates, STM, DMin and PHD students well and see increasing numbers from these groups every year, we notice there is one key group of students where we are not seeing stellar growth: ministry students! Yes, you heard me correctly. While ILT is growing in its academic programs -- particularly its academic graduate programs -- it is underperforming on that for which it was called into being: getting faithful and effective pastors into congregations. This we must do better! </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But there is actually a very good excuse for not doing this. Everywhere in the North Atlantic countries we see lower numbers of people studying to become pastors. The reasons why this is so are apparent: Pastors no longer enjoy the respect of American society in general and they are poorly recompensed. Why would anyone want to be a pastor when they could do something that our society could value and understand? While we can excuse our performance in growing ministry students by pointing to the fact that pastors are under-compensated and under-appreciated, making an excuse does not solve the problem. We simply must work to get more people into congregational pulpits. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Congregations in North America are increasingly aware of the difficulties in finding pastors. There are, or will soon be, extreme pastoral shortages in most all of the Lutheran denominations in the United States and Canada. Rural congregations are immediately affected, for their very survival is often at stake. If a rural congregation cannot find somebody to fill the pulpit, it likely will not able to remain open. Closing congregations has, however, devastating consequences not only for the religious life of those within those congregations, but also for the <i>rural communities</i> in which these congregations reside. Often, the last institutions to close in a rural community are the bar and the church. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We at ILT remember our beginnings. We were called into being in order to get pastors into congregations, and thus advancing <i>congregational life</i> is within our very DNA. Accordingly, to be ILT is to care about congregations and their challenges and difficulties. It is with this in mind that we announce our new venture of <i>congregational revitalization</i>. The time is upon us. How does congregational revitalization work at ILT? </span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We enter into formal and informal arrangements directly with congregations, pledging that we shall help them in their search for pastors and that we shall do everything possible to help them keep pastors in pulpits. What we want to create is an ILT league of Lutheran congregations. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We create a funding mechanism to help support the educational costs associated with the training of pastors. We want to make it as easy as possible for those with a passion for congregational ministry to attain it. No serious student should be stopped merely because he or she has insufficient funding. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We work with congregations to develop new ways to deliver theological pastoral candidates into congregations. Clearly, for small rural congregations hoping to find somebody willing to serve them, the completion of a full M.Div degree may not be needed. We have since our inception worked to grant pastoral certificates to those lacking the time, opportunity or means to attain a full M.Div degree. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We work with successful pastors already in the field to create new educational programs and structures that can produce pastors on an <i>ad hoc </i>basis for the <i>ad hoc</i> and dynamic ministry situations that shall increasingly obtain. This means that we design M.Div, MM, and MCM degrees that prepares students deeply to face the kind of situations they will likely face. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We partner with donors who have a passion actually to change Lutheran congregational life in North America. While we know much of what must be done, we don't presently have the requisite resources to address those things necessary to ameliorate Lutheran congregational life. Committed donors can change what we do, but they need to see what can actually be done to improve the situation before they can donate deeply. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">We put people in touch with each other to address the issue at hand. We act as a Lutheran clearing house for the normative task of delivering proper theology to congregations. We don't allow the ILT focus to stray from the congregational horizon. Lutheran theology is incarnation, not excarnational. We can never be primarily concerned with the theological rectitude of abstract theological propositions, but rather with the incarnation of these principles in congregational life, i.e., in the lives of concrete men and women leading the Christian life within their communities. </span></li></ul><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Much more needs to be envisioned and developed as we consider the creation of the ILT <i>Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR)</i>, but this will be the subject of many papers and articles that will be written and evaluated within CCR over the coming months and years. I want here simply to alert everybody that ILT is coming home to its congregations. We intend to focus on you and your needs. We want to be friends with you and we want to learn from you how we can do what we do better. Blessings! </span></div><p></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-19589360129183067522023-08-21T13:06:00.004-05:002023-08-21T13:09:12.793-05:00Calling a Thing What It Is: Two Points<p><span style="font-size: medium;">I admit that I have thought before about being utterly honest in a post or two about the trends that I am seeing in western culture, particularly in the so-called North Atlantic countries. Criticizing the prevailing culture is in the Biblical tradition being prophetic, and being prophetic is not generally a very stable or highly-regarded activity, either in the days of Jeremiah or in our day. Why? Well, of course, one can always be wrong about what one says. But that is not the main irritant, for people don't much want to hear prophetic things even if one might get things right. Criticizing one's contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon is always disruptive, appearing to some to be a deranged activity, like being "anti-vax." "What is it about these people?" some would say. "Clearly, they have gone off the deep end, believing conspiracy theories and all kinds of other nonsense. It's a shame that people like this guy (me?), have fallen for such BS." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Being prophetic demands a certain grasp of history. Cicero once said that the study of history allows us to escape the tyranny of the present. To critique one's culture demands one can envision other ways that one's culture might have gone. Unfortunately, we know very little history these days, and we have forgotten what we once knew about the effects of history upon our own self-understanding. Truly, in America in this very cold third decade of the 21st century it is as if Dilthey and Gadamer had never lived. We, who our products of the historical development of culture and its civilization, now operate as if we have reached a position above history and can thus ahistorically morally judge objectively (somehow) the historical processes from which we are birthed. This has taken us in the direction of censoring history for the sake of a good that somehow lies above history. But I get ahead of myself, for truly most of the new men and women of our age -- the young mostly in the cities -- have no way to conceive or make sense out of a good that putatively lies above history, a good that operates as its source and goal. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let's be honest, folks. The best days of the West, and maybe the world itself, are likely behind us. Before you think that I rant as an old guy, let me offer evidence for my claim. The two points I make below are the results of my own thinking which, like all thinking, thinks within a stream of thinking. I know generally what many others have thought and think, but I have not here cited the specific thinking of particular thinkers. This is what I think, given that no thinking is entirely one's own. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here are the two points about which this post is concerned: </span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Human power and facility are diminishing.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Since human beings no longer can appeal to anything above or beyond life to ground their life of diminishing power, they increasingly regard traditional existential questions as irrelevant. </span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">1) <i>We are faced with an accelerated diminution of human power and facility</i>. Once upon a time in the west, there were a few that were educated. They could read books and, having gone to college or the university, they could think and write books. Accordingly, they could talk to each other. The educational idea once embraced was that the kind of informed discussions that could happen with the few might happen with the many if civilization were to adopt universal literacy. The idea was that if more people went to college, there would be more people who thought like people that once went to college. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But clearly this did not, and could not, happen. Just as there are few people that can hit a baseball 400 feet or play a Beethoven sonata beautifully, there are few people who can really read Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Einstein, etc. While it is exceptionally hard work and it takes great discipline to think like the great thinkers, hard work and discipline are, nonetheless, not sufficient to think like these people. One must have a bit of <i>genius</i>, and there is nothing so rare and anti-democratic as genius. Some people have it but most don't. Since most in our universities and colleges don't have much genius, the conversations they now undertake are generally neither deep nor penetrating. Discussions within our universities now must moor themselves to the current cultural consensus because there are few in the conversation who can see to the very heart of the contingency of that consensus. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is a simple matter of mathematics. Suppose that genius is distributed at a rate of one in 10,000. (I will regard 'genius' here to mean the ability to apply creativity of a certain kind and imagination of a certain kind to a whole range of issues.) Suppose that many people of genius find themselves in deep conversations about fundamental issues. When there were perhaps 3,000 people in the conversation when there were 50,000,000 people, there was a supply of 5,000 people of genius to potentially be in that small conversation of 3,000. But now let us imagine 10,000,000 in the conversation in an underlying population of 500,000,000. There is now potentially 50,000 people of genius in a conversation of 10,000,000. While before there were 1.6 people of genius for every conversational partner, now there is .05 for each partner. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What I am saying is that the conversation now is arguably very <i>diluted</i> with respect to creativity and imagination with respect to what it once was. Emerson once quipped, "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." As the number of people available to think deeply falls, the form of the conversation is elevated over substance. The idea is simple enough: If we can get a very determinate arena to investigate and and agreed-upon rules for that investigation, then real work of an academic nature can advance even if the people engaged in such work are not particularly creative, imaginative, brilliant or insightful. Under the conditions of what Kuhn called "normal science," most who are educated in what passes for education now in the west can potentially make significant scientific contributions. The task of thinking deeply in "normal periods" seems to be counter-cultural and potentially disruptive of the public good. Genius is not needed, and can even seem dangerous, when the task is pedestrian. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">None of this is to suggest that great scientists don't have genius. Clearly, they do and they are great because of it. It is just that many in the conversations no longer have the genius to appreciate the greatness of the great scientific minds. They cannot see the creativity and the synthesis involved in laying out a theoretical vision of the world. Since they cannot see this, they are lulled into thinking that science is a continuous project of discovering what really exists in the world. They think this without thinking how problematic it is to claim that <i>what really exists</i> can be discovered at all. What means the phrase, "what really exists?" </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While there are fewer geniuses in the important conversations these days, there are many in the conversations who, judged by earlier standards, should not be in these conversations at all. One hundred years ago, I would argue, most in scientific discussions were pretty good at basic mathematics. Euler continued to do thousands of mathematical computations in his head after he lost his eyesight. We once as a culture had to master basic mathematical skills to survive. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But all of that changed with the invention of calculating devices and now computer programs. Many people now, both within and outside science, are incapable of performing simple mathematical calculation either in their minds or on paper. Since they need a calculator to calculate, they cannot autonomously <i>see</i> probabilities, inferential schemas or even functions. They can occupy the mathematical landscape only by placing themselves within mathematical machine space. They come armed now with machine guns where the fight used to be among gentlemen with swords. They genius of the mathematical sword fight has been replaced by the use of mathematical machine guns. Thinking mathematically on one's own has become as irrelevant for mathematical progress as learning the art of thrust and parry for winning twenty-first century wars. We all know that many of our young cannot calculate basic things such as how to make change, and we understand that this would have been disastrous in an earlier age for success in business. But we act as if this is no longer the case. After all, one can get a MBA from an Ivy League school without knowing how to calculate. But despite this, I claim that the loss of basic mathematic skill is a fundamental diminution of human power and facility. Doing business demands that one can work the numbers wherever and whenever one needs to do so. One cannot do it <i>from the outside</i>, as it were, from a position mediated by an external machine. One needs to <i>see</i> the numbers, not have them <i>reported</i> to you. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But what else is around the corner, dear friends? Think about it a moment. <i>AI will do for human writing and reasoning what the calculating device did for basic mathematical computational skills! </i>AI programs already write well, and we are in our infancy with such programs. Soon our secondary school students will learn that they have programs that will actually write the paragraphs and give the reasoning. Just as mathematics has marginalized simple mathematical calculation, thinking and writing will soon marginalize simple rational justification. Giving reasons in logical space for positions adopted can be turned over to computer programs. In fact, must means-ends thinking can so be turned over. Technical reasoning, including both mathematical calculation and the giving of reasons in logical space can be done through the writing and implementation of appropriate algorithms. Just as the invention of large machines during the industrial era meant that there was less and less work to do <i>by hand</i>, so too the invention of AI machines during this computational era will mean that there will be less and less work to do <i>by human thinking</i>. So what will be left for humans to do? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In any means-ends algorithm, the ends are already given. Paul Tillich called <i>ontological reason</i> that activity of human thinking by which the ends are first established on the basis of which the proper means are selected for success. Computational machines and AI programming cannot reason to what ought be the <i>ends</i> of human thinking and calculation. Traditionally, questions such as these have fallen within the province of religion, value, morality and philosophy widely-conceived. Deeply pursuing these questions would seem to be an important activity for our time. But unfortunately, it is becoming increasing difficult for human beings to recognize that the questions of the ends of human life are important questions and ought to be pursued in their own right. Maybe it takes some genius to see this, and there are few today with genius. These considerations bring us to the second point:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>2) We are faced with the increasing conviction by many that the traditional questions of human existence are not legitimate and not worth pursuing. </i>There are vast cultural regions, mostly urban, where a type of unthinking scientism prevails. To see this, let us look to the lives of the young urban elite and attempt to generalize to their values from the specifics of that form of life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For many in what might be called "safely blue areas" within contemporary urban life, religious life is considered mere superstition. Sirens of the new atheism, which is neither new and arguably still commits to some of the old gods, claim that the physical is all there is and that religious people are deluded, and quite possibly weak and devoid of courage, not to embrace what is: The world is all that is the case. Accordingly, there is no "more-thanness" (Jaspers) to which we are related and must deal. Since no values are simply given in an unthinking universe, any values that we have must be constructed and perhaps have been sedimented into the genes through our evolutionary history. While nature often takes the long way to get to where it needs to go, it eventually gets there, and one ought to be able to provide an explanation for what seems to be the universal nature of some human values by pointing to stories about what furthers or hinders human survivability in the face of natural environmental pressures. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The young in cities know that the values they are likely to encounter in life will have to be constructed by themselves in ways that are basically consonant with their own survivability. In this environment, it makes no sense to hold abstract views on human life that do not immediately connect to their survivability and that of their friends. Questions like, "Is it morally permissible to engage in sexual activity with members of one's own sex?" make no sense at all. Why, they wonder, would anyone ever be concerned with this? Since, there is no God to judge this or abstract metaphysical principle for which homoerotic behavior is disconsonant, the question can only be interpreted by them as posed by people being somehow intrusively interested in something that clearly makes no difference to anybody's everyday life. The only question that arises for them is <i>why</i> would somebody be concerned about this. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The new urban dweller understands death or disease as a bad thing because both carry with them concomitant human suffering, and suffering is unpleasant. But many activities, they believe, can be pursued which don't issue in human suffering. While it is interesting to study the actual sexual activity of the young -- it is up slightly with significant increases in those reporting "none at all" -- what they regard as morally permissible of proscriptive seems to be changing. There are many indicators of this, although I must admit that the data can be read in different ways. However, I will boldly claim that the reports that most young people believe that their friends are sexually active and that they ought not judge them for it, means something. The reports buttress the notion that sexual activity is increasingly regarded as a physical thing that carries with it little of relevance to the traditional <i>loci </i>of love, marriage, family, and God that were once associated with it. Young women increasingly speak of "body count" as a good or empowering thing, endeavoring in such speaking to catch up with the historically greater promiscuity of the male. The logic seems to be this: Males have been traditionally more promiscuous than woman and males have had the power in society over and against women. Thus, if women become more promiscuous, then they will have greater power in society over and against men. Clearly, this is a fallacy of denying the antecedent and affirming the consequent, but logic is powerless to break the spell of the association. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The new life of the new urban man or woman is a life without God or overall purpose in which pleasure can be pursued for its own end. Clearly, there is a <i>prima facie</i> rationality to this view. If we are physical beings only, then what is important for us ultimately is our having of pleasant or unpleasant physical sensations. It is arguable that having sex without guilt is more pleasurable than experiencing unpleasant psychological experiences associated with misplaced guilt and regret about something that is quite natural. And that which is true of sex is true of many other things we do in life. Why exactly would one sacrifice? For what reason would one be loyal if it does not issue in increasing the pleasantness of life? It is clear that a predilection towards hedonism, though not necessarily crude hedonism, likely accompanies for many commitments towards physicalism and a denial of God and the life of the spirit. While questions of individual suffering and happiness make sense to those without God, questions as to the rightness or wrongness of sexual practice (extra-marital sex, polyandry, etc) make little sense. It all depends, one hears, of who the people are and what <i>makes them happy</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The questions of life (abortion, euthanasia, etc) are not likely to weigh heavily upon those who regard themselves as fully physical and who believe that physical pleasure and displeasure constitute the barometer of morality. Why exactly does one not terminate the fetus -- even if the fetus is nearing nine months? After all, having a baby will like contribute to the pain and suffering of the mother's existence and the fetus will not recall not existing. While it might have some unpleasantness at termination it does not have the complicated psychological structure to recall and live again its suffering. In fact, while it is sad to have to put down a dog, this sadness ought not limit the happiness of the dog's owner if he or she thinks about matters properly. What is good for the dog is also good for the fetus. To regard the two in fundamentally different ways is to presuppose some external point that allows us somehow properly <i>judge</i> human activity like terminating pregnancies. But if there is no external point, then why not let one's life and experience judge it? And who is anybody else to walk in the shoes of the one to have to make this choice. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the absence of religion, who properly determines our ends? Clearly us! And to the point: There is no abstract <i>view from the top</i> or <i>from nowhere</i> (Nagel) that can make this judgment for another. The ends to which one ought to strive are highly individual. The answer to the question of "What are the ends of human life" is easy: "It depends upon who is asking the question." But this answer undermines the very force of the question -- at least in how it has been traditionally asked. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In this time where most who think and write are not men and women of genius, two things are clear: (1) We have machines now that help us carry out the <i>means</i> by which we reach an <i>end</i>, and (2) the <i>ends</i> of human life are now highly individual, connectable finally to the particularity of the men and women in question. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We no longer live in the days where moral questions arise for us clearly. We can no longer as a society think them through. This is why the ends of human life are increasingly given to us by those who would think for us. We hear that "Everyone knows that global warming is a bad thing," and we are taught somehow that sacrificing here for "the good of the planet as such" is a wonderful virtue. We are taught this despite the fact here that the science on global warming is not settled, and the models show that increasing renewable energy sources in the North Atlantic countries will have little effect on greenhouse emissions or global temperature over the coming decades. The new urban young believe that global warming must be slowed by any means possible without connecting that belief to the other beliefs that they might have regarding the basic physicality of life and their propensity to maximize physical pleasure as the good of that life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We knew that "wearing masks is a good thing," and that "we ought be vaccinated," though the science upon which this was based was flimsy or nonexistent. The young seemingly believe these judgments without giving them serious thought about their ultimate support or the degree to which they properly cohere with their other views. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Traditionally, death has been viewed in the North Atlantic countries as a bad thing. Lutherans have talked for 500 years about reality of "sin, death, and the power of the devil." Luther wrote passionately about how in the midst of life there is death. If ever there was an end to human life it was, for most of our experience, that death is not our friend and that we can be saved from death. But now there is no death to be saved from because increasingly we are coming to believe that death is part simply of the great cycle of life. There is no <i>tragedy</i> in death. Rather, death is just a natural part of life and should not be given more importance than it has. If we could but grasp that death is part of life, then we would be freed to make the important personal decisions that give to us physical beings a greater quantity and quality to life. It makes no sense to think that some religious conversion on the way to death has any more importance than simply giving to the person a greater chance for pleasure in the life that one has yet to live. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So this is our plight: We are increasingly losing our capacity to think lucidly, the percentage of truly imaginative people of genius is diminishing within most important conversations, and as a society we are finding it difficult to find a place from which properly to judge our experience. Simply put, how is it possible now to arrive at the proper <i>ends</i> of human existence when all such putative ends are simply reducible to the pleasure or displeasure of the individuals asking the question? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I want anyone reading this to understand that I myself am not a hedonist, and that I do believe that moral reasoning and even moral knowledge is possible. I am speaking here about what is happening in North Atlantic culture right before our eyes. I invite people to take issue with what I have written not by pointing out that hedonism is a very unsatisfying position intellectually, but by showing that I have misread the current cultural and intellectual presuppositions of the life of the urban young. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-12926270265951173002023-05-03T20:01:00.002-05:002023-05-03T20:01:46.807-05:00What does it mean to be the Christ School of Theology? <p><span style="font-size: medium;">As many readers might know, the Institute of Lutheran Theology's seminary and graduate school is called the Christ School of Theology, and we are all about the accreditation of this institution. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When checking our accreditation with the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) find us under <i>The Institute of Lutheran Theology.</i> View our ABHE fact sheet here: <a href="https://app.weaveeducation.com/publicFiles/institutionprofilepdfs/Institute_of_Lutheran_Theology-ABHE_-_Association_for_Biblical_Higher_Education_Fact_Sheet.pdf" target="_blank">https://app.weaveeducation.com/publicFiles/institutionprofilepdfs/Institute_of_Lutheran_Theology-ABHE_-_Association_for_Biblical_Higher_Education_Fact_Sheet.pdf</a>. We have been a full member of ABHE since initial accreditation in 2018. We successfully achieved our first ten-year accreditation with ABHE at the 2023 February meeting of ABHE's Commission on Accreditation. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When checking on us on the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) website, always look for <i>Christ School of Theology</i>. Christ School of Theology is the accreditable entity as for as ATS is concerned. You can find us on the ATS website here: <a href="https://www.ats.edu/member-schools/christ-school-of-theology-of-the-institute-of-lutheran-theology" target="_blank">https://www.ats.edu/member-schools/christ-school-of-theology-of-the-institute-of-lutheran-theology</a>. While we have not been officially accredited by ATS's Commission on Accreditation yet, we are already Associate members of the ATS, and are engaged in many activities with them. We are working hard to get our self-study complete this year, and anticipate an ATS visit in February of 2024. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My thoughts in 2005-06 was that a new Lutheran House of Studies was needed that would serve all Lutherans -- especially ELCA Lutherans. This House of Studies, I argued, should be <i>independent</i>, <i>autonomous</i> and <i>accredited</i>, should assume the basic hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation on Scripture, and should be straightforwardly realist in its understanding of God and of theological language generally. ILT, I thought, should be fully engaged with the question of truth, particularly the question of how to connect the truth of theology with the truths of the special sciences. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">ILT will begin its fifteenth year of offering classes in the fall of 2023 and, I must say, we are moving forward nicely. I always knew that ILT could produce pastors because we have from the beginning been blessed with great students and a renowned faculty. However, because we are not a LCMS, ELCA or Wisconsin Synod seminary, we don't have an already established market for students studying to be pastors. As our Wikepedia page says, we do prepare pastors for the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations, the Augsburg Lutheran Churches, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). We are happy to have such important work to do. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">However, other seminaries compete with us, particularly within the LCMC and the NALC. While we believe we have the deepest program for students in these two church bodies, our program is quite traditional, with heavy doses of Biblical Theology, History of Theology, Systematic and Pastoral Theology. It takes time to achieve an ILT education and not everybody wants to take the time, or perhaps has the time, to go through a program like ours. But I believe that our age demands more deeply prepared pastors than has perhaps been the case in the past. Accordingly, we shall always serve these constituencies, and we shall always try to grow our ministry programs. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To really effect change in the contour of Lutheran theology in North America, we would need to train perhaps 1,000 pastors over the next 10 years. 1,000 very well-educated pastor-theologians who would take very seriously the traditional truth claims of theology would likely alter the course of the church bodies we serve and the North American Lutheran traditions from which they were born. ILT's Christ School of Theology will always take seriously the task of raising up the next generations of Lutheran pastors, and we hope to train 1,000 pastors -- though to do so in 10 years would demand that more markets become open to us. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">From the beginning, however, ILT has had another task, a task parallel to that of raising up the next generation of Lutheran pastors. As I wrote already in 2007, we must <i>raise up the next generations of Lutheran professors and teachers. </i>We must tend to our theological traditions theologically. We need people involved in an effort that will issue in the making of a new class of theologians, theologians who know the the great Christian deeply as it has been understood by the Lutheran Confessions, people who have a profound grasp of the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon and who can adroitly relate this tradition to the contemporary horizon. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">From the beginning we have created opportunities in ILT for advanced study, but now we are experiencing something at ILT we could maybe not have expected 17 years ago. Although I knew that ILT must train future theologians, I did not realize in 2005-06, the degree to which God would bless our efforts at building a real <i>theological institute.</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The last three years have shown very strong growth in our post-M.Div programming: the STM, the Doctor of Ministry, and especially the PhD. People are seeking us out to study because they <i>trust</i> us to allow them to encounter the great texts of the tradition in creative and fruitful ways. We don't tell the students that the great texts of the tradition must be avoided because they are not sufficiently sensitive to issues of class, sex, race, orientation, etc. We are not <i>deeply suspicious</i> of the western canon as some are. Paraphrasing Barth, we believe that we should take the presuppositions of that canon at least as seriously as our own. Since we trust the tradition, we encourage our students to engage it deeply. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What does ILT's Christ School want to be when it grows up? While I cannot predict exactly what the Christ School will look like in fifty years, I do hope that I know what it will mean to be the Christ School then. To be the Christ School of theology is to take very seriously the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of interpreting those Scriptures. To take these Scriptures seriously means that this texts are not something of the past, but living and breathing documents of today, documents which engage us and open for us possibilities of our being. God's grace is, after all, something he dispenses each and every day, even as we living within the paradigms of the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon. Simply put, the documents confront us with the very question of <i>salvation</i>, the question that separates human beings from the beasts below them and the angels above, the question that will always remain orthogonal to the concerns of AI and the "machining of our culture." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The Christ School of Theology is growing rapidly, particularly at the D.Min and PhD levels. How big might we be next year? If the trends I am seeing continue, we will have between 30-35 PhD students studying in the fall of 2023, 20-25 D.Min students, and 10-15 STM students. This means that 60-75 of our students next fall will likely be doing advanced work in theology. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We celebrate this! It is a God thing! The students are coming from almost all of the Lutheran traditions and beyond these traditions as well. Our ATS headcount of 96 in the fall of 2022 could see another 15% increase next fall. We are building the Christ School of Theology not by watering down who we are, but by embracing it the more deeply. We are not a divinity school, but a flesh-and-blood Lutheran seminary dedicated to taking seriously Lutheran truth claims. In a time in which seminaries are shrinking, ours is growing. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I have been discussing here our seminary and graduate school and have not addressed our undergraduate school, Christ College. Nor have I talked about ILT's library and all of the publishing planned to flow from it. These demand separate posts. Here I have simply wanted to remind all what it means to be the Christ School of Theology. We live the commitment to our heritage while at the same time being wholly vulnerable to our intellectual and cultural horizon. This way of living is, we think, what the theology of the Cross is all about. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-5707375587059210412023-04-29T13:59:00.003-05:002023-04-29T13:59:22.888-05:00Model-Theoretic Considerations for Theological Semantics<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I have for many years been convinced that the theological enterprise cannot survive in our age without affording to its language robust truth conditions. Contemporary men and women presuppose what Jaegwon Kim once called <i>Alexander's Dictum</i>, that is, "to be is to have causal powers." We don't live in the 19th century where ideas themselves are thought to have a kind of reality; we don' t live in a time in which the <i>conceptuality</i> of God can remain important for vast numbers of people. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In our days, people are not generally searching to find some overarching concept or principle that grounds our rational thinking about life and existence, a notion that might somehow explain why human experience is given as it is, and accordingly, somehow ground the preciousness and <i>value</i> of that experience. While Madonna once sung of a "material girl," we generally acknowledge that, even in our churches, the cultural <i>primacy of the physical </i>reigns. The new atheism talks breathlessly of its discovery of a worldview without divine agency and causality -- as if such a view of things is in any way new. There is an assumption of the causal closure of the physical among many unwashed in the complexities of the actual relations holding among experience, theory and truth, among those who simply believe that the theories of the natural and social sciences simply state the way things are. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The idea is easy enough to grasp. Consider this structure <{x | x is a natural event}, C>. This is a structure consisting of the set of all natural events and a causal operator C relating members of this set of events to each other. This structure can satisfy these two assertions: 1) For all <i>x</i>, there is some <i>x</i> (or other) that causes <i>x</i>, and 2) For all <i>x</i>, if <i>x</i> is caused, then it is caused by some <i>x</i> (or other). What is precluded by this structure is that there is an <i>x</i> that can be caused by some event or agency that is outside the set {x | x is a natural event}, or that <i>x</i> causes some event or state of affairs outside the set {x | x is a natural event}. Simply put, there are no non-physical events causing physical events, nor no physical events causing non-physical events. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In addition to the causal closure of the physical assumed by many impressed with the results and progress of the natural and social sciences, it is also supposed, though not always as clearly, by the heralds of late nineteenth century radical criticism, that human beings are somehow <i>alienated</i> when they fail to come to terms with the physicality of their fate. Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, all, in their own way, argued that the <i>illusion</i> of the traditional God connects with the fundamental alienation of men and women. Marx, for instance, argued that human value and ideology is determined by underlying economic processes, and that the concept of God simply operates to block human beings from understanding the basic materiality of their existence. The God concept sanctions prevailing ideology and functions to keep in place value ideologies grounded in the unequal distribution of economic materiality. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Most people that continue to practice the Christian life believe that there is a God and that God is active in the world, i.e., they assume that "to be is to have causal powers" and that God has causal powers. They speak about the divine design of the universe, and about the power of prayer, particularly prayers of petition. They assume that there are things that have come about that would not have come about were there no God, and that there are events and processed that have not come about that would have come about were there no God. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The structure they assume is perhaps this: <{x | x is an event}, g, C, D> where there is a set of natural events and there is God, and that there is a binary natural causal operator C linking natural events to other natural events, and a binary divine causal operator D, linking natural events to divine agency, e.g., 'Dgp' means God divinely produces event p, with p being a member of the set of all natural events. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Metaphysics remains crucial in theology because claims about that beyond the physical are by nature <i>metaphysical</i>, and assuming God to be with causal powers means that something beyond the physical is bringing about something physical. This is clearly a <i>metaphysical claim</i>. To afford to theological language robust truth conditions in an age that assumes that to be is to have causal powers means that theology must be self-consciously and boldly metaphysical. There must be intellectual honesty here. Either theological language is broadly expressive of the self, its experiences and existential orientations and possibilities, or it is a rule-governed customary discourse by and through which human communities function and operate in the world, or it is a type of discourse that non-subjectively <i>donates</i> possible ways of being, or perhaps it is <i>realist</i> in its motivations; it states what its utterers believe is the ultimate constitution of things. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">One needs to think through these issues very clearly. What are either the truth or assertibility conditions of theological language if one eschews <i>realism</i>? Are sentences in the language rightly assertible simply because my tribe (the theological tradition) has traditionally asserted them? But clearly the assertibility condition cannot simply be 'x is properly assertible' if and only if x has been asserted by normative theologians of tradition T over time t. Why? In order even to begin to evaluate that claim we must know the identity conditions of 'normative theologian' and 'tradition' and 'time'. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Are the assertions of theology then either <i>descriptions</i> of the self -- its experience and existential orientations -- or are they <i>expressions</i> of the self? Clearly, embracing the latter is to give up on truth, for it entails that assertibility must be understood broadly in terms of a "boo hurrah" theory of theological language. But the former alternative is not much better, for on its assumption the truth-makers of all theological language are not theological. On this view, models satisfying a set of theological assertions are not theological models at all because the sets, functions and relations of the models deal with the human. Since human dispositions, experiences, and orientations are operated upon by relations and functions, these functions and relations ultimately concern the human. The fact that such models can satisfy a class of theological statements, should give us pause about what it is we are doing when we provide theological models. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But there is another alternative, for we might hold that theological language somehow operates to disclose truth, that language, the Word, in its wording grants world and our place within it must itself be given a theological model. But it is to me unclear exactly how this model can be constructed coherently. Models or structures concern domains with functions and relations drawn upon those domains. But what can be the domain of the creative Word? Remember that revelation is not insight. Insight concerns an intellectual grasp of that which is already present. Revelation, on the other hand, is a daring grasp of what is not present, but which shows itself eschatologically. There is so much that can be said here, but I cannot in this brief essay say it. We must move to the central issue of the influence that model-theoretic arguments might have for one who in her theological semantics, is broadly speaking <i>realist</i>. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">II</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">While I could only sketch briefly in the last section my <i>prima facie</i> reservations with non-realist construals of theological language, I will assume in this section that the reader is sufficiently persuaded by what I have said to give theological realism a try. Theological realism, simply put, is the view that God, and divine states of affairs generally, exist and have the particular contour they have apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Theological realism is thus a species of <i>external realism,</i> the view the world consists of entities, properties, events, relations and states of affairs which, broadly speaking, exists <i>independently</i> of our human perceptual and conceptual processing, or, more to the point, apart from our epistemic structures and capabilities. We might call this the <i>independence thesis</i> with regard to external realism. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I am convinced with many others that <i>external realism</i> makes two other important claims as well. The first is the <i>correspondence thesis</i> which claims that statements about the world are true if and only if they correspond in appropriate ways with how the world actually is. (Clarifying what 'correspondence' and 'appropriate' might mean here is notoriously difficult.) The other thesis of external realism one can be called the <i>Cartesian thesis</i> which states that although our theories about the world might meet all theoretical and operational constraints of an ideal theory, we could still be wholly wrong in our theory. Since the theory is made true (or false) by how the world is apart from us, it is always logically possible to be wrong about everything that we might say about it. Satisfying all theoretical and operational constraints does not a theory true make. Only the way the world is can make the theory true or false. The <i>external realist</i> thus seems committed to all of these: the <i>independence thesis, </i>the <i>correspondence thesis</i>, and the <i>Cartesian thesis</i>. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Hilary Putnam in his famous "Models and Reality" distinguishes among three positions in the philosophy of mathematics. These positions deal with both truth and reference in mathematics, and are thus, for him and for us, relevant to considerations of truth and reference with respect to external realism generally. These positions are: </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Platonism which, according to Putnam, "posits nonnatural mental powers of directly 'grasping' the forms" (<i>Models and Reality</i>, p. 24). This notion of grasping is primitive and cannot be further explicated. Those familiar with Husserl's description of phenomenological intentionality will understand this quickly. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Verificationalism replaces the classical Tarskian notion of truth with verificational processes or proof. Mathematic assertions are not <i>true</i> in any deep sense, but they are assertible on the basis of other mathematical procedures. Verificationist proposals within the philosophy of science of the last century are connected to this. </span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Moderate Realism, for Putnam, "seeks to preserve the centrality of the classical notions of truth and reference <i>without postulating nonnatural powers" </i>(Ibid.). The idea here is that mathematical assertions are true, but that their truth does not involve one in a deep process of grasping or understanding the structure of some Platonic heaven. </span></li></ul><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Putnam believes that arguments built upon the "Skolem-Paradox" are germane to a moderate realist perspective within mathematics and the external realist perspective in metaphysics generally. These arguments are known in the literature as "model theoretic" arguments, and they basically exploit the difference in model theory between what might be <i>intended</i> and what might be <i>said</i>. If one is a non-naturalist when it comes to semantics -- that is, if one thinks that semantic objects, properties, relations and functions are natural objects and does not involve non-natural <i>magic</i> -- then one has a problem with reference, because <i>many models</i> can make true the very same class of sentences. This means, that one cannot naturally fix reference, that is, what the sentences <i>say</i> is logically independent from what one might mean to say in their saying. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Putnam draws conclusions from this that are quite far reaching. For instance, he claims that <i>metaphysical realism</i> (external realism generally) in incoherent, and that 'brain in vat' or 'evil demon" (Descartes) scenarios cannot even be coherently stated. Putnam throughout tries to show that, because of the problem of reference, one cannot even state the conditions necessary to formulate the brain-in-vat/evil demon hypothesis. In other words, the necessary conditions for the possibility of posing the brain-in-vat scenario cannot obtain because a certain type of reference must be had by the language in stating the scenario, and since this type of reference cannot be had, the scenario cannot be coherently stated. In other words, while it might <i>appear</i> that we could be a brain in a vat, we really can't be one, for to be one demands that we can refer to being a brain in a vat, and this we cannot do. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Putnam employs a bit of a technical branch of logic known as model theory and there are considerable arguments in the literature about the effectiveness of his employment of these resources. There are arguments as to the number and effectiveness of distinct model-theoretic arguments that Putnam uses, and their ultimate effectiveness in attacking metaphysical realism. All of this, I will lay out at another time. What is important for us, however, is this question: Why is any of this important for theology? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">III</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I believe that theological language must be given a realist construal if we are to retain it. Long ago, I argued that the arguments for the elimination of theological language are strong, and that only a realist interpretation of theological language will likely stem the collapse of such language into reduction and ultimate elimination. I can't rehearse that here, but know that I believe that theological realism best coheres with the principle that to be is to have causal powers. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Notice now that if we afford to theological language realist truth conditions we seem to be interpreting it in ways that best connect to the classical Christian tradition. Believers throughout the centuries assumed that there is a God, that one could refer to God, and that once could talk meaningfully about God's relationship with His universe, both in terms of creation and redemption. It is extremely difficult, I think, to argue that the horizon of the Reformation is one in which one of the three following is <i>not</i> presupposed: theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation. The Reformers thought that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, that our language about God is true or false apart from the ways in which we verify or come to hold it true or false, and that God is in principle capable of causal relations with nature and the historical realities of nature. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">So on the assumption of <i>external realism</i> when it comes to theology, what are the repercussions of model-theoretic arguments on theological semantics? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">At this point we must appreciate how important <i>reference</i> is for theological language. We are using theological words and phrases, and if we must ultimately give a realist construal to theological language then <i>reference</i> turns out to be the key to theological semantics generally. 'God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself' is true only if 'God' refers, 'Christ' refers, 'world' refers, and the relation of 'reconciling' can be drawn between the world and Christ. But now the question, if reference is so important, why cannot it be something <i>intended? </i>Why can we not simply say that intentionality fixes reference and that we don't need to worry about model-theoretic considerations at all? Remember, Putnam had said that model-theoretic arguments really apply to the moderate realist in mathematics and the metaphysical realist; they are not aimed at one who holds that intentionality can be fixed nonnaturally by something like Husserl's "ego rays." If one wants to hold intentionality as a nonexplicatable primitive, then can't we simply say that our intentionality determines reference in the theological order, as well as the mathematical and metaphysical orders? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Here is the problem with this response. While one might hold that one can <i>intend</i> cherries or trees by nonnaturally fixing one's gaze upon them, one cannot seem easily to do that when it comes to God or the inner workings of the Trinity. After all, "nobody has ever seen God." How can one <i>intend</i> that which has no clear content? The theological tradition knew the apophatic nature of God-talk. We can never be given the proper content to think God, because the content of our thoughts pertain to the finite order and God is infinite. Our thoughts of God do not thus determine our reference to God; our intentionality cannot issue in reference, because we cannot be given that by virtue of which reference is determined. Instead of intentionality granting an intensionality that determines reference, our theological language -- the language of the tradition -- speaks about God and God's relationship to His creation. The ways of talking about God are very important indeed! God's name is that by virtue of which reference is established, and maybe for Christians -- or perhaps all the monotheistic religions of the west -- this happened at the burning bush. (Recall here Kripke's "initial baptism" of the tretragrammaton at the burning bush in Exodus.) </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It is important here to grasp what is at stake. If intentionality cannot fix reference to the divine, and if we don't want to give up truth to some verificationist-inspired theological position -- that is to say, if we want to be realists in theology -- then we seem to find ourselves in theology <i>with no other option</i> than to have to take the model-theoretic arguments seriously with regard to theological realism. This means that not only are model-theoretic arguments relevant to theology, they might be crucial to its very future. If model-theoretic arguments yield a knock-out blow to external realism, of which theological realism is a species, and if realism is essential in providing a defendable semantics for theology, then model-theoretic arguments may pose a much deeper threat to theological discourse than we previously might have thought. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">So what is at stake with respect to model-theoretic consideration in theological semantics? I think it likely that the future of theology itself might be at stake. But consideration of this must await another time. It is upon that which I am toiling a new manuscript. </span></div><p></p><p><br /></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-88821986464658544932023-04-06T14:59:00.004-05:002023-04-07T22:46:25.292-05:00Extensionality, Description and the Question of Good Works: Towards An Anomalous Monergism?<p> <span style="font-size: medium;">The great American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) wrote the following about causality:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The salient point that emerges so far is that we must distinguish firmly between causes and the features we hit upon for describing them, and hence between the question whether a statement says truly that one event caused another and the further question of whether the events are characterized in such a way that we can deduce, or otherwise infer, from laws or other causal lore, that the relation was causal ("Causal Relations," <i>The Journal of Philosophy, </i>64 (1967), 691-703). </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Davidson's point in this famous article is that causality has an <i>extensional </i>nature. If <i>a </i>causes <i>b, </i>it is, in fact, the event <i>a</i> that causes <i>b</i> to obtain, and this is a causal relation that obtains <i>apart</i> from however <i>a</i> and <i>b</i> might be described. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Compare the following: </span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-size: medium;">Jack fell down and broke his crown.</span></li><li><span style="font-size: medium;">That Jack fell down explains the fact that Jack broke his crown. </span></li></ol><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, (1) bespeaks extensionality and (2) intensionality. Very simply put, extensionality concerns what there is, while intensionality deals with how we might pick out or refer to what there is. For example, in f(x) = y +2 for natural numbers N where 1< y < 5, the intension is the rule 'y +2' applied to either 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, while the proposition's extension is {<1, 3>, <2, 4>, <3, 5>, <4, 6>, <5, 7>}. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What is there a difference between (1) and (2) above? (2) is concerned with the relation between two descriptions, 'Jack fell </span><span style="font-size: large;">down' and 'Jack broke his crown'. These two sentences are related by the operation of causally explaining. Notice, however, that (1) does not connect to descriptions at all, for the 'and' in (1) is concerned with the actual </span><i style="font-size: large;">events</i><span style="font-size: large;"> of Jack falling down and Jack breaking his crown. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Assume that <i>d</i> is the event of Jack falling down and <i>c </i>is the event of Jack breaking his crown. Notice that event <i>d </i> may cause event <i>c</i> without any recourse to modal terms. Clearly, the singular event <i>d</i> and the singular event <i>c</i>, both denizens of the extensional<i>, </i>cannot be connected by a modal operator, for modality applies to events only in so far as they are properly described. Modality is <i>de dicto</i> and not <i>de re. </i>In Humean terms, it concerns the relations of ideas, not the matters of fact. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">One could, I suppose, have a general law claiming that for all <i>x</i>, if <i>x</i> falls down then <i>x</i> breaks <i>x</i>'s crown. Such an occurrence may be so regular that one might, I suppose, claim that it is <i>necessarily</i> the case, that for all <i>x</i>, if <i>x</i> falls down then <i>x</i> breaks <i>x's</i> crown. But this modal operator which concerns relations between ideas (or language) might be replaced by a far more modest operator in intensional contexts, the <i>causal explanation </i>operator. We have our stories about the world and the behavior of objects within it. We know that there are <i>features</i> instanced in Jack's falling down and Jack's breaking his crown, such that the features of the first causally explains the features of the second. Thus, it is true that Jack's falling down causally explains the breaking of Jack's crown. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But Jack is the man most to be pitied on Beecher Street, and while his falling down is the most unfortunate event of his lifetime, his breaking of his crown is that that issued in his wife leaving him. Does causal explanation still work as we substitute descriptions for singular events <i>salve veritate</i>?</span></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">3. That the man most to be pitied on Beecher Street suffered the most unfortunate event of his lifetime causally explains the fact that his wife left him. </span></div><p></p></blockquote><p></p><div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, any law connecting fallings and breakings is now no longer at issue. Here the connection is between unfortunate events happening to guys on Beecher Street and their wives abandoning them. While one might think the causal explanation operator in (2) is apt, its use in (3) seems much more problematic. But how can causal relations depend upon the <i>descriptions</i> of <i>d</i> and <i>c</i>? Is it not simply about the relations between these two events <i>however they might be described</i>? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Davidson developed a theory of token identity in the philosophy of mind that exploits the difference between causal relations and causal explanation. Imagine that there is some event <i>e</i> such that it can be given both a neuro-physical and psychological description. The neural event that <i>e</i> is is presumably related to other neural events, but the mental description of that event -- perhaps a particular thinking of one's particular mother when she was 36 -- cannot seemingly be relatable to other mental events causally in the same way. After all, neural events do not swim in the waters of the normative. My thinking of my mother when she was 36 might be followed by a particular thought of the appropriateness of my love for her, and this is clearly a matter of normativity. One <i>ought</i> to love one's mother, after all; it is <i>right</i> to do so. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">One might generalize from these reflections into the philosophy of action. What is the best explanation why Bob gets in his vehicle and drives the 25 miles to the airport at 4:50 p.m. on April 23? It is that Bob <i>believes </i>that his wife Jan is flying home on the 6:00 p.m. plane from Chicago, and that Bob has a <i>desire</i> to see her. Causal explanations for why we do what we do our routinely cast in the language of beliefs and desires, and not in the language of neural states. It would be odd, after all, to say that Bob is getting in his vehicle at 4:50 on April 23 because Bob's neurophysiological states coupled with appropriate external sensations <i>caused </i>it to be so. What kind of causal explanation for Bob's behavior refers simply to brain states and perceptual inputs? How could knowing the neural events of Bob causally explain the <i>purpose</i> he had when entering his auto? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Davidson's token identity theory of the mental and physical simply points out that our mental life with its complexities of purpose in beliefs in desires is <i>physically realized</i>, that is to say, that some set of neuro-events realizes our mental states. Davidson is not a substance dualist, after all, claiming that there is an ontic realm of mental events, entities, properties, relations or functions that can exist on its own, and whose processes are simply coordinated with physical events, entities, properties, relations of functions in the brain, and that, in principle, one might be able to draw causal connections between the mental and the physical. By claiming a token identity between mental states and some brain states or other realizing these mental states, Davidson believes he can protect the anomalousness of the mental while not acquiescing to dualism. His position is appropriately called <i>anomalous monism. </i>The point is that one event can have different descriptions, and that there is a certain <i>irreducibility</i> of the mental to the physical. Accordingly, the complexities of our mental life cannot be either explained or predicted by pointing to the existence of strict scientific law -- if there actually is such -- at the neuro-level. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Whether or not Davidson's position of anomalous monism is finally defensible is not my concern here. I advert to this only because I want to show again the importance of <i>description</i> when it comes to events. Causal explanation is possible because of the descriptions we give to a particular event. Causal explanation involves language, in our use of language to highlight features of events we want to explain. Causal relations, however, are ultimately <i>extensional</i>, they are drawn between events however they might be described. That event <i>e </i>causes event <i>e'</i>, is a feature of the world, not a feature of our description of the world -- or so one might argue. But what might any of this have to do with theology? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In the Lutheran tradition there has been since the beginning profound controversy about the status of good works in salvation. Classically, one might ask, "are good works necessary for salvation?" An unreflective quick response is simply "no!" "Good works do not save us before God, so good works are not necessary for salvation." It is perhaps a response like this that underlies the suggestion by Amsdorf and others that good works might even be <i>harmful</i> for salvation. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But reflecting on the logical form of the statement, 'Good works are necessary for salvation' does not mean 'if good works, then salvation'. If 'if A then B' obtains, then A is sufficient for B, and B is necessary for A. The proper translation of 'good works are necessary for salvation' is 'if salvation, then good works', that is, 'if not good works, then no salvation'. Those claiming that good works are necessary for salvation are clearly not claiming that by doing good works, one might be saved; they are not saying that good works are <i>sufficient </i>for salvation. Good trees bear good fruit. If God makes the tree good, then good fruit will follow. Therefore, good works are necessary for salvation. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But merely pointing to the logic, does not seemingly solve the controversy. Those espousing <i>monergism, </i>that we are saved wholly by God apart from our own agency, want to protect divine autonomy. They are deeply suspicious of language having to do with human working and doing, of language having to do with human <i>discipling, </i>for such language suggests human agency; the language itself suggests <i>synergism. </i>Luther was profoundly critical of the category of created grace, the notion that God through his agency might create in human beings ontologically-extended dispositions to behave, and thus that there might be something in human beings on the basis of which the divine imputation of righteousness rests. Luther accordingly rejects the notion that human beings have been made right, and on that basis, they are pronounced right; the <i>Gerechtmachung </i>grounds the <i>Gerechtsprechung</i>. But if this were so, were we given such goods, then why and how could we who have benefitted so deeply utter as did Luther in his final hours, "Wir sind bettler, hoc est verum?" </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">There are standard moves in this debate, a debate that is connected to the so-called "third use of the law." My purpose here is not to get into the debate and follow the lines of reasoning that have a certain plausibility no matter upon which side one finds oneself. My purpose here is simply to propose something new that might move the conversation forward. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What if we took seriously the distinction between the event of the person doing a good work and its description? Let me be more clear, what if we took seriously the distinction between <i>d</i>, the event of a person behaving in a particular way, with its description as to what the person was doing in that event <i>d</i>? After all, Paul's ingredience in <i>d</i> could be described as both the doing of a good deed through Paul's own agency or as a divinely-gifted doing where it is <i>no longer I who live but He who lives in me</i>. The point is this, the same event <i>d</i> is multiply describable. It can be described on the basis of a human agent believing that he must do the act and desiring so to do it, or it can be described as a behavioristic input/output function, or it can be described as wholly caused by the Holy Spirit. Our background assumptions and theories deeply influence how the event might be described. The same event can be given a description in terms of beliefs and desires and the intent by the person to "do what is within them." It can be described, solely in monergistic terms; the event is that work that is worked by God in us <i>propter Christum</i> and by grace through faith; or the event could be described perhaps without averting to so-called "folk psychological ascriptions" at all. If we were to give a neuro-description to the event, it would make no sense in giving a casual explanation to the event to speak of the Holy Spirit's causality or the desire to be saved and the belief that that a particular doing, a suitable description of <i>d</i>, motivates the doing. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The language of discipleship -- what is it to be a fisherman that follows -- is clearly a different language than the language of apostolicity -- what heralds does God establish in His Wording of the world. Both languages can be developed quite thickly, with language available to speak of all sorts of events, and both languages can provide causal explanations. This being said, however, there still is some underlying events that are what they are because of causal relations they sustain with other events. The fact that no language can mime the contour of these causal relations does not tell against their presence. The extensionality of causal relations of such <i>d</i> doings by Paul might not be able to be articulated in the languages by which events like <i>d</i> are described. Here we are talking about propositional attitudes, about the believings of people doing <i>d</i>. Here we are at the level of the intensional. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Although I have not defended anamolous monism, in closing I want to open up the possibility of an <i>anamolous monergism</i>. What if Davidson is right, and that there are simply causal relations at the neuro-level that support mental descriptions where causal explanation is possible? What if one could be a nonreductive physicalist of such a kind? Does this have relevance for the theological issue at hand? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Imagine that the Holy Spirit has a causality such that some human events are <i>caused</i> by the Holy Spirit. After all, maybe Luther is right in that we are either ridden by the devil or Christ. If the Holy Spirit causes that event we might describe as a good work, then clearly no human agency is determinative in its doing. Clearly, this is an embrace of <i>monergism</i>. But what about our description, our own self-understanding of that event? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Surely, we could causally explain that act in terms of beliefs and desires. We could have an intent to do what God would have us do, and we could believe that that doing is meritorious somehow before God. We live lives that are thus pleasing to God, and we try in all we do to keep God's commandments. We learn more about God and we attempt to follow Christ in all we do. All of this description of our life of faith, as thick or thin as we might want, could be seen as <i>realizable</i> within the underlying divine causality upon human events. Clearly, the language of belief, desire, intentionality, and following is not <i>reducible </i>to the language that describes the Holy Spirit's causality upon our behavior. From the standpoint of the extensional, God authors are events, but from the standpoint of the intensional, are doings realized by those events can be explained in therms of the motivations of living the Christian life. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What I am suggesting here is an <i>anamolous monergism</i> that neither undercuts the reality of monergism, nor does it downplay the complex experience of living out the Christian life. There are deep philosophical and theological objections to this view, of course, but I do think that the main point might be defendable: The penchant to good works is a way of talking or describing Christian lived existence, and this way of talking or describing does not have to contradict the reality that I cannot cause that event that might be described as a Christian following. Similarly, third use of the law talk need not contradict the reality that there are only two proper uses. But this topic must await a later treatment. </span></div><p></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-85344817945211834882023-03-19T13:52:00.005-05:002023-05-27T19:24:07.146-05:00On Rabbits and Christology <p><span style="font-size: medium;">The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine schooled us on the indeterminacy of translation using the example of a tribesman speaking the unknown language <i>Arunka </i>employing the locution 'gavagai' whenever he saw what we might think is a rabbit. But while we might think that 'gavagai' refers to the object rabbit, we can never know for sure what the tribesman is actually referring to when employing 'gavagai'. There is, after all, an <i>inscrutability of reference</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I can imagine a culture, that does not individuate the world like my own does. Perhaps the tribesman's culture actually has no rabbits, but does work the world up by thinking in terms of temporal rabbit stages. Let S be a linguist from culture X and P be a tribesman from culture Y. X sees the world as a place where there are unified rabbits while Y understands that the world is a place where there are rabbit parts, some detached and some undetached. When P utters 'gavagai', P is referring to a set of undetached rabbit parts, but when S hears P utter 'gavagai', S thinks in terms of rabbits. So what is there <i>really</i>? Does the world come with rabbits as a basic ontological category, or is it a place where rabbit parts proliferate and where 'gavagai' refers to a collection or set of rabbit parts suitably ordered? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Suppose Q from culture Z uses 'gavagai' only to talk about a set of temporal rabbit stages. Culture Z is extremely time sensitive, and they "see" the world as a place where the temporal slices of things are ontologically primary. The linguist S hearing 'gavagai' could scarcely imagine that Q associates the term with a set of temporal slices of a particular kind. Again Q's culture finds temporal slices of things ontologically primary to the collections in which they are ingredient. So what is there <i>really</i>? Does 'gavagai' properly refer to rabbits or to temporal rabbit stages? Or does it rightfully refer to spatially extended, undetached rabbit parts? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Mereology is concerned, of course, with the unities that parts comprise. Culture X finds a unity in the rabbit which is made up of parts. But cultures Y and Z seem to find unities in the parts that comprise collections. Our question really boils down to a question of what the <i>proper</i> unities there are of things, and if there are no such unities in themselves, what unities we seemingly commit ourselves to when experiencing and articulating the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But there are other possibilities than those of P and Q and their cultures. What if R and his friends read so much Plato that they actually see the world as the "shadowy place" where the primary forms are dimly instantiated? R and his culture U work the world up such that <i>rabbithood</i> has ontological priority over rabbits, over any concrete instantiation of that rabbithood. But while we might say that rabbithood is instantiated in rabbits, culture U might simply say, "there is rabbitthood here." Each and every time R uses 'gavagai', S uses 'gavagai', but they are not meaning the same thing in their using of the term. S means rabbits, after all, while R means that rabbithood is present. So what is there <i>really</i>? Does the world come with rabbits pre-made, as it were, or is their existence ontological dependent upon something more basic: the form of rabbithood? Is the particular ontologically dependent upon the universal, or does the universal ultimately depend upon the particular?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally enter T of culture V who sees the world quite differently than the rest. Everything is made up of processes for the denizens of V. Perhaps it is not the raindrops that a culture knows, but the entire process of raining. Perhaps rain drops are ontologically dependent upon the event of rain. <i>A fortiori</i>, perhaps rabbits are mere distillations of <i>rabbiting</i>. When T utters 'gavagai' she means that it is rabbiting. What is there really? Does 'gavagai' refer to rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, temporal rabbit stages, the form of rabbithood, or the event of rabbiting itself? If people in cultures X, Y, Z, U and V use 'gavagai' in similar ways and on similar occasions, then how could we ever tell what S, P, Q, R and T <i>really mean</i> when employing the term? Is there not an <i>inscrutability of reference</i> here? How can S ever really know what P, Q, R and T are referring to when they use 'gavagai' each and every time they are in the presence of what S assumes is a rabbit? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Quine's indeterminacy thesis has been around for many decades. The statement of the thesis is consistent with reflection within the last seventy years on language and its relationship with the world. How does language <i>anchor</i> to the world? What is the world? Does it come as a set of self-identifying objects, properties or events? Are there <i>natural kinds</i>, or do human beings gerrymander the world, imposing through their individuation their own ontological prejudices upon it? Whose power is served by understanding the world to have rabbits at its deepest level rather than rabbithood? Who is marginalized by seeing rabbiting instead of undetached rabbit parts? If the world has no objective ontology, but rather receives the ontology of our prejudice, then does not ontology become a <i>projection</i> of our interest and power, specifically as pertains our race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc.? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Indeed. One might say that if the world has no ready made ontological structure, then the world is really worldless, for it becomes merely the field that the self projects. Accordingly, the world cannot sustain an over and againstness with respect to the self to which it relates. Here, the self devours the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But as the last hundred years of reflection has taught us: there is no privileged access to an objective self that can be full of itself. The self that is not full of itself, is itself a battle ground of different cultural, linguistic and conceptual ideologies. The self is dispossessed, and the worldless world now finds itself in relation to a dispossessed self. The world and self each have lost their <i>inseity, </i>and must now be understood<i> ecstatically</i>. We now suspect that while the putative determinacy of the world rests upon the putative determinacy of the self, the putative determinacy of the self rests upon that which is not itself and can never be itself. So in these late postmodern days there is ripening the realization that world and self, the original Dyad, has breathed illusion since the Beginning. But I digress. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is important for theology to know the ontological contour of the land it must work. Theology must relate the kerygma to the concrete historical-cultural situation in which it finds itself. Theology must concern itself with proclaiming and understanding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in a time of a worldless world and a dispossessed (self-less) self. Accordingly, it must understand how to do christology in this time of rabbits. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Looking at christology in this time of the absence of presence of world and self -- this time of the indeterminacy of reference and translation -- it is clear that we are going to have to <i>specify</i> what we mean in ways we have never had to do before in the history of theology. Because meaning is no longer "in the head" -- we have no immediate access to a cartesian self with pure intent -- we are only going to gain clarity as to what we mean by employing the tools of semantic modeling. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Language is syntax and theory, and theory refers semantically to that which is not language. There must be something that language is about if there is ever going to be the possibility of truth and objectivity. If language is not to collapse into itself -- or into the black hole of the self -- it must specify something in the world that it means, something on the basis of which it is true or false. As we have seen, that to which language refers can be expressed set-theoretically. What is necessary is that we start with a domain of objects, and then define relation and function operators on this domain. In this way we, we provide the possibility of an extra-linguistic reference to language. (At least this is the hope. Clearly, if one holds that sets and operations are affairs of language, then we are thrust back into Derrida's position of language being an "infinite play of signifiers.). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So what do we do with christology in a time of the relativity of rabbits? Clearly, just as we are able to specify the salient differences between undeatached rabbit parts, temporal stages of rabbits, and the instantiation of rabbithood, we must be able to specify the differences in meanings of 'person', 'nature', 'happy exchange', 'justification' or '<i>theosis</i>' when it comes to Christ. But what are the conditions for the possibility of difference? What makes if possible that "gavagai" could apply to such different things? More to the point, what are the conditions for the possibility that differences of meaning of 'person' and 'nature' could obtain? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Some theology proceeds, I think, on the assumption that if one can use language in the same way and in the same situations, then there is substantial agreement about <i>meaning</i> in that language. If one can say, "it is true that Christ is one person in two natures," then do we have to say anything more about persons and natures? Why provide some set-theoretic interpretation to theology theory, if "this game is played," that is, that the language of theology is used appropriately and consistently whether used by person S or P above? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But this objection misses the point. That a game is consistently played does not entail that meaning is consistently had. In a time when an unbridgeable chasm has opened between <i>what is intended</i> and <i>what is said</i>, we have no choice but to provide the relevant models for christological language, pointing out that language's possible <i>interpretations</i> and evaluating those interpretations in terms of their overarching theological <i>plausibility</i>. In this time of the worldless world and the self-less self, language itself must police itself such that the proclamation of the wording Word is pronounced with clarity. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Doing christology in a time of rabbits demands we understand profoundly the challenges to christological reflection in the twenty first century. Our naivety is gone. Even the stability of what Quine called "stimulus meaning" is seemingly absent for theology. While linguist S sees and understands the stability of P, Q, R, and T's occasions of uttering "gavagai' in the face of some experience which can be understood differently, what constitutes the stability in uttering 'person' christologically, an uttering that seemingly is not linked deeply to experience at all? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is ultimately no other choice here for finding stability in the occasions of use of 'person', than to locate that stability within the Bibical-historical tradition of the Christian community. In this time of the worldless world, and self-less self, there can be only the linguistic event of the utterance of 'person' consistently and stably throughout the Christian tradition. While Quine could speak of the stimulus meaning of 'gavagai' in a field of perception, christological reflection must locate a meaning of 'person' within the revelatory event of the Biblical-historical tradition itself. Only when we can make sense of the stability of occasions of using 'person' can we begin the task of providing models for the <i>interpretation</i> of 'person' christologically. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, there is a great deal of work that must be done. However, the first step in moving forward is to no what direction is presupposed in the semantics of 'forward'. Beginning with rabbits can help us in christology, but the path forward is not at all easy. In fact, some of the way forward will not look like a path at all. But this is how it must be if we are going to do christology in this time of rabbits. </span></p><p><br /></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-50771184158202210752023-03-05T15:57:00.006-06:002023-03-05T16:01:06.402-06:00Worlds and Difference: Theology in an Ecstatic Age?<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">I. When the World Was What it Was</span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once upon a time in the west we believed that there was a world that existed apart from us. There were many versions of how this was so, but the paradigm was clear: Entities and the properties that they instance are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Aristotle (384-322 BCE) spoke of primary substances as the basic building blocks of the world. These substances have properties that are either <i>present in</i> them or can be <i>said of</i> them. Those properties that are <i>present in</i> the primary substances are called <i>accidents</i>. They <i>inhere</i> in primary substances, and constitute the way that the substances can be <i>modified</i>. Accidents are always parasitic on substances; they cannot obtain other than being in a primary substance. Aristotle identified nine accidents that primary substances could have: quantity, quality, relation, habit (state), time, location, position, action and passion. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Primary substances and their nine accidents constitute the ten categories Aristotle discusses in his book, <i>The Categories</i>. The important point is that the accidents do not <i>individuate </i>one substance from another. Rather, individuation of substances happens at an ontological level prior to accidents. Substances come already individuated, and these already individuated substances sustain accidents that that modify it; they constitute at any time how the substance is being the substance that it is. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For Aristotle, however, substances are more than their mere <i>accidental properties</i>. Certain things can be <i>said of</i> these primary substances<i>, </i>and that which can be said of primary substances are not accidental to these substances. For instance, 'man' can be said of Socrates, and the predication of 'man' to 'Socrates' is not an accident of Socrates, because while Socrates could presumably be Socrates and not have his snub nose, Socrates cannot be Socrates without being a man. In <i>The Categories, </i>Aristotle asserts that the <i>secondary substance </i>man is <i>said of</i> the primary substance Socrates. This <i>said of</i> relation concerns what is <i>essential</i> to Socrates, that without which Socrates could not be Socrates. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Secondary substances in Aristotle are clearly a reworking of Plato's notion of the forms. For Plato, the form man is instantiated at the location of Socrates and is accordingly that which is known when one knows Socrates as a man. Plato famously gives <i>ontological priority</i> to the forms (universals) over the concrete particulars that instantiate them. Aristotle's secondary substances, however, do not have the ontological priority Plato had given to the forms. For Aristotle, concrete primary substances are more real than the abstract secondary substances that can be said of them. Accordingly, the world for Aristotle is comprised of concrete primary substances having essential properties by virtue of the <i>said of</i> relation and accidental properties by virtue of the <i>present in</i> relation. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This basic way of seeing the world in terms of substances and properties was firmly in place by the thirteenth century with its so-called "rediscovery of Aristotle", and it survived throughout the Reformation and the trajectories of theological development arising immediately from it. The idea of substances possessing properties formed the basic metaphysical background on which both the physical world and the world of the divine rested. While it was always problematic in the theological tradition simply to think of God as a substance having properties, the idea that God is some thing existing on its own apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language seemed clear enough. While it might stretch language to call God a 'substance', God nevertheless does, like any substance, exist on its own and is individuated in itself. Accordingly, the world comes ready-made, both with respect to primary physical substances and the most important entity of all: God. Things are what they are apart from human beings. The <i>ontological order</i> is thus independent from the human <i>epistemological </i>activity of knowing it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Aristotle and the tradition prior to the Enlightenment was thus <i>realist</i> with respect to its understanding of substances and the properties they might have. This realism extended to the notion of <i>causality</i> as well. Aristotle famously gave a four-fold analysis of causality, citing a material, formal, efficient and final cause for why a substance can give up some of its properties while assuming new ones. The idea is that any substance is what it is by virtue of it being "formed matter," or "actualized potentiality." Any object that is, is what it is by virtue of its individuating form which makes it a particular substance. Aristotle's <i>hylomorphism</i> claims that all substances are constituted by particular actualizations of that which could have been actualized in a different ways. A substance's <i>nature</i> constitutes the <i>whatness</i> by virtue of which an object <i>is </i>that which it is. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Change happens in two basic ways. If one substance is to cease and another substance begin, there must be a change in that substance's form. If a substance is to be modified some of its accidental properties must cease and others must rise. In both instances, the substances already posses the <i>possibility </i>of these transformations. What is needed is an <i>efficient</i> cause to collapse the possibility of this transformation into a determinate actualization. The substance water is potentially ice, but this potentiality is actualized when. temperatures reach a particular level. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Aristotle, however, saw the universe teleologically, and thus added a fourth cause to the material, formal and efficient causes. Trajectories of transformation must ultimately be explained in terms of <i>purpose</i> or <i>final cause</i>. The final cause of the acorn is an oak tree, and this cause operates in selecting among efficient causes to actualize substances in particular ways over time. The point of all of this is that Aristotle saw <i>causality</i> as built into the nature of things. For him, both substances and the causal connections in which they are ingredient have a determinate trajectory apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While the language of substances, properties and causality seemed suited for conceiving the natural world, medieval thinkers knew that problems arose in using the Aristotelian categories to understand the divine. God clearly exists apart from us, but His having of properties is not like our having of properties, and any changes that might be attributed to Him cannot be the result of external efficient causality. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course, the tradition held that the perfection of God entailed his <i>immutability. </i>Were God to change, God would need to move from one state to another. But if God is perfect, God cannot move from one state to another because either God would have to move from a state of lesser perfection to a state of perfection -- and thus not be perfect -- or move from a state of perfection to a state of lesser perfection -- and thus not be perfect. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i> </i>Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) following much of the tradition famously argued for the <i>divine simplicity</i> of God by claiming property-talk of God does not pick out in God some properties that God may or may not have, but such talk merely is a way of characterizing, picking out, or referring to the divinely simple substance that is God. Accordingly, 'God is good' cannot mean that the substance God has the property of goodness, but is a picking out of some being without parts, a being of which one might attribute goodness merely <i>analogically</i>. Whatever God is <i>in se</i>, God is more like a being to which we might customarily attribute goodness than to a being to which we might customarily attribute evil. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When it came to Christology in the age of when the world was what it was, Christ had to be understood to be some kind of substance or <i>person</i> who had its own principle of individuality and who is what He is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Such a person has <i>natures</i> or batches of properties, some of which are essential and some accidental for Christ being the person He is. The Trinity and incarnation must be understood <i>realistically</i>. Just as the world is what it is apart from us, so is Christ and his Trinitarian and incarnational relationships what they are apart from us. Human salvation too must be understood realistically. The believer is a person who is who she is, and Christ who is who He is apart from her (and us) effects a transformation of the believer (either intrinsically or extrinsically) such that the properties that the person has are themselves changed. All of this could be talked about through Aristotelian notions of causality. On the basis of a final cause, there is an efficient cause that collapses potentiality into actuality; indeterminate matter is formed. Accordingly, the <i>real ontic unity</i> of <i>theosis </i>must be understood metaphysically. There are properties of believer and properties of Christ such that parts of the believer change and the believer is not that which the believer once was. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Since what I am attempting here is merely a sketch of that time when the world was what it was, I will not develop further here a fully metaphysical Christology except to say that Christology <i>had to be understood metaphysically at this time</i>. This is <i>not</i> to say that this metaphysical understanding was all that there was to Christology. The relation of sin, justification, faith, and regeneration is complex, and, as Luther taught us, metaphysical categories strain to express the reality of God and his relationship to us. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">II. When the World was What it was For Us </span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that we have no immediate experience to thing-in-themselves, but only things in so far as they already are for us. Kant argued that the realm of the thing-in-itself was supersensible because no human senses could put us into touch with this realm. Knowledge of the world we experience proceeds, for Kant, through our encounter with objects already constituted by us. Conception without perception if void and perception without conception is blind. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant's solution to the problem that had beset Descartes (1596-1650) and had become acute in the British empiricists -- the problem of the external world -- was that while we do not have <i>immediate</i> access to the external world apart from us, we do encounter the external world as already organized by us. This means <i>inter alia</i> the the "externality of the world," the contour of the world as it is presumably apart from us is already a product of us. We have <i>mediated </i>access to the external world. Accordingly, when we know the external world, we know our representation (organization) of it. While the realm of experience may be a "joint product" of mind and external world, we only have access to that which is already organized by the mind. Accordingly, knowing the other -- the otherness of the world -- is to know ourselves profoundly, for we are the ones organizing the world of experience. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant inaugurated the tradition of transcendental reflection: What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience itself? Kant argued plausibly that the contingency of the world is grounded both in the necessary structures by which we organize percepts in space and time and those necessary concepts that function as rules by which the manifold of perception is united. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After Kant the world was not the same. The world does not come as it is in itself, a world so metaphysically regular that we can find general categories by which to comprehend it, rather the world comes bearing the marks of the determining judgments of the human understanding by which objects take on the general features they do. Famously, the world is not in itself an arena in which self-determining substances are what they are while being causally connected one to the other. Rather the world reflects the very order we put upon it. Just as we are autonomous with respect to morality, so are we with respect to the external world. We are the law-makers of each realm! Since we are law-makers of the moral and worldly, we gain insight into ourselves when we know the world. Knowing the other happens only in and through knowing ourselves, our capacities and proclivities of organization. While the world apart from us -- the supersensible realm -- remains hidden in itself, we know something about it by examining the capacities we have to reflect it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant, and not Fichte, was in many ways the author of German idealism. Kant knew that the world was reflected in our activity of reflecting upon our own reflecting. The transcendental world is not like the old world-in-itself. In the transcendental world, we find not things in the world, but rather things as they show themselves in their <i>aboutness</i> of the world in us. While the older Aristotelian way of thinking posits primary substances existing on their own, Kant's objects are those by concepts of which the manifold of experience is united. Transcendental questions don't deal with the world, but the conditions by which the world is the world. To explore the transcendental horizon is to dig deeper than the world in order to find those structures which make the world possible. The world as world is made possible by that transcendental unity of apperception by and through which the world in its particularity is birthed. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The story after Kant is so well known that it scarcely needs repeating. Fichte denied the cut between the world in itself and the world for us, and thus ridded philosophy of that which cannot be accessed and is not needed to explain the particularity of the world. Accordingly, when it comes to the world, the spade does not need to stop somewhere in some dull non-conscious things existing somewhere outside us waiting to be known. For Fichte, all that is necessary is that one thinks, and in one's thinking the world in its particularity is born. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Fichte's take on Kant motivated subsequent thinkers like Shelling and Hegel to reflect upon their acts of reflection, an act they called "speculation" from the Latin word for mirror, <i>speculum</i>. To reflect on reflecting is no longer to access things, but to reflect on those conditions by and through which things are organized before us. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant, Fichte, Shelling and Hegel together constitute a trajectory of thinking that denies the <i>immediacy </i>of the world. The world is not what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and there can be no <i>immediate</i> apprehension of it. Instead our apprehension of the world is <i>mediated</i> by the particularity of our perceptual and conceptual organizing activity. But while all of these thinkers knew that knowing the world is mediated by the particularity of that by which the world is known -- the human epistemic apparatus --- they nonetheless followed Descartes in assuming that they can directly know themselves. We have access to our own ideas, after all! While our ideas or "representations" constitute a screen through which the world is known, there is no screen at all between us and our ideas. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Descartes had argued that while I can conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of the world is not genuine knowledge, I cannot conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of myself is not genuine knowledge. Since the condition of doubt is that there exists one who doubts, the condition for doubting the immediacy of the world is the immediacy of the self doubting. While critical thought can dislodge the immediacy of the world in its doubting the world, it cannot dislodge the immediacy of the self as the transcendental condition for the possibility of doubting the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Accordingly, while Kant is wary of trusting that the world really is <i>in se</i> what it appears to be <i>pro nobis</i>, he seemingly gives transcendental reflection a complete pass. There is a transcendental unity of apperception that makes possible the unity of our experience, and while we can legitimately question whether the unity of our experience rests upon how the world might be apart from us, we cannot question what the transcendental unity of apperception might be apart from our apprehension of it. Clearly, the game has changed. There is no longer a world that is what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Human beings give natural laws to the order of nature. However, the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. In transcendental reflection we reach an arena of objectivity. While the world is <i>mediately</i> known, we have an <i>immediate</i> apprehension in transcendental reflection of that by which the world is mediately known. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">By the time of Hegel (1770-1831), however, problems with this picture are emerging. Hegel knew that the categories by which the world is known are not simply objectively present and ready for the fateful gaze of transcendental reflection. They are not simply "shot from the pistol," but are themselves dynamic and in play historically. Hegel recognized that the subject's grasp of its own self through its categories were at issue if one could not explain how the dynamism of the categories is itself objective. Accordingly, Hegel's move to absolute knowledge is a move by which the immediacy of the categories could be restored. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">If knowledge is at all to be possible, there must be a perspective that gets to the thing itself. If this is not the world, then it must be those transcendental conditions by which the world becomes world. Since the immediacy of those transcendental conditions cannot be vouchsafed any longer by the subject, these conditions must be guaranteed by the Absolute that "takes up" all conditioned finite perspectives, whose taking up itself is necessary for the writing of books about the "taking up." The Absolute Idea unfolds through concepts allowing the grasping of transcendental content, a historically mediated grasping that grants an immediacy to that which would otherwise remain wholly mediated. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Notice that as the world became what it is for us, the world of as it is for us was true both of the <i>manifest image</i> of the world as well as its <i>scientific image </i>(Sellars). The manifest image of the world is clearly not the world as it is in itself. The scientific image which tries to explain those mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest, however, is often assumed to be what ultimately is the case. However, it is clear that if there is no immediate access to the world in itself as the manifest world, there can be no such access to the world in itself as the scientific world of mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest. The scientific world with all of its objective structures is a world that cannot be more immediate than the manifest world. Accordingly, it is a world for us. The manifest image of the world <i>and</i> the scientific image of it do not deal with the world as it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Simply put, the world bears the marks of that for whom it is a world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had theological aspirations, of course. While much has been written about the the changed metaphysical climate after Kant, not as much has been written about the relevance of this changed climate for theology. If we cannot know the supersensible world -- if the very notion of the supersensuous drives us beyond the bounds of all possible experience -- we cannot also know any regions of that supersensuous realm, e.g., theology. Kant, of course, recognized this and claimed that he "had done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant had argued that the categories of substance and causality cannot apply to objects outside the realm of the phenomena. This means, <i>inter alia</i>, that one cannot apply 'substance' or 'causality' to God. God cannot be a substance bearing causal relations to other substances because there are no precepts being united to organize experience into one in which there are gods. Gods do not exist in the phenomenal, and there are no metaphysical arguments showing conclusively that God must exist. One might believe in the realm of the supersensible, but one cannot ever <i>know</i> those supersensible substances putatively causally connected to other supersensible entities or entities in the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While knowing the external world occurs when we know the ways we have organized that external world -- when we know <i>ourselves</i> properly! -- <i>knowing</i> the supersensible world is not possible even though we are again thinking about our thinking. Thinking about our thinking with regard to the phenomenal gives <i>discrete knowable experience</i>. Thinking about our thinking with regard to the noumenal does not issue in any knowable experience, but rather can only put us in touch with our <i>way of thinking</i>. Theology does not give experience, but it does constitute a way of thinking. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So how must Christology proceed on the other side of Kant? Given that we have no epistemic right to claim that we <i>know</i> the divine/human constitution -- nor the causality through which the divine person in Jesus of Nazereth effects salavation -- what do we do when doing theology and thinking our philosophy rightly? What <i>ought</i> be the ways forward in Christology on the other side of Kant? What does theology become when its world is a world that is only for us? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Since concepts are rules of possible syntheses, relating concepts in Christology must be a relating of ways in which such syntheses might relate to each other. What can "two natures in one person" <i>mean</i> in the non-metaphysics of post-Kantian reflection? After all, to speak of divine and human <i>nature</i> is to speak of that which lies beyond human experience. Add the notion of 'person' to the mix and we are talking about the ordering of our ideas and not about the synthesis of experience. Our ideas do not constitute experience, but they are important in how we must think aspects of our experience. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant famously saw Christology as flowing from morality, and understood that human beings are unavoidably in the middle of moral life, even though moral life is not one of experience. There will be much more exploration of this in later posts, but for now we must continue our story beyond when the world was what is was for us to when the world turned ceased to be for us at all. We must examine what happens when the world becomes worldless. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">III. Beyond the World as it was For Us</span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When the world was what it was, the world was <i>in itself</i> what it was. The trajectory of thinking inaugurated by Kant gave a world no longer <i>in itself</i>, but a world now merely <i>for us</i>. When the world was in itself, the world was known in its <i>immediacy</i>. When the world became what it is for us, the world was known in its <i>mediacy</i>. Both the <i>in itself</i> and the <i>for itself</i> of the world nonetheless presupposes that there was an <i>immediacy</i> to that by which the world is known <i>in itself</i> and <i>for itself</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Transcendental reflection that had dislodged the <i>immediacy</i> of the world nonetheless presupposed its <i>immediate </i>graspability. While Hegel increasingly realized that no Archimedean standpoint for transcendental reflection existed, his creative attempt to understand the various limited standpoints of transcendental reflection as manifestations of an unconditioned Absolute transcendental perspective that yet united the limited, conditioned, historically-mediated acts of transcendental reflection, kept at bay for a time the dawning realization that our acts of reflection are <i>mediated</i> as well, that is to say, there is no <i>immediate </i>access to ourselves. Our putative privileged access to the contents of our own mind is a chimera. While Descartes was often deluded about his access to the external world, we thinkers after Kant have been deluded about our access to our own thinking. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The age that dawned after the age of the world as it is for us, is an age that increasingly took seriously that by virtue of which we thought we knew ourselves: it took seriously the <i>language</i> by and through which we thought we had found ourselves. This attention to language occurred both in the Anglo-American and the Continental expressions of philosophy, though in different ways. The story here is complex and filled with surprising turns in trajectory. Simply put, the twentieth century was an age that increasingly came to recognize that our capacities of self-representation are dependent upon others in surprising ways: our concepts, language and values are not our possessions by which we can objectively explore both the world and our own exploration of the world, but are themselves historically-conditioned <i>social products. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The words we use we did not create, and the concepts by which we think, we have learned from others -- mostly through the words that we did not create. Every act of thinking employs concepts that have been bequeathed to us by tradition. The days of thinking of language as a "tool kit" to grasp the objectivity of meaning are long gone. We know too much. Our so-called transcendental horizon is not the "unvarnished good news" that Quine once called the "myth of the given." Just as there is no givenness to experience apart from our historically-conditioned conceptuality by and through which such experience arises, there is no <i>givenness</i> either to transcendental structures of reflection. Transcendental reflection cannot escape the historicity of experience itself, a historicity that grasps the impossibility of reflecting objectively upon the conditions of reflection itself. Just as "looks red" presupposes "is red" (Sellars), so does the apprehension of transcendental structures presuppose the <i>conceptuality</i> of such structures, a conceptuality given through language <i>socially</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Heidegger (1889-1976) famously uncovered the living and breathing <i>ontology</i> through and by which human beings make and live meaning. We are creatures of meaning embedded within worlds of meaning that we did not construct. We who in our being ask the question of the meaning of being, necessarily ask the question within the historically messy process of the history of being. Ultimately, Heidegger claimed, our takes on being are themselves a working out of be-ing as it is in and through our thinking. But, for Heidegger, this Be-ing in its history is no Absolute that can in Hegelian fashion "take up" various understandings of be-ing and somehow come to itself deeply in its own thinking. The history of Be-ing cannot be the God of the tradition of the Absolute of Hegel, this Be-ing in its history is nowhere and no place, and it cannot be accessed by itself. It is deeply and necessarily so <i>hidden </i>that Heidegger in speaking it must use the language of "the last God." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We live in the world beyond the world as it was for us. This world is not in itself, not for itself, and definitely not in and for itself. This world is, in fact, worldless. It is a world suspicious of meta-narratives (Lyotard), of comprehensive attempts to find in the world discrete trajectories of rationality or progress. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once there was the a world that really was in itself. After the death of this world, there was a self that really was in itself. Post-modernity is the celebration of both the death of the world and the self, a celebration that must be in a certain sense <i>ecstatic</i> because there is no longer a self-possessed self through and by which the self can clearly conceive and pronounce its own death. Our current time is an age where the screens have overwhelmed the capacity of either the world or the self to manifest themselves clearly upon them. We are without foundations; it is turtles all the way down. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Living beyond the world in itself is difficult for theology. God understood along the lines of world or self, could be a God that is still somehow understood. But when the self lives ecstatically on the basis of concepts and language that are not its own, then there are no places any longer for God to lay His head. After all, God is by definition incapable of ecstatic existence. God cannot be carried along or constituted upon differential fields that somehow account for intermittent manifestations of identity. If anything <i>is</i>, it would seem<i>, </i>God <i>is</i>. There are no parts to God. God is that identity by and through which all difference is ultimately understood. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So what does one do with Christology in an age beyond the age of the world for us? In our age where all immediacy is blocked, everything that seemingly is, is dependent upon something that it is not. Just as the identity of the world turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the world -- its putative transcendental structures -- and the identity of the self turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the self -- the concepts and language of historically-conditioned social communities -- so too do our fleeting perspectives arising out of particular historically-conditioned social communities find a deeper difference out of which language and thought emerges, a difference that is Other than the historically-conditioned linguistically bequeathed by culture and tradition, a difference that must ultimately be Other than the world and all its putative foundations. We are very close now to the beginnings of our tradition, a tradition claiming that out of nothing comes something. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What is needed is to think Christology radically after not only the deconstruction of onto-theology (Heidegger), but the de-structuring itself of that deconstruction. Thinking Christology beyond the phenomenological presencing that putatively once gave rise to onto-theology, is to bring into focus clearly the Abyss that is either unsupported and provides no support, or unsupported that provides support, or somehow itself supported. What is Christ in such a situation, and what could a real ontic unity between Christ and the Christian be? But the development of these ideas must await another time. What is needed is a Christology in a time when the world is not. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-13103202530556864062022-12-14T13:47:00.003-06:002022-12-16T16:15:27.567-06:00On the "That" and "What" of Abortion<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the High Middle Ages, e<i>sse</i> was routinely distinguished from <i>ens</i>. While the latter refers to a being, the former concerns the "to-be-ness" of that being. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) famously argued that God is wholly <i>esse</i>, and that all things that are share <i>esse</i> with God. An <i>ens </i>is a determinate limitation of pure <i>esse</i>. Accordingly, to be at all is to have some of what God wholly is. Aquinas further claimed that God's essence is God's <i>esse. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Duns Scotus (1265-1308) did away with Thomas' Neo-Platonic-inspired understanding that individual things participate in <i>esse </i>which God wholly is. Accordingly. being became for Scotus simply the most general and abstract of concepts applicable to both the finite and the infinite. Any possible thing either is or is not. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While this spelled an end to the "degrees of being" model of the earlier tradition, Scotus was, like his predecessors, very interested in being, particularly the "thisness" of things in comparison to their "whatness." For Scotus, <i>haeccitas</i> is the primoridal thisness of a thing that is not deducible from a thing's <i>quidditas</i> or whatness. While every <i>ens</i> participates in <i>esse</i> for Thomas, Scotus' <i>haeccitas</i> is logically irreducible to <i>quidditas</i>. God grants and values the <i>particularity </i>of being. Particular things have particular essences. Over and against Thomas, the divine essence does not entail existence. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The separation between<i> thatness</i> and <i>whatness</i> was enshrined by Kant (1724-1804) in his critique of the ontological argument. The ontological argument, classically stated by Anselm (1089-1152), had argued that since God is that which none greater can be thought, God must exist because it is greater to exist than not to exist. Accordingly, the conceivability of God entails the existence of God. Famously, Anselm had offered a second argument claiming that since God is that which none greater can be thought, God must <i>necessarily</i> exist because it is greater to exist necessarily than merely to exist contingently. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant, though likely not reading Anselm, would have none of this reasoning, for while one can derive three-sidedness from the concept of a triangle, one cannot derive existence from the concept of God. Why? The reason is that although the c<i>oncept</i> of God's perfection might include the <i>concept</i> of God's existence, God's <i>actual </i>existence is a different matter entirely. The <i>concept</i> of an existing God does not an <i>actual</i> existing God make. One must distinguish the instantiation of any concept from the concept itself. If one allows existence to be a predicate, then one is stuck with saying, "there is an <i>x, </i>such that <i>x</i> does not exist." But this is nonsense. Accordingly, no amount of determining <i>what,</i> can issue in an actually existing <i>that</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once upon a time the western tradition widely accepted Augustine's (354-430) notion of <i>creatio ex nihilo</i>, the claim that creation itself emerges from nothing. It knew that no amount of moving the deck furniture around upon the ship of existence could produce through that moving a newly existing ship. A causally efficacious God was needed to create and sustain the universe. A divine being with efficient causality was necessary in order for there to be created things. Being is not merely an inversion or unexplored side of nonbeing, but rather stands out from being on the basis of divine fiat. Existence is not a move in the unfolding of the Absolute Idea. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Lamentably, the West has been busy forgetting this insight. Human beings, we are told, are co-creators with God. We envision, construct, paint, compose, and otherwise bring new things out of old, believing that God also engaged in ordering the chaos. We forget the old ways because we have forgotten what Heidegger (1889-1976) called the fundamental question of being: "Why is there something and not nothing at all?" We dream of quantum cosmology where a multiverse contains all possible ways that the universe might go, including the actual way it went, and thus we attempt to make less jarring the fact of the <i>existence </i>of the universe by pointing to the <i>essential</i> structure of that from which existence flows. But we lose the point of Heidegger's question, for why does the multiverse, which grounds every trajectory of existence, itself exist? Why is this <i>something</i> there and not merely <i>nothing</i>? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Our modern logic presupposes the distinction between <i>that</i> and <i>what</i>. We express the what of anything through monadic and polyadic predicates which take as their values names for existing entities. We might say, for instance, that the whatness of the subatomic world is found in the spins, charges, and mass that particular entities possess. But theories of particle physics are accordingly committed to the existence of those entities that the fundamental theories of particle physics quantify over. Quine's (1908-2000) famous quip applies clearly here: "To be is to be a value of a bound variable." The value of the bound variable is the <i>that</i> which exists, and the properties and relations that the <i>that</i> which exists sustains constitutes the <i>what</i> of the properties and relations exhibited. The early Wittgenstein (1889-1951) taught us that we cannot reason from the fact that something exists with determinate properties, to the existence of some other existing thing. After all, following Kant, <i>existence is not a predicate</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The rejection of the ontological argument and the acceptance of the gap between essence and existence is standard fare in philosophy. So how then are these insights forgotten in a small region of a subdomain within philosophy, the <i>ethics of abortion</i>? Why is it the case here that certain arguments seem to forget the incommensurability of existence and essence, and accordingly assert that the existence or nonexistence of something can justifiably be derived from the particular way other things are? </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">II</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Arguments about the permissibility or nonpermissability of abortion sometimes suffer from a loss of precision between the <i>what</i> and the <i>that</i> of a thing. In what follows I want to be precise <i>in exploring the structure of common consequentialist arguments allowing abortion</i>. I shall here not try to prove abortion is always wrong, or even determine under what conditions abortion might be permissible. I am only concerned with arguments that regard the <i>existence</i> or <i>nonexistence</i> of the fetus/baby as derivable from a <i>description</i> of the happiness of agents within the wider context in which that fetus/baby is ingredient. In simple language, <i>I am interested in exploring arguments that claim that "the baby would be better off not existing than be likely existing in a situation like this."</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Imagine female <i>f </i>and partner <i>p </i>who decide that it is morally justified to terminate <i>f's</i> fetus/baby <i>b </i>because of the likely liabilities that <i>f, p</i> and <i>b</i> would suffer were <i>b</i> to exist. Let us assume, for instance, that <i>f</i> is living in poverty, that <i>f's</i> relationship with <i>p</i> is unstable, that <i>f</i> already has three young children, and that <i>f</i> will like descend into substance abuse to mitigate the tensions in her life. One might, given this scenario, simply do the calculation about what the likely collective utility or disutility be to <i>f</i>, <i>p</i>, and <i>b</i> would be were <i>b</i> to exist or, alternatively, were <i>b</i> not to exist. Included in this utilitarian calculation might be the putative <i>rights</i> <i>f</i> has for self-determination, and how carrying and delivering <i>b</i> might intrude on the exercise of these rights. Arguments like this, while structured as purely <i>consequentialist</i> in nature, might thus include an element of <i>deontology, </i>as suggested by <i>f</i> having rights. In what follows, however, I am interested only in the consequentialist argument. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The question before us is this: Can a description of the <i>what</i> of <i>f</i>, <i>p</i>, and <i>b's</i> pleasure or happiness entail either that <i>b</i> should exist or should not exist? More to the point, should the calculation of <i>f</i>, <i>p</i>, and <i>b's</i> total possible happiness on <i>b</i> existing or <i>b</i> not existing justifiably affect the <i>existence</i> of <i>b</i> at all? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There are perhaps reasons to say it should. After all, don't we often argue from the whatness of an organism's physical condition to a determination to end the thatness of an invading virus, bacteria, or parasite? The bacteria <i>s </i>exists and this eventuates in the suffering of the agent <i>a</i> in whom the bacteria is operating, and the family of friends of that agent. Is not the existence of fetus/baby <i>b</i> analogous to the existence of parasite <i>s</i>? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Perhaps we are in need of a functionality argument here. While having baby <i>b</i> is within the proper function of agent <i>f</i>, the having of lethal parasite <i>s</i> is not within the proper function of agent <i>a</i>. While the natural organism <i>a</i> has its function optimized in not having <i>s</i>, it is arguable that <i>f's</i> function is optimized by <i>not</i> terminating <i>b</i>. To see what is the proper function of a thing it is necessary to know the nature of that thing. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is clearly the case that some no longer would regard birthing <i>b</i> as part of the nature of <i>f</i>. They might say that <i>b</i> is no more determined to come about given <i>f</i> as <i>s</i> is determined to come about given <i>a</i>. Accordingly, there is no natural tie between <i>f</i> and <i>b</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But it is difficult to claim that there is no natural tie between <i>f</i> and <i>b</i> when <i>f</i> is clearly the <i>sine qua non</i> of <i>b </i>occurring. Clearly, if <i>b,</i> there must be <i>f,</i> and without <i>f</i> there can be no <i>b</i>. (I am going to avoid for now the question of <i>b</i> being produced in a laboratory.) Functionality arguments will likely generate controversy, and I will not attempt to develop a fully defensible one here. I avert to them only because I am cognizant that some way must be found to argue for the preciousness of <i>b</i> existing and not <i>s </i>or myriad other things not existing </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So let us assume for purposes of this paper that we can disarm arguments that make <i>s</i> like <i>b</i> with respect to <i>a</i> and <i>f, </i>and simply look at calculating the goodness of <i>b's</i> existence given the possible scenarios for <i>f</i> and <i>p</i> on both <i>b</i> and ~<i>b</i>. How would such a calculation work? How could one assign a value to the existence of <i>b</i> or nonexistence<i> </i>of <i>b</i> given that the happiness or pleasure of <i>f</i>, <i>p</i> and <i>b</i> is incommensurate with the existence of <i>b</i>? What I am suggesting is that since there is no <i>rule </i>or <i>recipe</i> tracking from <i>whatness </i>to <i>thatness</i>, there can be no rule or recipe from a description of likely or unlikely <i>consequences</i> of having <i>b</i> to the actual existence of <i>b</i>. While it might be possible at the conceptual level to think that <i>b</i> should or should not exist<i> </i>given the pleasure or happiness of <i>f</i>, <i>p</i>, and <i>b</i>, the actual <i>instantiation</i> of <i>b</i> is as logically disconnected from <i>f, p, </i>and <i>b</i>, as the actual instantiation of God is from a consideration of God's putatively perfect attributes. When it comes to denying the ontological argument, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Many more considerations can be added to this argument suggesting that <i>b</i> has a fundamental right to exist, but I am not adding them here. I am merely claiming that one cannot derive that it is morally permissible to terminate <i>b</i>'s existence on the basis of the happiness of <i>f</i>, <i>p</i>, and <i>b</i>. In fact, the ease by which some would reason to the morally permissible of terminating <i>b</i> given the likely happiness of <i>f, p</i>, and <i>b</i>, might remind one of the <i>Dasein ohne Leben</i> reasoning of certain German doctors in the 1930s. They reasoned that the life of a person might be at such a low level of development and thus happiness, that it is morally permissible to end the <i>fact</i> of that person's existence to save him/her (and their families) from <i>what</i> that existence might likely be. <i>Dasein ohne Leben</i> thus assumes that existence (or non-existence) can somehow be derived from essence. If existence is not a predicate, that is, if existence is not a property of a being, then there is no way to argue to it (or away from it) by considering the relational and non-relational properties of that being. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">III</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Mary is considering terminating her pregnancy because the total amount of happiness for her, her family, and her fetus/baby will likely increase were she to terminate. She reasons to this in facile ways widely accepted by our culture. Clearly, the fetus/baby is at the stage where its immediate happiness or unhappiness is not a profoundly relevant consideration in comparison with Mary's own happiness, her partner's happiness and the happiness of her family. She aborts the fetus/baby on strictly utilitarian grounds, seemingly including the happiness of the fetus/baby in the calculation. How does what we have discussed concern Mary's concrete decision? </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I am saying that consequentialism must respect the distinction between the whatness and thatness of the beings which it is considering. The consequences of events concern the existence or non-existence of properties instanced by the beings impacted by the event. Accordingly, the consequences of Mary's abortion concern which properties Mary, her partner, her family and the fetus/baby instantiate. One reasons here from whatness to whatness. The happiness, pleasure, and total human flourishing of all engaged may indeed increase on the termination of the pregnancy. What I am arguing, however, is that no amount of consideration of whatness can entail <i>that</i> any of the morally relevant beings <i>not exist</i>. <i>The fact of existence is of a different order entirely than the how or what of existence. </i>One cannot derive a <i>that </i>from a <i>what</i>. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is not to say, however, that consequentialism should not be employed when comparing the <i>that</i> of the mother's life with the <i>that</i> of the life of the fetus/baby. Here considerations of the <i>what</i> of both mother and fetus/baby are relevant. What-talk can be helpful when comparing one <i>that</i> with another. It may well be that the consequences of not-aborting are decidedly worse for the mother facing possible death in delivery than for the fetus/baby. After all, the mother is conscious in a way that the fetus/baby is not. In addition, the mother has other children; she has a family who have known her for decades and love her. Given the choice between the existence of the mother or fetus/baby, one could likely construct consequentialist arguments showing that it better to abort than not abort. I am not, however, claiming this here. I am only pointing out that while consequentialist arguments might be helpful in the adjudication between two or more thats, they nonetheless fail when comparing whats and thats. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But what about rape or incest? Does not the distinction between <i>that</i> and <i>what</i> mean that a fetus/baby can never be justifiably aborted? I am not claiming this here. What I am arguing is that a <i>consequentialist</i> argument cannot legitimately be employed to derive the justifiable non-existence of the fetus/baby from considerations of the happiness of the mother and her family and friends. This does not mean the <i>deontological </i>considerations are not ethically relevant. Not everything in complicated issues of abortion can be decided on the basis of consequentialist thinking. What I have argued is only that for a certain class of moral judgments based upon the likely consequences of aborting the baby/fetus for the happiness of the mother and her family/friends, it is <i>unjustified</i> to move from the <i>what</i> of their happiness to the <i>that</i> of the fetus/baby's existence. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, a full defense of this view demands that one can distinguish degrees of goodness with respect to the <i>t</i><i>hatness </i>of a person, fetus/baby, pet, cricket, tree or mountain. While the <i>that</i> cannot be directly derived from the<i> what, </i>our moral reasoning oftentimes is concerned with questions about whether or not something justifiably should exist given the consequences of its likely existence. But considerations of degrees of goodness or rightness cannot be themselves based upon consequentialist reasoning. Here we have entered the province of deontology. My argument here is simply that consequentialist reasoning cannot justifiably conclude to the existence or non-existence of fetus/baby <i>b</i> based upon sum total of happiness of agents <i>f, p, </i>and <i>b</i>. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-87037673684883986182022-11-13T23:53:00.003-06:002022-12-14T13:50:19.542-06:00Sorting Rules and Acts in Climate Policy<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In 1959 Richard Brandt (1910-1997) clearly distinguished rule and act utilitarianism in his book <i>Ethical Theory. </i>In the sixties he further developed the distinction and responded to his critics in a series of essays which were later collected and published in his 1992, <i>Morality, Utilitarianism and Rights. </i>What is the distinction between the two types of utilitarianism and why should it matter in thinking about contemporary climate policy? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One might put the distinction as follows: </span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest happiness.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest happiness.</span></li></ul><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Sharp eyes see that much is still vague in the distinction. For instance, what does "greatest happiness" mean? We can for both act and rule utilitarianism distinguish hedonistic pleasure from total human flourishing conceived as the development of our intellectual and moral virtues. </span></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Flourishing Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to human flourishing.</span></li></ul><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But too much ambiguity remains. One must specify the extension of the set of individuals to which the properties of pleasure of human flourishing might apply. Are we concerned with <i>global</i> or merely <i>regional</i> happiness? We are left with these distinctions: </span></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Global Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Global Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Global Flourishing Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing for the greatest number.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Global Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed would conduce to human flourishing for the greatest number. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Regional Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to the greatest pleasure for the set of people in which one has interest.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Regional Hedonistic Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to the greatest pleasure for the set of people in which one has interest. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Regional Flourishing Act Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if doing A will conduce to human flourishing for the set of people in which one has interest. </span></li><li><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Regional Flourishing Rule Utilitarianism: Do act A if and only if A is an instance of rule R which, were it universally followed, would conduce to human flourishing for the set of people in which one has interest. </span></li></ul><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">Now let us consider contemporary climate policy and the current demand upon the developed countries to limit carbon emissions to slow the greenhouse effect <i>even though</i> developing countries, <i>and India and China</i>, likely will not limit such emissions for several decades and maybe not until the end of the century. </span><span style="font-family: times;">On what ethical basis is this made? </span></span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">While currently the heating of the earth seems to remain much slower the many climate change models have projected, I will not deal with this factual question in this short reflection. I will simply assume that there is some global warming, and that carbon emissions are the main culprit in this warming. (Although I am not a climate scientist, I don't there is universal consensus that climate science has conclusively shown that high CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere actually </span><i style="font-family: times;">cause</i><span style="font-family: times;"> global warming. There is, in fact, data suggesting that there has not been a consistent correlation in earth history between elevated CO2 levels and high temperatures.)</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So let us consider Germany's cultural and governmental penchant toward deeply reducing carbon emissions. On what ethical ground might a judgment deeply to reduce CO2 levels stand? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Since we know that draconian cuts in CO2 levels will have virtually no effect on global climate -- perhaps .02% of one degree -- over the next century, justification for such cuts cannot rest on an act utilitarianism of any kind. The Germans can either deeply cut use of fossil fuel, or not deeply cut the use. Since there will be little effect on global climate whether they cut or not cut, the decision to cut cannot be due to application of an act utilitarian yardstick. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So if we are interested in <i>consequences </i>at all in climate policy, we must point to a rule utilitarian basis. But what kind of basis is this? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Since most advocates of draconian carbon cuts talk about saving the planet, appeal is being made to a global rule utilitarianism: <i>We must move to cut emissions in such-and-such a way, because were all people to cut emissions in such-and-such a way, the greatest happiness for the greatest number would eventuate. </i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But is the rule utilitarianism to which appeal is made of the hedonistic or flourishing variety?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">While one could argue this either way, I think it most natural to think that the ability of human beings to flourish by cultivating their intellectual and moral virtues would be inescapably negatively impacted were temperatures to rise significantly. After all, temperature increases will eventuate in the melting of polar ice and the rise of sea levels, a situation which will damage or destroy coastal cities. The concomitant cultural loss of these cities being destroyed would clearly impact total human flourishing even if governments were somehow successful in evacuating people from areas of flood. While I can even imagine a scenario where governments might somehow make it <i>pleasant</i> for their populations to migrate away from the coast, I can't imagine a scenario where the destruction of these cities is a artistic-cultural good. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So Germany ought to reduce CO2 levels because acting to reduce such levels is in accordance with a general rule so to act that, were this rule universally followed, would conduce to the greatest flourishing for the greatest number of people. Notice that since the reduction of CO2 levels by Germany will have virtually <i>no effect</i> on global warming, the decision to reduce such levels is quite <i>abstract</i>. One must have a philosophical bent, I think, to be convinced by this abstraction. I suspect, however, that the fact that most Germans are so convinced does not mean that most Germans are philosophical, but simply that most Germans have only thought about the benefits of such reduction <i>were all countries to reduce</i> as the Germans are, and have not thought about the <i>concrete</i> downsides of their own reduction. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">What happens when act and rule utilitarianism come into conflict? Will the German population opt for the abstract benefits over concrete losses? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Imagine, as seems quite likely, that the German desire to end fossil fuel consumption, and their continuing commitment to eschew atomic energy solutions, eventuates in much higher energy costs and an increased reliance on other countries in the importing of their energy needs. This seems actually quite likely because Germany does not get much sunlight and it is in general not very windy. Clearly, it is likely that the renewable energy to fuel the German economy will likely have somehow to be imported. Under these conditions, it is quite probable that people in Germany will have radically to cut their consumption of energy. They can do this by not heating or cooling their buildings to previous levels, living in buildings that more efficiently heat and cool -- big apartment complexes rather than individual homes -- and <i>not consuming</i> processed food or manufactured goods to previous levels. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">If this happens, the German population will likely grasp that from a regional hedonist or regional flourishing act utilitarian perspective, one ought <i>not</i> to have acted to lessen CO2 emissions. Why would one do that which lessens their own pleasure or human flourishing? From an abstract global flourishing rule utilitarian perspective one must cut CO2 emissions but from a concrete regional hedonistic or flourishing act utilitarian perspective one must not cut CO2 emissions. So what to do? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Jeremy Bentham famously argued that the principle of utility was not finally an abstraction at all, but that it is simply part of our nature. Since we do act so as to bring about our pleasure, we are allowed to claim that we ought to act to bring about that pleasure. (I have never found this part of his argument convincing.) However, I do believe that Bentham has his finger on something important. When human beings are confronted with a choice between an abstraction potentially benefitting many and a concrete course of action that actually benefits themselves, they will likely take the latter. What else would the sinner do, the sinner in which concupiscence runs deep? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Speaking theologically -- I must do this sometimes because I am a theologian -- I would point out the spiritual pride and <i>hubris </i>of well-sated populations holding abstract positions that they believe will never be put to the test. It is quite easy to dream about CO2 reductions when such reductions do not have concrete effects on the dreamer. But the minute the dreamer is profoundly affected all bets are off. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Spiritual pride comes when we think we can divorce our "higher part" (reason, sound judgment, empathy, altruism, etc.) from our "lower part" (body, feelings, needs, self-preservation, etc.). I am not saying that thinking as a rule utilitarian is not a good way to think, but only that such thinking, when unbuckled from life itself, can tend to make one quite arrogant an unwieldy in one's judgments. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Thinking philosophically is hard work; one must look at all sides of things. Unfortunately, in the current politically charged arena of public opinion, looking at all sides appears to be a moral failing. </span></div><p></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-60048084240193796652022-11-06T17:48:00.003-06:002022-11-06T20:29:15.904-06:00Climate Policy and the Generalization Argument<p>In July of 1955, <span style="font-size: medium;">Marcus Singer discussed in <i>Mind </i>(Vol. 64, No. 255: 361-375) the so-called "generalization argument in ethics." The argument's general form is this: "If everyone were to do that, the consequences would be disastrous (or undesirable); therefore no one ought to do that" (361). An instance of the argument is this: "The consequences of no one doing <i>x</i> would be undesirable; therefore everyone ought to do <i>x</i>. The question for Singer is this: What are "the conditions under which the fact that the consequences of doing <i>x</i> would be undesirable provides a good reason for concluding that it is wrong for anyone to do <i>x" </i>(361)?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Singer believes that determining these conditions links to the basic principle underlying generalization arguments. The <i>generalization principle</i> states that <i>what is right or wrong for one person must be right or wrong for any similar person in similar circumstances" </i>(362). In the <i>Mind</i> article Singer defends the validity of the generalization argument, leaving open the question of its <i>soundness, </i>that is to say, there is nothing in the form of the generalization argument that determines whether or not the consequences of everyone acting in a certain way are, in fact, undesirable. He is not concerned with the "desirability or undesirability of a certain set of consequences" (375), but only with the hypothetical '<i>were</i> the consequences of <i>x</i> undesirable <i>were</i> all to do <i>x'</i>, <i>then</i> no one ought to do it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Because he is not concerned with the truth of the assertion, 'were everyone to do <i>x</i>, the consequences would be undesirable', he does not take seriously the popular objection to the generalization argument: "Not everyone will do <i>x</i>." Singer claims that the objection "is irrelevant because the argument does not imply that everyone will" do <i>x</i>. What it implies is that "if A has the right to do something, then everyone else (or everyone similar to A in certain respects) has the same right in a similar situation," or alternately, "if it is undesirable for everyone to have this right, it is undesirable for A to have it" (374-75). Singer believes that while it might be undesirable for A to have a certain right, this does not entail that the consequences of A acting in a particular way are themselves undesirable (375). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While Singer does not find the objection 'not everyone will do x' relevant to evaluating the validity of 'if the consequences of everyone doing <i>x</i> are undesirable, no one ought to do <i>x,' </i>in the actual application of generalization arguments it nonetheless seems quite important. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take a standard example, 'If everyone were to engage only in homoerotic activity then there would be no children and the human race would end, then no one ought engage only in homoerotic behavior'. Is this valid? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">One might say that it is formally valid, but point out that the antecedent simply does not in fact obtain. It is simply not the case that everyone will engage only in homoerotic behavior. Clearly, if it is false that the antecedent in fact holds, then the first conditional is vacuously true. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But it must be admitted that if the disaster conceived on the supposition of exclusive homoerotic behavior will not in fact obtain, then the very <i>motivation</i> to cast the homoerotic behavior argument as a generalization argument resting on the generalization principle disappears. If, as a matter of fact, only 5% or less of the population engages in exclusive homosexual activity, then correct application of the generalization principle must take this fact into consideration in determining what is to count as "similar circumstances." </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Imagine Molly is deciding how to apply the generalization principle when determining whether or not to initiate sexual activity with Myrna. She thinks, "what is right or wrong for me must be right or wrong for similar people in similar circumstances." Thus it is, thinks Molly, that my desire to engage with Mryna must be judged acceptable if people having the particular psychological orientation I have are deemed acceptable in pursuing homoerotic relationships with others who, like Myrna, are open to them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, Molly's thinking has drifted far away from an application such as this: Molly is similar to every other woman in being a woman, and since if all women were to have only homosexual relationships is disastrous for the human race, then Molly having only homosexual relationships is disastrous for the human race. Obviously, everything depends on what one understands "similar" to mean. How does one rightfully apply <i>similarity</i> here? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">How does generalization in ethics affect contemporary thinking on climate policy? Is such policy committed to a <i>generalization principle</i> that is, in fact, misapplied? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The default position of many of the North Atlantic countries on climate policy seems to be this: If the situation of no countries doing anything to limit greenhouse emissions is undesirable, then all countries should limit greenhouse emissions. Or alternately, if every country ignoring greenhouse emissions has disastrous consequences, then no country ought to ignore such emissions. Again, one might grasp that the generalization argument rests on this principle: what is right or wrong for one country with regard to greenhouse emissions must be right or wrong for any similar country in similar circumstances. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Those convinced of the general validity of this principle are obviously convinced that the fact that not every country will limit greenhouse emissions is irrelevant to what ought to be done, for clearly, <i>if</i> every country were so to limit emissions then disaster might be averted. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But does this situation not call for an investigation of what motivates the application of the argument in this context? Clearly, the presupposition is that it is in the <i>power</i> of every country to limit greenhouse emissions. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Compare this to the situation of Molly. Can it be said that it is fully within the power of Molly simply not to be predisposed to homoerotic activity? In one sense, of course, Molly might reasonably be said to have the power to do other than what she might otherwise want to do with Mryna, but does this mean that she has the power not to have the general psychological orientation she has? Given her psychological orientation, and given the psychological orientation of others similar to her, and given the relative infrequency of her psychological orientation among the general population, could it be said that acting in accordance with her psychological proclivities actually lead to disastrous consequences? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It might be similarly argued, that while every nation may have the abstract power to limit greenhouse emissions, many would not find it in their best immediate interest so to, and might even find it almost impossible to limit such emissions given the current socio-economic conditions obtaining in their country, and the happiness of the <i>actual populations</i> of that country! What I am suggesting is simply this: Just as it seems that 'not everybody will do so' is ethically relevant to the application of the generalization argument to homoerotic behavior, so is it relevant to that argument's application with respect to greenhouse emissions. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take, for example, the country of Germany having the fourth largest GDP in all the world. Many in Germany are convinced by the generalization argument. Since every country ignoring greenhouse emissions would lead to disastrous consequences for the future of humanity, it is not morally permissible for Germany to ignore such emissions. Presumably, German citizens hold this even knowing that were they completely to eliminate fossil fuel consumption, such elimination by itself has virtually no effect on global temperatures over the next 100 years. The actual consequences of Germany eliminating fossil fuels is irrelevant, we are told, from their ethical mandate so to eliminate these fuels, for "if everybody continuing to burn fossil fuels has disastrous consequences for the earth, then it is not allowable that Germany should continue to burn such fuels."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But why exactly? Why should Germany and the North Atlantic countries limit emissions over the next century when, as a matter of fact, most of the developing countries will increase emissions dramatically? Why must Molly act like the rest of the women who are unlike her? What makes Germany <i>unlike</i> countries like India and China that will likely raise carbon emission levels through the end of the century? How should we apply the criterion of <i>similarity</i> here? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I would argue that while Molly is unlike 19 out of 20 women, (but like 1 out of 20), Germany is more like China and India than it likely believes. Undeveloped, developing and developed countries share overarching similarities. They are all comprised of <i>people</i> who want to have enough food to eat, clean water to drink and air to breath, and energy to heat and cool their days and get them from one place to another. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Right now there is general acceptance that undeveloped and developing countries do not have the requisite socio-economic structures that would allow them to eschew consumption of all fossil fuels. Prohibiting such consumption would wreak havoc within their societies with concomitant suffering of their populations. It would lead to the profound unhappiness of their populations. Is Germany ultimately more <i>similar</i> or <i>dissimilar</i> to these countries? Does Germany find herself in <i>similar</i> or <i>dissimilar</i> circumstances with respect to these other countries? How does the g<i>eneralization principle</i> rightfully get applied?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I believe that the fact that <i>not all countries</i> will limit emissions is ethically relevant to the generalization argument with regard to climate policy. Given that Germany has a population that wants many of the same things that the folks of India and China want, how does the requirement that Germany's population suffers by deeply limiting their carbon footprint find ethical justification when the other populations will not in fact limit fossil fuel emissions, and that Germany's reductions will likely have no discernible effect on temperature and sea-level measurements world-wide? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The answer might be more surprising than we originally imagine. Perhaps it is because the plausibility of using the generalization argument in climate policy is based on a presumed <i>dissimilarity</i> between Germany and the developing countries. Just as Molly might get a pass from the ethical requirement of exclusive heterosexual behavior based upon her <i>dissimilarity </i>from the rest of the women, so does the requirement that Germany achieve all fossil fuels emissions ultimately rest on its dissimilarity from the populations of the undeveloped and developing countries. While China and India are exempt from the requirement to limit fossil fuel use based upon the sufferings of their populations were such fuels not used, so is Germany <i>not</i> exempt from this requirement. After all, the German population has already developed and has no right to claim an exclusion from general requirements of the generalization argument. Thus, the suffering that eschewing carbon emissions will bring to German life are simply not ethically relevant the German situation. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is a rather startling conclusion, I think, and I shall end this reflection purposefully in ambiguity because the ethical situation underlying it is not clear. I have claimed that the generalization argument seems to support current climate policy. The argument is this: If the effect of all nations not dropping carbon emissions is disastrous, then it is not allowable that one nation not drop carbon emissions. This is so because what is right or wrong with respect to this issue for one country, is right or wrong with respect to this issue for all similar countries in similar situations. Thus, Germany must drop their carbon emissions even though dropping such emissions will have little to no effect on world-wide temperatures and sea-levels. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of this is clear enough, bur remember that that <i>not all countries will drop their carbon emissions. </i>So what is Germany's responsibility in lowering carbon emissions given that lowering such emissions themselves have little effect on the climate? Here we must look to the generalization principle itself. What makes a country similar to another? I have suggested that through a strange inversion of its use, the chief perpetrators of high carbon emissions are protected from moral censure on the grounds that adopting strict carbon emission policies would lead to untoward suffering to their populations. Germany, however, (and by extension other North Atlantic countries) are <i>dissimilar </i>from these populations in ways that do not allow escape from moral censure. Because of this dissimilarity, Germany is condemned. The fact that many countries will not lower emissions is somehow not ethically relevant to the proscription and the guilt under which Germany labors. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I do not believe that that such moral censor <i>ought </i>be the case, and I would argue that populations are comprised of concrete individuals whose sufferings are morally relevant to climate policy no matter what countries they inhabit. Further, I would argue that the Rule Utilitarian yardstick simply does not work in climate policy. Here we must be Act Utilitarians. But this argument awaits another post. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-47735352217193706262022-10-15T11:21:00.002-05:002022-10-15T14:27:14.262-05:00Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze: An Introduction<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Every so often a book is published that demands serious and sustained engagement. Adkins and Hinlicky's 2013 <i>Rehinking Philosopher and Theology with Deleuze </i>raises a number of important issues that I shall address in a series of posts. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A major question of the book concerns the relationship between the exploration of being as such versus the investigation of the highest being. Philosophy has traditionally dealt with the first and theology with the second. But what is the relationship between these two explorations? The tradition has assumed a <i>discontinuity </i>between philosophy's reasoned exploration of being as such, and theology's religious response to that which reveals itself as highest. However, must this be the case? What <i>ought</i> this relationship be, given the contemporary intellectual and cultural context in which we find ourselves?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Adkins and Hinlicky ask us to reconsider regnant discontinuity assumptions about theology and Philosophy. Instead of the disciplines being concerned with different types of things, might one better understand them as poles on a continuum? Adkins and Hinlicky suggest that we might better regard them as <i>assemblages, </i>as constructions out of heterogeneous components. Were we to regard them so, might we make progress on a set of vexing questions that appear to us now as insolvable? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But what is an <i>assemblage</i>? The authors write: "An assemblage is a singular and temporary coagulation of heterogeneous forces that achieves consistency"(2). Importantly, 'consistency' here does mean either unity or identity. An assemblage is assembled out of disparate components, and that these disparate components are assembled out of disparate components. It was Deleuze and Guattari who introduced the metaphysics of assemblage in their books, <i>A Thousand Plateaus </i>and <i>What is Philosophy?. </i> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The properties of assemblages are dependent on the properties of their component parts as they sustain relations with each other. Assemblages generate limits -- one towards dissolution and the other towards constriction. The first limit functions as the boundary of the assemblage beyond which the assemblage transitions into another. Deleuze and Guattari use terms like 'immanence', 'deterritorialization', 'molecular', 'smooth space', and 'chaos' in naming the dissolution limit. Alternately, 'transcendence', 'territorialization', 'molar', 'striated space', and 'opinion' apply to the constriction limit. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In the history of philosophy, say Delueze and Guittari, the notion of a <i>thing</i> gets confused with the assemblage reaching its limit of constriction. When one asks what something is, one is treating the assemblage as a thing. The very question lifts that which looks stable and eternal out of the context of its ever-changing existence. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">However, this question of the what is, for Deleuze and Guattari, clearly secondary to the question of "which one?" This latter question concerns singular, concrete sets of capabilities within the process of being, the behavior of concrete assemblages (3). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The book aims to explore theology as an assemblage, particularly in its relationship to the assemblages of both religion and philosophy. Unfortunately, according to Adkins and Hinlicky, "assemblages that have been created have impoverished rather than enriched our lives" (3). But why have the assemblages of philosophy, religion and theology impoverished our lives? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Our authors tell us that the problem has been that we continually opt for discontinuity over continuity. It is Kant who bequeathed to modernity the current form of the discontinuity thesis.<i> </i>It was he who sharply distinguished concepts from intuitions (percepts) and the supersensible from the sensible. It was he who pointed out and corrected Leibniz's confusion that "perception is just confused conception." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Adkins and Hinlicky discuss the ontological dualisms to which Kant and much of western philosophy is committed. Such dualisms exist alongside the basic grammatical distinction between subject and verb. Accordingly, we traditionally have distinguished being and doing, cause and effect, and the conditioned and the conditions. These dualistic differences are difference in <i>kinds</i>, not <i>degrees</i>. Moreover, these kind differences presuppose hylomorphism's form/content schema and the <i>analogy of being. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Adkins and Hinlicky muse about what philosophy and theology might look like if we were to consider lightning as inseparable from its flash, being from inseparable from doing, and the doer inseparable from the deed (5). Maybe hylomorphism could be replaced by hylozoism, by the notion of the <i>self-organization</i> of matter. Accordingly, we might replace the analogy of being with the univocity of being. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The authors are bold, for <i>prima facie</i> it seems that God/universe presents an ontological dualism if ever there were one. Traditionally, God has so far exceeded the perfection of His creation that one might speak of God only analogously. While the infinite God is literally not good in the way that finite being Mother Threasa is good, nonetheless God is more like Mother Threasa than He is like Joseph Stalin. God is that which none greater can be thought; God is the one activity of being in and throughout all activities of being. Clearly, the tradition has tended to blend the <i>onto</i> with the <i>theo, </i>in forming and committing itself to onto-the-logy. But must Christian theology be committed to a rejection of ontological continuity between God and His creation? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Thinking beyond discontinuities in theology means to think beyond immanence and transcendence. Every assemblage is a continuum from which we might abstract two poles. Philosophy tends toward the immanent and religion towards the transcendent. Now we reach the important point: <i>transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity</i>. All that is required for transcendence is "the organization of a field by something that is discontinuous with the field" (5). Because Kant's transcendental categories are discontinuous with the manifold of sensation, they are discontinuous with that manifold. But must this transcendence entail a difference in ontological kind? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Christian theology, we are told, differs from both religion and philosophy because it attempts to think immanence and transcendence within a single assemblage. Accordingly, theology is a "fragile, paradoxical assemblage," and can easily become bad religion or bad philosophy (6). Christian theology must eschew simile in favor of metaphor, apophatic theology in favor of kataphatic theology, and negative dialectic in favor of positive dialectic. Were we to assume a basic continuity between God and other beings, we might be able to conceive God as a "fully giving self-relation . . . commonly referred to as the Trinity" (7). </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">The continuity thesis shall require a rich cartography because maps must be continually drawn and redrawn since assemblages are always in the process of becoming. <i>Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze </i>explores how theology, </span><span style="font-family: times;">philosophy and religion might map on the assumption of the continuity thesis. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant has been most influential in the drawing of boundaries over the last 250 years. These boundaries have had real staying power. Much of the tradition has simply followed Kant's lead in establishing boundaries for what things (and their disciplines) are and what they are not. Thus it is that phenomenology, the new ontology, existentialism and even deconstruction remain wedded to the drawing of boundaries on the assumption of </span><i style="font-size: large;">discontinuity</i><span style="font-size: medium;">. Adkins and Hinlicky ask what the rejection of discontinuity might mean to the refiguring of philosophy, theology and religion generally. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Clearly, Adkins and Hinlicky are asking an interesting question, and this is why I shall spend some time unpacking their text. Ultimately, the success of their argument rests not in the broad strokes in which it can be stated, but in the answers they can provide to the many related mostly philosophical questions that arise on the assumption of these broad strokes. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In reading the Adkins and Hinlicky's text, I was reminded of the process metaphysics that process theology appropriated from Whitehead's <i>Process and Reality.</i> <i>Prima facie </i>for Whitehead and followers, neither the antecedent and consequent natures of God nor God and the universe are ontologically <i>discontinuous</i> from each other. Accordingly, in discussing later chapters of the book I shall be interested in whether dialogue with the promise and perils of process thought is at all fruitful in understanding the authors own move from hylomorphism to hylozoism. My questions throughout are explorations shall be these: Is is <i>true</i> that transcendence need not entail a transcendent entity, and is Christian theology<i> conceptually possible</i> without a transcendent entity? </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-52242450924098133072022-10-11T14:38:00.005-05:002022-10-11T14:52:49.396-05:00The Paradox of Transcendental Reflection<p>
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<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I first read the <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique of Pure Reason </span>seriously over four decades ago. Like many novices
reading Kant, I was impressed by the epistemological distinction between the <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">a
posteriori </span>and the semantic distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Kant’s
question intrigued me: By what right do we claim truth in synthetic <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori </span>judgments? What
justifies the assertion that deep reflection allows for an advancement of knowledge about the
ultimate features of reality?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kant claimed that a true analytical judgment is one where the meaning of the predicate is
included in the meaning of the subject, while a true synthetic judgment is one wherein the
meaning of the predicate is not so included. A synthetic judgment is thus “ampliative,” that is, to
say that “all bachelors are happy” is to make an assertion that cannot be known to be true simply
by thinking deeply about what the word ‘batchelor’ <span style="font-style: italic;">means</span>.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">As is well-known, Kant criticized traditional metaphysics by showing that its claim to extend
knowledge “beyond the realm of possible experience” was chimerical. In the absence of <span style="font-style: italic;">intuition
</span>– that which is “given” through sensation – concepts simply relate to other concepts analytically
or <span style="font-style: italic;">semantically</span>. Since no intuitions “fall under” the concept ‘God’, we cannot know that ‘God
loves human beings’, unless, of course, we are able to claim this to be merely an analytical truth,
that is, that the concept of ‘God’ includes as part of its very meaning ‘loving human beings’.
Putative metaphysical judgments that turn out to be analytical in this way are, for Kant,
“regulative judgments.” While incapable of miming the ontological contour of the supersensible
world, they are useful in ordering our supersensible concepts, and thus our <span style="font-style: italic;">thinking </span>about the
supersensible world. Kant thought his analytic/synthetic distinction exhaustive. Either
judgments are analytic or synthetic; <span style="font-style: italic;">tertium non datur</span>.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In reading the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique</span>, I was struck by the
oddity of what Kant was writing and what I was doing in reading. Kant was offering arguments
about how it is that knowledge consists in the application of concepts to intuitions such that there
is a “synthesis of the manifold of sensation.” I thought that what he wrote was plausible and was
even able to grant that what he said was likely <span style="font-style: italic;">true</span>. But with this an uncomfortable argument
seems to emerge.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Let us regard as true the Kantian statement, ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold
of sensation is united’. If this statement is true, it must be true either analytically or
synthetically. But clearly it is not an analytic truth for no amount of simple reflection upon </span><span>‘object’ allows one to conclude by meaning alone the concept ‘that by concept of which the
manifold of sensation is united’. Therefore, it must be true synthetically.</span></span></p></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But now the discomfort becomes acute because it is unclear what sensible intuitions must be
united to make true the judgment ‘an object is that by concept of which the manifold of sensation
is united’. Synthetic judgments for Kant are true <span style="font-style: italic;">a posteriori </span>except for arithmetic and geometry
which make direct appeal to the pure forms of sensibility. But neither sensibility nor its pure
forms are synthesized in judging true the proposition, ‘an object is that by concept of which the
manifold of sensation is united’. Accordingly, the sentence seems to be left <span style="font-style: italic;">without justification</span>,
and with it a great many of the statements Kant employs in his discussion of the <span style="font-style: italic;">transcendental
unity of apperception</span>.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Clearly, I had stumbled upon the paradox of <span style="font-style: italic;">transcendental reflection</span>. Kant asks his readers in
the <span style="font-style: italic;">Critique of Pure Reason</span>, “What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience
as such?” After claiming that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic and that synthetic <span style="font-style: italic;">a
priori </span>metaphysical judgments are problematic in extending knowledge beyond the realm of
possible experience, he writes hundreds of pages in which he is seemingly using synthetic a
priori judgments justifying these claims. Kant’s transcendental reflection apparently did not have
to follow the same justificatory practices with respect to knowledge and truth that our reflections
on the nature of things must follow. When reflecting upon the conditions of our knowledge of
the nature of things, we no longer need to play by the same rules as we do when reflecting
simply upon the nature of things.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Transcendental reflection</span>, our thinking about how we think things, is exempt from the rules it
prescribes to our thinking of things. Kant had perhaps “done away with knowledge of God to
make room for faith,” but in doing so he created a cottage industry for philosophers. They who
could not with justification lay out the truth conditions of ‘God created the universe’ -- there are
no intuitions united either under the concept ‘God’ or the concept ‘created the universe -- could
now claim <span style="font-style: italic;">truly </span>this statement: ‘The judgment that ‘God created the universe’ cannot be
regarded as true because there are no sensations falling under ‘God’ and ‘creating of the
universe’. While clearly <span style="font-style: italic;">this </span>proposition is <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori</span>, we need no longer worry if <span style="font-style: italic;">it </span>is synthetic or
analytic. It is a statement within the field of transcendental reflection after all, and while such
reflection sets the rules for meaning and truth for other provinces, like the Politburo of the old
Soviet Union, it is wholly exempt from the rules that it prescribes for others.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The problem of transcendental reflection is a problem of grounds: What legitimates claims of
transcendental truth? Why can we not ask <span style="font-style: italic;">with sense </span>whether the statement ‘truths divide
exhaustively between the analytic and synthetic’ is itself an analytic or synthetic statement?
After noticing that true judgments are both “clear and distinct,” Descartes argued that clarity and
distinctness form the very criteria of truth. Analogously, we might argue that reflections that
philosophers regard as true that do not meet the truth criteria of what they prescribe are
<span style="font-style: italic;">transcendental</span>. Accordingly, the claim that we can say truly that there are conditions that do not
apply to what is said truly actually constitutes <span style="font-style: italic;">the very criteria of the transcendental</span>.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>The problem of the transcendental standpoint and the truths discerned in occupying it has often
been overlooked or ignored. The verificationist criterion of meaning asserted that only those </span><span>propositions are meaningful that are comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in
experience. But clearly, the statement that ‘only those propositions are meaningful that are
comprised of tautologies or can be checked up upon in experience’ is neither a tautology nor can
it be checked up upon in experience. Faced with the inability to say with truth the material
conclusion of their argument, some retreated to regarding the statement as neither true nor false,
but merely a </span><span style="font-style: italic;">proposal. </span><span>Of course, this begs the questions of why one would be motivated to
adopt the proposal in the first place.</span></span></p></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 3"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The twentieth century, though often increasingly wary of transcendental reflection, has
nonetheless had difficulty avoiding it. After laying out the conditions making possible
propositions of sense, Wittgenstein in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Tractatus </span>points out that none of the propositions he
has written can be regarded as either true or false. They are like a ladder one climbs that can be
thrown away upon reaching the summit. Such propositions might be <span style="font-style: italic;">elucidations</span>, but they
themselves have no truth conditions. Wittgenstein famously says that while saying what cannot
be said, he nonetheless hopes in this saying that something might be <span style="font-style: italic;">shown</span>. While one cannot
state the conditions for the meaningfulness of propositions meaningfully, one can nonetheless
<span style="font-style: italic;">show </span>in one’s saying how to use propositions meaningfully. Wittgenstein notes sadly that the
most important things of life cannot be said.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Wittgenstein knew that Russell’s paradox had spelled doom to Frege’s logicist program. That
program depended upon the unrestricted use of the axiom of comprehension within set theory,
the notion that any set of conditions clearly demarcate and distinguish sets from one another. Set
theorists make extensive use of sets that have sets as their own members. Given the axiom of
comprehension, this condition should uniquely determine sets, that is, for all sets, either they
have sets as members of themselves or they don’t have sets as members of themselves: <span style="font-style: italic;">tertium
non datur</span>.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Russell then asked us to consider those everyday sets that don’t have sets as members of
themselves, e.g., the set of elephants has as its members elephants, not sets of elephants. He
directs us to consider the collection or set of all of sets that are not members of themselves. Now
since we can ask with sense whether a set is a member of itself or not a member of itself, and
<span style="font-style: italic;">tertium non </span>datur, we can ask with sense whether the set of sets that are not members of
themselves is itself a member of itself or is itself not a member of itself. A little reflection shows
that if the set of all sets is a member of itself, that is, is a member of the set of all sets that is not a
member of itself, then it itself must not be a member of itself. Conversely, if the set of all sets
that are not a member of themselves is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of
itself.<span style="vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span>That this paradox was not allowed in logic shows that somehow logic was not going to
be regarded as a case of transcendental reflection, for it itself must obey its own rules!
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>That logic must obey its own rules is assumed in the celebrated Incompleteness proof of
Gödel. He showed that paradox arises on the assertion that all known mathematical truths
(tautologies) can be derived from a finite set of axioms. By ingeniously semantically encoding
information into the syntax of arithmetic, it can be proven that there will always be a provable </span><span>true proposition G from some axiom set that states that it itself cannot be proven on the basis of
that axiom set. Adding a new axiom will not solve this problem because a statement can be
proved stating that it cannot be proved on the basis of the new axiom set. While logicians
carefully distinguish their metalanguage from the object languages about which the
metalanguage speaks, they do not countenance theorems in the metalanguage contradicting those
of their object languages.</span></span></p></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 4"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Paradox dooms logic, but not transcendental reflection! How else can we explain the rise of
phenomenology with all its fanfare and hopes? Reading the texts of Husserl, Heidegger and
others brings us again into the orbit of the transcendentality that Kant had birthed, and Fichte,
Shelling, Hegel and others so effectively exploited.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The phenomenological tradition of such reflection differs from the Neo-Kantian tradition in that
while the latter is engaged with the <span style="font-style: italic;">principles </span>by which knowledge is legitimately had, the
former utilizes <span style="font-style: italic;">evidence</span>. <span style="vertical-align: 4pt;"> </span>Husserl realized that truth is itself not something that can be
accounted for on naturalistic assumptions, and thus argued that so-called natural truths must rest
upon non-natural grounds. Accordingly, the very grounds of the truth of metaphysical truths
must be non-metaphysically investigated. One must go <span style="font-style: italic;">zu den Sachen selbst </span>and bracket
questions of metaphysics and the natural world in order to apprehend those grounds upon which
the natural world and metaphysics rests. These grounds, thought Husserl, were to be found in the
direct apperception of that which is immediately given to consciousness.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But phenomenological reflection proved to be no easy task, and reflection on “the things
themselves” was soon seen to involve reflecting upon many other things, some of which were
not so unambiguously evidence. In fact, the criterion by which to evaluate the nature and
strength of evidence was not clearly something one could simply “see” evidentially. Marshaling
evidence and relating that evidence to philosophical problems seems to involve principled
transcendental reflection. Husserl knew this, and by the publication of <span style="font-style: italic;">Ideas </span>in 1913 adopted the
position of transcendental idealism that he once wished to bracket. Transcendental reflection
demonstrated the necessity of a transcendental ego related noetically to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sinn</span>-world of
noematic content. This transcendental ego could not be examined phenomenologically without
presupposing that very ego under investigation. The problem was that transcendental reflection
seemed to require a transcendental ego that was, by definition, not amenable to
phenomenological investigation.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>It is at this stage that Heidegger enters our story, penning <span style="font-style: italic;">Sein und Zeit </span>and striving mightily
therein to avoid the paradoxes to which Husserl’s hidden transcendental ego fell prey. By re-
thinking what a transcendental ego really is, Heidegger was able to avert the problem of how the
transcendental ego can direct itself upon its world. For Heidegger, the occult ego of Husserl
became Being-in-the-world, <span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span>. The ego is already embedded in its world and it <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>this
embeddedness. With this step Heidegger would try to do something nobody had yet succeeded in </span><span>accomplishing. Heidegger wanted phenomenologically not only to access those beings in the
world that constitutes the basic experience and structure of </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Dasein</span><span>, but he wanted to examine the
conditions for the intelligibility of phenomenologically accessible beings in the world; he wanted
to coax out of hiding </span><span style="font-style: italic;">those worldly conditions </span><span>making possible beings in the world. His interest
was in the be-ing (“to-beness”) resident within the horizon of the world itself. He claimed that
his investigation was </span><span style="font-style: italic;">ontological</span><span>, that it had to do with be-ing, that is, it concerned not primarily
beings, but those conditions of intelligibility that made possible the intelligibility of beings as
such. </span></span></p></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 5"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But Heidegger’s work in <span style="font-style: italic;">Sein und Zeit </span>was beset by transcendental paradox as well. His pointing
out of different ways of being seems at times to leave out the very possibility of a way of being
doing the pointing. Take, for instance, his distinction between <span style="font-style: italic;">Vorhandensein </span>(present-at-hand
be-ing) and <span style="font-style: italic;">Zuhandensein </span>(ready-to-hand be-ing). This distinction is fundamental for Heidegger.
Objects appear to us either as “present-at-hand” or “ready-to-hand”, either as objects having
properties or as equipment to be used in our everyday pragmatic concerns. But what is the being
of the one who distinguishes be-ing-present-at-hand from be-ing-ready-to-hand? Is the
distinction between the objective and pragmatic an objective or pragmatic distinction? If neither,
then should Heidegger not have distinguished some other category beyond the objective and
pragmatic?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Heidegger’s detailed analysis of the be-ing of Dasein in <span style="font-style: italic;">Sein und Zeit </span>seems to push towards
<span style="font-style: italic;">theoretical comprehension</span>, a present-at-hand description of those fundamental structures that are
not in themselves present-at-hand. But this is exactly what transcendental reflection does: It attempts a theoretical description of a province of being that cannot be theoretically described. Transcendental phenomenology perhaps has made the most valiant attempt to grant explicit truth conditions for statements of the transcendental. Clearly, Husserl was attempting in his formal ontology to escape the paradox of transcendental reflection. But as mentioned before, the hope that there could be a stable province of being impassible to its own investigation was quickly extinguished by Heidegger's insight that knowing being is itself an activity of being, that at the foundation of being, there is be-ing, and that <i>there is be-ing all the way down</i>, as it were. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The paradox of transcendental reflection are encountered by a being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. Such reflection and paradox can sometimes be brought to the surface by the <i>Geisteswissenschaften</i>, who realize profoundly that the <i>Naturwissenschaften</i> proceed so successfully because they exclude what to the human spirit is central: We are not who we are and can never not be who we are. Difference rules the first set of disciplines and identity the second. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So what is deeper in human experience, the <i>geistliche</i> paradoci of transcendental reflection, or the tidy coherency of natural science? </span></p></div></div></div><p></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-89990182324082848192022-10-02T14:20:00.006-05:002022-10-02T14:21:48.049-05:00Theology and Metaphysics<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other. The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology. Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics. The story is that metaphysics is <i>bad</i>, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "<i>death dealing</i>." But why the rancor against metaphysics? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware. I tell the story in the following paragraphs. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world. If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know. If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers. Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world <i>change</i>. It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed. After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible. Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about. The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.' </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world. There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in." The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep. However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing <i>categories</i> by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is. A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us. What was needed is the <i>logos</i>, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine. Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God was in need of such forms as well. Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us. After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine. God is <i>supersensible; </i>the divine is beyond all sensible finite being. Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God. Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite. The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply. If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak. Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the <i>supersensible</i>. These great "continental rationalists<i>" </i>thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical. And why not? God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself. No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders. After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the <i>Grund</i> (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's <i>raison d'etre </i>must be included within Himself alone. God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such. Why is there being and not nothing? There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being. Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order. God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals. The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking. One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings. In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical. Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal. The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be <i>known</i> are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience. Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the <i>supersensible</i> it itself. It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is <i>regulative</i>; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought <i>is</i>. The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics. "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith <i>in</i>? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations. Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence. Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known. Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is <i>absolute</i> when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned. As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that <i>all </i>of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell. Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell. Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ. One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories. But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories? Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question. If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology? This will be my topic in a later post.</span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-40894403355231463662022-07-04T12:21:00.006-05:002022-07-04T12:24:13.005-05:00Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements<div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated </span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that <i>are not the result of individual people making decisions</i> to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. </span></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human </span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><i>habits. </i>In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the<i> telos</i> of human beings is their <i>happiness</i>, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good. </span></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values. Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the<i> rule </i>that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the <i>categorical imperative, </i>a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;">But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. </span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is. Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. C</span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">ultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject.</span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> She or he must tr</span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">ain</span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." </span></span></div><div><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon </span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">oneself all of the time. Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute <i>character, </i>those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence. </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems. Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly? Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.</span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian. We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is <i>better </i>to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig. Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether. Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely. </span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable </span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">calculus</span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> and, on the </span><span face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X. How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical. Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety. Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the <i>light</i> by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a<i> mirror </i>by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a <i>guide</i> as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the <i>logos</i>. </span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication. My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to <i>test</i> the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their <span>moral intuitions should function as</span><span> </span><i>data</i><span> </span><span>for ethical theory-making. </span><span> </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having? We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory. Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete. But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed. G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an <i>analysis </i>of it in terms of something more basic. <br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right. Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.</span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the </span><i>same</i><span>, the realm of </span><i>totality </i><span>-- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other. </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Maybe the <i>light</i> we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification. Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.</span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace. We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. <span>This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics. </span><span> </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions. While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas. Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them. </span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine. Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a <i>being otherwise</i>, but rather in that which is <i>otherwise than being</i>. </span></div><div><div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br aria-hidden="true" /></span></div><div id="x_x_Signature"><div></div><div dir="ltr" id="x_x_divtagdefaultwrapper" style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br /></div></div></div></div>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-53876818422095292462022-06-20T15:39:00.009-05:002022-07-04T12:25:03.535-05:00ILT Commencement Address June 2022<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">It was an honor to offer the first commencement address for the Institute of Lutheran Theology's graduates from Christ School of Theology and Christ College on Thursday, June 16, 2022. There were 14 students who walked last week. Congratulations all! </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">__________________________</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Grace and peace to you in the Name of the Risen Lord! <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">You made it! Some of you made it just this last semester, and some semesters long ago. Regardless of when you completed your programs, we are proud of you! <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">We just completed the ILT Board Meeting this morning. We talked about operations, policies, budgets and the future. And we talked about you! You are so very important to us, and I want you to remember this throughout what I shall say today. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">This summer some of my PhD students are reading two very important books from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): <i>Totality and Infinity </i>and <i>Otherwise than Being.</i> Levinas in these texts does something bold and new. He claims, in fact, that most of the western intellectual tradition has simply missed what is completely obvious: There is much more to things than just our thinking about them, our categorizing, explaining and <i>knowing</i> of them. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">There is the Other, he argues, that which is truly not-I, but is irreducibly more than merely not being I. Levinas claims, in fact, that the Other is infinite; we can never think deeply enough or sense precisely enough to be able to grasp the Other as other than my grasping of it. We have an inexorable Desire for this Other, says Levinas. We want to escape our world and flee into it. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">This Other, declares Levinas, resists the Totality of the Same. It halts every effort to comprehend it. It confronts my life of freedom with <i>demand</i>. I encounter the Other though the human Face. The Face and eyes of the Other place a demand upon me that limits the freedom of the world I have built and in which I dwell. According to Levinas, the Face of the Other is a trace of God. Accordingly, religion pertains to the irreducible, unbridgeable gap between my activity and my projects and the Face of the One whose meeting cannot be comprehended in and through my activity and my projects. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">The Other meets me as demand, but every fiber of my being wants to deny the pull of the Other and to make the Other into the Same, that is, into more of me. Accordingly, I who am drawn to the world of the Other, want a world without an Other, for I can dwell comfortably in such a world. I am quite at home in the sameness of my world until the Other’s nomadic sojourn, until this Stranger arrives. The Other announces itself to me in and through my discomfort. Now I, who am no longer at home, must have a face-to-face encounter with one who is not of my world. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Levinas has a particular take on the philosophical notion of <i>transcendence</i>. His teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thought mightily on this topic. Husserl believed that the I transcends itself when it knows what is not it. Because consciousness is directed toward an object, conscious life is <i>ecstatic</i>. To be conscious, to be self-conscious, is to be conscious of that which is not the self. In Husserlian talk, every noetic act has noematic content, and all noematic content presuppose a noetic act. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">His student Heidegger too was concerned with transcendence. Human being is that “being-there” which is being-always-already-in-a-world. To be is to have a world in which to be. Human existence for Heidegger is thus ecstatic. To be is to be always already outside oneself. There is no bare identity to the self. The self is the self in being other than a mere self. It is what it is in the world which it is not. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Levinas thought that both Husserl and Heidegger were not bold enough in conceiving transcendence. He argued that both philosophers ultimately tried to understand the Other on the basis of the same, and thus never really go to the Other at all. Instead Levinas opts for a real encounter with the Other, an Other that can be no part of the Same. We live, dream, plan and execute in the Totality of the Same. Our lives, dreams, plans and deeds are the deposits of our own freedom. We are comfortable. Then comes the Other from a place outside the Same, an Other that pushes us beyond ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Same. We transcend toward the Other. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">In the Face of the Other, in the vulnerability of his or her eyes, I am lifted beyond my own projects. I am no longer the one I seemingly inescapably am, no longer the one trapped in the freedom and comfort of my self-narrative. The Other grants me an <i>ecstasis</i> beyond being all I can be, beyond being who I authentically am, beyond being the one who in its being lives the possibility of no more being. The Other seizes me and all my dreams of self and Same are shattered.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">So what does the relation between the Same and Other have to do with you who graduate from ILT? Why have I started my commencement speaking by speaking in such a way? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">You have all been to graduations, and you know the drill. Graduation day is the day to talk about the graduates, their lives as students, their overcoming of adversity, their accomplishments, skills, dreams, and opportunities. Graduation Day celebrates the student after years of emphasizing the professors. Graduation day is pregnant with future possibilities. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">But the President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology cannot talk about you in this way. Why?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Because you are neither your possibilities nor your actualities. You are, in fact, not you. You are beings who in your being are ecstatically connected with something not of your world. Accordingly, you are beings who shall preach and teach without a career. You are beings who shall pray and serve in denial of searching for or finding yourselves. You are beings who are not who you are, but are only in pushing beyond to what you are not. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Let me make this clear. ILT has not prepared you to live fully, but rather to come and die. ILT has not offered you opportunities to get ahead in life, but has pushed you to the edge of life. ILT has not given you courage to be yourself, but has robbed you of the illusion of self. Why say such things on this day of days? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">When Christ calls a person, He calls that person to come and die. This death is the death of the self, the end of the Totality of the Same, the abnegation of the creaturely life of enjoyment within the Father’s creation. This Call from the Stranger, from the One who perpetually sojourns, is a call to live outside the self and upon the boundary, it is a call back from the monotony of being into the rupture of meta-physics, a call to that which is beyond physics and all its being. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Let me make this even more clear. ILT is not about its students, its faculty, its curriculum, its staff, its Board, its alumni or its donors. ILT is not about ILT. ILT is not at all about the Totality of the Same, but rather about the ecstasy of the Other. ILT is about that which ruptures all of its own projects. ILT is in the call toward what is not. <i>ILT is about the Christ.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Graduates of ILT, you have been called to extraordinary lives, because you are called to a life that ends your life. You have a serious task at hand, a task much more serious than your life. Your task is witness to that Other who displays His traces in the eyes and faces of those you encounter. The master lives in his own house, but the servant lives in another’s. You servants who face Faces of divine traces, have ultimately one and only one otherworldly task. You must listen! <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">You, whose lives are not your own, you, who have no careers, you, who live the discomfort and displacement of all that makes you you, you must listen to a Word that cannot be your word, a Word that destroys your illusions to lead, a Word that annihilates the deepest pleasures of Creation itself, a Word that seizes you, strangles you, and suffocates the last vestiges of your own freedom, a Word otherly distant but proximately fascinating. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">What advice can I give graduates of ILT? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Live in the ecstasy of this Word. Dwell not in the meadows of the Same, but rather in the desert of the Other. Listen to this Word from that place beyond being that calls you to a deep service of your neighbor, a call not built upon the <i>reasonability</i> of such service, but rather gifted by the <i>absurdity </i>of the call itself. Live, hearing the Word that propels you to the ultimate boundary of this world, live the Word that demands, but loves in and through those demands. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br />What advice can I give to graduates of ILT? “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom.12:2), a renewing that can never be of this world, but can be only in being otherwise than being, can be only through the free grace of Jesus the Christ. What I am saying should now be clear. Hear the Word that loves, graces, frees, transforms, and renews; hear this Word not as words about the Word but as the Word itself, as the Word that assumed flesh and dwelt among us. Hear the Word whose doing in you drives you away from yourself and towards the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who will ultimately equip you for ministry.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Graduates, we have learned from you and have been changed by you. Your faces among us have made us more than we are. Your time here was precious for us. We know that you are not ours, but His. We now wait, listening for the Word that words in and through your words. We wait as you preach, teach, and witness to that Other, an Other that sounds forth from where we ought to be, but can never find ourselves. We wait as the Word that words in your words reclaims the Same for service of the Other, an Other who is wholly holy. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">We are created as nomads who profoundly prefer to wander in the labyrinths of the Other than settle in villages of the Same. But we have exchanged our birthright for a mass of pottage (Gen 25:29-34) and have become squatters upon the Same, thus erasing and defacing the Other. But then the Word spoken by your lips, graduates, speaks <i>Truth. You are not your own, but His, so you need no longer worry about being you. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">So what ultimate good could come from the goodness of life when compared to wandering in the wilderness of the Holy? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"> </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-4706825045930277242022-05-09T04:42:00.004-05:002022-07-04T12:26:26.642-05:00Luther and Heidegger: Modeling the Destruction of Metaphysics<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The International Luther Congress beckons this summer and I am thinking about doing something on Luther and Heidegger in the seminar on Luther and Philosophy. I am old enough now to remember Luther Congresses 35 years ago and more where this topic was not of deep interest. Having written a dissertation on Luther's theological semantics, I was from my first Luther Congress interested in these matters, and remember being introduced to the Finnish work in this area in Oslo in 1988. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The following is the abstract for my paper on Luther and Heidegger this Sumer. The seminar headed by Jennifer Hockenbery asks participants to relate Luther to the philosophical tradition through consideration of the notion of freedom. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">________</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Much has been written about Heidegger’s indebtedness to Luther (along with Paul and Augustine) in the development of central themes of <i>Being and Time</i> e.g., death, fallenness, guilt, sin, freedom, etc. Heidegger breaks here with Husserl and western philosophy’s dream to frame a consistent and coherent theory adequate and applicable to all the facts, both physical and metaphysical. In the early 1920s Heidegger was interested in the phenomenology of Christian life, what it was to-be-unto-the-Parousia. He discerned in Luther a friend in uncovering the meaning of factical Christian existence, that primordial self-understanding from, and through which, any talk of theological “facts” can emerge. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But the parallels between Luther’s critique of late medieval Scholasticism and Heidegger’s critique of Catholic theology in his time -- both are interested in the <i>destruction</i>of the abstract metaphysical in favor of the phenomenology of concrete lived existence – can occlude what profoundly differentiates the two approaches: Luther’s “Christian being” cannot be conceived apart from an encounter with the Other, an encounter that cannot be interpreted either as <i>Zuhandensein </i>or <i>Vorhandensein. </i>One must not confuse the <i>experientia </i>of Luther’s theologian with the experience of the peasant or particle physicist. The phenomenological ontological approach “laying bare” the being-in-the-world of both occludes the “stand on being” assumed in the approach itself, an approach that itself finally <i>must stand before God</i>. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In this paper, I review the research into Luther and Heidegger with an eye toward towards an appropriation of the start <i>differences</i> between them, particularly with respect to the question of freedom. What is constructive here is my employment of model theory to show the truth-conditions of the sentences used in the analysis. Clarity on the semantics of sets of sentences about Luther’s <i>experientia, </i>Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Christian life, and the enterprise of their comparison provides greater precision and accuracy in evaluating the differences in their respective projects. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">_________</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have for some time thought that theologians should know the basics of model theory so that they might gain greater clarity into their own theological and ontological assertions. I will endeavor to provide a brief introduction to model theory in this summer's paper, and use it to clarify the difference between Luther and the early Heidegger's project of disclosing the primordial factic life of the Christian prior to the making and evaluation of abstract theological assertions. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-89657411449293101432022-04-24T19:20:00.001-05:002022-07-04T12:28:48.427-05:00ATS Fall Headcount and FTE for Lutheran Institutions and an Update on Progress at Institute of Lutheran Theology <p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is time for my yearly update on the growth of the Institute of Lutheran Theology with respect to Lutheran Seminaries in North America. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">ILT had a combined headcount of 101 in the F 2021 and a FTE of 81.26. The graduate school alone, Christ School of Theology, had a headcount of 79 with an FTE of 68.72. This places ILT in ninth place in size among the 21 Lutheran seminaries. Below are the numbers for the fall of 2021, with the first number reporting headcount and the second in parenthesis giving the student FTE. ATS schools numbers are easiest to find, and I must confess to almost guessing on some of the other institutions. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Of real interest is that the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary is now ATS accredited and claiming to have a FTE and headcount of 174. This would make it the sixth largest Lutheran institution in North America. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">ILT's Christ School of Theology is beginning the process of ATS accreditation, having had its first ATS visit in February. I am very optimistic the partnership we will have with ATS going forward. </span></p><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="bo53u-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Concordia Seminary (LCMS) 603 (377)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="bf02u-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Luther Seminary (ELCA): 476 (330)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="1kn5a-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS): 307 (217)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Warburg Seminary (ELCA): 231 (198)</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">United Lutheran Seminary (ELCA): 342 (184)</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (WELS): 174 (174) </span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Martin Luther University (ELCIC): 134 (110)</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="bldj2-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (ELCA): 129 (103) </span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="1pp6b-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">INSTITUTE OF LUTHERAN THEOLOGY: 101 (81.26), 79 (68.72) grad school alone</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="1pp6b-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Trinity School of Ministry (where the NALS is housed): 152 (65)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="34ci6-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Lutheran Theological Southern (ELCA): 57 (46.3)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="6ppqt-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Trinity Seminary (ELCA): 43 (35)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="el5s-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Bethany Theological Seminary (Brethren): 55?</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="873uq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Pacific Lutheran (ELCA): 49 (40)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="7g07m-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Lutheran Brethren Seminary: 40?</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="279c4-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Free Lutheran Bible College: 25?</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="ar6ha-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">ALTS (AALC): 25??</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="7a01p-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Bethany Lutheran Theological Sem (ELS): 16?</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span data-offset-key="c2h6s-0-0" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Concordia Lutheran Ontario (LCC): 19 (14)</span></span></li><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">LTS Saskatoon (ELCIC): 17 (11)</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">Concordia Lutheran Edmonton (LCC): 7 (7). </span></li>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-36100507802097959852022-04-15T16:42:00.006-05:002022-07-04T12:28:02.391-05:00Levinas and the Transcendental Project<p>I<span style="font-size: medium;">n anticipation of the Levinas readings course this summer at ILT's Christ School of Theology, I have written this brief summary below on some of Levinas' most salient themes. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is surely one of the more important philosophers of the twentieth century. He is thinker whose influence in many ways continues to grow. His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are profound for they point the way to "post-modernity" generally and Jacques Derrida in particular. So what is the fundamental insight that Levinas has? Why is he such an important thinker? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There is much one could say here, but I think his fundamental significance rests upon his realization that the ethical relationship between self and other is <i>irreducible, </i>that is, that the ethical relation as primary. Levinas knew that the immediate, concrete relationship of responsibility between self and other is more fundamental than the self's subjectively-articulated <i>theory</i> about any putative relationship between the self and the other. Levinas, the philosopher of ethics, understood profoundly that the reality of other -- the other person -- is irreducible to subjective, transcendental structures or categories of the self. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Accordingly, instead of ethics depending upon human reason and cognition, it is the other itself that brings the self into being, for it is the other itself that calls the self to responsibility and service. The other cannot be reduced to a congeries of concepts, it is not constituted by its placedness within an ethical theory. Rather, it confronts the self with a justice that transcend's the self's freedom. This other reveals itself to the self in a demand or call to responsibility, a<span> demand or call to serve it as other. With this call to serve the other the self now locates itself with respect to itself and to other others. In so doing, the immediacy of the ethical thus grounds and motivates concerted reflection upon the other. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of this means that to become wholly who I am, to achieve self-determination, I must be called by the another into a responsibility for that other. Accordingly, the other calls me out of self-isolation and into self-determination. This self-determination includes the coming into being of discourse, the revelation of my separation from that which is other, and the founding of a common <i>world</i> that I share with the other. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Levinas first and perhaps most important work appeared in French in 1961, and was soon translated as <i>Totality and Infinity</i>. In it Levinas shows how most traditional philosophy went about a "totalizing task" of trying to understand all of reality on the basis of a comprehensive system that humans might <i>know</i>. 'Totalizing' connotes control and possession, fundamental activities by and through which the controlling self tries to maintain its separation from all other things. The self always wants to be both complete and self-sufficient. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But such totalizing strategies suppress and displace that upon which they themselves are founded. In the immediacy of our experience with the other we encounter traces of that which is not us. This otherness is not projected by a self-identical subject, but is rather a <i>condition</i> for our own efforts at self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For Levinas, the face of the Other is not a projection of the subject. It is rather that which is encountered, and in whose encounter the self is confronted by the givenness of a world that is not finally <i>its own</i>. It is only in this world -- a world that cannot be merely mine -- that true <i>freedom</i> can emerge. Were the world to be merely my projection, it would be impossible to define what doing <i>x</i> over and against doing ~<i>x</i> could even mean. Specifying identity conditions for freedom in a world without essential limitation is not possible. Moral choices and moral freedom only make sense on the basis of an already-encountered other. The presence of the other in its vulnerability as Face calls me to service and responsibility; its presence calls me to <i>freedom</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The world common to the other and me can arise only if the other is truly other and not a projection of myself. The "exteriority" of this world calls into being my own interiority. The confrontation with the other's face calls me into differentiation from the world. The call of the other to serve the other calls forth language itself, language in and through which the world can be shared and communicated. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Since the other is irreducible to my conceptualizations, it is other than the process of determination, finalization, and ultimately, <i>finitization. </i> It is thus without bounds, and being without determinacy, must be admitted to be <i>infinite</i>. Accordingly, the other produces in me an idea of infinity, an infinity other that the determinacy of my conceptions of, or my trajectories of service towards, the other. My obligation towards the other is primitive and has a phenomenological basis. I am always already confronted by an other, and always already called towards serving that other. The demand of the other is not the result of abstract <i>do ut das</i> ethical considerations within a constituted ethical theory, but is simply primordial. My obligation towards the other always proceeds and likely exceeds any obligation that other might have towards me. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Levinas argues that the condition for the possibility of differentiation is indeed the difference of the other from me. While the difference of the other cannot be accounted for on the basis of the sameness of the self in its enjoyment, experience, knowledge, etc., the determinacy of the self can be conceived on the basis of the difference of the other. While the self and all of its activities are understood as a <i>totality</i>, the transcendence of the other is <i>infinite</i>. This other is no mere memory or projection of the self-- its "echoes" -- but is that by and through which the self can speak, that it can be concerned with justice, goodness and truth, that it itself is made precious by the irreplaceability of its ethical response to that other, an other that is finally a trace of the Divine itself. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Levinas claims that ontology recapitulates ethics, that the specificity of being itself rests upon the prior ethical relation with the Other. To be in this way is to be for the Other. Accordingly, to be is to be called <i>beyond being, </i>to be <i>other than being</i>, to be unbounded by being and thus <i>infinite. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The primal ethical relationship between self and other cannot be understood from a position outside the relationship. This ethical relationship must be lived in the first person, a living that eschews totalization. The ecstatic nature of this relationship means that any attempt to understand it sociologically, politically, economically or historically is doomed to failure, for the relationship is itself <i>irreducible</i>. The irreducibility of this relationship, and the supervenience of the cognitive and ontological upon it, entails that cognitive-ontological explanations themselves rest upon upon the ethical, for ultimately to explain to an other is to always already have an ethical relationship with that other. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While Levinas' starting point might appear <i>prima facie</i> refreshing, it does produce disquiet for anyone engaged in the project of transcendental reflection. What if such reflection finally has ethical roots? What if meaning encountered in the self's relation to other is meaning that is not synthesized by the self? What if there is a <i>Sinn</i> to things that is not worked out on the basis of intentionality or language? What if the "traces" of the Divine are not the murmurings of our own heart, i.e., our own displaced alienations? What if being a self finally depends upon the immediate meaningfulness of that which is not a self? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Levinas argues that difference ultimately precedes identity. But is this true? Discerning readers of Levinas must decide this for themselves. </span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-5469148258291017962022-04-04T13:29:00.006-05:002022-10-10T15:42:36.279-05:00Transcendental Reflection and the Divine Other<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Transcendental reflection investigates those conditions necessary for there to be the kind of experience that we have. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously inquired into the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such," finding that pure priori forms of sensibility and pure a priori concepts of the understanding are both necessary to deliver the world as it is: one filled with objects having properties causally related to one another. Without these, the universality and necessity of Newtonian physics could not obtain. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kant inaugurated a type of thinking that has in many respects dominated theology for the last couple of hundred years. Kant argued that in order to have a unity to experience there must be a transcendental unity of apperception, a unifying activity that is itself possible to reflect upon. In writing the <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>, Kant was thinking about his own thinking, about the way that thinking grants unity to experience. His thinking about thinking was neither an empirical thinking, a thinking of mathematics or geometry, nor a thinking about the ultimate nature of things as Leibniz and Wolff would have thought. It was a reflective thinking that offered insight into how the unity of experience is possible, a thinking that sought the <i>truth</i> of this unity of experience. It was not a metaphysical thinking of the <i>transcendent</i>, but a <i>transcendental </i>thinking that brought into the light of day those structures employed but not noticed, a thinking that sought a hermeneutical retrieval of that which is closest to us but remains unnoticed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were convinced of the profundity of Kant's project which reflected upon, and ultimately coaxed into the open, those transcendental structures making experience possible. A transcendental unity of apperception did not commit one to Descartes' "thinking substance'; such a unity of thinking that did not entail old school metaphysics. Fichte and followers followed Kant's lead after pointing out that the good philosopher could not sustain his famous distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear for us. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">If thinking is that which unites our experience, then why must such thinking be turned back by a putative thing-in-itself? This too could be thought, and thinking this actually dissolves problematic dualisms. Of course, there is something one bumps up against in experience (<i>Anstoss</i>), but such a bumping does not entail that that what is bumped is of a wholly disparate ontological lineage. Perhaps nature which, as Kant pointed out, is already the result of the synthesizing activity of the transcendental unity of apperception, is not a joint product of something out there and our synthesis. Perhaps it simply is the result of our synthesis, a synthesis that does not have to hook to the disparate, but can simply connect to itself in appropriate ways. And so it is that the I posits the very world with which it must deal, the world that it can know, the world that serves as the backdrop to the moral life and all the loftiest of the human heart. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Transcendental reflection is born in the security of the transcendental unity of apperception, a security that finally cannot admit the Other, for to admit that is to destroy the very grounds upon which transcendental reflection is based. To posit the Other is to return to the problematic between things as they appear and things in themselves; it is to bark up the Kantian tree and return to an <i>aporia </i>once thought solved and vanquished. Thinkers in the Kantian tradition knew that this could not be progress. After the Kantian critique of old-style metaphysics, the security of the transcendental provided a felicitous place for the narrative of God and His incursion into history to took place. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">II</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">At the risk of oversimplification, I claim that in the days prior to Kant, the days running from the Old Testament prophets through Plato and Aristotle to the steppes of the Enlightenment, the alterity or otherness of God was simply taken for granted by the Church and society generally. Although one could not know the nature of God, the regnant assumption was that God did have a nature that was not dependent upon human awareness, perception, conception or language. God's being did not depend upon human being, particularly<i> not upon human thinking. </i> </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The story of how Neoplatonic thought forms gradually gave way to Aristotelian categories is important to tell, however, for our present purposes, I will just remark that both types of thinking generally assumed that the Being of God is externally related to human being. Whether God is regarded as being itself or as the highest being, the tradition acknowledged that God is causally related to the universe. God's creation of the universe is a <i>causing</i> of the universe to be. Without God's act of creation, the universe would not have being. Divine power is needed to bring being out of non-being. Accordingly, the theological tradition was generally committed to the reality of God apart from human being -- the thesis of <i>theological realism</i> -- and the possibility of causal connections between God and the universe -- the thesis of <i>theophysical causation</i>. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">At the dawn of the Reformation, there were a number of differing theological schools that read Augustine, Plato and especially Aristotle in different ways, ways that reflected differing philosophical positions on the ontology of universals and the relationship of these universals to particulars. While it is an oversimplification to say that Aristotle had become the philosopher of the Christian tradition, many theological traditions assumed with him that there were basic things in the world (substances) and that these substances had properties, some of which were necessary for the substance itself, and some which were accidental to the substance, that is, some of which could either be had by the substance or not possessed by it without changing the being of the substance. God's creation was a creation of substances with properties. These substances were the effects of God's creativity activity. Adam and Eve were individual substances bearing the kind-identifying properties of being both rational and animal. The contour of Adam and Eve's particularity was due to the contingent properties each possessed. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">All of this is important for Christology. That God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself meant that the particular entity Christ had both divine and human properties and that Christ had causal power. The miracle stories suggest all of this, of course. The being (or substance) Jesus caused it to be the case that 5,000 men (plus women and children) were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread. This being caused it to be true that the man Lazereth was no longer dead. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Christ was the God-man, He is the second person of the Trinity that had assumed human flesh. The Second Person eternally existed; there was never a time when Christ was not. This means <i>inter alia</i> that Christ is simply <i>other</i> than any human who might think, love or trust in Him. Christ is not a category of human thinking, but a name for a being that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language. To say that Christ is externally related to anybody ether accepting or rejecting him is to assume that Christ is <i>other</i> that anybody either accepting or rejecting Him. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When it came time for Enlightenment rationalists to do theology, it was very natural to do it in a metaphysical key. God who is other than worldly being or human thinking must ultimately be seen as the <i>sine qua non</i> of the created order. The principle of sufficient reason claiming that for anything that is there must be some reason why it is, when applied to the universe seemed to point univocally to God. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One might claim that the time before Kant's <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i> was a "pre-critical" time where the primary objects of religious thought and experience were not yet dissolved into the fog of rational doubt. Reason, properly applied in discovering many truths fully consonant with the Bible, attested to the same reality as the Holy Scriptures themselves. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">While Kant himself seemed to leave room for there to be a God that is other than human thinking, this God could not be known, and accordingly, the enterprise of rational theology had to be profoundly rethought. The idealist tradition following Kant wished to think God within the security of transcendental subjectivity. Reason had found a place for God that could protect God from the contingencies of the other. When one thinks about it, the post-Kantian theological tradition can be read in part as an attempt to rescue theology from Lessing's "broad ugly ditch." Clearly, this theological tradition could insulate the "necessary truths of reason" from the "accidental truths of history." </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">III</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Martin Heidegger knew the tradition well, understood Kant, and had read Martin Luther. In the Freiburg lectures from 1919-23, Heidegger shows himself increasingly dissatisfied with a thinking in theology that leaves out the life of the one thinking. Heidegger's early attraction to Martin Luther (and fueled by Kierkegaard) was his attempt to find a way out from the security of the transcendental project. For Luther, death was part of the very life of the theologian, an <i>experienced</i> life. Luther famously uttered "<i>experiential macht die Theologum</i>". There is nothing <i>secure</i> about finitude, about the life of the believer beset with "sin, death and the power of the devil." The reality of all three is part of the experience out of which and in which theology is done. Theological thinking must always be tied to the Otherness of God and the divine project of the salvation of the sinner. It is a bold thinking of infinite things done by flesh-and-blood finite human beings whose thinking always happens under the Cross. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Human thinking can never be wholly secure, because the otherness of sin, death and devil is always already besetting it. Such thinking is ecstatic, it is a thinking that is "outside oneself" because it is a thinking in the light of the Cross, a thinking that is a trusting in a Savior that is not a projection of one's own being, not an aspect of the nobility of human being with its cultivated intellectual and moral virtues, not a thinking that is grounded in reason. Luther, who lived 250 years prior to the heyday of transcendental reflection, already knew that such reflection, if possible, could not end in human <i>salvation</i>. To be saved is to be saved by that which is other than oneself. Salvation happens in a world of flesh-and-blood believers dying and sinning. Thirty-year old Martin Heidegger understood that if theology is to be a serious discourse, this discourse must not hide what is basic to the theologian: The theologian in her now is always already running ahead of herself in encountering that possibility of their being no more possibilities. The theologian in her now is always already living death, sin and the power of the devil. This triumvirate does not allow for calm, calculating thinking on the wonders of the grace-filled life. Life is filled with death. Our lives, like Christ's life, are lived in the shadow of our crucifixion. We are now the not that we shall once be when we are no longer being the one for whom the not of the future is no longer. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Heidegger wanted to bring reflection upon ultimate things back to the phenomenological-ontological-existential ground from which all metaphysical reflection arises. He wanted to call us back from the forgetfulness of this ground, a forgetfulness of being which gives rise both to our absorption in the world and our flights into metaphysical abstraction. Heidegger's reading of Luther buttressed his conviction that it was time for philosophy to rediscover again the one for whom philosophy means, the one who in its being, has be-ing at issue for it. With Heidegger, the spector of the Other comes into sight. We are in our be-ing, beings for whom and by whom the question of being and meaning arise. This questioning of be-ing by that being who cares about be-ing, is a questioning that opens to the Other of being, a questioning done over the pit of non-being, a questioning that itself is the conduit of the presencing of the absence of being. Death, after all, cannot be taken up into the life of being; it is the boundary of being that establishes the conditions of being itself. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">IV</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But the early Heidegger did not get to the Other. His project remained curiously within the province of transcendental thinking and subjectivity. Laying out (interpreting) the existential-phenomenological-ontological roots of our reflection upon being is at some level a <i>continuation</i> of transcendental subjectivity. In our thinking, we think Dasein which is open to its Other, but we can only think this alterity as part of the transcendental existential-ontological conditions for the possibility of ontic engagement with an Other, an Other that may for Dasein have profound existentiell significance. No longer does the transcendental thinker lay out the unity of the categories of human thinking by which the world is known, now this thinker is engaged in highlighting the unity of the existential structures themselves by which and through which the unity of care is possible, a caring that grounds any thinking in the first place. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The problem is clearly seen in Heidegger's treatment of other Daseins. They are <i>Mitsein</i> for Dasein who can have <i>Fuersorge</i> for them, but they themselves in their otherness from Dasein cannot be be in themselves other. The early Heidegger is simply unable to bring the world into focus. He can and does get to the world from a certain position in the world, but cannot get to the world itself. Being cannot ultimately be refracted by considering profoundly being as it is <i>da</i> (there). What gets thought when considering <i>Da-sein</i> is Dasein, not <i>Sein</i>. Ironically, Heidegger finds himself in the position of Leibniz. One has a take on the world within any monad, but monads are windowless, and the world itself can only be reconstructed as describable above the fray of the monadic descriptions themselves. To get to that world, one needs theological commitments not presenting themselves within the metaphysics of the monad. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So wither comes the Other? Can it be brought into focus beyond the security of the transcendental project? Did Levinas accomplish its encounter with the face? Can phenomenological encounter ground the Other? Can it give a basis for a radical theological of the Cross where one finds oneself living without metaphysical and ontological nets, as it were? Can alterity be thought of <i>ontically</i> in the way of those of the Reformation, as an otherness of being toward being? Must we finally admit that it can only be <i>shown</i> and never <i>said</i>, but that in its <i>showing</i> that we discern the real ontological position of human beings eviscerated by sin, death and the power of the devil as they live their lives in the shadows of the hidden divine. The Theology of the Cross is about <i>showing</i>, but not about a metaphysics of presence. <i>Showing</i> here cannot be said without the s<i>aid Showing </i>turning into such a presence. Wittgenstein knew that <i>showing</i> happens in words, but not in truth-claims. To say what can only be shown is to turn preaching into a dogmatics that must always miss the glimpse of Divine alterity. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Bringing this Other into the open will demand an overturning of the very identity that has grounded the security of our theology of glory project of transcendental reflection. At the end of the day, human beings cannot save themselves. Salvation demands an overturning of the ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other, a clearing that finds in God's traces its own footsteps. At stake is the fundamental question: Can otherness show itself as what it is, or must if always show itself as what it is for us. At stake is the fundamental question of the Garden: Did God really say? </span></p><p><br /></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37269394.post-60984629930508847902022-03-20T23:38:00.005-05:002022-07-04T12:30:12.602-05:00Curb, Mirror and Light<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Lutheran theology has always been interested in the <i>usus legis (</i>"uses of the law"), and has argued passionately as to whether there are two <i>usus legis </i>or three. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Luther oftentimes limits the law to two uses, its <i>civil</i> use in curbing sin, and its <i>theological </i>use in showing one's sinfulness and driving one to Christ. In later Lutheran theology a third use was highlighted, a use consonant with some of what Luther sometimes said about the law. In the second edition (1535) of his <i>Loci</i>, Melanchthon explicitly suggests a third use, one that functions as norming the contour of the believer's sanctified life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But while what I have thus far said sums up what many say about Luther and Melanchthon on the uses, neither theologian actually standardly employs the terminology of <i>usus</i>, preferring instead to use other phrases, e.g., Luther's use of <i>officium legis </i>in the 1537 <i>Smalcald Articles </i>connoting "office" or "function." As a matter of fact, it was only in the wake of the <i>Formula of Concord </i>that <i>usus legis</i> became standard language in Lutheran theology. Generations of theology students, both Reformed and Lutheran, have since learned the <i>usus legis</i> in this tripartite way: The one law functions in three ways: (1) to <i>curb</i> sin within civil society, (2) to <i>mirror</i> to us our sinfulness before God, and (3) to <i>light</i> our way in living out the sanctified life. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Controversy about the putative "third use of the law" within Lutheran theology has centered on the issue of whether the law whose essence it is to accuse can remain law while yet being being properly employed as a guide. If the law as God's left hand always accuses, then how can it function in the grace of God's right hand to <i>guide</i> Christian living. One can freely adopt rules of thumb for Christian living consonant with Gospel proclamation, but these rules are not the law <i>qua</i> law. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">While the controversy between two or three uses of the law in Lutheran theology seemingly continues unabated, it is not my desire here to engage the historical issue further. I am rather interested in appropriating the metaphors of <i>curb</i>, <i>mirror</i> and <i>light</i> spawned in the <i>usus legis </i>discussion for use in the context of establishing and justifying ethical standards and positions. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">II</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Imagine a scenario in which Doctor Jack must make the decision as to whether to disconnect his patient Bob from life support. Jack knows that Bob's recovery is unlikely, and realizes that as a rule of thumb, the hospital could likely not afford to keep patients like Bob on life support when the chances of recovery are so dismal. Still Jack is reluctant to unhook Bob. Why? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When Fred later asked Jack why he did not unhook Bob, Jack grew pensive a moment and said the he was guided by the Hippocratic Oath and its admonition to do no harm to the patient. Since unhooking Bob seemed to Jack as an effecting of harm on Bob, Jack allowed Bob to remain connected. He was surprised two days later to learn that, against all odds, Bob's condition had improved and he would likely survive. Dr. Jack was happy that he had not unhooked Bob, glad that he took the Hippocratic oath seriously, and relieved that Bob's condition did not simply worsen as anyone familiar with the relevant medical literature would have predicted. Indeed, Jack felt like he had dodged a bullet, and the he himself was no less fortunate than Bob. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">III</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The example illustrates the position that we often find ourselves within when reflecting about morality and ethics. In the concrete ethical situation we often find that we do start with some moral or ethical principles seemingly incumbent upon us even when we don't reflect upon them. These unthought principles do often strike us as something true to which we must conform. One might say that they strike us <i>immediately</i> as a <i>curb </i>upon are possible action. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Jack unthinkingly affirmed keeping Bob hooked to life support, and only later in conversation with Fred tried to clarify why. That which ought to be done simply confronted Jack, and Jack's actions were clearly curbed by that which stood over and against him. While Doctor Jack is no philosopher, he experienced the principle of "do not harm the other" as something <i>real</i>, as something <i>given </i>to him and not constructed by him. The principle not to harm came upon him in its otherness as law. Accordingly, one can imagine a <i>code</i> of such laws defining what is permissible, prohibited or obliged for a set of people in similar concrete ethical situations. Moral and ethical codes do often successfully curb behavior. Social contexts in which they are present often appear better ordered and more efficient than when they are absent. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But the immediacy of the encounter with this ethical <i>other </i>does not sustain itself over time. The curbing function of the code pushes in upon the self, exposing to the self that it has <i>chosen</i> the curb that curbs. When this happens the curb becomes a mirror, a reflector of the self. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In standing over and against the curb, the one curbed comes to know herself as part and parcel of establishing and sustaining the curb. The curb for others becomes a mirror to the self; one recognizes one's own hand in the establishment of the curb and its perpetuation. After all, how could a curb be a curb if it is not <i>permitted to be so? </i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Clearly, one must afford recognition to the curb as Other in order for one to be curbed by it. But in reflecting upon the putative alterity of the curb, one notices that the curb <i>qua </i>curb wears a human face. Just as there are no self-identifying objects, properties, relations, events or states of affairs apart from human consciousness, neither are there self-identifying ethical norms governing our behavior without our cooperation and tacit agreement. On closer reflection, the<i> heternomony</i> of the curb reveals itself as a posit of our own <i>autonomy!</i> It is we after all who project curbs into nature. In staring at the face of this putative external curb, we come to recognize our face in the curb. Unfortunately, when we recognize the curb to be a projection of our own subjectivity, the power of the curb to curb is undercut. That which appeared to be objective has now become subjective, and with this we touch our own freedom. <i>It is we who create the ethical world in which we live; it is we who are the rule makers. </i> The law in its externality has now become an expression of our own subjective desire, and the problem presses down upon us: How could that which we create come to judge the one who creates it? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All of us implicitly realize that the efficiencies produced in codes that curb can last only as long as people grant the possibility that the curbing code is not merely an arbitrary and capricious projection of some arbitrary and capricious subject or subjects. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">IV</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When the immediacy of the curb has been broken by the mediacy of the mirror, one is left with the question regnant in our time: How is it possible to use terms like 'good', 'evil', 'right', and 'wrong' without admitting that these appellations are deployed on the basis of my own desires, my own pleasure, and my own happiness? How can saying 'John is bad' mean something more that I disapprove of John? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is here that the metaphor of <i>light</i> is necessary. Once one realizes that ethical properties are not baked into the universe in the same way that chemical interactions, one has a choice: Either admit that the subject devours any putative objectivity of ethics, or look for those deeper conditions that give rise to ethical predicates in the first place. The metaphor of <i>light</i> points to the back-and-forth movement of reflection that is ultimately responsible both for the curbs and the mirroring that exposes such curbs as subjective. The <i>light</i> of ethical reflection drives more deeply into the ultimate grounds for the law that binds. It recognizes that the recognition of this law as driven by the subject is itself short-lived and ultimately irrational. How indeed could it be that that ethical reality that seems so close to me, that reality that governs my behavior with respect to others, simply is a projection of me? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After the heteronomy of the code is seen to rest in the autonomy of the subject, the subject realizes finally that there is no longer otherness, that the <i>ought</i> has been vanquished, and accordingly, that the deepest experience of human beings being confronted by what they <i>ought</i> to do -- and their not living up that ought -- is wholly counterfeit. What an irrational world the projecting self inhabits! The very experience of ought that seemingly separates human beings from the higher beasts is itself grounded upon nothing. It tokens nothing deeper. It is simply an unfortunate result of not taking mirroring seriously enough. \While men and women can reason from what they want to how to get it, reason does not operate at all in establishing what they ought to want.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But here again the light shines forth. It is a light that takes up the immediate code and its negation into a higher synthesis. It is a light that allows reason to operate not as a cipher of the self's desires, but as the <i>logos</i> speaking a divine order. The light draws us more deeply into conversation. It makes us ask how parts of the code fit together and for whom parts of the code are privileged. It asks us questions of moral theory and ethics. It distinguishes types of consequentialism and compares these types with deontological perspectives. The light seeks a comprehensive theory to stand behind the curb, a theory which points to the incapacity of the self to account ultimately for the experience of the curb. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the reflection of the light, we are drawn into the deeper questions of morality and ethics, questions that drive us to admit that we are not who we ought to be, and that we are not ultimately who we now are -- questions that cannot be entertained without entering deeply into the tragedy of our current situation of not being able to affirm deeply that Ground and Abyss that we cannot finally deny. '</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Human beings find themselves in fields of meaning, purpose and value that point to the Divine deeply hidden within the fissures of broken experience itself. The light which lightens the curb and its mirror is a light whose reason is ultimately <i>ontological, </i>it pertains to the Being of the hidden God whose absence is present in a forgotten Cross on a lonely hill, a Cross in which time itself briefly nested. And so it is that Curb and Mirror unite in that light that shows itself as Word. The heteronomous and autonomous have both been cancelled yet preserved in a uneasy theonomy. Ultimately, the Curb and Mirror must be understood from the standpoint of the Light, a light forever constituting itself as the divine in, under, around and beyond human life itself.</span></p>Dennis Bielfeldthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948642851506603307noreply@blogger.com0