Curb, Mirror and Light

I

Lutheran theology has always been interested in the usus legis ("uses of the law"), and has argued passionately as to whether there are two usus legis or three.  

Luther oftentimes limits the law to two uses, its civil use in curbing sin, and its theological 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 Loci, Melanchthon explicitly suggests a third use, one that functions as norming the contour of the believer's sanctified life.  

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 usus, preferring instead to use other phrases, e.g., Luther's use of officium legis in the 1537 Smalcald Articles connoting "office" or "function."  As a matter of fact, it was only in the wake of the Formula of Concord that usus legis became standard language in Lutheran theology.  Generations of theology students, both Reformed and Lutheran, have since learned the usus legis in this tripartite way: The one law functions in three ways: (1) to curb sin within civil society, (2) to mirror to us our sinfulness before God, and (3) to light our way in living out the sanctified life. 

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 guide Christian living. One can freely adopt rules of thumb for Christian living consonant with Gospel proclamation, but these rules are not the law qua law.  

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 curb, mirror and light spawned in the usus legis discussion for use in the context of establishing and justifying ethical standards and positions.  

II

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? 

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. 

III

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 immediately as a curb upon are possible action.  

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 real, as something given 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 code 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. 

But the immediacy of the encounter with this ethical other does not sustain itself over time. The curbing function of the code pushes in upon the self, exposing to the self that it has chosen the curb that curbs.  When this happens the curb becomes a mirror, a reflector of the self.    

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 permitted to be so? 

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 qua 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 heternomony of the curb reveals itself as a posit of our own autonomy!  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. It is we who create the ethical world in which we live; it is we who are the rule makers.  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?  

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. 

IV

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? 

It is here that the metaphor of light 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 light 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 light 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? 

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 ought has been vanquished, and accordingly, that the deepest experience of human beings being confronted by what they ought 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.

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 logos 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. 

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.  '

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 ontological, 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.

The Heideggerian Engine: A Glimpse Under the Hood

In four days I shall begin taking another group of students through Heidegger's epic book, Being and Time.  What should they know when beginning the journey?  What words of wisdom do I have as they embark?

I think that the best thing I might say is that reading Heidegger is not about imparting knowledge at all. It is not a book fundamentally about things, but a book that happens in its reading. One might say that it is a text that happens in the happening of reading itself. 

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often thought to be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Heidegger is a philosopher using the language of the philosophical tradition, but using it in ways that many regard as strikingly idiosyncratic. Clearly, we all know what being is, or at least we thought we knew before reading Heidegger. In fact, prior to reading Heidegger we might be tempted to believe some explanation is occurring in the following: 

• X asks, "What is being?" 
• Y responds, "That which is."  

If we have read Plato and Aristotle, we perhaps are prone to contrast the realm of being somehow with that of becoming. Plato thought being was stable and eternal, the kind of thing that can be known as something discrete and definite.  Aristotle regarded primary substances as the locus classicus of being. There are things that are, that are stable enough to carry properties, sometimes contrary properties over time. This particular cat is now hungry and later is sated. Bill is in Florence and now in Athens. The United States once had 13 states and now has 50. This seems simple enough, but Heidegger exposes the complexity of such simplicity.  

As a boy on an Iowa farm, I went into the barn and experienced life with animals. I experienced animals eating, drinking, congregating and defecating. Often they would be curious or frightened by me. Their life was part of the life of my five-year-old self.  I had not yet come to regard these animals as having some being apart from their basic intelligibility to me in the little world in which I dwelt. 

I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point I came to recognize the animals in my world as beings existing apart from me with particular properties that didn't depend upon me.  Heidegger would say that I now had fallen, that I had, in fact, adopted a pretty complex and ultimately unsupported view on things.  But I knew nothing then about the Verfallenheit in which I now found myself.  

My father taught me that steers and heifers had to achieve a certain rate of gain in order for their lives among us to be profitable to us.  After all, we were farming, and we had to cashflow the animals.  Somehow we needed the market price of our animals to be greater than the feed we fed them, plus the labor we expended upon them, plus the costs of medical treatment for them, and some percentage of the cost of barns, fences and feeding mechanisms, manure spreaders, tractors and all of the rest of it. 

Farm kids soon learn that different breeds of animals have different properties, e.g., temperaments, disease resistance, ease of birth, propensities to convert feed into weight gain. It is important in livestock husbandry that one knows the properties animals have apart from us because the very profitability of one's enterprise depends upon such knowledge. I learned many things on the farm about animals, machinery, tilling practices and efficiencies, mechanical qualities of machinery, and the nature of the greatest variable for successful farming: the weather.  

I learned about cold and warm fronts, low and high pressure systems, and the related possibilities of precipitation and storms when lows, highs and fronts were located in particular places and had particular qualities. I thought about the conditions leading to drought and the possibilities of those conditions manifesting themselves given the current macro conditions. I wanted to know about the processes of weather in themselves. I had adopted a view of things, in which things were the more real the less meaningful they were to me. 

Maybe all of this led me to want at an earlier time in my life to be a scientist, actually I dreamt of becoming a physicist. I was deeply intrigued about the in itself of things, and believed that mathematics could describe that in itself and predict future changes in it. I remember watching the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my Honors Physics class as a college freshman.  I was intrigued about special and general relativity, about cosmology, about the fundamental laws of nature that determine the very contour of the in itself.  

Perhaps all of this made my first reading of Heidegger difficult.  Although I did not know it, I was deeply committed to a substance ontology quite early in life.  I thought the world consisted of objects that somehow self-identify as the objects they are, and I believed that these self-identifying objects (substances) could possess modifications while still being the substances they were.  In other words, I believed that substances could contingently take on differing properties while remaining what they essentially were.  

Early on in life, I already bought the distinction between necessary essential properties and contingent accidental properties. There was something that made me who I was -- or so I thought -- and that which made me who I was continued to perform its function apart from whether I wore my hair long or short, or whether I even had hair.  

It seemed the most natural thing to me that the world would be what it is apart from me, and that my dealings with the world, particularly my knowing of it, did not change the world. The worldhood of the world was, accordingly, logically, ontologically and epistemically independent from my subjective apprehension of it -- or so I assumed. 

Accordingly, I was from a rather early age committed to the subject/object dichotomy.  As a knowing substance, I was that upon which the objectivity of the world manifested its effects.  The world was filled with substances being themselves, I was a substance being myself, and my substance was the subject in relationship to objects apart from me being substances in themselves.  As I said, all of this made my early reading of Heidegger difficult.  

What, after all, was Heidegger getting at in his phenomenological description of the world? Was he not finally describing the color, the projection of my subjectivity on the objects of a quite colorless world?  When I first read Heidegger I thought, "How can he escape idealism?  How can he not be committed to the assertion that the properties of my substance -- of the substance if one is an objective idealist -- are what they are, and that these properties determine the contour of the world so encountered?  Is this not simply another rerun of Kant's "Copernican Revolution?" 

But I will admit that I missed what was fundamental. By looking for something profoundly transcendental, I simply could not see what was before my eyes.  The mystique of Heidegger, the engine propelling his thinking, is nothing transcendental or profound at all. I could not see under the hood in those days, and had I seen I might have judged then that the car had no engine at all! 

I had to go back to my five-year-old self to see it, and those steps backwards did not seem to me to be steps forward at all.  I struggled with Heidegger's technical German vocabulary, hoping to find in his technical philosophical terms something foundantional, some ground upon which his philosophy was based. I searched for some deep ontological commitment or some fundamental presupposition that would explain what he was saying and why he was saying it. In all of this, I simply overlooked the fact that my five-year-old self would not have searched for, nor understood, what an ontological commitment or a fundamental presupposition even was.  

What Heidegger was inviting me to do in Being and Time was simply to look around me and notice everything I constantly overlooked and ignored. If there is any fundamental presupposition he has, it is simply this: Notice where you are and what you are doing. Even at five, I knew the way of the farm; I knew the smells, the rhythms, the places I could walk and the things I could do. These comprised my world, the world in which I found myself and the world in which I dwelt. I knew the way to the house, to the table, to my bedroom. When it rained I found myself under a roof, and when it snowed I wore my boots and mittens. String from mom's sewing box was that which made the barn cats excited. Barn hay was that in which new kittens were encountered.The rock on the barn ledge next to the milk cow was that by which ice in the pan was broken.  

How effortlessly I navigated the complexities of it all! I could "get around" on the farm; I knew how to deal with things. Of course, I did not abstractly know that there was a context that allowed my dealings, and I did not conceive that this context was part of my culture which itself was related to history.  My five-year-old self had neither read Dilthey nor Troeltsch -- I did not read much in those days -- so was unaware of the "historical problem" as a problem, but that did not matter.  I had agency, I could act and somehow my actions made sense in my farm world.  

My reading of Being and Time began to give me language to talk about my more primordial "gettings around" in the world, my facility to deal with the wholly meaningful world in which I found myself.  Heidegger taught me that human be-ing is that be-ing in and for which be-ing is at issue.  The word 'Dasein' even connotes this; I am being 'there' or 'here'.  Prior to any grown-up conception of the world in which I am a subject confronted by objects, I live a world of meaning and purpose.  It is only when reflecting on this world of meaning and purpose that I am aware of the clearing that is my being and the world's worldness all together. Heidegger calls all of this being-in-the-world, meaning that my be-ing, is a be-ing that already has a world. There is no world without be-ing in it, and there is no be-ing without a world to be in.  The 'in' is not a spatial term, but is what Heidegger terms an existential.  I am a being, who in my be-ing, is be-ing-in-the- world.  Accordingly, my being is being-in-the-world.  

Before I read Heidegger seriously, I had read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.  It is probably the case that I never did understand exactly what it was to "overcome the subject-object dichotomy" recommended in those books because I simply already knew that there were subjects and objects.  How does one overcome that which is?  I had also read Eliade on Eastern religious traditions and knew that moksha and nirvana got us to places where we were no longer isolated subjects, but could somehow become simply a "drop in the cosmic ocean."  But none of this actually dislodged my own commitment to substance ontology. One might say that such a commitment only dies with violence.  These texts were not violent enough. 

But I see it, and Heidegger wants you to see it as well. He wants you to look under the hood of your commitments about being, to the be-ing that is be-ing in and through your commitments about being. Heidegger wants to give you an "a ha" experience, and the koan he chants is substance ontology itself. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? So how can an isolated subject build a bridge to the external world?  How indeed?  

Read Being and Time freshly by taking off your glasses of substance ontology. Look and see what it is to be.  To be is actually everything we do in the everyday.  We get around pretty well, and there must be some structure to this getting around. What are then the ontological possibilities of our being which allow any of our concretely actual gettings around in the world?  It is here, I admit, that the smell of the transcendental returns.  

Heidegger is a philosopher, after all, and his description of getting around in A-fashion or getting around in B-fashion finally must lead him to ask what is common to A-fashion getting around and B-fashion getting around.  In a faint echo of Kant who asked about the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such, Heidegger asks about the ontological conditions which make possible the actuality of what he calls the ontic, the actual and concrete what is in which one deals in one's world.  What might it be to uncover the conditions for the possibility of any dealings, conditions which are endemic to experience as such, conditions which are deeper than person X or Y or fashion A or B?  

I will write more later, but for now simply enjoy reading Being and Time, my students, and be ready for adventure! 

Transcendental Self-Reference, Spirit and God

I remember distinctly my first reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I had learned about the semantic distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, and the epistemological distinction between a priori and a posteriori judgments. Kant famously asked in the Critique about the legitimacy of synthetic a priori judgments, that is, judgments that are not dependent upon empirical experience in which, nevertheless, the meaning of the predicate is not included in the meaning of the subject. Traditional metaphysics consists in such synthetic a priori judgments, and for a host of reasons, Kant concludes that traditional metaphysics built on synthetic a priori judgments is wholly dubious. No amount of thinking things through conceptually can add to knowledge. For knowledge to occur, intuitions (that which is given through sensibility) are necessary. Kant does argue, however, that geometry and arithmetic has recourse to the pure forms of intuition, i.e., space and time, and that both are justified as synthetic a priori endeavors. 

Kant thus admitted that there are analytic a priori judgments, propositions that are analytically true, and he allowed for synthetic a posteriori judgments, empirical propositions known on the basis of experience alone.   He denied that analytic a priori judgments exist, and was thus left with the question of the synthetic a priori. The results of the Critique are that the traditional synthetic a priori judgments of metaphysics are  unwarranted, but that the synthetic a priori judgments appearing in geometry and arithmetic are permissible. 

I remember being troubled the first time I read The Crique of Pure Reason by the transcendental analysis he undertakes. He is writing a book, after all, that is making claims about the transcendental structure of things, a book seemingly claiming a transcends structure that might be known. Clearly, this knowledge is neither empirical knowledge constituted by synthetic a posteriori judgments, nor is this knowledge merely dealing with the  conceptual, that is, the results of analytic a priori judgments. So what is this knowledge? Prima facie, Kant believes these transcendental structures hold, that he (and we) are justified in holding they exist -- he speaks often of the warrant for his claims about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- and that we should believe they obtain.  

Knowledge of the existence and structure of the transcendental unity of apperception must be a matter of synthetic a priori propositions, I thought, but this seems incorrect, because Kant had just proved that synthetic a priori judgments are legitimate only in the fields of arithmetic and geometry, and the structure of the transcendental unity of apperception is neither a matter of arithmetic or geometry. So what is it?  Clearly, it is not traditional metaphysics either. Kant spends much ink in showing that traditional metaphysics dealing with the transcendent is bankrupt because it employs synthetic a priori judgments beyond the realm of possible experience. It is clear that the transcendental structure Kant explores is  prior to the transcendent, for it is through his exploration of the transcendental that we are warranted in drawing the limits of the synthetic a priori. 

German philosophy after Kant clearly understood the great philosopher's critique of metaphysics, but also grasped the transcendental conditions for the possibility of this critique. Kant knew that there was no warrant to claim that the "I" was a substance as Descartes had supposed. But his transcendental investigation had indeed uncovered the presence of a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of experience that was not an experience of unity as Descartes had thought. So what is the ontological nature of this transcendental unity that is not a unity within the transcendent? How can we know it? What language can speak about it? 

Questions of epistemology, ontology and semantics arise immediately with regard to putative transcendental structures. The German Idealists strove mightily to bring into focus the dynamism of the transcendental. Hegel's critique of Shelling was based not upon which philosophical system was more felicitous, but rather on which was true. It is clear to anybody reading Hegel that he is making truth claims, claims that are presupposed in his treatment of absolute knowledge. Obviously, these claims cannot be divorced from questions of being and meaning. 

The problem of knowing transcendental structures involves self-reference because it is an act within the transcendental unity of apperception to know that transcendental unity. The phenomenologists were also acutely aware of the problem of intending structures of consciousness that are utilized in intentionality itself. Although the 20th century positivist tradition attempted to leave behind these problems of self-reference by limiting knowledge to the positive sciences, their attempt to limit such knowledge to these sciences clearly was not something that could be known factually through these sciences. In divers and sundry ways, the intellectual tradition, since the days of Descartes, has had to do with paradox. We might say that the paradox of self-reference has been at the center of all the paradoci generated by the Enlightenment: After all, how is it possible to know X, when knowing X seems ultimately to rest upon what X is? Simply put, what is the epistemic and ontological status of the form of thinking, when that form seems to deal with the very matter of thinking.  

The German tradition understood that the Geisteswissenschaften differ from the Naturwissenschaften.  While in the latter, we can safely assume that the thinking form independently grasps (and structures) the matter of the thing thought, in the former the grasping is of that which itself grasps; it is a grasping through forms that it itself is! It is nature of spirit to relate itself to itself in these ways. When grasping what is the nature of human being, human be-ing is involved in the grasping. Martin Heidegger famously spoke of Dasein -- which includes human be-ing -- as that being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. There is no view from the outside when it comes to examining the basic structure of human be-ing, for asking the question belongs to the basic structure of human be-ing. Any asking of the ontological question is immanent to the ontology of the questioner.

So it is that we talk about the spirit that constitutes human be-ing. It is the nature of this spirit to question and seek to know about itself. To know who we are means to know the one who seeks to know who we are. To know ourselves is to know ourselves in the process of knowing ourselves, and knowing our knowing of ourselves. This knowing of ourselves as the knowers of ourselves constitutes the spirit that is us. Aristotle conceived God as thought thinking itself. Human beings are beings who are be-ing in their relationship to their own be-ing. It is the nature of spirit to be itself subjectively when relating to itself objectively. Spirit in-itself is being ultimately in-itself when spirit is being for-itself, that is, spirit is that relation between subject and object that can neither be described either as subject or object. Spirit in-itself takes up the subjective spirit in-itself and the objective spirit for-itself.  Hegel was clearly not wrong on any of this, if we have the perseverance and patience to think what he thought. 

So if the paradox of self-reference pushes towards human beings being spirit, trinunely constituted as beings forever what they are in relationship to what they are in-itself and for-itself, then why would we think God to  be otherwise?  It is the nature of the Triune God to relate Himself to what God is in Himself and how God expresses Himself as other than that self. We use the word "Spirit" to talk about the life of God, a life forever relating God to God. Divine knowledge involves the same dialectics of self-reference that confronts human beings. God is God in relating God to God. We are who we are in relation to ourselves. We know ourselves dynamically as we find ourselves in that which is other than ourselves.  God too finds His full divine life in relating to that which is other than God. 

There is much here about which to be careful in its saying because I do not want to fall victim to the historical heresies in thinking or speaking God.  However, it is clear that the life of both human beings and the divine is a spiritual life, and that these parallel lives have something to do with the problem of self-reference: Where can one find a position outside of the life of God or human beings from which to describe the life of God or human beings? Any attempt to find that position outside of the life from which to describe the life is an illusion, a fallacy of aseity. Such a fallacy ignores the paradox of self-reference. Gods and human beings have a similar spiritual structure. To grasp them as objects means not to so grasp them. Both are objects, whose being it is to be subjects forever related to themselves objectively. 

Given that human beings are spiritual beings, and the God they seek has spiritual divine life, how might it be that God and human being might relate to each other? Clearly, the answer is that the relationship is a spiritual one. While human beings in their be-ing can have their own be-ing at issue for them, they cannot in their own being have divine be-ing at issue for them. The life of God cannot be reflected in human spiritual life without human spiritual life being gifted with a new subjective standpoint, a subjectivity that is provided different capabilities, a subjectivity that can now grasp (however obliquely) the objectivity of God -- not a human projection or chimera -- a subjectivity that is a divine subjectivity gifted to human beings. Human access to God demands the elevation of standpoint that is best characterized as a human participation in the life of God.  

The deepest paradox of human life is that the standpoint we must employ in the grasping of our lives is always underdetermined by the life we grasp.  In this position, there could never be hope that human beings might relate to God. But as the theological tradition has always taught, it is God's Spirit that constitutes the conditions for human beings to relate to God. Clearly, as Luther said, "it is not by our own reason or strength that we might believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and come to him . . . "

The New Viator

"I thought at that time that I was enjoying the conversation today with Darius, but I must admit now to uneasiness."  "Why is that?" asked Alisha.  Ashley responded quickly, "I thought Darius agreed with me, but maybe, in retrospect, he was making fun of me."  "I don't think Darius would do that," remonstrated Alisha; "You and Darius seem always to agree on the important issues."  So began innocently enough an important conversation between the two friends.  

Alisha wanted to know all about the fateful conversation Ashley had had with Darius.  She needed to know because there was something in Ashley's demeanor that suggested disorientation. "Ashley, please tell me what happened today when you talked to Darius. What did he say? Did he not respect you? Was he trying to make you think that his fringe thinking was not homophobic?"  

Ashley glanced at the birch tree standing at her right, "Well, it seemed innocent enough at first. I told Darius that I was on a journey of discovery." 

"A journey of discovery," repeated Alisha, "What do you mean by that?" 

Ashley was remembering it all vividly. "I was telling Darius that we today are somewhat like the people in the 15th century that found themselves on a journey either to the celestial city or to eternal damnation. Like them, we are viatores, pilgrims on the way, but our journey is not a death dealing journey out of life, but rather a momentous journey within life itself.  I am on this journey, a journey deeply momentous, a journey in which I hope to find myself, a journey after my authentic gender."  

Alisha knew of her friend's confessed gender fluidity. She understood that Ashley had early on in life understood herself as primary a little girl, but then on entering puberty had thought maybe the she was psychologically an adolescent male, and then in college had actually traveled back and forth between these poles, sometimes even identifying herself as somewhere in between. Alisha had always cared for Ashley, and had been steadfastly interested in her friend's voyage of self-discovery.  There was no reason, after all, why Ashley should have to pick one traditional gender in exclusion of the rest, as both her mother and father had.  Ashley needed to be who she really was, not some projection of an overwrought parent. 

But Ashley was visibly shaken. She wanted to tell Alisha the story of her conversation today with Darius.  Maybe, she thought, Alisha could help her, maybe she could cheer her up. Maybe, in fact, Alisha could make her forget the conversation she had had with Darius. Maybe if she explained to Alisha what had happened, she could be set free from the results of that fateful conversation. "Here is what happened today, Alisha." 

Darius was in the Wal-Mart parking lot looking at his friend's new Ford pickup, when Ashley arrived.  Seeing her, Darius said, "I love the fact that this one ton pick-up can develop so much torque."  

"I do as well, Darius. Although I prefer a Dodge Ram. My dad always loved his Dodge Charger hemi engine." 

"What brings you to the Wal-mart parking lot on this glorious day, Ashley," asked Darius. 

Because Ashley did not know exactly why she was in the parking lot, she replied, "I was thinking how fortunate I was to be in America in this third decade of the 21st century, Darius. It is wonderful to have the freedom to express oneself."  

"You speak rightly, Ashley, but about which freedoms are you most concerned about now?" 

"I enjoy the freedom to try on different gender roles. My life need not be like my mother and father's lives were, lives of quiet desperation where there was an enforced hegemony of gender roles. I don't have to be that which people once claimed I had to be, for I have freedom.  I find myself sometimes interested in living the traditional roles of an America male, but sometimes I just want to be female. I am free now to be no more (or no less) interested in plumbing than knitting. I can be male even if I have biological female parts, or vice-versa.  I can live in relationship with both men and women at the same time. I am liberated to experience the polyamorous life style that does not make me be what somebody else wants me to be!' 

"This is a wonderful thing, Ashley, but do you think that you are able to choose to be other than you are?" 

"I believe it," said Ashley, "for America protects the rights of those like me who do not find deep personal satisfaction either living forever as a male or forever as a female." 

"You speak with conviction," added Darius, "but are you able to do what you say?" 

"What do you mean by that," quipped Ashley to her interlocutor. 

"Are you able actually to choose a gender?" 

"Of course," Ashley quickly replied.

"But if you are choosing a gender, is there some definite gender you are choosing?" 

Ashley did not have to reflect on this for long.  "Of course," she said, "a gender is a definite thing." 

"But what is it for a gender to be a definite thing?  Is a gender a nature?" 

Ashley knew too much to be pulled into Darius' apparent trap.  Clearly, she did not want to suggest that there are Aristotelian natures.  "No, a gender is not a nature, for I choose it." 

Darius continued his interrogation: "Yes, I suppose you are correct. One cannot choose a nature because it is part of the nature of a nature not to be chosen. So what is the 'it' that you choose, Ashley, if it is not a nature?" 

"I choose a determinate set of dispositions to behave, dispositions that make me the one I am," replied Ashley smugly.  

"You choose your dispositions to behave, Ashley?  How does one do this?" Are your dispositions prior to, subsequent to, or are they identical with your gender?"  

"They are identical to it, Darius."  

"So you can choose your dispositions to behave, and these constitute your gender. Is this your position, Ashley." 

"It is so, Darius. Upon a little reflection, one can easily see that this is the case. My gender is constituted by how I will act given different stimulus-response conditionals." 

"But is it the case, Ashley, that you had a disposition to claim that your disposition to behave constitutes your gender identity?" 

"I don't think I understand you, Darius." 

"You claim that you can freely chose your dispositions to behave, and so is it the case that you freely chose to claim that you freely choose your dispositions to behave?" 

"No, Darius. I am free in my claim that to choose a gender identity is to chose dispositions to behave.  If my claim were simply the actualization of a disposition in a particular stimulus-response situation, then it would not be free. I am free, after all." 

"I thank you for your deeply reasoned response, Ashley.  You are indeed no easy foe with whom to dispute.  So I think your position is that you could have done other than claiming that your gender identity could be freely chosen, and your choosing of this involves the taking on of a disposition to behave. Is this right." 

"You speak with rectitude, Darius." 

"So you are saying that you could have done other than choosing the gender identity you choose, and that the a gender identity consists in certain dispositions to behave.  Is this correct."  

"As I said, Darius, this is my position." 

"And you would concur, that dispositions to behave are objective determinates of behavior.  They are that from which actual behaving emerges, right? 

"Yes, if I said that a gender were not something determinate, it would not be anything at all. It cannot be a nature, for if it were, then it could not be freely chosen. One must choose freely one's gender, for otherwise one could not be a viator.  One must be on a road filled with momentous decisions. There is no dignity in simply acting in accordance with a nature that has been determined by something other than the self." 

"I am still failing to follow you completely, Ashley.  Are you saying that the dispositions to behave that constitute your gender identity are freely chosen, or are they determined by something else?" 

"No, Darius.  There are dispositions to behave that I have, and I can identify with some of them and not others. What I identify with is my identity." 

"Let me understand this more deeply, Ashley. You are saying that you have a very complex set of dispositions to behave and that you can choose to identify with some of these dispositions and not others." 

"That is my claim, Darius." 

"Do you know how legislatures determine the districts from which representatives are elected?  They know that in districts there are regions where people tend to vote Democratic and other regions where they tend to vote Republican. If they are a Democratic legislature, they will try to gerrymander the district so that the Democratic regions are in the district and the Republican regions are excluded from it. They thus can elect a Democratic representative. One might say that the identity of the district is Democratic, and that they faithfully will elect Democratic representatives in perpetuity. Is this what you mean by a gender identity?  Are you saying that you can gerrymander dispositions to behave appropriately so that a particular gender identity is manifest?"  

"I have not thought of it in this way, Darius, but the condition you describe seems to me now to be the necessary condition of gender fluidity. We are a complicated set of dispositions to behave, and our identity is manifest by identifying with some of these dispositions and excluding others. After we accept an identity we are engaged in cultivating certain dispositions and suppressing others.  Such cultivation and suppression is the warf and woof of identity formation."  Ashley was obviously happy to be able to use "warf and woof" correctly.  

"Thank you, Ashley. It is important that we get clear on these matters, for failure to clarify may allow a contradiction to lurk in our position, and from a contradiction anything follows." 

"Upon this we agree, Darius. I don't want to argue a position with a hidden contradiction because there is no possible world in which a contradiction can hold, and I have always thought, in fact, that if a position cannot hold in a possible world, it cannot hold in the actual world." 

"Ashley, I am impressed by your modal thinking here, and you are, of course, correct. No impossible state of affairs can obtain in the actual world. But we digress from the main issue. We are trying to determine if you are describing a consistent state of affairs when you say that gender identity is constituted by either cultivating or suppressing already existing dispositions to behave. Your position is that gender identity A just is the inclusion of some set of dispositions G and exclusion of some set of dispositions H, that the original dispositions to behave are, as it were the raw data of your psychology, that these dispositions can change, and that identity is in fact freely organized.  We choose which dispositions with which to identify and with which not to identify." 

"This is my position, Darius, and I think it is self-consistent." 

"But let us reflect more deeply, Ashley. You have said previously that your organization of data is in fact a free one, emerging neither from a nature nor some set of deeper dispositions to behave." 

"I have said this, Darius." 

"So let me ask again, how is this possible?  How can one freely choose to identify and cultivate one set of dispositions over another?  What is that by virtue of which this occurs?  

"Darius, we are essentially free, that is, we have contra-casual freedom. We can do other than what we do, in fact, do.  When we choose to identify with a disposition, we are simply choosing freely." 

"But Ashley," replied Darius, "does this not mean that there are ultimately no dispositions that determine our character?  If we can choose freely to identify with set of dispositions G over H, and this is not determined by a disposition, then should we not say that the original dispositions constituting our raw psychological state is also the result of choosing to cultivate some tendencies we might have and choosing to suppress others?"

"I am not sure about this, Darius. This would mean that we really have no basic determinacy at all.  That is to say, we are just choosing all of our character. But I don't think I want to say that, Darius. I want to say that I could choose to embrace those parts of me that I already am."  

"But is that not the point, Ashley?  You are choosing to be who you are when as a viator, you explore different genders. You want to already be that which you become, right?"

"I think I can agree with that, Darius.  If I am to explore my gender identity, I need to be doing it on the basis of what I am. If I am going to identify myself as X, there must be some grounds of that identification.  But you are suggesting that what is good for the goose is good for the gander, that is to say, if it is on the basis of freedom that I choose to identify with a particular batch of dispositions, and if you further assert that this freedom allows me to cultivate dispositions that are consistent with the identity I wish to adopt and suppress other dispositions not consistent with that identity, then I am really engaged in freely constructing my gender.    But there is something about this that makes me uncomfortable." 

"What is that, Ashley?" 

She reflected a moment: "Part of the justification with exploring other gender identities and making others respect those identities is that we ought not discriminate against others."

Darius stared at Ashley for a long time before responding, "Yes, of course it has always been part of the way we have routinely regarded those having non-standard genders. We treat them as we do because we know at some level that they could not be other than how they are. It is an issue of civil rights, after all. A person can neither change the color of his skin nor change his sexual orientation. This is why we build gender neutral restrooms and enact gender neutral laws to protect minorities from prejudices of those in power. We do this because we realize that others have natural rights that we must respect.  It is not their fault, after all, that they have a non-standard gender identity." 

Ashley looked at Darius inquisitively and said, "But have we just now agreed that what is good for the goose   is good for the gander?  What I mean is that if we have freedom to gerrymander dispositions, cultivating some and suppressing others, would we not have such freedom at the level of the original dispositions themselves?  Don't we always have some identity or other and are we not trying to do those acts consistent with the identity we have?  What I realize now, is that the free choice of identity has likely always been the driving principle here, and that combing our subliminal depths for a real self is likely quite misguided.  After all, what rational support to we really have in the selection of criteria by which we adjudicate that one has a self and that, furthermore, that self posses a determinate nature?"  

Darius replied, "I see you are thinking this through carefully, Ashley. You see the problem now, don't you?  The viator's journey is supposed to be a voyage of self-discovery. Tying on gender roles is supposed to allow one to grasp one's authentic self, one's true nature, as it were, a nature that can finally order the chaos of our psychological life. The goal of the gender search is to find the identity that best fits one's experience and being. Society tolerates those differently-ordered because it respects the rights of all to be happy, and happiness entails that tensions between one's conscious and unconscious life be mitigated.  That is to say, one is a viator because one believes "to thine own self be true."  

"Yes," Ashley admitted. 

"But you know from our earlier discussions on the issue of freely choosing one's identity that, if this freedom be granted -- that is, there is no determinate nature that determinately prescribes or proscribes this choice -- then this freedom likely trickles all the way down to our most fundamental dispositions, and if this be so, then one ought not to regard gender as anything determinate in need of protection by one's civil rights."  

"Yes," replied Ashley, "and I see the problem."

But Darius would not let her finish: "The one holding that gender roles are freely chosen cannot say that gender ought to be protected by civil law. As an effect of free-will, it is not the kind of thing that people could have irrational prejudice about. Moreover, if gender roles are completely determined, then one has really no freedom in trying out other gender roles. Determinism with regards to gender pulls the rug out from underneath our modern would-be viator."

At this point, Ashley looked at Alisha and simply stopped talking. Alisha asked her to explain what happened next with Darius, but for Ashley the day had begun and ended with this conversation. Alisha told Ashley that she had done very well in her conversation with Darius, but Ashley would have none of it, for she knew that she could no longer do the things she had done before, or, if she did them again, she would hitherto have to think very differently about what she was doing. These things saddened her greatly.  

Alisha thought that a trip to the museum might cheer her friend, but Ashley wanted nothing more now than just to go home. So Alisha watched Ashley as the latter walked briskly away. Maybe tomorrow the memory of her conversation with Darius would fade and she could start to think about herself in the ways in which she was accustomed.  But Ashley knew this would likely not happen, and she remained despondent.  Things would likely not be the same ever again.    

Thoughts on Stewardship and Sorge

Stewardship is about care, and Heidegger showed us that Sorge (care) is the way in which Dasein exists. To be Dasein is to be a creature, and Sorge is the sine qua non of Dasein. This seemingly puts Sorge squarely in the order of creation.

Since the care of Dasein is an existential-ontological state tied to temporality, our creaturely stewardship in time is seemingly grounded in the temporality of care, and Dasein's "running ahead" (Vorlaufen) to the possibility of there being no more possibilities for it (death).

But for the Christian, care of the other cannot be simply one ontic possibility among others grounded in something more fundamental, the condition of our possibilities. It is commanded, after all, and the otherness of the command is constitutive of the creature in a way that an ontology making possible mere ontic possibilities is not. The problem is that transcendental subjectivity finally makes the Other merely a pole within the subject. But it is precisely because stewardship is not a possibility for Dasein that entails that the ex-stasis of its acts must be grounded in the Other. What is more Other than the Cross? Where better to encounter la differance upon which human existence ultimately and uneasily rests?

Christian "existence" is ex-static, grounded not in that which makes the everyday possible, but in that which reveals this ground as ungrounded. Revelation can never be a move within transcendental subjectivity nor of the Being within which such subjectivity hides and finds itself. It is the knife that pierces the veil, the veil constituted in the ease of our temporal exstasis, the veil finally blotting out the orthogonal. It is as if moving right or left with dispatch and profundity could move one up or down even a bit.

What if we took seriously the Otherness of God, an inescapable otherness of which the face holds no trace? What if existence itself is constituted upon an Abyss not synonymous with a Ground? What if to talk of this is not to domesticate it, that is, it is not to find a place for it in the Temple of the transcendental subject? What if we have mis-identified the non-being at the heart of our dis-ease?

Limits in theology do not work like in mathematics. We cannot get close to the former as we do the latter. Think a limit that is infinitely qualitatively different than anything most proximate to it. And so we have an analogy to God and Being.

Theology and the Philosophy of Science: The Syntactic and Semantic Views

The Received View in the [hilosophy of science is the syntactic view.  Accordingly, scientific theory is construed as a set of sentences with the laws of the scientific theory being its axioms. By inputting initial conditions and conjoining these conditions to the laws (axioms) of the theory, one deduces future states of the system as theorems.  This is the theory's predictions. The syntactic conception of scientific theory is clearly in the tradition of Euclid, Aristotle, Newton, Carnap and the Logical Positivists. But as we pointed out in the last post, there are problems with the account. 

One problem is that the syntactic view presupposes the so-called analytic/synthetic distinction, that is, the distinction between what is true by definition versus what is true because of the way that the world is. The distinction is rooted in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant famously claimed that an analytical statement or proposition is true because the meaning of the predicate is included in the meaning of the subject.  A synthetic statement, on the other hand is ampliative in that the meaning of the predicate is not included in the meaning of the subject.  The first effectively decomposes the meaning of the subject, finding that what makes the subject true also makes the predicate true. The second amplifies the meaning of the subject; it asserts of the subject that something is true that is not included within the very meaning of the subject. 

While this semantic distinction in Kant must be distinguished from the epistemological distinction between what is known "prior to" experience (the a priori) and what is known "after" or on the basis of experience (the a posteriori), we often today simply identify the a priori with analytical judgments and the a posteriori with synthetic judgments.  For instance, "a bachelor is unmarried" is a true analytic statement because one cannot think of married bachelors, but "a bachelor is happy," if it is true, would be a true synthetic statement.  We would know the second on the basis of experience, e.g., surveys, personal observations, controlled experiments, etc. 

W. V. O. Quine famously criticized the analytic-synthetic distinction about seven decades ago, calling it one of the "dogmas" of empiricism.  He claimed that the analytic-synthetic distinction is not a matter of meaning over and against experience, that it is not a matter of the necessary truth of the former over and against the contingent truth of the latter. The distinction is not absolute at all, he avers, but it is merely a matter of degree, of what statements we will give up last.  In our "webs of belief," we hold onto some statements longer than others.  We might say, "water is H20" and "water is odorless," and dutifully subject each statement to our "tribunal of experience."  It is clear that confronted with experience, we would hold onto the truth that water is H20 much longer than water is odorless.  In fact, I can imagine some experience which would compel us to claim that water is not in fact odorless.  Of course, the latter statement could be "saved" from repudiation by declaring that it is not water itself that is not being odorless, but something in the water that is smelling foul.  

Problems with the analytic/synthetic distinction were a profound challenge for the syntactic view of scientific theory because the "bridge rules" of the theory coordinating the theoretical and observational terms were supposed to be a matter of meaning alone.  This theoretical term just means this observational term. In fact, the higher level terms and propositions of the theory could be in principle reduced to phenomenal experience. The classic text of this approach is Carnap's The Logical Construction of the World.  Clearly, if analyticity does not hold by meaning alone, then the very notion of bridge rules is undermined. 

There were, of course, other difficulties with the syntactic approach. It turned out that rigorous axiomatic laws were too cumbersome to be used by actual scientists. Also, because scientific theory was construed in terms of sentences, endless debates in the philosophy of language ensued.  Finally, there were Goedel problems.  As it turns out, no axiom set and system of proof within a theory could prove all of the sentences regarded as true within the theory. The result was the overturning of the syntactic view of scientific theory.  The new approach was called the semantic view of scientific theory.

Emerging in the 1970s and 80s, the semantic view of scientific theory generally identified theories with classes of models or model-types along with hypotheses of how these models relate to nature. A theory thus could thus be cast as a "class of fully articulated mathematical structure-types" using set-theoretical predicates.  (See Demetris Portides, "Scientific Models and the Semantic View of Scientific Theories" in Philosophy of Science, December 2005, pp. 1287-98.)  

Models are thus included in the the theory structure, and are themselves constructed on the basis of data within a context of experimental design and auxiliary theories.  On the semantic view model A is equivalent to Model B if and only if there is a correspondence of the elements and relations of A and B.  (Some advocates claims there must be an isomorphism, some a partial isomorphism and some merely a similarity.) 

Advocates of the semantic view claim that a physical system is represented by a class of model types. Semantic theorists generally hold that data alone does not falsify a theory, but that  data, design and auxiliary theory are important in the construction of data structures. These data structures must be sharply distinguished from the theoretical model, in that the latter is a construction out of the data structure.  But the question arises: What exactly is a data structure? 

It seems that the models in question can be either more abstract, e.g., mathematical structures, or more concrete, e.g., visual models of molecules. Proponents of the semantic view often claims a superiority over the syntactic conception in that scientific theory now is understood as actually focussing on the actual things that scientists treat within their theories.  Moreover, they claim that the semantic view allows that scientific theories can be clearly seen as not simply related to actual chunks of the world, but rather to mathematical objects as idealizations that are connectable to the world. Such idealizations, they claim, are the true objects of science. Accordingly, abstract mathematical structures come to be understood as that which the theory is about. Thus, semantic theories privilege mathematics -- especially "set-theoretical" entities -- over first-order predicate logic.

Rasmus Groenfeldt Winther's article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes two general strategies within the semantic view generally.  The state-state approach focuses upon the mathematical models of actual science such that the scientific theory just is a class of mathematical models. Alternatively, the set-model theoretic approach emphasizes that the axioms, theorems and laws of a theory are satisfied, or made true by, certain mathematical structures or models of the theory.  The second approach is often deemed the more fruitful. 

I find Michael McEwan's 2006 article "The Semantic View of Theories: Models and Misconceptions," helpful in understanding what the semantic view is and is not.  McEwan points to the following slogan of the semantic view: A theory is a collection of models (1).  On what he calls the naive semantic view, the "is" here is the "is" of identity. Tarski famously connects models to semantic concepts through the notion of satisfaction.  He uses model-theoretic models in accomplishing this. A model-theoretic model is an interpretation which satisfies a class of statements by specifying a domain of individuals and defining the predicate symbols, relations and functions on this set of individuals.  Accordingly, a theory is a collection of model-theoretic models (2).  

On the model-theoretic model the theory is a set of sentences and the models are interpretations in which the set of sentences turn out to be true. A model-theoretic theory is true for a given model just in case the sentences are true on that model. The class of model-theoretic models make true the model-theoretic theory.  McEwan calls the identification of the model-theoretic theory with the class of its models a naive semantic view.  If, however, the class of models satisfies the sentences of the model-theoretic theory, McEwan no longer dubs this a simple naive semantic view.  He specifies the naive semantic view as having the following conditions (3).

•  It is identified with M, the class of model-theoretic models,
• The models in M are directly defined, 
• The naive-theory is true for model n just in case n is an element in M. 

One problem with the naive theory is that it is difficult to see how any of it touches the world.  As it turns out, no n need represent the world at all! Another problem is that since the theory itself is just the class of models, it is what it is only when each model is true. This means that no model really instances the theory, for the theory would not be that theory if it had other instances!  As McEwan points out, the question of whether the solar system instances Newtonian mechanics is not a non-trivial one, but on the naive theory, it would be true just in case we stipulate that it is so (5).  Simply put, if the naive theory were true, then one could not axiomatize in model-theoretic theory without knowing in advance which interpretations would satisfy the model-theoretic theory.  But we do not always know in advance which interpretations satisfy our theory; there are sometimes unintended models. (Consider the non-trivial question of whether a newly discovered solar system obeys Newtonian laws.) Thus, by modus tollens, naive theory is not true.  McEwan puts the matter bluntly: "There is nothing above and beyond the models themselves to decide whether a theory is applicable to some model or not" (7). 

Fortunately, the semantic view is not identified with the naive theory.  Indeed, the semantic view realizes that the models of M must represent the world in some way.  Clearly, realists and many empiricists would want this to be so. Why not then simply identify n with a physical model?  But how can a physical system be an interpretation of a formal language?  This seems to have the matter backward.  

As it turns out, semantic views are plagued by the representation problem. Consider the claim that one of the models of M (say n) is the faithful representation of the physical world. But on what basis is n the representation? If the theory is the class of models, one of which is the real world, then why identify the theory with the class of models in the first place (8)?

It seems that the semantic view must somehow deal with the representation problem.  However, Bas von Fraasen a theory's models is identified with a class of structures.  He writes: 

The syntactic picture of a theory identifies it with a body of theorems, stated in one particular language chosen for the expression of that theory.  This should be contrasted with the alternative of presenting a theory in the first instance by identifying a class of structures as its models.  In this second, semantic, approach the language used to express the theory is neither basic nor unique; the same class of structures could well be described in radically different ways, each with its own limitations.  The models occupy center stage.  

So what of these model that occupy center stage? What becomes of realism on the semantic view?  If the models are mathematical structures, then are the objects in these models "real enough" for one to claim that one's scientific theory is true of the real world?  Is the wave function a mathematical object and thus real in the sense that a scientific realist wants?  What would distinguish a real physical object from other pretenders?  What about unobservables -- are they real?  What would distinguish an unobservable mathematical object from an on observable "real" one?  The representation problem is clearly a problem for realism. 

While one might claim that the semantic view is the new "received view" in the philosophy of science, there are very strong voices that have emerged which have pointed to the "extra-scientific" or "extra-rational" factors at work in science, factors that seem as almost as deadly to the semantic view as they are to the syntactic view. We shall attend to these in the next post. 

Reflecting Judgments and another Kind of Metaphysics

I. Kantian Background

It is well known that Kant rejected traditional metaphysics, claiming that such metaphysics attempts to know that which "lies beyond the bounds of possible experience." Kant held that metaphysics' grand cognitive failure is due ultimately to the particular constitution of the human understanding.  

We are constituted epistemically by possessing two quite different elements, one spontaneous and one receptive. We have the spontaneous ability to work the world up conceptually. Such conceptual thinking constitutes the form by which anything is known.  When we think we are active in our thinking; we attempt to know by grasping and shaping that which we know.  

But knowing the world does not consist merely in an active, spontaneous, formal grasping of what is known.  There is something, after all, that must be present to be grasped and shaped.  Kant argues persuasively that this content to be shaped is received, i.e, it is an intuition, something given by outer sense, something that is not itself the result of our grasping and shaping. Of course, the matter is a bit more difficult than this. That which is given by outer sense is not the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, but is rather an appearance of that thing.  

I believe that the best way to interpret Kant here is by claiming that it is the same thing that is in itself and that appears to us. What appears is not what the thing is in itself, but rather what the thing in itself is for our intuitional capabilities.`The thing in itself as given to us is always patio-temporally formed by the pure forms of sensibility, that is the pure intuitions of space and time.  While we actively organize that which is by the forms of space and time, the entire spatio-temporal formed content is nonetheless received as an appearance of the supersensible thing-in-itself. 

When we are knowing the empirical world rightly, the pure concepts of the understanding are spontaneously applied to the manifold of intuitions, and we have from this the reality of empirical experience as such. Such experience is already given as knowledge with quantity, quality, relation, and modality built into it, as it were.  Most importantly, our empirical experience is always one where there are things that can change while remaining themselves (substances), and things that change because other things have changed (causality). Knowledge of the natural world is thus always mechanistic.  Because we organize the world according to the universal law of causality -- for every event x, there must be some y such that y causes x -- all natural events have some causal explanation such that there are necessary and sufficient conditions why those events happened.  

Our cognition of the natural world is discursive. Intuitions are received and actively organized by concepts. An object is thus that by concept of which the manifold of intuition is united.  Without intuitions, our concepts would be empty, and without concepts, our intuitions would be blind.  When we know anything we begin with the concept (a universal) and subsume intuitions (the particulars) underneath it.  While space "falls within" space and time "falls within time:, particulars "fall under" concepts.  Our judgments of the world are determinative, that is, when we judge something to be the case, we must actively engage in a synthesis, bringing particular percepts under universal concepts according to rules.  These rules actively constitute objects.  

We hear a sound, see a shape, feel a presence, and are confronted with an odor.  The sound, shape, tactile sensation, and odor are synthesized immediately into an experience of a dog.  The dog exists by perduring through time, taking on other qualities without relinquishing its individuality, its being that particular dog, a dog called 'Spot'.  We don't simply know the dog as a particular immediately, it is rather mediately given through application of concept to percept. Since we have no immediate access to the thing-in-itself, we cannot immediately intuit individuals. Such individuality is the result of synthesis and constitution.  

This is very bad news for traditional metaphysics. Such metaphysics had attempted to unhinge the conceptual apparatus of the understanding from its connectedness to intuitions, and allow it to operate purely formally, hoping, as it were, that by formal reflection using the law of non-contradiction, one might be able to fill in the content of the supersensible world.  Kant devotes half of the Critique of Pure Reason to showing that metaphysics falls prey to a transcendental illusion or subreption when it is tempted to think that what is necessary for thinking also displays the contour of reality itself. The problem is that the activity and spontaneity of the formal conceptual is no longer being applied to the passivity and receptivity of intuitional content.  

So it is that metaphysics, once the queen of the sciences, has fallen on hard times. Indeed, Kant believes that when the form of thinking is disconnected from the content to be thought, metaphysics ends in paralogisms and antinomies. Reason now unfettered from intuition can both prove that there is a first cause of the world and not a first cause of the world; it can prove that there is contra-causal freedom and there is no such freedom. Reason, in searching for the unconditioned, still dreams that it can make use of determinative judgment, that it can find in its grasping and shaping that which is ultimately the case.  

But it is a fool's mission. Traditional metaphysics cannot know what is ultimately the case because the very condition for knowledge is that the manifold of intuition must be synthesized according to the rules implicit in the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding. Since this epistemic condition is not met by traditional metaphysics, metaphysics, no matter how sophisticated, can merely spin its castles in the sky.  It cannot know. 

Kant believed, however, that this state of affairs is not the end of the discussion, but merely the beginning. The self-legislation of the understanding which produces nature is at most only half of what is relevant to human beings. Human beings are, unfortunately, naturally metaphysical. We are concerned always with three focal notions: God, freedom and immortality.  If self-legislated nature was all there is, then there could be no God, freedom or immortality. In fact, the entire life of Decartes' res cogitans ("thinking thing") would simply be cut off, cast off, and ignored, as if the experience of the res cogitans were merely an illusion or mistake.  We would be a natural object among natural objects, and like other natural objects caused to be. We would be determined in the contour of our being as other natural objects are determined in the contour of their being. The natural metaphysical inclinations of humanity would need thus to be regarded as the leftovers of human childhood; they are an infantile wish. While we might yet long for God, freedom, and immortality, the world would not be the kind of place that could deliver these things. 

But, of course, the story cannot be that simple.  Kant, after all, is engaged in transcendental reflection, that is, he is looking for the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such, and such a looking seems quite disconsonant with there being no res cogitans at all.  

Had not Kant determined that a transcendental unity of apperception was needed to have a stable and consistent synthesizing of the manifold of sensation?  While this transcendental unity cannot be known to be a metaphysical res cogitans, that is, a metaphysical substantial transcendental ego, it is also not the kind of thing that is the result of the application of concepts to spatio-temporal particulars. The existence of the transcendental unity of apperception, and the possibility of transcendental reflection in general seems to cry out for a more comprehensive view of things. After all, if we are the authors of nature through application of the categories onto things, if empirical reality is the result of our self-legislation, then how can we simply halt our curiosity and say that nature is all there is? If it is we who make nature what it is, how can we ignore ourselves, the makers of nature? 

Thus, it is incumbent on Kant to search further to clarify and understand transcendentally what this transcendental subject is. Clearly, this subject is not the empirical subject of psychology, subject, as it were, to all of the psychological laws of conditioning. While psychology might find the psychological self to be determined, this determinism does not properly extend to the transcendental subject that can inquire into the conditions of the very possibility of the empirical psychological self being determined. When one reflects upon the project of transcendental reflection seriously, one realizes that the entire project presupposes something like judgment as it was conceived by Descartes. That great 17th century philosopher thought it a necessary condition to judge rightly or wrongly that one were free to judge. One must accumulate evidence as to why x might be the case or y might hold and on the basis of that evidence judge that x exists or y does. But how is that activity possible without freedom?  

Kant is concerned with the giving of evidence in his transcendental reflections. Such evidence-giving is what the transcendental deductions are all about. To provide a deduction in Prussian court of law is to give a valid  argument and evidence of title. Kant is interested in providing transcendental deductions that show that understanding is entitled to its claims that it does know the empirical world. As Newton thought, but Hume denied, we can have both universal and necessary knowledge of the empirical order. But this giving of transcendental evidence cannot be the result of the mechanism of nature, because the mechanism of nature only holds on the ground of proper application of transcendental reflection, a reflection that shows that human beings are entitled to claim that the can know nature objectively, in terms of both universalizability and necessity. 

But what else do we know about this transcendental subject? Is it merely a knower of the empirical order, or is it engaged in other matters? For Kant, the answer is quite obvious. Human being do not make merely empirical judgments about nature, but the make moral judgments about what ought to be done, and aesthetic judgments about what is beautiful. They make both moral judgments and judgments of taste. 

As it turns out, reason is not completely sidelined by its failure to use determining judgments in carving the beast of ultimate reality at its joints. Reason has other work to do rather than merely to know.  It must do as well. But what ought it to do? No amount of empirical knowledge of nature's is can ever help us determine what we ought to do. One cannot derive an ought from and is, after all. If the ought is to be understood, it won't be understood along the lines of nature, where concepts must synthesize the manifold of sensation into an experience of the world in which the universal law of causality holds. If we are to understand anything about the ought, we need to do it with reason, for such reason need not be mechanical in the way of the understanding. This is the reason that heeds reason!  But Kant had just argued that pure reason is not suited to mime the contour of the supersensible world. So what remains? 

Kant believes we do, in fact, employ reason practically rather than purely in dealing with moral questions. Given that we desire to do x, ought it be the case that we do, in fact, do x? In order to know what to do, we must consult moral law. Acting morally is acting due to this moral law. This acting presupposes freedom which is the condition for the possibility that consulting the moral law can determine the will. This determination of the will constitutes a desire to do x rather than y. Practical reason determines action by consulting the moral law on the basis of freedom. It thus constitutes a noumenal access to the supersensible, an access that allows for the very determination of the supersensible.  

Through the transcendental unity of apperception, the autonomous transcendental subject legislates law into and onto the empirical order. While the supersensible ground of this legislation, the realm of the thing-in-itself, remains indeterminate with respect to this legislation, with respect to the moral sphere, the supersensible becomes determinate. The autonomous transcendental subject through practical reason also self-legislates, this time it legislates the moral law in accordance with the categorical imperative, and accordingly acts due to that moral law alone. This autonomous subject is free to do x or y because such freedom is presupposed by the experience of ought itself.  

So at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, we find Kant in a situation not wholly unlike that of Descartes. Descartes had left us with two disparate domains: one a realm of natural objects governed by mechanical natural law (the res extend), and the other a domain of the thinking subject free to think or do other than what one had thunk or done. This substance dualism of the mechanical deterministic alongside the purposeful and free could not, however, be conceived in such a way as to allow linkage between the two.  Descartes' dualistic causal interactionism seemingly depends upon a connection between the disparate, a connection that, on the grounds of dualism itself, would either need to be a corporeal or a non-corporeal connection. But if either of these, then would there not need to be another connection connecting these?  

Kant had two different self-legislations, one issuing in a domain of determinism and the other one of freedom. His linking of the two has more options than Descartes because while the latter was thinking that he had mined reality, Kant knew that the empirical world is just one of appearance. In his Third Antinomy in the First Critique Kant solves the problem of freedom and determinism simply by pointing that we are transcendentally free even though we are phenomenally determined. While the concept of the supersensible underlying nature is wholly indeterminate, we can nonetheless understand that the supersensible underlying our moral order is determinate in its freedom and it acts out of duty to the moral law.  

But there is a big problem for Kant. How is it possible that a human being that is corporeal and subject to determinism as a natural object, is nonetheless free to have done other than it might have done by choosing to do act x rather than act y because doing act x is acting due to the moral law? How is the kingdom of ends possible, the corporeally-instantiated association of moral agents having dignity on the basis of their freedom. Does this not seem like the ghost of Descartes has returned? The linkage between the autonomous moral agent and the natural product instantiating it must be an identity, but that leaves open the question of the properties that agent has.  Is she really free to do other than what she did do, or is she determined after all?  Saying that determination is merely an appearance and she really is free, means that much of nature will be erroneously said to be determined when it is not. After all, there are nearly 8 billion agents comprising the kingdom of ends, and that number is rising quickly. How can all of these have freedom, but nature in general not? So Kant believes he needs to provide some unity between the results of the two Critiques. 

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant is concerned with judgments of the agreeable, judgments of taste, judgments of the good, judgments of the sublime and teleological judgments. He clarifies considerably his notion of judgment in this critique, distinguishing between determining judgments (bestimmende Urteile) and reflecting judgments (rerflectierende Urteile).  The first cover the type of constitutive judgments Kant had assumed in both Critiques. In a determining judgment, the universal subsumes the particular under it.  In so doing, nature can be thought as being comprised of substantial natural objects which are instances of kinds and related to each other causally. Through such judgments we can think of a world of parts determining one another such as to constitute a whole. 

But a reflecting judgment is not constitutive.  It is rather like being regulative in the way that Kant spoke about this in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Reason goes astray when it thinks its judgments have content.  Formally they move from the conditioned to the unconditioned ground of the conditioned, but they cannot establish causality, because the causal connection is a denizen of the empirical order. They can regulate how we think, but cannot fill in the content of what is to be thought. For that we need intuition. A reflecting judgment does not constitute by bringing particulars under universal, but regulates by thinking universals on the basis of given particulars. 

Reflecting judgments start with the given particular, and are free to discover universals that might apply to those particulars. In aesthetic judgments, beauty is ascribed on the basis of the presentation of particulars.  While Kant is sure to claim that beauty is not a property of the thing, it is nonetheless universally and necessarily ascribed on the basis of particular presentations that involve a proper stimulation of the imagination in its interconnectedness with the understanding, an interconnectedness producing a feeling of pleasure. Beautiful objects are thus experienced as purposive although they have no purpose. The purposiveness of the thing is merely formal, depending as it does on the particular interplay of the imagination and understanding, one in which the understanding is stimulated as thinking the parts of the presentation as a function of the whole. It is as if the beautiful object had a final cause determining its parts in accordance with its end. 

What is particularly interesting about reflecting judgments is how they can be used teleologically, and how they might be applied in a more thoroughgoing way. Used teleologically, the judgments allow us to grasp in a more comprehensive form certain empirical processes and laws, particularly of a biological nature.  

It does seem, after all, as if there are processes whose best explanation makes use of functional or purposeful explanations. What is the best way to explain the bird's behavior under the gutter on the house? The bird can be seen flying to and fro with small pieces of straw or little twigs or blades of grass in its beak. To offer an explanation of this flying and selecting of appropriate twigs with which to fly without mentioning that the bird is building a nest is very difficult. Imagine giving an explanation of this behavior by appealing only to mircophysical particles and the relevant laws of nature governing them.  

Kant lived at a time where there was no scientific explanation for how life, no matter how primitive, could arise from inanimate, material conditions. There simply was no way to account for the behavior of purposive beings by appealing to mechanistic laws. I think, however, that while trying to understand nature in Kant's time without appealing to teleological explanations would have been impossible, it is still quite difficult for us today.  

Imagine the bird in the process of building a nest. Let us call the bird and its beak, twigs and flying a supervening level of description with its appropriate ontology. There are birds, and nests, and twigs, etc.  Let us in faithfulness to reductionism claim that there is an ultimate subvenient base such that two molecule-by-molecule replicas at the subvenient level would result in the same state of affairs at the supervening level of the bird. Will will not be type reductionists here but only token reductionists or more fashionably, non-reductive physicalists. We shall claim that for each and every event at the supervenient level there is some state of affairs at the subvenient level such that we can draw a function from the subvenient to the supervenient.  

So does the subvenient level explain the supervening level?  Clearly, the answer is "No, it does not." The subvenient level metaphysically realizes the supervenient level but does not explain it -- at least not yet. So what is the explanation for the bird flying the twigs to a spot under my gutter? One might say now that the best explanation is simply that the bird is behaving as it does because it wants to bring about the building of its nest. But is such an explanation in terms of purpose the same as that of Kant? 

Kant would probably say that there is some slight of hand here. One would need to specify the explanation of why the higher level would supervene upon the lower.  Clearly, it is the case that the bird exerts purposive behavior and that behavior is realized physically, and that the bird thus makes use of fundamental particles and laws in its behaving. But one cannot simply leave it at that, assert an asymmetrical dependency relation and claim that the subvenient ultimately determines the supervenient. That is to smuggle what Kant would call the mechanistic explanation in the back door without explaining how it might actually be that apparent purpose arises from an underlying mechanism.  

My point here is that it is really quite unclear that if Kant were here he would change his mind on the need for real teleological explanations in nature. He might say that his position on teleological explanation was that he used such explanations when mechanistic ones were inadequate. Recalling #77 and #78 in the Critique of Judgment he might say, "I can imagine a being other than I or you who might have different cognitive equipment and might thus be able to understand particulars immediately, not as worked up through concepts. Such a being could perhaps see that there is some deeper mechanism that we will never be able to grasp because of the constitution of our epistemic equipment. Although this fact should be faced squarely, we should in our cognitive lives simply use teleological explanations in nature and afford them truth-conditions and ontological status, for we do not have such intellectual intuition." 

While Kant knows that reflecting teleological judgments likely give the best explanation for natural processes as they were understood in his day, it seems that he wants more out of reflecting judgment. He is searching in his reflecting judgments for both simplicity and unity. He discusses his architectonic task in the Critique of Pure Reason and other places. He is clearly interested in a vision of the world that might fit our natural metaphysical aspirations, a world where God, immortality and freedom are present; a world which is unified and coherent.  He wants to use reflecting judgment to unify his critical philosophy. Kant knows that this unification will not come from the bottom-up as the more basic stuff in the universe determine determine what is at the top.  Instead this must be top-down vision of the world, one where the synthetic universal at the level of the Idea can take us what is disparate and disunited and place it into a unity.

Kant has a story about how this might happen, but it is not deeply worked out. Below I provide the beginning of my own story. 

II. Another Kind of Metaphysics

I think Kant was on the right path in his treatment of reflecting judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Such judgments are a matter of taste and they are made on the basis of intellectual pleasure, that is, they concern beauty.  Kant knew that we had no way of knowing the ultimate metaphysical contour of reality, but he did not simply ignore the problem of the human inclination to do metaphysics.  After all, we are by our very nature interested in the questions of God, immortality and freedom. 

So let's think about doing another kind of metaphysics. Let's think of metaphysics in terms of looking about for some universal that we might be able to apply to given particulars. I am not thinking merely about the particulars of empirical objects or special science specific laws, but all of the facets of existence that are given to us, and which appear prima facie disparate.  We might think of this as a metaphysical theory, but we are not looking at either traditional explanation or prediction from our theory.  We look rather for something more akin to an artistic vision which might both apply to and be adequate to the most abstract features of concrete experience as such. These most abstract features would be the theory's particulars. Our goal is simply to think reality coherently and consistently.  

Let us call M a metaphysical vision, schema or understanding of things which is internally consistent, coherent and parsimonious, and applies to, and is adequately to all of our experience. M would be concerned with unity and would seek an understanding of the parts such that the the human inclination to search for metaphysical knowledge of God, freedom and immortality counts as much in the vision as successful mechanistic scientific explanation. Instead of playing down moral and aesthetic experience, M would seek regulatively to balance that experience alongside of empirical experience. Instead of denigrating certain subjects as not being truth-apt and thus noncognitive, M would assume that there is a way to unify the more truth-apt and the less truth-apt disciplines. The various disciplines in which humans engage, and the natural, social and cultural aspects of human life would all be the data of M.  

Clearly, there are many ways to cast M, but this is to be expected. If constructing M is done correctly, there are likely few disconfirming instances of it. If we are dealing with the most abstract features of concrete experience, and these features are exemplifications of M, then M is necessary. That is not to mean, that holding M as a vision of the world is necessary, only that M exists as a schema that has no disconfirmations given the present state of our empirical knowledge. 

What would be the use of having M? It would give us a way of seeing things that would involve the interplay of imagination and understanding as Kant thought, a way of seeing things that would produce in us a feeling of intellectual pleasure. The reflecting judgment that produces M realizes that there can be many Ms, both synchronically and diachronically. More than one object can be beautiful, after all.  However, M will make the demand of the aesthetic ought on all those capable of understanding.  

If we honestly engage in the reflecting project of providing M, we would, I think, find ourselves doing systematically what we are doing confusedly today. After all, something like a reflecting judgment is at work when we learn a little physics, a little literary theory, get a dash of German social theory, learn something from the news, reflect on the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, watch a crisis in Africa, think about global CO2 levels, and listen to jazz. We are always engaged in unifying our experience, even if the unification produces a view of thing that is chaotic, dissonant, and ultimately pessimistic, a view that downgrades the natural inclinations in us for the ideal and assigns the motives of moral decision-making to psychological egoism, or maybe to a privileged class or race consciousness. Not only individually, but as a culture, we are engaged in unifying experience by suppressing some features of it and highlighting others. What might be the result if we could step back and in an act of critical distantiation see the various features and elements of experience for what they are, and then seek to appropriate what we see in the building of an M that would grant us a view of things that would meet the standards of taste?   

Clearly, very few people would do this, and many would wonder why they should attempt it. But for some the intellectual satisfaction involved with conceiving a world that is consistent, coherent, simple, unified, and applicable and adequate to our deepest yearnings of the human heart might be worth the effort in casting it.  Why would one who could think M not ascribe beauty to it? If we find beauty in the fine arts and music, why could we not find it in a metaphysic that could deliver a view of things that made sense to us? 

This metaphysics is not theology, of course, but it would be concerned with some of that with which theology deals. It would take seriously the wonder of existence itself, and the tragedy of human dwelling in time. It would not abstract away from the questions of guilt, sin, and death, and our desire to find security in the great ideas of God, freedom and immortality. M cannot, of course, fail to deal with God, whose appearance in M ultimately motivates the very project of the casting of M. God appears in M formally as the ultimate theoretical entity for reflecting judgment. It is that which finally makes M coherent; it gives M the very possibility that the parts of M can mutually presuppose themselves.  God is thus at the depth of being; God is the sine qua non for the possibility that M can be cast in a way that cannot be disconfirmed by particular concrete experience.  

The God of M is not, of course, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Reflection cannot, I think, get us to the Trinity or to the Incarnation.  However, neither is the God of M the "God of the philosophers." M does not seek to cast about for a determining metaphysics for natural theology, but simply opens a path for a reflecting metaphysics of a theology of nature. Christian symbols can be exhibitions of M, I think, but other religious symbol systems are possible too.  

If Kant is correct about our cognitive powers, our powers of determining judgments, we can no more grasp the nature of the supersensible than Luther could find the hidden God. The supersensible is essentially mysterious, showing us any determinacy only in moral judgment.  However, reflecting judgment does perhaps make the supersensible determinable, and maybe that is enough for us yearning for beauty in our brief sojourn within the fields of time.