Category Archives: Self-knowledge

Thinking About Believing

April 21, 2013 By in religion, Self-knowledge Tags: , , , , , 13 Comments

I consider my students and I consider myself–and I think:  our problem is that we know heaps and heaps of things but we believe nothing, or almost nothing.

…

A friend of mine asked me the other day about Christian religious belief and being a good person, about whether you can be a good person and disbelieve.  That sort of question I cannot answer formulaically, and would not, I hope, even if a formula came to mind.  What I found myself saying was something like this:

We most of us have no real knowledge of what we believe or disbelieve, in the existentially indexed form of belief I take ultimately to be at issue in Christianity.  What we believe or disbelieve is something that isn’t captured by putting a ‘T’ or an ‘F’ in the blank before, say, “There is a God”, on a True/False test.  Perhaps living a good life–a genuinely good life, not a conventionally good one–is itself to believe.  And perhaps living a bad life–a genuinely bad life, not a conventionally bad one–is to disbelieve.

What I said was something like that.  At any rate, I reckon that someone who has a false understanding of Christ could disbelieve in that Christ without disbelieving in Christ.  So too someone with a false understanding of Christ could believe in that Christ without believing in Christ.  Kierkegaard somewhere attempts to elucidate Christian belief by talking about it as ultimately a matter of the imitation of Christ:  imitation is the sincerest form of belief, we might say.  Does imitation–in the sense at issue, whatever exactly that is–require that one know that one is imitating, who one is imitating?

“No one can come to the Father except through me”, “I am the door of the sheep”:  couldn’t ‘going through’, ‘entering the door’, be a matter of what we are ontologically (salvation as theosis) and not, or not so much, a matter of what we are epistemologically, of what we believe in a non-existentially indexed sense?  ”Not everyone who saith unto me Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven…”   Will non-existentially indexed denial prevent entrance?

What significance would all this have for the Church?  Well, that is a huge topic.  But Orthodoxy has taught me to believe that although we know where the Holy Spirit is (in the Church) we do not know where it isn’t. –What the Church does is to help us to live a good life, a genuinely good life, to live in imitation of Christ, deliberate imitation, and imitation of Christ truly understood.

Living a genuinely good life is far harder than we reckon it to be, I think, far harder; a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  Both inside the Church and outside it, people underestimate how hard it is.  Mea maxima culpa.  And it is not just hard to live a genuinely good life, it is just as hard to figure out what one would be, what it would look like.  Especially on your own, especially in situ.  ”Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leads to life, and few there be that find it.”  Travelling the way is hard, yes; but finding it is just as hard.

I know there is much to complain about here–but I am just thinking aloud, quasserting, not asserting.

Completed Draft of New Talk

March 19, 2013 By in Kant, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Plato, Self-knowledge, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Since I posted bits of this already–its first part yesterday and its last part a while back–I thought I would go ahead and post the whole thing.  I find writing talks for audiences that will include both philosophers and non-philosophers especially hard.  I wish I were better at it.

Philosophical Investigations and Three Kinds of Illusion:  A Talk

Dick Moran Keeps it Real

November 26, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Kierkegaard, writing, skepticism, Kant, availability/disposability, Self-knowledge, reading, teaching, history of ordinary language philosophy, education Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine.  The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.

As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.

Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.

Literary Rigor–Re-blogged from Josh Blog (7 Nov ’12)

November 12, 2012 By in availability/disposability, education, Self-knowledge, writing Leave a comment

Scholars say that an author – usually of a philosophical text with literary dimensions – ‘invites’ us to do this or that, think of this or that, when they wish to treat the text as possessed of a sort of rigor, but also to avoid having to show how this rigor is essentially a matter of the literary dimensions of the text. This is like receiving an invitation, not accepting it, but passing it on to someone else.

‘We’ve been invited!’

‘Oh, how nice. Are you going?’

‘Well you’ve been invited! We all have!’

‘But what about you?’

I would like to say that this can’t be done halfway. To acknowledge the text’s rigor is to accept the invitation. The troublesome question should be, can it be accepted at all if one’s response is any less literary than the original? And more troublesome: how will one make one’s response just as literary, without loss of rigor?

Link

Descartes’ Meditations: Seeking Purity of Mind

October 17, 2012 By in Self-knowledge, skepticism Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

I have been teaching Descartes’ Meditations in my Intro class.  It is the first time in many years that I have worked past the Second Meditation with any care.

Among the many things that strike me–and I am of course not claiming original insight here–is the way in which Descartes’ epistemological struggle runs parallel to spiritual struggle.  Like the acknowledged sinner, Descartes repents, and, in repenting, seeks for a true change of mind.  To do this he must, again like the sinner, conduct an agonizing examination of conscience, testing himself at every turn.  He makes but fitful progress:  lessons learnt are soon forgotten; old habits die very hard.  But he keeps at it, keeps salting his beliefs with the fire of doubt, and eventually he purifies himself.  He stands naked, vunerable–apparently alone.  The purifications of doubt, have, however, done their work–blessed are the pure in heart, in mind, for they shall see God.  And Descartes does.  He finds that he is not alone:  God is with him.  And, it turns out, God has been with him all along:  though Descartes has been wandering through a valley dark, no evil demon need he fear.  God’s shepherd’s crook comforts him.  And, so, in the end, much like Job, Descartes gets back what he had before (at least, what he really had).  God prepares a table for Descartes before the face of the evil demon, and Descartes’ epistemological cup runs over.

Psalm 36 (Mother Maria, trans.)

October 15, 2012 By in Mother Maria, poetry, prayer, religion, Self-knowledge, virtue and vice Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

An oracle for the impious
Is the sin in the deep of his heart.
He regards himself
With an eye too flattering
To discover his guilt
And hate his transgression.

Perfidy and misdeed
He plots upon his bed,
He sets his steps
Upon an evil course,
Heedless of his sin.

The words of his mouth
Are fraud and deceit,
He can no more act
Wisely or well.

…

There, see how the wicked are fallen,
They can rise no more.

Cartesian Witness Protection–Alphonso Lingis

September 11, 2012 By in Philosophy, Self-knowledge Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

For the modern philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes, our immediate and basic experience of subjectivity occurs in an internal or reflective experience  whereby I discover, by a sort of turning back of my own mental attention upon itself, that I am able to see, immediately, incontestably, that I exist at least as a stream of conscious states.  Thought discovers that it always has this power to attend to itself; the mind has the ontological structure of existence-for-itself.  For consciousness to exist is for it to be continually aware of itself, to be its own witness.

This reflexive experience is immediate and non-discursive; let us call it immanent reflection.  There is an eclipse of the body functions and their interactions with the world; thought experiences itself directly, without the interposition of the body or the world, and even comes to wonder if it could then exist without the body and without the world.  In turning back reflexively upon itself it seems to form a circuit with itself such that it not only becomes its own witness, but closes itself to outside observation.  Its essential nature, which is to exist reflexively for-itself, is not mediated by anything extended or sensibly observable; the mind seems, then, not only to be its own witness, but to be its sole possible witness.

Three Thoughts on Job

September 6, 2012 By in Job, prayer, religion, Self-knowledge 5 Comments

From an old notebook:

Job’s confused.  God’s not helping.  God’s making it worse.  So too the comforters.  (Carrion comforters!)  They worsen Job’s confusion.  It’s not bad enough that he’s wrestling confusedly with God; his comforters want to wrestle too:  against Job, for God, as if they were members of a Divine tag-team.

Job speaks out his misery.  What he says is of his pain just because it expresses it.  He is venting his misery more than he is accusing God.  But his comforters will not hear his misery; they hear only the accusing.

Job knows what his comforters know.  He knows the glory and the power of God.  But he knows more than his comforters know.  He knows God’s power and glory in a way that does not deny that power and glory.  Even more, he knows his innocence.  Job knows that God knows it too.  But now it looks like Job knows too much, more anyway than he can bear, for how could a God of such power and glory and knowledge as his tolerate Job’s misery?

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