Part 3:
Unknowing, or Perceiving the Invisible
NT. I have
always found it bewildering how one’s words and actions can be misinterpreted
by others (and by oneself? – now there’s a question to ponder), no matter how
clear and transparent one has attempted to be. Our
discussion on agnosticism is a case in point. I thought I had made it quite
clear that, by “agnosticism”, I mean the view that one should neither believe
nor disbelieve in God, that one should suspend judgement. This idea is part of
a venerable tradition of skepticism, going back to the ancient Pyrrhonians such
as Sextus Empiricus, who argued that, since the contrary positions and
arguments of philosophers cannot be resolved, the only rational response is to
“suspend judgement”, to practice “epochê”. Agnosticism of this sort has nothing
to do with what you call “existential agnosticism”, where one does not know
whether or not one believes. (Is such an idea even coherent? If I believe
something, then does it not necessarily follow that I know that I believe it?)
Also, I am aware of the form of agnosticism you dub “epistemological
agnosticism”, which goes back to T.H. Huxley, the very person who introduced
the word “agnosticism”, taking it from the
apostle Paul’s mention of the altar to “the Unknown God” (Acts 17:23). But,
again, I thought I had clearly distanced myself from this understanding of
agnosticism, and that is why I went to the lengths I did in defining the term
by way of belief (not knowledge) and the withholding of judgement.
You are right to lampoon and criticize the lazy dogmatism
of some religious believers (though I don’t think that dogmatism is the special
preserve of the religious, as the New Atheist movement has shown). But you seem
to be creating a red herring with your advocacy of agnosticism. First of all,
there is no reason why claims to knowledge must
result in hubris, intolerance or violence. Many people, for example, claim to
know that Christianity is true, and yet they are tolerant of other religious
groups, respecting the freedom of conscience and religious expression of all people.
It is simply implausible to think that, if one purports to know the truth on
some matter, then one will irresistibly be drawn to fanaticism and
fundamentalism. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if one defines
“knowledge” in the way you seem to do – viz., as something that is
self-evident, incontestable or based on irrefutable proof – then of course no or very little knowledge
will be possible for poor, existing individuals like us, thus making even more room
for “faith” (whether natural or supernatural). But the problem here, as I
mentioned previously, lies with the standard of proof that you demand. Just as
there is no point throwing dust in the air and then complaining that you cannot
see, so there is little point in raising the bar of proof exceedingly high and
then complaining that no proof or evidence is available.
Continuing from this latter point, your standard of proof
is again looming on the horizon when you turn to the question of whether
certain commonly held beliefs should count as “knowledge”. In your opinion, for
example, the belief that the world has existed for more than 10 minutes passes
the knowledge-test in virtue of being
self-evidently true, whereas the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow fails
this test in virtue of lacking
self-evidence and being open to some degree of doubt. But note that my
willingness to count these beliefs as instances of knowledge has nothing to do
with “self-evidence”. Indeed, the view that knowledge requires self-evidence
and incontestable proof is a very limited conception of knowledge, one that is
modelled on a mathematical account of knowledge that has little application to
areas outside of the formal sciences. (Your claim, later on, that “it is
self-evident that 9/11 happened” suggests that you have a somewhat unorthodox
understanding of self-evidence. The notion of self-evidence is, of course, a
philosophically problematic one, but it is usually thought that a proposition
is self-evident when, as soon as one understands or grasps the proposition, one
can just see that it is true. To defer to some typical examples, understanding
the propositions “2 + 2 = 4” and “If Socrates is a philosopher, and all
philosophers corrupt the youth, then Socrates corrupts the youth” is all one
needs to do in order to apprehend their truth. The situation is complicated if
one admits that self-evidence is not a guarantee of truth, or that self-evidence
should be relativized, so that what is self-evident to one person need not be
self-evident to another person. It is clear, in any case, that self-evident
propositions have a radically different status from standard empirical or a posteriori statements, such as “Terrorists
destroyed the Twin Towers on September 11”.)
You go on to state that, although we agree that at least
some commonsense beliefs should count as knowledge, I “still demand proof”. But
I’m not the one who thinks that these beliefs can and should be proven to be
true. I’m simply asking you to make good on your promise that you “can easily
prove that [you and I exist], in various ways.” You seem to have had a change
of heart. You now describe the attempt to prove these things as “ridiculous”
and a piece of “sophistry”, and you don’t want to have any part in this. But
why then did you say that you could easily prove in various ways that you and I
actually exist? Was this itself a
piece of sophistry?
I might add that your gloss on “any person” as “any
reasonable person” is of no help, since it seeks to explain obscura per obscurius, hoping to
understand one ambiguous and contested set of terms (“self-evidence”,
“incontestable proof”) by way of an even more highly contested term (“reasonable
person”). Who counts as a “reasonable person”? What are the limits of
“reasonableness”? Many highly sophisticated Buddhist philosophers reject the
belief that any distinct individual that could be labelled “you” or “I” truly
exists. Are such philosophers thereby condemned as “unreasonable”? Other
Buddhist philosophers, those belonging to the Yogacara (“Mind Only”) school,
believe that the external world we perceive does not really exist. On this view, the world has not existed for more than
10 minutes because it has never existed in the first place – the world is ‘mind only’, somewhat analogous to
a shared hallucination. Again, should this view be dismissed as “unreasonable”
simply because it strikes us (that is, Western-minded philosophers) as
counter-intuitive or contrary to commonsense?
Your notion of self-evidence is again in play when you
discuss the hypothetical case of video footage being found on the life of
Jesus. Such footage, you claim, would render traditional Nicene christology
self-evidently true, or would “constitute incontestable evidence to any
reasonable person” – at least if the footage showed Jesus performing various
miracles and recorded him proclaiming that he was the Second Person of the
Trinity. The problem, however, is that this ignores a cardinal tenet of
hermeneutics: our reading of a text (and similarly our understanding of what we
see, whether it be mediated by video footage or not) is always underwritten by
the presuppositions or “prejudices” that we bring to bear on the text (or video
footage). It may appear to us from the video footage that Jesus is walking on
water, or that Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God, but a convinced atheist
could dismiss the purported miracles as chicanery and the claims to divinity as
self-delusion and mental instability. Even if one accepted the occurrence of
the miracles and the divine claims as historically substantiated, the interpretation of these events will
always remain contested, as the history of Christianity clearly demonstrates.
This is not to say that there cannot be a correct
interpretation of anything. It is merely to highlight the futility of
searching for pure, unadulterated, self-evident and incontestable facts.
Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, such as D.Z.
Phillips, like to put this by saying that coming to know God is not like coming
to know, say, the chemical composition of the planet Saturn. In other words,
coming to believe in God involves not so much an extension of one’s store of
factual knowledge, but a deepening of one’s understanding and appreciation of certain
aspects of life. Although this trades on a dubious opposition between knowledge
and understanding (or fact and value), there is an important insight lurking
here, and that is that God cannot be conceived as one more object or being
among others, as a particular thing or item in the universe. But it is
precisely this anthropomorphic conception of divinity that you seem unable to
relinquish, as is evident by your claim that the Second Coming is something
that could be captured on CNN. Your atheism, as laudable as it is, has yet to
purify your theological vocabulary to the extent that talk about God no longer
resembles talk about a superhuman being who can be singled out, comprehended,
(psycho)analyzed and judged – much like the protagonist of a film, whether produced
by Hollywood or CNN (the difference becoming less and less visible). Alas, you
are not alone in this.
If I can briefly venture into more speculative territory,
I wonder whether this penchant for photographic realism as the surest path to
knowledge and truth is merely a symptom of a more pervasive but uncritical
acceptance of modern (and postmodern) ways of understanding the world. A more
ancient (and pre-modern) view is that our knowledge is broadened and deepened
when it includes things which cannot be seen and cannot be articulated (at
least clearly and distinctly). On this view, which runs from ancient Greece to
medieval Paris and Byzantium, the wondrous beauty of the creation is a sign of the
love and beauty of the transcendent Creator: in perceiving the former we can
come to see and know the latter.
Of course, ‘knowledge’ in this context is not
scientifically demonstrable or logically irrefutable, but an apophatic kind of
knowledge that is predicated on ‘unknowing’ or a docta ignorantia, a ‘learned ignorance’. As Gregory of Nyssa beautifully
states in his Life of Moses (2:163), “the
true vision and the true knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not
seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is
everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.”
Reflecting its Platonic heritage, the Eastern Orthodox
tradition has usually construed the close connection between Creator and
creature in terms of participation. The
basic presupposition of this view, as of all Christian anthropology, is that
human beings have been created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). It
follows from this that human beings are not autonomous and self-sufficient, but
are truly human only insofar as they exist or live in God. In other words, we
are made for fellowship with God, for as Augustine stated at the beginning of
his Confessions, “You made us for
yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you” (I.1). This
notion found expression in the Greek patristic tradition in terms of the idea
of “participation in God” (metousia theou), where such participation is
conceived as essential to human being. We, and along with us the entire
physical world, participate in God, who is both origin and telos, the source of
our being and the end that we desire and are drawn to. However, human life
conceived as participation in God is not a static matter, but a challenge to
grow and progress – by means of a synergy (or cooperation) of divine grace and
human freedom – in the divine life and energies, without end (Gregory of Nyssa,
again, developed this beautifully by way of his idea of epectasis). This, of course, brings us to the notion of theosis or deification, which occupies a
central place in Orthodox thought and liturgy. We are called to be “partakers
of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), to become by grace what God is by nature.
It is participation in the divine life which confers
ultimate value and meaning to all things, human and non-human. But this is not
the kind of participation that is limited to a few hours on Sunday morning,
perhaps with some additional prayer time and other pious activities during the
week. Rather, it is participation on an ontological
level, pervading all aspects of our existence, leaving nothing untouched. All
dimensions of life – not only the incorporeal but also the corporeal, not only
our language about God but all language and discourse – are thereby
transfigured and saturated with meaning. But to contrapose, if a transcendent
signified is made inaccessible or indeterminate (as your agnosticism seems to
entail), then there can be no meaning, or meaning itself is rendered
meaningless (something we merely create in our own image and likeness). As
Catherine Pickstock puts it in After
Writing, language has a “doxological character”, in the sense that
“language exists primarily, and in the end only has meaning as, the praise of
the divine” (p.xiii). This is why, for Pickstock, the language of liturgy
represents the true consummation of philosophy. Like the Radical Orthodox, many
contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians, from Alexander Schmemann to John
Zizioulas, have also highlighted eucharistic communion and liturgy as the locus
of truth and meaning. The being of all creaturely phenomena is grounded in
participation in and praise of the divine – and praise or doxology is precisely
what liturgy is. Correcting Derrida, outside
liturgy there is nothing.
MM. I
think the world really is in trouble when we – the two of us – can’t even agree
on the meaning of ‘agnosticism’ and its relevance for belief. But I’ll try once
more: ‘agnosticism’, ‘strictly speaking’, means without gnosis, without knowledge. Let’s go to an objective reference; the OED states that an agnostic is “One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and
behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.” In
other words, the agnostic does not know whether
there is any divinity. An agnostic may still believe or refuse to believe. When
it comes to religion, this does not necessarily mean that the believer should
suspend their beliefs – but they should suspend the belief that their belief is
knowledge. Anything else is just pseudo-faith. Now, many believers believe humbly,
but you certainly can’t deny that the world needs more of this humility when it
comes to religion. This leads to my point about the need for more agnosticism and
the need for more atheism – yes, yes – precisely because the world is so
dogmatic, so viciously dogmatic. Sure, Christians have in the main stopped
killing each other and other believers in the name of ‘God’, but this is still
going on. Consider that spectacular event on September 11: thousands of people
were killed by Islamic fundamentalists. (Of course, other factors were
involved, such as political motivation, but religion – religious dogmatism,
hatred – was a key factor.) Hence, when you claim that “there is no reason why
claims to knowledge must result in
hubris”, you’re right in an idealistic, optimistic sense, but the history of
humanity has shown that people kill each other when they disagree. Sure, things
have come a long way. People are more ‘tolerant’ in the West these days, but, globally,
people are still being murdered in the name of ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ or whatever.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.
Let’s also return one last time to your continued
hyper-Cartesianism: your continued insistence for me to prove that you and I
exist and that this exchange is real isn’t contributing to the renewal of
philosophy’s good name. Your hyper-skepticism is all-the-more perplexing
considering your apparent negativity towards agnosticism and atheism, and your
seemingly enthusiastic avowal of orthodoxy. You seem sure that the divine exists,
and yet you require evidence for the most obvious of truths. I find this
perplexing. The sophistry continues with the mystification of yet another
self-evident truth: the ‘reasonable person’. Sure, there are degrees of
rationality – we could get caught up in all sorts of qualifications and nuances
(some people are more reasonable than others; rational beings are always
exposed to irrationality; etc.) which would just take up too much precious time
– but I consider you and I to be reasonable beings. I consider a lot of people
reasonable. I think reasonable people would accept my arguments – begrudgingly,
perhaps, because we don’t like being proven wrong or have our faith exposed for
what it truly is – but we accept what is reasonable because it’s reasonable.
You also use the very fashionable tactic of citing
Buddhist philosophers and their dissolution of the ‘I’. I don’t buy into that
either. I believe the self is multiple, somewhat ‘divided’ (I don’t like that
word that much because it implies an original Unity), it’s fluid, and so on,
but I think there is some kind of continuous ‘self’ – it may be socially
constructed (though I think it’s a combination of socialization and biological
impulses), but there’s still a self. Highly problematic? Sure. Elusive and
abyssal? Yes, yes. And even if there
‘really’ isn’t such a thing as an ‘I’, existentially
we all behave as if we are I’s. Much
Western ‘philosophy’ has bought into the idea of the self’s ‘dissolution’. I
just don’t buy into the ‘end of the self’ – just another example of the
shoddiness of ‘philosophy’, of its sophistry, its utter irrelevance to life, its uselessness, its betrayal of wisdom.
‘Philosophy’ does not love or befriend wisdom – which is its original meaning
and perhaps its original ambition – but ‘philosophy’ is – or has become –wisdom’s
enemy, its traitor. It’s time we restore philosophy’s good name, and we can
start by abandoning sophistry, hyper-Cartesianism, the dissolved self, etc.
You make a remark with which I wholeheartedly agree: “God [if there is any, I would add] cannot be
conceived as one more object or being among others, as a particular thing or
item in the universe.” But this very nice statement is complicated for
Christians, is it not? For Christianity – especially trinitarian Christianity,
to which you appear to subscribe – is precisely
anthropomorphic insofar as Jesus – who was a human, a being – is also,
somehow, puzzlingly, bewilderingly divine. And vice versa. If there is to be a
Second Coming, wouldn’t Christ be perceptible to humans as some kind of being,
as some kind of thing? I’m not saying that divinity is an object but we humans
must surely receive it – or perhaps more accurately: perceive it – as some kind
of ‘thing’. Let’s expand this notion a little; think of the ‘burning bush’: the
divine was not a burning bush but Yahweh purportedly appeared in some kind of
physically apprehensible form. If a CNN crew were up there on that mountain, perhaps
that would have averted a lot of atrocities, such as the slaughtering of the
Canaanites to make room for the Chosen People. It would’ve been great if their
‘chosenness’ was globally broadcast – with all the requisite evidence, such as
footage of burning bushes and divided seas. I only have a “penchant for
photographic realism” when it comes to the slaughter of millions based on the
‘perceptions’ or opinions of the ancients.
You contrast my ‘photographic realism’ with an
alternative: “A more ancient (and pre-modern) view is that our knowledge is
broadened and deepened when it includes things which cannot be seen and cannot
be articulated (at least clearly and distinctly).” This all sounds nice and
romantic, but it is precisely the problem at the heart of the exchange. How can
we universalize that which cannot be seen or articulated? – even if seen or
articulated vaguely? Why should I accept and live by that which is unreasonable
or unverifiable? This kind of mystification lies at the heart of history: one
person/tribe claims that they have the correct version of ‘things unseen’ – deities,
especially – and then they thrust their ‘truth of things unseen’ onto the rest
of us. If you experience something which cannot be validated but insist that I
must be sacrificed or circumcised or march in a Crusade or crack a whip during
an Inquisition or spark a match during a witch-hunt or fly a plane into a skyscraper,
should I then go ahead and do it? This is precisely the tragic story of
history. That’s why I’m so darn insistent with evidence, with reasoning, with
Reason. That’s why I’m an unabashed child of the Enlightenment – or perhaps
more accurately: a champion of a neo-Enlightenment – and why I love the fact
that I am becoming more rational, more open, more humble, more agnostic. You
cited earlier the New Atheists – they’re just reverse fundamentalists. Hell,
I’m still a believer. But I cannot claim that my belief – as tentative and
minimal and progressive and provisional as it is – is knowledge. It’s a feeling, a hope. Wishful thinking – that, too.
(What’s wrong with wishing? Yes, yes.) But the history of humanity is a history
of powerful, persuasive individuals leading a herd of ignorant peoples. Now, it
seems you finally come around to my position by referring to ‘unknowing’ or
‘learned ignorance’. ‘Learned ignorance’ is a good thing. Like Socratic
ignorance, epistemic humility, agnosticism and a little bit of atheism – these
are all good things. Divine things. It’s also true that the men you cite – Gregory
of Nyssa and Augustine – exhibited moments of docta ignorantia, but their writings were, on the whole, arrogant,
puritanical, sexist. They contributed to that persistent plague called
‘orthodoxy’.
NT.
“Why can’t you see,” Anomius
whispered to him, “that there was once when the Son was
not.”
Dusk had fallen, and
only the two of them were left inside the church building, amongst the
flickering candlelights beside the icons. Anomius continued:
“We all agree that God
the Father is the only truly unique being, the absolute other, and the only one
who can be named Unbegotten and Unoriginate. But if we agree on this much, then
surely we can also agree that the Son, because he is begotten, cannot be of the
same essence as the Father. Indeed, the Son is a creature who has been called
into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning. And even though the Son
is more exalted as a creature than any human being, his glory is nonetheless
infinitely transcended by that of the Father. Do you follow me?”
Gregory sat quietly and
reflectively, before answering after a few moments:
“This, my friend, is to
undermine entirely our hope for salvation. For if the Word who became flesh and
dwelt amongst us was not truly God, of the same essence as the Father, then how
could he reconcile us to the Father? How could a mere creature, even a highly
exalted one, heal and redeem the fallen creation? We were created out of
nothing, and we were rapidly descending into nothingness. The only one who
could put a stop to this descent is God. And he did so by descending to humanity, so that humanity
can rise up to God. Surely you see this?”
“No I don’t,” Anomius briskly
replied in a confident tone. “In any case, why should I accept what you and the
bishops around you say, when my reason assures me that my view is the correct
one, the one that is in line with the Scriptures and with sound philosophical
principles?”
“You raise a difficult
problem, Anomius. But beware, for it is not our own reason and our own
arguments that count most. The ultimate reference point is not our works and
achievements, but the free workings of the Holy Spirit in the life of the
Church. Arrogance is the result of placing ourselves above this cloud of
witnesses and presuming that we, and perhaps only we, have privileged access to
the truth.”
“But you also are
presuming to know the truth, so why is your presumption any more justified than
mine?”
“Truth is not the
objectified and conceptualized truth of the Greeks. Rather, truth is life, and
life is communion. This is what it means to say that the Son belongs to God’s
substance. It means that God’s being, and indeed the ultimate character of
being itself, the essence of life and truth, is to be found in communion, in
relationship with the other. And so anyone who chooses isolation from the other
is inevitably brought up against death and dissolution – and this is hell.”
“What rubbish! The wine
and incense have finally gone to your head and made you lose your mind!”
“Did you know that in
hell it is not possible to see anyone face-to-face? Each person is fixed to the
back of another, and so no-one can see anyone else’s face.”
“That’s interesting,
but what’s your point?”
“What is it that
can hide from us as nothing else can the face of the Other?”