Greetings Tanya, Platt, everyone,
Platt wrote:
Sorry, can't help you except point to the New Testament which is not
philosophy, of course, but revelation. Maybe this is the place to develop
such a philosophy. The first step is to define the term. That in itself
could take many weeks before agreement is reached. But it sure would be fun.
~~~~
This paragraph is just so provocative (in a DQ way) for me, that I have to
give a substantial response. So apologies for the EXTREME (!) length of this
response but, from my point of view there are such deep contradictions
embedded in what Platt wrote that I hope it would be fruitful to unpack
them - and I also hope it might contribute to the fun.
So here goes.
"The first step is to define the term." I interpret one of the main messages
of ZMM (especially part IV) as being a refutation of the need to define
things in every circumstance, that in fact the desire to define can in
important cases be radically counterproductive - that is how I understand
the 'victory' of rhetoric over dialectic. Now I may be biassed in my
interpretation of this as a result of my studies of Wittgenstein (my
principal philosophical interest), who I think says very much the same
thing, but because the constructive part of this post depends on
understanding Wittgenstein's view of language, I'll spell out his view in a
bit more detail. I promise to bring the discussion back to love and the MOQ
eventually, and I also promise to try my hardest to avoid jargon.
Wittgenstein's underlying idea is actually astonishingly simple, it just
runs completely counter to standard (including SOM) thinking, so people who
are steeped in the standard models don't really 'get it'. One last bit of
preamble - Pirsig says different things to Wittgenstein, they are not the
same and there are places where they disagree. The relationship between them
reminds me of what Phaedrus says about - I think - Poincare, as someone who
was climbing the same mountain, but from a completely different starting
point, and stops at just the other side of where he had stopped. But on with
the show:
Wittgenstein once said 'It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a
great philosopher. Because when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and
people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn't satisfied but
wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and
its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want.'
Wittgenstein had in mind a passage such as this one, from Socrates' first
speech in the Phaedrus: 'in every discussion there is only one way of
beginning if one is to come to a sound conclusion, and that is to know what
one is discussing... Let us then begin by agreeing upon a definition'. In
the conclusion of the Phaedrus Socrates restates this: 'a man must know the
truth about any subject that he deals with; he must be able to define it.'
For Wittgenstein it is this emphasis upon definability in words which is the
source of all our metaphysical illusions, illusions which 'lie as deep in us
as the forms of our language'. Wittgenstein's view, in contrast, is that "in
most cases, but not in all, the meaning of a word lies in its use in the
language game".
Wittgenstein's positive philosophical achievement lies in an understanding
of language which is not predicated on this Socratic perspective. The
easiest way to get a quick grasp of Wittgenstein's view of language is to
talk about the difference between what he calls surface grammar and depth
grammar. Surface grammar is the explicit content and form of a sentence: the
division into nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. It is what we normally
think of as grammar. Depth grammar is the function that a sentence plays
within the life of the person speaking the sentence. In other words, an
investigation of the depth grammar of a word will indicate the use that the
words have. Think of the expression 'I need some water'. This seems quite
straightforward, but depending upon the context and the emphasis placed upon
different words, it could have all sorts of different senses. For example,
it could be a straightforward description of thirst, or an expression of the
need for an ingredient in making bread, or preparing water colours. So far,
so straightforward. But think of something more interesting. Perhaps it is
an insult: I am a mechanic, and I am working on fixing a car radiator. My
assistant knows that I need some fluid, but passes me some left over orange
squash: 'I need some water' - where the expression also means: why are you
being so stupid? In other words, the surface grammar of a comment may be the
same, but the depth grammar is radically different dependent on the
situation at hand. For Wittgenstein, true understanding came not from the
search for definitions but from grammatical investigation - ie, looking at
real situations and seeing what is being discussed.
Now, for Wittgenstein, the point of this grammatical investigation was that
you achieved clarity about any questions that are at issue. If there is a
philosophical discussion, then the way to proceed is to conduct a
grammatical investigation of the words and concepts that are in dispute, to
look at how different words are used in their normal context. For
Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are the result of conceptual confusion
and to meet these problems what is needed is conceptual clarification. The
task of the philosopher is carefully to depict the relationships between
different concepts, in other words, to investigate their grammar. The
concepts are the ones used in our everyday language, and it is the fact that
the concepts *are* used in our language that gives them their importance. A
grammatical investigation in the Wittgensteinian sense is one that looks at
how words are used within a lived context. Hence there is the need to
investigate the nature of "language games" and "forms of life", which are
the usual phrases which you hear when people talk about Wittgenstein. This
is a method, and it is with this method that Wittgenstein's true genius
lies. In contrast to almost all philosophers within the Western tradition
Wittgenstein was not concerned with providing answers to particular
questions. Rather, he wished to gain clarity about the question at issue,
in order therefore to dissolve the controversy. He wrote: 'Philosophy can in
no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only
describe it.'
An example might help to make his view clearer. A traditional metaphysical
question might be 'What is time'? We want to know what the word means, and
because the word is a noun we look to see what it is that is referred to.
Yet there is nothing to which we can point and say 'That is time'. Thus
philosophers are puzzled, and trying to answer questions such as this is the
classic job of a philosopher, or more precisely, a metaphysician. For
Wittgenstein, though, the question is without sense. Wittgenstein would say,
why do we assume that there must be something to which the word refers? Look
at how the word is actually used in our language, and see if that enlightens
your consideration. Thus, when we look at the contexts in which we use the
sentence 'Time flew by' they would tend to describe moments when we are
particularly absorbed in a piece of work, or where we are with friends
having an enjoyable evening. The phrase derives its meaning from that
context. To then ask, 'What is time?' would be absurd. What we must always
have at the forefront of our minds is the organic basis of the language that
we use. Language has evolved for particular purposes, it has various
distinct uses, and there is no necessity that there is a clear and logical
basis for it. One of Wittgenstein's best images is to suggest looking at
language as like a tool box, with different tools to perform different
functions. Why should there be something which all tools have in common? And
why are you so concerned to find it? Wittgenstein is very concerned to ease
the philosophical mind away from its tendency for abstract theorising, and
to focus it on everyday details, to see what language is actually doing in a
given situation. (To come down from the mountain of abstract reasoning, into
the valley of life, to misquote Pirsig's image)
To me, the question of love is is the 'important case' par excellence, and
if we start down the path of trying to define love, then we are already on
the wrong path. I would suggest that, following Pirsig as much as
Wittgenstein, we look instead at what is going on when people use the
language of love, ideally by taking the best exemplars of what are commonly
accepted as loving people, and seeing what they do with it - hence my
profound agreement with Platt pointing towards the New Testament as a place
to start.
Now, having said what I wanted to say about Wittgenstein, it's time for
something constructive about the nature of religious belief. For me
(speaking as a fully paid up member of a religious sect ;-) ) Christian
doctrine *is* the philosophy of love. But that requires more explanation.
I think most of the participants in this forum would have sympathy with the
argument that Pirsig makes, first in Zen and then in Lila more
systematically, that there is something wrong with present-day Western
scientific and technological culture. Scientific culture claims to be
value-free; and Pirsig offers a beautiful route out of the problems which
that dominant view has created. Science was born out of a political and
religious context - principally what are traditionally called the 'wars of
religion' of seventeenth century Europe. One of the consequences of those
historical events was that 'enthusiasm' was greeted with great suspicion. It
was believed that those who were so caught up with their religious views
that they 'enthused' about them were dangerous fanatics, who had to be
opposed. The cardinal virtues were now tolerance and rationality. (Any of
this ringing some bells, by the way, given present day events?) This came
through most in the work of John Locke. Locke's principal innovation was his
argument that, in order to resolve these disagreements we should resort to
the light of Reason. He wrote:
'since traditions vary so much the world over and men's opinions are so
obviously oposed to one another and mutually destructive, and that not only
among different nations but in one and the same state - for each single
opinion we learn from others becomes a tradition - and finally since
everybody contends so fiercely for his own opinion and demands that he be
believed, it would plainly be impossible - supposing tradition alone lays
down the ground of our duty - to find out what that tradition is, or to pick
out truth from among such a variety, because no ground can be assigned why
one man of the old generation, rather than another maintaining quite the
opposite, should be credited with the authority of tradition or be more
worthy of trust; except it be that reason discovers a difference in the
things themselves that are transmitted, and embraces one opinion while
rejecting another, just because it detects more evidence recognizable by the
light of nature for the one than for the other. Such a procedure, surely, is
not the same as to believe in tradition, but is an attempt to form a
considered opinion about things themselves; and this brings all the
authority of tradition to naught'
Locke fleshed out a practical programme for how our beliefs should be
guided. The following aspects are the most crucial:
1. we have a moral responsibility for what we believe,
2. we should apportion our beliefs according to the evidence available to
us, and
3. in all things we should let reason be our guide.
Put positively, the beliefs that we can hold should be those which can be
rationally demonstrated, either by appeal to self-evident first principles,
or to empirical evidence. Beliefs must, in either case, be shown to have a
rational foundation. Where a rational foundation is lacking then we are
subject to unreason - to the excesses of enthusiasm that had led to the
cultural crisis of the 17th Century.
Now I want to pick out two aspects of this project for criticism. The first
relates to the nature of religion, the second to the flaw in the scientific
world view.
What is religious belief? (I'll talk here only about Christianity - I hope
that Rasheed and Jonathan in particular will forgive me for that; it's the
only one that I understand from the 'inside', but I'm confident that my
points would be accepted by people in other faiths, even if not by all.) The
secular world has a clear view of what it considers religious belief to be.
One of the most outspoken critics of Christianity in the West is Richard
Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene and other works about the theory of
evolution, and someone who (possibly not consciously) is clearly following
Locke. He writes:
'Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means
blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The
story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so
that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded
evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency
to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that
they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The
meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious
expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.'
And in a footnote to this passage he expands:
'But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to
believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of
supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would
be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.I don'
t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith
are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no
way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of
faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed.'
According to the Dawkins conception, then, faith is 'blind', and not open to
rational debate. The distinguishing characteristic of a Christian (or other
religious believer) is their belief in certain things, for example that
Jesus is the Son of God. This belief is something that is held independently
of any grounds that can be rationally demonstrated (at least to Dawkins'
satisfaction). For Dawkins the debate between an atheist and a religious
believer is therefore about what can or cannot be believed by an intelligent
and aware person. He would argue that there are no credible grounds for
believing in the Christian religion and that therefore one should not be a
Christian believer (or, at least, the justification for such a belief would
not lie in the truth of the matter, but rather in something like social
utility or personal psychological need). The secular world therefore sees
religious belief as being primarily about certain propositions, certain
claims about the nature of the world.
It seems to me that this is the voice of SOM thinking, which Pirsig and
Wittgenstein both dismantle, albeit from different directions. To condense
quite a long argument, religious belief is NOT a matter of accepting
propositions. Let's go back to Wittgenstein's view of language - words don't
necessarily refer to something (they aren't in need of being defined)
because we understand the meaning of the word from its use in the language;
in other words, what are we doing when we use certain words. In this
context, 'The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean - but,
rather, what you mean.' For Wittgenstein (and for me) 'Christianity is not a
doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to
the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in
human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair
and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for
instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss
anyone may want to put on it.' In other words, when religious believers use
religious language (eg doctrines) they are actually *doing* something with
them - they are not offering descriptions of an outer reality. As
Wittgenstein puts it, 'I believe that one of the things Christianity says is
that sound doctrines are all useless, that you have to change your life (or
the direction of your life)...the point is that a sound doctrine need not
take hold of you, you can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription.
But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction',
or, in another place, 'Christianity is not based on a historical truth;
rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But
not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical
narrative, rather: believe through thick and thin, which you can do only as
a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitude
to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different
place in your life for it.' To come to the crunch - a religious statement
(eg God made the heavens and the earth) does not function in the same way
that a scientific statement does (eg the universe started with a big bang).
As a summary (and my favourite quotation from Wittgenstein): 'A theology
which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and
outlaws others, does not make anything clearer...It gesticulates with words,
as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to
express it. Practice gives the words their sense.'
So: the western scientific outlook systematically misunderstands the nature
of religious belief. Onto the second of the flaws (again, something which
Pirsig deals with). The scientific outlook completely devalues what might be
called the emotional realm. I'm sure you're familiar with what Pirsig says,
so I'll put it in my own words:
Scientific method is built upon the exclusion of the individual viewpoint,
and in particular, upon the exclusion of the individual's emotional
reactions. Science is concerned with providing knowledge that is 'objective'
and 'value free'. The ideal is that of disengaged reason (following Locke)
which alone can provide a lucid analysis of the way that things really are.
Of course, this is impossible, as scientists have now discovered. If you
exclude the observer from consideration then you are rigging the experiment.
More fundamentally, the act of excluding emotions means that the possibility
of finding value in something is intrinsically excluded. The idea that pure
reason is a path to truth is an old one, but it is no longer credible. In
particular, we now know that our emotions are linked to our reason in a much
more fundamental way than hitherto suspected (see my earlier post about
Damasio, in June sometime I think). We are embodied intelligences, and we
cannot function without the body and the emotions which reside therein. The
emotions actually play a role in our reasoning capacity. (Which is why the
search for artificial intelligence is in one sense deeply misguided;
intelligence as a reasoning capacity might be duplicated, but intelligence
as something which might provide something separate to our own is tied up
with the importance of emotions and our bodily life. AI will therefore
depend on the prospects for artifical life). It is the difference between
meaning and knowledge (knowledge is meaningless as it stands, it requires
emotional engagement to become meaning, and as science excludes the
emotions, all it can produce is meaningless knowledge). If, as I believe,
religious language is primarily concerned with value, then there is no
surprise that the dominance of science has resulted in undermining the
structures of religious belief, for the method of science rules the subject
matter of religion out of court from the beginning.
In saying this, I do not mean to argue that the intellectual stance is
without value. At the heart of science, and also wider academic endeavour,
is the conception that any claims might prove to be wrong. It is therefore
ultimately a holy activity, because (in theory) there can never be an idol
constructed by science. Of course, scientist themselves fall short of this
ideal, and therefore promote certain viewpoints as definitive (eg Dennett
and Dawkins on Darwinism). There is a necessity for a reengagement of
emotion and reason, and the recognition that that is a higher form of
intellectual activity than mere science itself (which is what Pirisig has
done with the MOQ). Furthermore, it is the only 'science' that has the
potential to be religious, for it does not exclude the spiritual - the
shaping of the emotional response in accordance with the wider values of the
community, ultimately derived from God (or Quality!). The intellectual
stance has value because it does produce knowledge, but knowledge as such is
unimportant. What is important is the weaving of that knowledge into the
fabric of a whole life. Or, put in a different way, the highest academic
virtues relate to the discovery of truth, to honest intellectual endeavour.
That value, however, is only one value of many, and (even speaking purely
cognitively) that value is subordinate to the values of beauty and the good.
Truth is in itself beautiful, but is only one aspect of beauty, and beauty
is only one aspect of what is good. What we need is the largeness of spirit
to integrate the value of academic truth within a wider sense of the truth,
which includes the beautiful and the good. The truth which is provided by
reason is ultimately only that of consistency. This is important, but it is
limited. A consistency which inspires by its beauty and humanity, which
provokes us to fall in love with it, is rather more truthful than one which
doesn't, and, in practise, a consistency which does not embrace these
values, even if only in part, will not succeed (Kuhn).
Of course, it is not simply science that suffers from this, it is actually
the stance of disengaged intellectual endeavour, ie the academic mind
(SOM!). The root of the church's problems lie in the 11th and 12th
centuries, when academic theology became separated from the monastic
practice of devotional reading. There was a shift from the quest for
knowledge in order to help belief, to the quest for knowledge for its own
sake. The disengaged stance required for academic endeavour is incompatible
with spirituality, for the latter is concerned with shaping the emotional
response, and the former is predicated on the exclusion of emotion from
consideration.
Which brings me (at last! Hallelujah!) to what I want to say about the
philosophy of love and the MOQ. The principal function of religion
(Christianity) is, for me, to educate us in love. The apparatus of doctrine
and worship - developed as static latching mechanisms attempting to
safeguard the dynamic breakthroughs made by Jesus - are things which are
primarily functional, not definitional or descriptive. The traditions of
prayer and spirituality are a highly sophisticated means of raising our
emotional awareness - and therefore our cognitive capacity - in a
qualitatively superior direction. In other words, if we really want to
describe and understand a philosophy of love, we have to live it, not just
talk about it.
~~~~~~~
If you've made it this far - thanks, and congratulations. A summary of the
above might be handy:
1. Definitions are worse than useless in some contexts. Talk of love is one
such.
2. If Wittgenstein is right, then we understand what a word means by seeing
what is done with it.
3. The West systematically misunderstands the nature of religious belief.
4. Religious belief is not essentially propositional language, but
functional language (it shapes our lives in a certain way).
5. The scientific outlook is emotionally defective (and the MOQ removes the
defect).
6. If we want to understand the philosophy of love, the religious traditions
are a very good place to start.
Tanya - I hope this is of some use in your quest!
Cheers
Sam
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