philosophy – eyebeleave

Gender theories

3625 words, 18 minute read.

Before being condemned for blasphemy and tortured to death, Jesus left his followers with his last will and testament, “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21). This exhortation resonates particularly strongly in me today and I am drawn to Jesus’ imperative of oneness having a universal determiner. Reading these words makes me stop and ask myself whether I truly include “all” as I think of those whose oneness Jesus desires. It also makes me ask the question in a negative form: whom do I not include among these “all”.

Without unpacking the question fully, I have the sense that an important element of inclusion is understanding. How can I truly include someone and relate to them in the way in which Jesus related to those he met, if I lack an understanding of who they are, what they care about, what pains them, what gives them joy. The most important part of this, always incomplete, understanding will come from a personal relationship, but there is also value in an understanding of the contexts in which another person’s life is set. Some understanding of their culture, history, values, etc., may help in building an authentic relationship with them, without such preambles determining it.

Another way to frame this picture is to ask who it is that I understand least and who it is that I am therefore least well prepared to welcome and relate to. Today the answer for me is twofold: religious fundamentalists and transgender people. In both cases the root cause is that I don’t, knowingly, have friends to which either of these apply. And in both cases I would like to know more, so that, if I were to get to know a transgender or religious fundamentalist person, I would be in a position to befriend them without inadvertently and unnecessarily offending them due to a lack of basic understanding. Just to be clear, I don’t believe that such knowledge is indispensable – friendship is open with all even without a shred of knowledge – only that it is preferable.

As you can guess from the title of this post, I chose to focus on trying to develop an understanding of transgender people first and I started with reading their testimonies, like those shared by PFLAG (the largest US organization uniting parents, families, and allies with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+)) in their “Our trans loved ones” publication. This is an excellent resource with FAQs, expert opinions and experiences shared by transgender individuals and their families, and one that I’d recommend as a starting point.

I felt though that I wanted to know more about the philosophical underpinnings of what was presented in very accessible, but therefore simplified and abbreviated ways in this text. After reading around for a bit, I realized that to get a better sense of what is meant by gender, sex and sexual orientation, I need to go and read some feminist philosophers first, since the initial critical confrontation with these concepts comes from their thought. This quickly led me to Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”, which I have now finished reading and which I would like to reflect on in the remainder of this post. Needless to say, these are first steps into a rich and complex field, but even as such I found them very insightful and rewarding.

From the get-go, Butler’s approach is critical in the best philosophical sense and is meticulous about examining and challenging potential flaws in preconceived, inherited concepts. For a start, she questions what the subject of feminism ought to be and is reluctant to accept “women” as an unqualified answer for the following reasons:

“In the course of this effort to question “women” as the subject of feminism, the unproblematic invocation of that category may prove to preclude the possibility of feminism as a representational politics. What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject? What relations of domination and exclusion are inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics? The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation. Perhaps, paradoxically, “representation” will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of “women” is nowhere presumed.”

In essence, an underlying concern for Butler – and, as we’ll see later, also for feminist philosophers like Beauvoir and Irigaray whose work she builds on – is that concepts like woman, gender and sex qua concepts, by definition, exist in a signifying economy. In other words, the fundamental domain in which these analyses unfold is that of language, where “woman”, “gender”, “sex” have meanings that are established by the system-language they are parts of. An analysis of these concepts becomes an analysis of their meanings within a given system and it is the system itself that needs to be questioned instead. Accepting it and therefore, implicitly, accepting and being constrained by its structure, even while attempting a “correction” of the meanings of “woman”, “gender” and “sex”, would be a trap.

Butler then proceeds with probing the consequences of conventional ways of thinking about sex as given/natural and gender as constructed/cultural:

“If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. […]

Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”

As she later states explicitly, Butler here follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps by setting out to elaborate a genealogy of gender, along analogous lines to his “Genealogy of Morals”. That is, to question the forces, factors, contributors whose interplay results in a particular concept of gender. This is especially clear in the above passage, where history, science, politics, society, power and processes of gender construction/acquisition are all called upon as elements of a genealogy.

Butler then argues that “sex” and “gender” are both firmly discursive, language-bound concepts and that not even sex can claim “given”, “natural”, “prediscursive” status and therefore immunity from semiotic enquiry. In other words, “sex” and “gender” start their existence in a language, as opposed to having non-linguistic, prior being:

“Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. […]

Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will? Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender.”

Even though the argument here is that “sex” and “gender” are a consequence of a broader discourse in which they attain their meanings, and Butler warns against conflating a particular cultural discourse with “universal rationality”, she also does not consider all gendered possibilities as open:

“The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience. These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender.”

Having laid out the setting in which an engagement with “gender” and a theorizing about it will take place, Butler presents two alternative, prior theories. The first is Simone de Beauvoir’s, in which:

“women are designated as the Other […] the “subject” within the existential analytic of misogyny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal, differentiating itself from a feminine “Other” outside the universalizing norms of personhood, hopelessly “particular,” embodied, condemned to immanence. […] Beauvoir is often understood to be calling for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and, hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject. That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female.”

The key idea here is that already at a conceptual-linguistic level there is a categorical imbalance between male and female genders, whereby the universal, seemingly genderless subject is male, with women relegated to being an “other” to the universal male, to being passive bodies in contrast with male existential subjects. From the perspective of such a theory of gender, it makes perfect sense to call for a feminist restructuring of everything. “Feminist science”, “feminist history”, etc. all make sense, since the hitherto seemingly universal subject has implicitly been cast as male. It is not about some reframing within a universal signifying economy, but about a universalizing of what only apparently was universal.

Butler then introduces Luce Irigaray’s critique of Beauvoir:

“Irigaray argues that both the subject and the Other are masculine mainstays of a closed phallogocentric signifying economy that achieves its totalizing goal through the exclusion of the feminine altogether. For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification. Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrian frame of signifying-subject and signified-Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate.”

Rather than challenging the concept of women within a given signifying economy, Irigaray argues that women are not represented at all in the ruling “hegemonic Western representation” in force today, that the “feminine” is defined wholly in terms of the “masculine” and therefore not a “feminine” at all. In the face of such an insidious totalitarian structure, Butler sounds a warning that feminism too needs to heed its risks and be weary of power relations that can undermine dialogue:

“Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism. The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms. […]

Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous process of democratization. The very notion of “dialogue” is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.”

The consequences of such a theory of gender, that Irigaray argues is embedded in Western culture, is that it does not even allow for the possibility of women to “be” and leaves them as an unintelligible “difference”:

“Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference suggests that women can never be understood on the model of a “subject” within the conventional representational systems of Western culture precisely because they constitute the fetish of representation and, hence, the unrepresentable as such.Women can never “be,” according to this ontology of substances, precisely because they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself off. Women are also a “difference” that cannot be understood as the simple negation or “Other” of the always-already-masculine subject. As discussed earlier, they are neither the subject nor its Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine.”

Importantly, Butler also challenges the relationships between “sex”, “gender”, “identity” and “personhood”, pointing to a risk of not understood gender identities threatening the very personhood of an individual when these concepts are tightly coupled:

“To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is “identity” a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity? In other words, the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as “identity” is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of “the person” is called into question by the cultural emergence of those “incoherent” or “discontinuous” gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined.”

Such incoherence and unintelligibility are only avoided when the starting assumption is heterosexuality, which therefore is embedded in them:

“Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self—and desire—where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. The internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality.”

How then are these systematic biases and inhibitors to an equitable representation of all individuals to be overcome? Here the answer offered by Butler, on the basis of Beauvoir’s thought and that of Monique Wittig, is the following:

“The identification of women with “sex,” for Beauvoir as for Wittig, is a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibly sexualized features of their bodies and, hence, a refusal to grant freedom and autonomy to women as it is purportedly enjoyed by men. Thus, the destruction of the category of sex would be the destruction of an attribute, sex, that has, through a misogynist gesture of synecdoche, come to take the place of the person, the self-determining cogito. In other words, only men are “persons,” and there is no gender but the feminine. […]

Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general.

Hence, Wittig calls for the destruction of “sex” so that women can assume the status of a universal subject.”

Finally, Butler makes an explicit reference to Nietzsche and proposes a parallel with his concepts of doing and a doer as a first hint of her “performative” gender theory:

“The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”

Again, Butler makes the point that such a concept of “gender” does not imply arbitrariness:

“To claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality, where those terms are understood to reside within a binary that counterposes the “real” and the “authentic” as oppositional. As a genealogy of gender ontology, this inquiry seeks to understand the discursive production of the plausibility of that binary relation and to suggest that certain cultural configurations of gender take the place of “the real” and consolidate and augment their hegemony through that felicitous self-naturalization.”

The first, introductory chapter of “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”, where all of the above comes from and which I would recommend reading in full, then concludes with the following mission statement for the rest of the book:

“This text continues, then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.”

What follows are sharp, in-depth confrontations with the gender theories of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Freud and further analyses of Irigaray, Beauvoir and Wittig’s thought, which would take far too long to engage with in this already long read.

Let me conclude by sharing two passages from the book’s final chapter, in which Butler talks about the consequences of a performative theory of gender and a call to action aimed at challenging established cultural and political structures.

“The tacit constraints that produce culturally intelligible “sex” ought to be understood as generative political structures rather than naturalized foundations. Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary. […] Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. […]

The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness. What other local strategies for engaging the “unnatural” might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?

Reading Butler’s “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” has been an enriching and challenging experience. Her thought is complex, deeply rooted in the history of philosophy and complemented by a web of connections to anthropology, sociology and psychology. Like all good philosophy, her enquiry goes to the root of the question and, like previous feminist philosophers, challenges the very structure of language, meaning, identity and agency. While the motivation is a reframing of “sex” and “gender” for the purposes of a better representation for all individuals, the deeper project here is an examination, demasculinization and universalization of the universal, of the very concept of a thinking, acting, being subject.

Chiaretto: truth, freedom, unity

Chiara e Don Foresi

This morning, Don Pasquale Foresi, one of Chiara Lubich’s first companions and a co-founder of the Work of Mary, has completed his earthly journey. Don Foresi, known to his friends as Chiaretto, was a man who has given his life to God unreservedly and I am sure that there will be much written about him in the years to come. Instead of attempting to share an outline of his life here, I will focus on his thought, which shone with brilliance and where he displayed not only a love of the truth, but also great care for and familiarity with the world and the Church. Chiaretto was an extraordinary theologian and philosopher, but before all else, he was a follower of Jesus worthy of the apostles.

Chiaretto’s thoughts on prayer are something I shared here already, but since they are such a great example of his characteristic focus on the essential, let’s re-read them again:

Prayer does not consist in dedicating time during the day to meditation, or to reading some passages from Scripture or from the writings of the saints, or in thinking of God or our ourselves with the aim of some internal reform. This isn’t prayer in its essence.

Reciting the rosary or morning or evening prayers is just the same. One can do these things all day without ever having prayed even for a minute.

Prayer, to be truly such, requires above all a relationship with Jesus: to go with the spirit beyond our human condition, our worries, our prayers – no matter how nice and necessary they may be, and establishing this intimate, personal relationship with him.

In an early article in Nuova Umanità from 1979, Chiaretto embarks on an profound analysis of the first three chapters of Genesis, with the aim of examining the way woman is presented there and arriving at a conclusion of fundamental equality between her and man. Just to get a sense of his clarity of thought, take a look at the following excerpt:

“Verse 23 [of Genesis 2], which says that: “the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of man this one has been taken.”” is a hymn of joy of the man who has found his partner. He discovers the same flesh, the same bones. In Hebrew “flesh” had a far vaster meaning than in our languages, because there was no word for “body”. Von Rad sees in this verse the key to explaining the creation account of Eve; this is in fact about understanding one fact: the primordial attraction between the sexes – whence comes a love as strong as death?

It seems to me that the Yahwist writer certainly explains the origin of the sexes, but his story is far more extensive and elevated than that. It is not just about a differentiation internal to the first couple, but it is the story of how all of humanity is meant to be that is being presented to us.

The deep love, (made tangible by the account of the birth of woman from a rib) between the first man and the first woman, foreshadows the love between all beings that are to be born; hatred ought not to exist, because it is against one’s own flesh; that which later will be said spiritually, “then” was true also physically.”

Many years later, in a seminal paper from 2001 entitled “Doing philosophy,” Chiaretto presents a startling picture of what is at stake when true philosophy is sought:

“[P]hilosophy implies a risk: the risk of one’s own peace of mind. Doing philosophy, in the sense I intend, is to say: I prefer to take risks, not be calm; I want to know, I want clear things up, I want to go further beyond. And this is a terrifying step, because no one helps us, because the answers that all give us the feel prefabricated, something that is meaningless because we must look for the real answer within ourselves. Only in these moments do we know what the real problem is, we feel it, even if we can not express it yet, to clarify it, to say it. It is the choice of a non-peace in the face of the appearance of peace offered by the world around us. It is a choice that involves changing all relationships with others. Because of this I would say that one aspect of this tragic situation is that almost no one will understand us. The surprise implies a break with the world around us: that surprise which is the wonder of being in the world without being in the world. One is cut off from everyone else, one is alone, naked. You say one thing and the others will understand another; they say one thing and you maybe understand the contrary. Basically, you do not receive any solution from the others, and even though you know that you have to find the solution with others, one feels alone, not in the sense of not having company but in the sense of a radical, metaphysical impossibility of “feeling oneself with someone.” It is as if one lived in another world. It’s like entering a cave, with the risk of never coming out of it again. But none of this is of interest in those moments: “what will be will be,” I can not have peace until I accept to face myself, to face the problem of my existence and of my knowing myself. We realize that we are at sea, in an abyss, in a dark universe. We have only just started to walk and we can not turn back. There is nothing left but to press ahead. This is the drama of doing authentic philosophy.”

In a follow-up paper Chiaretto then argues for knowledge being intrinsically social, even though the journey towards it starts in that dark universe of the self that artists like Antony Gormley have explored with such beauty:

“Knowledge is always born in dialogue. All knowledge is a talking with others while addressing myself. Or, more precisely, it is a dialogue with myself which others are present intrinsically and profoundly. They will perhaps be present in a confused, imperfect way, but they are there. I never know solipsistically, even when when I know “by myself.”

What happens then when I give some of my knowledge to others? The words that I formulate to express and transmit that being that I perceived, are not only mine, but come simultaneously from me and from others: this means that when I offer what I have known, those who are listening to me are already inserted in the expressions that become formulated from before.

In telling others those words-knowledge of mine, they are completely, even if unknowingly, inserted in what I am saying, precisely because they have contributed to my knowing, they have given it to me and constructed it for me at least to some extent. Those insights are already the result of some communion with them.”

And finally, let me share with you Chiaretto’s synthesis of how Mary completes God making us in His own image, which is highly consonant also with how Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the Trinity in his “Introduction to Christianity”:

“God is the Father who gives himself wholly in the Son, who in turn wholly re-gives himself to Him. And their reciprocal love for each other – the relationship that unites them among themselves – is the Holy Spirit.

Being like God means therefore to live with Him in this same Trinitarian dynamic.

We, like all creatures, are called to being by God, just like the Son by the Father, and, precisely because we are his creatures, we tend to return to him in a relationship of love. Yet, this re-giving of oneself, even when total, of the creature to God, does not yet fully expresses its capacity to be like Him. Such a way of being does not in fact reach a “re-giving” of God to God, as it is in the Trinity. There, the Father is Father because he begets the Son. In other words, being Father is determined by the relation of sonship, that is, the Son being makes the Father be the Father.

To us too, then, created “in the likeness” of God, must be given the opportunity to give God to God, that is, to return to Him as creatures truly able to be his likes.

This possibility has taken on complete form on earth, at a given moment in history, in Mary.”

There would be so much more to talk about in terms of Chiaretto’s thought, but I believe that the above give a sense of his genius, even in the crude translations provided here.

Dearest Chiaretto, thank you!

Possessed by truth: a journey

[Warning: long read.]

One of the points made by Pope Francis in his letter to Eugenio Scalfari at the beginning of September regarded the nature of truth, which he likened to a relationship and which he argued “embraces and possesses us” instead of us possessing it. In this post, I would like to revisit this passage and look at it, and related statements made by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, through the lens of philosophy.

The question of truth is one of the central concerns of philosophy and theories about it impact a vast variety of other aspects of rational enquiry. Since it is such a central theme, my attempt to look at Francis’ and Ravasi’s words from the point of view of philosophy will necessarily be in the form of a very roughly-ground lens¹ indeed and all that I can hope to convey are blurry silhouettes. To keep the argument at a high level (as much as I would love to delve into the depths, e.g., of Alfred Tarski’s approach), I will mostly stick to summaries provided in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s “truth” entry and round it out by headlines from the “truth” entry in the Wikipedia.

With the caveats out of the way, let’s first look at the concept of truth most akin to what is typically meant by this word in “ordinary language” (i.e., language as used without the machinery of technical definitions – effectively the language spoken by “the man on the Clapham omnibus” to borrow an expression from English law). Here, an expression, statement, declaration, description, account, etc. is true if it matches how things actually are. If I say “there is a cat on the mat” and there actually is a cat on the mat then what I have said is true. What does philosophy make of the concept though and how does it deal with the pandora’s box that spills out left, right and center, when a basic idea like truth is subjected to scrutiny and deconstruction (in “ordinary language” terms).

As the King said to Alice, very gravely, let’s begin at the beginning – or at least reasonably close to it – and look at how Aristotle (who had something to say about pretty much everything) thought of the truth. In his Metaphysics, he declares: “to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Book 4, Part 7). This, in fact, is close to the everyday meaning of the word and a variant of what today would be called the correspondence theory of truth – a theory still adhered to by many philosophers today and a theory (or class of theories) that I too consider to be best representative of my own understanding.

Put in more contemporary terms, “[a] belief is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact.” There is immediately a host of questions that spring up: is belief the only possible “truth-bearer” or are there others, what is the nature of correspondence, and what is a fact and can there be other “truth-makers”? Put in more generic terms, the above definition becomes: “a truth-bearer is true if and only if it corresponds to a truth-maker.” Here truth-bearers include entities like beliefs, propositions, sentences or utterances, truth-makers can be entities like a world that exists objectively (i.e., independently of the ways we think about it or describe it), electrodes connected to a brain’s nerve endings in a jar, states of a self’s consciousness and correspondence can refer to a match on the truth-bearer’s structure to the truth maker’s structure or just to convention (i.e., the “situationist” argument). As is obvious, a sprawling tree of choices grows from under our feet even just by enumerating some of the options, never mind engaging with them.

As should be obvious from the “truth is truth-bearer corresponding to truth-maker” way of posing of the correspondence theory of truth, the schema lends itself to modification and also to analysis using mathematical, formal languages methods (as Tarski did – more about that in a future post …). Still using my ultra-rough lens, let’s next look at G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell’s identity theory of truth, where “corresponding” becomes “being identical to” – i.e. “a true proposition is identical to a fact […] Propositions are what are believed, and give the contents of beliefs. They are [..] the primary bearers of truth. When a proposition is true, it is identical to a fact, and a belief in that proposition is correct.” This is essentially a flavor of the correspondence theory, cutting out the bearer-maker dichotomy.

The most substantial competing theory of truth though is the coherence theory, whose basic idea can be put as: “A belief is true if and only if it is part of a coherent system of beliefs.” Truth here is not constrained to individual truth-bearers (instead whole systems of beliefs are the primary truth-bearers) and is “not simply a test or criterion for truth. Far from being a matter of whether the world provides a suitable object to mirror a proposition, truth is a matter of how beliefs are related to each-other. [… It] insists that truth is not a content-to-world relation at all; rather, it is a content-to-content, or belief-to-belief, relation.”

Extending the two basic concepts of correspondence versus coherence are a host of other, more recent approaches. Here pragmatist theories (e.g., as propagated by C. S. Peirce) make truth be about its practical value, since “[t]rue beliefs are guaranteed not to conflict with subsequent experience.” Verificationism instead “holds that a claim is correct just insofar as it is in principle verifiable, i.e., there is a verification procedure we could in principle carry out which would yield the answer that the claim in question was verified. [.. T]ruth just is verifiability.” Deflationist theories (e.g., as put forward by Gotlob Frege) argue that there is no property of something being true – that the concept is redundant. “[A]ppearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant, having no effect on what we express.” Constructivist theories instead hold “that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community.” This is, e.g., the truth theory that underlies gender theory. A related, democratized, alternative is consensus theory where “truth is whatever is agreed upon.”

In summary, and in Cardinal Ravasi’s words:

“There are essentially two opposing approaches to the concept. The first is a relativistic, subjective view which sees Truth as a sort of Medusa‐like figure, constantly changing appearance depending on the circumstances. [… This view argues] that Truth does not in itself have any ontological basis and, for this reason, should be left free to follow the course of continual change.

The second approach to Truth […] holds that there is an objective – or rather, transcendent – Truth. [… Here] an emblematic image is provided in Plato’s Phaedrus, where the soul is likened to a chariot that flies across the plain of Truth. […] Adorno, in interpreting one of the aphorisms of Truth in his Minima Moralia, maintained that “one does not have [the Truth], but is in it.” Hence, humanity, finding itself within the womb of Truth, uses the mind to take it in, to become familiar with it, to investigate and illuminate it. There is clearly an attempt to combine the two aspects: on the one hand, a Truth which precedes us; on the other, a Truth which the individual must choose to enter. We read in Robert Musilʹs The Man Without Qualities that: “The Truth is not a precious stone to be kept in a casket, but a sea in which to immerse oneself”. This approach emphasizes the primacy – or precedence – of Truth, which is to be understood not as dominion but rather as illumination: a Truth more complex than mere rational knowledge.”

In fact, it is the above concepts – from a talk by Ravasi in 2009 – that, to my mind, underpin Pope Francis’ response to Eugenio Scalfari a couple of months ago and already the positioning of truth in Francis and Benedict XVI’s Lumen Fidei: “truth leads to humility, since believers know that, rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth which embraces and possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all.”

With all of that under our belts, let’s take a fresh look at Francis’ response to Scalfari:

“I would not speak about “absolute” truths, even for believers, in the sense that absolute is that which is disconnected and bereft of all relationship. Truth, according to the Christian faith, is the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship. As such each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture and situation in life, etc. This does not mean that truth is variable and subjective, quite the contrary. But it does signify that it comes to us always and only as a way and a life. Did not Jesus himself say: “I am the way, the truth, and the life?” In other words, truth, being completely one with love, demands humility and an openness to be sought, received and expressed. Therefore, we must have a correct understanding of the terms and, perhaps, in order to overcome being bogged down by conflicting absolute positions, we need to redefine the issues in depth. I believe this is absolutely necessary in order to initiate that peaceful and constructive dialogue.”

Armed with my rough, philosophical lens, the above looks to me very much like a correspondence theory: correspondence here is the relationship Francis speaks about, the truth-maker is God and his creation and the truth-bearer are my own, circumstance-, culture-, language-relative beliefs, thoughts and utterances. The truth-maker is absolute and objective, while the truth-bearer is ultimately its opposite: relative, in flux and existentially subjective. The image of a journey and of being embraced express the entities of this scheme in an intuitive way. On the one hand, the givenness and quiddity of the landscape, which envelops the traveller, and on the other hand, the subjective, observer-dependent experiences of it, had by the pilgrim (the “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:12)). What makes this paradigm profoundly Christian though is what Francis points to when he identifies truth with “the love of God for us in Jesus Christ.” The truth-maker is reaching out to the truth-bearer across the absolute-relative chasm, placing himself in relationship with His creatures, who are to Him like a dimensionless point is to the unbounded hyper-dimensional space.

Before you change channels, just bear with me while I try to put the above in other, less faith-dependent words. The concept of truth presented by Francis, as I understand it, is one that maintains the realism² of a classical correspondence theory of truth, while acknowledging elements of contemporary truth theories that point to the impact of social, historical, conventional, linguistic and individually-subjective factors on the truth-bearers. Unlike truth theories that are marked by an absence of realism (e.g., coherence, pragmatist, verificationist and constructivist ones), here the imperfect and inherently subjective truth-bearers are still in relationship with their truth-makers. Up to this point, the theory does not make recourse to Christian beliefs and could just as easily be held by an atheist, in my opinion. Where it diverges is then in the belief that the truth-maker is not only an objective reality but also a personal agent who actively seeks to relate to the subject owning the truth-bearers. I didn’t say I’d put it more simply 🙂

¹ Apologies to my überbestie MR – a fully-qualified and practicing professional philosopher – for bringing the name of philosophy into disrepute. I am sure she could have done a far superior job of the following.
² And by “realism” I mean that the truth-makers are posited to exist independently of the truth-bearer’s circumstances – not the typical, ordinary-language meanings of the term.

The inescapable indulgence of philosophy

If you are not in the mood for reading a rant, please, kindly, move along to some calmer, more edifying post.

OK, so, for those of you who are reckless with you blood pressure, the topic of today’s rant is, yet again, the “Faith and Reason” section of the the “Our Faith on Sunday” leaflet that now accompanies my parish’s newsletter (for a previous run in with it see here). This time the topic is none other than philosophy, and it gets disposed of in less than 150 words.¹ You’d think that those few words would have to be carefully chosen to say anything meaningful about a complex topic like this. Yet, instead, the opening words are the following:

“Every person will at some stage in life indulge that inescapable curiosity which seeks answers to philosophical questions; even small children exhibit impressive levels of philosophical inquiry when, during the so called ‘Why Stage’, they demonstrate an insatiable desire to know the causes of things.”

The unidentified author of the above wisdom then drops gems like: “[h]ow articulate and explicit each person’s philosophical investigation is will depend on circumstances,” “there is in human nature a questioning quality, an irresistible urge to find out” and “although no single philosophical system can claim to give us a complete account of reality, some do reflect it more fully than others.”

Two words: WOW! Where do you even start in the face of such platitudes and inanity? First, let’s just spell out what the above actually implies about philosophy:

The opening line makes philosophy sound like sneezing, a temporary infatuation with Brad Pitt or the onset of puberty. It makes philosophy seem like something that may one day overcome you, out of the blue. You’ll have no control over it and you’ll just have to indulge it. But, don’t worry – it will pass …

Philosophy may also have the hallmarks of a disease – how serious its symptoms will be in your case (and at some point it will wash over you for sure) depends “on circumstances.” It would have been useful to get at least at hint of what it is about “circumstances” that may make a philosophy attack more or less severe. Is it open spaces, high altitudes, allergens or the presence of nanosphere complexes that one should watch for?

The paragon of philosophical activity is a small child asking “why?”. Having actually been at the receiving end of barrages of “why”s by small children (and having greatly enjoyed the game), I am therefore inferring that the purpose of philosophy is entertainment, attention-seeking and maybe in 1/10 of its instances an actual desire for an answer. [Well, this one may not be that far off :)]

You may find this hard to believe, but some philosophical systems reflect reality more fully than others … Mind. Blown. I would love to see the unidentified author of this gem of a treatise on philosophy sketch out how one might go about determining the extent to which a given philosophical system reflects reality. Maybe we could have a star rating in next week’s newsletter. (Dialectical materialism: x stars, Neoplatonism: y stars, Deconstructivism: z stars … You didn’t think I’d actually assign specific values, did you?)

“It is easy to be critical,” I hear you think. So, let me show you how I would use a ~100 word limit to talk about philosophy (and I’d do so by letting another, far better qualified mind, speak):

“Men and women have at their disposal an array of resources for generating greater knowledge of truth so that their lives may be ever more human. Among these is philosophy [meaning “love of wisdom”], which is directly concerned with asking the question of life’s meaning and sketching an answer to it. Philosophy emerges, then, as one of noblest of human tasks [… and] shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself. […] Through philosophy’s work, the ability to speculate […] produces a rigorous mode of thought; and then in turn, through the logical coherence of the affirmations made and the organic unity of their content, it produces a systematic body of knowledge.” (John Paul II, Fides et Ratio)

¹ I owe it at least to my überbestie MR (née MM) to rush to the defense of philosophy. Not that it is being attacked particularly efficaciously here, but an attack is an attack and this one is bringing the game into disrepute … its a matter of principle!

In search of joy

As I haven’t managed to write a post here for over a week, I would just like to take the opportunity now to tie together a couple of the strands of the last seven days, which happen to have a shared theme of joy.

First, there is a talk by Pope Benedict XVI that I have been wanting to read for a while and that I finally got to last night. It is the first sermon he gave after the start of the Year of Faith, where he sets out to – what else – talk about the nature of faith. Amongst other things (and I encourage you to read the original in full), he says that “[f]aith is a gift of God, but it is also a deeply human and free act” and he asks himself how we can get “that openness of heart and mind […] to believe in the God.” The answer Benedict puts forward comes from Dei Verbum (§5): “To make this act of faith, the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit must precede and assist, moving the heart and turning it to God, opening the eyes of the mind and giving “joy and ease to everyone in assenting to the truth and believing it” (Second Council of Orange, Canon 7, 529 AD).” And this makes him conclude: “To believe is to trust freely and joyfully in God’s providential plan” and saying “yes” to God “transforms life, opens the way towards fullness of meaning, thus making it new, full of joy and of reliable hope.”

Second, this joy and freedom of choice (also supported by the ultimate emphasis placed on the freedom of conscience in the Catechism (§1790)) then lead to lives like those of the saints, whom Benedict considers to be “the greatest apologetic for our faith,” alongside art. The accessibility and attractiveness of the joy that another person has, was then one of the topics that I spoke about with my bestie JMGR – a (in my opinion accurately) self-proclaimed “born-again agnostic” :). While our beliefs and views cannot be transferred to another and can remain the subject of doubt and suspicion, the joy and goodness of another’s life is accessible to us regardless of what we think about their beliefs. We can recognize the goodness of the fruit and as a result be more receptive to listening to the tree. A related theme that came up during our chat was also the role of uncertainty in the context of building personal relationships. Acknowledging the fundamental limitations of knowledge (which make it impossible to go beyond one’s self epistemologically) can lead not to indifference or nihilism (which is exhausting) but instead to openness and a greater readiness to hear out those who hold other beliefs.

Third, preceding these explicit instances of thinking about joy as the primary focus, was my reflecting on the activities of aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins and realizing that I should be grateful for them! On this blog alone, I have confronted their claims repeatedly (about goodness, rationality, science, cosmology) and have always come away from the process enriched both because I read up on the relevant science or philosophy and because I have discovered that the views held by the Church (through the Catechism, the teaching of the Popes or the insights of the Saints) are eminently rational, warmheartedly open and very much my own. There is also no denying the fact that the Church’s teaching has become what it is today also in response to attacks from militant atheists, which have meant that it had to think more carefully about how faith and reason relate and to clean itself from some aberrations that have crept in over the centuries.

Fourth, a very good friend of mine – MK – has been a constant source of joy to me over the last months, during which he has been battling with a serious, life-threatening disease. Throughout this time he has been sharing his experiences on Facebook and on a blog, where he chronicles his battling with the disease, while firmly keeping his sight set on God and on loving his neighbors. His blog is such a source of light for me that I could pick a paragraph at random and share it with you here. In fact, I am just going to share the beginning of what he wrote today:

“I am a child of God not by merit but by a gift of love from Him. Not only that, everybody else is a child of God and if God is our father, we are brothers and sisters, equal! Sounds obvious, but from my, our behaviour, we don’t treat each other as equal. How many times do I put me before loving God in my neighbour. I have all the experience in this and that, I know best, because I have done it before, I have a talent from God! More and more I discover that all these things are given into my hand to make his love visible! When I and my talents, inspirations and gifts from God get in the way of taking time to love my neighbour, it is always me. Where there is me there God can’t be! Here is the challenge: To love the way Jesus loved when he was on the cross, giving everything, becoming nothing out of love!”

True joy is rich, rewarding and all-encompassing. It is not a matter of only the good, easy times, but an insight and gift that transforms challenge, difficulty and suffering. My bestie Margaret once wrote the following to another bestie of ours – DF – and me: “Hope all is very very well (I mean, of course all manner of things are always well because we are loved immensely, so maybe I should wish that you are in the state where you are able to see that it is).” That too is joy and I couldn’t put it any better myself.

From individual to person

I am feeling quite “meta” today and have no less than four reasons for it: first, what I am about to discuss is fundamentally meta, second, the act of writing about it to you is an instance of it, third, it ties several of the strands that I started in previous posts together, and, fourth, it has come to me in a way that illustrates the topic itself (thanks to my bestie, Margaret, of ‘the God of Explanations’ fame). If that is not enough to pique your interest, let me add that it is centered around a talk given by one of my favorite contemporary thinkers – Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The subject of the talk is an exploration of what it means to be human and revolves around the distinction between an individual and a person. In customary magisterial fashion, Archbishop Williams ties together the thinking of St. Augustine, Orthodox and Catholic theologians (Vladimir Lossky and Robert Spaemann), a Russian and a French philosopher (Mikhail Bakhtin and René Descartes), a French thinker (Alexis de Tocqueville), a psychotherapist (Patricia Gosling) and an LSE sociologist (Richard Sennett). The argument begins by claiming that the relevant polarity is not between individualism and communitarianism but between the concepts of an individual and a person.

Here an individual is simply an example of a certain thing: e.g., Bob is an example of a human being, just like Fido is an example of a dog. Seen from this “atomic” perspective (where, incidentally, “individuum” is merely the latinized version of the Greek “atomos”), the individual is the center of their own world – its solid core. Even when they engage in relationships with others, they always have “the liberty of hurrying back home,” and the best relationship they can have with the world, that is separate from them and beyond them, is control. The consequences of such a view of what it is to be human are alienation, non-cooperation and unease with limits. This view is summed up clearly by de Tocqueville saying that “[e]ach person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger in the destiny of all the others.” It is also the psychological and anthropological parallel of the epistemic approach pioneered by Descartes (and driven to its limit in the “brain-in-a-vat” scenario), that I also adapted in an earlier post and that, in art, is mirrored by Antony Gormley’s approach to sculpture.

The other concept of a human being is that of a person, where there is “something about us as a whole that is not defined just by listing the facts that happen to be true about us” and where a person is a “subject [that is] irreducible to its nature” (Lossky). Williams argues though that while “we know what we mean by personal/impersonal and persons in relation, […] we struggle to pin down what we mean that we cannot be reduced just to our nature.” He then goes on to postulating that “what makes me a person and distinct from another person is not a bundle of facts, but relations to others. I stand in the middle of a network of relations.” This leads to the definition of a person as the “point at which relationships intersect.”

Williams then moves on to the question of how one is to determine whether another is a human person and, following from the previous analysis, concludes that this cannot be done on the basis of a checklist for whether a given set of pre-requisites are present. Instead, we need to “form a relation, converse, to determine whether another is a person” and that language helps us to decide. He is quick here to move from a narrow concept of language as verbal only to a broad one that includes gestures and the “flicker of an eyelid.” This means that “[p]ersonal dignity or worth is ascribed to human individuals because, in a relationship, each of us has a presence or meaning in someone else’s existence. We live in another’s life. Living in the life of another is an implication of the profound mysteriousness about personal reality. Otherwise you end up with the model where somebody decides who is going to count as human.” Such a test of human personhood based on relateability very much reminded me of Turing’s test of machine intelligence, where the basis again is not a predetermined set of criteria, but the ability for a machine to converse with (relate to) a human person and for that person to recognize the machine as a person. Williams’ point about “each of us [having] a presence or meaning in someone else’s existence” also brought back echoes of Martini’s “the other is within us.”

How does the individual (which is by far the position with the strongest epistemic justification) see themselves as a person though? Here Williams quotes the following passage from Spaemann:

“Each organism naturally develops a system that interacts with its environment. Each creature stands at the center of its own world. The world only discloses itself as that which can do something for us; something becomes meaningful in light of the interest we take in it. To see the other as other, to see myself as his “thou” over against him, to see myself as constituting an environment for other centers of being, thus stepping out of the center of my world, is an eccentric position. […] As human beings in relationship, we sense that our environment is created by a relation with other persons; we create an environment for them and in that exchange, that mutuality, we discover what person means.”

How do you “step out” and assume an “eccentric position” tough? Here, Williams admits that such “stepping beyond one’s own individuality requires acts of faith. Living as a person is a matter of faith.” And I completely agree with him – strictly from a position of introspective enquiry, from Gormley’s “darkness of the body,” there is no fact-based way out. There is a need for a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” but I would like to argue that it does not require a belief in God and in fact is akin to Eco’s communist acquaintance’s belief in the “continuity of life” discussed in an earlier post.

Finally, let’s also look at what Williams says about the aspect of personhood that is revealed as a consequence of belief in God:¹

“Before personal relations, we are in relation with God. I am in relation to a non-worldly, non-historical attention which is God. My neighbor is always somebody who is in a relation with God, before they are in a relation with me. There is a very serious limit for me to make of my neighbor what I choose. They don’t belong to me and their relation to me is not what is true of them or even the most most important thing that is true of them. Human dignity – the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another – rests firmly on that conviction that the other is already related to something that isn’t me.”

In summary, a very clear picture emerges here, where I can think of myself as an individual – a world unto myself – or as the intersection of relations with others that allows me to go beyond myself and recognize in others that they are part of my world and I part of theirs. As a Christian this eccentricity also reveals to me that the relations I have with others build on the relations He has with them already and allow me to relate to Him not only in the intimacy of my self but also through my neighbors.

¹ As an argument, this is essentially a variant of Bishop Berkeley’s response to the following challenge to his philosophy, where being is predicated on perceiving:

There was a young man who said God,
must find it exceedingly odd
when he finds that the tree
continues to be
when noone’s about in the Quad.

To which Berkeley responded with another limerick:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I’m always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
Since observed by, yours faithfully, God

:)))

Belief in theory moves mountains

Long before a piece of evidence is found for a theory, its postulators need to have faith in it, or at least entertain the possibility of its truth before they have the data to back it up. The first test(s) of a theory may well seem to disprove it, which in the absence of faith ought to be the end of it. However, even a simple, but sufficiently potent, idea carries the potential for “incomprehensible complexity” (see E. O. Wilson’s WWW Conference talk) and therefore also for an incomprehensible complexity in confronting it with evidence. Testing needs to be commensurately advanced relative to the theory for it to lead to either support for or conflict with it.

Many a beautiful theory may well lie dead as a result of an ugly fact (see Thomas Huxley), while the fact is simply not in correspondence with it, as a result of the grotesquely naïve view that a theory-fact mismatch always points the finger of blame at theory. Evidence is as much prone to error as the postulation of theories and all that one can hope to achieve in science is evidence-theory consistency. The absence of such understanding and a lack of faith in a fledgling theory are as damaging to science as is a disregard for data.

Science needs faith as much as religion does, for it to be capable of feats like landing a vehicle on Mars, propelling a human into space, setting off on a ship due west from Portugal in the anticipation of reaching land or building the dome of the cathedral in Florence. In all these cases, theory preceded evidential support and there was significant risk associated with failure, ranging from a huge waste of resources and careers being on the line to death. This is not to say that science and religion are the same, but simply to underline the fact that faith is needed in the practice of advancing science as much as it is for internalizing the doctrines of a religion (more on the role of evidence in the two cases another time :). While scientists (including myself) may rightly point to the fact that a theory ultimately needs to be matched up with reliable evidence for it to persist, I would like to argue that this in no way detracts from my claim that faith is fundamentally necessary for the practice of scientific enquiry and resulting advances, since evidence may often be decades away from theory (see Higgs’ theory postulated in 1964 and supported by evidence in 2012 – 48 years later!).

You may wonder, “Why are you bringing this topic up today?” The answer is simple – my besties PM and JMGR and I have been working on a theory that we postulated almost two years ago (and in a general form with PM five years ago) and it was in these last days that we have found the strongest evidence for it. Along the way we have been faced with a string of failures that could have meant the end of it and that would have resulted in us never discovering the groundbreaking results that now reward us for our persistence. I thank them both for their support!

[UPDATE (27/09/2012)]: I have just received a great message from my bestie, RR, who – unlike me: a peripheral tinkerer – is a real scientist (at Caltech, no less!) and who told me that I was “perfectly on mark with paragraph 3″ 🙂 Thanks for the nihil obstat, RR!

Orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy

What is the relationship between correct belief (orthodoxy) and correct action (orthopraxy) and how much does one matter versus the other? Is it more important what you think or what you do? While this is not a new question, I believe it is still a key one today.

Starting with Jesus, we can see him emphasizing both orthopraxy (also as a means of inferring orthodoxy when heterodoxy may be suspected):

“By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16) and

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)

and validating orthodoxy in spite of it’s proponents’ heteropraxy:

“The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens [hard to carry] and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen.” (Matthew 23:2-5)

Looking at Jesus’s teaching, there is a clear preference for orthopraxy (whose absence is an obstacle and which will also be the basis for the questions asked at the last judgement about feeding the hungry, quenching their thirst, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, … (Matthew 25:31-46)) but orthodoxy is valued in its own right as a (non-exclusive) means for engendering orthopraxy (and, by Christians, as a gift from God). In a way it can be seen as being assumed to be present at least implicitly, partially, unconsciously in those behaving orthopractically.

Let me just pick out two examples of where this principle of orthopraxy being taken to assume (implicit) orthodoxy has been employed by Jesus’ followers – a very recent one and a rather ancient one:

Saint Pope Gregory the Great (6-7 century AD) was so taken by the justice that the emperor Trajan (1-2 century AD) has shown towards a widow, who violently lost her only son, and by his virtue that he prayed for the salvation of his soul and it’s promotion from purgatory to heaven. In other words, Gregory was motivated by Trajan’s orthopraxy to petition for his receiving the rewards he thought were only due to the orthodox.

Archbishop Müller, when questioned about his friendship with Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of Liberation Theology, responded: “The theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, independently of how you look at it, is orthodox because it is orthopractic. It teaches us the correct way of acting in a Christian fashion since it comes from true faith.” This is not to say that all of Liberation Theology is exonerated by virtue of the virtue of its followers (the Vatican’s criticisms of Marxist influences in some of its strands are upheld by Müller), but that the virtue of its followers is a fruit of their orthodoxy.

All of this links rather nicely with Martini’s idea of (non)believers and is another argument for appreciating the orthopraxy of all while also valuing beliefs that can lead to it. I also believe it is a key to reading some Protestant–Catholic differences, to relating the lives of saints and Church doctrine and to appreciating great works of art created by artists who have committed heinous crimes (a.k.a., my roadmap for a couple of future posts :).

Martini & Eco: ethics for (non)believers

The passing of one of the princes of the Church is always a call for me to find out a bit about them, if I didn’t know of them already, and Cardinal Martini, whose dies natalis was yesterday, is no exception. I’ll leave it to you to find out about him for yourself (and there is certainly interesting material widely available across the internet) and will instead spend a couple of paragraphs talking about a topic very close to my own heart: the relationship between believers and nonbelievers, which is also the subject of a great book (or rather pamphlet as it is only 60-odd pages in length) containing the correspondence of Carlo Maria Martini and one of my favorite writers and an agnostic, Umberto Eco. The book is entitled “Belief Or Nonbelief” and I highly recommend it to you in full.

The two points I would like to pick out here (and I may return to others covered there in the future) are what constitutes (non)believers and whether one can think of a common basis for ethics that can be shared by all.

In the introduction, by Harvey Cox, Martini is quoted as saying the following about (non)believers:

When I think about “believers” and “nonbelievers,” I don’t have two different groups of people in mind. In all of us there is something of the believer and something of the nonbeliever, and this is true of this bishop as well.

As soon as I read this, I knew that I was going to enjoy the whole book – and I was not disappointed. After tackling topics like hope, human life and the role of men and women, the pair – who deliver a masterclass is dialogue (neither trying to trip up or ridicule the other, striving to deepen their understanding of each other’s positions) – turn to the question of whether there is common ground in terms of the ethical basis of believers and nonbelievers.

The question is posed by Martini, who asks: “what guides a secular person[, who does not recognize a personal God or appeal to an Absolute, to] profess moral principles, principles so firmly held that the person would give his life for them?” Martini acknowledges that all have ethical foundations and that even believers would often not seek recourse to God when making decisions under ordinary circumstances. What interests Martini is what happens in extremis – when one’s life is at stake – and he also pays homage to nonbelievers who have sacrificed their lives for their moral convictions or performed acts of great altruism. He is particularly keen to drill down to the foundations, which kick into action when things are pushed to their limits and wants to sweep away the consequences of “custom, convention, usage, functional or pragmatic behavior, even social necessity” and get to life and death choices which these can’t underpin.

To answer his question on behalf of believers, Martini points to inter-religious efforts that have looked into it and that point to it being “transcendental Mystery” that forms the basis for moral action. For Christians this is the Trinity, which provides us with “God the Father, Creator of All, and our brother Jesus Christ,” who give us an impulse to closeness and solidarity with others and who express that “the other is within us.”¹ Quoting Hans Küng, Martini also points out that this basis makes ethical values “binding unconditionally (and not simply when it’s convenient) and hence universally (to all classes, ranks, and races).”

Eco’s² response kicks off with an admission of his, now lost, Catholic roots and the realization that their past presence cannot be factored out. Given such caveats, he states that there can be a sense of the scared and of “communion with something greater even in the absence of faith in a personal and provident deity,” but he rightly comes back on track by reiterating the focus on that which is “binding, compelling, and unrenounceable” in secular ethics.

Eco cleverly and appropriately widens the scope of the question to universals and not just their application to ethics and proceeds with a magisterial introduction to “universal semantics”³ – i.e., that “notions common to all cultures exist” (citing examples of referring to our position in space – up, down, left, right, …). After postulating the universality of perception, memory, desire, fear, pleasure, pain, … Eco steps back and draws our attention to there being not only universals applicable to the “solitary Adam,” but that sex, dialogue, parental love or the loss of a loved one provide social ones too. Poignantly Eco exposes the underlying implications of the semantic basis so far – that of focusing on ‘us,’ and on restricting the “other” or Martini’s “the other is within us” to those from our own tribal group, ethnicity or circle. Those outwith are inhuman and may therefore be treated barbarically even while members of one’s own group are afforded respect. Eco places the growth of who is considered a member of one’s circle at a millennial scale and cites even Jesus’s coming as having been conditioned by when humanity was ready for his teaching of the Golden Rule.

To get to the basis of what can drive a nonbeliever to give their life for a moral principle, Eco cites the example of a “communist” whom he asked how he, an atheist, can make sense of “something as otherwise meaningless as his own death.” “By asking before I die for a public funeral, so that, though I am no longer, I have left an example to others.” Eco argues that it is this “continuity of life,” a sense of duty to those who come after us, “because in some way what one believes or what one finds beautiful can be believed or seen as beautiful by those who come after.”

In essence my take on this exchange is that Martini threw a bit of a curved ball, knowing that Eco’s answer can but elaborate the consequences of his own beliefs about the roots of morality since he also believes that God is present in all – whether they believe in him or not. Eco did hold his own though by turning the situation around and highlighting the value of the Christian story, whether it is true or not. What they have done together is present a case for the Golden Rule both from divine revelation and from semantic analysis. I only see winners in this exchange: Martini’s “the other is within us” and Eco’s “continuity of life” form a pair of insights that, I believe, enrich all (non)believers :).

¹ See my take on the epistemological parallel of this concept here.
²Please, note that, unlike Cardinal Martini for Catholics, Eco is not an official representative of nonbelievers and his answer therefore cannot be taken even as being intended as an answer on behalf of all nonbelievers. I, therefore, also don’t take it as such and don’t presume that, if you are a nonbeliever, it represents you. If you do happen to be a nonbeliever reading this and either agree or disagree with Eco’s take, I’d very much appreciate hearing from you in the comments. Thanks! 🙂
³ Semantics being the “study of meaning.”

Somewhat off-topic is another gem from the book – a reference of Eco’s to Kant’s take on atheism: how can one not believe in God, maintain that it is impossible to prove his existence, yet also firmly believe in the nonexistence of God, claiming that it can be proved 🙂

I would, finally, also like to dedicate this post to my bestie, SH – the most sincere agnostic I have ever met and a man who to this day teaches me humility by consistently beating me at scrabble, typically by a factor of two …

I say polygon, you say polyhedron

When you look at the above image, what do you see? Two triangles and five quadrangles, a cube or something else? Now, let’s turn to the following thought experiment:

You are strapped into a chair, your head held firmly in place, and you see a bright, diffuse screen in front of you, showing a series of black lines. You notice that the screen can go from an only-just visible black point at its periphery, via lines cutting across it or forming triangles with its edges, to closed squares or even constellations of polygons moving and morphing across it. You also notice that there are several knobs and levers at your disposal and that you can influence the shapes seen on the screen. Your task is to work out how the patterns you see are formed.

All you have access to in this case is a sequence of experiences of a two-dimensional, bounded world, yet through painstaking experiments you come to the realization that what you are seeing is consistent with there being a wireframe cube behind the screen. All the patters, the changes from one pattern to another and the lengths of edges could be the result of a wireframe cube casting a shadow. Once you arrive at your conclusion you are released from your restraints and are free to exit the room. As you do so, another person exits the room next to you. A quick chat reveals you had the same experience, but it turns out that they are convinced that it was just a computer screen rather that the silhouette of a mesh cube. You enter each other’s rooms and realize that they look identical! You believe their room shows a 3D cube’s shadow; they believe your room contains a 2D computer-driven display. You both look for a way to access what is behind the respective screens and after a while you find the rooms backing onto your two ones. Your screen and theirs were indeed driven differently: one was a display driven by a computer and the other a piece of translucent plexiglass having a backlit cube cast shadows on it. Which was which remains a secret guarded by the two of you.

Now, my question to you: who was the more rational participant in this experiment? The person postulating a 3D entity on the basis of strictly 2D evidence or the person whose theories remained firmly 2D, in line with the nature of their evidence?

I would like to argue that they were both equally rational and that the distinction between them was not along rational-irrational lines and to underline the fact that they were both deriving their world views from the same evidence.

What was the point of this whole exercise though? It was to propose that empirical evidence alone is not sufficient to constrain explanation to a solely empirical domain (even just the use of mathematics in science, with its universal quantifier is beyond the empirical) and that the exact same experiences can be held up as a basis for alternative theories.

The last exegetical point I’d like to make though is that the two protagonists of the thought experiment can learn a lot from each other. The person hypothesizing the 3D cube can lend the other means for simplification while the strictly 2D person can share a more refined understanding of 2D relationships, which also enrich the cube’s understanding.

Why is it that I am concerned by the evidence-theory relationship and try to dig into its nature? It is because this is a key stumbling block in the rapprochement between atheist scientists and the rational religious. The former don’t get how the latter can transcend evidence while the latter are threatened by the former’s insights into empirical evidence. The many-to-many nature of the evidence-theory relationship also underlies inter-religious dialogue. Since the transcendent is infinite, hyper-dimensional and vastly exceeding the fragmentary insights we can have of it, also in terms of aspects we don’t even know about!, it is understandable that different interpretations of its actions have been formed in different cultures and by different people. It would be short-sighted to stop at an incompatibility between the monotheism of some religions, the personal Trinitarian insight of Christianity, the polytheism of Hinduism and the apparent atheism of Buddhism (in the strict sense of atheism as opposed to its current use as anti-theism) and arrive at the erroneous conclusion that these religions talk about different things rather than differently about aspects of the same (please, don’t mis-read this as me saying that everything that all religions claim is true, that all religions are equally true or that religions can be freely intertwined and recombined. End of caveat :).

If there is a God, who is infinite, transcendent and vastly more complex than us, wouldn’t his actions as experienced in our limited realm lead precisely to the variety of religions as well as agnosticism and atheism that we see today?

Just a quick hat-tip to Flatland, to the Chinese Room thought experiment and to the story of the blind men and an elephant (and surely to many others :).