Thursday 28 November 2013

God and the Absolute (talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe 20/11/13)

Why The Good needs God

This started out a couple of years ago when one of Feliz’ students, Yvonne Plowright, gave us a talk on whether it was possible to ground ethics without the concept of God,  concluding that you could.    Feliz commented that it was a shame that since we are mostly atheists – and a survey showed that about 80% of academic philosophers these days profess atheism – there was a rather one sided discussion and we could do with someone to express the opposite view.    It’s been on my conscience for some time and finally I decided to have a go at it.   The title isn’t quite right though.    I’m not going to argue that the good needs to be grounded in some religious concept, like the ten commandments, because that implies that we don’t know right from wrong ourselves and need to be told or instructed, and I don’t believe that.   It’s more that the good, and God turn out to be aspects of the same thing, and that the concept of the good leads you to the concept of God.

I used to think that belief in God was a personal choice.   When I did, for the record, I sided with the majority, the atheists.    And I wouldn’t have tackled a topic like this in a philosophy gathering because if it is just a matter of personal choice then philosophy has little to contribute.    And most people who do express an opinion do seem to see it as a matter of choice.   On the side of God, those who believe often stress the importance of faith, in other words that there is no compelling reason for it, it’s a leap in the dark, and can only be explained as given by God’s grace.    On the atheist side, militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, who may be firmly convinced of his atheism, sure that he is right and that his opponents are in the grip of a delusion, nevertheless when you get down to it clearly express a belief in atheism, materialism and so on rather than a sure knowledge of it.    For example, Dawkins belief that evolution can explain everything is not based on the fact that it can, but that it is the only materialist explanation he can think of so it must be right, because only a materialist explanation (I use that word uneasily, because I don’t really know what it means) is acceptable.    In other words belief in materialism is what guides Dawkins, it is a presupposition and not a result.

What I want to argue, and what I have come to conclude simply through study of philosophy, is that you can come to a proper knowledge of the concept of God.     It’s not strictly a proof, as in the medieval proofs of the existence of God.    If you take these strictly as proofs, they contain a fatal flaw, which you can see for example in Descartes’ version of the ontological proof.   I can conceive of a perfect being, says Descartes, and for a perfect being not to exist would consist in an imperfection, therefore perfect being must exist.   In other words, existence is part of the notion of perfection, so this is a deduction, a kind of syllogism.    The problem with this is that it makes God (perfection) a result of reason, and if God is a result of reason then he is also dependent on it, not independent, or to put it another way, he’s a figment of your imagination, and you have proved exactly the opposite of what you wanted to prove.    The absolute in Descartes is the cogito and God is dependent on and subordinate to that.   But there’s another way of looking at it.   Take the phrase “nobody’s perfect”, something we have probably all said at some time so presumably it has meaning.   But where does that notion of perfection come from?   It can’t be from experience, because we just said nobody’s perfect, so you can’t point to an example of perfection and say the rest of us are imperfect in relation to that one perfect being.   But for the notion of imperfection to make sense there must nevertheless be an idea of perfection, even though we have never experienced it.     That more platonic procedure is the one I’m going to follow here, and I’ll show you a proof of the existence of God that is not based on deductive reasoning but which neverthelsss is necessarily true.


I’ll say more about that later but first I wanted look at the notion of truth, which is of course central to philosophy.   It’s fashionable nowadays to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are good reasons for saying that if you work within the paradigms of modern philosophy.   At the same time though, it is logically absurd.    If you say there is no absolute truth, then what is there?    Either there is no truth at all, in which case there is certainly no point on doing philosophy and arguably no point in any kind of communication at all, or there is some truth but it is somehow less than absolute.    So does the notion of relative truth make any sense?    If we take relative to mean partial, then something that is partially true is also partially untrue, and something that is untrue, even partially, cannot be a truth, so that doesn’t seem to make any sense.    Or if you say that something is relatively true meaning that it is true in relation to something else, but not necessarily in its own right, then you have to ask what is the truth of the thing is it relative to.   Is that absolute, or is its truth in turn relative to something else?    And is there then an infinite chain of relatives, or does the chain stop somewhere when we reach an absolute?    If the chain is unending they you are back with the notion that there is no truth, but if it does stop then you have found the absolute.    There doesn’t seem to be any other option so either the truth is absolute, or there is no truth.   If there is no truth we might as well all go home, so I’ll stick with the notion that there is truth, and that it is absolute, so we need to look for the absolute.

The absolute may be unfashionable, but there are plenty of examples of it in modern philosophy.     One of the great divisions in modern thought is that between fact and value, the is and the ought – and never the twain shall meet, because you can’t derive an ought from an is.   And of the ought, you can say that it is not, because there is no point saying something ought to be if it already is.   It makes sense then to say that philosophy should deal only with what is, because if it is interested in truth, how can you have a truth of something that doesn’t exist, that is not?    So philosophy becomes centred on what is, the empirical, or what is purely logical, but not on what ought to be.

Of course there is a big problem with this which is that if philosophy is restricted to the logical and the empirical it can’t say anything of any value, so it needs some connection to the “ought”.    It often does this through “premises” which are notions that are not logically necessary or observable facts, but which seem to be uncontroversial and serve as a starting point for philosophizing and enable it to make a connection with the real world.    There are many examples, happiness (Mill), life (Hobbes), Reasonableness (Kant), the self (Descartes).    These then function as the absolute, the premise of your philosophy which gives truth to the rest of it.   All the rest is true only in relation to the premise.


You can summarise it in a diagram, or rather a couple of lists:

Ought                                                                         Is
Value                                                                          Fact 
Good                                                                          Neutral
Non-being                                                                  Being
Metaphysics                                                               Facts and deductions

Absolutes:                                                                  Results:
Life (Hobbes)                                                             Social Contract
Happiness (Mill)                                                        Utilitarianism
Reason (Kant)                                                            Rationalism
Freedom (Sartre, Descartes)                                       Existentialism
DNA (Dawkins)                                                         Biological determinism

Now, there are four things I think worth noting about this picture.

Firstly, philosophy is done on the right hand side of the page, and the absolute lies outside of philosophy proper, on the left hand side, the side of non-being.   The absolute is just a premise, a starting point which doesn’t get examined, which is very odd because the absolute is the foundation of truth which surely ought to be the prime focus of philosophy.

Secondly, this absolute is very weak.   It’s just a premise or assumption and you can simply deny it.      For example, if you say to Hobbes, “I don’t care if I live or die” you take away his basic premise and his entire philosophy collapses.    All he can do is accuse you of lying, and maybe you are, but some people would make that claim in sincerity, and in the face of that Hobbes has no response and the whole edifice of his philosophy comes tumbling down.   It’s unsporting of course to do this and a good student accepts a philospher’s premises and focuses on the reasoning that follows, and attacking the premises is rightly seen as unproductive and negative;   but the fact remains that the philosophy cannot exist without them and they are the foundation of its claim to truth, the most important point in any philosophy worthy of the name (“love of truth") and if they are inadequate, then this is a very important and significant finding.

Thirdly, these versions are all abstractions, e.g life in general, happiness in general, and not any particular life or happiness.    Because of this it is axiomatic that they will end up in contradiction, and a Socrates would quickly show this.   Example?   Let's take Hobbes.    For Hobbes, life is the absolute and this means we all value life above all else.     This means we must want longer life and in order to achieve this we need security and rule of law to protect ourselves.   In order to have rule of law we have to have government and to have government there has to be a territory over which government can exert control, in other words the state.   In order to establish that you need men at arms who are willing to risk their lives to establish that rule of law.    But you said that life is the absolute, which means that nobody would risk it in defence of the state, so either the state couldn’t come into existence, or , because it does in fact exists, it proves that life is not the absolute.    QED.   I don’t say that because I want to pick a fight with Hobbes, but simply to illustrate with an example the notion that an abstract conception of the absolute will lead into contradiction

Fourthly, there are many absolutes, and of course that can’t be.     Because they all look as good or bad as each other it is tempting to conclude that there is no one absolute, which many and perhaps most students of modern philosophy do conclude, but as I have said that is problematic because it leaves you without any truth and with no basis for philosophy at all.


Now, let’s take a look at the right hand side of the page, and try to imagine a world where you have only what is, not what ought to be.    There is a strong element within analytical philosophy in particular that wants to do this.   Ayer for example says that only things that can be observed or things that can be deduced are capable of being true, and anything else that doesn’t come under either heading is “metaphysical” and meaningless.   He take this from Hume, of course, and Wittgenstein if I understand him rightly takes a similar view though instead of dismissing the left hand side as meaningless, he concedes that it does have meaning, but says that philosophy can’t say anything about it.    He’s a mystic in other words, rather than nihilistic like Ayer, but it’s really based on the same understanding.

The first question you can ask is what would a language that consisted only of expressions of matters of fact and relations of idea be like?    Don’t you think it would be rather dull?    If it can’t express anything of value, can it express anything at all?    Would there be any point in learning such a language?    I don’t think there would.  So, first point, without the notion of the good, of value, language itself would disappear, because there would be no point to it, nothing to express.

Second, a simple point, you can note that without the notion of the good, there could be no economy, because the things we trade are goods, things of value and without value there is no economy, so another key aspect of civilization would disappear.

Thirdly you can ask the empiricist who wants to ground truth in facts, how can you have facts without value?    Facts may look like neutral things, data, but they are much more than that, they are data that are interesting, or have value.    It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's not.    For example, if I say that 7% of the population of Scotland own 84% of the land, well, it looks like arithmetic, just numbers, objective data – but you immediately perceive that I have an agenda.   You don’t know what it is yet, probably some lefty notion to do with land reform (and in fact 7:84 was the name of a left wing theatre group in Scotland in the seventies), but you do know that I have marshaled the fact for a purpose.   Actually all facts are like this and the idea that you can study facts and proceed from the facts to conclusions is false.   You need to have some notion, something you want to investigate, some hypothesis, something of value, before any facts will exist for you and without that interest facts simply don’t exist.    Even science can't draw conclusions directly from data, it has first to propose a hypothesis and then look for facts that confirm or deny it.   So you can say to the hard-nosed empiricist that his beloved neutral objective facts themselves simply can’t exist without there first being some notion of value, without the good.    The notion that facts and deductions (Hume’s “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas”) are the only things that have meaning, and that anything else is metaphysical and meaningless is the exact opposite of the truth.   Actually deductions and data have no meaning of their own and any meaning they have is borrowed from the metaphysical:   only the metaphysical has meaning.    Deductions need premises if they are to lead to anything meaningful and the premises as we have seen lie on the side of metaphysics, and facts simply don’t exist unless someone shows an interest in them, thinks they are of value, and value also lies on the side of metaphysics.      

I don’t want to labour the point.   If you try to imagine a world without the notion of the good, you can discern what actually depends on the good and can only exist because of it, and the answer turns out to be everything, certainly everything to do with what we think of as civilization, and arguably literally everything.    Without the good, without value, nothing exists, not even a simple fact, let alone the trappings of civilization, language, art, government, a cup of tea….  Everything depends on the notion of the good.

So you may ask where does this notion of the good come from and in particular can if come from nature?    Can it somehow evolve?    Well, if it evolved from nature it would be the same kind of entity as nature.   If nature is being, what it gives rise to must also be being, but the good is really its opposite, because as we have seen value is non-being and sits on the metaphysical side of the page.    Civilization is the opposite of nature and the things that distinguish it can only exist because of the notion of the good.     The good is the cause of civilization, and if it is its cause, it can’t also be its result, and it can’t be a result of nature because it is its opposite.     It can no more evolve from nature than consciousness itself can be a product of matter – the neuroscientist’s dream – because as a subject it is the very opposite the object and is its ground, so it can’t also be its result.

If the good is not produced by nature, we must say then that it exists independently of it, and this means that it is real.    It is also absolute, as we have seen, because everything else results from it.    Hegel calls it the Absolute Idea, or simply The Concept, not any particular concept but conceptual thought in general.   Hegel’s use of terms like Idea, Concept, Notion and the like can be confusing – certainly confuses me – but one thing that he is clear about is that the key term The Concept is the same as the Greek notion of the Logos, which means something like reasoned thought in general but is usually translated simply as The Word, so when John writes “in the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God” this is the Logos, and is the same as the concept of the Absolute Idea, the Notion that allows our culture to exist.    The Logos is divine, it is God Himself, and it is God in this sense who makes civilization possible, who accounts for the remarkable fact that we all take for granted, because it comes so naturally to us, that we can actually communicate with each other at all.   The Logos is the power of discrimination in general, the basis of conceptual thought, the knowledge (if you want to speak allegorically) that Adam gained when he ate the apple, of good and evil.    And because atheists generally think of God as a being, or a concept, that you can choose to believe in or not as you prefer, it is worth stressing that the Divine Logos is not itself a being or a concept, but something much more,  the ground of all being, that which makes it possible for individual beings and concepts to exist, and is not an optional idea but a necessity.

Now, the good has a structure.    Because it exists, it must have four causes, because everything that exists must have a material, efficient, formal and final cause.     This is Aristotle’s theory of causality, which you are probably all familiar with but perhaps it’s worth just going over it again.    I like to think of the example of a building.    According to Aristotle, if the building exists all four causes must also exist.     The material cause is the building materials, bricks, mortar, wood, whatever, the stuff it is made of.    The efficient cause is the builders, because the materials don’t arrange themselves and there has to be an input of energy before they can come together to make the building.      The formal cause is the architect, because the builders can’t work without a plan, something that defines the shape of the building.    The final cause is the user, because you wouldn’t build a building without a purpose.     Each of these four is essential and if any one is missing, the building couldn’t exist.    If you have builders, materials and a plan, but no purpose, then no building, because there wouldn’t be any point… and so on for the others;  but if you have all four then nothing else is needed so they are both necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the case of the good, these causes are the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice in that order.    We can represent the good as a circle, and the virtues/causes as its quarters.    It’s critical to understand the relation of these parts to the whole, and two points in particular.   Firstly, the cardinal virtues are independent of each other and cannot be expressed in terms of each other, just because each is a different type of cause.     But, secondly, while they are independent of each other, each is entirely dependent on the whole.    It’s not as if you could collect say wisdom, courage, and temperance, and then say you only need justice and you will have the whole set and will have created the good.    It’s the other way around.    Each virtue or cause exists only as a moment (to coin a Hegelian term) of the absolute and has no existence independently of it.    As Aristotle said, a hand cut off from a body still looks like a hand, but without its relation to the body it used to be part of it no longer has meaning.    The cardinal virtues only have meaning as part of the good as a whole.   So for example, risking your life looks like courage, but it only has that meaning if it is done for the sake of the good and if it is done for some other reason – showing off for example – its really foolhardiness, and not a virtue.




                                                                   THE GOOD


 






Now there are a few features of this model that are worth pointing out.   Firstly, the notions of cause and necessity it contains are rather different from those you more commonly encounter in philosophy.    If a modern philosopher says something is necessarily the case, he is usually referring to deductive necessity, the kind of logic you find in mathematics, and if he talks of cause he means force, like a billiard ball forcing another to move in a certain way by imparting its momentum, a kind of bottom-up pressure, pushing from behind.   Here both cause and necessity have a different sense, although one quite in accord with normal language.     The four causes of the good are essential.    The good cannot exist without them and because it does exist the four causes must necessarily exist, but this is not a deduction in the mathematical or purely logical sense.    It has to do with the relationship of the parts to the whole, which is a necessary one and therefore causal, but the causes are not bottom-up forces working together to force the good into existence from below or behind, but elements that must be present.    Because the good can’t exist without them you can say that they are the necessary causes of the good, but it is a different and more subtle notion of causality than the modern one.

You can also say that if the truth is the whole, as this model implies, then you can only express the truth in a systematic way, because you have to show how the parts and the whole relate to each other.   That means philosophy must be systematic.   That's another unfashionable idea - so 19th century - but if the truth is the whole, it is unavoidable.

This simple picture is the beating heart of what I call real philosophy, to distinguish it from modern philosophy which is called philosophy but which doesn’t actually contain any truth, something you will surely have noticed at some level if you have studied it, and certainly doesn't love it.   Hegel has another name for real philosophy and calls it "speculative", a potentially misleading term which has nothing to do with speculation in the ordinary sense.    A better name perhaps would be Idealism, recognition of the logical primacy of ideas, because all true philosophy is idealism, and materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms.

Now, that will do for now as a summary of the positive side of the absolute.   Let’s look at it from a negative point of view.    If you want to defend atheism you need to show why this picture is wrong.   Specifically you need to show
1   .     That the good is not real
2   .     That the cardinal virues are not independent but can be derived from eachother or from something else.
If you can do that you will have given atheism a philosophical grounding which it doesn’t have at the moment, so there’s a big opportunity, and I’ll follow you gladly if you can do it.   I don’t much want to be a believer and may aspects of religion (human sacrifice? cannibalism?) sit uneasily with me.    But it has never been done and I don’t think it ever will be.


Modern philosophy does in fact and quite consistently argue that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues can be derived from each other, but not because it has a thought-out critique of these ideas, but because it is unaware of them.   Like Descartes in his stove, it starts from scratch and with scant reference to the philosophy that came before it.

The basic idea of modern philosophy is that the good can be “explained” or “defined” (it amounts to the same thing).    After all if you can’t define something then it looks like you don’t know what it is, and that is anathema to a modern thinker.     We explain things by showing what causes them, so to explain or define the good is to show that it is caused by something else, for example happiness.   If the explanation succeeds then the notion of the good becomes redundant, because you can always replace it with what it really means, happiness.   The good is just an epiphenomenon, a shorthand, but the true reality is its deeper cause, whatever you think that is.     This is what is meant by “explaining something away”.   In explaining the good, you make it disappear.   It’s a kind of vanishing trick.     By implication, the good isn’t real, it’s more like an illusion, and this view is held implicitly by virtually all modern philosophy.

So modern philosophy is reductionist in terms of the good in general and you can further divide it in terms of which of the four causes the various practitioners reduce it to.     Take John Rawls for example.    The good is barely mentioned at all in his A Theory of Justice, and where it is it is immediately reduced to (meaning replaced with) the just, its final cause.   This is then immediately reduced to fairness, which replaces the concept of justice for the rest of the book.   Fairness is a category that belongs to reason (because of its appeal to universality, reason being the faculty of the universal) and reason with its virtue of temperance is formal cause.    This means that by implication Rawls is arguing that the notion of the cardinal virtues is wrong because he thinks that you can derive one, Justice, from another, Temperance.    But has he proved it?   Not at all, and in fact it is obvious that justice and fairness are by no means the same thing.    Justice is meted out by the state and involves vengeance and punishment, neither of which have anything to do with fairness.    You might as well say of a building that the people who use it (its final cause) are produced by the architect (its formal cause).    They aren’t and the architect can’t do anything without a client who wants a building for a purpose.    Both are essential to the process and play their separate part, and to say that only one matters is ridiculous and the simple response to Rawls’ identification of justice with fairness is that it is wrong.    You can’t derive justice from reason and if Rawls had paid attention to classical philosophy he would know that.   His entire "Theory of Justice" is in fact nothing of the sort, it's a theory of fairness, and justice is completely absent from the book, replaced everywhere by fairness.    Actually it’s not just justice which is reduced to reason by Rawls.   The other virtues also disappear and Reason becomes the only virtue, the only truth.   Rawls in other words, in common with most modern thinkers, is a rationalist, meaning that he thinks that the truth is to be found in reason, or that reason is the absolute.    It’s as if the architect said “you don’t need the client, you don’t need the builders and the materials – you just need me”.    I know some of them are a bit like that, but you can see the problem.

The majority of modern philosophers make the same mistake as Rawls.    They are rationalists, because they believe in Reason and think that everything else is derived from it.   Certainly Kant would fit into this (Rawls is really just Kant minus the interesting bits) as would Mill.     The problem with this view is not that reason is wrong, but that it is wrong to take it as the absolute, because that is to abstract from the three other causes of the good each of which is equally essential.

There’s another group though that goes further and reduces the good to efficient cause.   Thinkers like Sartre notice reasonably enough that reason can’t produce any particular virtue because it depends on generalisation, and also again reasonably enough react against the proscriptive, dry moralizing of the rationalist which is all about self denial and self control – because of course this is the virtue of reason – and says that actually the absolute is just the individual who is free by nature.     This comes from Descartes and the notion that self- consciousness is the one thing that is independent of the outside world and depends only on itself, but it is developed into the philosophy of existentialism by Sartre and others.    What matters for this way of thinking is not what I do but whether I do it freely or not and that is the only real virtue.     Rationalist morality is seen as a way of drawing comfort from the presence of rules and regularity, which means denying the essential and scary Angst-inducing fact of your existential freedom, and so you see a connection between this way of thinking and the cardinal virtue of courage.    The connection is also there at a deeper level because here we are delving into efficient cause, the question of what motivates us, and the existential answer is our freedom, and, subtext, our constant struggle for recognition.    The good in simple terms is reduced one more phase, from the rational to the free.    And this is wrong, not because we are not free, but because this freedom is only one of four moments of the good and because it is false to say that this freedom is itself the absolute.

And finally there is one more group of thinkers, not really philosophers but very popular, who go the final stage and reduce the good to the material cause, which they understand to be DNA.     All other virtues for such thinkers are results of impulses generated by our (selfish) genes.     This is the notion that the good is a result of nature, and that any virtuous behavior can be understood as a result of pressure on the organism to do that which favours the survival of the species.     This is like saying that the materials a building is made from cause its design.    Materialists really believe this and think that DNA causes us to have the shape we do, but this is impossible because DNA is the same in every cell in the body, so it can’t explain why one cell differs from another.    Biologists counter that genes within dna are switched on and off by other factors, which may be true, but if so then the other factors are not the DNA so you cannot say that it is the DNA that causes the shape and you need to understand how the other factors are operating independently of the DNA.   Of course, if you could demonstrate that DNA creates and accounts for not only our shape but our culture, wants, language, ethics and so on you would have done something that effectively demolished the classical model and would show that only material cause matters, but the truth is that this certainly has not been done, and it would seem for logical reasons that it never could be done.    It is still a belief powerfully held by many.

So the arguments of modern philosophy do rest on the notion that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues are not independent, but only as assumptions and not because they have been able to prove this is true, or even are aware of the implied criticism they are making of the classical model.    It’s worth reflecting a bit more on the notion of reality implied by this.   What is real?    The sense being used here is that what is real is self-subsistent.    Something that is real is not a result of something else, but stands on its own as an independent being.    If the good is real in this sense, we can ask what else is real?    The answer is profoundly counterintuitive:   nothing.    Why?    Because everything is a result of the absolute, everything owes its existence to the Logos, and without the Logos nothing would exist.   It seems strange;  after all, the objects we encounter every day seem to be self-subsistent, to have an independent reality.    I’m pretty sure this table in front of me will still be the same if I come back next week, so its self-subsistence seems OK.   But its being depends on someone understanding it as a table, and everything we know about it is conceptual, therefore without the Concept, it doesn’t exist.     This strange result was well understood by Plato, who famously argued that phenomena are not real and that the forms – the concepts by which we apprehend them – are the true reality.    One of Hegel’s more puzzling pronouncements in the Phenomenology, that  “reason is the certainty that it is all reality” also makes sense in this context, because not only is reason (in the sense of the Logos, rather than logic, the Kantian faculty of reason) the absolute, but also everything else is a result of it, is dependent on it, so has its reality only in relation to that absolute.   That is just what the notion of the absolute means:    everything else is relative to it.    The Logos actually is all reality, the only reality, and what goes for the Logos also goes for God, because they are the same thing.

Because this conclusion is so counterintuitive it is easy to brush it aside, and you can view modern philosophy as a kind of a conspiracy to ignore this inconvenient conclusion.   Prior to Descartes the notion that phenomena are not real was a defining feature of philosophy in general and it was understood that this mystery was at the centre of philosophical thought.     Since then there has been instead a dogged holding on to the common sense idea that appearance is reality, an idea which is hubristically called “enlightenment” when it is actually the opposite, a return to prephilosophical darkness.     It’s a kind of tyranny of the majority, a fingers-in-the-ears-singing-la-la-la group denial, a hope that by sheer force of numbers we can make the inconvenient truth that appearance is not the same as reality go away, if we only wish it so with enough conviction.   Instead we should face up to the fact that it is our common sense that it at fault and that actually without the metaphysical we are nothing, quite literally:  we don’t exist.    The metaphysical, the Logos, is not only real, it is the ground of all reality and anything else that exists does so only as a result of the Logos, or, if you like, by His Grace.