In Response to Matt Walsh

I have no idea who Matt is, and I have never read anything else he has written. But I did stumble across this link while browsing the internet on Robin William’s recent death http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/08/12/robin-williams-didnt-die-disease-died-choice/, and felt, if only for my own sake, that it needed to be addressed.

Matt makes two primary contentions:

1.       Suicide is a moral failure in virtue of being a choice.

2.       Spiritual emptiness is an essential cause for depression and spiritual health is the best cure for depression.

As disagreements often go, it isn’t so much that I think Matt is wrong so much as I think his thought is imbalanced, and, at times, naïve. My main beef lies with Matt’s criticism of phrases that people make of Robin while they're grieving. Many of them say that Robin is now “free” or “at peace.”

Matt writes:

“It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it? Chesterton said, “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Where is the freedom in that?”

I hate that Matt quotes Chesterton here both because the quote does not follow from Matt's claim (which opportunistically abuses the word ‘free’)[1]--probably Matt is just being incoherent--and because I think that Chesterton, for all his insight on gratitude and joy, was far too predisposed to glee to understand much about a lifetime of despair. (Is it any wonder that Chesterton’s sentiments and rational in “Orthodoxy” lead him to eventually commit to the Catholic Church—whose own staunch position on suicide is well-known?) That is, I think Chesterton is the doctor with (part of) an elixir, not the patient in need of it. He knows no more of the hauntings of despair than a life-long healthy doctor knows of what it is to live with chronic cancer. He may be right, but he is naïve. He prescribe the pills, he doesn't know what it is to force oneself to take them over and over.

There is no denying that suicide is a type of selfishness, if not, in certain scenarios, a very selfish brand of selfishness. There is also no denying that a choice is involved. But to concentrate one’s interpretation of Robin’s death around Robin’s selfishness is…. what? 

Ill-timed? Insensitive? Misguided? Conveniently reminiscent of Matt’s religious convictions? 

While I think Matt is sincere—and even judicious—I also think he talks about people’s false senses of security and their sloppy sentimentality toward Robin in order to promote his religious convictions. What, after all, is the function of his entire blog other than to promote his brand of belief? In the same vein, what is the function behind nit-picking at a few therapeutic colloquialisms if not to advocate his ‘nuanced’ position over those who are colloquializing?[2]

 

That's the reason people are upset at Matt, including myself. It’s not necessarily because he's wrong;[3]it’s because he's being an asshole. No one cares about the ‘finer’ theologies driving one's interpretation of Robin’s death right now, let alone a theology that convicts Robin. 

People are just sad. Let them be. 

They might even be misguided in their sadness. So what?

Is it really appropriate to focus on Robin’s moral culpability a day or so after he passes? Not only that, but on a public venue?

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[1] All people mean when they say that Robin is free is that he is not haunted by depression or its symptoms—which in this case includes thoughts of suicide. A good night’s sleep or drugs can be just as freeing; they’re just not permanently freeing. The function behind killing oneself is permanent freedom from depression. Matt, upon my research, might be hinting at (however unclearly) his view that Robin’s consciousness lingers on post mortem and is still not free.

[2] Of course, like many, he is probably naïve to the fact that it is, in fact, a brand.

[3]  I think Matt has some of this right, but I also think he's to unclear to really say anything too meaningful.

This Thing Is Due Soon...

Heidegger: A Deconstruction of Religious Experience Theory

1.  An Introduction to Perennialism and Constructivism

The absence of Martin Heidegger’s presence within both the recent and historical scholarship dedicated to religious experience theory might be puzzling to the neophyte of the phenomenology of religion. In general, Heidegger’s philosophical significance to religion has been sequestered away in theological debate—predominately in Christian theological crowds.[1] Meanwhile, the majority of prominent theorist’s discussions concerning the phenomenology of religion have been dominated by Husserlian undertones, ignoring the more existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.[2] This is not to say, of course, that scholarship has a uniform conception of Husserl’s impact on the phenomenology of religion, let alone religious experience theory. His exact degree of import on the field is controversial and hazy among scholars. It is, however, to say that scholars almost universally agree that Husserl’s terminology and particular brand of phenomenology has been adopted by religious studies programs and as such has had direct recourse on the study of religious experience.[3]
            The two prevailing camps of religious experience theory under consideration here are perennialism and constructivism, or the phenomenological and reductionistic camps, respectively.[4] Though both borrow facets of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology—a contention I qualify a bit later—it is surprising to find the phenomenologically inclined perennialists shy about involving Heidegger in the religious experience discussion. Given the volume of debates between perennialism and constructivism over the last century, one might have anticipated more Heideggerian interest piquing, at the very least, in the phenomenological camp. But scholarship is scant, and the debates which do occur, occur almost exclusively under a Husserlian canopy.
            Over the last thirty years or so these debates have reached something of an impasse, with scholars going one of three directions. (1) They make compatibilist-like efforts to combine the stronger points of perennialism and constructivism. In 2000, for example, the perennialist Robert Forman hoped to “forge a truce in the twenty years,” [5] sensing that it was time to let, “the constructivist and perennial…positions about religious experience be seen as complementary.”[6] (2) They tweak stock arguments to match the findings of external research. Ann Taves at the University of California interprets Forman’s call for a ‘truce’ as having realized that the debate, “had reached a dead end,” and in her eyes thinks it best to bring in outside academic research (i.e. neuroscience) to enliven the discussion.[7] She combines attribution theory[8] and what one might call a series of anatomical reductions to supply a casual model for why religious experience occur.[9] (3) They simply regurgitate the same thesis over the span of many years. Steven Katz’s, for example, argues that a religious languages’ make-up—its grammar, vocabulary, syntax, etc.—preconditions mystics for a religion-specific religious experiences.[10] Mystics, in other words, export their religious experiences from their language context and biasedly describe their experience using the lingo of their religious tradition. These descriptions, after all, appear in document form ex post facto either as first-hand or second-hand accounts. It is not surprising to find religious people interpreting their experiences within their religious context. 

In all three approaches, the methods employed seem to have been circling the same set of philosophical categories for some time. In fact, not much has occurred over the past one-hundred years at the philosophical level, not even Anne Taves’ work (2009) and recent work like it—most of which has remained more or less within the constructivist genre in what might called spiritual neuroscience.

At issue among scholars is whether some religious experiences are either, 1) irreducible and ineffable: transcendently caused and independent with respect to naturalistic explanations—the position espoused by perennialists, or 2) whether they are all reducible to some combination of cultural, linguistic, or physiological cause—the position espoused by constructivists. Though scholars within both traditions are not necessarily religious or non-religious, phenomenological scholars have tended to defend the religious view where reductionist scholars have tended to defend the more naturalistic approach.

Specifically, scholars within the phenomenological tradition have spent their time shaping theories which establish the possibility for sui generis religious experience.[11] In the early 90’s perennial efforts were in large part reactions to the socio-linguistic push coming from reductionist scholars (e.g. Steve Katz and Wayne Proudfoot) who, conversely, spent their energies explicating the requisite cultural and linguistic conditions without which they believe religious experience would be impossible.[12] Both schools have their list of the necessary and sufficient conditions needed to produce religious experience, both have evolved, and both have their defenses against the opposing tradition. Roughly, constructivist think that for every religious experience, cultural condition “X,” linguistic condition “Y,” and physiological condition “Z” are necessary. For perennialists, however, these conditions are not sufficient— nor, depending on the scholar, are they all necessary—especially since transcendent intervention is said by those who have these experiences to be a necessary condition. [13]

When William James first bracketed institutional religion in order to focus on individual religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience he set the tone for religious experience theory, especially the phenomenological school.[14] By bracketing institutional influence, James allocated authority to the incorrigibility of subjective experience.[15] This move was the first of its kind with respect to religious experience, and might be best summarized as an argument from authority. In James’ eyes, the chief observer is given full credit concerning what, in phenomenological terms, appears to him or her.  Thus James writes of religious experiences that, “they usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.”[16]

 Rudolf Otto too, whose Das Heilige will appear later in this paper, utilizes this argument from authority, though he adds a neo-Kantian twist to it.[17] Like James, Otto thinks that since no one can tell John Smith that his experience did not appear to John the way it did, John is the authority on the matter, and we are at the mercy of his memory and communication skills. What Otto adds to the discussion is the fact that many Johns across time and space say exactly the same thing: that the experience is ineffable, sui generis, and that it can only be known by direct contact. Enchanted by the ubiquity and similarity of mystical testimonies Otto outlines the necessary and universal conditions for this type of cross-religious experience to manifest. The temptation to read Otto as constructing a more sophisticated argument from authority than even James’—one with the aim of demonstrating that these experiences refer to something real— is an alluring one. [18] But we will have to skip it. Our concern lies with the fact that Otto’s primary occupation is essentially neo-Kantian in character. Otto is a major figure to both the perennialist and the constructivist because he sets the methodological parameters (neo-Kantian) for religious experience theory.
            These were the beginnings of religious experience theory, if not, to some degree, the phenomenology of religion as a whole.  Of course, religious reductionists supply counter-arguments, ranging from deconstructions of thinkers like Otto to upshot theory creation.

Not least among the reductionists is Wayne Proudfoot, who, to put it loosely, argues that religious language paradigms cultivate religio-centric experiences.[19] Christians do not undergo nirvana specifically because Christian language, doctrine, and practice does not foster the disillusionment of self. Buddhism, however, does, which is why Buddhist monks undergo nirvana. Furthermore, and by implication, the ostensible similarity between the experiences of people in competing religious traditions is nullified. There is no cross-cultural core religious experience, no mysterium tremendum.  Otto’s numinous consciousness does not manifest everywhere because religious experiences burgeon out of their particular socio-lingual traditions.

With the sui generis element explained, Proudfoot then deals with the ineffability of these so-called cross-religious experiences. In short, he argues that ineffability functions as a logical placeholder within the language grammar of a religious tradition to constitute the religious experience.[20] Ineffability becomes part of the grammar of religious dogma because religious schools educate their adherents in such a way as to exercise or expect ineffable experiences. Christian ascetics, for example, trust that their experience with God will be ineffable because—drawing from the pseudo-Dionysus, apophatic tradition— they have been told that speaking about God at all is impossible.[21] So when they have these experiences, they are unsurprisingly incapable of giving the experience signification. As such, the experience acts, at least in part, as a strategic defense against outside attacks. Where the experience of God is, as a matter of degree, so very spiritual that human utterances cannot possibly contain it, the sacredness of the experience is felt to be impervious to assault.
            Once reductions like these are admitted, physiological reductionists like Ann Taves step in to fill the remaining gaps. After positioning herself under attribution theory along with thinkers like Proudfoot—arguing that religious people attribute sacredness or specialness to ‘things’ (objects, events, or relationships) using the religious system with which they are most familiar—she assigns these ‘things’ physiological causes. Most engaging among her examples is how she explains felt presences (ghosts or otherwise) during sleep paralysis. At the risk of oversimplification, she argues that an alert system intended to warn against predators called TAVS (threat activation system) activates during sleep paralysis.[22] In cases where religious people are involved, attributions of transcendent agency are given to would be predators. Religious people, she says, tend to attribute agency in ideal, anomalous, or ambiguous situations.[23]

Of course, a great deal more could be said about each of these thinkers as well as their respective traditions. But both sketches are only intended to leave an impression of the overall debate. I have reviewed James and Otto because they are to a high degree responsible for the genesis of the religious experience theory discussion en bloc. Not only that, but their methods and conclusions are something of a staple to the tradition. On the other hand, the story of reductionists like Proudfoot and Taves (more contemporary thinkers) consists in large part of reactions to the phenomenological school. As such, their theoretical apparatus—its questions and categories—developed out of the phenomenological school itself. Specifically, beyond the deconstructions of phenomenological theorists, the positive theory of reductionists resides in positing social, linguistic, or biological explanations as opposed to the phenomenological justifications offered by scholars like James and Otto.

2. Methods and Parameters

The challenge for us is to determine just how much Husserl has influenced this debate, and how, or whether at all, infusing Heidegger into the discussion can amend the original exclusivity enjoyed by Husserlian theorists. This is thus a transitory project, a way of moving beyond Husserl but not necessarily outside of the interests of the history of religious experience theory. To do this, however, we will need to start with an analysis of Husserl and his impact on the religious studies tradition. By no means will this be a thorough analysis. Too many competing tableaus overviewing Husserl’s influence already exist. My aim is not to regurgitate these or adjudicate among them, but to focus on those elements which will help us transition into a Heideggerian analysis. The immediate sections to follow therefore supply both a background to the development of Husserl’s thought and an example of how that background manifests itself in the religio-phenomenological tradition, namely Otto’s Das Heilige. 

Two movements in particular play a central role in the development of Husserl and religious experience theory. They are 1) foundationalism, whose cornerstone figure is Rene Descartes, and 2) transcendentalism, whose dominant figure is Immanuel Kant. I will start by looking at the affect of these two movements on Husserl and later look at their significance to the religoius experience theory tradition by virtue of having affected Husserl. Mutatis mutandis this will entail an even closer look at Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige. Again, Otto is very much responsible for the development of religious experience theory, be it within the perennial or constructivist school. It is not surprising, then, to find that foundationalism and transcendentalism both occupy Ottoian theoretical space, making him a helpful representative case study for us.

I hasten to clarify, however, that foundationalism and transcendentalism serve only as vehicles for identifying the noetic building blocks of Husserl’s thought, as well as those of religious experience scholars like Otto.  The specifics governing or constituting the movement’s formulation are what interest us, not the historical movements nor the scholars per se. The goal then is not so much to be explicit about the movements and their relations to their parts or scholars but to introduce piecemeal those elements which, broadly speaking, religious experience theorists use as conceptual tools.

So words of caution are in order. Debates regarding the effects of both the movements (and their working parts) on Husserl and Otto manifest throughout academia—e.g. many scholars opt to either mitigate or altogether remove a foundationalist interpretation of Husserl.[24]  These types of arguments, though typical, stand outside our concern. [25]  Whatever the exact impact, what is essential to us is that the movements are at least taken by some to have a degree of effect. Again, our procedure here is less concerned with the exact formation of this thinker or that tradition. It is concerned with familiarizing ourselves with the philosophical ingredients which constitute the overall soupy texture that is religious experience theory.  

With these provisional materials available we will move into our analysis of Heidegger. Yet even there a number of parameters need to be set. Our interest in Heidegger will be limited to a broad-swath overview of his early doctrine of Being and its immediate relationship to the sui generis discussion within religious experience theory. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s version of religious experience will thus, for example, not be covered here. It also means we will not inspect any individual facet of Heidegger in detail, looking instead at his general (early) philosophy in relation to a few similar passages where he offhandedly mentions Otto’s Das Heilige. One passage, for example, comes from The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Heidegger writes, "the holy may not be made into a problem as theoretical [which Otto wisely avoids]—also not an irrational theoretical [where Otto fails]—noema, but rather as correlate of the act-character of ‘faith,’ which itself is to be interpreted only from out of the fundamentally essential experiential context of historical consciousness.”

We will parse out the meaning of this passage and others like it in light of their relationship to the history of religious experience theory, Husserl, and Heidegger’s general philosophy. It is important to mark from the start, however, that this passage comes from the early Heidegger (1919-1920), even before Sein en Ziet, and amounts to something of a deconstruction of religious experience theory.  As such, it is not far removed from Heidegger’s broader deconstruction of the history western metaphysics in Sein en Zeit. With this in mind, I will first argue that the history of religious experience theory is, in Heidegger’s eyes, an overextension of post-Socratic categories onto religious experience—which is to say that religious experience theory is largely nonsensical— and that, second, as an alternative, we would do well to reevaluate religious experience under the auspices of the “act character of faith.”  

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     [1] Stalwart theologians like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich littler their work with Heidegger’s thought, not to mention more contemporary thinkers like Westphal and Jean-Luc Marion who will make their appearance later on in this paper.

     [2] Two authors are the exception to this rule—Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phanomenologie der religion (1933) and Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1975)—but even they scarcely mention Heidegger with respect to religious experience.

     [3] James Cox writes, “It has been a subject of controversy as to how far and to what extent Husserl influenced the phenomenology of religion, but almost everyone is agreed that at the very least Husserlian terminology was transposed into and utilized within phenomenological analyses of religion. James Cox, A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 10.

  

      [4] Perennialism fits within the essentialism, phenomenological, or decontextualism family. Constructivism fits within the anti-perennial, intentionalism and contextualism family. Though the lexical emphasis of each word tends to inform a particular scholar’s approach, these words are more or less coterminous.  

    

     [5] Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Jensine Andresen and Robert K. C. Forman (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000), 8.

    

     [6] Ibid., 8.   

     [7] Taves writes, “He [Forman] claimed that both [constructivists and perennialists] had made some good points, but he seems to have sensed that the debate had reached a dead end.” Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) 56.

     [8] Attribution theory in this context refers to the propensity of religious people to attribute transcendent causation or activity to anomalous, ambiguous, or unknown events.

     [9] By anatomical reduction I mean something to the effect of a physio-psycho reduction, both being the result of either how the brain is wired or how other parts of the body effect how the brain responds to external stimuli.

      [10] As late as 1992, Katz writes, “It is my view, argued in detail elsewhere, that mystical reports do not merely indicate the postexperiential description of an unreportable experience in the language closest at hand. Rather, that experiences themselves are inescapably shaped by prior linguistic influences such that the lived experience conforms to a preexistent pattern than has been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality of the mystic. Although this reading has been the subject of much scholarly discussion since I first argued it [in 1978], I have not yet been dissuaded of its correctness. Steven Katz, “Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.

     [11] In a prototypical way, Mark B Woodhouse argues in On the Possibility of Pure Consciousness, “My intent is…to…illustrate how an abstract philosophical discussion may find expression in a major spiritual tradition built, in part, around the experience of pure consciousness,” where pure consciousness stands for at least one (relatively recent) way scholars try to talk about the logical possibility of sui generis-like experience. Mark B. Woodhouse, “On the Possibility of Pure Consciousness,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 254.  

     [12] William Barnard, for example, tries to return to the methodology of William James. Standing specifically against the reductionist methods of Wayne Proudfoot, he writes, “Perhaps it is inevitable, even necessary, that as students of religion, we will choose which methodological approach we find most adequate and fruitful. I would like to propose that a modified Jamesian approach is, in the end, far superior to Proudfoot's solution. James's willingness to entertain seriously the possibility of a transcultural reality, combined with his awareness of the tentative nature of every explanatory attempt, and his emphasis on the worth of attempting normative assessments of different religious worldviews and practices, makes his methodology a far more attractive and viable option than the methodology offered by Wayne Proudfoot in Religious Experience. William G. Barnard "Explaining the Unexplainable: Wayne Proudfoot's 'Religious Experience’” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 60, No. 2, (Summer, 1992), 231-256.

     [13] It is essential at this point to describe the complexity of the problem, both with respect to the definition of ‘religious experience’ and with the varying types of religious experience. In the first place, to calling something ‘religious’ is cheating. There is no hint of uniformity to the term or its conceptions, and probably the best method for determining what we mean by religious is, as Talal Asad explains in The Genealogies of Religion, recognizing it as a piece of folk-vocabulary indigenous to western scholars. It has its uses once parameters are set for its meaning, but once you try ‘getting to the bottom of it’ you find a cacophony of definitions, many of them derivative of western academics.

         In the second place, once you determine what you want to mean by ‘religious,’ you still have to determine what you want to mean when you couple ‘religious’ with ‘experience.’ Naturally, you get the whole spectrum. William James goes so far as to call the emotive high from reading poetry a ‘mystical’ (coterminous here with religious) experience, while Rudolf Otto has more particular conditions for what counts as a religious experience: namely sui generis, rarefied, numinous experience. More than this, even if a scholar manages to establish definitions, it is not simply a matter of applying the term to varying traditions. The explanations of and causes for nirvana supplied by those who have these experience, for example, are in many ways exactly the opposite of, say, the explanations of and causes for Protestant religious experiences similar to Stephen H. Bradley’s vision of Christ, the famous example described in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. (In truth, James’ work would be better titled The Varieties of Protestant Religious Experience.)

         The epistemological differences alone are enough to demonstrate a severe rift in the two types of experience. Where in the former experience the self (whoever that is) is said to vanish into the All (whatever this may mean), obliterating any subject to object distinction, the latter hinges entirely off of the subject to object distinction. The very gap between God all-powerful (whatever your theology) and self supplies the ostensible qualitative difference between a ‘religious experience’ and ‘normal’ experiences.  The absence or presence of subject to object consciousness is instrumental in the religious experience type.

     [14] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 4.

     [15] As W. T. Jones has said, James was “…one of the first philosophers to adopt what subsequently came to be called the ‘phenomenological’ approach, that is, an approach that seeks to start from, and confine itself to, a presuppositionless description of experience as it comes.” W. T. Jones. A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. IV. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1975), p. 299.       

     [16] Despite his contributions to the religio-phenomenological school, reading James here in purely phenomenological terms betrays the facts. Strictly speaking, by the time this quote appears in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 James is working predominantly under the auspices of radical empiricism and pragmatism, the philosophical methods of his later years, not the phenomenological procedure reminiscent of his earlier career.

     [17] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).

     [18] Some accuse Otto of sneaking a Christian apologetic into Das Heilige. He may be using a neo-Kantian transcendental method as a backdoor way to defend and promote the existence of the Christian God. Though I grant that this is possible, for the time being it is enough to point out the difference between that argument and mine, i.e. an argument from authority concerning the actual existence of the object of the mysterium tremendum (the Holy) and an argument from authority of the Jamesian type (that accepts religious experience accounts at face value) and uses it to list the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of numinous consciousness. Otto certainly makes no obvious case concerning the actual existence of the Holy, let alone something as specific as the Christian God. This is not a point of contention, and is disputed by no-one. The question is whether someone can make an implicit argument. Thus, if a case were to be made in favor of Otto’s Christian apologetic, it would have to be one with implicit value. Otto is vague at best; what is conspicuously clear is that he assumes the existence of the Holy, even providing a passage warning would-be readers to put the book down if they have never experienced numinous consciousness for fear they would not understand his meaning. In any case he spends majority of his efforts formulating the transcendental conditions necessary to sustain human consciousness of such an object. His project is largely neo-Kantian in this sense, a position I spend some time delineating later in this paper. To miss the Kantian influence in Otto is to fundamentally misunderstand Das Heilige, and by extension the corpus of religious experience theory following it. .

     [19] Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985). Along with katz…part of the contextualist movement.

   

     [20] Proudfoot writes, “I shall argue that ineffability is not a simple unanalyzable characteristic of the [phenomenological/mystical] experience, as James implies, but that it is an artifact of the peculiar grammatical rules that govern the use of certain terms in particular religious contexts…[ineffability] often serve[s]…to constitute an experience rather than to describe, express, or analyze it” Proudfoot, 125.

     [21] Proudfoot reminds readers that speaking of Aquinas’ esse or Plotinus’ the One. Both have a part to play in the evolution of Christian theology. For Aquinas and Plotinus, God or the One are apophatic in nature, that is, they can only be known by their negative differentia or by analogy.  God or the One are not trees, or stones, or abstractions, or mathematical equations. What positive things can be said about them, at least according to Aquinas, are analogous references. God or the One are something like Love, or Beauty, or the Good. They are not actually those things, but they are like those things.

     [22] Taves, 135.

     [23] Make the argument that she is a biological reductionist. This will require some examples.

     [24] Smith and McIntyre—to select a few scholars at random— say, “The basic task of philosophy, he [Husserl] believes, is to discover the ultimate foundations of our beliefs about the world and our place in it, and to justify – or at least effect an understanding of –the framework within which all our thinking about the world takes place, both our everyday, common-sense thinking and our theoretical, scientific reasoning. Like Descartes, Husserl thinks these foundations lie with an understanding of the nature of the experiencing subject and his consciousness. David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982), p. 93

     [25] A popular reason scholars think he is not a foundationalist lies with his commitment to the phenomenological reduction, i.e. epoche. Epistemological foundationalism of the kind we find in Descartes operates within the natural attitude. Thus, as Husserl methodologically denies the natural attitude, and therefore the questions concerning the “I” as being, no claims concerning what is foundational in the sense of being can arise. This ontologically preoccupied definition of foundationalism might be too narrow to apply to Husserl. Likewise, other definitions might be too broad. Roughly, all discursive reason operates foundationally. Given the truth of proposition “A,” correlative proposition “B” and “C” may arise. On this model, every philosophy is a foundationalist. The idea is to find a middle ground definition of foundationalism that is resistant to overtly Descartian interpretations as well as useless broad definitions. Husserl, I imagine, fits somewhere in this space.

Religion, Atheism, and Dying

Two years ago around this time I met weekly with a former professor of psychology from UPenn who, because of his age and ailments, attended a nursing home. To put it abruptly, my job was to baby sit him with the probing questions of an enthusiastic grad student. He was bored and desperate to feel engaged, just like the good ol’ days, and I was happy to meet with him.

I liked the idea then as much as I do now. Who in their right mind would pass up speaking with a highly-educated Third Reich atheist about religious experience?

Because as a rule old people nearing death no longer give a damn. They are candid. They have either abandoned formalities and niceties because they’re out of time or because they’re out of their minds. Both are excellent.

Sure you have some who are shy about their last vestiges of consciousness, but the honest ones know they don’t have time for that. Whether someone is religious or not, death is a practical matter. The epitaph must be decided upon, the will and testament drafted. The aged know this best of all. Even before then, in youth, measures are taken to prolong physical well-being, thought is given to how or even if to live a good life while death looms (somewhere) on the horizon.

As such, I have not forgotten the old professor’s words to me. “It may be,” he said contemplatively, “that I need God in my dying moments. I do not know. But I don’t think I will. I can live with the fact of dying.”

Immediately upon hearing this, a Faulkner quote passed through my mind. “It’s not when you realize nothing can help you,” says Quentin, “—religion, pride, anything. It’s when you realize you don’t need any aid.”

For the brief moments I walked this earth as an atheist I had to mark with honesty that both Quentin’s and the professor’s words, and that my similar position, was an instance of atheistic psycho-linguistic therapy disguised as bravery and strength. Fascinatingly, the very act of naming or categorizing the event gave me control over my ominous future by giving me a designator inadvertently designed to stifle anxiety.

That is, the “rage against the dying of light” ceased when I compacted all my premonitions of death into a designator whose grammatical function was to enact acquiescence—which is to say emotional passivity.[1] It was not Christian hope and therefore not Christian therapy, but it was atheistic passivity and therefore atheistic therapy. It's not totally unlike Buddhism, really. Different method and emotions, same result--though not in degree.

What I thought was that I was being brave by shedding the hope associated to Christianity and simply ‘facing the fact of death.’ But in reality each time I spoke or thought about my death  as something I had ‘accepted,’ I blindly drank the very cup I accused the Christians of drinking.

For all my admiration of Sisyphus, I could not help but wonder what attracted him to pushing the boulder in the first place. What function did it serve him if not a therapeutic function? Why not roller-skate instead or get high? Why not wallow or, for me, believe in better/more effective therapeutic measures? For if both we atheists and Christians are unconsciously seeking therapeutic measures, and the absurd problem still faces us, why opt for the lousier of the two? Such were my thoughts at the time. 

What I realized was that all the mental toughness self-attributed by (certain) atheists to themselves can be reduced to mental tenderness in light of the fact that they still seek or simply find themselves with therapeutic counter-measures.

My omnipresent brain editor William James likewise accuses atheists of being intellectually tender for merely ‘facing the fact of death’ because it is symptomatic of the need to satisfy the demands of Western man’s obsession with the ultima ratio, the total ‘filling in’ of one’s worldview (a point Heidegger would like, too). According to James, to quantify death fits neatly into the modern rationalist’s tendency to ‘need an answer’ and ignores any degree of mental discomfort over the possibility for alternative explanation—which here means incomplete explanation and for James means pluralistic explanation. To put it differently, it’s the comfort epistemology well known to religious enterprises manifesting in an atheistic way through atheistic language (a point which amounts to a very Eliadaian extrapolation, I’m proud to say).

   

In the history of my life, I’ve supported any number of versions and competing therapeutic narratives. The more popular Protestant version of it here in America appears in conservative comfort theology, where foreign philosophizing and theologizing are simply ignored for the fear of paradigm shifting. Above all my ideologies hovers the eternal cloud (smog?) of this fundamentalism. I shall forever be haunted by it. I supported it in my youth and abandoned it in adulthood. Most of my family still operates inside of it. In most cases, this tough-faith approach is mental tenderness manifesting as mental stupidity. The methods used by this class are so dubious that even those within the Christian tradition recognize it as mental tenderness. 

The other and less popular version (in America) of Protestant mental toughness is more sophisticated, and usually appears as an argument from authority based on faith—which is to say an argument for Catholicism without the Pope. I myself currently belong somewhere between this class and a religious pluralist. They/we believe in such and such based on the legitimacy of these traditions: insert list here with accompanying propositional, historiological, metaphysical and other such reasoned paraphernalia. To this class, one can market the advances of philosophy and science with much less push back. For Protestants in this set, mental toughness means not breaking at each newly learned or refined philosophy, but instead a steady metamorphosis toward more complete faith. Even doubt works within the mechanism, and oddly becomes a garment of faith itself. So tough are the Christians in this set that they’ll listen to pretty much anything without dropping their belief.

In the case of Christianity—not to mention religious systems like it—the popular criticism against it is obvious. Death is so horrifying that people are willing to believe crazy shit to circumvent the void. Religion is by many estimations (which is to say Atheist/Agnostic) the tender-est of the bunch simply in virtue of being the most obnoxious relative to the wisdom of the scientific era and Ockham’s razor—a point that standing by itself is pretty naïve but is often rhetorically convincing. 

Every system, I imagine, has their ‘death solution.’ Buddhism solves the death problem simply by never letting anyone die. Atheism plays dodge ball. Islam, if I understand it right, solves the problem in much the same way as Protestantism. Agnosticism, to oversimplify, doesn’t have a fucking clue what to do with any of it so it finds distractions (of a Pascalian sort) or despairs (of  Kierkegaardian sort) and is thus restless (of an Augustinian sort). Catholicism and Dante toss you purgatory and time to work out the kinks. And early rabbinical Judaism contribute retribution theory to the mix after simply neglecting the possibility for an afterlife. I suspect that with a little work you might locate the “tenderness” in any tradition.

Because what is meant by tenderness of mind, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is relative and informed by someone’s weltanschauung. James thinks dogmatist (of any degree and of any worldview) are tender because they need to feel complete, where James is satisfied being tough in the open-endedness of pragmatism/pluralism. Atheists (and sometimes agnostics) think James and religious folk are tender because they can’t face the misery of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil.’ And Christians (probably other religions as well) find James tender for lacking the requisite faith to be dogmatic and the atheists tender for lacking the requisite faith to have hope. It’s a rough summary, but with a little gerrymandering, I think you can see the truth in it. Or, at least, I’ve bought into something like this story for the time being.

In the end, we are, I am, at my core, deeply concerned with dying, my own death and other’s. In my mind, Heidegger was right to locate the human problem as the ‘throwness’ problem, the inevitability of death problem, and wrong to depend on that finitude to enable Dasien to ‘care.’ But I certainly understand the appeal. 

It's true; they don't teach us this in our temples; they teach the opposite.

And the “one short sleep past we wake eternally” is the answer par excellence to Christianity. Probably in large part due to my background it remains the par excellence narrative to me. So powerful was Paul's "death has lost its sting" revelation that many early Christians were signing up to become martyrs, and I have always been attracted to it.

Even still, Christianity by and large has neglected the value space of the finite, either subjecting the finite to an Augustinian critique and devaluation, or, more regularly, being totally oblivious to its existence. Both are probably atrocious underestimations of its importance. Chesterton is about the only Christian I've ever noted to have noted it on its own terms. His model is essentially Humean, though I have no space/time to deal with it here.

Ah well, I'll have to write another blog. I'm afraid 3 pages is already too much. Kevin out.

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[1] I think of Freudian psycho-therapy as an example. In Freud the utterable or at least conscious retrieval of the traumatic memory supplies the patient with a designator or a pointer to a designator—be it an image, phrase, word, or all of the above—with which they can quantify and measure that event. You might call the quantifying act a naming act. Once it’s named it can be manipulated and either purposively shoved forever back into the subconscious (whatever that is) or placed ‘out in the open’ for further repairs to the psyche. Once the cause is diagnosed, which is to say identified and named, the effect no longer permeates because the cause is no longer a cause; it’s just another designator in an ever evolving idiolect.

As such, the cause designator gives the patient the equipment for accepting, combating, or revalorizing his/her present experience in, quite literally, new terms. More often than not, what was originally a cause becomes a designator designed (consciously or unconsciously) by the agent to be therapeutic. (The same thing, by the way, occurs when husbands and wives come home from work and ‘get things off their chest’ through ‘talking it out.’)

Why I Don’t Wear Pants at the Library, Stepfather-hood, and Some Haphazard Remarks Concerning Religious Pluralism.

I have a library now. I didn’t used to, but now I have one. I don’t mean that I lock my front door and turn the keys to start my car and drive over to a newly discovered library located in downtown Ephrata. I don’t have a favorite couch I like to sit on there, or a favorite parking spot near the entrance. The clerk and I don’t exchange knowing glances or jokes about my countless late fees.

I mean that I walk out of my bedroom first thing in the morning with my hair pointed awkwardly over my ears and simply, if not nonchalantly, step into my library. I mean I have my own private library. I mean that I can go to the library without my pants on. George R.R. Martin seems to think I can live a thousand lives before I die if I spend enough time in books, so in the interest of learning from my betters, I take his advice—only in my case I do so without pants.
  

My family and I have moved to a new crib with six bedrooms, two living rooms, and all manner of other things we don’t need yet are glad to have. The rent is good, and we don’t have enough belongings to put in the rooms.

Fortunately, however, we do have enough books—an overabundance in fact— and have made one of the living rooms into a library. Inside it are four overflowing bookshelves, a lamp, a night stand, globes, maps, and, naturally, a framed medieval ship mounted on the wall.

In spite of having lived in more places than I remember, I have never had the opportunity to have a library. And every one of my relocations has had an intellectual phase associated with it. That is, I remember what I used to think about by remembering where I read my books.

In Columbia’s Cool Beans coffee shop I studied Augustine and Plato. At Penn’s main entrance, I studied religious theory and myth theory. On my back porch with a pack of Camel menthols, I studied C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien.

With this new house I expect I’ll look back remembering this as the time I began engaging religious pluralism. The difference now is that I have kids roaming about, asking me unrelated complex questions concerning why prince Arthur doesn’t have hair as long as Sir Gwaine or why we haven’t gone to McDonalds since yesterday.

The other difference that comes with stepfather-hood is that now I no longer look into intellectual fields with just my own interests and heart in mind. Now I have to ask at the end what I will tell my kids about religion when they’re old enough to fully understand. Well that, and what to tell them now, while they’re not old enough to understand.

One thing I won’t tell them is that religion and theology are simple. The world and its gods are not simple, only the people who worship them. My (ever ongoing) master’s degree has taught me that.

In fact, I remember my first day at Penn. I was nervous as hell. In my mind I had traveled some 500 miles to engage some of the world’s brightest minds concerning some of the most complicated topics accessible. My nervousness was silly, I realize, because I was only concerned with not wanting to seem stupid in front of people.

“You know nothing John Snow,” I should have told myself.

They were all to converge on me at once, mankind and idea alike, and I was nervous for the wrong reason. I did not expect to change as much as I should have expected it, and as much as I did. Because in most of those rooms I possessed only average intelligence, and I was definitely the least educated of the bunch. I didn’t stand a chance. I felt the shock of philosophical and religious novelty perhaps more than anyone there. In a way, you might say that my current interest in religious pluralism comes as a result of the explosion of philosophical and religious ideas entering my mind from that time period. 

Because having moved back to Pennsylvania where I grew up as a child has shown me just how small my family’s background is, and, I say this cautiously, how small their ideas are. One day I hope to write an essay entitled, “In Defense of Horse and Buggy,” to defend a culture that, at bottom, is not altogether distinguishable from Hobbiton. But though I admire much about the epistemologies of Amish folk, I have no time for such defenses today. For now it is enough to say along with Frodo and Sam that I have returned from Mordor and I cannot go back to the hobbit I was.

I’m sure many of my kin and kith would very much agree to the Mordor analogy and the effect it’s had on me.

But it’s only natural that a (former/sorta still) student of religious theory find himself confronted with religious pluralism. It’s not surprising either that as a student of philosophy I have already beheld atheism and agnosticism in all their glory, and, in a way, ‘dealt’ with them. To most of my readers ‘dealt’ will mean reviewed and refuted, but I do not mean this. I mean something more existential. That is, I have rejected them not on philosophical grounds—because it’s not clear to me that there are any— but pragmatic grounds.

   

Really, for some time now I have said something to the effect of, “atheism is the most scientifically agreeable, agnosticism the most philosophically reasonable, and religion the most ethically and aesthetically tenable.”

Because come now, let us be true to one another, many of us who believe in Christianity believe it faute de mieux. I don’t mean this logically, because to mean it logically is necessarily the case. We all opt for that worldview that seems the best option for the very simple reason that there is nothing better than the best option.

No, I mean it psychologically, where the implicature seems to be, “I’m not satisfied with the current version of theology I’m given, but what else can I do? I just wish this whole God thing made more sense.” The gospel seems better than every other worldview because at bottom I know nothing about the other world views. Jesus seems better because I live in a community of Jesus followers. For what reason would I abandon that post? Christianity seems better because I already know its theology and its rituals.

And in the case where you believe that there’s nothing especially more appealing about another worldview why bother with them? What advantage do they pose?

I like what William James says here. He makes the perfect (albeit obvious) case that some weltanschauungs, like wires, are ‘live’ while others are ‘dead’—each relative to particular individuals in particular places at particular times. To an Arab atheist, Islam is live and Christianity is dead. To an American atheist, Christianity is live and Islam is dead. To both, tribalism is dead, and to both, atheism is live. Nietzsche (and Heidegger) believe that God is dead, and everyone believes that Baal is dead.

The deadness or liveness of the weltanschaunng is directly correlative to the willingness of the agent to believe in it, and the willingness of the agent to believe is directly correlative to the social atmosphere within which they find themselves.

James’ account seems a bit overly agent-sensitive. Even still, I think I can comply with him and say somewhat reservedly that religious pluralism has moved to the rank of ‘live’ for me, just as it had in the case of atheism and agnosticism some years ago. Beforehand, religious pluralism was, I confess, simply too ‘weird’ to be taken seriously. Of course, it was only weird because my tradition told me it was weird, illogical because my tradition told me it was illogical.

In reality, it was only foreign because I wasn’t born a Sikh or in New York City, or, for that matter, Corinth or Rome. When you talk to actual pluralists you’ll find nothing even remotely weird about it. Very roughly, pluralism is to religion as agnosticism is to philosophy. It’s liberal enough to be concerned with all men and humble enough to recognize it lacks an epistemic grasp of both gods and men.

It probably also has similar flaws to that of agnosticism. And as the main problem with agnosticism is action, or rather, lack of action, so too with pluralism. What ritual, I wonder, does one participate in to the god with many faces? And how are we to ask Him, or Her, or It if we cannot identify some strand of theological truth within which to speak about this holy ‘X’? Does the holy ‘X’ speak? Does it have agency, or is it just a Oneness with being? A pluralist can’t be a compatibilist, especially when trying to combine Buddhism or Taoism with the Semitic religions. At best, a pluralist can only be an extreme inclusivist without any real theology.

Is there a way to approach religion? Religions and their theologies will want to move centrifugally, interpreting the data and phenomenon of the cosmos in light of their dogmas. Every sophisticated faith, I imagine, has its own credo ut intelligum, not just Christianity’s Anselm of Canterbury. And even for the unsophisticated ones, one week’s dive into a phenomenological text will reveal that certain types of knowledge are purely experiential. Heck, one doesn’t need books; falling in love can teach you as much. A religion believed is a religion informing your interpretation of data and phenomenon.

The alternative, perhaps, is a centripetal method, where we start with a given set of criteria and determine which God or god’s or Universal Oneness is the actual. But how do we determine such criteria? How could we possibly be objective? Are we not forced to use the very centrifugal theologies we have to guess at the attributes of the holy “X”?

Maybe we could go about it in a Heideggerian way. We would have to ‘dive into religion in the right way,’ whatever the heck that would look like.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

To recount all of this is not to have abandoned my Christianity; it is only to mark with honesty that my Christianity is a complicated psychological and philosophical matter. The world, I tell you, is a complicated thing. The world, I say, is an aporetic cluster fuck.

And so, for me, I return to the, ‘to whom else shall we turn’ of Peter. Scholars (Coleridge?) often talk about the willing suspension of disbelief with respect to the reading of fiction stories. Readers ignore all questions of whether or not the events occurring in the story could actually happen. At the phenomenological level, belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ is an analogous (and conscious) act in the face of the anti-theses posed by religious pluralism—at least in my case. The same, I repeat, applies to atheism and agnosticism.

I’m sure over the next few months I’ll overview the works of people like John Hicks and MacIntyre, or Westphal, Ricoeur, and Heidegger and come to a fresh, more comprehensive view of religion and Christianity. For the time being, I am contented with my new home, my new family, and my old—albeit reformed—faith.