Just get on with the gardening
Mark Vernon tells us that the key issue in Kant’s Critiques was understanding the limits of human knowledge.
When Kant said that Enlightenment was maturity this is what he meant, being able to live with this finitude and not reach out for false certainty. So we have Enlightenment humanism as scepticism and grappling with the reality of human knowledge and experience. This I would actually relate to a tradition within religion, though it is one lamentably in decline today. It is called the ‘apophatic’, meaning ‘negative way’. It stands in marked contrast to the ‘cataphatic’, meaning ‘positive way’, the strident assertions of indisputable religious dogma and divine truth. The apophatic is a way of approaching what is ultimately unknown by identifying what that unknown cannot be. In religion it says God is not mortal (immortal), not visible (invisible) – note, saying nothing positive about God.
Okay…but if you say nothing positive about God, how do you know it’s ‘God’ that you’re talking about? Or to put it another way, why is whatever the [?] you are talking about called ‘God’? Why that name in particular? Why not a different name, for a different subject, since this ‘God’ does seem to be a different subject. The ‘God’ that is usually meant by ‘God’ is not ‘that which no one says anything positive about’ – on the contrary. So why use that one name for two such different items?
Well, because we have to have ‘God,’ because it wouldn’t be respectable not to, so we have to hang onto it by simply doing away with all the rules and saying God is this, God is that, God is not this or that, God is everything, God is nothing, God is whatever. God is just whatever you want God to be, darling, and nobody can tell you otherwise. We can be apophatic one day and cataphatic the next and there is not a damn thing those pesky secular bastards can do about it.
Anthony Gottlieb is not much impressed by the whole ‘apophatic’ thing.
Consider, for example, “The Case for God”, the latest of 22 books on religion by Karen Armstrong, who was once a Catholic nun but now espouses a vague, universalist religion of compassion. In her opinion, God “is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God ‘exists’, because our concept of existence is too limited.” Her main idea is that the only authentic and defensible God is one who utterly transcends human understanding and therefore cannot be described at all…What is even more baffling is the idea that one can talk about a wholly indescribable God who cannot be said to “exist” but who nevertheless in some sense “is”.
Quite. Gottlieb goes on to Eagleton next (Armstrong and Eagleton should form an act of some sort, like Abbot and Costello). Same kind of thing. He concludes sagely: ‘A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.’ That’s my view. If you’re going to be apophatic, why not just move on and do something else? What is the point of saying you don’t know and calling that ‘God’?
Sorry about the blockquote typo; here’s an attempted fix.
And yes. If you don’t know, you don’t know. For these types ‘don’t know’ always seems to mean something quite different.
If you squint your eyes, you can see that the word “unknown” in this type of writing always has a little halo over it. The halo magically shields the author from falling under the influence of the word.
What something IS NOT doesn’t tell us what it IS. NOT doesn’t help us understand one bit better. Once you identify a property or quality as NOT part of the subject, it’s no longer a part of it; it no longer tells us anything about the subject. In most other disciplines, if you seek to determine what something IS and can only determine what it IS NOT, that’s considered a failure, and you start over. But here it’s considered something divine…?
Hey look, more incompetent scholars of philosophy.
Whatever Kant said about the Enlightenment, he was certainly not a skeptic just because he opposed speculative reason as a source of human knowledge (which is the primary subject of the Critique). This is about as appropriate as saying that Newton’s view of the Enlightenment implies that for every action there is ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN!! COMETS UNICORNS!!
Now that I see the context, incompetent was too strong a word. I regret using it. “Mindboggling” would be better.
The point is that it garners the speaker of such vacuous bilge considerable power over the intellectually impoverished.
That is the point, and has been since the ‘priesthood scam’ was invented.
But isn’t the assumption that god exists as something we can be apophatic about a cataphatic claim in itself?
I don’t think it is supposed to have the force of a belief. It’s like saying, “This mysterious intuition of transcendence concerning I-know-not-what is something I find compelling”. If that’s a claim, then it doesn’t have enough spine to count as fodder for overt dogmatism.
He’s at it yet again! Good lord. I hadn’t even heard of him before I wrote the rabbit-y parody of one of his earlier pieces, but now it’s like his theologicalbabble bullshit is EVERYWHERE. Gah!
The more I read Vernon’s essay the more troubled I am. It’s not simply the efforts to conflate humanism and religion and attribute intuition to science. It’s the huge rule of the excluded third perpetrated by someone who has a research fellowship in philosophy: Where–in all this–is rational inquiry? Once we know the limits of our knowledge–such vanity we have!–and we are faced with what we don’t know, we then–induct? The answer is to achieve a mystical understanding of the ineffable by perceiving what it is NOT? The goal of apophasis is transcendence; the goal of secular humanism is knowledge. We ask questions about the natural world to seek answers relying on natural explanations. (And then he invokes Bertrand Russell to instill reverence for a “personal” truth…!)
Alas, the more I hear from professional “philosophers”, the more convinced that I become that ‘philosophy’ is synonymous with mental masturbation.
Vis: it makes the philospher feel good for a moment, but it repels normal observers.
God doesn’t have to exist for there to be a special kind of not knowing that makes one superior to atheists.
@Stewart:
You are quite correct. That ‘special kind of not knowing’ is called “SCIENCE”.
God really has come down in the world from the days when he spoke to people, laid it on the line, and told them to do stuff asap – like build an ark, say. Or sacrifice an only son.
Now God is – so far as a pleb like myself can grasp – a vague sense of unease with the popularity of Richard Dawkins. How is the Almighty fallen.
Valdemar – on the contrary, God has gone up in the world. He used to be on the shopfloor, getting his hands dirty, smiting people and handing out tablets of stone. Now he’s become one of those titular CEO’s whose name is on the letterhead but whose staff say to each other – What does he do all day? Does he even exist?
Eaglestrong!!!
Good point KB. Funny I missed that, what with me working for the council and all…
“Now God is – so far as a pleb like myself can grasp – a vague sense of unease with the popularity of Richard Dawkins.“
Bwahahahaha. Genius!
Thanks, Ebonmuse, I think I’ve found my level in the realm of philosophical debate. ‘We’ve had the profound stuff – now can anyone offer a cheap gag before we get stuck into the sarnies?’
Mark Vernon is a bit like a raven. Ravens are attracted to bright round things that look like eggs. Vernon is attracted to the latest new idea that comes his way, from which he hopes to hatch a real idea of his own. But he never quite makes it.
The latest is apophaticism. Say it sententiously and it sounds profound. But, as Ophelia points out, it doesn’t mean anything. After all, the unknown might be anything at all. Why call it god?
Well, there’s a very simple reason. Since god botherers have painted themselves into a corner, as Anthony Gottlieb says, they need to have something to hang their scriptures, prayers and rituals on. So they talk about the kenosis of their god(it always sounds better in Greek), his/her/its self-emptying, and then they elide straight through to prayers or turning wine into blood, forgetting that, once they have said they don’t know, well, they really don’t.
As to Bertrand Russell, whom Vernon apparently takes as his mentor, at least for now (though he is likely just another bright shiny object for his nest), here are some words from the great man himself:
Like all the other shiny bits: not quite an egg.
Well Mark Vernon is good for something: he inspires a lot of eloquence in these comments!
Apophaticism is a way of never having to say you’re sorry for bullshit claims.
I have an apophatic insight into all the works of all the Shakespeares of all the forms of intelligent life that are too distant for humankind ever to find or encounter.
I tell you these works are *fabulous* — many of them stand above our Shakespeare as our Shakespeare stands above Dan Brown.
Your lives are impoverished if you don’t share — or strive for — this apophatic insight-type-thing I have. And if you deny that I have it, it only reveals you as a deeply uncultured wretch with a profound contempt for fine literature. Shame on you.
Why are you blaming “professional philosophers”, Michael? Professional philosophers defend a huge range of positions, so some may seem nutty – granted. But some not so much. Daniel Dennett defend some positions that I disagree with, but he is certainly a thinker that it’s good to have around. Sam Harris was originally trained in philosophy. And there are many others who write the kind of clear, well-argued stuff that you won’t find so often elsewhere in the humanities.
And it was professional philosophers, historically, who subjected religious claims to rational scrutiny and certainly helped to bring religion into doubt. I’m not saying they made the biggest contribution (which may actually have come from textual critics of the Bible, rather than from either scientists or philosophers), but it was certainly a significant one. We owe a lot to Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and so on. In any event, Vernon’s degrees are supposedly in physics and theology.
More cleanup for you on aisle 6 over at Jerry Coyne’s site, Russell! Though Ben and Eric have got it under control really.
OTOH, I’m probably not a very good advocate for professional philosophy. What goes on under the name of “analytic epistemology” strikes me as remarkably fraught.
In any case, once you adopt the continuity between science and philosophy — which people (like Coyne) have already committed themselves towards doing in their remarks against Mooney’s hatchet-shaped distinction between them — there’s really not much room left to deride and bemoan philosophy as science’s bastard little cousin. But of course this sort of epiphany would require these readers to have a longer memory or degree of honest involvement in the relevant discussions than evidently they are willing to commit.
Mr. Blackford: This is not the place for us to discuss my opinion of the utility of philosophy. Steven Weinberg & Richard Feynman do so far more eloquently and thoroughly than can I.
I take it that as a philosopher yourself, you have already read their reasoned assesments?
On a good day, I share Weinberg’s attitude to philosphy almost exactly, for what that is worth, which is the contention that where philosophy has advanced society, it is solely because it corrected a previous destructive philosphy.
If you have not yet done so, I urge you to read him.
On a bad day, I prefer Feynman’s approach to most philophers.
There are a handful of philosophers whom I respect, Dennet, Grayling etc. But when they make sense, they do so as practical scientists, not philosophers.
Michael Kingsford Gray, you are welcome to ride your high horse all you want – but remember, it’s a long drop, and the only thing to soften the landing is the primary product left by said horse, which stinketh.
Not true Scotsman?
Michael, I take it then that you must also support Chris Mooney’s argument that there is a distinction between methodological (good) and philosophical (bad) naturalism?
Golly, there’s a lot of silliness on that thread at Jerry’s, too. I’m surprised. I didn’t know philosophy was such a whipping boy.
Yeah, I’ve been noticing a lot of this, lately, Ophelia … and I’m getting tired of it. It’s difficult enough having to deal with the religious without being constantly sniped at by your own side.
I’m upset that it hasn’t gotten to the whipping boy stage yet. When and if people have serious allegations — say, against the poststructuralists, for instances — they pull out all the stops. Rightly so. But at the moment, we’re at the “boo hoo one time a guy with a goatee was a meanie” stage, which has all the gravity and seriousness of purpose as Kanye West at an award show.
We’re also well and truly stuck at the ‘Wull Feynman said!’ stage – occasionally varied with ‘But Weinberg said!’ Big help.
Yesindeedy. As now as always with Feynman, it’s a matter of “don’t hate the band, hate the fans”.
The irony buildup in that thread is quickly reaching critical mass. At the apex I predict a round of whining about philosophers not being able to take jokes and being overly sensitive to semi-serious criticism and wah wah wah do be do be do. I’ll bet that a few more specious references to the “One True Scotsman” fallacy ought to round it out beforehand, if only Michael is quick enough.