More Haughtiness
Just a little more John Haught. If it’s good enough for Jesus and Mo, it’s good enough for me.
He really does have a little bondage thing going here – one feels tempted sometimes to close the door hurriedly and pretend not to have seen.
And we can trust our search for right understanding ultimately because our minds have already been taken captive by a truthfulness that inheres in things, a truthfulness that we cannot possess but which possesses us. [p 75]
Jeez, get a room.
But more to the point – that’s typical of the way he goes on, and it’s like an incantation but not at all like an argument. What he says is not tethered to any kind of observation or inquiry or awareness or even thought – it’s just a kind of schmaltzy poetry that sounds pretty but doesn’t mean anything. I know that’s obvious, and that I’ve said it before, but it’s just so peculiar – this aestheticky word salad effect. I wonder what he’s like to talk to. Does he come out with this stuff face to face, do you suppose?
Faith, as theology uses the term, is neither an irrational leap nor “belief without evidence.” It is an adventurous movement of trust that opens reason up to its appropriate living space, namely, the inexhaustibly deep dimension of Being, Meaning, Truth, and Goodness. [p 75]
Fetch the sick bag.
What does it do to use capital letters on those words? Is Meaning different from meaning? How? How does Haught know?
No, of course it’s not, it’s just silly conjuring, that shouldn’t impress anyone over the age of four. Yet he’s an academic, with a job, and a title. Funny, innit.
He’s channeling Stephen Colbert here.
I gather that the capital letters refer to Plato-style Forms? Like, there’s some ethereal plane out there where the “really real world” sits. And there are objects in that world like Truth or Being or whatever, which our everyday concepts of “truth” and “being” are paltry conceptions of.
And no, the uninitiated can’t see the metaphysically “real” world.
It’s not quite meaningless, but it’s rather an outdated kind of philosophy, and there’s not much to be said for it. Plato’s price-of-entry to the ideal world was education and hard thought, which at least was worthwhile. John Haught’s price-of-entry seems to be “have faith that there’s something out there” without being very specific.
I’m not a Buddhist of any stripe, but I’ve always taken a guilty pleasure from the statement “Zen is your everyday mind.” The idea of Zen can be wonky, but I like this idea that there’s no hard, impenetrable distinction between the thought that gets you through normal, everyday life, and the thought that’s most useful to comprehend philosophical stuff.
I doubt it. He’s sending coded messages to fellow believers. Since you have not submitted to the ecstasy of this possession, you do not understand the code, so he would not bother sending these messages to you directly.
The courtier’s reply at its most desperate. Please get me out of here. Don’t worry, son, help is on the way.
I think that by “truthfulness”, Mr. Haught actually means what the prominent American Catholic social critic and political theorist S. Colbert calls “Truthiness”.
Oh, crap…just saw that Mr. Jacobi @ #1 beat me to it. The wages of skimming…
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: More Haughtiness http://dlvr.it/7JhbQ […]
I heard Haught speak last fall and I can say that his words are just as flowery but devoid of meaning when he’s addressing a crowd as he is on the page. His talk was called “Evolution and Faith: What Is At Stake?” (It was part of a series of talks on the theme of evolution, and the title seemed to have some potential.) I didn’t do my homework about Haught before attending, though, and I didn’t realize he was going to engage in the (pointless) exercise of trying to reconcile divine providence and evolution. My notes indicate that he sees evolution as divine pedagogy (evolution is the curriculum, and, according to another theologian that he quoted, the earth is a soul school). He seemed to define life as that which has the possibility to transcend itself. My notes say “All life? How does a bacterium or mosquito transcend itself?” It was a long evening; I’m not sure why I stayed, except for maybe wondering how silly it would get.
Yeah. Because of their beliefs. Without evidence.
Just like Cadbury’s doesn’t make chocolate bars, they make a snack experience allowing us to touch the depths of Satisfaction and Happiness. Via chocolate. In a bar.
Dear Tyro,
can we propose a name – rather like the name Gnu Atheists – for people like this and call them the Chocolate Gnostics?
We could write about the thrill of unwrapping the contents of the experience, the slow but satisfying consumption of the contents and how these are absorbed by our being to raise the sugar level of our blood. We will ignore minor matters like it can make us fat, raise cholesterol levels, rot our teeth – chocolate is good for you! Perhaps the Chocolate Gnostics can offer us diverse brands?
The loveliest part of the metaphor is that you cannot write about taste in any meaningful way (unless you are a wine expert). So that stops Gnu Atheists denigrating Chocolate Gnostics. Perhaps the Gnu Atheists will have to learn how to make chocolate before they’re allowed to talk about it.
And we know this how?
Language that doesn’t mean anything – that’s “not even wrong” – can’t be disproven so is perceived as profound by susceptible people. I’m convinced that crafting such language is the main skill of the theologian.
Bit of a waste of time Haught (or anyone else) keeping on trying to describe “It” – after all “It” is ineffable innit?
One should (as most of us already know) beware of word salad, since the lucid stuff interspersed in the salad may be something rather nasty and not fluffy and meaningless at all. (Example: Heidegger, as demonstrated by Johannes Fristche and others.)
Also, many traditional (fundamentalist and otherwise) believers don’t want fluffy poetry it seems, they want their thing – they’re keen on Jesus, as the saying goes, not keen on the results of magic mushrooms. (Or reverse the two for other religions.) I think it extremely likely that these “sophisticated theologians” tick off the “faithful” too …
I kind of like the idea of a captive mind, but in a wholely different context. If our minds are actually contrived by purely material causes, they must in the service of thriving as best the organism is able, whether the mind is aware of it or not.
As for adventurous movements, well, that sounds like a great brand name for a laxative.
The “faithful” just think that “sophisticated theologians” are atheists.
That’s not just bullshit; it’s Bullshit!
One of the many things which is annoying about Haught (and people like Eagleton, though in a slightly – slightly – different key) is that he doesn’t seem to see any need to try actually to persuade, or even make himself comprehensible to people like me – despite going on an on about how atheists are only talking to themselves, etc.
Of course the obvious explanation for the incomprehensibleness is that it doesn’t Mean Anything.
But I read Haught (and Collins and Flew and mcGraw or whatever his name is) because I really, really wanted to read some good anti-atheist arguments. And you think – Jesus! This is the best you can do?
Regarding “sophisticated theologists”:
Isn’t it all just some form of solipsism? I mean, if it doesn’t matter if “real” things (like a “real” God) exist, then it is just a step from that to saying that it doesn’t matter if real things (like AIDS) exist. At that point, knowledge is useless. If reality is different for each observer, then there is no reality and there is no way to know anything. Then I can just as authoritatively say that only I exist and the rest of you and the world are just in my mind.
It gives imagination and reality the same status. If anything you can imagine (I imagine the perfect experience of the Great Thundering Cucumber whose Sacrament of little sandwiches symbolizes the inexhaustibly deep dimension of Snacks made of Bread and Vegetables) is to be treated as real as the chair I am sitting on, then how do I know I am sitting on a chair.
Suddenly every attendee at a rave is a god because they are possessed of an inherent truth during the hours they stare at their hand after a tab of LSD.
It’s useless, meaningless crap. If we can’t agree on what reality is, we can’t have a conversation. Things are either real, or they are not.
I think Haught is not the best they can do (Clive @18) – Plantinga is generally cited as the go-to philosopher of religion. (I don’t know who the best-they-can-do theologian is. Maybe Tillich [despite not being contemporary] is the best example.) But even if he’s not the best they can do, he certainly is one of the things they can do – he’s respectable, he has a respectable job title, he gets reviewed. He’s not an oddity, he’s not embarrassing Cousin Jack from Hayseedopolis, he’s an establishment theologian. And to an outsider what he says is simply obviously nonsense – just made-up legless waffle in what he at one point calls, revealingly, “luxuriant” language. Oh it’s luxuriant all right – like kudzu.
As dirigible says – the problem with everything he says is, we know this how?
Thanks for the confirmation that he does it when talking, too, Mary. Good to know.
“And if you’d be impressive,
Remember what I say,
That abstract qualities begin
With capitals alway:
The True, the Good, the Beautiful —
Those are the things that pay!”
Lewis Carroll, in “Poeta fit, non nascitur”.
It’s not bullshit, it’s bullshit à la crème. There is a difference you know. Real quality academic bullshit.
When the so-called moderate and liberal believers wonder why atheists don’t confine themselves to the real danger of fundamentalism, passages like this one come to mind. Apparently people of faith can read this charming airy-fairy description of faith and see nothing but good. It’s so high and it’s so deep so what can be the problem? Even if a person doesn’t themselves possess this theological faith, can’t they at least appreciate its beauty and recognize its good intentions?
The problem is that this description of faith is a high, deep insult to people who all too sadly lack this wonderful, wonderful thing. It characterizes outsiders as being defective, monstrous dregs. You don’t exactly have to go through any strained hoops to read this passage on how faith opens reason up and derive the implication that atheists have therefore closed their reason up to its appropriate living space. They are stuck in an inappropriate living space. Atheists — unlike theists — are incapable of living in the deep dimension of Being, Meaning, Truth, and Goodness. What atheists are left with is a life lived in the shallow dimension of Non-being, nihilism, delusion, and evil.
No offense.
I mean, please don’t take that the wrong way. They’re not being judgmental or anything. I’m sure they recognize that our hollow existences can and usually do successfully mimic the real, significant existences of those with faith. So they can treat us like anyone else. Of course.
They have nothing but good intentions. The real problem is those extremists.
I just love how people like Haught make these bald assertions:
Replace the word “truthfulness” with “delusion” and I pretty much agree.
It reminds me of
PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER…itty bitty living space!
or even better…you’ve never had a friend like me
I remember reading something like this from ol’ Barney Zwartz years ago in the Age. The only thought that kept crossing my feeble cortex was ‘how the hell do you know this? And if you don’t have any way of knowing this, why do you presume all these other things that follow from this ?’ Of course when I questioned ol’ Barn, he replied in a smug way, gently condescending to me as if I were brain damaged for not getting it. Which reminds me, didn’t some other religious dude suggest gnu atheist types were all autistic? We just can’t get the emotion/feel/faith, so we bang on about uninteresting stuff like argument, evidence, instead of being raped mentally by the grand poobah in our minds….
There are a number of worthwhile (at least partly) critical theologians. Two in the Roman Catholic tradition are Hans Kung and Uta Ranke Heinemann. Of course, they’ve had their licenses to teach as catholic theologians withdrawn, but they do at least make some sense. Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s Putting Away Childish Things is worth a look in, as is her Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, the latter about the church’s chequered record with sexuality. Kung has a good, and reasonably thought out, theological study of euthanasia, just entitled Dying with Dignity, besides his much longer tomes. In the Anglican tradition, though a bit steeped in Heidegger, some of John Macquarrie’s books are interesting. And Maurice Wiles, an Anglican, has a number of very tolerable books, and I don’t think many of them disappear in verbal smoke. My special favourite still is Don Cupitt, though not many would class him amongst theologians. Alister McGrath, despite being thought of as the Church of England’s current top theologian, is, from my point of view, quite useless. He’s really a fundamentalist evangelical, but he tries to dress it up in modern clothes, but they’re diaphonous, and what you can see under them is not lovely. I thought I’d mention these, since some were asking. I don’t think Tillich makes the cut. There’s too much woo in his work. I tried for years to understand his three volume Systematic Theology, but, in the end, it seemed like just a jumble of words. He did share in somewhat in the socialist vision, so his social philosophy is still of some value. Of course, in the end, you just have to know that there is nothing that reaches solid ground.
I guess I wouldn’t mind it all, if people were to admit right up front that they are playing a game with symbols, and that they do not think the symbols reflect or mirror reality, that it is comforting game to play, but no practical details for life follow from the symbols, except general principles of love and care. If the leaders of all the religions would make that admission, and add they they did not have any intention of trying to influence secular law except by way of concerns for love, compassion, fairness and human rights, I would have no more problem with religious people than with those who like to play chess. However, they are much more likely to sack any leader who takes this point of view along the interface of the official church with its flock (or faithful adherents). Generally, atheist theologians are tolerated at university, and biblical criticism can cut quite deep in seminaries, but they don’t like it revealed beyond the sacred walls of academe. When religious leaders are prepared to make these admissions publicly, then perhaps we can begin to let off taking religion to task, except to remind them from time to time what they have said they are doing. (Since I have an eye infection and this looks very blurry, I won’t proof read it. I hope it’s better than some of my typing.)
“Aestheticky word salad effect”! Oooooh, I love the way you talk, Ophelia!
When are these people going to realise that what comforts the cognitively dissonant faithful does absolutely nothing in terms of swaying the skeptical atheist? I once again ask just one of them to produce some examples of how sophisticated arguments for religion – rather than emotional and/or sociocultural influences – are why people choose to accept faith rather than reject it.
Eric, it was up to your usual level of excellence.
Sean’s right: it does look like Platonism when someone starts capitalising abstract nouns… but that’s not based on ‘trust’ in something unspecified.
It has to be accepted that these abstract concepts exist as forms in the human mind only, where they are conceived. They are not objectively existing ‘things’.
Thanks Eric – exactly what I wanted to know.
From the above: cream of chocolate gnostic bullshit… sorry, Cream of Chocolate Gnostic Bullshit just about sums the offering up.
#s 9 (Tyro), 10 (jan frank), 17 (James Sweet), 22 (Egbert) all contributed. Never say anything about too many cooks.
Over the port and cigars, I would add that when I see this sort of Haughty verbal souffle being cooked up, I always look for some defence of special privilege hidden away somewhere; far less acceptable to the less academically astute if expressed in plain English. Such delights are a bit like the raisins in the cake mix or the threepences in the old style Christmas puddings. They are really what it’s all about.