I’m less and less interested in the views of individuals exchanged in ‘debates,’ the bulk of which are politically and ideologically driven. I’m more and more interested in what individuals do. Reality is complex; it is bigger than any of us. No one can perform the God-trick. Even should it be possible for the human species to have complete knowledge of the whole world – it isn’t, and still begs the question of how discrete individuals can draw on, embody and articulate that knowledge in pure fashion, untainted by ideological filters – the fact we live in a ceaselessly creative universe means that the world is always outrunning our knowledge. Our knowledge is always incomplete. Which means we have to live forwards into the future with courage and faith, and with an acceptance that our views may well be wrong. Science is a reality-check. But all human modes of understanding are based upon concepts and intellectual tools that mediate reality, and which themselves are contingent. We never get that whole reality. Far too much energy is wasted in shadow boxing, people exchanging views which are based on their perception of reality, and misunderstandings and rows are generated by seeing different shadows on the wall differently. The test of the truth, in terms of getting on with the challenge of living, is practical wisdom, experiment and experience, small-scale practical reasoning, communities of practice, learning by doing and by living together, under the guidance of the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains all things. Evidence? Someone asks me for evidence for this. In return, I ask for the evidence for anyone’s most cherished beliefs, values and ideals. When asked for proof, I ask for proof in return. Pushed consistently to any length, there’s little evidence and even less proof for anything of much significance in human affairs. In the new Dante piece I shall shortly be bringing out, I write of how philosophy undercuts itself, and how a world enclosed in reason soon turns oppressive in its unreason, and destructive in its irrationalism. What we do have is the test of ‘what works,’ which is not necessarily the crude pragmatism it may sound. I say that in philosophical debates, which have been going on since the ancient Greeks, no side seems able, rationally, to refute the other, hence the debates are endless. For this reason Dante puts the great philosophers in Limbo, without punishment, but cut off from the Paradise that is open to all of us. Kant was famous for establishing the limits of reason. He is considered the greatest of the modern philosophers. Arendt notes that Kant discovered ‘the scandal of reason’ as lying in the fact that the human mind cannot help but raise questions of meaning and significance that it is not capable of answering by means of certain and verifiable knowledge. That doesn’t stop human beings asking those questions, and it is an impoverished view of humanity that thereby dismisses those questions as non-sense. It isn’t evidence and proof that satisfies humanity in the depths of being. The search for meaning goes beyond reason. (And beyond naturalism, too, I should add).
Praise to St Thomas Aquinas and Dante, then, who always pointed to the limits of reason here, and pointed us in the direction of the Greater Love. ‘Love takes up where knowledge leaves off,’ wrote St Thomas. And he was right. It’s not evidence or proof that makes us appreciate the truth of this statement, but wisdom. And faith. Faith is not against reason. (Although it is against a position that would reduce all things to reason). Reason as far as reason is possible, says St Thomas. And then we have to advance by other means. If we advance at all. The philosophers debate their questions for all eternity in Dante’s Comedy. That may seem like a vision of Hell to most people; for the philosophers themselves, it is a vision of Heaven. And Dante? He sees how such endless reasoning and philosophizing lacks movement, in the sense that the ideas go round and round forever in debate, and never take roots and go anywhere. So Dante puts the philosophers in Limbo, cut off from the transcendent hope that takes us further, without the backing of evidence and proof, without the safety net of certainty.
In the end, when it comes to philosophical arguments, it’s a waste of time expecting one side to be able to refute the other by reason. It has never happened and will never happen. It can’t happen. It’s impossible. Change the conceptual tools, establish another framework, and you get different conclusions. But why should anyone accept the concepts and tools of another? They are all open to decisive criticism and objection.
The question for me is actually quite simple: when looking at various philosophies and arguments, ask which gives the better account of, and makes most sense of, human beings in the sense of their history, their experiences, the meaning they crave, the way they live their lives, using human beings in the expression of all their healthy potentialities as the underlying philosophical anthropological guide. Not all accept that guidance, and say there is no such thing as human nature. They say there is no God either. I say practical wisdom says otherwise.
There is the test, it’s a test in practical living. I have to say this plain to certain ecologists who insist on stating that ecology in itself constitutes an ethic – you are wrong, profoundly so, and dangerously so. I share the same ecological concerns. But I want a resolution of the ecological problem, not its endless restatement ensuring (self)destruction. Ecological ethicists should spend less time in ecology and give much more though to ethics. Nature’s patterns and systems alone do not constitute an ethic. They give us the source of life and life’s imperatives, but imperatives are not ethics. They need to spend less time on the wild plains and in the pre-historical past, and more time in the places where human beings live, interact and make history, in the city, the public realm, the school, the church, the factory, the kitchen, the household, these are the places where you will know people, their hopes, dreams, desires, their doings. Human beings are animals, the naturalists insist. Indeed. But they are social and political animals who live in organized societies. It is institutions and practices that make civilization work. Study them, develop them. They are meaning-seeking, spiritual animals too. A desiccated rationalism can dismiss this as a superstition and a delusion, looking for a meaning where none exists. A richer and deeper understanding of human beings in the wealth of their history and culture reveals the deficiencies of such rationalism.
And a richer and deeper understanding of human beings reveals the deficiencies of naturalism, too. There is a certain naturalism among contemporary ecologists that insists that there is no ‘wealth’ of human civilization, that civilization is a complete error that is destroying the planetary ecology. I have written time and again on the problems of a techno-urban capitalist civilisation removing us further and further from our biological matrix. In Of Gods and Gaia I wrote: ‘We no longer speak to Nature and Nature no longer speaks to us. If she did, could we hear? Removed from our biological matrix, we are no longer capable of listening and learning.’ That’s deep ecology. I see this as more than biology, though. The problem is abstraction from the source of life and the source of meaning. And that involves more than naturalism. Naturalism solves nothing. I notice the irony of naturalists who are atheists, who say there is no ‘God,’ and instead set up ‘Nature’ as the entity worthy of our worship. They are oblivious to the fact that the same philosophic objections that they consider decisive in refuting God also apply to their Nature, and especially to their concepts of ‘Mother Nature’ and her needs. Read the literature on environmental ethics, and see the intricate debates on notions of intrinsic value and inherent worth. None of them are conclusive, none decisive, all are subject to decisive philosophic objections. I don’t need to accept your ‘Nature’ for the same reason you don’t need to accept my ‘God.’
Is that the end of the matter? If philosophy and scientific evidence constitute the limits of your knowledge, then that’s the end of the matter. You are in Limbo for all eternity. You will never have the Paradise that is available. Unfortunately, however, the price of such endless and inconclusive debate is the deterioration of the planetary ecology, promising to bring Hell on Earth. Limbo is not an option, not this side of Heaven.
I note the irony of Marx pointing argumentative types in the right direction.
“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
Thesis II on Feuerbach
The point is this, terms such as ‘Nature,’ ‘God,’ ‘Humanity,’ ‘Man,’ and ‘Reason’ are all ahistorical abstractions with no existential reality unless infused with real content through practice. Human beings are what they do, and what they do, they do in culture and society – human beings ‘graduated’ from the state of nature a long, long time ago. Rousseau is badly misunderstood to be a ‘back to nature’ theorist here. He is anything but. He is attempting to recover natural human qualities within a society that has grown inauthentic and mechanical, but he was clear that the realization of such a nature is a moving forwards to a civil state in which humans are citizens constituting a legitimate public community subject to laws that they have had a hand in making. There is no going back, and laments for a lost paradise serve only to ensure we never take responsibility and engage in the actions that could take us to the Paradise that is within our reach. And that involves more than a naturalism. What St Thomas Aquinas called our ‘true native land’ is more than the state of nature that some ecologists cling to. There is a truth beyond perceptions and conceptions, and it is a truth that is inaccessible to reason. We access it and share in it only through practice, and the right practices are those based on community, small-scale reasoning, interpersonal relations, experiment and experience and proximity. Arguments in the abstract are neither here nor there in the end. As for demands for ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, those things are matters of empirical science and logic, not questions of meaning and significance, nor being, beauty, love and loving. The German-American theologian Paul Tillich served as a chaplain during the First World War. The horrors he witnessed there inflicted a heavy psychological toll, pushing Tillich to the limits of his faith. I read Dante in the Inferno, and I see that God is not here, not in the evil actions and the punishments they merit. Tillich looked into the Hell of war, saw human life at its very worst, and saw God in the darkness, the real God, not the trivial, inadequate, abstract, impersonal ‘God’ of philosophical and scientific exegesis. Einstein proclaimed a belief in Spinoza’s God, which was Nature and its impersonal unfolding. Fine. As Jonathan Sacks points out, that’s half a God, the easy and uninteresting half, the half that is cut off from the God of Love and personal relationships, of meaning and significance. Tillich in the horror of human reality came to see God as both everything and everywhere, the very ‘ground of being.’ That is a God that is beyond political divisions in time and place. And it is a God that is the reason that is beyond reason. The real God shows up when the God of the intellectuals disappears, so long as you keep seeking, living into mystery with courage and faith beyond what reason and evidence tell us.
“The courage to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon oneself is the boundary line up to which the courage to be can go. Beyond it is mere non-being. Within it all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
— Paul Tillich, “The Courage to Be”
Proof? Practice. Any reasons you offer me for or against are as plausible or implausible as any I could offer. I'm leaving the endless debates in Limbo behind. There's a Paradise out there, if you have the courage to be.