Hearing the Deep Cry of Meaning
After singing the praises of John the Baptist, Jesus turned to lambast the people for their failure to respond:
‘To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.”
Matthew 11: 16-17
It's a familiar lament. Why such unresponsiveness on the part of people? Why does materialism as the endless accumulation of quantity not suffice? The problem with such a thing is not that it is materialistic but not materialist enough, it's an hypostatisation and fetish that distances us from sources of life and meaning. But the questions remain: Why the need for response? Why is naturalism not enough?
Despite the success of capitalist modernity in expanding the quantity of material goods and extending civil liberties and rights (as its adherents claim, ignoring the social struggles involved, it was never a passive and automatic process), there is a growing feeling of discontent, a pervasive sense that society is not at ease with itself. Those who look at the successes of the dominant social system are inclined to dismiss this as a psychological malaise on the part of a spoiled and entitled generation. But that is a complacent view that makes human fulfilment merely an automatic function of economic quantity. At the same time, the views of critics who think the problems we face are ones of inequality are likewise superficial. The problems go far deeper than material production and its unequal distribution. The pervasive discontent that characterises modern society points to a dis-ease. Marx describes the modern condition perfectly when he writes ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ In such a society, all the certainties and stabilisers by which human beings settle and order their existence are constantly undercut by the rapid pace of change, leaving human beings forever unmoored. Marx criticised the capital system as a dehumanisation, Max Weber characterised it in terms of meaninglessness and depersonalisation. We need to resolidify.
To reject such views as overly pessimistic, and to point to the unprecedented expansion of material quantity as evidence of the capital system’s success, is merely to beg the question. Let’s accept that the system, in its own terms, has delivered on its promises, generating material wealth far in excess of all previous civilisations. It is still abundantly clear that this material largesse is not nearly enough to satisfy the conditions of a fulfilled life. Quantity can never compensate for the absence of quality. Marx and Weber (Durkheim too) could be presented as social theorists who wrote in a nostalgic frame, pointing to the world that was in the process of passing into history, and worrying about the uncertainties of the world that was coming into being. But they identified a real problem here: the reduction of life to quantity and the failure of such reductionism to satisfy the soul. Such a world could deliver a wealth of means, but not meaning. Both Marx and Weber were attempting to restore the human dimension to the material life processes of society, accenting the dimension of human subjectivity within the notion of a meaningful life.
The problem with a naturalism that too closely reads values from the findings of natural science is that it ignores the human dimension of the world we live in. In fact, it often makes a virtue of that fact. That’s misguided. It is neither anthropocentric nor anthropomorphic to factor the humanness of existence into an account of the meaningful life. I have a wealth of notes on evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and intend to write at length on social epigenetics, holarchy, biomimicry, patterns and webs in nature. There are exciting developments in all these areas. But I don’t need the latest findings in science to confirm to me the things I know to be true in the field of ethics and society. Critics could say I have this the wrong way round, that natural facts come before ethic. True, but natural facts are not ethics. Aristotle was always interested in the implications of his natural science studies in biology and zoology for politics and ethics, but he was always clear on the dignity and importance of the latter in determining the best regime for human life. The values and practices I argue for can neither be reduced to the findings of natural science with respect to the world, nor deduced from them. There is a relative autonomy and it is in that space that we find the humanness of existence.
Plato, the great philosopher who affirmed the life of reason, was wise in knowing that reason does not and cannot rule alone. The real significance and value of the facts of life are made manifest only by being placed within the more inclusive dimension of the true, the good and the beautiful together. That is to see the world as something more than physical cause and effect. And human beings likewise are more than physical machines composed of drives and instincts. Successful living is about more than functioning effectively as a consequence of right conditioning. Flourishing well as a human being involves character formation and the acquisition of the virtues as qualities for living right as a human being. It is here that the human being is given due consideration as a meaning-seeking creature. It is the loss, frustration, diversion and perversion of this meaning that is at the source of the ills of the modern age.
Those who remain wedded to a scientistic disenchantment will dismiss this search for meaning as a chimera, human beings doomed to frustration through the endless search for a meaning that does not exist in the world, prone to delusion in making a meaning up. On this reading, the problem lies with the immaturity of human beings in clinging to outmoded yearnings. That view, I say, is crude and simplistic and betrays an almost complete ignorance of what human beings are. The danger is that the yearning for meaning will continue to be denied and repressed, with who knows what damage to human sanity and planetary health as a result. The scientistic - and economistic - view is incapable of addressing the dis-ease afflicting the world today, because on a priori grounds it cannot understand the nature of the protest against meaninglessness. We must accept disenchantment as a fact of life, and address any outstanding issues in terms of physical causality and material quantity. In those terms, the Enlightenment project has triumphed and capitalist modernity has delivered. Any discontent can only be the result of psychological maladjustment to the rational-natural order. I say that that underlying dis-ease gives evidence of an emotional intelligence and spiritual yearning that are far beyond our rational tools, an anarchic surplus that evades capture and enclosure by reason.
If evolutionary biology and psychology address the issue of meaning and purpose at all, they tend to refer to treat them as delusions and instances of wishful thinking, cautioning against the dangers of ersatz ideas and values. I’ll issue that caution too, whilst affirming that there is a moral knowledge and truth as well as scientific.
The presumption seems to have been that the expansion of material quantity would suffice to satisfy the conditions of human happiness. But this is not how things have worked out, and the reasons have nothing to do with psychological maladjustment. Rather, the loss of meaning attendant upon assertions that we live in an objectively meaningless and valueless world has left a gaping hole in the heart of the world which the endless expansion of quantity could never serve to fill. You can neither reform nor transform a vacuum, and the endless accumulation of material quantity is neither a reformation nor a transformation, it is the vacuum.
There is no compensating for the absence of meaning. Individuals could be conditioned to be well adjusted and functioning beings in a sociological and biological sense, but the absence of meaning will continue to be expressed in a profound underlying unease. We need to address individuals as human beings, that is, as beings characterised by a deep cosmic longing for meaning. This innate yearning needs to be seen as something deep and defining rather than as some psycho-chemical malfunctioning that needs to be corrected. The scientistic approach overlooks the profoundly human truth that a person who has found, or is in the process of finding, the meaning sought, will make sacrifices and endure any amount of pain and suffering, even lay down their lives for the sake of it. In the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’ The world is full of people giving us their ‘hows’. I want to know about their ‘whys.’ That is, I am at least as interested in human reasons as I am in physical explanations and technical solutions, not least because the former are more complicated, more endearing, more enduring, and much more interesting than the latter. More on this later.
There are still people who are perplexed by the paradox of discontent and protest in the midst of abundance and state-sponsored social security. People, it seems, want for nothing and yet are still unhappy! How can this be? In economic terms, the capital system has delivered the goods. There is a question of uneven distribution, but the fact remains that human beings are wealthier and healthier and better educated and housed than ever before, and in greater numbers. These are claims that the likes of Steven Pinker makes, and he backs them with an array of facts and figures. I know these have been contested, but let’s accept this thesis for the sake of argument. The capital system gratifies every want and satisfies every longing but one, the longing for meaning! And it turns out that a fulfilled and happy life depends upon the satisfaction of that need for meaning. So long as that need for meaning goes without fulfilment, then human life will continue to proceed in a vacuum, which no amount of material quantity could ever succeed in filling.
There is no paradox at all here. For too long we have thought that economic growth would be the cure to all our problems. Once the social and economic conditions of people have been improved, then happiness will follow as a matter of course. It’s a delusion. John Maynard Keynes was one of the greatest economic thinkers, and he knew that economists were merely custodians of the good life not the creators of it; he knew that the good life was constituted by much more than economics. Economics concerns the means, important but not an end in itself. Happiness depends upon the satisfaction of all manner of conditions, and a wealth of meaning matters much more than the wealth of means. In threatening the survival of civilisation, the crisis in the climate system is forcing us to face the key question square in the face: survival for what? For what purpose or end do we live? What is our ‘why’? Albert Camus argued that ‘There is but one truly serious problem, and that is … judging whether life is or is not worth living …’ (The Myth of Sisyphus 1955: 3). We have a wealth of means available to us in settling the question of ‘how’ we are to live, but a scarcity of the meaning which enables us to discern ‘why’ life is worth living.
There are qualitative questions that face human beings as truth-seeking, meaning-craving creatures that no amount of material quantity can satisfy. The paradoxical discontent of the modern world lies in its expansion of means coming at the expense of a diminution of meaning. Further, this expansion has been achieved in such a way as to undercut the social and ecological grounds of sustainable living. The costs are now becoming apparent. We had thought we had achieved eternal life through our machines, only to find that this is not the case. That’s one reason why environmental crisis has provoked such a deep existential anxiety in modern society. We have lost faith in God only to find that our earthly saviours are implicated in our damnation. We risk being orphaned by our own technology. Modern man had thought himself godlike, only to find himself threatened with disinheritance in a world of his own creation at the hands of his own powers. And there's even worse than this. As Ernst Bloch wrote, ‘Today, men have been granted those concerns which they formerly had been confronted with only on their deathbeds.’ The environmental crisis which now threatens long-term civilised existence challenges us not merely to fight for our survival, but to answer the question as to why survival even matters. Are human beings worthy of being saved? And what, precisely, does salvation mean? Answering those questions involves finding a meaning beyond physical existence.
The affluence of our society is reflected not only in the expansion of economic goods and services, but also in the technologies available to us. The problem is that we have started to use technology as a crutch. As Marx wrote in 1844: ‘they want only “useful things” to be produced, but they forget that the production of too many useful things produces too many useless people.’ (Marx EW EPM 1975: 362). The over-reliance upon technology has led to a winnowing away of our own survival skills. There is a grim irony in the predicament that we now face with respect to the environmental crisis. We have created a social system that contained the assurance that we could ensure survival without having to exert ourselves, only to find that this system is a global heat machine that constitutes a direct threat to the survival of life on earth, human life included.
‘A perfection of means, and a confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem,’ said Albert Einstein. The continuous expansion of means has been accompanied by a diminution of meaning. We have a wealth of resources for settling the question of ‘how’ we should live, but a confusion of ends by which we could answer the question of ‘why’ we should live. Unless we have clarity on ends, and build a common devotion to those ends, we will never find satisfaction through the means.
Human beings are animals, the naturalists, biologists and zoologists repeat as if telling us some great revelation. That’s the easy bit. It’s the fact that humans are the meaning-seeking animal that is the complicated bit. Some may regret what is called ‘free-will,’ and the problems humans cause to natural life. Call that disdain for erring humans what you like. I call it a misanthropy that evades the key question. It’s like regretting the fact that human beings exist as semi-clever, curious, inventive, meddlesome shaved chimpanzees. We are what we are, and regret is futile, a complete evasion of the challenges of being human. You may as well regret the fact that human beings have toes. But if it is natural facts we are dealing with, then the fact remains that determining what we ought to do with our natural endowments involves much more than reactions to drives and instincts and a conditioning that focuses only upon those things.
To raise the question of the meaning of life is an expression of emotional intelligence; it is also an expression of a deep cosmic longing on the part of human beings. If the endless accumulation of material quantity does not satisfy the thirst for meaning or the hunger for justice, then this is not evidence of psychological maladjustment on the part of men and women, it is evidence of emotional intelligence, the survival of the soul in soulless conditions. This is the kind of questioning that makes human beings human, something more than a zoological specimens. One does not need to be a psychologically disturbed malcontent to express a concern with life’s meaning, only a human being. What makes us human? Not being satisfied with the material alone, I'd say. Man does not live by bread alone, and those who think bread alone is sufficient are blind to the human story. The human species is characterised by the quest for meaning. Whether some think this misguided and delusional is irrelevant. It just is. Declaring the universe to be bereft of meaning and asserting that human beings simply accept the fact is to miss a profoundly human truth. Human life is not without meaning. In the very least, leaving aside the nature of the universe, the search for meaning is itself of great survival value. Remove that, and you remove a central spring of human action.
For good or ill, we are entering an age of ecology. Had we chosen, voluntarily, the terms on which we recognize the ecological conditions of life, then this could have been the best of times. In light of the worsening crisis in the climate system, it looks likely to be a time of adjusting to straitened ecological circumstances. The survival of civilisation and even the human species may well be at stake. Survival in these conditions with require a hopeful orientation toward the future, whether in terms of a cause, a commitment, an undertaking, responsibilities to others or love of others, anything which involves a future fulfilment through the devotion of concern to something or someone beyond the horizon.
The will to meaning
The human animal is forever reaching out to the world in search of meaning, always setting out on a journey in quest of meaning. It is in this respect that the apparent paradox of mass discontent in the midst of material abundance can be unravelled. The satisfaction of the longing for meaning may be considered to be the primary human concern. The satisfaction of material needs takes precedence only in terms of physical survival. Beyond that, fulfilment becomes much more complex. Arguments over the maldistribution of material goods is only a part of the current malaise. The problem goes much deeper and will not be resolved either by increased material production or its even distribution. The problem goes deep to the satisfaction of the human longing for meaning. Those who dismiss this as psychological maladjustment are not only blind to systemic and structural flaws running through existing social arrangements, they are missing an expression of a deep human truth concerning life, the demand that a truly human life is one that is defined by the fulfilment of meaning.
To be committed to the actualisation and flourishing of healthy human potential is to presume that there is such a thing as human nature in the first place, and that such a thing can be defined. Human nature is, as they say, a ‘contested concept.’ The problem is that in the contestation, the protagonists have obsessed over the concepts and lost sight of the nature. This has serious consequences. Not only do we lose sight of the philosophical anthropology underpinning ethics and politics, there is a real risk of a drift that takes us ever further away from where we ought to be. Laissez-faire does not work here. If healthy human potentials are not being developed, then other natural potentials will be being realised. Human nature comes with a potential for both good and bad. Failure to develop the former through an intellectual paralysis over discerning its precise nature, and we drift into circumstances that allow the latter to grow. Unless we are involved in actualising the potential for good, things will deteriorate and drift.
Those sceptical of a meaning to life will readily admit to a will to meaning in human beings. If there is no meaning in the world, only a will to meaning in human beings, then that leaves us having to decide what to make of that will. We could see it as the delusion of weak and insecure people who need to grow up, shed their illusions, and face reality as it: meaningless. That’s a view I often see expressed by people who call themselves humanists, in opposition to religion and its superstitious views that there is design, purpose, and meaning in life. I consider that view to be an inhumanism rather than a humanism.
Instead of dismissing the quest for meaning as wishful thinking on the part of human beings unable to accept the reality of an objectively valueless and meaningless world, it is more profitable to see this quest in terms of a wish-fulfilment implanted in us by a greater power. We are meant to identify with something greater than we are. Indeed, morality has something of this quality, with intractable debates over foundations being resolved into communities of practice which have an innate way of bringing humans into alignment with the order of the world. The very thing which proves so elusive to define intellectually can be discerned much more easily in terms of practice.
Victor Frankl writes of ‘the secret of life’s unconditional meaningfulness’. He expresses a ‘conviction that life is unconditionally meaningful’, affirming ‘the possibility of finding meaning in life even in suffering and death’ (Frankl 1978: 40). I would put this in terms of life’s inherent meaningfulness, which we play a part in revealing through our actions and standpoints. It’s a ‘secret’ only to the extent that it evades precise intellectual definition.
The conflation of means and meaning lies at the source of the problems we have in making sense of the social order and its discontents. Whilst economic goods are certainly a necessary condition for survival, they are not sufficient to invest life with the meaning required for a truly fulfilled and happy life. Far from overcoming the sense of meaninglessness and emptiness, the endless expansion of material quantity succeeds only in feeding it. Meaning, then, is not conditional upon the quantity or even the quality of means, it possesses an autonomous significance of its own and is to be treated accordingly.
So what meaning is there to life? A reductionist cannot answer the question, and sees no need to, dismissing it as a meaningless question: it presumes the very thing that stands in need of being proven. It doesn’t stop human beings asking the question: is there meaning to life?
In the end, human beings are not subject to the circumstances in which they live in some passive, determined sense. It is how we respond to those circumstances, the stance we take in respect of them, that shapes a life:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
As a human phenomenon, however, freedom is all too human. Human freedom is finite freedom. Man is not free from conditions. But he is free to take a stand in regard to them. The conditions do not completely condition him. Within limits it is up to him whether or not he succumbs and surrenders to the conditions. He may as well rise above them and by so doing open up and enter the human dimension. I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields (neurology and psychology) I am a survivor of four camps – concentration camps, that is – and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
Frankl 1978: 47
Of course, this begs the question of what these choices are based upon, something which opens up a regressus in infinitum. ‘All choices are caused but they are caused by the chooser’ (Magda B. Arnold, The Human Person, 1954: 40), which is an appropriately inconclusive way to end any discussion which takes its stand on the self-legislating reason of human beings. Reason cannot be its own grounds. The humanists/atheists who ask religious people for the proof or evidence of God’s existence can have the same question asked of their own ideals and principles, forcing them into a consistent nihilism. Some may take that position. I believe it is a cul-de-sac that makes no sense of human life.
Martin Heidegger defines being human in terms of ‘being in the world.’ As Kant showed, this world is a human world shot through with will, consciousness, purpose, reasons and meanings. Hence Gramsci’s designation of the world as ‘humanly objective’ (Gramsci 1971: 445). The question, however, is whether this reason, meaning and purpose exists in the world in itself or whether it is merely a human projection. But if we do say that the world possesses inherent value and significance, then how could we know this unless by that great self-projecting, self-validating form of reason?
The behaviourist B.F. Skinner wrote explicitly on this, in his significantly entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity:
Only by dispossessing autonomous man, can we turn the real causes of human behaviour – from the inaccessible to the manipulable.
Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity 1971
I have had people who object to my views on religion tell me that free-will is a myth and an illusion and the cause of so much error and destruction on Earth, and that the world would be better off if human beings were divested of their belief in free-will (or better still if humans didn’t exist in the first place). How ill the sound and spectacle of someone denouncing the very quality they most readily – and very vocally – make the most use of! Professor of both neurology and psychology and survivor of the concentration camps, Victor Frankl has some pertinent words on this loss of freedom and dignity:
When the self-transcendence of existence is denied, existence itself is distorted. It is reified. Being is reduced to a mere thing. Being human is de-personalised. And, what is most important, the subject is made into an object. This is due to the fact that it is the characteristic of a subject that it relates to objects. And it is characteristic of man that he relates to intentional objects in terms of values and meanings which serve as reasons and motives. If self-transcendence is denied and the door to meanings and values is closed, reasons and motives are replaced by conditioning processes, and it is up to the ‘hidden persuaders’ to do the conditioning, to manipulate man. It is reification that opens the door to manipulation. And vice versa. If one is to manipulate human beings he first has to reify them, and, to this end, indoctrinate them along the lines of pan determinism.
Frankl 1978: 53
Reductionism is a nihilism, the reduction of life to mere physical means and the concomitant loss of ends. And naturalism is an evasion.
My RE teacher in the sixth form would refer to praying as a ‘conversation’ with God. Many people talk to themselves, think things over in their own minds, go into deep areas, touch base and ponder ultimate meaning in life. Are we just talking to ourselves, then? Are we talking to the better angels of our nature (to use Lincoln’s words?) For my RE teacher, we would be talking to God when we do this. People who dismiss this call God an ‘imaginary friend.’ The imagination is very natural and very real. And there’s a friend in all this. We are talking freely and honestly, displaying a naked piety. There is no hiding place in there. Who knows you better than yourself? Only God. I try hard to leave this question alone but it doesn’t seem to matter how often atheists proclaim that God doesn’t exist, they simply can’t leave the issue alone. They blame people who believe in God for this, but I get the distinct impression that even if religion really did become a matter of private conscience (that is, silent, and eliminated not only from public life but from social view), such people would continue to gnaw away on this one:
If God really exists he certainly is not going to argue with the irreligious persons because they mistake him for their own selves and misname him.
Frankl 1978: 63
And religion comes in all manner of forms. Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the view that since we humans have become gods – through our technological powers – then we had better get good at being gods. We should stop deifying our powers and instead start to humanize them. And we can only humanize them when we come to see ourselves in the image of God, not identical. No God, no humanity. Foucault knew this. After Nietzsche’s “death of God,” he said, the death of the subject will follow. The post-structuralists thought this a good thing. Become what you are, said Nietzsche. We don’t know what we are now.
We need to consider the motivations behind the obsessive concern to analyse, dissect, unmask, and debunk. ‘It seems to me that at least some of the people to whom debunking is so appealing take a masochistic pleasure in the nothing-but-ness that is preached by reductionism.’ (Frankl 1978: 89).
Meaning spurs thinking, and thinking leads to speaking and writing. Speech and the written form, then, presume the thought and meaning they attempt to convey. Without a message to convey, there is no language worthy of the name. The idea that ‘the medium is the message’ inverts the true relation, since ‘it is only the message that makes the medium into a real medium.’
Language is more than self-expression. Language is always pointing to something beyond itself. In other words, it is always self-transcendent – as is human existence at large. Being human is always directed to something, or someone, other than itself, to a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter. Like the healthy eye, which does not see itself, man, too, functions best when he is overlooking and forgetting himself, by giving himself. Forgetting himself makes for sensitivity, and giving himself, for creativity.
By virtue of the self-transcendence of human existence, man is a being in search of meaning. He is dominated by a will to meaning. Today, however, the will to meaning is frustrated … feelings of meaninglessness and emptiness, a sense of futility and absurdity. They are the victims of the mass neurosis of today.
Frankl 1978: 89-90
In fact, we are living in an age of what I would call the pluralism of science, and the individual sciences depict reality in such different ways that the pictures contradict each other. However, it is my contention that the contradictions do not contradict the unity of reality. In order to demonstrate this, let us recall that each science, as it were, cuts out a cross section of reality. Let us now follow the implications of this analogy from geometry.
If we cut two orthogonal cross sections from a cylinder, the horizontal cross section represents the cylinder as a circle whereas the vertical cross section represents it as a square. But as we know, nobody has managed as yet in bridging the gap between the somatic and psychological aspects of human reality. And, we may add, nobody is likely to succeed, because the coincidentia oppositorum, as Nicholas of Cusa has called it, is not possible within any cross section but only beyond all of them in the next higher dimension. It is no different with man. On the biological level, in the plane of biology, we are confronted with the somatic aspects of man, and on the psychological level, in the plane of psychology with his psychological aspects. Thus, within the planes of both scientific approaches we are facing diversity but missing the unity in man, because this unity is available only in the human dimension. Only in the human dimension lies unitas multiplex, as man has been defined by Thomas Aquinas. This unity is not really a unity in diversity but rather a unity in spite of diversity.
What is true of the oneness of man, also holds for his openness:
Going back to the cylinder, let us now imagine that it is not a solid but an open vessel, say, a cup. In that case, what will the cross sections be like? While the horizontal one is still a closed circle, in the vertical plane the cup is now seen as an open figure. But as soon as we realize both figures are mere cross sections, the closedness of one figure is perfectly compatible with the openness of the other. Something analogous holds for man. He too is sometimes portrayed as if he were merely a closed system within which cause-effect relations, such as conditioned or unconditioned reflexes, are operant. On the other hand, being human is profoundly characterised as being open to the world … What I have called the self-transcendence of existence denotes the fundamental fact that being human means relating to something, or someone, other than oneself, be it a meaning to fulfil, or human beings to encounter. And existence falters and collapses unless this self-transcendent quality is lived out.
Victor Frankl, The Unheard Cry for Meaning 45-47
Whether we approach reality with the tools and methods of science, philosophy or religion, our knowledge and understanding will necessarily fall short of that reality. That reality is an anarchic excess beyond the grasp of human reason and imagination; it is the core truth that is beyond appropriation, enclosure and manipulation, and science/philosophy/religion are just three different ways of pointing to the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, the land and the sea, and all other things besides. In understanding this, we will come to understand that science, philosophy and religion are actually complementary rather than contradictory, and that the disputes between these various fields are mere turf wars between rival perspectives, none of which have or can have the whole truth, since even all of them together cannot have such truth.
The pan-determinist is like a man ‘who would study organic existence,’ to quote Goethe. He
First drives out the soul with stern persistence,
Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class,
But the spiritual link is lost, alas!
Encheireisin naturae, this Chemistry names,
Nor knows how herself she banters and blames!
Goethe, Faust, Part 1
There is a ‘missing link’ indeed. Meaning is missing in the world as described by many a science. This, however, does not imply that the world is void of meaning, but only that many a science is blind to it. Meaning is scotomized by many a science. It is not demonstrated by every scientific approach; it is not touched by every ‘cross section,’ to stick to our simile. Consider a curve that lies in a vertical plane.
What is left of this line in a horizontal plane is no more than three points, isolated points, disconnected points, points without a meaningful connection between them. The meaningful connections lie above and below the horizontal plane. Might it not be the same with those events which science sees as random, for example, chance mutations? And is it not conceivable that there is a hidden meaning, a higher or a deeper meaning that eludes the cross section because it lies above or below it as do the higher and the lower parts of the curve? The fact remains that not everything can be explained in meaningful terms. But what now can be explained is at least the reason why this is necessarily the case.
If this is true of meaning, how much more does it hold for ultimate meaning. The more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is. Infinite meaning is necessarily beyond the comprehension of a finite being. Here is the point at which science gives up and wisdom takes over. Blaise Pascal once said ‘the heart has reasons that reason does not know.’ There is, indeed, what is called the wisdom of the heart, In praecordiis sapientiam me doces. Or one may call it the ontological self-understanding. A phenomenological analysis of the way in which the man on the street, out of the wisdom of the heart, understands himself, may teach us that there is more to being human than being the battleground of the clashing claims of ego, id and superego, and there is more to being human than being a pawn and plaything of conditioning processes or drives and instincts. From the man in the street we may learn that being human means being confronted continuously with situations which are each at once chance and challenge, giving us a chance to fulfil ourselves by meeting the challenge to fulfil its meaning. Each situation is a call, first to listen, and then to respond.
And now the point is reached at which the circle is closed. We departed from determinism as a limitation of freedom and have arrived at humanism as an expansion of freedom. Freedom is part of the story and half of the truth. Being free is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is being responsible. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I would recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Frankl 1978: 58-60
This passage bears repetition, because it is key to the whole story: 'one may call it the ontological self-understanding. A phenomenological analysis of the way in which the man on the street, out of the wisdom of the heart, understands himself, may teach us that there is more to being human than being the battleground of the clashing claims of ego, id and superego, and there is more to being human than being a pawn and plaything of conditioning processes or drives and instincts. From the man in the street we may learn that being human means being confronted continuously with situations which are each at once chance and challenge, giving us a chance to fulfil ourselves by meeting the challenge to fulfil its meaning. Each situation is a call, first to listen, and then to respond.'
In the end, it comes down to the question of which view offers the more plausible account of human nature and human life.
I should offer, here, a word of clarification. I distinguish between natural law- essentialist metaphysics-virtue ethics, on the one hand, and a quasi-scientific naturalism on the other. In recent decades there has been something of a recovery of Aristotle in philosophy and ethics, and this can also be seen in areas heavily influenced by science and biology. I would describe myself as an Aristotelian, but consider some modern presentations of the man as overly naturalistic, to the neglect of the cosmological aspects of his thought. The reading of Aristotle as an ethical naturalist is understandable, in that Aristotle saw a teleology running through nature, including human beings, so that his biological and zoological studies had implications for politics and ethics. There is an immanence to the universe, and Aristotle saw the ‘ought-to-be,’ as the potential of a substance, implicit within the ‘is.’ So far, so naturalistic. But the cosmological dimension set this animated universe within a broader frame. Further, ethics and politics were very much considered by Aristotle to be ethics and politics, and not extensions of biology and zoology. Modern accounts tend to recover Aristotle in a way that retains the fallacies of modernist scientistic and biological modes of thought, thereby diminishing the ethics.
I would state plainly that a natural law/virtue ethics/normative essentialism is distinct from neo-Aristotelianism as a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism, but can embrace all the naturalism in the world whilst presenting politics and ethics legitimately as concerned with the best regime for human beings as the kind of social creatures they are.
The point is important precisely because clarification here yields a clear division between the two basic positions in philosophy and ethics with respect to human nature, desire/appetite and will, a proper understanding of which would allow us to examine and properly understand human association (family, community, city)-economy-polity.
On this, we have a choice between two basic positions:
a natural law/essentialist/virtue ethics affirming transcendent standards within a necessary rational freedom;
an emotivist/expressivist/atomist/empiricist/sophist ethics affirming a conventionalism within a libertarian conception of freedom.
As with all simplifications, that division leaves complicated cases like Kant out. Kant, I would argue, doesn’t fit either category but, rather, attempts to reconcile both. I have written extensively on Kant and have done so because I consider him the greatest of modern philosophers. Kant is the only philosopher capable of making that third option work. Some will consider that he did. I think he came as close as anyone could. Kant is known as a deontologist, believing in an ethics of rules, duty, and obligation. I argue, too, that he has a virtue ethics, writing a book called The Doctrine of Virtue. He is a Platonist, too, strongly influenced by Rousseau, giving him a connection with option 1). But he also incorporates atomism and empiricism and holds a praxis-based notion of truth, giving him a connection with option 2). So Kant could give us a third option. My view is that Kant, ultimately, fails to bridge the divide with the result that his intersubjectivism thus fragments into a modern subjectivism; his morality of duty, with reason educating desire from the outside, proves too brittle. The elements of 1) in Kant prove too weak to restrain the force of 2). Kant should have read Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas a lot more and a lot closer, as an ethical tradition in which reason educates desire from the inside.
So I shall defend my simplification of the ethical tradition into just two options, ranging Plato/Aristotle/Augustine/Aquinas and those who followed in their footsteps (I’m putting Leibniz, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx in that category, along with Habermas, Arendt, Nussbaum, MacIntyre, and Taylor) against Hobbes/Locke/Hume and all who followed in their footsteps, which is the modern liberal tradition, most especially that liberalism shorn of its metaphysical assumptions (which Locke retained, but so weakly as to be easily sheddable in time), sophism, nihilism, poststructuralism, postmodernism. The big ‘post’ structuralism/Marxism/modernism line of the 1980s was that ‘there are no necessary relations’ between things – and that there are no ‘things’ as essences or substances either, these are mere spectral projections, a hidden God, repressive of difference and otherness etc. Many of these people, like Hindess and Hirst, Laclau and Mouffe, identified with the left, claimed to draw on Nietzsche, but were actually employing a metaphysics that came straight from Hume’s scepticism. I identify them plainly with option 2), with Marx on the other side, with conservatives and traditionalists affirming transcendent standards.
The stage is now set for a long and complicated philosophical dialogue in which the case for each side is articulated before we examine the criticisms that each side makes of the other in an attempt at refutation. I once had a very ill-tempered exchange with a biologist who objected to my reference to natural law, claiming that ‘arrogant Catholic scholars’ like me know nothing of nature and that he would try to explain, even though he thought I was incapable of understanding. He also claimed to have ‘refuted Taylor’ when in high school. That latter claim told me I was dealing with a naturalist who felt that the methods of natural science were appropriate in the political, sociological, and ethical affairs of human beings. They are not. No side can ‘refute’ the other in this debate, and this is true whether we are referring to science vs humanities/social sciences (a comparison of two different modes of investigation and understanding, reflecting the old socio-biological ambition) or essentialism vs atomism.
The real question is not which side can refute the other, and which philosopher can refute the other, because not only is that not possible, it would resolve nothing even if it were. The truly pertinent question is one that is beyond philosophical tools of analysis, beyond logic and evidence, and instead asks which side offers the best, most meaningful account of lived human experience in its richness and diversity, of human life in both its good and bad aspects. In a nutshell, which side makes most sense of human beings, their actions, their relations to one another, their cosmic longing for meaning …
With the latter, I have deliberately loaded the question. Naturalists will dismiss the quest for meaning as a chimera, claiming that you can never track that meaning to any objective source, since it doesn’t exist. Hence the endless nature of the quest. It doesn’t stop human beings questing, though, a perennial fact of life that is as objectively true as anything the naturalists propose. So I’ll put the same question another way: which side makes most sense of the non-sense of human life and human nature?
My straight answer is that would-be ethicists should focus much less on the animal kingdoms of the present and the pre-historic societies of the past and much more on what human beings actually do today and have done in history. I understand why ethical naturalists examine societies stripped of historical and cultural accretions – to see some pure human nature in operation. But there is no secret biological or anthropological key to human nature in this way, for the very reason that human nature is modified through human actions and interactions in society. If you want to understand human nature, then examine what human beings do, and if you want to understand the complexities of that nature, then examine human beings in more complex societies and environments. Study Darwin etc to grasp the rudiments, but understand that this is the easy stuff. I made a big effort to study these texts in biology and socio-biology. I welcome the recovery of the view that there is such a thing as nature and human nature, which is a breath of fresh air after reading culturalists rejecting the existence of such things. I’m with the naturalists on this. But, with expectations high, looking forward to incorporating great insights into my own work, I quickly noticed how these studies dissolved into generalisations involving competition, cooperation, sex, aggression, ‘drives’ and biological imperatives. There is a sexual imperative, apparently, and human beings are rivals for scarce resources, sex and food, and if you scratch my back then I’ll visit you in hospital, not because you are family or a friend but because I may one day get something in return and it looks good and makes me look good. It’s crude, frankly, and basic, no basis for any meaningful ethics. So any naturalism on my part is concerned to set evolutionary biology and psychology within the much derided culturalism of the humanities and social sciences, rejecting entirely this false naturalism vs culturalism antithesis – with respect to human beings, the one is in the other. If you want to know who and what human beings are, study what they have done in history and study what they do in society, politics, and economics. After long and considered reflection, my original choices of areas of study – history, economics, sociology, politics, moving on to philosophy from there – have been the right ones. Ever further removed from our biological-ecological matrix as a result of our technics, we are coming to forget that we are natural beings, to our detriment. I agree with my ecologist friends who repeat the claim that human beings are natural beings, but have to say that as statements go, this says precious little. To say that we have forgotten that we are natural beings isn’t even true in the most superficial of senses. Any human being who is forgetful of everyday natural functions would be in serious danger of being removed to an institution as being incapable of looking after themselves. I make that fairly facile comment in an attempt to get ecological naturalists to think harder and deeper. Human beings are naturally social, political, and cultural beings who have long since created an environment out of original nature. We are immersed in culture. That is the nature of our achievement and the source of our predicament, to the extent that we have come to live in an urban-industrial technosphere that is deaf to the health of the natural sources of life (and supernatural sources of meaning, I would add). But it is the source of human achievement, and indicates a cultural creation that is quite natural to human beings. As natural beings we are more than bodily needs and functions, we are cultural creatives acting in an interactive social and political context. We left the state of nature a long, long time ago, and whether this is for good or ill depends on us and the choices we make. Those who assert an ethical naturalism to avoid responsibility for such choices – the people who claim free-will is an illusion, and the source of all that has gone wrong in the world – are not only evading the issue, they are betraying human beings to natural inclinations and desires to ensure that, without proper training and cultivation through a culture of discipline, the worst choices will be made. I utterly reject naturalism as an enslavement to empirical necessity.
To the key question “Which side offers the better, most meaningful, account of human beings and human life?”
I answer clearly in favour of natural law, normative essentialism, and virtue ethics. That tradition originates in Socrates’ emphasis on moral knowledge and character formation, is developed systematically by Plato and Aristotle, takes in Augustine and Aquinas to integrate an ethics of transcendence and immanence, is developed in the modern world by Anscombe, Maritain, and MacIntyre. I would include also Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx, as praxis-philosophers whose position lies somewhere between and beyond the natural law and modern positivism. My view is one that affirms timeless truths unfolding in the historical process. I insist on Plato and the transcendent norms buttressing all of evolution. And don’t forget Dante, either, and his 'sweet symphony of Paradise.' The Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and carries all, which is the Love 'that seeketh not its own.’ Other favourites include William Blake, Lewis Mumford, R.H. Tawney, E.F. Schumacher, and Murray Bookchin.
That’s my side in philosophy.
A note on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative
"Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx’s insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre’s thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields."
By Rod Dreher • March 7, 2017
In writing of the moral law that is written on the heart, I want to be clear that this does not mean that I see ethics, society, culture and change in terms of the inner life alone. Transformation and life for human beings as social beings requires more than changes in individual hearts and minds. Although values and virtues are personal qualities, persons live in relation to each other in a social context. If we are serious about the good society and its attainment, then we need to see character formation as something that proceeds hand in hand with social formation. If we fail to relate changes at the level of personal commitments to social changes, then there will be no change at any level. Individuality and sociality are two sides of the same coin, lose one and we lose the other. All attempts to change based upon individual changes alone will fail. So when I write of character and of personal responsibility, values and virtues, it should be understood that these things take place in a social context and, together, are part of constituting the good society.
But what is the ‘good?’
In 2002 Professor James Davison Hunter, originator of the term ‘culture war’, delivered a lecture entitled ‘To Change the World.’ Which begs the question of whether our job is to disclose and appreciate the truth about the world or to make and impose that truth. Should we be changing the world or changing ourselves? Or seeing world-changing as a self-change? The latter would see human beings as creative agents at work within the endlessly creative universe. That would be to see our agency as part of nature’s ceaseless creativity. That would be my view, placed somewhere between disclosure and imposure.
Hunter, though, sees this in terms of a ‘culture war’, conceiving culture to be a form of capital. Marx saw capital as a relation, hence my insistence that change in terms of individual hearts and minds alone is doomed to fail. Real change takes place in a social context. Hunter sees it in terms of power.
‘Like money, accumulated cultural capital translates into a kind of power and influence. But what kind of power? What kind of influence? It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.’
My old history tutor Ron Noon puts it this way: ‘The ability to persuade people that your representation is the right one is an important source of influence and power.’ This is indeed true about the societies we live in, but what does that truth reveal about these societies? Societies based upon asymmetrical relations of power possess a centre and a periphery, and the representations generated reflect these divisions. The greater the social power, the greater the cultural influence. The key agency in all of this is not individual hearts and minds, not personal values and virtues and genius, but the network in which representations are generated and disseminated. A culture war, then, is a struggle over the power to persuade people that a particular representation of society and reality is the right one. It is about the power to define reality and name what is real. But that still begs the question as to the nature of the good. If this is simply about winning the culture war, then the good is merely conditional upon the ability of those with the most cultural capital to define it. In other words, we are not talking about a truth determined with respect to the nature of reality as such but a war between social groups as to which group is authorize to say what that nature is.
In recent decades, politics has been a form of culture war. There has been a shift away from controversies over socio-economic issues and systems to a legislative agenda in relation to rights and lifestyle. Instead of changing society, there has been a focus on renaming it. Instead of a politics in tune with reality, there has been a cultural struggle over naming the real, a struggle over words, with cultural power and influence being exerted to persuade or, through law, force people to accept particular representations of reality. This shift from socio-economic struggle to identity politics (and the two are not mutually exclusive, they can be fought together) worked for a while, critics cowed for fear of being labelled sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic. The liberal left agenda triumphed on the cultural level but, crucially, is exposed to ultimate defeat for its lack of socio-economic content. That is a grim irony, given the solid socialist critique of abstract and formal rights and liberties as lacking substantive social content. The lesson is that a cultural power to persuade people that your representation of reality is the right one is not in itself sufficient to deliver the ‘good’ society. You can name and rename reality all you like, but the nature of that reality and the truth about it will remain unchanged. As Iris Murdoch writes in The Sovereignty of Good, ‘words themselves do not contain wisdom. Words said to particular individuals at particular times may occasion wisdom.’
But James Davison Hunter was not altogether wrong. He has more to add to his view on the culture war: ‘To change the world is, at some point, to take power seriously. But the power we need to take seriously is not power in a conventional sense. … Rather, it is the power to define reality in ways that sustain benevolence and justice.’
With this statement, we are not just defining reality in some arbitrary way, imposing a particular representation as true because it suits our interests and predilections. Instead, the requirement is that we define reality ‘in ways that sustain benevolence and justice’, and that implies that our representations must in some way conform to the true nature of that reality.
In his Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict XVI argued that science and reason cannot stand alone but must be grounded in faith in order to fulfil their potentials. At the same time, faith has to be grounded in reason, in the concept of the Logos running through all of creation.
God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI, TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG, (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006), MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE, LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER, Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg, Tuesday, 12 September 2006, Faith, Reason and the University, Memories and Reflections
When the connection between reason and faith is lost, then both are corrupted: the missing one becomes the missing other, because the quality and character of either depends upon its relation to the other. When one goes missing, that relation is skewed, undermining the nature and distorting the character of the other. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate and sustain communities and societies that embody benevolence and justice.
This view of the good society presumes the existence of an objective reality, of transcendent norms, truths and values, of a morality that is capable of being shared in common, and of ways of attaining a broad consensus on the nature of reality. We are talking now not just of accumulating cultural capital but also of building moral and intellectual capital so that the power and influence to shape representations of reality are brought into accord with the nature of that reality so as to sustain communities and practices devoted to benevolence and justice.
The key political question, then, is how to build that informed, principled power and influence?
I would argue that the values, virtues and practices necessary to achieve and sustain communities of benevolence and justice – the good society which is in accord with the true nature of reality - cannot be attained without a metaphysical basis in transcendent truths and norms. This involves more than shaping perceptions and representations. I would point here to what Alasdair MacIntyre says in relation to Iris Murdoch in his perceptive article Which world do you see? MacIntyre notes that in the Christian past the Good was identified with God, with the love of the Good being understood in terms of the theology of a triune God. Murdoch, however, considers Christianity’s claims concerning divine existence and incarnation to have become incredible. Christianity, therefore, needs to be de-mythologized, so that the images that human beings do indeed require can come to serve as aids to meditation and reflection.
The "ontological proof" of the existence of God does not exhibit, as St. Anselm believed, the necessity of divine existence, but rather the necessity of the idea of the Good for the moral life. In providing an answer to the question "Are there fundamental concepts and problems which moral philosophers have to (or ought to) deal with?" the ontological proof, as she sees it, shows us what is ineliminably metaphysical about the moral life.
In fine, a morality that matters, that makes a difference, is based upon a bedrock metaphysical apparatus and commitment. This entails an axiomatic commitment to the existence of a transcendent realm of the true, the good and the beautiful that is independent of time and place but which is in some way connected to time and place and therefore manifested through the historical process.
That begs the question of how? For MacIntyre, Murdoch shares a belief with Plato (as interpreted by her), Kant, and Schopenhauer that an adequate conception of the moral life involves some kind of metaphysical dualism:
For Plato the ideal forms are distinct from the physical universe, and the form of the Good is even beyond being. For Kant the contrast is between the freedom of the rational will and the determinism of the world known by sense experience. According to Schopenhauer, Kantian freedom is an illusion, and the incessant desire and ruthless egoism of the will as manifested in that same determined world of appearances are things that can be escaped only by an ascetic surrender of the will, which is at once extinction and liberation, identified by Schopenhauer with the Buddhist nirvana. And for Iris Murdoch the brute contingencies of the human world, with their confusion, manipulations and corruptible motives, are only to be escaped by a radical redirection of the self toward the Good.
The problem for MacIntyre is that such dualisms make the conceptions of morality that they generate deeply problematic. MacIntyre wants to know the nature of the connection between the inner consciousness and the language we share with others, ‘between our inner lives and our actions and utterances in the social world.’
On the one hand, she portrays a realm of inner consciousness whose transformation is crucial to movement toward the Good. On the other, she speaks of the contingencies and confusions of everyday life, the setting for those actions by which plain people discharge or fail to discharge their occasionally heroic duties as decent human beings. But any connection between these two is dangerously obscured. Murdoch does see the need for such a connection. She speaks about it in images and in very general terms in her penultimate chapter. But what is absent is any conception of the achievement of the Good as a task for human beings in community, so that the transformation of the self has to be a transformation of social relationships and thus a reordering of our everyday duties as members of communities. Progress in vision, in this alternative view, is tested through progress in the virtues of daily life that effect such transformations.
To state the point clearly, being good and achieving the good society are two aspects of the same good life; character formation and social formation go together. But a commitment to the good is premised upon a belief that the good exists and that we can know and achieve it. That conviction is grounded in a belief in the existence of the true, the good and the beautiful and that these things are guaranteed by a transcendent realm. I put it in Platonic terms here. The Judaeo-Christian tradition would refer to God. Taoism refers to the Tao, the law of the immanence of ‘the way’. All of these things exist as a transcendent realm which serves as the metaphysical grounding for morals. Without this realm, then there is no grounding for morals, and hence we live in a world of culture wars fought over the power and influence to shape the perceptions and representations we live by, naming and renaming reality as we see fit in promoting our self-interest and self-identity. This is not a struggle to achieve and sustain benevolence and justice in a society which merits the designation good on account of being in accord with the true nature of reality; this is a struggle for the accumulation of cultural capital between social groups for the power and influence to authorized what that truth about reality is. This is not a true representation of reality, it is the imposition of a representation upon that reality and its dissemination through society. That dissemination is contested by other groups. Such representation, therefore, lacks the unifying power and influence of transcendent truths and norms and is therefore incapable of generating a social conception of a good that is shared in common. This authorization lacks the common moral reason that gives it meaning and authority. This is the moral condition of modernity – a plurality of competing representations of truth and value with no objective standard available by which to evaluate and decide between them. The world has become not just socially but morally atomized and fragmented. Truth claims and normative statements with respect to a transcendent realm of the true, the good and the beautiful are being abandoned. The social world is being divested of its unifying moral power.
Is this such a bad thing, many would ask. If these unified moral orders ever existed in the past, then surely they presided over hierarchical, iniquitous and impoverished societies. I avoid the nostalgic frame. In my thesis, I wrongly criticized MacIntyre for being nostalgic, though I stand by the view that if there is hope, then it lies not in trying to revoke past solidarities but in those lines of development pointing to new solidarities that are immanent but repressed within capitalist modernity. Marx wrote that within modernity, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ We call this liquid modernity now. We are being called on to resolidify our existence by generating practices and creating communities and forms of life that are capable of achieving a solidarity based upon a conviction in and a commitment to transcendent truths and norms. If we do not make the connection between those truths and norms and our practical social existence, then we will not live the truth of the world, we will be embroiled in endless debates over representations purporting to be the truth of the world. If we lose the aspiration to this transcendent realm, then we will fail to activate our innate moral grammar. We will just be counted amongst the solids disappearing into air, liquid modernity as a swamp, a moral morass of competing value positions, incommensurate self-assertions of no universal value or meaning. Victory goes to those with the most power and influence in the culture wars, those who have accumulated the most cultural capital, those with the most money and power. That’s Thrasymachus’ world, where justice is merely the interests of the strongest. All the assertions of changing individual hearts and minds are worthless without the connections to the transcendent realm that infuses the world and enthuses human beings, uniting each and all in shared moral reasoning and a common good. This would be to affirm the existence of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and to commit to it, bringing our communities, solidarities and practices into alignment with it. And here we see that the greatest power and influence lies not with the accumulation of cultural capital, not even with monetary or military or institutional power. By such means, socially powerful groups succeed in ‘persuading’ others that their representation of reality is the true one. Their social and cultural capital gives them the power to define and redefine reality as they see fit in extending and entrenching their interests. But there is a ‘real world’ outside of such representations. Those who may be socially and culturally powerless in relative terms still have the power to see reality aright, not to name and rename reality at will, but to see reality as it is, see the benevolence and justice we seek in the social world as truths and norms guaranteed by the transcendent realm, and to live out these truths and norms in the teeth of lies, distortions and immoralities. It is live by the moral stance of Socrates. There are much worse losses than losses in the culture wars and politics; the worst loss of all is the loss of the Greater Love that enfolds, enthuses and sustains us. It’s the loss of transcendence. Virtue is its own reward, said Plato. By being virtuous, we become the best we could be. We could, like my old school priest, call it living the Gospel. We could call it ‘living in truth’ (Vaclav Havel). It is to refuse to ‘live within a lie’.
Cooperation is a fine ideal, but it matters a great deal who we cooperate with and to what ends. Our cooperative instincts are continually hijacked by free-riders and turned to private advantage. In such ways do many become locked within destructive and exploitative patterns of behaviour, collaborating with interests, groups and things they know to be wrong, compromising their better natures, falling short of their full humanity. All we can do, says Havel, is to ‘attempt to live within the truth.’ Gandhi castigated those who dreamt of 'systems so perfect that no one will need to be good'. The creation of perfect systems does not in itself make human beings good. There is always a need for ethics. ‘A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,’ Havel writes. ‘In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.’
Culturalists deny the existence of transcendent truths. The idea that there are transcendent truths is dismissed as a projectionist fallacy in an objectively meaningless and valueless universe: there are no transcendent truths, only the truths that we create. In Reinventing the Sacred, Stuart Kauffman argues that human beings – that great general ‘we’ we hear of all the time – need to take morality back into their own hands. The problem is that there is no singular ‘we’, only a lot of plural ‘we’s’, and hence no singular morality, only a lot of competing moralities, none of which can offer good and compelling reasons for rivals to take seriously. We are all existentialists now in this meaningless universe. As Max Weber commented, each is free to choose their own god, which may be another person’s devil, or one’s own; since there are no objective standards enabling us to evaluate competing claims, whether our choices are good or evil cannot be determined by anything other than actions and consequences, power and how much people are prepared to suffer. This pluralism of the good in the moral marketplace mirrors the economics of the capitalist market, where notions of objective value have been supplanted by subjective choice and preference. At which point I will simply note an anomaly in the aggressive atheist position here, insofar as it is liberal, and does not draw on the kind of Aristotelian normative essentialism/naturalism adumbrated above: if there is no singular good, only competing goods that human beings, taking morality into their own hands, are free to ‘make up,’ then it is inadmissible to deny or refute those humans who, as a matter of their personal choice, believe in God: some of us express a preference to create truths that are transcendent. If you seek to refute this choice by asking for proof or evidence of a self-created ethical position, then my response back is to demand the same grounds of your self-created ethics. The fact that a God-centred ethics is ‘made-up’ cannot be held to count against it given, in an objectively valueless and meaningless world, all ethics must be ‘made up’ human creations. That’s precisely what is involved in human beings taking morality into their own hands, that is, rejecting the existence of objective, transcendent standards that it is our moral task to disclose in favour imposure and the projection of truth and meaning upon the world. Some humans create a God-centred ethics, others create a Nature-centred ethics, and all positions are based on the projectionist fallacy.
My view is that human self-creation is actually a sub-creation within the Creation. Human beings are made in the image of God, but are not thereby identical. There is a subtle difference with big consequences: human beings do not have morality in their own hands, the true, the good and the beautiful are outside of human preference and prejudice in time and place.
Hence the deliberately paradoxical nature of Nietzsche’s statement with respect to the “death of God” – it presumes the existence of God in the first place. No theologian worth his salt ever argued for the existence of God. In demanding empirical proof of a non-empirical entity, atheists are effectively saying that the only meaningful knowledge is that based on fact. That view is acidic when applied to religion, hence the extent that it impresses many in these debates. But it is acidic in other areas too, stripping human life to the basic facts of life. Such a meagre philosophy could never make sense of how an Oscar Wilde came to cling to Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian when in prison after being sentenced to hard labour for his homosexuality.
I don’t see what changes for the better by this emphasis on human beings coming to live by their own created values. If the premise of the argument is correct, and there are only human beings and the symbols they create, then we have always been living by our own created values. It’s just that some human beings disagree with the made-up values of others, and there’s no way of deciding which side is right. That’s precisely where we are and have been for a long time. It’s well over one hundred years since Nietzsche declared the “death of God,” and that idea itself and the issues arising from it can be found much earlier in the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Comte and others. There is a presumption that once we have abandoned God and religion to take morality into our own hands, there would be a huge moral improvement. That’s a delusion – we already live in that world, hence the frequent laments from religious folk that the world is turning its back on religious truths (a perennial lament heard since the rise of religion). We’re here! There’s no great change.
If some state that transcendent values are wrong, then that criticism implies the existence of an objective standard by which to evaluate all created values. And such a standard could only be a transcendent one that stands outside of all values. For all of the effort and controversy, for all of the words spilled, there is precious little gain at the end. The only gain possible here is for those sceptic/nihilists who want to undermine the foundations of truth claims and morals (not sceptics like Montaigne or Shakespeare who provoke us into greater clarity with respect to moral standards, rather than impose false fixities), or for those with the cultural and social power to make their representations of reality count more than those of others. Transcendent norms and truths are humanity’s best defence against totalitarian imposition.
A brief comment is in order here on critical perspectives which reject the claims I am making in this piece. I can only comment at an extreme level of generality here, referring to structuralist/post-structuralist/postmodernist/deconstructionist approaches. The principal idea I wish to highlight is the denial of the existence of transcendent norms/truths/values as some pure idea which is to be translated into spoken, written or visual form. In this view, there is no outside author, and meaning is just what is spoken or written. Meaning can only be understood in terms of the structures of communication. Such views reject the illusion of origins, hypostatizing spectral projection as the source of meaning when, in fact, it is a human self-creation. There’s your God, your reality, your three transcendentals, as ‘made-up’ as any power claim by any grubby politician and businessman. Human life is all power struggles, no more, with victory going to those with the biggest voices or biggest clubs, those capable of coercing others to their will. Everything else is a rationalization. Human beings are not rational beings, they are rationalizing beings.
A process of deconstruction is required to understand a piece of writing, exposing the presuppositions of the text, comparing the claims being made by the author with the actual form of language used and exposing any contradictory claims within the written form.
Such an approach entails the end of metaphysics. For Derrida, there is no external meaning to a text, there is no way of getting outside or beyond the structure of communication.
Derrida’s concern with 'actuality' comes out clearly in this passage where he explains what he means by 'artifactuality':
[Artifactuality] means that actuality is indeed made: it is important to know what it is made of, but it is even more necessary to recognize that it is made. It is not given, but actively produced; it is sorted, invested and performatively interpreted by a range of hierarchizing and selective procedures - factitious or artifactual procedures which are always subservient to various powers and interests of which their 'subjects' and agents (producers and consumers of actuality, always interpreters and in some cases 'philosophers' too), are never sufficiently aware.
There are two main points to be made with respect to this passage. The deepest philosophical point concerns the idea that actuality is made rather than given. As I consistently argue, such reasoning is self-contradictory and ends up negating itself. The idea that there is no pre-given order other than the one we make begs the question of what this making is based on and why, indeed, we need any making. If nothing but itself, then how can we judge it to be right or wrong, good or bad? Why do we need such a standard? A consistent nihilist would say that we don’t. But there has never been a human society without morals. To say that there is no pre-given morality and therefore we must create one – the argument that human beings ought to take responsibility for the creation of their own morality – begs the question as to where this independent and pre-moral ‘ought’ obliging us to create a moral system comes from. We can, of course, simply say that there is no morality and no need to create one. But that doesn’t seem true at all of human beings and human society.
This comes to the second point, the view that ideas are neither transcendent nor neutral but are the products of the structures, institutions and relations within which they are expressed. We need to see through the actual claims being made here and ask who is making those claims, from what perspective, and in whose interests. Ideas and their expression are thus to be related not to any objective standard but to the intricate web of political, financial, cultural, and personal interests and influences within which they are set.
The philosopher Stephen Hicks has made solid criticisms of this deconstructive kind of thinking as a pseudo-philosophy masquerading as philosophy and which itself masks its own explicitly political commitments. He asks why the left, for so long champions of Enlightenment, have now turned so sharply against reason. For him, the left were allies of reason when reason seemed to be on their side. But with the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy and the demise of socialism, he says, the left were faced with having to part company with reason or with their favourite causes. They abandoned reason, in the view of Hicks. He then goes through the key figures of postmodernism to show how they consistently sacrifice transcendent truths and norms to their political commitments.
For my part, I remain with reason, my work is organised around the concept of ‘rational freedom.’ And I remain a socialist and see celebrations of the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy remarkably uncritical and premature.
I’m not so much interested in Hicks’ critique here. I agree with much of what he says about postmodernism, and have said as much myself. What interests me most of all is the fact that postmodernists retain a certain commitment to emancipatory principles and causes. Hicks may not like the leftist politics of the postmodernist thinkers he criticizes, but that does at least point to certain positive commitments and principled stances on their part which, strictly speaking, they are not allowed to make. I want to know upon what these commitments are based when politics is shorn of transcendent standards. Groundless grounds in a world without foundations? OK. But how is this different from God? God was never a foundation in the modernist sense. In the absence of metaphysics, upon what are notions of good and bad, right and wrong based? Both critics and defenders of postmodernism point out the commitment to emancipatory politics on the part of postmodernist theorists. But that merely begs the question. To refute the likes of Hicks, there is a need to show that these emancipatory commitments are based on more than politics and endless power struggles. You cannot argue for emancipation against oppression without having some idea of what freedom means, and why freedom is good and oppression is bad. This necessarily involves normative judgements, which in turn leads us to a position which looks remarkably like an ethics and metaphysics based on transcendent norms, values and truths. To remove these and yet continue to affirm an emancipatory politics involves an approach that contradicts and defeats itself. Or reduces to mere sophist politics. That may well be the world we live in. But such a world is neither left nor right and can sustain no notion of emancipation; it’s a world in which the strong win and the weak go to the wall.
I would need to see through such deconstruction and turn its destructive tools against it by asking in whose interests this rejection of transcendent standards and norms is launched. Take Marx. Marx’s emancipatory critique is based on normative claims that are in some way transcendent. Marx would reject this. But he is in denial. His designation of the proletariat as ‘the universal class’ implies a ‘principle’ of the proletariat that is something more than its class or material interest. But the weapon of deconstruction could easily be turned against Marx here. Marx is merely cloaking his own political commitments as a Communist in claims of a general good. I’m caricaturing, of course. But this lament that we are now living in ‘post-truth’ times ignores the extent to which our current predicament has been a long time in preparation. It does, however, have the merit of implying that there is such a thing as truth independent of time and place and various social interests, positions and perspectives, and that truth matters. Of course, ideas exist within a social context. But if we merely reduce ideas to that context, then we are robbed of a normative and emancipatory dimension and merely mired in relativism. Without that transcendent dimension, we are in no position to make emancipatory commitments in politics. The existence of those commitments imply a transcendent dimension and only make sense in those terms. Without it, all emancipatory claims is mere politics of self-interested positions. Such a politics is entirely possible. In an objectively valueless and meaningless world, there is no justice, only power. You fight it out with others as rivals for scarce resources. These resources are whatever you consider valuable or usable in terms of personal gratification, and you try to take what you want. That sounds like the anarchy of the rich and powerful, that sounds like the global capital system that Marx criticized, that sounds like Marx’s class politics was a critique of sophist power struggles to deliver us from the evil of class society and exploitative relations. That sounds like Marx possessed an ideal standard by which to evaluate society and human conduct.
I have heard some critics claim that climate change denial is postmodernism’s revenge on the left. Here, we have the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists – some say well-nigh 100% - pointing to the evidence for human made anthropogenic global warming. And we have a rejection of this evidence amidst claims that that global warming is a socialist plot to increase taxation, extend government regulation, abolish capitalism, and suppress individual liberty. Of course, science as a reality check is not the same thing as metaphysical assertions of transcendent norms and truths. But the commitment to a truth that is independent of time and place and the interplay of social interests is the same. And I would argue that science needs metaphysics in order to secure its point, worth, and value. (Read Roger Trigg’s Beyond Matter for why science needs metaphysics).
Big claims are made for metaphysics: ‘Apart from metaphysical presuppositions there can be no civilisation’ (Tomlin 1947: 264). Such a view is out of favour in an age of ethical and cultural relativism. (Peter Critchley Ethical and Cultural Relativism). Metaphysics is the scourge of relativism. But for postmodernists, you cannot get behind the texts, images, and symbols to discern any essential or inherent purpose or meaning. It doesn’t exist. It is a view which extirpates ‘metaphysics’ and any notion of transcendent truths, values and norms. At this point, I expect to be told that I have not understood and that postmodernists do indeed have grounds for their emancipatory claims. I do hope so. But until they succeed in making these grounds more clear than they have so far, then I shall stick with the way I make the case for the same thing, which at least has the merit of clarity. I’m not alone in not understanding. John Searle, Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky from three different, equally expert, positions have demanded that postmodernists make clear statements and arguments for them to be able judge fairly. Each of these express dissatisfaction with postmodernist thought. Time and again, the response was to accuse critics such as these of failing to understand. At which point Dawkins lost interest and declared there was no mystery to any of this since there was nothing to understand. Chomsky asks for a clear statement to help him to judge whether there is any worthwhile thought going on. He knows words, language is his area of expertise – he doesn’t understand. If he doesn’t understand, then what chance the rest of us? Alan Sokal said his motivation in exposing intellectual impostures here came from his commitment to the Left in politics. He failed to see what such modes of thought offered the working people of the world. Chomsky can’t see it either. They may be wrong. They may not be up to the intellectual challenge. Philosophy is tough. Such thinkers are not to my liking, but I did make a big effort to understand Luce Irigaray, and found her insightful. But that merely begs the question as to what use a thinking so abstruse as not to be understood by some of the best thinkers on the Left is to emancipatory causes.
I’ll end this excursus with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s view that philosophical statements about purpose, the good life, and the overall purpose of society, and political statements such as society or the state exists for the good of its members, are no longer credible. He famously declared the age of the grand narrative to be dead, just as the capital system, the biggest 'meta-narrative' on the planet, went global. As capital went ‘big,’ the left started to think and act small. What you think about this depends on your political views and, if you have them, normative commitments – and whether it makes sense to have any. Lyotard’s point was that general statements of a metaphysical nature about life, society and humanity are no longer tenable since they do not reflect the fragmented nature of modern society. Which is really akin to waving a white flag of surrender in face of a world falling apart. In the past, when times were bad, people would object and mobilize to turn things around. Now, our liveliest minds seem exhausted and hopeless and present the reality to be criticized, challenged, and changed as just the unchangeable way of the world. What a great comedown!
To which I can only reply that, of course, such ‘grand’ commitments and ideals don’t reflect that fragmented nature of modern society! There is a terrible inversion here which takes this fragmented state of society as the norm, rather than criticize that condition as a violation of true standards. That’s precisely my point. Without transcendent standards, the idea that there is no meaning or purpose outside of societies in time and place soon reduces to the passive acceptance of the dominant features and conventions of those societies. Those who are sceptical of any and all purpose and meaning in life and society are soon lost in the thickets of accident in a particular time and place. To them applies what Marx wrote of Gustav Hugo: 'He is a sceptic as regards the necessary essence of things, so as to be a courtier as regards their accidental appearance.’ (Marx MECW I 1975: 204).
If you deny a vision of a meaningful alternative then, whether by default or design, you end up as a supporter of the status quo. It was for this reason that Jurgen Habermas characterised the poststructuralists as ‘young conservatives’. That flatters them. I would call them apologists without standards. They are the people who see the meaninglessness and fragmentation in the contemporary world and declare that there is no such thing as meaning and purpose, and no such thing as the good life. They are atomists and empiricists, whose vision is confined to surface level events, and who are incapable of penetrating to the underlying structures to see how the whole coheres. For them, there is nothing outside of the structures of communication. They see nothing, their views are based on nothing, they express nothing.
Lyotard’s statement can be turned around to make the claim that it is the very weakening of the metaphysical apparatus of human life that has led to this fragmentation of modern society, along with its meaninglessness and nihilism. That fragmentation is not a standard which our values need to conform to, but a dislocation and discord that needs to brought into accord with true values.
Each human being is a variation of an ancient theme. The same life forces that have moulded human existence in all times and places continue to work upon the modern psyche. The big difference being is that modernity has a much weakened metaphysical apparatus, leaving us unable to deal adequately with the life forces that govern our lives. Such forces require a treatment that is arational and non-rational, but not for that reason irrational. Irrationalism is certainly possible, but it isn’t the necessary result of a non-rational or arational approach. Some things are beyond reason. It is, in my view, irrational to restrict vision to the rational and dismiss the importance and meaning of everything outside of reason. Metaphysics has been dismissed since the days of logical positivism as literally nonsense. The misunderstanding of Wittgenstein here has led to a blinkered view that cuts us off from meaning in the world. Deny the transcendent sensibility and there should be no surprise at the explosion of irrationalism. Ersatz surrogate fictions and fantasies result from such negation, not genuine myths but their substitutes. As mathematician A.N. Whitehead argued, possibly thinking of Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism, ‘man may not live by bread alone, but neither can he live by disinfectants.’ (Science in the Modern World).
Postmodernism resolves the problems of modern society by simply declaring to be problems not of society but of unwarranted normative and intellectual claims. It’s the cultural logic of a capitalism gone consumptive and a liberalism gone decadent. I’ve wasted enough words on it over the years and shall waste no more of my time on it. Norman Geras, from my old stamping ground in Manchester, called it right: it’s an ‘ex-marxism without substance.’ I am beyond being angry with the caricature of metaphysics, transcendence and essentialism in this mode of thinking. I find it boring now. And it wastes time I can use more profitably elsewhere. ‘In any case, enough is now more than enough,’ which were the last words of Norman Geras’ Discourses in Extremity.
Dante takes us into the Light, and into the Greatest Love of all. He takes us to a place where we may bask in the warmth and the glow that accompanies the light: the finitude of material things in the context of eternal life.
It depends on how you look at life, who we are, where we are, and where, if anywhere, we are going.
One day closer to the grave, or one day nearer to the Lord.
Either already at home and in the process of being disinherited, or going home.
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
(Anais Nin).
And the point and possibility of human intercommunication is? And if I continue to live out my fantasies of being Elvis Presley, performing a new hit single as every new day arrives? The problem with individual plots with social beings like human beings is that, with power and interaction, others can get dragged into them. With the likes of Hitler’s fantasies, it never ends well. I have no time for the deified ‘I’ of the individualists. They are impossible to refute in their solipsism and not worth the effort. It comes down to the question: which side offers the best, most meaningful, account of lived human experience. And by best, I mean best in terms of what kinds of creature human beings are, in terms of the realization of their potentialities to enable true fulfilment.
How bare and basic do you want the facts of life? Sex and violence is easy enough.
The Cry of Abel’s blood is the inner struggle
I haue yow told ynowe To reyse a feend al looke he neuere so rowe.
Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, circa 1395:
In Modern English:
I have told you enough already to raise a fiend, look he never so savage.
It refers to ‘raising Cain.’
In making trouble you are raising the accursed spirit of Cain, referring to the abomination of murder between brothers.
“The cry for meaning is a cry for ultimate relationship, for ultimate belonging.”
(Abraham Heschel).
“The Gospel gives our suffering personal and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others, and finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God.”
(Richard Rohr).