Belaqua wrote:First I confess that I don't have Lewis's book, and probably won't be buying a copy. I read the parts of it that are available for free on Amazon, and I've been reading the excellent summaries on this thread. So I hope it's OK for me to comment.
Okay, so no pressure to summarize accurately or anything. Well, since the usual custom is to read the book without commenting on it, I think we ought to be able to make room for those who comment on it without reading it. Besides, a lot of the comments spin off into comments on comments anyway, so I see no problem with starting out there.
Belaqua wrote:First, I was a bit disappointed with Lewis's approach to God. I suppose a book of this sort demands a clear and concise definition, but the God he doesn't believe in is a kind of popular dumbed-down version. The one where, if supernatural stuff doesn't happen, we don't believe in it. This is the same Nobodaddy that Hitchens, et.al., also don't believe in. But it is more like a magic Demiurge than the God of Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas. It is the God that people who have never read any theology think that Christians believe in.
I find myself disappointed (my sleeves are dry, but my head shakes sometimes) that none of these books comment on the God of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" which is theologically well respected and authored by someone of the same faith as this author. Without even asking for a "spirit of Love" or similar formulation, it would be great to hear about Kushner's God who cares about our suffering but cannot do miraculous acts to stop it.
I think to work in the Lewis's psychological expertise, it probably saved trouble just to deal with the knee-jerk God of the foxholes, the one people take out of a place normally ignored, like they do pictures of their family, when the occasion arises. I don't think he is really aiming to convince anyone about God, nor to rant like Dawkins or skewer like Hitchens. I am in it for the psychological perspective on meaning.
Belaqua wrote:Second, people who think of God that way, and then decide (very understandably) that such a God doesn't exist, seem then to pivot over too easily to a view of life as absurd. Either God planned everything on the big drawing board in the sky, or life is without meaning. That's way too easy.
Well, despite Lewis' avowed love of the Existentialists, extolling Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," for example, he doesn't really seem to believe anything very nihilist either. Rather he is on the lookout for "erroneous meaning" arising from our emotions backed up by a slavish and slovenly reason. This chapter appears to suggest that he is going to distinguish between a psychological "sense of meaning" and a derivable "conclusion of meaning." And I might be willing to go there with him, depending on how solidly he analyzes the matter.
Belaqua wrote:Harry, I am embarrassed to say that I haven't worked on Kierkegaard yet. But I read Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy with a group recently, and it's easy for me to structure the problem through his terms -- which I think will also give me a hint toward Hegel, etc.
No reason to be embarrassed. I am still quite taken with SK, but re-reading three of his best works has reminded me how much he was a creature of his time and place. His ability to lift up a philosophical version of the great Christian themes is wonderful to me, as I have already found these themes meaningful, but his irony now feels as cramped by early 19th century Lutheran culture as Plato's irony (in the mouth of Socrates) feels cramped to me by Plato's limited knowledge of the world and political stalking horses. Both are still amazing doors to insight, but both are also unable to make the transition to current relevance that their philosophical derivations do.
Belaqua wrote:As you know, Nietzsche claims that the world is Dionysian chaos. That is the truth behind things -- no meaning.
As long as we are confessing, let me say that I have read very little of Nietzsche. I have not made it through even a single chapter, despite downloading several free versions in Kindle. Yet Kushner (of "Bad Things") takes the same view - the universe, "things", are not organized by any meaningful process other than whatever rules of causality we can work out scientifically.
Belaqua wrote: For him, meaning is carved out of the chaos by the Apollonian faculty. It is a dream image, which people share, more or less. Now I think it would be a mistake to say that since meaning is created by people that it doesn't really exist.
We have been reading through Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" and he works on the same themes. He talks about "stories" or "myths" and then uses nations, constitutions and money as examples. A bit of a cheap claim to novel perspective, but anyway he is not just trying to disrupt complacency but also gets into the mechanisms a bit. I feel that he has come to the same conclusion I did, when reflecting on these exaggerated claims, that they are descriptions, or perhaps justifications, of processes already in place. As such, they are more about the communication concerning these processes than they are about the actual enforcement or establishment of the systems.
One of his examples, worth reflecting on, is the caste system of Hinduism. We know this is created by an invasion of Indo-Europeans who subjugated previous residents, who mostly had darker skin. To this day there is a strong correlation between skin lightness and status of castes. The present-day BJP claims to believe the mythology spun to justify caste, that lower castes are reincarnations of people who were careless or hostile to others in the previous life, while higher castes reincarnate the good guys.
It is probably possible, like the Congress Party tried to do, to replace the social organization by caste with something more suitable to modern economic functioning. Belief in the mythology is a barrier to such a replacement. But the point I would make about this is that an Apollonian process of discerning "what makes sense" is much more able to have its current results modified by persuasion than is a set of claims to supernatural insight (Jovian?) about the workings of the alternate reality.
Belaqua wrote: True, it is a social construct. But social constructs are real things. They exist before, and independently of, any individual. If we suddenly forgot all the social constructs, and couldn't perceive them in the world, we would be insane.
The term "intersubjective" seems to be very helpful in thinking about this stuff, since it dispenses with the absolutism of claims to "objectivity" while recognizing that social constructs are real things.
Belaqua wrote:They saw the chair just enough to deduce its meaning and use, they sat down on it and didn't fall on the floor, but didn't really look at it. We could say they saw only its meaning, and not the thing itself.
That's a good example, probably helpful for thinking about art in particular. On our Jung thread, which was basically Robert and me, the subject of synchronicity or "acausal significance" came up. My version is that synchronicity, or astounding coincidences if you prefer, represent nature "rhyming with itself." That is, something about it raises claims to our attention which seem to represent causal processes, but actually embody our sense of the significance of the matter.
Belaqua wrote: If you expect that all meaning can be accommodated within a system, as Hegel suggested...
This I think is the key. Meaning is created in and through a system. It is a system that humans all pretty much share. It is not intrinsic in that, if all the people died it would stop. When the cockroaches take over in a few years, the meanings will be different. But as long as there are people, it is not just fiction.
There is an iterative "dialectical" process, I think, between inductive discernment of meaning systems, and deductive conclusions based on a particular system (such as "that chair will do, whatever its color"). Anthropologically, the systems of meaning tend to change depending on what works. I like Peter Berger's example that fat women were perceived as beautiful in Rubens' day (and, to some extent in present day Africa) because they represent to the world the status of their husband who can feed them well, while thin women are considered more attractive today, based on the ubiquity of ample food that robs fat of its status.
Belaqua wrote:ethics is ethics for people, based on what we are as people. It is not independent of our human condition.
Well, I never quite thought of Aristotle as an existentialist before, but there is truth in this observation. And of course that tends to help us see his "errors" about women and slaves as perhaps more success than failure, given the difficulties of achieving democracy or an educated, cultivated life at the time.
Belaqua wrote:And here, Robert (if you're reading) I think we're up against Heidegger's concept of "thrownness," aren't we? I may be wildly wrong, but it seems to me that we as individuals are thrown into this system of meaning, like it or not. And that's important because it means that despite being non-physical, meanings are also intrinsic aspects of the culture we are in.
Robert has presented some of this about "thrownness" already on previous threads. I find it helpful as insight, and a place to start. If there are already systems in place, and a superstructure of stories about the reasons for these systems, we can critique them based on problems we believe we see, and perhaps even better we may be able to propose changes or tweaks to make the systems work better.
Fundamentalism may be seen as a certain set of claims about which critiques are admissible. Critiques which involve denial of the usual supernatural creeds are not admissible, nor are critiques which claim some higher basis of authority than the revealed scriptures. Scriptures play a powerful role in fundamentalisms, not present in, say Hasidism (which works from relatively modern revelations even though it tends to assert that they are fully compatible with Torah and Talmud.)
Belaqua wrote:Hitchens-type atheists are wont to say that since there is no God and no absolute meaning handed down, then we are all to make up our own meanings in life. But that ignores the fact that we are inevitably and invariably born into culture, and culture determines meanings that individuals are not free to dismiss. This could easily extend to issues of "how should a person live his life?" because it means that within human culture, we are not free to choose our personal meanings -- or not entirely so.
Well, it hinges entirely on "not entirely so." We are not yet very good at all at figuring out which systems we are critiquing, much less how to go about it successfully. Science has made us pretty good at critiquing claims about origins, for example, and what heavenly bodies circle around what. As a result, some of the understandings involved in traditional religion can be set aside, and so the claims of absolute authority for past revelations can be set aside. But claims about the basis for structured, regulated living are not as easily deconstructed.
Belaqua wrote:Earlier Harry mentioned Popper's World Three, and this seems important to me here. Popper gives the example of a Beethoven symphony. Not the score for the symphony, but the symphony itself. The symphony, he says, has real existence, despite being a human-created mental construct. It exists as long as anybody knows of it, even when it's not being played. And due to this type of existence, it is real and meaningful to discuss its qualities objectively -- whether the 5th is better than the 9th, whether a given performance is better than another, etc. My conclusion is that meaning in the world is similar.
I really like this example, and the openings it provides for discussing "meaning" without having to worry about whether it is "real" meaning or just "intersubjective" meaning or even "arbitrary" meaning.
But of course it begs the question of what is being referred to by "God." We can objectively discuss the sociological phenomenon, or the theological constructions, but one of the main modern theological claims is that these are only (potential) pointers to God, not God's self.
I have an intuition that what is up in the air is the question of what kinds of processes for "creating" or "finding" meaning are likely to avoid doing violence to our "thrown" sense of meaning. Obviously I don't buy the fundamentalist line, and would urge anyone interested to consider what they think its basis is. But I have used the term "nihilism" for processes which treat meaning as arbitrary, and so far I am willing to stick by that.
Behind that is a tension between our sense that all meaning should harmonize, so that the same organizing principles apply equally to all claims of meaning, and our desire for meaning to be grounded in emotional intuition. Obviously we cannot force all the tangled connections to work, but neither can we let go of a sense that there is reason and purpose in the process itself, so that some organizing principles "ought to" work.