Extraordinary Realities

The religious impulse is perhaps best understood today as a desire for something extraordinary to break into ordinary existence. This “extraordinary” might be a God “outside” the universe who can and does intervene from beyond to transform our world; or it might be an extraordinary outlook & intuition: new, unusual practices and ideas that work to suddenly liberate us from the pervasive misconceptions of our inherited ways of life. However it is taken to manifest itself, the extraordinary must burst into the universe so that nothing remain the same after — our hope is for a pointed, salutary revolution in what we do and how we think.

This religious expectation for something extraordinary & new is nothing but the eternal intuition that our ordinary understanding of the world has always already built an invisible prison around us. We know there is much more to the world and life than what we see and have been told — but how are we to discover this inconceivable reality? The religious impulse is just this attempt to be free of the oppressive, mundane, ordinary world. When properly directed, it can be an unstoppable force for bettering our lives, for miraculously happening upon exceedingly better worlds.

The ordinary world against which religion must rebel is often that of science, the economy, ethics or politics; these make up a good but insufficient world that continuously traps us in its shortcomings. These realms are very real and must never be ignored or sidestepped by a religious outlook: the perspectives are in an important sense true; and yet, they are also myopic and oppressive in their simplifications; they have never been able to conceal their gaping, dangerous blindspots. The religious outlook must search for extraordinary solutions to the problems these ordinary views of the world cannot fix, escape routes from our always closed understanding of reality. But religious attempts will only prove successful if they can compel the ordinary world to accept their extraordinary solutions on its own terms. Though the religious inspiration is extraordinary, the solutions it offers must become conveivable, that is, they must transform the ordinary world as they are incorporated into it — at which point, of course, even better extraordinary realities must be sought.

The pronoun e

As the English language regrettably lacks a third person singular pronoun to designate persons of all sexes, and refusing to settle for “he or shes”, “theys” and other heavy duty work arounds, i decided to create my own such term. Seeing that all other vowels were otherwise occupied (a, I, oh, you, and why), i decided to dignify the letter e with its own purpose, especially since it is also the shared last letter of the two gendered pronouns, he and she.

I decline the pronoun following the simple rules that also apply to “it”, hence: e (subject), e (object), es (possessive) and eself (reflexive).

While i am on the subject of grammatical innovations, i will point out that i have also ceased to capitalize the letter i when used as the first person singular, since the reasons for this bombastic spelling, the alleged need to save manuscripts’ cursive i’s from disappearing into a mass of indistict humps and waves, has itself long since disappeared.

wittgensteinian thoughts on morality

How does one choose a morality? — Like shoes: by trying them out.

A: Aren’t humans determined by their moral past?
B: No, they can interpret it.
A: With what?
B: With one another.

What do i want? — To be at peace with myself and the world. — Is this what everyone wants? — Probably not. Others are creatures of movement.

When i decide between a kantian and a utilitarian act (killing an innocent man to save the world), the ultimate rule of my decision is nothing other than my peace of mind.

What is the purpose of morality?

wittgensteinian thoughts on religion

To answer the question: “What is religion?” ask: “What do religious people do?” or should we ask: “What do people do when they practice religion?”

What do religious people do? — They do certain things in a certain way.
What do non-religious people do? — They don’t do certain things. — Or do they do them in a different way?

What sort of things do religious people do?

The religious person points towards the solution, trying in vain to describe it.

When i think about religion, am i being religious? Can you think in religion? Can you do religion?

A: What happens when a christian converts?
B: She sees things differently and she does things differently.
A: Is that how a buddhist converts?

Why do so few people believe in hell? — Because they don’t need to.
Why do so many people believe in heaven? — Because they want to.

wittengsteinian thought on the existence of god

A: God does not exist.
B: Which god?
A: No gods exist.
B: True, God is beyond existence.
A: There are no supernatural beings.
B: Indeed, God is more natural than nature itself.
A: Hrmf.

wittgensteinian thoughts on evil

Do you know you just became evil like an unbeliever knows he just became christian?

–Where does evil begin?
–Do not ask that question. Ask: When did we begin speaking of evil?

“Evil is a destroying of the good” — What is the cash value of that statement?

Imagine a robot programmed to shoot and kill human beings. Is this object evil or is it just bad?

on the origin of good and evil

Do not ask: Unde malum? but: Unde malum atque bonum?

There is no good reason to assume that the world is good and then ask how evil came to it. The greater mytery is whence our concepts of good and evil came from. One simply explanation is evolutionary: one day, someone came up with the word “good” and said to her friend, pointing at a berry: “good!” and pointing at another, poisonous one: “bad!”. Humans suddenly had a means of structuring their social interactions, of getting one another to do things by talking to them. The invention of the words “good” and “bad” or “evil” was a revolution, like the invention of agriculture or electric power.

alain badiou on evil

I like what Alain Badiou says in this interview about evil not being something that can be derived from nature, but i wonder about his solution, making it all a mater of subjective perspective. His book on the subject (which i havent read yet) is Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Amazon). From the interview:

that the natural state of the human animal has nothing to do with Good or Evil. And I maintain that the kind of formal moral obligation described in Kant’s categorical imperative does not actually exist. Take the example of torture. In a civilization as sophisticated as the Roman Empire, not only is torture not considered an Evil, it is actually appreciated as a spectacle. In arenas, people are devoured by tigers; they are burned alive; the audience rejoices to see combatants cut each other’s throats. How, then, could we think that torture is Evil for every human animal? Aren’t we the same animal as Sencea or Marcus Aurelius? I should add that the armed forces of my country, France, with the approval of the governments of the era and the majority of public opinion, tortured all the prisoners during the Algerian War. The refusal of torture is a historical and cultural phenomenon, not at all a natural one. In a general way, the human animal knows cruelty as well as it knows pity; the one is just as natural as the other, and neither one has anything to do with Good or Evil. One knows of crucial situations where cruelty is necessary and useful, and of other situations where pity is nothing but a form of contempt for others. You won’t find anything in the structure of the human animal on which to base the concept of Evil, nor, moreover, that of the Good.

But the formal solution isn’t any better. Indeed, the obligation to be a subject doesn’t have any meaning, for the following reason: The possibility of becoming a subject does not depend on us, but on that which occurs in circumstances that are always singular. The distinction between Good and Evil already supposes a subject, and thus can’t apply to it. It’s always for a subject, not a pre-subjectivized human animal, that Evil is possible. For example, if, during the occupation of France by the Nazis, I join the Resistance, I become a subject of History in the making. From the inside of this subjectivization, I can tell what is Evil (to betray my comrades, to collaborate with the Nazis, etc.). I can also decide what is Good outside of the habitual norms. Thus the writer Marguerite Duras has recounted how, for reasons tied to the resistance to the Nazis, she participated in acts of torture against traitors. The whole distinction between Good and Evil arises from inside a becoming-subject, and varies with this becoming (which I myself call philosophy, the becoming of a Truth). To summarize: There is no natural definition of Evil; Evil is always that which, in a particular situation, tends to weaken or destroy a subject. And the conception of Evil is thus entirely dependent on the events from which a subject constitutes itself. It is the subject who prescribes what Evil is, not a natural idea of Evil that defines what a “moral” subject is. There is also no formal imperative from which to define Evil, even negatively. In fact, all imperatives presume that the subject of the imperative is already constituted, and in specific circumstances. And thus there can be no imperative to become a subject, except as an absolutely vacuous statement. That is also why there is no general form of Evil, because Evil does not exist except as a judgment made, by a subject, on a situation, and on the consequences of his own actions in this situation. So the same act (to kill, for example) may be Evil in a certain subjective context, and a necessity of the Good in another.

Jim Wallis on the new christianity

Jim Wallis (wikipedia), a non-right-wing intelligent evangelical christian (no joke), was on the Daily Show (video) talking about how (his) religion needs to refocus on the environment, peace (Darfur) and ethics.  Refreshing. From the Friendly Atheist.

Kant, Hume and the evolution of morality

There is a long post on the Illusive Mind blog defending an evolutionary morality against Kant. I do not particularly want to defend Kant, but i do want to raise a very sizable caveat: whatever “morality” evolution has given us isn’t by any means necessarily the “right” one!

Here is the synopsis of the article/post:

In this essay I will outline what I regard as the most successful attempt to explain the evolution of altruism. I will then illustrate some of the effects that an evolutionary account of moral behaviour has on cognitivist and noncognitivist theories of ethics. I will argue that evolutionary theory does not undermine Hume’s noncognitivism but supports it and casts doubt on Kantianism.

Where things go horribly wrong is when morality is reduced to “a question of desire” because we then have nothing to ‘get behind desires’ and assess them morally (unless you posit some kind of coherence theory, but that is no the case in this article):

The question of retaining moral judgements then is reduced to a question of desire. Do we want to utilise judgements whose agenda is the ongoing survival of the species (at the level of the gene) through a system of rewarding co-operation and punishing cheating?

In effect the morality we have inherited through evolution is taken to be ‘valid’ – except when we don’t like it. The exception is, in my opinion, befuddled; the first part of the above sentence is, however, very dangerous, committing something akin to an is/ought or natural fallacy.

The only alternative on offer is a purely rational ethics à la Kant, but even this is undercut by more primary evolutionary forces:

The only way to be objectively moral and avoid ‘evolutionary baggage’ from tainting our moral judgements seems to be to devote oneself completely to reason in a Kantian fashion. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that reason is above evolutionary pressures. In The Evolution of Reason, William Cooper argues, “the laws of logic emerge naturally as corollaries of the evolutionary laws” (2003, p.5).

In the end, one gets the impression that we are enslaved to the morality evolution thought up for us and are incapable of stepping out of it to evaluate our own moral intuitions.

Admittedly, evaluating our moral intuitions is no easy task. But what is often forgotten is that we are not alone working at that task. It might be impossibly solipsistic for me to want to morally evaluate my own moral intuitions (where would i stand in order to do so?); but it certainly is not very difficult for someone else, actually many other people, to do so.

The solution will likely be neither Humean nor Kantian. We must both use some moral intuitions to assess other ones but also reason through our moral intuitions and find instances where the intuitions clearly go wrong.