Philosophy and life, p.42
Philosophy and Life, page 42
Abraham cut firewood, saddled his asses, and journeyed three days to Moriah with Isaac and two servants. When they reached the appointed place he left the asses with the servants and he and Isaac, onto whom he loaded the firewood, set off up the mountain. Isaac asked him, ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ and Abraham said, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb.’ When they reached the appointed place Abraham built an altar and laid the firewood, then bound Isaac and placed him on it. ‘And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.’ At that moment an angel of the Lord called out to stop him, saying, ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.’ Abraham then notices a ram caught in a nearby thicket, and sacrifices it instead. God again speaks to Abraham through the angel, saying, ‘For because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou has obeyed my voice.’14
Consider the sharply contrasting views of Kant and Kierkegaard on this story.
Kant is one of the great figures of the Enlightenment; indeed, he is the source of its definition – in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – as enlightenment, the process of minds becoming enlightened by freeing themselves from superstition and bondage to absolutist authorities, whether secular or religious, and doing so by the use of reason. Applying reason to the story of Abraham and Isaac, Kant points out that whereas one can be certain that killing one’s son is wrong, one cannot be certain that the apparition instructing one to do so is God. He writes: ‘It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God’s; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion.’ In a footnote he adds: ‘We can use, as an example, the myth of the sacrifice that Abraham was going to make by butchering and burning his only son at God’s command (the poor child, without knowing it, even carried the wood for the fire). Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: “That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God – of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from heaven.”’15 What Kant is saying one should say to the voice from the sky would, in our far less polite age, be expressed in two words of one syllable each.
Behind this argument is Kant’s conception of the moral law, expressed by the ‘categorical imperative’ that ‘one ought never to act in any way other than according to a maxim which one can at the same time will should become a universal law’. The ‘determining ground of the moral will’ is the purely formal concept of lawfulness as such, which is a concept of reason; independently of the content of the law, it is the formal property of being such that everyone similarly placed recognizes that everyone else must, rationally, obey it. Kant’s argument is therefore this: it is wrong to kill one’s son. Any rational being can recognize this. If a god existed it would be perfectly rational. Therefore it would not enjoin anyone to kill his son.
Kierkegaard’s take on the story is of course completely different.16 He sees it as an exemplary case of absolute and unquestioning faith in God and obedience to him, which is the ‘higher something’ that trumps even the ethical rule that you must not kill your son, or indeed anyone. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard offers different ways of interpreting the story, in one of which Isaac loses his faith in God because of the profoundly unnatural and wicked thing God demanded his father do. But the conclusions Kierkegaard draws from the story are not consistent with each other. One, in line with the idea that there is a duty imposed by faith that is higher than morality, is that ‘faith makes it a sacred thing to wish to sacrifice one’s son’. But then he also claims that Abraham was completely certain that God would not, in the end, let him sacrifice Isaac: ‘All the while he had faith, believing that God would not demand Isaac of him, though ready all the while to sacrifice him, should it be demanded of him. He believed this on the strength of the absurd; for there was no question of human calculation any longer … Abraham ascended the mountain and whilst the knife already gleamed in his hand he believed – that God would not demand Isaac of him.’ And Kierkegaard was emphatic in arguing that this was not resignation on Abraham’s part, but faith, the genuine article; for resignation is merely a kind of ‘wretched lukewarm sloth’ whereas faith licenses you to sacrifice your son on God’s command.17
Kierkegaard dwells at length on the three days’ journey to Mount Moriah; on the accumulation of details such as collecting the firewood, saddling the asses, whetting the knife, but especially the three days – nay, three and a half days, Kierkegaard insists – so that we can see that Abraham has plenty of time to contemplate the horror of what he is being asked to do. Kierkegaard dramatizes this because he wants faith to be a confrontation with, and the answer to, existential horror, even though the latter is continuous, requiring a constant iteration of one’s commitment of faith. The despair, emptiness and boredom to which he says the aesthetic life is doomed is anatomized in the Either part of his two-volume Either/Or and his Sickness unto Death; to it he opposes the idea of a ‘leap of faith’ (not actually his phrase) as transcending the ‘bondage of logic and tyranny of science’ by embracing the faith exemplified by Abraham. As one commentator writes, ‘By means of the dialectic of “the leap”, he attempted to transcend both the aesthetic and the ethical stages. Completely alone, cut off from his fellow-men, the individual realizes his own nothingness as the preliminary condition for embracing the truth of God. Only when man becomes aware of his own non-entity – an experience that is purely subjective and incommunicable – does he recover his real self and stand in the presence of God.’18
There is another inconsistency here. Fundamental to the existential dread we face is that there is no criterion by which to choose what to do, Kierkegaard says. And yet the ‘horrors’ – the emptiness and boredom resultant upon the Either life of aestheticism, as Kierkegaard sees it – would seem to indicate that an alternative is rationally motivated thereby. Yet he wants to extol the irrationality of the act of faith, ‘the leap’ – this is the underlying Romantic impulse in his view, because central to Romanticism is the assertion of the superiority of feeling over reason, conceding authority to emotion, intuition and desire. In politics, Romanticism appeals to the tribe, the race, blood, the fatherland, patriotism; we know where that has led. We would not be without Romantic music, art and poetry, certainly; but Romanticism in philosophy raises questions in turning fundamentally on a rejection of the ‘bondage of logic’, and justifies what by reason’s standards is unethical by the claim that ‘something higher’ justifies it – ‘something’ vague and mysterious, something expressed by an undefined word. No doubt those who flew aeroplanes into New York’s Twin Towers in 2001 had no less conviction than Abraham on that exact same score. The ultimate problem is that abandoning the handrail of logic gives one no better ground for any choice than what one happens to feel like choosing; Kierkegaard could as well have leapt to belief in the existence of pixies and gnomes or Chinese ancestors as to belief in the doctrines of Christianity. Choice without reason is arbitrary, and is therefore not choice at all.
These examples illustrate what happens when one gets down to a more granular level of what is implied by a philosophical outlook, and how it works in practice. The Roman Stoics were consistent Stoics, but unsurprisingly disagreed about some of the practical applications of their principles. That does not impugn Stoicism, but shows how a set of attitudes and doctrines inevitably relates to practical affairs – in effect, as a map stands to a territory. Pater’s Epicureanism richly elaborates what can – in his view should – furnish the Garden in the way of experience and its objects; that is what pleasure consists in: the best quality of the moments of that experience. This would be Cyrenaicism if the assumption is ignored that the highest enjoyment of art and thought requires knowledge, the acquisition of which is, along with its possession and application, a component of pleasure; and Pater’s pleasures are supremely intellectual. One can see how the case extends from the enjoyment to what produces it, and from both to the conclusion about the life worth living: pain and anxiety are excluded because the pleasure created and enjoyed displaces them and gives them no foothold.
The contrast between the commitment that lies at the base of all the Hellenistic schools – namely, that life should have a rational ground – and the abandonment of any pretence to such a ground in the absoluteness of faith, could not be more sharply drawn than in the Kant and Kierkegaard attitudes to the Isaac story. It is an especially interesting contrast because in Kant’s case it turns on an idea of the majesty of reason so unassailable that even the most convincing display of deity must be subordinate to it. It offers an answer to one version of the question ‘What can provide a handhold, a bannister, something to grip on to, as I try to make sense of things and work things out?’ – for reason at work is scrutiny, reflection, evidence, consistency, constructive scepticism, and a refusal to accept any proposition which lacks adequate grounds. In debates about the ‘ethics of belief’ the principle at stake is expressed in the words of the nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematician and philosopher William Clifford: ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.’19 The other side of the contrast consists in making a virtue not just of believing on insufficient evidence, but in the very face of contrary evidence; for that is the definition of ‘faith’.
Appendix 2 A Technical Aside to Chapter 14
In epistemology I reached what seemed to me a satisfactory way of rebutting sceptical challenges to ordinary knowledge-claims made about the world of perceptual experience, by showing how their justification-conditions include general ‘covering law’ assumptions about the nature and properties of entities and events in that world, assumptions which are also constitutive of shared conditions of meaning for language; and the theory includes an account of the defeasibility of such claims (that is, an explanation of why they fail if they do).1 Together with an argument to the effect that the justificatory scheme as a whole is coterminous with any putatively alternative scheme which we can recognize as a scheme – this because the schemes have at the minimum to be inter-interpretable to be mutually recognizable – the sceptic is met both at the level of individual claims and the level of relativism about schemes.2
But this theory is only a beginning, because it shows that the world of ordinary empirical experience is a construct, and leaves the question of its metaphysical underpinnings open. Kant and the contemporary science of neuropsychology are at one in identifying the world of phenomena (the world of ordinary experience) as a projection, a virtual reality. In this respect Berkeley was right too, though his way of putting matters – that things are made of ideas, which only exist in mind, and that therefore things exist only in mind – is rudimentary and limited in comparison to later articulations of the insight, as to both the mechanisms involved and the implications for our conception of reality – indeed especially as regards this latter. Considerable progress has been made in philosophy and psychology on the question of the relevant mechanisms when these are couched in terms of the phenomenal world, where we can talk of the structure and operations of brains, undertaking lesion studies of them and recording real-time blood flow in them by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), ignoring for fruitful purposes that brains and their structures are phenomena too.
As these remarks suggest, the implications for thinking about reality are a different and larger matter than is involved in the parochial matter of perceptual experience alone. The problem can be put most simply by observing that enquiry into the structure and properties of the physical universe proceeds by investigating the phenomena with ever-increasing sophistication, extending human powers of observation with microscopes (including electron microscopes), telescopes (including radio, X-ray and infrared telescopes), and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Chemistry, biochemistry and biology proceed likewise at more familiar and accessible scales. Mathematics is a powerful tool of description and further inference, especially in fundamental physics and cosmology. The further science reaches beyond the familiar domain of ordinary objects, the more remarkable nature seems. Classical Newtonian science is competent to describe most phenomena at the human and larger scales, but at the quantum level of subatomic phenomena many of the standard intuitions of the classical – the ordinary – scale of experience fail, and the reality described at that level appears strange.
Among the reasons why the quantum realm seems strange might be that theories about it are wrong or have not yet gone quite far enough, or that our classical, ordinary intuitions about things are an artefact of the kind of creature we are – contingent on the scale we occupy in the universe, and in no way even remotely representative of how reality is at its deepest levels, which our fundamental physics more accurately describes. But we and our experience are nevertheless part of the universe, and therefore part of that reality, even if just a sliver of it; so our reality is indeed ‘real’, though not metaphysically fundamental. This point should in fact be uncontroversial, but it raises – more accurately: keeps very much in play – questions about the assumptions and methods employed in trying to get from how human cognition organizes experience of a reality tractable to its own scale to an understanding of the fundamental nature of reality as such. One way of dramatizing the point (accepting important disanalogies) is to ask: if you were wearing a virtual-reality headset giving you the experience of walking through a forest, could you infer from that experience (seeing trees and bushes, hearing birds chirping) the nature of the wiring, microchip and battery inside the headset? In a sense that is the task on which science is embarked. That it is doing so with great success in terms of its applications via technology – aeroplanes, computers, antibiotics – suggests that it is getting a lot right. But questions (such as: is it invariably the case that the successful application of a theory proves the theory right?) remain, prompting further thought about the epistemology and metaphysics involved. I give an informal account of these matters in my Frontiers of Knowledge (2021), and a more philosophically technical treatment in The Metaphysics of Experience.3
Acknowledgements
Though generations of students, colleagues, editors, publishers and friends are too numerous to mention individually – they will know who they are – I should like to single out Joe Palumbo, David Mitchell, Naomi Goulder, Adam Zeman, Simon May, Patrick Markwick-Smith, Mick Gordon, Jane O’Grady, Bill Swainson, Daniel Crewe, Catherine Clarke and John Grayling for special mention. They will know why they are.
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