John Lachs has retired but his door, I’m pleased to report, continues to instruct and amuse. “Why God didn’t get tenure: he had only one major publication, some even doubted he wrote it himself…He expelled his first two students for learning…His office hours were infrequent…” pic.twitter.com/GEyA7L3b5v
LISTEN. Not only wouldn't He get tenure, He'd not even get hired. Or pass his oral exam, or even prelims probably. The Ph.D. Octopus wouldn't allow it. (And in fairness He would have a lot of explaining to do.)
LISTEN. If a secularist criticizes secular discourse, must we then distinguish secular(ity) from secularism?
I'd have thought it might be more to the point simply to question and critique the particular instances of discourse that prompted the criticism. But maybe that's as pedantic as the seeming scholasticism it aims to skirt. Philosophers love to draw distinctions in any event, so let's let a hundred distinctions bloom.
The political philosopher William Connolly rejects what he sees as the stridency of Bertrand Russell's atheism, and announces his rejection in Why I Am Not a Secularist. Perhaps he should have announced instead that he's not a Russellian secularist. But a rose is still a rose, etc.
I've indicated my concerns about denying secular spirituality and transcendence. Here I want mostly to indicate points of assent with Bill Meyer's analysis, which I think generally coheres with my own sense that pragmatists in the tradition of William James, John Dewey, and perhaps Richard Rorty can simultaneously stump for their own preferred visions of the secular/spiritual while also making space on the pragmatist corridor for other visions.
I do have to say, though, that I don't see a lot of daylight between Bill's initial characterization of the difference between "secular" and "secularism," except (as I've explained) for the repudiation of "any form of transcendence." To find the ground of existence wholly within the world seems to me a sensible secular view, with or without an 'ist attached.
...“secular” (and its cognate secularity) is defined by two main characteristics: (i) an affirmation of life in the world, and (ii) a modern commitment to using reason and common experience rather than appeals to authority as the basis for validating claims within public discourse. In contrast, the term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Secularism denies any metaphysical form of transcendence, including any form of theism. The ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself.
Perhaps my failure to detect a significant difference attests to my own form of affirmation. Life in the world, guided by reason and common experience, is the very immanence of what William James called "the earth of things" I seek and value most. I do not "deny theism" for others, I simply reject it for myself. I do not deny metaphysical transcendence, but for myself I affirm naturalized transcendence. My friends across the corridor affirm differently. I accept that. We'll all still roam the same corridor, we'll discuss our differences, we'll agree to disagree. We may even agree that we're each right to affirm what we respectively and differently affirm.
Has modern secular discourse tilted too far towards reason, to the neglect of "the visceral register" of religious forms of experience (among others)? Might "An Ethos of Engagement" right the balance and "foster a generous pluralism"? That all sounds fine. "Existential yoga" sounds a little less familiar, though "stretching and reimagining [ourselves]" can't hurt. But I for one am unprepared to stretch in the direction of pathological liars, election deniers, and fascists. That's the world some of us are trying hard not to live in right now, the "post-fact, post-truth world of the 21st century." I agree with Bill, "what is needed is a broader rational tent, not a retreat from reason to the realm of the visceral..."
Returning to the theme of transcendence, I appreciate Connolly's "Deweyan-like" openness to novelty and everyday experience (etc.); but Dewey himself would not agree that this is un-metaphysical in a worrisome way. His "continuous human community" [U@d] is "an evolving all-inclusive whole" that approximates a reconstructed conception of the divine as it closes the gap between the actual and the ideal. The "passing ephemeral experience of value" is our locus of continuity with the doings and sufferings of that vast human community. It is not a small or trivial thing.
Should it concern us to imagine that the universe as a whole lacks meaning and value? Why should it, if we ourselves are generators of meaning and value? That's a big question. But though it's a big universe, we're continuous with it. If we possess meaning and value, it does too.
Should it bother us, that our "forms of agency and value" are radically immanent and thus will leave "no lasting trace"? Freud was not the only one to greet such complaints by imploring us to "grow up and face the indifferent universe..." Kant did too, to name another. That's the meaning of enlightenment, after all, to take courage and throw off our self-incurred immaturity.
Charles Hartshorne wondered what it matters that we're definitely here now, "if the universe has no way to retain the definiteness?" That's a strange question. I prefer to turn it around. What does it matter that the universe may not contain our definiteness, if we're definitely here now?
In billions of years we almost certainly will all have long since been "melted down and washed away," but Bertrand Russell was surely right:
Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. --"Why I Am Not a Christian"
And Annie Hall's Dr. Flicker was right too, when he told young Alvy Singer that the universe "won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here."
Anticipating the TPA this weekend, I went walking with an old BBC podcast episode from the Free Thinking program called Culture Wars: Secularism vs. Religion. Parts were illuminating and entertaining, notwithstanding the annoying habit of British intellectuals of talking rudely over each other and making it difficult for listeners who want to be edified by spirited dialogue to hear all of what was actually said. Do they teach that at Eton and Oxford? Seems like the radio presenter/moderators would know better. What's the point of an audio conversation that can't actually be adequately audited?
The lone American in the conversation, Dan Dennett, more than held his own. I share his view that commitment to secularism in a pluralistic democracy entails robust public dialogue but does not allow any "trump cards" to end or resolve discussion. Faith cards don't take the hand. Neither do No Faith cards. Matters of state and of public policy, though not of public dialogue, are rightly walled and separated from private and personal convictions. All can speak their views, none can properly impose or insist on them in a coercive way. President Obama was making this point when he said "the religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason, and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect." (Copson, 87) Same goes in reverse, of course. The irreligiously motivated must also translate their concerns.
Dennett affirms the non-oxymoronic reality of secular spirituality...
"People make a mistake in thinking that spirituality [necessarily]
has anything to do with religion, immateriality, or the supernatural."
Bill Meyer, the author of the paper I'll be commenting on Saturday morning, evidently does not.
[T]o affirm the secular is to affirm the value of life in the world and to affirm a public discourse rooted in reason and experience rather than authority...[T]he term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Just as all 'isms tend to absolutize what they affirm, so too secularism absolutizes the secular’s affirmation of the value of life in the world into a full-blown philosophical absolute—one that posits that life in the world is its own ground of meaning and value. Differently stated, secularism denies any form of transcendence, including any form of theism; the ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself. Consequently, secularism likewise has no place in public discourse for any theistic or metaphysical claims—as if the ground of existence could be anything other than the given world itself. As William Connolly puts it, “secularism strains metaphysics out of politics” (see, for example, Richard Rorty’s essay: “Religion as Conversation-stopper”). So, secularism seeks to affirm the value of life in the world by attempting to make life in the world its own basis and ground. By denying any notion of transcendence, one is inclined to say that secularism assumes that all existence is contingent—that there neither is nor can be any form of necessary existence.
That's from Meyer's TPA presentation last year, to which the session at hand will stand as sequel. The bold emphasis is mine, because I wish to challenge the claims that all 'isms necessarily "absolutize" and that secularism necessarily renounces transcendence.
Transcendence is a slippery term. Like James's tree-hugging squirrel, it eludes us until we pin it with a working definition. Mine begins with Peter Ackroyd's clever line in The Plato Papers: "transcendence or trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death." There's nothing more natural in the world than death, and nothing more restorative of life than the ability to come to terms with it.
My William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life (VU Press, 2001) explicitly affirms the reality of a kind of naturalized transcendence that is available to the secular, pragmatic, naturalistic, and/or humanistic sensibility, and that enables the owners of such sensibilities to come to amicable terms with their mortality.
Transcendence may seem to be about God, or it may be sacredly secular and humanistic. Secular, humanistic, and sacred? Those who find "secular humanism" intrinsically profane will not grasp, as James did, the possibility of this triple yoking. Dewey also affirmed this possibility, as do many liberals, Unitarian Universalists, and other "progressive" minorities in our time. Habit and convention, not empirical perspicacity, decree that public-spirited and earth-centered secularists must disavow a spiritual life.
Transcendence may be cosmic or quotidian, reserved or refined, proselytizing or private. It may suggest supernaturalism, but it need not; indeed, one of my aims here is to strengthen the claims that, for a Jamesian, transcendence need not imply the supernatural and that strictly speaking, and in the spirit of James, it need not involve the transcendence of nature.
Transcendence may be strictly transient, momentary, and isolated, an experience discontinuous in each instance of its occurrence with the larger rhythms, patterns, and meanings of the lives it graces. Alternatively, it can compose the largest meaning in one's life, the pattern of a lifetime.
Transcendence may be a fruition, an experience of conclusion--"consummatory," in John Dewey's language--or it may be less punctuated and more persistently enduring. Dewey himself wrote a great deal about consummatory transcendence, but the latter sort, transcendence of a more stolid and stoical kind, suggests the consistent pattern and meaning of Dewey's long life's work (perhaps more than that of any other American philosopher). His gravestone paean to "the continuous human community in which we are a link" summarizes that pattern and meaning with simple but powerful eloquence.
Transcendence might strike like a bolt from the blue or be more like the almost imperceptibly accretive sands on a beach. It may be an event in life, small or staggering. It may be a dispositional attitude toward life that raises one's sea-level of happiness and the quality of experience in general, attuning the sensibilities to notice and appreciate a transcendent dimension of events that more somber natures miss. Or it may be the pessimist's prayer of salvation, his escape from an immanent existence he finds all too oppressively real.
And I could go on. I did go on. (One of my faculty committee advisors, the wonderful John J. Compton, said I went on too long. He was the very epitome of my Platonic Idea of what a university professor should be. He was probably right.)
But the point is that at least one variety of pragmatic pluralism is also an embrace of a non-exclusionary, non-absolutist variety of secularism. It's the sort of view James indicated with his metaphor of the pragmatic corridor:
Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.
But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism, lecture 2
As for Rorty's conversation-stopping metaphysical strainer: yes, Rorty also has a room on the corridor. Maybe even a suite. But it's a long corridor, and we all must share it. Absolutists are among us, but they're clearly the worst tenants. And after reading and discussing his Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism in the Atheism class last winter, I'm persuaded that Rorty was not himself an absolutist with respect to secularity/'ism. Nor are most secular academics. We're far more likely to encounter absolutists among some of our students and (especially) their parents.
[W]e do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.'
Is that absolutism? Or is it simply an acknowledgement that no sane polity can sustain itself when it turns a blind eye to the intolerant racists (etc.) in its midst. Yes, they'll speak their piece in the public square and in the corridor. If we value a free and open society, we'll answer them vigorously.
The corridor is here. It contains chambers whose occupants look to the heavens for transcendence, but just across the hall we find secular sinners and saints. Nature is global. In fact it's cosmic. Transcendent spirituality of every sort, including but not limited to the supernatural, is a natural expression of human aspiration.
We'll talk about it in the 2d floor corridor of Furman Hall (and room 217, at 10) Saturday morning. Like a good pragmatist, I am indeed looking forward.
LISTEN. Looking forward to the TPA this weekend, and specifically to the Saturday morning session (10 am, Furman 217: "Secularistic But Not Secular? An Analysis of the Philosophy of William Connolly" by William J. Meyer) where I'm supposed to have something to say about the distinction between secularity and secularism.
My first and probably over-hasty impulse is to say the distinction likely will strike most non-academics as scholastic in the worst sense, angels-on-pinheads scholastic... in other words, hair-splitting, trivializing, and (just a week after we feted the esteemed author of The Relevance of Philosophy to Lifea literal stones-throw away) less than urgent at this particularly troublesome moment in the life of the nation and planet.
My conversation yesterday, during a pleasant noontime campus stroll with a former colleague who happens also to be a divinity student and who identifies as secular, persuaded me that there may be something vitally relevant at stake in the distinction. Nothing less than the possibility of sustaining democracy (if that's still on the American table, and if Rob Talisse has not yet trademarked that expression) may hinge on secularists getting the distinction right and then applying it widely in our civic discourse.
So that's what I'm working on today, understanding the distinction and trying to see why it might matter. Urgently.
I volunteered for this gig because of my own great interest in the general topic, if not yet necessarily in the 'ity/'ism distinction. Last semester in the Atheism and Philosophy course we read Andrew Copson's fine Secularism: A Very Short Introduction, as well as his Little Book of Humanism. The latter summarizes my own view pretty accurately:
Here’s a secret that more and more people are discovering: you don’t need religion to live a good life. The natural world is wonderful enough, without having to imagine a supernatural or divine dimension to it. And our natural human capacities for reason, kindness and love are all we need to live well and with meaning.
Throughout history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives – using reason and humanity to guide us. These people have looked to scientific evidence and reason to understand the world. And they’ve placed human welfare and happiness – as well as the welfare of other sentient animals – at the heart of how they choose to live their life..
There are more humanists today than ever before, as the influence of religion wanes around the world. And many religious people are finding humanist ideas appealing – and religions themselves are changing as a result.
Humanism is a positive approach to life which has underpinned many of the humanitarian revolutions as well as the drive for equality over the last few centuries. That is something we should celebrate.
I do call myself a humanist, and because I also call myself a pragmatic pluralist and secularist I acknowledge that while I don't believe I need a religion to live a good life, others think they do. I respect their right to think so, and to express their thought in public.
What I don't respect or accept is my right or theirs to impose any particular variety of religion or irreligion on others. We can talk about it, of course. We can air our differences in public, we can speak and dine and dress differently etc. etc. It's still a free country, last time I checked.
But what we can't do, mustn't do in a free, diverse, and aspirantly-pluralistic democracy, is use the public sphere and its institutions, especially the public schools, to favor one variety of religion or irrelegion over all the others and try to coerce universal obeisance thereto. That's secularism as I have understood it.
Now my immediate TPA task is to see if my old understanding must yield to something in that ity/'ism distinction that matters for the fate of democracy in America. That's not scholastic or pinheady at all.
A confession: I'd never heard of William Connolly. Neither, apparently, had Andrew Copson or the editors of the big fat Oxford Handbook of Secularism(but contributor James Arthur does include Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist, 1999, in the bibliography of his "Secular Education and Religion").
Anticipating the TPA this weekend, I went walking with an old BBC podcast episode from the Free Thinking program called Culture Wars: Secularism vs. Religion. Parts were illuminating and entertaining, notwithstanding the annoying habit of British intellectuals of talking rudely over each other and making it difficult for listeners who want to be edified by spirited dialogue to hear all of what was actually said. Do they teach that at Eton and Oxford? Seems like the radio presenter/moderators would know better. What's the point of an audio conversation that can't actually be adequately audited?
The lone American in the conversation, Dan Dennett, more than held his own. I share his view that commitment to secularism in a pluralistic democracy entails robust public dialogue but does not allow any "trump cards" to end or resolve discussion. Faith cards don't take the hand. Neither do No Faith cards. Matters of state and of public policy, though not of public dialogue, are rightly walled and separated from private and personal convictions. All can speak their views, none can properly impose or insist on them in a coercive way. President Obama was making this point when he said "the religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason, and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect." (Copson, 87) Same goes in reverse, of course. The irreligiously motivated must also translate their concerns.
Dennett affirms the non-oxymoronic reality of secular spirituality...
"People make a mistake in thinking that spirituality [necessarily]
has anything to do with religion, immateriality, or the supernatural."
Bill Meyer, the author of the paper I'll be commenting on Saturday morning, evidently does not.
[T]o affirm the secular is to affirm the value of life in the world and to affirm a public discourse rooted in reason and experience rather than authority...[T]he term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Just as all 'isms tend to absolutize what they affirm, so too secularism absolutizes the secular’s affirmation of the value of life in the world into a full-blown philosophical absolute—one that posits that life in the world is its own ground of meaning and value. Differently stated, secularism denies any form of transcendence, including any form of theism; the ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself. Consequently, secularism likewise has no place in public discourse for any theistic or metaphysical claims—as if the ground of existence could be anything other than the given world itself. As William Connolly puts it, “secularism strains metaphysics out of politics” (see, for example, Richard Rorty’s essay: “Religion as Conversation-stopper”). So, secularism seeks to affirm the value of life in the world by attempting to make life in the world its own basis and ground. By denying any notion of transcendence, one is inclined to say that secularism assumes that all existence is contingent—that there neither is nor can be any form of necessary existence.
That's from Meyer's TPA presentation last year, to which the session at hand will stand as sequel. The bold emphasis is mine, because I wish to challenge the claims that all 'isms necessarily "absolutize" and that secularism necessarily renounces transcendence.
Transcendence is a slippery term. Like James's tree-hugging squirrel, it eludes us until we pin it with a working definition. Mine begins with Peter Ackroyd's clever line in The Plato Papers: "transcendence or trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death." There's nothing more natural in the world than death, and nothing more restorative of life than the ability to come to terms with it.
My William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life (VU Press, 2001) explicitly affirms the reality of a kind of naturalized transcendence that is available to the secular, pragmatic, naturalistic, and/or humanistic sensibility, and that enables the owners of such sensibilities to come to amicable terms with their mortality.
Transcendence may seem to be about God, or it may be sacredly secular and humanistic. Secular, humanistic, and sacred? Those who find "secular humanism" intrinsically profane will not grasp, as James did, the possibility of this triple yoking. Dewey also affirmed this possibility, as do many liberals, Unitarian Universalists, and other "progressive" minorities in our time. Habit and convention, not empirical perspicacity, decree that public-spirited and earth-centered secularists must disavow a spiritual life.
Transcendence may be cosmic or quotidian, reserved or refined, proselytizing or private. It may suggest supernaturalism, but it need not; indeed, one of my aims here is to strengthen the claims that, for a Jamesian, transcendence need not imply the supernatural and that strictly speaking, and in the spirit of James, it need not involve the transcendence of nature.
Transcendence may be strictly transient, momentary, and isolated, an experience discontinuous in each instance of its occurrence with the larger rhythms, patterns, and meanings of the lives it graces. Alternatively, it can compose the largest meaning in one's life, the pattern of a lifetime.
Transcendence may be a fruition, an experience of conclusion--"consummatory," in John Dewey's language--or it may be less punctuated and more persistently enduring. Dewey himself wrote a great deal about consummatory transcendence, but the latter sort, transcendence of a more stolid and stoical kind, suggests the consistent pattern and meaning of Dewey's long life's work (perhaps more than that of any other American philosopher). His gravestone paean to "the continuous human community in which we are a link" summarizes that pattern and meaning with simple but powerful eloquence.
Transcendence might strike like a bolt from the blue or be more like the almost imperceptibly accretive sands on a beach. It may be an event in life, small or staggering. It may be a dispositional attitude toward life that raises one's sea-level of happiness and the quality of experience in general, attuning the sensibilities to notice and appreciate a transcendent dimension of events that more somber natures miss. Or it may be the pessimist's prayer of salvation, his escape from an immanent existence he finds all too oppressively real.
And I could go on. I did go on. (One of my faculty committee advisors, the wonderful John J. Compton, said I went on too long. He was the very epitome of my Platonic Idea of what a university professor should be. He was probably right.)
But the point is that at least one variety of pragmatic pluralism is also an embrace of a non-exclusionary, non-absolutist variety of secularism. It's the sort of view James indicated with his metaphor of the pragmatic corridor:
Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.
But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism, lecture 2
As for Rorty's conversation-stopping metaphysical strainer: yes, Rorty also has a room on the corridor. Maybe even a suite. But it's a long corridor, and we all must share it. Absolutists are among us, but they're clearly the worst tenants. And after reading and discussing his Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism in the Atheism class last winter, I'm persuaded that Rorty was not himself an absolutist with respect to secularity/'ism. Nor are most secular academics. We're far more likely to encounter absolutists among some of our students and (especially) their parents.
[W]e do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.'
Is that absolutism? Or is it simply an acknowledgement that no sane polity can sustain itself when it turns a blind eye to the intolerant racists (etc.) in its midst. Yes, they'll speak their piece in the public square and in the corridor. If we value a free and open society, we'll answer them vigorously.
The corridor is here. It contains chambers whose occupants look to the heavens for transcendence, but just across the hall we find secular sinners and saints. Nature is global. In fact it's cosmic. Transcendent spirituality of every sort, including but not limited to the supernatural, is a natural expression of human aspiration.
We'll talk about it in the 2d floor corridor of Furman Hall (and room 217, at 10) Saturday morning. Like a good pragmatist, I am indeed looking forward.
If a secularist criticizes secular discourse, must we then distinguish secular(ity) from secularism?
I'd have thought it might be more to the point simply to question and critique the particular instances of discourse that prompted the criticism. "Secularisms are in fact plural." (Copson, 80) But maybe that's as pedantic as the seeming scholasticism it aims to skirt. Philosophers love to draw distinctions in any event, so let's let a hundred distinctions bloom.
The political philosopher William Connolly rejects what he sees as the stridency of Bertrand Russell's atheism, and announces his rejection in Why I Am Not a Secularist. Perhaps he should have announced instead that he's not a Russellian secularist. But a rose is still a rose, etc.
I've indicated my concerns about denying secular spirituality and transcendence. Here I want mostly to indicate points of assent with Bill Meyer's analysis, which I think generally coheres with my own sense that pragmatists in the tradition of William James, John Dewey, and perhaps Richard Rorty can simultaneously stump for their own preferred visions of the secular/spiritual while also making space on the pragmatist corridor for other visions.
I do have to say, though, that I don't see a lot of daylight between Bill's initial characterization of the difference between "secular" and "secularism," except (as I've explained) for the repudiation of "any form of transcendence." To find the ground of existence wholly within the world seems to me a sensible secular view, with or without an 'ist attached.
...“secular” (and its cognate secularity) is defined by two main characteristics: (i) an affirmation of life in the world, and (ii) a modern commitment to using reason and common experience rather than appeals to authority as the basis for validating claims within public discourse. In contrast, the term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Secularism denies any metaphysical form of transcendence, including any form of theism. The ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself.
Perhaps my failure to detect a significant difference attests to my own form of affirmation. Life in the world, guided by reason and common experience, is the very immanence of what William James called "the earth of things" I seek and value most. I do not "deny theism" for others, I simply reject it for myself. I do not deny metaphysical transcendence, but for myself I affirm naturalized transcendence. My friends across the corridor affirm differently. I accept that. We'll all still roam the same corridor, we'll discuss our differences, we'll agree to disagree. We may even agree that we're each right to affirm what we respectively and differently affirm.
Has modern secular discourse tilted too far towards reason, to the neglect of "the visceral register" of religious forms of experience (among others)? Might "An Ethos of Engagement" right the balance and "foster a generous pluralism"? That all sounds fine. "Existential yoga" sounds a little less familiar, though "stretching and reimagining [ourselves]" can't hurt. But I for one am unprepared to stretch in the direction of pathological liars, election deniers, and fascists. That's the world some of us are trying hard not to live in right now, the "post-fact, post-truth world of the 21st century." I agree with Bill, "what is needed is a broader rational tent, not a retreat from reason to the realm of the visceral..."
Returning to the theme of transcendence, I appreciate Connolly's "Deweyan-like" openness to novelty and everyday experience (etc.); but Dewey himself would not agree that this is un-metaphysical in a worrisome way. His "continuous human community" [U@d] is "an evolving all-inclusive whole" that approximates a reconstructed conception of the divine as it closes the gap between the actual and the ideal. The "passing ephemeral experience of value" is our locus of continuity with the doings and sufferings of that vast human community. It is not a small or trivial thing.
Should it concern us to imagine that the universe as a whole lacks meaning and value? Why should it, if we ourselves are generators of meaning and value? That's a big question. But though it's a big universe, we're continuous with it. If we possess meaning and value, it does too.
Should it bother us, that our "forms of agency and value" are radically immanent and thus will leave "no lasting trace"? Freud was not the only one to greet such complaints by imploring us to "grow up and face the indifferent universe..." Kant did too, to name another. That's the meaning of enlightenment, after all, to take courage and throw off our self-incurred immaturity.
Charles Hartshorne wondered what it matters that we're definitely here now, "if the universe has no way to retain the definiteness?" That's a strange question. I prefer to turn it around. What does it matter that the universe may not contain our definiteness, if we're definitely here now?
In billions of years we almost certainly will all have long since been "melted down and washed away," but Bertrand Russell was surely right:
Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. --"Why I Am Not a Christian"
And Annie Hall's Dr. Flicker was right too, when he told young Alvy Singer that the universe "won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here."
LISTEN. We're burrowing deeper, in CoPhi today, into Why Grow Up and its discussion of Hannah Arendt's observation that "education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it... [and] where we decide whether we love our children enough... to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world." I wonder how many of us working academics regularly remind ourselves of that momentous mission statement. It definitely raises the stakes.
We're talking Energy in Environmental Ethics. Given the current relative percentages of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and energy derived from renewables, it does feel like "a momentous turning point in civilization"--if you can believe that we're really about to turn.
Or will we falter, as Bill McKibben asked in his eponymous book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? It's increasingly easy to think so, but “let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things.”
We've done so before... though never before have so many in positions of influence been so cavalier about believing things they know to be untrue. That's a profound corruption of the media and political environment we're going to have to solve. Meanwhile, the best and wisest parents will continue to teach their children that social justice and a better world of equal opportunity and universal inclusion are democratic ideals still worth seeking. They'll concede that life is hard but insist that it is not pointlessly absurd. It matters.
One thing that matters to me but is making life hard at the moment is the imminent return-to-ground of the Tennessee Philosophical Association (TPA) this coming weekend at Vandy. It's hard, that is, to find the time to really focus on preparing my comments for the session whose presenter proposes a sharp distinction between secularism and secularity.
That sounds hair-splitting, but I hope to conclude that it's just a verbally confusing but still fundamentally sound insight. Unlike many of my peers, I don't like to be contrary and disagreeable at philosophy conferences. I like instead to listen, ponder, and discover common ground, and then declare victoriously, "Look at what we found!" I like, in other words, to CoPhilosophize in the spirit of attentive collaboration and constructive, respectful, mutual criticism. That's where the wisdom comes from, and that's when philosophy is a delight.
That's also the spirit required, if we're all to meet the "momentous turning point in civilization" dead ahead. We can use the practice.
Feeling your pain this morning, Yankees and Padres fans. Felt it myself a couple weeks ago, and many times before. Strange how much worse it feels when your team goes deep into the postseason before losing, as opposed to going out quickly. Just remember, as Chance the gardener said, there will be new growth in Spring.
And as Kieran Setiya says in Life is Hard, "the past can't be erased. But for that very reason, all we can aspire to do is mend the future." Hope springs eternal.
Meanwhile, my advice is to pick a team. I'm with the Phils.
LISTEN. In CoPhi today we're into Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. At his best, her muse Kant had a succinct and compelling answer: grow up because that's the meaning of enlightenment. Throw off self-imposed immaturity. Take responsibility. Think. Sapere aude.
At his worst, though, in that film about his last days, Kant and his umbrella-toting manservant come across as a pair of pathetic peripatetics, the Sage having paced creepily past maturity into a doddering, declining senescence. He won't inspire our rising next generations to rescue democracy and summon the courage to think for themselves (and not by themselves).
In Environmental Ethics we're onto the Food chapter of Regeneration, which includes a detour to consider the legacy of the great E.O. Wilson before it gives Jonathan Safran Foer the last word. "We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go." Eating habits, transportation habits, residential habits, urban/suburban design habits, and so many other habitually destructive behaviors. Again, Gen Z, it's your time to shine.
Jonathan also said:
“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”
Maybe we don't need the option of draining every last drop of fossil fuel either, or of sprawling beyond the suburbs, or choking on our meds, et al, unless we really do want to confirm Kristofferson's Bobby McGee definition of freedom as nothing left to lose. I vote for losing the bad habits, before it comes to that.
Enjoyed our discussions of Wittgenstein and Arendt yesterday in CoPhi. Every time we talk about "Witty" (as an unimpressed student dubbed him long ago) I find less to pass over in silence.
And every time we talk about Arendt lately, I shudder to realize the rhyming echo of banality in our time with that in hers. So many have been so silent and passive in the face of so much outrage. Her early crush Heidegger said "only a god can save us now." I'll never say that. But it may well be that only an engaged and enlightened next generation can save democracy. That headline yesterday ("Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority") was not, in that regard, very encouraging.
I missed this when it was released. A student yesterday said she didn't watch it because it has subtitles. That's not encouraging either.
"In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly surrendered the single most defining human quality: that of being able to think; and consequently he was no longer capable of making moral judgements..."
Hannah Arendt is up for consideration today in CoPhi. She's often been misunderstood, just as Emerson said great people always are. Those who would be great often misunderstand themselves and wait for greatness to descend, rather than undertaking the effort to make it happen.
That's Maria Popova's understanding of Henry James's message in his "Beast in the Jungle"--the importance of doing something, even (as my old friend always said) if it's wrong. It's the flipside of Arendt's point about the banality of evil, that inactivity, inattention, and disinterest are the ultimate enablers of failure, misfortune, and tragedy in our world.
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (NYer I, II)... Susan Neiman ("we could just possibly save ourselves...the world is a place fit for human habitation")
Hannah and Henry would have been disappointed but perhaps not surprised by this morning's headline in the Times:
Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority
Guess that begins to explain the absence of interest so far, at our school, in American Studies. "Interested in American culture? Concerned for the fate of American democracy?" Guess not.
On a more positive note...
In Environmental Ethics we consider cities, their contribution to the climate crisis and their potential for ameliorating it... For me of course, the crucial marks of a livable city include walkability and bikeability. If you can't pedal or perambulate to whatever you need in fifteen minutes, you might as well live in the 'burbs. But I won't say that in the middle of my 55-minute (on a really good day) auto commute.
What I will say is this: if we can muster care enough for the livability of our human habitat to design and inhabit walkable and bikeable cities and make them our norm and standard, we might stand a chance of saving democracy. But without the one, the other will most likely elude us. We're going to have to care, and to think.
The Lachs conference/celebration was, to borrow one of his own favorite characterizations, lovely.
Friday's talks and testimonials from former students and colleagues spanning generations were appropriate, occasionally moving, and not (at the honoree's request) too "sappy"... and that was a nice little story from Herman, explaining how John's co-founded American Philosophy Society became S.A.A.P. in spite of its acronymic unfortunateness.
The food (salmon, ratatouille, several kinds of dessert) was, to borrow another distinctively Lachsian descriptor, delightful.
The Saturday morning talks were great.
And what fun, laying eyes again on so many old friends so long (too long) parted.
No single event could justly reflect and reward the lifetime achievement of such a wise, fecund, and impactful mentor, but this one sounded all the right notes and spotlighted what I think is John's greatest quality as a teacher and a human being: the eagerness to accept, appreciate, and applaud individuals for themselves and in their uniqueness. A "community of individuals" is no abstraction for him. Like William James, John revels in the teeming varieties of experience and has no use for meddlers, authoritarians, and spirit-killers.
We who've benefitted from the gift of John's instruction owe it to him to keep the flame of that sort of humane education alive. We owe it to him to pay it forward.
On a day Budapest native John Lachs was honored at Vandy, and @PhilosophyBB’s Eric Weber spoke brilliantly of the crisis in American public education… “Still work to be done” @erictweberhttps://t.co/JcjzifGFhb
The long-awaited and much-anticipated day has come, the first of two days (will they be enough?) designated for celebrating the “contagious love of life and learning, playful spirit, boundless generosity, and unimpeachable character” of a great philosopher and man. The John and Shirley Lachs Conference on American Philosophy at Vanderbilt kicks off this afternoon, friends and former students are coming in for it from every direction, at least one of them will join me shortly for a hot chicken lunch to warm us up for the festivities. Can't wait.
The conference organizer Michael Brodrick invited written and recorded testimonials for John. I submitted this:
I do intend to be present in October at Vandy to celebrate the exemplary, inspiring career and life of John Lachs. But I want also to include for the record the following, originally posted when Scott Aikin invited me to participate in a Tennessee Philosophical Association event in 2021 commemorating the 40th anniversary of Intermediate Man. Unfortunately that event did not eventuate. But these remarks in tribute to my mentor and friend, and many others over the years, belong on the record. Thank you, John. For everything. Phil Oliver
LISTEN. Yesterday was bookended by delightful surprise at the front end, and whatever you call its opposite at the other. I'll call it gratuitous confusion and acrimony, and I'll say nothing much more about it. Just this: some humans, particularly those in my profession, can be difficult and obtuse. Be better, please, colleagues.
The delight, owing to a different sort of academic: an invitation to participate in a panel at the next gathering of the Tennessee Philosophical Association to commemorate "Intermediate Man at 40."
Intermediate Man was my mentor John Lachs's refreshing paean to immediacy in experience and in life, published August 1, 1981. It caught my eye at about the same time its author did, in my first year of grad school. In keeping with its theme it insinuated no footnotes or other distractions between author and reader, just a smart, humane, extremely unpedantic scholar reflecting on the live-but-latent possibilities of perception for those who resolve to remove mediating obstacles from their direct intercourse with the world.
Lachs writes: "Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends..."
I've been wrestling pleasantly and, I think, constructively with that proposed form of transcendence ever since. Distant ends and the remote future matter profoundly for us, I believe, as prime motivation for responsible conduct in the present, and the challenge of becoming good ancestors. If we're going to address climate change and the other existential threats of our time we're going to have to accept our collective responsibility for distant ends. We're going to have to think globally and act locally. We're going to have to care about the future, just as our more enlightened ancestors cared about their future--our present.
But... enjoying present activities presently, extracting the full meaning and richness of the moving spotlight that is the specious present, is the unnegotiable condition of our happiness.
So, balancing Lachsian transcendence and its attendant shift of attention without sacrificing sensitivity and commitment to the "long now" has been my bellwether aspiration in philosophy. I am endlessly and immediately grateful to John Lachs for giving me that perspective, and that reflective frame.
So I anticipate with immediate delight that upcoming TPA event in November. There will be scholarly talk and interchange -- the usual academic exercise in extended mediation -- and then, more delightfully and most appropriately, for a man who always asks after my wife and daughters, a family lunch.
It will be transcendent. Or rather, it already is. The future is now.
"There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought
without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."
My enduring mental picture of John "barg[ing] into the philosopher's lecture hall with the direct concerns of everyday life" is captured forever by the acknowledgement I wrote years ago, in gratitude for the deft mentorship without which I'd never have stood a chance against the "Ph.D Octopus"...
We'd originally planned a trip to the Florida Gulf Coast, but Ian got in the way. So we canceled the flight and pivoted to the nearest mountain. It's a modest one, as mountains go, but it had everything we could want in an improvised extended weekend getaway: cool and secluded cabin, crisp mornings and sunny afternoons, great hiking and biking, good eating, postseason baseball (it went poorly for my team but Albert and Yadi went out winners)... and we didn't have to leave the dogs at home.
World Mental Health Day happened to come up while we were there. Too bad more of the world can't, or won't, take regular forest baths.
And now it's back to school. We pick up with Existentialists in CoPhi, where I'll again endorse Hitch's shade at nihilists who think they're Existentialists.
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.” Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
And then in Environmental Ethics, it's the People chapter of Regeneration. So much to like in this chapter, including the 30 by 30 Movement, Nemonte Nemquimo's truth-to-power letter to presidents and other plunderers of indigenous habitats, Soul Fire Farm, Mary Reynolds' ARKs, fossil fuel divestment, the problem of philanthropy (when it displaces collective democratic responsibility)...
That's enough to pack into such a short working week.
We're already looking forward to the weekend, we and colleagues and out-of-town friends, starting tomorrow with a celebration at Vanderbilt of the “contagious love of life and learning, playful spirit, boundless generosity, and unimpeachable character” of a great philosopher and greater man, my esteemed mentor John Lachs.
And the Southern Festival of Books, "a celebration of the written word," is back this weekend too. Hooray for autumnal festivity! What better time to celebrate than the season (as George Carlin said) when everything is dying.
Not everything though, so long as we do remember to celebrate.
Happy Fall Break! Good time to head up the mountain and into the woods for some forest bathing.
“I can face the winter with calm. Crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here’s to October.” ~A.A.Milne #naturepic.twitter.com/IQMnUI3FV9
This is Nashville is a terrific noontime radio program (WPLN) and podcast that's been a real addition to the civic discourse of our community. The host Khalil Ekulona is a pro's pro, as well as a former teacher. I predict he'll go far, we're lucky to have him here in our air for now.
I appreciate their regular solicitation of listener opinion ("we want to hear from you"... tweet us"), and appreciated being re-tweeted yesterday when they talked about the local bus situation.
I would love for MTA/WeGo to make one more evening run, after 6 pm, from Murfreesboro/MTSU to Nashville. I’d be on it, I’m WAY over my auto commute. There are so many reckless, inconsiderate drivers on I 24.
Thanks for listening, Bus Deciders. I really do want to join the local transit community.
The day before, the show was all about the pagans and Wiccans of middle Tennessee. It was a good show. But I'm concerned that it will reinforce the prejudice of many mainstream Christians here against non-Christian varieties of spirituality. There wasn't an acknowledgment that pagans and Wiccans are just a couple of the myriad alternatives to the mainstream.
So I also appreciate the fact that the show's producers asked me to elaborate. This is what I said:
Well, the show seemed to me to imply that self-avowed Wiccans and pagans are the predominant alternatives to mainstream Christianity. In fact there are many more humanists, naturalists, and secularists of other sorts who do not dabble in magic or hexes or other supernatural-sounding sorts of talk. Most “nones” and others who say they are “spiritual, not religious” have a more rationally oriented worldview. That’s my impression anyway, after teaching a course called “Atheism and Philosophy” at MTSU for many years. I did enjoy the show, and This Is Nashville is a great addition to our civic conversation. I’m just concerned that this particular installment might reinforce a certain stereotype that some have about the sorts of people who find conventional religion narrow and constraining.
So thanks for asking and listening, TIN. It's good to be seen and heard. I'll look forward to the next installment of the show that extends the conversation about alternative forms of belief and practice in our back yard.
Life-affirmers don't necessarily want to live the same life recurrently and eternally (unless it's either that or eternal oblivion), but we'd prefer to stick around at least long enough to begin applying the hard-won lessons we've learned... and to try changing the things we cannot accept. Stoicism must be paired with pragmatism.
"I just wish I could stay a little longer." On a day when we discussed Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" in class, Jack Thomas's words are particularly resonant. He died yesterday at 83. https://t.co/4oCNUAXq5k via @BostonGlobe
Other people aren't so resilient, because they are what they eat. "Foods are enriched because they are impoverished."
And then there's Polyface Farm, a place and an ethos I first learned about from Michael Pollan. Animals there are treated with respect, but not ultimately with personhood. They're still destined for human plates. But at least they get to range free for most of their natural lives.
To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.
For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago. An Animal's Place
"It is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it." We've taken it for granted, failed to nourish and sustain it. Worms have done better than we have. What does it say about our bio-illiteracy, that we have a stock expression denigrating "lowly worms"?
A Berry not Wendell says we've become an extractive species because we see ourselves as "transcendent" and not at home here. He names the alternative "Inscendence," the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core. (Robert Macfarlane made that one of his "words of the day," and it's a great one.)
Thomas Berry also said "the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities should [he said will, but that's aspirational] be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.”
That seems too obvious to need saying. But so many of us still don't understand what was so clear to Thomas Berry:
We went hiking at Burch Reserve yesterday, a gorgeous Fall day wasted by so many of our neighbors watching overfed behemoths bashing one another's brains on the gridiron.
In fairness, many of our other neighbors were at the Warner Parks across the road. The Reserve is a relatively recent addition to Nashville's sumptuous recreational park and greenway system, and is still relatively unknown or disregarded by park patrons. We had it largely to ourselves. It was lovely.
I think the enduring memory of our afternoon, though, will be the little picnic we had out on the back porch of the Nature Center when we finished. There was a mom and her son and daughter. The little girl, maybe five or six and uninhibited in the delightful way of children who've not been over-warned against stranger danger, settled in under the nearby bench and announced to us that they were playing tag and she was hiding. Then she hollered to her brother, who of course declared "found you"... at which point the little girl ran to find a better hiding spot. "No fair!"
Maybe you had to be there, but the moment was for me an epitome of childhood. It captured the freedom from care it seems fewer and fewer kids get to experience because their parents can't be troubled to pull away from their screens and spend a little quality time with their children in the open air on a glorious autumn day.
That goes for all of us, at every age. It seems like half or more of my students complain of chronic and debilitating anxiety, and not coincidentally also have lost their tickets to nature. They need what the Japanese call a forest bath, shin-rin yoku. They need to bathe regularly. We all do.
