Some ideas from Robert C. Solomon / Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life

Notes from Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (Oxford, 2002).  Solomon (September 14, 1942 – January 2, 2007) focused on critical thinking and building a cosmopolitan point of view.  He taught for many years at the University of Texas. 

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Paraphrases and quotes:

Only an impoverished philosophy of religion reduces faith to beliefs, as propositions to be proven … as if they were club passwords or code words … all these sects and religions, secret societies, are all but indistinguishable from one another ... 

Real faith is not belief but, as Kierkegaard says, passionate inwardness, which may not have any cognitive content, although it somehow captures cognitive aspirations.

"I will not explore faith as such for the reasons I have suggested, because it is a term too exclusively wedded to a small number of religious traditions and, even there, it suffers from some deep philosophical ambiguities and equivocations.  It is treated (e.g. by Kant) as a species of rationality.  It is treated (e.g. by Kierkegaard) as a species of irrationality.  It is treated by some philosophers and theologians as an emotion, but by others as a virtue very different from emotion.  But I think that faith can best be understood as a kind of reverence and a variety of trust (ultimately as a variant of love).  Reverence, trust and love, I want to suggest, are the essence of spirituality." 

"I want to talk about trust rather than faith and hope, because what we call faith and hope are more specially tied to particular traditions; because they are focused emotions (unlike reverence); and mainly because faith and hope appear in traditions that insist on metaphysical and ethical closure."

Faith, when by this word we mean something that speaks to all spirituality, is best conceived as "authentic trust." Authentic trust is constituted just as much by doubt and uncertainty as by confidence and optimism.  Augustine, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky speak to a kind of life experience that is trust and despair at once.  "Put another way, authentic trust, like true love and genuine faith, may be possible only in light of a breakdown of trust (or love or faith). One cannot authentically trust unless one has experienced the shipwreck of deep disappointment, loss or betrayal."

Sometimes people envision reason as having no heart or passion or energy of emotion in it.  Their conception of reason as neutrality, impartiality, detachment and remoteness has some consequences nearly opposite to the first inspiration for these ideas of reason or rationality or objectivity. In the long run, the result of this kind of thinking -- envisioning reason as a neutral mechanism -- is cynicism; a catastrophe emerges in backlash, as the  resentiment of passion denied. 

"For those of us who enjoy the mixed blessing of seeing beyond all traditions and thus finding ourselves without an anchor in the world, spirituality is an arduous  process, filled with doubts and misgivings, skeptical of glib formulations and platitudes, frustrated with the limitations of the personalities we have worked so hard to create over the course of a hard-headed lifetime."

 "If the self to which spirituality and philosophy refers is nothing other than the everyday self, neither is it simply the everyday self.  The tremendous effort to discover or realize our better selves within, through and out of the everyday self is what spirituality is all about."

As Hegel said, spirituality is a process rather than a result.  This is a naturalized concept -- but it is still worth striving for -- in suffering and cosmic joy -- with all our struggles and shipwrecks -- everything good and bad that we experience -- "exactly what Nietzsche famously referred to as the Dionysian aspect of human life."

Some thoughts from Neil Postman

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003)

Media theorist, cultural critic, philosopher of education – probably best known to the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Some Quotations

--Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

--I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.

--Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it also destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.

--Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

--What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

--A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

--The notion of childhood, while it might conceivably have a biological basis, is largely a social artifact.

We know, for instance, in the medieval world there was no such thing comparable to what we today call childhood. There were basically two stages of life: infancy and adulthood, with infancy ending at about the age of seven.

This form of social organization was the product of the kind of communication system that existed. That is to say, it was largely an oral culture in which most of the important social transactions occurred through speech in face-to-face situations. So in order to be an adult, one had to learn how to speak, which most people do by the age of seven.

In the sixteenth century, this began to change because the communication environment changed with the invention of the printing press. After the printing press, one had to earn adulthood by becoming literate. People are biologically programmed to learn how to speak, but they are not biologically programmed to be literate. This required the development of the modern school. And for the first time in centuries, a certain segment of the population was segregated from the rest of the population and sent to a special place, namely school, in order to learn how to become literate. After a while, the term schoolboy became synonymous with a certain age group, which developed into the idea of childhood—a special stage of life that was to act as a bridge between infancy and adulthood.

For about 350 years, we in the West have been developing this idea of three stages of life: infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Now, we have a new element in the communication environment called television, which is making the idea of childhood increasingly untenable; and it is doing this in several ways. One is that it makes the content of the adult world available to the young without them having to learn any special coding system such as the printed word. Previously adults revealed the secrets of adult life—by secrets, I mean the social, political, and sexual secrets that adults know but that are not considered appropriate for children to know—to the young in stages and in psychologically assimilable ways.

Now, television reveals all these secrets all at once, simultaneously to everyone in the culture, so that it becomes impossible to control the socialization of the young.

--In my books called Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Teaching as a Conserving Activity, I tried to develop some ideas for revolutionizing education.     

I think the most important thing we can do for our students is to help develop in them a sense of detachment and analytic skill so that they can look at their own culture with courage, calm, and intelligence. I would certainly agree that the present curricula for the most part try to get students to believe what their culture believes. This cannot be what we are about. 

Perhaps we should abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less ignorant. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with health; they concentrate on sickness. And lawyers don't think too much about justice; they think about cases of injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of ignorance and working to eliminate as many of them as we can.

--What are some chief forms of ignorance?  (Postman also refers to ignorance as balderdash, baloney and bullshit.)  Some main ones are: pomposity, earthiness, euphemism, fanaticism, word magic, sloganeering.  Selections:

Pomposity is the triumph of style over substance, and generally it is not an especially venal form of balderdash. A little pomposity at a graduation ceremony is surely bearable. But it is by no means harmless. Plenty of people are daily victimized by pomposity—made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies. Many people in the teaching business dwell almost exclusively in the realm of pomposity and quite literally would be unable to function if not for the fact that the profession has made this form of balderdash quite respectable. Generally speaking, pomposity is not a serious affliction among the young, although they are easily victimized by it. There seems to be a correlation between pomposity and aging, as I am beginning to discover myself. Young people, however, suffer badly from a related form of balderdash—what might be called earthiness.

Earthiness is based on the assumption that if you use direct, off-color, four-letter words, you somehow are speaking more truth than if you observe the proper language forms. It is the mirror image of pomposity, because, like pomposity, it hopes that people will be so dazzled by the manner of speech that they will not notice the absence of matter. Earthiness becomes dangerous when we convince ourselves that four-letter words are the natural mode of expressing sincerity or honesty or candor.

Another, far more distressing variety of balderdash is called euphemism, and it is exemplified by the word “balderdash” itself. By using the word, I am guilty of euphemizing. But my guilt is not nearly as serious as the guilt of some other, more prominent people. One of the best examples of euphemizing in recent decades was provided by President Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, who instead of using the four-letter word “lies,” as in the sentence “The President’s previous statements were lies,” chose the eleven-letter word “inoperative.” President Nixon went Ziegler one better when he chose to say that members of his campaign organization were guilty of an excess of zeal. This was the first time to my knowledge that the word “zeal” has been used as a euphemism for illegal entry, stealing, bribery, and perjury. In any case, euphemism seems to be playing an increasingly important role in American public life. We have had to endure such phrases as “protective reaction strike,” “preventive detention,” “pacification programs,” and one of my all-time favorites, “disinformation.” The Reagan administration says it did not lie to the American public about Libya; it merely disseminated disinformation.

Euphemism, then, is that form of balderdash wherein we attempt to obscure the nature of reality. Like pomposity, this process is not always harmful, for there are some occasions when simple good taste, or good manners, requires euphemism. 

On directing reason to itself

Preliminary notes regarding directing reason to itself

Plato argues in the Republic that the good man reaches the highest pitch of happiness in contemplating the unchanging forms; also that the good man’s sense of justice moves him to turn his back on unfailing light and return to his fellows and the shadows of the cave. 

Aristotle continues this argument in holding that there are two importantly different kinds of thinking: calculation (inference) and contemplation (meditation).  Calculation “deliberates” about variable things; contemplation, by contrast, does not “deliberate” at all; it is more like appreciation than close analysis.  The father of logic also held that contemplation is superior to inference in that it does not deliberate but is the basis of deliberation; thus it counts as a more divine state of mind (Nicomachean Ethics, VI). 

Heidegger holds the same distinction between calculation and meditation: “calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next” whereas “meditative thinking collects itself and bides its time in quiet composure.”  Calculation wanders to and fro; meditation stays rooted in the home ground; calculation is practical and always seeks; meditation is poetic and merely perseveres.  Heidegger evens claims that calculation is not a thinking at all but a flight from thinking; likewise man is not a thinking being but a meditating being and the true issue of the day is to “keep meditative thinking alive” (Discourse on Thinking). 

Philosophy in the East never accounted sheer reasoning or inference as the essential ‘spiritual act.’  The summit of mindfulness in Eastern traditions has always been accounted meditation—a contemplative state —from which grows a kind of observant consciousness or witness.  Contemplative or meditative mind e.g. in Theraveda teachings, is an insistent consciousness or awareness or wakefulness, in which successive states of emotion, memory, association, sensation, inference and the like are registered, observed, transpiring and allowed to pass, without clutching or grasping or tarrying, succeeded by new trains and, after a lifetime of attentive practice, by tranquil composure.

—Gautama held that the concentration and equanimity practiced in insight meditation develops moral self-discipline; thus a kind of wisdom derives from the calm of meditative practice, allowing one to stand aloof from experience and extinguish clinging, clutching, obsessiveness within one.  One should neither hope nor fear nor clutch, but let slip the moments of experience.  Reaching this liberation shows itself in compassion.

A consequence of this line of thinking is that the development from intellect to ethics is not made via argument, inference, association or any kind of connectivity—from abstraction, to practice—but precisely because the thinker does not deliberate, reason, infer, or develop argument.  He practices steadying the mind to observe and not clutch; the more he is able to do this, the more compassion he shows for everything transpiring around him. 

This approach to intellectual honesty via attention offers a new prospect on the mental landscape; it suggests that the goal of radical inquiry is best accomplished by not inquiring; it attributes dishonest thinking to the false substantive of the fixed self; it returns thinking to the still more concrete reality of mere moments, observed, undergone and lived—rather than codified or judged. 

This suggests that intellectual dishonesty a kind of selfishness or egotism.

—These are a few researches into the powerful idea of doubting absolutely everything in order to surmount bias and reach wisdom.

In sum: everything that is essential to the question should be available in every instant of thinking; there is no need to get anywhere in reasoning, but instead to awaken in the present without stint or preconception.  This is how one becomes what one admires. 

Question: What is the point of directing reason to itself? 

Answer: Introspection makes the closest approach to realism.  Nothing is given in experience except thoughts—neither the mind nor the world.  

Plato on theology -- Laws Book 10

Socrates' daimonion (inner voice) warned him not to enter politics (Apology 31c).  Socrates' student, Plato, portrays Socrates founding an imaginary city -- The Republic -- the dialogue with this name dates from the middle of Plato's life and is considered his greatest work -- perhaps the greatest single work in all philosophy.  Cicero explains that this book, the Republic, is not an attempt to lay out the best political order but instead is an attempt to present the nature and limits of politics as such (Cicero, Republic II, 52).  At the end of his life Plato wrote his longest work, the Laws, in which Socrates does not appear as a character; and this work does very explicitly try to lay out practical ideas about governing, rather than considering politics in the abstract.  These notes are about Plato's Laws, Book 10, which is Plato's most sustained discussion about theology.  

Today we define theology as the study of conceptions about God, the study of the nature of God, the study of religious ideas and claims that purport to state religious truths.  In the Republic Plato puts a definition of theology into the mouth of the character Adeimantos -- Plato's elder brother -- for whom theology is "study of the patterns and norms of right speech about the gods" (379a).  The discussion of theology in the Laws stays close to this definition, concentrating on what people say about this subject.  This is a crucial limitation: theology on Plato's conception is not about the gods, but about what we say concerning the gods.  Book 10 of the Laws investigates this question and tries to define the right things for us to say rather than a truth apart from all human experience and public discussion.  In a way the most important idea in the dialogue comes at the end, where Plato's character, the Athenian Stranger, summarizes the discussions he has been having with his two interlocutors -- Kleinias, an elderly man from Crete, and Megillos, an elder from Sparta -- by saying that the imaginary state they are founding and writing laws for must pass a law forbidding all private shrines; all worship of the divine must take place in public temples (910c; see 717b and 885a).

The introduction of the subject of theology in dialogue devoted to the problem of writing laws for a state comes about by an observation that many kinds of laws refer to the gods.  The discussion of crimes, for example, of incest and murder, and the discussion of marriage, and swearing people in to official duties, refer to oaths.  Oaths -- in order to feel binding and carry the highest import -- in order to be taken seriously and have the force of law -- are made before gods, the sacred, the holy, the divine.  

This is the reason why we talk about gods in the context of politics.  Kleinias mentions that all men, whether Greeks or barbarians, hold that there are gods.  In ancient times it was sufficient to point to the Sun, moon, stars, and the earth itself to prove the existence of gods. But wise men of recent times have explained that all these things are made of elements, and so the existence of gods is no longer self-evident.  Atheists also live in our community.  Thus the question arises whether we should abandon the attempt to legislate on the presupposition that gods exist.  In any case we see immediately that any short and easy proof of the existence of gods is completely worthless.  We also see that when people speak about these subjects they do so with spirit or anger; it seems hard for people to discuss these subjects calmly.  The Athenian stranger decides to conjure up a young person for the three old men to talk to and work out the proper ideas and way of speaking about gods.  

Beginning the discussion, the Athenian stranger says that gods exist by art not by nature or law; this is why there are different gods for different places.  

Kleinias is shocked by these statements and wonders what will happen to the family and the obedience of young people when they hear this shocking idea.  He says that the belief in gods is an ancient law or ancestral custom or unwritten law based on a common report of a mysterious origin and coeval with man himself.  The belief in God survived the flood when all arts and wisdom were lost.  He repeats the old idea that there is more than one god; he says that all things are full of gods.

The Athenian stranger calls to mind the problematic existence of happy people who have corrupt characters and who do evil things. This seems to suggest that the gods do not the police the world of virtue and vice, but instead allow corrupt people to succeed, good people to fail, and in general it would seem that the gods have no interest in us.  We feel some kinship with the gods, he explains, which is why we hesitate to blame them for the existence of evil; we are unwilling to hold them responsible for such things or feel disgust at the gods for allowing evil men to prosper.  Since we are unwilling to blame them, the only alternative is to think of them as looking at human affairs with contempt and having no care for human beings at all.  The Athenian stranger then brings up an argument to the effect that human beings are the possessions of the gods. Thus we might think that since man is so given to worshiping gods, and since man belongs to the gods, then surely the gods care no less for the affairs of human beings than they do for wolves or lambs.  All creatures are the playthings of the gods.  But a property owner is not necessarily wise or infallible simply by holding property.  An artist, however, who creates or makes something, is wise at least to the extent that he is an artist, or in his capacity as artist; and surely the gods are supreme artists, who therefore created man with artistry and care.  The Athenian stranger reminds his friends of some lines from the Odyssey (3.26) -- see 803e:

Search for thoughts from your own suggesting mind, 

and others dictated by heavenly power, 

they will arise spontaneously in your hour of need. 

Nothing unprosperous shall come your way 

Born with good omens, and with Heaven as your friend.

In the middle of the discussion, after this interlude about poetry, the Athenian stranger notes that speaking rationally (by logoi) will not be enough, but we will always need to discuss this subject via some enchanting story (by mythoi).  In this context, the Athenian stranger says the following things.  Everything that we care about, all the solicitude we show in our daily lives, what today we call our values, is vulnerable.  The good we are trying to find and live is under attack.  We have to wage a never-dying battle against forces of chaos, recklessness, thoughtlessness, and all forms of disaster.  Our lives therefore have to be a wondrous watchfulness.  The things that we are battling against are injustice, hybris (arrogance, excessiveness, overreaching), together with folly.  The things that save us are justice, moderation and good sense.  These virtues dwell in the animate powers of the gods and some small trace of these virtues can also plainly be seen here dwelling in human beings. The Athenian stranger apologizes for the way he is speaking -- he says that it is somewhat vehement or overzealous -- but reminds the company that he is trying to lay out an enchanting myth.  The gods as he conceives them are our leaders; they are our generals in the fight against vice and for virtue.  To abandon them is to abandon the things we hold most dear in life.  To sacrifice to them or think that they can be bribed is a pernicious idea; it is like thinking of generals remaining with our cause, and not going over to the other side and fighting for the enemy, simply because we have paid them a goodly sum.  To expect that gods could be bribed (or cajoled, influenced, tempted, begged or prayed to) is a horrible falsehood, which portrays the gods as weaklings who might desert their posts -- like corrupt dogs who, instead of protecting the flock, share a part of the booty with the wolves -- what we should think instead is that the gods are our leaders in the undying fight against bad things of all forms, including avarice and acting merely in self-serving ways.  

At the end of this discussion, showing what gods have to do with legislation and the foundations of the state, and showing how we should think about gods by an enchanting myth, the conversation comes around to atheism and what a well-founded state should do with atheists.  It appears that there are different kinds of atheists:

1.  people with good character, who hate evil, loath injustice and do good

2.  people who are weak (akrasia), but who have good power of memory and are quick at learning

People from group 1 are likely going to be practitioners of parrhesia (utterly free and frank speech) and therefore they will speak openly and thus ridicule gods, sacrifices and oaths, and by ridiculing these things they will likely produce more people who are impious, and thus endanger the state; they will undermine the foundation of the state and its oaths and regulations, which are intended to fight against chaos and recklessness and which are free mens' allies in the fight against vice.  These people therefore should be restrained; the state should create a sophronisterion -- a sophist-cage (a special place in the marketplace, whose leaders meet at nighttime -- note that this word sounds a lot like Aristophanes' idea of the phrontisterion in his comedy The Clouds -- the phrontisterion is where Socrates hangs out in the play and is roughly translatable as the think-o-mat -- an idea by which Aristophanes made fun of people who think too much).  Thus atheists of good character should be required to remain in the sophronisterion for five years.  During their stay, men of good sense will come to speak with them and help them to see clearly what they should say in public; if they recant, they shod be released; if they persist, they should be punished with exile or death.  

People from group 2 are the people who become renowned as gifted; they are full of guile and craft; they become soothsayers, jugglers, tyrants, public figures, generals, plotters of private mysteries and of course sophists.  These people despise human beings and tempt everyone into thinking the gods can be bribed.  They should be imprisoned and no one should be exposed to their influence.  

But an atheist who is just and does not ridicule others and only speaks frankly and searchingly with doubts to his friends and people he knows personally and can influence positively for the good -- we cannot imagine Socrates denouncing such a person.  

The point is that when we worship, we show what we care about, what we uphold and value; this is why it is most important that there be public religious ceremonies -- not private ones -- so that everyone in the city can see everyone else -- where we can all see each other and see clearly what we care about, what we value, and see whether this person is on the side of fighting against chaos and recklessness, or whether instead this is a person who is working for disaster and the destruction of all virtue.  

Paraphrase: the gods are our leaders in (theism is the principle of) the development of the human project.  To deny the gods is to undermine this project.  Atheism is contradictory to the purposes of the state founded to promote virtue, which must rely on public forms of worship and common bonds of civility and cooperation.  Private atheism, like private worship, is meaningless from a political standpoint (i.e., it is meaningless, period).  What counts and is important is what one promotes in public, especially among people who lack philosophical training and mental discipline, who can never follow logoi, but must be persuaded, guided, kept in check and assisted in the hour of need by mythoi.