A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History

1. A history of concept-making practices — Checking the historian’s predicament; 2. Backward-looking history — Forward-looking imagination; 3. Imagination and hypothesis — How do we curb the vision of mechanism?

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1.      In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin evinces what Robert Brandom has called “fundamental pragmatism,” “the idea that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how.” [1] For philosophers, this has been a very difficult idea to assimilate ever since Plato distinguished the knowing of philosophers from the doing of artisans, thus making ideas—idea, eidos—unchanging elements to be contemplated, epitomized in Plato’s Realm of the Forms. Fundamental pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic scale of methodology is associated in the analytic tradition with the later Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, now sometimes called social-practice theorists of language, and who would applaud Shapin’s attempt to write “a history of concept-making practices” (4). [2]

One feature of practices is that they do not come into being randomly or without reason—practices are created for something, to do something. Shapin’s book is shaped to show how the efforts of the past were geared into the concerns of their present. [3] This is, itself, a historiographical lesson. History-writing has been the site of extraordinary theoretical pressures in the last 50 years. One effect has been the greater awareness of the dangers of writing Whiggish histories of progress. Such histories require that one posit in the past the seeds of a phenomena one wishes to praise in the present. This gives a lopsided view of how the past is, however, how it was in its wasness, as things unassociated with the contemporary telos you wish to explain the origins of are pushed from view, things that were possibly quite important to the actual historical actors. Such pessimism about stories of progress give way, however, to a more pervasive doubt about one’s ability to even select the phenomena you, the historian, wish to write about without corrupting the data with your contemporary concerns.

Shapin, in effect, shows how to diffuse this worry, what he calls “the historian’s predicament” (10). His explicit answer is a brusque “it is foolish to think there is some method … that can extricate us from this predicament” (10), before talking about such theoretical shibboleths as “respect [for] the vast body of factual knowledge we now have about the past” (10) and “the desire to make endless qualification to any generalization” (11). These are beside the point to the predicament Shapin has scared up, particularly as any revisionist historian—as Shapin, in the end, does aim to be—bloody well better not respect “the vast body of factual knowledge” we have, at least not if they truly want to change what we think that knowledge is. What Shapin runs up against here is what the earlier philosopher of science Norwood Hanson called the “theory-laden” nature of facts. If a historical fact is only constituted as such within some historical story, then “respect for the facts” can’t play a role when the problem is competing stories. [4] The theory-laden nature of facts simply restates the historian’s predicament. Shapin’s implicit answer is that it won’t do us any good to pose our anxiety at the level of epistemology—at the level in which we attempt to understand our concepts of concept-making. And so Shapin’s implicit answer to the worry about contemporary interests running rampant over the selective process used to tell the story is to take seriously the interests of the historical actors themselves. This is the check on the historian—not “the vast body of factual knowledge,” but sensitive treatment of the historical actor as having concerns of their own, of doing things for reasons that might not be our reasons for developing and employing a practice. Shapin’s selection of the “Scientific Revolution,” indeed as it is commonly understood and talked about, is a mark of his own contemporary interests—“how we got from there to here” (7)—but it is his third chapter that checks the encroachment of too much here into there.

2.      What is interesting about the story that Shapin tells is how it parallels the lesson I’ve just pulled out of Shapin’s practice as a historian, thus making Shapin’s story an adjunct to a larger story of cultural development. [5] Shapin gestures toward this larger story at the very opening of his third chapter, whose presence is intended to largely account for the book’s “originality.” Shapin says,

Seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers attempted to discipline, if not in all cases to eliminate, teleological accounts of the natural world. Yet as ordinary actors they accepted the propriety of a teleological framework for interpreting human cultural action, and with some exceptions so do modern historians and social scientists: the very identity of human action—as action rather than behavior—embodies some notion of its point, purpose, or intention. (119)

The unspoken implication of this passage, which is simply a segue into Shapin’s check against his selection process, is that what he’s selected is somehow antithetical to contemporary wisdom about the selection process. I believe there is no contradiction here, not even for one who thinks that the mechanistic model of nature has been and still is a boon to scientific study, but it does invite the telling of another story.

The shape of the conceptual story is this: Shapin’s third chapter is the specifically backward-looking moment in his story. It doesn’t matter if we care about theological problems or not—they do, and that’s all that matters for getting the history right. [6] However, Shapin’s juxtaposition of Descartes and Boyle in that chapter gives us a picture of how to be forward-looking. Here is the crucial passage that sharpens the distinction:

On the one hand, Descartes proceeded by imagining a hypothetical natural world that God might have created, a world wholly amenable to mechanical explanation: this was the world the natural philosopher was to explain. On the other hand, such writers as Robert Boyle and John Ray were concerned to trace the evidence of God’s purpose and design in the world he did create. That is why they were comfortable with the philosophical propriety of giving explanations in terms of purpose when, as they reckoned, the evidence of nature unambiguously supported such conclusions. (156)

Shapin’s account of Descartes here displays, whether Descartes intended to or not, how to be a visionary, looking forward to a time not fully comprehended: “by imagining a hypothetical natural world.” The irony of this situation is that the English are known for being philosophical empiricists as opposed to those on the Continent being rationalists in this time period, [7] and it is empiricism that is so often thought synonymous with science and scientific method. However, in this juxtaposition we see Descartes the visionary pursuing the outer limits of this new metaphor’s effects on human understanding, whereas it is the English who stop at the limits of common sense, which is whatever is denoted as “obvious” or “unambiguous.”

What is at work to create this irony is what philosophers like Wittgenstein and Sellars have now told us about how language works. Underlying the empiricist framework is what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given”—that sense-perception gives us a conceptual content that is unaffected by our interpretive apparatus, e.g. words or theories. [8] If we follow Sellars in thinking that this is a philosophical myth, and that our facts are always already theory-laden, then the “evidence of nature” that Boyle and Ray think obvious and unambiguous is a function of loyalty to the past. For if social-practice theorists of language are right, then facts are a function of the language we’ve been taught to state them in and the force of facts is a function of the authoritative hold we still accord them.

3.      The convenience of Shapin’s language in the above passage on Descartes is that it bridges the gap between imagination and reason. Still to this day in philosophical stories, the two are opposed. The distance, however, is not as great as we might imagine. The notion of the “hypothetical” has a history, but the short way to my point is to first point out that in Kant’s time, he still referred to the logical connective we call the conditional (the “if, then”) as “hypothetical judgment.” The conceptual shape of what Descartes was suggesting was the fantasy of supposing X to be true, and then working out its consequences (“if X, then Y”) without regard for whether X was actually true. The axe comes down on the distinction between imagination and reason when we note, with Sellars and Brandom, that the conditional is the basic unit of inference, of reasoning. [9]

What Shapin’s story suggests is why Boyle and Ray followed what we might call an “intellectually conservative” strategy toward mechanism. It is not that they cared more for preserving God’s province, though that is a plausible candidate and a viable motive in respecting the authority of past reasoning. [10] I take it that Shapin’s comment on Newton displays it: “it was not philosophical, but its opposite, to ‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses, even and especially mechanical causal hypotheses, when the senses and the intellect could not securely discover them” (157). The enemy here, the foe to be curbed, is the Poet of Book 10 of Plato’s Republic. With the conceptual understanding I’ve unfolded in hand, one sees that neither “the senses” nor “the intellect” securely discover anything by themselves. For so gerrymandered in Shapin’s gloss on Newton, all the senses tell you are what you’ve already been programmed to say in response to perceptual stimuli and all the intellect tells you is what you’ve already been programmed to concede as consequences once you’ve disallowed new possible premises in reasoning—which is what is ruled out by “‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses.”

To put it in an idiom I can only suggest, the conservative intellectual impulse is here created by a fear of romanticism, a kind of generic romanticism we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. To try and pull together some of these threads, we can see Shapin’s stance toward science—as a sociological phenomena, which is an outcome of what I called his fundamental pragmatism—as the outcome of an ongoing search for how to curb the vision of mechanism: not by how they in Chapter Three did it (God knows), but by how he views effective historical explanation. Effective explanation of action requires us to use a concept of purpose, telos. [11] And since the shape of the story of the Scientific Revolution Shapin tells is in broad terms designed to show the unresolved conflict between mechanical explanation and teleological explanation (which takes its final form in the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes’ dualism between res extensa and res cogitans), there is a larger story to be told about just what we should do with the metaphor of mechanism. This larger story, I can only suggest, is that romanticism takes the place of religion in a conflict with scientific empiricism, and that romanticism’s successor on the plane of philosophy is first pragmatism and then social-practice theories of language. This makes Shapin’s theoretical views about how to write history the heir of Descartes’ rationalism, which is what saved him from the Boyle-Ray empiricist attempt to curb the visionary expanse of a new metaphor. [12]

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Endnotes

[1] Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, 9

[2] Social-practice theories of language also distinguish the kind of Hegelianism pragmatists like Brandom and Richard Rorty are willing to countenance. “Postmodern theory” has made a bad name for itself by promulgating such slogans as “all we have is discourse.” I think it’s important to distinguish what Shapin, Brandom, and Rorty are saying from this. This slogan has led to too many pratfalls by theorists (e.g., deconstructionists who want to say that meaning is impossible) and too many openings for hostile critics (e.g., “There is no thing other than a text? Really?”). The problem with both is poor communication, where whatever good point was meant to be made gets bogged down (e.g., the foolish idea that Derrida was some Berkeleyan idealist).

The good point of the slogan “all we have is discourse” is that meaning only occurs within language, so if you have “thing,” you have a “discourse.” However, people like Shapin, especially, want to go one step further. They want to say that not only are “things” embedded in “discourses,” but “discourses” are embedded in practices. The reason why this is an important move to make, philosophically, is because it closes the loop between you, your community, and the world. Stopping at “discourse” makes one look like an idealist, which makes some people fear we’ve lost the world for the sake of philosophical laziness (for it is hard to make a realist theory of truth-as-correspondence work—i.e., no one’s done it satisfactorily). “Practices” puts us back in touch with the world in a very obvious sense. It also helps move us closer to why material emblems like clocks weird us out when we wonder whether the clock is a symbol for time or is time itself. Like chasing the horizon, such gestalt hiccups merely punch up how entwined meaning is with practice, semantics with pragmatics.

[3] Shapin says that “if there is any originality” in his book it “flows from its basic organization” (12).

[4] I take it that Shapin himself isn’t nearly this naïve, and this theoretical lacuna is a result of his writing a book suitable for non-professionals.

[5] Though, admittedly, size is relative to perspective.

[6] I use the literary present tense, “they do,” partly because I think it is helpful to think of the “other in the past” as a conversation partner, much like we do a contemporaneous other we wish to talk to and understand, such as an Australian aborigine, French political operative, or Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I suspect that this has been common sense for historians for some time.

[7] It might suffice for this old doxographical chestnut to point out that the Three Great Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are all from the British Isles and that the Three Great Rationalists are Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German).

[8] Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given is from his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which one can find in his collection Science, Perception, and Reality or as a standalone book from Harvard UP with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom.

[9] Technically the conditional is the basic unit of self-conscious reasoning, but that is part of a much different story.

[10] I think this is true in Descartes’ case—I take it that, even from just the evidence Shapin displays, that Descartes was a true believer and wanting to display loyalty to God as much as Boyle. However, in terms of possible motivations, concern about one’s relationship to established Church practices and patterns of thought is certainly a distinct possibility in a way that, for example, it wasn’t in Athens in the first century or most intellectual centers in the United States in this century.

[11] For an articulation of the difference between action and behavior in the context of a discussion of what intentionality is, see Section 4 of “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization.”

[12] This larger story isn’t as kooky as it seems when it’s just kind of thrown out there. It is roughly coordinate with the kind of story M. H. Abrams tells about romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism, Leo Marx tells about American romanticism in The Machine in the Garden, Rorty tells about pragmatism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and Brandom tells about social-practice theories of language in Tales of the Mighty Dead and Reason in Philosophy. The interesting conclusion of Brandom is that some of the roots of the pragmatist philosophy that Rorty espoused went back to not only Kant, but Leibniz and Spinoza. For a discussion of Brandom's reinsertion of rationalism into pragmatism and his relationship to romanticism, see “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”

A Spatial Model of Belief Change

I have three major goals in this discursus: 1) to explicate Robert Brandom’s technical vocabulary, 2) elaborate a spatial model of belief, and 3) apply that model to two different problem areas—A) Rorty’s Public/Private distinction and B) the Reason/Faith distinction (held in common by theists and atheists alike, two groups I specifically define as holding that distinction).

I. Logic and Making Beliefs Explicit

Brandom’s magnum opus without a doubt is his massive Making It Explicit. In that book, he develops in great detail an alternative philosophy of language (and much else) to replace the traditional representationalism that has been the paradigm of most philosophical work for the last 400 years, if not longer. Whereas Brandom’s teacher, Richard Rorty, spent most of his time making representationalism as a replaceable paradigm apparent, Brandom has done what Rorty only ever suggested and pointed in the direction of—developing an alternative.

I have not read that book, nor would I probably understand much of it if I tried, but thankfully Brandom has written an introduction to his systematic redescription of traditional philosophy, which he calls inferentialism, Articulating Reasons. Another helpful thing about Brandom is that he writes in such a way (befitting Rorty’s heir) where learning his philosophy is pretty much like simply “getting the hang of” a new way of speaking and thinking. He is also a brilliant expositer for what would otherwise be a tremendously difficult task—replacing one edifice with another. Since getting the hang of Brandom’s philosophy is synonymous with getting the hang of a new technical apparatus, one finds the tools he uses on almost every page, so there aren’t usually better or worse places to draw one’s attention to in Articulating Reasons, and for that reason I will mainly explicate Brandom without much reference to particular places in his text (most of the tools and orientations I will be referring to, however, come from chapter five, “A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing”).

Brandom is a pragmatist, and as such he wishes to follow out the Deweyan suggestion that we take thought to be a kind of practice. When you are thinking you are doing something, and Brandom wishes to describe what it is we are doing. One of the obstacles to viewing thinking as a kind of doing is the idea that our minds are passive mirrors upon reality and that whatever thinking is, we do it naturally. Brandom suggests, however, that thinking is like riding a bicycle—it is a social practice that we learn.

Two main pictures fundamental to Brandom’s view are from Quine and Sellars. From Quine we get the picture of the self (our minds) as a web of beliefs. Beliefs, however, are wont to be viewed as little static items that hang out unchanging if we aren’t careful. Following the pragmatist apotheosis of Bain, then, we can begin our analysis by construing beliefs as habits of action. For our purposes, which will eventually be to display belief change and the scope of rationality, there is a particular habit of action, called reasoning, that we want to understand. For that purpose, Sellars’ own spatial model, the space of reasons, comes in handy. This is the space in which we can say that we remain rational, for it is within this space that we play, in Sellars’ phrase, the “game of giving and asking for reasons.”

It is the explication of precisely what is involved in this game that Brandom is primarily involved in. I’ve previously reserved the “space of reasons,” or rationality, for Sellars’ picture (for reasons to become apparent later), but for Davidsonian reasons (which I will not go into), describing the space of reasons will be the same as describing how language functions. Thus, we get this description from Brandom:

“Specifically linguistic practices are those in which some performances are accorded the significance of assertions or claimings—the undertakings of inferentially articulated (and so propositionally contentful) commitments. Mastering such linguistic practices is a matter of learning how to keep score on the inferentially articulated commitments and entitlements [emphasis mine—MK] of various interlocutors, oneself included. Understanding a speech act—grasping its discursive significance—is being able to attribute the right commitments in response. This is knowing how it changes the score of what the performer and the audience are committed and entitled to.” (164-165)

What follows is an attempt to unpack part of the preceding, dense paragraph.

The basic idea is that Brandom redescribes a belief (a term he amusingly says he does not officially believe in) even further from Bain’s definition of a habit of action. A belief, for Brandom, is a kind of commitment. When you assert a belief, you are committing yourself to the content of that belief. If you say, “I believe in God,” you are committing yourself to the consequences of believing in God—which is to say, you are committing yourself to act accordingly. And because of the pragmatist housing of thinking under the broader category of doing, part of the habits of action you are committing yourself to are habits of speech/thinking. To put it another way, saying belief is a kind of commitment is to make sense out of the form, “If you say X, you can’t say Y.”

As an example:

P1) Bob believes in God.
P2) God created the world and all of its inhabitants within seven days.
P3) Biological evolution created homo sapiens over millions of years.

P1 states that Bob is committed to his inability to believe in P3. If Bob does happen to believe in evolution, then a friend of Bob’s, Carrie, could point out to Bob that, according to the scorecard she’s keeping of his commitments, he’s not entitled to believe in evolution—he has broken the rules of the game (called “rationality”).

It is a common happening of the world that people aren’t always fully aware of cognitive dissonances in their web of beliefs, and that these can be pointed out. Because we have so many beliefs that we could be aware of, it is quite possible that Bob had simply never been confronted with the fact that he cannot believe both P2 and P3. On Mondays through Fridays, Bob works as an evolutionary biologist attempting to discover when homo erectus gave way to homo sapien. On Sunday, Bob nods approvingly when the preacher reads from Genesis. Bob didn’t notice anything wrong until Carrie said one day, “You know, Bob—if God created the world, including people, in seven days, then there’s no way evolution could be true.”

What Carrie has just done is make explicit and an implicit tension in Bob’s web of beliefs. Every belief in our web gets its definition by its relationship to every other belief in our web (and implicit relationships are just as much a real relationship as explicit, even if they look invisible to the naked mind’s eye). The tool that was used by Carrie to make the tension explicit to Bob was logic (specifically the logical connective known as the “conditional”). Traditionally, logic has been understood as a canon of right reasoning, but for Brandom it is an auxiliary vocabulary of explication—it helps nonlogical vocabularies (like talk about rocks, or God) go from implicit to explicit relationships.

To sum up the pieces of Brandom’s vocabulary I’ve been deploying: beliefs are like point-masses in a web. As point-masses, beliefs have no definition outside of their relation to other points. This is to say that to know what a belief is (whether for others or yourself) is to know both what else that belief allows you to do/say (your entitlements) and what allows you to say it (your commitments). Logic helps you make explicit what other beliefs you are allowed to have and what beliefs you are committed to keeping.

II. A Spatial Model of Belief Change

Part of what upsets people with Rorty’s argumentation (which becomes more and more pronounced as the years wile by) is that he seems to take positions, and make argumentative choices, for eristic reasons—“I would lose this debate if I didn’t take this position” (i.e. “if I didn’t take this position, I would have to agree with you—and abandon other positions”). Eristic reasons have traditionally been ruled illegal (i.e. sophistic) because they flout truth: one shouldn’t simply argue to gain ephemeral superiority over a transitory opponent, let alone take a position simply because you don’t want to agree with them—one should only take the best position available. However, part of Rorty’s philosophical point (which his practice mirrors) is that eristic reasons are legitimate reasons (though not the only kind of reasons).

The reason for this is the same reason that it’s tough to tell the difference between Sophistic eristic and Socratic dialectic. The Sophists were said to be simply scoring points on the opponents standing in front of them, but that’s what Socrates looked like he was doing, too. The positions exhibited by the characters in the dialogues take the shape they do because of the positions and intercessions of the others. This is to say, both exhibit argumentation spatially, as positions, where moving on the X-axis shifts—whether you know it or not explicitly yet—your relationship to Q (that’s what the “and abandon other positions” clause, usually hidden in people’s understanding of what Rorty means, conveys).

Fig. 1 pretty much represents the spatial model of belief that Quine thought of with his web of belief. In addition to the panrelational quality of beliefs, on the spatial model we can also represent the tenability of a belief by the length of the line between the different points. We can think of the lines as like rubber bands and if a line gets too long, it becomes easier and easier to snap. Facing belief change is sometimes done consciously, but even unconsciously it can be represented as a series of choices, various alternatives of what might happen given increased untenability.

With Fig. 1, say you are faced with A and B:

A) you believe P and Q.

B) you are either 1) confronted through persuasion with believing R instead of P or 2) suddenly find yourself believing R instead of P (through sensation or other dramatic life event, like death of a loved one)

C) What do you do?

1) believe R and stop believing Q

2) forced with the loss of Q, reverse course to P

Both (1) and (2) are simple rankings of importance. In (1), you concluded explicitly on reflection (or we are to assume you must have thought, given exhibited unconscious belief dumping) that R was more important to you than Q, and vice versa in (2).

3) augment Q to Q´

By way of example, if Q is belief in God, you might change your relationship to God (in this case illustrated by the changing spatial inhabitation of your beliefs caused by the shift from P to R) without considering yourself to have shifted beliefs.

4) leave QR implicit, and thus unacknowledged and unfaced

This (illustrated by the dotted line) is the psychological option—which is not an explicit option (for if it was, it wouldn’t be the option it says it is)—that Brandom’s notions of logic helping make beliefs explicit sheds light on formally (which is to say explicitly). Beliefs, for Brandom, are not rocks you pick up and carry with you in a bag that you can inspect at a moment’s notice. Beliefs, following the pragmatists, are habits of action, which is to say for Brandom habits of linguistic articulation. And unlike rocks, habits aren’t something you can just look at and inspect—you can really only get a good look at them while in the act of performance. Adding a new belief isn’t like adding a new piece to a puzzle, where you can kind of glance over the whole puzzle notice clashing colors. Belief tension is more like playing different sports: it isn’t apparent any of the skills you learn playing various sports would clash with each other—until you try hitting a baseball and swinging a golf club. (Or think of Happy Gilmore’s importation of hockey habits into golf.)

The explicit way you articulate a belief shapes exactly what the belief is, which is to say there’s nothing exact about anybody’s web of beliefs because I know of no one who articulates themselves in exactly the same way, even if seemingly talking about the same thing they did the day before. Part of this is memory and part of it is actually being in slightly different contexts (and so causing you to call up slightly different words to articulate just what you think). Either way, though, to say that Q is the same belief from moment of expression to moment of expression becomes a slightly trickier affair, even without the trouble of P and R.

I don’t want to meditate on this difficulty in the isolated belief (which Brandom accepts full, slightly paradoxical, responsibility for in his work), but simply massage it for now by remarking, 1) remember that there’s no such thing as an isolated belief and 2) since beliefs are all hooked up to each other, like in a web, just ponder on how webs billow in the wind with sometimes great flexibility without losing their, shall we say, identity. I bring up the billowy nature of belief simply to make explicit the often lost possibility that it makes quite a lot of sense that people sometimes don’t face up to tensions in their web until some distance after the fact of belief change, like Bob and God in Part 1. Tensions don’t arise until they are made explicit, which can be done by yourself (if you are reflective person), by others (if you are making an ass of yourself and people are sick of your hypocrisy), or by situations (if you find yourself suddenly wanting to say two contradictory things). Since beliefs are habits of articulation, all thinking is an activity, and like all activities, can be practiced.

III. What Are Private Beliefs?

There would seem to be a 5th option, based on Rorty’s work, which would be to:

5) make Q and R not connect

Rorty’s notion of a public/private distinction seems to suggest that we can make beliefs not connect to each other (as when he suggests that we keep God and poetry out of politics), but under this model, it is understood that all beliefs are connected in some fashion. If it’s a belief, it’s a dot, and every dot has a spatial distance from every other dot.

Rorty’s been criticized in several different fashions on this score, some saying it’s impossible to keep beliefs out of each other’s way, some that he’s suggesting something like lying to yourself (an explicit (4)). If the former means “all beliefs are connected,” then yes it’s impossible, and then the latter collapses into the impossibility of the former (you can’t lie to yourself, at least not explicitly). But if the former is not construed that way, it is difficult on its face to see why we can’t keep our beliefs out of each other’s way. Does my belief that “God loves me” get in the way of my belief that “peanut butter is brown”?

What, however, if my belief was that “God loves me because peanut butter is purple.” Then there is a tension if I encounter peanut butter (unless my friends don’t let me open my PB&J sandwiches, and I just see the jelly trickle). What Brandom’s vocabulary helps us see, however, is that these two God beliefs are actually different because actually articulated differently. Articulation counts, big time. Further, we see that Rorty’s suggestion is itself about connections between beliefs, though it typically composes itself by saying it’s not (“God has nothing to do with democracy”). And here we see that Rorty’s strategy is (3).

It might be useful to see that Fig. 4 and Fig. 7 are both useful ways of describing the same change in belief, depending on perspective or attitude. In one regard, “Q to Q´” highlights the similarity between believing in God before and after disconnecting it from your democratic citizenship. One does this facing a community, so that if your membership in a community is at stake, you could suggest that it is a minor alteration within the pale, not a drastic shift beyond it (one might do this with belief in God or disbelief in a war). In the other regard, “Q to S” highlights the fact that in the previous, “Q” and “Q´” are actually different beliefs, and therefore occupy different spatial positions, and therefore have different consequences to your other beliefs.

IV. Faith and Reason

One thing I dispensed with early is the notion that Reason was a thing that could tell you anything, as in the phrase, "What does reason tell you?" There isn’t a faculty called “reason,” but there is an activity called “reasoning.” But, if we follow Brandom’s vocabulary for thinking of thinking, what do we do about faith, that traditional opponent to reason. What do we do about the person who says, “I believe in God based on faith, not a reason.” I do want to puncture the haughtiness of atheists, but we still must say something about it. The first thing to do is to realize that faith is—even if denied—a reason to believe, and so is an articulated reason. But that’s just a baby step: what kind of reason, what kind of seemingly homogenous, infinitely deployable reason is faith?

I think what we need to say about faith is similar to what Kant said about the transcendental ego—it’s that little “I think” that trails implicitly after every sentence. Now, in the case at hand, the reason known as Faith is something like a guardian angel attached to a belief. Remembering that beliefs are habits of articulation, a person is sometimes taught (as all beliefs are learned habits) that if asked for X’s commitments, to reply singularly with “Faith.” In other words, a person just simply learns that “faith” is the only commitment to some beliefs (though the entitlements are everlasting).

This is a fairly simple representation, but it doesn’t quite do full justice. While the above may be true for many simpler kinds of beliefs that some believers have, what are we to do with theology, or any of the sometimes massively articulated creeds of various religions? I think what we get is something like Fig. 9.

Remembering that a line is nothing more than an infinite number of point-masses, we might think of Faith as the shield that protects religious discourse from the entreaties of other discourses. In a way, this is very similar to Rorty’s public/private distinction. We could easily conceive it that way (see Fig. 10).

I’m not quite sure how to wind our way out of it, of what to say about dissimilarities between the two. One might be that the public/private distinction, while itself possibly based on faith (the faith of it succeeding, which is to say hope), is not itself a faith-shield. While the faith-shield in Fig. 9 is something like the ass-end of the outermost beliefs, showing off their commitments to incomers, mooning everyone else with their immunity, the public-shield isn’t exactly a commitment, but a prohibition, a stay-the-eff-out.

I’m not sure where this exactly plays out, but I do think that Brandom’s vocabulary helps us better understand what we are dealing with. We are dealing with people who think—just people who think a certain way. And it isn’t at all clear that us non-religious types, who out of force of habit exclude religious types from their “we’s” and “us’s” when talking about them, don’t ourselves have certain habits of thought similar to their’s with faith. I think that’s why Rorty talked so much about hope and ethnocentrism—what we do around here: both are conversation-stoppers, similar to faith, but it isn’t clear how, or why, one should continue a conversation on certain topics (like why yo’ moms so fat).

Oakeshott's Rationalist

The first time I encountered Michael Oakeshott was in a contemporary political theory class in 2001, from which this paper issued. From the time of Hobbes, the first conservative theorist in the face of the spread of modern democracy, through the 19th century, a hot topic in political philosophy was that of sovereignty. It kind of recedes after that, but still exists under varied guises.

Hobbes, whom Oakeshott is one of the major interpreters of, saw the problem of sovereignty as the problem of where the buck stops--every state must have a sovereign, and though Hobbes expressed preference for the single authority of a king in the Leviathan, he did concede that an oligarchy would do, just so long as the authority chain did not lead into an infinite regress--some body had to have the final say.

The United States stands, of course, as something of a practical refutation of the philosophical problem--the US Constitution effectively disperses the very idea of final authority and replaces it with various interim authorities amongst its bodies that can be checked in the fullness of time by its other bodies (a "system of checks and balances," as we are consistently taught in school--or at least were taught until Reagan started eviscerating the American educational system). I suspect that the practical survival and success of more and more democracies set up in manners similar to the United States has caused political theories to spend more of their time on other subjects.

Oakeshott was identified to me then as the contemporary conservative theorist par excellence. The file the paper was saved under was called "oakeshottispureevil". Oakeshott's problem in "Rationalism in Politics" is that the ability to negotiate the arena of politics is not something that one can learn in a book, but something that must be experienced in a tradition, like that of farming, handed down father to son over a long period of exposure. My response, though probably not that carefully carried out (and, oh my god, is the writing bad--only about half the paragraphs are worth anything), was simple--why isn't politics like that for democratic citizens? How isn't the 18 years of watching political discussion by politicians and deliberation over who to vote for by one's family members before one has a chance to cast their first vote not analogous to an aristocratic tradition of familial heritage? The problem of rationalism, like sovereignty, seems to me to stand and fall with the practical experience of modern democracies (though, here again, the Reagan Revolution which birthed American neoconservatism is eviscerating this experience, though now in a much more real way as the decline of a democratic political education leads directly to the demise of democracy, and the feeling that an authoritarian elite--whether aristocratic or corporate--should rule, an outcome neocon political strategists foresaw quite clearly).

Since reading more widely, my opinion on Oakeshott has changed somewhat. He's certainly a conservative, but I see now his real enemy was theory, at the time identified as Marxism, the then political Left of the world. Rank-and-file Americans have never taken Marxism seriously, and so I had no real idea why Oakeshott was writing against this mysterious Rationalist as he was. I see now, however, that Oakeshott's Rationalist was also the basic enemy Rorty identified as "the Academic Left"--that by mastering a theory we would better the world, politically speaking. This family resemblance between people like Oakeshott (and MacIntyre and others who lauded "tradition") and Rorty, I think, is largely what garnered catcalls of "crypto-conservative" and the like from other philosophers. Be that as it may, Rorty was a lifelong political liberal, though he quite rightly saw that political theory was kind of silly, and that what we perhaps need more of is philosophical rallyment around "tradition" and "virtues," rather then around "reason" and "principles." Specifically, it is the distinction between tradition and reason that Oakeshott takes for granted (to take down the Rationalist) that grounds my bafflement, and the erasure of which would produce a better dialogue between a conservative and liberal political philosophy by agreeing on the stupidity of Theory problems and getting down to empirical problems like the stupidity of the pundit-class produced by corporate media conglomeration.

All parenthetical references are to Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Expanded Ed. (Liberty Fund: Indianapolis, 1962, 1991).

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In his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” Michael Oakeshott attempts to justify his own conservatism by refuting the value of rationalism in politics. He does this by defining the Rationalist and then attempting to show that everything a Rationalist stands for is bad. His conservatism is then justified because it is everything that a Rationalist is not. I will show that Oakeshott fails to justify his own conservatism in two ways: 1) Oakeshott discredits reason by aligning it with the Rationalist, but then smuggles it into tradition to allow for change and 2) his central tenet of “experience only” for participating in a tradition fails in the face of an educated democracy.

The first place to start is with Oakeshott’s definition of a Rationalist. He first links it intrinsically with reason by saying, “…there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’…” (6) He also opposes it to experience when he says, “He has no sense of the cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into formula: the past is significant to him only as an encumbrance.” (ibid.) Oakeshott actually goes on for several pages worth of definition of what a Rationalist is. He ends up with a very narrow definition that I cannot imagine anyone actually following.

Oakeshott has a very specific purpose in mind with such a narrow definition. With such a narrow definition that no person could completely agree to, Oakeshott can easily “refute” Rationalism, which immediately endorses his own conservatism. It works like this because Rationalism is linked intrinsically with reason and opposed to its philosophical counterpart experience. Experience is aligned directly with Oakeshott’s traditionalist conservatism and from it he argues that one should not participate in politics if one has never had experience in it.

His refutation of Rationalism mainly consists of accusing Rationalism of denying a form of knowledge. Oakeshott splits knowledge into two parts: technical and practical. Oakeshott contends that Rationalism only acknowledges technical knowledge as real knowledge. Traditionalists, presumably, acknowledge both kinds, but seem to be more inherently aligned to practical knowledge because practical knowledge is gained through experience. This error on the part of Rationalism is really the only place Oakeshott stages an argument outside of name-calling.

The critique of Oakeshott begins with the question of change. It is obvious how change occurs in Rationalism: the Rationalist is constantly critically analyzing his position with reason. What is questionable is how change occurs “naturally” and not self-consciously in a tradition. Oakeshott says that a Rationalist “does not recognize change unless it is a self-consciously induced change, and consequently he falls easily into the error of identifying the customary and the traditional with the changeless.” (8) But where does this change happen then? Nowhere does Oakeshott answer this question and the reason is this: reason is needed for change. And since reason is linked directly to the Rationalist it needs to be held as far away from his traditionalism as possible.

To illustrate the need of reason in change, let us take the example of a metalsmith. Our metalsmith is hammering away at his smithy. Becoming tired he stops and begins to think about his arm motion. Believing that he is wasting energy by lifting his arm so far into the air, the metalsmith thinks of a different way of hammering. He projects that his new way would use less energy and then tries it out. Seeing it work he continues with his new arm motion. Did the metalsmith not just abstract his arm motion when thinking of a new way? This was an addition to practical knowledge, not technical knowledge. But since practical knowledge is only acknowledged by the traditionalist we find that Oakeshott has smuggled reason into his traditionalism.

Oakeshott might come back and say that he’s not trying to refute the value of reason in politics, but the Rationalist in politics. He might say that Rationalism is a plague because those who become infected can no longer acknowledge tradition and history. Here we come to the root of the problem within Oakeshott’s essay. Oakeshott has set up a straw man. His Rationalist is no man. Oakeshott has tailored his definition of Rationalism so tightly that no one could be wholly identified with it. Whoever his Rationalist is, I certainly don’t agree with him. Completely ignoring history and scraping tradition for the sake of scraping it is definitely a mistake. So Oakeshott refutes the Rationalist, an extreme position if there ever was one, and flees to the other extreme: only tradition has a place in politics. Oakeshott’s refutation of his Rationalist is no big deal, but by doing so he destroys any value to be gained from Rationalism. This being his plan, he could then go to the opposite extreme since everything about his Rationalist must be bad. By chucking the Rationalist’s crib of politics, Oakeshott ends up throwing out the baby, too.

The baby is us. The baby Oakeshott throws out is thinking individuals. Every person has a mind and is entitled to use it. Oakeshott might argue that he isn’t restricting the use of an individual’s mind. A person must be able to think about his job or trade. The metalsmith must be able to think about his craft, his tradition to improve upon it. But why should the metalsmith restrict his thinking to his craft? Why can’t he think about politics? Oakeshott would say that the metalsmith should stick to his craft for the same reason that he shouldn’t be thinking about quantum physics, computer programming, or shoe cobbling: he has no experience in the field. But now Oakeshott is ignoring history and tradition. How did any of those fields get started, but with an innovative use of reason upon an older tradition? Quantum physics came out of a tradition of classical physics, computer programming out of a tradition of making physical tools to help calculation, and shoe cobbling out of a tradition of walking in bare feet. In each of these three cases, reason was used to improve a tradition. If you back up far enough in human history, almost all traditions could be seen as coming from the hunter-gatherer’s tradition of survival.

Oakeshott might concede that he was a little hasty in throwing out reason, but he would be quick to point out that if we take survival as the original tradition, the increase of specialization in traditions and the breaking off of new traditions fits exactly into what his argument is for change within tradition. Oakeshott would say that the slow, gradual improvements made to an existing tradition could produce new traditions, which would then produce its own tradition. Oakeshott would then say that after a new tradition has broken off, a person shouldn’t go back to the old tradition or to any of the other branches of traditions. In this case, a quantum physicist wouldn’t go back to food production/accumulation, he would stick to quantum physics. And because of this, politicians should stick to politics and not metalsmithing and vice versa. This is why the metalsmith should restrict his thinking to his craft and not politics. A politician doesn’t come into the smithy and start telling the metalsmith what to do. And the metalsmith, I can assume, wouldn’t want him to.

I would accept this point, but only if the metalsmith and the politician know nothing of the other’s craft. If the politician did metalsmithing on the side for fun, he might have a few pointers for the metalsmith. The two should stay out of each other’s hair only if they have no experience in the tradition. Oakeshott would probably agree with this. Experience is the key. My problem becomes, Why restrict the gaining of experience in various traditions? No man is born a politician or metalsmith. They are educated as such. If Oakeshott is afraid of letting un-politically educated people into politics, why not give them a political education and let them participate? In a democracy, all people take part in the political experience. And if we give them a political education before we allow them to participate (say before a voting age of 18) what is the problem? Why restrict? In a tradition of democracy and education there isn’t a problem and there should not be a restriction on people’s involvement in politics.

Uncertainty, Reason, and Trust in “Young Goodman Brown”

This was my midterm for my American Lit course in which the various Lit notes were taken from. The below uses some of the material and thoughts mentioned initially in my reflections on Hawthorne. There are essentially two different arguments worked out below, one about the interpretation of "Young Goodman Brown" and one, briefly, about interpretation in general, a typical pattern for someone impressed by Stanley Fish, a person who wants to both interpret a text and advance an argument against those who want to suggest that this or that particular text is open (or closed, for that matter) in a way that other texts aren't--at the level of theory, all texts are as open and closed as any other. The separateness of the two arguments (and activities of theory and interpretation) are itself a consequence of the pragmatist theory of interpretation Fish elaborates.

References are to:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin Books, 1981, 1974, 1946.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Portable Hawthorne. Ed. William C. Spengemann. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Immanuel Kant wrote famously in 1781 that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” (A 51/B 75)[fn.1] As worked out in Kant’s system and 19th century thought generally, this formula’s tremendous impact was to suggest the mind-dependence of reality. Emerson ambiguously took hold of this tradition and suggested we might never see reality directly, but always through the mediation of our minds. I would like to suggest that Hawthorne writes “Young Goodman Brown” as an allegory for the uncertainty of the human condition in its mediated state. Hawthorne uses the figure of the dream as a means in establishing ultimate uncertainty. Further, this uncertainty is caused by our ability to reason. We are fallen because we reason and words are depicted as the devil’s work, whispering to us the dark thoughts embedded in all of us. In this same conceptual set-up, however, we are given the tools of freedom. With the figure of Faith, Hawthorne suggests how one arrests, not just Satan, but the maddening, endless cycle of words and the mistrust engendered by them.

Kant began something called transcendental idealism, which was meant to combine the New Science with Christian spirituality, and it did so by splitting them off into two ontological corners: science took the conceptualizable phenomena and religion took the ultimately unknowable noumena. This posed a problem for spiritualists who had thought that they had known something. What they knew was God, and at the very roots of Christianity worked the ancient Greek tradition of Orphism that taught that there was a radical disjunct between Humanity and their realm and God and His. As Kant got wrapped into Orphism, it helped reproduce the idea that words, being human-made, would never help us see God’s plan, and, in the image of Milton, were in fact the devil’s work. Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” sits on this stage between Humanity and God and the uncertainty with which we divine His plan.

To pin down the program at work in “Young Goodman Brown,” I would like to first differentiate two ways in which Hawthorne uses narrative uncertainty to achieve his aims. Hawthorne frequently puts the reader at bay from the exact occurrences of his stories, but the reasons for doing so are not always the same nor achieve just the same results. For instance, it is often argued that Hawthorne’s prefacing of The Scarlet Letter with “The Custom House” and continued use of his “this-may-or-may-not-have-happened” figures, particularly the penultimate chapter’s revelation of what may or may not have been a red A on Dimmesdale’s chest, indicates Hawthorne’s wish to dethrone the authority of the author over his text. As readers, however, we should always be wary of this gesture for, as a matter of course, an author can never give up their authority of what appears on the page, and therefore over the text being presented. The meaning of any gesture of narrative uncertainty can only be found by the way it hangs together with the rest of the text, which thereby gives it its own particular inflection. The “antiauthoritarian author” is an illusion that Hawthorne creates, fitting together in this case with The Scarlet Letter’s wish to open up a space for moral reflection on the issues that the story presents, rather than forcefully moralizing in any particular direction.

Hawthorne’s use of the dream trope in “Young Goodman Brown” aims for something different. In the swift penultimate paragraph, Hawthorne wonders, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream, of a witch-meeting?” (Hawthorne, 64) This question remains totally unanswered, a seemingly massive hanging thread wafting in the forest winds. Rather than attempting to diffuse authority, as in The Scarlet Letter, I think Hawthorne is establishing the particular allegorical interpretation of his tale. All of the tricks of perceptual uncertainty that Hawthorne threads throughout are certainly uncertain—not in the service of ambiguous uncertainty, but specifically to establish the certain uncertainty of life, so that it doesn’t matter whether, e.g., a pink ribbon fell in the forest (59) or the staff actually writhed or not. (53) What matters is how Goodman Brown reacted to the uncertainty, to the events, real or dream, that were experienced.

All of this work occurring in Brown’s mind is what connects him to the Emersonian tradition of Kantians. The point of “Young Goodman Brown” is that it doesn’t matter whether it was a dream or not. Brown has been changed by the experience because dream and reality both occur in our minds equally, the mind thus attaining its mediatory powers. It would seem, however, that because Brown has been changed by this particular experience he has also thereby lost to the forces of sin. The shape-shifting devil says that the knowledge he would bestow those who’ve traveled is “to know their secret deeds,” (62) of all your neighbors, “to penetrate … the deep mystery of sin….” (63) What knowledge is this? seems to be the question. At the outset of Brown’s journey, Hawthorne sets in contradistinction the lonely solitude of the traveler with the possibility of “passing through an unseen multitude.” (52) This “unseen multitude” eventually takes the shape of all his neighbors: “And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her [Faith] onward.” (58) Even if we can commonsensically distinguish between saints and sinners, Hawthorne blurs them all together in Brown’s nightmare, the dark knowledge that we are all sinners.

The way in which Brown attains this knowledge is key and brings us back to Emerson. In the Orphic tradition that Emerson summons, the only true knowledge is that which breaks through the mediation of our minds to reality itself—the power of intuition. Whereas in a dark mood Emerson says “we do not see directly, but mediately,” (Emerson, 284) in a brighter mood Emerson seems to think that the truth of God is possible, though still not “second hand.” “What he [any other] announces, I must find true in me, or reject,” and this turn inward “is an intuition.” (76) Hawthorne’s counter—as the darker Emerson would surely agree—might be that all of these announcements, even our own, get bounced around the mediated internals of our reasoning minds. It is reasoning that gets Brown into trouble, listening to the devil.

The trick of the devil is his “reasoning as we go,” (Hawthorne, 53) “discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor….” (56) The reasoning that the devil teaches, which seems so natural in the “uncertain light,” (53) is that, if we harbor any sins in our own hearts, even living as if we did not, then could not any other, including those pure saints we esteem as being beyond sin entirely?

“Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward.” (62, italics mine)

It is because Brown treats the possibility of goodness as coextensive with the existence of pure cases of purity that, having finally lost faith in this easily doubted notion, he becomes a storm of gloom, “a distrustful, if not a desperate man,” (64) treating everyone as a secret horrid sinner, lustful for the worst depravities. Forever after, Brown “shrank from the bosom of Faith….” (ibid.)

The figure of Faith completes the allegory, for the significance is the setting of faith against doubt, and the triumph of doubt. Previous convictions of purity are shattered as Brown hears their whispers in the dark gloom of the wilderness. We should take the wilderness to be simply the living of life: we walk through life without truly knowing the hearts of our fellow-travelers, but—and this is key—only our own. “But, where is Faith?” (61) says Brown, and it is the loss that sinks us. By the same token, Hawthorne is suggesting to us how to climb out of despair—by the act of faith, faith and trust in our fellows. It is because Brown holds a particular view of good and evil that sinks him into depression. Brown has reacted to the uncertainty of our moral concepts, to the uncertainty over the Puritan good/evil dichotomy, one which holds for no mixed, ambiguous cases. Hawthorne isn’t sinking us into the despair of the Puritan Brown, he’s suggesting to us what mental furniture we can move around to reach different results.

Hawthorne casts the forest of “Young Goodman Brown” as a mental screen upon which the Puritan mind had projected their innermost, rejected desires, with for example Puritans imagining (and being titillated by) the image of Pagan orgies. Once you start reasoning, however, you start to pull at the thread that hangs the picture, you pull down the dichotomizing partition, illustrated here by the parentheses between “imagining” and “titillated.” This makes you, not an innocent, but as a reaction a “raging,” “gloomy” moralist. (60, 65) Brown’s paranoia of the forest is a paranoia of himself. This is, principally, why it doesn’t matter whether it’s a dream or not—it is real because he is changed by it. Literally real or a dream, it doesn’t matter to Goodman Brown. Rather than some form of direct intuition of reality, the results of which just get bounced around in the noggin anyways, Hawthorne, I believe, is suggesting that the knowledge of the self that reasoning brings is honesty with oneself and the repressed desires you harbor. Fear and paranoia—the Puritan mind—turns the breakdown of the partition into a peering into the abyss. Hawthorne thinks no such pure, sinful abyss exists and that social virtues like honesty with oneself and trust in others might replace it.

Endnotes

[1] Standard notation for the Critique of Pure Reason in Norman Kemp Smith’s translation lists both the first and second editions, and as A and B respectively.

Socrates and Relativism

This is the first paper I ever wrote about Plato in college, almost ten years ago. The first thing you'll notice is how bad my writing was. But the second, and far more interesting, is how obvious the modern tools I was using. People don't naturally think in the jargon philosophers use, so it takes years for a student to shrug off the terms the subject (whether it's a class on particular philosopher like Plato or a topic like free will) is being taught in. Like the first few years of French, an undergraduate philosopher is basically just trying to repeat back in as interesting fashion as possible what they were just being taught. The fact that I was using terms like a posteriori and a priori in discussing Plato (another sign of my youth, that I keep saying Socrates) is a testament to who my professor was, how I was being taught ancient philosophy. Clearly I was being taught with modern problems in mind, because my third paragraph is a pure Cartesian problem, hardly Greek at all. (The dialogue in question that I never mention? The Meno. Meno is the correct answer.)
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Relativism, as espoused by Protagoras, is a theory about the relativity of knowledge and sense perception. It is the position that truth does not exist independently of a perceiver and perceiver’s assertion that something is true. To exemplify this stance, Protagoras said that, “Man is the measure of all things.” What this means is that reality is only knowable, interpreted, through a medium: ourselves. And so Man determines what all things are. And because everybody is different, the medium through which we interpret the world is different and therefore reality will be different for each person.

Relativism says that all knowledge is a posteriori. It says that anything known is only gained empirically. But empirical knowledge can sometimes be proven incorrect over time if suddenly contradictory knowledge is gained. For instance, if Bob told Greg his mother’s name was Hilga, Greg would assume Greg’s mother’s name was Hilga. Twenty years later Bob finally meets Greg’s mom and greets her using the name Hilga. Greg’s mom tells Bob that her name is not Hilga, but Gertrude. This shows that the truth (Greg’s mom’s name is Hilga) can be, at some later point, proven wrong. Even if Greg’s mom had responded and said her name is Hilga, it is still possible that she is lying.

What this means is that we are sometimes mistaken in our empirical knowledge. If we are sometimes mistaken in our empirical knowledge, then it is logically possible that we are always mistaken in our empirical knowledge. If it is logically possible that we are always mistaken, then we never know if any of our empirical knowledge is true.

Socrates agreed with the sophists insofar as that empirical knowledge is flawed and relative. But for Socrates true knowledge was gained through the use of reason. He believed that all true knowledge was actually a priori knowledge merely forgotten when the soul entered the mortal body. Therefore true knowledge, gained through reason, was really gained through a process he called anamnesis. Socrates said that through reason you were just “remembering” the truth. He said that this was true knowledge and that everything not gained through reason was merely true opinion.

To prove his point, Socrates used the example of teaching a young slave boy rudimentary geometry. He could guide the boy step by step through geometrical proofs and the boy could understand them, even though he had no prior understanding of geometry, because, through reason, he was merely recollecting geometrical truths. Socrates also used many other mathematical tools to prove his point. The square root of four is logically always two, no matter who is doing the math. It is through this process of finding logical truths that Socrates finds universal Truth.

Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Reason

Note: I wrote this in 2000, for a class on the history of science. I've done little editing and I still think it does a decent job in setting a certain pallet, a way of perceiving the history of philosophy (that I was already imbibing from Pirsig, but later drank more fully from Rorty).

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In the history of Western thought, the possibility (or impossibility) of change was a question that pushed early thinkers to some of the most important philosophical distinctions of their time period and ours. These distinctions would leave their mark on philosophical inquiry and would not be fully taken up until the Modern era. Some of the most important distinctions were defined by the Eleatics (led by Parmenides), Plato, and Aristotle. While all three theories of change did not grow out of a vacuum, Parmenides more or less followed the force of his own logic, Plato kept Parmenides’ conclusions close at hand, and Aristotle’s theory grew in direct response to both of them. All three also used reason as the primary gateway to knowledge. But in their responses to the problem of change, each one integrates the material world more than the last. This integration allows more satisfactory models, but poses significant problems in itself. Parmenides never runs into these problems because he rejects the material world outright as an illusion. So to address these problems in Plato and Aristotle we must first identify Parmenides’ answer to the problem of change and its consequences: to both change and to the use of reason.

Parmenides’ argument is easily constructed in an analysis of the statement “A becomes B.” In this statement, it can be seen that A is not B because if A=B then there would be no need for change: A is already B. As it is, A is not B and so “A” can be replaced by “not B”. The statement “not B becomes B”, though, does not make sense to Parmenides. A cannot become B unless A has some of B already in it, but for Parmenides this would violate its essential not-Bness: A cannot have any of B in it because A is not B. It is through this kind of argument and logic that Parmenides says that change is impossible and that A does equal B, which equals C ad infinitum. As David C. Lindberg, in his magisterial history of Western science, says,

“What does one do if experience suggests the reality of change, while careful argumentation (with due attention to the rules of logic) unambiguously teaches its impossibility? For Parmenides and Zeno, the answer was clear: the rational process must prevail.”[1]

And so Parmenides declares that all change is merely an elaborate illusion and the underlying reality is a completely stable, unchanging monism.

Enter Plato. The force of Parmenides’ argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is truly stunning, but not quite satisfactory. Plato agrees that the underlying reality must be unchanging, but disagrees that this must be all that reality is. It is here that Plato enunciates the first great metaphysical distinction, between appearance and reality, which Parmenides had used, but not in a systematic way. It is encapsulated in Plato’s divided line, which he elaborates in The Republic. Plato designates the underlying reality as the Realm of Forms. The Realm of Forms is incorporeal, perfect, eternal, insensible, and changeless. In contrast to the Realm of Forms is the material world. It is everything that the Realm of Forms is not: corporeal, imperfect, transitory, sensible, and changing. The divided line separates the two. Plato says that the material world is a reflection of the Realm of Forms and that while the Realm of Forms is completely stable and unchanging, the material world, the reflection, does change as can be plainly seen in everyday life. In this way Plato supplies a rational, fixed underlying reality while still allowing the material world some relevance.

One challenge to this argument would be to question how the Realm of Forms interacts with the material world. How can things that are corporeal interact with things that are insensible? Plato answers this in two ways. First, through a series of arguments, Plato shows that, while we cannot sense the Forms now, our souls were in the Realm of Forms before they were placed in material bodies. We can gain access to the Forms, then, by a process of anamnesis or recollection. Through contemplation we are able to recall the Forms. (Plato does this notably in the Meno by showing how he can teach even a slave the basic mathematics: something that clearly only could be done if a Realm of Forms existed.)

Plato also answered this challenge in the form of the Allegory of the Cave. In summary, the Allegory describes people whose only known reality is the back wall of a cave where they can make shadow puppets. One day, one person ventures outside and discovers that the cave and the shadow puppets are not all that exists. In fact, he realizes that the shadows are really only reflections of the sun. It is through this analogy that Plato shows that the Forms (specifically the Form of the Good) represented by the sun, “illuminates” the material world. Without the Forms, the material world would not, could not exist.

It is important to notice here that Plato is continuing with Parmenides’ placement of reason as the pinnacle of knowledge. The process of anamnesis can also be called “reason.” It is through reason, which Plato made into a method called the “dialectic,” that we can reach the Forms. Plato merely adds a material world to account for the change of our senses. The change is real, but not as important as the unchanging, reason begotten by the Forms.

There is one other important distinction to make before we move to Aristotle. It is the distinction between the General and the Particular. The distinction has actually already been made. The General can be equated to the Realm of Forms and the Particular to the material world. This is important because the difference between Plato and Aristotle can be termed a difference in orientation to the General and the Particular. Plato believes and argues that what is real is the Forms or the General and statements about what is real are found in the material world or the Particular. Aristotle, on the other hand, is just the reverse. What is real is the Particular and statements about what is real is the General. With this distinction in hand we can turn to Aristotle.

Aristotle believes that what is real is the material world and all that the material world is contingent upon. To Aristotle, the Realm of Forms are really just properties possessed by the material Particular, or substance. And like Plato and Parmenides, Aristotle designates that the ultimate reality be unchanging. But how do we account for change now, if the material world, represented as substance and properties, is now unchanging?

To account for change, Aristotle goes back to Parmenides. Parmenides made a distinction between Being and non-Being. Aristotle sees this and says that Being can split into two different types of Being: Potential and Actual Being. So Aristotle agrees with Parmenides that a thing cannot move from non-Being to Being. However, when change occurs, Aristotle says that it is Potential Being changing into Actual Being. Take an acorn and a tree for example. In Parmenides’ model, an acorn (non-tree) cannot change into a tree. In Aristotle’s model, however, an acorn (potential tree) can change into a tree (actual tree) because the acorn houses tree-ness in the form of potentiality. So Aristotle also accounts for change and places an even greater emphasis on the material world than Plato.

What is important about these three philosophers is their use of reason. Each one placed reason on the highest pedestal, but Plato and Aristotle each successively put more and more emphasis on the material world and the senses. The question that arises then is why didn’t they question the use of reason? Parmenides used only reason and he found that change was impossible. He stuck to his guns and followed his own argument to its logical conclusion. But instead of looking around himself and seeing the fallacy of his conclusions, he declared that his use of reason had detected a flaw in the senses and that all the “evidence” to the contrary is illusory. But why does the flaw exist in the senses? Nothing in logic dictates that the flaw be placed upon the senses. It's just as logical to think that the flaw exists in the instrument of argumentation used: reason itself. Parmenides doesn’t think so and neither do Plato or Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle add the senses back into reality to some degree, but the philosophical question that arises out of the problem of change is “How much do the senses and reason play in reality?” Once you let a little in, who’s to say how much? And so the philosophical lines between the Rationalists and Empiricists of the Modern era, who would drag “reality” between these two polar points of reason and the senses, were drawn 2,000 years before the culmination point during the 17th century.

[1] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnnings of Western Science, University of Chicago Press: 1992, p. 33

Lessing Between Enlightenment Christianity and Romantic Atheism

This is, essentially, the last paper I wrote before graduating, the paper for my senior history seminar. I did write a brief little ditty on Augustine and moral philosophy, but it was written in French, ergo, I myself can't really read it anymore. Nor was it that good. Nor was the French that good. It's unreadable on many levels. But, as you can tell, I'm about to post a bunch of stuff I've already written, rather than write new stuff, to pad the score. So I'll probably post that one, too.

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Gotthold Lessing’s theological writings sit on a bridge between the old and the new. The old in Lessing’s time was the Christian faith. While it still wasn’t entirely kosher to be an outed atheist during the 18^th-century, atheists were becoming more and more brash and philosophers like Voltaire, Hume, and Kant took as one of their prime functions the putting of God in his place. The new at this time was Man’s innate capacity of reason. Enlightenment intellectuals at this time, given immense confidence by Galileo and then Newton’s successes in natural philosophy, thought that they had the power to figure reality out, that God alone did not have this power. Lessing appears on a bridge because he argues for both the reality of revelation and the innate power of reason. Through his use of certain literary tropes, namely through an analogy between revelation and education and a synecdochal relationship between the temporality of history and the eternity of God, Lessing is able to create a religious position that attempts to skirt the supposed doom of atheism. If Lessing fails, it is only because of the path he helped open up.

Before I go further, I would first like to define a few terms that will underwrite the paper. M. H. Abrams defines Romanticism as writers who “undertook … to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.”[1] As Abrams’ book’s title suggests, it was a process of turning the supernatural natural. I would like to call this thesis naturalism and distinguish it from another thesis also frequently present in Romantic writers, namely historicism. Historicists are those who take history seriously, not believing that anything happens outside its confines. Historicism might look to be a natural outgrowth of naturalism, but one of the things I shall argue is that Enlightenment rhetoric about Nature and Reason, which they used as their “natural” replacements of God, is a last ditch effort to retain something supernatural, something outside history. I shall oppose historicism to Enlightenment rationalism, the idea that reason is a natural capacity of humans and that it is everywhere the same. Enlightenment writers, because they believe that universal Reason is able to deduce the outlines of Nature, tend to demote the use of history as being extraneous to a correct apprehension of reality—much like their theological counterparts. Lessing, certainly an Enlightenment writer, sits awkwardly across rationalism and Romanticism by both using the rhetoric of Nature and Reason and also taking history seriously in his attempt to accommodate God.

I. The Analogy Between Education and Revelation

The essay of Lessing’s that has preoccupied most commentators is The Education of the Human Race. In this essay, Lessing attempts to pave the way for reason and nature by reconstruing the history of Christianity in terms of it. Lessing begins by drawing an analogy between education and revelation: “What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race.”[2] This immediately has the effect of drawing a comparison between something commonsensical and human, namely an education we might gain in school, and something considered divine and miraculous, namely God’s voice to his people. Lessing uses this analogy to suggest that just as a person in school suddenly “realizes” the truth of, say, mathematical propositions through the instruction of their teacher, the human race is taught by God through his revelations to them.

Lessing, however, quickly moves to his main thesis, that humankind has within itself the capacity to teach itself, without the aid of an outside teacher. “Education gives man nothing which he could not also get from within himself….”[3] Lessing knows that he is veering dangerously close, by way of his analogy, to the atheistic idea that we could do quite well without God (which then leads us to question his very existence), so he also quickly ameliorates the situation by granting that God simply gets us to the truth quicker than reason: “…only it [revelation] has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things sooner.” Lessing develops this analogy by suggesting that God is a teacher raising children into adulthood. Young children start with easy primers to teach them the basics, but eventually they move on from their old primers to new ones, like moving from a Basic Algebra book to Advanced Calculus. Nothing in the old primer is contradicted by anything later learned, but everything must be learned in steps. “A primer for children may fairly pass over in silence this or that important piece of the science or art it expounds…. But it must contain absolutely nothing which bars the way to the knowledge which is held back…”[4] Pulling us back to the work of reason, however, Lessing adds that some children will perhaps be smarter than the others: “some educate themselves to an astonishing degree.”[5] Lessing is constantly involved in a balancing act between the usefulness of revelation for education and the self-reliance of reason. God teaches us truth, but we could­ have done it on our own.

By establishing this analogy between education and revelation, Lessing is able to turn the history of Christianity into a story of maturation. Lessing argues that the Jews of the Old Testament were God’s chosen people because he chose them to teach the rest of humankind when they had grown up enough through his tutelage.[6] But they must first grow up. Further developing his analogy, Lessing argues that the Jews, like small children, must be taught authoritatively, with rules and discipline: “Of none other but such as is adapted to the age of children, an education by rewards and punishments addressed to the senses.”[7] This again strikes us as commonsensically true based on our experience with children and it makes sense of and explains why the Old Testament reads as it does, with Mosaic Law and the Great Flood. God was taking “a people so raw, so incapable of abstract thoughts, and so entirely in their childhood”[8] and molding them through time—and so through the Old Testament—into something greater than what they had been.

The epochal turning point is then naturally the advent of Jesus Christ and the creation of the New Testament. All the pieces are in place for Lessing. The maturation of children from a first primer to a second, the shift from the Old Testament to the New, from Mosaic Law to the example of Christ. Lessing says that “every primer is only for a certain age,”[9] which plays with a double meaning between the age of a child and a sweeping historical designation. Lessing says that primers are meant to be outgrown and that it is dangerous to hold onto old primers. He thereby makes Jesus a rebel figure who must “tear the exhausted primer from the child’s hands.”[10] Jesus launches us into a new stage in human history by shifting us from rules that must be followed to gain rewards in the afterlife to providing us an example to live by. In Jesus’ example, we would no longer do good to get into heaven but rather we would “direct one’s inner and outer actions in accordance with it.”[11] And all along the way of his argument about Jewish-Christian history are his asides about the self-sufficiency of human reason: “For seventeen hundred years past they [the New Testament Scriptures] have occupied human reason more than all other books, and enlightened it more, were it even only through the light which human reason itself put into them.”[12]

After spelling all of this out, Lessing is finally able to suggest the advent of an even newer age for a finally matured people. Playing off Joachimite tradition, Lessing suggests splitting history into three ages and that we are about to enter this third age: the “new eternal gospel.”[13] Lessing admonishes the impatient for wanting to usher in this age too quickly,[14] again appeasing and accommodating God and theists, but pushes ahead with what this age will look like. Lessing suggests that we must cast aside the old primers by transforming revealed truths into truths of reason: “the development of revealed truths into truths of reason, is absolutely necessary, if the human race is to be assisted by them.”[15] Through his analogy between education and revelation, Lessing is able to shift thinking about religion from either the theist’s dogmatic handling of the Bible’s texts or the ever-emboldening atheist’s dogmatic rejection of God into an historical dialectic. Instead of a plainly universal vertical relation between God and Humanity or Reason and Humanity, Lessing tosses the line over on its side as a horizontal, gradual temporal awakening, the gradual maturation and education of humankind through history.

II. Figural Interpretation and Synecdoche

One of the reasons Lessing is able to effect this shift is because of his use of what Erich Auerbach calls “figural interpretation.” By figural interpretation Auerbach means the establishment of “a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”[16] Lessing enters into a long-standing tradition of figural interpretation that was begun by Paul and the New Testament writers. With this “method of revisional interpretation” Auerbach says that the early Christians played down the Old Testament as “popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of ‘figures,’ that is of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events.”[17] Lessing continues this tradition by interpreting the Judeo-cum-Christian history as a process of maturation, whereby earlier elements can sometimes only be understood in light of later developments.

Figural interpretation thus uses the rhetorical trope of synecdoche as a philosophy of history. The interpreter takes history as their text and uses various events in history as signifying the whole arc of history itself. Auerbach argues that this kind of historical interpretation will in the end devalue history itself, that “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension…. It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding.”[18] The figural interpreter’s focus thus becomes that of the vertical link with God and not the horizontal, temporal linkages between events. This produces a dialectic of interpretation. As history marches on, new events are produced that must be placed in vertical connection with God and made sense with the already in place vertical connections, since after all these vertical connections are eternal. Auerbach says that “wherever the two conceptions [vertical and horizontal] met, there was of necessity a conflict and an attempt to compromise—between, on the one hand, a presentation which carefully interrelated the elements of history, which respected temporal and causal sequence, remained within the domain of the earthly foreground, and, on the other hand, a fragmentary, discrete presentation, constantly seeking an interpretation from above.”[19]

Lessing fits perfectly into this tradition. He takes full advantage of this dialectic by suggesting that Christians themselves are only a stage on the way to something greater. Auerbach suggests that the very process of figural interpretation, or “universal history,” creates a situation in which the frame of interpretation is forced out of necessity to change and shift as time marches on, as new events need interpreting.

Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretive change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe.[20]

Lessing represents a theological reaction to the Enlightenment. Lessing interprets the phenomenon of the Enlightenment, with its rhetoric of reason and nature, as the fulfillment of Christ, who was Himself the fulfillment of Mosaic Law. Lessing takes advantage of the very process by which Christianity was able to supersede Judaism to argue that Christianity itself will be superseded.

By analogizing the Old and New Testaments to educational primers, Lessing suggests that, much like textbooks, the Testaments cannot contain anything that “bars the way to the knowledge which is held back, or misleads the children away from it.”[21] In addition, Lessing is also able to employ figural interpretation. About the Jews in Persia, Lessing says, “Thus enlightened respecting the treasures which they had possessed without knowing it….”[22] Lessing is able to suggest that the Jews had before them in the Old Testament the materials to interpret Jehovah the national deity as God the single, pure universal, but they lacked the ability until they had encountered the Persians. Thus Lessing is able to agree to the figural interpretation of the captivity as “the visible fulfillment of the prophecies which had been spoken and written respecting the Babylonian captivity and the restoration from it,”[23] but is also able to argue that this figural interpretation is only made possible by presupposing “the exalted ideas of God as they now are.”[24] In other words, events only become visible fulfillments or figures after a certain level of education or enlightenment has been reached. Lessing is then able to tie together figural interpretation with education, which makes for the play of history a much more important phenomenon.

Lessing historicizes the vertical connection between events and God by arguing that fulfillment only occurs to the enlightened, thus laying the vertical connection back over on its side. With his publication of fragments from Reimarus, Lessing was at the forefront of what is called the search for the Historical Jesus. And if we look at how Lessing describes the enlightenment of the Jews, how they changed Jehovah into God, Lessing does not refer to figures in the Bible, he refers to the historical event of Persian ideas disseminating into Jewish culture. It was only after learning of the “pure Persian doctrine”[25] that Jews were then able to find God in their sacred writings, instead of the national deity Jehovah. Lessing even goes so far as to insinuate in this passage that God may not actually be in Jewish scripture: “and since they could the more readily find him and show him to others in their sacred writings, inasmuch as he was really in them.”[26] If this were true, it would then call the whole idea of God being anywhere in the Bible into question insofar as Christianity is figuratively built out of Judaic materials.

Lessing seems to suggest that the figural interpretation of history is then an ad hoc, post facto event of the pasting on of divine interpretations on events that had nothing to do with them, that historical forces can be found that causally created the event, but if we want we can stretch our imagination and also come up with how Divine Providence worked parallel to those forces. Near the end of The Education, Lessing says, “Go thine inscrutable way, Eternal Providence! Only let me not despair of thee because of this inscrutableness. Let me not despair of thee, even if thy steps appear to me to be going backward. It is not true that the shortest line is always straight.”[27] Lessing leaves Divine Providence to its own devices because he has already argued that we will not be able to come up with a suitable path between the past and the present until we’ve reached a suitable level of education. Providence thus drops out because it will never be a predictive device, only a “Well, I guess that’s the direction God wanted to go.”

III. Lessing's Defense Against Atheism

It is this kind of talk that has led many scholars to talk about Lessing as an atheist and also of Christianity as naturally and necessarily leading to its own demise in atheism. Through his argument, and particularly his master analogy, Lessing turns the history of Christianity back into history rather than as a tradition of universal history. Mosaic Law was important to us because it disciplined us. Jesus was important to the maturation of humankind because he taught us to internalize God’s code and to live it, thus becoming an example to live by. Lessing is able to argue that these were important historical events leading up to our age. Lessing’s stroke of genius was to use the precepts of universal history, of figural interpretation, to dismantle the tradition of universal history. In another synecdoche, instead of the Bible being history, Lessing made the Bible a part of history. This is the transformation of progressive revelation into the civil history of religion.

The process of Judeo-Christianity turning into secular atheism works by a method of historical accommodation. Stephen Benin says that divine accommodation is the process by which “divine revelation is adjusted to the disparate intellectual and spiritual level of humanity at different times in history.”[28] Benin finds this phenomenon at the roots of Jewish and Christian thought. In explaining the appearance of change in God’s message, a theologian responds that God is simply accommodating us by condescending to the level we are equipped to handle. Different levels means seemingly different received messages. As time pressed forward, however, and this method of biblical exegesis progressed, it became used principally as a method of explaining humanity’s progression, rather than God’s progression. In Enlightenment terms, accommodation was the balancing of God’s revelation with Man’s reason. The shift occurs as humanity changes in ways unexplained or predicted by the Bible. As humanity’s reliance on reason grew, God’s message changed, but eventually humanity’s reason eclipsed revelation on a scale of importance and rather than God accommodating us, a subtle shift was affected in which we now accommodated God, or in Kant’s spirit, we tried to make room for faith in an age of reason. As Karl Löwith says of Kant’s belief in the Enlightenment’s superiority to previous ages, “It is the most advanced expression of the Christian faith for the very reason that it eliminates the irrational presupposition of faith and grace.”[29]

Lessing, however, won’t go down that easily. It is difficult to tell whether he was an atheist condescending to his Christian brothers or a Christian accommodating the rising tide, but there are defenses against atheism in his writings. In several of Lessing’s other theological writings we see the Enlightenment’s rhetoric of reason, along with its atheistical tones, pop through very clearly. In On the Origin of Revealed Religion, Lessing opposes natural religion to positive, revealed religion. Natural religion is the purified common denominator of all historical instantiations of religion. Positive religion was created as a reflection of natural religion to help the community, just as positive law was created out of natural law. Lessing, however, blurs the difference between reason and natural religion by suggesting that natural religion is “To acknowledge one God, to seek to form the ideas most worthy of him, to take account of these most worthy ideas in all our actions and thoughts….”[30] Lessing here spends most of his time talking about ideas or reason, rather than about God, in defining natural religion. And in the end he suggests that “The best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion, and least hinders the good effects of natural religion….”[31] The best religion is the kind that stays out of our way.

In Lessing’s short polemic, The Religion of Christ, he is even more abrupt, though still elusive. The same distinction as before is cut, though this time between the “religion of Christ,” the religion that Jesus himself practiced, and the “Christian religion,” which makes of Jesus an object of worship. In Lessing’s description of the religion of Christ, he makes quick, rapid allusion to Enlightenment reason by first emphasizing that Christ was a “mere man,” i.e. just like us, and that his religion is “that which every man has in common with him.”[32] This alludes to the Enlightenment doctrine, begun by Descartes, of the psychic unity of humanity. As Arthur Lovejoy says, “For in nearly all the provinces of thought in the Enlightenment the ruling assumption was that Reason … is the same in all men and equally possessed by all.”[33] This is the Enlightenment reason we find in Lessing’s writings, the reason by which we can educate ourselves.

All of this might lead to a negative assessment of Lessing’s Christian pose, but I think we find in another of his writings the key to his master plot. In On the Reality of Things Outside of God, Lessing appears to be involved in a short polemical sideswipe at Leibnizian possible worlds. By the end, however, he effectively argues that God contains within himself sheer, temporal contingency, which is typically considered to be the opposite of God’s necessary universality. This gives us the key to Lessing’s master trope. Lessing attempts by another synecdoche to radically place history, with all of its individual events, within God’s eternity, in such a way as to not lose God and to not lose the importance of history and humanity. Change is always embarrassing to the philosopher or theologian talking about the eternal. This created the history of accommodation. Lessing, however, has effectively argued for the enshrinement of Enlightenment Reason, with all of its naturalistic overtones and atheistical leanings, by ensconcing it in a theological argument about the eternity of God, that even contingency itself, the seeming contradistinction of God’s necessity, is contained within God. Lessing is arguing that temporality is dangerous unless we place it within God’s spatial plenitude, effectively raising again Auerbach’s vertical connections.[34]

Lessing’s The Christianity of Reason is a perfect complement to his Education on this count. Whereas the Education presents us with a temporal, horizontal axis on which to place the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and by those means the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Lessing’s “new eternal gospel,” the Christianity presents us with a spatial, vertical axis on which to place God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Lessing’s synecdoche is made clear when he says, “Since these simple beings [God’s creations] are as it were limited gods, their perfections also must be similar to the perfections of God, related as parts to the whole.”[35] This spatial, vertical connection between individuals with God finds its temporal, horizontal complement in the Education when Lessing says, “And what if it were as good as proved that the great, slow wheel, which brings mankind nearer to its perfection, is only set in motion by smaller, faster wheels, each of which contributes its own individual part to the whole?”[36] And just as Lessing says that “the harmony which exists between them [the Father and the Son] is called by Scripture the Spirit which proceeds from the Father and Son,”[37] the harmony between temporal and spatial, between time and eternity, is found in Lessing’s trope for the third age, which is represented by the Holy Spirit: the “new eternal gospel,” which achieves its power by its almost nonsensicalness.

IV. Traveling the Garden Path to Atheism

The rain on Lessing’s parade occurs, however, when we look back to history and how the arguments Lessing is wielding have panned out. We can begin by looking at how Harold Bloom handles synecdoche and Auerbach and Paul. In Bloom’s early theory of poetry, from such books as The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, poets are involved in an agonistic contest with earlier poets, always trying to stave off their own belatedness. One of Bloom’s revisionary ratios is what he calls tessera, which is a completion or fulfillment of the earlier poet’s poem (the most obvious being Paul’s contest with the Redactor and Blake’s contest with Milton). The rhetorical trope used for this revision is, of course, synecdoche. Bloom, however, later seems to take back, or at least shift, this part of his theory in Ruin the Sacred Truths. In their own ways, Auerbach, Benin, and Löwith all chart divine accommodation, or figural interpretation, from the earliest Jewish and Christian origins as a way of reinterpreting the letter of the Scripture to accommodate the changes in history. In Joachim, as Löwith says, we see that “the fundamental law of the history of salvation is the continuous progress from the time of the Old and New Testament ‘letter’ to that of the ‘spirit’.”[38] Bloom, however, wants to argue against Auerbach’s (and others’) “rigorous insistence upon functioning wholly within Pauline interpretive categories of the letter and the spirit.”[39]

Bloom distinguishes between the “allegory of the theologians” and the “allegory of the poets.” The former effectively aligns itself with what Auerbach calls figural interpretation and the latter is a weak strawman set up by these allegorical theologians: “In the allegory of the poets, the first or literal sense is a fiction, and the second or allegorical sense is the true one…. In biblical or theological allegory, the literal sense is true and historical, and the second or allegorical sense is spiritual, being an interpretation of fact and history.”[40] In arguing against Auerbach’s interpretation of Dante, Bloom says, “On this distinction between an allegory of the poets that is so palpably weak and an allegory of the theologians at once true and prophetic, it is obvious why Dante made his choice.”[41] But Bloom does not think this distinction will stand. In answering the question “is the historical Virgil truly a figura of which Dante’s Virgil is the fulfillment?”, Bloom says that,

Dante, and Auerbach, and Saint Paul, cannot really have it both ways at once. You cannot say that Virgil in Dante’s Comedy is the historical Virgil, but then again not. If the historical Virgil or Cato or Moses or Joshua is only a figura of the fulfilled truth that Dante’s Comedy, or the New Testament, reveals, then this fulfillment necessarily is more real, more replete with significance, than the figura was or is. … Instead of the Hebrew Bible of J, Jeremiah, and Job, we get that captive work, the Old or indeed senescent Testament, considerably less vital than the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible becomes the letter, while Saint Paul and Saint John become the spirit.[42]

Bloom is arguing on historico-pragmatic grounds that there can be no fulfillment except transumptive dominance, which is a cancellation, not a fulfillment. “In merest fact, and so in history, no text can fulfill another, except through some self-serving caricature of the earlier text by the later. To argue otherwise is to indulge in a dangerous idealization of the relationship between literary texts.”[43] In this same way, to call Lessing a fulfillment of Christianity, to call atheism a fulfillment of Christianity, would be a dangerous idealization of history. Just as Auerbach’s and Paul’s stance for Bloom refuses “the temporal anguish of literary history,”[44] we must be careful not to suggest that atheism is the natural outcome of Christianity. The temporal agon of history will not allow it.

Rather than arguing, as Lessing might suggest to us, that God has within himself the desire for us to be free of him, we can instead chart the changes in intellectual history that has led to the increasing respectability of atheism. One of these changes is the gradual replacement of internalization by projection. Lessing’s tripartite scheme does seem to chart one thing, and that’s the increasing propensity for internalizing God’s authority. The God of the Old Testament handed down authoritative rules, an outside structure that imposed on us strictures of conduct. With Jesus we reach a man to be emulated. Jesus had internalized God’s rules and we should simply act as Jesus did. This created an increasing role for interpretation, however, as how Jesus acted, and what this should suggest to us, is a little more ambiguous than “thou shalt not kill” (though surely in certain contexts this is debatable). We thus see the rise of a priest class who are the sole authoritative interpreters of the Bible and God’s message. With the Protestant Reformation, however, we see a further internalization as Luther argued that we do not need priests to be intermediaries between us and God, which opens the gates to all to interpret the Bible. In many respects, the Reformation seems to be a fine historical candidate for Lessing’s epochal change into the “new eternal gospel.” Lessing often rails against the priesthood and what Abrams says of the Inner Light Protestant Gerrard Winstanley equally applies to Lessing: “Biblical history is completely internalized and the entire text becomes no more than a sustained metaphoric vehicle for the powers, states, conflicts, and processes of individual minds in the course of their experience on earth.”[45]

Increasingly putting powers into human hands, however, both in terms of interpreting God’s message and our use of reason generally, is what created Lessing’s process of internalization’s transumptive figure, that of projection. A handy figure in this tradition is that of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach says that “Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”[46] Feuerbach is arguing that whatever God says, we put in his mouth. Once we get God stuffed into our inner selves, who’s to say that he wasn’t always already there, or rather that God was simply our own projected creation. Abrams argues that the Romantics culminate this tradition by writing a theodicy without God, by naturalizing the categories of Christian history, of fall, redemption, and ultimate restoration, and transforming them into a progressive education. “This is a theory of progress—or more precisely, a theory of the progressive education of the mind of man—but it is not a philosophy of optimism, except insofar as the Christian view of history is itself optimistic in holding that the best is yet to be….”[47] Thus, as Löwith puts it, “Man will seek to replace providence, but within the established horizon, by secularizing the Christian hope of salvation into an indefinite hope of improvement and faith in God’s providence into the belief in man’s capacity to provide for his own earthly happiness.”[48]

Even with Bloom’s strictures in mind, we can still wonder whether the Enlightenment or the Romantics freed themselves from the Christian religion, from supernaturalism. Many like Carl Becker think that for all of the Enlightenment’s rhetoric about reason and nature, and their sharp break from the prejudice of religions, that Enlightenment philosophy was simply theology by other means.[49] Keeping Lessing’s balancing act between theism and atheism, between reason and enthusiasm, and his writings about natural religion in mind, we see Becker write this of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

In the end Hume manages to chevy Christian mystics and atheists into the same camp, since they obviously agree on the main point, that reason is totally incompetent to answer ultimate questions; and so he concludes with that masterpiece of irony: ‘To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.’ To read Hume’s Dialogues after having read, with sympathetic understanding, the earnest deists and optimistic philosophers of the early century, is to experience a slight chill, a feeling of apprehension. It is as if, at high noon of the Enlightenment, at the hour of the siesta when everything seems so quiet and secure all about, one were suddenly aware of a short, sharp slipping of the foundations, a faint far-off tremor running underneath the solid ground of common sense.[50]

The Enlightenment philosophers found in nature their guiding norm. Everything was to be made natural, religion, morality, law. And to replace God’s voice, his revelation, they looked to themselves, to their reason. But the Enlightenment philosophers found themselves with the same problem as the theologians, that which originally produced theodicy: how do you explain evil? If nature is good and is to be emulated, and man is the product of nature, “then how could man and his customs ever be out of harmony with nature?”[51] Becker suggests that the Enlightenment philosophers faced a dilemma: with nature our guiding norm and reason our guiding light, where do we go? “They have followed reason faithfully. Will they follow her to the end? She is pointing in two directions: back toward Christian faith; forward toward atheism. Which will they choose? It does not really matter much, since in either case she will vanish at last, leaving them to face existence with no other support than hope, or indifference, or despair.”[52]

If we turn back to Lessing, we find our answer in historicism. The problem with the Enlightenment’s naturalism was that it created in Nature and Reason new Gods. Positive theology, the naming of God’s attributes, dies at the hands of Feuerbach. What we still have left, however, is negative theology, the notion that all we can say about God is what he is not. This activity chimes with mystics whose ultimate claim is that you cannot say anything about God because to say something would be to contaminate the springs with anthropomorphic debris—one can only experience God. This is why Hume is able to gerrymander together atheists and mystics: both think that it is pointless to think, or reason, about God. However, in Kant’s great usurpation of Hume, he claimed that reason was a faculty that could limn the true world, thus transcending the world if only to draw a circle around what we can know so as to distinguish the knowable (the world, phenomena) from the unknowable (effectively God, noumena). What we see in Kant we see everywhere with the rhetoric of nature and reason—eternal, universal categories of interpretation.

In discussing the use of nature as a norm in Tertullian, Lovejoy ends by pointing at two implications of Tertullian’s writings. One was “the epistemological assumption that there is a light of nature uniformly and equally present in the minds of all men by virtue of their rationality….”[53] This is what was previously called the psychic unity of humanity and is pervasive in Enlightenment thought. The second implication came from Tertullian’s “efforts to reconcile his faith in a divine revelation contained in the Old Testament writings with the innovations of the Christian doctrine” in which “he was led to contradict his own assertions of the uniformity of operation of the human reason and the immutability of the ‘teaching of Nature,’ and to propound the thesis of the necessarily gradual development of man’s capacity for apprehending truth….”[54] Here we see Lessing’s answer in that, rather than a light ever gleaming, we would have a light slowly getting brighter.

Following Bloom, we can see this as the contradiction Lovejoy says it is. Historicism appears as the full naturalization of the supernatural because it destroys the “absolute authority” that Auerbach suggests is the reason why theology must always “be adapted through interpretative transformation.”[55] There are no absolute authorities in Lessing’s vision, only stopping points in the history of humanity, primers that sum up current human wisdom. This explains why Lessing so blithely dismisses the nature of Providence. Revelation becomes a technique by which positive religions established rules in real human communities, to establish order. Lessing wants to acknowledge that these rules played their role in the progressive history of humanity: “it is recognized as a good thing to make religion a concern for the community, people must be united about certain things and ideas….”[56] However, he also wants to be able to pave the way for new rules and ideas that do not conform to the old. He wants new speculations to be acceptable, even if they are proven to be wrong. “Reproach is due, not to these speculations, but to the folly and tyranny which tried to keep them in bondage; a folly and tyranny which would not allow men to develop their own thoughts.”[57] The only way this is a secularization of Christianity in some substantive way is if hope is the sole province of Christians, of the religious. Because of his attachment to Enlightenment rhetoric, Lessing still sits awkwardly between the two stools of Christianity-cum-rationalism and Romanticism-cum-historicism. But Lessing remains a suggestive figure on the road between them.

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[1] M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 13

[2] Gotthold Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 82

[3] ibid., 83

[4] ibid., 87

[5] ibid., 85

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid., 84

[8] ibid.

[9] ibid., 91

[10] ibid.

[11] ibid., 92

[12] ibid., 93

[13] ibid., 96

[14] ibid., 93

[15] ibid., 95

[16] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 73. Auerbach is here quoting himself from a paper, “Figura.”

[17] ibid., 48

[18] ibid., 73-4

[19] ibid., 74

[20] ibid., 16

[21] Lessing, 87.

[22] ibid., 89. Italics mine.

[23] ibid., 90.

[24] ibid.

[25] ibid., 89.

[26] ibid.

[27] ibid., 97

[28] Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), xiv

[29] Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 244-5, fn. 8

[30] Lessing, 104

[31] ibid., 105

[32] ibid., 106

[33] Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 288

[34] It is useful to remember Lessing’s admiration for Spinoza, the philosopher for whom there was but one substance, namely God, and all else was contained within, that both Henry Chadwick (Lessing, 46-7) and Paul Tillich (Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E Braaten, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 369) recall and that Spinoza was considered an atheist during his time.

[35] Lessing, 101

[36] ibid., 97

[37] ibid., 100. Italics Lessing’s.

[38] Löwith, 149

[39] Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 39

[40] ibid., 40

[41] ibid.

[42] ibid., 42. Considering that Auerbach acknowledges this outcome of figura (“This conception of history is magnificent in its homogeneity, but it was completely alien to the mentality of classical antiquity, it annihilated that mentality down to the very structure of its language, at least of its literary language, which … became wholly superfluous as soon as earthly relations of place, time, and cause had ceased to matter, as soon as a vertical connection, ascending from all that happens, converging in God, alone became significant.” 74) I am less sure about Bloom’s attack on Auerbach than on the Pauline interpretive categories as a whole.

[43] Bloom, 43

[44] ibid.

[45] Abrams, 52

[46] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 12-3, found in Fall Semester 2002 Course Packet

[47] Abrams, 189-90

[48] Löwith, 111

[49] See especially Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

[50] Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 68-9

[51] Becker, 66. Italics Becker’s.

[52] Becker, 69

[53] Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, (New York: John Hopkins Press, 1948), 336

[54] ibid., 338

[55] Auerbach, 15

[56] Lessing, 104

[57] ibid., 96