The Knowledge Newsletter

A better title for this post would be "A Breakthrough on Existentialism" but both titles really are appropriate. I’ve been listening to a lecture series by the late Robert C. Solomon on existentialism. The series is excellent but one lecture in particular opened up existentialism for me in ways that haven’t been before.

I’ve always had a caricature of existentialism that it is anti-rational and espouses an epistemology that is entirely capricious and arbitrary. While I’m not convinced a thoroughgoing existentialism avoids this, I do see now how the view, the "attitude" as it is probably better called, is not completely irrational. The lecture that opened things up was on Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.

Solomon was clear that Kierkegaard was not against the idea of objective truth as a general concept. I found that curious since I always thought of him as not allowing for objective truth in any context. Solomon said that for Kierkegaard subjective truth came into play when objective truth could not be discovered and there was no way of discovering truth objectively in a specific area (notably religion).

When it comes to religion, Kierkegaard held that getting at truth in religion rationally is impossible. This is something I’ve always understood in him but I was getting a better feel for why it was so important. Because truth in religion is impenetrable logically, we have to come at religion by using "subjective truth" which involves the passions. According to Solomon, Kierkegaard said that religion involves a decision to commit oneself to it precisely because reason cannot help us decide. We commit in the absence of full knowledge and because of the apparent absurdities in the religion. For Kierkegaard, committing to a religion wasn’t a single leap but a series of leaps; a series of commitments that one has to make. The absurdities force us to either fall more in love with the religion or to abandon it depending on how one’s passions go when one studies the religious text.

Here’s where the breakthrough came. Solomon said that Kierkegaard likened the commitment to religion to that of a human love relationship. When two people choose to love each other, they have no rational idea (1) what they’re getting into, and (2) what the other person is like or what they’ll find when they get to know him or her. BUT people choose to commit themselves to the other person in the absence of (perhaps because of the absence of) this rational knowledge. As they learn about the other person and the truths about them that are in a lot of ways absurd from a rational point of view, they either fall more and more in love and make deeper and deeper commitments to that person or they decide that the person is not for them and choose to fall in love with someone else.

Further, the complexities and apparent absurdities of the other person drives them to get to know him or her more deeply and to become more passionate about the other person. The complexities and what appears to be irrational on the surface actually creates the desire to learn more and to discover more. If the one being loved were exactly like the lover or were completely simple and everything to understand was on the surface, this would actually discourage love and commitment, not encourage it. The same is true, said Kierkegaard, of the Bible and religion. It is the apparent contradictions, absurdities, and irrationalities that drive us to deeper study and longing for a deeper understanding.

He also said that from the outside, a person looking at love making or courtship that has never been involved in that type of relationship finds it absurd. They have no understanding of it AND COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND IT FROM OUTSIDE THE RELATIONSHIP purely rationally! The relationship is purely subjective and only “makes sense” from inside the relationship. If the analogy works, the same is true of religion. This explained two things for me. 1. Why the atheist may never “get it” even though theists “prove” the truth of religion rationally and 2. Why rational rational proofs sometimes appear powerless to convince regardless of how strong the arguments might be I think it works for atheism in this way as well).

Finally, this explains why existentialists can never really tell a person that he ought to believe or ought not to believe. It would be like one person telling another which person to fall in love with. The idea is nonsense. Now I do think there is a role for reason here but I can see where the existentialist is coming from.

Solomon also articulated Kierkegaard’s critique of what he called “herd religion” which was the idea that a person would think they were a Christian (atheist) because of the family into which they were born or because they associate with some group or some set of doctrines or meet for a Bible study and the like. Those who have not entered that love relationship are not in the relationship at all.

My goal here has been to try to understand the view. There is a lot to consider and while my rationalist tendencies are still strong, I do think this view provides some very important things to consider when attempting to come up with a broad and thorough epistemology.

Last night, I had one of the most epistemically interesting dreams I can recall. In the dream, I was deceived and came to discover this (or infer it).

In my dream, I was me; I experienced the dream through my own eyes. I had written a book critiquing the religious epistemology of Richard Dawkins and he invited me to some museum for an interview for some television show he was running. In order to entice me to do the interview, he promised me a small honorarium, though he didn’t state the amount up front. At the interview were two people. To Dawkins’ right was a heavy-set gentleman who appeared to be his publicist (I don’t know if Dawkins even has a publicist but he did in my dream). To his left was a woman but I wasn’t sure why she was there. She appeared to be an assistant of some sort. I sat directly across from him at a small table.

Dawkins began the interview asking me some preliminary questions about myself and my position. After a few minutes he asked me about my teaching position and how much I got paid. I said, somewhat hesitantly (I didn’t know whyit was important) around $220/hour. This itself is odd since I don’t get paid by the hour but if I broke my salary down per hour it would be far less than that. In any case, that’s what I said and Dawkins slowly started mocking me for it. He had his signature smirk on his face asking me how I could call myself a professor of any decency when my students have to neglect their studies to work so they could pay my inordinate salary.

Frequently during this exchange, he would look at his colleagues with incredulity and they would support his position though not overtly. In my dream, I felt myself becoming more and more angry and feeling as if I had walked into something. I could also feel a strong sense of shame and that I could not let Dawkins get the upper hand on me for something not related to religious belief.  Dawkins then stops his invective and says something like, "Speaking of money, here’s the $313 honorarium I promised you." and slid an envelope across the table. I was so angry at his mocking and somewhat shamed that I refused and slid the envelope back saying, "You keep it. I don’t want it." "No" Dawkins said, "I promised it to you and I keep my word." I again refused the honorarium and said, "Give it to charity if you want. I’m not taking it."

After a minute or so of this, the woman speaks up and says, "I have an idea. Let me take the $10,500 and donate it to a "Squirrel Rescue" fund I know of. " (don’t ask me where the squirrels came from) as she slowly pulled the check out of the envelope exposing the amount. The woman explained her plan. Dawkins agreed and states to both the man and the woman that no changes to this plan are to be made. Dawkins continued with the interview.

Here’s where the dream is fascinating to me from an epistemic point of view. As Dawkins continued to talk and I thought about how I just gave up 10K, I slowly became aware that Dawkins plan all along was to get me to reject the money so he could have it "donated" to a cause in which he was interested. I began to see that his taunting and mocking were a psychological tactic to get me so upset that I would be unable to accept a $313 honorarium (I found out later in the dream that he broke the honorarium into three parts: $313 for the introduction, $9500 for the main part of the interview, and the rest for the conclusion of the interview — this breakdown was so he didn’t have to "lie" when he offered me the original $313).

In my dream, I went into the interview thinking nothing of anything being amiss. As the interview went on, I discovered Dawkins tactic through subtle looks to his colleagues, intonation of words, the cadence of the interview and the like. In my dream I became aware of the strategy though I wasn’t aware of it when the dream began. What striking is that I constructed Dawkins, his two colleagues and my conscious self. My mind "created" all four minds for the purpose of the dream, I created the deception, I created the mockery, I created it all. Yet in the dream, "I", the me in the dream, didn’t know what Dawkins and his colleagues were up to. I had the dream just before waking (which is why I remember it so vividly) and remember being struck by how "deceived" I had been in the dream. How is that possible since I was all four persons?

In this dream, I can honestly say, I didn’t know what Dawkins was thinking. Yet I knew intimately because I was him.

I have held for some time now that Kant was the father of what has become known as epistemological postmodernism. The term has enough meanings to satisfy anyone attempting to wear it. On my definition, epistemological postmodernism categorizes anyone who holds the following:

• That direct knowledge of a reality beyond one’s own perceptions is not possible (i.e. logically possible)
• That if humans do have any grasp of a reality beyond their own perceptions, that reality is always interpreted.
• That knowledge consists of community agreement among tightly or loosely defined ideological groups.

While Kant did not say much about the last of these, depending on one’s interpretation, he did say something about the first two and it is his philosophy about perceptions (the phenomena) and reality (the noumena) that set the foundation for epistemological postmodernism.

I was reading through the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man in response to a question from one of my students tonight and it made me think of Kant and a discussion I had recently with a colleague who is an existentialist and a fan of Kant’s epistemology. Lewis, criticizing the epistemology of Gaius and Titius (pseudonyms for the authors of an unnamed elementary text on literature), includes a quote from their book that is very much Kantian in nature. Talking about a man that looks at a waterfall and calls it ’sublime’, the authors write,

Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really ‘I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime…"’

This is Kant with a little Wittgenstein mixed in topped off with a dash of Logical Positivism. But the essentially subjectivity of such a belief is clearly present. A colleague of mine was attempting to make a similar claim about knowledge.

His essential position (can one call it a position?) is that it is not possible to get beyond our own perceptions to the world "out there" and thus to have knowledge as defined by classical epistemology is not possible. The best we can hope for is belief that "works." Thus, existentialism is the only possible option for humans living on this planet. He does seem to allow for one exception and that appears to be knowledge of the divine. It’s not clear how all that works but the exception is notable and very Kierkegaardian.

In a recent dialog, my friend was attempting to make two arguments. The first was that the possibility of phenomena like inverted qualia and interpretive differences between similar perceptual experiences entails the relativity of all knowledge. That is, the world never presents itself to us directly because, ostensibly, not everyone’s experience of it is exactly the same. Second he claimed that language was the only epistemic connection human beings have between one another. If Clive and John both see a red object, the only epistemic commonality they have is that they both may use the English word "red" when pointing at the object. This is similar to Lewis’ author’s reducing a feeling to a word.

Rejoinders to arguments like these seem painfully obvious yet seem to elude so many. John and Clive do not epistemically share merely a word but an experience of the world. The experience of redness is their epistemic connection and we could say they both know the same proposition ("there is a red object before me") without every exchanging a word. It is this experience that makes a linguistic exchange even possible and so must be prior to any language game. Perhaps a stronger example would be to exchange the red object for a speeding vehicle coming directly at them. Both Clive and John, hopefully, would move out of the way of the vehicle without ever having to verbalize the fact that a car is speeding towards them and THEN could they live to tell about it. Language is secondary to the experience.

Kant’s argument that humans never get beyond the phenomena to the noumena seems to presuppose the existence of the noumena and thus some knowledge of it. The argument also seems to presuppose that statements can be made about the truth value of our epistemic position vis-a-vis both the noumena and the phenomena which either is a noumenal statement or either false or neither true nor false. If the former then it’s self contradictory and if the latter, epistemically impotent (Wittgenstein’s advice seems to be relevant here).

Lewis’ piece struck me because it illustrated again how deep epistemology have been impacted by the implications of Kant’s thought. My colleague doesn’t believe anything can be known about the world beyond our perceptions. Lewis was attempting to argue not only is there a real world that humans can know directly but that some objects have inherent value, inherent beauty, inherent evil and we can know these properties and respond appropriately or inappropriately to them! I find it hard to imagine any modern thinking calling an emotional reaction to anything "wrong or right." Not because he or she doesn’t have an opinion about, say, the sublimity of a waterfall but because he or she thinks that is all one could have.