All in the mind

Giotto, The Death of St. Francis, c. 1325 (the-athenaeum.org)

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So far as I know, Jrgen Habermas set the ball rolling. In 2008 the German
philosopher wrote a celebrated essay, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith
and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. The thrust of what he had to say first occurred
to him much earlier, after he had attended a memorial service for Max Frisch, the
Swiss author and playwright, at St Peters Church in Zurich in 1991. The service
began with Karin Pilliod, Frischs partner, reading out a brief declaration written
by the deceased. It stated, among other things: We let our nearest speak, and
without an amen. I am grateful to the ministers of St. Peters in Zurich ... for
their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service.
The ashes will be strewn somewhere. Two friends spoke but there was no priest
and no blessing. The mourners were made up mostly of people who had little time
for church and religion. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that
followed.
Habermas wrote in his essay that, at the time, the ceremony did not strike him as
unusual but, as the years passed, the form, place and progression of the service
came to strike him as odd. Clearly, Max Frisch, an agnostic, who rejected any
profession of faith, had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices
and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has
failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final
rte de passage which brings life to a close. And this more than a hundred years
since Nietzsche announced the death of God.
The essay traces the development of thought from the Axial Age to the Modern
period and argues that, while the cleavage between secular knowledge and
revealed knowledge cannot be bridged, the fact that religious traditions are an
unexhausted force must mean that they are based more on reason than secular
critics allow. This reason, he thought, lies in religions appeal to what he called
solidarity, the idea of a moral whole, a world of collectively binding ideals,
the idea of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It is this, he said, that contrasts
successfully with secular reason, and provides the awkward awareness of
something that is missing. In effect, he said that the main monotheisms had taken
several ideas from classical Greece and based their appeal on Greek reason as
much as on faith; this is one reason why they have endured.
Habermas has one of the most idiosyncratic and provocative minds of the
post-World War Two generation but his ideas on this subject are underlined by
an increasing number of his contemporaries, all of whom seem to think that there
is something missing in our lives.
First came Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher from New York University. In
his book Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (2009) he put his
argument this way: Existence is something tremendous, and day-to-day life,
however indispensable, seems an insufficient response to it, a failure of
consciousness. Outrageous as it sounds, the religious temperament regards a
merely human life as insufficient, as a partial blindness to or rejection of the
terms of our existence. It asks for something more encompassing without knowing
what it might be.
The most important question for many people, Nagel says, is: How can one bring
into ones individual life a full recognition of ones relation to the universe as a
whole? Among atheists, he says, physical science is at the top of the hierarchy of
understanding the universe as a whole, but it will seem unintelligible to make
sense of human existence altogether ... We recognise that we are products of the
world and its history, generated and sustained in existence in ways we hardly
understand, so that in a sense every individual life represents far more than
itself.
At the same time he goes on to agree with the British philosopher Bernard
Williams (and with Habermas) that the transcendent impulse, which has been
with us since at least Plato, must be resisted and that the real object of
philosophical reflection must be the ever more accurate description of the world
independent of perspective. He argues: The marks of philosophy are reflection
and heightened self-awareness, not maximal transcendence of the human
perspective ... There is no cosmic point of view, and therefore no test of cosmic
significance that we can either pass or fail.
In a later book, Mind & Cosmos (2012), Nagel went further, arguing that the
neo-Darwinian account of the evolution of nature, life, consciousness, reason and
moral values the current scientific orthodoxy is almost certainly false. As an
atheist, he nonetheless felt that both materialism and theism are inadequate as
transcendent conceptions, but at the same time acknowledged that it is
impossible for us to abandon the search for a transcendent view of our place in
the universe. And he therefore entertained the possibility (on virtually no
evidence, as he conceded) that life is not just a physical phenomenon. According
to the hypothesis of natural teleology, he wrote, there would be a cosmic
predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is
inseparable from them. He admitted that In the present intellectual climate
such a possibility is unlikely to be taken seriously, and indeed, he has been much
criticised for this argument.
Nagel was followed by Ronald Dworkin, who, just before his death in 2013,
published Religion without God, in which he argued that the familiar stark divide
between people of religion and people without religion is too crude. Many people
who do not believe in a personal god or the inanity of the biblical account of
creation, say nonetheless believe in a force in the universe greater than we
are. It is this, he said, that leads them to an inescapable responsibility to live
their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others, and if they feel their life is
wasted they suffer inconsolable regret.
Religious atheism, Dworkin said, was not a contradiction in terms because even
atheists can feel a sense of fundamentality, that there are things in the universe
that, as William James put it, throw the last stone. Lifes intrinsic meaning and
natures intrinsic beauty, he said, were the main ingredients of a religious
attitude, irrespective of whether people believe in a personal god. Moreover,
Dworkin added, these are convictions that one cannot isolate from the rest of life
they permeate existence, generate pride, remorse and thrill, mystery being an
important part of that thrill. And he said that many scientists, when they confront
the unimaginable vastness of space and the astounding complexity of atomic
particles, have an emotional reaction that many describe in almost traditional
religious terms as numinous, for example. They have a kind of emotional
response that at least borders on trembling. This is similar to Nagel when he said
that existence is something tremendous.
This feels new, though some of it at least was presaged by John Dewey between
the two World Wars and hinted at by Michael Polanyi in the late 1950s. The main
point, for now, is that these three philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic and
each at the very peak of his profession are all saying much the same thing in
different ways. They share the view that, 500 and more years after science began
to chip away at many of the foundations of Christianity and the other major
faiths, there is still an awkwardness, as Habermas put it; or a blindness or
unsufficiency, as Nagel writes; or a thrilling mystery, numinous in nature, as
Dworkin characterised it, in regard to the relationship between religion and the
secular world. There remains an awareness that something is missing.
All three agree with Bernard Williams that the transcendent impulse must be
resisted but they acknowledge ironically that we cannot escape the search for
transcendence. This is, in effect, they say, the modern secular predicament. And it
accords with what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls a subtraction
story: non-religious people lead lesser lives than the religious.
In itself this is impressive enough as a modern movement in thought. But now
they have been joined by philosophers nearer home. Earlier this year Terry
Eagleton published Culture and the Death of God and Roger Scruton gave us The
Soul of the World. It is surely noteworthy when, in the midst of what some people
choose to call militant atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam
Harris, Daniel Dennett), we have a raft of philosophers seemingly going against
that trend.
Eagletons view is that atheism is in fact much harder than it looks. In the first
part of his book he seeks to show how varieties of culture the Enlightenment,
Romanticism, German Idealism and High Modernism never really succeeded in
dispensing with the religious attitude. No symbolic form in history, he writes,
has matched religions ability to link the most exalted of truths to the daily
existence of countless men and women. One cannot place any great hope of
redemption in the idea of culture as a whole form of life. There are no whole forms
of life. In culture, he says, there is no grand telos no common purpose and we
dont appreciate how inadequate that is as an approach.
The new mood, he says, what appears to be a new need for a telos, has arisen
because the need to believe grows more compelling as capitalist orders become
more spiritually bankrupt. It is also because that bankruptcy has been thrown into
high relief by the spectre of radical Islam, a binding force that needs to be tackled
if the so-called war on terror is to be won.
At the same time, for Eagleton, post-modernism is probably the first truly atheist
culture. Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an
affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism
does not experience it at all. There is no God-shaped hole at the centre of its
universe, as there is at the centre of Kafka, Beckett or even Philip Larkin. This is
why, for Eagleton, post-modernism is also post-tragic. Tragedy involves the
possibility of irretrievable loss, whereas for postmodernism there is nothing
momentous missing. And life without the possibility of tragedy, of irretrievable
loss, he implies, is impoverished.
For Eagleton, the death of God is inconvenient but it only brings into clearer relief
that a feeling of redemption is as urgent as ever and that the solidarity
Habermas seeks can be found only with the poor and the powerless. In other
words, God may be dead, but Marx isnt.
Finally, and most recently, we come to Roger Scruton. In one sense of course
Scruton does not belong squarely among this company he is, unlike the others, a
firm believer in God. In The Soul of the World, however, he conveys at least the
impression that his view is softening in interesting ways and he tell us clearly
what he thinks is missing in life among non-believers.
The afterlife, conceived as a condition that succeeds death in time, Scruton
writes, is an absurdity. In saying elsewhere that the I is transcendental, this
does not mean that it transcends death and exists elsewhere, he says, but that it
exists in another way, as music exists in another way from sound. Arguments by
analogy are by no means always convincing but notwithstanding Scrutons
occasional supernatural lapses, there is in his book some good sense, where
originally religious ideas can be re-presented in secular garb in particular his
idea of sacrifice.
Whatever we think of Abraham and the Crucifixion, Scruton says, being guided by
the notion of sacrifice places us in a special relationship to the world this world.
Sacrifice helps us verify ourselves, helps us belong, above all unites us binds us
into a single moral community, reminds us what our obligations are. Our
readiness for sacrifice opens us up to others, makes living together more joyful
and meaningful. This is an idea of religion Judaism and Christianity in
particular but he implies that we do not need to believe in God to live in this
way. The privileges of first-person awareness are tempered and we become ready
to embrace what Oscar Wilde called the sordid necessity of living with others.
This binding ideal of sacrifice is the most important thing that is missing in our
lives.
Where does it come from, this idea that something is missing in our lives? Is it
true? Do Western non-believers really envy Islam its explosive binding force?
While I was researching my own recent book, The Age of Nothing: How We Have
Sought to Live Since the Death of God, I surveyed a raft of playwrights, poets,
philosophers, psychologists and novelists who have been active since Nietzsche
made his fateful pronouncement, many of whom did and do not share this view
that there is something missing in modern life. Some did Ibsen, Strindberg,
Henry James and Carl Gustav Jung would all be cases in point. But far more did
not see any reason to mourn the passing of God George Santayana, Stphane
Mallarm, Wallace Stevens, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud of course, and, not
least, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. Alfred Sisley and
Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic
style but they did have something in common. As the art critic Robert Hughes
writes in The Shock of the New, It was a feeling that the life of the city and the
village, the cafs and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the
seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden a world or
ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.
Moreover, there was a time when it was religion that was felt to be missing
something. Joshua Loth Liebman may not be remembered today as much as other
contemporary American writers (he died young in 1948) but in his time he was
every bit as widely read. His book, Peace of Mind, published in 1946 in the wake of
war, was top of the New York Times bestseller list for 58 consecutive weeks, a
record until it was overtaken by Norman Vincent Peales Power of Positive Thinking.
Liebman, a Boston-based rabbi, wrote that religion, for all its wonderful
achievements, has been responsible for many morbid consciences, infinite
confusions and painful distortions in the psychic life of people. He drew
attention to the fact that the overall strategy employed by the church to cope with
wickedness has been repression. With few exceptions, Western religions have
insisted that people can be good only through the stern repression of sensual
thoughts and impulses; and, most important, he concluded, that strategy has not
worked.
Psychotherapy, on the other hand, he said, is designed to help the individual work
on his or her own problems without borrowing the conscience of a priest or
pastor, and it offers change through self-understanding, not self-condemnation.
It was this, as much as anything, that gave rise to the psychotherapy boom of the
late 20th century and led George Carey, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury in
the 1990s, to remark: Christ the Saviour has become Christ the Counsellor.
The turn from religion to therapy has not been wholly successful. As the
sociologist Frank Furedi has written, it has led some people to define themselves
by their pathology, a very limiting process. Nor is therapy, exactly, a binding
process. But for many it has been a fresh form of freedom, and an escape from
congenital sin and guilt.
In a sense Habermas answers his own question in a later book, Between Naturalism
and Religion, where he argues that the fallibility of science has been as important
as its technological successes and its theoretical breakthroughs. It is the
procedural reasoning of science that counts now, he says, the process by which
understanding is built up by trial-and-error, the point being that it directly goes
against the previous metaphysical manner of living, which crystallised around
the theoretical attitude of one who immerses himself in the intuition of the
cosmos. The triumph of the one over the many was, for Habermas, the most
important aspect of metaphysical thinking, underpinning much of religion as
well. In this way, human history, cultures and language were given a sense of
unity and purpose but a synthetic one, which has ultimately held us back.
Post-metaphysical thinking was an important step forward.
Yet it seems as though we are switchbacking again, or at least this raft of
philosophers is. What they appear to mean is that our lives are missing a sense of
unity, telos, of oneness, of wholeness; that the meaning of life is, essentially, as
W.H. Auden once said, a security blanket.
We must beware this viewpoint. As Habermas said elsewhere, seemingly
contradicting himself, There is no transcendental perspective, but a plurality of
perspectives. Progress in all walks of life comes, as it does in science, from
unforced agreement in dialogue, what John Dewey called the unforced flowers
of life.
So it becomes necessary to put alongside Habermas, Nagel, Dworkin and Eagleton
the words and example of the French author Andr Gide, who ended his last major
creative effort, Thse, with words that were to resound: I have lived.
Arguably the most important influence on Gide was the landscape that he
explored with the familys maid, a woman of the mountains, who shared and
fostered his passion for wild flowers. He was, he said later, not just enchanted
but intoxicated by the beauties of the countryside above all the garrigue, or
scrubland, of the Languedoc, where the wild flowers stood out and allowed him to
appreciate their heroic and dignified qualities.
Because of this upbringing, Gide was temperamentally suited to the central idea
of Edmund Husserls phenomenology, a horrible word but an important notion,
which reacted against the view that the particular is somehow of less consequence
than the general. Husserl said that, in giving our attention to the particular, we
fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule, but that was never
Gides worry. He felt we should not spoil our life for any one objective; there is
no one to pray to, and a man must play the cards he has. He came to believe that
it is the duty of a person to surpass ones self, not toward any specific goal
any telos but simply toward the enrichment of existence itself. Gide insisted
that the particular is as meaningful as the general, from which it follows that
truth is not to be attained by any procedure artistic, scientific, philosophical
but only by those experiences which are immediately accessible to perception and
sensation. Nothing, he insists, can trump the argument of the individual who
says, I saw it or I felt it.
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This is, in essence, what Gides 1897 book Les Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the
Earth) was about, emptying the mind of its contents, so that there is no longer
anything between us and things: There were merchants of aromatics. We
bought different kinds of resins from them. Some were for sniffing. Some were for
chewing. Yet others were burned Sheer being grew for me into something
hugely voluptuous. For Gide, touch was the most immediate of the senses,
underlining that Only individual things exist things in themselves hold forth,
accessible to everyone, all that life has to offer. Objects are neither symbols nor
manifestations of laws more important than themselves, but independent
entities that have successfully resisted all of mans attempts to organise them into
other things that can be neither seen, heard nor touched.
The independence of things, the voluptuousness of objects, is all that there is, he
warned. It can be terrible but it can also be exhilarating, an opportunity:
Existence is not something that may be thought of at a distance; it has to invade
you abruptly, fix itself upon you.
What this shows and many other examples besides Gide could be given is that
there is something missing in our lives only if we think that there is. No wonder
the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker advised his disciples, not entirely
rhetorically, that in expressing themselves they should Quit thinking!
Peter Watsons TThhee AAggee ooff NNootthhiinngg:: HHooww WWee HHaavvee SSoouugghhtt ttoo LLiivvee ssiinnccee tthhee
DDeeaatthh ooff GGoodd is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson;; Terry Eagletons
CCuullttuurree aanndd tthhee DDeeaatthh ooff GGoodd is published by Verso Books;; Roger Scrutons
TThhee SSoouull ooff tthhee WWoorrlldd is published by Princeton University Press
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