Sometimes, usually late at night, after having devoted an inordinate amount of time to figuring out some arcane and indecipherable philosophical theorem, I ask, “Why torture myself? Why not simply accept uncertainty and live out my days happily, secure in the knowledge that what is, is, and what shall be, shall be?”
Why bother with philosophy?
Recently, an answer to that question emerged. As mentioned previously here, for some weeks I have been muddling through Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. Having just finished the lengthy section on Medieval Scholasticism, I considered myself not much the wiser for it. On the contrary, I felt disheartened and depressed.
That night, however, a list of conditions that I consider foundational to my own philosophy took shape, one after the other, in my mind. Even as I tapped them into my mobile – which I keep handy on the night table for recording thoughts – I realized these fundamentals were in response to my reading of the Medieval scholars… that they are part of my attempt to make sense of what my intellectual forebears had to say.
Here are the foundational statements to my own metaphysics:
Substance is neither created nor destroyed.
Change is incessant and never ending
All change is transformation of one substance into another
There are three fundamental substances: energy, matter & spirit.
Nothing exists that is not composed of the three fundamental substances.
The three fundamental substances never exist in isolation from one another.
The purpose of Being is Being.
The purpose of existence is existence.
The purpose of change is change
The nature of spirit is Being.
The nature of matter is existence.
The nature of energy is change.
Entropy is countered by Being
Being is threatened by entropy.
Nothing cannot exist.
This moment has been possible for all eternity.
All future moments are possible in this instant.
I can imagine that which does not exist; I cannot imagine that which is impossible.
What I imagine does exist.
I can only know what exists in imagination.
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Not everyone will agree with that starting point. Perhaps no-one other than I will. And I may have to revise its terms as I go. But for this existentialist, at this moment, every one of those statements is true, none of them are conditional or contingent.
A butterfly on our back verandah. There’s more than seven wonders in this world!
When I was a kid, my parents insisted I go to church. My older sister and brothers didn’t have to put on a scratchy suit and sit in the bum-polished pews of Norwood United for an hour or so of tepid religion – either because they were already saved or irredeemable, I didn’t know which. But I had no choice.
Then, at some point, Mum and Dad stopped attending, but insisted I continue to make my weekly pilgrimage to the House of God. I resented this arrangement, felt like a sacrificial lamb, being sent as a proxy to atone for my family’s guilt. The only redeeming factor in the whole situation was Rev. Kennedy’s daughter, who sat in the front pew, revering her father, while I sat toward the back, revering her.
Eventually, having recognized my own apostasy and the unattainable nature of the reverend’s daughter, I stopped going to church, too, saving the offertory money for other entertainments that might or might not have required forgiveness, but certainly had nothing to do with salvation.
Thus I spiralled like a misguided spark down the black hole of disbelief. I didn’t permit myself to know it at the time, but I’d stumbled upon my own sort of absolution at the drained font of atheism. It took decades for me to realize I was an atheist, decades more to believe it. I suppose it was mostly the unsettling notion of personal mortality that kept me in suspended animation all those years.
Having lived long enough to know that I don’t want to live forever, though, I’ve freed myself from that more or less selfish entanglement for imposing God on the universe. And what other reason could there be?
Well, it turns out that belief sort of sneaks up on you. If there is no God, I found myself asking, how do I explain all this? ‘All this’ referring to a seemingly infinite and eternal universe which harbours that most astonishing of all miracles: living Beings? Entities that are conscious, that procreate, and that have evolved into something as complex and incomprehensible as my self?
If you are not awed by the panoply of life buzzing, rooting, galloping, creeping, wriggling and a thousand other …ingings all around you, and inside you, and before you, and after… if you aren’t amazed, utterly and profoundly amazed by every bug on every leaf on every tree in the forest, then you can’t be fully human, can you?
That’s where religion sneaks back in. Aren’t awe, wonder and other such terms clearly in the religious realm? Don’t you have to be certifiably religious to use that kind of language in public? Doesn’t it bespeak things we mere mortals can’t understand, or even appreciate wholly. And if we can’t comprehend this universe of ours, who can? I mean someone has to? Otherwise, just like a bunch of passengers on a jumbo airliner, whose pilot has just died of a heart attack, we’re doomed.
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The catch to that sentence, “I don’t understand!” is it presumes there is someone who does. And of course, there have been plenty of prophets throughout the ages, who have proclaimed God’s word in fulfilment of that presumption. And most people throughout history have taken a proclamation of some sort as their truth.
Who knows, they might be right. That I don’t believe in a divine being who exists outside the realms of the physical universe and animal consciousness doesn’t mean all those prophets have been wrong, or charlatans. I don’t have to disprove the existence of God to disbelieve; nor do believers – despite the strenuous logic of thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus et al – have to prove His existence as a prelude to common faith.
As an existentialist I refuse to waste everybody’s time and energy with elaborately futile refutations of God’s existence. Is God possible? Yes. Therefore he cannot be denied with certainty. That’s an end to it. In fact, existentialism is not incompatible with faith.
On the other hand, I don’t have to listen politely to the strenuous attempts of believers to ‘save’ me. Or accede to claims about God-given rights in the realms of morality, justice and politics. I don’t mean to quibble, but there’s a stark contradiction to the lyric “God keep our land glorious and free” in the Canadian National Anthem. Who’s God are we talking about? And how is this presumed God going to be fair and impartial to citizens who don’t believe in Him?
Rev. Kennedy was a nice man. I liked him. Most believers are tolerant people. But there’s an underlying pity, or smugness in perverse cases, to the religious outlook. Not only are non-believers damned, according to the Bible, they are also incapable of true wonder, true awe. The heathens are not experiencing the eternal light of salvation; their vision is dimmed by blinding cataracts of sin. The presumption here is that, without God’s divine light we cannot be truly spiritual.
The damage done in the name of that kind of faith has been incalculable.
The other day I was sitting with a group of people in our workshop, the only indoor space on our property where we can practice the edicts of social distancing in accordance with COVID-19 protocols. We heard a cricket chirping in the room, and I spotted him next to the baseboard on the opposite wall. I excused myself from the conversation, walked over and coaxed the creature onto my hand. What a delight! To accompany a living Being out-of-doors and let him go about his singing in a place where it might attract a mate.
Awe is scaleable. Some people need dramatic music and dazzling vistas to achieve that sense of wonder; some need prospects of omnipotence, eternity and infinity; others find it in the minutest of details, in the awareness of spirit infusing every space, every nook and cranny of consciousness.
As an existentialist and atheist I’m reminded every day of my spiritual connection to this world, and I want to celebrate its wonders every moment. In that sense, I’m a believer, too.
In Chapter 8 of Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy, on page 463, there is a section talking about Scotus on Divine Law. My initial reaction was to set aside the nuances of the conversation as being irrelevant to an atheist’s point of view. But as an atheist, who has been raised in a society still at odds over the existence of God, and who can’t deny the religious controversies I have been immersed in, I have to pay attention to all the possibilities that might be believed.
If I am understanding Kenny’s explication, the new idea Scotus introduced was the arbitrary nature of God’s absolute power. As an omnipotent, omniscient being, God does not have to decree a ‘natural law’ in keeping with mankind’s happiness. He admits there are some essential aspects of ‘divine law’ that cannot be contradicted, even by God – for example, God cannot command a person to blaspheme Him or deny Him. But outside those absolute contradictions, which are foundational and fundamental, God can command anything He wants.
Thou shalt not kill may be a commandment, but if God chooses to break it or make ‘exceptions’, it is perfectly within his power to allow murder and not classify it as sin. Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not commit adultery, many of the Ten Commandment edicts only apply because they are decreed by the will of God, and if God chooses to vary them under certain circumstances, it is within his infinite power and wisdom to do so… and who are we to question the divine will.
To me, the logic of Scotus’ interpretation of ‘divine law’ seems obvious. I have often wondered how theologians up to his time could possibly explain the limits they wanted to place on God – how they could fashion God in their own image and according to their own mental and spiritual powers. If I were a believer, I would go farther than Scotus, actually. I would say that God has the divine ability to enact what seems to us mere mortals as contradictory realities.
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Of course, that godly power is often usurped by religious and political leaders for their own ends, quite often, to simply use as a means of grasping earthly authority for the sake of ungodly enterprises.
This unshackling of God would play an important role in the coming Reformation, Kenny says. By countering the ‘eudaemonistic’ nature of a loving God, he disabused those who agreed with him of any notion that the power of their God could be contained within the bounds of any human desires and comprehension.
A more scholarly philosopher than me might be able to tie that depersonalized version of God to the eventual apostasy of most of His followers. It certainly reinforces my notions of morality and ethics as being evolved systems of belief and behaviour that only exist in individual minds, communing with other individual minds.
There is no moral code, inscribed on tablets that have been handed down to us by God. Each human has his or her own set of moral standards that have been developed over a lifetime. Ethics is the complex, never-ending task of coordinating and reconciling individualistic social behaviour into a code the majority can agree and adhere to. To accuse someone of being ‘immoral’ is really saying they are activated by moral impulses different from your own; to call them ‘unethical’ is to say, they don’t agree with or abide by many of the behavioural standards endorsed by your society.
I have been reading the chapter on metaphysics in Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. For the most part, I don’t understand what the various philosophers are talking about. I read and re-read paragraphs, but can’t make sense of them. I have distilled some meaning from the effort, though. I think, at the very least, I have arrived at a starting point for my own consideration of metaphysics.
Introducing the chapter, Kenny describes the subject as the study of Being qua Being, or Being as Being. I didn’t grasp the importance of that phrase or its nuances setting out, and without that central clarity, haven’t been able to put my ideas about metaphysics into context. Precise language is crucial in any philosophical conversation, and especially in a discussion as abstruse and abstract as metaphysics.
So, before going farther, I have to distinguish between my philosophical definitions of ‘Being’ and ‘existence’. I have to emphasize here that what follows are my own definitions; I don’t know if others give the same meaning to these two crucial words, which in my view overlap, but are not identical. That said, I believe the universe exists, whether or not it is perceived; it comes into being when it is perceived.
The implications of that statement are astounding! I can’t even begin to work them out. But its central claim is that without consciousness, there is no Being. So a central concern of metaphysics has to be: How does a universe without Being differ from a universe with Being? I’m going to jump ahead here, and hint at the importance of this comparison, which is to say, assert why metaphysics is a fundamental philosophical dimension that needs to be borne in mind as the backdrop of all philosophy.
A universe without Being has no meaning. Time, space, the consciously held relationships between constellations and physical objects… everything that gives our universe meaning vanishes. I can’t even talk about what exists at that point, because nothing exists in a conscious framework. Existence itself becomes utterly devoid of meaning, not to mention purpose. That fear of nullification has led us to believe in an eternal, omniscient being in the fabric of our universe.
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Back to the starting point: Being qua Being, what does that mean? There are two senses in which the word Being with a capital ‘B’ can be taken. It can be treated as a verb, or as a noun. “I am being” is one statement; “I am a being” another.
Prince Hamlet’s anguished soliloquy is steeped in both senses:
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep…
In the here and now, Hamlet is Being, intensely. He is thinking and feeling deeply about his world, trying to make sense of it, and in doing so, exposing himself to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. If he decides to end his suffering by ending his life, he will no longer be ‘a Being’ in the present sense of the word, his universe simply vanishes, perchance giving way to a new universe viewed from the perspective of a new, in the present tense unknowable, Being.
I am Being every conscious moment of my life, and the things that exist in my universe ‘come into being’ as I experience them; I am a Being as long as I am capable of that kind of consciousness, even if I happen to be in a dreamless sleep, and am not conscious, I am a Being because I might wake up and begin experiencing my world again.
More to the point, I am Being when I experience my world as such, and sense a continuum in my experiences; when I encounter another creature capable of experiencing the world consciously, I become aware of a Being other than myself. When I step outside my conscious boundary – or imagine myself to be doing so – I view myself as a Being.
My existence as a Being will come to an end before I have figured out the implications of Being.
