A special thank you to Mr. Montag for recommending Alain Badiou to me. In a comment to a recent post, he quoted Badiou. I was baffled, but intrigued and he was kind enough to recommend a book, which I now have in my possession. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.

You all have probably read him already, but my familiarity with French philosophy pretty much ends with Sartre.

Here is a quote from early in the book worth sharing:

The heart of the question concerns the presumption of a universal human Subject, capable of reducing ethical issues to matters of human rights and humanitarian actions.

We have seen that ethics subordinates the identification of this subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics thus defines man as a victim. It will be objected: ‘No! You are forgetting the active subject, the one that intervenes against barbarism!” So let us be precise: man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim.

I thought that was rather tasty. One could argue that this is a mere restatement of Heidegger’s man is the being that takes a stand on its own being… The book is short. His critique of “rights” is what I’m most interested in.

Cataloging one’s beliefs is easier said than done. I am of the temperament that resists dogmatism. You could say I’m wishy-washy. Trouble is, for every firm conviction one might have, there is an equally firm conviction on the other side. Having the ability to understand both positions can lead to intellectual paralysis. Better to be skeptical of both positions and search for something deeper. My skepticism runs deeper than most, perhaps. I don’t find it particularly interesting to be skeptical about the usual things: superstition, the power of prayer, astrology, quantum physics and so on. Those are easy targets. My skepticism is of the more fundamental variety. Of what can I be certain? Lacking the genius of Wittgenstein, I’m kind of stuck with this persistent doubt about the things that of necessity are taken for granted.

The flip side of not being certain about most things, is that with little effort one can provisionally believe just about anything. I have exploited this phenomenon repeatedly. I have at least dabbled in multiple major religions. Multiple years of study have been sincerely devoted to both Buddhism and Christianity. These were not merely academic indulgences, but full blown conversions with all of the accompanying levels of activity necessary to be accepted among the faithful. One thing about religion is you really can’t understand it unless you are fully enmeshed in the whole “web of truth” that is spun and tended by the faithful. “Webs of truth” can be more or less permeable depending upon the density of the strands and the level of interaction that is allowed across the membrane. Different religions create different style webs. The Roman Catholic web, for example (another of my dalliances) has high permeability, but is made of incredibly strong strands. By contrast, certain evangelical protestant strains have dense webs of truth that resist permeability. Once inside, it becomes increasingly difficult to move in and out. Every human phenomenon becomes filtered through the web.

(Political affiliations have their own “webs of truth” also, but are of a different order from religion. I’m sure I’ll have some comment on that later).

I use the term “truth” in my formulation intentionally. I could say “web of belief” and that would be perfectly intelligible, but that these beliefs are “true” is itself more factually true. More on that later.

Back to what I believe. Given that I have already confessed to my propensity for vacillation anything I say about what I believe right now could change tomorrow. I do not rule out divine revelation as a source of belief. Maybe I will get struck by lightning. But what I am trying to do at present is unravel the “web of truth” within which I persist and see what’s at the bottom of it.

I believe that my existence has a definite beginning and that it will definitely end.

I believe that I am conscious at this time and I am not dreaming.

I believe that my intentions originate in myself and are not dependent on another being.

I believe that my ability to converse in a natural language is adequate to express my own experience.

I believe that other independent beings, similar to myself, exist and that I am able to converse with them intelligibly using natural language.

That’s a pretty paltry list, but represents those statements that I have the highest degree of certainty about. The last statement, obviously, blocks solipsism. The natural language stuff seems to be resistant to skepticism, but the other statements are not.

What a nasty word. I don’t even like putting it in the title. Reading Errol Morris’s five-part piece in the New York Times the past few days, as well as other interesting commentary, has forced me to think about the topic. The piece is occasionally entertaining (particularly part one), but in the end seems to be an erudite bit of score-settling at the expense of yet another dead white philosopher.

Morris ends his vindictive meditation with this bit of wisdom:

There are endless obstacles and impediments to finding the truth – You might never find it; it’s an illusive goal. But there’s something to remember, there’s a world out there that we can apprehend, and it’s our job to go out there and apprehend it. It’s one of the deepest lessons that I’ve taken away from my experiences here.

Truth, in the sense that Morris uses the word, entails that there exist objective, external facts that are totally independent of a particular point of reference. I can’t imagine that there is anything controversial about that idea to anyone. Even a solipsist ought to conclude that there are objective facts about himself, whether or not there was anyone else that existed to observe them. As is continuously pointed out, one cannot deny reality in its harshest form (physical pain). Neither does it matter whether one is an idealist or a realist. So we all ought to be able to agree that there is some objective reality and what I by myself think it is, or I and everyone else who speaks the same language as me thinks it is, it is.

The more difficult question is whether we can say anything intelligible about it. To be capable of uttering a true statement about something is completely different from saying there is some such truth out there that we have to find. I can make many true statements about myself. “I have a headache right now”. This is incontrovertably true. “William Tecumseh Sherman is the name of the man that burned Atlanta in 1865.” Another true statement. True, but subject to historical skepticism. There is a whole universe of statements such as the latter that we take to be true (including scientific statements) that are philosophically trivial.

It is technically possible that this objective truth that everyone is so worried about is actually dependent upon what we human beings think, say and believe. I find this idea rather unlikely, but it’s possible. But then there are the facts about being human that probably do utterly depend upon what we think and say. Pretty much all theoretical knowledge is of this type, and it is incontrovertibly subject to paradigm shifts. Whether or not these theoretical structures are incommensurable looks like a technical issue to me, rather than a profound epistemic one.

Part of the problem of being human (as Nagel points out in “The Absurd”) is our strange capacity to imagine ourselves from some objective point of view. The anti-relativist wants to beat us over the head with the trivial point that there really is such a point of view. So what? You’re never going to have it. You are human and you will always and only perceive what your piddly little eyes and ears will let you perceive.

The rest of what we all take to be true about the world, the human world of language, emotion, perception and work, is replete with systems that rely on internally consistent webs of truth. For something to be true to a human being is for it to render some fact or set of facts about the world intelligible. That’s all. Truth emerges, converges, gets twisted, straightened out and then twisted again. What is that but “form of life” as Wittgenstein called it?

The first real philosopher I ever read was Bertrand Russell. And I didn’t read him for his philosophy; I read his classic atheist treatise Why I am Not a Christian. I was still in high school, and a budding materialist. But something about the tone of his book didn’t sit right with me. I recently got another taste of it after reading Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. There is so much ammunition at hand when one takes on religion, it seems to become irresistable to the religious antagonist not to pick up stones and start hurling them in every direction. It was true of Russell, whose philosophical writing was not considered polemical, and it is true of Hitchens.

Skepticism about God–regarding his existence, properties and so forth–is intellectually necessary, in my view. In the absence of direct revelation, I cannot understand faith, and yet it exists everywhere. But I cannot argue that just because so many believe it, it has to be true, since upon examining the details of such faith amongst a wide variety of individuals, first hand, over many many years, I have never detected any rational basis for faith even among the most intelligent adherents. At the base of it all is–I was going to say infantilism–but instead I will leave it at emotionalism.

I cannot rejoice over the inevitable end of meaning entailed by the lack of a god-perspective in the universe. We are end-oriented creatures, with a conscious awareness of time. Our teleological prejudice litters our language. It is inescapable. We cannot merely be, we must persistently strive toward. And what is the reward of all that striving? Merely being. It’s a joyous circle or a vortex of doom.

Religion is the ultimate world-creating activity. Its aim is to stitch all of the little threads that dangle off of us into one tidy tapestry of truth. Science cannot replace it, and though I respect my “Realist” and atheist brethren for their attachment to scientific truth (reality), I can’t be comforted by it. What difference does it make to me whether a rock is a billion years old or a hundred years old? Science must be admired, respected and encouraged. But constitutive answers are not exhaustive.

So I won’t be gloating over the death of God. Would the world be a better place without religion? Not with humans in it. It is impossible. We create worlds. That’s what we do. I don’t know why.

I am a solipsist.

That is not true. I am not a solipsist in the metaphysical sense. But there is a sense that perhaps demands a new word. The word hasn’t been coined yet, but if I think of it, I will certainly post it. My solipsism is not metaphysical, as I said. Nor is it epistemological. There is sufficient evidence for the existence of other minds, and the notion that there aren’t other minds is not credible.

However, there is another problem. While I can be comfortable in my knowledge of the existence of other minds, I am also aware of a more immediate problem: the inadequacy of that knowledge. While I am aware that other intentional creatures exist, I am at a loss as to how to interact with them. Yes, language is a wonderful innovation. Facial expressions and body language make subtle, emotional communication possible. But all of this communication is false.

The inadequacy of human communication.

Even when we try to be honest, we fail. External facts can be communicated. The utterance, “two plus two equals four” is a true statement, but it communicates nothing about the sender. So, the problem is not that true utterances are not possible, but that a true statement about oneself is impossible. All of the “facts” that can be stated about oneself — the totality of facts about oneself — even if they could be cataloged and expressed, would not reveal the truth about a person. The public fact library, if there was such a thing, about an individual would reveal nothing about the being in itself.

Even truth and falsehood as categories break down. Can I speak about a true state of my mind? That it is in such and such a neurological state? That can be shown to be true, by an observer. It is a “state of affairs” as the philosophers say. But can a truth value be ascribed to my experience? “I am in pain.” “I have a pain in my foot.”

A Wittgensteinian will argue that if there is any inadequacy, it is a limitation of language and not a fundamental problem. But there are private experiences that are inexpressable. Does an infant exist before it acquires language? Is it conscious? Is it human?

I want to avoid a philosophical argument in any event since I am not competent to conduct it. But somewhere in this is a root of anxiety, perhaps better expressed by appeal to literature than philosophy.