An apologia for my thinking by Don Cupitt The first part of a paper that was presented in advance The Multi-Faith Centre conference held at Derby: I I th May 2002.The next part will follow next edition of the magazine.
All my writing has been an attempt to explain myself, but I don't seem to have succeeded very well, because so many people continue to say, 'Yes, yes, but now could you please explain in words of one syllable what you've been trying to do for all these years?' So I must try again.
Since the age of about fifteen I have known that I am a person unusually preoccupied with philosophical and religious questions, and especially the sort of questions that are called 'existential'. What are we; what sort of sense can we make of our world and the way we are placed in it; and what is the best that we can hope and aim for? For about fifty years I have wanted to reach, and to state in a book, a view about these matters with which I could feel content.
Usually, I have put the point by saying: I'd like to write a really truthful religious book.
I started with Christian faith, to which I became committed at the age of fifteen, and with two great systems of thought to which I was introduced at school — platonism and darwinism. Plato's philosophy, with which Christian theology has almost always been intertwined, is the greatest example of a 'top-down, or metaphysical, account of reality. The apparent world in which we live is explained by reference to a greater unseen and controlling 'spiritual' or 'intelligible' world above. Our dual nature — body and soul, the passions and reason — shows that a part of us properly belongs to that higher world. Our life is then a journey through time towards the last home in eternity, which we hope to enter through death.
That was impressive, but darwinism was equally impressive, for it was and it still remains the most wonderful and potent demonstration of the sheer power of purely 'immanent' and gradualistic or 'naturalistic' explanation. Just time and chance and the natural process of things, over sufficient time, can give rise to astonishingly 23 Sof 54 July 2002 D r a f t O n l y complex and self-maintaining objects such as the housefly on the wall, your brain and our language.
Although darwinism is, as some people like to insist, 'only a scientific theory', its implications are formidable. If Darwin is right, there seems to be no need to postulate any special divine action in order to account for the first appearance, and the capacities, of human beings in the world. But Darwin obviously is right on the main issue.
Has he not then made God redundant? Christian platonism could, to some extent, cope with this by pointing out that it has always preferred to play down talk of a personal God and his intervention in the world, describing all such language as merely 'analogical' or symbolic. But more seriously, as the darwinian style of purely-immanent explanation spreads out from biology into other subjects, it seems more and more to make obsolete any talk of an unseen metaphysical order behind the visible world. We are not embodied souls: we are just talking animals.
Philosophers usually don't like to admit that a mere scientific theory could be of such enormous intellectual importance; but the fact is that darwinism has probably been the chief influence in bringing about the Death of God and the end of metaphysics. In my own case, the conflict in my thinking between platonism and darwinism was eventually resolved after thirty years, when first I put forward in 1980 the non-realist doctrine of God, and then in subsequent books extended non-realism through my philosophy generally.
The non-realist doctrine of God is fairly close to Kant's teaching. We should give up the old realistic idea of God as an infinite, all-powerful Person-out-there who controls all world-events, but we can keep the idea of God as 'the pearl of great price', a spiritual ideal and the focus of the religious life. To say that God is love is in effect to say simply that love is God; and although a purely ideal God doesn't push, he can still have considerable pulling-power. So in the Eighties I used to say that believing in God is by no means the same thing as thinking that God 'exists'. Talk about God doesn't give us any metaphysical information: it functions to guide the spiritual life.
So far, so good. I planned to keep the practical and religious use of the idea of God, whilst dispensing with the old metaphysical God out there who orders and unifies the world and knows everything as it really is. But in the following years my non-realism spread from God to become a general philosophical position, and everything began to shift and crumble. If there is no absolute Mind out there and no metaphysical order, then there are no objective and timeless essences or meanings for us to think in. There is no 'mentalese' or abstract language of pure thought.
Human thinking becomes merely a way of talking to oneself in the current vernacular language. We can think only in the public language — which means that thinking is not something spiritual and basic but something secondary.
If there is no Mind out-there that makes, knows and unifies everything, then there is no Cosmos; no ready-made, orderly and intelligible world out there. There is no absolute vision of the world; there is only our world, the world-picture painted by our current theory. And because our language and our theory are not anchored, but are changing all the time, we are always stuck within our own merely-human angles upon our world. Because we can never think outside our own shifting language, we can never be sure of objective reality or truth. As Nietzsche says bluntly: 'There are no facts, only interpretations'. In effect, every single subject studied in the modern polyversity is a field of discourse on which conflicting interpretations jostle against each other, and 'truth' can never be more than today's state of play. And that's as true of religion and ethics as it is of every other subject. Value is only current market value, and meaning is only current usage.
In Nietzsche's day the worlds of music and the theatre were beginning to grasp, for the first time, the implications of the rule that 'Every performance is an interpretation'.
Musicians and theatre directors may go on producing fresh interpretations of classical works till the end of history, but nobody will ever produce the final and definitive interpretation that makes any further reinterpretations unnecessary. Playing his works on an organ just like his will not by itself gives us the 'real' J.S. Bach, and the quest of the historical Jesus will not by itself lead us to the essence of Christianity. Interpretation or 'spin' goes all the way down, and we never get to a pure uninterpreted essence of the thing. Thus as we explore its implications non-realism unpicks the world, leaving us with no absolute Origin, no last End and no objective reality, or value, or truth. It leaves us with only a beginningless, endless and outsideless flux of conflicting interpretations; and since the whole analysis applies to us too, we ourselves are also melted down into the general flux. Hence my recent phrase: 'Empty radical humanism'. There is nothing but our language, our world, and the meanings and truths and interpretations that we have generated. The world fully becomes the world, bright and conscious of itself, only in us and as our world. We are the only worldbuilders; but we are as empty as our world.
In the end, there is only Emptiness and brightness, as in a late-Monet painting of vegetation and water. Beautiful, but — I must admit — ultralight.
Along these lines I moved during the 1980s from a rather cautious and conservative non-realism about God, towards a form of 'nihilism'. But this wasn't as pessimistic and gloomy a progression as you may suppose. After all, I loved the analogous movement in painting, from realism to impressionism and on eventually to abstraction in Kandinsky and Mondrian. I had two main arguments for optimism: one was that what we made, we can remake.
Old-fashioned conservative realists always like to say that things such as 'human nature' or 'God's revelation' are fixed and can't be changed by us; but I could reply that if we ourselves have evolved amongst ourselves our own pictures of everything, then anything and everything can be changed. What we made, we can remake. Thus nonrealism makes an optimistic Utopian outlook possible again. And secondly, when my 'active non-realism' reduces us also to being no more than transient bits of the general flux of things, it thereby helps us to feel completely at one with the world of which we are parts. A religious person no longer has to feel that she's exiled from her true home in another world. On the contrary, we can feel completely at home, now, this minute, and in this world. More generally, personal fulfilment and the point of our life are not to be sought either in a mythical Beginning or in a mythical End of all things, but simply here and now, and in the present moment. Thus my non-realism eventually led me to what I now call 'solar ethics', a spirituality of creative selfexpression in the present moment.
In the next edition — how Don's theology developed from the 1980s with the move to all out postmodernism and the recovery of ontology.
The full paper by Don, with other papers presented at the conference by Karen Armstrong, Daphne Hampson, Brian Hebblethwaite, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Frank Walker, are to be available in a volume.
The first part of a paper that was presented in advance of the Multi-Faith Centre conference held at Derby, 11th May 2002. The next part will follow in the next edition of the magazine.