Here are some passing thoughts on the new ‘tag-line’ statement – I am not aiming to engage directly with the defence argued for in the March issue of Sofia.
‘religion’ was the lynch pin of the network – it seemed revelatory when I first came across the idea: R is a human creation. Watching the TV series when it was first aired was an education.
Now I am being told that Philosophy (with a small or capital p?) along with something called ‘worldview/s’ are also to be welcome into the fold.
Did anyone ever suggest that these two were not ‘man-made’?
It’s all the fault of Socrates – he did the job so well we still have the Euthyphro Problem: is good good because it is good or because God says it is? (Philosophy has an intellectual edge – it’s not just any old metaphysical speculation even though we are Metaphysical Animals as the title of a recent Philosophy book has it, etc.)
As for ‘worldview’ it’s not really an English word – or thought. The English, with the help of the Scots and others, had a world Empire, not a view. Beginning with Locke’s tabula rasa they wrote whatever they wanted to on the world stage.
Perhaps it begins with Leibniz – this is the best of all possible worlds. Kant argued this was a logically invalid statement – it goes beyond what is presented to us as human beings; we can say there is more but we need to learn to pull ourselves back there and STOP.
But we are Dependant Rational Animals as the title of another book has it – we just can’t help it; we go on to invent religion.
That was and remains the problem: religion. (Marx: all criticism begins and ends with Religion, etc.) We have always been like that, we are used to Living with the Gods, to bring in yet another book title. Karl Marx said it all – religion is ‘at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against…; it is the sigh of the oppressed …, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’, etc. Lower-upper class people may not need it – except in extremis.
The Network will be doing more than enough if it just continues – and sticks to religion. Of course recommend the other two – we would be better off with that kind of thinking.
But Philosophy and World-view/s aren’t really English things. Commenting on such matters Nietzsche put England at the bottom of his scale when it came to Philosophy! Stick to Utilitarianism – man does not seek happiness, only the English do, he claimed.
Which brings me to the Church – of England. Three years ago I found myself living in a Sussex village – I attended all sorts of dos. The service at the Anglican surprised me – humorous, jokey, with many asides. They all enjoyed it. Is this religious I asked some of them … well, belonging to the C of E is just an aspect of being English; we want to continue our traditions and keep our history alive. After half a century many of them have absorbed the lesson/s of SoFN! How do they say ‘thank you’?
This Latin-derived word ‘religion’ keeps returning – so here are some more thoughts: it really means ‘Christianity’ derived from Judaism. In trying to be all-inclusive it labelled all as ‘religion’ if those frameworks were more or less like itself. It then arrived at the thought of ‘world-religions’ – six of them, though these days only five of them are actually discussed. Some Christians didn’t like being grouped along with other ‘religions’ so they began to claim that, unlike the others, they were a faith. In line with that, at the beginning of this century, a Teach Yourself book appeared with the title “World Faiths”.
‘Deen’ (Arabic) and ‘dharam/a (Sanskrit) are not well-translated as ‘religion’; the Buddhists suffer translation and know in advance that it’s going to be unsatisfactory. Jews begin with ‘tohu’ and ‘bohu’ and continue arguing – they place the key text in the centre of the page and surround it with interpretations. Instead of editing out some bits, rabbinical Judaism kept it all in the Hebrew Bible – that turns out to be their genius. And when the Christians left home, as Richard Holloway puts it, they took the family jewels with them. Thieves – like all creative writers/people
The point being made was that Christianity was based on faith and not reason. Yet it is Christianity that invented theology which, at its best, developed into a new kind of poetry in prose. Jews and Muslims don’t ‘theologise’ about God – for them the whole thing verges on the blasphemous, like breaking the Commandment against idols which hasn’t deterred the Christians who have gone ahead and produced wonderful religious Art. Of course the other two traditional monotheisms engage with Theology – they do this in order to keep pace with the frameworks created by Christianity, the most ‘successful’ religion in the world, being superseded in front of our very eyes by an ethical stance on all life. Other cultures study ‘knowledge’ according to categories established in nineteenth century Europe; these eventually derive from Aristotle – the world’s greatest Philosopher according to a recent pocket-book. The Network is welcoming but it will not attract members from other ‘religions’ – except for those with a journalistic predilection. That’s not a fault. Each history brings one to a particular point in the present – the ‘universal’ remains at the horizon, which word brings to my mind The Two Horizons by Anthony Thiselton: the writers of the Bible had different horizons, or pre-understandings, from ours, etc.
This cerebral kind of debate arises from a misreading of Kant (we share a birthday – he was born 225 years before me). He did not say that everything has to be based on reason. He said he could reason about ‘everything’ as long as he was allowed some non-reason based starting points; these in his case were God, Freedom and Immortality. Like a geometrician he claimed these were his postulates. He writes pages and pages on these three ideas; his God does not sound quite like the Christian God – nor does that of the Theologian-Philosopher who came next: Schleiermacher, ‘the father of modern Hermeneutics’. The latter tried to find a place for feeling in religion; neither philosopher satisfied the Christian thinkers in the long run.
A thousand years ago reason invented the Ontological Argument for the existence of God – this was a kind of extra for St. Anselm: ‘let me believe so that I may understand’ was his motto as the Archbishop of Canterbury; he thought he had found an intellectual way to God as well. (In the next century Abelard would go for the exact opposite – let me understand first). Aquinas continued with that argument and Descartes re-stated it for his own purposes. Later Kant showed that this and other arguments for God were invalid. Yet God remained real for him – that is why, in part, Don Cupitt did not really engage with him; Kant even wrote a book, which got him into trouble with the authorities, entitled ‘Religion within the Bounds of Reason’.
Is there a God? In the sixth century Christianity was at the height of its power and authority. Emperor Justinian closed down the Academy – very likely the philosophers were not coming up with anything very interesting; Philosophy has gone through an unproductive patch two or three times. Henceforth Philosophy would come under Theology which gradually became the Queen of the Sciences. The Emperor died in 565 AD (or CE). Only five years later a man was born in the desert – if there were a personal God would he have let this happen? It appears that like some human beings God was sabotaging himself – he’d got his project off the ground properly only about 200 years earlier. We could say, as we sometimes do – God’s ways are inscrutable and leave it at that.
It is conjectured that soon there will be more Muslims than Christians in the world. That perception may be another reason why some people are leaving the fold; as someone said – it’s not that Christianity has failed, it’s just that it has not been tried. It is too difficult; it would be a lot easier to follow some watered-down world view – most people just want to be nice. And there is always respectable Philosophy to fall back on. And again, this word ‘Philosophy’ doesn’t translate happily into other languages though every culture wants to claim it has ‘philosophy’ – that’s a similar idea but different, however desirable. Would someone in such a cultural milieu attempt writing a book such as “Before Philosophy” (Henri Frankfurt et al)? These two, philosophy and world-view, cannot replace religion; it’s handmade for our human needs. We need to keep on revising it, instead of trying to kill it. What has anyone really against?
Unlike philosophies and world-views religions, and religious groups, typically, announce themselves in a dramatic way – the ‘founder’ is hit on the head, so to speak. This happened almost literally to Mehar-Baba, of Parsi extraction; before him there were the Bab and Bahaulla, also hailing from Persia. I asked one of their followers why they were called prophets when the last Prophet died in the seventh century. The carefully thought-out reply was – he was the last one but not the final one. A few hundred years before that there was Guru Nanak – at the age of about 30, like the Buddha before him, he saw what was what: belonging to a particular religion was not the whole story. The reality below the surface was that we are all human beings. Okay so no religion but which caste do you come from? I am the lowliest of the low. (He had no caste markers.) And is your God a He or a She? In relation to God, we are all feminine, came the reply; God alone is masculine.
‘Honest to God’ was preceded by other interesting titles such as ‘Religion without Revelation’ and recently ‘Religion for Atheists’; it was followed by Honest to Man by Victor Skipp. Religion has raised interesting questions such as ‘meaning of life’. This query has been watered-down to something more manageable but thereby losing the original question – it is not about finding something meaningful and the like. For example one might say – your life might become even more meaningful if you join the SoFN. Should we turn to earlier books on the issue we find a very different take. ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ begins by saying there are two questions to consider: Why do I exist and why does the universe exist? Karl Britton, the author, was a student of Wittgenstein – like his mentor Prof Britton ends up with some gnomic comments in the last chapter, reminiscent of the Tractatus, but the issue is treated seriously throughout. It’s not about whether I can give life meaning – I am here to discover, as he says, not invent.
Asking serious questions like the ones above is different from asking ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ Possibly none, it doesn’t matter. At that point one can start reflecting on the word ‘life’ – there’s even a book that has already made the first useful moves but the word doesn’t bring anything serious to mind immediately: life. But there is life in it. A certain kind of person might retort – well, just don’t raise such questions! And in modern terms – live in the here and now. One more question – where, and when, is that? As Bertrand Russell pointed out in his thin volume, The Problems of Philosophy, there just are these two kinds of mind – the metaphysical and the other; he wrote that over a hundred years ago. After all this time that little book remains one of the best introductions to the subject – if one reads it slowly. There is no good introductory book on religion; as for world-view/s – what’s that? The Germans have Weltanschaung. And Weltschmerz – not just the schmerzen of young Werther. Even the phrase ‘philosophy of life’ starts its life in German, Lebensphilosophie.
Some people just get on with life – no point in thinking too much, there is no answer, they say. But once one has had a thought one might as well take it further – and add to one’s reflection some affection. For oneself – create the right kind of fiction, we live by fictions which thought gave another writer the title for his book: Resisting Novels. Anything novel is to be resisted.