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Self and Soul
Prompted by the great Casey, I re-read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. First read it years ago, but I’m older now, and reading it again brings very different reactions.
One argument is that the modern world has done away with the Soul and has replaced it with the Self. That’s a quick way of describing a conviction I’ve held for a long time. A soul is an individual connected to God and the rest of the universe, striving to find harmony with all of it. A self has no such connection; it’s just a command center (with little control) over a sea of conflicting and confusing interior psychic currents. Or, as Bloom suggests, a soul is on the roof pondering the mysteries of the heavens, but a self is in the basement snooping around in the dark for Freudian rats.
Bloom describes the modern self who scorns religion and yet seeks salvation in psychology; but that’s a circle that can’t be squared. You can’t have both. I could understand an atheist who believes that life was a cosmic accident and has no meaning. On the other hand, I could understand a believer who believes that we were created, and therefore we have whatever purpose our creator intended (that’s my view). If you were created, it only seems logical that your purpose is anchored in the creator’s intention. What cannot square is being both an atheist and also seeking meaning to life. And yet, that would be a working description of a mere “self.”
Bloom portrays the American culture as being increasingly driven and shaped by an education system which is nihilist, relativist, functionally atheist, and therefore a disaster for the American soul. A soul, in the Christian understanding, is oriented to God and a higher purpose; if you dismiss that dimension of life, all you have remaining is an unremarkable and uninteresting self. Our educational system, and eventually our culture as a whole, is producing just such uninteresting “selves.”
Lately there has been some concern about what would happen if robots took over. Would soulless machines abandon any concern for humanity and pursue their own interests at the expense of human souls?
Well, hell, isn’t that what’s happening now?
Published in General, Religion & Philosophy
Z, there is another group call agnostics. From your description you probably fit in there. I doubt KC would deny the existence of agnostics.
You say there is no certainty, and how else do we measure beliefs that fall short of certainty except by probabilities?
Nor does it seem to me that answering the question, “Does God exist?” with “Probably so” make a person merely agnostic. For example, consider a Christian who has occasional doubts. A Christian has a commitment to belief in God that can help tide him over through doubting times. Even if the belief in God wavers, the commitment to believe often remains. Does that make sense?
“Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”
Ask a person who knows that his opinion on whether God exists or not is fueled by a commitment to believe that God does exist, “Does God exist?” and he might say, “Probably.”
“Probably” because he knows he has doubts. What you haven’t asked him is, “How committed are you to your belief in God?” the answer to which might be “Very,” even despite his having some doubts as to God’s existence.
Simple. What remains are the people who are neither. Perhaps there isn’t an elegant label for them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Many mathematicians aren’t materialists. They spend too much of their day believing that mathematical objects – things with no material existence – are real. Yet many are also atheists.
Many atheists appear to feel like they have souls as well. Sure, they may suspect it’s a reasonably safe bet that their experience of having a soul is ultimately reducible to physical processes, but they still aren’t sure – and, more importantly, whatever the explanation, they still experience themselves as having souls.
This isn’t what is meant by “materialist” as used in the context of discussions like this, is it?
It isn’t?
Materialists believe that matter is the fundamental substance of nature, that everything that exists is a result of matter in motion. No?
Were you thinking of some other definition?
As long as the intervals of doubt are short and you invariably return to “the norm” then I see where you’re coming from. However, if one is constantly vascillating or if the period of doubt is long enough or if the doubt is enough to initiate seeking of a different answer then that commitment is questionable at least.
When we talk about asking the question “does God exist” I think it’s implied that we’re asking for your normal or resting state or average answer rather than the answer you are feeling right that particular second which may change in the very next second.
Well, that’s it I suppose, but unless you mean that mathematicians think that mathematical concepts actually have physical form as opposed to conceptual truth then I don’t see how the example is relevant. Are conceptual truths distinct from or exclusive to a materialist view?
Midget Faded Rattlesnake: #55 “Is there a rule that all atheists must be materialists?”
Yes. We are accidents springing from matter is the understanding of atheists. Accident beings with accidental thoughts, accidental emotions, no afterlife.
I haven’t met one. Sure, I’ve met atheists who are comfortable in their ignorance about the exact nature of consciousness and self. However, they’re only comfortable with it because they’re pretty confident that there is a rational materialist explanation even if science hasn’t uncovered it yet. Then there are those who love telling you that that experience of having a soul is an illusion (delusion?) probably arising from evolution. I haven’t met, though, an atheist who believes in souls in anything approaching a transcendent way.
Midget Faded Rattlesnake: #55 “You posit the rule: “If you seek transcendent meaning, you can’t be an atheist,” which is equivalent to, “If you are an atheist, you can’t seek transcendent meaning.”
Correct. The atheist, who is a materialist, has ruled out transcendent meaning. Any urges in that direction are the result of digestion, an electro-chemical imbalance in the brain, or some other recognizable physical process having nothing to do with transcendence.
KC,
I’ve been trying to answer your introduction, in paragraph three, of the idea of life having meaning. As soon as I read or hear an assertion or question about life having meaning, I interpret it as an assertion or question about at least one of the following:
– there being a reason to stay alive,
– the speaker’s or writer’s life having a purpose,
– the speaker’s or writer’s life being understandable
– the speaker’s or writer’s world being understandable
None of these seems to require a creator who assigned this purpose, this order, this intelligibility.
Or, is this an instance of my misunderstanding of an important term ?
Assuming, as usual, that the commas denote a nonrestrictive clause, you’re asserting “the atheist” (i.e, every atheist) is also a materialist. Which doesn’t square with my experience of atheists. Some atheists are materialists, some are not.
Bloom differentiates between Marxist atheists and Nietzschean atheists.
See video.
With those as context, then, how would you answer the question: if there is no God (or even the demands of Nature), why bother inventing a purpose? You don’t owe anyone an explanation.
It’s not a gotcha or trick question.
One of Nietzsche’s arguments is precisely that we have an interior longing that drives us to seek an answer to the question: why am I here? According to Nietzsche, we don’t owe anyone an answer. That’s the point; either the answer is grounded in a creator God, or there is no answer.
So if you already posit that there is no God, there’s no need to keep asking the questions.
KC, am I wrong in suggesting it was Nietzsche’s ultimate aim to find a new answer to that question? Or create an answer. Something which he could never do.
The question, “why am I here?”, seems to assume I was put here by someone else who had a purpose in putting me here. If that’s what you, and many others who ask it, mean by that, it begs a crucial question.
I just consider that I simply am here. Given that, if I want to be happy while I’m here, I need to find something I love, and that enough people will pay me for, and do it. There is no “why” in the sense I think you mean.
And, I’ll most likely need to find someone I love and spend my life with her.
And, if I love helping people, I need to do that — with their permission, of course.
I also happen to love understanding things as deeply as I can, and seeing things as clearly as I can.
All these things become my purpose, give my life purpose, are the reason I go from day to day.
Owen, you have articulated the modern misinspiration of Nietzsche that so concerns Bloom. What he calls “modern American common sense.”
I’ll hie myself to my library and look that up; or does the video explain that?
The video here is part 5 of 5 on Nietzsche. There are others. He touches on many of the same themes in these videos but Closing is its own thing.
I’m a non-materialist atheist who believes in free will (a soul?) based on observation. It irks me to be told by theists I’m not allowed to use that word to discribe myself because I don’t fall into their well defined notion of what the word means. Agnostic is completely inadequate.
Is math the reason for existence?
Can an atheist believe in free will
If not a deistic transcendence, then what is the nature of the transcendence? What is there aside from and outside of material?
I have trouble understanding what questions like this are asking. What is transcendence? I don’t have definite answers for the why, all I know is free will exists, because it’s obvious, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s math that “transcends” everything. I think math exists outside anything material. If there’s a God, math exists independent of Him too. Math could be God, but I don’t think God created math.
Well, speaking as someone who does think God created math, I still think even atheists would find math rather hard to think of in purely physical terms.
I think it’s natural for the human mind to consider abstractions such as planes, lines, and points more real in an important sense than any material approximation of these abstractions that we could construct.
I figure a diehard materialist could never look at a dot on the chalkboard and say, “Yeah, that’s a point.” No, he would owe it to his materialism to say, “No, there isn’t a point on that blackboard. Rather, there’s a very small smear of chalk molecules. I can imagine a point from that, but the point isn’t really there.” Except life goes more smoothly, in most cases, if you think the point really is there. And so the existence of purely immaterial things takes priority over their material approximations.
My sticking point is I can’t imagine logic and self consistency needing to be created.
They might seem more real (Platonic view) because they — abstractions — are the units the mind directly perceives and manipulates. But they are derived from a prior, external world (Aristotle), without which they could not exist.
I might agree. However, if not created then what’s the alternative aside from what follows from the facts of material existence and the nature of differeing material and it’s interactions?
That second thread looks familiar, but I’m having difficulty believing that I would have refrained from commenting. Perhaps it was a rare occasion on which I showed restraint in the face of lack of knowledge of the subject matter. Free will in action.
Interesting, though. So if I’m understanding you correctly: you’re not a materialist because you believe in free will, and free will is incompatible with materialism, so therefore materialism loses out, though it may be plausible in other respects. Close?
I think I’m following and agreeing, but to clarify: understanding and valuing the immaterial (e.g. points and planes) and using it in practical ways doesn’t preclude materialism, right? Nor does it preclude deism (assuming I myself am mostly internally-consistent).
I’m still scratching my head at a non-materialiast atheist. I can’t conceive of how that circle gets squared. For those you know personally, what is their view then?
I see in one pf the posts that Mike linked to, Joseph Stanko put forth things like crystals and chakra and such as examples of non-material atheism, but I’m not so sure. Depending on the individual and what they actually believe about those things, I would think they still fall either into the deist or materialist camps (either there is a supernatural power governing these things, or these things follow from the properties of material existence – they’re just not well understood or easy to harness).
Today’s Pearls Before Swine