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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
I think the correct term is dualism. We obviously have a material brain, and something about our brain gives rise to “libertarian free will” manifested in the choices we make. All I really know is I have free will; I have choice. Determinism is false. Choice is constrained by a lot of things (It’s very difficult to change my preferences), but there is still always a choice.
I’m not sure what “though it may be plausible in other respects” means. If you’re referring to something in the post I may just not be remembering what I said.
Why must we choose, though, between the “Platonic” and “Aristotelian” view of these things?
If you say these abstractions only “seem more real” but aren’t “really real”, you’ll soon come to an impasse when doing proofs. For example, if you were to decide there’s no such thing as points because they’re an abstraction, only very small blobs of material, what’s to stop you from saying that two parallel “lines” (in reality very long, thin, straight things) can pass through the same “point” (in reality a very small blob) without being identical? No, in mathematics, it really does make sense to treat the abstractions as more real than their physical approximations.
In an engineering problem, on the other hand, sometimes you won’t get anywhere until you realize you’re dealing with a concrete object, not abstract geometry. That pivot point in your machine isn’t really a point, after all, merely a relatively small bit of material. Maybe a lot of the time you can safely ignore the material and treat it as a point, but surely not all the time.
The human mind seems perfectly capable of switching between prioritizing abstract reality and prioritizing material reality without causing some philosophical crisis.
For some reason, mathematical objects come into existence. Maybe God chooses which mathematical objects appear in order to create the universe, or maybe they occur spontaneously simply because they are logically consistent.
It certainly doesn’t preclude deism. It might not preclude materialism; however, maintaining a consistent materialist mindset while manipulating these objects adds so much unnecessary complication that I think there are fewer genuine materialists out there than there claim to be.
Whereas I have enough affection for the absurd that I’m at least capable of wondering what existence would be like if logic and self-consistency hadn’t been created.
I don’t have the sense that, when I’m proving a theorem, I’m considering the abstractions as more real than the material entities they model. I don’t think about their reality at all. I’m not aware I’m even thinking of them as models of external reality. I go from statements I assume true at the start, via logically manipulating/processing them, to the truth of the statement I was trying to establish. A consideration of the reality of the abstractions — or their place in a hierarchy of degrees of reality — does not seem to be part of that process.
Are you suggesting that it is, but that I don’t know that?
I’m not understanding how materialists would be troubled by abstraction.
Yet our intuition guides our attempts to logically manipulate things, and, all else being equal, “better” intuition results in more-efficient attempts at establishing logically valid proofs.
Sort of. I’ve observed that when something is more intuitive to us… it seems “more real” to us, more meaningful, less like a “mere abstraction”.
I believe a “better intuition” about X corresponds to a stronger “belief” that X is real and meaningful. This “belief” is typically never articulated, so we tend not to notice it – we may not even be aware that we “believe” it. Yet it influences us nonetheless.
No. “Some atheists are materialists, some are not” does not cause one to aver that a non-materialist atheist is not an atheist.
You merely assert that every atheist is also a materialist, but that contradicts my observed experience, so I naturally disagree with your assertion.
You said earlier that “agnostic” is inadequate, but based on your follwuup statements I would think that “atheist” is even less adequate than “agnostic” for your particular views. In one of the other comments above, you’re basically saying: “I don’t know” to the God question. Isn’t that classic agnosticism rather than atheism?
To give a “concrete” example (heh), theologians reason about God. Most of them are substantially helped in this endeavor by their belief that a God exists in the first place.
While it’s not impossible to reason about God absent a belief in God, in practice, doing so is considerably more difficult that reasoning about a God you’re convinced exists.
More generally, it is typically easier to reason from premises that you accept than from premises you do not accept. People tend not to find reasoning about counter-intuitive things very motivating, so they tend to do worse at it. One reason why, when we encounter something counter-intuitive but real, it’s in our interest to change our intuition to match reality.
Well, my feeling is when people say “atheist” they tend to mean they don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian (or other personal/creator) type of God. Agnostic implies (at least to me, and I think to most people) you really have no strong opinions on the matter. If you need to pin down the word atheist into some rigid definition, then you’re going to define nearly everyone out of it which makes the word less useful. Then you are left with a whole bunch of people that don’t have a best word to describe themselves because they are told they are not allowed to identify they way they would like since it doesn’t conform to your idea. Why can’t there be different types of atheists?
When I say atheist, it means I’m pretty sure if there is some god it’s really really unlikely it resembles anything anyone worships. Thiests seem to be the ones trying to define all these types of atheists as something else, and it feels to the atheist that thiests are trying to make themselves more confident in their belief by defining the number of non-believers as small and unflattering as possible.
I’m pretty sure I agree with the part in bold (the last quoted paragraph; the danged comment link grabbed too much text).
I take it this observation is from introspection. I’m a pretty good introspector, if I say so myself, and I haven’t observed that, and I don’t consider it true, BUT … it sounds like it might be true, so I’ll chew on that and be vigilant.
Have you read George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God? I think he does a pretty good job (though, of course, I can’t prove it wasn’t harder than if he’d been a believer).
Moreover (this is how an atheist might put it), isn’t it likely that someone starting out irrational (by believing in an impossible being) has already compromised his rational integrity and might be more likely than a non-believer to further do so in trying to reason from that irrational premise?
Maybe not. There are people who are motivated by a love of reason itself, and highly value logic, consistency (probably actually a subset of logic), and a strict, honest adherence to them.
Why question motives so broadly? Don’t you concede that your definition of atheism is novel even if mine is inaccurate? Otherwise, discussion of the terms is meant to facilitate communication: if I’m operating under one meaning of atheism and you’re operating with a different one then it’s going to be difficult to have a meaningful exchange.
It has nothing to do with bolstering faith or marginalizing atheists. Either you are an atheist or you’re not. Based on what you’ve described and on what I understand the widely accepted meaning of atheism to be, I’d say you’re not atheist. I could be wrong about either my understanding of your view or of the widely accepted meaning of atheism. That has nothing to do with you.
Sorry to have been away from my own thread. The posts make for a very interesting conversation. Let me add a couple comments, though.
Even for the most rabid Catholic, as I am, I don’t pretend to have a definitive and precise understanding of God. That’s why my church spends so much time talking about “mysteries,” because we acknowledge upfront that an anthropomorphic God is at best an approximation of the reality.
But then the next question follows … you’re “pretty sure” a god wouldn’t resemble anything anyone worships. Well, why not? If you’re simply projecting a skepticism about human knowledge, we can respect our limitations with humility without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the unstated premise to your argument is a skepticism that the creator of the universe would actually communicate anything about himself, at least in a way that we insignificant humans would understand. And that is far from an obvious or automatic assumption.
It may come off as too broad. I’m thinking about specific cases. Atheists are often treated as one-dimensional and broadly negatively as Muslims are by some on this site.
I don’t believe it’s novel to say that when people say “atheist” all they really care about saying is they don’t believe in gods of mainstream religions, and are extremely skeptical of anything that seems supernatural. They might also be materialists and declare certainty in no god because they really want to be a jerk about it. But there are a lot of nuanced atheists who don’t claim certainly about the possibility of a first mover. But since atheists can imagine a universe without a god, adding a god seems to be making things more complex than they have to be.
I agree. I think the one theists tend to use is too simplistic and they tend to tell a thoughtful atheist that they’re “not really an atheist.” That doesn’t facilitate communication either. It tends to just peeve people off.
OK. It still bothers me when people say I’m not allowed to identify the way I wish. Or worse, call me something I don’t feel I am.
Because it almost always requires believing something absurd. That’s the only way you can have a meaningful sizable religion. Everyone professes they believe the same strange thing that goes against reality. Otherwise religion doesn’t have much purpose and you don’t develop cohesion and you can’t signal your fidelity unless you can profess belief in the most controversial aspects that makes your religion unique.
What are some things that makes Catholics unique and strange? That communion is God’s actual flesh and use of birth control is always evil. So these are the aspects that tend to be emphasized the most by the strong adherents – so they are able to show their higher commitment.
I don’t know that I follow. As far as I know I’m not more skeptical about such things.
If such an atheist doesn’t believe in the supernatural (certainty is impossible, strictly speaking; like Midge said, we’re talking about probabilities), what else is left aside from the natural – i.e. materialism?
It has nothing to do with feeling or identity. It’s dependent on whether your beliefs and the strength of those beliefs coincide with the meaning of the term.
If you make allowance for the real possibility (not of the “anything’s possible” variety) of the supernatural then even by your definition you’re not really an atheist. And if you don’t allow for the supernatural, then how is that anything other than a materialist?
I said I believe in free will, and as far as I can tell there’s no material way to explain that. Call it what you will. I never said I “don’t allow” for the supernatural, but I am skeptical until I am convinced by evidence.
Well, let’s unpack these a little more, and that should shed some light. I don’t want to make this a birth control thread, and I only want to refer to it because it’s a cautionary tale for the cultural shifts that Allan Bloom was talking about.
The birth control thing is a classic example of how these “battles” evolve, and the history and underlying logic gets forgotten. Birth control is a historically recent battle. The underlying battle is really about natural law and technology. The Pill is what provoked the battle, and that was invented within my lifetime.
What you now label as an “absurd” belief was once the dominant assumption, just a couple generations ago. In the time of the American Founders, natural law was considered an “of course” assumption. Of course there is nature; of course we must respect it; of course we should not disrupt what nature has so delicately designed to work in harmony. Not absurd at all.
But as human beings became increasingly better at technology, we got to the point where we could artificially “fix” some of nature’s flaws. These days, popular culture and the legal profession confidently assert the right of each individual to exploit whatever technology is needed to avoid any unpleasant outcomes. But that assertion is historically recent; until recently, the belief in a natural law that should be respected and not tampered with was the far more common view. Its dominance is now all but forgotten.
The mere fact that the Catholic view of natural law is no longer dominant doesn’t mean that it’s “absurd.” It would be historically naive to think that. And it would be mistaken to go from that naivete to a general assumption that religion forces its believers to promote “absurdities” just to prove their faith.
KC – I didn’t mean to associate the birth control thing with the word absurd. Putting that aside, each religion has beliefs out of the mainstream or that don’t comport with reality. The way one signals commitment to the faith is to be adamant about the things people outside the religion are very unlikely to agree with.
Since presumably each religion’s God is tied to unlikely and often outlandish claims, unless you see the faith (of most likely your parents) as a special snowflake there’s little reason to think the God that maps to those beliefs is going to happen to be the real one.
You make a point that Pope Francis and Benedict (among many others) have made; we often focus on our differences to the point of blindness. That’s a fair criticism.
For me, I don’t find that as a stumbling block to religion, because I see that as a weakness of living up to the religion rather than a flaw in religion itself. Yes we have differences, yes we believe those differences are important – but we should be able to deal with others despite the differences. I don’t see that as invalidating the religion, just a warning about being a jerk about it.
Midget Faded Rattlesnake: #100 “You merely assert that every atheist is also a materialist, but that contradicts my observed experience, so I naturally disagree with your assertion.”
Since we now live in an age where the old meanings of words are up for grabs, finding that there is such as thing as a non-materialist atheist is not overly surprising. So long as one has no consideration for the idea that words should have consistent meanings, this is a perfect age to live in.
Transcendental disbelievers in any deity. Or is it transcendental disbelievers in materialism? Hard to have a conversation with such a person. Bi-polar perhaps. A bit of medicine might solve that problem.
Mike H: #110 “It still bothers me when people say I’m not allowed to identify the way I wish. Or worse, call me something I don’t feel I am.”
If I were to tell you that I am a Roman Catholic, an American, a United States Marine, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a whole bunch of other things, that would be true. How I “feel” about any of them at any given time is irrelevant. I am not those things because of an emotion or a feeling. I am each those things because of a fact.
You’ve taken a position which means that you’ve described something about yourself. If that position is described by a particular word, it is a start on us finding out about you. Is there more to you than that word? Undoubtedly. Yet that word is a start and it does tell us something about you.
If that is the wrong word, then enlighten us.
Mike H: #103 “When I say atheist, it means I’m pretty sure if there is some god it’s really really unlikely it resembles anything anyone worships.”
By way of a historical fact, the early Christians were deemed to be atheists because they did not worship the gods of Rome or Greece or Egypt. They weren’t atheists but they weren’t polytheistic either.
They were also accused of being cannibals because they ate and drank the Body and Blood of their God.
Sometimes you just can’t do anything right.