Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions.
When the revolutionaries of France began building their new order, they knew it would have to include religion. Even the atheists among them saw that the people needed comforting rituals and sanctioned celebrations to usher them through life. The Christian God, however, had been sent to the guillotine; an alternative was required. Their answer was the Cult of Reason.
Just like old-style religion, the Cult had centres of worship, virtue-stiffening sermons and a calendar of festivities. These climaxed with the Fête de la Raison of November 1793, for which churches across France were renamed “Temples of Reason”. The altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame was replaced with a model mountain, atop which a mini Greek temple stood dedicated “To Philosophy”. Beside it burnt the Torch of Truth and the lengthy proceedings culminated with the appearance of an attractive women dressed in red, white and blue embodying the Goddess of Reason.
But the Cult proved short-lived, and as the revolution consumed itself, a chastened Catholicism crept back into France. The fundamental tension, however, remained unresolved: between, on the one hand, the views of an expanding educated class who saw the many holes in Christian doctrine, and on the other, the people’s need for guidance and meaning that the Church had long fulfilled.
This tension between religion’s intellectual implausibility and its emotional satisfactions remains unresolved to this day. As a result there is a pattern to western thinking on religion since the Enlightenment: first the intellectual classes gleefully declare God dead, then they set to worrying about what, if anything, is to fill the God-sized gap He leaves behind. The Cult of Reason was one answer to this puzzle. Now, after God’s recent execution at the hands of the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and co), a number of thinkers are again asking whether, even in His absence, we need religion regardless.
Guilty, but not responsible?
The US neuroscientist Sam Harris claims in a new book that free willis such a misleading illusion that we need to rethink our criminal justice system on the basis of discoveries coming from the neurological wards and MRI scans of the human brain in action.The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated in the 1980s that activity in the brain’s motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Subjects were hooked up to an EEG machine and were asked to move their left or right hand at a time of their choosing. They watched a specially designed clock to notice what time it was when they were finally committed to moving their left or right hand. Libet measured the electrical potentials of their brains and discovered that nearly half a second before they were aware of what they were going to do, he was aware of their intentions. Libet’s findings have been borne out more recently in direct recordings of the cortex from neurological patients. With contemporary brain scanning technology, other scientists in 2008 were able to predict with 60% accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made that choice (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet).
Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s actions. The discovery that humans possess a determined will has profound implications for moral responsibility. Indeed, Harris is even critical of the idea that free will is “intuitive”: he says careful introspection can cast doubt on free will. In an earlier book on morality, Harris argues
Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusionBut a belief in free will forms the foundation and underpinning of our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The US supreme court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our entire system of law.
Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behaviour in question. In Free Will Harris debates these ideas and asks whether or not, given what brain science is telling us, criminal justice, in focusing on retribution, rests on an entirely false basis. An example he gives is a murderer who kills because of a brain tumour. This person is a victim, not a criminal. The tumour is the cause of his crimes. People imagine that the normal brain is a different story. But in fact the study of any criminal brain, says Harris, is the equivalent of finding a tumour in it – the wrong genes being transcribed, the brain being dictated by events over which he has no control. Human choice, says Harris,
is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.Clearly we need to lock up dangerous people. But there is no sense to the idea that they somehow deserve it. Retributive justice is like requiring us to hate, as well as shoot, a wild animal who escapes from the zoo.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought… There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.
The Zombie Within
The zombie within: the idea that we don’t know what we are doing, or where we are going, when we think we best know, is an old one. (The words I’ve just paraphrased are Emerson’s.)
James Atlas, in a recent New York Times article, is probably on to something when he notices that there has been an explosion recently of what he wittily calls Can’t-Help-Yourself Books. These are books that take as their starting point something like the idea that science now teaches us the “choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system” and that, therefore, in some sense, we are not really the authors of our own actions, responses, choices.
Today I want to come at the question of whether we are really controlled by a neural zombie deep within by considering one route that might lead to that conclusion. This has to do with how we think about thinking, action and the intellect.
Consider that a novice basketball player needs to think about the mechanics of how to dribble; doing so — concentrating, paying attention to hand, wrist, ball, etc. — improves performance. But not so for the experienced player. It isn’t just that that he or she doesn’t need to pay attention to ball handling to play well; it’s that fluent and skillful performance will be disrupted if she does. This is a general fact about expertise. Pick your favorite example. A chess beginner needs to think about the rules governing how the pieces move in order to play. That layer of thinking recedes into the background for the advanced player, freeing him up to pay attention to the things that matter for winning, such as tactics and strategy.
It’s tempting to say that the contrast here is between thinking and not thinking, or being conscious and being a zombie. The expert leaves the plodding, deliberative mind behind and enters “the zone,” captures “the flow,” lets the zombie within guide the fingers as they race over the neck of guitar, or the hands and feet as they (not “you”!) work the pedals and gear shift as you accelerate to overtake on the high way.
But this gets what interests us wrong.
Yes, athletes, musicians, drivers and chess players, when they are in the flow, can act fast without needing to make decisions about what to do. But this is not because they aren’t thinking. Nor is it because they are thinking really fast. It’s because they are thinking about what matters, such as the musical ideas or the traffic or the potential vulnerability of the King to attack. Mastery consists precisely in shifting attention from the mechanics of a task to, if you like, the task’s point.
Nothing illustrates this better than the case of language itself. We learn to decline and conjugate so that we can talk. The learner of a second language needs to give painstaking attention to grammatical choices and rules. But conversation — thoughtful participation in the parry and thrust, the give and take — requires that we stop focusing on the grammar and start focusing on what we are doing. What is required is not that we become automata, or forget the grammar; what is required is that we become masters of it.
Historically, we have tended to think of “intelligence” as a matter of deliberate judgment; we celebrate rationality. Agency consists of doing things for reasons: see, think, decide, plan, execute. This is the structure of human agency. If it should turn out to be the case that much of our action passes over the thinking/deciding/planing stage, then it would seem to follow that, at least much of the time, we are not the agents we think we are. If it should turn out that we act without deliberating, then, it would seem, we’re a lot less smart and in control than we think we are.
But this conclusion isn’t mandatory. We can and should reject the conception of intelligence and agency it presupposes. An expert is not simply someone who has learned to do what the beginner does but fast. The expert has an entirely different relation to the task. The expert’s intelligence and thoughtfulness shines not despite the lack of deliberation, but thanks to the freedom not needing to deliberate affords.
Sometimes not deliberating is the mark of our intellectual fitness, as when I answer your question without needing to ponder your grammar or my own.
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find… that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
(via doubtlr)
In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
Existentialism is a Humanism
It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Sartre accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism”, a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (‘existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.
…If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity; the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together… .
There is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever. This fundamentally unscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs.It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up.
The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
Even someone who both accepted anthropogenic global warming and believed that it was possible to do something about it might look at the odds and think that fatalism was the most appropriate response. As long ago as the 1990s, Al Gore admitted that ‘the minimum that is scientifically necessary’ to combat global warming ‘far exceeds the maximum that is politically feasible’, and many now seem to agree. Aside from the spike created by the Copenhagen summit in 2009, newspaper coverage of climate change has been dropping since 2007. Perhaps we should just acknowledge the problem, try not to exacerbate it too much and hope for the best. That, after all, is what most people have decided to do about the nightmare of the previous generation, nuclear weapons, and there is no reliable means of quantifying whether nuclear war is more or less likely than severe climate change, or whether its effects would be more or less destructive.
The real question is whether such fatalism is ethically defensible. The moral argument for preventing further climate change is easily stated. It is not just a matter of protecting the vulnerable from harm, but of taking responsibility for a harm that we in the industrialised North have both caused and benefited from. However, the worst effects of climate change are likely to be experienced by beings from other times, places or species, and as Stephen Gardiner points out, this allows us to rationalise our obligations to suit our inclinations, rather in the way that, in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood and his wife Fanny gradually persuade themselves that the large sum of money John had promised to support his stepmother and half-sisters really ought, in the best interests of everyone involved, to be reduced to nothing at all.
Global surveys already show that people who live in countries with high per capita emissions are less inclined to believe that global warming is a serious problem than those who live in hotter, more vulnerable countries with low emissions. But in this case it is not necessarily just a matter of self-interest prevailing over honesty and virtue. Climate change creates what Gardiner calls ‘a perfect moral storm’, within which it is difficult to keep one’s bearings. The key elements of this storm, which he enumerates with admirable – if exhausting – clarity, are problems of agency, the temptation to intergenerational buck-passing, and the inapplicability of existing political theories.
It is no secret that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, designed to bring the emissions of industrialised countries below their 1990 levels, has been unable to achieve its targets (or only with unexpected help from economic recessions), or that the Copenhagen summit of 2009 failed to reach any meaningful agreement at all. Such failures, according to Gardiner, reflect a fragmentation of agency: while it might be collectively rational for nations to co-operate on climate change, it is individually rational for them not to. Even greater difficulties are presented by what Gardiner calls the ‘pure intergenerational problem’. The current generation has nothing to gain from reducing emissions and every subsequent one has more at stake than its predecessor. In game-theoretical terms, this means that the current generation has no incentive to co-operate even if every other generation were willing to do so, and that the same will be true of the next generation if the present one has failed to co-operate and passed the buck instead. If successive generations were distinct in this way, it would never be rational to do anything about global warming. In practice, of course, they are not distinct, but even if future generations overlap with ours, they can do little for us or to us as far as climate change is concerned, so our relationship with them is effectively non-reciprocal.
If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.
He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.
Currently Reading
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
Consciousness is notoriously difficult to explain. On one hand, there are facts about conscious experience—the way clarinets sound, the way lemonade tastes—that we know subjectively, from the inside. On the other hand, such facts are not readily accommodated in the objective world described by science. How, after all, could the reediness of clarinets or the tartness of lemonade be predicted in advance? Central to Daniel C. Dennett”s attempt to resolve this dilemma is the “heterophenomenological” method, which treats reports of introspection nontraditionally—not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as data to be explained. Using this method, Dennett argues against the myth of the Cartesian theater—the idea that consciousness can be precisely located in space or in time. To replace the Cartesian theater, he introduces his own multiple drafts model of consciousness, in which the mind is a bubbling congeries of unsupervised parallel processing. Finally, Dennett tackles the conventional philosophical questions about consciousness, taking issue not only with the traditional answers but also with the traditional methodology by which they were reached. Dennett”s writing, while always serious, is never solemn; who would have thought that combining philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience could be such fun? Not every reader will be convinced that Dennett has succeeded in explaining consciousness; many will feel that his account fails to capture essential features of conscious experience. But none will want to deny that the attempt was well worth making.
Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Sartre accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism”, a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (‘existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
