The Philosopher and the Metropolis

Once again, I've been out on the tiles and enjoying my weekend rather than writing a blog post. Shame on me, I know. Anyway, that gives me an opportunity to dig back into My Rather Unimpressive Archives and pull out some pre-written material. I just took a quick look at the file, and apparently I wrote this in October of 2010, so that would have been shortly after I first moved to Guelph. An interesting time in my life that was. I hope that you enjoy reading a little about it. Before really getting into it, let me once again plug dutifully away for Philopolis Guelph, that most philosophical of festivals where you'll find presentations much like the content of this blog (though hopefully far superior in quality). The call for activities is still open, and we're excited to hear about your ideas. Submission deadline is August 26, and you should all submit something. Plug complete. Here we go:

The Philosopher and the Metropolis

I had an interesting experience in Toronto the other day. I wanted to take the underground, aiming to visit a friend who actually wasn't there anyway, but that's another matter. Anyway, I had some TTC tokens in my pocket, got them from a friend. (He's a Newfoundlander, not a Newfie mind you, and definitely good folk.) So there I was with my token and the machine wouldn't take it, so naturally I went to the guy in the booth. "The machine keeps rejecting my token," I said, offering up the chunk of metal as evidence. He took the token from me, examined it momentarily, handed it back to me and said, "That token's no good anymore, it's too old. They changed to new tokens ages ago because those others were being counterfeited."

            I'm from Montreal and so of course I never spend time in Toronto: I had only faint notions about how these tokens worked, and obviously no clue about their being changed. All I knew is, I was standing in front of the hand of anonymity, impersonality, inhumanity. The hand that always keeps you at arm's length. The Man in the Booth was as much a machine as the automated metal thing that rejected my token in the first place.

            What I had in my hand was a piece of metal, but it represented one ride with the TTC, duly paid for (remember what I said about my friend the Newfoundlander), but the man wouldn't let me use it. All he saw was a token that was too old; he saw neither the ride it represents, nor the guy who was standing there holding it. You know: me. "These tokens were being counterfeited? News to me. Well, this is a good one, so please let me use it. Do you think I counterfeited it? You need a reason to believe that it's a good token? Here's the reason to believe: I'm telling you it's a good one, it represents one trip. Don't you trust me? Is it really your nature to assume that a stranger is a liar?"

            There I stood, a man with a chunk of metal in his hand that used to mean something but that the machine doesn't like any more, talking to a man who used to be able to help you with such things. Now he stands behind a sheet of glass, looks at the token and tells you exactly what the machine tells you: token's no good. Of course, I'm a human being who could speak, and he's a human being who could hear. There is all the possibility in the world for us to discuss this and sort it out. I could have told him all those things I thought to say about trust. But like all the faceless, un-individuated individuals in the Metropolis, I didn't ask any of those questions, I didn't press the issue. I simply paid my three dollars and got on the underground without a word or a fuss.

A New Earth

*Foreword* Before starting this post, let me shamelessly plug the Philopolis Guelph festival of philosophy, taking place October 12–14, 2012. It's a festival that promotes public discourse on philosophy, especially looking to elucidate the impact of philosophical ideas on other domains of questions (including those in other academic fields), much like this very blog. We're currently looking for people to host activities, which basically means (in its simplest form) discussing ideas just the way I do here, except doing so viva voce along with a whole bunch of other people who are also interested, though we also encourage panel discussions, roundtables, etc. It's a lot of fun, and I sincerely hope that some of you will take the time to explore our website, with submission form. If you're wondering what kinds of ideas have been presented in the past, here's the schedule from our event in March, which will give you full descriptions of the activities if you click on them.

So, on to this week's post. In the last couple of weeks, I've discussed some ideas about rites, as well as a difference that I see between covenants in the Old Testament and in the New. In both of those posts, I believe, I've mentioned my wariness of Christianity as a metaphysical thesis. What I'm referring to as the "metaphysical thesis" of Christianity is the straightforward and (what some would call) the "obvious" reading of Christianity. I'd like to flag the fact that there are numerous apparent contradictions in the Bible, and so no reading is obvious. However, let's jump right in and discuss a little bit of what this obvious reading entails.

As I mentioned in my last post, I see the covenant of Christ as demanding of us that we love those around us, that we love them selflessly. As Kant put it, we should always be treating our fellow men (and women, though Kant definitely did not put it that way) as ends unto themselves, and never strictly as a means. So stealing is wrong because you are not respecting the inherent dignity and worth of a fellow person, you are disrespecting their right to property by taking that which is theirs and making it your own. We are never supposed to put ourselves before others in this way, we are always supposed to be selfless. Note here that the opposite of "selfless" is "selfish," not "self-interested." We can do things in our own interests, certainly; we just cannot put our interests before those of others. That's in Kant, too, as he says that we cannot use people strictly as a means to an end. We must respect them as an end unto themselves, but that does not prohibit us from also using them as a means to an end. This qualification is important, because it makes acceptable working towards mutual benefit.

However, in both Kantian and Christian doctrine (Kant himself was a devout Christian, so the congruence is not surprising), it's important not only that the outcome be mutually beneficial, but that the intention be to bring about mutual benefit. This is a pretty stringent condition to put on people's behaviour. In fact, the Bible claims that no one is up to this standard; humanity is inherently fallible, and strong as one's will may be, it is never strong enough to overcome all temptation all the time. Everyone lapses. And even if you don't lapse personally, you are a descendant of Adam and Eve: thus, you are stained with their original sin, which was to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. (The most compelling and interesting interpretation I see for that story: it's a symbolic representation of the dawn of rationality in humankind.)

So here we are, a bunch of sinners, an inherently weak lot of folks who are generally pretty good to each other but lapse from time to time. How, then, could we possibly fulfill our end of the bargain? How can we hope to achieve this impossible feat? The achievement of the ideal in reality is impossible in principle, as discussed in the comments section of my post about the Lord's Prayer. However, the New Testament speaks of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God conceived by the Virgin Mary, who lived an entire human life without lapse. This Godman is the paradox: he is the ideal instantiated, he is the perfect realized, he is the impossible achieved. And his sacrifice was to die to bridge the gap between unwaveringly loving our neighbours as ourselves, on the one hand, and on the other hand and our best, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to do so. His death is the symbolic taking on of the burden of our imperfection. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

We've got a pretty simple formula here. First, do your very best to treat everyone equitably. Second, recognize that ultimately your efforts will be insufficient, no matter how much you try. Third, chase after that ideal anyway, fully aware of the paradox, knowing that the sacrifice of Christ makes up the gap. That's our end of the bargain; that's our part of the covenant fulfilled. God's end of the agreement is that whosoever doeth that shall have everlasting life.

This is where the "straightforward" metaphysical reading starts to get murky for me. What exactly does that "everlasting life" entail? Many people take it literally, thinking that at the Second Coming of Christ, all the good Christians will be raised from the dead. This causes some serious issues for notions of personal identity, as treated quite comprehensively by Mark Johnston in his book Surviving Death. Johnston makes some compelling arguments that even raising "the same" body is extremely problematic. What happens to all the bodies that have decomposed, etc? There are serious problems trying to give a criterion in virtue of which it is still "the same" body, or "the same" person.

Johnston worries that these problems lead to darker consequences. Specifically, he worries that if death is the great leveler, then there's nothing to make being good worthwhile. If bad people get all the good stuff in life, and no one gets anything after life, then the value of the Good itself is seriously in jeopardy.

Johnston doesn't leave the Good in the lurch, though. He does offer us a way forward. To sum up very briefly, Johnston makes an important distinction between the self (me) and the person (David Brooke Struck, DBS for short). Let me illustrate with a thought experiment. Suppose I wake up one morning, look around me, see my house being relatively normal, etc. But as I pass by the mirror, I realise that I have a different body than I did yesterday. Instead of my good old normal body, I have some nice fit body. I look down and my hands are different, my stomach is flat, etc. The idea in imagining these things is that we can dissociate the field of consciousness, i.e.: that arena or field of presence in which everything in our lives is presented to us, and the person who is found at the centre of that arena out from whom that field of presence emanates. Johnston calls the field "the self" (i.e.: me), and "the person" is what's found at the middle of that field (i.e.: DBS, in my case).

The next question is to ask what we're concerned with when we talk about resurrection. Am I concerned that DBS be resurrected, or that this field of consciousness be resurrected? The body swap case that I just outlined seems to suggest that I'm concerned about the arena of presence and not the person. For instance, I'd be really worried if I, in the new body, were going to undergo some kind of very painful procedure, whereas I would have a different kind of concern if someone newly inhabiting the DBS body were going to undergo such a procedure. That latter kind of concern might be similar to the concern you'd feel if a friend were going to experience a bunch of pain (yes, bunches are the appropriate SI unit for measuring pain), but it's not self concern, and that's what at issue here. So says Johnston.

Johnston then goes on to suggest, through some rather complex arguments regarding "merely intentional objects," is that this self, this arena of presence, is actually determined by concern for the future. As in, it exists so long as the things that it concerns itself with exists. So if all you're interested in is the small and vulgar pleasures (to borrow a phrase from de Tocqueville) of Earth-bound life, then when those pleasures cease, life comes to an end. It's only going so long as the going's good, and when that good is entirely wrapped up in the self, it dies when you do. However, for the virtuous folks that value the benefit of other individuals equally, Johnston suggests that you live on (literally remain conscious) so long as other people are around to be concerned about. Major conclusion at the end of the day: Johnson tries to prove that bodily death is the end of the line for the self-centred, but for the selfless bodily death is only another step along the way for a consciousness that persists when the body perishes, and specifically because concern for the good of others does not end when your body does.

I agree with Johnston that there are problems trying to bring back "the same" body. I also agree that our concern follows the arena of presence rather than the person, as the body-swap-and-painful-procedure thought experiment was supposed to show. However, I don't agree that these things can be separated. My response here is to say that we can't actually imagine swapping bodies. We can imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a body that we don't recognize, but that's not the same thing as imagining ourselves living in another body. To illustrate the point, let me use an example (not a thought experiment). In my mother's house, I basically never wear my shoes. No one does, on pain of death by flaming bamboo shoots under the finger nails. However, every once in a while, I get my shoes on as I'm ready to jump out the door, and I realize that I've forgotten my keys on the kitchen table. Rather than laboriously untie my shoes, take four steps into the kitchen and four steps out only to put my shoes back on again, I'll sneak into the kitchen incognito with my shoes on. Strangely enough, the whole room looks different from up there. The heels of my shoes add about an inch or so to my height, and the room looks remarkably different from that perspective. Every time, I'm amazed. It's kind of charming to realize every once in a while just how much the particular features of one's body determine what the world looks like, and how seldom one is aware of any of that.

Turning back to my criticism of the thought experiment, I think that we can't actually imagine what life would be like in a radically different body. We would actually need to live in it to see what the world looks like from there. So what are we actually imagining? Simply the world the way it looks to us in our own body, but with another physical body attached to that perspective. Similarly, I argue that our memories and values, that which compose the person that we are, also plays a role in constituting our arena of presence (and actually our bodies, too). So the my body, my memories and values, and my consciousness all condition one another and can't be pulled apart. This means that the identity conditions for bodily resurrection make such a thing unrealistic to expect.

Following Johnston, I'll also want to establish a differentiation between the good and the evil. I want the good people out there to have something that bad people don't have. And it seems possible: for good as well as for bad people, I think that bodily death is the end. Finished. However, for bad people (who I'm defining here as selfish people, not just self-interested remember) what is good in the world is entirely tied up with their interests. So when they die, and they no longer have interests, the Good itself is gone. However, for people who value others for their own sake, treating them as means rather than solely as ends, the Good is not entirely dependent on their own lives. Simply put, death jeopardizes the Good for self-centred people, but it doesn't for people who defined the Good more broadly than their own self-interests.

So the integrity of the Good itself is something that good people gain by not being bad people. That's something. But what about all this resurrection business? What about the New Heaven and the New Earth, the Old Heaven and the Old Earth being passèd away (Revelations 21:1)? My stance is that the resurrection of which we hear so much in the New Testament actually happens within the time of bodily life. I used the example of walking into the kitchen wearing shoes to show the intimate connection between body, world, consciousness, and values. When one grows out of selfishness, that is to say, when one changes one's ideal of the Good, that has repercussions on the whole system. Seeing one's neighbour as one's equal, worthy of all the respect that we pile on ourselves, that drastic change in values (part of the person, e.g.: DBS) results in a change in the way that we see our world, our selves, our body, because all of these things are interrelated. So what is the resurrection? It's the fundamental change in one's world when one sees oneself in the other, recognising a fundamental equality among all persons and peoples. The world will just never be the same after that.

Turning back to some of the points I made in my "new translation" of the Lord's Prayer, these last points allow me to elucidate some of what I said earlier on. The ideal is never fully instantiated in the world, but one's values definitely condition the way in which the world itself is formed for us. Heaven, the ideal way that we think the Earth ought to be, actually conditions Earth, the place where we live out our lives day to day. We are brought into a new world, resurrected, when we drop our selfish values in favour of selfless ones. When the Old Heaven (the ideal of selfishness) passes away, so too must the Old Earth (the way the world appeared to us, as partially constituted by selfishness). The adoption of the New Heaven (the ideal of equality) brings along with it the New Earth (the way the world appears to us, as partially constituted by the value of equality). For those who remain forever selfish, there is only the Old Heaven and the Old Earth, and those come to a close when the curtain closes on the theatre of the mind (i.e.: at the time of bodily death). For those who take up equality instead, the New Heaven and the New Earth outrun one's own self-interest, and so when the body dies and the lights go out, the New Heaven and the New Earth just go right along trucking.

*Postscript* Anyway, now that I've probably got lots of people all riled up, ready to accuse me of heresy, etc, I'll sign off. I hope that you've enjoyed reading it, and that it will stir up some reflection on your part. For my part, writing this has been difficult, mostly because I've tried to make it a manageably readable length. I've tried here to boil down a rather drawn out argument by Johnston, as well as my response, and I hope that I've made myself at least a little bit clear. However, it rests on some pretty heavy philosophical stuff, so this short treatment probably doesn't do it justice. I offer a more lengthy and detailed response in a paper I wrote last year, and I would be happy to send that off to anyone interested. Alternatively, you can just read Johnston's book for yourself; it's actually quite palatable, even to the non-philosopher. If you do, I'd really like for you to read my paper as well, and hopefully send me your feedback.

A New Heaven

Back by popular demand (I know, I don't believe it either): blogging about religion! Last week I posted some thoughts on the Lord's Prayer, and was very encouraged by the response. Several people inquired about other thoughts I might have on religion, and so I caved to what was actually a shockingly small amount of pressure. But here goes.

I've said for many moons that I don't buy Christianity as a metaphysical thesis, but until now I haven't written anything public on the topic. For those who know only little (or nothing) about Christianity, here's a brief recap of what you've missed in the Bible. First, it comes in two Testaments, the New and the Old. That's 1.0 and 2.0 for those keeping score at home. The Old Testament is where one finds most of the biblical stories that we might encounter growing up: e.g. the Garden of Eden, Noah's ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, God passing down the 10 Commandments to Charlton Heston, God testing the faith of Job, etc. The Old Testament is actually a chunk of Jewish religious text (that Christians also adopt) composed of several books, though there are disputes about the order in which the books go. The New Testament, by contrast, is the most significant point of departure where Christianity diverges from Judaism. That section of the Bible is about Jesus of Nazareth, also known in swearing man's terms as "Jesus Christ" (and sometimes even as "Jesus H. Christ," though the origins and meaning of the H. are completely unknown, and the topic of much speculation).

Here I think it propitious to drum up an old line: a little education is a dangerous thing. There are many who learn about the Bible and adopt it as completely unquestionable, on account of the fact that it's the word of God. However, when one learns a little bit more, one realizes that in fact there are more biblical-type books, candidates for the canon if you will, and it was in fact groups of men who chose what to include and what not to, and what order they should go in. So, some critical reflection is needed here. First, how did they (and how should we) decide what to consider canonical text and what to omit? Second, and more importantly, what does it mean for the status of these texts that they are chosen and bound in leather and red letter by mortals?

Anyway, back to the Bible. The Old Testament contains a series of covenants between God and men. (Note here that I use "men" and not "people," not because I'm oblivious to the gender issue, but because God didn't make any covenants specifically with a woman, so far as I know.) Some examples of God's covenants: he made one with Adam and Eve that they could live in the paradise of Eden forever so long as they did not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or of the Tree of Life. Sadly, that didn't pan out. God later made a covenant with Abraham that if he would follow God's commands, then God would make Abraham the father of a nation. In fact, Abraham became the father of two nations: the Israelite people and the people who would later become the Muslims. The Ten Commandments were another covenant, this time between Himself and the Israelites.

The Ten Commandments are something we should talk about a little more. (Again, for the popularity of their story we are indebted to Charlton Heston, that gun-toting nut from whose cold dead hands the Ten Commandments were taken when he died before reaching the Promised Land.) The Ten Commandments are a set of rules that the Israelites were supposed to follow in order to remain holy in the eyes of the Lord, and to hold up their end of the bargain. In that respect, this covenant is entirely non-unique in the Old Testament. There are thousands of rules laid out in these pages; open to any page of Leviticus for examples. These rules are often quite explicit, and even more frequently seem to us quite strange. For all those who use Leviticus 18:22 as proof beyond any doubt that homosexuality is unholy, there are relatively few who follow the decree in Leviticus 19:19 that we are not to wear any clothing of blended cloth. That's right: y'all are a bunch of poly–cotton blend-wearing sinners.

My main point here is not to harp on those who would apply religious texts unevenly and uncritically, though that is also a really important topic that I should perhaps one day treat. No, the main point here is that there's a trend that emerges in the Old Testament that I don't find in the New. The Old Testament lays out a multiplicity of detailed laws, which are meant to serve as guides for our behaviour. In the New Testament, by contrast, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of God (to be fair, he said he was the son of God, but what I have written I have written) takes human form and begins to teach the Israelites. Now this Jesus character is a real rebellious cat: he doesn't work his way up the professional ladder through a series of peer-reviewed articles in respectable journals. No no, he just starts his own school. The Sadducees and the Pharisees, who are the leading religious scholars and teachers at the time, don't appreciate Jesus' teaching the folk, and when he starts to get a significant following, they have him hauled off, put on trial by Pontius Pilate and crucified. That was on a Friday, and by Sunday he's already resurrected and back up to his old tricks. That was the first Easter, by the way. And the statutory holiday on "Easter Monday" is just superfluous.

The interesting thing about Jesus' teachings is that he only gives his disciples one real commandment: to love one another as he loved them. This is where I see a real break between Old and New Testament methodology. Whereas the Old Testament gives really detailed and numerous instructions, the New Testament gives one simple instruction that entails the kind of detailed stuff one finds earlier in the Bible. For the math people out there, rather than giving us all the points that constitute a relation, and giving them to us piecemeal, Jesus gives us the function that we can use to calculate the points ourselves.

An important consequence of the position that I'm advocating here is that Christianity thus conceived can be a partner of culture rather than its enemy. (Not everyone agrees that this is a virtue, but I certainly see it as such.) Of course, what it is to love and respect the people around you is a culturally-determined factor, and so the decree to love one's neighbours is culturally variable. As the culture changes, so too do the concrete actions of the Christian follower. Conceived as a set of explicit rules, where the set of concrete actions deemed holy is static, cultural change is antithetical to Christian values. If there were indeed a time when wearing blended cloth was not a very nice thing to do to one's neighbour (and honestly I have trouble imagining such a time and place), that's certainly not the case now. Blended fibres are everywhere, they're ubiquitous. But I don't believe that to wear them is a sin.

Defined statically, Christianity becomes either an impediment to the evolution of cultures, or the culture just goes right along evolving and Christianity wags its finger at the sinful folks all around it. That depends on whether the culture tries to stick to the statically defined practices, or whether it just goes on its own merry way, Christianity be damned. Defined dynamically, I see Christianity as being able to demand the best out of any culture that it adopts. What could be more idyllic than loving and respecting everyone around us?

Proposed next topic: the resurrection. Thoughts?

A new translation

I'm constantly reminded that there are two topics that one does not discuss in polite (and/or volatile) company, and seeing as I've already discussed politics a little bit, I figured that I might as well go for broke and talk about religion, if for no other reason than to stir the coals and see what happens.

As a philosopher, many people find it completely dumb-founding that I could be a religious person. However, I seem to never find myself questioning whether the postulates of Christianity are true, but incessantly trying to figure out what they mean. That is to say, I question what it is that I believe, not whether I believe it. This is something that I find few people doing, or at least few people talking about around me, and my suspicion is that the apparent conflict between scientific findings and (what seems to me a very facile and un-nuanced reading of) religion has prompted many to simply reject the latter wholesale without inquiring into the matter of whether a more appropriate reading of religion might be possible, one that fits better with one's other beliefs about the nature of the world, what's in it, and particularly its beginning.

Anyway, those issues are all far too sweeping to address in such a modest forum as this, but one thing that I will address is rite. In particular, a certain rite that I think loses its impact because of constant repetition. I'm referring to the Lord's Prayer, which is recited every Sunday in every church of which I am aware. It's a beautiful piece of poetry, but what I notice about it, in fact what hits me square in the face every time I hear it recited, is that it comes out so much like a song. Those reciting it speak the words in a very particular way, always with the same cadence, and even with the same melody. The problem with that, of course, is that we seldom reflect on what is said, and the prayer thereby loses its meaning (or its power, if you're into that sort of thing). We don't think about the content of what we're saying so much as we spill out its form by rote, like if one were to write out the alphabet not by knowing which letter comes next in the series, but rather what the next shape looks like. (The alphabet song has an interesting effect on us as children worthy of note here: because the letters L M N and O are 1/16th notes instead of 1/8th notes as are the rest of the letters, that is to say, since they're sung at twice the speed, many children believe for a time that there is a letter called "ellemeno.")

My intention in this entry, then, is simple, though difficult. I wish to make the meaning of the Lord's Prayer resurface, and I will do that by offering a different interpretation of it. For anyone not familiar with the original, I will write it out at the end of this post.

(Warning, the following verse contains a good dose of platonism, and may therefore not be suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is advised.)

Here goes:

Righteousness and virtue,

pure by nature but not in it,

we revere and seek you:

that the Earth may be more full of you,

that we may follow your dictates more boldly and courageously,

and thereby bring about a better world.

Grant that our lives may be sustained,

that we may be forgiven when we falter from your straight and narrow path,

and that we may have the strength to forgive thus around us, for they, too, falter.

Let us not be tempted into vice,

and be spared the violence and the hate that vice promotes.

For you are the ideal

that inspires and drives us

eternally forward.

Amen.


Some might call this heresy, though such accusations these days are not nearly as widespread as they once were. (That's a sad thing, too: the world was a pretty exciting place when people were gallivanting around calling one another heretics.) I'm interested to see what reaction this will bring about, both from those who de-religify Christianity, and from those who think that that's what I'm doing here. I'll say outright that that is not my intention.

Here's the original, by the way:

Our Father,

who art in Heaven,

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

thy will be done

on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

But lead us not into temptation,

and deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

the power, and the glory,

forever and ever.

Amen.