Abnormal Interests

You are doing very well with the questions, Duane.

You are clearly right that there are transpersonal difference-makers over which we have no control. Looked at from the point of view of a phenomenology of religion, one or more names are given to such factors, and out pops a pantheon of some kind. But of course the pantheon is not reducible to the transcendent factors. There is a surplus of meaning that is lost when religion is done away with, and I think Beckett was sad about that.

Nietzsche, who swam daily in that surplus of meaning, felt betrayed by religion. Can't say that I blame him. On the other hand, it led him to be feel betrayed by life itself. The consequences, I think, were not healthy ones. Is it really true that modern atheists do w/o the dimension I'm calling "a surplus of meaning"? It seems to me that Ayn Rand and company are just as ideological as everyday garden-variety religionists are.

Perhaps the need that Beckett felt was not that far from the one that Camus (and Job) felt: a need for a moral order, an eschatology, a Judge.

I've often thought that if I were an atheist, I would still desire those things. To be sure, if life is going pretty well, and you enjoy good health and good plumbing, maybe not.

Or here is another way to put it: the experience of having a conscience is a pretty general one among human beings. Not only kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, but also radical altruism are ubiquitous, or at least far from rarely occurring. What is the explanation for radical altruism?

Human stupidity? I've always considered that the catch-all explanation within an atheist framework.

But I imagine you can set me straight on that.

Thanks for entering the conversation. I'll give Chris a couple of days to respond, see if anyone else jumps in, metablog thereto, and see where it goes.

If only Godot had showed up...

John,

Your reply highlighted the extent to which I misunderstood your first question. I understood it as asking if there needed to be something outside of the human condition that accounted for cultural and other differences you and I both celebrate. In that regard, I took the question as an effort to tease out evidence for a "difference-maker." I now see that you had something quite different in mind. I now believe, perhaps also incorrectly, that you are asking if there is a need for something, at the cosmological level, that makes a difference in the way a judge makes a difference in a court (or something in that neighborhood). With that understanding, I would decline to answer the question on the basis that it is improperly put in the same way as "What time is it on the moon?" is improperly put. The question as you put it entails a significant error. It assumes something that is not in evidence, a "difference-maker." If I where to ask, as a serious question, "Does a unicorn need to eat clover?" you would also defer. Your question is a little more nuanced than that but without evidence for a difference-maker there is no basis to discuss a need for one at that high level. If forced to answer, I would say, "It might be better if there was one or it might be worse, but since there isn't why bother discussing it.

In your reply your mentioned several things that, in my view, mudded the waters rather than clarified them. In what follows I will complain from time to time about problems of definition. While I hope you will take my complaints seriously, I know that a comment to a blog post is very limiting. But for us to be sure we are talking abut the same thing, definitions are important.

"Surplus of meaning:" John, I have only the slimiest idea what these three words might mean when strung together in this way and in this context. I sure I don't know what you mean by them. By most definitions and in most contexts "surplus" means "extra," "more than is needed" even "leftover" or "unnecessary." When applied to human thought(s), it implies a brake down in parsimony. At least it does to me. And "meaning," while it may exist independently of human thought, is only of value to humans when it is realized in human thought. Perhaps you think of this "surplus of meaning" as manifesting itself in emotion. But surely, you would not claim that atheists lack emotion or experiences and thoughts that engender emotion. From a somewhat different angle, a surplus of meaning may arise from any over determined problem. But most of our problems in life are woefully under determined. Many people, me included on occasion, introduce irrelevancies into our thoughts in order to make an underdetermined problem appear to be determined. At the end of the day, this is never helpful. Bottom line: As far as I understand your "surplus of meaning," I take it to be a bad rather than a good thing.

"A need for a moral order, an eschatology, a Judge:" I assume that these three things are somehow packaged together and have something to do with ethics. But without better definition, I cannot be sure. The moral order, and I think there is one, is based on an extrapolation from learned and natural behavioral patterns into increasingly larger communities and eventually to the whole world itself. No need for either "eschatology" or a "Judge." I hope that you are not implying that atheists cannot or do not or will not or need not act morally.

"Radical altruism (is) ubiquitous:" This may relate to your previous point but how is not clear. Here I think you did define "radical altruism" as a kind of altruism that is beyond kin and reciprocal altruism. Of course, I recognize that there are individuals and groups that reach out beyond their immediate kinship group and are altruistic to much larger, even worldwide, communities. However, I see no reason to think that this is not just a natural extension of reciprocal altruism. One of the characteristics of reciprocal altruism is that the giving party may not think in terms of reciprocation in any direct way. As the ability to learn about the larger world expands, many people come to see those new worlds as their extended kinship group. While such activity is ubiquitous in the sense that one sees it everywhere, the percentage of the population that actually practices "radical altruism" is very small. I do think and hope it is growing. But I think it is growing at about the same rate as the number of people who see themselves as a part of a expanding community grows. Note: In this paragraph, I have made a couple of claims that can be imperially tested. If they have been and you know the results please let me know.

I was a little put-off by your statement about "life is going pretty well, and you enjoy good health and good plumbing." What does such a statement have to do with the price of bananas in Turkey? Some people came to be atheists because life was not going well, some become theists under the same circumstances. Like everyone else, many atheists live through good times and bad without the need for an eschatology or a Judge. Like many theists, many atheist live their lives within a moral order and also like many theists, many atheists do not.

It is true that some atheists attribute theism to "human stupidity?" I think it also true that many atheists are more comfortable with large areas of ignorance than are many theists. But the phenomenon of religion (which I think differs from a "phenomenology of religion") is extremely complex. It's proponents have been among the most brilliant thinkers in the world. That doesn't mean that they were and are correct. Now, I'm going to use my own specialized vocabulary. I think you can understand it if you look at my post on Liver Models, Lung Models and Science (http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2007/09/liver_models_lung_models_and_science.html). Religion and beliefs in god(s) played an important role when the only science was deductive science. But modern human thought has the benefit of induction and abduction. In my view, there is no longer a positive contribution that comes from any "surplus of meaning." With these new tools in our thought arsenal, we are able to live with what we don't know every bit as comfortably (and as uncomfortably) as we live with what do know.

The fact that I so seriously misunderstood your question is indicative of the extent of our differences.

My goodness, Duane, you are good at this. Here I thought I was just warming up with you until the Hallq showed up, and you've just about KOd me already.

I especially like the part about atheists being comfortable with large areas of ignorance whereas theists, I suppose, think they know way too much.

As for the concept of a "surplus of meaning" being a slimy concept, well yes, why do you think I chose it?

I mean to describe something which cannot be read off from some combination of observation, deduction, induction, and abduction (I better look that last one up). There's a lot of it in the thought of Beckett, Camus, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand. It is a lot more than emotion or what have you.

My questions are: do these kind of surpluses not interest you? Assuming that they do, then their religious counterparts might interest you at some level as well. Then the question is: how does one adjudicate between competing surpluses? And so we're back to difference-making again, though we are still a long way off from a difference-maker with a capital "D."

John,

One of the most vexing things in the kind of discussion we are having is the introduction and use of concepts that are not well defined in exactly the places where precise definition is most required. I feel this has happen with the use of "surplus of meaning." I feel this way for two reasons. First, you yourself call it a slimy concept and seem happy with its sliminess. Second, it is hard for me to believe that "Beckett, Camus, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand" had the same thoughts in this neighborhood if they thought in these terms at all. I have read a lot of Nietzsche, a fair amount of Camus, some Beckett (and almost no Rand) and I am not sure that I see much like "surplus of meaning" in any of their works. But then, it was a long time ago that I read them. And as you pointed out in your post, this is not a exercise in the exegesis of these writers anyway.

You ask, "Do theses kind of surpluses not interest you.?" Because I don't know what "these kind of surpluses" are, I really can't answer that question. As far as I have any idea about them, I view them as bad, not good, as unhelpful, rather than enlightening. I wonder if this kind of thought process would even come up absent certain, in my view highly improbable, theological commitments. I don't mean to overly critical, but it feels a lot like "intelligent design." An entity not in evidence drives a thought process that must remain fuzzy to be rhetorically effective. But at the end of the day, it's no more than rhetorically effective and then only to the in-group. Such concepts end up lacking any meaning because they have too many meanings.

By the way, while I use deduction and induction in a rather technical way, I use abduction more informally to mean that set of virtues like parsimony, modeling, evidence aggregation, testability, etc that are the stuff of theory building. I see formal logic as the "language" of deduction and statistics as the "language" of induction but I am not sure abduction can even have a formal language even if some modeling methodologies come close to it.

Now I understand abduction better.

Let's take Nietzsche as an example. According to my definition, which, come to think of it, is actually precise, everything in Nietzsche's thought that does not derive from deduction, induction, and abduction would be surplus meaning.

How much is that? Just about everything, unless deduction, induction, and abduction are defined in ways that have nothing to do with the experimental sciences.

Nietzsche himself does not present his key concepts as derivatives of deduction, induction, and abduction. From his own point of view, they derive from the will to power, which is, furthermore, beyond good and evil.

Generally speaking, Nietzsche makes intuitive and brilliant assertions w/o anything but the loosest of arguments. He leaps, in his own words, from mountaintop to mountaintop.

I find it all profoundly interesting. Given how much you have read of him, I assume you do as well.

Yet Nietzsche had no interest in theory building as you define it. The avenues by which he gains insight are closer to those of religion than they are to the hard sciences.

My thesis: if it's the epistemology of religion that makes it meaningless to you, then the same should apply to what Nietzsche comes up with.

Is that what you want to say?

John,

I find this helpful in narrowing the semantic range of the expression "a surplus of meaning." I am looking for a specific example to work with. I know I am on dangerous ground here, but is graphic art an example of what you call a surplus of meaning? Or, perhaps better, is it a vehicle for that surplus or some combination of the two? I am exposing myself here because you no doubt know a lot more about art than I do. But if graphic art is an acceptable example, I'd like to focus on it. Please let me know and I will try to address how it is surplus and how it isn't and what I think it means if you concur. I would have chosen poetry, but I'm afraid you'd kill me with that example.

I do have two comments on your latest comments. First, I suggest that Nietzsche does indeed have theories although not necessarily scientifically rigorous ones. By my lights, not all theories need be scientifically rigorous; they only need to be evidence based. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says, "After examining philosophers between the lines with a sharp eye for a sufficient length of time, I say to myself: we must consider even the greatest part of conscious thinking an instinctual activity." This is not only a theory but Nietzsche tells us it is built on empirical observation. I'm not claiming his theory is true or false, I'm only claiming that it is an attempt at an empirically based theory. There are many other examples that I could cite.

Second, I do worry about the phrase "epistemology of religion." I do not understand how epistemology of religion differs from any other epistemology, if it does indeed.

By the way, I consider Nietzsche the second greatest humorist of the 19th century; I think Twain the first. But both of them were far more than humorists. The problem with both of them is that it is hard to certain where the joke stops.

Well, I still don't think that Nietzsche was interested in theories of the kind the experimental sciences put forward and test on a daily basis.

But I don't want to drive a wedge between the epistemologies of science and religion either. John Polkinghorne, I've found, has much of interest to say on the topic that backs up your point.

Still, religion - and Nietzsche - tend to be in touch with a range of things like instincts, dreams, and epiphany-like experiences that are thrown out of court in the hard sciences, at least in theory (I add the disclaimer because I've read a few biographies of scientists that give the impression that they came to their conclusions, not by trial-and-error experimentation, but by way of serendipitous intuition, but I digress).

Your example, art, is well-chosen. It's an interesting test-case. I happen to like both Picasso and Chagall. Picasso said that "art is a lie that tells the truth." I think that's true, but I don't see how its truth is testable according to an evidence-based standard. Here I go, with Picasso, making a truth claim, distinguishing things, for which I cannot reasonably expect ever to have in hand sufficient evidence to back the claim up.

Yet I'm not ready to give the claim up. Am I unreasonable to do so?

Not if there is a Difference-maker. But now I want to know if you feel comfortable making a Picasso-esque assertion, and on what basis.

Now Chagall. A friend of mine, and Chagall expert, Benjamin Harshav, assures me that Chagall was not a believer. The same holds for a famous Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai (you think I could leave poetry out of this?).

Yet the work of both is thought by believers and unbelievers alike to point to transcendental (I know; a somewhat ridiculous word; I didn't invent it), even religious truth. How is that possible?

Well, it kind of makes sense if the world we live in is intelligible and not quite intelligible at the same time, more or less as Shakespeare saw it.

I understand why a physicist might not be a Christian or Jew. The god of Christianity or Judaism is certainly not a working hypothesis of use to him or her. But I can also understand why a physicist like Davies or Einstein or a philosopher like Flew might be attracted to a god like that of Aristotle. Quite apart from religion, an Aristotelian kind of god seems an eminently reasonable hypothesis, even if it is hard to see how to adjudicate between it and the competition.

What am I missing here?

Darn it, John, I knew I should have chosen piccolo concerti as a test case but I was afraid you were the lead piccolist in your local symphony orchestra. After all, it is formally called a flauto piccolo. And with you knowing Italian and all.

In your most recent comment, you brought up several extremely interesting things a few of which I will address later in this comment. For now, I'd like to focus on one of them. Picasso comment "art is a lie that tells the truth" says it well. I do think that art can also lie. I think of some, but certainly not all, of the German expressionist works. Picasso's "truth" is in the neighborhood of what I think we are calling "meaning." Spoken lies, as Twain and others have taught us, also have meaning. And that meaning, whatever it is, is not necessarily associated with the thing depicted, if the work depicts anything at all. The whole range of modern and contemporary art has taught us that; but we see it already in the great still life paintings that are as old as the Romans and even in the earliest cave drawings. And I think we see the same thing in what at first glance appears to be the most "realistic" of all graphic art forms, photography.

So far I have been talking about "meaning" but not addressing what the meaning might be. For that, we need a very specific example. I would note that the mention/use problem comes up often in these kinds of discussions. I will try to be careful. Allow me to select a work of art that I see every day: a Hoi LeBaDang litho called "Along the River." It and a few other LeBaDangs hang on our walls. If you are not familiar with this work, you can download a scan of a photograph at http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/odds_and_ends/lebadang.jpg . Yes, I did choose it in effort to tilt the playing field a little in my direction. :-) One sees a riverbank with boats, the trees, and a house. The river stretches toward a lantern (the sun?). But the colors are dramatic. This is not a peaceful river, in that calm there is great danger even evil. Or is it that the danger and the calm go hand and had? I'm quieted and excited at the same time. I often look at the work as a source of peace when I am anxious. But I also look at it as a source of motivation when I am too complacent. So there is, at least for me, great meaning in the work alone. But, knowing that LeBaDang, a Vietnamese, executed it in Paris in 1972 enhances that meaning. And the fact that it is the first work of art Shirley and I acquired, not that we have acquired all that much, adds to its meaning when I look at. I think further meaning is contributed by the fusion of Asian and western (Impressionist) themes that LeBaDang brings to his all work. But I see no surplus of meaning. All the meaning can be accounted for on the surface of the litho itself, in the historical context of 1972 Vietnam, in history of art itself and between my ears. Where is the surplus?

Now I do think there is a surplus but not in any individual work. That "surplus" resides in the simple fact that art exists at all. What a wasteful animal we are that we spend energy on something other than feeding and procreating. Sure, other animals appear to do things for enjoyment alone but our species is way beyond the norm in these pursuits and we have been for a very long time. How long is a matter of debate among anthropologists. Some would couple this surpluses with the advent of language. Some would place both as recently as 70 KBP. I think many current options would put it much earlier, but not much earlier than two or three times that long ago. Here we do indeed have an interesting area for inquiry. I'm sure that all this is tied up with our unusually large Encephalization Quotient. We have obscenely big brains! And they are costly to have and to maintain. The reproductive advantage of such big brains is a matter of debate. Our females die in difficult deliveries and all of us must eat more to keep those big brains well feed. There sure seems to be a surplus here but I'm sure there is, at least in theory, a valid evolutionary explanation.

A lot more can and should be said about all this but this comment is already pretty long.

Now, briefly to a couple of your other points: I see it as irrelevant that a non-believe can inform the religions beliefs of a believer. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister, but little has informed my own unbelief in the way Bayes theorem has. On the other hand his Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures, 1731, has not been all that influential.

Several of your remarks seem revolve around what I call the "problem of the gods of the philosophers." That problem is that the god(s) of the philosopher (and there is a large pantheon of them) is/are not the same as god(s) as any religion. The gods of religions are extremely interesting and the gods of the philosophers are almost always boring. In my view, the attempts to identify a god of the philosophers with a god of religion have all been disappointing failures. I say this even though John Cobb is a friend of mine. Whitehead's god is not YHWH however much Cobb or Whitehead wanted it to be. From time to time, deism has tempted me. But on reflection, the god of the deists is just another god in the gaps. The fact that how the universe began is a very big gap doesn't make it something other than a gap.

I am please to hear that you "don't want to drive a wedge between the epistemologies of science and religion." It sure would be easier for you if you did.

Your lebadang link, my friend, is dead. Which is too bad; you got my interest up.

An atheist who finds the gods of the religions abnormally interesting, and the god(s) of the philosophers rather boring. That is a sweet combination.

I enjoyed your paleoanthropological riff. It reminded me of the time I traversed the Galilean countryside with an old kibbutznik and amateur paleoanthropologist who knew wads about every stone implement we came across (many! he knew where to go). He probably was an atheist, too, but he viewed his subject matter with such awe, I couldn't help hearing the melody of Psalm 8 in his voice.

The epistemologies of science and religion meld more than we know.

Sorry, I think I fixed the link but just in case try clicking here.

That is a beautiful piece you have. Since you said "Shirley and I" acquired it, I approached the piece from that angle, and identified the birds with the two of you. I don't see the boat and river you talk about.

My first thought: the capacity of art - and religion - to contain meaning, even meaning that goes far beyond that imagined by the responsible artist, is unsurpassed.

What part of the meaning of a work of art subsists within it? One part of the work's supposed meaning will be considered superfluous by one interpreter, but essential by another. How does one adjudicate between competing interpretations?

Sometimes I think differences in interpretation of experience are of the same order. One person looks out at the universe and responds with great and wonderful science. Another responds with something like the first part of Psalm 19. Truth be told, a single individual may respond in both ways.

(I'm going to play bait and switch with you here; you are free to do the same with me:) Now do you really want to say that the author of Psalm 19, who responds to the universe with the same disinvoluted freedom you and I respond with, when we react to a beautiful painting, operates at a level of surplus meaning in a negative sense?

Chris Hallquist has now responded to my initial challenge, and I've since replied.

John, I'm glad to see that the Chris Hallquist has joined the party. Not unexpectedly, he has taken a somewhat different and very interesting direction. While I will comment on one of your points in that conversation here, I'd will continue to pursue the line we have taken here.

I am a little amazed at what you see and, even more, in what you don't see in the LeBaDang. I am glad you liked it. I find most of LeBaDang's earlier works amazing. His oils are often surprisingly dark in a couple meanings of the word but his lithos have a rather joyful flavor even when they speak of danger and fragility as I think they do. In the last couple of decades, he has become a bit of an industry. He still produces a great work now and then but I think much of this work has suffered from his success. In any case, we both agree that the meaning need not be in the representation, so a discussion of why I see one thing and you see another is a little beside the point. Even if agreed with your interpretation of the litho, I find no surplus of meaning that is not accounted for anthropologically in the way I mentioned in my last substantive comment. Likewise, I see no surplus of meaning in Psalm 19.

I have been reflecting on Picasso's comment "art is a lie that tells the truth." I might agree with a comment like this about religion, "Religion is a lie that sometimes tells the truth." But the problem is that, unlike artists or at least unlike Picasso, believers are not willing to state that their medium of expression is based on one or more untruths, the existence of a god or gods being among these untruths.

One thing that you said to Chris (and I have read it on your blog elsewhere) relates to the supposed value of atheists and other unbelievers as "true defender(s) of the faith" as far as they perform a useful "task of pointing out the inanity and stupidity of wannabe apologists of the Christian faith." I know you don't mean this to be insulting, but in one important way it is. What if I were to say, "Believers provide an important service to unbelievers by serving as a foil to hone debating skills?" Perhaps you won't be insulted by it but you would see that it is both condescending and considerably off the mark.