“Atheists today are too often castigated as materialistic calculators whose
lack of spirituality sucks their universe empty of all beauty. Remembering [Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s argument for the non-existence of God in his short “The
Necessity of Atheism.”] gives us an opportunity to counter this stereotype and
to reflect on the aesthetic of enchantment with which a non-theistic world-view
can be associated. The works of Shelley join the novels, poems, songs,
sculptures, paintings, architecture and plays of generations of godless artists
in exposing the straw man of the desiccated rationalist for what it is, and
showcasing a humanist vision of life.” Andrew Copson, “Atheism's aesthetic of enchantment,” The
Guardian, April 2, 2011
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/02/shelley-the-necessity-of-atheism
I have been an atheist
since the age of 15. I was strongly
convinced, then, and am still today, by a number of arguments against God’s
existence. First, there is the problem
of evil, which has never been adequately answered by theologians. How could a good God create a world with so
much suffering? The atheist answer is
that the existence of so much suffering proves there is no God if God is
defined as the all-good, all-powerful creator of the universe. Second, there is scientific evidence for a
materialistic universe, and there is no need for immaterial things like God to
explain what is not yet been explained by science. Evolutionary theory, for example, gives us a
much better explanation of the emergence of human consciousness than any
religion. Third, traditional proofs for
the existence of God all fail for a variety of reasons. Fourth, as David Hume showed, the concept of “miracle”
is incoherent. Fifth, religion is not
necessary for morality. I will not go
into the arguments for atheism here, but if you are interested there are a
number of good books out there. In
short, I find it hard to understand how belief in God, immaterial souls, and
the afterlife can be taken any more seriously than belief in fairies. But I am not against religion. I think religion has a lot to offer us, even those
of us who are non-believers. I admire
religion for trying to deal with the fundamental issues of what it is to be
human, for addressing our deepest hopes, fears, and needs. Religion at its best is based on experiences
(for example of the presence of God in the world and in our hearts) which have,
for large numbers of people, given meaning to human existence. Philosophy of the non-religious sort, however,
handles these issues better because it is not burdened by the metaphysical
baggage associated with traditional religious belief. Philosophy
questions authority and allows us to doubt.
But I do not reject
religion because I believe in doubt. To
be sure, doubt is something I value. Although, for many, doubt can be a source of
pain, I enjoy it, at least when it is directed to the big questions. I not only enjoy the adventure of raising
difficult questions and trying to answer them, I enjoy the to and fro of debate
over these things. However, philosophy
does not just give me doubt. I love philosophy
partly because it gives me a suitable replacement for faith. That’s not to say that my belief in philosophy
is an example of faith. I do not have
faith in philosophy. Faith is belief
based on some scripture or on the say-so of some religious leader, and
philosophy does not offer anything like that, or at least it shouldn’t. In logic, the “appeal to authority” fallacy
happens whenever an authority is deemed to be higher than reason or
evidence. An example would be saying
that something is true because the Pope says it is true.
What does philosophy
gives me more than the joys of debate?
It gives me several quite different, beautiful, and systematic ways of
understanding the world, each offered by a single writer or by a school of
thought, ways that address some of the same fundamental issues addressed by
religion. Of course it is up to each
student of philosophy to not only understand and appreciate these systems but
also to oppose them and borrow from them in constructing one’s own system.
But before going into
that I will say a couple words about science.
Science is a wonderful thing and I am a great advocate of science. And most philosophers I know feel the same
way. I am not convinced that science is
the only path to truth, but I think it is a very important one. I, and most other philosophers, are happy
with sharing inquiry with science.
Philosophers typically ask and try to answer questions that science
cannot answer. Traditionally, whenever a
question becomes resolved or even resolvable by science philosophers happily
give it up. For example, philosophers no
longer are concerned with the ultimate building blocks of the material universe. We think scientists are doing the best job
that can be done with this problem.
So what do philosophers
do? They ask and try to answer a certain
kind of question. Most philosophical
questions take the form “What is X?” For
example, “What is truth?” “What is reality?” “What is man?” “What is law?” “What is beauty?” “What is art?” They then offer competing definitions or
theories of these things and argue about them. There are also the “Does X exist?” and “Is X
real?” questions such as “Does God exist?” and “Is nothingness real?” And we also ask the closely related question:
“What does the word ‘x’ mean?” For
example, you need to ask what is meant by the word “God” before you can ask
whether God exists. Of course not all “What is X?” questions are
in the domain of philosophy. Again, there
are “What is X?” questions that are best answerable by science: for example
“What is water?” I am not saying that
this question has finally been answered by scientists, but they are on the way,
and they are getting better and better answers every day.
However, there are other
“What is X?” questions, such as “What is moral goodness?” which are not answerable,
yet, by science. Religion provides
answers to some such questions, but again, religion does so via the appeal to
authority fallacy and its answers are metaphysically suspect. It is questions like these, or at the least
the important ones, that are the domain of philosophy. Philosophy then, sits in many ways between
religion and science. It is sympathetic
to aspects of each, but it follows its own path and its own methods.
It also turns out, and
this is equally important to me today, that art, especially great art (including
music, visual art, literature, dance, architecture, movies) also provides much
of what religion gives us, or gave us in the past, but usually without religious
belief. Although most people today still
seem to need religion, great philosophy and great art can, together, give us
all we thought we could only get from religion. Nonetheless, as I will argue, that does not
mean that religion is without value, even for atheists.
But, someone asks, what
about morality? Oddly, I suppose, I do
not consider morality a complicated problem.
Thousands of years ago Confucius, and later, Jesus, got it right. The basic moral rule is that you ought to
treat others as you would have them treat you.
This isn’t true because either of these people said it was true: they just provided the formulation of a basic
insight. The basic moral truth was
recognized much later by Immanuel Kant as the second formulation of the
categorical imperative: act in such a
way to treat people primarily as ends and not as means. Without this moral rule we would not be able
to function as a society. The more
people follow it the better off we will be.
There are also moral saints who go beyond following this basic rule in
helping others. I would say that their
acts are not only morally right but morally beautiful. (Since beauty is an aesthetic concept, we are
entering here into the domain of aesthetics).
The Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s is an example of something
that was not just morally right but morally beautiful. We can argue over this but I do not think
much more needs to be said about ethics, at least by me today.
You may ask me why I am
not an agnostic, especially given my natural skepticism. Agnostics, it is true, reject all dogmatic
belief. But an agnostic holds that,
regarding religious belief, there can be no knowledge one way or another. On the issue of God the agnostic just says “I
do not know…I cannot know.” But how does
the agnostic know that she cannot know about God’s existence or non-existence? Most agnostics claim to know a large number
of things in other aspects of their lives? So what makes the subject of God so unique? Some people say that you cannot prove that
God does not exist, and yet atheists
have come up with perfectly good proofs for that, proofs that just are not
accepted by either believers or agnostics. From the atheist perspective, evidence for
belief in God is pretty much on the same level is evidence for other spiritual
beings, such as witches, ghosts and fairies, that most people today actually
reject.
Can we ever be absolutely
certain of anything? No. Can we be reasonably certain that God does
not exist? Yes.
But earlier I was saying
that philosophy offers me something more than just non-belief, and I want now
to pursue that. Each philosopher has his
or her own perspective, his or her own philosophy. Being a philosopher is a matter of building
up, usually over a long time, an elaborate structure of ideas that helps make
sense of things. We philosophers generally
call this structure our “philosophical position.” Today I will be talking about
my own position (or perhaps, more modestly, my own hypothesis), and you
shouldn’t assume that I will be speaking for any other philosopher or school of
thought.
My point of view is based
not only on years of reading and writing about philosophy, but also, like many
other thinkers, on key moments of inspiration that have happened in my life. Few philosophers would admit this. But I would argue, perhaps controversially, that
inspiration plays as important role in philosophy as it does in religion, art,
science, and even in business and love. The idea of inspiration was originally tied to
religion: the thought being that the
prophet or mystic is inspired by god. However, philosophers, unlike saints, do not
take moments of inspiration as guarantees of truth, only as relatively reliable
guides towards inquiry. These moments,
to be frank, can be like mystical experiences.
Does this pose a problem? Does any
use of inspiration give the game away to religion? Does it imply the existence of a world beyond
our material world? I don’t think
so. I think that this material world in
which we all exist has some pretty amazing properties, one of those being that
it generates life, another that it produces consciousness, and another that it brings
forth creative thinking and dramatic insight.
One of the main reasons people become immaterialists is that they
shortchange what the material world, and the material things in it, including
us, can do. We do not yet know how this
world accomplishes these things or how we, as parts of it, accomplish them, but
this is no reason to hypothesize another world.
So, when it comes to
having insights, I just think it is amazing that there are moments, usually
after long study and hard intellectual work, when everything seems to come
together and ideas flow, when we have a real idea, a real insight into things. Again, belief in the value of these
experiences does not require belief in something non-material that causes
them. Moments of insight just are one of
the many surprising things the material world coughs up. Moreover, such moments are not limited to
philosophy, and can be found in art or, and it may be surprising for an atheist
to say this, even in religion.
So part of the basis of
what I will say is a certain kind of experience, an experience of inspiration
which is also, hopefully, or at least seems to me to be, insightful. Whether or not it actually is depends on how
its results fare in the battleground of ideas, and I am happy with that. Again, I do not think that these experiences
give what I will have to say any special validity. I do think that they are much like the mystic
experiences described by religious figures, although I have no way of proving
so.
The experiences I am
describing often involve a perception of unity underlying a great deal of
diversity. After a number years of
teaching philosophy I find such a unity between a wide range of thinkers. And yet this unity ultimately depends, I must
confess, on some rather unorthodox interpretations I have about each of them. I doubt that I would ever be able to make
this clear even to myself, and yet I do think that there is something like a
perennial philosophy, that is, some inner truth to philosophy itself, a truth
that is unfortunately hidden by superficial differences in language and
approach. The claim, in short, if I were
ever able to spell it out, would be that philosophers like Lao Tzu, Confucius,
Plato, Kant, Thoreau, Emerson, Dewey, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Dogon all
have a message to convey which is fundamentally the same, despite all of the
differences between their various theories.
The central idea is that there is a path of transcendence, but one that
is without God, without belief in an immaterial or transcendent realm, and
without souls that survive our deaths.
All of these rejected ideas are just myths that hide an underlying and
much more important truth.
So, then, what does this
have to do with speaking to a group of humanists. Just about everything. Humanism, I believe, is also fundamentally
committed to this way of seeing things, or at least something like it, i.e.
that there is no religious truth and yet there is something like a religion of
humanity, or perhaps of life, and that this religion (if we can call something
a religion that is without faith or God) has something to do with what Lao Tzu
meant by “the Way,” what Confucius meant by “humanness,” what Plato meant by
“the Good,” what Kant meant by the “transcendental unity of apperception,” what
Hegel meant by “the Absolute,” what Emerson and Thoreau meant by “Nature,” what
Nietzsche meant by “eternity” and the Dionysian, what John Dewey (the great
American Pragmatist philosopher) meant by “pervasive quality,” what Heidegger
meant by “Being,” and what Zen means by “satori.” Moreover, I think that the great religions
were trying to talk about this very
thing. They just got this all confused
with wishful thinking about the goodness of the universe and the existence of
an afterlife.
Why all of this talk
about inspiration and mysticism? The
perspective I take towards these issues is fundamentally aesthetic. That is, it focuses on aesthetic experience. There are all sorts of low- level aesthetic
experiences, for example the pleasure we take in a pretty dress, but there is
also what Dewey referred to as “an experience” which is the high point of
experience, and which is also aesthetic.
That is, experience itself is graded according to its aesthetic value. An experience,
or what Dewey also calls integral experience, has unity, a pervasive quality,
great intensity, and considerable complexity. In general, Dewey argued, we should have more
of such things in our lives, and less inchoate experience, which is the
opposite.
Aesthetic experience
should not be confused with artistic experience. Art plays an important role in aesthetics,
but aesthetics includes natural aesthetics and everyday aesthetics as
well. Aesthetics deals not simply with a
certain kind of experience but with the properties that give rise to it. Notable among these are the beautiful and the
sublime. Religious experience really is
just experience of these properties, as is also any profound experience of
nature or art. If you experience God,
that is a sublime experience in the sense that it has aesthetic intensity and
gives great delight, as well as being pretty scary. Edmund Burke said that both terror and
delight are essential to the sublime. A
better example of the sublime for atheists is seeing something dramatic in
nature, like a volcano, but from a safe distance, so that there is an element
of fear but a greater element of enjoyable astonishment.
Now when I said religion
is just experience of these properties that may seem unfair. The believer would say that the experience of
God is sublime precisely because God really exists. Since I deny that He does, but want to be a
bit fairer to the believer, I will say that the most profound forms of
religious experience are actually
profound forms of aesthetic experience. Religion and art, then, are closely tied. Religion may be said to come into being with
ritual and mythology. And ritual and
mythology are proto-art forms. Ritual,
of course, requires belief in God or gods and the earliest drama and dance were
ritualistic. But as religious elements gradually
disappeared from art performance, and as enjoyment of art no longer required
belief in spiritual entities, secular art arose. But it is still tied to its origins in
profound ways.
I have a name for my
approach to religion, a pretty clunky one as these things go. I call it “aesthetic atheism.” The combination may seem strange. Aesthetic atheism is a kind of atheism: it
is predicated on non-belief. However, at
the same time, it stresses the aesthetic, particularly the beautiful and the
sublime. I developed the idea out of a
dissatisfaction with more mechanistic and ham-fisted approaches to atheism,
like those of such recently famous atheists as Richard Dawkins and Daniel
Dennett. Aesthetic atheism is somewhat
more positive about religion than many other forms of atheism. As I have suggested, religion is predicated
on religious experience, and religious experience is very close in character to
the powerful and profound experiences we can have of art, nature, and
philosophy. Aesthetic atheism recognizes
this.
As I said earlier,
aesthetic atheism learns from the great philosophers, with the important
exception of Descartes who made no worthwhile contribution to this project,
whose logicism, over-reliance on mathematics, mechanistic view of nature,
hard-core dualism, and rejection of human imagination, made him an opponent to
all things aesthetic.
I want to end today with
some reflections on Immanuel Kant, who, although deeply influenced by
Descartes, managed to break away from him in important ways. Kant of course was not an atheist. He did believe in God. But he also systematically destroyed all of
the traditional proofs for the existence of God. What we were left with after Kant was
basically agnosticism. It would be best,
according to him, that we act as if
we believed in God. So Kant was deeply
ambiguous about religion. We cannot
prove that God exists but morality would be meaningless without God, and free
will would be impossible without the existence of a transcendent soul, or so it
seems. Because of his residual Cartesian
dualism Kant could not conceive of free will as just another word for the
amazing creativity open to us as material beings. (But there is one passage that seems to
indicate he could.)
Kant wrote three great critiques: The
Critique of Pure Reason, which showed that metaphysics has limits, in
particular that it cannot prove that god exists, although it can provide us
with certain a priori truths such as that everything has a cause; The Critique of Practical Reason, which
attempted to ground morality in the categorical imperative, and The Critique of Judgment, which deals
with issues of taste, beauty, the sublime, fine art and the apparent design of
the universe. By the time he got to this
last book he had a problem. He knew he
could not prove the existence of a transcendent realm, a realm of God, heaven
and the soul, and yet he thought he needed this realm to make sense of his
ethical theory. The Critique of Judgment, besides allowing him a chance to apply
his previously developed theories to art, aesthetics and nature, provided, he
thought, a solution to the problem of the gap opened up in his philosophy between
the world of experience and the transcendent realm. In my view, and I think in his as well, this
book was the culmination of his entire career. And the most important part of The Critique of Judgment comes when Kant
discusses what he calls the fine artist, which he also called the genius. It is in this discussion that Kant describes
what he calls “aesthetic ideas.”
Here’s a quote from Kant
on aesthetic ideas, which appears in Paragraph 49 titled “The faculties of the
mind which constitute genius”: (The Critique of Judgment tr. James Creed
Meredith. Oxford U. Press, 1952,) “Soul (Geist) in an aesthetical sense,
signifies the animating principle of the mind [for example when a poem is more
than merely pretty or elegant it has soul].
But that whereby this principle animates the psychic substances [Seele]
– the material which it employs for that purpose - is that which sets the
mental powers [e.g. imagination and understanding] into swing [by which he
means a free play] that is final, i.e. into a play which is self-maintaining
and which strengthens the power of such activity.” He goes on to say, “Now my proposition is
that this principle is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic
ideas. But, by an aesthetic idea I mean
that representation of the imagination [that picture or image] which induces
much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever,
i.e. concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never
get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible..” A rational idea by contrast is a concept to
which no intuition can be adequate. [For
example, you could never fully imagine God] Further, “The imagination (as a
productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were,
a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature. It affords us entertainment where experience
proves too commonplace; and we even use it to remodel experience…” And “By this means we get a sense of our
freedom” so that we can borrow materials
from nature working them up into something that “surpasses nature.” “Such representations of the imagination
[that is, aesthetic ideas] may be termed ideas.
This is partly because they at least strain after something lying out
beyond the confines of experience, and so seek to approximate to a presentation
of rational concepts [i.e. ideas like idea of God or other abstract ideas like
the idea of death]….thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective
reality.” [Notice he says
“semblance”: he is not really committed
to God’s existence here.] Further, the poet [meaning any artistic genius] tries
to interpret “to sense the rational ideas of invisible beings,” and other
religious ideas, as well as abstract ideas related to life.
Now I must admit that I
am going to give a somewhat unorthodox take on what Kant means by “aesthetic
ideas.” Kant might not have approved of
how I will go about using his notion. My
take on aesthetic ideas is that they are essentially powerful metaphors. They are not literal truths but rather ways
of seeing things. They are the central
force behind all sorts of creativity. As
Kant correctly said, they cause our thoughts to seemingly go on unendingly, or
as Kant said, they generate much thought but no final definition. They are sublime insofar as we find them
astonishing and a little scary.
The art of the genius is
the art of creating aesthetic ideas.
Great works of art just are
aesthetic ideas materialized in a medium.
Moreover, when a great work of art is created, including the great
mythological stories of the great religions, what we get is a created
world. The genius artist and the
religious figure both create a world, a “second nature,” out of the materials
of the world.
As I have suggested I
have modified Kant’s concept of aesthetic ideas somewhat. I have given them something of the character
of what he called rational ideas or ideas of reason. By ideas of reason Kant means something like
what Plato meant by his eternal Forms. Kant
included as rational ideas, the ideas of God, immortality, and the soul, but
also the great ideas of philosophical interest, such as the ideas of justice,
truth, and beauty. I am willing to agree with Kant up to a point on this: the rational ideas are ideals, like the
perfect circle which we can never actually draw. But, on my view, unlike Plato and perhaps
Kant, ideal things are not real, or rather, their only reality is their name
and their touted ideal nature. Rational
ideas do not refer to real things: they
are just abstract markers, endpoints in a never-ending quest. The aesthetic ideas, however, are real. They are real things directed towards or
trying to represent something which is unreal except for a name.
I fuse Kant’s concepts of
aesthetic and rational ideas, dropping the aspects of each that I don’t
like. That is, aesthetic ideas, on my
view, have a quality of unity that Kant never intended them to have, a unity he
would not, however, have hesitated to attribute to rational ideas. I agree,
however with Kant on many points concerning aesthetics ideas: that they will not be fully explicable, that
they are not unchanging, and that they are directed towards the rational ideas. But the important thing is that they do not
belong to another realm: they belong to
our world. They are an aspect of the world
we experience.
So, on my view, what Kant
called rational ideas just are aesthetic ideas, or better, are the unreal
things aesthetic ideas unendingly aim towards.
There are no rational ideas above and beyond aesthetic ideas. One way of putting this is that if you want
to see a rational idea or the referent of a rational idea you can only look at
an aesthetic idea. That is, rational
ideas are just words: they have no
content, but they function as abstract goals, as things aesthetic ideas try to
express, even when those things are not real and have no real reference. Kant may be right that it might be best to
act as if rational ideas were real, but the real things are the aesthetic ideas.
Aesthetic ideas cause the
appropriately receptive mind to have its faculties of imagination and
understanding go into a free play that seems unending. This experience is sublime.
We still feel wonder at
certain things in nature: the natural world seems as-if designed.
Moreover, the great works of humanity, including those of art, philosophy, science,
and even religion leave us in wonder.
It follows that religion is
best seen as an unconscious art form.
Religious rituals should be seen as total works of art. As such, religion incorporates within it many
other art works and aesthetic phenomena. Like grand opera, for example, religion
incorporates within itself both the beautiful and the sublime. It
contains also the important elements of tragedy (first worked out in its
aesthetic dimensions by Aristotle in his Poetics) and redemption (first
understood in an active way by Nietzsche through his idea of the Dionysian as
expressed in his The Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music). Recognition of religion as unconscious art distinguishes
aesthetic atheism from traditional atheism.
Aesthetic atheism also
has some affinity with the small number of religious practitioners who do not
believe in the tenets of their religions, but remain in the church, mosque,
temple, in order to retain the benefits of seeing the world under the light of
a vast, although fictional, drama.
Aesthetic atheism denies the existence of God and affirms our material being, but at the same time it affirms experiences of transcendence, of what Kant called “aesthetic ideas” which themselves both partake in the beautiful and the sublime. These ideas are to be found not only in art but also in other non-art cultural phenomena, including religion.
Aesthetic atheism denies the existence of God and affirms our material being, but at the same time it affirms experiences of transcendence, of what Kant called “aesthetic ideas” which themselves both partake in the beautiful and the sublime. These ideas are to be found not only in art but also in other non-art cultural phenomena, including religion.
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