Ethics and The Existence of God

There is a popular argument for theism which is based on the claim that ultimate moral reality is dependent on. or best explained given, God. In this post, I want to explore what can be made of this argument and what the best way to understand this dependency relation is. Duly note that I am not particularly sympathetic to this argument, so this is as much an exercise in trying to understand as anything else.

First, what kind of dependency relation should we take this to be? First off, note that this is supposed to be an apologetic argument, so it cannot be simply the claim that all of reality depends on God for its being. No, something more must be meant here. A closer relationship between God's existence and moral reality is being supposed. The most popular way of making this out is that divine law requires a divine law-giver. This is sound as far as it goes, but many ethical views are reasonably coherent without claiming that there are any such thing as moral laws independent of our own existence. An Aristotelian view, which bases morality on what is good for creatures like us, does not require more than a recognizable human good (does this require God? Maybe. We'll come back to this).

Next, what about God as the best explanation for the existence of a moral reality? This is generally placed as an argument against an impersonal universe. So, this is the argument that random matter in motion could not give rise to moral realities. There are two possible reasons for this. On the one hand, one might view the processes which give rise to organisms on such a view as inherently incompatible with those beings having moral responsibilities or duties. On the other hand, one might think it unlikely that beings with the particular attributes which ground moral responsibilities and duties could have arisen in an impersonal universe. The former strikes me as conflating the ends involved in evolution with the ends of the organisms produced by evolution--simply because a being arose through selfish processes does not mean that the organism cannot have selfless motives itself. The latter sounds a lot like the simpler argument that consciousness could not have arisen in a consciousness-less world, which some atheists accept (many panpsychists are atheists: David Chalmers and Tom Nagel, off the top of my head).

So far, we have not made a very strong case for the argument in question. I promised to come back to the question of whether a recognizable human good requires the existence of God, however. This is where the argument has some strength. If you take all your goals and ask why you take them to be good goals, you must refer them to some further goal. At some point, one or more of your goals must stand by themselves, without reference to further goals. If there is no heaven nor any eternal guarantee that there there will be conscious beings into eternity, then our innate disposition to try to make the world better for those after us eventually runs out at the end of consciousness. If we make ourselves our final end then we will have to advocate a kind of selfishness, however well it may try to be self-effacing. If God or heaven exists, then our goals can reach an end in increasing the flourishing of consciousness. An alternative, and more orthodox, final end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, recognizing that communion with him is our flourishing.

But does this really show that God is required for moral reality? No, not quite. It does appear to show that some account of human flourishing as constitutively involving an other-focus must be true to ground moral reality--that is the form the orthodox final end takes. This may require God, but it may simply depend on our being communal beings.

Merleau-Ponty and Incarnation

We are embodied. This is not a generally contentious claim, but its implications are not well thought out. In this post, I want to sketch an argument for using Merleau-Ponty to fill in this claim and its impact on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is famous for returning the body to philosophy, particularly in the existentialist tradition. His arguments push against scientific reductionism without holding the mental to be independent of the physical. This emphasis on our intimate connection to our bodies as lived allows us to use him to think through how our embodiment has and provides value.

Merleau-Ponty views the body as the center-point from which we live and discover the world. It is the condition of our awareness of the world. On the other hand, the body as center-point is dependent on the world--it must be an opening on a world, or it is nothing. The body and the world are thus correlates. We therefore must discover them together.

This is an important point: once we have accepted our embodiment, we must accept that our awareness of ourselves as active and perceptual beings (more accurately: active-perceptual beings, as there is little distinction) depends on our awareness of the world. We discover both ourselves and the world through engaging the opening onto the world which we are with the world which we open out onto.

In this active-perceptual engagement the world and our bodies arise for us as significant--having significance. The world offers us options in relation to the body, which offers us correlated capacities. The options the world offers others are options we know through intersubjectivity--our awareness of others--which, Merleau-Ponty argues, occurs through our bodies. We subtly use our own bodies to understand the activities of others.

This centrality of the body and its capacities for knowledge of the world and others entails that differences in embodiment result in different ways of understanding the world. Furthermore, the body as condition of action presents itself as a Good without which we could do and know nothing. The body constrains our way of being toward the world, and thus, while Merleau-Ponty agrees with other existentialists that we have the ability to construct our identities, and that what we do produces us, he nevertheless leaves the initial substrate outside our ability to choose. The restraints of nature, and particularly body and the culture we are born into, provide a basis on which to stand when choosing. These restraints do not inhibit agency but rather enable it. This at the very least puts the question of the validity of sex change operations into question: is it a way of developing the bodies we are, or a way of bucking the very condition of our freedom? The same kind of question may be asked of other transhumanist technologies, whether reproductive or otherwise.

The biggest metaphysical commitment I see in Merleau-Ponty is to the value-ladenness of things prior to our choices. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, the activity of answering a question from the world. The world offers us puzzles which demand solutions, and those solutions must form the world into a comprehensible form. The solution is demanded by the world, and includes the values of the things seen, its potentialities for reception of activities of various sorts. There are occasionally multiple viable solutions, yet not just any solution will do: it must guide our interactions with the problem of the world productively. The solution must, as it were, harmonize the world's witness. This means that form is necessary to the world's existence--it must be viewed as formed--yet form is a perceptual category, and so the world must be viewed as given perceptually, not as though the real world were a world of imperceptibles.

Once we have attuned ourselves to this notion of form, of self-sustaining orderings, we can begin to recognize much of our work as the work of producing form. This is the aim of every valid institution: to be formed in a way which harmonizes and preserves its parts in order to exhibit its form by seeking some telos. Likewise, we can see the environment and our bodies both as forms whose structure is self-sustaining and not to be violated without good reason. We will have to recognize the fact that we deal in these and many other cases with systems which are complex and which seek their own continuance until they cannot, and which then tend to decline rapidly.

Hopefully this post has shown how Merleau-Ponty may be useful to Christian thought on how to think about ethics in light of our embodiment, which we must insofar as we think of ethics in light of Christ's incarnation. There will, of course, be much to think through about what Merleau-Ponty gets wrong in virtue of denying the existence of a sovereign God, but there remains much which is profitable for our thought, and even where he goes wrong, he will offer a sympathetic interlocutor on many points.

Authenticity and Identity

If authenticity is to be a guiding moral ideal, we must have some notion of what a self is and how to identify who we really are. Introspection, by all accounts, is inadequate, even misleading. There are three basic approaches:

1. The existential option: We may observe the narratival pattern of our lives thus far and creatively extend it, calling future actions authentic when they help produce a coherent narrative.

2. The revelatory option: We may depend on Scripture to tell us who we are and what is consistent with so being.

3. The dialectical option: We may enact what appears to us to be our values in order to discover whether they are truly our values.

The existential option does not require there to be any pre-existing fact of the matter as to what we are. We create a self from our actions, and so long as they cohere we can call our actions authentic. Only conflicting actions--ones which pull the narrative flow of our lives in different directions--can be called inauthentic. Which action is inauthentic in such a case, moreover, cannot always be determined beforehand. It may be that narratival unity can be preserved by disowning either action, in which case authenticity will not guide one's choice. In other cases, one action stands out against the backdrop of one's life as out of place.

The revelatory option has a major flaw as an account of authenticity for anyone who cares about the usual conception of authenticity. If we look solely to Scripture, then what is revealed about us is not individual. Each of us is shown to be the same so far as Scripture's account of our deep nature goes: sinners in need of redemption, created in the image of God, and so on. Nowhere does it say what I, now, in my particular situation, am to do with my unique self. It provides bounds and principles, of course, but that does not fit with the main point of an ideal of authenticity.

The dialectical option is essentially an experimental approach to authenticity. On this account, we have a deep nature which is revealed in situations. We discover who we are by doing things and seeing how they turn out for us. This is very similar to the existential option, except it presumes that there is some pre-existing fact of the matter about who we are, so that we can be true to ourselves or not. Yet, this fact is concealed from us and only comes to light as we act on what we seem to know about ourselves thus far. There is thus an interpretive spiral regarding ourselves on this view. We start with some view of ourselves, act on it, then alter our view in accordance with what our actions expose about ourselves--our talents, desires, values, abilities, etc. We repeat this over the course of our lives, changing course a little bit with every action. Each account of ourselves being merely a hypothesis to be tried or theory in the works.

It will come as no surprise that I think elements of each of these three views are correct. Scripture does reveal who we truly are, and if we are to be true to ourselves we must, minimally, be true to the nature we share with all humanity. To get a fuller picture of ourselves to be authentic to, however, we must observe ourselves. We must observe what we have shown ourselves to care about and the traditions out of which we live. We should ask how we see someone with this life history going on to live, interpreting our life histories--which extend to before our births, to family histories and traditions of thought--through the lens of Scripture. We should then live into a preliminary picture of who we appear to be, ready to change course as it becomes apparent, whether through our own dissatisfaction or the advice of others, that the course we are on does not fit us.

Relations in Nature

I am half inclined to start by just gesturing toward Merleau-Ponty and various articles which have made similar points. There is more I want to say than they say, however.

First, the external conception of nature is the notion of nature as a bunch of particles combining in various ways, governed by various laws. This is all well and good. The notion goes on to view everything as reducible to the particles which each have a nature of its own, independent of other particles. Some people hold this kind of view in some domains but not others, but my concern here is with the trajectory of this sort of view.

First off, we are part of nature. We are thus equally subject to these laws of nature. This gives rise to psychological experimentation on motivation and grit, which, again, I am not against. The problem in this realm arises when we start treating ourselves as things. That is, when we start treating our problems as engineering problems, where we expect a five step troubleshooting plan to solve our issues. Most self-help falls into this category, as do many blog posts. Life becomes skill, rather than wisdom.

Next, nature becomes something to control. It is resource, problem, or solution. By viewing its parts as external to each other, we fail to recognize the dynamic systems which occur in nature, and imagine instead that we can simply engineer our way to a world built for ourselves.

By now it should be clear how nature is not related externally to itself. Nature is full of systems, from atoms to electrical circuits to the weather to the solar system, there are an immense variety of interlocking facets, where each part reacts to a change in every other part. By disrupting these systems beyond their capacity to accommodate change, we discover that nature is not infinitely resilient, but is constructed to resist us should we play god too far.

At this point it may be good to try to articulate a little more of what we might call gestalt metaphysics. A gestalt is a form. However, particularly in Merleau-Ponty's usage, a gestalt is a dynamic form. A system which holds together, accommodates changes, and maintains itself to some degree. Merleau-Ponty's definition holds that a gestalt occurs where each part depends for its properties on every other part (if I remember correctly). What I have been trying to sketch in these posts is the view that much of what we think of as independent of its surroundings actually exists in a gestalt and contributes the form of that gestalt. Our social institutions form a system which holds together and accommodates changes to some extent, sometimes reacting against threats whether we notice or not. Social groups collect in a way such that they can sustain themselves without much effort from participants. Even with means/end relations, the meaning of an action depends on the situation which provides the background against which the action appears as any particular action, and thus the action depends on its situation to be the action it is.

Society as Organism

The following is essentially a restatement of Hegel's views on society modulated through my own metaphysical views (which are, themselves, heavily influenced by Hegel).

The relation of people to society or each other can likewise often be thought of as an external relation. Each individual is thought of as a unit, in principle independent of others, free to define him or herself however he or she chooses. This lies behind our notion of how democracy should operate, the capitalist notion of freedom of exchange, and much of our obsession with personal freedoms.

Let me try to trace the ligaments of this a little more. On this model, each person is ontologically independent of others. One is who one is solely because of one's own decisions. Perhaps, of course, one's environment has shaped one, one's particular body has given one certain skills or impediments, but none of this is supposed to come into who one is. One is supposed to be externally related to all of these factors. You are supposed to be an individual, independent of your past. In principle, then, who you are cannot be essentially related to your community or any other obviously contingent facts about one's concrete existence. You must be free, then, to create yourself--and, indeed, reality--however you like.

But your creation is your own creation. It is therefore distinct from that of others, even unique. No one can understand the real you because you are not accessible through the cultural medium you express yourself in. Any mode of expression must be felt as inadequate because it expresses one as in a particular culture in a particular time, not as a free and independent individual. One thus inevitably becomes lonely, since one cannot express oneself in a manner which will feel adequate to one's self conception, and thus one cannot feel known in one's expression.

There are two attitudes one may take to these individuals. They may be basically good or basically bad. In the former case, restrictions on expression must be bad, and must therefore be done away with. In the latter case, the individuals must be restrained from hurting themselves. Generally, the view will be mixed, but this only means that the individuals will be treated as alternately a source of good potential to be harnessed and a danger to be restrained. The relation of government to people will thus be felt as that of regulation. There will be only either the imposition of restraints, whether for our own good or not, and the removal of such restraints, either for our good or to our harm.

Once we are independent individuals, we lose the communal ties which bound us together and provided a rich web of connections such that we could discuss issues civilly with other whom we respected independently of the particular issues. Overlapping communities provided ways of expressing ourselves which others in those communities could understand, but depended on the assumption that culturally situated modes of expression could adequately express us. As individuals, we seem to have lost that belief. We experience ourselves as beyond our cultures.

Still, however we may act, we are related to each other internally. I mentioned some about how men and women are internally related, although I cannot flesh that out thoroughly. We are also internally related to society in that our ways of experiencing the world are picked up from others. We understand ourselves in relation to others or not at all. We cannot find ourselves without recognizing ourselves in the world. This is way going out into the world to find oneself is such a strange idea. You are far more likely to discover who you are by examining how you came to views you hold, by tracing the threads which make up your life, and by acknowledging your socially situated perspective. This need not make one less confident of one's views, although it should make one a little more circumspect about rejecting others' views out of hand, but should rather give one a greater ability to articulate what draws one to one's views, what fallacies one might be making, and thus make one more confident that one has thought through one's views well.

Because we are internally related to others in society we are stuck with group affiliations, however much we may deny them. These groups metastasize into factions and oppose each other because each claims to be independent. Each faction wants to be seen as made up simply of free independent people who think rightly. Neither faction, therefore, can stand the other. This results in something like war, where neither side can recognize the other as right thinking, but winds up dehumanizing the other.

I have already said something about how thinking of ourselves as internally related to society and to each other may work itself out, but let me develop it a bit more. First off, we should think of society on the model of an organism, rather than on the model of a contract of people. This is a rather biblical notion of society, in that the Bible expresses often that the Church is a body made of many members who perform different functions. In society, too, there are many sorts of people, and not all have the same talents and skills. Not all have the same cultural background. If we want genuine diversity, we will need to find some way to allow for cultural situatedness to have a substantial role in society, to be validated. Hegel works this out be arguing for a form of government where different kinds of workers have different relations to government. I doubt that would be quite right. What I find intriguing, however, is his idea that each group, rather than geographical locale, should be represented. The details of how this might work today are, however, obscure.

The notion of society as an organism should help us discuss issues which disproportionately affect one class or one kind of worker. By articulating how our nation holds together organically, we can start to picture why all of the nation should care about parts of the nation, and thereby help move us to a place where we all care what other groups think, rather than hiding away in our own groups which we deny are groups.

The Means/End Relation

In this post I will likely be drawing more than I know from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. I will also be drawing from others, however. The aim is to show how we think of the means/end relation as external, how that works out in practice, how it is an inaccurate way of thinking of the relation, and how we should think instead.

First, what does it mean for the means/end relation to be external? It would mean that any action we might do is only externally, contingently related to its effects. Such a conception can work out in one of two main ways. Either it is only the thought that counts, and what happens from there is inconsequential, or the actions are evaluated solely in terms of their effects. There are also middle grounds, where the intentions are weighed against the consequences.

This lies behind a particular kind of reasoning, called calculative reasoning, where I act for the sake of some goal in such a way that I select my aims simply to achieve the goal. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the maximum of the specified goal, whatever that goal might be. It also lies behind a particular kind of justification or excuse, where one apologizes only for the effects, refusing to accept that one may have done something really wrong because one "didn't mean it."

If I understand contemporary critiques of capitalism, they tend to rely on a critique of calculative reasoning, whereby this kind of external relation of goals to means whereby we seek to achieve them results in a flattening of the moral imagination and of the kinds of goods we can be sensitive to. Money becomes the symbol of commensurable values, and thus money gain is to be maximized at any cost. This results in the loss of non-monetizable goods, such as community and virtue. My point in bringing this up is that it won't be enough to shift away from seeing money as the medium of exchange of all values, thereby excluding non-monetizable goods, but the underlying problem is calculative reasoning about goods.

What, then, would it look like to think of the means/end relation as an internal relation? MacIntyre talks about goods internal to practices, where the good one is after is inseparable from the practice. The fun one has playing chess is inseparable from actually playing chess, as his famous example goes. This can be extended, however. The Hegelian way of articulating this is to talk of the means as the end in motion, or the end as the means at rest. In this way of thinking, the means have to fit the end, they have to be fulfilled by the end. The kind of action which the means is has to be the sort of thing which can come to rest in the end, the kind of behavior which will not tend to extend itself beyond the intended consequences. Similarly, the intent has to become embodied in action which aptly expresses it and brings it to fulfillment. One cannot sacrifice one's goal in pursuit of one's goal, in other words. One cannot oppress others for the sake of freedom or vote for a vicious person in order to preserve virtue.

Relations Internal and External

In this post I want to try to explain the concepts of internally related and externally related things and how they differ.

When two things are internally related, understanding one requires understanding the other. If two concepts are internally related, then one simply cannot really understand one of the concepts without understanding the other. Black and white, male and female, up and down, are all cases of internally related concepts, in this case, related via opposition. Some things are internally related in other ways, however. A tree and the seed from which it sprouted or the seed it spawned are internally related in that one does not really understand a tree without understanding the life cycle of a tree. Male and female are internally related not only by contrasting, but by being formed in such a way that their organs go together in a natural manner. One cannot understand manhood apart from womanhood not only because manhood excludes womanhood but because manhood presupposes womanhood for its subsistence.

When two things are externally related, they exist simply alongside each other. They may be related, as when an apple rests on a desk, but they are so only contingently. It is extraneous to what they are that they are related. A finger and the hammer which hits it are externally related. I do not need to understand anything about a hammer to understand a finger, nor a finger to understand a hammer. A world without hammers could have fingers in just the same way as ours does (granted, not having fingers might alter how we constructed hammers, but I think the point is clear).

There are a variety of phenomena which are internally related but which we have been trained to think of as externally related. The means/end relation is one, the relation of people to society is another, and the relations of various parts of nature is a third. I will spend a post analyzing how thinking of these as external relations works itself out, why they are actually internally related and what that means in each case, and at least a gesture in the direction of how thinking about them correctly might work out.

Forms of Cultural Critique

There are three main ways of critiquing a culture. The most obvious way is to critique the actual institutions which operate in the culture. The next way of critiquing a culture is to critique how people talk about and argue for positions in the culture. Finally, one may critique how the way people talk about and argue for positions impacts how and what institutions are formed and operate.

If we critique a culture solely by critiquing the institutions which operate in it, we run into the problem that we must presuppose that some institutions are good and others bad. Perhaps democracy is good or private property is bad, but in either case the critique is performed in terms alien to the culture under critique. This is the form of critique at work when we object to institutions in terms of their results. It is a valid form of critique, but only where the presupposed good is a generally shared good.

The next way of critiquing culture is to focus on what are called discourses of legitimation, that is, the language in which claims are accepted as valid or invalid. This is the way of talking about and arguing for claims which is dominant and which all arguments must fit in order to be taken seriously. In this manner of critique, it is possible to uncover tensions in the discourse itself, ways in which its terms presuppose conflicting claims. This will not always be the case, however. A form of discourse can be bad without being inconsistent. Incidentally, this is a claim not taken seriously enough by presuppositionalist apologists.

The problem with this second mode of discourse is that it does not engage social reality. It stops at the level of terms, and fails to make the case for why the terms we use matter. It is, after all, at least possible that two different discourses might lead one to the same results, and so long as nothing too bad happens, it seems, no harm no foul.

The final mode of cultural critique manages to connect the previous two. In this mode, we articulate how the discourse gives rise to the institutions, and then how the institutions and their results fail to measure up by the lights of the language of legitimation used. We can also do a reverse form of this mode of critique, often referred to as genealogy, where we articulate how the discourse of legitimation arose from concrete institutions, in order to come to terms with the inadequacies of a previous language of legitimation and the institutions it gave rise to. Each discourse of legitimation, then, gives rise to a new set of insufficient institutions which then sets it to change into a new discourse of legitimation designed to rectify its old failings. This is one way of appropriating the Hegelian dialectic in our day.

Critique in this final mode attempts to expose people to how the way they are talking about their problems is giving rise to new problems or failing to rectify their situation. To be successful, it cannot simply show how policies give rise to the problem, but must show how our way of talking gives rise to policies which it either cannot accept or which can be clearly seen to give rise to problems which the discourse of legitimation is designed to solve. The critique needs to do this in such a way that the answer cannot simply be to claim that the discourse would work with better knowledge or better understanding, that is, the critique must show that these failures are not contingent but part of how the discourse works.

Emotional Levels

The best analogy for how levels of emotions work is to the figure/ground distinction. This is the distinction between what is the focus of attention (figure) and what forms the background against which the figure stands out. The background is experienced as relatively undifferentiated and static, while the figure is experienced as relatively differentiated and dynamic.

On my account of the emotions, when we experience emotions, it is because we are interpreting something, a focus of attention, as relevant to our concerns in some way. The spread of potential foci of attention form the background against which any particular focus stands out. Thus, we can conceive of a background of emotions corresponding to the background of foci. Both of these backgrounds are experienced as relatively homogeneous, although there is space for being aware of things hovering on the periphery, eliciting one's attention.

The relative homogeneity of the background and the relative richness of the figure account for a general separation into two levels of emotional emotional experience. In other words, we are always experiencing some kind of emotion in response to a figure and having an (background) emotional reaction to the background. This background emotion provides a baseline against which other emotions are measured, and sets the standard of reasonable variation.

A background of joy, then, does two things: it heightens the default emotion, and it makes mourning more acute. The inverse applies to a background of sadness. The background can also color the focal emotion in other ways, perhaps contaminating it, perhaps contrasting with it, perhaps supplementing it. It is important to note that not all emotions occupy the spectrum of happy/sad. Anger, I think, does not fall directly on this spectrum. A background of anger contaminates happiness and sadness both into particular forms of happiness and sadness. Likewise, joy can modify how we experience other emotions, providing resilience and a baseline of expectation that there is joy to be had.

The analogy of figure/ground also fits with how little we are usually aware of secondary emotions. Occasionally, we feel a swirling mass of emotions, but usually we feel one emotion at a time, or even feel like we are feeling no emotions. A background is ordinarily overlooked, and only the figure is noticed. The figure, in turn, is only noticed in its differentiation from the background. Thus, when the figure and ground match, nothing seems to be felt. On the other hand, when we are feeling something, it is usually only the focal emotion. The background only becomes noticeable when it is abnormal, that is, when it stands out against the background over time of our emotional lives, or when it starts having a noticeable impact on the shape of our emotions by constricting them. In the ordinary case, then, we can only tell what our background emotion is by either asking others or noticing how we tend to feel in general, when we attend to a variety of phenomena.

Happiness

There are two dominant concepts of happiness in the west, and perhaps elsewhere. One is the concept which I associate with Aristotle and Augustine, the other I associate with early modern philosophers. We will start with the latter, move to the former, and then try to articulate a synthesis, as we did with the notion of fulfillment. Both concepts are utilized to make the claim that we all always seek to be happy, but because the concepts are different, the claims are different.

The early modern notion of happiness conceives of it as something one essentially feels. One can thus know whether or not one is happy. Happiness is an occurrent mental state: there is something it feels like to be happy. Further, all it is to be happy is to feel happy.

The older notion of happiness ties happiness to doing well. Thus, on this account, one cannot be happy, however one feels, if one is being vicious. One can "feel happy" and yet fail to be genuinely happy, and thus one will remain restless and unsatisfied no matter how many endorphins are soaking your brain. Further, on this account, it is at least questionable whether or not someone has to feel happy to be happy. It would be consistent with this theory to claim that some people who are doing well are happy yet feel unhappy.

What kind of synthesis can be made of this? Let me start by suggesting that the older notion is the more basic, and that the more recent notion is parasitic on it. Feeling happy is evidence of being happy, but does not entail it. Feeling happy--like other feelings--involves a construal. It involves construing oneself as living well, as being happy. Thus, we are generally warranted in moving from "I feel happy," to "I am happy," but not incorrigibly. There are two consequences to this. First, the source of our felt happiness should be what we take the source of our well being to be. Second, if we are unhappy, there are two routes to becoming happy: we can seek what we think we need to feel happy, or we can reorient what we take to be involved in living well.

This first point is the source of Jon Piper's claim that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. If God is the source of our well being, then he should be the source of our happiness. We should be happy primarily in God and only derivatively in other things if we take our well being to be dependent primarily on God and only derivatively on other things.

The second point should not be taken as the claim that we should simply alter our notion of what living well consists in whenever we are unhappy, nor that we should obtain a notion of living well which will be invulnerable. It is simply the point that we can move in either direction. We can seek what we think will contribute to a good life or we can redirect our efforts to a different conception of the good life. It is not always the case, however, that we should do what will most quickly make us happy. I take the goal to be, rather, to have a happy life. Not a life full of happy feelings, but a life which one would rightly feel happy about at the end.

I want to end by articulating a multi-leveled account of happiness. I have noted that we should feel happy because of God who secures our well being eternally. This should not be taken as meaning that we should be perpetually giddy which feelings of happiness. Rather, I take it that we feel at multiple levels. We can have an abiding sense of our own well being while feeling terribly morose. We can recognize our total well being in Christ while also mourning our sin. We can rest in God's sovereignty while striving hard to pursue sanctification. Perhaps I will say more about this later.

Divinity and High Standards

There are three ways of reacting to God's command to be holy as he is holy. We can lessen his holiness and feel righteous--or unrighteous--in ourselves, or we cal recognize his holiness and his sufficiency.

The commands of Scripture must not be made a dull blade, but must be recognized as sharp with God's divine standard. The commands hold forth the standard of God, and thus God's perfect goodness, as a standard we could never meet. If we seek to dumb down the commands, we must lose a sense of God's holy goodness.

If we are seeking our righteousness in ourselves, the commands will make us guilty or proud. If we know we depend on an alien righteousness, the commands will instead make us acutely aware of the necessity and sufficiency of Christ. We feel crushed by guilt only when we think that it is up to us to carry the burden of guilt. When we recognize that our guilt is a burden Christ bore, and which Christ only could bear because he fulfilled the standard we could not fulfill, because he is the standard, then the commands of God show us how great a salvation we have received: how free a gift we have been given, how dependent we are on that gift, and how unimaginable the goodness of God is. We would never have set so high a standard as God sets, for we know we would fail, but God sets the highest standard for himself, and calls us to try it, to show us how true and good and powerful he is, and how beyond human wisdom his wisdom is.

If our religion did not hold out commands high above any we would set for ourselves, if Christianity did not call us to come and die to ourselves, if it did not set a standard which we could not hold each other to for fear of hypocrisy, then we might argue that it was a merely human religion. But the commands are so far above any this world has produced, yet so true to what we are most certain of that the fulfillment of these commands would outshine the most righteous human of our imagining. Because the commands outstrip our wildest dreams of righteousness, we can claim with confidence that this must be of God, that this religion cannot be a mere invention, for no one would dare to invent this. No one would dare to hold himself to this standard. Unless that someone were God or had the righteousness of God. God came down, and we now have his righteousness, so that we can confidently face commands which we still do not fully satisfy, and be confident that we stand secure in the righteousness of Christ who accomplished all that God called for.

To lower the standards is to cheapen the Gospel, because it makes our salvation petty and our God meager. To raise the standards is only legalism when Christ is not permitted to satisfy them for us, and then it leads naturally to lowering the standards to be within our reach. We can only be consistently legalistic by lowering the standard. Raising the standard places the emphasis on Christ's righteousness, not our own.

Truth

A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.

1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.

Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.

If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.

The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.

How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.

With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.

In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.

Multitasking

The term "multitasking" is ambiguous. We can consider different forms of multitasking along two dimensions: how multi and how tasking. As to how multi the multitasking is, I do not mean how many tasks, but how close together the tasks are in time. Thus, the basic three options are: simultaneous, rapidly alternating, and slowly alternating. The options for tasking have to do with how much of a task the various tasks are, by which I mean how much they require attention. Again, there are roughly three options: no attention, second-nature attention, and full attention.

Simultaneous no attention/other multitasking occurs all the time. Your heart beating is a case of a no attention "task." Simultaneous second-nature/second-nature or second-nature/full attention multitasking, on the other hand, never fully occurs, but likely approximates slow cycling multi-tasking because of the low attention required of the second-nature tasks. When we think we are simultaneous full/full multitasking, we are actually rapid cycling multitasking.

Rapid cycle multitasking involves shifting one's attention between tasks at a fast pace. It is what we generally mean when we colloquially refer to something as multitasking. because rapid cycle multitasking precludes keeping one's attention on a single task for much time at all, it thereby encourages short attention spans, and precludes following an argument of much depth, since one is likely to miss bits in-between. Because one will tend to miss things in both tasks while multitasking, and because it precludes careful argumentation and giving someone else careful consideration and giving careful thought to one's own words--since one is spending, say, half as much time considering them--rapid cycle multitasking is corrosive to community and promotes sound-bite discourse.

Slow cycle multitasking also has some costs to it, since one still has to refocus on what one was doing, but, provided that slow means slow (that is, probably over an hour between shifts) it is far less corrosive to one's ability to pay attention when one needs to, and thus is more civically responsible. This is, presumably, what employers mean by "multitasking" when they list it as a desired skill, although my proposed time between shifts is unlikely to be the actual time in such environments. In any case, since rapid cycle multitasking is what we mean by the term colloquially, the use of the term "multitasking" to refer to a valued skill promotes the value of rapid cycle multitasking and is thereby civically irresponsible.

Value and Money

Money has the property of being exchangeable for anything which one can exchange for. It is the medium of fungible value, or to put it in the vernacular, it can buy anything that can be bought. There are valuable things which cannot be bought. These are internal goods, such as virtue, or social goods, such as community. These goods which cannot be purchased are still considered worth monetary value, however, via the supposed equivalency of time and money. The value of the internal goods may not correlate with how much time they require, however.

It is also worth noting that the value of items is variable. I do not simply mean that prices change, but that the value of an item is agent relative, and this in several ways. The most obvious way in which the value of an item is agent relative is that we prefer different things and have different needs. Another way in which things vary in value is that we have different funds, and thus for the poorer, the more essential items are worth more. The essentials are of basically infinite worth, although how one attains those essentials, what kind of food one gets, may depend on other factors, including one's budget.

Some of the preferences we have, and thus the values we regard things as having, are irrational. The costs of some items therefore do not fit with what it takes to make those items, but is simply dependent on how much we want them. This drives up costs for those who do not regard those items as worth the cost.

Some items could be made so that they would be worth more to us, and yet no one has any interest in producing them. In particular, planned obsolescence ensures that purchasers buy more often, and introduces more bad quality items into the market, and thus into the junkyard. If a company wants to prove that it cares about the environment, making products to last would be a good way. Other ways cost companies little, but gain them the applause of nominal environmentalists.

Some internal and social goods have an absolute value which is independent of both economic status and preferences. It is just as worthwhile to cultivate virtue and community no matter where one is in society. Nevertheless, it costs differently for different groups. The time it takes is actually worth more for those who are poor, despite their hourly wage generally being lower, because it costs more directly in the necessities of life. The rich can cultivate virtue in the spare time which they can afford because they have more money than is requisite to securing the necessities of life. The opportunity costs, then, of living a good life, are greater for the poor than for the rich.

In fact, this can be generalized to almost anything: opportunity costs of acquiring goods, internal or external, are greater for the poor than for the wealthy. Not every dollar is of equal value. Because of this, the less one has, the less ability one has to impact the economy, and thus the more one must buy according to a traditional account where quality and cheapness of the goods matters, and the supplier is fungible. Thus, the poor cannot use their purchasing patterns to push back against companies which hire them for little, because they are either dependent upon those companies for acquiring what they need, or could not purchase from those companies if they wanted to.

The same applies to work choices. The wealthy can afford to be concerned with life/work balance. The poor cannot. If a company requires workaholism (otherwise known as being "career oriented" "dedicated to the company" etc.), and it pays, then there is a class of workers which cannot avoid being formed into a vicious form of life.

None of this is limited to the poor qua low income. There is also a group which we may call the poor qua high outgo. What matters is that both groups get to keep a small amount of money, if any, after food is bought, bills are paid, etc. Whether this is due to loans or bad jobs, both are in a situation which is harmful to cultivating virtue and community. Companies then sell to these groups by promising them community and virtuous living--promises which cannot be kept, because they promise what cannot be sold.

Legitimacy and Responsiveness

In the context of the free will debate, Fisher and Ravizza use a concept of reasons responsiveness to account for when an action is performed freely. I want to apply a similar account to the legitimacy of actions performed by government entities.

On a reasons-responsive view of freedom, an action is performed freely only if it is caused by a mechanism that is somewhat responsive to reasons. This concept of "being responsive" needs to be spelled out more, however. The strongest way would be to say that an agent performs an action freely only if they would have done something else in any situation where there was good reason to do otherwise and not good reason to perform the action. This is likely too strong, however. For one, it requires an agent to be omniscient as to what the reasons are (at least, on reasons externalism). Alternatively, we could hold that the agent performs the action freely only if the action is performed via a mechanism which might have produced a different action in some close situations where there was good reason to do otherwise.

My aim here is to use a similar notion to account for the legitimacy of government actions. I take it that, to be legitimate, the government action needs to be responsive to the values of the people it governs. The values of those people should be responsive to reasons, of course, but that might not be required for the legitimacy of the government. The government action must be performed through a mechanism which usually produces actions as if motivated by the values of the people it governs.

There is a problem here, of course: how do we aggregate the diverse values of a populous? I am not sure there has to be just one answer to this question. It is open to a government to weight different values differently, provided that the weightings, in turn, are motivated by the values of the citizenry. So the aggregation scheme must be such that it provides the result that it is legitimate. Further, it should count all the citizens. It is possible for it to weight the values of some values differently than others, although this should be motivated by values regarding whose values are expected to be the most accurate, rather than which class is preferred. The limit here is provided by the threat of citizens regarding the government as ignoring them. When this occurs, it is safe to say, that government has failed to be sufficiently responsive.

This may be because it is impossible to be responsive to the values of the whole citizenry, or it may be due to failure to attend to the values of some group and take seriously the concerns of that group. In either case, there is a failure of society, a failure of the state as social body to maintain its unity. At such points, the government becomes either a tyranny of one group over another, it splits into two governments, or it finds some way to satisfy both parties, e.g., by ensuring that members of both groups have a role with some degree of efficacy in the government, so that both groups are confident that they are having a say. All of these are attempts at preserving at least a veneer of legitimacy. A government becomes illegitimate in the first case alone. In the other two cases, the legitimacy is repaired. My claim, then, is that a state becomes illegitimate only when it regularly fails to take the values of the whole citizenry into consideration, and thus where a mass of the citizenry has a long-standing sense of disenfranchisement, whatever their legal situation may be.

This is the root of representative democracies. A representative democracy is an attempt at ensuring that the government is responsive to the values of the citizenry. It is possible to maintain this level of legitimacy in non-democratic systems, however, and it is possible to impose a democratic system which fails to be legitimate precisely because it is democratic. The latter case would occur, for instance, if one tried to impose democracy somewhere where people believed that it was a terrible system of government. The former case would occur where a king, for instance, truly cared about his people and considered their values and well-being in his decisions (as, e.g., will be the case in the divine government in heaven).

Government and Fallenness

It seems to be a common assumption that government exists because of the fall, not as a symptom of the fall, but as a bandage. The view seems to be that we would have anarchy if the fall had not happened, but because of the fall we need government to restrain us from the more egregious sins.

I disagree. As plausible as it is to suppose that government would be extraneous in a perfect world, this relies on a one-sided view of the role of government. Government exists, not only to secure justice against unrighteous agents, but to impose an order on society which will go beyond not sinning to securing justice which requires logistical support.

Here is one way of putting my claim: systemic injustice can occur without any individual qua citizen sinning. It may instead involve individuals qua government authorities sinning--I am not claiming that systemic injustice could occur in a world which did not fall, but that it could, and likely would, occur in a world which was perfect except for lacking government.

Apart from the fall, it may be that the government would have just been God, and that in heaven we may again find ourselves in a theocracy. My argument does not hinge on this, however, and God may well have seen fit to work through humans granted logistical gifts in an unfallen world just as he has in our fallen world, and this need not involve God's presence being mediated, only his logistical procedures being realized through a human being. Either way, such government would have existed without the fall.

If we recognize that the government has this logistical role, then we must recognize the authority of government to regulate, to tax, to build roads and such. These are all logistical roles. We might argue about the proper shape of regulation, but, granting that we are aided in doing the right thing by having regulations laying down how we are channeling our efforts toward the common good, even a sinless society would benefit from regulations which would ensure harmony between the actions of different individuals and companies.

Consider how important logistical thought is in putting together the simplest event, or in shipping items from place to place. Such logistics do not presuppose a fallen world. My claim is that similar logistical thought would be required in a perfect world, that this logistical thought would need to be performed from a relatively high vantage point on society, and thus that whatever performed this role would be, in function, a government.

Contractualist Politics

Contractualism is probably the dominant account of political legitimacy currently. Let me sketch what it is, why I claim it is dominant, and why that is a problem.

A contractualist account of political legitimacy holds that a government is an implicit contract of all citizens to give up some rights to get others to do likewise and to gain certain rights. It supposes that there can be no (political) justice or injustice unless some entity with authority dictates laws. It also supposes that no entity can have such authority unless we the people grant it such authority. It operates with the point of view that there is a default state, or state of nature, which we are trying to avoid, and thus that we contract together to solve the problems of that default state. What the government can do, therefore, is limited by what we can suppose individuals would let it do in order to get out of the default state. If the situation in the government is worse than the default state, then the people cannot be supposed to have authorized it, and thus the government must be illegitimate.

The default state is generally viewed as a state where each person is alone, where it is one's own effort and labor by which one survives. Whether the contract is formed for security against aggressors or for the benefits of division of labor, the contract is what first brings people into communities. Even Rawls's veil of ignorance has each individual considering what the best situation would be for one, not knowing what social location or what talents or abilities one might have.

The strongest versions will form a multilayered structure where only the most basic elements rely on a contract of everyone with everyone, and thus preclude such anarchistic tendencies as suggested by "not my president." For instance, our own government relies for its authority on the constitution. Nevertheless, if we the people established the constitution, then we the people can revoke it, and secession is easier than accession. To establish the constitution one needs a critical mass of people to form a citizenry. To disestablish it, one must merely lose such a mass. Of course, what keeps a constitutionalist government going, on its own account, is that everyone hopefully prefers it to the alternative. How long one can keep that up depend on what people take the alternative to be and how people feel about how things are going under the government.

The United States is founded on contractualist political philosophy: the preamble to our constitution is explicit that "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The revolution was based on the premise that the people have a right to revolt against a government which is not providing for the citizens' improvement beyond the default condition, but which is rather, as it was viewed, merely using the citizens for its own benefit. The colonists held that they could improve on the default condition better than Mother England, and so, in virtue of that fact and the failure of the existing government, held that they had a right and even a duty to rebel and instate a government which would be truly legitimate. This same attitude recurs when we hear "not my president," claims that because the taxes are unfair one needn't feel bad about cheating on them, or see individuals speeding because others are doing so and they can get away with it. If the government is not succeeding at improving on the default condition, and if it is failing to secure my rights, then the rights I gave up for that security may be retained.

There are two big problems with this view: the notion of a default state and the account of legitimacy are both problematic. They both play into an individualistic view of authority and persons.

The problem with the notion of the default state is that there is no sense that one might rightly uphold a government because it is one's own. This may be an unfair critique of Rawls, insofar as what the veil of ignorance is supposed to establish is the shape of justice, which is the end point, not where we are quite expected to be now. Rawls has been critiqued in this way before, by those who see his establishment of the goal as prior to figuring out how to get there as problematic, but that is not the present point. The present point is that contractualist views of political legitimacy encourage one to judge any present government for failing to achieve justice. They occlude the importance of our present situation for any analysis of what we should do now. Rawls can grant that the question of how to reach justice may be a difficult one requiring an analysis of present social realities. What Rawls occludes is how our view of what we would see from behind the veil of ignorance is always situated in our society. We can never get fully behind the veil, because we are already situated in some society which has formed us to value some things over others. Even our account of who goes behind the curtain or what counts as a social location is modified by who we take to count as a citizen. How disabled, how young, and how old can one be and still count?

The account of legitimacy is likewise problematic. Because we are situated already in a society, we do not, in the ordinary course of things, consider ourselves the source of the legitimacy of the government. We do not, contrary to what contract theorists originally hoped, view the government as legislating on our behalf such that the law is decreed by us by proxy. Rather, we view the government either as doing well or doing poorly, promoting the welfare of society or not. The legitimacy of the government appears to be secured by the government's attitude toward the governed. Thus, the justice of revolt arises, not because the citizenry can do better or because the default state would be better, but because the government does not take the citizenry into account in its deliberations. It is the alienation of the citizenry from the government, and not the failure of the government per se, which delegitimatizes the government. What is accurate about contractualism is that citizens ought to see their interests represented in the legislation, and not merely interests of the state as such or interests of other institutions (although such will be brought in via the interests of the citizenry). The requirement that it be an equal contract is accurate in that the interests of the whole citizenry ought to be represented in legislation, not simply the powerful citizens.

But what I am suggesting is right about the legitimation scheme of contractualism is a different account of legitimation. The source of legitimacy is no longer the consent of the citizenry, but the success of the government as a government, where a government is not defined as a group of contracting individuals, but as providing order and protection to a group of interested social agents, who are situated in a society which is already under way, in a way consonant with how those agents and that society is.

We can also view these two problems from a theological standpoint. The authority of the rulers and authorities of this world is derived from God's authority. The legitimacy of a government is ultimately a matter of its fulfilling God's purpose for government. Where contractualism makes our collective purposes the standard for good government and the source of its authority, we must affirm that, viewed theologically, it is God's purposes which matter and he is the source of all authority. Contractualism--I suggest, recognizing that there is room for push-back--is a political philosophy which views the citizenry as a god, catering to our idolatrous hearts.

Fulfillment

The notion which provides the title for this post finds use in a rather wide spread of "western" thought. Whether or not it finds use outside of thought which the West has drawn from, I cannot say. There are two distinct sources which come into understanding this notion: one is the Aristotelian concept of the fulfillment of a telos, the other is the Biblical concept of fulfillment of a prophetic theme. These are connected concepts, but not identical.

The Aristotelian concept of fulfillment is that of satisfaction. A fulfills something (a telos or desire) B if, and only if, B had specified A, or an item with property P where A has P, as its condition of satisfaction. Thus, a desire for something sweet can be satisfied by chocolate because chocolate is sweet, although a desire for chocolate cannot be satisfied by candy corn. On this notion of fulfillment, something can only be the fulfillment of a desire or something else which has a telos, and can only do so by meeting that telos. A human can only be fulfilled, in this sense, by becoming all that a human is supposed to be, by fulfilling the human telos, by matching the goal specified by one's human nature. One cannot fulfill the telos of a being by altering the underlying nature, for then one is simply altering the being to be a different being. Turning a human into a giraffe does not change the telos of the same being, but eliminates one being and brings another into existence, and this is precisely because the telos changes so fundamentally.

The Biblical concept of fulfillment is similar, but different. It is evident that Biblical fulfillment can apply to things which do not possess inherent teloi, or can apply to things which possess inherent teloi without satisfying their surface level satisfaction conditions. Thus, Jesus can fulfill the law while, on the face of it, breaking the Sabbath. This is because the Biblical concept of fulfillment is a narrative-based concept. To fulfill something in this sense is to bring the story of which it is a part to completion in such a way that the part one is fulfilling is evidenced as important to the plot. This variety of fulfillment not only brings an underlying pervasive telos to satisfaction, but draws together the narrative threads which pointed to it and exhibits them in such a way as to accomplish their sense. The Biblical concept thus adds a narrative component which is lacking in the Aristotelian desire satisfaction account. The Biblical concept does not specify that it is the essence of a thing which specifies the telos to be satisfied, however. This is not to say that the Bible excludes that possibility, it simply does not tend to operate in terms of essences and teloi so much as narratives.

Hegel's reinterpretation of Christianity and drawing of the Creation-Fall-Redemption cycle together with an expressive account of reality brings the Biblical concept into philosophy and begins to unify the Aristotelian and Biblical concepts, but I find the existentialist account of action brings these two concepts together more clearly. Ironically, we can see this most clearly in thinkers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty whose metaphysics generally seem opposed to Christian metaphysics. Sartre emphasizes that we lay down a past behind us, a sediment as it were, which makes us a certain way which we never at the same time are. One's past defines one, in a way, that is, one's objective being is only how one has been in appearance, yet that appearance cannot limit you. Sartre is opposed to a narrative construal of life, yet emphasizes the way that my past can only be understood in light of the future it gave rise to--if one finds oneself weeping over one's faults, this may be a moment of repentance or of weakness, depending on what one does from there. One's sincerity or insincerity can only be ascertained--only holds, even--in light of how one lives from there.

Merleau-Ponty is more sympathetic to a narrative understanding of life. His thought operates in terms of Gestalts. That is, he thinks in terms of wholes which are composed of parts in dynamic relation to each other. In this way of thinking, the whole can only be understood in terms of its parts and vice-versa. Applied to a life as a whole, then, there is a kind of unity which is to be attained, and that unity is a unity which must be constructed by living in such a way that one's life forms a narrative whole. For Merleau-Ponty as for Sartre this narrative whole does not pre-exist our construction of it, but unlike Sartre, the narrative has validity to it. One's past thus makes a certain demand on one's present and future to be such that the whole life forms a unified whole and not merely a set of moments one outside the other, as Sartre seems to claim all lives essentially are.

This narrative notion of life as being such that it ought to be unified presses us towards a Biblical concept of fulfillment. Yet Merleau-Ponty has not abandoned the Aristotelian concept, either. The essence has been replaced by a dynamic of forces which seek equilibrium and that equilibrium specifies a telos. This is a telos of self-maintenance, but self-maintenance as the kind of being one is, and thus this notion draws in the narrative concept of fulfillment because it endorses Sartre's idea of sedimentation. If we sediment ourselves, then that becomes part of who we are which must be maintained, any break with it must itself have a place in the narrative unity we are making of our lives.

From this vantage point, there is another kind of fulfillment which we can make out in the Bible. I do not think it is ever called fulfillment, but it is, itself, fulfilled in light of this concept of fulfillment I am drawing out here. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac or the story of Job, or really any of the stories which mirror Christ's cycle of life, death, and resurrection. In all of these stories, an inner reality is expressed, sedimented, proved. Abraham's faith is proven to the highest extent, it is given opportunity to express itself and sediment itself as a part of his life. Job's faith, likewise, is expressed in his life in a way it could not have been otherwise. In these stories we find God desiring to make evident what is only visible to himself. Even in Creation we see God wanting to make himself visible to others. Abraham fulfills his faith by offering his son. Job fulfills his faith by holding fast to God in suffering. In this way, we can see these events as generous gifts of God both to those who went through the trials and to us. For them, they are fulfilled by fulfilling who they have become in a hidden manner. For us, we are granted to see what only God could see before.

There is a general principle which I draw from all this: whatever exists is proven to exist in the way it exists. This can be applied as a principle of metaphysics, epistemology, or value-theory. What is good is proven good, what is real is proven real. The notion of proof here is correlative to the notion of fulfillment. I could equally say: whatever exists is fulfilled. This is a very Hegelian claim, but it does not require the rest of Hegel's metaphysics, and fits well with existentialist thought as well as Christian thought about the eschaton, when Christ will be proven Lord of all and all things will be made right.

This does not mean that it is fulfilled in the straightforward Aristotelian manner. It does not mean that everyone will one day have their telos satisfied completely. Rather, there is a narrative dimension which also applies. Those of us who have faith in Christ, who participate in his death and therefore also in his life, will be fulfilled in our narrative and fulfill the narrative which Christ has lived ahead of us. Yet this ending which we look forward to is tied to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and that narrative must be made our own. This is not to say that we must act perfectly like Christ or forego Christ's ending, but it does mean that we must recognize our lives as narratives in his mold. We can only claim our lives as of our own writing in ways which we also live as moments, not of sincerity, but of weakness. Our sins must take a particular role in our narratives, and Christ must take his place as Lord of our lives. The unrighteous, on the other hand, will receive their due punishment in order that their actions may form a narrative which fulfills the nature of injustice. If this attempt at explaining how this principle does not give rise to universalism makes little sense, do not worry. It is a single paragraph tackling a subject on which books are written.

Addiction, Regulation, and Social Media

This is a brief argument. Note that I mean the term "regulation" very broadly, to include "sin taxes" and other such non-regulatory pressures placed, by the government, on things because "we" disapprove of them.

Premise: we regulate (in this broad sense) addictive substances.
Premise: social media platforms are addictive.
Conclusion: we should regulate (in this broad sense) social media.

Now, there are some obvious objections. For one, we do not regulate all addictive substances, nor do we regulate them simply because they are addictive. For instance, coffee is addictive, yet basically unregulated in this way. Rather, we regulate substances which are particularly dangerous, and we particularly regulate dangerous substances which are addictive. Nevertheless, social media, at least broadly, seems to qualify. I doubt I need to link to the research on how social media tends to significantly affect markers of depression, or the ways that social media has corroded connection and aided the production of epistemic bubbles. So, the altered form of the argument goes:

P: we regulate dangerous addictive substances.
P. social media platforms are dangerous and addictive
C: we should regulate social media platforms

Now, some will object that we ought not regulate dangerous addictive substances because it infringes on the liberty of consumers. The view seems to be that consumers should be trusted to exercise their liberty according to their own views of their best interests. This view strikes me as a little bizarre in this case, since the whole point is that these substances in particular are capable of subverting what rationality we do have. It does not seem to be conducive to liberty to permit people to easily enslave themselves to dangerous addictive substances any more than it would be to permit them to easily enslave themselves to other humans. The regulation's purpose in these cases is to preserve liberty.

If one accepts this argument, then the chief puzzle is how one goes about regulating, in this sense, something like Facebook or Twitter. The kinds of regulations we have used for dangerous addictive substances in the past are not easily applicable to an ethereal substance which is accessible anywhere without paying money. Even a "no Facebook zone" would be hard to enforce. One might attempt requirements on applications designed to reduce either the harmful effects or the degree of addictiveness, although these will need to be constantly updated to keep up with new developments, making it an arms race between social media companies and regulators.

Another option might be to provide just enough nominal regulation to get the point across that social media usage is a dangerous addictive substance, and thus should be engaged in only in moderation. The aim here would be to change social attitudes toward social media usage, making it more socially acceptable to try to avoid social media usage, less socially acceptable to appear addicted to it, etc. This kind of tactic could operate without the regulation, of course, provided a sufficient number of people began expressing such views. I would almost be surprised if this is not the direction we are moving in. Social media addiction may soon be regarded similarly to alcoholism: both are addictive, correlated with depression, and isolating.

Mourning and Perspective

Bad events justify mourning. Bad events, being bad, are mourn-worthy. This seems like an accurate statement, but it must be refined. Do we mean that every bad event justifies everyone mourning forever? If not, why not? It cannot be because the proper response is not, for some people, to mourn, supposing that the mourn-worthiness is inherent in the event. Of course, we might give an account on which the mourn-worthiness of events is relative to the agent. In that case, what makes an event mourn-worthy to some but not others?

Now, there are likely some events which are mourn-worthy only for some and not for others. I would like to set those aside for now, however, and consider only those events which are mourn-worthy for anyone who hears of them. Even in such cases, the degree may vary. I want to suggest that, where the badness to the agents is the same but the mourn-worthiness differs, this is a result of how worthy those events are of consideration by the agents.

On this account, we have more reason to consider bad events the more they affect our lives and the lives of those close to us. Two equally mourn-worthy events, or the same mourn-worthy event at two different times, may rightfully elicit different degrees of mournfulness from us on account of our differing practical relations to them. The events continue to provide reasons for us to mourn, but we cease to be in a situation where those reasons warrant as much consideration.

Depending on one's conception of reasons, this may amount to the events giving less reason. That is, if a reason just is something which should be given consideration in practical reasoning, then the fact that one has reason, all things considered, not to give weight to a fact in practical reasoning entails that the fact is not a reason for one, and similarly if one merely has some reason not to give weight to a reason, then the reason is less weighty of a reason. If this is one's account of reasons, then it should be no surprise that reasons come and go over time.

If, on the other hand, we presuppose that reasons are eternal in the way that other ideal entities are supposed to be (e.g., numbers, the predicate "being red," etc.,), then the reason goes along with the event, and is just as much a reason whether or not we have reason to take it into (or exclude it from) consideration. Translated into a less Platonist idiom, this might becomes the view that an event provides a reason for action phi provided only that, were one to consider it and only it, then one would rightly reach the practical conclusion *phi*. Combinations of events will provide different reasons from their isolated parts, and might not provide a reason derivable from their parts. This conflicts with our ordinary language of "weighing reasons" which seems to suggest that distinct reasons can be placed alongside each other. Yet it is not an uncommon claim that it is only in a context that reasons exist and have force. That the light turned green is only a reason to go because of its situation in a set of laws, and it seems to provide no reason to go if the road is blocked ahead of me. Again, the reason appears to evaporate in certain contexts.

So we seem to be forced to claim that reasons are ephemeral things. Nevertheless, mourn-worthy events remain mourn-worthy. That is, they remain such that the proper reaction to them, when faced with them, is to mourn over them to an extent corresponding to their degree of mournfulness and how directly one is faced with them. The reason to mourn provided by a mourn-worthy event may evaporate, but this is not because the event ceases to be mourn-worthy, but because we lack reason to consider it. The mourn-worthy event only provided reason to mourn at all because it occurred in a context where it made it fitting for someone to mourn. If we were given fresh reason to consider the event, as on the anniversary of the event, then the reason to mourn would revive because the event retains whatever features made it a mourn-worthy event.

Self-Awareness

When one is aware, one are aware of something. To be self-aware is to be aware of oneself. One can be aware without being aware of oneself if, for instance, one is aware of a ball in front of oneself instead. But is this right? If one is aware of a ball in front of oneself, isn't one implicitly aware of oneself? This turns on what we mean by awareness.

There are, potentially, at least two ways in which one can be aware of something. One can have the object of awareness before one, or one may have the object of awareness as an understood correlate of one's experience. When one is aware of a tree, for instance, one is aware of the part of the tree facing one, but one is also aware of the whole tree. The back and insides of the tree are merely understood as the correlate of the front of the tree. Likewise, then, one may be aware of oneself as one examines oneself or as one recognizes oneself as a correlate of one's experience as centered on a body.

When one views a tree, the existence of a front and behind, of a left and right, involves a relation to the point of view from which it is viewed, and thus the experience entails a perceiving being. This may be noted more or less. It is possible that animals might have experiences which imply their particular beings without noticing this implication. They would thus be self-aware in a very weak sense. We are able to direct our awareness to the implied particular being, ourselves, and thus shift from being aware of ourselves as an understood correlate to the direct object of awareness.

If one means by awareness only direct awareness, then one can be aware of things without being aware of oneself. If one means both varieties of awareness, then any being with awareness at all is aware of itself. I suspect that, when we are discussing self-awareness, we mean awareness of the direct kind.

We may be peculiar in being able to reflect on the perspectival nature of our engagement with the world. One can notice that One is seeing things only from one's own point of view, and one can reflect on how one's point of view may alter what one sees. One can do this at several levels, not only with perception of objects, where one can consider the possible effects of optical illusions, obstructions, and deception, but also with our thoughts. One can thus consider how ideas appear to one perspectivally, and hence how one's considerations may be being altered. One can ask, for instance, what would make one's argument stronger or weaker.

We might structure kinds of self-awareness by what elements of the self the awareness takes in. Some creatures might be self-aware in recognizing that their perceptions are perspectivally bound and might therefore engage in a particular kind of exploratory or group behavior. One might suppose that the use of lookouts hints at this degree of self-awareness in many creatures. Others may be aware that their thoughts are perspectivally bound in that they are restricted by the ideas they are aware of and their cognitive capacities. Others may recognize that their emotions are perspectivally bound, and this in one of two ways. Their emotions are perspectivally bound in being elicited by what they are aware of from their perspectival vantage point, but their emotions are also perspectivally bound by being an expression of their particular values. The former kind of self-awareness, I would suspect, would be more common, or stronger, than the latter. As humans, we are capable of all of these varieties of self-awareness. Some of these come more naturally than others. The perceptual and the first emotional kinds are likely the most straightforward, whereas those relating to thoughts and the latter emotional kind take more effort or reflection. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to genuinely wonder whether one's conclusions are accurate and whether one's emotional reactions are fitting.

Out of the Echo Chamber Wars

I noted in the previous post that our present predicament bears some similarities to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In this post, I want to use that as a clue to how we might expect our cultural development to go from here. However, having taken time to examine that region of the Phenomenology of Spirit a little bit more, it turns out that Hegel later discusses a phenomenon closer to our own culture, and so we will examine that discussion, not the master-slave dialectic. We will also discuss Hegel's account of the French Revolution and Terror. It is noting, however, that the feature which all of these share, that is, that of hostility between groups which each want unilateral recognition, is based, in both cases, on a desire for independence which does not permit mediated independence.

The sections we are interested in to begin with are  labeled (in my copy) The  Law of the Heart, and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit (C.V.B.b., pp.209-15) and Absolute Freedom and Terror (C.VI.III., pp.343-50). First, I want to show how this section matches our current predicament, then I want to examine whether Hegel's account of this phase's transition can be made sense of from where we are. Be warned that I find these sections difficult, and will be relying somewhat on Charles Taylor's reading in his Hegel (Ch.V.3.II., and Ch.VI.2., pp.163-7, 184-188). Even with such aid, however, I may not be able to make this as clear as I would like.

Taylor sets the stage as one where self-consciousness wants to recognize itself in the state, and believes itself to be naturally good and the world to be at its service. Thus, it wants to reform the state in its own image. This natural goodness, however, means that it thinks that the problem is law itself. Thus, it finds laws, generally, to be bad. For this reason, self-consciousness cannot, here, stop trying to reform the law and finds any law it passes to be an alien imposition upon it again. What one generation reforms the state into, the next (if both are in this stage) reforms it back out of. This comes out especially in Hegel's discussion of the French Revolution:

This process is consequently the interaction of consciousness with itself, in which it lets nothing break away and assume the shape of a determinate object standing over against it. It follows from this, that it cannot arrive at a positive accomplishment of anything, either in the way of universal works of language or of those of actual reality, either in the shape of laws and universal regulations of conscious freedom, or of deeds and works of active freedom.

Now, Hegel describes how get conflict from here:

Hence others find in this content not the law of their heart fulfilled, but rather that of someone else; and precisely in accordance with the universal law, that each is to find his own heart in what is law, they turn against that reality which he set up, just as he on his side turned against theirs. (p.212, emphasis in original)

And, in the case of the French Terror:

Universal freedom can thus produce neither o positive achievement nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the rage and fury of destruction. (p.346)

The government is itself nothing but the self-established focus, the individual embodiment of the universal will. ... By no manner of means, therefore, can it exhibit itself as anything but a faction. The victorious faction only is called the government; and just in that it is a faction lies the direct necessity of its overthrow; (p.347)

Because the government is a faction, it is guilty, and thus cannot prove the guilt of its opposition, thus,

Being suspected, therefore, takes the place, or has the significance and effect,  of being guilty; and the external reaction against this reality that lies in bare inward intention, consists in the arid barren destruction of this particular existent self, (ibid.)

And towards the end of Hegel's analysis (after discussing how this stage goes crazy):

The universal here presented, therefore, is only a universal resistance and struggle of all against one another. ... What appears as public ordinance is thus this state of war of each against all.  (p.215)

I have now presented the two contradictions in the opposite order to Taylor (and Hegel). Taylor follows his explanation of these two contradictions with the shift which they require:

If the world order is the law of all hearts, then it can be considered as potentially capable of expressing the universal. What it would require on this view would be simply to be purged of individual self-seeking. (pp.165-6)

Because the source of the problem here is holding to one's own individuality, the next phase is a stage of self-denial. As I cannot yet make sense of Hegel himself in this following section, we will deal with Taylor here.

The peculiar feature of this kind of phase is man's sense of his own unworthiness, his apologizing for his existence, and his attempt to suppress his particularity, and become nothing but universal will. (p.166)

If Taylor's reading of Hegel is right, and if our era is sufficiently like the previous phase, then a Hegelian prediction for our future would be that we will transition into this self-denying phase. What could this look like? I think we already see this developing in a concern with "checking one's privilege" and avoiding assimilating other cultural expressions for fear that we will do so in an offensive manner. It shows up in other ways as well, but the general direction is towards putting oneself and one's own group down. This may also account for the amount of depression if we take depression to be internalized anger, anger with oneself. This is strongest in groups which form a majority, but I suspect it spreads to other groups, and most people are part of some kind of majority.

However, this takes self-consciousness on a road to a Kantian philosophy of duty. This is a duty which can never be fulfilled, because its fulfillment would be its end. Just as our current attempts at being authentic tend to involve seeking to be different from others, this kind of duty seeks to do the duties because they are duties and not because that is how we can be true to ourselves. What is needed is an account where being true to oneself and doing one's duty, as one is called to it by one's society, can come together, and thus where one can attain both true authenticity and fulfill one's duty. The Kantian account divides happiness from duty, whereas the account Hegel is driving at has it that our ultimate fulfillment is a fulfillment of duty, happiness is found in doing what is truly one's duty.

Because of this contradiction, we come around to a Romantic notion which holds to a moral intuition which is divided into a virtue-signaling speaker and a confidently active person who fails to attain to a genuine universal, who is thus charged with hypocrisy by the virtue-signaler who is likewise a hypocrite. Each is confident that it is in harmony with the universal, but they are still operating from intuition, not reason. They hold their views as a kind of divine revelation through intuition of the divine mind, but not one which can be thought, rather, it is only felt. This phase finally ends in a reconciliation between the two parties, and seems to complete the development of political culture in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Perhaps there are other hints as to directions of development elsewhere, and we should certainly be open to the possibilities that Hegel may easily have gotten things wrong, missed stages, or failed to recognize a continuation.

This is not an entirely optimistic bit of futurology, but this discussion also does not bring us to the end of the line. We can hope that it is a short lived phase, and that we get to a decent stage before too long. Or we can hope that we take a good long time getting there, for the following one appears to be coming, one of letting the intention count for everything, on the one hand, and a struggle over what our actions mean on the other, which goes along with the Romantic phase I briefly noted above. This already appears, in our development, tied up both with entitlement and with the fear of appropriation just noted. It is a long road out if Hegel is correct and if we do not speed up.

It is worth noting that this account has twists and turns. On this account, we are not doomed to go farther and farther in the direction we are now going. I have not articulated how these twists might actually impact those trends which we are currently concerned about, but there are glimpses of hope for concerns about entitlement, linguistic tyranny, and, I think, racism.

A small note on race and Hegel. Hegel can look quite racist, and I wouldn't deny that he is, in fact, racist. However, his account of slavery's position in history and the development of consciousness does not validate slavery or racism in the end, although it grants it a position in the development of a people. Hegel would say a similar thing about the French Terror. The various iterations of master-slave-type dialectics can be seen as transitions enabling a previously hierarchized relation to reach equality. This is, roughly, how I see Marx appropriating the master-slave dialectic in economic relations. Thus, our present transition through extreme opposition may be seen, from a Hegelian standpoint, as a stage in racial reconciliation.

I should also note that I am not completely sold on Hegel's philosophy. I find it intriguing, and an interesting tool for thinking through these things and gaining a new perspective on them. It is worth trying to see how well what Hegel would say fits with where we are, and how much we might be able to use to make better progress. 

No, We Are Not Postmodern

The notion that we live in a postmodern world is bandied about, still. Primarily, I come across it among conservatives, political and theological, who tend to mean something about our culture not caring about truth or believing that truth is relative.

Perhaps there are some circles where the concept of postmodernism is applicable. Perhaps it is even clear what postmodernism is. I doubt it holds of American culture broadly. If it does hold, it holds more among conservatives themselves than liberals.

First of all, my argument is not that we actually tend to attain truth, nor that we actually act like we care about truth, but that we would claim to care about truth and claim to aim at it. Further, there are some postmodernist claims which we completely disavow. Yet there is continuity with postmodernism. We used to be more postmodern, but things have changed. It was a phase of which we retain a residue.

The very use of the terms "Post-Truth" and "Fake News" expose, not a lack of concern with truth, but a massive concern with truth, a weaponized concern with truth. Truth cannot be relative in the stereotypical postmodern sense without making these terms incoherent. These terms do not claim that the other side's news is true for them but not for the speaker, rather, it claims that the other side's news is false and usually suggests that the news is maliciously false (whether by intending to be false or maliciously being unconcerned with whether or not it is true). What we do not do, however, is claim that this is good or right.

The use of the term "Fake News" is also incompatible with a radical postmodern take on interpretation which would hold that there are no facts, only infinitely questionable interpretations. We do not claim that the news we call fake is merely an interpretation which is equally possible if one approaches with particular presuppositions; rather, we claim that they are accounts of matters of fact which get things wrong. We object, not only to what we take to be false factual claims, but to what we take to be unjustified interpretations. The postmodern instinct, on the other hand, is suspicious of claims about facts, being extremely aware of how statistics can lie, likely to a fault.

The belief that there is a "right side of history" or that America or a particular ideology is destined for greatness collides head on with the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Metanarratives being just such claims about history having a purpose, an overarching structure which gives historical action meaning and our actions meaning in historical perspective.

This shift has come about gradually, and there is important continuity with postmodernism here. We are strongly aware of the sociology of knowledge, that is, how our social groups set up plausibility structures and provide claims as to what can count as knowledge. This underlies the concern with bubbles and echo chambers. We are also aware of a need to listen to and understand those who disagree with us, which at least points in the direction of needing to be aware of each others' presuppositions in order to understand and communicate with each other across ideological lines.

The shift we have undergone is one which moves us from an individualistic way of securing certainty and tolerance by blocking argument to a communal way of doing so. Instead of individually trying to hold off arguments by denying that truths of certain kinds can reasonably be argued for, we form cultures which deny the possibility of any sane argument for certain claims, and regard all arguments for such claims as insane in some form, often maliciously so. Instead of individually demanding tolerance for our views, we merely isolate ourselves to groups of people who do tolerate our views and keep at arms length those who do not tolerate our views.

This shift has occurred because we want our truth claims to be recognized--again, the sociology of knowledge ideas which postmodern theorists largely popularized. In order to gain recognition for our truths, we need groups which will recognize those truths as truths. But we have also retained the desire to avoid needing to argue carefully for our views in response to all-comers. We are uncomfortable with argument, perhaps largely because one of the things we have retained from the postmodern era is a suspicion of reason. The only way to gain recognition for truth claims and avoid argument (and thus gain something have the form of certainty but lacking its power) is to form echo chambers. The two desires of our era are, then, the recognition of our own truth claims and the avoidance of conflict. In some ways, the latter is an extreme manifestation of the former--conflict occurs where truth claims are not recognized. To sum it up in a single desire: we desire certainty. This, too, is opposed to what "postmodernism" is ordinarily used to mean. A true postmodernism is comfortable with uncertainty, indeed, would hold it to be our necessary condition.

This era, too, will give way. We all recognize that echo chambers are a problem and that we have produced a situation where ideologies routinely talk past each other. The challenge is to alter our desires and forms of life in such a way as to move beyond our current era. We must move beyond, rather than back to the "good old" days of modernism, because we cannot unlearn the ways in which our rationality is affected by more than reason, the ways that reason can be used to manipulate, and the ways in which we are situated in cultures.

In pursuing these desires, however, we have cut ourselves off from the genuine community which comes only where conflict can occur and from the pursuit of objective truth, that is, truth which can be recognized by any who genuinely and carefully seek it. We fail, then, to achieve recognition for our claims to objective truth, because our claims are recognized merely as a truth of the community we are in, not as objective truth, that is, the truth of, in principle, everyone. Hegel would claim, I think, that this kind of recognition occurs in the state, and this would account for the way in which the legal system is weaponized by all sides against their opponents in arguments about what is good.

At some point, I hope, we will recognize that we have merely substituted one kind of conflict for another. In seeking recognition for our claims to possess objective truth, we have attempted to wrest it unilaterally from each other by force of law, thus pressing us into a conflict which must end in either annihilation or subjugation of the other view. We are engaging, in other words, in something very similar to a community-level or thought-level occurrence of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. We are operating at a different level, but the same dynamics of conflict are at work, and both ordinary conclusions will be unsatisfactory because they will not prove the truth claims to be objective.

This post has gone long enough. I will end by summarizing. We are not postmodern, but are distinctly not postmodern. Nevertheless, we possess an inheritance from postmodernism which affects how we live, and casts light on our present predicament. When seen in this light, we can see that our present predicament, too, must pass on into a further stage of culture, and cannot retreat to an apparently better age.