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    • Philosopher Fridays: Augustine on the Promise of Hope

      Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on December 26, 2014

      Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, where I aim to expose the academic underpinnings of my thoughts on story-telling and writing. In this series I make no attempt to give a comprehensive view of any of the philosophers I tackle, but instead pick out and explain what draws me back to their works again and again. 

      For the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the tenuous relationship between faith and reason in a sub-series I’m calling “Expecting Ambiguity“. My aim is to explain how philosophical arguments for the existence of God are not as concretely determinate (and thus as easy to dismiss) as they are often cast, but that they instead offer as much insight into the limits and powers of subjective human knowledge as they do into religion. For the finale, I offer you some thoughts on Augustine’s City of God and the promise of hope. 

      AUGUSTINE: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, who lived from 354-430 AD, is often categorized as a Medieval theologian, though he more properly fits into what is known as the Late Antique period. As both a philosopher and a Church Father, Augustine wrestled with questions of faith and reason throughout his life, ultimately finding that reason was a tool for the faithful, best used to help them seek understanding in their faith, but in itself not sufficient to deal with infinite goodness of God, the prospect of individuated conceptual substances, and the excess of being. We are but finite creatures, and our rational capacity to simplify the complex world around us could not, by itself, give us a full picture of reality.

      Augustine faces his despair over and over throughout his career, moving closer and closer to the comfort and understanding he seeks even as his despair and grief grow and deepen through loss, regret, and devastation. I could cite dozens of examples, but for this post I’ll stick to just one: Book XIX of The City of God.

      Written at the end of his life, The City of God is often categorized as a response to the Visigoth’s sacking of Rome in 410. In the face of violence and death, The City of God is thought to be Augustine’s attempt to console Christians and help those who suffered find a way out of despair.

      And human reason just wasn’t going to cut it.

      The Earthly City

      Chapter 1 of Book XIX begins with the difficulties and particularities of finding happiness in the earthly city. Life in this world, in these bodies, in these cultures, with these personalities – it’s highly complex and personalized. Following the logic of the Roman Marcus Varro, Augustine determines that there are at least 288 different possible paths to happiness, and likely a good deal more. While some people desire pleasure above all else, others desire repose. Some like a balance of pleasure and repose, and others find value in objects or goals. That’s at least four different possibilities right there, and none of them very specific. Augustine/Varro then takes those four general categories and divides them up again – whichever you desire most can be desired primarily for its own sake, for what it can do for you (and the virtues it can cultivate), or can be valued both for its own sake and for what it brings. Now were up to 12, and aren’t any closer to saying something specific. Those 12 possible combinations can be seen in our personal lives, and in our social interactions, and may not be the same in each – now we’re at 24.

      Augustine’s fortitude exceeds mine, so while I’ll stop here, Augustine makes it all the way 288 before giving up on the seemingly indefinite project of finding perfect happiness by earthly means. While we all seek happiness above other things, our finite and complex lives on earth make it difficult for us to be perfectly satisfied even under the best conditions.

      And so Augustine trims away the excess, eliminating accidental qualities and matters of taste, seeking to find the central core of the matter, collapsing categories until he can see only 3 major differences in the ways humans can seek happiness, or rather, three ways of answering one major question: for the sake of what do we live?

      In the City of Men we have but three options:

      1. we can seek good things for their own sakes, using virtues and talents to get us these things.
      2. we can seek good things for the sake of making ourselves better people (the cultivation of virtue).
      3. we can value both the things themselves and the virtues equally, but separately.

      Or in other words, we can try to find happiness through our bodies, our souls, or some equally yoked combination. For the earthly philosopher – in this case Varro – there can be only one answer: because bodily pleasure seeking cannot regulate itself, and requires virtue, we must seek virtue above all else. Because virtue is the wise regulation of the self according to reason, it alone is capable of organizing life to keep both the body and soul in line. Virtue is the only way to get the most of these three possibilities, and so virtue alone can bring us any possibility of earthly happiness.

      Virtue makes a good use both of itself and of all other goods in which lies man’s happiness, and where it is absent, no matter how many good things a man has, they are not for his good, consequently should not be called good thing while they belong to one who makes them useless by using them badly.

      But for Augustine, virtue isn’t enough.

      Augustine looks at the life that philosophy can provide, and he finds it a dismal prospect. Virtue, in its classical meaning, refers primarily to self-control and discipline. Classical virtues were based in hard-work, punishment, eschewing pleasures, being temperate, moderate, and restrained. Effectively, virtue would stop individuals from hurting themselves and others through overindulgence, bad decision making, greed, violence, rage, or emotional outbursts. It would make a good starting point, Augustine thought, but there was no way he could ever see that as “happiness” properly speaking.

      Firstly, even if we were able to achieve perfect self-control, that still leaves an infinite world of things out of our control. And the world, as it was for Augustine, is full of terrible things. The forces working against our happiness are unlimited – limitless, even – and so no matter how wise we may be or how well we master ourselves, our limited powers will always be outmatched. In every good thing we can encounter, there is something evil. That is the nature of our physical world. Every friend we love will leave us eventually, either by choice or by death. Every moment of safety we feel can easily be upset by outside forces. Every reward of discipline can be undermined by a failure of the body, a disease, natural deprecation, a betrayal, unfairness, and on, and on. Self-control is a fine thing, but the evils of the world far exceed those of our own making. Virtue has no intrinsic ability to make good out of bad.

      Secondly, even achieving self-control is no small feat. In fact, far from adding goodness our lives, every virtue exists only in opposition to some tempting vice, and we are faced with a constant battle against our own human weakness. Prudence, the virtue of the cautious, “is itself a proof that we are in the midst of evils, or that evils are in us.” Justice is the restoration of order, but only after it has been disturbed. Chastity is the virtue of physical restraint. Temperance is the virtue of refraining from indulgence. Nearly every virtue exists in reference to some potentially self-destructive desire, and no one is “so wise that he has no conflict at all to maintain against his vices.”

      That isn’t to say that virtue isn’t important to Augustine; it’s an essential piece of the puzzle. Virtue helps us deal with misfortunes, avoid temptations that would cause new misfortunes, and make us ready to receive goodness by waging war against the miseries of the outside world. At its most effective, perfect virtue can keep our vices at bay and lead us to contentment within our situations. But though self-control is necessary for happiness, it is far from sufficient.

      And so, according to Augustine, it is clear that human beings lack the power to make themselves happy. They’re too busy trying to avoid self-destructive behaviors. If they succeed, then they can look to external sources of positive happiness and goodness that are big enough to combat the ills of earthly life. Any attempt to effect for ourselves a happiness on earth resolves either into arrogance or ignorance – either in the active oppression and control of others, or in the stoic abstention from all human joy.

      The Promise of Divine Hope

      In order to be happy we need something that is great enough to not only match the forces of evil and sadness, but great enough to actively make something good out of them. He sees evidence of this in our earthly lives; the death of a plant or animal nourishes the ground so that other plants and animals may live, through the pain of study or exercise we can become stronger and smarter, the loss of one opportunity may open the door to another, and in all sadness and fear there is a promise of something better:

      In the abode of weakness, and in these wicked days, this state of anxiety has also its use stimulating us to seek with keener longing for that security where peace is complete and unassailable.

      What this means for Augustine is not that we need to feel pain in order to understand pleasure and joy, but rather that our feelings of pain and sadness tell us there is something we would wish to have – a state of peace and goodness. If there was no better goodness, then we would have nothing to long for, and our pain would not be so keen. What we want is in this way as real to us in its absence as it is in its presence. Just as there is in every good thing a persistent threat of loss, there is also in every sad event the possibility of goodness – but only if we look for it and hope for it.

      Happiness, thus, is tied to the hope that there is some possible way for things to turn out all right, even if we cannot ourselves imagine how. In fact, the hope that we need in order to be happy is, for Augustine, necessarily ambiguous. Since what we can imagine is limited to our own powers and the evils of lived experience are unlimited, we must necessarily seek an external power that far exceeds our own understanding. When we attempt to reach beyond the limits of what we can reasonably control, our attempts to affect for ourselves our own peace stretch us too thin. When we try to make others behave the way we want, we either set ourselves up for disappointment (when we inevitably fail) or turn ourselves into monsters obsessed with power. When we think we can make ourselves happy and create our own perfect peace, we end up either settling for an utterly impoverished notion of happiness (as the Stoics do, and perhaps as Socrates does) or becoming bullies and tyrants, and separate ourselves even further from goodness (as Kakos, and perhaps Callicles also, does).

      Ironically, this means that our efforts are best spent on cultivating our own virtue and controlling what we can – but only in so far as we externalize our view of happiness by focusing on our hope for a greater and more perfect happiness beyond what virtue can provide. When we do this, we actually make it easier for ourselves to be virtuous. The humility inherent in hope actually makes us better at controlling ourselves because it gives us something to focus on, a goal to work towards. This focus makes us better at unifying our virtues, and increases our power.

      Reading this section of City of God reminds me of walking on a tightrope. In this metaphor, the tightrope is stretched over all of the temptations in the world that will lead us astray, as well as the nearly infinite world outside of our control. Our goal is to stay on the tightrope in order to avoid falling into despair. Virtue, in this case, is the means by which we hold our balance and tighten our core muscles. If we focus on ourselves as complex beings, looking at all of the different ways we can move our arms and legs, we’ll flail one arm, bend a little to compensate, and end up continuously countering each movement with another.

      But if we lift our head up, and focus on a point off in the distance, we’ll be much better at keeping our balance in a unified way. We’ll pull ourselves together without thinking about the details and move smoothly forward. As soon as we stop moving towards our goal, we wobble. As soon as we look down, we lose our balance.

      In the same way, hope makes it easier for us to be virtuous without thinking through all of the details. Instead of considering various lifestyle choices offered by the world (attempting to juggle all of Varro’s 288 possible combinations), if we look towards something always off in the distance, we will be able to keep ourselves from succumbing to self-destructive temptations. This hope isn’t just a hope that waits – it’s a productive anticipation that changes how we feel in the present.

      For Augustine, belief in God manifests necessarily as hope and not resolution because otherwise, God couldn’t continue to make us happy as we encounter new situations and scenarios. In order to be happy, there must be something capable of granting happiness and peace beyond anything we can imagine, because it is only when we are able to fix our eyes on something in the distance that we can move through the world with ease, and without feeling our constant mortal struggle. Without this hope, we get stuck, and happiness is impossible.

      In Sum

      What Augustine seeks is something to counter the trivial precision of human reason. Virtue is a good starting point, but it does nothing but guard us against preventable misery – it’s not enough to actually make us happy because it cannot extend beyond itself. While it is tempting to look at The City of God as a mere apologetic for Christianity, Augustine’s reasoning in Book XIX actually stems first from his desire for a Goodness that exceeds the evils of the world, and then finds fruition not in the resolution of his desire, but in his hope for it. Hope itself becomes not merely knowledge of a delay, but rather an active and productive anticipation that is itself an experience of happiness. Hope begins in a desire for something of unquantifiable power, but manifests itself in a true experience of happiness, radiating back from our projected desire.

      As I explained in a post on optimism last year:

      In Book XIX of The City of God, Augustine implies that hope is not just anticipation of the good that you wish to come, it is the reflection from the goodness beyond, reaching back to us in order to pull us along. He goes on at length about the various ways that even good things can disappoint us, because the evil in the world is so insurmountable that happiness seems impossible. But he doesn’t just give up. As long as we keep our heads up and our eyes fixed on the far away light of God, even though we cannot see it directly but can only use it as a guide for where to look, the overwhelming darkness around us can’t swallow us whole. As soon as we drop our gaze and try to grapple with the misery on our own terms, we get pulled into it.

      I thought this made a fitting capstone for this series on ambiguity in explorations of God. The purpose of this series is not to argue for the existence of God, but instead to argue that explorations of the nature of God are more open to interpretation than they may initially seem. Far from defining a precise vision of God, Augustine finds fruit in the distance between the precision of human reason and the productive happiness of ambiguous hope. If we could see God clearly and prove his existence, then he wouldn’t be God. He wouldn’t provide us with the continuous motion we need to stay balanced with ease, and he wouldn’t help us avoid focusing too much on individual details. Without that distance – that ambiguity – we would think about our arms and legs, and we would wobble. We would dwell on the things we couldn’t control and we would look down, falling into despair. We would try to conquer others who would threaten our peace and disrupts ourselves further. We would find our small achievements disappointing and give up entirely.

      While this is not exactly a proof for the existence of God, it doesn’t assume that God exists either; rather, it begins with a need, and then looks to what works. And this – this power, this goodness, this ambiguous possibility – is what he attempts to argue for. He doesn’t argue that God must be pure goodness – he argues that there must be something purely and infinitely good.

      And this he calls God.

      Posted in Series | 5 Comments | Tagged Augustine, city of god, expecting ambiguity, god, hope, longreads, philosopher fridays, philosophy, religion, theology, virtue
    • Philosopher Fridays: Anselm’s Ontological Argument

      Posted at 4:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on December 13, 2014

      Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, where I aim to expose the academic underpinnings of my thoughts on story-telling and writing. In this series I make no attempt to give a comprehensive view of any of the philosophers I tackle, but instead pick out and explain what draws me back to their works again and again. 

      For the next few weeks I’ll be exploring the tenuous relationship between faith and reason in a sub-series I’m calling “Expecting Ambiguity“. My aim is to explain how philosophical arguments for the existence of God are not as concretely determinate (and thus as easy to dismiss) as they are often cast, but that they instead offer as much insight into the limits and powers of subjective human knowledge as they do into religion.

      And because of finals and grading, this week we have a very special Saturday installment of Philosopher Fridays. 

      ANSELM: Saint Anselm of Canterbury was one of the earliest scholastic theologians. Born to a noble family in 1033, Anselm was initially denied the chance to choice a monastery by his father at the age of 15. After suffering psychological illness and the death of his mother, he left home at the age of 23 to pursue his dream without his father’s consent, and joined the Benedictine order. He was exiled from England a few times because of monarchical and papal power disputes and died in 1109.

      What he is best known for, however, is his proof for the existence of God: the Ontological Argument of chapters two and three of the Proslogion. Written in 1077 as a meditation on the existence of God, the Proslogion – originally titled Faith Seeking Understanding – was contentious from the start. The text is almost universally published with its earliest critical commentary, written by monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers and followed up by Anselm’s own reply to this rebuttal. I will go through the proof, and then address some of its criticisms.

      The Ontological Proof:

      1. If the phrase “that than which nothing greater can be thought” can be understood, then this concept can be said to exist in the understanding.
      2. That which exists both in reality and in the understanding is greater than that which exists only in the understanding.
      3. Thus that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist solely in the understanding, because if it were only to exist in the understanding, then we could think of something greater – and we would no longer be describing something than which nothing greater could be thought.
      4. Therefore, that than which nothing greater can be thought must exist in both the understanding and in reality.
      5. Further, if it is possible to think that something can exist which cannot be thought not to exist, then surely that which cannot be thought not to exist is greater still than anything which can be thought not to exist.
      6. Therefore, that than which nothing greater can be thought doesn’t just exist in both the understanding and in reality – it cannot be thought not to exist.

      And he finishes the argument by saying “And this is you, O Lord, our God” (Ch 3).

      Interpretations, Reductions, and Critiques:

      This can be a little confusing linguistically, so interpreters are tempted to simplify the ungainly “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” to “the greatest thing I can think of” or “the greatest being that can be conceived”. The argument is recast thus:

      1. God is the greatest thing that can be thought.
      2. Since it is greater to exist in reality than just in thought, the greatest thing must exist in reality.
      3. Therefore, God must exist.

      With this change, critiques come quickly and easily. Guanilo’s “perfect island” objection (the early commentary mentioned above) stems from this notion, stating that in imagining a perfect island, you could easily keeping imagining something to make it better without that better thing ever coming to be in reality, thereby nullifying the necessity of static perfection. If one God is the greatest being that can be conceived, then two Gods would be even greater, and then God would not be the greatest possible being, and the entire thing would fall apart. Perfection in God cannot imply existence any more than perfection in an island.

      But this simplification is a mistake that fundamentally changes the meaning from something indefinite to something definite. These objections aren’t wrong in themselves. In fact, based on his reply to Guanilo, Anselm quite agrees. However he also notes that these objections have almost nothing to do with his own proof. Because Anselm never defines God as the “greatest being that can be conceived.”

      Infinite Perfection and Positive Ambiguity:

      In the Latin, the definition of God is always framed in open-ended terms, as aliquid quo maius nihil cogitate potest (that than which nothing greater can be thought), aliquid quo maius cogitari non valet (that than which something of greater worth cannot be conceived), or aliquid quo maius cogitari non potest (that than which something greater cannot be thought). He later asks “What are you, if not the greatest of all beings…?” (ch 5), but he never settles on anything concrete.

      This is explicitly not something definite or static, but rather something unlimited and indefinite. To change the definition in this way is more than just reductive – it completely erases the major theological heart of the Proslogion. The real goal of the text, as I see it, is not to prove the existence of a specified and delimited God, but instead to wonder at the notion of God as something which exceeds human understanding. He’s meditating explicitly on our temptation to simplify God and reality into concrete terms and seeking the limits of human understanding. The chapters that follow this proof are primarily questions about what appear to be contradictions, questions about what it means to seek something with no apparent limit, and finally statements about eternity, timelessness, and limitlessness.

      This does not simply resolve into a negative theology. God is not “that which we cannot understand”, but instead gives rise to a positive ambiguity that allows us to experience a goodness that can increase indefinitely. Our own limits are removed – however great our creative and intellectual powers, there is no ceiling, no static standard of perfection that cannot be breached. By asserting a God that is not “the greatest being that can be thought” but instead “that than which nothing greater can be thought” Anselm is asserting that our own human limits need not be stifling – essentially, no matter how small we are, God’s infinite greatness is our infinite growth.  Says he at the beginning of the final chapter of the Proslogion:

      For I have found a joy that is full and more than full. Indeed, when the heart, the mind, the soul, and the whole human being are filled with that joy, there will still remain joy beyond measure. The whole of that joy will therefore not enter into those who rejoice; instead, those who rejoice will enter wholly into that joy. Ch. 26

      This isn’t merely a defense of faith, it’s a celebration of human creativity. Anselm recasts our infinite distance from God in a positive light; rather than lamenting how far we are from perfection and bemoaning the ambiguity of faith, he instead rejoices over how far and how freely we can travel when we leave behind our own limits. If we focus solely on what we can contain (concrete, definite ideas) we will deny ourselves the chance to jump into something than can contain us – something in which there is infinite possibility.

      There are, of course, some more substantial critiques of an epistemological nature. Kant’s critique of Anselm’s assumption that existence can be cast as a predicate and Hume’s critique of a priori knowledge are both worth some time and exploration. The implications of these critiques far outreach the scope of this post, however, and I’ll save them for another day.

      What Anselm calls the divine, others may call wonder or doubt, but the claim is the same: that we can always know more than we can rationally explain, we can always feel more than we can put into words, we can always discover more than our dominant paradigm can account for. The God that Anselm proves is not something concretely determinate, but instead something which renders knowledge, creativity, and growth without limit.

      Posted in Series | 15 Comments | Tagged anselm, god, monologion, ontological argument, philosopher fridays, philosophy, proslogion, st. anselm, the existence of God, theology
    • Philosopher Fridays: Pascal’s Ambiguous Wager

      Posted at 11:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on November 21, 2014

      Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, where I aim to expose the academic underpinnings of my thoughts on story-telling and writing. In this series I make no attempt to give a comprehensive view of any of the philosophers I tackle, but instead pick out and explain what draws me back to their works again and again. 

      For the next few weeks I’ll be exploring the tenuous relationship between faith and reason in a sub-series I’m calling “Expecting Ambiguity“. My aim is to explain how philosophical arguments for the existence of God are not as concretely determinate (and thus as easy to dismiss) as they are often cast, but that they instead offer as much insight into the limits and powers of subjective human knowledge as they do into religion.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#mediaviewer/File:Blaise_Pascal_Versailles.JPG

      PASCAL: Born in 1623, Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, inventor, theologian, and philosopher until his death in 1662, when he was just 39 years old. He is known for his work in the invention of calculation machines, his development of mathematics, and notably, both his defense of the scientific method and his defense of religious belief – two things which are now painted as diametrical opposites – and by far his most famous contributions to the Western philosophical canon is his view of faith as a wager.

      Pascal’s wager is essentially the theory that believing in God is a sure bet, not necessarily because you are guaranteed to win, but because you’re guaranteed not to lose. His premise is fairly simple: it is rational to believe in God because even the possibility of being wrong causes no harm, where as deciding not to believe in God may turn out alright, but might also be devastating in the long run. Belief in God carries with it both the greatest potential pay off, and almost no chance of losing anything, whereas denying the existence of God may result in no loss, but could cause you to lose everything. Essentially, the decision to believe in God (or not) comes, for Pascal, down to decision theory.

      Options: God exists God does not exist
      Belief in God Infinite reward Nothing gained or lost
      Denial of God Infinite punishment Nothing gained or lost

      In Pascal’s words:

      “God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (Pensees, 1660)

      Now, it can get a bit more complicated than that; the IEP does a wonderful job laying out three different versions of the theory that have gained traction in the tradition, as well as prominent academic critiques, and I highly suggest you read through the linked page for a full understanding of the argument and its merits and faults.

      I, however, am going to  stay on the surface and boil it down to a pair of simple claims: that belief can be a matter of rational choice, and that rational choice can be inherently a gamble. Taken together, these claims reveal a surprising tie between reason and ambiguity. Reason is often spoken of as a system for dealing with empirical data, or as an internal system of axiomatic truths, but this view opens up a new understanding of reason as pure possibility – a gamble, but not a guess. And this says as much about our human intellect as it does about God.

      No matter how well we reason things through and how much evidence we have available to us, there will always be at least a little bit that we don’t know for sure. And more often than not, there will be a lot we don’t know.

      Following this, one could say that when we believe in scientific theories, we have a good reason to do so – but we’re still making a choice to accept the evidence as it is given. According to Richard Feynman, there’s always something missing from any scientific account, and thus always something more to know. The good scientist is one who holds on to doubt and skepticism. In this way, accepting a scientific theory, no matter how sure it is, still involves a choice to believe it while still be open to the possibility that the theory is potentially limited, incomplete, or even wrong.

      This would, of course, be a very zoomed in version of Pascal’s wager. The personal stakes of being right or wrong are potentially lower (your life, perhaps, instead of your immortal soul) and the jump from probability to knowledge a much shorter distance (the gaps closed by empirical evidence), but in many cases the wager is the theoretically the same. If we only zoomed out half way between the close lens of the science and the wide lens of Pascal, we might find a similar model of decision making in those who rely on science, but know little about it, including those who work with chemicals, anyone taking medicine or having surgery, people operating heavy machinery, and those relying on safety equipment. They would have some knowledge, but would still be making a choice to believe based on the potential costs and benefits.

      This makes me think perhaps that all knowledge involves a choice and a gamble, even when we’re not dealing with something as much of a leap as the existence of God. Even if Pascal’s bet on God isn’t in itself convincing, it still opens a wide range questions about what knowledge and belief require, and suggests that perhaps they’re not quite as distinct as we would like to think.

      Posted in Series | 30 Comments | Tagged Blaise Pascal, faith, feynman, god, pascal, pascal's wager, philosopher fridays, philosophy, reason, the existence of God, theology
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