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All in the mind

Giotto, The Death of St. Francis, c. 1325 (the-athenaeum.org)

This article is a preview from the Summer 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find

out more and subscribe here[1].

So far as I know, Jrgen Habermas set the ball rolling. In 2008 the German

philosopher wrote a celebrated essay, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith

and Reason in a Post-Secular Age. The thrust of what he had to say first occurred

to him much earlier, after he had attended a memorial service for Max Frisch, the

Swiss author and playwright, at St Peters Church in Zurich in 1991. The service

began with Karin Pilliod, Frischs partner, reading out a brief declaration written

by the deceased. It stated, among other things: We let our nearest speak, and

without an amen. I am grateful to the ministers of St. Peters in Zurich ... for

their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service.

The ashes will be strewn somewhere. Two friends spoke but there was no priest


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and no blessing. The mourners were made up mostly of people who had little time

for church and religion. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that

followed.

Habermas wrote in his essay that, at the time, the ceremony did not strike him as

unusual but, as the years passed, the form, place and progression of the service

came to strike him as odd. Clearly, Max Frisch, an agnostic, who rejected any

profession of faith, had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices

and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has

failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final

rte de passage which brings life to a close. And this more than a hundred years

since Nietzsche announced the death of God.

The essay traces the development of thought from the Axial Age to the Modernperiod and argues that, while the cleavage between secular knowledge and

revealed knowledge cannot be bridged, the fact that religious traditions are an

unexhausted force must mean that they are based more on reason than secular

critics allow. This reason, he thought, lies in religions appeal to what he called

solidarity, the idea of a moral whole, a world of collectively binding ideals,

the idea of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It is this, he said, that contrasts

successfully with secular reason, and provides the awkward awareness of

something that is missing. In effect, he said that the main monotheisms had takenseveral ideas from classical Greece and based their appeal on Greek reason as

much as on faith; this is one reason why they have endured.

Habermas has one of the most idiosyncratic and provocative minds of the

post-World War Two generation but his ideas on this subject are underlined by

an increasing number of his contemporaries, all of whom seem to think that there

is something missing in our lives.

First came Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher from New York University. In

his book Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament(2009) he put his

argument this way: Existence is something tremendous, and day-to-day life,

however indispensable, seems an insufficient response to it, a failure of

consciousness. Outrageous as it sounds, the religious temperament regards a

merely human life as insufficient, as a partial blindness to or rejection of the

terms of our existence. It asks for something more encompassing without knowing

what it might be.


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The most important question for many people, Nagel says, is: How can one bring

into ones individual life a full recognition of ones relation to the universe as a

whole? Among atheists, he says, physical science is at the top of the hierarchy of

understanding the universe as a whole, but it will seem unintelligible to make

sense of human existence altogether ... We recognise that we are products of the

world and its history, generated and sustained in existence in ways we hardly

understand, so that in a sense every individual life represents far more than

itself.

At the same time he goes on to agree with the British philosopher Bernard

Williams (and with Habermas) that the transcendent impulse, which has been

with us since at least Plato, must be resisted and that the real object of

philosophical reflection must be the ever more accurate description of the world

independent of perspective. He argues: The marks of philosophy are reflectionand heightened self-awareness, not maximal transcendence of the human

perspective ... There is no cosmic point of view, and therefore no test of cosmic

significance that we can either pass or fail.

In a later book,Mind & Cosmos(2012), Nagel went further, arguing that the

neo-Darwinian account of the evolution of nature, life, consciousness, reason and

moral values the current scientific orthodoxy is almost certainly false. As an

atheist, he nonetheless felt that both materialism and theism are inadequate astranscendent conceptions, but at the same time acknowledged that it is

impossible for us to abandon the search for a transcendent view of our place in

the universe. And he therefore entertained the possibility (on virtually no

evidence, as he conceded) that life is not just a physical phenomenon. According

to the hypothesis of natural teleology, he wrote, there would be a cosmic

predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is

inseparable from them. He admitted that In the present intellectual climate

such a possibility is unlikely to be taken seriously, and indeed, he has been much

criticised for this argument.

Nagel was followed by Ronald Dworkin, who, just before his death in 2013,

publishedReligion without God, in which he argued that the familiar stark divide

between people of religion and people without religion is too crude. Many people

who do not believe in a personal god or the inanity of the biblical account of

creation, say nonetheless believe in a force in the universe greater than we

are. It is this, he said, that leads them to an inescapable responsibility to live

their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others, and if they feel their life is


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wasted they suffer inconsolable regret.

Religious atheism, Dworkin said, was not a contradiction in terms because even

atheists can feel a sense of fundamentality, that there are things in the universe

that, as William James put it, throw the last stone. Lifes intrinsic meaning and

natures intrinsic beauty, he said, were the main ingredients of a religious

attitude, irrespective of whether people believe in a personal god. Moreover,

Dworkin added, these are convictions that one cannot isolate from the rest of life

they permeate existence, generate pride, remorse and thrill, mystery being an

important part of that thrill. And he said that many scientists, when they confront

the unimaginable vastness of space and the astounding complexity of atomic

particles, have an emotional reaction that many describe in almost traditional

religious terms as numinous, for example. They have a kind of emotional

response that at least borders on trembling. This is similar to Nagel when he saidthat existence is something tremendous.

This feels new, though some of it at least was presaged by John Dewey between

the two World Wars and hinted at by Michael Polanyi in the late 1950s. The main

point, for now, is that these three philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic and

each at the very peak of his profession are all saying much the same thing in

different ways. They share the view that, 500 and more years after science began

to chip away at many of the foundations of Christianity and the other majorfaiths, there is still an awkwardness, as Habermas put it; or a blindness or

unsufficiency, as Nagel writes; or a thrilling mystery, numinous in nature, as

Dworkin characterised it, in regard to the relationship between religion and the

secular world. There remains an awareness that something is missing.

All three agree with Bernard Williams that the transcendent impulse must be

resisted but they acknowledge ironically that we cannot escape the search for

transcendence. This is, in effect, they say, the modern secular predicament. And it

accords with what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls a subtraction

story: non-religious people lead lesser lives than the religious.

In itself this is impressive enough as a modern movement in thought. But now

they have been joined by philosophers nearer home. Earlier this year Terry

Eagleton published Culture and the Death of Godand Roger Scruton gave us The

Soul of the World. It is surely noteworthy when, in the midst of what some people

choose to call militant atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam

Harris, Daniel Dennett), we have a raft of philosophers seemingly going against


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that trend.

Eagletons view is that atheism is in fact much harder than it looks. In the first

part of his book he seeks to show how varieties of culture the Enlightenment,

Romanticism, German Idealism and High Modernism never really succeeded in

dispensing with the religious attitude. No symbolic form in history, he writes,

has matched religions ability to link the most exalted of truths to the daily

existence of countless men and women. One cannot place any great hope of

redemption in the idea of culture as a whole form of life. There are no whole forms

of life. In culture, he says, there is no grand telos no common purpose and we

dont appreciate how inadequate that is as an approach.

The new mood, he says, what appears to be a new need for a telos, has arisen

because the need to believe grows more compelling as capitalist orders becomemore spiritually bankrupt. It is also because that bankruptcy has been thrown into

high relief by the spectre of radical Islam, a binding force that needs to be tackled

if the so-called war on terror is to be won.

At the same time, for Eagleton, post-modernism is probably the first truly atheist

culture. Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an

affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism

does not experience it at all. There is no God-shaped hole at the centre of itsuniverse, as there is at the centre of Kafka, Beckett or even Philip Larkin. This is

why, for Eagleton, post-modernism is also post-tragic. Tragedy involves the

possibility of irretrievable loss, whereas for postmodernism there is nothing

momentous missing. And life without the possibility of tragedy, of irretrievable

loss, he implies, is impoverished.

For Eagleton, the death of God is inconvenient but it only brings into clearer relief

that a feeling of redemption is as urgent as ever and that the solidarity

Habermas seeks can be found only with the poor and the powerless. In other

words, God may be dead, but Marx isnt.

Finally, and most recently, we come to Roger Scruton. In one sense of course

Scruton does not belong squarely among this company he is, unlike the others, a

firm believer in God. In The Soul of the World, however, he conveys at least the

impression that his view is softening in interesting ways and he tell us clearly

what he thinks is missing in life among non-believers.


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The afterlife, conceived as a condition that succeeds death in time, Scruton

writes, is an absurdity. In saying elsewhere that the I is transcendental, this

does not mean that it transcends death and exists elsewhere, he says, but that it

exists in another way, as music exists in another way from sound. Arguments by

analogy are by no means always convincing but notwithstanding Scrutons

occasional supernatural lapses, there is in his book some good sense, where

originally religious ideas can be re-presented in secular garb in particular his

idea of sacrifice.

Whatever we think of Abraham and the Crucifixion, Scruton says, being guided by

the notion of sacrifice places us in a special relationship to the world this world.

Sacrifice helps us verify ourselves, helps us belong, above all unites us binds us

into a single moral community, reminds us what our obligations are. Our

readiness for sacrifice opens us up to others, makes living together more joyfuland meaningful. This is an idea of religion Judaism and Christianity in

particular but he implies that we do not need to believe in God to live in this

way. The privileges of first-person awareness are tempered and we become ready

to embrace what Oscar Wilde called the sordid necessity of living with others.

This binding ideal of sacrifice is the most important thing that is missing in our

lives.

Where does it come from, this idea that something is missing in our lives? Is ittrue? Do Western non-believers really envy Islam its explosive binding force?

While I was researching my own recent book, The Age of Nothing: How We Have

Sought to Live Since the Death of God, I surveyed a raft of playwrights, poets,

philosophers, psychologists and novelists who have been active since Nietzsche

made his fateful pronouncement, many of whom did and do not share this view

that there is something missing in modern life. Some did Ibsen, Strindberg,

Henry James and Carl Gustav Jung would all be cases in point. But far more did

not see any reason to mourn the passing of God George Santayana, Stphane

Mallarm, Wallace Stevens, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud of course, and, not

least, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. Alfred Sisley and

Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic

style but they did have something in common. As the art critic Robert Hughes

writes in The Shock of the New, It was a feeling that the life of the city and the

village, the cafs and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the

seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden a world or

ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.


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Moreover, there was a time when it was religion that was felt to be missing

something. Joshua Loth Liebman may not be remembered today as much as other

contemporary American writers (he died young in 1948) but in his time he was

every bit as widely read. His book,Peace of Mind, published in 1946 in the wake of

war, was top of the New York Times bestseller list for 58 consecutive weeks, a

record until it was overtaken by Norman Vincent PealesPower of Positive Thinking.

Liebman, a Boston-based rabbi, wrote that religion, for all its wonderful

achievements, has been responsible for many morbid consciences, infinite

confusions and painful distortions in the psychic life of people. He drew

attention to the fact that the overall strategy employed by the church to cope with

wickedness has been repression. With few exceptions, Western religions have

insisted that people can be good only through the stern repression of sensual

thoughts and impulses; and, most important, he concluded, that strategy has notworked.

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, he said, is designed to help the individual work

on his or her own problems without borrowing the conscience of a priest or

pastor, and it offers change through self-understanding, not self-condemnation.

It was this, as much as anything, that gave rise to the psychotherapy boom of the

late 20th century and led George Carey, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury in

the 1990s, to remark: Christ the Saviour has become Christ the Counsellor.

The turn from religion to therapy has not been wholly successful. As the

sociologist Frank Furedi has written, it has led some people to define themselves

by their pathology, a very limiting process. Nor is therapy, exactly, a binding

process. But for many it has been a fresh form of freedom, and an escape from

congenital sin and guilt.

In a sense Habermas answers his own question in a later book,Between Naturalism

and Religion, where he argues that the fallibility of science has been as important

as its technological successes and its theoretical breakthroughs. It is the

procedural reasoning of science that counts now, he says, the process by which

understanding is built up by trial-and-error, the point being that it directly goes

against the previous metaphysical manner of living, which crystallised around

the theoretical attitude of one who immerses himself in the intuition of the

cosmos. The triumph of the one over the many was, for Habermas, the most

important aspect of metaphysical thinking, underpinning much of religion as

well. In this way, human history, cultures and language were given a sense of


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unity and purpose but a synthetic one, which has ultimately held us back.

Post-metaphysical thinking was an important step forward.

Yet it seems as though we are switchbacking again, or at least this raft of

philosophers is. What they appear to mean is that our lives are missing a sense of

unity, telos, of oneness, of wholeness; that the meaning of life is, essentially, as

W.H. Auden once said, a security blanket.

We must beware this viewpoint. As Habermas said elsewhere, seemingly

contradicting himself, There is no transcendental perspective, but a plurality of

perspectives. Progress in all walks of life comes, as it does in science, from

unforced agreement in dialogue, what John Dewey called the unforced flowers

of life.

So it becomes necessary to put alongside Habermas, Nagel, Dworkin and Eagleton

the words and example of the French author Andr Gide, who ended his last major

creative effort, Thse, with words that were to resound: I have lived.

Arguably the most important influence on Gide was the landscape that he

explored with the familys maid, a woman of the mountains, who shared and

fostered his passion for wild flowers. He was, he said later, not just enchanted

but intoxicated by the beauties of the countryside above all thegarrigue, orscrubland, of the Languedoc, where the wild flowers stood out and allowed him to

appreciate their heroic and dignified qualities.

Because of this upbringing, Gide was temperamentally suited to the central idea

of Edmund Husserls phenomenology, a horrible word but an important notion,

which reacted against the view that the particular is somehow of less consequence

than the general. Husserl said that, in giving our attention to the particular, we

fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule, but that was never

Gides worry. He felt we should not spoil our life for any one objective; there is

no one to pray to, and a man must play the cards he has. He came to believe that

it is the duty of a person to surpass ones self, not toward any specific goal

any telos but simply toward the enrichment of existence itself. Gide insisted

that the particular is as meaningful as the general, from which it follows that

truth is not to be attained by any procedure artistic, scientific, philosophical

but only by those experiences which are immediately accessible to perception and

sensation. Nothing, he insists, can trump the argument of the individual who

says, I saw it or I felt it.


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http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4658/summer-2014-new-humanist-out-now-war-and-

peace-josie-long-peter-tatchell-lars-von-trier-and-much-more

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This is, in essence, what Gides 1897 bookLes Nourritures terrestres(Fruits of the

Earth) was about, emptying the mind of its contents, so that there is no longer

anything between us and things: There were merchants of aromatics. We

bought different kinds of resins from them. Some were for sniffing. Some were for

chewing. Yet others were burnedSheer being grew for me into something

hugely voluptuous. For Gide, touch was the most immediate of the senses,

underlining that Only individual things existthings in themselves hold forth,

accessible to everyone, all that life has to offer. Objects are neither symbols nor

manifestations of laws more important than themselves, but independent

entities that have successfully resisted all of mans attempts to organise them into

other things that can be neither seen, heard nor touched.

The independence of things, the voluptuousness of objects, is all that there is, he

warned. It can be terrible but it can also be exhilarating, an opportunity:Existence is not something that may be thought of at a distance; it has to invade

you abruptly, fix itself upon you.

What this shows and many other examples besides Gide could be given is that

there is something missing in our lives only if we think that there is. No wonder

the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker advised his disciples, not entirely

rhetorically, that in expressing themselves they should Quit thinking!

Peter Watsons TThhee AAggee ooff NNootthhiinngg:: HHooww WWee HHaavvee SSoouugghhtt ttoo LLiivvee ssiinnccee tthhee

DDeeaatthh ooff GGooddis published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson;;Terry Eagletons

CCuullttuurree aanndd tthhee DDeeaatthh ooff GGooddis published by Verso Books;;Roger Scrutons

TThhee SSoouull ooff tthhee WWoorrllddis published by Princeton University Press

This article was brought to you by New Humanist, a quarterly journal of ideas,

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