John Haidt: Religion and Life

I've tagged this video because I think it emphasizes a point I've been trying to make. I am a nontheist (if you've read my blog at all you've figured this out).  However, I am not a evangelical nontheist.  Religion has been an important part of people's lives for over thousands of years.  I personally don't have any use for it, you know this.  However, I recognize that it does play a central role in the lives of others.  So long as that leads to, what one might call, a liberal Christian interpretation of the Bible and the rights that are due to others as members of the species homo sapiens, then I have no beef with religion.  It is when religion encroaches on democracy, when we can no longer talk to each other, do I get bothered.  I feel the same about militant atheism.  It is equally unproductive.  That being said, enjoy the video.  I feel we as atheists have a lot to learn from religion, and a duty to correct the mistakes made in the name of it.

The Religiosity of Music

“More than one hundred years before Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribble that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves, and through a faint scraping and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air” (Huxley, 428)

I wrote a paper, it’ll be three years ago, about an ‘object’ that evokes a religious experience. Having never had a religious experience it was a difficult assignment. The class was advanced philosophy of religion and it was populated predominately by atheists and agnostics. There were a few religious people in the class, but interestingly enough none of the objects the religious chose to present on where actually affiliated with what someone might call established religion.

Many of us, well, nearly all of us, chose music. It was a trend the professor had noticed. Each year a greater percentage of his class would choose music as an object of religious experience. I would like to reflect on the why of those choices and possible motivating reasons.

I chose Rufus Wainwright’s version of the Agnus Dei. We were using Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy as a model of dissecting what qualified as a religious object. The Wainwright song fit, at least to my mind, because of the emotions in invoked, its otherness, its darkness, the transition from minor and strange abruptly to a full and resounding major chorus. I was raised Catholic and so there is a very subjective reason why the song speaks to me. I used to sing the Agnus Dei, play it on trumpet and French horn. I used to be a musician in ensembles so I had a theoretical understanding of music. This personal experience led to the song being more meaningful for me than for others. Then again, this seems to be a hallmark of religious experience. It is deeply personal. It’s like jazz, “if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know”. There was something profound in its invocation, something that surely pointed to something other, something outside itself.

Music is problematic from a philosophical standpoint. On the one hand it is abstraction. The notes on the page stand for something, they’re at a remove from the immediate experience of hearing music. Moreover, there is not a principled reason (at least to my knowledge) why minor chords should sound sad or lonely. Why should certain frequencies (the one over period of oscillation) should have that quality when heard? At least, not unless there was something more to music than its playing and perception.

I’ve just finished Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint. In the novel there is a passage where one character, Spandrell, is desperately trying to believe in or find God and his last argument, his last resource, is music. This argument is ruthlessly knocked down by Rampion, a man who has a very Nietzschean view of human nature, disagrees because he sees music as an attempt for man to be more than what man is. The argument becomes, and the same for religious experience, does it refer to something outside of itself. If I have a religious experience, does it mean anything outside of what I felt? Just because I had what could be called an otherworldly experience, does it refer in fact to something outside of the world?

The argument in music’s case, as far as Spandrell pushed it, was summed up in this question, “Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor?” (427). Rampion thinks that it does not. Music is music. It is personal, experiential, but just because it is does not mean that it points to anything beyond itself, anything beyond human experience.

Maybe the reason myself and so many of the nontheists in the class chose music as our religious object is because of this perceived disconnect. Spandrell I feel would agree with us. Choose music, it’s somehow holy even if we don’t believe in anything holy. It points to something other. Rampion would laugh at the whole class and our project. Good try students, but you’re looking for something that isn’t there. Music reduced is still just music. It doesn’t refer, nor should it. Even so, the immediate experience of it is powerful, even for us who really don’t believe much of anything in the way of religious reality.

If anything this post has just been a series of musings and nothing very substantial. Oh well I guess. It’s a theme I’d like to explore given more time, more reading, and more musings. Perhaps the next book on my list to read should be Godel, Escher, Bach.

Either way, enjoy Rufus Wainwright’s Agnus Dei.

The Consolations of Reading

I want to address the role of culture, and specifically literature, in bringing comfort and solace to people (specifically me, since this is, well, my personal blog).

I read literature, the so called “classics”, because they hold within them kernels of wisdom. The edges of those pages are dotted with my annotations and notes. I find little bits of advice that resonate something important. I can read a book different times and in different moods and find that the meaning changes, what I find was previously overlooked.

This quote I particularly liked from Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, “That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors” (pg 47, Huxley, Harper Perennial). I think this is true enough, to say something obvious. We often grapple with complex feelings and have only clichéd avenues of expressing them.

This is why I am partial to another de Botton quote from The Consolations of Philosophy:

“It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made” (pg 161, de Botton, Vintage).

These are a few reasons I enjoy reading. I find scattered pieces of myself and others I know in the works of those far brighter than I, and far older. Like those who look up to the sky and know how small they truly are, so too does literature and philosophy remind me how little I really know.

Do you have a favorite quote or book? Please share it with me.

Alain de Botton on Success, TED

For those of you who know me, I am a huge fan of Alain de Botton. I think this is a very interesting talk and timely, given many of us are about to graduate (or have done so already) and have concerns about what comes next. I liked most in this video his discussion of success in that success involves the loss of something else, what we have chosen to miss out on.

Happy belated Thanksgiving.

Philosophical Engineering

To start, I want to layout a quick distinction before I jump into what I mean by philosophical engineering.

In freshman physics (yes I used to major in physics), the physics majors took their intro class with the honors engineering students. The honors engineers, as the title would suggest, are brilliant people (so were the physics students. Well, we hoped we were). However, we often sneered at their insistence to just know the equation. A homework session of physics and engineering students represented and ideological divide between how the problems in a physics assignment should be approached. We, the physics majors, insisted at starting at first principles (we had two to work with, the momentum and energy principles) while the engineers looked at the problem, the variables, and said “what equation do we use here?”

This is not to say the engineers did not have a grasp of the intricate subtleties of physics, that they were not inquisitive people. They were brilliant individuals who had a very different focus. They understood how to derive the equations they wanted to use, they could do what the physics majors did, they just didn’t see themselves as needing to reinvent the wheel for every problem. “Yes, I get it, and I’ve demonstrated I know the basics. Now, where’s my d*** equation?”

I bring this up to frame a similar divide in the current field of philosophy. I’ve discussed with classmates the relative merits of different fields of philosophy. We’ve decided I’m like a philosophical engineer. My view of philosophy is that it can (and should) be able to engage with real world problems and situations. Ethical and moral theories in particular have been brought up and discussed in many disciplines outside of philosophy (see Joshua Greene’s experiments http://www.pon.harvard.edu/faculty/joshua-greene/ , discussion of norms in sociology, biology, etc http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Framework_for_the_Psychology_of_Norms_7-23-05.pdf).

So why philosophical engineering? A metaphysician on this analogy is like the physicist. They want to know the deeper truth about the makeup of the world and traditionally this work has been done via thought problems, intuition, and traditional armchair philosophy. And (much to the frustration of my metaphysics professor) I’ve made the naturalistic assumption, meaning I’m willing to accept the structure of the world is as the natural sciences describes it (maybe with some qualifications). So I have my first principles in a sense.

And now I want to work on finding answers to more pressing problems. Like the engineers in physics classes, I’m the ethicist in metaphysics. “Thank you, this is all well and good, but do we really have to start from here?”

Have I committed a gross philosophical injustice? Or like in the physical sciences, do we have room for those of us more application minded over theory?