Transcendence, Creation and Incarnation

From Philosophy to Religion

Anthony O'Hear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367856908
• eBook ISBN: 9781000164107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book expounds and analyses notions of transcendence, creation and incarnation reflectively and personally, combining both philosophical and religious insights. Preferring tender-minded approaches to reductively materialistic ones, it shows some ways in which reductive approaches to human affairs can distort the appreication of our lives and activities.

In the book's first half it examines a number of aspects of human life and experience in the thought of Darwin, Ruskin, and Scruton with a view to exploring the extent to which there could be intimations of transcendence. The second half is then devoted to outlining an account of divine creation and incarnation, deriving initially, though not uncritically, from the thought of Simone Weil. The text concludes by examining the extent to which grace is needed to engage in religious practice and belief.

Taking in art, literature, music and classical Greek writings, this is a multifaceted thesis on transcendence. It will, therefore, will be of keen interest to any scholar of Philosophy of Religion, Theology, Aesthetics and Metaphysics.

Part I

Transcendence

1 The scope of philosophy

In this book, what I want to do is to sketch an approach to the world and to life which I find persuasive, more persuasive indeed than some of its obvious rivals. In doing this, I will employ philosophical methods. That is to say, I will use argument and logic in developing what I have to say, rather than the methods of religion or science.

I will not appeal to religious revelation, nor, in any direct way, to the findings of empirical science. Religious revelation is not part of my case here, because, as will become apparent, what I want to explore are some of the considerations within human life and experience which might incline people to be favourable to religious revelation. In other words, at the risk of seeming presumptuous, what I am hoping to explore is some of the ground on which a religious revelation might stand, might seem plausible or possible. In developing the sketch I am offering, I am not here appealing to the findings of empirical science because the matters I am treating are those which provide the context in which science works. What I am sketching are some aspects of the wider, all-encompassing picture in which science has its part. I hope that what I have to say does not contradict anything science tells us currently – indeed I shall from time to time refer to some of the findings of modern science. But part of what I am doing in this book is to examine the place science should be seen to hold within our lives and experience, as it attempts to describe and explain the physical world as it appears to us. In so doing, I will by implication at least, suggest some of the limits of science, pointing to some of the questions on which science as science can say nothing.

What, though, of philosophy? What can philosophy do? What can we hope for from philosophy? In this opening chapter, I hope to loosen the hold a certain view of philosophy has on many of us, that is, the view that philosophy can, of itself, establish deep truths about the world. As I hope to show, it would be more accurate to say that philosophy, of itself, establishes, and can establish, nothing, or at least nothing of fundamental importance. But in pointing to what I see as its essential inconclusiveness, I also hope to show what we can expect from philosophy and why it is worth being philosophical about one’s fundamental views on the world. Let us start this enquiry by considering a striking passage from Whitehead:

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding. Yet there is a danger in such reflections. An immediate good is apt to be thought of in a degenerate form of a passive enjoyment. Existence (life) is activity ever merging into the future. The aim of philosophical understanding is the aim of piercing the blindness of activity in respect to its transcendent functions. (1)

Notice Whitehead’s key concepts: wonder, purification of emotion, piercing the blindness of activity, transcendent functions. There are echoes here of the Platonic doctrine of philosophy as the care of the soul, therapy, the turning of the soul from fantasy to reality. (2) Education, says Plato (and not just philosophy), is the art of orientation, of conversion (or metanoia), the shedding of the leaden weights which progressively weigh us down as we become more and more sunk in the material world and the world of desire, eating and similar pleasures and indulgences. All this is in the context of the Platonic Cave, where most of us live most of the time, according to Plato, in illusion and darkness. For Plato philosophy can give us a form of vision which is to become able to bear ‘the sight of real being and reality at its most bright… which is a form of goodness.’

So for Plato philosophy and education should be aimed at a form of conversion, certainly moral conversion, but something more as well, covering the whole of life. Plato also warns us against the petty minds of those who are acknowledged to be bad, but who are clever, sharp-eyed and perceptive enough to gain insights into what they are interested in, and ‘consequently the keener their vision is, the greater the evil they accomplish.’

Evil? Can philosophy be an adjutant to evil? If philosophy can be a force for good, for taking us through to its or to our transcendent function, can it, if misused, be a force for harm too? Plato thought this and maybe when we think about it more, it isn’t so far-fetched. After all, the sophists were philosophers (of a sort) and were well known to Socrates and Plato. Maybe some of what they did, in fostering and encouraging doubts about morality and truth, wasn’t too good. Maybe (if I.F. Stone is to be believed (3)), some of what Socrates and his followers did, qua philosophers, wasn’t too good either, at least not if you were an Athenian democrat of the time and an opponent of oligarchs and dictators. In Crito when the laws of Athens are speaking to Socrates, they speak of Sparta and Crete as constitutions he admires, hardly bastions of democracy. Maybe, more even than The Republic, The Laws, with its nocturnal council and its draconian regimentation of life might give intellectual aid to would-be dictators and their repressive laws and inquisitions. This sort of thing is, of course, the burden of writers like Crossman and Popper who attack Plato as politically evil (though usually wanting to exonerate Socrates).

When you think about it, the great philosophies have rarely been neutral on matters of value. Philosophy is always done against a background of commitments, intellectual and other, which the philosophy is in a sense an attempt to work through, even if the working through may sometimes involve refining and modifying the commitments. Aquinas is often criticised for having very explicit commitments which his philosophy would not allow to challenge in a serious way, but all philosophers and all philosophies start from some framework of belief, even if that framework is one of fallibilism or even of scepticism.

Indeed one of the most famous of modern fallibilists, Karl Popper speaks of the adoption of a critical rationalist attitude as ‘a moral decision,’ and of acceptance of the dictates of reason as being ‘an irrational faith in reason.’ (4) In so far as acceptance of some minimal dictates of reason – those relating to basic consistency and non-contradiction – is required in order to have any sort of discussion or coherent thought at all, this seems to me to be exaggerated. Of course, this is not to say exactly how these dictates are to be understood or applied, but clearly something in this area is essential if we are not to lapse quickly into nonsense. However, it is not exaggerated to think, as Popper does, of the adoption of a critical rationalist attitude to substantive matters of fact or value as a moral decision (though one might demur from calling it ‘irrational,’ as opposed to a-rational or pre-rational). There are other decisions that could be made, and defended, for example an attitude of humility to what one perceives as an ancient wisdom, prior to the exercise of forensic and potentially destructive criticism. According to Malachi Haim Hacohen, Popper’s biographer, there was a time when Popper flirted with a Kierkegaardian attitude to his fundamental commitments, including his commitment to rationalism in the substantial sense itself. (5)

One does not have to be dramatically Kierkegaardian to suggest that being rationalist (as opposed to being rational) depends as much on a set of prior intellectual and emotional commitments or predispositions as on anything humanly or intellectually mandatory. It may be as much a matter of how one wants to live one’s life, or, more accurately, a matter of how one has come to live and feel one’s life, following upbringing, experience and much else besides. It is just in the case of the self-professed rationalist the commitment, if we may refer to a possibly unconscious orientation as a commitment, does not, to our eyes anyway, seem as blatant as Aquinas’s, or, to the ruling intellectual mentality of our day, as objectionable. So Plato’s notion of philosophy (or education) as a turning of the soul one way or the other may not be so far-fetched after all. But what about philosophy’s or our ‘transcendent function?’ There are, of course, many philosophers who would have no truck with any such thing, one of them, of course, being Bertrand Russell. As will emerge, I think that it is going too far to speak in an unqualified way of philosophy as such having a transcendent function, even if some philosophies and some philosophers might quite properly see what they are doing in terms of what George Steiner has referred to as a ‘wager on transcendence.’ (6) Up to a point, then, I may be seen to share some of Russell’s scepticism on such matters, but, before clarifying my own position on the potential of philosophy to derive fundamental truths from its activity, here is a story about the Russell family:

Winifred Nicholson tells an anecdote of her great-grandmother, who was also Bertrand Russell’s grandmother remarking after a visit from her grandson, ‘I don’t know why it is that all my grandchildren are so stupid.’ I don’t know why she thought the great logician stupid at that time; but the stupidity of logical positivism lies, if anywhere, in its premises… If it is true that the crassness of English philosophy has lain always in the quality of its premises. Lady Stanley may in this respect have been right about her grandson’s ‘stupidity.’ (7)

Stupidity is strong, some may think, particularly as applied to Russell, though maybe not altogether too strong if one reflects on some of his educational and political adventures, but what Kathleen Raine is talking about is not the intellectual brilliance and acuity of the logician, of however high an order. She is talking about the choice of premises, or what I have just referred to as a philosopher’s commitments. And here intellectual dexterity, even of the quality of a Russell’s, is not enough.

‘“If meinongianism isn’t dead, nothing is,” Gilbert Ryle is reputed to have said in the heyday of Oxford Philosophy. I think Ryle was exactly right.’ Thus Graham Priest, marvelling at the way belief in non-existent objects which at the turn of the twentieth century Alexius Meinong proposed and which Russell and others, including Ryle, emphatically rejected, has come back into good repute at the turn of the twenty-first century. (8) Priest thus thinks Ryle is exactly right, but right in exactly the opposite sense from that intended by Gilbert Ryle, standing as the proponent of a bluff common sense on these matters.

So nothing is ever dead in philosophy, and now, in the twenty-first century, Priest is but one of a phalanx of defenders of non-being. So the very meinongianism – belief in non-existent objects – which Ryle took as his touchstone of philosophical moribundity is actually alive and, in the view of many, actually flourishing. Some might wish for a healthy dose of Ryleanism (as it might be put) in ontology and the philosophy of logic, where possible worlds run rampant, and inconsistency is sometimes countenanced, as well as non-beings but, as readers of contemporary philosophical journals will appreciate, that is not how it is. And Priest is surely right to point to both the transience and the power of philosophical fashion when it comes to premises. So, up to a point, more power to Priest’s elbow in shaking us out of a certain ontological complacency.

That said, how are we to choose premises? And further, how are we to judge conclusions, when philosophers like Priest and Timothy Williamson are simply not prepared to accept what others might regard as reductio ad absurdum arguments when applied to their conclusions about such topics as noneism (non-existent objects) and vagueness? On the latter point, Williamson believes that there are no inherently vague concepts, that, for example, there is always a fact of the matter as to whether someone with thinning hair is bald or not, or whether in a damp morning it is actually raining or not; it is just that we cannot tell, which many, but not Williamson, would take as showing a degree of absurdity in his position. But as with Priest on non-existent objects, Williamson can argue for his position in the face of what many would take to be an absurd conclusion. Priest and Williamson would simply ask, as Ryle himself did at the end of his famous paper on ‘Categories,’ what the tests for absurdity are. (9)

Of course, Williamson and Priest are here following a style of scientific practice, where talk of multiverses, infinitely many, it is said, or of vast quantities of unobservable anti-matter, is justified on the ground that these entities are required by mathematical formulae which there are good reasons for accepting. Priest thinks that propositional logic requires that non-existent entities can be denoted and be the bearers of properties; Williamson takes a commitment to classical logic, including the law of the excluded middle, to rule out inherently vague predicates, in very much the same way their scientific brethren see their mathematical formulae bringing with them the commitments we have just mentioned. But mightn’t the conclusion somewhat weaken the reasons f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Part I Transcendence
• Part II Creation and incarnation
• Appendix
• References
• Index