Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals

Theology, Human Flourishing and Freedom

Dale Wright, Maria Antonaccio, David Jasper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032179803
• eBook ISBN: 9781317011194
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Contemporary thought is marked by heated debates about the character, purpose and form of religious thinking and its relation to a range of ideals: spiritual, moral, aesthetic, political and ecological, to name the obvious. This book addresses the interrelation between theological thinking and the complex and diverse realms of human ideals. What are the ideals appropriate to our moment in human history, and how do these ideals derive from or relate to theological reflection in our time? In Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines (physics, art, literary studies, ethics, comparative religion, history of ideas, and theology) engage with these crucial questions with the intention of articulating a new and historically appropriate vision of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals for our global times.

Chapter 1
Freedom and Matter

William H. Klink and David E. Klemm

Introduction

What do we mean by “theological reflection” and “the pursuit of ideals”? We can construct a simple model of these activities—and how they are related—by focusing on our most basic, pre-reflective modes of thinking. In our inner world of thinking, we oscillate between trusting what reveals itself to us and understanding what something is. “Trusting” refers to the manifold of events in which we respond to something or someone who presents itself. For our purposes, seeing a tree or listening to someone speak are acts of trusting. “Understanding” refers to all of the times in which we actively grasp what something is or what some language means by applying concepts. Both trusting and understanding are free acts of the singular subjectivity that is the “I,” in that “I” trust and “I” understand.

Whether we are aware of it or not, trusting and understanding are in some sense grounded in the acts of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals, respectively. Ordinarily we understand everyday things or states of affairs when we know what to do with them, and we understand other people when we grasp how their expressions and deeds freely embody another “I” (as a “you” for me) in a shared world. For example, I understand that the budget is tight so I must be frugal and that my sister’s birthday next month is important to her. When we understand anything at all, we reduce a set of possible meanings to an actual meaning. That is to say, when we think about something, we connect it with a set of (universal) concepts. When we undertake to understand what we understand when we understand anything at all, we are engaged in the pursuit of ideals. The ultimate norm of understanding is “being,” which we can provisionally define as the real connection in something, which is reflected in thought, between the particular entity and its defining universal characteristics.1 In theoretical judgments, being appears as truth; in practical decisions, being appears as goodness; in aesthetic awareness, being appears as beauty or meaningfulness.

Likewise, we typically trust both the world around us and many of the people in it. For example, I trust that the ground will support me when I walk and that the one whom I call “Mother” really is my mother. When we trust anyone or anything at all, we choose to assent to the word or presence of another person or thing, rather than to doubt it, deny it, or otherwise question it. When we trust or believe someone or something present to us, we let it be, or allow it to be, what it presents itself to be. However, when I ask “Whom do I trust in trusting anyone and anything at all?” then I have begun theological reflection. I trust my own trusting in naming the One in the Many, who is also the One beyond the Many, “God.” The ultimate norm of trusting is “God,” in the sense that Martin Buber gave when he defined God as the “eternal You,” the one you that appears in every immediate relationship I have with a finite you, or in the sense that Paul Tillich gave in defining God as the symbol of “being-itself.”2 Theological reflection is thinking about what it means to respond to God. Just as the pursuit of ideals arises from understanding, so also theological reflection reciprocally arises from the free act of trusting—yet the pursuit of ideals and theological reflection concern the ultimate norms of understanding and trusting, respectively.

Our simple model of thinking now has the following basic elements—namely, 1) the acts of understanding and trusting as the active and responsive poles of thinking, respectively; 2) the “I” who thinks; 3) theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals as reflexive acts of thinking about thinking in its two modes; and 4) “Being” and “God” as the ultimate principles of the pursuit of ideals and theological reflection, respectively. The pursuit of ideals arises from understanding, and theological reflection is grounded in trusting. Even this highly simplified model requires one more principle, however. Intermediate between the reflexive acts of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals, on one hand, and the ultimate principles of “Being” and “God,” on the other hand, is freedom.

Theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals are both grounded on the idea of freedom, for freedom is presupposed by these intellectual activities. Freedom, we say, is the capacity to actualize one among several possibilities—or, conversely, to open up what is actual to a new set of possibilities. An act of freedom transforms a mode of possible being, in which several alternatives present themselves within being, into a mode of actual being, in which one of the alternatives is chosen, enacted, and becomes real. Without freedom, neither trusting nor understanding would be possible, because freedom is the capacity to cross from the “I can” to the “I do,” and back again. The pursuit of ideals, and theological reflection, therefore, both require freedom, as the condition of their possibility.

The Western philosophical tradition has typically assigned the capacity of freedom to what we might call, with Schleiermacher, the intellectual faculty of human being (thinking by means of reason, the ideal)—as opposed to the organic faculty (bodily sensing what is material, the real).3 The intellectual faculty provides the form of things, while the organic faculty responds to the material aspect of things. The presumption of freedom is commonly taken to be evidence that there is a spiritual aspect of human being, in addition to its material side. The basis of this belief is that the idea of freedom implies a causal agency of the will that is spiritual rather than material. We hold ourselves, and others, to be responsible for our intentions, decisions, and deeds, because we assume that the faculty of will is not determined by any natural or material cause, but is free to determine itself. The power of freedom, we assume, is the power to initiate a causal series from ourselves and on our own, quite independently of any physical sensations or bodily feelings.

In the history of Western philosophy, Kant clarified the meaning of freedom in a pivotal way by relating it to the idea of causality. Kant held that all experience is subject to the law of causality—the law that a thing given in experience must itself be caused by another thing. He argued, however, that there are two kinds of causality, and that only two kinds are conceivable by us: “causality is either according to nature or arises from freedom.”4 Natural causality is “the connection in the sensible world of one state with a preceding state on which it follows according to a rule.” For example, April showers bring May flowers. By contrast, freedom in its “cosmological” meaning is “the power of beginning a state spontaneously.”5 Here we are presented with a causality that is utterly different than the causality of nature, because a free cause does not itself “stand under another cause determining it in time, as required by the law of nature.” For example, I am now reading these words, but I could be doing something else.

Freedom, in the sense of absolute spontaneity, is “a pure transcendental idea,” rather than an empirical idea, according to Kant, because it signifies the invariant structure within which we become acquainted with any causal series whose origin is different than the causation of nature. An empirical idea would refer us to an empirical object, and freedom is not an object of sense perception. As a transcendental idea, freedom is a necessary condition of our thinking. It alone accounts for our ability to initiate an event, such as the activity of our own thinking. But we cannot know that freedom exists—not in the strict sense of knowing, that is, the subsuming of sense perceptions under a concept. Rather, we recognize and acknowledge freedom in those cases when events happen through causes that are distinct from natural causes—such as cases of causal agency.

Kant continues. Freedom also has a distinct practical meaning in its application to ethics, where the concept of freedom means the self-legislation of a rational will, or the power of the will to be a law unto itself.6 What we will as laws for ourselves, in Kant’s view, are maxims, by which he means rules that take the form of “Do this act for the sake of that purpose.”7 Here, practical freedom is the capacity of rational self-determination—or, otherwise named, autonomy—in which the agent constitutes his or her own identity in its integrity, or lack of it, by how well he or she makes maxims for himself or herself. A morally “good” maxim is one that can function as a universal law for all agents facing the same moral situation. Adopting good maxims makes the agent, as author of the maxims, into a good, unified, and whole person.

There is a relationship between the cosmological idea of freedom and the practical concept of freedom that is significant for the argument of this chapter. Heidegger points it out: “Absolute spontaneity (transcendental freedom) is not a matter of will and the law of the will but of the self-origination of a state; autonomy, on the other hand, concerns a particular being to which there belongs willing.”8 Autonomy is therefore a certain kind of absolute spontaneity. Absolute spontaneity determines the invariant structure of autonomy. If absolute spontaneity did not exist, then autonomy could not exist. “The possibility of autonomy is grounded in spontaneity,” or, put differently, “practical freedom is grounded in transcendental freedom.”9 According to Kant, therefore, transcendental freedom—the freedom of absolute spontaneity—has a far wider application than does practical freedom. Kant does not tell us, however, what else, if anything, belongs under the idea of transcendental freedom in addition to rational self-determination (autonomy). In this chapter, we will propose a kind of transcendental freedom in matter that is indeed different than autonomy. Before we turn to our argument, however, let us reflect on the split between mind and matter that is the inheritance of modern philosophy, for it is that split which we hope to overcome within a revived dualism.

The foremost of Kant’s contemporary interpreters, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the most rigorous of all systematic thinkers, was highly aware of the problem. As we said earlier, for Kant, the idea of freedom is not something for which we have empirical evidence. Its status is that of a necessity for thinking. Consequently, from the empirical standpoint, one can say that the principle of sufficient reason (or natural causality) governs all of the activities of theoretical reason, and that this fact is incompatible with the existence of freedom.10 Conversely, from the transcendental standpoint (that is, the standpoint from which we think about what we must think in order to make sense of our moral experience), one can say that moral law applies to all activities of practical reason, and that this fact is incompatible with determinism. Therefore, Fichte argued, systematic philosophy necessarily divides into two fundamental types, which he somewhat pejoratively called dogmatism and idealism. Dogmatism and idealism, he claimed, are equally valid (that is, logically self-consistent) systems of thought. Both systems can claim that they express the truth of things, and neither one can successfully refute the other, “for their quarrel is about the first principle, which admits of no derivation from anything beyond it.”11 The first principle articulates a certainty for knowing, which explains how our experience of the external world is possible.

For dogmatism, the first principle is the “thing-in-itself,” which is “transcendent” to consciousness. In other words, we experience the world as we do, because objects, or things-in-themselves, present themselves to human consciousness, which in turn reflects these things as they are in themselves. Dogmatism treats consciousness, the “I think,” like any other object—that is, as a finite, material reality. Dogmatism is the philosophical approach that is consistent with the natural sciences from Newton to the present. It is necessarily a rigorous determinism that must deny freedom, because for dogmatism all objects obey the causal law of nature. Idealism, on the other hand, explains experience on the basis of its first principle, the self-in-itself, which is “immanent” within consciousness. According to idealism, we experience the world as we do, because consciousness constitutes all objects of experience in the activity of thinking, even though the material out of which objects are composed is simply given to our senses. The transcendental “I,” or self-in-itself, is a certainty for thought, because its original thinking activity is its own being; in positing its own being in thinking, it defines what objects are according to the laws of reason. Idealism is the philosophical stance that is compatible with Romanticism in poetry and the arts, as well as with political and legal theories that ascribe individual responsibility to free citizens.

According to Fichte, one must choose between the two rival systems, and “reason provides no principle of choice,” because each one claims to be true, and there is no neutral standpoint from which to settle the dispute.12 A dualism between mind and matter, such as Descartes bequeathed us, was ruled out by Fichte, because it fails to explain how mind and matter are interrelated, while presupposing that there is some necessary continuity between them. Fichte believed that the choice between idealism and dogmatism is made on the basis of inclination and interest—on what sort of person one is. The dogmatist analyzes things, and how laws of nature explain observed regularities among them. The idealist reflects on the workings of mind, and how freedom and imagination combine to create meanings in art and language.

Things have not really changed much in the past two centuries. Today, philosophy is divided between successor-forms of dogmatism and idealism. Freedom or determinism—are these still the only options? In this chapter, we argue that there is another option. What would happen if freedom were conceived as embedded in matter itself—not as practical freedom, but as an instance of absolute spontaneity nonetheless? What if there is a material appearance of transcendental freedom that is different than the causal agency of the will? If so—if freedom is ingredient in matter—then, among other things, new life would be breathed into dualism, because we would then have the missing point of continuity between mind and matter. Other consequences for the pursuit of ideals and theological reflection would also follow, because the domain of freedom would extend to the entire universe. In this chapter, we propose precisely this: a dualist model of freedom in matter, by which we mean an appearance of transcendental freedom as absolute spontaneity that is ontologically an element in matter itself. We begin with a discussion of matter.

The Argument

From observing such things as rocks and tables, we tend to think of matter as being inert. But plants and animals (including human beings) are also composed of matter, and they are not inert. A common viewpoint is to say that rocks and tables are made of more fundamental forms of matter, such as atoms and molecules, and, since atoms and molecules are inert, this explains why rocks and tables also are. But then it is necessary to give an explanation as to how freedom could arise in animate things. This is the problem that has to be solved in a materialist perspective. In this chapter we start from a different perspective, namely that matter at the level of atoms and molecules is not inert, but exhibits primitive manifestations of freedom by virtue of having the property of being able to opt from sets of alternatives.

To make such a viewpoint plausible, we start from a common intuition, namely that human beings live in two disparate worlds, the world of mind and thinking, which we will call the transcendent order, and the world of matter. Planning a hike for tomorrow is mental activity, while actually hiking is physical activity. Writing about the difficulties of the hike after having hiked is different from hiking. Theories such as quantum theory, which purport to describe the material world, are not themselves material. Such examples are so commonplace as to make it easy to forget how mysterious it is that there should be two such utterly disparate worlds.

For disparate these two worlds actua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface by David Jasper and Dale S. Wright
• 1 Freedom and Matter
• 2 The Call of Conscience
• 3 Spirituality and the “Humane Turn”
• 4 Tending the Garden of Humanism
• 5 The Practice of Memory
• 6 Dwelling Theologically
• 7 Imagination and Fallibility
• 8 Hegel Beyond the Ideal of Idealism
• 9 The Mystery of Catholicism
• 10 The Artist and the Mind of God
• 11 Living Up To Death
• 12 Historical Consciousness and Freedom
• 13 Divine Lordship, Divine Motherhood
• Index