What are ultimate questions and why are they hard to answer



What are ultimate questions and why are they hard to answer?

Dr Felicity McCutcheon

Dialogue Australasia Conference

Newington College, Sydney 2011

‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what’s a heaven for?’

from 'Andrea del Sarto' by Robert Browning

Introductory remarks

What are ultimate questions?

When I had finished writing my PhD on Wittgenstein, I had the privilege of having it read by the late emeritus professor of Christchurch, Oxford, David Pears. He called me into his study and after saying some complimentary things about it he remarked “you know Felicity, as I read it I got the distinct impression that there was just him and you in the room when you wrote it’. By ‘him’, he meant, of course, Wittgenstein. And he was right. I wrote it with Wittgenstein looking over my shoulder the whole time (disapprovingly, I might add)

Ultimate questions are a bit like that, I think. Always in the room, unsettling, demanding and challenging us – calling us to make sense of who we are and perhaps even calling us to become more than we are.

This paper has been more difficult to write than I had anticipated. My problem was essentially one of scope. Too much to say, so many ways and too little time to say it. It was also a problem of semantics. I initially got caught up in the issue of definitions (what is an ultimate question and what is not) and the ever present analytic philosopher in me then decided I should work through all ways ultimate questions can’t be answered before getting to the ways they can - a kind of via negativa approach. I had begun thinking seriously about the paper over Christmas when I was on holiday in Italy – and more especially, sitting at a little writing desk in a nunnery in Assisi. I was filled with a kind of wonder at St Francis and the example of his life as an answer to the most pressing of ultimate questions but I realised I couldn’t simply stand before you today and point to lives of truth and love, although everything I will go on to say is really a set of footnotes to doing just that.

I eventually realised I could have more modest aims and that as opening keynote all I really needed to do was to provide a scaffold for our thinking this week, both in terms of the nature of these questions and how we, as teachers, might go about handling them in the classroom. The sessions to follow will no doubt do a much better job at focussing on specific questions so my work is preparatory. I really want to do just 3 things:

1. Explore the essential features of ultimate questions

2. Examine various ways in which we might attempt to find answers

3. Discuss the particular difficulties that arise when teachers address these questions in the classroom

First, let’s have the experience before us of being asked these questions.

What does it mean to be human?

Why is there evil and suffering?

How do I find truth?

What is a good life?

Note carefully what happens inside you when you are asked questions like this.

Be assured that your students will have the same response, although in their case the sense of mental panic, confusion and helplessness will probably be more marked. It is very tempting, I think, to want to put an end to the discomfort and uncertainty, either by defaulting to a strongly felt opinion (with a kind of triumphant certainty) or to disconnect from the question altogether with a kind of triumphant relativism – I have had students take this position and declare loudly that ‘These questions don’t have answers so it doesn’t matter what you think.’

Which is really a way of saying the question doesn’t matter and so there is no need to think about it.

If, as I shall suggest, ultimate questions require not merely thinking about but a deeper response from our core, the challenge of helping our students take them seriously will require more than simply engaging their sceptical minds. There is the added difficulty in getting our students to travel inwards and discover ‘the outer regions of inner space’ as Joseph Campbell once put it.

In an age of information and interactive technologies, a world of search engines, tracking, updates, blogs, tweets, and immediacy of response, I think the difficulty is increased as we are led further and further away from developing the patience for and seeing the value in ultimate or eternal questions.

Robert Storr, Dean of Yale, School of Art expresses it well:

‘We are in a period in which scanning has replaced seeing and keeping track has replaced paying attention’ (quoted in The Age, 1 Aug, 2010)

Paradoxically, living in a constant present strips us of the opportunity to be truly present and this makes the asking and answering of ultimate questions even more difficult. I know that this is one of the biggest challenges I face in teaching my RE classes. It is trying to get the boys to slow down, to move them inward rather than settling for the outer, to get them to think from the back of their minds rather than always being in the front.

But being hard to answer does not make them unimportant. Indeed, I shall argue it is what gives them their importance.

Such questions arise from our deep self and so can only be inhabited and engaged with at a deep level. One way I try to get my boys to think about it is to draw a distinction between the near and the far.

[A classroom exercise was explained here]

If you only have the ‘near’ you can’t see where you’re going, nor can you see what’s coming. Having a horizon ‘makes sense’ of my experience and provides it with some kind of coherence. Without it my experiences are simply had – without a background or a backup, there is no ground to stand on and nothing to hold onto.

My ‘present’ is my near but it needs a horizon before it has a meaning beyond the fact that I am having an experience. ‘What is this an experience of?’ ‘What is the meaning of this experience?’ That question takes me out of ‘now’ in order that I may be ‘in’ it. If we never do this we will end up like Alex Higgins the Irish snooker player, who in an interview some time ago, when asked about his life, replied; ‘I can’t tell you – I haven’t been there for most of it’.

Ultimate questions – a peculiar specimen

What are ultimate questions?

When I am teaching free will and determinism to my year 11s I open with the question on the whiteboard: ‘what is the difference between the moon and a person?’ In this context, I am simply looking for something like ‘a person can choose to dodge a meteor and the moon can’t’ (it’s a way of motivating their interest in the way the free will question hinges on what you think a human is made of…on a materialist model, we are made of ‘essentially’ the same stuff as the moon which makes it problematic to defend the kind of free will they naturally think they have…hence, the follow up lesson on Creatures in the Libertarian Zoo (examines attempts to defend free will by developing views of what the ‘will’ is really made of – Kantian wills, Cartesian minds and religious souls…)

Humans ask ultimate questions. The moon cannot.

Ultimate questions tend to be concerned with two domains, although as we shall see, they are interrelated. The first is to do with what we might call the ‘ultimate ground’ of things. This is the fundamental nature of reality (explored primarily by philosophy and theology). The second is what Paul Tillich calls ‘Ultimate concern’. This is the nature of experience and meaning – the existential/values component.

If we take a look at some sample questions we shall identify these two categories and also see the overlap.

Origins

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

2. What caused the universe to exist?

3. Where did we come from?

4. What place do we have in the universe?

Meaning

1. Does life has meaning?

2. What is the meaning of human life?

3. Is there ultimate meaning behind the universe?

4. Does death cancel out meaning?

Guilt

1. Why do we feel guilty? Should we?

2. Is there a supernatural basis for moral behaviour?

3. Does following certain rules of conduct relieve our guilt?

4. Which comes first: guilt or morality?

Death

1. What happens after death?

2. How does having-to-die affect our living?

3. What does it mean to ‘fear death’?

4. Does my life cease to have meaning once I die?

Generally, we can see the interdependence by tracking down possible responses. If, for example, I come to the conclusion that there is a divine cause of the universe which also has the qualities of love, justice and goodness, answers to questions about guilt and meaning will follow a particular path (although not necessary a ‘certain’ one or the ‘same’ one for everyone).

Ultimate ground - metaphysical (philosophical/theological) - Reality

Ultimate concern – existential/value – ‘meaning’ - Experience

Given that it is humans that ask such questions, what are the ways in which they might be answered and what difficulties do we face not only when trying to answer them but also when trying to teach them?

In what follows, I want to look first at where science can take us. I want to address the place of science as I believe that scientists have become the new priests of culture and it is worth thinking carefully about what they can and what they cannot tell us, how they can and cannot help us. Helping students understand the limits of the empirical method is crucial to enabling them to recognise and look beyond the pretensions of scientific reductionists like Richard Dawkins. The point is not to enflame an already muddled religion vs science debate but to enable young people to think clearly about the issues presented in the debate.

Ultimate questions - How far can science take us?

I think it is really important for teachers to see with a steady eye and help their students see clearly why science cannot answer ultimate questions. I want to make two points about science and scientific knowledge.

First, science, no matter how far it advances, can never be more than a description of phenomena. That’s right. Science describes. It does not explain. My second point is that science qua science cannot provide answers to ultimate questions that by their nature seek the ground of the phenomena presented to and described by science.

Science as description

Judging by the number of people who think that science is explanatory, this first point must be terribly difficult to grasp. But if you think about it, the point is easy to see. Either science is describing patterns or predicting patterns and these patterns are simply made up of descriptions. In its simplest terms:

‘Every scientific statement in the long run, however, complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20am on January 15th and saw so-and-so, or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so. Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more I believe he will agree with me that this is the job of science – and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘something behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and there statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make…Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ and ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ and ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were? (C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Ch 4)

Nietzsche makes the same point: “We call it explanation, but it is description which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better – we explain just as little as anyone who came before us”. What we have achieved are descriptions of greater and greater complexity and sophistication (and inferred patterns, which we call laws – from our descriptions) but we have explained nothing. Knowing how fire changes molecular structure does not explain fire itself….“If we chop up the endless continuum of the world into manageable pieces for our digestion, let us not imagine that the menu we prepare for ourselves is the only, or even the tastiest, one. Yet the hubris of science insists that it is” (Introducing Nietzsche p60)

When I am trying to explain to my students the difference between a scientific question and a question about meaning, I use the example of a mother who has lost a child in a car accident. ‘Why did my child die?’ The ‘scientists’ (doctors, forensic police, etc) will answer this with a presentation of the empirical facts. Something perhaps like: when a car is hit at such and such a speed from such and such an angle, the human who feels the impact suffers from a crush of the chest resulting in a complete failure of vital organs, thereby resulting in death’.

Knowing the physical details won’t answer the mother’s actual question which is to ask for the event to make sense. To that question, science has nothing to say.

Of course when Richard Dawkins and many others insist that Science is the only menu and ‘There is no ultimate why’ they are not presenting a scientific view but rather declaring their own theological or faith position, they are presenting their answer to an ultimate question.

What Nietzsche calls the ‘hubris of science’ is more formally known as scientific reductionism or scientism which is not a scientific but a metaphysical position that holds only the physical universe exists and that only science can provide truth. It is itself an answer to an ultimate question but it is important to note that it is not in itself a scientific answer.

With the collapse of a religious world view and the increasing irrelevance of religious language, it is tempting for people to simply fall for the hubris of science. Our students literally imbibe its assumptions from everywhere in the media. Here’s just one example which I think is indicative of many. It’s a fairly typical example of how scientific discoveries are reported by the media.

Neuroscientists have apparently discovered the part/s of the brain that are connected to religious experience and religious belief.

Tuesday, 10 March 2009: ‘Belief and the brain’s God spot’



The by-line reads: ‘Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that control religious faith. And the research proves, they contend, that belief in a higher power is an evolutionary asset that helps human survival.

We are then told that:

A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history. Scientists searching for the neural God spot, which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief”.

Leaving aside the conflation of ‘belief’ with ‘experience’ and various other logical errors, this article is actually making one very simple claim. That scientists have found the part of the brain that is active when human beings have spiritual experiences, and they have discovered that all human brains seem to have this part, and that spiritual experiences can be caused by stimulating that part of the brain, whether the human has an actual belief in God or not.

Now I don’t know about you but I’d be more surprised if scientists discovered that no part of the brain was active when people have religious experiences. I’d also be a tad concerned! So, what have I learnt when I am told about this discovery (which, incidentally, I am not implying doesn’t have information that is interesting – science is interesting - it’s just not equipped to deal with the ultimate and is being dishonest whenever it suggests otherwise).

The article is too long to go through it point by point with you now but I will include the link in the published version of my paper and more detailed analysis of the philosophical assumptions embedded in the article. I encourage you to examine it with your senior students. They rightly feel caught in the middle of a science/religion debate where the options are either to reject science or to reject religion. It’s an impossible choice and unsurprisingly, they more commonly default to scientism without being able to clearly orientate themselves to the issues.

What most people take from articles like this is the conclusion that when science discovers the parts of the brain active in, say, our experience of beauty, or poetry, or in this case, God, this entails that beauty, meaning and God are nothing but brain states. If we can stimulate such experiences without having ‘real objects’, surely we have ‘proved’ there is no such thing as beauty, meaning or God. What follows from this is that it is foolish to continue to ask questions about God’s existence because clearly science has proved God doesn’t exist.

Obviously the shift from a description of brains and experiences to the metaphysical conclusion is philosophically illegal. Clearly the brain can produce an experience of X either by experiencing X or by being stimulated to experience X.  The fact of the latter does not disprove the existence of Xs (I could, for example, tickle the right part of your brain and cause you to see a chair or taste apple pie but that tells me or you nothing about the actual existence of chairs or apple pies).

So a clearer way to present the ideas in this article might be this:

A brain state can be matched to a belief in God, and researches have also found that the human brain can be stimulated to have religious experiences, according to a study that suggests that religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history.

You can now more easily see the descriptive, rather than the explanatory nature of the science and also realise that nothing in the findings themselves can tell us what our experiences are of.

The article rather tellingly concludes with this:

‘When we have incomplete knowledge of the world around us, it offers us opportunities to believe in God. When we don’t have a scientific explanation for something, we tend to rely on supernatural explanations’.

I presume we are supposed to conclude that although belief in God was a necessary explanatory feature for biological survival, we won’t need such beliefs in a world where science has explained everything. In essence this is the logical equivalent of claiming that now that we have knowledge of the God spot, we no longer have a need for God. I assume I don’t need to point out the absurdity of such a conclusion.

What I have tried to show here is that this contains a profoundly mistaken idea – that God currently fills the gaps that science will one day fill. Nothing about a scientific discovery per se can by itself give us an answer to ultimate ‘why’ or ‘what’ questions. Empirical data cannot, all by itself, reveal its source or ground. Re Lewis: why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is not a scientific question. When Dawkins decides there is nothing behind and there is no why, this is as much a faith decision as the person who thinks there is something behind and there is a ‘why’. It is simply dishonest of anyone to suggest that Dawkins’ position is the position that truly enlightened, scientific minds must adopt.

Science will never answer ultimate questions – but, more worryingly, perhaps the hubris of science may one day mean that people are encouraged to feel foolish for asking them. Something distinctly and deeply human would be threatened in such a world.

Humans ask ultimate questions. Science cannot.

Asking Ultimate questions – the distinctly and deeply human

What does it mean to be human?

Why is there evil and suffering?

How do I find truth?

What is a good life?

When a human asks a question like this they are asking about meaning and purpose. They are asking about ultimate reality, value and personal significance. They are asking an existential question, and this is another reason why ultimate questions are difficult to answer. The ‘facts’ contribute to the problem. They cannot, on their own, provide a solution. Answers to ultimate questions are to be found within. On that point I am sure David Tacey will have much more to tell us on Wednesday. I want to make just a couple of points here by looking at how Kierkegaard presents the problem.

Ultimate questions - the existential component

Of crucial importance to Kierkegaard’s analysis of the existential nature of ultimate concern is his critique of Hegel.[1]. Any totalising theory will have the same features as Hegel’s system. A ‘theory of everything’ would be just as much a target of Kierkegaard’s analysis as Hegel’s attempt to explain world history in terms of spirit consciousness.

You will recall that Hegel’s grand project was to provide a biography of Reason – the story Reason would write for itself if it could. Dissatisfied with Kant’s abstract and context free account of Pure Reason, Hegel engaged in the much more ambitious project of showing Reason progressing to an Absolute state. Recall Hegel’s Geist, moving through history via the process of the dialectic, overcoming paradoxes through a series of synthesising steps until it eventually achieves an ultimate synthesis – an absolute final state, realised, not unsurprisingly perhaps, in Hegel’s 19th century Germany. For Hegel, it was quite literally ‘the state’ that was absolute. All the contradictions and paradoxes that Kant had stumbled across disappear in Hegel’s final state. It is Rationality made perfect.[2] In Hegel’s ideal society, the will of each individual and society’s laws must coincide because ultimately human beings are defined by their relation to others. The result of this Hegelian system was that the individual must be subordinated to the family unit, the family to society and society to the State.

Kierkegaard argues that Hegel’s Absolute obliterates the subject.

Only individuals can ask ultimate questions. The State cannot. A system cannot.

Kierkegaard argues there can be no complete system because existence is a ‘surd’, always left over when all description and analysis is complete. Abstract concepts are always abstractions whereas real life human beings can never be reduced to mere concepts. Our individual existence is the unanalyzable residue which is simply’ there’. Kierkegaard rejects Hegel’s system because it does not include existing individuals. And he accuses Hegel of the absurdity of not being able to include himself in his own system: ‘Is he purely eternal, the pure ‘I am I’ even when he eats, sleeps and blows his nose?’

Reason and science may provide objective truths - abstracted from reality, conceptualised and tested. In each of these cases there are objective, external criteria to which we can appeal when we question the truth of a claim. These truths, claims Kierkegaard, are existentially indifferent. That is to say, nothing in your life would radically change if you discovered that one of these truths was false.

Take for example, the discovery mentioned earlier, that neuroscientists have discovered the parts of the brain that are connected to belief in God or religious experience. If, in 20 years’ time, this discovery is overturned, would that change anything about a persons’ life – religious or atheistic? I suggest not.

Subjective truths, on the other hand, are truths for which there is no objective criteria to which one can appeal, and yet, for Kierkegaard, they are the most important kind of truths. These are existential truths in that they are essentially related to one’s existence. These truths are not about objective facts but about values and the foundation or ultimate ground of values, and by implication, our identity, meaning and place in the universe.

Subjective truths are not pieces of knowledge, or well- reasoned arguments, rather they must be appropriated by the individual, internalised and reflected in one’s decisions and actions.

Humans ask ultimate questions. Humanity cannot.

Humans have fears, desires, thoughts, dispositions, neuroses and commitments. Humanity does not. This is Kierkegaard’s starting point. Whilst fictional and abstract characters are provided with a character or essence that determines their destiny, for real people, the opposite is true. It is their chosen actions the cumulatively determine their character and what they understand their actions and experiences to mean. Living is not an activity that can be ‘mediated’ by some ongoing dialectic (nor, I am tempted to say, by a scientific hypothesis).

If for example you are told that you are hard wired to propagate, you still have to decide who to marry, or indeed, whether to marry and whether to have children. The science doesn’t take decisions away from you – nor does it take away the consequences of those decisions, in terms of the meaning they have for you.

Kierkegaard suggested that most people flee from their freedom, seeking relief from the anxiety of having to choose for themselves or face ultimate questions by following the crowd. Most people are content to be absorbed into the everyday world of marriage, career and social respectability. If their society is a Christian one, they go to church, get their children baptised, and so on. If their society is communist, they dutifully attend party meetings and obey the dictates of the state. If their society is a capitalist one, they will no doubt unthinkingly believe their purpose is to accumulate assets and wealth and contribute to the ‘growth’ of the economy. Kierkegaard does not suggest they are hypocrites, however. They are simply avoiding all self-conscious reflection about the kind of life they lead. They lack any real freedom because they have allowed others to decide how they should live.

Kierkegaard’s existentialism is a radical and damning challenge to this. Our capacity to ask questions about meaning and value (which Kierkegaard would describe as our spiritual nature), to place ourselves in time and space and to hear the call of the eternal, is what defines us. But this is also a source of spiritual anxiety. The more awareness, the more freedom; the more freedom, the more risk, the more responsibility but also the possibility of lives with profound meaning – lives lived sub specie aeternitatis.

Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different types of choices we can make (the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious) ends up with the conclusion that only living in relationship with the absolute or ultimate will grant a person a life of ultimate meaning. Kierkegaard famously saw accepting the God-Man paradox of Jesus as the ultimate Faith stance because it required maximum subjective risk (it doesn’t make sense) and yet secured maximum meaning. A finite individual could live in relationship with the infinite. The eternal could be met in the present.

If you are ever looking for curriculum content in your philosophy and RE courses I highly recommend you include at least an introduction to Kierkegaard somewhere. I find that although the material is difficult, senior students get an enormous amount from it.

The existential nature of ultimate questions is what makes them possible to answer but also is part of the reason they are hard to answer. Why?

• First, a person has to take them seriously (and there are reasons why we would rather avoid them)

• Second, even if you do take them seriously, you live in a society that encourages you to avoid them

This means that as teachers, if we are to protect and preserve what is deeply and distinctly human, we must do all we can to affirm both the questions and the persons who ask them.

If ultimate questions are deeply and distinctly human why would we rather avoid them?

Because they unsettle us. Questions about our mortality and our value are only possible in creatures that have sufficient consciousness. As Kierkegaard emphasises, we are aware that we will one day cease to exist, that we have to choose and take responsibility for our actions and that ultimately, our lives may come to nothing. Tillich rather usefully presents the three main types of anxiety which are distinctly human and related to ultimate concern:

1. Ontic self-affirmation – threatened in terms of fate and absolutely in terms of death

2. Spiritual self-affirmation – threatened in terms of emptiness and absolutely in terms of meaninglessness

3. Moral self-affirmation – threatened in terms of guilt and absolutely in terms of condemnation

If our capacity to experience existential anxiety is connected to our ability to ask and answer ultimate questions it is crucial that we accept and learn from this anxiety and unsettledness. But this is painful and difficult.[3]

A striking component of Tillich’s analysis is his account of spiritual fanaticism and its connection to the threat of meaninglessness. Tillich suggests that anxiety about meaninglessness is based on man’s sense of separation from the whole of reality – so it can be overcome by surrendering his separation and fleeing from his freedom to fanaticism – a situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed authoritatively. The fanatic surrenders himself in order to save his spiritual life. Meaning (of sorts) is saved but self is sacrificed.

I sometimes wonder when I look at the technological totality that constitutes my students’ experiences, whether the need for constant connection is not another form of overcoming the anxiety of meaninglessness by surrendering separation. Of course the fanatic does this to a fanatical degree. In both cases, however, there is a collapse of a distinction between self and reality; for the fanatic, the horizon (the ‘far’) has become everything, for those addicted to Facebook and Twitter updates, the constant feed of the ‘near’ (the now) obliterates the horizon. Meaninglessness is staved off by the endless possibilities offered by social networking sites that can perhaps temporarily silence the anxiety. ‘I must check for new feeds’.[4] It is hard to see how in that conglomerate of constant news flashes and emotional flux the deeper, searching self can make itself heard or known.

Perhaps challenges to the importance of existential anxiety are also coming from other sources. Part of the consequence of the shift from the religious to the scientific world view is the objectification of humans to purely biological subjects, rendering us objects of scientific enquiry and technical management. Don’t we now have a proliferation of narcotics to soothe a proliferation of anxiety disorders?

But the problem here is highlighted by Tillich:

‘The safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, …this safety is bought as a high price; man, for whom all this was invented as means, becomes a means himself’ (Tillich p.138). In other words, self becomes an object, a thing.

Humans ask ultimate questions. Things cannot.

For those who seek the holy grail of a utopia of happiness (now more commonly termed ‘wellbeing’) expressions of individuality and expressions of despair disturb them. In such a utopia one is unable to distinguish the genuine from the neurotic. Think of Huxley’s brilliant vision in Brave new world. The controller wants the smooth functioning of society – the technological reduction of self to the collective. John the Savage embraces and courageously claims the ‘negative’ – he wants to incorporate suffering, not to deny life but to affirm it because this is the truth about reality, the truth about being human.

“We prefer to do things comfortably’, said the Controller.

‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want goodness. I want freedom’.

‘In fact’, said the Controller, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy’.

‘Alright then’, said the Savage defiantly. ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy’.

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent…the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

There was a long silence.

“I claim them all”, said the Savage at last.

“The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome”, he said.

(Brave New World)

Normalisation by narcotics – Augustine’s restless heart provided with peace, secured not by spiritual truth but by soma. There may be plenty that is new but there’s surely nothing brave about such a world.

There is something brave about an individual who understands that spirit makes him human and that the promise of physical or material salvation is simply another version of hell.

Of course along with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, that other 19th century existential giant, recognised the impending loss of a divine horizon and realised that humans would need to find a new horizon to replace the God they had killed if they wanted to avoid the mindless pursuit of pleasure and the siren songs of science. Nietzsche saw with a clarity wrought from a kind of brilliant madness the impending fate of man:

“Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand!” (Daybreak 174)

His rejection of hedonism and utilitarianism, perhaps of all the comfort and leisure technologies to which we have become increasingly addicted, is no less compromising:

“Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible” (BGE 225).

The higher one leaves pleasure “to the great majority: happiness as peace of soul, virtue, comfort, Anglo-angelic shopkeeperdom” (WP 944). (I can't help but think there's a side glance here to Benthan and his utility calculus)

Nietzsche’s much misunderstood Ubermensch is not a cruel and ravaging beast but a ‘higher man’ a ‘free spirit’ who understands that neither morality nor reason can generate meaning and neither can science. Ultimately one needs mythology – a horizon before which and a ground on which to stand.

“The passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar…it involves the use of a rare and singular standard cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; a courage without any desire for honours; self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things” (GS 55)

Nietzsche understood that to make sense of my life or my experience I must be shown it as a whole. I need a ‘far’ to make sense of the ‘near’. He adopted the mythology of fate, eternal recurrence. All that I have done and that happens to me can be creatively woven into the continuing saga of my life. I can choose to repossess it. Of anything I may say: ‘Thus I willed it so”.

I personally think there is something incredibly inspiring in Nietzsche’s call to authentic and passionate self-determination. I also happen to think he was deeply mistaken in his belief that an individual could self-create. But he does not advocate a nihilistic negativity, despite the fact that many postmodern cynics claim him as their master. But modern day cynics are not like their predecessors in Greek society who were critics of contemporary culture on the basis of reason and natural law. Modern cynics have no belief in reason, no criterion of truth, no answer to the question of meaning. They ‘courageously’ reject any situation which would deprive them of their freedom to reject whatever they want to reject. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and an ultimate meaning and are easy victims of neurotic anxiety.

[ anecdote about students who arrive with certificates justifying their resignation to weakness and entitlement to indulgence]

Nietzsche, when properly handled, can be a wonderful antidote to a culture of hedonism, helplessness and entitlement. Nietzsche, unlike many of his postmodern followers, at least knew that redeeming truths are not psychological but metaphysical. His mistake was to think that by force of will we could create new ones. Kierkegaard knew that whether we call on him or not, God is always present. He is always and already waiting to be found.

Teaching Ultimate questions

So, what does all this mean for our classroom practice? Good teaching is always about what matters. Good RE teaching is about what ultimately matters.

It turns out that it is not merely the minds of our students (sceptical or otherwise) that we need to engage. We must also

• Engage their hearts and spirits (their deep selves)

• Present them with examples of how these questions have been thought about and answered (the core of our curriculum) which is really a way of presenting them with possibilities

• Confirm in everything you do and say that these questions matter

• Live the questions ourselves

• Know that your answer need not be their answer. They are not you

Ultimate questions are essentially existential. What does that mean? The answer can’t be found on the internet or in a text book or even in a facilitated discussion. There is no answer ‘out there’ although the way other humans have thought about and lived their own answers is an important part of me working out my answer. At the end of the day, however, every individual faces the question and must come to an answer for themselves.

How many will even try?

Kierkegaard again:

“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their masters by copying the answers out of a book, without having worked out the sum for themselves” (Journals, Jan 17th, 1837)

We have new ways of copying the answers, don’t we? It’s so much easier to google than to really search (I think of it as ‘goggle’ – have a look at the eyes of your students when they are doing internet tasks. We literally goggle when we google.)

Perhaps the copy and paste facility has simply replaced the traditional method of rote learning?

Whilst there is nothing at all wrong with using technology for particular purposes I think it is important to be mindful of its limitations, too. When I am doing my ‘near’ and ‘far’ exercise with my new year 9s, I get them to read through and discuss the following remark.

“In post-modern culture we tend increasingly to inhabit virtual reality rather than actual reality. More and more time is spent in the shadowlands of the computer world. The computer world is all foreground but has no background. Much of modern life is lived in the territory of externality; if we succumb completely to the external we will lose all sense of inner and personal presence. We will become the ultimate harvesters of absence, namely, ghosts in our own lives”. (John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes)

People ask ultimate questions. Machine cannot. Ghosts do not. (Okay, so I don’t know that last one for sure.)

The most important thing we can do as teachers is to affirm what O’Donohue here calls the ‘inner and personal presence’ of our students which is the only ‘search engine’ that ultimately matters.

In closing, I have two teaching ideas I call to inner and personal presence that I have found to have lasting significance for my students in philosophy. Both are done at year 12 but I am sure they could be adapted to younger years.

• The grave stone exercise – what do you want your hyphen to stand for and why?

• Letter to unborn child on how to live a good life

Perhaps another way of affirming their personal presence and potential is to have reminders up in the classroom. What about Aslan’s command to the creatures of the newly created Narnia: ‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.” (ch 9)

It’s always struck me that Aslan does not say ‘believe this creed’ but rather ‘become a certain kind of creature’. In another of his other books, C S Lewis has one of his character’s ask: ‘How can the gods meet us face to face until we have faces?’ (Till we have Faces, p.223)

Why not have a discussion about the difference between having a Facebook page and having a face, an identity ready to meet the gods? Ready to come face to face with the ultimate?

Ultimate questions are hard to answer because they ultimately call us to account, they demand something from us. Rather like Wittgenstein’s gaze, or Aslan as described by Mrs Beaver, they are ‘good but not safe’.

In conclusion then

Understanding the nature of ultimate questions involves recognising the limits of science, reason and technology. It involves recognising that they demand a profoundly subjective response to the call of the eternal within us, that no answer is ever the once and for all answer or known once and for all. It is to recognise that ‘the real mystery of life is not a problem to solved, but a reality to be experienced’. (J.J.Van der Leeuw)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Appendix – sections that could not be covered due to time constraints

Ultimate Questions – How far can Reason take us? – Kant and Hegel

In examining the place of Reason I had to decide, due to the constraints of time, whether to look at Plato or Kant. Plato was, of course, Western philosophy’s most famous exponent of Rationalism as a source of knowledge of the ultimate or absolute and in many respects it would make sense to focus on him. However, Plato’s account, brilliant in its scope, depth and detail, has, nevertheless been found out by subsequent developments in philosophy where distinctions Plato never made have been introduced to sort out some of the conceptual and explanatory confusion Plato fell into to. I am thinking for example of the subsequent separation of epistemology from semantics, and metaphysics and logic (specifically, the distinction between necessary truth and necessary existence). More significantly for our purposes though, I personally think that Plato did not offer a vision attainable by Reason alone but, a mystical view which requires a more expanded and perhaps more spiritual view of the nature of consciousness. For these reasons I have decided to focus on Kant as a way of revealing the limitations of Reason when it comes to answering ultimate questions.

Time constraints will mean that I cannot do justice to the nature and scope of Kant’s project but you will remember Kant’s was trying to address the sceptical challenges presented by Hume whilst avoiding what he saw as the unjustified dogmatism of the Rationalists’ project. Armed with his belief that we can only give content to our conceptual categories via experience, Kant drew that famous distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal realms, arguing that empirical reason could not play the role of establishing rational truths because it goes beyond any possible experience and is applied to the sphere of that which transcends it.

I cannot here defend Kant against Rationalists who may present counter-arguments, but I think his concept of the antinomies is instructive when thinking about the relationship between reason and ultimate questions. Antinomies are contradictions reason encounters when it attempts to think about ultimate grounds or secure purely rational truths. Kant identifies four antinomies that are generated by reason’s attempt to achieve complete knowledge of the realm beyond the empirical. Each antinomy has a thesis and an antithesis, both of which can be validly proven, and since each makes a claim that is beyond the grasp of spatiotemporal sensation, neither can be confirmed or denied by experience. The First Antinomy argues both that the world has a beginning in time and space, and no beginning in time and space. The Second Antinomy’s arguments are that every composite substance is made of simple parts and that nothing is composed of simple parts. The Third Antinomy’s thesis is that agents like ourselves have freedom and its antithesis is that they do not. The Fourth Antinomy contains arguments both for and against the existence of a necessary being in the world[5].

‘Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer”. (Preface to First Edition, Critique of Pure Reason)

Our capacity to Reason is what gives us the ability to ask ultimate questions but alas, it is unable to provide answers to them.

Of course Kant’s account of Reason is far more sophisticated than the tool most of us use on a daily basis but the truth of Kant’s position can be seen more directly. For example:

We teach a unit in year 10 on the philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God. It is instructive and challenging for the boys as they work through the ontological, cosmological, teleological arguments, Pascal’s wager and Feuerbach’s projectionist theory. What always comes out of this unit is their acute awareness that these arguments, by themselves, won’t prove anything. They don’t settle the issue. If Reason alone is inadequate to the task of answering an ultimate question one might be tempted to reject as unimportant the study of philosophical approaches to these questions. After all, philosophy is the discipline that employs the tool of Reason par excellence. Aren’t all attempts doomed to fail?

Wittgenstein’s ladder – Tractatus 6.54

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Philosophical approaches are the rungs on a ladder which you ultimately discard…but which are essential steps. The VCE Philosophy course has a unit called ‘The Good Life’ which examines the answers given to the question ‘what is the good life?’ by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Simone Weil.

[ talk about the benefits of this…but how ultimately reason won’t decide for you – it’s the biggest challenge for my boys taking the course that ultimately they have to come to a conclusion on the question of God’s existence, on the nature of the good life and on whether life has meaning from somewhere other than reason.

Kant’s arguments to show that neither reason nor the empirical world, considered by itself, settle the question of the ultimate ground or nature of the world or persons. Kant concludes by saying to believe that experience makes sense as a totality we must have Faith.

[pic]Belief and the brain's 'God spot'

Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that control religious faith. And the research proves, they contend, that belief in a higher power is an evolutionary asset that helps human survival. Steve Connor reports

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

[pic]

GETTY

The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the brain.

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google

Dalai Lama in Melbourne

His Holiness' Official Visit. June

Long Weekend 2011. Buy Tickets Now!

Events

Is there Really a God?

Does He exist? How can you know?

What Is Life's Meaning and Purpose?

.au

Sexed-up Atheism- Dawkins

Pantheism adds reverence

for Nature, Universe, Life

atheism.htm

Brain Training Games

Improve memory and attention with

scientific brain games. Free Trial



[pic]A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history.

Scientists searching for the neural "God spot", which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief.

The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.

"Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures," said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington. "Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions."

Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis. Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions. Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world. Religion and the belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable.

The latest study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved analysing the brains of volunteers, who had been asked to think about religious and moral problems and questions. For the analysis, the researchers used a functional magnetic-resonance imaging machine, which can identify the most energetically-active regions of the brain.

They found that people of different religious persuasions and beliefs, as well as atheists, all tended to use the same electrical circuits in the brain to solve a perceived moral conundrum – and the same circuits were used when religiously-inclined people dealt with issues related to God.

The study found that several areas of the brain are involved in religious belief, one within the frontal lobes of the cortex – which are unique to humans – and another in the more evolutionary-ancient regions deeper inside the brain, which humans share with apes and other primates, Professor Grafman said.

"There is nothing unique about religious belief in these brain structures. Religion doesn't have a 'God spot' as such, instead it's embedded in a whole range of other belief systems in the brain that we use everyday," Professor Grafman said.

The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the brain. An early contender was the brain's temporal lobe, a large section of the brain that sits over each ear, because temporal-lobe epileptics suffering seizures in these regions frequently report having intense religious experiences. One of the principal exponents of this idea was Vilayanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, who asked several of his patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral words while measuring their levels of arousal and emotional reactions. Religious words elicited an unusually high response in these patients.

This work was followed by a study where scientists tried to stimulate the temporal lobes with a rotating magnetic field produced by a "God helmet". Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University in Ontario, found that he could artificially create the experience of religious feelings – the helmet's wearer reports being in the presence of a spirit or having a profound feeling of cosmic bliss.

Dr Persinger said that about eight in every 10 volunteers report quasi-religious feelings when wearing his helmet. However, when Professor Richard Dawkins, an evolutionist and renowned atheist, wore it during the making of a BBC documentary, he famously failed to find God, saying that the helmet only affected his breathing and his limbs.

Other studies of people taking part in Buddhist meditation suggested the parietal lobes at the upper back region of the brain were involved in controlling religious belief, in particular the mystical elements that gave people a feeling of being on a higher plane during prayer.

Andrew Newberg, from the University of Pennsylvania, injected radioactive isotope into Buddhists at the point at which they achieved meditative nirvana. Using a special camera, he captured the distribution of the tracer in the brain, which led the researchers to identify the parietal lobes as playing a key role during this transcendental state.

Professor Grafman was more interested in how people coped with everyday moral and religious questions. He said that the latest study, published today, suggests the brain is inherently sensitive to believing in almost anything if there are grounds for doing so, but when there is a mystery about something, the same neural machinery is co-opted in the formulation of religious belief.

"When we have incomplete knowledge of the world around us, it offers us the opportunities to believe in God. When we don't have a scientific explanation for something, we tend to rely on supernatural explanations," said Professor Grafman, who believes in God. "Maybe obeying supernatural forces that we had no knowledge of made it easier for religious forms of belief to emerge."

Philosophical analysis of ‘The Independent’ article on the God-spot

People engaged in the sort of research discussed here want to show that belief in God and the experience of the numinous can simply be explained by, or more accurately, can be reduced to nothing more than brain states.  The scientific assumption is that there is no God, but that the ubiquitous belief in God and the ubiquitous experience of God can be explained in terms of evolution and brain states.  There are several muddles here.  First, is the conflation of states of belief with states during which the brain has religious experiences.  The conflation can be shown thus: X can believe in the existence of God, that is, X can entertain propositions about God, without necessarily having any religious experiences at all.  On the other hand, X can have an experience of the numinous without entertaining any propositions about God. (There are people who have religious experiences but who are avowed atheists).  Second, both brain states involving belief and brain states involving religious experiences necessarily ARE brain states.  The fact that the brain is involved says nothing about the veracity and verisimilitude of the beliefs and/or experiences.  When I view a picture of an apple pie and when I view an apple pie, the same visual pathways of my brain are fired up.  This is a paradigmatic case of the chicken and the egg.  I can stimulate that part of the brain involved in the experience of having sex without actually having sex - this does not mean that that part of the brain will not be stimulated when I actually have sex.  In other words, what brain research tells us about the actual existence of God is zip. The article points to the on-going conflation of epistemic matters with ontological matters.  No doubt, when I entertain propositions about dragons, giants and princess faeries, some part of my brain lights up.  Should I ever actually encounter a dragon, giant or princess faery, some part of my brain will light up.

Problems:

 

1. Believing that X exists is not the same thing as experiencing X's ontic presence.

2. Brains can deal with both actualities and with analogies.

3. The brain can produce an experience of X by experiencing X or by being stimulated to experience X.  The latter does not disprove the existence of Xs.[6]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shaping the Spirit: policy and practice for promoting spiritual development in schools February 2009 ©

Appendix 2

Some examples of ‘Ultimate Questions’

The following offers some examples of the sort of questions that have been called ultimate or

fundamental questions. It is important to realise that sometimes young children may be asking an ultimate question about for example the fact of pain or evil, if they ask a question like, ‘Why are there stinging nettles?’

1 Authority

Who can I trust?

Who should I listen to?

Who should I obey?

What can I believe?

Who can I believe?

Whose rules should I follow?

Why shouldn’t I steal?

Where can I find the truth?

Am I answerable to anyone?

2 Morality

How do I decide what is right?

Where do my ideas about right and wrong come from?

Where do our ideas about right and wrong come from?

Why is honesty better than dishonesty?

Why shouldn’t I do bad things? E.g. Why shouldn’t I steal? Why shouldn’t I cheat? Why shouldn’t

I lie?

3 Values

What really matters to me?

Do people matter more than things?

Why is courage better than cowardice?

Why is justice so important?

Are people more important than animals?

4 Origins

How did the universe begin?

How can something come from nothing?

Why is there anything rather than nothing?

Is there a Creator or is everything really just a cosmic accident?

If there is a God, who made God?

Are we alone in the universe?

5 Identity

Do I know the ‘real’ me?

Do others see me the way I see myself?

Do I see myself in the way that others see me?

How can I get to know the real me?

Am I being true to the real me / myself?

What does it mean to be me?

What does it mean to belong?

What does it mean to be human?

6 Destiny

Where am I going?

Can I determine my own future?

Can I change?

Can I ‘buck the trend?

What can I hope for?

Is death really the end?

Why must we die?

Is there life after death?

Is there a heaven or hell?

Is there an ultimate reward or punishment?

20

Shaping the Spirit: policy and practice for promoting spiritual development in schools February 2009 ©

Will evil prevail?

Is reincarnation true?

What future is there for the human race?

How will the world end?

7 Meaning

Why do we keep asking ‘Why’?

Does anything make sense?

Is there a God?

Why is life unfair?

Why is there so much suffering?

Why do we not stop the suffering?

What brings lasting happiness?

Is there a reason why things happen to us?

Is there such a thing as an ‘act of God’?

8 Purpose

What is it all for?

Why go on?

Why do some people appear to win and others appear to lose?

Does life have any purpose?

What does it mean to be successful?

What should I aim for?

Can I be different?

This list of questions has been slightly adapted from one produced as part of RE Today’s Looking Inwards Looking Outwards project. We are grateful to RE Today for their permission to use the original list.

One of the 32 page booklets in the Engaging with Secondary RE series is entitled ‘Spiritual RE’ (Edited by Lat Blaylock, RE Today, ISBN 978-1-905893-10-2 – .uk ). It explores issues to do with spiritual development from an RE perspective.

-----------------------

[1] I have a more detailed section on this is my appendix, where I track Kierkegaard through Kant and Hegel.

[2] Many philosophers were enamoured with Hegel. His influence on Heidegger perhaps helps to explain the latter’s interest and belief in the Nazi state, although I suspect that only goes to show the malignancy of ‘rationality’ left unchecked. The Cyber men in Dr Who are another good example!

[3] For a cutting commentary on the medicalization of anxiety, see Kierkegaard’s parable: ‘A visit to the doctor’, subtitled: Can medicine abolish the anxious conscience?’ in The parables of Kierkegaard, p.57

[4] Does this perhaps not really mean – get some more emotional food?

[5] For Kant’s account of the Antinomies of Pure Reason see ‘The transcendental dialectic’, Book II, Chapter II – The Antinomy of Pure Reason in Kant’s masterpiece Critique of Pure Reason

[6] This analysis was kindly provided by my good friend and philosopher Dr Peter Bennett, Head of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Haileybury College, Melbourne. I confess to outsourcing this section!

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download