A personalized argument from need

In the case of certain kinds of transformational experiences—such as meeting the love of your life—you have the realization that this is something you really needed for flourishing, but didn’t know it. Further, in many cases of these kinds of experiences, part of that realization is not just that you need the subjective experience for flourishing, but that what you need for reality the flourishing. For instance, if it turns out that your experience of meeting the love of your life was a hallucination, it would be a part of your realization not just that you need an experience of meeting the love of your life, but that you need the reality.

Now I think this kind of realization is a part of the life of many theists in connection with the experience of a relationship with God: they come to realize that they have always needed both this experience and the reality of it. But then the theist has this argument:

1. What is needed for the flourishing of a human being is in principle possible.

2. A relationship with God is in principle possible only if God exists.

3. A relationship with God is needed for my flourishing.

4. So, God exists.

An interesting thing about this argument is that for a number of people, the full realization of the truth of premise (3) only comes about once they believe in God. The argument thus has a circularity of sorts: it works best for those who already believe the conclusion. This is an innocent circularity: the relationship with God, of which belief in God is a part, makes available significant evidence for that belief.

This is a bit like Kierkegaard’s “argumentum Spiritus Sancti” which is only available to those who believe. It sounds paradoxical, but I do not think it is actually all that paradoxical. Imagine you have a friend who is accused of some crime, but refuses to show you evidence of their innocence unless you believe in their innocence first. Then, your belief is needed for you to have the evidence, but the evidence can be perfectly genuine and unparadoxical.

Evidentialism, and self-defeating and self-guaranteeing beliefs

Consider this modified version of William James’ mountaineer case: The mountaineer’s survival depends on his jumping over a crevasse, and the mountaineer knows that he will succeed in jumping over the crevasse if he believes he will succeed, but doesn’t know that he will succeed as he doesn’t know whether he will come to believe that he will succeed.

James used his version of the case to argue that pragmatic reasons can legitimately override lack of epistemic reasons.

But what is interesting to me in my variant is the way it provides a counterexample to evidentialism. Evidentialists say that you epistemically should form your beliefs only on the basis of evidence. But notice that although the belief that he will succeed at the jump needs to be formed in the absence of evidence for its truth, as soon as it is formed, the belief itself becomes its own evidence to the point that it turns into knowledge. The belief is self-guaranteeing. So there seems to be nothing to criticize epistemically about the formation of the belief, even though the formation is independent of evidence. In fact, it seems, there is a good epistemic reason to believe, since by believing the mountaineer increases the stock of his knowledge.

Moreover, we can even make the case be one where the evidence on balance points against the proposition. Perhaps the mountaineer has attempted, in safer circumstances, to get himself to believe that he can make such a jump, and seven times out of ten he has failed at both self-induction of belief, and also at the jump. But in the remaining three times out of ten, he succeeded at both. So, then, the mountaineer has non-conclusive evidence that he won’t manage to believe that he will succeed (and that he won’t succeed). If he comes to believe that he will succeed, he comes to believe this against the evidence—but, still, in doing, he increases his stock of knowledge, since the belief, once believed, is self-guaranteeing.

(This phenomenon of self-guaranteeing belief reminds me of things that Kierkegaard says about faith, where faith itself is a miracle that hence is evidence for its truth.)

Interestingly, we might also be able to construct cases of well-evidenced but self-defeating beliefs. Consider a jeweler who has noticed that she is successful at cutting a diamond if and only if she believes she will be unsuccessful. Her theory is that belief in her success makes her insufficiently careful. Over time, she has learned to suspend judgment in her success, and hence to be successful. But now she reflects on her history, and she finds herself with evidence that he will be successful in cutting the next diamond. Yet if she believes on this evidence, this will render her overconfident, and hence render the belief false!

This is related to the examples in this paper on lying.

So perhaps what the evidentialist needs to say is that you epistemically may believe p if and only if the evidence says that if you believe p, p is true?

Freedom and theodicy

Invoking free will has always been a major part of theodicy. If God has good reason to give us the possibility to act badly, that provides us with at least a defense against the problem of evil. But to make this defense into something more like a theodicy is hard. After all, God can give us such pure characters that even though we can act badly, we are unlikely to do so.

I want to propose that we go beyond the mere alternate-possibilities part of free will in giving theodicies. The main advantage of this is that the theodicy may be capable of accomplishing more. But there is also a very nice bonus: our theodicy may then be able to appeal to compatibilists, who are (sadly, I think) a large majority of philosophers.

I think we should reflect on the ways in which one can limit a person's freedom through manipulation of the perfectly ordinary sort. Suppose Jane is much more attractive, powerful, knowledgeable and intelligent than Bob, but Jane wants Bob to freely do something. She may even want this for Bob's own sake. Nonetheless, in order not to limit Bob's freedom too much, she needs to limit the resources she uses. Even if she leaves Bob the possibility of acting otherwise, there is the ever-present danger that she is manipulating him in a way that limits his freedom.

I think the issue of manipulation is particularly pressing if what Jane wants Bob to do is to love her back. To make use of vastly greater attractiveness, power, knowledge and intelligence in order to secure the reciprocation of love is to risk being a super-stalker, someone who uses her knowledge of the secret springs of Bob's motivations in order to subtly manipulate him to love her back. Jane needs to limit what she does. She may need to make herself less attractive to Bob in order not to swamp his freedom. She may need to give him a lot of time away from herself. She might have reason not to make it be clear to him that she is doing so much for him that he cannot but love her back. These limitations are particularly plausible in the case where the love Jane seeks to have reciprocated is something like friendship or, especially, romantic love. And Scripture also presents God's love for his people as akin to marital love, in addition to being akin to parental love (presumably, God's love has no perfect analogue among human loves).

So if God wants the best kind of reciprocation of his love, perhaps he can be subtle, but not too subtle. He can make use of his knowledge of our motivations and beliefs, but not too much such knowledge. He can give us gifts, but not overload us with gifts. He may need to hide himself from us for a time. Yes, the Holy Spirit can work in the heart all the time, but the work needs to be done in a way that builds on nature if God is to achieve the best kind of reciprocation of his love.

I think there are elements of theodicy here. And a nice bonus is that they don't rely on incompatibilism.

The Incarnation is also an important element here—I am remembering Kierkegaard...

A Kierkegaardian response to the problem of hiddenness

Kierkegaard somewhere says that the best argument for the Gospel is something like this: Everyone agrees that the moral teaching of the Gospel—love of neighbor and so on—is morally good. Thus, one should wholeheartedly strive to live it. And one will find oneself unable to do so, which will lead to one's throwing oneself on the grace of God.

Abstracting from the details, Kierkegaard is committed to something like this thesis:

1. A sufficiently wholehearted attempt to live the morally upright life puts one in a position to have an epistemically justified faith.

By contraposition, if one never attains the epistemic conditions for an epistemically justified faith, one did not make a sufficiently wholehearted attempt to live the morally upright life.

But if one fails to make that wholehearted effort, then one cannot reasonably complain about hiddenness. This story may seem offensive to non-Christians, but I suspect that Kierkegaard also thinks very few Christians make that wholehearted attempt.

Some valid arguments from absurdity

Here are some curious forms of argument that I want to play with. First:

1. Doctrine D is so absurd that no one could believe D while fully realizing its absurdity, except by a miracle.
2. Someone believes D while fully realizing its absurdity.
3. So, a miracle has occurred.

Given the human capacity for believing the unbelievable, it is going to be hard to support (1) for any interesting D (except maybe: p and not p).

Let's try this:

4. Doctrine D is so absurd that no one could reasonably believe D while fully realizing its absurdity, except by a miracle.
5. Someone reasonably believes D while fully realizing its absurdity.
6. So, a miracle has occurred.

In arguments of this sort, the difficulty has shifted to (5). But we might try the following. Start by observing that a person doesn't become unreasonable simply by having a trivial belief that isn't reasonable. But to center one's life one a belief that isn't reasonable might be enough to render one unreasonable:

7. If at least one of the beliefs central to x's life is not reasonable, then x is an unreasonable person.
8. x is not unreasonable.
9. One of the beliefs central to x's life is D.
10. x fully realizes the absurdity of D while believing D.
11. So someone reaosnably believes D while fully realizing its absurdity.

The conclusions of the above arguments were that a miracle has occurred. Can we conclude that D is true? Well, we would have to look at our best explanation of the miracle. If it involves God, then we have reason to think D is true. Here's an argument that avoids the detour through miracles.

12. Doctrine D is so absurd that no reasonable person would hold D as a belief central to her life while fully realizing D's absurdity unless she knew D to be true.
13. Some reasonable person held D as a belief central to her life while fully realizing D's absurdity.
14. So, somebody knew D to be true.
15. So, D is true.

I think the big difficulty with arguments of this form in the cases most familiar to me, namely with D a doctrine from the Christian tradition, is that people who are paradigm examples of rationality, like Thomas Aquinas, do not take the doctrine to be really absurd.

Exegesis of Scripture

It is standard in interpreting Scripture to ask questions like: "What did the Paul hope to accomplish by this passage?" or "What motivated the prophet to write this verse?" or "What must the p been thinking given that he wrote this?" These questions are interesting to ask and the answers seem to illuminate our understanding of Scripture. We investigate secular texts in exactly the same way. It potentially illuminates our understanding of Aristotle's thought to ask why he waited until Met. H.6 to give a solution to the problems of Met. Z.

But there is a crucial difference between the secular case and Scripture: Scripture is authoritative. But, I think, what is authoritative is the text that the human author wrote, rather than the human author's motivations and thinking behind that text. The inferred motivations and thinking of the human author give us insight into what the text means (more strongly, I think that speaker-meaning is the relevant kind of meaning for Scripture, but the point remains even if one denies this), and hence help us know what is being taught. But the human author's motivations and thinking, in and of themselves, are quite fallible, while, in the words of the Vatican II ecumenical council, "everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit" (Dei Verbum 11, emphasis added) and hence is true.

Let me argue for the claim that the author's motivations and thinking are not in and of themselves authoritative, though I may need to qualify it. Suppose we infer from internal and external evidence that an author wrote the text to a particular audience with the confident belief that the text would convince the audience of some proposition. Can we conclude that it is authoritatively taught that the audience was in fact convinced of that proposition? Surely not. We gain an insight into the intentions of the author, and this helps us understand what the text means, but the author's motivating belief is not authoritative. Or for an even more obvious example, from the fact that a sacred author writes a sentence s we can typically infer that he thought s was orthographically and grammatically correct and stylistically good Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. But this claim about grammar and spelling is not authoritative. Scripture is not to be taken as an authoritative examplar of style—that would be like the confusion of apostle and genius that Kierkegaard inveighs against (this is probably a point at which Christian attitudes to Scripture differ from Islamic ones).

It is sometimes possible to infer from the fact that the author wrote a sentence s that asserts the proposition p that there is some other proposition, q, which he also believed. For instance, suppose the author writes with great emphasis that anyone who does A will be doomed for eternity. We might be able infer from the emphasis that the author believes that some people do A, or at least that it is quite possible to do A. This belief, however, is not asserted by the author and need not be authoritative. However, the belief does help us with the interpretation of what the author meant. For instance, suppose we have two ways of interpreting "A": A₁ and A₂. Suppose, further, that internal and/or external evidence shows that the author probably would not have believed that anybody does A₁ but would have thought that some people do A₂. This now gives us strong evidence for the claim that the author meant A₂ by "A". Thus, probably, we are being authoritatively taught that those who do A₂ are doomed for eternity. But it does not follow from this that we are being authoritatively taught that anybody actually does A₂, even though our exegesis depended on attributing that belief to the author.

However, the above needs to be qualified. We must avoid the serious theological mistake of limiting the inspiration of Scripture to the inerrance of its assertions—the inerrance of assertions is a consequence of inspiration, but does not exhaust inspiration. There are large chunks of Scripture—much of the Psalms, for instance—where the illocutionary act is not assertion, but, say, prayer. Those parts are inspired as well, but the doctrine of the inerrance of Scriptural assertions says nothing about them. Similarly, even in the parts where assertion is the (primary?) illocutionary act, we should be open to the idea that something more is going on than inerrance. (Besides, inerrance is something basically negative—a preventing of error—while inspiration is a positive thing.) Thus, while what should be open to the idea that it does not exhaust the authority of an assertion of Scripture to say that we need to believe its content.

In particular, this raises the question of whether what is implicated by a text of Scripture is also authoritative. Here I will be entirely speculative. I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of implicatures. The first kind is where we can infer from some hypotheses about the text, such as that it tends to obeys Gricean maxims, that the author believed something, but the author does not intend for us to make that inference. The second is where the author intends for us to make some such inference. In the case where the author does not intend the inference, but we can make it nonetheless because we're clever, the inferred belief is not authoritative. In the case where the author intends for us to make the inference, we still need to distinguish between cases. The author may just want us to infer an autobiographical fact about him, that he happens to believe p. (For instance, maybe by a particular way of phrasing a question, the author wants to indicate to the reader which theological faction in Jerusalem he belongs to, and membership in the theological faction may be defined by believing p.) In that case, p need not be authoritatively taught. But the author may intend for us to learn that p from the text. In that case, p is authoritatively taught. Though maybe then p was in fact asserted?

In any case, in untangling these issues there is material for someone who is both interested in Biblical exegesis and philosophy of language for years of fruitful research. I am hoping that these reflections also show the necessity of a deep familiarity (greater than my passing acquaintance) with contemporary analytic philosophy of language to serious work on the theology of biblical inspiration.

On forgiving and forgetting

Somewhere in his diaries, Kierkegaard thinks forgiveness by an omniscient being is paradoxical. (Of course, that's no reason to deny either divine forgiveness or divine omniscience, for Kierkegaard—paradox here is good.) One way of filling out the paradox is that forgiveness is a kind of forgetting, and an omniscient being can't do that. There is a story, quite possibly anecdotal, of a girl who claimed to have visions of Jesus. Eventually she has an audience with her bishop, who to check if the visions were genuine, asked her to ask Jesus what he (the bishop) confessed in his last confession. Next week the girl comes back: "Jesus said he forgot." And of course our language has the phrase: "Forgive and forget."

However, forgiveness is actually very different from forgetting. First of all, forgetting is insufficient for forgiveness. Forgiveness (when valid) has a crucial normative consequence—there is something that the forgiven malefactor no longer owes her forgiving victim. Forgetting has no such normative consequence. I may be glad that my misdeed has been covered over by mist in your memory, but I am in no way off the hook. If anything, I am in a tougher place once you have forgotten, because the only way I can get forgiveness from you is by reminding you of what I have done, and that might be undesirable (it might cause pain to you again).

Moreover, forgetting has no place in ideal cases of forgiveness. For if you have forgetten the ill I have done you, you surely have likewise forgetten that you have forgiven me that ill, unless your logical skills have gone haywire. But now it is possible that you will come across evidence of what I did to you, without at the same time coming upon any evidence of your forgiveness. And if you do not know that you have forgiven me this offense, you may well experience the kind of resentment towards me that you had put away when you forgave me, and even seek vengeance. Forgiveness includes an objective and a subjective component: the objective component is a certain normative canceling of debt (as it were?), while the subjective is a putting away of resentment and a surrender of the desire for vengeance. But if you do not remember having forgiven, the resentment may return, until you go through the subjective component of forgiveness again.

In the ideal case, when you have forgiven me, you keep track of your new commitment not to resent such-and-such a deed and of my new normative status as "forgiven former malefactor".

This, however, carries a danger with it. For if you keep track of what you have forgiven me, then surely you run the danger of your priding yourself on your moral superiority in not holding me bound. To dwell on having forgiven is dangerous—forgiveness does, after all, put us in a position of superiority, and there is a danger that our forgiveness will be haughty and humiliating to the one forgiven. The cure for this is love, and we sinners have an additional help, which is meditation on our own sinfulness—we do not forgive haughtily, but we forgive as we wish to be forgiven.

Kierkegaardian love

Kierkegaardian view of romantic love makes love not be based on a quality of the beloved such as her generosity, beauty, intelligence, chastity, plenitude of jewelry or knobbiness of knee. A love grounded on these kinds of qualities would not really do justice to the irreplaceability of the beloved, the mysterious incommunicability of the beloved.

But what does Kierkegaard put in the place of such qualities? It is a choice by the lover, a choice to love. But then on Kierkegaard's view, romantic love is, after all, based on a quality, a quality even more fickle than beauty or plenitude of jewelry: the lover's choice. And this, surely, is even more problematic, shifting as it does the focus from the beloved to the lover.

I think this whole business of finding reasons for love is silly. For we always have decisive reason to love another person... just because the other is a person. The question is not of what reasons we have for loving, but of what reasons we have for loving in a particular way (friendly, filial, romantic, etc.) And this question is both less momentous and easier.

Errors and love

Suppose John loves Mary "for being a baroness" (and for what follows from being a baroness), but does not love him for any other reason. But in fact, unbeknownst to both of them (errors in the geneology, say)[note 1] On the other hand, if Mary is a commoner, then in typical cases, we would say that John, who loves her for being a baroness, doesn't actually love her. Instead, he loves a Baroness Mary who does not exist.

But, pace Kierkegaard, it seems that sometimes loving y for P does entail loving y. This will be true at least in the case where y has P and P is a lovable quality of y. Granted, such a love is presumably a conditional one, and hence inferior to the love that Kierkegaard rightly values, but it is still a love. Moreover, the example of Duchess Mary thought to be a baroness shows that sometimes x loves y for P and y lacks P, but nonetheless x has a love for y there. This will be so for instance when y lacks P, but has a property that, in x's structure of beliefs, is more more lovable.

It could be said that if this is how things are, I've misdescribed John's love. He doesn't love Mary for being a baroness, but for being at least a baroness. Maybe--but the way I put it seems more natural. What makes her be at least a baroness is her being a baron, and it is for this that Mary loves him.

Hence, from "x loves y for having property P" it does not follow that x loves y. This gives a precise meaning to Kierkegaard's statement that to add reasons to love is to subtract from the love. In fact, it might be the case that that x loves y entails that x loves y for various properties, but that x loves y for some property only entails that x loves y in some cases, such as cases of y's essential properties like being a creature of God.

A different example of Kierkegaard's statement might be cases where x loves y for having P, and y has P, but we would hesitate to say that x loves y. This will be cases where the property P is not one that makes for the interpersonal love that is typically meant when we say x loves y. For instance, this will be true when the cannibal loves y for y's taste, and y in fact is tasty to the cannibal. Sure, we could say that the cannibal loves y, but she is loving y not in the way one loves a person, but in the way one loves a cake. But maybe these kinds of cases are just like the cases of a mistake about properties. For maybe the cannibal loves y not just for y's taste, but for y's being tasty and y's being food. But y, in fact, is not food (at least not in the normative sense).

Why do I care? For several reasons. First, I am interested in the phenomena of distorted love. Second, I am interested theologically in the ways one might misconceive of God and Christ and still count as believing.

Emotions and the spiritual life

To say that love is a feeling and the like is really an un-Christian conception. This is the esthetic definition of love and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But from the Christian point of view love is the work of love. Christ's love was not intense feeling, a full heart, etc.; it was rather the work of love, which is his life. - Soren Kierkegaard, Journal X.1 A 489 (1849)

If you make use of your reason, you are like one who eats substantial food; but if you are moved by the satisfaction of your will, you are like one who eats insipid fruit. - St. John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love, 46.

The view that feelings, emotions and desires are irrelevant to the moral life has fallen on hard times. Defenders of Kant go out of their way to argue that Kant held no such view (and are probably right to do so), as if holding such a view were a terrible disqualification. The idea that on some moral view it is better to visit a friend out of a consciousness of duty than out of friendly feeling is taken as a reductio of that view. Typical utilitarians ground the moral life in feelings, emotions and desires (happiness is taken to be pleasure or the satisfaction of desire). Aristotelians see the process of moral growth as in large part a process of making one's feelings, emotions and desires conform to moral reality--feeling to do virtuous deeds and all that.

On the other hand, there are significant strands of the Christian spiritual tradition that say that feelings, emotions and desires are irrelevant at least for those who are no longer beginners in the spiritual life (e.g., St. John of the Cross), or bad since they distract us from purely spiritual contemplation (e.g., many but not all the Desert Fathers). And much of the Christian spiritual tradition recognizes feelings, emotions and desires as often dangerous and distracting. It is tempting to dismiss these pronouncements as flowing out of a mistaken view of human nature, out of neo-Platonic intellectualism, and sometimes these pronouncements do indeed thus flow, but it is worth remembering that many of the spiritual writers are very empirical. They see in their own lives and the lives of others around them what works and what does not work in the task of submitting every deed and every thought to God, of doing everything out of love alone.

I do not dispute the claim that human perfection includes perfection of the emotions, feeling and desires, that it is good to feel compassion for the suffering, that it is good to desire what is good and to desire to avoid evil, that it is good to enjoy virtuous activity, and all that. But I think we need to be careful to hold on to the truths contained in the parts of the spiritual tradition that are much more cautious in approaching to the emotional life, especially in light of how empirically grounded the wisdom of this tradition is. The Desert Fathers were not theoreticians--they lived in the desert, they weaved baskets, they struggled with temptation, they guided and were guided.

In our fallen state, our feelings and desires do lead us astray. Making a habit of visiting friends out of the pleasure of their company, rather than out of the duty of friendship, may well make it more probably that we will not visit them when the visit is not pleasant. The six lesser deadly sins--lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath and envy--are all grounded in particular emotions. And at least some instances of pride are so as well. Now it is possible to fight these deadly sins by developing a more balanced emotional life, fighting gluttony with a deep emotional appreciation of moderation, fighting sloth by developing a balanced appreciation of good work, and so on, and indeed in the state of human perfection the virtues opposed to the deadly sins would have such emotional components, it is far from clear that this is the most effective way of fighting the deadly sins. It may be for some of them--thus, developing an appreciation of goods happening to others might be the best way to fight envy. But for others, something like the ideal of ataraxia, being unmoved by feelings and pleasures, might be rather more effective.

And then there is the wisdom of John of the Cross. Popular stereotype would not make one think of this passionate Spanish mystic as a defender of the centrality of reason to the Christian life. But in five separate Sayings of Light and Love, St. John indicates that what is most pleasing to God is that we act in accordance with reason, regardless of our feelings. And this is essential once one recognizes--as the lives of holy men and women like John of the Cross and Teresa of Calcutta abundantly show--that a dark night is a crucial part of spiritual maturation, a night in which most of the feelings that move the beginner in the spiritual life are absent. In the dark night, if one is to survive, one has no choice but to do what is right by reason, which reason is enlightened by the dark light of faith.

Feelings, emotions and desires are useful to the beginner in both the spiritual and the moral life. In the spiritual life, they make easy sacrifices that need to be made, which sacrifices one is not yet mature enough to make on the grounds of reasonable love alone. Love, of course, is not a feeling, emotion or desire--it is a committed determination of the will towards the good of and union with the beloved. There are emotions characteristic of love, but they are not always present with love. In the moral life, we may need moral feelings to help us come to the truth about things. Our repulsion at killing may help us come to accept that we ought not to commit murder. Altruistic helpfulness may help us to come to accept that we have duties towards neighbor. But once we have the truth about the moral life, this helpfulness is radically diminished, and the fallible emotions may in fact often be more harm than good, at least in this earthly life. (And, of course, if we have the Catholic faith, then we basically have the truth about the central aspects of our moral life, and we can derive many other truths from that.)

So I think that the Desert Fathers who embraced ataraxia--"affectlessness", we might translate it--as an ideal were wrong about human nature as it is ultimately meant to be, but it is far from clear that they were wrong, or at least far wrong, about the best way to proceed given what fallen nature is like.