Philosophy as a craft

I promised you some pro-difficult writing arguments, so here's one from Hegel, King of obscurity:

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately unders

tands how to philosophise, and how to evaluate philosophy, since he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason - as if he did not likewise possess the measure for a shoe in his own foot.

Phenomenology of Spirit

Learning to think isn't easy; learning to be good is difficult; becoming wise is hard. We worry about elitism, and we want to say that everyone is equal, because bad things happen when you don't treat everyone as equally valuable. But does that mean that everyone's equally able to do philosophy? Does that mean that we can get wisdom without having to work for it?

I can see flaws in the argument, but I'll leave that for another time. What are your thoughts?

Theology for ordinary people

I've blogged in the past about the accessibility of academic theology (those posts are tagged with 'Bad Writing' if you want to check them out or revisit them), and it's a topic I keep returning to. In the past, I've always taken the side of accessibility over obscurity, but I'm starting to think that it's a bit more complicated than that (isn't it always?) I'm planning to blog some thoughts from Iris Murdoch and from Hegel over the next couple of weeks, but thought I'd start off by pointing you in the direction of a few online things I've read recently that have got me thinking again.

First, a lovely post from Maggi Dawn, talking about why she thinks it's worth doing theology in public, arguing that it's as much about theology's need to remain connected as it is about everyone else's need to do theology:

'Nothing stands still, and if theology is to remain alive it needs to remain in the public sphere, not locked away in a museum. Theology is much more interesting done in a broad context; it saves it from the angels-on-a-pinhead stuff, and from disappearing down rabbit holes that are really not that important. But what I fear to some extent is that Christian theology is becoming more and more privatised, and the gap between those who are totally inside it and totally alienated from it is widening. And we really shouldn’t let that happen.'

Second, an article in the Guardian by Nick Cohen, arguing that the arts need to get better at communicating if they want to persuade the public that it's worth fighting to save them from the cuts. He makes some important points, but I think he's also way harsh:

'For all the leftish positioning of "transgressive" academics they have been naive to the point of stupidity about the right. They assumed that Conservatives did not mean what they said and would not take money from institutions which have gone out of their way to alienate the intellectually curious. People write well when they have something say. The willingness of too many academics to write badly has told their fellow citizens that they are not worth listening to or fighting for.'

So there are some anti-difficult writing thoughts. I'm going to blog some about the other side of the argument, but I'll leave you with a point made by one of the reviewers who recently rejected an article I wrote in which I critiqued Judith Butler for her obscurity: they pointed out that, for all that everyone talks about how difficult she is, she has changed the world: lots of her ideas are just taken for granted now by people who think about and read about and blog about and live in gay or queer culture; her discussion of the social construction of gender has been so influential that even right wing conservative fundamentalist Christians are starting to use it to argue that gayness is a social construction and therefore curable. And if they can get their heads round Judith, well...

Photo credit: voyageAnatolia

Things I have done recently whilst not blogging...

...include making this, currently on display in our bathroom:

It took flippin' ages. Seriously, like 24 hours worth of cross stitching.

Christian 'art' and the Bible

A little while ago, Richard Beck of Experimental Theology blogged about Christian art. He'd been in a Christian bookshop and noticed that all of the artwork had words on it, which basically explained what the art 'represented'; even, weirdly, a drawing of praying hands. What we end up with, he suggested, is art that is dominated by pedagogy, catechesis and evangelism: there's no room for ambiguity, for art that unsettles us, draws us in, invites us to deep engagement.

This all came to mind recently as I was thinking (as you do) about the art of the banner in Christian churches. You see banners all over the place in British Christianity at least, though probably more so the more evangelical the church, and I can testify to having seen some pretty spectacular ones in German evangelical churches (don't ask), whose aesthetic preferences seem to be for banners constructed entirely out of metallic fabrics. Gaudy. But, like the Christian art you can buy in Christian bookshops, they always involve words. The classic Christian banner tends to take a Bible verse, 'I am the light of the world' or 'I am the way, the truth and the life', and illustrate it with pictures that go with the words - lights, paths, basic allegorical images.

That's obviously pretty different to most contemporary art (although, as a side point, contemporary art involves text in a way that classical art didn't tend to: I wonder why?) But it's also crucially different to the sort of religious art that you found in churches as paintings or stained glass windows, because banners-with-text are all about assertions or statements, where religious art tends to illustrate stories. That in turn reflects a general shift in the way that a lot of evangelicals read the Bible: they're not looking for narratives so much as for truth claims, encouraging words, or rules. The Bible, and probably Christianity more generally, becomes a source of doctrinal statements, instructions, and fridge-magnet wisdom.

Photo credit: Kentishman

Philosophy is never objective

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that the idea of philosophical objectivity is a myth. We don't start with logic and argue to conclusions, he says: we start with value judgements, deeply held instincts about the sort of life that is worth living, instincts that are bound up with our physiology, literally gut feelings. When we do philosophy, we're not really trying to find the truth, we're just trying to justify our heart's desire. All the great works of philosophy are just a sort of personal memoir.

Isn't there anyone who is capable of the disinterested pursuit of truth? Sure, says says Nietzsche:maybe that's the case with jobsworthy academics who don't care if they're studying the history of stamps or the workings of the brain, because they're only really interested academic study for the money and the prestige that it brings. If you want to find a genuinely objective seeker after truth, go to someone who just wants to be distinguished but doesn't really care whether they get there by studying mushrooms or teapots. But philosophy is always personal.

On going public

Oh yes. I've written a review of The Monstrosity of Christ, which is a theological rap battle between Slavoj Žižek, the twitchy Slovenian philosopher, and John Milbank, theologian of the 'Big Society'. It's my first ever piece of academic work to be published. Check it out here in the latest (theological) issue of the International Journal of Žižek studies, and let me know what you think. It's hopefully not totally obtuse, and, I flatter myself, a lot easier to read than Monstrosity itself.

Next on the to do list: grow a beard for extra gravitas, and acquire a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

Hume on Miracles

David Hume was one of the big names in early modern philosophy (that's the 17th - 18th centuries). He's basically an empiricist, which means he thinks we should only believe stuff we can prove. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he discusses what would happen if you tried to apply empiricist ideas to accounts of miracles.

He starts out slightly smugly,saying that he flatters himself that he's found a foolproof argument against the possibility of miracles. It goes like this: everything we know is based on our experience. Sometimes experience leads us to expect better weather in June than in December, but this is not always the case (you can tell he's Scottish). So we see things are more or less likely depending on how good the evidence is: it's pretty much certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the BBC weather forecast will be wrong, and that any film starring Jennifer Aniston will have a happy ending; it's possible but unlikely that a Hollywood marriage really will last till death do them part, that the winner of The X Factor will go on to have a long and successful career, or that Fox News will come out in favour of anything the Democrats say or do.

One of the main sources of the evidence we use for making these sorts of decisions is human testimony. We've found, over time, that people tell the truth more often than not, and that what we're told happened is usually more or less what really did happen (you can tell this was written in the days before Wikileaks and the Iraq war). Most people tell the truth, most of the time, because most people would be ashamed if they were caught in a lie. So when someone tells us that something happened, we weigh their account up against all of our previous experience, as well as any other eye-witness accounts, the reliability of the person who's telling the story, whether they look like they're mendacious or mental, etc. Some one you trust tells you your partner is cheating on you, you get suspicious; someone you trust tells you your partner is cheating on you with a time-travelling mermaid, you maybe want to ask a few more questions before you believe their story.

So what happens when someone tells you that they witnessed a miracle? For an event to be miraculous, it must (and watch out, because this is probably the bit where Hume's argument gets questionable) violate a law of nature. A law of nature is a rule we deduce where our experience tells us that something always happens, every single time, without exception. Stones always fall to the ground. The sun always rises. Dead people always stay dead. People can't walk through walls. People don't get instantly healed of leprosy. And Hume says that when someone tells us that a miracle happened, the only way we can believe that a law of nature was broken is if it would be more miraculous that the testimony we heard was false than if the miracle they report had actually happened.

Hume concludes that on this basis, we can never believe any eyewitness account of a miracle. There are loads of reasons why eyewitness accounts might be false: most of the stories we have of miracles are reported by people who were too uneducated, too barbarous, too sneaky and, let's face it, insufficiently white, male, British and rich to be trusted. Besides, it's a near-universal characteristic of human beings that we love a tall tale even if it's totally made up. We're so keen to believe ridiculous stories that we're quite prepared to overlook glaring inconsistencies and improbabilities in tales of giant squid, aliens, government conspiracies. Sometimes religious people don't really believe a story, but talk themselves into believing it, or just tell it even though they know it's a lie because they think it's the story of story people should believe. And everybody loves a good bit of gossip: there is no story that spreads more quickly than the idea that two people fancy each other: all they need to do is be seen together once, and within the hour the whole neighbourhood has already married them off in their heads. Besides, the more civilised we get, the less prone we are to believing fantastical tales: no educated person would believe these days that climate change isn't real, or that we didn't really land on the moon, or that homeopathy actually works. Oh. Wait.

So, in conclusion, the proof for a miracle could never be so sound, reliable and indisputable that it would be good enough to stake your life on. Miracles can never be the foundation for religious belief. We must conclude, Hume concludes, that not only was Christianity not founded in the midst of miracles, but that today it cannot be believed in without one.

Photo credit: Rankeelaw