Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Isn’t it obvious and self-evident that when a text is in a foreign language, you have no access to it? But you can learn the language. The more serious you are about it, the better chance you have of learning it well. People can learn about foreign folklore via translations. Similarly, people take up religion (or change their religion) via conversion.
Conversion is absolutely central to religion/spirituality. Nobody is born into a religion. Read lives of saints for example. There is always a point in their lives when they “hear the call” and then their “heart turns to God”. Until then they are like common folks for whom religion is a notable socio-cultural convention, just that.
If you want to understand scripture, you will have to see how scripture is a distinct genre in its own right, what the genre entails, then treat it accordingly, and access to it will eventually be granted. Until then it’s a history book or science fiction book or silly imaginations of old men of yore.
I don’t care so much as to derail the discussion, but I very much care about the specific point I made. I’m claiming that Nietzsche is not a philosoper. This is not a small claim. I would sincerely like to see if my conclusion, having read as little Nietzsche as I have, can be refuted or not.
Hebrew scriptures use the concept of conversion to denote the fundamental decision by which the total human being responds to God’s call. It is the human attitude that corresponds to the divine action of election. Election calls for conversion, and conversion is experienced as an election. The radical change, or conversion, of one’s inner orientation has been described as a true enlightenment, as a rebirth, and in the Hebrew Scriptures as teshuvah, both in the meaning of “answer” and “return.” The Jewish convert is the baal teshuvah, or the person who has “answered the inner appeal,” and who has “truly returned.” This conversion is a conversion from the periphery to the center, and is the most basic choice man is offered in life.
– Jochanan H. A. Wijnhoven. Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought
That’s like claiming Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard were not philosophers. One needn’t dismiss the philosophical features and especially the questions that these (mere) ‘writers’ address. They both ‘loved wisdom’ within their religious sensibilities, embracing rather than rejecting their humanity.
Here at TA/SZ, the majority of commenters are anti-theology, anti-philosophy and anti-religion. As with KN, they promote philosophistry and personal degradation (e.g. secular Judaism), not serious, competent or elevated thinking about life past, present and future. They are charlatans hiding behind their ‘skepticism.’ They are the angry self-righteous empty containers of life, granting that a small few of them still leave open spiritual questions, seeking something more than what they currently have.
One sees far too many deviant, desperate derelicts (even several elders!) defending ‘skepticism’ here to allow it much credence or consequence. TA/SZ is not exactly rife with saints or ‘positive community builders’. Cognitive confusion here is the norm spun in a whirlpool of delusion meant to bring people down.
Too selfish to share, too horizontal to elevate, too egoistic to care. You have made a strong stand at TA/SZ, Erik. Let it not bring you down.
Well, I looked up the name. Doesn’t look like a philosopher. But don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the philosophical point she’s making. I have always appreciated the philosophical points of Mr. Kilmister too.
Dostoyevsky was not a philosopher, but this doesn’t mean he didn’t have a philosophy. He had a philosophy (love of wisdom and more or less systematic thought) from which his writings sprung forth. Same with Tolstoy. Same with Nietzsche.
These are slippery things, easy to twist and misread, for which reason my point to KN about Nietzsche was specific and limited: Find a quote from Nietzsche where he appreciates a philosopher on philosophical grounds for the philosophical merit, instead of due to parallels in an antique myth.
I’d happily say that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were philosophers, and indeed quite excellent ones.
I don’t think it’s actually important to have a clear demarcation between philosophers and “philosophical writers” — thinking here of people like Kafka, Borges, or my current favorite, Fernando Pessoa. The question “is Nietzsche a philosopher” is much like “Is Emerson a philosopher?” Well, yes — obviously — but also maybe no, and why does it matter?
Look, you have your views about Nietzsche based on what you admit is not having read very much of him. I have better things to do than type up passages from Beyond Good and Evil or The Gay Science, especially because I don’t entirely trust you to not move the goal-posts on me after I’ve done so.
If you want to read more Nietzsche, I’d recommend The Gay Science (Die frohliche Wissenschaft). That and Twilight of the Idols (Gotzedammerung) are my favorite works of his. And if you decide that reading Nietzsche isn’t where you want to put your energy and time, that’s fine — we all have only so much time and there’s always too much to read.
[Apologies for not knowing how to type umlauts here.]
Kantian Naturalist: [Apologies for not knowing how to type umlauts here.]
Press and hold alt then key in 132, 148 or 129 gets ä, ö or ü
Then you could simply state that I did so. Anyway, you have only right to suspect this if I have done this before. Have I?
On my part, I note that you did not reply to anything else I had to say. I will not derail the thread by going along with this Nietzsche stuff. If you want to refute my point about Nietzsche, simply do it when you find the time. Until then my point stands.
This claim?
Nietzsche was not a philosopher
Perhaps you should clarify what you mean by philosopher so it would establish the set boundary.
@Alan Fox
The challenge is this: Find a quote from Nietzsche where he appreciates a philosopher on philosophical grounds for the philosophical merit, instead of due to parallels in an antique myth.
Earlier I put the same challenge this way: If you quote something from Nietzsche where he says a philosopher was right – and he does not add that this is so because there’s this ancient myth that parallels the philosopher’s view – then I shall bow to your superior expertise.
ETA: I made the claim that Nietzsche is not a philosopher on the basis that he justifies his claims (exclusively, as far as I have read him) by his interpretations of antique myths. This would make him a literary essayist, an homme des lettres. To say that he was a philosopher would be aiming too high.
And I made this claim for a small humble purpose – to illustrate how difficult it is to interpret writings and attribute genres and categories. There are cases where you have to be specialist to get it right. And I maintain that this is surely the case with scripture.
Is that your definition of a philosopher then? Someone who appreciates a philosopher on philosophical grounds? Remember your claim was Nietzsche is not a philosopher.
So mentioning myths prevents you from being a philosopher? This is not making sense.
It made perfect sense to KN at first. Now he has no time. Whatever.
Not as such, but close. A few days ago — in this thread, actually — we were discussing whether empiricism presupposes rationalism. In order to address this question, I gave a quick version of an argument in support of that claim. You endorsed my version of that argument. I then spent a good amount of time explaining why I think that argument goes wrong. In response you said something to the effect of, “I’m not interested in that”. I’d put a lot of energy into explaining how I see the relation between skepticism, rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism, and quite frankly I felt that your response was curt and dismissive.
And while it’s not at all your responsibility to be nice or kind or considerate of my feelings, I did make me wonder how sincerely committed you are to dialogical encounter. I can easily imagine a situation in which I put some time into looking for the best quotes I can from Nietzsche, looking carefully at Nietzsche’s criticism of Spinoza or of Kant, and then have you say, “oh, that’s not really philosophy”.
Remember that I identified a specific characteristic based on which I claim this – Nietzsche argues only by drawing colourful emotional analogies from antique myths. If my impression is false and he actually uses logic somewhere, then for an expert on Nietzsche such as yourself it would take no time at all to disprove me.
Or you could disprove it yourself by actually reading Nietzsche.
Or you read this. Or not. I couldn’t care less.
Point taken.
Continue on genres and scripture when you find the time.
Moved a comment by Gregory to guano. I remind Gregory the rules are designed to discourage personal attacks.
Apparently you failed to realize that when I said “I don’t think it’s actually important to have a clear demarcation between philosophers and ‘philosophical writers’”, I was rejecting the idea of a clear demarcation, not endorsing or seeking one. Try again.
I teach students how to do philosophy; I don’t teach my own views. I teach Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in my classes, and Plato, and Nietzsche, and Aquinas and everything else. I’ve said this before but you obviously don’t believe me.
It is embarrassing that someone who claims to have read a lot of Nietzsche has made an elementary blunder: you took a quote of Nietzsche’s out of context and attributed to him. In fact, that is Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity, not his own view, from The Antichrist (not my favorite book of his, to be honest):
(This is from the Mencken translation that I found on-line. I thought I had a copy of the Kauffmann translation but I don’t.)
If you want to argue that Nietzsche is mistaken about Christianity, by all means. (I think he is.) But if you’re going to quote from Nietzsche, do your homework before you embarrass yourself again.
Also, you obviously know nothing of Sellars. Sellars was not a proponent of scientism. People think he is because they take one or two quotes out of context and think that’s the sum total of his philosophy — just as they do with Nietzsche. Sellars was a scientific realist, but it’s nothing but mere confusion to think that scientific realism is, or implies, scientism. There’s actually very little that distinguishes Sellars from the thought of a philosopher like Joe Margolis, whose The Unraveling of Scientism I recommend quite highly.
We are agreed. And it is telling that KN has made his ‘philosophy’ into his ‘religion.’ He’s deluded himself into running away from his Jewish roots into secularism cum atheism. Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard would object, but bottom-dwelling philosophistry like KN’s likely wouldn’t come up on their radars.
I’ve read a lot of Nietzsche, btw, and you’re not missing too much wrt goodness, Erik.
The Kate Tempest quote above was for you, KN. The ‘clear demarcation’ you seek is that you are a philosophist, not a philosopher. Philosophists talk people into the most horizontal and reductionist themes possible, no matter how ‘complicated.’
KN debts Nietzsche’s gay science, unsurprising: “The strongest and most evil spirits have so far advanced humanity the most.” Bullshit fake ‘superman.’
Kate Tempest would simply kick Nietzsche in the balls and walk away with just about everyone clapping.
I prefer this from Twilight of the Idols: “For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our current science-industry.”
KN, nobody should pay any attention to your propaganda defense of Sellars given the evidence goes against you. You’ve already displayed your secular skeptic ‘worship’ of him here.
Sellars spoke of “the primacy of the scientific image”. He also stated that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”
A philosophist like KN only tries to spin such statements into ‘neutral’ nice guy appearance.
Sellars isn’t even worth a quotation page at Wikipedia.
How funny that those two statements don’t correspond. : )
Your own views have been displayed time and again as philosophistry here. Let us hope you don’t teach what you actually believe.
Not that I think the “challenge” had any merit to it, but I figured it would be easy enough to meet.
Glen Davidson
@ Gregory
As KN has responded, I’ll let your comments stand though I invite you both to the Noyau thread where personal comments are de rigueur rather than rule-breaking.
Here again a bit more reading would have saved you from a bad reading.
Sellars does think that the scientific image has ontological priority over the manifest image, but he also thinks that
(1) the goal of philosophy is to fuse the two images, not to simply “vote” for the scientific image, “the conceptual framework of persons is the framework in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provide the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives. . . . Thus the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image but rather something to be joined to it” (Science, Perception, and Reality, p. 40).
(2) the sciences have priority in the order of being, but priority in the order of being is not priority in the order of knowing. (An Aristotelian thesis that Sellars absorbed deeply): “the priority in the order of being of microphysical entities to Austinian entities [entities as John Austin describes them], which means that the latter are, in a sense difficult to define, ontologically dependent on the former, is compatible with the epistemic and methodological priority of Austinian entities to these scientific objects, which means that the latter are again, in a sense, difficult to analyse, epistemically and methodologically dependent on the former” (Science and Metaphysics p. 164).
In other words: though the entities of fundamental physics are ontologically more basic than the objects of everyday life, it is also true that our practical engagements with objects of everyday life are epistemically and methodologically prior to the entities of fundamental physics. The task of the philosopher is to understand this reciprocal priority, or what Margolis calls “the benign antinomy” of “the ontic priority of independent nature and the epistemic priority of the conditions of human cognition”.
(3) Though it is true that Sellars says “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not”, he manifestly does not think that “the dimension of describing and explaining the world” is the only dimension of language. He takes pains to examine that there are many different dimensions of discourse — or, as Wittgenstein would say, many different kinds of language-games: mathematical discourse, moral discourse, semantical discourse, and so on. Let us note that Sellars ends “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” by talking of human intellectual development as a “journey”, “from the grunts and groans of the cave to the subtle and polydimensional discourse of the drawing room, the laboratory, and the study, the language of Henry and William James, of Einstein and of the philosophers who, in their efforts to break out of discourse to an arche beyond all discourse, have provided the most curious dimension of all”. (Science, Perception, and Reality p. 196).
I find it unfathomable that anyone can accuse Sellars of “scientism” in light of his reference to Henry James as contributing to human discourse in the same breath as William James and Einstein. James’s novels do not contribute to “describing and explaining the world” — and that is not their point, after all! — but that in no way mitigates their value for human life.
There is of course much in Sellars that I disagree with — for one thing, I think that his conception of both the manifest image and the scientific image is woefully inadequate, and with a more adequate conception of each, it turns out that much more of the manifest image can be vindicated in terms of the scientific image than he thought.
(So much for my “worship” of Sellars.)
Well, that settles it — the true measure of a philosopher’s importance is whether Wikipedia has a quotation page on him or her.
That’s a good one — thanks! There’s some scholarship on the Spinoza-Nietzsche connection, and I hope to contribute to it at some point.
He was pretty enthusiastic about the challenge at first, but soon turned for no reason and began to whine about it. I am not expecting an apology.
I also thought it would be easy to meet. Thanks. I can now consider a revision to my categorisation of Nietzsche.
However, this detail caught my attention, “Friedrich Nietzsche, found in a postcard to Franz Overbeck in Sils-Maria dated July 30, 1881.” It makes me wonder about the references that KN suggested to me…
And now back to the varieties of religious language.
I do owe you an apology, actually. I didn’t expect you to admit so readily that you had reason to revise your reading of Nietzsche. I think I was put off by our exchange on Thursday, where I put a lot of effort into explaining my views and I felt somewhat dismissed in your response. I’m sorry that I permitted my feelings about that to color our exchange over Nietzsche.
He would have written that after publishing Daybreak, which appeared in print in May 1881, but before finishing The Gay Science, which was published in I think the summer or fall of 1882. The other books of his I mentioned are later.
And now back to the varieties of religious language.
Some comments moved to guano. Please try and keep to the rules, folks. I know passions can run high but Noyau is there for letting off steam.
Well, Sellars is not well known for his ‘philosophy’ in the USA, that’s evident. You wish to celebrate his scientism, that’s also evident. You demonstrate philosophistry, strike 3.
Who’s the best secular Jewish thinker, in your opinion?
Richard Rorty likes him. In Mirror of Nature his name is mentioned over a hundred times.
Alan Fox,
Situated currently in France, Alan, do you actually pretend Sellars is a well known or important philosopher (oh, though KN so wants you to rub him nicely)? Sellars, if nothing else, was an atheist, who has little to contribute to this particular thread. And you, Alan Fox, promote atheism, not ‘religious language,’ isn’t that true?
Best of all time, best of the 20th century, or best currently alive?
By the way, since Sellars has nothing to say about religious language, that’s why I haven’t brought him up here. I wasn’t going to talk about him at all until Gregory brought him up. My own thinking about religious language was inspired by Charles Taylor’s criticism of Brandom’s own Sellarsian conception of language. That’s what got this whole conversation started — whether religious language is “assertoric”.
Oh, this should be fun. Why not give us your 3 secular Jewish heroes, KN, in any of those categories?
Your disenchanted philosophistry seems meant for Slytherin:
Here you go, then:
Kantian Naturalist’s Personal Favorite Secular Jewish Philosophers!!!!
Of All Time: Benedict Spinoza
Of the 20th Century: Theodor Adorno
Of Today: Martha Nussbaum
P.S.: I am a Hufflepuff and proud of it!
Me, too!
But you were never Jewish, were you, hotshoe? Just a clown-consumer, family flat, despairing atheist.
Does it matter if I were ever Jewish? Do I get special treatment if so? Do I get special treatment if not?
I’m not telling you either way, you see, because you behave like a douchebag to the one person here whom you’ve identified as “Jewish”.
I mean, it’s no big secret of mine; I’m not actually worried the Stormfronters are coming for me and my family.
But you’ll never know for sure, will you Gregory.
Hope you can sleep at night with all the guilt you must be carrying for your bad behavior.
Well, the quote was clean. No mention of any mythical figures, just a list of philosophical terms, as I requested. The only thing is that he wrote it on a postcard, not in a work intended for publication…
I have encountered two very different camps of fans of Nietzsche. The first camp is atheists who are happy about Nietzsche denouncing God. This camp doesn’t notice all the other gods that Nietzsche mentions, and his thought experiments to replace God because he (rightly) recognized that God holds an actual place in human psyche that cannot stay empty.
The second camp is the likes of Rudolf Steiner who discover esoteric and (quasi)spiritual insights in Nietzsche’s texts, practically taking him to be a prophet of sorts. Atheists do the same, actually. Even though atheists (say they) don’t believe in God, they apparently very much believe in prophets.
Since my intention with bringing up Nietzsche was to illustrate how difficult it is to interpret some genres, he remains a perfect example. In my view, Nietzsche’s writings are an emotional outpour prompted by the pain of his hypersensitivity and overexposure to antique literature. It does not hold much entertainment value for me (or any other value I could appreciate), so I will not read him more than I already have. To me it’s obvious enough that his fans overinterpret him.
Erik,
You take that back! Rather, it is something of an empty generalisation.
Why single that one out, Allan> Erik’s last couple of posts were empty generalizations in their entirety. There are three kinds N readers. Atheists all need X.
Gregory-worthy stuff. Although to get a really high mark there, you need to comment on individual poster’s religious upbringing, personal appearance and age. So, while they are birds of a feather, Erik’s feathers aren’t quite as colorful.
walto,
Only because it was the only thing I’d read … !
Based on real-life Nietzsche fans I’ve met. Prove yourself different and then I’ll give it a thought.
A man was walking in an open field when he saw a thunderstorm coming towards him from a great distance. There was no cover, and no way to run away from it. He knew that he would be just as wet if he panicked and ran, or tried to cower in the grass. Therefore, knowing that the storm was both unavoidable and temporary, he continued to walk as the storm came towards him. Soon he was drenched with rain, but continued to walk calmly and peacefully. But in time the storm passed, and the sun came out, and much later, he was dry again and continued to walk as he had before.
What is the rain? The rain is desire; the rain is fear; the rain is anger.
Who is the man? The man is the mind; the man is you.
Erik,
A few more thoughts on Nietzsche and interpretation . . .
Nietzsche is difficult to interpret, and I daresay that there is no correct interpretation of his work. But there are better and worse interpretations, based on how familiar one is with his work, how much historical background one has, the adequacy of the translations, and so on.
I think it is problematic (to say the least!) to read Nietzsche as an atheist. For one thing, Nietzsche had little but scorn for the atheists of his day. (The parable of the Madman, in The Gay Science 125, is evidence of this.)
The problem with atheists, he would say, is that they are incapable of acknowledging the spiritual dimension of human life. His considered view is that Christianity is that it is a “spiritual pathology” — it sickens and weakens the spirit by separating spirit from “life, history, and becoming”. The root of this pathology is what he calls “the ascetic ideal”, or renunciation for the sake of renunciation. (He is, on the other hand, a passionate advocate of self-discipline for the sake of self-enhancement and self-overcoming.)
We might say, with some simplification, that Nietzsche urges an “immanent spirituality” against a “transcendent spirituality” (or, in Gregory’s terms that I am willing to adopt, a “horizontal transcendence” against a “vertical transcendence”). As Nietzsche sees it, transcendent spirituality is bad for us. It is bad for us because it enforces a separation of spirituality from nature, sensuality, embodiment, history, and above all from life. Transcendent spirituality is life that negates itself, or that hates itself, which is to say, it is sickness. By contrast, immanent spirituality is healthy because it affirms itself, it is self-affirming. It is vertical transcendence itself, not the rejection of it, that is the essence of nihilism.
It is sometimes said that Nietzsche was a nihilist. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a diagnostician of European nihilism; he saw nihilism as what was happening to European culture because of the conflict between transcendent spirituality (value) and empirical science (fact). But he also thought that a turn from transcendent spirituality to immanent spirituality was the cure to nihilism, or how nihilism could itself be overcome.
The tragedy of Nietzsche is that his critique of the ascetic ideal became a self-critique. He identifies the priestly type as the type of human being who hates life, but his own hatred of the priestly type meant that he became a priest — a self-hating priest, one who hates hatred. His inability to move beyond his own hatred of hatred gave him no further moves to make in the dialectic, and I believe that this is the key to understanding his descent into insanity.
I stopped working on Nietzsche when I discovered that one of the things necessary for immanent spirituality — a spirituality that affirms life, history, embodiment, nature, sensuality — is something that Nietzsche hated with passionate intensity: democracy. (If Nietzsche had been able to recognize that, he would have arrived at Dewey’s mature position.)
Nietzsche was unable to make this move for several reasons, but chief among them is his fundamental loneliness. He always struggled to connect with other people and there is a sense in which other human beings are not fully real to him. He has no sensitivity to the fact of human sociality, which is partly why he takes a dim view of compassion (though he is right to say that the line between compassion and condescension is much thinner and blurrier than we usually think).
There are as many different interpretations of Nietzsche as there are readers; Nietzsche has been interpreted as a fascist, a socialist, an anarchist, an apologist for bourgeois capitalism, a positivist, a psychoanalyst, an existentialist, a postmodernist, and as a naturalist. I cannot think of any philosophical movement in the 20th-century that did not try and claim Nietzsche as a forerunner. Though some of these interpretations are better than others, Nietzsche is enough of a Rorschach test that every interpretation reveals something of the interpreter as well of the text. (A point that Nietzsche himself made explicit in his interpretations of classical texts.)
There is even, surprisingly enough, a logical positivist interpretation and appropriation of Nietzsche. Here is Carnap on Nietzsche, from “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Linguistic Analysis” (1931):
“Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz. Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or a historical-psychological analysis of morals. In that work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he does not chose the misleading theoretical form, but openly the form of art, of poetry.”
And this sort of proves the point I have been making about scripture all along. Except that different from writers who hope to convey their message in a clear manner, scripture is deliberately designed to be multi-layered, suitable for a range of interpretations. If one wants to take, for example, the flood story literally, it actually works this way. But if you plan to understand scripture as scripture (and not as a history or science fiction book), you will make the effort to learn the other ways to interpret it. Some nice resources to start with have been pointed out in this thread.
No, it doesn’t.
You’re biased.
Noah’s flood story doesn’t work at all — not even if we spare it from being compared to reality (the non-existent physical source of all that storied water; the impossible biology of “two of every kind”, etc.) It doesn’t work as a literal story, as a narrative, it makes no sense even within the genre of “folk tale” or “tribal origin story”
If you were an unbiased anthropologist collecting native stories, and they told you this one, you’d think they were making it up on the spot to pull your leg.
Nietzsche doesn’t work for me at all, not as an insightful set of parallels between antique mythology, psychology and philosophy, not as entertainment or pastime, not as anything. But I don’t deny it may very well work for others. Admittedly, for many people Nietzsche works even as philosophy.
Similarly, I understand very well that the flood story doesn’t work for you on the literal level. Thanks for sharing.
There are so many parallels with other flood stories that I agree with those who take it to be a textual universal.
We’ve already proven that “flood stories” aren’t universal.
Good for you to be agreeing with an untruth.
I have only seen assertions, no proof. Quote the relevant post, please.