Books 1

theme 1
The concept of sin is a theological concept rather than a moral one. This is why neither "God" nor "sin" appears in an index to the Analects of Confucius. This means that an adequate definition (exposition) of sin should refer to a (broken) relationship with God. For example, in 2,6,14: "the soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee." See Psalm 73.27 = "for, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee."

theme 2
Where should we ground our understanding of original sin: in our genetic inheritance (what some call "the genetic lottery") or in our socialization (our customs and habits)?

David Hume, Treatise, Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 2, bats for the force of genetics in a world of scarcity: "Here then is a proposition, which, I think, may be regarded as certain, that it is only from the selfishness and confined generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin. If we look backward we shall find, that this proposition bestows an additional force on some of those observations, which we have already made on this subject." - for example, on the observation that "each person loves himself better than any other single person, and in his love to others bears the greatest affection to his relations and acquaintance".)

Augustine and Adam Smith bat for custom or socialization.

Augustine, for example, in 1,16,25: "Woe unto you, O torrent of human custom! Who shall stay your course? When will you ever run dry? How long will you carry down the sons of Eve into that vast and hideous ocean, which even those who have the Tree (for an ark) can scarcely pass over?"

Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, Part 1, Section 3, Chapter 3 = "Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition." See James Otteson's paper, Adam Smith's Other Great Book, in particular, from page 3).
Note that if we opt for both - for genetics and for custom - we need to specify which is most salient, otherwise what we are opting for isn't very informative. I opt for both genetics and custom, but I believe custom is a more salient force than genetics.

theme 3
What does William James's "The Will To Believe" teach us about the will? Note that William Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" is the target of James's paper.

The first section of James's paper is the salient one and it goes like this:
"Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be living or dead; forced or avoidable; momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

Next, if I say to you: “Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it,” I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, “Either love me or hate me,” “Either call my theory true or call it false,” your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, “Either accept this truth or go without it,” I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.

Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well in mind".

As with opting for an understanding of original sin, so with James's account of a genuine option: we have to ask which of the three elements (forced, living, momentous) is the most salient? My choice is "living". Why?

Because of a hunch that the will, no less than reason, is driven by the passions; by Plato's concept of erotic love (Alexander Moseley: "eros is a common desire that seeks transcendental beauty"; note 4,13,20, which refers to De pulchro et apto [Beauty and Proportion"]; a lost essay with no other record save echoes in the rest of Augustine's aesthetic theories; for example, in The Nature of the Good Against the Manicheans, VIII-XV; City of God, XI, 18; De ordine, I, 7:18; II, 19:51; Enchiridion, III, 10; I, 5. Also note Augustine's need to love and be loved = 2, 2, 2 = "what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved?").

So, in trying to understand what binds or frees the will, I'm going to emphasise this bit of James's account: "A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. ..... This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably."

And so, I'm going to look for passages in the Confessions that support James's theory of belief: for example,
1 = Augustine's joining (3,6,10) and leaving (5,3,3 to 5,6,13 and 5,14,24 to 5,14,25) the Manichees;
2 = his turning towards (4,3,4 to 4,3,6) and away from (7,6,8 to 7,6,10) astrology;
3 = the problems he had with the Biblical stories (3,5,9) and the solution that Ambrose gave him (6,4,6);
4 = and, most of all, two things:
4.1 = his inability to subscribe to ideas that weren't associated with the name of Christ (3,4,7 = "Only this checked my ardour: that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, by thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour thy Son, my tender heart had piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk. And whatsoever was lacking that name, no matter how erudite, polished, and truthful, did not quite take complete hold of me."); and
4.2 = his rejection (8,7,17 = "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.") and acceptance of (8,11,27 and 8, 12,29) chastity.

Note that his aversion to books that weren't associated with the name of Christ is not a rational attitude; and his rejection and acceptance of chastity was a change of heart rather than of mind; a commitment to a new set of feelings rather than a new set of facts.

The first three changes were associated with intellectual problems; and these changes support two of John Selby Spong's dictums: "the heart cannot worship what the mind rejects" and "a God the mind rejects will never be a God the heart can adore".

theme 4 = questions
Question 1 = How many times was Augustine converted?
1.1 = To the love of wisdom (3,4,7);
1.2 = to the Manichees (3,6,10);
1.3 = to the Platonists (7,9,13);
1.4 = to Christ (8,12,29) or was it
1.5 = to Lady Continence (8,11,27 = Chadwick's translation)?

Question 2 = When in Milan, to what extent was Augustine converted to Plotinus's ideas? I ask, because one of the most famous Augustinian quotations ("our heart is restless until it rests in thee") echoes Plotinus (Enneads, 1.6.7) = "Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good." = McKenna & Page translation. See also Outler's introduction to Book 7 of the Confessions: "The conversion to Neoplatonism. Augustine traces his growing disenchantment with the Manichean conceptions of God and evil and the dawning understanding of God’s incorruptibility. But his thought is still bound by his materialistic notions of reality. He rejects astrology and turns to the study of Neoplatonism. There follows an analysis of the differences between Platonism and Christianity and a remarkable account of his appropriation of Plotinian wisdom and his experience of a Plotinian ecstasy."

Question 3 = Is nausea the opposite of concupiscence? [nausea = an urge to vomit; a strong aversion; disgust; from Greek, nausi, seasickness] versus [concupiscence = a strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust; from Latin, concupiscere, to desire, covet] This suggests that "homo-nausea", as well as "homo-phobia", could be used to describe people who oppose same gender intimacy. This debate about sexuality may be a good place to test James's theory of belief.

Question 4 = Which of Augustine's (academic) theological problems are mine?
4.1 = The origin of evil (4,15,26 = "Why, then, does the soul, which God created, err?").
4.2 = The idea of being made in God's image (3,7,12 = "I was entirely ignorant as to what is that principle within us by which we are like God, and which is rightly said in Scripture to be made after God’s image.").
Are these two problems related? I mean, is it our ability to imagine which is both the image of God in us and the origin of evil? I think so!

theme 5 = two other passages from James's paper that help to illuminate his theory of belief

section IV = The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision - just like deciding yes or no - and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more preliminary work.

section VII = One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done. There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion - ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error: these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A. Believe truth! Shun error! - these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. ..... It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

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