A Personal Note on How I Arrived at My Theses about the Self

In Foucault’s lost interview with Fon Elders, he rejects conversation about his personal life and as far as I know nowhere else has he ever spoken on the subject. After talking for half an hour about his hypothesis that “the universality of our knowledge has been acquired at the cost of exclusions, bans, denials, rejections, at the price of a kind of cruelty with regard to reality”, he retorts: “You are saying that I refuse to speak about my personal life, but I don’t see what I’ve been talking about for the past half an hour if not my personal life.” And he finishes his interview with these words:

I don’t say the things I say, because they are what I think, I say them as a way to make sure, they no longer are what I think… I don’t believe in the virtue of using language for “self-expression” …. the language that interests me is the one that can actually destroy all the circular, enclosed, narcissistic forms of the subject and of oneself… and what I mean by ‘the end of man’ is, deep down the end of all these forms of individuality, subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge. This is one of these forms of limitations, of these exclusions, of these rejections, that I was talking about… The West has tried to build the figure of man in this way… and this image is in the process of disappearing… And I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life, or die in such a way, that I will not have to recognize myself in them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg

Why do I quote this part of Foucault’s interview in my “personal note”? Because it shows the wheat and the chaff in my life at the same time. It is where I got lost, found, and lost myself again. It is very intricate, because Foucault is alluding to some truth:

“I don’t believe in the virtue of using language for ‘self-expression’ …. the language that interests me is the one that can actually destroy all the circular, enclosed, narcissistic forms of the subject and of oneself… and what I mean by ‘the end of man’ is, deep down the end of all these forms of individuality, subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.”

Thus he erases a theory of subject, of what the self is. He erases what we assume to know about the self, especially in the Western naturalistic secularism: a linguistic subject, an evolutionary biological subject, a productive subject, the subject of psychoanalysis, the sexual subject, an unconscious subject, a patriot and nationalistic subject… He buries the subject beneath the sands of “determinate historical practices”, his “historical ontology”, to liberate the self from the modes of constraints and exclusions, from the excessive narcissism of the selfie mode of Western culture. I can’t agree more with him on this topic. I want to write a personal note about myself, but I don’t want to promote this horrible narcissism of our time: the selfie subject.

But my personal note has something to do with Foucault. I have studied Foucault for the last twenty years, and while he helped me to erase the permeated trenches of my historical past into my soul, my self-perception, which was mostly a naturalistic and materialistic perception of the self a la Marxism, I found myself also in the “self-destruction” mode that he talks about. What is that? He says: 

And I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life, or die in such a way, that I will not have to recognize myself in them.

What does this mean? We will understand his point if we join this agonizing assertion with another passage of his that I quoted in my Reflection:

What meaning is this enterprise [replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction or regimes of truths] to be given? There are above all its immediately apparent ‘negative’, negativistic aspects. A historicizing negativism, since it involves replacing a theory of knowledge, power, or the subject [the self] with the analysis of historically deterministic practices. A nominalist negativism, since it involves replacing universals like madness, crime, and sexuality with the analysis of experiences which constitute singular historical forms. A negativism with a nihilistic tendency, if by this we understand a form of reflection which, instead of indexing practices to systems of values which allow them to be assessed, inserts these systems of values in the interplay of arbitrary but intelligible practices. (The Government of Self and Others)

I came to the conclusion that we need this negative force to wake up from the naturalistic secularistic enclosed self-perfection of autonomous subject. We need to see --what we are so sure about: our hedonism and humanism-- is a historical construction, not the pinnacle of truth, to shake ourselves free from the delusion of scientism, the illusion that Nietzsche also, Foucault’s progenitor, pushed us towards[1]. This was liberating to me who grew up within Western Enlightenment culture. I had been reducing myself and the world around me into atomistic-materialistic-physicalist laws of nature. I was now a production of nature, atoms, molecules, chemistry, physics, evolutionary biology, homo biologicus, homo mathematicus, homo economicus, homo sociologicus, and homo historicus. I felt dead inside, with hedonism and at most humanism in sight, because I saw life as such a subclass of the dead. This is the subtle rule of the nihilism of secularism, about which Heidegger also contends the fact that the direction of our sciences and technology, in which only the measurable (quantifiable, mathematical) is the Real, ends up in turning us into a controlled machine from within and without.

But what if this is true? What if we are a subclass of the dead, an accident of arbitrary interactions of particles? What if our high values and truths are all fabrications and fictions to keep us going on in this self-grandiosity? Foucault asks us, and this was another precious lesson I learned from him, “to question ‘truth’ on its effects of power, and to question ‘power’ on its discourses of truth.” Let’s assume this is true: that we are a subclass of dead. What would be the ethical effect of this perception? Because after all, we really don’t know. If one reads my reflection [repeated at the end of this note] closely, it shows that our “rationalism” and “scientism” is an item of faith. There is no ultimate ground for our naturalistic claim but just that, as Nietzsche tried, we de-deify nature to dead particles. But how do we know that dead particles are the ultimate ground? Because even methodologically it doesn’t make sense that the reductive method of modern philosophy and science really reveals the truth about us; a method that is questioned by Heidegger by introducing an alternative holistic method.  And Chomsky also makes it clear that the mechanical materialistic conception of science that Enlightenment thinkers assumed and assume in principle can help us know everything "limitlessly" is incoherent and fallacious[2].  So, in order to admit this reductive “fact” that we are a naturalistic entity and a subclass of dead, we need first to bring “faith” in our de-deification, i.e., to form absolute certainty that we are “nothing but” the interaction of dead particles.

So, let’s ask the Foucauldian question: What effect does this belief in being a subclass of death have upon us? At best, hedonism and humanism will follow: let’s enjoy this one life. And there is a thin line between hedonism and nihilism. Between “let’s enjoy this one life” and that all values are arbitrary. If one rejects hedonism and crude mechanistic materialism, as Chomsky does[3], it is itself based on another item of faith, similar to his faith in moral imperatives (he says we shouldn’t have irrational belief but have faith in universal moral codes such as justice and equality[4]). But how can Chomsky rationally and only rationally justify his “faith”? He thinks that we can have these sorts of commitments to principles which can’t be grounded in evidence and arguments and still take scientific method as the only useful way of understanding the world, even if we are not even sure it will take us to Truth or the right direction! This kind of Chomskian faith is a puzzle to me, and I don’t know how he could move himself committedly to achieve such a high moral standard as he achieved, by this kind of reasoning.

Now, let’s get back to my personal account about my Religio-Philosophical Theses on the Book of Job. I said Foucault refrains from giving a personal account of himself for a good reason. We take our subjectivity too seriously, especially in an individualistic, egoistic, and narcissistic way. On the other hand, Foucault’s erasure of subject happens in a total sense. While he helps us to get rid of fictitious subjectivity and grandiosity, while he lets us see how we attach and define ourselves in purely scientific naturalistic terms and then identify ourselves with those definitions with the detrimental conclusion of committing cruelty to ourselves and to reality and create our exaggerated anthropocentric and Eurocentric view of ourselves and the world, he also leaves us in an abyss of lack of self.

I have been sick for the last week, my regular lung and sinusitis inflammation. I woke up coughing in the middle of night. I read again my Reflection on the Book of Job. I think this is an important conclusion in my life. Then I told myself “you are full of yourself.” I prayed and read the Quran to empty myself. I opened randomly the book and again it came to chapter 41: Made Distinct, where it says: “Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness.” (41: 34) For example, I came across these verses last night:

Far better and more lasting is what God will give to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed. Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things. (42: 36-43)

I am the lover of all religions now, and knowing that they turn against themselves in fanaticism and excessive self-righteousness. I feel so grateful though because if I was left to go on my own way, I would not go further than Foucault and Nietzsche--or at best Chomsky. However, the divine grace—what I call “the event”—changed my direction completely with a shocking “warning”; so I am no longer surprised by the warnings of the Quran.

My students in Intro to Philosophy course had to study a couple of articles by Foucault. We went through his notions of “Subject and Power” and “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self”. We discussed instructive aspects of Foucault’s views, the destruction of a rigid self, in any scientific or epistemic sense. Yet it took 25 years for me to learn about the destructive aspect of his philosophy, i.e., to turn the table around and ask the same question: If we grant that his “nihilism” and that all values are historically constituted and are arbitrary is true, what would be the effect of this “truth” on individuals who believe it?

A student argued that Foucault doesn’t give us a positive account because he wants to leave it to the individual to choose for himself or herself. I replied: it is all good, but doesn’t he tell that individual that all values (including justice) are arbitrary? What would be the effect of urging the individual to choose his or her path based on this presupposition? Foucault, of course, has a ready answer: he is not responsible for what he says, because, he would say, “I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life, or die in such a way, that I will not have to recognize myself in them.”

Very strange notion! This is itself a manifestation of nihilism. He completely erases his responsibility for his accounts, because he himself doesn’t believe in them after saying them! However, at no point in his philosophy does he change his nihilistic view about human nature and the arbitrariness of all values. I realized that the anti-essentialist views of Foucault and generally of dominant philosophy, as well as essentialist views of evolutionary biology and scientism, both hurt me personally. I couldn’t overcome the congealed and deep despair in my soul. I was reckless in my personal relations, I went after pleasure (what in Islam is called Nafs), even if I never cheated anyone or committed adultery. However, I didn’t teach my first son that there are universal values to hold onto. When he asked me about the meaning of life and death, I had nothing to say. I couldn’t give him a clear framework for action and living as well as a clear ethical compass, as I myself was lost in “limit experiences”.

In 8/13/2001, before the event of 2005, the divine grace, I wrote:

I am seeing myself how I am turning gradually to a vague memory in my son’s life. One day, if everything goes well and no ‘unpleasant’ accident occurs [that happened, he became drug abuser, mostly weed, psychotic, and homeless for years], he will remember me in his adult age. How it will happen? Like the memory of Mozart or Dostoyevsky, like that of Koestler, or Van Gogh, like that of an insane man who was looking for his shadow in every corner? Like the memory of a Jew who was burnt and turned into soap in Auschwitz or an Arab with a suicide bomb tied to his guts?

At best, a mad philosopher. A person who spent years in prison for his political activities in Iran, not taking it anymore as a responsible action. Or like all children, he might think that I was handsome and the strongest person he had ever met. Or he might think I was an arrogant asshole who always believed he was ‘right’ and knew everything. 

He will probably remember that one day suddenly his mom and I decided to escape Iran and took a long trip, for his two-years-old age, to Turkey. He might remember that the hot water in a container was poured on his leg, in a crowded house in Ankara, and we did not know Turkish and wandered on the streets for help. And that at nights, strange insects attacked him and his mom and I was waiting to find out what and where they were. One night I discovered them. They were small and red everywhere, under the embroideries and rims of pillows and blankets and rugs, and only at nights and with effort you could see them; at daytime they were invisible. I have the same feeling now; I am looking for another set of insects which are biting our ‘souls’. 

He will probably remember the first years he spent in the U.S. and the growing sense of adjustment which was less painful for him than for us [but later I realized it was more painful for him than us]. He will remember that one day he came home and realized I had left and his mom was crying and not knowing what was the reason if not, like always, for ‘sex’ or another ‘woman’.

He might remember that I talked to him: ‘it is not the case that I left your mom for another woman, and sex was only some dim temptation in the constellation of events, that I felt suddenly I had to do this because that was the only time I found the audacity to overcome my fears and transgress the entrenched barriers of ‘security’ and I did not want to waste the time and lose that courage even if later I would break down under the burden of being lost in the wood. That, who knows, I wanted to experience this. That I myself do not know exactly the reason, that I do not know what is ‘love’, that I am looking for ‘love’, that I feel I am in dark’.

Now I see that the events of our lives find their aftereffect coherency only as an interpretation and a chain of reasoning for a kind of self-satisfaction, to see things within the body of human intentionality or unwarranted external pressures and to forget the fact that our interactions with the world is a two-way street. You do something and something is being done to you. We cannot predict the course of accidents as clear as we imagine. And we know ourselves, to some extent, by throwing ourselves in the valley, i.e., we do not fully know ourselves and our motivations before the accident. 

I remember, and he might as well remember, that I knew just one impulse: I do not know what ‘love’ is. And I wanted to kill my boredom with sex. And I told him and myself that I would not listen to the old stories about love, that intense feeling, about which tons of words have been written and said in millions of ways. And if I do not find it by myself, I will stick to the notion of ‘friendship’ that I understand somehow and I will discard the concept ‘love’ from my lexicon and will fight this word, wherever and whenever I see it pops out, as a false consciousness. He will probably remember all these words and even if he will not, now I wrote them.

Thanks God, I found my love (Marianne). But indeed a cry for love was a cry for God; it was a discontent cry against pleasure and hedonism, a cry for meaning and guidance, for coming out of darkness. I have to confess that if it was not for divine grace, I would have been lost for the rest of my life. But I realized I was longing for God all along, and hence to my shock, God responded to me and guided me to the right direction through a ‘warning sign’. Now, I understand the constant warning signs in the Quran. It seems we are unable to wake up from our slumber unless we realize we are losing our humanity to hedonism and materialism, that the beast is devouring us.

If I consider myself as an information processing machine, or the carrier of genes, I never can release myself from the agony of despair, and this despair is self-destructive in any sense, including in a nihilistic Foucauldian sense. Kierkegaard discusses this loss of self and its subsequent despair well in his “The Sickness unto to Death”. If it wasn’t for my own personal experience, I couldn’t relate to his concept of despair. 

Foucault and scientism indicate a loss of self. For example, the atheistic groundless Self suffers from a lack of identity in both Foucault and Sartre’s impoverished formulation of the self: “the Self is a form that is not identical with itself.” Or Sartre’s: “the for-itself is not identical with its past nor its future. It is already no longer what it was, and it is not yet what it will be, has to invent itself despite its groundlessness”; or in Pinker and Dawkins sense, the self is mechanical, it is only our genes, which in the final analysis are a subclass of dead. In each of these cases, we are dealing with a deep sense of consuming despair that we usually fill it up with pleasure, fame, name, legacy, wealth, honor, etc. but we can never fully overcome this sense of despair. 

Kierkegaard holds that this despair, the loss of self, the fact that we are aware of having a self, of life, of being in the world, in cosmos, to be curious about the meaning of our existence, and being able to ask the question “why are we here?” is itself an advantage over the beast:

This comes to the fact that despair is a qualification of spirit, that it is related to the eternal in human. But the eternal s/he cannot get rid of, no, not to all eternity; s/he cannot cast it from him or her once for all… The self which s/he despairingly wills to be is a self which s/he is not… what s/he really wills is to tear his or her self away from the [divine] Power which constituted it. But notwithstanding all the efforts of despair, that Power is the stronger, and compels one to be the self s/he does not will to be… This is the situation in despair. And however thoroughly it eludes the attention of the despaired, and however thoroughly the despaired may succeed in losing himself or herself entirely, and losing himself or herself in such a way that it is not noticed in the least—eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his or her situation was despair , and it will so nail one to oneself that the torment nevertheless remains that one cannot get rid of oneself, and it becomes manifest that one was deluded in thinking that one is succeeded. And thus in one eternity acts, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to human, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him or her.

Through such a tumultuous route, I arrived at my theses about the nature of the self:

A Religio-Philosophical Reflection on the Book of Job

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 32); 

Let me in your truth and teach me: for you are the God of my salvation. (Psalm 25:5); 

God is the Truth (the Real). (Qur’an 22:6); We cast the truth against the falsehood, so that it demolishes it, and lo! it vanishes away…. (Qur’an 21:18)

In this reflection, I ponder the question of suffering and how any external suffering and loss, such as Job’s loss of family and properties, is not commensurable with internal suffering (disharmony and disconnect from God and the divine nature within). My argument is simply to stress the fact that if I take purely materialistic and physicalist stance about my existence, any lack of pleasure would be an indicator of misery and loss. Evil, in this context, is what happens to me externally. This is so, because for materialism and physicalism, hedonism (sensual-aesthetic pleasure) and at best humanism are the ultimate goals. No wonder that the dominant moral theory of our time, Mill’s Utilitarianism, defines moral behavior in terms of maximizing pleasure for the most. I argue that there is another ‘truth’ which is told by religions and indicates that no matter what external calamities one goes through (similar to Job’s afflictions), Hell is the loss of internal harmony with the divine. And this is the worst loss. 

The structure of this reflection is like this: first, I will express my theses; second, I will briefly discuss some philosophical views on truth and values; third, I will quote part of the second book of Plato’s Republic as the source of reflection on values of truth and justice; then I will repeat my theses again in response to Plato’s question; and finally will end this paper with quotations from different religions about human nature.

My Theses:

1) Our essence consists of the ethical-spiritual truth whose truth is prior to scientific-knowing truth. This truth is expressed by religions, where ethics, unlike secularism, is not separated from cosmos, heaven, and God.

2) Human nature is divine (is Godly or is ontologically and morally attuned to God). The inner working of this divine essence urges us for moral behavior and just actions.

3) Each unjust or immoral action, similar to Kant’s Categorical Imperative[5] but for different reasons, creates inconsistency, a feeling of cognitive dissonance, guilt and shame, and suffering conscience.

4) Worshipping God and prayers is an act of redemption, atonement, and attunement. God doesn’t need our worship, but we need prayers to keep our internal soul balanced[4]. Lack of this balance is Hell.

5) Axial Age sages, Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s Mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and then Jesus, and Mohammad share a non-consequentialist message: they all hold that justice and morality are for harmony with God, Dao, or Heaven (T’ien) and are good for their own sake (have intrinsic value) and subsequently also have extrinsic value (good consequences). In Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant comes closest to this non-consequentialist approach. However, he along with other rationalists put all his faith in reason alone, which is the point of excess in our historical pendulum swing and detrimental to the divine balance of our soul.

6) The problem of evil or afflictions and suffering on an individual should not in any sense take him or her to an immoral or unjust position or pessimistic disbelief because the issue is an internal attunement to God (intrinsic value) rather than external gain and loss (extrinsic value). So, in the story of Job, when he is afflicted with so much pain and loss, he has no choice but to hold onto his divine essence which is worshipping God as its essential attunement despite all calamities. Hence he contends: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”.

Ethical-Spiritual Truth

What is the truth? The 20th century philosophy and sciences made the notion of “truth” more and more problematic. We all know now “reason” as such can’t ground our belief system. In “On Certainty,” Wittgenstein says:

The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing. . . Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end, – but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part: it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game. . . If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false. (Sections 166, 204, 205)

Although in our sciences we should strive for truth, as a valuable goal, the philosophy of science of Popper and Kuhn have already shown that (capital T) Truth is not achievable. Because either the truth of science is essentially and by definition falsifiable (Popper[6]), or basically there is no overarching meta-paradigm according to which we can compare the truths of different paradigms of science. This is so, because the truths (with lower case ‘t’) depend on the internal function of paradigms (Kuhn[7]), and accordingly, different scientific paradigms are not commensurable. A strife for truth, however, remains one of the noblest impulses of human beings. Popper holds that adherence to scientific truth is based on an ethical principle:

Thus ethical principles form the basis of science. The idea of truth as the fundamental regulative principle -the principle that guides our search- can be regarded as an ethical principle. The search for truth and the idea of approximation to the truth are also ethical principles; as are the ideas of intellectual integrity and of fallibility, which lead us to a self-critical attitude and to toleration. (Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World, p. 199)

The problem is that we know now that a purely secular, rational, materialistic, physicalist, and naturalist view of truth is groundless. We know now that our adherence to our secular naturalistic truth is itself an item of faith. Popper states: "I too believe that our Western civilization owes its rationalism, its faith in the rational unity of human and in the open society, and especially its scientific outlook, to the ancient Socratic and Christian belief in the brotherhood [or sisterhood] of all humans, and in intellectual honesty and responsibility." (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, pp. 243-244) 

Moreover, he openly and clearly declares his irrational faith in critical rationalism and science:

Critical rationalism recognizes the fact that the fundamental rationalist attitude results from an (at least tentative) act of faith -from faith in reason. Accordingly, our choice is open. We may choose some form of irrationalism, even some radical or comprehensive form. But we are also free to choose a critical form of rationalism, one which frankly admits its origin in an irrational decision (and which, to that extent, admits a certain priority of irrationalism). The choice before us is not simply an intellectual affair, or a matter of taste. It is a moral decision (in the sense of chapter 5). For the question whether we adopt some more or less radical form of irrationalism, or whether we adopt that minimum concession to irrationalism which I have termed 'critical rationalism', will deeply affect our whole attitude towards other men, and towards the problems of social life. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, pp. 231-232).

In the same way, Foucault also confronts “ethical truth” with “scientific truth” connaissance). In The Ethics of The Concern for The Self, he raises this important question:

Why are we concerned with truth, and more so than with the care of the self? And why must the care of the self occur only through the concern for truth? I think we are touching on a fundamental question here, what I would call the question for the West: How did it come about that all of Western culture began to revolve around this obligation of truth which has taken a lot of different forms? Things being as they are, nothing so far has shown that it is possible to define a strategy outside of this concern.

After this brief discussion of the position of truth in modern science, the priority of the ethical to the epistemological (knowledge as such), we come up with an interesting argument that ethical truth is prior to scientific truth. Or more clearly, one might argue that we can be more certain about what course of action to take ethically than whether our sciences really depict reality as it is. The priority of the ethical to the epistemological is a step forward in our understanding of ourselves. This is the same impulse that separates pre-Socratic philosophers (natural philosophers such as Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, etc.) from Socrates, and generally Axial Age sages, with their emphasis on the priority of the ethical to the metaphysical. Moreover, this priority is not only the priority of historical contingent practices whose truth is simply defined by the historical moment (Foucault and Marx), but the ethical truths are pluralistic (they can’t be reduced to one another) and universal and embedded in the human nature. 

In contemporary philosophy, basically it sounds strange if one talks about “ethical truth”, because so many of these philosophers think that ethics has no truth of its own, as it is not factual and there is always a gap between “what is” and “how things ought to be” (Hume’s gap). However, this gap doesn’t imply that ethical truths are not part of the inner working or nature of human beings. On the contrary, without ethical truths of collaboration, empathy, love, care, justice, virtuous life, and a holistic and integral sense of connection to the universe and God, our factual existence in the world is in danger. As the effect of hedonism, nihilism, consumerism, and unbridled capitalism and destruction of our environment clearly allude to this fact. 

In holding the priority of ethics to sciences, Chomsky also expresses his faith in moral imperatives and similar to his theory of linguistic creativity, according to him, morality is wired in human beings universally and embedded in the human nature; thus it internally evolves. About Chomsky’s moral-linguistic theory, Joshua Cohen & Joel Rogers state:

We take Chomsky’s social views to be marked by four key claims: (1) human beings have a ‘moral nature’ and a fundamental interest in autonomy; (2) these basic features of our nature support a libertarian socialist social ideal; (3) the interest in autonomy and the moral nature of human beings help to explain certain important features of actual social systems, including for example the use of deception and force to sustain unjust conditions, as well as their historical evolution; and (4) these same features of human nature provide reasons for hope that the terms of social order will improve from a moral point of view. (http://www.cows.org/joel/pdf/a_044.pdf)

For this reason Chomsky argues against moral relativism and Foucault’s conception of morality and justice[8]. While Foucault insists that we should give priority to the Ethics of the Care of the Self rather than to the “regimes of truth”, his own stance on ethical truth is nihilistic, which means that ethical practices as well as justice are arbitrary “values” played within contingent historical practices. He states:

What meaning is this enterprise [replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction] to be given? There are above all its immediately apparent ‘negative’, negativistic aspects. A historicizing negativism, since it involves replacing a theory of knowledge, power, or the subject [the self] with the analysis of historically deterministic practices. A nominalist negativism, since it involves replacing universals like madness, crime, and sexuality with the analysis of experiences which constitute singular historical forms. A negativism with a nihilistic tendency, if by this we understand a form of reflection which, instead of indexing practices to systems of values which allow them to be assessed, inserts these systems of values in the interplay of arbitrary but intelligible practices. (The Government of Self and Others)

So in Chomsky-Foucault Debate, Foucault clearly takes a Nietzschean position about the value of “justice”:

If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it.

In a departure from nihilistic position of Foucault about “human nature”, I hold that not only justice or moral values are not part of arbitrary historical practices, but also they are the ground of the major truth at hand, the divine ethical truth or divine human nature. While this stance is closer to Chomsky’s view about having faith in innate moral principles, it also departs from Chomsky’s secularism and Gnostic faith in reason alone, and reconnects with the divine source.

The Divine Justice as the Disposition of the Soul

In his The Republic, Plato clearly tackles the problem of justice as disposition of the soul that has “intrinsic value” against the views of Thrasymachus. Indeed, Foucault and Nietzsche say nothing new in rejecting justice as a value; they simply repeat what Thrasymachus and Glaucon say in the first two books of The Republic. I will bring a quotation from the second book of Republic and will try to respond to it in my own theses. Plato wrote:

The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning of the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were to find that of all the professing panegyrists of justice --beginning with the ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us, and ending with the men of our own time --no one has ever blamed injustice or praised justice except with a view to the glories, honors, and benefits which flow from them. No one has ever adequately described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either of them abiding in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of all the things of a human's soul which he has within him or her, justice is the greatest good, and injustice the greatest evil. Had this been the universal strain, had you sought to persuade us of this from our youth upwards, we should not have been on the watch to keep one another from doing wrong, but everyone would have been his own watchman, because afraid, if he did wrong, of harboring in himself or herself the greatest of evils. 

I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would seriously hold the language which I have been merely repeating, and words even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as I conceive, perverting their true nature. But I speak in this vehement manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from you the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the superiority which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have on the possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil to him or her. And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude reputations; for unless you take away from each of them his or her true reputation and add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise justice, but the appearance of it; we shall think that you are only exhorting us to keep injustice dark, and that you really agree with Thrasymachus in thinking that justice is another's good and the interest of the stronger, and that injustice is a man's own profit and interest, though injurious to the weaker. Now as you have admitted that justice is one of that highest class of goods which are desired indeed for their results, but in a far greater degree for their own sake --like sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real and natural and not merely conventional good --I would ask you in your praise of justice to regard one point only: I mean the essential good and evil which justice and injustice work in the possessors of them. Let others praise justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and honors of the one and abusing the other; that is a manner of arguing which, coming from them, I am ready to tolerate, but from you who have spent your whole life in the consideration of this question, unless I hear the contrary from your own lips, I expect something better. And therefore, I say, not only prove to us that justice is better than injustice, but show what they either of them do to the possessor of them, which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and humans.

So, I repeat my theses again:

1) Our essence consists of the ethical-spiritual truth whose truth is prior to scientific-knowing truth. This truth is expressed by religions, where ethics, unlike secularism, is not separated from cosmos, heaven, and God.

2) Human nature is divine (is Godly or is ontologically and morally attuned to God). The inner working of this divine essence urges us for moral behavior and just actions.

3) Each unjust or immoral action, similar to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but for different reasons, creates inconsistency, a feeling of cognitive dissonance, guilt and shame, and suffering conscience.

4) Worshipping God and prayers is an act of redemption, atonement, and attunement. God doesn’t need our worship, but we need prayers to keep our internal soul balanced[10]. Lack of this balance is Hell.

5) Axial Age sages, Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s Mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and then Jesus, and Mohammad share a non-consequentialist message: they all hold that justice and morality are for harmony with God, Dao, or Heaven (T’ien) and are good for their own sake (have intrinsic value) and subsequently also have extrinsic value (good consequences). In Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant comes closest to this non-consequentialist approach. However, he along with other rationalists put all his faith in reason alone, which is the point of excess in our historical pendulum swing and detrimental to the divine balance of our soul.

6) The problem of evil or afflictions and suffering of an individual should not in any sense take him or her to an immoral or unjust position or to a pessimistic disbelief because the issue is an internal attunement to God (intrinsic value) rather than external gain and loss (extrinsic value). So, in the story of Job, when he is afflicted with so much pain and loss, he has no choice but to hold onto his divine essence which is worshipping God as its essential attunement despite all calamities. Hence he contends: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”.

Our Divine Essence or Nature 

In elaboration of my fifth thesis, I will turn to the views of several of the world religions on human nature. These quotes, from Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, show that justice and morality have intrinsic value and connect us to our source.

Lao Tzu: Taoism 

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations… Tao flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all things. … The Tao is great, The Universe is great, Earth is great, Human is great. These are the four great powers…

From Hua Hu Ching (Lao Tzu’s oral teachings)

In ancient times, people lived holistic lives. They didn’t overemphasize the intellect, but integrated mind, body and spirit in all things. ..... Simply avoid becoming attached to what you see and think. Relinquish the notion that you are separated from the all-knowing mind of the universe. Then you can recover your original pure insight and see through all illusions. Knowing nothing, you will be aware of everything. Remember: because clarity and enlightenment are Within your own nature, they are regained without moving an inch.

Confucius

Confucius remarked: Heaven is author of the virtue that is in me. The power of spiritual forces in the Universe—how active it is everywhere! Invisible to the eyes, and impalpable to the senses, it is inherent in all things, and nothing can escape its operation. What is God-Given (Given by T’ien or “heaven”) is what we call human nature. To fulfill the law of our human nature is what we call the moral law [Tao]. The cultivation of the moral law is what we call culture. Our central self or moral being is the great basis of existence, and harmony or moral order is the universal law in the world. 

Confucius remarked: “The life of the moral person is an exemplification of the universal moral order…. The life of the vulgar person, on the other hand, is a contradiction of the universal moral order.” 

Confucius remarked: “To find the central clue to our moral being which unites us to the universal order, that indeed is the highest human attainment…”, 

Confucius remarked: “There are people who seek for the abstruse and strange and live a singular life in order that they may leave a name to posterity. This is what I never would do. There are again good people who try to live in conformity with the moral law but who, when they have gone half way, throw it up. I never could give it up. Lastly, there are truly moral people who unconsciously live a life in entire harmony with the universal moral order and who live unknown to the world and unnoticed by others without any concern. It is only people of holy, divine natures who are capable of this…” 

Confucius said: "In the morning hear the Way; in the evening die content."

Upanishads

Three thousand years ago, Nachiketas seeks wisdom of life from the King of Death (Yama), narrated in Katha Upanishads.

Death says: Take horses and gold and cattle and elephants; choose sons and grandsons that shall live a hundred years. Have vast expanses of land, and live as many years as you desire. Or choose another gift that you think equal to this, and enjoy it with wealth and long life. Be a ruler of this vast earth. I will grant you all your desires. Ask for any wishes in the world of mortals, however hard to obtain. To attend on you I will give you fair maidens with chariots and musical instruments. But ask me not, Nachiketas, the secrets of death.

Nachiketas: All these pleasures pass away, O End of all! They weaken the power of life. And indeed how short is all life! Keep thy horses and dancing and singing. Human cannot be satisfied with wealth. Shall we enjoy wealth with you in sight? Shall we live whilst you are in power? I can only ask for boon I have asked. When a mortal here on earth has felt one’s immortality, could he wish for a long life of pleasures, for the lust of deceitful beauty? Solve then the doubt as to the great beyond. Grant me the gift that unveils the mystery. This is the only gift Nachiketas can ask….

Death: There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End… There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and ends to different ends. You are, Nachiketas, a follower of the path of wisdom: many pleasures tempt you not. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind…. Not even through deep knowledge can the Atman [the divine self within] be reached, unless evil ways are abandoned, and there is rest in the senses, concentration in the mind and peace in one’s heart.”

Buddhism: The Fullness of Emptiness by Thich Nhat Hanh

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also, so we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. 

You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper would be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine, and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

But the Heart Sutra seems to say the opposite. Avalokiteshvara tells us that things are empty. Let us look more closely. Empty of What? The Bodhisattva Avalokita: while moving in the deep course of Perfect Understanding, shed light on the five skandhas and found them equally empty. According to Avalokiteshvara, this sheet of paper is empty; but according to our analysis, it is full of everything. There seems to be a contradiction between our observation and his. Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something. The five skandhas, which may be translated into English as five heaps, or five aggregates, are the five elements that comprise a human being. These five elements flow like a river in every one of us. In fact, these are really five rivers flowing together in us: the river of form, which means our bodies; the river of feelings; the river of perceptions; the river of mental formations; and the river of consciousness. They are always flowing in us. 

So according to Avalokita, when he looked deeply into the nature of these five rivers, he suddenly saw that all five are empty. If we ask, “Empty of what?” he has to answer. And this is what he said: “They are empty of a separate self.” That means none of these five rivers can exist by itself alone. Each of the five rivers has to be made by the other four. It has to coexist; it has to inter-be with all the others. When Avalokita says that our sheet of paper is empty, he means it is empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot just be by itself. It has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud, the forest, the logger, the mind, and everything else. It is empty of a separate self. But, empty of a separate self means full of everything. So it seems that our observation and that of Avalokita do not contradict each other after all. Avalokita looked deeply into the five skandhas of form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, and he discovered that none of them can be by itself alone. Each can only inter-be with all the others. So he tells us that form is empty. Form is empty of a separate self, but it is full of everything in the cosmos. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. http://www.lionsroar.com/the-fullness-of-emptiness/

Judaism

The word “image” (selem) is sometimes related to a verb ‘salam’ (to “cut off”). However, it is generally considered as “representation”. This conception of “representation” is different from the modern concept of mental images. It means ‘presence’ but not ‘identity’. So we can say in a sense God is present in human being but not identical to it. It is interesting that this way of representing God goes against the tradition of ‘image’ and ‘idolatry’ in which man used to create a statue or the like and called it a representation of God or a symbol of its presence. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt, “[t]he primary purpose of the image . . . was not to describe the god; rather the image was one of the primary places where the god manifested himself” (“The Anchor Bible Dictionary,” Volume III, p.390). 

In Genesis, on the contrary, God creates man and manifests Himself in his own image. While in Egypt and Mesopotamia sometimes the king also was considered as the manifestation of god, in Genesis human race on the whole is the manifestation of God, though in the beginning deprived of the knowledge of good and bad and desiring the divine wisdom, rooted in being God’s representation. “Thus, the presence of the god and the blessing that accompanied that presence were affected through the image. It was the function of the image rather than its form that constituted its significance” (“The Anchor Bible Dictionary,” Volume III, p.390). 

Rambam points out that the Hebrew words translated as "image" and "likeness" in Gen. 1:27 do not refer to the physical form of a thing. The word for "image" in Gen. 1:27 is "tzelem," which refers to the nature or essence of a thing, as in Psalm 73:20, "you will despise their image (tzel'mam)." You despise a person's nature and not a person's physical appearance.

The Dual Nature: In Genesis 2:7, the Bible states that God formed (vayyitzer) man. The spelling of this word is unusual: it uses two consecutive Yods instead of the one you would expect. The rabbis inferred that these Yods stand for the word "yetzer," which means impulse, and the existence of two Yods here indicates that humanity was formed with two impulses: a good impulse (the yetzer tov) and an evil impulse (the yetzer ra). The yetzer tov is the moral conscience, the inner voice that reminds you of God's law when you consider doing something that is forbidden. According to some views, it does not enter a person until his 13th birthday, when he becomes responsible for following the commandments. The yetzer ra is more difficult to define, because there are many different ideas about it. It is not a desire to do evil in the way we normally think of it in Western society: a desire to cause senseless harm. Rather, it is usually conceived as the selfish nature, the desire to satisfy personal needs (food, shelter, sex, etc.) without regard for the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires. The yetzer ra is not a bad thing. It was created by God, and all things created by God are good. The Talmud notes that without the yetzer ra (the desire to satisfy personal needs), man would not build a house, marry a wife, beget children or conduct business affairs. But the yetzer ra can lead to wrongdoing when it is not controlled by the yetzer tov. There is nothing inherently wrong with hunger, but it can lead you to steal food. There is nothing inherently wrong with sexual desire, but it can lead you to commit rape, adultery, incest or other sexual perversion. The yetzer ra is generally seen as something internal to a person, not as an external force acting on a person. The idea that "the devil made me do it" is not in line with the majority of thought in Judaism. Although it has been said that Satan and the yetzer ra are one and the same, this is more often understood as meaning that Satan is merely a personification of our own selfish desires, rather than that our selfish desires are caused by some external force. People have the ability to choose which impulse to follow: the yetzer tov or the yetzer ra. That is the heart of the Jewish understanding of free will. The Talmud notes that all people are descended from Adam, so no one can blame his own wickedness on his ancestry. On the contrary, we all have the ability to make our own choices, and we will all be held responsible for the choices we make. http://www.jewfaq.org/human.htm

Jesus: Christianity

The Parable of the Mustard Seed: The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard-seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; As a seed, mustard is smaller than any other; but when it has grown it is bigger than any garden-plant; it becomes a tree, big enough for the birds to come and roost among its branches.” 

The Parable of the Treasure: The kingdom of Heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field. The man who found it, buried it again; and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had, and bought that field. The Parable of the Vineyard Laborers · The Parable of the Wedding Feast. The Parable of the Prodigal Son. The Parable of the Good Samaritan. 

The Kingdom of God Is Among You. Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you. 

Gospel of Thomas: Jesus said: “if your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.

Islam

We created human. We know the promptings of human soul, and are closer to him [or her] than his [or her] jugular vein. (Quran 50:16)

God is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and of all things Knowing. God knows what penetrates into the earth and what emerges from it and what descends from the heaven and what ascends therein; and God is with you wherever you are. (57:3-4)

When your Lord took out the offspring from the loins of the Children of Adam and made them bear witness about themselves, He said, ‘Am I not your Lord? And they replied, ‘Yes, we bear witness.’ So you cannot say on the Day of Resurrection, ‘We were not aware of this,’ (7:172)

Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these. (17: 36)

Those who, having done something shameful or having wronged their own souls, remember God and immediately ask forgiveness for their sins... (Quran 3:135)

Have they not thought about their own selves within themselves? God did not create the heavens and earth and everything between them without a serious purpose and an appointed time, yet many people deny that they will meet their Lord. (30:8)

So [prophet] as a man of pure faith, stand firm and true in your devotion to the religion. This is the natural disposition God instilled in mankind—there is no altering God’s creation—and this is the right religion, though most people do not realize it. (30:30)

05/16/16



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[1] “The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos--in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms...Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses... But when will we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.109, Walter Kaufmann

[2] Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding, by Noam Chomsky.  The Science and Faith Foundation (STOQ), The Vatican, January 2014; https://chomsky.info/201401__/

Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E0IEyS4qw

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ARDKad9KwU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Q4F5yf2D8

[5] Kantian Western Enlightenment of the sovereignty of reason has an interesting and strange ethical theory, which is a heroic attempt to show that our wired in and innate (a priori) law of reason defies inconsistency in ethical issues and falls into cognitive dissonance and contradiction if it can’t universalize its own moral actions, i.e., I shouldn’t find myself in cognitive dissonance if everyone does the same thing that I morally do. This Kantian theory can’t explain why this inconsistency should be avoided. Kant appeals to a sense of “reverence” for the law of reason within. We all understand the kind of shame and guilt we feel, when we realize we are inconsistence. Maturity of divine conscience is a movement from the shame we experience under the dictum of social norms only to the shame we experience if we violate our own divine nature and lose the integrity of our own conscience.

[6] “I have created the jinn and humankind only for My worship.” (Quran 51:56) “Glorify the praises of your Lord...” (Quran 15:98) “The seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them glorify God and there is nothing which does not glorify God’s praise. However, you do not understand their glorification.” (Quran 17:44)

[7] Popper: "By 'fallibilism' I mean here the view, or the acceptance of the fact, that we may err, and that the quest for certainty (or even the quest for high probability) is a mistaken quest. But this does not imply that the quest for truth is mistaken. On the contrary, the idea of error implies that of truth as the standard of which we may fall short. It implies that, though we may seek for truth, and though we may even find truth (as I believe we do in very many cases), we can never be quite certain that we have found it. There is always a possibility of error". All quotations taken from: https://www3.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti/artigas.htm

[8] Kuhn: “The development process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.... We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance.” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1970), p.170-1). http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/94/hhr94_4.html

[9] Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i63_kAw3WmE

[10] “I have created the jinn and humankind only for My worship.” (Quran 51:56) “Glorify the praises of your Lord...” (Quran 15:98) “The seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them glorify God and there is nothing which does not glorify God’s praise. However, you do not understand their glorification.” (Quran 17:44)