Saturday, June 25, 2016


Metaphysical Certainty

If we try to establish metaphysical certainty and “faith” based on phenomenal knowledge (how things seem to be), we are prone to come up with some metaphors that make a lot of sense to us and even show some half-truths about us, but then they are the very springboard from which we fall astray, because we can’t form a metaphysical truth based on human phenomenal observation, even if we think what we say is not anthropocentric.  I bring three examples below.  Pay attention and see where they go wrong, based on this premise: 

We can’t draw metaphysical conclusions from our phenomenal observations, because we are not equipped with enough tools to grasp the whole of reality—including the unknown and the unseen or unperceived—comprehensively.  As Chomsky puts it, “[f]ar from bewailing the existence of mysteries-for-humans, we should be extremely grateful for it. With no limits to growth and development, our cognitive capacities would also have no scope. Similarly, if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth and development of an organism it could become only a shapeless amoeboid creature, reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment, each quite unlike the next. Classical aesthetic theory recognized the same relation between scope and limits. Without rules, there can be no genuinely creative activity, even when creative work challenges and revises prevailing rules.”  (Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding) https://chomsky.info/201401__/

Bin Song
1)     In a well-written piece, A Catechism of Ruism (Confucianism): A Ruist View of Death, Bin Song wrote:
Ruism is frequently introduced as a tradition which is too this-worldly to care much about what happens after death. To a certain degree, this is true. Ruism teaches that there is no afterlife, no final judgement, no Paradise or Hell, and no reincarnation. When people are born, this is only a contractive form of the movement of the cosmic matter-energy called Qi (); when people die, this energy dissipates, and accordingly people’s lives lose their agency. Accordingly, life and death is just one embodiment of the constantly contracting (yang) and dissipating (yin) natural processes of cosmic change. As a consequence, nothing is supernatural, nothing is uncanny.”
“According to Ruism, the truth of the Dao of Heaven (天道) is that the entire universe is a constantly creative process called ‘Tian’ (, Heaven). Tian creates a process of dynamic harmony, endowing energy and creativity to all creatures within Tian, in all places and at all times, by means of a method called ‘wu-wei‘ (無為, effortless action). In this view, the movement of cosmic matter-energy is the manifestation of Tian’s creativity. However, Tian’s creation is neither anthropomorphic nor anthropocentric. For, natural disasters on this little blue planet can be considered ‘disasters’ only from a human perspective. From the perspective of Tian, a flood, as one of millions of processes within Tian, has its own beauty, a beauty which is not inferior to that of, for example, the human houses being destroyed. In the same way, from Tian’s point of view, the HIV virus has a value which is not less lovable than that of the human bodies which have been infected by the virus.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bin-song/a-catechism-of-ruism-conf_1_b_9519626.html)
Where does this interpretation of the nature of cosmos, life, and death go wrong?  It goes wrong when it takes some common-sense evidence and metaphors, some phenomenal evidence as the foundation of a metaphysical knowledge.  In this case, Bin Song establishes absolute certainty about the nature of Heaven (Tien) and that “there is no afterlife, no final judgement, no Paradise or Hell, and no reincarnation”, by using some metaphors taken from some phenomenal (“this-worldly") observations: “When people are born, this is only a contractive form of the movement of the cosmic matter-energy called Qi (); when people die, this energy dissipates, and accordingly people’s lives lose their agency. Accordingly, life and death is just one embodiment of the constantly contracting (yang) and dissipating (yin) natural processes of cosmic change.”

It makes a lot of sense because it is based on our phenomenological observation of birth and decay of living beings and even objects, and the phenomena of “contracting and dissipating natural processes of cosmic change”.  So, he is so sure about how the universe works based on an anthropocentric phenomenology.  The idea of a chaotic purposeless naturalistic universe is itself a product of anthropocentric perception of the world.  The problem is that following modern astronomy, Bin Song, draws wild metaphysical conclusions about the nature of “heaven”.  He states: “What Confucians worship about “Heaven” is a benevolent but wild cosmic creative power, without any anthropomorphic sort of purpose, will or plan. Correspondingly, the Confucian humanism is a non-theistic humanism, and in this strictly defined sense, it is a religious humanism.”  One may wonder whether “benevolence” is not itself an anthropocentric description of the chaotic events in the universe.

In our Facebook exchange, Bin Song explicated his position:
We can only categorize Tian as lovable, pro-human, friendly in the vaguest sense. In the sense that Tian is ultimate resource for all forms of life, it is lovable; it is even love itself. However, Tian loves human beings equally as it loves the virus of HIV. Its love is so all-encompassing and egalitarian that we can't ascribe any personal characters to it. In this sense, we can worship Tian, but it is hardly to say we rely upon Tian to execute the Ruist program of moral self-cultivation.” And “Tian is humane in the sense that it creates all forms of life. Tian lets all forms of life be and become together in the most all-encompassing cosmic scale of eternity.

Bin Song obviously struggles to reconcile the modern naturalistic perception of the universe as a chaotic force of becoming with Confucian conception of benevolence and love.  However, he levels off all living beings, HIV virus and human beings, in the method of scientific reductionism, as “all-encompassing and egalitarian” love of Tien.  So the divine human nature whose author is Tien is the same as the nature of viruses or dead particles.  This is called pure immanentism, identifying the natural universe and God, but it is not even immanentism, because it doesn’t hold that the universe is alive.  It is pure naturalism.  This is a nihilistic reductionism in which life indeed is a subclass of dead. Tien is indifferent to us, barely alive, unconscious, and chaotic.  There is no point or purpose in Tien, as it begs the question that the meaning and purpose of creation is creation itself:

Tian's creation is not of purpose in the sense a purpose is understood as a 'telos' which can only be fulfilled in a long span of time so that all cosmic events are interpreted as the 'means' or 'stages' towards this purpose. No, in this sense of 'telos', there is no purpose of Tian's creation. But Tian's creation can only be described as of purpose in the sense that it has no purpose other than 'creation' itself. So every moment, Tian's creation is continuous, and all creatures in the cosmic scale of eternity were, are, and will be and become together. If we understand this most generic features of Tian's creation as of purpose, this purpose is instant and momentary, existing solely for the sake of itself. Anyway, Tian's creation is definitely meaningful. Its meaning is still creation itself. For human beings, this is particularly important because the meaning of human life consists in how we live out our life in relation to this cosmic creation of Tian. For Ruism, this 'living out' process of the innately good human nature is called the virtue of 'humaneness', and whether to live out it or not is the meaning of human life, which embeds itself in the meaningfulness of the entire cosmic process of Tian's creation.

One might ask why should this Sisyphean creation for the sake of creation carry the mark of “benevolence” or “innately good human nature”?  Nietzsche held the same metaphysical belief about the universe, as a pure force of becoming without any telos.  One might ask, why should the inner impulse of the chaotic force of Tien, in which the perpetrator and the prey are the same, not be “will-to-power” rather than “human heartedness” or “dynamic harmony”?  Bin Song’s response is vague: it is a kind of survival of our species in a hostile universe, in which dynamic harmony has to be attained based on what he calls 'anthropo-cosmism' or 'perspectival anthropocentrism in a cosmic scale'.   What does this mean?   I agree that depicting Tien in this way is anthropocentric, because it is grounded in human phenomenology.  But we can't take a humanistic code from a Tien, for which the beings who try to attain ren, equanimity, and love are the same as beings which have no sense of any of these (viruses).  Similar to Nietzsche, one might ask, why not our anthropo-cosmism should follow will-to-power instead of “dynamic harmony”.  After all, Tien is not aware and doesn’t experience love, or to make it as “impersonal” as possible, it "loves" everything equally, which doesn't even make sense to use the emotional-spiritual exuberance of love for a lifeless Tien.  Because Tien creates just for the sake of creation and is indeed indifferent to everything equally.  This is a concealed nihilism, I am afraid, under the name of “religious naturalism”. 

Bin Song finishes his comments with these words: “We evaluate from the perspective of human beings, but the values are also intrinsic to cosmic beings.”  I read it that in this cosmos everything has equal intrinsic value, as well as human beings.  But if Tien is not alive and aware, then this intrinsic value has the same intonation as a materialistic and physicalist scientific discourse which says everything is made of atoms or dead particles; on the surface it looks egalitarian but indeed it is nihilism.  Our human soul is the same as dead particles or at best viruses.


Thich Nhat Hanh

      2) In the second part, let's see how drawing metaphysical accounts from phenomenological considerations is fallacious by reading parts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful discussion of The Fullness of Emptiness:

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.
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.
Now, again what is wrong with this description?  Nothing, it is a wonderful phenomenal description of the interrelation of all beings—Inter-being.  It makes a lot of sense, but we can’t establish a metaphysical truth about the nature of cosmos and life and death based on merely a phenomenal knowledge or description.  This description tells us some truth about our dependent origination but does NOT establish that our five skandhas are “empty”.  So, based on some interesting observations and nice metaphors, he comes to this metaphysical certainty: “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.’"

The problem with this way of interpreting the cosmos or Tien or God or Nirvana is that everything, including our own self, is merged together and is empty of a self, because phenomenally we can see and experience dependent origination of everything.  In another word, if we could put the obvious interdependent skandhas together, still we couldn't say the sum is nothing but addition of parts, i.e., it is empty of self.  The other problem with this deduction is that it doesn’t and can't bring things that we don’t know, the unseen, the mysterious, the ineffable into account.  It is like a blind bat saying the nature of all cosmos is similar to its sonar perception of location of objects.  Both Bin Song and Thich Nhat Hanh say interesting and stimulating half-truths and rush to arrive at a strange metaphysical perception of the universe or Heaven, which is empty of God, [and indeed love], and perception, like an indifferent vast ocean that brings everything to life and destroys everything in a sheer impulse of creation for the sake of creation.

Myself

      3)  In the third part, let's look at my own mistake.  Out of a methodological mistake, I mixed half-truths with some observations and wrote the following a while ago:

Let's have a thought experiment, imagine we are really becoming dust if we are lucky enough to burn blue in a life. Imagine the body doesn't remain, nor does the spirit. Spirit merges with spirit and loses memory of a self and disappears. Imagine we live just this one life, and there is no eternity for us in anything: in fame, honor, wealth, in hell and heaven, except in our birth, and body-soul effects, the whole aura of actions and effects we leave on the world, including our children, the way we raised them, the mistakes we made, all that some call "legacy".

In this thought experiment even "legacy" [say “cultural immortality”] is gone.
A sheer world of becoming. Would you not still agree that the ethical has intrinsic and karmic value, i.e., we just don’t want it for its result? That this one life is meaningful, exactly rejecting modern nihilism and subjectivism? That the God of Love exists? And that we should love our integrated self in the universe and in God regardless of whether we are immortal or not? In this thought experiment, a natural death is the proper end of an integrated life.

So, I really don’t desire to live forever. It doesn’t make sense to me. I see my frail constitution. I see my skin, flesh, hands, eyes, the malleability and fragility of my brain, so easily destructible and how they evolve in the course of my life due to their inherent openness that makes them prone to death. I am a growing phenomenon, whose growth is due to its vulnerability and sensitivity to life and the world, and its growth to death. I am not only in the world, I am integrated in the world. So I don’t know what “immortality” really means. Because every flower to me is universal and eternal in the mirror of ontogeny (development of individual organism) of flowers renewed in each season. Because I don’t want to be immortal in my fragile and exhausted constitution in my old age, nor in immaturity of my youth. I am happy with where I am and please with where I am going, if I am lucky to arrive at that stage.

We are scared of death and desire immortality all our life. The Greeks found immortality in immortal fame [call it “cultural immortality”] in public sphere. All religions have some notion of immortality afterlife even in Religious Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism. Life is mysterious and magical, so anything is possible, especially when one is religious like me. But life is essentially based on "dependent origination" and "integration in biosphere".
To be able to grow and to become, to find my way about on the earth, I need to be inherently an open system, who exists because of its already connection to biosphere and stardust of universe, in constant growth and decay/change to the point of death, like a flower, a tree, any animal, any seed, and any transformation of one's body. It is like a cell in our body asks why it comes into being, grows, and dies, it is as if a leaf or branch or tree complains about its transient existence, not knowing that it exists and perceives and connects to the world BECAUSE of this ephemeral and impermanent constitution [one reason only, don’t commit the fallacies of denying the antecedent and/or affirming the consequent (look at footnote 1)]. It reminds me of Kant's analogy of the false perception of a pigeon who thinks that if there were no pressure of the air, it could fly higher! Not knowing, it flies because of the air pressure.

What is the problem with this piece?  The same problem with the other two.  I am bewitched by phenomenological clarity.  What is more clear, as Thich Nhat Hanh and Bin Song hold, than the fact of “naturalism”.  Look how nature is and from our phenomenal perception of the world we can see that our very existence is ephemeral and impermanent like every flower and every living being.  This is the whole truth and nothing else.  Our integration in the universe, dependent origination, and being wired into biosphere is the whole of truth.  I fell astray to this seeming clarity.  I couldn’t see the limits of my knowledge and like a blind bat insist that my sonar perception of objects is the way the cosmos works.  However, I could see that the only way I could connect and have a perception of God or Tien or Nirvana is through my Ren or Human-heartedness, or ethical impulse, or human-divine nature, or Buddha nature, and I think this is also the major message of Confucius and Buddha, rather than a “naturalistic religion”:

In this thought experiment even "legacy" [say “cultural immortality”] is gone.
A sheer world of becoming. Would you not still agree that the ethical has intrinsic and karmic value, i.e., we just don’t want it for its result? That this one life is meaningful, exactly rejecting modern nihilism and subjectivism? That the God of Love exists? And that we should love our integrated self in the universe and in God regardless of whether we are immortal or not?

However, as I mentioned, I was blind to the fact that the divine human soul is ineffable and not reducible to phenomenal nature. 

Conclusion

I have been thinking about the pitfalls of thoughts and heart.
How easy and deceptive it is when we are set to take something as true.  Not only we are credulous beings, but also we are ready to take a descriptive observation as the universal ground of truth and bring faith in it.  Read any thinker, even very logical ones’ such as Russel and Quine or Chomsky, leave alone Nietzsche, Foucault, and postmodern thinkers.  Take metaphysical claims of some adherents of Buddhism and Confucianism about Nirvana or Heaven (Tien), too excited to come to a non-theistic or naturalistic perception of the universe.  Or consider the hasty attempt of those who try to prove the existence of God based on pure naturalistic or scientific evidence.  Think about the blind belief of the dominant feature of Western Enlightenment that human reason can principally grasp and understand everything in the universe based on reason and evidence alone. 

Chomsky, who actually calls himself a representative of 
Western Enlightenment, dispels the myth of Western Enlightenment that evidence and reason are enough to understand the texture of cosmos.  One may say the same argument may apply to some followers of Buddha and Confucius, who despite the will of Buddha and Confucius, try to come to a wild metaphysical account about the nature of cosmos and de-mystify it into a kind of naturalism.  About the fact that understanding the nature of cosmos is a mystery, that it is a truism that it is a mystery, that we can’t fathom it, Chomsky states:

Contemporary rejection of mysterianism – that is, truism – is quite widespread. One recent example that has received considerable attention is an interesting and informative book by physicist David Deutsch. He writes that potential progress is “unbounded” as a result of the achievements of the Enlightenment and early modern science, which directed science to the search for best explanations. As philosopher/physicist David Albert expounds his thesis, “with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically, infinite."

The quest for better explanations may well indeed be infinite, but infinite is of course not the same as limitless. English is infinite, but doesn’t include Greek. The integers are an infinite set, but do not include the reals. I cannot discern any argument here that addresses the concerns and conclusions of the great mysterians of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

We are left with a serious and challenging scientific inquiry: to determine the innate components of our cognitive nature in language, perception, concept formation, reflection, inference, theory construction, artistic creation, and all other domains of life, including the most ordinary ones. By pursuing this task, we may hope to determine the scope and limits of human understanding, while recognizing that some differently structured intelligence might regard human mysteries as simple problems and wonder that we cannot find the answers, much as we can observe the inability of rats to run prime number mazes because of the very design of their cognitive nature.”  (Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding[2]) https://chomsky.info/201401__/

I read some different texts from philosophy to religion, from 
politics to cultural studies and scientific discourse.  What I see in some of these documents is a rash plunge into certainty based on certain limited evidence.  Yes, evidence.  We need evidence to form knowledge.  It is true, but I hold that no phenomenological evidence or description can give us enough evidence to talk about the essence of heaven or God.  We cannot address metaphysical questions by any set of evidence.  So it is strange to me when Darwin’s Origin of Species is taken as an evidence that God does not exist.  Or creationists try to bring phenomenal evidence that God exists.

For me there is enough “evidence” for the existence of God 
based on thousands years of scriptures and the elevation and revelation of love and the ethical command to break open from the prison of the self to YOU, to connect with you, and with every living being.  And then this strange and deep longing, strange longing in our heart for meaning and direction, for the heaven beyond and for the God close to our jugular vein, and a calling which is an “evidence” of God for me.  The calling is the “evidence”.  But how can I tell you about my calling?

Well, to conclude I repeat, my thesis is that 
phenomenological evidence of how things work and are in the phenomenal world cannot ground any metaphysical knowledge about God, Heaven, Tien, or Nirvana.  God comes to us in peculiar ways, through our very longing.  God comes to us through messengers and oracles.  Tien or heaven reveals itself to us through the light within, human-heartedness, shame, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right concentration, de, li, ren, and love.

I already mentioned the followings in another occasion and repeat it here. To me, the following is a way out of [self-]destruction of nihilism and opening up to God, Heaven (Tien, Nirvana):

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.  The only way to perceive the meaning of our life and death, and have a sense of the nature of our existence and the universe, is through seeing the relation of our ethical impulses to the divine and through the revelations of God. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] 
The followings are two fallacies that one may commit in this argument.  
1) The fallacy of affirming the consequent:
(premise 1): If a living being perceives and connects to the world,  it is because of their ephemeral and impermanent constitution.
(premise 2): the constitution of all living beings is ephemeral and impermanent.
(conclusion): This is the only way a living being perceives and connects to the world. 

2) The fallacy of denying the antecedent:
(premise 1): If a living being perceives and connects to the world, it is because of its ephemeral and impermanent constitution.
(premise 2): A living being does not necessarily perceive and connect to the world.
(conclusion): So, the constitution of some living beings is not ephemeral and impermanent. 

[2] Also check these speeches: 

Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E0IEyS4qw&list=PLHZGTTZG6HcLwJ6opUrf_VHBjSt2HgJBd&index=29



"The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

Mysteries of Nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54tBI7Y4K7k&list=PLHZGTTZG6HcLwJ6opUrf_VHBjSt2HgJBd

Monday, June 20, 2016


A Religio-Philosophical Reflection on Secularism

I had the privilege of living in different periods of my life in an autocratic and secular modern monarchic system, in a theocratic Islamic system, and in the U.S. secular democratic capitalism. Indeed, capitalism, with some major differences, is common between the mentioned political systems. In today’s reflection, I don’t mean to engage in political philosophy, though it carries an utmost interest in our lives. What I wish to do is a religio-philosophical reflection on the dilemmas of secularism.

These are my hypotheses: 1) secularism is not an indifferent separation of religion from state, it is an active ideology based on “the sovereign individual”; 2) secularism as an ideology actively separates and cuts off the relation between the ethical and the divine (cosmos, universe); 3) secularism is an excessive reaction or pendulum swing to the excessive self-righteousness and sectarian-dogmatic interpretation of faith, which in turn it swings all the way to a self-destructive nihilism.

Secularism as the Theology of the Sovereign Individual

“Secularism is not one simple thing; it has distinct theological, philosophical and political lives. Its theological and philosophical versions are formed from simple, if explosive, ideas. In its political guise, ideas are less important than institutions, and it is on the shoals of institution-building that American secularism wrecked.” So wrote Sam Haselby, in American Secular, in Aeon magazine. (https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-the-secular-ambitions-of-the-early-united-states-fail)

He is clear that secularism is not a simple and innocuous demand for separation of religion from state, it is a full force ideological and even theological stance against religions. But he complains that America couldn’t institutionally eradicate all the pretensions of religiosity from the public sphere. Let’s review Haselby’s article as a point of conversation about secularism. But before that it is good to have a summary of three secular systems: French, America, and India.

In his article, State, Religious Diversity, and the Crisis of Secularism, Rajeev Bhargava gives us some basic description of three versions of secularism: French one-sided exclusion of religion by state, America’s mutual exclusion of religion and state, and India’s distanced principle of exclusion and inclusion. I will briefly quote his description of these three versions of secularism.

“Take first the idealized French conception. In this conception, the state must be separated from religion but the state retains the power to interfere in religion. However, religion is divested of any power to intervene in matters of state. In short, separation means one-sided exclusion.”
“The idealized American self-understanding secularism interprets separation to mean mutual exclusion. Neither the state nor religion is meant to interfere in the domain of the other. This mutual exclusion is believed necessary to resolve conflicts between different Christian denominations, to grant some measure of equality between them, but most crucially to provide individuals with the freedom to set up and maintain their own religious associations. Mutual exclusion is believed necessary for religious liberty and for the more general liberties of individuals. This strict or ‘perfect separation’, as James Madison termed it, must take place at each of the three distinct levels of (a) ends, (b) institutions and personnel, and (c) law and public policy. Levels (a) and (b) make the state non-theocratic and disestablish religion. Level (c) ensures that the state has neither a positive relationship with religion - for example there should be no policy of granting aid even non-preferentially to religious institutions - nor a negative relationship with it; it is not within the scope of state activity to interfere in religious matters even when some of the values (such as equality) professed by the state are violated within the religious domain. The Congress simply has no power to legislate on any matter pertaining to religion.”

Finally: “The idea of principled distance unpacks the metaphor of separation differently. It accepts a disconnection between state and religion at the level of ends and institutions but does not make a fetish of it at the third level of policy and law (this distinguishes it from all other models of secularism, moral and amoral, that disconnect state and religion at this third level). How else can it be in a society where religion frames some of its deepest interests? Recall that political secularism is an ethic whose concerns relating to religion are similar to theories that oppose unjust restrictions on freedom, morally indefensible inequalities, and intercommunal domination and exploitation. Yet a secularism based on principled distance is not committed to the mainstream Enlightenment idea of religion. It accepts that humans have an interest in relating to something beyond themselves including God and that this manifests itself as individual belief and feeling as well as social practice in the public domain. It also accepts that religion is a cumulative tradition, as well as a source of people’s identities. But it insists that even if it turned out that one religion was true and others false, this would not give the “true” doctrine or religion the right to force it down the throats of others who did not believe it. Nor does it give a ground for discrimination in the equal distribution of liberties and other valuable resources.”

Contrary to Bhargava, Haselby argues that America had to take the route of French one sided secularism. Similar to so many secular and atheists, Haselby constantly remembers all the negative points of religious sectarianism and is unable to see the destructive falling state of the secular ethics, which is empty from a sense of belonging and connection to the universe and the divine and suicidal in the grip of nihilism. In the following, I will show that secularism is a theology and ideology of its own as Haselby admits it. And in the next section, I will argue that how excessive emphasis of secularism on the sovereign subject and enmity with religion is nihilistic and destructive to the soul of individual. In this context, compared to the distanced secularism of India, the critique of Bhargava of American and French secularism makes more sense. However, I will not elaborate on Bhargava’s article. All I try to do in this reflection, is to separate the wheat from the chaff and let us see the point of destructive excess of secularism.

Haselby states that America was the first power which established secularism. “Prior to 18th-century Anglo-America – specifically revolutionary-era Virginia – no other modern society had sought to separate law, politics, social life and civic institutions from the divine.” Accordingly, the theological root of secularism is Protestantism which systematized the idea of religion as a matter separable from the rest of life, a ‘private’ matter, in the well-known secularist formulation. Protestantism made religious institutions obsolete and “[a]s the Catholic Church immediately recognized, Luther’s ideas did not just defy established religious teachings. They made religious institutions profane, rendering the experience of the sacred a private matter. They elevated private judgment as equal to or above that of the high and learned, and threw religion and religious experience beyond the reach of the state and society. It marked the creation of the modern sovereign individual.”

How much this modern sovereign individual and Protestant ethics have facilitated capitalism is beyond the scope of this reflection and is elaborated by Max Weber. Also I take for granted that there are some relations between this sovereign individual and the autonomous subject of the Western Enlightenment, even though Luther, according to Haselby, wanted to protect religion from politics, not politics from religion. The idea of political equality of individuals is a later phenomenon. In the next part, I will come back to the ethical effect of these excessive pendulum swings. For now, I just want to report Haselby’s article and analyze it.

He wrote: “For Luther, however, the implications of the sovereign individual were narrowly and entirely theological, rather than social or political. Princes would always be princes; peasants were to perpetually remain peasants. Luther’s sovereign individual simply had no social or political implications. By contrast, American religious freedom, as it took shape in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, contained little differences that made big differences. The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom granted broad, principled protections for freedom of thought. It granted them to everyone, including those without theological qualification or learning.”[1]

Haselby rightfully emphasizes that belief leads to action, but his concern is that it is not enough to contain religious belief through constitutional freedom of religion and secularism but also framers had to curtail religious actions, and indeed this is his critique of American secularism that it didn’t go far enough to exclude religious practices from public and institutional domains. It is ironic that he forgets to reflect about the pendulum swing of secularism and what ethical-practical effects secular ideology has had on individuals. I will come to this point in the next part.

I started with the claim that secularism is not a simple political action but a full fledged ideology and philosophy. Haselby makes the same claim:

“The simplest way to grasp the underlying philosophical idea of the secular is to understand that its original antonym is not religious, but divine. That is, secular refers to all things that are not the prerogative of the divine, of God, but are in the world and ‘in time’. God is not in time, or worldly, because God and the City of God are eternal. It is the worldly, the City of Man, that changes.” For Jefferson “secular” meant to find natural reasons for astronomical, geological phenomena, the physics of cosmos and the earth. Jefferson talks about “secular acceleration and retardation of the Moon’s motion,” and generally “secular” meant in time and without God’s intervention (and by implication presence): “For Jefferson, Laplace’s discovery amounted to the heavens themselves attesting that God did not even intervene in the cosmos. This caused Jefferson much excitement both because of the great authority of science for Enlightenment thinkers, and for its political implications. Jefferson brought this core philosophical idea of the secular from the cosmos down to Earth in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Describing the origin of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, he gave a geological explanation meant as a direct challenge to the Christian account of creation.”

We can see that the myopic bigotry of religious fanatics gave rise to the myopic generalizations of secularism and naturalism. As some religious institutions hold that we can’t have some causal explanation of the movement of planets and formation of the earth, the myopic reasoning goes, so there is no presence of God in the world. As Foucault says, “we know what we do, frequently we know why we do ‘what we do’, but what we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does.” In a rebel against religious extravaganza, secularism created another extravaganza. It is the exclusion of the divine out of scenery by all means possible.

Haselby’s contends: “No one described this necessity better than Jean-Paul Rabaut, the architect of the French state education system. ‘The secret was well known to the priests,’ he said in 1791. ‘They took hold of man at birth, grasped him again in childhood, adolescence and adulthood, when he married and had children, in his moments of grief and remorse, in the sanctum of his conscience, in sickness and in death.’ Public schools ought to ‘do in the name of truth and freedom’ what the church so ‘often did in the name of error and slavery’.”

Haselby complains that America couldn’t do fully the same as French in substituting a new conscience, a secular conscience for the individual through public education, positively to create the conscience of ‘the sovereign individual’. He can’t see that how good and bad turn into each other in our lives by excess. How the divine faith, which educated and inspired us for centuries, turned into its opposite by excess of religious bigotry, authoritative intervention, and coercion, and how secularist schism turned into its opposite by excess in de-deification of nature (as Nietzsche wished and predicted) and reducing living beings to machines, human beings to AI and robots, a meaningful life to hedonism and at best humanism, and the sovereign individual into consumerist and nihilist. 

[New York Times reports:
“Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the Aids epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.” Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young White Jan. 16, 2016

And another report on April 22, 2016: “Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.”]

Surely there were some improvements in the fight against discrimination: antislavery, civil rights, women suffrage, and labor movements.  However, the dream that “a secular society would be a more enlightened, peaceful and just society,” in the course of two centuries turned into a nightmare: two world wars, cold wars, mass industrialization and consumerism, colonization and modern slavery, moral decadence, animal factories and destruction of environment, extinction of 20% of species, and the prospect of human made global warming, droughts and floods which are likely to bring about mass extinction. “We know what we do, frequently we know why we do what we do, but what we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does.”

Spiritual Starvation: Nihilism and the Separation of the Ethical from the Universe and the Divine

Haselby ignores the ethical effect of secularism and adamantly holds that we should persist and proceed more and more in our scientism and reducing individuals into “sovereign individuals” who are: carriers of selfish genes, lost in moral relativism, identify themselves with machines and electrical circuits, and see themselves as the subclass of dead, whose dream is getting lost in the principle of sensual-aesthetic pleasure, hedonism, and at best humanism, fame, honor, wealth, and nihilism, because our sciences and secular philosophy can’t give them anything better.

Basically it is a common current that life doesn’t have any meaning, but what ‘the sovereign individual’ gives it. The dominant philosophy in France and America leaves the individual to themselves and the principle of pleasure to find some motivation to proceed in life, but if you ask most of them they declare that the cosmos or reality is indifferent to them and life has no universal meaning but survival of genes. Ethics is basically secularized and disconnected from spirituality. In utilitarian terms, it is maximizing pleasure for the most. If you ask them why “the most”, why not only myself? The answer is whether it is not practical, or as Mill responded, statistics show we have a feeling and empathy for fellow human beings. Basically we are back to Plato’s Trasymachus definition of justice, who asks: why to be just, if injustice pays more? As the universe has no ethics and we are a subclass of dead, referring to the fact that some show feelings for their fellow human beings is not convincing enough for the youth not to fall into moral relativism, hedonism, drug abuse or suicide, and/or a desire for domination and abusing others.

My point is that it is clear now that none of our well wished secular theories: from capitalism to socialism and anarchism has an ethical-spiritual connection with the universe and the divine. Ethics for them is mostly about how to manage our lives here on the earth, it has nothing to do with the disposition of soul, our connection to our source, the universe, God or any meaningful spirituality. Going back to the time of Socrates, we have substituted pleasure, health, fame, wealth, and honor for cultivation of our souls. These are the ethical voids and values that secularism created for ‘the sovereign individual’. One can see clearly the pendulum swing, from excessive dissolution of the individual into collectivism and the spiritual to excessive confusion of the individual in the meaningless and absurd notion of ‘the sovereign individual’.

I don’t think we should go back to religious fanaticism and excessive self-righteousness. We have to learn from the past and stop this violent oscillation back and forth. I agree with Karen Armstrong in her The Great Transformation, that the solution is going back to the Axial Age sages and learn from them. We have to reconnect our ethics to spirituality. After all these ups and downs we should clearly see that to be moral is an internal affair; it is about the disposition of the soul of the individual as being-in-the-world. This non-consequentialist view of ethics is alien to our pragmatic and secular ears, because we already abandon the idea that there is anything eternal in us. We abandon the hope that there is a connection between our being-in-the-world here and the universe and God. We are now machines and robots who paradoxically have complete knowledge and grasp upon reality by our secular sciences and for sure know life has no meaning and it is a subclass of dead.

In going back to Axial Age sages and re-connecting the ethical to the spiritual, we also have to learn from the past not to excessively declare divine knowledge about all natural and metaphysical processes. This way of thinking will release the oppressive illusion that any religious institution per se can inform us about natural processes. As well, scientific method has to be critically scrutinized by philosophers and rational-ethical-spiritual insights to take a more revealing and less destructive pathos. After critiques of Heidegger, it is obvious now, for those who can reflect, that the reductive method of science and reducing reality only to the measurable is an excess and hence a dangerous aberration, and as Heidegger predicted, it will turn us into a controlled machine from without and within.

Secularism as Excessive Reaction to Fanaticism

“James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution, was an even more rigorous and consistent, if less poetic, secularist. On grounds of what he called ‘pure religious freedom’, Madison opposed military and congressional chaplains, believing that they amounted to government sponsorship of religion. Every step short of this ‘pure religious freedom’, he wrote, would ‘leave crevices at least thro’ which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster… feeding & thriving on its own venom’.”

“‘The mutual hatred of these sects has been much inflamed,’ Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1785, and ‘I am far from being sorry for it.’ Virginia’s disestablishment, or separation of church and state, came to be the model for national separation. But it was made possible only by a combination of parliamentary legerdemain and elite manipulation of sectarian hatred.” (American Secular, Sam Haselby)

Obviously, secularism is a pendulum excessive reaction to religious sectarianism and bigotry, as Protestantism rebelled against selling salvation in Catholic centralized institution, as Sufi movement was a rebel against materialism and hypocrisy in institutionalized Islam in 8th and 9th century. Both Protestantism and Sufism call for simplicity, piety, and individual connection with God. But how both of them might have pushed their critique, as always to another extreme, is the story for another note.

The question is what happens to religions when they turn into materialistic and authoritative institutions? And what is the way out of it? I don’t want to engage in historical and political analysis of the deviation of different religious institutions, but to do some religio-philosophical reflection on religious faith.

My general hypothesis is that our reaction to excess: from institutionalized and materialistic Catholic Church to Protestantism and from Institutionalized and materialistic Islamic Caliphate to Sufism, and from Religions altogether to Secularism is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a kind of knee jerk reaction which creates another excessive pendulum swing and another throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But let’s first reflect some on what real faith looks like or feels like and how, possibly, it gets distorted.

§ One of the first phenomenological (how it appears) unfolding of faith in the divine is overwhelming exuberance and transcendence. Those who have any tincture of this experience, know about its mind bending state which indeed supersedes rational thinking in that one can’t rationalize or bring a rational proof for the intense certainty that one experiences. It is a spiritual rapture and rupture. I know for most secular individuals and atheists this experience is delusional, irrational, and superstitious, as I used to think before experiencing it myself. However, as Pew Research Center polls shows “atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.”[2] The unaffiliated secular or atheists who deny the experience of faith as real and authentic are only 16.4% of population of the world, 51% of the population of the world experience it or take it to be an authentic connection to the source.

Nonetheless, the raw rapture of faith without proper reflective initiations and ethical growth, for strange reasons, can potentially turn into its opposite. It is like a nuclear fission within soul which can be productive or destructive, if it is not harnessed and trained properly. The experience of faith creates a sense of oneness which defies definition. It is usually the result of a long deep longing and prayers. It is a psychosomatic transformation which moves from a need, a desire, a calling inside (immanent) and to outside (transcendence), to the transcendental, to the divine, God, Nameless, Merciful, Ineffable Awareness. And it roams for life in spiral and spheres inside-outside, which constitutes one’s codes of behavior and ethical projection. 

What is important about this experience is that one is relieved from duality. When we were child, we used to act to please our parents, siblings, then friends and classmates, then spouse, colleagues, and co-workers. We mutually pleased each other, but if we had Plato’s “Ring of Gyges” to be invisible, probably or certainly we would act differently, because no one could see us. But the experience of faith, if it doesn’t get placid and pale due to lack of practice or focus, is this intense feeling that God can see us. This is another stage in which one experiences the constant presence of God from without.

But this ethical behavior is still immature and deficient. It doesn’t come fully from a source within. Or in Buddhism and Confucianism [even though I think their phenomenology of life is flawed without the Merciful Awareness], the sense of attunement to the divine (Tien or Nirvana) is not because of God is constantly seeing us but because of fear of disharmony and a state of falling, a sense of loss of self and a breach from the divine. In Religions of the Book, however, the intense awareness of God, through practice and prayers, gradually become a constant: an internal predisposition in which God is constantly present. In this stage, one can connect to God from within and so one becomes who one is. One becomes one’s ethical comport, not only because of fear of God, but because in oneness with God (as present, not identity), one overcomes all duality. One doesn’t need punishment and reward, fear and encourage, I and You, the duality will be over. One is one’s judge, and then judgement is also over. It is sheer psychosomatic oneness with the universe, the Merciful, aware and alive, ethical, dense, intense, and without any shadow of doubt, while one is constantly open to act uniquely, contextually, and authentically, sui generis, not always based on a kind of situation, or a generic formula.

The resoluteness here is not to get closed off or see oneself as infallible or dogmatic, though it is the very place that danger, the seduction, the schismatic, and the falling lurks. Faith is to be resolute and open to observing oneself, to see one’s mistakes without and beyond the veil of vanity, in constant resort to God, and making amends without time lapse. And if experience of faith turns out to close oneself off to the world, rather than opening up, to see evil all around oneself rather than loving people, then it is very likely that we have a touch of Mara and Iblis on this seeming faith.

Heidegger hyphenates the term “ent-schlossenheit” (resoluteness) in German to show two sides of the same coin of resoluteness: to be close and open. Etymologically entschlosseneheit drives from the word schliessen (to close, shut, fasten) and the prefix ent indicates opposition or separation. So entschlossenheit means to open, unlock, or to be unclosed and opened up. It is interesting that within the phenomenology of Heidegger, “resoluteness” (entscholossenheit) is related to dis-closedness (erschlossenheit), and this dis-closedness is related to Truth, alethia.

In this interconnectedness of an authentic comportment in the world to “resoluteness” and “truth” and “opening up”, one can see that “resoluteness of faith” doesn’t require to be closed off or dogmatic. In resoluteness of faith one is acting in truth and openness. And to be open resolutely is not a one-time act of will but requires constant vigilance and self-observation. This is the same about resolute faith in God and overcoming duality from within and without.
In another reflection note, I quoted Aldous Huxley about “duality” when I was talking about overcoming “duplicity”. I will quote it here again:

“That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases, it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.' For example, how significant it is that in the Indo- European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ' two ' should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from 'duo.' The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bevue ('blunder/ literally 'two-sights’). Traces of that 'second which leads you astray' can be found in 'dubious,' 'doubt' and Zweifel for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facingboth- ways, and modern American slang its ' two-timers.' Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy 'two* makes another decisive appearance.” (Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley)

It is interesting that this overcoming of “duality” is not to become “dogmatic” but to be true to oneself, to drop the veil of conceit and mask of pretentiousness. In most original cases of emergence of faith, such as Axial Age sages (Socrates, Upanishad mystics, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and then in Jesus and Muhammad), we won’t see that sectarian zeal and excessive self-righteousness. Why? To my estimation, it is so because of two reasons: first, they are predisposed to be affected directly and originally by the divine, and in the divine there is no sense of hostility, insecurity, bigotry, schism, and narrow-mindedness. Second, these sages have overcome the duality within and without. Ethically and spiritually, they have arrived at the level of righteousness in which they can defy the evil with good, to love the enemy, to be patient and forgive wrongdoers. For example the Quran contends:

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). Or: “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.” (The Quran, 42: 36-43)

Any way of life, including secularism, is based on some variation of faith, and when any faith turns into hostility and excessive self-righteousness, it becomes [self-]destructive. And this is what we see about all different fractions, discordance, and conflict within and between religions. This sense of faith which withers into bigotry is the root cause for a demand for “secularism,” as a hostile ideology (not only as the separation of religion and state). Secularism became an ideology and ideal which created a schism between ethics and spirituality, and a divide between economy of an unbridled capitalism[3] and ethical-spiritual practices. As the result, following a spiritual death, the unpredictable effect of secularism is nihilism, consumerism, and destruction of the earth and consequently ourselves.

05/28/16

------------------------------------------------------------------------[1] In his fervor to defend American secularism, Haselby won’t mention Chomsky’s critique that indeed sheer political equality was not also Madison’s vision. Chomsky says: “If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the founding fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to insure that the government will, in his words “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it.” (Radical Democracy https://chomsky.info/19970303/)

[2] http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/

[3] Marx questions the bourgeois conception of "the sovereign individual" and replaces it with “the social individual” within relations of production. However, Marx is still an offshoot of Western Enlightenment and his secularism (abolition of religion) is based on self-sufficiency of rational human beings unto themselves. He says: “Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." (the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

So, I hold that Marxism’s secularism is also a variation of nihilism for these reasons: 1) Human beings need a sense of connection or integration in the universe or the divine. 2) Marx’s materialism still implies that life is a subclass of dead. 3) Marx holds the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency of rational human being unto itself. 4) Similar to liberal secularism, not only Marxism separates the ethical from the spiritual, but also it doesn't have any coherent ethical theory. Remember Marxism holds that ethics as well as spirituality is a superstructure based on material condition of life. So, he suggests by changing material conditions of life through political action we can change the whole social moral-spiritual apparatus. I argue that this lack of ethics-connected-to-our-spiritual-needs gives rise to nihilism.