Fideism is generally defined as the thesis that it is sometimes appropriate (especially in relation to ultimate matters pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality and the meaning of our lives) to believe something on faith rather than based on reason and evidence, perhaps even in the teeth of reason and evidence.
What this means depends on what we take believing something “on faith” to mean. In practice if not in theory, believing something “on faith” often ends up meaning essentially the same as believing it “just because” (where there is absolutely nothing after the “because”), and doing so with complete certainty that one is right (again, with no foundation at all). Typically, the believer then adds that this conviction is due to God implanting it, even though one has no reason to think that God implanted it.
Understood in this sense, if I happen to believe that the entire population of African elephants is right at this moment flying around inside my refrigerator, then so long as I have no reason and evidence for believing this but remain firm in my belief, and so long as I insist that I believe it because God implanted the belief in me (even though I have no reason at all for thinking that this is true), then I am believing it on faith. Seen in this light, it becomes a challenge to justify the worth that is so often attached to believing something on faith.
But this isn’t Kierkegaard’s fideism. In fact, if fideism is defined in terms of believing things without evidence, I think one misses Kierkegaard’s point altogether. Because for Kierkegaard, faith isn’t really about what you believe at all. In fact, so long as what you care the most about is the content of your belief, faith in Kierkegaard’s sense has eluded you.
Consider an analogy. Suppose you meet someone for whom you feel an immediate attraction. You go on a few dates. You start to fall in love. In fact, you feel yourself falling hard. But then you pause and ask yourself, “Who is this person, really? Does she deserve my love? Is she the kind of person with whom I can sustain a long-term relationship?” Suppose you take these questions seriously and so back off from your burgeoning feelings so as to get an appropriately objective perspective. You investigate her history, interview her friends and her boss at work, all the while not letting your feelings for her color what you hear, since you want to get a wholly objective picture. Finally, through this process, you come to know more facts about her than virtually any other person alive.
But, of course, at this point the rhythm of love has been shattered. You have no romantic feelings for her anymore because you’ve stifled them in favor of a wholly objective consideration of what is true and false about her. Likewise, in the process of doing this, she’s sensed your withdrawal and moved on emotionally. Even should you decide from what you learn that a love relationship with her might be a good idea “on paper,” the very process of pursuing such an investigation has killed any chance of having such a love relationship in fact. Furthermore, the things you learn through such an objective investigation are the wrong things in any event. What really matters for whether a love relationship is possible depends on what you learn through relating to her as a lover.
When it comes to the ultimate nature of reality, Kierkegaard thinks something along the same lines is the case. Kierkegaard tells us that “the highest truth is that the knower is an existing subject,” by which he means that the most important thing for me to know is that I am a subject of experiences with a life to live and relationships to form. One of those relationships is with reality—with the world around me as it truly is. But if I investigate the world objectively and dispassionately, in order to collect all the right facts about it, I become like the deluded fool who squashes any chance at actually being in love with a real person because he is too focused on collecting all those facts that can only be collected by setting passionate interest aside.
The real truth about me is that I am a creature who cares passionately, and to be true to myself, I must live passionately in relation to the world. If I squash that passion in favor of objectivity, I stifle the truth about me and so fail to live the truth—all for the sake of collecting propositions that are more likely to be objectively factual. I end up living a life that is utterly false to what it means to be the kind of being I am—and my consolation is a collection of facts.
Consider the following passage from Kierkegaard (in which Kierkegaard is assuming for the sake of argument what he will readily admit is unknowable, namely that the Christian God is the true God—that, in other words, what Christians believe is true):
If one who lives in a Christian culture goes up to God’s house, the house of the true God, with a true conception of God, with knowledge of God and prays—but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous land prays with the total passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest on the image of an idol; where is there most truth? The one prays in truth to God, although he worships an idol. The other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore really worships an idol.
Kierkegaard frames the question in terms of objectivity and subjectivity—such that believing the correct doctrines is characterized as the objective side of faith, while believing in the right way, with the right kind of passion and love and attention to one’s relationship with the object of devotion, is the subjective side. I think this characterization may actually be misleading, because in reality both of these aspects of faith are subjective. Believing the right doctrines is a subjective achievement. My beliefs are a subjective matter, and hence believing in the truth is one dimension of having the “right” kind of subjective relationship to the truth. The other dimension is having the right kind of passion, the right kind of attitude, towards the object of belief.
The objective reality—such as the truth about God, about whether God exists at all and what He is like—is a different matter than how closely my beliefs correspond with this truth. And it may well be the case (as Kierkegaard seems to think) that it is impossible to ascertain how closely my beliefs about God correspond to reality. But that, of course, is Kierkegaard’s point: If I devote myself to this question, and to the task of bringing my beliefs about ultimately reality into alignment with ultimate reality as it is in itself, I am devoting myself to a task that, when pursued dispassionately, becomes a distraction from living life (which is passionate). And since this question about ultimate reality is unanswerable, a commitment to answering it before I decide what attitude to adopt towards the universe and how to live my life amounts to the decision to refuse to live a human life at all.
Now I think there’s something to all of this—but I want to make several qualifications. First, sometimes an objective study of something can be an expression of one’s passionate devotion. Because I love my wife, I pay attention to little details about how she moves, about the inflections of her voice. I want to hold these things in my heart accurately, and so there are moments when I attend so closely to her that I lose sight of myself for awhile. Likewise, the best scientists are full of wonder at the physical world—and their devotion to describing it accurately is a manifestation of that passion.
Second, our beliefs affect our attitudes and passions (and, of course, our attitudes and passions affect what we believe). We cannot cleanly separate the two. If I come to believe that my wife has cheated on me or that she disdains me, that would affect our relationship. If I come to believe that God is indifferent to human needs and human suffering—even that God is cruel and hateful—these beliefs will almost certainly impact my attitude towards God. It will be hard to sustain a passionate devotion in the light of these beliefs. More to the point, such devotion would be unfitting.
While it is true that a focus on dispassionately collecting facts about a potential romantic partner is inimical to actually having a romantic relationship, it also true that some people are blinded by their passions and so fail to see ugly truths about the object of their devotion—and their love is thereby rendered pathetic or even dangerous.
And when it comes to loving reality as it is in itself, such love is hardly being expressed when one unswervingly clings to certain beliefs about reality and loves them with all the passion of the infinite while ignoring reasons to doubt their veracity. In that case, the object of love has become one’s own picture of reality. One has become an idolater.
So how are we to pursue the balancing act between believing the right things about ourselves, others, and reality, and living the right way in relation to all of these things? I think Kierkegaard may be best understood as a kind of pragmatist—but not Pascal’s kind. Pascal saw faith as a betting game, in which you bet on the side which offers the highest payoff and the lowest risk. But for Kierkegaard, the proper analogy is not that offered by the betting table, in which you calculate which is your safest bet. Rather, it is that little table in the bistro, sitting across from someone you think you might be falling in love with, aware of the risks and costs of giving your heart in error, but prepared, for the sake of living life, to take the leap.
But if that is the right analogy, then what are the implications for how we construe reality at the most fundamental level, for what kind of meaning we attach to our lives, and for our decisions about the kind of life we forge? Surely it's not blind and unwavering dogmatism, but rather a habit of learning from one's leaps.
I love your work, but this is perhaps one of the best and most useful posts so far!
ReplyDeleteEric
ReplyDeleteThat there is much lost if we do not commit to lives of passion and imagination is perhaps inarguable. That such a life requires one to take a particular position of faith is less obvious. It is, I think, quite coherent to simply accept that some aspects of ultimate reality are just beyond us, and then to proceed with no particular attitude towards these mysteries at all (beyond perhaps some healthy curiosity).
One can then quite pragmatically adopt those stances, attitudes and behaviours that prove to be most satisfying, not just in a shallow, instant gratification sort of a way, but as a serious attempt to build a life of depth and joy.
Such is the case with the example of love I think. One needn't believe that a particular partner is right for you, hope that they might be provides the necessary starting point.
Might not a case even be made that the less we take on faith, the more open we become to new and rewarding perspectives and experiences?
Bernard
"The real truth about me is that I am a creature who cares passionately, and to be true to myself, I must live passionately in relation to the world."
ReplyDeleteThat is great- a true artistic temperament. But it doesn't mean that the stories & myths you make up to express your feelings should be foisted off as some kind of realistic truth, including the idea of god itself. It is all a sort of feeling-poem to existence, perhaps better hummed than rationalized in absurd theology.
The feeling is fitting indeed- we all can agree on an attitude of gratitude and love for existence.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteWith respect to the following: "It is, I think, quite coherent to simply accept that some aspects of ultimate reality are just beyond us, and then to proceed with no particular attitude towards these mysteries at all (beyond perhaps some healthy curiosity)."
I agree. Here, I think, is where individual religious experience becomes relevant.
Consider again the analogy of falling in love. If you start to fall in love with someone, what you do in relation to that feeling carries with it certain pragmatic presuppositions. You might storm away, crying out defiantly, "No one's gonna tie me down!" You might habitually cringe in anticipation of the pain of rejection at every step. You might plunge ahead with avowals of eternal love that are sincerely expressed even if (as may be the case) the relationship dies two months later.
In each of these passional responses, you are behaving AS IF something is the case. You are giving pragmatic assent to one belief or another, even if on a purely intellectual level you might be prepared to say, "I have no idea what the truth is." (Put another way, you are an intellectual agnostic but a pragmatic believer--which I think is ultimately what Kierkegaard recommends).
But suppose someone who is falling in love wants to RESIST operating as if anything in particular is the case with respect to the person across the table. This would be a PRAGMATIC agnosticism. To refuse to behave AS IF this or that is the case with respect to you and this person across the table is to strain against what is happening to you when you fall in love--far more so than were you to defiantly cry out against the emotional vulnerability that love entails.
But if you're NOT falling in love with the person across the table, then your failure to throw yourself into the relationship (or run away in panic) doesn't say anything about your lack of passion or your resistance to living life with passion. And this is why I say individual religious/spiritual experience matters.
Consider my recently reposted piece, Why I Believe in a Personal God. For one who's had the experience described there, an agnostic attitude towards ultimate reality will have a different pragmatic meaning than it will for someone who has not had this experience.
And so, while I think Kierkegaard offers important insights, I do not share his presumption that those who fail to make a pragmatic leap in relation to the ultimate nature of reality are being inauthentic or refusing to live with passion. In fact, I'm not even convinced this would be the case for me, were I to shift towards agnosticism, given my experience. It depends on what motivated the shift. If the shift were motivated by a decision to adopt on a pragmatic level an attitude of dispassionate objectivity in relation to the questions that matter the most in my life--THEN agnosticism would fall prey to Kierkegaard's critique.
On this last point, it may help to quote Simone Weil--whom none, I think, can accuse of being less than passionate in how she lived her life. This is from the letter she wrote to Father Perrin, dubbed her "Spiritual Autobiography," which appears in Waiting for God:
ReplyDelete"In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real human contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them...
"Yet I still half refused, not my love but my intelligence. For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enoughy with God if one does so out of a pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."
I wonder what Kierkegaard would make of Weil.
Eric,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the Kierkegaard quote. I think it nicely illustrates that in the religious mindset “truth” is much more than a potential property of propositions. Rather truth is a potential property of the human condition, as when one says “his love is true”, or “he is true to himself”, or “to serve God in spirit and truth”, or “I am the way, the truth, and the life”. Truth, in religion, is something one does, or even something one becomes.
Still the question remains about the epistemic status of the propositional content of the various world religions. What do religious propositions refer to? Perhaps they do not refer to some external reality (indeed on theism there arguably isn’t any such thing as an external impersonal reality). Rather they refer to the human condition, which, one way or the other, is the only basis for all knowledge, and in particular to what is essential to the human condition, namely the dynamic, self-transforming and self-transcending dimensions of it. In this sense religious propositions are interpretations, or metaphorical descriptions, of the deepest facts about human reality (a reality which encompasses all our experience of life, including the experience of physical phenomena). Which is not to say that religious propositions are just poetic. Rather they are pragmatically useful on the most significant level, for they tell us what we *should* do with our lives and with the rest of knowledge we have, and they tell us what the relevance of our choices is, and they tell us about what we can become in the future, and, indeed, what our future will be, in this life and the next. Remarkably enough, in all of that and despite the superficially different images used, all world religions say basically the same.
Someone new bursts into our world. A friend. A lover. Our thoughts about them intermingle with our experience of them in our world. We can’t see the person as others see them. Our chance to be an outsider is lost.
ReplyDeleteYou meet someone online. You learn all kinds of information about them. Unless they are a liar, which is equally possible in the flesh (hence it is *always* a leap of faith). Face-to-face at last, you have a visceral reaction, an experience of “knowing” this other person that confirms or contradicts your sense of who they are.
You observe a colleague from afar. You watch how they treat people, what sort of character they exude. You form an opinion of them. One day you are introduced, and that all goes out the window. You are swept up in the relationship. Two years down the line, you recall the accuracy of your initial impressions and wonder how they got overridden so easily.
I was born and raised in a religious context. I can never go back and encounter God or religion for the first time; I’m always already inside this mess of beliefs and opinions (I am having flashbacks to Philosophy of Language: Wittgenstein)… even if I were to go window-shopping for other religions ... could I really form an objective opinion, coming to the table with a lifetime of experiences?
Perhaps my agnosticism carries over into my personal life…I cannot really KNOW the Truth of another person no matter how many facts, feelings, second opinions, or experiences I may accumulate about them. Similarly, I cannot KNOW the Truth about the nature of the universe no matter how many texts I read, no matter how many arguments I weigh for one set of beliefs or another, no matter how many calculations or bets are made.
The only thing I DO know is that I’m never going to know for sure, yet I must set about the task of living regardless. I live “as if” heaven and hell are right here on earth in the way we treat one another. As for the rest, I don’t pretend to know.
Someone new bursts into our world. A friend. A lover. Our thoughts about them intermingle with our experience of them in our world. We can’t see the person as others see them. Our chance to be an outsider is lost.
ReplyDeleteYou meet someone online. You learn all kinds of information about them. Unless they are a liar, which is equally possible in the flesh (hence it is *always* a leap of faith). Face-to-face at last, you have a visceral reaction, an experience of “knowing” this other person that confirms or contradicts your sense of who they are.
You observe a colleague from afar. You watch how they treat people, what sort of character they exude. You form an opinion of them. One day you are introduced, and that all goes out the window. You are swept up in the relationship. Two years down the line, you recall the accuracy of your initial impressions and wonder how they got overridden so easily.
I was born and raised in a religious context. I can never go back and encounter God or religion for the first time; I’m always already inside this mess of beliefs and opinions (I am having flashbacks to Philosophy of Language: Wittgenstein)… even if I were to go window-shopping for other religions ... could I really form an objective opinion, coming to the table with a lifetime of experiences?
Perhaps my agnosticism carries over into my personal life (well, duh) …I cannot really KNOW the Truth of another person no matter how many facts, feelings, second opinions, or experiences I may accumulate about them. Similarly, I cannot KNOW the Truth about the nature of the universe no matter how many texts I read, no matter how many arguments I weigh for one set of beliefs or another, no matter how many calculations or bets are made.
The only thing I DO know is that I’m never going to know for sure, yet I must set about the task of living regardless. I live “as if” heaven and hell are right here on earth in the way we treat one another. As for the rest, I don’t pretend to know.