Confessions of a Philosopher

One book that I’m re-reading at the moment is Bryan Magee’s “Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey through Western Philosophy”. This free-ranging book takes the form of an intellectual autobiography, but includes compact and clear overviews of some of the most important philosophical reflections in the Western tradition. Magee was a teacher of philosophy at Oxford, a member of parliament in England (Labor), and a television personality. He was well-acquainted with Bertrand Russell, and was close friends with Karl Popper. He has written extensively on a range of subjects; he is never boring.

Last night I re-read a section that is a real two-fisted polemic against uncritical atheism. I’m so used to reading academics rail against theism, that it’s refreshing to read what Magee has to say. Just so you know, Magee is a thoroughgoing agnostic. He says, for example, “It is true that we might have immortal souls, though I am inclined to doubt it. And it is true that the might be a God, though I am inclined to doubt that even more. (p199)” So you can see that he doesn’t attack dogmatic atheism from the point of view of a believer. But get this:

“I have little intellectual patience with people who think that know there is no God, and no life other than this one, and no reality outside the empirical world. Some such theistic humanism has been one of the characteristic outlooks of Western man since the Enlightenment, and is particularly common among able and intelligent individuals. It is the prevailing outlook, I suppose, in most of the circles in which I have moved for most of my life. It lacks all sense of the mystery that surrounds and presses so hard on our lives: more often than not it denies its existence, and in doing so is factually wrong. It lacks any real understanding that human limitations are drastic, in that our physical apparatus must inevitably mould and set very narrow bounds to all that can ever be experience for us – and therefore that our worldview is almost certainly paltry, in that most of what there is almost certainly lies outside it. It is complacent, in that it takes as known what it is impossible we should ever know. It is narrow and unimaginative, in that it disregards the most urgent questions of all. I, like Kant, would go so far to say that it is positively mistaken in believing that there is no reality outside the empirical realm when we know that there must be, even if we have no proper understanding of it. Altogether, it is a hopelessly inadequate worldview from several different standpoints simultaneously; and yet it is one that tends to identify itself with rationality as such, and to congratulate itself on its own sophistication. Throughout my life I have found most of its adherents unable to understand that truly rational considerations lead to quite different conclusions…Their attitude is what Schopenhauer called ‘shallow-pated rationalism’” (p200-201).

To get what he’s saying here it helps to have read his comments on Kant and Schopenhauer, but even as it stands it has some real power. What he has to say on Nietzsche is just brilliant; I’ll blog on that anon!

Our Christmas Letter

Well, most of it....

Christmas 2006

God give you joy as you celebrate the birth of Christ this Christmas!

The most significant even of this year for our family has been the safe arrival of our baby daughter, Emmanuelle Magdalen. After some initial difficulty, I have mastered the spelling of her name, and I’m enjoying the bird-like human being that she is becoming. We haven’t yet settled on a shortening for her name. I’m considering calling her by the first 2 digits of her medicare number.

Believe it or not, Francesca will be starting school next year (she turns 5 this February!). If they are offering a subject on ‘The Care and Grooming of Toy Ponies’ she will be a star student. Francesca is very much like a pony, as it happens. In fact it’s tempting to go and buy her a float, so that we can transport her properly for long trips.

I’m glad to say that Cesca is a budding Shakespeare enthusiast. She recently sat down and watched the whole of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. It could be that she is actually a fairy enthusiast. Or, in the end, just a TV enthusiast.

One more thing with Cesca: every time I look at her buck-toothed smile I know that one day I will be helping to pay for an Orthodontist’s BMW.

Oscar has had a great year at school, with an excellent teacher. He must use up loads of energy at school, because, although he eats so much cereal that he was recently approached by Kellog’s to head up their Australian operation , he is a skinny fellow. Really, you could play xylophone on his ribs. Oscar recently played Joseph in the church’s Christmas presentation, and insofar as all he had to do was act asleep (for Joseph’s dream), he was a natural. If the Christmas story included Joseph playing Demolition Derby on PS2, then Oscar could handle that part of the role with aplomb as well.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Meg has been spending most of her time caring for the kids. She’s a fantastic mum, and the kids love her.

I’ve had a good year here in Bendigo. If you want to see pictures of what’s happening in our lives, as well as read my various rants and conspiracy theories, then look up my blog: http://epistolaeobscurorumvirorum.blogspot.com/

I’m looking forward to the celebrations and festivities of Christmas. May God bless you with a relaxing and refreshing break, and with the peace Christ Jesus freely gives!

Fraser, Margaret, Oscar, Francesca, and baby Emmanuelle

Tagged by Schutz

I notice that I've been tagged by David Schutz on his blog 'Sentire cum Ecclesia'. The theme is 'five things you may not know about me'. I think being tagged means that I'm meant to do a blog on the tag theme. Well, here goes...

1. I consider Shane Warne to be a genius. On the field.
2. I met my wife (proleptically speaking) at St Mark's in Sydney when I was in year 12 and she was in year 7; but I thought she was a university student.
3. In my first year of university I got four passes. The perfect first year of Arts.
4. I was in a band with the current Anglican Priest at St Bart's, Norwood.
5. I eat Carman's muesli most days of the week. My sister in law introduced me to it. It's great stuff.

Is that OK?

If Alex Pietsch is reading this, I'll tag him.

Sanctified Vision and Praying the Bible

There has recently been written (2005) a very good short introduction (139 pages) to Patristic exegesis called 'Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible' by John J O'Keefe and R R Reno (The Johns Hopkins University Press). I bought it because I had read it praised very highly by ELCA theologian David Yeago. It is one of the most refreshing books on the church fathers that I have read.

One quote: "However opaquely, Ignatius expresses the single most defining feature of patristic exegesis: the presumption that knowing the identity of Jesus Christ is the basis for right reading of the sacred writings of the people of Israel" (p28).

Up at Synod a couple of months back Adam Cooper and I, in our spare time, read through sections of Mariano Magrassi’s ‘Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina’ (The Liturgical Press, 1998 – also short – 126 pages). This book is a gem. It is a sophisticated, scholarly, and amazingly clear and simple introduction into the monastic tradition of reading the Scriptures.

One quote (which is a quote of Smaragdus): “Reading enables us to learn what we do not know, meditation enables us to retain what we have learned, and prayer enables us to live what we have retained. Reading Sacred Scripture confers on us two gifts: it makes the soul’s understanding keener, and after snatching us from the world’s vanities, it leads us to the love of God.”

Beautiful; and a nice complement to Luther’s meditation, oratio, and tentatio.

The Interpretation of Art

Here are two recent creations of my son, Oscar. He likes his art to have a message.

In case you can't read his script, he's saying.

"To mum and dad. Both of you area (are a) good mum and dad and you both are prit (pretty) and spshl (Special)."

"To mum. Dot (don't) be scrd (scared). I will be with you for mst (most) of yor (your) life."

Bids on these works can be made on ebay. In 50 years time.

The Open Society and Its Enemies

At the moment I'm reading the first volume of Sir Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ (I read the second volume a couple of years back). This wonderfully stimulating work, now regarded as a classic defence of liberal democracy, was written by Popper in New Zealand during the darkest days of the Second World War. Popper, a native of Austria, had, as a Jew, to flee from the murderous persecution of the Nazis. After the war he moved to England, where he lived until his death in 1994.

What Popper writes appeals to my small ‘l’ liberal sensibilities, but leaves me with questions.

For example, Popper makes the following statement,

“[Individualism] has become the basis of our western civiliaztion. It is the central doctrine of Christianity (‘love your neighbour’, say the Scriptures, not ‘love your tribe’); and it is the core of all ethical doctrines which have grown from our civilization and stimulated it. It is also, for instance. Kant’s central practical doctrine (‘always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means to your ends’). There is no other thought which has been so powerful; in the moral development of man.”

This resonates with me, probably because it acknowledges something that is indeed in the Christian tradition, and that does indeed go back to the teaching and practice of the Lord. This focus on the value of the individual was, as it happens, also a significant feature in the writing of that great 20th century apologist, C S Lewis. Listen to Lewis in ‘The Weight of Glory’,

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -these are mortal, and their life is to ours the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we have to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people that have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him Christ vere latitat -the glorifier and the glorified, Glory himself -is truly hidden."

Great stuff. But Lewis writes this with a general willingness to examine the question ‘What is a human being’, whereas (as far as I can tell) for Popper this sort of ‘essentialist’ question is not only redundant, it is destructive of true respect for human individuals.

But there’s the question that I want to put to Popper: "Sir Karl, as soon as you talk of 'human individuals' you must have some practical but unstated definition of what constututes a 'human individual'. Well, in your case what is the defintion? How do I know what you are talking about? Are disabled people human beings? Are poor people human beings? Are embryos human beings?"

Popper seems to be a dedicated nominalist, and at a methodological level, at least, would, it appears, want to defer the question of the definition of a human being in favour of attempting to solve problems confronted by particular human beings. This style of argumentation seems to work only if his readers agree to defer the question explicitly, but to have an agreed and unstated implicit definition of what constitutes the essence of a human being.

Popper’s apparent dedication to deferring the ‘essential’ question seems to me to be a practical impossibility (a practical impossibility, I would say, akin to that faced by the moral relativist, who at a practical level must use ‘ought’ language). In fact there seems to be an irony: Somewhere along the line, as far as I can tell, we human beings must show at least part of our ‘essence’ by being practical essentialists; we must, in our behavior and even more or less explicitly in our speech a definition of what we consider makes a human being. We must have a practical answer to the ‘essential’ question.

But Karl is dead. I can’t get an answer from him. I’m left thinking that he smuggled an understood but unstated essentialist definition of ‘human being’ into his text but that, given his loathing of Plato’s (and Hegel’s and Marx’s) historicism, he was afraid to admit it. The best interpretation that I can put on his approach is that generally speaking we only start asking for a definition of what makes a human being when something is desperately wrong (the murder of racial minorities; the creation of embryos as means to an end; the defence of slavery). And in human history, and even in the last few days in Australia, the definition of who is part of the human community is so often restricted in the interests of the rich; the powerful; the healthy.

Well, I’ll keep reading ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, and literally thank God that people like Popper have been dedicated enough to do the hard work of writing to defend the dignity of human beings, even if they have not understood that we all, even the smallest of us, are created in the image of God. And I’ll keep wishing that I could question Popper, and hear what he had to say.

Cribbage

My mum has, this year, started to teach my boy, Oscar, to play cribbage. He’s really taken to it. This picture is from earlier in the year, and shows my son and my dad together at the card table.