As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

In response to a former student, frustrated with the labels of agnostic and atheist, I wrote the following. I thought it might be of interest to others, so figured I’d post it here in case it is.

Well, I’m not sure you have a good grasp on what agnosticism is. Thomas Huxley coined the word as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, derisively, to the gnostics of the early Christian church. The gnostics were a sect of Christians who believed they were in on secrets that Jesus gave to a handful of his disciples but not the others. Gnostic in Greek is one of the words for “to know” and so the “gnostics” were those who thought they had “special knowledge.” It’s basically like “those in the know.”

SO, Huxley compared overly presumptuous metaphysical speculation and confidence to the gnostics, a sect believing it had secret knowledge. He contrasted himself to them by calling himself an “agnostic” (a “not gnostic”) who had no special knowledge about the secret metaphysical/theological truths of the universe.

So, the word agnostic has grown to mean a position of confessed not-knowing in almost any area of disputable beliefs. But primarily it applies to the theological position of declaring yourself as not knowing whether or not there is a God. Some Christians like to distinguish two types of agnostics: those who say THEY just don’t know if there’s a God and those who claim NO ONE can ever know whether there is a God. Clearly Huxley meant the latter. He meant to claim such matters were inaccessible to human knowledge and to have knowledge would require a preposterous “secret knowlege” that no one should feel entitled to claim themselves a right to.

Yet, there is still humility to agnosticism. It’s not audacious enough as to declare knowing that there’s not a God but it is saying that such questions are unanswerable and left alone. It’s not an opening for others to say they believe anyway. It’s not an outright claim there is no God. It’s a position that says we should ALL admit we know nothing about such things.

Atheism is just the firmer claim there is no God. I wish it wasn’t so closely linked to the attitude you described being wary of whereby someone claims that all knowledge is scientific knowledge. That’s scientism. That’s the (naive) belief that science can answer every question. I (and Nietzsche incidentally) completely reject that way of thinking. I think science is our most powerful and compelling mode of knowing and I think that it is a model for its insistence on method and experience and verifiability and falsifiability as tests for knowledge.

But, ultimately, science cannot answer many metaphysical questions that I think we can formulate relatively defensible beliefs about. Neither can science say very much at all about values and ethics. And again, I think there is much to say. Essentially, there are many topics for philosophy and for the social sciences that require modes of inquiry that are messier than science for being less quantifiable, but nonetheless are valuable forms of inquiry.

Just theology is not one of them.

So, you can be an atheist like me and Nietzsche without adopting scientism.

I’m technically an agnostic. I believe we cannot know the source of eternity in the universe. All we know is that in some way something must just exist. Whether that’s an eternal character to the stuff of our universe or whether it’s a seperate being is an unsettlable question. I’d rather not answer it therefore. But, if pressed to give an answer, I would say it’s a simpler and therefore less presumptuous answer, to simply say there’s something eternal about the world we do know rather than make the huge unwarranted leap to posit an entire other being that we can not know.

Ultimately, I call myself an atheist because due to my agnosticism, I de facto live like an atheist and I have enoough antipathy towards religion and monotheism that I like to express it in the least compromising title available. It is also a matter of importance to me that we deliberately accept a godless universe and pursue reframing our values in light of that apparent situation. The term atheism is more consistent with such an insistence on such an attitude.

Click video for a fundamental truth of life.

What follows are a couple of replies to questions sent to me by a student this semester about Nietzsche’s views on politics and religion. While not definitive or thoroughly sourced discussions of Nietzsche’s thoughts on politics and religion, I think the sketches of Nietzsche’s positions as I formulated them in these replies have some promise.

I would eagerly welcome replies as to the tenability of the positions spelled out both for their justice to Nietzsche’s texts and for their general philosophical merit. With no further ado, here are the questions I was sent followed by my replies:

Does Nietszche want everyone to embrace the noble mindset? He says the individual must always re-affirm himself, act spontaneously and free, without restrictions of some sort of authority/moral over him. But since humans do co-exist in societies, there needs to be some sort of order/law, no? Does he propose societies without leaders, that each person is his own sovereign? Or does he think the noble people will rise above the inevitable masses that will continue with the slave mentality?

Your questions are superb ones without simple answers. They are exactly the kinds of things I’m still trying to sort out. Firstly, Nietzsche acknowledges in a more fatalistic sort of way that not every one will be of noble mind and he is suspicious of philosophies that try to ignore the ways that people really are. The common person will always be the common person. He does, I think, talk about whole ages where a whole people might be more noble but in general there will be these contrasts in mindset and internal constitution between the herd and the more noble types.

So, to an extent, Nietzsche can be read as making his appeals to those fewer ones who will be receptive to the nobler calling to a nobler way of life that he is making. He can, to a greater extent than most philosophers, admit that there can be different codes of life good for the herd than for the nobles. Herd morality does serve the herd’s interests and so is genuinely valuable for them. Nietzsche does not so much want to upset their stability as free the “nobles” to do the sort of value creation that is possible for them as people with greater internal resources.

At minimum, we can say that these nobler individuals can transform a culture in a way that takes the whole people to another level for its having the influence of their greatness. The importance of great artists is of great significance for Nietzsche as exemplary figures who effect this kind of move within a culture. Now, whether or not the masses will be able to incorporate the profundities of these transformative cultural figures in such a way that makes them embody all his virtues and be as great in themselves is hard to say. It’s likely they won’t, but they will nonetheless be better off for the contributions to their culture.

Now the question of laws and ethical precepts are a couple whole other balls of wax. I think Nietzsche tends to focus on creating the conditions for the excellent to emerge and to be the cultural leaders. He totally mistrusts statism because he thinks that state apparatuses are woeful substitutes for genuine culture when it comes to genuinely uniting a people. Also, while he is not an individualist, he is protective of the values-innovators who state and religion will vilify as evil. The problem that Nietzsche sees the values-innovator as facing is that when (s)he questions the dominant values, he is inevitably going to be deemed evil according to the dominant values because he is a threat to them themselves. How can you question your values when your values are the judge of what’s a good answer? So, Nietzsche’s concern with morality is this conservative dimension to it, by which it shuts off the questioning that goes against it. So, he is concerned to break the hold of laws that would enshrine the values of the present. Whether he wants laws created by the coming values-innovators who will replace the Christian values or whether he wants them only to be cultural influences who don’t get into the business of actually turning their new values into actual laws, is a difficult question that I can’t really definitively answer yet.

I am starting to write my paper and I am a little confused about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

As far as God is concerned, I thought Nietzsche doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife per se, just that you keep living your life over and over again, like reincarnation except its always the same. So in that sense its not really an afterlife(because an after life, in the Christian sense anyway, is some spiritual never ending life after a short period of temporal living), I think it would be more like some never ending circle of temporal life. You would really never die (because death is understood as your spirit separating from your body for another place). It would be sort of like a book with many chapters, each saying the same thing. Does Nietzsche believe that there is some infinite being causing this eternal recurrence? and how exactly does it work, because obviously time goes on, so you couldn’t keep living your successive lives on Earth, they would have to be on some other plane or dimension right? And since people are born and die at different times, how does that work out( say I die today, and start my eternal life, but my brother doesn’t die for another 50 years…how does he end up in my “new” eternal life?)

Also, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any seperate infinite being or “other”, but rather the unity and oneness of the universe. So how are we all connected? Is there an interconnecting spirit or something?

thanks!

You’re basically on the right track. The only things that I would correct are as follows. There is no reference to a being beyond the universe such as an independently existing God. If he is to speak of a “divine” at all, it would be just the totality of the universe taken as a whole. What I mean by this is as follows: the question of “what is God?” is a question of what is the ultimate, eternal reality upon which all particular being depends for its existence. The metaphysical intuition that leads people to talk about the “divine” is that temporal beings as we know them require outside causes to come into existence—they can’t cause themselves. So, the divine has usually been interpreted by philosophers in some way or another as whatever that thing is that didn’t need a prior existing thing to create it.

Obviously particular material objects don’t seem fit for such an uncaused existence since they require causes outside of themselves. Where the monotheist posits a separate being, a God, who exists by his own power, uncaused by anything else, the atheist or the pantheist usually just posits that the universe itself has some sort of eternal dimension such that even though particular combinations of matter are created through causal interactions, there is some eternal dimension to the universe that itself is not caused to come into being or to go out of being.

This is a very rough way of spelling out Spinoza’s essential position and Spinoza was the thinker most fundamentally in the background of Schopenhauer—-who in turn deeply influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche also speaks very highly of Spinoza. So, it’s fair to infer some common sympathies with Nietzsche and Spinoza and flesh him out in the Spinozistic terms I like to use. For Spinoza, the universe is “God:” it is the totality of everything that is and it is eternally existing. The particular beings that we are and that we experience are just modes of the universe—forms it takes within the greater unity of itself. For Spinoza, as I think for Nietzsche, the universe is not merely matter, nor merely mind but rather is both in every one of its modes. What I mean by that is that there is both a material and a mental dimension to all of existence. In other words, everything in existence has both a mental side and a material one to it.

God is neither the material nor the mental aspect of existence or things but just the entirety of the whole universe, he is the “substance” in which all the particular beings exist. An analogy I like to use is to take a human being. There is a material and a mental dimension to you. And you can express those yourself in all sorts of ways physically and mentally. You can take on different modes. Your body can be sitting or standing or walking or chewing, etc. and your mind can be thinking and feeling all sorts of thoughts. You are not separate from any of these things but expressed through all of them. You are more fundamental than any particular mode you take. You exist before and after all the particular thoughts you think and body positions you take, etc. But you also don’t exist without any body position or thoughts whatsoever. So, to apply this analogy to the world. “God” is like you in that scenario, he is the totality of everything but he only exists in the particular modes that his attributes (matter and mind) take. You and I are just the modes of God’s attributes. We’re just shapes his material and mental attributes twist themselves into. He doesn’t exist without expressing himself in his attributes, but he is the more fundamental being because we exist in him, rather than him in us. He doesn’t have an independent identity apart from all the modes of the universe. In other words, our thoughts are God thinking, he doesn’t think separately from that as though he were a distinct person from all of us. We are modes of God’s body, he doesn’t have a different body than the material universe itself. So God=the universe.

So, that’s in a nutshell, Spinozistic pantheism. The connection between all of us in such a scenario, as Nietzsche to some extent accepts, would be that we all boil down to the same fundamental being of the universe. Nietzsche never explicitly embraces pantheism and so that’s why I suggest in my review of Julian Young’s book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion that we shy away from calling him a pantheist as Young does. What he does share with the pantheist though is that the universe itself is what is eternal and so if anything is to be called divine, that would be it. But I think he would reject ultimately reject the idea that the universe is indeed one substance since his major rejection of Schopenhauer is denying that the entire universe is a single will, in favor of interpreting it as made up of innumerable centers of will to power. In this way, Nietzsche is more Leibniz than Spinoza and less inclined to positing a notion of a fundamental unity to all the universe that we could call “God.”

Now, on Nietzsche’s thinking, how the eternal recurrence would happen is a little sketchy. But what he speculates is that with an infinite amount of time and a finite amount of matter following out fixed laws of nature, eventually all the combinations of matter would recur an infinite number of times. Since there are only a finite numbers of combinations among material in the universe and there’s an infinity to keep recombining the same combinations, following the same laws of nature, would recur an infinite number of times. This is roughly how Nietzsche sketched out the recurrence.

So to answer your question of how we can each recur in our own lives when we die while others continue their present lives—-the issue there I think is simply that it’s a matter of the universe recurring and our lives recurring when we are reconstituted in it. So, in other words, you don’t recur immediately but only when the universe gets back to reconstituting history to the point where you come into being again. There are others who think more in terms of dimensions similar to the one you theorized and argue that our infinite recurrences actually all happen simultaneously. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea since it’s hard for me to grasp what would distinguish all these infinite versions of the same existence. If they happen sequentially, then I can grasp that. But if they’re all happening simultaneously, how are they distinct?

I think the argument for the simultaneous recurrences is that eternal recurrence does not happen in time in the sort of manner I described earlier where the matter just keeps recombining sequentially in time. Rather than there being eternal recurrences in time, there would be the eternal recurrence of time itself. So, this would require different dimensions in which time and matter recurred separately from their instantiation in each other dimension.

Now, it is possible that none of these physical and metaphysical speculations are correct and it is also possible (though I don’t think likely) that Nietzsche didn’t think it important that they be correct. In such cases, the meaning of the eternal recurrence still stands as a test for affirmation. Is what we want most desperately to be eternal our own temporal lives in this temporal universe, recurring for all eternity? If it is, then we maximally affirm our lives—regardless of whether or not the universe honors our desire. This is at minimum our test. There are those (like Paul Loeb) who stress though that for Nietzsche it must also be that the universe does indeed recur for this to be such a crushing existential question to contend with. They argue that if the eternal recurrence is not real, we can just dismiss the question of its possibility as not at all the kind of thing that would lead us to the sort of turmoil that Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science 341.

In Nietzsche’s  Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, section 4 (Parkes translation, Oxford 2006)), we read:

Zealously and with much shouting they drove their herd over their bridge: as if to the future there were but one bridge! Verily, these herdsmen thesmelves still belonged among the sheep!

Little minds and capacious souls these shepherds had: but, my brothers, what little domains have even the most capacious souls been up to now!

Blood-signs they wrote on the way that they walked, and their folly taught that one proves the truth with blood.

But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisions the purest teaching, turning it into hearts’ delusion and hate.

And if one goes through the fire for one’s teaching—what does that prove! It is more, verily, if one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own blaze!

Sultry heart and cold head: where these come together there arises the roaring wind, the ‘Redeemer’.

Here Zarathustra challenges what Nietzsche in The Antichrist calls the “seduction” of the martyr, the false logic that if some one is willing to die for a belief that it therefore has some credibility. People can hold beliefs and be willing to die for them for all sorts of psychological and social reasons that have nothing to do with the love of truth first and foremost. A herdish, follower of a person can march off to the stake out of blind obedience, as can the suicidal, the delusional, or the foolish and easily persuaded.

In contrast, the ideal here, is not someone willing to die for a “teaching” but someone willing to make the pursuit of her perspective into a matter of fire and passion and intense internal struggle and experiment and risk. It’s the willingness to embrace Zarathustra’s insight earlier when he declares that ”one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star.” The embrace of this sort of passionate approach to life and personally developed knowledge as summed up by Nietzsche in these lines sum up the priorities and the spirit that motivate me.  It’s all about the sultry heart and the cold head.