Thoughts on Death, Christianity, and Nietzsche

Nietzsche criticizes Christians for being magnetically drawn to suffering and death, arguing that in longing for another world, Christians are giving up the will to life and actually willing death.

I was on a plane yesterday and I couldn't help but think of this. I always get those jittery feelings in my stomach during take-off and brace myself for the possibility of a crash ending in death (this is bizarre, I know...). Anyway, I went through the usual argument I put forth for myself on airplanes-- that I cannot rationally fear death because it opens the door to life in heaven, and heaven is essentially infinitely better than life here (that's the defeater for "fomo": fear of missing out). But I stopped myself in the middle of my premises this time, because Nietzsche, who has moved in to the upstairs of my brain recently, said that I was willing death for myself. My relationship with Nietzsche is a strange one; I really appreciate his criticisms of Christians because I think they are largely right, but I'm also constantly trying to explain and defend real Christianity to him, because most of the time it doesn't really conflict with what he's saying.

So am I willing death by desiring heaven? I'm going to argue no. There are two reasons for this: first, if I believe what Jesus said about the importance of sharing the gospel, then my life on earth has a mission with high stakes, and second, there is an aspect of being human and being fallen that makes for a different knowledge of God than the angels have.

The first point refers to the great commision, when Jesus says, "Go and make disciples of all nations." We are meant to tell the millions of people who don't know God about Him. If we don't, if we really will to die, salvation terminates with this small group of Christians who believe right now, and we are essentially willing the eternal death of the rest of the world. Jesus Himself demonstrates the importance of an earthly life with His coming down into the world and spending time revealing the Father to men. Teachers spend time in the classroom not to relearn the material, but to pass it on, and they value time in the classroom because presumably they realize that they are the best medium for the transfer of vital information. If everyone who had an education went on to his or her own trade or field and no one went into teaching, we would lose the chance of education for younger generations all together, and that's absurd. So we stay on earth while we can; we will our own lives, because we realize that we are teachers and what we're teaching the whole entire world desperately needs.

Secondly, and I'm not as sure that this one holds up such that it could stand alone as a reason, we relate to God differently as fallen beings than as perfect ones. The longer I live, the more aware I become of my own wretchedness, to put it bluntly. Even if I am trying to become a better person, the harder I try, the more I realize how deeply sunk I am and how far I have to go to really "be better." It's like going to the hospital for a headache and the doctor telling you that you have a brain tumor; it doesn't preclude your chances of getting well but it definitely makes the process harder.

More on Relations

As I was reading Chisolm's "The Myth of the Given" today, I stumbled upon another reason for thinking that properties are relations. Part of Chisolm's argument validating self-justified beliefs actually included an attempt to rule out the necessity of relating things to other things outside themselves. He says:

"Common to both 'pragmatism' and 'idealism' ... is the view that to think about a thing, or to interpret or conceptualize it, and hence to have a belief about it, is essentially to relate the thing to other things, actual or possible, and therefore to 'refer beyond it.' It is this view which we must oppose..." (Chisolm in Sosa's Epistemology Anthology, 89)

Chisolm tries to establish that these relations only come up when we state the belief aloud; for instance, once I say "this appears white," then I am implying references to things like other people using the word "white" for the same experience, other events which cause statements about "white," etc. So, he says, the relations expressed in justification do not really matter for a person's belief about the experience of being appeared to whitely.

This seems intuitively refutable, because I learn to define by distinguishing. I learn what white is by distinguishing it from other colors. The content of my beliefs and knowledge (I actually don't think I have any of the real stuff at this point), entail these relations. My feeling a smooth surface necessarily involves my body and the surface, if I hear birds outside the window there must be both birds and air in which the sound can travel and ears or some sort of mechanism for the hearer. When I see green, there is not only my perception of green- there is me, the light, and the surface instantiating the green. Nothing comes in isolation. At least I think not... but then we must posit God as at least two persons.

Whether claims of knowledge with low epistemic standards are bullshit.

I was joking with Gideon yesterday about epistemic standards of knowledge and he made a claim that he knew I would do well on my philosophy of religion paper. I argued that he had insufficient justification to claim that knowledge. There was certain evidence inaccessible to him at the time he asserted that I would do well-- he was unaware that I would try to stay up all night and so the end of my paper would be reflective of my exhaustion, he was unaware of the cat at Diane's house distracting us, and perhaps he is generally unaware that although in class I may sound like I have coherent thoughts, my paper writing skills are less than impressive. Is Gideon's statement that he knows I'll do well on my paper "bullshit"?

My intuitions said it was precisely the kind of corner-cutting Frankfurt describes in the example of the modern architect up against the architect of Notre Dame cathedral. He puts up a grand statement, much like an aesthetically pleasing building, without studying the details, analogous to learning the trade of building-making. So Gideon's statement is bullshit (no offense, friend :) ).

But Gideon has come back with this reply: while his epistemic standards for knowledge are low, he is still respecting some sort of justification scheme for knowledge, whereas true bullshit has absolutely no regard for the truth. So on this view, Gideon would have to tell me something with misleading implicatures for it to be bullshit.

Kenoticism, Relational Essence, and the Mutability of God

I've been reading about Kenotic Christology this weekend, the view that in coming to earth, Jesus emptied Himself of certain attributes like omnipotence, omniscience- those things which are incompatible with human existence. Defining divinity proves to be a difficult task for kenoticism, because if Christ is really fully divine but at the same time has really emptied Himself of powers we usually associate with divine attributes, either we must concede that Christ is not fully divine, or we must modify those attributes which we call "divine."

I think the latter makes a lot of sense- for instance, to say that the divine attribute "omnipotence" must be understood as possibly self-limiting. If Jesus does not express His omnipotence while human, but lays it aside in an act of self-limitation, then perhaps preserving His divinity means tweaking the definition of being "all powerful" to something like this: God is all-powerful except when He limits His own power.

Obviously this has implications for what we have traditionally called the "immutability" of God; if God can put aside His omnipotence for a time and then re-assume it, doesn't this signal change within God? Aquinas, addressing God's changelessness, says, "Because God understands and loves Himself, in that respect they said that God moves Himself; not, however, as movement and change belong to a thing existing in potentiality, as we now speak of change and movement" (Prima Pars, Q. 9, Art. 1). So if God is moving Himself maybe this does not represent a true change in potential within God. I'm not so convinced this works, though, because in Jesus it still looks like His omnipotence is hovering in a potential rather than actual state. Which is okay, because kenoticists gladly grant the changeability in God.

Here's another interesting move prompted by Aquinas: if the divine essence is a relation between persons of the trinity, then Jesus' self limitation may be a temporary change of His attributes, but one which does not change the relation of Father to Son and Spirit to Son and Father to Spirit which is the divine essence. In Article 1, Question 39 of the Prima Pars, Aquinas discusses distinctions between persons of the Trinity but concedes that the divine essence is a relation:

"in creatures relations are accidental, whereas in God they are the divine essence itself. Thence it follows that in God essence is not really distinct from person, and yet that the persons are really distinguished from each other. For person signifies relation as subsisting in the divine nature."

So a distinction between the Father and the Son in terms of the actuality of their omnipotence would not be problem for divine attributes which kenoticism would have to solve; instead, the kenoticist could say that the attributes which Christ gives up in self-limitation do not rob Him of any divinity, because divinity is that relation between Christ and the other persons of the trinity which is not altered by His coming to earth as a man.

Enter Hans Urs von Balthasar: in his book on the descent of Christ into hell, he argues that on "Holy Saturday" Christ was really forsaken by the Father. Writing on von Balthasar, Edward T. Oakes argues that we cannot ignore "the transformation inside the Godhead itself that occurred when the Son of God descended as a dead man to be among the dead" (Oakes, "He descended into hell: The Depths of God's Self-Emptying Love on Holy Saturday in the Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar" 238). If von Balthasar is right and Holy Saturday was a real event of "Godforsakenness" inside the Trinity, then we are still forced to concede the mutability of God even under Aquinas' conception of divine essence.

Humility and Grace

A friend once told me that she did philosophy because it cultivates the virtues of humility and grace. I hope this is true.

Today was a strange experience for me, perhaps a crux in my education. Two of the most brilliant scholars and interesting people I know sat with me at a table and raised pressing questions about the various books I elected to read on account of their timelessness and renown. Seeking to elicit more than a general knowledge of the texts, they led me up to the crossroads where authors and characters and ideas and eras meet and asked me to describe the ground upon which we were standing... the terrain from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas a Kempis, the birthplace of Medea and the distance between Euripedes' account of feminism and the feminist culture of today, the characteristics of the middle ground on which Ovid and Chaucer stand... I'm still hacking my way through the brush on whether or not Chesterton's critique of the suicide of thought is fair to Nietzsche.

My habits of mind still lack rigor and vibrancy and capacity to ignite light bulbs between thoughts. I left the room feeling like a kindergarten graduate in a world full of highschoolers. I am so grateful to have their company and for their willingness to prod me along until I learn to walk at their speed. My education has only just begun.

Why We Are Philosophers

I'm hesitant to post this for fear of sounding like a starry-eyed undergrad or a pedantic moralizer who thinks there are still remnants of human telos to be arrived at. But from a recent conversation with a friend who's also shaking in her boots about graduate school, I have hope that I am not alone here... so, here goes:

I was recently startled when I heard the criteria which graduate schools in Philosophy are now in the habit of using to select their students. In fact, if I had walked into the room five minutes in to one of these conversations and perhaps been confused of my whereabouts, the items on this list of criteria would have assured me that I had accidentally walked into the University's business school.

Not to be nitpicky or idealistic or naïve, but Philosophy must be wary of functioning like an ordinary trade. To hear Philosophers talk of “marketability” and “tenure-track jobs” with such gravity raises the army of hairs on my skin (I’m talking here about non-utilitarian and non-consequentialist philosophers). Of course, the Philosopher should not be wise in some ethereal sense and a complete buffoon on the streets; but to have spent one’s entire life searching for “wisdom,” and come out living as ordinarily as one’s neighbor with a bachelor’s in entrepreneurship smells fishy—and that rotten scent stirs up serious doubt in me concerning the current real work being done in Philosophy.

Now from the inside, or at least the 7th or 8th concentric circle from the core, I am confident that good work is taking place in Philosophy. The last three Philosophers I recently heard giving lectures all acknowledged that they spent years of study in another trade before realizing that their heads were always in books of another sort, that is to say, substantive books that answer questions better than anyone in their laboratories or factories ever could. That says to me first, that some Philosophers are writing work of import for real human life, second, that a good handful of current Philosophers stepped on the path with a genuine motive to pursue wisdom, and third, that they’ve found the practice of Philosophy worth sharing with both the contemporary public and future generations. These are three evidences that we have grounds for hope.

I return, though, to my critique. Once upon a time, (and this part matters only so long as you are not a presentist or physicalist), we fell in love with learning. Looking back as the sophisticated minds with which we are now identical, we may not describe it that way, but at some point we clearly all took the road untraveled by our peers and locked ourselves in our rooms and read or wrote or researched for hours. Maybe it was an entirely intellectual falling-in-love, reflectively endorsed by reason at each step; perhaps it was a perpetual parched feeling in the throat of the mind; or a subconscious “why” that no one weeded out of your two-year-old self, naturally and gallingly curious. At any rate, somewhere we all committed to this vague concept of a quest to “figure things out,” instead of making millions—because if there is any logician in you, and I assume there is, you know that you could drop the beleaguered life of the mind and channel your genius to get rich quick. And furthermore, we probably fell in love with some philosopher, reading his or her book late into the night, falling asleep with it in arms rather than letting it go to the bedside table like all the rest.

The way one was drawn down the path of philosophical inquiry was by some teacher—be it daimon or author or roommate or professor. And Socrates, on the other side of that, chose the pupils which he dragged along his dialogue; instead of a premed weed-out class, he perhaps carefully watched to see who made it through the entire argument about pastry-baking. And Plato chose Aristotle and Bentham chose Mill and Rawls chose Korsgaard, and so on. My professors continually encourage me to find a Philosopher in particular under whom I’d like to work; but why are schools not taking this into primary order consideration? The admissions committees which appear to be looking for product-producing, prolific students over those whom they wish to bring up in the field are comprised of Philosophers—the ones (again, utilitarians, please pay no attention here) who should be taking very seriously to whom they want to hand the baton.

I recognize that this is a new age, that Philosophy is not what it was fifty years ago, much less two thousand years ago. But I appeal to the Philosopher in each of us that fell in love with doing what we do, and ask that we consider that the nature of our field is such that it should differ from (dare I say supersede) all other branches of education, because we are the truth-seekers, we are the culture shapers and the culture analysts, we are the miners sweaty and grimy from digging through the rubble and the archeologists trying to piece back together a fragmented history and a confused picture of humanity. So let us create, rather than conform to, the culture of our day; perhaps evaluate its capitalistic drive before altogether acting as though we are capitalists, and hearken back to why we are Philosophers.

David Solomon 9-25-09

Dr. David Solomon, director of the center for ethics at the University of Notre Dame, came to Baylor and delivered a lecture on "The Moral Troubles of Medicine" which both enlightened and disturbed me.

Enlightened, because his analysis of contemporary medicine illuminated some roots of key ethical dilemmas we're facing today, such as "when does life begin and end?" and "what is the appropriate role of the doctor in a doctor-patient relationship?" Solomon pointed out that with the leaps and bounds medicine took in the 20th century, our association of health with the good life rocketed through the roof-- other values we thought necessary for the good life were "grabbed up" by medicine. Solomon, taking us back to the "old days," reminded us of the time when the kids who sat in the back of the class and use their pencils and paper as airborne weapons to launch at their fellow students used to be smacked with a paddle. Now we diagnose them with attention defecit and send them to the nurse for drugs. The anecdote is laughable, but all too true.

This week, Nietzsche seems to be following me around everywhere I go! Surely when he proposed health and sickness as new standards of value he did not intend to limit this to physical health. But when scientific breakthroughs offer medical solutions to human problems as basic as depression, behavioral issues, when we have labeled the alcoholic as "diseased," it's clear that health has trumped the other values on our "wanted" list. We've jumped at the chance to secure the good life for ourselves by means of surefire, empirically tested methods.

But this puts an enormous amount of pressure on doctors; the doctor-patient relationship is continually corroded by the lopsided moral dependency of the patient on the diagnoser. Doctors, Solomon says, have taken the place of religious figures in our personal lives; we expect them not only to prescribe us with the right meds but to tell us whether we should take them or not. (Hello, moral ought. Welcome to Hillcrest Medical Hospital. Dr. Jones will be taking care of you today.)

Doctors, in turn, are fleeing this weighty responsibility, one which they have in no way been trained to carry. Med school classes don't make sure every obstetrician reads Peter Singer on the status of a fetus before she graduates. My friend's mom's oncologist did not want to make the call on whether after two years of chemotherapy beating up her body and producing few desired results, she should try a new drug or accept that her time had come.

This affects liberal democracy (or perhaps liberal democracy affects it), argues Solomon, because we are committed to the "membership" property. All members of our society have unalienable rights to happiness and unquestionable dignity; so who's in and who's out? Once we start questioning who merits membership, we all feel threatened; if the elderly lady down the street is "useless" and a "burden" on society (utilitarians and consequentialists ike Peter Singer and Michael Tooley are actually claiming this, not a joke...), then at what age will I be like her and be thrown out of the club? The prestige of medicine, says Solomon, can lead us t other confusions of value. The strong man trumps the weak. The net product of a country of healthy citizens is greater than the net value of a country with large populations of elderly, indigents, babies...Nietzsche, meet capitalism.

Solomon argues that we need an arena for all members of the community to come together and have meaningful discussion on these basic ethical issues in place of lugging the sack of them into our doctors' offices and hospitals. What do we want? What do we need for human flourishing? Dr. Solomon suggests that the philosophy of psychology Anscombe called for to pave the way for a fresh look at ethics has been done in the last 50 years-- perhaps we are ready to start recovering moral philosophy.