Wisdom in Pieces

The problem, then, with how religion is demarcated from these three domains is that none of these alleged differences are as absolute or clear as they are typically made out to be. Science is supposed to be the rational inquiry into the nature of things, but we need a prior belief in how the world works to be able even to know how to inquire. We need a theoretical framework to be able to decide how to set up experiments. We may modify our beliefs over time, but we always begin with such beliefs, always have them, and are never free of them. Moreover, the commitment to such inquiry (and trust in the “scientific community”) is neither a finding of that inquiry nor even the theoretical framework within which that inquiry takes place. We begin with that commitment, and are sustained by that commitment, unless, as often happens, our commitments change, too. A person who does not believe that reason is good is unlikely to be a scientist, but reason cannot tell us that reason is a good thing.

Philosophers—many of them, anyway—fault religion for its already existing metaphysical commitments: for example, a belief in God, and especially in a specific revelation. Philosophy, on the contrary, is said to begin and operate solely based on human reason and not on the kind of authority and limitation that is demanded by the metaphysical background typical of theology. But is that true? Do any philosophers begin with literally no beliefs about the nature of the world? Sometimes philosophers will say that their discipline is about “the most general features of things” or the like, but we can only know the most general features if we already know what things essentially are, such that we can recognize their most “general” or “particular” features.

What it is about the already existing beliefs of philosophers that makes them better than the already existing beliefs of others? Why do the philosopher’s presuppositions about determinism and randomness magically allow him or her to think objectively, but presuppositions about purpose or consciousness encumber the theologian? Why are the philosopher’s starting beliefs weightless and invisible? A human being, beginning from a certain set of notions about the physical and moral world, can then through his or her life experiences, come to an objective knowledge that may or may not confirm the initial set of assumptions. Do philosophers tend to end up in a place radically different from where they started, more often than do theologians? Most people tend to stick to their original beliefs most of the time, but the assumption that a believer in purpose or design is necessarily dogmatic while a believer in determinism or randomness is not dogmatic, is just that: an assumption, and often a quite dogmatic one, too.

And finally, “art” is never about the subjective only. Art only makes sense against the background of truth, and in relation to a collective experience of forms that makes up the vocabulary and grammar by which someone experiencing the art will be able to fully comprehend it. Art always exists as a choice among possibilities—that is, among conceivable iterations of some particular form that the artist makes—and these possibilities present themselves to the imagination on the basis of the artist’s experience and his or her view of what the truth of things really is. The opposition of art/culture with religion, moreover, tends to reduce religion to a thing that is essentially a set of obligations and propositions, while being only incidentally a thing of beauty and creativity, if beauty and creativity are part of it at all. 

The Errors That Plague Our Culture

As science, philosophy, and art—and our ability to conceive of what is, what can be, and what ought to be—drift further and further apart, human thought loses its unified character. We are hurtling along a trajectory in which pervasive forms of bad thinking in our collective intellectual life are likely only to get worse, and these distortions of thought, which originate at the deepest level of intellectual culture, reverberate throughout the general culture. These errors are of three kinds, corresponding to the three fragments left when the unity of traditional wisdom was broken into pieces. Keeping in mind our earlier classification of beliefs into three kinds (the factual, the theoretical, and the moral), we can now consider how these patterns crystallize.

The first problem in our intellectual culture is the invocation of evidence as truth, but without fully acknowledging one’s theoretical framework and without making clear how much one is relying on trust and faith.

The world of nature does not simply hand us evidence. Rather, any data or observations must be interpreted in order for us to understand anything about them. There are an indefinite number of theories that can fit a given set of observations. We choose, necessarily, from among those contenders; but more than that, without an already existing method of analysis to guide our inquiry, we would never have any set of observations in the first place, just an undifferentiated mass of information. We would not know what to look for or which experiments to run. The failure to recognize or make explicit this framework of interpretation and analysis—namely, the theoretical assumptions and imaginative leaps that allow us to interpret data—is a major pattern in modern intellectual culture that often leads us to believe whatever scientists claim or whatever is claimed in the name of science, even if those claims are theoretical assumptions and not empirical findings. This false sense of the obvious hinders our ability to distinguish between the finding that the earth is round and the assumption that minds are simply brains. The way we justify the former is totally different from how we justify the latter, yet both are simply called “scientific.”

Alongside such questions of theory and interpretation, there is also profound trust and faith that goes unacknowledged. The very dangerous phrase “we know,” often deployed by popularizers of science, is very instructive in this regard. “We” do not ever know, but rather “I” know some things and I trust in others to tell me what they know, as when people say, “We know that the speed of light does not change,” which really means “I trust those who say this is true.” This implicit trust is another kind of unresolved ambiguity: the “we” in “We saw the eclipse” is different from the one in “We can predict a solar eclipse.” In cases such as the latter, it is not a theoretical framework but a moral one that helps us interpret our experience.

The second problem arises when a certain method of analysis or theoretical framework grows so powerful that it undermines itself, forgetting what it is about and what it is for.

We are told in countless ways that it is impossible for human beings to escape from outside factors—our genes, class, ideology, gender, race, language—that determine and shape our subjectivity, but if this claim is to have any validity, then its claimant must have achieved objectivity, which means that it is possible to escape. Every time someone denies the possibility of objectivity, they are proclaiming, “No human being can do what I, a human being, am doing right now.” We constantly encounter claims that abolish their own validity. Thinkers deny free will or reason or goodness, but that very denial is an argument that presupposes free will, reason, and the good, since the denier was free to deny, understood what he was denying, and deemed it worthwhile to deny. If human beings are determined by the molecular activity in their brains or by race and gender or by their cultural-linguistic inheritance, then the theory that makes such a claim about human beings is also determined (because it came from a human being), and hence is meaningless. And if people are indeed entirely driven by such factors outside themselves, then the goal toward which they work in providing such an analysis is similarly determined by those outside factors, and is thus also arbitrary.

The third problem consists of moral or normative demands that are unconnected with the set of choices from which they are deemed best, and with the account of human nature that renders such possibilities intelligible.

In modern culture, values are something people simply have. They do not correspond to anything beyond the personal and the subjective. That is why art or “culture” has complete freedom to make absolute proclamations about what is good, worthwhile, and beautiful, because art is utterly subjective, and lest it trespass on the territory of science or philosophy, does nothing more than reflect the personality and idiosyncrasies of individuals. Severed from the sense of what is possible and what is real, values have become neither defensible nor indefensible. They are simply there. 

But surely, one might protest, people argue for their values all the time? Think of a moral commitment as a destination: if you receive GPS driving instructions on how to get to several different locations, there is nothing in those instructions to tell you what your destination should be, only how to get to the place you already deem it worthwhile to visit. In the field of ethics, one typically encounters various modes of how-to-reach-such-and-such-good, but what makes us care about that good in the first place? And what are we, and what is the world, such that the good and our care for it is even intelligible? Any methodological stance, any advocacy of a mode of analysis, any activism in favor of a program or formula, can only result from some kind of commitment that considers that method, analysis, or formula to be worthwhile to pursue, and the expected results of it to be desirable. That is, one must realize that all good is good “for something” and good “in light of something.”

Some thinkers, such as Foucault, whose ideas are still incredibly influential in the fields of humanities and social sciences, disavowed the notion of morality entirely, all while making their own moral demands. Others, such as the philosophers in the analytic movement (which completely dominates philosophy departments in North America), have mostly denied that anything “meaningful” or “interesting” could be said about questions of good and bad, and have avoided questions of value to focus on “real” philosophical issues. This approach simply renders them incapable of seeing the assumptions about what is good and bad that guide their ideas.

The Loss of Disagreement

How do these three themes relate to the question of discourse and disagreement between people? Three patterns of error arise when each type of claim (factual, theoretical, normative) is not properly understood in light of the other two. Each pattern contributes in its own way to an intellectual culture in which talking with people with whom you disagree about your points of disagreement ultimately makes no sense and serves no purpose.

The first problem (the false sense of the obvious) produces people who think that what they believe is obvious and needs no argument. They tend to believe that people who disagree with them are either obstinate or stupid, because it’s obvious what is true. Only someone with bad intentions or defective intelligence could possibly miss what is so clearly there.

The second problem (methods of analysis run amok) produces people who think that an opponent’s beliefs (though never their own) are completely explainable in terms of some outside factor, and thus that person’s arguments can be ignored in favor of analyzing that outside factor. Every event or state of affairs is read through the prism of class or race or gender—or in terms of some mysterious “evolutionary past” whereby all human behavior (mental or otherwise) is seen as a function of random genetic mutations that enabled the owners of those mutations to survive and reproduce, while other genetic configurations simply disappeared.

The third problem (arbitrary morality) produces people whose goals or agendas are hidden to others or even themselves, and whose commitments can never be open to critique or discussion. They become muddle-headed or tyrannical. They do not situate good and bad in terms of what is rational or real, so the best they can do is loudly proclaim what they want. The good becomes a blind impulse, an incomprehensible given, or even a sublimated glandular effusion.

All three of these problems produce people uninterested in listening or responding to the beliefs of others. What is there, really, to talk about? This is not a failure to agree, but an inability to even disagree. We rightly lament the incivility at the level of popular culture, but often fail to notice that these problems have their roots in the fragmented and scattered fashion through which science, philosophy, and art deal with ultimate questions. This fragmentation has at its root the disavowal of the sacred—which encompasses truth, reason, and beauty. Modernity (or more precisely, modernism) can only sustain its rejection of the sacred by dividing it into pieces and keeping them apart. 

Piloting Modernity

What should we do about all this? Traditional religious civilizations did much better at keeping these three realms harmoniously related, and we can learn much from them through careful and serious study. Muslims, for example, must avail themselves of their own great intellectual tradition. Islamic civilization once had a thriving culture of ultimate questions, and it was sustained mostly from within three realms of discourse: falsafah, kalām, and taśawwuf, loosely translatable as philosophy, theology, and mysticism. It was among these thinkers and practitioners—luminaries such as al-Ghazālī, Rumi, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn al-ʿArabī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mullā Śadrā, and countless others—that ultimate questions were posed and explored, and it is their writings and works of art that we should cherish as a storehouse of wisdom, insight, and intellectual profundity. Muslim thinkers across these three disciplines—especially in the era before colonialism and the encroachment of modernism—had developed, through argument, elaboration, refutation, and engagement with each other, a marvelously limber, rich, and stable way to both frame issues and explain their competing and often profoundly diverse points of view. We need to study them, learn from their example, and continue their work in a way that makes sense for us.  

No individual today can undo the fragmentation modernity has handed us, but one can resist that fragmentation in one’s own mind and help others to do the same. In the realm of agreement and disagreement, of claims and counterclaims, one can have recourse to a spatial metaphor: think of the way pilots keep track of their own three spatial coordinates (latitude, longitude, and altitude), as well as the coordinates of other places. This image can help one to remember that one should evaluate one’s own claims and those of others by keeping in mind the three types of claims (factual, theoretical, normative), or “thought coordinates,” and remembering that no single one of them is fully intelligible in the absence of the other two. Like the three dimensions of space, the three dimensions of thought always go together. This means we ought to remember that every factual claim is embedded in a theoretical claim and dependent upon a moral claim, every theoretical claim is about a factual claim and guided by a moral claim, and every moral claim presupposes a factual claim and is chosen via a theoretical claim.

The spatial metaphor can serve as a kind of mnemonic device that helps us keep in mind the true parameters of our disagreements. To adopt this stance does not resolve difference, but it helps set the condition for people to then resolve, or at least mitigate, them. It is fine to tolerate someone who disagrees with you, but it is better to tolerate that person while understanding the parameters of the difference; otherwise, your tolerance will likely be fragile. However, if we can understand the universal dimensions of human thought that give rise to difference, our tolerance of others will be more robust because we will understand the difference even when we cannot surmount it. And God knows best.