i'm really frustrated the way things ended in my religion class the other day. somehow my papers always spur on these deep philosophical questions that don't entirely relate to the books we've read. sorry professor buyze. but in this last paper, over the theory of religion by bataille, he raised a lot of questions in me about the meaning of objects. How man has given everything meaning and purpose and man himself becomes an object. And somehow this relates to our spirit and how our spirit is separate from us once we die that "the spirit is so closely linked to the body as a thing that the body never ceases to be haunted, is never a thing except virtually, so much so that if death reduces it to the condition of a thing, the spirit is more present than ever: the body that has betrayed it reveals it more clearly than when it served it. In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit" (40). So in fact even when man becomes an object it is only metaphorically because we have the spirit which keeps us separate.
But then I was questioned about saying that truth is independent from belief. We can believe whatever we want but that does not make it true. I can believe that my hair is blonde but it obviously is not true. This seems to make perfect sense. And it doesn't mean not to believe in anything, there is obviously truth out there, there is an answer to everything whether we will ever find the answer or not. I just can't understand how someone can argue that our beliefs create truth. We may convince ourself that it is truth but that still does not make it so.
Will someone please argue this? I want to hear an intelligent side to someone who believes in relativism, and for that matter an argument against it as well. Because if ethical relativism is true what I believe is 100% true and what you believe is 100% true, therefore there can never be moral progress.
And what is the difference between truth and fact?
ohhhh thoughts thoughts thoughts.
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Living the European life
1 comment:
As long as I am putting off doing work, I might as well spend it talking about something interesting:) First off, I don't buy the distinction you are making (along with a lot of others) of objective reality vs. ethical relativism. This dichotomy is a really common point of discussion in philosophy/theology classes, but strikes me as a strawperson argument for those who want to argue for a concrete and objective reality.
As with most things in life, I would argue that truth (with a small 't') probably exists in the middle more than at either extreme. In other words, I would argue against both (imagine that). I think reality is much more intersubjective than most philosophers/theologians would like, given that most of them need the possibility of objective reality in order to have jobs.
Kant distinguishes between the neumonal world (reality as such) and the phenomonal world (reality as we experience it through our senses/reason) As such, I'm not arguing for our against the possibility of an objective reality, but rather that such a distinction isn't terribly useful, as, at best, "objective" reality can only be experienced/understood through our all too human senses and capacities for reason.
When I argue that reality is better understood as intersubjective, I mean that we collectively work together in the construction of "reality". This is generally done through language and symbol use. A lot of people a heck of a lot smarter than myself would argue that what ultimately distinguishes humans from other animals is their capacity for reason. Without it, everything from the possibility of moral action to architecture goes out the window. This reasoning is done through the use of language and symbols. Don't believe me? Try to think about the world without using symbols (words or images). I'm not sure I think it can be done, and every bit of the language we use is necessarily persuasive, meaning it guides our attention towards somethings and away from others, and thus encourages certain understandings of the world instead of others.
Now that I've spent 20 minutes setting this up, what I'm getting at is that humans work together using language to "construct" reality. In other words, your hair may be red, but if everyone agrees you are blonde, you will have to exist in the world with the connotations attached to being "a blonde." For those in your religion class that will write off my argument as subjectivity veiled in sematics, I ask how God positioned humans in relation to animals. Man [sic] rules over them, right? How? God didn't give Adam a cattle-prod, he gave Adam power in the form of letting Adam name them. The ways in which we combine our experiences, talk about things, and create a societal understanding constitutes this 'intersubjective' reality which, combined with our own senses and reason (themselves generally anchored in the languages in which we respectively think), is the only way we can every really experience 'reality.' Ask yourself about what you "know" about God. How much of it have you determined completely on your own, uninfluenced in any way by discourse with others? If you are honest, the answer is probably not very much. This doesn't mean that God (and objective reality along with Him) doesn't exist, but that to talk like you have any sort of objective idea of what God (or any other sort of objective reality) is, itself is probably foolish.
This disorganized stream of consciousness that I am passing off as an argument boils down to this: I disagree with entirely subjective reality, because I think there are likely some things that just are, regardless of my knowledge/belief in them. On the other hand, I think questions of objective reality (such as what is God ACTUALLY like, or which religion is right)are generally useless, because even if we could prove its existence (which we can't, given we are unable to percieve it as such), we can go no further in understanding it than in combining our subjective ideas and experiences, and reaching intersubjective [dis]agreements.
P.S. Hick has a really good essay on "The Real" which is an interesting (if not amazingly argued) look at how different cultures experience the divine and come to different understandings of the same phenomona. Also, if you are really bored, I have a copy of Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief," which is REALLY dry, but makes a strong case for the rationality of faith. Oh, and sorry I didn't get ahold of you over spring break, I was in Louisiana all week. Hope your teeth are feeling better:)
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