Missing Out
Thursday March 11, 2010
A couple of years back I reviewed Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age
And there are certain works of art — by Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres Cathedral: the list is endless — whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbeliever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment. (p. 607)
The claim — here made in relation to art, but also frequently made in relation to other aspects of human experience — is that by believing, or not believing x, one is simply missing out. One can see this claim on both sides in the seemingly interminable debates between the religious and the irreligious: the religious may claim that life with God is simply better; and the irreligious may claim that life without God is simply better. And both will claim that the other is missing out.
But there is something a bit suspect in all of this. Take Taylor’s challenge for example. If one assumes — as, one imagines, Taylor does — that on the scale of good things, God is about as good as it gets (that is, he is better than a posse of porcupines, or a tub of ice cream, or the complete works of Leo Tolstoy), then on this view it is hard to see that any non-theistic register could be a way of responding to these artworks without impoverishment. “Non-theistic” for Taylor already implies impoverishment, and if one goes along with this implication, then his challenge is impossible to meet. If one assumes at the outset that God is an ultimate source of richness, then this supposed impoverishment is of a fundamental order.
One can see why Taylor makes these claims; but I am less sure why thinkers who take a more naturalistic position should use the rhetoric of missing out. After all, a naturalistic position is one that does not need to make claims about ultimate sources of richness. It is true, on the one hand, that absolutely everything we might deem good is also a kind of missing out on something else that we might also (or that others might also) deem good. If for my holidays I go out drinking and partying, I am missing out on the quiet delights of birdwatching; and if I spend my holidays holed up in a hide on some remote marsh, looking for rare warblers, then I am missing out on drinking and partying. Every form of life is a missing out on some other form of life; indeed, every form of life is a missing out on innumerable other forms of life. To be sure, when I listen to Bach, or when I read Dante, my experience is impoverished in respect of not having that whatever-it-is that believers may have when they experience these things; but then when believers experience these things, their own experience may be differently impoverished.
And it is here, I think, if one takes a broadly naturalistic position, one has an advantage over the theists – an advantage, at least, in terms of not having to worry quite so much about whether one is, or is not, missing out. Theism implies a scale of ultimate value in which, if I miss out on God, I miss out on the very best, most important thing that there is. But if one takes a naturalistic position, one can recognise that our sense of the value of things is rooted in the various conditions of our lives, in our histories and social worlds and habits of thought. It is not inscribed in the fabric of the world. And if it is not inscribed in the fabric of the world, then there is no ultimate missing out. Taylor talks about “fullness”. But fullness is not a scale that leads only in one direction. There are many kinds of fullness, and we do not need to assume that they are necessarily in contention with each other.
#2 · Will
12 March 2010
Ah, but Robert, aren’t lots of other terms – “experience”, for example – also potentially up to no good?
My own approach to naturalism is rather more limited than the definition you suggest: not a matter of knowing the truth of the universe, but a matter of building up justifiable knowledge. This is methodological, more than anything else. We come to know the world more through the messy, careful, patient and – of course – fundamentally social procedure of investigation, reasoning and justification that takes place in the sciences than we do by sitting alone in our rooms and thinking about what might be outside the windows whilst the blinds are down. This is not to say that everything that can be expressed can be expressed in the language of the sciences (after all, one would have to ask which of the sciences would provide the ideal language…); but it is to say that once we know in broad outline how physics works, for example, then we should be cautious about tales about flying yogis (something I wrote about here year ago) that seem to contradict these understandings.
Naturalism, to me, is a kind of challenge – even if I suspect that, being the kind of natural beings we are, we are not fully capable of naturalism. It is a challenge to evaluate and re-evaluate our understandings of ourselves in the light of the best possible knowledge that we currently have.
Taylor’s point seems to be a stronger one than a caution against the dogmas of atheism sealing us off from the riches of a theistic tradition. It sounds very like he is saying that without a transcendent reference, it is barely possible to respond to these riches (and riches there are) without impoverishment.
#3 · Robert Ellis
12 March 2010
I think naturalism is up to no good in a way in which ‘experience’ never could be. Experience can be interpreted under dogmatic assumptions, but both critical thought and experience itself always provide a potential exit from such assumptions. ‘Nature’, on the other hand, is a metaphysical term about which anything can be asserted without the challenge of experience making any impression on it. It refers to the way things are supposed to be, not a methodology for reaching justified beliefs about them.
So why use ‘naturalism’ as a term to try to describe an open methodology? We have to adapt language of some kind to define ourselves in, but why adapt the tradition of scientism rather than the tradition of theism, when there are ways of avoiding both? Keeping an equidistance between the two seems crucial to me, otherwise one lays oneself open to a reasonable charge from a theist of being “one of them”. One’s chance of wriggling out of dualism is lost.
Here is another reason for the dodginess of naturalism: naturalism (at least as the term is usually understood) implies the fact-value distinction, because it privileges the objectivity of “facts” discovered by science over supposedly subjective “values”. Thus through one set of unnecessary conceptual assumptions we get stuck in the dichotomy of moral relativism and moral absolutism, and are unable to understand the nature of moral objectivity, which depends on shaking free of this framework. If you really want to avoid relativism, then naturalism has to go first. We gain justified beliefs, both factual and moral, yes – but justified beliefs about “nature”, no.
#1 · Robert Ellis
11 March 2010
Hi Will,
I’ve always wondered why you identify yourself with naturalism, and link your site to ‘The Center for Naturalism’. Perhaps you have a different understanding of what ‘naturalism’ means from mine. I would say it’s something like ‘claiming to know the truth about the universe using scientific methods’ – a position that is just as dogmatic as any kind of theism. Whether it’s used epistemologically or morally, ‘nature’ is such an infinitely manipulable term that about the only thing you can be sure of when you find it appealed to is that it’s up to no good. How can an appeal to ‘nature’ of any kind possibly be reconciled with an undogmatic openness to experience?
I haven’t read Charles Taylor’s book (I think I probably should), but going on the quotation you give, I wonder whether you are also interpreting his point too narrowly, as requiring theistic belief to avoid the impoverishment that would come from a dogmatic rejection of the resources theism offers. Perhaps his point could be interpreted as a caution against the dogmas of atheism in sealing us off from the riches of a theistic tradition, that we could still engage with from an agnostic position?
I think that naturalists and atheists do miss out, in the same way that dogmatic theists miss out. What they miss out on is the possibility of recognising conditions that are found with an opposing metaphysical label attached to them. If one’s response to a theistic context is not to engage with it because of the belief label that is attached to it, one can easily miss the insights into conditions that might be mixed up with it. The impoverishment isn’t an unavoidable effect of choosing to specialise in one view rather than another – rather it’s a limitation in our engagement with whatever views we encounter, because we’ve been primed against that engagement by metaphysical assumptions, whether positive or negative.