Doubt - Jennifer Hecht Flashcards
Introduction
Amorality - having no moral standards, restraints, or principles; unaware of or indifferent to questions of right or wrong: a completely amoral person.
Believers tend to see atheists as having abandoned themselves to meaningless, amorality and pain.
The term “dark night of the soul” in Roman Catholic spirituality describes a spiritual crisis in the journey toward union with God.
There is no universally compelling, empirical, or philosophical evidence for the existence of God, a purposeful Universe, or life after death.
We live in a meaning-rupture because we are human and the Universe is not. (Should the truth about the world exist, it’s bound to be non-human.)
Is humanness the error? Would be people be better weaning themselves from their sense of narrative, justice and love.
The Earth blips into existence, life appears and swarms, and the Earth blips out of existence.
Concentrating on the macro-picture of reality is enough to make you sit down and never get up again.
Poets have often described the oddness of considering a dead emperor, or the skull of a genius: human power in life has no translation in death, or in the greater universe.
We will be happier if we regard the Universe and existence itself as mysteries.
The religious virtuoso tells us that God has meanings and purposes we do not understand, and the meaningless of the Universe is an illusion.
Doubters and believers are concerned with the same area: they seek to understand the schism between humanness and the Universe.
Love can drastically alter a rational person’s world-view. The birth of a child can bring extraordinarily religious feelings - because it is such a good thing, but also because it makes no real sense.
We may strive for true altruism, pure love, and total clarity, yet we cannot possess these ultimate virtues; for some, this suggests that the ultimate virtues exist elsewhere.
homogenous = similar, comparable, equivalent
heterogeneous = diverse, assorted, mixed
When religious doubt becomes widespread, worldly contests can seem like the only reasonable pursuits, and people lose themselves in materialism, consumerism and entertainment.
On their own, these are never fully satisfying, so alternative life philosophies are devised and promulgated: we don’t need answers and we don’t need much stuff. We just need to figure out how to live.
A libertine is one devoid of most moral or sexual restraints, especially one who ignores accepted morals and forms of behaviour sanctified by the larger society.
Libertinism is described as an extreme form of hedonism.
Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses.
As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these was the Marquis de Sade.
Doubt can be identified in 7 categories across history:
1/ Science (materialism and rationalism)
2/ Nontheistic transcendence programs (religions without Gods)
3/ Cosmopolitan relativism (as people mixed)
4/ The moral rejection of injustice
5/ Graceful-life philosophies
6/ Philosophical scepticism - questions our ability to know the world at all and claim God’s existence, from Socratic questioning to Kant’s epistemological limits.
7/ The doubt of the ardent believer
Faith can be a wonderful thing, but it is not the only wonderful thing. Doubt has been just as vibrant in its prescriptions for a good life, and just as passionate for the truth.
Chapter 1 - Greek Doubt
The Hellenistic period covers the period of Mediterranean history between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
“Hellenistic” is distinguished from “Hellenic” in that the first encompasses the entire sphere of direct ancient Greek influence, while the latter refers to Greece itself.
The Final War of the Roman Republic, also known as Antony’s Civil War or The War between Antony and Octavian, was the last of the Roman civil wars of the Roman Republic, fought between Mark Antony (assisted by Cleopatra) and Octavian.
After the Roman Senate declared war on the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, Antony, her lover and ally, betrayed the Roman government and joined the war on Cleopatra’s side. After the decisive victory for Octavian at the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra and Antony withdrew to Alexandria, where Octavian besieged the city until both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.
The Pax Romana (Latin for “Roman Peace”) was a long period of relative peace and stability experienced by the Roman Empire between the accession of Caesar Augustus, founder of the Roman principate, and the death of Marcus Aurelius, last of the “good emperors”.
Marcus Aurelius’ death in 180 is considered the end of the Pax Romana. The increasing instability in the West that followed has traditionally been seen as the beginning of the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire.
|n the heyday of the ancient Greek polis or city-state, the gods oversaw a very well integrated society.
Ideally, you lived for the polis, you worshipped its particular gods, and you took part in its governance and defence. It was identity that was bigger than the self and the family.
The polis assuaged confusion and doubt because it was something between the world of humanness and the universe at large.
The Olympian gods were not very remote from humanity. They hadn’t created human beings. They were immortal but not eternal.
The great authorities of the culture were Homer and Hesiod, poets who had crafted wonderful praise poems detailing the historical adventures of the gods.
For a long time and for most people, it would have been unthinkable to question the existence of the gods. Under the gaze of philosophy, this level of belief eroded rather dramatically.
The Pre-Socratics began an attempt to explain the Universe by thinking it through rather than relying on handed-down tradition. Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt.
Heraclitus said that you cannot step in the same river twice. The cosmos is governed by change. Everything is always in flux.
Right at the beginning of philosophy, the original Greek pantheon was put into deep doubt, in favour of an essentially empirical world.
Xenophanes’ surviving writings display a skepticism that became more commonly expressed during the fourth century BC.
He satirized traditional religious views of his time as human projections. He aimed his critique at the polytheistic religious views of earlier Greek poets and of his own contemporaries: “Homer and Hesiod”.
One fragment states, “They have attributed to the gods all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men: theft, adultery, and mutual deception.”
Xenophanes is quoted, memorably, arguing against the conception of gods as fundamentally anthropomorphic (having human characteristics). He famously claimed that if oxen and horse and lions could paint, they would depict the gods in their own image.
Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth. The Socratic method is an eternal questioning. This is not relativism; there is truth to be found, but human beings may best approach it through doubt rather than conviction.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrate’s final day has been a model of a cool philosophical death scene ever since: he comforted his friends and family; sent away anyone weeping too much; joked and reminded one sad friend that they were all going to die.
At the end, Socrates told of an afterlife in which those who have “purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy” live on in ethereal grace.
We can take Socrates’ death, at the hands of a democratic Athenian government, as a signpost of the decline of the great Greek polis, Athens.
In the late 6th century Pythagoras brought the idea of immortal souls into prominence. Plato found it conceptually satisfying. He explicitly referred to the soul as a divinity.
The heavenly objects were gods, he concluded, because they are a grander version of souls.
The idea of the immortal soul also made sense in his epistemological theory - his inquiry into how we can know things. The soul is an essence within us that is possessed of knowledge, not gleaned in this life, but rather remembered somehow from the past (anamnesis - the theory of recollection).
Seeking truth was a life of reawakening the soul to its own self-knowing. This self-knowing was what the soul needed in order to come into harmony with the wider company of higher divinities.
The more we learn - and mathematics is the queen of the soul’s subjects - the more we will ascend toward self-knowledge and universal truth. This ascension is the drama of Plato’s religion.
The process was further conceptualised as the theory of ideals or forms, suggesting that everything on Earth is a specific and flawed copy of an ideal model that actually exists in another reality.
After Plato, one could speak of life after death without recourse to mystery rites or the intervention of anthropomorphic gods.
The gods Plato speaks of in the Laws are the visible gods, the stars and planets. They are manifestly real and thus undeniable.
Aristotle’s empirical conception of the universe is important in the history of doubt because it championed rationalism.
Euclid (about 300 BCE) reinforced Plato’s and Aristotle\s idea that through maths/geometry, the world was magically logical, and might be uncoded and understood.
The Hellenistic period dates at the 300 year period between Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BCE and Queen Cleopatra’s death in 31 BCE.
The period was suffused by doubt; it’s philosophers were the original Cynics, Skeptics, Stoics and Epicureans.
These Hellenistic philosophies are generally considered silver to the Hellenic gold. They are secular religions and were based on self-help-oriented doctrines. They had remarkably little use for God or gods.
Apotheosis is the glorification of a subject to divine level; the elevation of someone to divine status.
The CYNICS felt that the way people lived in civilised society was full of falsehood, emotional discomfort, and pointless striving.
Diogenes, the great exemplar, boasted that he performed all his physical functions without shame, like the city’s dogs.
The Cynics were less consumed with humanness. With the gods gone, the universe seemed like a dead place of violence and chance and we human beings the minuscule representatives of our own emotive fantasy.
All that is left of this fantasy is what we maintain in our own civilised, cultured behaviour - little creatures holding back the encroachment of meaningless, with nothing but our body shame and our quest for accomplishment.
Diogenes had essentially said, I give up, and he found the experience astoundingly liberating.
Diogenes did not want anything, so he did not lack anything. His advice is that we stop distracting ourselves with accomplishments, accept the meaninglessness of the Universe, lie down on a park bench, and get some sun while we have the chance.
The STOICS shared the Cynics’ no-nonsence realism, engaged detachment and their advice was to concern oneself only with what is within one’s control.
We are here, this is our situation, there is no hidden other situation. One’s task is to become inured to the pain of it.
Epicurus explained that there are 3 chief obstacles to being happy: fear of death, fear of pain and fear of the gods. He dismantled all 3 of them.
1/ Death is an utterly unconscious sleep and nothing more
“The true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence, not by adding infinite time by taking away the yearning for immortality.”
2/ Pain is usually short-lived and long-term pain tends to be relative mild, which means it is endurable.
3/ The gods are totally unconcerned with human affairs. He cited crocodiles as an ugly and terrible danger whose presence did not seem to indicate a benevolent creator.
What Epicurus really encouraged was a joyous cultivation of knowledge and friendships.
Unlike the Stoics, the Epicureans tended to stay away from public lice, seeing it as concerned with false ideals, and likely to trick people into spending their one lifetime running a race no one can win.
Epicurus believed that Aristotle and Plato had one a good deal of damage by convincing men and women that the stars and planets were divine. He wanted to free humanity not only from fear of the wrath of idiosyncratic gods, but also from fear of cosmic necessity and predetermination.
The world was not made by the gods and it was not made for us. We may enjoy it in peace.
Difficult truth is better than wonderful falsehood.
The actual human predicament is very difficult to hold in one’s mind; there is a natural forgetfulness that pulls one into the day-to-day world with al its frustration and emotional pain.
For Plato and Epicurus, brave thinking about the truth is the secret to happiness; concerted and regular contemplation will transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence.
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