|
Source: (consider it)
|
Thread: Purgatory: Why Dogma?
|
Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
In this context, the distinction between philosophy and religion is entirely arbitrary.
Rather, it is historically self-evident and utterly crucial.
Setting aside questions of mere inculturation (i.e., accidental rather than essential adaptations to a prevailing culture which in part will have been shaped by previous religion), Graeco-Roman religion was incompatible with Christianity. Graeco-Roman philosopy not.
The idea that Plato regarded the Form of the Good as a matter of disinterested intellectual enquiry and no more has been an article of faith with a certain kind of English philosopher in the line of Russell. That doesn't make it true. Plato's works are fundamentally treatises on how the soul ascends to its proper beatification on the basis of love. The only reason for excluding them from the title 'religion' is if one takes 'religion' to require public collective ritual.
The same I believe is true, if less blatantly, of the Stoics and even of Aristotle.
(I'll add that in Aquinas religion is an application of the natural virtue of justice rather than of the supernatural virtue of faith.)
Our society owes its dividing line between sacred and secular to Christian theology (post-Aquinas). It's misreading ancient society to suppose the distinction between their religion and their philosophy maps well onto it.
That Christianity is essentially incompatible with Graeco-Roman polytheism is due to the nature of polytheism, rather than the nature of religion. Graeco-Roman philosophy was not a natural fit for Graeco-Roman polytheism either.
--------------------
we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Graeco-Roman philosophy was not a natural fit for Graeco-Roman polytheism either.
This.
--------------------
This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
|
Posted
Dafyd, you have simply ignored my argument (hint: all the stuff you have snipped) and instead you now go on about side issues of no further interest. Can Plato's philosophy be turned into a kind of religion? Yes, as the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus et al. shows. Was Graeco-Roman philosophy compatible with Graeco-Roman polytheism? Only in a strained way, as already discussed by St Augustine in the City of God. Is it possible to misunderstand Thomist virtue ethic as setting religion apart from faith? Yes, as you demonstrate.
But none of this in the slightest concerns my two points. 1) Whatever wisdom (not religious sentiment) Graeco-Roman philosophy was able to elicit was naturally compatible with the true religion Christianity. Whereas the majority of supernatural teachings of Graeco-Roman religions obviously was not. 2) Really indiscriminate religious syncretism is not a long term religious option, because it is psychologically impossible to be single-mindedly dedicated to vagaries.
Thus the distinction between philosophy and religion is historically self-evident and utterly crucial for what can be incorporated into a true religion and what not. Philosophy is fundamentally compatible, while some practical aspects may have to be rejected. False (i.e., other) religion is fundamentally incompatible, while some practical aspects can possibly be adopted and/or adapted.
--------------------
They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Dafyd, you have simply ignored my argument (hint: all the stuff you have snipped) and instead you now go on about side issues of no further interest. Can Plato's philosophy be turned into a kind of religion? Yes, as the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus et al. shows. Was Graeco-Roman philosophy compatible with Graeco-Roman polytheism? Only in a strained way, as already discussed by St Augustine in the City of God. Is it possible to misunderstand Thomist virtue ethic as setting religion apart from faith? Yes, as you demonstrate.
Let me summarise: you make two points that I take issue with: a) the distinction between philosophy and religion is self-evident and critical; b) Christianity can learn from philosophy but not (except incidentally) from religion.
Now a) is just flat out wrong. (Saying anything is historically self-evident should always send up danger signals.) The distinction is historically contingent. And therefore b) is null.
(I agree with you about indiscriminate syncretism for what it's worth. I'm not impressed by magpie attempts to pilfer whatever bits of whatever religions seem shiny regardless of context.)
Far from it being possible to turn Plato into a kind of religion, I was claiming that Plato's philosophy is already a kind of religion. This I take it is obvious to anyone reading the Symposium, or the Philebus, or even the Republic. To restate: the aim of Plato's philosophy is to achieve beatification of the soul by contemplation of the Good.
Further, Plotinus was the form in which Platonism reached the majority of the Church Fathers. So Platonism was absorbed by the Church Fathers largely in the form you consider 'a kind of religion'; this falsifies your assertion b).
You think my point that Thomas cuts the boundary between religion and philosophy somewhere other than where we would (and that therefore the boundary is not self-evident) is based upon a misunderstanding. The bare assertion that I've misunderstood educates nobody. You need to explain.
quote:
1) Whatever wisdom (not religious sentiment) Graeco-Roman philosophy was able to elicit was naturally compatible with the true religion Christianity. Whereas the majority of supernatural teachings of Graeco-Roman religions obviously was not.
Again, you assume a distinction between wisdom and religious sentiment in Graeco-Roman philosophy that just cannot be justified from the writings of the philosophers themselves.
Likewise, you're assuming that the word 'religion' can be applied in the same sense to Christianity and Graeco-Roman polytheism. That last is false too. (One sign is that the Greeks and Romans had no word for 'religion' in the sense you and I call Christianity a religion.) It's the same mistake that underlies Dawkins' assertion that Christians disbelieve in all gods but one and atheists merely believe in one less God than Christians do.
quote:
Philosophy is fundamentally compatible, while some practical aspects may have to be rejected.
I'll just remark here that you're talking about 'philosophy' as if Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Russell were all engaged in the same activity in the same spirit to the same end.
(Is Montaigne a philosopher? Certainly to Cicero or Plutarch or Marcus Aurelius he would have appeared to be one. But he gets mentioned merely twice in Russell's History of Western Philosophy.) The concept of what philosophy is, just as the concept of religion, is historically contingent; a fortiori so is the distinction between them.
[ 15. February 2013, 19:11: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
--------------------
we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Let me summarise: you make two points that I take issue with: a) the distinction between philosophy and religion is self-evident and critical; b) Christianity can learn from philosophy but not (except incidentally) from religion.
Now a) is just flat out wrong. (Saying anything is historically self-evident should always send up danger signals.) The distinction is historically contingent. And therefore b) is null.
Clearly history is contingent. However, it is not entirely random, but has many regular patterns. Clearly some patterns in history are self-evident (do not require sophisticated discernment and argument), such as "people go to war over conflicting interests". Whether you believe - reasonably - that a distinction between religion and philosophy has been self-evident in history, or not, the contingent nature of history is hence no counter-argument at all. Furthermore, nothing follows from a) concerning b), other than the ease with which one can discern whether something can contribute to Christianity or not. If it were true that it is terribly difficult to distinguish between philosophy and religion, then it simply would be difficult to say to what degree Christianity can learn from one such entity. However, the central argument would remain untouched: all philosophical wisdom is compatible with Christianity, since true, no deviating religious doctrine is compatible with Christianity, since false.
However, since in fact the distinction between religion and philosophy is historically obvious enough. Certainly in retrospect, there is no difficulty here at all. We know that the teachings of Plato are basically philosophical, even if there have been some people who turned this into some kind of religion. We know that Norse mythology is basically religious, even if there are some people who used it for other purposes (literary, perhaps even philosophical). It is not anachronistic to look at this in modern terms, because we are not discussing what Christians thought back then (though it is pretty obvious that considerable understanding of the distinction was available even in antiquity, see for example Augustine's City of God). We are rather discussing from today's perspective what has happened historically, and what we can learn from this.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Far from it being possible to turn Plato into a kind of religion, I was claiming that Plato's philosophy is already a kind of religion. This I take it is obvious to anyone reading the Symposium, or the Philebus, or even the Republic. To restate: the aim of Plato's philosophy is to achieve beatification of the soul by contemplation of the Good.
I have read all of Plato (though admittedly it has been a while...), and I consider your opinion false. Laws, Republic and Timaeus do tell us something about the religious beliefs that Plato held (or at least about those that he thinks should be held), but precisely in the philosophical mode, not in a religious one. One could argue whether that is philosophy of religion or (philosophical) theology, but even theology does not establish religion, it analyses it. And the attempt to beatify one's soul by contemplation of the good perhaps distinguishes practical philosophy from academic one ("academic" in the modern sense). But that is hardly sufficient to establish religion.
The simple fact is anyhow that Plato himself makes the distinction that you try to deny. He does consider the gods, after all, and as subject to his inquiry.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Further, Plotinus was the form in which Platonism reached the majority of the Church Fathers. So Platonism was absorbed by the Church Fathers largely in the form you consider 'a kind of religion'; this falsifies your assertion b).
It does nothing of that sort. All that may show is that if one builds up a quasi-religion out of philosophy, then it is easy for others to strip back unwanted religious aspects and use the philosophy. One could probably make the case that it is particularly easy to source from such philosophical quasi-religion. Because considerable intellectual work is usually required to make philosophy speak clearly to religious concerns (as in Aquinas bending Aristotle into Christian shape). So if one finds a philosophy "pre-bent", then that is rather convenient. It requires though that the religious doctrine targeted is "close enough" to the religious doctrine the adopters hold true. In this regard Plotinus is a bit of a special case for Christians, really. It is hard to imagine a more convenient mix of mystical vagueness and doctrinal similarity to source from. But be that as it may, Plotinus in the end is still a philosopher, not the founder of a religion. It is his mysticism that gets him so close. (Just like Dogen Zenji is in the end a religious man, not a philosopher, but approaching the same boundary from the other side.)
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
You think my point that Thomas cuts the boundary between religion and philosophy somewhere other than where we would (and that therefore the boundary is not self-evident) is based upon a misunderstanding. The bare assertion that I've misunderstood educates nobody. You need to explain.
What is there to explain? Aquinas indeed considers religion as a duty to God, and hence as a kind of distributive justice (giving everybody his due), when talking about virtues and vices. But obviously this presupposes a belief in God. An atheist may have a duty towards God in the eyes of a theist (and God), but one cannot expect him to carry out this duty since in consequence of his error he does not believe that there is one. What Aquinas answers there is actually a quite modern question: is it OK to be "spiritual but not religious"? The answer is no, that is unjust. However, it does not follow in the slightest that Aquinas divorces religion from faith, and turns it into a mere question of duty. For example, he considers explicit faith in Christ to be necessary for salvation. The merely "just" exercise of Muslim religion would for Aquinas certainly not be sufficient.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Again, you assume a distinction between wisdom and religious sentiment in Graeco-Roman philosophy that just cannot be justified from the writings of the philosophers themselves.
Guess what, you cannot simply get by on unsubstantiated assertions either. The distinction between philosophy and religion may not have been as clear as it is in modernity, but it was hardly unknown in antiquity. Furthermore, this doesn't really matter anyway, because I'm analysing the historical situation, I'm not describing sentiments as they were historically.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Likewise, you're assuming that the word 'religion' can be applied in the same sense to Christianity and Graeco-Roman polytheism. That last is false too. (One sign is that the Greeks and Romans had no word for 'religion' in the sense you and I call Christianity a religion.) It's the same mistake that underlies Dawkins' assertion that Christians disbelieve in all gods but one and atheists merely believe in one less God than Christians do.
Again you confuse matters pointlessly. Dawkins' mistake is not to say that both pagans and Christians are/were religious, which is obviously true, but simply in supposing that all objects of religion, all gods, are comparable as entities. One can even viably call Buddhism a religion, so there really is no doubt that Graeco-Roman polytheism was a religion. Which is - astonishingly - why everybody calls it a religion. What would you like to call it?
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I'll just remark here that you're talking about 'philosophy' as if Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Russell were all engaged in the same activity in the same spirit to the same end.
(Is Montaigne a philosopher? Certainly to Cicero or Plutarch or Marcus Aurelius he would have appeared to be one. But he gets mentioned merely twice in Russell's History of Western Philosophy.) The concept of what philosophy is, just as the concept of religion, is historically contingent; a fortiori so is the distinction between them.
Apart from the point that I can use whatever concept of philosophy I want (since I am analysing history, not recounting it), the obvious answer to this nonsense is that clearly all these gentleman are similar enough in what they do to be called philosophers (or at least, to have produced philosophical writings). You can go on trying to reinvent language, but it really doesn't help your case at all. It would be wisdom-loving of you to stop this learned sophistry.
--------------------
They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Let me summarise: you make two points that I take issue with: a) the distinction between philosophy and religion is self-evident and critical; b) Christianity can learn from philosophy but not (except incidentally) from religion.
Now a) is just flat out wrong. (Saying anything is historically self-evident should always send up danger signals.) The distinction is historically contingent. And therefore b) is null.
Clearly history is contingent. However, it is not entirely random, but has many regular patterns. Clearly some patterns in history are self-evident (do not require sophisticated discernment and argument), such as "people go to war over conflicting interests". Whether you believe - reasonably - that a distinction between religion and philosophy has been self-evident in history, or not, the contingent nature of history is hence no counter-argument at all. Furthermore, nothing follows from a) concerning b), other than the ease with which one can discern whether something can contribute to Christianity or not. If it were true that it is terribly difficult to distinguish between philosophy and religion, then it simply would be difficult to say to what degree Christianity can learn from one such entity. However, the central argument would remain untouched: all philosophical wisdom is compatible with Christianity, since true, no deviating religious doctrine is compatible with Christianity, since false.
That last sentence, given the qualifications 'wisdom' and 'deviating', approaches a tautology. Some philosophers have said things that are incompatible with Christianity (and therefore false on the assumption Christianity is true). Likewise, deviating must mean contradicting Christianity. (For instance, Buber's I-Thou theology is not anticipated by any Christian theologian. Nevertheless, it's not a priori contradictory with Christianity.)
quote:
Certainly in retrospect, there is no difficulty here at all. We know that the teachings of Plato are basically philosophical, even if there have been some people who turned this into some kind of religion. We know that Norse mythology is basically religious, even if there are some people who used it for other purposes (literary, perhaps even philosophical).
Intellectual historians generally find this kind of retrospective classification dubious. Human activity is, unlike the natural world, intentional: that is, human activities are conditioned by the descriptions that those humans use to characterise them. And so attributing classifications alien to the ones used by the agents themselves is a fraught business.
'Religion' and 'philosophy' as you are using them are enlightenment classifications. The whole point of the category of religion is to argue that Christianity is one member of a class, a class whose true nature is to be understood by enlightenment savants. Treating it as a natural type is to subject Christianity to an exterior agenda. It is ill-advised to defend Christian uniqueness using the conceptual tools of Nathan the Wise.
Suppose for a moment that there were superheroes. Some people have superhuman powers and are immortal. They are engaged in an everlasting battle with malevolent beings of equivalent power. Now that of itself is not a religion. Even if the superheroes were believed to do us favours in return for tribute it would not be a religion. Just positing such a state of affairs does not of itself tell us anything about the meaning of life or the human good. Yet that is not terribly far off norse beliefs about their gods. Even if we add in norse beliefs about the afterlife, we do not approach anything of religious feeling: the goods of the norse afterlife are this worldly goods. To this extent, norse paganism is quite disanalogous to Christianity. God cannot be separated out from Christian ethics or metaphysics; whereas the norse gods are not essentially implicated in the definition of norse ethics or metaphysics.
quote:
Laws, Republic and Timaeus do tell us something about the religious beliefs that Plato held (or at least about those that he thinks should be held), but precisely in the philosophical mode, not in a religious one. One could argue whether that is philosophy of religion or (philosophical) theology, but even theology does not establish religion, it analyses it. And the attempt to beatify one's soul by contemplation of the good perhaps distinguishes practical philosophy from academic one ("academic" in the modern sense). But that is hardly sufficient to establish religion.
What is the difference between telling us about religious beliefs in a philosophical mode and in a religious mode?
Plato's statements about the gods as recounted in the Republic are not religious. There is no sense, as far as I can see, in which he takes the existence of the gods to have ethical or spiritual significance. The mere positing of entities understood as 'supernatural' is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a religious subject matter. (This is essentially the same as my argument about norse beliefs.) Whereas his beliefs about the Forms, especially the Form of the Good, are of fundamental ethical and spiritual significance.
If the attempt to attain beatification by contemplation of the Good is not sufficient to count as religion what more is required?
quote:
Aquinas indeed considers religion as a duty to God, and hence as a kind of distributive justice (giving everybody his due), when talking about virtues and vices. But obviously this presupposes a belief in God. An atheist may have a duty towards God in the eyes of a theist (and God), but one cannot expect him to carry out this duty since in consequence of his error he does not believe that there is one. What Aquinas answers there is actually a quite modern question: is it OK to be "spiritual but not religious"? The answer is no, that is unjust. However, it does not follow in the slightest that Aquinas divorces religion from faith, and turns it into a mere question of duty. For example, he considers explicit faith in Christ to be necessary for salvation. The merely "just" exercise of Muslim religion would for Aquinas certainly not be sufficient.
Indeed, for Aquinas the exercise of a merely natural religion is not salvific. The point is that Aquinas does not arrange these topics according to modern conceptual categories. Aquinas believes that monotheism and the duty of worship of God belong to the natural virtues. To a modern, those fall under religion. But Aquinas also believes that those duties are of no salvific value. (Further, he would argue that pagan idolatry is unconnected to the exercise of the relevant virtues.) And to modern categories religion is largely about seeking salvation. Aquinas' understanding of where the boundaries lie is simply different from ours.
quote:
Dawkins' mistake is not to say that both pagans and Christians are/were religious, which is obviously true, but simply in supposing that all objects of religion, all gods, are comparable as entities. One can even viably call Buddhism a religion, so there really is no doubt that Graeco-Roman polytheism was a religion. Which is - astonishingly - why everybody calls it a religion. What would you like to call it?
I believe the traditional Christian description would be 'idolatry'. I suppose the conceptual resources of modern English are such that we have to resort to contrasts such as 'rationalised' or 'higher' or 'postaxial' etc religion and 'unrationalised' or 'lower' or 'preaxial' etc religion. (All of those qualifications are open to criticism in different ways.)
The major point is that almost every reason for calling Graeco-Roman religion does not apply to Buddhism as such (although Tibetan Buddhism may come close), and vice versa. The only thing they have in common is that the principles of post-enlightenment liberal capitalist society treat them as holding the same role as Christianity.
quote:
Apart from the point that I can use whatever concept of philosophy I want (since I am analysing history, not recounting it), the obvious answer to this nonsense is that clearly all these gentleman are similar enough in what they do to be called philosophers (or at least, to have produced philosophical writings).
What all the gentlemen I cited (apart from Montaigne) have in common is that their writings can be adopted to the modern academic study of philosophy as understood by Russell. But Christians would be ill-advised I think to take Russell's understanding of philosophy or anything else as definitive. The point is that the classification of them all as philosophers is a subjective classification based on the purposes of the modern academy, rather than an objective classification that reveals anything useful about the writers themselves. At best, the resemblance is a family resemblance.
--------------------
we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view
