Choosing Existence over Possibility

(This post relates in some manner to my other recent post Siding in Favor of Existence as a Problem.  I hope to return to this topic by means of these reflections, as well as the discussion of understanding the question concerning why there is something rather than nothing.)

   Recently, while reading Part I of Either/Or, I was considering what it is ultimately pulls us out of our life of possibilities into the world we often call the actual, or existing world.  There are clear advantages to a life in the possible: I can construct any story I wish, follow the paths of different lives, skip what's not interesting, change elements of my life on a whim, and many other obvious things.  However, we choose to emphasize the world which appears to us apart from our imagining and projecting, and tend towards using this as a standard for organizing our life.  

   From just noting that the actual world does appear to us is not enough to show that we must, even always do, organize our life exclusively around it: sometimes we think through the possibilities available to us to decide what to do, and even when we do not see how these possibilities relate to our current situation, we can understand from them how it is we want to advance in any circumstances.

   It is clear that we require empirical concepts for our projections of possibility, and so possibility must at least take their standard from the world so far as it will project particular possibilities, however, at some point could we simply begin to rank and prioritize the possible over the existent, even when it leads to our doom in the world of existence?  Perhaps we can, but I do not mean to try to develop a view to convince anyone to pursue this goal, but I am interested at least in why it is that the existent continually pulls us back in, not because these things are not obvious in their own way, but because it is important to get clearer on them, and their central role in determining our orientation to life.

   (We could just as well consider how even though we tend towards emphasizing existence, we sometimes are called out into the possibilities and emphasize those; how do we understand this shift in interest in an a priori manner (according to forms of experience)?)

   There are events which involve interest in the existence, such as, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and duty.  All of these play some role in orienting us to the existing. The latter two of these, beauty and duty, place us in a free relation to existence: in the case of the beautiful, we are interested in the object and it is susceptible to our understanding; with duty, we are responsible for something, and so cognize ourselves as able to bring it about ourselves apart from circumstances.  In contrast, pleasure and pain place relate us to existence through interest in continuing or ending a feeling, and not to us in a free determining relation to nature (as minds, with beauty, or agents with duty).  

   Not only is our enjoyment (and pain) tied to existence, but also the source of our sense of higher calling, and self worth.  From this, it seems little wonder why we prefer to concern ourselves with the existing, and would laugh at anyone who pursues a life of pure possibilities - to the degree they could attain this life, they also could not have actual enjoyment or actual self-worth.  (However, we learn from Kierkegaard to not have a hard heart towards those who feel they can avoid difficulties by trying to live a poetic existence, as the  aesthete does in Either/Or, even if he is not necessarily to be emulated.)

   These interests of pleasure, pain, beauty and duty all show experience, and us, to be organized in a certain way a priori, and first seem to allow us to start organizing and integrating more and more into a developing perspective.  There is a lot of work to be done in understanding how these different original interests in experience relate and develop in relation to each other.

A note on Leibniz:

   Leibniz maintains that all possibilities have a degree of being, but are not actual.  What determines them as actual cannot merely be their non-contradiction, since there are many non-contradictory possibilities, and so something else needs to play this role of determining the actual from the possibles: goodness.  It is possible to see this as related phenomenologically to the discussion above: we think and project all kinds of possibilities and certain of them are more vivid (have a greater degree of being) for us because of the characteristics which Leibniz emphasizes - goodness.  Perhaps the fact that it is by degree that the possible is separated from the actual is a signal that to Leibniz the interests in the actual illustrated above play a role in settling this ranking, and so Leibniz' rather strange sounding account of the determining of actuals is merely a phenomenological account of how we do cognize the actual from the possible, given that both are available to us with the same level of access.

On Behalf of our Cultivating a More Complete Moral Outlook

(This is a continued reflection on a-moral situations.)

   In the fourth meditation Descartes writes, "When no reason inclines me in one direction rather than another, I have a feeling of indifference—that is, of its not mattering which way I go—and that is the poorest kind of freedom. What it displays is freedom, considered not as a perfection but rather as a lack of knowledge—a kind of negation.  If I always saw clearly what was true and good, I should never have to spend time thinking about what to believe or do; and then I would be wholly free although I was never in a state of indifference."

   If we consider, with Kant, that our freedom is recognized as a postulate whenever we are cognizing our duty, then the passage just quoted from the Meditations can be thought in terms of a life lived where we are always cognizing some duty and so constantly engaged as free beings.  This state of constant and complete moral determination doesn't imply that we are always acting out of duty, but that we always have something moral to be doing in every case.  If we consider this to be a positive direction to move towards, as Descartes does, it may be helpful to understand why, as well as what pursuit brings us closer to this state.

   Ultimately, the reason to engage ourselves in developing a complete moral outlook will need to be moral, and so something we discover on our own, so I will need to discuss how this duty may emerge.  But first, we may find this ideal of a completely morally determined orientation to the world attractive to us by repeating what Descartes says: "I would be wholly free although I was never in a state of indifference."  You would always experience yourself in action, and interested.  Also, you would be potentially attaining to higher levels of self-esteem; you would feel closer to having attained the goal of perfect virtue, since you would see it tested at all moments.

   (Recognition of a completely determined moral orientation as an ideal provides a new challenge to the validity of Schopenhauer's virtue of denial of the will to live, since Schopenhauer's argument arises out of thinking that we must necessarily find ourselves in a position of boredom when we are idle.)

   In considering how such a practical ideal for our moral outlook could emerge, we can consider how different understandings of nature and degrees of worldliness must always result in differences in moral judgments.  From this alone I assert that bringing humanity to a unity in moral matters depends upon agreement on our study and interpretation of nature (I will develop this topic elsewhere).  Our  fallibility  in interpreting our situation can call all our moral judgments into question, and so there seems to be a potential demand we could come to recognize morally (which I have come to feel) that clarifying the situations we are in to our utmost is important, but this duty right away conflicts with many other duties which may overrule it, particularly where we have special knowledge such as situations where we are inclined to lie.

   While I know that no theoretical argument can be given to support a moral judgment, I can at least hope to continue to articulate an interpretation of the situation that can heighten a concern with our understanding of the situation, and will hopefully foster this sense of duty to understand for ourselves in others.

Concerning A-Moral Situations

   Most situations in life lack a clear moral imperative.  Do you feel a moral compulsion regarding the manner with which you walk down the street, or is it clear what you ought to do with yourself during an elevator ride?  These a-moral situations can be easily overlooked concerning the possibility of their acquiring a moral character, and perhaps this is a problem.  I want to simply reflect on this and draw some implications that I think are interesting.

   It is possible for any situation to acquire a moral character.  We cannot predict what filling the gaps in our understanding will do to how we see situations.  However, granting that any situation may eventually be understood as moral, is there some reason why we should seek to uncover the moral character of every situation?  Before considering this more, I would like to consider just the matter of a situation acquiring a different moral character.

   My most often used example of a sudden shift in the moral character of situation is as follows: imagine a murder in progress which you feel you feel compelled to prevent by a sense of duty (we can ignore whether or not you decide to take action).  Now, imagine you hear, "Cut, cut, cut! What do you think you're doing here?  We're in the middle of a shoot!"  Clearly, you will have realized that the situation was not what you originally supposed, and while you will still feel that you should help people out when an injustice is being done to them, this was not actually a case of injustice, but acting.

   For a long time, situations like this have led me to consider some possible implications concerning the relationship between our theoretical and practical characters.  The moral character of a situation is not discovered like theoretical characters which appear, but emerge as a moral feeling in relation to the understanding of the situation (in a manner well described by Kant's Categorical Imperative).  Our duty itself is never questionable, but our understanding of the situation necessarily is unless we grant ourselves omniscience; because of this, we must ask: does a recognition of our theoretical limitations throw our determinations of duty into doubt, not because we judge incorrectly from a moral standpoint, but because we do not understand the world well enough?  Does this lead to a requirement to understand the world better?

   From the perspective of Kant's critical philosophy, this practical-theoretical feedback loop, which we are all familiar with from experience, can help us to illustrate some of Kant's picture of the relationship between our judgments more acutely.  However, from the perspective of our lives there are different difficulties we face, since we cannot wait until we omniscient before acting from fear of doing something wrong - even pursuing knowledge requires action.  

   When we expand our consideration from shifts in our moral understanding to cases that are currently without a moral determination, we have a question if we should be trying to find out the moral implications involved, and in what order and with what procedure we should go about it (if we should take any special action at all).  

   There are places in the history of philosophy that may be able to be cleared up by considering this further: Plato's determination (and Aristotle's agreement) that all things go towards the good; Descartes, in the Fourth Meditation, discussing how it would be best for every situation to be morally determined; Leibniz' determination of everything actual as being brought into its actuality by the ultimate determination of Goodness.  These things won't all be clarified in the same way, and to the same end, but considering what possible moral determination everything may potentially have, and seeing if we are constrained to feel they all do and why can shed a lot of light here.

Understanding the Question: "Do you Believe in God?"

    When asked if I believe in God I have what may seem a peculiar reaction.  After many years of reading in the history of philosophy, I do not think that asking about my belief in God is meant to query my opinion about an inherently unknowable entity, nor is it meaningfully posed if it asks if I am going by the word of some few I have accepted as authorities.  When I consider what I end up thinking about to answer the question, I consider nothing apart from how I have been living my life.  Here my interest in this question is not in answer it, but in accounting for, and even justifying, my reaction to it by evaluating what the question asks.  I will be helping myself to Kant's Practical Philosophy as a standard terminology for getting at the meaning of the question about belief in God.  I will develop an account in brief of Kant which may serve as an introduction to Kant's thoughts on the interface between morals and religion.
   When asked about their belief in God, many people have an answer grounded in a position developed over the history of philosophy, and either acquired from study or environment; these positions are: Theism, A-theism, A-gnosticism.  These positions are worthy of thought, but I mean to argue that none of them can satisfy the question concerning belief in God.  Why is this? It is because I am insisting that the question properly requires one consider their own life in a particular way that needs no recourse to arguments.
   I expect it sounds strange to insist that asking if one believes in God is a question of how one lives, or perhaps it is not so strange.  In either case, I mean to provide some justification, as well as some clarity.  But, how do I justify this, and what sort of clarity will be given?
   First, in order to justify reconsidering our beliefs in God in new terms, I will first examine what it is to have an interest in God.  There is a discourse already in the work of many thinkers concerning the source of our interest in God, and just as frequently people are surprised by thinkers who assure us that all men believe in God (at least in a certain sense).  I hope to be able to justify a certain sense in which many of us may have at least a vacillating belief in God.  As I mentioned, I will be employing Kantian terminology in order to have a standard for expression rather than a whole array of terms from the tradition.  This choice was based on my own familiarity with Kant, and not because such an account could not be given from another source.  I would be very interested in showing how these terms would be applicable elsewhere in the history of philosophy, and would love to share exchange with others on this matter.
   Second, the clarity which I want to provide does not, and cannot, consist in an answer to the question for any us: ultimately, each of us must look at our own lives to see if we believe and in what way.  But I hope to produce some clarity concerning our approach to this question, as well as some maxims in dealing with it.  We should not approach this question from the perspective of metaphysics except insofar as we mean to clarify the question - we cannot answer it with any doctrine, and our continual attempts to do so only hinder our understanding of the question and deny the answer we all have available.

The Interest in God as Unknowable Entity
   There are many ways we can talk about our interest in God, and many traditions.  I am not here considering all of the different cultural representations of faith, but rather the bare possibility of taking an interest in a God.  One reason why interest in God is particularly suited for a question like this is because of how unfathomable the object of interest is.
   Consider some object we can think, but which we cannot know.  Granting that you cannot know it, or determine it in any way, consider how you may take an interest in it and first think of it.  We do not know what it is, so have no idea of its usefulness, and we also have no reason to avoid it.  In fact, we are not even thinking the object in this example, since without any determinations this unknowable object is the same as any number of unknowable objects.  'God' is a concept of such an unknowable object, yet given some additional determinations which are interesting.  How is it that such an unknowable object becomes the object that takes on such determinations?
   When I speak of something as knowable I mean, with Kant, the possibility that an object can be given in experience.  And while God is unable to be given in an experience, we are still interested in him.  How we take an interest in these sorts of objects is a task that Kant accomplishes, and which we can benefit from considering.
   We can be interested in things we can come to know because they can be given to us in a certain way.  However, with things that cannot be given to us we can still have something we take an interest in which makes an interest out of something else, and this something else may be something which cannot be given.
   The moral law is given to us through the experience of moral feeling.  We recognize a duty to act or omit action from the experience of the moral law.  What the moral law imputes to us is the possibility of acting for the sake of that duty, and not for an externally determined factor, that is, it leads to an interest in our freedom.  So far as we consider our acts, or the acts of others, to be moral, we are also considering them to be freely done.  This isn't a metaphysical proof of freedom, but it is a proof of our taking others and ourselves to be free (in a positive sense) as an element of our morals and moral discourse.
   I use this example of freedom as a postulate to illustrate how something which cannot be known can become interesting to us.  If we did not have any moral experience we also would never be concerned with ourselves as free, though we may very well consider ourselves spontaneous (freedom in a negative sense).  A similar structure is illustrated in Kant which shows how we believe in God (as well as an immortal soul).  I will illustrate it briefly:
   Reason is a faculty of seeking unconditioned unity, not only in knowledge, but in life.  If we have ends that must conflict, then they are not in unity with each other.  The Highest Good is a state where none of our ends are in conflict, and we also have all of our ends met: we are happy to the degree which we are virtuous, and since we will be perfectly virtuous we will be perfectly happy.  (I have written about Worthiness to be Happy, and it would be good to read to clarify this point.)
   When we pursue the Highest Good we are striving to be moral, and restraining our desires whenever it is necessary in order to discipline ourselves to be more inclined to do what we ought to do.  However, it is still not in our power to make nature reward us for our virtue, and so we find that we have also assumed a postulate in the midst of these activities as well: God, a being who is able to judge and reward us for our moral worthiness.  So we find here that something which we do know - our way of acting - contains an interest that we did not arbitrarily insert, but which constitutes the coherence of the pursuit of our highest aim.

The Question Concerning Belief
   There is no impartial guarantee for the existence of God given above, nor is one possible.  However, God is required whenever we are willing to bring about the Highest Good - the unity of virtue and happiness.  If we are asked if we believe in God, and see in our own lives an effort to promote the Highest Good, then that is the same thing as our believing in God.  This is why I say that when we are asked if we believe in God, we have but to look and see how we are living our lives.
   If we see ourselves as promoting the Highest Good, yet deny our belief in God, we are saying that we are trying to bring about and end which we also take to be impossible, which is a direct contradiction in our behavior.  Of course, we can fluctuate in our belief, but we can be honest about what we are postulating at any time and find that sometimes we are believers and sometimes not.
   It is very important to point out that this faithful natural attitude does not depend upon any scripture or cultural development of a particular kind.  Rather it is would appear to be the fertile field out of which such scripture and articulate philosophical positions about God (for and against) begin to develop, as well as the basis on which scripture should be interpreted.  The more we can open ourselves up to carefully thinking through these sorts of fertile contexts in our own lives, the sooner we will be able to unravel many difficulties and disputes.
   (We may want to consider a thinker like Kierkegaard here, and wonder if his description of the knight of faith could serve as material for continued reflection on faith.  It appears that one could interpret the knight of faith as maintaining exactly that we will the Highest Good, yet affirm it to be impossible.  I am not committed to such a reading, but I do think that there are some who are interested in this, and I simply want to note that I am also interested in discussion about it.)

What do we do Now?
   Classical Theism, A-theism and A-gnosticism all present evaluations of approaches to the question concerning the the existence of God.  In the above, we have realized that a belief in God is not directly concerned with His existence as the result of a doctrine, but in how we are living our lives; and the way in which we are living our lives reflects our belief.  The classical treatment of questions directly addressing the existence of God still can serve us as examples of arguments that attempt to show some limits or extensions to our knowledge, but they can never really tell anyone if they believe in God or not.
   We should definitely not forget the classical treatment of the existence of God, but we should be very clear when we are presenting it and reviewing it as a sort of refresher about what we can know, however, it should be completely dispensed with in real discussions of religion, since a religious belief in God is not the product of any subtle arguments, but is found simply in how we organize our life around the problem of the pursuit of happiness and virtue.

Appendix: Ways of Believing or Non-Believing
   It may be interesting to consider the above analysis and see if we can establish briefly a use for the terms Theism, A-gnosticism and Atheism in this context.  Of course, these names for positions will acquire an entirely different mien now that we have reinterpreted the question concerning the belief in God along the lines we have.
   It seems that all finite rational beings (at least humans) are in one of these four conditions concerning God: interest, hope, belief, or delusion.
   If we acknowledge our self-worth or worthlessness, then we are able to take interest in the possible existence of God.  This seems to be a sort of pure A-gnosticism.
    If we are desirous of happiness from our worth, then we are desirous of God, and hope for His existence.  If we act as if we will be rewarded, then we believe in God.  This seems to be a sort of pure Theism.
   If we were to strive against virtue, then it seems like we may have a reversal of Theism available to us: if we are desirous to avoid punishment from worthlessness, then we are desirous of the non-existence of God, and hope for His non-existence.  If we act as if we will not be punished for our viscousness, then we do not believe in God.  This is a sort of pure A-theism.
   If you take yourself to know, theoretically, that there is, or is not, a God, then you are deluded.  This is usually considered Fanaticism.
   Some remarks must be made here which seem interesting.  Here it appears that A-theism is being accused of immorality.  I do not mean to imply that those who call themselves A-theists because of a position they have developed or have received from the history must be immoral, but rather that insofar as so-called A-theists are moral, I would probably consider them to be A-gnostic or even Theistic in the terms developed above.  It is important to keep in mind that these re-definitions of traditional terms are meant to express non-doctrinal positions which need not be articulated in order to be inhabited.