Philosophy hasn’t stopped being relevant, if anything, it’s even more relevant today in a hyper-globalized world. What’s changed is that academics have become over-specialized, to the point where many outright deny the usefulness of entire academic fields. Scientists like Einstein or Humboldt were well versed in philosophy and religion, whereas today the “public intellectuals” often say philosophy is outdated or useless, as if 21st-century American values were the best, final ones, never to be questioned again.
One would think that after Fukuyama’s end of history nonsense, we’d have learned this lesson, but apparently not.
Agreed. Everyone already has a philosophy (and a religion), though many people don't know it, and some would deny it. The question isn't whether to have a philosophy but which philosophy to have.
EDIT: since some have asked what I meant by "everyone already has...a religion," I meant that even something like atheism is a religion. It has a story of the origin of the universe, various accounts for why and how you should live your life, and an eschatology (where the universe is headed). Many atheists think they don't have a religion because they don't worship a personal God, when in reality atheism holds that the universe itself is functionally an impersonal, all-ordering deity.
In my experience, many atheists also seem to proselytize with a religious fervor as well (famously, Dawkins et al.).
Actual religions have sets of ideas (rules, creation-myths, alternative epistemologies, etc.), whereas atheism has none. The term literally means "without god(s)" (which was a defining feature of religions by those who coined the term).
It is an absence of belief (at least in the way the term is commonly used; There are "atheistic religions" in the sense that they don't have a deity).
Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.
The charitable interpretation is that most people -- even atheists -- will have a belief system that is functionally equivalent to a religion.
> Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.
Another way of saying it is that religions (as we know them) are answers to questions, you can get rid of those answers, disagree with them, etc. but the questions will remain and you will implicitly provide answers to them. Those answers will constitute what your religion is -- albeit one might not examine their answers in any detail.
Even this charitable interpretation doesn't make much sense: The only thing "atheists" have in common is that they have a lack of belief – we have no idea what they actually DO believe (people come with various philosophical persuasions, after all).
The other way you propose of defining religions is so general and vague that it borders on meaningless, and doesn't deal with the fact that different people have different questions, formulated differently, using different assumptions and caring about the answers to different extents.
I think it makes sense: even the utmost atheist needs to have beliefs; both in the ‘individual facts’ way (you can’t be rational about everything all the time), and in the ‘cosmovision’ way (ideas about what to do with one’s life, etc.).
The OP was just being a little bit provocative while calling those beliefs a religion, which I think can be allowed; at least for the fact that there are a bunch of people that are religiously “atheists”.
They might, but my point is that they are different - meaning that you therefore can’t categorize it as a religion (not to mention that these answers don’t have anything to do with atheism in and of itself).
You're just redefining "religion" so that the claim is a tautology. You could do this with anything:
"Everyone has a God (where 'God' means 'favourite thing')"
"Everyone believes in the existence of Hell (where 'hell' means 'being unhappy')"
"Everyone believes in the possibility of "salvation" (where 'salvation' means 'self-improvement')"
Redefining words so that the original sentence is correct is a tad too "charitable", particularly when the new definition is completely at odds with how everyone uses the word.
> Another way of saying it is that religions (as we know them) are answers to questions
Perhaps, but atheism does not answer questions like how the world is created. You can be atheist and believe in big bang or believe that the universe have always existed or something else, or you can just not care. Atheism just eliminates some particular answers like "a god did it".
So, you seem to have only met a certain kind of atheist. I don't really want to say more about that in particular because it feels like I will be accused of proselytizing. What I will say is that I think you're reading too much into what not believing in deities may or may imply about someone.
Edit: I should also ask, from your edit, what do you mean by "deity" and "universe" when you say that atheism holds that the universe is a deity?
Being an atheist doesn’t imply belief in the Big Bang, evolutionism or any way of life.
One could be an atheist convinced that dinosaurs are a fabrication, nothing more than funny looking rocks some weird junkie decided to give some absurd meaning to, that the universe has always been the way it is, that the Romans never existed, and that we should all live in the mountains, only eating whatever we find in some specific dark caves filled with the appropriately colored glowing mushrooms.
All for no other reason than that it makes them feel good.
I've been thinking about this issue of unknown, unacknowledged, or perhaps subconscious religion a lot lately. I grew up religious but am now an atheist, and though I haven't sought to replace it component-wise, I've been observing de facto beliefs in myself and others that wouldn't normally be recognized as such because they aren't packaged as a lot. What makes me note similarities between acknowledged religious beliefs and unacknowledged ones is their function. If you look at the desired effects, they have the same aim: guidance in making decisions, association with a group sharing a particular view, value judgments both aesthetic and moral. The religions we created are a reflection of our psychology and physiology, and often the tensions between those two. It seems to me at least that a name brand religion often fills a life module that's required for a human to operate. The fact that it might be unlabeled might make it more difficult to identify, but it doesn't nullify its existence.
“cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology” ~Bateson, 1991, Sacred unity : Further steps to an ecology of mind
Owen Barfield calls it 'the residue of unresolved positivism'
> my experience, many atheists also seem to proselytize with a religious fervor as well
That is a total non-sequitur since lots of religions does not proselytize. So clearly this is not a defining quality of religion but rather a characteristic shared between some religions and some non-religious movements and ideologies.
> I meant that even something like atheism is a religion.
This is incoherent because it presupposes "an" atheism, as opposed to a broad range of philosophies which only hold lack of religious faith in common. It's like saying "non-strawberries" is a useful and enlightening category of food.
I understand what you're saying but I disagree: atheism is not a religion. The verb "is" does not mean "fulfills the same function as". Just because atheists have to answer the same questions as theists does not make atheism a religion.
If you want a word to describe what atheism and religion have in common, I'd go with "spirituality". Not in the sense of "burning incense" or "believing in ghosts" but rather in the sense of holding beliefs that are not rational and deciding to care about the world and about humanity in particular.
I'd offer this idea in return -- religion may be the collective, social expression of individual spirituality, usually fuzzy and generalized beyond an individual's own specific beliefs in order to promote social harmony and cohesion.
Just as some people have "religious" beliefs that are very eclectic and isolated from organized religion, a sort of personal spirituality, I think there are atheists with particular and non-social views.
I also think many atheists, sharing similar "spirituality", find a similar kind of comfort in "communing" with other "believers", and socially expressing their beliefs with other "believers". Regardless of the specifics of said spirituality, I believe we do see some commonalities between "theists and atheists".
This way of looking at it takes all the theology out of the issue. That's fine by me, so long as this isn't the motte position in a motte-and-bailey argument.
> many atheists also seem to proselytize with a religious fervor as well
Could that be availability bias? You don't hear from the many that don't proselytise.
> even something like atheism is a religion
That's nonsense, a rhetorical subterfuge to defend religion ("oh, but you too have a religion.") maybe. Atheism has none of the things you claim (origin story and eschatology, prescriptions on how to live). Some (atheistic) sciences indeed give us the former two, and some (atheistic) Weltanschauungen (such as humanism) the latter, but that doesn't bestow religious status on atheism itself.
Hmmmm isn't climate change and enviromentalism in general the eschatology of the average modern atheist?
And they do proselytize quite a bit. The average atheist is as separate from the process of science as the average NFL fan is from actually scoring a touchdown. They're both spectators under a similar set of illusions regarding their claims as to their relevance in each ones game. Go TEAM SCIENCE!!!
> Hmmmm isn't climate change and enviromentalism in general the eschatology of the average modern atheist?
No, neither factual belief in climate change (in general, or more specifically anthropogenic climate change) nor ideological belief in environmentalism is eschatology ("the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind") to start with, and even if they have a weak correlation with atheism, there is no essential connection between them and atheism (they may sometimes have a common cause, in that both atheism and factual belief in climate change can be grounded in scientific rationalism.)
> And they do proselytize quite a bit.
Proselytizing atheists are disproportionately visible, because people that aren't trying to shove their beliefs down your throat are a lot less noticeable. So, sure, if you aren't an atheists, the people whose atheism you notice will be very disproportionately those who are proselytizers. That doesn't mean atheists in general are proseltyizers, and atheism has no unifying belief in the value of proselytization the way, say, mainstream Christianity does.
Now you're just repeating definitions.
I'll ask you this, why would any one give a damn about "anthropogenic climate change" if they did not have some theory in their heads about "the final destiny of humankind"?
Cause I hope they do have a theory that connects to their personal values, otherwise they are just following blindly.
PS. did you just make up "factual belief"? I mean it is a tautology on many levels. But let's take it as qualified belief. Isn't that the root of religion? It's okay, we humans need to believe in something
> I'll ask you this, why would any one give a damn about "anthropogenic climate change" if they did not have some theory in their heads about "the final destiny of humankind"?
Because they have some concern about the quality of life people experience in the future, independent of any concept of the final destiny of humankind.
> Cause I hope they do have a theory that connects to their personal values, otherwise they are just following blindly
I'm not sure what your point is, unless you are unable to separate the idea of having values from eschatological theory. While certainly these can (and often are) ties together in religion, values can exist without any eschatology.
> did you just make up "factual belief"?
No.
> I mean it is a tautology on many levels.
It can't be a tautology because it's not a proposition, much less one that is true by definition. You might mean to say it's redundant, but it's not that. A factual belief is a belief on a question of fact, as opposed, e.g., to a question of values.
Climate change can be extrapolated, through science, to a potentially very challenging future environment. Eschatology is about religious constructs like judgment by deities, prophecies, life after death, "end times", and the like. Believe in the latter if you like, but the former is about evidence, statistics, logic, and reasoning.
Perhaps in the US, but I don't think this is the case in say China. Communism is atheist but not known for environmentalism. Atheism does not imply scientism or rationality either.
People seem to have a really hard time grasping that atheism does not imply any particular world view or ideology beside believing in zero gods.
It might be, for many (not for me, for example), but it certainly isn't a defining or necessary feature. Future atheists, for example, with entirely different concerns (and eschatology) would still properly call themselves atheists if they're without belief in some deity.
The average liberal might like their caffè latte, but neither classical nor progressive liberalism contains a commitment to certain beverages.
Saying "there is no God" instead of "I don't know whether or not God exists" presumes a certain understanding of cause and effect, of being and essence, of meaning and purpose. After all, the atheist says "there is no need for another uncaused cause because ..." - that "because" serves the purpose of religion. I would argue that one cannot be an atheist without that "because". An agnostic can act in the fashion of an atheist (presumptive atheism), but an ill-considered atheist-in-act is not an atheist in intellect.
In fact the branches of natural philosophy nominally used to make the determination "God cannot exist" by the atheist cannot speak to being and essence (because the sciences presuppose them) and cannot speak categorically to meaning and purpose (because those depend on what philosophy has determined about being and essence). Prescriptions on how to live (i. e. what the moral response to being must be) flow from the first two and therefore also cannot flow from science alone which presupposes whatever kind of universe the scientist finds himself existing in. "Can I derive 'ought' from 'is'" is presumed by the physicist and can only be addressed by the philosopher.
To put it another way, one cannot be an atheist without a religion - one can only be agnostic.
To put it a third way, Cicero says "religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rites to a superior nature that men call divine." The atheist says "there is none to serve" - but that is patently untrue, for in that case there would be no end to strive after and all atheists would perish by inaction. Therefore, all atheists have chosen to serve some superior nature, either themselves, or some ideal (Chaos, Order, Balance, etc.).
You’re assuming people must hold beliefs based on rational evidence when religions aren’t based on rationality. Thus your argument is inherently flawed. An atheist with atheist parents hardly needs to deeply consider the matter.
Not believing in a God(s) is no different than not believing in perfectly square pigs. It’s people that have a specific religious belief that put much importance on the subject.
PS: Saying the universe or your life has no purpose is hardly a cause do nothing any more than it’s a cause to build churches.
> Saying "there is no God" instead of "I don't know whether or not God exists" presumes a certain understanding of cause and effect
No, it may just be grounded in an epistemological approach in which entities which are not necessary to explain observations are presumed not to exist.
> To put it another way, one cannot be an atheist without a religion - one can only be agnostic.
Many self-described atheists reject the atheist/agnostic distinction as meaningless, viewing the absence of belief as equivalent to unbelief in their epistemology.
> To put it a third way, Cicero says "religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rites to a superior nature that men call divine." The atheist says "there is none to serve" - but that is patently untrue, for in that case there would be no end to strive after and all atheists would perish by inaction.
That is fantastic illogic. The absence of a "superior nature" to which one might have a reason to offer "service and ceremonial rites" does not deny that there are goals that one might strive for. Maximizing one's own experienced utility, for instance, requires no assumption of a "superior nature", nor even a rejection of solipsism, but still provides an end to strive after and motivate action.
> Therefore, all atheists have chosen to serve some superior nature, either themselves
Serving yourself is not serving a "superior nature", since "superior" is meaningful only in comparison to something else, and in Cicero's statement it is clearly in comparison to the self.
Even if you say you don't believe in Santa Claus, you would still believe in Santa Claus. Because the gifts must be coming from somewhere, and if we call that somewhere Santa Claus, then everyone actually believe in Santa Claus despite their claim not to.
My personal, perhaps cynical perspective: religious people expanding definition of "religion" into meaninglessness.
In most languages, "religion" will imply an ordered belief in a supernatural entity and set of accompanying practices.
It is NOT a synonym for all belief, philosophy, ethical framework, world paradigms, etc. If it does become a synonym, then we'll simply need a NEW word to distinguish between "belief in supernatural entity" vs "no belief in a supernatural entity"
How so? Reincarnation is every bit as supernatural as Christian Heaven, and there are accompanying practices that are supposed to influence the outcome of that via karma.
I did not think impersonal entities were what the gp post was talking about; apologies if they were. But even including impersonal supernatural entities, the wikipedia page I cited shows that's not a defining characteristic.
It does not follow, from the claim that belief in supernatural entities is not a defining characteristic of religion, that the rejection of supernatural entities is a religion. You might be able to argue that they are orthogonal issues, but then a lot of religious people would disagree vehemently with you!
> In most languages, "religion" will imply an ordered belief in a supernatural entity and set of accompanying practices.
"Religion" isn't a word in "most languages". "Religion" in English and the closely-related terms in closely-related languages may mean (or at least strongly imply)
something like that (though with a god or God, specifically, not merely "a supernatural entity") simply because of the dominant belief systems to which the terms applied in the West (mostly, varieties of Near Eastern Monotheism), but even so they are frequently applied to systems from outside which don't have an "ordered belief in a supernatural entity", such as Confucianism.
> If it does become a synonym, then we'll simply need a NEW word to distinguish between "belief in supernatural entity" vs "no belief in a supernatural entity"
With, again, the caveat that it is more specific (referring to one or more gods, not merely any supernatural entities), we already have such a word, adopted specifically to focus in on that aspect and not the other elements of belief and practice which "religion" typically includes and may sometimes be used to refer to without an identifiable god anywhere in sight: "theism".
I think NikolaNovak is making the point that advocates of the "atheism is a religion" view equivocate over what it is that atheism is supposedly a case of.
> In most languages, "religion" will imply an ordered belief in a supernatural entity and set of accompanying practices.
That is simply not true.
"Religion is a modern Western concept.[12] Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages."
"Religion is a modern Western concept. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages."
Ah, so there are entire cultures that are atheistic. Your argument has just achieved circularity!
> In most languages, "religion" will imply an ordered belief in a supernatural entity and set of accompanying practices.
Rather, in modern, western English we consider "religion" to mean that. Islam for examples uses the word 'Deen', the meaning of it includes how you looked at the world and your entire way of life.
Deen means basically exactly the stuff you say religion is not a synonym for :)
If Deen - or any other concept - posits one or more dieties as creators of the universe, then atheism is explicitly not the same; on the other hand, if it does not, then it is irrelevant to the claim that atheism is a religion.
Not the commenter you replied to, but I recommend the book A Secular Age by Charles Taylor as an 874-page answer to your question. The short version: modern secularity is really more like a new development, where new influences interact in a (still essentially) Christian, Western context, and not a mere subtraction of previous religious attitudes.
Really fascinating book, I can't recommend it enough.
It's still not clear to me how that implies I have a religion. Being influenced, consciously or subconsciously does not mean I have a religion, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
Well, it basically comes down to how you are defining religion. The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian." Keep in mind here that Christianity, like all religions, is a really big tent.
Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? Is expressed spoken belief the final decider? Or does action factor in too?
This is a really long-winded way of saying that what "religion" is defined as is constantly changing. The book I recommended explains it much better than I can.
Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture.
That makes sense only if you redefine "Christianity" to mean "respect for universal human rights". By that logic most everyone is a Christian. Most Hindus and Buddhists would be Christian too.
The problem is that changing the definition of a word does not change boundaries in reality. I can call my automobile a "Leaf", but that doesn't mean my car does photosynthesis. Similarly, you can say that Christianity just means "respect for human rights", but that doesn't mean that everyone accepts the divinity of Jesus Christ.
That's not what I claimed at all. I simply said the values were formed in a Christian context.
Today, in our global world, the same values absolutely have changed previously different cultures. Japan prior to 1946 doesn't have a universalist (formed in Christianity) democratic tradition, which was forced upon it by the West. India has a similar story with the caste system. It doesn't mean that they are Christians, but simply that ideas strongly formed by Christianity are now extremely powerful there.
"The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian.""
Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too?
Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all?
I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim.
Edit: user
keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).
As I said before, it is a complex topic and there are many difficult questions to answer. But, I think it's more helpful to understand religions as entire ways of life rather than simple affirmations of belief. My observation is that people today define much of their identity by what they say and not necessarily by how they act or what they value. Whether that is what they truly are is again, a complex question.
With Christianity, for example, the history there is immensely complicated. There are perhaps an infinite number of interpretations of Jesus' teachings and actions, many of which place far less focus on belief than on works (actions.) Other groups don't care whatsoever what any organized church says and base their beliefs and actions on traditions or on the Bible itself. Paul, the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and innumerable others have shaped "Christianity" over the last two thousand years, so to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant.
Beyond that, it's also unclear precisely what "supernatural" means in this context.
Consider the "protestant work ethic". Most of the northeast is now either Catholic or Agnostic/Atheist, yet it persists, and all sorts of moral judgments are colored by it.
A big part of western world was never "protestant" and wouldn't say it has that "ethic."
Nevertheless, even having that "ethic" doesn't make one a believer in supernatural "messiah" properties of a person called Jesus or in the afterlife or expected punishment or reward then or in the mere existence of some almighty supernatural entity with any capability which conflicts with scientific knowledge.
To quote user keiferski from another post: "to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant."
We're trying to explain that coming from an entire culture and moral tradition means that you can decide God isn't real and you're still mostly flavored by that culture and moral tradition. The real-ness of God is just a little detail.
One can see this in the many analogues from specifically Christian traditions like repentance, confession and original sin to the current Social Justice movement. God not required.
The flavor and style of respect is what makes it Christian.
Most who claim "respect for universal human rights" as their motto actually have a belief system that's heavily influenced by specifically Western sources. When the rubber meets the road, their biases, blind spots and points of emphasis will reveal this.
Someone from a different cultural tradition will have a different set of biases while still believing in "universal human rights". Up to and including which rights are more important when they come into conflict.
> Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture
Both sides of that claim are fantastically false. First, while most describe the Enlightenment as novel, almost noone describes it arising ex nihilo rather than as a product of preexisting social forces, both building on and reacting against things present in its immediate context.
Second, while obviously it arose in a largely Christian context, there were significant non-Christian influences, and particularly the repopularization of pre-Christian influence (in part from interaction with contemporary non-Christian cultures) played a significant role in the Renaissance which itself set the stage for the Enlightenment.
> For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context.
Much of our idea of human rights is a reaction against the practices on all sides of the divides within Western Christendom.
> Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Sure, social evolution is path dependent. And if we adopted a cladistic taxonomy of belief systems, those stemming from the Enlightenment might usefully described as being subsets of "Christianity" because of their origin. But while cladistic taxonomy makes some sense for biological life, it really doesn't make sense for social movements.
> Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean?
It probably means that you and the people who think your "values and actions" make you part of X have radically different definitions of "X", and are essentially speaking different languages on that point.
This is a pretty complex topic, but I'll go back to my question that I posed: if your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean? Is is possible that modern secular culture is simply Christianity-as-act, but with the explicit verbal affirmation of belief removed? Religions change just as much as cultures do, and I would say that modern culture is quite obsessed with "verbal consent" as being the ultimate decider of what something is.
I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.
I think there is a difference between having cultural values and believing in a deity.
We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that:
a. the word religion loses meaning
b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.
a. The word doesn't lose meaning, unless you insist on what religion means circa ±2000 was the ultimate definition, and no previous or future meanings can ever be correct. Again, the definition of the term has changed over time and the separation of "religion" as a separate thing is itself a modern phenomenon.
b. That's more of a sociological labeling question, but I don't think that's a good example.
> The word doesn't lose meaning, unless you insist on what religion means circa ±2000 was the ultimate definition, and no previous or future meanings can ever be correct.
That's dodging the issue, which is that if you are going to argue that secular humaninsm is identical with christianity, then logically, you must accept that christianity is identical with secular humanism: No God, no creation, no Trinity, Christ is not the son of God in any sense... and if you do, then all the explicitly theological and christian concepts can be stripped out with Occam's razor.
I'd suggest you look at Bellah's Civil Religion in America (1967), which suggests that certain ritual practices, e.g. rising for the national anthem before a sporting event, are religious in nature.
And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology.
"Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."
I've already read it. I agree that there are implicit religious values, perhaps even pseudo-religious, I disagree that it is an actual "religion" as such.
Nor do I particularly subscribe to American civil religion itself.
> who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim?
No, according to GP, insofar as that person believes in the sanctity of the individual and human rights etc, that person was Christian all along, no matter their belief in the resurrection of Jesus, or what they think their religion is.
A thesis I disagree with.
Frankly, I find these redefinitions of common words somewhat annoying, as eg. in one of the earlier talks of Jordan Peterson with Sam Harris, where Peterson insisted on defining "truth" as "that which confers long-term evolutionary advantage". No, that's not what truth is. Just invent a new word for it.
Similarly, one can easily say that today's Western secular societies hold many values dear that arguably arose in Christianity (see, I just did!), without then adding that those secular societies are not, in fact, secular, but religious.
It is not that complex an issue, unless you want an answer that is not the obvious, straightforward one.
> If your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean?
Nothing more than that human thought and behavior is not a consistent logical system, let alone a sound one. As there is no reason to think that it is, this is not problematical, and there's nothing theological to see here.
Attempting to redefine "religion" to include "all the values people have" is a poor trick in distraction. Exactly in the Western world "religion" really means the belief in a number of supernatural deities, at least one much more powerful than the others, and/or in some form of life after death and supernatural punishment, and the institutions and organizations supporting such beliefs, dependent on their active believers.
Everything else is simply not "a religion." And I also have a whole book to cite:
"Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible" by Jerry A. Coyne
"Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions."
Your question reminded me of this quote from David Foster Wallace's This is Water:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Meaningless words unless you define the religion out of religion, which is hugely disrespectful to both the religious and the irreligious: You can take any philosophy and insist it's a religion, but in doing so you destroy the special place religion holds in the minds of the faithful, and you call atheists charlatans and fools for no legitimate reason.
>Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.
This kind of logic doesn't transfer well to other beliefs. God is omni-present, omni-powerful and all-knowing. Transferring the same logic, we assume people worshipping God always feel distant, powerless and knowing nothing.
Secular humanisn owes a lot to ethical principles developed in a religious context, but it does not follow that by adopting the ethics, one is also adopting the religion. Any attempt to push that proposition consistently is likely to devalue the overtly theistic aspects of the religion in question.
> it does not follow that by adopting the ethics, one is also adopting the religion
Those ethics were created from within a theistic worldview, they weren't born from reason. Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
> Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
Why is that unreasonable? I've "adopted" the basic idea of Newton's gravity but deny the fundamental assumptions regarding the flat spacetime and "gravity as just another force" because general relativity showed those to be incorrect.
> Those ethics were created from within a theistic worldview, they weren't born from reason.
In many case, they were both; the existence of a theistic worldview does not prevent the application of reason.
> Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
But we do adopt the relevant foundational assumptions, just not the irrelevant ones, where the conclusions are shared.
Of course, the conclusions are often different, because post-Enlightenment society often rejects substantive, morally significant elements of its precursors (in some cases, pre-existing religions have adapted to this and adopted, in whole or in part, Enlightenment values as well.)
> Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.
Why? Are you saying that just because Islam stresses peace, hospitality, and philanthropy, that one cannot be peaceful, hospitable, and philanthropic without reasonably adopting Islam?
Not at all, because secular humanist ethics can be derived without any reference to theistic concepts. That one can not get there by pure reason alone is a non-sequitur, as that applies equally to theologically-motivated ethics.
Furthermore, let's suppose a theologian - for the sake of example, let's say a christian one - insists that I am really a christian, on account of my ethical positions. Well, OK, but if that so, then it follows that being a christian does not involve believing in the Trinity, or that Christ is the son of God, or that God created the universe... in fact, that it does not involve anything beyond holding certain ethical positions, and that christianity is identical with secular humanism!
Of course, it is rare to find an avowed christian who follows this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. Motte-and-bailey argumentation [1] is rampant in theological thinking.
Every decision you make is made under a great deal of uncertainty. A person typically holds overarching beliefs that govern those decisions.
For example, how much value do you put into close relationships versus distant ones? Is charity worthwhile if it helps someone who can't help you back? Maybe someone who doesn't even know you?
No, it doesn't. While the discussion of the definition of religion would result in its own holy war, suffice to say that defining religion based of the involvement of the supernatural is cyclical logic used to discredit any opposing religion. "Pagans believe in the supernatural, the sun isn't a mythical being! Only belief in my God is grounded in reality" is not functionally different from "Theists believe in the supernatural, there is no mythical God! Only my belief in the lack of anything beyond my current understanding is grounded in reality."
Atheists don't believe they know everything, they just believe that people are full of shit when they talk about Gods or similar. It doesn't require any belief in the existence of or lack of supernatural things, just figuring out that it is much more likely that people are manipulative liars than that they got some profound message from some higher being.
Btw, even taking a very atheistic perspective, only focused on how humanity evolved (which is a selfish process in spite of your future protestations of how you have trascended it) we can see we evolved to be nice only out of self-preservation.
One would think that is the ultimate personal gain but I'll grant you that reminding yourself you are a good person must be a psychological gain of its own.
Mark Fisher describes the same thing, as not "the end of history" but the cancellation of the future based on observations that the Neoliberal political system has continued well past its serviceable life and that there seems to be nothing coming to replace it.
I've noticed this a lot with culture, particularly with television. At the moment, there seem to be an infinite number of shows that rehash the 1920s and the 1980s, as if we just jumped back a century, with 1920 being the present and 1980 being the future.
I'm not sure that there's a deep cultural issue with this, I think there's a pragmatic issue. 99% of television drama can be replaced with a text message. It's incredibly difficult to tell a suspenseful story when everyone can communicate with everyone else instantly at any time. Can you imagine The Shining in 2020? The guy would be driven insane by browsing reddit. This is why it's very difficult to make modern TV programmes that have realistic phone use.
And the observation clearly placed a great weight on Fisher, Rest In Peace. Capitalist Realism is short, but very heavy. I highly recommend it to the HN community.
I just came across Mark Fisher this past year - his ideas are interesting. He reminds me of David Foster Wallace for some odd reason. Here's a few of my favorite excerpts from Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:
> Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
> The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.
> Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.
> To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the - beautifully, painfully - dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experience with a ‘piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromissing judgement of self-depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.
> [A]s Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognized as ‘daemonic dread’; he saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously.
> Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.
> the Neoliberal political system has continued well past its serviceable life
Neoliberalism isn't a political system, but an economic ideology.
Neoliberalism, insofar as it is a distint viewpoint within the derivatives of classical liberalism, is a fairly recent reaction to post-classical-liberal economic ideologies, primarily (but not exclusively) those of the Left.
The neoliberal consensus beginning to break down is even more recent, and, while its obviously unclear what will replace it (or if neoliberalism will be resurgent), I don't see how that would be the "cancellation of the future", only (potentially, assuming neoliberalism is not resurgent and finally triumphant) the end of the idea that neoliberalism itself was, economically, the end of history.
Philosophy will cease to be relevant when thinking ceases to be relevant. I would cast suspicion on the intentions of anyone who wants people to stop reasoning and questioning.
From the way our modern society is structured, sometimes it seems that consumption is the most important activity for the masses, not sober thinking and reflection. If that is so, then philosophy really is something that exists for that relatively small proportion of society needed to keep science and technology going enough to sustain consumerism.
In the past, it might have been suggested that philosophy should be made available to the consuming masses because they would be somehow liberated through it and made masters of their own destiny or whatever. Yet as time goes by, I’m less confident that the masses even want that purported liberation, at least not if it threatens consumption. Remember how throughout the 20th century, the average man rolled his eyes at those socialist-party members who kept banging on about the need to rise up against the system? Well, those encouraging thinking and reflection can expect the exact same response.
"Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics."
First, Tyson didn't claim that philosophy is not a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world, but that for any individual, "if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world." The latter is a much more defensible claim.
Next, it's worth quoting from the conclusion of the article defending philosophy against Hawking:
> No doubt there is a fair amount of ill-informed, obtuse, or ideologically angled philosophy that either refuses or tries but fails to engage with the concerns of present-day science. One can understand Hawking’s impatience – or downright exasperation – with some of the half-baked notions put around by refuseniks and would-be engageniks alike.
People justifiably take issue with some aspects of philosophy (postmodernism, for example, and its misuse of scientific terminology, as exposed in Bricmont & Sokal's Intellectual Impostors), and a few scientists certainly overshoot in their criticism, or make it unduly broad.
But I don't think it's accurate to claim that "today the 'public intellectuals' often say philosophy is outdated or useless".
Lastly, even if one thinks that philosophy is largely useless today, that doesn't imply at all that one considers "21st-century American values [...] the best, final ones, never to be questioned again".
"Continental philosophy" isn't useless, either, except by the definitions of those who made up the term "continental philosophy". They have a very limited notion of what "utility" is.
The things targeted as "continental philosophy" are mostly meaning-of-life questions. Those aren't "useful", but they're important to people. It's no more useless than literature or video games or skiing, which you don't need but are exactly what people do when they're not doing things that they are required to do.
Not all "continental philosophy" is done well, and the vagueness of the question means that it's hard to distinguish rigorously between "well done" and "not well done". But that doesn't diminish meaning, or value, that people find in it.
Exactly. It's "reasoned", and it's easy to think that reason is everything worth thinking about. That is, after all, reasonable.
But a huge swath of human activity isn't reasoned. A lot of human activity is spent just sitting around wondering what it all means, trying to live a "good" life, and wondering for that matter what "good" even means. Those are unscientific questions (or at least, we lack anything close to a science for discussing them), but it doesn't make them unimportant.
Those are the questions the "continentals" are usually working on. In my opinion, they're at their worst when they're trying to sound analytical about it. The more rigorous they get, the more they make it clear that they're actually pretty bad at rigor. Derrida is the most obvious example, and honestly I have only the word of his defenders that he's somehow trying to undercut rationality rather than simply being a charlatan.
In the end I treat the continentals the way I treat fans of soccer: I'm glad you're having a good time and finding meaning in what you're doing. That's worth it. But I'm gonna get irritated if you insist that I must find meaning in it as well. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but the harder you insist the less interested I get.
I agree it is relevant, but not many people spend time exploring it or asking the fundamental questions and ruminating on them. If they did, you would have lesser visits to the shrink later in life, and far less inner-strife.
I believe philosophy should be introduced earlier in school.
There could be courses in Easterrn and Western Philosophy.
Philosophy is arguably the most important thing in my life. I'd like to live a morally good life, and figuring out what makes such a life is a great journey.
Thanks to my pursuit, I now give at least 10% of my income to the most cost-effective charities I can find (see GiveWell). Thousands of people do the same: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
Many philosophers are working on society's most pressing issues (see the Effective Altruism) movement.
I don't see anything religious in donating a portion of your income to non-religious causes.
In some religions or locations it is customary to give a certain percentage to one's church, for example 10%, but this is not a universal rule and the percentage varies, and sometimes it is optional and sometimes forced.
My experience is that they engage with ethics more than any other groups that I'm familiar with, except professional philosophers (including PhD students of philosophy).
The 80K podcast interviews professional philosophers all the time, for example:
That's a shame. I hope they get better at empathy and engaging with alternative points of view.
I wonder if part of it is youth. I am now 35 and have a more nuanced point of view on things (at least I try). When I was 25, I wasn't as good at it, and I was especially less experienced at communicating about it.
It's really sad that philosophy isn't a core part of the US curriculum and I can't figure out why that's the case. We were required to read plenty of novels that attempt to be philosophical, but analyzing them was always a nightmare because it's completely subjective. Is this paragraph literal? Symbolic? Metaphorical? Nothing at all? In many cases the author never explains, so there's no way to know. Everyone is free to project their own opinions onto everything.
I still remember being extremely frustrated when our teacher kept telling us it was "ironic" that the most physically fit character drowned in Stephen Crane's The Open Boat (sorry for the spoiler). It wasn't ironic at all because he was foolish, and foolish people get themselves killed all the time!
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” - Alfred North Whitehead
Which has always felt like such an unusual characterization.
I've read a ton of philosophy papers and books.
Only rarely does one come across a reference to Plato in modern-day writing and theorizing. Whereas Aristotle crops up constantly.
Plato was the first well-known philosopher, but honestly, none of his ideas are particularly relevant today. Whereas Aristotle really was so prolific and practical that I'd argue this quote only becomes true if you substitute Plato with Aristotle.
Whitehead was a proponent of process philosophy, a philosophy of 'becoming' as contrasted with Plato's philosophy of 'being'. This division can be traced back further to pre-socratic philosophy, i.e. Parmenides (being) and Heraclitus (becoming). Aristotle continued firmly on the same tract as Parmenides and Plato in terms of having a philosophical focus on being, and today we take this type of thinking for granted as it has permeated nearly all of western philosophy and society. Aristotle may have been more prolific but I suspect the quote is referencing this division more than anything else.
Lots of people enjoy "philosophical" discussions and certainly derive value from them. What they might not like is the "philosophy" that's continually throwing around author names, complicated words, and kinda leaves the average person feeling stupid talking around "proper philosophers". If you want to educate people, start with the layman explanations, and only at the end annotate the complicated words. It's not like people don't understand the general concept of things like "utilitarianism", it's simply that they don't use that word in their day to day, so they don't associate the concept to the word.
As to your other comment, well, that included a rather oversimplified example of utilitarianism, which many utilitarians will not even share. It's very easy to make naive utilitarian calculations, and in many cases there's too much uncertainty to even make calculations. You can only say that naive utilitarianism is easier than deontology. No offense intended, but maybe some people were downvoting you for this.
As far as i see the philosophy fails to correctly abstract and incorporate modern advances in scientific knowledge and technological development. While such abstraction and incorporation naturally would take time and make philosophy lagging behind, the majority of philosophy don't even bother to do it and dismisses the reality outright, a very stupid thing to do.
The philosophy's role of being a guiding science on the bleeding edge of scientific exploration of the world have been lost by the "philosophers" as the hard work of understanding of scientific reality was replaced by pseudo-scientific hand-waiving. That hand-waiving is easily noticeable even by casual observer and results in total loss of respect.
More than 30 years ago a freshman at University i had a great interest in philosophy, the new market capitalism in USSR resulted in great availability of books, including philosophical one, and we had a blast. With years as my knowledge grew, i started to see the philosophy's failure to provide both - a well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance - and started to see it only just as temporary mind crutches, a band-aid for the lack of knowledge, like those Ancient Greeks' myths.
And Plato today would have got Deep NN PhD and would be sitting at Google as a senior manager or director pulling $5M+ a year.
How would you discuss and constructively criticize the scientific method itself without philosophy? Philosophy is a superset of science and while it is less constrained overall, I wouldn't say it is useless.
You say philosophy has a failure to provide a "well build abstraction as well as exploration guidance" but how would that work? Philosophy is a large subject area, but I'll take the liberty to say it isn't required to be straight forward with concrete answers, more so to provoke thinking about what makes something straight forward and concrete.
It's about the relevance of ancient philosophical ideas to modern society's dilemmata, and progress in philosophy over the ages, in a fictionalised setting where Plato visits Google. I think "clickbait" is a bit harsh here.
i think its a fair condensation. the discussion of google is pretty incidental and given the lack of any actual official connection to GOOG, i think we should be shrewd in our assessment; it's in the title to sell more books.
I hadn't thought of that, because I knew the premise. I wouldn't say that it's been done on purpose to sell more books, but I could absolutely understand, now that you mention it, if someone bought the book based on the title and would be extremely disappointed by it. (I mean, I knew sort of what it was about and was disappointed...)
Great interview! Rebecca Goldstein never fails to kindle my interests in philosophy. Science really needs people like her, she pulls the rug out from under us but does it from a place of love. Her ability to communicate makes a huge difference also.
if someone is looking for a book where ancient philosophical ideas are critically applied to modern institutions and ideas, look elsewhere. this appears to be aimed at undergrad teaching, perhaps for an intro course, but despite the promising title, a quick read leaves me underwhelmed.
the main premise, forcing plato to engage with the modern world a la bill and ted, doesnt have to be bad. but this dramatization comes off quite patronizingly fellowkids. but if your students want to read about drunk people you can stick to the ancient texts! honestly, plato is one of the most accessible philosophers out there so this strikes me as doubly useless.
additionally, woe to the person looking for meaningful engagement with ethical topics where philosophical tools are actually used to answer modern questions. Here's a spot where a topic comes up, but then is lost in the banality of the author's stupid device.
> “So you’re telling me that the purpose of all this knowledge is merely to make money? Greed is driving the great search engine for knowledge? This bewilders me more than anything else I’ve gathered about this place. How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of the life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?
Well, what do you do when you’re faced with monumental cluelessness of this sort?
Plato, I said, I think you have a somewhat exalted view of Google and the nerds who work here.
Nerds? he said. Another word I do not know.”
it goes on to explain what a nerd is but never revisits the question of google's business model! the book leaves the reader at the end with a hotdog of chopped up, edited, and overly seasoned ancient philosophical ideas. i bet in high enough doses it causes cancer.
tl;dr - patronizing, zero actual engagement with technology ethics questions
I found the book underwhelming as well, and tedious to read. I cannot remember much from the part I managed (first quarter, approximately), except the idea that philosophy has made progress, revealed through the rhetoric device of having ordinary modern people teach and enlighten Plato himself on aspects of philosophy (eg morality of slavery).
Seems to me though that one could make that point directly just as memorably, without the entire narrative artifice.
Not as gripping and informative as the books of (her husband) Steve Pinker, IMHO.
One would think that after Fukuyama’s end of history nonsense, we’d have learned this lesson, but apparently not.