Emmanuel: A theodicy

EMMANUEL

—A theodicy

John J. Blom

Emmanuel

—A theodicy

Copyright © 2020 by John J. Blom

Other Books by John J. Blom

Descartes in Relation to Cicero, Peirce, and Ryle, Kindle, 2017

Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology, New York, New York University Press, 1978

René Descartes: The Essential Writings, New York, Harper & Row, Inc., 1977

Preface

The hallmark of the transcendental is that it is non-phenomenal; in other words, it is supposed bereft of all feeling. Whatever form the transcendental is deemed to take, for example, as Cartesian matter or Kantian noumena, we argue that there can be no such thing. Rather, being is feeling and feeling being. God and finite creatures, whether the latter be conscious or not, must be feeling beings, must be phenomenal.

Our argumentation is set forth in sections, not traditional chapters. In developing our argument, we refer from time to time to what we take to be views of certain philosophers. We have based our reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time on the translation by Macquarrie & Robinson. In the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, we have used the translation by Hazel E. Barnes.

Hartford, Ct. J.J.B.

Contents

Preface

Section 1: A Framework, Pending a Resolution of Solipsism

Section 2: More on the Framework, Still Pending a Resolution of Solipsism

Section 3: Overcoming Solipsism via God

Section 4: Looking at Matters in Light of Our Knowledge of God

Section 5: Remarks on Heidegger

Section 6: Remarks on Sartre’s System

Section 7: Where Things Stand

A Framework, Pending a Resolution of Solipsism

That Nothingness is not follows from our being here to assert that fact. But could there ever have been Nothingness? Or might Nothingness yet come to be? Such questions can intelligibly be pursued only by determining just how much about Being our thought can manage to strip away so as thereby to lay bare any bounds to brute contingency. We will, however, be hard-pressed if we undertake that task without formulating an ontological argument, for that’s what is required to force clearly to the surface the abiding principles of Being which circumscribe the realm of contingency.

The discovery of those abiding principles is unlikely to be straightforward. It seems, though, that we may be well served by trying, somewhat in the vein of Berkeley, to recast skepticism in such a way as to transform it into the core of a quite positive ontological stance. To do that we should first recognize what skepticism teaches us cannot be admitted to the core. Mathematics will not be part of the core. Even if pure mathematics, which has number theory at its roots, could be shown formally airtight, its applications, whether in the physical sciences or in daily life, are via conventions (coordinations) whose utility in prediction pure mathematics cannot guarantee—cannot guarantee, indeed, even when it comes to hypotheses about the brain processes or whatever else underlies mathematical thinking itself. Physical notions, then, must involve more than mathematics. Thought is our only contact with reality, and so even physical notions will have their point de départ in our self-experience, by analogy to thinking. Recognition of what is allowable by way of analogy to thinking, permissible variations on that theme, must, of course, be posterior to clarifying the paradigm, the very agency constitutive of thinking.

An essential fact about thinking is that it’s through and through sensate; it’s through and through a matter of feeling. Undoubtedly we may, for example, want to point out that the aspect of thinking through which we perceive some content or other differs in some ways, say, from those aspects by which we experience colors, tastes, sounds, and so on, but we ought not therefore be led into saying that perceiving, whatever be its content, doesn’t have as its substratum sensation or feeling. Even Descartes, however much he felt a need to emphasize that perception is not seeing, not tasting, not hearing, and so on, did not intend to suggest that intellection is a lifeless, feeling-bereft, spiritless affair; that was not his view of the nature of any mind, finite or divine. Suffice it to say for now that we will follow the required order and return to a consideration of physical notions only after we explore in some depth what can be said of thinking itself. We may, however, expect that the physical realm, conceived on analogies to thinking, will share with thinking the character of being in one way or another sensate, that is, of being in one way or another a realm of feeling.

As noted, pure mathematics is not per se about anything other than itself. The validity of any mathematical formalism seems not contingent upon the depictive or representative character of the vehicles of sense and imagination which we recruit to think and express that formalism; indeed the same formalism could be expressed in a variety of sensuous notations provided they are used isomorphically. There is a lot to be thankful for with respect to this epistemological independence of mathematical thinking from representation. For the precision required of mathematical thinking has little in common with the imprecision typically inherent in the vehicles of sense and imagination which we recruit to express that precise mathematical thinking. It is a wonder, then, that anyone should ever have thought themselves needing or able to validate even geometry by feigning, what is a contradiction in terms, namely, that they can literally imagine (i.e., sensibly represent) a non-phenomenal (i.e., a non-sensible) Cartesian res extensa. Any putative non-phenomenal realm, anything transcendental, is a nonentity. It could play no role in mathematics or physics or life generally. If we mistakenly talk as though such a realm were some sort of object, perhaps inhabited by other objects, to which we can simply refer, that only goes to show how easily we will manufacture phantoms unless we first insist on having some positive conception of whatever object we claim to be thinking about, and a positive conception will in one or another way involve sense or feeling; in short, it will be a possible phenomenon.

It should be stressed that, despite the attempts to devise formal mathematical techniques of proof that do not require accessing numbers individually (attempts clearly necessary, for example, if there is to be reasoning about the continuum or so-called mathematical extension), it may be claimed that, at least occasionally, some mathematical natures just reveal themselves to one, being, as it were, objects of a sense as different from all the others as vision is from hearing. If that be so, then such mathematical natures must, indeed, be ranked among phenomena; their sui generis lucid quiddities would render them the very antithesis of the nonbeing that attaches to non-phenomenal pseudo-objects. Similarly, there may well also be moral and aesthetic senses with their proper objects, and when we feel visited, not only by insights into mathematical, moral, or aesthetic phenomena, but also, and crucially, by insights into our own constitution as a thinking agent, we will naturally be prone to regard ourselves as confronted with, affected by, truths, not concocting them.

That the experiences involved in what we here call insight have feeling as their substratum is manifestly consonant with skepticism. But even skepticism by its very nature still fears it might court error if it embraced phenomenalism so conclusively as to imply that possible experience or at least Being itself could not in principle extend beyond the realm of sense and feeling. The challenge, then, will be to reinforce our view that whatever could merit being called insight into truth, i.e., insight into reality, would have to be a phenomenal encounter carrying only phenomenal effects. And we will want to do this in such a way as to allow that, what we find thus operating upon us during periods of our explicit insight into it, will, as appropriate to the case, also continue to operate on and through the agents that make up nature, whatever the degree of consciousness of those agents, as it were, besouling them. In this connection it is perhaps also helpful to recall that both Plato and Aristotle eschewed the position of those so-called friends of the forms who couldn’t explain how the forms or ideas were of effect in nature. In other words, Plato and Aristotle wanted to construe such notions differently; they were of the opinion, as are we, that the forms or ideas into which we are to seek for insight be recognized as the operating principles of nature possessing an overall source of unity.

It seems safe, then, to speak of the significant truths into which we seek insight as though they will be implacable, unmoved yet moving us into action—for example, when a mathematical insight operates in such a way as to set us scurrying, hoping to fashion one or other symbolism to register it and somehow work it into the tapestry, or formalism, of mathematical doctrine. Nor are similes to vision always the most apposite when it comes to capturing the conation we experience, say, in cases of moral insight: on the one hand there is the demandingness of what we feel ought to be; on the other hand there can be our ploys to distract ourselves from those demands. Clearly, nothing we are saying here requires the conclusion that a significant truth is fathomed immediately, as attested not only by difficulties we have in finding satisfactory ways to flesh out insights in schemes of proof or modes of discourse, but also by the difficulties we have in conceiving how behavior must be organized or further organized to make possible the instantiation of a moral and social ideal. There are undoubtedly cases, many cases, where we will be unsure whether some idea of which we speak is rooted in a significant truth; accordingly, from the epistemological point of view, until their merits are assessed, a function may be served by dubbing ideas subjective. But that should not be taken as an ontological assertion to the effect that ideas are somehow private to a thinking agent, themselves isolated, and isolating the agent, from direct access to the rest of nature.

As we’ve noted, the ontological substrate of whatever agency there may be is sense or feeling, yet that is not to say we need to, or even in principle could, completely describe any such essentially indefinite substrate before regarding it as being the embodiment of some agent and its operations. Accordingly, in the analysis we must make of our agency as a thinking being we will hopefully find a way of explaining in respect to which particular proposed ideas we have firm grounds for saying their operations upon us, as in leading us to try to register our insights into them by symbols, discourse, or behavior, are due to agents other than ourself. Admittedly, not too much progress can be made in this regard until we clarify what is essential to our own agency since that is to be the point de départ for conceiving, by suitably tailored analogy, other sorts of agents.

Yet apropos to what we’ve just been saying, a few more words may be in order even now. Even if we premise that there can be no nonbeing of phenomena and that agency can be embodied only in phenomena, and even if we consider ideas or forms as not of necessity always subjective ontologically, that is, not of necessity such as never to be outside ourself qua thinking agent, but to be possibly the putative eternal agents of nature to which science refers as principles or ultimate truths, and into which we seek insight, still the questions arise for us, as they did for Descartes, whether we can so clarify our own nature as a thinking agent that we can