Abstract
The answer to the question of my title, if anything could reasonably count as an answer, depends in large part on how we take ‘can’ and ‘beyond understanding’. I will come to this. But my discussion also takes place against the background of D.Z. Phillips’s remarks about ‘the vicissitudes of human life being beyond human understanding’ and about the ‘limits of human existence’. All, in turn, take place against the background of thinking about religions in a non-rationalistic Wittgensteinian manner. I will argue that there are senses in which Phillips is right in his claim that there are vicissitudes in human life which are beyond human understanding, but that these senses are of little philosophical interest. In the senses that might deliver philosophical gold, the claim is at best false.
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Notes
The original article, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy XLII, no. 161 (July 1967), 191–209, appears in a somewhat expanded form and with a follow-up chapter, in my An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1982), 65–133, along with my direct discussion of Wittgenstein on religion, 43–64. I pursue the twistings and turnings of Wittgensteinian fideism in my God, Scepticism and Modernity (Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press, 1989), chapters 5–11, in my Scepticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 23–40, in my Contemporary Critiques of Religion (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 94–112, and in my Philosophy and Atheism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press, 1985), 77–106, 211–27. See, as well, Michael Martin, ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Religious Belief,’ Heythrop Journal XXXII (1991), 369–82.
Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 202–21. I discuss limiting questions in my ‘Religion, Science and Limiting Questions’, Studies in Religion 8, no. 3 (1979), 259–65, my ‘The “Good Reasons Approach” and “Ontological Justifications” of Morality,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 9, no. 35 (April 1959), 2–16 and in my Justification and Morals (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1955), 63–72 and 216–45. See here, as well, Robert C. Coburn, ‘A Neglected Use of Theological Language’, Mind 72 (1963).
Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 181–242 and his
‘The Myth of the Subjective’ in Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 159–81;
Isaac Levi, ‘Escape From Boredom: Edification According to Rorty’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy XI, no. 4 (December 1981) and his ‘Conflict and Inquiry’, Ethics 102 (July 1992), 314–34; and Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–59, 116–51.
Hilary Putnam, ‘Meaning Holism’ and W.V. Quine, ‘Reply to Putnam’ both in Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, eds, The Philosophy of W.V. Quine (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 405–32 and
W.V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 13–16, 50–9.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939) and
Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ in D.Z. Phillips, ed., Religion and Understanding (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 9–42.
Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 183–98; Bjørn T. Ramberg, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 116–40; and
Simon Evine, Donald Davidson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 134–71. If there is a verificationist streak here so be it. Not everything in verificationism is wrong, not every application mistaken.
See Richard Rorty on the import of dropping talk of necessity. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19–36 and
Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin (his talk of incommensurability notwithstanding) make it clear why in spite of different standards of rationality we still have overlapping criteria of both rationality and what is taken to be humanly acceptable. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 116–33 and Isaiah Berlin, ‘Reply to Ronald H. McKinney, “Towards a Postmodern Ethics”’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 26 (1992), 557–60. Taylor goes on to show, in ways that mesh with the method of wide reflective equilibrium, how we can reason our way out of ethnocentric traps.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 19–21, 48–51, 571–87;
John Rawls, ‘The Independence of Moral Theory,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974/75), 7–10; Norman Daniels, ‘Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,’ Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979); Norman Daniels, ‘Reflective Equilibrium and Archimedean Points’ in J. Angelo Corbett, ed., Equality and Liberty (London: Macmillan, 1991), 90–109; Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 195–248; and Kai Nielsen, ‘Rawls and the Socratic Ideal,’ Analyse & Kritik 13, no. 1 (1991), 67–93.
Alice Ambrose, ‘The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy’ in Max Black, ed., Philosophical Analysis: A Collection of Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950), 15–37.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Paul R. Reynolds, 1902), Lectures XVI, XVII and XX; W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960); and Ninian Smart, Reasons and Faiths (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).
Anthony Kenny cites Wittgenstein as remarking in an unpublished manuscript: ‘A common-sense person, when he reads earlier philosophers thinks — quite rightly — “Sheer nonsense”. When he listens to me, he thinks — rightly again — “Nothing but stale truisms”. That is how the image of philosophy has changed’. Anthony Kenny, ‘Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy’ in Brian McGuinness, ed., Wittgenstein and His Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 22.
This claim about the incoherence of the concept of God in the developed forms of Judaeo-Christianity and Islam is articulated in the works of mine cited in note 1. David Ray Griffin, in a clearly formulated and fairminded review of my God, Scepticism and Modernity, has succinctly stated the core of my account, setting it out usefully in the form of seven propositions. He then argues that both my argument against theism and for atheism are incomplete. I argue that non-anthropomorphic concepts of God are incoherent (E), anthropomorphic concepts of God may be coherent, but they are superstitious and plainly involve false beliefs (F) and that concepts of God that are neither incoherent nor anthropomorphic are essentially atheistic (G). My case against theism is not exhaustive, Griffin has it, because the concepts of God referred to in the above theses (E, F and G) would have to be exhaustive but they are not. The non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God of traditional theism are, Griffin seems at least to agree, incoherent, but I fail to consider subtler forms of anthropomorphism in non-traditional theisms such as Tennant’s or Whitehead’s, which also reject the conceptions of God of traditional theism as incoherent without falling into a crude anthropomorphism or into atheism. Hence my case against theism is incomplete. I agree that it is not complete and that a complete case would have to consider such accounts and no doubt others as well. My suspicions here are (for now, they are no more than that) that if I did consider them I would find that (a) the God of such philosophers was at a very considerable distance from the God of Judaeo-Christianity and Islam, (b) that where their views are coherent they will reveal (as Spinoza’s conception of God does) an atheistic substance, and (c) that their distinctively metaphysical strands are, as all such speculative philosophy, at least as incoherent as traditional non-anthropomorphic theism. It is just such metaphysical thinking that we need, à la Rorty (a former Whiteheadean), to get rid of. Arthur Murphy’s ‘Whitehead and the Method of Speculative Philosophy’ is insightful here. See his essay by the same title in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Tudor, 1941), 351–80 and set it, as well, alongside his ‘Moore’s “Defense of Common Sense”’ in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (New York: Tudor, 1942), 299–317 and his ‘Can Speculative Philosophy be Defended?’ Philosophical Review LII (1943), 135–43. My case for atheism is also incomplete, Griffin contends, for I do not argue but simply assert that non-theistic accounts of the world are adequate. But that is not true for I do argue for their adequacy in my Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), my Reason and Practice (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), my Why Be Moral? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), my Ethics Without God, revised edition (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press, 1990), and in my God and the Grounding of Morality (Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press, 1991). In Reason and Practice, pace Griffin, I also argue that the efforts of natural theology have failed. See part III and, more indirectly, but still crucially, part VI, chapters 31, 36, 37 and 38. See also in this connection Michael Martin, Atheism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). My arguments, no doubt, are in one way or another defective. That is not surprising in any event, but it seems to me that in the last three centuries there have been varied and cumulatively very strong arguments for the adequacy of non-theistic (i.e. naturalistic) accounts. Taken together they present a very formidable case. It is little wonder that so much of the defence of religion has turned fideistic. Moreover, and vitally, what is reasonably taken to be ‘adequate’ or not varies with what the alternatives are (what the live options are). If the God of traditional theism is incoherent, Wittgensteinian fideism is at best obscurantist, the God of crude anthropomorphism is something yielding beliefs which are just plainly false and non-crude anthropomorphism is (where non-atheistic) metaphysical moonshine, there is, if these things are really true, little in the way of an alternative to a pragmatic thoroughly non-metaphysical naturalism such as that articulated (though differently) by John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty. I have also turned my hand to that in my After the Demise of the Tradition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989) and I have, as well, a bit in the tradition of Murphy and a bit in the tradition of Rorty, sought, without reliance on positivist assumptions, to undermine the claims of metaphysics (most particularly revisionary metaphysics). If metaphysics is a non-starter, then the very theological enterprises which rely on it, such as Paul Tillich’s or Reinhold Niebuhr’s or that (to quote Griffin) of such ‘nontraditional theists, such as Pfleiderer, James, Tennant, Whitehead and Hartshorne’, cannot, relying as they do on the constructions of speculative metaphysics, get off the ground. If I am right about the impossibility of metaphysics, there is little point in looking at the details of such views which are plainly metaphysical constructions. That is to say, key parts of their accounts rely on such constructions. I have argued for the impossibility of metaphysics in my ‘Broad’s Conception of Critical and Speculative Philosophy’, Dialectica (forthcoming), ‘Reconsidering the Platonic Conception of Philosophy’, International Studies in Philosophy (forthcoming), ‘Jolting the Career of Reason: Absolute Idealism and Other Rationalisms Reconsidered’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (forthcoming), and ‘What is Philosophy? The Reconsideration of Some Neglected Options’, History of Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming). See David Ray Griffin, ‘Review of God, Scepticism and Modernity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 1 (1992), 189–90. In this setting aside of metaphysics (to return to the beginning of my essay) Phillips and I, and Wittgensteinians generally, are one, though they are usually loath to put things so bluntly. But Phillips, while abandoning metaphysics, and still seeking to keep the God of Christianity, or any other God for that matter, has only left us something akin to morality touched with emotion and obscurity.
Axel Hägerström, Philosophy and Religion, trans. from Swedish by Robert T. Sandin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 224–59.
Simon Blackburn, ‘Can Philosophy Exist?’ in Jocelyne Couture and Kai Nielsen, eds, Reconstructing Philosophy? New Essays in Metaphilosophy (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1993). The exaggeration there that needs questioning is that the scrutiny of Minerva can have no causal impute. It cannot have the grand causal impute that philosophers are self-deceived into assuming. But that it has none at all would take a lot of showing. I doubt that Blackburn really wants to make such a strong claim.
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© 1995 Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr
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Nielsen, K. (1995). Can Anything be Beyond Human Understanding?. In: Tessin, T., von der Ruhr, M. (eds) Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23867-5_7
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