The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Dewey, like James, helped us slough off a lot of the misleading intellectual baggage we have inherited from the Platonic tradition, in particular the Aristotelian and Platonic convention that humankind’s most “distinctive and praiseworthy” capacity is “to know things as they really are—to penetrate behind appearance to reality.” It was this notion that gave rise to the traditional philosophical project of most of the past two thousand years, which has involved trying to find something stable that would serve as a criterion “for judging the transitory products of our transitory needs and interests.” As a result of what James, Dewey and the others observed, and the conclusions they drew from their observations, Rorty sums up pithily that we now have to “give up” on the idea that there are unconditional moral obligations, obligations which apply everywhere and at all times because they are rooted in an unchanging ahistorical human nature. Instead, pragmatism replaces the reality-appearance duality with a much less dramatic distinction—that between the more useful and the less useful. This reflects the fact that while the vocabulary of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology was useful for our forebears’ purposes, we have different purposes, for which we need a different vocabulary.8

  The same is true of reason. The Enlightenment replaced the idea of supernatural guidance with the idea of what Rorty labels “a quasi-divine faculty called ‘reason.’” But Dewey and James thought this was an attempt to keep a special faculty, called “reason”—something like God—alive in the midst of secular culture. This is tantamount to saying there must be a kind of “invisible tribunal” of reason overseeing laws which, deep down, everyone acknowledges as binding. Pragmatists argue that such a tribunal does not—cannot—exist.

  James and Dewey were both influenced by Emerson’s evolutionary sense of history, his awareness that “democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency,” but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature—what he called “the infinitude of the private man.” When he looked about him, and back through history, Emerson reflected that the great lessons of nature are variety and freedom. Because of this, he said, all questions of ultimate justification are decided by the future, a future that cannot be definitively predicted, but can be hoped for. Ultimately, pragmatism replaces the notion of “reality,” “reason” and “nature” with that of a “better human future.” “When pragmatists are asked ‘Better by what criterion?’ they have no answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. And by good they mean ‘variety and freedom’. . . . ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’”

  A parallel is sometimes drawn between the avant-garde and the aims of pragmatism. In both, the search is on for something new, something astonishing in a positive way, rather than any specific expectation. Dewey, for his part, was convinced that European philosophy was held back because it could not shed a world picture that had arisen within—and specifically applied to—the needs of an inegalitarian society. This had bred a dualistic way of thinking which he described as “baleful,” and had led to a fundamental social division between “contemplators and doers.” In fact, he was of the opinion that philosophy itself began with an attempt to reconcile “two kinds of mental product”—on the one hand, the products of priests and poets, and on the other, those of the artisans. Dewey believed that, at least until Darwin, the main thrust of Western philosophy had typically reflected the interests of the leisure class, which favored stability over change. One of the consequences of this had been that philosophy had lent its prestige to the idea of the “eternal,” the aim being to make metaphysics “a substitute for custom as the source and guarantor of higher moral and social values.” He was determined instead to shift attention from the eternal to the future; philosophy, he maintained, must become an instrument of change rather than one of conservation.9

  This was radical and so, following Dewey and the other pragmatists, philosophy did indeed change from being the search for some neo-Platonic “reality,” beyond the appearance of things (the idea of God included), to “How can we make the present into a richer future?”10

  Alongside this, Dewey wanted to replace with hope the attempt always to achieve certainty. He had little time for the notion of “truth” in any kind of certain sense: he thought that philosophers should confine themselves to “justification” or, in his words, to “warranted assertibility”—in much the same way as scientists phrase their findings. Once we realize, as Oliver Wendell Holmes had, that there is no one way that the world is, so it follows that there is no one way it can be accurately represented. Instead, there are myriad ways of acting to fulfill human hopes of happiness.11 Among all this, certainty is unlikely—it is, after all, no longer the aim. James and Dewey thought that the quest for certainty—even as a long-term goal—was an attempt to escape from the world. That quest must be replaced with the demand for imagination. “One should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs. The telos [purpose] of movement and flux is not solely mastery, but also stimulation.”12

  William James differed from Dewey in that he thought religion and science are both “respectable paths” for acquiring respectable beliefs, so long as we accept that these are beliefs suited to quite different purposes. “Knowing” is not something at which natural scientists are uniquely skilled. There are simply different ways of justifying beliefs to audiences. None of these audiences is more privileged than any other, or is closer to nature, or a better example of some ahistorical ideal of rationality.13 A believer in God will always be able to produce justification for his or her beliefs (most of them, anyway), and they will be justifications that meet the requirements of his or her community. At the same time, there is no reason to think that those beliefs, justifiable as they are to the individual and community of which he or she is a part, are those which are most likely to be true. There is no “higher” aim of inquiry called “truth,” no such thing as ultimate justification—justification before God, or before the tribunal of reason, rather than any merely finite human audience. Given a Darwinian picture of the world, there can be no such tribunal. If Darwinian biological evolution has no aim, it continuously produces new species, while cultural evolution produces new audiences; “but there is no such thing as a species which evolution has in view.”14

  NEW CONCEPTIONS OF POSSIBLE COMMUNITIES

  An allied claim of pragmatism is that we live in a world without essences. Because we can never step outside language, there is no such thing as “reality” unmediated by a linguistic description. Because pragmatists maintain that there is no distinction between knowing things and using them, so there can be no such thing as a description that matches the way an object really is apart from its relation to human consciousness or language.15

  Plato, Aristotle and the main monotheisms all insist on a sense of mystery and wonder in regard to non-human powers; that there is, already in existence, “something better and greater than the human.” Another element in this, also derived from the Greeks, is that humanity itself has an intrinsic nature—there is something essential and unchangeable within us called “the human,” which can be contrasted with what is “out there” in the rest of the universe. Pragmatism does not subscribe to that view but considers that humanity is an open-ended entity, that whatever it is, it is not an unchanging and eternal “essence.” Pragmatists therefore redirect the sense of awe and mystery—which the Greeks and the monotheisms attached to the supernatural—to the future. Pragmatism’s guiding spirit, so to speak, is that the humanity of the future, although derived from what we are at present, will be superior in some way, even if in as yet barely imaginable ways.16

  For pragmatists there is no difference, say, betwee
n numbers, tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions or anything else. There is nothing essential about these entities, nothing to be known about them other than what can be said about them. All that can be known about a hard, substantial table, say, is that certain sentences about it are accurate. We can’t go “behind” language to what might be regarded as a more immediate non-linguistic form of acquaintance.17 For pragmatists it is a waste of effort to concern ourselves with such “essences” as, say, constellations in the sky or moral values here on earth. These concepts are more or less useful, and this aspect of them is more important than arguing endlessly about their eternal (and therefore essential) nature.

  For pragmatists, even the scientists’ concern with electrons, with what are called “fundamental” particles, with essences, is yet another attempt to find something eternal in nature, and this, they suggest, merely reflects a human need; and the trouble with all such attempts is that “the need to be God is just one more human need.” The point is that nature can be described in any number of ways but none of them is the “inside” way. On this basis, understanding divinity under the aspect of eternity is neither an illusion nor a confusion—it is just one way of describing experience; but it is no more “inside” (or true) than any other way.

  The advantage of anti-essentialism, as we might call it (the term is Rorty’s), is that, aligned with Darwinian evolutionary theory, it shows that it is language rather than “mind” that is the distinguishing feature of our species, but one that is continuous with animal behavior. Together, these have allowed us to move beyond transcendental stories and replace them with empirical—experiential—stories. We have gradually substituted the making of a better future for ourselves for the attempt to see ourselves from outside time and history. As part of this shift, the very idea of philosophy changes: we see it now as an aid in creating ourselves (ourselves in the future) rather than in knowing ourselves.

  But the most important element of the anti-essentialist argument is the notion that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature, either generally or as applied to individual people. This view, of the self-contained individual self, what Dewey called the “belief in the fixity and simplicity of the self,” he put down to “the theologians’ . . . dogma of the unity and ready-made completeness of the soul.”18 His insight was to see that, on the contrary, any self may include within it a number of inconsistent selves, which do not necessarily act in harmony. This is an idea that ran throughout the twentieth century in all manner of disciplines, as we shall see. It is, for many, a most liberating doctrine, especially in a world without God.

  A NEW TRINITY: TRUST, MORAL AMBITION, SOCIAL HOPE

  It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this breakthrough. In some ways it aligned Dewey with Freud. With his interest in education, Dewey understood well the importance of the family in helping to socialize individuals—that is, in particular, the role of maternal love in creating non-psychopaths, in creating human selves who find concern for others entirely natural. Freud’s notion of the unconscious was in some ways an explanation of, and psychoanalysis a treatment for, individuals with multiple inconsistent and unharmonized selves (and who were disconcerted by them). Historians have located the origin of psychology in numerous places, and this is surely one of them. As Annette Baier, the New Zealand–based moral and feminist philosopher, sums up the pragmatist position, “the secular equivalent of faith in God . . . is faith in the human community and its evolving procedures—in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes.”19

  By this account, trust, moral ambition and social hope are the new trinity. In one sense this is not so radical, because more than one historian, or sociologist of religion, has concluded that the root of religious faith ultimately stems from the faith that a child has in its parent. As Rorty sums up Dewey: “Moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as a whole, is a matter of remaking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves. . . . It is neither irrational nor unintelligent to draw the limits of one’s moral community at a national or racial or gender border. But it is . . . best to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsibility to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.”20 Doing away with religious groupings helps this.

  Put another way, the pragmatist search is for an ever wider inclusion, rather than an exploration of “depth”; and this applies both to science and in the moral realm. Scientific progress involves integrating more and more data into a coherent overall account, but it is not a matter of penetrating appearance until one arrives at reality. Similarly, moral progress is a matter of seeking/achieving wider and wider sympathy. “You cannot aim at moral perfection, but you can aim at taking more people’s needs into account than you did previously.”21

  It follows that we should just give up the philosophical search for essences, unchanging reality. Moral progress is better understood as like sewing together a complex, multi-colored quilt of different human groups. “The hope is to sew such groups together with a thousand little stitches.”

  Imagination is the final key here, to add to trust, moral ambition and social hope. This amalgam is what will produce new conceptions of possible communities and, in that way, make the human future richer than the human past.22

  SANTAYANA’S COMIC FAITH

  Although he was less than happy with the label of “pragmatist,” George Santayana may be regarded as a maverick member of the species, who was friendly with, much influenced by, and an influence on, William James. Santayana had an unusual career path. Born in Spain, he spent decades in Boston as a professor at Harvard, and then left America, spending a further four decades in Oxford, Paris and Rome. He valued his freedom and, later in life, rejected offers of professorships from many universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Besides producing his many books, he was one of the most influential teachers of modern times—his pupils included Conrad Aiken, Van Wyck Brooks, James B. Conant, T. S. Eliot, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Frost, Walter Lippmann, Samuel Eliot Morison and Wallace Stevens.

  Santayana started from the fact, as he saw it, that there is nothing supernatural in life, there is no “over-soul,” as the Germans put it, “no supernatural more,” as William James put it, or, as he himself put it in an early poem: “No hope of heaven [to] sweeten our few tears.” “Few” tears because he was convinced that “the existence and well-being of man upon earth are, from the point of view of the universe, an indifferent incident,” that humanity, in terms of the whole, is “a fragment of a fragment.”23

  He thought that life “poses questions we cannot answer,” is beset by tragedy, and that transcendentalism adds nothing “essential.” When religions posed as science, he said, they had misplaced man’s hope. “It was a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic. . . . Religion, when it has tried to do man’s work for him, has not only cheated hope, but consumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.”24 There is no such thing as a “timeless soul across the board,” no core human nature, which is merely a name for a group of qualities “found by chance in certain tribes of animals,” artificially foregrounded by us, where no such foreground exists in nature itself.25 As regards absolutism and mysticism, “all human ideas are being sacrificed to one of them—the idea of an absolute reality.” Mysticism he dismissed as “a civil war of the mind” that ends “in the extermination of all parties. . . . Absolutism then tyrannously steps in to claim that superhuman Spirit resolves the disharmonies that people cannot.” But “absolute reality” is no more than a human opinion.26 Human well-being or salvation, he explained, depends as much on gratuitous external conditions or circumstances that people can neither engineer nor earn, as it does on their own behavior. Universality, as with the absolute, is like a mechanical rabbit at the dog track; it can never be
caught.27

  Santayana accepted that there was a “spiritual” crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, but claimed it was not a supernatural problem. Religion, he thought, is an ideal to which we would like reality to conform. Religion should be understood “poetically”; and it persists “because more distinctly than any other institution it contributed ‘moral symbols’ to culture that give people a way to live joyfully with the events that threaten meaninglessness: physical extremity or suffering, the limits of intellect or absurdity, and the dark edge of moral comprehension or evil.”28 Religious rituals create an “other world” and establish “a sense of joy” in things, throwing into relief the complex structures of the workaday world. “Festivity” and not social work, he maintained, was the hallmark of religion as a cultural institution; it was ritual, not certitude, that helped resolve the fear of meaninglessness. Religion lets people break away from social constraints, and religious practices, moreover, underscore the limit of human assertion. But he thought it a “beautiful and good” idea of religion that sin should exist in order to be “overcomeable”—it gave people a triumphant experience.29

  He thought, like James, like Dewey, that human beings represent “chances to make things better,” and his solution to the death of God was a new definition of the “spiritual” and otherworldliness, which was not transcendental and post-mortem but which involved an exploration of the imagination. Philosophy, for Santayana, could not offer “incorrigible first principles” but was a kind of conversation whose aim was to redescribe the world in ever more imaginatively accurate terms—he called it “rectification by redescription.”30 Philosophy, for him, was “festive, lyrical, rhetorical.” The imagination had to operate with a cosmic sense, but that meant a sense, above all, of our finitude and impotence. The aim of life should be to live triumphantly with finitude.