An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  Furthermore, we are acutely aware of the distinction between subject and object, and when we encounter other subjects in the world of objects, we treat them in a special way. Suppose an apple falls on the table before me, and I ask the question ‘Why?’ The right way to answer is by citing a cause: it fell because the breeze dislodged it. By giving causal explanations we are automatically ordering events in space and time, and the causal relation itself is intrinsically temporal. (In general causes precede or are simultaneous with their effects.) But suppose that you throw an apple onto the table before me, and I ask the question ‘Why?’ As we saw in Chapter 1, the question now has quite another sense. In the normal case - that is, the case where it is not asked of you, but addressed to you - the question looks for a justifying reason, not a cause. Why should you throw this apple down before me? The answer might be that I deserve it, or that it would be good to eat.

  Justifying reasons lead us in a new direction: not to other events, related to this one by space and time, but to abstract principles of right. We find ourselves enunciating ‘timeless’ laws, which are not summaries of observation but prescriptions addressed to all rational beings. Consider the principle that everyone should receive what he deserves: this applies without reference to place or time, and concerns merely the situation of the subject, and his relation to other subjects like himself. It is as though subjects addressed one another from a point of view outside space and time - condemned to see one another ‘under the aspect of eternity’. And this is how we see our own actions, when they proceed truly from us. If I do something that I regard as wrong, my reaction is one of shame or remorse. I carry the stain of this action around with me, and I feel myself to be judged. Judgement in such circumstances has a timeless character: it is always with me, inscribed hereafter in my very self, regardless of subsequent events.

  This predicament of the self-conscious subject gives rise to a strange experience — an experience whose strangeness we notice only when compelled to philosophize. It is as though the world of objects were perforated by apertures, from each of which a subject peers, and through each of which we glimpse the ‘transcendental’ province of another’s will. The eyes of a person may accuse, condone or exonerate. They do not look at things only: they offer glances, and summon other glances in response to them. Lovers’ glances are an instance of what I have in mind. A lover shines his eyes into the depths of his beloved, calling the other subject to the surface: the world of objects falls away, and self presses to self at a common boundary. This experience is hard to describe in words, but here is a version due to Donne:Our eye-beams twisted, and did thred

  Our eyes, upon one double string;

  So to‘entergraft our hands, as yet

  Was all the meanes to make us one,

  And pictures in our eyes to get

  Was all our propagation.

  This experience takes place in time. But it is frequently described as timeless, as though it opened onto a sphere outside the natural order. And we can see why. For lover’s glances are aimed at that which lies beyond the moment, beyond cause and effect, beyond the ‘empirical’ world. Maybe there is an illusion at work here. But it arises from our deepest thoughts about ourselves. In all our deliberations we are aware of this indescribable thing at the periphery of our mental vision: the subject who acts, who responds to reason, and who does not just show himself in the world of objects, but appropriates that world as his own.

  The phenomena that I have just sketched do not prove that the individual can exist in a timeless state. But they suggest that there is something in our condition which invites us to think of ourselves in that way, rather as Spinoza thought of the world. On the one hand we are objects in the world of nature, bound by time, space and causality; on the other hand we are subjects, who relate to one another as though bound only by reason and its immutable laws. And our individuality is conferred by this second view of ourselves. The subject is unique, irreplaceable, the focus of those attitudes like erotic love, praise, accusation and remorse, which cannot be directed to something which is conceived merely as an object. And it is these attitudes which tell us what the individual really is, and why he matters.

  But can we make sense of those ideas? Can we make sense of them, that is, without embracing a Cartesian or a Fichtean view of the self, as the object of its own awareness?

  7

  GOD

  The short answer is that I don’t know. But the next three chapters will help us to clarify the question. Much of modern philosophy leaves its readers cold because it begins from an impoverished conception of the human subject. We all know in our hearts, even if we have never put the matter into words, that the human subject is the strangest thing that we encounter; and when we do try to put the matter into words, we find ourselves employing concepts which we can hardly explain - such as: self, will, freedom, responsibility, individuality, transcendence. It is because they recognize these truths that philosophers in the Continental tradition - and especially romantics like Hegel and Heidegger - have acquired such a following; and it is because they seem to neglect them, or at any rate make no show of confronting them, that Anglo-American philosophers write, on the whole, only for each other, in journals that few people troubled by life’s brevity are tempted to read. This is a great pity, for Anglo-American philosophy has much more to say to us than Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, or deconstruction (to name but a few).

  Our most pressing philosophical need, it seems to me, is to understand the nature and significance of the force which once held our world together, and which is now losing its grip - the force of religion. It could be that religious belief will soon be a thing of the past; it is more likely, however, that beliefs with the function, structure and animus of religion will flow into the vacuum left by God. In either case, we need to understand the why and wherefore of religion. It is from religious ideas that the human world, and the subject who inhabits it. were made. And it is the ghostly residue of religious feeling that causes our most intractable philosophical problems.

  Two distinct phenomena are involved in religion, as we know it: religious observance, and religious belief. These do not necessarily coincide. There are religions which remain vague or non-committal in matters of doctrine, while insisting on the most scrupulous observance. Thus, traditional Chinese religion lays great emphasis on rituals, from the exact performance of which our ancestors are supposed to benefit, while offering only the most rudimentary theological speculations by way of explaining how that could be so. Something similar could be said of Japanese Shintoism, and even of the religions of Greece and Rome. The anecdotal theology of Hesiod seems half-aware of its own metaphorical nature; by the time of Ovid the awareness is open-eyed and full of wonder — wonder not at the world of divinities, but at the poet’s half-amused belief in them. Pious observance mattered more in ancient society than correct ideas about the supernatural beings who supposedly required it. By recognizing a changing multitude of gods, the Romans implied that it was of no great importance whether you actually believed in them In those days you could even become a god, by means similar to those now used to obtain an earthly title. It is hard to believe that the average Roman took the gods very seriously, when his emperor could arbitrarily declare himself to be one of them. But this did not remove the respect for sacred things on which, to the Roman mind, civil order depended. It was still necessary to invoke the lares et penates (the household deities), to treat old age with reverence, and new life with awe. It was still necessary to consecrate the most important happenings - birth, marriage, death and membership - to something higher than one’s own desire. Social obligations arose not from contracts only, but from solemn vows, and a kind of eternal jurisdiction was implied in this - as in the fate of ‘pious Aeneas’, as he departed forever from the flames of Troy.

  Just as there can be religious observance without religious belief, so can there be belief without observance, or belief which leaves observance t
o the conscience of the believer. The Protestant tradition of Christianity has tended in this direction, gradually shedding what it regards as the idolatrous trappings of the Roman Catholic ritual, until little remains of the outward display of religion, and all is reduced to a stark confrontation between God and the soul. Such an attitude is fraught with dangers. The via negativa which leads to God by discarding the images that disguise him, may come close to discarding God as well - as in the negative theology of Karl Barth. In its war against the impure and the inessential, the Protestant religion is always in danger of negating itself: which is one reason why the Protestant churches are now in far greater crisis than the Church of Rome. Nevertheless, in its stable and historically durable forms, the Protestant religion has shown an interesting tendency to combine clear theological beliefs with utter vagueness in ritual and worship.

  There is, it seems to me, a great mystery in the fact that rational theology should also be religion: that ritual observance, ceremony, and the sense of the sacred should come in time to have the God of theology as their object. The two things may certainly maintain separate lives in a single soul. Aristotle, for example, most lucid proponent of an abstract monotheism, comforted himself with the myths and customs of the Greek religion; while Muhammad, seized by the sublime conception of the one God, unearthly and all-transcending, nevertheless dutifully visited the sacred stone of the kabbah. But those are transitional cases, in which the light of monotheism had not yet swept away the mythic shadows. The belief in God, the prime mover and creator, who exists eternally and of necessity, who is ‘cause of himself’, whose essence it is to exist, and who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good: this belief immediately congeals with the ancient cults, which become cults of the supreme being. The interest that the ancestral ghosts and heroes maintain in their survivors becomes an attribute of God’s. Amazingly, the First Cause himself, the unmoved mover, takes a personal interest in his creation and in the doings of all of us. The God of theology - that abstract entity which proves itself into existence by an argument which is obviously sophistical but which has never been conclusively refuted - becomes a person, and even (for a Christian) an incarnate person, bridging in his own divine essence the otherwise impassable barrier between the empirical world of our experience and the transcendental world of our belief. Spinoza saw an absurdity in this, rejected the idea of transcendence, tore away from God the veil of personality, rebuffed the suggestion that God should want our love or need our worship, and dismissed the myths and the sacred customs as so many ‘graven images’. But Spinoza was denounced as the enemy of religion, the one who, in order to save theology, had sacrificed its purpose. For the mass of humanity there is no gap, and no contradiction, between theological belief and religious observance. Why is this? What is it that compels the one who believes in God the creator, who hopes for eternal life and trusts in a transcendental reality, nevertheless to worship only at the altar of his ancestors, living by customs that derive no endorsement from the revealed will of God, and perhaps looking on rival customs as horrendous acts of sacrilege? Why is it that our rational pursuit of an answer to the riddle of existence leads us in the very same direction as does the mythic consciousness, as does the sense of sin and defilement, and as do the customs and ceremonies that define an earthly community?

  I see myself and others as objects in the world of nature; but I also see myself and others as subjects, in some way outside the natural order, looking into it from a ‘transcendental’ perspective. This division between object and subject is inescapable, and, as Hegel saw, the root cause of our estrangement. All our projects - all those that really matter to us - are framed in terms of the subject: it is the self which I try to capture in love and desire, and which always eludes me; and it is the self which I strive to realize in the objective world, for which I demand recognition and right, and which remains untouched by the tinsel honours that bedeck the human person. Nothing in the world can ever be a self: to think otherwise is to fall victim to an illusion of grammar. It is to deduce from the valid use of ‘myself’, that there is a self to which I refer. (This is like deducing the existence of a sake from the valid use of ‘for my sake’. In one sense, ‘What kind of thing is a sake?’ is a paradigm of a philosophical question.)

  To put it in another way: the rational being lives in a condition of metaphysical loneliness. He may not describe it in those terms - and it is very unlikely that he would use the Kantian idiom of my previous paragraph. But if he is self-conscious at all he will suffer the effects of this loneliness, and perhaps find consolation in the texts, from Gilgamesh to Four Quartets, which meditate on our fallen state, and on the gap between human longing and human satisfaction: the gap which comes from being not of this world, but only in it. The innocence of the animals consists in having no knowledge of this gap; it is our awareness of it that leads both to religious ritual, and to the belief in a transcendental deity: and these two come together because they are addressed to a single need.

  Self-conscious beings do not unite in herds or packs; they come together in two quite different ways: first as communities regulated by negotiation, law and contract; secondly as tribes or congregations, united by a bond of membership. Anthropologists have long puzzled over the need for membership, over the rituals which establish it, and the penalties by which it is enforced. But almost all would agree with Durkheim’s thesis, in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that religious observance is, in its primitive form, part of the ritual of membership, and takes its sense from the new and ‘sacramental’ bond that is established when people adopt common myths, common liturgies, and a common distinction between the sacred and the profane. This sacramental bond should be understood in metaphysical terms. It is a bond between subjects, in a world of objects. Through religious observance people enter together into the sphere beyond nature. The function of ritual is to mobilize words, gestures and dances - those forms of behaviour which are replete with the experience of self - and to turn them in a supernatural direction. The rituals are essentially shared, and each subject, repeating the magic words, or performing the magic gestures, is freed for a moment from the world of objects, flowing freely into a ‘mystic communion’ with the other subjects who worship at his side. No ordinary commerce between people could achieve this effect, since ordinary commerce depends on negotiation, consent, and a respect for rights and duties, and therefore assumes the subject to be alone and inviolable in his sovereign territory, shut up in a fortress which he alone can occupy. The ‘first-person plural’ of the religious rite overcomes this isolation and creates, for a brief but necessary moment, the sense that we stand together outside nature, sharing the subjective viewpoint which otherwise we know only as ‘mine’.

  But the thought of this supernatural sphere gives rise to the idea of a transcendental perspective: a view which is not from the subject, onto the world of objects, but onto the subject, seeing the self as it truly is. This, I believe, is how the God of monotheism is conceived: as a self-conscious subject who confronts other subjects directly, and who allocates their place within the mystic communion. In the divine consciousness, subject and object are one; the divide between them is overcome and made whole. The religious ritual overcomes our loneliness; but without God this ‘collective subjectivity’ hovers on the verge of illusion. With God, the illusion becomes reality, subjectivity becomes another and higher objectivity, and we take our place in the realm where subjects are fully at home with each other and transparently known. We are not merely consoled, but redeemed, and this metaphysical redemption changes daily life. For, as I argued in the last chapter, the self-conscious being casts judgement on himself, and this judgement has a timeless character: it cannot be overcome in the world of objects, but only by an inner renewal, which removes the stain of guilt. Guilt remains just so long as subject and object are divided, the first standing in judgement over the second. But God, who sees subject as object, heals the rift between them, ‘purifies’ them of thei
r common pollution, and launches them as one into the world of self-conscious choice.

  The experience that I am trying to convey is familiar to all who partake of Holy Communion; it has been matchlessly dramatized by Wagner in Parsifal, and has received countless commentaries in works of devotion. But, with the notable exceptions of Hegel and his critic Kierkegaard, philosophers barely mention it. For most philosophers in our tradition, there is little more to the question of God than the flimsy proofs for his existence. If I am right, however, there is much more. For the impulse to believe, I suggest, stems from a metaphysical predicament. And the God of monotheism is the only possible solution to this predicament, the only thing which stands wholly outside nature, confronting us as a person, and raising us to the transcendental realm to which our aspirations tend.

  It is therefore necessary to examine whether this personal God exists: this is a question of some urgency, if it is really true that the self calls out for him. Now, it is only when people began to wander freely among strangers that the gods of the tribe seemed inadequate to protect them. The ‘God of the Philosophers’ is therefore a late-comer; but the speculations about his nature have been surprisingly uniform. God is conceived on all sides as timeless, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, supremely good, and - what is most remarkable - a person, who praises and blames, loves, hates and forgives, and acts by moral categories. Such a conception is bound to be problematic, since it runs to extremes in every direction, while clinging to the idea that we are made in God’s image - a sure sign, for the cynic, that he is made in ours. Nevertheless, no other conception will really answer to our need - the need to find a transcendental subject, for whom all other subjects are knowable in their subjectivity, and who has the power and the will to heal the fissure in our world.