Getting to the Point

The mutilation of reason means that we cannot consider it to be rational at all. Hence, it is incomplete and can recover its health only through reestablishing contact with its roots. A tree without roots dries up…

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 43

Reflection – This passage goes down a path often traveled on this blog. Still, I suppose it bears repeating; Ratzinger certainly thinks so, as he has often returned to it in his writings. The reclamation of reason and its ordered relationship to faith has been a major theme of his, from his Introduction to Christianity in the 1960s to the Regensburg Address just a few years ago.

The mutilation of reason he speaks of here is that wrought by logical positivism, which limits reason solely and exclusively to the scientifically verifiable. If a statement cannot be proven in a laboratory or expressed in a mathematical formula, it is irrational, meaningless.

As I pointed out just a few days ago, of course this means that positivism itself is irrational and meaningless, as its own truth claims cannot be so tested out. Put that way, logical positivism is shown to be a fairly silly theory, self-refuting in its first principles.

And yet positivism stubbornly remains with us, and seems persuasive to many. The New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, etc.) is founded on it. And this is points to a darker reality, I’m afraid.

Now when I begin to go down this road of exploring this darker reality, I need to say that little of this happens on the level of conscious choice and deliberate decision. There are secret chambers and depths in all our hearts where all sorts of less than creditable impulses and drives reside. We don’t always know why we think and act as we do, and I do definitely mean we here.

Why is positivism, that ridiculous theory, so persuasive to so many? I think there is a desire not to think too hard or much at all about the deep questions of life. Thinking might lead to insight; insight might lead to understanding; understanding might lead to conviction; conviction might require… repentance.

And I do think this is at least part of the picture. We want to do what we want to do. Don’t we? Nobody likes to repent, likes to change. I know I don’t. Change is hard. And if we think too hard about what we’re doing and what it all means and whether or not there’s a God in heaven who might have an Opinion or two on the subject, then we might conclude that we have to change.

So there is positive value for us in positivism. That voice that comes in right away in the reasoning process and says, “Oh well, nobody can know anything about these things anyhow! Hey, there’s a really cool book by Richard Dawkins! Read that instead! Positivism rocks! Now go back to your x-rated websites…”

Like I say, I don’t think this is exactly a conscious thought process for most people. Just a curious reluctance to do any serious thinking about life’s deeper questions, a resistance to beginning a process that might force us to change our behaviors, and a spurious clever-sounding theory that gives us intellectual cover to justify that lack of thought.

The real untruth of the worldview of which drugs and terrorism are symptoms consists in the reduction of the world to facts and in the narrowing-down of reason to the perception of what is quantitative.

A Turning Point for Europe?,  35

Reflection – This short passage may seem a bit obscure. It may even seem like practically nonsense, a bunch of familiar-type words jumbled together into a single sentence. Whassit mean?

Now of course this is one sentence lifted from a lengthy analysis of the subjects mentioned, namely drugs and terrorism. It’s nice to know that Ratzinger has really engaged with all the manifestations of modernity in his writings. A while ago I mentioned that he has theologized about rock music; here he philosophizes about the drug culture and terrorism.

These two may seem unconnected from one another, especially since the form of terrorism we are most familiar with right now is the Islamist variety. What does the quest for the global caliphate and universal sharia law have to do with toking up? But both drug use and political violence spring from a common source, which Ratzinger deftly identifies here.

Namely, the world of ‘facts’ is a bad world. All we have are facts, ‘the way things are,’ and the way things are is bad, bad, bad. And so, let’s get high. Let’s escape from the way things are into a cloud of artificial bliss. Sure it’s not real, but reality is highly over-rated, right?

Or, let’s blow stuff up. Let’s force the world of facts to change by violent direct action. The lives destroyed by this may or may not be regretted, but the bottom line is that the way things are is intolerable and we must pull it all down around us, tear it to pieces, and make things be some other way.

Flight from reality or fight with reality—drugs and terrorism, two different responses to the same apprehension of things. And Ratzinger rightly links this to the logical positivist approach to reality that I have often discussed on this blog: that all we have are the bare quantifiable facts, that there is no reality outside those facts, and that there can be no reality outside them, and we are all trapped in a world of brute matter and meaningless clashings of particles and energy fields.

Fight or flight—that is all that’s left to us in that positivistic world. Oblivion or destruction—what a choice! And even for those few of my blog readers who are neither raging coke fiends or members of terrorist cells, the ‘fight or flight’ approach to reality may beckon. We can fly into other things besides drugs, into banal entertainments or ceaseless busyness or (Internet users beware!) constant low-level intellectual stimulation. All of this can take us out of reality in ways subtle or not, out of our own hearts and the here and now demands of our lives.

And we can ‘fight’ reality in ways that don’t involve plastic explosives or high jacked airplanes. All the paths of manipulation, dominance, spin, influence peddling, politicking, and the manifold rejections of the moral law and rationalization therein, can be ways of rebelling against reality, bending and shaping it to my specifications and ideas with little regard for the human costs of that rebellion.

Fight or flight—when all we have are bare facts, and those facts are painful and ugly, that’s all we can do. But what, then, is the Christian alternative? It is to go forward towards reality, towards ‘the facts’, and embrace them in love. To meet the world as it is with the love of Christ, a love not our own, but given to us in baptism and fostered in us by the life of prayer and virtue.

This calls us, then, not into oblivion or destruction, but into the passion of faith. Because the world of facts will do to us what it did to Christ; it will crucify us. But because we are not bound by the mere brute facts, because there is a deeper, higher, truer reality around and within us—the nascent kingdom of God—we can enter this passion, this crucifixion.

The desperate situation of philosophy—that is to say, the desperate situation into which reason obsessed by positivism has maneuvered itself—has become the desperate situation of our faith. Faith cannot be set free unless reason itself opens up again. If the door to metaphysical knowledge remains barred, if we cannot pass beyond the limits to human perception set by Kant, then faith will necessarily atrophy, simply for lack of breathing space.

Truth and Tolerance, 135

Reflection – Hi, folks, I’m back! ‘Real-time Fr. Denis’ blogging here. Cana was great (as it always is) – a week of hot, sunny days and cool evenings and a genuinely nice bunch of families to share it with. Returning to Madonna House yesterday I found the place packed to the rafters with young’uns who have rolled in for our MH summer program. Nice!

Well, back to business. And it’s my favorite business today – philosophy! Ratzinger’s critique of positivism is a core element in his writings over the years. ‘Reason obsessed by positivism’ is a good turn of phrase. His point has been that the positivistic approach to human reason is arbitrary and unproven, and that our insistence on limiting reason to that approach is entirely unwarranted and deeply harmful to the human project.

Oh yeah—not everyone reading this is trained in philosophy… so what is positivism again? It’s the theory of knowledge that limits the known and the knowable to the immediately observable and the scientifically demonstrable. If you can’t measure it in a laboratory or touch it with your hands, it either simply doesn’t exist or at any rate is entirely beyond your knowledge and hence utterly irrelevant to your life.

Of course, positivism is inherently self-contradictory. The ideas expressed in the above paragraph are not objects of sense perception, nor can they be demonstrated in a laboratory. Therefore, by strict positivistic criteria, they do not exist, or are unknowable and hence irrelevant. Positivism is disproved and ruled out… by positivism. An intellectual theory that begins by cutting its own epistemological throat is perhaps open to criticism, eh?

And so Ratzinger has critiqued it, extensively and fairly unanswerably (in my opinion). Positivism simply has no persuasive force. Meanwhile, the effect it has is to render any kind of penetration into the deep mystery of life and humanity impossible. Forget about faith for the moment—any kind of inquiry into what it all means and how we are to live is ruled out a priori by scientific positivism.

I remember reading some blogger or other on the internet saying just that. “Well, we can’t really know anything about the meaning of life, so why bother with it, and just get on with having fun and doing what you think you’re supposed to do!” Positivism in action—and I think there’s an awful lot of people who have never stepped inside of a philosophy classroom who live out of that. Trickle-down philosophy—the bane of our times. If you don’t think for yourself and come up with your own philosophy, one will be given to you—and it will probably be some version of logical positivism.

Who says we cannot know anything about the meaning of life? Really, sez who? The whole human quest for wisdom and justice is based on their being something out there to find. And meanwhile, Mr. Positivist has in fact snuck in a conclusion about what it all means anyhow. “Let’s just have fun”—aka hedonism, aka ‘pleasure is the point of life.’ And ‘do what you think you’re supposed to do’—aka there is a moral order, and such a thing as ‘what we are supposed to do’. Where it comes from and why we are beholden to it is left unanswered…

Meanwhile, the door to metaphysical knowledge (that is, what things really are and what reality really is) is not really barred. It has been swinging open all these centuries, and thinkers unbound by Kant and Comte and Russell and Hume have been merrily going in and out of it all along. And the real possibility of metaphysical knowledge makes faith possible, credible, viable, intellectually respectable, vibrant and strong.

To make positivity an absolute… makes not only enquiry about God, but enquiry about man and reality in general quite impossible… We are facing… a fundamental crisis in reality in general, and the displacement of theology is but the most concrete expression of the fundamental dilemma of existence into which we have been precipitated by the triumphant advance of positivistic thought.

Faith and the Future, 70-71

Reflection – By positivity, Ratzinger is not referring to having a positive mental attitude. Logical positivism is the philosophical system which reduces intelligible reality to two things: immediate sensory experience and scientifically verifiable data. Everything else is nonsense, literally meaningless.

Ratzinger points out here that the positivistic stance, if taken as the only possible way to think about the world, eliminates a lot more from the field than just God. We cannot directly observe or scientifically demonstrate answers to a whole host of questions that most people consider significant. What is human life for? What do we owe to one another? What is the meaning of love? Is lifelong commitment possible, or desirable for human beings? What is happiness?

None of these questions can be either raised or answered in a strictly positivist system, and attempts to do so are generally embarrassingly shallow or covertly import non-empirical, non-verifiable data into the equation.

Without a concept of human reason that allows for more than positivist methods, these questions fall to the sphere of emotion, of sentimentality. What do I feel is important?

But this fails, too. We know, when we ask what human life is for, that we are not asking ‘what do I feel about being human?’ And the same holds true for the other questions. We are asking about something real, solid, substantial, not a mere changing emotion.