Ontoteologi och skapelselära

I västkyrkan skulle efter de långdragna patristiska striderna och kyrkomötenas avgöranden inte någon rent fideistisk-literalistisk linje etablera sig som den dominerande, trots motståndet mot filosofin. Alltjämt skulle filosofin ha en plats inom den kristna läroutformningen, och det var alltså just detta som skapade vad vi kallar teologin i västerlandet. Inom denna nya ram kunde platonismen i vid mening delvis fortleva, hos Augustinus och senare medeltida riktningar, och framför allt i de ortodoxin minst närstående riktningarna, som hos Pseudo-Dionysios och Scotus Eriugena, där den emellertid genomgick andra icke oviktiga förändringar.

Från de fideistiskt och literalistiskt inriktade tidiga fäderna upptog ortodoxin dock lärorna om frälsningens natur och den kroppsliga uppståndelsen. Den filosofi som kunde användas av den nya kristna ortodoxin måste därför underordnas och tjäna dessa dogmer. Senare visade det sig att aristotelismen tjänade dem bättre än platonismen. Detta innebar emellertid mest att nya teoretiska redskap tillfördes för den allmänna och principiella förklaringen av “kroppspersonlighetens” och “själspersonlighetens” nödvändiga förening, och kanske inte något nytt erkännande och betonande av den unika individualiteten av det slag som i övrigt följde med dessa läror.

Men filosofin måste också underordna sig den grundläggande, bokstavligt-exoteriskt förstådda läran om skapelsen. Den platonska uppfattningen om det högsta som höjt över varat avfärdas som oförenlig med Gudsuppfattningen: Gud som det högsta varat blir istället den kristna uppfattningen, vilket naturligtvis motsvarade den gamla den bibliska läran (Septuagintas ὁ ὤν). Men stundom började genom filosofiskt inflytande skapelsens vara nu anses bero av delaktighet i Guds vara inom en enhetlig varaordning. Gränsen blir ibland mindre skarp mellan å ena sidan den åskådning som etablerar ett nödvändigt sammanhang mellan skapelsen som manifesterad ur Guds väsen, och därmed Gud som del av denna helhetsordning, och å andra sidan vad som kan utläsas som den bibliska läran enligt vilken Gud visserligen förlänar världen vara, men i sin radikala “personliga” frihet gör detta i en skapelse ur intet genom sin blotta viljeakt.

Skillnaden mellan Gud och det skapade betonades i den senare alltså inte bara starkare utan på annat sätt, på annan åskådningsmässig grund. Nedtoning av den så förstådda olikheten kunde misstänkas dölja människoförgudande eller Gudsförringande irrläror. I vissa former kunde den ontoteologiska kontinuitetsläran förvisso vara oförenlig med den personliga, teistiska Gudsuppfattningen – hur vag den än vid denna tid fortfarande var i sin teologiska utformning – och leda till en deterministisk panteism. Men i andra kunde såväl denna teism som den ontologiska kontinuiteten bibehållas. Så exempelvis hos både Augustinus och, långt senare, Thomas av Aquino.

Philosophy and Science

Keith Ward on Materialism, 9     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8

“For good old-fashioned materialists”, Ward says, “everything that exists, or the one and only stuff out of which everything is made, is matter – solid particles located in three-dimensional space, with definite masses and velocities.” This old-fashioned materialism was basically the same from Democritus to the nineteenth century, built on the atomic theory that Ward here describes. Ward speaks as a philosopher about philosophy, although philosophy at a time when it was not clearly distinct from science. At the time of Democritus, philosophy and science were rising not together, but as an undifferentiated unity, and this unity was also very much real in the case of revived classical philosophy and emergent classical physics during the Renaissance or the “early modern” period.

I mention this because one of the importance of the question of the legitimacy of drawing, as a philosopher, on natural science, now that philosophy and science are considered separate in principle, not just institutionally but theoretically or conceptually. I would like to broaden the dicsussion here to address this more general issue of philosophy and science. Is the appeal of philosophy to contemporary science and some of its representatives against other representatives who defend materialism on scientific and not philosophical grounds admissible and recommendable?

I suggest it is. Not that it is sufficient, and not even that it is necessary. But that it is legitimate and natural as part of and for some clearly delimited purposes of the larger case I am discussing. Clearly, philosophy must on one level or within some of its sub-disciplines relate to and deal with science too. This is not the same as relying on it or becoming dependent on it, or being committed to certain current theories that will soon be obsolete. It is a question of a quite natural relation, indeed a factual necessity determined by the nature of philosophy itself.

Moreover, science needs philosophy for its own self-understanding, if only in a very different sense than the one intended by the original and main tradition of misconceived scientism within analytic philosophy.  Agreeing to some extent with the perennialist so-called traditionalist school, I will now cite the controversial Italian thinker Julius Evola, whom I too find problematic, although I reject his dismissal as simply a fascist. In Ride the Tiger, he gave a radical description of the “commonplace” understanding of science as pragmatic:

“None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense. The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications, even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science above all to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It is a matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as ‘pure research’. In fact, the concept of ‘truth’ in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of ‘truth’, but a matter less of seeing than touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the ‘maximum probability’. That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than even in recent subatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.”

And: “These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.”

We need not discuss here Evola’s particular evaluation of pragmatic science and his general perspective on it; I would just add that within a larger whole, represented by philosophy as well as the broader culture, pragmatic science can be perfectly legitimate, as a limited discipline. The pragmatic nature of scientific concepts is also discussed by Folke Leander and Claes Ryn, whose thought – in this area a partial, Crocean Hegelianism – I have often referred to. Concluding as they do that scientific concepts are largely pragmatic is, they point out, a conclusion reached by means of philosophy, a conclusion which goes beyond science itself. For contrary to the pragmatic concepts of science, the concept of a pragmatic concept itself is not a pragmatic concept, but a “categorial”, philosophical one.

This does not mean that scientists do not, within science, sometimes go beyond pragmatic concepts, develop theories of a kind that involves speculation in a manner that overlaps with and makes use of philosophy, whether or not they are themselves aware of it, and quite regardless of pragmatic applicability in science or technology. Distinctly philosophical issues that are not adequately dealt with by science itself inevitably arise all the time in science and its linguistic communication. One of the problems with some of the speculative scientists who address the question of God is that they do not see this. But basically, science, and contemporary physics, do not seem to go beyond pragmatic concepts. The fact that this includes their use of mathematics seems to raise some fundamental questions, as we will see.

“When, around 1911, Rutherford bombarded atoms with alpha particles, the indivisibility and solidity of the atom was shattered”, Ward continues. Here it could perhaps be argued that Ward is already talking about something beyond the scope of philosophy. But is it not arbitrary to allow him to speak of Democritus simply because he is considered a philosopher, or about Marx, but not of Rutherford, when Rutherford too speaks about atoms? If philosophers can speak about atoms, it would seem they could also speak about divided atoms and use such concepts in their philosophizing. If Ward’s account of Rutherford is not wrong and misleading, it seems this is something that it is legitimate do discuss among philosophers. If it is not, philosophers should perhaps not deal with Democritus’ and Marx’s materialism either, but leave that too to the scientists alone? Where precisely does philosophy turn into science of a kind that philosophers should no longer make use of in their philosophizing? How could philosophers possibly avoid dealing with and refering also to such science?

Again, in the earliest period, when philosophy and science were a new, unitary, speculative enterprise, Democritus argued that reality consisted of atoms falling through space and combining in different ways. Although the atomic theory remained well-known, and was revived during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, very few, indeed hardly anyone, reasserted the full metaphysical position of the materialism which it constituted in Democritus, namely that atoms (and space) were the whole of reality. Atoms were of course accepted by some and matter by most, but not materialism.

Only with Marx, whose doctoral dissertation dealt with the relation between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ versions of materialism, did materialism in the strict philosophical sense that is what Ward is concerned with become a significant force in Western thought – i.e., only when it became part of a political ideology, and politically organized. Even so, it was still not a common position in philosophy. In recent decades, it has, as Ward has described, become more common in philosophy. Still, it is not philosophers who are its main protagonists in the general public debate, but speculative scientists and journalists who insist on its truth in popular books aimed at the reading public. If a philosopher asserts, as almost all philosophers have done between Democritus and Marx, that reality is not such as Democritus or any later version of materialism describes it, or even that matter as described by materialism does not exist at all, he must of course address the arguments of those scientists and journalists. And if other speculative scientists say things about matter that correspond to what he himself claims, is it not perfectly natural and obvious that he should mention this as part of his case in a debate about the nature of reality started precisely by the materialist scientists and journalists?

In no way does such an appeal to science imply that the philosopher has made himself dependent on science or committed himself to its current hypotheses. Rather it is a legitimate consequence of a relation and dialogue that is both inevitable and desirable. Science can of course never be a replacement and substitute for philosophy, which goes far beyond it and includes areas of thought which science can never adequately deal with at all within the necessary confines of its constitutive framework.

Some speak of the poor self-confidence of philosophy or of philosophers in the face of the success of modern science and its technological application as well as its influence on public discussion, but I have never been able to understand this. It must be something found only among philosophers in the misconceived and failed scientistic tradition within analytic philosophy, which sought to prove the relevance and necessity of philosophy by making it the theoretical ancilla of science, but was rejected by science itself and its own intrinsic development. If other philosophers too suffer from it, it can only be because they have not really understood the true nature of philosophy at all.

It is evident that Ward does not belong to those philosophers, but is perfectly well aware of the distinctiveness of philosophy, and indeed that it is not just necessary but sufficient within the areas in which, by its own nature, it transcends other disciplines of human thought and research. Nicholas Capaldi’s The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation, is an excellent analysis of the relationship between misconceived modern philosophy and science.

But while science is thus neither sufficient in itself as a replacement of and successor to philosophy, nor necessary for philosophy, it is of course one of the most important cultural achievements of Western civilization (although certainly not exclusively of Western civilization). And it is a fragile one which is in the long perspective threatened, as so much else, by the decline of this civilization. It is something philosophers should certainly ever continue to take an interest in, and take into account in their own thinking. And vice versa: in the past, when the living cultural tradition still shaped and set the tone of society, scientists often had a good philosophical and humanistic education. This they should again acquire.

Ward gives more relevant examples for the fate of materialism of the development of science: “In 1924, de Broglie…argued that sub-atomic particles could be treated as waves. In 1925 the first formalism for quantum theory was produced. From that point on, matter itself was subsumed under the wider concept of ‘energy’, which could take many forms. Electrons, from being tiny precisely locatable particles, were seen as probability-waves in Hilbert space, only collapsing into particles under specific conditions of measurement. Even then, only the probability of finding them at a specific location could be predicted, and Heisenberg proved that such waves/particles could not be assigned both a determinate position and momentum at the same time.”

Is a line crossed somewhere in this paragraph, where the philosopher should have stopped talking about this development in physics and left it all to the physicists alone? If so, where precisely is it, and why is it drawn there and not somewhere else?

“In modern quantum cosmology, virtual particles of indefinitely many different sorts flash in and out of existence in accordance with quantum laws, from a vacuum (lowest-energy) state of precisely balanced, but fluctuating, energies. Time and space are only four or ten or eleven dimensions that emerge from such a vacuum state, and there may be many space-time universes (of which ours is only one) that fluctuate in and out of existence from a more primal quantum foam, far beyond the forms of space-time with which we are familiar in experience.”

Is Ward now, as a philosopher, far beyond the pale? Is the account even roughly adequate? Is this misleading popularization and distortion? Have New Age dreamers taken the place of the leading physicists in Oxford colleges? If it is admitted that it is at all legitimate and relevant for Ward to refer as a philosopher to these developments in science and to discuss them as parts of his case, then those who reject the truth of the account must point out where and why it is false.

“Things have proceeded so far in quantum cosmology that physicists like Chris Isham, of Imperial College, and Stephen Hawking, of Cambridge, tend to say that ‘imaginary time’ is more real than real time, that the human belief that time passes (or that we pass through time) is an illusion of consciousness, and that human consciousness of three-dimensional space is a narrow subjective selection out of a multi-dimensional reality that we are unable to perceive.”

It is inevitable that a simplified account must be given, although that does not really make all the pragmatic concepts in the cited passages very much more comprehensible to the non-physicist. Nonetheless, it seems to me the account does succeed in communicating what it is intended to communicate, namely that in science, “it has become increasingly hard to say just what ‘matter’ is”. Whatever it is said today that matter is, it is not that “everything that exists, or the one and only stuff out of which everything is made, is matter – solid particles located in three-dimensional space, with definite masses and velocities”. In other words, contemporary physics does not accept “old-fashioned materialism”.

And what it does say that matter is, is not, it seems to me, something that can easily be described in terms of some other materialism, in terms of materialism at all. Contemporary physics – which is neither more nor less than that, not physics as such, not future physics, not categorial concepts, not the absolute truth, but also not the physics of the past and not some insignificant, marginal and arbitrary theoretical speculation – thus says something about how matter is conceived today, something that is of relevance for the case against materialism and thus also for the case for idealism and personalism.

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 2

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 1

The concept of what I call an ”alternative modernity” and what others have called a ”second moderntiy” has recently come under attack, along with figures such as Vico, Burke, Herder, Carlyle, Croce, and even Isaiah Berlin, as part of the reactionary counter-Enlightenment discourse, in turn alleged to be intrinsically related to the rise of fascism. I suggest that Zeev Sternhell’s criticism in his latest, somewhat surprising book, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, must be rejected as part of an inadmissibly simplified discourse on modernity.

The concept of an alternative modernity is necessary, inevitable. There is and there will be no consensus on a modernity that is monolithic and unidirectional to the extent such critics seem to want. Almost all important thinkers have been strongly critical, on various grounds, of the mainstrem of modernity. An alternative to this dominant form of modernity and its ideological expressions, which shape not least the current problematic direction and substance of globalization, is badly needed. There may be more than one alternative, and all alternatives may not be desirable. But being an alternative modernity, the alternative which is desirable and to which I suggest idealism could decisively contribute, is not just a new, creative defence of elements of tradition, and not just an affirmation of the new factors of the economy and of technology as compatible with unchanged tradition, but, per definition, an alternative, selective defence of elements of modernity’s own Enlightenment and Romantic constituents and partial truths.

Since I am best known for my work on personalism, and among personalists and personalism scholars, some wonder about my interest in idealism. Personalism is no longer always conceived as an idealistic philosophy, not even in America, where the dominant personalist school was started by the obviously idealistic philosopher Borden Parker Bowne. Personalism has increasingly been conceived in terms of the phenomenology, existentialism, and Thomism of its twentieth-century European representatives. The facts that there was, even before the emergence of those best known schools of European personalism, a school of idealistic personalism in America, and that, as I have tried to show, this school was in itself a continuation of an even earlier, heretofore largely ignored European form of idealistic personalism, do not in themselves, from the point when I discovered them, account for my interest in idealism.

I am pleased to have been able to represent the field of personal idealism or idealistic personalism at quite a few personalism and idealism conferences over the years and, not least, to see a little bridge being built between idealism and personalism scholars inasmuch as they now to some extent attend each others’ meetings. A case can, I suggest, be made, along the lines of the personal idealists, that personalism is of necessity implicitly idealistic, and vice versa.

But my interest in idealism in some respects predates my interest in personalism. I became convinced of what was in substance some of the epistemological and purely metaphysical truths of idealism in a very broad sense early on, including not only central themes of Platonism and Neoplatonism, but also what could be regarded as some broadly ”Berkeleyan” ones, although there are problems with Berkeley’s more precise formulations of them.

In school, I was struck by what I found to be the unbelievability of the accounts of my physics textbooks of how sensation is produced by impressions from external, material objects which presupposed objective or absolute time and space out there in which those objects were floating about, impressions somehow received by the likewise objectively material senses, tranformed to signals transmitted through the nervous system to the brain, and there miraculously transformed again, into conscious perceptions completely distinct in nature from the originating objects themselves. I of course also soon discovered that leading modern physicists had long had strong doubts about that account themselves and often even rejected it outright, despite the limitations in principle of their particular perspective.

The ideas of those physicists were increasingly being taken up by the so-called New Age movement, which, while rejecting recent centuries of Western civilizational development as an old, invalid paradigm of gross materialism, in fact for the most part represented in unbroken yet strangely unconscious continuity the nineteenth-century revival of the Western tradition of esotericism which goes back to the Renaissance and to antiquity, a revival which was sometimes closely and reciprocally related to aspects of nineteenth-century idealistic philosophy.

And alongside the various expressions of what could often easily be seen to be the somewhat extreme romantic, distinctly modern pantheism of the New Age movement and of the residual countercultural movement, representatives of the Eastern spiritual traditions continued to appear in the West and feed their wisdom into the more and less congenial Western currents of thought. My study of some of the most important strands of Vedantic as well as Buddhistic thought confirmed my early idealist intuitions and suspicions regarding some forms of empiricism and of course naturalism and materialism or physicalism, reductive as well as so-called non-reductive. It made large chunks of Western philosophy seem irrelevant to me even before I hade made any proper study of them.

I had thus become an idealist long before I became an academic stundent o idealism. But it was of course only when I began my academic study Western philosophy and its history that I could conceptualize and express, to the extent that it was possible, the basic insights thus acquired in its terms and with reference to its thinkers. I then also came to understand how from certain perspectives, certain points of departure of the human mind, or certain levels of understanding, those parts and types of Western philosophy that had seemed irrelevant to me sometimes in fact have legitimate and even necessary functions in the dialectical systematicity of philosophy as a whole. They even to some extent had counterparts in Indian philosophy. But none of this made them any more true on the higher levels of that same philosophical systematicity.

Kristendomen och individualiteten

Hos de alexandrinska kristna platonisterna fanns fortfarande en balans mellan å ena sidan den strikt idealistiska synen på den tid-rumsliga materiella världen som en ofullkomlig och mindre verklig – om än, i den grekiska traditionen, verkligen inte overklig – spegelbild av den tidlösa evighetens transcendenta “värld”, och å den andra den bibliska och kristna läran om en transcendent Gud utan tillhörande andlig “värld”, som ensam skapat en inte bara verklig materiell värld utan en centralt betydelsefull sådan eftersom den är den enda världen, och som leder dess tidsliga förlopp, så långt det i samspel med de skapade varelsernas egna fria val är möjligt, mot ett mål av frälsning i den i de föregående avsnitten angivna obegripliga meningen. Åskådningen framstår som jag förstått den (men denna förståelse kan alltså vara i behov av revision i ljuset av nyare forskning) som mer idealistisk än biblisk, men åtminstone rymde den både en “själspersonlighetens” – om vi nu redan kan tala om en sådan, eller bara själens – ursprungliga ideella existens och en historia av världsligt fall och utveckling i denna värld tillbaka mot urtillståndet. Ordningskyrkans fastnitade ortodoxi stod i bjärt kontrast mot denna idealistiska åskådning.

Men den bibliska och kristna betoningen av historiciteten och dess differentiella historiska fakticitetsanspråk, alltid paradoxalt blandade med den nya dogmatikens rentav förstärkta, nya literalmytologistiska inslag, har också varit av stor betydelse för den nya individualitets- och unicitetsuppfattningen. Även de kristna platonikerna omfattade i viss mån den nya förståelsen av historien, men inte i samma form som ortodoxin. För ortodoxin var i motsats mot de kristna platonisterna, eller åtminstone mycket mer entydigt än hos dem, den nya historiesynen å det närmaste förbunden med den immanentistiska frälsningsläran.

Wolfhart Pannenberg framlyfter den uppfattning av det mänskliga livet som engångigt och avgörande för den eviga bestämmelsen, som ligger i den ortodoxkristna historiska synen. [‘Person und Subjekt’, i Odo Marquard & Karlheinz Stierle, utg., Identität (1979), 408.] Beskrivande soteriologin i termer av frihet förklarar Daniélou: “Dès lors que le temps n’était plus le reflet imparfait de l’éternité, mais le lieu d’une action divine, la décision de la liberté prenait une valeur singulière, en même temps que s’approfondissait le sens de la responsabilité.” [‘La personne chez les pères grecs’, i I. Meyerson, utg., Problèmes de la personne (1973), 120.] Kanske fortfarande under intryck av Kelsos’ inomkosmiska generalistiska kritik av Origenes tycks Daniélou dock även ge en missvisande entydig bild av den hellenska idealismens syn på själens evighet, som, som vi sett, i många centrala uttryck bibehåller dess individualitet, i det han vidare hävdar att “à l’idéal d’une libération intérieure, par dépassement des limites de l’existence individuelle et d’abord du corps, se substituait l’attente d’une libération eschatologique, qui confère une existence incorruptible à l’individu et à son corps.” [Ibid.]

När det talas om betydelsen av den kristna läran om den unika själens värde torde man med stor säkerhet kunna säga att vad som i de flesta fall egentligen åsyftas är läran om själens och kroppens oupplösliga förening. Kristendomen har övertagit något som påminner om det grekiska begreppet om den odödliga individuella själen, men satt den i nödvändigt samband med den likaledes odödliga uppståndna kroppen i en inkorruptibel eskatologisk förening, och förnekat dess eviga separata existens.

Bland de tyngre skäl som med tiden kunde anföras för den kristna läran om kroppens uppståndelse återfanns nämligen argumentet att man med denna lära räddade just den mänskliga personliga uniciteten. Kroppens unicitet – eller, mer strikt, singularitet – var ju mer uppenbar. De antika föreställningarna om själen framstod ofta som vaga och konturlösa, om än, som vi sett, inte alls endast som snarast gällande en abstrakt princip eller, ytterst, en identitet med en enhetlig världssjäl eller ett abstrakt världsförnuft. Givet vagheten och den i övrigt förvisso ofta dominerande grekisk-filosofiska generalismen och abstraktionen, kunde ändå den nya ultraexoteriska populärdogmen om kroppens uppståndelse framstå som värnande den unika personliga identitetens värde.

Även det gudda λόγος kunde uppfattas som det abstrakta gudda förnuft som erhöll sin individuationsprincip endast genom Jesus från Nazaret. Justinus och de senare trinitariska och kristologiska spekulationerna rör sig mot en sådan uppfattning, men släpper inte helt den opersonliga förståelsen av λόγος. Jesus från Nazaret tycks enligt Justinus heller inte vara det enda eller första förkroppsligandet, utan redan den ursprungliga avgränsande konstitutionen av λόγος som självständig περιγραφή innebär enligt Justinus ett förkroppsligande. Men ska vi föreställa oss denna första “inkarnation” som “andlig” (även Apollinaris talar om ett Kristi “himmelska kött”) i Paulus’ mening? Det är svårt. Var återfinner vi denna “inkarnation”? Man är tvungen att föreställa sig den som på något sätt “andlig” i en mer platonsk mening.

Och även läran om Jesu materiellt-kroppsliga uppståndelse, den lära som ligger till grund för dogmen om Människans motsvarande, är ju svår att förena med föreställningen om en Kristi, fram till återkomsten, återtagna fullständiga transcendens, vid Faderns “högra sida”. [Bengt Hägglund, Teologins historia: En dogmhistorisk översikt (1956 (1981)), 70 f.] Denna tycks endast kunna förenas med en andlig eller möjligen i annan mening än den återuppståndna människokroppen “andligt-kroppslig” uppståndelse i linje med Paulus’ rapport. Denne avviker ju från den berättelse om uppenbarelsen för Petrus som ligger till grund för ortodoxin, eftersom han “bara” erfor en okroppslig ljus- och röstuppenbarelse på vägen till Damaskus.

Såtillvida som kristologin lär att Kristus har – i presens – också en mänsklig natur, framstår ju läran om en återintagen position vid sidan av Gud motsägelsefull: även om treenighetsläran innebär att Kristus iklädde sig en mänsklig natur vid inkarnationen, har han ju, om han återuppstått i den mänskliga kroppen, icke avklätt sig den. Allt är oerhört oklart, och det är svårt att förstå vad exakt det är även högintelligenta kristna under alla århundraden egentligen trott på. De förklaringar nu levande avger när man pressar dem gör inte det hela klarare, och ofta tas regelbundet tillflykt till utsagor om mysteriet och det religiösa språkets egennatur. Här någonstans växte hursomhelst frågor fram som under den närmast följande tiden skulle stå i centrum för diskussionen om Kristi personskap – samtidigt som just den här inringade problematiken såvitt jag kan se inte får någon lösning eller förklaring alls, av den typ som de nya historiska fakticitetsanspråken kräver. Och eftersom en åskådningsmässigt sammanhängande lösning eller förklaring också framstår som filosofiskt strikt omöjlig, är vi såvitt jag kan se helt enkelt tvungna att betrakta mycket av detta som exoteriskt bildspråk som döljer en annan, esoterisk innebörd. Men kan kyrkan medge detta ifråga om hela den här beskrivna eskatologin?

Betonandet av individens värde är hursomhelst ett äktkristet tema i förlängningen av den äldre bibliska försynstro som redan hos Filon, uttryckt bland annat i hans individualisering av det grekisk-idealistiska själsbegreppet, utgjorde en motvikt mot generalismen. Pannenberg anför Jesuslogier rörande den oändliga kärlek med vilken Gud omfattar den enskilde, såsom Luk. 15:7, och framhåller hur det allmänna människovärdet som förenas med denna enskilda försynsmässiga omsorg – var och en är vulen och skapad och älskad i sin unicitet – härrör ur Genesis’ utsagor om människans Gudsavbildlighet. [‘Person und Subjekt’, i Marquard & Stierle, 408.]

Men om kristendomen således tydligare uppfattar själen som individuellt odödlig än vissa riktningar inom den grekiska filosofin, så gör den det alltså efter att ha tagit vägen över den individuella kroppen: “Erst das Christentum hat den platonischen Gedanken der Unsterblichkeit der Seele streng als Unsterblichkeit des Individuums gefasst, indem es die platonische Lehre von der Wiederverkörperung ablehnte und so die unsterbliche Seele an die Einmaligkeit dieses leiblichen Lebens band.” [Ibid.] Själen är individuellt odödlig – i den framtida temporala evigheten – endast i förening med kroppen.

Om detta förklarar hur det hela de facto gick till i kristendomen, och riktigt framhåller kristendomens sinne för det individuella och den distinkta arten av detta sinne, så ger det däremot en missvisande bild av den platonska och origenesiska uppfattningen sådan jag förstått den. Den individuella odödligheten tillhörde i denna själen eller rentav die Seelenpersönlichkeit i sig, före, i, genom och efter processen av upprepad återfödelse. [Jfr R. Hirzel, Die Person: Begriff und Name derselben im Altertum (1914), 29; Erwin Rohde, Psyche (1890-94 (1910)), II, 121-4, 129-31, 164-66.] Om den enskilda personen hos Platon och Origenes bestämmer sitt öde genom ett obestämt antal förkroppsligade liv, bestämmer den det enligt den kristna ortodoxin under endast ett. Med läran om den definitiva dubbla utgången blir naturligtvis det enskilda livet viktigare för ortodoxin. Men det är svårt att se att inte också den origenesiska ståndpunkten skulle innebära ett betonande av det individuella personliga livets avgörande självbestämdhet, om än i ett längre och djupare perspektiv, och förenat med uppfattningen om ett transcendent urtillstånd dolt under den världsliga förirringens glömska och synd. [Hirzel, ibid.]

Den kristna försynstron, den individuellt riktade Gudskärleken, och den individuella, nödvändigt amalgamerade kropp-själsuppfattningen, “die christliche Auferstehungshoffnung als Ausdruck der Bestimmung des ganzen Menschen zur Unsterblichkeit”, ska emellertid utan tvivel i detta filosofiska töcken under medeltiden fortsätta att utgöra väsentliga motvikter mot den kvarlevande idélärans ensidiga begreppsuniversalism. [Pannenberg i Marquard & Stierle, 408.]

Idealism, Materialism, and Science

Keith Ward on Materialism, 8     1  2  3  4  5  6  7

We now come to a number of formulations in which the differences between Ward’s case for idealism and personalism on the one hand and the more specific and complete idealism that I am inclined to think could be defended can be noticed. I do not wish to dwell overmuch on this and will focus rather on the parts of his case that I wholly accept, but a little should perhaps be said. This could at least serve the purpose of pointing to the larger idealist argument and position.

“If modern philosophy is the application of reason to the widest possible set of known data, in order to obtain an informed judgement about what sorts of things are real, what sorts of things can be known, and what ways of life are most appropriate to the facts, it seems that we have to begin with the admission that there are many possible philosophical views, and none of them is theoretically certain, or even overwhelmingly probable.” Here a definition of ”data” and ”known data” should, from the perspective of such idealism, be added. It could also perhaps be pointed out that classical philosophy too was the application of reason to at least a wide set of ”known data”, like those of the beginnings of science, which was at this time not separate from philosophy. Nor was it separate from philosophy in the early modern period, when the classical agenda was in some sense resumed after the dominance of Christian theology.

Analytic philosophy, as originally conceived, and the continued ”Enlightenment project” (as Nicholas Capaldi calls it) within it, went too far, however, when it wanted to make itself the servant of science instead of theology. Today, as I discussed earlier, analytic philosophy is often used as a formal apparatus of theoretical instruments in the defence of entirely different positions in the various fields of philosophy.

Science ignored and soon outgrow the absurdly reductionistic positions and theoretical instruments the early analyticists offered, but at the same time sought an independence from philosophy as such which was equally untenable. The effects of this are normally immediately seen when the theories and results of science are stated and communicated in concepts and language, as they of course inevitably must be.

Philosophy, conceived as part of the same distinctive Western intellectual development and project as science, should not withdraw the application of reason from the central class of ”data” and ”known data” that science provides, if the need for definition of the latter terms is kept in mind and scientific theories are included as also being data. But neither should science and scientific theory exist without philosophy. Indeed, science cannot really do without philosophy. It can obviously think this is possible, but what we find then is nonetheless philosophy, as inextricably intervolved in the enterprise as ever. Only now it is inevitably poor speculative philosophy, not knowing and recognizing itself as philosophy, having deliberately relinquished its full theoretical resources and their conscious and systematic use.

I have doubts about the statement that no philosophical view is overwhelmingly probable. It is certainly possible to hold many different philosophical views. The questions of theoretical certainty and probability depend on how philosophy is defined. Some ”theoretical certainties” are not only involved in the very possibility and fact of doing philosophy, they also remain central to its continued pursuit and systematic development. In other respects, theoretical certainty has the specific limits that are intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy as such and the range of its use of reason. In those respects, we rightly speak of probability. But in some of those respects we have to supplement the observation that philosophy can point beyond itself, in the direction of forms of spiritual practice which can yield their own certainty.

But Ward must of course rightly add that “It does not follow that they are equally plausible.” Still, “it does follow that reason alone cannot make final decisions between a fairly wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from the supremacy of Spirit to the supremacy of matter”. Here, I suggest, is one point in the argument where one must focus on the more precise definition of matter: such definition seems necessary for the meaningfulness of the statement about the spectrum of possibilities including the supremacy of matter. ”Reason alone” also calls for definition. These are questions which idealism in a more specific sense than Ward’s very inclusive one often does ask. I could perhaps later try to develop the case by adding the dimensions of such idealism.

But “What reason can do remains important. It can clarify basic axioms and aim to make them consistent with one another, analyse the strength and validity of inferences from those axioms, lay out a range of competing alternative axioms, test the consistency of an axiomatic system against the best available knowledge, and assess the strong and weak points of the general interpretation of the world that a rational system aims to provide. A rational philosophy is one that scores well on these criteria.” This, one must say, is still quite impressive. Philosophy is, among other things, a general culture of the intellect that is central to civilization. But then, again, “no philosophical view comes out as a clear winner”. Again I have to admit I have always had doubts about this. It seems to me idealism and personalism do come out as clear winners.

Indeed, “It may be thought that at least some views – perhaps that of Plato or Descartes or Bishop Berkeley – have been decisively refuted in the course of the history of philosophy. But I have sought to rescue all three from their critics, and show that their views can be reformulated in entirely plausible ways.” There are still some problematic aspects not lest of Descartes, but yes, both the possibility and reality of plausible reformulation is real, and also for the more specifically personal idealist views. “Of course, reformulation is necessary.”

There are of course many specific points to discuss in the various reformulations. “The Theory of Forms, for instance, needs to be re-stated as a theory of objective mathematical axioms, and related more closely to experimental observation. But it then survives very well in some versions of modern quantum theory, and mathematicians like Roger Penrose can describe themselves as Platonists without embarrassment.” The theory of forms exists in very different versions in Plato himself. One of them, developed in his later years, tends towards a reformulation in mathematical terms. Obviously mathematics is important here, important in idealism, as Plato himself insisted. But understood not least in a comparative perspective of the kind I have tried to introduce in several texts on idealism, it is not clear to me that other aspects of the theory of forms, the paradigmatic model or ontic logos (as Charles Taylor calls it) according to which the phenomenal world is ordered, most obviously with regard to ethics, aesthetics, and society, should or could be simply replaced in a complete re-statement in terms of objective mathematical axioms. Inevitable questions must, I think, arise, pace Penrose, about the relation between the structure of mathematical axioms of contemporary physics and the theory of forms. Does not the comparison, indeed identification, overlook the still pragmatic use of mathematics in physics? Is mathematics understood by the physicists in the way Plato understood it?

Ward thinks it is “not to be expected…that materialism is susceptible to a knock-down refutation”. “Knock-down” may not be the right way of putting it. Of course, “There will always be a possible reformulation of the view that mental phenomena are by-products of non-purposive and unconscious physical processes, and that our common-sense beliefs about the world do not represent the true nature of objective reality.” Yes, and it is always possible also to reformulate the materialist position. It is, as noted above, quite obviously possible to hold many different philosophical views – quite regardless of their own probability and possibility.

Ward’s stress on common sense sets his case apart from that of idealism in a stricter sense. It is valid with regard to many of his points. But there is also something that could be called common-sense materialism (not just common-sense realism), common-sense of the Johnsonian variety. Stones feel so hard and heavy when people kick them that their common sense tells them there must be lumps of matter floating about out there in objective space and time, quite independently of mind. Materialism certainly holds that the common-sense beliefs about “a God”, which Ward seizes on, do not represent the true nature of objective reality. But it is idealism of Berkeley’s kind that says Johnsonian common-sense beliefs with regard to stones etc. do not represent the true nature of that other part of reality and the way it can and cannot be said to be objective.

Leaving common sense, Ward says the “very grave problems” materialism faces are “largely raised by quantum physics. This is particularly annoying for materialists, since science tends to be a major plank on which materialism is based.” Ward still belongs to the broadly analytic tradition, although he is one of the many who now use its intellectual instruments for completely different purposes than the ones intended by the founders of it as a school. One can hardly speak of a set of theoretical instruments, of modal logic etc., or, more generally, of a mere formal method, as a philosophical school. I think it must be said that when analyticism relinquished its original programme which included substantial positions in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics etc., it ceased to be a school in any sense comparable with the one used for other philosophical schools.

Even analyticists who have completely rejected the original substantial programme of the logical empiricists and positivists, which included the self-identification of philosophy as the ancilla of science, have often remained preoccupied to a greater extent than philosophers of other schools with science and the theoretical issues of science. Ward is one of them. I see no problem with this but find it rather to be a natural and obvious part of what philosophy should do. But for idealists in the stricter sense, it is not quite as large a part as for mosts formal analyticists, even such formal analyticists as Ward who takes distinctly idealistic and theistic positions.

The early analyticists were not all materialists, as Ward has already discussed; some were phenomenalists and believed in experienced reality as a construct of sense-data. But they did see science as a major plank on which to base their rejection of idealism, religion, traditional morality, the great tradition in the arts etc. And the original programme was in any case such that the step to materialism was always a comparatively short one, at least for the philosophically interested public to which the programme was communicated in popularized form and which noticed rather the campaign against idealism than the subtleties of a certain branch of empiricist epistemology.

If the early non-materialist analyticists relied on science for this campaign, today’s materialist scientists and journalists do so to an even greater extent. Meanwhile, science in general or as a whole disappointed the early analyticists by not lending support to their programme, and the same often seems to be the case with their relation to the materialist scientists and journalists today. This is what Ward seizes on, in a part of the case that is legitimate and meaningful, albeit limited in what seems to me some important and precisely identifiable ways.

“The gravest objection”, Ward rightly observes, “is that it has become increasingly hard to say just what “matter” is. If your philosophical theory is that everything that exists is composed of matter, it is frustrating to admit that you do not know what matter is.” As indicated above, this, along with the question of the nature of reason, must be taken into account in any discussion about decisions, final and other, between a spectrum of positions ranging from the supremacy of spirit to the supremacy of this ”matter”.