darwin and nietzsche

Some thoughts on what has been surprising to me about reading Nietzsche and Darwin over the last 5 months.

1. Darwin isn't an environmentalist. In his travel writings, Darwin shoots and kills any strange animals that he finds, and cuts them open. In Origin of Species he talks about performing all sorts of experiments on animals, etc. He also isnt too worried about the extinction of specific species, or about the invasion of foreign plants onto domestic territories. No save the whales here. But he does set things up quite nicely for environmentalism, especially when he talks about the relationships between different life forms, or when he describes how the breakdown of coral could lead to the death of an island of people.

2. It's very difficult to disentangle both Darwin and Nietzsche from everything that has been said about them, or from how they have been used as weapons for different causes (or as targets for different attacks). Nietzsche isn't as much of an atheist as people want him to be, and he's not much of a nihilist (many of his arguments are critique's of nihilism). Darwin doesn't really talk about the origins of life in the origin of species. It's difficult to disentangle Darwin from contemporary biology and genetics.

3. I appreciate how easy both are to dip into when I'm not a specialist in science or philosophy. Darwin's arguments are complex (more complex than they are represented), but not in the way that a contemporary science journal is complex. As a casual observer, I can pick up Origin of Species and have some understanding of the arguments and details of what Darwin is writing. Likewise Nietzsche is more complicated than he is represented (either by enemies or fans), but reading bits and pieces of him gives me a lot to digest. In a more general sense, Darwin wrote in a variety of different genres (travel/memoir/autobiography/science), or somewhere between the genres.

Whatevz.

nature

Some people talk about discovering God in nature. Some people enjoy hiking and spending time out of doors, in the wilderness. I don't. In part, I just don't believe that nature exists, either nature in terms of wild life, wilderness untouched by humanity, or in the sense of nature as essence, as the real thing.

I don't find God in nature, in the diversity of plant and animal life, the fragility and complexity of an ecosystem, or even in the evolution of species. That is all very beautiful and moving, but what I find isn't God.

What I find is a system of taxonomy and invention, a system of language superimposed over the world. And I'm skeptical of the bases of taxonomy, of differentiation between species, etc. So when I go on hikes, I think of the systems of order that people believe they are discovering in the world, of the categories and qualities of a species that places it in one place or another in a taxonomy, and of the limited value of those taxonomies.

Also, how the whole idea of nature is a system of values, the basic value being the drive to catalog and systematize everything.

On the other hand, I love beaches and am all for environmentalism, prefer buying organic foods and minimizing waste, have very dear friends who care for the earth, and support them in their recreation, efforts and discoveries. Go figure.

free will

Why is free will considered to be a good thing? That is the question that has been bothering me lately, and one that I don't have an answer to. But free will is constantly talked of as if its existence is a good, and its nonexistence is an evil. God must have free will, and if we didn't have free will we would not be able to love God or others. I suppose I disagree with the assumptions that God has to have free will and that there is much choice in loving others (even the self-sacrificing sort of love that people rail on about). Regardless, I'm curious about how people talk in these ways as if it is self-evidently good. That is a much more interesting conversation than the one about whether we have free will or not.

The arguments always seem to be, to some degree, dishonest. People don't look at the evidence and decide whether or not free will exists (actually, whether or not to believe that free will exists), they value or don't value free will and move forward accordingly. Additionally, it seems dishonest from the love side, because I don't think anyone starts there. The idea that free will is a good is wrapped into a whole range of assumptions about economics and morality, and how we can treat people. Basically, we want to believe in free will because it allows us to be cruel to others, or at least to see cruelty against others and believe that we are not responsible in some way to alleviate their suffering.

Ah, but if we don't believe in free will why would we believe ourselves responsible?! That is the other problem with the conversation, which supposes that its one or the other, or that the complexity of life can somehow be dropped into nice categories (compatabilist, incompatibilist). It all starts to seem like someone started it out as a joke, and everyone who heard the joke took it seriously, and the rest of us have paid for it ever since.

I suppose the only real good that can come from the conversation is talking about the consequences of believing or not believing in free will, and the values in assuming that it is good or not good. It doesn't really matter whether we have free will or not, just whether or not we believe we do.

I'm not sure that "free-will" ever means very much, but it really doesn't mean anything when applied to God.

A few thoughts in reply to a commentor on my last post, and some connected issues.

1. Where is the impetus for thinking that God's priority is to be understood? Especially to be understood in some essential way, or as an absolute truth? The closest thing to an absolute understanding of God is touching Jesus' body. In general in the gospels Jesus speaks quite ambiguously and mysteriously, and confuses the people around him, and is quite content to do so. When he explains what his parables mean (the sower and his seeds, for instance) it really only adds another layer of ambiguity, and often he only explains things after his followers ask him to. What is important is how God's interactions with people in the bible are non-repeating and unique, and this includes Jesus' methods and interactions too. Repetition leads to essentialization, and difference ends it. God constantly reveals himself as different from his self. Perhaps the impetus for projecting a desire to be understood onto God is our drive to understand God, which is our drive to atheism, to minimize God and conceptualize him as a linguistic proposition, as an ideal.

Any use of language is giving up on absolute truth. Whenever God "speaks" it is always a limitation on God's self. Language doesn't have the capacity to hold truth, especially taking seriously what Jesus says when he identifies truth as person. Incidentally, the more I insist that God is a being and person rather than an ideal, the less it makes sense for me to have a relationship with Jesus. For some reason its very popular to talk about being humble and killing off yourself (take up that damn cross, son), and to talk about God humbling himself in the form of Jesus, but this is never extended to God humbling his own statements, or humbling truth. Probably because truth (as an ideal, and as the bible, not as a person) is worshiped more than God is ever worshiped.

1.5. To talk about the meaning, you always have to extend your argument to something outside of the text, something that isnt present, that isn't there, something that's added or subtracted. Give it a whirl: read anything at all, ask yourself what it means, and if you think you know, ask how you know and on what basis you're making your interpretation. The interpretation always extends to something outside, which means that meaning is a sort of glue from the outside that holds everything together, rather than an internal tissue.

Of course, it's ignorant to say that this means you just pick and choose, as if everyone isn't already picking and choosing. The whole process of interpretation is picking and choosing different patterns of repetition and difference to spin out some sort of ideal and some sort of argument. More significantly, there are still good interpretations and bad interpretations, the standard for which is probably more based on ability to persuade someone who has read the same text, rather than on adherence to any sort of genuine meaning in that text.

2. I've heard many different people make this sort of statement, "The bible is so amazing, every time I read it I find something new!" What that usually conveys to me isnt anything about the bible but something about the person. Usually it means that the person hasn't read very much at all, and whatever they have read they haven't reread. That sort of experience of discovery is the experience you will have reading anything, and it happens because when you return to the text you've already read it, you've heard other people talk about, and you are a different person than the last time you read it. It has nothing to do with a special or magical quality, or secret knowledge that is being revealed. But most people don't read, so why should they know that? The bible is worth reading and rereading, but so are thousands of other books.

3. Is God omniscient? When you talk about God, 'omniscience' has no meaning.

coherence + Christianity

When did coherence emerge as a value of Christianity? This question has been on my mind for some time.

Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.

Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)

If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.

I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!

I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).

So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.

reward and punishment

There is no connection between offense and punishment, or action and reward. There is no connection in value, no way to make the two equivalent in value. Steal a car and get placed in jail? Where is the connection? What is the system of values that allows these equations to take place? Likewise, rewards. Spent 10 hours lifting boxes and receive 100 dollars? Where does the connection come from?

Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).

The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?

heroism and memory

Why value heroism in ethics? Where does it come from? In part, I think Christians have simply picked up the model of the bible itself, and the form of memory that is found within the text.

For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.

Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.

To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.

I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.