The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (39 page)

And this is the crux, the sediment left by the great monotheisms: that the mind of God can never be known, we shall never solve the mystery of God because God is the name we give to the mystery itself. Therefore, all we are left with in life is
interpretation.
We must construct our own inter
pretations of the world, and live with them. We never mature, as Freud anticipated, because we don’t know the rules.

Any summary of a Kafka plot is, inevitably, more or less bloodless, for the point of his stories is to convey to the reader the unbalanced, uncomfortable, bewildering feeling that is the modern condition. Kafka exaggerates, but only in order to make his argument. And he lays before us his profound skepticism about interpretation itself. In 1970, Paul Ricoeur, the French Protestant professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, identified what he called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In
Freud and Philosophy
he said that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were the “masters of suspicion” because what they had in common was “the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.” In particular, they were all suspicious, skeptical, of religious consciousness.

Each applied his theory to various aspects of contemporary life, including ideology, morality, art, literature and sexuality, but their core arguments were characterized by a suspicion of religion as myth—whether understood as “an opiate that prevents the masses from awakening to their condition [Marx, whose ideas were at last being put into practice in the 1920s in Soviet Russia], a systematic form of
ressentiment
that subjects the great individual to a herd morality [Nietzsche], or a comforting illusion that allows civilized people to ignore their own repressed instincts [Freud].” In rejecting religion as mere myth, if with a latent function, each of these masters had created his own alternative mythology, says Ricoeur, “risking the accusation of having slain the Minotaur only to become himself the monster at the center of the labyrinth.” They had, in effect, established their own new form of sacred myth, and this, too, was Kafka’s point.
26

Hermeneutics had developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in large part as an effort to understand Scripture as the word of God, whether in the Jewish tradition of the Talmud or the Christian tradition of allegorical interpretation. By this account, the all-important element in hermeneutics is that it is an outgrowth of monotheistic thought “in which the apparent variety and heterogeneity of the world are understood to have a
unified
, underlying meaning, known only to God (or, in modern variants, to the skilled interpreter) [italics added].”

And this is Kafka’s ultimate concern, except that, like a good novelist, what he does is not
tell
us his argument but
show
us; he takes us into this new suspicious realm, he invites us to be suspicious of
all
interpretation, modern as much as traditional, by giving us a form of literature that
resists
interpretation.
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THE MODERN TRADE-OFF

Some critics have seen
The Castle
as resembling the Bible, others have called it an allegory. K. is known only by his initial, other characters are known only by their professions or occupations; and the settings—the Castle, the Inn, the Schoolhouse—are drawn only in the most general terms, are given no proper names. This generality is broken from time to time by vivid detail. When K. sleeps on a straw mattress in the taproom of an inn, this echoes Christ’s birth in the manger, but in the very next room the peasants are carousing—realistic details that strike a very different note. “The effect is to leave the reader unbalanced,” says Pericles Lewis, “threatening constantly to slip from one register to another, feeling increasingly as though some stabilizing level is just out of grasp.”

K.’s position as a secular outsider carries with it the task of bringing secular reason to his dealings with the sacred mystique of the Castle. The officials maintain this mystique in part through an elaborate hierarchy, in part through secrecy reminiscent of the bureaucrats in
The Trial
. In
The Castle
, one figure in particular may be seen as close to being a God. This is Klamm, who seems on occasion to be an alter ego for K., whose initial he shares, at other times to be not dissimilar to Samuel Beckett’s Godot. Klamm, in some ways, is “God imagined as a senior bureaucrat.”
28

What Kafka was most trying to do was to show his suspicion of hermeneutics. Indeed, as noted, his works
frustrate
attempts at interpretation. Invariably, they rebuff all attempts to give them a single meaning. Harold Bloom here expresses the opinion of many critics: “[W]hat most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation.” His recourse to multiple meanings “challenges attempts to find a single latent truth but leaves open the (never confirmed)
possibility of a higher revelation standing behind his texts. It is this quality that gives many of Kafka’s texts the air of scriptural authority.”
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Moreover, interpretation for Kafka, as for Freud, offered opportunities for belonging to a community. Neither writer was fully assimilated, and Kafka in particular was aware that he would always find it difficult to be anything other than “a community of one.” But he seems to have felt that the way to a “balanced” life—one without bewilderment, comfortable rather than uncomfortable—was to become a member of an “interpretative community.” This coincides, to an extent, with Henry James’s idea of “shared fictions.”

For Kafka, then, the modern condition is a trade-off. The most authentic course is to live as an outsider. Otherwise, one is a member of an interpretative community in which one finds the comfort of numbers and the illusion of certainty but at the cost of hostility toward—and from—others who do not share the community’s beliefs: there is no happy medium. Culture wars will replace—or add to—religious wars (how right he was about that).

What Kafka is showing us, then, is that religious belief is itself an interpretation, one centered on the idea of unity and latency, the idea that there
is
an ultimate meaning. And this is a notion that no longer suffices, not because it is wrong in its details (if God could ever be called a detail) but because our basic predicament is “natality,” profound ignorance. We don’t know the rules of existence, we don’t even know if there
are
any. All we can do is make the most of it. Other interpretations of life—Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, for example—may seem to have a handle on reality, for a time at least; but the real legacy of the great monotheisms is to leave us with the
conviction
that there is an underlying unity to reality. Kafka’s stories
show
us that we have no way of knowing whether that is true, not even in principle. There is no such thing as wholeness, because wholeness, too, is an interpretation. Kafka seemed to take delight in creating disturbing societies where the rules of existence are unfathomable.

15

The Faiths of the Philosophers

A
s has often been pointed out, the God of the philosophers of the past—Boethius, Hume, Spinoza—differed in the glosses placed on his divinity, as to whether and to what extent he (usually “he”) was omniscient, omnipresent and all-powerful, or co-ruled with nature. This book has already explored what such figures as Edmund Husserl, the American pragmatists and Martin Heidegger thought should be the main philosophical concerns in the post-Nietzschean, post-Christian world, but in the interwar years—with the painful memories of the Great War still so vivid, with Russia and Germany in thrall to totalitarianism and with the West disfigured by depression—philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic regrouped, to assess recent political and scientific developments and to offer their thoughts on the way forward.

DEWEY’S COMMON FAITH

The American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont, held that “democracy begins in conversation.” “Conversation” is a gentle word, but then Dewey was a gentle man for whom democracy, what it meant, how it might be better achieved, was all-consuming. And it naturally affected his thinking about God.

For him it was possible to experience religious feelings without metaphysical commitments to anything supernatural. Born in 1859, by the time he was thirty-five he had dispensed with much of the doctrine unique to
Christianity, though he kept to Christianity’s ethical concerns. He never gave up entirely on the idea of God, though he abandoned it in its traditional theological form. For Dewey, in
A Common Faith
(1934), there is no privileged standpoint (such as science or theology) from which the fundamental metaphysical structure of nature “in itself” can be determined. Such entities as “values,” “freedom,” “purposiveness,” which distinguish us from other animals, “belong to our human nature.”
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For Dewey, “Any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal and against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality.” “The religious must be liberated from the supernatural commitments of actual historical religions, from dogmas and doctrines that are, pragmatically, unnecessary. The values and ideals belonging to the religious attitude are not imaginary but real; they are ‘made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.’” The religious feeling is, by this account, a natural part of nature. The problems arise when we become entangled in the supernatural. “Religion must be brought down to Earth, to what is ‘common’ between us. Supernaturalism—especially the claim that religions have a monopoly of supernatural means to further human ideals—is an obstacle in pursuing the natural changes that are in our power to bring about; hence religious values need emancipation.”

For Dewey the crux of the matter lies in the distinction between religion and “religious.” A religion is “a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization,” whereas “religious,” an adjective, “does not denote any specific entity but ‘attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal.’”

Dewey is focusing on religious experience as a common faith or attitude rather than an individual one. “Religious” can be connected with aesthetic, scientific, moral or political experience, as well as companionship and friendship. Whenever we experience the plenitude of life, a religious attitude, outlook or function is in play. And “the paradigmatic case of a social enterprise carrying religious qualities is science,” whose methods he actively sought to introduce into political society. “Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation.”

He insists there can be no return to pre-scientific revealed religion. Rather, we must understand faith as “the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices.” Again, he underlines that these ideal ends are not supernatural. “The assumption that the objects of religion exist already in some realm of Being seems to add nothing to their force, while it weakens their claim over us as ideals, insofar as it bases that claim upon matters that are intellectually dubious.” The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. “But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.”
2

“Use of the words ‘God’ or ‘divine’ to convey the union of actual with the ideal may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance.” In other words, if people want to use the word “God” for this feeling they have, that is okay by Dewey; but he himself has no need of it—it is a psychological matter, not a supernatural one.

More important, this way of conceptualizing God enables him to promote his view of
continuous growth
as our highest goal. The growth of knowledge stemming from scientific inquiry, or “growth in understanding of nature,” may be regarded as religious, and insofar as it liberates religious ideas from narrow supernaturalism it is ethically, socially and politically relevant: “I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the concept of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed. Whether or not we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.”
3

His point here is this: “We have the potential to grow, struggling together toward the actualization of ideals, instead of assuming that our ideals are ‘already embodied in some supernatural or metaphysical sense in the very framework of existence.’” For Dewey there can be no such thing as “the very framework of existence”—that is woolly metaphysics. Religious feeling, when it occurs, stems from “the sense of awe we have at being part of the immense (but entirely natural) cosmos.”

There is no ready-made divine reality “out there,” in a transcendent world order, which we will one day penetrate through either religious experience, dogmatic revelation or theological sophistry. There is, rather, the human pursuit of religiously conceptualizable ideals, “an ongoing struggle for the good in the natural world of material and social existence,” an entirely human achievement—crucially, more than the sum of its parts—produced by our own intelligence and imagination. If we want to call the harmony we achieve when the ideal and the actual meet divine, then so be it, but we shouldn’t take it for something it is not.
4

His crucial point was that religion should “return to an intimate connection with our other social pursuits.” In
The Quest for Certainty
(1929), Dewey characterized the religious attitude as “a sense of the possibilities of existence and as devotion to the cause of these possibilities, as distinct from acceptance of what is given at the time.” As Sami Pihlström says, Dewey’s “God” is something like a combination of social intelligence, democracy and science. Dewey was not a theist, and he dismissed any idea of a transcendent God. “God” for him was at most “a poetic symbol to identify those forces and values in experience that are of ultimate concern to a people in their quest for well-being.”
5
Like poetry, religious feeling should be one of the “unforced flowers of life.” He was criticized by theologians for devising what they considered “a watered-down version of faith,” as well as by atheists who didn’t see why he needed to use words like “God” or “divine” at all.

What is most valuable in Dewey’s work is his rigorous attempt to reconcile scientific and religious thinking. He sums up: “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”
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WITTGENSTEIN’S WORDLESS FAITH

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on religion are generally less well-known than the picture theory of language that he sets out in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
. He wrote no books on the subject, but he gave a series of lectures on religious belief in Cambridge in 1938. What we know about these lectures stems from a curious publishing venture carried out by Cyril Barrett, who compiled a volume, not published until 1966, entitled
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief
. Barrett’s book is based not on Wittgenstein’s own lecture notes, but on those of the students who attended the lectures. He points out that since these students were among the most ardent followers of the master, “we may safely assume that they have provided a faithful record of his teaching.”
7

In these lectures, Wittgenstein explores two areas that especially interest us. First, in characteristic Wittgensteinian style he analyzes the language of belief to show how misunderstandings arise, how believers and non-believers “talk past” each other. And second, he explores the idea of the mystical—this, too, he says, is related to the use and misuse of language.

He starts from the premise, familiar from the
Tractatus
, that there are limits to language, that language is, in effect, the limit of our world, and that the idiosyncrasies of language have “bewitched the intelligence.” In the realm of ethics, for example, the sentence “He is a good man” looks like the sentence “He is a good tennis player” but it is not. A man or a woman might or might not want to be a good tennis player, and that would not necessarily be of interest to a third party. But if someone were to say, “I don’t want to be good,” this would seem shocking to most people. The imperative to be good in this latter sense is something we should care about for its own sake, “irrespective of any end to which it may be the means.” Similarly, when we use the term “eternity,” whether we are religious or not, we do not mean by that “infinite temporal duration,” we mean “timelessness.”

This is more than splitting hairs, because he thinks that the limits of language are really at the basis of what we mean when we say we have a mystical experience. Wittgenstein did not accept that there is any such thing as metaphysics or transcendence in the supernatural sense. Rather, he thought that the mystical arises from the fact that some things can be
“shown but not said.” In a vivid example, he identifies how impossible it would be for an artist to paint us a picture of his
way
of painting. Every artist has his or her own distinctive mode (think of how a Renoir is different from a Degas or a Van Gogh), such that no signature is ever needed. “But what could we be asking for, if we said to one such artist, ‘We don’t want a picture of anything which you see in the world around you. What we want is simply a picture of your way of painting things. Not an example of that way, mark you! A picture of that way itself’!? Patently, this is a request which no artist could fulfill. . . . An artist’s way of painting is manifest in his every picture, but it cannot (logically) be the subject matter of any of his pictures.”
8

In other words, there are certain aspects of experience/the world that cannot be put into words, or painted. He went on to say, more generally: “The propositions of philosophy and logic are not themselves logical pictures of possible states of affairs. They show what the structure of language is, although this cannot be said.” Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that language gives us a feeling of the world as a whole, but a limited whole, and it is this sense of limits, and that there is something beyond those limits, that constitutes the mystical. “Answers to questions concerning the sense of the world must necessarily take us beyond the world (i.e., ‘all that is the case’).” And “[T]he sense or value of what is the case cannot (logically) be answered. . . . To view or feel the world as a limited whole is to be aware of the limits which meaning-rules impose on what can be said.”
9

Wittgenstein thought that mysticism stems, at least in part, from “wondering” at the world, that it should exist at all. This, too, he felt, was a misuse of language, because we can’t really
imagine
what it would be like for the world not to exist. We can imagine a house that we know not to exist—and we can imagine what that plot of land would look like without the house on it—but we can’t even begin to imagine what the universe or the world would look like without the universe in the universe: it doesn’t make sense, we have come up against the limits of language, and it is at these logical/semantic limits that the sense of the mystical is grounded.

And this is where Wittgenstein is at his most distant from the logical positivists, in particular in his remark quoted at the start of this book: “We feel that even when
all possible
scientific questions have been answered,
the problems of life remain completely untouched [italics in original]” (
Tractatus
, 6.52).

Wittgenstein, like Schopenhauer, believed that morality is a sphere for the exercise of the will rather than reason. “It is the will alone that can break out from the limits imposed by language. . . . If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. . . . The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.”
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He further felt that the mystical shows itself in both art and action. He discussed with his friend Paul Engelmann the way the mystical could manifest itself in poetry: the sense of a poem going “beyond” words, breaking the limits of language, is shared by many. He thought, too, that the mystical showed itself in the school teaching that he undertook between his various spells at Cambridge; Wittgenstein believed that there are aspects of school teaching that also go beyond words, beyond the facts of the case, and that, too, may be regarded as a mystical experience.