Category: Philosophy

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Philosophical Parenting: Mara van der Lugt’s “Begetting”

In early April, my wife and I received confirmation: we’re going to become parents in November! I’m thrilled, nervous, excited, scared…all of those seemingly oppositional but actually related emotions. I’ve begun to prepare for fatherhood the same way I prepare for most everything: by funding Jeff Bezos’ space program, a.k.a buying too many books on Amazon. I know that reading about parenting won’t make me a good parent but I believe that thoughtful parenting is better than thoughtless parenting, so I’m trying to be thoughtful by reading!

The second book I’ve read in preparation is Mara van der Lugt’s Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?—the first book was read a while back when I completed Jennifer Banks’ Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, which I may discuss at a later date. Begetting is an uncomfortable book to read, at times. Van der Lugt discusses the arguments of anti-natalist philosophers, questioning whether bringing a child into the world is an act (or potential act) of harm, especially in light of the uncertainty that accompanies every birth. Every child who comes into this world risks a life of pain and suffering. Our world is full of potential harms. If we don’t have children, that “non-existent being” (if such language makes any sense) isn’t harmed by not existing but existence brings with it the potential of great harm. Related, Van der Lugt asks whether it’s ethical to beget when the child being born can’t consent to existing. In the background, haunting the entire discussion, is climate change. Van Der Lugt challenges potential parents to consider what it means to bring children into a world that could be devastated ecologically but also to consider potentially affluent parents whose children could contribute to our unsustainable consumer practices in a way that could contribute to this potential, impending disaster.

In Part III of the book (“Narratives”), Van der Lugt asks us to critically evaluate our culture’s narratives around reproduction such as doing it because of a personal desire, or the feeling that our “biological clock” is ticking, or that we can’t mature morally without becoming parents, etc. Her main target, at least as I read the book, is the “Entitlement Narrative” where becoming a parent is framed in “wanting and getting and having” language as states in this quote from p. 145:

Begetting: it should be seen as an act of creation, a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible. Something that should fill us with awe and trepidation, with infinite caution and an awareness of the immeasurable fragility of life, It is not a language of wanting and getting and having that is needed here—but a language of carrying the finest glass of iron firsts, of fragility as we’ll as responsibility. Not to think that our children owe anything to use, but that we must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.

Van der Lugt works through the reasons given for having children, acknowledging their strengths and exposing their weaknesses; reasons ranging from the need to pass along our genes to the love we have for our partner and/or our potential children. Then she revisits these reasons, helping the reader ask better questions and provide better answers. One of the things I appreciate most about the book is she isn’t pro-natalist or anti-natalist. She’s a philosophical tour guide. For potential parents who want to think deeply about the decision to have children, this is an honest, unflinching book.

When our child is born, I’ll be 42 years old. I say this to point out that even though I didn’t read this book until after my wife became pregnant, I felt more like a concrete exploration of things I’ve considered for many years. We waited to become parents. I’ve had anti-natalist impulses at points; I continue to worry about climate change. The choice to become parents was done “in fear and trembling”. But this book, in spite of the fact that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone read it and then decided not to become parents, made me more secure in my choice, primarily because of some of the things Van der Lugt writes in Chapter 28, “Givenness”. Let me share three key quote that resonated with me and my own philosophy of begetting (from pp. 209 and 2011):

The language is all wrong. We need to get rid—in thought and words—of this idea of entitlement. We need to find a different way to talk about begetting. Something that removes us from the vocabulary of wanting, having, getting, being entitled to, and moves us closer to a concept of fragility and accountability: of bring entrusted with, being responsible for.

What conditions are required in order to bring a new being into the world? Is creation always justified? What are our own responsibilities here, and are we fulfilling them? In deciding to beget a child, surely our first concern should be the good of that future child—before society’s interests, before our partner’s interests, before even our own.

But thinking about begetting in this way need not lead to the decision not to beget at all: it may instead lead to a different conception of parenthood, one that is grounded not in entitlement, but in a sense of utmost responsibility—of being entrusted with something both precious and precarious.

This is the conclusion I reached about a year ago: if I have a child, I owe them everything. They didn’t choose to exist. My wife and I made the choice for them. I’m responsible to do everything possible to help them be healthy, happy, successful, fulfilled, etc. This doesn’t mean raising a spoiled, undisciplined child. Not at all. But it does mean giving my all and recognizing the great weight of responsibility that I’ve accepted. If someone is considering begetting but they don’t feel this great weight, then this book is definitely a required read because begetting is serious.

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Lucretius, resurrection, and bodily regeneration

Yesterday, I was reading some excerpts from Lucretius, the first-century Roman philosopher. He is considered to be a central contributor to the philosophy of Epicureanism. He was an “Atomist” which was akin to modern materialists. In his On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura ), he declares that “death is nothing to us” since his understanding of death is that it’s a mirror to our non-existence prior to birth. We don’t feel sadness about all of the cosmic history that we missed before our birth, so why should we care about all that we’ll miss after our death? He states, “…when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted—to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all.”

Then he says something that has stuck with me since I encountered it as an undergraduate a couple of decades ago. He writes,

If any feeling remains in mind or spirit after his has been torn from our body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced. Or even if the matter that composes us should be reassembled by time after our death and brought back into its present state—if the light of life were given to us anew—even that contingency would still be no concern of ours once the chain of our identity had been snapped.

Except found in The Good Life edited by Charles Guignon, p. 45

Lucretius’ statement causes trouble for people who believe in religious/philosophical concepts like resurrection and reincarnation but also for some post-humanists who imagine someday uploading our consciousness into a digital utopia. For Lucretius, even if this body or this body and mind combination would be reconstructed, it wouldn’t be “me”. I ended. This is someone new with recycled parts!

This raises the “Ship of Theseus” (Greek) or “Chariot Simile” (Buddhist) problem. If discontinuity is measured by change, then how do we have any continuity. In both the Greek and Buddhist ways of framing the problem, we have an object made of parts—either a ship or a chariot—that can have parts replaced. Since theoretically each part can be replaced to the point that there’s no original ship/chariot parts, we must ask, what’s essential to the identity of Ship A or Chariot A. If Ship A’s parts have all been replaced, how can it be Ship A still? But if it’s now Ship B, when did it become Ship B? And if we can take all the old parts in a pile that was made as Ship A was being deconstructed, would rebuilding it make it the real Ship A?

An answer to this that comes from the Buddhist monk Nāgasena is that we’re thinking of identity wrong. He claims in the Chariot Simile that the name “Nāgasena” isn’t referring to a singular static person but an observable process. The child named Nāgasena isn’t the adult named Nāgasena but they’re connected in that the child is part of the same process that led to the adult who will lead to the old man before the whole process ends with death. Nāgasena isn’t a fixed object; Nāgasena is an organic movement.

I don’t know that I had encountered Nāgasena in college (pretty confident that I hadn’t) but I do remember doing a presentation that made a similar argument in favor of the coherence of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. If we’re a process now, why can’t that process resume at the eschaton? My criticism of Lucretius’ idea is that he sounds like he assumes we’re static now, but we’re not. If we’re not static now, but our modern self has a sense of continuity with our former self, then why wouldn’t our future resurrected self, as different as it may be from our previous self, maintain that same sense of continuation. Now, obviously, we’re talking about taking a logical argument only so far before having to use a God-of-the-gaps to get us from death to resurrection, but I was proud of the argument nonetheless.

In some way, this could work for reincarnation or post-humanism too. But does it work or does Lucretius’ critique hold? I think there remains a problem. Often we hear about how the human body regenerates new cells every seven years, on average. And this gives us a sense that we experience something like complete bodily renewal every seven years but that’s not quite accurate. Here’s a summary of what happens in actuality:

Some parts of our body are renewing constantly but some parts of our heart, brain, eye lens, and another source I read said cells within our spinal cord, last a life time. Therefore, unlike the Ship of Theseus or the Chariot Simile, we never quite get to the point where we’ve been completely replaced. Until we die, there is some stability though not much. What does this do to undergraduate me’s argument that our existence is dynamic already therefore a resurrected identity (or reincarnated or uploaded) isn’t a massive discontinuation as it may have been claimed. It would seem that if our bodily life is anchored to even a few bits of continuation, then when those end we lose what we were and Lucretius’ point stands centuries later.

Obviously, I’m pondering this on Easter Sunday when Christians celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. I’m wondering what it means for our understanding of the doctrine. I know that the Pauline interpretation in 1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that discontinuity is built in. He talks about how Jesus’ resurrected body is animated by spirit and how our bodies are “flesh-and-blood”. Whatever we may do with his language, his point is that Jesus resurrected body, while a body, isn’t like our body. The Evangelists do something similar when they talk about Jesus appearing and disappearing but also being able to be touched and even consume food. But this brings me back to Lucretius: if this is the resurrected body, how is this not a new Jesus? How does the resurrected Jesus related to Jesus of Nazareth?

Analogously, let’s imagine that in the future people can map our brain patterns. As we die, they scan our brain and upload that pattern to a computer. My body dies but my “code” awakens in post-humanist, digital bliss. Is that me? Is that a copy of me? If my current bodily state is impacted by everything from my synapses connecting to my gut bacteria to my external stimuli, would merely reproducing my brain patterns be preserving me? This may be where religious thinkers retreat to a dualism: the soul (or “Atman” in Indian philosophy) is the real me, it interacts with my body, but it’s independent of my body in some way even now. But that pushes us to deal with the problems of dualism, and there are many! But is dualism the only escape if you want to preserve concepts like resurrection or reincarnation? Or does the Buddhist claim that we’re processes already, even if there is a portion of who we are that remains static, continue to hold in some way that I’m not considering?

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A Žižekian Good Friday

I have a confession: the two days of the year when I feel the most at home within Christianity are Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Triumphalistic Christianity troubles me. I don’t mean to say that the hope that Christianity provides is what troubles me. I mean to say that when Christianity is taken as a given, empirical metanarrative that explains away our human experiences, then it troubles me. I dislike apologetics for this reason. I’m not interested in “proving” the “truth” of Christianity. For this reason, sermons that say something like, “it’s Friday…but Sunday’s coming” bother me. Let Good Friday be Good Friday. Let Easter Sunday be Easter Sunday.

Good Friday and Holy Saturday resonate with me because my “belief” or my “faith” is more attuned to the mood of these days than it is to other days on the ecclesial calendar. Our religion has existed for two millennia. It can be argued that it’s brought more good than bad to the world, though I don’t know how to measure such a claim. What I do know is this: what Christians thought had happened and what they thought it meant for the near future has proven false, or at best unprovable. The Apostle Paul was in error when he wrote (in 1 Thessalonians 4:17), “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.” Yes, I understand that there’s a hermeneutical move that can extract a deeper meaning from this text, something like, “This is the attitude that all Christians everywhere should have always, until Christ does return,” but I doubt that’s what Paul meant. Paul meant that he suspected he would see the parousia of Christ occur, and soon.

More than nineteen centuries have passed. There has been no “Second Coming”. When Christians proclaim the “Memorial Acclamation” that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” we must admit that we understand one of three acclamations: Christ has died. We understand death. We debate the meaning of resurrection but as the evolving Resurrection Narratives of the canonical Gospels show, and how later interpretations like that in the Gospel of Peter intensify, our story about Jesus’ resurrection is actual a plurality: stories. Those stories differ in their presentation and interpretation of the Resurrection. They add details about his appearance, about his being touched and heard by this or that person, about him eating, but also about him appearing out of no where and then disappearing again. He’s a ghost; he’s not a ghost. As we return to Paul again, when we read his exposition on the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, we see someone wrestling with how to understand what he is convinced that he has encountered: an embodied man who had died but who is embodied in a way that is different from our own embodiment.

I say all that to say this. Whatever assurance we Christians have must be understood as something felt, something hoped, but not something known. The Evangelists didn’t know what it meant for Christ to have risen. Paul didn’t either. We don’t, surely. If we understand death to a degree, and resurrection hardly at all, then what to make of the claim that there’s a future hope that will occur in cosmic space-time as Christ “returns”? I have no answers though I have heard many.

On Good Friday, we have something concrete. We have a man who has brought us hope. His life has impacted us generations later. He has inspired us and he has challenged us. We’ve never seen him. Some claim to encounter him, to hear him speak, but the subjectivity of such claims aren’t helpful for those of us who lack such ecstatic visions! On Holy Saturday, we have the divine silence that is characteristic of many of our lives—I suspect most but who am I to say?

This is why I want Good Friday to have its place and Holy Saturday too. Don’t push me toward Easter Sunday. When I have to proclaim, “He is risen,” I do it with doubts and I don’t know if I know what I’m saying. But I understand, “he has died”.

In his collection of essays, Heaven in Disorder, Slavoj Žižek includes one titled “Christ in the Time of a Pandemic” (pp. 128-131). In it, he claims about our shared life during the pandemic, “We live in some kind of hell, caught in a permanent tension and depression, the pandemic having destroyed the daily life we were used to. And here Christ enters—but how?” He rejects the “standard answer” that “especially in times of trouble…there is a higher almighty power that loves us and protects us” (p. 128). As all those who died during the pandemic testify, if they were loved, they weren’t protected. With this reality in mind, Žižek takes inspiration from Meister Eckhart, saying, if we have to choose heaven with God or hell with Christ, we should choose hell. And for Žižek this is a real choice, as I’ll explain momentarily.

For Žižek, the crucifixion is the moment when “God is abandoned by Himself” (p. 129). He quotes G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic philosopher and critic, who says that on this day, “God has forsaken God”. Žižek comments, “…in Christianity, God dies for himself—in his ‘Father, why have you abandoned me?’ Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith (p. 130).” But for Žižek, this makes Christ our model. He writes:

Christ’s death on the cross signifies that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology—Christ’s death is the the death of this God, it refuses any “deeper meaning” that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes (p. 130).

In Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Žižek finds Christ present with us, though notably from a materialist perspective. “Christ is now present here more than ever, He is suffering here with us. When we curse our fate in despair, when he courageously accept that no higher force will help us, he is here with us (p. 131).”

For Žižek, this means that “we act with Christ only if we assume our responsibility for the pandemic and other catastrophes, and act together in global solidarity, aware that no higher power guarantees the happy outcome (p. 131).” He calls this “global solidarity” “Holy Spirit,” reinterpreting the Third Person of the Trinity to be “the community of believers bound by love”. In this, Žižek writes, “Christ returns as a link of love between his followers, not as a higher power uniting them (p. 131).”

This may be too depressing an interpretation of Christianity for most Christians. Admittedly, there are days when I can’t settle for a materialist reading like the one Žižek offers here. Sometimes I need the hope that even though I don’t understand what we Christians are saying about Jesus’ resurrection, reappearing, and other concepts like a future resurrection, I hope that these ideas maybe point to something. But today isn’t the day for that. On Sunday, I’ll force myself to hope. I’ll declare, “He is risen, indeed!” But not today. Today is Good Friday. Žižek is correct: today, we’re alone, except for each other.

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Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram

I’m suspicious of personality tests like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. My suspicion is based on a principle. Those tests are understood by many who take it to reveal the static personality-type that you inherited. Whereas I tend to see people as creating the dynamic personality that they want. Or, if you want to propose a more passive way of seeing personality, we are dynamic personalities that are created by realities ranging from our genetic inheritance to our social situatedness.

My views begin with the influence of Buddhism. I’m not Buddhist but I’ve studied enough Buddhism over the years to know that Buddhist concepts of the self—or more precisely the no-self (anattā /anātman)—make a lot of sense to me. Our existence is transient. Our bodies are constantly changing. Yes, there are consistencies in our personalities and appearance over time but consistencies don’t reflect concreteness. Buddhism places a premium on the changing nature of reality, which includes us. When I reviewed Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, I said this about anattā /anātman:

its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Or, as K.T.S. Sarao states it (“Anātman“), more succinctly, “the ‘self’ or ‘person’ (Pāli. puggala, Skt. pudgala), conceived as an enduring entity, simply does not exist and that everything is a succession and in flux, there being nothing that is substantial or permanent.”

I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned something like the “soul” or “mind” as an emerging property when I say that I find this Buddhist concept attractive. I’m saying that the Hindu concept of Atman, which can understood to be somewhat static, or the “soul” of Cartesian dualism, seems unsatisfactory. Whatever it is that we experience when we experience metacognition, when we reflect and when we speak of “I,” it seems unlikely that it would be static while everything else about us and our world is dynamic. So, no, I haven’t embraced a more extreme form of anattā /anātman, or the language we hear from philosophers like Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is illusory. But I do want to say that whatever consciousness is, whatever mind is, whatever “soul” is trying to capture, that changes with us like all of us changes. It’s evolving. It’s not static and there to be “discovered”.

The aforementioned personality tests, whether intentionally or not, leave people seeing themselves as something settled. They need to find what that is. Then they can appreciate it and use it to their benefit. Each form of settledness includes strengths to be harnessed and weaknesses to be suppressed.

There are some aspects of Existentialism that align with the Buddhist critique of a static-persona paradigm. Kevin Aho’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Existentialism” is helpful here. First, Aho’s comments about Existentialism’s emphasis on embodiment:

Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is lived and not known.”

We aren’t being with bodies; we are bodies. We are a static personality in a dynamic body. All of our existence is dynamic.

Second, Sartre’s comment that “existence precedes essence” is key. Aho summarizes it this way, “there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always other than ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold.” At a glance, this may sound like the claim that we’re not limited by our bodies but that’s not the claim at all. Existentialism posits two important concepts: facticity and transcendence. Aho summarizes facticity this way:

Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.

How does facticity relate to our transcendence? Aho notes, “we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question”. We can see what we are but then reinterpret it and even will to reshape it to a degree. This means that we are “free” but as the more mature expressions of Existentialism acknowledge, that freedom is “mediated”. Aho observes of Sarte:

…he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed this insight. Aho summarizes, “In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation ‘before any personal decision has been made.’ The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made.”

Finally, Existentialism emphasizes “Authenticity”. This is the desire to live as ourselves; to avoid the herd-mentality as much as possible. This isn’t being non-conformist for the sake of non-conformity but instead being honest about our likes and dislikes, our desires, tastes, dreams, and ambitions, even when the broader society of which we’re part doesn’t sign off on them. This is where the concept of “bad faith” enters the picture. Aho again:

Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation.

When I hear people say “I did this-or-that because I’m Enneagram 8,” I hear a bad faith comment. We may say this in jest. I joke about being from California or my French heritage when something I do irritates or intrigues people I know, but it’s mostly a joke. I know that being from California isn’t determinative and even less so that a bunch of people in my family tree have French surnames. But there are those who take these identities to be determinative of who they’ll be…no, who they are since being and becoming is incorrect. Personally, I want to say that Buddhism’s emphasize on the transitory nature of all reality and Existentialism’s emphasis on our ability to self-reflect and self-interpret (and to some degree, though limited, self-improve) means that Enneagram-identities are choices. We want to understand ourselves. We want an identity. These are convenient pre-packaged ones. I guess they’re no worse than when I identify with my career or field(s) of study. There’s an urge to say, “that’s me, that’s my ‘type’ and my identity and my place with my people”. But I think in doing this we’re saying this is who we want to be and we’re saying this is the interpretation of ourselves that we like.

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Questions: Philosophy for Young People

In my last post, I mentioned the positive experience that I had with PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” conference. I want to share something else that PLATO is doing that I learned about just today: a philosophy journal! It’s titled Questions: Philosophy for Young People. The last issue (#23) focused on “Community”. The next issue (#24) focuses on “Conflict and Cooperation”. The deadline for the next issue is the end of April. I would like to encourage my students to try to publish to this journal in the future!

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PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” Conference

Lucio Mare’s presentation of Hadot and the philosophy of history and science

Yesterday, I spent a few hours attending a conference via Zoom called “Philosophy in High School”. It was organized by the Student Advisory Council of PLATO: the “Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization”. What I admire about this conference most was that it combined presentations from faculty and students. As a member of the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of the Society of Biblical Literature, I can say that I’ve been part of conversations around what it could look like to do something like this for the field of biblical studies. I’ll say more about that idea below. For now, let me praise the student organizers who made the “Philosophy in High School” conference a reality. They did a great job!

Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen presenting on how philosophy is useful for teenage life

I attended four presentations. The first was by Lucio Mare of Stanford Online High School. He spoke on “Philosophy as the Education of High Schoolers: Using Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ to Teach History and Philosophy of Science”. The remaining three presentations were by students: Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen, “Philosophy: making life vibrant”; Sophie Zhang, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”; and Kate Given, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”. All three were well done! As a high school teacher, I know that it can be difficult to get students prepared for 5-10 minutes of presentation. These young people had a half hour set aside for presentations and discussions!

Sophie Zhang’s presentation, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”

While philosophy has its own uphill battle agains the cult of STEM (and FYI, philosophy and STEM shouldn’t be rivals at all, so this means we’re doing STEM wrong!), biblical studies is much further down the hill when it comes to attracting enough young people to do a conference like this one. There are a few reasons.

First, philosophy is far more accessible. Yes, the Bible can be found anywhere but good tools for studying the Bible are difficult to find. Where I live in San Antonio, it’s difficult to keep up with current biblical scholarship because there are few libraries who do. For example, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could spend a day at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There were a ton of resources there. But San Antonio has nothing quite like this. While I know there are topics within analytic philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind) that share similar limitations when it comes to resources and that prevent entry by people who can’t keep up with the quickly unfolding literature on the topic, there’s so much more than you can do under the purview of “philosophy” than you can under “biblical studies”.

Kate Given’s presentation, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”

Second, and this is related, you can philosophize from anywhere about anything at any time. There’s the story of how Raymond Aron was sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in 1932-33 drinking apricot cocktails when Aron, who had been studying the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl, told Sarte and Beauvoir, “if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (See Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, pp. 1-3.) I can philosophize about friendships, education, music, movies, traffic, city planning, travel, etc. I can do biblical studies with regard to the Bible and the reception history of the Bible, which is extensive but also limited in comparison.

Third, as I’ve discussed recently, biblical studies are less attractive to young people because the Bible is becoming less attractive to young people. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift away from Christianity, so there’ll be fewer people reading the Bible in the future. Teens are philosophizing all the time, whether or not they’re aware of it. Teens aren’t reading the Bible all the time. You would know it if you’re were doing it! What it means to study the Bible is a more restricted activity.

If we’re to create a conference on biblical studies that includes high school participants, we’d have a fourth and final obstacle: philosophy has a rational air about it. When people encounter the Bible prior to reading it in an academic context, the vibe is something like “devotional”. How a conference for high school readers of the Bible wouldn’t devolve into a series of devotionals or apologetics is something that would need to be discussed. Religious studies may have more promise here. (In other words, something connected with the American Academy of Religion.)

That being said, it was wonderful to see a conference like this one. Kudos to PLATO and their Student Advisory Council. I hope to see future conferences like this one!

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The sub-man and the serious man

I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté). This morning, I encountered two of her “characters”. The first is the “sub-man” (sous-homme) and the second is the “serious man” (l’homme sérieux). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Beauvoir by Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke (“Simone de Beauvoir”) connects these two as both trying “to refuse to recognize the experience of freedom”. Ethan Hekker (“Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics”) summarizes these characters nicely. He says of the sub-man:

…the sub-man restricts himself as much as possible to the world; in an attempt to perhaps escape his shortcomings, or to excuse any attempt to try anything, he claims that nothing merits effort. Nothing is that meaningful or worthwhile. de Beauvoir says that the most harmful quality of the sub-man is that he is most likely to become one of a mob; ignorant rhetoric appeals easily to the sub-man, since that’s the easiest thing to listen to.

Then of the “serious man,” Hekker writes:

The “serious man” is one who dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good. The serious man stops at nothing to achieve the cause, or embolden the ideology, even if it comes at the detriment of others. To de Beauvoir, the serious man doesn’t necessarily care about the cause as much as he does his ability to get lost in it. 

The “sub-man” caught my attention because it presents a picture of what some ideologies aim to do to us as humans. I’ll take my own field of work as an example. In education (and you’ll hear this rhetoric in traditional public, public charter, and various types of private schools), it’s common for higher ups to shame teachers with phrases like, “It’s for the kids!” Why should you accept lower pay? The kids. Why should you avoid self-advocacy in the work place? The kids. Why should you spend your own money on supplies, snacks, etc.? The kids. It’s not uncommon to be reminded that people don’t get into education, “for the money,” and this is true but manipulative. Usually, when teachers complain about their pay it’s not because they’re suddenly in it “for the money”; it’s because they want their basic needs met.

Beauvoir writes (in Bernard Frechtman’s translation, p. 49):

“…the sub-man plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as the essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth is that this rue miscarries, for the Cause can not save the individual insofar as he is a concrete and separate existence.”

When I read this, I thought immediately of the teacher who has become the “sub-man”. The “Cause” is “Education,” capital “E”. The sub-man becomes “inessential”. The teacher is exposable if they’re unwilling to sell themselves wholly to “the Cause”. If you Google articles about the rate of teacher resignations in the United States over the past half-decade, you’ll realize that many educators have concluded that they won’t be “inessential”. This is for good reason. Let’s remember that doing it “for the kids,” is rarely a statement made in good faith. The politician, the board member, the administrator, etc., may believe that they believe in what they’re saying to teachers but often, for a variety of reasons, people in the aforementioned roles choose to ignore the systemic failures of education (e.g. teaching to the test, grade inflation, the rat-race of the college admissions process and the portfolio building we’ve hoisted on children). But beyond the bad faith use of manipulative phrases like “do it for the kids,” is the sad reality that if we deconstruct this phrase we’ll realize that (1) it justifies dehumanizing adults who remain humans with their own worlds: wills, wants, emotions, feelings, dreams, identities, etc., and more sinister (2) it does this so that some day “the children” can grow and mature into cogs in the machine themselves! We value the humanity of the children but only in so far as we can anticipate that they’ll be adults one day who can be exploited.

According to Beauvoir, “The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity (p. 49).”

Quick biographical detour. I was raised within a sect of Christianity known as “Oneness Pentecostalism”. My perspective is that it’s an extreme expression of religion that is unhealthy, at best, and downright harmful, at worst. When I became an adult, I left that world behind me. I’ve known people who couldn’t leave. I’ve pitied them but I know they don’t need my pity. Subjectively, who’s to say. It may be as many of them have believed over the years that I, the apostate, need pity. But since I’m writing, let me share another quote from Beauvoir that reminded me of what I had seen time and time again as my contemporaries in my 20s realized all the problems with the Oneness Pentecostal subculture but chose to remain (p. 50):

“Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and his teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it.”

This must seem perverse to anyone unfamiliar with the subculture that I’m referencing but I remember being filled with fear when I realized that I didn’t think that I believed much of what I had been taught about things ranging from eternal judgment to how one becomes a “real” Christian (speaking in tongues as the outward evidence of salvation) to how one must appear on the outside (dress and grooming) to be “holy”. I wondered whether I was “backsliding” toward future eternal damnation.

Once this fear had been overcome though, it was freeing. It was freeing to choose to shape my own understanding of Christianity, which has evolved endlessly all the way up to this point in my life. But I knew people who chose to stay in the safety of their small religious communities because they couldn’t risk the “what if”. They worried that they had been taught “the truth,” as you’ll often hear it called in those circles: “the full gospel”. They turned back to the world that they knew; they repressed their doubts.

The serious man “dedicates his life staunchly to one particular cause, ideology, or set of values that he considers to be good,” as Hekker phrased it. For many of my fellow educators, for many of my former co-religionists, what was used once to demoralize us into accepting our condition (making us sub-people) makes us vulnerable to adopting the ideology so that we can recover ready-made meaning. About this person, Beauvoir says that “he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party (p. 52).” Once we have forsaken our identity as individuals who might change and evolve over time, open to what freedom may offer us, we become the “serious man”. This can be dangerous, as Beauvoir reminds us (p. 53):

“The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is a fanaticism of the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is a fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.”

This may seem dramatic but I’ve watched as underground fantasies of capturing the world “for Christ” have emerged to become legitimate threats to democracy. The Pentecostals who raised me have no problem with Christian Nationalism, or more accurately, Christian Fascism: Google “New Apostolic Reformation” to see what I mean. The educator who has given up on self-advocacy “for the children” may not turn into an extremist but they’ll judge their colleagues who aim for work-life balance, who don’t spend a bunch of their own money funding things that their schools won’t, etc. In doing so, they’re at least agreeing with the “Cause” that the problem isn’t systemic or institutional; the problem is with the teacher.

(I say this as a teacher who works hard. I arrive early to my job. I do find myself irritated by colleagues who seem laissez-faire about their vocations, who seem to lack work ethic. I don’t think I’ve crossed the line yet into reproducing the manipulative, anti-worker language that I see floating around the edu-sphere but I’m aware that my temptation is less “quiet quitting” and more “joining ‘the Cause'”. I’m definitely self-critiquing here as my identity is tied to my job in such a way that I must put effort into leaving work at work.)

Beauvoir understands that sometimes we can’t escape becoming “serious”. There are social factors and demands of all kinds (think keeping a paycheck to pay the bills or to feed your own kids) that lead people to remain in situations that they know aren’t ideal. She writes, “…certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honestly, for example, those who are denied instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given (p. 51).” I think of people who I know who became clergy, not only in Oneness Pentecostalism but within Evangelicalism. As they aged their views changed. They didn’t believe themselves the “statement of faith” on their church’s website. But to say this out loud would mean the termination of their employment. What do they do then? The fear of loss is great: lost status, a lost paycheck, a loss of community. These are real losses. Some realize that they’re down life’s journey too far to reinvent themselves now, so they self-justify in order to stay where they’re at. They preach from a pulpit every Sunday doctrines that they haven’t believed in years. I don’t judge this. It may not be wrong in a sense. They are serving their community in some way through this inauthenticity. And let’s be honest: all of us must do this to some degree to live in our world with others. The real question is how much inauthenticity is worth it to keep what you have?

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Philosophies of animals

I’m a vegetarian. It’s not for health reasons, per se. I’ve been teased as the most unhealthy vegetarian that some of my friends know, since I’m not particularly fond of vegetables! Instead, it’s because of my dog, Frida, mostly. In the six years that my wife and I have been her humans, I’ve come to see animals and animal minds in a new way. I know that there’s the danger of anthropomorphizing animals but I think that there’s an equal and opposite danger when we try to see animals as something fundamentally different from us humans. We humans are animals too. We humans with our wills, our desires, our needs, our pain and suffering are more similar to our animal companions that we’re wont to admit.

Obviously, my decision to become a vegetarian begins with my experience of animals. I think those experiences are rooted in values that go back to my childhood. I come from a family of hunters but I wasn’t interested in hunting. I couldn’t shoot a deer when encouraged. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t eat meat. I ate meat until I was 38 years old. I quit during Lent of 2020. Prior to quitting meat, I had begun to feel disgust when cooking meat. The meat began to smell bad to me. Again, my experiences led the way.

I live in Texas. Obviously, this is a state where people love to eat meat. BBQ is popular up and down the state; various meat-based tacos too. But it’s more than the taste of meat that causes many Texans to distrust a vegetarians. There are economic and cultural reasons too. According to the Texas Historical Commission (see “The Texas Tradition of Cattle Ranching Began in Tejas”), “Cattle ranching is still an important part of the Texas economy. In 2012, Texas grossed $10.5 billion (yes, with a “b”) in cattle production—approximately half the state’s commodities. The Lone Star State is number one in beef cattle production in the United States, and Texas is home to 248,800 farms and ranches totaling 130.2 million acres.” Vegetarianism isn’t a threat in itself but advocating for vegetarianism may be a sort of cultural treason down here. As the aforementioned article states, “Cattle ranching is not only part of the Texas economy, but also a part of the culture.” The article gives reasons, reasons that I understand, but ultimately I believe that in several decades one of the moral failures that future generations will pin on us (among many, of which I’m guilty of quite a few) is how we treated animals. They may not be vegetarians but I think they’ll look back in disgust at how we’ve slaughtered animals for food and they’ll see factory farming as something of an abomination.

The self-imposed cultural isolation that I experience as a vegetarian who is one for moral reasons has led me to read books exploring the philosophy of animals. For anyone who may be thinking about animals, how they relate to us, how we should treat them, and whether we should eat them, let me recommend some of the books I’ve read, or am reading, or intend to read.

Read: When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David M. Peña-Guzmán

Guzmán, along with his co-host Ellie Anderson, are two philosophers that I encountered through the podcast “Overthink”. His book models the strength of philosophical thinking that engages scientific data. Through the paradigm of dreams, Guzmán explores our interior subjectivity and how if animals have something like what we have, what that means for how we relate to them.

Read but need to re-read: Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals by Christine M. Korsgaard

I need to re-read this one because it’s rooted in dense, Kantian philosophy. You know, the ethics of seeing humans not as a mere ends but as ends in themselves. Now apply that to non-human animals. Unlike Kagan, Korsgaard leaves no room for “human superiority”. Her argument is one that I’ve been pondering as she claims (p. 74):

“Value is a perspectival notion: values arise from the point of view of valuing creatures. And the values that arise from one point of view can be discordant with values that arise from another. There may be a way in which it is true that a more cognitively sophisticated creature loses more by death, but there is also a way in which both the sophisticated creature and unsophisticated one lose everything that matter. In fact, we can see ethical life as an attempt to bring some unity or harmony into our various evaluative perspectives, by choosing those ends that are good for all of us. If we view ethical life this way, it is not surprising that things become more difficult when we try to take other animals into account.”

Reading: How to Count Animals: More or Less by Shelly Kagan

I’m reading this one right now. I don’t have a lot to say other than that Kagan offers a perspective that maintains humanity’s place as more morally valuable creatures while continuing to argue that this doesn’t in any way mean that animals lack moral value.

Intend to Read: Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C. Nussbaum

I haven’t read this one yet but I plan on it. For now, all I have to say is that the interviews I’ve heard with Nussbaum insured that I’ll read this book when I have the opportunity!

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The Bible is a talisman (for many). Reading it leads to deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary.

Jacques Derrida tried to point out that deconstruction isn’t a method. It’s what happens when you read (at least when you read closely). When you read something, you see the flaws in the text, you notice the gaps, you recognize what’s being fronted and what’s being supplanted, you hear the silence.

One can read a text and one can READ a text. When I speak of critical biblical studies, I’m not saying that the readers are disparaging of the text. To think critically is to be cautious, careful, aware. It’s to try to set aside assumptions. When we do this, texts deconstruct themselves.

Yesterday, I wrote a post claiming that critical biblical studies has a death-drive. My claim is that critical biblical studies exist in reaction to modernity, primarily, but it has come to exist in reaction to fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, being that those two ideologies are themselves reactions to modernity. The tone of the post could lead people to think that I’m saying we should abandon critical biblical studies or that we should leave the first naïveté alone. If we want students to value the Bible, then we need to let them retain the Sunday School version of the Bible that they’ve been taught.

Let me be clear: that’s not what I’m saying at all. I do think there’s a place for a second naiveté (something like a theological-reading of the Bible or seeing the Bible as a “wisdom text”) but I don’t believe we should leave the first naïveté alone because doing so is safe. It’s not. In an original draft of this post, I unpacked how concepts like biblicism and inerrancy are dangerous but that’s being redundant. One can find this information all over the Internet. And, to be honest, I don’t want to draw the attention of a particular class of online apologists. If you know, you know. And if you know, you know that the first naiveté is rich soil for ideologies ranging from homophobia to Christian Nationalism. If you know, I don’t need to say more.

What I do need to say is this: I don’t see how we can lead students from the first naiveté into the second naiveté without them experiencing the process of deconstructing the text as they engage modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Could this result in many students who abandon the Bible altogether? Yes but also no. My bet is that many of those students weren’t reading the Bible anyways. They had magical ideas about the Bible as a pretext that justified whatever ideology they associated with it. Critical scholarship is necessary if we’re going to de-weaponize the Bible. If students decide that the Bible isn’t for them and that’s it irrelevant now, then this may be better than if they grow to become the type of people who assume the Bible is their talisman, they magic amulet that curses their enemies and blesses their friends.

For the student who will mature to the point where they can experience a second naïveté, the deconstructing process is essential. We can’t force students to continue their journey toward learning how the Bible can be life-giving wisdom literature that doesn’t have to be read as anti-modernity, anti-democracy, anti-science, etc. We can open the door for them though. In fact, that’s all we can do. And critical scholarship is a key. If we could jump from first naïveté to second naïveté without the deconstruction that may cause disillusionment and disinterest in the Bible and in the Church, that would be wonderful. But we can’t ignore the cards we’ve been dealt. And we can’t pretend that the Bible hasn’t been given some sort of artificial meaning by our society that likes to cite it without reading it in order to weaponize it.

As I told a friend over text this morning, I have gained so much from the theological writings of people like David Bentley Hart. Will he sell as much as say “new atheists” like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, on the one hand, or fundamentalists like John Piper and Mark Driscoll, on the other hand? No. These books sell better and are consumed more because of their polarized simplicity. Sadly, interesting thoughts about the concept of “God” won’t be encountered because the sloppy stuff is easier to access and understand. But that doesn’t mean Hart is wrong for offering us the opportunity to become mature thinkers.

Similarly, yes, people may polarize around the Bible as the inerrant, infallible “Word of God” that justifies their every ideology, or around the Bible as a book of forgettable collection of outdated, ancient myths that needs to be rejected from the first page to the last. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the responsibility of offering students a way forward. The way forward to an informed rejection of the Bible (rather than merely a reactionary one) or toward a second naïveté (rather than a reactionary religious fundamentalism) goes through a critical engagement with the text first. At least, that’s my view at the moment.

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A Short Note on Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves

Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self (Princeton, 2021).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

Jay L. Garfield does for the Buddhist concept of anattā /anātman, what Robert Wright did for Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practices: he provides scientific and philosophical justification for their value to an audience that might be hesitant to embrace the metaphysics of Buddhism. For those unfamiliar with anattā /anātman, its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Garfield is a philosopher, so he runs through a wide-array of philosophical arguments for why this Buddhist concept is closer to the best philosophy than say Descartes’ dualism or other approaches to the mind-body problem that seem to depict a little “me” controlling my body from inside my brain. Similarly, modern neuroscience appears to be leaning in a direction that leads some to reject the concept of a static, essential “me” underneath it all. Instead, most neuroscientists appear to argue for an understanding of consciousness and explain our mind-body relationship in such a way that the Buddha would approve.

For Garfield, this doesn’t mean there’s no “me” but instead of a “self” he prefers the word “person,” with a person being what Buddhist understand when they see the Skandhas intersecting together. And Garfield argues that there are ethical implications to seeing ourselves (for lack of a better word) as “persons,” interconnected and dependent upon the environment in which we live and the relationships that shape us, over against a “self” that somehow transcends our material and relational realities. This work is very thought-provoking, easy to read, clear in its arguments, and challenging in its conclusions. I highly recommend!