Paolo Diego Bubbio

From "Science and Religion" by Werner Heisenberg:

"Science deals with the objective, material world. It invites us to make accurate statements about objective reality and to grasp its interconnections. Religion, on the other hand, deals with the world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do, not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. In short, the conflict between the two, which has been raging since the eighteenth century, seems founded on a misunderstanding, or, more precisely, on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statements. Needless to say, the result makes no sense at all. This view, which I know so well from my parents, associates the two realms with the objective and subjective aspects of the world respectively. Science is, so to speak, the manner in which we confront, in which we argue about, the objective side of reality. Religious faith, on the other hand, is the expression of the subjective decisions that help us choose the standards by which we propose to act and live. Admittedly, we generally make these decisions in accordance with the attitudes of the group to which we belong, be it our family, nation, or culture. Our decisions are strongly influenced by educational and environmental factors, but in the final analysis they are subjective and hence not governed by the 'true or false' criterion."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/heisenberg07/heisenberg07_index.html

The Münchhausen Strategy
Wednesday, November 05, 2008

According to Hegel, the human mind is ‘mind depended’: mind is dependent on itself.
One could charge Hegel with what we might call the “Münchhausen fallacy”. That is, to think of the mind as ‘mind dependent’ might remind one of Baron Munchausen who proceeded to tie a rope around one of the horns of the moon and slid down to the end of the rope: given that the earth was still a long way beneath him, he unhooked the rope from the moon and swung it beneath him, slid down the length of the rope again, and again threw the rope down and by this process reached the earth.
However, let’s examine the possible alternatives to the “Münchhausen Strategy”. If the mind is not ‘mind dependent’, it can be dependent on something else. An immaterialist à la Berkeley would answer that the mind depends on God. A realist would answer that the mind depends on the brain. Both these answers are ultimately metaphysical, as they share an idea of the mind as something needing a naturalistic explanation - the mind has to be ground somewhere (it is, of course, a ‘turtle problem’: if the world rests upon an elephant and the elephant rests upon a turtle, what is the turtle standing on?).
One could claim that the mind is just independent. To claim that the mind is independent is different from claiming that the mind is ‘mind dependent’. To conceive the mind as independent means to consider it autonomous and self-sufficient (in our metaphor, to think of the mind as independent is equivalent to think of the rope as long enough to reach the earth). It is still a metaphysical answer.
Conversely, to claim that the mind is ‘mind dependent’ means that it depends on its own development. Perhaps the notion of the mind as ‘mind dependent’ is not so far form Heidegger’s Geworfenheit: the mind is 'thrown' into situations without being able to reflect on them first, for to reflect on them (not act) is also something that can be interpreted as an action. And what Baron Münchhausen did - unhooking the rope from the moon and sliding down the length of the rope again – is more or less what, according to Gadamer, we do with tradition. Tradition is a legitimate source of knowledge because it is all we have and because as our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.
All in all, Hegel's ‘Münchhausen Strategy’ does not seem, philosophically speaking, so silly!

Voegelin on the replacement of "mythic" language
Sunday, November 02, 2008

Eric Voegelin, in his From Enlightenment to Revolution, comments on the Enligtenment aspiration to replace all "mythic" language with something more 'rational' and 'modern'. He writes that the religious language "was, at the time of its original employment, the precise instrument for expressing the irruption of transcendental reality, its incarnation and its operation in man,", and it became "mythic" in the pejorative sense only when thinkers who had lost a sense of what those symbols had meant in their own traditions came to see them "in a 'literal', disenchanted opaqueness from the outside".
Mutatis mutandis, I think that something similar can be said of the use of religious ideas and symbols in the idealistic tradition. When Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (and maybe Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis) focussed on "God", "mythology", "Christ", "religious community" etc., they were traying to capture aspects of reality that "are there anyway", but on a idealistic level (Of course Hegel is different from others, as the reality of the ideas is grounded on recognition among individuals). These conceptions became "mythic" in the pejorative sense only when the first generation of post-idealistic thinkers of the "analytic revolution" (Russell, Moore, etc.) came to see these ideas and symbols as expressing (traditional) metaphysical realities, and they lost the sense of what those ideas and symbols had meant in the idealistic tradition.