it took me (and is taking me) years to painstakingly develop my own constructive conception of the world, of knowledge, of ethics, etc.  But I know why I think everything I think because I embraced as radical a skepticism as I could manage ten years ago and have only let myself accept each idea as I have seen sufficient reason to make it clear and indisputable to me.

And The Natural Lawyer offered provocative and fundamental challenges, which I will likely take several posts to even begin to answer:

If I understand you correctly, your statement cannot be true. For you did not embrace a radical skepticism upon “seeing sufficient reason to make it clear and indisputable” that you should do so.

This is a really interesting challenge which I am not sure I have encountered exactly in this form before and so I am really grateful for it.  After I have established some preliminary points in this post, I will come back to this objection in a post of its own and then address the rest of Natural Lawyer’s provocative challenge to me (which you can read by following the link above).  He raises a number of ideas, each deserving their own substantial treatment.

In the meantime though, I will admit right that I should have used a different word than “indisputable” when describing most of my positions since I hold very few positions to be even close to indisputable.  And probably the closest I get to indisputable views are nearly indisputable ones—views about which, after a great deal of thought and investigation, I think I am so unlikely to be in error that I might as well think them beyond dispute even though there may be some theoretical possibility that they can be refuted which I presently do not foresee.

I do not hold many of these nearly indisputable positions at all actually (though there are some).  In fact, that is one of the freedoms and challenges of thinking post-faith for me.  I very consciously feel the freedom (and responsibility) to hold the vast majority of my philosophical positions with tentativeness and an honest uncertainty.  I have changed my mind or withheld assent to believing in difficult questions quite a bit.  I am open to counter-evidence about nearly everything and will listen to counter-arguments about even those things which I am rather confident there are no adequate challenges.

So, not everything I think now is something that I know clearly and indisputably to be true.  In fact, my skepticism remains healthy enough that there are a number of matters about which I hold either no opinion or only self-consciously provisional views.  There are many questions I can think of on which my thinking evolves rapidly and unexpectedly with each new article or book I read or each new conversation I have or class lecture I give.  In fact, in the last year I have learned enough and reversed my positions on enough philosophical questions that I am pretty sure a number of my posts on this blog would have been out of character for me just a year ago.  Ideas which are very new to me or which I only recently embraced after years of resistance can be found all throughout my recent writing.   Changing one’s mind, or at least making some significant critical revisions and refinements of one’s retained views, is an inevitable part of any honest intellectual life that is genuinely engaged in exploring the world rather than filling out a preconceived “worldview.”

So most of my positions are tentative and open to dispute.  The vast majority of my beliefs are taken on the immediate but fallible authority of my senses, my memory, and my everyday inferential abilities.  And these can be disputed in a number of conceivable ways on any given point despite their overall reliability.  I also have a large number of beliefs which I hold simply on the authority of proven experts and, accordingly, those beliefs will not change until expert opinion changes and at such point will change appropriately rapidly.  I cannot pretend to know better than experts about matters on which I am not an expert.  Some of their beliefs may even be false, but I am not in a position to justifiably claim I know which of those beliefs are the false ones or the true.  When it comes to issues on which experts disagree and about which I am not an expert, I would be kidding myself to pretend I had reasons to think confidently one way or another and so am happy to say that I simply do not know the answers to those questions and that any ideas I might have would be just speculations.

In matters I have studied to some extent, I have some positions that I hold tentatively and which I openly seek to confirm or correct from all manner of potentially enlightening sources.   There are other views about which I think myself more convinced and which I therefore hold relatively confidently.  I think of these views as rather defensible because I am convinced by them myself—I cannot see my way around them and they account for my experience and my understanding of concepts, etc. in the most thoroughly explanatory way.  Feeling myself passively forced by clarity of perception or logical conclusion to assent to these positions, I provisionally but nonetheless strenuously advance, and sometimes even advocate, these (theoretically disputable) viewpoints to see just how persuasive others find them.  Then through others’ challenges or alternative positions, I find myself constantly refining or even altering or abandoning even these views on whose behalf I feel confident enough to debate.

All of these attitudes should, I think, be relatively uncontroversial ones.  Where I see major controversy lurking between people of faith and me is in the question of how presuppositions and beliefs held on faith fit into the  ethos of my intellectual life which I have sketched above.  The position that I hold to be least disputable is that faith (as distinguished from virtuous forms of trust, fidelity, and reliance on authorities and established paradigms) is ethically and epistemologically completely impermissible.  The decision to hold any of one’s presuppositions or faith beliefs as somehow a matter of fate with no possibility for objective reconsideration is a disingenuous attempt to believe however one wishes and displays a contempt for the truth that is epistemically impermissible (in categorical terms) and is ethically impermissible (by most ethical standards properly conceived).

So, in subsequent posts, I will defend my “nearly indisputable” foundations from which I do the rest of my thinking and derive my skepticism, offer my challenges to “presuppositionalism” taken both as the view that we are incapable of fully and thoroughly reexamining our fundamental beliefs, and, worse, that beliefs with untested presuppositions can be held to be rationally justified.  I will also take several posts to describe and evaluate several possible meanings of the word “faith” from the perspectives of both epistemology and ethics.

Your Thoughts?

Questions of the most legitimate sources of value and normativity are not simple ones to answer.  No truth worth knowing is easy to find but takes a lot of research and vigorous independent thought.

But, what I can say fairly easily is the following:
(1) to behave according to moral codes out of fear of punishment is simply not to be motivated by a sense of duty or from a sense of commitment to something taken to be of intrinsic value, so anyone who associates being good with “obeying God for fear of the consequences of disobedience” is either morally corrupt or ethically infantalized in my view.

(2) if morality did come from God’s arbitrary commands (which is the tacit position I think assumed in your question) then I don’t see why it would be “normative” upon us unless you also hold the view that “might makes right.”  If God’s commands must be followed simply because he is more powerful over us and has control over our fate, then his supposed moral authority is only an extension of his greater power over us. If his power gives him such moral authority then it must be that might makes right.  The notion that the universe is one great tyranny in which we must all submit to the arbitrary decrees of a powerful being on pain of eternal punishment is a monstrous notion that I’m glad is quite likely utterly false.

(3) While I think that metaethics and abstract normative theory are inherently vital, urgent, and fascinating topics (engrossing enough to commit the bulk of my research and teaching to investigating them), I do not think that everyone without a full-blooded ethical theory is just at a loss for ethical insight or direction.  While I would argue for a particular conception of ethics and think that abstract investigation of ethics should in many ways help us revise and improve our everyday conception of the moral life—-I also think that people are sufficiently morally equipped to get by just fine without a grand theory worked out about what they are doing.

When I was still a devout Christian, a year before I left the faith, a close Christian friend, wracked with doubts, told me that he figured if there was no God then he could imagine just waking up one day and not moving.  His mother would come in and ask him to get up but he just wouldn’t.  There would be no purpose to anything.

And my reply to him even then, as a believer trying to persuade him to stay in the faith, was that even were I to be convinced there was no God I would still love what I love, love whom I love, and be passionate about the causes in which I believe.  Good food would taste no less sumptuous, laughter would feel no less joyous and/or cathartic, friendship could be no less deep.

Unlike those who think there is no value apart from God, I am not a nihilist.  I never was—neither as a Christian nor as an atheist.  I do not need an external authority to tell me to value or not to value that in which I already find intrinsic and indisputable goodness.

I passionately pursue the questions of what makes the good good and I am eager to figure out the mistakes in our value judgments and to figure out how best to conceptualize and implement the best lives possible for us.  But never, ever do I feel love and affection for another human being and think, “Oh no, this must be empty since there’s no God.”  Never do I feel the rush of satisfaction when I’ve succeeded at a difficult task and yet lament that it is all in vain since there is no God.  And never have I felt the pull of my conscience when I have done something that violated a principle I seriously hold, only to shrug it off because I’m not going to go to hell over it.

And I really don’t understand the psychology of anyone who could feel those things in the throes of those emotions.

Your Thoughts?

For my reply to a comment on this post which came to me from an old friend, see Is God Necessary For Us To Care About Starving Kids A World Away?

Best film of 2006, in my opinion. Just a stunning film. I was in love with it early on and then it took fascinating turn after fascinating turn and just became deeper and deeper.

It’s a truly sublime, sensual film that manages to communicate the power of scent through its medium’s power of visual imagery, through an incredibly seductive engagement in sensuality.

The film is a wonderful meditation on contingency and the pained desire for eternal possession of what is only contingent and passing and fleeting. It’s a film about the rise of beauty and love out of the muck and filth and violence of the filthiest modes of life.

It is the greatest screen portrayal of a super villain I have ever ever seen. It is a truly great and unconventional seriel killer film that manages not just to explore the narcissism, sociopathy, possessiveness, and desire for consumption that drives the seriel killer’s pathology, but also to make the viewer feel it by making the purity and intensity and aesthetic drive of the villain relatable in a perverse way; making the viewer forget the monstrous detachment from humanity is an abberation—the way the monster himself has let himself let his desire overwhelm any social feeling.

It is a visionary portrait of evil, of demagoguery, of genius, of beauty, of power, and of love.

It is a legend that plays like 18th Century science fiction.

And in a few scenes, it gives a fascinating portrait of what Nietzsche characterized as the Dionysian/Apollinian dynamic but I shall not elaborate here out of spoiler concerns. Perhaps in another post for those who’ve seen the film already.

I just loved it. I couldn’t get over it when I got out of it, my head was swimming.

This leaves a question to address right up front—-if this blog is actually about my ideas and not always necessarily Nietzsche’s, why not just refer to this blog as a place to find my “Finckean” ideas? Why call it at all a place to find primarily “NIetzschean” ideas? The reasons for this are that (1) at this stage in my philosophical development, my ideas are so related to his that they’re often better understood as his ideas than mine and (2) I also want to encourage wherever possible the increased discussion of ideas within broadly Nietzschean paradigms. I want to signal to the site’s visitors that if they’re interested in exploring what contemporary or “universally” philosophical issues look like through broadly Nietzschean paradigms, this is a place where they can do that. I want to encourage other Nietzscheans to contribute their perspectives here as well through comments and blog posts. I want to create a place where people of this particular basic likemindedness can compare their interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy and their competing views on its correctness and its applications to contemporary issues and other subjects of thought he never addressed.

So, this is not a site for Nietzsche’s ideas but a place for Nietzschean ideas.

But it’s not a place for the dogmatic preaching of Nietzschean ideas. It is not a place where everyone will necessarily agree with Nietzschean ideas. It is a place where Nietzschean ideas will seduce us to many a new venture of thought and promise nothing more definitive than that.

This is also a place where sometimes, maybe even frequently, the connections between Nietzschean ideas and our own will seem (and maybe even be) tenuous at best. Maybe I will prove not much of a purveyor of Nietzschean ideas after all. Maybe I will prove myself so distinctly different a thinker from Nietzsche as to be not really much of a “Nietzschean” at all. In that case? Alle zu besser.