Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn talks to Bill Moyers [link fixed!]:
BILL MOYERS: What do you think is missing in our conversation between faith and reason? You’ve been at this festival of writers for several days now. What’s missing in our conversation between faith and reason?
COLIN MCGINN: Well, I think there’s too much tolerance of faith, and there’s not enough respect for reason. I think there are two sides to what’s happening in contemporary culture. Let’s talk about the reason side first. For the last 30-50 years, reason has been under attack. Subjectivism, relativism, multi-culturalism have been brought in to undermine the enlightenment values of the disinterested search for truth, the belief in objective justification, the belief in objective reality, the belief in science, the belief in history. And so intellectuals and academics have told the world that these are all illusions, these ideas of truth and objectivity and justification, and we ought to accept that people just have different systems and they have their different cultures with different views. So you get an attack on reason. So reason isn’t taken very seriously.
At the same time, faith is flourishing because if there’s no such thing as reason, how will faith ever be criticized. So we get the idea, well, people have different faiths, and since everything’s relative anyway, there’s no point in trying to criticize other people’s faith and point out there’s no evidence for it. It’s internally incoherent. So, you’ve got a sort of resurgence of faith after what seemed to be a gradual wearing away of faith. And then you’ve got this way in which reason seems to be sinking in people’s estimation. So I think those two things are going on. I think we need to reaffirm the values of reason.
OB (in the distance): So do I.
[Even fainter voice, from rural South Carolina]: Me too!
Slightly slurred, from rural Northumberland, me too.
McGinn himself is from Northumberland I think, so that’s very appropriate.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with South Carolina! [Well, except its taste in Senators maybe.])
the link is broken
Last night’s “Faith & Reason” was pretty good, if you don’t mind the near total neglect of epistemology.
I also agree with Colin McGinn, although I think the real problem may not be tolerance in its traditional sense, but the kind of “tolerance” that’s come to replace it.
The classic model of religous tolerance worked out by Locke and others basically says that freedom of religion ought to be allowed, as long as the religious practices are not harmful to society. This model never said that religious ideas should not be criticized…in fact, the freedom to express criticism of religion, either one’s own or another’s, seems to be part of the model. But we’ve come to think of tolerance as a free pass for any and all religious beliefs. In the name of tolerance, we have to abstain from expressing any negative opinions about religious ideas, even if the ideas may be harmful.
The leap from the earlier model to the new one is not logically defensible. The people who keep telling secular humanists to stop being so intolerant of religion not only have no idea what tolerance is, but are acting most intolerantly of all.
Phil
Sorry about the link. Don’t know how I managed that.
Phil, yes, McGinn made just that point elsewhere in the interview – that tolerance has changed its meaning from ‘allowing to proceed’ to ‘not criticizing’ – and that that’s absurd and very wrong. I liked him. I wanted to invite him over for cookies and milk.
Well, I’ll be the dissenter here. McGinn’s comments are total balderdash. I would love to see one piece of evidence that ‘relativism’ has led to the revival of faith.
Here’s another story. At the beginning of the Cold war, regular church going, according to polls, was less common than it was at the end of the Cold War. Now, myself, I would think that the revival of the faith, both Christianity in the West and Islam in the East, had much, much more to do with cold war politics. The great thing about this thesis is that, unlike McGinn’s lower punditry, with its very dim sense of cause and effect in the social world, you can actually investigate it to see if it is true. That is, you could correlate the discourse of politics, of popular media, and of inflential “opinion-makers” with the thesis and see if the use of religion as politically identifying (against the Godless communists) reached a broad segment of the population. I know, of course, that McGinn apparently thinks that that segment really spent all its time pondering Jenseits von Gut und Boese, but I am going to claim the opposite. In fact, I will claim that the denunciation of moral relativism has been standard boilerplate at every barbecue chicken political meet, every American legion get together, every rotary club meeting, since at least the forties.
It constantly amazes me that philosphers who talk about science seemingly have a neandrethal’s knowledge of social science, and apparently have a very loose and even magical idea of the causal power of ideas.
For some figures on church attendence, see this link:
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9495/9495.ch01.html
Take a deep breath, roger.
McGinn didn’t say ‘relativism’ has led to the revival of ‘faith.’
But OB, you were worried a couple weeks ago about smugness, so I thought I’d do my part to break up consensus!
Seriously, I find this incredibly silly: “For the last 30-50 years, reason has been under attack. Subjectivism, relativism, multi-culturalism have been brought in to undermine the enlightenment values of the disinterested search for truth, the belief in objective justification, the belief in objective reality, the belief in science, the belief in history.” “Brought in,” first, seems either absurd or ignorant — the disputes about objectivity have a long history that goes back to the very beginning of Enlightenment and go all the way through the past two hundred years of intellectual history. Second, the attack on ‘objective’ standards is part of the attack on the objective social standards of fifty years ago — among the truths that were held to be self evident were: blacks are inferior to whites, women are inferior to men, and there is nothing wrong with building weapons systems that have the potential to destroy mankind. In fact, relativism has been the standard mock demon for every defender of racism, sexism, and the armament culture. Being a relativist myself, in the Nelson Goodman tradition, I find it rather laughable that the position is treated as a disease brought into the good and rational peoples of fifty years ago — those poor folks, what with their previous success, ten years before, in setting off world wars, herding various people into concentration camps, and bombing most of the cities of Europe and Japan and looting China, etc. etc — they were doing so well until the relativist came along to spoil the fun! Where did those pesky relativists come from, anyway?
Although I’m inclined to agree with it superficially, it seems to me that Colin’s story obscures at least as much as it reveals regarding the nature of faith and reason.
Not least of all, it would seem to me to be a bit of a paradox to say that “relativism” supports or even coincides with a rise in faith, (except perhaps as a counter-reaction?) since most of think of faith as a species of absolutism in some specific realm of belief.
Relativism: My impression is that most of what falls under the grand unbrella of “relativism” is essentially an intellectual aspect of social critique. “Relativist” ideas are not fundamentally opposition to reason but are motivated essentially by skepticism of various ideas and philosophies that are perceived to have been used to justify undesireable things. In the process of opposing ideas that are widely consider rational and commonsensical, “relativist” viewpoints oppose themselves to reason, as widely construed.
Faith: “Faith” as we typically use it has two aspects that I feel are important to distinguish: (1) holding fast to a belief *in lieu* of available empirical or logical justification, and (2) holding fast to a belief *in spite of* the strong possibility that currently available inquiry can contradict it.
The first has the sense of “an act of faith,” the second the sense of hiding from new ideas perceived to be dangerous. The two overlap, but I think most of us can imagine cases where the former is valuable to human beings, whereas the latter generally seems to have an unavoidably dishonest ring to it even when and if it somehow serves us.
Although there are plenty of cases that can be found where “faith” becomes mostly a way of dodging honest inquiry and failing to address delusions, it seems bizarre to me to turn that into a general definition of “faith” that simply means “unreason.” A general faith (in the sense of belief without specific empirical evidence) in underlying order in nature is part of what drives inquiry, afterall, just to use the most obvious and trivial counter-example.
I don’t agree that “A general faith (in the sense of belief without specific empirical evidence) in underlying order in nature is part of what drives inquiry”.
Rather than “faith in underlying order”, I would attribute that to a conclusion drawn from observation that there is quite a lot of order and predictability in the universe.
You could say that in order to find inquiry worthwhile one would have to assume that one is not “a brain in a vat” or dreaming it all, but that is merely the decision one has to make to live. If you make the opposite decision you will die as you wouldn’t bother even to eat. And you have to make one or the other decision. Anyhow, it’s not an irreversible decision, unless you die from lack of activity.
So I don’t see anything faith-like about people going about their daily life or conducting scientific experiments.
As for relativism undermining science, I’m talking about, for example, the form of relativism that says we invent what we think of as objective reality through our perceptions, therefore we can’t say anything is “real”, therefore we can’t say anything meaningful about anything. or the form that says trial and error through repeated observation and hypothesis only appear to give you knowledge because you decide it will.
I suppose using the word “relativism” without qualification does a disservice to a lot of good people. But those are the kinds of things, and also what you mentioned, that I’m talking about when I use the word.
And I also know the sort of world you are talking about when you talk about vfw and rotarians (and lions club and eastern star and church socials and county fairs) from a bit further west. But I don’t recall _ever_coming across the word “relativism”. And what you find today is a far cry from pervasive. The main people I know about that talk about relativism are people like OB and Jeremy. Not to say the right wing aren’t using it. The Florida law about it (well, nearly) was certainly an example of that. But that is rather recent even if it is coming on strong now.
Brian, I was making the point, actually, that the time marker for when McGinn brings in the terrible relativists gives us a picture of reason being dominant in the previous period. I merely teased out the absurd implications. No, WWII wasn’t caused by reason! However, the use of reason as a category to talk about intellectual dispositions, and the immediate imposition of those categories on history itself, seems to me wrongheaded.
OB – I’m not denying the power of communicated ideas, although I would absolutely deny the power of any idea that lacked any communicative instrument. If we can agree that ideas need to be communicated in some way before they exist as causal factors, then we are on a better track for talking about, say, the rise of faith (or at least its stabilization from the 70s until now)
Actually, this idea about ideas goes back to, well, Hume. Whose philosophy seems very resistant to McGinn’s description of reason. And who is, ahem, an Enlightenment philosopher. In the famous Section 3 of the Treatise of Human Nature, of the influencing motives of the will, Hume begins by saying:
“Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. Every rational creature, it is said, is obliged to regulate his actions by reason; and if any other motive or principle challenge the direction of his conduct, he ought to oppose it, till it be entirely subdued, or at least brought to a conformity with that superior principle. On this method of thinking the greatest part of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded; nor is there an ampler field, as well for metaphysical arguments, as popular declamations, than this supposed pre-eminence of reason above passion. The eternity, invariableness, and divine origin of the former have been displayed to the best advantage: The blindness, unconstancy, and deceitfulness of the latter have been as strongly insisted on. In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.”
The argument in Hume convinces me.
roger,
But, again – McGinn didn’t say relativism caused the rise of faith.
The argument in Hume convinces you of what?
OB, Hume convinces me that ideas don’t, by themselves, cause human action.
And McGinn said that religion flourishes because relativism has crippled reason, and reason criticizes faith. “At the same time, faith is flourishing because if there’s no such thing as reason, how will faith ever be criticized.” That seems bogus in every way. Relativism doesn’t propose that there is no such thing as reason; nor do relativists (Nietzsche, for one) refuse to criticize religion. When he writes, “So you get an attack on reason. So reason isn’t taken very seriously,” I can only say, what? Reason wouldn’t exist without ‘attacks’ – without criticism. It happens to be a “bring it on” entity – or it is nothing. I think McGinn is really talking sloppily here, and not voicing a very “reasoned’ opinion, but still, it is very slothful thinking.
roger, so you’re saying the passage of Hume that you quoted convinces you that ideas don’t, by themselves, cause human action? Why? Since that’s not what Hume is saying, why would that passage convince you of that?
Roger, my initial reaction in this discussion was to cut you some slack wrt “forms of relativism” and accept that you had something in mind when you used the term which was valuable and which was besmirched by, say, McGinn’s use of it.
But the course of the discussion has made me feel less charitable.
What you say in the paragraph just above puts the strongest and most exclusive possible interpretation on words McGinn used in a television interview for a general audience. Such an interpretation removes his remarks so far from the context in which he was speaking as to constitute a straw man argument on your part.
I interpret his remarks as meaning,
Do you agree with that as a hypothesis?
“words McGinn used in a television interview for a general audience”
Yeah. I’ve been wanting to mention that too. Cut him some slack, roger; this wasn’t a journal article or even a magazine essay, it was an interview for a tv show that reaches a broad, non-philosophical audience. He had to put what he said into terms that the audience would understand without a philsophical education, and he had to do it on the hoof.
Juan, I have ambiguous feelings about being a charity case. I, myself, am not going to apply charity to you. Please don’t give it to me.
Now: instead of giving me one instance whatsovever of science — some science, any science – being undermined by relativism — this is called evidence — you want me to agree to this:
“some common forms of relativism undermine science and the notion of truth.”
Now, if I were a relativistic beggar, looking to get some crumbs from the high table of reason, maybe I’d mouth that and whisper a little Galileo aside. But, I’m not, it turns out, a charity case at all, but an imprudent relativist who thinks that is bollocks. I can understand “undermining science” in a straightforward way — for instance, Stalin undermined the science of genetics by killing geneticists and encouraging Lysenko. It wasn’t relativism that encouraged him to do so, but the idea that Lysenko’s take on biology was true. Am I then to conclude that the truth undermines science? No, that would be mere rhetoric — although it would point to an important truth, when the philosophic relavist constructs various worlds, about the function of truth in one of those worlds.
Let’s go to some area (on earth) where science is undermined by relativism. How about climate change? There is a denialist position on this that is very strong, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of scientists have concluded that climate change is indeed happening due to androgenic causes. Some people — for instance, apparently Simon Blackburn — don’t believe this. See this link:
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue35/35blackburn.htm
So what would a relativist say? That Simon Blackburn and the scientists are both right?
… I was just about to write my answer to that when I thought, hmm. These comments are all questions to me, with me giving my answers. So I will await yours. Is there a case of relativism undermining science — as in, blocking science, or distorting a scientific research program, etc.? Examples enliven discussion.
OB — you disagree with my interpretation of Hume, apparently. Because I think that is exactly what Hume is saying. Without the passions, reason is helpless.
Here is what Colin McGinn said in an essay in the New Republic about the matter:
“David Hume, two hundred years earlier [from G.E. Moore] had proclaimed that the foundation of morality is not reason, but emotion. Reason may direct the “passions” in moral contexts, but it is fundamentally their slave. Moral altruism toward others originates in a “natural sympathy” with which we are endowed, and it spreads outward from the family to more impersonal kinds of human relation. Our moral sense, said Hume, is governed by innate fellow feeling, not by the affectless cognition of abstract truths; and despite Kant’s opposition to this view of morality, it became the dominant conception.”
Now, my reading of effectless cognition is ideas without effects. You could say, ah, but this is only about morality – cognition does have an effect in science. I would agree with you — but I would add that the effect is always in combination with those material conditions in which the idea is represented. For instance, that McGinn is giving a tv interview, as you have pointed out, effects the way we are to take his ideas. Myself, I think that doing this ‘on the hoof’ tells us something about the ideas that are common in that kind of venue — in other words, that the denunciation of relativism is so routine that it is let pass as something everybody knows.
And I prefer not to let it pass.
In intellectual matters, charity is not a virtue, but a vice.
“Without the passions, reason is helpless.”
But that’s not what you said Hume convinced you of. You said “Hume convinces me that ideas don’t, by themselves, cause human action.”
Yes, without the passions, reason is helpless, and so are ideas, but the reverse is also true. Without ideas, what is emotion? It’s just something like a gust of wind, a shaking of the frame. A feeling with no referent. Ideas tell us where to direct the emotion, what to do with it – how to act. Ideas are not sufficient, but they certainly are necessary.
And in any case I’m certainly not using ‘ideas’ as synonymous with ‘reason’; why are you? You don’t take them to be synonymous do you?
Actually, what Lakoff has to say might be of interest to anyone in this discussion because of the light he sheds on relativism, and on realism. A cognitive scientist, Lakoff has a concept he calls “embodied realism”, which starts from the simple fact that everything we do we do with the physical equipment which is our body. We have a mind which is a function of a brain, and the brain is an organic part of a living body. As simple and obvious as that sounds, most of philosophy does not in fact take it into account because for most of the history of philosophy the implications of it have not been clear. They are not entirely clear now nor will they be, surely, for a long time to come. But they are now clear enough that someone who sets out to do so, as Lakoff and his co-authors in particular have done, can trace a useful path from biology to philosophy. (And it is not deterministic in any meaningful way.)
The following extract should be easily understood as a whole by people who have not read the book it comes from — Philosophy in the Flesh. There are a couple of things which may make you wonder but these should not get in the way of understanding the rest of it and the general thrust of it. I’m not putting this here as an authoritative endorsement of anything I may have said in this thread but just as something that I find relevant to this discussion and useful to me. There are a few essays by Lakoff around. One of them is a talk he gave at edge.org. He also wrote a book called something like Where Mathematics Comes From which is also very good and more than one book with “metaphor” in the title. I don’t follow his political theory or advice, though he had a good idea there too.
Come on, roger – I still want to know what you meant.
First it’s this
“It constantly amazes me that philosphers who talk about science seemingly have a neandrethal’s knowledge of social science, and apparently have a very loose and even magical idea of the causal power of ideas.”
Then it’s Hume on reason. Then it’s “Hume convinces me that ideas don’t, by themselves, cause human action.” Then it’s a reiteration – “Because I think that is exactly what Hume is saying. Without the passions, reason is helpless.”
But 1) ideas and reason are not interchangeable, and 2) without reason, the passions are just meaningless gusts.
So your objection seems to me to be pretty much beside the point.
Well, OB, I figured we had finished with this discussion. But okay, since you insist.
Actually, McGinn’s book, Mindsight, begins with a disagreement with Hume on what ideas are. I myself was using ideas to mean what Hume would call the relation of ideas. Make of that what you will. Here’s some more Hume, from that chapter.
“The understanding exerts itself after two different ways, as it judges from demonstration or probability; as it regards the abstract relations of our ideas, or those relations of objects, of which experience only gives us information. I believe it scarce will be asserted, that the first species of reasoning alone is ever the cause of any action.”
Now, you could say reasoning is not the same as Reason. That might be the Kantian approach, actually, although as we all know, Kant’s notion of duty in the practical reason is a pretty odd thing. And since you have already said that ideas need passions to operate in the world — with which I wholly agree -we have messed up our Kantianism, right?
In my view, the idea that passions can operate without ideas is as ungrounded as the idea that ideas can operate without passions. I take those two things not as substantial poles, but as descriptions that abstract what is, in reality, an interaction.
So, then, let’s get back to McGinn. I am going to assume that he is not making a technical point about reason here. You object that I am taking the ‘because’ to rigidly to mean cause. And you claim that it is unfair to interpret him as implying that relativism alone is the cause of the flourishing of faith. I am saying:
a. the flourishing of faith, historically, is a political phenomena as much as a phenomena in intellectual history;
b. one should have some sense of the measure of faith to say whether it is flourishing or not. It rose during the fifties, and again in the seventies, and has stabilized, as far as I can tell. (this is Christian faith in the U.S. – worldwide, I don’t know about Islam, or Buddhism).
c. instead of being opposed to science, there are a variety of relativisms. I don’t know of any relativism that is opposed to science. The closest one gets to that is the school derived from Peter Berger’s social construction of reality — but Berger himself has said he never meant all of reality was socially constructed. While I’d admit that there are people who’ve gone overboard on that in academia, I think they have had zip to do with “impeding” science in any way, shape or form. When science is impeded, it is almost always because of some absolutist creed. There might be a case where some research program was interrupted because of relativism. If you can find one, tell me about it.
d. Finally, McGinn seems, in those comments, to be ignorant of the social motivations for the flourishing of faith, as he calls it, seems to have no sense of the dividing line between academic controversies and their social echo (or lack of one), seems not to have a very clear idea of the sociology of the philosophies, as Randall Collins calls it, and has to be defended, at best, by saying that he was only talking on a tv show.
So, okay, there it is!
“And since you have already said that ideas need passions to operate in the world”
Yes but I also said passions need ideas to operate in the world, which you ignored.
“In my view, the idea that passions can operate without ideas is as ungrounded as the idea that ideas can operate without passions.”
Well that’s what I said – but it’s not what you said. I hadn’t finished the discussion because you kept shifting terms – something that always gets on my nerves, no matter who does it. And I was curious whether you agreed that passions need ideas as well as v.v. Thanks for copping to that, however indirectly. Now we’ve finished with this discussion.
Reason will motivate ethics, provided one has a pre-existing emotional commitment to reason itself. Such a commitment orginates with a trial period where we test the efficacy of reason, and find that it works, forming a strong bond to the method. This is what I find so frustrating about talking to believers; they haven’t made this commitment, and so become as slippery as a greased pig. They are all too happy to dump reason when it doesn’t go their way. They lack what I call “an allegiance to the truth,” preferring to give their allegiance to rote dogma and belief. Epistemological relativists (including postmodernists) use this same tactic, quitting the field of rationality when it suits them. Believers will resort to relativism when they are losing the argument, only to attack it later when they believe they are in a position of strength, hoping to deny their opponents this refuge (they regard empirical approaches as morally relativistic because these deal with moral complexities which evade ancient formulations.) Which strategy they choose is dependant on who they are talking to, and how strong the counterarguments are. Corner them, and they become as wishy-washy and politically correct as any postmodernist.
One interesting thing that McGinn said was that he couldn’t figure out why fundamentalism is spreading, because science hasn’t penetrated the Muslim world. But there is another carrier of materialism: economics, which has permeated every part and aspect of the world so thoroughly that few believers think to challenge it. Northrop Frye made the distinction between the descriptive, metanymic (pertaining to ideas) and metaphorical modes of language. The metaphorical mode, traditionally the language of kings, poetry, and religion, has been unseated by the descriptive. Unlike scientists, business holds the realm of dreams in utter contempt (witness its treatment of the arts.)
Fundamentalists are converts to the very materialism they claim to despise–they apply the descriptive mode of language to the poetry of scripture. The Trojan horse is not in their science textbooks, but in their wallets. And they accepted that horse not just out of simple greed, but out of a lust for political influence. They sold their souls for the three temptations of the desert named by Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: economic, religious, and political power.