Facts of Experience vs. Truths of Experience
by Adam Robbert
Levy Bryant asks some excellent questions in response to my previous post on postsecularity and religious studies. His questions have definitely helped me to further refine my position. Levi asks:
Are you prepared to claim that there must be something to every widespread set of beliefs people have? For example, racism has been common throughout all cultures. Are you prepared to claim that there is truth to racism and that it is something “we shouldn’t explain away” as based on other things, whether they be cultural, neurological peculiarities of our brain, etc? I ask because this is the argument both you and Matter are making with respect to god and religion. You’re claiming that because it is widespread, there must be something to it and that it shouldn’t be “explained away” through ethnography, sociology, cog sci, neurology, etc. Yet all things being equal, I don’t see why I shouod accept this thesis in the case of religion but not racism. In fact, I take it that the fact that belief in the divine has been so widespread throughout history and culture is evidence of a neurological ground of religious belief (it’s a spandrel), not evidence for the truth of that belief. I’m all for investigating why the many myths of the world have such potent meaning and significance for people, but that’s an ethnographic secular project, akin to literary analysis, not a project that argues these things have true referents or that the divine actually exists.
To which I respond:
Thanks for your excellent questions, Levi. In short, I am prepared to claim that any account of the world we generate must not preclude the experiences people have of the world. This is different than claiming that there is positive truth value to those experiences, but nevertheless such moments in human life must be included in our datum of experience. This is my, following Whitehead’s, point about stating that religious experience is a cosmological fact: religious experiences do happen. To do away with the religious experience in our account of the humans and the cosmos, for me, suggests something like the following hypothetical position: there are many ways to experience the “human,” the “divine,” and the “cosmos,” but some of these are false and deluded, having explanations other than what the individuals who believe in such things happens to think is the case, because of this I shall ignore these elements of human experience and produce an account of experience without them. This is not a move I am prepared to make. I don’t see you arguing that we remove religious experience in our accounts of the world either, Levi. However, our approach to the study of the matter is different.
I think approaching matters of humans and religions as cosmic facts actually creates greater ethnographic import, and not less, since excepting the cosmic fact of religious experience at least provides the ground with which to approach a study of religious experiences from a greater number of perspectives. Secularity, for my tastes, reduces the number of ways we can study something in an unhelpful way, particularly in the case of religion. I think this is to our disadvantage, hence I don’t assume secularity when interpreting religious experiences, even as I don’t deny secularizing methods.
Further, I have to return to my statements in the above post and make extra clarifications. I claim that ethnography, biology, sociology, or psychology are not adequate to explaining “away” religion, and I hold this to be true. However, this is not an exclusive property of religion or religious thinking. I do not think biology, sociology, or psychology will explain away philosophy or science, or any other system of ideas for that matter, either. However, I have definitely not denied the importance of ethnographic or psychological studies of religion, or as you as rightly point out, the possible neurological ground that makes religious thinking possible for humans every where. Rather, I prefer to take a more integral approach by suggesting that all phenomena can be treated and approached with a mix-methods, transdisciplinary mode of research. You wrote: “I’m all for investigating why the many myths of the world have such potent meaning and significance for people, but that’s an ethnographic secular project, akin to literary analysis, not a project that argues these things have true referents or that the divine actually exists.” I totally agree with this statement, with one caveat. Ethnographic research is one mode of studying the significance of religious and mythological systems, not the only one. Thus while I wouldn’t reduce religion to biology, culture, or psychology, I am all for employing all of these disciplines (and more) in the study of religious experience, practice, and belief. What I will not do, however, is somewhat arbitrarily decide that one of these fields can dominate religion (or any other mode of thought) and explain it in terms of its own language. I need more thorough descriptions of phenomena in order to feel satisfied that I have done the experience justice, a singular approach just won’t do it for me. Again, this is not because of a special property of religion per se and is rather an approach that I would take with any subject.
Your comparison to racism is apt. Racism is a fact of the world that must be confronted and dismantled in ourselves and in our culture. Like religion, the fact of racism’s existence must be taken into account in order to treat it as the real, live, and contentious issue that it is. We can’t start with racism by saying “well its not really true and has no basis in biology,” which of course is an absolutely true statement, but often doesn’t do a thing to stop racism in the world. Racism, in order to be dismantled, must also be encountered as a real fact of people’s experience. We know, for example, that biological discourses on race themselves have a racist history (as does ethnography and anthropology), we also know that the actual biological evidence against racism doesn’t stop racism from acting in the world. Thus, for me, treating racism as a real phenomena is essential to its possible extinction. I hope this answer helps clarify things for you, as I found your question to be very provocative and important, it has definitely helped to further refine my position.
In sum, I am not looking for the evidence of a truth of belief in the case of religion or racism as the sole means to approach the topic. Rather, I move to study the effects of those practices as well (this is also consistent with the ethnographic approach you suggest, but I still don’t have to reduce the phenomena to ethnography). For me, then, moving ahead to the truth claim aspect of an experience is only one part of a larger move that involves multiple sets of actions and multiple methods of research, each only partial in its account of a phenomena. I do not hear you disagreeing with this and hopefully drawing it out more gives you a better sense of my position. Thanks for the great questions.
(A brief “confessional” might help to further situate my perspective: I have never been to church and have virtually no contact with religious communities -product of being Swedish I think- I do not necessarily have something personal at stake in this conversation, I’m more drawing out what I see as an important aspect of religious studies.)
Excellent post. These are how I would have approached the issues.
Thanks, it certainly has been a lively week of discussion!
[...] Adam has offered a response that I am largely in agreement with. He distinguishes between facts of experience and truths of experience. Religion, racism, and sexism are each facts of experience, though I am not prepared to claim that the content of these experiential modes necessarily corresponds to reality. I take a broadly Jamesian/Deweyan/Peircian approach to truth, however, in that I am more concerned with the effects of our descriptions of reality than with their accurate correspondence to a supposedly pre-given world. The truth of the claims arising out of religious experience are to be judged, from the pragmaticist perspective, by a “consideration of the experimental differences in the conduct of life which would conceivably result from the affirmation or denial of the [claim] in question,” as Dewey puts it (Century Dictionary, 1909). I think certain religious ideas and meanings stand on far better footing than racism and sexism in this respect, since the later two modes of thought have only been productive of hatred, violence, and injustice. I judge the experiential possibilities of racism and sexism to be undesirable based on “the experimental differences in the conduct of life” that their practice has been productive of in the past. No doubt some religious ideas have also been productive of violence and injustice, but I think it would be disingenuous to claim that religion has offered nothing positive to humanity. My pragmaticism may go beyond traditional definitions at this point, but when dealing with the ontology of the claims arising from experience, I take a radically participatory view. The history of humanity represents the Universe’s struggle to discover its own nature: we are the Universe’s conscious testing ground of truth, beauty, and goodness. These are ideals which are still in the process of working themselves out in our (and the universe’s) history. It is not simply a given that racism is wrong; its wrongness is a fact that must be discovered in our moral feelings and defended by our ethical practices. If Nazi Germany had won WW2, and its Final Solution had succeeded, we might be living in a world where the experiential facts confirmed the truth of racism. Fortunately, because of an outpouring of ethical will, this possibility was kept at bay. It has now become an ethical fact that genocidal racism is wrong, but only because the moral feelings of one sector of global society won out over another. Goodness is always at stake, always being defined and redefined in the adventure of civilization. [...]
Adam,
I think this rather misses the point. Nothing I have said suggests the denial of religious or religious experience. However, what’s at issue here is not whether or not someone has anparticular experience, but whether or not that experience refers to something true and real. In the case of the racist and sexist, the characterizations of other races and women is false and refers to something that isn’t real. Once this is conceded, it follows that an alternative account of how these forms of experience is required. I vehemently disagree with your thesis that showing things are false and providing a genetic account of such an experience can produce no difference. While I would agree that it doesn’t always change people (in the case of Matthew, for example, we see that no matter how much the problems with his arguments are pointed out he still holds to his positions) it can make a difference in many other cases where the person has developed in a racist framework and therefore has racist assumptions but isn’t committed to racism as a core feature of their being but rather merely has false beliefs.
I find myself underwhelmed by your discussion of pragmatism and being uninterested in correspondence truth. Matt is making substantial claims about the nature of reality, not merely talking about an “experience” as underlined here. The retreat to pragmatism is just a way of punting, so as to avoid critique of those claims. His remarks about religion providing the only meams of combatting jeooiberal capitalism is amreal howler given 1) that religious forces today provide one of the most consistent ideological supports for this social order, and 2) that the argument begs the question by arguing that evaluative critical tools can only arise within a religious framework. Rather, critical tools have historically arisen outside these frameworks within secularist and materialist forms of thought? Why? Because where another world, god’s will, and tramscemdemce are foreclosed we only have this world and life and thereby only have the option of improving our existence by grapplingnwith this political world.
Hi Levi,
Great comments, thanks for the insight. You are absolutely right to say that I haven’t made any substantial ontological claims and instead have referred to the pragmatist need for including experience in an account of the real (which we have already differentiated from an account of the true). I have in fact not purported to be doing anything other than this, and I don’t think I am guilty of any false advertising in this regard. You have however inspired me to venture out beyond my criticisms of your methodological approach to questions of religion, and will post something more substantial regarding my actual views on questions of religion and cosmology, which differ from Matt’s approach, in the near future. Given that I haven’t offered a substantial description of my own views on the matter I can accept that so far you have lumped us together. Matt and I do share similar influences and aims and in this regard have a certain shared solidarity, but our end descriptions are different. As I have already mentioned, Matt is explicitly engaged in theological philosophy, whereas I am not and instead focus more on the political and ecological issues that must be thought alongside of cosmological thinking. More on this to come.
Moving along to some of your other points…
I totally agree that evidence (in this case against racism) can and does change the way people think and behave. However, I think (at least in this case) that I treat the relationship between facts, experiences, and practices somewhat differently than how you outline them here. You seem to be attributing a rather simple system of causality between practices and perspectives, whereas I think all systems of thought (secular or religious) produce multiple effects so that a perspective such as scientific naturalism can produce a variety of outcomes. For me this reading of the relations between ideas and practices is essential to an ecologized mode of thought, which is something I expected you to be more sympathetic to.
In this context, for example, I don’t see scientific naturalism as necessarily providing us with a way to combat neoliberalism- I am reminded of the CEO of Enron’s citation of Dawkins’ “selfish gene” as a the prime model for a capitalist business practice (Dawkins of course laments this turn of events as he never in fact argued that his view of genes was translatable to the moral or political practices of human beings – a point he addresses in the footnotes to the 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene). In this same sense, I am not convinced that historical or dialectical materialisms necessarily pave the way for social justice either. Of course, both have strong histories of important political and liberatory interventions – to which I am grateful and to which I continue to offer my support of- but this, for me, has more to do with peoples ability to mobilize and build alliances in specific contexts than it does with the inherent social superiority of a materialistic worldview. Where we differ, then, is that you see materialism as providing an inherently more just practice of living, where as I join you in this view, but also see materialism as a highly problematic point of view in light of social issues that involve the coordination of multiple contradictory worldviews- multiple perspectives which are not necessarily served by a materialistic colonization. I thus see materialism as being only one site where practices of justice can be cultivated and not the only one. Here I am worried that your case sounds a little dogmatic. Hopefully I am reading you correctly on these points, though I am happy to be corrected if I have misinterpreted you.
Lastly, I also recognize your criticisms of other worldly salvation and transcendence as these beliefs relate to the need for this worldly political and social practices of justice. However, I also know that there many religious groups that are engaged in social liberation practices, political out reach, and ecological justice as well. The work of Martin Luther King Jr. is a prime example in the context of social justice, the forum on religion and ecology at Yale is a prime example of religion working for ecological justice. So for me I have to take a more complex approach and not draw simple lines of causality between, for example, materialism as a necessary condition for the dismantling of neoliberal capitalism, and religion as an inherently flawed and delusional system of thought (I will commit to the claim that religion has not just experiential value, but also truth value, even if the latter is highly problematic and needs to be treated on a case by case basis). Perhaps I am missing further nuances in your description of these practices of belief, but in the context of this discussion your center of gravity is definitely swinging towards support of the former and a more or less flat critique of the latter.
Again, I appreciate that my comments here are not directly addressing the question of truth vis-a-vis religion, but I don’t feel like I need to be the God police when it comes to other peoples beliefs and insights (which I think is what we amount to when we try and stamp out religious views with appeals to naturalism). Religion, for me, is just as much an epistemological practice that allows the cultivation of certain aesthetic and cosmological perspectives as it is a collection of texts, dogmas, and institutions. Thus, even as I don’t share all of the associated truth-claims that come with various religious systems of thought I welcome them to the table of discussion. I’ll try to unpack this further soon.
[...] Bryant has argued (also HERE) that, while individual religious experiences obviously do occur, the content of many of these [...]
Hold on there, cowboy. Let’s back up a bit on this “policing religion” remark and look at the context here. Questions were raised about OOO and nihilism. That’s what started this exchange. In response to those remarks, I articulated my position, expressed perplexity at the claim that OOO somehow is a nihilsm, and outlined the problems I have with theories of meaning and value premised on transcemdemt theism. In the meantime, Matthew made extremely offensive remarks, suggesting that in the absence of a transcendent God, it is impossible for thought to have meaning, or value, and suggesting that somehow materialisms are responsible for neoliberal capitalism (and, incidentally, these aren’t anthropological claims about “facts of experience” for Matthew, but are substantial ontological claims about how the world or being allegedly is). I defended against these charges and outlined why I believe they are mistaken. Please do not try to paint me as some sort of evangelical atheist. I did not initiate this discussion, nor do I make it a habit to discuss religion or attack religion. The suggestion that I am attempting to police religion is therefore unfair as I have only articulated my positions in response to rather ugly characterizations and jaw dropping assertions about materialisms… Unless, of course, the mere act of defending one’s position amd articulating it is understood to be “policing”. In the US this is not uncommon, as here the mere act of calling oneself an atheist or a materialist is seen as an underhanded assault on religion, ie, it is hypocritically suggested that we are free to have whatever religious beliefs we desire so long as we don’t publicly articulate the absence of belief. You seem to be making a case for religious tolerance with your remarks about differing epistemologies but seem not to notice the political implications of what Matthew is claiming.
If it is true, as Matt suggests, that atheistic materialisms are incapable of meaning, value, and are somehow incapable of fighting neoliberalism, then they are guilty of something truly egregious and dangerous to humanity, worthy of being fought at all costs. I would also add that nowhere have I suggested a simple relation between belief and practice. This should have been clear from one of my remarks about the difference between inductive and deductive claims in the course of these discussions. All I have done is point to certain predominant tendencies in the history of religions organized around transcendent. These conservative tendencies continue to be dominant in the US, where Christianity is regularly used as an ideological apparatus to shore up support for oppressive economic practices as well as a number of other oppressive practices with respect to women and homosexuals. Does that entail that there is a one to one correspondence between these beliefs and practices? No, occasionally you get your Martin Luther Kings and religious people fighting on behalf of “the least among us”. Unfortunately, however, these tendencies are not statistically dominant at this historical moment.
Levi,
I feel I have been misunderstood. I want to clear up a few things. First, I’ve written a great deal in the past week, both in response to you and to others, that explicitly critiques the notion of a transcendent God. I’ve suggested that philosophy’s role is to articulate God’s immanence and necessary relation to the world. I am beginning to wonder if you are actually reading my responses to you in full, or just skimming to find sentences that appear offensive to you (which is very easy to do if you take things out of context). Second, I never suggested that OOO is nihilistic; I said I thought it needed to unpack its theological and anthropological implications in order to more clearly distinguish itself from other speculative realisms that are explicitly aiming to remove meaning and value from the universe (like Brassier’s). Finally, I also did not intend to suggest that materialisms cannot resist capitalism; I suggested this might prove more difficult. As for the impossibility of value and meaning in an atheistic framework, we’d need to be more specific and actually get into the metaphysical and scientific specifics (as we began to with Varela, etc.). My basic claim is that a third position can be articulated that is neither atheistic materialism nor transcendent theism.
I hope we can more effectively communicate our respective positions in future conversations.
-Matt
And let’s just address this issue of value once again. The vast majority of people in the United States possess some sort of religious belief. Do we find, by percentage, any less incidence of immoral behavior among that population? No. Among that small percentage of the population that is atheist, do we find any higher percentage of criminality and immorality among that portion of the population? No. This simple observation is enough to establish– as Plato recognized so long ago in Euthyphro, that questions of value and religious belief are distinct (unless Matthew is prepared to argue that secretly atheists really believe and just don’t know it, and that those religious believers that engage in all sorts of acts of cruelty don’t really beleive even though they believe they do; at which point I call bullshit and charge him with falling into the “no true Scotsman fallacy”). As for the charge that atheist materialist are incapable of fighting neoliberal capitalism, I would argue that those struggling against neoliberal capitalism are also often atheistic materialists (coming, as they often do, out of Marxist traditions of thought). I get that Matthew might find his inspiration for value and fighting neoliberal capitalism from his religious beliefs, but the thesis that these beliefs are a necessary condition for fighting these things is tremendously overstated and simply not true.
Hi Levi,
It seems that we are largely in agreement on most of the issues that are brought up in this post. I understand that some elements of this dialogue began with a discussion of nihilism and theism with regards to OOO but, personally, I have never thought or stated that nihilism or theism were things that OOO necessarily had to worry about or defend against. In this post I chose to emphasize (in response to some of your questions) a different set of factors regarding claims of truth vs claims of experience. I think you can recall that you inspired this chain of discussion by comparing religious beliefs to racist beliefs, highlighting the important point that widespread beliefs do not necessitate truth (agreed). I felt it was a comparison worth unpacking and now that we have done so it seems that we are basically on the same page: values and beliefs are complexly related, you come to this conclusion drawing on Plato and I came to it drawing upon my ecological conception of belief and practice.
I thought my post and response to you was fair handed and inquisitive. It certainly was not meant to sound cavalier as I think these are very important issues. I should also say that OOO is an exciting position, for me, because it allows for a practice of ontology that is simultaneously attentive to the three domains that I am particularly interested in: the cosmos, the socius, and the oikos. Or, to put it in disciplinary terms, OOO helps me to think about cosmology, sociology, and ecology at the same time- this is a great accomplishment and one I support and utilize in my own work.
A few more quick points:
I agree with your conception of atheist practices in America, it is something many American’s find threatening. I don’t find atheism offensive and appreciate your frustration.
Your heated responses early in the discussion did have a policing tone to them, but perhaps not more so than the opposite claims made by those critiquing materialism. You came off as though you were arguing against the possibility of religion creating truth value (as though science was the only producer of such artifacts, which to me sounded dull and narrow minded).
I agree with your account of materialism vis-a-vis meaning and value. Materialism as a worldview does not necessitate meaningless or nihilism.
I think your assessment regarding the practices of certain US Christianities as they are linked to political economy and social oppression is dead on.
To reiterate my above statement (and my overall position in this discussion) there is nothing about a flat ontology (in this case OOO’s) that necessitates nihilism.
I agree that religious beliefs are not a precondition for the fight against neoliberal capitalism. I hope this is not what Matt is arguing for.
LastIy, I have already pointed to the important role that historical or dialectical materialisms play in the struggle for social justice, but I will also criticized those approaches where I think they can use it.
If I am hearing you correctly, then it seems that we agree on most of the issues. I think our main point of disagreement is how generous each of us is willing to be in regards to the truth value of religious practices. I lean towards a positive image of religion as a practice of cultivating a sense of truth, you lean toward a negative image. Neither of us wants to police religion, nor do we want to deny the role religions play in society, or experience. There are many more issues unresolved in these discussions, but I think you are better off arguing with the relevant people about their positions, and not conflating them with mine.