Mottainai: a Japanese sense of anima mundi

The Japanese expression ‘Mottainai!’ can be translated as ‘What a waste!’ or ‘Don't be wasteful!’ However, mottainai means much more than that. It expresses a sense of concern or regret for whatever is wasted because its intrinsic value is not properly utilized. Buddhism and Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto, are integral to the Japanese psyche, accordingly the other‐than‐human world is also experienced and lived in daily life. In the Japanese worldview everything in nature is endowed with spirit, every individual existence is dependent on others and all are connected in an ever‐changing world. Mottainai offers a glimpse of the anima mundi inherent in this worldview. This contrasts with our anthropocentric Zeitgeist, which manifests outwardly as environmental crisis and inwardly as fixation upon social interactions, especially through communication technologies, to the exclusion of all else. Jung's statement, ‘The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life’, has never been more pertinent. Encounters beyond the human world could be understood as touching this ‘something infinite’, and the apparent benefits of such experiences in the analytical process are illustrated with clinical vignettes from the author's practice.     

Bio‐Theoacoustics: Prayer Outdoors and the Reality of the Natural World

What does it mean to pray when the Earth—the fabric of our bodies’ lives, and indeed of the incarnation itself—is profoundly endangered from human action? What would Christian prayer look like that was not “losing track of nature” but following its tracks, physically and spiritually immersed in the actual, present, threatened and wild life of the more‐than‐human world? Using categories outlined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, this essay asserts that prayer and worship that take place entirely within the wall‐, speech‐, and screen‐mediated bubble of anthropocentrism risk becoming an abstraction. The essay explores this assertion in three moves: first, it delineates Bonhoeffer's assertion of the “abstraction” created by forms of Christian life in which God is conceived in separation from the world. Next, it shows how these categories—“God” and “world”—come together in prayer outdoors, understood both literally and metaphorically. And finally, it proposes how prayer outdoors might take shape for individuals or communities: a bio‐theoacoustics of prayer for the life of the world.     

Being,belonging, and borders: Scandinavian creation theology as political theology

Desire for life and protecting lives has come to the fore during the pandemic. Borders have been closed to stop the spread of Covid‐19. The virus does not respect borders, yet physical distance is crucial. Three things have become clear. One is the level of uncertainty about which measures are most efficient. The other is that the neo‐liberal philosophy with “just in time” deliveries on a global market has made everyone vulnerable and invited national protectionism rather than collaboration. A third insight is that the lack of borders between wild and tame animals and human beings is connected to the emergence of the virus itself, where rain forests are exploited for short sighted profit. In the midst of this, a cry for Being, for Life, and Human Flourishing, can be heard as an underlying drumbeat. In relation to this I ponder Being in relation to Belonging and to Borders. I first describe a political landscape where neo‐nationalist, and neo‐atheist, claims for belonging, have emerged all over the world, and hence emphasized strong borders between different people, but not for capital. Secondly, I draw on resources from Scandinavian Creation Theology, especially Grundtvig, Aulén, and Wingren to paint a planetary vision with porous borders, beyond patriarchy, populism, and protectionism. In the long run there is no opting out of the planetary vulnerability. I launch the term eschatological creation theology for a creation theology that allows creation to be inspired by the Kin‐dom to come with righteousness and life in abundance.     

Conflicting social paradigms of human freedom and the problem of justification

In recent work, Rawls, Nozick, and the ‘democratic‐socialist’ theory of Markovi? and Gould, attempt to ground rival models of just economic relations on the basis of conflicting interpretations of human freedom. Beginning with a philosophical conception of humans as essentially free beings, each derives a different system of basic rights and freedoms: (1) the familiar democratic civil and political rights of citizenship in the West (Rawls); (2) the classical bourgeois market freedoms ‐ ‘life, liberty, and property’ (Nozick); and (3) democratic socialist rights of self‐management of the work‐place (Gould and Markovi?). I argue that each of these theorists implicitly assumes a different but ungrounded ’social paradigm of human agency’ concerning the particular forms of human choice which are singled out as most important for a free, human life. None of these theories contains the methodological resources for showing why the forms of human agency it ‘emancipates’ are more important than the forms it suppresses or ignores. In order to overcome this impasse and provide a way of evaluating such rival paradigms of free agency, I elaborate a methodology based on the idea that a free society must provide its members with ‘equality in the social bases of self‐respect’. I use this methodology to argue that all three of the above conceptions are blind to problems of human agency, freedom, and dignity posed by the modern phenomena of welfare dependency, unemployment, and a self‐stultifying division of labor.     

The ends of medicine and the crisis of chronic pain

Pellegrino and Thomasma have proposed a normative medical ethics founded on a conception of the end of medicine detached from any broader notion of the telos of human life. In this essay, I question whether such a narrow teleological account of medicine can be sustained, taking as a starting point Pellegrino and Thomasma’s own contention that the end of medicine projects itself onto the intermediate acts that aim at that end. In order to show how the final end of human life similarly alters intermediate ends, such as the end of medicine, I describe Thomas Aquinas’s concept of pain and explain how his remedies for pain derive from his account of the telos of human life. In turn, this account has implications for the way in which physicians who accept such a telos would manage their patients’ pain. If a comprehensive telos for human life is necessary to make sense of even such a routine aspect of medical care, then medical ethicists may not be able to sidestep questions about the good life for human beings.

     

Heidegger's Generative Thesis

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world‐time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world‐time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world‐time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world‐time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling‐off. I argue, instead, that world‐time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling‐off of the world‐time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time.     

Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually‐given reasons for belief and desire‐based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our believing‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐perception and our acting‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal.     

Loss: the ultimate philosophical problem

This paper draws on Jan Zwicky’s claim in Lyric Philosophy that loss is the ultimate philosophical problem and Wittgenstein’s attitude to philosophy in his Culture and Value that: ‘philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’. This paper will enter the difficult territory of loss using poetry and reflections to engage loss as a spiritual challenge and perhaps one of the major forces shaping cultural ways. Death inescapably brings loss into life for those who remain after a death but loss has many other forms and is a persistent experience in living that touches every stage of the life journey. It is a philosophical problem rooted in common human experience from childhood on that has been addressed in a multitude of forms, conceptualizations, rituals, belief systems and religions. As a method, poetry is a way of inquiry that allows one to enter experience and meet the intensity of events, particularly loss. In her essay ‘Entering the Bird Cage: Poetry and Perceptibility’, Jane Hirschfield says that poetry allows us ‘to understand the world beyond the narrow self’ and to do so ‘it is necessary to be available to the unknown’ and loss moves experience into the unknown.     

Expression,Truth, Predication,and Context: Two Perspectives

Abstract

This paper considers the challenge to understanding another that comes from the view that language is, in Cristina Lafont’s phrase, ‘world‐disclosing’. If different speakers understand and refer to the world from different holistically structured worldviews, it seems to follow that there can be no mutual understanding unless there is significant overlap between ‘worlds’. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I claim, blocks this consequence while maintaining that language is indeed world‐disclosing. By holding that language is a medium in which the distinction between interpretation and object of interpretation is paradoxically both maintained and overcome, Gadamer shows us that the interpreter always thinks the object of interpretation as both transcending and immanent in her worldview. Mutual understanding becomes a matter of mutual recognition of such worldview‐(but not language‐) transcendent objects. Truth and meaning may on this view be characterized as ‘objective’, while retaining a significant element of relativity.     

The Problem of Criteria and the Necessity of Natural Theology

Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding ‘translating’ the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, ‘Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?’, is one that Christian thinkers have attempted to answer in different ways. There are two influential responses to this query in recent Christian thought: an ‘evidentialist’ approach which gradually moves from a theistic metaphysics to a Christ‐centred soteriology, and an ‘unapologetic’ standpoint which takes God's self‐disclosure in Christ as the perspectival lens through which to view the world. The opposition between these two groups is primarily over the status of ‘natural theology’, that is, whether we may speak of a ‘natural’ reason, which human beings possess even outside the circle of the Christian revelation, and through which they may arrive at some minimalist understanding of the divine reality. I outline the status of ‘natural theology’ in these strands of contemporary Christian thought, from Barthian ‘Christomonism’ to post‐liberal theology to Reformed epistemology, and suggest certain problems within these standpoints which indicate the need for an appropriately qualified ‘natural theology’. Most of the criticisms leveled against ‘natural theology’, whether from secular philosophers or from Christian theologians themselves, can be put in two groups: first, the arguments for God's existence are logically flawed, and, second, even if they succeed they do not point to the Triune God that Christians worship. In contrast to such an old‐fashioned ‘natural theology’ which allegedly starts from premises self‐evidently true for all rational agents and leads through an inexorable logic to God, the qualified version is an attempt to spell out the doctrinal beliefs of Christianity such as the existence of a personal God who interacts with human beings in different ways, and outline the reasons offered in defence of such statements. In other words, without denying that Christian doctrines operate at one level as the grammatical rules which structure the Christian discourse, such a natural theology insists on the importance of the question of whether these utterances are true, in the sense that they refer to an objective reality which is independent of the Christian life‐world. Such a ‘natural theology’, as the discussion will emphasize, is not an optional extra but follows in fact from the internal logic of the Christian position on the universality of God's salvific reach.     

Should We Want God to Exist?

Whether God exists is a metaphysical question. But there is also a neglected evaluative question about God’s existence: Should we want God to exist? Very many, including many atheists and agnostics, appear to think we should. Theists claim that if God didn’t exist things would be far worse, and many atheists agree; they regret God’s inexistence. Some remarks by Thomas Nagel suggest an opposing view: that we should want God not to exist. I call this view anti‐theism. I explain how such view can be coherent, and why it might be correct. Anti‐theism must be distinguished from the argument from evil or the denial of God’s goodness; it is a claim about the goodness of God’s existence. Anti‐theists must claim that it’s a logical consequence of God’s existence that things are worse in certain respects. The problem is that God’s existence would also make things better in many ways. Given that God’s existence is likely to be impersonally better overall, anti‐theists face a challenge similar to that facing nonconsequentialists. I explore two ways of meeting this challenge.     

DANCING WITH THE SACRED: EXCERPTS

Abstract. In excerpts from my Dancing with the Sacred (2002), I use ideas from modern science, our world's religions, and my own experience to highlight three themes of the book. First, working within the framework of a scientific worldview, I develop a concept of the sacred (or God) as the creative activity of nature, human history, and individual life. Second, I offer a relational understanding of human nature that I call our social‐ecological selves and suggest some general considerations about what it means to live meaningfully and morally in an evolutionary world. Third, I explore how we might be at home in a universe that is constantly changing and in which suffering and death are interwoven with life and new creation.     

Meaningfulness as Contribution

This article aims to offer a refined way of understanding what we mean by the concepts of meaningfulness and meaning in life. The first step is to separate worthwhileness, as the broadest evaluation of life taking all types of values into account, from meaningfulness, which is seen as one type of intrinsic value along with, for example, well‐being, moral praiseworthiness, and authenticity, which I argue are also separate types of intrinsic value. After discussing why we should not settle with the currently popular fitting attitudes analysis of meaningfulness, I argue that the meaningfulness of a life should be seen to be about the positive contribution beyond itself that this particular life is able to make. I show how this analysis is different from previous similar accounts and how it is able to avoid a number of challenges that have troubled these previous accounts, such as the pleasure machine challenge, the results machine challenge, and the doing good unintentionally challenge. I also demonstrate how it is able to account for prototypical examples of meaningful and meaningless lives and how it is compatible with subjectivism, supernaturalism, and objective naturalism, which is seen as a merit. Finally, I conclude with some notes about what could make life meaningful, given the current analysis of meaningfulness itself.     

Chronic pain as a posture towards the world

This article discusses what chronic pain is “about”, what the intentional object is of pain, and what is the intentional relation like? My approach is based on Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology, with an aim is to understand a two‐way relationship: how the sufferers bestow meaning on chronic pain, and how pain, on the other hand, signifies peoples’ life. In contrast to biomedical and cognitive‐behavioral theories, chronic pain is not only meaningful, but as an intentional emotion as well; it does not simply “happen” in the nervous system. I analyzed meanings assigned to pain through the narratives of three patients with chronic pain. Pain is described as creating a discontinuity in the patient’s Lebenswelt at the narrative level. When attempting to find meaning to their pain, patients point both to everyday life and biomedical referents. The structure of bestowing meaning is, metaphorically, like a necklace with everyday world and biomedical interpretations strung like beads, one after the other. The intentional object of pain, on the contrary, is constituted of the patients’ world in its wholeness. My results don’t confirm Drew Leder’s idea of disrupted intentionality, but underline directness as the basic relation of human experience also in case of pain and disease. Pain in itself is an e‐movere, an intense passionate movement, an intentional relation with and a bodily posture taken towards the world.     

The View from Way Below: Inter‐Species Encounter,Membranes, and the Reality of Christ

Viewing modern life from the perspective and world of those whose lives are treated as expendable commodities in our current economic systems—humans and creatures of every other species—creates, Bonhoeffer asserts, the most reliable hermeneutical standpoint for seeing and living in reality. This essay attempts to fashion in broad strokes a Christian theology of creaturely re‐engagement: learning to live again “way below,” in literal and metaphoric touch with reality. I assert that Bonhoeffer's theology of I/Thou encounter as the means of humans’ ethical formation has the potential to ground a broader theology of inter‐species encounter as well.     

SEMANTIC EXTERNALISM AND A PRIORI SELF‐KNOWLEDGE

The argument known as the ‘McKinsey Recipe’ tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and a priori self‐knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know a priori that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of ‘natural kind concept’: (i) a concept which in fact denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a concept which aims to denote a natural kind. Paul Boghossian has argued, using a Dry Earth scenario, that this response fails, claiming that the externalist cannot make sense of a concept aiming, but failing, to denote a natural kind. In this paper I argue that Boghossian’s argument is flawed. Borrowing machinery from two‐dimensional semantics, using the notion of ‘considering a possible world as actual’, I claim that we can give a determinate answer to Boghossian’s question: which concept would ‘water’ express on Dry Earth?¹     

Schiller and the Dance of Beauty∗

In the first volume of his Spinoza and Other Heretics entitled The Marrano of Reason, Yovel proposes a different cultural context for the study of Spinoza: the Marrano mentalité. Living as crypto‐Jews in a Catholic Iberian world, the Marranos developed a certain life‐style that had specific religious and literary modes of expression: heterodox tendencies, the use of equivocation, and the zealous search for salvation, which often assumed secular forms. These Marrano traits are, Yovel claims, found in Spinoza as well, who was the son of a Marrano and brought up in the Marrano milieu of the Amsterdam Jewish quarter. In this essay I challenge this interpretation of Spinoza by stressing both the generally orthodox character of Marrano religiosity and the significant differences between Spinoza and the few Marrano heretics by whom he was supposedly influenced. I argue that Spinoza not only rejected Marrano orthodoxy but was already inhabiting an intellectual framework that differed considerably from the marginal deviant Marrano pattern that Yovel focuses upon.     

Resources and the Rule of Rescue1

abstract The central issue that I consider in this paper is the use of the so‐called ‘Rule of Rescue’ in the context of resource allocation. This ‘Rule’ has played an important role in resource allocation decisions in various parts of the world. It was invoked in Ontario to overturn a decision not to fund treatment for Gaucher's Disease and it has also been used to justify resource decisions in Israel concerning the same condition. In the paper I consider the nature of the Rule of Rescue and its moral justification. The latter involves consideration of the distinction between agent‐relative and agent‐neutral obligations. If the Rule of Rescue is to be justified, it is plausible to think that it will be in the context of agent‐relative obligations. Two problems with this suggestion are considered: the role of identifiability in the Rule of Rescue and the extent to which policy makers in a health care system can be taken to have such obligations. It is argued that in both cases these problems can be overcome and hence that there is a prima facie obligation to follow the Rule of Rescue.     

Jung and Lévy-Bruhl

Abstract: For his knowledge of ‘primitive’ peoples, C. G. Jung relied on the work of Lucien Lévy‐Bruhl (1857–1939), a French philosopher who in mid‐career became an armchair anthropologist. In a series of books from 1910 on, Lévy‐Bruhl asserted that ‘primitive’ peoples had been misunderstood by modern Westerners. Rather than thinking like moderns, just less rigorously, ‘primitives’ harbour a mentality of their own. ‘Primitive’ thinking is both ‘mystical’ and ‘prelogical’. By ‘mystical’, Lévy‐Bruhl meant that ‘primitive’ peoples experience the world as identical with themselves. Their relationship to the world, including to fellow human beings, is that of participation mystique. By ‘prelogical’, Lévy‐Bruhl meant that ‘primitive’ thinking is indifferent to contradictions. ‘Primitive’ peoples deem all things identical with one another yet somehow still distinct. A human is at once a tree and still a human being. Jung accepted unquestioningly Lévy‐Bruhl's depiction of the ‘primitive’ mind, even when Jung, unlike Lévy‐Bruhl, journeyed to the field to see ‘primitive’ peoples firsthand. But Jung altered Lévy‐Bruhl's conception of ‘primitive’ mentality in three key ways. First, he psychologized it. Whereas for Lévy‐Bruhl ‘primitive’ thinking is to be explained sociologically, for Jung it is to be explained psychologically: ‘primitive’ peoples think as they do because they live in a state of unconsciousness. Second, Jung universalized ‘primitive’ mentality. Whereas for Lévy‐Bruhl ‘primitive’ thinking is ever more being replaced by modern thinking, for Jung ‘primitive’ thinking is the initial psychological state of all human beings. Third, Jung appreciated ‘primitive’ thinking. Whereas for Lévy‐Bruhl ‘primitive’ thinking is false, for Jung it is true—once it is recognized as an expression not of how the world but of how the unconscious works. I consider, along with the criticisms of Lévy‐Bruhl's conception of ‘primitive’ thinking by his fellow anthropologists and philosophers, whether Jung in fact grasped all that Lévy‐Bruhl meant by ‘primitive’ thinking.