subjectivist illusion
I can't think of a better name for it at the moment.
What I'm talking about is the illusion that the world, it's "shape", conforms to the way it appears to me. A simple form of this illusion might be visual, and it might occur to small children. A child stares, for instance, down a very long hallway and assumes that the hallway must really does shrink toward the far end. Or the child believes that moon really follows her or him around. (I used to believe this, in fact).
What the child fails to do is correct her or his understanding of the world for the perspectival distortions inherent in seeing things from a point of view.
The illusion has other, more complex or subtle, forms. The belief that the heavens orbit the earth, for instance. Taking something someone said too personally. The notion that the self is some kind of ghostly being occupying the body. The idea that everything always was and will as it is now. The conviction that I couldn't possibly have been created and couldn't possibly die, that my self or soul or consciousness has an infinite temporal duration. The feeling that we're the center or pinnacle of creation, the reason the universe is here in the first place. The notion that we have unmediated access to reality itself.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to recognize all of these illusions and then perform the work of correcting our understanding of the world, of removing these perspectival distortions from our "maps" of the world. We do the best we can, but falling prey to such illusions from time to time is part of what it means to be human. I'd like to propose, however, that the work of correcting our "maps" is precisely the work that science does.
Science corrects our understanding of the world by removing from that understanding the perspectival distortions of the subjectivist illusion.
Thomas commented that "evolution is such a promising theory that it ought to disturb the idea of God a little more deeply."
What I think it disturbs is the subjectivist illusion that human beings are the center or pinnacle or telos of creation. In this way, I think that it does disturb the idea of God -- inasmuch, that is, as the idea of God is itself the product of a subjectivist illusion. Traditionally, of course, it has been. Religion, in its traditional forms, is founded (so to speak) on taking the subjectivist illusion to be true, on the assertion that the world is how it appears to us, from our perspective.
But religion didn't die when we finally accepted that the earth goes around the sun. And evolution won't kill it either. It's simply a matter of reorienting our notion of God so that it doesn't depend on the subjectivist illusion, so that we are still able to assert the existence of God without first presupposing that the world actually is how it appears to us.
4 Comments:
What's your take on the question of whether or not the Copernican and Darwinian theories are in any sense refutations of religion (or the religious views that were dominant at the time these theories emerged). The Church certainly saw a conflict there; but I don't think they were the only one's to see these particular theories as alternatives to the reigning religious orthodoxy.
I guess I'd see these theories as challenges to a certain way of thinking about the world. It just so happens that this way of thinking about the world was deeply ingrained in the dominant religious views. In other words, I don't see science as a direct confrontation to religion itself, but rather something which undermines certain presuppositions that certain religious doctrines hold dear.
I suppose my main point throughout all of this is that faith as such can only really be threatened if knowledge becomes limitless -- which, if you believe Kant or Wittgenstein at least, isn't a real possibility at all.
I think faith and reason each have their proper places, and that they should generally stick to what they do best. Reason should tread with caution when making the sorts of metaphysical claims illustrated by Kant's antinomies; similarly, religion should tread with caution when making the sorts of emperical claims that are best left to science. In my opinion, there's more than enough room in the field of human experience for both.
The child might look down the hallway and think that it is very narrow at the end. Moving down it, he may think that the hallway is making room for him, i.e., that it is expanding as he walks forward. He may then leave his ball down there at the end. As he backs away from it, he may conjecture that the ball is shrinking along with the end of the hallway.
But there are simpler hypotheses, and for the sake of mental economy the child begins to grasp geometry.
Nonetheless, Funes (the Memorious) would find the hypothesis of stable objects in Euclidean space, i.e., the objectivist delusion we guide ourselves by on a daily basis, facile, would he not?
For the inhabitants of Tlön, geometry is a theory of psychology.
Man is in the world, and I am the nature of that in-ness.
I must re-read Borges . . .
But, until I do, yes, "Man is in the world, and I am the nature of that in-ness."
We can never be rid of the "subjectivist illusion" entirely. It's inherent in the structure of consciousness. Nothing can account for the phenomenological here and now -- any more than we can get a "bird's eye view" of the relation between language and the world.
This fact, in my view, is why we may need God . . .
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