In Search of Martin Buber (V)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Yet again I take up the philosophy of Martin Buber, as represented in his 1923 work I and Thou. In the previous installment, In Search of Martin Buber (IV), and in its predecessor, In Search of Martin Buber (III), I mentioned how key the Book of Job is to Buber's view of God as Thou. Job's wealth, offspring, and repute were taken away from him by the Lord, who subjected Job to humiliation upon humiliation and woe upon woe, just in order to test him. Job cried out to God to respond to his plaints face to face, and God appeared to Job from a whirlwind. We learn from this Old Testament book that such dialogue with the Lord, no matter what evils may be visited upon one, is one's best and only refuge.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The late myth guru Joseph Campbell also referred to Job in his 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in his chapter on "Atonement with the Father":

In the Biblical story of Job, the Lord makes no attempt to justify in human or any other terms the ill pay meted out to his virtuous servant, "a simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil." Nor was it for any sins of their own that Job's servants were slain by the Chaldean troops, his sons and his daughters crushed by a collapsing roof. When his friends arrive to console him, they declare, with a pious faith in God's justice, that Job must have done some evil to have deserved to be so frightfully afflicted. But the honest, courageous, horizon-searching sufferer insists that his deeds have been good; whereupon the comforter, Elihu, charges him with blasphemy, as naming himself more just than God.

When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, He makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job to do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven: "Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee." (p. 147)

The will of God, Campbell says, "derives from a center beyond the range of human categories." Buber would say that all such categories are from the world of It, not Thou, since categories are first and foremost tools that we use to keep things separate from one another and from ourselves, so that we can manipulate them. When we take our stand in relation to the eternal Thou — he who is, of course, the One God — all those categories are dissolved and all supposedly separate things are taken up into the global presence. In that exclusive presence, nothing in this world gets excluded!

"In the relation with God unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one," writes Buber (p. 78, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). "He who enters on the absolute relation is concerned with nothing isolated any more, neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven; but everything is gathered up in the relation."

Standing in such absolute relation to God-as-Thou produces one's life's meaning, one's destiny. This is what Job finds out when he is given a mission to "abase" the proud: to give what we would term a wake-up call to those who live in a self-sufficient world of manipulating and exploiting all the categories of It. Thus God needs something from Job, and this is why God tells Job, perhaps somewhat surprisingly to us, that "thine own hand can save thee."

Each person needs God; God needs each person. Buber has this to say (p. 82): "You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know too that God needs you — in the fullness of his eternity needs you? How would man be, how would you be, if God did not need him, did not need you? You need God, in order to be — and God needs you [in order to offer him] the very meaning of your life."

Sacrifice and prayer, Buber tells us (p. 83), "are set 'before the Face [of God]', in the consummation of the holy primary word that means mutual action: they speak the Thou [i.e., they say Thou to God, they call God by the second-person-familiar pronoun], and then they hear."


The consummation of the I–Thou relation with God in mutual action is, for Campbell, what Job underwent as "atonement with the Father," which is one key stage in the full canonical "hero's journey." The mythic hero in the mythos of every culture accomplishes the same basic trajectory:

Departure:
• Hero's call to adventure
  
• Hero's initial refusal of call
  
• Hero's receipt of aid from a supernatural personage
  
• Hero's outbound threshold-crossing
  
• Hero's figuratively re-entering the womb to experience a rebirth
  
Initiation:

• Trials of the hero
  
• Meeting by the hero of "the Goddess"
  
• Temptation of the hero by a woman, which must be resisted
  
• Hero's atonement with the Father
  
• Apotheosis (hero's becoming, as it were, godlike)
  
• Hero's receipt of the "ultimate boon" or gift from the Father
  
Return:

• Hero's initial refusal of the return
  
• Hero's "magic flight" away from the Father's house
  
• Hero's rescue by someone outside the Father's house
  
• Hero's crossing of the return threshold
  
• Hero's return as "master of two worlds"
  
• Hero's gaining the "freedom to live"
  

In his discourse on mutual action, Buber has this to say about freedom:

Yes; in pure relation you have felt yourself to be purely dependent, as you are able to feel in no other relation — and simply free, too, as in no other time or place: you have felt yourself to be both creaturely and creative. You had the one feeling then no longer limited by the other, but you had both of them limitlessly and together." (p. 82)

This, for Buber, is what the hero's "freedom to live" really means.

In Search of Martin Buber (IV)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Once again I investigate the philosophy of Martin Buber in his 1923 book I and Thou. My previous installment in this series was In Search of Martin Buber (III).

There will be those who suspect the discussion in that last installment of trying to demote morality, especially as it pertains to God and religion. That is not my intent. To show why I don't think spirituality à la Buber imperils questions of right and wrong, I'd like to borrow and adapt an argument certain philosophers make about human sentience.

Why we have sentience or a capacity to have conscious experiences above and beyond the complex information processing we use to succeed in this world (the way Job succeeded before his downfall) is hard to explain. Philosophers of mind are not agreed on this, but some say conscious experience — "what it is like" to see the color red, for instance — simply cannot be explained with recourse to cause and effect in the physical domain of this world. There is also a mental sphere which is not physical but which "supervenes" on the physical.

A telling argument can be made to that effect by showing that there conceivably could have been an alternate world whose denizens are doppelgangers. They seem just like us, physically and behaviorally ... but they don't experience anything. This so-called "zombie world" would be externally indistinguishable from our own. We would have the uncanny experience of meeting up with our zombie twins if we went there, but we simply would not be able to tell that our zombie twins were having no experiences whatsoever!

I'd like to extend and adapt that same argument to suggest that there conceivably could be an alternate world in which our doppelgangers also lack what Buber calls "man's sense of Thou."

This "Thou-sense" might be what some philosophers imagine as a relational component of the mind, in addition to the physical component and the conscious component. Admittedly, I am not aware of any actual philosophers who consider this third component real — a lot of them don't even consider the second, conscious component real. Still, given how hard it is to argue for consciousness being real-though-immaterial, it's not surprising that philosophers would take a pass on asserting this sort of third component which Buber would call the "sense of Thou" or the "inborn Thou."

So let us simply stipulate, for the sake of this discussion at least, that there is in the mind such a third, relational component, a Thou-sense. Our zombie twins presumably might be lacking it as well as the second component, consciousness. When we observe these zombies in their hypothetical doppelganger world, would we be able to tell their Thou-sense was missing?

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. My main point here is that we wouldn't be able to tell, simply based on observing their moral behavior.

Remember, the zombies in this imaginary "Z-world" are just like us, physically and behaviorally. For instance, if we were to be able to peek into such a zombie world, we would not find our zombie twins acting as if it were a cardinal sin to fail to run down pedestrians in crosswalks whenever possible. Nor would we find proper crosswalk etiquette to be a matter of random chance, or momentary mood. Either of those two scenarios would be ruled out by our stipulation that our zombie twins behave just like us. They seem to observe moral standards and ethical rules as much (or as little) as we do.

The Thou-sense is not about morals or ethics. It is what it is like to know we would sooner die than never encounter our Thou, ever again. There's no way to be sure our zombie twins know what that feels like.


I think this Thou-sense is in fact a "component" of our minds, but only in the following way. Our capacity for subjective, conscious experience — our sentience — actually is a separate mental component, built atop of all of that physical information processing going on in our brains. It's separate because, strictly speaking, it doesn't have to exist — witness our zombie doppelgangers — and because, were it to be absent, every last one of the cause-and-effect events taking place in this material world with which we interact would still be exactly the same ... just as it is in the Z-world in which there is no Thou-sense.

The Thou-sense, though, is not really a third, separate mind component, but rather a relationship between the consciousness "module" and the information-processing "module" comprising the physical workings of our brains.

We can think of both of the paired brain-state modules, consciousness and information processing, as "things" in the It-world. On that view, even consciousness or sentience is an It. Conscious experience may not be wholly material, but it can still be looked on as a suitable object of scientific investigation.

But if Thou-sense were just another It, that would seem to be a contradiction in terms. To imagine that the eternal Thou is never an It, while the inborn Thou is only an It, simply doesn't compute.

Thinking of Thou-sense as a relation, not a truly separate module of the mind, sidesteps that problem and makes Thou-sense primary in the same way that Buber calls all relation primary when he says, "In the beginning is relation" (p. 18).

At another point (p. 22), Buber further qualifies the primary word I–Thou as "the vital primal words I–affecting–Thou and Thou–affecting–I." When the participle — the word affecting — has been "split asunder" from the pronouns and in itself "given eminence as an object," continues Buber, Thou degenerates into mere It, and the I of I–Thou is degraded to the I of I-It. I take this to mean that there is a difference between "affecting" in the domain of Thou and "causing" in the domain of It.

Extending that view, if consciousness is thoroughly acausal and the cognitive information processing of the brain alone is causal, then there can't be a domain of Thou, for us, without the existence of consciousness within us. No Thou-sense without sentience, in other words. So, if that thinking is correct, then our hypothetical Z-world, which lacks sentience, also lacks Thou-sense.

Which means the sense of Thou of which we are capable is as extraordinary as the sentience which we experience — if not more so.

In Search of Martin Buber (III)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I continue to explore the philosophy of Martin Buber and his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou, along with how that outlook compares with the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. My previous installment in this series was In Search of Martin Buber (II).

To Sagan — though he was a non-believer in the God of his Judaic heritage — I attribute the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be. Buber, who was a practicing Hasidic Jew, wrote (see p. 79 of the Ronald Gregor Smith translation, not the Walter Kaufman translation pictured here): "When you hallow this life you meet the living God." No one hallowed this life more than Carl Sagan.

I think Sagan was in contact with what Buber calls "the eternal Thou"; though irreligious, Sagan partook of what Buber terms "man's sense of Thou" via his scientific wonder and awe. Hence his cherishing of this vast cosmos we call the universe surely turned into, in Buber's words, "a discovering of the primal, of origin."

Buber writes of such a discoverer: "His sense of Thou, which cannot be satiated until he finds the endless Thou, had the Thou present to it from the beginning; the presence had only to become wholly real to him in the reality of the hallowed life of the world" (p. 80).

Carl Sagan's The Demon- Haunted World

Sagan wrote, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

"Spirit" comes from the Latin word "to breathe." What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word "spiritual" that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain was made), or anything outside the realm of science. ... Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. (pp. 29-30).

Buber, for his part, held that "the world of sense does not need to be laid aside as though it were illusory. There is no illusory world, there is only the world — which appears to us as twofold in accordance with our twofold attitude" (p. 77). Or, again, "God cannot be inferred in anything — in nature, say, as its author, or in history as its master, or in the subject [i.e., the human person] as the [basis of the] self ... . Something else is not 'given' and God then elicited from it; but God is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly, over against us [i.e., it is God who most immediately faces us], that may properly only be addressed, not expressed" (pp. 80-81). It is this non-inferred, non-elicited, immediate God whom I think Sagan encountered.


So I think Buber and Sagan are saying the same things in different words. I think of it this way: the eternal Thou, God, whom we can address only in dialogue, can be engaged in many, albeit disparate, ways: religion, spirituality, science. If the stand we take (i.e., if our relational "attitude") is a proper one, the dialogue is real. Otherwise, we simply face nothingness.

It is as if there were an extra axis to reality. There are manifestly three axes of visible space, each orthogonal — at right angles — to the others. Science sees those. But there is also an axis of relationship, above and beyond length, breadth, and height. It is orthogonal to the other three ... which of course cannot be so unless you imagine an extra, unseen, spirit dimension, in a four-dimensional reality.

The "things" from which Buber says God cannot in any way be inferred or elicited exist entirely in the three non-spiritual dimensions. Science studies them and figures out how those things are produced by ordinary causes and effects. Meanwhile, our morality and ethics concern how we act in this, the material world of It — to use Buber's terms — rather than the relational world of Thou.

Reality's "extra" axis of relationship and dialogue — whenever we acknowledge our spiritual birthright and step forth along it toward the Thou — makes no difference to the material, causal world. Rather, it simply turns It into Thou for us. That ineffable act of stepping forth: it at one and the same time makes no difference materially and makes all the difference spiritually.


If morality and ethics relate only to the material domain of reality, does "being spiritual" excuse us from moral exigencies? Not at all. The domain of I-Thou relationality is distinct from morality, that's all. Distinct, but not separate.

This is what the Book of Job teaches us. Job was as upstanding as they come, as attested to by his copious offspring and material wealth. Yet God apparently wanted to "test" Job in order to see whether Job understood the distinction between mere uprightness and being in right relation with the eternal Thou. God visited no end of humiliation and woe upon the formerly wealthy patriarch, whose three friends tried to help him figure out what he had done wrong. Their explanations sounded pretty good to most people's ears, but they didn't satisfy Job. Instead of taking to heart these rationalizations from the sort of thinking done in the It-world, Job stepped forth into near-blaspemy, calling God himself into question. In Buber's terms, Job sought I–Thou dialogue with God.

And God at long last responded, appearing to Job out of a whirlwind and answering Job's charges face to face. The message here is that I–Thou dialogue with the Lord God is possible; indeed, it is indispensible ... and it trumps all considerations of righteousness, fecundity, and moral standing in the It world.

This is why Buber says "in the beginning" is relation (p. 18). Relation precedes all else: moral, ethical, material. Relation is primary.

Acolytes of Certitude

"Opening in theaters everywhere" today is the documentary movie Jesus Camp, which depicts life in a kids' evangelical Christian summer camp in, of all places, Devil's Lake, N.D.

Michael Sragow, reviewing it in The (Baltimore) Sun, says the movie, on the good side, shows children who are "immersed in something larger than their immediate appetites. Their dedication and energy could be positive qualities." On the bad side

... their certitude will horrify anyone outside this insular world [of evangelical-fundamentalist Christianity]. Parents home-school them with creationist curricula. Pastors inculcate them with the belief that their brand of Christianity should inform all public debate. So they march right into a closed system of thought and practice that's even more appalling in children than in adults ... .

In the current issue of TIME, columnist Andrew Sullivan's "When Not Seeing Is Believing" takes aim at "the utter certainty of those who say they have seen the face of God or have surrendered themselves to his power or have achieved the complete spiritual repose promised by the Books of all three [great monotheisms]: the Torah [of Judaism], the Gospels [of Christianity], the Koran [of Islam]."

Fundamentalists of any religion are acolytes of certitude.

In Jesus Camp, "the Rev. Becky Fischer, who runs the Kids on Fire summer camp ... [is of the] view that Christians should imbue their young with the same zealotry that turns young Islamists toward jihad. She doesn't see zealotry as the problem. But she's a serious, committed woman with the intensity and verve of a true believer. If she devoted herself to a secular cause like conservation, she'd win a cascade of puff pieces and softball talk-show spots."

According to TIME's Sullivan, "Complete calm comes from complete certainty. In today's unnerving, globalizing, sometimes terrifying world, such religious certainty is a balm more in demand than ever." Yet Sullivan, who is a liberal Catholic, favors "the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians [who relish] something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith [says Sullivan], and to say it is, is the great lie of our time."


So, wow, what a cultural divide we have going in America and the world: fundamentalism vs. the rest of us. Still, it must hastily be added that the fundamentalism on view in Jesus Camp and in Sullivan's article is something of a caricature that does not represent all evangelicals or all religious conservatives. For instance, I don't agree with Sullivan that the conservatism of the new pope, Benedict XVI, patterns with the rest of the caricature. Not that I fully understand where Benedict is coming from, but he does not seem to me to represent the same resistance to reason and insistence on inerrant scriptural revelation of the true fundamentalist. There is nothing more adverse to Sullivan's hopes for moderation and rational dialogue than arbitrarily lumping the sheep in with the goats.

Plus, it would seem to me that the real meaning of Jesus to us is squarely anti-divisionist. Jesus confronted the Pharisees and others in his own society who blamed "unclean" Jews — the poor, the sick, the "demon-possessed" or mentally ill, those too uneducated to know and observe the Law — for the demise of the independent nation of Israel at Rome's hands. Jesus stood for not marginalizing anyone except possibly those so lacking in true spiritual sense that ostracism was their main stock in trade. His message was firmly one of spiritual and political solidarity. Anyone who, out of their own fear and loathing, claimed that associating with those not just like them was drawing God's ire upon the entire nation did not pass muster with Jesus.

Today's acolytes of certitude conquer their own fear and loathing with zeal and fervor and then blessedly lose sight of their original fear. Their critics, whether liberals in the same faith traditions or freethinkers, conquer their fears by castigating the conservatives, usually in print. High-tech stonings, those; remember when Jesus interceded on behalf of a harlot who was being stoned to death by the conservatives of his time? Liberals are sometimes no better.

Nobody really seems to have any idea how we can come together, barring having the other side regain its senses. What we need is fewer verbal brickbats coming in the form, basically, of here's-the-truth monologues. What we need is more true dialogue.

In Search of Martin Buber (II)

In In Search of Martin Buber (I) I discussed my recognition that in some strange way I have been seeming to move beyond religion, with its emphasis on hard-and-fast precepts and sets of mandatory practices, to spirituality, in which precept and practice give way to, shall we say, presence.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

The recognition came in large part by way of my exposure to the philosophy of Martin Buber in his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou and to the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. To Sagan, though he was an atheist, I attributed the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be.

Since that last post I have continued to read I and Thou with an eye towards blogging about it on a regular basis — and found all my erstwhile ability to write coherently about such arcane subjects oddly absent in this particular case.

This morning I woke up with, for the first time, an awareness of why. I realized that most of my blogging has been in service to just one partly hidden purpose: to try to persuade myself of something. For example, the stuff I've been posting about Carl Sagan was to persuade myself that Sagan indeed had a deeply spiritual outlook, despite his irreligion, and thus that religion is at best a scaffolding for constructing the cathedral of a "real" truth which lies at its spiritual center.

With Buber, once you develop some sort of rapport with his thought, it's different. Once you "grok" I and Thou — once you achieve complete intuitive understanding of it — it stands as self-evident.

That word, grok, comes from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It is the Martian verb for "drink," and figuratively it means "to drink in all available aspects of reality," "to become one with the observed." Buber might say that only a Thou can truly be grokked; we can experience and use an It, we cannot grok it.


I and Thou can only be grokked. It can't really be explained or taught. Explaining and instructing in are actually forms of persuasion. If I explain to you, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, what I am basically intent upon doing is persuading you that your commonsense notions of time, space, and gravity aren't quite true. If I instruct you in Christian belief, I am seeking to persuade you that that Christian belief makes sense.

It isn't that way at all with Buber's thought, which goes right on past truth and sense — which after all are only from the world of It — to encounter. For Buber, the fulcrum of reality is in meeting, by way of whomever or whatever one's own Thou is — for Sagan, it was the entire cosmos — the eternal Thou. The latter is God.

I was about to say, just then, "The latter properly understood is the eternal Thou or God" But that would get the thought all wrong. Understanding, too, is just It. The correct formulation might be, "The latter properly met is Thou." To Buber, the relation between I and Thou, when the two properly meet, is primal. It comes before all else. That relation is not a matter of truth, sense, instruction, persuasion, or anything else from the world of It. It is, basically, a matter of dialogue.


In true dialogue, neither party tries to win the other over. Rather, there is a full sharing of the respective way or path which each party has trodden to arrive at their joint meeting place. To achieve full sharing, there must be mutual and unstinting acceptance of the other party in the exact moment of the I–Thou meeting, which is necessarily nothing other than the immediate present, the now. In the immediate present, an only in it, I and Thou abide together.

Each party to the I–Thou dialogue hallows the other: makes the other holy. Each party hails the other: makes the other hale, or whole in health. Or, what is hailed and hallowed, sanctified and made whole, is always the Thou which is affirmed in the mutual relation between the two parties who meet.

It can be said that the I and the Thou affect one another in this way — that is, they have such an effect on one another — but this is not the word "effect" as commonly used, as in "cause and effect." Cause and effect are from the world of It, not Thou. The I–Thou meeting does not set aside the It-world of cause and effect, the subject of Carl Sagan's beloved scientific understanding of the cosmos. Rather, it takes up into itself the whole of the It-world intact. There is no contradiction here. There is only the contradistinction between the two "attitudes" or "poles" we all have and move between. One attitude or pole gives us the I of I-It, and the other attitude or pole, if and when we manage to "take our stand" in Thou, gives us the entirely different I of I-Thou.

Buber says we can expect to take our stand in Thou only fleetingly and momentarily. The rest of the time, our I is closer to the I of I–It. My reading of that is that our individual I does not merge into an ethereal principle of universal awareness such as Brahman in Hinduism, or Buddha-consciousness in Buddhism. We come face-to-face with God as Thou; we do not "become God." We do not dissolve into something unnameable above and beyond the material world. For this reason, Buber does not care for what he calls "mysticism" or even what he calls "spirituality." Buber's thought could be called the distillation of Western monotheism.


So it would seem that, in view of the above, I actually do have a lot to say about Buber and I and Thou. But it remains hard for me to consider this a form of persuasion. You either grok it or you don't.

In Search of Martin Buber (I)

Last night I awoke out of a deep sleep to a pre-dawn awareness that what I am presently in search of is spirituality, even more than religion.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I immediately saw that all my recent interest in such things as the philosophy of Martin Buber in his book I and Thou and the worldview of Carl Sagan in all his works points in that direction (see Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans and its eleven predecessors in my "Quickening to Qualia" series).

Yet I knew that the specific trigger was something I read in this news article in The (Baltimore) Sun. In a theater review of a one-man show about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 for his participation in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler," came this clause:

[Bonhoeffer's] father, a psychiatrist, was "a cautious agnostic," and though his family was not particularly religious or political, they were spiritual.

On the face of it it seems odd, at least to me, to say that someone might be spiritual when he or she is not particularly religious. Even so, only a slight amount of reflection makes it clear that that is exactly what Carl Sagan was.

Carl Sagan's Contact

His television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was a spiritual love letter to all that is or ever will be. In his science fiction novel Contact, Sagan included a scene (pp. 302-307) in which several of his leading characters, including the scientists Ellie and Vaygay, are to dine with a Zen Buddhist Abbot named Utsumi. Ellie, Vaygay, and the other scientists are involved in building a Machine for space travel to somewhere in the cosmos to meet with the source of the interstellar Message giving the instructions for its, the Machine's, construction. On the way to the restaurant to meet Utsumi, Ellie asks Vaygay if Buddhists believe in God. Vaygay quips, "Their position seems to be that their God is so great that he doesn't even have to exist."

Godless or not, Utsumi is spiritual. During a consideration of the Vegans' reasons for communicating with Earth, Utsumi says, "I believe that we communicate out of love and compassion. ... I can communicate with a flower. ... I can talk to a stone.

The "innocent, almost childlike" Utsumi adds, "To communicate with a stone, you must become much less ... preoccupied. You must not do so much thinking, so much talking. When I say I communicate with a stone, I am not talking about words. The Christians say, 'In the beginning was the Word.' But I am talking about a communication much earlier, much more fundamental than that. ... To understand the language of the ants, you must become an ant."

The scientists describe the language of ants as traces of chemicals laid down on a path taken to food. Utsumi chides them, "Probably, that is the only way you know to become an ant." He asks why the study of ants and is told that scientists take pleasure in the understanding of them. "That is only another way of saying that they love the ants," he says.


Phiosophical though Martin Buber's I and Thou may seem, it too is basically spiritual. "The true community," writes Buber (p. 45), for example, "does not arise through peoples having feelings for one another ... but through, first, their taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre, and, second, their being in living mutual relationship with one another."

This is very much like the passage in the Gospels where Jesus tells of the so-called Great Commandment and its sequel:

One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied, "The first is this: 'Hear O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." The scribe said to him, "Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, 'He is One and there is no other than he.' And 'to love him with your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And no one had the courage to ask him any more questions. (Mark 12:28-34)

Buber, in a passage devoted mainly to showing that our feelings or emotions are not themselves a spiritual guide, in fact restates the two commandments of Jesus in terms not of God but of a "living Centre," adding:

The second has its source in the first, but is not given when the first alone is given ... The community is built up out of living mutual relation, but the builder is the living effective Centre.

That "builder" equates to Jesus's God. The "living Centre" is Thou, in Buber's scheme of the duality of human attitudes not It. The life of the spirit, one of these two attitudes, is in the subjective relationship I–Thou, not the objectification and exploitation which he calls I–It.

Jesus's own spirituality, clearly, was that of an I–Thou relationship with his Father in Heaven. Ellie, Vaygay, and the other scientists take their journey into the heavens where Ellie encounters her beloved father, long since deceased. Only he's not really her father, he's a godlike extraterrestrial with the ability to look like anyone in the memory bank of Ellie, whose mind he has read. He and his intergalactic coalition are so technologically advanced they can recreate the cosmos. For all intents and purposes, Ellie's faux-Papa is just like Jesus's: God.

The watchword of Ellie's faux-Papa is "lovingkindness" ... as was Jesus's. A watchword of Martin Buber's Thou as an innate, inborn drive is "tenderness." We start life knowing we seek "lovingkindness" and "tenderness" in, eventually, a spiritual Father. That is the essence of our search for spirituality.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)

To follow up on The Mind's Enigmas, the previous post in this "Quickening to Qualia" series: In that post I lauded the late Carl Sagan and his "dialogue" with the cosmos; he treated it with the respect due a Thou, not an It.

Carl Sagan's Contact

Sagan, who died in 1996, was a force behind the scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In Sagan's 1985 science fiction novel Contact, the earth in fact receives an intelligent signal from outer space. Ellie Arroway, the radio-astronomer who finds the signal, at one point tells her lover, the president's science adviser:

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational — I wouldn't call it irrational — aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it ‘numinous.’ The term was first used by ... let’s see ... somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.

"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.' Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe." (p. 153)

Rudolf Otto's's The Idea of the Holy

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was an eminent German theologian and scholar of comparative religion who published Das Heilige or The Idea of the Holy in, actually, 1917. (1923 may have been when an English translation appeared.) In it, Otto found that there was something "'extra' in the meaning of 'holy' above and beyond the meaning of goodness" (p. 6). This something beyond the purely rational he called numen, or the numinous.

The numinous was, Otto said, a mysterium tremendum, and also a mysterium fascinans. A discussion of his thought can be found in this online essay, "Otto on the Numinous."

Otto's idea of a mysterium tremendum has to do with a unique sort of sublime dread that makes us tremble before, and at the same time hallow, the source of all mystery. An albeit inadequate word for this experience is "daunting." "Awful" ("awe-full") is a word that gives us a true sense of the "majesty" that provokes such dread.

A mysterium fascinans is, however daunting and awe-full, one that is also entrancing, beguiling to us. The very same mystery that most cows us also "allures [us] with a potent charm" (p. 31). What most frightens us most fascinates us. What most fascinates us most frightnens us. Here is the real meaning of the expression "fear of God."


What if we could turn directly toward that fearful, majestic mystery and address it, quite familiarly, as Papa? That is exactly what Jesus did, though in his language the word was not Papa but Abba. Abba was how he spoke to his Father, the Lord God in Heaven.

In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Ellie Arroway, the protagonist who is something between an agnostic and an atheist, experiences both fascination and fear as she is launched in a speed-of-light-surpassing space vehicle toward the source of the Message, which has shown earthlings how to build the vehicle and make the journey. At the other end of her outbound leg, the source of the Message appears to Ellie in the form of her own beloved father, long since dead. Again, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans ... as Papa.

In his PBS series Cosmos, Sagan is awestruck at the sheer majesty of the universe. It has been through his mastery of space science, the viewer may muse, that Sagan has earned the right to call the cosmos itself Papa. He is at one with all its vastness and grandeur, its encompassing alienness and yet its potential hospitability. He has achieved atonement (at-one-ment) with the existent that he treats as Father — and as Thou.

Opening the Atlas of the Soul

From The (Baltimore) Sun of Sunday, September 24, 2006: "Holy day rites of passage help us find meaning in our lives" is Arthur J. Magida's paean to the annual ritual celebrations that commemorate and revisit, for members of every religious faith, the "moment when we are brought into the fold, into the tent, into the wisdom and the practices and the duties of being a member of that faith."

The occasion for Magida is this year's beginning of the Jewish High Holidays that began at sundown last Friday and will run until Yom Kippur next Sunday. The overarching point is that every religion, every faith, has such rites of passage and ritual commemorations. Any such rite, Magida says, represents "elaborate theater that helps us traverse crucial episodes in our lives." Any one of them "transports and instructs, alleviating the confusion and uncertainty that are so much a part of life."

Atonement is basic to each rite. It is the "humbling confrontation of self and past" that serves as "a rehearsal for the competence and the general, all-around bravura we need to get through life, with all its disruptions and annoyances and exasperations." To Magida, author of the reecently released Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage, "life is a series of hunches and guesses strung together into a story — our story: a story that's perplexing, charming, entertaining, confusing, confounding and, maybe best of all, thoroughly unexpected."

Each of us, says Magida, is a "story in the making, a splendid narrative still being told." Because "our tales have endings that we haven't quite figured out yet," we are in dialogue with our own life narratives. They are asking each of us, "Who are you? Where are you?"

"These are questions," writes Magida, "that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says are 'the beginning of the way. ... We can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where we live a true life. If we maintain holy discourse with the little world entrusted to us ... then we are establishing, in this our place, the Divine Presence.'"

"Maps to ourselves" is what Magida calls these holy rituals. They are "an atlas of our soul." And:

They introduce us to a Presence; they introduce us to our self; and they remind us that our lives have the profound possibility of being more charged, more potent and more glorious, and carry far higher stakes, than we ordinarily suspect, especially when we are stuck in the everyday that so often overtakes us. Burning off the haze of the mundane and the ordinary, these days turn us toward the light — never blinding and always illuminating.

Is there anything in Magida's description that disqualifies it as a characterization of specifically Christian commemorations such as, say, Lent or Advent? Not at all, I would say. In fact, the most profound thing Magida says is, "Everyone, in every faith, approaches God in his own time and his own fashion."

The Baylor Religion Survey

The Baylor Religion Survey is an in-depth statistical analysis of Americans' beliefs and practices concerning God and religion, as determined by extensive 2005 polling data. The initial findings were published in September 2006 by the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. A Baylor University news article about the initial publication appears here. An independent news article about it may be read here, at the website of The (Baltimore) Sun.

The initial published report, American Piety in the 21st Century: New Insights to the Depths and Complexity of Religion in the U.S., can be downloaded in PDF form by visiting this page or more directly by clicking here. Many statistical details (but not all) are available here, at the Association of Religious Data Archives.

A blog post which questions some of the statistical methodology that was used can be read here, at the "Amor et Labor" blog of Kletos Sumbulos.


The initial finding that is supposedly most surprising to many observers is that Americans are more religious and less secular than other recent surveys have found:

Are Americans losing their religion? Prior national studies with questions on religion, such as the General Social Survey and National Election Study, show an increase in the percent of the population with no religion over the past quarter century ... This growth in “religious nones” is often used by academics and the press to indicate growing secularization in the United States. But are Americans really that detached from organized religion?

Most surveys determine the religious affiliation of respondents by asking them to select their religious family or denomination from a list. This has become increasingly problematic over the years as more and more Americans are losing a strong denominational identity. The rising number of non-denominational congregations as well as congregations that minimize their denominational ties compound the problem. The declining importance of denomination, however, does not mean that religion itself is on the wane. Rather, Americans may simply be more likely to connect with religion at the local level ... To detect religious affiliation today, it is time to look beyond denomination. In addition to presenting respondents with a standard list of denominations, the Baylor Religion Survey asks respondents to give the name and address of their place of worship. Combining these three measures of religious belonging enables us to more thoroughly and accurately sort persons into broader religious traditions.

This method finds that barely 1 in 10 Americans (10.8%) says he or she is not affiliated with a broad religious tradition, much less a specific denomination. Other recent surveys such as the General Social Survey and National Election Study have put the (apparently rising) unaffiliated figure about 3 percentage points higher.

Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Black Protestant, Jewish, or Other (mainly Buddhist, Christian Science, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Mormon], Hindu, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslim, Orthodox [Eastern, Russian, Greek], and Unitarian Universalist were the broad traditions identified in the survey.

Only 5.2% of Americans emerge from the poll's questions as atheists who are "certain that God does not exist." The other unaffiliated respondents — a roughly equal number of them, in fact — apparently have some belief in a higher power, even if they do not identify with any broad religious tradition.


The survey result which I personally find most provacative is the "Four Gods" hypothesis. The researchers claim (pp. 26ff.) they were able to derive from the poll's responses four meaningful groupings of non-atheists:

1. Those who believe in an "Authoritarian God" (31.4%)
   
2. Those who believe in a "Benevolent God" (23%)
3. Those who believe in a "Critical God" (16%)
4. Those who believe in a "Distant God" (31.4%)

They labeled these believer groups, for obvious alphabetic reasons, Types A, B, C, and D. The four groups were in turn derived from two "clear and distinct dimensions of belief in God":

1. God’s level of engagement – the extent to which individuals believe that God is directly involved in worldly and personal affairs.
   
   
2. God’s level of anger – the extent to which individuals believe that God is angered by human sins and tends towards punishing, severe, and wrathful characteristics.

Here are more details on the four types:

• Type A: Authoritarian God: Individuals who believe in the Authoritarian God tend to think that God is highly involved in their daily lives and world affairs. They tend to believe that God helps them in their decision-making and is also responsible for global events such as economic upturns or tsunamis. They also tend to feel that God is quite angry and is capable of meting out punishment to those who are unfaithful or ungodly.
  
  
• Type B: Benevolent God: Like believers in the Authoritarian God, believers in a Benevolent God tend to think that God is very active in our daily lives. But these individuals are less likely to believe that God is angry and acts in wrathful ways. Instead, the Benevolent God is mainly a force of positive influence in the world and is less willing to condemn or punish individuals.
  
  
• Type C: Critical God: Believers in a Critical God feel that God really does not interact with the world. Nevertheless, God still observes the world and views the current state of the world unfavorably. These individuals feel that God’s displeasure will be felt in another life and that divine justice may not be of this world.
  
  
• Type D: Distant God: Believers in a Distant God think that God is not active in the world and not especially angry either. These individuals tend towards thinking about God as a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion. As such, God does not “do” things in the world and does not hold clear opinions about our activities or world events.

Type A ("Authoritarian God") is relatively big on both "engagement" and "anger." Type B ("Benevolent God") emphasizes "engagement" but minimizes "anger." Type C ("Critical God") de-emphasizes "engagement" with this world's affairs but attributes to a remote deity much "anger" at the way things are going. Type D ("Distant God") de-emphasizes both "engagement" and "anger."

This looks like a valuable contribution to the understanding of American religiosity, but a blog post which questions some of the methodology that was used to derive it can be read here, at the "Amor et Labor" blog of Kletos Sumbulos. The main complaint is that the questionnaire (which is shown at the end of the American Piety PDF) may have been constructed in such a way that the two reported dimensions of "engagement" and "anger" were bound to show up in the results with so-called statistical significance.


There are also worries about whether a "cluster analysis" would confirm the four belief types as being meaningfully separate from one another ... again, statistically speaking.

And in a comment I made to the post I said that, per a Wikipedia article on the statistical technique the survey used, called factor analysis: "Interpreting factor analysis is based on using a 'heuristic,' which is a solution that is 'convenient even if not absolutely true' ... More than one interpretation can be made of the same data factored the same way."

In other words, the "Four Gods" hypothesis may be more statistically "convenient" than "absolutely true."


Note also that there is no way to tell from the statistics given in the initial American Piety report how much, in believers' reported notions of God, God's "engagement" and "anger" pertain to the world's affairs in general, rather than the believers' own personal lives. The questionnaire does make such distinctions, but the "Four Gods" groupings do not.

Moreover, I see no way to tell whether respondents who feel God is, for example, "directly involved in my affairs" (see Question 22i) mean that God's personal involvement is at a subjective, spiritual level (as in "God comforts me" or "God seems to be silent when I pray to him") or at the level of objective events (as in "God didn't arrange for me to get the new job I wanted" or "Thanks to God, I finally found the right mate").

To me, that's a crucial distinction in believers' modes of piety. I, for instance, feel God is engaged with me and other believers at a personal, spiritual level but does not actually "make things happen" in the physical world ... or keep them from happening. I'm aware that other believers feel very strongly that God does exactly that. There's no apparent way to respond to the questions in the survey that would make such a distinction clear.

The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)

Throughout my "Quickening to Qualia" series (see "Thouness" and Self) I've made a case for a God with whom we can be in meaningful dialogue. I've based it upon a nonreligious, philosophical argument that consciousness arises out of our brain's complexity for ineffable reasons that can perhaps be best ascribed to a God-given law of nature.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker is not one who would embrace such a position. The professor of psychology and head of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT presents a range of other approaches to the mind's enigmas at the end of his excellent book How the Mind Works.

Pinker and I agree that consciousness, or sentience, defies explanation. Pinker deftly sets aside the other meanings of the word consciousness — self-knowledge and access to information. He then describes sentience as "subjective experience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person present tense, 'what it is like' to be or do something, if you have to ask you'll never know" (p. 135).

As I wrote in Water Into Wine, Pinker says that consciousness or sentience

has struck a great many thinkers as not just a problem but almost a miracle" (p. 132). One such thinker, Thomas Huxley, the English biologist known as "Darwin's bulldog" for defending the theory of evolution by natural selection, called it "just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." Philosopher Colin McGinn, adds Pinker, speaks of "the water of the human brain ... turned into the wine of consciousness."

Pinker asks, "How could an event of neural information-processing cause the feel of a toothache or the taste of lemon or the color purple? How could I know whether a worm, a robot, a brain slice in a dish, or you are sentient? Is your sensation of red the same as mine, or might it be like my sensation of green? What is it like to be dead?" (p. 558)

Further, "What good is consciousness? ... Is consciousness an impotent side effect hovering over the symbols [used in information processing], like the lights flashing on a computer or the thunder that accompanies lightning? And if consciousness is useless — if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it — why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (p. 132)


There are other features of the human mind, says Pinker, that are equally hard to explain. The imponderables include (pp. 558-559):

• The self as a "unified center of sentience"
• Free will or unforced choice in deciding among possible actions
• The ability to know the meaning of abstract propositions such as "the set of natural numbers is infinite"
  
• The ability to know the truth of universals such as "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, everywhere and for all eternity"
• A sense of moral truth as something absolutely real: "How did ought emerge from a universe of particles and planets, genes and bodies?"
  

There are, says Pinker, five ways to deal with knotty issues such as these which "give us a sense of bewilderment, of intellectual vertigo" (p. 559). The first, the one I favor but Pinker eschews, is the God hypothesis. I'll talk more about it presently.

Numbers two through four on Pinker's list don't satisfy Pinker either. One can say, first of all, "that the mysterious entities are an irreducible part of the universe and leave it at that" (p. 560). That consciousness, will, selves, ethics, etc., are brute facts — just like space, time, matter, energy, and other things physicists study — is the "irreducibility theory." It, Pinker complains, offers no insight and leaves us feeling cheated.

Or, one can simply deny the problems exist by claiming that statements about consciousness, will, etc., don't even rise to the level of uncertainty. These statements are, rather, meaningless, since there is no way to verify them; the philosophical position is called positivism. Pinker says it "leaves us incredulous, not enlightened" (p. 561). Something we know as supremely well as the fact of our own consciousness simply "cannot be defined out of existence."

Third, one can claim that all these mental imponderables can successfully be reduced to problems we are able to solve, by recourse to physical causality. For example, "consciousness is activity in layer 4 of the cortex" (see p. 561). Pinker rejects this approach, as do I, by arguing that our free will and moral choice are ruled out by it. We cannot be held morally responsible for choices we make if they are just "the causal effects of the cingulate sulcus," a portion of the brain. Furthermore, if our moral sense is reduced, per evolution theory, to a matter of "kin selection and reciprocal altruism," whither then our "conviction, as unshakable as our grasp of geometry, that some acts are inherently wrong, even if their net effects are neutral or beneficial"?


Pinker's preferred way of dealing with the mind's imponderables is "cognitive closure": saying there is no particular reason to suppose the human mind even has the power to answer every question that perplexes it. Our cognitive faculties are closed off from these answers, says Pinker, by the sheer fact that an ability to settle such highfalutin' questions was not part and parcel of our evolutionary design, brokered by natural selection.

From this perspective, all the things that make us persons — consciousness, will, a sense of morality, of comprehensible meaning, and of invariate truth, etc. — exist in a higher stratum of reality than we can ever hope to account for or explain.


I find Pinker's preference for dealing with the range of mental imponderables as problematic as he finds all the other options. To show why, I'll need first to discuss his objections to the God hypothesis.

Pinker cites H.L. Mencken to the effect that "theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing" (p. 560). Allusions to the divine to explain the mind's imponderables simply, Pinker says, "pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong?"

Pinker also asks, "How does he [God] infuse them [the enigmas] into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? Hoe does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."

The question about what accounts for God's own aspects of personhood — mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong — is one I believe I can deal with. God would not be worthy of the name unless he is understood as self-revealing to humankind. In his self-revelation to Moses he called himself Yahweh: "I am that I am." He thereby tells us his existence requires no further explanation; there is no need to look for an infinite regress of causes atop causes, where the Most High is concerned.

Thus, not believing in the God hypothesis because it permits of no explanations of God's own existence or personal qualities is logically inconsistent. The God hypothesis is specifically one which says, right up front, that an uncaused God cannot and need not be explained or accounted for.


Furthermore, it is God's self-revealing personhood that, to this theist, counts as what's the most "worth knowing," of all that we can know.

If what's worth knowing is the criterion of choice, I don't see how Pinker's "cognitive closure" outstrips the God hypothesis. It puts all the personal attributes that theists say we share with God — consciousness, will, etc. — beyond a cloud cover impenetrable to cognitive inquiry. How does that tell us anything worth knowing?

True, it sidesteps questions such as that of human suffering. So I'll take a wild shot at that one: we suffer because we find ourselves hard put to cease saying the primary word I—It, instead of saying I—Thou (German Ich—Du). According to the Wikipedia subtopic on the philosophy of Martin Buber:

One key Ich—Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich—Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

Buber's philosophy is basically that I—Thou represents a relational attitude wholly different from I—It. In the latter, we simply use or are used by. One of the relatants is always an object. In the former, we are in a two-way dialogue. Our interlocutor is a subject whom we take to have independent moral stature, just as we do.

As I said in my previous posts, I consider Buber's philosophy profound, if hard to put into practice. I don't know how one could take it at all seriously without suspecting that the flaw in Steven Pinker's outlook is his tacit assumption that God, if real, is an It, like all the other candidate accounts of imponderable mental phenomena. Irreducibility theory, materialism, reducibility to the physical, and cognitive closure — all are It. God alone is Thou.

Suppose God:

• is real
• has personhood
• possesses will, consciousness, moral sensibility, etc.
• reveals himself to us as being/having all the above
  
• wants us to speak to him always as Thou

Wouldn't that list of "facts" about God be wholly consistent with the problems of our mental imponderables, our suffering, etc.? Doesn't the very existence of these enigmas fairly cry out for us to put aside the I—It of ordinary thought for a relationship of fruitful dialogue with the Most High, or at least with his beloved creatures?


It is out of such dialogue that comes the one aspect of religion/spirituality which Pinker extols: "our higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings" (p. 555). But Pinker quickly disparages religion for its faults, excesses, and inconsistencies. For example: " ... even the Ten Commandments, read in context, prohibit murder, lying, and theft only within the tribe, not against outsiders."

Yet it's my conviction that the late astronomer Carl Sagan, nominally an atheist like Pinker, had a spiritual, dialogic relationship with the universe, the subject of his 1980 television series Cosmos. Though not a religious man, he was manifestly a man of higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings.

Carl Sagan's Contact

"It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness," a character says in Sagan's science fiction novel Contact (p. 153). The speaker, a biologist, has been asked what he will do with a caterpillar he has been keenly observing on a held twig: kill it? The scene is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, where 55,000 names of the honored U.S. dead are engraved in black, reflecting granite. The allusion: the caterpillar is not a miniature monster, eligible for killing like an enemy soldier. Neither, really, is the soldier. Both are Thou.

Sagan quotes Albert Einstein in the epigraph to the same chapter: "I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research." With the right spiritual attitude, everything is Thou.

This is what I think Steven Pinker misses in speaking as disparagingly of religion as he does. Despite its blemishes, it is the strongest voice in history for consciousness of Thou.

"Thouness" and Self (Q2Q X)

In The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX), my most recent post in this "Quickening to Qualia" series, I spoke of "Thouness" as the "qualitative feel" of encountering another self-aware, conscious, autonomous person.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

This is not just a matter of ordinary conscious experience. Martin Buber, in his 1923 book I and Thou, takes the idea of the Thou up out of the general realm of the experiential and into that of the relational. I believe Buber's idea of the relational depends as a necessary but not a sufficient condition on our experience of what it is like to have a self.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

In my previous posts in this series, I started out by looking for solid reasons why Christians such as myself might applaud Darwin's theory of evolution. A clue came from Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, a book giving the author's interpretation of Darwinian evolution. In it, Wright finds the human experience we call consciousness extraordinary.

Wright says natural selection is indifferent to consciousness, since the latter has no causal or functional effect. Because it doesn't really "do" anything, it doesn't make us fitter in any Darwinian sense. So why does it exist?

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

That question pointed me toward David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers, whom Wright cites, agrees that consciousness — a.k.a. subjective experience — doesn't really "do" anything.

Furthermore, its existence can't be explained in a reductive manner by analyzing it functionally, structurally, etc., and then giving a purely physical explanation of the involved causation. Consciousness's basic nature is mental, not material.

So, says Chalmers, our conscious experience of such things as "what it is like to see the color red" can never be explained by a knowledge base, however complete, of all the physical facts. Should we one day learn everything there is to know about, say, bats at a physical, biological, neural level, we even then could not know for sure whether bats are conscious.


Hence, consciousness does not automatically emerge from physical facts in an ineluctable way, as a matter of priori logic. We ourselves could be physically and functionally identical to what we are and still, for all mere argument could tell us, we might lack consciousness. The fact that we don't lack consciousness can accordingly be attributed only to some natural law afforded to this world in the same way as all the other natural laws have been afforded.

The law might specify, for example, that if there is information processing going on at a functional, physical level, then associated with that processing there is a qualitative experience that occurs at a phenomenal level. That qualitative, phenomenal experience is consciousness.

A corollary law might hold that the experience of consciousness which is associated with the processing of information will be faint or rich, depending on how simple or complex the underlying information processing is. Because the human brain is more complex than that of a bat, human consciousness is markedly richer than putative bat consciousness.


Those who believe that natural laws come from God are, of course, free to agree with me that the law of consciousness comes from God also. Chalmers, who owns to no particular religious orientation, says God hypothetically had to do "more work" to add the necessary law of consciousness to the others he was ordaining for nature. In this way, Chalmers's argument that consciousness is naturally, not logically, supervenient on the brain's functions suggests, in my theistic view, that evolution by natural selection — the force which tailored the human brain's functionality — is OK with God.

Why so? Because in tuning human brain functionality to a high level of complexity, natural selection provided an opportunity for the application of the law of consciousness to humankind in a uniquely non-faint way.


The above, in itself, is far from the whole story. I find that Martin Buber goes to great lengths to differentiate experience in general from what he calls "the cradle of Real Life" (p. 9). Specifically he says, "I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou."

The qualitative feel of the experience I have when I encounter another person does not in and of itself deserve the label I have invented, "Thouness." It remains an experience, on my part, of an It, says Buber, a "thing among things" (p. 8). To say the primary word I–Thou to a human being or to any other interlocutor is, on the other hand, to transcend mere experience.

To say the primary word I–Thou to a human, to a spiritual being — to God — or even to a tree is relational, not merely experiential. It does not blot out ordinary experience, it goes beyond it. As consciousness is something "extra" vis-à-vis the human mind, I–Thou relationality is something "extra" vis-à-vis ordinary conscious experience. It is that which unites in a seamless and eternal whole all experiential events concerning the relatant to whom I can say Thou.

When Thou is present, says Buber, mere things are nonexistent. Things have qualities of which consciousness is cognizant. Through these qualities a thing can be discriminated from other things — which precludes I–Thou participation in wholeness and unity. In this sense, ordinary conscious experience affiliates more with the I–It attitude than with the I–Thou. Buber tersely writes:

— What, then, do we experience of Thou?
— Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
— What, then, do we know of Thou?
— Just everything. For we know nothing isolated about it any more. (p. 11)

In view of the above, "Thouness" cannot be taken to represent just another phenomenal quality among qualities — even if it is stipulated to be first-among-equals among all the qualia which may be presented as "raw sensation" to the conscious "inner mind."

The I–Thou encounter might at best be thought of as the completion of conscious experience in a relational fusion which admits of no further isolation or separation.

One could also say that I–Thou relationality is the limit of conscious experience, analogous to the limit of a mathematical function. For example, the limit of y=x, as x approaches infinity, is itself infinity. I–Thou relationality might be said to be the limit of personal consciousness as it approaches a sense of sheer totality.

Consciousness per se is a prerequisite of Buber's view of the relational. I—Thou awareness is perhaps the perfection of consciousness, with all of its usual localizations removed.


Bridging the idea of consciousness per se and Buber's notion of the Thou is the idea of self-consciousness. Chalmers discusses self-consciousness — the sense of self — as being subtly different from self-awareness, but in some views of consciousness they are the same. (This Wikipedia subtopic may be of help here.)

Chalmers says of the sense of self:

"One sometimes feels that there is something to conscious experience that transcends all [its] specific elements: a kind of background hum, for instance, that is somehow fundamental to consciousness and that is there even when all the other components are not. The phenomenology of self is so deep and intangible that it somehow seems illusory, consisting in nothing over and above specific elements [of ordinary conscious experience]. Still, there seems to be something to the phenomenology of self, even if it is very hard to pin down. (p. 10)

If we visualize this "background hum" of one's sense of self achieving its fullness or completion in meeting and engaging in dialogue with another Thou who likewise has such a personal "background hum," we may be getting very close to what Buber was talking about in I and Thou. We can see why Buber insisted that we do not merely "experience" the Thou: that would make it seem like "Thouness" is nothing over and above the list of specific qualities we sense in any old I–It (or I–He or I–She) experience.

An experience of "Thouness" would accordingly seem to be the submerging of one's own "background hum" in the larger, cosmic one, transcending all "ordinary" experience. One loses oneself, in speaking the primary word I-Thou, only if one has a self to lose. One has a self to lose only if one is richly conscious. One is richly conscious only if one has a highly evolved brain: so says the law of consciousness instituted by God.

The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

In Thouness (Q2Q VIII), the previous post in this, my "Quickening to Qualia" series, I took up the insights of the late Jewish thinker Martin Buber into "the primary word I–Thou," as presented in his 1923 book I and Thou. I had an intuition that, in the conscious experience of a human being, what I spoke of as "Thouness" amounts to the "qualitative feel" of encountering another self-aware, conscious, autonomous person.

If that person is experienced as an object, not as a subject blessed with conscious experience of his or her own, the qualitative feel will instead be one of "Itness." In Buber's terms, the primary word I–It will be spoken, not I-Thou. The basic nature of the I relatant will accordingly change from the I of I–Thou to the I in I–It, a wholly different kind of I.

Speaking to God or another person using the primary word I–Thou and not I–It is an act which lies at the core of religious experience for Buber. My intuition here is that saying I—Thou is possible at all for us only because we humans possess consciousness.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This intuition accords with ideas about consciousness broached by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers makes a formal, technical argument to the effect that the consciousness that accompanies the causal, functional, psychological aspects of the human mind is not itself causal or functional. Nor can it be fully explained by any appeal to strictly physical levels of causation.

Rather, Chalmers thinks, some yet-to-be-discovered natural law determines that consciousness will inevitably arise from the merely psychological workings of the mind, in creatures like us with complex enough brains. Chalmers makes no claim to belief in God, but theists such as I are free to imagine this natural law being added to the others ordained for this world by God himself, in accomplishing his creative act.

Millard J. Erickson's's Christian Theology

One clue as to why God might have done this comes from Christian Theology, a review of Christian belief by theologian Millard J. Erickson. (This book is now in its second edition. I have the original edition.) The clue concerns a particular theological slant on divine revelation's relationship to human history: revelation through history (pp. 183 ff.) It is the view of a number of theologians who have called themselves neoorthodox that:

Historical events should not be identified with revelation ... . They are merely the means through which revelation came. For revelation is not seen as the communication of information to man. Rather, it is God's presentation of himself. Revelation is a personal encounter between God and man.

The distinction between revelation and "the communication of information," intriguingly, patterns closely with Chalmers's distinction between a conscious mind of subjective experience and a psychological, strictly functional mind which is basically tasked with ... wait for it ... information processing. I imagine these two halves of our human mental whole as, respectively, "the inner mind" and "the outer mind." Without what I think of as the inner mind, says Chalmers, we would be but functionally equivalent zombies lacking all conscious experience, blind to the qualitative feels of "redness" or "juiciness" ... or, I would add, "Thouness."

"Thouness," furthermore, can be thought of the qualitative feel of each and every "personal encounter," whether the Thou which the I encounters is God or man.


Erickson continues his discussion of "revelation through history" by alluding to the Old Testament encounters of Moses and Isaiah with God. He then says:

But the accounts of these events are not revelation, for the events themselves were not revelation. Thus, one may record the words spoken by God, as the Book of Exodus claims that Moses did, and another may read those words, and read of the circumstances of the event, but one will not thereby have obtained revelation. The revelation of God came through the words and deeds of Jesus, but those words and deeds were not the revelation per se. Thus, the Pharisees did not meet God when Jesus performed miraculous deeds. Rather, they maintained that he did what he did by the power of Beelzebub. There were many who saw and heard Jesus, but did not meet God. They simply came away convinced that he was a remarkable man. ...

Revelation, then, is not perceived as an occurrence of history. The event is merely the shell in which the revelation was clothed. Rather, the revelation is something extra added to that event. It is God's direct coming to someone through that event. Without this direct coming, the historical event is opaque; indeed this was the case for numerous persons who observed but stood by unmoved.

A "something extra" that is added to an observed event seemingly patterns with the "something extra" by which Chalmers says the phenomenon of consciousness augments the mere information-processing transactions of the psychological mind. We might accordingly say that the outer, functional mind is "merely the shell" of the inner, experiential mind. That inner mind takes in what phenomenologists speak of as "raw sensations," as that of "redness." The arrival of the quale of "redness" at the gateway to the inner mind feels, indeed, like a "direct coming." So, too, with the quale of "Thouness."


When Buber speaks of "experience" (pp. 5-6), he identifies it as an experience of "something" in the world, even if it is of something "inner" — by which I think he, for example, means the experience of being hungry. He contrasts this realm of experience with "the world of relation."

What Buber is talking rather disparagingly about as mere "experience," in which the word I is but that of I—It, may be what Chalmers refers to as "awareness." Awareness, an aspect of the outer, functional mind, likewise is always of something.

Or, possibly, Buber and Chalmers are talking about "experience" in exactly the same phenomenological way. Buber invokes the word "experience" in this manner (p. 5):

The man who experiences has not part in the world. For it is "in him" and not between him and the world that the experience arises.

The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.

This usage patterns with Chalmers's idea that conscious inner experience is not in the causal loop of events participated in and caused by the functional, psychological component of the mind.


Whether Buber's "experience" equals Chalmers's "awareness," or both thinkers mean the same phenomenological thing by "experience," the be all and end all for Buber is "the world of relation," established by speaking the primary word I—Thou.

The distinction which Buber draws between the experiential and the relational is not one which Chalmers says much about. He does allude to a possible third component of the mind, in addition to the psychological component and the conscious component, which he calls relational: " ... it is not much of a burden [on his main argument concerning consciousness] to note that there might also be a relational component to certain mental states, over and above the psychological and phenomenal components. Either way, no deep further mystery arises" (p. 21).

Here, perhaps, Chalmers is being a bit spiritually tone deaf. To him, all "manifest phenomena ... fall into two classes, those we have third-person access to, and those we have first-person access to." Buber might say that the former are merely the It of I—It , and the latter are merely the I of I—It. To Buber, the world of relation, established by the primary word I—Thou, does actually involve a deep further mystery, one to which he devotes his book. Perhaps Buber would even say that the Thou is the one manifest phenomenon that we have second-person access to.


I have little doubt that it is only those who say I—Thou to God who get a revelation, where others see only an historical event. I have no reason to think I myself would have understood the "something extra" that Jesus represented, or Isaiah, or Moses. In fact, I rather think of myself as a tone-deaf Pharisee, not as an in-the-know disciple.

Still, I think I see some of the implications of all this talk of phenomenal consciousness à la Chalmers. It looks as if there is within the inner mind of conscious experience an innermost holy-of-holies: an interior world of the I—Thou relationship.

Since this spiritual inner sanctum is nestled within our conscious mind, it follows that we need the phenomenon of consciousness to be able to hope to approach God properly as a Thou and not a He, She, or It.

Chalmers says consciousness is something extra that is associated with the complex information processing of the psychological mind. That capacity, in turn, evolved out of the lesser complexity of the brains of other animals. Moreover, the association of consciousness with human information-processing capabilities happens only by virtue of a natural law which — hypothetically, if there is a God — came from him.


That suggests to me that Christians need not fear Darwin's theory of evolution as in any way threatening to the revelation of God to them in Jesus Christ.

In fact — though it is an argument for another day — I would imagine evolution (rather than special creation) as the only way in which God could create persons who are autonomous agents possessed of free will. Perhaps free will, like consciousness, is part and parcel of our unique ability to speak the primary word I—Thou. If that is so, Darwinian evolution could turn into Chistianity's best friend!