A couple of days ago, I reread parts of Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death & Happiness (Granta, 2008). At one point, Rowlands writes: “I once had a colleague who was unusual among philosophers in that he was a believer. He always used to tell his students: when the shit hits the fan, you will believe. Maybe that's what happens. When the shit hits the fan, people look for God. When the shit hits the fan, I remember a little wolf cub”. Due to several unfortunate events that have occurred over the year, for the past few days I've been thinking about the issue of believing out of need (or desire or desperation). Over the years, I've heard or read the kind of remark made by Rowlands's former colleague; it is something most people say when confronted with someone professing, e.g., some form of radical skepticism. Even though I do understand the “logic” of such a stance, it appears to me that, in the end, it all comes down to each person's temperament. Once or twice in the course of my life, I felt the need to believe in something that is religious or metaphysical in nature, but after a few seconds, I told myself that as a matter of fact I didn't, the reason being that I couldn't hold religious or metaphysical beliefs simply because I needed to. Of course, this issue has to do with whether one can hold beliefs only on the basis of evidence of some sort or whether one can also hold beliefs out of need. In other words, do we always need epistemic reasons or are we also able to hold beliefs merely on the basis of pragmatic reasons? In my experience, it seems that quite a number of people can start believing in God, the afterlife, the soul, or what have you after having been confronted with extreme situations, but it is also clear that even when the shit hits the fan, some who would love to find solace in such beliefs are as a matter of fact unable to hold them -- for them pragmatic reasons are not enough. I'm considering the issue from a psychological point of view (is it psychologically possible for us to hold beliefs only because it is useful for us to do so?) and leaving aside the normative question of whether one should believe in x only on the basis of pragmatic reasons.
Interesting. I've sometimes wondered about the claim: "There are no atheists in foxholes". While I have never been in such a situation, I tend to think that it is unlikely that human psychology is so uniformly consistent. I imagine that the reverse may in fact happen: believers become doubters in such situations.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. We're then in agreement regarding such universal claims about human psychology. And you make an important point: extreme situations might well make believers have second thoughts about their faith and adopt a more pessimistic or nihilistic view on life and death.
ReplyDeleteOne place to go for some insight:
ReplyDelete“Both Christians and Marxists scorned us sceptic-humanistic intellectuals, the former mildly, the latter impatiently and brusquely. There were hours in the camp when I asked myself if their scorn was not justified. Not that I desired their political or religious belief for myself or that I even would have held this to be possible. I was not in the least bit curious about a religious grace that for me did not exist, or about an ideology whose errors and false conclusions I felt I had seen through. I did not want to be one with my believing comrades, but I would have wished to be like them: unshakable, calm, strong. What I felt to comprehend at that time still appears to me as a certainty: whoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself. He is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz. He is both more estranged from reality and closer to it than his unbelieving comrade. Further from reality because in his Finalistic attitude he ignores the given contents of material phenomena and fixes his sight on a nearer or more distant future; but he is also closer to reality because for just this reason he does not allow himself to be overwhelmed by the conditions around him and thus he can strongly influence them. For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits; under favorable ones it is material for analysis. For the believer reality is clay that he molds, a problem that he solves ... "
Or,
"At times he also rebelled ferociously against his believing comrades' exclusive claim to the truth. To speak of God's boundless mercy appeared outrageous to him, given the presence of a so-called senior camp inmate, a powerfully built German professional criminal who was known to have literally trampled a number of prisoners to death. In the same way, he regarded it as shockingly narrow when the Marxists unswervingly characterized the SS as the police force of the bourgeoisie and the camp as the natural product of capitalism, whereas anyone in his right mind had to see that Auschwitz had nothing to do with capitalism or any other economic system, but that it was the monstrous product of sick minds and perverted souls. One could respect one's believing comrades and still more than once mutter to oneself with a shake of the head: madness, what madness! But the intellectuals fell silent and they found no arguments when the others, as described above, reproached them for the emptiness of their intellectual values."
Jean Améry, "At the Mind's Limits"
Thanks for the quotes, Charles. I didn't know that author. I'll see if I can find his book. There are two claims that particularly called my attention: (1) "For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits." Why should the unbelieving person necessarily submit to the force of reality? Does this not actually depend on the temperament or psychological makeup of the individual unbelieving person? (2) "But the intellectuals fell silent and they found no arguments when the others, as described above, reproached them for the emptiness of their intellectual values." In what sense are such values empty? In the sense that they're, e.g., merely "subjective" or "individualistic"? And if they were, what are the reasons for the reproach? Are they epistemic reasons or just pragmatic reasons? If the latter, don't Christians and Marxists want more from their beliefs than their having pragmatic value?
ReplyDeleteIn those passages, Améry has a very specific adverse circumstance or extreme situation in mind: reality in the death camp at Auschwitz for an intellectual, the kind of intellectual he calls skeptical-humanist. Along the way he contrasts his personal experience having been this kind of intellectual with the experience of former artisans, non-intellectual professions, religiously and politically inclined intellectuals in the same camp. The account is haunting. Of the (2) emptiness in the passage above, Améry writes that in the camp the ‘value’ of rational-analytic thinking led straight into a “tragic dialectic of self-destruction” (p. 10), determined mostly by the SS tormentors and what he calls the consistent camp logic of destruction. Of the (1) force to which the intellectual submits there, it seems he means the “power structure of the SS” (p 12.), which he thinks the unbelieving intellectual in the camp was accustomed to subject to critical analysis and “yet in the same intellectual process to capitulate to it.”
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarifications, Charles. I'll have to read the book to get a better idea of Améry's views because it still appears to me that his claims are unfair when applied to certain skeptics or unbelievers.
ReplyDeleteRight, thank you for the exchange. The book is much more subtle than these isolated quotations. It is a highly specific account of the intellectual in Auschwitz, and it is difficult for we readers unfamiliar with this particular experience of "shit hitting the fan." One other place in the text worthing looking at in relation to your original post is the account of the fear of death for non-prisoners, and the fear of dying at the death camp.
DeleteLast night, I remembered an interview with a Polish woman who first lived at the Warsaw Ghetto and was then sent to Auschwitz that I watched two weeks ago. She's a very old woman living in Buenos Aires. At one point, someone asked her what she thought while in the camps and her reply was that she could only think about food and that she even dreamed about food. They were hungry and thirsty all the time. I wonder whether Améry's picture is not overintellectualized. Be that as it may, the story of this Polish woman was terrifying and she said that, because of her experience at the camps, she became agnostic. She was a teenager at the time.
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