Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not susceptible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it before when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of religion -- to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or to the judgments I make about it.  I am sitting on a chair, not a concept of a chair.  The chair, like God, is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence, so much so that it is plausibly argued that 'person' in application to God can only be used analogically.

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority as a person delightfully transcendent of my acts of thinking.

It is interesting to observe that it is built into the very concept God that God cannot be a concept.  This concept is the concept of something that cannot by its very nature be a concept.  This is the case whether or not God exists.  The concept God is the concept of something that cannot be a concept even if nothing falls under the concept.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  Or at least it is bogus to make this oppositin for the reason Buber supplies.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.  Suppose Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary each summit by a different route.  Mary cannot denigrate the accomplishments of the males by asserting that they didn't really summit on the ground that their respective termini were merely immanent to their routes.  She cannot say, "You guys didn't really reach the summit; you merely reached a point on your map."

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.  Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Child, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"

I believe I have established my point against Buber conclusively.  But to appreciate this, you must not confuse the question I am discussing with another question in the vicinity.

Suppose one philosopher argues to an unmoved mover, another to an ultimate ground of moral obligation, and a third to an absolute source of truth.  How do we know that thesee three notionally distinct philosophical Gods are the same as each other in reality and the same as the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, in reality?  This is an important question, but not the one I am addressing in this entry.  The present question is whether a philosophical treatment of God transforms God into a mere concept or mere idea.  The answer is resoundingly in the negative.  Such a treatment purports to treat of the very same real God that is addressed in prayer, seen in mystical vision, and  sensed in the deliverances of conscience.

Related articles

Martin Buber and "Bogus Grandeur" - A Note on Saul Bellow's Literary Treatment of Buber in "Herzog"

Comments

[Elliott]

Bill, thanks for the stimulating post.

It seems to me that if someone maintains the non-sequitur, then he presupposes the following:

1) a denial of epistemological realism (and perhaps a denial of the correspondence theory of truth); and
2) an affirmation of epistemological subjectivism.

In other words, he assumes that human minds cannot link with reality, but that we can only grasp our own representations. Or, at least he assumes this with regard to human thought about God.

If this assumption is false (and I believe it is), then the argument is unsound.

[Judith Stein]

Julia Child (no "s")

[Bill Vallicella]

You're welcome, Elliot.

[Bill Vallicella]

Thanks for the correction, Judith.

[Josh]

I completely agree that this division between "the God of Abraham" and "the God of the philosophers" is superficial, at best.

Yet I'm not hearing what you're hearing in this Buber passage (maybe more context would help). I don't get the impression that his position is somehow that all ideas or thoughts lack mind-transcendent referents. Rather, since he seems to define "philosopher" as someone whose business it is to explain phenomena within the bounds of a conceptual system, his conclusion re: "the God of the philosophers" is that such attempted "explanations" have an imaginary object as a referent rather than God himself. Why? Because any "God" that doesn't transcend any and all explanatory systems exists only in the mind of the "philosopher."

Even if we read him this way, though, it doesn't get him off the hook; for his definition of "philosopher" is irresponsibly narrow and silly (Plato and Aquinas would fail to be philosophers, for example).

[Peter Lupu]

Bill,

Being in a charitable mood of late, let me offer an analogy that may nudge us towards a better understanding of Buber's fideism.

Imagine that we ask a person, call him Frank, to provide us with a very detailed description of his most desirable ideal partner (soul-mate, if you like) complete with a physical description, psychological traits, and everything else that is important for Frank to find in his ideal partner. Call anything satisfying this description X.

Imagine further that we convince Frank that we are able to obtain a proof that X exists based upon a massive database we have about every human being on earth. Let us suppose that we do so and prove that there exists a unique, one and only one, person fitting all the components Frank listed in his description of an ideal partner. Of course, Frank never meets X eye to eye, flesh to flesh, mind to mind: i.e., in Russelian terminology, Frank never has any "knowledge by acquaintance" of X.

Does it make sense to say any of the following about Frank: "Frank passionately loves X"; "Frank is madly in love with X"; "Frank intensely cares about X"; "Frank misses X", etc,?

Of course, none of these things can be sensibly said about Frank's attitudes towards X; from Frank's point of view our proof, assuming he believes it, that X exists is internally (emotionally, etc.,) impotent. Frank's knowledge of X is (again in Russelian language) limited to "knowledge by description" only. And such knowledge is ineffectual to cause the above attitudes.

What Frank needs now is to actually meet X; i.e., to have knowledge by acquaintance of X; only then will he know whether X is indeed a suitable object of the above list of attitudes. In the absence of such an encounter, our proof that X exists will always remain, from Frank's point of view, a mere "idea" without concrete reality. This is not to say that Frank thinks that our proof is merely a proof of an idea. We can safely assume that Frank believes that we have proven that a unique X exists as a concrete and real person. Still, in the absence of a concrete encounter, of knowledge by acquaintance, X is neither real nor concrete from Frank's point of view. Hence, Frank cannot form any of the above attitudes towards X.

I think that Buber can be interpreted as saying that proofs for the existence of God, even if convincing and accepted as such, are ineffectual in inducing suitable attitudes towards God similar to the one's we listed regarding Frank because they only provide us with knowledge by description of God. Moreover, in the absence of such attitudes, belief in God is belief in an "idea"; to be sure an idea believed to be instantiated by a unique being, but nonetheless one which remains lacking in potency. What is needed for an all-embracing faith, so I suppose Buber maintains, is faith induced by knowledge by acquaintance.

Now, of course, the pivotal question arises: Can there be knowledge by acquaintance of God?

[Bill Vallicella]

>> I don't get the impression that his position is somehow that all ideas or thoughts lack mind-transcendent referents.<<

Where do I say or imply that?

[Bill Vallicella]

Peter,

We have a detailed definite description D. D specifies the attributes of Frank's dream lover. We are able to show that there is an x such that x satisfies D. Furthermore, x uniquely satisfies D because D is a definite description.

Does Frank love x? No. We agree on this.

I would put it this way. To love the being-uniquely-instantiated of a set (possibly complete) of lovable attributes is not to love the person who uniquely instantiates these attributes. Why not? Because to love whoever uniquely instantiates the attributes is not to love the particular person who in fact uniquely instantiates the attributes.

Because the loving regard is routed through a definite description which is general, it fails to 'harpoon' the particular person in her haecceity and ipseity.

So if Aquinas argues to a First Cause, he argues to whatever it is that satisfies the job description 'unique cause of the universe.' He cannot in that way reach God in his singularity, haecceity, ipseity. And Aquinas was well aware of this.

So far, we are on the same page. Unfortunately, Buber confuses the point I just made with the absurd notion that if discursive reason fails to get God in his haecceity, then it doesn't reach reality at all, but stops short at a concept or idea.

>>Moreover, in the absence of such attitudes, belief in God is belief in an "idea"; to be sure an idea believed to be instantiated by a unique being, but nonetheless one which remains lacking in potency.<<

I don't think so. If 'belief in God' means 'belief that God exists' then believing that there is a first cause is not believing that an idea exists.

[Josh]

>>'I don't get the impression that his position is somehow that all ideas or thoughts lack mind-transcendent referents.' Where do I say or imply that?<<

Sorry if I missed you here. I got the impression from this sentence:

>>When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.<<

I took this to be a rejection of a general claim that you take Buber to affirm.