Maverick Philosopher

Is Religion Escapist?

Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it. 

You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.

Image credit. 

What is Man?

He is an animal, but also a spirit -- and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness.  Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt).  Man envisages a higher life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it.  And then he puzzles himself over whether this envisagement is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life. 

More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal, which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status.  He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology.  The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as revelatory of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine.  It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it. 

Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ."  (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265)  We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short.  And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance!  The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is, assuming that one has significance.  Not knowing what it is, one can question whether it is. 

Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology.  Undiluted Christianity is his answer.  My answer:   live so as to deserve immortality.  Live as if you have a higher destiny.  It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized.  Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life.  Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.

You could be wrong, no doubt.  But if you are wrong, what have you lost?  Some baubles and trinkets.  If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe.  I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.

The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping.   We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.

Running as Equalizer?

Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:

Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists.  We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race -- and thus in life -- is a measure of our moral fiber.  Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour.  The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more  appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out.  A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him.  Hard work matters.

In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't. 

It levels the disparities of class and status and income.  You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk.  You won't be asked and no one cares.  The road to Boston or Mt. Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away.  One does not run to shmooze.  This is not golf.  Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'  

But in quest of one's personal best the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself.  We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain.  In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see.  Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand -- or fall.

So although running flattens the socio-economic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.

Life is hierarchical.