“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)

Do you feel lucky to be here? How lucky do you have to be in order to require a special explanation of that luck? Some philosophers and scientists have argued that the very improbability of our being here, of the universe being constructed so as to allow the conditions for intelligent life, requires a special explanation, a God, or intelligent designer, behind the original conditions of the universe. Part of the impetus for such arguments comes from an awareness of how the development of the universe depends upon certain variables that are not derived from anything else, but which are traced back to certain original conditions within a primordial singularity or big bang. Supposedly, when one looks at the number of such variables and the possible values they could have taken, the possibility of a universe arising in which one gets things such as stars and planets, or any kind of matter of the sort we know, is so small as to defy understanding. Roger Penrose has calculated[1] the probability of a universe that might contain the preconditions for life as 1 in 10 raised to the 10¹²³ power.  (That is 10 followed by more zeroes than there are particles in the universe.) According to this, all of us have pulled out the one lucky ticket out of gazillion-zillion-zillion losers in the cosmic lottery. Do you feel that lucky?

The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, has suggested[2] that this type of line of reasoning makes a simple logical mistake, jumping from a very obvious restriction on the type of things we can expect to observe to a very dubious conclusion about the origin of those conditions. Physicists sometimes call the starting point and ending points of this jump the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle, respectively. The Weak Anthropic Principle is sometimes stated as a recognition of the observation biases we find due to the limited range of possibilities we can observe. Just as we can only expect to see, with our naked eye, the small range of electro-magnetic phenomena that are visible to us; so we can only expect to observe the small range of possible configurations of the universe that are compatible with our existence. If we exist, then the conditions necessary for our existence must obtain. Stated this way, this seems just about as obvious as anything could be. If I am here, then none of the things that could have prevented it have happened: I haven’t been shot, run over by a car, had a heart attack, or any of the other things that could have prevented me from being here. I am not particularly lucky in having avoided these things. That I have avoided them doesn’t require any special explanation. Of course, if I am here, then none of these things happened, but there is no special reason that they didn’t; they might have. The Strong Anthropic Principle suggests that these original conditions, that the universe is capable of supporting intelligent life, are somehow necessary, and it is this necessity that requires special explanation. If, as I was walking over to my office, a car attempted to run over me and mysteriously swerved at the last moment; if no matter how determined the attempts to take my life, they were somehow thwarted (as in a Pink Panther film), then I would be lucky in a way that requires explanation. The question is whether the origin of the universe is like this kind of case. Dennett merely points out that this does not at all follow from the weak version of the principle.

William Lane Craig has suggested[3] that the origin of the universe is, indeed, more like this kind of case, comparing it to a firing squad that misses mysteriously. If 25 marksmen with perfectly functioning rifles all train their guns on a man at 50 paces, it is vastly improbable that they all should miss. If one of them typically misses such a shot only 1 in a 100 times, the probability of them all missing is 1 in 100²⁵ or 10^50. One would not expect a miss if they fired once a second from the beginning of the universe 10¹⁷ seconds ago until now. If such a thing happened, we would most certainly require a special explanation, such as that they all disobeyed orders and missed on purpose.  And, of course, this improbability is small compared to the super-super-astronomical improbability of the original conditions of the current universe according to calculations such as Penrose’s.

The real question is whether the assumptions that allows us to draw inferences in cases such as these apply to the original conditions of the universe. When we calculate probabilities we draw inferences from the formal structure of a situation based upon certain assumptions, chief of which are (1) The choices between the different possibilities are completely random; and (2) We are considering the probability of one unique instance, specifiable in advance. We cannot know to any degree of certainty that either of these conditions obtain in the case of the origins of the universe. Let us consider the second assumption first. When a meteor makes it through the atmosphere, it is certain to hit somewhere; though of all the innumerable places it could hit, it is improbable that it will hit me. After the fact, if we find the unlucky person that it hits, even though they are only one of the millions of people it could have hit, the fact that it hit them requires no special explanation; it had to hit someone after all. When we reach into a hopper full of 1000 white balls, each with a number, and pull out number 367, the odds of pulling that number out were 1 in 1000. Yet surely, I would be silly to thank my lucky stars for pulling off a 1 in 1000 shot. Each of the other indistinguishable possibilities was also a 1 in a 1000 shot, and there were 1000 of them, hence it was certain that I would get some number or other. If, on the other hand, there were one special number, specified in advance, and I was able to choose that and win the lottery, this would seem to require some special explanation. Again, this assumes that this instance is unique. If I repeated my attempt 1000 times, it would be even money that I would get the lucky number at least once. Imagine that in 999 other rooms, unknown to me, there are 999 other identical hoppers with other people choosing 1 of the 1000 balls. I may feel lucky, but the odds were that one of us would pick the lucky ball. Dennett, along with many other thinkers, has pointed out that if this universe is not unique, if innumerable other multiverses are playing the cosmic lottery, odds are that someone had to win, so it is not surprising that we find that we did. But, in this case, the very nature of the singularity from which the universe arose seems to prevent us from knowing whether this roll of the dice is unique or not.

Likewise, we have no way of knowing if the choices between the various different values of the constants in Penrose’s calculation are equally likely and taken at random. It turns out that 81 times 114,839 is equal to 9301959, the exact date of my birth. Is this a lucky stroke? Are the gods of mathematics preordaining the universe to my amusement? After all, there are 10 million other 7 digit numbers that could be the answer to that problem. But just as 2 times 2 couldn’t be anything but 4, so we may think there is nothing else that could be the answer to this particular multiplication problem. Are the different possible values of the cosmic constants equally likely? Could there be something that constrains them or renders them necessary, of which we cannot be aware? Again the very fact that the causal chains, which provide us knowledge, can reach back no farther than the Big Bang, renders it impossible, in principle, to answer these questions. In such cases, the conditions that allow us to draw inferences from probabilities, simply cannot be known to apply.

I am not enthusiastic about the Anthropic Principle as evidence for God’s existence, but I do like to think about it, since it reveals interesting things about how we think about chance and Providence. If this universe is the result of an intelligent agency, the most interesting thing about it will not be its existence, no matter how unlikely: Note that in the above cases there was nothing interesting, requiring special explanation, about me being the one being hit by the meteor or being the one who wins the ball lottery if 1000 others are playing as well. There was nothing about me, specifiable in advance, that made me unique. Yet to me it makes all the difference.[4] There have been about 106 billion human lives in this unlikely universe, of which about 7 billion are going on now, about 5.8 percent.[5] Of these, 80% live in abject poverty[6], with an even larger proportion of those who lived in the past, leading even more miserable lives, subject to the worst kinds of pains, fears, and misfortunes.  So only approximately 5 of 100[7] of the humans ever to have lived has ever been as fortunate as you. As we sit here at our computers, full of belly, warm of foot, healthy and well contented, we can see that there is nothing about us that could have been specified in advance that renders us more deserving than any of the other human souls to inhabit this unlikely universe, sole supporter of intelligent life, the winner of the cosmic lottery. Yet here we are. Do you feel lucky?

[2] Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Ch. 7.

[3] “The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle,” http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/teleo.html#text16 .

[4] I’ve written about this before with respect to the Problem of Evil: http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/evil.htm .

[5] http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx .

[6] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats .

[7] 0.0587 or (.2 x .058) +(.05 x .942).

Imagine explaining Christmas to an alien. Surely it would be strange to attempt to explain Santa Claus to someone completely unacquainted with the custom. Even once one got past the difficulty of explaining the religious significance of the holiday that celebrates God’ s redemption of humanity by his being born as a child and the tradition of giving gifts as an imitation of this ultimate gift, there would still remain even more and greater strangeness. We give our children gifts but pretend that they are not from us, but from this imaginary kind-hearted Santa Claus, who watches the naughty and the nice and grants the wishes of all the world’s children. We smile with tenderness at the innocence of our children as they absorb this belief and allow it to tinge the appearance of presents under a tree on Christmas Eve with a magical, mysterious glow. And we grieve, in a way, when the illusion is lost to the inevitable advance of our children’s knowledge of the practicalities that govern our world and the laws that govern the human heart. Why? Why do we do this, and why do we feel a great loss when we come to see it all as humbug?

It is surely no virtue to lie, nor is it worthwhile fostering an ability to be deceived, even about things that we might wish were so. The value of believing cannot lie in a willed ignorance of what is right before our eyes, but in a hope for a deeper truth that lies beneath the surface of things. All magic lies in there being more to things than meets the eye, in there being hidden virtues and powers hidden within the heart of things that cannot be revealed in their appearances without special probing and prompting.

It may seem that there are no two things more dissimilar than scientific knowledge and belief in Santa Claus, but I believe that there is a deep connection between them that reveals the value of belief of this sort. The scientist learns to probe beneath the surface of things, to believe that within the flux and chaos of normal experience there lie hidden laws of nature that exhibit themselves only to the initiated under controlled conditions. The natures of things, as Plato saw, exist eternally and purely, and can only be revealed in things as they come to fulfill them in time, in the absence of interference and impurity. A scientist must see in the complex morass of empirical data, a hidden structure. He must have confidence that at the heart of chaos, lies law; that the random ramblings of the most unruly particle is in the grips of a form, a law that will be revealed by its behavior only over time under pure enough experimental conditions. The scientists who sit and wait in the super-conducting super collider for the particle predicted by the exquisitely beautiful mathematics of their physical theory are waiting for Santa Claus.

Just as the scientists can work only in the hope the mathematical order to which his mind responds is reflected in the order of nature, so in the innocent heart of a child there lie the urgings of beneficence and love. Like the secret forms of the natural world, hidden in its complexity, these seeds lie amongst our passions and the practical requirements of our world, which interfere with their expression. Just as the scientist believes that reality, in the grips of a form, in the fullness of time, will exhibit the actions that mathematical laws prescribes, so the innocent, pure soul in the grips of these most scared urgings of the heart (as Simone Weil calls them) hopes for good rather than evil, that kindness will be returned, that their letters to Santa will be answered.

According to Weil, we grieve the loss of belief, because this ability to feel ourselves in the grip of eternal forms, forms that express themselves in this world only in pure circumstances in the fullness of time, whether these forms be forms of natural law or forms of life and love; this ability is the most sacred part of human nature. I don’t think this has much to do with the gullibility of believing in pleasant things, whether they be religious dogmas or cute fairy tales. There is a rationality to the belief of the scientist and the child. The things that matter, in both science and life, are more than what meets the eyes; they are things whose expression requires the fullness of time and purity of condition. We are sometimes mistaken in our ascription of form to the natural world, but only the man who believes, beyond all hope, in the face of the fear of error, that there is an order at the heart of motion of the planets, will discover it, as Kepler did. Often kindness is repaid with pain, and no unknown stranger provides hidden acts of kindness to delight us, but only those who keep alive the secret urgings of their heart to see the good, and expect it in all men in the fullness of time, will have the courage to build the types of conditions, as rare and difficult as a super-conducting super collider, in which these urgings can come to fruition. Only those that continue to hear the hidden ringing of the bell, inside the hollow metal shell, will discover one day as they sit back exhausted in the silent gleaming, after arranging presents quietly under a magically glistening tree, that there is indeed a Santa Claus, and that it is them.

David Banach
Department of Philosophy
Saint Anselm College

This paper was presented October 23, 2009 a the Conference on the Value of Human Life at the Bioethics Institute of Fransciscan University at Steubenville

Abstract
Powerpoint

The Ethics of Infinite Love

Click above to listen or right click to download.

And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.  And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. —Mark 12:30-31

If a thing loves it is infinite.— William Blake

Love goes beyond all bounds. Two things loved with all one’s heart must be equal. If you love others exactly as yourself, there will be no way of choosing between them, or between them and you.

It is often thought that a teleological ethical system, one that derives its theory of moral actions from a theory of the good, cannot account for the intrinsic value and dignity of human life. Utilitarianism, for example, is often criticized because it seems to make the overall happiness of a group justify sacrificing the values of the individual. The needs of the many seem to outweigh the needs of the few. But this only applies if the goods being balanced are finite. No number of finite goods can balance an infinite good.

While we shouldn’t pretend that using mathematical language gives our ethical intuitions more precision and certainty than they have, I do believe that there is something to be learned from looking at the way in which mathematical concepts of infinity work. Just as it may seem strange that no collection of finite numbers will add up to an infinity, so it may seem strange that no number of grasshopper lives will add up to a human life. Infinite quantities also confound our intuitions when we add finite numbers to them (no matter how much you add to infinity, you still just have infinity) and when we consider adding infinity to infinity (no matter how many infinities you add to infinity, you still just have infinity).¹ So it may seem strange that no matter how much finite value we add to a human life, it is still not worth more than another; or that no matter how many human lives we take together they still do not justify the willful destruction of one human life. Much of what is strange about the value of human life is part and parcel of the strangeness of infinity.

What makes the value of a human life infinite? This is a bit harder to say, and while here I am mainly interested in drawing out the consequences of this proposition rather than defending it,I do think that there are two useful things one can say: (1) A will that loves goes beyond all bounds. When you care about something, all other things being equal, you care about it always and everywhere. To feel joy is to desire to feel it always. To grieve at the loss of a child, is to grieve for all the lost children, wherever they may be. Though our will finds itself impotent to create the realities of the things it values, the reach of its commitments is not bounded by space or time. (2) The will can order its values into systems of commitments that transcend the individual values from which they arise, in fact, the will may be defined by such abilities. Our love for a person is more than just the sum of our enjoyments of the moments we’ve spent with them. Just as a melody is more than just the sum of its notes, the will synthesizes our values into new unities that transform the individual values as they come to exist within the new whole. One of the great discoveries of Gregor Cantor was that there are levels of infinity even greater than the infinity of the natural numbers. The number of real numbers on the number line (including both the rational and the irrational numbers) is a level of infinity (aleph one) that cannot be reached by adding any number of infinities. This new level of infinity arises from taking the power set, the set of all subsets, of the natural numbers. In an infinite world of values, the will has an unbounded ability to synthesize new values, integrating novel combinations of commitments in new ways. We can love things in more ways than there are things to love.

What would an ethics of infinite love look like? It will not generate a rational procedure to determine with certainty what you should do or to be sure that you have done what is required. There will be no unique way of balancing infinite values against each other, nor any way of satisfying the infinite demands of our values. It will not spare you the anguish of moral choice nor the urgings of conscience.

With no recipe for action, it will be the character of our love that will matter rather than the characteristics of our action. The two commandments quoted above are the best summary of such an ethics, and they might be summarized more succinctly as “Love the good without bounds” Or as C.S. Lewis puts it, “act in time, as beings destined for eternity.”²

An ethics of infinite love would also mean that we can never meet the infinite obligations that our love places on us. Once you start caring about the hunger of children, you will find that there are more of them than you can even think of, let alone feed. Once you allow yourself to feel the infinite value of each set of eyes that look at you, you will feel yourself to be, in Dostoevsky’s words “responsible to all, for all.”

This is not meant to be an invitation to despair; we were given wills that, while impotent in their power, were infinite in their reach. It is the depth of our care that leads to its infinity; we do not cease caring about things simply because we cannot achieve them: We feel our loves, for the things we care most deeply about, as a thirst for which there is no quenching³, from a cupful of goods that knows no bottom. The ethics of infinity reveals us to be creatures always in need of redemption, but also as beings capable of living in its hope, in the draft of a current that ends beyond the horizon.

—————————–

1This is more precisely stated by saying that all ordinal infinities (those arrived at by adding one more) all have the same cardinal number (aleph null); all are still equinumerous with the natural numbers or integers, or are still countable infinities.

2This is a paraphrase of The Screwtape Letters, number XV.

3This language is reminiscent of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 113.

The members of the Philosophy Department were asked which book they thought would be important to teach to students in an introductory philosophy course. Their answers are below. You can listen to them all at once or you can click on the name of the individual professor below to listen to each professor’s answer.

All answers in one mp3 file.
click the link to play or right click to download.

-Professor Robert Anderson

David Hume-An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-Concerning-Human-Understanding/dp/002353110X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222103665&sr=1-3

-Professor Robert Augros

Professor Augros argued that the dialogue between teacher and student was more essential to the philosophical process than any book.

-Professor David Banach

Euclid’s Elements

http://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-T-L-Heath-Translation/dp/1888009195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222103502&sr=8-1

Albert Camus- The Stranger

http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720200/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222102515&sr=1-2

-Professor Montague Brown

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

Saint Augustine’s Confessions

http://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Confessions-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0192833723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104161&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/Englishconfessions.html

-Professor Drew Dalton

Marcus Aurelius-The Meditations

http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Penguin-Classics-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/0140449337/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104796&sr=8-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

Slavoj Zizek

Violence-Big-Ideas-Small-Books

http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Big-Ideas-Small-Books/dp/0312427182/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222283299&sr=1-1

-Father John Fortin

Saint Anselm- Monologium

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-monologium.html

Proslogium

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-proslogium.html

-Professor Susan Gabriel

Bertrand Russell- The Problems of Philosophy

http://www.amazon.com/Problems-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/160597899X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104969&sr=8-3

Online edition

http://books.google.com/books?id=33jP5wdnt7YC&dq=the+problems+of+philosophy&pg=PP1&ots=iYnhLWaJnI&sig=IsMx9A1hbcpsZWLGZFZ40Ihs56Y&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA3,M1

-Professor Sarah Glenn

Sophocles- Oedipus Rex

http://www.amazon.com/Oedipus-Rex-Literary-Touchstone-Sophocles/dp/1580495931/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105258&sr=8-1

-Professor Matthew Konieczka

Leo Tolstoy-The Death of Ivan Ilyich

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Ilyich-Stories-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1840224533/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105435&sr=1-3

Plato- The Apology

http://www.amazon.com/Euthyphro-Apology-Crito-Phaedo-Philosophy/dp/0879754966/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105582&sr=1-4

Online Edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

-Professor Thomas Larson

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

Josef Pieper-The Philosophical Act

http://www.amazon.com/Josef-Pieper-Anthology/dp/0898702267/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222282616&sr=8-2

Michael Novak, Belief and Unbelief
http://www.amazon.com/Belief-Unbelief-Self-Knowledge-Michael-Novak/dp/1560007419

-Professor Joseph Spoerl

Plato- The Gorgias

http://www.amazon.com/Gorgias-Penguin-Classics-Plato/dp/0140449043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222106429&sr=8-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

Plato- The Apology

http://www.amazon.com/Euthyphro-Apology-Crito-Phaedo-Philosophy/dp/0879754966/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105582&sr=1-4

Online Edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

-Professor Kevin Staley

Plato- The Euthyphro

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

Tags: Teaching

Sometimes it’s hard to get things started. Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC) was reported by Aristotle to have argued that it was impossible. Before you can cover the first half of a journey, you have to cover the first fourth, and before that the first eight, and the first sixteenth, and so on . . . (Though Zeno’s argument is aimed at the difficulty of reaching the end of the journey, Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that the real difficulty is ever getting started.) It would seem that even getting started requires an infinite number of finite tasks. With such a daunting task in front of us, one can see how we might get discouraged.

You might think that just doing anything, including lying in bed, will make a start of things, albeit not a good one. Every journey begins with a single step, and it doesn’t even have to be in the right direction. But this is really not right either. Another of Zeno’s paradoxes,  the Arrow in its Flight, shows why. If we look at an arrow at any instant of its flight, as in a single frame of a motion picture, there is no motion. At each instant it is just what it is and where it is. It isn’t anything or anywhere else. At the next instant it is something and somewhere else, as when you advance the film one frame at a time. The motion seems to have occurred between the frames or between the instants. Where does the change lie, and how can it begin?

Zeno was right to think that if time were a series of discrete frozen instants, then change would be impossible. To change you have to start being something different from what you are. But if at any moment you are just what you are, how can you do this? The existentialists were wrong to think that you are just your existence at this instant; just as their opponents were wrong to think that our essence was a finished frozen thing that precedes us. If the past, or the present, were just itself, how could it ever be any more. But all things are in motion. All things fall,  tumbling through time. The rhythm and timbre and tone of a thing’s travels are its very nature. We never start from a dead stop, and Zeno was right to say it was impossible.

We always find ourselves in the midst of many natural motions. Beginning is always just a matter of nudging and channeling the momentum we already have into a new pattern. We find ourselves already moving to the beats of our bodies, to the waves of the seasons, and the revolutions of night and day. The impetus of our past actions, our habits, and desires drive us forward, constrained by our connections and commitments. A beginning simply guides these forces to converge into patterns that have a new type of unity, an integrity distinct from the flux from which it arose..

Without even thinking about it, you can be swirled into action of this semester, your life guided by the schedules, habits, and assignments that will swallow you up if you let them. Something is beginning, even if you aren’t the one starting it. And when those beginnings, and all of your beginnings, have reached their end, the world will still be starting anew. It can’t help it. It will go on without you. Streams of the world’s flux will converge in you and then part again. The questions is how much of you will remain as it flows away from you. On the one hand you must exert enough guidance on the momentum of your habits and circumstances so that you become a separate little stream with a beginning and ending of your own. Yet you must also harmonize your ends and your rhythms to leave a mark on the streams that run along side you and that will endure beyond you. Every beginning sees to its end and aims beyond it. If you can guide the momentum of each day to come to an end that you create, and if that end aims at empowering a new day to its own end, then the day will have been well begun. And well begun is more than half done; well begun implies a good end.

Of the three Christian virtues (faith, hope, and love), hope is the one least often discussed. Just as Faith is belief that goes beyond proof, and loves is care that goes beyond just deserts, hope is commitment that outruns our abilities. It is allowing our reach to extend beyond the grasp of intellect. Hope engages the will fully in a project to whose end our mind cannot see. Why is it a virtue?

A will that hopes will sometimes encounter successes that it could not have anticipated. If you are drowning in the middle of the Atlantic with no help in sight, if you continue to struggle to keep afloat to the utter end of your abilities, you are more likely to encounter a miraculous rescue than those who give up earlier. Yet this is not the source of hope’s value. After all, the help that is to save you is unanticipated (or else it wouldn’t be hope that kept you going, but rational calculation) and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, will not arrive.

The real value of hope is based upon the very nature of the human will and the values it establishes. Human reality consists of events that unfold in time and will not fully be what they are until completion. The sweetness of anticipation, established within the tension of the first few notes of a melody, only exists in relationship to the release of that tension in the melody’s resolution. All gestures, actions, and intentions project themselves forward in time to a completion that defines them. To care about something is to set your will towards the future. Yet the power of our minds and our actions to see and control the future is limited. Is it rational to leap where you cannot look? Each step towards the future is a step into darkness. Imagine walking in pitch darkness with no way of seeing when a solid wall would block our path or an endless abyss would open before us. Trapped in a dark cave with the possibility of walls and precipices at each moment, it might seem foolish to stride confidently in the direction of our dreams. Better to inch our way, toeing the line into the future cautiously to feel our way into what we cannot see. But to imagine a life like that is to see another level of rationality from which the leap of faith is the only rational alternative. For to never to proceed further than we can see, is to live a cramped, crippled life where the full scope of our values, radiating forward in time, cannot exist. The leaps and capers that define the type of caring and valuation that make us human would be impossible under those circumstances. A dancer who truly loved her dance, would find it necessary to leap into the darkness, for the very love of leaping, even if they could not know what lay ahead. Hope is a virtue because the very values that define us extend in time beyond the reach of our minds and bodies.

Just as Faith sees truths that will only unfold in the fullness of time, and Love sees beyond the reality of a person at a moment and into the person that might be; Hope gives itself over to the values that are always extending to the future. It is the nature of our loves and of our care, under the unlimited power of our will, to extend themselves beyond the limits of our power, to inspire us to reach beyond our grasp. To feel joy is to desire to feel it always. To grieve at the loss of a child, is to grieve for all the lost children. Though infinite in reach, our will finds itself impotent to always create the realities of which it dreams. Hope calls us to an impossible task and indicts us for our failures. To hope is to realize that the things you care about cannot be protected through your power alone, while resolving to care about them still. It is to see yourself as a creature in need of redemption. It is a cry for help, both to our fellow travelers and to the author of our travels.

There is also a fundamental part of our nature that fears false hopes. Our calls for help often go unheeded. There are many safe goods within the here and now that we must abandon if we are to leap into the darkness. Camus, in The Plague saw this danger well when he warned that for

those others who aspired beyond and above the human individual toward something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer. . . If others, however, Rieux could see them in the doorways of houses, passionately embracing and gazing hungrily at one another in the failing sunset glow, had got what they wanted, this was because they had asked for the one thing that depended on them solely. And as he turned the corner of the street where Grand and Cottard lived, Rieux was thinking it was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love should enter, if only now and then, into their reward.

But this is to make an error that Camus, himself, recognized in other places: The formidable love that makes human life worth living, and which allows us to sometimes enter into our reward, is only possible by leaping into the future, into events that do not depend solely upon ourselves. Just as Camus saw that Dostoevsky was right that one cannot express and be true to one’s love of humanity by torturing humans, so one cannot keep alive our love of human values, which naturally pulls us beyond the moment, beyond what we can control, by restricting ourselves to what is only humanly possible. Love is not content with the possible but carries us beyond to will, for those we love and what we care about, things towards which we cannot see our way. Hope is the only condition under which beings like us, beings with infinite but impotent wills, can continue to care. For beings such as this, to fear false hope is to despair.

Tags: Albert Camus, Christianity, Hope, process, virtue, will

There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, ‘laws, conscience, faith,’ and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he said. . . . And he was punished for that… that is, . . . he was sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometres in the dark . . . Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion kilometres, stood still, looked round and lay down across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ . . . “Well, is he lying there now?” “That’s the point, that he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and went on.” “What an ass!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently. “Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometres? It would take a billion years to walk it?” . . . “Well, well, what happened when he arrived?” “Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in; before he had been there two seconds, . . . he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometres but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power.” (The Brothers Karamazov , Book XI, Chapter IX.)

What do you do when you have lost hope? Do you continue to pour water frantically onto a fire which continues to burn out of control? Do you brush your teeth on the day of your execution? Do you continue writing the 7^th chapter of your 25 chapter novel as your vitality ebbs away on the last day of your life?

In some ways our age is characterized, more than anything else, by a type of despair. All of us are in despair in some respects. Most of us have despaired of escaping death; of persisting in any of our earthly activities without end; of holding onto the things we care about forever. Some of us have despaired of being the person we hope to be, of loving the people we care about as we should. Some of us have despaired of being able to transform the world; of repairing all wrongs; of helping all those in need. Much of our lives takes the form of escaping or dealing with these and other types of despair. The question of the logic of despair is the central question of our time.

Some of our actions have meaning only within the context of a completed whole in which they make sense and which constitutes their value. It would seem that a loss of faith in the possibility of the completion of the whole should destroy our ability to take these types of actions seriously. (This might appear to be the case in each of the examples above.)

It may seem that sometimes we are still capable of throwing ourselves into other activities and values that are not constituted by the whole in which we have lost faith. We can still enjoy a sandwich even after we give up on saving our house from the fire. Sometimes we view this as healthy, as when we throw ourselves into volunteer work after having lost out beloved child; and sometimes as unhealthy, as when we lose ourselves in alcohol or video games after flunking out of school.

Irrespective of how we make the distinction between these good and bad ways of escaping despair into values that are not affected by it, the story from Dostoevsky above suggests a more fundamental way of dealing with despair, even with respect to the very values that are constituted by the faith we have lost. It suggest that it is illogical to abandon these values even in the face of despair, despite the fact that it may appear paradoxical to continue to pursue them; that it is illogical to stop caring for what we love even under conditions in which our love cannot find expression.

What is the argument? Why is failing to walk in the direction of your dreams illogical even when you have lost faith in those dreams? Is it enough to be on your way, even if you have lost faith in the destination?

The debate between Platonists and Aristotelians is one of the most ancient of philosophic issues. This is an informal panel discussion of the basic issues, featuring four members of the Philosophy Department at Saint Anselm College.

Click here to download or you can listen directly at the Philosophy Podcast site.

Participants

From the Philosophy Department at Saint Anselm College

Robert Anderson
Professor Anderson’s homepage

David Banach
Professor Banach’s homepage

Tom Larson
Professor Larson’s homepage

Kevin Staley
Professor Staley’s homepage

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In the search for wisdom what comes first?

Philosophy is the love or pursuit of wisdom, but where do you start? Aristotle’s Metaphysics deals with what he calls first philosophy, protē philosophia. (The word metaphysics simply means that which comes after the Physics: Aristotle’s book on first philosophy was placed after his book on Physics by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of Aristotle’s first editors.) This book deals with the question “what is substance?” What is the most fundamental type of being or existence, and what is the fundamental character of being in general? But why is this first philosophy; why would one start here?

In our daily lives, questions of this type are surely not the first we encounter, or even the first we start to reflect about. The first things we come upon are merely the events and objects and actions of the every day world (to pragmata in Greek, or what happens.) As we are swept into the whirlpool of events in our encounters with the flux of happenings, our fundamental impulse as human beings, as rational agents, is to make some sort of sense of it all, to get some type of control. As you wake up, as you walk out the door, as you start a semester, as you start the rest of your life; you need to know not only where you are, where you are starting, but the end of your journey, its goal, your purpose. Eschatology is the study of last things, of ultimate goals, of endings, of death and what lies beyond. To act wisely, to live intelligently, to make our passage through time a thing of order and beauty, we need to start by reflecting upon not what comes to us first, but upon last things, where we are going, our purpose.

Apart from the order in which we come upon things and are capable of understanding them, the order of knowing, there is also an order of being, the order in which the things came to be, or in which they are actually intelligibly structured. As you look at a complex machine, the order in which you come upon things as you take them apart does not make as much sense as the assembly instructions for putting it together, or, better yet, a schematic diagram of the different parts of the machine and their basic functions. For intelligible beings, the way they were put together reflects their end or purpose.

The love of wisdom is inspired by desire of the beauty of making our lives intelligible in just this way, of knowing what we are doing and why, of knowing where we are going and what lies at the end of each journey. To live our lives in this pursuit we must start not with the practical matters we encounter first, but with the ends and ultimate destinies of our actions. First philosophy investigates the intelligible being of the lives we live and the world in which we live them: what makes them what they are in the order of being and the ends to which they are ordered. Aristotle began at just the right place. To live today wisely, well, and beautifully, we must start at the end, as revealed in the ultimate beginnings of things.