The Paradoxes of Modernity: Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual 3030990567, 9783030990565

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The Paradoxes of Modernity Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual Zachary Simpson

The Paradoxes of Modernity

Zachary Simpson

The Paradoxes of Modernity Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual

Zachary Simpson University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Chickasha, OK, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-99055-8    ISBN 978-3-030-99056-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book was born out of innumerable conversations with my students, and it is to them that I dedicate this book. They have been my partners in dialogue, the critical voices in my head, and my fictive audience as I wrote this book. In particular, the following students have been invaluable discussion partners: Chelsea Davis (who asked the question upon which the First Paradox is based), Bridget Byers (whose work on Sloterdijk was inspirational), Jorden Wiggens, Chisum Lane, Daniel Pool, Kaitlyn Pool, Zach Quintero, Lexi Hoebing, Keisha Mohr, Tabatha Whiteside, Alicia Working, Maggie Wilson, Lindsey Brown, Morgan Wilson, Max Terrell, Preston Lowe, Alexis Avery, Raychel Murray, Claire Smith, Cory Clegg, and Korbyn Peebles. I cannot thank you all enough for your patience, intelligence, and humanity. Adam Bales, a distant friend and colleague, provided invaluable feedback on every chapter of the book. His eye for detail and clarity improved every chapter and idea. All other infelicities are my own. Other colleagues provided inspiration and support: Jordan Vinyard, who constantly encouraged me to write like myself and to do so unapologetically—you are an inspiration; Kevin Crow, whose problematization of modernity and conversations animated the central thrust of the book; and my mentors, Tad Beckman, Philip Clayton, and David Weddle, who, like good friends, have allowed me to become what I am. The final writing and revision of the book was made possible by a sabbatical leave granted by my institution, the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The desire to write and put words into the world would not be possible without the love of my mother and father, and my other mothers and fathers, Gary, Kelsie, and Brian. I’m sorry you didn’t get to read this one, Lito. The book begins and ends with my little girl. I love you, Cassia, both for your understated brilliance and your abundant love. Most of these chapters were written in anticipation of our time together. Thank you for letting me pretend with you. And to my loving partner, Kenzie. For loving me, supporting me, cajoling me, and watching as this book, much of which you inspired, took on a life of its own. Each chapter is dotted with your insights and our conversations, many of which altered the course of my thought.

Contents

1 Introduction: Modernity and the Paradoxes of Belief  1 2 Skepticism and Beyond: Skeptics and Kant on Critique and Ideals 17 3 Noble Lies, Fantasies, and Fictions: Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Foucault and the Demand for Fictions 31 4 The Religious Story: The Re-Envisioning of God in Contemporary Theology 55 5 Modernity and the Temporal Shift: Overcoming the Problem of Self-Deception 77 6 A Philosophy of Fictions: How Fictions Become Real 93 7 Art, Narrative, and Commitment: Creating Belief through Story111 8 Community: Creating Belief with Others133 9 Ritual: Creating Belief Through Repetition and Imagination157 vii

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Contents

10 The Subject: The Modern Individual Reconsidered185 11 Pretending Our Way to Fulfillment: Virtue and Risk in the Modern World207 12 The Work of Mourning225 Index235

About the Author

Zachary Simpson  is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Bradford Abelson Chair in Religious Reconciliation at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He acted as Associate Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (2006), editor of Adventures in the Spirit: New Essays in Philosophical Theology, by Philip Clayton (Fortress Press, 2008), and authored Life as Art: Aesthetics and the Creation of Self (Lexington Books, 2012).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Modernity and the Paradoxes of Belief

I am standing in my daughter’s room. The large blue eyes of a five-year-­ old look back at me, wondering and waiting. She has just asked me if I think “No Noggin,” a character on Curious George, is real. For a child with an immense imagination like my daughter, these questions matter. Before I have time to reply, she states, “P [the girl down the street] thinks they’re real.” She’s feeling me out, seeing if I agree. I don’t. I reply. “I think No Noggin is not real. He’s pretend.” I feel proud of my having been honest but also leaving her a place to still believe. My daughter, though, does something remarkable, something anyone who has had a child will recognize. She says something strange and brilliant that she may not even grasp. “Daddy, I don’t think he’s real, but he’s also real. I think he’s real but not real.” Out of thin air my little girl has created a third category of reality, somewhere in the dark hinterlands between reality and unreality. Those things we know aren’t real, but believe in. And that makes them real. After uttering this strange koan, she goes back to being a Color Fairy. This book is about that third category. Those things that are real because we believe in them. * * * Ever since the Enlightenment, those of us in the West have been asked to do two things. On the one hand, we must be more skeptical of any mythic, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_1

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imaginary, or nonprovable claims, both in the interest of truth and social order. On the other hand, we have participated in the greatest explosion of imaginary entities and ideas in the history of humankind—not just of gods and goddesses, but social orders, forms of identity, financial instruments, scientific aids to understanding, fictional universes. We are to be both skeptical and believe. Amidst this paradox, we no longer have the ability to commit to beliefs, or to realize those values we deem to be important. To be modern is to be trapped in this paradox. In what follows I want to tell the story of this confusing demand, and the personal, ethical, and social ways that it takes hold. I also want to tell the story of how we might resolve this paradox. The path towards realizing our invented values, I will argue, lies in art, community, and ritual. But in this path lies another paradox, too. * * * Four stories. We begin in the middle, where most stories begin. Our first story is to be found near the end of The Gay Science, where, after getting rid of the idols of old and arguing for a “poetics of existence,” Friedrich Nietzsche ventures an interesting and serious thought experiment. One day, Nietzsche muses, a demon might offer to us the following challenge: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…” (1974, Aphorism 341). This is followed by a bifurcation: there are those who will be terrified of such a notion, and those who will embrace it. For those that embrace it, such a challenge would be the “greatest weight” that lay behind all their actions. The meaning is not entirely clear, but we see well enough: Would you be willing to live your life over and over again? Would you do as you are doing now? What would you change? This challenge is dubbed the “eternal return,” as we would, presumably, have to eternally return to the same existence, faced with the same pressures. We see the eternal return again in the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s attempt to turn his ideas into fantastical literature. Thus it should come as no surprise that we are presented the eternal return again by way of a fictionalized conversation between Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s protagonist, and a troublesome dwarf. Zarathustra informs the dwarf that

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there are two eternal paths; one he does not name, but the other, as the dwarf adds, is circular. Afterwards, Zarathustra implores the dwarf to see that if there is such a thing as eternity, it is a repetition of what came before: “Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come?…And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane – must we not eternally return?” (1978, “On the Vision and the Riddle, #2). Zarathustra ends his declaration here, for this thought frightens him. We see many features here similar to Nietzsche’s first articulation of the eternal return. First, Nietzsche is always clear to frame the eternal return with fiendish and fictional characters, such as a demon and a meddlesome dwarf. The reader should know that the eternal return is a fiction. Secondly, this literary affect is intensified by Nietzsche’s use of words and phrases like “as if,” “must,” and “would.” We are to see the eternal return as a hypothetical means of adding weight, meaning, and significance to our lives. And this supposed fiction should both scare and embolden us. But something happens in Zarathustra. An escalation of the rhetoric. Nietzsche speaks in terms that make the eternal return seem real, not merely a fiction. And, if it is real, then there are consequences. Our lives might need reordering. Our actions take on even more weight. This would not be surprising for readers of Nietzsche. Throughout his work, he constantly cajoles his readers to create their own values, to pick-­ and-­choose from religious ideals, to even endorse, as he does in both Zarathustra and in the Genealogy of Morals, the value of a “noble lie” (see 1978, “The Song of Melancholy,” 3 and Dionysian Dithyrambs, 1; 1969, III: 19). That Nietzsche would create a fictional imperative, replete with demons and dwarves, that allows us to give greater weight and significance to our lives should not be seen as out-of-line with his thinking. Indeed, I would offer that it offers us an essential glimpse into how Nietzsche thinks. Yet this is only half the story. Nietzsche is also famous for offering us insight into the fact that we can know little, if anything, about the nature of nature. In his Gay Science, for example, he offers the following: “The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos – in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms” (1974, Aphorism #109; all citations of Nietzsche will

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hereafter refer to aphorism numbers unless otherwise indicated). Knowledge, Nietzsche claims, is more a matter of the accumulation and canalization of errors over time. Our belief that life has meaning is not true, but a life-preserving idea that has stuck around because it has allowed us to survive and endure. Other sacred bits of knowledge, like love and purpose and cosmic order, suffer the same fate: they are useful illusions, not deep insights into the world itself. Here is where the story gets convoluted. On the one hand, Nietzsche deeply needs for us to learn to love our lives the way they are, in all their messiness. Love of fate. Hence the eternal return. It is a means to an end. On the other hand, we cannot know if the eternal return exists. In fact, we’re almost certain it does not. The universe, in all its messiness, would not simply obey something as elegant as the circular repetition of time. We need the eternal return. The eternal return does not exist. This, I would offer, is one of the most pressing paradoxes of Nietzsche’s thought. And, as I will later argue, of European thought after the Enlightenment. We need fictions, myths, and stories. And yet we do not believe in them. We must imagine, but we must also be deeply critical of our imaginative stirrings. We must be both deluded and sincere. This is not only a philosophical problem, but a problem that sits at the heart of our social, personal, and political lives. Nietzsche himself did not see this as a problem. He even offered, in his early work, Human, all Too Human, that we need a “double brain,” (1984, #251) one for critical reason and one for imagination. Interpreters of Nietzsche have offered similar psychological approaches. Robert Solomon, for example, offers that Nietzsche requires “desirable untruths” in order to sustain his philosophy. As Solomon adds, “Lies can protect and inspire, and deception can serve noble ends. Self-deception sustains the illusions that sustain us, and though conducive to pathological dysfunction it is self-deception and not the truth alone that shall set us free” (2009, p. 17). Solomon boldly notes that what we need is self-deception, plain and simple. The road to both self-emancipation and self-creation is paved with self-deception. But how? How are we to convince ourselves of that which we know to be untrue, even if it is deeply desired? Knowing full well that the eternal return does not exist, how do I will myself to think it long enough to have it change me? * * *

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A second story, of the folds of imagination and of old ideas reborn anew. In his classic apology for Christianity, Mere Christianity, C.S.  Lewis takes on a plain-spoken and humble approach to many of the questions that Christians might have regarding the nature of faith, what to believe in, and even the trinity. To these questions he gives straightforward answers steeped in a nascent evangelical worldview. Within this common-sense approach to Christianity, though, resides Lewis’ deep faith in the power of metaphor, fiction, and imagination. For example, when he attempts to elucidate what it is like for God to be outside time, Lewis asks for the reader to suppose he is writing a novel. The reader, as God, will see the novel differently than those in the novel (2001, see p. 167). Such is God’s relationship to time. Or, similarly, he beseeches the reader to see scriptural imagery of God’s royalty, not as literal, but as attempts to “express the inexpressible.” He provides an admonition to those who cannot imagine: “People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.” (p. 137). Lewis does this for very good reasons, given his theological anthropology. Humans, for Lewis, are conflicted beings, standing betwixt reason and emotion and imagination (see p. 139). Indeed, much like theologians before him, we are not fully ruled by reason according to Lewis. We are ruled equally by our passions and what we can envision (see p. 139). To truly cultivate faith, one must be moved in mind, body, spirit. Hence the imaginative exercises above. Such examples pale in comparison to one of the final chapters of Lewis’ Mere Christianity, appropriately titled, “Let’s Pretend.” There, Lewis propositions the doubting and inquisitive reader to put herself in the place of Christ when praying the Lord’s prayer. By doing so, the reader is “dressing up as Christ.” In doing so, we will come to certain realizations about the world, namely, that we are not a son God. He continues, “You are not a being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death” (p. 188). Pretending one is like Christ brings us to the negative realization that we are not the same as He. This imaginative exercise is productive insomuch as it allows us to see reality more fully. This is, as Lewis later adds, the “good kind” of pretense which “leads up to the real thing” (p. 188), that is, to a more complete knowledge of God.

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The latter parts of Mere Christianity and the upper reaches of Christian reflection, Lewis offers, require this kind of imaginative engagement. How else can we envision the Trinity, where three substances are in one? Or Divine Perfection? Such recognition can only be secured through imagination. Holding onto this imagination is another story, however. And so, when considering how we are to fully envision and commit ourselves to such an imaginative idyll, Lewis gives us an answer steeped in the language of philosophy, fiction, and folk psychology: When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important. (p. 188, emphasis added)

Doubt is overcome and commitment created through physical acts which are to have a feedback loop onto faith and belief. Analogous to faking a good day until we are actually having one, we shall pretend God until God becomes real. Earlier in Mere Christianity Lewis offers that we are to pray and read religious tracts in order to “remind” (p. 141) ourselves of what we believe. Or, similarly, Lewis uses the example of a previously ugly man wearing a mask that made him look more beautiful, and when he took off the mask, “he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What bad begun as a disguise had become a reality” (p. 187). Faith is reinforced through acts of both pretense and external practice. The only way we can fully commit to a God that is perfect, triune, and only reached through metaphor, Lewis offers, is to envision and commit ourselves physically to those metaphors. The as if becomes real. Which brings us to Lewis’ stunning inversion at the end of “Let’s Pretend.” There, instead of predictably asking us to imagine and will belief in God, Lewis turns the tables, and asks us to imagine God imagining us. The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in fact a self-­centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says ‘Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to

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make the pretence into a reality.’ God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I dare-say this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’: that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end. (pp. 193–4)

In order to make us worthy of grace and love, Lewis seems to argue, God must perform an act of imaginative liberty (maybe duplicity?) upon Himself. He must think of us as if we were Christ, like a parent thinks of a child as a future adult. Only then, in the realm of pretense, are we capable recipients of divine love. It seems here that imagination has run amok. Not only are we to imagine God, but we must believe that God, too, imagines us. Imagination spurs more imagination. The loop only ends when what is imagined becomes real. Only within this web of pretense are we to find faith. There are new ideas, like the eternal return, and old ideas, like God. Yet we are asked, in both, to imagine them as if they were real. With Lewis we find a hint, though: believe long enough, and it might become real. God and humanity, locked in cycles of imagining. * * * A third story. About the meaning of words and creation. The Navaho creation story begins with a series of monochromatic worlds populated by insect people. These “first people” then migrate from one world to the next—usually by means of ascent—discovering new communities along the way. In the Fourth World, one that is black and white, the insect people are visited by a series of gods that wish to create new people in their image. Blue- and black-bodied gods, or Holy People, come bearing sacred buckskins. A white-bodied god brings two ears of corn, which are laid on the buckskins. As the story now states, “Proceeding silently, the gods laid one buckskin on the ground, careful that its head faced the west. Upon this skin they placed the two ears of corn, being just as careful that the tips of each pointed east. Over the corn they spread the other buckskin, making sure that its head faced east.” Feathers are then placed under each ear of corn. Then, as if it was an established ritual, “the White Wind blew between the

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buckskins. And while the wind thus blew, each of the Holy People came and walked four times around the objects they had placed so carefully on the ground” (Zolbrod 1984, p. 50). The eagle feathers begin to move. The buckskin is quietly removed, revealing a newly created man and woman. A similar motif is followed for the creation of Changing Woman, the patron deity of the Navaho, and for the creation of human beings. When it is time for the creation of humans, gods once again appear. This time, Talking God and Growling God arrive in the presence of Changing Woman. Four other deities—each representing a sacred mountain in the four directions—also appear, arranging themselves around the sacred home of Changing Woman. Changing Woman’s sister, White Shell Woman, stands to the east, while Changing Woman stands to the west. Two sacred blankets, along with two sacred buckskins and two ears of corn, are introduced. In a scene which mimics the creation of First Man and First Woman, who are also present, buckskins are placed over corn. Talking God, and then Growling God, chant over the corn, orienting them in each of the sacred directions. The narration states, “Then Nilch’I the Wind entered between the two skins” (286). The buckskin is raised and lowered by Talking God three times. The fourth time, “he saw that the white ear of corn had been changed into a man. And he saw this time that the yellow year of corn had likewise become a woman” (Zolbrod 1984, p. 287). “It was the wind that had given life to these two Nihookaa dine’e, or five-fingered Earth Surface People….It was the very same wind who had similarly breathed life into many Haashch’eeh dine’e, or Holy People….It is the very same wind that gives those of us who dwell in the world today the breath that we breathe” (Zolbrod 1984, p. 287). There are clear continuities here between the many Navaho creation stories. Intelligent beings are created through rituals that are structured and highly symbolic. Sacred objects, most of them natural artifacts, are crucial. And speech, or Wind, is the animating principle in intelligent creatures. The creation engendered here is symmetrical and harmonious. These themes are echoed in the “Beginning of the World Song,” recorded by Mary Wheelwright: “The earth will be, from the very/beginning I have thought it./ The mountains will be, from the very beginning I have thought it. [This continues for many stanzas]/ The earth will be, from ancient times/ I speak it./The mountains will be, from ancient times/I

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speak it” (As quoted in Witherspoon 1977, p. 16). Speech, thought, and rituals are what create the world. Indeed, in the Navaho formulation of ideal life, sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh hozho, which is often translated as “long life beauty happiness,” thought and speech are made explicit. As Witherspoon states, “Thought (sa’ah naaghaii) is not without its inseparable companion, speech (bik’eh hozho). According to the Navajo, speech is the outer form of thought, and thought is the inner form of speech” (1977, p.  29). The object of Navaho thought—a beautiful and balanced life—is symbolized by the ideal relationship between speech and thought. Knowledge becomes thought, thought becomes speech, speech becomes creation. And there is no more powerful site for speech than ritual. Ceremonies are the locus for the power of sacred speech. It is in ritual that new states of being are created and sustained. As Witherspoon once again offers, “Ritual language does not describe how things are; it determines how they will be. Ritual language is not impotent; it is powerful. It commands, compels, organizes, transforms, and restores” (1977, p. 34). Rituals are not a statement of what-is. Rather, they are a determination of what-will-be. The potency of speech and ritual are a double-edged sword, though. Just as they can create and transform into beauty and harmony, they can also bring about chaos and disorder. Coyote, the Navaho trickster, is also said to be able to create, though his creation often brings disorder. This is likely a power he learned from his wife, the She-Bear, a creature that can regenerate herself after being clubbed to death. Creation of this sort is unnatural, disharmonious. As Witherspoon concludes, “Ritual language was the means of transforming chaos into cosmos, but it can also be used to reduce cosmos to chaos” (1977, p. 39). There are, of course, other creation stories that are initiated through speech. The Navaho instance is not singular in this respect. What it does show us, though, is the deep entwinement between thought, speech, and ritual. To speak and repeat is to create. They are what allows us to create values, objects, and imagined worlds. They bring things and ideas into being from nothing. And yet this is a divine power, one that should be handled with great care. To speak in a ritual setting is to make oneself either a god or a witch. It is this essential ambiguity in speech and ritual that has aroused both wonder and suspicion. And yet, as I will offer, it is the only means we have

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of realizing values we wish to create, even if they are, as we well know, purely of our own imagination. * * * A final story. About banishing myths, only to see them come alive again in a more discrete form. And the odd paradoxes of modernity. The “modern world” is a term which designates a bundle of concepts and practices which emerge in Europe and North America after the decline of the High Middle Ages but before the emergence of nations: the privileging of reason over tradition; the privileging of the individual; a wrestling with hierarchies, human, divine, and natural; a reliance on sense experience; a reliance on markets as sources of value; urbanization; an emphasis on mechanization and technology; an emphasis on democratization and freedom of choice. Modernity does not “begin” in one place and time, nor does it ever fully arrive in its purity. It is a set of ideals which guide an age. Such ideals are lumpy and discontinuous and create discontent. But, like the Navaho Talking Gods, such ideals are creative. They generate ways of being, thinking, and doing. They speak life into the husks of culture and belief. One may call such ideals myths. They are, after all, stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we wish to be. Yet, to be modern is to deny the substance of myth, to lay bare its falsity in favor of something more real, more repeatable and less mysterious. This, perhaps, is the guiding light of modernity: a revolution in thought which unveils the delusions of old. To be modern is to continually renew this promise. We should not be deceived by this sleight of hand, though. As Mary Midgley argues in her Myths We Live By, the need to uncloak old thought in exchange for the clarity of science is a “fairy-tale,” though one which appeals to us because it appears in “scientific dress” (2011, p. xii). For her, the Enlightenment—which is simply the crystallization of the modern impulse—is a “partial truth based on an imaginative vision fired by a particular set of ideals” (Midgley, xiii), a movement as mythic as our pre-­ modern forebears. We have simply exchanged a reliance on tradition with the “omnicompetence” of science, the model of man-as-soul with man-as-­ machine, the idea of humans as gregarious with humans as individuals. Each is an idealization which grounds the aspirations and doings of a culture and time. Indeed, as she offers, the modern period has given rise to a “myth garden” (p. xvii), one just as bustling with story, fantasy, and

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reference to the unknown as the pre-modern world which we wish to banish. To Midgley, we are just as mythic as before, except in one respect: our sincere belief that we have vanished all idols. Yet that, too, is an idol. In a similar spirit, Bruno Latour observes that the modern world operates through two movements: the criticism of the old, the outworn, and the mythic, and the erection of facts as their antipode. To gods and the occult we oppose Nature and Society (see Latour 1993, pp. 32ff; also see 2010, p.  11). We act as though we did not create such entities, even though they, too, owe their secret origin to us. We attribute false beliefs and totemism to indigenous peoples, while granting that our own entities are facts, objective reflections of reality. Instead of the foolish fetishes of foreign cultures, we have our “factishes” (see 2010, pp. 27ff), those idols of our collective worship and sacrifice. Far from ridding the world of myth, modernity has multiplied it. “Wherever they install their great fetish-­ smashing machines, [moderns] begin once again to produce the same sort of uncertain beings the [‘premoderns’] produced, and it is impossible to tell whether these beings are constructed or collected, immanent or transcendent” (2010, p. 8). Such deconstructions and constructions are borne of the modern penchant to “unmask,” the lone, “sacred” task of modernity (Latour 1993, p. 44), along with the need to erect a politics, a science, an ethics, and an order. Modernity thus remains a demand never fulfilled: it never fully rid the world of pretend entities. It just refashioned them. As Latour observes, “No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world” (1993, p. 47). We find ourselves betwixt two imperatives: the need to criticize and cast light on our arbitrary constructions, along with our need for growth, self-transformation, and order. “So the idol-smasher is doubly mad: not only has he deprived himself of the secret to produce transcendent objects, but he continues producing them even though this production has become absolutely forbidden, with no way to be registered” (2010, p. 79). As I will argue, at the heart of modernity lies a tremendous paradox: the simultaneous need to criticize myths, fantasies, and fictions, while at the same time multiplying them all the same. There are good reasons for both impulses. Like Nietzsche’s eternal return, myth and fantasy allow us to see and live in the world, just as they multiply mystery and opacity. As Midgley observes, “imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are not a distraction from our serious thinking but a necessary part of it” (2011, p. xii). They are, as she continues, “the matrix of

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thought, the background that shapes our mental habits. They decide what we think is important and what we ignore” (p. 5). Yet, within such visions lay the potential for violence and delusion. Or so we say. For, with myth comes the fear that the fantastic and mysterious will be mistaken for the real, that the abstract ideal will replace what we know and see in front of us. As the German philosopher of symbol and myth, Ernst Cassirer, states, “for mythical thinking and mythical ‘experience’ there is always a hovering between the world of dream and the world of objective reality” (1965, p.  36). Indeed, in the mythic mind, there is little space between the empirical and conceptual world (see Cassirer 1965, p. 35). Both are, alas, the same. For him, of course, this is the problem with myth: it is both confused and confusing. We mistake what is ideal for what is real. In myth, “all contents crowd together into a single plane of reality; everything perceived possesses as such a character of reality; the image like the word is endowed with real forces” (p. 42). Myth forecloses analysis and the cold apprehension of truth. And yet, as Cassirer hesitatingly admits—and perhaps there is no more modern feeling than this—we need myth. Without myth we have difficulty instilling political or social order or forging the bonds of society. As Cassirer offers, myth is “one of those spiritual syntheses through which a bond between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ is made possible, through which a…relation of kinship and a relation of tension, are created between the individual and the community” (p. 177). Indeed, as he seems to agree with the nascent sociologist Emile Durkheim, Cassirer finds that myth, and its outgrowth, religion, is perhaps reducible to the “social group” which ultimately “provides the basic schema and model for all theoretical understanding, for all knowledge of reality” (p. 192). Cassirer, it seems, is hard pressed to find anything non-mythic or scientific which measures up to this capacity in myth. One reason for this may be the fact that myth, and religion, are ideal vessels for practices that bond us to something greater than ourselves: art, rituals, and community feeling (see Cassirer 1965, p. 219). But it is these forms, too, which the modern world cannot leave untouched. In our rush to eliminate the excesses of tradition, religion, bondage to hierarchies and the past, along with the urgent need to emancipate the individual, the modern world evacuates such vestiges of myth and its attendant practices. We are now free to create our own myths and our own practices. And hence the second paradox of modernity: Our only tools for realizing ideals are ritual, art, and community. And yet these are precisely what

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generate, if not restrained, the very behaviors that modernity wishes to eliminate. We cannot believe. And yet we do. We must realize the values we don’t believe in. And yet the only ways to do so are anti-modern. To be modern is to be trapped within these two paradoxes. * * * There is another myth embodied within the modern world, one that coincides with the destruction of the idols of old. In thinkers like Hegel and Whitehead and Cassirer himself, we see an unflagging optimism that myth and religion will eventually evolve out of themselves, into a greater and higher subjectivity and understanding, perhaps even science or philosophy. Cassirer imagines a point at which “we can observe something else, namely the gradual growth and unfolding of religious subjectivity” (p. 221). Here, religion and truth become universal. The meaning we seek in myth and the language we use for it “bursts forth anew in every phase of development,” where, presumably at some point, the “immanent necessity” (p. 252) of myth becomes intelligible. As if emerging out of Plato’s cave, religion and myth eventually evolve long enough for us to see the light. This elimination of myth is itself a story. And an ingenious one. Yet myth evolves only towards evermore myth. The only real evolution is the way in which new myths cloak their real identity in the name of something else, if only to create new social and cultural orders. We are not snakes shedding our old skin, but the ouroboros consuming and creating itself anew. * * * In the chapters which follow, I will describe these twin paradoxes. They are, in short: . The need to believe and the need to criticize all beliefs; 1 2. The need to realize invented values through art, community, and ritual even if those same practices, or their effects, are anti-modern. We stand astride these dual paradoxes. They hold captive our politics, our ability to solve collective problems, or our search for individual meaning. These ideas have a history, though, both historically and evolutionarily. Historically, it is modernity and the Enlightenment that gave birth to our skepticism towards fictions. And yet, simultaneously, it is also the

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Enlightenment that, like a child trying to put toothpaste back into the tube, multiplied fictions in an effort to restore what had been lost. In Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5, I will discuss some of the figures who theorized both this skepticism and this multiplication. In Chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, I will discuss the ways in which we can realize values. We have, as Freud once said, an “incredible need to believe.” Our minds promiscuously seek fictions. To be human is to imagine. Hence, the Enlightenment effort to eliminate fiction is always stillborn, destined to fail. At the same time, psychology shows us the best way to realize the very fictions we create. As I’ve stated above, this path lies in narrative, community, and ritual. These forms take fiction from psychic potential to belief. They allow us make-believe long enough for the power of our invented ideas to take hold. As I will explore in the final chapters of the book, realizing values has consequences, both for our worlds and for modernity itself. To realize values is to undo key aspects of the modern world, namely, the individual and world-creating subject. It also means we must live differently, and courageously, if we are to have meaningful lives. If we are to become what modernity demands of us, we must dispense with, or change, elements of modernity. To know this dilemma is not to solve it. To be modern is to be aware of the problem without the ability to fully unravel it. To describe the ways in which we invent truth is not to free ourselves from it. Nor is it my task to prescribe how we shall invent new values and truths. Truths are more complicated than that. We can only identify those truths—and their accompanying forms of implementation—that are worth inventing. Our journey begins where most philosophical journeys do: with the Greeks and then the Enlightenment. For, in their nascent realization of the nature of truth, they saw, perhaps better than we, the odd bind of created truths and skepticism.

literAture cited Cassirer, Ernst. 1965. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Trans. Catherine Porter and Heather MacLean. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Lewis, C.S. 2001. Mere Christianity. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco. Midgley, Mary. 2011. The Myths we Live By. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1884. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1984. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Solomon, Robert. 2009. Self-Deception, and Self-Deception in Philosophy. In The Philosophy of Deception, ed. Clancy Martin, 15–36. New  York: Oxford University Press. Witherspoon, Gary. 1977. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zolbrod, Paul. 1984. Dine Bahane: The Navajo Creation Story. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

CHAPTER 2

Skepticism and Beyond: Skeptics and Kant on Critique and Ideals

The first paradox of modernity is a claim about knowledge. We need certain beliefs to be true, but we are skeptical that those same beliefs can be true. To be skeptical is to lose a sense of security about the world. To believe is to rescue that security, even if it rests on a mire. These ideas have a history. The West has always been skeptical about knowledge claims. For every Plato, confidently asserting that there are absolute truths, there is an Aristotle, calmly pointing to what we can and can’t know. The conceptual history of the West is the vacillation between these two positions. In modernity, skepticism wins out. But the specter of Plato, and the lure of a knowledge that grounds all knowledge, is still alluring. Skepticism, for but a few, is not a resting place. * * * Our story begins with Sextus Empiricus, a second-century philosopher in the Roman Empire. Sextus claimed the mantle of Skepticism, a school of philosophy invested in the constant refutation of philosophical, religious, and scientific truth claims. This was not just idle trolling. For the Skeptic, skepticism was a way of life, a means to an end. To engage in the refutation of truth was to not engage in the wanderings of the mind which induce one to fanaticism, confusion, or, like Don Quixote, chasing after windmills. The end result of this mental practice was, hopefully, peace. To quiet the endless stirrings of the mind was to quiet the spirit and achieve a sense of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_2

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balance. As the biographer Diogenes Laertius says of another skeptic, Posidonius: “When his fellow-passengers on board a ship were all unnerved by a storm, he kept calm and confident, pointing to a little pig in the ship that went on eating, and telling them that such was the unperturbed state in which the wise man should keep himself” (1980, p. 481). Or, as Sextus himself claims, “The originating cause of Scepticism is, we say, the hope of attaining quietude. Men of talent, who were perturbed by the contradictions in things and in doubt as to which of the alternatives they ought to accept, were led on to inquire what is true in things and what false, hoping by the settlement of this question to attain quietude” (1993, p. 9). The Skeptic does this, Sextus claims, by “opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize” (1993, p. 9). Truth to the Skeptic, like Newton’s third law, observes the maxim that for every asserted truth there is an equal and opposite truth. Skepticism aims to ferret out these divergent maxims and systematically oppose them to one another. As Sextus again observes, “owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude” (1993, p.  7). Thus the Skeptic does not make any dogmatic assertions, only claiming “I determine nothing” (1993, p.  11). To be skeptical is to be constantly pulled between truth and opposing truth, between “contradictions of equal weight” (1993, 19), never settling on any one opinion or claim. To reside in the middle is a state of peace, one where truths are seen as opposed and mutually cancelling. This operation is best seen in a series of antitheses presented by Sextus. A single exemplar will do. Here, in a stunningly clear portrayal of folk Greek beliefs, Sextus lays bare his philosophical method: And we oppose legendary belief to legendary belief when we say that whereas in one story the father of men and gods is alleged to be Zeus, in another he is Oceanos—“Ocean sire of the gods, and Tethys the mother that bare them.” And we oppose dogmatic conceptions to one another when we say that some declare that there is one element only, others an infinite number; some that the soul is mortal, others that it is immortal; and some that human affairs are controlled by divine Providence, others without Providence. (1993, p. 89)

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These contradictions are well known, and read like modern “balanced” discourse: “the soul is immortal”; “humans are purely mortal”; “everything has a reason”; “all is chaos”; “God created all things”; “the world created itself.” The chief strength of the Skeptic lies not in choosing a side, but in finding propositions to oppose to those they are presented. Like a swordsman, a Skeptic must parry the attacks of dogmatism as they come at him, sometimes advancing with strong and thorough arguments, sometimes repelling the attack with more defensive moves (see 1993, p. 513). What results are a series of antitheses—seventeen of them, in fact— whereby Sextus details how to oppose ideas with thorough refutations (see 1993, pp. 25ff and 95ff). Like a trained speech and debate coach, he counsels future Skeptics on how to take both sides of every argument, arguing vigorously for each side. The result, we hope, is not just confusion or rhetorical mastery (though that would certainly help). Rather, when one has learned the different modes of argument, “we are finally led to suspension of judgement” (Sextus Empiricus 1993, p. 93). This is because, as Diogenes Laertius states, “They showed, then, on the basis of that which is contrary to what induces belief, that the probabilities on both sides are equal” (1980, p.  491). The Skeptic demolishes ideas not by undermining them, but by laying bare their utter relativity. If it is worth arguing about, then it likely also has two opposing sides, each equal in weight. The Skeptic sees this “endless controversy” (1993, p. 155), and, wisely, follows the counsel to “suspend judgement concerning the real nature of the objects” (1993, p. 83). Lest they be accused of logical incoherence, the Skeptics followed this rule to a T.  As Diogenes notes, “The Sceptics, then, were constantly engaged in overthrowing the dogmas of all schools, but enunciated none themselves.” The constant admonition was, as stated before, not “nothing can be determined” (that would make them a dogmatist), but “‘We determine nothing,’ since otherwise they would have been betrayed into determining” (1980, p.  487). Nor are they foolish about their skepticism. Skeptics carefully opposed all claims which did not have direct evidence. Sextus, in particular, clearly states that “we do not overthrow the affective sense-impressions which induce our assent involuntarily” (1993, p. 15). Skeptics cast doubt on how those sense-impressions are collected and turned into stories about the way things are. In short, Skeptics reserve their therapeutic and philosophical method for metaphysics. This means that the Skeptic has a rather wide berth in terms of what she can and cannot say. Skeptics can admit their sense impressions without

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doubt. They are, in this sense, empiricists. They are also, as Sextus admits, allowed imagination, those “mental conceptions which arise through the reason itself as a result of passive impressions and clear appearances and does not at all involve the reality of the objects conceived” (1993, p. 157). Moreover, the Skeptic is allowed—for the sake of peace of mind, primarily—to live in accordance with the customs and culture of the place in which she lives. As Sextus states again, “For it is, I think, sufficient to conduct one’s life empirically and undogmatically in accordance with the rules and beliefs that are commonly accepted, suspending judgement regarding the statements derived from dogmatic subtlety and furthest removed from the usage of life” (1993, p. 315). In sum, the Skeptic can live like most of us, trusting her senses, trusting the cultural norms in which she finds herself, and even allowing the occasional dalliance of imagination. She is, by all accounts, normal. What is limited, then, in Skepticism, are those matters about which we normally reserve the designation of belief. In the constant battle of ideas, Skeptics refuse to take sides. They see—perhaps rightly—that all truths have multiple sides. Instead of seeing these opposing sides as part of a whole, like Heraclitus or the Taoists, they see this as a condition of humility: we simply can’t know which side to pick. In light of this, the best path forward, say the Skeptics, is to suspend judgement and not worry about being right or wrong or having the proper arguments at one’s disposal. With respect to those things over which we constantly fight, Skeptics provide perhaps the most clear and logical answer, namely, that there is no right answer. All one can expect is “quietude,” which follows inevitably upon the suspension of judgement, “even as a shadow follows its substance” (Sextus Empiricus 1993, p. 21). This is not to say that the Skeptical position, though logical, is in any way satisfying. As Sextus admits, the result of constantly abstaining from “dogmatism” is to be “impassive in respect of matters of opinion” (1993, p. 483). Indeed, though the Skeptic often suffers from the same pains as the rest of us, she does not attempt to attribute such pains to any cosmic reason or purpose. She suffers without attribution. Sextus uses a surgical metaphor to drive the point home: “For the added opinion that a thing is of such a kind is worse than the actual suffering itself, just as sometimes the patients themselves bear a surgical operation, while the bystanders swoon away because of their opinion that it is a horrible experience” (1993, p. 483).

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But is it? Does our opinion of a certain experience make it worse, as Skepticism (and Stoicism) would have us admit? The Skeptic believes so, and thus refrains from any speculation about the source or meaning of her sufferings and successes, to the point of “impassivity.” Yet the history of philosophy, and of religion, would beg to differ. The tradition after Sextus and his compatriots veers decisively towards providing the kinds of answers Sextus worked so hard to get his believers to refrain from. Just a few short centuries after Sextus, Christianity would become the dominant mode of thinking in the late Roman Empire, doing the kind of metaphysical work that Sextus and others believed to bring tremendous suffering. Skepticism, for all its virtues, lost. Skepticism, though, is a perennial philosophy, one that comes back periodically, if only to remind us of our inability to say what we think must be said. Though Skepticism loses out, it never fully dies. It merely becomes subterranean. And this is largely because, hidden within Skepticism, there is a central truth: it is right. It may really be the case that every truth, at least those which are the object of belief, is relative. All truths may really be opposed by other truths. There may be no true winner in metaphysics. I stated above that this is unsatisfying. And it is. But that is no philosophical argument against the Skeptical position. It is an existential one, which comes from human desires and needs, not the hygienic space of logical argument. And so Skepticism reappears, over and over again, as a logical corrective to the pretensions of human desire. We remain, however, unsatisfied. * * * The Skeptical strand of thinking, one which consistently challenges what we can and can’t know, next appears again in the sixteenth century. In the art and science of the Renaissance we find subtle attempts to remind us of what we can’t know, on Heaven or on Earth. In essayists like Montaigne, we are taught to treat the small, lest we think of that which is too large. Even dear Hamlet begins to question whether the world is “but an unweeded garden.” Perhaps no thinker has come to embody this dawning mistrust of belief more than Rene Descartes. Descartes, mimicking the ground clearing and distrustful spiritual autobiographies of thinkers like al Ghazali, famously eliminates all prior beliefs in both his Discourse on Method and his Meditations on First Philosophy. In each, he systematically eliminates old

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theological beliefs, what others have told him, and even his senses (a move too far for most Skeptics.) The aim, as he announces at the beginning of the Meditations, is to “demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last” (1988, p. 76). So thorough is his demolition of previous ideas that, at the end of the first Meditation, Descartes admits that there may be nothing left. For a brief moment, Skepticism wins. For the Skeptic, this would be the therapeutic resting place. Old beliefs are seen as relative, old pretensions to truth have been humbled. Job done. Yet, in a move which makes Descartes fully modern, the utter skepticism of the first Meditation is but a way station. In the opening sections of the second Meditation (mirrored in the Fourth Discourse), Descartes posits what he believes to be a fundamental truth: that he is thinking about thinking itself. In doubting, Descartes stumbles upon the bedrock of modern thought: the thinking self. “I am, I think.” To many, Descartes’ skepticism—the eponymously named “Cartesian doubt”—is simply a front to sneak some metaphysics in through the side door. Clearing away everything allows us to see the real man behind the curtain: the conscious ego. Or, even more sinister, skepticism sweeps clear all but the real ground of knowledge: God. It is little coincidence that Descartes’ Meditations include not one, but two proofs for the existence of God. And it is little coincidence that Descartes’ “faith” in his senses and knowledge are not restored until God is proven. It may be the case that Descartes’ thought is simply a thought experiment that gets us where we already wanted to go, a carefully designed ruse. We get the sensation of doubt without any of the insecurity. (Or the Skeptic’s tranquility, for that matter.) There is actually something deeper at work here, though, that I think bears repeating. The fundamental architecture of Descartes’ thought is, to some degree, the following: 1. We are compelled by reason to doubt most, if not all, things (even if the doubt is a pretence); 2. And yet we need the Ego/Soul and/or God to allow us to reliably live in a world of science and mathematics. In Descartes’ thought, these two thoughts are held simultaneously, and the first point flows seamlessly into the second. I doubt, but there are

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things I cannot doubt, such as the self or God. Faith in knowledge can thus be secure. But what happens when the volume on the first argument above is turned up and the skepticism is not a feint, when skepticism goes all the way down? When, in the spirit of Sextus, we do not find solid ground in the existence of the self or God and allow truths to be seen as relative? That, I would argue, is the tack pursued by David Hume and, to a large degree, one of the key thinkers of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. For Hume, we can only know what we observe and can demonstrate as logical proofs. Full stop. This eliminates God, the soul, freedom, and even—in a move which scares most—cause and effect. We’ve never observed all instances of cause and effect. Hence, we can only have “constant conjunction.” Hume does this, not in the name of tranquility and peace, but in the name of logical hygiene. We should only assert what we can truly know. But, as is the case with Skepticism, Hume’s disquieting skepticism with respect to most knowledge claims is both existentially unsatisfying and, in an age of science, a non-starter. We need, for a variety of reasons, some way of standing firm. (Science doesn’t go far without cause and effect.) This is the niche into which Kant situates himself. * * * Immanuel Kant is, for the purposes of our story, the thinker of modernity who best exemplifies the first paradox. His ostensible purpose, principally in writings which begin in the 1780s and extend to his death in the early nineteenth century, is to give full voice to the power of reason and its subsequent limitations. What can we say and know? What can’t we say and know? As esoteric as this sounds, it leads us to the central dilemma of modernity: that we cannot know, and yet we must say. This quest begins innocently. For Kant, our senses are utterly intuitive and fundamental. We receive information through our senses, which are, for the most part, completely reliable. Data we receive from the world (sensory intuitions) immediately comes to reside in a mental architecture which situates them within both time and space. Because of this mental architecture, humans are capable of geometry and mathematics: all phenomena are subject to space and time, and, since our subjective properties of space and time are universally shared, then we can all agree upon the properties of objects, both real and abstract.

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Experience gets another layer after this, according to Kant. After sensory intuition, phenomena are then subject to our understanding, which, like a mental filing cabinet, sorts phenomena according to various categories and taxonomies. Phenomena are now both in space and time and in categories. This process of categorization is what allows us to safely do the work of science, observing and sorting the world. Again, because understanding, too, is universal, our scientific statements about the world can also be seen as universal. Moreover, they constitute real knowledge, as long as the rules we make about the world can actually be seen as applying to the (observed) world itself. Things get tricky, though, with Reason, which has much higher aspirations than naming and categorizing. Indeed, the sole aim of Reason, according to Kant, is to unify various forms of knowledge. Insomuch as some knowledge becomes an infinite regress, Reason seeks to terminate the regress in God. Insomuch as all of our experience is unified in one body, Reason seeks to explain this by resorting to the notion of a soul (or transcendental ego). You get the point. Reason demands unity, finality, and totality. It aspires to be universal. Hence, it is the root of metaphysics, those ideas which Skepticism worked so hard to defend against. But here’s the problem: we can never experience totality. Nor can we experience the concrete objects that Reason tends to posit, like God or the Soul or Freedom. The ideas of Reason anticipate only themselves—they can never point to the objects they generate. As Kant offers, “Even if we suppose the whole of nature to be spread out before us, and that of all that is presented to our intuition nothing is concealed from our senses and consciousness, yet still through no experience could the [transcendental] object be known by us in concreto. For that purpose, in addition to this exhaustive intuition, we should require what is not possible through any empirical knowledge, namely, a completed synthesis and the consciousness of its absolute totality” (1965, A483/B511; also see 1965, A482/B510). In short, Reason demands the impossible. We want what we cannot fully have. For other theorists, this is not a problem. This is what makes metaphysics special: its universal nature. Yet, for Kant, ideas must anticipate phenomena. If they do not, they are empty. Hence, to Kant, some of the aspirations for Reason are simply illegitimate if they attempt to be “constitutive,” that is, objectively present, knowledge. They do not fully anticipate experience nor can they be shown. As he clearly states, “In any [constitutive] use of the transcendental idea we should, however, be

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overstepping the limits of its purpose and validity. For reason, in employing it as a basis for the complete determination of things, has used it only as the concept of all reality, without requiring that all this reality be given and be itself a thing. Such a thing is a mere fiction in which we combine and realize the manifold of our idea in an ideal, as an individual being” (1965, A580/B608). The “illusion” Kant refers to here is twofold. First, we invent ideas that serve to unify knowledge and ground our assumptions about how the world holds together. This illusion is that of metaphysics itself. And, second, as Michelle Grier states, the other illusion is “said to consist in our taking the subjectively necessary demand that we seek unity of thought to be an objective necessity extending to objects” (Grier 2001, p. 269). That is, we actually think our illusions are real. The problem here is simple. As Kant plainly states, “the solution of these problems can never be found in experience, and this is precisely the reason why we should not say that it is uncertain what should be ascribed to the object [of our idea]” (1965, A484/B512). The ideas generated in Reason can never be found. Our Reason is a fallacy waiting to happen. The great tragedy of Reason for Kant, then, is that it is “set…in unavoidable conflict with itself” (1965, B526/A498). Reason wants what it cannot and should not have. Its quest for knowledge terminates in ideas which give satisfaction, but no true knowledge. This is shown most stunningly in Kant’s famous “antinomies,” a series of logically opposed arguments which hearken back to the rhetorical training of the Skeptics. Laid out in two columns in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant takes on the great metaphysical ideas of the West: God, the soul, freedom. In one column, for example, he gives us the strongest possible argument for the existence of God. In the other column, the strongest possible arguments against the existence of God. Both columns are convincing. And, like a good Skeptic— that’s the point. Reason gets itself into trouble by erecting equally logical—and equally contradictory—ideas. For every argument that the soul is immaterial and eternal, there is an equally rational argument for the opposite. As we explored earlier, this is where Skepticism takes us. Behind every idea that merits the attribution of “belief,” there is a quagmire of arguments for and against, each of them generating the same morass of confusion. But—and this is a huge but—Kant does not stop here. In what will become the signature move of modernity, Kant attempts to rescue the above metaphysical concepts—God, the soul, and freedom—from the Skeptical hinterland.

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This is largely because, as Kant recognizes, metaphysical ideas have tremendous “practical power,” and are able to “form the basis of the possible perfection of certain actions” (1965, A509/B597). We need God and the soul and freedom not because these ideas are true, but because they do significant work for us. This intuition, right or wrong, is what leads Kant to posit “regulative” ideals. A regulative ideal is not a statement about reality. It is not, to use Kantian parlance, “constitutive.” Rather, as Dorothy Emmet states, regulative ideals “have a role in setting standards for practical reason, including thinking when seen as an intellectual practice” (1994, p. 2). Regulative ideals are meant to regulate reason, to guide it to a certain end. They are ultimately unrealizable, but lead Reason more productively down a path it is already inclined to go. Here’s a good way of thinking about regulative ideals. God concepts are normally pretty good at making us moral. God watches over us, sees our misdeeds, judges them, and so on. In this way, we tend to act better if we entertain the idea of God. But, as Kant earlier argued, we can’t really claim that God exists in an absolute sense. We can never know if the idea of God is true. So, instead, we are asked to act and think as if God existed. In this way, we get to have our God concepts without actually stating that they are fully real in a fundamental sense. We can imagine, entertain, or posit God while still, at the same time, remaining agnostic about God’s absolute existence. This tension is felt throughout much of Kant’s work. For example, a regulative ideal is a “principle of reason which serves as a rule, postulating what we ought to do in the regress, but not anticipating what is present in the object as it is in itself …” (1965, A509/B537). Or, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant states that we should assume a “supreme reason as a cause of all the connections in the world” (p. 107). This kind of imagination allows us to “conceive the world as if it came, in its existence and internal plan, from a Supreme Reason” (1950, p.  108). We should posit God “as if” it existed, but cannot say anything about that same God. We are permitted, for practical reasons, to “invent a being” (1950, p. 110), but we are not permitted to say anything of that being. Regulative ideals are a focus imaginarius, a point which draws our attention, only to slip away when we reach for it. This logic is perhaps best seen in an additional example, that of the nature of freedom. In Kant’s more critical moments, he recognizes that we can never fully adopt the view that we are truly free. Indeed, if we look to nature, all we see is pure causation. Kant summarizes:

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The actions of natural causes in the time-sequence are thus themselves effects; they presuppose causes antecedent to them in the temporal series. An original act, such as can by itself bring about what did not exist before, is not to be looked for in the causally connected appearances (1965, A544/B572).

Action creates reaction. For the sake of our sensory experience of the world and for science, we notice that every action is preceded by another reaction. Thus, from a purely rational and experiential standpoint, absolute freedom does not exist. And yet, from a moral perspective, we need freedom. Eliminating freedom eliminates culpability for moral decision-making. Investing agents with freedom allows us to imagine and pursue alternative moral actions. As Kant offers, “Without transcendental freedom in its proper meaning, which is alone a priori practical, no moral law and no accountability to it are possible” (1993, p. 101). Hence, we arrive at a paradox. We cannot assert freedom; we need freedom. Kant finds his way out of this paradox by positing agency outside of normal causation. That is, conscious moral agency is not a part of the causally determined world we normally find ourselves in. As Kant states, “While the effects are to be found in the series of empirical conditions, the intelligible cause, together with its causality, is outside the series. Thus the effect may be regarded as free in respect of its intelligible cause …” (1965, A537/B565; emphasis mine). For the sake of morality and regulative concepts, we “may be” thought of as free, even though, from an observed perspective, this is simply false. The world presents itself as a closed system, and yet, for the sake of freedom, we can consider ourselves outside that very system. Moreover, according to Kant, we make popular appeals to our own will as an originating cause, and this recognition belies the realization that our reason is unconditioned by prior appearances (See 1965, A555/B583 and following). Because we think of ourselves as free, in short, we should continue to do so, even if this is not truly justifiable. In one sense, Kant is absolutely right: it’s not logically incompatible to say that humans are outside the normal sequence of nature. Indeed, as he states, this view is “at least not incompatible with nature” (1965, A558/ B586). Yet, from another (Kantian) perspective, this move is illegitimate. In Kant’s defense of freedom, he reverts back to metaphysics, stating that part of human decision-making is not conditioned by nature. He admits as much: “[N]othing justifies us in deriving an existence from a condition

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outside the empirical series or even in regarding it in its place within the series as absolutely independent and self-sufficient” (1965, A561/B589). And so, like Solomon, we are forced to split the philosophical child down the middle. We are allowed to think of ourselves as free, but only conditionally, in the realm of “as if.” We are free for the purposes of our imagination and our dealings with the world, but we can’t apply this recognition to the observed world itself. Kant summarizes: “Such transcendent ideas have a purely intelligible object; and this object may indeed be admitted as a transcendental object, but only if we likewise admit that, for the rest, we have no knowledge in regard to it, and that it cannot be thought as a determinate thing in terms of distinctive inner predicates” (1965, A565/B593, emphasis added; also see 1997, 451). As Kant will later offer in the Critique of Practical Reason, the two views above contained in this paradox—that of pure causal determination and that of pure freedom—“do not in fact contradict each other” (1993, pp. 109–10) due to the fact that one lies in the realm of appearances and the other lies beyond appearances. This is done, as Kant makes abundantly clear, in the service of practical aims. To affirm pure causal determination would leave us without moral agency. On the other hand, affirming freedom—even if speculative and conditional—enables us to be rational, if not imaginative, moral agents. What drives the use of regulative ideals, then is “ultimately practical” (1993, p. 128), where concepts like God, the soul, and freedom are consistently employed as “practical postulates” (1965, p. 150) that allow us to go about our lives. Observed truth is seen as subservient to moral ends. What was once metaphysics is now a matter of practicality. We need to be clear about what Kant has done here, though. When confronted with the seemingly irresolvable problem of an unfree and fully determined world, Kant has found a loophole: it is at least conceivable, though wholly unprovable, that moral agency lies outside the physical world. What was once inadmissible as knowledge becomes necessary as the ground of moral activity and decision-making. Kant will frequently admit that regulative ideas like God, freedom, and the soul are “a mere idea, a focus imaginarius,” which lie “quite outside the bounds of possible experience” (1965, A644/B672), but that they serve a purpose nonetheless. In effect, Kant is conceding that we need metaphysical concepts, even when we do not have reason to think them to be true. In a stunning admission, Kant offers these concluding thoughts: “That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical researches is as little to be expected as that

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we, to avoid inhaling pure air, should prefer to give up breathing altogether. There will, therefore, always be metaphysics in the world; nay, everyone, especially every reflective man, will have it and, for want of a recognized standard, will shape it for himself after his own pattern” (1950, p. 116). What Kant has done, to use his own phrasing, is to “shape” metaphysics to his own pattern, that of a foundation for morality. Viewed slightly askew, however, this is weird. We are asked, according to Kant, to both reject metaphysics as absolute knowledge, but, in the next breath, to recover it as useful. He makes it clear that the recovery of metaphysics is an imaginative enterprise, a grand “as if,” but it can also be seen as a “‘subjectively necessary’ illusion” (Grier 2001, 276). And thus the first paradox is presented in its boldest and clearest form: we do not believe, but we must believe. To be truly moral, in some sense, we must engage in illusions that we know to be, on some level, of our own creation. That Kant did not question the viability of such illusions, however helpful, is telling. To him, we could merely temporarily suspend our critical attitude (that he wants us to cultivate) and engage in the imaginary world of our own metaphysical creation. He does not say how we should do this, or how we are to partition the critical part of our brain from the imaginative part. It may be the case that Kant, one of the most systematic thinkers ever, left a blind spot in his thinking. I am unconvinced of this line of argument. Rather, I think that he leaves the question of how unanswered principally because he simply did not see the psychological viability of his philosophy to be of concern. Or, perhaps more interestingly, it is because answering such a question would take his thought too far afield and into areas where a critical philosophy could not reach. * * * In Sextus Empiricus, early modernity, and Kant, we can see the evolving logic of modernity. For the Skeptics, true peace could be attained by holding in tension two competing belief structures. This opposition had a therapeutic purpose, insomuch as it allowed us to see the irresolvability of belief claims. The Skeptics did not hold the day, though, and the tradition largely followed the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. At the dawn of the modern period, Skeptical doubt was renewed in figures as various as Descartes, Hume, and Kant. In Descartes, skepticism

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was a way station to the warm reassurances of God. In Hume, skepticism goes too far. In Kant, though, both positions are seemingly satisfied— Humean caution allows us to be skeptical of metaphysics, while Cartesian metaphysics slips in as regulative ideas. It is my contention that the Kantian bargain remains the operating paradigm of modernity, one in which we are deeply skeptical of appearances and metaphysics, but also one in which we see the practical necessity of metaphysics. We do not like ideas without physical representation, and yet we need to be moral, conceive of God, or find meaning in life. And we are hard-pressed to do this without such objects of belief. The following chapters will show how this basic conceptual architecture unwinds in our existential, political, and interpersonal lives. After Kant, a self-created and critical metaphysics begins to annex every dimension of our lives.

literAture cited Descartes, Rene. 1988. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emmet, Dorothy. 1994. The Role of the Unrealisable. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Grier, Michelle. 2001. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1950. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. ———. 1993. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Third ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1997. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. Laertius, Diogenes. 1980. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Volume 2. The Loeb Classical Library. Trans. Robert Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sextus Empiricus. 1993. Outlines of Pyrronhism. The Loeb Classical Library. Trans. R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Noble Lies, Fantasies, and Fictions: Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Foucault and the Demand for Fictions

In Kant we see, in clear but nascent form, the startling paradox of modernity. We do not know if we are free, but yet we must live as if we are free. We do not know God, but we must believe in God in order to be moral. We must affirm what we cannot know. We must believe even what we do not yet believe, if only because our affirmation has benefits to us and others. Modernity and the Enlightenment ask us to do many things. We are to criticize ideas, authority, knowledge, science, and institutions. We are to value the individual, and, at the same time, reject the paroxysms and unpredictability of collectivity and ritualized action. We are to be guided by reason, knowing full well that such reason has limitations, many of which should be self-imposed. And, finally, we reject the force and authority of the unseen, instead preferring the evidence of our senses and technology. These imperatives are not met without complaint. Indeed, to be modern is to both adopt such values and see them as limiting, mistaken, and possibly foolish. For every Kant heralding the power and limitations of reason, there is a Goethe, showing how static and lifeless such reason can be. And yet we plod on, imbued with a faith in modernity enviable by even medieval standards. These imperatives and their contradictions reach their nadir in the two-­ hundred years after the death of Kant in 1804. This chapter shall explore how such demands manifested themselves in three different © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_3

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thinkers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault. There could be others. But, among these thinkers, we can see the architecture of philosophy’s engagement with modernity, where art, fantasy, fiction, and truth-telling become tools in the task of self- and world-construction. For there is one more thing demanded by modernity: that we become better than what we are. Only through seeing all of human knowledge, including ideas, as a tool, do we come to realize that project. * * * Friedrich Nietzsche, as was portended by his eternal recurrence in chapter one, represents perhaps the clearest and most evident embodiment of the architecture of modern thought: a simultaneous reliance on cold, scientific discrimination, along with a steadfast call to construct and design gods, fellow travelers, and selves to suit the ends of a post-metaphysical world. The path towards this overall project is paved, I would argue, through Nietzsche’s steady and consistent assault on traditional ideas of truth and objectivity, which then grows into a creative vision that radically adopts untruth as a necessity in the life of the free spirit. While Nietzsche’s thought is often seen as episodic and, given the subject, even discontinuous, there remains a consistent thread in his thinking regarding the nature and status of truth. As early as his “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche asserted the following: What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and bind; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions… (1982, #1; also see 1998, #11)

As illusory as truth is, though, it is indispensable. It has allowed us, Nietzsche will claim, to make ourselves what we are, to build ourselves up as noble or debase ourselves as unworthy. Truths do work in the world, even if they say very little about the world as-is. They are there to create worlds. Hence, Nietzsche can claim only a few years later that “there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths” (1984, #2), without blushing, knowing full well that the absence of eternal fact and truth does not leave humans out in the cold.

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And yet Nietzsche must go on deconstructing, showing the multitude of errors we are seduced into by our “reason,” emotions, and senses (For the senses, see 1997a, #117). Numbers, for example, which we esteem as fundamental, are built on the “initially prevailing error that there are various identical things (but actually there is nothing identical) or at least that there are things (but there is no ‘thing’).” As Nietzsche continues, with numbers, as in all things, “we invent entities, unities, that do not exist” (1984, #19). Such comments are legion. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, we see that “cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose” are “mythological” projections onto the world from our ever-creative minds (1989, #21). Indeed, with all things, whether they be as fundamental as number, cause-­ and-­effect, purpose, or even reality itself, Nietzsche claims that all are inventions, ways of making the world interesting and understandable. One of the chief inventions, for Nietzsche, is morality itself. While we may be under the impression that moralities name things and affects that are in-the-world and eternal, they do nothing of the sort. As Nietzsche will state late in his life, “no morality has any value in itself” (1990, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” 37). Instead of identifying what is eternal, moralities label what we deem as beneficial or harmful to ourselves (1984, #39), what we see as important based on our own limited perspective. Eventually those perspectives and biases, as Nietzsche will claim in a variety of places, get woven “into an imaginary world: the so-called higher world” (1997a, #32): they claim to have an authority, provenance, and legitimacy aside from their humble, all-too-human one. As Nietzsche claims later, in Dawn, believing morality to be more than what it is amounts to a “subtle deception,” even a “self-deception” (1997a, #103), a trick we play on ourselves to make ideas seem as if they are worth more and say more than what they really do, which is, ultimately, an admission of our biases, fears, and projections. For many Nietzscheans, these are trite realizations. Yet what Nietzsche has claimed here is, from the perspective of a history of ideas, astounding: cause-and-effect (which Hume attacked with brio), purpose, love, morality, and God are all of human construction and human creation. They are, to Nietzsche, part of the “apparent world” (1989, #34), that assemblage of ideas that give our ideas weight and meaning. And so it goes for truth, too: it is a human construction, albeit an important one. It only has value insomuch as we assign it value.

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These ideas, for Nietzsche especially, are ponderous and grave, but necessary. Hence, like a good modernist, he consistently assigns a domain of inquiry to them, science (in the German, Wissenschaft, which is much more akin to “inquiry”), which he sees as “colder and more skeptical, on the whole, and cools down particularly the hot flow of belief in ultimate truths…” (1984, #244; also see #635). The task of each thinker (Denker) is to maintain the scientific attitude, coldly deconstructing inherited ideas, traditionalisms, so-called truths, metaphysics, gods, etc. Particularly in Nietzsche’s early works, this negative bent to the scientific thinker is clear—the scientist must reject “any other idea of death and of any life beyond it” (1997a, #72). For, only by doing so, will the thinker reach what is “true and actual” (1997a, #270), which is not, as some would have it, something eternal, but the opposite: a realization of the transitory and genealogical nature of all things human. For many, Nietzsche’s assessment of the radically contingent and sometimes arbitrary nature of our most treasured ideas is an assertion of nihilism. For others, it indicates a creeping anti-theism and anti-metaphysical leaning in Nietzsche’s thought. And, on its own, it may be seen as such. Nietzsche’s deconstruction does, to be sure, go “all the way down.” He is fully modern in that respect. But this is not Nietzsche’s tack. And so, as with Kant, Nietzsche sees the task for humans not only to live coldly, scientifically, but to begin to live fully into the fabricated truths that we both inherit and create for ourselves. In general, this attitude—which will become paradigmatic for other figures, like William James and Foucault—is cast most broadly as Nietzsche’s “experimentalism,” an open call to tinker with the various untruths that make life more interesting. In the aforementioned Dawn, for instance, Nietzsche extols us to “experiment with ourselves,” (1997a, #501) or, similarly, he claims that “We are experiments,” which gives rise to the notion that we should live into such an affirmation, “let us also want to be them!” (1997a, #453). Or, finally, in The Gay Science, we are to see ourselves as “guinea pigs” (1974, #319), allowing ourselves the capacity to see truths as “hypotheses,” as “experimental point[s] of view” (1974, #344), which may allow us to live, or see, more fully. If anything, then, Nietzsche embraces the creative and constructive impulse of humans. We are to both see our ideas as creations and to give ourselves over to that same process of creation, seeing our lives not as static or as given, but as experiments. There is no objective truth and untruth, but, rather, those truths that are of benefit and those that are not.

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Truth, in this interpretation, becomes subordinate to our quest to make ourselves what we wish to be. It is a tool. And, to be sure, because all statements of value are fabrications, errors, and, at times, falsifications of the world we see, adopting Nietzsche’s emancipatory attitude means, on occasion, lying to oneself. Lest this sound too harsh, Nietzsche offers us this: This unconditional will to truth – what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too – if only the special case “I do not want to deceive myself” is subsumed under the generalization “I do not want to deceive.” But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? (1974, #344)

Indeed. Why not deceive, especially if all truths are deceptions to a degree? Why not adopt those ideas that are of benefit to us, instead of the ones that leave us less than before? All ideas are, after all, but castles of our own making. And so, in the absence of any profound truth, and in the spirit of experimentalism, we must go on adopting those views we know to be, on some level, not necessarily real. For example, in The Gay Science he approvingly quotes Homer’s “‘Many lies tell the poets’” (1974, #84). Or, only a year later, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he pens the following poem: Only poet! An animal, cunning, preying, prowling, That must lie, That must knowingly, willingly lie: Lusting for prey, Colorfully masked, A mask for itself, Prey for itself – This, the suitor of truth? No! Only fool! Only poet! (1978, “The Song of Melancholy,” #3; also see his Dionysian Dithyrambs in the same volume)

Lest these invocations of lying be seen as disapproving, Nietzsche puts approval in the mouth of his pseudonymous prophet, Zarathustra: “But what was it that Zarathustra once said to you? That the poets lie too much? But Zarathustra too is a poet. Do you now believe that he spoke the truth

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here?” (1978, “On Poets”; also see “On Old and New Tablets,” #2). Or, later, in his Geneaology or Morals, Nietzsche tells us what we all need is a “real lie, a genuine, resolute, ‘honest’ lie” (1969, III: #19). So what shall we make of the imperative to “lie”? Seen against the backdrop of Nietzsche’s thoughts on truth, can there even be such a thing as a lie? If there is no truth, there can be no untruth. Despite this proviso, we are asked seemingly rhetorical questions by Nietzsche regarding truth and untruth, all of them affirming the value of the untrue. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche opens with these questions: “We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” (1989, #1). Or, but a few pages later, “Why couldn’t the world that concerns us – be a fiction?” (1989, #34). Nietzsche gives us a hint within the same book, one we will find familiar from the work of Kant, though Nietzsche puts the point much more starkly: “the falsest judgments are … the most indispensable for us … without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live – that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life…” (1989, #4) Untruths are necessary not because of their untruth, but because they are of benefit. Untruths allow us to see the world differently than it is. They exist outside of the flux of becoming and chaos. They offer a different perspective—albeit a false one—than the world that we constantly inhabit. Hence, in the same book, we are told to see the world through a “mask,” not as it is, but as filtered through another way of seeing and knowing. Like a method actor, we are to envision the world from a different perspective. Nietzsche opines that every “profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives” (1989, #40). Yet, we must know that such masks are just additions to the world of interpretations and falsifications. “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask” (1989, #289). We can live through and in a mask, but we must know that the mask hides as much as it reveals. No one mask is perfect; no one idea is a match for reality. These thoughts are echoed in two principal areas of Nietzsche’s thought: art and religion. With respect to art, Nietzsche endorses its mask-like function of allowing us to see the world differently, transformed:

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Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes… (1974, #78)

Over and over again, Nietzsche will impel us towards the potent and affirming affects of art. It is what allows us to the see the world as transformed and different, an illusion that makes life bearable and worth living (See, for example, 1997b IV: #4; also see 1990, “Expeditions,” #24 and 1974, #107). It perfects the unperfectable, giving us a vantage point of life, and the world, as different than what it is. But this is just an illusion. In fact, like all human constructions, art is a lie, albeit perhaps a noble one. And so, in parallel to Nietzsche’s constant promotion of the salving and saving effects of art, we see art depicted consistently as “illusion” (see 1967, #1; also see 1974, #80) or, in line with Zarathustra, a lie (see 1989, #192 and 1997a, #223 and #306). The artist herself is a liar, deceiver, counterfeiter, and creator (see 1984, Preface, #1; and #211 and #353). Art is, like number, cause and effect, purpose, and even the eternal return, a lie, a potent deception. Art which is worth our experimentation, though, is of benefit to us. It makes us yearn for life and see it in new and interesting ways. This does not eliminate its falsehood or potential error, but, more importantly, makes it of use to us. This duality—art as noble lie and art as lie—captures Nietzsche’s basic ambivalence towards art, and, as we will see below, religion. We can use art, but only insomuch as we know that we’re using it, and it’s not using us. It’s a part of our experiment, and not the other way round. This “use of art” perspective is captured in Nietzsche’s potent rendering of the power of art—masks, lies, illusions, and all—in The Gay Science, where he asks us to consider being the “poet” of our own lives. There, we are to “make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not…” (1974, #299), a feat which can only be accomplished by art itself, false and interesting as it is. Moreover, it is art which allows us to “continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations” (1974, #301). To see our lives as works of art is to adopt a perspective of creativity, invention, and deliberate falsity. Later, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche implores us to “put a little art

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into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial – as the real artists of life do” (1989, #31). These thoughts are echoed in Nietzsche’s careful, but often misunderstood, reflections on religion. In Nietzsche’s reflections on religion, we see the same imperative to “use” religion, and the same fear when religion usurps its role as a tool and becomes the dominating force in one’s life. Just as with art, religion and gods are seen as “poets’ prevarications,” engendering the “motley bastards” that we call “gods and overmen” (1978, “On poets”). Or, in his earlier Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche will characteristically claim that “we can no longer believe those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of truth in our hearts and heads…” (1984, #109) even if those very same ideas have made us more interesting, delicate, and sensible. For, just as cause and effect, purpose, and morality are inventions, so too are religions and gods. They, too, have their use, but we should not mistake use for eternal truth or absolute fact. Such things are not the stuff of us. And so, like all the other truths that Nietzsche examines, religions and gods and metaphysics must be of use to us, if they are to be used at all. As early as his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche will claim that “without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement” (1967, #23). Myths guide thought, helping us to see the nature and meaning of things, even if the myths themselves are not identical to those meanings. This more pragmatic perspective is amplified in later works, like The Gay Science, where Nietzsche not only claims that religions surround us with “eternal perspectives” and give us the ability to see ourselves at a distance (1974, #78), but, further, that we should actually create religious ideas and gods as part of our quest to create ourselves. “For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights… The wonderful art and gift of creating gods – polytheism – was the medium through which this impulse could discharge, purify, perfect, and ennoble itself…” (1974, #143). Far from denying religion or polytheism here, as many would suspect, Nietzsche endorses the polytheistic attitude of creating gods and goddesses. Only then will our self-­ experimentalism achieve its proper weight and gravity. Similar to his writings on art, then, Nietzsche advocates a rather nuanced position with respect to religion. Religion is neither true nor absolutely false, but can be a useful (un)truth. For this reason, the philosopher will “make use of religions for his project of cultivation and

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education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand” (1989, #61). Or, in the same passage, Nietzsche will claim that “religion can even be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and exertion of cruder forms of government, and purity from the necessary dirt of all politics” (1989, #61). This is, I would argue, the place in which we may situate Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal return. Not as a truth or untruth (though it is said that Nietzsche tried to see if the eternal return was physically possible), but as a useful fabrication, an invention that allows us to see the gravity we must assign to every moment. We are to see the world as if this moment would repeat itself again and again, though we know full well that such a thought is of our own creation and choosing. There are, of course, other creations in Nietzsche’s work. Free spirits, philosophers of the future, thinkers, and wanderers (see Simpson 2012, Chapter 2). All are fabrications, inventions for the sake of some other purpose, just as are scientific concepts, moralities, folk psychological ideas, and fictions. We create and invent. Some, Nietzsche will claim, use these creations for a higher purpose. Others are deceived and mystified by them. And, for Nietzsche, a select few will actually engage in the process of creating such ideas for themselves. As Zarathustra tells us, “Creation – that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s growing light…. Indeed, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators….To be the child who is newly born, the creator must also want to be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth giver” (1978, “Upon the Blessed Isles”, also see “On Immaculate Perception”). Just as a mother gives birth to the child, we are to give birth to new ideas and values, some of which may, like our children, “possess great charm and can constitute an enrichment of nature” (1997a, #426). And, just like children, our ideas are meant to flee the nest at a certain point. Ideas have value, but their value should be but for a time. If our own creations linger too long, they come to rule us. We should, instead, “live within” a morality, an aesthetic perspective, or under the aegis of a god, until it has “laid down a new nature in us” (1997a, #534). Ideas are for transformation and revelation. They are, as Sallie McFague will remind us in the following chapter, “houses” to live in for a bit. But—and this is an important but—we should always be reminded that such ideas, as our scientific nature will tell us, are of our own making. We know them to be fundamentally untrue, because all ideas are. None are eternal and abiding. And some are, worse yet, simply unhelpful.

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And so we can see the basic architecture of Nietzsche’s thought: all ideas are inventions, albeit helpful ones; we should experiment with ideas, particularly those which are of use in art and religion; and we should maintain the critical consciousness that such ideas are ours. Nietzsche does not say how we live into such ideas or even believe in them. Perhaps this is the work of experimentation itself. The best clue, albeit a metaphor, that Nietzsche gives us, is that we should possess a “double brain” (1984, #251), one for science and one for art. But that just deepens the problem: how do these two “lobes” of the brain talk to one another? How do we both believe in ideas and deconstruct them? Even if done at different times, how do we believe in what we know we made? How do we create ourselves, when we know the raw material is from, well, ourselves? For these questions, I would offer, Nietzsche has no answers. * * * Nietzsche, like Kant, allows us to see a common form within modern appeals to truth and creativity. First, as good modernists, we realize that all truths are contingent. They do not name eternal essences or things. Second, we reimagine truths as hypotheses, and life as an experiment, making science the preeminent image for truth and the self. Third, we re-­ engage art and religion anew, not with the eyes of innocence, but as useful concepts. We may even create our own ideas. And, fourth, we attempt to suspend both our critical apparatus and our inventive apparatus within the same being, movement, and logic. What one hand taketh, the other giveth. After Nietzsche, this form is philosophically repeated in a diversity of figures. I shall discuss two more of those figures this chapter, Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. With Marcuse, we have a similar conceptual architecture, but it is employed not for the sake of conventional morality and duty, as in Kant, or for self-creation, as in Nietzsche. Rather, Marcuse wishes to bring forth fantasy, fiction, and myth for the sake of a redeemed and more humane world after the second World War. As a Marxist and Hegelian, Marcuse is committed to founding a new reality, a more humane world, based on the potentialities of this world. Fantasy and myth are some of the keys to bringing about that reality. The reasons for Marcuse’s reliance on fantasy and myth are simple: they are untrue. It is precisely in their “untruth,” their unreality, that fantasy and myth can effect change in the world. For, in the “known” world, the possibilities for change and revolution have already been foreclosed. Thus,

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we need a way to “think in opposition to facticity,” to “abstract from the present state of affairs” (Negations, 111), since the present is dictated by those with an interest in preserving it. And this abstraction, Marcuse notes, cannot be in the form of reason—reason, too, is enclosed by reality. Only fantasy, with its ability to imagine beyond what we can see and know, can abstract itself. “The abyss between rational and present reality cannot be bridged by conceptual thought. In order to retain what is not yet present as a goal in the present, phantasy is required” (1988, p. 113, also see p. 114). Fantasy is required because it is not real. As a Marxist and Hegelian, Marcuse is committed, at least in theory, to the idea that the present holds the potential for its own reform and revolution. Such a future lies latent, waiting to be conjured. But, for Marcuse, history is insufficient. Consciousness must be changed. New potentials and realities must be explored. And this is the function of fantasy. It imagines a beyond, both in time and space. It is not clouded by the encroachment of the present. As a result, the role of fantasy, imagination, myth, and play becomes a recurrent motif in Marcuse’s work, even if such mental wanderings are, in their essence, unreal. For example, in his most famous work, Eros and Civilization, Marcuse returns again to fantasy, stating that it “not only plays a constitutive role in the perverse manifestations of sexuality; as artistic imagination, it also links the perversions with the images of integral freedom and gratification…” (1974, p.  50). Or, similar to his earlier Negations, Marcuse recognizes that, “in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy…” (1974, p. 149). It is this logic which leads Marcuse to the most interesting, and yet paradoxical, passages of Eros and Civilization. After extolling the power of fantasy, Marcuse turns to two Greek mythic heroes, Orpheus and Narcissus, as images of a reformed world. The reason is simple: Orpheus and Narcissus, unlike other gods, “stand for a different reality” (1974, pp. 161–2), they rebel against the present order, with its restrictions on pleasure and freedom. As Marcuse states, “They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated – a freedom that will release the powers of Eros now bound in the repressed and petrified forms of man and nature. These powers are conceived not as destruction but as peace, not as terror but as beauty” (1974, p. 164). Both Orpheus and Narcissus “protest” the present order, one built on repression (see 1974, pp.  170 and 171). For Marcuse, who wishes to bring about a world based on equality, the ability to see work as play, and the

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ability to work less in a world of more, Orpheus and Narcissus help us see a different world. As Marcuse summarizes: “The Orphic Eros transforms being: he masters cruelty and death through liberation. His language is song, and his work is play. Narcissus’ life is that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation” (1974, p. 171). But, as with Nietzsche, Orpheus and Narcissus are not, for Marcuse, real. Their power lies in their unreality, or at least the unreality of the world they point us towards. And so Marcuse must continually qualify that which he promotes. Instead of seeing Orpheus and Narcissus as fully real, or miracle workers, they are, at best, “poetic, something for the soul and the heart” (1974, p. 165). Or, later, he will state that they are “certain archetypes of the imagination which, in contrast to the culture-heroes of repressive productivity, symbolized creative receptivity. These archetypes envisioned the fulfillment of man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of inherent libidinal forces” (1974, p. 175.) As archetypes, they can “liberate potentialities” (1974, p. 165) in the present world, and are psychically real, but not really real. The move here is similar to Nietzsche’s invocation of Dionysus, at least formally. Marcuse desires a world different than the present, one in which we live by and for standards that regard our humanity and equality. Yet the present reality does not want that possibility. So we must imagine. And those imaginings can and should be the stuff of myth, of realities that transcend this world. However, we must “believe” in such myths as symbols, archetypes, and internal psychic domains, not as literally existing. We must imagine such gods and heroes and imaginations (for how else do they expand our mind?) long enough for them to have an effect upon our consciousness and practice, but knowing full well that they are not physically or metaphysically true. This interesting and nuanced, view of fantasy is not singular in Marcuse’s thought. Indeed, most of his signature concepts rely upon a similar logical fabric. As a final example, consider one of Marcuse’s most stirring and beautiful ideas, raised in a variety of papers and books near the end of his life: that we should see society as a “work of art.” In an unpublished lecture, Marcuse evokes what such a concept might entail. It is worth quoting at length: The vision is that of the historical movement when man calls a halt to the rat race that has been his existence, when man takes stock of what he has and what he can do with it, and decides that instead of going on with the rat

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race, instead of producing ever more and ever bigger for those who can and must buy it, to subvert the very mode and direction of production, and thereby of the their entire life. This means, to abolish poverty, and then to devote all resources to the elimination of the spiritual and material garbage with which the established societies have covered not figuratively but literally, our mental and physical space, and to construct a peaceful and beautiful universe. (1998, p. 116–7)

This beautiful vision, I would argue, is perhaps summative of Marcuse’s goal throughout his working life, one of a collective reality wherein people are treated with dignity and the excess potential of society is used for the alleviation of suffering. But why call such a society a “work of art”? For that answer, we must look briefly to Marcuse’s theory of art, one which mirrors, to a large degree, that of Nietzsche. As with Nietzsche, Marcuse is principally concerned with art’s “unreality,” its utility as a fiction. Hence, when discussing art, Marcuse will offer that art “contains nothing that does not also exist in the given reality, the actions, thoughts, feelings, and dreams of men and women, their potentialities and those of nature. Nevertheless the world of a work of art is ‘unreal’ in the ordinary sense of the word: it is a fictitious reality…” As unreal, though, like Marcuse’s earlier theory of fantasy, art “contains more truth than does everyday reality” (1978, p. 54; also see 1978, p. 22). As illusion (Schein), art can “break open a dimension inaccessible to other experience” (1978, p. 72), where we see the world, not as it is, but as it might be, or should be, or can be. We know of these kinds of visions. They can be dystopian or utopian. They can be in the present, the past, or the future. Through the power of empathy and projection, fantasy allows us to inhabit a different world, one very much unlike our own. Yet, with such a parallax view, we may begin to see that the world need not be how it is, either negatively or positively. This is the function of art, fantasy, and myth for Marcuse. Art purchases this power, though, by virtue of the fact that it cannot do anything directly about our present world. Art’s only power, according to Marcuse, is due to its alienation. As he will offer in Eros and Civilization, “the realm of aesthetics is essentially ‘unrealistic’: it has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being ineffective in the reality” (1974, p.  172). Once art tries to change the world, it becomes compromised. It is now a part of the present. It is no longer the stuff of imagination.

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And so the best art can do, according to Marcuse, is “serve as a sort of gauge for a free society” (1969, p. 27). We can compare and contrast the world we live in with the world we want and imagine. Art works through creating this critical dissonance and tension between what we want and what is. It raises consciousness. In short, art is the means by which we achieve “a new rationality and sensibility in the individuals themselves” (1972, p. 48), allowing us to see the cracks and deformations in the present while also seeing the potentialities for a greater and better world. Art—narrative, visual, musical, or otherwise—is the only medium which belies this possibility, for Marcuse, in a broken and yet homogenous world. Which brings us back to “society as a work of art.” Seen through Marcuse’s aesthetic vision, society can be a work of art if it is committed to realizing the unexplored—and yet imagined—possibilities that lie dormant in the present. Society as a work of art would be “the idea of a possible artistic formation of the life world” (2007, p.  128; also see 1969, p. 45), where individuals and groups could “experiment” with the possibilities of liberation and redemption in the present world. Such a society would not have a definite form—how could it?—but would instead be the consistent imaginative exploration of new ways of living and doing, not merely those which are given to us. As Marcuse concisely offers, “This is the most utopian, the most radical possibility of liberation today” (2005, p. 83). Similar to fantasy or Orpheus and Narcissus, society as a work of art functions as an ideal and a symbol, allowing us to think about a world of constant imagination and vision. Yet there is another link here, one that reveals the formal similarities between Marcuse and modernity more broadly. Society as a work of art, to be sure, is not a thing. It does not specify a state of being or a concrete state of affairs. Were such a society to be realized, it would simply go on envisioning. Hence its utopian nature. Its reality is formal, not substantial. This aligns Marcuse’s society as a work of art, I would offer, with Kant’s regulative ideals. It is an infinite horizon towards which we move, but one that disappears as we approach it. Its function lies not in its realization, but in its being envisioned, as a cue for the imagination. Its only reality is temporal—it might be, but it is not yet. The same may be said of fantasy and myth—the realities they point to are in the future, deferred, but do not exist in the present. Their power lies in their unreality. Marcuse’s thought, then, is full of cues and props for the imagination: fantasy, myth, and art. Each is a way of seeing the present differently and envisioning alternatives. But they exist only as a means, as a way of inviting

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experimental thoughts that tinker with potential truths. Their potency is underwritten by their unreality. But believing in such unrealities, according to Marcuse, is the only way we actually envision a better world, even if we know them to be, again, unreal. And so, like Nietzsche, that which is untrue and purposefully constructed or resurrected is the key to our constant self-transcendence. * * * One final thinker. Again, on the power of untruths, even if self-conscious. Modernity, with its emphasis on science, experimentation, and truth, helps to mold the logic and form of arguments in thinkers as diverse as Kant, Nietzsche, and Marcuse. Each is a careful blend of cultivated skepticism and renewed creative and imaginative vigor. It is said, though, that modernity gives rise to postmodernity, which is both an intensification of modernity’s insights and predilections, as well as an undoing of modernity. I would offer that such simple reductions miss the considerable continuities between modernists like Kant and their postmodern counterparts. One way in which we might see this continuity is through the work of Michel Foucault. In Foucault, the radical and potent deconstruction of truth undertaken by people like Nietzsche is furthered. Everything is contingent. All is constructed. For many, this is the only story. But there is a deep undercurrent here—Foucault still remains deeply committed to the truth. Indeed, as he will offer, truth is the means by which we change ourselves and our world. Truth is constructed; truth matters. We can begin to see one dimension of Foucault’s encounter with truth in his middle writings on power and knowledge. There, Foucault dismantles both the origins of knowledge and their effects. Knowledge is, at least genetically, the result of various attempts to interpret the world, make it more interesting, and, most importantly, mold the eventual outcome of that world. To this entanglement of explanation, investment, and self-­ motivation, Foucault lends the term “power.” Power is not something to be had, but something produced through our complicated relationship with other humans and the world around us. In this way, truth is not what generates power, but, rather the other way around. As Foucault states in his Discipline and Punish: “power produces knowledge…power and knowledge directly imply one another…there is no power relation without

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the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (1979, p. 27). Our disparate attempts at producing knowledge are always colored by our investment in knowledge and what kinds of relations it modifies, constructs, or deforms. There is, then, no knowledge outside of power, no power outside of knowledge (see 1980, p. 131). They exist in circular relations with one another. From this period of Foucault’s writing forward, power becomes one of the central ways in which we understand the production of truth. There is no such thing as Truth-in-itself, nor is there a subject who has access to such a truth. Truth is, as Nietzsche would remind us, produced. And, for Foucault, it is productive. Truth produces social arrangements, moralities, customs, body types, selves, identities, genders, and practices. Each of these is goal oriented. Ultimately, then, the search for truth is the search to “discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc” (1980, p. 97). Similar, if not identical, to Nietzsche’s recognition that truths are self-preserving and make the world more interesting, Foucault will recognize that power-knowledge makes the world what it is. We cannot get outside of power and truth. We are always entangled in their webs. What is distinctive about modernity for Foucault is not the fact that we exist within the entwinement of power-knowledge, nor that we are aware of it. Rather, to be modern, according to Foucault, is to multiply and enumerate ever more ways of using power and knowledge. Modernity amplifies both power and knowledge. It creates new truths. As he remarks in a famous interview: [What has happened in the modern era] is the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge  – methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organize and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs. (1980, p. 102)

These “effective instruments” include the ways in which we monitor and construct cities and jails; the multiplicity of academic and medical discourses on the body and human sexuality; the way in which we talk about

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the soul; or, more recently, the control of human health and bodies within modern states and institutions. To be modern is to be implicated in multiple nodes of power and truth which operate on us, making us into subjects of “truth.” Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge is transformative and liberating. It sees truth as not fixed, but constructed. It sees power not as a substance, a thing bequeathed on certain individuals and institutions, but as a relation between truth, discourse, and various individuals and groups. And, finally, truth is within our control: we can construct it or resist it. If truth is power, and if power is disseminated, then we, too, have truth and power. Foucault illuminates his theory of power by pointing to the various ways in which it operates in the world. There is a problem here, though. If all truth is power, and all discourse is a product of power relations, then aren’t Foucault’s “truths” also a form of power? Aren’t they, too, constructed? Why not see Foucault’s work as a merely contingent construction, too, and therefore equivalent to all other constructions? To this, Foucault has an answer, one which is fully consistent. We find it boldly stated in another interview: In spite of that, the people who read me – particularly those who value what I do – often tell me with a laugh, “You know very well that what you say is really just fiction.” I always reply, “Of course, there’s no question of it being anything else but fiction.”…[M]y problem is not to satisfy professional historians; my problem is to construct myself, and to invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed. (1997b, p. 242)

Foucault’s works, then, are not necessarily true in the sense that they identify something present in the world that is objectively represented by an impartial observer. Nor do they isolate and designate eternal realities, truths, or essences. Instead, truth for Foucault is a “fiction,” a production—as all knowledge is—which is to help create a transformative experience in the reader. As he continues later in the same interview, “[T]he essential thing is not in the series of those true or historically verifiable findings but, rather, in the experience that the book makes possible. Now, the fact is, this experience is neither true nor false. An experience is always

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a fiction: it’s something that one fabricates oneself, that doesn’t exist before and will exist afterward” (1997b, p. 243). This view is both wholly consistent and startling. Foucault’s books, lectures, and interviews are not fully true, but, rather, “invitations” (1997b, p. 246) to see the world in a particular way, like a work of literature or a film. And, as with all power, Foucault’s truths have a function and purpose: they are designed to alter and transform our experience in fundamental ways. He makes this clear in another interview: It seems to me the possibility exists to make fiction work in truth, to induce effects of truth with a discourse of fiction, and to make it so that the discourse of truth creates, “fabricates” something that does not yet exist…One “fictionalizes” history starting from a political reality that makes it true, one “fictionalizes” a political outlook that does not yet exist starting from an historical truth. (1996, p., 213)

As he will state elsewhere, an author or someone engaged in discourse creates a certain rendering of reality such that “this interpretation could produce some of the effects of truth,” but Foucault, pointedly, has an aim in mind, namely, that “these effects of truth could become implements within possible struggles… Deciphering a layer of reality in such a way that the lines of force and the lines of fragility come forth; the points of resistance and the possible points of attack; the paths marked out and the shortcuts” (1996, p., 261). Much like Marcuse’s theory of art, fiction/ truth for Foucault functions to illuminate the dissonance and shortcomings of our present world. The only difference between Foucault and those who produce other forms of discourse is Foucault’s self-awareness: he knows he is producing fiction, whereas those who produce truth try to mask its human, all too human, origin. Hence, just as Nietzsche portended, truth becomes a tool, an agent in producing new ways of seeing and constructing the world. Truth is a thing of this world, and this world is molded by power relations. As Foucault reflects on the role of an author—who in this instance is simply a creator— we observe that she is to “see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality” (PPC, 155–6). Authors do so in order to create new power relations, new ways of seeing and being. Thus, while the truths of creative effort are not true at the time they are written, they may become true by eventually

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being incorporated into forms of power-knowledge. Foucault recognizes this temporal shift, stating, “What I am trying to do is provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope is my books become true after they have been written – not before…. I hope that the truth of my books is in the future” (1996, p. 301, italics added). With this notion of a truth in the future we see more fully the role that truth plays in a world where truth is seen skeptically. Nothing may be “true” at the time it is uttered. But something may be true if it changes the future. Truth is not; rather, truth becomes. Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge renders the epistemic world flat: there are not privileged truths or essences. Nor is any one truth more real than the next. The silver lining, though, is that truths can be produced and incorporated into the world we know, altering power relations. It seems, then, that we are brought full circle to Nietzsche’s reflections on truth and error. For Nietzsche, truth was a tool, one which certain individuals could employ to change themselves. In Foucault, truth is a thing of this world, a tool, laden with motivation, interest, and a curious need to understand. But, ultimately, truth is a fiction that makes the world. And so, like Nietzsche, Foucault will ask the question: “Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? And I think that, instead of trying to find out what truth, as opposed to error, is, it might be more interesting to take up the problem posed by Nietzsche: how is it that, in our societies, ‘the truth’ has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall?” (1988, p. 107). The import of Foucault’s line of questioning is clear: let us not preoccupy ourselves with whether something is true or not, but, rather, with its effects. The similarities with Nietzsche do not stop there. Just as Nietzsche’s deconstruction of truth leads him to see truth-as-fiction and thus all inquiry as an “experiment,” so too does Foucault see truth, writing, and creation as experimental (it helps not to see the self as fixed, but that is another story). As Foucault reflects, “Each book transforms what I was thinking when I was finishing the previous book. I am an experimenter and not a theorist…. I’m an experimenter in the sense that I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before” (1997b, p. 240). If life and creativity and truth are experiments, then, we can see them as a “game of truth and fiction” (1997b, p. 244), as a way of playing with our reality, unstable and power-laden as it is. Deconstructing truth and ennobling fiction give rise to the endless possibilities for

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tinkering, playing, and imagining. Fictions open up the critical space for us to see and create ourselves anew. And, to be sure, like Nietzsche before him, Foucault’s truths/fictions are implicated in acts of self- and world-making. In Foucault’s late lectures on Greco-Roman ethics, he explores the ways in which we make ourselves what we are. For the Greeks and Romans, according to Foucault, we make ourselves through practices which, collectively, come to be known as “askesis.” And askesis works by interrogating and converting truth into practice, into a way of being. As he states in his 1981 lectures at the College de France, “In reality askesis is a practice of truth. Ascesis is not a way of subjecting the subject to the law; it is a way of binding [a subject] to the truth” (2005, p. 317). Or, further, we see that askesis, and therefore truth, is what allows for us to “establish an adequate, full, and perfect relationship to ourselves,” to “transfigure” ourselves in the midst of certain truths (2005, p. 332). We need the truth, according to Foucault (by way of the Greeks), in order to make ourselves what we are. We become better selves, bodies, and agents by incorporating true discourses into ourselves, by, as Seneca states (as quoted by Foucault 2005, p. 405), becoming “attached to them and…governed by them.” Just as truth modifies power, truths also modify individuals. We become what we wish to be through the truths of religion, nutrition, careers, jobs, aspirations, and all the sundry ways we engage the world. Askesis is simply the desire to control such a process. We must remind ourselves, though, of Foucault’s previous deconstruction of truth. For Foucault, there is no absolute truth. There are only fictions, some of which are productive. To be “attached” to truth, then, as he would suggest in his account of askesis, is to be attached, fundamentally, to fictions. The truths we use to modify ourselves are contingent and constructed. They are, at best, to have an effect in the future. The goal, throughout, is to change “one’s style of life, one’s relation to others, and one’s relation to oneself” (2001, p. 106). This desire, evoked throughout many of Foucault’s later works, amounts to what he dubs an “aesthetics of the self,” a practice whereby we make ourselves according to artistic standards. Here, using the truths we know to be created, we are to “comport oneself towards oneself in the role of a technician, of a craftsman, of an artist, who from time to time stops working, examines, what he is doing, reminds himself of the rules of his art, and compares these rules with what he has achieved thus far” (2001, p. 166). Like Nietzsche and Marcuse, Foucault’s aesthetics of the self allows us to see what ethics ultimately is in modernity: aesthetics. To make

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ourselves, to be virtuous, or to change the world is a creative process which engages tools, manifold skills, and, ultimately, one chief resource: truth. Part of this creativity, of course, is the open-ended engagement with myths, ideas, ideals, and fictions of our own making. For if truth is not given to us, but given by us, then it shall be used. Truth is a tool. The only hope is that the truths we create have, as Foucault rightfully notes, an effect on the future, that the truths we evoke will become true by our making them so through practice. Part of the role of the author— which may be seen as an analogue for the creative act—is to construct those truths which will alter the complex dynamics of human relationships, including the self. Truth-making and self-creation become experimental exercises in casting nets into the airy chaos, hoping they latch onto reality and forge a new self and world. * * * With Kant we saw the simple movement from skepticism towards large-­ scale truths to a recovery of the necessity of certain truths for ethics. This fundamental architecture, I would offer, is inherited by Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Foucault. Each, for their own reasons, shows this interesting duality: the recognition that truths are contingent and maybe even errors, alongside the need to invent and live into fiction and error. After the loss of absolute truth, it appears we have three options: the denial of all truth; the romantic lapse into a state before skepticism; or the use of truth. Modernity, it appears, counsels the latter. With this pragmatic perspective on truth, we are thrust into a world of experimentation and testing. There is no longer a fixed self or world, but, rather, a series of invented selves and worlds. And, with experimentation, truth becomes temporal. Truth is not now, but a possibility, in the future. It awaits becoming and realization. And, of course, fiction, myth, art, and religion are put to use in modernity. With Nietzsche, they are the tools of self-becoming and transformation; with Marcuse, they are to make the world a more humane and less repressive place; and in Foucault they are to change power relations. Just as modernity multiplies truths, it also multiplies the ends to which truth may be subjected. There are as many uses for truths as there are truths. Without a fixed locus, a discrete point of reference, we put the tools of our own making to work.

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There is a gap, though, one we can see coming. None of Nietzsche, Marcuse, or Foucault, much less those not explored here, tell us how we can realize the fictions that are to serve so many functions in modernity. Does simply thinking it make it so? Is merely calling something a fiction like an act of conjuring, bringing it into existence? How do we believe what we want to be true? Does the act of writing, like that explored by Nietzsche and Foucault, create the very reality we wish to see? Or is it an act of imagination, as explored by Marcuse? We are left, it seems, with a call but no direction. And so we are thrust into the first paradox. We must believe what we know to be unreal. We must commit, but our commitment is arbitrary. This is not simply a problem of philosophy, but one of the central aspects of modernity itself.

literAture cited Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1980. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1988. In Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence Kritzman. New York: Routledge. ———. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1996. In Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). ———. 1997a. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Vol. 1. New York: The New Press. ———. 1997b. Power. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. Vol. 3. New York: The New Press. ———. 2001. Fearless Speech. Trans. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2005. Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–82. Ed. Frederic Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1972. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1974. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1978. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1988. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Trans. Jeremy Shapiro. London: Free Association Books.

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———. 1998. In Towards a Critical Theory of Society, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner, vol. 2. New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. In The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner, vol. 3. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Art and Liberation. Ed. Douglas Kellner. Vol. 4, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Vol. 4. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Penguin Books. ———. 1982. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. In The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New  York: Viking-Penguin. ———. 1984. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1989. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1990. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. New  York: Penguin Books. ———. 1997a. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997b. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Simpson, Zachary. 2012. Life as Art: Aesthetics and the Creation of Self. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 4

The Religious Story: The Re-Envisioning of God in Contemporary Theology

In Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Foucault, we see the ways in which constructed ideas are deployed for concrete individual, political, and discursive purposes. Yet these constructed ideas are merely that—consciously self-constructed. We know that they are of our own making, but need them nonetheless. These arguments are not isolated to philosophy, though. Modernity is, after all, a cultural and historical movement in the West that has imperial ambitions: it wishes, above all, for the rule of reason to encompass all of existence and all of inquiry, from science to philosophy. Religion and theology are no exception. Indeed, as I will argue below, religion and theology may present to us the most crystalline form of the modern paradox. For, in having God as one’s object, modernity encounters the ultimate of all created-but-necessary entities. God, throughout modernity, will be called upon as the savior of our souls, our curiosities, our earth, and our politics. These demands are accompanied by an increasing awareness that what we say of God, and God itself, may be a human projection or false. We shall see this duality of demand and realization as it winds its way from the early yearnings of modernity to the present. * * *

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_4

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Our story begins, as with Kant in Chap. 2, in a figure who attempts to straddle the multiple worlds at the cusp of the late-medieval period and early modernity. Blaise Pascal, even more so than Kant, exemplifies the tensions that run throughout the Reformation and its cousin, modernity. Pascal embodies both the modern faith in reason as well as the need to believe, even if unbelievable, in a gracious and just God. We see this most ostensibly in the famous “wager,” which has seemingly become canon for the rationality of belief. And yet, within the beating heart of the wager lies a reliance on the limitations of reason and the role of emotions in confirming belief. For, as the story goes, we are all confronted with a dilemma: either believe in God and potentially receive eternal reward in Heaven, or do not believe, and potentially receive eternal damnation. The cost for believing is slight in comparison with infinite reward, whereas the cost of nonbelief, too, is slight, in comparison with its miniscule reward or infinite downside. Presented as such, the wager is often seen as a rational game theoretic way of framing the need to believe. As Pascal offers in summary, “There is, indeed, an infinite distance between the certainty of winning and the certainty of losing, but the proportion between the uncertainty of winning and the certainty of what is being risked is in proportion to the chances of winning or losing” (1995, #418, p. 124; note that references to Pascal will include both aphorism and page numbers). This is only half the tale, however. For, suppose one does “wager” on God, but does not believe? What of her? She may be rational, but she may not yet have faith. What is she to do? Here, I would offer, lies the true genius of the wager. For, Pascal states, in the absence of belief or faith, one is to mimic the gestures and signs of faith until one eventually gets faith. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road… These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured; follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile. (1995, #418, pp. 124-5)

Again, what is offered here is stunning, both psychologically and theologically. From a theological perspective, Pascal is stating that, in effect, belief

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need not precede action. Indeed, action can create faith. Or, psychologically, there is a feedback loop between ritualized action and states of mind. Actions can precipitate beliefs. To paraphrase the Alcoholics Anonymous phrase: you fake it ‘til you make it. What resides behind the second half of the wager—and its reliance upon action as a vehicle for realizing beliefs we know to be false—is a threefold doctrine that is developed throughout the rest of Pascal’s Pensees. First, and as seen in part in the wager, is the recognition of the limitations of reason. Reason, or the reasons we give ourselves for believing in any one thing, can only go so far. As Pascal states, this is for one chief reason, grounded in the infinite perfection of God: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that” (1995, #188, p. 56). Or, similarly, “We are something and we are not everything. Such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight” (#199, 62–3). For Pascal, we are, quite simply, too small and too big. As partially material beings, we cannot understand the incorporeal nature of the universe. And yet, as part spirit, we cannot fully understand the material world, either (see 1995, #199, p.  65). As with Kant one-hundred fifty years later, there are simply objects beyond the reach of human reason. Or, as Pascal offers in summary, “we may well know that God exists without knowing what he is” (1995, #418, p. 121). Given the limitations of reason according to Pascal, it is hardly surprising that he translates the shortcomings of reason into a richer practical account of how humans are motivated and act. As he is often (in)famously quoted for saying, Pascal states, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing…” (1995, #423, p. 127). That is, reason is limited with respect to both the external world and to the self. It does not fully know even its own subjectivity. In light of that limitation, Pascal develops a theory of motivation which seems to hinge, as does that of Aquinas and others before him, on two elements: the heart and the will. As he states with respect to the heart, “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason” (1995, #424, p. 127; also see #482, p. 153). It is our hearts, according to Pascal, which incline us to God. Not reason. For the heart is the seat of feeling, which pulls more strongly than reasons ever can (1995, #530, p. 188).

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The same may be said of the will, which acts in response to the heart’s command. It inclines us to believe, or not believe, according to its direction. “Thus the mind, keeping in step, with the will, remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by what it sees there” (1995, #539, pp.  189–90). As with other medieval thinkers, Pascal adopts an account of human psychology wherein reason plays an important, but tempered, role. Reason resides alongside the heart, or feeling, and each can equally motivate the will. It is ultimately will which carries out the directives of the heart and mind. Which takes us, again, to the second half of the wager. For, according to Pascal, what motivates the heart and will, in part, is habit. He gives this clear expression in two of his succinct meditations. First: “There are three ways to believe: reason, habit, inspiration….we must open our mind to the proofs, confirm ourselves through it in habit, while offering ourselves through humiliations and inspiration, which alone can produce the real and salutary effect…” (1995, #808, p.  244). As with much of Pascal’s work, he recognizes the effect of reason on belief. But such an effect is secondary to that of habit and practices which render us open to outside influence and grace. The real work is done by physical practice and God. Or, as he offers here: For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us. How few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it…. In short, we must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present before us. We must acquire an easier belief, which is that of habit. (1995, #821, p. 247)

Habit is, as he notes, the “easier belief,” the way in which we, like tea, “steep and stain ourselves” in the belief in God. This, I would offer, is the Janus-face to the seemingly rational wager. Wagering on God is only part of the story, and a small one at that. The real trick is to believe in God, and that occurs not through abstract reason, but through habits—prayers and self-submissions—which open the self to feeling and inspiration. As Pascal states at the end of the wager, “Custom

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is our nature. Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else” (#419, 125). Only through physical practice can we motivate the heart and will properly to truly believe in God. Let us note, however, the structure of Pascal’s argument. It goes something like this: we cannot fully know God, so we must, in the absence of full knowledge, commit to rituals and actions which create belief. Belief does not precede action or knowledge. Rather, action is what creates belief, and knowledge is always, alas, lacking. We must commit to God, even if we do not yet believe in God. Pascal, I will offer, is the first truly modern religious thinker. He understands both the limitations of reason and what we must do in light of that limitation. As we shall see below, the architecture of his thought becomes paradigmatic for modern religious and theological reflection. * * * Another story, this time on an exemplary religious life. Here, we join John Wesley, the father of the Methodist Church, as a young man returning from a maiden evangelical voyage to the then-colonies, spreading the Gospel to both English colonists and Native Americans. Taken by religious zeal and a fervor to have others see his vision for salvation and the grace of Christ, Wesley had voyaged to the American south, preaching with clarity and passion. It is reported that he gained many early converts. There is but one problem, though. Wesley himself, though a passionate proponent of the Gospel, had pangs of doubt throughout his journey. These doubts intensified during his trans-Atlantic voyage home to England, where he reportedly nearly lost faith on rough seas in the Atlantic. As he later wrote in his journal: “It is now two years and almost four months since I left my native country in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why (what I least of all suspected), that I who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God” (as quoted on Collins 1999, p.  54). Or, as Wesley later reported of his state of mind much later in his life, he felt he was “alienated from the life of God,” and a “child of wrath,” an “heir of hell” (Tomkins 2003, 57). Upon his return to England, Wesley sought out a Moravian priest, Peter Böhler, as a spiritual mentor. What should he do to find true faith that does not waver? Böhler argued that Wesley “believed intellectually,

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but still hoped to become righteous by virtue of his own deeds, lacking the true faith that comes in an instant, bringing rebirth and an utter certainty of salvation” (Tomkins 2003, p. 58). Wesley inevitably questioned Böhler about how to achieve instantaneous and undoubted faith. Should he stop preaching? Should he cease to be a servant of Christ? As Stephen Tomkins reports in his moving biography of Wesley, the following exchange then occurred: Naturally [Wesley] thought he should stop preaching, but Böhler would not hear of it. “But what can I preach?” asked John. “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.”

Tomkins then observes, “An unorthodox answer maybe, but psychologically brilliant, because such preaching is precisely what gradually built up Wesley’s faith and confidence in his salvation” (Tomkins 2003, p. 58). Wesley would go on to preach on the roads of England and to have a “conversion experience” after hearing Luther’s Preface to the Letter to the Romans (though he was simply converted to the realization of his own salvation through a gift from God), but it is Böhler’s advice that held the day. Wesley was to act as if he had the faith he craved, which would, circularly, create such a faith. Even in the absence of what he desired—saving faith—he was to preach until such faith arrived. Pascal’s wager come to life. * * * Theology and philosophy of religion in the modern era are obviously not unilinear trajectories or homogenous movements. For every Pascal, asking us to commit to a faith through habit and heart, there is a Hume or Feuerbach, deconstructing the essence of faith, or a Hegel, who believes in the utter rationality of faith. Pascal’s arc lies somewhere in between, a reconciliation between absolute faith and the denial of religious truth altogether. This third option, I would argue, is most potently expressed in the American pragmatists, most ostensibly William James. For it is in James, like Nietzsche, that we see a more practical and flexible notion of truth which gives rise to an experimental and hypothetical religious vision. Indeed, as James offers in his introductory lectures on pragmatism, he

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performs, like Nietzsche, a reversal in how we understand truth. Instead of thinking of truth as a correspondence between what we think and what the world reveals, the pragmatic method determines the truth of an idea by “tracing its respective practical consequences” (2000b, p. 25), or, likewise, “by the way it works” (2000b, p. 33). The criteria for whether an idea is true or not, James states, is that it “helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting...” (2000b, p. 94; also see p. 30). Truth is, fittingly, pragmatic: it has practical consequences. An idea has truth-value if it allows us to live better, see the world more clearly, or if it gels with our experience. James avers that such ideas must “pay,” that is, “by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but with which at any rate we are now in a kind of commerce vaguely designated as verification” (2000b, p. 96). This applies to both our mundane beliefs about objects and the world around us, and to the big stuff of belief and metaphysics. As James offers, theological ideas, just as much as any others, “will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged” (2000b, p. 36). Religious ideas and beliefs are true insomuch as they “would help us to lead that life,” or that it would “be really better for us to believe in that idea…” (2000b, p.  38). Function, or potential functioning, is what determines truth. Concepts must have, in James’ terms, a payoff. This obviously has interesting consequences for truth and falsity. True ideas are those that have a function and mesh with experience. “False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as” (2000b, p. 88). Moreover, truth is not a static concept, inhering in isolated Platonic ideas, a thing-in-itself, or a sense world outside of humans. Rather, truth is what works or may work. Something becomes true through its use in human experience. As James states wonderfully: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation” (2000b, p. 88). True statements are what either has been verified through human use and experience, or those which initiate the process of verification (see 2000b, p.  90). There is, as James makes abundantly clear, no need for abstract

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truths which play no role in human affairs. An idea is true only insomuch as it anticipates life and meshes with our process of meaning-making (see 2000b, p. 119). James is well aware of what this means. Truth is no longer static. It now occupies, as James states, a “third estate of being,” neither fully real nor fully not-real, but in the space of possibility, of that which “may be” (2000b, p. 123). We make statements, ideas, and concepts true through enacting them or finding them within experience. Given his notion of truth, we can more fully understand what James means in his often misunderstood and fully pragmatic lecture, “The Will to Believe.” There, as with his theory of truth, religious ideas come to take on the nature of “hypotheses,” where life is the “experimental test by which they are verified, and the only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out” (2000c, p. 196). Religious ideas, like all ideas, may be true, but that truth awaits verification. Yet James takes this notion of pragmatic truth one step further in the “Will to Believe.” We are not simply to passively accept that truth is what we make of it. Instead, we should go beyond this passive acceptance and actively believe in those ideas which may conform to our experience, or might be of value to us. This is, indeed, the will to believe, an active faith which puts forth ideas and concepts in the hope that they turn out to be true. This kind of faith, based on desire, “is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing” (2000c, p. 214). Moreover, as James states, there are instances “where faith in a fact can help create the fact…” (2000c, p. 214). Indeed, as James offers to his supposedly skeptical Harvard audience in the lecture, it is worse to treat religious ideas as if they were not true, since it would “put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait.” This, to James, “seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave” (2000c, p. 217). James defends this stance in other lectures, most notably his lectures on pragmatism, where he states that we should “treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal” (2000b, p. 37), a hypothetical attitude that allows us to grant, like Nietzsche’s eternal return, significance to the everyday. Or, in his “Is Life Worth Living?,” James offers that, to hold religious ideas means to “live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition” (2000a, p. 236). Indeed, in answering the question of whether life is worth living or not, James states that the invisible worlds

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we imagine and inhabit in our minds are of inestimable value to us. “[T]o believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform” (2000a, p. 238). It seems here we are back to Kant and Nietzsche. Religious ideas and concepts have value inasmuch as they can transform our lives and give greater meaning to our experience. And, to be sure, James, like Nietzsche only a few years before him, is agnostic about the “existence” of God. Our ideas are human constructions, many of which may not say much about the world itself, God included. If the idea of God works, it is true (see 2000b, p. 131). All religious ideas await an answer in human experience, not in a transcendent realm of static truth. We are, as Nietzsche himself might have stated, devoted to a world of “maybes” (2000a, p. 238), and we are the experiments of truth. James, I would offer, goes beyond Nietzsche and Kant, though, in his admission that such a “will to believe” borders on foolhardiness. In a moment of clarity and candor, James gives us this stunning observation, one which reaches to the heart of the modern problem of created beliefs: Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure’s Magazine are all of someone else?...We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up, – matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own. (2000c, p. 200)

This is, of course, the same problem encountered by Pascal. Can we believe in that which we know to be not (yet) true? Can we simply will something to be true because we desire it to be so? It is one thing to wish something to be true, to even state that it will become true in our lives at some point in the future, but quite another to believe that this will be so. On the heels of this question, James gives two replies. The first is, somewhat unsurprisingly, the Pascalian answer, found in the second half of the wager. That is, as James states, “Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,  – …Why should you not? At bottom, what have you to lose?” (2000c, p. 201). In short, practice your truth until it is verified by experience or until belief takes over. Preach until you have faith. This answer is, of course, wholly in

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keeping with the pragmatic perspective. Ideas are true if they can be manifest in experience. We should, then, have faith until that faith becomes true. Imagine until you truly believe. Steeped in Pascalian metaphor, James’ second way of making sense of having faith without belief is presented in similar terms to what Pascal proposes: that of a wager. For James, we have but two options: pure skepticism (mirroring that of Sextus Empiricus), which renders us infertile and betwixt ideas, or faith, which at least plays its hand on the fecundity of human experience and the possibility that life will match our hopes and desires. In short, the skeptic is “actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field” (2000c, p. 215). Bereft of confirmation and held fast in the knowledge that beliefs and truths are contingent and constructed, we are to hedge our bets and opt for an optimistic faith that life has value and meaning, that we are not simply a spandrel of experience in the stars. As James observes in his lectures on pragmatism, the reception of his “Will to Believe” was icy. “All the critics, neglecting the essay, pounced upon the title. Psychologically it was impossible, morally it was iniquitous. The ‘will to deceive,’ the ‘will to make-believe,’ were wittily proposed as substitutes for it” (2000b, p.  113). Clearly, James believes the will to believe as both psychologically possible and not an act of self-deception. And, for him, the way to overcome such criticism is to argue for the value of ideas which may not be real. For in these ideas might lie a future richness of experience and human knowledge. James frames his response as such: Every [ideal] realized will be one moment in the world’s salvation. But these particular ideals are not bare abstract possibilities. They are grounded, they are live possibilities, for we are their live champions and pledges, and if the complementary conditions come and add themselves, our ideals will become actual things….Does our act then create the world’s salvation so far as it makes room for itself, so far as it leaps into the gap? Does it create, not the whole world’s salvation of course, but just so much of this as itself covers the world’s extent? (2000b, p. 125)

The proof, it seems, is in the living and doing. The world shall be saved when we act as if it will be saved, or as if we are already saved.

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James’ ideas clearly represent an advance on Pascal’s wager and his notion of the heart and will as motivating factors for belief. In James we see similar notions of wagering and believing the not-yet-true, but they are undergirded by a practical theory of truth which sees truths as potent hypotheses and kernels of potential reality from which experience may spring. Casting aside the idea of eternal truths, we must adopt those truths which fulfill humanity. And if those truths happen to be the stuff of faith, then they, too, must be lived into and made true through our investment and action. * * * The imagination of God, it appears, accelerates after James, the World Wars, and the hastening of postmodernity. C.S. Lewis, who we encountered in Chap. 1, is one example of this, if only in an attempt to get us to realize a faith that is always already there. There are other examples of this multiplication and intensification of imagination, though, most notably in the efforts of constructive theology to envision a God who is better suited to the fears and crises of today. One example is Sallie McFague, whose feminist reconstruals of the divine have had a profound impact on the late-twentieth-century divine imaginary. In a series of books, McFague beseeches her believing—and perhaps open-minded—readers to consider God not as a distant and abstract patriarch, but as a nurturing and freeing Mother, Lover, and Friend. Or, similarly, we are to think of the earth as the Body of God. We are to do this for profound social and political reasons: the image of God as Father and Sovereign has authorized violence against women, the helpless, and the earth. We must change our metaphors of God, McFague argues, if we are to change our world. This constructive theological approach is authorized, according to McFague, for at least two reasons. First, as she notes repeatedly, all language about God, or even reality for that matter, is human construction and as such “misses the mark” (1987, p. 23). Because of this, we never have a clear picture of the world as-is, as Kant remarked. Or, in short, “All renderings of reality are metaphorical (that is, none is literal), but in our novel constructions we offer new possibilities in place of others. In this sense we create the reality in which we live; we do not copy it, or to put it more pointedly, there are no copies, only creations” (1987, p. 26). Hence,

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all thinking is metaphorical, though we must always recognize that our metaphors do not fully fit with reality (see BG, 19). Secondly, and as an extension of the first point, McFague offers, like many feminist philosophers of science, that the sciences themselves are simply constructions like the rest of human knowledge. There is, according to McFague, no one privileged space for viewing the world, not even science. Indeed, science, “like other significant interpretations of reality, is a construction, relying on paradigms, models, and metaphors…” (1993, p. 74). This is for a very obvious reason: scientists, like the rest of us, are “concrete human beings who occupy embodied sites, particularly cultural, gender, racial, social, and economic settings” (1993, p. 94). McFague’s two axes of reflection together amount to a leveling and humbling of human knowledge. We are limited and equal in our ability to view reality, much less ultimate reality. In a note reminiscent of Nietzsche, our best attempts at viewing reality are constructions, models, and heuristics. In light of this, the task of a theologian is not one of despair, nor is it to steadfastly cling to tradition and creed, but to “remythologize” the faith by “identifying and elucidating primary metaphors and models from contemporary experience which will express Christian faith for our day in powerful, illuminating ways” (1987, p. 32). That is, the theologian must devise new models, new ways of seeing the world and the divine that match contemporary experience. And yet she must be fully aware that such models, as are all human constructions, are “only one partial and inadequate way to interpret reality” (1993, p. 18). Given this more negative and yet creative framework, McFague’s calls to re-envision God make sense. To see the world as God’s body, for example, allows us to imagine the “the creator in the creation, the source of all existence in and through what is bodied forth from that source” (1993, p. 134), an expression which would, hopefully, make us less likely to continue the destruction of the planet. Or, similarly, reimagining God as Mother, Lover, and Friend, evokes images of God as maternal, carnal, and relational. These images, McFague offers, are better ways of “attempting to express experiences of relating to God” (1987, p. 39), or, just as well, illustrative of how we might relate to God in the future. And yet, as with Pascal and James, we confront here a problem: how do we believe in such a God and commit ourselves to Her? As untraditional, un-liturgical, and perhaps unfamiliar as such a God might be, how do we re-envision Her, much less believe in such a God(dess)? The answer, one well-considered by McFague, will come as no surprise by now: we are to

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“live within” such an image of God for a time, “testing it for its disclosive power, its ability to address and cope with the most pressing issues of one’s day, its comprehensiveness and coherence, its potential for dealing with anomalies, and so forth.” As McFague adds further, “Theological constructions are ‘houses’ to live in for a while, with windows partly open and doors ajar…” (1987, p.  27). Such constructions will become believable through the act of living itself. We should, like Nietzsche, treat our lives as “experiments” (see MG, 36–7) where we think and live in an “as-if fashion” (1987, p. 36) long enough for our own created models to take hold. In short: McFague, like others before her, argues for a reciprocal relationship between acting and believing. We are to act as if what we imagine is true and worth performing. We are to live hypothetically and experimentally, “fleshing out” our models of God “to see what their implications might be” (1987, p. 182; also see 1993, p. viii). Such a life would have, of course, ethical consequences: to imagine the earth as the Body of God, or God as Mother, would alter social, political, and economic arrangements. We are to manifest these arrangements, knowing full well that the models upon which they are based are provisional, hypotheses. In perhaps an echo of Pascal, then, McFague offers up the modern conciliation to what now constitutes belief: it is no longer a systematic way of being or the ocean of belief and tradition in which we live and move and have our being, but a “wager, proposition, or experiment to investigate” (1993, p. 84). All is conditional and may not really be what we say it is. In light of this, all we can do is to live as if our hoped-for metaphors for God and the world are real. As she states clearly, “The answer, then, is finally a belief or a wager that reality is like this more than it is like that. And if enough of us were so to live, reality would become more like we believe. That is not a vicious circle, but a hope against hope” (1993, p. 91). The hope for a reality that “becomes” as we believe is the same hope seeded in all of those previously encountered in this chapter. Desire becomes a guiding light to what might be real. In a rather pragmatic way, though, McFague has good reason to endorse a practical theology along the lines of William James’ “Will to Believe.” We adopt models not because they are eternally true, but because “it helps to make things better… Some models seem to help us both to envision and to work toward that hope more than others” (1993, p. 88). Indeed, this seems to be the fundamental choice: not whether we have provisional hypotheses, but which ones. Shall we opt for that of the distant and haughty sovereign who authorizes dominion over humans and the

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earth? Or shall we see the world as a part of the divine, as something sacred (see 1993, p. 89)? Both are, in some sense, equally true. But, in a more pragmatic sense, the latter is a more welcoming and ethical vision than the former. Truth shall be made by virtue of which vision creates a better earth and politics. Truth, as James would tell us, becomes true through the world it makes. With McFague, then, we can see the general architecture of a number of constructive theological moves in the late twentieth century. We cannot know fully of the world and God, given that all knowledge is construction and all humans are limited. Our constructions have power. So we must create those models of the world and God which make the world a better place. And the way to fully buy in to those models is to live and imagine experimentally, to make the world in the image of the imagined. If all knowledge of God is tempered by human fallibility, and all ideas of God have consequences, then McFague’s theology is fully rational. And, insomuch as she furthers the path paved by Pascal, Kant, Nietzsche, and James, her theology lies within the ambit of modernity and its strictures on both belief and nonbelief. * * * I could offer numerous other examples of the modern logic of contemporary constructive theology. From Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Gaia and God to the liberation theological imperative of a preference for the poor in the eyes of God to process theological beliefs on God as “poet of the world,” we see the power and prevalence of new models for God, all built on the same humbling of theological claims and the same experimental approach to faith. Each raises the question that lies at the heart of McFague’s feminist reconstrual of God: how do we believe in that which we have not previously believed in, especially if we have good to reason to think that all attributes of God are socially relative at best, and arbitrary at worst? McFague’s deferral to experience here only defers the problem: if it is a matter of “living into” such an idea, how do we dwell in such ideas, like a house? I would like to offer here, as a preliminary answer, the work of Philip Clayton, another constructive theologian, whose work is inspired by a potent amalgam of the history of Christian thought, interreligious dialogue, contemporary science, and, most recently, the ecological crisis. In Clayton’s theological work we see the same structural architecture as McFague and other constructive theologians—the undercutting of an

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absolute knowledge of God (see 1997, p. 2; 2008, p. 25; 2013, p. 20), such that doubt becomes central to faith itself; the use of “hypothetical” language to refer to the constructive theological quest (see 1997, p. 66; 2008, p. 43; and 2013, pp. 41, 67, and 69); the employment of a discursive notion of theology that allows for the theologian to “withdraw” claims contradicted elsewhere, in society or the sciences (see 2008, p. 56; 2013, p. 112); and the use of the language of “wagering” to refer to the way in which we view theological hypotheses and their possible entry into the life of a believer (see 2008, p.  62; 2013, p.  119). And, similar, to McFague, Clayton constructs models of God, though principally in deference to the sciences (see 1997, p. 5; and 2008, p. 64), specifically, complexity theory and emergence, which dictates both what we know of the world and how we are to speak of God. While Clayton’s theology is ambitious, I am interested in another dimension of Clayton’s thought, one which centers on how we come to accept, and live within, constructive theological ideas in an age of doubt, un-belief, and wagering. To this end, we see many of the same theological gestures in Clayton that we’ve seen in others, like James. For example, Clayton endorses the idea of a religious attitude where we live in the midst of “hope-plus-faith,” in which we attempt to live “as if that hope were a certainty” (2008, p. 30). However, Clayton goes beyond this more provisional attitude and begins to outline a gesture akin to that of Foucault in the previous chapter, one which acknowledges doubt, the value of religious imagination, and the possibilistic nature of belief. We find this dimension of Clayton’s thought in a book co-written with Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief. There, after outlining a series of “levels” of belief, ranging from the fundamentally secure to those engaged in “hope-plus-faith,” Clayton and Knapp offer a sixth level of belief, which they describe as such: S [a person] does not believe P [a religious idea, like the resurrection or the existence of God], or perhaps believes that P is actually false if understood literally, and therefore does not even hope that P is true. But S does regard P as a valuable metaphor for a proposition or set of propositions she does regard as true. She may at times allow herself to suspend her disbelief in P while participating in religious practices like prayer or worship; she does so, however, with at least tacit awareness that P is not true in its own terms but is really, for her, a metaphor for something else. (p. 117)

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Clayton and Knapp more than adequately describe the life of a believer that may take the ideas of Pascal, James, or McFague seriously. Such an agent possesses a double brain, of sorts—one in which she recognizes the tenuous nature of belief, and another in which she sees its fecundity. Such an articulation, I would offer, encapsulates many a modern believer. What Clayton and Knapp offer in light of this predicament is not the same advice of others in this chapter to live, somewhat vaguely, as if something is true. Rather, Clayton and Knapp argue, such a believer should manifest her values and ideas in community, with others that share the same doubts and predilections. Were such a person to live in an attitude of hope, faith even, with others who share the same hopes and as if intentions, then it might “play an important and even essential role in creating a shared set of experiences that bind together members of an otherwise disparate community and in the spiritual formation of individual believers….all the while preserving a tacit awareness that the claims in question may well not be literally true” (pp.  117–8). Not only are the ideas of potential forward-looking value, Clayton and Knapp argue, but they can be the basis for a shared community. What is a community if not a group that believes in a common set of imagined ideals? Such a life would not overcome the central paradox of modernity, however: such a person “presumably regards [such a belief] as something she hopes may yet turn out to be true, even though she lacks sufficient reason at present to believe it. Or perhaps she can no longer even hope that it may turn out to be true, in which case it becomes at best for her an inspiring fiction” (p. 126). Even as an inspiring fiction, Clayton and Knapp argue that such an attitude still constitutes a minimum case of faith in an age of doubt. Indeed, as I have been arguing, it may be the quintessence of modern belief: to both hold a view as “inspiring” or hopefully true while recognizing that it is not true, at least at this moment. In the absence of truly believing, then, we have community, which acts to construct a common identity, but also to, like Pascal’s prayer or Wesley’s preaching, create belief where there is none (yet). As Clayton and Knapp put it: Participating in a church community and beginning to share its values becomes a path toward belief rather than a consequence of what one already believes. (In one author’s pithy expression, ‘believe, behave, belong’ is replaced by ‘belong, behave, believe.’)…. Out of the evolving practices of worship, study, and discipleship, some degree of shared belief may well emerge, even if complete convergence of belief is unlikely. (p. 147)

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Here, again, is the familiar conjunction of external activity—“behave”— with its consequence, belief. What is new, however, is the addition of community. The modes of reinforcing fictive or imaginary ideals are not simply solitary prayer, but worship, study, discipleship—all of which occur in and through communities and collectives. McFague’s sense of “living within” ideas is given new meaning and import here—such ideas are lived, not in solitude, but in community and practice with others. This does not, to be sure, remediate doubt, which Clayton sees as central, and perhaps pivotal, to the modern religious life. Nor does it remove the hypothetical status of theological claims. What it does indicate, however, in addition to the suite of ideas proposed by Pascal, James, and Lewis, is a recognition of the potential potency of community and collective identity in fostering behaviors which have a feedback effect on belief and commitment. One can become more comfortable with doubt, perhaps even more believing, in and through a community that holds to similar fictions. What constructive theology offers, it seems, is the recognition of theology as a creative enterprise. Concepts of God, Christ, and salvation are always reformed, always reforming. In the midst of these reformulations, though, arises doubt and the need to overcome the hypothetical status of theological ideas. With Clayton, we see one more way in which this might happen: not merely through external acts upon an isolated mind, but through and with others. * * * One final story. One of deconstruction and a search for God after God has become unbelievable, dead, even. Since World War II and the horrors of the holocaust, the specter of nuclear annihilation, the death of traditional and lineal communities that impart meaning, and an undercutting of all claims to knowledge, there has emerged, alongside constructive theology, an attempt to reckon with a God that we no longer find to be believable. Shall we resurrect a new God? Shall we simply await Her appearance? We find one answer in the work of Richard Kearney. For Kearney, perhaps the most poetic and clear of those summoning us back to God after the “death” of God, we see an even more radical gesture towards the possibility of faith in the modern world. As he often recognizes, he is in search of an attitude that allows us to see “God after God” (see 2010, p. xiii), or, in other words, a “faith without religion” (2010, p.  4). This is for the

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reasons listed above: after the twentieth century, he, along with many others, finds it hard, if not impossible, to believe in a God who possesses a “Divine Plan” for us all (2010, p. 58). There is another reason, too. A Kantian one. We can no longer fully believe in God with doe-eyed innocence. We know the reasons. In short: “No human can be absolutely sure about absolutes” (2010, p.  5). Or, similarly, we must concede that we know “virtually nothing about God” (2010, p. 5) aside from the fact that all we say about Him is interpretation, construction, and conjecture. To Kearney, these are all necessary moments in the modern disposition towards God. We must first “lose” the God of old before God may be recovered. This attempt to recover God after God is what Kearney dubs “anatheism,” the drive to return to God. We do this in holy unknowing, fully aware, like good moderns, of how contingent all claims of God are and must be. And yet, we make the interpretive choice, according to Kearney, to see friends, colleagues, and strangers—others—as God. Each stranger, each friend could be the divine. It could also be simply another person in our presence. Do we greet the stranger as God, or as enemy? Do we see the neighbor or immigrant as merely human, or as God? This, for Kearney, is the fundamental question of anatheism. And anatheism, though not without some reservations, offers that we shall see God in those inaugural moments. And so it comes as no surprise that Kearney allows us to come full circle with Pascal, for what is the attempt to interpret the other as God, if not a wager? As Kearney puts it: “Philosophically speaking…the anatheist wager is marked by a moment of radicalized ‘innocence’ that opens the door to ulterior dimensions of truth. Without disorientation no reorientation” (2010, p. 8; also see p. 22). Each other is the one who “may be” God, “if we choose to believe” (2010, p. 10). This is, as Kearney reminds us, a matter of “choice, a matter of interpretation” (2010, p. 11). Instead of willing ourselves to believe in a God for rational, even game theoretic, reasons, as Pascal would have us do, Kearney wants us to interpret the other as God as a sacramental act of divinizing the world. The world becomes holy because we choose to make it so, or at least choose to see it as such. And yet we remain fully aware that the world may not be as we see it. We simply choose to see it as divine. To do so requires, as Kearney is quick to remind us, an act of imagination. That person over there is not just a person—she is a messenger, a vehicle of the divine. As Kearney offers, “If we have no imagination, we cannot open our eyes and ears to the Stranger

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who comes” (2010, p. 41). Indeed, faith is “inconceivable” (Kearney, 41) without this act of imagination, one that requires us to hold fast to the seemingly paradoxical belief that, “In imagination, in short, I both am and am not the stranger” (2010, p. 42). In anatheism, all are both God and not God. In each moment is the interpretive choice to see the world as unfolding in the divine, or not. It would seem that Kearney, and deconstructionist attempts to see God after God, represents the nadir of modern attempts to maintain a belief in God while also reckoning with the doubt and criticism which are critical to modernity itself. In Kearney we have, in crystalline form, the demand to see the world with two eyes, two modes of interpretation: both as is, and as God. For Kearney, this is a return to God, not a new God. Hence, the ana—a return (see 2010, p. 167). But there is something new here, or at least historically new. In anatheism we must make the consistent wager that reality is something more than what we see in front of us. That there is something that transcends the obvious. This is not done in confidence, nor in ignorance, but in the firm recognition that my recognition of the other-as-God could be other than what it is. * * * I could offer other stories here. There are other figures which represent the religious logic of modernity, from the Romantics to deconstructionists to apologists. Collectively, though, Pascal, Wesley, James, McFague, Clayton, and Kearney lay bare the elemental logic and progressively unfolding nature of religious thought and life in the midst of modernity. With each figure we have seen a similar logical and structural architecture, a shared set of ideas about how we face religious claims. If modernity is, at least partially, about the persistent imperative to criticize ideas and to lay bare their truth, then religion in the modern age faces this demand by seeing its truth claims not as absolutes or givens, but as hypotheses, as truths that might be, or, as James states, as truth in the making. To live into such hypotheses requires a bet, a wager, one not founded necessarily on the self-evidence of such a truth, but on extrinsic reasons: the need for salvation, the demand to live a better life, the desire for faith, or the desire for a better world. Indeed, such wagers are always made with a stacked deck—we gamble on truth with other considerations in mind, not all of which are religious.

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Once we have lost the self-evidence of truth, we can no longer see it simply as is. Instead, we must constantly conjure, through imagination and empathy, the God that might be, or ourselves as believing in a God that might be. If the medieval period was about seeing God, the modern period is about pretending God. Yet, as all here have offered, pretense is not enough. From Pascal’s prayer to Wesley’s preaching to McFague’s houses that we live in to Kearney’s everyday sacramentalism, we are told that the way to enshrine pretense, to make it more real, is to somehow, someway, make it an element of everyday life, of physical existence. Since belief is no longer there, revealed, it must be reinforced. And so we find ourselves in cycles of hypotheses, wagering, imagining, and living, attempting to foster and forge beliefs whose status is uncertain. There are discontinuities, too, or at least trends. With Pascal and Wesley one simply knew that prayer and preaching would reveal a truth once and for all. One simply had to believe and perform the gestures of believing, and the object of belief would reveal itself. By the time we reach McFague, however, we are offered no such assurance. Living in the house of metaphor may change how we live, but it may not bring forth the truth of God. And, once we reach Kearney, we realize that the anatheist wager is one that must be renewed at all times. It is never fulfilled. Interpretation only gives rise to more interpretation. Such is the progressive nature of modernity. What began as an exercise in probability and overcoming doubt has now become the essence of modern religious life. Doubt now goes all the way down, and, as such, so too must wagering and imagination. We are aware of this bind, of the need to recover God amidst our doubting of God, but that does not change the nature of the bargain. Bereft of assurance, we are left with constant imagination. Hermeneutics is the new revelation. * * * Two last points, both related. Each figure in this chapter has seen something elemental about modern religious life, and perhaps about human psychology: the odd loop between physical practice and belief. Supposedly, at least in the minds of Pascal, James, and Clayton, one used to believe before they behaved. Now, the order has been reversed. We behave to create belief. Things have been upended. And yet none ask the question: how? How does belief arise from practice? Moreover, is this logical? Or

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even ethical? This remains the decisive question for modernity, one whose silence is telling. A related observation. The logic discussed here is not unilinear. There are discontinuities. One such discontinuity is found in the work of Clayton, who, while pointing to the difficulties of belief in the modern age, also signals a unique way out. For, in a move that may undo much of what Pascal and James and others presuppose or tacitly accept, Clayton offers a new form of feedback between practice and belief—communal practice. Perhaps one of the problems with those who presuppose a relationship between practice and belief is not simply the initial paradox of modernity, but the subject doing the believing and acting. Is this subject with others, or alone? Who is doing the praying and pretending? Perhaps the reason we have yet to overcome the odd demand to believe and doubt is because we have not yet assessed the question of who is doing the believing, much less the doubting.

literAture cited Clayton, Philip. 1997. God and Contemporary Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2008. In Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, ed. Zachary Simpson. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Clayton, Philip, and Steven Knapp. 2013. The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, Kenneth J. 1999. A Real Christian: The Life of John Wesley. Nashville: Abingdon Press. James, William. 2000a. Is Life Worth Living? In Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Guinn, 219–241. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 2000b. Pragmatism. In Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Guinn, 5–132. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 2000c. The Will to Believe. In Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Guinn, 193–218. New York: Penguin Books. Kearney, Richard. 2010. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New  York: Columbia University Press. McFague, Sallie. 1987. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. ———. 1993. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Pascal, Blaise. 1995. Pensees. Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin Books. Tomkins, Stephen. 2003. John Wesley: A Biography. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 5

Modernity and the Temporal Shift: Overcoming the Problem of Self-Deception

Modernity is a series of ideas, institutions, and practices that speak of a collective understanding of who and what we are and should be. It is not so much a time period but an attitude, a general disposition towards the world. In the arts it is the reawakening of humanism, the keen emphasis on perspective and geometry, along with an awareness of the fantastic and sublime; in music it is the rise and fall of the subject; in literature it is the rise of the modern novel and its attendant concern with individual subjectivity, along with a realization of our limitations; in the sciences it is the ongoing process of defining our collective evolution, either as a universe or a species, side by side with our limitations as inquirers; and, as we saw in the two preceding chapters, in philosophy and theology modernity is the undermining of truth while also admitting the desperate need for truth. We cannot mark when modernity begins, but we can at least see the points at which conceptual and practical shifts occur in the way the West thinks of itself. These are just sketches. But what they evoke are the cross-currents of modernity, its penchant for criticizing ideas, institutions, and traditions, while at the same time necessitating ideas, institutions, and traditions for its endless demand for self- and world-improvement. Because of modernity’s emphasis on rationality and reason, it is also unabashedly individualistic, decrying the vagaries of collectivity and the self-inflicted ignorance of ritual and repetitive action. And, because of its individualism, it continuously seeks out and interrogates the self, its whims, its connective tissues, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_5

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and what, if any, central core it might bear, showing the dense entanglement of reason, emotion, and imagination. Finally, if the self is the subject of endless dialogue and disentanglement, it is also the subject of constant improvement, endless growth and development to match that of our economies, our communities, and our faiths. To be modern is to be both a part of, and caught up in, this thicket of criticism, reimagination, individualism, psychologism, and evolution. At the beginning of the book I called the simultaneous demand for criticism along with the need to believe the first paradox of modernity. What else could it be? As we saw in previous chapters, we are called upon to criticize ideas, their origins, and their provisional status. All is contingent, and all is the artifice of our inventive minds. And yet we are also asked to invest ourselves deeply in the power of those invented ideas, whether they be Nietzsche’s gods and eternal returns, Marcuse’s fantasies, McFague’s models, or Kearney’s imagined strangers. Or, likewise, we are to invest ourselves in old ideas that are made anew through our recognition of their contingency. Such is the status of Kant’s freedom, Wesley’s prayer, James’ will to believe, or Lewis’ pretense. We know ideas are the stuff of human minds and motivations, but we also know that we need truth, that truth has power, even if we don’t really think that such truths come from on high or are a reflection of the world as-it-is. Hence we must believe in what we find to be un believable: lies, errors, things-in-themselves, fictions, myths, and models. But we can no longer believe with the eyes of babies. We are cast out of our childish innocence, seeing ideas for what they are. So we must adopt a different attitude to belief, one not of acceptance and immersion, but one more modeled on the language and reality-testing of science, of experimentalism, hypotheses, and reassessment. The language of science, even with respect to ethics, God, morality, and the self, is ubiquitous: we find it in Nietzsche’s and McFague’s call to turn ourselves into experiments, or James’ and Clayton’s hypotheses. And, lest we be unclear: if we are experiments, then we are creatures of time, constantly being uncovered, revised, and tested. To be modern is to no longer be fixed, but thrown into the flux. A paradox need not imply a direct contradiction, though. No thinker sees their criticism of ideas as antithetical to their acts of imagination in reawakening or otherwise inventing fictions, fantasies, myths, Gods, and errors. If truth is pragmatic, then we have just joined the game of invention, no longer being set upon the flow of inherited truths like a leaf in a stream. To know that ideas are not necessarily true, and to commit

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ourselves to something similar, is not a contradiction or an act of illogic; it is, rather, wholly coherent and consistent. Whether or not we can perform such mental feats, of course—that of not believing and believing at the same time—is another matter. Given this more pragmatic bent, we see created beliefs being put to use, like tools, in all manner of ways. For Nietzsche, to transcend our old selves and be the poets of our lives; for Marcuse, to make society into a work of art; for Foucault, to destabilize systems of power and knowledge; for McFague and Clayton, to envision God anew. Or, similarly, we are to practice acts of renewed pretending to see as new what is old. Such is the track of Kant, Pascal, Wesley, Lewis, and James. We are caught in spirals of imagination, fantasy, fiction, myth, and God, not because we know those ideas to be true, but because our world demands action and growth, and we know, perhaps unconsciously, that the only way to shed our skin and continue our metamorphosis is by speaking to our incredible need to believe. We desperately want to evacuate ourselves of belief, but multiply that which we can and should believe in all the more. And so the modern world is riddled with beliefs, myths, fantasies, and constructions that do work even though we critically, or cynically, see their roots for what they really are. We have explored the arc of such beliefs in philosophy and theology, but similar paths can be traced in politics. In political philosophy, for example, we have John Rawls’ thought experiment in which we place ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance,” mentally bracketing our contingent place in society and imagining ourselves as any token member of a society, or, in some versions, as the most disadvantaged member of society. From this, we are to generate the norms and laws of a civil society. At best, this is an act of empathy and imagination; at worst, it is foolhardy—such objectivity may not exist. Or, better yet, consider democracy itself: most of us cynically know it to have never really existed, and, moreover, its claims of equality are on an equally shaky foundation. Yet we deeply invest ourselves in the trappings and institutions of democracy. It, like Rawls’ veil of ignorance, can be seen as a useful fiction, one which we fulfill only by living into it, much like Pascal’s praying gambler. And on and on. Our world is filled with fictions, myths, regulative ideals, and helpful constructs, from paper money to Marvel heroes to symbolic eucharists to yoga. Modernity, far from cleaning up the storehouse of fictions, proliferates and multiplies them at a level hitherto unseen in human history. It does this because we know they work, even if we know, on some deeper level, that they are untrue or an error or a simplification.

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And, in many cases, they work because we agree they work. Their value is both pragmatic and collective. We are not told how to negotiate this profusion of entities, nor how to resolve the seemingly paradoxical demands of criticism and prudential adoption of belief. Most take it for granted that we can do both, that we can give with one hand and take with the other. Others, though, see the problem for what it is, and propose that we must find a way into belief through a pact between the external world and our own minds. This path is explicitly taken in the work of Pascal, Wesley, and Clayton, and implicit in the experimentalism of others. There appears to be an inchoate understanding that we make ideas more real when we express them physically or collectively. The mechanism for this loop between world and mind is never fleshed out, but it is a trope of the modern call to believe what we don’t believe. We know, at least on the folk level, that we make ideas real by treating them as if they were real. These calls for criticism, imagination, re-mythologization, individualism, and practice mark what I am calling the modern period. And, lest we think that postmodernity has done away with such calls, I would argue that it can be an intensification of modernity. Such is the case with Foucault and Kearney. For both, fiction goes all the way down. All is interpretation, hermeneutics. Truth is always what we make of it, which is, at best, fiction and imagination. There are, of course, exceptions to this logic. No cultural movement is homogenous. Modernity does have its discontents. There are the fundamentalisms that reject modernity and insist on received tradition, authority, revelation, and truth. Or the isolationisms that ignore modernity altogether. Or those who wish to go beyond modernity, to reject not its criticisms but its invented ideals, its reliance on abstractions like reason, god, the individual, the subject, and growth. For every modern, laying claim to the emancipatory power of critique, the individual, and constant creation, there are an equal number of detractors and skeptics. Such is modernity’s position, both contested and part of the lives of those of us in the West. Many of us know this. For, after all, part of modernity is self-awareness and a realization of the moment. Part of modernity’s secret, however, is the fact that it survives even its own self-recognition. * * *

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So what does all this mean? One may answer this question two ways, one short and one that will occupy the rest of the book. The first, and perhaps easier answer, is that knowing and understanding the dynamics of our age can be a liberating pursuit. To see the fault-lines and imperatives of our age means we can, if we so choose, free ourselves from them. We can decry the grip of endless criticism, imagination, and individualism if we see it for what it is. Genealogical awareness, as Foucault rightly reminds us, is a form of resistance. But the more pesky answer follows the above question with another question: What if we wish to fulfill the demands of modernity? What then? We have explored the paradox of modernity—the demand to both criticize truth and believe in truth. What if we, being good moderns, realize the sense of such an imperative? How do we come to believe that which we want to be true, knowing full well where that truth comes from? How do we realize the aspirations of modernity? For this, short of the presumed circularity between practice and belief seen in the preceding two chapters, philosophers, theologians, and others are hard pressed for clear and compelling answers. They just know, as an article of faith, that if one commits themselves to a truth, that belief will follow. But will it? Can we actually believe in what we know to be, at minimum, contingent, and, maximally, false? This is the question of modernity, and it is, remarkably, unexplored. Perhaps this is a result of obviousness: you can simply believe what you choose. Will to believe. Or perhaps this is the result of its difficulty. Or, as I will suggest, it is because the answer leads one to undermine the foundations of modernity itself. The realization of the modern demand for self-creation and world improvement seemingly hinges on our consciously adopting certain beliefs, ideas, and untruths. To be repetitive, though: how do we do this? How, realistically, do we believe and commit ourselves—for what these ideas require is commitment and belief—to ideas whose origin and reality are uncertain? Short of an act of faith, how do we come to live into the noble aims of modernity? * * * We may begin to answer the problem presented by the first paradox of modernity by attending to its logic and framing. Seen superficially, the first paradox of modernity is potentially a contradiction. The modern subject is asked to both deny a proposition and assert

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its reality simultaneously. God may or may not exist, but I need God, so God exists. I don’t know if I’m free; I posit that I’m free. Or, more strongly stated, I’m pretty sure—as sure as one can be—that there is no real eternal return, true accounting of history, or true nature of God—but I will believe in it nonetheless. This more strong version can be viewed as a contradiction. Or, from a psychological standpoint, self-deception. From this perspective, the pleas of Nietzsche, Foucault, Pascal, and others may appear to be a demand for self-deception, the desire to believe what one does not believe. These beliefs are to be conscious and intentional. There is a fairly abundant literature on self-deception. Many authors agree on how it is defined: one comes to believe both a proposition, and its negation, simultaneously. I consciously believe in something, and deny that something, at the same time. This is “classic” self-deception. Where there is considerable disagreement is whether or not, psychologically, we can actually deceive ourselves in this straightforward way. In the instance of “classic” self-deception, psychologists generally agree that such self-­ deception is exceedingly rare, if not impossible. For example, Albert Bandura states that “literal self-deception cannot exist.” He adds, “Attempts to resolve the paradox of how one can be a deceiver fooling oneself have met with little success” (2011, p. 16). This is largely because, as psychologists William von Hippel and Robert Trivers argue, such self-­ deception is both hard to pull off and detect: “The classic form of self-­ deception is convincing oneself that a lie is true… This sort of self-deception can be difficult to verify, as it is difficult to know if the person believes the lie that they are telling to others, given that situations that motivate lying to the self typically motivate lying to others” (2011, pp. 10–11). For the most part, the literature on self-deception either explicitly or implicitly denies classic self-deception. It is either hard to find or hard to do. And yet we are left with the fact that plenty of people come to believe in things they believe to be false. This, in itself, is not simply a modern problem, but an intrinsic feature of human psychology. (The modern problem is intentional and conscious belief of two different propositions.) How does this occur? Approaches vary, but the most prominent ways in which philosophers and psychologists come to understand self-deception of any variety is by framing such self-deception as the product of information distortion in a divided mind. For example, the aforementioned Robert Trivers, in his Folly of Fools, asserts that one can only hold two conflicting propositions if one of the propositions is held unconsciously:

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Does that not require that the self knows what it does not know (p/~p)? This contradiction is easily sidestepped by defining the self as the conscious mind, so that self-deception occurs when the conscious mind is kept in the dark. True and false information may be simultaneously stored, only with the truth stored in the unconscious mind and the falsehood in the conscious. (2011, p. 9)

For Trivers, we do this principally so we can better lie to others (see von Hippel and Trivers 2011, p. 4). If we don’t know we’re lying to ourselves, we won’t produce the cues and “tells” of one who is lying. We also do so in order to make ourselves better in our own eyes: “the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual good goal of appearing better than one really is  – beneficial to others, for example. Misrepresentation of self to others is believed to be the primary force behind misrepresentation of self to self” (Trivers 2011, p.  139). Self-­ aggrandizement is just another form of self-deception, too: we know we’re not as good as we say we are, but we build ourselves up nonetheless. We find a variant of this argument in Herbert Fingarette’s classic book on self-deception. There, self-deception is intentional, but not conscious. In most cases of self-deception, Fingarette argues, we fail to “spell out” one proposition or another, by either not exploring the idea in its fulness or thinking through its consequences (1969, p. 46). For Fingarette, what makes this self-deception is the fact that such a failure is fully intentional and purposive. I have good reasons for not knowing all my good reasons. As he states, “We then state that the self-deceiver is one whose life-­situation is such that, on the basis of his tacit assessment of his situation, he finds there is an overriding reason for adopting a policy of not spelling-out some engagement of his in the world” (1969, p. 60). This means, though, that the self-deceiving agent is hiding certain reasons from herself. She does not want to know all of her beliefs in their fulness. Thus, when confronted, she will “disavow the engagement” (1969, p. 66), since avowing it would be disruptive to her psyche. She would have to admit she was living in bad faith or holding contradictory views. This would lead to, as Fingarette offers, “intensely disruptive, distressing consequences as to be unmanageably destructive to the person” (1969, p.  86). Thus, for Fingarette, self-deception is an act of both personal identification and rational belief management. We may need to hold two contradictory views for a variety of reasons, but we cannot fully spell out those views, as doing so would cause us to eliminate a healthy or otherwise useful belief.

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We find a similar engagement with the problem of self-deception in the work of Amelie Rorty. As with Trivers and Fingarette, Rorty agrees that to self-deceive is to intentionally believe what one disbelieves. And, similar to Trivers and Fingarette, Rorty largely solves the dilemma of self-deception by dividing the mind into discrete sub-units that may or may not have full communication with one another or full control over the agent. As she argues, “Self-deception is demystified and naturalized, and even to some extent explained, if the self is a complexly divided entity for whom rational integration is a task and an ideal rather than a starting point” (1988, p.  12). As Rorty further argues, our minds are a “loosely confederated system of subsystems, which includes the various activities of critical rationality without giving them any dominant centrality” (1988, p. 22). That is, there is no self-deception because there is no unified self. Parts of the brain may “believe” in one thing, other parts may believe in another. To hold two contradictory views is utterly predictable: one part of the brain may “need” a belief for one task or another, while another part may “need” a contradictory view. For Rorty, we do this for good reason. The various ways in which we self-deceive, “Compartmentalization, self-manipulated focusing, selective insensitivity, blind persistence, canny unresponsiveness,” can, collectively, “have enormous benefits” (1988, p. 17). Self-deception, as she states, can be a “cure for melancholia” (1988, p. 17) a way to endear ourselves to others (1996, p. 76), or to construct identities that are beneficial and pleasurable (1996, p.  83). Moreover, self-deception need not be a solitary pursuit. It may work to foster the allegiance of others or to be of greater benefit. By sustaining a personal identity and cultivating dispositions that are of use, self-deception can be a way of better living within the world. As such, “Like other intentional activities, [self-deception] works through sustaining social support. As standard ordinary beliefs are elicited and reinforced by our fellows, so too are our primary self-deceptive strategies” (1996, p. 76). These varying readings of self-deception work for what I would call garden-variety self-deception, wherein we hold a view, say “I am of above-­ average intelligence,” alongside a realistic self-assessment (which may not be as kind to myself). There are a variety of reasons why one would hold such views, and I would posit that the views of Trivers, Fingarette, and Rorty do well to treat these various instances. And, given our emerging view of the brain, they likely have the virtue of being, to varying degrees, true.

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But the modern problem, I would offer, is of a different order. All of the above theories work by essentially affirming a view of the mind where (a) one part of the mind does not know what the other is doing and (b) the reasons for holding both views need not be intentional. I may hold one view because it is habitual and unconscious, while holding another that is reasoned and conscious. This is not the case with the modern impetus to adopt useful truths and untruths. There, we are to hold two views, simultaneously, which are both conscious and intentional and unpartitioned from one another. They may be completely oppositional or in practical conflict with one another (not necessarily logical conflict). In Nietzsche, for example, I should affirm the following: all gods are untruths, possibly even lies; I must believe in gods nonetheless. We find varieties of this argument, to varying degrees in Kant, Marcuse, Foucault, James, McFague, and Kearney. Thus the problem is not one of unconscious self-deception or of a divided mind. Modernity demands, at least on this count, a fully conscious and undivided mind which both criticizes and adopts certain ideas, not for their truth value, but because they have positive practical consequences. I am to hold an idea, intentionally and consciously, that I know full well is likely untrue, not because of its potential truth, but because it is of use. This requires us to shift the way in which we think about the first paradox of modernity. I would argue that this shift should occur in two phases. First, instead of seeing the first paradox as self-deception, plain and simple (and as explained above), we should, rather, see it as an act of “wishful thinking,” where part of the reason we adopt a view is due in large part to our wish that it be true. Brian McLaughlin defines wishful thinking precisely as such (where p represents a belief or proposition): “When believing that p is wishful thinking on one’s part, one’s desire that p renders one biased in favor of evidence for p. Wishful thinking is a species of biased thinking” (1988, p. 42). Or, similarly, Mark Johnston adds that, in wishful thinking, “anxious desire that p, or more generally anxiety concerning p, generates the belief that p” (1988, p.  66). Such, I would argue, is the status of the modern demand for useful untruths, myths, and artifice. We desire something to be true because it is useful. This desire should then create our belief in that truth. Reasons create desire, and desire creates belief and commitment. This arc, I would argue, is wishful thinking. The hope in wishful thinking is that, as we commit ourselves to certain truths, those truths will eventually become beliefs. As McLaughlin again observes, “the person in question moves from slight inclination to believe

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that not-p toward actual belief that not-p” (1988, p. 45), a line of reasoning and desiring that eventually comes to constitute something like self-­ deception. We do so, as both Johnston and McLaughlin note respectively, usually without “possessing sufficient evidence, or at least without relying upon sufficient evidence that is in his possession” (1988, p. 67), or “on less than adequate evidence…” (1996, 37). This, I would offer, fits the modern paradigm nicely: we wish to believe in God, freedom, etc., not contrary to evidence, but in the light of a lack of any supporting evidence. Indeed, we may have perfectly good reasons, derived from our critical inclinations, to think otherwise than what we wish to believe. Wishful thinking willfully suspends or neglects these reasons in favor of other, more pragmatic concerns. Indeed, as McLaughlin grants, in wishful thinking the reasons we give for holding a belief, or wanting to hold a belief, are “prudential,” not evidential. We want to hold a belief because it may have positive effects, or fit with the kind of world we wish to make, or simply because it rationalizes agency. The evidence may go against such a view, but not so much as to make it an act of pure delusion. Fittingly, both McLaughlin and Johnston use as their chief example of such wishful thinking an example we should now find familiar: Pascal’s wager. As McLaughlin observes: Recall that Pascal’s wager was intended to show that we all have a conclusive prudential reason for believing that God exists. However, the Wager was not intended to provide evidential reason to believe that God exists, that is, evidence for God’s existence. But it was intended to show that we all have conclusive prudential reason for promoting or sustaining that belief. (1988, p. 46)

Or Johnston: [W]e should allow for the possibility of one’s intentionally coming to believe p out of a desire to believe p which is not itself the result of any sensitivity to the evidence for p – for example, a desire springing from an interest in the causal consequences of one’s doxastic states, as opposed to an interest in the truth-values of the propositions one’s doxastic states are beliefs in. The appeal of Pascal’s wager crucially depends on the cultivation of such an interest. (1988, p. 69)

This is not simply coincidence. Pascal’s wager, along with James’ will to believe, are crystalline instances of wishful thinking. In both, what is of

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interest is not the truth (even the Calvinist Pascal is not overtly concerned with this in the wager), but, rather, the pragmatic and practical consequences of holding such a belief. We are not invested in whether something is objectively provable—we may have given up on the fulness of this—but, more powerfully, on the world that beliefs create. And so it should come as no surprise that McLaughlin and Johnston, like Pascal, Wesley, Clayton, and others, give us a directional heading for converting desired belief into real belief. For McLaughlin, it is in potentially seeking and emphasizing “evidential reasons for so believing” (1988, p. 47), distorting the evidence, as it were. Such is the case with Foucault’s histories. These attempts are deliberate, not unconscious, and can thus be seen, if we are so invested, as a form of classic self-deception (see Johnston 1988, p. 69). What matters, though, is that, in wishful thinking, our hope for a belief to be true is the ground for its acceptance. The reasons why we may want to adopt a belief may vary, but the unifying feature of wishful thinking is that it is motivated by a desire which ultimately culminates in a belief. But isn’t this still a form of self-deception, even if desired, motivated, or otherwise an accurate description of the modern demand for belief and non-belief? Again, seen simply as intentional and conscious wishful thinking, the modern demand is still self-deception, as hard and elusive as that may be. If defined merely as wishful thinking, little is done to help us see how modern ideals may be realized. Which brings me to the second, perhaps most important component to the examination of belief and self-deception: its temporalization. We should not think of the modern demand as self-deception, which demands that we believe two opposing propositions simultaneously, but, rather, the recognition that we may believe one thing at one time and another thing at another time. This can be parsed in multiple ways. Johnston, for example, discusses this in the context of “forgetting,” where we no longer remember our old beliefs or the reasons for holding them (see 1988, p. 76). Or, alternatively, it may not be a matter of forgetting, but of simply changing one’s mind. “I believed this then, but then changed my mind when I discovered reasons for believing otherwise.” Both ways of redefining self-­ deception in terms of time, have in common, however, the fact that they “take time” (see 1988, pp. 76–77), that there is a lag between what one believes at one point and another. The temporalization of wishful thinking thus has the beneficial effect of not only eliminating classic self-deception (if one cares), but of mimicking

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the way in which beliefs actually occur. I may hold one belief, and then, over time, hold another that is contradictory. Some of the reasons for this shift may be evidential; some may be prudential; others may be emotional or experiential. What matters is this: wishful thinking takes time. My desire to believe something requires that I hold onto that desire long enough for the belief to form, in spite of my reasons for not believing as much. Fittingly, Johnston and McLaughlin again use Pascal as a signature instance of this temporal shift. For Johnston, we see that Pascal’s advice to kneel and pray, even if we don’t (yet) believe, is “the adoption of a practice itself sufficiently engaging so that past a certain point one need not think of one’s participation under the description ‘means of getting me to believe in the tenets of Catholicism in the absence of sufficient evidence’ in order to intend to participate.” As Johnston then adds, “Past a certain point one just gets carried along” (1988, p. 77). Johnston notes that this process of participating until one believes is like “getting lost in a fantasy or pretense” (1988, p. 77) whereby we immerse ourselves in a set of reasons, practices, and views long enough for that view to become dominant. As I will suggest in Chap. 7, this is precisely the case. McLaughlin, citing Pascal, offers a similar perspective. At the beginning of the Pascalian practice of praying, kneeling, and mimicking the gestures of religiosity, his supposed agent, “Tom,” may think it all a silly and elaborate ruse. But, after a period of time and lots of practice, “it may be possible for the program to succeed without Tom’s ever having forgotten his stratagem.” Indeed, as McLaughlin observes: If, after a period of vacillation and confusion, Tom becomes a believer, he will view the program from a changed perspective. From the new perspective, the stratagem will reflect the desperate attempt of a lost soul with the hubris to think he could manufacture belief, when all that was required was that he open his eyes to see how God makes his presence known. (1988, pp. 32–33)

What was once a ruse now becomes a conviction of things unseen. What one knew to be false, or at least in need of evidence, is now firmly held. This only occurs with the passage of time. Pascal’s wager only works if the will to believe is sustained over time, long enough to either forget the initial reasons for believing or to simply have a transformation of self. Annette Baier gives us one final, additionally modern example of the temporal shift in belief, that of Descartes and his restless doubts, perched

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at the threshold of discovering the ground of all knowing: my conscious self. What belies this observation, though, is a cunning stratagem: we have to believe in our doubt long enough for it to be real. And, only when real, can we see the self-evidence of the world-granting ego. Seeing an opening, Baier offers us this: Many contemporary discussions… struggle to find in the self-deceiving person two contemporaneous psychic “systems,” one duping the other. This may occasionally happen, but surely the more common cases involve the passing of time and… the complicity of selective memory. With good reason does Descartes at the beginning of the Second Meditation refer to his lying memory, for if his project of pretending that everything that he can doubt is in fact false is to really amount to a project of deceiving himself, he will have to have the help of convenient forgettings. It is because both our cognitive and our practical projects do typically take time, and that memory can heighten and dim its spotlight differently at different times, that it is so easy to seem to produce multiple temporary selves out of one persistent complex self. So it is easy to find something like the structure of deception of one person by another within the temporal stretch of one person. (1996, p. 67)

Here, I would argue, lies the secret to modernity, both in form and in content. The Cartesian project depends on a self that is not only capable of doubting all and of recasting belief after such doubt, but one that stands in the flow of time, able to adopt new views depending on reasons. We can see the truth of Descartes’ project, as Baier offers, because we are “complex selves,” existing within a “temporal stretch,” where past doubts and beliefs are cast aside, forgotten, or otherwise tucked wisely away. This is not classic self-deception, as Trivers, Fingarette, and Rorty offer, where our mind is divided in space and we are unconscious of our competing ideas. It is, rather, one where our minds are divided in time, which allows for us to be fully conscious of our competing ideas. It is not necessarily self-deception if one evolves or comes to see differently. The modern demand for intentional and conscious belief can thus be seen as wishful thinking extended over time. We have good reasons to adopt a view that we know may not be true, so, at a certain time, I devise to believe in such a view. Over time, that view becomes a belief, or a truth. All the while I have either forgotten my reasons for denying that belief or carefully suspended them, if only for a time. This way of framing the first paradox resists seeing modernity as inherently self-contradictory or self-deceptive. Rather, it relies on a temporal

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understanding of the subject, a complex view of belief formation and the self, and an inherent faith that we can come to believe what we wish to believe, that desire can facilitate belief. While we are not asked to be self-­ deceptive, we are asked to evolve, to be at one time critical and at another accepting, motivated by pragmatic reasons just as much by critical, rational ones. To be modern, it seems, is to understand complexity, both at the realm of ideas and, at least implicitly, at the level of the self. Note, though, that framing the first paradox does not explain how we come to believe ideas over time, much less ideas that we want to be true. This simply avoids the trap of logical contradiction and self-deception. What remains to be seen are the psychological processes at play in our collective Pascalian wagers, how our minds can come to believe something else, simply because we want it to be so. * * * There is a coda here, one that will echo in the coming chapters. Even if we reframe the first paradox as wishful thinking extended over time, it is an act of belief acceptance that may occur without full critical rationality or evidence. We are to accept ideas, over time, that will be of use to us. This is both the product, and independent of, the critical reason that modernity demands of us. We know truths are self-limiting and potentially arbitrary, which is what allows us to use them as tools. But once we begin the process of belief acceptance, can we stop? As Amelie Rorty reminds us, “Self-deception does not monitor its own use: it doesn’t know when or where to stop.” Belief acceptance and wishful thinking require habits. And, as many of us know personally, once we initiate a habit, it is hard to stop. As Rorty continues, “[Self-deception] is specifically constructed to ignore and resist correction. The danger of self-­ deception lies not so much in the irrationality of the occasion, but in the ramified consequences of the habits it develops, its obduracy, and its tendency to generalize” (1996, p. 85). The way to realize modern values and ideals may itself be anti-modern. If we wish to willingly accept those beliefs we desire for pragmatic reasons, what’s to say we don’t buy into other ideas for pragmatic reasons? Or, if we kneel and pray as Pascal counsels us, why not follow a similar path for other ideas? Can critical reason be turned on and off, like a light switch? It remains to be seen how we can fix belief. But, if we do so, we may be falling into an even deeper conundrum.

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literAture cited Baier, Annette. 1996. The Vital but Dangerous Art of Ignoring. In Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Roger Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, 53–72. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bandura, Albert. 2011. Self-Deception: A Paradox Revisited. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (1): 3–17. Fingarette, Herbert. 1969. Self-Deception. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnston, Mark. 1988. Self-Deception and the Nature of the Mind. In Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Amelie Rorty, 63–91. Berkeley: University of California Press. McLaughlin, Brian. 1988. Exploring the Possibility of Self-Deception in Belief. In Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Amelie Rorty, 29–62. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. On the Very Possibility of Self-Deception. In Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Roger Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, 31–51. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rorty, Amelie. 1988. The Deceptive Self: Liars, Layers, and Lairs. In Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. Brian McLaughlin and Amelie Rorty, 11–28. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. User Friendly Self-Deception: A Traveler’s Manual. In Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Roger Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, 73–89. Albany: State University of New York Press. Trivers, Robert. 2011. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New York: Basic Books. von Hippel, William, and Robert Trivers. 2011. The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (1): 1–16.

CHAPTER 6

A Philosophy of Fictions: How Fictions Become Real

The first paradox has a history. We do not believe, and yet we must. And so, in philosophy we construct eternal returns, gods, societies, and truths that are not real but must be. In theology we invest ourselves in gods and models that may not be true, courageously taking on both belief and unbelief simultaneously. To be modern is to embrace this duality. It is also to be unsure about how this paradox is resolved. These created ideals may be seen as self-deceptions. But they may also be seen as something else, as truth awaiting reality. The truths of modernity are in the future. This chapter aims to both deepen and clarify this dilemma. For, at their root, the ideals of Kant, the gods of Nietzsche and Marcuse, the truths of Foucault, and the models of McFague and Clayton have, as I will argue below, one thing in common: they are fictions. Not “mere” fictions, but the fictions that we live with and encounter daily: the imaginings and stirrings of our minds that we feel, believe, and care about. Whereas the previous chapter dealt with the possibility of such truths, this chapter seeks to resolve the status of ideals and values that we wish to see in the future, but know are not-yet in the present. How do we engage with what we know to be constructed, to be the arbitrary work of human hands and minds? The solution to the philosophical problem of the preceding chapters lies, I would argue, in our everyday engagement with fiction and make-believe. How we care for and believe in and feel such fictions shall help us possibly resolve the first paradox of modernity. Maybe we can, and often do, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_6

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believe in that which is not real. But this simply opens us up to the second paradox: that we have left behind our best ways of realizing fictions. * * * This is not the first attempt to analyze the ubiquity of fictions in the West and what role they play in our philosophy, science, politics, and ethics. Arguably, the first theorist to do so with clarity and exhaustive rigor is the little-known Kantian Hans Vaihinger. Vaihinger, writing in the late nineteenth century, took his cue from Kant’s regulative ideas, the imaginary constructs of the mind that allow us to live and think more virtuously, which we explored in Chap. 2. More expansively than Kant, though, Vaihinger saw such constructs everywhere: in the postulated particles of atomic theory, in infinitesimal calculus, in our ideas of God, and, yes, in ethics, too. Vaihinger sees the greatness of the human mind, and of modernity, in their ability to continuously deploy mental constructs in order to better see and act in the world. This impulse, Vaihinger offers, is fully natural. To be human is to create mental pictures of the world and to attempt to make sense out of the welter of phenomena that shatter against our minds. As Vaihinger offers in his Philosophy of “As If”: “The psyche weaves this aid to thought out of itself; for the mind is inventive; under the compulsion of necessity, stimulated by the outer world, it discovers the store of contrivances that lie hidden within itself” (2009, p.  12). And the means by which we seek to make sense of the world are thought-objects, heuristics, models, fictions, and hypotheses (more on the latter two in a moment). For Vaihinger, we should see “thought as an art” (2009, p. 9). not simply in the sense of creation, but also in the sense of artifice, a falsity that helps us see something we hadn’t seen before. These are the “as if” propositions that kindle imagination and progress. Ideas, though not necessarily real in an objective sense, or even discoverable, are our best way of finding our way in the world. As Vaihinger gleans from Friedrich Lange, a contemporary, sometimes we must simplify and reduce reality in order to understand it (see Lange, as quoted by 2009, p. 185). Or, as he offers in a rare moment of brevity: “fiction proper makes reality incomprehensible – in order that it may be comprehended” (2009, p. 80). To be sure, what we’re talking about—fictional entities that help us understand the world—are no more than a general form of Kant’s ideas, Nietzsche and Marcuse’s gods, or the hypotheses of James and Clayton.

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What Vaihinger contributes, though, is a clear understanding of the nature of those ideas. For Vaihinger, such ideas must be seen as fictions, a notion he opposes to hypotheses. For Vaihinger, a fiction is a “mere auxiliary construct…a scaffolding afterwards to be demolished,” while a hypothesis, on the other hand, “looks forward to being firmly established” (2009, p. 88). Fictions help us see reality. Hypotheses potentially anticipate reality. Hypotheses may eventually be discovered. Fictions cannot. Thus, a fiction is an expedient (see 2009, pp. 89 and 99), something to be used “provisionally until experience has become richer” (2009, p. 98). Or, like a middle term in a syllogism, a logical connecter that can be dropped once its utility has been realized. As Vaihinger sums up, fictions are “mere temporary halting-places for thought and have no bearing on reality” (2009, p. 100). Fictions can do this work not because they are real, but, precisely, because they are unreal or not-yet real. Like Nietzsche’s “noble lie” or Foucault’s historical untruths, fictions get us to see truth insomuch as they are profound untruths or simplifications. Vaihinger calls this, at various points, “legitimized error” (2009, p.  106), one that we can make only because of its effects—it either helps us see the world better or act in it more ethically (think here of James’ pragmatism in Chap. 4). Indeed, fictions often assume “something unreal or impossible” (2009, p. 269), as in the case of infinitesimal sums in calculus, whose unreality is precisely what allows them to work. Were they to be fully real, fictions may not attract our reason, will, or emotion. Fictions work because they tug at our innate desire to go beyond human experience. Vaihinger’s idea of fiction is perhaps best seen in an idea discussed in Chap. 2—that of freedom. Akin to Kant’s notion of practical reason, Vaihinger dubs freedom a “practical fiction” (2009, p. 43), in the precise sense that it allows us to act in certain ways while naming something that may not exist. We are not, after all, “free” in an objective and knowable sense. Keying on Kant’s use of “as if” in the First and Second Critiques, Vaihinger offers us this: “Thus, according to Kant, man is not merely to be judged in his conduct as if he were a free agent, but should conduct himself as if, at some time or other, he were to be held accountable for his acts.” (2009, p. 47) That is, just as with Kant, ethics is, at least in part, an imaginative exercise. We know full well we cannot have knowledge of freedom, but we must act as if we are free nonetheless. Or, going ever further than Kant, Vaihinger opines that freedom is “in contradiction with

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reality,” but, nevertheless, “it has an irresistible power. The Ideal is a practical fiction” (2009, p. 48). For Vaihinger, it is not an overstatement to say that all of Kant’s ethics rest on fictions. Such ethical fictions, though, owing to their nature as fictions, and owing to Vaihinger’s Kantianism, are not real. Ethical action relies on unreality, or, as Vaihinger states on multiple occasions, such fictions are “creations of thought” (2009, p.  278), “a mere idea without reality” (2009, p. 289), and that which “exists only in and through the idea” (2009, p. 295). Hence, we see again the architecture of modernity: (1) I am not free and, yet, (2) I must think of myself as if I am free. To Vaihinger, this is not a contradiction, but, simply, the most practical way of harnessing fictions to think and live better. This structure is repeated across disciplines, from ethics to science to math to philosophy to theology. We cannot know, yet we must imagine. For Vaihinger, then, all truth, especially the truths worth worrying about, are “merely the most expedient errors” (paraphrasing 2009, p.  108). Truth is a means which allows us to see something we had been missing or otherwise could not see without the truth-as-fiction. Part of the value of truth lies, at least in part, in its seduction. Yet it is this seduction that, like Kant and Nietzsche, worries Vaihinger. He constantly reminds us to not mistake the fiction for reality. Fictions are a means, not an end. As such, they must “drop out” (2009, p. 111) of our thinking, lest they be taken for reality itself. Part of the seduction of fiction lies in our attachment to it. Hence Vaihinger recommends to “not become attached to these fictions as though they were the essential thing, but we must recognize them as fictions and be content with this knowledge, and refuse to allow ourselves to be enticed and confused by the illusory questions and illusory problems arising out of them” (2009, p.  90). The mature thinker and investigator knows full well what fictions are: “practical and relative” (Vaihinger 2009, p. 265) truths, borne not from mistaking the fiction for reality, but, as the title suggests, from the perspective of the “as if” (Vaihinger 2009, p. 301). And therein lies Vaihinger’s wonderful crystallization of what it means to be modern. We are constantly seduced by the innumerable fictions we construct to understand our world. And, if we are clarion enough, we see that they are fictions, tools for understanding. We know they are “errors,” but also realize their necessity. To be truly modern, then, for Vaihinger is to constantly be conscious that “the fictional idea, the fictional assumption, has no real validity” (2009, p. 80) other than its use. We are enmeshed

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in webs of “conscious mistakes,” “conscious errors,” and “conscious contradictions” (Vaihinger 2009, p.  80), each of our own choosing and construction. It perhaps goes without saying that Vaihinger does not explore how we believe in such conscious errors, though. They are heuristics, sure, but how we entrain them in thought long enough for them to work their magic is left open. Vaihinger is content to mark the steady progress of modernity without seeing it as a paradox. * * * A definition. In what follows, I define “imagination” as a mental investment in an alternate reality. “Belief” is to be thought of as imagination combined with emotional, cognitive, and/or social commitment. * * * Vaihinger, though seemingly prescient about the nature of modern thought and what it demands, does not figure prominently in the history of western philosophy. His prescience is largely unseen and unknown. Occasionally, though, his intuitions are extended. Such is the case with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s As If: Idealization and Ideals, an essayistic renewal of Vaihinger’s chief insights. There, Appiah takes on Vaihinger’s central insight that falsity can be of use (2019, p. 3) and extends it to ethics, politics, and the philosophy of mind. Central to Appiah’s reappraisal of Vaihinger is his contention that there are times where we are justified in using falsity or error as a way of better understanding the world (2019, p. 21). Or, as he offers later in precise philosophical terms, there is value to those ideas which are “sorta true” (2019, p. 45): like Vaihinger’s fictions, sorta truths, perhaps full of error, can get us to see certain higher truths. While Appiah’s extension of Vaihinger to other fields is compelling (and something Vaihinger would have done), I am interested in a subtler move made by Appiah to begin to understand how we come to work with sorta truths and fictions. Appiah gives us two paths ahead. The first is an idea that has received considerable support from psychologists, economists, and philosophers: cognitive partitioning. When we consider fictions, according to Appiah, we are able to place them in the frame of “believing in under these circumstances” for a short time. As he

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puts it, “In believing that it is as if something is so, I dispose myself to act in a certain way, but only in certain contexts and for certain purposes. In that context and for those purposes I will do what I would have done if I had just straight out believed it” (2019, p.  22). In other places Appiah calls this “functional isolation” (2019, p. 12), shorthand for the process of believing in some things under some circumstances and not others, and, moreover, not bringing those separate beliefs into contact with one another. As Appiah nicely summarizes: “idealization may involve contradictory presuppositions…. If an idealization involves knowingly acting for some purposes as if what is false is true, then using it means that you are treating a proposition as true while, in another part of your head, so to speak, you are regarding it as false” (2019, p. 16). If we are to believe in that which we do not (yet) believe in or know, it seems we can avoid cognitive conflict by separating out beliefs from one another. I believe in Star Wars while watching Star Wars, but not while playing tennis. And vice versa. Perhaps I believe in infinitesimals while doing math, but not so while thinking about particles or brains. More on this later. The second way forward resides in something familiar to all of us: make-believe. To illustrate, Appiah gives a lengthy but worthwhile example gleaned from the world of a little girl, playing with a make-believe mud-cake: For she is inviting us to join in her treating something that she knows is not a cake as if it were. But only in some respects. She’s not going to put it in her mouth, for she knows that this “cake” is in fact mud and that mud is no good for eating. She may blow on it when it comes out of the toy oven, because that is what you do with something that is hot. But she’s not worried about being burned. Because though the cake is “hot” in her make-­ believe, she knows that the mud that “is” the cake is cool. Psychologists and anthropologists make a great deal, rightly, of the fact that in this sort of play children are rehearsing for real life: for real cakes that need real cooling after cooking. But let us begin by acknowledging how strange a capacity this is, especially given that it is something children take up at a certain age with very little prompting. The child who plays at cooking does not need to be taught that she is not really cooking, that the mud is not a cake, that the oven is not hot, that you eat the cake by pretending to put it in your mouth. We come prebaked for make-believe (2019, pp. 105–6).

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I’d like to linger, as Appiah does, on this particular scene, that of a little girl “baking” a “cake.” At least four things occur here which are of interest. First, the girl has, both consciously and unconsciously, a working vision of reality, one wherein you don’t eat dirt or think it’s hot when it’s just lukewarm. She knows that the dirt is, well, dirt. Secondly, she nonetheless imagines that the dirt is not these things, that it can be cake, or hot. In this case the dirt does not behave much like dirt at all. Thirdly, she readily performs the imagination of dirt-as-cake for an extended period of time, making cakes, baking them, feeding them to her Stuffies, and so on. And, fourth, holding the two notions in mind—that of dirt-as-dirt and that of dirt-as-cake—creates no cognitive conflict for her. In fact, were it to do so, the game would cease to be fun. She’d just be getting dirty. As Appiah observes, we come readymade for this kind of make-believe, perhaps even evolutionarily primed. So much so that we don’t really recognize that something remarkable occurs every time we play tennis or watch Star Wars or feed our Stuffies. We are treating something as real even though it is not. And this gives us little, if any, pause. It is automatic. We see this automaticity all the more when we watch movies or engage with great literature or art. As an example, Appiah cites Hamlet and the death of Ophelia: [T]he phenomenology of the emotions behind my tearful response to Ophelia’s death is altogether indistinguishable from the phenomenology of my feeling at a funeral: they feel the same. Still, normally when I am sad, it is because I believe that something regrettable has really happened; but when Ophelia “dies,” I am never in any doubt about whether an actual person had died (2019, pp. 107–8).

Again, the feelings and sensations here are complex. When someone “dies” onscreen or finds the Force, I am sad or elated or dumbstruck. These feelings are real. As with the child in make-believe, though, I am not misled here into thinking someone actually died: I know full well that this is fiction. I am able to maintain both thoughts simultaneously, and, if need be, perform in line with those thoughts and their accompanying emotions. Many may call this, after Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a “suspension of disbelief.” But I, along with Appiah, find such a phrasing inadequate. What happens when one watches Ophelia die or plays in dirt or moves an X-Wing with their hand is not a side-lining of our normal state of belief,

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but, rather, a very particular kind of believing. In “normal” instances my belief has consequences. In the “as if,” however, my mind automatically looks past those normal consequences. They simply don’t apply. Dirt is not dirt and death is not really death. As Appiah avers, “I don’t abandon the belief. I give up some of its normal consequences. This capacity is possible only because our minds are not unified” (2019, p. 110). Arguably we can feel just as intensely when rapt in imagination as we do in the “real” world. And yet, because our minds block out certain elements of normal belief, we don’t have all of the normal associations with belief that we generally think apply. What those associations are, however, is nebulous. In some instances, like movies, we give up the action orientation that comes with belief. I have never once decided to take up lightsaber combat, for example. In other instances, our imagination compels action but not coherence with other aspects of our typical orientation to reality. We can hold imagined concepts that are in conflict with other conscious and unconscious schema. What Appiah rightly sees, in these two examples, is a linkage between the rigorous “as if” of Vaihinger and the “make believe” of everyday life. Reframed, we can and should see Vaihinger’s “as if,” along with Kant’s regulative ideals, Marcuse’s fantasy, James’ will to believe, and Kearney’s “wager,” as simply imaginative exercises. By linking them to make-believe, however, we can begin to see how the imaginal can be entertained in our minds, if only for a while and in restricted contexts. Yet this only designates how we imagine fictions and sorta truths. Turning fiction into belief is another matter. * * * If make-believe or aesthetic reception is the key to linking the “as if” to belief and potential commitment, then the nature of make-believe and aesthetic reception needs deepening and exploration. As I will argue below, we turn fiction into belief through make-believe, that is, through the mental and physical processes that allow us to entertain and imagine ideas long enough for them to take hold in other parts of our lives. The best and most personal experience of such processes are constantly encountered in the ways in which we engage movies, novels, and other forms of art. As stated before, our attitude in the midst of fictions, particularly those seen in an aesthetic medium, is generally one of a particular kind of believing. Perhaps the most influential thinker of aesthetic reception is Kendall

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Walton, who has systematically explored the ways in which we receive, feel, and think about fictions and fictional entities. In perhaps his most famous example, Walton states that, in a horror movie, we spontaneously feel fear in reaction to oozing green slime (see 2015, p. 256). Or, likewise, we automatically “worry about Tom Sawyer and Becky lost in the cave, pity Willy Loman, envy Superman…” (2015, p. 253). These reactions, as we all know, are spontaneous and authentic. And, moreover, they are nearly universal. We all have such feelings. However, Walton calls these sensations “quasi-emotions” (2015, p. 253), not because they are not heartfelt or authentic, but because they do not lead to direct action (2015, p. 255). If I “believe” in the Force, for example, I still don’t try to move objects with my outstretched hand (okay, maybe once). For Walton, “quasi” emotions and feelings are not a denial of feeling something, but they are a denial of the fulness of feeling. As Walton makes clear, when we grieve during a movie, for example, we are not “literally” grieving in the same way we would for a dead relative or friend (see 2015, p. 275). These emotional states are “characteristic” of real emotions (1990, p. 251), but not the same. Oftentimes Walton seems to be dismissive of such feelings in the midst of artistic and aesthetic examples. The notion of “quasi” feeling captures this potential diminution fairly well. For Walton, such feelings aren’t as real as the ones we feel in real life. Death onscreen is not the same as death off-screen. One can see why Walton argues as he does, as he is trying to capture something we all intuitively feel and know: when we respond to certain works of art, they affect us. But they don’t affect us like other experiences do. Simple enough. But Walton over-corrects when he says that such feelings aren’t as real as others. When we are sad during a movie, we really are sad. It’s just different. Such feelings are not a simulation (as Walton suggests below). They are actually felt. As a critic of Walton, R.M. Sainsbury, states nicely, “Unlike Walton, we need engage in no fancy reconstrual in order to regard what Charles says after the movie as literally true: ‘Boy, was I scared!’” (2010, p. 20). So what’s going on here? What do we make of the fact that, while engaged with fictions of various sorts, we have real feelings, but that, as Walton recommends, such feelings do not immediately or necessarily initiate actions, nor are they the same as our typical responses to events in the real world?

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Walton himself has an answer to this dilemma, namely, that aesthetic feeling of the sort above is the product of an active process of mental simulation. In simulation, I “will first form beliefs and intentions in imagination, concerning the particular [thing] I am imagining” (2015, p. 279). Or, as Walton clarifies shortly thereafter, “In simulating, one’s psychological mechanisms are being run “off line.” This means at least that they are disconnected from some of their usual behavioral manifestations” (2015, p. 280). Walton’s picture allows us to coherently see how we both feel in the midst of aesthetic reception while simultaneously cutting that feeling off from typical behavioral and psychological consequences. Yet such an account, as you may have felt already, is clunky and inaccurate. Walton’s notion of simulation is much more active and conscious than most of us experience while in the midst of artistic feeling. For most, feeling and imagination are immediate, spontaneous, and often without our conscious control. It just happens. This deficiency can be remedied, I think, by seeing aesthetic reception not as mental simulation or active imagining, but a state where fictional states, entities, and worlds are partially segregated from other states and processes within our minds. This is the notion of “framing,” one prominently introduced by Floyd Merrell, whose Pararealities allows us to examine the ways in which fictional truths and ideas exist within a particular frame that allows them to create sense. For example, when we watch Star Wars, many of us do not apply the standards of normal reality to our reception of a universe long ago. We do not thoroughly reality-test in fictions. Within the frame of aesthetic reception, such claims simply make sense. As Merrell notes, we can have multiple frames or schema for multiple situations: one for art, one for movies, and one for books (I don’t scream when reading), and one for playing with mud pies (1983, pp. 34–5). These frames allow my mind to be engaged with media while also differentiating such experiences from typical experience. Moreover, it is automatic, or, cognitively, autonomic. I need not will a frame into existence. As Merrell nicely states, “We don’t say, ‘In this fiction with respect to which I have suspended my disbelief…’” (1983, p. 22). And, once inside a frame, that frame is incompatible with my “real world” frame. We cannot be in both (see 1983, p. 24). For, were we to do so, it would cause a collapse in my understanding and distort aesthetic reception. This is what leads, as many of us know, to the disappointment when fantasy is intruded upon by reality. One frame obviates the other.

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Hence we oscillate constantly between frames, between fictional worlds and real worlds. This is seamless and we are often unaware of this slippage. I can move from watching a television show to reading a novel to doing the dishes to playing a game (all requiring different rules and schema) without any slippage. And, even though such frames have different rules and different cognitive accompaniments—some demand action while others demand heightened feeling, for example—we are not always aware when we slide from one frame to the next. As Merrell offers, “Yet it bears mentioning that the boundary between fiction and ‘real world’ is not always available to consciousness. That is, one is not always consciously aware of the participation of one’s subjective self when conceiving/perceiving-imagining fictions” (1983, p. 27). Moreover, we are not always conscious of how and when such frames are made. We can either create imaginary worlds, and their accompanying mental frame, or have them created for us (1983, p. 32). Both work. In short, Merrell offers a compelling picture of how aesthetic reception feels to us. When engaged with fictions, we invariably employ the logic of that fiction, not the logic of our own typical reality. And we carry within us these multiple logics, which we seamlessly traffic between. Hence, to illustrate Walton’s example, I can feel scared in the presence of green ooze, but it does not lead me to jump up off my couch, grab my dog, and flee to a shelter. That’s not in the frame. On the cognitive level, at least hypothetically, my brain switches off certain processes and allows others to act as if reality applies. I can feel real emotion, but not be traumatized, for example. And yet, as Merrell keenly notes, there is considerable porosity between my frames—sometimes we mistake one frame for the other, or for reality itself. The boundaries are “fuzzy” and “invariably confused” (1983, p. 36). There is spillover from frame to frame, logic to logic. Which brings us to make-believe. For, in make-believe, we see a complex negotiation between the “reality” frame and the “fiction” frame. Some forms of aesthetic reception are, as we have been saying, spontaneous and passive. Others, though (like Appiah’s little girl making mud pies), are intentional and controlled. Both rely on framing of different sorts. Yet the latter instance, of our girl making mud pies, is much more like the kinds of fictions we are being asked to create and sustain by the likes of Kant, Nietzsche, James, and Lewis. Not only are we to imagine an alternate reality, perhaps even spontaneously, but we should be calling

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forth a fiction and engaging with it, while still recognizing its provisional and conditional status (at least for a time). This kind of make-believe, I would offer, is closer to play than it is to the kinds of making-believe which are elemental to watching movies or viewing art. For, in play, we not only imagine different realities, but engage in them physically, emotionally, and, often, collectively. As Kendall Walton rightly argues: I suggest that much of the value of dreaming, fantasizing, and making-­ believe depends crucially on one’s thinking of oneself as belonging to a fictional world. It is chiefly by fictionally facing certain situations, engaging in certain activities, and having or expressing certain feelings, I think, that a dreamer, fantasizer, or game player comes to terms with her actual feelings – that she discovers them, learns to accept them, purges herself of them… (2015, p. 270)

Walton’s emphasis, like many in psychology, is on play-as-rehearsal, make-­ believe as preparatory for real life. However, we can see this in light of the fictions of modernity, too. For, as Walton again notes, “to ‘make-believe’ is to engage with something as if it is true, to give it truth value on a conscious level” (2015, p.  264, emphasis added), and, I would offer, on a physical and affective level. It is this mode of participation which I think is critical to understanding how a fiction can become, eventually, belief. The intermediate state for such a transition is make-believe. And, for most make-believe, we not only “frame” such fictions off from normal life, but, additionally, we participate in our own created worlds (see 2015, pp. 273–4). Children do this most obviously, but such make-believe is not limited to them. Indeed, as Walton offers again, “Participation involves imagining about ourselves as well as about the characters and situations of the fiction – but not just imagining that such and such is true of ourselves. We imagine doing things, experiencing things, feeling in certain ways” (2015, pp. 273–4). This can be true of play, of acting, of performing, of pretending, or, as we will see in later chapters, of group cohesion and rituals. Make-believe of this sort does not simply occur in the mind. It also occurs in external space. Make-believe can come to encompass props (the mud pies), other participants, and my physical body. For Walton, these various physical components to make-believe “prescribe imaginings  – imaginings that are about themselves by virtue of the fact that they themselves do the prescribing  – and it is to themselves that they issue the

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prescriptions” (1990, p. 212). That is, imagination and make-believe are enhanced by employing the outside world. The frame grows. And our oscillation between make-believe and reality becomes more tenuous and thin. In reflecting on fictions, then, we can begin to see a fuller picture of how, at least theoretically and phenomenologically, fiction becomes make-­ believe. To engage with fiction is to somewhat spontaneously partition the fictional world from our normal world. This is a natural disposition, one that can be either conscious or unconscious, prompted from the external world or internally motivated. This disposition can be further enhanced by our engagement with the surrounding physical world, which renders both our make-believe more real and our frames more complex. If we are to understand the fictions of modernity, not as self-deceptions but as models to live in and through, then such a path runs, I would argue, through the provisional world of make-believe, where parts of reality and our normal responses to it are cordoned off from the fictions themselves. There, they can begin to exist and take on a reality of their own. * * * We should not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. Make-believe does not constitute belief. Nor is it the kind of living and doing constitutive of the fictions announced in preceding chapters. Make-believe gives us a way to begin to understand how a fiction becomes belief, but it is not the whole picture, even theoretically. In order to get a more complete understanding of how a fiction becomes belief, as Appiah does, I’d like to turn to the work of Mark Alfano and his Character as Moral Fiction. Here, we can begin to flesh out the ideas of participation and physical realization discussed above. Alfano, a virtue ethicist, seeks to understand how character formation is best achieved. The central claim of Character as Moral Fiction is that virtues can be instilled in others through positive attribution. If we want someone to act virtuously, we should treat them as if they are virtuous. As he states, “plausible, public attribution of virtuous traits induces in the target of the attribution both identification with those traits and a belief that others expect him to act in trait-consonant ways, which in turn leads to trait-consonant conduct” (2013, pp. 83–4). That is, even though an individual may not actually be virtuous, how we label that individual matters. If you want someone to be good, tell them they’re good and act

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accordingly. This is, as Alfano rightly notes, the placebo effect with respect to virtue: it works because someone believes it. Or, as Alfano offers in an echo of Philip Clayton, “fact tracks belief, rather than belief tracking fact” (2013, p. 83). Alfano calls this phenomenon, that of belief preceding fact, or of attribution preceding character, “factitious” virtue, a lovely portmanteau of fictitious and fact. It is, I would offer, a third option between the two: neither fact nor fiction, but that which, like James’ pragmatism, is made real through our enactment of it (see 2013, p. 84). Alfano summarizes the idea nicely: “Like placebo effects, factitious virtue depends on beliefs about oneself; like self-fulfilling prophecies, factitious attributions are causally implicated in their own (near enough) truth; like both, factitious virtue inverts the direction-of-fit characteristic of belief and assertion” (2013, p. 88). It is clear that Alfano is inverting our normal scheme for how character and virtue occur (though that doesn’t mean he’s wrong). We normally think of virtue as occurring through virtuous acts. Alfano, on the other hand, sees one of creating virtue through attribution. We must pretend that we are virtuous in order to become virtuous. In Chap. 4 we examined how prayer or ritual action preceded faith; here, with character, we see how an outer state—attribution and identification—precedes an inner state. Not content to simply evoke a theoretical concept, however, Alfano cites an extensive social scientific literature on “looping kinds” (2013, p. 107) where labels and/or descriptions can loop back onto reality. Or, likewise, there is the abundant educational literature on children and intelligence, whereby simply telling children they are intelligent actually raised test scores versus a controlled group of students. Finally, Alfano examines self-fulfilling prophecies, and the ways in which evoking concepts or future realities has a way of bringing them about. I will have more to say on the social scientific literature on the relationship between action and belief in later chapters. What is important here with respect to Alfano is his philosophical clarity with regard to the relationship between outer reality and inner states of mind. Belief can be produced by way of an external stimulus. That is, one can believe in a reality that does not (yet) exist if that proposed reality has certain features. Those features, I would argue, usefully supplement our previous discussion of make-believe. They are fourfold. First, as Alfano notes repeatedly, attributions and labels about individuals must be at least plausible (2013, p. 91). If I am to say that Kim is a good person and treat her as

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such, she must have already exhibited the capacity for goodness. It makes no sense if she is cruel or mean. It won’t “take” with either her or others. Secondly, and connected to the plausibility claim, factitious virtues must also be public (2013, p. 92), that is, attributions must be said and externalized, not simply thought by either the labeler or the labelee. If we want Kim to be good, it must be said. The foregoing dual considerations touch on the nature of the utterance itself. It must be plausible and public. But, for Alfano, two other considerations touch on its enactment. For, third and fourth, factitious virtues must also be interpersonally reinforced and habituated (see 2013, pp. 96 and 177–79). Simply calling someone a virtue we wish for them to exhibit is not enough. We must also, collectively, enact that label through repetition and habituation. People must be consistently labeled in line with the virtues we wish for them to exhibit, and, further, they must be treated, and treat themselves, as such. In a rather keen way, Alfano has given voice to the ways in which we create aspirational virtues or values in others. With a child, for example, we call them good or smart, often when we simply see the promise of goodness or smartness. Enacting those values, by consistently employing such labels and treating someone as such, allows for those values to be integrated into one’s own self-image. (Alas, this works negatively as well.) We make others into what we want them to be through consistent, plausible, and externally enacted labels and values. Alfano, like most of the thinkers we have encountered, is lucid about the nature of factitious virtues. They are not, as he notes, true at this moment. Their truth, if it happens, lies in the future. Their truth is simply possible. Thus, as with others we have observed before, Alfano candidly notes, “We may have to admit that a certain degree of (self-)deception and illusion are indispensable” (2013, p. 102) in order to produce virtue. I do not think that Alfano is here indicating self-deception in the “classic” sense. Rather, he is referring to the fact that we must, either as subject of labeling or the community of labelers, believe in a state of affairs that is not yet true. Vaihinger’s fictions work not only with knowledge, but, potentially, with moral behavior as well. * * * Between Vaihinger’s fictions, the complex process of make-believe, and factitious virtues, a plausible conception of turning fiction into belief begins to emerge.

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In Vaihinger’s exhaustive account of the sundry fictions of modernity we see not only the fact that the modern world produces fictions and “as if” ideas at an astonishing rate, we can also delineate the key features of fictions. Fictions are, unlike hypotheses, often untestable. They may even be errors. And yet they are of tremendous use to us. We need fictions. Yet Vaihinger, like so many before and after him, does not see the paradox at the heart of fictions: how can we believe in something we know to be unreal? Appiah’s resumption of Vaihinger’s thought gives us an opening, though. For, nestled in the middle of Appiah’s account of fictions as useful for philosophy of mind and political theory lies a way forward: make-­ believe. In recounting the familiar story of a girl and her mud pie, we begin to see how fictions might become something more. In deepening this account, I have referred to two separate modes of reflection on fiction. The first relies on seeing make-believe as an automatic, framed process that engages the external world. Here, feeling and other sensations are engaged without the physical or physiological consequences of typical reality. The second relies on “factitious” virtue, where we see the ways in which the external world can create virtue where there was only possibility. From these multiple sources, we can begin to see, on a theoretical level, how fiction becomes belief. For this to happen, make-believe must be: . Capable of imagination, and therefore framing; 1 2. Plausible; 3. Public; 4. Reinforced; and 5. Habituated. If we desire to make good on Nietzsche’s many gods, or Marcuse’s fantasies, or Pascal’s wager, these are the elements that would allow for them to become more than simply fictions. And, as we have seen, elements of the above are present in the works of Kant, Foucault, Pascal, James, and McFague. The calls to live, pray, and experiment are but a subset of the above. In the next three chapters I will lay out the social scientific case for the above. As we shall see, the path from fiction to belief is paved with imagination, others, and habits. Or, as practiced, in art, community, and ritual. * * *

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In modernity we are asked to criticize belief and yet realize the utility of belief. We are told that beliefs are arbitrary and yet necessary. We fill our worlds with fictional entities of tremendous utility—money, democracy, god particles, and equality. And yet we know they are made by human hands and contingent. This is the paradox of modernity and the source of its delusion. We think we have vanquished gods, but we conjure them all the same, new and old. We can see these ideas, as we saw in the previous chapter, as self-­ deceptions. And, on some level, they might be. But this more literal view is a dead end. To entertain fictions as true, at this moment, is to both mistake their reality and their use. They are useful not because they are true, but because they might be. And so we can, if we desire to make them real, see them as fictions. This shift, as seen above, allows us to place them in their proper realm: that of imagination and as truths that await realization. To become real, fictions must become objects of belief and, eventually, commitment. And to become objects of belief, fictions must be imagined, public, and enacted.

literAture cited Alfano, Mark. 2013. Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2019. As If: Idealization and Ideals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merrell, Floyd. 1983. Pararealities: The Nature of Our Fictions and How We Know Them. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Sainsbury, R.M. 2010. Fictions and Fictionalism. New York: Routledge. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2015. In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaihinger, Hans. 2009. The Philosophy of “As If”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books.

CHAPTER 7

Art, Narrative, and Commitment: Creating Belief through Story

In modernity we are asked to both criticize and believe, to affirm truths when we know they are likely not true. As we saw in the preceding chapters, this demand cuts across philosophy, religion, ethics, and politics. It is the paradoxical demand of our era. Yet it is not a contradiction. To desire to believe something that one knows might be false can be logically coherent if we recognize such a desire as a form of wishful thinking practiced over time. And so we must engage in extended make-believe, fictioning over time. To do so requires that belief be shielded from consequences, plausible, repeated, and communally enforced. The number of things that fits this list, or even a fraction thereof, is sparing. Among them, though, is art. Art has the ability to cast a frame over our imaginings, sequestering them from reality, if only for a bit. Art is also mentally salient, and, occasionally, can engender commitment and sacrifice. In this chapter, I will argue for art, specifically narrative, and its power to automatically set the stage for make-believe. Additionally, narrative is inherently attention-grabbing and commitment-generating: our brains are primed for narrativity and the occasional demands it makes on the worlds outside of our minds. I shall do so by discussing the relevant cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and real-world implications of narrative. Art is not a catch-all, though. Part of art’s efficacy, as Marcuse reminded us, lies in its ineffectiveness. Thus, while narrative captivates us, stirs our © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_7

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imaginations and lingers in our minds, it is still in need of social reinforcement and repetition. For that, we must look elsewhere. Yet all beliefs must begin as make-believe, as imagination. And thus art, or narrative, is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating new and desired beliefs. The act of intentionally believing an idea, even if in the future, begins with narrative. But in narrative and its power over the imagination, like all things, lies both our ability for redemption and for sin. * * * One brief tale, this time of fantasy and fairies. In 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a lecture, “On Fairy Stories.” There, the famous author of fantasy and fairy stories discussed what makes a fairy story work, how it ingratiates itself to our brains, and what it means to “believe” in fairy stories. He notes that fairy stories shall not make fun of “magic itself” (1939, p. 3), and that, in fantasy, the author can do as she wishes, taking “green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood.” This is, as he explains, an “enchanter’s power,” one that renders the author a divine calling, as she can be a “sub-creator” (1939, p. 4). The fantasy and fairy story author works, he says, to stir our imagination and create images of things not present. For those of us who love fantasy, we know this to be true. What interests me, however, is an insight that Tolkien registers at the apex of his lecture. There, he declares that fantasy and fairy stories register images that are “not in the primary world,” which—similar to Marcuse but a few years later—renders fantasy as “a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent” (1939, p.  6). Here Tolkien creates a subtle dichotomy between the familiar world—the “primary” world—and the world of imagination, make-­ believe, and fantasy. This, fittingly, is the secondary world. And, corresponding to each world is a form of belief. Our reflexive orientation to the world is one of Primary Belief, a reflection of the things we know and see. But, in fantasy and fairy story, there arises “Secondary Belief,” which is the earnest and rare product of “narrative art” and “story-making” (1939, p. 6). This keen distinction is the one I wish to play upon. For what is created in good narrative is not mere imagining, but, rather, another belief, akin to, and perhaps even stronger than, our normal beliefs about reality. Narrative creates this belief, argues Tolkien, in service to showing us a different world.

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Conjuring such a belief is the wizardry of a good author. It is not altogether dissimilar from dreaming, as Tolkien argues, though the act of reading is a different one, insomuch as “you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp” (1939, p. 8). Indeed, the effect of narrative and storytelling is so personal, so intimate and powerful, that we often mistake the world of fantasy for that of Primary Belief (1939, p. 8). This is a delusion, to be sure, but a natural one, especially when we are dangling in the hands of a skilled author or a well-honed story. It is thus the weird fate of Secondary Belief that it is often mistaken for Primary Belief. And those stories and tales which dance upon this line well, fooling us all the better, are termed by Tolkien as “Enchantment.” As he then notes, “Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose” (1939, p. 8). We are enchanted by story, carried away into belief. This is both the work of a good author, but also, as Tolkien seems to imply, our own minds. The conjuring of Secondary Belief is all-too-easy and natural. And this naturalness can, of course, lend itself to delusion, as even Tolkien observes. The stuff of fiction can become the stuff of belief. Indeed, as Tolkien seems to say, fiction and religion and science are all of the same accord: “Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’ own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice” (1939, p. 9). We make fairies and gods, some of them false, out of narrative. The move from Primary to Secondary Belief is a seamless one, paved all-the-­ more by human minds and human authors. And Secondary Belief, for some reason, demands sacrifice. It is both the seamlessness and seriousness of narrative that interests me. We can hold Secondary Beliefs while we actively engage the primary world. But sometimes Secondary Belief takes hold. And therein lies our ability to realize hoped-for and pragmatic ideas, as well as the commitment they require. * * *

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Another definition. Hereafter when I refer to “commitment,” it means the following: an action orientation which implies sacrifice of something of value, whether that be time, money, some extension of the self, or the self. * * * How does this occur, though? How do we form Secondary Beliefs through stories that come to dominate us? What occurs in our minds as we do so? We can begin to answer some of these questions by interrogating how we perceive and receive narrative art. For this, literary theorist Norman Holland deepens some of Tolkien’s intuitions. He notes that, when we engage with a literary text or narrative: . we no longer perceive our bodies; 1 2. we no longer perceive our environment; 3. we no longer judge probability or reality-test; 4. we respond emotionally to the fiction as though it were real. (2004, pp. 396–7) These are intuitive reflections, many of which we reflected upon in the previous chapter. Narrative and imagination depend on our ceasing to test reality, our engaging fiction “as if” it were real, and our dimming of the natural response to “do something” in response to narrative. We may enjoy the “free play of imagination” (2004, p. 398) in narrative, but, as we all know, “we do not plan to act” (2004, p. 399) in response to narrative. I can have emotional and passionate responses to art and narrative, but they need not compel me to action to be successful. In fact, it is precisely the denial of action that makes art what it is. For, by holding off on the drive to act, we are also circumventing the part of our brain that plans movement and action, the frontal cortex. And, by sidestepping this part of our brains, we’re also shutting off reality testing (Holland 2004, p. 400). Our brains, by silent agreement, seem to know intuitively that this is “only a movie” or “just a book,” since it inhibits action immediately (Holland 2004, p. 400). As Holland explains: “Those regions of our frontal lobes would ordinarily respond to data about the external world from our senses with plans for action, including testing the reality of the situation. But we know this is ‘only a story.’ We therefore cease to test reality, and we do not disbelieve the fiction” (Holland 2004, p. 406). This is what enables us to watch a movie or read a novel without

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being compelled to act. Our brains, in aesthetic reception, do not activate centers associated with reality testing, movement, or planning. They do, however, continue to activate systems associated with feeling and emotion, according to Holland (2004, p. 406). Thus, while we cease to reality-test, our brains are engaged in fine-grained acts of feeling and mimicry. We can feel the pain of others, be aroused, or experience schadenfraude in response to narrative, but are never driven to action or physical response, other than, of course, elevated feeling. Holland’s general recognition that narrative engages us emotionally while allowing us to slow down or otherwise silence part of our normal response to the world accords with contemporary social scientific and neuropsychological data on aesthetic reception and response. Our ability to “metarepresent,” to say, “this is just a movie,” or “this is just a book,” while being immersed in a movie or book, is a natural and typical neurological state for most humans (see Pyysiäinen 2009, p. 20). What such a process represents, though, is the brain’s intuitive and hard-wired response to art, noted by Holland: we are allowed to feel and think and imagine as we please within art, but such feelings and thoughts are not subject to planning or reality testing. Consider, for example, the play behavior of children. By the age of two, most children generally engage in pretend play, a carefully segregated dance between pretend and reality (see McConachie 2015, p.  41). The psychologist John Gerstmyer, for example, observed his two-year-old daughter’s play and noted that she used appropriate speech for particular situations; sound effects to enhance play; “magicking,” whereby she did appropriate actions for certain processes, like cooking; occasional out-of-­ rule behavior, both alone and with friends; and preparing her friends for certain events (see McConachie 2015, p. 42). This is so typical as to be mundane. But what it entails is that, by an early age, neurotypical humans can metarepresent and engage in imaginary play that is not subject to reality testing. Children can entertain ideas and truths in a sphere separate from that of their primary orientation to the world. Adults, of course, do this too. Thalia Goldstein, for example, conducted a study designed to test the hypothesis that the sadness experienced in fiction differs from the sadness experienced in “real life.” As she hypothesizes, “in the former case, sadness is unadulterated with anxiety, whereas in the latter case, the two are intertwined” (2009, p. 233). Real life sadness has consequences; sadness in fiction does not. In her study, Goldstein found that film clips which triggered personal experiences were more

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anxiety-inducing than those that did not trigger personal experiences. That is, those experiences which were more “real” accompanied a greater range of emotions than those which were deemed as less real. These examples comply with our basic understanding of our own experience of fictions and that of others. In the midst of fiction and narrative, we do not have the same feelings as reality. This is manifest in pretend play, how we engage film, daydreaming, or thought experiments. This normalcy is precisely what is of interest, though. For in it lies our ability to consciously conceive of, entertain, and hold ideas that violate our primary and working relationship with reality. Given its normalcy, neuropsychologists have proffered models for the way our brains handle this seemingly everyday task. Dyutiman Mukhopadhyay, for instance, suggests a “dual phase oscillation hypothesis,” where individuals go back-and-forth between two different neurological states, “suspension of disbelief” and “introspective detached contemplation,” where the latter essentially amounts to meta-­ representation (2014, p. 238). We are pretending and know we are pretending. We can switch between being thoroughly engrossed and detached. He gives an illustrative example: “Thus while observing a typical Hollywood action movie we may get engrossed in the chase sequence for a considerable period of time and then suddenly lose interest and start muttering that it is all nonsense and then again can generate renewed interest in a confrontational scene” (2014, p.  245). This oscillation is essentially the product of the increase and decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex, where the brain is moving in and out of reality testing and planning. Similarly, Torben Grodal develops a neural model of aesthetics (specifically film viewing) based on the idea that “the human biocomputer is an integrated system of perceptions, emotions, cognitions, and muscular activations” (2009, p. 145). This comprehensive view of the brain allows us, when watching a movie, “to cue an intense focus on perceptual processes; to evoke saturated emotions linked to affect-charged associations: to evoke tense, action-oriented, and goal-oriented emotions; to elicit relaxation through laughter by blocking goal achievement in an active setting; or to elicit sorrow and tears by blocking such achievement in a passive setting” (2009, p. 151). This fits with the way in which we tend to receive and feel the impact of film and narrative. We are engaged emotionally in appropriate ways. Images and stories have real emotional impact because, at the

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neural level, fictional events and images trigger many of the same processes as real events (see Grodal 2009, p. 185). Indeed, the problem of fictional engagement is not one of suspension of belief, but, as Grodal states, “suspension or control of belief” (2009, p. 185). We are hardwired to “believe” what we see in film, or what we read in books. This belief is automatic and natural. For example, in film or in pictures, “when we see a man being hit in the stomach, the same neurons that would anticipate such a blow to our own body will also reflect the other person’s experience of being hit” (2009, p. 197). Mirror neurons, those which simulate, in our heads, what’s going on outside of our heads, not only anticipate pain, but pleasure as well (as the ubiquity of pornography shows). Similar to Mukhopadhyay’s model, Grodal asserts that our brains easily fall into aesthetic reception, feeling, and simulation of narrative and film. We just as easily can metarepresent and reality-test, too, though. As Mukhopadhyay recognizes, our minds vacillate between experiencing aesthetic pleasure and testing that same pleasure. And so, during or shortly after viewing a film or reading a book, our brains try to label what is real and not real. As Grodal argues, after perception, “[r]eality status mechanisms then continuously try to monitor and tag these experiences, determining that this one is a dream, that one is a hallucination, this one a plan, that one a memory…” (2009, p. 154). Because our brains are hardwired for belief and engagement, they must continuously scan and tag fictions, ensuring that they don’t become too real. Indeed, as Grodal summarizes, “Playing, acting, pretending, laughing, or modeling other people’s minds and story comprehension all demand skills that modify or decouple the reality of events” (2009, p. 155). What reality testing belies, however, is the fact that Secondary Belief can easily be mistaken for Primary Belief. Hence, our “reality status modules” (Grodal 2009, p.  186) must be constantly on the lookout for boundary-­ crossing. This constant shifting, though, does not interfere with our aesthetic experience. In fact, it is essential to it. We can be “immersed” in characters and simulation while at the same time “aware of the fact that films are representations” (Grodal 2009, p. 204). What we know as typical narrative aesthetic experience—reading a book, watching a film, engaging a performance—is actually a complex negotiation in our brains between simulation, feeling, mimicry, emotion, and, as counterbalance, reality testing and planning.

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What this evidence tells us, though, is that our brains automatically frame or cordon-off fiction from reality, desired belief from regular belief, Secondary from Primary belief. This framing does not constitute, though, an elimination of fiction or Secondary Belief. Far from it. Framing is in service to allowing fiction to be truly believed, though separate from our regular and routine and habitual beliefs about the world. Narrative accomplishes, in short, a key facet of desired belief and factitiousness: it is allowed to linger in the mind and be believed, even if provisionally. * * * A nice example of the above phenomenon can be found in neurological studies of empathy, the cognitive ability to take on the perspective and feeling of another individual. In a series of studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; which shows the parts of the brain that activate after a stimulus), researchers have shown that, even as we are mentally “feeling” the pain of others, our brains are also carefully segregating that pain from our normal perception of pain. For example, Gu and Han presented subjects with images of individuals in painful or stressful situations (the pictures were taken as first-person), such as a knife cutting into their hand or a hammer banging on a finger. Participants of the study were then asked to rate pain intensity of the perceived image. When asked to rate the images (as opposed to a control group which just counted them), that is, feel the pain of others, participants showed an increase in activity in centers of the brain associated with feeling (the anterior cingulate cortex) and emotional regulation (the frontal cortex) (2007, p.  263). As the researchers conclude, “Our results support the proposal that both affective responses and emotion regulation are activated when watching others in painful situations” (2007, p.  263). This means that empathy, especially feeling the pain of others, at least as relayed by pictures, is a multistep process: first, an individual must pay attention; secondly, an individual must segregate the picture from normal reality; and third, an individual can then feel the pain of others in associated parts of the brain (Gu and Han 2007; Gu et al. 2010). These results comport with a number of other studies which detail brain activation while viewing images or looking at faces in distress (Gu and Han 2007, p. 256). Yet they go further in that they show not only that the brain processes the pain of others, but that it actively and continuously monitors whether or not that pain is really real.

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In another study, an electrode was placed on the back of a fellow participant’s hand (who acted out pain) and researchers simulated painful shocks to the hand while a subject was monitored through fMRI. Singer (2004) found that, again, subjects registered the pain of others as if it were their own in the anterior cingulate cortex. And, again, the brain activated regions associated with meta-representation and reality testing, allowing for the pain experience to be “decoupled” from real pain (Singer et  al. 2004, p. 1161). This allows us to understand and represent the pain of others to ourselves while constantly discriminating that pain from our own. We can thus simulate and feel pain, but are not overwhelmed by it. Similar to play in children, our brains can test and sample feelings of pain without suffering its true consequences. There are numerous other studies which detail the neurology of empathy. Yet the above are sufficient to add further detail to how brains discriminate and distinguish between reality and aesthetic absorption. On the one hand, the brain is constantly running simulations of pain, pleasure, and enchantment as if it were real. On the other hand, the brain cautions against rapture or immersion, insuring that Primary and Secondary Belief are carefully segregated, the one real, the other a simulation. We do so because belief is automatic. Our brains, through mirror neurons which simulate the actions and movements of others and emotional centers which imagine the pain of others, are ready-made for simulating, if not believing, what we see and hear. And thus we have another part of our brain to control and manage such beliefs, testing them and seeing them, possibly, for what they are. * * * There are ways to make stories more salient, though: more believable, memorable, and likely to contest the carefully held line between Primary and Secondary Belief. Not all stories are made equal, and not all beliefs have a similar hold on our brains. Some en-trance, and others are forgotten. Some make us want to believe they are real. Anthropologists, neurologists, and evolutionary psychologists have detailed those narratives which are more salient, memorable, and believable. There are those stories, like the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad and The Ramayana, which exert a powerful cognitive hold on us, enduring thousands of years and different cultures. Others, obviously, do not. Two ingredients that make narrative more memorable, potent, and believable are agency and

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counterintuition. Stories that feature compelling agents and minimally defy expectation lure us further into belief and have a greater hold on our minds. First, stories with agency tend to have a greater hold on our brains and collective mind than do stories of abstract and objective forces. This is due, as many evolutionary psychologists have argued, to a cognitive process known as a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD). Agency detection is a deeply embedded natural process that allows us to attribute agency to things that don’t have agency. It’s better to think that the snap! you hear in the forest is a bear or tiger (which would prompt a fight or flight response) than just a twig falling. Thinking of phenomena in terms of agency confers greater survival value and allows us to form coherent stories about the world around us. As a result, most neurotypical humans attribute agency promiscuously. Adults and children interpret the movement of dots and shapes on screens as agents (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, p. 7). Catholics see the face of the Virgin on a piece of toast or Mother Theresa on a cinnamon bun in a shop in Tennessee (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, p. 7). We see faces in clouds, order in the universe as the sign of a divine hand, and shadowy conspiracies behind systems and institutions (see McConachie 2015, p.  38). Children, by the age of three or four, can detect what other agents know or don’t know in a situation, attributing like-mindedness to others. (Pyysiäinen 2009, p. 13) Our brains are ready-made for agency and attribution to the minds of others, and those stories which feature agents fit more naturally into our evolved mental architecture. This is for a variety of reasons, survival chief among them. But it also mitigates anxiety in the face of uncertainty if we know who, or what, is behind the world around us. In the midst of mystery, agency becomes a way of seeing through the mist. The most salient form of agency attribution, of course, are religious concepts which invoke gods, demi-gods, and supernatural forces. Gods are obviously supernatural—eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, etc.—but they are also agents, too. Gods can have emotions and feelings, and can also cross boundaries, perform miracles, or defy death. In this way, gods and other supernatural agents fit into our desired forms of agency, but also defy our expectations of normal, everyday objects (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, p. 8). A god may have wants and needs, but it can also be in two places at once. This makes them, as Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan argue, more “attention-arresting and memorable” (2004, p. 8). And those gods and agents which activate agency without completely violating our

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expectations last longer than merely human, all too human, agents. As Atran and Norenzayan continue, “an all-knowing bloodthirsty deity is a better candidate for culture than a do-nothing deity, however omniscient” (2004, p. 9). That is, supernatural agents activate agency detection in our minds, potent as it is, but there are limits to how super they may be. Agency is thus a key ingredient in narrative, fitting more keenly into our brains and evolved responses. But this takes us, almost logically, to the second ingredient of successful narratives: minimal violations of our normal perception of the world, so-called minimally counterintuitive (MCI) narratives. With MCI phrases or narratives, some element violates our folk biological or psychological framework. For example, “laughing cheeseburger,” or “flying dog.” These can, of course, become more grandiose, such as Rama’s flying chariot, or the Incredible Hulk, or YHWH holding the sun so the Israelites can win a battle victory in the book of Joshua. As researchers have discovered, stories and phrases with MCIs have a unique hold on our minds. For example, Barrett and Nyhof (2001) asked people to remember and retell Native American folk tales containing natural as well as nonnatural events or objects. Content analysis showed that participants remembered 92% of MCI ideas, but only 71% of intuitive ideas (10). The same pattern was found with Yukatek Maya speakers, who not only remembered MCI ideas after one week, but after nearly three months (Barrett and Nyhof 2001, p. 11). In another experiment, Banerjee and colleagues presented children with a variety of narratives containing counterintuitive concepts. In successive studies, they added more MCI concepts to the narratives. In stories which contained one or two MCI concepts, children recalled the stories more accurately than mundane stories. This pattern dropped off, however, upon the addition of a third MCI concept or item (Banerjee et al. 2013). Indeed, it appears as if there is a “sweet spot” for narratives containing MCIs (Banerjee et al. 2013, pp. 1277–8). Too few, and the story is not memorable. Too many, and the story is too fantastical. Like Goldilocks, a story must contain a moderate or minimal number of counterintuitives to be more salient and memorable. This is why most of the stories that endure over time, like those of epic literature or in religion, balance narrative between mundane events and a few counterintuitive occurrences (Atran 2010, p. 21). In a study of the Brothers Grimm fairytales, for instance, Norenzayan and colleagues found that MCI narratives were also more successful than more intuitive or highly counterintuitive narratives in a recall study. Again, the curvilinear, bell-shaped pattern of success versus

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number of counterintuitive narratives was produced (Norenzayan et al. 2006). There are likely good reasons for this, one of which is that memorable elements promote learning and the ability to perform simple tasks. Stahl and Feigenson, for example, found that surprising elements in narratives and images shown to infants (2015) and children ages three and six (2015) increased memory salience and learning simple tasks afterwards. Put simply, we learn more and pay more attention when we are surprised, when things do not conform to our expectations. Indeed, as Barrett and Nyhof offer, a good story is like a moderately spiced dish, being neither too bland nor too spicy. This “gives the story a mnemonic advantage over stories with no counterintuitive beliefs or with far too many counterintuitive beliefs.” They conclude that “Such beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that greatly facilitate their mnemonic retention, social transmission, cultural selection, and historical survival” (Barrett and Nyhof 2001, p. 12). Clearly MCIs confer cognitive advantages to certain kinds of stories, those which both stand out and which we can better remember. Cognitively, this is likely because MCIs activate different conceptual templates in our brains. A “laughing cheeseburger,” for example, activates the schemas for both laughter and for meaty sandwiches (see Banerjee et  al. 2013, p. 1253). A mere cheeseburger, good as it is, does not do so. Moreover, were we to say “laughing gaseous cheeseburger man,” it would be too cognitively unwieldy. This is why, again, religions tend to be filled with agents which are counterintuitive in important and arresting ways. They are both highly memorable and, even better, we can impute greater abilities to them (Swan and Halberstadt 2019). Combining my first and second points, I would offer that stories which (a) feature agency and (b) are minimally counterintuitive have a particular hold on human minds, both individually and collectively. Such stories are the ones that remain with us, not simply for what they teach, but because they comport with cognitive processes associated with agency detection and our normal relationships to objects and things. Such stories are more memorable, salient, and likely to remain with us over time. As a result, they are also more likely to permeate the subtle boundary between Primary and Secondary belief, remaining with us long enough for the illusions of Secondary Belief and fiction to become more real. Narrative on its own, as many have argued, is a natural and abiding tendency in our minds. We ascribe stories to things, even our own lives

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(narrative psychology). We need to see cause, effect, and development (Grodal 2009, p.  31). Making, telling, and recalling stories are natural consequences of minds that are desirous of linkages, willing to believe if only to suspend mystery and see the world as orderly. Such stories become even more memorable and potent if they engage our mental centers for agency and surprise us. We become even more willing to believe, or incapable of disbelief, if the stories we tell ourselves are those which arrest us. Nietzsche announces the eternal return with a dwarf, it seems, for good reason. * * * And such stories are efficacious not only in our minds, but in the world outside of us as well, generating commitment (sometimes costly), positive feeling, and, like a feedback loop, even greater belief. Our brains are hardwired for narratives that are agential and surprising, but they are also hardwired to act upon such narratives, moving us more and more from Secondary to Primary Belief. The positive, real-world consequences of narrative range from the mundane to the cooperative to the sacrificial. In the sense of the banal, Young and Saver (2001) examine the neurological underpinnings of self-­ narration or narrative psychology, the neurotypical act of giving one’s life a narrative arc, even as it unfolds. Narrative psychology, they contend, allows us to give our lives a narrative sequence with a past, present, and future. Further, “Not only does the activity of story production prompt then the production of memories, but it as well encourages an arranging of events into a state of coherence, consecution, and consequence – features of what constitute a narrative. We come to see our lives as understandable because of their apparent integration, logic, even order: our narratives and their consequent memories tell us that our lives were so” (2001, p.  79). And, it should go without saying: these narratives, spun naturally out of our minds, are a part of our Primary Belief and are the fount from which we draw upon to interact with the world. To live consciously is to give narrative structure to our lives. Narrative has other, more obvious effects in the world than simply our orderly arrangement of it. For example, Weber and colleagues (2006) examined the efficacy of how to improve organ donor card signups. In the study, researchers varied messages that participants would read prior to filling out an organ donation card. The messages were varied with respect

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to statistical versus nonstatistical information, and positive versus negative emotional affect (some of the positive messages were funny). Fittingly, the most effective condition was that which blended humor and myth, while the least effective was a blend of sad narrative and statistics (2006, p. 83). That is, participants were more likely to fill out organ donation cards (a sacrifice, albeit one in the future and post-mortem) if they read a compelling narrative as opposed to a factual and non-compelling one. Narrative, in this case, allowed for participants to see their future actions as participating in a greater good. In a similar study, Barraza and colleagues (2015) selected a group of participants to watch a video of a father with a two-year-old son who is dying of brain cancer (there was a control group as well). Participants had medical data collected before and after the video and were asked to donate to a cancer charity. Researchers found that those who watched the video exhibited a decreased heart rate (counterintuitively, indicative of excitation), higher awareness of their autonomic functions, and increased skin conductance. Further, participants who watched the video donated significantly more to charity than those who didn’t. In a second study (Alexander et  al. 2014), researchers found that participants had significantly correlated physiological responses to the video. Those who watched the video had similar heart rates and skin conductance at similar times. Both studies showed, again, that a compelling narrative generated altruistic behavior and a sustained physiological response. Similar results were found in a study (Morris et al. 2019) which had individuals read a pro-­ environmental narrative and a control narrative (about the construction of a university). There, subjects were twice as likely to donate to an environmental charity after hearing the narrative than those who heard no story or the control narrative. These studies show what most of us know, perhaps intuitively: narratives get us to act, often in profoundly unselfish ways. Narratives, as opposed to dry facts, arrest us and create emotional responses. When confronted with stories that are emotionally salient or memorable, we act differently. All of the above studies show a positive link between narrative and action, stories and commitment. Narratives do not live in an enclosed universe. They have affects on our world, too. Of course, what such studies do not show is that narrative creates belief when there was none. Most studies on narrative are short term and do not gauge the feeling and beliefs of participants. Yet, I would contend that the

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willingness to act on behalf of narrative, combined with its salience and memorability, allows us to see narrative as a potential precursor to forming beliefs. * * * We can further see the ways in which narrative allows us to form beliefs in phenomena that reveal the deep ties between story, memorability, agency, salience, and commitment: conspiracy theories. In the conspiracy theories that populate our world, both past and present, we see how stories evoke belief, often inverting the relationship between Primary and Secondary Belief for those who hold them. Most of us know what conspiracy theories are. They are ways of attributing order to events and are usually against accepted or official narratives regarding those events. Conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example, run counter to official reports and claim that they can better explain the evidence than a single gunman with a magic bullet who acted alone. Or, in the more bizarre, there is the reptilian conspiracy theory of David Icke in England, who claims that a race of alien reptiles have, by shapeshifting, overtaken the highest levels of world governance (see https://www.davidicke.com/ and Alcock 2018, p. 194). While such stories might seem absurd on their face, they resonate with an all-too-human need for explanation, agency, narrative coherence, salience, and memorability. The factors which work to make narrative potent and believable are thus the same factors which allow us to believe in the unbelievable. Franks and colleagues, for example, remark of conspiracy theories that, “These narratives reduce the complexity presented by such events, contain the uncertainty they generate, and translate unspecific anxiety into focused fears” (2013, p. 1). Further, part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that, like all successful stories, they have, within them, agential and MCI narratives. As they state: “we are not claiming that some [conspiracy theories] have minimally counter-intuitive representations, and others do not; rather, we claim that they all do, but that they vary in complexity and depth of such qualities” (2013, p.  4). And, like most stories with MCI elements that are successful, conspiracy theories that endure and are memorable are those which are minimally counterintuitive. Hence most people don’t believe in reptilian shapeshifters, but the idea of more than one gunman makes sense. What makes such stories work, then, is the fact that they

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appeal to a desire for order, are narratively salient, and attribute a known source of agency. As Franks and colleagues offer, “The narrative explains the conspiracy using accounts of everyday experiences and their connections to wider social conditions…. The CT propagators themselves can then offer minimally counter-intuitive narratives for awareness that promise redemption from the control of the conspirator” (2013, p. 5). As other researchers have found, then, conspiracy theories tend to thrive when people feel a lack of agency or deep uncertainty. They offer order and agency, like any good story, where there often is none (Douglas et al. 2019, p. 7). And, further, people who are usually inclined to counterintuitive explanations, such as beliefs in the paranormal and supernatural explanations, have been shown to have stronger beliefs in conspiracy theories (see Douglas et al. 2019, p. 7). From an Enlightenment perspective, conspiracy theories are illogical and, worse, foster habits of mind that incline believers to bias information, distort reality, and seek easy solutions. Yet, as shown above, the same psychological processes at work in our typical reception of stories are those which are at work, albeit in extremis, in conspiracy theories. And they have the same real-world effects, too. For example, in research on anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, Jolley and Douglas found that participants who endorsed anti-vaccine conspiracy theories indicated less intention to vaccinate. In a second study, the same researchers exposed respondents to either pro- or anti-conspiracy theory information. Again, they found a significant relationship between anti-­ vaccination beliefs and pro-conspiracy theory narratives regarding vaccination. The inverse was also found. People in both conditions that were less likely to endorse vaccination also tended to feel more powerless and disillusioned with authorities. Stunningly, even those who don’t hold anti-­ vaccination conspiratorial beliefs were less likely to endorse vaccination after being primed with anti-vaccination material (Jolley and Douglas 2014). A similar study investigated the correlation between lack of reality testing and holding conspiracy-oriented beliefs as well as beliefs in the paranormal and urban legends. Subjects rated well-known conspiracy theories, and the official story on each on a scale from “unlikely to be true” to “highly likely.” Agreement was also measured on the same scale. Similar measures were made for elements of belief in the paranormal, urban legends, and reality testing. The study found that “reality testing scores and belief in the paranormal were associated with less critical ratings of conspiracy theories, lower truthfulness ratings for official explanations, and more positive evaluations of alternative explanations. In addition,

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conspiracist beliefs and urban legend ratings were found to be positively correlated” (Drinkwater et al. 2012, 68). Those who endorse conspiracy theories, lovers of narrative they may be, tend to reality-test less and promiscuously attribute narrative to events that are non-narratival. Adopting conspiracy theories, it seems, is part of a general habit of mind that sees narratives as true, or of those who consistently blur the line between Primary and Secondary Belief. With narrative we see the potential, at least partially, for realizing the aspirations and ideals of modernity. Narrative is appealing, surprising, memorable, and generative of commitment. This power is natural and ubiquitous. It has the potential to push Secondary Belief into the realm of Primary Belief. And yet this power is neutral. For every organ positive use of narrative there is a conspiracy theory, lurking in the depths of our minds. To unleash narrative is to unleash the imaginative and idealizing aspects of mind. This tendency can help harness modern ideals or it can lead to confirmation bias, lack of reality testing, pure absurdity, or, worse, negative social consequences. As Heidegger, by way of Rilke, might offer: in what saves us also lies what damns us. * * * We see the duality of narrative, its potential to both elicit positive social change and negative habits of mind and action, in a similar way in those stories which resonate with large groups and spread epidemically through a population. These stories are called, fittingly, “viral narratives.” With viral narratives, we see, again, the way in which human minds, both collective and individual, thirst for narrative, order, salience, and memorability, and spread such stories, propagating them across other minds and in the real, external world. Virality, of course, has become all too commonplace. There are viral memes, viral trends, and viral stories. Those things which are viral depend critically on two criteria: (1) that it gains social support which spreads rapidly through a population and (2) that it is an appealing narrative. As for the former, Matthew Salganik has conducted a number of studies on how certain ideas gain social traction and what allows for something to “become viral.” In one study, for example, Salganik and colleagues (2006) created an artificial music market of 14,341 participants who were shown a list of previously unknown songs from unknown bands. They were sorted into two separate groups, independent and influenced. The

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influenced group was shown how many times the song was downloaded, either fictitiously or within a small group (called a “world” by the researchers). Both were asked to rate the songs on a 1–5 scale. In this Amazon-like rating study, Salganik and colleagues found that social influence (how songs were rated, independent of quality) deeply contributed to inequality within a cultural market. So-called popular songs became more popular, and less popular songs became less popular. These ratings were independent of how participants actually rated the songs. That is, social influence had a greater effect on popularity than did the quality of the songs themselves. In a follow-up study, Salganik (2008) keenly inverted the relationship between how a song is rated and its popularity. He then conducted the same study as before. And, in an echo of his previous study, in the “social influence” world, the number of downloads was inverted between worst and first songs, at least for many songs. Some of the more appealing songs, however, eventually recovered their rankings. Social influence and self-­ fulfilling prophecies largely worked, but, occasionally, not even the artificial ranking of the researchers could keep good songs down. Social influence is powerful, it appears, but it is not always fate. Viral narratives ride on the back of perceived social influence. Stories are picked up because they are picked up. Ideas gain currency because we think they have currency. Such is the power of community. Yet narratives need to be salient in order to become viral, too. This was demonstrated in a stunning examination of Twitter data from 2006 to 2017 (thus it included the 2016 Presidential Election, among others) by Soroush Vosoughi and colleagues, where they measured the rate at which posts were retweeted, linked to, or otherwise propagated. These tweets were also measured for truth using a number of independent fact-­checking sites. As would be suspected, political rumors dominated the survey. And, perhaps unsurprisingly as well, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information” (2018, p. 1147). The researchers continue: Falsehood also reached far more people than the truth. Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people. Falsehood reached more people at every depth of a cascade than the truth, meaning that many more people retweeted falsehood than they did the truth. The spread of falsehood was aided by its virality, meaning that falsehood did not simply

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spread through broadcast dynamics but rather through peer-to-peer diffusion characterized by a viral branching process. (2018, p. 1148)

Perhaps fittingly, the researchers found that falsehoods were almost 70% more likely to be propagated than truths. Truths took six times longer to reach 1500 people than falsehood (Vosoughi et al. 2018, p. 1148). Most of us cynically view such data as banal, commonplace. Yet it belies the power of narrative coupled with social influence: ideas, especially those which are appealing, memorable, and perhaps even affirming of our own beliefs, travel faster and are propagated more quickly in our minds than those which are shorn of their memorability and are simply bare facts. As Vosoughi and colleagues posit, “Novelty attracts human attention, contributes to productive decision-making, and encourages information sharing because novelty updates our understanding of the world” (2018, p. 1149). As we’ve shown above, novelty travels better because our brains are built for it. Novelty is more easily believed because we want to believe it, if only to remember it all the more or explain the world better than we previously did. It goes without saying that such narratives are both believed and receive the commitment—sometimes costly—of those who believe in them. They have the power to change the world. And such belief and commitment engenders further belief and commitment, resulting in cascades of acceptance and propagation. Popularity and salience beget popularity and salience. Viral narratives work because, like conspiracy theories, they fit our mental architecture, providing details which are surprising, agency which is intelligible, and emotion which accords with our own. Coupled with being socially accepted or desirable, such beliefs no longer tread on the line between “as if” and real. To those who endorse them, they are fully real. * * * One more story, this time about stories. In A Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar, betrayed by his wife, commits himself to murdering a woman every night after he weds her. He does this to soothe a wounded soul and to elude further betrayal. To stop this cycle of violence, Shahrazad, his vizier’s daughter, asks to wed the king, with the stratagem that, each night, she shall tell the king a story with a cliffhanger ending. Desirous to hear the end of the story, Shahryar

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keeps her alive one night more, and then another night, and on and on, until his rage is subdued and he can regain his humanity. Such is the power of story. And Shahrazad, like all great weavers of tales, tells stories that are fantastical, memorable, and with subtle implications regarding rage, justice, and forgiveness. Only through the enchantment of story can the king be gently guided to something like fairness and love. Narratives have this hold on us because they tap into evolved cognitive processes which crave agency, memorability, and the ability to simulate reality without succumbing to that reality. There is a reason our Primary Beliefs are segregated from our Secondary Beliefs. One is the stuff of life and death, the other of simulation. If a narrative is compelling, able to trigger an emotional response, and memorable, though, it can permeate the barrier between Primary and Secondary belief and enter into the known world. Such is the path from pretense and imagination to belief and commitment. Many narratives exist simply to entertain and be the stuff of imagination. But others beg to be real, to be believed and acted upon. Narratives compel us to act, sometimes in selfless and beautiful ways. And, other times, narratives activate and trigger cognitive biases and dim reality testing. In narrative lies both the potential for realizing imagined ideals and for foolhardiness. Modernity certainly knows this, if only unconsciously: to see the world in terms of story is to activate both the best and worst parts of ourselves. One way in which modernity may begin to realize its own ideals, then, is through the power of narrative and story. Hence Nietzsche’s eternal return, Foucault’s histories, and Kearney’s acts of imagination. Values, created though they may be, are more powerful when encapsulated in a story, even if we know that story might be false. If we desire for a value or truth to be real, even if it violates our critical faculties, it should find its way into art. Only as art can truth hold us long enough for it to make us believe.

literAture cited Alcock, James. 2018. Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Alexander, Veronika, Bethany K.  Bracken, Paul J.  Zak, Victoria Romero, and Jorge A.  Barraza. 2014. Physiological Synchronization Is Associated with

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Narrative Emotionality and Subsequent Behavioral Response. In Foundations of Augmented Cognition. Advancing Human Performance and D ­ ecision-­Making through Adaptive Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. D.D. Schmorrow and C.M. Fidopiastis, vol. 8534. Springer. Atran, Scott. 2010. The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive by-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions. Biological Theory 5 (1): 18–30. Atran, Scott, and Ara Norenzayan. 2004. Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6): 713–730. Banerjee, Konika, Omar S. Haque, and Elizabeth S. Spelke. 2013. Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children’s Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts. Cognitive Science 37: 1251–1289. Barraza, Jorge, Veronika Alexander, Laura E. Beavin, Elizabeth T. Terris, and Paul J. Zak. 2015. The Heart of the Story: Peripheral Physiology During Narrative Exposure Predicts Charitable Giving. Biological Psychology 105: 138–143. Barrett, Justin, and Melanie Nyhof. 2001. Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials. Cognition and Culture 1 (1): 69–100. Douglas, Karen, Joseph Uscinski, Robbie Sutton, Aleksandra Cichocka, Turkay Nefes, Chee Siang Ang, and Farzin Deravi. 2019. Understanding Conspiracy Theories. Advances in Political Psychology 40 (Suppl. 1): 3–34. Drinkwater, K., N.  Dagnall, and A.  Parker. 2012. Reality Testing, Conspiracy Theories and Paranormal Beliefs. Journal of Parapsychology 76 (1): 57–77. Franks, Bradley, Adrian Bangerter, and Martin Bauer. 2013. Conspiracy Theories as Quasi-Religious Mentality: An Integrative Account from Cognitive Science, Social Representations Theory, and Frame Theory. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 1–12. Goldstein, Thalia. 2009. The Pleasure of Unadulterated Sadness: Experiencing Sorrow in Fiction, Nonfiction, and “In Person”. Psychology of Aesthetics 3 (4): 232–237. Grodal, Torben. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gu, Xiaosi, and Shihui Han. 2007. Attention and Reality Constraints on the Neural Processes of Empathy for Pain. NeuroImage 36: 256–267. Gu, Xiaosi, Xun Liu, Kevin G. Guise, Thomas P. Naidich, Patrick R. Hof, and Jin Fan. 2010. Functional Dissociation of the Frontoinsular and Anterior Cingulate Cortices in Empathy for Pain. The Journal of Neuroscience 30 (10): 3739–3744. Holland, Norman. 2004. The Power(?) of Literature: A Neuropsychological View. New Literary History 35 (3): 395–410. Jolley, Daniel, and Karen Douglas. 2014. The Effects of Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Vaccination Intentions. PlosOne 9 (2): 1–9.

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Kauppi, Jukka-Pekka, Iiro Jääskeläinen, Mikko Sams, and Jussi Tohka. 2010. Inter-Subject Correlation of Brain Hemodynamic Responses During Watching a Movie: Localization in Space and Frequency. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 4: 1–10. McConachie, Bruce. 2015. Evolution, Cognition, and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, Brandi, Polymeros Chrysochou, Jacob Christensen, Jacob Orquin, Jorge Barraza, Paul Zak, and Panagiotis Mitkidis. 2019. Stories Vs. Facts: Triggering Emotion and Action-Taking on Climate Change. Climatic Change 154: 19–36. Mukhopadhyay, Dyutiman. 2014. Understanding the Neuropsychology of Aesthetic Paradox: The Dual Phase Oscillation Hypothesis. Review of General Psychology 18 (3): 237–248. Norenzayan, Ara, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner, and Mark Schaller. 2006. Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives. Cognitive Science 30: 531–553. Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. 2009. Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salganik, Matthew, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts. 2006. Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science 311: 854–856. Salganik, Matthew, and Duncan Watts. 2008. Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market. Social Science Quarterly 74 (4): 338–348. Singer, Tania, Ben Seymour, John O’Doherty, Holger Kaube, Raymond J. Dolan, and Chris D.  Frith. 2004. Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective But not Sensory Components of Pain. Science 303 (20): 1157–1163. Stahl, Aimee, and Lisa Feigenson. 2015. Cognitive Development. Observing the Unexpected Enhances Infants’ Learning and Exploration. Science 348 (6230): 91–94. Swan, Thomas, and Jamin Halberstadt. 2019. The Mickey Mouse Problem: Distinguishing Religious and Fictional Counterintuitive Agents. PLoSOne 14 (8): 1–15. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1939. On Fairy Stories. Accessed at: http://brainstorm-­services. com/wcu-­2005/fairystories-­tolkien.html. Accessed 4 Feb 2020. Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. 2018. The Spread of True and False News Online. Science 359: 1146–1151. Weber, Keith, Matthew M. Martin, and Members of COMM 401, and Michael Corrigan. 2006. Creating Persuasive Messages Advocating Organ Donation. Communication Quarterly 54 (1): 67–87. Young, Kay, and Jeffrey Saver. 2001. The Neurology of Narrative. SubStance 30 (94/95): 72–84.

CHAPTER 8

Community: Creating Belief with Others

One of the stated aims of modernity is to realize values that are of our own creation. We know all values are constructed, and so we should make our own hypotheses and wagers about the kinds of ideals we wish to see in the world and ourselves. And, as I have been offering, the way in which self-­ constructed ideals can be realized is through make-believe, imagination extended over time. We imagine something long enough for it to become belief. The previous chapter examined how this can occur in the universe of narrative. With narrative, we can parse our worlds into those of Primary and Secondary Belief, that of the “real” and the “imagined.” But, through the power of narrative to arouse our minds and stimulate commitment, that which is Secondary can replace that which is Primary. We can, eventually, come to believe what we once did not believe, even if intentionally. Such is the power of story. Narrative is not the full picture, though, and, left on its own, it does not generate the kind of lasting commitment and belief required by modernity. For that, other mechanisms are needed, those which can reinforce and amplify the cognitive hold of narrative. Such, I would offer, is the power of community, of those with whom we share our intentions, actions, and lives. In and through community we can see further how ideas can be carried out, projected, and eventually believed, even if all in a community do not yet believe them. Such is the case with social norms and sacred values, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_8

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ways in which we create ideals and values for a culture, sometimes while fully recognizing that they are of our own making. Creating such norms is the work of joint and synchronous action, working with another and feeling with one another, effectively creating an emergent “we” which helps to realize and project values which I have not yet fulfilled. As with narrative, though, there is a Janus-face to community. To be with others is to realize values greater than ourselves and to reinforce them in ways the individual herself cannot fathom or even control. And yet, in this power lies also the potential for loss of self, for fusion to an ideal so great that the I becomes lost in the We. Modernity, and especially the Enlightenment, knew of this power and fear and carefully shielded us from it by elevating the individual above all else. But, in the rise of the individual we lost one of the best ways to realize the values of modernity. We traded community for the binds of individuality: unmet expectation and anxiety. * * * The story of community begins with our evolutionary origins. We can examine our propensity for community and the realization of communal ideals in the work of Michael Tomasello. For Tomasello, the common problem of human evolution was principally one of cooperation—hominids had to act together to solve common problems, share resources, and prevent those who free rode off the efforts of the collective. This required, over time, the development of language, morality, and human cognition associated with being-with and joining others. What is most fundamental, though, Tomasello argues, is joint activity and joint commitment, where individuals have roles and recognize “one’s dependence on a collaborative partner, to the point of relinquishing at least some control of one’s actions to the self-regulating ‘we’ created by a joint commitment” (2016, p. 4). It is this collective “we” of common action that forms the basis of human cognition and morality for Tomasello— “collective intentionality.” As he elaborates, “To coordinate their group activities cognitively, and to provide a measure of social control motivationally, modern humans evolved new cognitive skills and motivations of collective intentionality  – enabling the creation of cultural conventions, norms, and institutions – based on cultural common ground” (2016, p. 5). These reflections sound both intuitive and basic. Yet, within collective intentionality is the recognition that humans have evolved principally

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through their capacity to form joint agency which culminates in a “we” that works towards a common and agreed-upon end (Tomasello 2016, p. 51). And, because the formation of a “we” is so critical to human survival, we come to metarepresent the collective in our own minds, conceiving of ourselves in terms of the collective. As Tomasello states, “These judgments do not represent what ‘they’ think of me but, rather, what ‘we’ think of me. I develop a sense of personal identity based on how ‘we,’ our joint agent, judges me” (2016, p. 73). Moreover, the collective, task oriented as it is, sees its parts—us—as interchangeable. You can chase a gazelle just as well as I can. This interchangeability and exchangeability means that there evolve, over time, objective standards for human behavior and for common tasks. We’re all pulling in the same direction. And, thus, common and independent standards apply to all of us equally (Tomasello 2016, p. 83). Thus arises a common morality out of the substrate of collective intentionality. As Tomasello elaborates: And so with modern humans was born a second way to form a “we.” Modern human individuals felt solidarity not only with interdependent collaborative partners, as already in early humans, but also with in-group members who resembled them in behavior and appearance. (2016, p. 90)

The evolutionary picture here is simple but compelling. As humans endowed with relatively little in the way of physical prowess, we had to cope with common problems through a cognitive advance: cooperation. Cooperation, though, requires collective intentionality, which, in turn, allows us to form groups that have common norms and standards. These standards become self-fulfilling. Because collective intentionality is so basic, so fundamental to human evolution, we should expect to see it encoded in our most primal moral instincts. And we do. For example, Tomasello describes an experiment where researchers had preschoolers agree to play a game with an adult, and then another adult tried to lure them away. He continues, “Although two-year-olds mostly just bolted to the game straightaway, from three years of age children paused before departing and ‘took leave,’ either verbally or by handing the adult the tool they had been using together. The children seemed to recognize that joint goals involve joint commitments, the breaking of which requires some kind of acknowledgment or even apology” (2014, p.  40). Indeed, from an early age, children form joint goals with others, expect fairness of effort and distribution, and tend to

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identify and single out those who are unfair (Tomasello 2016, p. 49). Our task orientation and commitment to collective intentionality run deep. This fundamental behavior becomes more complicated after adolescence, of course, but the basic parameters of collective intentionality and joint commitment remain there. We tend to favor those with whom we collaborate, our group (Tomasello 2014, p. 84). We try to detect and ferret out free riders. And we subscribe to moral codes that are supposedly objective and agreed upon. Taken together, these features mean that, over evolutionary time, “interdependent collaborative activities structured by joint intentionality fostered in participants a new kind of collective rationality” (Tomasello 2016, p.  40). This means that humans have evolved largely to see themselves in and through the eyes of others, as collective participants. Human cognition is molded and shaped by the demand for common action. What this means for our purposes is that social norms, codes, values, and ideals are generally shared standards of conduct. Such aspirations are generated, fixed, and reinforced communally, in line with our evolved proclivity for communal action and collective intentionality. As Tomasello consistently offers, norms are always “shared” and based on “ideal role performance” relative to what is decided by the group (2016, p. 54). We do so, he adds, because such standards and norms “facilitate success not only for the individual himself but also for his valued partner and partnership” (2016, p. 55). Through Tomasello’s history of human cooperation and morality, we can begin to see how community allows for us to construct, realize, and repeat norms and values, even if they are arbitrary or constructed. Because our brains evolved for collective rationality and participation, we are primed to participate in collectives and work towards common goals with others. This goal and collective orientation allows us to form groups and their corresponding norms, many of which concern the preservation of the group itself. Finally, through shared participation and common action, we realize and solidify the values and ideals of a given collective. In short: we realize ideals through and with others. Communities marshal both our brains and their collective resources to generate belief and commitment. * * * We can see this history extended into advanced cultures in the work of Emile Durkheim. Through Durkheim’s granular study of Aboriginal

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Australian rites, religious ceremonies, and ways of life (most of it second-­ hand), he came to revolutionize the Western understanding of the function of religion and the status of the individual. In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim sees, amidst all of his presented data, that society is both the creator and object of religious life. Indeed, as he offers, “A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful” (1995, p. 208). In line with Tomasello’s analysis, what is actually being sustained and upheld in religion or, more broadly, culture, is the community. And it is the individual who lives in service of the collective, a part of the desired-for “we.” As he offers: In all kinds of acts that express the understanding, esteem, and affection of his neighbor, there is a lift that the man who does his duty feels, usually without being aware of it. But that lift sustains him; the feeling society has for him uplifts the feeling he has for himself. Because he is in moral harmony with his neighbor, he gains new confidence, courage, and boldness in action – quite like the man of faith who believes he feels the eyes of his god turned benevolently toward him. (1995, p. 213)

Society, for Durkheim, achieves a kind of divine status: omniscient, demanding, and the purpose which guides and constructs human lives. If society is a body and individuals its organs, then norms and ideas become the capillaries which link individuals to each other and to the greater whole. For this reason, society “consecrates” ideas (1995, p. 215), like the sacred, or the profane, or the role of genders. These ideas are the glue which binds the disparate parts to the whole. And, for this reason, the operating ideal for most societies (at least pre-modern ones) is “intellectual and moral uniformity” (Durkheim 1995, p.  5), the production of selves, nodes, and norms which maintain the health and conformity of the whole. The parts, collectively, are in service to the whole. Or, as Durkheim states, “it is society that is foremost in every consciousness and that dominates and directs conduct,” such that “the particle of social being that each individual bears within himself necessarily participates in this collective remaking” (1995, pp. 352–353). Durkheim’s study, of course, is about religion and religious ideals. And it is religion that figures most prominently in the idealization and fixation of belief within each society, undertaking the collective revitalization of social ideals through rites, ceremonies, and codes (Durkheim 1995, p. 379). More specifically, it is through “common action,” synchronized

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and ritualized activity, that “society becomes conscious of and affirms itself; society is above all an active cooperation” (Durkheim 1995, p. 421). But this is not just simply cooperation. In reviewing the ecstatic and dysphoric rites of Aborigines, Durkheim also sees how rites fix and revitalize belief: through loss of self to the collective, immersion in a sphere greater than one’s self. Durkheim describes the feeling of a religious participant discovering the worlds of the sacred and profane in the following: “Feeling possessed and led on by some sort of external power that makes him think and act differently than he normally does, he naturally feels he is no longer himself. It seems to him that he has become a new being.… Especially when repeated for weeks, day after day, how would experiences like these not leave him with the conviction that two heterogenous and incommensurable worlds exist in fact?” (1995, p. 220). Through repetition, loss of self, and immersion in the world of the “as if,” the collective is able to create and fix belief in its individual members. It is this element of Durkheim’s thought that interests me most. For, within Durkheim’s understanding of society, there is the realization that collectives operate, though not solely, for the creation and realization of norms that serve that same collective. Rites, especially those which result in “collective effervescence,” the simultaneous awakening of common feeling, are critical in the arousal of ideals that serve not the individual, but the whole. In this feeling there is loss, of course, as “Man does not recognize himself; he feels somehow transformed and in consequence transforms his surroundings” (1995, p. 424), but it is only through this loss of self that a different world is to be constructed, envisioned, and fixed. Indeed, this collective conscription of individuals is the means, perhaps the only means, by which “society makes itself, and remakes itself, periodically” (Durkheim 1995, p. 425). It is through these cultural ideals that individual activity is directed and society is made whole. These are “mere ideas,” as Durkheim often reminds us, but they are the embedded aspirations and codes of our collective lives. And such ideas only work if we believe in them, if they direct both our minds and bodies in service of the community. Hence, as Durkheim elegantly offers, in order to be belief they must be constantly renewed, repeated, and reinforced through communal effort: The beliefs are at work only when they are shared. We may well keep them going for a time through personal effort alone, but they are neither born nor obtained in this way, and it is doubtful that they can be preserved under

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those conditions. In fact, the man who has genuine faith feels an irrepressible need to spread it. To do so, he comes out of his isolation, he approaches others, he seeks to convince them, and it is the ardor of the convictions he brings about that in turn reinforces his own. (1995, p. 427)

The resonance here with Pascal and Wesley is unmistakable. Through the gestures of the social, through its demand for repeated belief and action, the individual comes to adopt the very beliefs that society wishes for her. The collective realization of belief is thus a continuous process, demanding ceremonies, periodic loss of self, and collective goads to “strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality.” And these can only be achieved through “meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments” (Durkheim 1995, p.  429). The path toward adopting values and norms, many of which are not of benefit to the individual herself, is paved with constant reinforcement, feelings of collective feeling and belonging (and often guilt), and feelings of being-together. Only through the collective, Durkheim offers, can social ideals—or any ideals, for that matter— become real. If the ideas of modernity are to be real, I posit that it is through the collective and its powers of cooperation, joint intentionality, repetition, emotional resonance, and common belonging. Communities have the power, through their serial arrangement of time, through the need for human belonging, and through their power over the self, to create authentic belief and commitment within individuals. These beliefs are irrespective of their benefit to the individual or their efficacy: they are to be believed in because they demand belief. Collective belief thus belies both a power that transcends the individual and a kind of blind faith. * * * We can see this tendency towards shared participation and joint action in a series of experiments that show our proclivity for collective action and group behavior. There are, of course, classic experiments in this regard, such as the Zimbardo prison experiment or the Milgram study on authority and group think. There is a well-established literature on how powerful groups can be. We can see this in a few more idiosyncratic studies, too.

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For example, in one study researchers measured participant response to being shocked in an experimental setting (literally shocked by electrodes— the study was in 1976!). Participants were shocked both in the presence of an observer and unobserved (Kleck et  al. 1976). Both outward expressions (facial contortions) and physiological arousal were measured. Researchers found that, in the presence of others and even when literally being shocked, participants controlled their nonverbal displays of pain. They also reported less pain. The authors of the study speculated that observers may have a calming effect on subjects. Further, participants were unaware that they were suppressing their response, indicating that such a response could be autonomic. Such is the power of being observed: we control reactions and actions that may prove uncomfortable to others. Another less painful study sought to examine the effects of shared arousal on relationship satisfaction of married couples. Previous studies have found that “exciting,” more so than “pleasing,” tasks stimulated great relationship satisfaction. In the study researchers “aroused” couples by performing odd tasks, like carrying a pillow together without using their hands. Non-aroused couples in the control condition performed tasks like rolling a ball to one another. One experiment had a no-activity control group, too. Results showed that, “shared participation in novel and arousing activities was consistently associated with higher levels of experienced and behaviorally expressed relationship quality…” (Aron et al. 2000, p. 281). Here, as we will see below, it is not simply shared activity or joint participation that creates a feeling of togetherness. It is also a common challenge, a shared sense of commitment and arousal, and task orientation, which can create a greater commitment to the whole. A final study shows this sense of shared commitment and joint feeling. Bastian et al. (2014) had a group of participants place their hands in ice water or perform squats while in groups (another study introduced eating a hot chili pepper). They then completed questions regarding the painfulness of their experience, how they felt towards their groupmates, and in another study, played a game which measured their cooperation (a Prisoner’s Dilemma). In all studies, researchers found that shared pain promoted cooperation and bonding. They speculate that, “Sharing pain therefore is an especially powerful form of shared experience that enhances the salience of the group and promotes bonding, solidarity, and, ultimately, cooperation” (2014, p. 6). Joint experience in itself, like narrative, can be compelling, since our brains have evolved to live within and through collective intentions. But painful experiences, like MCIs, can make joint

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activities even more salient and memorable. They can also, like narrative, compel us to be more group oriented and self-sacrificial. Such studies, though just a selection, show not only our innate disposition towards group-oriented and prosocial behavior, but also the ways in which such behaviors can be rendered more potent through common stress, common challenges, or shared pain. Many of the ceremonies and rites observed by Durkheim included elements of shared challenge or stress, perhaps because, over time, those ceremonies generated greater feelings of commitment to the group and its shared customs and norms. We are social creatures, but those instincts can be enhanced by calling upon feelings of emotional resonance (you felt that, too!) and shared sacrifice. * * * Such feelings of togetherness can, as the previous study showed, also generate a greater sense of shared sacrifice and cooperation. As with narrative, community also generates commitment which outstrips individual calculation. If what is required to realize the aspirations of modernity is both belief and commitment, then shared sacrifice and cooperation constitute our committed responses to social and collective cues. We can see this sense of togetherness and commitment even further in instances of synchronous activity, where individual behavior, movement, or general activity is synchronized in time and place with that of others. Synchronicity of movement is the extreme of joint intentionality. In synchronicity, there is a common goal, a common set of movements, and, potentially, common feeling. Such synchronous actions and movements are common, ranging from gospel singing to dancing to the Hajj pilgrimage to the wave in sports stadiums. All are oriented ostensibly around keeping in time and presence with others and, hopefully, generating feelings of togetherness and mutual alliance. Done right, they also generate commitment and sacrifice. A simple study shows the relationship between synchrony and feelings of collectivity. In the study, participants tapped their fingers synchronously with one another while watching a target video (Hove and Risen 2009). They then completed a questionnaire on likability and feelings towards the other participant. Even with something as simple as finger tapping, synchrony significantly predicted liking the one with whom one tapped. Indeed, the more synchronous one’s activity with the another, the more

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they liked them. On the other hand, an asynchronous condition produced the lowest degrees of likability, and tapping with a metronome did not produce liking or feeling. Another, slightly more elaborate study had similar findings when subjects were broken into dyads and exposed to either rhythmic music, arrhythmic music, or a control (Lang 2016). They sat back-to-back when the music started, but then had to jointly manipulate a ball through a wooden maze. Researchers found—as many of us would guess—that individuals who listened to a rhythmic beat aligned their movements with the beat and each other, and not the task at hand, making their ability to move the ball more difficult. Even though they were not as successful in manipulating the maze, rhythmic subjects reported greater positive feelings towards their partner. In both studies we see how absorbing (sometimes too absorbing) synchronous activity can be. Seeing these studies, Baimel et al. (2018) explored the ways in which synchronous action goes beyond simple positive feeling and potentially blurs the lines between self and other, as measured through increases in empathy and taking on the perspective of others. In a series of experiments, participants listened to music over a shared set of headphones while they moved cups in unison to the music; some participants were also subjected to asynchronous movement with another participant. They then responded to an empathy questionnaire, and, in some parts of the study, completed additional questions about “reading minds,” social cohesion, and mentalization of the other participant. The experiments found that synchronous action significantly increased the tendency of participants to think about the mental states of others (though not necessarily accurately) and drew attention to “the minds in one’s immediate environment” (2018, p. 288). As we suspect, to act with another person effectively forges a connection to that other person, even if they are previously unknown. Acting out-of-sync, on the other hand, makes people feel less inclined to consider the mental states of others. Other studies using a shared musical experience demonstrated increases in pain tolerance (a proxy for elevated feeling) and feelings of social closeness (Tarr et al. 2016), furthering establishing a link between social cohesion and synchrony. There are other studies that establish a connection between synchrony and social cohesion, but these suffice to show what we know, perhaps intuitively: doing things with others, especially in unison, makes us feel better about those others. Anyone who has played in a band, gone to a concert, prayed with others, or even gone to a political rally can attest to the feelings of togetherness and common intent that can be generated

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through collective synchrony. When we act synchronously, we feel what others feel. We promiscuously attribute feelings to others. And such feelings tend to be positive and prosocial. In a fairly classic example of this, Konvalinka and colleagues (2011) measured the heart rates of various people who participated in a fire-walking ceremony in Spain. The study found that those who walked across fire had elevated heart rates. Perhaps just as interesting, though, is the fact that friends and family of fire-walkers experienced the same levels of excitation and elevation as did the fire-­ walkers themselves. To be a part of something, even vicariously, is to feel with others. And, in this case, to literally feel the same as they feel. There are neurological reasons for our common feeling, especially in synchronous activities. Numerous studies have shown that brains synchronize across individuals when presented with a common stimulus. Similar to the fMRI studies in Chap. 7, we see correlated brain activity across individuals who participate in a common endeavor. This can occur when people listen to music (in this case, jazz; see Lindenberger et al. 2009); watch the same movie clips, causing brains to “tick together” in emotionally salient moments in a film (Nummenmaa et  al. 2012; Hasson et  al. 2008); and perform the same movements (Dumas et al. 2010; Yun et al. 2012). In each case, the same areas of the brain fire, across subjects, at the same moments in time. We literally feel, and think, what others are feeling and thinking in that same moment. This is the substrate upon which common and positive feeling towards others is built. Synchrony does not just produce social cohesion, though. It also generates a desire to sacrifice for the very same group it is in the process of establishing. When we synchronize with others, we are more likely to sacrifice for those same others. To act in community and feel in common is the wellspring of common commitment and sacrifice. We see this in the behavior of soldiers, the solidarity of those in the midst of common trauma, and in the higher rates of giving and charitable donation amongst the world’s religions. We can also see this in a few illustrative and controlled experiments. With children, for example, Kirschner and Tomasello (2010) had threeand four-year-olds either play synchronously together with music (singing, dancing, and playing percussion instruments) or playing asynchronously with one another. They sat on a blanket in pairs and needed to “wake up” nine frogs, either with music or without music. (There’s a rather elaborate set of movements that were used to wake up the frogs.) They then engaged in a cooperative task, where they were to use tubes filled with marbles

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(“fish food”) to feed the fish. The first tube was set up to drop the marbles when lifted. Children could then help or not help their confederate. Cooperation with one another was recorded. As might be predicted, they found that the children that jointly made music were significantly more cooperative and helpful than children that were not synchronized beforehand. (This effect was especially pronounced in boys, who rarely helped in the non-musical condition.) Even as children, we are primed for synchronous activity and joint commitment. This behavior extends to adults, too, and can be seen in similar simple experiments. Wiltermuth and Heath (2009), for instance, conducted a series of studies on synchrony and cooperation. Participants performed a variety of synchronous activities, like walking in unison and singing “O, Canada,” and afterward performed public goods games that showed levels of cooperation. As with other studies (Fischer et al. 2013), the researchers showed that even simple synchronous behavior increased a willingness to cooperate and sacrifice for others. Synchrony, even when rudimentary and done at a specific point in time, can produce momentary commitment to an anonymous group (Valdesolo et  al. 2010; Lang et  al. 2017; Jackson et al. 2018). Synchronous activity, then, goes beyond mere collective intentionality and creates common, positive feeling through common action. In many instances it may also create a willingness to sacrifice for the group itself, even if anonymous or created in a lab. Any activity which arouses collective common feeling in unison has this capacity, and we can see it, even selectively, in the group behaviors caught in the midst of collective feeling, whether they be in church, at a political rally, at a sports event, or dancing with one another. To be together physically, to move together in time, and to feel what the other feels, generates the cohesion and commitment necessary to make ourselves a part of the collective. In this lies the power, as Durkheim observed, to identify not only with the individuals within a group, but with the group itself and its ideals. Synchronicity, though it appears to be automatic and mindless, may be a powerful tool in the realization of belief. Such collective synchrony and groupishness, it goes without saying, is also antithetical to the aims of modern individualism. We are to move to our own beat, out-of-sync with others. We are to be mindful, not commit to the mindless repetition of synchrony. In this lies both our genius and, as seen in many of the studies above which employ asynchrony, our feelings of alienation. It may also belie our inability to realize values, even

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when we deem them to be important. Outside the group, we are shorn of one of the strongest tools available to believe what we desire to believe. * * * Lest this be too abstract, though, we can see the effects of common feeling in a phenomenon that is, unfortunately, all too common: that of experiencing the shock, and rush, of war. War, as those who have heralded both its horror and ecstasy admit, brings forth intense feelings of togetherness, collective feeling, and commitment to a common cause. In his War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Christopher Hedges admits that war offers us the chance to “exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion.” The drug of war, though, like many actions on behalf of a group or in the midst of trauma, “seemed worth it in the midst of war – and very stupid once the war ended” (2003, p. 5). What is it about war that generates such feelings? Why, as Albert Einstein once mused, does war appeal so deeply to us? Part of the appeal of war, aside from its myths of honor and assurances of glory, is the fact that it brings forth collective, synchronous feeling, and hence togetherness. As J. Glenn Gray, a World War II veteran, admits, “Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle…has been the high point of their lives…Their ‘I’ passes insensibly into a ‘we,’ ‘my’ becomes ‘our,’ and individual fate loses its central importance… I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life” (as quoted by Haidt 2012, p. 222). This sense of immersion, of loss of self, is what marks out the experience of war from normal life. In war we are allowed, if not forced, to lose ourselves in the service of the collective. There is a high in this. This is, as Gray admits later, the power of comradeship (not friendship), one where we fight and struggle with others, even at the expense of ourselves. Hedges, echoing this, poignantly remembers the musing of a Marine Corps colonel: “Just remember…that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other” (2003, p. 38). War, through its trauma and the inevitability of collective (and often synchronous) experience, forges collective identity. We feel with our fellows. We fight for one another. In this lie both the self-abandonment and self-overcoming that make war bring out both the best and worst of

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ourselves. As Hedges offers, those in the midst of war “live only for their herd,” for it “alone endows worth and meaning” (2003, p. 40). He will state, perhaps oddly, that there is a “kind of love in this” (2003, p. 40), one that allows us to feel and sacrifice for others. But this also leads us to commit to acts which are, at best, “morally dubious” (2003, p. 45), such as the demonization of others (2003, p. 21) and its other face, collective glorification (2003, p. 45). Such is the duality of war. Espirit d’corps or hatred. Both are the offspring of collective feeling, especially that wrought by fear and trauma. We feel more deeply and poignantly what others feel, and they do the same with us. In this lie collective feeling, empathy, and even sacrifice. But in this also lie loss of self and protection of the group, forged through collective feeling, at all costs. War, and the feelings it presents us with, is thus collective intentionality in extremis. With war we see the potency of synchronous feeling and its ability to engender deep attachment to others. This brings forth, as we will discuss later, the potential for both collective self-sacrifice and transcendence, destruction and self-abandonment. Erich Maria Remarque captures this poignantly: “We run on…overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance” (as quoted by Hedges 2003, p. 87).

It is in synchronous action and feeling that we see our groupishness at its most pure. In sync with others, we feel what others feel; we think what they think; we are bonded to those closest to us. This is evident in dance, music, art, sports, and war. In each we are brought closer to a group by acting and feeling as a group acts and feels. We have merged our “I” with the “we” of joint action and feeling. In this loss there is the potential for gain. What is gained, though, is neutral. * * * The above evidence only constitutes our allegiance to the group and our willingness, through joint and even synchronous action, to commit ourselves to its existence and others. While this may, as Durkheim notes, predispose us to believe as the group does, it does not yet offer evidence that

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collectivity and community help us to believe what the group believes. For that, I offer social norms, as previously mentioned, as evidence of our ability to believe that which we are supposed to believe. We can also see this capacity in the evolution of sacred values. Whereas social norms and taboos operate like the air we breathe, dictating what foods we eat, what we wear, and how we act, sacred values come to represent collective values that must be defended, explicitly, through oftentimes costly acts. Sacred values, at least in the contemporary literature, come to represent an interesting paradox in our supposedly rational minds. Values come to be sacred because their violation is taboo. To go against a sacred value is to violate not only that particular value, but the social order itself (Tomasello 2016, p. 105). Such values are inviolable. They represent that which we shall not do or even discuss. In many societies, honor is such a value, and to violate one’s honor, or have it violated, is to lose place and identity within a society (Atran and Axelrod 2008, p. 226). Further, while “sacredness” may imply a religious value to such ideals, religion is not the sole store of sacred values. A nation, a totem, or even a team can come to be seen as sacred. There is another interesting feature to sacred values, though. As much as we want them to be rational, sacred values are often immune to “rational” trade-offs. Indeed, as Scott Atran and Robert Axelrod recognize, “violent opposition to compromise over issues that people consider sacred actually increases when material incentives to compromise are offered” (2008, p. 224). That is, when offered compensation to relinquish a sacred value, individuals and groups often “double down” on the sacred, imputing even more inviolability to such values. This has come to be known in the literature as the “backfire effect” (Norenzayan 2013, p. 168), where material incentives, even of astronomical amounts, are discounted in favor of sacred values, and, conversely, symbolic gestures like recognition and apologies outstrip material compensation. Examples of such sacred values, both experiential and experimental, abound. Consider, for example, the “ping-pong” diplomacy between the United States and China in the 1970s, where the United States agreed to ping-pong matches—which they knew they would lose—in order to help normalize relations with China. For the Chinese, this symbolic defeat of an enemy helped soften their stance on other issues, while, for the United States, it meant giving up something of little value in exchange for something of much greater value (Atran and Axelrod 2008, p.  230). Or,

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alternatively, Atran and Axelrod conducted studies with families and supporters of Palestinian suicide bombers. They describe their results as such: We asked about the amount of compensation that their society should give to the family of a suicide bomber. We found that willingness to allow compensation decreased as the amount offered increased: one hundred thousand dinars is significantly less acceptable than ten thousand dinars, and one million dinars is much less acceptable….Follow-up interviews clearly point to a willingness to accept minimal compensation for loss of a family member (who may be a helper or wage earner) and one’s home (Israeli retaliation often includes destruction of the bomber’s house). Nevertheless, Palestinians see more substantial payments to families as unacceptable, even disgusting, because they would create the impression that the martyr had acted as a materially calculating actor rather than as a martyr devoted to a moral cause. (2008, p. 229)

In follow-up surveys with Palestinians, Atran and Axelrod found that nonmaterial concessions, such as apologies or a recognition of a suffering, would help clear the path towards possible resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict (2008, p. 231). What is interesting, at least for our purposes, is that sacred values are being created in real time. That is, we are inventing sacredness, along with belief and often extreme commitment, within our own lifetimes. We know that such values are new, and yet we believe in them. Israel-Palestine, as a geopolitical issue, did not acquire sacredness until the last century. Gandhi, in his opposition to colonial rule, made salt into a sacred value. Flags and cultural totems are new, yet inviolable. How does this happen? One answer is that group allegiance—particularly when a group is threatened—may dictate the adoption of sacred values. In a telling study, Sheikh et al. (2012) conducted a series of studies regarding the relationship between group membership and adoption of sacred values. In two experiments in the United States, researchers found that the more individuals participated in religious rituals or in group religious observance, the more they were likely to say that their preferences were sacred. In a final, third study, Palestinians from 2006–2011 were sampled regarding frequency of religious worship as well as perceived threat to their community. The final variable was whether or not they viewed the sovereignty of East Jerusalem as sacred. Again, researchers found that both religious worship and perceived threats to their community were positively correlated with holding the sovereignty over East Jerusalem as a sacred value.

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The study concludes, “the more people participate in religious ritual the more likely they are to treat preferences as sacred values, and perception of threat to the in-group (e.g., in the context of intergroup conflicts) accentuates the positive relationship between participation in religious ritual and treating disputed values as sacred values” (2012, p.  115). That is, increased signals of group allegiance or threats to group identity increase adopting and clinging to sacred values. Many of us can see this anecdotally in our own lives. In the United States, for example, election of Democrats—who are seen as anti-gun— usually results in the increase of gun sales and a deeper resistance to measures of gun control. Or, in international affairs, we can see the resistance to nuclear containment by countries such as Iran. In a series of experiments conducted by Dehmani and colleagues in 2010, Iranian citizens were asked a series of questions regarding the Iranian nuclear program. They were then given a number of possible scenarios for Iran giving up its program for nuclear energy and weapons, some of which involved increasing material trade-offs. As with the above studies, Dehmani found that, at least for nuclear energy, resistance to relinquishing the ambition of nuclear energy increased with greater material incentives added. Additionally, further threatened sanctions increased resistance. The researchers offer the following summary: “Hypothetical offers of material incentives and sanctions to get Iran to give up its nuclear program appear to backfire in the sense of only increasing support for Iran’s nuclear program among this segment of the population, as among the country’s leadership. Moreover, this part of the population, whose demographic characteristics indicate closeness to the regime, express belief that sanctions have the opposite effect of what the imposing nations intend, with the government and revolutionary guard being least adversely affected.” (2010, p. 545) The point here, I think, is simple: we can adopt beliefs, even of ideas that we know to be new or recent or invented, by virtue of our membership in a group. Iranians knew nothing of nuclear energy, or of its sacredness, forty years ago. And yet, in a short period of time, such values have become deeply held and vehemently guarded. The sole factor which mediated this large-scale adoption of belief is common membership within a group. Many Iranians themselves, as with countless other groups, may know that such values are arbitrary, nonhistorical, and contingent, but they hold them dearly nonetheless. Sacred values show us that such paradoxes may be overcome.

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Sacred values thus give us a way of seeing, in real time, how groups can foster the adoption of new beliefs for prudent reasons. In many instances, adopting such beliefs is not conscious or intentional, but because of perceived threat to a group or the accidents of history. What remains clear, though, is that sacred values, like social norms, allow us to see the power that groups have in creating and maintaining belief in values, ideals, and customs. If modernity asks us to adopt values, often invented or experimental or for prudent reasons, then group membership and collectivity are one of the best means of doing so. Groups have the capacity to engender belief, even in the irrational, and to foster commitment, even costly. * * * As with narrativity, though, there is another side to collectivity, one which modernity is well aware of. Borne of the spasms of religious and nationalistic violence in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, moderns knew full well the costs of collectivity, even if it beheld the power of holding belief. What belies such violence, though, is a tendency that is inherent to groupishness: the fusion of individuals to a group and the subsequent loss of self, figuratively and sometimes literally, to a greater whole. While groups and collectives have the power to align minds with a common objective, they also hold the power of self-sacrifice and identity fusion. There is an abundance of theoretical, anecdotal, and scientific evidence regarding the perils of identity loss to a collective. In philosophy, Heidegger famously invoked the “they” (das man) as a nonidentifiable collective that captivated and stole individual feeling and thought. Similarly, Adorno mourned the loss of the individual to the “culture industry” and its ability to stupefy. Even in popular culture, the fear of zombies is a symbolic recognition of the nameless, brain-eating hordes. Social scientists have examined this phenomenon and dubbed it “identity fusion.” Swann et al. (2012) offer a compelling definition of identity fusion as “when people experience a visceral feeling of oneness with a group. The union with the group is so strong among highly fused persons that the boundaries that ordinarily demarcate the personal and social self become highly permeable” (2012, p. 442). In identity fusion, a person’s goals are the group’s goals, and thus to act is always to act on behalf of the group. This is distinct from identification, which indicates that a person identifies with the group and works on its behalf, but their personal goals

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may not fully mesh with the group’s. If groups help to realize goals, identity fusion represents this power in its most extreme form, with the individual’s goals no longer being separable from those of the group. And, as with other studies which show a link between group membership or synchrony and the willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the group, identity fusion reveals the same pattern. For example, Swann and colleagues found in a study of Spaniards that participants who were “fused” with their country were more willing, in a classic trolley problem, to save fellow countrymen by jumping to their own deaths in front of the trolley. This prospect was even further enhanced when their own death could lead to the death of terrorists (Swann et al. 2012, p. 447). Of course, not all people are highly fused to a group. But, for those that are, they show a greater-than-average desire to sacrifice their own lives for that of the group. In another study with Spaniards, Swann et  al. (2010) showed that fusion with a group (in this case, fellow Spaniards), along with physiological arousal, predicted endorsement of extreme actions on behalf of the group. In a series of studies, participants played dodgeball or ran wind sprints and then completed a questionnaire on their willingness to commit acts on behalf of Spain, some mundane and some self-sacrificial. In all three trials, fusion, along with arousal, predicted a willingness to commit extreme acts on behalf of the group. The arousal condition generally created a willingness to act for all participants, but only fused participants directed that action on behalf of the group. That is, those who are at one with a group and physiologically aroused tend to reflect greater sacrificial behavior for a chosen group. The willingness of individuals who overidentify with groups to commit violent or sacrificial acts on behalf of those same groups is not limited to controlled laboratory studies. In an interesting set of surveys, Harvey Whitehouse et  al. (2017) examined the attitudes of Americans, college fraternity and sorority students, and English Premier League football fans regarding fusion and sacrifice. In all instances, individuals were more likely to donate money or endorse extreme pro-group behaviors if they completely aligned their goals with those of the group. These tendencies were amplified if individuals had undergone loss (especially with football fans), had been hazed, or if they felt the group was under threat. To be fused with a group, it seems, is to run the risk of being both merged with the group and to commit actions—moral, honorable, or otherwise—on behalf of that same group.

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Two more historical examples, both from contemporary events, bear this out in stark terms. In an example which reveals the fractures of twenty-­ first-­century America, Misch et  al. (2018) used the 2016 United States presidential election as a catalyst for their study of identity fusion. Conducting multiple surveys which measured identity fusion and behavior on behalf of a group (an economic game), researchers found extreme identity fusion in individuals before and after the 2016 presidential election, both among Democrats and Republicans. After the election, both winning and losing, euphoria and dysphoria, contributed to greater identity fusion and a willingness to contribute to the group. That is, the group dynamics discussed in this chapter—affiliation, synchrony of feeling, and resulting greater group affinity—all combine to further entrench political partisanship and willingness to sacrifice for one’s group. These dynamics are evident in a final, and perhaps more distant, study of soccer hooligans by Newson et  al. (2018). In a series of surveys to Brazilian superfan groups (torcidas organizadas), researchers measured, again, fusion with the group, willingness to die for one’s team, and whether or not individuals had been involved in violence related to football. Perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone that has watched football in Latin America, super fans were found to be significantly more likely to be fused, to be willing to fight and die for their organization, and be physically violent than other, more common fans. None of those measures correlated for common fans. Finally, for these super fans, violence was significantly directed outward, towards rival fans. Such group behavior, given the nature of collective intentionality and group dynamics, is utterly predictable. To be a part of a group, tribe, or party, is to engage in jointly intentional actions and to feel what they feel. It is, if done repeatedly or synchronously, to feel welded to others within the group and to the norms and values of that group. To feel this way does not come with inherent restraints, though. While groups unlock prosocial behaviors and willingness to sacrifice in altruistic and beautiful ways on behalf of groups, they also open up our willingness to be partisan, sacrificial, and violent. We can see this, perhaps quaintly, in our party politics and in the behavior of soccer fans, but also in the chaotic paroxysms of nationalistic violence and the tribalisms of race-based chauvinism. In groups, we see the best and worst of ourselves. * * *

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Like any cultural movement, modernity faced a series of problems. Emerging slowly out of the waning High Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, and the emerging nationalisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modernity saw the individual, her dignity, and her possible genius as a remedy for the excesses of the preceding centuries. This was not accidental, nor was it without benefit. But, by doing so, moderns limited their ability to realize the new values they promoted. For it is in groups and communities that ideas can be born and adopted. To live in a group is to engage in jointly intentional and communally enforcing behaviors. It is, over time, to adopt the values and norms of the group, even if, as in the case of sacred values, such ideas are adopted in real time and do not have the sanction or mystery of tradition. When we are physically present with another and engaged, sometimes synchronously, our bodies and minds fall in tune with one another. To do so is inevitable. Such harmony, as Durkheim predicted, is the wellspring of group feeling, belonging, and action on behalf of the group. From such commitment springs further adoption and reinforcement of values in a self-reinforcing and virtuous cycle. Such cycles can be vicious, though, as seen in the instance of identity fusion and, more generally, in our own history as a species. And so, as with narrative and its ability to stymie and captivate critical thought, communities, too, bear within them tendencies which militate against the modern spirit of the dignity of individuals over and above groups. It seems, then, that one of the best ways of making-believe, or of creating and fostering beliefs, is through groups. And yet, even more so than narrative, community and its attendant obligations, loss of self, and norms, runs against the very heart of modernity itself. Communities demand duty, obligation, self-sacrifice, and consistency, whereas modernity compels individual effort, genius, and continual growth. Modernity, though, also demands that we realize new values or re-adopt the old, in self-­ experiments and life-wagers. Communities give us the means to realize these values, both old and new. And so arises the second paradox of modernity. We may resolve the first paradox through community (and ritual, as I will offer in the next chapter), but doing so runs headlong into the beating heart of modernity itself. To realize values demands that we relinquish, to some degree, our individuality. To resolve the first paradox we thrust ourselves into another. * * *

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One final word, on creating new ideas. Durkheim’s work, though remarkably restrained in regard to making statements about how things should be, does offer, perhaps at the peak of its theoretical brilliance, a statement on how we realize new values. Writing amidst the fall of gods, rituals, and collective ideals, Durkheim notes, without any emotion, that “former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born” (1995, p. 429). We are, in short, in the interregnum between the old gods and the new. Such is modernity, even if our new gods are in constant need of renewal and upgrades. But, Durkheim warns us, lest we think we can conjure new gods and ideals all on our own, it is only “life itself, and not a dead past, that can produce a living cult” (1995, p. 429). If we wish to imagine and believe and commit to new ideals, they must be made of the stuff of life: communities, feeling, living, and dying. And, for Durkheim, it is clear what will fix and create new beliefs. Not individual fiat or will to power or analytical hypotheses, but groups and communities acting with and through individuals. As he states in his conclusion, “A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of collective effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time” (1995, p. 429). Perhaps to be modern is to defer and forestall this day, even if it holds the promise of the very gods and ideals we demand.

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Dumas, Guillaume, Jacqueline Nadel, Robert Soussignan, Jacques Martinerie, and Line Garnero. 2010. Inter-Brain Synchronization during Social Interaction. PLoS One 5: 8. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press. Fischer, Ronald, Rohan Callander, Paul Reddish, and Joseph Bulbulia. 2013. How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation? An Experimental Field Study Comparing Nine Ritual Types. Human Nature 24: 115–125. Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David Heeger. 2008. Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film. PRO 2 (1): 1–26. Hedges, Christopher. 2003. War Is a Force that Gives us Meaning. New  York: Anchor Books. Hove, Michael, and Jane Risen. 2009. It’s All in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases Affiliation. Social Cognition 27 (6): 949–960. Jackson, Joshua Conrad, Jonathan Jong, David Bilkey, Harvey Whitehouse, Stefanie Zollmann, Craig McNaughton, and Jamin Halberstadt. 2018. Synchrony and Physiological Arousal Increase Cohesion and Cooperation in Large Naturalistic Groups. Nature Scientific Reports 8 (127): 1–8. Kirschner, Sebastian, and Michael Tomasello. 2010. Joint Music Making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-Year-Old Children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31: 354–364. Kleck, Robert, Robert Vaughan, Jeffrey Cartwright-Smith, Katherine Burns Vaughan, Carl Colby, and John Lanzetta. 1976. Effects of Being Observed on Expressive, Subjective, and Physiological Responses to Painful Stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34 (6): 1211–1218. Konvalinka, Ivana, Dimitris Xygalatas, Joseph Bulbulia, Uffe Schjødt, Else-Marie Jegindø, Sebastian Wallot, Guy Van Orden, and Andreas Roepstorff. 2011. Synchronized Arousal Between Performers and Related Spectators in a Fire-­ Walking Ritual. PNAS 40 (20): 8514–8519. Lang, Martin, Daniel Shaw, Paul Reddish, Sebastian Wallot, Panagiotis Mitkidis, and Dimitris Xygalatas. 2016. Lost in the Rhythm: Effects of Rhythm on Subsequent Interpersonal Coordination. Cognitive Science 40: 1797–1815. Lindenberger, Ulman, Shu-Chen Li, Walter Gruber, and Viktor Müller. 2009. Brains Swinging in Concert: Cortical Phase Synchronization While Playing Guitar. BMC Neuroscience 10 (22): 1–12. Misch, Antonia, Grant Fergusson, and Yarrow Dunham. 2018. Temporal Dynamics of Partisan Identity Fusion and Prosociality During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Self and Identity 17 (5): 531–548.

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Newson, Martha, Tiagob Bortolini, Michaela Buhrmester, Silvio Ricardo, Jefferson da Silva, Nicássio Queiroga da Aquino, and Harvey Whitehouse. 2018. Brazil’s Football Warriors: Social Bonding and Inter-Group Violence. Evolution and Human Behavior 39 (6): 675–683. Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nummenmaa, Lauri, Enrico Glerean, Mikko Viinikainen, Iiro Jääskeläinen, Riitta Haria, and Mikko Sams. 2012. Emotions Promote Social Interaction by Synchronizing Brain Activity Across Individuals. PNAS 109 (24): 9599–9604. Sheikh, Hammad, Jeremy Ginges, Alin Coman, and Scott Atran. 2012. Religion, Group Threat and Sacred Values. Judgment and Decision making 7 (2): 110–118. Swann, William, J. Gregory Hixon, Angel Gomez, Carmen Huici, and J. Francisco Morales. 2010. Identity Fusion and Self-Sacrifice: Arousal as a Catalyst of Pro-­ Group Fighting, Dying, and Helping Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99 (5): 824–841. Swann, William, Jolanda Jetten, Angel Gomez, Harvey Whitehouse, and Brock Bastian. 2012. When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion. Psychological Review 119 (3): 441–456. Tarr, Bronwyn, Jacques Launay, and Robin Dunbar. 2016. Silent Disco: Dancing in Synchrony Leads to Elevated Pain Thresholds and Social Closeness. Evolution and Human Behavior 37 (5): 343–349. Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valdesolo, Piercarlo, Jennifer Ouyang, and David DeSteno. 2010. The Rhythm of Joint Action: Synchrony Promotes Cooperative Ability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46: 693–695. Whitehouse, Harvey, Jonathan Jong, Michael D.  Buhrmester, Ángel Gómez, Brock Bastian, Christopher Kavanagh, Martha Newson, Miriam Matthews, Jonathan Lanman, Ryan McKay, and Sergey Gavrilets. 2017. The Evolution of Extreme Cooperation via Shared Dysphoric Experiences. Nature Scientific Reports 7 (44292): 1–10. Wiltermuth, Scott, and Chip Heath. 2009. Synchrony and Cooperation. Psychological Science 20 (1): 1–6. Yun, Kyongsik, Katsumi Watanabe, and Shinsuke Shimojo. 2012. Interpersonal Body and Neural Synchronization as a Marker of Implicit Social Interaction. Nature Scientific Reports 2 (959): 1–8.

CHAPTER 9

Ritual: Creating Belief Through Repetition and Imagination

Sir Francis Galton, sociologist, psychologist, statistician, and cousin of Charles Darwin, decided in the late nineteenth century to pursue an odd experiment. He set out to worship an utterly invented God, “Punch” (named after the “Punch and Judy Show”). In order to make his belief in Punch real, he prayed to him morning and night. He built an altar to him, complete with a picture. Within a few weeks, Galton began to believe in Punch. Of this experience, Galton writes: “I addressed [Punch] with as much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behavior of men toward it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment gradually succeeded. I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains toward his idol, and learnt to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him” (as quoted by Alcock 2018, 423). Indeed, Galton soon turned to Punch in times of distress, praying to him as devout as any worshipper does to a god. * * * Narrative and community have the ability to help us realize those values and ideals which are objects of pretend or make-believe. If we can imagine it, then narrative and community, by binding our imagined ideas to a story or others, can help to make such imagined ideas more than simply idylls of the mind. They can become real, objects of belief and commitment. And, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_9

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at times, belief and commitment that outstrips reason or morality. To realize values comes with a cost. To do so is a power that also resides in ritual. Pascal and Wesley were right: if we want to conjure belief, we need only ritualize the object of belief. Kneeling, praying, chanting, moving, preaching, suffering, and repeating are all ways to belief, allowing us, like Galton, to believe in the often unbelievable. While narrative and community bind us to story and others in order to help realize belief, the route for ritual is more direct: rituals bind us, in unmediated form, to the values, ideals, or gods we wish to believe in. Rituals do so by creating worlds. Not the everyday world that we inhabit. Ritual is not a descriptive enterprise. Rather, rituals work by creating worlds that should be, or that we imagine. They pull off this trick through repetition, symbolism, external gestures, and the incorporation of both narrative and community. Ritual, when done right, gets us to inhabit, like make-believe, a different sphere. When done often, that world, like Secondary Belief, comes to reside alongside, or above, Primary Belief. And, like narrative and community, it creates not only belief but commitment, getting us to give and sacrifice to others in the name of a different world, value, or ideal. But—and this is a large but—rituals do all this through means we do not understand, either as practitioners or outsiders. We do not know why moving this way, or that, makes us feel this way, or that. We do not know why we are to chant Hail Marys or walk twice around Ganesh or bow when praying or eat pasta before the big game. Rituals, perhaps even more than narrative and community, work for reasons we cannot understand. We just know it works. For this reason, modernity has greeted ritual with hesitation. From the de-ritualization of the Protestant Reformation to the purging of magic, to the denial of effects without mechanisms, we mistrust the odd worlds engendered by ritual. And perhaps for good reason: ritual itself can be violent, painful, and disgusting. Like narrative and community, its hold on our mind is neutral: it creates belief, whether or not that belief is tethered to human dignity or empathy. The offspring of ritual is just as likely to be terrorism or sacrifice as it is compassion and altruism. Such is the odd bind of rituals and modernity. We wish to realize beliefs in worlds, values, and objects that are necessary or desirable, but we are skeptical of the best ways we have to do so. This was apparent with community, and shall be again with ritual. Rituals allow us, I will argue, to

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bring ideals to life over time, to do the slow work of making-believe long enough for us to make belief. But to do so is deeply anti-modern, casting us into methods and ways that are mysterious, opaque, and magical. In short, ritual is both what may help bring forth the aspirations of modernity, while itself being anti-modern in its demands for repetition, its relinquishing of the individual, and its embrace of costly sacrifice. The Second Paradox looms. * * * First, a preliminary definition. Ritual: To engage in prescribed bodily actions, either repetitive or at preordained times, that are goal directed and intended to bring forth powerful images or feelings. * * * Rituals, as many social scientists will argue, are one of the most road-tested means by which humans are able to encode beliefs in societies. Through rituals humans have marked births, marriages, and deaths, honored sacrifice, fostered beneficial patterns, prepared for war, reinforced social norms, begged for a different future, or relived the past. Insomuch as modernity is about the adoption of ideals, rituals may provide a cipher into the best means by which we do so. But the diversity of rituals belies, in part, their mystery. What unifies rituals that mark time, that create worlds, that are repetitious, or that simply reinforce values? One unifying feature, as I defined above, is their embodiment: rituals usually consist of bodily actions, usually prescribed. These actions usually occur at specified times in the year, the course of one’s life, or one’s day. And they are generally about achieving some purpose or conjuring an idea. And, as some have argued, most if not all, rituals are process oriented, obsessively concerned with proper performance of the rite (Watson-Jones and Legare 2016). Yet, at this point, there is a potential bifurcation: some of these rituals, as Harvey Whitehouse argues, are repetitive and of low intensity, what he calls “doctrinal” rituals. Others are infrequent, intense, and often dysphoric, so-called imagistic rituals (Whitehouse 2004). Whether doctrinal or imagistic, though, I would like to add an additional qualification to the above definition, especially with regard to the intent of rituals. Rituals are purposeful, embodied, and prescribed actions,

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but they are also subjunctive, that is, as Adam Seligman and others put it, “the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (2008, p. 20). As subjunctive, rituals attempt, through action, to create a world as it should be, or would be, or as if it were real. This potential order can be forward or backward looking, even transcendent. But, as Seligman and colleagues make clear, the order created by ritual is “in self-conscious tension with an unritualized world” (2008, p. 21), that is, the world created by ritual is not this world, but one transformed. Rituals are embodied practices of engaged imagination, allowing for physical actions to spur the imagination towards envisioning values that are not-yet. The reality of ritual, then, is the possible. “What is, is what can be” (Seligman et al. 2008, p. 22). As a result, ritual enacts worlds that do not exist (yet). Whether it be one’s redemption, athletes ritually envisioning victory, or a Buddhist mindfully sweeping a floor, rituals attempt to create the very world they intend. Seligman and others call this the “third space” of ritual, neither true nor false; or, as ritual theorist Ronald Grimes states, ritual is a “liminal zone,” one which lives off the “as-if” (1990, p. 156). In ritual we can play with reality, not as it is or must be, but as it should be. Ritual externalizes and performs imagination writ large. Rituals create worlds that are not-yet. Part of the physicalization of ritual, though, means it is enacted with and through others. Aside from the repetitive rituals that mark one’s day, rituals are often communal and synchronous, with all the attendant power of attachment, belief ideation, and commitment entailed in such action. As such, ritual is a “kind of shared ‘deceit’ or ‘self-deception’” (Seligman et  al. 2008, p.  64; also see p.  25), a “mutual illusion” (Seligman et  al. 2008, p. 23), a communal engagement with the as-if. And such engagement need not be limited to those with whom one physically performs the ritual: rituals join together those present with those imagined, whether they be human or otherwise. As anthropologist Frederique Apffel-Marglin puts it, “[R]ituals are radically creative: they enact the world in concert with its humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans” (2012, p.  15). While communities perform through joint action, encoding social norms and values, rituals create worlds by linking together others in shared action with the aim of constructing and sustaining an ideal space. Aside from embodiment, collectivity, and imagination, part of the instrumentality of ritual lies in its repetition, in the repeated activity of doing and imagining an as-if reality. This repetition could be daily or yearly. For Seligman, repetition is the core of ritual itself: “Getting it right

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is doing it again and again and again – it is an act of world construction” (2008, p. 24; also see Whitehouse and Lanman 2014, p. 679). This repetition is obviously not willy-nilly, either: it is the repetition of prescribed actions. Thus, what is repeated is a performance, a set of external actions that are intended for both the performer and the audience (Rappaport 2012, p. 118). To partake in ritual in any form is to be a part of a performance, where make-believe is extended over time and space. As anyone who has performed knows, part of what a performance conveys—if done well—is an imagined world, or at least one conjured through the act of performing. As Grimes puts it, “Performances, like texts, construct ‘worlds.’ A performance creates a microcosm in gestural and concrete form” (1990, p. 86). Such performances operate, as Grimes notes, by activating social, psychological, and physiological cues (2014, p. 39). Pretense, when performed, is synaesthetic. It is this organization of sensory and emotional data, imagined and repeated, that makes ritual effective in producing intended attitudes and reverence. Like a Hindu temple, rituals work by touching upon all of our senses at once. The sensory dimension of ritual performance is further enhanced by its inclusion of culturally appropriate and specific symbols. Rituals do not simply exist in a physiological or emotional dimension, but they call upon cultural or sacred cues which render them even more rich and effective. As anthropologist Terrence Deacon observes, repetition of such symbols and objects can render elements of the ritual as “automatic and minimally conscious,” making them impactful on both a conscious and unconscious level. This, when coupled with their physical enactment and collectivity, “can help focus attention on other aspects of the objects and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light” (1997, p. 402–3). Part of the transformation occasioned by ritual is the fact that it allows us to see cultural symbols and our everyday world in a new light, or, more appropriately, in light of what should be or could be. In a sense, then, ritual is akin to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art). For Wagner, the total work of art—in his case, opera— combined art, poetry (the libretto), music, motion, collective feeling, and dance, all in the service of rendering a more vivid and persuasive view of reality. Ritual, I would offer, is similar. In combining physical action (either by oneself or seen), relevant cultural symbols and objects, repetition, imagery, and a subjunctive reality, rituals may create the very worlds they imagine for those who participate in them. To do so is to be saturated with

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physical, psychological, sociological, and spiritual cues, all of which point towards a controlled and intended world. And it is control, after all, which rituals seek most. The subjunctive world created by ritual is an orderly one. There would be no need for ritual in a perfect world. But, in a world that is fragmented, where ideals are not yet realized, rituals are necessary. As Seligman and others offer, rituals “set up an ordered world” (2008, p. 34). This is, to be sure, an “order beyond order” (2008, p. 111), but the conceit of rituals lies in the hypothesis that, if an idealized order is ritualized enough it can become true. Rituals not only imagine reality, then, they create it (or pretend to). As Frederique Apffel Marglin states, “Like the performance of a symphonic piece of music, the performance and enactment of these actions, gestures, and utterances is what makes, creates, and achieves the sought-after continuity and regeneration of the world(s)” (2012, p. 164; also see Grimes 2014, p. 152). And this created world, orderly and secure as it is, is a “livable common world” (Apffel-Marglin 2012, p. 162), one in tension with our everyday lives. Seen another way, though, there is a fundamental truth to rituals: they are not real. That is, neither the worlds they create, nor the attitudes they rely on for their performance, are real (yet). Rituals are, as Seligman and others constantly remind us, insincere. One need not “believe” in the gestures and performances of ritual, nor does the world of ritual need to be real (yet). This lack of present-truth is the hallmark of ritual, one which allows it, like art, to “play” with reality and truth, or as Grimes notes, ritual allows “us trial runs and explorations not possible in the ethically framed world” (1990, p.  157; also see Seligman et  al. 2008, p.  112). Ritual, then, occupies the same space as prudential truths or make-believe: it is the not-yet, the possible, the unreality that lies untapped. For many, this is the fundamental “ambiguity” of all ritual (Seligman et  al. 2008, p. 113), it’s occupation of a space neither true nor false. And, for those that perform such rituals, it means a commitment to gestures and meanings that one may not fully understand or believe in. Of course, nothing could be more anathema to modernity than insincerity. Modernity privileges self-disclosure, self-exploration, self-­ knowledge, and authenticity. Ritual, on the other hand, creates belief or acceptance through public acts. As Roy Rappaport states, “People may accept because they believe, but acceptance not only is not itself belief; it doesn’t even imply belief. Ritual performance often possesses perlocutionary force, and the private processes of individuals may often be persuaded

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by their ritual participation to come into conformity with their public acts, but this is not always the case” (2012, p.  120). Ritual performance or participation does not imply prior belief. Indeed, rituals are intended to create belief through their very action. All that is needed for ritual is the doing. As Rappaport rightly concludes, “Acceptance, then, can be unconvinced and ‘insincere,’ but insincerity does not nullify acceptance” (2012, p. 121). Rituals may be, then, one of the best technologies for the adoption of created values. Rituals propose as-if worlds and then employ repetition, community, narrative, symbolism, and performance in order to create such worlds. Rather than requiring sincerity, ritual embraces ambiguity and a temporal attitude with respect to belief. Rituals tacitly understand that belief is created through ritual itself. Again, from Rappaport: “Acceptance in, or through, liturgical performance may reflect an inward state of conviction; it may also encourage ‘the mind,’ ‘the heart,’ and ‘the spirit’ into agreement with itself” (2012, p.  122). Like Pascal’s prayers into the wager or Galton’s tongue-in-cheek self-experiment, rituals slowly unfold belief within us, drawing us in accord with the implied world(s) of ritual performance. Belief takes time; rituals, as futural, are prepared to wait. * * * Lest this be a purely theoretical exercise—some specific rituals as illustration. The first example of ritual as subjunctive, world creating, and performative comes from the Me’en people of Ethiopia, and as retold by Jon Abbink. The Me’en annually perform a ceremony—the Mosit—before the sorghum or maize harvest. The Mosit ceremony is in service to the god Tuma, the sky and rain god, whom the ritual intends to propitiate. According to Abbink, the ritual is given in the subjunctive mode. Here, according to Abbink’s translation, is the opening prayer of the ceremony (the original Me’en words have been elided): Let the crops ripen, let people acquire cattle, let people acquire goats Let girls come, let cattle come, let the milk be a lot, let beer be plenty, Let our country be full, let wild animals get lost,

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let the baboon get lost. May the people acquire cattle, goats, may the cattle low. Let me marry a woman, let goats come, let people buy it, let girls come to the doors [of the hut]. Let the cattle go to the forest, let cattle grow big and trample the earth, let the cattle low. Let the crops ripen, let beer be plentiful, let the women and girls sit down and urinate, Let the crops ripen, let beer be plentiful. Let the crops be ripe, let people marry wives, let there be meat, let there be honey. Let the seeds sprout, let cattle come back here, let the maize ripen, let cattle move to here from the lowland. Let the cattle be blessed and come, what can cause them to disappear? If the cattle are many, where will they go?… Let the wild animals get lost, let the sorghum ripen, let the crops come forth! Let the eyes of the wild animals be hurt and lost, let it reach and hurt the eyes of the hog, let the hog be wiped out. Let disease go, let it be weakened from the roots, and be thrown out. Let the crops be ripe, let people acquire cattle, let the hog go to the forest. (1995, pp. 175–6)

This song/prayer is followed by a blessing of corn and/or sorghum by elders of the community, which is then communally eaten while further blessings in the form of “let them eat…” are repeated. The Mosit ceremony is then concluded with the following, after which there is dancing and feasting: My forefathers, Boroba, Bulch’a, the woman people called Shu’aya Let all the crops be ripe, all! Bow, bow, she will come near. Let the fire-spear kill all that which comes to the crops! (1995, p. 179)

Certain features of the Mosit ceremony are of obvious interest. First, the ceremony is littered with subjunctives like “let,” indicating that this is a future state that could or should happen, if Tuma is so inclined. Secondly, the ceremony is a calling forth of the various elements of the Mosit world—people, cattle, crops, and families. All are collected and brought

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under the creative auspices of ritual here. Finally, the prayers do not stand on their own: they are completed with physical and alimentary actions that bring together and constitute the Me’en community. Like most rituals, there are physical actions and feasting which bring forth the intended world of plenty. The Me’en are not unsophisticated about what such a ceremony accomplishes. As Abbink recognizes, the Me’en “know that ultimate determining factors are things like sufficient rainfall, selection and care for crops, their own hard work in the fields, and their being alert to animal pests throughout the growing period (e.g., by guarding and armed repulsion of pigs, buffaloes, and baboons)” (1995, p.  184). The ritual may create a world, one of plenty and harmony. But ritual performance is no guarantee. To borrow a phrase, a ritual, too, is a wager. Yet, in more functional terms, as Abbink offers, what the ritual accomplishes is to “uphold and assert a norm of group cooperation and of harmony of humans and the wider environment” which is “always precarious” (1995, p. 184). Akin to the recognition of Seligman, Rappaport, and Apffel-Marglin, it is clear that the Mosit does create an order, one that should be. The ritual aims to make this reality come forth, though it does so in full knowledge that it may not be. The Me’en know, perhaps contrary to Western myths otherwise, that such rituals are not automatic or even magical. They may fail. And such failure may be the work of improper ritual or of the gods. Who knows. What the Mosit does guarantee, though, is a common vision of an anticipated and desirable future, one where humans, the earth, sky, and animals are joined together in abundance. A second ritual. Again on harmony and the ideal world. Here, we return to the Navaho, who we saw in the midst of creation in Chap. 1. For the Navaho, harmony and beauty (sa’ah naagai bik’eh hoozhon) are overriding aesthetic and ethical imperatives. Harmony is the state of the world, and it is our job to align ourselves with it. Hence warriors returning from battle must be restored to harmony, or, equally, those who have fallen afoul of themselves or the community. In other cases, though, hoozhon can be anticipatory: one is about to embark on a journey or new phase of life, and harmony can be invoked and hoped for. It is here, usually upon the building of a house, the birth of a child, or a woman’s first menses, that the Blessingway ceremony is performed. The ceremony may last many days and occupy a variety of songs, dances, physical reenactments, and feasts, but, at the heart of the ceremony lies a prayer, much like the Mosit,

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which guides and orients Navaho life. Leland Wyman and Berard Haile here give a concise rendering of the “Prayer of the Eight Words”: Earth’s feet, by means of them I shall go through life! Its legs, by means of them I shall go through life! Its body, by means of it I shall go through life! Its mind, by means of it I shall go through life! Its voice, by means of it I shall go through life! Strands [extending] from the top of its head, by means of them I shall go through life! Blessing extending from the mountains that encircle its surroundings, by means of it I shall go through life! I shall be long life-happiness, before me it will be blessed, behind me it will be blessed, it has become blessed again, it has become blessed again! [[This is followed by a similar identification with sky, Mountain Woman, Water Woman, White Corn, Yellow Corn, Pollen, and Corn beetle]] … I am long life-happiness, [as] I shall go through life! Before me it is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! Behind me it is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! Below me it is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! Above me it is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! Around me it is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! My speech is blessed, [as] I shall go through life! All around me it is blessed [as] I shall go through life! It has become blessed again! It has become blessed again! It has become blessed again! It has become blessed again! (1970, pp. 299–300)

As with the Mosit ceremony, a subjunctive order—harmony—is called upon and made the guiding light of the prayer. Yet, unlike the Mosit, the prayer is seen as efficacious in its own right. Simply repeating the prayer four times (usually with movements in four directions, and, if performed as a prayer, sprinkling corn pollen) effects the harmony that is called upon. Such is the potency and ever-presence of hoozhon, that one need merely to look and see and speak to bring it forth. This is done, as the poem indicates (and as Navaho sandpainting makes visually apparent), by the pray-er identifying herself with various gods, each of which occupies a sacred space in the Navaho world and is symbolized with specific colors, foods, natural phenomena, rocks, and natural features. Moreover, each is usually a dyad, consisting of male/female. The ritual participant identifies herself with each of these, symbolizing their

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immersion in a total world, the harmonious world, the one which she should be a part of. To pray and act and see in this way is to be immersed in a synaesthetic world, rich with potential meanings. Only through such immersion may a person come to identify with hoozhon. A final example. Not of divine or created harmony, but of peace between tribes. The Yanomamo, a group of pastoralists and agriculturalists of Northern Brazil, live in small villages that have attendant gardens. Because of this semi-feudal order, attacks between neighboring villages—often kin and clan based—are somewhat common. Occasionally, though, a village must be moved in order to secure better garden-land. In order to insure peace during this time of transition, the Yanomamo often engage in a ritual, known as a “Feast.” Anthropologist Terence Deacon records what happens during a Feast: First, the hosts who wish to make peace prepare a meal. When their guests are due to arrive, dressed as for war and carrying their weapons, the hosts put their weapons away and the men recline on their hammocks waiting for the guests to enter their village. The guests enter, dancing and chanting, and circle around the camp stopping in front of each host. There they ritually threaten them, raising an ax or drawing a bow and arrow. The hosts must remain unmoved, trying to show no fear and no offense at provocative remarks. After this has been repeated for a while (and latent hostilities have not erupted in violence), the roles are reversed. The guests recline in hammocks, their weapons hidden away, while the hosts circle around the camp dancing and ritually threatening their guests. Finally, when it is clear that nothing untoward is likely to happen, they break off and the guests are offered food. Later they may chant together, barter and exchange goods, or even arrange a marriage. (1997, p. 404)

Here, the Feast ritual enacts, through a series of dances and evocative performances, the very order that must be in place for a village to be safe. Violence is acted out and pacified repeatedly, showing the transition from a state of anarchy to one of order. The ritual, like the Mosit, is closed with the cementing of communal bonds through food, love, and shared norms. Rather than being seen as outside the ceremony, the feasting afterwards is the manifestation of the ceremony itself, its logical outcome. The as-if of ritual has become real. The above rituals evoke three key points. First, they are, like most rituals, subjunctive—they create a world and order that should be. They share this with the Hajj, the Eucharist, or Passover. Rituals can be a statement

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of what should be, even if they are a remembrance of what was. Secondly, the above rituals are synaesthetic and synergistic: they combine intellectual, physical, physiological, and communal elements, along with complex symbols and a gathering of the known worlds. Finally, the worlds envisioned and created by such rituals are seen as tenuous or fragile—they may not happen in the first place, and, even if they do, ritual is required for their renewal. On the communal level, rituals are needed for constant communal engagement; for the individual, there is the tacit recognition that belief, if formed through ritual, must be reinvigorated and maintained. What these examples, show, then, is both the power and precarity of ritual. They can create worlds, but such worlds may not happen, both in the outer world of action and in the inner world of our minds. And, to be sure, rituals understand this duality—they are to effect change in the social and ecological and divine orders, as well as in our hearts and minds. * * * How does this occur, though? What is it that makes such rituals work, if they do? Is it the prayer or the gestures or the food or community? In the next three sections I will offer three ways in which ritual works to secure the very worlds they envision, through repeated gesture, community, and the structure of rituals themselves. I will offer that rituals do create the worlds they propose, along with belief and commitment, but that such gains come at the cost of critical reason itself. To engage in ritual is to allow belief to take hold over time. But belief purchased in this way often requires the sacrifice of reason and individuality. The above rituals may work, but, if they do, it may be through a host of factors, many of which may be symbolic or cultural. We can gain some insight into the power of the physical dimension of ritual, on its own, without the cultural or alimentary elements, in more modern contexts. In power posing, laughter yoga, and emotional role playing, we see that, isolated, the performative and physical dimensions of ritual can bring about changes in mood, thought, and feeling. Power posing is the adoption of a “powerful” physical posture that displays, both to oneself and others, feelings of control and authority. A group of Australian researchers (Carney et al. 2010) sought to examine the relationship between physical posture and feelings of power, as well as biochemical traces of empowerment, like testosterone (and feelings of stress, registered in cortisol levels). A group of participants held a “high”

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or “low” power pose for one minute each and were then asked to play a high-risk dice game after the study. As one might predict, high power poses caused an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol, whereas low power poses did the opposite. Moreover, high power posers were more likely to play a high-risk dice game after the manipulation. Even a simple and short exercise, like power posing, had a noticeable effect on the physical and mental states of participants, making them feel more in control and willing to take risks. That is, simple physiological changes precipitated behavioral and cognitive changes, too. We see this same effect in people who participate in “laughter yoga,” where participants learn to laugh at their own command, breathe properly, and perform a variety of laughs, such as the “lion laugh” or the “eating breakfast laugh” (Weinberg et al. 2013). In a study of laughter yoga participants, a group of researchers had yoga students complete surveys on well-being, general life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, and stress both before and after a laughter yoga session. Researchers found that laughter yoga was shown to have a significant positive effect on life satisfaction, well-being, mood, anxiety, and stress. Tellingly, it did not have an effect on depression, which is a more chronic and long-standing condition, unamenable to simply one session of laughter yoga. Again, as with power posing, we see a strong relationship between physical movements and gestures and change in affect and feeling. The relationship between physical performance and feeling is perhaps best seen, though, in emotional role-playing, an exercise akin to method acting, whereby a person adopts the postures, affect, and feelings of another individual or a given cue. More than power posing and laughter yoga, then, role playing entails not just physical gestures but theory of mind and the adoption of an alternate perspective. This is particularly evident in a series of studies from the 1970s on smoking cessation. Investigators asked study participants to record their smoking behavior both before and after an emotional role-playing exercise where they mimicked the behavior of someone suffering from lung cancer (Mann and Janis 1968). Researchers found that participants who engaged in emotional role-playing had smoked significantly less, after eight and eighteen months, than those who simply observed the role playing as audience members and an untreated control group, even after they had all been exposed to a Surgeon General’s report on the effects of smoking. As with studies of narrative, a simple recitation of facts had little to no effect on behavior, but, in this case, acting “as if” one was dying of lung cancer had

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a significant effect on how much—if any—one smoked. In follow-up studies, those who scored highest on an “Empathic Fantasy scale” were also the ones most likely to reduce their smoking after a role-playing exercise (Elms 1966). We find similar results for people who manipulate their facial expressions, either upon receiving a negative stimulus (once again, electroshocks!) or in response to cues to make certain faces, whether they be sad, happy, angry, fearful, or surprised (Duclos and Laird 2001; Flack et  al. 1999; Levenson et al. 1990; Lanzetta et al. 1976). In all, simply imagining a proper expression and manipulating one’s face lead to those same feelings. To mimic anger was to become angry; to mimic sadness was to become sad; to mimic stoic resignation in the face of pain was to feel less pain. Perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who has acted, simply the performance of a feeling often rendered that same feeling. Though just a few examples, we can see how physiological changes, even absent sincerity or cognitive cues, can have a tremendous effect on how one feels. This is, in a sense, a physical placebo effect: the mere act of doing can facilitate changes in feeling. If such doing is limited to physical movement or gesture, it has the capacity to change feelings, but must be repeated to be more lasting. If physical movement is coupled with empathy or relevant cognitive states, however, such changes can be more enduring. Insomuch as rituals, both doctrinal and imagistic, require the manipulation of the body and its affects, then one would expect for simply the physical dimension of rituals themselves to have demonstrable effects on how people feel, both within the ritual and afterward. By taking physical cues, in prayer, movement, or prostration, rituals open up avenues to new feeling and the adoption of subjunctive mental attitudes. As the above studies show, such feelings need not be consciously adopted or even intentional. Rituals, with their prescribed behaviors, get us to feel, and even possibly believe, by causing us to simulate feeling and belief through gesture and performance. * * * In addition to the physical and repetitive components of ritual, I offer a second reason for the efficacy of rituals: their ability to engage and deepen bonds with a community. As we saw in the previous chapter, to be engaged in common, synchronous activity both increases the bonds one feels with

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others and with a given set of values or ideals. To work together, in common, is to align selves and ideals. Insomuch as rituals are also communal (for the most part) and rely, at least in part, on common action (sometimes synchronous), one would expect for rituals to bear out the same pattern of prosocial commitment and, occasionally, sacrificial behavior. Anthropologists like Roy Rappaport largely agree. For him, the synchrony and rhythmicity of ritual often induces Durkheimian communitas (2012, p. 227). Indeed, as he offers, ritual has the power to bind others to one another, both in mind and spirit: To perform a liturgical order is to effect a union with others, and the ritual acts that make the reasons of the heart one with the reasons of reason may also join radically separate individuals to their fellows in unions that may seem to approach in intimacy those of the cells or organs of simple organisms. (2012, p. 384)

Of course, what is at issue here are the “reasons of reason,” the beliefs we carry with us by virtue of our shared participation with others. Ritual helps achieve this alignment of souls largely through common action, intentionality, and, in some rituals, repetition. This “union” of selves can join together the disparate or the close at hand. There is empirical support for this idea, too. Ara Norenzayan, for example, in his Big Gods, discusses a study by David Clingingsmith where he found that “hajj participation led to more tolerance toward Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It increased endorsement of equality, harmony, and peace among different ethnic and religious groups. Participation also encouraged more favorable attitudes toward women and their right to education and jobs” (2013, p.  165). Norenzayan, perhaps following Clingingsmith, avers that this might be due to the reduction in more parochial moralities and an increase in more “global” Islamic practices that transcend ethnic and political boundaries within the Hajj itself. One feels united with all of God’s children within the Hajj, and the pilgrimage itself instills and instantiates these values. This can be observed in other rituals which promote bonding to others, such as the Eucharist; Buddhist rituals freeing living beings from suffering; or collective acts of mourning in civil societies. As Norenzayan concludes, “In this way, shared rituals can contribute to more tolerance and possibly could also be a tool for conflict resolution” (2013, p. 166).

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Ritual can promote such prosocial behavior largely because it, like synchronous activity, plays on our innate dispositions to learn through repetition and to align with others in jointly intentional activity. Studies with children and repetitive action bear this out. Liberman et al. (2018), in a sprawling series of studies, found that children expect those who share in ritualistic actions to be a part of the same social sphere, or even friends. That is, children expect affiliation between people who perform “causally irrelevant actions” (2018, p. 49) (like one does in a ritual), especially those which are viewed as intentional. This was found in both toddlers and infants. As the study concludes, “Overall, infants evidence an early developing understanding of the social significance of engaging in shared versus dissimilar ritualistic actions: they infer patterns of third-party social relationships based on whether people complete the same rituals” (2018, p. 49). Rituals, then, create at least the expectation of affiliation on a very basic level. These effects extend further, into adulthood. Whitehouse and Lanman, in a rather synoptic investigation of both doctrinal and imagistic rituals across a variety of cultures, found that rituals generate identification with collectives greater than control groups (2014, p. 680). Routine, repetitive rituals, those which are dubbed “doctrinal,” generate identification through “familiar and automatic habits” which diminish reflection and criticism (Whitehouse and Lanman 2014, p. 680). Occasional, sometimes painful or dysphoric rituals, those which are dubbed “imagistic,” on the other hand, create affiliation and commitment through powerful and sometimes overwhelming images for both the participant and for viewers. These displays, whether they be found in the self-laceration of adult men in the Sun Dance, hugging blocks of ice in Shintoism, or penitentes on the road to salvation, create salient and potent markers for the power of belief and for one’s commitment to a set of ideals and a community. As Whitehouse and Lanman offer, both forms of ritual (but especially those which are imagistic) produce “psychological kinship,” feelings of identity fusion, and “the cohesion necessary for societies to be successful in different resource ecologies” (2014, p. 681). For many, the more social, outward dimension of rituals, that which “displays” costly and often “irrational” behavior, is part of the cohesive genius of ritual itself. As Richard Sosis has argued in a variety of studies, rituals can send a “costly signal” to others that one is with the tribe, committed to its members and ideals. Such signals can be as mundane as giving up smoking or sex, or as extreme as terrorism and self-sacrifice (Sosis

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2004; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; also see Watson-Jones and Legare 2016). Such signals can be affiliative because they are hard to fake, counterintuitive, and, in the case of dysphoria, quite painful. Why else would one do such things, if they were not committed? Sosis bears out this thesis empirically, showing that communes with costly requirements endure longer than ones with minimal requirements; and experimentally, demonstrating that Israeli kibbutzniks (which have a number of costly requirements and rituals) give at far greater rates in public goods games than even fervently religious Israeli citizens (Sosis 2004; Sosis and Alcorta 2003). Rituals, even more so than community itself, create powerful feelings of identification and fusion, largely because they can more efficiently engender trust, group feeling, and group commitment. This is observable, I would offer, by the greater sense of affiliation generated in annual rituals of belonging, rites of passage, or daily, low-­intensity forms of repetitive behavior, all of which create belonging and commitment to a group. One need only think of the ritualistic edifices of religious societies, modern raves, fraternities and sororities, or even the training of athletes and soldiers. Experimentally, Dimitris Xygalatas and colleagues have found similar patterns in subjects who participate in a Hindu ceremony, Thaipusam, in Mauritius. Some participants of Thaipusam are exposed to “body piercing with multiple needles and skewers, carrying heavy bamboo structures, and dragging carts attached by hooks to the skin for over 4 hours before climbing a mountain barefooted to reach the temple of Murugan,” while others perform more “low intensity” movements (2013, p. 1604). As might be expected, those who engaged in such intense ritualistic action were more likely to be charitable to others (even non-Hindus) than the low-intensity participants, as shown in a public goods game. Indeed, the more pain felt by the participants, the more they gave (Xygalatas et al. 2013). Such a simple test reinforces the findings of Whitehouse, Sosis, and others: to engage in ritual behavior, whether it be repetitive or intense and dysphoric, creates a greater sense of belonging. And, with that belonging comes a willingness to give to others. It may be that, by engaging in ritual behavior, we transcend ourselves and merge, selflessly, with a whole. Whether it be in simple, repetitive behaviors or more powerful and imagistic practices, rituals are capable of creating feelings of belonging and commitment. This may be seen as part of their efficacy, alongside prescribed physical action, in helping us realize their envisioned worlds and aspirations. As seen in the previous chapter, we are more likely to adopt

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values and attitudes if we are bonded to others in doing so. Rituals, with their repetitive, prescribed, and occasionally salient behaviors, represent an ideal technology for generating community, and, if done enough, belief. Rituals can promote prosocial norms, instill trust in others, and fuse the individual to the whole, allowing her to be bonded with confederates both near and far. Yet such a power comes at a cost. To merge with a group is to lose oneself, especially in the instance of dysphoric rituals, which rearrange memory and experience and overwhelm our capacities to reckon. In rituals we may transcend both our banal lives and ourselves, sometimes in dramatic fashion. To do so is to potentially adopt the values and aspirations of trusted friends and ritual others. But to do so is also to lose oneself in an imagined world, in repetitive action, and in collective euphoria. * * * One final reason regarding the efficacy of ritual and its peculiar force in creating meaning and belief in our minds. While routine, physical action, along with community, form identifiable nodes in the ritual edifice, part of the power of ritual lies in its unidentifiability. That is, there are elements in ritual that simply do not make sense. Aside from words spoken, prayers uttered, or interpretations offered, there are other elements in rituals— particularly those which are dysphoric or euphoric—which do not allow for cognition: they are simply overwhelming. While we can identify collectivity and physical action as a factor in ritual efficacy, rituals also work for reasons we cannot specify. This idea is perhaps most forcefully articulated by Uffe Schjoedt and colleagues, who propose a “cognitive resource depletion” model for how rituals work (2013, p. 40). In short: rituals overwhelm our brains. This occurs through a confluence of overwhelming imagery, movement, dance, song, symbology, metaphysics, cosmology, and mystery. Rituals can be arousing; ritual specialists or religious authorities can be charismatic; and repetitive action may “turn off” critical thinking. Or, in the case of many rituals, we simply do not know why we do what we do within the ritual itself. Rituals are, as anthropologists often aver, “causally opaque”: they include actions which have little or nothing to do with the idea or order being achieved. As Jesper Sørensen offers, for example, “[t]here is no inherent, domain-specific relation between eating sanctified bread and receiving grace…” (2005, p.  174). Likewise, the shedding of blood in

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many sacrificial rituals has little to do with appeasement, at least directly. This means that most rituals are causally opaque or underspecified: we cannot determine, from the ritual itself, why one action leads to an imagined outcome. To divine the meaning of such rituals, if any, is the work of religious or ritual specialists. For Schjoedt and others, this means that rituals are always hard to understand. And this isn’t a glitch—it’s a feature. Rituals perform a variety of actions, many of which do not have inherent meanings. By doing so, they rob us of our interpretive capacity and dim critical cognition. Rituals work, they offer, precisely because they cannot specify how they work. A consequence of this is that such an overflow of meaning and an underflow of understanding allows for collective and individual memory to be assigned by the group. As Schjoedt and colleagues state, “If, for example, the cognitive resources involved in updating participants’ perception of a situation are depleted in religious rituals, then individuals’ attempts to understand the event and construct episodic memories that make narrative sense of the experience may consequently suffer. As a result, prior expectations and post-ritual interpretations may become more important for participants’ understanding of the ritual than their actual perceptions of the ritual context” (2013, p. 42). Indeed, as they argue, lacking an interpretation of a ritual event “enhances participants’ susceptibility to suggested memories and narratives” (2013, p. 42), allowing for narrative and interpretive authority to reside in the hands of the community or ritual specialists. Rituals leave people wanting a definition or interpretation, and this opening is the place in which communities can install values and norms within individuals. To do so, individuals and communities may call upon collective memory, cognitive biases, and social attributions to foster proper meaning within ritual participants and the audience (Schjoedt et al. 2013, p. 50). Part of the genius of ritual, then, lies in the fact that we don’t know what’s going on. Many rituals explain this lacuna by reference to tradition, history, or revelation. Another way of seeing this, though, is as “magical agency”: rituals work by mechanisms we cannot understand, and it does so irrespective of who performs the ritual (Sørensen 2005, p. 175). This is why, for instance, rituals are obsessed with certain prescribed actions: to perform such actions in such-and-such a way is to produce the intended effect, irrespective of our knowledge of how such processes actually work. As Sørensen again offers, “By virtue of their very form, ritual actions provoke a search for magical agency as the necessary source of force enabling

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ritual efficacy, and all ritual elements, persons, actions, and objects are potentially ascribed this property” (2005, p. 176). In the midst of epistemic or causal indeterminacy, we can only resort to “knowing” by ascribing the force of ritual to magic. Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard provide a particularly salient example of magical thinking in ritual and its features. In the Turkana (an African nomadic people) ariwo ceremony, ritual participants are asked to walk through the carcass of a sacrificed and splayed ox after circumambulating it twice. As Boyer and Lienard discuss, though, Turkana participants do not know how walking through a dead ox produces its intended effect, which, in this case, is healing (Lienard and Boyer 2006, p. 820), or why it must be done in the fashion prescribed by ritual specialists. Nonetheless, the ritual, like all rituals, is studiously guarded for potential failures and is repeated throughout the year. One can find similar examples in other religious contexts where the actions taken do not literally make sense in light of their intended goals. Boyer and Lienard, like Schjoedt and colleagues, offer a number of explanations for rigid adherence to causally opaque rituals. Such behaviors may be the result of an obsessive-compulsive cultural mindset (Boyer and Lienard 2006, p. 606), a fear of the unknown, or a need to establish subjunctive boundaries between sacred and profane (Lienard and Boyer 2006). Most notably, though, they arrive at roughly the same conclusion as Schjoedt and others: “In our view, these facts legitimate the conjecture that complicated prescriptions may constitute a spontaneous and moderately efficient form of thought suppression, with some similarities to the suppression processes studied experimentally by psychologists” (Lienard and Boyer 2006, p. 821; also see Boyer and Lienard 2006, p. 606). If the above theories are correct, then part of the efficacy of ritual lies in the magical production of known affects from prescribed actions. Think again of Pascal’s prayer: we don’t know how prayer produces faith. It just does. The same may be said of Galton’s Punch, Wesley’s preaching, or any variety of anecdotal stories which relay stories of newfound belief after ritual action. This may be the result of cognitive overload or causal opacity: ritual action is either underdetermined or overwhelming. Either way, we have little ability to render sensible interpretations of why we do what we do within a ritual. And that may be the point. Rituals may work by keeping us in the dark, both at the level of consciousness and at the level of sense-processing. In the absence of any meaningful interpretation, we are inclined to adopt

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views of the community or authority. We go along. Or we are drawn to beliefs for extrinsic reasons: the smell of candles, the feeling of euphoria in dance, the collective joy of a ritual done well. What we know, though, is that rituals can work. And part of their ability to do work in the world is related to the somehow magical conjunction of known actions with known affects, with mysterious mediation in between. * * * In similar terms to narrative and community, ritual presents the modern mind with a deep and unwavering ambivalence. On the one hand, ritual can enact imagined worlds and generate authentic feeling. Ritual can, if done right, create the belief demanded by modernity for its new fictions, whether they be of eternal returns, feminist gods, or societies that become works of art. Ritual allows us to extend imagination over time, enacting such realities in bodies long enough for them to take hold in our minds. Yet ritual does so at the cost of critical thinking, analysis, and the modern resistance to magic. To give in to ritual is to potentially submit oneself to cognitive distortions, group think, and evidence filtering. Because ritual is often causally opaque, it defers understanding to charismatic authority, leaving us open to authority figures, hucksters, and charlatans. (Hence the modern fascination with cults.) This routinization and its accompanying lack of interpretation is, to be sure, one of the few ways in modernity to generate new beliefs and attach them to lasting commitment. This is evident in the plethora of new religious movements which evolve under the centrifugal force of modernity. As Jesper Sørensen once again offers, “The ascription of personalized charismatic authority enables the replacement of existing constitutive rules with new rules legitimized by the leader’s direct relation to superempirical agencies. Rituals are the primary means to produce this superempirical connection, and at the same time rituals are among the first structures to crystallize as new constitutive rules are constructed” (Sørensen 2005, p. 171; also see Carlton-Ford 1992, p. 366). Rituals give us the ability to realize new ideals and values, but they do so by potentially allowing for the erection of charismatic authority and its attendant loss of self. There are more direct effects of ritual, too. In addition to the reliance on magic and the deferral to charismatic authority, there are rituals which are themselves violent, and it is their violent enactment which manifests the values, ideals, and beliefs desired by the ritual apparatus. Societies,

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both pre-modern and modern, are a register of violent ritual, from the sacrifice of Chinese warriors and peasants as funerary offerings in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, to ritualized violence in Ancient Greek polei, to the ritualized spasms of fascistic violence in the twentieth century. In each, we see that ritual is both a catalyst and vehicle for violent and occasionally sadistic behavior. There is no more potent example of ritual violence than the meso-­ American Aztecs, whose record of human sacrifice reached its nadir in the fifteenth century. Thousands of slaves, warriors from outlying regions, and humans dressed as impersonators of the gods (ixiptla) were sacrificed in highly stylized and controlled rituals within the capital city of Tenochtitlan (see Carrasco 2000 for an extensive examination of such rituals). One such ritual, examined by Caroline Dodds (2007), portrays the ritual sacrifice of a female ixiptla, who impersonates a goddess for a year (often taking her own coterie of male lovers), circumnavigates the Aztec world, and is then ritually killed and beheaded. Like many other ixiptla, the dead woman’s body is then skinned and her skin is donned by priests, who impersonate her during feasts. This set of actions appears to be a reenactment of the slaying of the goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother, Huitzilopochtli, the patron god of the Aztecs. Thus, the beheading of a woman is seen as the founding myth of the Aztecan people, and the death of a female as the symbolic renewal of the Aztec world and empire. Such a ritual, of course, has its own internal logic—one of renewal, domination of outlying provinces, and the founding of an empire—but it also belies a ghastly and sadistic destruction of human life. We need not look so far, though, either in space or time, to see the violent potential of ritual. As recent history suggests, nationalisms and their discontents can also breed ritual violence. Whitehouse and McQuinn (2013), for instance, discuss rebel groups and their different attendant modes of ritual cohesion. Some rebel groups, such as the RUF in Sierra Leone, conduct ritual murders. Others, like the AUC of Columbia, have recent recruits “murder the best friend you have.” Other, more doctrinal groups like FARC or Hezbollah, have highly regimented daily schedules focused on both physical exercise and learning. Both forms of ritual create group cohesion and persistence over time. We see this as well in the behavior of Palestinian suicide bombers, detailed by Mohammed Hafez. Among the many religious factors that Hafez lists as motivation for Palestinian suicide bombings (chiefly social and political grievances), Hafez includes ritual. He details a culture which

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honors heroic sacrifice, particularly through the cult of martyrdom that surrounds suicides bombers. He gives the following examples: Ritual and ceremony permeate all aspects of preparing “living martyrs” (suicide bombers in waiting) and burying dead ones. The videotape to record the last will and testament of the bombers and solidify their commitment to martyrdom; the white shrouds that cover the bombers from head to toe to simultaneously symbolize their purity and preparedness for the grave; the headband and banners emblazoned with Quranic verses to decorate the living martyrs’ quarters before they declare their intention to go on a mission; the guns and bombs that serve as props for their last photos, to symbolize empowered individuals making a free choice to self-sacrifice for the cause; the mass procession to commemorate the death of the martyr, often featuring other militants dressed as martyrs in waiting and strapped with fake explosive belts; the chants of marchers and loud speakers during burial processions: “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you o’martyr” (bil rouh, bil damm, nafdika ya shahid); the melodramatic music to celebrate the heroism and sacrifice of the martyrs; the mourning ceremony where the women ululate and distribute candy or sweet coffee to celebrate the martyr’s entry into heaven, and where men receive congratulatory handshakes because their sons or daughters have achieved eternal salvation; the posters on a wall, and electronic links on a web site to immortalize the bombers—all these actions are undertaken repeatedly, routinely, and with procedural rigor. (Hafez 2006, p. 67)

As Hafez later explains, such rituals do precisely the work we have been discussing—creating greater bonds between individuals, a willingness to sacrifice for one’s community, and a simple narrative that portrays the world as amenable to the spirit of heroes and martyrs (Hafez 2006, p. 68). As Atran (2010) has described in interviews with other terrorists, this ritualization is neither rare nor extreme. Violent groups often use ritual, perhaps unknowingly, as a means to create greater group cohesion and foment radical violence. This may be due, as Sosis and Alcorta proffer, to the fact that such rituals signal costly commitment, but it may also be due to the fact that rituals, whether they be prayers, meals, or other repetitive behaviors, prime individuals to believe what others believe, often resulting in cycles of increasing group commitment and a willingness to suspend one’s individual judgment. Tamil warriors and separatists in Sri Lanka, for example, employ tantric principles in preparation for war, mimicking marriage practices with a turmeric-stained string around their neck which

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holds a cyanide capsule, emulating a similar necklace worn upon marriage. Dead Tamil warriors are also referred to as sacred, and their bodies as “planted” (Roberts 2016). For some, the path to violence goes through the sacred. There are other examples of ritual and violence, to be sure. Yet such examples suffice to show what moderns knew all too well: ritual, in its power to create and sustain belief and commitment, is a power best taken in small doses, if at all. Riding on the waves of religious and nationalistic violence, modernity sought to constrain tragedy by elevating the individual, dispersing common narrative, and dispensing with ritual and repetitive behavior. And yet ritual endures, in both the subterranean pockets of resistance fighters and terrorists, as well as in the collective feeling of political rallies, sports events, and stock market speculation. We are drawn to such behavior, and, as good moderns, stunned by its indelicacy and vacuity. The persistence of ritual, though, belies its power. When humans are called upon to transcend themselves or engage in collective sacrifice, ritual is inevitably in its wake. Try as it might, modernity cannot vanquish rites. This is perhaps because, for all our ingenuity, ritual remains the best technology we have for creating and sustaining commitment. As we have seen, this potency is deeply neutral. In it lies healing and redemption. But it is also the road to altruistic sacrifice that outstrips our humanity and revulsion to violence. To submit to ritual is to accept this wager. Modernity, perhaps in silent opposition to Pascal, has attempted to consciously reject such a gamble. * * * Ritual has the ingenious capacity to generate belief, which engenders further commitment, which creates further belief (see, for a nice example, the work of Singh (In Press)). Yet our inquiry raises an additional consideration: can rituals be created for new values to be realized? Can rituals be invented wholecloth, without failing? Can we invent a ritual to realize the eternal return or society as a work of art, to “lock in” belief? This would be the logic of our invented values, after all: a self-experiment demands that we tinker with new narratives, new communities, and new rituals. No longer constrained by the whims and prescriptions of old rituals, we are free to invent our own, for new ideals and new horizons. What could be more modern, more free and intentional and constructive, than the growth of new rites for new values to be realized?

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Unfortunately, and perhaps as an indication of the demanding paradox(es) of modernity, there is little evidence that invented rituals work. One reason, given by anthropologist Roy Rappaport, is that such rites often seem hokey, cheesy, or fake: “Conscious attempts are sometimes made to cut new rituals from whole cloth, but they are likely to strike those witnessing them to be forced or even false” (2012, p.  32). Rituals, like good literature, operate by stifling the inner impulse, honed even more by the modern spirit, to meta-reflect, analyze, and criticize. Road-tested rituals “know” how to silence this voice. Invented rituals, because they lack time, tradition, gravitas, or simply the power of being rolled around in minds for thousands of years, lack this power. They seem to be what they, in effect, are: forced. There is another reason invented rites often fail, perhaps equally pernicious. Because our lives are often more disconnected, lacking a unifying narrative, rites can no longer serve the same functions they used to. Rites, in former times, marked seasons and moments of the day, or allowed for belief and harmony to be cultivated at critical moments. Now, as Ronald Grimes admits, “Because they are limited in number and restricted to specific days on the calendar, people trust them not to bleed shamelessly into everyday life, but this seemliness is part of their weakness.” Rites only work if made part of one’s life, either as a significant marker of life (as in the case of dysphoric ritual) or as the connective tissue of daily existence. As Grimes adds, “Such rites thrive only if integrated into the rounds… [R]itual should shape the reality outside its boundaries, permeating it so that living itself is suffused with ritual values” (2014, pp. 242–3). Indeed, to try to invent new rites not grounded in the everyday is a “serious mistake,” largely because such rites lack a foundation, practically, communally, and narratively. They simply aren’t the stuff of our lives anymore. Rituals, when done in all of the instances cited in this chapter, “work” because they are part of a lifeway: they are integrated into the fabric of communal consciousness. Rituals, for us moderns, no longer function in this way. Hence, the difficulty in erecting new rites. If they do at all, they may be ingested and consumed as part of a tourist experience or a dalliance with the strange and pre-modern. This is both symptom and effect. It indicates our individuality, our resistance to repetition and alliance with growth, our aversion to all parts of our lives being linked to one collective story, dharma, or essence. As consumers and individuals, though, we lack the ability to ratchet up collectivity and belief. The ritual cycle is thrown into reverse.

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And so we run headlong into the second paradox: rituals are our best way of creating belief, but the very spirit of our times resists them. Having cast away old rituals and anchoring ways of believing and doing, we now find ourselves in need of inventing or reinventing rites, which we cannot do. To be modern is to be trapped betwixt the need for ritual and its rejection. If we want what we do not yet have, we need ritual. But we no longer want what we had. This gap is the source of modernity’s disappointment and potential.

literAture cited Abbink, Jon. 1995. Ritual and Environment: The “Mosit” Ceremony of the Ethiopian Me’en People. Journal of Religion in Africa 25: 163–190. Alcock, James. 2018. Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Apffel-Marglin, Frederique. 2012. Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Atran, Scott. 2010. Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists. New York: Ecco Press. Boyer, Pascal, and Pierre Lienard. 2006. Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29: 595–613. Carlton-Ford, Steven. 1992. Charisma, Ritual, Collective Effervescence, and Self-­ Esteem. The Sociological Quarterly 33 (3): 365–387. Carney, Dana, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap. 2010. Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance. Psychological Science 21: 1363–1368. Carrasco, David. 2000. City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. Deacon, Terence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Dodds, Caroline. 2007. Female Dismemberment and Decapitation: Gendered Understandings of Power in Aztec Ritual. In Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, ed. Stuart Carroll, 47–63. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Duclos, Sandra, and James Laird. 2001. The Deliberate Control of Emotional Experience Through Control of Expressions. Cognition and Emotion 15 (1): 27–56. Elms, Alan. 1966. Influence of Fantasy Ability on Attitude Change Through Role-­ Playing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4 (1): 36–43.

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Fischer, Ronald, Rohan Callander, Paul Reddish, and Joseph Bulbulia. 2013. How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation? An Experimental Field Study Comparing Nine Ritual Types. Human Nature 24: 115–125. Flack, William, James Laird, and Lorraine Cavallaro. 1999. Separate and Combined Effects of Facial Expressions and Bodily Postures on Emotional Feelings. European Journal of Social Psychology 29: 203–217. Grimes, Ronald. 1990. Ritual Criticism: Case Studies on Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2014. Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life. 2nd ed. Waterloo: Ritual Studies International. Hafez, Mohammed. 2006. Dying to Be Martyrs: The Symbolic Dimension of Suicide Terrorism. In The Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism The Globalization of Martyrdom, ed. Ami Pedahzur, 54–80. London: Routledge. Lanzetta, John, Jeffrey Cartwright-Smith, and Robert Kleck. 1976. Effects of Nonverbal Dissimulation on Emotional Experience and Autonomic Arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 33 (3): 354–370. Levenson, Robert, Paul Ekman, and Wallace Friesen. 1990. Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity. Psychophysiology 27 (4): 363–384. Liberman, Zoe, Katherine Kinzler, and Amanda Woodward. 2018. The Early Social Significance of Shared Ritual Actions. Cognition 171: 42–51. Lienard, Pierre, and Pascal Boyer. 2006. Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior. American Anthropologist 108 (4): 814–827. Mann, Leon, and Irving Janis. 1968. A Follow-Up Study on the Long-Term Effects of Emotional Role-Playing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8 (4): 339–342. Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rappaport, Roy. 2012. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Michael. 2016. Tamil Tiger Ritual, War, and Mystical Empowerment. In War Magic: Religion, Sorcery, and Performance, ed. D.S.  Farrer, 88–106. New York: Bergahn Books. Schjoedt, Uffe, Jesper Sørensen, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Dimitris Xygalatas, Panagiotis Mitkidis, and Joseph Bulbulia. 2013. Cognitive Resource Depletion in Religious Interactions. Religion, Brain, and Behavior 3 (1): 39–54. Seligman, Adam, Robert Well, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singh, Manvir, Ted Kaptchuk, and Joseph Henrich. In Press. Small Gods, Rituals, and Cooperation: The Mentawai Crocodile Spirit Sikaoinan.

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Sørensen, Jesper. 2005. Charisma, Tradition, and Ritual: A Cognitive Approach to Magical Agency. In Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and Robert McCauley, 167–186. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Sosis, Richard. 2004. The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual. The American Scientist 92: 166–172. Sosis, Richard, and Candace Alcorta. 2003. Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology 12: 264–274. Watson-Jones, Rachel, and Christine Legare. 2016. The Social Functions of Group Rituals. Current Directions in Psychological Science 25 (1): 42–46. Weinberg, Melissa, Thomas Hammond, and Robert Cummins. 2013. The Impact of Laughter Yoga on Subjective Wellbeing: A Pilot Study. European Journal of Humour Research 1 (4): 25–34. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, Cognitive Science of Religion Series. New York: AltaMira. Whitehouse, Harvey, and Jonathan Lanman. 2014. The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification. Current Anthropology 55 (6): 674–695. Whitehouse, Harvey, and Brian McQuinn. 2013. Ritual and Violence: Divergent Modes of Religiosity and Armed Struggle. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson, 597–618. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wyman, Leland, and Berard Haile. 1970. Blessingway. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Xygalatas, Dimitris, Panagiotis Mitkidis, Ronald Fischer, Paul Reddish, Joshua Skewes, Armin Geertz, Andreas Roepstorff, and Joseph Bulbulia. 2013. Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality. Psychological Science 24 (8): 1602–1605.

CHAPTER 10

The Subject: The Modern Individual Reconsidered

One of the more paradigmatic images of modernity is Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer 1818), which shows a hiker, back to the viewer, standing astride a craggy precipice as he looks upon the imagined expanse of the Bavarian Alps, shrouded in fog. He is alone, as Friedrich’s subjects often are, yet he is still, calm, and victorious. Having cleared the clouds and the forest, he gazes upon a domain that few get to see. For millennia, hiking and mountain climbing were not a pursuit. Some places aren’t meant to be seen. But with modernity we see the advent of the individual conqueror, the man prepared to stare down the forces both external and internal to himself, and to set them aside for feats of individual greatness. Friedrich’s wanderer, though he is alone, stands with the other figures of modern individual greatness: the resolute artist, the genius, the man-against-the-world, the entrepreneur. For each, we know representative examples: van Gogh, Delacroix, Chopin, Abramovic, Joyce’s Daedalus, Ayn Rand’s Galt. Modern popular culture is a celebration of the individual against the fog which encloses his aspiration. There is a theoretical lineage that accompanies our artistic and cultural hagiographies of the wanderer. While most trace the advent of the individual to Descartes, individualism in modernity began in fits-and-starts, from the humanism of the Italian Renaissance to the early modern essayists. It does not become a full-throated phenomenon, though, until the Enlightenment, where Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Kant’s enlightened © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_10

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individuals throw off the shackles of externality to become who they are. It is no coincidence that Romanticism follows shortly thereafter, attempting to test the limits of individualism and nature, from Goethe’s Faust to Schleiermacher’s mystical rest against the bosom of the infinite. By the middle of the nineteenth century we see the emergence of the familiar trope: the individual against objectivity and universality, whether it be Schopenhauer’s dissolution of the universal will, Nietzsche’s ubermensch, Emerson’s great eye ball, or Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Each is a world-­ discoverer and world-creator, always on the frontier of themselves or the world. And discovery requires sacrifice. Here, it is the world, and its fettering of the individual, that must be given over. There are countercurrents to this trend, of course. For every attempt to give flight to the genius, the creator, or the artist, there is a Hegel, placing the subject in tension with the world, or a Marx, showing that our thoughts are founded on material reality, not of our own creation. In the twentieth century it is Heidegger who gives us being-in-the-world, our situatedness in the ambient reality, or in the social sciences the social constructivists, who show that we are compositions, but not the composer. This tension is felt most poignantly in postmodernists like Foucault or Italo Calvino, where we witness both our construction and our desperate need to self-­ construct, to make a coherent narrative out of our own already-made lives. These are not necessarily paradoxical reflections, though they often are. Modernity may be seen, if we choose, as the attempt to both identify what constrains the individual, as well as the invocation to move beyond those constraints. We must know our fetters before we lose them. As we saw in the previous chapters, though, we cannot become the individuals we wish to be without implicating ourselves, in body and spirit, in the very constraints we wish to overcome: collective narratives, rites, and joint intentionality. It seems, alas, that our values and ideals, invented as they are, can only be realized socially. Perhaps more acutely than attempts to reveal our entwinement with the objective world, then, we see, in the attempt to create values, something more radical: our very individualism is contingent upon the external world for its realization. We cannot become what we are, or what we wish to be, on our own. We are, for better or ill, dependent upon others. The path to creating values and ideals may force us to rethink modern subjectivity itself, then. How we realize the aspirations of modernity forces us to rethink the basis of modernity itself. For, as every climber knows, we cannot stay on the summit. At some point Friedrich’s wanderer descended

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back to camp, where he launched from in the first place. It is only in art that he remains on the precipice. * * * If the preceding chapters are correct, then a different view of subjectivity lies at the heart of resolving the First Paradox. It also throws us headlong into the Second. Modernity is conscious of this, at least partially. It is this subterranean current I would like to explore. The first attempt to rethink the modern subject in light of the demand for new values and ideals can be seen in the later work of Albert Camus. In Camus’ early work, such as The Stranger, we see Camus probing somewhat familiar territory: the isolation of the individual and the confrontation between the individual and an absurd world. This tension is deepened in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (1991), written as it was during the German occupation of Paris. There, the fundamental question is on what terms we shall live in an absurd world. Camus ultimately finds solace in the artist, the creator, and, above all, a reinvented Sisyphus, pushing his rock up a hill. The individual is at the center of the struggle for meaning in an absurd world. These are standard and powerful refrains within the ambit of modernity and its confrontation with a cold, statist, and technological world. Yet something shifts in Camus’ work after that time, perhaps as a result of the experience of war or Camus’ disillusionment with the postwar world. Beginning with The Plague (1944) and continuing through The Rebel (1952), Camus begins to test the limits of modernity. He finds it wanting, and for much the same reason elucidated here: we can only confront the modern world as collectives, not as lone individuals. This rethinking of the subject begins with a genealogical assessment of the modern subject, who, as Camus sees it, is born out of the simultaneous rejection of God and the intolerable conditions of the modern, industrial world. Camus traces this rebellion against the old order in The Rebel, where the rebel “affirms that there are limits,” even if he suspects, deep down, that there are “certain things beyond those limits” (1971, p. 19). The “limits” Camus refers to are manifold: the dignity of human beings, the assertion of humanity against the abstraction of God, and the rejection of nameless states and bureaucracies that consign individuals to their deaths. Thus, rebellion against such an order “amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity…. The rebel

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obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the fatal obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity” (1971, p. 73). In effect, to reject such an order is to assert that human life has value, that the rebel is worth something, even if others do not deem it so. For Camus, rebellion is thus the insistence that, even if there is no “ultimate” meaning in the world, something has meaning, and “that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one” (1960, p. 28). In the struggle against slavery, poverty, racism, colonialism, or the death penalty, humans assert that there are limits. These limits are not founded, as Kant would have it, on reason, nor are they grounded in God or the divine rights of man or kings. Rather, they come from us. When we reject the order of the world, we give life to limits. They are not eternal, but they are there. In the moment of rejection, then, we find our collective unity with other humans. Rebellion is almost always a statement of “We are” (1971, p. 240), for Camus, insomuch as we reject the human condition as it is. Note, for example, this: “rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are” (1971, p. 218). By denying history and rebelling against the world as we find it, we “create what we are,” namely, human beings (1971, p.  261). Hidden within every rebellion against the world is a collective yearning for the assertion of limits and a rejection of whatever infringes upon those limits. As Camus states, “Man’s solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion can only be justified by this solidarity” (1971, p. 27). Or, to put it in terms of this essay: the creation of a limit, perhaps hitherto unknown in the world, depends upon the joint action of individuals who assert that limit. The rejection of colonial rule because of its dependence upon slave labor, for example, only occurs because someone insists upon their dignity, often through concrete, collective action. Values are created, for Camus, through collectives asserting such values in solidarity with one another. As he poignantly states in The Rebel, “Rebellion is the common ground on which every man bases his first values. I rebel – therefore we exist” (1971, p. 28). We find this commitment to common action throughout both Camus’ life and his later writings. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for instance, we find Camus himself attempting to toe the line between the lone artist and one who joins in the struggles against oppression. Even in

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creating artistic universes, Camus states, the artist will find the realm of “hard brotherhood” (1960, p.  267), where her commitment will find common cause. Indeed, it is only in the “very thick of the battle” (1960, p. 272), presumably with others against the very limits specified by rebellion, that the artist finds her true calling. The idea of creating values through solidary rebellion finds its most poignant expression, though, in Camus’ Plague, a fictional depiction of an Algerian town fighting against a plague. Just as the rebel finds herself and her limits in rejection of the order of things, the heroes of the plague, a band of men that form a sanitary squad, find brotherhood and meaning in fighting a losing battle against an unseen foe. Indeed, as the book’s narrator, Dr. Rieux, tells his friend Tarrou of the plague, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague” (2004, p. 113). Hence, for Rieux, to fight the plague is “fighting against creation as he found it” (2004, p. 114). And so Rieux, along with Tarrou and others, must fight the plague, not because he expects to win, but, rather, because in doing so he establishes his own dignity and the dignity of those for (and with) whom he fights. This attitude, both combative and resigned, is echoed in the end of the above conversation between Rieux and Tarrou: [Rieux]: “since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where he sits in silence?” Tarrou nodded. “Yes. But our victories will never be lasting; that’s all.” Rieux’s face darkened. “Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.” “No reason, I agree. . . . Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.” “Yes. A never-ending defeat.” (2004, p. 115)

Even though fighting against the plague, perhaps like many social causes, invites “never-ending defeat,” Camus’ heroes go on fighting nonetheless. The object is not final victory—what would that mean?—but the assertion of humanity against the absurd world.

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What Camus is after, then, is the humble assertion of a common value found only in our collective rejection of the absurd world as we find it. Short of asserting an eternal return, or a categorical imperative, or a God, Camus hopes for something smaller—and yet more difficult—than other modern fictions. We see this, in rather striking prose, in a conversation Rieux has with a priest after the death of a little boy at the hands of the plague: [Rieux] “I know. I’m sorry. But weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.” “I understand,” [Father] Paneloux said in a low voice. “That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.”… “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture…. We’re working side by side for something that unites us – beyond blasphemy and prayers. And it’s the only thing that matters.” Paneloux sat down beside Rieux. It was obvious that he was deeply moved. “Yes, yes,” he said. “you, too, are working for man’s salvation” Rieux tried to smile. “Salvation’s much too big a word for me. I don’t aim so high. I’m concerned with man’s health; and for me his health comes first.” (2004, p. 192–3)

Of course, by “human health” Rieux intends, perhaps in line with the rebel, to assert human dignity as the source of his commitment. And it is something achieved “side-by-side,” with others. In common rebellion we find ourselves. There are other instances of such commitment and a collective rejection of absurdity in Camus’ work. Yet what Camus outlines in his later work is clear: we realize values, particularly the value of common humanity, through common humanity itself. It is precisely the struggle against dehumanization and the absurd which asserts the very limits of dehumanization and absurdity. Common action grounds a value. Camus did not go further than this. And yet we can find, in his work, a subtle rethinking of the modern subject. We may be individuals, but such individuality is limited when it comes to asserting our humanity or desired values. For that, solidarity is required. And it is in solidarity that we discover, as Tomasello noted in Chap. 8, the “we” of consciousness and intentionality. When we truly affirm what we wish to be, we become more than just isolated individuals. * * *

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Camus’ rebellion mirrors the collective intentionality described in Chap. 8. In attempting to affirm a new value, we engage in solidary efforts. Camus is careful not to draw causal arrows here: desired values do not lead to solidarity, nor does solidarity lead to new values. Both are dependent upon one another. What Camus edges up to, though never fully sees, is a rethinking of the modern subject. In all his sketches, Camus gives a portrait of the hazy edges of modern subjectivity, but he still remains within the ambit of the individual, struggling to straddle solitary and solidary meaning-making. For him, it is simply enough that our highest aspirations require collective struggle. In this respect, he is no different than Martin Buber, whose I and Thou, though deeply intersubjective, never fully leaves the realm of the individual. A greater revolution in how we think about the modern subject is left to later minds. In this respect, Peter Sloterdijk’s capacious Spheres trilogy stands as perhaps the most extended theoretical treatment of human communality and the ways in which humans require others for their actualization, security, and self-affirmation. For Sloterdijk, to live is to be enmeshed in communal structures which allow for us to bring ideals, gods, and aspirations to life. Indeed, in a mirror of Camus’ causal agnosticism, for Sloterdijk collectives need ideas, and ideas need collectives. We find this sense of interdependence and necessity in a series of evocative examples, drawn from art, literature, and theology. The most notable example of the Spheres trilogy is given at the beginning of the first volume, Bubbles, where Sloterdijk meditates on a soapy bubble given life by the breath of a child. There, floating through the air, is a little bit of ourselves, enclosed in a liquid sphere (2011, p. 19). This example, simple as it is, signals Sloterdijk’s central thesis: we always exist outside ourselves, either in physical form or in the hearts and souls of others. By the same token, we are never alone—there are always already others inside of us, too. Thus, for Sloterdijk, “the simplest fact is automatically at least a two-part or bipolar quantity.” We are never isolated, but, as spirit, always “in and in relation to spirit, and true soul is by definition soul in and in relation to soul” (2011, p. 42). We are, in our very being, intimately related to others, whether they be our parents, our beloved, or our gods. As Sloterdijk rather poetically puts it, “We live, as intertwined beings, in the land of We” (2011, p. 51).

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This is not the “we” of Camus, though, which is founded upon joint action and common rebellion against injustice and indignity. Rather, the “we’s” of Sloterdijk are the stuff of common life: couples, friends, families, cultures, and civilization. As Sloterdijk puts it, “The hordes, tribes and peoples, and the empires all the more, are… psychospheric quantities that arrange themselves, climatize themselves and contain themselves” (2011, p. 57). We live in and among multiple groups, each of which provides a critical function, namely, that of protecting us and placing us within a system that grants us purpose and immunity from outside threats. These immune systems may be phratries, clans, feudal arrangements, or gods. All provide a shell of protection against a chaotic world. As Sloterdijk adds, “In spherological terms, peoples appear above all as communities of cult, effort and inspiration… Through their gods, their stories, and their arts, they supply themselves with the breath…” (2011, p. 59). For this reason, we are never truly alone. We require others. In an inversion of the modern subject, Sloterdijk offers that “real subjectivity consists of two or more parties” (2011, p. 53). In order to illustrate this point, Sloterdijk points to a number of salient examples, three of which are sufficient to illustrate Sloterdijk’s utter reworking of the modern subject. The first example is of the interchange of hearts, seen evocatively in the medieval Catholic saint, Catherine of Siena. There, Catherine is awoken in the night to find that Christ has appeared before her. In an oddly beautiful scene, Catherine’s chest is opened, and her still-beating heart is removed by Christ. On the brink of death, Catherine is saved by Christ, who gives her his own heart. Catherine and the risen Christ save each other through a “cardial exchange” (see 2011, pp. 108ff). Of this bi-cardial intimacy, Sloterdijk asks, Does a sum of advantageous invasions not hollow out a love grotto within the individual, with enough space to house the self and its associated spirits for life? Does not every subjectification, then, presuppose multiple successful penetrations, formative invasions and interested devotions to life-­ enriching intruders? (2011, p. 96)

Indeed. To be a self is to be intertwined with others. All of us bear, within ourselves, “love grottoes” for others, whether they be friends, family, or other intimates. The exchange of hearts is a familiar medieval trope. Catherine is not alone, both in an ontological and a literary sense. And, of the various

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cardial interchanges described by medieval writers, Sloterdijk summarizes, “The anthropophagous communion, the mystical exchange of hearts, the telepathic transfusion in an erogenous two-person blood circulation  – these were models for encounter excesses beyond the personal melting point; our intercardial scenes describe the final stages of relationships in which individuals are already sharing their innards with each other” (2011, p.  140). This exchange of “innards,” both physically and figuratively, becomes paradigmatic for Sloterdijk. It is an exemplar of “bipolar intimacy,” where two selves are linked to one another through excess and dependence. We see, in such scenes, the fact that each other is always “taken along by the other” (2011, p. 547). This deep intimacy is seen again in Sloterdijk’s elegant examination of the phenomenon of the face in human history. For most of human history, we did not see our own faces, save for the rare glimpse in a body of water. As a result, we only knew what we looked like through others—they acted as our mirror when one was lacking. That is, our self-image, resonant with the metaphor of the bubble, was entirely mediated by and through others. Sloterdijk continues, “Initially, a face is only accessible to the view of the other; as a human face, however, it also has the ability to respond to being seen with a gaze of its own – and this gaze, naturally, does not initially see itself, but only the face opposite” (2011, p. 192). We thus find our image dependent on the words and exchanges with others, and theirs dependent equally on ours. Sloterdijk concludes: “The initial experience of faciality rests on the basic circumstance that humans who regard humans are themselves regarded by humans, and return to themselves by way of the sight of the other” (2011, p. 200). Of course, this all changes with the advent of widely available mirrors. With a mirror, we can see ourselves by ourselves. We can be alone and still have a self-image. As Sloterdijk rightly sees, with the mirror, “The separate actors in the individualistic regime become isolated subjects under the dominion of the mirror, that is to say of the reflecting, self-competing function” (2011, p. 203). Thus the traditional self-image, mediated as it was by others, is inverted. For most of our history, we lived in an uneasy alliance with others, from whom our self-image emanated. Like the bubble image, others were always already inside of us. For Sloterdijk, the bipolar unit, consisting of two selves, is irreducible. We were always in the land of We. As Sloterdijk offers, “compared to the individual, the couple constitutes the more real unit – which simultaneously means that we-immunity embodies a deeper phenomenon than

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I-immunity” (2016, p. 14). Irreducible as it is, though, it is not the sole site of human intimacy or immunity. We not only protect ourselves through friendships, lovers, children, and others, but through cultural and civilizational immune systems, too. These, for Sloterdijk, in a metaphor resonant with the architecture of bubbles, are “globes,” those perfect shells in which we may be encased. Philosophies, political structures, physical structures, religions, and social codes are all globes—they are self-­ contained environments in which we are surrounded by a world that makes sense (2014, p. 200). Such globes are, as Sloterdijk dubs them, the “In,” which is “the dye bath in which all discrete acts of imagination, will and judgment are immersed” (2014, p. 137). To borrow a phrase, globes are that in which we live, move, and have our being. They give sense to the world, both logically and practically. Sloterdijk, as usual, provides numerous examples of such globes, from the walls that surround cities to our reckonings with the cosmos. Each provides a structure of intelligibility and protection from the outside world, chaotic as it might be. They are a “shared inside” (2014, p. 202), a place where we feel both protected and at ease. The greatest such structure, as Sloterdijk argues at length, is the Platonic-Christian cosmology developed in the waning centuries of the Roman Empire and the nascent Christian West. There, philosophy and theology colluded to form a perfect metaphysical orb, where all points were contained within the perfection of God. All ideas were related, all concepts contained within the divine image, whether they be the Great Chain of Being, the divine right of kings, the just-price of goods, or the evil which so frequently befell the medieval world. Of this structure, Sloterdijk offers: “Wherever philosophical thought after Plato was at the necessary level, the two epitomes of totality, the world and God, were envisaged as an all-encompassing spheric volume in which countless subordinate world shells, value spheres and energy circles are concentrically embedded…” (2016, p. 17). The reasons for such a spheric invention are obvious. We feel cozy in an intelligible world. But, further, we are linked with others in such a world. We have solidarity through intelligibility. We belong to a “close-knit family of knowing and able powers responsible for the thereness and thusness of the world” (2014, p. 502). I know who my family is in the elevated Platonic-Christian universe. We are all interrelated through divine perfection. Indeed, as Sloterdijk notes, life in such a world is “intertwined with other lives and consist[s] of countless units” (2016, p. 23). Not only does such an intellectual advance make sense of the world, but it creates a space

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within which we can live and know with whom we should—and should not—cooperate. These three examples illustrate Sloterdijk’s central contention: we are constituted through and with others. To live is to be intimate and inside shells of intelligibility, whether they be city walls, theologies, or cultural norms. Such spheres provide comfort and immunity from invasions, both physical and conceptual. And, perhaps most importantly, globes are both conceptual and intersubjective. Communities realize ideas, and ideas are the stuff of communities. They are mutually intertwined, just as subjects are. Similar to Camus, then, Sloterdijk recognizes the integral role that communities play in creating and reinforcing values. However, beyond Camus, Sloterdijk shows that such communities are not constituted by individual monads, but, rather, through intimacies and exchanges. For Sloterdijk, community goes all the way down. Our subjectivity, at least prior to modernity, was/is in spheric intimacy with others. Insomuch as the modern need to realize values brings about a reckoning with modern subjectivity and its shortcomings, Sloterdijk gives us a way to conceptualize subjectivity and its relationship with ideals outside of modern individuality. For Sloterdijk, subjectivity is precisely the need to create values with and through others. To be a subject is to create values and ideals. Such globes are founded upon our already-present intimacy and communion with others. And they are, practically speaking, how we immunize ourselves from a threatening world. * * * There is a parallel here to the history of the subject, at least prior to modernity. For Sloterdijk, to be pre-modern meant that subjects existed within concentric circles of bipolar intimacy, family, and spheric forms. We realized values and ideals as communities, because such values and ideals both protected and furthered the community itself. At the same time, though, pre-modern subjects were also subjects of routinized and synchronized actions. As Sloterdijk keenly offers in his You Must Change Your Life, “It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition” (2013, p. 4). Such repetitions allow us to live within our bubbles and globes or modify ourselves. If we are to become religious, practical, or athletic subjects, we do so through routines and rites.

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The implementation of routines as the core of practice is based, much like the argument in Chap. 9, on the knowledge that physical practice loops back onto human cognition. “Being human means existing in an operatively curved space in which actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler” (2013, p. 110). Much like the concept of ritual evoked in the previous chapter, what matters is not sincerity, but a series of practices which, in time, create the proper and desired effect. For Sloterdijk, the various asceticisms throughout western history—Cynicism, Platonism, mysticism, and, in modern times, athleticism—understand, on a pragmatic level, that physical practice often precedes mental states. We become what we are through work, not by cognitive fiat. As Sloterdijk recommends, in line with the previous chapter, “It is the daily line of writing that forms the artist, the daily self-denial that forms the ascetic, the daily encounter with the power needs of other humans that forms the diplomat, and the daily joy at the willingness of children to be stimulated that forms the teacher” (2013, pp. 321–2). The form of such repetition changes in modernity. Rites and action lose their “vertical” dimension in the modern world, becoming less about God and homeland, and more about the self. Yet, in tandem with Sloterdijk’s theory of the pre-modern subject, we can see a richer vision of how values and ideals were formed and held fast. In the pre-modern world, subjects were implicated in communities and practices which formed both immune structures and subjects themselves. Values were made through communities and practices, and communities were made through values and rites. As Foucault observed, prior to the modern world there was a relationship between practice and truth. Truth was the fruit of physical labor. This linkage, of course, allowed for subjects to find themselves in the world, to be in a place. It also allowed for the spasms of parochial and tribal violence that riddled the pre-modern (and modern) world. We may be subjects that live through communities and routines, but that does not mean that our subjectivity is of benefit to all. * * * Subjectivity, as I have been suggesting, changes in the modern world. For Sloterdijk, the history of subjectivity is not simply one of intimacies and immune systems, but also of a modern subject who creates ephemeral immune systems and relies on himself as the source of creativity. Whereas

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the pre-modern subject is marked by communality, physical exchange, habits, rites, and common spheres of meaning and intelligibility, the modern subject operates outside these safe confines. To be modern, Sloterdijk will argue, is to cast aside the familiar and safe while also demanding comfort. Hence the need to create, but under conditions hitherto unknown in human history. Echoing thinkers like Heidegger, Sloterdijk argues that modernity is a kind of opening to the world without the safety of developed immunities. “[Modern man] has sent himself into exile and expatriated himself from his immemorial security in self-blown bubbles of illusions into a senseless, unrelated realm that functions on its own… Taking part in modernity means putting evolved immune systems at risk” (2011, p. 23). Part of the legacy of the Enlightenment is the discovery and criticism of “evolved immune systems”—the church, the soul, the feudal order, the lineal family. Criticism of this order results in a sort of “shellessness” (2011, p. 24), where we “break away from [our] group bodies” (2014, p.  958), and attempt to boldly go forth on our own, in acts of both bold self-­ transcendence and genius. Individuality comes at the price of the known and familiar. One of the models for this transcendence, Sloterdijk observes, is Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, in 1765, retreated to a lone island on a lake in Switzerland. Floating alone in the middle of a lake, Rousseau experiences a kind of anomic reverie, free from the laws and constraints of normal life. This, for him, is the model of true happiness and the ideal for modern life. Sloterdijk observes that, for Rousseau, “the individual is far removed from ‘society,’ but also detached from their own person as woven into the social fabric. They leave both things behind: the world of collective themes of concern and themselves as part of it” (2015, p. 22). Like Friedrich’s hiker, Nietzsche’s ubermensch, or the geniuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the truly modern man is suspended above the normal, free from its currents. As Sloterdijk offers, “The ontological freedom movement we call modernity rests on the fundamental need to ‘escape completely from the yoke of circumstances’” (2015, pp. 28–9). This means that, in effect, “every person is a parallel society” (2015, p. 36) in the modern world. We make our own worlds and spheres, insulated from the outside world, like Rousseau’s boat, by structures of our own making. For our purposes, modernity dispenses with the familiar and evolved means of creating and realizing values. We no longer receive our ideas from “some embarrassing heavens”; rather, our inventions, as we have

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been observing, “are supposed to come from the no man’s land of ownerless, precise thoughts” (2011, p.  31). We are to be our own masters, a “monadic ego orb” (2011, p. 86) who creates spheres and structures as if by imperial fiat. Thus, for Sloterdijk, modernity is, simultaneously, the epoch in which we take the greatest risks and yet demand insurance for those risks; abandon solidarity and yet attempt to form autonomous and self-chosen collectives; dispense with tried immune systems and attempt to create ones that fulfill the same functions. What is lost with the ascent of the individual we try to patch up through a series of “non-religious binding agents,” which include the “market economy, parliamentarianism, welfare systems, mass media, law and the art world” (2014, p. 365), or, alternately, with respect to the individual, “matter, man, the species subject, the avant-garde, race, structure, the unconscious, capital, language, the brain, the genes, the primordial mass…” (2014, p. 451). Modernity, having cleaved the individual from traditional anchors, is a movement in search of a center. It casts about in search of old-new structures which can be reborn or new structures which can serve an old purpose. To these new structures, and in a play on his “bubbles,” “spheres,” and “globes,” Sloterdijk gives the name of “foams” (2016, pp. 29ff). Foams, as the name suggests, are the ephemeral structures, both conceptual and physical, which we build autonomously or in makeshift collectives. As individuals, we build autonomous cells which, like Nietzsche’s fictions, form, coalesce, and then effervesce. Foams are meant to be small, transparent, and transient. As Sloterdijk keenly observes, such foams constitute “a paradoxical interior in which, from my position, the great majority of surrounding co-bubbles are simultaneously adjacent and inaccessible, both connected and removed” (2016, p. 54). In our foams, we are close to others and yet at a distance. We are in an immune system, but only for a time. These structures—careers, relationships, ideas, forms of practice— allow us to live within them for a bit, as “self-referentially constituted microcontinents” (2016, p. 56) from which we can investigate and experiment with the world. The most evocative and imminently modern example of the foamic architecture of the modern world is the apartment building. In an apartment, we live in isolated cells, but only for a time (Sloterdijk 2016, p. 537). Like our philosophies, practices, and relationships, apartments house us in discrete isolation from one another, though we remain comfortable. The intention of the apartment building, for Sloterdijk, is “the creation of solitary dwellers via individualizing housing and media techniques, and the

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concentration of uniformly aroused masses via organized events in large-­ scale, fascinogenic effects” (2016, p. 529). There, in our individual cells, we may devote ourselves to “the cultivation of [our] self-relationships” (2016, p.  530), our hobbies, our career, and our ad hoc alliances with philosophies, religions, and ideas. We do so, as most of us who have lived in apartments know, in relative isolation from neighbors but a few doors away. Sloterdijk jokingly observes that “if Einstein lived next door, I would not know any more about the universe as a result. If the son of God and I had lived on the same floor for years, I would only learn afterwards – if at all – who my neighbor was” (2016, p. 58). If apartments are paradigmatic for modernity, it is because they combine elasticity with individuality. They are not wholly shelless, but they are not rigid and spheric, either. Instead, they are like islands, where we can all be our own Crusoes or Rousseaus as we see fit (2016, p. 293). Here, we are all different but disconnected. To be “in the foam” is to live in a mixture of which “no homogenous basic form can ever be identified” (2016, pp. 463–4). What we hold in common is our difference, not of the sort spoken of by Derrida and Levinas, but simply physical and metaphysical distance. As most of us moderns know, our foamy world is supported and sustained by a network of devices and developments that allow us to live comfortably, or, as Sloterdijk states, “pampered.” Our individualized and separate existences are supported by a host of technologies, devices, and comforts. To live and transcend alone requires more than just the self. Our homes require hardware stores and a host of trades to keep them going on their own. As Sloterdijk sarcastically remarks, hardware stores seem to say, “Do not dwell with the whole! Settle in your own place, alone or with a few others! But remain recognizable and behave similarly!” (2016, p. 498). Similarly, to be alone, and not truly alone, we require media to simulate the noise of family, community, and close relationships. We need to mimic intimacy and the production of self that occurs when we are with-others (2016, pp.  552–4). One can now be, like Rousseau on his little island, self-enclosed without becoming too lonely or too isolated. We can live comfortably without others. Indeed, such media “ensures that the cell, even though it reliably performs its defensive functions as an insulator, an immune system and a supplier of comfort and distance, still remains a space with world-content. Remote from the world and open to it, the auditory egosphere grants admission to selected particles of reality, sounds, sensations, shopping, finds and guests” (Sloterdijk 2016, p. 555).

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This selective admission of the foam-world is important, and it allows for our transitory creations to create the feel, at least for a time, of the immune support and protective function of our old philosophical, political, and communal structures. Within our apartments and homes, our chosen friend groups, our chosen careers, and our chosen hobbies, we may cultivate our own “intramundane hedonistic individualism” (2016, p.  548) without the demands that spheres place upon us. As Sloterdijk avers, prior to the world of social media, “The modern dwelling is a place to which uninvited guests almost never have access. ‘Toxic people’ must stay outside, and bad news too if possible. The dwelling becomes an ignoring machine or an integrous defense mechanism: the basic right to ignore the outside world finds its architectural support here” (2016, p.  504). Modernity is the bold attempt to have our security and comfort without the baggage of communality, repetition, and being bound to a common fate with others. Sloterdijk, perhaps unfairly, dubs the modern era as one of “hardshiplessness” (2016, p. 739) and one marked by the “democratization of luxury” (2016, p. 742). While this certainly is not the case for all, these are, perhaps, the aspirations of modernity, if only to salve what has been lost in terms of community and belonging to a common narrative. But herein lies one of the central contradictions of the modern world. We demand intimacy and self-transcendence, growth and stability, creativity, and yet protection from the invasions of the world. Or, in Sloterdijk’s terms, we want to remain within an immune system while also being shelless. As a result, we insist, like foams, on creating makeshift or temporary structures of intimacy and being. Experiments. These take the form, as Sloterdijk observes, of “a national convention, a Love Parade, a club, a freemasons’ lodge, a corporate workforce, a shareholders’ assembly, a concert audience, a suburban neighborhood, a school class, a religious community, a mass of automobilists caught in congestion, or a taxpayers’ association in a meeting” (2016, pp.  564–5). We belong, but for a moment. Maybe even long enough to bring new ideas into being. But such efforts never receive our full devotion or attention. They become hobbies or objects of passion, but not, as we should have it, habits or sites of repetition. As we have observed, to be modern is to be caught between the demand for the self and constant creativity and the realization that such aims can only be obtained by abandoning some shred of those same goals. Never fully reckoning with this bargain, we try to have both, without fully having either.

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Thus, modernity, as Sloterdijk interprets it, is a set of cross-currents. On the one hand, we have a cultural identity marked by entertainment, comfort, individualism, growth, and chosen allegiances and foamy collectives which come and go. On the other hand, we have loneliness, transitory ties, the loss of habits, the loss of a secure identity within a closed orb, and the anxiety of unrealized ideals. While we may think we can have it all, we can’t. The modern world is a bargain, one whose terms are not yet fully disclosed. In the pre-modern world we dwelled in homes that were tied vertically to time and a complementary set of ideas, practices, and aims. This meant security, but it also meant fixity, even stasis. In the modern world, we live in our individual cells, tied to groups shifting in time and focus. This means creativity and growth, but it also means anxiety and rootlessness. To combine the demand for created and realized fictions with Sloterdijk’s architecture of the modern world, we see that, if the modern aim for prudent and realized fictions is to be actualized, they stand the best chance of realization in bipolar intimacies and globes. Short of that, we can create values, sacredness, beneficial fictions, and gods in foams, but such foams must last long enough, and be combined with enough habits and stories, to allow the magic of social cognition, belonging, and repetition to take place. Foams work, but for a time. Like Rousseau, adrift on his boat, we eventually must return to shore. All modern fictions are thus experiments, ideas, and values that work for a time, or as long as the communities and rites and stories which bring them forth last. To crave something more is to leave modernity itself. * * * There is a question that often arises in relation to realizing values, one seemingly unrelated to the notion of the subject: If we are to realize new values and ideals, what principles should they follow? What ideas guide our soon-to-be fictions? Does, as Ivan in the Brothers Karamozov suggests, anything go? If subjectivity is collective, and ideals are collectively and ritually derived, as I have argued, then what form should our creations take? On its face, such questions are ethical ones. They ask what rational principles we should employ to help mold and shape the prudential ideas that we wish to be true at some point in the future. However, I would like to suggest, if only in cursory fashion, that such a question is actually related to how we view subjectivity. Rather than see such questions as calling

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upon rational decision-making processes, I would offer that they are related to who and what we are. This line of thought comes, uncoincidentally, from Camus. Camus was, throughout his career, deeply committed to ethical questions. He was a part of the French Resistance, fought for the humane treatment of Algerians, and wrote passionately against the death penalty. In one essay, he offers the following: Our task as men is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what is torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that’s all. (1968, p. 135)

The question, of course, is how we square such sentiments with Camus’ recognition in The Rebel that “we rebel, therefore we are.” How do we create a just world communally? How do we create values and new ways of being that observe the demand to “mend what is torn apart”? If we are to create values, how do we make sure they observe constraints? The answer lies, at least structurally, in the conditions of rebellion itself. To rebel, according to Camus, is to reject a present order that oppresses oneself and one’s group. It is to fight against, along with others, a world that infringes upon human dignity. These are not, as Camus makes clear, metaphysical or religious demands. Such demands are born of human experience and the organic resistance to suffering. It is in this resistance, natural as it is, that the limits to our value creation are born. When we reject the present world, we affirm that there is something in us that shall not be infringed upon. Our dignity, ungrounded as it is in reason, God, or the law, is the limit for our imaginative stirrings. What we affirm in our rebellion is also what we must affirm in our creation. As Camus puts it, “In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist” (1971, p. 27; also see 1971, p. 253 and 1968, p. 153). In short, the impetus for community formation, the “we” of rebellion, is also that which limits the world we wish to bring into being. We rebel and form community because of dignity, and thus it is dignity that calls for limiting what we choose to be. In our “refusal to be

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treated as an object” (1971, p. 216) lies the very boundaries for how we are to make and found a new world. To many, Camus’ insistence on a self-justifying limit seems both simplistic and overly general. Such limits are not grounded in anything other than a group’s own self-affirmation. Moreover, they do not specify concrete norms or principles to guide our fictionalizing. These criticisms, leveled by many of Camus’ contemporaries (Sartre chief among them), are largely accurate. Yet they miss two critical considerations. First, as Camus offers, while such limits are general, they are still limits. Rebellion does affirm human dignity, and, in doing so, it becomes self-limiting. As Camus offers, rebellion’s “movement, in order to be authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction which sustains it…. The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness” (1971, p. 249; also see 248). For Camus, the affirmation embedded within communal rebellion affirms a world without suffering. Perhaps that is enough. Secondly, and by omission, Camus never offers how we form such values or communities. As was suggested in Chaps. 8 and 9, such a process is organic and cannot be coerced. Communities come together to realize values, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to specify in advance what shape such values will take. Indeed, as Camus often observes, those movements which rigidly adhere to principles born of the mind and not of community often become absolutistic and totalitarian, violating their initial human impulse. In this way, Camus’ silence seems a riposte to any reading which would deem that we can create our own values and follow them through without deviance. To affirm limits and create a new world, Camus seems to offer, is to both be limited by one’s empathy and to be born along with the current. When we join with others to realize fictions, we lose purchase on exactly what form they will take. To be clear, then: we can form fictions, but, once they become social and the stuff of rites, we cannot specify what they ultimately become. Fictions, whether they be regulative ideas, eternal returns, or reawakened gods, represent a hope that we wish to realize in the future, but we cannot see those fictions through in their ideal form without the help—and interference—of others. The best us moderns can hope for, it seems, is for our ideas to become the stuff of community, narrative, and rites, and, simultaneously, obey the very limits that accompany their socialization.

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Ultimately, following Camus, the only intrinsic values within created values are those that spur their creation in the first place—the demand for a better world. The modern need to create values and ideals, to realize fictions, is ultimately a prudential one, a hope for a new and improved world. If such values are to be constrained by anything, it must be this impulse. But, again: there is no guarantee that creation will do so. In submitting our ideas to others, we run the risk of failure or infidelity. Again, we make wagers. Finally, then, we come full circle: to realize our fictions we need groups; but this does not guarantee that our fictions adhere to modern values or that, when realized, our fictions are what we wanted them to be. Or that they last. To create individually is to risk unrealization; to create with others is to risk impurity. * * * To be blunt: what we see in an examination of how we realize the fictions of modernity is a need to rethink the modern subject itself. The modern subject cannot realize the ideals of modernity itself. To live into and believe the fictions demanded by modernity requires the very narrativity, community, and repetition that modernity spurns. The Second Paradox looms again: to become fully modern, we must abandon the hard kernel of the modern world—the individual and critical subject. Camus and Sloterdijk show us, in cursory form, what this might look like. In the same year that Friedrich painted the Wanderer, Theódore Gericault, in France, depicted a similar scene, his “Heroic Landscape with Fishermen.” Craggy mountains and distant skies with full, puffy clouds abound, similar to Friedrich’s piece. There is a shift in perspective, though. Instead of a lone man atop an icy summit, a group of men labor in the valley below, pulling a boat out of the shallows. The markers of civilization—temples and buildings—dot the distant landscape. While Gericault painted his share of lonely landscapes, bereft of human souls, here he has presented us with a much different composition and meaning. As if in reply to Friedrich, he seems to say that the true labor of making civilization is in the valleys, with others. The stirrings of our imagination and longing are best realized with and through groups and repetitions. While we may climb peaks alone, the lonely hiker is an aberration, and one dependent upon the labors of others at that. In thinking about how we bring our fictions to life, we are also

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forced to rethink the subject itself. To gloss Camus: we create, therefore we are. Such creation and collectivity unlocks our ability to make values and ideals real. It may also bear within itself the limits of such creation. But it also means, as our poor fishermen might remind us, that things are no longer in our full control. While we may scheme to mitigate this risk, it never goes away. Indeed, modernity multiplies it with every new attempt at creation.

literAture cited Camus, Albert. 1960. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1968. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Ed. Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1971. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2004. The Plague. In The Plague, the Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays, 1–272. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2011. Spheres. Volume 1, Bubbles: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). ———. 2013. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2014. Spheres. Volume 2, Globes: Macrospherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). ———. 2015. Stress and Freedom. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2016. Spheres. Volume 3, Foams: Macrospherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

CHAPTER 11

Pretending Our Way to Fulfillment: Virtue and Risk in the Modern World

The modern subject—individual as he is—finds himself at a crossroads in modernity. He may either continue to relentlessly push forward with the modern project, attempting to believe his own creations while all the while constructing his own shell of identity and meaning. Or she can embrace something like shared intentionality, community, and its attendant stories and rites, all the while attempting to realize new ideals and values. In the previous chapter we saw how the need for invented and pragmatic fictions compelled a rethinking of the modern subject. The modern subject fades when faced with the demand for her own self-realization. There is a second consequence of our analysis of fictions and their realization, though. While illuminating the critical role of narrative, community, and ritual highlights the interconnected and intersubjective nature of value adoption, it also points us to the demand for different emphases in the kind of ethics we pursue. The previous chapter discussed—and was hesitant to adopt—normative criteria for the fictions and ideals that should be adopted. These are, to be sure, ethical questions. But different questions remain as to how individuals should approach their own lives. What virtues and characteristics are needed to realize our own chosen ideals? What should we become, so that we may become who we wish to be? For, at their core, the demands of Kant, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Pascal, James, and others are answers, in some sense, to the question of meaning and fulfillment. What we are to do is bound up, inevitably, with what we aspire to be. The eternal return, society as a work of art, the will to believe, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_11

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and even Kant and Pascal’s reinvention of tradition, are all attempts to make life more meaningful, not as momentary euphoria, but to construct lives of enduring fulfillment. Modernity, it seems, perhaps more than its pre-modern counterparts, remains tethered to Aristotle’s demand for happiness. And, lest we think otherwise, flourishing or living meaningfully are demands that are conditioned by time and place. For many Hindus, a meaningful life is to fulfill their dharma; for many Navaho, it is to live in line with hoozhon. We are no different. For us, to live meaningfully is to commit to self-growth, self-transcendence, self-fulfillment, to ally with a chosen community, and to live into the values we see as necessary and prudent. This requires, as we have seen, new fictions and values that are provisional, experimental, wagers. It also requires, as I have argued, old forms of realization. But to live into such wagers requires something new of us, too. Not simply a living into community and an acceptance of organically emerging rites and stories, but, equally, a willingness to fail. With every wager comes the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of the hoped-for idea falling short or outliving its value. With every wager also comes the knowledge that we could be wrong, that our new rite or value is false, or, worse yet, does not render the intended effect. We must face down the source of our new values, namely ourselves, and our own shortcomings. And this requires, above all, courage. To stare down failure, or to embrace the ephemeral, requires that we take change and loss into ourselves. Insomuch as modernity values self-­ growth, the construction of new sites of purpose and meaning, and the invention of self, it also calls for us to cultivate the virtue of courage. Only by reckoning with the nonbeing at the heart of all our self-initiated projects, our new communities, and our new practices can we actually live into the demands of our age. * * * The attempt to define and frame the ideal contemporary life has been the active subject of investigation for many of late. Indeed, as modernity appears to be at its apex, there has been a considerable amount of effort expended to define what we should, and should not, live for. This explosion in what is currently dubbed “meta-ethics” is in itself telling: perhaps unconsciously and organically, we see the need for new virtues to align

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with our new world, one in which we are more atomized, prosperous, dissatisfied, and autonomous. Like the Athenians after the Thirty Tyrants, we find ourselves in search of a new form of life. Of the many new interventions in contemporary meta-ethics, I consider the work of Susan Wolf paradigmatic, both in in its clarity and in its generality. For Wolf, as she asserts in her Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, the meaningful life (not of simple happiness), “is a life that a.) the subject finds fulfilling, and b.) contributes to or connects positively with something the value of which has its source outside the subject” (2010, p. 20). That is, as she later clarifies, the meaningful life is one which combines subjective fulfillment with “objective” satisfaction—the notion that someone “outside of oneself” (2010, p. 5) finds one’s actions to be worthy of respect or praise. Meaningfulness consists of these two poles held in constant tension. Such an attempt is “modern,” I would offer, in two respects. First, and perhaps most obviously, is Wolf’s inclusion of subjective fulfillment as a component of meaningfulness. At many points, Wolf defines this as “acting out of love” (2010, p. 4), or out of “reasons of love” (2010, p. 7), an idea which she defines as follows: “Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some thing or things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something – as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all that she does” (2010, p. 9). In short, a meaningful life, as one of its poles, must include activities, deeds, and purposes which we choose because we love them and gain joy from them. And we must, as both Wolf and Jonathan Haidt (2006) offer, be “vitally engaged” in those projects. This is seemingly balanced by the second characteristic of Wolf’s framework, that of “objective” satisfaction, the need to “get involved in something ‘larger than oneself’” (2010, p. 10). This signals an intentionality to have one’s subjective aspirations be balanced, and judged, by relevant communities. It is also a hedge against one’s interests being nakedly immoral or heinous. By engaging those outside oneself, others find our projects of value. This view is not rooted in the more modern preoccupations I have noted, but, rather, the sensible notion that such activities “connect” us with “objects, people, and activities that have value independent of oneself” (Wolf 2010, p. 42). Such a view is modern, I would offer, in that the communities one is connected to are communities of choice, not those to which one is given

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or assigned by birth, place, or otherwise. When pushed to define which communities should value one’s efforts, Wolf responds with the following: “To the question, ‘Who’s to say which projects are independently valuable and which are not?’ my answer is, ‘No one in particular’” (2010, p. 39). Indeed, Wolf later acknowledges that such a group may even be “idealized” or “hypothetical,” and that one’s actions “would be valued by someone sufficiently rational, perceptive, sensitive, and knowledgeable to be… ‘a competent judge’” (2010, p. 46). The community to which one is connected need not even be real, at least in a physical sense. It is sufficient that one’s activities are worthy of appreciation, even if from a God’s eye, or as-if, perspective. Wolf’s ideas are arguably paradigmatic because they offer a notion of subjective fulfillment balanced by moralistic or anti-hedonistic concerns. We are free, as self-creating subjects, to choose both our forms of satisfaction and the community which finds them valuable. Such satisfactions need not be enduring or given to us; they may be experimental, time sensitive, and self-created. We are not bound by the constraints of tradition, unintentional community, or shared narrative. In its generality, though, Wolf’s notion of meaningfulness is, I think, correct. It balances purely subjective fulfillment with objective worth. But what lurks behind its obvious individualism is a nod, albeit free, to the value of community in helping us see the worthiness and meaning of our own passions and goals. If we are to be the inventors of our own fate, Wolf seems to argue, then we need others. And those others are an indispensable component of our self-realization. Indeed, we cannot do without them. We find a similar arc of argumentation in Valerie Tiberius’ The Reflective Life. Parallel to Wolf’s pole of subjective fulfillment, Tiberius argues for a rationally oriented and individual pole to meaningfulness that centers on the following: First, [a meaningful life] must aim at reflective success; that is, it must give us guidance that will be satisfying from a person’s actual reflective point of view. Second, it must include norms of improvement for our reflection that are not derived from an unachievable ideal. And, third, it must recognize the importance of our passions and experiences both as a source of information and as a motivational force. (2008, p. 8)

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As she later offers, an individual that does so can “live a life that she can affirm” (2008, p.  11), because she reflects on the goals of her life and weighs them against their feasibility. And, lest this seem too rational or overly theoretical an enterprise, such a person “negotiates the various perspectives that make life satisfying without engaging in intellectual or abstracted reflection” (2008, p. 69). That is, we need not be philosophers or sages to engage in the kind of sustained reflection Tiberius has in mind. We need only be thoughtful about our choices and what they mean for us. In this sense, Tiberius’ account may be seen as a helpful expansion on Wolf’s notion of love or passion, and it sets appropriate limits on how we should think about our undertakings. Unsurprisingly, then, Tiberius moves in a direction similar to Wolf in her keen balancing of individual satisfaction with communal worthiness. She begins by conceding the obvious: we are already in community with others, and those others affect who and what we are. “Practical perspectives inform our reflection because it is (at least in part) by being a friend, daughter, sibling, or parent that we discover what is valuable about these relationships. It is by absorbing ourselves in a hobby or career that we experience the value of accomplishment” (2008, p.  76). Indeed, like Wolf, these relationships offer a “third-person point of view” (2008, p. 122) on the worth and merit of our actions. Friends, family, and one’s greater community are indispensable in guiding us towards proper discernment and right action. Tiberius’ reflective subject looks a lot like Wolf’s meaningful life, at least from the top-down. Both balance individual pursuits—adequately reflected upon-with some form of communal engagement. As Tiberius summarizes, finding this balance is a matter of practical wisdom and improvisation: “The Reflective Wisdom Account proposes balancing thinking and feeling, reflection and passion, leading one’s life and living one’s life. There are no step-by-step instructions for getting this balance right, and, in fact, no picture of exactly what such a life would look like. To live life wisely is to engage in the process of figuring it out” (2008, p. 202). Such a life is marked, again, by both its experimental nature and its autonomy. We are asked to “figure it out,” both in terms of what we are doing and who helps us in this affair. I bring up both Wolf and Tiberius for two reasons. First, in their concise rendering of subjective satisfaction and the external criteria to which they are submitted, Wolf and Tiberius accurately bear out a kind of modern reckoning with the simultaneous demands for pleasure, growth, and transcendence, alongside our recognition as subjects enmeshed in

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communities, even if chosen or idealized. And, secondly, there is the explicit recognition that communities matter, that there are limits to (critical) reason, and that, at least tacitly, practice is vital. Yet the role of community is only as a check on subjective fulfillment. It is not necessary to realize subjective fulfillment, nor are communities, along with rites and narratives, indispensable to the formation and ultimate success of the ideals of individuals. They are present as observers, spectators, and judges, but not those with whom one both constructs and lives into such ideals. They are a check on immorality and selfishness, but no more. If the meaningful life is to include subjective fulfillment, I would offer, the path goes not only through our individual discernment and passions, but, more expansively, through communities, practices, and stories. And not merely as judges, but as those with-whom we realize values and ideals. Others are not just the voices in our head, but those alongside us in our work, practice, and story-making. We must connect to our values through something bigger than ourselves. In short: subjectivity requires, and is perhaps subsumed to, spirit. * * * Definition. Spirit: To be connected to something outside oneself; to be transformed in the process. * * * We can see this ethical move to spirit in both philosophy and the contemporary positive psychology movement, which emphasizes human flourishing and the accompanying practices that have been shown, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to achieve it. In both, the modern demand for self-growth and individuation is matched by a deep need for connection outside oneself and productive habits (ethoi) which help one to realize such self-growth. A particularly emblematic example of the positive psychological contribution to our modern understanding of a meaningful life is given to us by Emily Esfahani-Smith and her book The Four Pillars of Meaning. The “four pillars,” as she relays throughout the book, are “our relationships to others, having a mission tied to contributing to society, making sense of our experiences and who we are through narrative, and connecting to something bigger than the self…. They are the four pillars of meaning:

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belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence” (2017, p. 41). These are, obviously, familiar themes, though the notion of storytelling advocated by Esfahani-Smith is not necessarily a communal or larger narrative, but can be of one’s own construction and choosing. Taken together, Esfahani-Smith argues, these four pillars provide a resilient and adaptive structure for dealing with life’s difficulties and for thriving. Of particular interest here are the sections on belonging and transcendence. Belonging, for Esfahani-Smith, entails being engaged in productive and intimate relationships with others founded on trust and common care. Indeed, she argues that such belonging, similar to the intimacy evoked in the previous chapter, requires empathy and openness: “When we open our hearts to others and approach them with love and kindness, we ennoble both those around us and ourselves…” (2017, p. 71). When we engage deeply with others, either through common action or compassion, we create bonds of trust and love. These allow us to feel that we are a part of something, that we belong. As Esfahani-Smith shows, such a sense of belonging predicts a longer life, increased well-being, and greater disease resistance. As she concludes, “If we want to find meaning in our own lives, we have to begin by reaching out” (2017, p. 72). This sense of receptivity and active engagement with others is matched, I would offer, by a similar openness and receptivity to worlds or realities greater than ourselves. Esfahani-Smith argues that, in brief or sometimes repeated moments, we experience an inflow of such a reality and transcend our normal circumstances. After observing night stars outside of Marfa, Texas, Esfahani-Smith recognizes the “abject humility we experience when we realize that we are nothing but tiny flecks in a vast and incomprehensible universe,” one that “paradoxically fills us with a deep and powerful sense of meaning.” It is in these moments, where we connect with something greater than ourselves, that we approach Wordsworth’s “sense sublime” or Otto’s “mysterium tremendum,” one which “can transform us” (2017, p.  131). And, of course, we can cultivate our receptivity to such moments, through ritual or communal practice. As Esfahani-Smith, who grew up as the recipient of a Sufi lineage, offers, such practice cultivates a “sense of surrender” (2017, p. 141), one where we allow ourselves to feel humbled and a part. Taken together, Esfahani-Smith’s insistence on belonging and transcendence (or humility, for that matter) reveal the dependence of meaning on participation in circles, both large and small, greater than oneself. Indeed, though Esfahani-Smith speaks of belonging and transcendence

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separately, we may see them as interconnected dispositions, a common willingness to go beyond oneself and reach out to others and the greater world. Such a disposition requires, as Esfahani-Smith recognizes, compassion, empathy, practice, and, arguably, rituals. The four pillars arise against a common backdrop, which Esfahani-­ Smith repeatedly laments: the modern disconnection by way of consumer society, a lack of connection, and the pace of modern life (2017, p. 191). The plea for connection and transcendence arises, fittingly, in an age which increasingly closes off the possibilities for both. It is easy to see, then, why such connection is vital, not only as an all-too-human need that must be salved, but, further, as the means by which we live into our new selves and realities. Connection, to both selves and mystery, is indispensable in modernity precisely because it is both lacking and allows us to engage in the practical work of grounding our aspirations and values. This is, I would offer, the work of spirit. We see this spiritual orientation receive its fullest elaboration in John Cottingham’s brief-but-concise On the Meaning of Life, in which the outward, receptive, and pragmatic orientation of Wolf, Tiberius, and Esfahani-­ Smith receives its most extensive treatment. As with Esfahani-Smith, Cottingham endorses a life which is “open rather than closed,” one that does not “foreclose the possibility of genuine emotional interaction and genuine critical dialogue with their fellows” (2003, p. 29). To live well is to belong. Such belonging resides in a series of concentric circles, encompassing intimate friends, a community, and the greater world. And, like Wolf and Tiberius, such relationships are cultivated with a vision to how they contribute to the whole of our lives, the “worthwhile part they play in the growth and flowering of each unique human individual, and of the other human lives with which that story is necessarily interwoven” (Cottingham 2003, p. 31). Again, the ideal life is one balanced by a rational appreciation for one’s passions alongside closeness in community. What is remarkable about Cottingham’s ethics, though, is his embrace of spirit and practice as the means by which we secure meaning in our lives. For it is in practice—communal, physical, and repeated—that we open ourselves to others and to the greater world. On a number of occasions, Cottingham stresses not “doctrines but practices: techniques of meditation and prayer, techniques for self-examination and greater self-­ awareness, and so on” (2003, p. 88). Or, as he says later, in appreciation of praxis as the means by which we find and secure meaning, “What is central to the Christian life is not reaching an intellectual decision on these

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intricate issues, but rather the adoption of a framework of understanding and praxis” (2003, p.  90). Cottingham, in the conclusion to his essay, repeatedly insists on a de-rationalized vision of meaning in life. It is one marked by practices as antecedent to belief. The reasons for this embrace of practice should be familiar by now. As Cottingham approvingly cites Pascal and his demand for physical practice, we see, again, the common notion that physical practice leads to mental belief. As he states in full: The essential point is that spiritual practices express an existential and a moral response to the human predicament that can plausibly be recognized as beneficial for those who undertake them; and given that such responses can be properly developed only within the context of passionate commitment to the relevant form of life, it makes sense to go the Pascalian route, take the risk, and gradually initiate oneself into the relevant practices, rather than remaining outside in an unsatisfied stance of dispassionate cognitive aloofness. (2003, pp. 96–7)

Here, Cottingham incisively recognizes both the modern problem and its solution. First, we need to passionately commit ourselves to a way of life, to objects of love, or to undertakings that we have discerned through reason (2003, p. 90). We also need to connect to others. Which means that, secondly, we must do as Pascal, McFague, Clayton, and James recommend: take the risk. Not simply in an epistemic, probabilistic way, but to actually engage in practices, undertakings, and rituals which call forth and identify one with a belief or desired commitment. Indeed, in a voice resonant of Grimes and Rappaport, Cottingham argues that it is important to “adopt a pattern of life which is structured by traditions of worship – traditions not merely in periodic rites of passage (naming, maturity, marriage, death), but also in individual habits of response that mark the daily and weekly rhythms of living: in eating, retiring to sleep, rising in the morning, as well as in collective patterns of song and prayer and meditation” (2003, p. 91). This, I think, puts a point on the subjective and objective poles of meaningfulness identified by Wolf. Modernity demands, perhaps at a neurotic level, self-satisfaction, growth, and individual flourishing. But, as many have recognized, this is only achieved through connection with others and with a world larger than oneself. Cottingham shows how joint physical activity, ritual, and collectivity are the connective tissue that allow

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these two poles to be joined together. One is able to cultivate passionate commitment, or community, only through physical activity, ritual, and community itself. Such is the route of Pascal. As Cottingham beautifully recognizes at the beginning of his essay, “meaning and worth cannot reside in raw will alone.” We cannot simply will a belief into being by wishing it were so. Such beliefs, contrary to our modern zeitgeist, “cannot be created by human fiat alone” (2003, p. 17). What is required is the hard work of practice, which unites our subjective aspirations and our objective needs. We must labor to blend our own desires, beliefs, and ideals with the rites, communities, and others that enable them to come into being. Such is spirit. To be united to something larger than ourselves, and to find our own passions and ideals in that effort, is spirit. And it is spirituality, fittingly, that Cottingham finds to be the lynchpin of meaning: “the practices of spirituality generate a resonance, a depth of response, for which there is simply no analogue in the dry language of scientific rationalism or its associated systems of secular ethics” (2003, p. 98). This is, of course, not a spirit that demands a god, or a necessarily transcendent object, but, instead, a set of practices that link us to our own loves, to others, and, perhaps, to what we do not know. Meaning, as advocated by Wolf, Tiberius, Esfahani-Smith, and Cottingham, calls us to engage in the slow and often ambiguous work of spirituality. Cottingham does not call upon research to show the efficacy of community or ritual or even art in helping to achieve our passions. In this, his faith remains all-too-modern. But, at the core of his call for meaning resides the tacit recognition that community, practice, and ritual help to cultivate and grow our own individual well-being. They also, I would offer, allow us to remain open to others and engaged in communities that feed our instinctive needs for connection and intimacy. These are spiritual needs, even if such a spirit is more horizontal than vertical. Cottingham’s essay closes, fittingly, with a bow to a familiar modern sentiment. Meaning, too, can be one of the fictions, like God or eternal returns or democracy, that we embrace. Meaning can reside in the as-if. If that is the case, then meaning becomes another value that must be conjured and acted-upon to be real. Or, as Cottingham concludes, “For in acting as if life has meaning, we will find, thank God, that it does” (2003, p. 104). * * *

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Simply deeming something worthy of practice and belief does not make it so. To engage in the work of storytelling, community, ritual, or spirit is to open oneself and others to their ambiguities, discontinuities, and ruptures. In short: practice often fails, or, worse yet, goes sideways. Practice, riddled with the needs of others, with the unknown demands of ritual, or with individual passions, is messy. To be committed to spirit, or anything even approximating it, is to open ourselves to the possibility of never achieving what we most desire. A group of thinkers has contemplated this impasse. The first, Karl Jaspers, sees such failure at the heart of existence, and our awareness of it as the conscience of modernity. For Jaspers, we are surrounded by our own limitations, what he terms, on multiple occasions, “the encompassing” (in German, das Umgreifende). The encompassing is the limit for all human endeavor, whether it be practical or epistemological. We are limited in both what we can do and what we can know. For this reason, we simply cannot will realities into existence, nor necessarily think them. Echoing Kant’s critiques or Camus’ absurdism, Jaspers reckons with the indifferent cap on our conjurings. In light of our limitation, philosophy, and the philosopher, must do two things, according to Jaspers. First, in both sequence and in importance, philosophy must constantly push against this limitation, if only to know that it is there. We discover the “force of the real” by the constant “foundering of thought” (Jaspers 1971, p. 71). We become aware of limitation through our encounter with it. This is, as Jaspers claims, a “loving struggle,” one where we “preserve reason alert,” if only to fail or witness the withdrawal of what we desire most. It is in this movement, thwarted as it is, that we may “ultimately… find the way home to reality” (1971, p. 93). This “never ending task” (2017, p. 94) is the work of reason, one which “pushes on continually” (1955, p. 65), constantly testing the limits of the Encompassing. These attempts, as Jaspers admits, have “the value of sharpening our awareness of our limits” (1955, p. 71). Thought, then, is inscribed with a reminder of its constant failure. To think is to fail. Yet, in falling-short, we come away, like Gilgamesh, with something more valuable: a recognition of our place. And, in the case at hand, through the work of reason, we see that our invented values are ephemeral, that our attempts to secure belief in them are fragile, and, even if we do achieve them, that they may have unintended consequences. New paths, even if rational, are precarious.

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Yet reason is but half of the story for Jaspers, and the more uninteresting one at that. For, in light of our limitation by the Encompassing or the limits of ourselves, we must, if brave enough, “leap” towards transcendence (Jaspers 1971, p. 24). This “leap,” akin to Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, is “the starting point of philosophizing” (Jaspers 1971, p. 24), one which is “decisive for my freedom” (Jaspers 1971, p.  25). It is only by going beyond ourselves, either in mind or practice, that we truly become free, according to Jaspers. This is our “unlimited task” (Jaspers 1971, p. 27), for our limitation, too, is unlimited. While Jaspers does not make such ideas concrete, it is clear that the attempt to go beyond our limitations, to find God, ourselves, truth, or new practices and ways of being, is the constant and unending task to which we are assigned. Such action is a “leap” in the sense that we do not know of its success nor of its fruits. And, in a final sense, we know that we will fail, like all projects do, nonetheless. Such failure, though, should not be seen as empty. For, like Camus’ Sisyphus, it is in the struggle to realize the unknown or to push against the yet-unseen that we can find meaning. As Leszek Kolakowski remarks with respect to Jaspers, “What good, then, is such a futile search, acknowledged as such from the start? The answer is that it is the search itself that matters; for such a search, however unsuccessful, radically changes our lives” (2001, p. 9). To be trite, it is the journey that matters. To be modern is to know that our values are invented. To live into modernity is to attempt to realize them, messiness and all, nonetheless. The value of such action lies not in what it might secure, but in the acts themselves. Jaspers thus seems to calculate the central dynamic of modernity, one marked by both a recognition of limits and the need to create within those same limits. And the advice, similar to Pascal and Cottingham, is not to simply “think” or “propose” new realities and creative endeavors, but to “[produce] something in the world through deed and activity” (Jaspers 1955, p. 123). Jaspers goes further, though, in advocating that such deeds and activities be done as a “leap,” and a constant one at that. We labor for our new values and ideals, Jaspers seems to tell us, at our own peril. This is as far as Jaspers can take us. To see the ethical implications of Jaspers’ project, we must return to a central figure from Chap. 4—William James. As we may recall, James proposes willing belief, the adoption of that which we know may not be true. But that, again, is not all of the story. After his pronouncements to will belief, or to adopt the unknowable, James recommends, with considerable boldness, a path forward: “These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that

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life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact” (2000a, p. 240). Or, as he states in another essay, “The course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands – that and that only is the path of peace!” (2000b, p. 256). For James, we are to passionately engage in the creative endeavor to live into the very values we have created. We do so fully aware of the risks and pitfalls. In his remarkable essay, “Is Life Worth Living?,” James offers us a stark, and perhaps partially correct, answer to his own question: life is worth living if we make it so (2000a, p. 239). This will, not only to believe but, to make of life a “success” through our endeavor is given the virtue of courage by James. Courage is the ability, according to James, to “believe in what is in the line of your needs,” for, only by doing so “is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself” (2000a, p. 238). As we have seen, “believing” is a much more complicated matter than simply thinking something to be the case. Belief requires engagement with community, rites, and narrative. I would offer that such a complication heightens the need for courage. To act in community, or in rites, or in line with one’s story, requires courage, even if simply defined as the will to enact that which is not seen as true or possible. And, like Jaspers, we do so according to James knowing full well that our action and thought may not align with the world-that-is or the world-­ to-­be. As James reckons, “These [experiments in moral action] are to be judged, not a priori, but by actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry or how much appeasement comes about” (2000b, p. 258). Such an undertaking is, as many would remind us, a wager, one where we do not know the results, much less the stakes, until the experiment is complete. To live into the unknown, to embrace the incalculable, requires, for the critic, a forfeiture of reason, but for James, courage. To combine thoughts here: the work of spirit, fully aware of its limits, goes forth boldly into the unknown. To live meaningfully in the modern world is to act creatively, consciously, and pragmatically, living into community, story, and rite, knowing full well that such work, like all constructions, may not succeed. This brings us to a final set of reflections on courage, meaning, and spirit. For, even though James helps us to see the boldness required in our various willings, he leaves underdeveloped the concept of courage. Nor

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does he link such a concept to community or something larger than oneself. For those ideas, I would offer, we must in closing turn to the work of Paul Tillich. In Tillich we find a more explicit and direct conception of courage, along with a clear demonstration of its risks. To this end, courage, as defined by Tillich, is simply “the power of life to affirm itself in spite of… ambiguity” (1952, p. 27), or, as he states a few pages later, “Courage is self-affirmation ‘in spite of,’ that is in spite of what which tends to prevent the self from affirming itself” (1952, p. 32). Courage acts “in spite of” the inherent ambiguities of life. We know that we may fail, and yet we act nonetheless. Courage is thus, as Jaspers might remind us, a twofold act: we must be both aware of our limitations, and, yet, act in spite of that limitation. And, in an echo of Jaspers, we encounter ambiguity all around us. This, for Tillich, influenced as he is by ontology, goes by the name of non-­ being, the invisible divide between us and aspiration that surrounds us all. As he states, “Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness. It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation” (1952, p. 41). We will die, we will feel empty, and we will fail. These are ineluctable. Of course, modernity heightens the stakes here, as we no longer have the safeguards of traditional life to console us in the face of non-being, much less direct our action. And, moreover, we are not only set free, but we must create in the midst of non-being. This is why, for Tillich (as well as Heidegger and others), modernity is the period of anxiety: we must stare down our own non-being and the possible failure of our creative efforts without traditional supports (1952, p. 61). Far from allowing us to adapt to impossibility, modernity heightens it. Despite this, though, courage moves forward. To do so, as Tillich reminds us, is a form of self-­affirmation: “Everyone who lives creatively in meanings affirms himself as a participant in these meanings. He affirms himself as receiving and transforming reality creatively. He loves himself as participating in the spiritual life and as loving its contents” (1952, p. 46). Such courageous affirmation is not limited to the self, though. In an often overlooked section of The Courage to Be, Tillich expands the conception of courage to not only a form of individual self-affirmation and transcendence, but the courage “to be a part” of a chosen community or the larger world (1952, p.  91). This, I think, is where courage receives its

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most concrete form. To be courageous by oneself, believing in the impossible, is one thing. But to participate with others, to join in rites, to make oneself a part of a larger story, requires considerable courage. With others, one is vulnerable. Or, as Tillich states, one is potentially guilty or ashamed (1952, p. 93). Such are the risks of being in community. The same goes for rites, practices, and narrative. One could be wrong. Practice could be futile or embarrassing. Our creations can fail, especially if they are new. To “be a part” is to actively take on courage in a concrete and real way. It links courage to the work of spirit and meaning. As with Jaspers or James, courage does not remove limitation, much less doubt. To be courageous is not to be naïve, but to take on doubt through action. As Tillich reminds us, “Doubt is overcome not by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself…” (2001, pp. 117–118). To be courageous is to know that one’s creations are just that: creations. As such, we are always aware of their arbitrariness, their contingency, and their impossibility. They exist in the realm of the not-yet. We know this, and yet, with courage, we still act. For moderns, this is likely enough. To live a meaningful life in modernity, I would offer, requires courage of the sort that has been discussed here: active engagement with communities, rites, and stories to realize values and passions that one knows may be false or impractical. Of course, one need not do this: we can still live in old systems of meaning, or resist the call to creation, or simply go about one’s day. But to be fully modern there is a stark choice: courage or anxiety. If aware, we either act or do not. Tillich, a theologian, does not see mere courage as enough. For him, if the subject of our courageous affirmation is an ultimate concern, then our courage goes by another name: faith. Faith is the full awareness of our limitations and the creative self-affirmation of an ultimate concern (2001, pp. 18–19). Thus, what is required by Pascal, James, and Clayton is not simply courage, but faith. Here one is presented not simply with the possibility that one’s fictions are not true, but, more pointedly, that one’s entire lifeworld and sense of meaning may rest on a shaky foundation. As Tillich offers, “Living faith includes the doubt about itself, the courage to take this doubt into itself, and the risk of courage” (2001, p.  119). Insomuch as modernity seems to demand something like spirit, it may also require, for those invented fictions which receive the power of ultimacy, faith. * * *

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Lest this be unclear: I am not saying one should be courageous or that communities must go about the work of spirit. Rather, the argument here is simply descriptive: if we are to live meaningfully as modernity recommends, then it demands the work of spirit and the virtue of courage. We must cultivate practices that combine individual passion with greater belonging, whether it be to story, rite, or intimate community. And this belonging, fraught as it is with humanity and chance, requires courage. Courage is what allows us to push forward into intimate and ambiguous spaces which call for our engagement and passion, risky as they are. This engagement is human, messy, and vulnerable. “Community” is not the stuff of a careful remove from humanity, but is built upon mutual doing, sharing, and acting. We must embrace such a world and hope that it helps us to realize our values and aspirations. Just as the ways in which we realize fictions caused us to rethink the modern subject, they also force a reckoning with our ethics and habits. If we are to become what moderns ask us to be, we must cultivate the work of spirit and the ethics of courage. In attempting to realize the ideas and longings of our own creation, we must also be lucid about their precarity, as well as the fragile means by which we secure them. As we saw above, spirit is the way in which we connect our individual passions with physical practice and others. And courage is the disposition to see such undertakings through. To live meaningfully in our age, I would offer, requires both. We may ultimately resolve the First Paradox. But, in doing so, we find ourselves in a deeper paradox, namely, that the ways in which we resolve the First push us into the very risks, unpredictability, and lack of reason that modernity tried to shield us from. There is no resolution to the Second Paradox, only a deepened engagement with the world outside ourselves and a willingness to be borne along by unpredictable currents. We must be both modern and pre-modern at once, criticizing humans and practicing humans. Spirit attempts to join these two poles, and courage attunes us to the task. But such work is never complete, nor resolved. It must be renewed again and again, in new experiments and failures.

literAture cited Cottingham, John. 2003. On the Meaning of Life. New York: Routledge. Esfahani-Smith, Emily. 2017. The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

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Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books. James, William. 2000a. Is Life Worth Living? In Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Guinn, 219–241. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 2000b. The Moral Philosopher. In Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Guinn, 242–263. New York: Penguin Books. Jaspers, Karl. 1955. Reason and Existenz. Trans. William Earle. New  York: The Noonday Press. ———. 1971. Philosophy of Existence. Trans. Richard F.  Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kołakowski, Leszek. 2001. Metaphysical Horror. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tiberius, Valerie. 2008. The Reflective Life: Living Wisely with Our Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tillich, Paul. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2001. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper Collins Perennial Classics. Wolf, Susan. 2010. Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 12

The Work of Mourning

Another story. But a few pages from his startling initial evocation of the eternal return, Friedrich Nietzsche announced the Death of God. Many have felt that Nietzsche embraced the Death of God, but a close reading of Nietzsche would tell otherwise. For, in one of the two aphorisms devoted directly to the topic, we are introduced to a “madman” who, at dawn, crashes into the marketplace and cries out to a group of bewildered townspeople, Whither is God?… I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. (1974, #125)

Far from signaling a triumph, Nietzsche’s madman—who is not mad, really—alerts us to a tragedy. God is dead, and we His murderers. As he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 Z. Simpson, The Paradoxes of Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99056-5_12

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remarks later, there is no festival that can help us to see how momentous this moment is, nor is there a way to truly mark the significance of this event. Like cultural Pandoras, we have opened the box, knowing little of the consequences. The madman, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the Bible’s Jeremiah, is greeted with incredulity and disdain. His portent is not for the ears of his contemporaries, but for ears in the future. As the madman later mourns, “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard” (1974, #125). How could they be “seen and heard” in their time? The anchor of pre-modern government, society, culture, literature, and meaning has been undermined or cast aside, the madman seems to say. Such a deed, and its consequences, take time. Perhaps now, one-hundred fifty years later, we can begin to understand such a prophecy. Of the madman, Peter Sloterdijk offers that he is “the first endangered, cosmologically alert individual in the Modern Age who can no longer have any illusions about the earth’s situation” (2014, p. 558). The madman sees. He realizes that to be modern is to be “unharbored, shelless, and exposed” (2014, p. 558), bereft of evolved immune systems, tradition, lineage, and the technologies of narrative, community, and rites which anchored systems of meaning. Without the aids and shackles of our old world, as Sloterdijk offers, “the edge no longer holds the world together, and the picture has fallen out of its divine frame” (2014, p. 559). As we have been examining, this loss is registered in fits-and-starts. But, when we become aware of such a loss, we moderns attempt to recreate what was forsaken, if only prudently and provisionally. We must substitute artifice for tradition, intentional wishful thinking for authentic belief. We do not know, though, how to do so; the modern world gives us no clues, and, perhaps perversely, the few ways to do so it finds contrary to its spirit. As Sloterdijk again observes, in the modern world we “no longer know where [we] should start” (2013, p. 323), much less where we should end up. We are certain, though, that our path is new, that our undertakings are experiments, and that success is not certain. Whether we knew it or not, every cultural movement is a bargain. In the modern world, we traded our evolved comforts and immunities for a world of innovation, criticism, and novelty. In this deal resides both our unheralded wealth and our inconsolable anxieties. When we “wiped away

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the sun,” we gained freedom and the self, but lost our center. Part of every culture is to practice amnesia, to act as if such bargains have not been struck. But, in the prophecies of madmen and our cultural oddities, we can begin to hear of the paradoxes of our age. * * * Modernity is a movement beset with both deconstruction and reconstruction, demythologization and mythologization. Modernity demands that we lay bare our reasons, our bodies, our laws, our rationalizations, our technologies, and our traditions. All are subject to observation, analysis, and critique. In that movement is born countless forms of knowledge, new ways to grow, to experiment, to tinker with the possible. But that movement leaves us cold, without the heat of tradition or the security of community and reassurance. To be modern is to be cast into the open, as an individual, a risk-taker, and a rational ego. As contemporary anthropologists and psychologists have offered, modern Westerners are an aberration, both culturally and psychologically. Dubbing a cute moniker, Joseph Henrich and colleagues call us WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), a title which captures our uniqueness along a variety of axes (Henrich et al. 2010). In addition to the above characteristics, Ara Norenzayan adds, “For the subset of those who are Westerners, it also means hyperanalytical thinking, experiencing the self as being autonomous and independent, emphasizing choice and personal control, and having a narrow conception of morality that revolves around caring/not harming, fairness, and justice” (2013, p. 53). For Henrich and Norenzayan, this means that social scientific studies should not extrapolate results from groups such as ours. We are the outliers, not the norm. Yet, from my perspective, there is an equally important idea here: to be modern and Western is to engage in hitherto unknown ways of dealing with the world. Perhaps this is our genius. In dispensing with the evolved structures of old, we have adopted a kind of cultural skepticism, preferring to undermine ideas as they arise. Instead of remaining on the perch of ambivalence, though, as Sextus Empiricus would recommend, we go boldly forward with projects of invention, from regulative ideas to new gods to novel social arrangements. Having dispensed with the old, we imagine new realities to grow into, self-­experiments and beliefs that allow us to live in new shells of meaning, purpose, and transformation. Bereft of their old reasons, though, these

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new imaginings must be seen as “as if” worlds and beliefs, to be adopted prudently and pragmatically, since we cannot fathom an ultimate foundation for our ideas. Such is the status of our religions, our ambitious politics, human rights, or even the convenient truths we tell ourselves to make history and life seem more intelligible. This odd amalgam of skepticism and renewed belief is what I have called the First Paradox of modernity. Moderns do not give us a path to realize these ideas. There seems to be a tacit agreement that mere imagining is enough. But it is not. To be the stuff of belief and commitment, we need such beliefs to be encapsulated in salient narratives, held by and through communities which engage in joint action, and idealized in rituals. Narrative, community, and ritual have the power to transform imagination into belief and commitment, as they are more memorable and prosocial, calling upon our evolved needs for meaning, community, and repetition. Belief can be instilled by allowing the work of story, others, and rites to slowly take hold over time. And it is time which modernity requires. Implicit in the First Paradox is a recognition that, given time, we can come to believe that which we wish to believe. Such a will to belief means we are no longer static subjects, but individuals capable and desirous of change. New selves require new beliefs, even if such beliefs are not-yet authentic. We adopt ideas for prudential reasons, not because, as the pre-modern world would have it, those ideas are true. The truth, it seems, is in the future. Creating new beliefs, or re-vivifying old ones, is the work of narrative, community, and rites. We see this in human history, psychology, and sociology. We can adopt ideas and beliefs if we find them in convincing narratives, in others, or if they are physicalized and made real in rites. These hold within them the power to convince and coerce, even if, at first, such beliefs are inchoate or as-if. Such a power is neutral, though. Narratives, community, and ritual do not come pre-packaged with checks on human rights or promises of human flourishing. For every eternal recurrence, feminist God, or society as a work of art waiting to be realized through such technologies, there lurk conspiracy theories, cognitive biases, and the potential for violence. Modernity casts an unyielding vigilance towards such excesses, even at the expense of unrealization. And yet our contemporary world continues to multiply fictions and imagined realities at a scale unprecedented in human history. We have been led to believe that pre-moderns were all-too-promiscuous in their beliefs, loving gods, occult forces, and nature, all of which demanded

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sacrifice and an absence of interrogation. For every pre-modern dalliance with occult spirits, though, we have our fictions: democracy, equality, fiat money systems, Bitcoin, X-Men, Avengers, professional wrestling, the Force, subatomic particles, expanding universes, multiple universes, systems theories, the ego, the unconscious, Reason, Nature, self-help, and countless others. To be modern is to traverse across the plain of fictions, consuming those which one sees of value, turning down others. Some are to be worn for a time, while others last a bit longer. Some, like gods, demand sacrifice. Others ask little. Those fictions which endure are the ones which have become attached to salient narratives, communities, and rites. Without being externalized into stories, practices, or communities, though, such fictions are empty, mere myths. Those fictions that endure are the ones that somehow cling to our world, either in practice or in the stories we tell ourselves. Herein, though, lies the Second Paradox of modernity: the very ways we have of securing and realizing our desired ideals run counter to the aspirations of the modern world. To be modern is to be individualistic, to decry mystery and repetition, to live outside common narrative. If we are to adopt modern ideals, then we must move beyond the strictures of modernity itself. One of those strictures is who we think we are. We can exist and create as individuals, but our creations only become real through solidary action. The focus of our psychology, our aspirations, our cultural aims—the individual—is insufficient to see our longings through. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he returns to his cave having accomplished little. It is through being with others, in courage and in spirit, that our ideals can become real. To do so requires encountering failure and the limits of our own understanding. There are no assurances, after all, in experiments. There are two myths in modernity: 1) that there are no myths; 2) that we do not need to practice or externalize our ideas to make them true. Like all cultural constructions, these mythologies construct worlds and make meaning, but they are not fully true. Modernity violates the first myth and is inviable without the second. To see this is not to be anti-­ modern, but to reckon with our own challenges. We must be more like what we rejected to be what we wish. Lest this sound like a denunciation of modernity, it is not. All epochs have their paradoxes, blind spots, and contradictions. These are ours. We are not even unique in our self-consciousness of our own paradoxes, as all great literature seems to both affirm and deny the very soil from which it

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springs. Our only uniqueness may reside in the fact that, sadly, we lack the means to get out of modernity, so long as we remain within modernity itself. Modernity does not provide the ground for its own self-transcendence. * * * Which brings us, perhaps uneasily, to religion. Religion has evolved as the perfect technology which combines narrative, collectivity, and ritual. Indeed, religion may be defined as the combination, to varying degrees, of all three elements. (This allows for civil religions, to be sure.) Religions offer us compelling stories regarding our genesis and the way the world works, built on minimally counterintuitive concepts and triggering agency. Religions offer, in their practice, collective intentionality and joint action, often in service of sacred values. And religions give us rituals to realize the as-if worlds they imagine. Religions give us, perhaps, our best means of creating belief and commitment. Religion, I offer, can add something more to the above, which should not be omitted. While religions are built upon belief and commitment, as catalyzed by narrative, community, and rites, they are also the means by which we address the question of ultimacy (Tillich 2001). We seek answers to the meaning of things, our purpose, and what we can do in the world. Religion answers these questions and addresses these anxieties. For this reason, religion is not simply belief and commitment, but the realm of faith, where belief, commitment, and ultimacy collide. Let us not forget that the aim of Pascal, Wesley, and Lewis is that of faith, or at least a renewal thereof. Each, though, is aware that the passage to the sacred lies in creating belief. As Saint Augustine offers, perhaps in the same spirit as our dear moderns, “Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe… Therefore, seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand” (2004, Tractate 29). The challenge of faith, propelled by our desire to grapple with the dearest questions of life and death, may be the best way to compel belief. And yet modernity, with its paeans to Reason, eschews religions, while, of course, allowing its questions and practices to exist in subterranean form in the worship of nations, economics, security, and others. The reasons for this are sundry, and have been told and retold in countless ways: the modern divide between the secular and the sacred; the resistance to

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religious violence, stemming from the “religious wars” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rise of science; the rise of nation-states; the demystification of religious texts; the atomization of society. What is more telling, of course, are all the ways we have found to explain and attempt to heal a primal wound, the seeming loss of both our innocence and sacredness. I would offer, though, that these collective denunciations register a deeper loss. In decrying religion, we have lost our best chance at securing the aspirations of modernity. With no organizing core for our collective idealization, we are left, as individuals and ad hoc communities and networks, to go it alone, to invent, fabricate, and hope. As Nietzsche’s madman tells us, we have lost God, not just as an ideal, but as an organizing force for our values and practices. Now, all is subject to effort and its attendant fragility. Our solutions are no longer road-tested. They are experiments, improvisations, wagers. If Freud was right that civilization was the birth of our original discontent, one which fostered our creative and social enterprise, then I would offer that modernity constitutes our second moment of discontent, in reverse. We are now freed from the demands of religion and faith, but must now attempt to realize our self-transformations and self-­ transcendences on our own. As Freud might remind us, in this lies both our creativity and our disappointment. * * * One may be tempted here to find a way out. And that way, I will offer, is the following: we can create our own narratives, communities, and rites, just as we create our own values. Created values, or rediscovered old values, demand new communities, rites, and stories for their realization. Intentional ideals call for intentional means. Nothing could be simpler. Unfortunately, as we have seen, there is little reason to think that ginning up the means to fix belief and commitment actually work. There are two reasons for this. First, as we saw in the previous chapters, stories, narratives, and rites must emerge from the life of a group. They cannot be conjured. They must grow, organically, out of common experiences, concerns, and hopes. As Paul Tillich argues with respect to the symbols of faith, “Symbols cannot be produced intentionally… They grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being” (2001, p.  49). I

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would offer that a similar logic applies to the tools we use to realize belief and commitment. We should heed the advice of Durkheim, Grimes, Tillich, and others: symbols, communities, and rites emerge, but are not, contrary to the technist orientation of moderns, capable of being made. This is owing, perhaps, to the second reason: we cannot pre-state those values, stories, or rites which will take hold within the minds of individuals and communities. Part of this is due to the fact that, for all our knowledge, we do not yet understand how and why we believe what we do. Such things are left to future science or magic. But another reason gets us, perhaps, to heart of things: we never knew why stories, communities, or rites worked. They just did. And, for reasons we’ll never fully know, we desperately tried to keep those traditions intact throughout their slow evolution. But now, cut off from our stories, our groups, and our rites, we do not know how to make them anew, for we never really did. We dispensed with the blessings of time and collective consciousness, and now find ourselves wishing to recreate not only new tools, but the timescales upon which they were built. So we are left, it seems, with two options: to either patiently await the emergence of new stories, communities, and rites which take root and somehow obey the demands of modernity, or we grow at ease with the disappointment inherent to our age. The first option requires, as I have argued, something like courage. We must be willing to engage in community and repetition, to seek out the stories that make our values and ideals real. Only then, as different subjects, may we encounter that which is greater than ourselves. It is written of Albert Camus, when he was asked how to live without God, that he had three answers in reply: to live, to act, and to write (Todd 2000). That is, to engage the world, to imagine, and to commit those experiences to narrative. Though the work of the lone author and artist, this trinity of physical enactment bears out the ingredients for our own overcoming and believing. In modernity, though, where ethics are equated with aesthetics, we must all become such authors and experimenters. This book began with a question: can we believe what we know to be of our own creation? The answer is yes. But this takes us to a deeper recognition: we can, but making-believe with our chosen fictions forces us to choose between the competing ideals of our world. Either we give life to our fictions, or we hold fast to criticism, individuality, and the denial of magic and repetition. We have only begun to reckon with the loss of our

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old center, and the choices it foists upon us. As the madman reminds us, the significance of such a choice, paradoxical as it is, still requires time to be seen and heard. * * * A final story. It is bedtime, and my little girl is desirous of a story. Like Shahrazad’s tales, each story flows into the next. She proudly pulls a book off the shelf, Maggie’s Monkeys (Sanders-Wells 2009). Here, little Maggie imagines a family of pink monkeys that live in the refrigerator. Her older brother is stunned that her family acted as-if the monkeys were real, gently closing the refrigerator door and making the imaginary monkeys banana pudding. Incredulous, the brother questions his sister first, who always parries his questions, then his mother. “Maggie’s monkeys aren’t real,” he states emphatically. “Sometimes,” his mom replies, “it’s hard to know what’s real.” A group of boys come over. They find out about the monkeys and begin teasing little Maggie, who puffs up, ready to cry. Turning from his own disbelief, the boy defends his sister, insisting that there are monkeys in the refrigerator. The raucous boys question Maggie’s brother, but he holds firm. Maggie is consoled. The brother is happy. My daughter looks up at me. “That’s a funny story, Dad. Why do you think he pretended there were monkeys, too?” “I don’t know, maybe he was just being nice.” My daughter cuddles up next to me. “Maybe. Maybe it’s better to pretend together, too.” “Why?” I ask innocently. She gives an answer both fitting and wise. “Because then you can play, Dad.”

literAture cited Augustine of Hippo. 2004. Homilies on the Gospel of John. In Nicene and Post-­ Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, 7–452. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers. Henrich, Joseph, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The Weirdest People in the World? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61–135. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

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Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sanders-Wells, Linda. 2009. Maggie’s Monkeys. Illustrated by Abby Carter. Somerville: Candlewick Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Malden: Polity Press. ———. 2014. Spheres. Volume 2, Globes: Macrospherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Tillich, Paul. 2001. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper Collins Perennial Classics. Todd, Olivier. 2000. Albert Camus: A Life. Boston: Da Capo Press.

index1

A Aesthetic reception neuropsychology of, 114–118 Aesthetics, 43, 50, 116, 232 Alfano, Mark, 105–107 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 97–100, 103, 105, 108 Aristotle, 17, 29, 208 B Belief definition of, 97, 114 primary, 112, 113, 117–119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 130, 133, 158 secondary, 112–114, 117–119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 130, 133, 158 and the temporal shift, 87–90

C Camus, Albert, 187–192, 195, 202–205, 217, 218, 232 limits to resistance, 188, 202–204 solidarity and community, 189–190 Cassirer, Ernst, 12, 13 Clayton, Philip, 68–71, 73–75, 78–80, 87 Conspiracy theories, 125–127, 129, 228 Cottingham, John, 214–216, 218 Courage, 62, 137, 208, 219–222, 229, 232 D Descartes, Rene, 21, 22, 29, 88, 89, 185 Durkheim, Emile, 12, 136–139, 141, 144, 146, 153, 154, 232

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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E Esfahani-Smith, Emily, 212–214, 216 F Factitious virtue, 106–108 Faith, 5–7, 22, 23, 31, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62–66, 68–71, 73, 78, 81, 83, 90, 106, 137, 139, 176, 216, 218, 221, 230, 231 Fictionalism, 95–97, 101–105 Fictions, 3–6, 11, 13, 14, 25, 31–52, 70, 71, 78–80, 93–109, 113–116, 118, 122, 177, 190, 198, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208, 216, 221, 222, 228, 229, 232 Fingarette, Herbert, 83, 84, 89 Foucault, Michel, 31–52, 55, 69, 79–82, 85, 87, 93, 95, 108, 130, 186, 196 on askesis, 50–51 theory of fiction, 47–48 theory of truth, 45–50 Friedrich, Caspar David, 94, 185, 186, 197, 204 H Hedges, Christopher, 145, 146 Hume, David, 23, 29, 30, 33, 60, 63 I Identity fusion, 150–153, 172 Imagination, 1, 4–7, 10, 20, 26, 28, 41–44, 52, 65, 69, 72–74, 78–81, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 108, 109, 112, 114, 130, 133, 157–182, 194, 204, 228

J James, William theory of truth, 62, 65 will to believe, 62–64, 67, 78, 86, 100, 207 Jaspers, Karl, 217–221 Joint intentionality, 136, 139, 141, 186 K Kant, Immanuel, 17–31, 34, 36, 40, 44, 45, 51, 56, 57, 63, 65, 68, 78, 79, 85, 93–96, 100, 103, 108, 185, 188, 207, 208, 217 freedom, 24–28, 78, 95 regulative ideas, 28, 30, 94 Kearney, Richard, 71–74, 78, 80, 85, 100, 130 Kolakowski, Leszek, 218 L Latour, Bruno, 11 Laughter yoga, 168, 169 Lewis, C.S., 5–7, 65, 71, 78, 79, 103, 230 M McFague, Sallie, 39, 65–71, 73, 74, 78, 79, 85, 93, 108, 215 theological practice, 66–67 theory of religious language, 65–66 Make-believe, 7, 14, 64, 93, 98–100, 103–108, 111, 112, 133, 157, 158, 161, 162 Marcuse, Herbert, 31–52, 55, 78, 79, 85, 93, 94, 100, 108, 111, 112, 207 society as a work of art, 44, 207 theory of art, 43, 48 theory of fantasy, 43

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Me’en ceremonialism, 163–165 Midgley, Mary, 10, 11 Minimally Counter-Intuitive Concepts, 121–123, 125–126, 140 Modernity, 1–14, 17, 23, 25, 29–32, 44–47, 50–52, 55, 56, 68, 70, 73–75, 77–90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 104, 105, 108, 109, 111, 127, 130, 133, 134, 139, 141, 150, 153, 154, 158, 159, 162, 177, 180–182, 185–187, 195–201, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220–222, 227–232

R Religion, 12, 13, 21, 36–40, 50, 51, 55, 60, 71, 73, 111, 113, 121, 122, 137, 143, 147, 194, 199, 228, 230, 231 Ritual and community, 12, 158, 177, 216 construction, 161 definition, 159, 175 opacity, 176 theroy of, 159–163 Role Playing, 168–170 Rorty, Amalie, 84, 89, 90

N Narrative, 14, 44, 111–130, 133, 134, 140, 141, 153, 157, 158, 163, 169, 175, 177, 179–181, 186, 200, 203, 207, 210, 212, 213, 219, 221, 226, 228–232 Navaho creation story, 7 ritual, 9, 165, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2–4, 11, 31–52, 55, 60–63, 66–68, 78, 79, 82, 85, 93–96, 103, 108, 123, 130, 186, 197, 198, 207, 225, 226, 229, 231 the eternal return, 2–4, 37, 39, 123, 180, 207, 225 the madman, 226 on self-deception, 4, 33, 82 theory of truth, 62

S Sacred values, 133, 147–150, 153, 230 Self-deception, 4, 33, 64, 77–90, 93, 105, 107, 109, 160 Self-experimentation, 38, 153, 163, 180, 227 Skepticism, 13, 14, 17–30, 45, 51, 64, 227, 228 Sloterdijk, Peter, 191–201, 204, 226 globes, 194, 195, 198, 201 modern subjectivity, 195 theory of community, 192, 195, 196, 199–201, 204, 226 Spirit, 5, 6, 11, 17, 23, 32, 35, 36, 39, 57, 153, 163, 171, 179, 181, 182, 186, 191, 192, 212, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 226, 229, 230 Subjectivity, 13, 57, 77, 186, 187, 191, 192, 195, 196, 201, 212 Synchronous activity, 141, 142, 144, 170, 172

P Pascal, Blaise habits, 215 Theory of Reason, 57–59 the Wager, 56–58, 63, 86, 87, 163 Plato, 13, 17, 29, 194 Power posing, 168, 169

T Tiberius, Valerie, 210, 211, 214, 216 Tillich, Paul, 220, 221, 230–232

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Tolkien, J.R.R., 112–114 Tomasello, Michael, 134–137, 143, 147, 190 Trivers, Robert, 82–84, 89 Turkana ceremonialism, 176 V Vaihinger, Hans, 94–97, 100, 107, 108 Viral stories, 127

W Wagering, 58, 65, 69, 74 Walton, Kendall, 100–104 Wesley, John, 59, 60, 70, 73, 74, 78–80, 87, 139, 158, 176, 230 Wishful thinking, 85–90, 111, 226 Wolf, Susan, 209–211, 214–216 Y Yanomamo ceremonialism, 167