Philosophy as Theodicy

Platonism, Pragmatism, and Super Nature

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwhind: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without Knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

And the Lord said to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer.” Then Job answered the Lord: “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer twice, but I will proceed no further.”

The Book of Job, 38:1-4; 40: 1-5 (Catholic RSV)

These words clearly show that Job, in spite of his doubt as to whether man can be just before God, still finds it difficult to relinquish the idea of meeting God on the basis of justice and therefore morality. Because, in spite of everything, he cannot give up faith in divine justice, it is not easy for him to accept the knowledge that divine arbitrariness breaks the law.

C.J. Jung, An Answer to Job¹

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.

Hegel, The Philosophy of Right

I. Classical Philosophy as Theodicy

Wilfrid Sellars famously claims that the philosopher as such is perennially “confronted by two conceptions, equally public, equally non-arbitrary, of man-in-the-world and he cannot shirk the attempt to see how they fall together in one stereoscopic view."² He dubs these two prima facie opposed totalizing visions (worldviews) as the “Manifest Image” and the “Scientific Image.” With the latter, Sellars has in mind the understanding of humanity and its place in a the broader world understood entirely in terms of non-personal entities and the laws governing their movements. The Scientific Image takes elemental matter (as characterized by the going theory of what is most physically basic) as the ultimate ontological category and physical necessity (understood as described by the slate of the broadest physical laws currently on offer) as the ultimate explanatory category. We might say, along with Sellars, that the Scientific Image describes the world as a space of causes, and by causes we mean ultimate physical necessities as expressed in the movements of ultimate physical entities. In its contemporary iteration, we call this view physicalism. Since the Scientific image pretends to ultimacy in both its ontological and explanatory principles, the proponent of this vision claims to have the whole story about the world (including humanity) in hand; or at least such a comprehensive story about nature is in principle possible, even if is as yet to be completed. What to make of our sense of ourselves as persons in this world supposedly accounted for in the categories of the non-personal is the tough question for those who prioritize the Scientific Image over the Manifest Image.

The proponent of the Manifest Image takes the way we manifestly appear to ourselves as persons as her point of departure, and accordingly the personal is her categorical ground floor:

The first point I wish to make is that there is an important sense in which the primary objects of the manifest image are persons. And to understand how this is so, is to understand central and, indeed crucial themes in the history of philosophy. Perhaps the best way to make the point is to refer back to the construct which we called the 'original' image of man-in-the-world, and characterize it as a framework in which all the 'objects' are persons. From this point of view the refinement of the 'original' image into the manifest image, is the gradual depersonalization' of objects other than persons.³

By persons, Sellars has in mind beings residing “in the logical space of reasons,” and the price of entry into this neighborhood is the ability to play the game “of justifying and being able to justify what one says” and does.⁴ That is, according the Manifest image, things are explained not in terms of what must happen (as in the space of causes postulated by the Scientific Image), but in terms of what ought to happen. The entities subject to such normative explanations are the sayings and doings of persons. When we ask a person “Why have you said X?” or “Why have you done Y?”, we expect a reply in terms of why X or Y is something that ought to be said or done (it is dictated by norms) or at least is not something that ought not to be said or done (it is consistent with norms): “Because X is implied by Z, and Z is true!” or “Because Y probably brings about Z, and Z is a good!” The ontologically basic category of the Manifest Image is persons (beings competent to give reasons for their sayings and doings) and the basic category of explanation is normative justification (things are said and done because they are demanded by or at least in conformity with norms of rationality, whether practical or theoretical). The big question for those who prioritize the Manifest Image is what work is really left to be done by these normative explanations in the space of reasons once we have the full story about the space of causes in hand.

Note well, and this is often passed over without notice, that the Manifest Image, no less than the Scientific Image, is a comprehensive conception of man-in-the world, as Sellars puts it. Just as the Scientific Image poses matter and physical necessity as constituting the complete story of both humanity and the world in which we find ourselves, the Manifest Image holds persons and reasons as the ultimate ontological and explanatory basics for humanity and nature alike, i.e, “the primary objects of the manifest image are persons.”⁵ That is not to say that the Manifest Image depicts all fundamental natural beings as fully personal. Rather, in the Manifest Image, only humans, or otherwise linguistic beings, are capable of “the full range of personal activity.” The Manifest Image is, however, a modification of an earlier conception of the world, the Original Image, according which the wind’s blowing down someone’s house would

imply that the wind either decided to do so with an end in view, and might, perhaps, have been persuaded not to do it, or that it acted thoughtlessly (either from habit or impulse), or, perhaps, inadvertently, in which case other appropriate action on one's part might have awakened it to the enormity of what it was about to do.⁶

In other words, in the Original Image, all natural beings are residents of the space of reasons; the category of person is coextensive with nature, not exclusively human nature. Here Sellars seems to have in mind the mythological moment in the history of human thinking, in which we took all of nature as something from which we could demand reasons for its doings. It will be helpful in what follows to refer to the Original Image as a strong version of panagentialism, i.e., fundamental reality is composed of beings operating for the sake of explicit reasons.⁷ Nature self-consciously knows what it is doing.

The Manifest Image, which for Sellars is the first great leap in human philosophical maturity, no longer sees all of nature as possessing the full range of personal capacities. Linguistic beings are now the exclusive denizens in the category of bona fide persons. Nevertheless, the non-linguistic fundamentals of nature are still taken as quasi-personal: the is wind is no longer “conceived as acting deliberately, with an end in view- but rather from habit or impulse.”⁸ Someone operating out of a habit may not have any explicit grasp of the reasons for her activity, even though there may be impeccably good reasons implicit in what she is doing. She might even be unable to bring those reasons to light in any fully articulated form, though they are her reasons for her activity.⁹ For example, my son Cormac might not be able to articulate explicitly why he goes about his daily activities in some habitual way, but that does not bar me from recognizing that there are in fact very good reasons for his routines, and those reasons are his reasons, even though he cannot bring them to light. In fact, I should expect as much. I do not take Cormac as a non-personal being operating solely out of the force of blind physical causal necessity. Rather, I see him as implicitly personal (or on-the-way-to-personal), which leads me to look for the otherwise inarticulate reasons in his doings.¹⁰

Certainly, the Manifest Image leaves behind the mythological or animistic view of nature as populated with actively personal beings. The whirlwind that blows my house down does not do so for reasons that are explicit to it, or that it can articulate, in the way an ancient Greek hero might have expected an account from Poseidon justifying the tidal wave that flooded his city, e.g, “Hey, didn’t we get the sacrifice right this year!” Those who see the world through the Manifest Image do not literally negotiate with the Aegean Sea. The Manifest Image, however, does not fully depersonalize nature, anymore than I reductively reduce Cormac exclusively to a denizen of the space of causes. Natural beings still act for reasons out of a kind of habit, but there are reasons implicit in these activities that are in principle articulable, even though elemental beings cannot do the work of making them explicit. Nature has normative justifications, but it cannot articulate them for itself (or at least in a language we can understand prima facie). It then makes sense, even with the rise of the Manifest Image over the Original Image, to ask for the reasons for nature’s doings, even when those reasons are not articulated explicitly by nature. In other words, the Manifest Image still places the world within the bounds of the space of reasons, and a complete understanding of nature requires that we can make the justifications for the ways of nature explicit. Even if nature does not make sense to itself, it should make sense to us. The Manifest Image does not bind the space of reasons, only its articulacy. Let’s say then that the Manifest Image is a species of quasi-panagentialism, i.e., fundamental reality is composed of beings operating for the sake of implicit reasons.¹¹

The Scientific Image claims a total accounting in terms of the non-personal (how things are and must be according to necessities of nature), while the Manifest Image claims a total accounting in terms of the personal (how things ought to be), and Sellars believes that synthesizing these seemingly contradictory visions, which have equal claim on us (though Sellars has is own prioritization!), is the fundamental problem of all philosophizing. Looking at some of the earliest Western appearances of philosophical reflection, we can see that Sellars has a plausible point. For instance, consider the Anaximander fragment:

. . . the first principle is neither water nor any other of the thing called elements, but some other nature which is indefinite, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. The things perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the order of time . . . .¹²

Of course these remarks by Anaximander (If they really are remarks by Anaximander!) are among the most obscure and controversial in the history of philosophy, and accordingly they have are generated generations of scholarly debate.¹³ I only draw your attention to the way Anaximander seems to expect both a necessitarian and a normative ultimate accounting of nature. Things come to be and perish according to principles of necessity and justice (retribution for injustice). Thus, for Anaximander, the cycles of life and death (and all the flourishing and suffering in between) are explicable in terms of what must be and what ought to be. Nature is a space wherein the space causes and space of reasons are co-located. We are intuitively compelled to understand that Anaximander’s infinite does what it must, but yet we can’t help but to ask for a justification for its doing so. He seems to be groping for a single view of things, Sellars synoptic view, encompassing a sort Scientific Image and some version of panagentialism (full-blooded or quasi), the inner substance of things has good reasons for what it is doing. I have always taken a foreboding sense from Anaximander’s fragment. It is unclear how we can accommodate the grim inevitability of ceaseless change and mortality to our insistence on making sense of the world in normative or moral categories, that there is justice operating through the grind of indifferent necessity.¹⁴ In short, at the very origin point of philosophy we find the problem of evil. Can we make an apologia in terms of what ought to be for the world as it must be?

Plato likewise highlights this tension between the Scientific Image and the Manifest Image (the seeming conflict between the space of causes and the space of reasons) as the primary impetus behind philosophy as a distinctive mode of intellectual activity. In Phaedo, he has Socrates (who is offered as the personification of the philosophical way of life) recite his intellectual autobiography. The soon-to-be-executed Gadfly of Athens begins by recalling that “When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science, for I thought it splendid to know the causes of everything, and why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists.”¹⁵ In his maturity Socrates is now “far, by Zeus, form believing that I know the cause of any of those things.”¹⁶ The problem seems to be that all these scientific explanations, even though they do well enough within there own domain, fail to add up to a real explanation of the whole of things.¹⁷ This becomes clearer a few lines later in the Phaedo, where Socrates argues that “giving the responsibility of managing things” to causes like “air and ether and water and many other strange things” is much like saying

. . . the reason I am sitting here [i.e., in a prison awaiting execution] is because my body consists of bones and sinews, because bones are hard and separated by joints, that the sinews are such as to to contract and relax, that they surround the bones along with flesh and skin which hold them together, then as the bones are hanging in their sockets the relaxation and contraction of the sinews enable me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent . . . . but he would neglect to mention the true causes, that, after the Athenians decided it was better to condemn me, for this reason it seemed best to me to sit here and more right to remain and to endure whatever penalty they ordered.¹⁸

In Plato’s Crito, Socrates is given an opportunity to escape from prison and evade his execution. He declines this offer of salvation, because he believes that escaping, and thereby undermining law and order in Athens, would be like betraying his parents. Later in Phaedo, Socrates sits in prison as he is about to be executed. Why? It is certainly true that, in some sense of “because,” he is sitting in prison because his bones, muscles, sinews, etc. (and he is willing to specify this physical description all the way to the elements) are in certain states. Certainly all of those facts are sufficient conditions for his sitting in prison, i.e., “If Socrates’s muscles, bones, sinews etc. are in this state, then he is sitting in prison” might be a necessary truth. For Socrates, that is all well and good, but you don’t really know why he sits in prison on the morning of his execution unless you also understand his disposition toward what is best, The Good. He is in prison not only because his body parts (and their parts, and their parts, and so on) are in a certain state, but also, and more primarily, because that is what is for the best. Both the necessary and the normative must be taken into account, and Plato gives pride of place to the latter. As Plato has Socrates say it, without the physical elements “I should not be able to do what I decided,” and yet “to say that they are the cause of what I do, and not that I haven chosen the best course, even though I act with my mind, is to speak lazily and carelessly.”¹⁹ If we asked why Socrates is still in prison, the account of his bones and sinews would not satisfy. We don’t understand why he is there until we include his sense of The Good.

I’m not going to attempt to defend Plato’s attempt to put necessity and normativity into a stereoscopic vision.²⁰ My point is only to emphasize that Plato sees this project as the central philosophical task. Moreover, like other proponents of the Manifest Image, Plato does not restrict this normative demand to his account of human action. For Plato, even if we have the full story about the physical necessities of nature in hand, there is still a lingering “Why?” that needs to be asked. We can still ask why the world is such that those are the necessities we have: Why this world of physical necessities rather some other? For Plato, the only satisfying answer is a normative or moral reason. As John Leslie puts it:

Plato’s suggestion, I take it, is that the actual world of existing things is a good one; that the existence of such a world is therefore required ethically, because calling a thing intrinsically good just is calling its existence required ethically; those seeking “what gives existence to things” need look no further.²¹

This extension of the space of reasons to encompass the entire world leads Plato to entertain a robustly panagential cosmology. Early in Timaeus, Plato has the title character of the dialogue (Socrates, curiously, takes the backseat in this conversation) tell us, speaking of the “craftsman” of the world, that

. . . it’s clear to all that it was the the eternal model he looked at, for of all the things that have come to be, our universe is the most beautiful, and of cause the craftsman is the most excellent. This, then is how it has come to be: it is a work of craft, modeled after that which is changeless and is grasped by a rational account, that is, by wisdom. ²²

We need to be cautious (more so than has been done over the centuries) with Timaeus’s talk of the craftsman of the world. Bear in mind that Plato has Timaeus go out of his way a number of times in his long speech to remind us that he is spinning a “likely tale on these matters,” because how the world came into being is beyond the human ken.²³ In fact, I do not detect a theistic argument, strictly speaking, in the Timaeus at all. The prelude to Timaeus’s first creation myth does not argue to the conclusion that there must be a craftsman of the world, but instead only questions whether the “craftsman” (whaterever mover is behind the natural order) has patterned the universe on a principle of universal perfection (The Good).²⁴ Timaeus is arguing that the universe is as it ought to be, it is ordered to the best. In other words, the questions is not whether there is a first mover (even though Plato does seem to think there is one), but whether the universe is itself on the whole within the space of reasons, and what consequences that thesis holds for the nature of the cosmos. For this reason, even philosophers who do not fit the bill of traditional theists can be seen as following on the Platonic version of the Manifest Image.²⁵

Timeaus then spins a “likely tale” in which the “preeminent reason for the origin of the world’s coming to be” is that “the god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible.”²⁶ In other words, the universe exists because it is good. Wisdom and reason are the ultimate explanation, and as such Timeaus goes further “in keeping with our likely account . . . we must say divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing, endowed with soul and intelligence.”²⁷ The natural world for Timaeus is an intelligent organism acting for reasons as only living things act for the sake of reasons. Only a world that acts for the sake of the best reasons makes sense (otherwise we’re left with a lingering “But why this one rather than a better world than might have been?” questions), so the Universal Animal acts for the sake of The Good. Timaeus develops the cosmological myth to account for the coming to be of lesser, though immortal, rational animals (gods), human beings (mortal rational animals), non-human animals, etc. all as dictated by The Good. He even explains death, disease, etc. (the seemingly irrational realities of the world) in terms of how they can be seen as inevitable by-products of the pursuit of perfection, or certain beings (humans) falling short of that norm.

Timeaus, however, does not give us just one creation myth. He starts with another tale “concerning the things that have come about by Necessity. For this world is of mixed birth: it is the off-spring of a union of Necessity and Intellect.”²⁸ Even though Timaeus argues that “intellect prevailed over necessity,” he believes a complete story of the coming to be of the universe can be told exclusively in terms of a sort of Scientific Image, and in fact he thinks that such a story must be told. The necessary has a vote in how the world unfolds. As such, Timaeus give us a second cosmological account, ultimately grounded in the geometric properties of matter, that explains the coming to be of the whole of the universe within the categories of mathematical necessity. Moreover, Plato seems to aspire to the Sellarsian synoptic vision, as he finally puts a third cosmological tale into Timeaus’s mouth; this time he accounts for how the world comes to be in terms of normativity (intellect) and necessity (physical law) working in tandem, and once again he explains the whole of the universe from the grand astronomical scheme down to the nitty-gritty of zoological differentiation, human anatomy, happiness, health, disease, and death all in terms of the interplay of these two principles.²⁹ It is only with this third synoptic account (even though Plato clearly prioritizes the Manifest Image over the Scientific), that Timeaus believes we have a complete explanation of the cosmos. Notice that the resulting cosmological picture is one in which the space of reasons is coexstenive with the cosmos. Even the most irrational and seemingly sadistic aspects of nature can, at least in principle, be explained the categories of rational justification. Plato’s panagential cosmology is a theodicy for the natural world.

I was reluctant to interpret Plato’s approach in Timaeus as narrowly theistic, but it certainly is not hard to see theistic arguments as a case of what he has mind, and that is the more traditional view. Again, with Leslie: “God, we could say, is the Platonic truth that the ethical requirement of the world is itself responsible for the world’s existence. Or God is the world’s creative ethical requiredness, or perhaps a creatively powerful ethical requirement for the world to exist.’³⁰ Certainly God, taken as a creating agent who guarantees the normative standing of the cosmos (either through a design or the ordering of all beings to God through their natural agency a la Aristotle’s account of the Unmoved Mover), is the most common version of the prioritization of the Manifest Image in the Western philosophical tradition. No doubt, Leibniz had something like this in mind in his theistic arguments.³¹ Even Aquinas, who is not one to claim the world is morally perfect, does argue that the world is a space of reasons with God as the final ground of its normative standing.³² Even if the world is not itself perfect or not itself agential, the theist guarantees the rationality of the world as an instrument of a perfectly rational agent. Whether narrow theistic or not, the basic Platonic synthesis of the Manifest and Scientific reasons that is the common thread of traditional philosophy leads us to expect that the reasons for the necessities of the natural world, however grim, can in principle be made explicit.³³

II. William James’s Pluralistic Anti-Theodicy

William James’s parsing of the central opposition in philosophy prefigures Sellars’ division between that Manifest Image and the Scientific Image. On the one hand, James us as attracted to what he calls materialism or naturalism:

The laws of physical nature are what run things, materialism says. The highest production of human genius might be ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better be called naturalism.³⁴

On the other hand, we have “‘theism,’ or what in a wider sense may be termed ‘spiritualism.’ Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its higher element.”³⁵ In other words, for James, we are confronted by two conflicting proposals: one an image of the world according to which matter operating by laws of causal necessity delivers the total picture, as opposed to another wherein personal agents and reasons are the fundamental explanatory elements. The simultaneous attraction of these conflicting images is the “radical question of life — the question whether this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe . . . ,” which is really just “the question of materialism” as opposed to spiritualism (theism): “Is the world a simple brute actuality, an existence de facto about which the deepest thing that can be said is that it happens so to be; or is the judgement of better or worse, of ought, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment is or is not?”³⁶ James then, like his philosophical progenitors (including Plato) and his philosophical progeny (Sellars), sees the question of whether the world is a space of reasons or only a space of causes as the primary philosophical concern.

Already when James introduced his iteration of the problem of the seemingly conflicting images, he worried that the question of the priority of one over the other had become “little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences” that lends itself to no reasoned resolution.³⁷ Ever the radical empiricist, James attempts to surmount the perennial philosophical impasse by applying his pragmatic method, according to which one interprets each of two opposed philosophical proposals in terms of their “respective practical consequences” and then asks “What difference does it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”³⁸ For James, the difference the truth of a claim would make fo how we deal with the world is the essential ingredient of its meaning: “Our conception of these effects . . . is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance.”³⁹ A claim that makes no difference for how one would deal with the world is meaningless, and two exactly behaviorally significant claims then have exactly the same meaning. If the claim There is a snake under the chair leads to no different action on our part than There is a bunny under the chair, then the pragmatist takes these claims amount to the same thing.⁴⁰ Importantly, the differences a claim can make for our practical dealings include how we would go about verifying that claim, i.e., essential to the meaning of a claim is what we would have to do to find out whether it is true. Thus, the conditions for experientially (experimentally) verifying a claim are integral to its meaning. Someone who doesn’t know how even to begin to verify whether there is a snake under the chair doesn’t know what There is a snake under the chair means. This is James’s empiricism.

Moreover, for James, “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify,” and the verification process culminates in a “function of a leading that is worthwhile.”⁴¹ In other words, if operating as though a claim were true is beneficial, then James takes that claim as provisionally true. Truth is fit to reality, and the fact that something fits is the sign that it is true. For example, when discussing St. Theresa of Avila, who presents a stark mix of heroic personal virtue and extravagant mystical and miraculous claims which she cites as the grounds for those practical virtues, James says:

It should be no otherwise with religious opinions. Their value can only be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them, judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by those other texts should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.⁴²

James points out that in “the natural sciences and industrial arts,” the the sanity or insanity of the scientist or engineer are irrelevant to our evaluation of his or her claims; scientific “opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment” however extravagant those opinions may be.⁴³ Part of this “experimental verification” is prediction, e.g., “According to my hypothesis, if we set conditions X, then consequences Y will likely occur.” If these predictions hold true, then we should take up this hypothesis for as long as those predictions hold their ground. Does accepting this belief go well for us practically, do its predictions make for good expectations?James believes that the same goes for religious claims. St. Teresa essentially makes a prediction that certain practices will lead to practical or moral fruits based on her mystical and miraculous experiences, e.g. “Because of my mystical experiences, I say that doing these things will lead to a better life.” On James’ pragmatism, St. Teresa’s claim to mystical experience should be evaluated, just like a scientific claim, in terms of its predictive success, including its practical predictions. Thus, if indeed St. Teresa’s practices make good on her practical predictions, i.e. living this way does in fact produce great fruits, then one is at least provisionally committed to the truth of her mystical claims. For James, we don’t get to help ourselves to the moral fruits of a view, religious or otherwise, without accepting the ontological consequences of holding that view. Of course, the practical upshot is not the only consideration (logical coherence counts too), but in some cases, the only experimental verification that we have to go on is the practical consequences of entertaining the hypothesis.⁴⁴ Counterintuitively, this extreme commitment to experiential verification leads James in The Varieties of Religious Experience to take seriously all order of mystical claims that we would expect any hard-minded empiricist to laugh out of court.

Returning to our main consideration, James would take up the question of the priority between the Manifest Image (spiritualism or theism) and the Scientific Image (materialism or naturalism) by considering the predictions these two hypotheses make and whether those predictions are verified in our experience, including our practical or moral experience. Cleverly, James divides the question between what naturalism (materialism) and theism (spiritualism) predict about the past and what they predict about the future. With respect to the former, James argues that “it makes not a single jot of difference as far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author.”⁴⁵ He supposes that both the theist and the naturalist have broad and internally consistent accounts of how the world came to be and how it has brought us to the present moment: the theist “shows that God has made it” and equally plausibly the naturalist shows “how it resulted from blind physical forces.”⁴⁶ Naturalism and theism make the same predictions about the past. If James is right on this point, then, when we view the world entirely retrospectively, naturalism and theism (the Scientific Image and the Manifest Image) amount to the same claim, and the debate between “materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant,” so we would then all do well to move on to discussions that might actually mean something.⁴⁷

When we look to the future, things get more interesting: “A world with a God in it to say the last word may indeed burn or freeze but when we think of him as still mindful of the old ideals . . . tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolute final things,” whereas for the naturalist the world is ultimately an “utter final wreck and tragedy . . . not a fulfiller of our remotest interests.”⁴⁸ If we live in a world exhausted by the space of causes, there is no reason to believe or even hope that the future will be much different from the past. We can expect nothing more than a repetition of the same dire processes Anaximander notice as inevitably grinding up everything into death. A world that is itself a space of reasons (that is “mindful of the old ideals”) affords us hope that everything will come to make sense; we can hope for a satisfying reason justifying all the cruel necessities of life. As James puts it: “But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism’s sun sets in a sea of disappointment.”⁴⁹ The spiritualist predicts that there will be some final realization of what makes sense of the cosmic drama. Thus, naturalism and theism do make different predictions about the future, and which of these predictions we commit ourselves to makes a difference for how we act. If the the world is hopeless, there is little reason for us to act in ways that will improve it. Nature is not going anywhere, and it is not tolerant of our projects. Whatever we do, our expectations will not be fulfilled. Things, ultimately, will not get better, whatever we do. Theism, however, holds out the “possibility that one can rationally claim is the possibility that things may be better. That possibility . . . is one that, as the actual world goes, we have ample grounds for desiderating.”⁵⁰ Theism predicts, because it places the world in the space of reasons, that our doings can make a difference in mitigating the dire state of the world, and this prediction therefore encourages ameliorative action. For James, we could ask for no better evidence in favor of prioritizing the Manifest Image over the Scientific Image.

That is all well and God, but James also cautions that there is an action-blocking possibility in theism’s most common form. James believes that suicidal nihilism is “essentially a religious disease” that “consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.”⁵¹ The problem is that theism can lead us to expect to find the reasons the grim realities of nature within nature’s ordinary habits. As we have seen earlier, the proponent of the Manifest image assumes there are reasons for the necessities of nature implicit in nature’s doings, and we can at least partially articulate them. Or at least that is our hope. Sadly, says James, those hopes are perennially dashed. It is not hard to explain “the nightmare view of nature” entirely on “organic sources,” but there is a stubborn “contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.”⁵² The religious person suffers from a heavy burden of cognitive dissonance brought on by the high expectations for the character of God theism suggests and the equally undeniable fact, at least prima facie, that the natural world reflects badly on the intentions of whoever is running it. All theodicy fails to make sense of the cruelties of life, and thus, for James, a pessimistic nihilist teetering on the precipice of suicide is likely a disappointed theist who could no longer stand the contradiction between the cruelty of nature and the supposedly perfection of its “craftsman.” James believes that the notion that this world is a space of reasons strains credulity to the breaking point, and therefore theism (in its standard form) ends us up in the same paralytic pessimism as naturalism, though with the added resentment that follows on existential disappointment.

James recognizes another religious hypothesis that holds promise against the atheistic and theistic threats of despair, what he calls “the supernaturalist sense”:

declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this world’s experience, is only a portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists.⁵³

James’s point is that the world of nature (the space of causes described by physics) that so dangerously disappoints our moral expectations, is a regional perspective, a small slice of a much more complicated and richer world. Maybe our mundane lives are actually just cutouts from a total Super Nature, which is under normal conditions beyond our ken.⁵⁴ James proposes that we are much like dogs that “are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to our intelligence — events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part.”⁵⁵ Our pets are in our world, but their take on this world is truncated by their sensory and cognitive capacities that were not honed to get the entire picture; they do not get what is really going on when they sit at our feat as we discuss the events of the day, even though they can see and smell us. We aren’t supernatural viz. our pets, but we do access a broader space in Super Nature than they do, and therefore there are possibilities for sense-making to which we are privy that are out of their range.⁵⁶ We see what is invisible to the dog, because our world encompasses its world while going far beyond. Notice, however, in our own life “a still wider world may be there, as unseen as our world is by [the dog]; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.”⁵⁷ Because we have reason to believe that our take on things is just one more limited take on the whole, we are haunted by inescapable maybe as to what is really going on in the the complete picture, Super Nature. Our take on nature, for James, does not show itself to be rational (the world as a space of reasons), but that’s just our take. Maybe there is more to the whole show that makes ultimate sense. Maybe there is an agent or agents running this business that operates in an ultimate space of reasons, even while our repeated requests to speak to the manager go unanswered.⁵⁸ This maybe is what James believes makes meaningful action, and therefore meaningful life possible, and therefore the hypothesis of Super Nature has a pragmatic justification over both standard forms of theism (Nature reflects Gods good design and benevolent intentions.) an atheism (There is no manager.).

We then have something like a vocation to carry on as if this maybe were a certainty, and that is a considerable fight given the grim realities of our narrow picture of things. “But it feels like a real fight” and there is “something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts form atheisms and fears.”⁵⁹ This feeling of something more is not just the “gut sense’ that many of us have that “this can’t be all there is to it,” nor is it only proposal for how we can best live (though that would be no strike against it for James!). As we discussed above, people like St. Teresa attest to having directly experienced agencies form broader Super Nature, and the practical effects of such experiences on the lives of experiencers are verified and quite often ameliorative. James always reminds us “that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself,” so we have “no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen world or mystical world unreal.”⁶⁰

James’s contention is not really with theism per se, and he does “call this higher part of the universe by the name of God.”⁶¹ Rather, James’s beef is with traditional philosophy, in particular those who attempts to address the problem of theodicy: “The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world.” ⁶² The problem is not with God, but the supposition that we are going to make sense of things by bringing the entire world, the space of reasons and the space of causes, into a synoptic vision. James questions the Platonic project, and sees it as the cause of some of our worst nihilistic cramps. The aspiration toward ultimate theoretical unification in single space of reasons inevitably leads us to think of Super Nature as “the materialist world over again, with altered expression,” i.e., a mythological vision in which the world beyond is just like this one, but only invisible.⁶³ This disposition only leads to disappointment. All of that is finally a lapse into humanism and anthropocentrism, the presumption that what makes sense to us (in just one of our ways of sense-making, i.e., science or logically rigorous metaphysics) is the only sense-making to be done. On the contrary, James holds out that what makes ultimate sense of things is something more than we can handle. The ball is not in our court. By default, we only get a maybe.

James takes it that we can answer “Why?” in the normative sense only in an encounter with the “further side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected . . .,” but that ‘more’ is not something we can expect to make sense in our ordinary categories.⁶⁴ It seems then that making normative sense of life will come not through a sort of synoptic synthesis a la Timaeus, but possibly through an ontological and explanatory pluralism:

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.⁶⁵

James wonders whether we do live in a panagentialist world (or really a plurality of such worlds), though those agencies are not right here neatly apparent within the confines of our natural take on things. Rather, they seep in or show up in certain experiences that that don’t make much sense to us, beyond their effects, for good or ill, on the lives of their subjects. The attempt to put these experiences, and the other worlds from which they arrive, into a single stance we can hold present-to-hand is the hubristic anthropocentrism leads down the path of atheistic or religious despair. James is confident that there is “some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious,” but “the outlines of the superhuman consciousness . . . must remain, however, very vague, and the number of functionally distinct ‘selves’ it comports and carries has to be left entirely problematic.”⁶⁶ The plurality and ambiguity of Super Nature is bothersome to those of us of Platonic mindset, but that is what, for James, will make the practical difference in our lives. We should then see James as prioritizing neither the Scientific Image nor the Manifest Image (nor even the Original Image), but the Pluralistic Image as an answer to the central philosophical conundrum.

If we can see the world through that lens, maybe then Job can get an answer from the whirlwind that makes sense of what has happened. At any rate, knowing that maybe that answer is forthcoming will catalyze his will to rebuild after the storm.

If you find value in the essays publish through this newsletter, you might consider supporting my work by buying on of my books:

Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techo-Nihilism

Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World

In any event, I appreciate that you have taken the time to read my work!

1. C. J. Jung, The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell (Penguin, 1971), pp. 530-531

2. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception, and Reality (Ridgeview, 1991), p. 5. I provide an extended analysis of Sellars’ canonical essay in this newsletter. Here is the first of the seven parts.

3. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” pp. 9-10;. Sellars’ emphasis.

4. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception, and Reality (Ridgeview, 1991), para. 36.

5. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” p. 12.

6. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” pp. 12-13; Sellars’ emphasis.

7. I am taking the term “panagentialism” from Philip Goff, Why?: The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford, 2013). Goff’s final chapter in that superb book covers much the same ground as what follows in this essay, but I will leave a treatment of his thought for another piece where I can give it the detail it deserves.

8. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” p. 13.

9. I defend something along these lines at length in Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism (Cascade (Veritas), 2023), especially chapter 3.

10. When we consider sophisticated non-human animals or any other sort of “alien intelligence” we might confront, we should be careful not to jump from “X’s activities are not explicitly rational to us” to “X’s actives are not explicitly rational to X.” We cannot presume up front that our modes of articulating reasons are the modes of articulating reasons. This raises delicious questions about what is or is not in a space of reasons, which I will leave aside for now. You can get some sense of where there inquiry might take us in an earlier edition of the newsletter. Tim Morton’s Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (Verso, 2019) and chapter 8 of Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) are indispensable on this issue. Harman’s notion of polypsychism is a position I am planning to explore at length in future iterations of this newsletter.

11. Possibly the paradigmatic instance of quasi-panagentialism is Aristotle’s views in the Physics and Metaphysics according to which even fundamental elemental beings (earth, air, water, and fire) are ultimately moved by a desire for what is best (the life of The God). We will revisit this notion as it shows up in Plato in what follows in this section of the essay.

12. Attributed to Anaximander, Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, in Readings in Ancient Great Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 2nd ed. (Hackett, 2000), p. 10.

13. I have no business weighing into that fray, but for a sense of the vastly different conclusions serious thinkers have drawn from these remarks see Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander (Westholme, 2007), pp. 65-70; and Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides (Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 1-76.

14. Quentin Meillassoux is correct when he says Anaximander is “a thinker of the arche as apeiron, which is to say the necessary becoming of destruction of every entity,” Time Without Becoming (Mimesis International, 2014), p. 26.

15. Plato, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube, in Plato: The Complete Works (Hackett, 1997), 96a.

16. Plato, Phaedo, 96e.

17. I have been helped in my understanding of this moment in the Phaedo by “Plato Seeking for One Explanation in Phaedo,” which can be found here. The name of the author alludes me. If someone is familiar with him or her, please let me know!

18. Plato, Phaedo, 98b-e.

19. Plato, Phaedo, 99a-c.

20. I’m not sure Plato himself claims to have done so successfully.

21. John Leslie, excerpt from “A Cosmos Existing through Ethical Necessity,” in The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything at All?, ed. J. Leslie and R.L. Kuhn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 126. See Also Leslie’s extensive treatment of Plato in Immortality Defended (Blackwell, 2007).

22. Plato, Timaeus, trans. D. Zehyl, in Plato: The Complete Dialogues, 29a.

23. Plato, Timaeus, 29d.

24. Plato, Timaeus, 27d-29d. I take Timaeus’s point early in this passage as the claim that anything that changes must change toward or for the sake of something, and that end is its ulimate cause. The question is then whether the world is changed for the sake of perfection or something itself subject to change. Like Aristotle’s argument for the first mover in the Metaphysics, teleology is what is running Timaeus’s inquiry, not efficient causality. The question for Timaeus is what the “craftsman” is up to in moving the world, not whether there is a craftsman.

25. For example, see the famous quotation from Hegel with which I open this essay.

26. Plato, Timaeus, 30a.

27. Plato, Timaeus, 30b-c.

28. Plato, Timaeus, 48a.

29. Plato, Timaeus, 60aff.

30. Leslie, Immortality Defended, p. 19. Leslie’s emphasis.

31. Leibniz’s “Ultimate Origination of Things” is the easiest place to find him arguing as much. In light of this essay, Leibniz’s praise for Plato’s Phaedo in section 20 of Discourse on Metaphysics is noteworthy. See Leslie’s Immortality Defended for his interpretation of much of the theistic tradition in metaphysics along these lines.

32. For Aquinas on whether ours is the best of all possible worlds, see Summa Theologica, Ia. 19. 4. I have in mind here in particular Aquinas’s Fourth Way. For a comprehensive account of that proof, see Michael Augros, Who Designed the Designer: A Rediscovered Path to God’s Existence (Ignatius, 2015). I also recommend Brian Davies, Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford, 2011). Aquinas’s Fifth Way can also be seen in this light. There Aquinas argues that since nature is full of non-conscious beings acting for reasons, we must conclude that there is a divine intelligence doing the reasoning on their behalf. This argument is both a case of a Platonic theodicy for nature and significant step away from classical panagentialism, an ironic moment in the disenchantment of the world.

33. This is not to limit the prioritization of the Manifest Image, and the subsequent normative stance toward nature, to theism. I make the case, for example, that the Hegel’s metaphysics is a non-theistic theodicy here.

34. William James, Pragmatism, in Writings: 1902-1910 (Library of America, 1987), p. 526.

35. James, Pragmatism, p. 527.

36. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in Writings: 1878-1899 (Library of America, 1992), p. 533. James’s emphasis.

37. James, Pragmatism, p. 527.

38. James, Pragmatism, p. 506.

39. James, Pragmatism, p. 507.

40. It is important to note that James would include what we have to do to verify that the claim were true as part of its practical consequences, as he would likewise include our practical responses to its verification.

41. James, Pragmatism, p. 573 and 575. James’s emphasis.

42. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings: 1902-1910, pp. 24-25. James’s emphasis.

43. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 24.

44. Of course a claim’s consistency with other claims we have provisionally verified needs to be taken into account. James, however, entertains an ontological pluralism that allows that there may not be a single true account of the world, but one for every practically successful way of dealing with it. Unification may just be an operational ideal. I will return to James’s pluralism below.

45. James, Pragmatism, p. 528.

46. James, Pragmatism, p. 528.

47. James, Pragmatism, p. 529. There are reasons to doubt whether theism and atheism make the same predictions about the past when it comes to the emergence of qualitative consciousness, particularly pain qualia. See “The Evolution of Suffering, Epiphenomenalism, and the Phenomenon of LIfe; Evidential Problems for Naturalists,” Religions 2021, 12(9), 687; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090687 and James D. Madden and Patrick J. Flynn, “An Anti-Atheological Argument from Suffering” (forthcoming).

48. James, Pragmatism, pp. 532-533.

49. James, Pragmatism, pp, 533-534.

50. James, Pragmatism, p. 539. James’s emphasis.

51. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, in Writings: 1878-1899, p, 486.

52. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, pp. 486-487.

53. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, p. 495.

54. I am taking the notion of Super Nature from Jeffrey Kripal, Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Whitely Streiber and Jeffry Kripal, The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real (Teacher Perigree, 2017).

55. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, p. 499.

56. Timothy Morton makes a good case that we should be quite so quick to believe we have the richer take on things in comparison to non-humans. See Morton’s superb Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017). I give an analysis of Morton on these issue “Specters of the Thinking Machine.”

57. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, p. 500. I apply something along the lines James has in mind here to the UFO phenomenon in Unidentified Flying Hyper Object: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World (Ontocalypse, 2023).

58. Thanks to my friend Francis Petrucelli, with whom I enjoy time in the space of reasons, for coining that metaphor.

59. James, “Is Life Worth Living?”, p. 502.

60. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p, 461.

61. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 461.

62. James, The Varieties of Religions Experience, p. 460.

63. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 462.

64. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 458.

65. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 463.

66. James, A Pluralistic Universe, in Writings: 1902-1910, pp. 770-771.