Flirting with Relativism
Commenters Thales and Zach caution me against falling prey to moral relativism as I deliberately walk a path that leads around or away from moral certainty. I hear the warning bells they ring and the warnings they shout about the dangers of denying or doubting the existence of unchanging truth, but I remain, obstinately perhaps, unwilling to turn my feet away from the dark woods of doubt and step onto the sunlit roads of certainty. As comforting as certainty would be, as much as I wish the world made clear and ordered sense, I cannot stray out from under the stormy night sky. It is here, half-blind from sheets of black rain and half-deaf from roars of fierce wind, barely and rarely able to catch a glimpse of the stars, that I live the moral life and seek its truth.
If I can hold on to anything in this endless raging storm, it is the realization, or at least the hope, that certainty is not a prerequisite for the attainment of truth. I’m no relativist. I don’t deny there’s such a thing as truth. But I’m not certain of it. At most, I hope that the truth I pursue is actually there and actually knowable, in some manner or other. I’m not timid. I have no qualms about speaking what I think to be the truth, but I’m less than certain that what I think is truth really is truth. Socrates is said to have said, “I know that I do not know.” That limited knowledge may be the most that I or anyone can possess. Everything else, like starlight, eludes my grasp, even as it shines upon my hand.
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So you are an agnostic Catholic now?
I put too much stock in hope to be an agnostic.
I am married to a hopeful agnostic so either I have a problem here or you have one there:)
Let me rephrase: as I hope the world (including the divine) is knowable, I don’t consider myself an agnostic.
You just did this post to torment Thales. Shame on you:)
He is a man not a kitty with tape on his paws.
The moral principles are absolutely certain. The application of them in any given situation is not. The world rarely presents itself to us in categories of clearly defined good and evil; rather, each situation is a mixture, from which we must extract the good and avoid the evil. The habit or ability of being able to extract the good from such mixed situations is called “prudence,” for which reason it is also called the “Mother of Virtues.”
Treating actual situations as purely good or evil leads to a rigidity that actually advances evil. Disregarding the moral certainties leads to relativism, which enthrones evil.
Disregarding moral truths may lead to relativism, but I don’t see how the same road to relativism is traveled because one walks uncertain but hopeful that such truths exist.
MInor edit, Kyle: ‘perquisite’ means ‘perk’, like a job perk; here, it looks like you mean ‘prerequisite’.
Take comfort in the dark night of the soul that many great saints have passed through on their spiritual journeys. I’ll never forget my shock at hearing how Blessed Theresa of Calcutta felt total spiritual dryness for over 40 years of her life!
Thank you, Kevin. Fixed.
On a serious note, I will concede that there are individuals that have the intellect and the honorable motivations to pull off your little trick. That said, there are I am afraid, a massive amount of individuals that either lack one or both of those qualities.
There are also those who start out possessing both that manage to get themsleves corrupted somewhere along the trail. You truly are dancing on wet marble floors here.
That last silver-tongued sentence by the way, was how I wound up with that hopeful agnostic I spoke of above. Scary stuff man.
Kyle,
I actually like your very nice and very poetic post. In fact, I think it touches on what I think is a very important intellectual virtue: humility — as seen by the Socrates quote. Humility, and knowing that you don’t know anything, is the start of the pursuit of real wisdom.
So I see where you’re coming from and to a large extent I agree with you. (And as an aside, I don’t think your uncertainty necessarily means that you are “flirting with relativism”.)
I don’t deny there’s such a thing as truth. But I’m not certain of it. At most, I hope that the truth I pursue is actually there and actually knowable, in some manner or other.
When I read this, what came to mind is a certain important person declaring “I am the Truth”.
Again, a nice post!
Thank you, Thales. I know I’m not really flirting with relativism. Just being a little provocative.
In the final analysis, all one can do is choose. As St. Augustine put it: “Love and do what you like.” Knowledge is limit by nature; love is not.
Yes. We have to make choices without the benefit of certainty, but we can nevertheless make them in the spirit of love. (And, I would add, hope).
Midway through life’s journey, I found myself in a dark and shadowed wood, for the straightforward path was lost to me.
Yes, I had Dante in mind when writing this.
This may sound bizarre but perhaps there is some solace to be found in mathematical logic (of all places). Godel’s incompleteness theorems tell us (roughly) that any formal system of axioms are either incomplete or inconsistent: either they contain statements that are true but cannot be proved, or the axioms are inconsistent (meaning they can be used to prove both a statement and its negation).
Now this theorem applies only in the setting of formal mathematics, but I think it tells us something important about truth and our ability to understand it. If we are unable to “know” (prove) everything in the controlled sandbox of mathematics, then we are unable to achieve any kind of logical certainty in the broader (and wilder) areas of ethics and morality. All attempts to comprehend “the truth” will fall short: there will is a Truth (which is Jesus) which we are unable to fully understand. We can see it, and more importantly we can be in relationship with it. But we cannot domesticate it. We will not be able to use the Truth to “prove” conclusions we are sure are true, and in probing the Truth we will find ourselves in moral quandaries in which we seem to be proving that opposite conclusions are “true” or at least plausible.
As a friend of mine says, at the very least this calls for epistemological humility: the mind of God and His creation is very large and complex, and I am neither.
Well said.
I wonder if God always knows the right thing to do! Suppose you feel you have to break a longstanding promise to your spouse to help your father to something that, while not an emergency, you feel is important enough to warrant breaking your promise to your spouse. Or suppose you have to break a longstanding promise to your father to help your spouse. There is no mathematical way of arriving at a precisely correct solution, and even if there were, what keeps the two mutually exclusive options from being exactly the same weight? I am not sure omniscience would help. It seems to me that the best anyone can do in such a situation is to do what feels right. A logical analysis could take hours or days, and the decision might have to be made in a matter of minutes.
Maybe moral reasoning is even fuzzier than math, with the incompleteness theorem, or physics, with the uncertainty principle.
I’ve always wondered if God cares less about our actions than we think. Some decisions are better than others, but it seems that God’s will can be done regardless of the outcomes of our decisions.
We were raised to think that God is terribly offended when we do something wrong. But I’ve always struggled with the idea of an insecure God. Perhaps he’s not offended, but rather empathizes with the suffering that we bring on ourselves if we choose the lesser path.
This, of course, takes the idea of justice out of the equation. But, at the end of the day, I wonder if our idea of justice isn’t the same as God’s. After all, what happened to Jesus wasn’t just in any way, shape, or form.
A further thought on this – it’s not just mathematics, but the observable world itself that appears to be rooted in relativity. If the same physical object can have two different sizes, shapes, and masses, depending on the perspective of the observer, doesn’t that indicate that relativity is built into the universe itself? What does that say about the mind of God? When we speak of objective reality, do we have any precedent for it besides our own insecurity?
I do think that the one thing we need to do is to choose the truth we are willing to stand for, rather than let one get chosen for us, which may or may not be truth. We’ve got to choose the hill we’re willing to die on.
Going over the debates of LiveAction’s tactics, and then about Wisconsin doctors writing fake sick notes for protesters, it becomes apparent how effective the world is in getting us to abandon that which we hold dear for their own causes (which may even be good causes).
So John, let’s just cut to the chase here. Who is abandoning what, and what would be those causes that may even be good causes. Could we take a momentary pause in the lamentations and clue me in?
I think that LiveAction and those who supported it abandoned commitment to truth for the cause of the unborn.
I think the doctors who wrote false notes abandoned their commitment to the truth and their fiath in their profession to support the unions’ cause.
It is a pattern of behavior I have seen too often from all sides.
So John I will ask a new question before I ask again the ones you did not answer.
How many lives did the lies of LiveAction save and is it not also possible that these lies may have endangered the lives of others?
You will of course also denounce the practice of employing ad hominem attacks to discredit a valid or worthy argument correct?
I presume you also will support the rights of the workers in Wisconsin as your Church has correct?
I had answered your questions, in post the moderators were wise enough to moderate (at my request).
I will not be responding to your challenges, since I am here to discuss how we may go about living a moral life, not to prove to you the fitness of my moral character.
In general, I would say that both causes have discredited themselves by engaging in dishonesty, but that this does not challenge the fundamental justness of their causes.
We can use this dishonesty (or the exploitation thereof) as an occasion to score some points against causes or people we don’t like. I would prefer to us it as an occasion to reflect on how we are all tempted to compromise are values when we are swept up in a cause, and how we might work to overcome that temptation.
John I fail to see how asking how many lives Livection saved or whether any were jeopardized, let alone asking for you to state whether you support the Wokers in Wisconsin has anything to do with the fitness of your moral character.
I will interpret your failing to answer them as a dodge of said questions, which in a way, really does answer my questions for me.
Thank you.
John I am not the guy who judges the fitness of your moral character. That is way above my pay-grade.
My asking how many lives LiveAction saved or whether any were jeopardized could in no sane way offer me or God a look into your moral fitness.
I was just attempting to determine what ideology your agenda was actually based upon. It appears you do not desire for that to be something that is transparent.
Oh and as for those doctors writing fake sick notes, I am quite sure if these are real reports and not just another stunning example of LiveAction (Breitbart scumpond) style tactics that both doctors and “patients” will be severely and properly disciplined as well they should be.
That said I am quite sure being the good Catholic you are you will not only denounce the weak and unethical practice of employing ad hominem attacks to discredit a valid or worthy argument, that such linkages (whether the offense is confirmed or not) are commonly used for, but I am quite sure that you will also publicly back your Church and it’s call to stand be these workers…right?
Kyle,
If you admit you don’t have all the truth all nailed down then you admit you are open to God, and that’s a good and humble place to be. Those who think they know it all have closed themselves off to God.
Some Saint once said that God is so far beyond our human concepts that any concept we have of God is likely to be more an idol than God.
God Bless
If this is an extended meditation on “we see through a glass, darkly,” I think it rather nice.
Nevertheless we should not be ashamed of what we do know, and we do know some things, and we know some things with certainty. I think Aristotle can help one realize how much there is that we do know. He’s a good antidote to skepticism.
As you grasped I am more concerned about our disposition vis-a-vis our culture. There is enough skepticism to go around. There is not enough truth or confidence in the truth.
We should indeed not be ashamed to admit what we do not know. That is the first step on the path of the pursuit of truth and wisdom.
I am on that path now, and I can still see where my path started but the end, well it appears to be well beyond the horizon:)
“I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.”
Flannery O’Connor
Wonderful quote. And post. It reminded me of Newman, actually, and he’s beatified!