--- In ppiindia@yahoogroups.com, Nugroho Dewanto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> maaf pak danardono, anda mengaku sebagai pengagum spinoza
> schopenhauer dan hermann hesse... tapi kok pernyataan-pernyataan
> anda lebih mirip renungan august comte dan nietszhe...? dua orang
> filsuf positivis dan eksistensialis yang tergolong rasionalis
ekstrem...
--------------------
Tambahan mas Nugroho:
Saya tak mengikuti faham nihiliist dari Nietzsche. Terlalu sederhana,
dan tak membawa pencerahan. Kita layak juga mendengar apa yang
dikatakan oleh Sir Karl Popper, yang mengkomentari Imannuel Kant.
Nah, ada bacaan yang sangat mencerahkan dalam hubungan agama dan
falsafah, seperti misalnya:
"The Roots of Rudolf Otto's Theory of Numinosity in Immanuel Kant,
Jakob Fries, and Leonard Nelson,".
Selamat membaca.
salam
danardono
The notion of the sacred or the numinous as a category for
understanding religion was substantially launched by Rudolf Otto
(1869-1937) in his classic Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige) in 1917.
Otto, indeed, coined the term "numinous," which has now become part
of common usage. Otto's influence on thought about religion extends
from C.G. Jung (1875-1961) to the "Chicago School" of history of
religion founded by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). On the other hand,
Otto's influence on the philosophy of religion has been less strong,
perhaps because he was professionally more of a theologian (not
rigorous enough for philosophers) and is too easily misunderstood and
dismissed as describing some kind of mysticism. Even in the history
of religion, Otto's own analysis often does not persuade because of
his clear preferences for Christianity and his devaluation of
religions that do not measure up to Christian paradigms.
The history of Rudolf Otto's theory of the sacred begins, however,
more than a century earlier, with the great philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804). Otto's own confidence in his ability to talk about God
has its origin in Kant's own theory about the basis of the concept of
God in human reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant had
reworked the traditional distinction between the immanent (within the
world) and the transcendent (outside the world) by distinguishing
between phenomena and things-in-themselves. "Phenomena" are how it is
that objects appear in our own conscious minds. We do not have access
to the world outside of the experiences we enjoy through our own
consciousness, and Kant believed that consciousness itself, or the
possibility of conscious experience, imposes certain conditions on
the manner in which phenomenal objects appear to us. Among those
conditions are the forms of space and time and the abstract forms of
connections between events and objects such as the concept of
substance and the relation between cause and effect. David Hume (1711-
1776) had challenged philosophers to show why it is that we believe
in principles such as the one that every event must have a cause.
Kant's answer, then, was that the mind itself constructs a phenomenal
reality according to just such a rule.
Things-in-themselves, in turn, are the way that reality exists apart
from our experience, our consciousness, our minds, and all the
conditions that our minds might impose on phenomenal objects. The
question occurs, then, whether concepts like substance and cause and
effect apply to things-in-themselves the same way that they do to
phenomena. Kant did not think that we could know. However, he did
notice something very curious: it isn't just that we apply the
principle of cause and effect to phenomena, it is that we apply in a
certain way. In phenomenal reality, cause and effect are applied in a
continuous series. Every effect has a cause, but every cause also has
a cause, and so forth, ad infinitum. This adds up to a philosophical
principle of determinism, that everything is causally determined to
act in a certain way. Kant believed that science sees things that
way, but we do not, for the idea of free will contradicts
determinism. Free will involves a free cause, i.e. a cause that is
not determined by some prior cause. We can also call that an
unconditioned cause, since it is free of a prior causal condition,
and it occurred to Kant that a characteristic of phenomenal reality
was that everything was conditioned by something else. In that, Kant
hit upon the same point that had been made earlier in Buddhist
philosophy: in the reality that we see, everything is conditioned by
everything else. One example of this in Buddhist thought is the
doctrine of Relative Existence or No Self Nature: Nothing has a
essence, nature, or character by itself. Things in isolation are
shűnya, "empty." The nature of things only exists in relation to
everything else that exists. Existence as we know it is thus
completely relative and conditioned by everything else. Only Nirvâna
would be unconditioned, although we cannot know what it is like.
If an unconditioned cause cannot occur in phenomenal reality, then it
could only occur among things-in-themselves. But for all we know,
even if cause and effect do apply among things-in-themselves,
determinism may even be true there also. Other kinds of unconditioned
objects, like God or the soul -- God is not conditioned by anything,
and the soul is free of most of the conditions of phenomenal reality,
like corruptibility -- might also exist among things-in-themselves,
but we cannot be sure about that either. Thus, Kant did not believe
that it was possible to prove things about things-in-themselves. If
we try to do so, we create what Kant called "dialectical illusion,"
involving contradictions in reason itself, e.g. between determinism
and free will, which Kant called Antinomies. Kant's Fourth Antinomy
lays out equally compelling arguments for and against the idea of a
Necessary Being, i.e. a God. Nevertheless, Kant believed that the
existence of things like God, freedom, and the soul could not be
disproved; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he decides
that the Moral Law provides us a basis for making certain decisions
about transcendent objects that mere theoretical reason could not do.
Thus, we believe in free will because we must if we are to use moral
concepts like responsibility, guilt, praise, blame, retribution,
punishment, etc.; for according to determinism, no one is actually
responsible for their actions, and scientific explanations will
always reduce people to creatures of remote causes, e.g. genetics,
childhood, society, drugs, disease, etc. All three of what Kant
called the "Ideas" of pure reason in the First Critique--God,
freedom, and immorality--Kant comes to believe are motivated as
objects of rational belief, on the basis of moral considerations, in
the Second Critique.
The next step towards Otto comes with an obscure post-Kantian
philosopher, Jakob Fries (1773-1843). Friesian theory is little known
today, but Fries does rate honorable mention by perhaps the greatest
recent philosopher, Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), who says, apropos of
G.W.F. Hegel's dialectical method: "For the truth is, I think, that
it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as
Schopenhauer, or J.F. Fries)..." [Karl Popper, The Open Society and
Its Enemies Vol II, Princeton University Press, 1966 (1945), p. 27].
Popper himself, in his seminal The Logic of Scientific Discovery
(1934), says that he considers his own system of thought a successor
to the Friesian pattern, probably because Fries revived the
Aristotelian principle that not every proposition needs to be proven.
Popper believed that scientific theories do not need to be proven
because they are actually falsified instead. As with Schopenhauer,
Fries was attempting to come to terms the problems in the Critical
Philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Fries was not impressed by Kant's arguments for belief based on
practical reason. Like Kant, however, he did believe that the notions
of God, freedom, and immorality are necessitated by reason. He
concluded, in his Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung [1805; available in
English as Knowledge, Belief, and Aesthetic Sense, translated by Kent
Richter, Jürgen Dinter Verlag, 1989], that we simply must accept that
these concepts spring from theoretical reason directly as, indeed, a
kind of rational belief (Glaube), which we will not be able to
understand in the way that we understand science or the world of
experience (what Fries called Wissen, "knowledge"). On the other
hand, Fries was put off by the bloodless rationalism and moralism of
Kant's theory. Kant had provided a place for feeling in his system,
in the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790); but his view
was that the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime did not arise
from any direct relationship to external reality but only from a
subjective harmony of our own mental faculties. Fries did not think
such a theory was good enough. He thought that aesthetic and
religious feelings were real cognitions of their objects but that
they existed in dissociation from any concepts that would make them
real matters of Wissen or understanding. Kant himself had earlier
believed in such an aesthetic realism, but he later decided that only
morality related directly to things-in-themselves.
Thus, after a fashion, Fries extended Kant's own theory of the mind:
Kant had thought that experience arose from the synthesis, the active
unification, of sensations according to rules provided by pure
concepts of the understanding. Kant then figured that reason had some
concepts, the Ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, for which we
have no corresponding sensations and so no corresponding experience
or understanding. Fries merely added that there are corresponding
sensations, aesthetic and religious feelings, but that synthesis,
experience, and understanding still do not actually occur between the
sensations and concepts. Fries calls these feelings that we have
independent of reason and understanding Ahndung, or "intimation."
They are intimations of the transcendent.
Where Kant had thought that it was only through reason and morality
that we are related to things-in-themselves, Fries adds that there is
a component of feeling to this relationship as well. Fries was thus
bound to see religion differently from Kant. In Religion within the
Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant had reduced religion to a
phenomenon of reason and morality. Kant believed, indeed, that
morality was what religion was all about and that it provided a basis
for rational belief in concepts like God, freedom, and immorality;
but this provided no ground for any other aspects of traditional
religious practice, belief, or experience. Fries was able to add an
important component, that the central aspect of religion was not so
much reason as feeling. But Fries still provided little room for most
of the traditional contents of religion. Even though both Kant and
Fries were, in some general and cultural sense, Christians, there was
nevertheless no reason in their systems of philosophy to believe
anything more than that Jesus Christ was a particularly good moral
teacher. Fries might make Jesus some kind of poet in addition, but
there was still no way that he could admit anything like traditional
Christian views about the status and function of Jesus in the nature
of reality or the scheme of salvation. Indeed, Fries had a moral
objection to the idea that Jesus might have suffered for our sins and
redeemed us from damnation. Salvation itself could only remain an
alien concept to both Kant and Fries, but it is hard to see what
something like Christianity (or Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism) could
possibly mean as a religion without the idea of salvation.
Kant and Fries thus both represent a strong sort of philosophical
rationalism, albeit one with much more room for something like
religion than the reductionistic materialism that became common in
the 19th century (continued and continuing among many in the 20th).
Fries himself was simply forgotten until rediscovered by a later
German philosopher, Leonard Nelson (1882-1927). Nelson added little
beyond lucid exposition and restatement to Fries's view of religion,
but Nelson did introduce Fries to a colleague of his at the
University of Göttingen: Rudolf Otto. Otto had a clear sense that
there was much more to religious feeling than what his philosopher
friend allowed through a sense of the beautiful and the sublime. But
he also thought that there was no reason not to add that extra
feeling into the very fine metaphysical and epistemological
framework, the theory of Ahndung, that Kant and Fries had actually
provided. Thus, as a purely descriptive matter, Otto believed that we
are related to the transcendent, not just through morality, and not
just through the beautiful and the sublime, but through a sense of
the holy and the sacred, categories of value that are unique and
characteristic of religion.
Otto takes the Latin word numen, "the might of a deity, majesty,
divinity," and coins the term "numinous" to describe either religious
feelings or the religious aspect attributed by those feelings to
experiences and objects. He characterizes the feelings as involving
1) ultimacy, 2) mystery (mysterium), 3) awe (tremendum), 4)
fascination (fascinans), and 5) satisfaction. Unassociated with any
objects, the sense of the numinous is a feeling of "daemonic dread,"
a sense of the uncanny, frightful, eerie, weird, or supernatural.
These feelings make us feel vulnerable and overpowered, what Otto
calls "creature feeling." A lot of this now sounds like it would go
with a horror movie and be associated more with the "forces of evil"
than with the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, let alone with
Jesus or the Buddha. However, the "forces of evil," if taken
seriously enough, as Satan, demons, etc., actually are supernatural
and numinous; at one time most religions did not clearly distinguish
between benevolent powers (Orisis) and malevolent ones (Seth) as
such; and, finally, the God of the Old Testament and the Qur'ân
really is a terrifying, overpowering, awesome, even dreadful being--
not because He is at all evil, but just because He is genuinely
supernatural and uncanny. The expression "fear of God" is not
appropriate because wrongful harm is necessarily to be feared from
God, but because the kind of reality God represents is superlatively
awesome and frightening just because of what it is. Even in Buddhism,
this sense turns up in the "Wrathful Deities" who are particular
manifestations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the Vajrayana form of
Buddhism found, for instance, in Tibet.
Taking Otto to be a mystic, which is typical in philosophy of
religion, involves a serious misunderstanding or distortion of his
theory. Mysticism might be defined as some kind of direct, immediate,
or perceptual knowledge of transcendent objects, e.g. God, angels,
etc. That might have been the experience of Abraham, Moses, Job,
etc.; but it is not the experience of most ordinary religious
believers, and it is not what numinosity is particularly about,
although Otto's language may suggest that at times, and Otto was
interested in mysticism. Instead, Otto clearly distinguishes our
concepts of the ultimate transcendent objects of religion from the
ordinary rites and experiences common to most religious believers,
which contain the numinous feelings about non-supernatural objects.
The concepts, as far as he is concerned, come from reason, just as
Kant or Fries would have thought. A mystic claims more than that, and
Otto does not seem particularly inclined to credit this as real
except as an enthusiastic overinterpretation of numinous feelings, or
in extraordinary moments of religious revelation about which we may
have to suspend judgment.
Indeed, it is the importance that Otto assigns to reason that creates
the greatest difficulties for this theory. Otto accounts for the
difference between historical religions in two ways: 1) religions
reflect different degrees to which ethical questions have been
assimilated into religious consciousness. He calls this the
ethical "schematization" of religion, and he seems quite justified in
regarding this as a historical innovation. Greek philosophers, the
Jewish prophets, the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, and the Buddha all
introduce strong moralizing tendencies into their religions. Now it
is hard to imagine religion without a moral aspect, but that really
had little to do with early Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, or any other
ancient religion or, for that matter, modern Shintoism. Otto also
believed that, 2) religions reflect different degrees to which the
Kant-Friesian religious Ideas have been assimilated into religion.
Thus, not all religions have a single creator God, and Otto is
willing to dismiss the sophistication of Buddhism, along with ancient
polytheisms, as insufficiently developed compared with Christianity.
Since he believes that Judaism and Islam are insufficiently developed
morally compared with Christianity, Otto comes to the, for him,
comfortable conclusion that Christianity is the supreme religion.
The force of these views, however, rests on the credibility of Kant's
and Fries's arguments for their rational faith in Ideas like God,
freedom, and immorality. Fries's confidence in rational Glaube seems
unwarranted because of the serious rationality of a Buddhist
philosophical tradition that contains nothing like what he regards
as "natural" to reason. Kant was somewhat more agnostic and careful
than Fries, but he produces only the lamest of arguments for Ideas
like God and immorality.
Even Kant's argument for free will, which seems more credible than
the others, is confused and defused by the traditional Islamic
doctrine that there is free will but that God, as the only cause of
everything that happens, including our own actions, is the only being
who has free will.
Since the important philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) both propose very similar theories,
it is hard to see how their disagreements do not demonstrate the
very "dialectical illusion" that Kant himself describes.
Even the ethical "schematization" of religion creates a problem for
Otto.
The traditional Problem of Evil does not even arise when the gods are
both good and evil. Nor does it arise very much for Islam, where the
Qur'ân plainly says that God does what He pleases and that it is not
our business to question Him.
But where an omnipotent, omniscience God is ethicized to the extent
that He is supposed to be perfectly moral, then the difficulty of the
existence of evil in the world, and its evident toleration by God,
becomes acute. For many modern Christians, Jews, and others, the
moral reproach to God of the world, especially after the horrors of
the 20th century, has become so acute that it destroys faith and
denuminizes God and religion altogether.
--------------------------
Buddhism is certainly in better shape when the presence of suffering
is simply taken as a given, no attempt is even made to explain why
the world is structured so as to allow such a thing, and the Buddha
can be charged with no responsibility for a situation to which he
only offers the solution, not the explanation. The result, of course,
is there is no explanation whatsoever for the ultimate nature of
reality. That may be the most modest and wisest position, but it is
also one that tempts even Buddhists into occasional speculations. As
Kant would certainly say, this is not a situation that our reason has
an easy time leaving alone; and most sophisticated religions, apart
from Buddhism, attempt some sort of explanation, however much those
must become part of "dialectical illusion."
-----------------------------
Stripping away the confident positive "rational" side of Kantian and
Friesian theory would leave Otto with a much more credible theory.
However religious concepts are related to reason, historical
religions present us with very different views of ultimate reality
and the purposes of human life. Kant's own theory of the Antinomies
describes this situation better than anything else, and it is in turn
suggestively conformable to the Buddhist doctrine of the Four Fold
Negation: the Buddha had affirmed, for instance, that the person who
attains Nirvâna neither 1) exists, nor 2) does not exist, nor 3) both
exists and does not exist, nor 4) neither exists nor does not exist.
While this powerfully expresses the magnitude of our disability to
say anything positive about the transcendent, its logical force is
simply to posit a contradiction, which is thus equivalent to the
contradictions in Kant's theory of the Antinomies. These
considerations, however, carry us well beyond Otto's own theory and
the historical form of the Kant-Friesian tradition. Further
development will therefore be handled separately.
Finally, however, a couple of additions to Otto's theory should be
noted. The first is made by Mircea Eliade. Eliade claimed that one of
the most important senses of a hierophany, an appearance of the holy,
was as an ontophany, an appearance of Being. Sacred realities thus
represent real existence while profane or mundane realities are in
some ultimate sense merely non-existence. In terms of space, this
means that the creation of the cosmos, which is accomplished by
numinous beings (but recapitulated in the founding rituals of cities,
buildings, tombs, etc.), sets it off as true existence from the chaos
which preexisted it and which remains, perhaps, outside its
boundaries. The chaos is thus, in a profound sense, non-existence. We
might say now that the chaos is the empty, absurd, horrible, and
meaningless merely mundane and factual world so honestly represented
by the Existentialist philosophers. Since we do not really want to
say that mundane reality does not exist, we could regard chaos as
something like Mâyâ in the Advaita Vedanta theory of Shankara:
neither existing nor non-existing nor both nor neither, as opposed to
the existence of Brahman. Sacred space thus reverses the situation in
Buddhism, where the visible world has a prima facie existence, while
Nirvâna involves the Four Fold Negation. On the other hand, in terms
of time, we face the Antinomy-like paradox of cyclical time versus
linear time. Eliade himself speaks of the terror of history, and he
seems to be right that sacred time always involves a return to a
paradigmatic mythic time in the past, the time of the creation, the
Exodus, the Last Supper, etc. On the other hand, cyclical time
contains its own terrors, as may be well perceived in Nietzsche's
theory of the Eternal Recurrence, or in the endless and futile cycles
within cycles of Hindu Deep Time. Thus, it should be clear that
sacred time in religion is rather like a synthesis of the eternal and
sacred in illo tempore ("in that time"--Eliade loves his Latin) with
the actual historical linearity of the present. The Antinomy allows
us neither simple linearity nor simple cyclicity.
A second important addition to Otto's theory may be seen in C.G. Jung
with his theory of "synchronicity," which he calls "an acausal
connecting principle." The word "synchronicity" can simply
mean "together in time." Jung proposes the theory of synchronicity to
deal with the occurrence of "meaningful coincidences." Events have
always been meaningfully associated with each other, e.g. Halley's
Comet appearing at the time of William the Conqueror's invasion of
England, when it is now obvious that there can be no causal
connection between them and when the slightest bit of scientific
sophistication leads us to dismiss any such connections as
superstition. Jung can take such connections seriously, not just
because he is a psychologist who is interested in whatever
appears "meaningful" to people, but also because he is actually a
rather faithful Kantian who understands that causal connections
themselves are problematic among things-in-themselves. The "meaning"
of such connections, of course, is the same kind of meaning that
Jung's Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious have, for which Jung
self-consciously uses Otto's own term, numinosity. Synchronicity,
therefore, coupled with Eliade's ontophany, is about the manner in
which connections between events can strike us as real and
meaningful, especially religiously meaningful, when there is no
sensible, causal, and phenomenal reason for believing that there is a
connection at all. This holds off, not the terror of history, but the
terror of the arbitrary, random, pointless, and meaningless.
An example of synchronicity is recounted by the great physicist
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) [In his quasi-autobiographical
book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"], who is the kind of person
who clearly and self-consciously lived in a mundane of world of
science and nothing else. During World War II Feynman's first wife,
Arlene, died of tuberculosis. She had been living in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, while Feynman was working on the atomic bomb, not far away,
at Los Alamos. Feynman was present when she died. Later he noticed
that the clock by her bed, a rare digital clock (for that era) which
had been a special gift from him, had stopped at the precise moment,
according to the the death certificate, that she had died. That
coincidence impressed him; but he comforted himself, after a fashion,
by recalling that the nurse had moved the clock to check the time of
death, which could have stopped its sensitive works. For the rest of
his life he never for a moment doubted that the clock had stopped
either from a very mundane cause or by nothing more than an
extraordinary coincidence. To be sure, it was a coincidence--but
truly a meaningful coincidence. Feynman's universe did not contain
Jung's category for him to speak about it.
A more intriguing example of synchronicity is from an area that was
of interest to Jung, astrology. Liz Greene is both a Jungian
psychoanalyst and an astrologer, often using horoscopes as guides to
psychoanalysis. In her 1983 book The Outer Planets & Their Cycles,
The Astrology of the Collective [CRCS Publications, Reno, Nevada],
Greene gives examples of "birth charts," not just of several
historically famous persons, but of some countries, including the
Soviet Union. While discussing the Soviet chart, she says, "I think
it's worth considering now the conjunction which is approaching
toward the end of the decade [i.e. the 80's], because the Russian
chart of all the national charts we have looked at is the most
strongly affected by it... I would therefore expect that, although
the conjunction represents many other things on a deeper level, one
of its effects is to produce concrete changes in Russia... It's very
possible that the Russian regime may topple..." [p. 122]. Since this
was written, or at least published, eight years before the fall of
the Soviet Union, it stands as a fairly impressive bit of
astrological forecasting, however qualified as merely "possible."
Now, it is the only bit of astrology I have ever seen that is quite
that impressive, so we can hardly say that this verifies astrological
forecasting, in the face of all its falsification by failed
predictions. On the other hand, this is the only forecast of trouble
for the Soviet Union in the late 80's that I have ever seen from any
source, including more presumptively scientific ones in economics,
political science, sociology, or history. About the only forecasts
for the failure of the Soviet economy that were ever made were those
of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. While Hayek did live to see the
collapse of communist command economies and the fall of the Soviet
Union (1989-1991), even he does not seem to have predicted prior to
the event just when this would happen. Thus, while we don't want to
say that Liz Greene has vindicated astrology, it is definitely a
meaningful coincidence that she is about the only person in either
science or para-science to have made so specific a forecast so much
in advance, especially when respected economists were still writing,
at the same time, that the Soviet economy worked and was successful.
Certainly Jung would have been pleased and intrigued.
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