1720. Hartshorne says . . .

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Hartshorne says:

'''Faith' in general is trust, and this means, doing our part in the system of things with confidence that the rest of the system will do its part, at least to the extent that we shall not have striven simply in vain" (Realty as Social Process: 163).

But "doing our' part in the system of things," like "striving," sounds rather more like loyalty than trust, even if it is "with confidence" that we loyally do our part, or strive—such confidence, or trust, presumably coming first.

So "[w]hat Santayana calls 'animal faith' is the confidence of every sentient creature in its environment as favorable to its efforts to live and to continue its species," while "[f]aith on the human level is trust that the nature of things insures the appropriateness of ideals of generosity, honesty, and esthetic refinement, or goodness, truth, and beauty, to such an extent that despite all frustrations and vexations, despite disloyalty or crassness in our fellows, despite death itself, it is really and truly better to live, and to live in accord with these ideals, than to give up the struggle in death or in cynicism. Of this human faith [Hartshorne adds] there are varieties almost beyond telling: the great religious faiths, and the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these" (163; he also speaks of "human faith," or "faith on the human level," as "trust in the environment as an adequate basis for our efforts to live in accordance with certain ideals" [164]; cf. also "the mere general faith that somehow it is all right for us to live and try to do our best" [165]).

But, surely, if Hartshorne's right that any concrete whatever, even a physical particle, is and must be at least "sentient," one may well question whether Santayana ever says or implies any thing to indicate that he means by "animal faith" what Hartshorne says he means by it. Moreover, would Hartshorne himself really want to use "animal faith" in such an utterly general sense? Or has he tacitly slipped back into using "sentient" in its ordinary sense to mean simply "animal," or "animate"?—Note his terminology: "the great religious faiths" and "the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these," i.e., philosophical faiths (163); "diverse faiths"; "particular form[s] of faith"; "the various faiths"; "faith, or life-trust" (165 f; 171.).

about something other than God. One may answer them by thinking and speaking, say, about Nature or the Absolute, one's Real Self or the Whole, Nirvana or the Form of the Good. Cf. On Theology: 122.

As for his talk about the "ideal" of a certain form of behavior, I wonder whether it's more than verbally different from talking, as I'm accustomed to do, about a normative understanding of a certain form of behavior. I don't see why one couldn't say equally appropriately, for instance, that the ideal of doing theology is to appropriate witness critically by critically interpreting its meaning and critically validating its claims to 'validity and that doing just this is what it is to do theology, normatively understood.

"The most basic animal and human faith is beyond need of justification. Even suicide expresses the truth that to die is, in certain cases at least, better than to live. What needs justification is not faith in general, for to think, as to live, is already to accept faith as valid. What needs justification is only the choice of which faith, which verbal and intellectual and perhaps institutional, ritualistic, and artistic form of expression and intensification we shall seek to give the faith we inevitably have. Here truly we do need justification, not merely by faith, but of faith. Is there any way to achieve this, if not by deducing the consequences of various interpretations of the content of faith, and examining the arguments for and against each? The only alternative is to put unlimited trust in our luck in having been born into the right religion, or in our capacity to make the right choice without any careful consideration of the relevant arguments" (164).

All of this could hardly be said better. Note the implied meaning of "religion," given what Hartshorne has just said about "which verbal and intellectual and perhaps institutional, ritualistic, and artistic form of expression and intensification we shall seek to give the faith we inevitably have." One thing that he might have helpfully clarified is just 'what is to be understood by "the content of faith," and why it is so important to distinguish between its constitutive assertion(s), necessary presuppositions, and necessary implications, on the one hand, and its particular formulation(s), assumptions, and consequences, on the other.

Collingwood says:

"Faith is the religious habit of mind. That is to say, it is the attitude which we take up toward things as a whole. . . .

"Faith as a kind of knowledge or theoretical faith is the knowledge that the universe as a whole is rational. It is only because we know that this is so, that we can be certain of finding in this or that detail of it a fit and possible object of scientific study....Without an absolute confidence in the 'uniformity of nature,' or whatever name [the scientist] gives to the rationality of the universe, he would never try any experiments at all" (Faith & Reason: 141).

"We thus possess certain pieces of knowledge about the -world which we did not acquire, and cannot criticize, by scientific methods. The knowledge in question is our knowledge of the world, not in its details, but as a whole. And not only is it not acquired by scientific thought, but it is the very foundation of such thought; for only in so far as we know, for instance, that there are laws of nature, can we reasonably devise methods for discovering them" (139).

"But faith is just as much a practical thing as a theoretical. In this aspect, it is a practical attitude toward the universe as a whole. Our acts, like our knowledge, are concerned in part with matters of detail within the universe, in part with the universe in its entirety. The question, 'What is the good of this or that?' is not the only question that can be asked about our actions; there is also the question, 'What is the good of anything?' and the person who answered 'Why, nothing,' was exhibiting a (no doubt transient) failure of practical faith. Practical faith consists in the certainty that life is worth living, that the world into which we have been unwillingly thrust is a world that contains scope for action and will give us a fair chance of showing what we are made of; a world in which, if we turn out complete failures, we shall have only ourselves to blame. Practical faith means 'accepting the universe,' or, what is the same thing, knowing that we are free" (141).

"Reason . . . cannot exist without faith. The finite is nothing except as part of a whole. We cannot evade this by calling it a part of a part of a part of a part . . . and so on without ever speaking the word 'whole'; for the longer we go on refusing to speak it, the more insistently it rings in our ears and forces its repressed meaning upon our minds. Unless there is a whole, a universe, an infinite, there is no science; for there is no certainty beyond the certainty of mere observation and of bare particular fact; whereas science is universal or nothing, and is bankrupt unless it can discover general laws. But this discovery, as every student of logic knows, rests on presuppositions concerning the nature of the universe as a whole—Iaws of thought that are at the same time laws of the real world, not scientifically discovered but embraced by an act of faith, of necessary and rational faith" (144).

"Whatever may be said about the details of the world, there is always something that may be said about the world as a whole, namely, that it is a whole: a whole within which all distinctions fall, outside which there is nothing, and which, taken as a whole, is the cause of itself and of everything in it. The details of the world are the proper theme of scientific thought; but its characteristics as a whole, its unity and the implications of that unity, are not matters for scientific inquiry. They are, rather, a foundation on which all scientific inquiry rests. If it was possible to deny them—which it is not—scientific inquiry would instantly cease" (138).

"The peculiarity of the cogito ergo sum is that Descartes here found a point at which reason and faith coincide. The certainty of my own existence is a matter of faith in the sense that it does not rest on argument but on direct intuition; but it is a matter of reason in the sense that it is universal and necessary and cannot be denied by any thinking being. It resembles the religious man's knowledge of God in its immediate certainty; but not every man is always religious, and faith in God may desert us. It resembles the knowledge of the Aristotelian first principles in being universal and necessary; but the Aristotelian first principles are deniable and thus lack the absolute and immediate conviction that is inseparable from the cogito" (137).

"[For Kant] God, freedom, and immortality, the three traditional objects of metaphysical speculation, were objects of faith, not of scientific demonstration. Not that Kant thought their reality doubtful. He did not; he regarded them as truths of which all our experience assures us. We do not demonstrate them, not because they are too uncertain, but because they are too certain: they lie too close to our minds to be proved, they are too inextricably interwoven with our experience to be argued about. To prove them is like buttoning up your own skin.

"Kant was trying to treat God, freedom, and immortality as certainties of the same kind as Descartes' cogito ergo sum: that is, as universal, necessary, and so far rational, but indemonstrable and so far matters of faith" (137).

18 May 2009