Philosophy – LibertySaints

Intelligences, Subjective Phenomenology, and Transcendence

Note: This essay was written for BYU’s Philosophy of Religion course (PHIL 215) in August of 2019. If you should ever have the opportunity to take a class from Brother Roger Cook, I can’t recommend him highly enough. This is probably the densest writing you’ll find here on LibertySaints, but if you can muscle through it, you might find the topic of philosophy of mind as fascinating as I do.

In 1831, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon received a revelation, recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, concerning the religious experiences and beliefs concerning the Shakers. The Shakers and certain members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who believed some of their teachings believed, among other things, that Jesus Christ had returned in the form of a woman, Ann Lee. The Shakers had been “deceived” by what they believed as revelation.¹

Revelation, miracles, the confirmation of the Holy Ghost, and even mystical and visionary experiences are the “rock” on which the Church is built.² Doctrine and Covenants Section 42 says “If thou shalt ask, thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge, that thou mayest know the mysteries and peaceable things…”³ But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is not the only sect that believes in and attempts to derive doctrine from revelation. This begs the question: is revelation inconsistent? Why would revelation from God mean different things to different people? And if it is inconsistent, does it remain valid as a source of knowledge? Or even as a real phenomenon?

Late philosopher of religion Louis Pojman argues that “religious experience is amorphous and too varied to yield a conclusion with regard to the existence of God.”⁴ He compares the religious experiences of western Christians to that of a polytheist in East Africa who receives a vision of the hippopotamus-god to show that religious experience is varied across people and varies with cultural beliefs.

Those who have observed mysticism and revelation from a physiological perspective acknowledge that religious experience is a real mental and neurological phenomenon in some sense and that it may be epistemologically convincing to the person who experiences it for a limited period of time. But the ability of revelation to give us knowledge by which we live our lives remains in doubt for those who make such studies. As William James says in his classic study on The Varieties of Religious Experience:

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience. . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordance of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings…⁵

If revelation seems disconnected from the physical world as measured scientifically or empirically, its value as knowledge is in question. Furthermore, the perspective of the physicalist challenges the very possibility of religious experience having any value outside the neural processes of the brain. The brain in the physicalist model is mechanically reductive, in that it can be completely understood as a complex system of interacting pieces of biological matter, like an electronic calculator or computer on a larger scale. Mathematician Bertrand Russell denies the possibility of any mental existence beyond the matter that can be scientifically observed and analyzed:

The continuity of the human body is a matter of appearance and behavior, not of substance. The same thing applies to the mind. We think and feel and act, but there is not, in addition to thoughts and feelings and actions, a bare entity, the mind or the soul, which does or suffers these occurrences.⁶

A different conception of the mind is necessary to explain both religious experience and the relationship between the mind, religious experience, and the world. This is where transcendent experience has a place, as it represents the relationship between the divine and the conscious mind. Transcendent experience can be usefully defined here as all mental phenomena that access the transcendent reality, or the reality beyond the scientifically measurable physical world.

The concept of mental phenomena, or “phenomenology,” is necessary to understand the mind in its connection with the transcendent. To explain the processes of the mind or consciousness we do not refer primarily to the anatomy or physiology of the brain, we instead speak of what the consciousness experiences, or “mental phenomena.” Mental phenomena include not only the raw sensations of the senses, but also certain more complex mental events, such as love, learning, or appreciation of art.

Consider the classic question on this subject: what does the color red look like? And does it look the same for all people? This is not referring to the physical nature of visible electromagnetic radiation that can be measured at a wavelength of approximately 625-740 nanometers at a frequency of 405-480 terahertz. Visible radiation (“light”) is what causes the mental phenomenon of the color red, but it is not the color red itself. It is only when radiation of this type reaches the retina, is processed by the brain, and reaches the conscious mind that the mental phenomenon of seeing the color red actually occurs.

Imagine a man completely blind from birth, who through intensive study managed to become a leading expert on the properties of light and of the neurology of the cerebral cortex where much of the brain’s visual processing occurs. Would this intensive study give him access to the experience of seeing red or any other color? Would one be able to describe the color red to him based on their own experience, calling it “warm” or “like a sunset”?

Tommy Edison, a YouTuber who was born blind, said about this problem, “I don’t have any concept of what [color] is… It doesn’t mean anything to me. Over the years people have tried and tried and tried to explain color to me, and I just don’t understand it…People will try to explain a sense with another sense: ‘It’s like the way this smells, maybe, this is what a particular color is like.’ What?”⁷ Not just specific colors, but the entire concept of color as a category of sensory phenomenon is beyond comprehension to those who have never experienced it. While it might be possible to teach someone like Tommy Edison how certain objects reflect certain wavelengths of radiation into the eye, the mental phenomenon remains beyond scientific understanding.

Phenomena not precisely explainable by scientific reduction of their parts are aspects of mind that should not exist in a physicalist/reductionist system like that which was proposed by Bertrand Russell. The existence of some aspect of mind that cannot be scientifically explained as a series of interactions between particles and waves, and the fact that this aspect of mind can interact with the observable physical world, is a threat to the reductionist program. The reductionists can hold to the hope of an eventual hypothesis to scientifically explain the process of mental phenomena and keep consciousness out of the equation, but such an explanation seems unlikely. David Chalmers uses the color example to address the possibility, or lack thereof, of scientific experimentation on mental phenomena through neurology, saying:

“…imagine that two of the axes of our three-dimensional color space are switched— the red-green axis is mapped onto the yellow-blue axis, and vice versa. To achieve such an inversion in the actual world, presumably we would need to rewire neural processes in an appropriate way, but as a logical possibility, it seems entirely coherent that experiences could be inverted while physical structure is duplicated exactly. Nothing in the neurophysiology dictates that one sort of processing should be accompanied by red experiences.”⁸

Colors are just one basic unit of larger mental phenomena in the real sensory world. More complex phenomena, like the cinema or music, combine thousands of mental phenomena to create a new mental phenomenon, making the reducibility of consciousness even more difficult. These phenomena are also tinted by our memories and the peculiarities of our minds. We can see this in the diversity of tastes in mental phenomena, in which stimuli that can be scientifically measured as identical to two people are perceived as completely different as mental phenomena by those people. The exact same stimulus can result in the mental phenomenon of a favorite song to one person and an annoying racket to another.

Beyond these references to phenomena of the senses, there are further indicators of the existence of a non-reducible consciousness. One example is Chalmers’s hypothetical “zombie twin,” a being physically, neurologically, and psychologically identical to Chalmers, but lacking the ability to receive these mental phenomena.⁹ This “philosophy zombie” would behave identically to a human, though it may be confused if asked questions related to its consciousness and phenomenology. It would not have a consciousness the way other humans do, though that lack would not be immediately apparent based on observation of the zombie, which would walk around and eat and use sight to avoid obstacles and respond to pain. But even in being mechanically identical to a human, there is still a fundamental difference between it and those humans. The difference is that of consciousness, or the feelings of being itself and of experiencing phenomenology.

Thomas Nagel, in his classic paper “What it is Like to Be a Bat?”, pointed out that the phenomenological experience of echolocation, which comes naturally to the mind of a bat, is beyond the understanding of human minds, even those biologists who have studied the process extensively.¹⁰ Human-built submarines, which “see” through echolocation in the form of sonar, must translate the mechanical process into something visible on a screen for it to be seen by sailors.

Nagel argues elsewhere that consciousness in a basic sense does not follow from evolution as we understand it. He says in Mind and Cosmos:

“We recognize that evolution has given rise to multiple organisms that have a good, so that things can go well or badly for them, and that in some of those organisms there has appeared the additional capacity to aim consciously at their own good, and ultimately at what is good in itself. From a realist perspective this cannot be merely an accidental side effect of natural selection, and a teleological explanation satisfies this condition. On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because that is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life, with all its possibilities of development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value. This is a revision of the Darwinian picture rather than an outright denial of it.”¹¹

Nagel is claiming the universe is teleological (created intentionally), but he is not arguing the traditional conception of the universe being created by a deity, rather that consciousness has some part in creating or organizing matter and exists in some kind of symbiotic relationship with it. This consciousness, the mind that experiences the ineffable, non-reducible mental phenomenon, is sometimes referred to as the mind or the soul but is known in Latter-Day Saint thought as “intelligence.” This was revealed to Joseph Smith and recorded in Doctrine and Covenants Section 93: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.”¹²

The most non-reducible phenomena are in the forms of religious experience; revelation, mysticism, miracles, the feeling of the Holy Ghost, the spiritual use of dowsing and seeing stones, visions, etc. Catholic writer Evelyn Underhill says in her response to William James, “True mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It is an organic life-process, a something which the whole self does; not something as to which its intellect holds an opinion.”¹³

But even without religious experience as typically defined, there is a connection to the divine in human phenomenology. In the Book of Mormon, Alma argues against Korihor, an anti-Christ critic, that “…all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.”¹⁴ This is typically interpreted as a teleological argument, but with a Latter-Day Saint understanding of the intelligences, the statement that the elements of creation “witness that there is a Supreme Creator” can be taken literally. If so, this witness is based on a transcendent separate from the traditional understanding of religious experience.

This conception of consciousness avoids the problem of “the ghost in the machine,” or an immaterial consciousness or spirit that somehow controls the matter which composes the brain and body. Consciousness, or the intelligence that constitutes it, is composed of what Joseph Smith called “finer matter.” Doctrine and Covenants 131 says, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”¹⁵ Finer matter cannot be directly studied by human instrumentation, nor can the human mind understand it reductively. The part of the mind that receives non-reducible mental phenomena, including transcendence, is composed of this finer matter.

Transcendence in this sense is much broader and includes every sort of mental experience that can “denote there is a God.” These are events that in certain mental conditions can create a feeling of connection with God, despite having no claims of visionary or supernatural phenomena accompanying them; seeing a religious work of art or music is a common source of such experience, as is a walk alone in nature.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell formulates a model of this sort of experience based on a Freudian theory of the subconscious, in which certain phenomenological experiences, particularly the hearing of a story about a “hero’s journey,” are affirmed by the subconscious to the conscious, creating a feeling of transcendence. “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.”¹⁶

More modern examples of his theory can be seen in certain films that evoke something like a transcendent experience without overtly addressing a religious topic, such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), or The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003). These are movies that depict the archetypical “hero’s journey” Campbell studies. Leading film writer Roger Ebert compares Star Wars to “an out-of-the-body experience at a movie… The movie relies on the strength of pure narrative, in the most basic storytelling form known to man, the Journey.”¹⁷ George Lucas, writer/director of Star Wars, credited Campbell’s influence in achieving this effect that resonated with popular audiences to make Star Wars the most successful film to that point.

Campbell’s theory of transcendence is based on a Freudian/Jungian understanding of the subconscious mind, and he asserts that evolutionary psychology has created this system by which humans subconsciously crave storytelling to provide meaning. This understanding is adequate to understand the feelings of transcendence associated with a select few types of phenomena, like the receiving of a “hero’s journey” story, but inadequate to explain those things that are not evolutionary beneficial. Joan of Arc’s transcendent experience led her not to “evolutionary success,” but martyrdom.

Catholic philosopher Stephen Fields attempts to explain transcendent experience through the grace of Jesus Christ. In his model, Christ is the standard to which all aesthetics strives, and his grace acts through us when we experience art that imitates Christ in some way:

“If the intrinsic structure of reality is radiated forth in the incarnation, then all deeds and words of the particular Jewish man Jesus must reveal, apriori, the divine standard of beauty. In other words, if God is beautiful by definition, and if Christ is God, then the acts of Christ must set the first principles of authentic aesthetics. It follows that Christ’s beauty must accordingly judge, or cast into a shadow, the beauty of all other created forms.”¹⁸

The wider scope of transcendent experience; heroic tales, other religious art, secular art, or the beauty of nature, are understood in this model as falling short of the artistic standard of depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ, and only have artistic value in so far as they share in his grace. This model, however, fails to adequately explain the richness contained in the wider scope of transcendent experience, or why those without a Christian understanding are unmoved by the images of him that represent the perfect artistic ideal.

The understanding of transcendent experience as a special class of mental phenomenon is essential to understanding its value to human knowledge and to explain why transcendent experiences disagree. The diversity of religious views and understandings demonstrates this problem, as does the inability of transcendent experience to address fine details of theology and metaphysics.

When revelation like that received by followers of Ann Lee as mentioned appears to be contradicted by that of revelation received by the prophet Joseph Smith, it is not, in fact, a contradiction of revelation. It is rather a difference in perception and interpretation, similar to the differences in perception of ordinary sensory phenomena. In our perceptions of the transcendent, “The fault… is not in our stars, But in ourselves.”¹⁹

Transcendence is not felt or understood uniformly because it is a phenomenological experience, similar to the mental experiences of seeing a color or hearing music. There is no transcendent experience outside human phenomenology. Transcendent experience is a feature of the conscious mind, not of scientifically reducible brain matter. But it reflects the physical reality of “higher matter” just as ordinary sensory experience reflects the reality of matter as we ordinarily understand it.

Though we as humans do not perceive everything identically, our subjective phenomenological sensory experiences can still collectively show underlying truths. For example, we know that even if two people disagree on whether a certain piece of music is good or bad, they do agree on the underlying fact that there is some kind of sound being made. The subjective phenomenological experience of hearing music is evidence of the concrete fact that sound waves are traveling nearby.

We disagree even on the nature of our consciousness itself, the thing which we are phenomenologically closest to. Physical reductivists like Russell observe their own consciousness and see nothing beyond the mechanical, or at least nothing great enough to overcome their worldview that denies the transcendent self. But when the spiritually attuned observe their consciousnesses they perceive God through transcendence. As Truman Madsen, late BYU emeritus professor of religion and philosophy, says:

“One begins mortality with the veil drawn, but slowly he is moved to penetrate the veil within himself. He is, in time, led to seek the “holy of holies” within the temple of his own being… There is inspired introspection. As we move through life, half-defined recollections and faint but sometimes vivid outlines combine to bring a familiar tone or ring to our experience. One feels at times at home in a universe which, for all that is grotesque and bitter, yet has meaning.”²⁰

Everything witnesses there is a God when questioned by the intelligence of mankind because everything material has underlying intelligence of its own, composed of the finer matter. This is transcendence in its fullest sense, and it is how we understand God and our nature. Religious experience in all its forms is phenomenological, giving it commonality with our everyday sensory perception, but it is also transcendent, giving us access to the “finer matter” beyond the world of our ordinary understanding.

Endnotes:

1. Doctrine and Covenants 49:23 (1981 Edition).

2. “Revelation” in Guide to the Scriptures (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, Inc., 2013), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/gs/introduction?lang=eng. See also Matthew 16:18 (KJV).

3. Doctrine and Covenants 42:61 (1981 Edition).

4. Louis P. Pojman, Philosophy of Religion (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2001), 57.

5. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2005), 12, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/james/varieties.pdf.

6. Bertrand Russell, “The Finality of Death” in Philosophy of Religion, An Anthology, ed. Louis P. Pojman and Michael Rea (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008), 337.

7. The Tommy Edison Experience, “Describing Colors As A Blind Person,” YouTube Video, 2:39, December 4, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59YN8_lg6-U.

8. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 100.

9. See Robert Kirk, “Zombies”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/zombies/.

10. Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, no. 4 (October 1974): 435–50.

11. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122-123.

12. Doctrine and Covenants 93:29-30 (1981 Edition).

13. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2005), 78, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.pdf?membership_type=b10f8d8331236b8b61aa39bc6f86075c12d7e005.

14. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Alma 30:44 (1981 Edition).

15. Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8 (1981 Edition).

16. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; repr., Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 21.

17. Roger Ebert, “Star Wars” (Chicago Sun-Times, 1977), https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/star-wars-1977.

18. Stephen Fields, Analogies of Transcendence (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 156.

19. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I.II.147-148.

20. Truman G. Madsen, Eternal Man (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1966), 20.

Top image: A Group of Shakers, from an 1875 woodcut.

Hume’s Slight-of-Hand Skepticism

“A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”¹ When David Hume wrote this definition in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he said he had “discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”² This argument, however, is reliant on the rhetorically loaded definition he invented, which ultimately disproves something no one “wise and learned” actually believed.

Hume argues that miracles are logically impossible, because they are defined as breaking the laws of nature, and everyone knows through the sum of their empirical observation that breaking the laws of nature is impossible. He says that even if a miracle has a multitude of personal eyewitnesses, their testimony must be weighed against that of the sensory data we have received over a lifetime asserting that the natural laws are consistent and unbreakable and necessary for the continued function of the world and our sciences.

A God who created the world and its initial conditions with perfect knowledge of the outcomes would have no need of “miracles,” as defined by Hume. Hume uses the word “marvel” for what any other English speaker would call a “miracle.” Hume’s definition sets up a strawman version of the belief in miracles for him disprove.

“But in order to encrease the probability against the testimony of witnesses, let us suppose, that the fact, which they affirm, instead of being only marvellous, is really miraculous; and suppose also, that the testimony considered apart and in itself, amounts to an entire proof; in that case, there is proof against proof, of which the strongest must prevail,…”³

This method of reconciling contradictory proofs is epistemologically bankrupt. If two contradictory things seem to be proven, it is illogical to weigh which one is more proven than the other. When contradictory proofs appear, it should be obvious that one or both proofs are flawed, or, more likely, that the terms on which the proofs are evaluated are inconsistently used or poorly defined. Ignoring the problematic use of the word “proof” to evaluate empirical data, it’s quite clear that the words “marvelous” and “miraculous” are being used dishonestly.

The phenomena Hume classifies as “marvelous” are what typical English-speaking Christians would call “miraculous.” But in assigning a new definition to the term, Hume creates the appearance of a logical contradiction:

1. Impossible (Hume’s definition of “miraculous”) events have been witnessed.
2. Impossible events cannot occur
3. Therefore, the witness is invalid

If we use some definition of miracle that is more consistent with the claims of the believer, we would not assert that impossible events have been witnessed, only events that are unexplainable, or explainable only to God or a mystic. This removes the illusion of a logical contradiction:

1. Unexplainable (layman’s definition of “miraculous”) events have been witnessed.
2. Impossible events cannot occur.

Hume’s argument against miracles is only fatal to a conception of God and miracles that very few people, if any, actually hold: that God is subject to natural laws, that he did not create the world or as least did not fully anticipate the consequences of doing so, and that he cannot create miracles consistent with natural laws. It’s an argument that still shows up in contemporary atheism now and then, and it’s this kind of rhetorical slight of hand that demonstrates why we should always “doubt our doubts,” as President Uchtdorf counseled. We should always look for people being sneaky with their terms, and treat them like we would treat a magician’s trick.

Note: This essay was written in part for BYU’s Philosophy of Religion course (PHIL 215) in August of 2019 and was revised in June of 2021 for publication online. For a refutation of Hume’s epistemological framework and a proposed alternative, see my essay “Hume and True Skepticism: How Do We Know?“

Endnotes:

1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748; repr., Project Gutenberg, 2003), Footnote 22, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9662/9662-h/9662-h.htm.

2. Hume, Enquiry, 86.

3. Hume, Enquiry, 90.

Top Image: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, circa 1601-1602.

The Necessity of Suffering in Frankl’s Existentialism

Victor E. Frankl’s experiences in the concentration camps, detailed in Man’s Search for Meaning, have enduring significance and popularity among contemporary Christians and Jews. They demonstrate that suffering can be the source of meaning, but Frankl stops short of saying that suffering is an essential: “But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering–provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable.”¹ He argues that there are other sources from which man can discover meaning, “There are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone…”²

Accomplishment, appreciation of art, and interpersonal relationships, then, are sources of meaning independent from suffering, according to Frankl. Frankl is considered a religious existentialist because he thinks deeply and examines the meaning of life and existence itself, and we can therefore examine and expand on the existentialist philosophy he created. In examining each of the sources of meaning Frankl identified, we can see that not only do they contain suffering in various forms (usually less severe and more subtle then that of the concentration camps), but that the suffering endemic to these sources is necessary for them to possess meaning.

The first source which Frankl names is the accomplishment of creating a work or doing a deed. The writer who has stared down a blank page struggling to find words and the academic who studies a lifetime to make a contribution to their field are both uniquely familiar with the true scope of their respective accomplishments once complete. Those who have not endured the suffering of bullying the brain to keep writing when it wants nothing but to quit cannot understand their accomplishment. But the person who has suffered to bring about an accomplishment knows its value and can truly appreciate it.

This suffering exalts and gives meaning to the purpose it is directed toward. We can see this even in more trivial accomplishments, like in winning a video game. Certain video games have options to increase or decrease their difficulty, and high difficulties result in a certain level of suffering to the player, as the player endures mental strain and frustrating failures before reaching their goal. Why does the player ever set the difficulty above the easiest setting? Because the difficulty gives meaning to the accomplishment of finishing the game, even if the difficulty is voluntary and minor compared to other sufferings of life.

The second source of meaning, in part, is “experiencing something,” or beauty and art. We can see that art involves certain subtle or vicarious forms of suffering, which gives it meaning. The richest works of art often deal with tragic subjects; Oedipus, Hamlet, Götterdämmerung, Citizen Kane, and The Godfather are each reliant on some form of empathetic or vicarious suffering on the part of the viewer to give the work emotional meaning. This applies to all art in some form. Those who study the theory of comedy find that it is based on pain examined in new perspective. A world without suffering, or at least minor inconvenience, would be devoid of all humor. Even the contemplation of perfect beauty involves a different, more subtle suffering; a hopeless longing to somehow be a part of that beauty which can never be fulfilled. The Book of Mormon is filled with accounts of wars and even genocides, which are a key part of how it teaches us about suffering, sin, and redemption through Christ.

The second part of this source is what Frankl calls “encountering something,” or love and friendship. Once again, this is an area of life that is not free of suffering, and it may be the case that love and friendship are made real by sacrifice. The most meaningful relationships in most lives are those with one’s spouse and children, those people for whom most is sacrificed.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury says that the importance of a book comes from its texture; “To me it means texture… They show the pores in the surface of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”³ This is a principle that can apply suffering to all life; that if anything is to have meaning it must have texture, or some amount of suffering.

We believe in a God who suffers. Christ suffered tremendously as part of the atonement, but our Heavenly Father suffers as well because of the iniquities of his children. His status as a God entitles him to both the extreme joy of bringing about “the immortality and eternal life of man,” but also consigns him to the suffering of a worried parent.

When Frankl qualified his thesis in saying that suffering was not necessary to find meaning, he may not have wanted to compare the relatively trivial sufferings of everyday life to those of the concentration camp, or to say that maximizing suffering was the path to meaning. It seems from these examples that strategically minimal suffering can maximize its return of meaning, and that the path for those who follow Frankl’s tradition of existentialism is to minimize unnecessary suffering, to extract all possible meaning from the suffering that cannot be avoided, and to be willing to pursue meaning despite the suffering that may accompany the pursuit.

Note: This essay was written in part for BYU’s Philosophy of Religion course (PHIL 215) in August of 2019 and was revised in June of 2021 for publication online. I highly recommend reading Man’s Search for Meaning. Not only is it one of the most compelling accounts of the Nazi concentration camps ever written but, it also examines the experience through Frankl’s unique psychological and philosophical lens.

Endnotes:

1. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946; repr., Boston: Beacon, 2014), 106.

2. Frankl, Man’s Search, 137.

3. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1951; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 79

Top image: A prayer room at Theresienstadt, painting by Malva Schalek, circa 1942-1944. Viktor Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, where his father died. He was later sent to Auschwitz in 1944.

Autonomy, Power, and the Possible: A Brief Intellectual History

Preface: This essay was written for BYU’s History of Ideas course (HIST 312) in April of 2021. The recent attempts of the certain parts of the intellectual left to pretend that cultural Marxism doesn’t exist has made it suddenly relevant, as it’s necessary to place the stages of modern and postmodern Marxism in their context within the narrative of freedom and power. I’ve made some minor changes to this essay to highlight that. Book references are included in parenthesis rather than as end notes to make them simple to identify.

Is human autonomy possible?

If so, to what degree? And how do we recognize autonomy when we have gained it?

The starting point for such a question depends on what autonomy is. We have different words for it: freedom, liberty, self-determination, liberation. All of these words seem to be getting at a concept that humans understand and have a natural inclination to pursue, and yet we disagree on what it is. This appears to be more than just an argument over definitions, as it has been an issue since before the days of Socrates and has been argued in every language common to western philosophical writing.

Isaiah Berlin makes a well-known set of distinctions that is useful for classifying the two main threads of thought into which the “over two hundred senses” of liberty could be separated (Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1). Liberty in the “liberal” sense, in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the writers of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Federalist Papers, is what Berlin calls “negative liberty.” Autonomy in this sense is the freedom from violence and violent threats against an individual’s “life, health, liberty, or possessions” (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, § 6). The second set of thought systems concerning autonomy is “positive liberty,” which takes many forms and includes the systems of Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel, and of Marx and his followers. It is generally more nebulous and difficult to define and recognize than negative liberty but can be generally characterized as looking for freedom from influence. This could be the influence of our baser instincts that distract us from the pursuit of collective civic virtue in the understanding of Aristotle or Rousseau, or it could be the influence of economic or other external forms of power in Marxist, post-Marxist, Neo-Marxist doctrine.

A common rule of thumb for this distinction is that negative liberty is “freedom from,” while positive liberty is “freedom to.” But the rhetorical thrust in the systems of Marx and his various followers is also on “freedom from.” Not freedom from acts of violent aggression – attacks on “life, liberty, and property” as Locke and his followers might define it – but freedom from influence, or “power.” Freedom of speech can be conceived as freedom to speak, as though it were a positive right, but is typically legally understood as a freedom from deprivation of life, liberty, or property in retaliation for one’s speech. A better version of the rule of thumb, therefore could be that negative liberty is freedom from aggression, whereas positive liberty is freedom from influence.

Thinkers in the tradition of positive liberty before Marx focused on the influence of man’s base, selfish instincts, while Marx focused on the influence of economic power. Later neo-Marxists and post-Marxists identified and criticized many other forms of power, which they then related to the economic order in various ways to remain in the Marxist tradition. This dominant contemporary conception of influence and power was formalized in the work of the mid-Twentieth Century French critic Michel Foucault, who said that the modern struggle for autonomy “is a question of orienting ourselves to a conception of power which replaces… the privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 102). This conception of power “is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Sexuality, 93).

Given these two radically different understandings of human autonomy, the degree to which autonomy is possible and the approach to achieve or to get closer to it depends on each individual thinker’s conception of the forces that oppose autonomy. Among the theorists of negative liberty, autonomy is possible insofar as it is possible to curtail violence against life, liberty, and property while limiting the extent to which the state threatens them, usually by placing the individual and the state within a social contract. Among the theorists of positive liberty, autonomy requires the elimination of all power. To some of these thinkers, power is an inevitable part of human life which we can fight against in a “perpetual revolution” but never eliminate, while to others, power can eventually be eliminated as when we reach the “absolute,” that end point of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical process that represents utopia, the end of history, and perfect autonomy.

The concept of negative liberty certainly wasn’t created in the modern period, but the emergence of the individual as a focus of thought during the enlightenment allowed for the refinement of negative liberty into its modern form. In the modern period negative liberty is primarily associated with British and American thinkers and with the empiricist and pragmatist epistemological traditions. There are multiple epistemological and metaphysical outlooks that can lead to a conclusion of negative liberty, and the only metaphysical stance necessary for a theory of negative liberty is some conception as the individual as subject.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, while both British Empiricists, differ fundamentally on their understanding of human nature and on their ultimate conclusions regarding government. But they both agree on the basic question of what freedom is. Hobbes accepts the notion of autonomy as “the absence of external impediments,” though he believes that without a state, a Leviathan to limit freedom, people would live in a constant state of war, their freedom paradoxically leading to mass deprivations of freedom by others (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 13). Without surrendering freedom to the absolute power of the Leviathan via the social contract, freedom is even more radically limited. As Hobbes infamously says, in this state life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, Ch. 13). Only limited human autonomy is then possible, according to Hobbes, as it is compromised by constant war in the state of nature or must be given up to the ruler as a part of the social contract.

Locke’s definition of autonomy may not be accepted as a universal within intellectual circles, but it is the premise beneath many political traditions to come after him. He agrees with the principle behind negative freedom, though he tries to expand the definition in a way that further excludes the possibility of being interpreted as positive freedom, saying that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (Human Understanding, § 6). Locke makes clear that liberty is the right not to be subjected to aggression or threats of aggression, but it does not include the “license” to subject another to aggression or threats of aggression. Locke’s conception of liberty is useful because its particularly simple to identify when someone is free by whether they are being subjected to attack or threat of attack (except as retaliation or the possibility of retaliation for their own acts of aggression). This is the liberty referenced in the Declaration of Independence and by the anti-slavery abolition movements.

Locke differs from Hobbes in his understanding of human nature. He believes that the state of nature is one of autonomy already, though there exists the risk of attack against that autonomy. But it is not one of constant war, as Hobbes believes. Locke says that in the state of nature, each individual is tasked with the preservation of liberty by exercising their “right to punish the offender and be executioner of the law of nature” (Human Understanding, § 7). This right is part of their autonomy, and it is a right they give up to the state upon entering a social contract. When one is a member of a social contract which they have consented to, they even then are arguably perfectly autonomous in Locke’s understanding.

Later thinkers in the tradition of Locke have focused on discovering how liberty might be preserved while sacrificing a minimum of one’s own autonomy to the state or even rejecting the social contract as non-consensual and therefore incompatible with autonomy. After the rise of Marxist thought, thinkers working in the paradigm of negative liberty ranging from John Stuart Mill or Lysander Spooner in the nineteenth century and up to Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard in the late twentieth century were relegated to the fringes outside the mainstream of Western academic philosophy.

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, Bk. 1, Ch. 1). Rousseau’s assertion begins the modern understanding of positive liberty, and thinkers and academics from him to Foucault three hundred years later have dedicated their careers to the analysis of the forms these chains take. Rousseau thinks of liberty in an Aristotelian sense, focusing on what he calls “civil liberty” or “moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself” (Social Contract, Bk. 1, Ch. 8). He acknowledges the existence of negative liberty as a “natural independence” but believes that civil liberty is the ultimate form of human autonomy which is can only be gained in entering a social contract (Social Contract, Bk. 2, Ch. 4).

Rousseau’s civil liberty is the liberty of a citizen. “Individual self-interest may speak to him quite differently from how the common interest does,” so that where they conflict, “each individual will be forced to be free” (Social Contract, Bk. 1, Ch. 7). The common interest, or “general will,” represents man’s true interest, and to comply with and support that general will is to be free from those chains. The obvious political problems that come from discovering the general will and forcing compliance with it mean that human autonomy waxes and wanes with the life cycle of each government. “The body politic, like the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction” (Social Contract, Bk. 3, Ch. 11).

Hegel represents a turning point in thought, not merely because of his influence on Marx, but also due to the implications of his dialectical method. In Hegel’s dialectical conception of society, the particular and the universal are essential members of a relationship that makes them complete, or “absolute.” This is the dialectical approach that Hegel applies to every basic relationship in metaphysics. This approach allows for both negative and positive liberty, as the liberty of both the individual (the particular) and society (the universal) are necessary for absolute liberty.

“All the qualities of Spirit exist only through Freedom; that all are but means for attaining Freedom” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, 77). This conception differs from that of Rousseau, as both freedom of the individual and of society are necessary for absolute freedom, and therefore forcing someone to be free would not be compatible with absolute freedom. Hegel believes that all history is a process of realizing and refining autonomy, and that the disagreement between Locke and Rousseau on the meaning of freedom will be reconciled in the ultimate realization of autonomy.

The Hegelian approach to the history of ideas means that ultimate, absolute autonomy is possible when society reaches the “absolute.” This is the state in which the spirit, meaning both the spirit of the individual and the spirit of society, exists “in and for itself.” Hegel believes that all aspects of society follow this approach of dialectic progression, that science, philosophy, art, law, politics, and any other matters of contention are constantly being refined and will eventually reach an end state, the final “synthesis” or “absolute.” True and complete autonomy is only possible in this final state of synthesis, as freedom is an “indefinite, and incalculable ambiguous term” that can only be understood within the absolute (Philosophy of History, 79).

Marx inherits Hegel’s belief that history is undergoing a process to achieve a final state of synthesis, though he “turns Hegel on his head” by focusing on the economic processes he believes determine changes in political and intellectual life. His process is the beginning of a unique trend in that he focuses on the ultimate causes of the forces which exercise influence on people against their autonomy. He believes that workers in the capitalist system are slaves due to both the influence the employer has by offering them wages to influence them to give up the fruits of their labor as well as the influence the capitalist system as a whole as on “consciousness.” There is no state of nature or social contract in Marxist thought, because humans are fundamentally economic creatures whose behavior has always been influenced by economic demands, even when they were just the economic demands of the household.

A truly autonomous person, says Marx, is not influenced by the lure of wages or the economic needs of society. An autonomous person can “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” in Marx-Engels Reader, 160). As long as there are economic factors that influence his work, he is not truly autonomous. But Marx believes that after the overthrow of capitalism, in the Communist society that constitutes the “absolute” theorized by Hegel’s approach, there will be no economic factors influencing people’s behavior, and they will therefore be completely free.

Autonomy is not just a possibility for Marx, it is an inevitability, though it can only exist in that “absolute” state after the workers inevitably overthrow capitalism and establish a state without property. Marx believes that in this state there will be no economic influences, and therefore no other kind of influences, acting on anyone, as politics, law, and culture are downstream of and dependent on economics.

Marx’s understanding of autonomy as the absence of power or influence was tremendously influential in academia, though the historical events of the first half of the twentieth century would cause a crisis for the concept of Hegelian/Marxist progression. The Hegelian belief that society was progressing toward a stable end state of absolute justice was seriously threatened when the Second World War showed that the First World War was not the “war to end all wars,” but the beginning of a period of over 200 million excess deaths in less than thirty years, setting up not a stable peace but another potential showdown between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in its immediate aftermath. In Bolshevik Russia and Maoist China, it appeared that communism was obviously not a final stage of economic progression, but a political movement. The Marxist thinkers in the post-war period also had to explain why communist nations appeared to have oppression without economic oppression, which shouldn’t be possible in the Marxist framework. Put simply, the first problem is whether positive freedom, the absence of all power/influence, was still to be considered inevitable or even possible, and the second is whether economic power is the fundamental form of power/influence.

Antonio Gramsci was confronted directly by these problems as a prisoner of the regime of Mussolini, who had once a been member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party and yet had created a regime that was clearly not the absolute state Marx predicts and had even greater oppressions than ever before. Gramsci, a Marxist, believes the missing explanatory factors in Marxist thought are culture and the intellectual class responsible for it. Cultural influence is still downstream from economic influence, according to Gramsci, but the bourgeoisie, through their control over culture, have the ability to delay or redirect the natural reaction to their economic oppression by indoctrinating the proletariat with their bourgeois morality. “The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government” (Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals” in Selections from Prison Notebooks, 145).

Theodor Adorno, a German neo-Marxist of the “Frankfurt School” working out of the University of Columbia during and after WWII, follows and expands on Gramsci’s insight regarding culture in the capitalist world. He is aggressively critical of negative freedom, saying that “freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same” (Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, 135). Culture, for Adorno, is also a means of influence which threatens human autonomy.

The project of both Adorno and Gramsci is to identify culture as a causal factor in the progress of history. As Marx believes that capitalism is an economic race to the bottom, in which things get progressively worse for the proletariat until the proletariat inevitably retaliates, leading to the final synthesis, Adorno believes that there is a similar race to the bottom in culture. “Today, works of art, suitably packaged like political slogans, are pressed on a reluctant public at reduced prices by the culture industry” (“Culture Industry,” 133). If we understand the process of cultural decline for the proletariat Adorno believes is linked with capitalism as the same process of economic decline for the proletariat Marx believes is linked with capitalism, then we can predict what must happen in culture if it follows the Marxist pattern in economics. Eventually, the proletariat must rise up against the culture industry, which, according to Adorno, “they recognize as false” (“Culture Industry,” 136). The inevitability of a final absolute state, in which all power/influence against autonomy is overthrown, is thereby resurrected in Adorno’s system, because the true revolution will be against the capitalist “culture industry.” This is why Adorno and the Frankfurt school can be referred to as the “neo-Marxists” or “cultural Marxists.”

In traditional Marxism, the economy is the structure on which everything else in society – culture, science, philosophy, religion, etc. – is built. Economics is the structure, everything else is the “superstructure.” Changes to the structure precede changes to the superstructure, but changes to the superstructure cannot change the base structure itself. Cultural Marxism is simply any strain of Marxism that considers culture to be part of the base structure rather than the superstructure. It asserts that the overthrow of capitalist culture is part of the overthrow of the capitalist economy, not an after effect of that overthrow. This intellectual framework is what makes Adorno a “cultural Marxist” rather than just a “Marxist cultural critic.”

The cultural Marxist framework might provide an answer to the first of Marxism’s two Twentieth-Century problems, that positive freedom as the absence of all power/influence can still be considered the final synthesis at the end of history, but Michel Foucault argued that there are still forms of oppression or influence that are not fully accounted for by economics and culture. Foucault believes that “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together,” and he commonly uses the term “power-knowledge” to show that they are fundamentally connected (Sexuality, 100).

In his History of Sexuality, Foucault claims that these discourses shape human identity using the example of homosexuality. He points out that the category of “homosexual” was developed as part of Victorian morality, and saying that “The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’etre and a natural order of disorder… The strategy behind this dissemination was to strew reality with them and incorporate them into the individual” (Sexuality, 44). Foucault believes that the identity of homosexuality, like all other identities, is created by discourse as an exercise of power.

Everything is systemic for Foucault, and the individual is just a node in the system, a construct of language and discourse. These power-relations are not simply an act of oppression of one person or group against another person or group as they are in the Marxist tradition or even in the tradition of negative freedom. Even though “power relations… are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice of decision of an individual subject” (Sexuality, 95).

Foucault’s analysis of power describes the means by which we might resist or overthrow and transform it, but we ultimately cannot eliminate power, because power is knowledge. Power-knowledge certainly isn’t caught in a race to the bottom that will lead to the inevitable destruction of all power-knowledge as capitalism and the cultural industry are claimed to be in Marxism and neo-Marxism. Human autonomy is not inevitable in Foucault’s system, which is why he can be categorized as a post-Marxist. So to what degree is autonomy even possible in this now widespread Foucauldian worldview? Our freedom is limited by the range of options made possible within the context of the various discourses or power relations we exist at the nexus at. The Foucauldian system leaves us without even a criterion by which we can tell whether or not we are autonomous, as any knowledge of one’s autonomy is power-knowledge, and therefore subject to the influences of outside discourse.

Autonomy in the sense of negative freedom is easy to identify, if not always politically possible to achieve. Autonomy in sense of positive freedom before Hegel and Marx, as used by Rousseau and other earlier thinkers, is similarly identifiable and achievable, though difficult. In the systems of dialectical progression of history, Hegelianism, Marxism, and neo-Marxism, autonomy is not only achievable but inevitable. But in the post-Marxist sense, in which all sources of power and influence must be overthrown as forces against positive liberty, autonomy is ultimately not possible, though it remains something we must strive for anyway. This last understanding of autonomy is more radically different from the others than Locke’s negative liberty is different from Rousseau’s positive liberty, as it calls for a state of “perpetual revolution” as Mao put it. It calls for nothing less than the imperative to constantly redefine autonomy and then overthrow that new definition as another iteration of power-knowledge.

Top Image: “The Triumph of the Guillotine in Hell” by Nicolas Antoine Taunay, 1795