23. THE NUMINOUS AND ITS SYMBOLS Philosophy begins in wonder. This was the view of Plato (as expressed in his Theaetetus, p.155d), as well as many other philosophers down through the ages. In this sense, wonder is not simply idle curiosity, but a passion for the unknown, which drives us to seek an underlying meaning behind the diversity of our life, impelling us to ever new depths of insight and heights of understanding. I have chosen to introduce philosophy to you in this course by starting not with wonder, but with its opposite, ignorance. This is because the logical progression of the parts of the tree of philosophy is opposite to the normal chronological progression in our experience of doing philosophy. In these lectures I am attempting to explain philosophy to you in such a way that, having completed the course, you will be able to set out on a philosophical journey of your own. That means that, although the best way to learn philosophy may be to move from metaphysics through logic and science to ontology, the best way to do philosophy will be to move from wonder through wisdom and understanding to a fuller recognition of your own ignorance. Wonder relates primarily to our amazement at the great diversity of human experiences, especially those experiences which give rise to questions that cannot be answered merely by logical reasoning, but only by living through the experience itself. The most basic kind of philosophical wonder is wonder about the meaning of life. We cannot satisfy that wonder merely by developing metaphysical theories, or sharpening our logical thinking skills, or expanding the depth and range of our knowledge. Rather, the meaning of life gradually emerges out of our willingness to be open to the kinds of "wonderful" experiences we will be discussing here in Part Four. Even though our discussion of these experiences will depend on words just as much as in the previous lectures, we must keep in mind that we experience wonder most profoundly in silence. All of the theories we will examine as possible "answers" to the various problems we will discuss here in Part Four pale in insignificance compared to the real answer we receive whenever we experience the wonder of silence. For silent wonder, more than any number of words, can impress us with a true sense of our own reality, and can urge us on to a level of wholeness which words alone can never express, but which gives the diversity of our words their ultimate meaning. As you have been learning to do philosophy, I hope you have already experienced this philosophical kind of wonder. Indeed, another reason why I started this course with lectures on ignorance is that I have found this is one of the best ways to awaken wonder in those whose modern, scientific world view tends to isolate them from the many experiences which, prior to the domination of technology over human society, used to be a natural part of everyone's life. I have considered teaching this course in the reverse order, starting with a lecture on death and ending with a lecture on myth. Although this would probably have made the course more interesting at the beginning, and thus attracted you more quickly to a serious study of philosophy, there would have been a danger of interpreting the kinds of experience discussed here too scientifically, without recognizing the wondrous mystery towards which they point. These days, when death so often happens in the anonymity of a hospital ward, when beauty is so often locked within the confines of a museum's walls, when religious experience is so often identified with doing "churchy" things, it has become all too easy to think we have really experienced the mysteries of life, when in fact all we have done is to isolate ourselves from the real thing through the trappings of technology. Recognizing our ignorance of ultimate reality has, I hope, succeeded in shocking you out of the common complacency that kills our instinct to wonder. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is one of the best examples of a philosopher who appreciated the shock value of recognizing human ignorance, as well as the connection between such a recognition and philosophical wonder. Thus his Penses is filled with passages expressing the tensions in human existence, as in the following (section 434): What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! ... Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God.... Whence it seems that God, willing to render the difficulty of our existence unintelligible to ourselves, has concealed the knot so high, or better speaking, so low, that we are quite incapable of reaching it; so that it is not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by the simple submissions of reason, that we can truly know ourselves. Pascal's paradoxes point us beyond our ordinary way of looking at the world, and confront us with a transcendent reality whose mystery stirs up silent wonder in the depths of our heart. Today I will introduce to you one of the most common and yet profound ways of experiencing the wonder of silence: namely, that which has as its object the ultimate reality most people call "God". But first, I should mention that one of the names traditionally given to the philosophical task of understanding this and other ways of experiencing the "unity in diversity" of existing things is "ontology" (which means "study of being"). Ontology, the study of what is, is one of the methods philosophers have used to resolve the various tensions created by our philosophical reasoning. For example, Kant not only recognized the tension between freedom and fate, as we saw in Lecture 18, but also argued that man has a "practical need" to resolve it in order to appreciate the "totality" of human knowledge and experience. As we shall see in Lecture 24, he attempted to resolve this tension by adopting something like an ontological point of view in his account of the role of beauty and purpose in nature. The ontological study of human experiences of the transcendent (i.e., of God) has often been regarded as one of the tasks of the branch of applied philosophy known as "philosophy of religion". However, the scope of this discipline ought to be limited to issues related more directly to our knowledge, such as the arguments for the existence of God, the nature and reliability of religious language and beliefs, and the problem of evil. The task of understanding what is typically called "religious experience" belongs to the branches of the tree of philosophy only insofar as we are asking whether or not such experiences can give us knowledge of God. The examination of the experiences as such belongs more properly to the leaves of the tree. The common term "religious experience" can be misleading, though, since it could be taken to imply that such experience can occur only in people who belong to some established religion. But in fact, many people who are not "religious" in any traditional sense would claim to have had experiences of this type at some point in their life. This suggests that we need a new name to refer to such experiences when studying their ontological character. Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a German theologian who adopted a Kantian framework in attempting to construct a thoroughgoing interpretation of religion and religious experience. His stress on discovering the essence of the empirical manifestation of religious experiences was quite different from Kant's stress on their rational foundation. Nevertheless, Otto believed his ideas could serve as a helpful complement to Kant's. After investigating the similarities between the religious experiences of people in many different traditions, especially those normally regarded as "mystical", Otto wrote a book, called The Idea of the Holy (1917), in which he gave a now famous description of the fundamental characteristics of such experiences. Let's look today at just a few of his main ideas. Because the word "God" is not used in all religious traditions, and because those traditions which do refer to God inevitably employ different names and/or descriptions of God, Otto decided to avoid using the word "God" as much as possible. Moreover, in examining the bare phenomena of our experiences (i.e., when we focus only on what we can observe), we do not actually find God Himself. What we find is various types of experience. Therefore, Otto coined the words "numen" and "numinous" to refer to the kind of object which, when we feel its presence, gives rise to certain types of deep, religious experience. (Remember, Kant had distinguished between the "phenomenal" and "noumenal" in a similar way (see Figure 7.2).) Of course, most people would call this object "God". But Otto's goal was not to propose a theory about the object causing such experiences (i.e., whether it is really God, or nature, or just something we ate for lunch); instead, he only wanted to give a phenomenological description of what is there. This is, by the way, the typical method employed in doing ontology. For that reason ontology and "phenomenology"--i.e., description of the essential character of the phenomena we experience--always tend to be closely related disciplines. According to Otto, the feeling of being in the presence of a numen, a transcendent reality which is "wholly other" than my own self, is a basic human experience, and should therefore serve as the starting point for any ontology of religious experience. The result of experiencing this numinous presence is that I will be deeply impressed with my own dependence on it. This gives rise to what Otto called a "creature-feeling". He warned against the temptation to regard this "feeling of dependence" (as Schleiermacher had called it) as the primary reality, and to think we infer from it the belief in some underlying object. On the contrary, Otto claimed, the object mysteriously presents itself to us first, and the mystical feeling follows only as a consequence. No matter what we believe about God, this numinous presence will appear to us as something that can be described by appealing to the idea of the "holy". Otto devoted a great deal of effort to the task of explaining the nature of our experience of the numinous. The "holy" object, he argued, will be both "nonrational" and "nonmoral". This does not mean it will be irrational and immoral, but only that questions of rationality and morality will be irrelevant when it comes to the feeling aroused by such a deep experience. Otto further named this feeling "mysterium tremendum" and argued that it involves five distinct "elements": awe, majesty, urgency, mystery (or "otherness"), and fascination. The feeling of awe refers to a special kind of fear or dread (a tremor) in the presence of something mysterious. We will look more closely at this feeling in Lecture 26. The recognition of the majesty of the numinous object then gives rise to a sense of humble self-abasement (or "creaturehood") in us. The fact that this is a real experience of a living object, and not just an abstract philosophical theory, is expressed in the "energy", or urgency we feel whenever we have such an experience. This urgency can sometimes intensify our dread, as when it comes in the form of "the wrath of God", but it also leads to the recognition that this object is "wholly other" (i.e., mysterious). These feelings are all rather negative so far, and might on their own cause us to flee from the numinous object; but they are balanced by a sense of fascination, which keeps us intensely interested in the experience and in its object. With this brief description of Otto's theory in mind, we can summarize it by combining the two maps in Figure 22.1, as follows: [Figure 23.1: The Numinous Breakthrough and the Idea of the Holy] It is worth mentioning that Kant himself had some awareness of this kind of numinous experience. For example, the passage concluding the second Critique (quoted above, at the very end of Lecture 18) refers to the "starry heavens above me" and the "moral law within me" as basic experiences ("I see them before me") giving rise to the feelings of "admiration and awe", as well as to a sense of mysterious urgency and dependence ("I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence"): one could hardly cite a better example of Otto's ontological description of religious experience! Moreover, Kant elsewhere described these same experiences in terms of the "hand of God" in nature and the "voice of God" in our hearts. These two ways in which reason manifests itself to human beings were, for Kant, self-validating, for they represent the very source of our scientific knowledge and moral goodness, respectively. As such, they unify the endless diversity that always characterizes our actual experiences of truth and goodness. This, in fact, is why the source of logical reasoning cannot itself be logical; nor can the source of the moral law itself be moral. Kant recognized (though he unfortunately did not emphasize the fact) that the "starry heavens" (nature) and the "moral law" (freedom) are like boundaries upon which we bump our heads if we try to get beyond them. For, just as Otto claimed, the source of these boundaries must itself be nonrational and nonmoral in order to be capable of unifying the diversity of our rational and moral experiences. Anyone who has had such experiences of the numinous will have an immediate response to Nietzsche, or to anyone else who wishes to argue that God is dead. The death of God as Nietzsche proclaimed it was real enough; but it was the death of a false God, a God invented by human rationality more than by divine revelation. Those who have experienced God will know we cannot force God to live within the boundaries of any human system. Just as Nietzsche claimed, to attempt to do so is to kill God; and the only proper response is to break out of that mold in order to regain the possibility of experiencing the life-giving reality itself. But this raises a crucial question: Once we have experienced the numinous, how can we describe it or understand it without forcing it into an unnatural mold? This question has been addressed by many scholars in this century by referring to the power of symbols. So in the remainder of today's session I will introduce an existentialist thinker whose ideas we will meet again at several points here in Part Four. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was another German theologian, though he lived much of his life in the U.S.A. Of his many interesting insights, his account of the nature of faith and its relation to symbols is one of the most important. According to Tillich, everyone has faith, because everyone has some "ultimate concern", even those who are not aware of it. Our ultimate concern is the thing or person or goal towards which all our energies in life are directed; it is the final determining factor in all our decisions. For many of you, "doing well in university" might be your ultimate concern--the issue determining what you do and when you do it most of the time. However, Tillich claimed that some things do not deserve this honor, for "the surrender to a concern which is not really ultimate" is "idolatrous" and hence "destructive" (Dynamics of Faith, pp.16,35): "Our ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us. But we never can be without it." An improper object of ultimate concern is dangerous because faith is more than mere trust or rational belief. As Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be (p.168): Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm himself because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be. We will look more closely at Tillich's concept of "courage" in Lecture 26. The problem at this point is that the proper object of faith is what Otto calls the "numinous"--in other words, it is the mysterious object of certain deep but inexplicable experiences we have. So how can faith exist if its object is a mystery? Tillich's answer was that objects which are not mysterious can lead us to the mysterious object. The former objects are called "symbols". Thus Tillich defined the special, religious form of faith as "the acceptance of symbols that express our ultimate concern in terms of divine actions" (Dynamics, p.48). Tillich carefully distinguished between a "symbol" and a "sign". A sign is a knowable object which merely points beyond itself to some other knowable object, whereas a symbol is a knowable object which points beyond itself to a hidden reality, while at the same time participating in the mystery to which it points. A road sign directs us to the place we are going, but when we reach our destination we see that it has nothing to do with the sign(s) we followed along the way. Like Wittgenstein's "ladder" (see Figure 13.1), we can discard a sign as soon as it has done its job. A symbol, by contrast, is intimately connected with our ability to experience the reality in question. Without symbols, we would be unable to experience the thing symbolized. As such, Tillich argued, "symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.... The language of faith is the language of symbols" (Dynamics, pp.41,45). The difference between signs and symbols is, in fact, parallel to the difference between analytic and synthetic logic. Hence we can depict this difference by using the map in Figure 23.2, where the double-headed arrow (being a combination of the two types of arrow given in Figure 22.1) represents participation. [Figure 9.3: Analytic and Synthetic Propositions] This comparison between the sign-symbol relationship and the analytic- synthetic relationship is not accidental. For symbolic language is based on synthetic logic, while our ordinary, literal use of words (as signs) is based on analytic logic. Thus, just as the former, according to Tillich, relates to the language of faith, so also the latter relates to the language of knowledge. As we saw in Part Two, our literal use of words requires any "A" to remain "A" and hence always to be opposed to "-A". As a result, any "B" which is not identical to "A" must be included as part of "-A". (This, by the way, is usually regarded as the third law of analytic logic, called the "law of the excluded middle": "B = either A or -A".) Signs always direct us in this way around the world of the known and the knowable. But whenever we use words in a symbolic way, the original symbol ("A") itself presents to us a hidden reality ("-A") which we can actually experience, because this A participates in the -A, and vice versa. (Obviously, synthetic logic therefore rejects the law of the excluded middle.) Symbols enable an object, paradoxically, to be for us something which it is not, so it should come as no surprise to find some philosophers basing symbolic language on the "law of paradox" or "law of participation" (see Lecture 10). Let's take my wedding ring as a simple example. If I regard this object merely as a sign of my status as a married person, then the ring itself, as an object, will not be very important to me. I will be more concerned with how it looks on me than with what it means to me. If I lose it, I will be sad only because it's worth lots of money, since it is made out of gold. But the loss would not have any effect on my marriage, since I could buy a new one, which would point to my married status just as effectively. However, if I regard my ring as a symbol of my commitment to love my wife as long as we are alive, then the ring itself will actually participate in my marriage. To lose it would be a tragedy, since a part of my marriage would thereby be lost. I would, of course, buy another ring to replace it; but it would take a long time for that new object to become as significant a symbol of the mystery of love as my original ring was. As we shall see in Lecture 25, love is in fact one of the most common types of experiences that require us to interpret objects as symbols. Since today's lecture deals mainly with "religious experience", let's use the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as another example to help clarify just how symbols operate. When Christians partake of the "Lord's Supper", each participant usually eats a small piece of bread and drinks a small amount of wine or grape juice. But the significance of this ritual will vary greatly, depending on whether the person regards these common, "knowable" objects, as signs or as symbols. Regarded as signs, the bread and wine point the person to some other knowable reality, such as the actual body and blood of the historical man named Jesus Christ (in the case of the Catholic who believes in "transubstantiation"), or to the memory of this same person and what he did (in the case of the typical Protestant). In both cases the original objects lose their importance as bread and wine once we apprehend the object to which they point. Regarded as symbols, however, these same objects no longer have anything to do with magic or memory; instead, they are recognized for what they are (namely, bread and wine), but they are believed to participate in the mystery of the Incarnation of God in human flesh. Eating them is therefore a profound expression of one's own willingness to participate in this mystery. By experiencing this ritual symbolically, the person is transported by these ordinary objects into a deep communion with a mysterious reality that can never be comprehended, except perhaps in the incomprehensible wonder of silence. In conclusion, it might be helpful to use Tillich's definition of faith to distinguish between metaphysics and ontology--two disciplines which are easily confused, even by philosophers. Whereas metaphysics is the search for knowledge of an ultimate reality, ontology is a search for experience of an ultimate concern. So as we study various forms of ontology here in Part Four, we must keep in mind that the "ultimate", towards which our attention is pointed by the various symbols we meet in our experience, is an ultimate attitude or way of life much more than an ultimate object or set of dogmas. Such symbols should all be regarded not as giving us any metaphysical knowledge of ultimate reality, but only as kindling within us the silent fire of concern for the ultimate direction and meaning of our life. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT 1. Is it possible to experience the wonder of noise? 2. What is the relationship between wonder and ignorance? 3. What is the opposite of "ontology"? 4. Would it be possible to experience an unholy symbol? RECOMMENDED READINGS 1. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy,2 tr. J.W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950[1923]), especially Chapters III-VI, pp.8-40. 2. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), especially Chapter III, "Symbols of Faith", pp.41-54. 3. Joan Mitchell, In Pursuit of Wonder (Minneapolis, Minn.: Winston Press, 1977). 4. Blaise Pascal, Pensees: Thoughts on religion and other subjects, tr. William Finlayson Trotter (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965).