On being a Quaker and a philosopher

Posted on April 24 2011 | 9 Comments

I’ve posted before on this blog about my struggle to reconcile my Quaker faith with my experience of academic philosophy. I didn’t get very far with my last post on the subject, either! But I had a great experience yesterday which helped my thinking a lot.

First, some background. I’m at a Quaker conference in Switzerland. I’ve been uplifted by meeting lots of Quakers, and generally reminded of why I value my Quaker faith so much. This got me thinking about how I have drifted in my Quaker faith a bit. Not in the sense of losing certain beliefs – this is not really a Quaker difficulty – but I have not been to Quaker meeting much, and my spiritual life has become a bit stagnant. So I went on a solitary walk up a hill to think and pray about it. I ended up praying a bit about my fears about faith and philosophy, and my sadness at abandoning my Quaker life to some extent. I ended up thinking something along the lines of: God, help me see how to flourish as a Quaker and a philosopher without compromising either path. I felt better for having opened my heart in this way, and felt OK with the fact that an answer might take some time to arrive.

Later yesterday evening, I bumped into a Quaker from France who is a philosopher of religion, just finishing a book on belief and atheism, though not an atheist himself. It felt a bit like bumping into a God-given signpost which said: does that answer your question?!

So now a bit more on my thinking and recent clearness on how to be a philosopher and a Quaker.

The simplistic view which worried me in the past is that analytic philosophy, with its fondness for logic, tends to brush aside unknowable truths, and works to reduce the world to small-scale certainties. This would seem to leave little room for faith. I am learning that this simplistic view is false.

For me, being a Quaker is about being part of a community which is committed to seeking truth and and acting faithfully. At out best, Quakers are keenly and constantly listening for new insights from the Spirit. Our individual spiritual paths can make for a confusing mosaic of beliefs. But one thing we do agree on is that no single person can have all the answers.

We aspire to be humble in our claims to truth – not to the point of crippling doubt or silence, but because the truths we seek are so profound and far-reaching, Quakers are rightly suspicious of neatly packaged answers. We are content for our faith picture to remain incomplete, and don’t expect to stop learning from God. Evolving insights and changes of view do not shake our faith. Instead, such updates encourage us to keep listening for and testing new insights as we find them. Our conversation with God continues. By listening carefully to each other, and being open about what we have found, we keep this conversation alive and grow together.

What of philosophy?

Notoriously, in the popular mind, philosophy asks daft questions and offers baffling answers. Or, perhaps, it demands narrowly defined logical proof, thus excluding many important parts of human experience – meaning, morality and faith to name a few. Having read a lot of philosophy, I can see where this pessimistic view comes from. I disagree with this view, however.

Philosophy doesn’t shrink from asking the big questions, and why should it? Our human nature drives us to look for meaning, purpose, and insights into the biggest questions. I see no problem with a discipline dedicated to grappling with these questions. All of what we now call science has grown out of philosophical impulses. It’s true that some philosophical ‘answers’ can be complex and unsatisfactory. But they are arrived at in good faith (most of the time) from a commitment to truth and consistency.

At our best, philosophers are a community of truth-seekers working together, listening to each other in our efforts to increase human wisdom and happiness. A good philosopher makes a cautious claim to knowledge, aware that some of our most famous philosophical arguments are later found to be false or confused. But we also know that even the humblest good-faith attempt to examine a meaningful question is time well spent. Neatly packaged ‘final’ knowledge and watertight proof may be elusive, but the basic process of questioning and arguing can give us understanding and wisdom. This happens as we make our questions more precise, and dismiss commonly-held bad answers. So good work is done even when answers are not final.

So what are the parallels? Are my faith and my passion for philosophy compatible?

I am increasingly confident that they are complementary. Perhaps not in the content of the beliefs I derive from them, but certainly in form. Both aim at enlightenment. Both are wide in scope and accommodate diverse attempts to answer the biggest questions. But both are careful in sifting – some questions are not meaningful for Quakers, just as some questions have little value for philosophers.

Both Quakers and philosophers are cautious about answers, too – we don’t try to claim too much. And we are always mindful that later insights will expose gaps in our current picture. I guess that will happen with this blog post!

(in writing this post, I realised that it was very short on examples of Quaker-philosophical questions and answers. Here are a few:
- how are we to live?
- what models can we draw on, and why are they helpful?
- what makes our humanity valuable?
- how can we make society better?
- where can we find meaning in the world?
- what are the most reliable ways of seeking the truth?
- how can we share and test our truths together in a loving way?

Some answers
- be a pattern, an example
- love each other
- all of humanity is precious
- simple moral judgements are often wrong
- questioning is good

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9 Responses to On being a Quaker and a philosopher

Martin Kelley | April 25 2011 at 4:55 pm | Reply

I so wish we could hang out in person sometime and B.S. late into the night. I was a philosophy major in college. Its department focused on continental philosophy–John Caputo was one of my profs. I definitely had talents–I graduated with honors and was expected to become a philosophy professor myself.

But I ended up rejecting all that. The endless meta loops of Derrida started feeling like academic word games. I was intrigued when I learned that Foucault scrapped his drafts for the History of Sexuality after an eye-opening semester teaching in San Francisco. His elaborate philosophical constructs felt like coded abstraction of his personal life–I I found myself wanting to hear his stories.

I turned toward stories. The Beats were very influential, as they basically created an literary universe of themselves by the attention they gave one another. I also watched activist community organizers. Friends became another influence, of course. I saw lives being lived with integrity and intention and wanted to understand the spiritual underpinnings of that.

One thing I will say is that my philosophical side makes me very conscious of logical inconsistencies of the mix-and-match syncretisms of many modern-day Friends. I don’t find the “we are who we are” model and its insistence on community trumping theology very compelling. That’s part of the reason I’ve been drawn to more philosophically-rooted Friends that don’t shy from discussions of belief and group accountability.
Tom Smith | April 25 2011 at 7:26 pm | Reply

I appreciate very much this post. As someone who has spent some time looking at the relationship of “Natural Philosophy,” aka science, and Friends, I too see no apparent reason why Friends and Science need to be “distinct.” In fact, there is a great deal in common. Eddington spoke of not having any “creed” but not being lukewarm in belief as applying to science and Friends. I often think of “Quaker Perfection” as a model for science in the sense that we (I) believe that there is Truth and Reality to be revealed and that we have access to this while at the same time realizing that there is always more than we have obtained. In my opinion the “true” scientist as well as the “true” Friend, find answers to questions but find even more questions to be asked to find even more answers.
Alden Josey | April 26 2011 at 3:33 pm | Reply

As a Quaker who is also a Jungian psychoanalyst, I found this essay to be an eloquent, even poignant, expression of a conflict that grows in thoughtful and reflective persons between what is rational and what is non-rational in their psyche. My approach to the dilemma is transformational and synthetic. I try to allow my experience of Quakerism and my work as an analyst (a “soul-healing” work) to interpenetrate, to shape and to transform mutually. I “press on” (like Paul) toward a union of these apparently disparate attitudes in a higher form that entertains and embraces paradox as it takes shape. My work in the consulting room and all my efforts to deepen my grasp of its meaning and purpose, together with my time in Meeting for Worship, teach me that the profoundest truths lie in the interplay of contraries. I found in sources so wide-ranging as the writing of Rufus Jones on mysticism, the thoughts of St. John of the Cross, and in the Upanishads a common theme: “God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all”. Now there’s a paradox to delight the soul! To the philosopher, I say, Press on and take reasoning powers to the limit! At the same time, embrace the wordless and un-premised flights of the Spirit! These are not different.
Alden Josey
Centre MM, Delaware
Enok Kippersund | April 28 2011 at 11:05 am | Reply

Thanks for recharging the batteries! – and soothing and support!

most friendly regards
Enok
Sean Sarnecki | May 1 2011 at 5:11 pm | Reply

I agree very much with this. Edith Hamilton observed in her book ‘The Greek Way’ that Aristotle thought poetry could describe ‘absolute truth’ better than historical writing (which I think would include science in his comprehension) which intentionally tries to establish logical consequences to what is observed. Like you said so well here, the phenomenal world and our experience does defy tidy explanation, such that no matter how tight the argument or explanation, it always forgets something or leaves something out. Hence, the systems of the great philosophers are always ‘found out’ by the thinkers who follow. Capturing the universe in an explanation is like grasping at sand; it just runs through our fingers and escapes. Still, as Mr. Josey from my great native state of Delaware says, this should in no way deter philosophers and scientists from passionately investigating phenomena as though the endeavor were poetic in nature, though only the mad language of poetry can describe nature in a fashion that will last.
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Ela | September 18 2011 at 6:08 am | Reply

Thank you for this post! I think the phrase, “content for our faith picture to remain incomplete” summarizes exactly what I have been trying to come to terms with lately.
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On being a Quaker and a philosopher

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