The Impossibility of Proofs of the Existence of God and
the Sphere of the Absolute in Consciousness
by Manfred S. Frings [*] ________________________________________________________________________
The presentation of our subject has four parts:
1. An explanation of Max Scheler’s
position that the existence of God cannot be proven,
2. An explanation of the concept of the sphere of the Absolute in
consciousness,
3. An explication of the experience
of God in repentance,
4. The centrality of two categories of
the person and the dynamic type of existence of the
person as the foundation of religious experience.
1.
Max Scheler in The Eternal in Man
makes it easy for us in subscribing to the idea that the existence of
God cannot be proven. Simply put: “existence” itself is not provable. What
can, strictly speaking, be proven are only propositions that have already been
found (V 253, E 259). Furthermore, proofs can only pertain to already known
existing things. The object must be there first in order to be able to be
proved. In the philosophy of religion, therefore, proving the existence of God
begs the very question in that the existing object is not there first.
Scheler makes it difficult for us, however, in adding two more types of
confirmation. One he calls in German Aufweis
and the other Nachweis. The
three German words of Beweis, Aufweis,
and Nachweis contain the German verb
“weisen” which means ”to point to” something. The word is quite
common in German usage as, for instance, in “der
Wegweiser,” meaning a signpost that points to a destination. A Beweis
also points to an endpoint as it does in mathematics. Hence a proof points to
propositions that are already given.
An Aufweis and a Nachweis are however different from a proof, for which reason I used
the word “confirmation” instead of proof. A number of translations have
been offered, and mine included, that do not quite translate these German
words. Checking out various texts again in detail we want to suggest a better
rendition of the terms: An Aufweis
is a “discovery” of something (V
250 E 255/6; V 254 E 260). Confusingly, Scheler refers to an Aufweis
also as a demonstration (Latin: de-monstrare) meaning a “showing” of
something. But this has too wide a meaning as to what an Aufweis precisely entails; namely, to be a discovery of something found
for a first time (in archeology, for example, this meaning plays an
important role when something entirely new has been discovered)
Applying Aufweis to an
experience of God would mean, then, that a person would have had an experience
of the divine for the first time after he had been all along unaware of
something like the divine existing. An example for this may occur in a severe
and hopeless tragedy that has befallen a human being, but which tragedy all of
a sudden turns out to have a miraculous ending, prompting the spontaneous
remark of “my God” this or that did not happen after all.
A Nachweis, on the other hand, is roughly an opposite of an Aufweis
in that something had earlier
been found what was totally forgotten later but then had been
re-discovered. Scheler calls this also confusingly a “construction,” or
even a “verification” (i.e., a verification of what had earlier been
found). We translate Nachweis,
therefore, simply as a
“re-discovery” of something that had earlier been found but had completely
been forgotten.
While discovery and re-discovery can be helpful to find something like
God in a religious experience, they nevertheless do not measure up to an
unquestionable reality of God's existence in a personal experience (V 254 E
260) to anyone who plainly denies God to exist in the first place. Indeed,
Scheler tells us that in his lifetime not every human being may even have a
religious experience. But even more importantl is the fact that both discovery
and re-discovery still contain at least some degrees of rational elements (V
254 E 260) and that rational operations are not a fitting foundation to
establish an existence of anything, God’s included. In the philosophy of
religion of Scheler’s first period up to 1920 or so the above Vor-
and Nachweis have relative relevance
to the sphere of consciousness
called the “sphere of the absolute.”
But our following intention to describe in brief this sphere in every
human being’s consciousness will also show that proofs for the existence of
a highest being called God can
not be valid. Let
us ask the question: “What
is a sphere in consciousness and what does it have to do with God?”
2.
There are twelve spheres of consciousness mentioned throughout Max Scheler’s
works.
Sometimes they are called “regions” of consciousness and Scheler
once referred to a sphere in German also an “Anschauung.”
A brief and concise description of a “sphere” of consciousness
would run like this: A sphere of consciousness is the delineation of a
particular universal meaning within which entities of a relevant kind are
comprehended. Thus, the sphere of the thou (of other human beings) or the
“we-sphere” contains the universal meaning of “otherness” or of the
“thou” or “of other human beings” of the past, present and future
humanity.
This state of affairs reminds one, however, of Plato’s universal
ideas and limited copies of them in the practical world, a Platonism which
Scheler charged Husserl's Logical Investigations with. The spheres of
consciousness are, however, very different from said Platonic argument in that
universal meanings in consciousness are neither eternal, nor inborn, nor in
the Platonic sense of the word “recollected” on occasion of seeing a
practical imperfect copy of a Platonic “idea” in question. This difference
between a sphere of consciousness and a Platonic idea can be seen in the
sphere of the thou: an infant born lives first in a “psychic stream”
wherein mine and thine are still undistinguished, says Scheler in The
Nature of Sympathy (Wesen
und Formen der Sympathie) (VII
209-259 E 238-264) and the child is not born with innate ideas.
We all know that the thou-sphere is well illustrated in Scheler’s
example of an “ideal” Robinson Crusoe: It is in the very absence of
having ever met real fellow humans at any time since his birth that Robinson
experiences the we-sphere by way of absent thous, by way of total loneliness
and communality with others.
The universal meaning of the sphere of the absolute, too, can be
described by way of the very absence of an absolute in the everyday practical
world. This may be one reason why ever so many finite and various contents of
absolutes in this sphere in consciousness have been made up since times of
yore. For this sphere can be “filled’ with absolutes like individual gods
or godlike images, with fetiches, with man-made socio-political
absolutizations such as materialism, idealism, atheism, or even with
philosophies at certain periods of time. Scheler calls all human-made finite
absolutes “aberrations” or “idols.”
Nevertheless a Realsetzung of
something absolute that is not rationally made up, can, Scheler holds, be
posited to certain degrees by way of an Aufweis
or by ways of a Nachweis; but
it can be posited without a doubt only in an individual’s
immediate religious experience. This experience is radically different
from any and all mundane experiences of things and entities in the our
practical everyday world. This experience was neither treated by Husserl nor
by Heidegger, let alone later by thinkers of existentialism, deconstruction,
structuralism, positivism, post modernism or other modern “-isms.”
3.
We have chosen an example for an individual religious experience of God that
Scheler himself provided for us in his lengthy 1917 essay on Repentance
and Rebirth.
In a highly litigious and technological age as ours today acts of
self-communion, or of one’s concentration into our innermost self, or of
what I have perhaps rendered in an over-translation in Scheler's Formalism
in Ethics of German Sammlung as
personal “in-gatheredness,” an act of genuine repentance appears to have
almost no place anymore. In their early education today our children are
told, “do better next time” when they did something wrong and failed our
expectations. One is not supposed to let children suffer from wrong deeds and
mistakes they have made; one is supposed to “help” them and spare them
from feeling bad about themselves. Clearly, there is a difference between this
mundane attitude and an act of repentance. To-day’s “do better next
time” attitude pertains to what is to be done by children or by others in
the future, whereas a feeling of repentance over guilt reaches back to a deed
of the past. The widespread modern “do better next time” attitude closes
our eyes to a guilt of the past.
For this reason Scheler maintained that the feeling of guilt has been
numbed in modern times but keeps nevertheless accumulating in
sub-consciousness. This appears to have also been a reason why Scheler every
so often wrote the word “repentance” on margins of his copy of
Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) next to those lines where Heidegger treats
Dasein’s guilt without repentance referred to.
For, there is to be observed a parallel manifestation of repentance and
guilt that Heidegger did not mention. There is repentance of a person over a
deed (Tatreue) and there is
repentance of a person having been so as to have committed the bad deed
(Seinsreue), just as Heidegger, on
his account, distinguished between guilt as a vulgar
phenomenon of guilt (moral
instances of guilt, “Tatschuld”)
and the being of guilt (“Seinsschuld)”
of Dasein. There is therefore at
least a parallel structure of repentance and guilt.
The numbing of feelings of guilt in present days’ society’s
preponderant attention to the individual’s body-ego and its future
(suspiciously expressive of angst of death) - rather than a concern for
immoral happenings of the past - repentance does not readily lend itself today
for a discovery, re-discovery of a personal experience of God. As we said
earlier, our example for the genuine religious act of repentance will remain
controversial to-day. This is especially so when we do not recall that
personal repentance lies within the formation of the “type” of existence
that Scheler assigned to persons and their relations. It is within the context
of a peculiar type of existence that Scheler appears to fix the possibility of
a Realsetzung, i.e., a positing
of the reality of the divine.
4.
We must ask first, however: Can there be a “type” of existence in the
first place? Is not the existence of any and all entities the same as has
been propounded for centuries?
Scheler does not think so. In his views about existence (hidden as
these views may be in his writings) he may be regarded as a forerunner of
existentialism and as an epigone of
Kirkegaard. For he drew a sharp distinction between the traditionally
conceived fixed and stable existence as that of a stone, on the one hand, and,
on the other, what I term to be his view on a “dynamic existence.” The
former existence does not pertain to persons and their manifold relations, but
dynamic existence does. What is dynamic existence and how can it relate to an
experience of the reality of the divine?
Let us have Scheler first speak for himself (V 331/2; E 335):
Only a person
can in this sense ‘be silent’, be ‘uninforming’. For it is of the
essence of the person – as distinct from a merely animate organism, a
bundle of vital processes signaling an automatic
self-impression to the outer world – that it can make knowledge by
others of what it thinks, wills, and judges, dependent on its free
decision. A spiritual person is known only in self-revelation. A person
can lie, dissemble, hide itself. Only a
person; the stone cannot, neither can the animate organism, the plant, or an
animal.
Dynamic existence is a self-generating existence in contrast to the commonly
understood static existence of something, say that of stone
associated only with a visual and tangible perception of it. Upon a
closer look, dynamic existence has two major characteristics:
1. The character of self–revealing, disclosing, self-opening or
emerging (V 143; E 146/7).
2. The character of the opposite: of receding, closing itself off,
self-concealing and silence.
In between these opposite characteristics of dynamic existence there
are gradations as those of deceiving, pretending, misleading, misinforming,
lying, acting itself out, et alia.
All interpersonal
relations consist in dynamic
self-generating and acted-out existence. It is no coincidence, says Scheler,
that the world has always been likened to a stage on which persons are
“players” and play roles. Hence, also human history must be
self-generating, revealing and concealing existence and rests on
“historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit)
in contrast to recalled historical facts and events.
In sum, then, the person can be as overt and explicit as it can be
withdrawn and silent. The person can laugh and weep, be happy and sorrowful,
and guilty and innocent.
As we hinted earlier, the withdrawal into silence is associated by
Scheler with a specific form of personal existence, i.e., that of an extreme
self-concentration or in-gatheredness (Sammlung)
which in to-days’ mostly extroverted humanity is a rare phenomenon: Scheler
explains this Sammlung in Formalism
in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics
of Values (II 417 E 420):
There are states in our existence that one calls “ingatheredness”
(Sammlung). This term refers to a concentrated being-in-oneself, or
“living deeply in oneself.” In such a state our total psychic life,
including our past, is grasped as one and is effective as one.
These states occur very rarely in our lives; e.g., one may occur before we
make a grave decision or when we are compelled to take a crucial step.
Everything is somehow “present” and “effective” at such a moment,
and no “isolated particulars” of our past are remembered. We are not
empty but entirely “full” and truly “with ourselves,” “in
ourselves.” Effective experiences speak to us from all points of our
lives, and at the same time a thousand “calls” reach us from both the
past and the future. We “look over” our entire ego in its total manifold, experiencing it as a whole,
entering into one act, one deed,
one action, one work. Yet we do not come “upon” any singular past
experience here, nor do we direct our attention to any such thing, not even
“to our ego.” But we “experience” the ego-totality in a peculiarly
concentrated manner.
It is in personal ingatheredness - in the concentration into one’s
innermost personal self - which points to the important threefold essence of
individual religious acts:
1. In these
acts the world is left behind us, they are filled with “world transcendence.”
2. In world
transcendence lies the impossibility of
fulfillment of religious acts (such as
of asking, imploring, thanking or praying for something) by any finite
entity.
3.
Any response to a religious
act can not come from any contingent and finite being.
The threefold essence of religious acts also imbues the act of
repentance to which we now draw our attention.
For in repentance over guilt of the past, the world is left behind in the
innermost concentration into one's own personal self and relevant deed, just
as fulfillment in asking for forgiveness lies beyond any finite being as any
possible response does. It is in this connection of a repenting person -
holding his head in this hands while severely suffering from the pain and
level of immorality of “having been so” as to have committed the evil deed
- that the person slowly realizes
that the pain over a past deed can only be removed by an invisible
infinite being. And it is also in this regard that Scheler compares the act of
repentance to a mountain climber who, looking backward, sees a valley below
behind him and disappearing, and looking forward he looks up to a still invisible
destination of a mountain top.
The invisible destination of repentance, forgivenness, is a reception
of a gradual revelation (des Offenbarwerdens) of God,
which revelation is a category of personal dynamic existence. Scheler can say,
therefore:
“The correlate of the religious act takes up (nimmt auf)
the becoming revelation and communicating of [the divine] self (Selbstmitteilung)”
(V160: E 164/5).
A religious act is a “receiving” act, i.e., “receiving” God’s
self-communicating (Selbstmitteilung)
“in” this act. Rationally proving acts are logical “constructing” acts
that can not and do not claim to establish God’s self-communicating
to him who proves.
We must stress that Scheler does not use the sense of “revelation” as
theologians do (V 143; E 147). Revelation used in Scheler's sense is the event
happening between the person of God and a human person “in” a religious
act. This revealing takes place within the divine and human dynamic existence.
As he says, he uses the term revelation
“...solely [in] the specific
manner in which any kind of data relating to an object of the divine and
holy nature is received into the mind.” (V 143; E 147).
Hence:
“religion
flows objectively from the revelation of God which proceeds by many degrees
and has many stages, and subjectively from faith” (V 143; E 146/7).
Religion, therefore, is not dependent on rational proofs and
metaphysics. Rational proofs of the existence of God are - by comparison to
the Divine revealing itself by responding to and in a person’s religious
acts - like proving the existence of colors before we see them “in” acts
of seeing, or the existence of tones before we hear them “in” acts of
hearing (V 257 E 263).
Max Scheler's work On the Eternal in Man has,
therefore, the meaning of On the Eternal “in” Man’s Religious Acts.
Scheler’s philosophy of religion has appeared to us as establishing a link
between an individual person’s genuine religious act in
the dynamic existence this person shares with the Person of God. In this act,
the revealing of God occurs in terms of evidence-in-faith
- as present in silence, responding (as forgiving in repentance), and as
loving. Not every human being has this experience, we had been told.
The experience of individual evidence-in-faith, however, is categorically
different from the evidence of rational proofs. While the evidence in faith is
a non-formal priori in the individual person who experiences God’s
self-revealing in a religious act,
a rational proof of the existence of God contains no such non-formal a priori.
Since the Middle Ages rational proofs have not enjoyed a general acceptance,
although they had been formulated with the conjecture that all humans would in
the end understand or be convinced by them, be it by those humans of the past
or of the present. Chances are that they will not do this in the future
either.