A Suicidal Bias

by Tessa den Uyl

‘With men came suicide’ could have flown out of Pandora’s box, as well as, ‘I think therefore I suffer’. Even when our agonising states might seem incredibly real—just like the joyful ones—we might be slightly mistaking our perceptions. Once we recognise how we have become enslaved to believe in a cultural heritage, we also comprehend that our life is nourished by a language-shared involvement. Though this language might not hold (at) all what we are. If suicide could be archived as ‘an urgent need that once involved humankind’, we have to start to think in a different way. After all, to kill oneself out of despair, nobody was born.

What humankind has passed on for centuries eludes us all in who we are. The fashionable expression that there is just the now (or actually, no time at all) is plausible when we turn to quantum physics, biocentrism and ancient spirituality that envision the whole of reality as one single movement. Though emotionally speaking, to experience this oneness would mean to have burned the whole past within us. To put it briefly: on an emotional and intellectual level, unless one were unable to live a life in which memory has no decisive input on our emotions, thus our thoughts, each of us is intrinsic to ‘the reality’ of society rather than the ‘one Self” of the cosmos. If so, our daily reality is elusive in the face of the cosmos and real towards society.

Where does this leave us?

Society demands a certain attachment to those thoughts that fulfill specific images about life. How many are the thoughts which others think for you and you think others think? This is a forest where not everybody will walk quietly. People think and therefore have opinions, which serves communication. Though once people believe in their thoughts, as if they are the words they pronounce, life seemingly has a great deal to do with the submission to, and the manipulation of, other people’s requests. Not unpredictably, when life means a jar filled with expectations to be fulfilled, that jar is not unbreakable under its own pressure. Like stalkers in a spider’s web where thoughts continue a never-ending communication, most of all within ourselves, should one in this realm trace a self?

When the initial information which is handed one in life is to erect an idea of self with a tiny bag of thoughts as the available tools, to understand the boundaries of where your life starts and the requests of others end, is extremely difficult. Not uncommonly, the encounter with discrepancy in society is of no surprise. Especially when one comprehends that society itself is established in divergence, and each of us is therefore raised in conflict. A communication, which serves its own contraries, can only hand one to struggle as the outcome. And in such societies, to think that problems can end is nothing but a mediocre generalisation. Simultaneously thought-induced reality cannot be denied, it serves to stop in front of a stop sign or to pass the salad. Though if suicide is on one’s schedule, one has to be aware that killing oneself is as justified as not, like everything else, only in the barrel of thought that we have learned to think.

When we profoundly understand that nothing can ever be fixed in how our societies work today, until we continue to think the way we do, (cut everything into pieces as if division is truly possible) we can all comprehend that nobody will ever allow us to become who we are. Though what we are is exactly the same for every other being, which is a part of life and of this universe, in which no being is more or less important. Being foremost bundles of energy, when we make ourselves more important than something else, we have divided ourselves from everything else solely by ideas. We thus prefer thoughts above the energetic form of life itself. Without the latter, thoughts cannot be. Still, we are drilled to believe that thoughts (thus emotions) rule our reality.

Thought is a human social fiction, which is rather significant as a confirmation of our identity and completely insignificant to all else. Not being able to get rid of your-self is the same as trying to maintain that idea of self. In both cases there is a refusal to let go of what one thinks. Whether the package is pleasant or unpleasant, it satisfies the same mechanism. Though the problem is not about who one is, as a form of energy, we never can be a problem. Socially accepted ideas raise the illusion of hope to become what one is not yet or to lose what one thinks one is. If the tadpole announces that it will be an elephant tomorrow, we might have some doubts. Though only when there is hope attached to that exclamation, to fulfill a self in the face of society, language offers the unpleasant thought that hope equals suicide. Either as a tadpole or an elephant, for the tadpole this is the same. It is what it is. It cannot be more, nor less.

Embracing the thinking patterns that are bound to social logic, a state of being can easily switch and eventually become a fixation. Ideas intermingle with emotions and knowledge, social status; an incredible pressure of images bombards people daily. Embarrassment, lack, fulfillment, desire, humankind has made an incredible effort to narrow our perceptions. This makes the structure of the social illusion fragile, and meanwhile we were not raised to doubt its utilisation. Though what has not happened yet may certainly happen. Not in the affirmation of one’s identity, not in the utilisation of language to enhance oneself in front of society. This is the main point, to let go of which seems so implausible.

Once thoughts can be seen as a tool to not identify with, and to exploit one’s feelings continuously, there is some space to acknowledge that our consciousness surpasses all the social learned perceptions we’ve put into that feeling of ‘Me’. And this is the blind spot on which so many of us erect their convictions, on which societies build their bricks. At the same time it is this ‘Me’ which enfolds in everything. If there is a way to a more pleasant state of living for all of us, and everything that immeasurably surrounds us, this can be found in unfolding our illusions. We cannot truly get in or out, as is the case at the metro stop. We’re always in. Until and unless human beings profoundly understand that one for all and all for one is not just bound to three musketeers, suicide will only be one of the bigger outcomes of a dysfunctional humanity.

Talking about suicide is not about whether or not it is justified. The question is really how it got there in the first place, to occupy a person with such a thought. In the face of an immortal cosmos, understanding that we cannot truly set ourselves free, the question of being free is erased from the mind. We are more than what we’ve learned to be and less than what we think we are.

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Posted by Keith Tidman 

We favour certainty over uncertainty. That’s understandable. Our subscribing to certainty reassures us that perhaps we do indeed live in a world of absolute truths, and that all we have to do is stay the course in our quest to stitch the pieces of objective reality together.

 

We imagine the pursuit of truths as comprising a lengthening string of eureka moments, as we put a check mark next to each section in our tapestry of reality. But might that reassurance about absolute truths prove illusory? Might it be, instead, ‘uncertainty’ that wins the tussle?

 

Uncertainty taunts us. The pursuit of certainty, on the other hand, gets us closer and closer to reality, that is, closer to believing that there’s actually an external world. But absolute reality remains tantalizingly just beyond our finger tips, perhaps forever.

 

And yet it is uncertainty, not certainty, that incites us to continue conducting the intellectual searches that inform us and our behaviours, even if imperfectly, as we seek a fuller understanding of the world. Even if the reality we think we have glimpsed is one characterised by enough ambiguity to keep surprising and sobering us.

 

The real danger lies in an overly hasty, blinkered turn to certainty. This trust stems from a cognitive bias — the one that causes us to overvalue our knowledge and aptitudes. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

What’s that about then? Well, this effect precludes us from spotting the fallacies in what we think we know, and discerning problems with the conclusions, decisions, predictions, and policies growing out of these presumptions. We fail to recognise our limitations in deconstructing and judging the truth of the narratives we have created, limits that additional research and critical scrutiny so often unmask. 

 

The Achilles’ heel of certainty is our habitual resort to inductive reasoning. Induction occurs when we conclude from many observations that something is universally true: that the past will predict the future. Or, as the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put it in the eighteenth century, our inferring ‘that instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience’. 

 

A much-cited example of such reasoning consists of someone concluding that, because they have only ever observed white swans, all swans are therefore white — shifting from the specific to the general. Indeed, Aristotle uses the white swan as an example of a logically necessary relationship. Yet, someone spotting just one black swan disproves the generalisation. 

 

Bertrand Russell once set out the issue in this colourful way:

 

‘Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’.

 

The person’s theory that all swans are white — or the chicken’s theory that the man will continue to feed it — can be falsified, which sits at the core of the ‘falsification’ principle developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The heart of this principle is that in science a hypothesis or theory or proposition must be falsifiable, that is, to possibly being shown wrong. Or, in other words, to be testable through evidence. For Popper, a claim that is untestable is no longer scientific. 

 

However, a testable hypothesis that is proven through experience to be wrong (falsified) can be revised, or perhaps discarded and replaced by a wholly new proposition or paradigm. This happens in science all the time, of course. But here’s the rub: humanity can’t let uncertainty paralyse progress. As Russell also said: 

 

‘One ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt. . . . One has in practical life to act upon probabilities’.

 

So, in practice, whether implicitly or explicitly, we accept uncertainty as a condition in all fields — throughout the humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences — especially if we judge the prevailing uncertainty to be tiny enough to live with. Here’s a concrete example, from science.

 

In the 1960s, the British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, mathematically predicted the existence of a specific subatomic particle. The last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But no one had yet seen it, so the elusive particle remained a hypothesis. Only several decades later, in 2012, did CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reveal the particle, whose field is claimed to have the effect of giving all other particles their mass. (Earning Higgs, and his colleague Francis Englert, the Nobel prize in physics.)

 

The CERN scientists’ announcement said that their confirmation bore ‘five-sigma’ certainty. That is, there was only 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was sighted was a fluke, or something other than the then-named Higgs boson. A level of certainty (or of uncertainty, if you will) that physicists could very comfortably live with. Though as Kyle Cranmer, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the particle, appropriately stresses, there remains an element of uncertainty: 

 

“People want to hear declarative statements, like ‘The probability that there’s a Higgs is 99.9 percent,’ but the real statement has an ‘if’ in there. There’s a conditional. There’s no way to remove the conditional.”

 

Of course, not in many instances in everyday life do we have to calculate the probability of reality. But we might, through either reasoning or subconscious means, come to conclusions about the likelihood of what we choose to act on as being right, or safely right enough. The stakes of being wrong matter — sometimes a little, other times consequentially. Peter Higgs got it right; Bertrand Russell’s chicken got it wrong.

  

The takeaway from all this is that we cannot know things with absolute epistemic certainty. Theories are provisional. Scepticism is essential. Even wrong theories kindle progress. The so-called ‘theory of everything’ will remain evasively slippery. Yet, we’re aware we know some things with greater certainty than other things. We use that awareness to advantage, informing theory, understanding, and policy, ranging from the esoteric to the everyday.

 

Picture Post #59 Proscenium

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

      

To me, this image has a theatrical quality, almost a grotesque aspect. Look at the man's hand, on his leg, like a dead thing… the awkward tilt of his head. And how thin and sickly the whole body, in this seedy room with the dirty backdrop. 

Yet, at the time, this was modernity, and sophistication. This image represented new technology: think 'Steve Jobs' and iPhones.

The photo was taken exactly 127 years ago, that man could be my great great grandfather, which is to say not so incredibly a remote relation. Yet something has changed, and a certain innocence has been lost even in our celebration of sophistication.

Oh, and why did I call this post ‘Proscenium’? I came across the term reading about the new, trendy visual presentations. It's a term describing the part of a theatre stage in front of the curtain.  The two figures are thus playing out a very ancient routine - that also points to a very different future.

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The Myth of the Global Cow

Posted by Martin Cohen

Data crunchers have started to attack farms on the basis of statistical creations such as ‘The Global Cow’. Of course, there’s no such thing. The sublimation of differences in concepts like the average cow, leaves cows and sheep who are helpfully and quietly grazing grass suddenly accused of inefficiently expropriating vast tranches of valuable land, while farmers keeping animals fed soya in sheds can be reinvented and presented as efficient and ‘climate friendly’. And yet summarised and simplified messages creatively abstracted from the data itself construct a global picture, skewed by preconceived ideas, and designed to influence policy decisions.

    • The idea of ‘the Earth's average temperature’ is also an exercise in mental gymnastics - which parts of the oceans are included - or of the atmosphere? Does it make sense to have hypothetical data points in uninhabited regions? Even NASA and the Met Office cannot agree. 

   • Food policy in particular always seem to consist of sharp, Manichean (good versus evil), divisions even as most things are nuanced and a matter of detail - and degree. Missing from both types of thinking is any acknowledgement that the experts behind the expert consensus are also political and ideological subjects, and the vast majority of respected science (or any research) is produced from a mainstream and shaped by the policy objectives of funders.   

But let’s just take up that idea of a ‘global cow’. Even small farms can be completely different in terms of differing habitats and differing good or really bad practices in one place. Last year I had a series of email exchanges with a Welsh couple in the Brecon Beacons (on the England/ Wales border) about their efforts to graze farm animals ‘sustainably’. The two explained how they have mountain grazing rights on the Brecon beacons and have cattle grazing an ancient hill fort, to preserve the archaeology from the incursion of scrub and to enhance the diversity of the grassland untouched by a plough for millennia, if at all. All their fields are natural pasture kept in a grazing rotation. One of the fields is an iron age enclosure and has never been ploughed in modern times! Yet now the call everywhere is to shun animal farming and rely solely on crops. 

The couple keep grassfed (Dexter breed, as in  the picture above) cattle and sheep and rare-breed pigs, all raised outdoors and supplemented  by a range of non-soya concentrates, and farm amazingly sustainably. They firmly believe that the sheer complexity of their farm demonstrates that the global environmentalist models about ‘Norm’ cannot possibly map onto reality anywhere on the planet. 

Instead, their farm is a case study in how the new ‘plant-based food’ movement risks upturning delicate relationships between humans and nature but also a more anthropological study in how apparently deeply-entrenched attitudes towards long-established activities and traditions can be rapidly changed by elite groups using sophisticated control of public information.

Is Technology ‘What Makes us Human’?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Technology and human behaviour have historically always been intertwined, defining us as the species we are. Today, technology’s ubiquity means that our lives’ ever-faster turn toward it and its multiplicity of forms have given it stealth-like properties. Increasingly, for many people, technology seems just to happen, and the human agency behind it appears veiled. Yet at the same time, perhaps counterintuitively, what appears to us to happen ‘behind the curtain’ hints that technology is fundamentally rooted in human nature. 

Certainly, there is a delicate affinity between science and technology: the former uncovers how the world happens to be, while the latter helps science to convert those realities into artefacts. As science changes, technologists see opportunities: through invention, design, engineering, and application. This restlessly visionary process is not just incidental, I suggest, but rather is intrinsic to us.

 

Our species comprises enthusiastic toolmakers. The coupling of science and technology has led to humanity’s rich array of transformative products, from particle accelerators to world-spanning aircraft, to magnetic-resonance imaging devices, to the space-station laboratory and universe-imaging space telescopes. The alliance has brought us gene-editing technologies and bioengineering, robotics driven by artificial intelligence, energy-generating solar panels, and multifunctional ‘smart phones’.

 

There’s an ‘everywhereness’ of many such devices in the world, reaching into our lives, increasingly creating a one-world community linked by mutual interdependence on many fronts. The role of toolmaker-cum-technologist has become integrated, metaphorically speaking, into our species’ biological motherboard. In this way, technology has becomes the tipping point of globalisation’s irrepressibility.

 

René Descartes went so far as to profess that science would enable humankind to ‘become the masters and possessors of nature’. An overreach, perhaps — the despoiling of aspects of nature, such as the air, land, and ecosystems at our over-eager hands convinces us of that — but the trend line today points in the direction Descartes declared, just as electric light frees swaths of the world’s population from dependence on daylight.

 

Technology was supercharged by the science of the Newtonian world, which saw the universe as a machine, and its subsequent vaulting to the world of digits has had obvious magnifying effects. These will next become amplified as the world of machine learning takes center stage. Yet human imagination and creativity have had a powerfully galvanizing influence over the transformation. 

 

Technology itself is morally impartial, and as such neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy. Despite how ‘clever’ it becomes, for the foreseeable future technology does not yet have agency — or preference of any kind. However, on the horizon, much cleverer, even self-optimising technology might start to exhibit moral partiality. But as to the point about responsibility and accountability, it is how technology is employed, through users, which gives rise to considerations of morality.

 

A car, for example, is a morally impartial technology. No nefarious intent can be fairly ascribed to either inventor or owner. However, as soon as someone chooses to exercise his agency and drive the car into a crowd with the intent to hurt, he turns the vehicle from its original purpose as an empowering tool for transportation into an empowering weapon of sorts. But no one wags their finger remonstratively at the car.

 

Technology influences our values and norms, prompting culture to morph — sometimes gradually, other times hurriedly. It’s what defines us, at least in large part, as human beings. At the same time, the incorporation and acceptance of technology is decidedly seductive. Witness the new Digital Revolution. Technology’s sway is hard to discount, and even harder to rebuff, especially once it has established roots deep into culture’s rich subsurface soil. But this sway can also be overstated.

 

To that last point, despite technology’s ubiquity, it has not entirely pulled the rug from under other values, like those around community, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, respect, leadership, generosity, and accountability, among others. Indeed, technology might be construed as serving as a multiplier of opportunities for development and improvement, empowering individuals, communities, and institutions alike. How the fifteenth-century printing press democratised access to knowledge, became a tool that spurred revolutions, and helped spark the Enlightenment was one instance of this influential effect.

Today, rockets satisfy our impulse to explore space; the anticipated advent of quantum computers promises dramatic advances in machine learning as well as the modeling of natural events and behaviours, unbreakable encryption, and the development of drugs; nanotechnology leads to the creation of revolutionary materials — and all the time the Internet increasingly connects the world in ways once beyond the imagination.

 

In this manner, there are cascading events that work both ways: human needs and wants drive technology; and technology drives human needs and wants. Technological change thus is a Janus figure with two faces: one looking toward the past, as we figure out what is important and which lessons to apply; and the other looking toward the future, as we innovate. Accordingly, both traditional and new values become expressed, more than just obliquely, by the technology we invent, in a cycle of generation and regeneration.

 

Despite technology’s occasional fails, few people are really prepared to live unconditionally with nature, strictly on nature’s terms. To do so remains a romanticised vision, worthy of the likes of American idealist Henry David Thoreau. Rather, whether rightly or wrongly, more often we have seen our higher interests to make life yet a bit easier, a bit more palatable. 

 

Philosopher Martin Heidegger declared, rather dismally, that we are relegated to ‘remain unfree and chained to technology’. But I think his view is an unappreciative, undeservedly dismissive view of technology’s advantages, across domains: agriculture, education, industry, medicine, business, sanitation, transportation, building, entertainment, materials, information, and communication, among others. Domains where considerations like resource sustainability, ethics, and social justice have been key.

 

For me, in its reach, technology’s pulse has a sociocultural aspect, both shaping and drawing upon social, political, and cultural values. And to get the right balance among those values is a moral, not just a pragmatic, responsibility — one that requires being vigilant in making choices from among alternative priorities and goals. 

 

In innumerable ways, it is through technology, incubated in science, that civilisation has pushed back against the Hobbesian ‘nastiness and brutishness’ of human existence. That’s the record of history. In meantime, we concede the paradox of complex technology championing a simplified, pleasanter life. And as such, our tool-making impulse toward technological solutions, despite occasional fails, will continue to animate what makes us deeply human.

 

REVIEW: The Leader's Bookshelf (2020)

By Thomas Scarborough

BOOK REVIEW: The Leader’s Bookshelf: 25 Great Books and Their Readers

Martin Cohen. Rowman & Littlefield, $32 (288p) ISBN 978-1-53813-576-1

The Philosopher by Marlina Vera 2018

It was Martin Cohen's sideways look at philosophy which propelled him into the limelight with Routledge's 101 Philosophy Problems (1999). In his latest book, the author would seem to recall his offbeat roots—like a band returning to its original sound.

There is an obsession in business and management circles today with leadership theory (I myself hold two Master's degrees in leadership!) and the books which propound it. There are hundreds of them, if not thousands, many of them fresh off the press. Mostly, they adhere to the ‘transformational’ model—which typically advises vision, character, and influence, and a few things besides. Such books are generally written by people who claim to have tried the formula and succeeded (many have not).

Yet, rather than read books by leaders, why not read the books the leaders read? What were their own sources of inspiration? It would seem to make eminent sense. What's more, for the doubters, Martin Cohen meticulously traces how exactly the leaders' reading is connected with their leadership: thought leaders, political leaders, corporate leaders, and leaders of many kinds. While this is not an entirely new idea,* it is still fresh, and reveals approaches to leadership which are in some way the same—only different—to those of the ‘transformational’ leadership genre.

Martin Cohen selects twenty-five ‘great books’ (by Plato, George Orwell, Herman Melville, Alex Haley, and so on) and twenty-one people who read them (Harry Kroto, Jacob Riis, Rachel Carson, Malcom X and so on), mixing them all into ten chapters.  With a potpourri like this, one is hardly going to find a systematic leadership theory. A review in Publisher’s Weekly calls the book a ‘fun yet haphazard survey’. Yet there is ‘method in the madness’. One finds it in the chapter titles. The ten chapters of the book represent an orderly progression of concepts. It seems worth listing the chapter titles here:

Meet the Wild Things (which is to say, tame the wild things of life)

Roll the Dice (which is to say, just give it a go, and see)

Save the Planet—One Page at a Time! (give a care for the wider world)

Search for Life’s Purpose

See the World in the Wider Social Context

Be Ready to Reinvent Yourself

Set Your Thinking Free

Make a Huge Profit—and Then Share It

Recognise the Power of Symbols

Follow Your Personal Legend

In each of these chapters, Martin Cohen describes the books, and describes the people who read them, then ties the two together—and like the best of biographers and historians, drops a sprinkle-sugar of fascinating facts and anecdotes into his text: for instance, John D. Rockefeller’s (miserly) penny in the Sunday School plate, a lost and lonely young Barack Obama’s attachment to a children’s book, or Richard Branson’s zany experiments with chance.

Is there any leadership theory we can glean from the book? In spite of its free-wheeling style, there surely is. All these leaders found a guiding thought which resonated with them, and they stuck to it; they often had a vision for a wider world, and its many subtleties and interconnections; they found, too, the ‘vision, character, and influence’ of the leadership books—yet so very differently. Theirs was vision which was not bound to material outcomes, character which did not always match cultural norms, and influence which seemed an after-effect rather than a carefully nurtured goal in itself.

In an important sense, one needs to note that this book is not a standard work of research—and yet it is thoughtful, balanced, and broad. It represents personal insight and wisdom, from a well informed philosopher. This is what Cohen brings to the book. In fact, the more serious leadership theory often is little more than unsupported conjecture, where the conjectural nature of it is well disguised.

There is something of an Easter egg for philosophers at the very end of the book—tucked away in the afterword. Cohen says that time and again, in the reading of successful people, ‘philosophers and philosophical works pop up as aspirational or influential texts more often than any others’. At the end of the day, it is philosophers who rule the world—by proxy as it were. And yet, what do the philosophers themselves read? In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein anyway (one of the thought leaders described in this book) it turns out that it was a work of literary imagination, indeed humour: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne (1759). This is one of the many surprising literary connections made by Cohen's book.

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* A popular book of its kind, also The Leader's Bookshelf (without subtitle), surveys the reading of high-ranking military officers of the US Navy. Published by the Naval Institute Press (2017).

Picture Post 58: The Underpass

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

What is graffiti? Urban art, identity statements, politics, distraction, public empowerment, vandalism, property, religion, claiming ownership—graffiti embraces them all. Not always do we know its meanings, though habitually we recognise it when we see it.

Aesthetically speaking, graffiti might not be attractive—though this does not explain why often it is at one and the same time accepted and abolished. Obviously graffiti tends to move against the mainstream, though its form it is somehow of the same language—eradicated in that contradiction which suits the social order.

This makes graffiti a scribble in a world where its echo is instantaneously consumed. On the other hand, it is a manifestation and a message, noticed by the unconventional way it is proposed.

Yet the incompatible is never as discordant as it might initially appear. Graffiti exposes the innate ambivalence of our societies and legal systems, by being an illegal form of expression while also being sold for high prices in mainstream museums. While some graffitists obtain copyright on their work, others are prosecuted for vandalism.

Similar to the man depicted in the picture above who, exceptionally, has become a legend and a symbol for a generation and beyond, it might well be that the influence of graffiti will have clearer definition in the future, to become what it is not yet.

Whatever the case, it seems bound to tell us more about ourselves than we initially imagined some swiftly drawn assumptions of its meaning could provoke.

Hell: A Thought Experiment

by Thomas Scarborough

Going Down with the Cash by Peter Gourfain 1998

Various religions have concepts of hell. However, nowhere is the doctrine clung to so tightly or debated so vigorously as in the Christian faith.

Yet it is, too, a philosophical subject, which has been treated philosophically in recent years by the universities of Oxford, Stanford, Alaska, and Tennessee—among various others. With this in mind, this short post presents a thought experiment—and a fundamentally philosophical one at that.

While the Christian faith rests on revelation, and its central teachings are known through revelation, there are various interpretations of revelation. In the case of hell, a good many. The most basic variations concerning hell—if they are not major views, then notable ones—are these:

• The literal or orthodox view, that hell is a place of eternal conscious torment

• The metaphorical view, that hell's torments are symbolic, yet real in some way

• The ‘circles of hell’: the view that there are degrees of eternal torment, suited to the crimes

• A ‘temporary torment’: the view that hell is not eternal, but finite in time

• Annihiliationism and conditionalism, which hold that the wicked—or unbelieving—do not live after death

• The universalist view, which holds that there is no hell, but all are saved

In reality, these views have many subtleties—even many designations—and it needs to be borne in mind that this brief survey is far too simple. Yet it gives an idea.

With regard to the more literal views on hell, the most basic problem from a human point of view—apart from the question of the existence of hell itself—is that we find it difficult to imagine eternal torment. We revolt against the idea. Also, we find it difficult to reconcile it with a loving God—in spite of Scripture's copious emphasis on the dangers of hell.

On the other hand, many feel it would be a travesty of justice not to have a hell. Many, too, have felt the fear of hell—call it a supernatural fear. This has been particularly prominent at times of spiritual revival.

The theological response to people’s qualms, most generally, is that we do not need to understand hell, or the God who prepared it for some. Ultimately it is about the sovereignty of God, and the revelation of Scripture. Yet have we fully explored the concepts, or driven deep enough with alternatives? A thought experiment may make this clear.

What is hell? Apart from representing some form of torment, there are at least two features which are central to the literal view: it is said to separate people from God, and it offers no hope. There is no exit. Those who are consigned to hell cannot view from afar the perfect person and purpose of God, and perhaps thereby have some small comfort. Nor can they strengthen themselves with the thought that this, too, shall pass.

With this rudimentary overview, then, our thought experiment is this:

If I should find myself in hell—whether I had thought I knew anything about it in my lifetime or not—would anything in my experience of hell contradict its eternity? Even if, that is, hell were not eternal?

Perhaps we may call this a phenomenalist view of hell. Those condemned to hell would experience it is an eternal torment—a place without God, and without hope—which, after all, is by very definition what hell is, at least to those of a more literal persuasion.

In short, would the sense-experience of those in hell be in any way distinguishable from a literal view of hell? Similarly, could Scriptural descriptions of hell as eternal—with banishment from God's presence, and the absence of hope—reveal to us which of the two is true? On the surface of it, no.

On the surface of it, this might promise to solve some critical theological and philosophical problems. One could reconcile the literal view with various other views, because eternity is something which is experienced. There need not be, then, metaphysical truths at stake. One could see complete justice done, while both believing and not believing, as it were, that hell is eternal. And one could ultimately reconcile the unmitigated torments of hell with God’s love.

However, before we congratulate ourselves on having solved the mysteries of hell, there are some further things we need, philosophically, to consider:

• Would this not give us the deus deceptor of Descartes—a God who deceives us into believing that the torments of hell are eternal?

• How should we distinguish the experience of hell and hell itself, and consider that the one is better than the other? What can be worse than eternal torment?

• Would our thought experiment not open the possibility that heaven is not eternal, in the objective sense?

Further, this would surely reflect on views other than a literal one. If the essence of hell lies in the experience of it, then even if we should allow a ‘temporary torment’—namely, the belief that hell is not eternal but finite in time—would we not through this introduce hope to hell? Surely any torment can be borne bravely where there is hope—not to speak of the hope of Paradise! Yet if the ‘circles of hell’ is correct—namely, that there are degrees of torment, but no hope of an exit—is there any judgement without hope which can be a bearable one?

What then might our thought experiment teach us?

It separates objective and subjective views of eternity—which may not have been done before. Yet this seems to offer us little to ameliorate the sufferings of hell. Further, a phenomenalist view of hell might worsen the terrors of the age-old view of the ‘circles of hell’, and—too much, it might be said—improve the situation of those in a ‘temporary torment’.

All in all, there is perhaps little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of hell, no matter which view of hell we espouse—given, that is, that we admit its existence at all. Happily, for those who believe, there would seem to be little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of heaven either.

Hell: A Thought Experiment

by Thomas Scarborough

Going Down with the Cash by Peter Gourfain 1998

Various religions have concepts of hell. However, nowhere is the doctrine clung to so tightly or debated so vigorously as in the Christian faith.

Yet it is, too, a philosophical subject, which has been treated philosophically in recent years by the universities of Oxford, Stanford, Alaska, and Tennessee—among various others. With this in mind, this short post presents a thought experiment—and a fundamentally philosophical one at that.

While the Christian faith rests on revelation, and its central teachings are known through revelation, there are various interpretations of revelation. In the case of hell, a good many. The most basic variations concerning hell—if they are not major views, then notable ones—are these:

• The literal or orthodox view, that hell is a place of eternal conscious torment

• The metaphorical view, that hell's torments are symbolic, yet real in some way

• The ‘circles of hell’: the view that there are degrees of eternal torment, suited to the crimes

• A ‘temporary torment’: the view that hell is not eternal, but finite in time

• Annihiliationism and conditionalism, which hold that the wicked—or unbelieving—do not live after death

• The universalist view, which holds that there is no hell, but all are saved

In reality, these views have many subtleties—even many different designations—and it needs to be borne in mind that this brief survey is far too simple. Yet it gives an idea.

With regard to the more literal views on hell, the most basic problem from a human point of view is that we find it difficult to imagine eternal torment. We revolt against the idea. Also, we find it difficult to reconcile it with a loving God—in spite of Scripture's copious emphasis on the dangers of hell.

On the other hand, many feel it would be a travesty of justice not to have a hell. Many, too, have felt the fear of hell—call it a supernatural fear. This has been particularly prominent at times of spiritual revival.

The theological response to people’s qualms, most generally, is that we do not need to understand hell, or the God who prepared it for some. Ultimately it is about the sovereignty of God, and the revelation of Scripture. Yet have we fully explored the concepts, or driven deep enough with alternatives? A thought experiment may make this clear.

What is hell? Apart from representing some form of torment, there are at least two features which are central to the literal view: it is said to separate people from God, and it offers no hope. There is no exit. Those who are consigned to hell cannot even see the perfect person and purpose of God, and perhaps thereby have some small comfort. Nor can they strengthen themselves with the thought that this, too, shall pass.

With this rudimentary overview, then, our thought experiment is this:

If I should find myself in hell—whether I had known anything about it in my lifetime or not—would anything in my experience of hell contradict its eternity? Even if, that is, hell were not eternal?

Perhaps we may call this a phenomenalist view of hell. Those condemned to hell would experience it is an eternal torment—a place without God, and without hope—which, after all, is by very definition what hell is, at least to those of a more literal persuasion.

In short, would the sense-experience of those in hell be in any way distinguishable from a literal view of hell? Similarly, could Scriptural descriptions of hell as eternal—with banishment from God's presence, and the absence of hope—reveal to us whether it truly is eternal, and without exit? On the surface of it, no.

On the surface of it, this might promise to solve some critical theological and philosophical problems. One could reconcile the literal view with various other views, because eternity is something which is experienced. There need not be, then, metaphysical truths at stake. One could see complete justice done, while both believing and not believing, as it were, that hell is eternal. And one could ultimately reconcile the unmitigated torments of hell with God’s love.

However, before we congratulate ourselves on having solved the mysteries of hell, there are some further things we need, philosophically, to consider:

• Would this not give us the deus deceptor of Descartes—a God who deceives us into believing that the torments of hell are eternal?

• How should we distinguish the experience of hell from hell itself, and consider that the one is better than the other? What can be worse than eternal torment?

• Would our thought experiment not open the possibility that heaven is not eternal, in the objective sense?

Further, this would surely reflect on views other than a literal one. If the essence of hell lies in the experience of it, then even if we should allow a ‘temporary torment’—namely, the belief that hell is not eternal but finite in time—would we not through this introduce hope to hell? Surely any torment can be borne bravely where there is hope—not to speak of the hope of Paradise! Yet if the ‘circles of hell’ is correct—namely, that there are degrees of torment, but no hope of an exit—is there any judgement without hope which can be a bearable one?

What then might our thought experiment teach us?

It separates objective and subjective views of eternity—which may not have been done before. Yet this seems to offer us little to ameliorate the sufferings of hell. Further, a phenomenalist view of hell might worsen the terrors of the age-old view of the ‘circles of hell’, and—too much, it might be said—improve the situation of those in a ‘temporary torment’.

All in all, there is perhaps little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of hell, no matter which view of hell we espouse—given, that is, that we admit its existence at all. Happily, for those who believe, there would seem to be little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of heaven either.

Hell: A Thought Experiment

by Thomas Scarborough

Going Down with the Cash by Peter Gourfain 1998

Various religions have concepts of hell. However, nowhere is the doctrine clung to so tightly or debated so vigorously as in the Christian faith.

Yet it is, too, a philosophical subject, which has been treated philosophically in recent years by the universities of Oxford, Stanford, Alaska, and Tennessee—among various others. With this in mind, this short post presents a thought experiment—and a fundamentally philosophical one at that.

While the Christian faith rests on revelation, and its central teachings are known through revelation, there are various interpretations of revelation. In the case of hell, a good many. The most basic variations concerning hell—if they are not major views, then notable ones—are these:

• The literal or orthodox view, that hell is a place of eternal conscious torment

• The metaphorical view, that hell's torments are symbolic, yet real in some way

• The ‘circles of hell’: the view that there are degrees of eternal torment, suited to the crimes

• A ‘temporary torment’: the view that hell is not eternal, but finite in time

• Annihiliationism and conditionalism, which hold that the wicked—or unbelieving—do not live after death

• The universalist view, which holds that there is no hell, but all are saved

In reality, these views have many subtleties—even many different designations—and it needs to be borne in mind that this brief survey is far too simple. Yet it gives an idea.

With regard to the more literal views on hell, the most basic problem from a human point of view is that we find it difficult to imagine eternal torment. We revolt against the idea. Also, we find it difficult to reconcile it with a loving God—in spite of Scripture's copious emphasis on the dangers of hell.

On the other hand, many feel it would be a travesty of justice not to have a hell. Many, too, have felt the fear of hell—call it a supernatural fear. This has been particularly prominent at times of spiritual revival.

The theological response to people’s qualms, most generally, is that we do not need to understand hell, or the God who prepared it for some. Ultimately it is about the sovereignty of God, and the revelation of Scripture. Yet have we fully explored the concepts, or driven deep enough with alternatives? A thought experiment may make this clear.

What is hell? Apart from representing some form of torment, there are at least two features which are central to the literal view: it is said to separate people from God, and it offers no hope. There is no exit. Those who are consigned to hell cannot even see the perfect person and purpose of God, and perhaps thereby have some small comfort. Nor can they strengthen themselves with the thought that this, too, shall pass.

With this rudimentary overview, then, our thought experiment is this:

If I should find myself in hell—whether I had known anything about it in my lifetime or not—would anything in my experience of hell contradict its eternity? Even if, that is, hell were not eternal?

Perhaps we may call this a phenomenalist view of hell. Those condemned to hell would experience it is an eternal torment—a place without God, and without hope—which, after all, is by very definition what hell is, at least to those of a more literal persuasion.

In short, would the sense-experience of those in hell be in any way distinguishable from a literal view of hell? Similarly, could Scriptural descriptions of hell as eternal—with banishment from God's presence, and the absence of hope—reveal to us whether it truly is eternal, and without exit? On the surface of it, no. In fact, one could ask whether the Lord himself could have known he was not forsaken (if he was not) by the Father.

On the surface of it, this might promise to solve some critical theological and philosophical problems. One could reconcile the literal view with various other views, because eternity is something which is experienced. There need not be, then, metaphysical truths at stake. One could see complete justice done, while both believing and not believing, as it were, that hell is eternal. And one could ultimately reconcile the unmitigated torments of hell with God’s love.

However, before we congratulate ourselves on having solved the mysteries of hell, there are some further things we need, philosophically, to consider:

• Would this not give us the deus deceptor of Descartes—a God who deceives us into believing that the torments of hell are eternal?

• How should we distinguish the experience of hell from hell itself, and consider that the one is better than the other? What can be worse than eternal torment?

• Would our thought experiment not open the possibility that heaven is not eternal, in the objective sense?

Further, this would surely reflect on views other than a literal one. If the essence of hell lies in the experience of it, then even if we should allow a ‘temporary torment’—namely, the belief that hell is not eternal but finite in time—would we not through this introduce hope to hell? Surely any torment can be borne bravely where there is hope—not to speak of the hope of Paradise! Yet if the ‘circles of hell’ is correct—namely, that there are degrees of torment, but no hope of an exit—is there any judgement without hope which can be a bearable one?

What then might our thought experiment teach us?

It separates objective and subjective views of eternity—which may not have been done before. Yet this seems to offer us little to ameliorate the sufferings of hell. Further, a phenomenalist view of hell might worsen the terrors of the age-old view of the ‘circles of hell’, and—too much, it might be said—improve the situation of those in a ‘temporary torment’.

All in all, there is perhaps little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of hell, no matter which view of hell we espouse—given, that is, that we admit its existence at all. Happily, for those who believe, there would seem to be little to suggest that one may reduce the concept of heaven either.