PHILOSOPHY PATHWAYS Issue 124

III. 'Heidegger, Technology and Time: review of the film The Ister'
by Matthew Del Nevo

The Cogito and Descartes' two proofs of the existence of God are familiar ground to first year philosophy students. Alfredo Lucero-Montano gives a careful evaluation of Descartes' arguments, emphasising the novelty of Descartes' attempt to determine the nature of being starting from the pure idea of thought as such. The essay succeeds in casting new illumination in a well-trodden area.

Richard Dawkins is the author of the best-selling introduction to orthodox Darwinian evolutionary theory, The Selfish Gene. In the final chapter of that book he describes his controversial theory of 'memes', the idea that ideas are propagated and survive for reasons totally unconnected with truth; religion being one such idea. In his most recent book, The God Delusion, Dawkins takes his attack on religion a stage further. Lawrence Trevanion offers a critical but ultimately sympathetic view which gives little hope to those who would like to cling to their religious 'delusions'.

This is the first time that we have included a film review in Philosophy Pathways. However, The Ister is no ordinary film. It was made by Australian film-makers David Barison and Daniel Ross as an accompaniment to Heidegger's lectures on Holderlin's poem der Ister, the river more widely known as the Danube. ISFP Board member Matthew Del Nevo offers compelling reasons why anyone interested in 20th century philosophy should make every effort to see this.

Finally, Pathways contributor Seher Yekenkurul has politely taken me to task for referring in the last issue to 'his' interview with David Chalmers, when I should have said 'her'. My false assumption is an embarrassing example of sexist bias for which I am glad to take this opportunity to apologize.

The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is that we must 'doubt everything, as far as is possible,'[1] and this obviously represents an absolute beginning. This is Descartes' essential thesis of philosophy. Nevertheless, this first thesis does not entail a skeptical sense, whose aim is doubt itself. On the contrary, Descartes' doubt means that we must give up any prejudice and any proposition that we might directly accept as true, and take thought itself as a starting point to arrive to certainty and to establish, then, a pure beginning.[2] For Descartes, doubt is not a consequence, but a starting point.

Cartesian doubt means that no idea is either certain or indubitable, unless reason can separate itself from all preconceived opinions, namely, to think, because the pure thinking precisely consists in separating itself from uncertainty. What prevails in the Cartesian mind is the goal of arriving at something certain -- objective -- and not to just stand still at the subjective moment, but to arrive to something established, known and proven by reason. In Descartes' own words:

     Since we began life as infants, and made various judgements
     concerning the things that can be perceived by the senses
     before we had the full use of our reason, there are many
     preconceived opinions that keep us from knowledge of truth.
     It seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these
     opinions is to make the effort... to doubt everything which
     we find to contain even the smallest suspicion of
     uncertainty. This doubt... should be kept in check and
     employed solely in connection with the contemplation of the
     truth.[3]

This Cartesian reasoning, then, states that what is truth must be recognized within reason itself.

Descartes seeks something certain and true in itself, something that is not merely true like the object of faith -- without knowledge -- nor like sense certainty and skeptical certainty which lack truth. For Descartes, nothing is true but what has an inward certainty (in consciousness), or when reason knows in a clear and definite way, that is, when it excludes any possibility of doubt:

     In rejecting... everything which we can in any way doubt,
     it is easy for us to suppose that there is no God and no
     heaven, and that there are no bodies, and even that we
     ourselves have no hands or feet, or indeed any body at all.
     But we cannot for all that suppose that we, who are having
     such thoughts, are nothing. For it is a contradiction to
     suppose that what thinks does not, at the very time when it
     is thinking, exist. Accordingly, this piece of knowledge --
     I am thinking, therefore I exist -- is the first and most
     certain of all to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an
     orderly way. This is the best way to discover the nature of
     mind and the distinction between the mind and the body. For
     if we, who are supposing that everything which is distinct
     from the false, examine what we are, we see very clearly
     that neither extension nor shape nor local motion, nor
     anything of this kind which is attributable to a body,
     belongs to our nature, but that thought alone belongs to
     it. So our knowledge of our thought is prior to, and more
     certain than, our knowledge of any corporeal thing.[4]

Therefore, Descartes does not understand the cogito as the individuality of consciousness of itself, but rather as the meaning of thought. This is precisely the the second Cartesian thesis, namely, the immediate certainty of thought. The certainty is nothing but knowledge as such, in its pure form, as reflected upon itself, which is thought.

The starting point of Descartes, then, is the cogito as the simply certain; what I know is that something presents or represents in me. His philosophy now moves toward the realm of subjectivity. The content of the proposition is abandoned, because it disappears facing an abstract subjectivity. Considering the content in itself is no longer important, for if I can abstract myself of all representations, I cannot abstract myself from the cogito. Thought is absolutely general, but not because the cogito can abstract itself, but because the cogito is this entity, both simple and identical with itself. Thought is the first determination; the one that follows is the determination of being. According to Descartes, the 'I think' involves directly my own being, and this is the absolute foundation of all philosophy.

     It was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was
     something. And observing that this truth 'I am thinking,
     therefore I exist' was so firm and sure that all the most
     extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of
     shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without
     scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was
     seeking.[5]

The determination of being is contained in my cogito, and this is the first relation. The thinking as being, and the being as thinking, is my certainty, my cogito; in the Cogito, ergo sum we find inseparably united thought and being.

This thesis -- Cogito, ergo sum -- seems constructed as a syllogism, as if from thought we can deduce being. Kant argues against this syllogistic mechanism, and he claims that thought does not contain being, for the latter is something different from thought. Of course, this is true, but it is no less true that both are inseparable, that is, we find an identity between both -- its unity is not undermined by its diversity. Nevertheless, this absolute and pure certainty is not proven -- the totality that is in itself. This is why we cannot turn this proposition into a deduction. In Descartes' own words:

     When someone says 'I am thinking, therefore I am, or I
     exist', he does not deduce existence from thought by means
     of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident
     by a simple intuition of the mind. This is clear from the
     fact that if he were deducing it by means of a syllogism,
     he would have to have had previous knowledge of the major
     premiss 'Everything which thinks is, or exists'; yet in
     fact he learns it from experiencing in his own case that it
     is impossible that he should think without existing.[6]

A syllogism is an argument consisting of three terms; here we should have a third term that would function as a mediator, as a link between thought and being, but this third term does not exist. The 'therefore' that links both thought and being is not the 'therefore' of a syllogism. Here the relation between thought and being is established in an immediate way. This certainty is a metaphysical priority.

Descartes, at this point, is not concerned to demonstrate the identity between being and thought, but just to refer to awareness or consciousness. He does not yet feel the necessity to develop the differences contained in the 'I think'. He only stresses the cogito, not on the rest of its content. For him, being is identical to pure thought, not the content of being, whatever it is.

     By the term 'thought', I understand everything which we are
     aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have
     awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here
     not merely with understanding, willing and imagining, but
     also with sensory awareness. For if I say 'I am seeing, or
     I am walking, therefore I exist', and take this as applying
     to vision or walking as bodily activities, then the
     conclusion is not absolutely certain. This is because, as
     often happens during sleep, it is possible for me to think
     I am seeing or walking, though my eyes are closed and I am
     not moving about; such thoughts might even be possible if I
     had no body at all. But if I take 'seeing' or 'walking' to
     apply to the actual sense or awareness of seeing or
     walking, then the conclusion is quite certain, since it
     relates to the mind.[7]

With willing, seeing, etc., thought is implicit, because it would be absurd to believe that the mind keeps a special compartment for the faculty of thinking. However, when we say: 'I am seeing' or 'I am walking', on one hand, my consciousness, the cogito and, hence, thinking are implicit, and on the other, willing, seeing, walking, etc., and with it the content of consciousness is also implicit. And precisely this content prevents us from asserting 'I am walking, therefore I exist', for we can abstract ourselves from such mental occurrence since it is not thinking as such. We have to view the pure consciousness contained in this concrete cogito. When I exist in it as thinking being, only then I have before me the pure being, since this pure being can considered only in general and never in a particular state. Descartes writes:

     In order to realize that the knowledge of our mind is not
     simply prior to and more certain than the knowledge of our
     body, but also more evident... as is manifest from the fact
     that whatever enables us to know anything else cannot but
     lead us to a much surer knowledge of our own mind. For
     example, if I judge that the earth exists from the fact
     that I touch it or see it, this very fact undoubtedly gives
     even greater support for the judgement that my mind exists.
     For it may perhaps be the case that I judge that I am
     touching the earth even though the earth does not exist at
     all; but it cannot be that, when I make this judgement, my
     mind which is making the judgement does not exist. And the
     same applies in other cases 'regarding all the things that
     come into our mind, namely that we who think of them
     exists, even if they are false or have no existence.'[8]

Here we see philosophy's proper realm, the basis on which thought starts from thought itself as something certain, and not from something exterior or given, but pure and simply from the activity that contains the 'I think'. Though I can doubt everything else, the existence of physical things, or my own body, still this certainty of the cogito has the property of the immediate. For the cogito is precisely the certainty itself, of which everything else is only the predicate; naturally, my body is certain for me, but is not certainty itself.

     There are certain things that make us doubt the existence
     of our body. Therefore we shall not attain certainty of
     this except through the knowledge and certainty of
     something else that is prior to it in knowledge and
     certainty. Therefore the statement 'I am', insofar as 'I'
     am a thing consisting of body, is not a first principle and
     is not known through itself.[9]

For Descartes, the real is a substance, and the 'I' is the thinking substance; the latter exists for itself as something distinct and independent of all material and external things: 'From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist'.[10] Its thinking nature is self-evident: the mind would think and exist even if material things did not exist; that is why the mind is easier to know than the body.

Any truth we might have lies in this certainty, for anything we could hold as true needs this certainty in the inwardness of consciousness:

     We must consider as most certainly true everything that is
     equally evident to us and that we perceive with the same
     clearness and distinctness as the already discovered first
     principle, and also everything that so agrees with this
     first principle and so depends on it that we cannot doubt
     it without also having to doubt this first principle (that
     is, this 'I').[11]

The knowledge of itself is perfect certainty, but it is not yet the truth. For if we considered this proposition as the truth, we only have a vacuous content, and it is precisely the content of truth -- being -- that the Cartesian project is all about.

     I observed that there is nothing at all in the proposition
     'I am thinking, therefore I exist' to assure me that I am
     speaking the truth, except that I see very clearly that in
     order to think it is necessary to exist.[12]

The issue now is the movement from certainty to truth. Descartes, at this point, offers us his metaphysics. The process involves the interest of other representations about the abstract unity of being and thought.

     The mind... knowing itself, but still in doubt about all
     other things, looks around in all directions in order to
     extend its knowledge further. First of all, it finds within
     itself ideas of many things; and so long as it merely
     contemplates these ideas and does not affirm or deny the
     existence outside itself of anything resembling them, it
     cannot be mistaken. Next, it finds certain common notions
     from which it constructs various proofs; [and so long as it
     attends to the premises from which it deduced them]... it is
     completely convinced of their truth. But... recalling that
     it is still ignorant as to whether it may have been created
     with the kind of nature that makes it go wrong even in
     matters which appear most evident, the mind sees that it
     has just cause to doubt such conclusions.[13]

Descartes writes here that error, with respect to the representation, takes place in relation with exterior existence; for if the soul can exist without the corporeal, and the latter without the former, therefore, they are distinct realities, and thus the one can be conceived without the other.[14] Hence, the soul does not know with the same clarity and distinction the other as it knows the certainty of itself.

However, the truth of all knowledge entails the proof of the existence of God. The soul is an imperfect substance, but it has within itself the idea of an absolutely perfect substance; this perfection is not created by itself, for it is an imperfect one, hence, it is an innate idea.

     The mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of
     a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear
     proof that God indeed exists. It only remains for me to
     examine how I received this idea from God. For I did not
     acquire it from the senses... .And it was not invented by
     me either... .The only remaining alternative is that it is
     innate in me, just as the idea of myself is innate in
     me.[15]

According to Descartes, while the existence of God is not proven and recognized, there is the possibility that we could be mistaken, due to our incapacity to know if our nature is really inclined to fall into error.

     Given that we have within us an idea of the supreme
     perfection of God. Now it is certainly very evident by
     natural light that a thing which recognizes something more
     perfect than itself is not the source of its own being; for
     if so, it would have given itself all the perfection of
     which it has an idea. Hence, the source of its being can
     only be something which possesses within itself all these
     perfections -- that is, God.[16]

Descartes here contrasts the consciousness of itself and the consciousness of the other (objectivity), but the real matter is the unity of both things, that is, how to know if what we discover in thought also has objectivity. However, this unity lies in God, that is, is God itself.

     The mind next considers the various ideas which it has
     within itself, and finds that there is one idea -- the idea
     of a supremely intelligent, supremely powerful and supremely
     perfect being -- which stands out from all others.[17]

     For when we reflect on the idea of God... we see that he is
     eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, the source of all goodness
     and truth... and finally that he possesses within him
     everything in which we can clearly recognize some
     perfection that is infinite.[18]

This general idea, which spans over everything, characterizes within it that there is no uncertainty about its being (existence), such as we observe in many other ideas. This idea guarantees the existence of its object.

     In this one idea the mind recognizes existence -- not
     merely the possible and contingent existence which belongs
     to the ideas of all the other things which it distinctly
     perceives, but utterly necessary and eternal existence. Now
     on the basis of its perfection that... necessary and eternal
     existence is contained in the idea of a supremely perfect
     being, the mind must clearly conclude that the supreme
     being does exist.[19]

The idea of perfection contains within it, as an effect, the property (determination) of existence, for we cannot assert that the concept (representation) of something not existent is perfect. Here we have the unity of thought and being or, in other words, the ontological argument for the existence of God. This is Descartes' attempt to deduce the existence of God from the idea of God: we understand God as a perfect being, nothing greater can be conceived, and since we have this idea, God exists. In sum, the argument for the existence of God, starting from its idea, entails its existence, and hence it is true.

1. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (AT VIIIA 5), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

2. Here the notion 'pure beginning' means, in a Kantian sense, that such beginning does not depend of any particular course of experience.

5. Descartes, Discourse on the Method (AT VI 32), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

6. Descartes, Objections and Replies published together with the Meditations on First Philosophy (AT VII 140-141), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

9. Spinoza, The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (PPCp3dem), trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).

Descartes, Principles of Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

___. Discourse on the Method. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

___. Objections and Replies published together with the Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Vol. 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Spinoza, Baruch. The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. Trans. Samuel Shirley. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).

It is refreshing to read a no nonsense critique of religion from an eminent scientist. I share his fear that religion is a threat to human inquiry into the real, particularly its promotion of the self-serving view that 'Thou shalt have no other concepts before me'.

I think it is worth introducing into a discussion on religion the notion from the field of biology that Homo sapiens has entered the 'conceptual niche'. The miracles that can be achieved in this niche are so astonishing that it seems unlikely that human culture will ever forget the possibility it holds. It seems possible that humanity is just at the doorway of this niche and so we should resent the attempt by religion to block the entrance so as to prevent deeper incursion into the niche past religion itself.

One weakness of the conceptual niche is that regardless of the conceptual achievements of a culture, each new individual born into that culture must enter the conceptual niche themselves. This is a focal point of religious policy and Dawkins is right to point out the danger of religious organizations educating children.

I am doubtful that concepts from the Stone Age will continue to thrive but admit that progressives have reason to be pessimistic. Voltaire's 'Philosophical Dictionary', for example, predates 'The God Delusion' by nearly 250 years yet some of Voltaire's observations (unacknowledged in Dawkins) still shock the door-to-door Evangelists. On the other hand, consider the negative reviews of Dawkins' book. They tend to take refuge in the opinions of theologians or in obscure personal notions of God rather than the Bible itself. People tend not to think that Heaven is up and Hell is down. It may not be much and it may have taken a quarter of a millennium but something has been achieved.

My optimism concerning the decline of religion has a stronger foundation than just this. My own view is that religion has conceptual content that has yet to be effectively challenged. Dawkins does not see this content and fails to recognize it in his own thought. A minor but striking example of his failure to see conceptual content is his discussion on cargo cults. He observes (p203) 'The independent flowering of so many independent but similar cults suggests some unifying features of human psychology in general'. He means particularly by this human 'susceptibility to religion'. But it is obvious from his description of the cults that they are an attempt at explanation -- it is evidence of rationality in human psychology not susceptibility to religion! We should be humbled by the cargo cult attempt at explanation for it reminds us that we ourselves could be made to look conceptually incompetent.

My own feeling is that the development of human understanding has been a long and difficult struggle and that religion has been a serious and honest contributor to that struggle. As a thought experiment I wonder, for example, what it means to think that the sun is a God and it strikes me that it is an attempt to understand visual perception. (The use of light as a symbol for the soul seems to be an associated understanding.) Needless to say I deplore the willful dishonesty in modern Christianity. But dishonesty and hypocrisy are not the exclusive province of religion. More importantly, dishonesty (or self-deception) is not the essence of religion. It seems to me that this may be a critical difference of opinion that separates Dawkins from his religious audience.

I do not think the persistence of religion, irrational and anti-rational as it may sometimes be, requires us to abandon the notion that merit is the main feature of a concept's survival. I do not think we must adopt a survival theory of memes to account for religion. Do we not ask ourselves whether the 'meme' meme itself has merit?

The religious content in Dawkins' own thought lies in his understandings of the concept of truth and the problem of mind and body. It is notable that Dawkins sees nature or inevitability in both these areas. He writes:

   'Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to
   defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But
   so is everybody else.' (p283)

   'The idea that there is a me perched somewhere behind my
   eyes and capable, at least in fiction, of migrating into
   somebody else's head, is deeply ingrained in me and in
   every other human being, whatever our intellectual
   pretensions to monism.' (p180)

Keeping in mind that Dawkins thinks there is 'nothing beyond the natural physical world' (p14) let us look at his comments relating to truth and the real. He writes:

   'This predictive success seems to mean that quantum theory
   has to be true in some sense; as true as anything we know,
   even including the most down-to-earth common sense facts.'
   (p365)

It seems from this that Dawkins thinks statements can be more true or less true but that we have no perfectly true statements about the real world. It would be odd to suppose that there are true statements in the real world that are not about the real world but Dawkins may think that mathematical statements are of this type. Given that to Dawkins the real world is everything then you would expect him to argue that we do not have any final truths at all.

   'That you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and
   trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely
   prove the non-existence of anything.' (p54)

This sentence makes no sense unless we understand that the word 'absolutely' is meant as emphasis rather than as indicating a different kind of proof. This suggests that Dawkins envisages ultimate truths and proofs even though we have none that concern the real world in practice. Furthermore, when Dawkins writes about the probability of something being true he gives the impression that this is the probability of it being absolutely or finally true.

The point of these remarks is to confirm Dawkins' implicit description of himself as a truth-fundamentalist. But how did he arrive at this notion of truth when he can find no example of it? It looks as if he has used none other than Aquinas' 'Argument from Degree' (discussed p78-79), in effect, some truths are more true than others therefore there is a maximum truth. I think Dawkins owes us an explanation as to why an ultimate being is absurd but ultimate truth is not.

Not everybody is a truth-fundamentalist. Ultimate truth seems as absurd to me as an ultimate being does to Dawkins. Language simply does not support it: identifying particulars is fraught and collective terms are inevitably fuzzy.

If one starts with a notion of ultimate truth it is inescapable because any examination of it is subject to it. Rather, we should start with truth as we find it: we should consider the experience that leads us to an understanding of the word. Taking this approach I think it is fair to observe that when we genuinely assert that something is true we are affirming it (and we usually don't add that it is true). We affirm in a finite or limited context and do not attempt to assail the Heavens with assertions that will ring to the end of time. We do not make assertions as if the Universe is defined and discovered and comprehended. It does not follow that the Universe, whatever that may mean, is definable, discoverable or comprehensible. We make assertions as discoverers and our assertions reflect how much we have discovered. The truth of assertions, therefore, is relative and objective i.e. it is relative to our experience of the real world. Our assertions do not have a relationship to a perfectly known and comprehended Universe (because we do not perfectly know the Universe and do not know if it is knowable or comprehensible). Our assertions relate to what we know about the Universe.

People now have so much knowledge at their disposal that they may take it as a matter of course that assertions/ theories may be falsified as a result of changing (enlarged) meaning and context. No truths are unassailable (and note that only an absolutist understanding can turn this assertion into a paradox). Language is communicative and cannot be confined, in principle, to a person or culture and so no personal or cultural truths are unassailable either. It makes no sense to respect truths relative to person or culture as absolute truths.

There is no basis for introducing ultimate meaning and context into our considerations (which is a profoundly anti-religious observation) and no basis for using probability to relate current knowledge to such a context. Dawkins' resort to probability so as to reconcile his notion of truth with our pervasive uncertainty about the real is unwarranted and unnecessary. It is religion, not science, that aspires to ultimate knowledge. It is religion that attempts to ask ultimate questions and provide ultimate answers (and as a truth fundamentalist Dawkins sometimes engages with it in the wrong way.) The futility of religion in this regard is notable and science can expect the same outcome if it adopts the same ambition (as it sometimes does!). Ultimate or fundamentalist truth is a religious concept.

The meaning and context of contemporary science has arisen from the study of objects. It is now so powerful and comprehensive that people without an understanding of science may be regarded as conceptually incompetent. Dawkins argues that ancient religious assertions will not be re-discovered as true. It seems obvious that he is correct.

A quick note on the truth of mathematics is probably required. Traditionally mathematics (including formal logic) has been credited with absolute truths and proofs. But in mathematics 'is true' means 'is consistent' (with the rules of the mathematical system). It makes sense to say 2+2=4 is true in its application as counting but as an assertion in an abstract mathematical system it is difficult to see what more one could mean than to say that it is consistent within the system. It makes sense therefore to use the word 'consistent' rather than 'true' in mathematics i.e. we consider truth in the application of mathematics but not in mathematics itself.

We think of proofs as producing irresistible conclusions. This is only possible in an abstract system with well-defined elements and procedures. It makes sense to confine the word 'proof' to mathematics. Outside mathematics it is more appropriate to use the word 'demonstrate' rather than 'proof'. According to this usage, in mathematics we prove the consistency of assertions and in science we test and demonstrate the truth of theories.

The notion that truth is about affirming something means that we dispute the understanding in (applied) logic that assertions are either true or false, for they may simply be nonsensical, and we dispute that tautologies are true for they say nothing about their subject. The self-reference paradoxes disappear because we cannot perfectly identify the 'self' and cannot make perfectly true or false assertions about that self.

We do not consider proofs for the existence of God because there are no agreed elements and procedures in which to construct such a proof. We may say something exists if there is evidence for it. Conversely we may say something does not exist if there is no evidence for it. An absence of evidence (in a context) is a demonstration of non-existence in that context. We are thus able to argue that God does not exist because our best understanding of the world, our scientific understanding, yields no evidence of God. The multitude of understandings of the word God, far from rescuing God, serve to emphasize God's poorly resolved identity. Proponents of a particular understanding of God would need not just to demonstrate God's existence but also provide a strong explanation as to why God has been so widely misidentified.

The second of Dawkins' religious concepts concerns the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is a great fracture in contemporary understanding and while this persists I do not think the conceptual content of religion can be completely dismissed.

     'An atheist ...is somebody who believes there is nothing
     beyond the natural physical world, no supernatural creative
     intelligence... no soul that outlasts the body ...' (p14)

     'Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly
     complex interconnections of physical entities within the
     brain.' (p14)

     'A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a
     manifestation of matter -- material in a brain or perhaps a
     computer -- and cannot exist apart from matter.' (p179-180)

Dawkins seems to be of the view that mind/ emotions/ consciousness all exist: apparently as material or as a manifestation (?) of matter. One assumes they do not feature in the chemistry books because they are vast complexes of atoms, but if this is the case it is difficult to see how they emerge from a complex of interconnections. Perhaps Dawkins means emotions are the action of vast complexes of atoms (thereby breaking down the distinction between nouns and verbs).

How did Dawkins arrive at the conclusion that emotion is material? His best evidence would be that when someone says they feel an emotion this correlates with the presence of a particular structure or activity in the brain. But the correlation is no more than that. It is only a correlation. We identify the brain and the emotion separately. And so to say that not only do they correlate but that they are the same thing, this surely is a step beyond reason into faith. If both emotion and brain are admitted as existent then Dawkins' solution to the mind-body problem involves stepping from correlation to miraculous identity. He should not be surprised if religious people do not share his view of this particular miracle but see the soul as separate from the body. He should not be surprised if religious people feel that his awe of the real world, as a knowledgeable scientist, is trivial and disrespectful compared to the undeniable and irresistible awe they feel at their own presence in that world.

Dawkins' miraculous monism, his faith-based atheism, contains a critical religious entity -- the mind element of the mind-body problem.

The mind-body problem isn't difficult. It is conceptual change that is the hard problem. (Who will welcome new concepts? Who will conceptually re-decorate, change house, change country?)

To solve the problem one must start with human experience rather than by assuming, as Dawkins does, that there is a real world. Experience is the given that we start with, not the real world. The notion that there is a real world is obtained from comprehending experience.

The deep history of human conceptual development has yielded the notion that we perceive the real world. This notion had developed to such an extent that by the eighteenth century British empiricists (notably Berkeley and Hume) could assert that all experience is perceived. Since then the development of science has provided a detailed understanding of the mechanism of the perception of the real in terms of the real. It is now easy to conjecture that all experience not just our perception of the real, may be understood in terms of mechanism. The relationship between one's experience and the real is now recognized to be so close that people, such as Dawkins, feel compelled to assert that there is only the real. All experience seems able to be related to activity in the brain.

We are thus able to propose that humans are objects that perceive; that perception is a process in the real world; and that our experience can be understood as what we perceive. This is to propose that our experience is what it is like for an object to perceive. This can by no means be discounted for if we are objects that perceive, then our knowledge of objects (including ourselves) is obtained indirectly and uncertainly through perception -- because perception is mediated. The anti-real attitude fostered by the mind-body understanding is no basis for dismissing the notion that we are objects that perceive. The notion that perception by humans is conscious (at least in part) and that perception by objects is 'blind' and mechanical, (behaviorist even), is founded on the mind-body distinction and cannot be understood as supportive of that distinction.

As a perceiving object we learn that there is a real world; learn that we ourselves are an object in that world; and learn that we know about the world because we perceive it. The development of this understanding has evidently taken place on a cultural and historical scale rather than a personal one. If humans really are objects that perceive then it has taken humans -- a network of communicative perceivers, a long time to reach this conclusion.

But if humans are objects that perceive why do they think they have a mind? Our understanding of other people as objects seems unproblematic. We think other people have minds because we understand that we ourselves have one. We think we ourselves have a mind because, one, we think there is a real world and two, we recognize that what we perceive and the real world are different. We call what we perceive 'mind'. We thus identify two entities -- the real, and our mind.

The flaw in this reasoning may already be obvious. From a perceiver's point of view there is NOT two distinct entities -- the real world AND what we perceive. The basis for our comprehension of the real world is what we perceive. The real, which we say exists, arises from our comprehension of experience, a comprehension that does not add any new existence into our understanding such that we need to consider how we perceive what we perceive. What we perceive does not appear as an entity in that real world: not as emotion; not as color; not as qualia. If it did what we perceive would be one of the items that we might perceive thereby producing a regression (typical of the mind-body problem). We do not find what we perceive (or mind, or consciousness or qualia) in the real -- the real arises from our comprehension of what we perceive. There is no basis for a perceiving object to argue that what it perceives is produced by the real world for this would be to put what it perceives as an item into a comprehension derived from what it perceives. The mind-body problem arises when we put what we perceive as an entity into the comprehension of what we perceive. We double entities and become confused about whether we perceive objects or whether we perceive perceptions; we wonder what the relationship is between perceptions and objects.

     'We never evolved to navigate the world of atoms. If we had
     our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty
     space.' (p368)

What could mediate this perception in the way that light mediates when we see objects? What could a brain be made of to receive this mediating phenomenon? Our visual comprehension of the real is based on light reflecting off huge aggregations of atoms. To expect the real this presents to us to be replicated at the level of light and atoms is to expect the real to be infinitely analyzable i.e. that it is real because it is made up of the real. This is to suppose that our perception of the real is the perfect apprehension of the real. Visualizing rocks as full of empty space is an insecure understanding. (For a discussion of the unreality of quantum mechanics see my review of J. Baggott's Beyond Measure at http:---)

'What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real
world but a model of the real world... ' (p371)

Here Dawkins is suggesting we don't see objects, we see models of objects. Admittedly the word 'unvarnished' warns us not to take this literally. Nevertheless the assertion is conceptually disordered for our notion of models is derived from our perception of objects. An infinite regress is produced if we then assert that our perception of objects is a model. The point that he is trying to make is that when a developed human (and no doubt many other animals as well) perceives objects the perceiver itself contributes a great deal to what is perceived to the point that a perceiver may be deceived or deluded. Human memory and imagination is evidence that a perceiver can perceive an object in the absence of the object.

The color problem is a variant of the mind-body problem. Dawkins cites it as a problem that may be irresolvable in principle (p.47-48). This seems inconsistent with his view that there is only material. The color problem can be dealt with according to the conceptual structure outlined above and I will not discuss it except to point out that we do compare the vision of different perceivers. We do say that some people are colorblind or see in black and white. Proponents of the color problem should contrast the means by which we arrive at such conclusions with their arguments that such conclusions are impossible.

I will finish this discussion on the mind-body problem with just a few more remarks. (A more thorough discussion is accessible at: http:---)

It makes no more sense to say we are natural dualists than to say we are natural sun-worshippers. The dualism Dawkins refers to can be understood as empathy i.e. as our ability to identify with others. This, one would expect, is a natural human ability because it seems necessary to a society of high-order communicators.

I have argued above that there is only a real world. This point of view is not realism, however, because its key assumption is that we are objects that perceive the real world. It is best termed 'perceivism'. It supports thoroughly the notion of natural cause -- there is no God and no self that initiates cause. It removes entirely the ghost religious entity that is the spirit, mind, consciousness or soul. The religious awe of the self's presence in the real and the need for a 'soul God' to unite infinitely lonely souls is replaced by the mysterious unity of all people, all livings things, and all objects in the real that we perceive.

There are some less significant issues in 'The God Delusion' that deserve mention.

Species have evolved rather than been designed and consequently can show very poor 'design'. An obvious example is human childbirth. It may be that this form of childbirth was significant in the evolution of human intelligence but to modern humans it is painful and risky to both baby and mother. It would earn any intelligent designer the sack. Poor 'design' is explicable in evolutionary terms. Unfortunately Dawkins fails to emphasize this. On the contrary, he quotes Richard Lewontin with reserved approval:

'... it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an
organism is doing in its own environment.' (p164)

     'I have discussed examples in other books: the recurrent
     laryngeal nerve, for one, which betrays its evolutionary
     history in a massive and wasteful detour on its way to its
     destination.' (p134)

Dawkins' chapter 'What's wrong with religion?' is too kind. The notion that we are souls responsible to God through an intermediary human authority is awful in principle not just occasionally in practice. (Removing the intermediary authority amounts to deifying one's own conscience and that too is an awful principle.)

The God/ self concept of morality regards the self as a free agent able to initiate cause. It follows from this that individuals can be expected to conform to social and religious dictates i.e. to be perfectly responsive to language. Religion is disparaging of notions of natural behavior for these weaken the notion of personal responsibility. In contrast to this, biology treats all living things as objects subject to natural cause. Language, and communication in general, is seen as causal. Humans are treated as social primates with extremely influential language. Religion, therefore, opposes a causal explanation of human behavior -- it opposes the biological view in principle.

The religious view becomes contentious at the boundary where natural behavior ceases to respond to language. For example, the lunatic or retarded soul, according to the usual Christian reckoning, is doomed to Hell for all manner of misdemeanors. But we generally think it pointless to judge the insane (our legal and moral reckoning tends to be secular/ biological in tenor), and Christians tend to be sotto voce or pragmatic about it. But if a pragmatic abandonment of principle is acceptable, what becomes of these souls and at what point does divine vengeance kick in? The extremes of life, which are natural to a biologist, likewise present religious problems. Does a senile soul go to Heaven or Hell senile? How is the soul of a baby to be judged? The viewpoint that gives meaning to these questions is thoughtless, incoherent and morally abhorrent.

The debates over sexuality also lie at this boundary. The gay lobby's opponent is religion and so it emphasizes nature (but risks conceding that it would be wrong to choose to express gay sexuality). The religious lobby emphasizes choice i.e. the ability to respond to their demands. Ironically, the religious lobby also likes to call homosexuality unnatural as if neither God nor our rebellious animal nature supports it -- a reckoning that makes gay sexuality perverse beyond belief. As it is, gay sexuality appears to be well within the human norm, statistically speaking, and is unexceptional for primates.

Reproduction is not the sole function of human sexuality. Unfortunately, human modesty and the desire for sexual privacy has enabled religion to establish and maintain absurdly extreme views -- that sex is solely for reproduction in a union sanctified by God, for example. Religion has the effect of preserving public ignorance and making inquiry into sexuality difficult.

While ever religion asserts that people are souls susceptible to divine judgment, while ever it idealizes human susceptibility to language but denies their biology generally, it cannot deliver decent moral judgments. It is not a good conceptual abode for those with a high determination to be decent. Religion obstructs a biological understanding of ourselves and is stupidly brutal by comparison to it. This is putting it gently. Contemporary religion shows that now, as in the past, savages can have dignity, a mild manner and fine clothes.

It is worth adding that the notion that science is morally neutral and only related to morals in its application is a thoughtless disparagement of science's great quest to understand objects. The primary understanding of science is that humans can comprehend objects (at least to some extent and to very great effect). Humans succeed in comprehending objects by seeking and gathering evidence. In pursuit of the aim of comprehending objects scientists have discovered a great principle of truth-seeking -- 'Distrust thyself!' This does not sit well with the supposedly humble religious fundamentalist with his/ her tiny shard of supposed divine knowledge. To deal with this problem scientists have developed procedures such as the double blind experiment. Scientists demand that experiments be reproducible. They discard authority and anecdote. Science has a profound moral force that a religious understanding can easily recognize. It also has extraordinary accomplishments to back it up. This is not to suggest that understanding objects is the over-riding moral objective for humanity although it is a very significant one. A biologist would relate the range of our moral intuitions to our nature as evolved highly communicative (and therefore social) primates.

There are no political benefits of religion as such. The future of politics lies in biological understandings, not in the notion that we are souls visiting the real under the dictatorship of God. The fact that there are no non-religious societies does not speak for the survival value of religion or for any mysterious or supernatural merit of religion. Religion is ever present because it has retained its place in human concepts up to the present time. It is human rationality that has survival value and merit and religion has been integral to that rationality. The erosion of religious understandings has seen religion and rationality separating such that religion now attacks rationality and promotes faith and belief for its own sake. We are seeing religion abandoning understanding in favor of its own organizational survival.

I conclude firstly by asserting that Homo sapiens is a potently rational animal and that its religions are at heart rational. There is even rationality in the escape into faith for it reflects a crisis in reason: the mind/ soul seems both indefensible and undeniable. Faith in this context is not a psychological problem; it is not a delusion. It is a last resort and it's a resort that I think good hearts and honest 'minds' would be glad to leave; glad too not to have to defend bad history, bad science and bad morals.

III. 'HEIDEGGER, TECHNOLOGY AND TIME: REVIEW OF THE FILM THE ISTER'
BY MATTHEW DEL NEVO

In 2004 two young Australian film-makers, David Barison and Daniel Ross, premiered a film they'd made entitled The Ister at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. Since then the film has been getting shown at film festivals and conferences around the world. The Ister is the old name for the river we know as the Danube. It is also the title of a famous poem by Hegel's friend and contemporary, Holderlin. In 1942 Martin Heidegger gave a course of lectures on Holderlin's poem der Ister at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany where he was professor of Philosophy. Heidegger had been lecturing on Holderlin since the early 1930s. Heidegger's lectures on der Ister were translated into English and published in 1996.[1]

At the start of the film an on-screen text states the film has been made to accompany Heidegger's lectures of 1942 on Holderlin's poem. This is important. The film is neither about Heidegger's lectures as such, nor about the river; nor is the film a documentary. The film is an accompaniment, literally. It operates as a film in a rather novel manner, analogous to the way, in a previous century, a poem was set to the accompaniment of piano or some other instrument. According to this analogy, the musical instrument and setting is the film; the 'poem' is Heidegger's lecture course. The film does not therefore offer either an introduction to Heidegger or to his lecture course. Having said that, one will certainly learn something of both Heidegger and the core ideas of the lecture course from the film, if one is not already familiar with them. Just as the setting of a poem is musical, this film which 'accompanies' the lecture course is itself philosophical.

The viewer is taken during the course of a 3 1/2 hour journey from the mouth of the Danube at the Black Sea in Romania to the source of the Danube. The film follows a natural and sensible structure of a journey which is also a quest. The quest gives the film a resonance with all the great quests of literature (from Homer on) as well as Heidegger's quest for origins in philosophy, and his rethinking of philosophy from ostensible origins. The film also resonates with Heidegger's mode of thinking -- the question -- pointed as it always is toward the essence in the sense of origin, historically and ontologically. When we arrive at the source of the Danube near the end of the film we discover the actual source is disputed and that one can go 'upstream' from the source in various directions. The film-makers avoid trite philosophical point-scoring about this, they prefer to express some wry humour at the fact. However, once again, it inevitably reminds us of the subject, Heidegger, whose exploration of the sources of Holderlin's great river and land poems in Greece, do not discover a pure univocal philosophical origin.

The 3 1/2 hour film is broken into five parts divided after 102 minutes by an Intermission. Part One takes us from the mouth of the Danube through Romania and the former Yugoslavia (just after the fall of Slobadan Milosevic). In Part Two we travel through Hungary. After the intermission, Part Three takes us from Vienna to Mauthausen concentration camp. The film tackles National Socialism, through which the course of the river, Heidegger's life, and the lectures all ran, historically speaking. Then in Part Four we travel up river from the concentration camp to the Hall of Liberation in Germany at Kellheim. At intervals the screen flashes up 'distance from source', as happens on an aeroplane with regard to destination. Part Five of the film takes us from the Hall of Liberation to the source. Each part of our journey as a viewer we are accompanied by a guide. The guide speaks to the camera answering questions we don't hear. We witness them philosophising in the present, as it were. The whole film is subtitled. Barison and Ross are not seen.

The guide who dominates the film is Bernard Stiegler who has written a book in French entitled, Technics and Time.[2] The other three guides accompany us for a short while only. They are Jean-Luc Nancy who takes us through Hungary in Part Two, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe who accompanies us in Part Three from Vienna to Mauthausen concentration camp, and the thespian Hans-Jurgen Syberberg who accompanies us through the upper Danube to the source in Part Five. Stiegler reappears at various stages of the journey. He gives us strong and clearly expressed ideas. Stiegler does not talk about Heidegger's thought as such, but he talks about that of which Heidegger thinks: time and technics; a stance towards the matters themselves is the one Heidegger always advocated and himself practised. Unlike Stiegler, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe come across, at least to me, as typical academic French intellectualisers rather than thinkers in Heidegger's sense. Luckily for the viewer we do not get either guide for long. Stiegler, on the other hand, is absolutely charming and keeps the viewer focussed and interested on the journey with well-articulated insights that belong to his own journey -- parallel to Heidegger's, but different in key respects -- in search of the origins and philosophy and culture. Syberberg, our final guide, is famous for a controversial 7 hour film on Hitler that he made in the 1970s. You can see that this good looking man in his 60s is charismatic and fascinating, with a beautiful speaking voice, even though he doesn't seem to manage to say quite what he wishes to say in English. However, we get the gist.

Much of the film we see the river itself and we see something of what Heidegger meant about it being appropriated by technics. The river is often lined with dilapidated warehouses, decaying industrial sites, war-torn buildings. Almost from first to last there are signs of war. We see broken bridges in Milosevic's Serbia and recently rebuilt bridges. We see a lot of mess and debris, rather than old castles, though these feature in glimpses. There is no romanticism in the film, nothing of a travelogue about it. The film is concrete rather than symbolic. Nevertheless, the river comes across as featuring the things Stiegler, often in voice-over, is saying about time and technics. The film gives us a real sense of the amazing age of this landscape and of the mythological origins and history of violence on both banks and behind the attempts to bridge and dam it. At the same time there is a sense of perennial human striving, of human struggle and hope.

My experience of the film is that we will watch it with expectations that we have when we watch a documentary; but that ultimately the film exposes these expectations because they are consistently not met. We should not be tempted to blame the film, for not obeying the laws of genre; but I think we should look further into the film. At this point we will begin to realise the film is a philosophical work in a Heideggerian manner. The Ister has philosophical themes of course, but so do many films that it would be incorrect to call works of philosophy. The Ister is Heideggerian because it does not just try to represent philosophy (although inevitably it does this), it tries to be philosophical. Of course what it is to be is the Heideggerian question. For the film-makers Barison and Ross, the question translates in the film's way of being which is neither abstract, obscure or pretentious, as philosophical films so often are, but as I've said, very concrete.

At the end of the film, in the Black Forest where Heidegger wrote Being and Time (1926) in his hut at Todtnauberg, we see, at last, the beauty of the origin and hear Heidegger read the poem he loved and knew so well, der Ister. Then we are left just with a still of the river further downstream flowing to the sound of a Schubert impromptu. This is an extremely thoughtful, thought-provoking and thought-worthy film that needs to been seen more than once.

1. Heidegger, Holderlin's Hymn 'Der Ister', tr. William McNeil and Julia Davis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.

2. B. Stiegler, La technique et le temps. Tome 1: La faute d'Epimethee (1994); La technique et le temps. Tome 2: La desorientation (1996). Time and Technics 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford CA: Stanford University, 1998.

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