Thor's Day: Value experience for its own sake

It's an art

By Morris Dean

A passage in John E. Smith's study of The Spirit of American Philosophy recently brought me full-stop. It was like the birth of Minerva from my own skull.
    The passage was in Chapter IV, on the philosophy of John Dewey, and it was about Dewey's conception of art. It provided a formula or metaphor for me to express my own personal sense of the holy or sacred.
    Professor Smith wrote that a trend among twentieth-century thinkers was that

Religion has fallen on evil days, the great moral traditions of Western civilization have been brought into question; science, progress, and the possibilities of history have been made to take their place. But for many this has not been enough. Is there, they have asked, no source of meaning for life which takes us beyond the struggle for existence? Is the whole of life to be summed up in the effort to master ourselves and our surroundings?...We want to go beyond organism and environment, beyond the push and pull of social and political life, to some ideal fulfillment that is more lasting than successful manipulation of things....
    ...Art as expression....What Dewey called the museum conception of art is to be rejected...it isolates art from experience...and severs the connection between artistic production and ordinary events of aesthetic interest by setting it up on a pedestal. Dewey argued instead for an understanding of art which sees it as a direct development stemming from aesthetic perception; art results from experience and, in a certain sense, is experience. It is experience in that heightened sense in which experience becomes valuable for its own sake. [emphasis mine; pp. 158-9 of the revised edition, 1982]

    This passage reminded me that my own, personal view of the sacredness of experience may essentially be an aesthetic view, especially in view of the fact that I have posted a number of "art pieces" in this column. For example, "Perceiving beauty," "Animal spirits," "The sense of life...is life," "Contemplative estheticism: From The Elegance of the Hedgehog." I consider it a sacred art to live in a way that values life and respects one's own and others' experience for its own sake. I accept as self-evident that experience must be valuable for its own sake, for this is it, this is all there is. We pass this way once. Here and gone. We need to cherish it.
    And it's not just my experience that is valuable. All life on Earth grew out of Earth. I value and respect the experience of others, and include in "others" not only humans but also non-human animals. (They are our relatives, after all.) On this core value is founded my sense of morality, of what is right. It is wrong, for example, to treat a pet, or a farm or ranch animal – or a wild animal – inhumanely, or to end its life unnecessarily. Those animals, too, are in the same situation. For them, too, this is it, this is all there is. Each one passes this way once; each animal is here and gone; it, too, deserves to have and hold its life.
    My disbelief in God – and of the supernatural in general – has not left me unreligious in this sense.

One failing of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is that they don't champion animal rights. They condone the subjugation of animals in general (not to mention out-group humans in particular, whom, for example, they may kill for supposed offenses against their God or His chosen people; whom they may enslave; whose wives they may steal for themselves; whom they may even offer up for sacrifice if they're feeling desperately in need of salvation)....
     That is, for these religions, not all experience is valuable for its own sake – certainly not the experience of non-human animals, whom people may sacrifice for their various rituals or propitiations, and even eat with no qualm whatsoever.

A second flaw is that these religions devalue experience that doesn't occur on the "holy days." They implicitly demote days that aren't sabbaths (or Saint's days, or other religious holidays) to a lesser status. You're to observe "the Lord's day" by doing no work, but on your days for doing as you please you can work. The subtext seems to be that you are not to think of "your" days as holy or sacred.
    The result seems to be that people live from holiday to holiday, hoping for something transcendent and liberating that never quite comes, for it has been overlooked on all the little, ordinary days, as people have failed to experience and value their lives in themselves, failed to appreciate the sacred in all their ordinary, daily moments. They haven't learned to recognize it because it has been demoted and neglected. The Abrahamic religions have distracted people away from the daily sacred and corrupted their ordinary experience – corrupted their lives – profoundly.

I mention those deficiencies because they are pertinent to the art of treating experience (everyone's and everyday's) as valuable for its own sake – that is, as sacred. But those faults didn't arise in a vacuum; they follow from other defects of the world's Big Three theistic religions:

3. 
   The Abrahamic religions are founded on fantasies, day-dreams, hallucinations, delusions, fanciful notions, manic visions, wishful thoughts, magical thinking, received myths...that simply aren't true – articulate burning bushes, talking snakes, waging spirits, parting red seas, immaculate conceptions, bodily resurrections, apocalyptic returns, final judgments, heaven, hell, 70-some-odd virgins waiting upstairs to spread their legs for sexually repressed jihadists....
4. 
   They promote or condone as moral the treatment of other people and of animals that is actually immoral  – human- and other animal-sacrifice (the crucifixion of Jesus was an act of human sacrifice, after all – at least as framed by later Christian writers, who were intent on founding a religion); subjugation of women; "honor" killing of daughters who have sex out of wedlock, consensually or otherwise; outing of gays (contemporary American Christians and Muslims in Africa, Europe, and Asia are warring on gays everyday); covering up sexual abuse of children by clerics (it's still going on in the Roman Catholic Church); accumulation of disproportionate wealth by "chosen" or "elect" people (a popular rallying point for televangelists and mega-business-churches in the United States); rationalization of crimes for which they can be forgiven because "the Son of God died for them," or because they confess, "atone," and do the prescribed number of penances....
5. 
   They subjugate followers through fear and intimidation – warnings that if people don't believe certain things they will not go to heaven, or that if they do certain things they will surely burn in hell; the requirement that in order to be pure they do the prescribed number of prayers per day in the prescribed manner and facing in the prescribed direction; threats of stoning or beheading or exile if they don't believe the officially prescribed things; literal judicial executions for apostasy (as Leonard Pitts reports of a current case in Khartoum, in his column "Faith cannot be coerced," in which he writes, "Meriam Yehya Ibrahim...stands convicted of apostasy. She renounced Islam and became a Christian...Converting from Islam is against the law....")....
6. 
   They dull the minds of many of their followers with dogmatic poppycock that leaves them unreachable through rationality and science – the earth (the whole universe?) is just over 6,000 years old; Adam & Eve were created in human form and are the parents of mankind; supernatural spirits can intervene willy-nilly in the workings of the material universe, and can either acquiesce in, ignore, or reject the prayers of the faithful (it's the faithful's option to decide which alternative his or her God chose, of course)....

Not that there aren't followers among the adherents of the Abrahamic religions who share the sense that experience – others' as well as one's own, everyday – is sacred for its own sake. One has to wonder, though, why such followers don't reject the baggage in their religions that contradicts that sense?
 

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[Note: John E. Smith was the Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Yale when I was an undergraduate there, and my scholarship job for three years was to be his "bursary student." I supported his office staff, made copies, did some research, some typing, that sort of thing. I noted his death in December 2009 ("Death, too, is what happens"). Professor Smith's secretary, who joined the staff a few months after I did, is still on the job, 52 years later. Patricia (Mrs. Alan) Slatter, I salute you! Please give my regards to Alan.]
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean