Dealing with the Deficit! (3) - Cutting Defence.

Of Military spending, Trident, Cuts, Cabbages and Kings (And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings - well, not really.)

This article follows on from previous articles outlining the economic arguments around the Coalition's budget plans and introducing the structure of the public finances and the plans for reducing the deficit.  It's followed by looking at popularly proposed schemes for cutting the deficit more efficiently/morally by raising taxes and cutting ring-fenced spending and a final article on fairness and (my) opinion of the government's plans.   I've separated them out to try to keep them shorter.  

The current government's approach to cutting the deficit is to take a broad based attack on the problem, raising some money in taxes, and also taking money from across government departments (apart from ID and Health) as well as capital spending and welfare, at varying rates decided on due to various other considerations. All these choices can and have been questioned, most completely by the Labour party's plans, but also by a range of commentators and public bodies. As Polly Toynbee notes, 'What's your cut?' has become a popular game in the media, with various people suggesting their own swinging cuts of things they just don't care about, or they claim are unimportant, or of raising taxes they claim are painless or intrinsically 'fair' compared to the government's plans. These suggestions can be divided into two classes, those such as the Labour party's, which take a similarly broad approach to the coalition, though differing in detail, and those that take a narrow approach and suggest massively attacking a few narrow areas of policy, believed to be particularly unworthy by the suggester, with the belief that this could mean saving most of the pain elsewhere. (Though of course there's also a range in the middle.) These narrow suggestions seem to be uniformly based on the principle that their proposers believe there to be vast pots of money somewhere either just waiting to be painlessly taken in taxation, or being totally wastefully spent that can just be excised without much harm to our general body politic.

These suggestions seem to be largely motivated by the belief that our financial problems are not complicated, deeply based and systematic issues with our economic and political structure but rather a simple problem with an obvious and largely cosmetic solution. The problem with this idea is that it is total bunk, and with most of these ideas underwritten by faulty logic or data. A common thread with these ideas is that either the tax rises proposed could not easily raise nearly as much money as suggested, or the simple spending cuts would not save nearly as much money as their starry eyed proponents would hope, at least not without causing serious damage. These suggestions can be roughly divided into right-wing ideas and left-wing ideas, though both share similar characteristics, as they do with other similar examples of simplistic, near conspiratorial thinking.

The first category for bizarre left-wing approaches to solving the budget deficit is the stop-spending-money-on-defence school. The most bizarre and radical form of this idea comes from Simon Jenkins who proposes saving £44 billion a year by entirely eliminating the armed forces, and thus saving the entire defence budget. Yes, you heard that correctly.  But sentiments along the same lines, if a lot less precise, are expressed widely as a throwaway line by left-wing commentators.  A lot of the desire to be rid of defence spending seems to be based on an emotional dislike of funding things whose sole purpose is to wage war. This is an understandable concern. Ask any person whether they'd rather spend money on healing the sick, educating the ignorant, or purchasing new and better ways to kill people, it is pretty clear, which anyone would chose. There is also the fair criticism that post-Cold war the level of traditional military threat to the UK is unsure.

However, sadly the world is not so simple. In defence of the armed forces there are a number of serious points. Despite the progress mankind has made, we still live in a dangerous world where violence rages all around us. Although Britain itself is relatively unlikely to be invaded anytime soon there are many calls on our armed forces, whether defending British territory abroad, such as the Falklands, or in fighting threats against other peoples and innocent countries. Nor can we be sure that this state of affairs will continue. Europe enjoys unparalleled peace and prosperity, but around exists a deeply unstable world. Whether Russia, the Middle east, China, Africa or other areas the danger of violence increasing in an increasingly populated world struggling over natural resources, changes in climate and political and economic problems. And the terrifying truth is that it only requires a brief period of military unpreparedness to have terrible consequences. We maintain armed forces all the years we don't need them because the possible risk of a situation when we do need them is just so great. Also, an inability to defend ourselves is itself a temptation to less morally scrupulous groups to attack us, knowing we are not strong enough to resist. Even if one does not go as far as Simon Jenkins tentatively suggests there is a temptation to say, well, why don't we hold minimal armed forces then. But this is not a real option, there is no point having a military that cannot quite win in a conflict, considering the damage that can ensure that is hardly better than having no military at all.

Even ignoring this though,although the moral argument that we should not be spending such vast sums on what are in effect weapons of death is a powerful one, but I would say there is an equally powerful opposite argument. As far as the world is a dangerous place, and it is, and this is something we must be aware of then we have an active duty to both provide for our own defence ourselves and also to maintain capability to help others. Europe today has a habit of spending relatively little on defence and criticising the USA for spending relatively more. But this is disingenuous in as far as Europe still benefits from he implicit or explicit protection of American forces and strength, as it did to a huge extent in the Cold War and also the 2nd World War before that. More generally, even if we ourselves are not threatened we have a moral duty to help others who are. And others are most definitely threatened. Neutrality and isolation, a la, Switzerland or Ireland or Sweden, is nice for us, but it sucks for everyone else, and in the larger analysis is really an abdication in the face of evil. We no more really have a moral option of walking by on the other side of violence and military oppression than we do of poverty or sickness or ignorance, and this fact carries the corollary of we, who can afford it, maintaining the military forces to help others who cannot afford it. Whether the first world war, the 2nd world war, the Korean war, the gulf war, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Falklands, fighting pirates off Somalia or peace keeping engagements around the world our military forces are primarily engaged in defending others, often for our own benefit as well, but significantly in defence of those who cannot defend themselves. Indeed, except for the example of Iraq, that particularly divisive conflict, then the main examples of the failure of peacekeeping efforts are examples of the western world not acting decisively enough to stop great evil, whether in Rwanda or in Srebrenica or elsewhere. Elsewhere in a more continuous example, today the security of Taiwan is probably only guaranteed by the promise of military support from the United States in the event of any conflict. Otherwise it is highly likely Communist China would have destroyed this small country. The sad truth is that in a dangerous world we must be able to defend both ourselves and all other peoples of the world, even as we work for a reduction in arms and the threat of force in international and intranational politics. And this is not to mention the central role our military has in relieving disaster zones around the world. Along with our international aid spending, our defence forces are our main ability to actively project our power around the world for the better.

That would be the moral case for military spending (as odd as that may sound), but assuming one does not go quite as far as the complete abolition idea for our armed forces there are practical issues as well. Unlike some departments, such as Health, Education, Welfare, spending on Defence held pretty much flat in real terms throughout Labour's 13 years, while public spending in total increased by around 60%. Our armed forces are already stretched thinly after years of running the forces on an effectively frozen budget. We are also still engaged in a war in Afghanistan, putting additional pressure on the military budget. On top of this defence effectively already has its own internal deficit. Military procurement is legendarily bad value for money. We sink huge sums into purchasing equipment over several years, and by the time it comes it is largely out of date for the threats we face. We are, in procurement terms, always fighting the last war. Also due to the financial pressures of War in Iraq and Afghanistan eating into the military budget the government attempted to save money by stretching out the contracts for major purchases for the armed forces. Like other instances of, effectively, borrowing money over the long term this just means that we end up paying more money in the end, than we would have originally. Talk of inefficient procurement may make it sound as though there is plenty of room for efficiency savings in the armed forces, and hence strengthening the argument for cuts, but what it does mean is that although there is considerable scope for doing things more efficiently in the future, in the present we face looming bills from prior mistakes that we cannot get out of. We would have trouble maintaining our armed forces at their present standard even were funding to remain the same due to this looming internal deficit. In the face of even relatively modest cuts (compared to other budgets, as is planned now) we are going to lose a significant part of our military capability.

That is the broad argument surrounding the inability to solve the deficit through attacking military spending. One important sub-set of this argument is the widespread argument that scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent should be the first call in cutting the deficit, advocated in a limited sense by the Lib Dems and more strongly by the Greens, SNP, Plaid, as well as a host of organisations and commentators. This bears even greater immediate appeal than the standard cut-the-military argument. Nuclear weapons, by definition, can never be actually used except to deliberately cause massive civilian casualties. Their only legitimate purpose is deterrence. Especially in a post-Cold War world there seems relatively little purpose holding expensive nuclear weapons. There is a problem with this, though, similar to the argument above. The number of unstable countries either with nuclear weapons or seeking to gain them continues to increase: China, Russia-ish, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and possibly others. As more countries gain nuclear weapons the possibility of an unstable future situation involving nuclear blackmail at the hands of one of these non-democratic countries increases and this is something that is deeply to be avoided as once we get in that situation there is no way we can respond. There is also a feasible argument that nuclear weapons actually reduce conventional conflict, by making it not worth people's time. Between their founding in the late 1940's and their acquiring nuclear weapons in the 1970's Israel and its Arab neighbours and India/Pakistan engaged in three wars each, but since these states acquired nuclear weapons there have been no major wars. On a grander scale the threat of Nuclear war may have contributed to the peaceful (at least in Europe) conduct of the Cold War, that could so easily have turned into a 3rd World War of immense proportions.

If we accept the importance of some respectable nation having nuclear weapons to counter the possible threat from less stable nations, soon or even in the relatively more distant future, then there comes the criticism that it is unnecessary for us to maintain nuclear weapons, as some people correctly suggest there is no conceivable situation where we would use nuclear weapons independently of America. So why not just let them pay for them and scrap our own capability? The argument is, again, moral. To push the responsibility of maintaining a nuclear capability for the "good guys" onto the USA is to abdicate a responsibility to others. It is to say that it is acceptable for American taxpayers, soldiers, politicians etc to bear the essential responsibility of defending the enlightened world in this most extreme manner, with the danger of retaliation that entails, but it is not a danger and cost that it is worth us bearing. This is an abdication of moral responsibility, and a remarkable one at that, seeing as how it explicitly places us as a strategic dependent of the United States. What is particularly odd about this is that it is generally the same people who claim to be most worried about the UK being subservient to America, or following too closely America's foreign policy, who advocate most strongly that we abandon this major independent capability for independent action and policy and effectively cede this entire area of independent strategic policy to the US in its entirety.

That is, again, the theoretical case for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. The practical issue in terms of deficit reduction is that even entirely scrapping Trident and our whole Nuclear deterrent would not save that much money. And this itself it not something that any major political party supports. Pre-election the Lib Dems went the furthest in supporting an alternative cheaper system than Trident, though they never actually said what system. This is one of those topics for which reliable statistics seem most in need. Numbers given for the actual cost of the Trident system and its renewal vary dramatically depending on the person giving them, as well as contextual factors such as whether figures given involve just the cost of purchasing the system, the cost of running it over the next parliament, over the entire lifetime of the system or something else. And of course those who give the statistics do not make this clear when they give them. Possibly depending on which of these features one takes into account or just what your ideological bias is, it is possible to read statements running from £20 billion to as high as £100 billion I read in one commentary piece, for the cost of replacing the Trident system.

 Actual official estimates for replacing the system, as opposed to whatever numbers column writers come up with, tend to be at the lower end of this continuum, with estimates in the range of around £20 billion for replacing the system and around £1.5 billion annual running costs. It is only possible to get the higher range estimates for costs should we take the possible costs over the entire life-time of the system, some 20-30 or more years. Looking at the total cost of a nuclear deterrent is a reasonable thing to do in general but in a conversation about a budget deficit it is not, since that is mainly concerned with annual cost. One could take a similar approach and produce monstrous figures that the cost of housing benefit is £400 billion, but neglect to mention that is over the next 20 years. On an annual basis, assuming the cost of purchase is spread over a 20 year period, Trident makes around a £3 billion a year contribution to the deficit. Getting rid of it is evidently not going to solve our budgetary problems or really even make more than a small dent in the hole. And these savings are for the outright scrapping of the nuclear deterrent. Trident is already assessed as one of the cheapest long term option for an independent nuclear deterrent. Any other system, even if was cheaper, would still have significant costs running in the billions of pounds and so relative savings would be even smaller.

This is not to say that some savings cannot be made in planning for the nuclear deterrent. It is possible to lengthen the lifetime of the Trident system by refitting submarines and missiles, rather than replacing the system now, as well as reducing from the current level of Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD). Full replacement could be put off until we don't have a desperate budget crisis and there is more money to go around. It is estimated that postponing Trident's replacement could save some £11 billion over the next 5-10 years. This is definitely worth doing in a time when money is tight, and the nuclear threat over the next few years is tight. But neither cuts to defence nor the nuclear deterrent particularly are either a wise nor useful solution to cutting the budget deficit, except as small part of a much wider program of savings and tax rises.

My Masters Dissertation - The Philosophical Nature of Human Relation to other Human Beings

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After 2 months of solid work I have finally finished the Dissertation for my Masters.

It was one hell of a rush at the end, and during a difficult period of my life, but I'm proud of what I've done. After a month of reading, three weeks of note making and then 10 days of frantic writing, editing and referencing I have finally got 11,000 words, 4 sections and 111 references of Dissertation, all done and handed in.

That's my MA in Continental Philosophy finished. And now I only have to wait two weeks to see if I've passed. I'm hopeful, especially since I finally got some of my marks back and I got 71, 67 and 59 for the three essays I have got back so far. This is alright since a pass is 50, and I knew the 59 wasn't my best work. My dissertation is at least as good as that essay I reckon, so I should be fine.

My Dissertation is on the subject of the nature of Human Inter-Personal relation. This is the idea that the most important feature of human existence is not what we know, or what we earn, or what we think,but rather, it is the way we relate to other people, and also the rest of the world we encounter.

How and Why did Levinas consider Buber's Philosophy Insufficient as a Philosophy of Inter-Personal Encounter?

More precisely it is an investigation of the work of one Philosopher, Martin Buber, from the perspective of another, Emmanuel Levinas. Two of the great figures of 20th Century philosophy. Especially in the considering the nature of being human, and the choices in life that we all must make.

Buber and Levinas had a lot in common. They were both Jews who lived through the horrors of the middle of the 20th Century and the 2nd World War. They both held a fierce devotion to the Bible and the message of Judaism and saw their work as an attempt "to translate the Bible into Greek", meaning to express the ethical and spiritual message of Judaism, and especially the fierce call to justice of the Old Testament Prophets, in the language of Philosophy.

They share a deeply optimistic commitment to the worth and importance of the individual human being and the vital importance of considering the way we relate to other human beings for our morality and the priorities with which we structure our lives. They took the ideas of devotion and respect, of commitment with one's whole being, which the Bible described in relation to meetings with God, and daringly applied this language to meeting and interaction with God's images, human beings.

Levinas described a radical phenomenological approach to providing a philosophical justification for ethical duty while Buber concentrated on describing the two possible modes of human relation to other persons and also nature and Art. Their work is a genuinely enriching experience for anyone, challenging them to truly consider the manner in which they approach the world we all find ourselves placed in. I know I have learnt a lot from studying their ideas and the writing about them and the thinking that lays behind them.

Anyway, I can barely believe it's all over. Not just my Masters, but also my entire University career. It's been a long 4 years. I can barely say how long a time its felt. Or how different I feel than I did 4 years ago, when I first faced coming to University as an 18 year old kid, or how amazing an experience it has been thanks to many, many people. And now soon I'll be looking for a job. Scary.

The Philosophy of Christian Focus

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First, a quick disclaimer. This is just some of my thoughts about Christian Focus.  You'll have to excuse me if it is a bit idealistic and theoretical.  I'm not saying we actually manage do all these things.  But they are, rather what I feel we try to do, could do, and perhaps should be trying to do.  And, what we have to offer, as a society, as a community and as part of God's Church.  I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do their job (note to the current exec).  This is just some of my thoughts, I hope it will help people think about what we do and why and how we try to do it.

I feel that Christian Focus, as a society, has something unique to offer, to individuals, to campus, and to the Church in our area.  For me the philosophy of Christian Focus can be summed by saying that we aim to be a Welcoming and loving community to everyone who may want one.  We have two main meetings a week, which, conveniently for this schema, match up with these two ideas, of building a community of people and of seeking to learn from and about one another and the wider world. We are fundamentally open to the world.

For me, these are all the same.  I believe God created all things and loves all things and because of this the Gospel, God's witness to us all, speaks to the whole of our lives, the whole way we conduct ourselves, the way we organise ourselves, both personally, socially and worldwide.  The things we have to offer the community of Christians are similar to those we have to offer our entire human community.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said that the worst poverty in the world is not that there are people who have no money, but that there are people who are totally alone, who feel that no-one cares that they are alive.  One of the greatest features of Christian Focus is that it offers a welcome with no conditions attached.  With most societies you have to be able to, or want to, do some activity or be interest in some particular thing, whether rugby, singing, french culture, beer or whatever.  With Focus, though, we have always tried to make it a place where anyone can come, regardless of what they do, or what they are like or who they are, and they will be welcomed and included in the group and accepted for what they are at that moment, without any requirement (you don't even have to eat).  Most basically, to make somewhere where anyone can come and someone will show an interest in the fact that they are alive, regardless of how they're feeling or acting.  And for me one of the ways I have tried to do this, for example, is to just, occasionally, look around at Socials and check that there is no-one sitting on their own with no-one talking to them, especially any new person who may have come in.

More than this though, is to try to build a community of people who know each other and support each other and have fun together and to offer hospitality and rest to whoever comes in.  To make a place that is as nonthreatening as possible so people feel able to come in and take part and get to know people.  The Bible tells us to give to the person who asks of you, lend to a person who asks to borrow from you, and in all things that the person who serves others, God considers master over all, and so we try to attempt to make a space where people can come in to be what they want, not considering it ours, rather than asserting ourselves to get other people to conform to our way of doing things.  Jesus also said "Come to me if you are tired from carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take the weight I give you. Put it on your shoulders and learn from me.  For I am gentle and humble, and with me you will find rest.  For the weight I give you is easy to bear, and my burden is light."  So we try to make a place which does this so, as much as possible, people may always leave more at peace and happy than when they arrive.      

To be honest, this is just a posh way of saying making friends and having fun together.  'Making friends' is a simple phrase that means a lot.  Getting to know people, getting relaxed around people,  appreciating people for who they are and what they bring into your life, people who know what's going on with your life, who know how you react, who you trust, without having to explain everything each time you meet.  Enjoying people's company and having fun.  It is such a commonplace thing, but it is also, almost, the most important thing of life.  These are the building blocks of any community, and especially God's Church.  We can solve all the big problems of the world: war, poverty, prejudice; but if we do not build a society where every person is remembered and appreciated and has somewhere to turn in times of trouble then we still do not have much, because there will still be people who are afraid and alone in times of trouble.  Also, part of being welcoming and including without conditions comes a commitment to respecting and appreciating diversity, to all the different possible people that we may meet. You can only offer a welcome to anyone who comes in if you are also willing to respect everyone's difference.  To make a community out of people who are very similar is easy, it is a harder and, hence, a better thing to try to bring together equally people who are different in all sorts of ways.  For me, this is building the Kingdom of God, where the lion will lie down in peace with the lamb, and people from every nation will live together without fear or violence, caring for one another as Lord Jesus cared and cares for us all.

Another part of community is the fact that everything we have as a society, everything we do, we try to share between us and do together.  We eat the same food, we try to make sure everyone can do the activities we do.  We don't try to make a profit from anything we do, we do everything at cost and try to keep the price as low as possible.  We are, as much as we can be, a good socialist community, as the first disciples were in the first days of Christianity, and as religious orders around the world are.  This is all part of standing together and being a loving community that supports one another, whose first aim is to do things together and to help one another, without entry requirements, so that a diverse range of people can be part of it, and in which each person has a place.  St Paul spoke about the Church being like a body, with each cell linked with every other, each organ having a role and a place as part of a larger whole along with every other.  John Donne said that "no man is an island, rather each a part of the mainland", and we try to do this by attempting to bring people from all different groups together, and also appreciating and integrating what every different person brings and the perspective they have and what they like to do, whether music, mathematics, frisbee, photography, football, webcomics or whatever.  

Jesus called his disciples to make disciples of all the nations, and at Pentecost the disciples received the gift of languages to speak to people in their own tongue.  Christianity, for me, is not only a religion for all people, in whatever time and place, but also can never be a religion that attempts to force people to speak with one voice, but rather embraces them in their diversity, as it is that diversity which adds up to give the richness that God created and loves. For me, it is important that Christian focus is a community made up of people from different groups and backgrounds.  This gives us a chance to learn from different people, whom we might not naturally spend much time with, and we strengthen, and compliment each other through our difference, more than we could if we were all the same.  All individuals are precious to God, all are his children, whether Christian or not and Christian Focus would be a weaker place if we were dominated by liberal Christians or evangelical Christians, religious or non-religious people, catholics or protestants, Christians or people of other faiths.  Together, though, we have more to offer one another and more ways to learn about and experience the depth and width of all that God has made.

This idea also motivates our talks, the desire to learn and understand more about the width and richness of the world we are part of and the issues it raises.  They give an opportunity to learn as much as possible about the many different sorts of issues we meet in the wider world, inspired by a Christian perspective.  University is a time to learn and to widen horizons and a wide range of talks gives us a chance to be challenged in many different ways, whether faced with a different religion and way of being spiritual, or the realities of complex moral issues, or the possibilities of new spiritual disciplines and perspectives we hadn't thought of before.  For me, this is about just appreciating and showing an interest in all the world contains.  God made us, and the gospels speaks to us, as creatures of body, mind, heart and soul and at my time at Christian focus we have had talks that have spoken to each one of these parts of our being.  It is dangerous to risk neglecting any one of these areas, as too often happens in our wider society and culture.  

To this end we have talks on many issues, whether intellectual or emotional, or theological.  We also make an atmosphere to discuss issues like these informally between people and, on the intellectual side, we create a chance for people to talk to those at University in other years and get help and advice with work, at times.  Or just reassurance that it is possible to get through your course without going nuts before coming out the other side.  On the side of the soul, We also have Time2Focus, prayer times and various reflections and meditative things.  we try to look at new and different ways to consider faith and spirituality.  We also have food on a weekly basis, though, and we come together to hang-out, to share each other's company, to relax and to end the week in calm.  This just about covers body, mind, heart and soul.  Feeding people is just as important as being able to learn through the talks, or experience community with the people, or take part in new forms of meditation and spirituality or prayer.  Showing hospitality, as simple, as it is, is such a gift and a useful thing in the world, and it is our commitment to this world, as well as the next.

The last thing about Christian Focus, for me, and in line with its diversity and its welcome, is that it is complementary, not exclusive.  Being a part of Christian Focus is entirely compatible with pretty much anything else, and, especially in the life of our Christian members.  We do not try to do everything good or useful for a Christian life, so that we can do the things we do do, better.  For example, Evangelism, spreading the Gospel, telling people about the things God did, and God revealed, in Jesus Christ, is such an important part of the Christian faith.  But we don't do it, at least not explicitly or as a group, because it would appear threatening to some people and reduce our ability to be unconditionally open and welcoming, so we deliberately give up this part of our nature so we are more able to be open.  But it is good that people can then be part of groups, as well, that do do those things we don't.  Different groups and activities and approaches can complement each other and we do not regard that as a problem, but an opportunity to, between us, do more and better than just one group on its own, doing things one way, could.  And, for me, personally, I really like doing different things in different groups, giving me a chance to do things different ways and with different people, rather than doing everything related to my faith through a single church, say, or other group.  This is also all part of the diversity of the thing as well.  We can all do and want to do different things, as Christians and in the ordinary sense, that is fine, because we can agree and come together on certain important things, the importance of pasta bake on a Sunday being one of them.

Excuse me, again, if this all sounds very theoretical.  What it all boils down to, though, is people.  Appreciating, showing an interest in and caring about people.  Beings so precious that God, who is so far above all things, and against whom stars and galaxies and space and time are mere trifles, gave himself over to humiliation and abuse and death to try to save them, in all their messiness and fallibility and complications.  It is, after all, the people who make any community, and whether they care, or are willing to help out, that will make somewhere great or just a pain, far more than any principles or ideas they may be trying to carry out.  
And, as this seems as good time as any to say this, at Christian Focus, over the last three years, I have met the most interesting, diverse, talented and friendly group of people that I have ever met anywhere.  I have to say, that my favourite part of each academic year is the start, because of the excitement about what unique, funny, kind, talented people the new academic year will bring.  It is a source of constant amazement to me that there can be so many people in the world but that each one can be so individual, so different to every single other one, though I guess this doesn't necessarily reveal anything more than my poor imagination.

On a personal note: I have immensely enjoyed my time at Christian Focus, even the year and 2/3 that I spent on the exec, and both the chance to work, relax and live alongside such amazing people.  Over the years the chaplaincy has become a home, and you have become like a family: numerous, argumentative and difficult at times, but always around.  And this has been more and more true the longer I have known you, and we've been around for good times, bad times, exams, holidays, relationships, journeys, illnesses, arguments, and God alone knows how many speakers and how much over cooked rice.  With any luck Christian Focus will continue to thrive for many years to come and have something unique to offer the world, the University, the Christian community, and all its members.

Steve.

The Nature and Basis of 'Infinite Responsibility' in Levinas' Ethics

This is one of my recent MA Essays, on Levinas' theory of Infinite Ethical Responsibility.

The nature and basis of 'Infinite Responsibility' in Levinas' Ethics

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century.

Levinas's main concern as a philosopher was Ethics, morality, the way we should act towards and treat one another.  He developed a radical philosophy of love and compassion, based on an overwhelming respect for the importance of the unique value of each human individual.

Levinas' philosophy was profoundly shaped by the reality of the 2nd World War, his internment for 4 years in a Prisoner of War camp and the murder of his entire family in the Holocaust in his native lithuania.  A different man may have surrendered to despair, about the world, humanity or God, but Levinas came out of the experience of the prison camp and the murder of his people with a profoundly optimistic, almost idealistic ethical philosophy.

Against the horror of the vast collectivist machine that sought to eradicate whole peoples, purely on the basis of their race, with total disregard for their lives as individuals, Levinas reacted by building a philosophy that placed the  individual and the encounter of one individual with another as the core moment, the core judgement on which all other thought and philosophy depended.  Levinas put his entire career at the service of  building a philosophical structure that guaranteed the importance, place and dignity of the unique human individual against all attempts to make him or her a disposable means to the larger ends of a group, system or purpose. 

For Levinas, the encounter with another individual was the event against which all other events paled into insignificance.  In the encounter with another person Levinas described the appearance of infinity, of height and majesty, of a thing that could never be fully comprehended.  He described the realisation of an infinite duty to that other individual, based on the infinity within him, that captures you and leaves enthralled by the other person.  He openly talked about building a wisdom of love instead of a philosophy, the love of wisdom. 

 In a century marked by atrocities, collectivist ideologies that judged people by the colour of their skin or their class, and a popular philosophical contempt for the ability and choice of the individual, Levinas stood consistently for the worth and value of individual humanity and created a unique phenomenologically based ethics and critique of the destructive tendencies of human civilisation and thought.        

Sydney Shoemaker on Colour and Phenomenal Character

This is one of my recent MA Essays, on Sydney Shoemaker's theory of the role of colour perception in the constitution of the phenomenal character of perception.

Shoemaker on Colour and Phenomenal Character

For those of you who don't speak jargon, this is an essay about the manner in which we visually perceive colours as a particular part of the way we perceive the external world.

Colour perception has been a major subject of discussion in modern philosophy, as it gives a clear and accessible starting point to discussions about human perception and the extent to which we can say we know our perception of the external world to reflect objective external features and to what degree it may reflect the structure of

Most terms are explained in the essay.  There are two that just bare some explanation.

Philosophers divide perception up into two types of content: Representational content and Phenomenal character.

The Phenomenal Character of experience is the qualitative features of it, the things that you individually experience, the way hot and cold feels, the way blue looks etc, but are not necessarily comparable between people. We all call the same objects blue, hot, cold etc, but how that feature actually feels to us is almost impossible to compare between people (at least in theory). It is the qualitative featurs that we can't measure.

Representational content of experience, is the objects we experience and their properties that are comparable between people, things like size, shape. Things we can measure and give a quantity to.

Roughly with visual perception representational content is like a pencil drawing of what you see, shape, size, position, etc. and phenomenal character is the colour, the colouring in of those objects.

All other terms should be explained within the essay.

What Christianity is all about.

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Christianity is all about ‘more than you deserve’. The principle is that we are given more than we deserve by god, because he loves us. God is not just or fair by human standards, he is so much greater than we can ever imagine that he is completely divorced from our ideas of justice. God has given us, through the eternal sacrifice of Christ, more than we deserve. He has paid himself the debt that he is owed. This is why we are ordered to turn the other cheek. “If someone slaps you on your left cheek, turn to him the other cheek and let him slap it as well, if someone steals your coat, give him your shirt as well, if an occupation (roman) soldier forces you to carry his pack a mile, carry it two miles”. To accept the grace of god doing more for us than we deserve we have to give to others more than they deserve.

This isn’t just a good ideal either, it is the only practical way to heal the world. We have seen, bitterly played out, that an eye for an eye does not work. Just ask the Israelis and the Palestinians. Rather the way of the Gospel, of turning the other cheek, is the only way to ever completely gain peace. But still there are so many people who cry out for revenge, for a strike back, and the killing continues.

. . . One Eye on the Future

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Compared to the widespread ignorance and disinterest in the past that characterises our society, it could be argued that we are in fact obsessed with the future. We are, after all, deep in the grip of the cult of youth: our popular culture is preoccupied with what is new and unheard of. Fashion, music, Art and wider culture are engaged in a process of constantly inventing new forms and attempting to replace what had been popular or regarded before. We are obssessed with new technology and the next innovation and gadget and live in eager anticipation of the promise and expectation of ever newer advances and technology. Our time has seen the furore over the turn of the millenium and the rise of the issue of Global Warming to worldwide political and social prominence. It would seem odd, therefore, to claim that our era is characterised by a lack of interest in the future. And indeed, I mean this in a very particular, but no less important for that, way.

On the level of individual people a claim that we are unconcerned with the future seems even stranger. People plan obsessively who and what they want to be. They dream about where they want to go with their lives and, on a more mundane level, they plan their holidays to come, their shopping tomorrow, their bills, their mortgage, their retirement, their love life. The issue here though is precisely this very fact though: People are concerned with my job, my life, will I find someone. People are intensely concerned with what faces them as individuals. Just as with our ignorance of the fact and lessons of history is really one of our amnesia at a societal level, rather than individual forgetfulness so with our societal future. We are, each of us, intensely concerned with my future, but we have lost, if we ever had it, an awareness and concern for our future and those things that must be affected primarily not as individuals but as a whole. We are unconcerned with the future, then, in a very particular sense.

Although our lack of concern with our social future is, to a degree, merely a matter of neglect, as I think is overwhelmingly the case with our past, it is partially also a matter of deliberate encouragement. Nothing is more uncertain than the future and, in the sense of unconnected specifics, nothing has been less successful than long term predictions of our future. This has led to an intellectual, and also in a vaguely connected manner, cultural antipathy to any kind of prediction concerning the future. This does have a legitimate basis. The type of predictions often popularly made about the future, whether about politics or the development of technology are normally excruciatingly poor. Even worse than this: the 20th Century was scarred by the advocates of explicitly historicist philosophies, who appealed to a certain necessary historical development to justify the most appalling violence and persecution in human history. Historicism, the belief that history as a whole is moving towards some inevitable conclusion is itself, when phrased in purely secular terms, everywhere and always a fallacy. The contingency of all natural occurences, including the development of human society, alone assures this. It is moreover deeply dangerous, even in the more limited, non-universal sense, in that it encourages complacency towards whatever end for which it is invoked, which is itself the most sure method of ensuring that end does not occur.

The problem with these types of future prediction is that they are, almost everywhere, dreams, which may or may not take place. They are hoped for possibilities, in the same sense of our personal hopes and daydreams for the future. They also often rest on a mistaken faith in the inevitability of certain complex events, which are in fact under the control of complex and varying forces. This phenomenon itself is familiar from our personal lives. How often do we see people, often ourselves, assuming that something: a job, an exam, a partner, a dream, a sucess, is in the bag, only to see it slip from our grip due to our naive underestimation of the complexity and difficulty involved. We take things for granted, that they will occur, that they will always be there, and thus fail in drawing the correct conclusions for what we must do to secure them. It is in this sense of failing to make the logical leap from where we are now to where we are going, to what we must do to get there, that our awareness of our social future fails. It is a sheer failure of our logical thinking. We are seemingly incapable, as a society, of considering what we are doing at the moment, looking at what the inevitable or likely long term consequences of these actions will be, and preparing for them accordingly.

When you start to think about it, this failure of our social thinking becomes glaringly obvious. We are embroiled in various problems as a society and as a species that can be traced directly back to our failure to consider the wider, likely consequences of the actions we are and have been taking, and to prepare for them accordingly. Just look at the major issues of our time. The Economic Crisis: An entirely avoidable global disaster brought on by our failure to take awareness of the simple fact that economic stability could not be maintained by taking up exponentially increasing levels of debt. The obvious consequence of this, that eventually we, as a society, would not be able to continue borrowing and to service our debts, was, indeed, obvious to many, but at a societal level the message did not seep through and together we failed to respond to this and avoid the inevitable. The War in Iraq: as clear an example as you could wish for of a failure of the consideration of the long term implications of our current actions. The invasion of Iraq was a complete success, but our leaders were so obssessed with getting to the war and completing the invasion they completely failed to take any account of the difficulty of the task that would come after it. This is a wide-ranging failure that both we and Iraq have then suffered from for years after. More examples come easily: The Demographic Crisis, as low birth rates mean our society ages and population declines; the Environmental Crisis, of the reckless destruction of priceless and irreplaceable species and habitat; the coming Energy Crisis, as oil continues to slowly run out and we do not have a plan to replace it. Even the Global Warming debate, which on the surface seems to represent our interest in our future, really betrays our inability to transform that casual interest into something more substantial. Many people see the possible dangers of Global warming, and it is given wide spread lip service as an issue of importance, but we seem incapable as a society of turning that knowledge into action, the difficult action, which that knowledge demands. We are incapable of turning our widespread individual knowledge into wider societal knowledge and action on the scale necessary and thus continue on much as before.

As in all these cases, this is not even just the case of the inertia of our society, with a small aware minority attempting to rouse a slumbering and foolish mass. Even those who are aware of the dangers of Global Warming, for example, and of the action that must be taken, are often the very same people who continue to fly, to drive and engage in various other actions that produce vast quantities of carbon. Each person deludes himself with the thought that my actions, alone, will do not nothing and then infers from this that therefore I have no responsibility to do anything, or often that this therefore means that the macro scenario will not itself occur. No one raindrop thinks that it is the cause of the flood. This is the fundamental failure of logic that is occurring here: The complete inability to reason from the society to myself, or my locality, or vice versa, from myself and the situation I see to the issues facing our entire society. We struggle with the fact that the macro issues that face society require our action, even if that individual action itself will not shift the whole issue. We are seemingly incapable of making the inference from our individual activity up the level of complexity to the action of our entire societal body.

What we fail with in each of the situations of these crises is not forecasting the future in the manner of a weather forecast, is not imagining the dreams we one day hope to have, but rather simply considering the inevitable consequences of where we are and what we are doing now. We do not need dreams about the "end of history" but what we do need is to do what, at the individual level, is considered an essential human skill: To consider the consequences of the actions we are undertaking, considering the state we wish to be in, and co-ordinating the one so that we meet the other. This is often a complicated process, requiring that we consider many variables and co-ordinate many smaller individual actions, but through its execution we are able to traverse our lives and accomplish what we seek to accomplish. THis same action is essential if we are to co-ordinate our society as a whole and interact with other societies. It is a process of checking where we are going, of keeping our eyes off our feet and on the road we are walking,so we don't trip up, to keep our eyes on the obvious consequences of our actions and to prepare for them, thoughtfully and properly, as we would instinctively do in our own lives.

It is a process of
If . . . then . . . ,
Given . . . then . . .

Obviously in all situations there will be a limit to what we are able to know about where our current path is taking us. The denial of this fact is the fortune telling, prediction of the future that is such a waste of time. Our inability to fortune tell our future does not take away our responsibility to consider the immediate consequences of our current actions and to act according to that knowledge. In all situations though there will be some facts and consequences that will be obvious, or at least calculable. Such investigations often require a great deal of academic work and understanding, at the level of the complex problems that face whole societies, or groups, but with all the resources that our societies have to muster we can do this and we must. What better use could there be for them? For if the Economic Crisis or the War in Iraq, or a whole manifold of other crises teach us anything, it is that it is considerably easier and cheaper to sort out a problem before it happens than to clean up the mess after it is made. It is easier and less painful to walk around, or step over an obstacle than it is to trip over it, hit the floor and have to pick yourself up again. Neither can this be considered a low priority. As we move forward into the future the economic, political, social choices we make will be and are having consequences, and it is of the greatest importance that we seek to consider and prepare for what consequences that are evident, with all the rigour and resources that our society can bring to this problem. We must stay focussed on our future, for we cannot afford the alternative.

This is not even a matter of merely reducing costs, but rather one of life and death. History is littered with the groups and societies and nations that failed and fell behind and died. Sometimes there was nothing they could do about this but too often it was a consequence of the actions they took and their failure to consider the evident consequences of the direction in which they were heading. They never thought it could happen to them, but it did, and if we do not pay attention to where we are heading, as well as where we came from, then eventually it will happen to us as well, if for the simple reason, that it is not the things behind you that normally trip you up, but rather the things in front of you that you are about to walk into.

Essential to the Present: Keeping One Eye on the Past

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As a society, our past is not paid the attention it should be, and this means we struggle to understand our present, or predict our future. On a certain level, the reason for this obvious: We tend to have enough trouble just dealing with the present. But it is still deeply unsatisfactory and, I would say, dangerous. This is connected to understanding both our present and our future. How can we predict the future from the present, if we don't understand how the present has developed from the past?

I hope that saying, as a society, 'we do not have a great understanding of our past', is not a very controversial claim. Perhaps never before have even relatively educated sections of our society had so little idea of the full sweep of our History, whether of Britain, or the whole World. Pick almost anyone at random, and they are probably largely unable to describe either the broad sweep of history over the millennia, or its details, outside perhaps a few very specific periods. I believe this sad fact is a simple consequence of a few factors. Firstly, the decline of the ideal of what can be called the 'Renaissance Man': that an educated person should be generally well informed and skilled to call themselves educated. Education has become increasingly specialised, to the great benefit of economic and technical pursuits, but to the cost of an understanding of the background of our society and the wider world. This can be seen at school where beyond GCSE most subjects are just abandoned and specialisation really sets in. Secondly, and connected, is the commercialisation of education, meaning education seen as something undertaken for purely for economic benefits, rather for any ennobling, character enhancing reasons. The Humanities in general suffer particularly from a combination of both effects.

This process is intensified by the manner in which history is taught in the modern day, for the little time it is obligatory. That is, by intense concentration on a few isolated segments or periods of history, without any overview of how the whole, rolling, continuous human story fits together. For all its possible benefits this method has a crippling deficiency. I do not know how to quite explain it except by analogy. Our method of teaching history is like teaching pupils about America by intensely drilling them on the social, economic and political facts of North Dakota, South Carolina and Utah, but nothing about the country as a whole, whether its government, its shape, where it came from, or what stands for or anything else. Even among A-Level or University students of history, the general ignorance is often maintained, outside the particular few areas they have studied in such detail, unless they have a strong natural interest that they pursue more broadly in their own time.

I think few would disagree that most people know only a small amount of history, whether ancient or comparatively recent. Far more people, however, may question why this ignorance of the Past really matters at all. To answer this, I first appeal to another analogy. We consider a person who has entirely lost their memory, or even for whom their memory is particularly weak or failing, as a person who is profoundly disabled. This is for the obvious reason that they can neither truly know or appreciate who they are, or have the resources of knowledge and experience to apply to the situations they meet now or in the future. These are resources that we all rely on on a constant basis. They are doubly crippled by being robbed of the riches of memory of all they have done and achieved in the past, and in facing their present or their future. Exactly the same applies to whole societies or peoples or, indeed, humanity as a whole.

Obviously a group of human individuals totally ignorant of their social past can continue, in a manner unlike a single individual, because they do in fact retain their individual memories, but still in as far as they constitute a single social body and seek to act socially they will be crippled like any individual amnesiac, both by a failure to appreciate the richness of their past and the individuals who came before them, and by the lack of knowledge with which to understand the situations of their present or future, especially when faced with other peoples for whom the past is a more immediate current motivation. I would go even further. In any individual personal relationship what is important to that relationship is not mostly what we are doing with that person right now, but rather the depth and warmth of the history that we share. It is likewise so in the social bond that binds us together, whether country or people or community. If we as a social group do not know our shared history then we lose a major part of what makes us one people, one community, rather than just individuals thrown together. Indeed, as a man who has no idea of his past loses his very identity, so a people without idea of their past will struggle to have an identity as one people at all, but merely as a group of individuals thrown together by accidents of birth, or geography, or politics.

I speak in terms of our social identity here because I believe that is where the problem of our collective social amnesia is most dangerous. Not just in the loss of social identity, and the failure to appreciate those who have gone before us, but equally in failing to equip ourselves with the lessons of the past to guide us in the present and future. This is not dangerous, perhaps, in the theoretical sciences, areas where progress would not be possible without a constant awareness of the discoveries that have gone before and where, hence, such a consciousness is maintained. It is an immense risk, however, in the more practical and general areas of the social, political and economic choices we make to direct our country, state, community and people.

Without an awareness of the history and background of these decisions, of what has been tried and tested before, of what situations have already emerged, and what has succeeded and failed, we cannot be sufficiently informed to take the decisions we must in a complex world and decide wisely. We don't just need to know ourselves either, we need to understand the nations around us. Just as ignorance of where we have come from cripples our ability to know ourselves, and act, so ignorance of the deep background and heritage of the communities around us cripples our ability to understand them, where they come from, and what they seek to do now. Just as knowledge of an individual person's past allows us to understand what has shaped and motivated them, so we need knowledge of the past of the peoples and communities around us to better judge their actions and motivations now.

It is trivial to list political issues of our time that rest on deep historical causes and influences. From the politics of racial injustice and Confederate memorials in America, to the historical motivations behind the European Union; from the complex divisions over Israel-Palestine, the tensions in Northern Ireland, the continuing violence in the Middle East, the policies of Russian Expansionism, and even the background to the Corbynite and Conservative political movements within Britain; none of these can be really understood except through the deep historical wells and sources that have fed and driven them. 

Even apart from these arguments, for me there is another important reason we should care about the poverty of historical awareness in our society. History is an immensely rich topic of study because of the sheer diversity, wealth and wonder of the things we can discover there.  L.P.Hartley once wrote, "The Past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". This is very true. I can think of no better metaphor for the wonders we can discover in History than the joys of travelling to a foreign country for the first time and experiencing new culture, food, climate, sights, people and stories; a richness and diversity we would never have imagined without venturing beyond our own land and people.

This is as true of the past as any possible place we can travel in mere space, though obviously and sadly we can never experience them as directly as in actual travel. Still, there is a richness there, of people and stories to tell, greater than any writer of fiction could conceive in one small imagination; being the true lives of billions of people just as inventive and creative as any of us. More than this though, the people of the past were people just like us: with hopes, fears, dreams and the vision of a purpose and meaning to their life. Surely then, if we are a people of love, who honour the value of human beings, we must honour them by remembering their lives and those things they gave and spent their lives for. We must remember the things, causes, and people that were so important to them, and which are also, of course, now the essential building blocks and causes of the lives we have today. For the basis of the near-infinite complexity of the lives we lead is that near-infinite beauty and complexity that came before us, with its loves and hopes, goods and evils, which now exist only as far as we take them up into our minds and make them part of our thoughts, hearts and lives.

What God Does.

Last October I took part in a week of guided prayer in Warwick Chaplaincy and I became very aware of something. With prompting from Steve my prayer guide, I thought back to my times sitting in the woods, or on the train or anywhere else where I was just watching the world go by. I spoke of these times as times of great contentment at just being within the world. I also told him about my great sense of the presence of God at these times. He asked me about what I thought that God was doing at these times, or how he was looking at me. The answer was that God was just watching.

When I was sitting there watching the world, it was a very special moment, for I was still and complete, for I am whole in the world when nothing is wrong that I can or must affect. It is a way in which I feel the goodness which underlies reality and that I could abide forever in that moment in perfect contentment, if that moment would just remain. So God was watching the world as well.

Like when I sat and looked down the valley behind my house. I sat on the grass in a warm summer, looking down the valley, past the golden and brown fields and trees and watching the sun go down behind the treetops. I watched this happen and drank in the beauty of it and I has the most incredible sense of watching it with God and of him watching it to, and appreciating it to, for he need do nothing but watch, and sharing this beautiful vision of what he had created.

I realised that I saw a piece of beauty, unique in the history of the world and the Universe, and I realised that no-one but me saw it, no-one but me and God. I realised that he must see this beautiful sunset every day, every day a little different, and that most days he saw it alone, unseen and unappreciated by anyone else. But this day he shared it with me, and I felt that God smiled, and that I was supremely honoured to share this moment where I was experiencing the pleasure of a maker at the success and unveiling of the beauty of the thing he had made. Like the pride of a parent at their daughter’s wedding, or their graduation from University. Love mingled with pride and the one reinforcing the other.

Thinking about this time I think that this is what God always does. He watches and waits for the time to come and sometimes he watches beauty and sometime he does not, but always he watches, and when the times is right he acts and he is working his purposes out from year to year. I had never thought about what God does with the world when he is not dealing with people, with thinking beings. What did he do in the aeons before the founding of the world. The answer, I think, is very simple, he watched.

God in the Bible and in the experience of my heart is not a God of many words. In the Bible God never uses ten words where one would do. I admit that this is not always true. God’s silence is broken by action, and powerful action to, and speech. In Jesus, God spoke at length but still the Gospels leave the feeling of so many words unspoken, so many parables we wish could be more completely explained, so many pages that could be in there.

Furthermore, my own explorations have led me into the search for stillness, in being able to move with rather than against the universe and God’s truth and the nature of what is valuable. It is a feeling of seeking a Taoist-like harmony with the universe, in Christian terms being in perfect obedience with the will and intentions of God. This is in terms of harmony and an important part of that harmony is both inner and bodily stillness and watching and waiting and acting when it is needed. In Taoist terms, doing by not doing. Actions, and powerful actions, puncture silence and watching. It is impossible, however, to underestimate the importance of watching and listening, and experiencing, for to do such a thing is to drink in the world as it moves around you.

Neither does it have to be contrary to God’s ever-activity and care. It is the nature of things that God pervades all. God acts constantly, both in his intercession in the world and through the constant over-flow of his Love into the world, that we call Grace. However, in any particular strand of existence, viewing any particular slice of time, looking at all the places in the cosmos, overwhelmingly in terms of their number God watches and does not directly act, although still his love and compassion overflow, as we know that we can merely watch someone and yet still our love and care can flow onto them.

A Defense of Truth in Art - Some Preliminary Ideas.

These are some of my first brief thoughts on looking at how we consider and access Truth in, and through, Art and Literature and how this is fundamentally different to how we generally model and determine truth through maths and science. This is something that I believe has interesting possibilities for helping to explicate an explanation of the ways we access and react to the truth and knowledge we experience and rely on in ordinary life (and also in religion), in a fuller and more useful manner than the simplistic model we often rely on from the hard sciences and mathematics.

These ideas are inspired as a response to an article by J.Stolnitz 'The Cognitive Triviality of Art', which can be found here and argues for precisely the title, that Art is cognitively trivial, containing no unique useful knowledge or truth. The idea of this article is that supporters of Art often make claims to such a thing as Artistic 'Truth' or even knowledge. It takes a very narrow sense of truth and knowledge and then proceeds to use this to ridicule claims of Artistic truth or knowledge. To the extent it does not particularly engage with the wider questions it is merely a polemic, but it is a interesting starting point to bounce off of and give us somewhere to start in forming and defending the opposite view.

The article accuses Art of lacking the definitions of knowledge and truth that would provide us with a range of propositions whose truth is uniquely or best discoverable through that area of knowledge and a method by which such propositions could be compared and verified. He then claims that this demonstrates that the idea of Artistic truth or knowledge is essentially vacuous since there is no knowledge that is not more easily comprehendible and verifiable in some other area of understanding or by some other method. He contrasts this with examples of proper areas of knowledge such as science, history, religion, and even 'garden-variety' knowledge and examples of their respective unique propositions such as, ‘nothing can travel faster than the speed of light’, ‘the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066’, ‘the Trinity consists of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and ‘summer is warmer than winter’.

I am sympathetic to the article to the degree that I feel that talk of Artistic beauty is more immediately useful and relevant as a starting point of discussion of Arts than that of "Artistic Truth", which is to introduce a model of evaluation that is immediately likely to confuse when related to Art, especially when imported with all its retinue of ideas of contradiction, proposition, law of excluded middle etc,which is the baggage of formal logic. Any idea of Truth in Art or truths imparted by Art, let alone 'Artistic knowledge' is going to be considerably more difficult. The evaluation of beauty is perhaps hence a more useful starting point, possibly even because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that it itself is not a precisely defined concept and hence does not bring such immediate baggage with its use, it is however one that strikes most people at some point with immediate force, whereas Artistic Truth is ironically the more amorphous idea in most people’s minds.

The Article plays on this ambiguity to ridicule the prospect of Artistic truth and knowledge by taking a strictly propositional definition of truth or knowledge. He demands to know precisely what substantive and interesting propositions can be discussed and verified solely, or even best, through the medium of fine art. In this regard he appears to be correct. Any particular proposition about the world expressed in a piece of Art would seem better justified and grounded through some other means and area of knowledge particularly designed to develop and assess claims of that type of knowledge, whether history or science or philosophy.

In my view though, this merely shows the weakness of his model of artistic truth, or indeed of truth in general if he believes that the propositional model is the only one that there can be, or which can be useful (or indeed if he limits the range of his proposition to factually statement about the composition of the world as he seems to do).

My personal distaste for his talk of artistic knowledge or artistic truth leads me to constantly seek to phrase these ideas rather as the truth of Art or the Truth through Art. But that is merely personal preference.

I believe that the model in which we must discuss truth in Art is precisely not a propositional model but rather one of the immediate synthetic realisation of a whole manifold of truths, their inter-relation and their importance in terms of their aesthetic, moral, religious and existential value. Within a piece of Fine Art we can see captured and revealed an instantiaton of a scene or idea or or maybe just one element of a scene, whether in terms of a snapshot of a something, or a revelation or all eternity, enhanced and shown to us for our appreciation and understanding, with all the infinite, interwoven detail, connotations and connextions such a thing can produce. Such a picture, once (partially, for that is all it could ever reall be,) atomised into its constituent propositions, will inevitably lose its richness, not only in the sheer range of propositions, but also in the inter-related nature they share and the emotional impact which can actually bring them home. It is near (though I do not say entirely) impossible to achieve the same effect, of the over-arching view and connexion of something, with what must become in the end a mere list of individual propositions.

I believe that it is this precise feature of the encounter with truth that we reach in Art that gives a study of this truth the greatest relevance because it is this structure that it shares with so much of the truth or "truth" that we meet and deal with in our ordinary lives, where decisions from the trivial to the overwhelmingly important are so often based on an image or a glimpse or a moment and the immediate intuitve apprehension of what they mean, from our ordinary human perspective and which can so rarely be boiled down into one of logical atomism.

These ideas are not withstanding the eminent human tradition, whose most well known advocate that comes into my mind is Plato, which all but equates beauty and truth and hence the regards the insight of beauty, which many sense in even the most unadventurous or un-humanist Art as an authentic meeting with some truth in the universe that exists in the sense of deeper value and constitutes a meaning and being that gives surface reality and propositional truth its purpose and use and hence constitures a deeper and better truth than that expressed through any proposition. I recently read a man saying that we do science and technology so we may have the means and leisure to do Art, to create. And this is by no means an unheard of view.

Through Art, even apart from the conviction of beauty we can realise many truth and realise them deeper and better than we can through them merely being told to us. I do agree with the article further to the extent that not many of these ideas or propositions would necessarily be justified or grounded in their explanation through Art. Art may show me that a sunset is a supremely beautiful thing, but this would not be because of any particular painting that this was true. Aesthetic, Moral, religious, Existential propositions will often have their basis in some other area of knowledge, and merely receive expression through Art. Again though this is not necessarily true though, as with any of these categories, Fine Art, especially perhaps literature, may lay out the case for them in such an intricate detail unobtainable elsewhere that Art itself is uniquely situated to provide the evidence and backing for them, even if the particular events depicted are fictional. This could be thought of as in a way similar to an extended thought experiment.

This will not be true in all places, however, some Art will merely convict you at that point of ideas and propositions best grounded elsewhere and sometimes Art will reveal knowledge primarily or only in the form of the revelation of Beauty itself (not that this is to be disparaged) and sometimes it will reveal truth in the sense I have just described above. What this all goes to show though is that there is in fact an entire range of meaningful that Truth in and through Art can be studies and considered and through which we may then gain a great deal.