micah - agreement, disagreement and respect
here's my response to dan:
as dan alluded to in his first post, it seems important to our friendship that, although dan and i disagree about fundamental questions, we do so while respecting the fact that the other person holds his beliefs. i think (and hope) that in my friendship with dan, our mutual respect is not simply a willingless to let the other person go his own way - a worldview truce, or a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. rather, it is a matter of taking seriously, of honoring even, the way in which the other person holds his beliefs, and lives them out. and by extension, it is a way of taking seriously and respecting the other person.
perhaps part of the puzzle dan was discussing has to do with what this respect amounts to. on at least some important issues, its plainly not the kind of respect we give to the truth, because we believe the other person is wrong. but maybe it is a respect for the truth-regarding attitudes and practices of the other person. that is, even the we think the other wrong, we respect his way of approaching questions, of trying to reason carefully, of being open-minded, of listening well and giving the other side its strongest hearing, etc. in this sense, we think the other person is right about certain things -namely, things having to do with how one searches for truth and seeks to understand the world. and behind this are agreements about important values and virtues, such as the value of intellectual honesty and the virtue of conversational humility.
this is not to say that we agree fully about even these matters, especially in the details. for example, i think that careful reflection on scripture is an important, indeed crucial, way for us to understand the truth about the world and ourselves. dan clearly does not view scripture the way i do. even in this case, however, i imagine that there are agreements between us about they way one ought to approach scripture or any other important text. for example, we agree that one ought to read carefully and charitably, that one should be sensitive to wordplay and irony, etc.
interestingly, with respect to our 'ethics of conversation' and our 'ethics of reading', i agree much more with dan than i do with many fellow christians, who may not value carefully reasoned argument or attentive reading the way that dan and i do. (this is not, of course, to say that all, or even most, christians are like this)
i began by talking about respect, and i have quickly slid into talking about agreement. two things can be said about this. first, there is a kind of respect that does not depend on much agreement, and maybe not on any agreement at all, but rather is directed at the person in a different way. examples of this kind of respect include kantian respect for persons-as-ends and christian respect for persons as made in the image of god. i think that such respect plays some role in friendship, but the kind of respect i have been thinking of here is the respect unique to friendship, a respect that is (somehow) connected to affection and shared outlook and experience.
second, my point about agreement has probably just re-formulated dan's initial puzzle about friendship. the question is: how is that people with vastly different views about the fundamental can have the kind of agreements involved in friendship? and relatedly: how is it that people with the same fundamental views can fail to have the kind of agreements involved in friendship?
i take it as fairly obvious that friendship involves important agreements, whether articulated or simply lived out in an unspoken way. at this point, then, it seems to me worth considering what these agreements amount to, and how they related to one's approach to basic questions, such as the existence of god and the meaning of human life.
as dan alluded to in his first post, it seems important to our friendship that, although dan and i disagree about fundamental questions, we do so while respecting the fact that the other person holds his beliefs. i think (and hope) that in my friendship with dan, our mutual respect is not simply a willingless to let the other person go his own way - a worldview truce, or a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. rather, it is a matter of taking seriously, of honoring even, the way in which the other person holds his beliefs, and lives them out. and by extension, it is a way of taking seriously and respecting the other person.
perhaps part of the puzzle dan was discussing has to do with what this respect amounts to. on at least some important issues, its plainly not the kind of respect we give to the truth, because we believe the other person is wrong. but maybe it is a respect for the truth-regarding attitudes and practices of the other person. that is, even the we think the other wrong, we respect his way of approaching questions, of trying to reason carefully, of being open-minded, of listening well and giving the other side its strongest hearing, etc. in this sense, we think the other person is right about certain things -namely, things having to do with how one searches for truth and seeks to understand the world. and behind this are agreements about important values and virtues, such as the value of intellectual honesty and the virtue of conversational humility.
this is not to say that we agree fully about even these matters, especially in the details. for example, i think that careful reflection on scripture is an important, indeed crucial, way for us to understand the truth about the world and ourselves. dan clearly does not view scripture the way i do. even in this case, however, i imagine that there are agreements between us about they way one ought to approach scripture or any other important text. for example, we agree that one ought to read carefully and charitably, that one should be sensitive to wordplay and irony, etc.
interestingly, with respect to our 'ethics of conversation' and our 'ethics of reading', i agree much more with dan than i do with many fellow christians, who may not value carefully reasoned argument or attentive reading the way that dan and i do. (this is not, of course, to say that all, or even most, christians are like this)
i began by talking about respect, and i have quickly slid into talking about agreement. two things can be said about this. first, there is a kind of respect that does not depend on much agreement, and maybe not on any agreement at all, but rather is directed at the person in a different way. examples of this kind of respect include kantian respect for persons-as-ends and christian respect for persons as made in the image of god. i think that such respect plays some role in friendship, but the kind of respect i have been thinking of here is the respect unique to friendship, a respect that is (somehow) connected to affection and shared outlook and experience.
second, my point about agreement has probably just re-formulated dan's initial puzzle about friendship. the question is: how is that people with vastly different views about the fundamental can have the kind of agreements involved in friendship? and relatedly: how is it that people with the same fundamental views can fail to have the kind of agreements involved in friendship?
i take it as fairly obvious that friendship involves important agreements, whether articulated or simply lived out in an unspoken way. at this point, then, it seems to me worth considering what these agreements amount to, and how they related to one's approach to basic questions, such as the existence of god and the meaning of human life.
posted by micah at 10:50 AM
1 Comments:
One striking aspect of your conversaton so far is how you have both quickly brought out the idea that friendship requires a lot of agreement about certain aspects of life---Micah illustrated a couple of intellectual virtues that he thinks important to his friendship with Dan, and reformulated Dan's original question as precisly this: how can two people have all the agreements you need for a friendship, and yet somehow fundamentally disagree (or, in Micah's formulation, disagree about the fundamental). Dan did a good job of indicating the role that `fundamental' might be seen to play in this formulation: the beliefs in question are fundamental because they are so central to the lives of the participants. And now I can draw out a further tension in what Dan and Micah have said so far: how can the theistic/atheistic beliefs really be so central if they don't seem to have much of an effect on practical, day to day things like friendship - in particular, if they don't have an impact on the types of virtues that Micah points to, maybe the beliefs aren't really that fundamental. One response might be a form of agnosticism: since it doesn't have practical ramifications, belief in God or disbelief in God doesn't really (in spite of what theists and athiests might profess) amount to anything, so really the whole question is useless or even meaningless. Another response is to maintain that the disagreement about the fundamental really is so fundamental that it does impact the virtues necessary for friendship. I think such a response would have to hold that Dan and Micah are just confused about their points of agreement---their disagreements about the fundamental are so fundamental that they in fact have very different understandings of what they take to be common ground. They are just deceiving themselves when they think they share common ground. Another response (and this is my favourite) is to start to rethink what it means to dis/believe in God. If two people who apparantly disagree about the fundamental in fact seem to share a great deal, perhaps their disagreement about the fundemental isn't as substantial as the bare theism/athiesm (p vs not-p) formulation might suggest.
Tom.
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