1

Gorazd Andrejč

On Atheist Interpretations of Existential Feelings

Presented at The Annual Conference of the British Society for

Philosophy of Religion, Oxford, September, 2013.

1. Existential feelings

(Two “non-religious” examples)

1. “Jill”:

‘Since then, the world has seemed distant and

cold to me, and this feeling wouldn’t go away.

Whereas before, people I meet daily, the

neighbour’s dog, and even the grass before our

house and the bench on my way to work, were

somehow alive and closer, now everything and

everybody is somehow more distant. I often don't

feel “at home” in this world. The few friends I

could talk to about how I felt, give me “advice”

which seems totally irrelevant, and I felt that,

in fact, at times their own lives are as

estranged as is now mine, only that they, by

being active and social and so on, run away from

it, and supress that underlying cold reality of

the world’.

2

“Joe”:

That warm summer night I couldn’t resist laying

down on the grass behind our house. It was an

unusually clear night, moonless sky full of

stars. As I was watching the stars, they, as well

as me and our little garden, became so very real.

I felt, hey, universe which includes me laying

here on the grass, a tiny speck on another tiny

speck which is our planet, is really there. There

is this vast 3-D interior of the universe of

which I am fully a part, and it is truly

miraculous. It was clear to me that it is nothing

less than magical that universe existed.

Both kinds of felt experience, Jill’s as well as

Joe’s, have received serious attention in the history

of philosophy. Jill’s experience may remind us of

Heidegger’s phenomenological explorations of Angst and

the feeling of the world as a whole as ‘uncanny’1;

and, Joe’s feeling of wonder at the world-whole may

remind us of what Wittgenstein called his experience par

excellence:1 “What happens in the experience of angst is described as a “drawing away” or “slipping away” of the world--the world as a whole. In the unspecified dread experienced in angst the world in its entirety turns into something remote and strange. Even very familiar things, things that make up the ordinary environment of everyday life, turn, as it were, into alien and uncanny objects. The cares and feelings that usually connect a person to his or her everyday environment wither away.”

3

When I have it, I wonder at the existence of the

world. And I am then inclined to use phrases as

‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or

‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.

(LE 11)

More recently, Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) has been

using a concept ‘existential feelings’, developed out

of Heidegger’s concept of ‘moods’ (more accurately,

it is based on one species of Heidegger’s moods,

those which are most primordial & all-encompassing;

since for Heidegger not all moods are such). In part,

Ratcliffe’s motivation for introducing this

phenomenological category was to pick out feelings

that do not fit well into the category of ‘emotions’

or ‘emotional feelings’. He argues that categorizing

all feelings as ‘emotional’ obscures the difference

between states that are intentionally directed at

particular objects, events or situations in the

world, and others that constitute backgrounds to all

our experiences, thoughts and activities’ (ibid.,

37).

So, existential feelings are defined as:

4

non-conceptual feelings of the body, which

constitute a background

sense of belonging to the world and a sense of

reality. They are not

evaluations of any specific object, [and] they

are .. not propositional

attitudes. (ibid., 39)

It constitutes, you may ask, reality of what? Well,

normally something like the reality of “me-and-all-

this-that-I-perceive and everything-else-that-

exists". According to Ratcliffe, there is a broad

variety of such feelings besides the ‘uncanny’

feeling and existential wonder. Other expressions of

existential feelings may include: feeling ‘complete’,

‘separate and in limitation’, ‘invulnerable’,

‘empty’, ‘at one with life’, ‘nonexistent’, ‘at one

with nature’, ‘there’, or 'intensely real’. Or, ‘the

world can feel unfamiliar, unreal, unusually real, homely, distant,

or close’ (ibid. 7).

My presuppositions

For many believers, faith becomes existentially

important, or revived, when it is closely related to

some variants of existential feeling. For example, a

5

Roman Catholic priest described what happened to him

after a hard day of social work in Africa, in this

way:

“Suddenly, everything in myself became still,

including my body, which had been in agony from

stress and exhaustion. I felt the presence of

God. The smells of the jungle and the river, the

night sounds, the sensation of heat in the air –

everything seemed part of the Oneness of God” (quoted in

Merkur 1999: 9-10).

Now, this testimony can of course be seen as a

religious interpretation of felt and perceptual

experience which may itself be religiously neutral;

However, some experience existential feelings as

'religious-talk-inviting' and 'religious-belief-

inviting'. Wittgenstein certainly thought that the

feeling of existential wonder we mentioned above is

"exactly what people were referring to when they said

that God had created the world" (LE 12). He also said

that all he wanted to do when expressing this

experience is to "go beyond the world" (which for

younger Wittgenstein was nonsensical). Moreover, such

feelings can be experienced as having a pull towards

a belief-commitment that the world is in some sense

6

truthfully or aptly depicted as such. Or, a change

from feeling that all is devoid of meaning, to

feeling of a fullness of meaning and depth of

existence, can be a crucial experiential episode of a

religious conversion (Mark Wynn has written on this

point recently). So, a non-controversial descriptive

claim here is that Existential feelings work as a

potent "experiential source of faith" or of renewal

of faith for many.

A more normative, theological suggestion would be that

existential feelings properly attended to are a

vital, or even the most important, spring of faith.

This can be read as an old claim of priority of

'experiential faith' over a merely intellectual

assent or a blind obedience in religion.

(Schleiermacher’s claim that ‘feeling is the essence

of religion’ can be interpreted in this way).

And finally, even more ambitious claim would be that

such religious belief-formation out of existential

feelings is epistemologically legitimate, and leads

to religious knowledge. There are, of course, very

different ways to construe this, as our understanding

of 'knowledge', 'epistemology', 'belief' etc. can

vary substantially. I will not engage directly in

7

justification of either theological or

epistemological claim here. But, to be explicit, I

have to say that I do myself believe, with certain

qualifications, that existential feelings are both

vital and legitimate source of broadly, liberally-

theistic religious believing.

For me, then, the question of atheist interpretations

of, or responses to, existential feelings is

important.

What follows is a suggestion of basic classification

of atheist interpretations of existential feelings,

with an attempt to understand some nuances of these

interpretations and differences between them. At the

end, I will briefly explore a few points of

reflection on theist-atheist conversation in relation

to the import of existential feelings.

2. Atheist interpretations of existential feelings

Two broad categories: Scientistic vs. non-scientistic

atheist interpretations

Scientistic atheist interpretation of existential

feelings

This interpretation advances claims along these

lines:

8

- Any kind of feelings, be they existential or

emotional, brief or long-lasting, can only be merely

subjective colouring of experience which can tell us

nothing about the world.

- So, existential feelings have no epistemological

significance as such. They cannot be knowledge-

producing in anyway (sense-experience together with a

combination of inductive and deductive reasoning is

the only path to knowledge).

- Scientism also includes the ontological claim that

only those realities which science can at least in

principle discover really exist. But even if one remains

agnostic about possible realities which are beyond the

reach of science, an atheist scientism claims that

one cannot say anything about such possible

realities, and feelings definitely cannot provide a way of

intuiting them.

- An ethic of belief which for the scientistic

atheist universally applies, demands from all

rational beings with enough knowledge of the world

that, however strong or deep or existential our

feelings may be, we should not allow ourselves to

adopt any beliefs on the basis of these, accept

beliefs about our own subjective states.

9

Now, I know you are all bored by people using Richard

Dawkins as a model atheist, but I have to disappoint

you: I believe Dawkins is a very good and admirable

example of a scientistic atheist; in fact, he has

some valuable things to say also about the kinds of

feelings we are talking about here.

In order to be more precise, I will focus here only

on his view on the feeling of wonder.

From his Waving of the Rainbow:

Dawkins recognizes at least two kinds of wonder, or

amazement. On the one hand, there is a wondering as

in being puzzled by a mystery of something

unexplained. This is a normal thing for any truth-

seeker to experience, but such wonder has to disappear

when the puzzle is solved through explanation. In

fact, some philosophers of science have claimed quite

generally that a pretty reliable sign of correctness

of a scientific explanation is an ‘ability to reduce

amazement’.2

Dawkins agrees with these philosophers of science

and, accordingly, despises ‘ordinary superstitious

folk who … revel in mystery and feel cheated if it is

2 (White, R. ‘Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes, Nous, 269); in otherwords: “scientific knowledge often advances by making that which is puzzling understandable” (John Leslie, in ibid.).

10

explained’ (xi). What they should be doing is trust

science that the puzzlement and mystery will

eventually go away and get resolved, respectively.

However, Dawkins doesn’t accept Max Webber’s view

that science causes a thorough (and irreversible)

‘disenchantment of the world’ (from Sherry,

‘Varieties of Wonder’ (2012), p. 5). While rational

explanation removes the mysteriousness, Dawkins wants

to avoid the bleak conclusion presented to us by the

Webberian disenchantment thesis, and claims that a

life of science can still be a fulfilling one, and

full of noble feelings. Within such ‘poetically

expressed naturalism’, Dawkins fights for a space for

a more weighty feeling of wonder than the ‘puzzlement’

mentioned above:

‘The feeling of awed wonder that science can give

us is one of the highest experiences of which the

human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic

passion to rank with the finest that music and

poetry can deliver… it is one of the things that

makes life worth living’. (x)

We shouldn't read too much into this. Dawkins

recommends ‘though-mindedness in the debunking of

11

cosmic sentimentality’ (p. ix). The awed wonder is OK

as long as it is an affective reaction to our

scientific learning about the world. It should not be

confused with any cosmic feeling which tends towards

‘mysticism’, let alone ‘religiosity’. Remember,

Dawkins accuses Einstein of deception and

‘intellectual high treason’ for using words

‘religion’ and ‘God’ for the latter’s naturalistic

pantheism and nature, respectively. All ‘cosmic

sentimentality’ needs to be debunked for the good of

humanity.

To sum up: Dawkins promotes a kind of wonder which is

an affective, poetic-aesthetic reaction to the

knowledge of how the world is, full stop. He rejects

any ontological or epistemological value of feeling,

and he doesn't make any space for the feeling of 'how

extraordinary that the world exists' (Wittgenstein).

Wittgenstein’s once wrote (about Bertrand Russell’s

philosophy): “the world becomes broad and flat and

loses all depth, and what they write becomes

12

immeasurably shallow and trivial.” (Zettel 456) 3 Quite

probably, he would say this for Dawkins as well.

More generally, but briefly, I suggest the following:

scientistic atheist interpretation of existential

feelings presupposes a version of the so-called

Kantian4 trichotomy of mind:

cognitive/conative/aesthetic as three separate, or at

least clearly separable, areas of mind’s activities or

states of mind, which are both exhaustive and

exclusive. Each of these has its own clear rules, BUT

only cognitive and conative have their own

distinctive ‘reason’ (theoretical reason, practical

reason). Feelings, in this scheme, are seen only as

'aesthetic experience', ‘subjective colourings’ or

‘add-on’ to more fundamental and philosophically

relevant mental states (beliefs, desires).

Non-scientistic atheist interpretation

3 But such characterisation of Russell may not be entirely fair (see Russell, Religion and Science. While Russell does write of mystical felt experiences: “From scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven [in mystical experience] and the man who drinks much and sees snakes” (p. 188), he also has some appreciative things to say, not only about feelings, but even about a ‘religion of feeling’ which does not make public assertions, and ‘mystic emotion, if it is freed from unwarranted beliefs’… (189)

4 Whether Kant would recognize this trichotomy, as expressed here, as trulyhis, is a question which we cannot tackle here.

13

While within scientistic atheist view of existential

feelings there is some variation in allowing

different degrees of 'poetic expression', there a

greater variety of non-scientistic atheist

interpretations. For example, we can talk of

Pragmatist (Rorty), Grammaticalist (Michael Kober) and

Phenomenological-Heideggerian (Quentin Smith)

interpretations of existential feelings, as well as

quite different, Derridean, Zizekian, and other

atheist approaches, which we will not address here.

There are also varying degrees of how seriously

existential feelings are taken by different non-

scientistic atheisms in philosophy. In other words,

to be non-appreciative towards existential feelings

need not mean to be scientistic.

Some of these interpretations one may dub ‘over-

linguistic’: language is prior to and fully determines

all experience, including existential feelings.

According to such an approach, phenomenological

exploration of such feelings is not a philosophically

fruitful enterprise. For phenomenological atheist

approaches, however, existential feelings are usually

both epistemologically and metaphysically important,

14

and deserve a detailed philosophical exploration, as

we shall see below.

What is common to all non-scientistic atheist

approaches to existential feelings? They all reject

the Kantian trichotomy cognitive/conative/aesthetic.

But it is the phenomenological view that really

emphasises the felt component of these feelings (it

sounds tautological, but it’s not), explores it, and

finds insights in and through feelings which

transcend merely subjective attitudes.

Quentin Smith’s felt meanings of the world-whole Quentin Smith is one of those atheist interpreters

who takes existential feelings philosophically

seriously. He engages in a full-scale, detailed

phenomenology of various kinds of feelings, focuses

especially on existential feelings or ‘moods’, but

argues also in favour of epistemological and

metaphysical significance of such feelings. According

to Smith, moods open for us different ways in which

the world-whole is important. Examples of feelings he

examines include ‘suspenseful and anxious

contemplation of an all-pervading ominousness’,

15

‘captivated marvelling at the miraculous presence of

the whole’, and ‘joyous feeling of global

fulfilment’. In all such existential feelings, there

is a “direct sense of a meaningful world-whole”

(Smith, p. 25).

Given Smith’s well-known, purely analytical and

robustly argumentative defence of atheism and

naturalism in his exchanges with equally analytical

and argumentative William Lane Craig, branding

Smith’s approach to existential feelings as non-

scientistic needs some justification. But before

that, we need to see in which way his approach

remains resolutely atheist.

Smith strictly distinguishes between two kinds of

metaphysics: metaphysics of reason and metaphysics of

feeling. These two are drastically different and

should not be confused or even combined. While they

have, according to Smith, been unfortunately confused

and wrongly merged throughout the history of Western

philosophy, metaphysics of reason has clearly but

unjustly enjoyed a total primacy. So, what’s the

difference between the two?

16

- Metaphysics of reason looks for answers to the

question “Why does the world exist?” and “Why

does the world have this nature?” The reasons can

be either purposes or causes. And, of course, the

ideas of the ultimate, uncaused cause and the

ultimate purpose have been equated with God, and

with the ultimate state of goodness, respectively (the

latter is known as summum bonum, i.e. the

content of the beatific vision in Christianity).

- It has been shown, however, and largely realized

in modern times in the West, says Smith, that

such metaphysics is doomed to failure. The world

as a whole just has no recognizable reason or

purpose: on the contrary, there are compelling

reasons to think there are none. Neither can one

establish a rational first cause, i.e. a

necessary being, a priori.

- According to Smith, a major mistake of most of

Western tradition was to suppose that rational

meaning is the only possible meaning. With a slight

lack of modesty, Smith offers a solution which,

according to him, was partially grasped by

Wittgenstein and Heidegger: a fully developed

17

metaphysics of feeling which remains within the

bounds of felt meanings alone.

‘From the perspective of reason, it is reasons

for the world that are meaningful, whereas

from the perspective of feeling, it is the

ways in which the world is important that are

meaningful. Importances are felt meanings, and

have the same fundamental role in the

metaphysics of feeling that causes and

purposes have in the metaphysics of reason’.

Existential feelings or moods are, for Smith, the

most fundamental feelings, which reveal the ways in

which the world-whole is important, and make possible

all other important appearances.

So, why calling Smith’s interpretation ‘non-

scientistic’? Because of his central claim that in

the disclosure of such feelings there is ‘a unique

kind of knowing proper to feelings’ which he calls

‘appreciative knowing of the world-whole’, and for

which there is ‘appreciative-metaphysical standard of

truth’. Feelings are not simply an aesthetic add-on to

our epistemologically informative experiencing.

18

Smith, following Heidegger, rejects the

cognitive/conative/aesthetic trichotomy and doesn’t

ban feelings from having a capability to disclose

deep and important (objective) aspects or realities

of the world. He goes so far as to introduce the

concept of ‘extrarational and nonpropositional felt

evidence’:

‘For example, a person experiencing an affect of

awe tacitly and nonpropositionally feels it to be

evident that the world is stupendous and immense.

It is irrelevant to this evidential feeling that

a corresponding proposition about the world, e.g.

“The world is stupendous”, cannot be cognized to

contain the reason for its truth within itself. A

global state of affairs has felt evidence in that

it is immediately present in intuitive feeling.

But this does not imply that the knowledge

obtained in these feelings is “subjective” or

“individually relative”. There are criteria

specific to intuitive feelings… that enable us to

determine which appreciations are veridical and

which are not, and these criteria enable to

community of appreciators to reach agreement

about the nature of the world’s felt meanings’.

(p. 28)

19

Clearly, then, the objectivist impulse shapes Smith’s

metaphysics of feeling5 as it does, of course, all

scientistic versions of metaphysics, and quite

consciously so.

3. Some points for atheist-theist conversation in

relation to existential feelings

As in atheism, we can also talk about very different

kinds of theistic interpretation of existential

feelings. And, particular kinds of theists will feel

closer proximity towards particular kinds of

atheists, rather than other, even as potential

conversation partners. In other words: in some

respects, the divisions along 5 ‘The problem of whether or not there is an ultimate truth is not whetherthere are divine Ideas to which our ideas can correspond, but whether thereis an important appearance of the wholeness of the world that makes possible all other important appearances. Such an important appearance would be the ultimate “felt truth”. And the problem of whether there is a meaningful reality that is independent of human awareness is not whether causal inferences to a noumenal or divine ground of the world are justified, but whether it is possible to appreciate an important feature ofthe world-whole that can exist as an important feature irrespective of whether or not it is being appreciated.’ (Smith)

20

scientistic/pragmatist/phenomenological/psychoanaliti

c etc. lines can be much more significant and

consequential in terms of enabling possibilities of

conversation and constituting common intellectual

cultures, than those along atheist/agnostic/theist

lines.

Some important questions:

1) We have seen that different kinds of atheists

have different views over whether there is any

legitimate 'non-scientific believing' at all (let

alone knowledge) which may arise from existential

feelings. So, an important question for discussion

among theist and atheists is the following: should

existential feelings be ‘allowed to be’ belief-producing –

about the world-whole, about nature of reality, etc.

(i.e.: beliefs about realities beyond one’s own

subjective states)?

Scientistic atheists clearly answer ‘no’ to this

question. But so do many theists (even theistic

philosophical defenders of the legitimacy of

religious experience, such as Keith Yandell and

William Alston, would agree with scientistic atheists

21

here and answer ‘no’). On the other hand, some non-

scientistic atheists answer 'yes' (phenomenological

atheists can even talk about ‘felt knowledge’, ‘felt

evidence’ and ‘felt truth’, as we’ve seen), others

might say 'not really'.

One important question in the atheist-theist

conversation should therefore return, I suggest, to

the Wittgensteinian preoccupation with the meaning of

‘belief’, and with the question of what should decide

whether this or that kind of belief we should

recognize as worthy of the title ‘belief’ or not,

etc. It seems to me that this question deserves to be

more central to the atheist-theist discussions than

they tend to be these days. Possible fruitful

directions of such discussion have been enabled,

hinted at or implied by recent Wittgensteinian

philosophy (by the recent work of David Stern, Oskari

Kuusela, Brian Clack, and others) well beyond the

old, and by now exhausted, Wittgensteinian

discussions of ‘fideism’, for example (D.Z. Philips,

N. Malcolm, K. Nielsen and others).

2) Another old and well known question but still

important and deserving discussion is the relation

22

between discursive thought and feelings – especially

the religious discourse (God-talk and other ‘world-

view talk’) and the existential feelings.

There are, I think, two ways of answering this

question which are simple and clear, but are both

wrong:

a)On the one hand, there is the claim that

existential feelings are some kind of pure, pre-

linguistic experience with clearly discernible

theistic, or atheistic, implications. This

ignores the ‘enmeshment’ and the mutual

interrelatedness of the discursive, sense-

perceptual and felt dimensions of our

experiencing – the phenomenological reality which

most people appear to experience most of the

time.

b) On the other hand, ‘over-linguistic’ approaches

(both in theism and atheism) go to the other

extreme and tend to treat all feelings as strictly

posterior to verbal discourse. They claim that language

determines the nature of, and structures, all

experience. Post-liberal and radical orthodox

23

theologies, for example, are on the same page as

certain strand of grammaticalist, Derridean, and

Lacanian atheists in this conviction.

Both of these ‘solutions’ give up much too quickly on

a difficult conversation which deserves to be

continued, a conversation which must necessarily

involve non-scientific and ‘extrarational’ reflection

on phenomenology of feelings, of perception, and

language/culture. Language, history and culture

contribute to our felt experiencing and to our sense-

perception in fascinating ways; but also vice versa,

in all three directions: it is hard to imagine a

creative extensions of meaning of expressive

language, for example, if it were not for the

phenomenon of ‘struggling to express that (as yet not

adequately expressed) feeling in language’, and the

resulting enrichment of language as such, however

small (Merleau-Ponty). In the light of ethnographic

research, too, the fact that language/culture, felt

experiencing, and sense-experience have inter-

influenced each other since the very beginning of

language/culture, can hardly be disputed.

24

In theist-atheist discussion, then, rather than by

combatively debating and trying to knock down the

opponent, more clarity can be gained through a

patient, joint phenomenological reflection (at least

among non-scientistic theists and atheists) over the

conceptual- and belief-inviting pulls which certain

kinds of existential feelings or changes in them,

within this or that cultural framework, have for us.

Such discussions will necessarily develop over time,

and are unlikely to produce a ‘discovery’, let alone

‘facts’, which are sometimes expected to decide the

atheist-theist discussion. However, together with the

discussion regarding the meaning of ‘belief’, they

can enable better possibilities to inhabit each

other’s worlds, phenomenologically speaking, and for

some, even open the doors for a world-view change in

one or the other direction.