Causality and Subjectivity in the Religious Quest

The dynamics of seeking causation and the dynamics of subjectivity are first presented and are then brought together in a consideration of the 3 core components of the religious quest: the search for and experience of ultimate explanations, the interiority of religious experience ("spirituality"), and the empathic experience of religious fellowship. Thomas Berry proposes that the universe functions on three principles: Differentiation, Subjectivity, and Communion (Berry 1988). Elsewhere I suggest (Goodenough 2001) that these three categories can be mapped as well onto the core components of a religious orientation, with differentiation translated as the quest to develop an orientation with respect to Ultimacy, subjectivity reflected in our spiritual quest or Interiority, and communion reflected in our search for Fellowship with one another and with the Earth and all its creatures. In this essay I develop these relationships. I first describe two distinctive facets of the human psyche, the search for causation and the subjectivity of experience, and I then consider how these operate in our religious quest to apprehend Ultimacy, deepen Interiority, and experience Fellowship (the substrate for morality). The Components of Causality All animals seek causes: they respond to sensory inputs by identifying the eliciting stimuli (potential prey, mate, food). But humans possess an additional capacity: they can imagine/invent/construct causes in their minds. Psychologists speak of this operation in terms of the “causal operator,” the brain function that takes in a stimulus, responds with a cause, AND -and here’s where we’re different -imagines a possible cause if no coherent cause can be identified. (I use “imagine” here by choice to remind us that such causeconstruction is done in scenarios, in narrative, in image.) For early humans with limited understandings of Nature, the travails and the joys of natural existence were attributed to the causation of all sorts of wonderful gods and ancestor-gods. In the Abrahamic traditions, the causation factor became more unitary, powerful, and abstract, while in the Eastern meditative traditions a central tenet was to let go of the angst of seeking causation, finding religious experience instead in accepting and becoming an unquestioning part of the universe. Psychologists also tell us of the robust human tendency to pair experience with some causative agent. Thus when we think of Uncle Fred and he calls minutes later, we wonder yet again about the possibility that, just maybe, psychic forces can cause subsequent events. We are much slower to recall the many times we thought of Uncle Fred and he didn’t call, or the times he called when we weren’t thinking about him. We are fascinated by apparent causative pairings, and they generate our superstitions (wearing a lucky hat when we play golf) and fuel our biases. This same dynamic, I would argue, convinces us that our prayers are (sometimes) answered and our rain dances (sometimes) rewarded, where the “sometimes” gets forgotten as we recall the (story of) the year that a particularly powerful rain dance brought deluges of rain in a particularly dry season. These two kinds of causal systems -the search for direct cause and for causal pairings -come together in interesting ways. When I do a rain dance and it doesn’t rain, what then? What’s the cause? Well, one possibility is that the whole Rain God story is untrue. A second is that I and my villagers didn’t dance powerfully enough, or are being punished for transgressions. We opt for the second kind of possibility, time and time again, because it offers an explanation, imparts causality, satisfies the causal operator in ways not sustained by the “there’s no Rain God” explanation (which deprives us of causality and instead elicits existential anxiety). It is our ability to invent causes that allows us to be both scientists and philosophers. A bold scientific hypothesis is no more than a stab at causation, as is a novel philosophical treatise. But scientists throw in the extra insistence that the cause-postulate must suggest experiments that test its validity (generating the spectacular success of empirical science), and philosophers insist that the cause-postulate must possess coherence, must occupy a niche in the web of cause-postulates that form the overarching system. Neither science nor philosophy asks that we believe in a postulate. Rather, we are asked to evaluate its consequences, its manifestations, and its germinativity. The search for causation is, of course, at the core of our theological endeavor as well, where belief in the outcome is a central component of the process. Whereas the scientist and the philosopher make every effort to purge their search for cause of any vestige of subjectivity (success here being variable), the search for a satisfactory account of Ultimacy comes to roost in the subjective. Therefore, I next consider the dynamics of subjectivity. The Components of Subjectivity Antonio Damasio (Damasio 1999) presents a brilliant in-depth version of the concepts I will traverse here (using my own language and offering my own spin), and should be considered required reading by anyone interested in the human being. I will first outline my understanding of temperament, then of sentience, and then the co-participation of the two in the generation of subjectivity.