An online acquaintance recently sent me a private message recommending a Catholic apologetics book — my post on sola scriptura was an upshot of a debate with her and a few others. I thanked her for the recommendation, but politely declined, saying that I had a very long to-read list and wouldn’t have time for it. Her reply suggested that I was not “open-minded enough”. I was a little taken aback, for I always flattered myself as a rational person with abundant curiosity. This, along with other recent online experiences, prompted me to reflect on open-mindedness.
Merriam-Webster defines “open-minded” as
1. receptive to arguments or ideas
2. willing to consider different ideas or opinions
“Willing to consider” differs from “receptive to”, in that one can reject an idea after carefully considering it. So for the purpose of this post, I choose 2. as the working definition.
The Danger of Being Receptive
In Protagoras, Socrates likens receiving ideas to taking food, and warns against being indiscriminately receptive:
“For I tell you there is far more serious risk in the purchase of doctrines than in that of eatables. When you buy victuals and liquors you can carry them off from the dealer or merchant in separate vessels, and before you take them into your body you can lay them in your house and take the advice of an expert as to what is fit to eat or drink and what is not, and how much you should take and when; so that in this purchase the risk is not serious. But you cannot carry away doctrines in a separate vessel: you are compelled, when you have handed over the price, to take the doctrine in your very soul by learning it, and so to depart either an injured or a benefited man.”
Open-Mindedness is a Necessity
From a Christian perspective, I believe there is objective truth, and it can be known. I wouldn’t be working in the field of scientific research if I didn’t. On the other hand, I believe I’m fallen and fallible, and therefore have very many blind spots which prevent me from seeing the truth, let alone having monopoly of it. For this reason, we submit our ideas for critical examination by other members of the community, and also consider ideas that are different from our own.
Each one of us look at the world from within an interpretative framework, whether we know it or not. In other words, a datum doesn’t interpret itself, we the people interpret the data. People draw vastly different, even opposite, conclusions from the exact same set of data, time and again. This suggests that our personal beliefs and experiences shape our interpretive framework. Open-mindedness is the necessary ability to look at the world from an entirely different perspective. It is a paradigm shift, which often reveals things that we’ve never known or considered before.
To quote a Chinese saying, “There are heavens beyond the heavens, and men beyond men”.
Open-Mindedness is Creativity
Of all the philosophers I’ve read, Aristotle is by far the most open-minded, for it is his custom to approach a subject always from different sides. His treatise On Rhetoric is a classic on diverse perspectives and human natures. In his works On Logic, he writes that to consider an idea with an open-mind, one must re-formulate the idea in a coherent manner, and also delineate the circumstances and experiences from which the idea arose. In other words, unless one can provide the best possible defence and explanation of an idea, he has not comprehended it.
Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, likens reasoning to walking a path, which often times feels like traversing a labyrinth. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates always starts his discourse with a consensus. From this common ground, he proceeds, by simple logical steps, to a high ground previously unknown to his interlocutors. In other words, to comprehend different ideas with an open-mind, one must be able to convey one to another via the shortest path or multiple paths.
For a more practical example, I find a blog post by Prof. Larry Hurtado, a New Testament scholar, inspiring: “When I wrote a review of a book, I’d send the review typescript to the book’s author … I hoped that the author would recognize his/her views as I stated them. It was a discipline: If I hesitated about handing the review to the book’s author, then I should consider whether there was something in the review that was excessive or unfair.”
Signs of a Closed Mind
Having considered the above, I must admit I fall far short of the standards of open-mindedness set by wise men. I’ll close this post by listing the common signs of a closed mind, for self-examination.
- inability to ask sincere questions without aiming to refute the answers
- asserting one’s opinion as correct or more likely without demonstration
- repeating assertions in disregard for counter-arguments and evidence to the contrary, aka. mantra
- ad hominem
- refusal to dialogue
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Thank you for the post. Openmindedness is hard; we all have a natural instinct for self-preservation, and being challenged on our publicly expressed views often triggers a defensive reaction. Psychologists say that’s why rational arguments and evidence often just cause people to double-down on demonstrably false beliefs.
I think religion shows a real paradox for all openminded projects. The most openminded religions, like Reform Judaism, Unitarian Universalism, or even denominational Protestantism like us Presbyterians, have been losing members. As one scholar pointed out (I think I heard this at AAR) the line between being a member and not being a member is sort of thin, and people can just sort of drift away or just decide that they don’t believe in “something” definite. In these openminded approaches, a large part of the “something” is not a doctrine or objective content, but the whole process and life-project of personal striving and growth—-it isn’t the destination, it’s the journey. (So don’t stop believin’; but I digress.) The religions that were growing for most of my lifetime so far were the most closeminded: Mormonism, Evangelical Protestantism, and more generally fundamentalisms. They have clearly defined boundaries; you know if you’re “in” or “out” and you know what you have to do or think to be “in.” And being closeminded reduces anxiety; you know what you need to do to answer all questions and to be assured that your god loves you. The problem there is that life is far too complex, the universe too big, and the Divine far too mysterious to be caught in one of our human bottles. If you can understand it and explain it in your system, it isn’t God, or Truth. As Kierkegaard quoted from Lessing (in the Postscript), if God offered me all truth in his right hand, and a lifetime of striving for truth in the left, I should humbly take the left, since that is what it is to be human; we can never have all truth, but we can strive for it, like a sailor following the North Star to stay on course although he never expects to touch it. I think that is why, in the last few years, the fastest growing religious group has been the “spiritual but not religious,” or “None of the above,” or just “Nones.”
Politics is the same way. Right now, I’m caught in that tension. I’ve come to realize, as Plato said, that the price of apathy towards politics is to be ruled by bad people. But the price of engagement with politics is constant disappointment, since none of these jerks is going to measure up on close inspection. Right now, I’ve made a judgment as to which ideologies are the most dangerous and least helpful, and chosen to push as hard as I can towards Scylla instead; but I know this is tentative and that one day Scylla and Charybdis may switch places, and I’ll have to adjust my course. The only certain and permanent choice is to try to be a moral person and to do what will make myself and the world better, whatever that is at the moment.
Gotta run, but before I go: The most openminded philosopher I know is probably Hamann. His whole epistemology is based on the idea that there is a truth, but that we never know the whole thing, that we need to be receptive to truth as it gives itself, knowing that we will make mistakes, but that if we choose as Hume did never to believe then we also risk error in not believing truth, so just keep trying knowing you’ll fail sometimes. I’m not doing justice to the philosopher called the most obscure writer in the German language, but I just ran short of time. TTFN
What do you think of the idea that an effective way to be religious and open-minded is to compartmentalize one’s thoughts. Learn and evaluate new ideas in one compartment separated from one’s religious notions. This protects new ideas from being judged unfairly because of religious bias.
Is it realistic? Does one require philosophic training to acquire that skill? Does it even work?
Are you referring to Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA)?
Brad,
As your question was addressed to “philosophicalscraps”, I’m hoping he would respond directly, as I’m interested in his answer as well.
Speaking for myself, I don’t see why religious ideas, in so far as they are “ideas”, cannot be evaluated in the same way as all other ideas are. Personal bias does not originate with the idea, but with the person who is doing the evaluation, IMO.
P.S. It seems to me Kant’s philosophical architecture is an attempt to compartmentalize religion. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether or not it works.
philosophicalscraps wrote, “The religions that were growing for most of my lifetime so far were the most closeminded: Mormonism, Evangelical Protestantism, and more generally fundamentalisms. They have clearly defined boundaries; you know if you’re “in” or “out” and you know what you have to do or think to be “in.””
You might want to check out this hilarious piece by Alvin Plantinga on the term “fundamentalist”: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2015/10/alvin-plantinga-on-the-pejorative-term-fundamentalist/
There is a saying attributed to Kierkegaard, “Once you label me, you negate me.” I think labels tend to separate people with different viewpoints, instead of bringing them to the dialogue table.
Having defined boundaries per se is not the problem – we wouldn’t be here if there were no boundaries between nature and ourselves. The problem, as I see it, is how to interact with others through our respective boundaries, in a manner that is mutually beneficial rather than mutually destructive.
My wife has a definition she read somewhere: a “fundamentalist” is a person who doesn’t know he or she has a hermeneutic.
When you know you have a hermeneutic, that means you know you occupy a particular standpoint, you have presuppositions, and those color what you see, magnifying some parts and diminishing others. When you don’t know this about yourself, you’re right and everyone else is wrong, probably willfully wrong but definitely dangerously so since he or she claims to be part of your group and thus might lead the young and other weak minds astray.
You’re a lucky man. 🙂
There is an important difference between these two beliefs:
1. There is such a thing as right and wrong.
2. I’m right and everyone else is wrong.
Do you agree?
I think I’d have to disagree with Plantiga here; since someone like Jerry Falwell Sr. defines himself as a “fundamentalist,” the term is not innately pejorative. But Falwell doesn’t know he has a hermeneutic, just as Rev. Coffin does or Bishop Sprong. When I was growing up, in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, I often heard or read about “liberals” in terms that made it clear they were a greater threat to Christianity than were Jews or Muslims or others who openly rejected Christ, because they taught lies such as evolution or social reform. A racist would be considered a fellow traveler, maybe confused or emotionally disturbed but still a fundamentalist so basically still on the right path; a liberal was on the road to atheism and perdition and determined to take as many other good Christians with him as possible. These views were not generally strong among the clergy in my denomination, but they were common in the culture and not that unusual even in the pews of the PCUS. The people who labeled those others “liberals” were confident that the Bible clearly supported everything they believed in and held dear. Not only did it not occur to them that they might have a particular historical and cultural standpoint that might tint their interpretation of the Bible; their theology rejected even that possibility. It was only “liberals” who believed that our views of God are partial and distorted; we good conservatives knew that while there were many things we did not know, what we did know we really knew as true. Jerry Falwell Sr. “knew” God supported capitalism as the only just and Christian economic system, despite having no direct Scriptural warrant for that claim and despite having to ignore a whole lot of Torah, Gospel teaching and early church practice that might indicate otherwise. The thought that his upbringing as a well-off American patriot might have influenced how he read the Scripture, and that some of what he thought might be more wrong than the views of a black Christian raised under segregation or a Latin American peasant schooled by years of injustice and Church hypocrisy, simply never occurred to him at all, except perhaps to thank God that he was born a well-off white male American patriot who could receive the full Gospel without distortion while those others were deceived by their perspectives.
The other side of my wife’s definition is that one can be both “liberal” and “fundamentalist.” If to be a fundamentalist is to not know you have a hermeneutic, there are certainly liberals who are just as closeminded and certain that they see the only possible truth and that those conservatives are either deliberately deceitful, or emotional cripples, or just ignorant and childish. Fundamentalists tend to be social conservatives, since the essence of fundamentalism is to say that my view is a return to the fundamentals of the movement and that gives me direct and undistorted access to moral rightness as well as objective truth; but it is possible for “liberals” to have a community and be the ones who establish the status quo, in which case the closeminded fundamentalist could espouse Marxist views or other “liberal” ideas. I’d say that was much of my college experience: the most closeminded, ideologically-driven, authoritarian-arguing people I knew considered themselves “liberal” and were the majority, while the ones who considered themselves “conservative” were much better able (and more willing) to give reasons for their views rather than simply dismiss the questioner as ignorant or evil.
Perhaps the way to escape the reductive nature of labeling is to start out by humbly accepting that one has one’s own hermeneutic. As Kierkegaard says, no one thinks without presuppositions. That means that not only are their gaps in one’s own knowledge (something the fundamentalist generally accepts) but some of one’s own views are false, and even the fundamental direction of one’s thinking on some question is probably wrong. After making that confession, one can admit that while the other person has a perspective and is probably wrong about some things, he or she is likely right about some things too and thus can be teacher as well as student. (This is nothing new; it’s the basic Socratic claim.)
After making that confession, one can admit that while the other person has a perspective and is probably wrong about some things, he or she is likely right about some things too and thus can be teacher as well as student.
To admit one is wrong, and the other person is right, would require that both recognize a common standard of right and wrong. In other words, there is a defined boundary, if one is to make such an admission meaningful.
I’d say there is. As Hamman argues, reality exists and gives itself, or reveals itself, to the senses and thence to the reason. There are things that are simply real. Start from there. Examine what you think is true as vigorously as you can, always knowing that your view is partial and that you definitely missed something (which means that the other person may know something too).
I’m wondering whether there is a way for us to examine what we think is true, not only from a personal and existential pov, but also as members of a community, whose lives are inseparably linked, whether we like it or not.
In Reformed Protestant thinking, the individual and community are two checks on each other. Calvinists praise the freedom of conscience but also call on the individual to compare his or her beliefs with the testimony of the community. No one, to my experience, has resolved that tension or said which should take priority, and I think that’s the point. I may be wrong, and by checking with the community I may discover this; but sometimes the community is wrong. So each can raise questions about the other but there’s no foolproof way to know which is right. It’s not the sort of dogmatic certainty we usually associate with “Calvinism!”
In your own experience, if you don’t mind sharing, did you ever discover that you’re wrong by checking with the community? If so, how?
When it comes to checking with the community, I am told there are over 100 live religions in the world today, which of these do you check with, and why?
Brad,
Speaking for myself, I think of religion as a worldview and a way of life that follows from it, and as such, atheism is also a religion. Christian and atheist communities are the ones I interact with almost on a daily basis, because they are the ones that I live and work in.
I’d say I try to take the community (i.e. my theological and philosophical traditions, opinions of peers and mentors, family etc.) into account before I commit myself firmly; it’s hard to back out of a position once one has let the concrete dry around one’s feet. I can think of some occasions where I rethought my own views due to information I was getting from others. For example, I’m currently rereading “Finding Our Father” by Diogenes Allen, who was one of my favorite professors in seminary. I took his “Philosophy of Love” class, and I would definitely say that over time I did change my understanding of love as a virtue as a result. I moved from something like Aristophanes in Plato’s “Symposium” or “The Missing Piece” to an understanding based more on a mutual respect for the particularity of the other, as he described.