Relation to the world· Philosophy of religion
Fideism
Axis: Faith and reason — How do faith and reason relate to each other: agreement, conflict, or indifference?
Faith eludes reason: God is encountered through the heart, through commitment or a leap, not through demonstration. Trying to prove faith misunderstands its nature, which begins where calculation ends.
Philosophers 3
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
The mainspring of the is a paradoxical : by ruining reason's claim to prove anything of God, Montaigne does not destroy faith but strips it of its false supports. A reason incapable of reaching the slightest certainty cannot ground religion, which can therefore hold only by grace and authority, not by demonstration. Far from setting faith and reason in a conflict, he separates them while ranking them, the very weakness of reason serving as an argument for believing submission.
Essays, II, 12, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"
Show inferred positions (2)
Wittgensteininferable
Religious belief is not a hypothesis rivalling science: believer and unbeliever are "on an entirely different plane". It is a picture that regulates a whole life, an unconditional commitment, not a conclusion drawn from proofs. Hence a position at once fideist (faith as commitment, not demonstration) and of separate domains (a plane other than the factual). "Wittgensteinian fideism" is, moreover, a label coined by his critics, not by him.
Lectures on Religious Belief (1938); Culture and Value
Rousseauinferable
The vicar's faith rests neither on the authority of the Church nor on a demonstration, but on inner feeling: it is the heart that attests to God where reason wavers. This religion of conscience, midway between fideism and a harmony of faith with natural reason, heralds the religious feeling of the Romantics and of .
Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar