Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals by Paul Katsafanas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9780192867674.

See what a mighty prince the devil is, how he has the world in his hands and can throw everything into confusion, when he can so quickly catch so many thousands of peasants, deceive them, blind them, harden them and throw them into revolt, and do with them whatever his raging fury undertakes. (Luther, 1970:123). It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which is pitiable enough, considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, without exception… it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free and should wish to be so… (Robinson, 1906:94). And so, they revolted. Their rebellion (1524–1525) would ultimately prove unsuccessful. But before it failed, it caused great consternation to the priest and theologian, Martin Luther. Luther was himself a noteworthy rebel, excommunicated by the Pope and condemned as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor only a few years prior, and his example had seemingly played a role in inspiring the peasants. But revolution, justified or not, is a dangerous thing. And Luther sought to distance himself from the disaffected Swabians. He started in a relatively measured fashion, criticizing the peasants' tactics, while expressing sympathy with many of their goals.1 Still, the rebellion grew. Soon there were significant episodes of violence. Luther's stance against the peasants hardened. He mocked their beliefs in equality and common property as lacking biblical warrant. And, invoking the end of peace, he foreclosed the possibility of any rapprochement between the nobility and peasant rebels: “a rebel is not worth rational arguments, for he does not accept them…” (Luther, 1974:91). This being the case, the nobility must kill the rebels: “It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.” (Luther, 1970:122). The peasants, in Luther's view, had become fanatics: extremists, operating with excessive enthusiasm – perhaps even under malign inspiration – “I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants.”(Luther, 1970:123) As fanatics, they were both lethally dangerous and beyond reason or mercy: “It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace.”(Luther, 1970:124). Fanaticism is one of the many very interesting phenomena under examination in Paul Katsafanas' fascinating new book Philosophy of Devotion. Like Luther (whose account of fanaticism is one of several theoretical touchstones in this rich book) Katsafanas views fanaticism as something to be feared and avoided; as something, moreover, that resides beyond the reach of rational disputation. It is a phenomenon of special concern to Katsafanas because he wants to understand the human relationship to sacred value, and to at least partially vindicate our propensity to devote ourselves to sacred value/s. But devotion to sacred value lies at the heart of many apparent cases of fanaticism. So, what is the nature of the relationship between sacred value and fanaticism? Where is it advantageous to hold sacred values, and where does it become harmful, even pathological? Katsafanas uses the term “sacred value” to denote commitments to values, goals, and relationships that become sacralized for individual human beings through attitudes of devotion. Sacred values are agent-relative: what is revered as sacred by a particular agent will depend on their individual perspectives, beliefs, experiences, and preferences. Many people sacralize their commitments to specific intimates and kin, to religious figures, and to political ideals like equality and freedom. But human beings, ever catholic in their tastes, will also sometimes hold devotional attitudes to dogs, train timetables, Ryan Gosling, and racist ideologies. Katsafanas contrasts sacred values with “ordinary values.” Ordinary values do not inspire devotion. They are the sorts of values that can be conceded, contested, outweighed, and abandoned. In disputes involving ordinary values, we will weigh reasons for and against actions that realize or compromise these values. Sacred values, by contrast, are those that we regard as (1) inviolable, (2) incontestable, and (3) dialectically invulnerable. Inviolability means that if I regard “social equality” as a sacred value, then it is prohibited to sacrifice it in pursuance of an ordinary value – a value that I don't hold as sacred – like economic expediency. Incontestability means that it is prohibited to even contemplate trade-offs between sacred and ordinary value. Reserving tax-free status for feudal lords might be nice for my treasure stash if I'm a lord, but if I hold equality as sacred, it's prohibited to even entertain pursuing such a policy on prudential grounds, given equality's incontestable claim.2 Finally, sacred values are dialectically invulnerable, by which Katsafanas means that although we can engage in justificatory reflection about them – “equality is good for us, because…” – in doing so, our ultimate commitment to the value is such that no matter the results of justificatory reflection our commitment will not waver. There is no dialectical move, claim, argument, thought experiment, process of reasoning, etc., whose effects will displace the sacred value as sacred for us. A carefully crafted skeptical scenario, no matter how compelling, will not extirpate my belief in the sacred value of equality.3 Thus, when we adopt sacred values, we adopt strict impositions on certain sorts of action and thought. Where conflicts with ordinary values arise, we will not act to violate sacred values, we will not even consider doing so, we will not even weigh reasons to do so! But Katsafanas acknowledges that blocking the ordinary effects of rational deliberation and refusing rational comparison sounds very much like paradigmatically irrational behavior. This is a serious worry – if he is right that human beings have a marked propensity to this sort of valuing activity, then isn't this a species-level blow to our claim to rationality? In response, Katsafanas sets out to soften the blow: to defend the claim that it can nonetheless be rational to hold sacred values, and to argue that it is generally good for creatures like us that we have a propensity to do so. Before explaining his response, I want to note a worry about equivocation that isn't adequately addressed in the book. When Katsafanas responds to concerns about the “irrationality” of foreswearing reasoned comparisons, he does so by pointing out that, for example, “prohibiting certain comparisons enables valuable forms of relationships that would otherwise be impossible or inaccessible” (63). Thus, he tenders that it can be “rational” to prohibit reasoned comparisons, where doing so enriches our relational lives. This may well be true. But note the punning on irrational. It may be in the agent's interests to adopt habits of thought that support their relationships – doing so could be practically rational – but the initial concern about the irrationality of prohibiting comparisons is that you thereby come to lack justification for your beliefs. It is an epistemic worry about lacking evidence for one's belief in the value of the object. Katsafanas' meliorative response supplies practical reasons for belief: he argues that believing will often serve the agent's well-being interests. But it does not serve to resolve the epistemic worry. The believer in sacred value operates on the same sort of rational justification as that afforded by Pascal's wager – Pascal gives us practical reasons to believe in God, not evidence for his existence. Katsafanas' response, trading as it does on an equivocation about rationality, is mismatched to the initial epistemic charge. But let's move to the case for the practical rationality of elevating at least some commitments in one's life to the privileged status of sacred value. Katsafanas motivates the claim that sacred value can help to protect our enjoyment of meaningful lives by reference to Bernard Williams' famous ‘one thought too many’ case. My beloved partner might justifiably complain if, when I come upon them and a stranger drowning in Williams' dangerously appointed backyard pond, I pause to wonder as to which person morality requires me to save. Holding some values, like one's loving commitment to one's partner, as a core or sacred value, as more profound than ordinary values, including moral norms, might plausibly be required to enjoy a meaningful life. The pond thought-experiment is intended to show that it is good (and good in a distinctive and important way) for us to hold sacred values in at least some cases. But we are quirky fellows, and human beings often sacralize objects that others scarce see the significance in. Our intuitions about the desirability of sacred values might waver if the agent at the treacherous pond opts to save a beloved register of train timetables rather than a drowning stranger. We might doubt both the meaningfulness and morality of a life where train timetables take such priority. It's plausible to think, then, that opting to prioritize a sacralized object redounds to the end of a meaningful life only in a limited range of cases, and that whether it does or not will depend, at least in part, on the specific content of the agent's sacred values. Consolation (at least at this point in the book's dialectic) is thus in limited supply: the human propensity to engage in sacred valuation may often – even standardly – manifest as a propensity to the valuation of things that shouldn't matter that much. And it may yet prove a tendency more likely to undermine, rather than bolster, the pursuit of meaning in our lives. But Katsafanas offers a further, very interesting, argument for the practical rationality of sacred value. It's an argument that looks to the formal features of sacred values, and that motivates the thought that having values with these formal features protects against a species of nihilism: namely, “normative dissipation”. This species of nihilism might appear a little idiosyncratic to those familiar with nihilism as the view that there are no moral facts, and that nothing, therefore, is morally good or morally bad. Normative dissipation doesn't necessarily entail the belief that there are no moral facts. Rather, it is a skeptical predicament that can emerge when an agent is confronted by two or more values that make competing claims, and where nothing about either value suggests a justifiable means of establishing priority among them. When, for example, an agent confronting a sizzling steak feels conflicted between a moral commitment to animal welfare and the value of aesthetic appreciation, she might try to weigh the aesthetic value of eating the steak against the moral value of abstaining – but at some point, she will realize that she does not have a means of justifying this practice of normatively weighting the two values against each other! Why ascribe greater weight to one over the other? In the face of competition, and troubled by a lack of justification, her convictions start to falter. She loses confidence in her ability to navigate conflicts of value. Eventually, normative dissipation takes hold, and our hero's purchase on a life in which she may operate according to norms, including moral norms, is lost. Human beings can't be sure that any value is better than any other where they lack confidence in their ability to satisfactorily compare them; and it is in such contexts that sacred values can forestall nihilism. Sacred values are, by definition, not the sorts of things to be weighed against competing considerations of value. They are thus impervious to normative weighting skepticism. Now it might sound an odd, not-entirely-satisfying cure for skepticism, to simply hold some beliefs about value with such bloody-minded intensity that they cannot be displaced. But perhaps it is the best we can hope for given the otherwise totalizing threat of normative dissipation. Of course, it's also worth noting that the fix is only partial: questions of value that don't implicate or aren't relevant to the content of an agent's particular set of sacred values will still be vulnerable to normative weighting skepticism. That I am devoted to dogs and Bauhaus aesthetics won't help me as I face normative dissipation in the moral domain. It's also interesting to observe that once we start explicitly celebrating sacred values as a means to ward off skepticism, more skeptical trouble beckons. To say to someone: “isn't it great that you hold the value of equality sacred, and that Jerome holds his commitment to his husband sacred, otherwise you'd both be plunged into normative dissipation!”, arguably calls into question the justification for revering these values. The agent devoted to equality believes that equality is sacred because it is equality, not because holding some value – whatever it may be – as sacred will help to preserve them against skeptical threats. Celebrating the general function of sacred valuation as an anti-skeptical device may prove self-frustrating insofar as it promotes a skeptical attitude to the inherent value of the particular sacred values that agents in fact hold. Katsafanas is cautious and never bullish in his defense of the putative rationality of holding sacred value, but even so, some readers may find themselves more pessimistic than he seems to be about the practical advantages that the propensity to sacred valuing affords. Now, let's return to the marauding peasants – fanatics, as Luther would have it – defined by epistemic faults that sound a lot like the features Katsafanas ascribes to the activity of sacred valuation: theirs is an allegedly inflexible commitment to their ideals, one that trumps ordinary values (including some dictates of prudence) and is immune to rational disputation. Are sacred valuers simply fanatics? Katsafanas says “no” – but he thinks those who conceive fanaticism in purely epistemic terms might have to say “yes.” On Katsafanas' account, the fanatic holds sacred values, but she also has additional psychosocial features that help to determine her as fanatical with respect to these values. Drawing on work in the psychology of extremism, Katsafanas describes the fanatic as someone insecure about their identity. She is someone who feels that she must revere some specific value/s as sacred in order to be the person that she is. She also views the sacred value/s that she takes to be core to her maintenance of self-hood as dependent on widespread social acceptance for survival as that sort of value. And she identifies with a group defined by a shared commitment to the value. Fanatics are thus insecure and fragile people who identify with a group defined by sacralized value/s, in social circumstances that seem (at least to them) to threaten those values. Groups can radicalize people, turning them into fanatics. Katsafanas devotes a chapter to exploring how movements like ISIS work to induce the constellation of beliefs and states in individuals that comprise fanaticism. It's an interesting and highly engaging treatment. But I found myself thinking in response that, whether or not there is a group actively looking to recruit a person, or indeed, whether or not one antecedently has a particular psychological pathology (like a fragile sense of identity), simply having certain values can have significant bearing on the likelihood of one's becoming a fanatic. For example, if a contemporary Londoner were to go all in on a particular value – say, “white supremacy” – and deem it immune to rational disputation, then that might well have the side-effect of making them socially and, ultimately (given the importance of social acceptance for psychological well-being), psychologically, vulnerable in relevant ways for Katsafanas' account of fanaticism. Whether the content of an agent's sacred values will place them in this hazardous zone will depend on social context – you are more liable to find yourself lonely and persecuted if you espouse social equality in a feudal community than in a modern liberal democracy. Think of the Swabian peasants, utterly sympathetic to modern sensibilities, paradigmatic “fanatics” in the context of their time. This then suggests something a bit disturbing, namely, that committing to sacred value always carries with it some risk of fanaticism, and that it is a matter of significant psycho-social luck as to whether that risk eventuates or not. The sacred valuer has a profound commitment that is insulated from the effects of critical reflection, and they are committed to maintaining this insulation. If social factors beyond their control conspire against them, and the things to which they are devoted become stigmatized or taboo, merely holding a given sacred value will make them liable to become a fanatic (and to attract the social opprobrium that this status standardly enjoys).4 Katsafanas devotes the final substantive chapter of the book to thinking about habits of thought and attitudes that we can cultivate in ourselves in order to maintain a healthy, non-fanatical relationship to sacred value. He argues that we should seek to maintain a certain sort of openness and flexibility in our devotional attitudes. We can, for example, sit in contentment with the fact that our values are not the sorts of things we are able to fully justify – Katsafanas terms this stance “affirmation.” Or, we can acknowledge the clear limitations to our ability to justify our devotion and seek to “deepen” our appreciation of our sacred values, treating them as aspirational ideals that we don't fully know, but can work towards. Both stances, affirmation and deepening, make space for contingency and epistemic humility, at least in principle, while allowing the practitioner to maintain their sacralized commitments. They represent narrow but navigable paths between the “barrenness of normative dissipation and the horrors of fanaticism” (221). We may be the sorts of creatures that tend to adopt sacred values, but should we be satisfied with our status as such? Are they ultimately worth it, these commitments that entail serious epistemic and social vulnerabilities, and that only afford a partial (at best) respite from normative dissipation? In describing human devotional activity and cataloguing a set of phenomena that are both fascinating and under-theorized in secular moral philosophy, Katsafanas prompts many critical existential questions of value. Now, it is for us to work to answer them. As Luther reminds us: “If anyone think this too hard, let him remember…that the destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.” (Luther, 1970:126).