Belief, Credence and Credit

It is fair to say that Western epistemologists have an unhealthy obsession with belief--'unhealthy' not because any obsession with belief is necessarily unhealthy, but because of a mischaracterization of the beliefs over which they obsess.

Prescribing cures for this obsession is hardly something to be handled in a blog post--even a post of unseemly, reader-repelling length (for examples of which, see below). But as the following post's demographic is already infinitesimally small, and the basic idea about how beliefs come to be mischaracterized is, in broad outline, a familiar story, here we go:

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Suppose one has a practice --say, a practice of assuring others. I say, for instance, "Oh don't worry--I assure you that is the best road", or "It can't be as terrible as all that" or "Don't worry so much--you'll do fine"...and so on. Now suppose we come, not merely to assure others, but to talk about the assurances we give. There would seem, at least grammatically, a new subject to discuss: we not only have a practice of assuring, but also 'assurances' and their various properties. The shift here, made in a hundred instances since the West took Plato and ran with him, is from VERB (and the adverbs that describe ways of assuring--e.g. 'poorly', 'quickly', etc.) to NOUN (and the adjectives which describe assurances--e.g. 'solid', 'credible', 'good', etc.). And having made the shift, I may now ask this previously un-tempting question: “I want to give good assurances: what makes an assurance a good one?”

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Note what has happened: the question is framed as a matter, not of assuring well, but of finding out ABOUT or ACCESSING assurances—specifically, whether they are good—and then, having FOUND a good assurance, giving it. The thought seems to be that “Giving a good assurance” insures I am “assuring well.” But note the detached language of ABOUT and FINDING, as if the world were strewn with assurances (some good, some bad) t0 be given or not given. Assuring well begins to appear as a form of DISCOVERY, not of SKILL. And we are now in a position to ask things like, “How can I be sure an assurance is a good one?” And in this way skepticism enters.

What has this to do with belief?

To show how this same story occurs with belief, it is important to get the original practice of believing correct. What sort of practice is it?

I am presently inclined to say this: that the original notion of ‘belief’ is not the name for an item in the world, but a mode of issuing assurances. “I believe…” is making an assurance, to others, or perhaps to oneself. Philosophers are right this far: that belief is a form of commitment. But what must be added (to avoid the disastrous verb-to-noun-ifying arc just sketched) is that belief’s original form is of a commitment to another person.

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You ask me: “Do you believe this rope will hold?” I hesitate. Why? Because my announcement that I do, in fact, believe the rope will hold is not merely an observation of some epistemic state I am in (“I report to you I have the belief ‘This rope will hold’); rather, I make a commitment to you; that rope’s holding is something of which I am willing to assure you, and therefore something upon which I am willing to risk my credibility (something I can hardly lose with objects!). I thereby lend credence—not merely to the idea that the rope will hold—but to you. I literally lend you credence—creed—belief; I issue it like credit, which I promise that you can spend. And when you tell me that you believe something—or even assert something in my presence—you are issuing credit to me, which I may in turn issue another…and so on, in the marvelous market of credit/credence which is the practice from which ‘beliefs’ spring.

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This is a large move to make in so small a space—but note at least three very fine consequences.

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(i) First, the entire, unfortunate, ‘Western’ arc we sketched with respect to assurances is short-circuited. The practice of believing is, at bottom, the practice of issuing credit, NOT the quest of a single subject knowing/getting things right. Beliefs arise in a credit economy—they are its currency. They first appear as nouns in the form of particular declarations of commitment which we make to other people. (This is why the present continuous ‘believing’ is rarely used—because to say “I believe” is to commit—and if we are still ‘believing’ we have not committed, and so have not placed our faith and credit so as to rest it upon some particular advisory/assurance. Similarly: we say, when pressed, “I promise” not “I am promising”—for if we are still promising, we have not yet issued a promise.)

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(ii) Second: if this is right, the very idea that all our beliefs are false is a very strange thought—on our picture, it is the worry that all assurances are vain. But how can this be, if we issue earnest assurances? Of course, we may issue assurances which turn out poorly; the rope, in some cases, may not hold. But the repair for this is not to enhance the credibility of a proposition, but to enhance our credibility with others. And this is not some epistemic circumstance beyond our control; it is something always and at every moment within our power to DO. We can always issue credit; we can always BE credible.

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Finally, and most importantly (iii) this permits a shift from treating of belief as a primarily epistemic, to a primarily ethical matter. The results of this are massive. A sample: (a) it means that wondering whether we can ever trust our beliefs is, at bottom, the question of whether we can trust each other, and whether we ourselves are trustworthy. The ontological question of whether there are any assurances is gone, replaced by the ethical challenge of whether we will assure others, and whether others will assure us (and perhaps, whether we will allow them to). (b) Crippling and unresolveable questions about our belief’s credibility give way to an active interest in enhancing our credibility, issued to others in the form of declarations of belief. The question of whether to give credence to our beliefs becomes the question of whether or not we will issue credit/credence to others, both in the form of accepting their commitments to us, and ensuring our credit is good when issuing creeds to them (“The rope will hold”, “It’s down the road on the right”, “Paris is in France”). (c) By ethicalizing the nature of believing in this way, we make the process of believing intrinsically intersubjective—not merely in a linguistic or collaborative sense, but in the sense that beliefs are issued/oriented to others. And this eliminates entirely a certain brand of skepticism which speaks of ‘my’ and ‘your’ beliefs, envisions beliefs which are ‘internal’ to me, and unaccessible to you, and imagines this to be a problem overcome by gathering MORE beliefs. But if the root use of ‘belief’ is as I have here supposed, the idea that we relate THROUGH belief is simply out of court. Rather, our epistemic relations are built upon the issuing of assurances to each other; our relation to ‘beliefs’ are rooted in our declared commitments to each other. And our concern for belief is, at the end of the day, a function of a form of interpersonal concern, deeper than the epistemic.

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This last point, were it to stand, would eliminate the concern that , without impregnable beliefs about why we should be concerned with our standing with each other, our ethical lives are ‘ungrounded’. For if this sketch of belief were in the ballpark, the very nature and origin of belief destroys this worry. Beliefs exist because we give credence to each other (as gifts exist because we give good things to others). In a world of credit, beliefs are our markers, a currency of interpersonal commitments. Thus to suppose one need believe something about the world in order to accept the original rootedness of interpersonal commitment has things backwards; one needs to make commitments to others in order to believe at all.

The Avoidance of Love

i. There are no lengths to which we may not go in order to avoid being revealed...especially to those we love and are loved by. –Stanley Cavell

ii. We hid because we were...naked...and ashamed -Genesis

iii. I’ll do anything for love...but I won’t do that -Meatloaf

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Love is said to be hard to find; but one wonders how many of those wishing to find love are willing to be found by it. At this moment millions plot their capture by love, and millions plot their escape from its clutches. Moreover, because these contrary impulses to find and to flee love appear as a fault line within single souls, this tragi-comedy is possible: the love-seeker and love-avoider can be one and the same person. With respect to love, then, we are each in danger of this double-mindedness—in danger of unwittingly living two lives; we may weave paeans to love in articulate thought’s open daylight, then retreat each evening to unravel the day's work by candlelight in some inner room, out of sight of all suitors. Yet this polarity is most often unknowingly practiced, so we do not recognize our existence as unravelers. We may in public profess fondness for love while conspiring against it in some deep and destructive privacy. We consciously identify with the quest for love, yet are reluctant to acknowledge that rogue element of our selves which relentlessly labors to avoid it. Left unchecked, this cross-purposed quest for love quickly degenerates to farce. Each day the sun rises. We cross ourselves and cast a net for love; the sun sets; we have caught nothing. And love escapes our nets each and every day precisely because of the holes we have torn in its bottom the previous night.

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Our dual reaction to love suggests that love has two aspects. And the sheer disparity in our reaction to these aspects suggests that, while there is something about love which is wonderful (the aspect which gets all the press, and to which we will give no more here) there is also something formidable, even fearsome about it. It is welcome—and also unwelcome. It is deeply attractive; but it is also, as Dante has it, a ‘lord of terrible aspect’. But what is so ‘terrible’ about love? This is not, of course, to be answered tritely—with some aphorism about how ‘love hurts’. For what we are interested in here is a fear, not of love going bad, but of a good love—not of some pseudo- or failed love, but of the genuine article. What is interesting is the fear of a healthy love, and the nature of this unhealthiest fear.

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i. Cavell’s analysis of love-avoidance has two components. The first involves noting that love has an imperative aspect. This is disguised by talk of love as something we have; but love involves a very special sort of possession. My love is ‘mine’, not in the sense of something I have; rather, the possessive is in place only to note that this love is demanding something uniquely from me. We can 'have' love, but only in the sense we have responsibilities. We ‘keep’ our love, but in the sense that we keep covenants. Love is owned in the sense that the officer owns his battlefield commission; it calls him out before he can call it his; it is ‘for him’, but only because he accepts it as what he is for; and for him to accept it as his cannot be done without deferring to its constitutive demand—without already honoring its authority. So while being loved involves elation, to accept it is to be subjected to an obligation. To decline or avoid a commission, and to avoid or decline to be loved, thus involves a rejection of some sort of call or claim upon us.

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So love demands something of us. But what does it demand? In his morally beautiful reading of King Lear, Cavell offers an account of the imperative of love. Love seeks to cherish you, respect you, do you honor; it seeks to give you recognition—to recognize you. This is what love would do for you. But love cannot do this for you without thereby asking something from you; this means that in order to be loved one must “Stand forth and be recognized!”—and this, Cavell argues, is a step which, to some degree, we are often unwilling to take. Love revels in you and seeks to do you honor; yet love’s recognition/honors are such that they must be bestowed face to face; and this means that to receive love’s recognition is to run the risk of being recognized. Love thus demands exposure (hence its association with light)—insists that the one to whom love is given “allow himself to be recognized, revealed to [the] other.” Love says, “Come forth and be loved!” Yet however much longing for love there may be, there remains a deep desire to avoid being forthcoming—a desire to avoid the ‘coming forth’. We wish for It, considered as gift or present without strings; but that we present ourselves is unconditional love's one condition. Love comes to us this dual imperative containing a promise of both honor and exile—honor in being paid that indescribable compliment of being recognized— exile from the cold, cool comfort of my own internality; love seeks to shine upon me, and so cheerfully annihilates that pleasant shade of inner anonymity to which I retreat and in which I feel secure.

This theme of exposure explains the selection of Lear. Cavell pursues this distinctly human art of avoiding this exile/exposure—the art of avoiding love— in his reading Lear because Lear is a play long noted for its obsession with vision, blindness, (recall the horrendous blinding of Gloucester) and deep concern with not being seen. In particular, Lear’s dominating motive, Cavell insists, is ‘to avoid being recognized”. Cordelia’s genuine love therefore threatens him in a way Regan and Gonheril’s false love does not—“puts a claim on him he cannot face”; thus threatened by the demands of real love, he proceeds to demean and threaten the one who really loves him. Refusing to recognize her love for fear he will be recognized, he even has recourse to madness, wherein he refuses to recognize himself. Other characters likewise exhibit a drive to ‘isolation and the avoidance of eyes,” under theat of ‘the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation.”

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ii. So love brings with it the threat of being, not merely looked at, but seen. But why is being seen such a threat? Why might one fear the recognition love demands?

Cavell’s answer is shame— which, as he notes, is "the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at; the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces”. Shame seeks, above all, not to be seen. “Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed but yourself.” Yet as just noted, to be presented with love, one must be present to receive it; to be fully loved one must be fully present—a frightening thought if we find our selves un-presentable! To be found by love is a fine thing, then: until one realizes that to be found by love is to be found out. To be seen seems benign: unless one fears being seen through—in which case the eyes of those who love you pose a direct threat. Shame in this way interprets an offer of love as a singularly intolerable intrusion—and intrusions are natural to avoid.

This avoidance is not merely reactive; a well-trained avoider/unraveler, it is pre-emptive, taking the form of avoiding not only the love of others, but an avoidance of loving others oneself. For to love another incites the dangers of reciprocation. By contrast, the refuser of love reserves the right to remain hidden. “A failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize you” and ‘recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him...”. This, Cavell argues, is why Lear first recognizes the now eye-less Gloucester: because he “can be recognized by him without being seen...”

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iii. So it is ‘the threat of self-revelation’ that is at the root of love-avoidance, and the notion of shame which drives the desire to avoid. There are, one presumes, as many shames as there are persons. But there also seems to be a common structure to the shame threatened by love--or rather, there seems to be a form of shame which is, as it were, instigated by love itself.

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This shame which is 'instigated' by love must be kept separate from other kinds of shame--kinds which vary in content, but are most manifest with those who are closest to us. The normal case seems to be this: an insecure beloved feels the lover knows too much. The lover’s demand, implicit in his love, is, necessarily, that he be a witness to our inadequacies; we are ashamed of these inadequacies. And this shame and awkward feeling, produced by the thought of having our embarrassments publicized, we then interpret as some inadequacy of the love or the lover in question. We thusly make the faults which love reveals into the fault the lover, or of the love itself. The irony is that it is constitutive of love, this ‘inadequacy’ we would avoid. Yet we madly try to wriggle clear of it, regardless. They love us. They have found us out! This makes us uncomfortable. Out with their eyes! Of course, we do not do as Cornwall did. But we do diminish the lover’s sight of us by increasing our distance. When they come walking, we absent ourselves mentally, emotionally—they cannot see what is not there! To love’s ‘Come forth’ we send forth to parley only some portion of ourselves, and hold the rest in reserve. And in parley we stand further away so as to diminish their vision of us, complain we feel distant, then look for love elsewhere--always elsewhere.

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But there is an odder explanation of love-avoidance—an explanation which involves that shame which seems prompted by love itself. At first, this motive of avoidance appears more innocent than the others but is not. For it arises in an arrogance far worse than mere insecurity.

It begins with the fact that love always appears as a sort of excess—as something we could not possibly merit—as something always arbitrary—something undeserved. So far, so good. Trouble begins, however, when this is attached in the wrong way to a strong sense of justice—the mad idea that we ought only get and/or accept what we deserve. The often-admirable sense that "I don't deserve this" is heightened in those with a good sense of accepting no more than one deserves.

Yet into the moment that love meets justice enters this disastrous thought: that one would be ashamed to accept a love for which one is not yet worthy. At first glance, this looks like a humility. But is it? For it is as though one were to say to oneself: “Ah. I do not now deserve the love on offer. Until I earn your love, I will not have it! This love you freely give me will not be mine until you MUST give it because it is OWED me.” In this way a fine concern for equity morphs into an emotional and ethical absurdity. A love which is owed? which might be earned? Here is no humility, but rather, a preposterous conceit. For it supposes that one could deserve love—might, instead of accepting it, earn it like a wage—could, by one’s sheer worthiness, be the cause of it—could extract it from others as a sort of tax, rightly and justly collected as a kind of tribute to our own outstandingness. I could (in a very different sense than the usual and more healthy one) MAKE love—or rather, make it MINE, not by accepting its one demand to show myself, but by demanding love show itself in encore to my own excellence. This awful notion of earning love seeks to turn the tables on love’s demandingness—supposes that love not only issues demands, but must respond to demands we might issue. It seeks to take from love its command ‘Come forth!’, and invert it, forcing love to show itself in honor of itself. It twists the basic rightness of love—its serendipity, unreasonable generosity, seemingly pointless abundance—into an issue of rights. "What RIGHT have I to your love?" the poet asks—knowing that, insofar as the love is real, the answer the lover gives is always a smiling "None—and yet I give it." Love has no interest in this economic equality of rights or calculations of worthiness. Love, rather, is an embarrassment of riches; but it is not humility to decline to accept love until one is seen as worthy of it, and so is no longer embarrassed; this is a special form of love-avoidance, masked as virtue, is inspired by the most deep-seated pride.

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Of course, we have been speaking in over-stark terms here—i.e. EITHER love OR love-avoidance; but at the end of the day, most are willing to compromise, not seeing that a love diluted is nothing less than a love denied. In this spirit of compromise—in this compromised spirit—we often avoid the absolute ‘Here I am!’ of love, settling for some safer, cheaper facsimile. Generally speaking, doing such deals looks smart. Sensible. Love is domesticated; its demands become housebroken; we become comfortable; safe. But the price for this mere contentment is hard to see, is invisible, and so is rarely faced. For as we pad about, having sanded smooth all of life and love’s threatening edges—as we, in an appalling composure, play down the sheer audacity of love’s intolerable demand—as we shuffle through an easy and inoffensive life warmed by wealth, chloroformed by comfort— a Cordelia stands strong, wide-armed, open-hearted--and stands...and stands... out in the cold with her love and its fearsome demands. Her arms are open for us, but remain empty, because we cut a deal, compromised—lost faith. And in this way Love seems to escape some of the truest lovers. The world’s Cordelias paradoxically fail to find love precisely because of the genuine-ness and concentrated nature of the love they offer. Their offer of a free, full love demands too much. By contrast, Goneril and Regan’s offer is rarely rejected. It is accepted by Lear precisely because “they are not offering true love”, and this offer of a tamer substitute is exactly what he wants...” Cordelia (“Love, and be silent!”) offers herself and her love, and, in doing so, demands more than Lear is ready to give. Cordelia—Love—thereby puts a claim upon us we often flinch from, and do not face. We are offered love, in all its terror of exposure, and we blink, scratch, look down at our shoes—a instant’s hesitation which produces an infinite, irreparable (though generally unseen) harm. We might say that those who ask where love is might better ask, 'when'—the love they seek is forever lost in these instants of heart-hesitation—in these instants of losing heart.

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Perhaps we are not this love-avoider (surely not!); but at least we know them. Here is the woman who flees love’s possibility for a sensible merger—who hides from love in marriage—who exchanges the wild exhilaration of being called out by love in favor of life with a nice man who calls each day before dinner. And here is the man who, despite all his swagger, spends his time adventuring, but who balks at the Great Adventure and its terrible potential for that most powerful shame, generated only by the gaze of a loving woman who recognizes him--the prospect of which leaves him nauseous with a dread whose intensity hails of gunfire and grisly death cannot equal.

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At times in the face of avoidance the lover persists. In such cases, things tend to end badly, as the avoider counters by persisting in his avoidance. Granted, adamant avoidance often goes no further than that bitter undercurrent—that inexplicable simmering resentment—a petty aggression for all persons who love, or have loved, and so KNOW us. We are exposed to them, and seem to bear them a special, if minor and manage-able malice—are relieved in their absence—wish them gone as petty criminals wish the absence of cameras. Other reactions are more extreme. Avoidance is expressed as aggression. The presence of love brings the terror of exposure. The terror of exposure then leads to more provincial terrors. The more the lover persists in loving, the more the love-avoider resents him—digs in against him as though against an attacker (“Do thy worst, blind cupid; I’ll not love...!”) I avoid. I reject. Yet the lover keeps offering love! The bastard! The persistent lover keeps reminding me of my unworthiness, aggravating my fear of shame. And he insists. And in his insistent love is love's imperative. How I hate him! An inarticulate anger is then aimed at the source of this threat of exposure—and so often at the very persons by whom we are most loved.

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This analysis of love-avoidance would seem to give us a window into the unbearableness of Christ. “Christ was killed by us,” muses Cavell, “because his news was unendurable.” And what was the ‘undendurable-ness’ of His news, if not His talk of a Love infinite, unconditional, inescapable? And to the love-avoider, keeper of secrets, hider of failures, what is this announcement, if not the unending prospect of an infinite, unconditional, and inescapable shame?

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Yet, every now and then, love is not avoided, but accepted. The madness of hiding oneself—perhaps even the competing terror of passing through life anonymously—as one whom no one knows—may break the spell. And, though there is something embarrassing about love, embarrassment may be prevented from turning to shame by being laughed at—or, perhaps, laughed out. We spoke of love-making earlier: when all is well, this too strikes lovers as a wild kind of excess, which, when both have given themselves over to it/each other, often ends in laughter of the highest and healthiest kind—of two persons who, somehow levitated by the exultation of the other in them, suddenly find they can afford to take themselves lightly (something the person who hides in his shame never does—shame is too heavy for that). And this is wonderful—this sense of lightness of self afforded by love, wherein our brooding self-concern is simply laughed away, as though, in the light of love, this self-concern itself becomes embarrassing. At such moments, the madness of love-avoidance itself becomes something about which we are embarrassed. It is, as Cavell has it, as though "shame becomes ashamed of itself"—and stops.