Trust: Who or What Might Support Us?

Introduction

1 Introduction I began writing this book when Professor Robert Crease, chairman of NYU’s Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook, sent me an invitation to give a series of lectures on trust as part of a Templeton grant for research and discussion on The Relevance of Trust from the Perspective of the Relations between Religion and the Sciences. On March 16, 2009, the first lecture was delivered and discussed with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues. Five other lectures and discussions followed in March and April of that year. However, the completion of this book had to be postponed until the summer of 2010, while reviewing and additional editing took about a year. To contextualize the questions that are emphasized in this book, I sketch here briefly, while using words of my introductory lecture, how I understood the task that was implied in the grant and the situation in which I tried to do my part in its execution. Several elements of the proposed topic deserve emphasis and preliminary observation before we can concentrate on a direct answer to the questions implied in it. We cannot begin an examination of the triangle religion-science-trust, for example, unless we rely on an already available, albeit naïve and possibly deficient, acquaintance with 2 Introduction the meaning and functioning of several phenomena evoked by the word trust and some of its cognates. The fact that we come together “in the name of trust” shows that each of us has such an acquaintance. That all of us share exactly the same understanding of “trust” or “distrust ,” however, is not certain, but it is safe to state that our meeting by itself testifies to a common interest that seems to be indicated directly or indirectly by those words. A second feature of our encounter is the assumption that we, as professionals of various academic disciplines, are together sufficiently competent to conduct a scholarly discussion about the meaning and the relevance of trust from a perspective that does not only include those disciplines but also religion. Since all scholarly knowledge emerges from prescholarly acquaintance with important phenomena that we, as human beings, have experienced before we ascended to the level of science or philosophy and still experience outside the domain of our strictly professional activities, we must pay attention to the relations between our naïve acquaintance with trust and our scholarly-conducted investigations of it. This observation is particularly urgent when an examination concerns a phenomenon that cannot entirely be studied from the outside , because the examiners themselves are constantly involved in its practice. In the present case this means that we are engaged in trusting one another as contributors to a conversation, while at the same time wanting to be involved in a rigorous investigation about trust, without, if possible, allowing private biases to prevail over a truthful approach. As far as my own competence—and, I fear, some biases—are concerned , my contribution will not only be philosophical rather than scientific, but even more limited than the predicate “philosophical” might suggest. Indeed, I am at home in a philosophical tradition that British philosophers began to call “continental” when they said farewell to their longstanding veneration of Hegel and other luminaries of the European continent, in order to unite in a trend they proudly baptized “analytic philosophy” (as if Hegel were too hasty in forging syntheses or too lazy in making distinctions). The fact that someone Introduction 3 who has enjoyed working in both Hegelian and post-Husserlian phenomenology was asked to write this book has given me the courage to interpret Templeton’s formulation of the task in a generous sense, which includes philosophy among the epistemic and meta-scientific approaches to the sciences and religion. objective and literature The philosophical literature on trust is not huge, if one sticks to a narrow meaning of the word trust. Sociology and psychology have been more productive. But related subjects, such as hope, faith, expectation , confidence, fidelity, and promise have been regularly studied from Parmenides onward, down to our own time. And yet, it is not easy to assemble and integrate the available thoughts and suggestions into a not only analytic but also synthetic treatise. The existing literature in the social sciences, offers a host of interesting analyses, which offer a philosopher much food for thought. This book has profited from that literature...