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William A.  Christian, Sr.

           William A. Christian, Sr. was born in Mobile, Alabama on November 1, 1905.  He was educated at Davidson College in North Carolina (A.B. 1927) and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (BD, 1930).  He then did graduate work at the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Chicago before earning a Ph.D. at Yale in 1942.  He married Rena Grubb, and they had three children.  Christian taught at Smith College in Massachusetts (1937-1951), and at Yale University in Connecticut from 1951 until his retirement in 1974, where he was John A. Hoober Professor of Religious Studies.  His wife died in 1985 (after 52 years of marriage), and he died in Hamden, Connecticut on Saturday, August 9, 1997.^[

           William A. Christian Sr.’s work in philosophy (particularly philosophy of religions) was simultaneously wide-ranging,  conceptually demanding, and open to disciplined and sometimes surprising developments.  The goal here is to survey his four books, with only periodic allusions to his published essays (listed in the concluding bibliography).  This will not yield anything close to a complete interpretation of his work, much less his life.  But it may help understand the breadth and depth of his work in and on philosophy.  This is an “interpretation”.  It is neither defense nor an attack, although it proposes one way to understand developments in his thinking.

                 Christian wrote early articles on philosophy and religion.  But his first book was An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics.  This book focuses on Whitehead’s later writings, particularly Process and Reality.  Christian does so against the background of Whitehead’s comparison of his metaphysics (“speculative philosophy”) to the flight of an airplane.  It takes off from the ground of experience (using “pre-systematic language”) into the air of speculative abstractions (using “systematic language”), returning to earth using (including modifying as needed) these abstractions to interpret experience (using “post-systematic language”)(IWM, pp. 3,  284).^[  This essay will propose that this unfinished movement from the concrete to the abstract and forward to the concrete characterizes all of Christian’s writings.  There are limits to the metaphor -- Whitehead used it before the modern bombers of World War II as well as modern travel to Air B&Bs.  But it sheds light on Christian’s work -- as well as some ways to carry forward or dissent from that work .

Christian notes that Whitehead’s speculative questions (in systematic language of a plane in flight) are analogous to those asked by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza -- while also recognizing that questions like those asked by Kant, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein will also go on being asked.   How did Christian become interested in. this enterprise?  Beginning on his own ground, Christian says he began to study Whitehead because his writings “seemed to promise new answers to theological questions” -- particularly proposals calling for “a new systematic [sic] interpretation of how God transcends the world”.   IWM is neither a summary nor a commentary.  It is a flight into the airs of “an interpretation”.  Christian came to think (here the plane takes to flight) that God’s transcendence of the world in Whitehead could not be interpreted without taking account of God’s immanence in that world.  Perhaps even more crucially, God’s immanence and transcendence could not be interpreted without unpacking how actual finite individuals transcend while existing immanently in each other -- as well as how non-actual “pure potentials” transcend such actual entities while also being immanent to them.  Thus, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics has three parts covering the conceptually intricate mutual relations (transcendence and immanence) within and between actual entities, eternal objects and God.

Christian’s three other books will use Whitehead explicitly in unsystematic (whether pre- or post-systematic) rather than systematic ways.   But Christian continued to teach a seminar on Whitehead until his retirement (along with seminars in religion and morality as well as critical philosophy of religion).  This, along with some of his articles, suggest that Whitehead’s metaphysics continued to be important for his later writings in ways that merit exploration beyond this survey.   But two issues are particularly important for these later writings.

First, in the conclusion to An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Christian points out that “I have not argued that Whitehead’s system is true or that it is untrue” -- although “the question of truth” is “both a fair and important question, though not a simple one”.  Suppose, he says, we grant that “the system” (the plane in flight) is “logical and coherent” -- questions of internal coherence are the focus of IWM.  We still must show it is “adequate to the facts” and “applicable”. That is, we must relate “the system” to its pre-systematic origins and post systematic application (IWM, pp. 412-413; cp. 168-172).  The airplane must work on the ground as well as in the air -- and be prepared to change on landing.  There is plenty of work for readers to do as and after they read this book.  But, as we will see, this concern with truth-conditions on the ground and in the air, landing for renewed life and thought, endures and expands in Christian’s other works.

Second, what about an issue at the margins of Christian’s first book: “religion”?  While noting that Whitehead’s view of God and the world is stated less fully than his view of the world of actual entities and eternal objects, Christian unpacks the way Whitehead’s God is an actual entity immanent in other actual entities.  But God also transcends other actual entities in that God’s envisagement of what is possible is (unlike, inter alia, ours) “nontemporal and thus primordial”. This leads to Whitehead’s revisions of traditional theology.  But Christian denies that Whitehead was what modern interpreters sometimes call a “panentheist” (e.g., that God and all the world are “in” each other in roughly the same way) -- and he shows overlaps as well as differences between Whitehead and traditional theology of God’s attributes.  Whitehead certainly knew and wrote about the diversity of religions in his time.  But he did so from within this revised theism -- to which IWM gives the detailed (and critical) attention it deserves.  But is there a way to give these diverse “religions” their own different (and sometimes alien or opposed) voices?

As noted above, at the same time as Christian was writing on Whitehead and God, he was also writing articles on the varieties of religions (not only theisms) as well as the variety of ways philosophy might study such religions.  These essays bore their next fruit in Meaning and Truth in Religion .  Here Christian argues that philosophy’s contribution to “freedom of discourse and freedom of belief” is to study “the structure of religious inquiry and discourse” (MTR, p. 1.  Such “religious discourse” (the airplane in the air) is embedded in  “religious inquiry” (the ground whence the airplane rises and temporarily lands) -- and leads him in new directions when it lands on the ground.

Christian therefore surveys various theories of religious inquiry, from those defining “religion” as whatever we take to enable us to hold our duties as divine commands (Kant), or whatever gives us the feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher), or whatever is fascinating and awe-inspiring mystery (Otto), or whatever is of ultimate concern (Tiliich).  Christian sorts out the burdens and benefits of these theories. He also develops his own theory. That is, religious inquiry arises out of a “religious interest” in “that which is most important”.  Such religious interests arise out of a “supposition” that something or other is “most important” (or most holy, or most something-or-other) and an “open commitment” into inquiring into what it is that is “most important”.^[3]  These interests and commitments might yield “a basic religious proposal” --“an epitomization of the truth-claim made by the doctrinal scheme as a whole” (MTR, p. 109).   For example, “Nirvana is most important” or “God is most important” are two of many (as we will see) candidates for such (partly opposed) truth-claims.

It is important that Christian insists that “the theory of meaning in religion I am proposing [and will be sketched in the next paragraphs] does not depend on this theory of religion [above]” -- although, he seems to suggest, it is illuminated by some such theory (perhaps, Kant or Schleiermacher or Otto, or his own, some other).  In any case, religions are, inter alia, inquiries.  Christian reported to students that his view of religious inquiry was heavily influenced by John Dewey’s Logic. The Theory of Inquiry -- but without identifying the logic of inquiry with the logic of discourse (which some, although not Christian, argued Dewey had done).  Christian sometimes complained that his readers were more interested in his theory of religious inquiry (the ground where the plane takes off and lands) than in his own central interests in the logic of religious discourse (the air where the plane flies).  This mistake is understandable: “religious inquiry” (the airplane on the ground) is a more concrete topic than ”religious discourse” (the airplane in the air).  But, to understand Christian, it is important to learn to move the plane from the ground of various theories of “religious inquiry” into the airs of “religious discourse”.  How so?

Christian first stipulates a view of the conditions of making truth-claims in much religious discourse -- and then goes on to giving many concrete examples of diverse “basic proposals”.  That is, building on the truth conditions mentioned at the end of his book in Whitehead, Christian stipulates four conditions “in which we might properly take some proposal as a candidate for being true”: the proposal is capable of self-consistent formulation, permits a self-consistent alternative so as to be liable to significant disagreement, permits a reference to its logical subject, and permits support for the assignment of its predicate to its subject.  Thus, four different types of arguments may be proposed or occur for any single basic religious proposal.

Concrete examples of such proposals are diverse and conflicting.  Harvesting data from phenomenologies of religions, Christian then considers arguments over nine distinct logical subjects^[4] along with five possible ways of referring to such logical subjects.^[5] There are also different sorts of arguments over the predicates for these logical subjects.^[6]  This careful attention to religious inquiries leading to diverse and competing logical subjects and predicates, explicated and supported in diverse ways, is surely one reason Meaning and Truth in Religion (1964) was reprinted in 1967 and 1977.  There have been and are diverse and conflicting “religions,” with perhaps more to come.

When MTR lands on the ground, it raises two main issues for Christian’s subsequent books.  First, Christian’s view of “religious discourse” is highly attuned to the differences and conflicts between “basic religious proposals”.  But his view of “religious inquiry” (focused on religious interests, suppositions, and open commitments) pays less attention to how such religious inquiries might differ and even conflict in different religious communities (e.g., Jewish and Buddhist, Christian and Muslim, etc) than how at least individuals and perhaps whole communities may engage in religious inquiry.^[7]  This suggests that such inquiries need to be related to the religious inquiries of particular religious communities (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and many others) if we wish to understand and/or practice the full breadth and depth of religious inquiries.  Second, religions which make truth-claims (not all may do so) make a variety of sorts of such claims, not simply one sort of truth-claim (“basic religious proposals”).  What about the many other features of religious discourse?  What about not simply beliefs but teachings about how to live with friends and enemies and strangers, and how to pray or mediate, alone and together?  Christian’s next two books address such questions, even while building on his earlier two books.

Thus, Christian’s next book addresses these two issues by highlighting the way religious communities dialogue about their disagreements over multiple sorts of doctrines.  Oppositions of Religious Doctrines. A Study of the Logic of Dialogue among Religions is an exercise in what Christian now calls “critical philosophy of religion” -- “in something like Kant’s sense of ‘critical’ ”.  This is an enterprise that builds on a philosophical tradition from Spinoza through Kant, but with the increased attention to religious diversity in the traditions of Rudolf Otto, Ninian Smart, and Joseph Bochenski.  Here Christian moves from the inquiry into and logic of basic religious proposals (Meaning and Truth in Religion) to dialogue over oppositions between a range of doctrines (beside but including basic proposals, or what he will now call “basic religious valuations”) that constitute a range of religious doctrines.

As Meaning and Truth in Religion developed a view of “religious inquiry” as a context for (a ground for the airplane) studying “religious discourse,” Oppiositions of Religious Doctrines first develops “a model situation” for dialogue in which convinced, knowledgeable, and charitable adherents of different religions are willing to propose their diverse doctrines for acceptance and give reasons for them.   Christian recognizes that oppositions of religious doctrines have “a secondary place in religious discourse” -- and the activity of dialogues are not a central activity of most religious (or any) communities.  But such dialogues can and do occur, and they provide one “on the ground” context for articulating and discussing doctrines.  

His concrete example of such a dialogue is between a series of Buddhist and Jewish doctrines of different sorts (beliefs, action-recommendations, and valuations) which loosely “hang together” in complex ways, proposing different patterns of life.  For example, he compares opposed proposals of belief such as “The Dharma is the path to the attainment of Nirvana” and “The Torah teaches us to respond rightly to God”.  Such belief-proposals in turn involve different action-guides such as “Direct life as a whole to Nirvana” and “Direct life as a whole to God”.  These beliefs and action-guides in turn involve different “basic religious valuations” such as “Nirvana is the supreme goal of life” and “Adherence to God is the supreme goal of life.”  Robust dialogues must consider such multiple oppositions between religious doctrines, one by one and together.

Beside such oppositions between beliefs and action-guides and valuations,   Christian also investigates prima facie oppositions which turn out not to be oppositions (faux disagreements, we might say) -- and insists that “[t]here is no general reason why some doctrine of one religion must always have a corresponding opposite among doctrines of some other religion”.   There may be some incommensurables among the doctrines of different religious communities.

Again, as in his books on Whitehead as well as meaning and truth in religion, Christian does not aim to settle which (if any) of these beliefs, action-guides, and valuations are actually or authentically Buddhist or Jewish: that is the business of Buddhists or Jews to determine.  The doctrines he discusses are simply prima facie doctrines. Neither does he aim to explicitly relate these prima facie Jewish and Buddhist doctrines to the more general conditions of truth mentioned at the end of his book on Whitehead and further developed in Meaning and Truth in Religion -- although studying further the more exact relationship between Oppositions of Religious Doctrines and his previous two books would be worthwhile. Instead, a final chapter moves from the thin air of the logic of oppositions in a dialogue to an ethics of dialogue -- although, more accurately, a logic of the ethics of dialogue.  For example, seeking oppositions of such diverse religious doctrines, Christian proposes, can be more helpful than simply seeking agreements (e.g., “All religions say the same thing”) or being satisfied with mere incommensurable differences (e.g., “Religions are simply different, with no significant common ground”).  Further, in the face if such oppositions, Christian insists that we do not have to agree with each other to respect each other. This may be argued comprehensively on the basis of something like Kant’s duty to respect persons (along with “a conviction that the truth is open to all”) -- and/or on grounds more specific to particular religious traditions like Buddhism or Judaism.  

But (landing again on the ground) what then is the relationship between comprehensive accounts of things (as in Whitehead’s metaphysics, or Kant’s ethics, or the conviction that truth is open to all) (An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics), meaning and truth in particularly religious inquiry and discourse (Meaning and Truth in Religion), and oppositions between such religious ways of living and thinking more comprehensively (Oppositions of Religious Doctrines)?  Doctrines of Religious Communities. A Philosophical Study tackles these issues by taking as its runway not primarily religious inquiry or interreligious dialogue but the diverse teaching activities of select religious communities.  How do particular religious communities determine their doctrines -- their beliefs, action-guides, and valuations?  Formulated in a way that adherents to as well as students of a particular religion might put it, how do these particular ways of living address the question “Is S [some sentence, whether a belief, action-guide, or valuation] a doctrine of R [some particular religion]?”.

From this context Christian notices that many religious communities not only have primary doctrines (beliefs, action-guides, and valuations in Oppositions of Religious Doctrines) but they also have doctrines about those doctrines (governing doctrines, or “secondary doctrines” about those “primary doctrines”).  Here Christian’s airplane ascends to new heights -- including but beyond the issues raised by religious inquiry (Meaning and Truth in Religion) and inter-religious dialogue (Oppositions of Religious Doctrines).  These are doctrines which govern a community’s “authentic” doctrines, including doctrines (if any) articulated about what Christian will call “alien” claims.   The adjectives “authentic” and “alien” are peculiar to Christian.  They aim (we will see) to shed light on different and sometimes opposed ways different religious and secular ways of living and speaking treat or might treat their own (authentic) or others’ (alien) doctrines or teachings as “true” and “right”.

However, it is important to recognize a way these doctrines about doctrines (“governing” doctrines,” or “secondary doctrines” relative to “primary doctrines”) are puzzling.  “We might say that a community’s doctrines about its doctrines are presented to nonmembers of a community, in response to requests for explanations of its body of doctrines, for example, but not proposed to them. In contrast, a community’s primary doctrines may just as well be proposed to nonmembers of the community as to its members”.  It is important to try to grip the puzzle here because it has to do with how members and non-members of specific religious communities interact (e.g., talk and reflect) with themselves and each other.  It is tempting for adherents and non-adherents alike to act and think as if “governing doctrines” are ”primary doctrines”.  If so, then understanding a religion is simply or primarily understanding its governing doctrines -- and practicing a religion is simply formulating and reformulating its governing doctrines.  But doctrines about doctrines are not the same as primary doctrines about the cosmos, or the earth, or living human life, or Nirvana, or God, or some other central religious valuations.  Doctrines about doctrines are “secondary” doctrines.  Christian’s airplane is very high off the ground here.  Gripping the difference and relation between primary and secondary doctrines is akin to trying to understand how the grammar of language (one sort of language about language, “secondary” language, “governing” language) can illuminate as well as distort but cannot replace speaking a language (e.g., primary language, including doctrines).  But why even bother with “grammar”?  Different religions can and do supply their own answers when (for example) interpreting their scriptures .   But such semantic ascent might also be because such reflection on reflection (e.g., doctrines about doctrines) is simply what human beings naturally do, or some human beings sometimes do.  

Before ascending further into these conceptual thin airs, Christian gives multiple examples of such doctrines in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other religions.  He asks readers to consider the Four Great Authorities in Buddhism; Aquinas and al-Ghazzali and Nargajuna on interpreting the scriptures of their communities; the Mahaparinib-banasutta and Westminster Confession and Dogen on arguing about doctrines; Vatican I and Vatican II on how doctrines of alien (religious and secular) communities “may be” true or right; John Ray and John Cotton and Karl Barth on limits to the comprehensiveness of primary doctrines. Such examples of “doctrines about doctrines” are briefly sketched, although Christian does offer a more lengthy case-study of possible oppositions and incommensurabilities and surprising overlaps between Christianity and Buddhism on the paths to Nirvana and God.   In any case, these examples are the ground (samples of teaching activities) whence his philosophical airplane will take off.

As Christian supplies a runway of concrete examples,  he also formulates principles and rules at work in these examples -- here the airplane takes off from the ground of examples into the air of abstraction.  For example, he gives samples of principles and rules for judging whether what is proposed in some doctrine is an “authentic” doctrine of that community; how “important” a doctrine is in the “ordering” of those doctrines; whether it is “consistent” with other doctrines; is “true, or right”; is limited and/or “comprehensive” in its “scope” -- including related to the doctrines of other (or alien) religious and secular communities.

Just as Christian’s examples of such teaching activities require study one by one, so also do his proposed doctrines about doctrines ingredient in those examples.  But among these distinctions Christian makes, the most central is between communities that might presume or teach that all their  “authentic” doctrines are true or right (the A-T/R principle) and communities which might presume or teach that all true or right doctrines are doctrines of its community (the T/R-A principle).   An advantage of the A-T/R principle is that it permits communities to limit their authentic doctrines, while distinguishing them from as well as relating their doctrines to the doctrines of “alien” communities in multiple ways.  For example, religious communities can have doctrines which are (or may be) identical, opposed, or value in some ad hoc (occasion-specific) or comprehensive (occasion-comprehensive) way the doctrines of other religious or secular (scientific, philosophical, and other) communities.  Christian gives examples of these options (above).  It is crucial that “alien” doctrines are not “opposed” doctrines, any more than strangers are usually enemies -- although Christian insisted (as we have seen) that an opposition of doctrines is not an opposition of persons, alien doctrines are not “alienated”persons.    

On the other hand, the T/R-A principle implies that one community comprehensively includes or should aspire to include the multiple truths and rights enacted in ordinary life as well as in all the natural and social sciences, various religions, and philosophies and more ordinary public and private life.  The T/R-A principle supposes “comprehensive” teachings -- not simply teachings about God or some other basic religious proposal, not simply about the right ways of living but also about the cosmos (e.g., scientific truths), about moral living as a whole and its details, about the arts and everything else.  The T/R-A principle seems to imply that there are or should be no limits to what a particular community teaches -- and therefore no “alien” truths.   

Again, Christian does not aim to advocate the A-T/R or T/R-A principles in the abstract, or make any religious (much less theological) claims here.  The focus is on “the force, the grounds, and the consequences of what is said” (DRC, p. 115) rather than historical, psychological, or theological, or other important issues.  Whether a reader is persuaded of the priority of the A-T/R principle over the T/R-A principle for the religions analyzed in DRC depends on how the reader connects these two principles (along with Christian’s other proposed “governing doctrines” summarized in a final chapter) to the concrete examples Christian gives from diverse religious traditions (above).  To hearken back a final time to Whitehead’s airplane, governing doctrines (which are secondary to primary doctrines) arise out of and need to be related to (including, as needed, reformed) life as lived “on the ground”: how does this or that (or mine and yours and our) community identify its teachings, including its teachings about alien claims?

But consider two very different and probably opposed objections to Christian’s proposals in DRC (along with possible responses that return us to Christian’s earlier books).

Paul Griffiths, along with a keen appreciation of Christian’s contribution to issues of religious diversity, proposes that Christian “does not show a sufficient awareness of the theoretical problems involved in abstracting what amount to disjectra membra from a religious community other than ones own and assuming what is said in the fragments”.  It is true that Christian does not claim to summarize the doctrines about doctrines of any specific religious community as (one might say) “wholes” (if you will, non disjecta membra) rather than provide ad hoc examples (disjectra membra).  However, he does note how the overall “framework” of doctrines about doctrines for any specific community may be quite complex.  He does not aim to show how the particular examples of doctrines about doctrines of the particular religions he discusses form particular “wholes” or “frameworks”.  How (Griffiths asks) can we understand these doctrines about doctrines as ”frameworks” or “wholes” (not simply disjectra membra) for particular religious communities?  Christian attempted to view diverse primary doctrines as “wholes” or “frameworks” with regard to Buddhist and Jewish doctrines in Oppositions of Religious Doctrines.   A future project might well consider how this might be done for the whole “frameworks” of secondary doctrines of these diverse and particular communities, keeping in mind how Christian proposes that dialogue about oppositions among primary doctrines promises to be more fruitful than dialogue about secondary doctrines.   As with his other books, Christian leaves work to be done, on the ground, and in the air.

But consider another objection to Doctrines of Religious Communities, this time from the side of the T/R-A principle.  Ninian Smart also (like Griffiths) has a keen appreciation of Christian’s book for the world of conflicting religions and their “authentic doctrines” in which we currently live.  But he also proposes that Christian gives too much importance to the A-T/R principle, whereas we could give concreteness to the T/R-A principle by taking account of the way human beings form one community, even though “we typically belong to more than one community” -- a religious community, a nation,  the world of science and practical knowledge, and humanity as a whole.  But he proposes that we might “rewrite Christian’s title and call this book Doctrines of Worldview Affirming Communities.   Again, Smart says that Christian’s A-T/R principle applies to much of the world in which we actually live -- but he seeks more.  One wonders what Smart would make of the many conflicting basic religious valuations defining the many religious communities -- affirmations which affirm more than the “world”, more than a Weltanschaung.  Smart’s issue might thus return us to the diverse and the competing basic religious proposals of Christian’s Meaning and Truth in Religion.  Or perhaps Smart seeks something more like the conceptual heights Christian’s An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics -- and the competing views of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy visible in some of Christian’s essays.   If not Whitehead or some other metaphysics, then perhaps we should seek some other philosophical response to the crucial challenges of developing a comprehensive Weltanschaung transcending a world of conflicting people, nations as well as religions.  Christian’s possible responses to such friendly criticisms would require turning from his books to his essays.

This interpretation of Christian suggests that his books build on some of the unsolved issues each leaves (on the ground and in the air) -- and that some of the unsolved issues of one book may be addressed by taking into account all four.  He invites readers to begin on the ground (with experience, inquiry, dialogue, teaching practices) but not to be afraid of flying. Indeed, people were flying (in Whitehead’s or Christian‘s sense) long before airplanes existed.  This air, we might say, is only apparently abstract air.  It is actually what enables persons on the ground to breathe, or not.  But inquiry in general or religious inquiry in particular, whether undertaken by elites investigating the multiple religious and other options or more ordinary (un)believers, needs to test itself by its landing -- promoting inquiries, actual as well as possible dialogues, attuned to our differences and disagreements as well as to how doctrines can help us better understand those oppositions -- perchance overcoming them, one by one.  Finally, integrating Christian’s articles (below) into this interpretation would surely provide additional insights.

But this strategy for interpreting his critical philosophy of religion may be (or seem to be) much too centered on William A. Christian, Sr. himself.  Christian took decided stands -- most importantly for this essay, that critical philosophy of religion is a worthwhile (unfinished) enterprise.  But there was no academic or other hubris to these stands.  Louis Dupre, a Yale colleague whose philosophy followed much different lines, once commented that, with Christian’s passing, “disappears a scholar endowed with the high intellectual and moral virtue we tend to expect from a scholar, but which few among us academicians can pride ourselves of actually processing”.  Christian’s own reaction to criticisms might be akin to Whitehead’s when he declined to respond to a set of essays on his philosophy, including criticisms. “The absence of any direct expression of my reaction to these chapters is but a slight loss. The progress of philosophy does not primarily involve reactions of agreement or dissent. It essentially consists in enlargement of thought, whereby contradictions and agreements are transformed into partial aspects of wider points of view. Thus, my own reaction to this book should consist in devoting many years to rewriting my previous work. Unfortunately, this is impossible.” Similarly, it is up to others to carry forward or dissent from Christian’s proposals, on the basis of this or some other interpretation of his thinking.