Room for Rest

May 7, 2009

I am like Kant, trying to make room for faith. His approach was to get reason in order; my object is the passions.

If we begin with the individual as given, as developed and self-aware--the actual individual person--we begin with a smattering of beliefs. To draw conclusions about what is known, which of those beliefs are pieces of knowledge, the beliefs must be parsed into bundles of certainty and uncertainty. Here we run aground on the problem of the criterion. The problem of the criterion consists in the fact that that belief which parses between known belief and unknown belief is itself an unknown belief that must, for the sake of parsing, be assumed to be true. The inescapability of the unknown in a person's beliefs demonstrates the personal necessity of faith, which is the endorsement of a belief that is not certainly known.

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Where ought belief begin? That is precisely the wording of the question. "Ought" introduces a valuation into the sphere of belief. It introduces the centrality of ethics into all belief. Life is action; ethics is thought about action. Thought is, viewed ethically, an act in itself--if nothing else one of complicity. For in thinking we grant attention, and the granting of attention is itself an ethical act, i.e., one that admits of value.

If a thought has no ethical import, is it valueless--is it worthless? Not necessarily. It is trivial. There are times when triviality is valuable, as when playing a game or viewing life practically. Such value, however, is of lesser stock. It can sustain life, but never perpetuate it. A prudent act, one that is practically rational, when viewed only as such, is a sort of digestion. It nourishes what already exists, without adding anything significantly new. It maintains stasis. Ethics, being fundamental, is always of greater value than the simply practical. An ethical act is a sort of birth, always bringing something of intrinsic value into existence.

There is nothing wrong with believing something because you want to. There is, however, something wrong in refusing to admit your desires. To deny your desires is dishonesty at best and self-ignorance at worst.

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Desire is one of the most fundamental feelings. As with all feeling, however, it is not the consequence of a free process of consciousness. It is not totally up to the man to desire power in a situation; his response is largely automatic, a predisposition. Not all feeling is chosen at the time of being felt; some feeling is spontaneous and uncontrolled. All feeling, when considered from a longer perspective--i.e, a person's habitual patterns of passion--is chosen to the extent that prolonged feeling can be nurtured or suppressed. To nurture a feeling is to voluntarily, freely, direct one's attention to situations that have been associated with that feeling before. To suppress a feeling is to systematically avoid awareness of those passion-generating situations.

Here is a meeting place of the whole person--the will, the passions, and reason. For to choose which passions to suppress or nurture appropriately is to draw upon reason to pass judgment. Reason, guided by the passions, selects those passions that can be self-endorsed. When a person in full consciousness assents to a certain sentiment as a response to a situation, a person has secured greater ownership of herself.

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Where does one find assumptions that need not be further justified? Where can one allow the mind to rest? In those areas where the heart speaks most loudly does the questioning mind cease to question. Conviction is a consequence of intense feeling--something quiet and preconceptual, a short, forceful movement--and intense feeling is that which undergirds all thought-architecture.

When one sets about inspecting thought-architecture, the belief nexus of any individual, one takes a survey of the edifice. One looks at it from without and within, aiming to draw a blue-print. The blue-print, the edifice's essence, is the visual representation of conviction--those unquestioned, foundational/structural beliefs. (Feelings are to ideas what form is to matter.)

Upon gaining familiarity with thought-buildings, one suspects everything superficial--everything presented by the person through conversation, writing, and action--is a near necessary consequence of the hidden scaffolding. This window here (a speech), this protusion there (a letter), a high ceiling (a habituated smirk-response)--all follow from nuanced sentiments. A man builds with his mind what his heart requires.



How can we make a disinterested, unbiased, thought-aesthetic? If such a thing were a real possibility, it would rely upon overlapping areas of conviction.



Do people present such overlap? There are a great many shared beliefs that are trivial or historical which are the results of education. Such beliefs hardly warrant discussion because they lack actionable import. The acceleration rate of gravity or the year of Columbus’s maiden voyage to the Americas do not influence thought or action construction. The sort of convictions we are concerned about here, as thought inspectors, are those that are not reliant upon education. Given the contingencies of education and the idiosyncratic emphases in different geographical locations, most taught beliefs lack overlap potential.



Are there tendencies in uneducated beliefs? If so, how could they be explained? Let us consider the latter first, given that it is more approachable (i.e., more readily admits of speculation rather than empirical inquiry, as the former warrants). Shared convictions could have a natural origin (given that all humans are natural) or metaphysical origin (given that metaphysical explanations are always possible).



Surveying the various thought-aesthetics (i.e., philosophies), all of the convictions that a person could build other actionable thoughts on, the likelihood of a natural overlap is slim. There may, however, be certain questions that nature readily posses, which explain the thematic unity in the diversity of thought-aesthetics different people hold. If those questions admitted of a few common answers, those questions would function as guideposts for comparison.



What is the most unavoidable question for every individual? “What should I do?” Every individual faces the following moment of openness in time with an eye for potential avenues of action. As that openness stretches into an undefined point into the future (e.g., the evening, Tuesday, July, marriage, death, etc.), people have various avenues that correspond to various time periods.



The prompting that comes from future possibility is the instigator of thought-construction. Thought-architecture is where people take shelter in all that is undefined, pre-linguistic. It is a place of stasis within the openness of the future. The landscape presents possibilities that are humanly relevant. (The totality of relevance is commonly referred to as the human condition.) What is relevant to humans? That there could be such a distinct sort of things suggests that humans themselves ar ea certain sort of thing. (The world is fixed, the human condition is fixed, therefore the third condition must also be fixed).



Here we meet with the concept of human nature. Human nature can be considered physical (consisting genes, chemicals, etc.), metaphysical (consisting of a soul, mind, etc.), or a hybrid of the two. Human nature sets limits on the question, “What should I do?” when considered metaphysically. It does not do so when considered physically. Human nature qua physical phenomenon generates factual, not normative, implications. It describes what humans do. Only by an erroneous logical can it take the natural description of human activity and conclude with a recommendation that is actionable for the individual. No sentiment is aroused by the introduction of a fact into consciousness alone.



In this way, biological facts are as trivial as historical facts. If upon asking the question, “What should I do?” a person is told, “Humans are altruistic as a result of the evolutionary efficacy for altruism. If you are a human, then you would be altruistic,” the person’s question is not answered. A factual response to a normative question engenders a factual, rather than ethical, response—a blink of the eyes or a blank stare, for instance. Only by an appeal to metaphysics can one answer a normative question in kind.



It is here that we rejoin our introductory remarks on sentiment. Conviction, an outcome of intense feeling, is a response to metaphysics. The conviction is not justified and so is either unjustifiable or above justification.



What is justification? It is the appropriate origin narrative of a certain belief. Appropriate often designates something empirical, something that because it is able to be sensed can garner universal consent. “I believe in this because of that there,” tends to be the ultimate/basic justificatory statement. (The bearing of universal consent upon the given individual is often overstated. What it matters to a person whether he is identified with a larger group or not depends on his need for community. Some individuals would risk truthful solitude over false companionship.)



What of beliefs that are not corporeal, could not admit of physical sensation? If there is any hope of answering the individual’s most persistent question in a robust fashion, then it must be from the non-factual/non-physical/non-corporeal/non-natural. It is in that realm—the realm of metaphysics—that the mind finds rest. The question is whether this rest is, to be metaphorical, on a solid foundation or in quick sand.