Master 205: What is most real to you? Part 1 of 3

Clarifying the question.

This is the most fundamental and overarching question of human life: What is most real to you? That's quite a claim, but even if I end up having to retract it after more careful reflection, the importance of this question is something that needs to be emphasized.

What is most real to you?

This is some of what I've been getting out of philosophical reflection lately and out of conversations with Tyler and from watching Francis Chan's sermons. Indeed, I think that it is reflections on this theme and the connection of other philosophical questions to this theme that makes the pursuit of philosophy worthwhile. But lately I've been focusing on Nietzsche and Heidegger. (The First Treatise of the Genealogy of Morality is brilliant. It strikes me that while Nietzsche is extremely critical of the Christian church and culture, he is even more condemnatory of post-Christian society and culture. There's an interesting notion.)

Both of these authors help to sensitize readers to the forces and ideas that are actually shaping and influencing our lives. It's one way to say that your life is guided by a certain belief or conviction. It is quite another to actually be guided by those beliefs and convictions. And, in fact, the category of 'beliefs' may not be the most felicitous for capturing the particular phenomenon that is at issue here.

Dallas Willard makes the point, in one of his lectures, that, for the most part, our lives are not guided by beliefs. Rather, they are guided by our ideas, by the way in which we think about things. Now some will object by asking, 'What's the difference between beliefs and ideas?'

Consider a silly example to start our thinking along these lines. How many people worry about dinosaurs in the normal course of their day? By that, I mean, how many people are worried about meeting up with a tyrannosaurus rex, of being eaten by velociraptors, of rounding the corner and coming face-to-face with an allosaur? Obvious answer: No one. Dinosaurs are not real for us. They are not the sort of thing that we have to deal with in the course of our life. We don't have to think about them--or not think about them, because they just aren't real for us. However, you may recall, after seeing the movie, Jurassic Park, that your attitude toward dinosaurs was a little different. The shift in mentality probably did not last for long, but for a little while, dinosaurs actually occupied a pretty significant place in your thought-life.

We may be able to get a bit clearer on this phenomenon if we focus more on horror movies. For most people, in ordinary life, ghosts and other supernatural phantasms simply do not show up in the catalogue of things that they need to deal with in our daily lives. But after watching a really compelling horror movie, certain odd things start to happen. A person becomes uncomfortable being alone. He or she may avoid sitting with her back to the door or window. He or she may turn on all the lights in the house--even in rooms that are not ordinarily trafficked or occupied. If you asked her, she would still say that she doesn't believe in ghosts. So what explains her behavior? Have ghosts become something real for her? That might be putting the point too strongly. Rather, the possibility of ghosts has become real for her; the possibility of creatures lurking in dark corners; the possibility of homicidal prowlers on the other side of closed doors. Not the actuality--she doesn't believe that there are such things, yet the possibility of such things has become real for her in a way that affects her actions, attitude, mood, and disposition.

Turning from this simplistic, perhaps silly, illustrations to more weighty matters, let us consider what things shape and affect the course of our lives on a daily basis. What is most real to us? What is most real to you? One of Heidegger's significant insights (borrowing from his predecessors), was that in our ordinary, daily life, our actions and conduct are more guided by our sense of what is normal for people in general than by what we would claim to believe or hold to be true. This comes across especially clearly (unfortunately) when we think about the case of religious belief. In many cases, religious confessions actually end up having very little to do with how people actually conduct themselves. Pick out two random people who work in your office building and have wildly different religious beliefs; you will probably find that they conduct most of their life in much the same way. Now this observation, by itself, does not prove the claim that I am making. It is but one piece of evidence. But I think that the pattern is also familiar enough that many people will recognize and resonate with it. Similar observations have certainly led many people throughout history to reject, altogether, the idea that the propositions and claims associated with the various religious traditions actually connect to anything that is real.

But this claim by philosophers and thinkers throughout history goes a bit too far. Just because one can offer a purely psychological analysis of people's behavior does not mean that purely psychological factors are wholly responsible or that a complete explanation can be offered in purely psychological terms. To appeal to psychological factors in explanation is to latch on to certain real features of the world, but part of what I have also come to appreciate more in the course of my philosophical studies is the fact that reality is not indifferently self-disclosive. What do I mean by "indifferently self-disclosive"? What I mean is that reality, and all that is real, does not simply show up to anyone who is occupying just any stance or vantage point. Some obvious examples: if we simply open our eyes and look at the world, we will miss out on a whole lot of reality: microbes, atoms, and radio waves. But the thesis is even more radical. Imagine a person who, for their entire life, could only see the world from one vantage point and one perspective. Such a person would never have a way of coming to understand the three-dimensionality of space. The discovery of space depends upon our being mobile and able to take up different perspectives on the same thing. Certain aspects of reality also only become available to persons with certain kinds of skills. If I walk into an auto-mechanic's shop, I will be confronted with a whole range of objects and entities. I may identify rubber tubes and heaps of wires and numerous metallic objects with particular shapes and configurations. But that is not what those things are. They are not (just) metallic objects. They are car parts--very specific car parts--with very specific names that I don't know--having certain functions, fitting into the larger apparatus in very specific ways. But without the requisite skills, that whole sphere of reality is completely closed to me. Those objects cannot be real for me in the way that they are for the mechanic. They cannot affect my actions and attitudes and behavior in the ways appropriate to their purpose and function.

Reality is not indifferently disclosive. The nature and essence of things do not put themselves on display and announce themselves for just anyone. And so, if we find people who profess religion and do not conduct their lives in the way we would expect of a person who professed such religion, then we need to conduct an exploration of what is real for them. We should do this, keeping in mind that to say that something is real for one person and not for another, in the context of this blog, is not to say that reality as a whole is subjective or relativistic or constituted by our perceptions. Rather, it is just to say that one's perspective and skills and attitude and dispositions, play an important part in rendering us able or unable to perceive what is actually there.

There is an interesting circular relationship here: attitude and perspective shape what shows up as real for us and what is real for us shapes our attitudes and perspectives.

This brings us back to the overarching question of this blog: What is real (or most real) for you?

This question is one that is relevant to Christians--and that is part of what is motivating my writing this. But it is also relevant for people in general. The reason that this question is so important is that one's answer to it, more than anything else, shapes and conditions one's ability to interact and engage with the world meaningfully and effectively. There is a certain tendency in our world to overlook the importance of this question--just because so many of us have simply come to accept that there are many equally legitimate ways to do life. But I think that this multiplicity of options is actually a source of incredible anxiety for people in our world.

Consider how people in many ancient cultures would have lived--or even how young children in our own culture sometimes approach the world. There is a stable value system, passed down from elders, or maintained by one's parents and close friends. That stable set of values is what gives shape and coherence to one's world. This stability can be undermined through intercultural contact, or when a child moves away from parental supervision and begins to interact with other people who may have radically different values or ways of looking at the world. Now I am not saying that this sort of destabliziation is a bad thing, in itself. But, ideally, what should happen is that the destabilization leads to a new and different stable condition.

One of the unfortunate results of our strongly intercultural modern culture (keeping in mind that many good things have also come from this) is that many people are living in a perpetually destabilized condition. People are not able to (or it is extremely difficult to) settle into a coherent values system. To stand strong on one particular value system often seems to require becoming obstinate and appearing to be closed-minded. (It's important to realize that holding to one particular value system is not actually incompatible with being tolerant, reflective, thoughtful, and intellectually honest.)

Another tendency of modern culture is toward homogenization and the blending of different value systems that are actually incompatible. This just aggravates the problem of destabilization because it leads people to think that they have a coherent worldview, when they actually don't. Then what happens is that people's lives are guided more by this homogenized cultural understanding than by the religious commitments that they profess. Or, to express the same point in not-explicitly-religious terms, what happens is that people's lives are guided more by this homogenized cultural understanding than by the values that one might claim to hold.

Again, what is the problem with destabilization or with incoherent value systems? Such situations interfere with our ability to engage effectively with the world. Imagine a mechanic or scientist who was trying to do his work while holding to two different and conflicting approaches to his work. The truth is that it is just as problematic to try and live life on two conflicting approaches. (I won't engage here with the question of why one ought to care about engaging well generally with the world.)

This all is part of why I think it's worthwhile to study philosophy. This is also why most people aren't interested in philosophy. Because most people aren't aware of the essential role that their understanding of the world plays in shaping their lives. But once we realize that our basic worldviews do have this significant role, then we will see that it is something we need to think about. It's not the sort of thing most people need to think about all the time. But it is important for people to think about at some point. And in our contemporary world where there are so many different options available and there is so much unclarity about these matters--it's even more important to attend to these matters.

And we should also take seriously that while philosophy does a good job of raising these questions and analyzing the issues and offering a formal framework for thinking about these matters--it does not necessarily do well at offering a solution. The question of what actually is the best way to live can only be answered by an actually-coherent values system. We'll talk a bit more about some different answers, along with other related issues, and the Christian answer in the next two parts of this series.

--

God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.