The Way Fayer

This internal war of reason against the passions has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts.

Blaise Pascal

In my post, “Between Two Knights,” I discuss the 19th-century philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, though Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century philosopher whose quote you see above, planted the seeds of existentialism almost two centuries earlier. In any case, the two have much in common.

The term existentialism was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s. Over time, this camp of philosophy broadened to include a large sum of modern thinkers whose approach to reality hinges on personal, subjective, and individualistic points of view. This way of thinking splits from most premodern thought, which tends to focus on impersonal, objective, and universal points of view. In other words, existentialist philosophers think about existence from the perspective of the self (zooming out) rather than the self from the perspective of existence (zooming in). Furthermore, they doubt the sufficiency of human reason to find purpose in life, placing the heart at the center of reality instead of the mind and, in doing so, separating existentialism from other modern philosophies.

Modern philosophy (which is considered by many to have started with Descartes in the 1600s) is full of epistemological skepticism. “Epistemology” is one of four branches of philosophy (i.e. metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, and ethics); it studies knowledge and how we know things. “Skepticism” is just like it sounds: doubting the validity of something. Thus, epistemological skepticism means doubting the validity of human knowledge.

In many ways, existentialism is an answer to epistemological skepticism, though it mostly answers with more questions. Both are characteristically modern, beginning with philosophical questions from the subject, or from the self. But while epistemological skepticism asks, “What can I know?” existentialism asks, “What is my purpose?”

Before I continue, you may be wondering why all of this matters. Why is philosophy, something so universally considered dull and pretentious that even the skeptics and existentialists cannot deny it, relevant to our lives today? Is it not just meaningless, impractical thought experiments that crazy-eyed, messy-haired people do for some sick kind of fun?

It is said, after all, that the only difference between a philosophy major and a park bench is that a park bench can support a family of three. (For the record, I am not majoring in philosophy—though I’m not sure it makes much difference at this point.)

Well, believe it or not, everything begins with philosophy. What, for instance, is a sport? Seriously. Think about it. A game? What’s a game then? Entertainment? … What’s that? To make this even more complicated, what constitutes a sport? Is chess a sport? Cup stacking?

Here are some more questions for you to consider: What are politics? What is democracy? What are drugs? What is money? What are morals? What is leadership? What are people? What is war?

Having an answer to these questions (not to mention countless others) is essential to understanding what’s happening in the world today and finding a path forward.

Unsurprisingly, what strikes me as one of the most glaringly obvious problems in modern society is our philosophical ignorance. Everyone has a philosophy, even if they never take the time to explore it. Everyone believes something, or else they wouldn’t do anything at all. Philosophy, in fact, makes us human because it is the very expression of our self-consciousness. As Dr. Peter Kreeft puts it in the introduction to each volume of his Socrates’ Children collection, “To be human is to philosophize, for to be human is to wonder.” But now, people don’t know what they believe in because they fail to philosophize (and perhaps to be human).

Additionally, philosophy is important because, as Dr. Kreeft writes a few sentences later, “ … it makes a difference to everything. Sometimes the difference is a matter of life or death. Wars are fought for philosophical reasons.” In the same vein, sports are played, books are read, decisions are made, riots are lead, politics are driven, and all things are derived from philosophical reasons.

In many ways, you either philosophize or you’re indifferent; you either participate in life or you merely get by—except why is it that you feel so inclined to get by, might I ask?

This may sound extreme, and it may raise some eyebrows, but I think it’s one of the most important things to recognize in modern society that, to our great misfortune, remains unrecognized because of our great disinterest. It’s no wonder we don’t have the ability to communicate about things effectively—we don’t even look for the right vocabulary!

And now that you’ve heard why this matters, perhaps you understand how unreasonable it would be to avoid this conversation. A conversation about reason itself. But who cares about reason anyway?

Reasonable people, of course, like Blaise Pascal even if he recognized its limitations. In Pascal’s work Pensées, he comments on the sin of indifference: “This negligence in a matter where [ignorant people] themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me with more irritation than pity.” He continues by satirizing the implicit argument for ignorance, “How can such an argument as this occur to a reasonable man? ‘I do not know who put me into the world … All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade. Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going … And my conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me.’”

Fair enough, Pascal. But what then are the limitations of reason, if any? How does someone reasonably face death if reason itself is not to be trusted?

There are many ways to go about this, some being more convoluted than others. To start, however, you might begin with the following question: “Why can something not be both true and false at the same time?” The answer seems to be vested, or at the very least expressed, in what is known as the law of noncontradiction. Similarly, a two-dimensional shape cannot be both a circle and a square at the same time—that would be absurd (as well as impossible to imagine). This law is considered a tenet of formal logic, and even if you haven’t heard of it directly, you certainly recognize its application. (How frustrating it is to hear a story told as if were true that you know to be false.)

The question then becomes, “What is logic, and can it be trusted?” One answer would contend that logic is simply a man-made system imposing meaning on reality (a modern approach). Another answer would suggest that logic is built into human nature and, therefore, discovered within reality (a premodern approach).

Although, whether or not logic can be trusted depends on your level of analysis. The laws of logic aren’t nearly as uncontroversial as people think. Neither is its application.

Take the two answers from above, for example. If logic simply imposes meaning on the world, how can we be sure that the world conforms to our imposition? Wouldn’t that make logic an arbitrary, potentially limited way of looking at reality? How can truth be objective if we’re the ones who make it? And how can we agree with each other if we aren’t looking for something … together? In the case that the world does not conform to our imposition of logic, we risk losing reality to our own devices (if, let’s say, logic prohibits us from believing something contradictory to itself and, nevertheless, true). On the other hand, if logic is discovered in the world, what led us to its discovery … if not logic itself?

One answer to that question is God. And yet, what leads us to belief in God … if not logic? It becomes a circular argument, because a logical appeal to God’s existence requires, once again, logic, but the validity of logic requires, you guessed it, God.

This problem, of course, is just as bad if not worse for materialists—those who believe that the natural, observable world is all of reality. If a natural process of evolution produced consciousness without objective purpose, that means all interpretations of truth are subjective to creatures with consciousness, and specifically to those that have come to conceptualize “truth.” But if that truth is entirely subjective (and, thus, not grounded in objective reality), it is literally impossible to know anything outside of ourselves. We can think things, but we can’t know them, at least not in the way we typically mean. This makes the belief in evolution for a materialist defeat itself, because, if true, evolution could not be knowable.

So, while the circularity of the argument for God is self-reinforcing (and, consequently, logically imperfect), the circularity of the argument for materialism is self-undermining (if it is true, then it is false).

Quickly, it’s worth pointing out the irony of this essay: the very process I am using to deduce these claims is derived from logic. But how can logic—being expressed through my own words—prove or disprove itself? Once again, this entire piece is circular. That said, it is not unlike all other pieces of writing or logical ventures in this because circularity, to some degree, is simply unavoidable (except on a very small scale).

All of this makes reason very hard to justify. While it is certainly a useful tool, we can’t expect it to yield to us all of the answers to life’s questions. Whether this is due to the inadequacy of logic as a man-made system, or otherwise its incompletion as of yet in nature, is still to be determined.

So where does this leave us? First of all, let’s not forget the necessity of logic. Thanks to something like the law of noncontradiction, we can have direction. We can know (or believe) that 2+2=4 because to say something else would leave us incompetent, unable to navigate the world and its complexity. If contradiction were allowed, then logically speaking anything follows. For instance, if it is both raining outside my house and not raining outside my house as I write these words, I can also say that the sky is red, ants are dogs, and Batman likes bananas.

The issue at hand is simply this: what is truth, and what is reality? Your answer to these questions will determine your relationship to reason. A materialist claiming that truth is objective must admit that truth for them is simply what is practical or adapted for survivability, not what is real.

All of this may sound like nonsense, but these are the issues splitting the foundation of reason for any philosopher. And if they aren’t considered carefully, there’s no telling where we will end up. It turns out that reason, for all it’s worth, is not very good at understanding itself.

For me, this is the appeal of existentialism. I certainly have not made up my mind on all of these matters—not by a longshot—but Pascal and Kierkegaard’s existentialist approaches to these questions seem the most sensible to me. Why? Because they make room for the inadequacy of reason by balancing it with faith.

Ultimately, it is faith that closes the gap between speculation and belief, that guides us to our conception of truth, and it is reasonable faith that guides us to real truth, if such a thing exists.

In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard says that, “ … faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.” So for all of my rationalizing, I simply implore you to think about thinking, to understand what you believe, and to accept that you too have faith in something. Only then can you even begin to be reasonably unreasonable.