Prior to the References and Opinions: Origin and End

The various years I have spent as a philosophy student have understandably been burdened by random spurts of darkness, which often resolve into a never ending game of skepticism. To many contemplatives, Plato’s depiction of the soul emerging out of the cave as it gradually acquires Truth always appears to be that tragically unachievable aspiration we all can relate to. But I think I can confidently say that most contemplatives and philosophy students eventually understand their seemingly endless whirlwind of skepticism to be a phenomenon that often occurs when they lose a sense of their belonging in the world. It’s that Dark Night of the Soul the religious contemplatives often refer to. Fortunately, it’s not the end of the game for many and most of us. In reflection, we often recognize those spurts of skepticism to only be chapters in our already written narrative - a concept we so often criticize but intuitively perceive as already there for us to discover and place ourselves in.

That concept of “what is already there” has been agitating my mind for the past several months, and I have been through a roller-coaster of anxiety in response to it. It agitates me, because, without an already existent reality, all of reality is human craft. In everything I have read in my life, I can not see any way around that consequence, and it is a very bothersome consequence. I have read a good portion of books with that concept infusing every page of every book I read this past year. Recently I finished a book by John R. Searle, entitled Mind, Language, and Society. I chose Searle, because I already read the argument from theist Natural Law thinkers. I wanted to see how the argument could possibly be extended outside of a theistic context. Searle was going to be my atheist bridge in hopes of finding a world existent outside of my language (as I used language to get off the ground in talking about it).

In the very beginning of the book, Searle defends against the notion that all facts are relative to language (e.g. “The world is everything that is the case”) and the continuous flux of social constructs and meanings. His chief concern was that of thinkers like Derrida and Foucalt, who seemed to make all of what we mean by “reality” to be a craft or tool of man in his will to power. Yet, as I will elaborate below, this seems to truly only be a fear of Searle’s on an individual scale, not a collective one. Searle’s original response is one I would stick with: we would not attempt to get at reality or the world or explain reality if we did not presuppose an independent reality already there for us to discover in the first place. His argument is that there is an ontologically independent reality outside the meaning of our language (as in things and “facts” already existent before and after our explanation and meaningful portrayals of them).

This was not much of a disagreement on my end until he reduced teleology and human values (in a few pages) to the result of useful ends collectively sought by individuals. What begins as a system of use develops into a system of valued ends. A wall, for instance, is originally used to block out the enemy but then develops into a staple of cultural identity. It consequently receives its end value by its assigned function, which apparently arises out of a human need. Previously in his book, without explicitly drawing out the value of life in the same way, he argues that the functions of certain organs would not be assigned if there was not a presupposed value of human life. Even natural human and animal functions and values are dependent on the way we want to see the world. At this point, I could not resist…. If all value of human life and other relational values we hold are not independent of us (as were neutral scientific phenomena for Searle), then they are qualified by needs and are not values at all. If we are consistent with Searle’s system of causation, the value is only a product of utilitarian means. It is some purely biological need we have. The social institution is constructed for the manipulation of brute facts in service of our biological urges. If values are only seen and assigned as good ends, then, following his original argument against anti-realists, what is the point in aspiring to an explanation of them as existent? And if the end pursued is pursued on the basis of collective agreement, what basis does a society have to criticize the value system of another society? What is the resource for Searle’s “realist” at that point? This, to my surprise, was not much of a stated or recognized concern for Searle. Even if it is a misrepresentation of his argument, I am surprised it is not within his concern to treat the subject. But then I remember his original intent was to provide “clarity” to a world we can have a progressive understanding of, a way of getting at the world intelligibly, and his primary starting point in justifying knowledge was “consciousness”. I believe this is the fundamental result of a system that is closed within the world as we know it. Searle’s world is justified by human consciousness, and its value is at the service of humanity.

So I went back home to a religious response. I ran to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on the relationship between faith and reason (Fides et Ratio). A very small principle can go a very long way, and John Paul II’s principle did. According to John Paul II, Man, in his approach to the world, must see himself and begin his enquiry about the world in relation to the rest of humanity. Hence, at the outset, he finds himself theorizing within a context of faith, hope, and love with other beings. He thinks and must think with and for them. He can not rip himself from this context, and he is destined to theorize about his world within it. He can try to ignore it, but his system inevitably falls into a system like Searle’s or Derrida’s or Hegel’s when he fails to recognize a world of value to be discovered, and a world of value he is already in. Following Searle’s logic, it does not logically follow that because we are bound to explaining value and function within our accepted system of meaning and biological needs, that those values and functions must be reduced to those systems and needs. Man can’t simply begin to justify his world in relation to his mind, because, at the outset, he excludes other minds, other values, and the entire human person (who is naturally received with intuited value). Man must see himself as a receiver. He must receive a spiritual heritage of concerns, ideas, values, and ends, and it is this complex pilgrimage to begin with. I cease to be so anxiously skeptical of my world when I place myself into this relation. I am fundamentally bound to it. The question I must then inquire after is the Origin and End of this relation.

“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.” – Alexander Schmemann