Indy, this one's for you....

CHECK YOUR PREMISES Part Two

When I think a little more about why what the preacher said about existentialism bothers me, I think about my friend Mari.
Mari has interesting views on many issues, including religion. I think about something she told me once, and how it is related to this idea. She said that "Sin is what we decide it is." Sin is subjective. It is something that the individual believes takes him away from God, and what is considered a sin to one person might not be the same for someone else. Even with that being her opinion, she still lives what appears to be a moral lifestyle in accord the "absolute authority of God".
If we take a subjective approach to our faith, that it take away the absolute morality inherent in God's word? Can't one believe in a subjective truth, even where it comes to "sin" and a moral framework, and yet still adhere to the absolute values set to us by God?
So I did a little deeper, and encounter the existenial theists.
One of the more prominant "faces" of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, was, in fact, approaching it from a Christian viewpoint. In Kierkegaard, the singularity of existence comes to light at the moment of conflict between ethics and religious faith. Suppose it is my sense of doing God's will that makes my life meaningful. How does philosophy conceive this meaning?
Kierkegaard, in his book Fear and Trembling, argues that for philosophy life becomes meaningful when one attempts to "raise myself to the universal" by bringing immediate (natural) desires and inclinations under the moral law, which represents "telos" or "what I ought to be". In doing so there is a loss of individuality (since the law holds for all) but one's actions become meaningful in the sense of understandable, governed by a norm. Now a person whose sense of doing God's will is what gives their life meaning will be intelligible just to the extent that their action conforms to the universal dictates of ethics.
Existence as a philosophical problem appears at this point: if there is a dimension to being that is both meaningful and yet not governed by the rational standard of morality, by what standard is it governed? For unless there is some standard, it is impossible to speak of "meaning."
To solve this problem there must be a norm inherent in singularity itself, and, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard tries to express such a norm in his claim that "subjectivity is the truth," an idea that prefigures the existential concept of authenticity. His justification is what he called the "passion of faith". To perform the movement of faith "subjectively" is to embrace the paradox, rather than to seek an escape from it by means of objective textual exegesis, historical criticism, or some other strategy for translating the singularity of my situation into the universal. Because reason cannot help here, the normative appropriation is a function of my "inwardness" or passion. In this way I "truly" become what I nominally already am.
To say that subjectivity is the truth is to highlight a way of being, then, and not a mode of knowing; truth measures the attitude ("passion") with which one makes their own, an "objective uncertainty" (the voice of God) in a "process of highest inwardness."
Ethics are considered transcendent, and are based on God's character. Thus, right and wrong are determined by God. However, due to the subjective nature of transcendent truth, as depicted in theistic existentialism, it could also be said to be determined by the individual themselves.
This makes me think of Mari again. So I dig even deeper.

Check Your Premises

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
Ayn Rand

At our bible study lesson, we are watching a video to our Song of Solomon. The minister who is doing the video series makes a comment denouncing existentialism, stating it caused the sexual immorality that we see in our culture. His claim is that existentialism would have us believe that truth is subjective, and without absolutes, we lose self control.

I wonder if this is true. The problem is, to determine if it is true, you have to take it apart. You have to define the parameters.

Let's start by defining existenialism. The problem with that is that there is no clear definition. There have many interpretations and representations of this school of thought, and even among the more famous representatives, there is wide deviation in explanations. Here is what the dictionary has to say about it:



Existentialism: A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Another source1 states, "Existentialism cannot be precisely defined. In fact, an exact definition is usually avoided by existential philosophers, since to define it would be to lose it in the bondage of too restricted confinement...Existentialism, as the name suggests, relates the destiny of the individual thinker to the ideas that engage and can be understood by his own mind."

In order to disprove the preacher's point, I set out to answer the following questions:

Does believe in existentialism negate belief in God?
Does it take away the absolute of moral authority?

Does existentialism represent a threat to Christianity?

In doing some research on existentialism to prove my hypothesis, my clarity begins to bend and finally disappears altogether in face of the different metaphysical viewpoints presented by various "existenialists". I try re-reading Nietzsche's "Beyond God and Evil", including commentary by philosophical researchers, for clues about how existenialism juxtaposed with Christianity, but I end up just getting a headache. Learning more about Nietzche, I come to see that he believed that, "even though Christian morality is nihilistic, without God humanity is left with no epistemological or moral base from which we can derive absolute beliefs."1

In that sense, then, perhaps the preacher and Nietchze would have been of the same mind.

What is bothering me is the idea that because one believes in existentialism, one has no absolute believe in a moral framework, AND that having no moral framework leads one to sexual immorality.It just seems like flawed logic to me.

So I did a little deeper....

TO BE CONTINUED

http://www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/documents/existentialism.htm

The Philosophy of Depth

Several threads of conversations with my coworkers have my mind spinning around trying to make sense of different theories about human behavior. I am testing out some ideas they have introduced, trying to apply them to my experience to see if they are true.
Last night, the doctor was testing an animal for propreoception. It happened that the receptionist walked by during the testing and was asking what the difference was between the two different tests the doctor had performed. Dr McFadden explained that one test was for superficial pain and one was for deep pain. The receptionist, who is a very sweet, younger girl whom I do enjoy the company of, but who has some limited knowledge, did not understand the difference between the two types of pain. I was trying to explain it to her and realized the problem was she did not understand the vocabulary.
This really didn't surprise me as much as it should. One would think that someone who made it all the way out of high school would understand these terms. However, I have spent time with this girl outside of work, and our conversation had turned to the things we enjoy, and when I talked about how I liked to study and discuss literature, philosophy, and creative pursuits (I would say "art", but I mean that loosely, since I really don't know much about what most people consider 'art' but I am interested in the imaginative creative process that urges people to produce works), she told me that did not interest her at all. She had also told me she hates to read and really doesn't like to think that much, and is mostly only concerned with appearance and attraction when it comes to the opposite sex. This is who she is, and it seemed foreign to me, but I am fairly open minded and don't really think that someone has to think like me or be interested in everything I am in order to be friends with them. We have enough in common between being mothers, wives, coworkers, and anxious types who are concerned about others perception of us to form enough common ground to have a friendship.
At the end of the explanation to her of the difference between the two types of pain, I was trying to link it to what those terms mean in relation to people, and another one of my coworkers jumped in to the conversation and said something to this effect;
That the terms "superficial" and "deep" are relative to the perception of the subject, and due to this, are subjective terms.
I don't think I agree. Her argument that she used to validate this was that that there are different types of intelligence: common sense, book smarts, street smarts, logic skills, etc. I told her I agreed with that but I didn't see how it related to what we were talking about. She tried again, and this time she told me basically that when a person says another person is superficial, it is only a value judgement and could be based on fallacy. For instance, she says, a person might be concerned with making sure their appearance is top-notch, but it might not have to do with the fact that they believe that appearance is all that matters, but might be in fact that they feel that they do their best work and make the best impression when they feel good about how much work they put into their appearance. I could almost see where she was going with that, and couldn't really come up with a rebuttal, and then the conversation digressed into what she hated about philosophy. I went home thinking about it and researched the terms to see if I could find that those terms are indeed relative. This is what I found on Webster's.

Main Entry: su·per·fi·cial
(1) : of, relating to, or located near a surface (2) : lying on, not penetrating below, or affecting only the surface b British, of a unit of measure : SQUARE 2 a : concerned only with the obvious or apparent : SHALLOW b : seen on the surface : EXTERNAL c : presenting only an appearance without substance or significance - su·per·fi·cial·ly /-'fi-sh(&-)lE/ adverbsynonyms SUPERFICIAL, SHALLOW, CURSORY mean lacking in depth or solidity. SUPERFICIAL implies a concern only with surface aspects or obvious features . SHALLOW is more generally derogatory in implying lack of depth in knowledge, reasoning, emotions, or character .
Main Entry: deep
(1) : extending well inward from an outer surface (2) : not located superficially within the body c : extending well back from a surface accepted as front d : extending far laterally from the center e : occurring or located near the outer limits of the playing area f : thrown deep 2 : having a specified extension in an implied direction usually downward or backward 3 a : difficult to penetrate or comprehend : RECONDITE b : MYSTERIOUS, OBSCURE c : grave in nature or effect d : of penetrating intellect : WISE e : intensely engrossed or immersed f : characterized by profundity of feeling or quality ; also : DEEP-SEATED 4 a of color : high in saturation and low in lightness b : having a low musical pitch or pitch range 5 a : situated well within the boundaries b : remote in time or space c : being below the level of consciousness d : covered, enclosed, or filled to a specified degree -- usually used in combination 6 :

I am not sure that I see anything in these definitions that indicate relativity.
More on this subject and others like it shortly.