Hope Within Human Systems: Theological Reflection on Culture

 

I want to offer a way of thinking about the systems in which human beings participate. The attempt here will be to explore a systems theory regarding culture that will be descriptive, in contrast to the attempt to ascribe moral superiority to any existing system.[1]

The core element of Niklas Luhmann's theory pivots around the problem of the contingency of meaning, and thereby it becomes a theory of communication. Social systems are systems of communication, and society is the most encompassing social system. Being the social system that comprises all (and only) communication, today's society is a world society. A system is defined by a boundary between itself and its environment, dividing it from an infinitely complex, or (colloquially) chaotic, exterior. The interior of the system is thus a zone of reduced complexity: communication within a system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside. Such a zone is an event. Society consists in these events, and these are communication events. This process is also called "reduction of complexity". The criterion according to which information is selected and processed is meaning (in German, Sinn). Meaning being thereby referral from one set of potential space to another set of potential space. Both social systems and psychic systems operate by processing meaning.

Furthermore, each system has a distinctive identity that is constantly reproduced in its communication and depends on what is considered meaningful and what is not. If a system fails to maintain that identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment it emerged from. Luhmann called this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-complex environment autopoiesis (self-creation), using a term coined in cognitive biology by Chilean thinkers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Social systems are operationally closed in that while they use and rely on resources from their environment, those resources do not become part of the systems' operation. Both thought and digestion are important preconditions for communication, but neither appears in communication as such.

Communication is autopoietic. Communication is made possible by human bodies and consciousness, but this does not make communication operationally open. To "participate" in communication, one must be able to render one's thoughts and perceptions into elements of communication. This can only occur as a communicative operation (thoughts and perceptions cannot be directly transmitted) and must therefore satisfy internal system conditions that are specific to communication: intelligibility, reaching an addressee and gaining acceptance. We interact with the expressions of people and only rarely with a person. Interaction involves participation in a communication system that gives self-definition and guidance for behavior. The system shapes the peole. Participants in the system of communication are anonymous. People are expressions of the communication that occurs within the system. 

Luhmann likens the operation of autopoiesis (the filtering and processing of information from the environment) to a program; making a series of logical distinctions. Here, Luhmann refers to the British mathematician G. Spencer-Brown's logic of distinctions that Maturana and Varela had earlier identified as a model for the functioning of any cognitive process. The supreme criterion guiding the "self-creation" of any given system is a defining binary code. This binary code is not to be confused with a computer's operation: Luhmann (following Spencer-Brown and Gregory Bateson) assumes that auto-referential systems are continuously confronted with the dilemma of disintegration/continuation. This dilemma is framed with an ever-changing set of available choices; every one of those potential choices can be the system's selection or not (a binary state, selected/rejected). A biological cell reproduces itself within an environment to perpetuate its own existence, making it a closed system. A cell makes a cell because that is what cells do. This closed system action of the cell is poiesis. The purpose of autopoiesis is self-production. If people are more like cells within a system of then poiesis rather than praxis is the proper designation. Luhmann treats systems as autopoietic and operationally closed. Systems must continually construct themselves and their perspective of reality through processing the distinction between system and environment and self-reproduce themselves as the product of their own elements. Modern society is defined as a world system consisting of the sum of all communication happening at once, and individual function systems (such as the economy, politics, science, love, art, the media, etc.) are described as social subsystems which have "outdifferentiated" from the social system and achieved their own operational closure and autopoiesis.

Luhmann starts with the differentiation of the systems themselves out of a nondescript environment. He does observe how certain systems fulfill functions that contribute to "society" as a whole. For Luhmann, functional differentiation is a consequence of selective pressure under temporalized complexity, and it occurs as function systems independently establish their own ecological niches by performing a function. Functions are therefore not the coordinated components of the organic social whole, but rather contingent and selective responses to reference problems which obey no higher principle of order and could have been responded to in other ways.

Finally, the systems' autopoietic closure means that system works strictly according to its very own code and can observe other systems only by applying its code to their operations. For example, the code of the economy involves the application of the distinction between payment and non-payment. Other system operations appear within the economic field of references only as far as this economic code can be applied to them. Hence, a political decision becomes an economic operation when it is observed as a government spending money or not. Likewise, a legal judgement may also be an economic operation when settlement of a contractual dispute obliges one party to pay for the goods or services they had acquired. The codes of the economy, politics and law operate autonomously, but their "interpenetration" is evident when observing "events" which simultaneously involve the participation of more than one system.

One peculiar, but, within the overall framework, strictly logical, axiom of Luhmann's theory is the human being's position outside the strict boundaries of any social system. Consisting of, but not being solely constituted by, "communicative actions" (a reference to Jürgen Habermas), any social system requires human consciousnesses (personal or psychical systems) as an obviously necessary, but nevertheless environmental resource. He refers to the difference in an environment as a social system, a life system, such bodies, and consciousness systems or minds. We are closed systems in that we interact with others, we are affected by the environment, but we are not integrated into the environment. In Luhmann's terms, human beings are neither part of society nor of any specific system, just as they are not part of a conversation. People make conversation possible. Luhmann himself once said concisely that he was "not interested in people". That is not to say that people were not a matter for Luhmann, but rather alluding to the scope of the theory where the communicative behavior of people is constituted (but not defined) by the dynamics of the social system, and society is constituted (but not defined) by the communicative behavior of people: society is people's environment, and people are society's environment. Systems organize themselves to perpetuate their own order. Everyone is in service to these patterns and subservient to them, making them passive participants in a system that is without moral purpose. 

Thus, sociology can explain how persons can change society; the influence of the environment (the people) on a given social system (a society), the so-called "structural coupling" of "partially interpenetrating systems". In fact, Luhmann himself replied to the relevant criticism by stating that, "In fact the theory of autopoietic systems could bear the title Taking Individuals Seriously, certainly more seriously than our humanistic tradition" Luhmann was devoted to the ideal of non-normative science introduced to sociology in the early 20th century by Max Weber and later re-defined and defended against its critics by Karl Popper. However, in an academic environment that never strictly separated descriptive and normative theories of society, Luhmann's sociology has widely attracted criticism from various intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas.

Change occurs in modern societies because of the mutual benefit it produces, the securing of freedom, and the expansion of individual rights. It focuses upon the improvement of ordinary human life. Such a statement does not derive from ideology, but from measurable data. Autopoietic systems do not have goals other than their own perpetuation, but modern systems perpetuate by adapting to new historical moments, technological changes, advances in sciences, and to expansion in freedom.

I can choose which differentiated systems will bear the priority for my self-meaning, but I cannot disassociate from any of the systems in which I participate. I will always be dis-integrating. Since I experience divergent self-meaning depending upon which divergent system I participate. I must rationalize how what one system requires does not bear on my attempt an integrated sense of self. My mind is good at providing me with rational coherence where my lived experience is inconsistent or incoherent. I can hold one belief, that growing the federal government for compassionate reasons is a good thing, while incoherently minimizing my share of the tax burden. Such justified social behavior is a sign that the goal of the system is not the fulfillment of my self-hood, the discovery of my integrated or authentic self, but is the perpetuation of the distinct systems in which I participate. The communication events within distinctive systems within society use me to perpetuate the system. The social identity of the person arises from participation in these distinct systems. I may have a personal goal of discovering my unique calling, discovering who I am and why I am here. But as a participant the various systems of society I am anonymous, for anyone willing to satisfy what that system requires will do. I am not integrated into any system because I am only fulfilling a role within the system. The various systems of society (legal, economic, political, religious) are integrated with each other, except as they share a common environment, namely, the people needed to perpetuate the system.

Understanding the oppressor in this context is complex, since praxis, rational reflection, and choice, are not part of the system. Participants are not cohesive wholes, but amalgamations of anonymous participation. Each system perpetuates itself independently. It has a function of the law as Paul describes in Romans 7. Morality and spirituality function within the system but is not a goal of the system. Oppressor and oppressed participate an emerging social system and by that participation allow the self-perpetuation of the system. Participation in the system brings dissipating personal responsibility in such systems. “It is just business,” or “that is way it is” reflect such submission to the reality of the system. Those who oppress are just as much oppressed by the patterns of the system as are those oppressed by it. 

Fulfilling one’s role in the system will lead to some satisfaction, but it does not satisfy human longing or sense of personal cohesion.  Our societal value derives from our satisfactory acceptance in our system-specific roles. Systems are concerned only that we participate in society. It has no interest in our moving us toward fully formed persons or toward human flourishing. We assume this is how society must be, so we seek acceptance in these systems and compete over privilege or power within these systems. People are committed to distinct operationally closed systems for identity substantiation. Each system has its own rationality, and if we are to fulfill our role in that system, we will need to learn its logic. This explains why we can be successful in one system and dysfunctional in another. 

The restrictive forms of thought and action imposed by any existing social makes all human beings unfree, apart from some event that brings awareness of their lack of freedom to their consciousness. All such systems are open-air prisons, where people adapt to these conditions rather than resist them. 

Unless a person is a sociopath, we can assume that people do not wake up and decide to be an oppressor. Modern society, like all human societies, have a natural tendency toward oppression, in which individuals will be oppressors in one setting and oppressed in another.

This understanding of all social systems contrasts sharply with the critique of liberal democracies we find in all forms of Marxism and Critical Theory. It contrasts with attempts to create a revolutionary moment through ideological critique. What I want to explore now is why ideological critique of one form of human societies, must always be wrong.

A shared initial cause pointing toward a desired end, the overturning of a government, is only loosely cohesive and vaguely rational. As with all such critiques, they want to limit themselves to the critique of liberal democracies and capitalism, oblivious to the oppressive systems of totalitarian and communist regimes. All this is done to divert attention from the horrors perpetrated upon citizens who have the misfortune of living under the saintly tutelage of Marx. Such critiques could not arise in any system other than liberal democracy. One can shut down discussion since the Other has become an object of deserved hate (fascist, racist, misogynist, capitalist, and so on). The lack of genuine evil in the Other creates the need to create imaginary evil in the Other. A devout person or a reasonable political opponent become evil in the revolutionary mind. The critique relies upon a myth of imperialism, it defines private property as theft, exploitation explains why there is wealth and poverty. Such an assemblage has an identity structured around exteriority. Those involved protest their positions in the system, so those lower in the social hierarchy temporarily organize as part of an antagonistic struggle, Us against Them. This protest rests upon a static view of culture, which was true in non-modern societies like feudalism, military dictatorships, and so on. They assemble to face an obstacle that thwarts their self-identity. They imagine that revolutionary violence is the only path to such self-identity, for the movement from oppression to liberation is one of dismantling social structures. When the external revolution is achieved, cohesion among the players dissolves. This Us against Them mentality does not have the tools for a critique of its own assemblage. The cost of banding together for such a purpose is perpetual alienation between races. It identifies virtue and evil self-confidently, not recognizing that all human societies are oppressive, as well as all classes, races, and genders.

Such a view allows us to be brutal, transgressing respect for life in the service of the utopian vision of classless society. It allows for a form of purity and righteousness for those who adopt the ideology and deny kinship with those outside the believing group. We can also adopt the victim scenario, in which goodness belongs to the victims of the evil oppressor, while righteousness and purity belong to the rescuer. The cost of projecting evil onto the other is ruthlessness. It sanctifies violence, war, sacrifice of others, and denial of equal humanity. Religion can do this, largely because sacred killing offers a form of purification. The stronger we feel that we engage in a battle with evil, the greater the temptation is to reach a mode of projection in which evil is external to us and in anyone we view as our opponents. We are pure because we have identified the other as the enemy of good and the embodiment of evil. It is another case of the scapegoat mechanism, where we place the pollution of evil on to the other. In this case, our violence transforms into a higher unity of the warrior who has meaning and purpose for their battle and if necessary, their death. Our violence serves a higher purpose. Such a vision can transform into an ideological and atheist one, as it does in communism. Such violence affirms the purity of the one performing violence and the evil contained in the victims.

The revolutionary believes that any amount of suffering and death is worth the implementation of the ideas the revolutionary holds dear. The desire and hope for freedom and justice inevitably leads to the destruction of the present order and the birth of a new order. However, the new order will always, in the context of modernity, bring greater tyranny than the previous order. The technological means to do so are present and the revolutionary will use them to impose the ideas of the revolution. One who loves a friend loves in the present, while the revolutionary loves a person who has not yet appeared. If one is of a revolutionary mindset, one needs to recognize the limits of the human condition and recognize that the suffering death required to implement one’s revolutionary ideas are not worth the price. The revolutionary mind might go the path of establishing organic communities.  Such communities would have deliberate freedom against the rational tyranny of the State, altruistic individualism against the colonization of the masses, which would express the endless opposition of moderation to excess that has animated history. Such life would be in perpetual conflict with the established order. Excess will keep its place in our heart, the place where we find solitude. We carry within us our places of exile. Our task is not to unleash our crimes and ravages upon the world. We must fight them as they exist within us and in others. We may need to see the inborn impulse of revolt inspired by a new spirit of action. Such rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of live. The revolutionary spirit and the rebel within all of us can show that real generosity toward the future lies in giving our all to the present.[2] Although I doubt the revolutionary mind can accept such limits on their dreams and activities, we need to remember that great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.[3]

After this digression, we can continue with the understanding the role of human beings in a system that does not care about them. Systems are dehumanizing. Human beings provide the environment out of which social systems arise and continue to exist. Systems are not oppressive. The system has roles for individuals to play. This participation can deceive us into believing the system is the primary player in forming our identity. What I want to explore is the experience of alienation and exploitation that one needs to have before one can become open to new ways of living. Thus, the themes identified by Marx re-discovered as applying to the human experience of all systems. The genuine subjective experience of alienation is a necessary negative experience of one’s social reality that can open the way toward a new way of life that does not depend upon the system for achieving one’s true or authentic self, one’s sense of meaning and significance, and a genuine enjoyment of human flourishing and happiness. One abandons the desire to discover one’s identity through absorbing one’s beliefs and values into the system. The extent to which you think involvement in the system will give meaning and purpose to your life is the extent to which you surrender your unique self to the control of the Other. One’s identity derives from that which transcends the self and the system. The genuine objective experience of exploitation by the system can open the way for reform, the type of change that the system allows so that it can perpetuate itself. The system will adjust to any changes within that environment to perpetuate itself. The complexity of civilization allows for multiple systems within it, which means that one can be oppressor in one segment and oppressed in another. 

Persons lose awareness of the sense of the ontological or Being. Persons who participate in complex societies become an agglomeration of functions. This treatment leads to an inward life of dread. A functionalized world offers stifling sadness. The imposition of rationality on increasing sectors of social life means that the individual becomes increasingly controlled, administered, and engineered. Rationalization shapes the meaning structures of modern societies. It creates dullness and intolerable unease. The distinction between full and empty is the most significant philosophical issue. Life in a world centered on function is liable to despair because such a world is empty. It rings hollow. To eliminate mystery is to move in that psychological and pseudo-scientific category of the purely natural. It becomes a degraded rationalism. In such a world the ontological need is exhausted and brings the consequent atrophy of the faculty of wonder.

The existentialist concerns regarding the complex economic, social, and political arrangements of modern, technological, and capitalist societies, are well worth pondering. An increasingly functional and technical culture has led to an acute lack, impoverishment, and aridity of the experience people have of their lives.[4] One may simply learn the rules of the game and participate in the game. One participates by finding an occupation through which one is productive, and which might contribute to a meaningful life, by establishing a household, and by practicing respect for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in self and others. One can also reflect upon the qualities necessaries to participate in such a complex society, such as the willingness to take risks, which will involve faith in oneself and others, to invest in the future, which will involve hope, and to care about the needs of one’s co-workers, employees, and customers, which will involve a form of love. In an economics organized around the market, it will be the free exchange of goods and services that will determine the economic plan of the nation, and thus will guide millions of people regarding what is produced and what the price is for what is produced. Political freedom will always mean vigorous debate that usually has limits because the majority in one election may be the minority in the next. If one changes one’s stance toward economically and politically free societies from that of oppressed/oppressor, to a stance of appreciating the creativity and responsibility that such a society offers, one can meaningful participate in ways that can lead to a full and authentic life.

This leads me to discuss existentialism as viable way of focusing upon the existing individual.[5] Whatever part of humanity that trends toward the irrational and mystical will resist rationalization that modernity demands.

Existentialism will grant science its vital role in understanding humanity and world, but it refuses to submit to the objectification all science requires as a model for the way human beings ought to exist in the world. The scientific path of objectifying that which it studies, if applied to the way one exists in the world, can only lead to homelessness. It refuses to view the human being as a subject removed from nature, persons, and culture as objects. The person develops the self out of its emergence in the world. We dwell in the world and the world dwells in us. This means ontology is prior to epistemology.

Those who provide the environment for the system – you and me – need a moment to arise in us where we sense the emptiness that comes from fulfilling our various roles in the system. While still participating in the system, we experience our alienation from it, since it is insignificant to that which is of ultimate concern to us, namely, the discovery of our true self, the fulfilling of the unique calling, vocation, and calling we have. The system, the presence of other selves, become our environment as we pursue the self we will be. Each part of the system will entice to be in a way that conforms to that system. The crisis presented here is that the challenge of the individuality of our unique self occurs in a social setting that does not care if we ever discover our true self. It will take courageous praxis, thoughtfully considered action, to pursue such a course. Such is the heroism involved in the ordinary lives we will live. 

While social validation occurs through participation in the system of communication, our concern in our participation is that the unique self we are is at stake. We can have a derived sense of self that is socially derived and determined by the system. The system rewards us with a sense of self. Undoubtedly, some people will live their lives satisfied with this derived sense of self. However, for many others, it leads to emptiness. The system assumes there is no self outside the system. The system entices us to live with this false self. The system thinks of us as anonymous, but we are not anonymous to ourselves. The system dehumanizes us, but we cannot dehumanize ourselves to us. We have profound concern with our self as self. If this leads a person to seek freedom and identity as a coherent self, this journey creates a tension. Existentialism provides some important insights for this journey. Such an approach identifies individuals within a community. The dissolution of the self that participation in the system brings can be resisted if one has the proper tools to do so. 

If one seeks a point of contact between theology and nontheological anthropological studies, existentialism, especially as seen in Heidegger, may be of assistance. Paul Tillich wanted his systematic theology to correlate with philosophy,^[6] his primary dialogue being existentialism as the best interpretation of the situation faced by his generation. Existentialism was his way of sharing common ground with the questions his generation were asking. His famous notion of “ultimate concern” as defining this common ground acknowledges the existential character of religious experience. The questions of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair reveal the situation of his time, to which the New Being appearing in Christ is an answer that overcomes the self-estrangement of human existence, offering reconciliation, creativity, meaning, and hope. These answers contained in revelation are already implied in the questions that arise from human existence.^[7] John Macquarrie is explicit about the role of Heidegger in his approach to theology. He refers to it as a contemporary style of natural theology that that begins with the common humanity that each of us knows as those existing in the world. He refers to it as existential rather than rationalistic.^[8] It will want to find ways of describing who we are as human beings in our normal, average, everyday experiences. our perception of reality is through a community of persons. We experience our freedom as we set aside the past. The intentional object of consciousness already discloses that the person values, enjoys, loves, and hopes. We direct our attention in numerous ways to our world and proposed the notion of regional ontologies like the physical sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and philosophy. The concern of the existentialist was to use phenomenology to describe accurately the everyday experience of human beings in modern culture, which they would view in negative ways, but also provide a way of lifting ourselves out of the ordinary identification of ourselves with the crowd or mass and into some form of illumination that will help us see the potential of our unique lives.

We are thrown into a world that does not have a clear map to wholeness. The uncertainty about who to be and what to do engenders anxiety and even despair of never becoming who we truly are. The desire to find fulfillment, to have our happiness or human flourishing, gives rise to the anxiety or despair of having actualized that possibility. Pondering the possibilities and the freedom involved is not itself the dissolution of the self, but it does provide the setting for that dissolution. Out of desperation, we will move toward pride or apathy, both of which involve the dissolution of the self. 

Some notion of self is important here. The self is always in the process of forming and is therefore incomplete. Human beings are potentialities that must be responsibly and courageously actualized during the process of living. We can miss an authentic life. Human existence involves living in the tensions or polarities that constitute a human life. We are the facticity of birth, gender, nationality, and death, but we are also possibility in the fulfillment of our projects. We are beings who rationalize, and we are beings of moods like anxiety, despair, and dread. We are individuals and we are communal beings. We are responsible, guided by conscience, but we are also impotent. The polarities lead to an anxiety that expresses a concern for our existence with its potential and its precariousness. Such anxiety is a mode of awareness of nothingness or nullity and thus the precarious dimension of human life. We employ various devices and illusions to tranquilize our anxiety. The tensions and polarities of a human life will end when death overtakes us. The fact that we continued living with the tensions suggests that our lives make sense to us and are meaningful. We experience the disorder of our lives. We can describe it as fallen, alienated, and estranged. An authentic life will have a unity, stability, and structure that have held the polarities of existence in balance and allow the person to reach fulfillment. When one becomes aware of the possibility of living an authentic life, the imbalance implied in tensions and polarities resolve themselves in a temporal balance of commitment to our possibility and acceptance of our facticity. Our care for the world unites the decisions we make, but an ultimate concern or commitment has greater potential to unite the various tensions of a human life. Embracing the call or vocation that arises out of life experience is a leap, a faith commitment that takes us beyond simple rational analysis.[9]

As Heidegger posed the question, what is the meaning of Being? The answer will not arise in metaphysical speculation. The answer will not come from any fanciful appeal to a world beyond the world of human experience. Human beings are the ones who raise the question of meaning. The meaning of our lives arises because we do not naturally live our lives meaningfully. We naturally fall into a life dominated and dictated by the Other/They. Something will need to change if a life of everydayness is to become an authentically lived life. The underlying fear and anxiety of everydayness can lead us to search for something different. One possibility is that meaning arises as we have a mystical encounter in facing the nothingness of death. We courageously accept the project of living by living with the shadow of death in every decision we make. Another possibility is that meaning arises as we live our lives and accepting full responsibility for our decisions. Some truth may reside in both possibilities.

Existentialists are aware of the scientific approach to humanity that merges humanity with nature. Humanity is a complex entity within a system of entities that are in relation to each other. Being is simply there. Existentialists will want to distinguish humanity from such generalized Being. The appearance of Being has an absurd quality to it. It has no reason to be, it has no meaning, and it has no purpose. It is undifferentiated and meaningless massiveness. Something is simply there. We might think of it as the ontological shock that there is something rather than nothing. Such questions do not arise with the inanimate universe or even with low level biological life. Such questions arise only with the appearance of the human being. The development of consciousness required the pre-existence of Being, so the human being arises out of the generalized stuff that is already there. We are the ones who raise the question of why we are here, of what our destiny might be, and what our role might be in the world. We did not ask to be born. We simply are – and are not. The contingency of human existence is such that our “being” is not determined. We create our unique mode of being in a way no other being in the world can claim to do. We must bear this responsibility that our freedom has been placed upon us.[10]

The only possibility of finding fulfillment, of finding the true self, is outside the system. This will require becoming aware of the system and its requirements. One becomes aware of the dissolution of the self toward which the system entices us. It will mean awareness of the ways in which the system has shaped us. Being a self means separation from everything else while also belonging to that at which it looks. The self-world polarity is the basis for the subject-object structure of reason. Existentialism will resist every attempt to turn a subject into an object. The ontological shock that there is something rather than nothing is matched by the ontological shock that contained within Being is the possibility of non-being. Existentialism wants us to face this nothingness and the threat of meaninglessness, which would mean the destruction of the structure of Being. The only way of dealing with the threat lies in the courage of taking it upon oneself. Finitude is unintelligible without nonbeing. To be something is to be finite. We anticipate that end. To be aware of moving toward death, we must look out over our finite being and move beyond it, imagining infinity. The notion of infinite directs the mind to experience its unlimited potential. The fact that we are never satisfied with any stage of our finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold us, although finitude is our destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to Being. Thus, awareness of finitude is anxiety. Such a mood is ontological. Time is the central category of finitude, negatively suggesting the transitoriness of everything and positively suggesting the creative character of the temporal process. Time unities the anxiety of transitoriness and the courage of a self-affirming present. [11]

One difficulty in the journey of self-discovery is that human beings are so open to the world into which they have been thrown by birth that they naturally absorb what they experience. The self of the individual identifies with Others in a way that becomes a prison.[12] The question will become how we gain access to the unique self we are when the dominant forces that determine who we are derive from They/Others.

One path to the self is that of feeling or mood. All moods have intentionality in that they refer so some state of affairs beyond themselves or situations in which the person participates. A mood attunes us to the environment and is an awareness and response to the situation we face.  Emotional life is shot through with intelligence. It is thought that does not yet have words. A feeling or mood is our receptivity to our experience of the world. They become signs of our welcome or rejection of what we discover in our world. We can try the role of a spectator of the world around us and never participate. However, contemplation is an intimate mode of participation in the world.[13] Contemplation is a form of looking that receives an object into oneself. It transcends inward and external. It arises from anxious self-questioning of the relation between me and my life.[14] Fear is a mood that discloses who we are in a unique way. One experiences fear of something that is out there. Such anxiety is near to awe in that it opens our eyes to the wonder of Being.[15] This mood underlies most of ordinary encounters with the world. Existentialism will want to elevate the experience of a mood into significant place in philosophical reflection. It will disclose the phenomenon of our everydayness. Existentialism is confident that deep down in every person there dwells an anxiety that he or she become alone in the world, forgotten, overlooked among this huge household of millions upon millions. One keeps this anxiety at bay by seeing many people around one who are bound to one as kin and friends. Nevertheless, the anxiety is there all the same. One dare hardly think what it would feel like if one could take away all this anxiety.[16]

We are not now whom we shall be, for we create ourselves with every decision we make. Our anguish or dread over this reality reveals our fragility. Being is everywhere, but our lack of Being, our lack of the fullness we desire, haunts us. This emptiness of the future is our anguish. Our freedom is how this emptiness of the future enters the world. Anguish is my consciousness of this empty future. Consciousness of my freedom also generates this anguish. I may await myself in the future, but my anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment. My anguish is a distraction from my responsibility for my future and an attempt to disarm the past of its threat to imprison me.[17]

This discussion of mood changes significantly if we consider the experience of love, the aesthetic, and even sheer sense of wonder that this life can stimulate. I am struck by the laughter, joy, humor, and happiness of which human beings are capable. The truth will confront us with discomfort, but sometimes, we receive it into our lives, and it brings joy. When we think of the struggle involved in finding our place in life, finding the unique reason for which we are here, the serious ethical question of the manner of relating to the natural world and to the world of people, we can still pause for expressive enjoyment, exuberance, pleasure, fun, and amusement. I would imagine sexual pleasure would be part of this discussion. When such moments are genuine and spontaneous, we do so for no deeper reason than the desire to do them. Given the structure of existentialism, one must show how each of these experiences of our average everydayness descends into inauthenticity. I do not think that would be difficult to do, as appreciation of the beautiful becomes obsessive possession, as the sense of wonder descends into unproductive daydreaming, and as enjoyment descends into the shallow pursuits of hedonism. We repeatedly know the original joy in life, joy in the richness, breadth, and beauty of creation and in each new day, joy in the illuminations of the life of the spirit, power from action within the order of community life, and a turning to others and participation in their joys and sorrows. We have achieved astonishing things and known periods of high cultural blossoming.

In his journal entry for 1834-6, Kierkegaard said he no interest in his theological examinations, suspecting he engages them to make his father happy. He desires clarity for “what I am to do.” He wants knowledge, but only because it must precede action. He wants to know his destiny. He wants to know what Deity wants of him. He wants “to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.” He will find it primarily in becoming an author. He thinks one must know oneself before one will learn the path of life one must choose. He refers to people who, because of “spiritual laziness,” satisfy themselves with the crumbs of the tables of others. He starts seeing himself as different from “ordinary” people and not interested in “practical life.” He commits himself to an inward journey, and thereby to what he knows will be a battle. In one aphorism, he notes, “It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.”

The primacy of the individual and the struggle involved in a human life is the primary concern. This path rejects a philosophy that absorbs the individual into a system. It also means rejection of the scientific and mathematical method as providing a model for way of existing in the world as an authentic human being.^[18] To be oneself and to remain oneself is a trickier matter than most people think. We are involved in situations within the world that presses upon us from within as well as from without. Our ontological bond with the world precedes our knowledge of it. We are in a unified whole that we might call world or universe. Yet, such a notion of the involved self in its social world leads to an indeterminate notion of self. Science addresses the universally human, but philosophy must address the individual in a way that assists people in their chosen way of existing in the world.[19] Existentialists will keep pushing us to engage in the tricky journey to know ourselves, believing that such knowledge will yield the meaningful life we seek.

Human systems provide for some segments of society that will assist individuals in their journey of self-discovery, the family and religious organizations primary among them. The hope contained here is that there is the possibility, even for the oppressor, to start anew. Human beings are not defined by their yesterdays or defined by the roles they have in the system. It involves the dawning of light upon our darkness. It involves a new birth. In contrast to the autopoietic nature of the system, one becomes tuned into the pneumapoietic movement toward respect and mutual regard. Within the Christian perspective, the way of life represented by Jesus was a challenge to the experience of exploitation within both the Jewish and Roman systems. His path was to refuse to dehumanize those who had power. He violated purity legislation, prophesied the destruction of the Second Temple, healed, cast out demons, taught people rather than gather Jewish armies against Rome, and peacefully confronted the violence brought by the Romans. The way of liberation is always the way of the cross, a death to the patterns of life exalted by the system. Liberation comes through a new way of life. He was among the oppressed but refused to allow that oppression to define him. The story of liberating the those who operated within the system as oppressors could begin with looking closely at the Apostle Paul, as well as his concern in his letters to live the calling Christians have received in their union with Christ. Reconciliation of oppressed and oppressor will involve both justice and forgiveness.[20]

The intellectual rift between individual and community that many people seem to experience needs a path toward healing.  The loss of meaning structures leaves participants in modern society open to the threat of isolation and meaninglessness. One is no longer at home in society, the cosmos, or with oneself. Social systems exact a high price on the level of meaning one experiences by participation in those systems. Social architecture reflects the urge human beings have toward meaning, purpose, creativity, and wholeness. In short, it reflects the longing for human flourishing. Our desire to have our individuality respected by the institutions of society, even though such respect is not forthcoming, has the balancing desire to participate meaningfully in the various aspects of institutional life. Such meaningful participation that the individual discovers and brings to the roles one fulfills within the system has anticipatory healing power as we confront the ambiguities of life.^[21]

Religion that subsumes itself to the economic or political system becomes a problem or obstacle that one will need to overcome to find freedom, purpose, and the unique calling or vocation one has in this one life one has the privilege of living. However, religion can aid persons to move from poiesis into praxis. Religion offers the possibility of a transcendent immanence that points toward a new way of life lived within a society. This will involve a confrontation with the system of communications in which we find ourselves and a new pattern of life in, with, and for this world.

Secularization involves the progressive reality loss of traditional religious interpretations of the world. Modernity smashes traditional institutions and traditional structures of meaning. It gives participants freedom, but also produces a condition in which the individual is deprived of stable, secure ties with other human beings and thus lacks meaning that provides adequate direction for life. Persons who live with their faith traditions within the blending encouraged by modernity can feel on the defensive. What they hold dear can seem implausible to their neighbors. In that sense, within the world created by modernity, all faith traditions seem implausible. It creates a crisis of credibility. Faith traditions become a colony within the larger culture created by modernity. Such a situation can generate uncertainty among individual adherents and the felt need among faith traditions to adjust to the new cultural reality. It becomes a matter of faith traditions accommodating themselves to a form of religious free enterprise. A faith tradition can refuse to accommodate the pluralistic situation of modern life and profess old images of the social order as if nothing has happened. It can engage in massive resistance to pluralism. The fundamental problem for faith traditions is how to keep going in a cultural setting that no longer takes for granted their definitions of reality.^[22]

Modern life opens the possibility of a purely secular experience of the world. The secular setting of the North Atlantic can take the form of devaluing faith commitments and the cumulative tradition because they think it is inseparable from mindless or unreflective external conformity. It contributes to the desacralization or disenchantment of the world. Such a world has no interruption. Rather, the continuous experience of space and time is central to the secular experience. Yet, the secular person may well experience his or her own terror in the face of a history that is full of suffering and evil that has no meaning or purpose.^[23] Secularity applies to processes inside the mind. Faith traditions are on the margins of the present cultural and political battle. Faith traditions had a place at the table of reasonable discourse, but that place is increasingly questionable.

Within the systems of communication are practices of civility that build upon respect for the worth and dignity of persons. the best prospect for reducing violence and suffering is one that provides minimal rules of mutual respect and mutual benefit as individuals pursue their sense of personal happiness, an approach that relies upon our natural sociality as creatures and therefore the bond of altruism. Such sympathy becomes the basis for the spread of benevolence and justice. Such recognition of the individual expanded to include imagination and feeling. It became a moral imperative to reduce suffering. Within the differentiated systems, such systems invite a discourse among people willing to offer rational disagreement. Some participants will resist participating in such a discourse, but short of dropping out, that will be difficult. The discourse allows for reform movements to correct its oppressive aspects.

Moral reflections are part of the journey toward self-discovery. A code will never adequately capture our moral life. Events have so much variety that we cannot develop a formula that will capture all of them. The good person needs the flexibility to act in the uniqueness of the moment. The plurality of good things for which to strive inevitably leads to a conflict between goods that no formula can resolve. We need training in goodness and a worthy life so that the inevitable conflicts of daily life do not immobilize us. We will still need flexibility and wisdom beyond the rules. Code fixation forgets the goal, such as tolerance and mutual respect, and uses speech codes, for example, as justification for intolerance and disrespect. We need a sense that we have both the horizontal space of relating to others and the vertical space of accountability to a higher order that lifts us to higher dimensions. In Christianity, this would be the eschatological dimension that relativizes all codes and institutions, making it troubling when Christian communities absolutize either. The eschatological dimension moves us to the higher dimension of reconciliation and trust. 

If existentialism is right, the moral life is part of the losing ourselves in the anonymous other, guilt and conscience arising from inauthentic life. The authentic call of conscience is to face one’s life and possibilities. Here is a synoptic awareness of human being in its authentic possibility and its actual disorder.[24] The call is toward leading one’s life apart from fixed moral standards. One thinks through to the end, not for fixed standards, but to find one’s deepest aspirations given the preciousness of time. Since no one has the perspective of God, only I can take responsibility for my life in this time and place. The moral is partial because it does not disclose a way of existing in the world, is evasive because it is motivated by a flight from anxiety, and derivative because the capacity for moral obligation presupposes that one is guilty in one’s very Being. Morality loses its fundamental place in human existence because it is an escape into the universal. 

Most existentialists will question conventional morality as a way of hiding in the Other rather than embracing the full responsibility of the freedom of this moment. Therefore, they will shift the traditional view of moral instruction as guidance that will lead to a full, meaningful, and happy life to a notion of living authentically out of the personal calling and insight one receives, the courage to see anew the inauthentic life one has been leading, and the courage to live our lives in its finitude and movement toward the nullity of death. The traditional view would look upon sin as crossing the line established by accepted and officially recognized codes that could lead to persons to their own prison and self-destruction. Not yet thinking of criticism, we should note that this shift in language is not a denial of moral concern, for authenticity becomes the new moral compass and inauthenticity becomes the new sin from which one needs liberation.

Authentic life arises from morally conscientious individuality. This moral posture would provide corrective for inauthentic selfhood and losing oneself in the anonymous other. Morally conscientious individuals lift themselves above the prevailing expectations of the group to do justice to the Other by considering a higher standard than what anonymous others find respectable. Morally conscientious individuals do not drift along impelled by the social tides. They subject their prejudices and public opinion alike to critical scrutiny. Authentic life may open the possibility of authentic co-existence. Authentic individuality opens one up to others in a new way and makes liberating solicitude possible. A relation of authentic care in which one can help others become transparent to themselves in their care and to become free for it. Moral conscience separates one from anonymous others. It also enables the individual to treat others as ends in themselves beyond the horizon of their public roles and situations.  Authentic life, understood in this way, does not isolate the individual from others. Crucial to genuine moral conscience is the refusal to lose oneself in the dictates of the anonymous other. It involves willingness to take one’s stand against what is fashionable, to criticize public opinion for the sake of the community, to judge what is right beyond the horizon of the taken for granted. That one thinks for oneself does not guarantee wisdom. However, the habit of critical reflection puts an obstacle in the way of banal evil. The presence of moral conscience attests to authentic individuation and freedom. 

If existentialism is right, the development of a worldview with its assertions and opinions about the world can lead to a dehumanizing relation to the world. One develops assertions or opinions about the world. The worldview develops for some as they thematize their understanding and interpretation of the world. In these ways, the world becomes an object and they become the subject. They have separated themselves from a world that they inhabit and from a world that is already within them. This subject-object split is the source of the experience of alienation from the world, especially as embodied in other persons. Less authentic information leads to greater aggression, while authentic information will lead to lessening unilateral judgments. The most common mode of thinking is calculative. We use it in our everyday activities. Such thinking is in the subject-object pattern, for what we think about is an object to us, standing outside us. The direction of such thinking is toward handling, using, and manipulating the object, incorporating it within our instrumental world. Technology is a sophisticated use of such thinking. Theoretical science reduces the elements of utility and concern to the point where the scientist becomes a spectator. The knowledge we gain in such thinking is objective. We transcend or rise above what we know as an object and master it. We gain control over our environment, even if all we can is predict the course of events. Existentialism is among the primary ways of resisting the dehumanizing element in technical reason. Since cognitive reasoning aims at truth, the existential-ontological reason finds verification only in a life-process. Although this approach can lead us to embrace the risk contained in life, it is also threatened by meaninglessness.[25]

If existentialism is right, language itself can lead to an inauthentic experience with others and with the world. A distinctive path to self-knowledge is our capacity for language. We engage each other in discourse and tell each other stories. Narrative is the unique capacity of language for people to express themselves. Yet, our talk is often nothing more than idle talk.  Talking is the way we significantly articulate our life in the world.  It is important for hearing, listening, and keeping silent to take place.  If we want to discover the passion of the other person, we need stillness and stillness so that we may discover the secret of the other.[26] Our everyday and average life as determined by our interaction with others indicates the alienation of our own human nature.  Idle talk is the everyday disclosure of relationship to others as conversation.   Instead of disclosing one another, it closes us off to each other.  It does not take into one's self the other.  It removes understanding from true relating to the world. Our desire to understand is little more than shallow curiosity. Curiosity is the everyday disclosure of others as sight. This act sees only to see, not understand. It seeks novelty, is restless movement to a variety of entities, and does not dwell anywhere. Our interpretation often yields nothing more than ambiguity. Ambiguity is the everyday disclosure of our relation to others as interpretation.  All action is seen as unimportant. The result is that we have fallen into the crowd and experience our random thrownness into life. The self is lost in the They-self. We lose the self in the babble of the crowd. 

In these ways, our sense of alienation belongs to our everyday life.  We have fallen from the true possibility of self. We have fallen to the demands, dreams, and expectation of others.  We live with the temptation of becoming only what others desire, rather than living out of the unique possibility that belongs to us.  In fact, we can deceive ourselves that such a life is true life, rather than alienation.  True life hides itself from us.  Yet, far from being separated from ourselves, we are entangled in ourselves.  Thus, we fall into everyday life.  The possibility of true living blinds our understanding.

I have shame of myself before the Other. “Once bitten, twice shy” is a saying that displays the intuition of the power of the Other. Negative appraisals of us carry more weight than positive appraisals. Yet, I am so open to the world, so with the Other, that I need the Other to become my true self. The Other occurs in the gestures, expressions, acts and conducts. The Other is the self that is not me. We depend on the Other in our being. In the look of the Other, we are seen. I am the object at which the Other is looking at and evaluating. I offer myself to the appraisal of the Other. [27]

If the mood of fear, the desire to understand, and the capacity for narrative are essential ways that human beings exist, then what unites them is that human beings care for the world in which they are and which is within them. This form of care for the world means that epistemology is not the primary question of philosophy. Rather, ontology is the primary issue. That which is true is that which has disclosed itself, created a clearing, and giving space and time for self and others. Truth is not a matter of scientific calculation of objects in the world and truth is not a matter of developing propositions that correspond to the world, that are part of a coherent system, or that contain a pragmatic truth. The truth we seek, the meaningful life we seek, is through disclosure. We are the ones who uncover and disclose. 

Our ordinary, everyday, average experience of the world, through which the mood of fear, the rational attempt to understand, interpret, and develop assertions regarding the world, and the use of language with idle talk, express shallow curiosity, and be ambiguous as we can, eventually becomes a source of dissatisfaction. Our need for transcendence will arise out of our dissatisfaction.[28] The temptation to surrender the question asked in our existence is to surrender the answer to someone else, such as a religious sect or a political ideology. Delegating this responsibility discloses our alienation from our Being.

In his journal entry for 1840-5, Kierkegaard points to the difficulty of the inward journey.

 

It is quite true that philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.

 

The suspicion that we cannot get into a place or position in the flow of life to properly rest and look backward to gain understanding of our lives is a lively one for most existentialists. He may be referring to Hegel, who contemplated the past to show the development of the world process. Such a philosophy means we gain understanding of our lives too late. We are alive now and must properly live our lives while we live. His point is that Hegel has not considered the ethical dimension of the future. We need to choose to live forward in the direction of our calling or vocation. We will fill our lives with what meaning we can. If we have the Hegelian glance backward, we seem for a moment to be an existing individual with an ethical orientation toward the future.[29] In Concept of Anxiety (1844), he says that our anxiety is over the possibility contained in our freedom. We may leap toward authenticity, but most of us leap into the inauthenticity of everydayness, which leads to our guilt and shame. Too many rush headlong into life, continue to rush forward, and yet never find life. The rush of modern life does not give one pause to reflect upon how a religious existence pervades and interweaves the outward existence. He seems to think that denying the Infinite and Eternal is a way of saying “goodnight to all meaning in life.”

Sartre may be right in his stress upon discovering meaning in amid the everydayness of our lives. We do not know our calling or vocation inherently, as if it were our predetermined destiny. Most of us find our calling with great difficulty. We make mistakes before getting it right. We may discover talents there were not in our skill set at age 25. Contrary to the secular mysticism of Heidegger, most of us do not get epiphanies. We get a whisper or faint urge. That is all. It barely deserves the name “call.” It is up to us to do the work of discovery and connect it to an answer.

What unifies mood, understanding, and language is our care for the world. The world is not a separate thing from us, but we are intimately related within the world and the world is within us. Dread of our end in death arises because that about which we care so much will no more be with us. Death is the loss of that about which we care. That in which we have invested our lives, such as a cause or people, will continue to feel the influence of our lives. We will still be with them. Our dread is that we will not be with them. Yet, as we come-face-to-face with nothingness as our future, we increase the possibility that we will have the courage to live out of authenticity. 

The temporality of human existence discloses itself as existentialism will look upon an authentic way of existing as an event of anticipatory resoluteness. Anticipatory resoluteness arises because there is a future now. Time is what it means for the human being to be. Anticipatory resoluteness shows itself as being toward one’s possibilities. We can be “toward” anything because there is a future. The future is meaningful to one because one goes toward the future, and therefore the future is meaningful. Awareness and consciousness presuppose the basic attitudes of living toward a future or from a past. The past is meaningful because I am its result, and the future is meaningful because I am coming toward it. The present is meaningful because the present is the place in which something occurs and in which I carry out an action. The present is making present and carrying out an action makes the present significant. Care is aware of its possibilities, it is already in the world, and it is alongside the entities it discovers in friendship with others and concern for things in the world. Such an understanding of care is possible because of its grounding in time. Authentic life anticipates the future and moves toward it as its own possibility. In authentic living, the present becomes the moment of vision. It refers to the resolute rapture with which the person carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the situation as objects of concern. Resoluteness, in a moment of vision, looks at the situation with equanimity that are possible in the potential for the wholeness of Being as disclosed in anticipation of death. The meaning of our lives becomes the expectation of death. When death occurs, it can only put its seal upon the life we have lived. In this resolute decision, we can make death our own. Our attitude toward death anticipates the final note our lives will play. Facing the present mood of fear, anxiety, anguish, and despair generated by our death with intentionality and courage opens the way for a light to be shed upon the way we choose to exist in the world. The unity of temporality makes humanity possible. Here is a clearing where light shines. Our destiny is nothing other than our resolute moment of vision handing down what our heritage has handed down to us. Authentic Being unto death leads to the appreciation of one’s finite freedom. It leads to recognition of the compelling situation of the actual historical world and to urgent commitment to what is unique about one’s way of being here. Only as a member of a community with a shared heritage does one seek to own up to one’s fate in relation to a wider destiny that we all face. 

Yet, we could look upon death in another way. To say that death is absurd as the inevitable ending is to say that life is void of meaning, or that if meaning exists humanity is unable to know it. From the perspective of human existence, human beings simply need to embrace its truth. The contingent quality of human life has no external justification. The universe is unintelligent and immoral. The meaning and values that consume so much of human energy have no solid external component. Human beings need meaning, significance, and purpose, a need that confronts the unreasonable silence of the world. Thus, the absurdity of human life is inescapable. [30]

For these reasons, it may well be that we need to remove death from consideration of the ontological structure of the human being. I cannot discover my death or wait for it or arm myself against it or adopt an attitude toward it that will open the way for authenticity. One can adopt many attitudes toward death, some helpful and some not so much. Death and birth are facts. They come to us from outside. Yet, we still have the choice of freely giving to our being a meaning for which we are responsible.

What does it say about us that, despite the nothingness of the end toward which all of us move, despite our loss of all that about which we care and love, we have the capacity for gratitude for having lived, open ourselves to love and friendship, stop what we are doing to gaze upon beauty, and stand in awe of the mystery that surrounds us and resides within us? It seems obvious to me that each of these further constitutive aspects of human existence unite around Being as care in that each expresses the care each of us has for the world into which we have been thrown.

In fact, what if the end toward which we move is not nullity, void, or nothingness? I am thinking only of the phenomenon of the human at this point. We received the gift of life because of togetherness. Not only was sexual desire present, but someone nurtured us through the initial stages of our lives when we were dependent upon the care of others. No one could substitute themselves so that we could receive that gift. Only I can receive the gift. In an analogous way, the end toward which we all move is an end only we can experience. No one can take my place. However, as we received the gift of life, we will surrender our lives as well as the things and people about which we have cared and loved. That is what causes our fear, anxiety, or dread. We have cared and loved our world. Our world has touched us profoundly. We do not want to lose that about which we have cared, but we have experienced such losses throughout our lives. Death is the final surrender not only of our lives, but of that about which we have cared and loved. However, even in death, togetherness is present. What we have given to others will continue in them. We have given money, time, talent, and passion, to causes and people. What we have given will continue in them. We are social beings, we are Beings-in-the-world, in birth, in the living of our lives, and in our deaths. 

How can we give to Being a meaning that is intelligible for us? Such questions have behind them a felt need to devote ourselves to understanding our lives and experiences as fully possible. We can embark upon this enquiry only if some fullness of life is our starting point in a way that also assumes relation, togetherness with, and the intersubjective dimension of human life. The underlying reality of human life is the presence of a community. We concern ourselves with questions of Being because we have a consciousness of the underlying unity that ties us others. They are fellow-travelers and fellow-creatures.[31]

The fulfillment of our finite life requires participation in that which transcends the self and the system, which philosophy as called the Eternal, and therefore, in theology, life with God. Awareness of our finitude includes awareness that death is ahead of us. Facing this end, we still have a feeling for life as we pursue the course of a human life to its end. Heidegger describes this process quite well. Life lived in time did have to be broken by the separation of past, present, and future. We have our self and identity only in anticipation of the totality of our lives. The self forms in relation to that which is other than itself. Yet, its self-seeking is such that remains with itself. Our now goes with us through the changes of time. Our sense of time is participation in eternity and awareness of the division and opposition of the moments of time. The end of this tension in a human life is death. Our finitude becomes death for us.

The notion of the Infinite remained an important part of the philosophical tradition through the early 1800s. Descartes could say that as he became aware of the finite, he had intuitive awareness of the Infinite. He could see that his finite life was part of the Infinite totality. Hegel developed a notion of the Infinite embracing the finite. Kierkegaard speak of the anxiety of modernity arising from being cut off from the Infinite.

Heidegger and Sartre reflect on time while dropping its connection with the eternal. Yet, we experience life with an anticipation of its wholeness. Hearing a melody, which has a sequence of notes, we hear the whole. Speech is a sequence of syllables, but we hear it as a whole. In an analogous way, duration occurs in our attention to the movement of time and in the movement of every ordered series. The view of duration as the synthesis of what is separated within the flow of time is significant from a psychological perspective as well as its application to non-human creatures. The being of a creature relates to its duration, and therefore, every creature participates in divine eternity.[32]

Let us consider the limited duration we experience in time. Limited duration is self-evident in the phenomena of the world. We can measure time only based on the notion of limited duration. We develop our identity in the course of the time we have. Even self-identity has its root in a notion of limited duration. A notion of limited duration is decisive for the independent existence of creatures. Life is present for us as we sense duration against the background of indefinite totality. Eternity represents unlimited duration. Thus, our experience of limited duration is anticipation of the unlimited duration of eternity. Our experience of time is participation in eternity in the sense that we experience the limited duration that anticipates the unlimited duration of Eternity. We receive hints of the contours of Eternity through recollection and expectation.  Expectation takes precedence as we anticipate a future that completes time. An analogy might help. You hear a song, not simply in its individual notes, but as you think toward an ending the song has not yet reached. Our experience of time separates past from future, while the present bridges time in a way that offers limited duration to the individual. Continued objective individual duration in recollection and expectation corresponds to the duration we find in the Eternal. 

Since the system dehumanizes everyone, we find our freedom in finding our identity in that which transcends the system, and therefore in God. 

I shift now to consideration of the liberal-democratic institutions in which I live.

Genuine pluralism in the public square urges opposing views to offer rational interpretations of their positions but does not assume this will lead to cognitive agreement. We accept the reality of difference. Co-ordination and co-operation are possible and rational even in the face of a disagreement of facts or values. The penchant for consensus is the last stand in an ethos of democracy of a pre-democratic insistence on social co-ordination that is unwilling to let people go their own way into a social diversification that affiliates each to such kindred spirits as circumstances may offer. Such an approach legitimates diversity, offers the reality of restrained dissonance that leads to constructive interaction, accepts different in opinion, evaluation, custom, and modes of action, and respects the autonomy of others that goes beyond tolerance. Such an approach looks to incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will view as perfect but with which all can live. We live in an imperfect world. We have limited resources at our disposal. Consensus is unattainable. In a world of pervasive disagreement, we must take recourse to damage control. The way forward is pluralism.

Our conceptions of things are always provisional. A correct perception of things requires getting all the properties of a thing right, and this is not something any of us can do. We are led back to the thesis of the great idealist philosophers, such as Spinoza, Hegel, Bradley, and Royce, that human knowledge inevitably falls short of the perfect, the Idea or the Absolute. Our knowledge of the objects in the world is deficient both in completeness and correctness. This epistemic modesty is crucial if we have any hope of maintaining the idea of America.

I would include myself among those who think that the best prospect for reducing violence and suffering is one that provides minimal rules of mutual respect and mutual benefit as individuals pursue their sense of personal happiness, an approach that relies upon our natural sociality as creatures and therefore the bond of altruism. While associated with libertarian political theory, John Rawls and Thomas Friedman, as well as Francis Fukuyama, have varying forms of this argument. Such a view of liberal democracy builds within itself the possibility of reform. It does so through its encouragement of real conversation that encourages participants to have humility toward their views and openness to learning from the views of others. It distributes power over a broad range of levels of government and institutions of civil society. This regard for the individual becomes the basis for the legitimacy of all institutions.

The problem is that violence continues, likely because the liberty promoted in the theory eventually becomes morally unstable. 

Among the frustrations of the revolutionary mindset that derives from Marx is that liberal democracy has shown a capacity for reform. The anti-slavery movement arose precisely because individuals perceived the moral failure of slavery: it denied to a race of people their right to express their worth and dignity and develop their plan of life. Although many fought to preserve the union of the states, without the moral agitation generated in newspapers and churches, the war to end slavery would not have occurred. The Civil Rights movement continued the expansion of rights. The point is that the system absorbed the need for change. Even some of the items in the Communist Manifesto, such as a graduated income tax, public education, and child labor laws, were incorporated into the liberal democracy system.

Yet, tensions in free societies exist.

Free markets produce negative consequences for some people who will respond with some form of resentment. Further, the rules of fully free market do not guarantee allegiance to the common interest. Yet, undercutting liberty through increased central control in favor of enforced common interest can also threaten desired freedom. 

It can be hostile to diversity. It can encourage one group to build its sense of moral integrity by projecting evil onto the other, reinforcing its conviction of its purity and self-righteousness by waging violent persecution or war against the other. Any conception of purity can make the move of scapegoating, in which we can affirm our righteousness by our violent combat against those projected as evil. 

Supplementing liberty with our natural sociality and the hope for altruism would also appear to be a weak bond. Even the attempt to ground mutual respect in the recognition that human beings are rational agents deserving of such respect does not seem to be a strong enough basis for the reduction of violence. 

Our sense justice is a possibility, but it can give way to the cause of the month. Further, the stronger our sense of injustice, the more powerfully will be the pull toward the dialectic of sacred killing. As Nietzsche pointed out, the hatred by the weak for the strong can be a powerful motivation that we mask with affirmations of love and justice.

Simple love of human beings can become contempt, hatred, and aggression as we face the reality of human shortcomings. It can lead to despotic socialism. 

Exploitation within the liberal-democratic system calls for reform of the social setting for those exploited. The obvious example of the removal of slavery and the legislation rooted in prejudice is before us as students of American history. Such changes in those involved in the political, economic, and legal system are part of what this system had to do as it perpetuated itself. The environment of the system, us as a people, changed significantly enough that the system needed to change. 

Liberation involves freedom from that which constrains choice and limits expression.[33] Liberation is the freedom to discover and express one’s identity, using the limited resources one has available to do that. Such freedom is the capacity to weigh alternatives, make decisions, and assume responsibility for the decisions one makes. Such freedom becomes complex, whether we think of our immediate neighbors, who may express their freedom on their property that interferes with what my freedom, or the complex arrangements of the international economic and political system. Competing expressions of freedom and liberation can mean little more than a pursuit for power. 

While it is easy to think that those who exploit deserve only vilification and portrayal as evil, I want to suggest another path. Those who exploit, unless they are sociopathic, have the need to find their true and authentic self. A liberated oppressor remains free but uses their freedom in a separate way as they respond to others. They adopt a new of living that involves them in loving and respecting others. They will make space for others rather than restrict, control, and dominate others. The endless cycle of the oppressed defeating the oppressor, the elevation to power leading to their transformation into oppressors themselves, expressed so well Animal Farm, by George Orwell, can be broken only as oppressed and oppressor refuse to the play the game and deal with each other as people in need of liberation. Such a path moves toward reconciling and redeeming relationships, so that foes become friends. Helping oppressors, who have power, to see the cost involved in their repression, is a liberating act toward the oppressor. What is needed is a new way of life that, from a Christian perspective, is nothing less than aligning ourselves with the coming rule of God. Such vision involves seeing that the ontological value of the person is not affected by the position one holds in the social hierarchy of the moment. Sin imposes patterns of meaning and value that are imposed by that hierarchy. Both oppressed and oppressor are not free and thus both need liberation. The path is different for each, but the goal is the same for both – genuine community. Such a transformative path becomes a creative passion for the possible. It can lead people toward new discoveries of the possibilities for human life together. Looked at in this way, oppression is part of human nature. All of us are oppressors and need liberation, if only we could see the ways in which we oppress others. 

The task of liberation is for each of us. The attempt to secure one’s own sense of self within the system sets up a path of human interaction and response within those autopoietic models that causes oppression within those systems to endure. 

The issue in exploiting settings is that even the oppressor is isolated from the movement toward discovering the true and authentic self. Oppressors need liberation from their dysfunctional self. Since outward actions reflect the inner self, changing just the environment of the oppressor will repress the dysfunction rather than liberate the self. The way of hope for the oppressor involves embracing a new way of life that involves embracing a person as person, engaging their personhood in a community of other persons. The oppressor needs to discover a new pattern of life. The appeal for the oppressor is what they must gain by a new pattern of living. Liberation addresses the underlying issues for what they are and offers a holistic alternative. Our instinct is to attribute blame and tell others how they need to act better. The underlying issues that provoke people to respond to life in certain ways is a critical issue. Oppressors do not lack material necessities or apparent freedoms. It is easy to miss where they might need liberation. Since they perceive themselves to be more rational and more integrated than they are because they are playing their part in the system and may be doing well within them. The system also promises substantive resolution. The appearance of community becomes an opiate that numbs one from the realities of the oppressed and oppressor situations. The promises of self and community provided by the system is always an illusion. The way forward, which is the way of hope, comes through a reconstituted unity of self in the context of diversity of other realized selves. 

If the Christian vision of the highest good as communion, mutual giving and receiving, as part of the eschatological banquet that we are to actualize in the present becomes a possible ethical motivation, we can see a way out of the dialectic and dilemma. We may need to divest ourselves of power or seek to liberate others. Alternatively, we may need to acquire power and liberate ourselves by dismantling social structures.

 

 

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[1] (Oden 2019), Chapter 1.

[2] (Camus, The Rebel 1951), Foreword by Herbert Read.

[3] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 272

[4] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter III.

[5] (Oden 2019) Chapter 2.

[6] (Tillich 1951), Volume I, Preface.

[7] (Tillich 1951), Volume I, Introduction, 4, 5, 6, 12, 49

[8] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter II, 50, 51.

[9] (Macquarrie 1966) Part One, Chapter III, 54-74, Chapter IV, 77

[10] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Introduction

[11] (Tillich 1951) Vol I, 163-203.

[12] (Heidegger 1962, 1927) Much of what I describe as existentialist is from Heidegger.

[13] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter VI.

[14] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter VII

[15] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 89.

[16] Journal of Kierkegaard, 1846-7.

[17] (Sartre 1943, 1956), Part One, Chapter One.

[18] (Jaspers, Reason and Existenz 1935)

[19] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Introduction

[20] (Oden 2019), chapters 3-6.

[21] Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology, 1951, Volume III, 275-82).

[22] (Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion 1967), (Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christiam Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America 1961). (Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural 1969). 

[23] (Eliade 1957); (Smart 1996).

[24] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 92.

[25] (Tillich 1951), Vol. I, 94-105.

[26] (Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin 1844,, 1980), Section II.

[27] (Sartre 1943, 1956), Part Three, Chapter One and Two.

[28] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter III

[29] (Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler: or, A Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays. 1846), Chapter IV

[30] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 27-28, Letters to a German Friend.

[31] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960), Vol II, Chapter I.

[32] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990), 79-82.

[33] (Oden 2019), Part III.