Metaphysical and Ontological Meditations

 

Metaphysical and Ontological Meditations

Human intellectual reflections take various forms, all of which arise out of our wonderment and curiosity regarding our experience of the world, our desire to understand a world in which the capacity of our minds can make us feel like aliens,[1] and apply what we have learned to our pursuit of human flourishing. I want to consider the “something more” that many people feel they need in their lives. The evolving complexity of the human mind has meant that an archeological exploration of biological instinct will not be sufficient to understand human beings. Such instincts for sexual reproduction, for territory, responding to threats to one’s vital interests with fear leading to flight or aggression leading to violence, and thus the struggle to survive, even if satisfied, are not sufficient to the flourishing of a human life. When human beings become dissatisfied with meeting basic needs for survival, the boredom everydayness can set in. The brokenness of human experience, the fragmented and isolated withdrawal from meaningful connections with others, is always an option. Such feeling can also lead one beyond the archeology of us biological animals and to a teleological consideration of who human beings can be.[2] Such feeling can also lead one to consider what it means to lead a happy, satisfying, meaningful, purposeful life. These considerations are the source of the aesthetic expression of humanity, appreciating and creating beauty for its own sake. They are the source of ethical and moral norms that balances a personally flourishing life and social cohesion, leading to reflection on the virtuous life. They are the source of the desire to make intimate relationships, especially family, to be a faithful and lasting relationship that builds character. They are the source of religious experience and spirituality, the feeling of the worthiness of that which transcends individuality, that becomes an ultimate concern. Such a desire for something more involves seeing that this individual human life is a significant and meaningful part of a system of relations. The part has a meaningful connection to the whole. I will suggest that this desire for a cosmic connection, the feeling many individuals have to connect to something greater than themselves for them to discover meaning and purpose, is a valid desire that finds verification in the world of human experience. Meaning is in the world (insofar as we are describing the goal and ultimate value of living systems: viability), in the mind (insofar as we’re describing all other proximate human goals and values) and emerging from physical matter (but not reducible to it). Emergence refers to how something more arises out of something less. It suggests random relationships providing the basis for an emergence of something surprising and increasing complexity. This view allows for novelty and surprising arrangements of complexity. The universe had a meaning before the emergence of self-consciousness, if we understanding meaning as each part of the universe being a significant part of the whole. With self-consciousness, with the human mind, a being exists who can recognize these connections, describe the relationship mathematically, and consider their own part in being a significant member of the system. Our wonderment and curiosity are an important beginning, but it leads to recognition that truth, goodness, and beauty transcend our subjective experience of the world and the working of our minds. This recognition gives greater specificity to the hunger for “something more.” 

The road to understanding the real is not easy or direct, for it has many aspects that require different avenues of approach that reflect themselves in the desire to know. The rich texture of the real world involves avenues of affectivity or feeling, intersubjectivity, recognizing that no one cannot approach the fullness of truth without other people, narrativity, the stories by which people experience their world, beauty, which lures persons to know, and theory, the provenance of scientific and mathematical precision. 

We will need to be attentive to two realms of human experience. First, theory is one way persons express their desire to know. The objectivity of science depends not only on its mathematical reasoning, which is purely formal and algorithmic, but also relies upon its reference to empirically perceived data in terms of which the algorithm is interpreted. The twin pillars of objective knowledge are mathematical deductive reasoning and inductive generalization from direct observation. Technology is the application of scientific theory to the practical accomplishment of human purposes. Its advance is built into the structure and method of modern empirical science. Laws of nature can be used and to serve the needs of human life and comfort. Second, in contrast, religion is inconceivable apart from feeling, the substance of religious experience being the sense of an elusive and sacred mystery toward which one is grasping, and to which one is surrendering worshipfully. This awareness of both realms of human experience carries with it the anti-reductionistic connotation that the totality is governed by principles that differ from those pertaining to the parts that compose it.  

Thus, I am moving beyond the model of the natural sciences for this study. The question we need to face is whether the mindless, purposeless, self-originating, self-enclosed universe of naturalism or materialism is enough to explain the presence of this form of rationality. Theories based upon the model of science, isolated from other ways humans interact with the world, tend to be implausible and lead to bad science. Part of their inadequacy is that they avoid interesting questions and must expend much energy defending themselves against the charge of irrelevancy. Its reductionism is well-known.[3] Reductionism always involves the genetic fallacy. The true nature of the real is to be sought in its most mature and developed forms rather than in its basic elements. Religion testifies to those who have felt, beneath all sensible appearances, an elusive mystery that grounds, embraces, and transcends self and world, a mystery that takes hold of time, invites them, unsettles them, and reorients their lives. Such persons testify to something more than nature, and I want to leave room for that testimony in this ontology. Such persons appreciate the natural world and the science that studies it but refuses to absolutize either the results of scientific research or nature. In recognizing such a limit, this spiritual impulse anticipates a fullness of being to which science does not have access. Such persons surrender to “something more” than what is provided in nature or culture, the anticipated transcendence of the fullness of truth and the goal of the desire to know, to be good, and to affectively be overwhelmed by beauty, all of which is the core of rationality. Such persons have a reasonable response to the world, recognizing that anything that can give meaning and purpose to human life must have a value encountered that transcends the mind. This rationality shows itself in the desire to know, attentiveness to experience, to intelligent understanding, and to critical judgment, all of which leads to action involving responsible decision. Persons trust this imperative process of knowing. For religion, this anticipated fullness is God. Such an understanding of God emphasizes that God creates and saves by calling the world into a new and unprecedented future whom persons approach through anticipation and hope. This view of God means orienting our lives to what God has revealed concerning who God is and whom God is calling humanity to be. This explains why those who use the language and institutions of religion to promote their political agenda have not understood religion or religious communities truly. Especially in nations with democratic institutions, there are many ways in which people believe they are building just and compassionate institutions that enhance human freedom, honoring their worth and dignity, while also leading to vigorous debate, but can stop short of claiming that God is on your side.

Other disciplines, especially the exploration of language, is a more fruitful direction. Formative for this philosophical reflection is Plato-Aristotle and the Enlightenment (Descartes, Kant, Hegel), a broader empiricism (Polanyi, Lonergan) process philosophy (Hegel, Whitehead, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin), existentialism (Heidegger), and the hermeneutic of narrative and religious texts (Gadamer, Ricoeur).[4]

Such pondering on human experience, the curiosity and wonderment that are a constant part of that experience, leads to some modest conclusions. First, science has an important and modest role in the consideration of a flourishing human lfie. Second, minds with the capability of self-reference are the product of a community minds. Third curiosity is important in all reflective meditation. Fourth, human beings properly question self-identity, but especially through the affective life by pondering the out of balance character of human life, leading to a philosophy of feeling. Fifth, action in a shared world discloses human beings as agents of their lives. Sixth, conscience is the realm of feeling that opens the way for an ethical and religious view of the world. Seventh, all this suggests that philosophical anthropology is an important consideration. Eighth, a phenomenology of the sacred as revealed in the self exposes the fragility, fallibility, and evil of the self. Ninth, humanity finds redemption through forgiveness, thereby finding freedom. Tenth, reflection on truth and meaning opens a path for considering being-in-the-world as also being-before-God.

First, science gains when it accepts a modest role.

A totalizing role for science could lead to certain conclusions. We could conclude that our subjective desire or need will result in nothing more than a projection of human thought onto the divine. Thought of the divine may be nothing more than the human faith and hope that enough power exists within humanity to redeem humanity. In thinkers like Feuerbach, theology is nothing more than anthropology, for reflection upon divine essence reveals nothing other than the highest image of human essence. Humanity will heal its sickness, mend its brokenness, and liberate from that which binds, as it devotes itself to bringing more beauty, goodness, truth, and love into the world. If this were true, we could evaluate every religious belief based upon its ability to encourage humanity toward living such a life. 

One of the characteristics of a narrowly understood scientific and technical approach to the world is "demystification," the loss of wonder, the dissipation of mystery and awe. Consistent with this is that among the effects of our secularity is the loss of religious language and knowledge. The Enlightenment of the 1700s elevated science and technology to the status of being the primary lens through which it viewed the world. Such techniques improved the ordinary lives of citizens. Thus, one expression of the secularity of modernity is the narrow view of modernity rooted in science and technology. However, I am going to be suggesting that people living in modern civilizations have deeper and broader sources worthy of reflection as they pursue a life worth living.

Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn have shown that science is not as objective as many would like to think. The development of large hypotheses in physics and biology have the nature of providing a perspective that proves helpful in understanding the world combined with openness to new discoveries that may amend or overthrow the hypothesis. Such hypotheses provide coherence within itself as well as enable scientific engagement with the world.

Let us consider this way of acting within science as a way of understanding what happens in other realms of human experience. If we think at this level, we become aware of a certain view of the world that guides us. If we approach these matters in a healthy way, we aim for a coherent view of the world that also helps engage the world in a way that leads to human flourishing. It will be a guide. It will also have openness to innovative ideas, insights, and experiences that allow for amendment or even an overthrow. We might call such an overthrow of a worldview a conversion. Such a worldview will cohere with other forms of human experience. I want to be quite clear that in this process, no religion, scientific theory, or theories in the human sciences of psychology, sociology, or philosophy, has a prior claim to truth. Given the historicity of human beings, we develop such views of the world while renouncing any prior claim to truth. This also means that appeals to authority are not enough in making the case. The process I have described seems like giving rational assent to a set of beliefs. Yet, such is not the case. Taking the risk of total commitment of one’s life recognizes that one place one’s trust in the wrong thing. Since none of us likes to admit we are wrong, conversion is rare. Yet, admitting one has lived in accord with wrong commitments is also part of why engage in this process of reasoning.[5]

I will question the worldview that presumes that everything that can be known is accessible to ordinary experimental science. Science rightfully views nature as all there is within the limits of its study. The accumulative evidence arrived at by the scientific method is enormous. It emphasizes the observable and testable. Thus, although the history of the physical sciences is interesting, one does not need to know that history to be a good physicist, biologist, or chemist. It describes how things are. It provides a true world-picture or story that embraces the origin of the universe, its formation in accord with laws of physics, and the origin of life on this planet in accord with chemical rules of interaction that led to the origin of human consciousness and the rise of culture.[6] Scientific theory keeps us from building castles in the air, but we do our humanity a disservice if we do not allow ourselves to heed the calling of lofty ideas and ideals, such as truth, goodness, and beauty. In doing so, we are not just considering projections of our minds. Scientific theory has its limits in that it cannot provide a basis for what one might know, a sense of in what one might hope, guidance in what one ought to do. It does not have the tools to enable people to face the tragedy that is part of human life and does not have the tools to provide a basis for the faith and love that is part of human life.[7]

Science is the basis for reflection on metaphysical and ontological belief. However, I want to begin with the non-scientific source of scientific exploration. Wonderment that there is “something” rather than “nothing” is at the root of human curiosity about the world. Such ontological surprise that there is something rather than nothing is the root of the religious and aesthetic experience.^[8] The universe we experience is full of logos or rationality and mystery. Physics describes both an irreducible complexity at a both a quantum level and at the level of the history of the universe. The complex organization of atoms and cells leads to random leaps that becoming transforming events that represent leaps in organizational complexity. The universe is an open, unbounded, finite system that allows for new organization of the totality. The cooperation and tension within the system results in both creative and destructive possibilities. The totality is a field of force that exerts influence throughout the system, suggesting the priority of the whole over the parts. In philosophical terms, the Infinite embraces the Finite and the Eternal embraces the Temporal (Hegel), even if in an unthematic, confused, anticipatory way. It suggests a metaphysics that recognizes the tension between Being and Non-being resulting in becoming. It suggests an event ontology through encounter. This suggests an ontology of anticipation evident in emergent phenomena that are discontinuous with the past and allows for new complex organization of parts to emerge. Such emergence resists inertia and entropy. The significance of leaps toward increasingly complex forms is evident in the emergence of living cells that would eventually be the context out of which minds would emerge. Life becomes a paradigm of how emergence occurs in small, quiet, unobtrusive, humble origins that will only slowly and subtly grow significantly. Parts, systems of atoms and cells, want to survive, but they also want to live well and to live better (Whitehead). Complex organization of systems suggest there is something more, as these systems are oriented toward what they can become, suggesting the priority of the future over the present. The rise of the presence of mind involves awareness of what it means to be here, the value of the emergence of life, the value of nature as the context in which beings with minds survive and thrive. Nature is vast, complex, powerful, and beautiful, the root of aesthetic appreciation. It is also the source of danger and struggle in that life is sacrificed so that others lives may exist, but that life also ends. Although the presence of beings with mind is rare, it emerged from nature and is important to our understanding of nature. Beings with mind have ethical responsibility for each other and for the context nature provides. Such Being-in-the-world leaves open the question of whether there is also Being-before-God. It would also suggest God acts in such quiet, unobtrusive, persuasive ways to bring nature to its fullness.

A challenge for the theologian who respects the sacred text is that humanity can live quite well and responsibly without God. Humanity can be human apart from God. Such freedom and independence among human beings expresses their power. In this sense, God is not necessary being, in the same way that the presence of the universe itself or the presence of life are not necessary.^[9]

The scientific notion of the orientation of the universe toward increasingly complex relationships has a counterpart in the philosophical realm, connecting between philosophical notions of time, the Infinite, and the Eternal. We will not truly grasp the significance of individual things or beings in the world without making this connection. We will not deal with death (finitude and temporality) until we make this connection. We have a general notion of Being; we have perception of the Infinite, even if not comprehension, prior to our grasp of individual things. Thomas Hobbes suggested that the notion of “infinite” arises from our frustration with trying to count individual things. Rather, “Infinite” is the way in which we express our awareness of the interconnected quality of reality. Individual things participate in this wholeness, and this participation is what we mean by “Infinite.”^[10] Thus, our perception of the Infinite is “in some way” prior to that of finite things. Since we perceive the passing away of the finite, and yet, the continuation of reality, the Infinite has more reality than do finite things.^[11]

Such reflections on the orientation of humanity may provide some basis for agreeing with Descartes (Meditations III) when he offered that the Infinite is the condition for the apprehension of all finite objects, including the self. Space and time are specific forms of the primordial intuition of the Infinite. [12] We carve out our experience of finite things from within the context of the Infinite. Yet, our grasp of the Infinite is unthematic and confused. The finite has its limit in the Infinite. If so, he is thinking of an intuition of the Infinite that precedes the contents of consciousness. We might think of this experience as a transcendent mystery or silent Infinity of reality beyond our control, but which also constantly presents itself to us as a mystery. We may think of the experience as unthematic and primordial, originating in our relation to the mother, but steadily expanding toward our openness to the world and to the Infinite.

I want to be careful here, for I think some people have such a fragmented experience of the world that they will not be able to travel with me to the place I want to take the reader. For some persons, their affective experience includes so much suffering and alienation that they cannot bring themselves to imagine the possibility of wholeness and suffering, making the quest for meaning and purpose absurd (Camus). Others may develop an intellectual predisposition toward misery and alienation that precludes the possibility of happiness and meaning in the present, delaying any such possibility to a utopian future (Marxism and its iterations in postmodernism). 

What I want to pursue here is that while human experience will always have a mixture of dignity and misery, we can have a genuine experience of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment when we live our lives toward a satisfactory goal. This will require some philosophical meditations

Let us begin with the notions of Being, Nonbeing, and Becoming.[13]

At this general level of reflecting on what is in the universe, philosophy has a term that positive quality of Being, that which is, and the negative quality of Nonbeing. That which “is” at one time “was not” and in the future will “pass away.” Yet, they are not mutually exclusive, for life as we experience it is the destructive and creative tension that defines the relation of Being and Nonbeing, which we can think of as Becoming. Becoming is a matter of finite entities relating to each other in ways that have their dialectical relation as well, creating tensions that have both a destructive and creative energy. Very simply, “to be something” is to be finite. To say that anything is anywhere, in a place, is to say it exists. Entities in the world do not just exist, but rather, they exist in relations that repel and attract, destroy and create, all moving forward to increasingly complex relation.

What I have described is a movement, suggesting that nothing simply “is what it is” now, but exists now in a form that anticipates that toward which it moves. Yes, I am suggesting a teleological structure, at this highly general level, of Being and Time. In the Present, human beings cannot see clearly the goal toward which Being and Time move, for the goal is present in only an unthematic, implicit, tacit, and provisional way. The “end” is not yet present. In that sense, the present is the destructive and creative tension between what was and what shall be. The “horizon of expectation” includes the notions of hope and fear, trust and anxiety. We need both, for what I have suggested is that the Future is what constitutes what is. Yet, this Future is not clearly before our eyes as human beings. Nothing guarantees, from the standpoint of philosophy, a happy end or goal. Yet, we need to deal with the fact that our minds work in a way that strive toward wholeness and meaning, even as we feel the pull of disintegrating forces that we might think of as an unhealthy self-centeredness. Humanity does not experience satisfaction with any stage of finite development. Every stage has its limit, but humanity keeps pushing beyond that limit. To use a poetic metaphor, humanity hears a song that could have a beautiful, sublime, true, and noble end. Yet, from the standpoint of philosophy, humanity cannot know whether that such an end is true. It could be an illusion. As an aside, for someone who has an incredibly fragmented life that they do not think they hear a song, I would suggest that they in fact do, since they do not commit suicide. 

Now, to return to the more general terminology, the priority of the Future suggests that the Present at one time was an anticipation that has come to be. It also suggests that nothing limits this process of coming to be, for the Present keeps pressing toward the Future, which is, of course, unknown. The Future is present only as an anticipation, but the anticipation itself may not come to pass. Such is the ambiguous quality of the Future. In fact, for human beings, awareness of finitude is anxiety.  Finitude is the possibility of losing one’s individuality and sense of belonging, losing one’s dynamism for life and creativity in a lifeless form, and losing one’s freedom and destiny. Finitude implies this threat.

To help us here, I want to suggest another dialectical relation, that of Time and Eternity. Far from being mutually exclusive, the priority of the Future suggests that the Eternal is the term we can use for the wholeness of lived time. The duration of entities in Becoming has its ambiguity, of course, since nothing is yet what it shall be, but duration also becomes an image of what shall be, even if we see unclearly. What I am suggesting is that Time is not just a matter of counting it externally. We also have a psychological dimension to Time. Very simply this means that the death of the individual is not constitutive for its wholeness and meaning. I am suggesting that we will need another light to gain such clarity, and it comes from the Eternal. If everything “is” by anticipation, then the “essence” of a thing is not something we can grasp, for what we see and experience is still an anticipation of what shall be. Individual beings are an anticipation of what they shall be. To apply this to us as human beings, the emergent self participates in the Eternal through expectation of its wholeness and the wholeness of all that is. However, as a reminder, peculiar to the Future is the ambivalence of possible completion on the one side and of possible failure and destruction on the other. Thinking philosophically, we can only speak of the possible wholeness of human existence as participation in eternity.

At this general level of philosophical reflection, I will want to introduce the notions of the Infinite and the Eternal. The rise of the finite, limited, individual ego occurs in a way in which the Infinite embraces it. Here again, our experience as human beings confirms that Finite and Infinite are not mutually exclusive but have a dialectical relation. Our experience of human life is not simply a matter of counting sense experiences, but of experiencing a quality of life. The struggles of a human life toward meaning and wholeness, and the recognition that we will not have such experiences in this time and space, give rise to the positive and philosophic notion of the Infinite and Eternal.

The finite implies a real ending in space and time. They limit each other. Every “something” is what it is in its particularity only by being differentiated from an other. Yet, as Hegel showed convincingly in his logic, one cannot think the border without thinking the other that lies on the far side of the border. All that is finite exists through the determination of its limits, which one must then “cut out” from the Infinite. The intuition of the Infinite is an unthematic thought within all representations of the finite. Our sense of space depends upon the primacy of the whole of space over its parts. If finite and infinite are in dialectical relation, we need to view them in dialectical movement with and against each other, a creative and destructive tension arising in the relation. The finite gains its power only as embraced by the Infinite, while the Infinite has power only as it actualizes itself in the variety and multiplicity of finitude. Their unity is of the nature of a transition of the finite into the Infinite, and the Infinite into the finite. The Infinite emerges in the finite, and the finite emerges in the Infinite. The process of this transition passes from the finite to the Infinite. Such transcending of the finite is far from an external act. Such lifting of the finite into the Infinite does not occur as if either is acted upon by an external force. Their mutual tense relationship is the dynamic that both abrogates and lifts up. One must conceive the Infinite both as transcendent in relation to the finite and as immanent to it. 

Another general category in philosophy is that of the Whole and the Part. When we think of the category of Whole and part, every individual appearance occurs within a context that is itself unique. Each appearance is part of a whole. Language is an example of this process, for each word depends upon the totality of the language and the language itself depends upon the cultural context. Words depend upon sentences, sentences depend upon the discourse, and the discourse depends upon the situation of the discourse. The context may imply the cultural and world setting. The parts and Whole mutually imply and condition each other.

The totality of human knowledge embraces the present state of knowledge in the form of anticipation. Categories are truth claims in the form of assertions that must relate to each other and to the states of affairs in the world to which they refer. Although most of us do not apply ourselves to a systematic way of thinking, the assumption is that truth claims cohere with each other. The truth claim of an assertion has a link with the words of the sentence, but the realm of meaning relevant to the assertion extends beyond the sentence and discourse and to other states of affairs. The claim of every assertion to truth means one cannot avoid reflecting on the totality of all true assertions and thereby to the totality of what is. Of course, as a further reminder, the truth of the statement is in anticipation of the totality of knowledge, for human beings will never formulate categories that will fulfill the condition of there ever actually being a time when humanity will have the totality of all true assertions. At its most general level, then, the category of the whole plays the same role as that of law in the natural sciences.

Concept and Anticipation need to become basic logical categories (Pannenberg). Every Concept of the whole or totality is an abstraction, due to the anticipatory nature of all knowledge of the whole in a world that has not yet been completed and reconciled to the whole. Such reflections must have the character of a conjectural reconstruction in relation to its object, one that distinguishes itself from its intended truth while at the same time construing itself as a preliminary form of this truth. The philosophical concept will reveal itself to have the structure of anticipation. Concept and Anticipation cannot be in isolation from each other. What would anticipatory concepts and conjectural reflection look like? The physical sciences present one with examples in the formation of hypotheses and with their testing. Science reminds us that every assertion has an anticipatory structure. All such assertions are hypothetical and anticipatory directed toward reality as a whole. Anticipations look forward to the occurrence of future experience and to the content of such experience.

Such a view of the anticipatory concept makes the assertion ambiguous, for the anticipated future may not become a reality. The anticipating consciousness does not guarantee the truth of its content. Every form of the anticipatory concept has preliminary meaning, one that leaves open the ultimate truth of humankind. In contrast, the Concept is the act of conceiving some designated thing. When one focuses on concepts that are appropriate or which intend a given thing, construing them as anticipations draws attention to a structural component that otherwise remains hidden. The concept depends upon verification through the thing that it grasps, a verification that transcends the concept. Recognizing the anticipatory nature of all concepts does justice to rationality, in comparison with descriptions that conflate the true concept of a thing and the thing itself.

The notion of the totality of reason and reality is a thought, for it depends on the individual objects of possible experience bound together in reality. This idea is the condition for grasping and determining all the individual objects of experience. Anticipation is a real instance of something occurring in advance. The anticipated future is already present in anticipation. If the future does not occur, its anticipation will only be prophetic enthusiasm.

Anticipation is always ambiguous. The true significance of any anticipation depends upon the future course of experience. Anticipation cannot guarantee the truth of its content. The concept of anticipation helps one understand the two-sided character of both concepts and judgments. Both concepts and judgments claim for themselves an identity with the thing conceived. Yet, one can also speak of the “mere concept” and the “mere assertion” to point a difference from the asserted state of affairs. The concept of anticipation unites both aspects of identity and difference. Identity and difference have a temporal relationship. The anticipation is not yet identical in every respect with the anticipated thing. Yet, given the presupposition that the thing will appear in its full form sometime in the future, in the anticipation the thing is already present. The form of the anticipation must correspond to the peculiar character of whatever it is that one claims the anticipatory concept grasps and one can only grasp it in this way. Could it be that the anticipatory form of knowledge corresponds to an element of the “not yet” within the very reality toward which knowing is directed? If this were not the case, the result would be that anticipation is no more than a preliminary stage that one could leave behind by grasping the concept of the thing. If the answer to the question is yes, the identity of things are not yet present in the process of time.

The philosophical point here is that the broad categories of philosophy suggest an infinite horizon of philosophical reflection. Every philosophical boundary we may sense or imagine keeps being broken and moving us beyond.

Such a view preserves the distinction between true and false regarding factual matters, it preserves the distinction between appearance (our picture of reality) and reality itself, it serves as a basis for intersubjective communication, it furnishes the basis for a shared project of communal inquiry, it provides for the fallibilistic view of human knowledge, and it sustains the causal mode of learning and inquiry that serves as basis for the objectivity of experience. Such would be my statement of being as becoming in general. This would be my outline of an ontology of anticipation, which would show how at each level of finite-temporal objects, the previous level contains traces of what would become. Higher levels are not the necessary outcome, but higher levels necessitate the past out of which they arise.[14] This would also suggest that there is a noble purpose to it all, which might help persons find a measure of acceptance of the tragic dimension to all living things. It can lead to courage, vitality, commitment to life for the sake of life, all of which makes sense if individual life is part of a responsible, anticipatory act within an open system. 

Naturalism or materialism presumes an ontology of death, as lifeless matter is the ground state of being. Life and mind are separated from the universe, so when consciousness disappears, the mindless world remains unshaken. All life returns to the lifeless matter from which it arose. This tragic vision of life in this universe is inescapable. One can still affirm the meaningfulness of this moment in the history of the universe, and that is enough for the morally responsible decision for honor, courage, and cooperation. However, one can reasonably hope that if truth and goodness transcend the mind, lasting forever, and persons trust their desire know truth, goodness, and beauty, then we can reasonably hope. This hope is consistent with the anticipation in the human mind toward meaning and truth.[15]

Some persons will find the flatten and purposeless nature of the world described by science and technology as enough. For such persons, all they need to know in ontology is that atoms and cells exist. Such a naturalist and materialist view of ontology assumes that science is the only arbiter of truth. However, to return to our sense of wonder, many others find themselves amazed that something exists rather than nothing. If anything, science has heighted awareness of this amazement. After billions of years of a universe evolving lifeless matter everywhere, many are amazed that this blue planet exists in a way in which life emerged from lifeless matter. The existence of human beings who are conscious of their lives and the life around them, is amazing. Such beings who seek truth, evaluate goodness, and find themselves attracted to the beautiful in nature in in the things they create, is an amazing thing. Human wonderment of the world suggests a mystery that intrigues human beings enough to raise questions regarding the mystery within us and around us. Human awareness of this mystery hints there is something more to ponder than the reality of atoms and cells. As powerful as science is, it does not represent the totality of human curiosity and wonderment. Science and the technology it creates is empty without the further reflection upon the world as human beings experience it delivered through philosophy, religion, poetry, storytelling, morality, and politics. They do so by observing, analyzing, ordering, elucidating, and accounting for the contents of human experience. 

The imagination expressed here is subjective. The use of metaphor in language is an expression of the imagination. The poet is an artisan of language, engendering and shaping images through language alone, producing a semantic shock, a sudden glimpse, a restructuring of the semantic field. The reference-effect of fiction is to redescribe reality. Both poetry and fiction have a mimetic or re-descriptive function regarding the world, allowing us as readers to see the world differently.

The classical notions of creation, rooted in the imaginative and poetic language of Genesis 1-3, and of the end in various imaginative and poetic images expressed in eschatological-apocalyptic texts, are notions derived from mythical texts. Modern persons must accept scientific presentations of the origin and end of the universe and reinterpret them in the direction of a moral exhortation to care for the world in which God has placed humanity and as an exhortation toward living with meaning, purpose, and hope. 

Second, mind emerges out of the communion of minds or persons. Philosophers join with scientists in exploring the distinctive qualities of human beings. The distinctive qualities of humanity relate to consciousness, self-consciousness, and the capacity to reason. Developing rationality means the increasing independence of human decision-making. Human beings have the capacity for self-reference, considering their place in the world and the influence they will have on it. Humanity occupies a pre-eminent position in ontology as the being who asks the ontological question and in whose self-awareness can find the answer. 

Such ontological objectivity is a presupposition. Without it, communication would be impossible. This mind-independent reality outdistances the range of human cognition. Real things have a cognitive depth we cannot reach. Realistically, this means the limits of “our” world do not define the limits of the real world. Such metaphysical realism is a presupposition or postulate for our inquiries that allows us to learn from our experiences. Human cognition involves a community of inquiry concerning an objective order of reality. Persons are agents of their intentions by which they relate to an object or project in the world of space and to move temporally toward an envisioned future. Decision is anticipation of that future. Persons exhibit their power in acting and willing, but also project themselves into their projects, thereby making themselves in each moment. The self is not prisoner to what has been, but each moment opens possibilities of what might be. 

Ongoing human activity is both creative and destructive. This involves the finite and ambiguous quality of human life, which will have its hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, and falling. The most dramatic limitation of such a life is its disintegration toward death. Human beings undermine the conditions that make for the flourishing of human life. The cognitive act of decision is the basis of morality and ethics. Taking responsibility for the project of being human in this world involves personal and social decisions that respect the worth and dignity of individuals, encouraging the complex notion of freedom in personal, economic, and political life. The notion of freedom acknowledges that human beings are agents who have control over what they do and can take responsibility for their actions and be held accountable for what they do. Human beings are agents within history, responding to the challenges that being human in all its creative and destructive possibilities involve and to become accountable for those possibilities. Here is the basis for moral agency, which raises the question of norms that enhance responsible conduct and provide guidance in human decision-making and action. Human freedom includes the power to act upon and to transform the self, through self-discipline or training of the self. This presumes that human agency is a living and creative process in transformation of the self, opening the self to new and different possibilities of action, taking responsibility for what we have become and what we shall be.[16] Recognizing such responsibility in decisions means that morality does not have a purely naturalistic explanation in the striving of genes to get passed along through altruism and cooperation, religion created to support these moral traits. The unconscious striving of genes is not sufficient. Such a genetic account cannot explain the attraction goodness has in evaluating human action. Imitation of others is important in moral education. Being responsible for decisions requires that one be attentive, intelligent, and critical. It is irresponsible to make uninformed ethical decisions. Being responsible involves a dimension of reality that transcends nature and the human subject grasping the person. Acting responsibly shows the activation of the human mind by its anticipation of a transcendent goodness that encompasses and grounds the world and consciousness. Moral and religious development involves stages. In the primitive stage a sense of rewards and punishment dominates. In the conventional stage is a desire for a social group to accept the person. Beyond these is a rare stage shaped by anticipation of and responsiveness to an incomprehensible ream of goodness. It is an answer to a call or invitation to an unswerving commitment to that which transcends the status quo. Such moral aspiration rooted in the cognitive act of being responsible, is one of the ways cosmic emergences shows up in human life.[17]

It is only in community that needs can be met and desires satisfied. Were human beings devoid of needs and desires society would never come into being. It does come into existence because individuals do have desires and needs, the most vital of which can be satisfied only in cooperation. No person can survive, let alone attain satisfaction, in total isolation. From this very fact results the complication and sophistication of this simple need of life, so that from them emerge the further social needs for security, solidarity, and mutual dependability. Out of these arise such demands as those for personal and group loyalty, honesty, and reliability and the concepts of honor, fidelity, justice, and all personal and social virtues. These are kindred ideals or what people seek to realize during the lengthy process of endeavor that constitutes the history of a nation and develops a social tradition.^[18]

Behind such desires and their expression in personal and corporate life is a type of love for life. Our care for the world draws us out of ourselves and toward the desired fullness of life. We want to see the flourishing of life in general and of human life in particular. Each of these desires has a darkness as well, of course, and we will need to explore that darkness. Such is the nature of the dignity and misery of humanity. We have the capacity to turn that which is our gift into a curse we inflict upon self and others. Our creative reflection on experience discloses both the dignity and misery of humanity. Our experience reveals both our quest for wholeness and the brokenness that plagues our personal and corporate lives. Our human experience of openness to our world, which shows itself in our capacity to learn across time to improve the human condition, meets its counterpoint in our tendency to close ourselves off from world. The infinite horizon of life meets the resistance within us to close off questions and think we have reached the end of such explorations. 

Third, the fundamental gesture expressed in the curiosity of reflective meditation upon human experience of the world is a humble one of acknowledging the historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed in the reign of finitude. We are reflective beings who express ourselves in philosophy, religion, storytelling, poetry, history, morality, politics, and science. We care about the world in which we live and express this caring in the way we exhibit reflective curiosity by meditating upon our experience in the world. Engaging the world in these ways involves a love of truth, intellectual humility, having a teachable spirit, an independent mind, and most importantly, a spirit of pervasive wonder that shows itself in reflective curiosity. One can suppress this childlike wonder toward the world, but if one does so, one becomes a melancholy spectacle of idle unreflective sightseers, passing through life without ever internalizing and pondering the great questions of human life. Such persons forfeit some of the best expressions of human worth and dignity. In removing the heart of humanity, this wonderment and attraction toward what is true, good, and beautiful, a wonderment that directs attention away from self, an aspiration toward something more than simple self-fulfillment, an aspiration expressed in an outward journey that also returns inward, but with an expanded and deepened self because of the journey, the risk is no longer developing the basic virtues and character necessary for a free society. 

Such wonderment regarding the world taps into the human imagination. Human knowledge begins in wonder. It begins with a form of learned ignorance, recognition that not knowing something, and the suspicion that what you do not know is both important and wonderful. Such wonder can lead to the exploration of the world to gain a better understanding of it. Science cares for the lifeworld of human beings by understanding the world in way that leads to learning techniques that improve the everyday lives of people and expresses the desire to know more about the world in which we live. Any of the forms of the expression of human curiosity can help move humanity that direction. The point of such endeavors is to push back the frontiers of ignorance regarding this world, presuming that to do so will lead to human flourishing. The search becomes participation in something infinitely greater. Such a search has an element of self-forgetfulness. Openness to others, submerging self in favor of truth, recognizes that truth is not our private possession. Such a search displays care or love for the world that freely gives. The seeker (subject, knower) becomes a lover of the object. Knowing is a creative act emerging out of encounter and mutual indwelling. Truth is in the hands of this encounter. Love is the reason disclosure occurs in encounter. If truth is a matter of disclosure, then the disclosure awakens trust.[19]

One can have no theology without interaction with philosophy and other disciplines developed in the modern/post-modern era. Yet, if a philosophical perspective or worldview dominates the theologian, the theologian has adopted a questionable authority. At the same time, interaction with philosophy will sharpen and clarify the thinking of the theologian and yield an improved theology. 

Fourth, human beings properly question self-identity, but especially through the affective life by pondering the out of balance character of human life, leading to a philosophy of feeling.

The ambiguous quality of human life that arises from human finitude and temporality, the presence of suffering caused by being part of nature, the disintegration of life that ends in death, leaves humanity open to the anxiety that leads to sin and evil. The creative possibilities of the use of freedom are counter-balanced by the destructive possibilities of freedom. 

We need to rise to another level of reflection as we consider the difficulty of self-identity. Human feeling, knowing, and acting will be the path through which we gain insight into self-identity. Reflecting on the self incites us to take care of our lives. It will mean we notice ourselves and all that surrounds us. We become transparent to ourselves. However, this path is not easy, for feeling can lead to destructive attachment, knowing is never complete, and acting is indistinct. The path to self-identity is through considering the ambiguity of human feeling, knowing, and action. 

All this occurs despite so much random, meaningless suffering. Any discussion of human life begins with the reminder of the finite and therefore ambiguous quality of human life. Finite life has hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, and falling. Such a life has physical limitations, the most dramatic of which is the ultimate disintegration of our lives toward death. We have obvious external limits. The ambiguity of human existence includes the presence of natural and moral evil. Any attempt to express notions related to human flourishing is inseparable from the ambiguities of everyday life. One who passionately engages life will also experience the pain of life. The more one gives oneself in faith, hope, and love, the more intensely one experiences life and death.^[20]

Human life is out of balance because of its finitude and suffering, which we experience in a definitive way in feeling. We feel the lack of proportion and balance, which leads us to consider an anthropology of disproportion. We feel this disproportion in the tension between our finitude and the wholeness of life that we will never grasp but in which we desire to participate. ^[21] We desire this wholeness, an expression of a love of life, in our quest for the truth expressed in our desire for a connection to the wholeness of life, goodness of life as we consider what we owe the world we inhabit, and a profound aesthetic experience. It expresses itself in the personal lives we build and in the cultural institutions we develop. While this desire expresses the dignity of humanity, human disproportion expresses itself in the darkness expressed in human action. The quest to participate in wholeness also expresses the broken condition of humanity. Human openness to the world, through which we learn, has a counterpoint in closing ourselves from the world. We feel the disproportion in the power of human knowing, by which we receive from the world and express our openness to the world. We feel the disproportion in the difficult movement from the theoretical, in which we must resist the strong attraction that can lead us to think we can gain a total philosophical picture of the world, to the practical, which must deal with the limitations of the lifeworld. Human knowing, feeling, and willing provide a finite perspective from which to consider disproportion, but the affective life is of particular interest because through feeling we grasp the loveable, the attractive, the hateful, and the repulsive, all of which are anticipatory stages of fulfilling human destiny or purpose. This suggests the intentionality and elective character of feeling or desire. 

This focus upon the significance of affective life reminds us that feeling orients us to the fulness of life in feelings of sympathy, joy, and hope through the community of other persons. In contrast, negative moods or feelings isolate persons within themselves. The dread of an inauthentic life reveals we are concerned with our place in the totality of life and thus with the meaning of this unique life we must live. Feeling discloses human disproportion. 

A philosophy of feeling brings passion to the level of rational reflection and meditation, thereby bringing philosophy out of the ivory tower of the theoretical to the practical lifeworld as people live it. Here is the path philosophy will need to take to deal with the fragility of the person and its intermediate nature. Feeling manifests aims. Feeling interiorizes the reality of the experienced world, while knowing separates the subject from the object. Feeling binds me to things, beings, and the desire to participate the wholeness of life, while knowing objectifies and sets me over against the world. The disproportion expressed in feeling is that feeling anticipates and promises more than it gives. Feeling shows itself in the passion for possession or having. The innocent quest for having expressed in designating that which is mine is in tension with greed, avarice, and envy. The feeling of the passion for domination or power innocently shows itself in work and achievement, but is in tension with the possibility of exploitation. The feeling of a passion for honor or respect is the quest for worth in the eye of another but is in tension with vanity and pretension. Esteem is fragile and easy to wound. The restlessness of feeling leads to further disproportion. When will I have enough, adequately use my power, or find another to adequately appreciate or recognize me? Such tensions express the disproportion human beings experience, which can express the misery of human life. Feelings are transient, but they reveal our alienation from the world as well as our connection to it. 

We might question whether a philosophy of feeling is possible, since in everyday use we often contrast reason and emotion. However, the body combines the domain of living thing and the domain of the self. This mindfulness of the other reveals a philosophy seeking to uncover a world common to all of us.[22] Perception opens to us the thickness of the world. Perception of time and space opens us to transcendence. The body says we are here in this space, tied to a certain world, and co-present with others, even if we have only an undifferentiated and tacit awareness. Embodied perception occurs within a specific situation. Every such encounter occurs within the horizon of a lifeworld that does not hold direct attention at this moment. Both the world we already have and the horizon that transcends our experience shape present experience. This suggests unity of self in body, unity of body-soul, the connection of subject-object as well as speech-thought. We inhabit what we perceive, and what we perceive inhabits us, making perception incarnational. The merging of present experience with the horizon of future possibilities is anticipation of a synthesis we will never see fully. Since perception involves the social world, we coordinate personal perspective with others. This coordination of perception admits that nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see. This intersubjective nature of perception suggests the things the community of persons perceive in common. While self and the other are separate, there is not an abyss no one can cross. Separation discloses the prior communion of persons. The world-experiencing self emerges only being in community with others. This incarnational notion of perception of the other leads to inhabiting the other and the other inhabiting us. The other and the self are perceiving a common world. The result is that emotion is shot through with intelligence, a form of thought without words.[23] Positive feeling (aesthetic experience, love) moves people toward community and the authentic self we desire to be; negative feeling (Lust, aggression, anxiety) disclose the brokenness of human life. Human life occurs in the gift of allotted time between birth and death, but human beings ponder the meaning of both. Life is on loan and has its limit in birth and death, with birth initiating the loan and death ending it. We can seize the unique opportunity provided by the loan, using it seriously and joyfully. The challenge of the loan is to use it fully. 

Feeling is a form of rationality, a form of thought, which has not yet reached our ability to put words to them. This reality is what makes psychotherapy possible. It also makes a philosophy of feeling possible. The danger in a philosophical meditation on feeling is to infuse too much content. We will need to be modest in what we see in feeling. Feeling and knowing explain each other. Since feeling is always directed toward an object, it is intentional. Feeling is directed to our connection to the totality of life. Feelings reveal that at which one's life aims. They reveal the orientation of the tendencies that direct life toward the world. Feeling reveals its meaning by contrast with the more refined form of thinking proper to what we commonly call knowledge. Feeling makes interior what we objectify. In contrast, knowing sets a cleavage between subject and object. This contrast shows the privileged status of feeling in forming the self.

The fragility of feeling, this affective sense that human life is out of proportion results in the difficulty of self-identification. Our lives are not presented to us ready-made. Traveling this path will keep us from simply beginning with the person, which would lead to the fanciful ontology of being and nothingness. The original familiarity that begins a human life becomes the horizon of feeling within which the self emerges, since feeling emphasizes the sociality in which we live our lives. This means the center of who we are is outside us, in family, in sexuality, and in culture. The foundation of our individuality meets us in the person of the other. This experience of the Other provides the ontological basis for ethics, which involves living well for and with others in just institutions. To be the friend of oneself, one will need to enter the relationship of friendship with others. The welcome of the other makes the good take on meaning.[24] We are here, in the body, which provides us with perspective or a point of view. We escape our perspective as we recognize and honor the perspective of the other.

As being-in-the-world, the world matters to us, and feeling reveals our perspective or place in this moment that we have toward the world. Fear or dread of the world is a common reaction, one that often leads us to submerge the unique self we are to the mass of society, or to a group with which we have chosen to affiliate. The temptation is present to abandon the search for the true self by merging with a collective, thereby abandoning one’s own life and cease taking responsibility for our lives. We can become content with a common and inauthentic self. For example, everyday life is determined by interaction with others. We can also experience this everyday life as a fall. Talking is important for hearing, listening, and keeping silence to take place. Idle talk closes us off to each other. Curiosity sees only to see, especially novelty and restless movement, but refuses to dwell anywhere to arrive at genuine understanding. Such experiences of everyday life can make it appear that all action is unimportant. Alienation belongs to everyday life because we have fallen from possibility of being the true self. We fall into the demands, dreams, and expectation of others, rather than becoming the unique possibility that belongs to us. This fall can lead us to deceive ourselves that such a life is true life, when it has become a life of alienation.[25]

Philosophically, the affective life relates people ecstatically to the world and the people around one. The orientation of human beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in the positive effects and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy, but also in joy and hope. Such feelings draw individuals out of their isolation. However, a characteristic of negative moods and feelings, such as fear, anxiety, arrogance, sadness, envy, and hate, is to isolate individuals within themselves. The positive effects are expressions of an anticipatory expectation.

A philosophy of feeling leads us to an investigation of human fallibility. With feeling, we have the moment that reveals a new sense of human disproportion. Passion may well be the transition through which human beings must pass to move from physical life to a life of reason. Passion both unites and separates vital affectivity or desire with Eros. Modern philosophy needs to recover this insight of Plato (Symposium, Republic). This represents a move from the theoretical to the practical to the affective, developing a philosophical anthropology that is more inward and fragile. The restless heart would be the fragile moment of disproportion that culminates in the reflection on happiness and character. The paradox involved is that a philosophy of the heart needs to bring passion to the level of reason that faces the demands of our life world. It is a movement from an abstraction to the real. Philosophy needs to step out of the ivory tower and into life as human beings live it. A philosophy of feeling will express the fragility of the intermediate nature of our lives, deal with the gap between the intellectual sense of disproportion and the lived experience of misery.

Feelings reveal that at which one's life aims. They reveal the orientation of the tendencies that direct life toward the world. Feeling reveals its meaning by contrast with the more refined form of thinking proper to what we commonly call knowledge. Feeling makes interior what we objectify. In these tensions, we experience something of the misery of human life and the separation we experience within.

Feelings come and go quickly.  Moods dominate a person's life.  We can even imagine ourselves in certain circumstances and generate certain feelings.  Pleasure and desire play a significant role in the terminology of moral philosophers and of some schools of psychology.  

Our moods reveal, whether good or bad, our own sense of alienation and separation from the world in which we live, as well as our submission to it. Our moods are ways we evade ourselves as we submit to the world and let it matter to us.  Though we may tend to see moods as delusions, they reveal the world.  Among the ancients, this was viewed as feelings. Fear is one way mood shows itself. We feel ourselves threatened; it then matters to us.  Alarm, dread, and terror are ways fear reveals itself. If one remains in daily life, the experience of dread is submerged.  We cannot always experience life in this way.  A voice within makes one aware of how little it all matters.  Fear is a part of life, but dread takes us beyond those fears.  The burden of dread leads one to escape into the mass of society.  Yet, this very dread reveals that humanity is concerned about its own being, is concerned about the meaning of things.

Fifth, action in a shared world discloses human beings as agents of their lives.

Human action is distinctive in adding the activity of consent, which leads to consideration of the human will. Consent involves hesitation, deliberation, and choosing, all of which have their reasons. Choice fixes attention among various projects. Action presupposes responsibility grounded in the call to authentic selfhood. This taking of the initiative in the living present emphasizes responsibility for choices, as responsibility discloses human beings as cause, agent, or author of action.[26]

Action occurs in a community of persons, which presumes humility and decentering of the self that is potential and actual. Recognizing that intersubjectivity of human action means other persons are also going through this process suggests the values and perspectives of the other are of equal dignity with mine. The justification of an action expresses value judgments, so our values appear in the projects of life. Each decision is a judgment, designating one project or object and not others. Deciding is taking a position in relation to the world. We adopt a project to bring change in our world. We take responsibility for this position and for the project we adopt. Then one makes a choice that completes a process and breaks it off at the same time. Even when we feel circumstances have constricted our choices, we create our lives, and in this freedom of choice we are distinctively human. The completion of self occurs in community.

Every initiative is an intention to do something and a commitment to do that thing, a promise that I make silently to myself and tacitly to another. In promising, I place myself intentionally under the obligation to do something. Commitment has the keen sense of being bound by my word. The promise is the ethics of initiative. The heart of this ethics is the promise to keep my promises. Being faithful to one’s word becomes a guarantee that the beginning will have a sequel, that the initiative will inaugurate a new course of things.

The present occurs at the intersection of personal history with the horizon of expectation for a future possibility. The forward expectation toward a future full of novelty gives birth to hope as well as impatience for a life better than present experience would dictate. Individuals can make their history. The present is not a prison made by our personal history. Such expectation still needs to be consistent with finite and temporal reality of human community. We must not narrow expectation to match experience so much that will lead to the dread of everydayness, which will lead to the despair that nothing we do will matter. The danger contained in any discussion of the future and its possibilities is the utopian expectation. Utopia is “No-place,” for there is no path to get there because there is no basis in experience for the expectation, so utopian expectations lead to frustration, anger, and despair.[27]

Meaningful action lessens the deficiency of human life. An agent acts meaningfully because the action becomes free from the intention of the agent and develops consequences of its own by becoming a social phenomenon. This makes human action an open work, holding the meaning of an action in suspense. The forthcoming interpretations of the action of an agent contribute to the meaning of an event. Action is meaningful because its effects go beyond what the agent intended and what the agent can control. An action receives new references and fresh relevance as it ripples through the social setting of the action.

What we have here is an evaluative metaphysic of morals. Person is extremely rare in this universe. The spatial-temporal quality of objects and minds has the practical effect that they exist in relation to other objects and minds. The existence of persons introduces a spatial-temporal being that experiences the ambiguity of the past, the tensions of the present, and the anticipations of the future. Human endeavor is purposive. Human projects are teleological. The purposive quality of human projects and enquiries provides them with a degree of rationality and objectivity. We are the sorts of rational beings who consider our obligation to the other. Be an authentic human being means doing your utmost to become the rational and responsible creature that a person is capable of being. The moral project of treating of other people as we would be treated is part of this.  

With this foundation of the shared world of human beings, we need to consider briefly an ontology of culture. Persons have a heightened sense of relation, moving beyond simple response to stimuli and beyond instinct, leading to the increased complexity of interpersonal relations, families, tribes, peoples, nations, economies, political entities, and cultures. Such society of human beings is broken by evil and suffering. Every type of social organization has its brokenness. The move toward technology in modern societies has its gifts in improving everyday life. It also creates further opportunities to treat the other as an object that advances science and technology. As we gain in civilizational complexity and organization, genuine community becomes increasingly scarce. The notion of togetherness and truly being with others is losing meaning. We can think of the increasing administrative machine of large corporations and a large federal government and the general bureaucratization of life that favors the abstract, depersonalized, uncreative tasks that maintain them. Creativity has many opponents. The complexity of modern social organization has challenges, but intimacy and community are possible if one reconciles oneself to the nature of economic and political freedom as the expression of faith, hope, and love that unleashes creative energies of capitalism and democracy. The question raised by this interplay of the presence of being and absence of being, of identity and difference, in human groups is how they can coexist and still leave the genuine otherness of the other group intact.

Sixth, conscience is the realm of feeling that opens the way for an ethical and religious view of the world.

Conscience is the result of the dialectic between the always evolving self and the encounter with the Other. It has a special place because the whole of life is vaguely present in positive and negative feeling toward the totality of life as we experience it. It leads to genuine self-knowledge and self-identity. This reality restores morality to its proper ontological place. The emergence of the self out of the web of social life carries with it the rise of conscience, indicating that moral awareness is an important aspect of the formation of self. Moral awareness is the realm of conscience, out of which arises the call to become our true self and the shame and guilt we experience when we fall short of that calling. Its presence raises the issue of human fallibility and evil. The encounter urges, obligates, enjoins us to act in certain ways that will lead to live well with and for others and form just institutions, to value oneself enough to become a bearer of that wish. Metaphors abound in this discussion. The extent to which we hear the unique call for each of us to be the authentic self we are intended to be, which will require silence, is the extent to which most people will have a good or bad conscience. Part of a meaningful life is response to this call, which results in a vocation. This vocation involves a sacrifice or consecration of life, an event that involves living for something, of dedication to a cause, idea, or quest. Only from the depths of life can spring this inner need of self-dedication. We cannot speak of our lives without asking what the point is and or what direction our lives are taking. Asking such a question presupposes that individual lives have a point. Denying this assumption is the final estrangement from the authentic self we are here to discover and be and alienation from those with whom I have already developed bonds of family and friends. We accept responsibility for this life unique life given us, rejecting the alternative of surrendering this life to the dictates of a group, losing oneself in the anonymous other, which inevitably leads to the right to divide and judge. Here is the problem with moralism and conventional morality. The only way out of this hypocritical dilemma is to accept oneness with the one judged and open a path to reconciliation through forgiveness. Every reconciliation is despite evil and is a thanks to something good arising out of evil. This is the path of genuine care for the world. It opens a moral posture which acts justly and lovingly even if it moves against the expectations of a group, refusing to drift along with the crowd, subjecting their opinions to critical scrutiny, leading to liberating co-existence with the other. Accepting responsibility means we are agents of our lives. We are making lives. Conscience recognizes the debt we owe to each other, for to live inauthentically leads to guilt (Heidegger), but it also has a social nexus of transgressing accepted social norms, which if those norms are excessively strict can lead to neurotic guilt (Freud). This guilt recognizes the debt, the responsibility involved in encountering the other. Guilt reveals the alienation of the self from the call to authenticity. It reveals the significance of the “ought” that arises out of the encounter with the other. Guilt as transgression of the encounter with the other and falling from the calling to fulfill our authentic self provides enough content to our guilt. The rupture with the community gives birth to anger and sorrow. Despair can lead to isolation. The path to healing involves repentance and forgiveness. Confession of our transgression and the resulting guilt brings our fault to light in speech. Such confession arises out of emotion, fear, and anguish. It recognizes the defilement, stain or blemish that infects human beings by personal acts and inflicted by others upon oneself. Confronting this guilt will lead to fulfilling my authentic self, binding us to a healthy and joyful way of being uniting to the community. In this way, guilt is a feeling that becomes the foundation of moral reflection. Moral reflection by persons has the goal of meaningful self-realization of the person toward a happy and fulfilled life of human flourishing. The answer to the question, “What do we owe each other,” is one that will change regarding specific rules. However, the basis of moral reflection is basic regard or respect for the personhood of the other. To see the face of the other is to confront a moral question of how one ought to treat the other.

Morality is inherently something functional: the moral enterprise exists as what it is because it has a purpose to serve. It is the objective of morality to equip people with a body of norms, rules, and values that make for peaceful and collectively satisfying coexistence by facilitating their living together and interacting in a way that is productive of the realization of the general benefit of the wider community. As many people are concerned with adopting a physically healthy lifestyle, so we ought to have concern for the codes and values by which we live. Since we can deliberate about such codes and values, they are rational. Violations of moral principles are against the well-being and flourishing of the other. Such a life is a creative and artistic life.[28] It recognizes the value of the practical morality made in many religious and secular codes, while also recognizing the importance of developing personal excellences, such as listening to the tradition within which one finds oneself while accepting responsibility for applying that tradition appropriately in specific settings (self-direction), recognizing those who have shared ideals of the good life, knowledge of the tradition, and practice in applying its wisdom to the situations today (moral authority), treating others with respect and developing good taste (decency), approaching a human life with the realism of one who does not expect the contingencies of life to always be favorable, that suffering and pain will intersect with one’s life, but that one can still pursue one’s projects with hope (depth), and that one can develop loyalty to being the type of person one desires to be regardless of whether one will have a successful outcome (honor). We will choose our style of life through the projects to which we dedicate ourselves. An artful life chooses worthy projects. The classical virtues will accompany the artful life largely because the virtues keep us from making shipwreck of our lives. Love precedes the virtues, for without basic care for self and others we will not consider virtue. 

Aristotle will consider virtues as universal principles or values that “we” hold: courage, truthfulness (sense of duty), temperance (self-control, moderation) in our enjoyment of pleasure, liberality or generosity with our wealth, proper self-esteem or humility, good-tempered or gentle, tactful humor, wholesome ambition (duty of working honestly), and righteousness indignation. He will discuss justice as having a sense of proportion. I think it wise to add to his list with such virtues as compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, simplicity, tolerance, and purity (which adds a consideration of sexuality that Aristotle omits). As ethics begins with love, it might be an appropriate addition to say that as we consider the ethical moment and these principles, the result will be a loving action. Such principles are guidelines to our moral development, educating our feelings to desire a life exhibiting the character of the good person. Our passions are response to existential needs and reflect the perspective of the whole person. Our passions transform us into courageous and heroic persons. Our passions reflect our attempt to make sense out of life and provide us with the optimum intensity and strength to achieve amid the challenging circumstances of life. If we have a passionate love of life and all that is alive, ethics will include the idea that good is all that serves life, while evil serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, and cuts it into pieces. Such wisdom is practical and encourages development of proper insight into a situation. Such wisdom is not theoretical knowledge that we could prove through math or science, but rather, as we deliberate concerning the type of character we need to develop to arrive at the end, which is a happy, well-lived, and meaningful life. Proper philosophical reflection on ethics will keep bringing us back to the virtues necessary for a human being to experience the desired end. It will bring us back to the ordinary life most of us lead and help us to live it well.

Contrary to Aristotle in Book III of Nichomachean Ethics 1112b12-20, we can reason about ends. Cognitive deliberations regarding matters of information involving the issue of means is one type of deliberation, and evaluative deliberations regarding matters of value involving the issue of the merit of ends is another. Whether certain means are appropriate to given ends is a question whose resolution must be addressed in the former, informational order of deliberation. Whether the ends we have are appropriate, whether they merit adoption, is an issue that can be addressed in the latter, evaluative order of deliberation. Valuation is clearly something subject to reason once the matter of what is necessary for or advantageous to human well-being enters upon the scene. One cannot be rational without giving due care for the desirability of what one desires. If our ends are inappropriate then no matter how well we cultivate them, we are not being rational. A voyage to a foolish destination is a foolish enterprise, regardless of how efficiently conducted. There is inferential or logical reason that focuses on an instrumental or cognitive concern for effectiveness and efficiency in their cultivation and evaluative or axiological reason. Reasoning about ends is a matter of legitimation. It involves appraisal and evaluative judgment and focuses upon the appropriateness of ends. 

Political and economic belief systems ought to have (meaning that such systems are also moral systems) the goal of giving persons the freedom to pursue their vision of a flourishing human life in a reasonable and morally acceptable way. Such systems will show basic respect and regard for the personhood of their citizens. A well-ordered society will strive for political arrangements that coordinate morality with self-advantage. Everyone has a personal interest in so arranging matters that it comes to be in everyone’s interest to act as morality demands. Morality calls for working toward a social order where moral comportment is advantageous. Self-advantage will call for working toward the same end. The political and economic order do not have the tools to serve as the primary source of moral education, but they can provide a structure within which persons can fulfill their personal vision of their excellence. Such education must come from other institutions of society, including the faith community. Art shares these qualities but has regard for deeper dimensions of life in the formation of picture, myth, and story as it explores the depth of individual life.[29]

The grandeur and limitation of an ethical vision of the world becomes the theme of this portion of philosophical anthropology. Truth, goodness, and beauty direct our attention away from self. They represent human aspiration. Yet, in focusing our attention on that which is beyond self, we return to the self, hopefully expanded and deepened by the journey. In all hypotheses, evil manifests itself through the constitutional weakness of humanity. Freedom that assumes the responsibility for evil is freedom that comes to a self-understanding filled with meaning. In this ethical vision, freedom is the ground of evil. The confession of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. In this confession one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-being and pure action, which are at the core of freedom. Such is the grandeur of an ethical vision of the world. Reflection on the symbolism of evil reaches its peak in the ethical vision of the world.[30]

Seventh, all this suggests that philosophical anthropology is an important consideration. 

One, philosophical anthropology will need a hermeneutics of the text. We as readers who seek to understand, interpret, and apply such texts involve ourselves in a dialectical process of participation in and distancing from the text. We experience the power of language to disclose as we become aware of the horizon of our world intersecting with the horizon of the world of the text. Our world becomes open to the world disclosed by the text. The encounter can lead us to contract our world or enlarge our world.[31] The task of the reader in understanding a text is to discover that to which it refers. What we interpret in a text is the proposing of a world that we might inhabit and into which we might project our powers. Poetry re-describes the world. Making a narrative re-signifies the world in its temporal dimension. Interpretation and appropriation culminate in the reader gaining in self-understanding. The discourse of the text meets the discourse that is our lives. Such appropriation is the recovery of a movement and orientation already at work in the text.[32]

Two, philosophical anthropology will need to appropriate or apply the understanding of the text. The significance of any literary work finds its complement in the lifeworld of the reader. The interaction of the world of the text and the world of the reader is the point of application. We are in a world and are affected by situations. We try to orient ourselves in them by means of understanding. Narrative proposes a world that we might inhabit and into which we might project our powers. The role of literature in its various forms (poetry, myth, fairy tales, novels, dramas) becomes the occasion of moving toward liberation of our lifeworld or of our being-in-the-world. To interpret texts is to explicate the sort of being-in-the-world unfolded in the world of the text. The world of the text proposes a world I might inhabit if I project my possibilities toward the text. This encounter brings new possibilities for our being-in-the-world of everyday reality. 

Three, philosophical anthropology will need to reflect upon meaningful or good action. Consideration of the good moves from contemplation to action, such as universal human rights, the demand to reduce suffering, and the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-determination. We consider the realm of human flourishing. We consider the movement toward the true self and genuine freedom. Such a movement will require trust in the communal and temporal process.

Eighth, a phenomenology of the sacred as revealed in the self exposes the fragility, fallibility, and evil of the self. If such a phenomenology finds too much of the preferred theology of the writer within human experience, then it goes too far. Such hints occur in the overwhelming context of human pain, suffering, and tragedy.  I will not want to minimize this reality. Amid so much random, meaningless suffering, human beings desire the truth in the sense of wholeness of life, the good in the sense of values and beliefs that guide one’s life toward human flourishing, and the beautiful in the sense of profound aesthetic experience. We express this desire in our personal lives in how we think and live. We also express the desire in the institutions we build. 

Religion shares the grandeur and limitation of the ethical vision of the world, but they occur in a different sense. That religion refers symbolically to truth and reality within our experience is always a possibility. For adherents, religion refers to transcendent reality that ought to affect our way of life. For adherents, religion will have an appreciation of the beauty of life and world through its image of the divine. The accountability of the life one leads is toward the understanding of the divine that the adherent has. Human history has seen many such belief systems rise and fall. Many are nothing more than antiques in a museum. Their belief systems met the realities of the world and could not adjust to the inevitable change that spatial-temporal beings encounter. Religious systems of beliefs will succeed or fail based upon their ability to adjust to such changes in ways that enable adherents to face new challenges that the historical moment presents to them. Religions with myth at their center have an increasingly difficult justification in the modern, scientific cultural setting. Religions that point to spatial-temporal events of revelation have a unique responsibility to test their systems of beliefs rationally to maintain credibility and to have adherents willing to live with a view of the world proposed by such an event of revelation. Religion senses that the uniqueness of persons suggests a connection with something more than simply a spatio-temporal world, which philosophically would be the Infinite and Eternal, and religiously would be God. If true, such a God would need to appear or would need to reveal in a paradigmatic event who this God is and what this God would desire for humanity. Such a God would respect the spatio-temporal setting of persons, while finding ways to communicate with them and relate to them. The gift offering at the heart of religion merges with another fundamental aspect of sacrifice.  For mediation between the divine and the human may well be called the universal meaning of sacrifice. It may well be that the only way to mediate the divine and human is for this God to make the sacrifice necessary in forming the bridge between the Infinite and Eternal on the one side and the spatio-temporal person on the other. In prayer, an expression of humility, and worship, one recognizes dependence upon a mysterious will of an incomprehensible power one cannot imagine, such adherents seek an immediate relation to the Infinite and Eternal. Such ways of devotion would recognize the manifestation of the divine special times and places as well as recognize this manifestation in the ordinary: love, family, work, nature, and society.

            This essay tests the notion that religious texts arise out of the type of imagination we find in meaningful stories, legends, fairy tales, and poetry, more so than the type of imagination used to pursue scientific theory or historical construction. This ordering of a narrative involves us in discerning causes for the actions represented and a sense that as the story moves along it is moving in a certain direction. This approach frees us as readers from the burden imposed by a literal reading of the Bible, freeing us to engage the world of the text and its movement in such a way as to move us toward the transformation of our experience of the world. 

            These texts open the possibility of a phenomenology of the sacred as shown in the formation of the self, with the formation of conscience providing the bridge to these reflections. The closeness of religion to feeling is why philosophical anthropology needs to take these texts seriously.

Exploring the symbolism of evil is the initial step toward bringing myths nearer to philosophical discourse. The developed language of myth will make an important contribution of a modern understanding of human fault. Myth is already logos, although it is a false logos. Myth is a traditional narration that relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of people of today and establishing all the forms of action and thought by which humanity understands itself in this world. Myth cannot be an explanation for the modern person. Modern humanity can recognize the myth as myth because this culture has reached the point where history and myth separate. However, myth reveals its exploratory signification and its contribution to understanding, which is its symbolic function, since it has the power to discover and reveal the bond between humanity and what humanity considers sacred. When myth is demythologized through contact with scientific history, and elevated in the dignity of a symbol, it can become a dimension of modern thought. Thus, mythical time can no longer be coordinated with the time of events that are historical as established by historical method and historical criticism, and mythical space can no longer coordinated with the places of our geography. As modern persons, we lose the myth as immediate logos, but we rediscover it as myth. The philosophical exploration of myth creates the possibility for a new reversal of circumstances out of which logos may reappear for the modern person. Myth does so through the way it speaks of the beginning and the end of evil.

The fragility and fallibility of humanity is obvious, given the capacity of humanity for evil. Exploring the theme of fallibility, the constitutional weakness of humanity, allows us to explore how such fallibility is the path by which evil becomes possible. With the concept of fallibility, an understanding of humanity becomes intelligible. The symbol opens and discloses a dimension of experience that would remain closed and hidden without it. It occurs in language, and the symbol takes the form of narration. It expresses an inclusive mode of behavior relative to the lifeworld of human existence. If the symbol gives rise to thought, and therefore something about which to think, then philosophical discourse needs to lead to the speculative equivalent of the mythical themes of fall, exile, chaos, and tragic blinding, the notion of a free will that is bound and finds itself already bound. 

As Charles Taylor put it, the desire for cosmic connection, for an experience of joy, significance, and inspiration, suggests a higher and deeper than the everyday world around us. It hints that there is something more, that a well-lived human life is more than the abundance of the things one possesses. Such an approach opens the door for a religious conversation, although it cannot prove such a dimension to reality exists.

One example is the myth of overcoming chaos by divine creativity activity. Sacred places and times (ritual) manifest a sacred order that opposes the profane chaos shown in nature as well as human behavior. It identifies evil with chaos, salvation with creation. The death-like and terror-filled experience of history gives way to the manifestation of the sacred and the possibility through ritual and pilgrimage of participation in that sacred reality. Salvation is identical with creation, so the act that founds the world is also the liberating act. While still being-in-the-world, humanity is also being-before-God, who sanctifies places and times, allowing humanity to actualize its potential by participation in sacred reality. To be clear, secularity has replaced the sacred tradition with plays, novels, movies, television mini-series, and poetry. The ability of such medium to produce symbols that allow the secular person to participate in them is a similar experience to most of human history that experienced the transcendent to derive such meaning. Political states also have their monuments in space and time that touch the aesthetic and feeling. 

In another example, the symbolism of evil contained in the myth of the Fall calls upon philosophical reflection to recapture the symbol and extend it to the domain of the formation of the self and human consciousness. To do so will point us to the grandeur and limitation of the ethical and religious vision of the world, for human beings are both victims of evil and guilty of evil. Humanity is fragile, fallible, and liable to evil. The externality of evil shows itself in its deceptive offer of life as the reward for sin, when it can only deliver death. Its deceitful character shows itself in the human ability to choose what is objectively evil. The finite-temporal reality of humanity and the separation between the self and the call to be the authentic self contributes to the possibility of evil. This means a certain non-coincidence of the human being with oneself. This personal nonidentity is the result of a failure to recognize that self-identity develops in a journey toward others. Overidentification with that which is external to us is an important source of the struggle with self-identity. This is common as one loses oneself in the dictates of the group, the anonymous other. In over-identifying with the results of our thinking, often reflected in becoming a true believer of a political or religious ideology, believing the content of our knowledge is absolute, we close ourselves from the health of recognizing that knowledge and truth are always partial. We can over-identity with what we do, the classic example being wrapping our self-identity with a profession, rather than recognizing that our calling and vocation to live life authentically transcends a profession. This disproportion of self to self would be the explanation of fallibility. The fallibility of humanity consists in the possibility of moral evil inherent in human constitution.  Humanity is the only being so unstable in ontological constitution that it is capable of being both greater and lesser than itself. Humanity is bounded by unlimited rationality, totality, and beatitude on the one hand and limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire on the other. 

This pathos of humanity involves a pre-comprehension of human misery. Such misery occurs when the ego seeks to dominate the other, asserting an arrogant claim in relation to the world, a form of self-love and egocentricity. This egocentricity makes its appearance in human life long before we consider moral behavior, showing itself in the finitude of the limitations of our finite-temporal perspective. Moving toward a self-enclosed perspective is an expression of human fault. The center of the distortion or lack of balance human beings experience is the egocentricity of human beings (Augustine). The distortion in human behavior often begins in an obscure manner, and may even go for prolonged periods unnoticed, reflecting itself in the implicit distortion of relation to self and world. This distortion shows itself in the psychological insight that human beings have an unnoticed or unconscious drive to oppose their best interests. Human beings reject their own happiness by their turn toward the self and as they experience a conflict between self and their destiny. If the earliest form of the sense of self exhibits narcissistic pleasure (Freud), this form conflicts with the best interest of the vocation of us all to find authenticity and freedom in personal and social life. 

The ego transcends these limits recovering its original familiarity with the world and the destiny of healthy community toward which the authentic self aims.[33] Such health occurs as we consider this time and place occurs within a horizon that exceeds our grasp. The symbol moves us beyond itself so that it never becomes something we can manage. We properly consider what we think, what we do with our lives, and how we feel about the people and groups in our lives, but all this occurs in the context of a horizon of thought, feeling, and activity that is always beyond our grasp, always receding, and something at which we never arrive. That is why the search for truth is never complete, we strive for moral goodness and not perfection, and we appreciate beauty despite its transitory nature. Yet, if we transform that which is beyond into an object ready-at-hand for us, what we have done is create an illusion, of which Kant warned us.

We need to re-consider the way we think of evil. As much as modern life wants to think of human beings as good, it still wants to find a place for evil. A secular culture places responsibility for evil and its defeat upon human beings. It places the blame for evil on others, especially on anonymous structures and pressures in the social system. It localizes evil in others or in groups. In the process, it exonerates the group to which one belongs. If evil could find its localization in a group (the rich, the capitalist, a race, a gender) then all one must do is single out, isolate, or destroy the group. Of course, if we step back, even if we could destroy the group, evil will remain. George Orwell told this parable in Animal Farm,remaining a powerful reminder of this truth. 

One can try thinking of evil as monstrous and inhuman. Evil is very human. The subterranean stream of Western history finally came to the surface and usurped the dignity of western tradition. That subterranean stream of western civilization includes slavery, the suppression of women, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism, all of which arose with liberal democracy and capitalism. This shadow or darkness within western civilization gave birth to communism and fascism. The horrors of Hitler and Stalin were not accidents or monstrous abstractions. Rather, most who worked with them and implemented their policies were ordinary conformists and followers; the kind of people we can find all too easily in any time, leading to the controversial observation on the banality of evil. While we conveniently portray evil in monstrous ways, morons and imbeciles can embody evil just as well. One may be a diligent yet banal bureaucratic criminal. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful. Hannah Arendt saw the moral and intellectual shallowness of Eichmann. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. Others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. That is the banality of evil. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. In this sense, thoughtlessness and evil are interconnected. That is the banality of evil. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.^[34]

One may recognize sin first as an act, but we have not seen it truly until we see it as influencing the structure of human existence. The structure of human desire is rooted in the over-valuation of self that wills. Our desperate striving for self-fulfillment results in anxiety and despair. Excessive focusing on our own identity is a deformation of the theme of human life. Anxiety becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. Need and desire characterize human life. However, the step to excessive desire that sin takes in anxiety leads to attempts to ensure the self by possession of what we desire. Anxiety and the related fixation on the self also are behind the search for confirmation from others. We want recognition by others. When we seek it at any price to secure own identity, the search springs from an anxiety about the self that expresses a self-fixation as we find in the self-love in Augustine. Uncertainty of the future and the incomplete nature of our identity feed the anxiety. Anxiety makes us cling to the self. Such everyday manifestations of sin are its true nature.

Are some people so broken they become evil? If we understand that healing is still possible for the evil person, I am not afraid of that designation. If we can assume that some human beings reach a large degree of wholeness in this life, we can assume that others may reach the maximum degree of destruction and failure. If so, such persons would have a remarkable degree of consistency in this destructiveness, largely because they would not tolerate a sense of the degree to which they are broken. They would scapegoat, lashing out at anyone who might confront them. They would sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection. Since they are without fault, the world with which they are in constant conflict must be at fault. Such evil is destructive, even while they might attempt to destroy an evil in the world. Refusing to see the sickness of their lives, they project the sickness onto others or toward society. Hating evil outside themselves, they do not hate the evil within. They will want to maintain the appearance of moral purity, since it provides a cover for the evil lurking within them. Such concern for public image will contribute to respectability and stability in their lives. They would have a strong will to get their own way. Such persons take advantage of those they perceive to be weak and innocent. They use the power they have to prevent others from fulfilling their potential as human beings to defend their broken self. They cause suffering wherever they go. They would be narcissistic in a way that does not allow them to experience empathy. This is why such persons are dangerous. Empathy provides the healthy person with a normal restraint in times of stress and anger, a restraint the evil person would lack. They can ignore the humanity of the other person. To maintain it all, their intellectual deviousness will become clear.^[35]

Human behavior in groups can become strikingly evil. Groups are too often less than the sum of their parts. The specialization that occurs through refining our individual gifts and passions in a role we find within the group can lead to the fragmentation of conscience. People in a group can pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. Individuals can forsake their conscience. Groups can have an almost nonexistent conscience. Under stress, even as individuals, we tend to regress to a childish state of desiring others to serve us. Under stress, groups can regress as well. In certain types of stress, groups can anesthetize themselves from truly seeing the horror in which they may be complicit. Evil in groups is also a form of immaturity or regression. Yet, stress is also a test of goodness. Groups will also tend to depend upon a leader. Most people would rather take the comfortable and easier path of following the leader. The follower becomes like a child. Adults hand their choices and destiny over to a decision-maker. The adult becomes psychologically dependent upon the leader. By contrast, a healthy group encourages everyone to be leaders. Groups tend to be cohesive. Groups develop pride in their group. They also create enemies or even hate those outside the group. They become cliques. The group can easily deflect attention away from its deficiencies by focusing upon the far worse sins of those outside the group. Evil groups will flee self-examination and guilt, while healthy groups will see self-examination and criticism as a stimulus toward greater health and wholeness. Nations organized by democratic institutions, undergirded by basic respect and tolerance, have a regular opportunity to re-evaluate at every election. Such nations have also always had their enemies, such as communism, fascism, and Islamism.^[36]

The solidarity of humanity in dealing with sin and its resulting evil highlights the social nexus of sin and evil and blocks any path to moralism. Evil can hide in religious institutions and among the good just as much as it can reside in economic and political structures. Sin will show itself in the idolatry we see in the excess of self-affirmation, in lust as a refusal to mature our love, in injustice as we make others serve us and in the despair that leads us to the failure to risk creative action. Yet, we cannot separate ourselves from sin. Thus, the roots of sin are not in society. Sin has its root in the heart, as Romans 7 makes clear, and thus, the social nexus fails to explain the universality of sin. Our anxiety leads us to prioritize self, which we disclose in the choices we make. The alienation that results is with our cooperation, even if sin usually arrives in an alluring and deceptive clothing. Sin promises a richer and fuller life, but it always leads to death. Our end threatens each moment of our living self-affirmation with nothingness. We lead our temporal lives under the shadow of death (Luke 1:79 and Matthew 4:16). Yet, our self-affirmation of life is an antithesis to our end in death. Fear of death pierces deep into life. It motivates us to unrestricted self-affirmation. It robs us of the power to accept life.

Christian faith involves a unique affirmation about Jesus Christ, not only that he is the presence of God but also that knowing his identity is identical with having him present or being in his presence. If we say we believe something, but it does not affect the way we live, we do not really believe it, or it is so abstract as to have no life-changing dimensions to it. Identity and presence of Jesus are for the believer one. 

Ninth, humanity finds redemption through forgiveness, thereby finding freedom. 

The web of human relationships is so intricate that even when we act out of the best of intentions, our actions can negatively affect others as well as ourselves. We may not have all the evidence that we could have had. We may act too quickly. We may not act quickly enough. We may not have developed the insight necessary into ourselves, the nature of people involved, or the seriousness of this moment, to act appropriately and courageously. Human action is always open-ended and therefore ambiguous. We may be physically sick, and this causes us to act in a confused way. We may never learn of the harmful effects of our well-intentioned actions. 

The point is, there are many reasons to give and receive forgiveness that do not reflect the moral implications to which sin points us. Forgiveness helps to keep us going, not allowing a past act, whether a mistake or a sin, to define us. The human condition is such that we need forgiveness, and we need to extend forgiveness far more than we realize. We must not forget that we need to direct this redemptive activity toward ourselves.

The wearisome sequence of revenge for past wrongs that only provokes further revenge is a chain people can break only through forgiveness. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover. We would remain the victims of its consequences forever. Yet, a path needs to become open human relationships that says that what is done is not always done, the broken can be fixed, that the ravaged can be restored. That you can have another swing, that you can wipe the slate clean, and you can go back to square one. Forgiveness is costly primarily to the one who forgives. The one who forgives gives up the right to justice or revenge and chooses mercy. Anyone who has truly forgiven another knows what this means. Respect for the person is sufficient to prompt forgiveness for the sake of the person. To think that we owe respect only where we admire or esteem the person constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.

I direct your attention to a few sayings of Jesus.

Matt 6.12 And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors

Matt 6.14-15 For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Luke 11.4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us;

Mark 11.25And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."

One who acts never quite knows what one is doing, and thus everyone becomes guilty of consequences they never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of one’s deed one can never undo it, that the process one starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who does not act. All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that one appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what one has done. To condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who forfeits one’s freedom the very moment one makes use of it. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving.

Jesus is consistent with his Jewish tradition in its emphasis of forgiveness. The entire sacrificial system was a way of helping people confront their need for forgiveness. That system dealt with sin, but also with unknown transgression. The story of Joseph in Genesis is a profound reflection on family relationships and the need for forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.[37] Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God — as though God, not humanity, would forgive through the medium of human beings — but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Human beings in the gospel are not supposed to forgive because God forgives and they must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing people from what they have done unknowingly. In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance. The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.

The most plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as intricately connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. What was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. Jesus clearly recognized this as well. An example is Luke 7:36-50, “Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little,” and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self - revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with qualities and shortcomings no less than with achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.

The modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person.

We can speak of redemption only in relation to an event that creates freedom for the redeemed. The actualization of freedom and its appropriation by us is the theme of redemption. This suggests that our vocation as human beings is to actualize our freedom in our personal and corporate lives. This vocation involves a sacrifice or consecration of life, an event that involves living for something, of dedication to a cause, idea, or quest. Only from the depths of life can spring this inner need of self-dedication. We cannot speak of our lives without asking what the point is and or what direction our lives are taking. Asking such a question presupposes that individual lives have a point. Denying this assumption is the final estrangement from the authentic self we are here to discover and be and alienation from those with whom I have already developed bonds of family and friends. This vocation will find expression in psychological health, morality, and family. It will find expression in cultural, economic, and political institutions, if they reflect the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. In selfhood human beings come to know their proper destiny, a destiny that they attain through their own behavior. An original indebtedness of existence finds expression in the experience of being responsible. As Heidegger describes it, human beings owe it to themselves to correspond to this destiny of theirs and so to themselves. All responsibility is responsibility to the self. Such considerations make clearer the connection between responsibility and freedom. One hears the call of the self in conscience, summoning persons to accept responsibility for their own behavior and their world and enabling them to transcend the actual state of their own existence together with all the aspirations linked to it. Freedom is self-determination in the sense that individuals allow the call of their selfhood to determine their actions. Aristotle is consistent with this thought when he says that when people are free, they exist for their own sake.[38]Their present life situation is their own in the light of their destiny. They know themselves as responsible for their own condition and activity and for turning the natural and social gives of their own life situation into a fulfillment of their destiny. These individuals accept responsibility for their separate actions and destinies, but they also accept spheres of responsibility that extend beyond these to embrace the life situation and behaviors of other human beings. The call of freedom is always to a harmonization of one’s behavior with one’s own destiny. Yet, human beings are the kinds of beings that find pleasure in what is harmful to their own destiny. Niebuhr^[39]  says that individuals do not deserve the devotion they lavish upon themselves, and thus they must practice self-deception to practice it.

Tenth, reflection on truth and meaning opens a path for considering being-in-the-world as also being-before-God.

Showing the anthropological need to rise above the finite to the thought of the Infinite and Eternal still has significance for the truth claim of all religions talk about God. All talk about God must validate itself by being able to make the world of experience a proof of its power, showing what it is in everyday experience. Every religious message must demonstrate its truth claims by philosophical reflection on the relation of humanity and religion. Philosophical reflection on the anthropological necessity of elevation to the thought of the Infinite and Eternal, which must encompass the thought of perfection as well. The basis of the thought of God is the philosophical notion of the Infinite and Eternal, but to be clear, this is not knowledge of God. Such reflection imposes minimal conditions for talk about God that need to be taken seriously. In this sense, one might develop a philosophical concept that acts as a framework for what deserves the name “God.” [40] The experience of the finite occurs in the context of a horizon that always exceeds the grasp, and thus, the Infinite limits the finite. An awareness of the Infinite as such is possible for us only if we first know finite things, reflect on their finitude, and perceive the ungraspable horizon within which human beings experience finitude. We attain a sense of the Infinite only by negation of the limit of the finite. Such primordial and unthematic experience prepares the way for knowledge of God that one can receive only in revelation. Paul can affirm that ever since the creation of the world the eternal divine power and the divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made (Rom 1:20), and that Gentiles do instinctively what the law requires (Rom 2:14). Such knowledge has validity, even where people do not want to know anything at all about God. ^[41] God is present to us and known, but only as the unthematic awareness of the Infinite and Eternal. Such self-knowledge and self-awareness is the role of conscience. From the life of feeling in which conscience is rooted, there develops a nonthematic relation to the totality of life, in which one seeks a reliable basis for life in which one can place trust. In this sense we know what it means to have a God. Such a trust presupposes a difference between self and world. From the first we are before a transcendent mystery in the sense that the silent infinity of reality that is beyond our control constantly presents itself to us as a mystery. We live with provisional answers to the question of existence, answers that endure so long as they can serve as a reliable basis for confidence. Intuition of an indefinite infinite, of a mystery that transcends and upholds human life, and gives us the courage to trust it, achieves differentiation from finite things only through experience.[42]

Actual knowledge of the divine will need to come from another sphere, which is that of revelation. Within the productive imagination is the experience of the awesome, overwhelming, and powerful that encounters the holy or sacred. Love is the act through which one apprehends the value of the sacred.[43] This experience in the Judeo-Christian tradition places greater emphasis upon the word than the numinous experience, hierophanies withdraw in favor of doctrinal and ethical instruction, an historical trajectory runs through the time of repetition and making the remembered historical event actual in the present. We can see this in the Old Testament, where patriarchal narratives, the exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land, the tribal federation, the formation of sacral kingship, exile and restoration, have a dominant un-mythical theme, while the myth it does have relates to origin and promised redemption, as well as to remembered acts of deliverance. While the story of Jesus includes myth (his infancy, vision at baptism, Mount of Transfiguration, calming the storm, miraculous catch of fish, feeding the multitudes), the story of Jesus of Nazareth can be read as that of a charismatic healer/exorcist, an apocalyptic prophet, and a wise rabbi forming a community of followers. His chosen distinctive form of teaching, the parable, is as un-mythical as one can imagine, while its telling sets us in the direction of the coming rule of God. He was an obedient servant-martyr for the cause his Father had given him. The point is that this desacralizing and demythologizing of the world we find in the Judeo-Christian tradition leads to an a-religious form of Christianity. It is not the secularity that dominates this age, but it does intersect with some of the concerns found in secularity. Contrary to the scientific-technological ideology of our time, humanity itself is not conceivable without the sacred, a feeling of absolute dependence.[44]

A theology arising out of such narrative texts as we find in the Bible will announce the God of Israel as the great actor in a history of deliverance. A focus upon the world of the text frees the reader from premature application of existential or ideological categories. Placing the subject matter of the text as primary frees us from the problem of its inspiration. This recognizes that what is at issue is a world involving cosmic, communal, and historical and cultural concerns, such as Israel and the coming rule of God. The projected world we find in the Bible proposes a new being that encounters our world as readers. When we find ourselves situated before the text, it opens another reality, another possible world. The existential category par excellence is that of appropriation, encounter, and application. It opens one to trust in what God has done in Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth, and this belief will lead to the transformation of the life of the one who believes. The self-understanding of faith provides a link with the critique of religion we find in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, a hermeneutics of suspicion, which deconstructs prejudices we have, the illusions of the subject, that prevent the world of the text from being allowed to be free to involve us as readers in the direction in which it is leading. A playful approach to the text frees the reader to the new possibilities of the world opened by the Bible, for it ties into the imagination, which is the place where the new being forms in the reader, thereby allowing new possibilities to encounter the reader. 

A Christian theology that respects the meaning of the biblical narratives must begin simply by retelling those stories, without any systematic effort at apologetics, without any determined effort to begin with questions arising from our experience. The stories portray a person -- a God who acts in the history of Israel and engages in self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. They help us learn about that person in the way that a great novelist describes a character or that a telling anecdote captures someone's personality. They provide insights that we lose if we try to summarize the narrative in a nonnarrative form. No abstract account of God's faithfulness adequately summarizes Exodus. The Gospels surpass any abstract account of God's love. Far from seeking merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. Christians who tell these stories, stories that are rich, enigmatic, sometimes puzzling and ambiguous, can find that their lives fit into the world they describe -- indeed, that our stories suddenly make more sense when seen in that context.

If the event of revelation has occurred, the basic task of theology becomes shifting the ground from under the self and toward what the event of revelation says concerning God and humanity. This notion assumes that only God has the right to speak of God. Instead of finding so much fascination with the existing, thinking, and doubting self, God needs to become fascinating again in that the event of revelation is the source of our affirmation regarding the existence and essence of God. God becomes interesting for the sake of who God is. 

For the Christian, of course, the event of revelation is the word and deed of the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. Our reason will need a shift to acknowledging that in this event we find that which satisfies our drive toward beauty, goodness, and truth. The doubting self of Descartes takes the self into the world of experience. The person who acknowledges the event of revelation acknowledges God as the supreme partner in the journey of a human life. Such a person seeks to become part of the divine journey of renewing humanity after the image of God. Theology is always on the way and is thus a pilgrim theology. The journey becomes allowing the event of revelation to continually shape thought and life.^[45]

All of this properly places the analogy of being increasingly far from the theological task, for it assumes a distance and inaccessibility of the divine and thus seeks a middle term to bridge the difference. Such an approach seeks to show how the common experience of movement, for example, must derive from God. In contrast, the analogy of faith assumes correspondence between God and world in the event of revelation. The event announces a turning point in history, a language event that takes temporality seriously. The event of revelation invites us to ponder the way God has come near to us charismatic exorcist/healer, as apocalyptic prophet, as was rabbi of a community, and as obedient servant-martyr, as embracing the nothingness and death, and ultimately the divine address embodied in love.^[46]

Such a language event involves the telling of a story. The social structure of the self corresponds to the Trinitarian structure of the event of revelation. We must learn to tell our story. As we do, we gain an insight into the story of God. In fact, theology needs to continually re-tell the story of God for each generation. Narration of a story preserves the past for a future that remains undetermined. Thus, narration does not invent stories. It involves us in on-going discovery and engagement that can have a playful character. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, is about whom his followers told stories. They lead us to the affirmation that “God is love.” Love is the event of surrender, selflessness, affection, promise toward the beloved. Love distances us from self and orients us toward the other. Turning to this event with faith will mean that love and hope gain a victory.^[47]

Much of science has concluded that nature has an orientation toward complexity, a notion that invites a conversation with philosophy in its discussion of the Infinite and Eternal. If we understand time as occurring within eternity and that therefore eternity is the realm of the fulfillment of time, we open the possibility of the divine. In fact, it may well be that the future has more influence upon the present than does the origin of either the universe or life on this planet. To be bold, the future may well have more content than we dare to imagine on our own. Far from being empty, death-like, and nothing, the future may well be the divine becoming all in all, full of life, and meaningful. In that sense, religion becomes a death-defying act, the faith and the hope that the end is something rather than nothing, life rather than death, meaning rather than emptiness. To put it bluntly, a universe in which human beings are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a quite different universe from one with an original guiding agent who guides the universe toward a divine and beautiful end.

Biblical scholars need to analyze the plot of biblical narratives, the way the literary forms work, the patterns of climax and tension. Christian theology ought to be descriptive in laying out a Christian view of the world. That view will reflect the enigmas and ambiguities of the biblical texts, and it will be a view of the entire world. Much of the most interesting recent work in Christian ethics discusses the way narratives shape our understanding of Christian life. We make decisions because of beliefs about what sorts of virtues seem important, what sort of human life we believe to be good. To answer that kind of question, a principle or a rule is often less helpful than a story. A Christian theologian will do ethics to indicate that this narrated, narratable world is at the same time open to and transforms the ordinary world of our experience. For example, the reawakening of political responsibility forms a link with the reanimation of traditional sources, into the most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection. There would be no more interests in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of humanity. Eschatology is nothing without the recitation of acts of deliverance from the past.[48]

Religion must fit itself into such a community of reasonable discourse. Religion has a right to expect others to respect its sacred texts. Religion has no right to assume their truth. The truths of religion originate in and receive validation from testimony. Testimony is notoriously subjective. Yet, I will suggest that testimony is a valuable element in a community of reasonable discourse. This means all views have the nature of a hypothesis that remains open to criticism. It means no one has the right to retreat to dogmatism, ideology, or revelation from God to avoid engaging discourse. It means all of us engage in the everyday learning process of trial and error.^[49]

What I am sharing here is one way in which philosophy, sacred texts, and theological discussion, are partners in intellectual curiosity. This is not a small thing. It can even help the atheist understand how some intelligent people can be religious. It can help a secular society understand that the religious community is part of the rational community that builds upon tradition, beliefs, values, and institutions, expressing desire that all human beings have. Such communities have much to contribute to public discourse. However, it will do less than what many religious persons would like to see. It does not prove there is a religious dimension to which human beings must relate if they are to have a life of human flourishing.

To state what is obvious for us in the West, one does not find truth as a finished product. Rather, truth is a history, a process. When Hegel says, “truth is the whole,” in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he says that that which makes this truth into a whole can become visible only at the end. The inner contradictions of the preliminary stages of truth will drive them beyond themselves. To put this simply, the conversation that is philosophy and religion has a history that involves vigorous debate. They cannot all be “true,” but their interaction will leave some ideas behind, and some pushed forward into deeper levels of truth than they had in them before. The conversation occurs dialectically.[50] The meaning of this whole path is the truth. Truth is a process that runs its course and maintains itself through change. The truth is not timeless and unchangeable. The process of uncovering truth suggests unity of the process, which is full of contradictions while it is under way. It will become visible along with the truth meaning of every individual moment in it, and from the standpoint of its end. What a thing is, the future will decide.

            Correctly understood, the question of meaning and the question of truth are inseparable. The whole everywhere conditions the individual, and the consciousness of this situation belongs to what it means to be human. 

Yet, the world of humanity in the West does not take a meaningful life for granted. Human time has a dominant concern with emptiness and loss. The experience of emptiness suggests that people cannot presuppose meaningfulness to human life. For many, the human situation is that of living in a meaningless universe, calling upon individuals to confer meaning so that they can live. However, there is another way.

One way of reflecting the issue before us is the nature of language and the nature of human action. 

As common as language feels to us, language is the primary mark of distinction that humanity has. Words have their meanings initially within sentences. One cannot separate this meaning from the context of an individual sentence. The individual word bears a certain degree of indeterminacy, as one can see with the variety of dictionary meanings to words. The word receives greater determinacy in a sentence. The words in the sentence contain the sense of the sentence. Sense and meaning belong together. Meaning has to do with the position of particulars within the context of the whole. One can speak of the meaning of the sentence within the broader context of a discourse or text. Linguistic meaning has to do with the relationships between parts and a whole within the context of a discourse. At the same time, the speaker or writer has a subject that he or she has concern to communicate. One represents it through the mediation of the meanings of the words that make up the sentence. Language also expresses and communicates. However, representation is always present. Assertions claim to be true in the sense that the meaning of such sentences attempt to represent an objectively existing meaning in a situation. 

On the surface, language is a human activity and gives human beings the power to confer meaning. However, this view does not appreciate the fact that language represents a reality that is already given. One needs to discover their meaning, rather than bestow meaning upon them. In addition, there are many layers to the meaning of linguistic utterances. The speaker or writer says more than he or she intends. The meaning of a sentence, once one has spoken it, proceeds from the combination of the words themselves. Yet, interpretations can miss the meaning that the author intended the utterances to have, as well as the meaning that the reader should derive from what the author said. This possibility of error weighs heavily against the view that interpretations are only a bestowal of meaning. If the interpretation can miss the meaning of its object, then the meaning of a sentence, a discourse, or a text is obviously not merely dependent on the interpreter. In a comparable manner, assertions also presuppose rather than produce the meaning of the corresponding situation. One can approach meaning through language, but it is not the product of language. If the use of assertions is meaningful, then reality must already possess a meaningful structure before we grasp it in language, even if language is the only way to articulate this meaning structure. Language can either grasp or miss the semantic structure of reality, and therefore language does not create this semantic structure. To reduce meaning to language is to take the first step along a path that culminates in the position that human action creates, that it is a product of a bestowal of meaning.

Human action depends upon goal setting, and it in turn depends upon perceptions of meaning. Human experience is a special case of the semantic structure of reality. This reality precedes its linguistic representation. Experiencing has to do with the ontological structure of a creature who is capable of language, and thus with the social context within which one develops and uses language.  Human action depends on perceptions of meaning. Goal setting requires the choice of the means relevant to a given goal. This process presupposes orientation to the world and the grasp of semantic content.

One approaches meaning through language, but meaning is not the product of language. If human use of assertions expresses the nature of human experience and experienced reality, then reality has a meaningful structure prior to human attempts to grasp that meaning in language.

Language can either grasp or miss the semantic structure of reality. Without this truth, all assertions would be misguided. To make the point clear: one cannot reduce linguistically grasped meaning to acts of the bestowal of human meaning. Experienced meaning precedes human comprehension of meaning, providing the connection between religion and the experience of meaning.

Events already have meaning and significance. This applies also to the events of history, which do not need to have a meaning conferred upon them through human interpretation. Historical events have meaning and significance themselves according to their contribution to the whole of the life context in which they belong. Life’s moments have significance in themselves. One can only grasp their significance through the medium of an interpretation that is conditioned by the perspective of a particular historical standpoint. Only from the end of history could one fully and completely comprehend the significance inherent in the events and forms of history. The end of history will make a final decision concerning the truth or falsity of personal convictions of meaning. The evidence that the contemporary experience of meaning provides has the form of faith and of an anticipatory representation of a meaning that has yet to appear with finality.[51]

Another way of considering the matter before us is the role of philosophy.

At its best, philosophy will hold before it a love for truth, goodness, and beauty. It will do so by clarifying thought through reasonable dialogue. The dizzying array of philosophical schools unintentionally contributes to the journey to wholeness of truth, goodness, and beauty. Philosophy attempts to clarify by focusing upon ideas and concepts. Religion has a way of picturing to truth, goodness, and beauty to the imagination. Aesthetic expression in the arts presents to the senses, especially to the hearing and seeing, the special qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty. Our natural appreciation for the beauty we find in nature is not sufficient. The contemplation of the beautiful leads to the creation of the beautiful. In other words, the fine arts are an important part of the journey of humanity toward its wholeness. This also means that the fine arts are an important part of our journeys toward human flourishing. Philosophy will lead to better understanding of the true and good. Religion can lead to our subjective experience and embodiment of the true and good. The fine arts can lead to our seeing and hearing of that which is true and good. The point is that philosophy, religion, and the fine arts arise from the unique purpose of human life. Their disappearance would bring great damage to the human journey. The fine arts are a distinctive way in which human beings experience and express truth, goodness, and freedom. The fine arts allow us to contemplate, dwell with, and shape our minds and lives to, the contours of beauty. The fine arts, in their drive to express the beautiful, bring human freedom and vitality (liveliness, spiritedness) to the senses. If we lost our taste for beauty, we would lose our taste for that which sustains and nourishes us. We could make the same statement regarding philosophy and religion. Fine art has a history of close connection with mythology and religion. The modern era has opened the door for a secular presentation of beauty that arises out of daily life, embodying human freedom and liveliness. All of this suggests that, while philosophy may lead to a totalizing claim, especially as expressed today in science, religion and the fine arts will always act as resistance to such claims. Religion and the fine arts stand as resistance to the attempts to bring humanity under scientific control by reminding philosophy and science of the elusive nature of the human quest for truth, goodness, and beauty.^[52]

Behind the reflection on truth, goodness, and beauty is a light that has occasionally shined through. The light is the hidden influence of love. The opposite of love is indifference. Even hate demonstrates our care for something valuable to us. Life wants to continue. We are not apathetic about living. We care enough to arise in the morning and engage the people and task of this day. Love shines through in our care for life. Love is the beginning of our desire for the truth. Love is the beginning of our moral reflection and love is the goal of moral reflection. Love invites us to pause and hold the aesthetic moment in our imagination. Love suggests that something matters. Love heals the sickness that can invade us that nothing matters. It invites us to escape the prison of our aloneness. It helps us discover who we are. We are incomplete without it. We express love as we engage others in the search for the true and the good. We express love in friendship, compassion, and justice. It frees us from a legalistic approach to life. We love as we share the life-giving quality of aesthetic experiences with others. Love pulls us out of our obsessive self-concern and focuses our attention on the other. Yet, love toward another means we also learn to have proper regard and respect for self. 

Such reflections on truth, goodness, and beauty, disclose the orientation of our lives. Despite the broken quality of human life, we orient our lives toward the true, good, and beautiful. Such feeling is close to the religious experience in that it indicates the totality of life. Such feeling indicates the fullness of life that transcends the individual and shows itself in the community of fellow human beings. Such feeling orients us to hope for the future. In feeling, we find the theme of the wholeness of human life. In its reaching out to the totality of life, feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition.

We are questioning beings. A finite system would not have the ability to question itself as a whole. Thus, we have an orientation toward the Infinite and Eternal. We experience the Other of our lives in love and freedom, continuing the process of questioning. The Infinite draws our attention through such encounters. Such drawing remains implicit in our questioning. Such questioning also reveals our brokenness. At the most benign level, our questioning reveals us as doubters. We must live with doubt. We must live with ignorance. We feel the separation of our present with our true or authentic self. We feel our alienation from our destiny. Many of our questions seem to meet a deafening silence. Yet, our questioning also invites to perpetual openness to others, to the human journey, and to the future. Human life is a process of inquiry. In fact, the phenomenon of inquiry is an essential element of human existence. Our inquiry reveals that our present lack points to the possibility of totality and wholeness.^[53] Our inquiring and questioning reveals our freedom. Our questioning is a quest toward the true or authentic self, a response to the call embedded in us as human beings. 

The course of philosophic reasoning outlined in this essay has the character of a wager. It presumes that the participant will gain a better understanding of humanity and of creation by following the indications of symbolic thought. The intelligibility of the interpretation will verify the wager through coherent discourse. The symbols of deviation, wandering, and captivity, of chaos, mixture, and fall, all of which lead to the servile will under the guidance of a mythology of evil existence, then we have deduced the symbolism of human evil. The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to end the prerogative of self-reflection. The symbol gives reason to think that the “I think” is within being, so the being that posits itself in the “I think” has still to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol. The symbols of guilt found in deviation, wandering, and captivity, as well as the myths of chaos, blinding, mixture, and fall, speak to the situation of the being of humanity in the being of the world. The philosophical task is to start from the symbols and elaborate structures of human existence. The symbols are elevated to existential concepts.

---

[1] In the introduction to (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature 1830, 1970, 2004).

[2] (Rue 2012), where he considers whether meaning is inherent and therefore discovered, where or invented by subjective imagination and social negotiation, or reductionism that would lead to meaning being an illusion. He suggests that before self-consciousness the universe was pointless and absurd, but I will disagree with that, as long as we have a limited view of meaning. As a naturalist, he embraces the idea that purposes emerge out of the struggles for life.

[3] (C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 1985), 1, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Robert Wright.

[4] For reasons such as these, the solipsist and the skeptic will travel paths I do not find intriguing enough to explore with them.

[5] (Lonergan, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding 1958)

[6] (Goodenough 1998), xvi.

[7] (Hartshorne 1962), 11.

[8] (Vaught 2004), 141-158.

[9] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), 20-34.

[10] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[11] Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Third Meditation, par. 24, 1641).

[12] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, 1988, 1990), 77-90. 

[13] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990) will be the basis for the following discussion, which he develops in dialogue with Hegel and Whitehead and in opposition to David Hume, atomism, analytical philosophy, and P. F. Strawson.

[14] (Rescher, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason 1997)

[15] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), loc 2072-2119.

[16] (Kaufman, Jesus and Creativity 2006), Chapter 3.

[17] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), loc 1680-1809.

[18] Errol E. Harris, “Objective Knowledge and Objective Value,” International Philosophical Quarterly, XV (March 1975), 35-50.

[19] (von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory 1947, 1985, 2000, 2004). As a Catholic theologian, he will stress that God is truth, the Logos is the expression of the love at the heart of truth, Spirit continues to help see the disclosure and trustworthiness of truth in revelation.

[20] (Karkkainen, Creation and Humanity: A constructive Christian theology for the pluralistic world 2015), Section 16, location 12855ff

[21] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[22] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962)

[23] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962).

[24] (Levinas, Time and the Other 1987).

[25] Martin Heidegger on everydayness.

[26] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 302.

[27] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Initiative,” 1991.

[28] (Kekes 2002)

[29] (Rescher, Ethical Idealism: An Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ideals 1987)

[30] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 300.

[31] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 1973

[32] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” 1991.

[33] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 106-7.

[34] (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 1963, 1977).

[35] (Peck 1983), 36-84.

[36] (Peck 1983), 212-53.

[37] Hannah Arendt says too much when she said that the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.

[38] (Metaphysics 982b25f, Book I, Chapter 2).

[39] (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941, Volume 1, p. 203ff).

[40] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Vol 1, 95ff.

[41] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Vol I, 107ff.

[42] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Vol I, Chapter 3.

[43] (Scheler 1973, 1913-16), 108-9.

[44] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995) “Manifestation and Proclamation,” 1978.

[45] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter III, sections 8-10, p. 34, Chapter III, Section 11, 12, 13.

[46] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter IV, Section 14-18.

[47] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter V, Section 20-21.

[48] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 1981.

[49] (Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science 1973, 1976), 44-47. 

[50] For Hegel, the outcome that is supposed to embrace all contradictions and everything provisional, showing them to have been one-sided syntheses, is the Absolute.

[51] Today, many people assume that individuals must create their own meaning and thus impart meaning to a reality that appears meaningless. The sociology of knowledge often suggests that individuals have as their task to create meaning. Solving the problem would then depend on finding the power to give meaning to one’s own life in order to liberate oneself from the crippling influence of meaninglessness. Is the experience of meaning a matter of creating meaning or of discovering an already given meaning? If people bestow meaning upon life through their own action, meaning would merely be a human projection, lacking any truth content beyond our consciousness. The move from pre-linguistic reality to semantic structure requires justification. The representational function of language, and particularly the structure of assertions, justifies the supposition of structures of meaning that extend beyond the realm of the linguistic. In all realms of reality, particular appearances are parts of more complete meaning-forms. When philosophers attempt to reduce meaning to language, they take the first step along a path that culminates in the creation of meaning through human action. 

[52] (Houlgate 2007), Stephen Houlgate, “Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics.”

[53] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 226-34.