Fear and Trembling in the Postmodern World: Part Four - Je Suis
Our changing notions of what is real reveal much about us.
What is real?
This may seem like a fundamentally modern or even postmodern question, but it is surely ancient. After all, human beings have always understood that there are such things as truth and error, reality and mirage. The concept of investigating a matter to determine the truth did not begin with the Scientific Revolution. It is as old as Pontius Pilate’s famous question: “What is truth?”1
Yes, the ancients may not have understood every aspect of reality, but they knew there is such a thing as reality, and that it behooves human beings to seek it out. What changed after the Scientific Revolution was that people began to prioritize empirical evidence over other types of evidence—that is to say, as they pursued the truth, they tended to give more weight to sensory experiences gained in the material world than they did to other forms of evidence or knowledge. Because the scientific disciplines only have the capacity to measure the material world (by which I mean anything subject to the understood laws of nature), scientists tend to define reality as anything that exists within this realm…and nothing else.
However, even as the men of science became the arbiters of truth, the more philosophical disciplines refused to cede their historic place. They argued that the limitations of science require a different means of learning by which man can explore things that may not be subject to the ordinary laws of nature, such as morality. Here philosophers like Immanuel Kant attempted to establish a basic, unchanging moral law that could be discovered using human reason even if it was not subject to purely scientific study.
Into this world stepped the young René Descartes. After receiving his law degrees, he took up a military occupation in the hope of seeing the world. On a November day in 1619, while participating in a tour of Germany, Descartes sat alone in a small room heated by a stove. (Why the stove is important, I cannot tell you, but it is always mentioned.) Here he attempted to devise a system of knowledge that would mirror mathematics in the “certainty and evidence of its reasonings”.2 Essentially, he felt human reason must operate according to principles similar to the scientific method.
After much consideration, Descartes decided that since many of our beliefs are influenced by personal bias or opinion, it was necessary for him to begin by doubting everything if he was to arrive at the most perfect system of thinking. Although he believed himself equal to the task, being well assured of his own rational abilities, he stated that, “The single resolution to rid onseself of all the opinions to which one has heretofore given credence is not an example that everyone ought to follow…”3 Indeed, even within the world of science, one typically starts with a hypothesis based on a priori knowledge. However, Descartes hoped to discover one fundamental principle upon which he could build his system, and he strove to do so without relying on prior assumptions. This was his conclusion:
But immediately afterward I noticed that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.4
That truth discovered by Descartes, which in the original French read, “Je pense, donc je suis,” has become the defining truth of the postmodern world, but not in the way Descartes intended. For him, it was merely the beginning, but for us it is both the end and the means. Postmodern society lives by this maxim as if it were the ultimate reality rather than one part of a thought experiment meant to help Descartes determine what was real.
The 21st century world has raised up personal consciousness as the ultimate reality, even allowing it to override the material. Truth has increasingly been regarded as a matter of subjective opinion rather than objective fact. While fact and opinion have been intermingled throughout human history just like truth and falsehood, there has been a general assumption that they were different things, and that fact and truth should be pursued while opinion and falsehood should be avoided. The scholars of the Scientific Revolution did their best to assure us that material reality is the only reality that exists, and we must rely on objectivity rather than subjectivity. Some religious persons objected on the grounds that science can have nothing to say about the supernatural, but what has happened today is that both the traditionally scientific and religious understandings of truth (at least in the more Western sense) have been thrown aside in favor of an understanding that is subjective, individual, and mutable.
The prime example of this is surely the increasing cultural acceptance of transgenderism as equal in validity to cisgenderism. Gender dysphoria has existed since time immemorial, but it was typically assumed to be something that should be corrected. When a psychological condition (i.e. “I feel like a woman”) conflicted with a material condition (i.e. “I have a Y chromosome”), the material typically ruled the day. After all, science has no way to accurately test or measure what a person “feels like” in the purely psychological sense of the phrase, but it does possess the means to study a person’s DNA. Therefore, the testimony of DNA was considered an objective fact and the testimony of the person’s heart was thought to be a matter of subjective opinion.
Perhaps it is the vast expansion of the psychological sphere, chronicled more than five decades ago in Philip Reiff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic, that has caused our reasoning to shift in this manner. In one sense, our general opinion about how a person with gender dysphoria should be treated has not changed: we believe the conflict between the psychological and material should be solved by leading the person toward the truth. What has changed is how we define and understand truth. We now believe that what a person feels psychologically is a better indicator of truth than the physical construction of their body.
The never-ending platitudes fed to us by our culture—“follow your heart”, “do what you feel is right”, “only you know what is best for you”, “speak your truth”—speak to a psychological rather than material understanding of truth. This means what is reality for one person may not be reality for another. Again, we have raised up personal consciousness as the ultimate reality. We have taken the phrase, “Je pense, donc je suis!” as our rallying cry. We believe that thought or consciousness is the determiner of reality. We allow feelings to reign supreme, even though feelings are demonstrably varied among different people. What then is the ultimate reality?
As a statement of basic truth, “I am, therefore I think,” would perhaps be more appropriate. Thought always proceeds from existence in our universe. A thinking thing must exist, but an existing thing need not necessarily think. Yes, existence precedes consciousness. This was precisely Descartes’ point. When he said, “I think, therefore I am,” he was raising up thought as the evidence of something logically prior: existence. However, our postmodern society has come to believe that either existence proceeds from thinking, or existence and consciousness are one and the same.
One need not be a philosopher to see how this changes the way we understand reality, making it a matter of individual opinion. If existence does not precede consciousness, then there can be no common reality and logic itself breaks down. What is so troubling about this is not merely the poor logic, but the gaping hole left in the human heart by such a worldview. All of us long for reality. Even as our cultural mores change and the subjective is raised above the objective, we revert to the notion of material reality if we do not bother to check ourselves.
Why do we do that? Because we know somewhere deep inside that existence precedes consciousness. It must, for where there is no objective truth, society moves first to anarchy and then to tyranny. The anarchy comes because we can no longer agree on what the facts are, and the tyranny comes when someone forces us to do so.
But think about what I have just argued: that existence precedes consciousness. That means not only that our existence logically preceded our thought, but that something existed before we did, and were we to reach back through space and time, we would come to an existence from which all others proceed, and this would be the ultimate reality. Thus, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes moved immediately from establishing his own existence as a thinking thing to considering what existed first.
Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get its reality, if not from its cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect.5
Descartes identified God as the ultimate reality: a pure and perfect existence from which all others proceed. But if God exists, then he (or she, or it) must exist in a certain way. Such a God must be part of objective reality, and the most frightening thing of all for human beings who long for personal autonomy is that God may, in fact, be a person.
Why should it frighten us that God is a person? Because our experience with persons has taught us that they often disagree with us. They may even presume to tell us what to do, and if their power is greater than our own, they might succeed in bending us to their will. We rightly discern that if God is a person—a reality we are forced to confront—then the game is up. We can no longer simply play at religion. We must bow the knee to this person and adjust our understanding to his (or hers, or its). What a terrifying prospect this is!
Many human beings have concluded it would be far better for God not to exist, or to be some kind of nebulous spirit rather than a person. There is little to fear from a nothing or a nebulous spirit, but they provide little assurance of security. This is where we must seek out the true reality and determine the nature of this first existence. It is our Anfechtung and our Untergang, and it causes us to fear and tremble.
If anyone has a right to proclaim, “Je suis!” it is the one who proclaimed, “I AM WHO I AM.”6
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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE: “C.S. Lewis on Joy” at 1517
John 18:38. The New American Standard Bible. Updated edition. The Lockman Foundation, 1995. (All biblical quotations are from this source.)
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Fourth edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. 4.
Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 18.
Ibid, 73.
Exodus 3:14