{"id":155,"date":"2018-09-04T19:08:33","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T00:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barneysplace.net\/site\/?page_id=155"},"modified":"2020-03-09T14:43:13","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T19:43:13","slug":"article-15","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/barneysplace.net\/site\/article-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Article 15"},"content":{"rendered":"

BELIEF: AN OWNER\u2019S MANUAL <\/strong>
ARTICLE 15<\/strong>
INFORMATIVE EXISTENTIAL VIEWPOINT BELIEFS <\/strong>
THAT SUPPORT OBJECTIVITY . . . <\/strong>
AND SOME INCLINATIONS AND COMMITMENTS THAT <\/strong>
SUPPORT THOSE EXISTENTIAL VIEWPOINT BELIEFS<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you may recall, Article 14 provided an overview of the effects of Existential Viewpoint beliefs on our functioning in the Realist, Ethical, Visionary, and Quest and Commitment viewpoints. Some Existential Viewpoint beliefs, we observed, positively affect the efficacy and integrity with which we grapple with questions proper to those viewpoints; other Existential Viewpoint beliefs have adverse effects. In this article, we\u2019ll be taking a closer look at beliefs and commitments that support effective, conscientious Existential Viewpoint functioning as well as the values that underlie those beliefs and commitments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

THE CORE OF EFFECTIVE INFORMATIVE EXISTENTIAL VIEWPOINT FUNCTIONING: AFFIRMATION OF OUR MOST PROFOUND DESIRES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our commitment to objectivity is inspired, first and foremost, by our desires for experience, knowledge, love, and mastery, and by the satisfaction we find in our efforts to fulfill those desires (Frankl, 1959), (Lonergan, 1957).<\/p>\n

Although we are bounded, our desires are boundless. We want to experience all there is to be experienced, to understand all there is to be understood, to master all there is to be mastered, and to love all there is to be loved.<\/p>\n

Consider our conception of the monotheistic God. Constrained by the limits of our imaginations, that conception, I propose (with a tip of the hat to Xenophanes), embodies our deepest longings. God, as we describe that entity, is what we wish to be. We wish to experience all there is to be experienced; God is omnipresent. We wish to understand all there is to be understood; God is omniscient. We wish to master all there is to be mastered; God is omnipotent. We wish to love all there is to be loved; we trust that God, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is infinitely loving.<\/p>\n

All you need do to experience the desires for unrestricted experience, understanding, mastery, and love in yourselves is to pay attention. Allow me to illustrate these desires by sharing some of my most Quixotic and wistful fantasies.<\/p>\n

Like you, I yearn, without restriction, to experience. I would, if I could, dilate time, transforming the instantaneous and incomprehensible violence of the Big Bang into an eternity of languid indolence, savoring the roiling of the quantum universe, the emergence of physical laws and constants, the lazy transformation of amorphous energy into quarks and quarks into matter, the inflation that gave the universe its structure. I would be there when the first self-replicating organic molecules realized the spark of life. I would be an Apatosaurus, feeling horsetails, club mosses, and ferns journey down my twelve-and-a-half-meter neck. I would be Archimedes, running in naked ecstasy through the streets of Syracuse, shouting \u201cEureka!\u201d I would be Babe Ruth standing at Wrigley Field\u2019s home plate, bat in my hand, watching the ball I\u2019d just hit soar toward the spot I\u2019d pointed to in the center field bleachers. I would be whoever has loved the most ardently; fought the most passionately; been gripped the most powerfully by the act of creation; experienced the most profound enlightenment; known the most profoundly blinkered certainty; felt the deepest pain; most thoroughly shattered the barriers that isolate us from one another.<\/p>\n

Like each of you, I yearn, without restriction, to understand. I yearn, among other things, to understand counterpoint as did Bach; balance and proportion as did Mozart and DaVinci; irony as did Richard Feynman; language as did George Carlin and Gracie Allen; evolution as did Stephen Jay Gould; the interweaving of time and space as did Einstein. I yearn to truly grasp what women want and how to bring them joy \u2013 and yes, men too, and those on each of the rapidly proliferating bands of gender\u2019s rainbow.<\/p>\n

Like you, I yearn, without restriction, to be competent, to be effective, and to be loving. I yearn, among other things, to transform the Earth into an endlessly varied paradise; to benignly harvest and concentrate energy; to sow crippling doubt in the minds of those whose hatred is fueled by certitude; to cure disease; to create circumstances in which every sentient being can achieve his or her potential; to portray the complexities of human relationships with the elegance and economy of Cole Porter; to wend my way through shifting harmonies with the effortless grace of Charlie Parker; to challenge Iron Chef Masahara Morimoto to a culinary brawl and emerge from that contest, my cuisine supreme; to look in my wake and witness nothing but joy.<\/p>\n

I suspect that if you reflect on your daydreams, you will discover comparable yearnings in your own heart. And I suspect that, if you reflect on your own functioning, you\u2019ll discover that your yearning for experience, understanding, mastery and love leads you, in turn, to seek information, to strive to make sense of that information, to communicate your insights and the vision that grounds them, to determine whether your insights are accurate, and to use what you know to guide your actions. Perhaps you even yearn, as I do, to worship the Creator by striving to understand Creation.<\/p>\n

GENUINENESS: KEY TO FULFILLING OUR DEEPEST DESIRES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bernard Lonergan, the 20th century philosopher and systematic theologian, held that functioning that way and doing it well was the best we humans could hope for. He used the term \u201cgenuineness\u201d to characterize that way of functioning (Lonergan, 1957). Such functioning, he claimed, had four essential characteristics: attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility.<\/p>\n

By attentiveness, he meant openness and curiosity. By intelligence, he referred to the desires to understand and to communicate that understanding. By reasonableness, he meant the\u00a0 willingness to discuss and test one\u2019s ideas. By responsibility, he meant a commitment to acting on one\u2019s best understanding with appropriate humility and caution and a similar commitment to creating circumstances that support attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility.<\/p>\n

THE AGONY OF GENUINENESS<\/strong><\/p>\n

But being genuine is difficult. Our attempts to experience, know, love, and master all we can are likely to be painful.<\/p>\n

Efforts to expand our range of experience unavoidably sharpen our awareness of the endless array of experiences we\u2019ll never have, leading us to reflect on our frailty, our mortality, and our sensory, motor, and cognitive limitations. Efforts to expand our understanding require facing what we don\u2019t understand. Efforts to more powerfully communicate our insights require awareness of our communicative failures and of the agonizing fact that those whose understanding we yearn for will never truly \u201cget\u201d us. Efforts to identify the limitations and failings of our beliefs inevitably bring us face to face with the inadequacies of our conceptions and commitments. Efforts to accomplish our goals confront us with the limitations of our technology and our limited mastery of that technology. Efforts to love force us to face not only how poorly we understand what others need but also the clumsiness of our best efforts to fulfill those needs.<\/p>\n

If we wish to experience, know, love and master all we can, we must\u00a0 struggle for genuineness.\u00a0 That struggle, while unavoidably challenging, is daunting if undertaken alone. As Carl Sagan (1985) has written, \u201cFor small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.\u201d But, although Sagan\u2019s words are poignant, they say nothing about the nature of the love \u2013 that is, the structure of the relationships \u2013 that support the struggle for genuineness.<\/p>\n

NOETIC RELATIONSHIPS: TRANSFORMING THE UNBEARABLE INTO A SOURCE OF JOY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not just any relationships will do. Relationships that support our struggle to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible must have specific characteristics. For simplicity\u2019s sake, I\u2019ll be calling relationships that have those characteristics \u201cnoetic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noetic relationships are built around activities that make it wise to bring out the best in oneself and others. Such activities are those whose goals \u2013 like beauty, knowledge, competence, sobriety, enlightenment, or delight \u2013 are inexhaustible. Anyone may create or experience as much beauty, knowledge, competence, sobriety, enlightenment, or delight as she wishes without reducing the amount potentially available to herself or others. In fact, in most cases each person\u2019s attainment of such goals has the potential to make others\u2019 attainments easier.<\/p>\n

If goals are inexhaustible and each person\u2019s success makes others\u2019 successes more likely, there\u2019s every reason to root for one another. But it\u2019s one thing to have reason to root for others and another thing to do it.<\/p>\n

Relationships are noetic only if their participants choose to root for themselves and one another to achieve their goals. A relationship is not noetic unless each participant serves as a kind of cheerleader \u2013 motivating and inspiring others, celebrating their successes, accepting and responding to the support they receive, and rewarding those who root for them with their gratitude and enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

Further, if a relationship is noetic, the rooting and support it inspires can\u2019t focus exclusively on success in achieving the goal of the moment. Rather, each participant must root not only for success but for the processes that create it. That is, relationships are noetic only if each participant cherishes, in herself and others, the desire to embrace the universe \u2013 to experience, to know, to love and to master \u2013 and delights in the attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility that help satisfy that desire, if only in part.<\/p>\n

Finally, the goals around which we build noetic relationships must, if achieved, enhance life or human genuineness and diminish neither.<\/p>\n

RULES OF DISCOURSE THAT SUPPORT GENUINENESS\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I also believe that wholesome Existential Viewpoint beliefs must encourage the kind of open, respectful communication that Jurgen Habermas described in his Rules of Discourse (1990). To fail to communicate in that way is to close ourselves to information that could inspire insight and creativity, as well as to the feedback that, if we are open to it, can alert us to bubbles that might otherwise encase us and rails we might otherwise go off. Habermas believed that truly open communication required commitments to<\/p>\n

\u2022 making sense by avoiding contradicting ourselves and being consistent
\u2022 meaning what we say
\u2022 defending our positions or justifying our refusal to do so
\u2022 minimizing the influence of force and threats of force on what is said and how it is understood<\/p>\n

With all due respect to Habermas, I believe that open communication also requires commitments to<\/p>\n