My Dogmas: A Reflection on my Philosophy

   Though at bottom I dogmatically believe things like: my love for my children (and other people's) is a response to their independent reality; my reverence for the beauty of a glorious sunset or the sublimity of the night sky is a response to the independent reality of nature; my horror over the evils that occurred during WWII is a response to the independent reality of the people and goods that were violated in the most terrible ways. I could go on. I believe my grief is a response to the independent reality of a loved one who has died. I believe my remorse is a response to the independent reality of a person I have wronged. I believe my fear of death to be a response to the independent reality of living. And so on.

     Certain things – love, beauty, horror, grief, remorse, etc. – are responses to a reality that is independent of our constructions, interpretations, or linguistic games. These are not merely subjective feelings or social constructs; they are rooted in something out there, in the world, in people, in nature, and in history. My commitment to this is deeply philosophical and also deeply moral: it’s the kind of foundation from which I interpret the world and try (too often unsuccessfully) to live my life. These core responses to real, tangible realities that transcend any intellectual exercise. I’ve found my grounding, but it's a grounding that can still be shaped by experience, in ways that keep me open to ongoing reflection. A philosophy or lifestyle that seeks to make social constructs, etc., out of these convictions is automatically subject to a reductio ad absurdum refutation for me, though not for everyone. In this I am as dogmatic as the Catholic Church.   

    I suspect everyone has a core dogma whether they know it or not. I don’t think we can live and act without one. Mine puts me in a critical relation to many others. My conviction that love, awe, beauty, moral terror, and the like may be, when not sentimental, authoritative responses to the world reflects not just an individual subjectivity but a universal human response to something transcendent or real about existence itself. The irony is that, while they are deeply personal, these convictions are intimations of the world as it ought to be experienced; of truth, beauty, and goodness that transcend one person’s individual existence but still cannot be entirely separated from it. Truth, beauty, and goodness – revealed by the responses to the world I take as authoritative – are like the light of the sun: greater than any single window through which they shine, yet only visible to us through the particular glass we look through. Some windows (through fortune) are clear, allowing the sweet light to stream in, revealing the world beyond. Others are fogged, cracked, or even covered over – by childhood traumas, by ideological blinders, by the corporate regime, etc. – so that the light appears dim, distorted, or absent altogether. To those looking through such windows, the very idea of a sun may seem like an illusion, a story told by those who claim to see more than they can prove. 

   Or perhaps it's like this: the apprehension of metaphysical reality through certain moods or emotions like love, reverence, or moral horror are like the melody of a great symphony, written long before any of us were born, resounding through Being, waiting to be heard - idea from Tolkien's Silmarillion. Some through fortune more than merit have attuned their ears to its harmonies and can recognize its themes wherever they arise. Others hear only noise, the fragments disconnected, as if the instruments are playing at random. And some deny that any melody exists at all, believing instead that what seems like music to others is only the mind imposing order on meaningless sound.

     Perhaps what makes this so difficult to articulate that I have to resort to metaphor – or liturgy, music, art, paradox, symbol – is that these responses feel both deeply intimate (they belong to me) and at the same time undeniably real (they correspond to the way the world ought to be perceived). In this sense, my "personal" assertions about these responses being authoritative might in fact be the most authentic claim to metaphysical truth we can make. This is partly definitive of our finitude and should not be confused with subjectivism. Reality at it deepest dimensions discloses itself in the inner life and is expressible through art, music, metaphor, symbol, ritual, and liturgy. Moderns of a certain kind are rationally free to reject this, of course, but I think are impoverished by the rejection. 

    Should it bother me that my core beliefs are held in a way that seems resistant to counter-argument because they are anchored in my experience, in what I know to be true at the deepest, personal level? Aren’t they also, in a sense, fragile in the way that human beings are fragile: the capacity for awe, love, horror, beauty, and reverence is not immune to life's’s most terrible possibilities. Let something happen to one of my children – would my convictions survive that? I cannot truthfully say. No one can. But I will say that if they did not, it would prove nothing, no more than Winston’s Smith confession in Orwell's 1984, extracted under extreme torture, that 2+2=5 and that he loved Big Brother proved anything other than we all have a breaking point. The question is actually less about whether our convictions would survive suffering but more about how they are sustained, perhaps reconfigured, in the face of suffering and misfortune, and whether they are enough to give meaning to our lives, even when it feels as though everything is being taken away.

        Perhaps the question is also: which responses to the world are authoritative? To me, the ones I mentioned are. I think they must reveal reality but about this, ironically, one can only speak personally. Love, awe, horror, indignity, sadness, grief, remorse, beauty, joy, longing, and reverence are authoritative because they feel like true responses to the reality of the world, even though, ultimately, what they reveal is not something they can be known in a matter-of-fact way. No verification principle could confirm them as “knowledge” and yet in a way I as certain of them as I am that I have two hands. They condition my attitude toward Being and thus in what light I see any particular fact-of-the-matter.

     That is where I always end up. Attempts to express what is true but cannot be proven in a purely deductive or empirical way. Instead, such truths are apprehended through conviction, experience, love, and the deep structure of understanding itself. They cannot be forced upon someone who lacks the capacity or disposition to see them, no more than the beauty of the Prelude of Bach could be forced on a soul for whom Death Metal reveals life's truth. Yet for those who do (through good fortune mostly) have the disposition, they are as undeniable as the axioms of logic or mathematics.

   These responses to the independent reality of the world function as conditions of meaning rather than as conclusions of an argument. That is, they are not inferred but recognized, disclosed in love, awe, horror, or reverence, just as we recognize a face or a melody rather than logically deducing it. And because they are conditions of meaning, any attempt to "prove" them ends up either presupposing them or reducing them to something lesser. This would explain why they are, in a way, self-evident – not in the sense that they are obvious to everyone, but in the sense that once they are grasped, they serve as foundations rather than as objects of proof.

 . . .

  I recognize the existential moment in my thinking. I think the attraction of thinkers like St. Thomas has been that, although faith, love, and hope are central, when it comes to the natural reason and nature, well, there is no need for faith, hope, or love, no need for the existential choice. You can just know it if you clear your mind in contemplation. For Aquinas, at least as he is often understood, the natural world and its truths are available to us through the faculty of human reason alone. If we cultivate our intellect and engage in careful, systematic thought, we can come to knowledge of the world and its essences, whether it's the nature of a human being or the logical principles that govern existence. Aristotle uncovered natural reason. In this sense, Aquinas offers a vision where reason and faith aren't in conflict but are distinct domains, each with its own role. Faith is concerned with the divine mysteries – things like the Trinity or the salvation of the soul – which can't be grasped through mere reason. But the natural world is not hidden in the same way. Its truths are accessible to human reason, provided we engage with it properly. A person who has sold their soul to the corporation or a saint will have the same understanding of the worldly world, just like the corporate hack and a saint would not have different physics in modern science. (I actually no longer read Aquinas that way but it is a common way of reading him, the way I used to read him.)

     This clarity of the natural order, the possibility of knowing without existential choice or the need for subjective faith, has a certain comfort and security. It presents a world that is structured and ordered, where human reason can find solid ground, and there's a definite sense of "rightness" in knowing the world in this way. That has always exerted an appeal for me. This juxtaposition – the clarity of the natural order and the existential depths of human experience – makes Aquinas, or the Aquinas-reading pointed to above, particularly attractive. He offers an intellectual system where one can confidently know the world in terms of natural reason, while also recognizing the deeper, more mysterious, and ultimately transcendent aspects of human existence. It's a philosophy that gives structure to the natural-moral world but leaves room for the richer, more mysterious facets of human life that are only revealed through faith and personal experience.

    But this kind of dualism doesn’t completely account for the deeper dimensions of human life. While we can "know" things about the world, we still have to live with our inherent limitations, our subjective experiences, and the awareness that much of our existence lies in the realm of faith, love, and hope – things that can’t be grasped by reason alone. My view is that faith, hope, and love – or the absence thereof, or the skepticism thereto – condition our engagement with nature and worldly life all the way down. (There is a way to read Aquinas that is compatible with this.)

    Faith, hope, and love aren’t just concerns for the transcendent or for things beyond the natural world; they are foundational – affirmed or denied – to how we engage with the world and nature itself. In other words, they aren't confined to the "realm" of the divine or existential, but shape and guide how we perceive, interact with, and understand the very things around us. This changes the way one approaches both the natural world and our place within it. Rather than seeing faith, hope, and love as external, otherworldly forces that we bring to bear on the world of reason and fact, I believe that these virtues (or the absence of them) are intertwined with the very process of knowing and being. They aren't just things we apply to distant or invisible realms; they shape our perception and engagement with the tangible world, the very stuff of everyday life.

     While Aquinas might argue that we can know nature objectively through reason alone, I think it rather the case that our reasoning, our understanding, is always already inflected by our emotional, existential, and moral engagements with the world. Faith, hope, and love are not just philosophical add-ons or optional extras; they – or their absence – are embedded in how we perceive, interact with, and even interpret the world. Thus even in the most rational or empirical disciplines the way we see and experience the world is always conditioned by our attitude toward it on a deeper, emotional level. For example, we might study the beauty of a sunset scientifically, but it’s the experience of awe and wonder that makes that beauty matter to us. That awe isn’t just an external response; it’s part of how we process, interpret, and know that beauty.

    We can't just "clear our minds" in contemplation and gain an objective, detached understanding of reality; instead, we're always immersed in it, shaped by it, and shaped by our relationships with it. (Heidegger and Gadamer contra Aquinas are right about this.)

. . .

Credo ut intelligam / I believe so that I may understand. (Augustine)

  I think the circularity of my attitude is not viciously circular. You cannot prove life has a meaning from the outside, from a position of neutral reason (i.e. such that the conclusion would be obvious to anyone with a brain, as in geometrical proofs). Reason, the life of the mind, is only fruitful to a soul who already stands in the right relation to the world. It is logically impossible to prove the meaning of life, or the meaninglessness of life for that matter, and thus to put oneself in the right relation to one’s own soul, other people, the community, nature, and God. It is only those who already have the right relation to their own souls, their fellow man, the community, nature, and God – and the key here is love (see my core convictions) – that can understand anything about it. This, a commonplace among religious thinkers from Augustine to Anselm to Tolstoy, is rejected by the Enlightenment and thus modernity. So it is not surprising that the central spiritual problem of modernity is nihilism. Within modernity, as Nietzsche put it, within a kind of rationality based on radical skepticism of all that we somehow know from the purest human experiences: “There is no answer to the Why.”

. . .

I think a well-meaning person who had never studied philosophy at all, once they got past some of the weird, non-standard ways I express certain everyday truths, would find what I have written here to be the plainest common sense. I don't know why I am so concerned to respond to those ultra-skeptical pop-postmodernists or pop-logical-positivists, those folks for whom everything is discourse, or narrative, or social construction, or just subjective emotion.