Intellectual Autobiography

Dean Lauer once said that a philosophical life, or philosophic inclinations begin in a wonder of the world. I understand this, both as a wonder of – an awe or fascination, and as a wonder about – a curiosity about the world. I found this description striking and certainly true. This may be what others call a love of learning, or maybe it’s just asking too many questions. But questions are an essential part of this wonder, because they attempt both to satisfy curiosity about the world, but questions also foster a continued wonder of the world. There is always more to know, and more ways to understand it – there are more facts, more theories, more paradigms; there is me, me in the world, the world, others, others in the world, and me amongst it all. Wonder, curiosity, knowledge, can only lead to more questions and more wonder. So where did this all begin?

I have been considering the process of my thought development. Who knows if I focus on the correct instances, or whether it was instances at all that made me who I am. If I assume there were, however, as best as I can tell, wonder began with Christianity and my Dad.

I grew up living Christianity. It was everywhere: children’s Bible stories before bed, prayer before meals, and church on Sundays. This meant that questions such as, why are we here, what is our purpose, how should we live, what is our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the earth, were often discussed. Not only did these questions inform the purpose of our Christian lives, they also sparked in me an awareness and curiosity about myself and the world.

While religion formed the questions, my father incited the curiosity and methodology of wondering. He was always trying to understand things, to know why, for example, a machine behaved as it did, why certain marks appeared on something after use, the mechanics of a sculpture. He always encouraged us to ask similar question, to consider everything around us. He bred in me a desire to know and an ability to observe and analyze critically. My father taught me to ask questions.

In the fall of eleventh grade I took an advanced 20th century literature class in which we read Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, and No Exit to name a few. It was the first time I began thinking abstractly – the first time I was both curious and critical, attempting to understand, not only literary themes, but concepts relevant to human existence. This marked an intellectual awakening of sorts; I was now considering the same questions religion had answered, but this time I was actually asking the questions and considering the possibility that there was no real answer.

Some time my senior year of high school I began to question literally everything. Each part of my life, actions and ideas became one huge WHY? By senior year I had already moved far away from Christianity, finding it incomplete and unsatisfying. It wasn’t until senior year, however, that I realized my lack of faith wasn’t simply a pure choice – that I’d renounced Christianity – but rather, I just didn’t believe; with no rational argument for the existence of god, and no intrinsic, emotional faith, I had really had nothing. This realization further ignited further questions, all essentially coming back to: what is this life all about?

Senior spring of high school I took an advanced Russian Literature course. In the final scene in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov and Sonya have a conversation, the subject of which I cannot remember. I remember, however, our teacher emphasizing Raskolnikov’s position of reason, and Sonya’s position of faith and that the two, in their final conversation were fundamentally unable to understand the comprehend the other. This trivial instant was when my focus turned entirely to “reason” and rational, logical inquiry as a means of true understanding.

Fall of my freshman year of college read Plato’s Republic in a political theory course. Plato, like Christianity, argued for certain absolutes, his were absolute beauty, justice etc. Plato also emphasized “what ought to be,” in addition to what “is.” At the time I found this extremely compelling, likely, in part, because Plato’s conclusions, while different from Christianity, held onto certain ideas I found familiar, such as the existence of “absolutes,” and his theories about human telos, or potential. This notion of “being all you can be,” doing what you are most suited to, or in some way progressing, gave a kind of meaning to life that was grounded in an individual’s natural potential, in our intrinsic, essence, or nature rather than, as in Christianity, human purpose being god-given.

When I transferred to St. Lawrence the following fall, my knowledge paradigm had been totally fractured and only partially rebuilt with my reading of Plato. When I came to St. Lawrence my field of knowledge was fairly flat, and what began was not a further break down of what I knew, because that had largely already occurred, what began was a building of ideas.

There are too many significant “moments” to recount, so I will attempt to highlight a few particularly significant philosophers who had a fairly significant impact on my intellectual development.

The first is likely David Hume and his arguments concerning cause and effect, as well as his serving as a representative for the question, “how do we know what we know?” Hume first articulated the problems of cause and effect, and induction. He said that all our inferences about cause and effect are inductive, just because we saw something occur in a particular way in the past, does not in any way mean we know it will do so in the future. We can never see the cause, but because we see what we call an “effect,” we study that, assuming there is a cause and that we can know it. Given that this is how we live, and the way in which we engage with the world, it really made me think about this differently. If I ask, “how and why should we believe in cause and effect?” I can also ask, “how can we know what we think we know… how can we know anything at all?” Although I have worked through this and come to several conclusions, many with the aid of other philosophical works, Hume’s criticism of induction was extremely influential.

Friedrich Nietzsche was also particularly significant in that he provided a counter to the suggestion that in the absence of god, there is no purpose, no focus, no life, only despair and moral chaos. But Nietzsche (and what I am left with may not be entirely accurate), said that in the absence of god, this nihilism need not be the case. Rather, there is a will to power, an affirmation of self. Perhaps, similar to Plato, I embraced the idea that purpose was found within the self, that the absence of external powers was not despair but hope.

Martin Heidegger was extremely significant in two ways. First, he positioned human being in relation to death. This relationship or being-toward an absolute end, is what human potential or progress is defined in relation to. Second, and I do not remember if Heidegger mentioned this, but in any case, I have begun also to think of death as the confines, the limitation, that make our lives meaningful. Because they are finite, because they are limited, things must be done, achieved, discovered, realized in a certain amount of time. Perhaps it is, in many ways, what gives our lives meaning. It seems that this may also have been some of what Heidegger was writing about. To acknowledge this finite time and the fact that it is ever decreasing, is to acknowledge we are being unto this inevitable point and this realization, and a correct form of being in this realization, is what it means to live in a right way.

James Ladyman’s book, Understanding Philosophy of Science, changed many ways I understood knowledge, truth, and justification. Particularly in his discussion of Kuhn’s critique of paradigms and the ways knowledge is constructed.

Finally, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as discussed in previous submissions, have very much changed the way I understand my self (or the self), within an historical/social context. Both Arendt and MacIntyre’s emphasize narrative of self as essential for a full understanding of self. Both hold to a notion of individual progression, or potentiality. John Rawls was also extremely influential in providing what seems to be the best suggestion of how to achieve a just society. While incomplete, and involving some problems, his notion of abstracting individuals from their individual interests in order to hypothetically understand a system of justice from all perspectives is really fascinating. (see previous post for a more thorough discussion).

I have just begun reading William Ophuls who is an environmental political theorist/philosopher. I’m only part way into the book, but it is very new to me! It is the first environmental philosophy (or anything) I’ve read and I look forward to exploring environmental ideas more thoroughly in the future.