The Time We Have: Life and Ideas

Close observers of contemporary postmodern philosophy will notice that postmodern philosophy is commensurate with pack animals, for both operate on a deterministic model. How so? Consider that pack animals isolate, corral, and ultimately pounce on their prey. This is the nature of the kill. While ruthless and instinctual, this is indicative of nature at its most primitive and organic level. Predators and prey act and react according to a biological make-up that is akin to determinism. Animals cannot separate from nature any more than a devastating hurricane can be not a storm. Nature operates on an action/reaction basis. Postmodern philosophy is no different, for postmodernism is determined by a “here-and-now,” “ideological” irrationalism that forces action and stifles reason.

Why compare postmodern philosophy to the realm of instincts and natural reflexes?  Is this comparison truly warranted? One reason for the comparison is because it can help us better understand the limited possibilities that nature offers the animal world. While this remains true, we should not lose sight of the linguistic usage that humans give to words like “nature,” “determinism,” and “possibilities.” Ironically, this conceptual verbiage says more about humans than it does about nature. Language in human beings goes hand in hand with our ability to locate, organize, and explicate particular aspects of human reality (becoming) and our essential nature (Being). Thus, we find ourselves in a paradox, a conundrum that we confront with intellect: in order to understand and accept what science refers to as the principles that determine the constants of nature, man must use intellect to understand and language to explain.

Is an analogy between nature and human reason warranted? If one is necessary, it is because this comparison will aid us in visualizing the distance that man has from nature. One way to think of man in the cosmos is to realize that animals are to nature, that is, lacking in free will, and more so, creative existential engagement with time, as man is to existential reflection on the nature of the self.

How does man break away from the action/reaction, deterministic manner that nature exhibits? To compare man to the animal world equates to a comparison between man and nature, but also, free will and determinism. Nature’s action/reaction operative manner is objective in structure—even for man—for it makes man take heed of its inner principles. Failure to respect objective reality is often detrimental to human existence, values, and behavior. The comparison between man and nature is a necessary offshoot of man’s free will reaction to nature’s demands, what we otherwise refer to as contingencies.

Reason and Will

When man separates from nature, like a sculpture in high relief, is this achieved through reason or will?  On face value, the answer to this question appears to be reason, for it is reason that supplies man with ideas. Ideas about what nature is and how to counter or adjust to its objective structure, as the case may be, are staples of the human condition. Reason, then, enables man to make pronouncements about this and that aspect of human life. Some people may refer to this as dialectic or logic. In any case, thought creates distance from nature. This separation allows man to tackle nature with a detached perspective that animals lack, which includes, in particular, existential self-reflection. Many examples of this are warranted; nonetheless, a few will suffice to illustrate this point: medicine, artistic contemplation of natural processes, and existential reflection about the essence of the subject-I, to name a few. 

Life or Ideas?

Reason places man in a paradoxical situation. The notion of using ideas as necessary crutches that enable man to live is itself a paradox. The paradox is two-fold and plain to see. When man attempts to understand “nature,” it does so as a natural response to our circumstances as a being capable of reason. Nature is not equipped to do this. Yet part of the paradox is that man’s existential reflection might just be the apex of nature’s intricate process of manifesting itself as an ordered structure.

The other difficulty in man’s attempt to decipher the structure of physical reality is exacerbated by philosophical materialists, who attempt to level human life to biological/chemical processes. Reductionism fails to recognize that this form of ideation is fallacious, at best, when it levels man to the natural order, and intellectually dishonest in its militant ideological/sociological form.

Physicalism, biologism, and reductionism remind us of Descartes’ self-evident truths. The French philosopher alerts us to the realization that self-negation of the existence of the self, the res cogitans that is the foundation of the reflexive I of consciousness, only further affirms the existence of the doubter. This is hardly a theory. It is instead common sense that corresponds to the contingencies that objective reality gives to man.

Reductionism is destructive of human life. For one, it dismisses human life as being the seat of man’s higher possibilities as human existence, that is, a being that is capable of self-reflection. Human existence is an existential category and form of sensibility that reductionism does not even suspect. For this reason, reductionism must be discarded as a corrosive form of scientism that pretends to cover the sun with one finger, as the saying goes. Or is reductionism merely intellectually dishonest?

While reductionism is a radical perversion of the nature of man, one that is often ruled by ideological bias, reason remains an aide to human life. But what form of reason? When reason – not as theory – but as a vital component of human existence attempts to comprehend the complexity and vagaries of human reality, it acts in the service of life. As such, it is reason in its disinterested, intuitive form that should concern self-respecting thinkers, not theoretical reductionism. Reason, which man uses as a tool to help us live and organize experience, knows how to check itself for excess. This is the role of common sense and better judgment, especially where human existence is concerned. For, logically speaking, what is the endgame of reductionism, if not to force man to accept human life as the negation of possibility? This sets up infrahuman conditions for human existence that keeps it from flourishing existentially. The infrahuman conditions that reductionism promotes imply the destruction of life as human existence, while propping it up as mere biology.

Psychologically, morally, and spiritually speaking, reductionism is a time-bomb that delivers man to scientism, and ultimately, self-annihilation and state-sponsored slavery. Man cannot have it both ways: to become convinced that human life is reducible to biology and thus purposeless, and at the same time not to recognize that that statement is itself a mental construct.

Even after we discard the viability of materialistic reductionism as being incapable of contributing truth to human existence, we are still left with the dual nature of human life and ideas. The question, which is a perennial one, remains: what is the purview of ideas over life? A related question arises from this: what is the structure of human life (biology), which is felt as lived-vitality, and that is consequently experienced as human existence?

Part of the answer to these riddles of human life is encountered in the realization that man does not merely live on a biological plane. That is, human life is capable of becoming the subject of its own reflection as autognosis. As such, human life passes from engaging in a deterministic action/reaction model to embracing free will. Free will is not theoretical. Even the suggestion that free will does not exist is an affirmation of free will. Free will is a response to the sterility of nature that the structure of human life demands in beings capable of self-reflection.

The most significant aspect of human life that is embraced as lived-existence is that human life is experienced as transparency. Life does not call attention to itself, as it were. Only in times of existential inquietude or crisis does life become a ‘problem’ for man. The existential category of “peak experiences” in human life goes totally ignored by philosophical materialists.

The Time We Have

Hence, the time we have allotted as life that is capable of self-awareness – through self-reflection – is what science and philosophical materialism naively refer to as life as biology. It is a curiosity that the conclusion of life as biology is reached through the existential category of human existence, one that keeps tabs on other forms of life that lack the capacity for self-reflection. Paradoxically, the wide-eyed awe and wonder that foment the scientific method are a fundamental staple of life as human existence (an existential category). This is a curiosity that does not go unnoticed by thoughtful people.

Another aspect of the riddle of human life, as I am calling this, is that human life is not dumbly biological. Biological processes cannot attain the level of self-reflection that man enjoys while simultaneously negating the possibility for self-awareness. Instead, human existence concerns itself with the human person. Self-reflection is indicative of an existential creative process that experiences human reality as a holistic qualitative phenomenon.

The connection between life and ideas has been explored by thinkers, writers, and poets. We encounter this theme in Montaigne, Romantics, the philosophy of existence, and existentialists, to name just a few. As a reaction to positivism and other forms of crass materialism, this theme is a recognition that, while man can attain to objective knowledge, knowledge itself ultimately remains the purview of an existential being that is capable of self-reflection. As a consequence, the scientific method is not always compatible with human life as lived-experience. 

Human life as lived-experience engages with a form of reason that serves life and does not care to negate it. This form of reason acknowledges aspects of human existence that philosophical materialism, science, and scientism either downplay or negate altogether. Some aspects of reason that aid life in its quest for autognosis include intuition, creative fidelity to self-reflection, and a rational will that respects the possibilities and limits of human reality.

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