Chapter 7: Unreasonable Positions Before the Ultimate Question: Reduction of the Question

The last chapter discussed three positions that denied the pressing ultimate question. The next three positions acknowledge the question, but stop short of fully engaging it.

The Aesthetic or Sentimental Evasion

In this position, the individual acknowledges the questions, but does not commit his being to finding answers. Instead, he "finds enjoyment in expressing the emotions stimulated by the questions" (70). Look upon the starlit sky and the wide, blue sea! Is is not grand? Is it not curious? Everything makes sense here. Although emotion is an integral part of our nature, it are not by itself the finality that we seek.

While the practical denial of the questions often takes the form of sensationalism, spectacles, and drugs to tranquilize and distract the self, the sentimental evasion makes the admiration of beauty and happiness a definitive answer, however "this viewpoint cannot satisfy a mother whose son is dying, nor an individual out of work" (71). This 'emotional pampering' eventually leads to disregard for the suffering (who can find beauty there?) and the creation of a false reality focused on aestheticism.

The Desperate Negation

Here the individual feels the immense urgency of the questions, but commits himself to denying that an answer exists. This is different than the positions in the previous chapter, because it seeks to destroy an answer instead of a question. "At a certain point, the difficulty of the answers causes the person to say: 'it is not possible'" (72). We feel such an intense drive for an answer; which is more reasonable response? My entire being searches for an answer and one exists, or my entire being searches for an answer therefore one does not exist? Giussani quotes Cesare Pavese who expresses the sadness of the latter choice: "Has anyone ever promised us anything? Then why should we expect anything?" What he forgets is that we have been promised something, as indicated by the structure of our humanity, the longing we have for the infinite, for fulfillment.

The desperate negation is illustrated by three derivatives that I will briefly mention.

A. The Impotent Hope

There is no hope in finding an answer, and whenever one comes upon reaching a conclusion to even part of the question he pulls himself backward. It is unreasonable. It is believing a wound will never heal, despite the fact that you pick it open everyday.

B. Reality as Illusion

Confronted with the world, we are faced with two options regarding creation. Either it is made by an Other, or else all that we see and hear is an illusion. Choosing the former (and reasonable) option would mean starting the journey towards the ultimate answer, but many prefer to stay in the darkness. The man who chooses illusion "detaches himself from the impulse which shows him that things exist... and abandons himself" (75).

C. Nothingness as Essence

Because "you are," you depend upon something Ultimate, and in order to negate this Ultimate, you must deny this "you" - "You" being the word which emerges most naturally from the very depths of your origins. (75)

Alienation

Our final unreasonable positions claims that life and the world have a positive meaning, but it is not valuable or true for the person. Life is ordered towards some distant conclusion, the fruit of a collaborative effort towards 'progress.' But this begs the question: whose progress? Is it a vision by the rich and powerful? And why should I contribute to this far off future when I will not be able to be part of it? "This slant on reality considers the fundamental questions of the human being as mere functional stimuli," used as a "deceitful trick which nature plays in order to force us into serving its irreversible project" (76).

In my 400-level class on sexuality and marriage the instructor made both explicit and implicit comments about sexual drives being nature's tool for the continuation of the species; perhaps love is just chemical reactions in the brain? The human person finds no value here - he is just a pawn in some covert scheme. The reduction of humanity into a project leaves out the constitutive dimension of personality.

It is impossible to make the fulfilment of a collectivity in some hypothetical future the answer to those questions without dissolving man's identity or alienating the human being. (76)

In all of these positions, one or more factors of human existence and experience is left unaccounted for, some aspect is given unequal weight compared to the others, and therefore leads to an unsatisfactory understanding of reality and the ultimate question of meaning. Dostoevsky said that the bee knows the secret of his beehive, the ant knows the secret of his anthill, but man does not know his own secret - that his structure is a relationship with the infinite (79).

Chapter 6: Unreasonable Positions Before the Ultimate Question: Emptying the Question

The three positions in this chapter try to deny, or substitute things for, questions of meaning and destiny. The next chapter will discuss three positions that reduce the question unreasonably.

People take many different positions before the 'ultimate questions' of the religious sense, attitudes that are unreasonable because they fail to address all of the factors of the religious phenomenon.

The Theoretical Denial Of The Questions

Probably the most common error, quantitatively speaking, is in denying that questions of destiny and purpose exist, or can ever have an answer. Giussani relates a story about an Italian literature textbook his high school class used. The author berated a philosopher whose work focused on questions like, what is life?, why is there pain?, what is the purpose of the universe? The true philosopher eschews these questions, said the text, because they are like the "capriciousness of adolescents" which are "absurd" and lacking any real value. Giussani immediately told his class that, if true, Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Dostoyevsky, and Beethoven were all adolescents, since their works were driven by these supposedly absurd questions. Giussani was happy to stand in their company, since "a man who tosses out these questions is not 'human!'" (60).

Popular philosophy today also holds that one should not try and venture into the impossible and the infinite. Man is the final arbiter of his universe; he holds all power and mastery. John Dewey, who shaped several generations of pedagogy in the United States, said "to abandon the pursuit of reality and the search for absolute" lets us form a healthy society. Dewey encourages me to give up these deep, forceful questions within my heart, to ignore my very nature. He proposes a new unity among humanity by putting blinders on, but a "truly constructive collaboration, requires a factor which transcends the human person" (61). As we observed in the last chapter, if we refuse to acknowledge the questions of destiny within human beings we devalue them. A society like Dewey's vision would be frustrated; man desperately wants to seek and to know the answers to the questions gushing from his being, but knows that he is not allowed to acknowledge this existential drive or seek solace in sharing the quest for truth with others.

The Voluntaristic Substitution Of Questions

If you remove the stimulating energy of the 'elementary experience,'... if you take away the dynamic energy which those questions determine, the motion that they give our humanity, if you empty the content of those questions which constitute precisely the essential mechanism, the motor of our personality - if you do this, then where do we find the energy to act? (62)

The answer is only in ourselves. Our questions of meaning are substituted by self-affirmation. There are three fundamental forms of this position.

A. Personal praxis

To illustrate this category Giussani only provides a poem by Yevtushenko. I honestly cannot comprehend its full meaning. It will suffice to say that personal praxis is probably the most basic form of substitution, where one's conscious will is the only source of our driving energy. [If anyone can help me out please comment below.]

B. Utopianism

Here the voluntaristic energy "almost blindly provides the goal and the end itself" (63). Death and suffering are acknowledged, but there is no purpose for them, and no solution to the anxiety they cause. Man's desires are brushed off and replaced with a sentimentalism that says "such is life, oh well." Giussani quotes Bertrand Russell's writings as examples of this irrational response to the questions.

C. The Social Project

Here again we have the soulless society of John Dewey, where the human thirst for justice and the questions that spring up from the heart are replaced by a mere blueprint of rules and constructs. This is similar to the intellectual bigwigs of the age who publish guidelines for ethics and standards of care without any real concern or love for individual people. In his book Back To Virtue, Peter Kreeft is wise to point out that "ethics without virtue is illusion."

The Practical Denial Of The Questions

While the first position claims the questions do not make sense, this unreasonable position is actually lived out. "Because these questions are painful, wrenching, the individual structures his life so they quite simply do not surface" (64). Like many conflicts that we bury instead of confronting, we choose to not think about these questions of meaning. Besides simply telling ourselves to ignore the questions, we tend to more often distract ourselves through various means. Sports, television, alcohol - things that are not necessarily bad in themselves - become fixations through which we tranquilize ourselves. Sensationalism and superficial emotional rushes become our sustenance. As a result, life is so busy that there is no time for silence, no time to collect one's thoughts and examine one's self.

Another alternative to denying the essential questions of existence is stoicism, a life committed to the "ideal of perfect emotional imperturbability" (66). The stoic rejects feeling in its entirety, becoming a veritable fortress, indomitable and steadfast. "No matter what philosophy sustains the conception of the person, as long as it is irreligious, this will be its supreme ideal" (66). The stoic, however, lives an unreasonable life, closing off aspects of one's self yet still trying to live intensely. It is an irreconcilable paradox.

Sooner or later your construction [imperturbability], perhaps the fruit of an ascetic work of many years, a work of relentless philosophic reflection and presumption, will still need only a puff of wind to make it crumble. (68)

Every fortress has its weaknesses. The stoic, for all his work, cannot defend against love, precisely because his desire for it cannot be mastered by himself. It is part of his essence, something he cannot rip out or silence completely. Giussani ends the chapter by telling the story of a deformed man who grew up in monotony and mastery. He created a seemingly disciplined way of life, controlled and channeled by his intellect. Distant from any form of community, the people of his town admired him, but they did not love him. Then, one day, he fell in love. All his self-control "collapsed with a single blow and reduced him to the cold act of suicide" (69). Our nature drives us to embrace all that constitutes our being. In denying the most important questions and the most important experiences we are, in a sense, already dead.

Chapter 5: The Religious Sense: Its Nature

The religious sense has manifested itself through the ages in many specific questions. "Why am I here?" or "What is this world for?" or "Why is there suffering?" Oftentimes in literature they are asked of the great canvas of the starry sky or the daily emergence of the moon, cosmic objects which seem so close and familiar, yet so unknowable and distant. Although the rigors of daily living seem to blunt these questions, they will always spring up from the heart, cutting to the deepest layers of our emotion and our being.

Man seeks out a "total answer" to his problem of meaning. He is constantly asking if there is something more to know, something more to become. In fact, he pleads and begs for greater, even if he cannot comprehend it. The very language, the adjectives and adverbs, of these questions - what is life really about? what is the ultimate meaning of my life? - betrays the fact that they seek completeness. "They require a total answer, an answer which covers the entire horizon of reason, exhausting completely the whole 'category of possibility'" (47).

If life's meaning could be grasped after finding the answers of one thousand questions, man would still be as restless as when he began his search if he had found only up to the nine hundred ninety-ninth answer. Curiously, man's questions only seem to multiply as he struggles to answer them. In the natural sciences we observe things much smaller than us - insects, bacteria, atoms - and now we have even begun to breach the very foundations of subatomic particles. Similarly we have thrust past our humble atmosphere to probe and study the cosmic heavens, full of celestial bodies millions of light-years away. In both great and small we only seem to find new questions as we answer old ones. As one pushes back the unknown, the area of the unexplored grows.

At the same time, man increasingly realizes how disproportionate he is to the universe, "The inexhaustibility of the questions heightens the contradiction between the urgent need for an answer and our human limitations in searching for it" (48). Giussani gives excerpts from many works of literature, one of which is from "On the Portrait of a Beautiful Lady," by Giacomo Leopardi:

If, Human Nature, then,
In all things fallible
You are but dust and shade, whence these high feelings?
In any part if noble,
How is it that your worthiest thoughts and passions
Can be so lightly stirred
And roused and quenched even by such base occasions?
(49)

Our inability to answer such great questions and affirm the meaning of the entirety of reality is something that is built into our being. It is a structural disproportion.

Life is hunger, thirst, and passion for an ultimate object, which looms over the horizon, and yet always lies beyond it. When this is recognized, man becomes a tireless searcher. (51)

Consequently, human beings carry a great sadness. We long for finality and the affirmation of our destiny, but they elude us. Our yearning for the ideal, faced with our present "real" situation, creates this sadness. But without hope for the attainment of happiness and fulfillment, we fall into despair. This has been the sentiment of many recent philosophers, in which meaning is an illusion. Yet, deep in our being, we can find aspirations and great desire, repressed, but not destroyed.

Giussani says death is "the origin and the stimulus for all searching" (55). It is "the most powerful and bold contradiction in the face of the unfathomability of the human question" (55), however, it does not remove the question, but rather, amplifies it. If a person could be aware of the death he was to meet, would feel his questions to be exhausted? Or would he feel an incredible urgency for an answer?

The religious sense is reason's capacity to express its own profound nature in the ultimate question; it is the "locus" of consciousness that a human being has regarding existence. Such an inevitable question is in every individual, in the way he looks at everything. (56)

The philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead said that religion is "what the individual does with his own solitariness." This is partly true, because it concerns my self as a person, but this evaluation leaves me totally alone. And, if I were to interact with another person, a man, a woman, a friend, and not value the same question of destiny within the other, I would degrade them. The ultimate question unites us at the deepest level. "Before solitude there is companionship, which embraces my solitude. Because of this, solitude is no longer true solitude, but a crying out to that hidden companionship" (56).

By our reason, we can see how the human person has a structure that is oriented towards the infinite and the unfathomable. We have questions about our ultimate destiny that throughout history have not been fulfilled by our own means.

Our whole being corresponds to the existence of God. Without God, life is tortuous and full of violence. No hope can be found without God. I will let Giussani speak without my own interruption of his eloquence:

Only the hypothesis of God, only the affirmation of the mystery as a reality existing beyond our capacity to fathom entirely, only this hypothesis corresponds to the human person's original structure. If it is human nature to indomitably search for an answer, if the structure of a human being is, then, this irresistible and inexhaustible question, plea - then one suppresses the question if one does not admit to the existence of an answer. But this answer cannot be anything but unfathomable. Only the existence of the mystery suits the structure of the human person, which is mendicity, insatiable begging, and what corresponds to him is neither he himself nor something he gives to himself, measures, or possesses.

By the very fact that a man lives, he poses this question, because this question is at the root of his consciousness of what is real, and not only does he pose the question, he also responds to it, affirming the reality of an "ultimate." For by the very fact that he lives five minutes he affirms the existence of a "something" which deep down makes living those five minute worthwhile. This is the structural mechanism, an inevitable implication of our reason. (57)

Chapter 4: The Religious Sense: The Starting Point

The past three chapters have been an intense investigation into how we come to know things. We must use our reason, keeping in mind all of its methods, to observe reality. We have also seen how feeling and emotion are meant to aid us in becoming aware of reality. Consequently, the problem that plagues our understanding of things is usually not an inability of our methods, but an apathy towards the truth. It is often more convenient to hold onto our attachments and preconceptions than to work and struggle to break free of the darkness.

From here we will begin to study all that makes up the religious sense. As the previous chapters have emphasized, the religious sense must be understood from our perspective as humans. We cannot eliminate any part of our identities - physical, cognitive, emotional - or else we are denying ourselves. Keeping with this existential viewpoint, I must "start with myself" since the religious experience is really an experience. A question comes up already: How do I define myself? Starting with myself means running the risk of defining myself by assumptions and abstract preconceptions. The solution is in viewing myself in action.

Starting with oneself means to observe one's own movements, taken off guard, with his or her daily experience. Hence the "material" of our starting point will not be any sort of preconception... or definition of oneself, perhaps borrowed from current ideas and the dominant ideology. (35)

Through one's actions one can see what qualities he possesses and grasp his existence. Giussani uses the example of a boy who does not like math and therefore has not studied it. Because he has never applied himself to this discipline he does not know whether he has a natural skill for it. If the boy does begin to do his homework he may discover that he is able to outperform all of his classmates. In other words, it was in action that he found his talent, one of his many human factors.

Like children, adults often make judgments about ourselves without being reasonable. People brush off the religious question with the attitude of, "I don't feel God, and I have no need to confront this problem" (36). These adults are making excuses for themselves based on conditionings rather than making commitments to explore something that concerns their destiny. For the person who ignores this part of their life, it is like the religious sense does not exist for him, even though he never "brought into the horizon of his... reason the elements necessary to make a judgment" (36).

To be really alive is to be involved in all of life - the problems, the people, the questions, the ups, the downs. As we become more involved with any one aspect we encounter the others more clearly. This does not mean we should be fixated on any one thing, but we should commit ourselves to all of life. By embracing this wholeness we can uncover such a fundamental factor of our humanity like the religious sense.

One aspect of life is tradition, "that complex endowment with which nature arms us" (37), and which we are born into. Everyone is given tradition as a gift and a project. Through it we inherit knowledge and values from the past, however we are not meant to become stagnant in it. Rather, we can develop it ourselves and use our creativity to make tradition a launching pad. Rejecting this gift of tradition uncritically would be rejecting a part of ourselves.

Another aspect of life that pertains to our whole existence is the value of the present. So often in life we try to live in the mistakes or glories of the past, a recipe for despair or pride. Or, we try to live in the future so much that we forget our present obligations to people and become irresponsible and unrealistic. With the current discussion of the religious sense, man must start with himself (as we have already noted), and he must start in the present, because that is where he is. If I would uncritically make a philosopher's opinion my own I would alienate myself. Similarly, I would also betray my experience if I projected the past onto myself. "Once I have used the present as a starting point to discover the values that constitute the human experience in its essential elements, then the study of the past will only illuminate ever more the way I look upon myself" (40).

One of the central concepts in The Religious Sense is that humans have an essential unity. Each person is made up of a physical body, the ability to reason, and an elementary experience. With the denial of even one of these facets of humanity, we become less human, we are longing to be integrated. It is interesting that death, when mentioned in the Bible, is often associated with the word corruption. Examined by its Latin parts, corruption literally means to fragment, for each part to break apart and separate. This decomposition can only occur as far as "nature can be segmented, measured, modified" (41). But what if there are parts of me that are not divisible, that cannot be broken up? If in some way there exists in me an unbreakable unity, then "the idea of death, as experience demonstrates, is not applicable to me" (41). Does this sound a little bizarre? Perhaps, but entertain this thought for a while as we conclude this chapter.

The materialist claims that all of our experience can be essentially reduced to a material starting point. Anything that seems to be a unique element, like spirit or thought, is actually a different manifestation of our physical existence. Followed through to its end, this philosophy makes humanity devoid of excitement, passion, and love. It is frustrating dullness, and "the entire phenomenon of love is reduced, with bitter ease, to a biological fact" (42).

Our experience shows that we have two realities - the measurable (things of the material world) and the unmeasurable (ideas, decisions, and judgments; when I decide to love my friend, I cannot quantify this decision). In common language we usually coin these two parts 'body and soul,' or 'material and spiritual.' These realities are not reducible into each other.

To refute the materialist position, it must be made clear that the expression of the spiritual part of a person develops out of the material part. It is like a musician and his instrument, which unite to create music. The instrument (the material) in itself is lifeless to express sound by itself, but provides the channel through which the musician (the spiritual) injects his masterpiece. Both are essential. Let us keep this in mind as we further investigate the religious sense.

A unity composed of two irreducible factors, where the emergence of the second is conditioned by a certain development of the first, is perfectly within our grasp, and thus rationally plausible. Thus the human body has to evolve to a certain point in order to be suitably tuned for the genial expression of the human spirit. (44)