We begin the title of this post with a quote from Kierkegaard. It’s the sort of quote that we can begin to unpack or unwind with words, but it can’t really be done purely with reason. Instrumental reason will help with relative truths, but never ultimate Truth.
Let’s say you’re trying to use the mind to come up with Truth. You may succeed at coming up with some disembodied notions of it, but it will eventually become unsatisfying. Consider the causal loop you can get into trying to come up with your own meaning and purpose to life:
(1) secular culture says there is no normative good or bigger narrative to live for —> (2) feels liberating! —> (3) but now, I have the burden to come up with this story for myself —> (4) feels exhausting, too many choices, lots that are not satisfying! —> (5) I've created a new prison for myself believing I can do this for myself —> (6) I become despondent, in need of deeper meaning/purpose again —>(7) go back to (1)
At best, we may come up with some helpful content to work with. But immersing yourself in the ego-drama of coming up with a narrative for yourself still places your life being about you on your terms. And we need to move beyond a you.
Paul Tillich would say the seeking of Truth means you have already been seized by Truth. In some sense, the seeking is the finding; and as that deepens, the being of Truth is the founding of it. Yet, it can never be contained.
The error is not unrelated to the mistake that C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy) acknowledges committing when he sought to recover the experience of "Joy" by focusing on the thoughts and feelings generated by the experience within him. He recalls how this discovery flashed a new light back on his life:
“I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, “This is it”, had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.”
David Walsh notes, “All that he [Lewis] could find in such introspection was the sediment or trace of Joy. The reality which had been enjoyed disappeared once his attention became wholly directed toward the inner event itself. ... There is no surer way of missing the reality of human self-transcendence than to focus exclusively on the processes, the techniques or the ideas in which it is expressed” (emphasis mine).
I can certainly relate to the intellectual quest, and at times we do have to dance with at least some of the words we got. But eventually the words need to be made flesh! And this can only come from a submissive attunement to the whole of the reality.
Walsh says, “As human beings we are not closed in on ourselves, or enclosed within the instrumental reason of subject/object relationships, but rather engaged in the whole of reality long before reflection or instrumental reasoning begin, and able, indeed impelled by our deepest humanity, to engage in this wider reality and articulate our participation in luminous symbols that express our attunement to this embracing ordering reality.”
Walsh concludes: “Ineluctably we are existentially embedded, and morally engaged in reality, as a part taking part in the whole, unable to see the whole, only ever able to see an infinitesimal part of it, and only ever able to see it from within.”
Want Truth? Be Truth!