What does it really mean to be free? It appears to be a new shared value in contrast to mankind's oppressive legacy, but is it?
David Bentley Hart says, “Modernity’s highest ideal—its special understanding of personal autonomy—requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose.”
So are we free only because we can choose, or only when we have chosen well? Freedom without order is one hot mess. I've got too many examples to mention, especially when I see my crazy mind at work. If I acted on every thought impression, it wouldn't be pretty.
The problem today is what does it mean to choose well? The demarcation between the ancients and the moderns is that we moderns are lost in our buffered selves (as noted by Charles Taylor). We have no connection to something transcendent, nor are we enchanted by the cosmos. We have come to believe that, “Neither God, then, nor nature, nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only because it might be done in defiance of all three.” It is our wills that captivate us, or have become our new masters.
But our wills must be informed by some moral center that goes beyond us. The idea that we choose well because we have an inner goodness is just folly. For instance, “There is no such thing as “enlightened” morality, if by that one means an ethics written on the fabric of our nature, which anyone can discover simply by the light of disinterested reason. There are, rather, moral traditions, shaped by events, ideas, inspirations, and experiences; and no morality is devoid of the contingencies of particular cultural histories.”
To think we can author our own story by ourselves is missing the epic narrative we are all part of. Aristotle brought in the notion of telos to acknowledge that everything has an impulse towards its formal and final cause. “Both the primordial artistic impulses in a people and the most refined expressions of those impulses have always been indissolubly united to visions of eternal order.”
But most moderns (see Nietzsche) believe such an order can be manifested spontaneously by the individual, personal will. Yet, “As a matter purely of logic, absolute spontaneity is an illusion; all acts of the will are acts toward some real or imagined end, which prompts volition into motion.”
It seems like we've come full circle, doesn't it? Or maybe it's more like full sphere.
So to be truly free, that is to say, is realize one’s proper essence (informed by our idiom, beauty, truth, virtue, love, creativity, and Being) and to flourish as the kind of being one ultimately is. Or in other words, freedom is to align our existence with God, and in that, our essence is freed to be made manifest.
(All quotes by David Bentley Hart.)
I recently went on a walk on the wildly Gnostic side with my reading, and took on The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal. Strieber wrote the seminal Communion many years back, which I never read but was aware of. Although I've always have some fascination with the possibility of alien encounters, I think it had more to do with all my exposure to sci-fi entertainment in my childhood. I am not sure if there are or have ever been alien visitors (but neither are the authors).
As Kripal notes early on, “It all comes down to how one believes, not whether one believes.”
That's the side where Kripal lands. He's a contextualist. As a professor of comparative religion, he brings some rigor by interjecting theories around Strieber's explicit adventures. Yet his take on religion verges on the humorous.
Kripal says, “I do not think it is too much of a simplification to suggest that the entire history of religions can be summed up this way: strange super beings from the sky come down to interact with human beings, provide them with cultural, technological, legal, and ethical knowledge, guide them, scare the crap out of them, demand their submission and obedience, have sex with them (often forcefully), and generally terrorize, awe, baffle, inspire, and use them.”
Hmm, not my God.
But I am a sympathizer for Kripal's approach at times. We often need to make sense of the sporadic mysteries of the cosmos. Yet, as Gödel notes, we are going to be either consistent or complete (not both). Kripal sides with the complete, and throws in some tools to help cultivate our notions.
As he says, “It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is.”
Kripal finds Henry Corbin's idea of the imaginal useful in this context. That is, there is the empirical/material world and there is the intelligible/rational world. In between is the imaginal world, and this is the space were imagination and symbols coexist.
Strieber, on the other hand, is the “ordinary man appearing in the middle of an otherwise completely fantastic narrative.” I can't say for sure what has happened to Strieber, but I came to believe that something has happened. And this is nub of the book. Are such experiences Real or all in the head? As Kripal notes, “Plainly, whatever is happening, it is not "all in the mind." Or, if it is... the mind is not all in us.”
Surprisingly, Strieber's take is more humble than expected. He acknowledges his experiences may not simply be real aliens from another planet: but maybe plasma-like energy, something from another dimension, glowing orbs of spiritual bodies, or possible trauma induced trances.
But he doesn't dismiss it as all mind-stuff, as he has some empirical evidence to back his experiences: implants, injuries, other witnesses. Something is real, but we are also somehow playing a part in it in a quantum-like way.
(He also notes a story where a military General believed that the US government avoided disclosing their knowledge of UFO sightings because “obscure laws of physics might prevent them from entering our reality without first convincing us that they were real, and that official admission might be the tripwire that would enable them come through.”)
Ultimately Strieber counters Kripal's contextualism with some essentialism. There may be an ontological grounding to all this. We aren't just purely creating our Reality, but possibly co-creating it through our interpretive instruments along with a Creator. And that could be the Real that matters — all else is up for grabs in this mysterious story.
All this leads to Kripal believing we need a new story: one that is aware that it's still a story. He ends with a Philip K. Dick quote that concludes, “we are not the artists but the drawings.” To me, the idea of being drawn seems to look back to some older story that may still have its place in our day.
