On The Changing Nature of (my) Self: An Intellectual History

Certainly, the length of time since my last post has sifted my interests considerably. During the former posts which I had detailed on this blogging website, I mostly intended my writing to be read by people interested in philosophy and contemporary discourse about such topics, mostly directed towards philosophy nerds I suppose. 

Of course academia tends towards those who are intellectually introverted, the fighting is primarily done in books and in papers rather than the external world. However even from the formulation of intellectual development, I have found this kind of combat unpersuasive. Even internet debates which include the barrier of video seemed fundamentally unsatisfying. 

The experiences I first remember engaging intellectually were against my family members, unlike the seeming majority, my family were quite liberal. My political development was vaguely from libertarian to conservative to somewhat fascist. My present political views seem to be at odds with the majority of society however when they articulated in depth, while they do bring disagreement, I think they are reasonable to any true lived experience. 

Nonetheless, being a teenager becoming a conservative, it was clearly apt to ruffle the feathers of my gay aunt, and thus ruffling the feathers of my peacekeeping grandmother. My father also was mostly politically apathetic and seemed to have views not motivated at all by any particular methodology of reasoning but rather just a collection of various lived experiences of a fairly poor man who had grown up in a rough world. Fundamentally sentimentalist but not exactly well-reasoned.

I don't remember becoming a conservative exactly. I remember I had vaguely libertarian views in middle school, although I was under the impression that those views were liberal views, until I was corrected that thinking that people should be able to have guns was not a liberal position. However, I encountered conservative news radio some time during the summer of my 8th grade year before high school. I would listen to debate shows and Mark Levin's shows and I found myself agreeing more and more with the views articulated by those pundits. This was just after the election of Obama, who I had wanted to win. So they were talking a lot about healthcare and personal responsibility, a lot of it went over my head. 

I didn't realize at first that views were conservative exactly, I just knew I started to find that shift in my thinking. I had always had inclination toward older ways of thinking which I attribute to my grandparents who I was deeply influenced by. When my mother died, my maternal grandparents became second parents to me. They were deeply liberal but also very nostalgic feeling. I remember watching The Point, Bugsy Malone, Merlin with Sam Neill, Mists of Avalon, and old Hulk Hogan wrestling matches a lot when I was a kid. I played a lot of Morrowind and Total War games as well.

As I became more conservative, I would start watching more Fox News and that only reinforced the pattern and I isolated myself from my family. At the time, living in Aurora, Colorado, I knew no one who was very openly conservative. So as I went into high school, I mostly did not articulate my views. This is where I encountered Speech and Debate, where I vaguely learned about ethics. The first year I did public debate which doesn't really have a strong philosophical foundation, however during that time I also discovered debate.org.

At that time, I wasn't sure if I believed in God. My grandparents on my mother's side were Wiccans, and I had always found myself inclined towards that path. I read a ton of Mythology books my grandmother gave to me from when I was in elementary school. I always loved those stories and she would take me to meetings with her coven. She would tell me about new age kinds of principles of magic and mediation. She also had me read the book Illusions by Richard Bach.

I should put a note in here in that my grandmother was really quite intelligent. I was always impressed when I reflected on her expression and her thoughts. She also held a grudge very fiercely and she had difficulty moving past things even when it caused more tension between people. I have inherited all these things from her. She also was super New York Jewish. Her accent always reminds me of Raymond Smullyan's accent, so I think she was from Brooklyn but super Jewish. 

These things were interesting but they didn't hold any emotional sway and at the time it didn't strike me as something that could be decided by rational arguments. Around this time, on the internet I started to look at these internet forums about the existence of God and they tended to be dominated by atheists. Atheists always struck me as pretentious from the beginning, and they never seemed to be engaging in good faith. 

Around this time, I decided I should figure out what is correct. So I started investigating theism itself. I started reading arguments from St. Thomas Aquinas and William Lane Craig. At the time, WLC was beating the brakes off of all these internet atheists and their responses fell tremendously short. The five ways however were definitely poor represented and at the time I didn't understand the metaphysics behind the argument. I also think the zeitgeist and my upbringing made me more impressed by appeals to science.

I decided at the time that I found the arguments for God persuasive but it didn't point me towards any particular religion exactly. I was also turned off by Christianity because Grandma had told me that they had done many terrible things and that their core philosophy of forgiveness was evil. Essentially the normal critique of if a child murderer can be forgiven if he believes in Jesus, there is no justice in God. 

I was at some kind of secondhand shop one day with my paternal grandmother and I saw a book called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. This book was presented well and I enjoyed reading it, I thought the author did a good job of showing many things that I believed at the time were not true. I consider Jesus to be similar to many other holy men in history and it certainly was shown that he was not in many ways. 

At that point, I decided that I should be some kind of Christian, I didn't know what kind. So I did many what religion am I quizzes online. I remember at that time there were so many options it was difficult to pick one. I also remember seeing Joel Osteen on TV and it making me feel emotional. So much I started to go to a Lutheran Sunday school and talking to the pastors who were both women incidentally. 

I liked going there but it strike me as very intellectually or spiritually satisfying. My paternal grandparents were Catholic to some extent, and they asked me if I would like to try to go there. Both of them had not attended for some time, but they were willing to try it for me. It started the process of me becoming Catholic. 

In hindsight, the artistic beauty of the Catholic Church appeals a lot to me. All other Churches strike me as inferior and I never have a stronger response than when I see a beautiful Cathedral. But also the tradition of intellectual development and rigorous argument also appealed to me. I eventually came to also believe that the experiences of the Apostles were unique in that they uniquely sacrificed themselves for something that they would had to know was false. This combined with the proclamation of Jesus that upon this rock he would build his Church solidified my view. 

I remember during my University days I would attend a coffee shop meeting with Jon Mccray that was focused on atheists and Christians on matters of faith. I concurrently was also attending a Reasonable Faith meeting less frequently. At this time, I had no money and my primary transportation method was the bus. 

Around this time, I started reading more about political views. I started engaging with different forms of government. Because I was a Christian, and I was kind of old fashioned in general I started to lean towards monarchism. I never liked democracy anyway, and I had some philosophical justification for it. I found Socrates' argument against democracy persuasive. I started to look governmental systems like totalitarianism, fascism, communism, etc. 

I have always had somewhat a soft heart for the poor, so I was inclined towards helping poor people. So communism seemed somewhat appealing but I also was in favor of strong state control of the moral fabric of society. Hobbes idea of human nature was and still is appealing to me. As he says, we are made for Eden.

During my university days, I spent vast amounts of time with two professors: Dr. Mehring and Dr. Tanzer. Mehring was an old man who had some many books in his office it was always cluttered and he was always talking about hypnosis and how it connected to his philosophical view. His argument essentially boiled down to hypnosis demonstrated that Kant was correct epistemologically but Spinoza was correct metaphysically. I spent hours talking with him in his office about different philosophical perspectives, but he was quite conciliatory. He would articulate diverse views depending on his audience, and I remember someone coming to his office while I was there.

Tanzer on the other hand was extremely sharp, he also was more conciliatory than I would like but more in the sense of he would ignore if someone said something until it was obviously wrong and then he would shut it down hard. He also was bright enough to really nail down someone if need be. He was really interested in Veganism, but he seemed to have to the conclusion about Veganism independent from his philosophical development which was that he was taught by the Heideggerian scholar Richardson, so his major mission was to find a way to justify Veganism in Heidegger's system. 

Tanzer made me realize the importance of phenomenological conditions to philosophical argument and that experience is foundational to any philosophical worldview. These abstractions from the phenomena ultimately are products of us rather than conclusions about the phenomena itself. I combined this with Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics lie, and Humean skepticism about a priori synthetic judgments to show how modern Scientism is quite foolish.

I once heard an argument from Edward Feser that asserted that the principle of sufficient reason was correct simply because if the inverse were true life would become completely impossible. We always give justifications for things, and we expect explanations. Phenomenologically it is impossible to live without explanations and thus when I hear atheists try to squirm out of theistic arguments by suggesting it's possible they are wrong I am extremely skeptical. 

However in this period, I also realized how little one could really understand God. Heidegger's Ereignis showed me how the fundamental nature of being was quite uncertain. I also started to identify more and more with the alien nature of God, similar to the Augustine idea that God is aliud valde. I also read the book called The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil by Father Brian Davies in which he argues that God is not a moral agent, he doesn't have moral faults or responsibilities and can actualize any world he so choses and thus it makes no sense to argue God did something wrong. 

These conclusions combined with situations with my life also moved me towards stronger view that God is real but also that he was quite different from us. In fact, radically different. At the time I was going through the dark night of the soul, and started to see how thomists had made big mistakes. They were going beyond what their arguments demonstrated and were losing their sense of the mystical experience. 

From this point, I moved to Vietnam and I started to realize how different cultures were. I started to realize how homogeneous societies tend to function better because societal expectations are stronger. I also traveled to Japan and saw how strong societal pressure can be. I also started thinking more about how slave trade had such a negative impact on America.

The 1950s were a great time for America because it had an identity, an identity which has been diluted and part of the reason is the change in demographics. The race of people is not as important as the fundamental culture, and for America they have lost their identity. When you combine that with the decline in the education system and the loss of faith, you have a crumbling empire. 

These are my current views now and how I have proceeded here. I am now almost thirty years old and I am sure my views will continue to evolve and change. I haven't included my personal life in this explication, but I would like to make follow-up posts. Also I haven't included how I evolved linguistically which correlates with my current career, so I would like to do that as well.