1699.The Priority

SCANNED PDF

"[T]he priority of experience to reason is irreversible.... Furthermore, experience or perception itself involves an unsuppressable element of faith---of instinctive confidence in the independent reality of that which our experience in its various modes discloses. Our most inescapable certainties about existence, whether our own or that of the encompassing whole of which we perceive ourselves and our fellow creatures to be parts, are not facts that reason as such either needs to or could provide. Rather, they are in the strictest sense matters of faith, apart from which none of our special inquiries, whether scientific, moral, or religious, would even be possible or have any point....

"[T]he Augustinian formula 'faith seeking understanding' describes the task of secular philosophy no less accurately than that of Christian theology. To be sure, the faith the philosopher is charged with understanding is not specifically Christian faith. Moreover, the experience he takes as his datum has several clearly distinguishable moments or fields, of which only the various forms of philosophical reflection all working together can hope to provide the analysis. Even so, in trying to analyze the most fundamental structures of this experience as attested by language and culture the philosopher, too, is without doubt seeking to understand faith---that 'common faith' which is constitutive of our experience as such and by which we all live simply as human beings. But this means, among other things, that the ultimate tests of truth are something other than the principles of a supposedly 'pure' reason. They are themselves matters of faith, and so are grounded in that original revelation of God to mankind of which the Christian faith claims to be the decisive re-presentation" ("Faith and Truth" [1965]: 1057 f.).

 "[H]uman experience is [not] exhausted by the external sense perception of which science and history in their different ways are the critical analysis and reflection. Man ... also enjoys an internal nonsensuous awareness of his own existence and of the existence of his fellow creatures as finite-free parts of an infinite and encompassing whole. Indeed, this second kind of experience proves to be fundamental to the other kind, to our external sense perception. Presupposed by all my sense experience and the judgments arising from it is ... the certainty of existence, i.e., the certainty that I exist as the subject of my experience and that I exist together with others, fellow creatures like myself, with whom I am related andall. whose actions I am dependent, even as they are thus related and dependent with respect to me. And no less constitutive of this certainty of existence is the certainty that both I and my fellow creatures exist within, and therefore as parts of, an all-inclusive whole--that circumambient reality which is the primal source whence we come and the ultimate end whither we go.... [I]t is this complex experience of existence-of myself, others, and the whole--which is the experience out of which all religious language arises and to which it properly refers. In this sense, all religious language-including, therefore, the word 'God'-is existential language, the language in which we express and refer to our own existence as selves related to others and the whole.... 

"[T]his foundational certainty of existence... has a richness or thickness that the word 'existence' may not adequately convey. My experience of myself, others, and the whole is not simply the experience that we are in some neutral or non-evaluative sense-as mere facts, so to speak-but is always, precisely as the experience of existence, an experience of worth, of value, of meaning, of significance. In experiencing my own existence in relation to others and the whole, the essence of my experience is the sense of worth---of my own worth for myself and others, of their worth for themselves and me, and of our common worth for the whole and its worth for all of us.

"In short, the foundational certainty underlying all of my experience is not only that I am together with others in the whole, but that what I am and what they are is significant, makes a difference, is worthwhile. This certainty that I am and that what I am is significant or worthwhile is ... basic confidence in the worth of life. [This confidence is] the primal faith which is constitutive of our very lives as human beings and which, therefore, is in the proper sense the 'common faith' of mankind. To exist as a man at all is to exist as one who shares in this common faith, because every attempt to deny it or to controvert it actually presupposes it. I cannot question the worth of life without presupposing the worth of questioning and therefore the worth of the life by which alone such questioning can be done. Likewise, to look for evidence against the claim that life is worthwhile assumes not only that there is or can be such evidence, but that it is worthwhile spending one's time and energy to try to find it. As a matter of fact, even suicide, or the intentional act of taking one's own life, does not entail so much a denial of life's worth as an affirmation of it. I can hardly choose to end my life unless I assume that doing so is not merely pointless, but somehow is significant or makes a difference" ("How Does God Function in Human Life?" [1967]: 34 f.).

"[T]he most primitive mode of our experience is an awareness at once of being and of value; it is our dim sense of reality as such, as something that matters or has worth or is of intrinsic importance.... [T]his sense of reality which underlies all our experience comprises infinitely more than is sometimes supposed. It is the awareness not merely of ourselves and of our fellow creatures, but also of the infinite whole in which we are all included as somehow one. The very nature of our experience ... is such as to compel recognition of this third essential factor. Just as we are never aware of our own existence except as related to the being of others, so our sense that both we and they are important is our sense of the encompassing whole without which such importance could never be.... Because at the base of whatever we say or do there is our primitive awareness of ourselves and the world as both real and important, all our experience is in its essence religious. It rests in the sense of our own existence and of being generally as embraced everlastingly in the encompassing reality of God" ("Present Prospects for Empirical Theology" [1969]: 85 f.).

"[W]e may define 'myth' ... by means of three closely related statements:

"1. Myth is a particular way of thinking and speaking that, like other such ways, represents (i.e., re-presents, presents again) the reality presented in one basic mode of human experience.

"2. The reality that myth represents is the ultimate reality presented in our original, internal, non-sensuous experience of ourselves, others, and the whole.

"3. The particular way in which myth thinks and speaks of this ultimate reality is as a narative or story determined, on the one hand, by its intention to answer the existential question of the meaning of this reality for us and, on the other hand, by its use of concepts and terms proper to the other basic mode of human experience, namely, our derived, external, sense experience of others and ourselves...

"Thus myth is [defined] as committing by its very structure the kind of 'category mistake' that Gilbert Ryle takes to be committed whenever there is 'the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another'...On the other hand, by representing this mistake as precisely as it does, the definition avoids the familiar difficulties of defining 'myth' too loosely as thinking and speaking about the divine in concepts and terms that properly apply to the non-divine. What makes myth is not simply that it thinks and speaks about the ultimate whole of reality non-literally in concepts and terms that literally aply to ourselves and others, but that it presents facts belonging to the category of our existence as such in the idioms appropriate to the very different category of the reality presented by our senses" ("Myth" [1983]: 390).

"[To] be a self is not merely to be continually becoming, but also to exist, in the emphatic sense in which 'existence' means that no one is consciously aware of one's becoming and, within the limits of one's situation, responsible for it. Thus one is aware, above all, of one's real, internal relatedness---not only to one's own ever-changing past and future, but also to a many-leveled community of others similarly caught up in time and change and, together with them, to the all-inclusive whole of reality itself. But one is also aware, relative to this same whole of reality, of one's own essential fragmentariness and of the equally essential fragmentariness of all others. With respect to both time and space, the whole alone is essentially integral and nonfragmentary, having neither beginning more end and lacking an external environment. this is not to say, however, that the whole of reality is experienced as mere unchanging being, in every respect infinite and absolute. On the contrary, insofar as the whole is neither merely abstract nor a sheer aggregate, it must be like the self and anything else comparably concrete and singular in being an instance of becoming, or an ordered sequence of such instances, which as such is always finite in contrast to the infinite realm of possibility and relative and not absolute in its real, internal relations to others....

"[T]o be human [,then] is to live as a fragment, albeit a self-conscious and, therefore, responsible fragment, of the integral whole of reality as such. in other words....the meaning of ultimate reality for us demands that we accept